Worms of the Earth, Robert E. Howard [black authors fiction .TXT] 📗
- Author: Robert E. Howard
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side of the moon, yet Bran felt the potentialities of life—under his
feet, in the brown earth—sleeping, but how soon to waken, and in what
horrific fashion?
He came through the tall masking reeds to the still deep men
called Dagon’s Mere. No slightest ripple ruffled the cold blue water
to give evidence of the grisly monster legend said dwelt beneath. Bran
closely scanned the breathless landscape. He saw no hint of life,
human or unhuman. He sought the instincts of his savage soul to know
if any unseen eyes fixed their lethal gaze upon him, and found no
response. He was alone as if he were the last man alive on earth.
Swiftly he unwrapped the Black Stone, and as it lay in his hands
like a solid sullen block of darkness, he did not seek to learn the
secret of its material nor scan the cryptic characters carved thereon.
Weighing it in his hands and calculating the distance, he flung it far
out, so that it fell almost exactly in the middle of the lake. A
sullen splash and the waters closed over it. There was a moment of
shimmering flashes on the bosom of the lake; then the blue surface
stretched placid and unrippled again.
The were-woman turned swiftly as Bran approached her door. Her
slant eyes widened.
“You! And alive! And sane!”
“I have been into Hell and I have returned,” he growled. “What is
more, I have that which I sought.”
“The Black Stone?” she cried. “You really dared steal it? Where is
it?”
“No matter; but last night my stallion screamed in his stall and I
heard something crunch beneath his thundering hoofs which was not the
wall of the stable—and there was blood on his hoofs when I came to
see, and blood on the floor of the stall. And I have heard stealthy
sounds in the night, and noises beneath my dirt floor, as if worms
burrowed deep in the earth. They know I have stolen their Stone. Have
you betrayed me?”
She shook her head.
“I keep your secret; they do not need my word to know you. The
farther they have retreated from the world of men, the greater have
grown their powers in other uncanny ways. Some dawn your hut will
stand empty and if men dare investigate they will find nothing—except
crumbling bits of earth on the dirt floor.”
Bran smiled terribly.
“I have not planned and toiled thus far to fall prey to the talons
of vermin. If They strike me down in the night, They will never know
what became of their idol—or whatever it be to Them. I would speak
with Them.”
“Dare you come with me and meet them in the night?” she asked.
“Thunder of all gods!” he snarled. “Who are you to ask me if I
dare? Lead me to Them and let me bargain for a vengeance this night.
The hour of retribution draws nigh. This day I saw silvered helmets
and bright shields gleam across the fens—the new commander has
arrived at the Tower of Trajan and Caius Camillus has marched to the
Wall.”
That night the king went across the dark desolation of the moors
with the silent were-woman. The night was thick and still as if the
land lay in ancient slumber. The stars blinked vaguely, mere points of
red struggling through the unbreathing gloom. Their gleam was dimmer
than the glitter in the eyes of the woman who glided beside the king.
Strange thoughts shook Bran, vague, titanic, primeval. Tonight
ancestral linkings with these slumbering fens stirred in his soul and
troubled him with the phantasmal, eon-veiled shapes of monstrous
dreams. The vast age of his race was borne upon him; where now he
walked an outlaw and an alien, dark-eyed kings in whose mold he was
cast had reigned in old times. The Celtic and Roman invaders were as
strangers to this ancient isle beside his people. Yet his race
likewise had been invaders, and there was an older race than his—a
race whose beginnings lay lost and hidden back beyond the dark
oblivion of antiquity.
Ahead of them loomed a low range of hills, which formed the
easternmost extremity of those straying chains which far away climbed
at last to the mountains of Wales. The woman led the way up what might
have been a sheep-path, and halted before a wide black gaping cave.
“A door to those you seek, oh king!” her laughter rang hateful in
the gloom. “Dare ye enter?”
His fingers closed in her tangled locks and he shook her
viciously.
“Ask me but once more if I dare,” he grated, “and your head and
shoulders part company! Lead on.”
Her laughter was like sweet deadly venom. They passed into the
cave and Bran struck flint and steel. The flicker of the tinder showed
him a wide dusty cavern, on the roof of which hung clusters of bats.
Lighting a torch, he lifted it and scanned the shadowy recesses,
seeing nothing but dust and emptiness.
“Where are They?” he growled.
She beckoned him to the back of the cave and leaned against the
rough wall, as if casually. But the king’s keen eyes caught the motion
of her hand pressing hard against a projecting ledge. He recoiled as a
round black well gaped suddenly at his feet. Again her laughter
slashed him like a keen silver knife. He held the torch to the opening
and again saw small worn steps leading down.
“They do not need those steps,” said Atla. “Once they did, before
your people drove them into the darkness. But you will need them.”
