Beyond the Elder Peaks

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The snake people contact White Doe, offering an alliance against their “mutual enemy,” but she refuses. When our heroes return to Jamestown, Baron de la Warr has them locked away. Jack tries to take the Baron hostage, but Samuell Drake terrifies Jack into submission at the sight of his book, leaving a lasting phobia in Jack’s mind.

The Baron’s plans to start a war with the Powhatan have used John Smith’s tale about the Powhatan slaughtering the colonists at Roanoke as a key point of propaganda to justify that aggression. He locks John, Content Not Found: manteo, Solomon and Jack in the prison, while he hands White Doe herself over to the necromancer, Samuell Drake, aboard one of the ships anchored in the James River estuary. Drake reveals himself as the apprentice of Roger Simeon, the necromancer whose vengeance Solomon witnessed in Robert E. Howard’s short story, “The Right Hand of Doom.” He further reveals that his master, in the employ of Sir Francis Walsingham, planned the theft of the John Dee translation of the Necronomicon that H.P. Lovecraft noted, and that he now possesses the tome. That knowledge has driven Drake insane, and he has now dedicated himself to the Great Old One, Yig. White Doe encourages the termites to help her escape. She then sets off the ship’s gunpowder stores and swims to shore.

Later that day, the soldiers come to the prison for Jack, and lead him off to a hilltop, where a sacrificial altar stands. They chain him to it and leave him there. At midnight, the snake men arrive to make him a sacrifice to Yig, but Jack convinces them that he can give them White Doe instead, and even that he needs Solomon’s help. Meanwhile, White Doe convinces her people that they must fight the snake people. Her war band ambushes the snake man camp, freeing Solomon and Jack. Next, Drake leaves John White and Manteo as sacrifices, but Solomon, Jack and White Doe free them first and lay an ambush. The ambush succeeds, and they retrieve their possessions, but Drake magically burrows into the ground. They chase the necromancer into an ancient underground temple carved by the snake people, where he chants a spell from the Necronomicon, freeing a worm-like spawn of Yig imprisoned there. Even a cave-in does not stop the Worm-Thing, so Solomon commands the others to flee, and stands against it alone, sacrificing himself to destroy it forever.