"They say foul things of Old Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world.
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights.
Shapes pent in Hell."
--Justin Geoffrey
I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his _Nameless Cults_ in the original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in Dusseldorf in 1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the author. Collectors of rare literature were familiar with _Nameless Cults_ mainly through the cheap and faulty translation which was pirated in London by Bridewall in 1845, and the carefully expurgated edition put out by the Golden Goblin Press of New York, 1909. But the volume I stumbled upon was one of the unexpurgated German copies, with heavy black leather covers and rusty iron hasps. I doubt if there are more than half a dozen such volumes in the entire world today, for the quantity issued was not great, and when the manner of the author's demise was bruited about, many possessors of the book burned their volumes in panic.
Von Junzt spent his entire life (1795-1840) delving into forbidden subjects; he traveled in all parts of the world, gained entrance into innumerable secret societies, and read countless little-known and esoteric books and manuscripts in the original; and in the chapters of the Black Book, which range from startling clarity of exposition to murky ambiguity, there are statements and hints to freeze the blood of a thinking man. Reading what Von Junzt _dared_ put in print arouses uneasy speculations as to what it was that he dared _not_ tell. What dark matters, for instance, were contained in those closely written pages that formed the unpublished manuscript on which he worked unceasingly for months before his death, and which lay torn and scattered all over the floor of the locked and bolted chamber in which Von Junzt was found dead with the marks of taloned fingers on his throat? It will never be known, for the author's closest friend, the Frenchman Alexis Ladeau, after having spent a whole night piecing the fragments together and reading what was written, burnt them to ashes and cut his own throat with a razor.
But the contents of the published matter are shuddersome enough, even if
one accepts the general view that they but represent the ravings of a
madman. There among many strange things I found mention of the Black
Stone, that curious, sinister monolith that broods among the mountains
of Hungary, and about which so many dark legends cluster. Van Junzt did
not devote much space to it--the bulk of his grim work concerns cults
and objects of dark worship which he maintained existed in his day, and
it would seem that the Black Stone represents some order or being lost
and forgotten centuries ago. But he spoke of it as one of the _keys_--a
phrase used many times by him, in various relations, and constituting
one of the obscurities of his work. And he hinted briefly at curious
sights to be seen about the monolith on Midsummer's Night. He mentioned
Otto Dostmann's theory that this monolith was a remnant of the Hunnish
invasion and had been erected to commemorate a victory of Attila over
the Goths. Von Junzt contradicted this assertion without giving any
refutory facts, merely remarking that to attribute the origin of the
Black Stone to the Huns was as logical as assuming that William the
Conqueror reared Stonehenge.
This implication of enormous antiquity piqued my interest immensely and
after some difficulty I succeeded in locating a rat-eaten and moldering
copy of Dostmann's _Remnants of Lost Empires_ (Berlin, 1809, "Der
Drachenhaus" Press). I was disappointed to find that Dostmann referred
to the Black Stone even more briefly than had Von Junzt, dismissing it
with a few lines as an artifact comparatively modern in contrast with
the Greco-Roman ruins of Asia Minor which were his pet theme. He
admitted his inability to make out the defaced characters on the
monolith but pronounced them unmistakably Mongoloid. However, little as
I learned from Dostmann, he did mention the name of the village adjacent
to the Black Stone--Stregoicavar--an ominous name, meaning something
like Witch-Town.
A close scrutiny of guidebooks and travel articles gave me no further
information--Stregoicavar, not on any map that I could find, lay in a
wild, little-frequented region, out of the path of casual tourists. But
I did find subject for thought in Dornly's _Magyar Folklore_. In his
chapter on _Dream Myths_ he mentions the Black Stone and tells of some
curious superstitions regarding it--especially the belief that if anyone
sleeps in the vicinity of the monolith, that person will be haunted by
monstrous nightmares forever after; and he cited tales of the peasants
regarding too-curious people who ventured to visit the Stone on
Midsummer Night and who died raving mad because of _something_ they saw
there.
That was all I could gleam from Dornly, but my interest was even more
intensely roused as I sensed a distinctly sinister aura about the Stone.
