"The Salem Horror"

 by Henry Kuttner  

originally published Weird Tales, May 1937

"Carson" (for once our hero has at least a partial name ... albeit this time he's not the narrator) rents an isolated, creepy old house in Salem, Mass. (not Arkham??) in order to have peace and quiet to finish his latest novel (he is an author of "light romances" - which in the 30's meant more like a humorous adventure story with some kissing, kiddies - not a Harlequin special).  

Now the creepy old house comes complete with a creepy old reputation, involving a creepy old woman named Abigail Prinn who was mobbed and hanged back in the 1690's, allegedly for being a creepy old witch.  Well anyone who rents the place never stays long and they always complain about the rats, but Carson ain't buying any of that superstitious silliness so he moves in.  

Turns out the place has rats alright - big ones!  Also at least one, curiously, doesn't seem to like the sign of the cross.  

While puzzling that mystery in the basement, Carson discovers a secret chamber, with a mosaic stone floor and an iron disk press-fit smack dab in the middle of the floor.  Not only does he think this is very cool, he also thinks its a perfect workspace (???  Kuttner must have been a little weird).  So he moves his writing setup in.

He gets a visit from occultist Michael Leigh, who asks a lot of presumptuous questions (which Carson answers anyway) and to see the secret room (which Carson lets him do), then, even more presumptuously, asks Carson if he'll get the hell out of the house or at least work in another part of it. Carson tells him no to both a lot more politely than most people would, and even agrees to contact him if he has any strange dreams that night.

Which, of course, he does.

He can't remember the dream, but it wakes him up. So he takes a wee-hours stroll and ends up passing the burial yard, where he sees a dead guy propped up against the iron rail fence, staring up at the sky with an expression of terror.

Later Leigh tells him someone opened Abigail Prinn's grave and stole her bod. Leigh offers him big bucks to clear out, going on about Abby's black magic worship, and what's under the iron disk in the secret chamber, and The Necronomicon.  Carson thinks he's a froot loop, and ejects him a lot later than most people would have.  While he's watching Leigh depart, a neighbor accosts him, saying she saw "t'e brown thing" enter his house last night.

Carson falls asleep in the secret chamber and has weird dreams, involving black liquid, amoeboid shapes zooming through the Salem streets.  He wakes up, unable to move, to find a brown, mummified creature joining him through another hitherto secret entrance.

The mummy starts incanting, and the iron disk rises, a really foul odor rising from below, followed by a bit of black liquidy gloop.  Just then Leigh rushes in with a counter-incantation, and some magic stuff in a glass vial which he throws into the emerging gloop monster.  It grabs the mummy and goes back in its hole, slamming the iron disk behind it.

Carson never finishes his book, instead writing a novel called Black God of Madness which no one will publish.  Those he tells of the experience think of it as a dream.  But he knows it wasn't.  The mummy left one of its hands behind.

This isn't a bad story, and has some genuinely eerie moments which I had forgotten (actually I'd pretty much forgotten everything about it except the entity Nyogtha being a big liquid black blob that pops up out of somewhere. It is, as others have noted, kind of a rehash of HPL's "Dreams in the Witch House" but in some ways a bit tighter and more stripped down.  Still I prefer the Lovecraft even if "Dreams" isn't his best.  Kuttner was good and solid at pulp horror, but his terrors don't cut to the quick the way HPL's do.  Once banished, his baddies are done, where HPL's lingered, rattling your back teeth for years to come. A fun read though.