"My God! That’s an adumbry; looks authentic, too," I gasped. “What’s—”
"Sort of a Medieval bookcase. Monks in the old monasteries used them to lay flat books too huge to stand on edge." I said absently.
"Looks like they left a few behind, then." he remarked. For there were a number of immense volumes on the low, flat shelving—books bound in vellum, wrinkled and yellowed with age, or in flaking black leather. I pulled one down, screwing up my face at the reek of ancient mildew and decay which arose from it like a palpable touch.
The next instant a pang of fearful surmise stabbed through me. I held in my hands an Elizabethan folio of fabulous age, a bound manuscript written in a crabbed hand on thick sheets of excellent parchment. And the title page bore this inscription: Al Aziph, ye Booke of ye Arab, Call'd ye Necronomicon of Abdoul Al-hazred, Newly Englished by Me, Master Jno. Dee, of Mortlake, Doctor of ye Arts.
Even Brian could not help but be impressed by the discovery, doubtless remembering that I had called the Neironomicon "one of the rarest books in the world," which indeed it was. It was worth, I suppose, thousands ... even more, if it truly was what it seemed to be. That is, I am no expert in Elizabethan or Jacobean handwriting, but the huge folio pages looked old enough to have been in Dr. Dee’s own hand. Could this be the original manuscript?
“Here's another one,” Brian muttered thoughtfully. "Livre d'lvon ...”
"... The Book of Eibon," I said dazedly. I examined it; the ancient bound manuscript was tattered and in a disreputable condition, the pages water-stained and foxed with mildew. Still and all, the antiquated Norman French seemed legible enough ... and also, the calligraphy of the handwriting looked old enough to be in Gaspard du Nord's veritable hand ....
With repetition, I found, the shocks of discovery dimmish. The mind numbs, can bear no more. There were other books on the shelves, but we did not look at them. The light from the open door revealed cabalistic designs traced in chalk on the floor; curious and oddly obscene instruments of brass, copper, or steel glittered on the topmost shelf; the air was rank with mouldering decay, stale and vitiated. Quire suddenly, I felt sick to my stomach: Now I knew, or thought I knew, why Uncle Hiram had broken off relations with his family.
It was not his doing, it was theirs. The Winfields were of ancient stock; rumors and whispers of disgusting witch-cult survivals in our accursed corner of New England had come to them, with whispers of certain disturbing and unsettling doings in Arkham, Innsmouth, and Dunwich.
The Winfields had cast Uncle Hiram out because he was dabbling in rituals and lore too loathsome, too blasphemous, to be tolerated.
And I am a Winfield ....
No words passed between us, but we left the secret room together, as if in obedience to the same impulse. And we left the hidden door ajar.
VI.
WE did little more the rest of that cold, drizzly day; nor did we discuss what we had found. Brian was too healthy-minded, too boyishly wholesome and normal to have read the queer old texts and the tainted literature into which I have delved more deeply than I wish I had. But he sensed the evil that lurked all about us, in the pages of those abominable old books, and that gloated down from the smirking canine faces in that grisly painting, and that breathed about the dark old house from that charnel-pit of buried horrors men call Hubble's Field.
Later, feeling a bit hungry, and oddly desirous of some human companionship, we drove through the dank drizzle back to the diner by the waterfront. Before, it had been empty, save for a slatternly girl behind the counter and a fat cook chewing on the stub of a dead cigar, bent over the steam-table. Now, though, it was half-full, and I thought the locals looked at us oddly as we went in and took a table by the blurred and greasy window. They were a disreputable lot, men with stubbled cheeks and furtive eyes, clad in filthy overalls and flannel shirts. We paid them no attention, but it seemed to me that we were a larger object of curiosity, or resentment, than we should have been, even taking into consideration the attention a "city stranger" draws in secluded, decaying backwaters like Dumham Beach.
The gum-chewing waitress leaned over the counter and said something to one of the locals. I couldn’t make out her whining tones, something about “of Stokely place” and “Hubble's Field", but he grumbled something in reply that sounded like "Damned lotta nerve, cornin' in here."
"... Git back where they came from," muttered another. A third gave a surly nod of agreement.
"Now it’s gonna start all over again, I bet!" he growled.
More disapproving, even menacing, looks were directed at us. Brian noticed it, too. “We seem to be distinctly unpopular, Win,” he observed. I nodded quickly.
"We do, indeed. Let’s finish up and get out of here before there’s trouble."
"Good idea," he agreed. We left and drove back through the wet, saying little, each busy with his own thoughts.
That evening Brian was browsing through one of the old books while I tried to concentrate on cataloguing the contents of the house. My mind seemed unable to focus on business, being obscurely troubled.
"Here’s something odd. Win," Brian spoke up. Something in his tones made me look up sharply.
"What’s that you're reading?"
"The Necronomicon ... listen to this! Hm, let's see—here it is: '... and the Mi-Go that are the minions of His Half-Brother, Lord Hastur, come down but rarely to the ...', no, a little further on: '... and likewise is it with the fearsome Yuggs that are the servitors of Zoth-Ommog and His Brother, Ythogtha, and that are led in That Service by Ubb, Father of Worms, they slither but seldom from their moist and fetid burrows beneath the fields where they make their loathsome lair'—wasn’t that Ponape figurine you people were so concerned about supposed to be an image of Zoth-Ommog?"
I felt a queer foreboding. "It was. Is there any more?"
"Plenty, listen co this: 'But all such as these, aye, and the Night-Gaunts, too, that be in the service of Nyarlathotep under their leader, Yegg-ha the Faceless Thing, and the Dholes of Yaddith, and the Nug-Soth, that serve the Mighty Mother'—I’ll skip down the page—'they fret and fumble ever at the fetters of the Elder Sign, the which doth bind their Masters, and they strive ever to do That which should set Them free, even unto the Red Offering. And in this dreadful Cause they have full many times ere this seduced and bought the hearts and souls of mortal men, selecting such as be frail and vain, venal or avaricious, and thereby easily corrupted by the thirst for knowledge, or the lust for gold, or the madness for power that is man's deepest and most direful sin ....' "
We stared at each other for a moment. Then I got up and crossed to where my cousin was sitting, and examined the page over his shoulder.
I read: “Such men as these, I say, they whisper to of nights, and lure into their toils with Promises most often unfulfilled. For men they need, and that hungrily: for 'tis the hand of mortal men alone can dislodge the Elder Sign and undo the mighty ensorcellments stamped upon the prisons of the Old Ones by the Elder Gods—"
“Look at the next passage,” he said in low, troubled tones.
I read on: “In particular it be those of the minions that inhabit the noisome depths beneath the Earth's crust that lure men to their dreadful service through promise of wealth; for all the ore and riches of the world be theirs to dispense, aye, mines of gold and great heaps of inestimable gems. Of these, the Yuggs, whose name the Scribe rendereth as the Worms of the Earth, are by far the most to be feared, for it is said that there be many a rich and wealthy man bestriding the proud ways of the world today, the secret of whose wealth lies in accursed treasure brought to his feet by the immense and loathsome, the white and slimy Yuggs, whereby to purchase his service to their Cause, to the utter and most damnable betrayal of humankind, and the imperilment of the very Earth.”