“The Opener of the Way.” Weird Tales, October, 1936, pp. 277-287

https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v28n03_1936-10/page/n21/mode/2up

Sir Ronald Barton is an Egyptologist of ill-repute who is looking for his own big score in the relic-stealing business. His son, Peter, accompanies him on his latest expedition, the excavation of a well-hidden vault deep beneath the desert sands of Egypt. Sir Ronald relies on prophecy and papyrus parchments that guide him to the correct place and instruct him, for example, to sacrifice three jackals and feed them to bats. They enter the outer vault and find statues of the “seven principal Egyptian gods—Osiris, Isis, Ra, Bast, Thoth, Set, and Anubis” (283). 

Their heads are recognizable, but they are depicted in a bizarre and terrifying way: “…all seven heads protruded from a common body, and it was not the body of any god heretofore known in myth. It was not anthropomorphic, that figure; it held nothing that aped the human form. And Peter could recall no parallel in all the Egyptian cosmology or pantheon which could be remotely construed to resemble this utterly alien horror” (283). Peter grows increasingly apprehensive as his father becomes more and more intense. Sir Ronald reveals the final step he must take: the secret of opening the final barrier is that his consciousness must merge somehow with the statue of Anubis: “No, nothing can be discovered by looking at the thing; there’s no secret passage behind it; no levers concealed in the body of the god. The Master and his acolytes were cleverer than that. Mechanical means are of no avail — there’s only one way to enter into the tomb beyond, and that is through the body of the god itself!” (283). He self-hypnotizes and loses himself into the statue. Peter tries to shake his father awake, but the older man is dead. In a panic, Peter throws himself at the statue and fails away at it. The statue crushes him in its stony embrace. When the locals arrive to discover the bodies, they call it a suicide and bury the entire excavation so that nobody else will find it. The final revelation is that, just before he is crushed, he sees his father’s eyes in “the living stone face” (287) of the reanimated statue of Anubis.
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I did write that if there was only one story from the 1930s that someone needs to read it would be “The Shambler from the Stars.” Well, “The Opener of the Way” has got to be right up there with that story. It features a structure and characters familiar by now to readers of Lovecraft and his Circle. As Randall Larson puts it: Most of Bloch’s Egyptian stories had to do with the fulfilling of some ancient curse over the desecration of a tomb or a stolen mummy” (Larson Robert 21). Peter is a fascinating character here. he is skeptical of both his father’s methods and, by the end of the story, his sanity, and yet he follows the old man into the maw of death. He has moments of clear thinking, wishing at one point to escape: “For a moment he entertained a frantic impulse to turn and run back through the corridor; he wanted to see the sanity of a sun overhead, and feel a breath of air on his brow that was not dust-polluted by dead centuries. But the old man grasped him by the shoulders as he mumbled on, and Peter was forced to remain” (285). And so, the power of his father’s will meant his decisions were not quite his own, that he was compelled not by some ancient power but by his charismatic father’s obsession. Peter was another tool, the one who was meant to rush it the final chamber once Sir Ronald opened the gate. It appeared, therefore, that the familial love flowed in only one direction. This story provided the title for Bloch’s first collection which was published by Arkham House in 1945.