The Taint and Other Novellas Read Free Page A

recognizing the title: Cthaat Aquadingen, for the book was known only to a scattered handful of men, most of them erudite antiquarians or students of rare and ancient works, some of them students of darker things: the occult sciences! Indeed, only five copies of the work in various forms existed in the whole world at that time; one in the private library of a London collector; one under lack and key—along with the Necronomicon, the G’harne Fragments, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Liber Ivonis, the dread Cultes des Goules, and the Revelations of Glaaki —in the British Museum, and two of the others in even more obscure and inaccessible places. The fifth copy: that one was soon to fall into Spellman’s unwitting hands.
    But this book aside, during his decline and before his sister committed him to the institute’s care, Larner had also assembled something of a Fortean collection of cuttings from newspapers all over the world; cuttings which, especially if considered as from the often narrow viewpoint of a disordered psyche, might take on all sorts of disturbing aspects.
    Spellman wondered just where the institute had gained its often detailed information regarding the events leading to Larner’s confinement; and in this he was lucky, for enquiries with Dr. Welford the next morning led him to discover that Larner’s sister had placed all documents relevant to her brother’s derangement in the hands of the institute’s alienists. Both Larner’s cuttings-file and his “ Cthaat Aguadingen” (a great sheaf of stapled foolscap pages in Larner’s own handwriting; presumably copied from some other work) were still safely stored in a cupboard in Oakdeene’s spacious administrative offices—and Dr. Welford was not adverse to the idea of placing them, for a few days at least, at Spellman’s disposal.
    Of the great manuscript in Larner’s hand the student could make very little; there were too many inconsistencies in its strange contents—odd juxtapositions in sentence-structure and so on—that seemed to point to its being a translation from some other language, possibly German, and done by a man none too well versed in the tongue, perhaps Larner himself. On the other hand, Larner could have copied his work from some other translated version; and then again, it was just possible that the entire work was his own, but that seemed hardly likely. There were lurid descriptions of rites—hideous magical ceremonies involving human and animal sacrifices—which, even suffering as they did through poor translation, were more than sufficient to convince the student nurse that the study of this work had indeed gone far to helping Larner on his way to the institute’s basement ward. Having a very well balanced mind himself, and therefore seeing no point in wading through three or four hundred pages of such material, Spellman passed quickly on to the cuttings-file.
    Now this was something one could get one’s teeth into and what a bonus for Spellman’s book! Why, the cuttings-file was crammed full of stuff he was sure he could use. There were cuttings from sources scattered throughout the globe, from London, Edinburgh, and Dublin; from the Americas, Haiti, and Africa; from France, India, and Malta; from the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, the Australian Outback, and the Teutoburger Wald in West Germany; and the great majority of them involved the actions of persons—both singularly and in groups or “cults”—allegedly influenced by alien or “outside” forces!
    They covered a period from early February 1925 to mid-1926—detailing cases of panic, mania, and weird eccentricity—and as Spellman read he quickly spotted connecting links in what at first had seemed dissociated stories. Two columns of the News of the World had been given over to coverage of the case of the man who uttered a hideous cry before leaping from a fourth-storey window to his death. His room showed proof on investigation that the suicide had been