PseudoPod 979: Two Esoteric Texts: Old Things are Meant to Be Found and Shared and The Secret in the Tomb
Show Notes
From Leanna Renee Hieber: “Much like the introduction to this story will have you believe, I am, in fact, a licensed New York City tour guide who leads haunted and weird history tours specifically around Greenwich Village. I do, in fact, lead folks to the courtyard address on Perry Street that inspired Lovecraft’s “He”. So, when I was approached to write a piece posited as if it were non-fiction for The Book of Starry Wisdom, where this story first appeared, I created the finding of the diary outside the Perry Street address as a fun device, one I’d like to think Lovecraft and Poe- the latter of which I take pains to laud as my personal inspiration- would appreciate.”
Revenants for Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Zatara in The Books of Magic by John Bolton (EXTREME CONTENT WARNING: Dead animals)
Old Things are Meant to Be Found and Shared
By Leanna Renee Hieber
Dear Reader,
A very curious thing happened on a Greenwich Village tour I have been known to lead as a reincarnate Victorian, antiquated speaker and consummate old soul; a walking tour that takes guests along the very same paths that famed horror writers Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft walked in prior centuries when they lived in the West Village. I speak passionately of the stories these men penned in and about certain locations, and of course I must throw in the occasional ghost story as no tale is complete without supernatural influence. I think of Greenwich Village as a sort of spiritual and literary haven. And I’m hardly the only writer to have thought so. There’s quite a legacy on its streets and behind its townhouse facades.
I was nearing the end of my lecture, building my love of history and of Old New York into an artful crescendo when I stumbled across a weather-beaten leather volume, placed directly in my path, leaning against the foot of a gnarled tree. The roots had begun to upend the sidewalk leveled ineffectively to suppress its growth. The black volume, its corners damp with an odd oil, gleamed in the vaguely sulfuric glow of those modern streetlamps built to appear historic. The iron posts of replica gas lamps pepper many old neighborhoods where landmarking laws protect architectural treasures against the ravening jaws of modernity’s bulldozers. Their amber light illuminates a history reinventing itself into an uncertain future.
The volume leaned against the tree as I have been known to do when I tell city stories, as I love to come into direct contact with the architecture, flora, fauna, the brick and mortar of the sites and locations I feature. I touch a bit of the past each time I touch that tree or graze my fingertips along the rough brick of the address that old tree shades. This yellow-paged journal was standing in my place, directly, as if I were meant to find it at the foot of my stage. Perhaps, I thought with some excitement, tucking the volume in my messenger bag without interrupting my narrative, this volume belonged to that history.
Once I was home again in the kind of New York spaces that have to be thought of as cozy to justify the high rents to one’s own mind, I poured coffee into a teacup and opened the volume. My excitement cooled and a different energy took over. I shudder to think that I may have been targeted in this.
To speak candidly, I’m not sure I would have wanted this text to be found, had I a choice in the matter… But it was found nonetheless. And I picked it up and tucked it away of my own volition. Who can argue with what is?
But you, if you’re the type to be drawn to mouldering libraries and ancient relics, you might find the following content of interest, as the volume was found outside of an address that inspired the story “He”… (A rather miserable tale written by Mr. Lovecraft during his unrepentantly hateful time in this fine city.)
Of this address, 93 Perry Street should you wish to pay a visit; it is an average residential pre-war building with an unadorned archway leading to the curious interior courtyard that captured the vivid imagination of Mr. Lovecraft, the courtyard where he as narrator was reportedly “found” at the end of the wild tale. Whether or not this journal is in fact the diary of “He” himself… I leave that for you to judge. Or to dream. Or to conspire… Please do think upon the matter.
Because we are all connected, you know. One. Mass. Consciousness. Of course I was meant to find this volume. For Old things are meant to be found and shared. Passed along. Consumed. Brought to bear. Revealed. Freed from their depths. I have come to a certain peace. Welcome to what was and may always be inevitable.
