I dreamed of lying in darkness. I ached all over, my neck and spine pinched and stiff, and from somewhere near me I heard a thin, harsh sobbing, like an old man in terror or pain. I called out, “Who is it? What is wrong?” and my voice sounded hoarse in my own ears, like the rusty caw of a crow, as alien as my body felt when I tried to move.
“My God,” sobbed the old man’s voice, “my God, the pit of six thousand stairs! It is Lammastide, the night of sacrifice—dear God, dear God save me! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! It waits for us, waits for us, the Goat with Ten Thousand Young!”
I crawled across an uneven floor, wet and slimy, and the smells around me were the scents of deep earth, dripping rock, and far off the terrible fetors of still worse things: corruption, charred flesh, and the sickeningly familiar scent of incense. My hands touched my companion in this darkness and he pulled away: “No, never! Fiends, that you used poor Judith as bait, to bring me to you! The Hooded Thing in the darkness taught you how, as it taught others before you—showed you the passages in the Book of Eibon—told you how to take the bodies of others, how to leave their minds trapped in your old and dying body . . . the body that you then sacrificed to them! A new body, a strong body, a man’s body, healthy and fit . . .”
“Hush,” I whispered, “hush, you are raving! Who are you, where is this?”
Again I touched his hands, and felt the sticklike bones and flaccid, silky flesh of a very old man. At the same moment those frail hands fumbled at my face, my shoulders, in the dark, and he cried out: “Get away from me! You weren’t good enough for him, twisted and crippled and weak! And your daughter only a woman, without the power of a man! It was all a trap, wasn’t it? A trap to lure me, thinking it was she who sent for me to set her free . . .” His thin voice rose to a shriek and he thrust me from him with feeble hysteria. “And now you will send me down to the pit, down to the pit of the shoggoths!” As his sobs changed to thin, giggling laughter, I heard a stirring, far away in the darkness; a soughing, as if of the movement of things infinitely huge, and soft.
I staggered to my feet, my legs responding queerly; I reeled and limped like a drunken man. I followed the wall in darkness, feeling it to be, in places, ancient stones set without mortar, and, in others, the naked rock of the hill itself. There was a door, desiccated wood strapped with iron that grated, rusty and harsh, under my hands. I stumbled back into the darkness, and struck against something—a stone table, pitted with ancient carvings—and beside it found the only means of egress, a square opening in the floor, in which a flight of worn, shallow steps led downward.
Gropingly I descended, hands outstretched on either side to feel the wet rock of the wall that sometimes narrowed to the straightest of seams: terrified of what might lie below me, yet I feared to be in the power of the madmen I knew to be above. I was dizzy, panting, my mind prey to a thousand illusions, the most terrifying of which was that of the sounds that I seemed to hear, not above me, but below.
In time, the darkness glowed with thin smears of blue phosphor, illuminating the abyss below me. Far down I could descry a chamber, a sort of high-roofed cave where the niter dripped from the walls and showed up a crumbling stone altar, ruinously ancient and stained black with horrible corruption. There was an obscene aberration to the entire geometry of the chamber, as if the angles of floor and walls should not have met in the fashion they appeared to; as if I viewed an optical illusion, a trick of darkness and shadow. From the innermost angle of that chamber darkness issued, like a thicker flow of night, blackness that seemed one moment to congeal into discrete forms which the next proved to be only inchoate stirrings. Yet there was something there, something the fear of which kept me from moving on, from making a sound—from breathing, even, lest the gasp of my breath bring upon me some unimaginably nightmarish fate.
My fellow captive’s high, hysterical giggling on the stair above me drove me into a niche in the wet rock. He was coming down—and he was not alone. Pressed into the narrow darkness, I only heard the sounds of bodies passing on the stair. A moment later others followed them, while I crouched, praying to all the gods ever worshiped by fearful man to be spared the notice of anything that walked that eldritch abyss. At the same moment sounds rose from below, a rhythmless wailing or chittering that nevertheless seemed to hold the form of music, underlain by a thick lapping or surging sound, as if of thick, unspeakably vile liquid rising among stones.
Looking around the sheltering coign of rock, I saw by the growing purplish hell glare below me the tall figure of Burnwell Colby, standing beside the altar, an unfleshed skull held upraised in his hands. Darkness ringed him, but it seemed almost as if the skull itself gave light, a pulsing and horrible radiation that showed me—almost—the shapes of which the utter blackness was composed. I bit my hand to keep from crying out, and wondered that the pain of it did not wake me; an old man lay on the altar, and by his sobbing giggles I knew him to be he who had been shut into the stone crypt above with me. Colby’s deep voice rang out above the strident piping: “Ygnaiih . . . ygnaiih . . . thflthkh’ngha . . .”
And the things in the darkness—horrible half-seen suggestions of squamous, eyeless heads, of tentacles glistening, and of small round mouths opening and closing with an appalling glint of teeth—answered with a thick and greedy wail.
“H’ehye n’grkdl’lh, h’ehye . . . in the name of Yog-Sothoth I call, I command . . .”
Something—I know not what nor do I dare to think—raised itself behind the altar, something shapeless that glowed and yet seemed to swallow all light, hooded in utter darkness. The old man on the altar began to scream, a high thin steady shriek of absolute terror, and Colby shouted, “I command you . . . I command . . . !” Then it seemed to me that he gasped, and swallowed, as if his breath stopped within his lungs, before he held up the skull again and cried, “Ngrkdl’lh y’bthnk, Shub-Niggurath! In the name of the Goat with Ten Thousand Young I command!”
Then the darkness swallowed the altar, and where a moment before I could see the old man writhing, I could see only churning darkness, while a hideous fetor of blood and death rolled up from the pit, nearly making me faint. “Before the Five Hundred,” cried Colby . . . then he staggered suddenly, nearly dropping the skull he held. “Before the Five Hundred . . .”
He gasped, as if struggling to speak. The thing upon the altar lifted its hooded head, and in the sudden silence the dreadful lapping sound of the deeper darkness seemed to fill the unholy place, and the far-off answering echo of the now-silenced pipes.
Then with a cry Colby fell to his knees, the skull slipping from his hands. He choked, grasping for it, and from the darkness of the stair behind him another form darted forward, small and slim, and stooped to snatch up the talisman skull of the terrible ancestor who had ruled this place.
“Ygnaiih, ygnaiih Yog-Sothoth!” cried a woman’s voice, high and powerful, filling the hideous chamber, and the darkness that had surged toward her seemed for a moment to close in as it had closed around the old man on the altar, then to fall back. By the queer, actinic luminosity of the skull I could see the woman’s face, and recognized her as Judith Delapore, niece and granddaughter of the madmen who ruled Depewatch. Yet how different from the sweet countenance painted on Colby’s miniature! Like the ivory mask of a goddess, cold and lined with concentration, she bent her eyes on the heaving swirl of nightmare that surrounded her, not even glancing at her lover, who lay gasping, twisting in convulsions at her feet. In a high, hard voice she repeated the dreadful words of the incantations, and neither flinched nor wavered as the dreadful things flittered and crawled and quivered in the darkness.