THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (10 page)

I drank.  I slept and woke in brief and fitful torments.  Aharon, he did care for me.

In between my silences, I offered my grudging thanks.  The meagerness of my gratitude was made stronger by my sincerity.

Night began to fall, jackals yelped near the horizon.  We spoke of many things.

And as the chill of evening crept over the dunes, and my body blistered and shivered from the torments which it had borne, Aharon asked me not my name or what secrets I had buried in the sands beside Zarzara.

But rather, he asked me:  “Friend, when you walked to the oasis alone, and you did slumber there, on waking, what did you see?”

I saw the Watcher.  I beheld a Ghul.

I had no reason to share such an unbelievable secret with this man.  But I had been hollowed by my grief, by the vision of the Watcher and my acceptance of the Unnatural, striding among the wastelands of our world.  So hollowed and shattered, I was uncaring of whatever might happen to me.  I wanted only to grow wise enough to know the ways of Adaya’s murderers; to grow clever and fearless enough to stalk them; to wring the secrets of immortality from either them or from the mysteries of the Ghul; and to grow merciless enough to slay them all.

I had hope alone in my belief that there would be a way to bring my Adaya—as Ghul or returning mortal, I cared not, for love is eternal and the flesh is never equal to the spirit of the beloved—back into my arms.

And in such a reverie, I did tell the
fakir
Aharon precisely what I had seen.

“I saw the Watcher.  I beheld a Ghul.”

Rather than scoff at me, instead of kicking me away from his fire or cursing me as mad, Aharon only smiled sadly and did look into the flame which he had made.  He scattered the precious amber I had given him into the cinders, and the sweet perfumes of embalming and wonderment did course over us in a smoke of fog and spark.

He said to me:  “Of all amongst this caravan you could tell, only I.  You share this with me alone, a gift of truth.  I do believe you.  Ninety-seven moons ago, I myself did bury my first wife at that oasis.  The palm I had laid her beneath is gone, dried away from the receding waters and taken by the sands.  Her grave is lost.  But I know she is there.  And the Watcher?  The one who sits upon the rise and crouches and gazes and does not slay those who behold him?  That selfsame Ghul, I did see him as well.  For after I buried my Zahiya, he came to me.  And I was fool enough to attack him.”

Spellbound, I said nothing.  I waited.

Aharon went on:

“He dashed the
kulhad
-hatchet from my hand, shattering my wrist and writing my shame in scars all down my forearm to the bone.  Do you see?  Here, and here?  Yet the Watcher he did spare me, and he swore that he would provide me with the black gift of nepenthe.  This Watcher has a name, as well.  In his own age of mortality, a stargazer and a harp-priest of Akkad, he was known as Naram-gal.  He offered to me release from grief, the forgetting of mortal cares, for I was dying of a broken heart.  If only, yes, if only I would give to him one gift in return.”

“And what gift?” I asked of him.

And Aharon said, “I did let Naram-gal unbury my wife, and feast upon her flesh.”

Revolted, I stood and kicked the amber coals of the fire across the sand.  I began to draw my
jambiya
, and the guards stationed at their farther fires silenced their private laughter and drunken slurs and quieted themselves to watch me warily.

But Aharon, who had taken me in that day and had shared the waters and gentled my sorrows, ignored my blade and only looked into my eyes.

Feeling a fool, I cast my blade away.  And I asked of him, “You let that ... that
thing
defile the body of your wife?  How could you?”

And Aharon replied, “Young one, do you not know?  If love and honor truly were all to you and sang as one within your heart, you would have killed yourself over your Adaya’s grave.  You did not.  If you could release her, if you could be so strong as to free her unto death and go on to a life alone, you would have buried her in the canyon-land Al Adim, where every other soul of Sana’a is laid to rest.  This too, you did not do.”

“No.  You took her body to the Zarzara, you balmed her with treasured spice, and you tarried there.  You thought you would take your life, and you did not.  And in waking, seeing the Ghul Naram-gal and embracing the mercy of his intrigue, you did walk away.  And so you are here.  You choose to live, as you choose to be furious with me.  Because if the Watcher had promised you resurrection for your love,
you might have done the same
.  Desire of this kind which burns within you, it is not only love, it is selfishness, yes?  The soul of your Adaya longs only to be at peace, but still you want her.  Is that not the bitterest of truths?  Your love for her is great, but your love for yourself is greater still.  You forbid her exaltation.  You cannot let her leave you.”

