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to the pit of the shuggoths!” As his sobs changed to
thin, giggling laughter I heard a stirring, far away in the
darkness; a soughing, as if of the movement of things infinitely
huge, and soft.
    I staggered to my feet, my legs responding
queerly; I reeled and limped like a drunken man. I followed the
wall in darkness, feeling it to be in places ancient stones set
without mortar, and in others the naked rock of the hill itself.
There was a door, dessicated wood strapped with iron that grated,
rusty and harsh, under my hands. I stumbled back into the darkness,
and struck against something – a stone table, pitted with ancient
carvings – and beside it found the only means of egress, a square
opening in the floor, in which a flight of worn, shallow steps led
downwards.
    Gropingly I descended, hands outstretched on
either side to feel the wet rock of the wall that sometimes
narrowed to the straitest of seams: terrified of what might lie
below me, yet I feared to be in the power of the madmen I knew to
be above. I was dizzy, panting, my mind prey to a thousand
illusions, the most terrifying of which was that of the sounds that
I seemed to hear, not above me, but below.
    In time the darkness glowed with thin smears
of blue phosphor, illuminating the abyss below me. Far down I could
descry a chamber, a sort of high-roofed cave where the nitre
dripped from the walls and showed up a crumbling stone altar,
ruinously ancient and stained black with horrible corruption. There
was an obscene aberration to the entire geometry of the chamber, as
if the angles of floor and walls should not have met in the fashion
they appeared to; as if I viewed an optical illusion, a trick of
darkness and shadow. From the innermost angle of that chamber
darkness issued, like a thicker flow of night, blackness that
seemed one moment to congeal into discrete forms which the next
proved to be only inchoate stirrings. Yet there was something
there, something the fear of which kept me from moving on, from
making a sound – from breathing, even, lest the gasp of my breath
bring upon me some unimaginably nightmarish fate.
    My fellow captive's high, hysterical giggling
on the stair above me drove me into a niche in the wet rock. He was
coming down – and he was not alone. Pressed into the narrow
darkness I only heard the sounds of bodies passing on the stair. A
moment later others followed them, while I crouched, praying to all
the gods ever worshipped by fearful man to be spared the notice of
anything that walked that eldritch abyss. At the same moment sounds
rose from below, a rhythmless wailing or chittering that
nevertheless seemed to hold the form of music, underlain by a thick
lapping or surging sound, as if of thick, unspeakably vile liquid
rising among stones.
    Looking around the sheltering coign of rock,
I saw by the growing purplish hell-glare below me the tall figure
of Burnwell Colby, standing beside the altar, an unfleshed skull
held upraised in his hands. Darkness ringed him, but it seemed
almost as if the skull itself gave light, a pulsing and horrible
radiation that showed me – almost – the shapes of which the utter
blackness was comprised. I bit my hand to keep from crying out, and
wondered that the pain of it did not wake me; an old man lay on the
altar, and by his sobbing giggles I knew him to be he who had been
shut into the stone crypt above with me. Colby's deep voice rang
out above the strident piping: “ Ygnaiih … ygnaiih … thflthkh'ngha …”
    And the things in the darkness – horrible
half-seen suggestions of squamous, eyeless heads, of tentacles
glistening and of small round mouths opening and closing with an
appalling glint of teeth – answered with a thick and greedy
wail.
    “ H'ehye n'grkdl'lh , h'ehye … in the name of Yog-Sothoth I call, I command…”
    Something – I know not what nor do I dare to
think – raised itself behind the altar, something shapeless that
glowed and yet seemed to swallow all light, hooded