Sincerely,
Author Leanna Renee Hieber
The height of summer, 1926
If New York City is to be a place from whence all Great Old things flow, well… There is much work to be done on this teeming rock where tides of humans ebb and flow in predictable cycles, where two great heartbeats, one in the morning and one at night, pulse out churning crowds of people onto the grid veins of Manhattan island and, flowing from that powerful aorta, they are swept on to their homes and dreams and terrors. So many dreams, innumerable entwined thoughts and delicious nightmares, all tangled up like ivy up the side of brownstone row houses…
I can nearly taste the whole of it; a heady soup of society, flavored with hope, flawed with pride and incubating sleeping germs of madness. Some of those small particles are ready to wake within their hosts. The Cult has fanaticism here, on this rock, there are wondrous outbreaks on the island that have manifest in various ways, as have pockets awoken across this patchwork country. The New York cauldron is quite ready to boil. But it needs more leadership, more visionaries. More art. More voices to bring forth the call. This is my particular mission.
I confess that I have had moments of doubt, wondering if I am the correct facilitator; if I’ll find the right acolytes for this slow and sure turning of time’s great wheel towards the end days when all will rise from the pitch black abyss and come home again to rule. Valiantly I try to keep that doubt from taking further root or solidifying within.
When I grow worried and weary I content myself with the knowledge that the calendar of the Great Old Ones does not wax and wane in the same cycles as mine. They slumber peacefully in cavernous depths and await the resumption of their age in patience. Their range of space and time is fluid, flexible. So must I live in harmony with their visions, share in their dreaming black void that encompasses in perfect dichotomy the fullness of a day and the swift passing of a year; all in a mere blink of their great eye. Thinking upon the lengthy stretch of my own existence, the prescience of my task is a balm.
I was once a humble squire here in this village that used to be rural countryside and the estate holdings of Grand Dutchman. My future was bleak and ordinary, destined to be forgotten in a potter’s field. But through arcane arts of the Natives and helped along by the beautiful siren songs of the Deep, time is but something I demand to pass, a force under my control, here centuries later as I seek out a brave visionary and in him make my own mark. In this I shall assure my legacy as a critical stepping-stone in the new order.
To say that I have seen much is an understatement I cannot possibly quantify. The ways in which my life has been extended would be scoffed at and denounced as the most vile forms of witchcraft by the mother who bore me, a woman who has so long faded from my mind I remember nothing but her fear. Why must that one sentiment live in such rich and immaculately preserved detail when so much else has fallen away like rotting walls dribbling away their plaster?
Mother’s fear. A relative of that dread monster, doubt. It has calcified in me like a stone in my stomach. The state in which Mother mummified her mind had cause in those years, of course, with all the epidemics sweeping up from downtown and our having to take refuge from plagues like yellow fever, here on what is now known as Perry Street. Here now, this bustling Village of connected buildings is an unrecognizable cry from the rural expanse of yester-year… It does pain me. A soul is only meant to see so much change in their time on the globe.
Some maddened nights I can’t help but use my powers to wipe away the layers of modernization and go back to view a picturesque countryside. I stare a long while, then release the past from my grasp. I can’t hold it indefinitely- though some things slip through. An occasional tuft of grass from whatever 17th century lane I was sentimentalizing will remain wedged strangely into the foundation of the 20th century building that replaced it, or graveyard bones will jut up between patches of asphalt rolled over forgotten plots. There is nothing that brings me a wider smile than that; wrenching timelines together in a violent, snapping collision.
Looking back at formative worries, fear of cholera and sweeping fevers seem so paltry compared to the concerns that haunt me now. I fear the spirits of those Natives most of all, as their restless revenants would seek revenge on all who wronged their people, perceiving me as one of the countless oppressors, usurpers, appropriators of all they were and would never be able to become. Only eyes and the glint of tomahawks remain inside the shadows that seek to undo me and chop short my extended existence. Every night I keep their dark, oozing shadows at bay. The faraway thrum of the Old Ones’ call gives me strength and drives a wedge between converging dark magicks. I believe I have chosen a winning side in the battle for my soul and I will pass along that victory to my charge.
How much struggle I can or should reveal to my vital recruit I cannot yet ascertain. I must not seem weak when assessing the candidacy of a man who might be able to create the definitive, biblical lore on the Great Old Ones once and for all. I have to be a compelling pillar, for the time of the acolyte is near.
I saw him on a sleepless night when he was walking, a bit desperately I’d say, if I were to be so bold as to assess another man’s psychological state. And in seeing him so, I became both beholden to him and utterly sure of his capability.
