THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (23 page)

But
these
strangely curved portrayals were far more ancient, of a marvelous yet sinister cast.  The style was cunning, a unique and unknown art based on interlaced crescents and triangles compositing greater figures.

The figures swirled across every surface of the pedestal’s base.  Where was the beginning of this carven scene?  I grabbed my torch up from the sand, and peered at stranger figures still, which were carved in the pedestal’s farthest face near to the wall.

In digging the sands away from the rear of the pedestal, I somehow pressed a stud which served as a throne to one of the bas-relief figures.  The stud clicked, and the pedestal seemed to consume it whole.  I heard an immense grating below me of massive counterweights, stone upon stone.

~

The floor of the cavern trembled.

Where I stood, a whirlpool of sand began to churn all around me.  The sands of the “floor” were rushing down, sucking at my feet, as if I stood inside an immense and emptying hourglass.  I cried out and leapt back, but my footing in the shin-deep sand was poor and I was dragged down screaming into another chamber, some six or seven feet below.

I fell on the top of the new-made sand heap.  More sand rained down around me, and in my panic and desperation to keep my torch out of the cascading sands, I tumbled and fell down the pile head over heel.  Cursing, licking at my thumb which I had burned, I rose to find myself in a narrow corridor.

Here the air was bitter, cool and stale.  I coughed as the sterile reek of ages peeled up around me as a wind, gusting up into the pedestal-cave and out into the night so far above me.

I knew I should have leapt from the height of the sand-pile and there climbed out from the corridor, but I still estimated that I had thirty minutes left to my torch’s light.  And I had two other torches as well; a blessing, for my satchel had fallen down with me. I was fascinated to stand where surely no man had ever stood for at least ten thousand years.

Shouldering my satchel, raising my torch higher to keep the stinging smoke from my eyes, I followed the narrow corridor.  The farther I strode from the sand-pile, the dusts of the floor smoothed out into ripples of sparkling ash.  Thus, where the sands were smoothed, I could sense that the corridor was angling gradually down.  Hastening to explore as much of the tomb as I could before my torches’ depletion would force me to retreat, I continued down the corridor.  I would find as many of the funereal discs as I could, those priceless treasures of the name which belonged to nothing,
Anar’kai
.

Mesmerized, I almost forgot the immense peril I was in.  A shift of the winds in the desert above me would seal my fate, and I would be imprisoned in my own eerie tomb and never found.

~

The corridor came to an end.

There, in the flickering shadows of my dying torch, were the rudely-chiseled heights of a narrow descending stair.  Creeping further and looking down its steps, I knew that I had never seen its like.  This stair spiraled down in tight coils, and its steps were but two fingers thick, but also each two fingers in descent. 
(Whateley has written here:  “A 45-degree angle of descent?”)

Here there were many holes in the wall for my left hand, and with the torch in my right fist and my left fingers along the wall, I precariously made my way down into the depths.

I lost all sense of direction.  The staircase coiled like a serpent, turning a full circle six or perhaps seven times.  At the bottom I found only a circular chamber, and the grimmest and loneliest silence that I have ever known.  My own breathing seemed deafening, the crackling of my torch like gouts of thunder.

I whispered a prayer in a dry throat, if only to hear my own voice.  It echoed thrice eerily in the tiny space, the amplified whispers mocking me.

Looking all around, I saw that the room was not just circular, but
spherical
and half-filled with sand.  So very strange:  what use could such a chamber serve?  The walls were smooth, except for one.  I saw at my feet, just beside the final stair, a small space no more than eight inches high.

As the first such void had revealed the cave mouth to me in the desert far above, I suspected that this space must be its echo.  This would be the top of an alcove.  And did not Anata tell me that the viper-striders had buried their high priests in such a place?

Again, I planted my torch in the sand and began to dig.

SCROLL XXXVII

My Discovery of the Discs of Anar’kai,

And the Remnant Buried Beneath Them

What I found is difficult for me to say.

First I found four discs of an unknown metal, strung upon a pitted and ancient ring.  They were covered with glyphs and sigils, very minute, spiraling in hundreds of lines which I would later need a crystal prism to magnify and study.  But this could be done, in time.  And I had decrypted many an ancient tongue in dream, slumbering with the jewel of Naram-gal.

