Well, perhaps it’s not too late to bring this material to Horby. True, evening has fallen and the moon is rising, but I doubt he is yet to bed.
8. Extract from the Notes of Uriah Horby
Wed., the 30th. I am doomed. I am lost. The time has come—is less than an hour away—and all my barriers are fading. My spirit shall be raped from my shuddering flesh, in ways I cringe to think upon, and I shall wander upon the black winds that blow between the stars forever, a nameless wraith lost in the wailing multitudes of the Million Favored Ones. ...
It is Curtis at the door! Perhaps all is not lost; I shall end this entry here and admit him. Shall I ever write another word of this journal?
9. From the Statement of Charles Winslow Curtis
IT is now my painful duty to record a sequence of events which I do not understand, and I write the following if only in the vain hope that somehow I will be able to sort these matters out to my own satisfaction.
On the night of the thirtieth, some time past moonrise, I brought the passages copied from the Necronomicon to Horby, who met me at the door and virtually snatched the paper from me. He was in the worst state of agitation I have yet seen him in, his face flushed, eyes bloodshot and feverishly bright, hands trembling like a leaf.
He scanned the quotation swiftly, then threw back his head and voiced a shrill cry of triumph.
"It is Mnomquah! Of course—how could I not have known? And the place of his imprisonment by the Elder Gods is the Black Lake of Ubboth, in the gulf of Nug-yaa, at the moon’s heart! Ah, all becomes plain to me now ... those cryptic references I have tracked down in the old books—" Suddenly he broke off short, turning the paper from side to side in shaking hands, his flushed features paling to a sickly pallor.
“But there is more? Please, God, Curtis, there must be more! Where is the Zoan chant, you fool? How can I direct the energies against the Black Lake without the chant—?”
“I—I’m sorry,” I stammered apologetically. “My old professor back at Miskatonic was unable to copy out the ritual you wanted, because the pages were not legible at that point in the book—”
He stared with unbelieving horror into my eyes. Never have I seen a look more piteous: It would have wrung the heart of a stone thing. Then his face crumbled, his shoulders sagged. The page from Thompson’s letter fell from listless lingers to drift into a corner. He turned from me to face the window, and, absurdly, I felt myself dismissed. Tactfully, I withdrew, feeling lie wished to he alone with his thoughts.
Would to God I had stayed.
LATER that night, just as I was undressing and making ready to retire, one of the attendants called me to say that Horby was loudly chanting or praying, and that he feared it might disturb the other patients.
"If they can even hear him, with that hellish frog-chorus booming from the marsh," I remarked wryly.
"Yes, doctor. Bur may I give him a sleeping pill?"
"Oh, I think so. A good night’s sleep will do him a world of good. He is more distraught than usual. Ring me back if he proves uncooperative," I said. The male nurse agreed and hung up the phone.
Feeling some obscure premonition, perhaps, or merely restless, I went over to the window. The frogs were roaring away at full voice and the moon was high, glaring down at us frail, puny mortals like a gigantic eye of cold white fire. By its illumination, you could see the pools of the marsh behind the building, flashing like the mirrors they were.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something moving out of the waters and through the reeds, up onto the rear lawn. Something black and huge and wet, moving in the moonlight with a strange, splayfooted, hopping gait. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and it was gone. Probably a dog from one of the neighboring farms, I thought. But the lawn glittered from a slick deposit! It was like the slime-track left by a garden slug ....
Moments later I was jolted by a horrible, despairing cry—a shriek of unutterable terror, the sort of sound that the damned must make in the abysm of Hell.
I went out into the hall, which was suddenly full of people running. I followed them without words. The shrieking went on and on.
But the frogs had ceased their croaking song upon the instant Horby shrieked.
Yes, it was Horby. We burst into the room to view a scene of absolute chaos. The drapes were torn from the window and the glass of the panes lay in a thousand icy shards upon the carpet, which was soaked with slime and water. Moonlight poured coldly, triumphantly, through the open window.
Face down in the wreckage lay Uriah Horby, stone dead. The expression frozen upon his face was one of such intolerable fear that I hope never to see a similar expression upon a human visage.
There was not a mark on his body.
In the corner of the room crouched the attendant who had gone to sedate him. The man had suffered a ghastly shock. He was incoherent, his broken speech interspersed with fits of idiotic, horrible giggling. He was chewing and spitting out the pages from Horby’s manuscript and journals. They were trampled and torn and smeared with some odd greenish slime that rotted the paper like diluted acid.
"What has happened here?" demanded Dr. Colby, shaking the male nurse by the shoulder. The fellow peered at him vaguely from a white, wet, working face. Spittle smeared his lips and dribbled down his chin.
“... There was something in the moonlight, hopping across the lawn,” he babbled in a feeble voice. “It ... climbed the wall and broke through the window. ... It jumped on Mr. Ilorby. ... It was like ... it was like ....“
Then he began that hideous giggling again. Colby stared at me, shaken. I stared back.
“God, what a stench—that smell!" someone muttered, gagging. It was quite true. The whole room reeked of salt seawater gone stagnant and scummed with filth. It was indescribable.
“What do you think, Curtis?" Colby asked me in low tones, out in the hall again.
"I don’t know what to think.” I said numbly.
“Nor do I,” he sighed. “But this was the night Horby feared, the night his private demon was in full strength. I believe there was something to his story, after all."
"I don’t know, sir." I said. But I lied. Because I knew. Mnomquah had been revenged ....
Ever since then I’ve found myself avoiding the moonlight, too. It makes me feel uneasy. And I’ve been reading the Necronomicon. Looking for the Zoan chant, perhaps, I don’t know.
Poor Horby ....
INSPIRED in large measure by Lovecraft’s poem “The Outpost” and his revision tale “Winged Death”, “The Fishers from Outside” (which first appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu #54, Eastertide 1988) is a fine instance of its type, the story of a seeker alter ancient knowledge who experiments at the cost of his life to discover whether old legends may speak truly after all. Like its fellows in the genre, "The Fishers from Outside" creates the impression of a death wish on the part of its doomed protagonist. While other characters may scoff, the protagonist seems not merely to want to know one way or the other, but rather, like Heinrich Schliemann, to prove. Like Ouspensky, Professor Mayhew is “in search of the miraculous.” This in full knowledge of the fact that, if the hoped-for revelation proves our, it will surely mean his own death! How can we explain this? Is it an inherent and irredeemable implausibility that must rend the fabric of verisimilitude in any and every such Faustian tale? No, not at all, though some unimaginative school marms may think so.