The suggestion of dark antiquity, the recurrent hint of unnatural events
on Midsummer Night, touched some slumbering instinct in my being, as one
senses, rather than hears, the flowing of some dark subterraneous river
in the night.
And I suddenly saw a connection between this Stone and a certain weird
and fantastic poem written by the mad poet, Justin Geoffrey: _The People
of the Monolith_. Inquiries led to the information that Geoffrey had
indeed written that poem while traveling in Hungary, and I could not
doubt that the Black Stone was the very monolith to which he referred in
his strange verse. Reading his stanzas again, I felt once more the
strange dim stirrings of subconscious promptings that I had noticed when
first reading of the Stone.
I had been casting about for a place to spend a short vacation and I
made up my mind. I went to Stregoicavar. A train of obsolete style
carried me from Temesvar to within striking distance, at least, of my
objective, and a three days' ride in a jouncing coach brought me to the
little village which lay in a fertile valley high up in the fir-clad
mountains. The journey itself was uneventful, but during the first day
we passed the old battlefield of Schomvaal where the brave
Polish-Hungarian knight, Count Boris Vladinoff, made his gallant and
futile stand against the victorious hosts of Suleiman the Magnificent,
when the Grand Turk swept over eastern Europe in 1526.
The driver of the coach pointed out to me a great heap of crumbling
stones on a hill nearby, under which, he said, the bones of the brave
Count lay. I remembered a passage from Larson's _Turkish Wars_. "After
the skirmish" (in which the Count with his small army had beaten back
the Turkish advance-guard) "the Count was standing beneath the
half-ruined walls of the old castle on the hill, giving orders as to the
disposition of his forces, when an aide brought to him a small lacquered
case which had been taken from the body of the famous Turkish scribe and
historian, Selim Bahadur, who had fallen in the fight. The Count took
therefrom a roll of parchment and began to read, but he had not read far
before he turned very pale and, without saying a word, replaced the
parchment in the case and thrust the case into his cloak. At that very
instant a hidden Turkish battery suddenly opened fire, and the balls
striking the old castle, the Hungarians were horrified to see the walls
crash down in ruin, completely covering the brave Count. Without a
leader the gallant little army was cut to pieces, and in the war-swept
years which followed, the bones of the noblemen were never recovered.
Today the natives point out a huge and moldering pile of ruins near
Schomvaal beneath which, they say, still rests all that the centuries
have left of Count Boris Vladinoff."
I found the village of Stregoicavar a dreamy, drowsy little village that
apparently belied its sinister cognomen--a forgotten back-eddy that
Progress had passed by. The quaint houses and the quainter dress and
manners of the people were those of an earlier century. They were
friendly, mildly curious but not inquisitive, though visitors from the
outside world were extremely rare.
"Ten years ago another American came here and stayed a few days in the
village," said the owner of the tavern where I had put up, "a young
fellow and queer-acting--mumbled to himself--a poet, I think."
I knew he must mean Justin Geoffrey.
"Yes, he was a poet," I answered, "and he wrote a poem about a bit of
scenery near this very village."
"Indeed?" Mine host's interest was aroused. "Then, since all great poets
are strange in their speech and actions, he must have achieved great
fame, for his actions and conversations were the strangest of any man I
ever I knew."
"As is usual with artists," I answered, "most of his recognition has
come since his death."
"He is dead, then?"
"He died screaming in a madhouse five years ago."
"Too bad, too bad," sighed mine host sympathetically. "Poor lad--he
looked too long at the Black Stone."
My heart gave a leap, but I masked my keen interest and said casually.
"I have heard something of this Black Stone; somewhere near this
village, is it not?"
"Nearer than Christian folk wish," he responded. "Look!" He drew me to a
latticed window and pointed up at the fir-clad slopes of the brooding
blue mountains. "There beyond where you see the bare face of that
jutting cliff stands that accursed Stone. Would that it were ground to
powder and the powder flung into the Danube to be carried to the deepest
ocean! Once men tried to destroy the thing, but each man who laid hammer
or maul against it came to an evil end. So now the people shun it."
