Avyctes

In “The Double Shadow”, we’re back in Poseidonis, the last surviving isle left when Atlantis foundered, and a wizard’s acolyte named Pharpetron is writing about how he must set down this warning and cast it into the sea before he transforms into something that would destroy the manuscript. It seems that Pharpetron is studying under a sorcerer named Avyctes, himself the only surviving student of the dreaded Malgyris “who lay dead for years while men believed him living; who, lying thus, still uttered potent spells and dire oracles with decaying lips.” The two men reside in a stark white mansion atop cliffs overlooking the sea, and they have for years been digging deeper and deeper into forbidden arts. Just as a hint of the sort of lives they lead, Pharpetron and Avyctes are guarded by statues and mummies, and their meals are served by liches and phantoms. Avyctes is getting pretty adept at summoning demons from the fifth and seventh planets (that’s wisdom from ancient Thule), gaining knowledge of the far future (a trick brought over from Mu), and even traveling “the road between the atoms” (that was an art saved from their lost homeland Atlantis). But the elderly warlock is not content. He wants ever darker and deeper secrets, going beyond what even the most notorious magicians have learned and (sure enough) he eventually pushes his luck too far. After a terrible storm, a strange metal tablet is found on the beach, and nothing even in Avyctes’ extensive library can help decipher the unknown signs etched into one side of the object. Thinking he’s on to the great find he’s always dreamed of, the sorcerer and his student summon up the ghost of a magician from a long-gone prehistoric era. This vague insubstantial shade tells them that “the letters on the tablet were those of the serpent-men, whose primal continent had sunk eons before the lifting of Hyperborea from the ooze. But the ghost could tell us naught of their significance; for, even in his time, the serpent-people had become a dubious legend; and their deep, antehuman lore and sorcery were things irretrievable by man.” Really worked up by now, Avyctes sends the ghost back through time countless ages to the era of the serpent-men themselves. When the spirit returns almost dissipated, it lasts long enough to inform them how to translate the inscription. The sorcerer and his student then act out the conjuration with the help of their huge walking mummy, summoning something they know not the name or nature of from a non-human race long extinct. For a while, it seems nothing at all happens. Evidently, the spell was past its expiration date. Pharpetron is greatly relieved at this apparent anticlimax, until he notices that his master now has a second shadow attached to him. This new shadow is of a weird unnatural color and its shape is not quite right. “…Its form was altogether monstrous, seeming to move as if cast by one who trod erect, but having the squat head and long, undulant body of things that should creep rather than walk.” Much to his alarm, Ayvctes finds none of his magic has any effect on his new tagalong, and he resigns himself to whatever its intentions might be. Although Pharpetron attempts to make a break for it, he cannot leave the estate. The space between the genuine shadow and this newcomer narrows ominously, and both men fret over what will happen when the shadows merge…