Bran Mak Morn: The Last King Read online

  I sprang up, snatched on my clothing and rushed to my sister� room, flung open the door. The room was unoccupied.

  I raced down the stair and accosted the night clerk who was maintained by the small hotel for some obscure reason.

  �iss Costigan, sir? She came down, clad for outdoors, a while after midnight �about half an hour ago, sir, and said she was going to take a stroll on the moor and not to be alarmed if she did not return at once, sir.� I hurled out of the hotel, my pulse pounding a devil� tattoo. Far out across the fen I saw the ruins, bold and grim against the moon, and in that direction I hastened. At length �it seemed hours �I saw a slim figure some distance in front of me. The girl was taking her time and in spite of her start of me, I was gaining �soon I would be within hearing distance. My breath was already coming in gasps from my exertions but I quickened my pace.

  The aura of the fen was like a tangible something, pressing upon me, weighting my limbs �and always that presentiment of evil grew and grew.

  Then, far ahead of me, I saw my sister stop suddenly, and look about her confusedly. The moonlight flung a veil of illusion �I could see her but I could not see what had caused her sudden terror. I broke into a run, my blood leaping wildly and suddenly freezing as a wild, despairing scream burst out and sent the moor echoes flying.

  The girl was turning first one way and then another and I screamed for her to run toward me; she heard me and started toward me running like a frightened antelope and then I saw. Vague shadows darted about her �short, dwarfish shapes �just in front of me rose a solid wall of them and I saw that they had blocked her from gaining to me. Suddenly, instinctively I believe, she turned and raced for the stone columns, the whole horde after her, save those who remained to bar my path.

  I had no weapon nor did I feel the need of any; a strong, athletic youth, I was in addition an amateur boxer of ability, with a terrific punch in either hand. Now all the primal instincts surged redly within me; I was a cave man bent on vengeance against a tribe who sought to steal a woman of my family. I did not fear �I only wished to close with them. Aye, I recognized these �I knew them of old and all the old wars rose and roared within the misty caverns of my soul. Hate leaped in me as in the old days when men of my blood came from the North. Aye, though the whole spawn of Hell rise up from those caverns which honeycomb the moors.

  Now I was almost upon those who barred my way; I saw plainly the stunted bodies, the gnarled limbs, the snake-like, beady eyes that stared unwinkingly, the grotesque, square faces with their unhuman features, the shimmer of flint daggers in their crooked hands. Then with a tigerish leap I was among them like a leopard among jackals and details were blotted out in a whirling red haze. Whatever they were, they were of living substance; features crumpled and bones shattered beneath my flailing fists and blood darkened the moon-silvered stones. A flint dagger sank hilt deep in my thigh. Then the ghastly throng broke each way and fled before me, as their ancestors fled before mine, leaving four silent dwarfish shapes stretched on the moor.

  Heedless of my wounded leg, I took up the grim race anew; Joan had reached the druidic ruins now and she leaned against one of the columns, exhausted, blindly seeking there protection in obedience to some dim instinct just as women of her blood had done in bygone ages.

  The horrid things that pursued her were closing in upon her. They would reach her before I. God knows the thing was horrible enough but back in the recesses of my mind, grimmer horrors were whispering; dream memories wherein stunted creatures pursued white limbed women across such fens as these. Lurking memories of the ages when dawns were young and men struggled with forces which were not of men.

  The girl toppled forward in a faint, and lay at the foot of the towering column in a piteous white heap. And they closed in �closed in. What they would do I knew not but the ghosts of ancient memory whispered that they would do Something of hideous evil, something foul and grim.

  From my lips burst a scream, wild and inarticulate, born of sheer elemental horror and despair. I could not reach her before those fiends had worked their frightful will upon her. The centuries, the ages swept back. This was as it had been in the beginning. And what followed, I know not how to explain �but I think that that wild shriek whispered back down the long reaches of Time to the Beings my ancestors worshipped and that blood answered blood. Aye, such a shriek as could echo down the dusty corridors of lost ages and bring back from the whispering abyss of Eternity the ghost of the only one who could save a girl of Celtic blood.

  The foremost of the Things were almost upon the prostrate girl; their hands were clutching for her, when suddenly beside her a form stood. There was no gradual materializing. The figure leaped suddenly into being, etched bold and clear in the moonlight. A tall white bearded man, clad in long robes �the man I had seen in my dream! A druid, answering once more the desperate need of people of his race. His brow was high and noble, his eyes mystic and far-seeing �so much I could see, even from where I ran. His arm rose in an imperious gesture and the Things shrank back �back �back �They broke and fled, vanishing suddenly, and I sank to my knees beside my sister, gathering the child into my arms. A moment I looked up at the man, sword and shield against the powers of darkness, protecting helpless tribes as in the world� youth, who raised his hand above us as if in benediction, then he too vanished suddenly and the moor lay bare and silent.