"What is there so evil about it?" I asked curiously.
"It is a demon-haunted thing," he answered uneasily and with the
suggestion of a shudder. "In my childhood I knew a young man who came up
from below and laughed at our traditions--in his foolhardiness he went
to the Stone one Midsummer Night and at dawn stumbled into the village
again, stricken dumb and mad. Something had shattered his brain and
sealed his lips, for until the day of his death, which came soon after,
he spoke only to utter terrible blasphemies or to slaver gibberish.
"My own nephew when very small was lost in the mountains and slept in
the woods near the Stone, and now in his manhood he is tortured by foul
dreams, so that at times he makes the night hideous with his screams and
wakes with cold sweat upon him.
"But let us talk of something else, _Herr_; it is not good to dwell upon
such things."
I remarked on the evident age of the tavern and he answered with pride.
"The foundations are more than four hundred years old; the original
house was the only one in the village which was not burned to the ground
when Suleiman's devil swept through the mountains. Here, in the house
that then stood on these same foundations, it is said, the scribe Selim
Bahadur had his headquarters while ravaging the country hereabouts."
I learned then that the present inhabitants of Stregoicavar are not
descendants of the people who dwelt there before the Turkish raid of
1526. The victorious Moslems left no living human in the village or the
vicinity thereabouts when they passed over. Men, women and children they
wiped out in one red holocaust of murder, leaving a vast stretch of
country silent and utterly deserted. The present people of Stregoicavar
are descended from hardy settlers from the lower valleys who came into
the ruined village after the Turk was thrust back.
Mine host did not speak of the extermination of the original inhabitants
with any great resentment and I learned that his ancestors in the lower
levels had looked on the mountaineers with even more hatred and aversion
than they regarded the Turks. He was rather vague regarding the causes
of this feud, but said that the original inhabitants of Stregoicavar had
been in the habit of making stealthy raids on the lowlands and stealing
girls and children. Moreover, he said that they were not exactly of the
same blood as his own people; the sturdy, original Magyar-Slavic stock
had mixed and intermarried with a degraded aboriginal race until the
breeds had blended, producing an unsavory amalgamation. Who these
aborigines were, he had not the slightest idea, but maintained that they
were "pagans" and had dwelt in the mountains since time immemorial,
before the coming of the conquering peoples.
I attached little importance to this tale; seeing in it merely a
parallel to the amalgamation of Celtic tribes with Mediterranean
aborigines in the Galloway hills, with the resultant mixed race which,
as Picts, has such an extensive part in Scotch legendary. Time has a
curious foreshortening effect on folklore, and just as tales of the
Picts became intertwined with legends of an older Mongoloid race, so
that eventually the Picts were ascribed the repulsive appearance of the
squat primitives, whose individuality merged, in the telling, into
Pictish tales, and was forgotten; so, I felt, the supposed inhuman
attributes of the first villagers of Stregoicavar could be traced to
older, outworn myths with invading Huns and Mongols.
The morning after my arrival I received directions from mine host, who
gave them worriedly, and set out to find the Black Stone. A few hours'
tramp up the fir-covered slopes brought me to the face of the rugged,
solid stone cliff which jutted boldly from the mountainside. A narrow
trail wound up it, and mounting this, I looked out over the peaceful
valley of Stregoicavar, which seemed to drowse, guarded on either hand
by the great blue mountains. No huts or any sign of human tenancy showed
between the cliff whereon I stood and the village. I saw numbers of
scattering farms in the valley but all lay on the other side of
Stregoicavar, which itself seemed to shrink from the brooding slopes
which masked the Black Stone.
The summit of the cliffs proved to be a sort of thickly wooded plateau.
I made my way through the dense growth for a short distance and came
into a wide glade; and in the center of the glade reared a gaunt figure
of black stone.
It was octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot
and a half thick. It had once evidently been highly polished, but now
the surface was thickly dinted as if savage efforts had been made to
demolish it; but the hammers had done little more than to flake off
small bits of stone and mutilate the characters which once had evidently
marched up in a spiraling line round and round the shaft to the top. Up
to ten feet from the base these characters were almost completely
blotted out, so that it was very difficult to trace their direction.
