ERIC HOLM, IN COMMON with millions of other human beings, might have been fittingly and completely biographed by saying of him that he was born and presently died. Indeed, so it might well have been with him, had not his passing been so extraordinary.
The facts of his life may be summed up briefly enough. He was a childless widower living on a secure income. In person he was a colorless little man about whom the only distinguishing thing was an absurdly inexcusable moustache, the incongruity of which on his pallid face had penetrated even the thickheadedness of the corner policeman whom Holm passed at least once daily on his way home from the newsstand.
But certainly that policeman did not realize, when he saw Holm returning to his residence on the afternoon of April 3,1939, that the package which Holm was carrying beneath his arm was anything but a harmless and unassuming purchase.
Yet, at the rather astonishing inquest, Jeremy Lansing, apparently Holm s only friend, inferred that Holm was on that fateful afternoon carrying beneath his arm his death, when Lansing declared that Holm died because he bought a book.
The policeman admitted that on that afternoon, the last Holm had been seen alive by anyone save Lansing, Holm had certainly been carrying a package which looked like a carefully wrapped book.
The matter was virtually placed beyond all doubt when Mr. Sanderton of Sanderton and Harker, Book Importers, came forward and stated that Holm had on the afternoon of April 3 bought a book in their Fourth Avenue store.
The title of the book was simply Confessions of the Mad Monk Clithanus, a priceless and rare volume, which, owing to the present economic crisis, Sanderton and Harker had let go at a very moderate price.
Apart from the policeman and Sanderton, there were two other witnesses at the inquest. One was a young man who gave his name as Johnny Hekler, whose rather garbled story of having seen some vague but frightening thing slide over the wall of Holms garden was at first discounted owing to the young mans reputation for too frequent attentions to a constant and well-filled companion in his hip pocket.
The other was Lansing, a middle-aged gentleman of sober mien and nautical bearing, considerably supported by his large and bushy sideburns cut in a fashion for decades out of style.
It was Lansings deposition which split the press to have half of the newspapers calling for his life as the murderer of his best friend, and the other half darkly hinting at deep-laid plots by certain representatives of foreign powers, and which eventually left the coroners jury to take press censure for gullibility. Apart from minor persons called to verify the conditions of the finding of Holm s body, Lansing was the last witness called to testify.
"Please tell us, Mr. Lansing," asked the coroner, "what you meant by saying that Mr. Holm died because he bought a book?"
Lansing considered the coroner and the jury for a few moments before replying. Then he spoke.
"It was this way, gentlemen," he said. "Mr. Holm had got into the habit of buying a good lot of books on witchcraft and such matters, and he'd got quite set on trying out some of those old formulas. We did try out a few, but of course, nothing ever happened."
A member of the jury rose at this point to request more detailed information regarding the unsuccessful experiments. But the coroner decided that such details would contribute nothing to the matter at hand. Lansing was instructed to continue.
"Well, last Monday night—say about six-thirty, Holm called me on the telephone," he went on. "You'll remember the night, gentlemen—a muckish night with a bit of fog from the sea. He told me he'd just bought another book—the real thing, this time. There was something worth trying in the book, and would I come right over? I said I would, having nothing better to do; so over I went.
"He had the book all right. Confessions of Clithanus, as Mr. Sanderton has already mentioned. I looked it over. It was supposed to be a book of revelations written by a mad monk somewhere on the coast of England and privately printed. It was fairly old, and printed in Latin, though it was easy enough to read for all that.
"Holm pointed out certain chapters, and I looked through them. They concerned something which the monk claimed to have called out of the sea—some kind of queer animal with a funny sort of name. I've forgotten it now, but if I could look at the book for a minute, no doubt I could find it again."
The coroner accordingly handed the book down to Mr. Lansing, who, after a few moments of diligent search, looked up and announced that he had found it.
"It's this," he said, reading, " 'spawn of Cthulhu from the sunken kingdom of R'lyeh!' That's the animal, one of the spawn, which Holm said he could call up from the sea."
At this point a member of the jury rose to express the hope that Lansing would proceed as quickly and as directly as possible to the facts concerning Holm's death. The coroner instructed Lansing to proceed accordingly, but it was apparent shortly after Lansing had again taken up his story that he had not diverged in any detail from his leisurely method.
"This animal seems to have been a sort of evil being—so the book said, at any rate—and was banished and sent back into the sea by Augustine, then Bishop over Clithanus. The formula for summoning this beast from the sea was given by the monk, who wrote that this beast could be used by a wise man to be sent against his enemies.
"Holm proposed that he call the beast up that night and send him out after me. I'd be safe enough, of course, because he'd send along the monk's formula of protection and of sending the beast back to the place from which it came.
"Well, gentlemen, naturally, I put no faith in the business, especially since so many other trials had come to naught. So I agreed readily enough, though, to tell the truth, I was getting a bit tired of his everlasting experiments that didn't ever work out.
"We set on the hour of ten o'clock for the trial.”
"You mean ten o'clock that night?" put in the coroner. "Why couldn't it have been done in the daytime?”
"Oh, Mr. Holm would never experiment in the daytime. You see, he always looked to have one of those experiments come out—and that would never do by day."
The coroner nodded.
"Well, we sat and talked for a bit, he and I, and at nine o'clock, I went home. For the first quarter hour or so, I forgot all about the formula to protect myself, and it wasn't until five minutes of ten or so that I thought of it. Then I began to repeat the formula—"
"Have you a copy of the formula?" asked a member of the jury. Lansing nodded. "Yes, it's contained in the book. It's in old Latin, and it's full of very odd references to Ancient Gods and such things. It's quite beyond me, of course, but all I had to do was repeat the formula.