She thrust the torch into a niche above the well; it shed a faint
red light into the darkness below. She gestured into the well and Bran
loosened his sword and stepped into the shaft. As he went down into
the mystery of the darkness, the light was blotted out above him, and
he thought for an instant Atla had covered the opening again. Then he
realized that she was descending after him.
The descent was not a long one. Abruptly Bran felt his feet on a
solid floor. Atla swung down beside him and stood in the dim circle of
light that drifted down the shaft. Bran could not see the limits of
the place into which he had come.
“Many caves in these hills,” said Atla, her voice sounding small
and strangely brittle in the vastness, “are but doors to greater caves
which lie beneath, even as a man’s words and deeds are but small
indications of the dark caverns of murky thought lying behind and
beneath.”
And now Bran was aware of movement in the gloom. The darkness was
filled with stealthy noises not like those made by any human foot.
Abruptly sparks began to flash and float in the blackness, like
flickering fireflies. Closer they came until they girdled him in a
wide half-moon. And beyond the ring gleamed other sparks, a solid sea
of them, fading away in the gloom until the farthest were mere tiny
pin-points of light. And Bran knew they were the slanted eyes of the
beings who had come upon him in such numbers that his brain reeled at
the contemplation—and at the vastness of the cavern.
Now that he faced his ancient foes, Bran knew no fear. He felt the
waves of terrible menace emanating from them, the grisly hate, the
inhuman threat to body, mind and soul. More than a member of a less
ancient race, he realized the horror of his position, but he did not
fear, though he confronted the ultimate Horror of the dreams and
legends of his race. His blood raced fiercely but it was with the hot
excitement of the hazard, not the drive of terror.
“They know you have the Stone, oh king,” said Atla, and though he
knew she feared, though he felt her physical efforts to control her
trembling limbs, there was no quiver of fright in her voice. “You are
in deadly peril; they know your breed of old—oh, they remember the
days when their ancestors were men! I can not save you; both of us
will die as no human has died for ten centuries. Speak to them, if you
will; they can understand your speech, though you may not understand
theirs. But it will avail not—you are human—and a Pict.”
Bran laughed and the closing ring of fire shrank back at the
savagery in his laughter. Drawing his sword with a soul-chilling rasp
of steel, he set his back against what he hoped was a solid stone
wall. Facing the glittering eyes with his sword gripped in his right
hand and his dirk in his left, he laughed as a blood-hungry wolf
snarls.
“Aye,” he growled, “I am a Pict, a son of those warriors who drove
your brutish ancestors before them like chaff before the storm!—who
flooded the land with your blood and heaped high your skulls for a
sacrifice to the Moon-Woman! You who fled of old before my race, dare
ye now snarl at your master? Roll on me like a flood now, if ye dare!
Before your viper fangs drink my life I will reap your multitudes like
ripened barley—of your severed heads will I build a tower and of your
mangled corpses will I rear up a wall! Dogs of the dark, vermin of
Hell, worms of the earth, rush in and try my steel! When Death finds
me in this dark cavern, your living will howl for the scores of your
dead and your Black Stone will be lost to you forever—for only I know
where it is hidden and not all the tortures of all the Hells can wring
the secret from my lips!”
Then followed a tense silence; Bran faced the fire-lit darkness,
tensed like a wolf at bay, waiting the charge; at his side the woman
cowered, her eyes ablaze. Then from the silent ring that hovered
beyond the dim torchlight rose a vague abhorrent murmur. Bran,
prepared as he was for anything, started. Gods, was that the speech of
creatures which had once been called men?
Atla straightened, listening intently. From her lips came the same
hideous soft sibilances, and Bran, though he had already known the
grisly secret of her being, knew that never again could he touch her
save with soul-shaken loathing.
She turned to him, a strange smile curving her red lips dimly in
the ghostly light.
“They fear you, oh king! By the black secrets of R’lyeh, who are
you that Hell itself quails before you? Not your steel, but the stark
ferocity of your soul has driven unused fear into their strange minds.
They will buy back the Black Stone at any price.”
“Good,” Bran sheathed his weapons. “They shall promise not to
molest you because of your aid of me. And,” his voice hummed like the
purr of a hunting tiger, “they shall deliver into my hands Titus
Sulla, governor of Eboracum, now commanding the Tower of Trajan. This
They can do—how, I know not. But I know that in the old days, when my
people warred with these Children of the Night, babes disappeared from
guarded huts and none saw the stealers come or go. Do They
understand?”
Again rose the low frightful sounds and Bran, who feared not their
wrath, shuddered at their voices.
“They understand,” said Atla. “Bring the Black Stone to Dagon’s
Ring tomorrow night when the earth is veiled with the blackness that
foreruns the dawn. Lay the Stone on the altar. There They will bring
Titus Sulla to you. Trust Them; They have
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