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bearing empty rows of shallow pedestalled cups of lead shaped like Grecian
kylikes. On the other side was the table; with a powerful Argand lamp, a pad
and pencil, and two of the stoppered lekythoi from the shelves outside set
down at irregular places as if temporarily or in haste. Willett lighted the
lamp and looked carefully at the pad, to see what notes Ward might have been
jotting down when interrupted; but found nothing more intelligible than the
following disjointed fragments in that crabbed Curwen chirography, which shed
no light on the case as a whole:
'B. dy'd not. Escap'd into walls and founde Place below.'
'Sawe olde V. saye ye Sabaoth and learnt yee Way.'
'Rais'd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd.'
'F. soughte to wipe out all know'g howe to raise Those from Outside.'
As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw that the
wall opposite the door, between the two groups of torturing appliances in the
corners, was covered with pegs from which hung a set of shapeless-looking
robes of a rather dismal yellowish-white. But far more interesting were the
two vacant walls, both of which were thickly covered with mystic symbols and
formulae roughly chiselled in the smooth dressed stone. The damp floor also
bore marks of carving; and with but little difficulty Willett deciphered a
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
huge pentagram in the centre, with a plain circle about three feet wide half
way between this and each corner. In one of these four circles, near where a
yellowish robe had been flung carelessly down, there stood a shallow kylix of
the sort found on the shelves above the whip-rack; and just outside the
periphery was one of the
Phaleron jugs from the shelves in the other room, its tag numbered 118. This
was unstoppered, and proved upon inspection to be empty; but the explorer saw
with a shiver that the kylix was not. Within its shallow area, and saved from
scattering only by the absence of wind in this sequestered cavern, lay a small
amount of a dry, dull-greenish efflorescent powder which must have belonged in
the jug; and Willett almost reeled at the implications that came sweeping over
him as he correlated little by little the several elements and antecedents of
the scene. The whips and the instruments of torture, the dust or salts from
the jug of "Materia", the two lekythoi from the "Custodes" shelf, the robes,
the formulae on the walls, the notes on the pad, the hints from letters and
legends, and the thousand glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come to
torment the friends and parents of Charles Ward - all these engulfed the
doctor in a tidal wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder
outspread in the pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor.
With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began studying
the formulae chiselled on the walls. From the stained and incrusted letters it
was obvious that they were carved in Joseph Curwen's time, and their text was
such as to be vaguely familiar to one who had read much Curwen material or
delved extensively into the history of magic. One the doctor clearly
recognised as what
Mrs. Ward heard her son chanting on that ominous Good Friday a year before,
and
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20Lovecraft.txt (57 of 67) [5/21/03 1:11:41 AM]
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0by%20H_%20P_%20Lovecraft.txt what an authority had told him was a very
terrible invocation addressed to secret gods outside the normal spheres. It
was not spelled here exactly as Mrs.
Ward had set it down from memory, nor yet as the authority had shewn it to him
in the forbidden pages of "Eliphas Levi"; but its identity was unmistakable,
and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton, Almonsin, and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder
of fright through the search who had seen and felt so much of cosmic
abomination just around the corner.
This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-hand wall
was no less thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of recognition when he
came up the pair of formulae so frequently occurring in the recent notes in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]