The Mythos Tales by Robert E. Howard Read Free Book Online Page A

distant ancestor of Mongolian blood – a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed such traces.
    But Ketrick comes of the Welsh branch of the Cetrics of Sussex, and his lineage is set down in the Book of Peers. There you may read the line of his ancestry, which extends unbroken to the days of Canute. No slightest trace of Mongoloid intermixture appears in the genealogy, and how could there have been such intermixture in old Saxon England? For Ketrick is the modern form of Cedric, and though that branch fled into Wales before the invasion of the Danes, its male heirs consistently married with English families on the border marches, and it remains a pure line of the powerful Sussex Cetrics – almost pure Saxon. As for the man himself, this defect of his eyes, if it can be called a defect, is his only abnormality, except for a slight and occasional lisping of speech. He is highly intellectual and a good companion except for a slight aloofness and a rather callous indifference which may serve to mask an extremely sensitive nature.
    Referring to his remark, I said with a laugh: “Conrad pursues the obscure and mystic as some men pursue romance; his shelves throng with delightful nightmares of every variety.”
    Our host nodded. “You’ll find there a number of delectable dishes – Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin – look, there’s a rare feast – Horrid Mysteries , by the Marquis of Grosse – the real Eighteenth Century edition.”
    Taverel scanned the shelves. “Weird fiction seems to vie with works on witchcraft, voodoo and dark magic.”
    “True; historians and chroniclers are often dull; tale-weavers never – the masters, I mean. A voodoo sacrifice can be described in such a dull manner as to take all the real fantasy out of it, and leave it merely a sordid murder. I will admit that few writers of fiction touch the true heights of horror – most of their stuff is too concrete, given too much earthly shape and dimensions. But in such tales as Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher , Machen’s Black Seal and Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu – the three master horror-tales, to my mind – the reader is borne into dark and outer realms of imagination.
    “But look there,” he continued, “there, sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans’, and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto – Von Junzt’s Nameless Cults . There’s a book to keep you awake at night!”
    “I’ve read it,” said Taverel, “and I’m convinced the man is mad. His work is like the conversation of a maniac – it runs with startling clarity for awhile, then suddenly merges into vagueness and disconnected ramblings.”
    Conrad shook his head. “Have you ever thought that perhaps it is his very sanity that causes him to write in that fashion? What if he dares not put on paper all he knows? What if his vague suppositions are dark and mysterious hints, keys to the puzzle, to those who know?”
    “Bosh!” This from Kirowan. “Are you intimating that any of the nightmare cults referred to by Von Junzt survive to this day – if they ever existed save in the hag-ridden brain of a lunatic poet and philosopher?”
    “Not he alone used hidden meanings,” answered Conrad. “If you will scan various works of certain great poets you may find double meanings. Men have stumbled on to cosmic secrets in the past and given a hint of them to the world in cryptic words. Do you remember Von Junzt’s hints of ‘a city in the waste’? What do you think of Flecker’s lines:
    “‘Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose
    “‘But with no scarlet to her leaf – and from whose heart no perfume flows.’
    “Men may stumble upon secret things, but Von Junzt dipped deep into forbidden mysteries. He was one of the few men, for instance, who could read the Necronomicon in the original Greek translation.”
    Taverel shrugged his shoulders, and Professor Kirowan, though he snorted and puffed viciously at his pipe, made no