Worms of the Earth - Robert E. Howard (best novels for beginners txt) 📗

“Well for the Romans that they know not the secrets of this

accursed land!” Bran roared, maddened, “with its monster-haunted

meres, its foul witch-women, and its lost caverns and subterranean

realms where spawn in the darkness shapes of Hell!”

“Are they more foul than a mortal who seeks their aid?” cried Atla

with a shriek of fearful mirth. “Give them their Black Stone!”

A cataclysmic loathing shook Bran’s soul with red fury.

“Aye, take your cursed Stone!” he roared, snatching it from the

altar and dashing it among the shadows with such savagery that bones

snapped under its impact. A hurried babel of grisly tongues rose and

the shadows heaved in turmoil. One segment of the mass detached itself

for an instant and Bran cried out in fierce revulsion, though he

caught only a fleeting glimpse of the thing, had only a brief

impression of a broad strangely flattened head, pendulous writhing

lips that bared curved pointed fangs, and a hideously misshapen,

dwarfish body that seemed—mottled—all set off by those unwinking

reptilian eyes. Gods!—the myths had prepared him for horror in human

aspect, horror induced by bestial visage and stunted deformity—but

this was the horror of nightmare and the night.

“Go back to Hell and take your idol with you!” he yelled,

brandishing his clenched fists to the skies, as the thick shadows

receded, flowing back and away from him like the foul waters of some

black flood. “Your ancestors were men, though strange and monstrous—

but gods, ye have become in ghastly fact what my people called ye in

scorn! Worms of the earth, back into your holes and burrows! Ye foul

the air and leave on the clean earth the slime of the serpents ye have

become! Gonar was right—there are shapes too foul to use even against

Rome!”

He sprang from the Ring as a man flees the touch of a coiling

snake, and tore the stallion free. At his elbow Atla was shrieking

with fearful laughter, all human attributes dropped from her like a

cloak in the night.

“King of Pictland!” she cried, “King of fools! Do you blench at so

small a thing? Stay and let me show you real fruits of the pits! Ha!

ha! ha! Run, fool, run! But you are stained with the taint—you have

called them forth and they will remember! And in their own time they

will come to you again!”

He yelled a wordless curse and struck her savagely in the mouth

with his open hand. She staggered, blood starting from her lips, but

her fiendish laughter only rose higher.

Bran leaped into the saddle, wild for the clean heather and the

cold blue hills of the north where he could plunge his sword into

clean slaughter and his sickened soul into the red maelstrom of

battle, and forget the horror which lurked below the fens of the west.

He gave the frantic stallion the rein, and rode through the night like

a hunted ghost, until the hellish laughter of the howling were-woman

died out in the darkness behind.

THE END