"The Seven Geases"

 by Clark Ashton Smith 

originally published Weird Tales, October 1934

Lord Rabilar Vooz is a magistrate, cousin to the king hisself, in prehistoric Hyperborea.  One day he sets out with a band of retainers to the forbidding Eiglophian Mountains, a volcaninc range dominated by one Mount Voormithadreth, home of the hairy man-ape race called "voormis", which he intends to hunt.  The mountain is a spooky place, and it is said that many horrible things lurk in the caves under the mountains, including the bat-toad god Tsathoggua; but Rabilar, being a modern man, dismisses all that as mere superstition.

Rabilar, like the arrogant fuckwit he is, gets a bit lost in the mountains.  He also gets a bit of a surprise when he sees smoke rising from behind some tall rocks - as if someone were making a fire.  He follows the smoke and comes upon a nasty-looking old dude in a nasty-looking robe holding some kind of ceremony around a fire.

Mr. Nasty is a wizard named Ezdagor, and he's pretty put-out about Rabilar interrupting his ceremony.  So he puts Rab under a "geas", a spell which compels him to complete a task as ordered.  The task is to go into the bowels of the earth under the mountain, via the caves of the voormis, and offer himself as a sacrifice to Tsathoggua.  Rab tries to laugh this off but finds he can't laugh.  Or speak.  Or do anything other than make his way to his destination, guided by Raphthotis, Ezdagor's faithful archaeopteryx familiar.

Rab goes through the caves, harried by the voormis who manage to do only minor injury to him thanks to his armor, and makes his way down to Tsathoggua, who just ate and isn't interested.  So Tsath-o puts a new geas on him, sending him to Atlach-Nacha, who's too lazy to peel him out of hisd armor, and so geases him to go to visit the sorceror Haon-Dor, who also has no use for him and thus geases him to go see the Serpent People.  They too can't find a use for him, and geas him on to the Cavern of the Archetypes, where he is eaten several times by astral/mist-formed dinosaurs, before the archetypes, the original, evolved form of men (misty energy beings) insult him and geas him to go see Abhoth, who they consider all kinds of gross and therefore the only place for a turd like Rab.

Abhoth, a big slimy pool that breeds gross little monsters incessantly, also can't think of what to do with Rab.  So he puts on him the worst geas he can think of - sending him back to the surface world (well it's awful to Abhoth).

Rab starts his way back but falls through Atlach-Nacha's web and into a possibly bottomless gulf.  Poor Rab!

This is a rather tongue-in-cheek story, kind of a cross between a dark, surreal fairy-tale, and an EC comics story, had EC ever ventured into such territory.  You can almost hear The Old Witch or The Crypt-Keeper cackling away at the end.  Its kind of like a grim bedtime story you might read to your kid - if you had the Weirdest Kid in the World.  I know I would have dug it.  I leave it to you to speculate on what that says about me.

For all its tongue-in-cheek-ness, Smith's acidic prose and endless invention make this charming and a fun read.  And it its the one and only full appearance of Tsathoggua and Atlach-Nacha, both of whom I've always had a soft spot for.  I mean, come on - you can't beat a lazy toad-bat god!