He walks these streets with singular purpose and a glorious focus. Every twist and sloped turn of a curving Greenwich lane wrenches the grid of Manhattan streets, twisting the map into the discombobulating innards of this neighborhood; here where time eases its bustling clip and one is forced to confront the old city ways and recall what this city grew upwards from. I can see this man turn away from the Cyclopean towers of this ever skyward modern city and instead choose to stand on an old Greenwich cobblestone as if freed from a prison. Ways of antiquity are his breath of life, these historic streets feed his disenchanted soul and from this vulnerable place. I will enchant him with the last syllables of recorded time.
I’ve dipped into his mind through the channels of the Deep to learn that he is Lovecraft. A vindicating surname. I followed the man, tracing his favourite Greenwich Village paths. Of course he seems drawn to Edgar A. Poe’s same tread- whether by instinct or design- he is surely gathering up invisible breadcrumbs of inspiration left behind, yearning for the meaning of his scraps to become clear. Sometimes he takes a notebook from a threadbare suitcoat and scribbles a note or sketch, purging some sort of disquiet from his mind. There has never been a better fit than he.
I confess, I was impatient with Mr. Poe, whom I watched pace these rounds and for whom I once held a candle of great hope. But while he was not a fit acolyte in life, it was as if Poe planted seeds for this successor Lovecraft to gather. I may always regret that I could not capture dear Edgar, as the man’s genius was awesome to behold. But he was too fragile. Too gentle a soul. I can’t have a nuanced and innovative poet as my torchbearer. I need someone harder. Someone whose anxieties won’t snap them in two, but who will rather share their unraveling nerves, page by page, and let the Call flow freely unto a readership that will be at first timid, then ravenous.
I may always regret that I was unable to get my proper hooks into that poor, delicate Mr. Poe. I shall amend my mistakes and show instead this Mr. Lovecraft my gifts, courtesy of my masters who have allowed me to see the wonders of this world. What are gifts and sights if not to be shared? Disseminated? The mass of this city, and this populating, constantly populating country, the mass minds of this rock alone… why… will it not be such rich food for gaping Old and hungry mouths of the Deep?
I believe tonight is the night. He, this Lovecraft, is my choice. His lonely misery is the perfect match. Anticipation of our encounter has my charms at full, my glamour and my illusions all are humming at their most efficient. I have to stay focused, as what I will show him will take all my energy and concentration. I can’t for a moment slip up. Too much of import is at hand, and the shadows of my enemies are always watching and waiting for a way in…
On this night I declare for myself and unto the Old Ones that I shall draw this wandering Lovecraft to my bosom and share with him the glories of what must come. I will bid him follow me, to slake the thirst of his curious spirit and lure him down my proverbial rabbit hole. (Ah, now Lewis Carroll. That’s a man I wish I could have persuaded to the Great cause. But I do rather hate crossing vast waters, so that particular alliance was not meant to be. But the Jabberwock? Surely that man met an Old One once…)
But I digress from dear H. P., who has so little to lose and so much to gain from the sights I shall impress upon him. This poor man loathes this island of Manhattan, the whole of these connected boroughs and tethered souls. I shall release him from the clutches of this metropolis and nudge him homeward. His heart is in New England, of course, to where he’ll flee, of course, as surely my unraveling of time and the visions I shall conjure will overwhelm him. I’ll push him over a certain edge, and in doing so, his expanded and off-kilter mind will be ready for the true Gods to enter in.
I shall make ready tonight, as humanity tip-toes ever closer in every waking dream, to its inevitable, formidable end times. From my Perry Street window over a nondescript courtyard arch, humankind marches in a cacophonous dirge towards the sacrifice it was born to perform at the feet of the Old.
He’ll leave me, I know, once all this is done. I am prepared for this, lonely as I myself have proven to be. I am also prepared to at long last die so that he may see what he must. Ah. There’s Mother’s old rock of fear turning in my gut. What a polished gem it must be now. But there is no way but crawling forward.
Once fled to palliative safety, from his providential respite in Providence, the man will undoubtedly continue to hear the Call. Once Called, you must serve… And the call is greater, nearer to the waters…
If I, Gods forbid, fail with this Lovecraft to bring about the new dawn of old darkness, then perhaps it will be in the hands of authors of a new generation, to tell the old, old story.