Higher up they were plainer, and I managed to squirm part of the way up
the shaft and scan them at close range. All were more or less defaced,
but I was positive that they symbolized no language now remembered on
the face of the earth. I am fairly familiar with all hieroglyphics known
to researchers and philologists and I can say, with certainty that those
characters were like nothing of which I have ever read or heard. The
nearest approach to them that I ever saw were some crude scratches on a
gigantic and strangely symmetrical rock in a lost valley of Yucatan. I
remember that when I pointed out these marks to the archeologist who was
my companion, he maintained that they either represented natural
weathering or the idle scratching of some Indian. To my theory that the
rock was really the base of a long-vanished column, he merely laughed,
calling my attention to the dimensions of it, which suggested, if it
were built with any natural rules of architectural symmetry, a column a
thousand feet high. But I was not convinced.
I will not say that the characters on the Black Stone were similar to
those on that colossal rock in Yucatan; but one suggested the other. As
to the substance of the monolith, again I was baffled. The stone of
which it was composed was a dully gleaming black, whose surface, where
it was not dinted and roughened, created a curious illusion of
semi-transparency.
I spent most of the morning there and came away baffled. No connection
of the Stone with any other artifact in the world suggested itself to
me. It was as if the monolith had been reared by alien hands, in an age
distant and apart from human ken.
I returned to the village with my interest in no way abated. Now that I
had seen the curious thing, my desire was still more keenly whetted to
investigate the matter further and seek to learn by what strange hands
and for what strange purpose the Black Stone had been reared in the long
ago.
I sought out the tavern-keeper's nephew and questioned him in regard to
his dreams, but he was vague, though willing to oblige. He did not mind
discussing them, but was unable to describe them with any clarity.
Though he dreamed the same dreams repeatedly, and though they were
hideously vivid at the time, they left no distinct impression on his
waking mind. He remembered them only as chaotic nightmares through which
huge whirling fires shot lurid tongues of flame and a black drum
bellowed incessantly. One thing only he remembered clearly--in one dream
he had seen the Black Stone, not on a mountain slope but set like a
spire on a colossal black castle.
As for the rest of the villagers I found them not inclined to talk about
the Stone, with the exception of the schoolmaster, a man of surprizing
education, who spent much more of his time out in the world than any of
the rest.
He was much interested in what I told him of Von Junzt's remarks about
the Stone, and warmly agreed with the German author in the alleged age
of the monolith. He believed that a coven had once existed in the
vicinity and that possibly all of the original villagers had been
members of that fertility cult which once threatened to undermine
European civilization and gave rise to the tales of witchcraft. He cited
the very name of the village to prove his point; it had not been
originally named Stregoicavar, he said; according to legends the
builders had called it Xuthltan, which was the aboriginal name of the
site on which the village had been built many centuries ago.
This fact roused again an indescribable feeling of uneasiness. The
barbarous name did not suggest connection with any Scythic, Slavic or
Mongolian race to which an aboriginal people of these mountains would,
under natural circumstances, have belonged.
That the Magyars and Slavs of the lower valleys believed the original
inhabitants of the village to be members of the witchcraft cult was
evident, the schoolmaster said, by the name they gave it, which name
continued to be used even after the older settlers had been massacred by
the Turks, and the village rebuilt by a cleaner and more wholesome
breed.
He did not believe that the members of the cult erected the monolith but
he did believe that they used it as a center of their activities, and
repeating vague legends which had been handed down since before the
Turkish invasion, he advanced the theory that the degenerate villagers
had used it as a sort of altar on which they offered human sacrifices,
using as victims the girls and babies stolen from his own ancestors in
the lower valleys.
He discounted the myths of weird events on Midsummer Night, as well as a
curious legend of a strange deity which the witch-people of Xuthltan
were said to have invoked with chants and wild rituals of flagellation
and slaughter.
He had never visited the Stone on Midsummer Night, he said, but he would
not fear to do so; whatever _had_ existed or taken place there in the
past, had been long engulfed in the mists of time and oblivion. The
Black Stone had lost its meaning save as a link to a dead and dusty
past.