  The Little People

  Typescript

  This manuscript was probably written about 1928. It is unusual in that it contains a number of hand-written corrections and additions; Howard usually either simply retyped the story, or made his corrections and additions with the typewriter. At least one page is missing from the middle of the manuscript.

  The Children of the Night

  The Children of the Night

  There were, I remember, six of us in Conrad� bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world and its long rows of books which ranged from the Mandrake Press edition of Boccaccio to a Missale Romanum, bound in clasped oak boards and printed in Venice, 1740. Clemants and Professor Kirowan had just engaged in a somewhat testy anthropological argument: Clemants upholding the theory of a separate, distinct Alpine race, while the professor maintained that this so-called race was merely a deviation from an original Aryan stock �possibly the result of an admixture between the southern or Mediterranean races and the Nordic people.

  �nd how,�asked Clemants, �o you account for their brachycephalicism? The Mediterraneans were as long-headed as the Aryans: would admixture between these dolichocephalic peoples produce a broad-headed intermediate type?� �pecial conditions might bring about a change in an originally long-headed race,�snapped Kirowan. �oaz has demonstrated, for instance, that in the case of immigrants to America, skull formations often change in one generation. And Flinders Petrie has shown that the Lombards changed from a long-headed to a round-headed race in a few centuries.� �ut what caused these changes?� �uch is yet unknown to science,�answered Kirowan, �nd we need not be dogmatic. No one knows, as yet, why people of British and Irish ancestry tend to grow unusually tall in the Darling district of Australia �Cornstalks, as they are called �or why people of such descent generally have thinner jaw-structures after a few generations in New England. The universe is full of the unexplainable.� �nd therefore the uninteresting, according to Machen,�laughed Taverel.

  Conrad shook his head. � must disagree. To me the unknowable is most tantalizingly fascinating.� �hich accounts, no doubt, for all the works on witchcraft and demonology I see on your shelves,�said Ketrick, with a wave of his hand toward the rows of books.

  And let me speak of Ketrick. Each of the six of us was of the same breed �that is to say, a Briton or an American of British descent. By British, I include all natural inhabitants of the British Isles. We represented various strains of English and Celtic blood, but basically, these strains are the same after all. But Ketrick: to me the man always
seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman�.

  Others than I had noticed this feature, so unusual in a man of pure Anglo-Saxon descent. The usual myths ascribing his slanted eyes to some pre-natal influence had been mooted about, and I remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and 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: �onrad pursues the obscure and mystic as some men pursue romance; his shelves throng with delightful nightmares of every variety.� Our host nodded. �ou�l find there a number of delectable dishes �Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin �look, there� a rare feast �Horrid Mysteries, by the Marquis of Grosse �the real Eighteenth Century edition.� Taverel scanned the shelves. �eird fiction seems to vie with works on witchcraft, voodoo and dark magic.� �rue; 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� Fall of the House of Usher, Machen� Black Seal and Lovecraft� Call of Cthulhu �the three master horror-tales, to my mind �the reader is borne into dark and outer realms of imagination.

  �ut look there,�he continued, �here, sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans� and Walpole� Castle of Otranto �Von Junzt� Nameless Cults. There� a book to keep you awake at night!� ��e read it,�said Taverel, �nd I� 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. �ave 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?� �osh!�This from Kirowan. �re 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?� �ot he alone used hidden meanings,�answered Conrad. �f 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� hints of � city in the waste� What do you think of Flecker� 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.�

  �en 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 direct reply; for he, as well as Conrad, had delved into the Latin version of the book, and had found there things not even a cold-blooded scientist could answer or refute.

  �ell,�he said presently, �uppose we admit the former existence of cults revolving about such nameless and ghastly gods and entities as Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-goroth, and the like, I can not find it in my mind to believe that survivals of such cults lurk in the dark corners of the world today.� To our surprize Clemants answered. He was a tall, lean man, silent almost to the point of taciturnity, and his fierce struggles with poverty in his youth had lined his face beyond his years. Like many another artist, he lived a distinctly dual literary life, his swashbuckling novels furnishing him a generous income, and his editorial position on The Cloven Hoof affording him full artistic expression. The Cloven Hoof was a poetry magazine whose bizarre contents had often aroused the shocked interest of the conservative critics.

