Whither his wanderings took him that night is uncertain, for only the graceful cats were there to see, and these would only sit and clean their whiskers unconcernedly, after the immemorial way of cats, that takes not into account the sad mutterings of disillusioned venders of incense kept from sleep by thoughts not good to have. Perhaps even Snireth-Ko knew not where his footsteps would bring him. Something felt him there in the cobbled lanes, mumbling sadly to himself of the faith he had lost; for then a muffled piping drew him out of the night to that dim, evil-smelling alley mentioned elsewhere, and through the secret doorway where all such go in time, which something closed and locked behind him.
On the brick cylinders of Kadatheron many curious things are written, in archaic letters few now can read. There is revealed the madness that hungers in starless gulfs, the reason its own abominable spawn must flee to hostile worlds of light, blaspheming those worlds with horrible mockeries of form and substance. It was dark in that wide chamber which by all sane laws should be Woth’s respectable shop and the winding street in which it lies; then a light was struck somewhere to fall upon the idol’s shocking face, and Snireth-Ko knew where he was. That pale idol squatting obscenely on the altar of piled bones was more like a salamander than a leech, and its eyes were improperly placed. But Snireth-Ko did not like what it had in lieu of a mouth, and perhaps he should not be judged harshly for that one tiny scream. He well knew what services that idol offers, but he had heard unpleasant surmises about the fee that deceitful proprietor demands of clients. For it is told in Ulthar and in Nir, and passed by devious means throughout the Six Kingdoms, that what the Keeper of Dreams vends from its high altar is nothing less prized than men’s desires. All desires are goods in that infamous shop that should be Woth’s, for in its farthest end is a window sorcerously opening on all the dreams that men may have. Whether the dreams are of poets or eaters of hasheesh makes no difference to that dubious idol. And when the idol’s services are not required, the window overlooks only an abyss full of stars.
The daemon stirred its fretted wings, peered obliquely at its client, and smiled; and Snireth-Ko saw that he had been mistaken about the stars. Without that fabulous window lay all the bright opulence of wonder and incredible mystery he had lost with his faith, all the weird beauty, waiting to receive him, with pulsing vortices of scented flame and myths veiled in purple. And Snireth-Ko was wafted through the shimmering pane to the crystal dreams beyond…
In what far clime he knew not, the dreamer trudged the viscous shore of some vast continent of weeds, wrenched from the murky depths of what nameless sea he did not like to think. Slimy things watched his passage with numerous glazed eyes; fantastic polyps menaced him with ropey tentacles and gnashed their frightful beaks and sank back into the churning water; still he trudged on through the green rottenness towards an unspoken goal. White mists shredded from distant spires and proud minarets glinting emerald in the sun; and Snireth-Ko walked crystal ways between tall columns of figured glass, and riven temple-domes and cyclopean ruins of brilliant green, to a wide court where an emerald demigod banded with queer runes sat and stared unseeing at the stars. The dreamer too sought the stars and guessed what messages their cryptic winkings might convey, and shuddered. And when he heard that shocking moan from the god’s weed-bearded lips, he leapt into darkness rather than hear what Name that image would pronounce.
In some dark necropolis of shadow-guarded Leng, he turned in haste and fear from the lurid fires of ghoulish feedings beneath the Moon, but followed after a silent, hooded shape loping through the shades of tombs and over sunken graves. Beneath a precarious lintel it vanished; but Snireth-Ko traced in the dust a sign whose meaning he could not know, and hurried down the broken steps to the lightless vaults beyond. And there with the gloating shadows for aeons he threaded the insane labyrinth of the tomb, fumbling in the dark and disturbing the rats and far less pleasant things with his breathing. At last his eyes, grown large with the unending night, found the light beneath a secret door. But something behind that door rattled its moldy claws and snarled, and made him think better of opening it. He turned back into the friendly dark alive with the titterings of rats.
