a dreadful crimson thing, like a
skinned child, refilling my goblet. Strange, strange and utterly
blasphemous was our feast. We shouted and laughed and fed there in the
hazy light, while all around us thundered the evil horde. There was hell
beneath Castle Kralitz, and it held high carnival this night.

* * * * *

Presently we sang a fierce drinking-song, swinging the deep cups back
and forth in rhythm with our shouted chant. It was an archaic song, but
the obsolete words were no handicap, for I mouthed them as though they
had been learned at my mother's knee. And at the thought of my mother a
trembling and a weakness ran through me abruptly, but I banished it with
a draft of the heady liquor.

Long, long we shouted and sang and caroused there in the great cavern,
and after a time we arose together and trooped to where a narrow,
high-arched bridge spanned the tenebrous waters of the lake. But I may
not speak of what was at the other end of the bridge, nor of the
unnamable things that I saw--and did! I learned of the fungoid, inhuman
beings that dwell on far cold Yuggoth, of the cyclopean shapes that
attend unsleeping Cthulhu in his submarine city, of the strange
pleasures that the followers of leprous, subterranean Yog-Sothoth may
possess, and I learned, too, of the unbelievable manner in which Iod,
the Source, is worshipped beyond the outer galaxies. I plumbed the
blackest pits of hell and came back--laughing. I was one with the rest
of those dark warders, and I joined them in the saturnalia of horror
until the scarred man spoke to us again.

"Our time grows short," he said, his scarred and bearded white face like
a gargoyle's in the half-light. "We must depart soon. But you are a true
Kralitz, Franz, and we shall meet again, and feast again, and make merry
for longer than you think. One last pledge!"

I gave it to him. "To the House of Kralitz! May it never fall!"

And with an exultant shout we drained the pungent dregs of the liquor.

Then a strange lassitude fell upon me. With the others I turned my back
on the cavern and the shapes that pranced and bellowed and crawled
there, and I went up through the carved stone portal. We filed up the
stairs, up and up, endlessly, until at last we emerged through the
gaping hole in the stone flags and proceeded, a dark, silent company,
back through those interminable corridors. The surroundings began to
grow strangely familiar, and suddenly