Brian's face was drawn, his eyes haunted by a fearful surmise. “Remember, we wondered where Uncle Hiram’s fortune came from,” he whispered.
I flinched away from his stare. "What are you suggesting?" I cried protestingly. “That's absolutely crazy—madness!”
“Is it? Remember that queer term, the 'Red Offering' ... and all those bodies out in Hubble's Field ...?”
“What are you ... trying to say?” I scoffed, but my voice was shaky and I knew that Brian could read the doubt in my eyes.
"Hubble's Field." he murmured somberly, “Ubb, Father of Worms ... the Worms of the Earth ... 'those that inhabit the noisome depths beneath the Earth's crust that lure men to their service through promise of wealth' ... Hubble’s Field ... E-choe-lab, 'The Place of Worms' ...."
"...Ubb’s Field," I gasped. He nodded grimly.
“Come on,” said Brian briefly, springing up and heading for the secret chamber. I paused only long enough to snatch up my electric torch. Then I followed him into the Unknown ....
VII.
THE beam of my torch flashed about the plaster walls of the cramped, airless little room sending enormous shadows leaping crazily. Brian was running his hands over the walls as if searching for something. I asked him in a rather breathless voice what it was he was looking for. He shook his head numbly.
“Damned if I know,” he confessed. “Another secret panel, I guess, leading maybe to another hidden room beyond this one.”
At my suggestion we dragged the huge Medieval adumbry away from the wall. As the only piece of furniture in the hidden chamber, it might conceal another door, if door there was.
And there was ....
Brian’s searching fingers found and pressed a button set flush into the plaster. Some mechanism concealed behind the wall squealed rustily, protesting. A black opening appeared. I shone my light within the opening, and we saw crudely hewn stone steps going down into darkness.
"That's it!" Brian breached triumphantly.
“You're crazy,” I said. “Probably just leads to the basement.”
“This is Southern California,” he reminded me. “Houses don’t have cellars or basements like they do back east. Just hot water heaters out in back ... come on! And hold that light steady.”
Propping the sliding panel open with one of the brass implements from the top shelf of the adumbry, we started down the steps, Brian leading the way.
The stone stair wound down into the depths in a spiral; air blew up from below us, sickening with the stench of mold and rot and mildew, sweetish with the smells of raw wet soil. And over all the other stenches, strangely, the salt smell of the sea.
"My Cod! There! Look—"
Strewn on the lichen-crusted steps beneath us gems glimmered and flashed in the light of the torch. Some were cut into facets and set in antique gold or silver settings, others were raw and neither cut nor polished. Interspersed among the jewels were lumps of gold ore, and silver, and worked pieces of precious metals. There were many coins scattered down the steps: I bent, picked one up, examined it, peering with dread surmise at noble Spanish profiles of ancient kings.
"No wonder he was so rich, damn him!" breathed Brian, his eyes gleaming wildly in the electric glare of the torch. "No wonder they bought his ‘service’ so easily ... my God! "The Red Offerings!' "
"You still don't have any real proof," I protested. But my words rang hollowly, even to my hearing.
"There's all the proof I need." raged Brian, kicking with his shoe at the surface of the mold-crusted step. Gems and coins scattered, clattering. And it seemed to me that something stirred in the darkness beneath where we stood.
"Come on, let's follow this thing to the end of it." Without waiting for me to follow, he plunged recklessly down the coiling stair, rubies and sapphires crunching and squealing under his tread. While I lingered, hesitating just a little, he vanished from my sight.
Then I heard him cry out in a wrathful roar.
“There’s someone down here. Win! You, there, stop—”
A moment of dead silence. The stench became overpowering, sickening. Something huge and wet and glistening white surged in the gloom beneath where I stood hesitating.
Then Brian screamed ... a raw shriek of ultimate horror such as I have never heard before from human lips, and hope and pray never to hear again. A scream such as that could rip and tear the lining of a man’s throat—
Calling his name out, I plunged and stumbled and half-fell down the steps, slipping in the slimy muck that coated the stones.
I reached the bottom of the stair, but Brian was not there. There was nothing at all to be seen, no side passages, no doorways: nothing.
The coiling stone stair did not end, but it vanished into a black pool of slimy liquid mud which completely filled the bottom of the stairwell. Something died within me as I shone my light across the black pool. The agitated ripples that crawled from edge to edge of the pool, as if something heavy had just fallen in ....
Fallen, or been dragged.
I DID not stay very much longer in the huge old house so near, so fearfully near to Hubble's Field. Once the police had taken my wild and incoherent statement—which doubtless they dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic—I returned to Brian’s apartment in Santiago.
I brought with me the old books. It was—it is—my firm intention to give them to some suitable, scholarly collection; I shall most likely donate them to the Sanbourne Institute of Pacific Antiquities, which already has Copeland’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the Zanthu Tablets. For some reason, I linger on here; and I do not think I shall go back to my place of employment at Miskatonic. After all, with the wealth of my heritance from Uncle Hiram's estate, I need no longer work for a living and may indulge my whims.
Every night, as I hover on the brink of sleep, the Voices come—whispering, whispering. Wealth and power and forbidden knowledge they promise me, over and over ... now that I have already performed the Red Offering, I may enjoy the fruits of my—sacrifice.
In vain I protest that it was not I that flung or felled or drove Brian down into that horrible pool of black, liquescent mud at the bottom of the secret stair. The stair of which I said nothing to the police.
But the Voices say it does not matter: The Red Offering has been made. And it must be made again, and again, and again.
Is that what the loutish workman in the diner meant when he predicted, "Now it's gonna start all over again?" Perhaps. From the hundreds of corpses the authorities found buried in Hubble’s Field, it has been going on for a very long time already.
Oh, they know too well how easy it is to seduce weak and fallible men, curse them!
The Voices whisper to me how easy it is to make the Sign of Koth, which will take me beyond the Dream-Gates where the Night-Gaunts and the Ghouls, and the Ghusts of Zin, wait to welcome me; from thence the great winged Byakhee that serve Hastur in the dark spaces between the stars linger upon my coming, to fly me to the dark star amidst the Hyades, to Carcosa beside the cloudy shores of Lake Hali, to the very foot of the Elder Throne where the King in Yellow—even He, Yhtill the Timeless One—will receive my Vow, and where I will receive the penultimate guerdon of my service, and will at length glimpse That which is hidden behind the Pallid Mask ... soon ... soon ....