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I.
The Lord Vooth Raluorn [3],
a member of the minor nobility of Hyperborean and twenty-ninth hereditary High
Constable of Commoriom, succeeded to his inheritance at an unusually premature
age, when his father, an inveterate huntsman, succumbed to the fangs and claws
of one of the lesser dinosauria. As his official duties were largely ceremonial,
Vooth Raluorn enjoyed both the leisure and the income to indulge in his
principal enthusiasm, which was the perusal of antique grimoires and the mastery
of the arts of wizardry. In this hobby, he was assisted, albeit posthumously, by
his grandsire, for the twenty-seventh hereditary High Constable had been
unremitting in his persecution of the interdicted cultus of the demon Tsathoggua
and his loathly ilk, and his tireless persecutions had resulted in the
accumulation of an enviable library of sorcerous tomes.
His leisure thus divided
between scholarly pursuits and the lascivious pleasures of his rank, Vooth
Raluorn luxuriated in the best of both the intellectual and the voluptuous
spheres, and from these studies and pleasures he was but infrequently roused by
the call of his constabulatory duties. One such occasion took place early in the
reign of Queen Luthomne: a conventicle of demon-worshippers having been
discovered in the southernmost suburb of the capital, Vooth Raluorn was forced
to extricate himself from the embrace of his leman, the supple-limbed and sable-tressed
Ysabbau, in order to respond to the call of duty.
The demon-worshippers, it
seemed, had ensconced themselves in an abandoned manse which reared its terraces
on the esplanade of the Yrautrom canal, where they engaged furtively in their
unlawful rituals during those seasons of the year when the star Algol is in the
ascendant. Accompanying the constabulary troop, in order to lend the legality of
his office to their nocturnal raid, Vooth Raluorn was among the first to gain
entry to the semi-ruinous edifice, and while the robed celebrants were bound and
searched, he examined with interest the altar-like table stone which stood at
the centremost portion of the vault in which they had conducted their liturgical
blasphemies. It was strewn with a number of interesting ritual objects, unique
among these being a singularly abhor rent eidolon hewn from glinting obsidian,
which depicted a swag-bellied and corpulent entity with bat-like wings and the
splay-footed hind-legs of a monstrous toad. Face it had none, save for a grisly
beard of slithering tentacles which obtruded from the frontal portions of its
repellently misshapen skull.
Before accompanying his
raiding-party and their prisoners to the nearest gaol, Vooth Raluorn revoltedly
.shattered the eidolon to ringing shards with the bronze-shod maul of his
office.
This action, as it
eventuated, was exceedingly unwise. Returning at length to the arms of his
concubine, the High Constable found himself unable to rekindle the fiery ardour
he had known earlier on that memorable evening, and became increasingly aware of
a curious mixture of listlessness and uneasy excitation which neither the
honeyed lips of Ysabbau nor the bitter lees of the winecup could seemingly
assuage.
Nightly thereafter were the
dreams of Vooth Raluorn made hideous by an umbral apparition of menacing aspect
which resembled in every detail the repellant idol he had so imprudently riven
asunder. None of the wizardly volumes in the library of his grandsire served to
render again wholesome his slumbers, and even though Vooth Raluorn dared employ
the redoubtable exorcisms of Pnom, at first the Lesser and then in turn the
Greater, he found no means whereby to extirpate the shadowy and obscene
apparition from his dreams.
With despair and more than
considerable trepidation, Vooth Raluorn at length consulted those of his
colleagues in the Art Sorcerous with whom his relations were mutually friendly.
One such, a saintly septuagenarian yclept Zongis Furalor, succeeded in
identifying the cult-object as an image wrought in the likeness of a demonic
entity whose name among men was Zvilpogghua; so obscure was the repute of this
demon, that Vooth Raluorn had never heretofore encountered aught concerning him
in the grimoires and testaments available for his perusal, but Zongis Furalor
abstracted from his folios a painted likeness of the demon which the High
Constable shudderingly recognized as identical with the shadow-shape which had
for nights rendered his dreams unspeakably noxious.
Alas, his wizardly colleague
either knew little concerning the demon or refused to impart his knowledge
thereof; he had, however, a word of advice for the hapless Vooth Raluorn. It
seemed that the cult which had worshipped Zvilpogghua (until such time as the
surviving members of the conventicle had perished by impalement, due to the
swift justice of Queen Luthomne's ecclesiastical courts) had formerly counted
among their number a renegade named Yzduggor, who, for whatever reason, had
quitted their body some years agone, to take up the life of a penitent eremite
among the steeps of the black Eiglophian Mountains. Of the wise Yzduggor, whom
the wizards of Commoriom held in the highest repute, it was rumored that he, as
a former devotee of the obsolete and interdicted cultus of Zvilpogghua, was
privy to the sacerdotal lore of that entity, and moreover, that Zvilpogghua, as
firstborn of the spawn of dreaded Tsathoggua [4], begotten by
the Black Thing upon a female entity named Shathak on far and frozen Yaksh the
seventh world, was a demonic personage of the most primordial lineage, and very
greatly to be feared.
