The Lovecraft Coven by Donald Tyson

Author:Donald Tyson [Tyson, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Published: 2015-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

23.

Feeling around the circular wall of the chamber, he reached the small wooden door and pushed against it. The door opened without complaint. Oil lamps suspended from the ceiling on chains illuminated the passage beyond. Lovecraft passed through with care, watchful for any pitfall. The floor of the passage sloped downward. He saw no joints in the walls. The passage had been cut from solid rock.

The lead in the bottle tinkled.

“We’re in a passage that goes deeper under the monastery,” he murmured.

For the first time he had light by which to study the bottle. The glass was unusually thick and irregular, smoky with impurities and of a greenish hue. All over its surface were what appeared to be red occult symbols that had been cast into the glass during its creation. He stood near a lamp and studied the bottle. The symbols were made of thin lines of a ruby glass that had been dribbled over the bottle while it was still molten, so that the red and green glasses had bonded together. The wax that covered the cork stopper was such a dark red that it was almost black, and had a strange odour that turned his stomach when he raised it to his nose.

This time there was no trick, no ordeal. The passage simply ended on a door very similar to the one he had passed through to escape the round chamber. He reached out and pushed against it, certain that it would be bolted. To his surprise, it opened as easily as the first door.

The well-lit square room beyond had been carved from the solid bedrock in the same way as the passage, but in the form of an enclosed amphitheatre. An upper walkway some ten feet across wrapped around the four walls of the large chamber. The central part of the floor, some six feet lower than this walkway, was accessed by stairs that ran continuously around the room on all four sides. In the middle of this lower area stood an oblong stone table that had the appearance of a pagan altar. On it rested a large black book beneath a canopy of leaded glass that had the shape of a little house.

These things Lovecraft noticed with a part of his mind, but most of his attention went immediately to the two figures chained to opposite walls at the higher level of the room, so that they looked down upon the black altar and the book. To his left, as he stepped through the doorway, was Janice, and to his right, Luther. Both were held upright with their backs to the walls, their arms extended apart by chains that bound their wrists. Their ankles were not chained. All this he noticed in the instant it took him to enter the amphitheatre.

“Yours is a face I never expected to see again,” Luther said with a wry smile. His voice sounded dry.

“We thought the shadow-walkers had killed you,” Janice said.

“I feared the same of you,” Lovecraft admitted. “Have you been hurt?”

Janice shook her head.

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