There was one moment, a fleeting one of fire, when I nearly took up my blade again and slashed Aharon’s throat.  But my hand did tremble.  Why?  Because the sage was cruel to say such things to one bereaved?  Because he was fearless of death, and perhaps even would welcome it?

No.

It is because what Aharon said to me was the truth.  This I could not deny.  I did want her back, whatever the price, whatever unnatural magic might be demanded to cheat death and kiss her living lips once more.  Aharon knew this.  For the first time since Akram had smiled upon me, and the first since Adaya had taken me into her shelter, I had found a kindred soul.

All of this Aharon understood as I knelt in silence.  And I wept.

He did not touch me.  He said nothing until I raised my head, then only, “Boy.  Look to my hands.”

Aharon then did show me the tattoos upon his palms, each burned and scarred with the primal sigil of the Cabal of the Ghul.  The sigil is in the shape of four extinct tiger jawbones, arrayed in the order of the four stars of the horizons, a compass rose made of teeth.

He told me that he was burned thus by the grateful Naram-gal, and that this is the symbol by which the Ghuls mark those among the mortals who are to be spared.  Such people may wander into the desert, into the farthest wastelands and even the graveyards of the haunting Jinn and the cries of Al Azif, and never be slain by the Ghuls who dwell there.  And if such a marked one should choose to do so, he may later even share the feasting upon the dead beside the Ghuls themselves, and so become one of them, and learn of their every secret.

Immortality.

And who lords over the Ghuls, or the ones who are marked so?  When I dared to ask Aharon whom he did serve, he did not answer.  When I asked further if he had eaten of the flesh of the dead, he said, “Not yet.”

But he did gift me with an amulet, made of corpse-lizard bones, in the same shape of the sigil of the Cabal.  This I wear still. 

And then Aharon did tell me, “Listen to me now.  Do not judge me in anything but silence.  Yes?”

I let him put his arm around me.  He said further:

“Truly, it will be possible to bring your beloved Adaya back to life.  One such method is yet known by the most elder among the Ghuls.  This secret I do not know, for I am marked and not yet of them, but I do know that the gift of rebirth would not bring her back in the way that you believe.  Deeper, I know that the price of such a sorcery is far greater than any sane man would ever pay.”

He shrugged.  And he went on, “But who am I, young friend, to question your obsession?  I have a madness of my own, for I believe that the afterlife is not in heaven, but of this earth.  And I believe that I will walk that earthly paradise.  I will feast with the Ghuls upon my own flesh, and so I will become one with them.”

I covered my face.  Was that the secret of the Deathless Ones?  Or only one of a thousand horrors?

“Friend,” Aharon said to me, “I can only point you the way.  This sorcery of resurrection is known to the eldest Ghuls, this much is true.  You alone can choose which path you are to follow.  Will you seek such forbidden wisdom, or will you shun it as the blasphemy it certainly must be?  Such is the way of desert walkers, the marked ones of the Ghuls.  Once tattooed or bearing an amulet, we vow to share the secret of the sigil with one we believe is worthy, and one person only.  I have chosen you.  Tonight, sleep beside me.  If you kill me, I will have dishonored my master Naram-gal in choosing wrongly of your heart, and so I will deserve it.”

“But if this night you stay with me in peace, then I have chosen well, and my debt of shame is paid.  The spirit of my own beloved Zahiya will forgive me for allowing the Watcher to feast upon her, and she at last will slumbereth in peace.  Then will I be worthy to walk into the desert and share the feast with the Ghuls of Naram-gal, and so will begin the blessing of my afterlife upon this world.”

There was nothing I could say.  But I did lay myself beside him, and to show my faith in his confessions, I thrust my dagger into the fading coals and left it there.  Aharon did not seem to care.

When the moon had risen, half-cored and orange with a sandstorm raging upon the ever-far horizon, Aharon turned his back to me.  But his last murmur bade me to sleep beside him.  I laid near to him, waiting.  In time, he breathed with the ease of sleep.

When I woke there in the morning, recovering my
jambiya
from the ashes, the caravan had departed.  I found only Aharon’s tracks leading out from Jumani-Sab’a, toward the far oasis of Zarzara.