Thereupon, and without
dalliance, did the dream-haunted Vooth Raluorn forthwith eloign to the
Eiglophians, in search of the remote and secluded dwelling of this Yzduggor.
II.
In these central regions of
the continent, the land grew wild and perilous, and it was only prudent of the
High Constable to venture thither accompanied by two stout guards of his
retinue, Yanur and Tsangth [5]. They journeyed, clad in
garments of saurian-leather with accouterments of bronze, and both warriors
bristled with blades and barbs, for fear of the furry and prehuman Voormis who
haunted the peaks, to say nothing-of the monstrous catobleps of the mires.
Indeed, the unlucky Tsangth
fell prey to the scythe-clawed catobleps during their traversal of a swampy
region, and the doughty Yanur perished in combat with the furtive Voormis,
leaving the young noble with naught to depend on save his own wizardry and the
strength of his adamantine scimitar, whose tang was sunk in a grip carved from
mastodonic ivory.
Alone and unaided did Vooth
Raluorn assail the glassy scarps of volcanic obsidian, the scoriae cliffs of
time-riven basalt, avoiding the fumaroles and crevasses wherein might well lurk
not only the savage Voormis, but the cockatrices and basilisks rumored to favor
such darksome lairs.
Above him as he toiled
upwards towards the cell of the repentant eremite, the cloudless blue ascended
to a zenith of flawless sapphire. With difficulty, he made safe crossing of beds
of black lava like motionless rivers of stony knives, and, entering upon a
scruffy stand of gnarled junipers, which meagerly flourished from patches of
fetid black loam, he entered a narrow cleft between vast, tumbled blocks of
levin-shattered basaltic boulders, huge as the toy blocks abandoned by the
careless hands of Titan-children.
Through this winding and
tenebrous labyrinth he went, finding himself at last upon a flat and level
tableland where a tongue of rock thrust out over a vertiginous and bottomless
abyss. Thereupon he spied a hovel whose walls were made of boardings hewn from
Jurassic conifers, roofed over by the palm-like fronds of cycads. Before this
miserable hut, upon a bed of sanguine coals, a cauldron of black iron steamed
and bubbled.
And crouched upon the
door-stoop, he spied a gaunt and wretched figure, mummy-thin to the point of
emaciation, wrinkled flesh umber of hue between patches of ancient filth,
wearing naught but the reeking hide of a Voormis knotted about skeletal loins.
With a friendly halloo, the High Constable approached the eremite and addressed
him by name. But to this friendly greeting the lean hermit returned no reply,
not even deigning to recognize the approach of a fellow-human. Thin lips
revealing all-but-toothless gums, where yet remained the discolored stump of a
worn fang or two, mumbling prayers or adjurations in a hoarse and croaking
voice, the eremite continued at his devotions, ignoring the very presence of the
young noble, and all the while with talon-thin fingers he counted the beads of
an uncouth rosary seemingly fashioned from human knuckle-bones.
At length, his devotions
concluded, Yzduggor, for it was in sooth he, granted his supplicant the benison
of a sour glance of unwelcome from yellow eyes bleared with rheum. Undaunted,
Vooth Raluorn opened his leathern wallet and produced those gifts he had
hopefully assumed one so long sequestered in this wilderness, far from the
habitation of men, might covet above all else: dried meats, sweet jellies, ripe
swamp-fruits, a fat black bottle of fire-hearted brandy from Uzuldaroum, and a
bag of fragrant snuff. One by one he laid these offerings before the bare, and
bony, and very dirty, feet of the eremite.
His. choices proved apt and
quite welcome, for the claw-like hands snatched and tore at the luscious
delicacies, and while Yzduggor guzzled and slobbered in the most disgusting of
manners, the young wizard explained the reason which had prompted this visit and
implored the assistance of the former devotee of Zvilpogghua.
His appetite appeased, the
eremite at length yielded grudging reply to his entreaties, and erelong did the
young Commorian learn from Yzduggor’s reluctant lips that presently
Zvilpogghua resided on far and frozen Ymar [6], a world
circumambient about the green star Algol, and might be called down to this world
by his worshippers during those months of the year when the constellation
Perseus is in the heavens, whereupon it is his grisly wont to feed upon the
flesh and to drink of the blood of men, wherefore is he known to sorcerers as
the Feaster from the Stars.
"Very malign and
unforgiving is Zvilpogghua," quoth Yzduggor in harsh and ruminative tones
to the young wizard, "and beware lest you incur his wrath or ire, for he is
wise and old and cunning, and not of a charitable nature."
