Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred Page 13

  The priests of Nyarlathotep who use this place of power go robed and hooded in black, and keep their faces wrapped in a veil of black silk in imitation of their master, who wears these garments when he walks abroad across the world beneath the moon. They can see outward well enough through the silk, but their faces cannot be identified by any who look upon them, and they seldom speak but communicate with each other by means of elaborate gestures that are to them a language. They enter veiled and depart veiled, so that none knows the identity of the man who stands beside him.

  The chamber beyond is large and square. In its center rests a smaller copy of the Sphinx in black stone, exact in all its details except that its head is not that of Kephren but of Nyarlathotep. It stares down upon the man entering through the door of cedar as though affronted by his presence, and the expression upon its face, if this word may be rightly applied to describe its visage, is sardonic and malignant, though without a trace of human features that would render its expression familiar. The priests indicate with their language of signs that it shows the true liniments of the great Sphinx before they became eroded by the sands of ages and then cut away at the command of Kephren.

  The face cannot be described in any human tongue, for our race possesses no words adequate to the task; let it suffice to write that it is somewhat like the face of the god Set, though depictions of that god are but a faint shadow of the original image upon which they were based. The images of Set fail to capture the malignant horror of the face upon the smaller Sphinx, or the sense that it is aware and watchful, or its expression of supreme contempt. Before its gaze the priests prostrate themselves in worship, first gashing their arms with knives in the belief that the letting of human blood is welcomed by their god. In consequence the floor of the chamber before the statue is stained with blood, and though it is washed daily, it can never be made wholly clean.

  Leading away from this place of worship is a broad corridor in the wall behind the idol, and set in its sides are other passageways that open into chambers filled with mummies that have been stolen from the royal tombs of Egypt. Not only the kings and queens are present in these chambers, but their children and their relations by blood. When tomb raiders ignorant of the value of the mumia of kings discovered the burial places of the royal dead, they took the gold and other precious things the tombs contained and left the corpses as things of no value; but to the priests of Nyarlathotep, who followed their footsteps unseen and unheard, it was the mummies that were precious, and for the gold they cared nothing, for gold is a substance of this world, but the corpse is a thing of the next world.

  There are no greater necromancers upon the earth than the priests of this cult. Any traveler seeking the study of necromancy must come to the Sphinx, or his education is forever incomplete. Admission is difficult to obtain, but with sufficient proofs of skill, and the winning of the trust of those who deal in the marketplace for the cult, it can be achieved, but only by binding the soul in service to Nyarlathotep and his dark works. All who enter the gate of the Sphinx bear the mark of Nyarlathotep upon their bodies, where it remains until death, and indeed endures beyond death, for it can never be expunged. What is revealed in these pages is forbidden, and it remains to be tried whether the power of the Chaos That Creeps can reach across the sands from Giza to Damascus to strike down the writer who has betrayed his oath.

  he necromancers of Giza concern themselves not with the corpses of common men, but only employ those of royal blood or wizards; for the nobles when revived and made to talk may be able to describe the hiding places of rare books and gold buried in the earth, and the wizards to teach their methods, although oftentimes it happens that they are reluctant to reveal their secrets and must be encouraged with fire and blade. In this way, the cult has become both wealthy with ancient treasures and the repository of wisdom lost to the world. They are not to be trifled with, for their power and their agents reach to distant lands, so that a man marked for death in their council is foredoomed.

  When a corpse is chosen for resurrection, it is first cut into parts of convenient size and boiled in clean water in a large copper kettle for a full day and night, and during this time the kettle is constantly stirred with a long wooden ladle to prevent the settling of substances to the bottom. The linen wrappings also are placed in the pot along with the flesh, for they contain a measure of the essential salts which the process is designed to extract. The mumia is softened and made fluid by the heat, so that it gradually becomes liquefied and rises to the top of the water. The acolyte tending the pot draws it off periodically using a small silver spoon and stores it in a stone vessel for future purposes.

  At the end of the initial boiling, after all the mumia has risen and been skimmed from the pot, the linen strips that bind the corpse are taken out of the pot clean and white, like newly washed laundry, and discarded. The fire is allowed to burn to embers so that the heat is reduced, and an elixir is added to the water that has the property of softening and dissolving bone, teeth, nails, and hair. In this way the corpse is liquefied. When this has been accomplished the fire is fed with wood and made hot again, and the water in the pot, which has already been greatly reduced by these processes, is allowed to boil completely away.

  What remains in the bottom of the kettle is a white, crystalline material of an amount that may be carried on the palms of two hands. The priests of Nyarlathotep scrape this from the kettle, using utmost care to remove the last trace, and pound it to uniform fineness in a mortar of rock crystal, using a crystal pestle. The white powder resulting from this operation contains the essential salts of the man or woman whose corpse was boiled, and it is from this powder that the living body may be reconstituted and made to serve as a house for the soul, which is called back into its former flesh by words of power. The salts may be kept for many years in a sealed vessel without losing their potency. There is a chamber in the catacombs beneath the Sphinx that contains nothing but shelves of bottles, each filled with the essential salts of a human being.

