Tales of Alhazred Read online

  “Good. This place bores me.”

  The monks placed no guards on the passageways at night. The monastery was well-nigh impregnable and had never come under attack, so they saw no reason for such precautions. It was good to have such trusting souls in the world, I thought. It made things easier for the rest of us.

  We entered the long room that was the Abbot’s audience chamber and private chapel of worship, and went directly to the wooden screen that divided the room. Its door was locked, but Martala opened it without great difficulty. She has a natural talent for locks.

  “A simple antique design,” she murmured as she swung the door wide.

  The light was so poor, I could see only masses of shadow against shadow, even though by this time my eyes were fully adapted to darkness.

  “We need light to work. Strike your tinder, Altrus, and look for a lamp or a candle.”

  The flint of his tinderbox sparked against its steel rod, and Martala gasped and stepped backward, banging into me. I held her arms to steady her.

  The statue I had glimpsed through the screen towered above us, at least eight feet tall. It was an ambitious work. A naked man I took to represent Jesus stood with the long body of a scaled serpent coiled around his legs, hips, chest and arms. The head of the snake peered into his face, and his lips appeared about to touch the lips of the snake. In the forehead of the snake sparkled a ruby the size of an acorn, surrounded by a thick band of gold.

  All this was revealed in the instantaneous flash of the flint against the steel. The tinder in the box ignited and a glow spread, revealing the lines of the statue, which, I saw, was not stone, but bronze. In the flickering flame it almost seemed to breathe and move its limbs.

  I gave Martala my dagger and put my head through her legs to lift her onto my shoulders. “Take the setting around the jewel as well.”

  “Naturally. I’m not a fool.”

  She began to worry the soft gold setting from its harder bronze socket.

  “Try not to damage it.”

  “I’m doing the best I can,” she snapped. “Hold the light nearer.”

  The ruby flipped from the head of the snake, and the girl caught it from the air in her left hand and passed it down to me.

  I lowered her to the floor and examined the jewel near the flame in the tinder box. “A fine stone.”

  “The eye of Yog-Sothoth,” she said.

  “Not the eye. Only the pupil of the eye. We must visit the Abbot for the rest of the talisman.”

  Altrus cursed and the flame went out.

  “It got hot,” he said.

  “No matter. Follow after me.”

  Earlier, I had asked one of the monks in a casual way where the Abbot slept, so I knew in a general sense where to look. We returned to the audience chamber and I passed through a door into a side corridor. As we crept along it, I heard gentle snores. These led us directly to the old man’s bedchamber.

  6.

  We entered silently. Altrus struck his tinder alight. By its flame I saw that the bed held two men, the elderly Abbot and a younger monk of about the same age as Manasseh. I was not shocked, but I was surprised. I would have sworn that Joram was too old to copulate with anything, whether woman, man, or goat. The evidence of my eyes said I was wrong.

  The young monk opened his eyes first.

  “Kill him,” I told Martala.

  She darted to the side of the bed and slit his throat with her dagger before he gathered enough of his wits to yell for help.

  The gurgling of blood from the wound in his throat and his thrashing arms woke Joram. He blinked beneath his white, feathery eyebrows and stared about in confusion, then fixed his gaze on my face. “Demon,” he croaked.

  I had not troubled to put on my glamour for the night.Kneeling on the old man’s side of the bed, I held my dagger to his throat. “Remain silent, or I will kill you.”

  He must have believed me, because he stopped croaking. By this time, his young sleeping companion had expired.

  He looked down at the spreading blood soaking into the sheets and bolster cover. “Why are you doing this?” he whispered. “Are you fiends?”

  “Not fiends, only thieves,” Altrus said.

  He transferred the fire in his tinderbox to the old man’s oil lamp, and the room brightened. It was windowless, like so many rooms of the monastery.

  “We are here to take the talisman of Yog-Sothoth,” I told him.

  He made no spoken response but his blue eyes betrayed him. They flicked toward a wall rack, where hung his monk’s robe. Beside it from another peg dangled the golden medallion. I took it down and mated it with the ruby. The gold setting of the jewel fitted perfectly into the hole in the medallion. I saw that there was some mechanism concealed in the setting, and a slot in its back, presumably for the third piece of the talisman.

  “Where is the key?”

  The Abbot stared in horror at the red jewel. “What have you done? Heretic! Blasphemer! Demon.”

  “Where is the key?” I repeated.

  “Christ will punish you for this night of blood. Murderers!”

  Altrus grunted cynically. “I suppose you’ll tell us the blood of sacrifice on the altar of the shrine at the top of the mountain came from the throats of animals.”

  Joram did not respond with words, but his eyes betrayed him.

  “I thought not,” Altrus said. “What do you do? Buy children from the village of Erda?”

  “Christ will punish you,” the old man repeated. “You are all going to hell.” His voice was stronger and clearer. He seemed to be finding his courage.

  “Tell me, Joram; I’m curious. Is Manasseh your son or your grandson?” I asked.

  “That is none of your affair,” he snapped.

  “We’re wasting time,” Altrus muttered.