Therefollowing, he advised
his visitor to do thus-and-so which might avert the vengeance of the Son of
Tsathoggua. "Or might not," added the hermit with an enigmatic
chuckle.
III.
His return from the
Eiglophian range was more difficult and hazardous than had been the way thither,
lacking his two stalwart guards. Vooth Raluorn was forced to lone battle against
the beasts of forest and swamp, with his wizardry and his swordsmanship, and
fortunately he came out of each contest the victor. Returning home to the
ancient house of his ancestors, he dispatched pages and servitors to purchase
the requisites for the formula recommended by the eremite.
This involved considerable
expense, as it required rare spices, costly perfumes, expensive chemicals,
dangerous narcotics, and such valuable admixtures as powdered dust of opals and
the tears of the hippogriff; fortunately for his coffers, Vooth Raluorn was
enabled to procure several of these constituents at cost, as his closest
relative, his nephew and heir, Nungis Avargomon, had been reduced by poverty to
trading in rare substances required by wizards.
With all ready to hand, the
sun westering, Perseus in the ascendant and Algol a fervent eye of green fire in
the firmament, the young wizard repaired to a hilltop in the precincts athwart
his manse, hitherto occupied only by tombs and sepulchres, and prepared to
exorcise forever the demonic entity whose disapproval he had, however
accidentally, incurred.
He traced the circles and
built the fire and cast thereinto the required substances. Vapors occulted the
moon's cold eye, but Algol glared burningly down upon the scene. With cold
globules of perspiration bedewing his furrowed brow, Vooth Raluorn intoned the
versicles recommended by the eremite. A silence fell upon the gloom-shrouded
eminence; the wind died; cold stars leered down from above.
A
black shadow descended.
Swag-bellied, toad-like,
with bat-wings and splayed, webbed feet it was; entirely lacking in fore limbs,
the head featureless, a writhing mass of tentacles or feelers, the obscene black
shape swept down on the huddled, shrieking form on the headland, and bore it
aloft in webbed claws. Nor was it ever again seen by mortal men.
And far to the south, beyond
jungle and swamp, foothills and mountains, on a spar of jutting rock where stood
a crude hovel, a gaunt and famished eremite groveled before a crude image.
"Yet one more offering,
Lord Zvilpogghua," the mummy-thin hermit whined. "I eliminated one
precious ingredient from the formula, to thy power and glory. Grant me
forgiveness for having deserted thy coventicle: there will be other offerings, I
vow . . ."
And, months later, in
Commoriom to the north, a certain impoverished scion of the lesser nobility, one
Nungis Avargomon, was delighted beyond belief to learn that he was declared by
the courts to be the sole and complete heir of the missing Vooth Raluorn, and
became possessor of the ancestral estate and inheritor of the thirtieth High
Constable ship of Commoriom.
And all that he had done was
to cheat on the powdered opals.
NOTES:
1. The title
is one coined by Lovecraft and ascribed to his imaginary author "Robert
Blake", in "The Haunter of the Dark". It's a shame to let a good
title go to waste.
2. The story
itself derives from a plot-idea of Smith's which is not in The
Black Book but was discovered by myself scribbled on the back of one of
Smith's holograph manuscripts: "When a magistrate, condemning to death the
members of an illicit cult of devil-worshippers, gratuitously shatters the idol
of their god, he incurs its wrath. When all of the cultists are executed, the
demon must exact its own vengeance on the magistrate." Note that I have
only slightly altered this, making the lead character a High Constable, rather
than a magistrate, in order to avoid too close a parallel to "The Seven
Geases".
3. "Yzduggor"
and "Vooth Raluorn" are names coined by Smith, which appear in his
notes for the story eventually published as "The Seven Geases". In his
final version of the text these names were changed to "Ezdagor" and
"Ralibar Vooz". I hate to let good names go to waste, too.
4. It was
Lovecraft who came up with the notion of a "Child of Tsathoggua" in
his excerpt from Of Evill Sorceries,
one of the fragments which Derleth incorporated into The
Lurker at the Threshold. HPL failed to specify its gender. In his
"Genealogical Chart" excerpted from a 1934 letter to Barlow and
published in Planets and Dimensions,
Smith gives "Zvilpogghua" as the name of Tsathoggua's only listed
child. He also adds the information that the child was begotten on a female
entity named Shathak upon the planet Yaksh (Neptune) by Tsathoggua, before he
descended to this earth. In lieu of contradictory data, I presume Zvilpogghua to
be male.
5. "Luthomne",
"Yrautrom", "Ysabbau", "Zongis Furalor",
"Yanur", etc. All of these names were coined by Smith and listed for
future use in his notes.
6. Please note
that of the twenty-four proper nouns in this story, only one (Ymar) was invented
by myself.
---Lin
Carter
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