"Well, I was a little over halfway through the thing, when I heard something snuffling about near the window of my library. I confess that I got nervous at that, even though I didn't believe in any such things. So I hurried the formula a bit.
"Then I heard my front door open, and a moment later queer, shuffling footsteps coming down the hall. And believe me, gentlemen, I rattled off that Latin faster than I ever thought I could do it. I got it done just when the noise of something coming down the hall got up to my library door.
"When I finished reciting that formula the noise stopped, too. I was near to being paralyzed with the shock of the thing; so I stood there a bit and listened. Then I heard the noise again—footsteps going back down the hall and out the front door. I didn't hear the door close and when I saw it later, it was standing open.
"I finally managed to get up my courage and look out into the hall. Gentlemen, there was nothing there. But there had been something there, and whatever had been there was soaking wet, because there was a trail of water all over my carpet in the hall, and nasty-looking footprints."
Those in the court looked puzzled as Lansing paused.
"What kind of footprints?" asked the coroner.
"Oh, nothing I'd ever seen before. Something like a big frogs. Webbed feet—but big, very big, and irregular—yes, gentlemen, most irregular. Believe me, it set me up to see them there, and the smell, too. Like the sea. Of course, you know there was a fog that night, and with the door open, why the smell could have come from that—but it was so strong, and there was something else about it, something animalish!
"I stood for a few moments looking at the tracks. Then I thought of Holm. So I pulled myself together and went to the telephone. He was waiting, I guess, because he answered right away.
"I said who I was and then I told him, 'I think that beast of yours came all right, Holm. Left a nice mess of wet tracks on my hall carpet, I must say.' That's what I said to him.
" 'Did you see it?' he asked me.
"'Oh, no, thanks/ I said. 'I saw its footprints and I can still smell it. That's quite enough for me/
"I could hear him laughing. Then he said, 'It's too bad you didn't see it. Tell you what we'll do next time—we'll reverse it. You send it to me. I'll take a look at it before I send it back—' Then he paused a bit, and I asked whether anything was the matter. 'There's someone at the door, I think. Just a minute—why, by George, I think he's coming right in.'
"Then he went away from the telephone.”
Lansing paused again, swallowed with some difficulty, and clasped his hands tightly together.
"Then, gentlemen, then—I heard him scream—a terrible scream it was. And I heard furniture being turned over, and things being torn, curtains and such like—and then horrid grunting sounds, awful little croaks and Grunts."
Lansing paused again.
"I called into the telephone, but he didn't answer. No one answered. His man wasn't home—it was his day out, anyway. I called and called, and I could hear something all the time—a nasty, horrid sound like something— something eating.
"Then, gentlemen, I called the police.
"I met them in front of Holm's house and went right in with them. The front door was standing open on his waiting room—and, gentlemen, there were tracks there, like those in my hall, wet, nasty tracks that smelled like the deep sea, a slimy seaweed smell. And the tracks went all the way in, through the waiting room and around into the library.
"There we found Holm. He was dead. He had been sort of pulled to— to pieces. And he wasn't quite all there. I couldn't look at him, gentlemen, and he my best friend. I couldnt stand the library, either, and got back into the waiting room as quick as I could. The library had a smell twenty times worse than the one in the waiting room.
"After a while I went back and showed the police the telephone—it was hanging out of its cradle—just the way he'd left it. And then I picked up the book, too.
"A little later I went with the police on the trail of those footprints. They went out the back way, through the garden, where they dented in the ground fairly well, showing that the thing must have had a good deal of weight, and over the garden wall. From there they turned seaward and we lost them."
Lansing shuddered and stopped. He looked from the coroner to the jury and back again.
The coroner appeared to be considering the story.
"Of course," he said presently, "you can realize how we react to such a narrative, even with the authentic evidence we seem to have. But there is one thing that puzzles me. You said that Holm would send back with you the formula for your protection and for sending the beast back to the place from which it came. I assumed that Mr. Holm meant that your reciting the formula would send the beast back to the sea."
Lansing nodded vigorously. "Oh, yes, yes, absolutely—he did.”
"But, since the beast appears to have followed the appointed order of the formula—in coming in response to Mr. Holms summons, and in being repulsed by your formula—I am at a loss to understand why it did not return directly to the sea instead of going back to destroy Mr. Holm."
A breathless silence hung in the room.
Lansing fumbled awkwardly in his pockets and drew out a piece of paper, twice folded. Then he put on a pair of worn spectacles and peered at the writing on the paper. Following this, he opened the ancient volume which he still held on his lap.
Then he looked up, swept the room with a nervous glance.
"I wondered about that, too," he said. "I thought that perhaps I had bungled it or something. So I looked it up in the book—the formula, that is, before I turned the book over to you.
"You see, Holm had written out the formula for me. Its on this piece of paper, just the way I recited it. Now, if you'll look at the book, you'll see that the original formula for sending the beast is printed on page thirty-two, and that the formula for sending it back to the sea starts on the bottom of page thirty-three and is complete on page thirty-four. Then, if you'll look a little farther, you'll see that there's another formula started on the bottom of page thirty-five and finished on the top of page thirty-six. If you'll compare the formula started on page thirty-three with that started on page thirtyfive, you'll find that they read exactly alike.
"When Holm copied that formula out of the book, he turned over two leaves instead of one. While the two formulas start exactly alike, they don't end up alike. Gentlemen, they're altogether different.
"The formula he meant to give me was for sending the beast back to the sea; because in his haste he did not notice that he turned two pages, and because they read alike at the beginning. The formula he gave me was for sending the beast back upon the man who had first sent it out!"