  A man resurrected from his salts is in every respect as he was at the end of his life, save that the purification process of the priests removes from his renewed flesh the disease or injury that caused his death. It is a great shock to the soul to tear it back from its repose and reanimate it, and in consequence the resurrected are often insane, and scream ceaselessly or dash themselves into the walls, making it necessary to restrain them for questioning. Interrogation can take weeks, for the dead do not give up their secrets easily, and when the corpse used is old, its language may sound strange to modern ears, and contain many uncouth words that have passed from use and memory. The priests are expert in the lost dialects of their ancestors and skilled in all the arts of torture, so that little impedes their purposes except complete madness or a contamination of the salts.

  When the salts are contaminated with the essence of other living things, as sometimes happens when, unknown to the priests, the mummy has been the breeding place of beetles, mice, or other vermin, the revitalization of the salts produces a monster that is partly man and partly whatever gnawed his corpse. Monsters bred in this manner seldom prove reliable sources of information. When the priests discover that they lack the faculty of speech, or that their speech is crazed and bestial, they commonly destroy them without further interrogation, for though the memory of the man may remain intact, the verminous parts of his reanimated nature inhibit its expression.

  Wizards are treated with greater care, for in their hands, eyes, and tongues is the ability to project death on those who call them from their tombs. As a consequence, when the salts of a known wizard are reanimated, the first act of the priests is to put out his eyes with an iron pick, bind his hands into immoveable gloves of heavy leather, and gag his mouth. When answers are demanded of the wizard, the gag is momentarily removed, but a knife is held to his throat while he speaks, and a single false word results in his return to the grave. It is perilous to interrogate a wizard, and in spite of all these precautions,
unfortunate consequences have resulted from the attempt.

  A story is told among the younger acolytes of the cult, who have not yet learned the virtue of discretion, concerning the reanimation of the wizard Haptanebal, who was great above the Cataracts before the union of the two Egypts. Long ago his corpse was carried to Giza and laid to rest beneath the Sphinx, but over the years its identity was forgotten, until it became confused with the body of a scribe of the royal court and underwent reanimation without the usual safeguards employed for wizards. The story tells that five of the priests were consumed by spontaneous fire in their bodies before the sixth, who quite by chance was fortunate enough to be standing behind the wizard and beyond the range of his sight, succeeded in killing him with a sword.

  The danger in reanimating a potent wizard is always great, but equally great are the prizes that may be wrung from him by skilled interrogators prepared in advance for the risks and resolute of heart. Wizards often take their most precious secrets of magic into the tomb, for they are unable to trust such powers with other men, even those they accept as their disciples or their own sons. By portioning out their wisdom with care, wizards have remained alive beneath the Sphinx for several years, and even been accorded a limited measure of freedom when they have won the partial trust of the priests, who remain ever watchful against deception. However, they are never allowed to leave the catacombs, for their skills are too potent to release on our age, which has forgotten the greatest effects of magic.

  Those who have served their purpose are killed in an efficient manner, by strangulation with a cord around the neck, and their bodies are burned. Then the ashes are gathered and deposited into the Nile, where they are carried by the current to the sea. It is possible to reanimate the same corpse twice, by subjecting its resurrected flesh to the putrefaction and reduction process that was used to separate its essential salts, but this is seldom done since there is seldom any need. Those who are reanimated by the priests of Nyarlathotep are never permitted to die, save by mischance, until they have offered up all their knowledge, and the priests are satisfied that they have nothing more of value to give.

  hebes is a city of monuments, both to men and to gods. The eastern bank of the river is thick with temples, obelisks, and great statues. The temples, though much decayed with time and neglect, are connected by magnificent avenues lined with carved figures, and are reflected in artificial lakes and ponds, all of which give the city a grandeur not to be found in other cities of our race. On the western bank of the Nile are buried the royal dead in lavish tombs. Many of the tombs of the necropolis have been looted by the cult of animators, yet others still remain hidden beneath the sands, awaiting discovery.

  To those possessed of the second sight, the moonlit streets of Thebes are not empty but filled with solemn throngs. Ghosts walk along the avenues that join the temples in silent, stately processions; lines of priests bear smoking trays of incense before the closed wagons that contained the statues of the principal gods and goddesses of the land, for it was the practice of the priests to parade their gods before the people, though they were always kept carefully concealed behind the curtains of the carts that bore them to and from their temples.

  The great god of Thebes was Amur), who is sometimes represented as a man, or as a man with the head of a ram, and less often as a ram itself. To him was erected the largest of all temples in our world, the temple of pillars that humbles the pride of those who pass across its sand-strewn paving stones, for each pillar is ten times the height of a man, and they are so closely spaced that they seem to press down on those who walk between them. Not even the monuments of the Old Ones can belittle its grandeur.

  Within the secret depths of this temple in ancient times, the primary statue of Amun was preserved. It had the property of life, for it was a magic of the priests of this land to animate the statue of Amun in the temple and to induce a kind of shade or spiritual essence to dwell there that expressed the personality and purpose of the god himself. The ignorant have written that Amun dwelt within the statue, but this is false; the statue was host to his emissary, who spoke and acted with the knowledge and power of the god, but the god dwelt elsewhere. He dreams still in Kadath in the cold waste, with the other gods of this world.

