THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (19 page)

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The Second

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The first Ghuls were not creatures of choice.  They were murderers who had bereaved and afflicted the Palace of Pharaoh with unspeakable crimes, and for this they were to be cursed forever.  The magi of Pharaoh had these men and women of abomination entombed alive once a black ritual had been cast upon them.  Unable to die, they clawed at the interiors of their stone sarcophagi, their bleeding and shattered fingers forever regenerating with the black fertility of unlife, until in later centuries they did claw through and emerge.

As their minds in their entombment had become one with nightmare, so were they returned to life not in Khom, but rather in the Empire of the Blackened Mind.  They awoke within the netherworld, and there they bred and created their own kingdom.  These unnatural abominations were opposed by Nodens of the Abyss, who sent his servitors, the Night-gaunts, to annihilate them.  Yet the powers of the Deathless Ones were great, and so did they enthrall seven of the Night-gaunts to carry them unto Kadath and thence into the Abyss, to stand in defiance before hoary Nodens himself.

Thus were the Deathless Ones honored with their rightful kingdom in the netherworld under the Sign of Koth, the god of dreams, who had fled their domain in anguish; and the Night-gaunts were ever their allies.  There did they raise a glorious kingdom, and so too do they come to explore the lesser realms of the Real.

~

The Third

~

Before history and writing, mortals were confined in two castes which by their holy Matriarchs were forbidden to intermingle.  One caste was of those who dared to become civilized, building cities and beginning the reaping, harvesting, and learning of the tablet.  These grew great in mind, yet weak in flesh.

The other caste consisted of the pure, the ever-wanderers, who believed that written knowledge and harvest were folly if the price for such was weakness.

After the last ice and the great melting, the waters fell into the sea, the winds rose, deluge claimed all, and in the next retreat of the waters, many lands which were once fertile became deserts.  In such places, strength was great and need was ever greater, and with little to eat there came a time when the wanderers were compelled to eat of their own dead.

The numbers of the pure became few, and the city-caste killed the wanderers wherever they did find them, until at last the wanderers could not leave the deserts, and were forced to find their own shelters beneath the sands.  In so finding the ruins left by even older ages of men within the netherworld, they unburied the texts, ruins and legacies of the old ones.  So did they learn the black arts of survival, and how the eating of corpses could infuse the life essence into the flesh of the devourer, greatening the lifespan with each consumption.

And so, in the deserts of Egypt, Sumer and Arabia, were born the Ghouls.

~

Such are the Tales of Uncreation.  Pass no judgment upon them.

SCROLL XXIX

Mortis, Rapax ~

The Abominations of the Feast

The revelations of this scroll, while incomplete, form the fundament for my understanding of that which the necromancers among the Romans named the Abominations of the Feast.  Ergo, these are the laws governing the eating of flesh among the Ghuls.

There are many and diverse laws which are held by the level of the
pack
, others by the
clan
, and still others—varying between the lands of Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Persia—which are the laws of the
kind
.  Such distinctions are a matter for my bafflement; here, I only set forth that which I do know of the laws themselves, without distinction of supersedence.

~

I.
  It is unlawful for a Ghul to pull a victim away from the pack and feast alone.  The pack hunts as one, and devours as one as well.  The strong eat before the weak, the elder before the younger.  Conflicts which arise during the feast are held in abeyance until the feast is done.

II.
  If there is danger, the victims are dragged back to the
habrud
, or lair, and there devoured.

III.
  Veneration is given first to the absent lords and the ancients, the Ones Enlightened, the firstborn among the Ghuls.  This honor depends of course upon which creation legend the clan doth believe in, as I have spoken of in a further scroll. 
(Refer to
The Conflicting Tales of Uncreation,
prior. ~K.)

IV.
  The crone Klocha once told me that the only universally revered King of the Ghuls is Nephren-Ka, and the Queen of the Ghuls is Nitocris, as they dwell far below the necropoli of Hadoth ever after; yet she sayeth this if in jest, and she did say nothing more.  How these are honored in the feast I do not know.

~

V.
  The strictest of the laws involves the devouring of other Ghuls.  Ghuls of an enemy clan will be eaten after the wounded of one’s own brethren; for:

VI.
  After battle, the Ghuls also venerate their
own
wounded by devouring them.  In such a manner the strong become yet stronger, and the clan—while thinned—is strengthened.

VII.
  The brains of fallen Ghuls are never eaten, for this causeth the horrible disease amongst them which is called the Cackling Plague.

In eating the brains of their own kind, the Ghuls become infested with ancestral memory, and a longing for a return to the Kingdom of Men.  These Ghuls will wander directly into mortal cities and entreat the men and the women who stand in horror of them to lay with them, and to take them into their houses.  Such Ghuls are a threat to the ultimate secrecy of the Cabal of the Ghul.

Ghuls afflicted with the suffering of the Cackling Plague are set afire by their clan, purging their diseased memory from the packs.

Ghuls are
not
forbidden from speaking with mortals, with the understanding that those who behold them but who do not submit to the silence of the Cabal must be brought back to the
habrud
to be eaten.

Many Ghuls come to long for humanity, and may even converse in necropoli with tomb robbers, grave diggers, dreamers, suicides, and those such as myself:  seekers of ancestral wisdom.

~

The laws concerning solely the hunting of
mortals
are rather different in their cast.

As is well known, the Ghuls hunt in the night, and lay low in the blistering day.  However, sandstorms which blot out the sun and which cause caravans to become lost may be regarded as prime hunting times as well.  Ghuls will travel in daylight if there is dire need, either for hunting or for flight; but in doing so, they greatly wound themselves.

IX.
  The first law of the mortal hunt is simple, and that is to leave no survivors.

And there are more; these are the greatest laws.

