Pointing to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left,
the room; and when I sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary
and moldy, and that they included old Morryster’s wild “Marvels of
Science,” the terrible “Saducismus Triumphatus” of Joseph Glanvil,
published in 1681, the shocking “Daemonolatreia” of Remigius, printed
in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable “Necronomicon”
of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius’ forbidden Latin
translation: a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard
monstrous things whispered. No one spoke to me, but I could hear the
creaking of signs in the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as
the bonneted old woman continued her silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the books and the people very morbid and
disquieting, but because an old tradition of my father’s had summoned
me to strange feastings, I resolved to expect queer things. So I tried
to read, and soon became tremblingly absorbed by something I found in
that accursed “Necronomicon”; a thought and a legend too hideous for
sanity or consciousness. But I disliked it when I fancied I heard the
closing of one of the windows that the settle faced, as if it had been
stealthily opened. It had seemed to follow a whirring that was not of
the old woman’s spinning-wheel. This was not much, though, for the old
woman was spinning very hard, and the aged clock had been striking. After that I lost the feeling that there were persons on the settle,
and was reading intently and shudderingly when the old man came back
booted and dressed in a loose antique costume, and sat down on that
very bench, so that I could not see him. It was certainly nervous
waiting, and the blasphemous book in my hands made it doubly so. When
11 o’clock struck, however, the old man stood up, glided to a massive
carved chest in a corner, and got two hooded cloaks, one of which he
donned, and the other of which he draped round the old woman, who was
ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then they both started for the outer
door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after picking up the
very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his hood over
that unmoving face or mask. We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly
ancient town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows
disappeared one by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng of
cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway and
formed monstrous processions up this street and that, past the
creaking signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and the
diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying
houses overlapped and crumbled together, gliding across open courts
and churchyards where the bobbing lanterns made eldritch drunken
constellations. Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by
elbows that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and
stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing never a face and
hearing never a word. Up, up, up, the eery columns slithered, and I
saw that all the travelers were converging as they flowed near a sort
of focus of crazy alleys at the top of a high hill in the center of
the town, where perched a great white church. I had seen it from the
road’s crest when I looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had
made me shiver because Aldebaran had seemed to balance itself a moment
on the ghostly spire. There was an open space around the church; partly a churchyard with
spectral shafts, and partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of
snow by the wind, and lined with unwholesomely archaic houses having
peaked roofs and overhanging gables. Death-fires danced over the
tombs, revealing gruesome vistas, though queerly failing to cast any
shadows. Past the churchyard, where there were no houses, I could see
over the hill’s summit and watch the glimmer of stars on the harbor,
though the town was invisible in the dark. Only once in a while a
lantern bobbed horribly through serpentine alleys on its way to
overtake the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the
church. I waited till the crowd had oozed into the black doorway, and till all
the stragglers had followed. The old man was pulling at my sleeve, but
I was determined to be the last. Then finally I went, the sinister man
and the old spinning woman before me. Crossing the threshold into that
swarming temple of unknown darkness, I turned once to look at the
outside world as the churchyard phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on
the hilltop pavement. And as I did so I shuddered. For though the wind
had not left much snow, a few patches did remain on the path near the
door; and in that fleeting backward look it seemed to my troubled eye
that they bore no mark of passing feet, not even mine. The church was scarce lighted by all the lanterns that had entered it,
for most of the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up the
aisle between the high white pews to the trapdoor of the vaults which
yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit, and were now squirming
noiselessly in. I followed dumbly down the footworn steps and into the
dank, suffocating crypt. The tail of that sinuous line of
night-marchers seemed very horrible, and as I saw them wriggling into
a venerable tomb, they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed that
the tomb’s floor had an aperture down which the throng was sliding,
and in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase of
rough-hewn stone; a narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly
odorous, that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill, past
monotonous walls of dripping stone blocks and crumbling mortar. It was
a silent, shocking descent, and I observed after a horrible interval
that the walls and steps were changing in nature, as if chiseled out
of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad
footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes. After more eons of
descent I saw some side passages or burrows leading from unknown
recesses of blackness to this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they
became excessively numerous, like impious catacombs of nameless
menace; and their pungent odor of decay grew quite unbearable. I knew
we must have passed down through the mountain and beneath the earth of
Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should be so aged and
maggoty with subterraneous evil. Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious
lapping of sunless waters. Again I shivered, for I did not like the
things that the night had brought, and wished bitterly that no
forefather had summoned me to this primal rite.