  A traveler from our lands who was a necromancer learned from the ghouls of Thebes the legend that a large cache of precious objects lay buried beneath the floor of the temple of pillars. The wealth of the temple had been hurriedly interred by the priests so that it would not be looted during one of the numerous invasions of Egypt —who the invaders were is not preserved in the legend. By some mischance the precious things were never unearthed. Perhaps the invaders killed all the priests who had precise knowledge of their hiding place. How the ghouls learned of the location, they did not disclose.

  The traveler hired two workmen who were accustomed to laboring beneath the moon and could be trusted not to speak of their affairs, and undertook to unearth the treasure. After several hours of digging they came upon a statue of Amun. It was in size the height of a man, and formed of bronze overlaid with gold leaf. The value of the object was slight, for it held no precious jewels or large masses of gold or silver, and in appearance it was quite ordinary, save for one detail—its enormous phallus was obscenely erect. This aroused ribald jests from the workmen, but the traveler quickly set them back to digging, and went aside to examine the statue more closely.

  He drew a breath of surprise between his teeth, for his skill in necromancy revealed that the statue was alive. The hundreds upon hundreds of years it had rested beneath the dry sands of the temple had not extinguished its identity. The spirit present within the bronze body became aware of the traveler after several minutes, as though waking from a long slumber. The traveler felt a question in his mind, like the tickle of an insect walking upon his skin.

  Where are the priests of the temple?

  He sent his thoughts to the statue through its eyes. Dead, all dead and fallen to dust.

  He felt the awareness of the spirit in the bronze expand as it looked outward; for this it did not need physical eyes, but was able to perceive all directions at once. Its words came to him in a whisper of despair.

  Desolation, desolation, the end of days; the glory of God is put out like a reed torch in the river water, and the roof of the house is fallen.

  With a piteous cry, the spirit flew up through the crown of the head of the statue and fled, wailing, into the night sky. One of the workmen raised his head to ask the traveler what had caused the strange sound. Lost in his own thoughts, the traveler made no answer, and the man shrugged and continued digging.

  Though they labored until an hour before the first light of dawn, they found no other treasure. Perhaps it was too deeply buried to be unearthed in a single night. The work could not be continued a second night without the certainty of discovery by the inhabitants of the city, so with regret the traveler ordered that the empty and lifeless statue of Amun be cast back into the pit, and that the hole be filled. In the morning, there was no trace of the night’s work.

  The valley on the west bank of the Nile that holds the tombs of the noble houses of Thebes is a desolate land of sand and rock, surrounded by tall cliffs and steep hillsides. Holes in the ground reveal where robbers have looted the burial places in the distant past, for though the architects of the tombs took great pains to conceal their locations, always there were workmen who knew the places where gold lay hidden, and whose greed was more powerful than their fear of the gods. The tombs that remain undisturbed are well concealed and deeply buried, and may never be found by natural means.

  The traveler is wise to only explore the valley of the dead under the light of the sun, never during the night. The valley is inhabited by vampire wraiths who cannot leave its boundaries, but within its towering hills are forever in search of fresh blood, for they feed on the vital essence that is held in flowing blood. The blood itself they do not drink, having no lips of flesh with which to suck, but they are
nourished on the humors that exhale from blood in the moments after it spurts forth from the skin. They possess no physical part, yet in some way are able to cut the skin so that blood flows, and in this manner they feed. The cuts of these wraiths are less than the width of a finger, and are easily mistaken for the bite of some unseen nocturnal insect. They are shallow, and so sharp are the claws of the wraiths that make them that they are without pain, and only become noticeable by the wetness of the blood that runs forth.

  The danger from these wraiths would seem to be slight, for a wraith can produce no more than a single cut upon the skin in the space of several minutes, and the blood that wells up is no more than a few drops. However, the scent of fresh blood attracts them from their tombs even as biting insects are attracted by the exhalation of the breath, and they press in an invisible horde around the unwary traveler who ventures into the valley by night, each wraith making a new cut upon some part of his skin, nor does clothing prevent this injury.

  In a short while the hapless traveler will find himself wet from crown to heel with blood. Because the cuts cause no pain, the wetness is his first awareness of his peril. If he is fortunate and robust of body, he will realize the danger before the loss of blood renders him weak of limb. The wraiths press in an undivided mass around their bleeding prey, feeding upon his vital essence. Singly or in scant numbers, they cannot be detected save with the second sight, but when they feed in unison by the hundreds, their forms exert a pressure upon the skin that is felt as a soft embrace that squeezes the flesh from all sides and makes movement difficult.

  There is only one defense against the vampire wraiths, and that is precipitous flight. They move swiftly, but not with the speed of a running man, and the traveler who maintains both his senses and his balance can outdistance them, provided he can find the strength to fight through their united ring as they feed. There is danger in running across the floor of the valley, for it is strewn with loose rocks that turn beneath the foot. Should the traveler stumble and fall, the wraiths will be upon him in a moment, and it is doubtful that he will find the reserves of strength to regain his feet and break from their grasp a second time.