But he was mad to suppose those evil lights were eyes; for in a third vision the haunted skies engulfed him in the starry aether, and bore him on spectral winds to that lonely ashen sphere of silence and horror and cold men name the Moon, never suspecting Who it is that lurks bubbling and blaspheming beyond the Rim in full view of the Moon’s dark side. More delirious than that which the pale toad-things sliced and prodded with curious weapons as it bulged hugely from a sickening crevasse, or what carted the flesh sinfully away on disturbing wains, yet it was but the lowly Messenger of that Other: that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth…
Snireth-Ko shrieked and fled madly back through dizzying gulfs of space, back to the World of glittering cities and light, back through a jewelled pane into that wide, dim cell of dubious transactions, where he saw how the idol had tricked him. The Keeper of Dreams flopped stickily from its altar and wriggled across the floor in a manner that must have revolted even the cabalistically figured tiles, the painted box of astonishing rumour held open in one flabby claw. Snireth-Ko could not mistake what it is that the insidious Keeper hoards against the awakening of those Old Gods who possessed the Earth aforetime, for purposes of blackmail or perhaps to purchase unspeakable favours; neither did he guess wrongly the fee that slobbering idol now required of him; and he turned and plunged back through the charmed pane.
And the fate of Snireth-Ko remains a matter of grim speculation. Some believe that the idol was not cheated of its nameless fee, but snatched him back in absurd limbs from the dreams he hoped to hide in … and afterwards locked the little painted box and used the clean-picked bones to make its altar more comfortable. Others say that Snireth-Ko fell screaming into the starry abyss the window overlooks when the idol’s services are not required, that he is falling even now. But in a dream of that alien city of grey towers and smokes, uncouthly named London by they that dwell there with pale, worried faces that come of too much brooding on unhealthy things, I found an old man cowering in an alley, who would only claw the sightless walls of brick with long, fleshless fingers, and mumble sadly of the faith he had lost and a fee he had not wished to pay; and in the ruin of his face hovered the thin phantom of him who made the incense once, in Ulthar beyond the river Skai.
CHAPTER V
The Return of Zhosph
In which of the Seven Cryptical Books is forgotten, Hsan records this peculiar and exceedingly doubtful fact: that wisdom possessed in life is not permitted to pass with the soul toward whatever death really is, but cleaves to the mouldering corpse to fester and diminish even as flesh beneath the gentle nibblings of worms. Such perhaps is the reason dust from certain graves is valued in unlawful practices, and why necromancers are burned, lest the worms acquire arcane knowledge it is better they should not have. And such most certainly drove Snurd in secrecy through the high iron gate of Zulan-Thek, onto that dim, star-litten plain where they of Zulan-Thek were wont to inter their dead in dreams that died before men’s wasted souls.
Of Snurd and his dubious parentage men once hinted unmentionable things, indicating as evidence that hitherto only the detestable ghouls and kindred horrors were known to inflict such enormities upon the dead. What, they inquired of one another in hushed voices, became of the fat miller before the sextons came, and who defiled Klotlei’s grave and Shek’s in the night? Then they would gesture knowingly but make no more lucid answer. Little did Snurd care! He knew how the bones were taken down from the high place where the camels passed from Gak, laiden with bright silks and spices of exotic name, and where malefactors were displayed on a grisly hook set there for that purpose; only that morning they were taken and dragged by the muffled sextons whose duty it was, to the catacombs where their odour would not offend the camels. He guessed the nature of those crimes for which this penalty was exacted, and that all to some degree approximate witchcraft. And few knew better than Snurd what is written in Hsan’s Cryptical Books.
He went out with only the stars to see: they of Zulan-Thek were fearful of their dead, and kept the Night securely bolted out of doors and peering vainly at shuttered windows. How the Night finally overcame these barriers to extinguish all the lamps and hope, does not concern this tale. Snurd feared neither darkness nor the buried dead. But leaping grotesquely in the deep shadows of crumbling mounds, he ran his tongue over his pointed teeth in a hunger not often manifested by fully human persons. He remembered the screams of the carrion fowl flapping darkly in the gloom around the mewling bundle on the hook, and how the bundle lost its own tongue trying to charm the