  I sighed wearily. I hated torture. In my youth I had grown up in a king’s household as his royal poet, and my soft early years had given me tender sensibilities in many respects. I was kind to animals, other than camels. For the most part I refrained from beating children or striking women. Nonetheless, my months as a ghoul of the Black Spring Clan had taught me the necessity for cruelty.

  The old man withstood the torture well. I was inhibited by the need to keep him alive and able to speak. Toward the end he began to drift in and out of awareness, and I feared he was bleeding to death. He would not tell us where he had hidden the key.

  “Where would you hide a key?” I mused to Martala, who was busy cleaning the blood from her dagger on the corner of the bed sheet.

  “In the midst of other keys.”

  I stopped and thought. The Abbot had keys for every locked door and strongbox in the monastery. “Where does he keep his key ring?”

  We searched his rooms, and found the ring in a drawer of his writing desk. It held at least half a hundred keys of various lengths and sizes, some brass, some iron, a few of silver, and one of gold. The gold key was strangely shaped. Its end was broad and flat, with the teeth projecting forward instead of to the side, as is the usual way with keys. I worked it off the ring and fitted the setting of the ruby into the center of the medallion, then inserted the key into its back. It slid in with a satisfying click.

  “In the name of Christ, whatever you do, don’t turn the key!”

  The Abbot had managed to crawl out of bed and now stood in the doorway to the study, blood streaming down from his mutilated hands and from the cuts in his chest and thighs, so that his nightgown was saturated with red.

  Something in his tone of voice made me hesitate. I removed the key, and the two other pieces of the talisman fell apart from one another in my hand. “Why not?”

  The old man’s blue eyes were wide and staring, but whatever he looked at, we three could not see it.

  “What do you think happened to the people who built this monastery?” he mumbled. “Why did they all leave the mountain, with their storehouses filled with grain and their cisterns filled with water?”

  “Ah, ye
s; I take your point,” I said, sliding the ruby into one pocket of my thawb and the medallion into another pocket. I tossed the key to Altrus, who caught it. “Keep this safe.”

  “The three parts must never be joined,” Joram moaned. His legs would no longer support him, and he slid slowly down the doorframe, leaving smears of blood behind.

  “Should I kill him?” Altrus asked.

  “There is no need. We have what we came for.”

  “I hid bags with food and water near the gate of the monastery,” Martala said.

  “Did you hide rope with them?” Altrus asked.

  “Of course I hid rope.”

  “Then let’s bind the old man and gag him. By the time morning comes, I want to be many miles away from this place.”

  7.

  The torrent slowed our progress. It was almost impassable. We tied the rope around Altrus’s waist and anchored it while he crawled from submerged boulder to ledge, the white foam breaking over his back and shoulders. Several times I was sure he was about to be swept over the cliff, and that the girl and I would be forced to haul in his broken corpse, but somehow he held on against the weight of the water.

  When at last he was safely on the other side, he tied his end of the rope to a boulder and I did the same on our side with our end, pulling the rope as tight as I could pull it in the process.

  “You go first,” I told Martala.

  The girl bent her head nearer to mine—the roar of the surging water made it almost impossible to hear each other. I repeated myself, and she nodded.

  I extended myself out from the bank, keeping one foot on dry rock, and supported her as she inched herself into the thundering stream. On the other side, Altrus imitated my posture and extended his hand for the girl to grab it. She almost lost her footing and had to catch herself on the rope, but at last she strained forward and caught the mercenary’s strong hand. He drew her out of the water, wet and shivering.

  The icy chill of the mountain torrent was worse than I had imagined it would be. Within seconds I was cold to the bone and shivering uncontrollably. I inched out on the rope, feeling in the foaming water for secure places to stand that I could not see. It closed around my waist and tried to lift me and fling me over the cliff. I fought it with all my strength for what seemed hours, and when I was sure my strength was about to fail, I felt hands pull me to dry rock.

  “I hope we never need to do that again,” Altrus said.

  I tried to answer, but my teeth chattered together so loudly, I could not speak.

  “We have to move quickly,” Martala said, looking at the path behind us. “The sun has been up for over an hour. The monks must have found their abbot by this time.”

  We hurried as best we could single file along the narrow mountain path. It was impossible to go without caution or we would have fallen to our deaths. We were still in the open high places when a stone the size of a large melon fell from the sky, narrowly missing Altrus.

  I looked up and saw a levitating monk some thirty feet above our heads. He balanced a second large stone in his left hand, preparing to drop it on us.

  “Begone, you flying freak,” Martala shouted.

  She snatched up a piece of rock and threw it at him. The rock struck him in the leg near his knee. We heard him grunt with pain, and he dropped the large stone. It missed the path by several feet. Altrus and I looked at each other, then bent and gathered handfuls of rocks for throwing. The monk was forced to elevate himself above the range of our missiles. He drifted away from us back along the path.

  “He is going to pick up more big rocks,” Altrus said.

  “Look, here comes one of his brothers,” I said, pointing.

  It was two monks, not one, who drifted through the air toward us, one behind the other. Each balanced stones on both palms that were large enough to split our skulls and dash out our brains. We stopped and threw rocks until they were compelled to rise higher. They released their cargo, but because they were so high, we had time to judge the paths of the stones and step out from under them before they struck.