History will judge. History lives still. To wake. Listen. History never died, it is its own immortal god. The cults live on despite all efforts to annihilate them, and in this city the voices of the worshippers shall grow, their murmurs bouncing collectively off those Cyclopean towers of darkest dreams, expanding this pulsing island’s heartbeat to a ferocious noise that shall emit a mind-rending shriek once clutched in the grip of prehistoric claws.
Out in the waters, under the streets, on the air, there is a call. All can hear it. Some must devote their lives to repeating it. Gods speed…
The Secret in the Tomb
by Robert Bloch
The wind howled strangely over a midnight tomb. The moon hung like a golden bat over ancient graves, glaring through the wan mist with its baleful, nyctalopic eye. Terrors not of the flesh might lurk among cedar-shrouded sepulchers or creep unseen amid shadowed cenotaphs, for this was unhallowed ground. But tombs hold strange secrets, and there are mysteries blacker than the night, and more leprous than the moon.
It was in search of such a secret that I came, alone and unseen, to my ancestral vault at midnight. My people had been sorcerers and wizards in the olden days, so lay apart from the resting-place of other men, here in this moldering mausoleum in a forgotten spot, surrounded only by the graves of those who had been their servants. But not all the servants lay here, for there are those who do not die.
On through the mist I pressed, to where the crumbling sepulcher loomed among the brooding trees. The wind rose to torrential violence as I trod the obscure pathway to the vaulted entrance, extinguishing my lantern with malefic fury. Only the moon remained to light my way in a luminance unholy. And thus I reached the nitrous, fungus-bearded portals of the family vault. Here the moon shone upon a door that was not like other doors—a single massive slab of iron, imbedded in monumental walls of granite. Upon its outer surface was neither handle, lock nor keyhole, but the whole was covered with carvings portentous of a leering evil—cryptic symbols whose allegorical significance filled my soul with a deeper loathing than mere words can impart. There are things that are not good to look upon, and I did not care to dwell too much in thought on the possible genesis of a mind whose knowledge could create such horrors in concrete form. So in blind and trembling haste I chanted the obscure litany and performed the necessary obeisances demanded in the ritual I had learned, and at their conclusion the cyclopean portal swung open.
Within was darkness, deep, funereal, ancient; yet, somehow, uncannily alive. It held a pulsing adumbration, a suggestion of muted, yet purposeful rhythm, and overshadowing all, an air of black, impinging revelation. The simultaneous effect upon my consciousness was one of those reactions misnamed intuitions. I sensed that shadows know queer secrets, and there are some skulls that have reason to grin.
Yet I must go on into the tomb of my forebears—tonight the last of all our line would meet the first. For I was the last. Jeremy Strange had been the first—he who fled from the Orient to seek refuge in centuried Eldertown, bringing with him the loot of many tombs and a secret for ever nameless. It was he who had built his sepulcher in the twilight woods where the witch-lights gleam, and here he had interred his own remains, shunned in death as he had been in life. But buried with him was a secret, and it was this that I had come to seek. Nor was I the first in so seeking, for my father and his father before me, indeed, the eldest of each generation back to the days of Jeremy Strange himself, had likewise sought that which was so maddeningly described in the wizard’s diary—the secret of eternal life after death. The musty yellowed tome had been handed down to the elder son of each successive generation, and likewise, so it seemed, the dread atavistic craving for black and accursed knowledge, the thirst for which, coupled with the damnably explicit hints set forth in the warlock’s record, had sent every one of my paternal ancestors so bequeathed to a final rendezvous in the night, to seek their heritage within the tomb. What they found, none could say, for none had ever returned.
It was, of course, a family secret. The tomb was never mentioned—it had, indeed, been virtually forgotten with the passage of years that had likewise eradicated many of the old legends and fantastic accusations about the first Strange that had once been common property in the village. The family, too, had been mercifully spared all knowledge of the curse-ridden end to which so many of its men had come. Their secret delvings into black arts; the hidden library of antique lore and demonological formulae brought by Jeremy from the East; the diary and its secret—all were undreamt of save by the eldest sons. The rest of the line prospered. There had been sea captains, soldiers, merchants, statesmen. Fortunes were won. Many departed from the old mansion on the cape, so that in my father’s time he had lived there alone with the servants and myself. My mother died at my birth, and it was a lonely youth I spent in the great brown house, with a father half-crazed by the tragedy of my mother’s end, and shadowed by the monstrous secret of our line. It was he who initiated me into the mysteries and arcana to be found amid the shuddery speculations of such blasphemies as the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, the Cabala of Saboth, and that pinnacle of literary madness, Ludvig Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm. There were grim treatises on anthropomancy, necrology, lycanthropical and vampiristic spells and charms, witchcraft, and long, rambling screeds in Arabic, Sanskrit and prehistoric ideography, on which lay the dust of centuries.