He had chosen me as his successor, to carry forth the secret of the Cabal of the Ghul.  He was gone.

GATHERING THE FOURTH

Of the Cult of Cthulhu

SCROLL XVII

Unveiling the Deeper Treacheries

And the Unholy Naming

Of the Masters of Najeed

(?)

~

(The title is known.  This scroll is missing, but Dee has left clues in his scrawlings that he believes that Al-Azrad did come to learn with certainty that the Cult of Cthulhu, as well as Najeed, had caused her death.  The only word on the scroll which now remains is “Nyarlathotep.”)

SCROLL XVIII

Akhutu,

Of the Brotherhood of Filth

The Cultists of Cthulhu oft speak of themselves as one with the
Akhutu
; that is, “the Brotherhood” in the lost tongue of Akkad.  The word “cult” itself may be a corruption of this ancient name, a curse upon the worshippers of dark forbidden powers beneath the earth.

The Akhutu is the many-one of those blasphemers and defilers who toil to bring about the end of free mortal reign upon the earth.  We who do not embrace Cthulhu’s worship; or worse, we who fight against the Cult and seek to slaughter its priests and thralls?  We are but their prey.

We are here to by them be cleansed.  Our deaths must be in agony and terror, for only then in our dying cries do we send forth the primal essence of our minds, and in the panic of torment our dying feeds the psyche of Cthulhu as he slumbereth in R’lyeh.  In this manner do we strengthen the Sleeper’s dreams which open the gates of cataclysm between Vhoorl and R’lyeh, quickening the coming End of All.

Be it known that all of the Akhutu are mad.  They are bestial, and worthy only of destruction.  To their minds, however, the sacred madness is a gift borne of revelation, and those who do not possess this “Mark of the Chosen” are weak, and incapable of comprehending the glory of the End.  In such thinking, the oblivious and the innocent are a waste and serve no other function than to feed the Great Cthulhu with their agonies.

The Akhutu believe that in serving Cthulhu thus, they will rise among the few who are spared in the End of Days and who shall be exalted as the many-pleasured task-masters, anointed by the Brethren of the Stars to rule over the tearing of our world.

The Akhutu believe that only the mad are strong, and only the strong will prevail.

Can such be true?  The greatest men and women I have ever known have proven to be mad.  I, too, succumb to the disease of visions and screams deep in the night.  I am mad not for what I believe, but for what I have seen with my own eyes.  Of the Cult’s convictions, I do not believe their judgment of the innocents to be true.  To me, the Akhutu are nothing more than a Brotherhood of Filth, the mere deluded pawns of an un-god which ravens enthroned beyond any mortal dynasty.

And yet I believe that those who fight against the Cult are sacred warriors; that those who sacrifice themselves to slow the time when the stars are to be right are the greatest and holiest fighters that the Kingdom of Men shall ever know.

Many of my allies, my mentors and even unbelievers have fought the Cult over the years.  I have seen valorous men and women fall prey to the abominations of the murderous Cult, and cowards as well.  The Akhutu, they seek to silence us, for they know that an awakening is nigh.  In the last few centuries before Cthulhu’s rising, there will be a War of Culling and of Reaping, the likes of which no empire or kingdom of our earth has yet beheld.

The time of that war is now.

~

In writing of this Cult, I invite my death.  There are now few cities and fewer sanctuaries to which I can run; and I now devote myself to sharing these forbidden secrets with you, my reader, as my slave warrior and chosen.  You will be my vessel, by reading of me you will invite me to be your will.  Together we will slay and delay the rising.

And in this time, the time of this scroll’s inscription?  I will flee no more.  Of all the sanctuaries I have known, of all the places where I have eluded the Cult and refused to make my stand, there now is nothing.  Too many have died protecting me.  Of battlegrounds, and chosen mantles of sacrifice, Damascus shall be my last.

The writings of the Cthulhu Revelations are nearly complete.

When I am done, having inscribed all of the many hundreds of my scrolls, I will hide them in the libraries of Damascus and those caverns which line the shores of the Sea of Salt.  Though horribly I will die, I will die a man.  The flesh is a century’s slave, but the will is of eternity.  My revelations, in you, will live beyond me.