“Of course. If you want me to, I’ll go in another room and read ‘til you’re finished. I—”
He paused, astonished at the curious look that came into Benson’s face.
“God, no! You stay with me! That’s the only place you’ll be safe. The—the—”
He looked quickly over his shoulder. Doyle saw that a thick, bluish coil of smoke was ascending from the censer.
“Come on!” Benson said urgently and Doyle rose, watched his cousin carry a chair within the pentagram. Slowly he followed.
From somewhere, Benson produced a candle, set it in a candlestick on the table. He extinguished the oil lamp that had illuminated the room, so that the only light came from the candle and the six silver lamps. Shadows crept in. Outside the pentagram a wall of darkness seemed to press forward, and the black hangings lent a disturbing air of measureless distances to the blackness. It was utterly silent.
“I’d already started this,” Benson explained. "And it’s something that can’t be stopped. It’s got to run its course. Sit down; you’ve got a long wait.”
He bent over the great iron-bound book on the table, turned a yellowed page. The volume was in Latin, Doyle saw, but he knew little of the language. The pale face of Benson, brooding over the book, reminded Doyle of some medieval magician working his sorcery. Sorcery! Well, the gun in his pocket was a stronger magic than the mumbo-jumbo of half-cracked fools. Still, he would have to humor Benson. The man had an awkward habit of glancing up quickly, and Doyle had no relish for a physical conflict. The first shot must be fatal.
Benson threw some powder into the censer, and the smoke rose more thickly. Gradually a faint haze was beginning to pervade the atmosphere. Doyle quickly repressed a tight smile as Benson glanced at him.
“You think I’m mad, don’t you?” asked Benson.
“No,” Doyle said, and was silent. He had gauged his opponent too well to start a stream of protestations which would inevitably ring false.
Benson, smiling, leaned back, facing his cousin. From his pocket, he drew a battered pipe, eyed it longingly, and thrust it back.
“This is the worst of it,” he said irrelevantly, and chuckled. Abruptly he grew serious.
“They may have told you in the village that I’m mad. But they don’t think so. They fear me, Al—God knows why, for I’ve never harmed them. All I’m after is knowledge, and they wouldn’t understand that. But I don’t mind, for it keeps them away from here, and I need solitude for my research. Besides, it keeps them from blundering in where ordinary people shouldn’t be.”
“They call this the ‘Wizard’s House,”’ Doyle said, anxious to agree.
“Yes, I suppose so. Well, after all, they may be right. Long ago men who sought after hidden knowledge were called wizards. But it’s all science, Al, although a science of which the ordinary man— even your conventional scientist—knows nothing. The scientist is wiser, though, for he realizes that beyond his three-dimensional world of sight and hearing and tasting and smelling there are other worlds, with another kind of life on them.
“What I’m going to tell you may seem unbelievable, I know— but I must tell you, for the sake of your sanity. You must be prepared for what you’re going to see tonight. Another cosmos—.” He pondered, glancing down at the book. “It’s hard. I’ve gone so far, and you know so little.”
Doyle shifted uneasily. His hand went into his pocket, and remained there as Benson looked up at him. He knew better than to jerk it out with betraying haste.
“Put it this way,” Benson went on. “Man isn’t the only type of intelligent life. Science admits that. But it does not admit that there is a super-science which enables man to get in contact with these ultra-human entities. There has always been a hidden, necessarily furtive lore, persecuted by the mob, which delves deeply into this secret wisdom. Many of the so-called wizards of ancient times were charlatans, like Cagliostro. Others, like Albertus Magnus and Ludwig Prinn, were not. Man must indeed be blind to refuse to see the unmistakable evidences of these hidden things!”
There was a flush creeping into Benson’s cheeks as he talked, and he stabbed a slender forefinger down upon the book that lay open before him.
“It’s here, in the Book of Karnak—and in the other books, La Tres Sainte Trinosophie, the Chhaya Ritual, the Dictionnaire Infernal of de Plancy. But man won’t believe, because he doesn’t want to believe.
He has forced belief from his mind. From ancient times the only memory that has come down is fear—fear of those ultra-human entities which once walked the Earth. Well, dynamite is dangerous, but it can be useful too.
“My God!” Benson exclaimed, a strange fire burning in his somber eyes. “If I had only been alive then, when the old gods walked the Earth! What might I not have learned!”
He caught himself, stared at Doyle almost suspiciously. A gentle hissing began to come from the censer. Benson got up hastily to inspect the six lamps. They were still burning, although a curious blueness now tinged their flames.
“As long as they burn we’re quite safe,” he said. “As long as the pentagram is not broken.”
Doyle could not repress an irritable frown. Benson was mad, of course, but nevertheless Doyle was becoming nervous, and no wonder. Even a man not keyed up to high tension might well be shaken by these fantastic preparations, Benson’s insane hints of monstrous—what was the term—“ultra-human entities?” Doyle determined to end the grotesque comedy swiftly, and his finger caressed the trigger of the gun.
“It’s one of these beings that I am summoning,” Benson went on. "You must not allow yourself to be frightened, no matter what happens, for you’re quite safe within the circle. I am calling up an entity which mankind worshiped eons ago as—Iod. Iod, the Hunter.”
Silently Doyle listened as his cousin spoke of the secret and forgotten lore hidden in the ancient tomes and manuscripts he had studied. He had learned strange, well-nigh incredible things, Benson related. And perhaps strangest of all was the legend of Iod, the Hunter of Souls.
Man had worshiped Iod in older days, under other names. He was one of the oldest gods, and he had come to Earth, the tale went, in pre-human eons when the old gods soared between the stars, and earth was a stopping place for incredible voyagers. The Greeks knew him as Torphonios; the Etruscans made nameless sacrifices diurnally to Vediovis, the Dweller beyond Phlegethon, the River of Flame.
This ancient god did not dwell on Earth, and a certain apt phrase the Egyptians had coined for him meant, rendered into English, the Dimension Prowler. The evilly famous De Vermis Mysteriis spoke of Iod as the Shining Pursuer, who hunted souls through the Secret Worlds—which, Prinn hinted, meant other dimensions of space.
For the soul has no spatial limitations, and it was the human soul, the Flemish magician wrote, which the ancient god hunted. It was his monstrous pleasure to hunt the soul, as a hound will course and run down a frightened rabbit; but if an adept took the necessary precautions, he could safely summon Iod, and the god would serve him in certain curious but desirable ways. Yet not even in the suppressed De Vermis Mysteriis could the incantation be found which would summon the Dimension Prowler from his secret dwelling place.
Only by diligent searching through certain half-fabulous cryptograms—the monstrous Ishakshar and the fabled Elder Key—had Benson been able to piece together the incantation which would summon the god to Earth.
No man could say, moreover, what shape Iod would assume; it was whispered that he did not always retain the same form. In Rajgir, the cradle of Buddhism, the ancient Dravidians wrote with a peculiar horror of the god. Reincarnation is a vital factor in the religions of India, and to the mind of an Indian the only true type of death is that of the soul.