The Second Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft & Avram Davidson & Darrell Schweitzer & Lin Carter

Author:H.P. Lovecraft & Avram Davidson & Darrell Schweitzer & Lin Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Mythos, dark fantasy
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

THE TERRIBLE PARCHMENT, by Manly Wade Wellman

Originally published in Weird Tales, August 1937.

“Here’s your Weird Tales,” smiled my wife, entering the apartment.

“Thanks, Gwen,” I said, rising and taking the magazine she held out. “I say, it’s surely not the first of the month.”

“Not for two days yet,” Gwen assured me. “But, just as I came to the front door, a funny old man bobbed up with an armful of magazines—advance copies, I guess. He stuck a copy of W.T. right under my nose. I gave him a quarter and—oop!”

I had opened the magazine, and a page fluttered to the floor. We both stooped for it, both seized it, and we both let go.

Gwen gasped and I whistled. For that fallen page had such a clammy, wet feel to it. Dank is the word, I should think. Still stooping, we frowned mystifiedly at each other. Then I conquered my momentary disgust, took hold of it again, and lifted it into the light of my desk lamp.

“It’s not paper,” Gwen said at once.

No more it was, and what could it be doing in Weird Tales?—though it looked weird enough, in all conscience. It was a rectangle of tawny, limp parchment, grained on the upper side with scales, like the skin of some unfamiliar reptile. I turned it over, revealing a smoother surface with pore-like markings and lines of faint, rusty scribbling.

“Arabic,” I pronounced at once. “Let’s phone for Kline to come over; he reads the stuff.”

“There’s one Greek word,” Gwen pointed out. Her pink-tipped forefinger touched the string of capital letters at the upper edge:

NEKPONOMIKON

“Necronomicon,” she spelled out. “That P would be the letter rho in Greek. Necronomicon—sounds woogey, what?”

“That’s the name of H. P. Lovecraft’s book,” I told her.

“Lovecraft’s book? Oh, yes, I remember. He’s always mentioning it in his stories.”

“And lots of W.T. authors—Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Bloch and so on—have taken it up,” I added.

“But Lovecraft imagined the thing, didn’t he?”

I laid the parchment on the desk, for my fingers still rebelled at its strange dankness. “Yes, Lovecraft imagined it. Describes it as the work of a mad Arab wizard, Abdul Alhazred, and it’s supposed to contain secrets of powerful evils that existed before the modern world. It’s already become legendary.”

Again my wife touched the thing, very gingerly. “But what’s it for? Some sort of valentine or April Fool joke, stuck in to thrill the subscribers? If so, it’s cleverly made—looks a million years old.”

We pored over the rusty-looking scrawl of Arabic, our heads close together. It must be a fake, we agreed, yet there was every appearance of age-old fadedness about the ink.

“Kline must come over and have a look at it,” I reiterated. “He may give some clue as to where it’s from, and what it was doing in Weird Tales.”

Gwen was studying the last line of characters.

“This part isn’t faked,” she said suddenly. “Look, the ink is fresh—almost wet. And it’s not Arabic, it’s Latin.” She paused a moment, slowly translating in her mind. “It says, ‘Chant out the spell, and give me life again.

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