It was while returning from a visit with this schoolmaster one night
about a week after my arrival at Stregoicavar that a sudden recollection
struck me--it was Midsummer Night! The very time that the legends linked
with grisly implications to the Black Stone. I turned away from the
tavern and strode swiftly through the village. Stregoicavar lay silent;
the villagers retired early. I saw no one as I passed rapidly out of the
village and up into the firs which masked the mountain's slopes with
whispering darkness. A broad silver moon hung above the valley, flooding
the crags and slopes in a weird light and etching the shadows blackly.
No wind blew through the firs, but a mysterious, intangible rustling and
whispering was abroad. Surely on such nights in past centuries, my
whimsical imagination told me, naked witches astride magic broomsticks
had flown across the valley, pursued by jeering demoniac familiars.
I came to the cliffs and was somewhat disquieted to note that the
illusive moonlight lent them a subtle appearance I had not noticed
before--in the weird light they appeared less like natural cliffs and
more like the ruins of cyclopean and Titan-reared battlements jutting
from the mountain-slope.
Shaking off this hallucination with difficulty I came upon the plateau
and hesitated a moment before I plunged into the brooding darkness of
the woods. A sort of breathless tenseness hung over the shadows, like an
unseen monster holding its breath lest it scare away its prey.
I shook off the sensation--a natural one, considering the eeriness of
the place and its evil reputation--and made my way through the wood,
experiencing a most unpleasant sensation that I was being followed, and
halting once, sure that something clammy and unstable had brushed
against my face in the darkness.
I came out into the glade and saw the tall monolith rearing its gaunt
height above the sward. At the edge of the woods on the side toward the
cliffs was a stone which formed a sort of natural seat. I sat down,
reflecting that it was probably while there that the mad poet, Justin
Geoffrey, had written his fantastic _People of the Monolith_. Mine host
thought that it was the Stone which had caused Geoffrey's insanity, but
the seeds of madness had been sown in the poet's brain long before he
ever came to Stregoicavar.
A glance at my watch showed that the hour of midnight was close at hand.
I leaned back, waiting whatever ghostly demonstration might appear. A
thin night wind started up among the branches of the firs, with an
uncanny suggestion of faint, unseen pipes whispering an eerie and evil
tune. The monotony of the sound and my steady gazing at the monolith
produced a sort of self-hypnosis upon me; I grew drowsy. I fought this
feeling, but sleep stole on me in spite of myself; the monolith seemed
to sway and dance, strangely distorted to my gaze, and then I slept.
I opened my eyes and sought to rise, but lay still, as if an icy hand
gripped me helpless. Cold terror stole over me. The glade was no longer
deserted. It was thronged by a silent crowd of strange people, and my
distended eyes took in strange barbaric details of costume which my
reason told me were archaic and forgotten even in this backward land.
Surely, I thought, these are villagers who have come here to hold some
fantastic conclave--but another glance told me that these people were
not the folk of Stregoicavar. They were a shorter, more squat race,
whose brows were lower, whose faces were broader and duller. Some had
Slavic and Magyar features, but those features were degraded as from a
mixture of some baser, alien strain I could not classify. Many wore the
hides of wild beasts, and their whole appearance, both men and women,
was one of sensual brutishness. They terrified and repelled me, but they
gave me no heed. They formed in a vast half-circle in front of the
monolith and began a sort of chant, flinging their arms in unison and
weaving their bodies rhythmically from the waist upward. All eyes were
fixed on the top of the Stone which they seemed to be invoking. But the
strangest of all was the dimness of their voices; not fifty yards from
me hundreds of men and women were unmistakably lifting their voices in a
wild chant, yet those voices came to me as a faint indistinguishable
murmur as if from across vast leagues of Space--or _time_.
Before the monolith stood a sort of brazier from which a vile, nauseous
yellow smoke billowed upward, curling curiously in a swaying spiral
around the black shaft, like a vast unstable snake.