All these he gave me, and more. There were times when he would whisper strange stories about voyages he had taken in his youth—of islands in the sea, and queer survivals spawning dreams beneath arctic ice. And one night he told me of the legend, and the tomb in the forest; and together we turned the worm-riddled pages of the iron-bound diary that was hidden in the panel above the chimney-corner. I was very young, but not too young to know certain things, and as I swore to keep the secret as so many had sworn before me, I had a queer feeling that the time had come for Jeremy to claim his own. For in my father’s somber eyes was the same light of dreadful thirst for the unknown, curiosity, and an inward urge that had glowed in the eyes of all the others before him, previous to the time they had announced their intention of “going on a trip” or “joining up” or “attending to a business matter”. Most of them had waited till their children were grown, or their wives had passed on; but whenever they had left, and whatever their excuse, they had never returned.
Two days later, my father disappeared, after leaving word with the servants that he was spending the week in Boston. Before the month was out there was the usual investigation, and the usual failure. A will was discovered among my father’s papers, leaving me as sole heir, but the books and the diary were secure in the secret rooms and panels known now to me alone.
Life went on. I did the usual things in the usual way—attended university, traveled, and returned at last to the house on the hill, alone. But with me I carried a mighty determination—I alone could thwart that curse; I alone could grasp the secret that had cost the lives of seven generations—and I alone must do so. The world had naught to offer one who had spent his youth in the study of the mocking truths that lie beyond the outward beauties of a purposeless existence, and I was not afraid. I dismissed the servants, ceased communication with distant relatives and a few close friends, and spent my days in the hidden chambers amid the elder lore, seeking a solution or a spell of such potency as would serve to dispel for ever the mystery of the tomb.
A hundred times I read and reread that hoary script—the diary whose fiend-penned promise had driven men to doom. I searched amid the satanic spells and cabalistic incantations of a thousand forgotten necromancers, delved into pages of impassioned prophecy, burrowed into secret legendary lore whose written thoughts writhed through me like serpents from the pit. It was in vain. All I could learn was the ceremony by which access could be obtained to the tomb in the wood. Three months of study had worn me to a wraith and filled my brain with the diabolic shadows of charnel-spawned knowledge, but that was all. And then, as if in mockery of madness, there had come the call, this very night.
I had been seated in the study, pondering upon a maggot-eaten volume of Heiriarchus’ Occultus, when without warning, I felt a tremendous urge keening through my weary brain. It beckoned and allured with unutterable promise, like the mating-cry of the lamia of old; yet at the same time it held an inexorable power whose potence could not be defied or denied. The inevitable was at hand. I had been summoned to the tomb. I must follow the beguiling voice of inner consciousness that was the invitation and the promise, that sounded my soul like the ultra-rhythmic piping of trans-cosmic music. So I had come, alone and weaponless, to the lonely woods and to that wherein I would meet my destiny.
The moon rose redly over the manor as I left, but I did not look back. I saw its reflection in the waters of the brook that crept between the trees, and in its light the water was as blood. Then the fog rose silently from the swamp, and a yellow ghost-light rode the sky, beckoning me on from behind the black and bloated trees whose branches, swept by a dismal wind, pointed silently toward the distant tomb. Roots and creepers impeded my feet, vines and brambles restrained my body, but in my ears thundered a chorus of urgency that can not be described and which could not be delayed, by nature or by man.
Now, as I hesitated upon the door-step, a million idiot voices gibbered an invitation to enter that mortal mind could not withstand. Through my brain resounded the horror of my heritage—the insatiable craving to know the forbidden, to mingle and become one with it. A paean of hell-born music crescendoed in my ears, and earth was blotted out in a mad urge that engulfed all being.
