There came the dreaded eve, with its swiftly changing twilight of jewelled hues and its darkness hung with auroral flames. Lunithi stole across the sleeping city and entered the pyramid whose massive blackness towered amid the frail and open architecture of buildings that were little more than canopies and lattices of stone. With infinite caution, hiding his real intention in the nethermost crypts of his mind, he made the preparations prescribed by the Occlith. Into the huge sacrificial cup of black metal, in a room eternally lit with stored sunlight, he emptied the seething, sibilant poison he had brought with him from the white mountains. Then, opening with surgical adroitness a vein in one of his arms, he added a certain amount of his own life-fluid to the lethal potion. The blood appeared to quiet that angry venom, above whose foaming crystal it floated like a magic oil, without mingling; so that the entire cup, to all appearance, was filled with the liquid most acceptable to the Satanic blossom.

Bearing in his hands the black grail, Lunithi mounted a coiling stairway that led to the Voorqual’s presence. His heart quailing within him, his senses swooning in chill gulfs of superstitious terror, he emerged on the lofty sable summit above the shadowy town.

In a luminous azure gloom, against the weird and iridescent streamers of light that foreran the double dawn, he saw the dreamy swaying of the monstrous plant, and heard its somnolent hissing that was answered drowsily by innumerable blossoms on the terraces below. A nightmare oppression, black and tangible, seemed to flow from the pyramid and to lie in stagnant shadow on all the lands of Lophai.

Aghast at his own temerity, and deeming that his shrouded thoughts would surely be understood as he drew nearer, or that the Voorqual would be suspicious of an offering brought before the customary hour, Lunithi made obeisance to his floral overlord. The Voorqual vouchsafed no sign that it had deigned to perceive his presence; but the great flower-cup, with its flaring crimsons dulled to garnet and purple in the twilight, was held forward as if in readiness to receive the hideous gift.

Breathless, and fainting with religious fear, in a moment of suspense that seemed eternal, Lunithi poured the blood-mantled poison into the yawning cup. The venom boiled and hissed like a wizard’s brew as the thirsty flower drank it up; and Lunithi saw the coiling arm draw back in sudden doubt and tilt its demonian grail quickly, as if to repudiate the sacrificial draft.

It was too late; for the poison had been absorbed by the blossom’s porous lining. The tilting motion changed in midair to an agonized writhing of the serpentine arm; and then the Voorqual’s huge, scaly stalk and serrate leaf-crown began to toss in a frenetic dance of death, waving darkly against the auroral curtains of morn. Its deep, solemn hissing sharpened to an insupportable note, fraught with the pain of a dying devil; and looking down from the platform edge on which he crouched to avoid the swaying growth, Lunithi saw that the lesser plants on all the black terraces beneath were tossing in mad unison with their master. Like noises in an evil dream, he heard the chorus of their tortured sibilations.

He dared not look again at the Voorqual, till he became aware of a strange, unnatural silence, and saw that the blossoms below had ceased to writhe and were drooping limply on their stems. Then, incredulous, he knew that the Voorqual was dead.

Turning, in mingled horror and triumph, he beheld the flaccid stalk that had fallen prone on its bed of unholy compost. He saw the sudden withering of the stiff, sworded leaves, of the gross and hellish flower. Even the stony bulb appeared to collapse and crumble before his eyes. The entire stem, with its evil colors fading swiftly, shrank and fell in upon itself like a sere and empty serpent-skin.

At the same time, in some obscure manner, Lunithi was still aware of a presence that brooded above the pyramid. Even in the death of the Voorqual, it seemed to him that he was not alone. Then, as he stood and waited, fearing he knew not what, he felt the passing of a cold and unseen thing in the azure gloom—a thing that flowed across his body like the coils of some enormous python, without sound, in dark and clammy undulations. A moment more and it was gone; and Lunithi no longer felt the brooding presence.

He turned to go; and it seemed that the dying night was ominous of an unconceived terror that gathered before him as he went down the long volutes of somber stairs. Slowly he descended; and a weird despair was upon him. He had slain the Voorqual, had seen it wither in death; so Nala should be saved from the morrow’s sacrifice. Yet he could not believe the thing he had done; the lifting of the ancient doom was still no more than an idle myth.

The twilight had begun to brighten as he passed through the slumbering city. According to custom of Lophai, no one would be abroad for another hour. Then the priests of the Voorqual would gather for the annual rite of blood-offering.

Midway between the pyramid and his own palace, Lunithi was more than startled to meet the maiden Nala. Pale and ghostly, she glided by him with a swift and swaying movement almost serpentine, which differed strangely from her habitual languor. Lunithi dared not accost her when he saw her shut, unheeding eyes, like those of a somnambulist; and he was deeply awed and troubled by the serpentine ease, the unnatural surety of her motion. It reminded him of something which he feared to remember. In a turmoil of fantastic doubt and apprehension, he followed her.

Threading the exotic maze of Lospar with the fleet and sinuous glide of a homing serpent, Nala entered the sacred pyramid. Lunithi, less swift than the maiden, had fallen behind; and he knew not where she had gone in the myriad vaults and interior chambers; but a strange and fearsome intuition drew his steps without delay to the platform of the summit.

He knew not what he should find; but his heart was drugged with an esoteric hopelessness; and he was aware of no surprise when he came forth in the many-colored dawn and beheld the thing which awaited him.

The maiden Nala—or that which he knew to be Nala—was standing in the basin of evil soil, above the withered remains of the Voorqual. She had undergone—was still undergoing—a monstrous and diabolic transformation. Her frail, slight body had assumed a long and dragon-like form, and the tender skin was marked off in incipient scales that darkened momentarily with a mottling of baleful hues. Her head was no longer recognizable as such, and the human lineaments were flaring into a weird semi-circle of pointed leaf-buds. Her lower limbs had joined together, had rooted themselves in the ground. One of her arms was becoming a part of the ophidian bole; and the other was lengthening into a scaly stem that bore the dark-red bud of a sinister blossom.

More and more the monstrosity took on the similitude of the Voorqual; and Lunithi, crushed by the ancient awe and dark, terrible faith of his ancestors, could feel no longer any doubt of its true identity. Soon there was no trace of Nala in the thing before him, which began to sway with a dreamy, python-like rhythm, and to utter a deep and measured sibilation, to which the plants on the lower tiers responded. He knew then that the Voorqual had returned to claim its sacrifice and preside forever above the city Lospar and the world Lophai.

THE NAMELESS OFFSPRING

Many and multiform are the dim horrors of Earth, infesting her ways from the prime. They sleep beneath the unturned stone; they rise with the tree from its roots; they move beneath the sea and in subterranean places; they dwell unchallenged in the inmost adyta; they emerge betimes from the shutten sepulcher of haughty bronze and the low grave that is sealed with clay. There be some that are long known to man, and others as yet unknown that abide the terrible latter days of their revealing. Those which are the most dreadful and the loathliest of all are haply still to be declared. But among those that have revealed themselves aforetime and have made manifest their veritable presence, there is one which may not openly be named for its exceeding foulness. It is that spawn which the hidden dweller in the vaults has begotten upon mortality.