On one side of this brazier lay two figures--a young girl, stark naked
and bound hand and foot, and an infant, apparently only a few months
old. On the other side of the brazier squatted a hideous old hag with a
queer sort of black drum on her lap; this drum she beat with slow light
blows of her open palms, but I could not hear the sound.
The rhythm of the swaying bodies grew faster and into the space between
the people and the monolith sprang a naked young woman, her eyes
blazing, her long black hair flying loose. Spinning dizzily on her toes,
she whirled across the open space and fell prostrate before the Stone,
where she lay motionless. The next instant a fantastic figure followed
her--a man from whose waist hung a goatskin, and whose features were
entirely hidden by a sort of mask made from a huge wolf's head, so that
he looked like a monstrous, nightmare being, horribly compounded of
elements both human and bestial. In his hand he held a bunch of long fir
switches bound together at the larger ends, and the moonlight glinted on
a chain of heavy gold looped about his neck. A smaller chain depending
from it suggested a pendant of some sort, but this was missing.
The people tossed their arms violently and seemed to redouble their
shouts as this grotesque creature loped across the open space with many
a fantastic leap and caper. Coming to the woman who lay before the
monolith, he began to lash her with the switches he bore, and she leaped
up and spun into the wild mazes of the most incredible dance I have ever
seen. And her tormentor danced with her, keeping the wild rhythm,
matching her every whirl and bound, while incessantly raining cruel
blows on her naked body. And at every blow he shouted a single word,
over and over, and all the people shouted it back. I could see the
working of their lips, and now the faint far-off murmur of their voices
merged and blended into one distant shout, repeated over and over with
slobbering ecstasy. But what the one word was, I could not make out.
In dizzy whirls spun the wild dancers, while the lookers-on, standing
still in their tracks, followed the rhythm of their dance with swaying
bodies and weaving arms. Madness grew in the eyes of the capering
votaress and was reflected in the eyes of the watchers. Wilder and more
extravagant grew the whirling frenzy of that mad dance--it became a
bestial and obscene thing, while the old hag howled and battered the
drum like a crazy woman, and the switches cracked out a devil's tune.
Blood trickled down the dancer's limbs but she seemed not to feel the
lashing save as a stimulus for further enormities of outrageous motion;
bounding into the midst of the yellow smoke which now spread out tenuous
tentacles to embrace both flying figures, she seemed to merge with that
foul fog and veil herself with it. Then emerging into plain view,
closely followed by the beast-thing that flogged her, she shot into an
indescribable, explosive burst of dynamic mad motion, and on the very
crest of that mad wave, she dropped suddenly to the sward, quivering and
panting as if completely overcome by her frenzied exertions. The lashing
continued with unabated violence and intensity and she began to wriggle
toward the monolith on her belly. The priest--or such I will call
him--followed, lashing her unprotected body with all the power of his
arm as she writhed along, leaving a heavy track of blood on the trampled
earth. She reached the monolith, and gasping and panting, flung both
arms about it and covered the cold stone with fierce hot kisses, as in
frenzied and unholy adoration.
The fantastic priest bounded high in the air, flinging away the
red-dabbled switches, and the worshippers, howling and foaming at the
mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rending one another's
garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up
the infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the
wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the
monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror
I saw him rip the tiny body open with his bare brutish fingers and fling
handfuls of blood on the shaft, then toss the red and torn shape into
the brazier, extinguishing flame and smoke in a crimson rain, while the
maddened brutes behind him howled over and over the Name. Then suddenly
they all fell prostrate, writhing like snakes, while the priest flung
wide his gory hands as in triumph. I opened my mouth to scream my horror
and loathing, but only a dry rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toad-like
thing squatted on the top of the monolith!
I saw its bloated, repulsive and unstable outline against the moonlight
and set in what would have been the face of a natural creature, its
huge, blinking eyes which reflected all the lust, abysmal greed, obscene
cruelty and monstrous evil that has stalked the sons of men since their
ancestors moved blind and hairless in the treetops. In those grisly eyes
were mirrored all the unholy things and vile secrets that sleep in the
cities under the sea, and that skulk from the light of day in the
blackness of primordial caverns. And so that ghastly thing that the
unhallowed ritual of cruelty and sadism and blood had evoked from the
silence of the hills, leered and blinked down on its bestial
worshippers, who groveled in abhorrent abasement before it.