I paused no longer upon the threshold. I went in, in where the smell of death filled the darkness that was like the sun over Yuggoth. The door closed, and then came—what? I do not know—I only realized that suddenly I could see and feel and hear, despite darkness, and dankness, and silence.
I was in the tomb. Its monumental walls and lofty ceiling were black and bare, lichended by the passage of centuries. In the center of the mausoleum stood a single slab of black marble. Upon it rested a gilded coffin, set with strange symbols, and covered by the dust of ages. I knew instinctively what it must contain, and the knowledge did not serve to put me at my ease. I glanced at the floor, then wished I hadn’t. Upon the debris-strewn base beneath the slab lay a ghastly, disarticulated group of mortuary remains—half-fleshed cadavers and desiccated skeletons. When I though of my father and the others, I was possessed of a sickening dismay. They too had sought, and they had failed. And now I had come, alone, to find that which had brought them to an end unholy and unknown. The secret! The secret in the tomb!
Mad eagerness filled my soul. I too would know—I must! As in a dream I swayed to the gilded coffin. A moment I tottered above it; then, with a strength born of delirium, I tore away the paneling and lifted the gilded lid, and then I knew it was no dream, for dreams can not approach the ultimate horror that was the creature lying within the coffin—that creature with eyes like a midnight demon’s, and a face of loathsome delirium that was like the death-mask of a devil. It was smiling, too, as it lay there, and my soul shrieked in the tortured realization that it was alive! Then I knew it all; the secret and the penalty paid by those who sought it, and I was ready for death, but horrors had not ceased, for even as I gazed it spoke, in a voice like the hissing of a black slug.
And there within the nighted gloom it whispered the secret, staring at me with ageless, deathless eyes, so that I should not go mad before I heard the whole of it. All was revealed—the secret crypts of blackest nightmare where the tomb-spawn dwell, and of a price whereby a man may become one with the ghouls, living after death as a devourer in darkness. Such a thing had it become, and from this shunned, accursed tomb had sent the call to the descending generations, that when they came, there might be a ghastly feast whereby it might continue a dread, eternal life. I (it breathed) would be the next to die, and in my heart I knew that it was so.
I could not avert my eyes from its accursed gaze, nor free my soul from its hypnotic bondage. The thing on the bier cackled with unholy laughter. My blood froze, for I saw two long, lean arms, like the rotted limbs of a corpse, steal slowly toward my fear-constricted throat. The monster sat up, and even in the clutches of my horror, I realized that there was a dim and awful resemblance between the creature in the coffin and a certain ancient portrait back in the Hall. But this was a transfigured reality—Jeremy the man had become Jeremy the ghoul; and I knew that it would do no good to resist. Two claws, cold as flames of icy hell, fastened around my throat, two eyes bored like maggots through my frenzied being, a laughter born of madness alone cachinnated in my ears like the thunder of doom. The bony fingers tore at my eyes and nostrils, held me helpless while yellow fangs champed nearer and nearer to my throat. The world spun, wrapped in a mist of fiery death.
Suddenly the spell broke. I wrenched my eyes away from that slavering, evil face, and instantly, like a cataclysmic flash of light, came realization. This creature’s power was purely mental—by that alone were my ill-fated kinsmen drawn here, and by that alone were they overcome, but once one were free from the strength of the monster’s awful eyes—good God! Was I going to be the victim of a crumbled mummy?
My right arm swung up, striking the horror between the eyes. There was a sickening crunch; then dead flesh yielded before my hand as I seized the now faceless lich in my arms and cast it into fragments upon the bone-covered floor. Streaming with perspiration and mumbling in hysteria and terrible revulsion, I saw the moldy fragments move even in a second death—a severed hand crawled across the flagging, upon musty, shredded fingers; a leg began to roll with the animation of grotesque, unholy life. With a shriek, I cast a lighted match upon that loathsome corpse, and I was still shrieking as I clawed open the portals and rushed out of the tomb and into the world of sanity, leaving behind me a smoldering fire from whose charred heart a terrible voice still faintly moaned its tortured requiem to that which had once been Jeremy Strange.
The tomb is razed now, and with it the forest graves and all the hidden chambers and manuscripts that serve as a reminder of ghoul-ridden memories that can never be forgot. For earth hides a madness and dreams a hideous reality, and monstrous things abide in the shadows of death, lurking and waiting to seize the souls of those who meddle with forbidden things.