Free Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft Page B

something in the character of those noises, something without name or definition, which caused a slowly creeping chill to invade my spine.
    “Good Lord! What is all that racket?” I cried.
    “The rats! I tell you it is only rats!” Carnby’s voice was a high hysterical shriek.
    A moment later, there came an unmistakable knocking on the door, near the sill. At the same time I heard a heavy thudding in the locked cupboard at the further end of the room. Carnby had been standing erect, but now he sank limply into a chair. His features were ashen, and his look was almost maniacal with fright.
    The nightmare doubt and tension became unbearable and I ran to the door and flung it open, in spite of a frantic remonstrance from my employer. I had no idea what I should find as I stepped across the sill into the dim-lit hall.
    When I looked down and saw the thing on which I had almost trodden, my feeling was one of sick amazement and actual nausea. It was a human hand which had been severed at the wrist—a bony, bluish hand like that of a week-old corpse, with garden-mould on the fingers and under the long nails.
The damnable thing had moved!
It had drawn back to avoid me, and was crawling along the passage somewhat in the manner of a crab! And following it with my gaze, I saw that there were other things beyond it, one of which I recognized as a man’s foot and another as a forearm. I dared not look at the rest. All were moving slowly, hideously away in a charnel procession, and I cannot describe the fashion in which they moved. Their individual vitality was horrifying beyond endurance. It was more than the vitality of life, yet the air was laden with a carrion taint. I averted my eyes and stepped back into Carnby’s room, closing the door behind me with a shaking hand. Carnby was at my side with the key, which he turned in the lock with palsy-stricken fingers that had become as feeble as those of an old man.
    “You saw them?” he asked in a dry, quavering whisper.
    “In God’s name, what does it all mean?” I cried.
    Carnby went back to his chair, tottering a little with weakness. His lineaments were agonized by the gnawing of some inward horror, and he shook visibly like an ague patient. I sat down in a chair beside him, and he began to stammer forth his unbelievable confession, half incoherently, with inconsequential mouthings and many breaks and pauses:
    “He is stronger than I am—even in death, even with his body dismembered by the surgeon’s knife and saw that I used. I thought he could not return after that—after I had buried the portions in a dozen different places, in the cellar, beneath the shrubs, at the foot of the ivyvines. But the
Necronomicon
is right … and Helman Carnby knew it. He warned me before I killed him, he told me he could return—
even in that condition
.
    “But I did not believe him. I hated Helman, and he hated me, too.He had attained to higher power and knowledge and was more favored by the Dark Ones than I. That was why I killed him—my own twin-brother, and my brother in the service of Satan and of Those who were before Satan. We had studied together for many years. We had celebrated the Black Mass together and we were attended by the same familiars. But Helman Carnby had gone deeper into the occult, into the forbidden, where I could not follow him. I feared him, and I could not endure his supremacy.
    “It is more than a week—it is ten days since I did the deed. But Helman—or some part of him—has returned every night.… God! His accursed hands crawling on the floor! His feet, his arms, the segments of his legs, climbing the stairs in some unmentionable way to haunt me!… Christ! His awful, bloody torso lying in wait! I tell you, his hands have come even by day to tap and fumble at my door … and I have stumbled over his arms in the dark.
    “Oh, God! I shall go mad with the awfulness of it. But he wants me to go mad, he wants to torture me till my brain gives way. That