reckoned on the different contacts of two minds. You were a fool, Curwen, to fancy that a mere visual identity would be enough. Why didn’t you think of the speech and the voice and the handwriting? It hasn’t worked, you see, after all. You know better than I who or what wrote that message in minuscules, but I will warn you it was not written in vain. There are abominations and blasphemies which must be stamped out, and I believe that the writer of those words will attend to Orne and Hutchinson. One of those creatures wrote you once, ‘do not call up any that you cannot put down.’ Curwen, a man can’t tamper with Nature beyond certain limits, and every horror you have woven will rise up to wipe you out.”
But here the doctor was cut short by a convulsive cry from the creature before him. Hopelessly at bay, weaponless, and knowing that any show of physical violence would bring a score of attendants to the doctor’s rescue, Joseph Curwen had recourse to his one ancient ally, and began a series of cabalistic motions with his forefingers as his deep, hollow voice, now unconcealed by feigned hoarseness, bellowed out the opening words of a terrible formula.
“ Per Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton . …”
But Willett was too quick for him. Even as the dogs in the yard outside began to howl, and even as a chill wind sprang suddenly up from the bay, the doctor commenced the solemn and measured intonation of that which he had meant all along to recite. An eye for an eye—magic for magic—let the outcome show how well the lesson of the abyss had been learned! So in a clear voice Marinus Bicknell Willett began the second of that pair of formulae whose first had raised the writer of those minuscules—the cryptic invocation whose heading was the Dragon’s Tail, sign of the descending node—
“Ogthrod Aiʻf Gebʻl ⸻ Eeʻh Yog-Sothoth ʻNgahʻng Aiʻy Zhro”