“And I am Zar-thule the Conqueror,” quoth Zar-thule, less in awe now, “Reaver of Reavers, Seeker of Treasures and Sacker of Cities. I have plundered Yaht-Haal, aye, plundered the Silver City and burned it low. And I have tortured Veth Vehm unto death. But in his dying he cried out a name, aye, even with hot coals eating at his belly. And it was your name he spake. And he was truly a brother unto you, Hath Vehm, for he warned me of the terrible god Cthulhu and of this ‘forbidden’ isle Arlyeh. But I knew he spake not truly that he sought him only to protect a great and holy treasure and to protect his brother-priest who guards that treasure, doubtless with strange runes to frighten away the superstitious reavers! But Zar-thule is neither afraid nor credulous, old one. Here I stand and I say to you on your life that I’ll know the way into this treasure house within the hour!”
And now Zar-thule’s captains and men had taken heart. Hearing their chief speak thus to the ancient priest of the island, and noting the old ones trembling infirmity and hideous disfigurement, they had gone about and about the beetling tower of obscure angles until one of them had found him a door. Now this door was great, tall, solid, and wide and nowise hidden to the beholder; and yet at times it seemed narrow at its top and indistinct at its edges. It stood straight up in the wall of the House of Cthulhu, and yet looked as if to lean to one side . . . and then in one and the same moment lean to the other! It bore leering inhuman faces carven of its surface and horrid hieroglyphics, and these unknown characters seemed to writhe about the gorgon faces, and aye, those faces, too, moved and grimaced in the light of the flickering flambeaux.
The ancient Hath Vehm came to them where they gathered in wonder of the great door and spake thus: “Aye, that is the gate of the House of Cthulhu; I am its guardian.”
“So,” spake Zar-thule, who was also come there, “and is there a key to this gate? I see no means of entry.”
“Aye, there is a key, but none such as you might readily imagine; for it is not of metal but of words!”
“Magic?” asked Zar-thule, undaunted, he had heard aforetimes of similar thaumaturgies.
“Aye, magic!” agreed the Guardian of the Gate.
Zar-thule put the point of his sword to the old man’s throat, observing as he did so the furry gray growth moving upon the elder’s face and scrawny neck, saying: “Then say those words now and let’s have done!”
“Nay, I cannot say The Words—I am sworn to guard the gate that The Words are never spoken, neither by myself nor by any other who would foolishly or mistakenly open the House of Cthulhu. You may kill me—aye, even take my life with that very blade you now hold to my throat—but I will not utter The Words . . .”
“And I say that you will—eventually!” quoth Zar-thule in an exceedingly cold voice . . . in a voice even as cold as the northern sleet. Whereupon he put down his sword and ordered two of his men to come forward, commanding that they take the ancient and tie him down to thonged pegs made fast in the ground, one thong to each arm and one to each leg, so that he was spread out flat upon his back not far from the great and oddly fashioned door in the wall of the House of Cthulhu.
Then a fire was lighted of the sparse shrubs of the low hills and of driftwood fetched from the shore; and others of Zar-thule’s reavers went out and trapped certain great nocturnal birds that knew not the power of flight; and yet others found a spring of brackish water and filled them up the water-skins. And soon tasteless but satisfying meat turned on the spits above a fire, and in the same fire sword-points glowed red, then white; until Zar-thule and the captains and men had eaten their fill, whereupon the Reaver of Reavers motioned to his torturers that they should attend to their task. And the torturers came forward to retrieve their swords; aye, for of course those swords that had their tips in the fire were theirs. And Zar-thule had trained these torturers himself, so that they excelled in the arts of the pincer and hot irons.
But here there came a diversion. For some little time a certain captain—his name was Cush-had; he who first found the old priest in the shadows of the great pedestal and dragged him forth—had been peering most strangely at his hands in the firelight and rubbing them upon the hide of his jacket. Of a sudden he cursed and leapt to his feet, springing up from the remnants of his meal. He danced about in a frightened manner, beating wildly at the tumbled flat stones about with his hands. Then of a sudden he stopped and cast sharp glances at his naked forearms. In the same seconds his eyes stood out in his face and he screamed as if he were pierced through and through with a keen blade; and he rushed to the fire and thrust his hands in its heart, even to his elbows. Then he drew his arms from out the flames, staggering and moaning and calling upon certain trusted gods, and tottered away into the night, his arms steaming and dripping bubbly liquid upon the ground.
Amazed, Zar-thule sent a man after him with a torch, who soon returned trembling with a very pale face in the firelight to tell how the madman had fallen—or leapt—to his death in a deep crevice, but that before he fell there had been visible upon his face a creeping, furry grayness! And as he had fallen, aye, even as he crashed down to his death, he had screamed: “Unclean, unclean, unclean!”
Then, all and all when they heard this, they remembered the old priest’s words of warning when Cush-had dragged him out of hiding, and the way he had gloomed upon the unfortunate captain, and they looked at the ancient where he lay held fast to the earth. The two reavers whose task it had been to tie him down looked them one to the other with very wide eyes, their faces whitening perceptibly in the firelight, and they took up a quiet and secret examination of their persons; aye, even a minute examination . . .
Zar-thule felt fear rising in his reavers like the east wind when it rises up fast and wild in the desert of Sheb. He spat at the ground and lifted up his sword, crying: “Listen to me! You are all superstitious cowards, all and all of you, with your old wives fears and mumbo-jumbo. What’s there here to be frightened of; an old man, alone, on a black rock in the sea?”
“But I saw upon Cush-had’s face—” began the man who had followed the demented captain.
“You only thought you saw something,” Zar-thule cut him off. “It was only the flickering of your torch-fire and nothing more. Cush-had was a madman!”
“But—”
“Cush-had was a madman!” Zar-thule said again, and his voice turned very cold. “Are you, too, insane? Is there room for you, too, at the bottom of that crevice?” But the man shrank back and said no more, and yet again did Zar-thule call his torturers that they should be about their work.
The hours passed . . .
Blind and coldly deaf Gleeth the old Moon God may have been, and yet perhaps he had sensed something of the agonized screams and the stench of roasting human flesh drifting up from Arlyeh that night, for certainly he seemed to sink down in the sky very quickly.
Now; however, the tattered and blackened figure stretched out upon the ground before the door in the wall of the House of Cthulhu was no longer strong enough to cry out loudly, and Zar-thule despaired for he had perceived that soon the priest of the island would sink into the last and longest of slumbers; and still The Words were not spoken. Too, the reaver king was perplexed by the ancient’s stubborn refusal to admit that the door in the looming menhir concealed treasure; but in the end he put down this effect of certain vows Hath Vehm had no doubt taken in his inauguration to the priesthood.
The torturers had not done their work well. They had been loath to touch the elder with anything but their hot swords; they would not—not even when threatened most direly—lay hands upon him or approach him more closely than absolutely necessary to the application of their agonizing art. The two reavers responsible for tying the ancient down were dead, slain by former comrades upon whom they had inadvertently lain hands of friendship; and those they had touched, their slayers, they too were shunned by their companions and sat apart from the other reavers.