~

Ghuls hunt mortals much in the manner that hyenas do:  The prey is encircled, the weak and lagging are taken first, and the others are driven into an ambush to be slaughtered.  In battle, they often vie for dominance and may fight amongst themselves, but wounds in such confrontations are rare.  The success in past hunts determines a Ghul’s standing within the pack, and so the clan.  In the more savage packs, the weak will die of hunger.

~

Newborn Ghuls are made from devouring mortals alive, as I have told of in my tales.  Most such are the chosen of the Cabal, those humans who voluntarily submit themselves to sacrifice for the gift of earthly immortality.  Some few, however, are made Ghuls against their will.  In one clan I have known, of the Sinai, it was law that one in nine mortals were made thus.  I believe this to have been law because the pack was dying, beset by two other rival clans, and its numbers few.

~

Despite their longing to ever remain souls of the desert sands and shadows both of netherworld and dream, the Ghuls at times will brave the Kingdom of Men and select the choicest prey for the glory of the hunt.  I have known Ghuls to track down those who revealed their secrets in not only oases and caravans, but in cities and even in the bright of the day.  In legend, it is said that Ghuls will scour an entire kingdom with sandstorms so that one treacherous fool can be torn away from the kingdom and so into the desert for the feast.  In writing of these secrets and sundering my blood oath to Naram-gal, it may yet be that such a fate will be my own.

But it is not only the sharers of
secrets
who are hunted.  In the name of vengeance, or to repay a dark pact made with a necromancer, a cunning Ghul may choose to wear the robes of slain prey and walk amongst the streets as a beggar or harridan until the prey has been tracked and
stolen
.

Not only are the guilty hunted thus, but the innocents as well.

~

There is a fell practice which many fear but few know the truth of, and that is the consummation of mortal infants and children.

There are times when the elder of a clan will prophesize that a unique bloodline must be joined with the pack’s own to ensure the Ghuls’ survival.  It is true there are eccentric bloodlines with
many
Ghuls among them, the lines of sorcerers of old.

Worthy children are stolen, and their entrails torn out so that they quickly grow to become mature Ghuls themselves.  There is even a legend that the Ghuls may create new clans by returning such children to their households after the metamorphosis, so that the parents fear the child and learn the truth of its fate when they themselves are brought into the clan in later years.  Such legends are called
changelings
, and the parents are either brought into the secrecy of the Cabal or destroyed.  Of such creatures, I know not of their veracity.

~

Despite all these abominations, the most common hunt is simply one for the feast.  Unworthy mortals are food and nothing more.  They are torn apart, not to be transformed, but only to die; and the longevity of the hunting-pack is greatened by the vergence of the lifeblood.

When such a feast takes place, as I have told, the greatest and eldest Ghuls devour the greatest share.  Scraps are vied for by the others, and the treatment of the weak will vary from clan to clan.  Some of the weakest Ghuls eat only the defecated gore of their own kindred, while others are cared for and fed scraps within the confines of the
habrud
.

~

Of human flesh, the choicest elements remain:

The genitals.
  I know only that there are rites of Ghul fertility, but the deeper secrets of this are a riddle to me still;

The eyes.
  They are said to give the devourer second sight, merging the journeys of the Dreamlands with the Real;

The heart.
  Such is the touchstone of eternity;

And,

The brain.
  Ghuls long to experience the emotions, the terrors and the desires of the slain.  In this manner, they do for fleeting moments touch again upon the hem of memory-veiled mortality.  Of course, they feed only upon the brains of mortals, not the brains of other Ghuls, lest the disease should come.

~

These are the Abominations of the Feast.

SCROLL XXX

Canticles of the Deathless Ones ~

The First, of Naram-gal,

The Metamorphosis of the Feast

There are three great canticles, or song-spells, which I did learn from Hetshepsu, Anata and Naram-gal.  These are three of the many incantations of the Ghuls.

Should you be honored to hear such a ritual, know you are in the presence of the greatest of their Kingdom.  The strongest and eldest Ghuls are those who retain mortal intellect, while shunning the illusion of the soul.  Such Ghuls can read many languages, and can speak with cunning inflection and even mock many human frailties with the lilting of their tongues.  Such
cantus
-Ghuls may be seen as cruel, for they know they can never return to the soft pleasures of mortality.  Yet they possess the power to destroy those who live, and to choose the worthy from among the frail to be as
they
are, and so to learn their spells.

The first canticle is sung when the Ghuls feast upon a willing victim’s belly, and while he lays dying, he is saved and made to become one with their kith.  This is the chant which I first heard echoed behind me as I fled the metamorphosis of Fatimah.  I render it in this way:

~

O Nergal, god of death, reaper of remains

Who dwelleth beneath the E-Meslam,

You who crawled forth from the aeons,

From the waterfalls of blood of Belet-ili,

Be cheated of this offering,

This mortal who is our prey!

For this one is of the favored,

Offering herself to us in sacrifice,

And she is to stand amongst us

In the Kingdom of the Ghuls.

~

You, who we devour, O chosen,

Become as one with us

As we rend open thy belly,

As we feast upon thy entrails!

(The victim is held down, the feast begins.)

~

Rise not Ereshkigal, goddess of the netherworld,

Descender of the Ganzir, lavisher

Who dances in veils of blood and shadow

From the many-labyrinthed palace of the Kur,

And be appeased!  Honor this one’s sacrifice,

This fallen one who never

Shall become thy slave.

~

In turn, Lord and Queen of the world beneath,

To you in twain we offer this,

The
gidim
-soul of one who writhes in agony.

The flesh and mind of this one shall be ours,

Yet the breath of her
Qat etemmi
shall be yours.

Strip this shivering seed out from the husk,

Chain this
gidim
-soul in the garden of Ereshkigal