Now the beast-masked priest lifted the bound and weakly writhing girl in
his brutish hands and held her up toward that horror on the monolith.
And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath, lustfully and
slobberingly, something snapped in my brain and I fell into a merciful
faint.
I opened my eyes on a still white dawn. All the events of the night
rushed back on me and I sprang up, then stared about me in amazement.
The monolith brooded gaunt and silent above the sward which waved, green
and untrampled, in the morning breeze. A few quick strides took me
across the glade; here had the dancers leaped and bounded until the
ground should have been trampled bare, and here had the votaress
wriggled her painful way to the Stone, streaming blood on the earth. But
no drop of crimson showed on the uncrushed sward. I looked,
shudderingly, at the side of the monolith against which the bestial
priest had brained the stolen baby--but no dark stain nor grisly clot
showed there.
A dream! It had been a wild nightmare--or else--I shrugged my shoulders.
What vivid clarity for a dream!
I returned quietly to the village and entered the inn without being
seen. And there I sat meditating over the strange events of the night.
More and more was I prone to discard the dream-theory. That what I had
seen was illusion and without material substance, was evident. But I
believed that I had looked on the mirrored shadow of a deed perpetrated
in ghastly actuality in bygone days. But how was I to know? What proof
to show that my vision had been a gathering of foul specters rather than
a nightmare originating in my brain?
As if for answer a name flashed into my mind--Selim Bahadur! According
to legend this man, who had been a soldier as well as a scribe, had
commanded that part of Suleiman's army which had devastated
Stregoicavar; it seemed logical enough; and if so, he had gone straight
from the blotted-out countryside to the bloody field of Schomvaal, and
his doom. I sprang up with a sudden shout--that manuscript which was
taken from the Turk's body, and which Count Boris shuddered over--might
it not contain some narration of what the conquering Turks found in
Stregoicavar? What else could have shaken the iron nerves of the Polish
adventurer? And since the bones of the Count had never been recovered,
what more certain than that the lacquered case, with its mysterious
contents, still lay hidden beneath the ruins that covered Boris
Vladinoff? I began packing my bag with fierce haste.
Three days later found me ensconced in a little village a few miles from
the old battlefield, and when the moon rose I was working with savage
intensity on the great pile of crumbling stone that crowned the hill. It
was back-breaking toil--looking back now I can not see how I
accomplished it, though I labored without a pause from moonrise to dawn.
Just as the sun was coming up I tore aside the last tangle of stones and
looked on all that was mortal of Count Boris Vladinoff--only a few
pitiful fragments of crumbling bone--and among them, crushed out of all
original shape, lay a case whose lacquered surface had kept it from
complete decay through the centuries.
I seized it with frenzied eagerness, and piling back some of the stones
on the bones I hurried away; for I did not care to be discovered by the
suspicious peasants in an act of apparent desecration.
Back in my tavern chamber I opened the case and found the parchment
comparatively intact; and there was something else in the case--a small
squat object wrapped in silk. I was wild to plumb the secrets of those
yellowed pages, but weariness forbade me. Since leaving Stregoicavar I
had hardly slept at all, and the terrific exertions of the previous
night combined to overcome me. In spite of myself I was forced to
stretch myself on my bed, nor did I awake until sundown.
I snatched a hasty supper, and then in the light of a flickering candle,
I set myself to read the neat Turkish characters that covered the
parchment. It was difficult work, for I am not deeply versed in the
language and the archaic style of the narrative baffled me. But as I
toiled through it a word or a phrase here and there leaped at me and a
dimly growing horror shook me in its grip. I bent my energies fiercely
to the task, and as the tale grew clearer and took more tangible form my
blood chilled in my veins, my hair stood up and my tongue clove to my
mouth. All external things partook of the grisly madness of that
infernal manuscript until the night sounds of insects and creatures in
the woods took the form of ghastly murmurings and stealthy treadings of
ghoulish horrors and the sighing of the night wind changed to tittering
obscene gloating of evil over the souls of men.