  It was a deadly game, and we played it all the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. The need to watch for the floating monks slowed our progress along the path. We still found ourselves in the open, with nothing to hide beneath.

  “Thanks be to the Old Ones there are not more of them,” I said when we had a few moments to draw our breath. “They would surely overwhelm us.”

  “They may do so yet,” Altrus said. “My arms are becoming weary.”

  I realized then how tired my arms had become. It was all I could do to throw the chips of rock upward, and they flew no more than twenty or thirty feet. It was becoming harder to dodge the falling stones dropped by the seemingly tireless monks.

  “Sooner or later, one of them is going to hit one of us,” Martala said.

  I made no response because I knew the girl was right. It was only a matter of time until one of us made a mistake and stepped the wrong way, into the path of one of those cursed falling stones. It would be hours before we reached a sheltering ledge, and we could not continue this deadly dance for hours.

  “Why hasn’t one of them used his magic to pull us over the edge to our deaths?” Altrus asked. “They can move the torrent, why not us?”

  “Who knows?” I said wearily. “Maybe they can move water, but not flesh. Or maybe they don’t want to risk the loss of their talisman. It’s powerless without its three parts, and they have no way to know who carries them.”

  “I wish I had a good hunting bow,” the girl said. “I’d end this quick enough.”

  “Count your blessings the monks don’t have bows,” Altrus said.

  Not long after this conversation, there came a time when I discovered that I could no longer lift my arms above my head. My muscles refused to obey me. I saw that Martala was in a similar state, and Altrus not much better.

  He felt my gaze upon him. “I think we’re finished,” he said, too low for the girl to hear.

  “Not yet,” I said, my resolve firming itself. “There is one other thing we can do.”

  He realized what I was talking about. “The abbot said that would be a very bad thing to do.”

  “The abbot is not here on this path, having rocks dropped upon his head.”

  Another fell as I dodged aside. It missed me by mere inches and clattered its way down the mountainside. I glared up in fury at the impassive monks who circled high overhead. Soon they would realize we had ceased to throw our little stones, and they would come nearer. That would be the end for us.

  “Give me the key,” I told Altrus.

  He did not argue, but passed me the golden key.

  Martala watched me nervously. “If this thing ate an entire monastery full of people, how do we avoid being eaten by it?”

  “I have an idea about that.”

  “An idea? A good idea?”

  “We’ll soon know.”

  I dropped the jewel into the medallion and fitted the golden key into the slot at the back of its setting. Holding it at arm’s length and pointed away from myself, I turned the key. There was a click as the jewel locked into place on the golden disk. The key also locked into place. Using the key as a kind of handle, I pointed the talisman at the floating monks.

  “Is something supposed to happen?” Altrus asked.

  As if in response, a spiral vortex formed upon the air above our heads. It was composed of bands that resembled pale mist. With little cries of dismay the monks were drawn into its turning center and vanished one by one. A fifth monk who was further away from the others made haste to levitate himself out of danger, but I turned the eye upon him, and he also vanished into the turning vortex. The strange thing was, the device made no sound. After several seconds, the vortex vanished of its own accord.

  I looked at Altrus and the girl.

  “That was interesting,” he said.

  Out of nowhere, a kind of face formed in the sky. It was composed of turning spheres of diff
erent colors that were linked by rays of light, and in the center there was a vortex that had the appearance of an eye, or a mouth. It filled the entire heavens. Words thundered from the mountainside. The voice that spoke them was deeper than any I had ever heard. Altrus and Martala clapped their hands over their ears and fell to their knees. I would have done the same, but did not dare to drop the talisman. The words were in a guttural language I did not understand, but their tone was angry.

  Frantically I tried to separate the pieces of the talisman, but the key would not turn. All the hairs on my head and arms lifted and prickled, as they do when lightning is about to strike nearby. There was a terrible sense of oppression in the very air itself, which suddenly became humid and warm.

  The talisman was torn from my hands by an irresistible force and flew upward toward the turning eye or mouth of the face. A peal of thunder knocked me off my feet.

  8.

  I awoke with Martala leaning over me, concern on her face. She had my head on her lap and laved my forehead and cheeks with a damp cloth.

  “What happened?”

  “You were struck by lightning or something very like it.”

  “The talisman?”

  “Gone,” Altrus said. “It rose upward and never came down.”

  He sat on a jut of rock, watching me with his arms folded across his chest. I tried to sit up, and on the third attempt managed it with the girl’s help.

  “Did more monks come back?”

  He shook his head. “Either we killed all those who could fly, or their disappearance frightened the rest so much, they decided to leave us alone.”

  “Even so, we should not linger on this mountain.”

  “Agreed.”

  Martala prevented me from rising with her hand. “First, explain to me how you knew the talisman would not consume us.”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t know; I guessed. It was shaped like an eye. An eye sees only what is in front of it, not what is behind. When it was set in the hole in the green stone in the pagan shrine, it faced outward across the open mountaintop. I reasoned that whatever it did, it would only affect those in front of it.”