  �ou remember Von Junzt makes mention of a so-called Bran cult,�said Clemants, stuffing his pipe-bowl with a peculiarly villainous brand of shag tobacco. � think I heard you and Taverel discussing it once.� �s I gather from his hints,�snapped Kirowan, �on Junzt includes this particular cult among those still in existence. Absurd.� Again Clemants shook his head. �hen I was a boy working my way through a certain university, I had for roommate a lad as poor and ambitious as I. If I told you his name, it would startle you. Though he came of an old Scotch line of Galloway, he was obviously of a non-Aryan type.

  �his is in strictest confidence, you understand. But my roommate talked in his sleep. I began to listen and put his disjointed mumbling together. And in his mutterings I first heard of the ancient cult hinted at by Von Junzt; of the king who ruled the Dark Empire, which was a revival of an older, darker empire dating back into the Stone Age; and of the great, nameless cavern where stands the Dark Man �the image of Bran Mak Morn, carved in his likeness by a master-hand while the great king yet lived, and to which each worshipper of Bran makes a pilgrimage once in his or her lifetime. Yes, that cult lives today in the descendants of Bran� people �a silent, unknown current it flows on in the great ocean of life, waiting for the stone image of the great Bran to breathe and move with sudden life, and come from the great cavern to rebuild their lost empire.� �nd who were the people of that empire?�asked Ketrick.

  �icts,�answered Taverel, �oubtless the people known later as the wild Picts of Galloway were predominantly Celtic �a mixture of Gaelic, Cymric, aboriginal and possibly Teutonic elements. Whether they took their name from the older race or lent their own name to that race, is a matter yet to be decided. But when Von Junzt speaks of Picts, he refers specifically to the small, dark, garlic-eating peoples of Mediterranean blood who brought the Neolithic culture into Britain. The first settlers of that country, in fact, who gave rise to the tales of earth spirits and goblins.� � can not agree to that last statement,�said Conrad. �hese legends ascribe a deformity and inhumanness of appearances to the characters. There was nothing about the Picts to excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples. I believe that the Mediterraneans were preceded by a Mongoloid type, very low in the scale of development, whence these tales � � �uite true,�broke in Kirowan, �ut I hardly think they preceded the Picts, as you call them, into Britain. We find troll and dwarf legends all over the Continent, and I am inclined to think that both the Mediterranean and Aryan peoples brought these tales with them from the Continent. They must have been of extremely inhuman aspect, those early Mongoloids.� �t least,�said Conrad, �ere is a flint mallet a miner found in the Welsh hills and gave to me, which has never been fully explained. It is obviously of no ordinary Neolithic make. See how small it is, compared to most implements of that age; almost like a child� toy; yet it is surprizingly heavy and no doubt a deadly blow could be dealt with it. I fitted the handle
to it, myself, and you would be surprised to know how difficult it was to carve it into a shape and balance corresponding with the head.� We looked at the thing. It was well made, polished somewhat like the other remnants of the Neolithic I had seen, yet as Conrad said, it was strangely different. Its small size was oddly disquieting, for it had no appearance of a toy, otherwise. It was as sinister in suggestion as an Aztec sacrificial dagger. Conrad had fashioned the oaken handle with rare skill, and in carving it to fit the head, had managed to give it the same unnatural appearance as the mallet itself had. He had even copied the workmanship of primal times, fixing the head into the cleft of the haft with rawhide.

  �y word!�Taverel made a clumsy pass at an imaginary antagonist and nearly shattered a costly Shang vase. �he balance of the thing is all off center; I� have to readjust all my mechanics of poise and equilibrium to handle it.� �et me see it,�Ketrick took the thing and fumbled with it, trying to strike the secret of its proper handling. At length, somewhat irritated, he swung it up and struck a heavy blow at a shield which hung on the wall near by. I was standing near it; I saw the hellish mallet twist in his hand like a live serpent, and his arm wrenched out of line; I heard a shout of alarmed warning �then darkness came with the impact of the mallet against my head.

  Slowly I drifted back to consciousness. First there was dull sensation with blindness and total lack of knowledge as to where I was or what I was; then vague realization of life and being, and a hard something pressing into my ribs. Then the mists cleared and I came to myself completely.

  I lay on my back half beneath some underbrush and my head throbbed fiercely. Also my hair was caked and clotted with blood, for the scalp had been laid open. But my eyes traveled down my body and limbs, naked but for a deerskin loin-cloth and sandals of the same material, and found no other wound. That which pressed so uncomfortably into my ribs was my ax, on which I had fallen.