At last when gray dawn was stealing through the latticed window, I laid
down the manuscript and took up and unwrapped the thing in the bit of
silk. Staring at it with haggard eyes I knew the truth of the matter was
clinched, even had it been possible to doubt the veracity of that
terrible manuscript.
And I replaced both obscene things in the case, nor did I rest nor sleep
nor eat until that case containing them had been weighted with stones
and flung into the deepest current of the Danube which, God grant,
carried them back into the Hell from which they came.
It was no dream I dreamed on Midsummer Midnight in the hills above
Stregoicavar. Well for Justin Geoffrey that he tarried there only in the
sunlight and went his way, for had he gazed upon that ghastly conclave,
his mad brain would have snapped before it did. How my own reason held,
I do not know.
No--it was no dream--I gazed upon a foul rout of votaries long dead,
come up from Hell to worship as of old; ghosts that bowed before a
ghost. For Hell has long claimed their hideous god. Long, long he dwelt
among the hills, a brain-shattering vestige of an outworn age, but no
longer his obscene talons clutch for the souls of living men, and his
kingdom is a dead kingdom, peopled only by the ghosts of those who
served him in his lifetime and theirs.
By what foul alchemy or godless sorcery the Gates of Hell are opened on
that one eerie night I do not know, but mine own eyes have seen. And I
know I looked on no living thing that night, for the manuscript written
in the careful hand of Selim Bahadur narrated at length what he and his
raiders found in the valley of Stregoicavar; and I read, set down in
detail, the blasphemous obscenities that torture wrung from the lips of
screaming worshippers; and I read, too, of the lost, grim black cavern
high in the hills where the horrified Turks hemmed a monstrous, bloated,
wallowing toad-like being and slew it with flame and ancient steel
blessed in old times by Muhammad, and with incantations that were old
when Arabia was young. And even staunch old Selim's hand shook as he
recorded the cataclysmic, earth-shaking death-howls of the monstrosity,
which died not alone; for half-score of his slayers perished with him,
in ways that Selim would not or could not describe.
And that squat idol carved of gold and wrapped in silk was an image of
_himself_, and Selim tore it from the golden chain that looped the neck
of the slain high priest of the mask.
Well that the Turks swept out that foul valley with torch and cleanly
steel! Such sights as those brooding mountains have looked on belong to
the darkness and abysses of lost eons. No--it is not fear of the
toad-thing that makes me shudder in the night. He is made fast in Hell
with his nauseous horde, freed only for an hour on the most weird night
of the year, as I have seen. And of his worshippers, none remains.
But it is the realization that such things once crouched beast-like
above the souls of men which brings cold sweat to my brow; and I fear to
peer again into the leaves of Von Junzt's abomination. For now I
understand his repeated phrase of _keys_!--aye! Keys to Outer
Doors--links with an abhorrent past and--who knows?--of abhorrent
spheres of the _present_. And I understand why the cliffs look like
battlements in the moonlight and why the tavern-keeper's
nightmare-haunted nephew saw in his dream, the Black Stone like a spire
on a cyclopean black castle. If men ever excavate among those mountains
they may find incredible things below those masking slopes. For the cave
wherein the Turks trapped the--_thing_--was not truly a cavern, and I
shudder to contemplate the gigantic gulf of eons which must stretch
between this age and the time when the earth shook herself and reared
up, like a wave, those blue mountains that, rising, enveloped
unthinkable things. May no man ever seek to uproot that ghastly spire
men call the Black Stone!
A Key! Aye, it is a Key, symbol of a forgotten horror. That horror has
faded into the limbo from which it crawled, loathsomely, in the black
dawn of the earth. But what of the other fiendish possibilities hinted
at by Von Junzt--what of the monstrous hand which strangled out his
life? Since reading what Selim Bahadur wrote, I can no longer doubt
anything in the Black Book. Man was not always master of the earth--_and
is he now?_
And the thought recurs to me--if such a monstrous entity as the Master
of the Monolith somehow survived its own unspeakably distant epoch so
long--_what nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the
world?_
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