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in utter
darkness. The old man on the altar began to scream, a high thin
steady shriek of absolute terror, and Colby shouted, “I command you
… I command …!” Then it seemed to me that he gasped, and swallowed,
as if his breath stopped within his lungs, before he held up the
skull again and cried, “ Ngrkdl'lh y'bthnk ,
Shub-Niggurath! In the name of the Goat With Ten Thousand Young I
command!”
    Then the darkness swallowed the altar, and
where a moment before I could see the old man writhing there I
could see only churning darkness, while a hideous foetor of blood
and death rolled up from the pit, nearly making me faint. “Before
the Five Hundred,” cried Colby … then he staggered suddenly, nearly
dropping the skull he held. “Before the Five Hundred…”
    He gasped, as if struggling to speak. The
thing upon the altar lifted its hooded head, and in the sudden
silence the dreadful lapping sound of the deeper darkness seemed to
fill the unholy place, and the far-off answering echo of the
now-silenced pipes.
    Then with a cry Colby fell to his knees, the
skull slipping from his hands. He choked, grasping for it, and from
the darkness of the stair behind him another form darted forward,
small and slim, and stooped to snatch up the talisman skull of the
terrible ancestor who had ruled this place.
    “ Ygnaiih , ygnaiih Yog-Sothoth!”
cried a woman's voice, high and powerful, filling the hideous
chamber, and the darkness that had surged forward toward her seemed
for a moment to close in as it had closed around the old man on the
altar, then to fall back. By the queer, actinic luminosity of the
skull I could see the woman's face, and recognized her as Judith
Delapore, niece and granddaughter of the madmen who ruled
Depewatch. Yet how different from the sweet countenance painted on
Colby's miniature! Like the ivory mask of a goddess, cold and lined
with concentration, she bent her eyes on the heaving swirl of
nightmare that surrounded her, not even glancing at her lover, who
lay gasping, twisting in convulsions at her feet. In a high, hard
voice she repeated the dreadful words of the incantations, and
neither flinched nor wavered as the dreadful things that flittered
and crawled and bounced in the darkness.
    Only when the hideous rite was ended, and the
unspeakable congregation had trickled away through the blasphemous
angle of the inner walls, did the young woman lower the skull she
held. She stood in her black gown, outlined in the gleam of the
nitre on the walls, staring into the abyss from which those
dreadful unhuman things had come, barely seeming to notice me as I
stumbled and staggered down the last of the stairs.
    Of the old man's body that had lain upon the
altar nothing whatsoever remained. A thick layer of slime covered
the stone and ran down onto the floor, which was perhaps half an
inch deep in a brownish liquid that glistened in the feeble blue
gleam of the nitre. Having seen Burnwell Colby engulfed by that
wriggling darkness I staggered to where he had lain with some
confused idea of helping him, but as I dropped to my knees I saw
that only a lumpy mass of half-dissolved flesh and bones remained.
The bones themselves had the appearance of being charred, almost
melted. I looked up in horror at the woman with the skull and her
eyes met mine, clear golden hazel, like other eyes I could not
quite recall. Her eyes widened and filled with anger and hate:
    “You,” she whispered. “So you did not take
him after all?”
    I only shook my head, her words making no
sense to me in my shaken state, and she went on, “As you have seen,
Uncle, it is I, now, and not Grandfather –Grandfather who has not
existed for over fifty years – who rules now here.” And to my
horror she held out her hand toward that hideously anomalous angle
of the walls where the darkness lay waiting. “ Y'bfnk – ng'haiie …”
    I cried out. At the same instant light blazed
up on the stairway that led to the upper and innocent realms