Poetic Double Feature

"The Last Ritual"

from Dreams from R'lyeh

By: Wilbur Nathaniel Hoag (1921-1944)

composed from letters found in

Manuscripts Collection of Miskatonic University

Edited by: Lin Carter

The night he died the Demon Star was high.

It hung above the house against the dark

A cold, arcane, malign and watching spark

Like some green, burning and Cycloptic eye.

They locked me in my room, but I could see

My Uncle take down that abhorrent book

At whose mad page I was forbade to look,

Gorstadt's grim volume of Necrolatry.

I heard them chanting (they had closed the blind),

And smelled some burning reek ophidian . . .

Then all was silence . . . till the screams began.

At dawn the neighbors broke the door, to find

Jones gibbering and mad. Uncle was dead.

They found his body. All except the head.

"The Library"

When I was young they never let me look
Into that room kept under lock and key,
But when he died my Uncle left to me
His strange collection. Almost every book
Was old and crumbling, curiously bound
In serpent skin, and with a rotten meat smell
As of some tainted and abandoned well,
Or some dead thing long buried underground.

I looked in one. And, though my blood ran cold,
I read it, page by page. The nightwind blew
About the eaves, and when red morning rolled
Up from the east, I finished. And I knew
Those old, old books were not meant to be read
By sane men. They were better burnt instead.