Victory!  I had found some few of the funereal discs of Anar’kai.

But the writing upon the discs was far too minute and alien to read there, and time and good fortune were conspiring to abandon me.  Nevertheless, I felt tempted—nay, compelled—to tarry over my newfound treasures for some minutes.

My fascination with the minute glyph-spirals was nearly my end; for my dying torch flickered, and I suddenly realized it had less than a minute of life.  I frantically lit another with flint and steel and straw.  Thus I would have another hour of feeble light, if that. I had only one unlit torch remaining, and still needed to make my precarious return up to the surface.

I dug a little deeper and found something else beneath the discs.

At first, I believed I had found a scroll bundle.  It was gray and exquisitely fragile, and from the holes in it I could see what my discovery truly was:  hundreds of thin sheets pressed against one another, like the interior of the nest of a paper wasp.  Digging further, I found a hole in the papers’ layers, and realized it was not a hole at all.

It was an eye socket.  I had dug and revealed half of a face, and that face was not human, but serpentine.

The face was no sculpture, no.  This had been a living thing.

I cried out, my finger darted away from the hole and snagged on the top of the eye socket.  The entirety of the horror’s head crumbled.  I gasped, and so I breathed in the dust of that vile thing’s collapsing skull.

I coughed, and then I vomited, precious water.  What had I inhaled?  How long had that thing been dead?  And what had it been?

~

I had seen enough.  I fled back up the staircase, stumbling on its precarious and swirling rises.  I stumbled out to the corridor, and ran along it with discs in hand, suppressing my panic, until I finally came to the pile of sand.  Above me loomed the taunting void of my escape.

Looking up, I was fearful, nearly hopeless.  The sand-pile was still growing with falling sands, and its summit was only four feet from the rim of the portal above it.  But that meant that the pile had grown quickly indeed as I had been exploring down below.  As I watched, more sand was pouring down.  How long had I tarried in the tomb?  Soon, the square hole above me would be choked away and there would be no escape.

I climbed into the sand of the pile’s base, and found to my alarm that the pile was so loose and unstable that I was buried up to my knees.  What would be a minor leap and a four-foot grasp was now a jumping vault of more than six feet, from poor footing.  And how could I master such a leap and hold my torch at the same time?

More sands fell.  Despair began to overwhelm me.

Cursing my own stupidity, I risked all.  I looped the discs of Anar’kai about my neck.  I took off my sandals, so that I could run faster and leap higher in the sand.  I threw my torch up through the hole, praying that it would not go out.  It did not, although it hit the pedestal above me and rolled away.   I could see its flickering gouts reflected on the smooth ancient wall far above me.

I strode down the pile, smoothing and tightening the sands as best I could.  I walked twelve paces down the corridor, and turned.  I would need to sprint as best I could.

Taking one deep breath, I ran up the pile.  I leaped.  Clawing up into the air, I nearly missed the hole’s stony edge.  My fingers bled open as I scratched at the crumbling stone around the hole, but found no purchase.  Defeated, I fell.  I tumbled half down the pile of sand.  Radiance flickered fitfully above me.  My torch, lying on its side in swirling sand, had begun to stifle and to die.  Soon I would be in absolute darkness.

In trying one wild jump, I had scattered much of the sand, and more was falling.  The pile was scattering.  Now, it was a seven foot leap between myself and the lip of the stone above me.

In wild desperation I ran again up the hill, stumbling, and leapt before the sands could swallow me.  I caught the lip of the stone above me once again.  This time, I found a jagged outcropping hidden beneath the trickling ashes.  Gripping this knob with two fingers of my left hand, I swung myself upward.

I cried out at the pain but held on.  My other hand flailed and found the hole’s upper lip.  I used my weight as a pendulum and hoisted myself higher.  Exhausted, I pulled myself up at last.

No hope.  I began to fall.  Sand poured down into my face and choked me, filling my mouth.

But I was relentless.  I slung one leg up over the brim, and had scant purchase with bare toes upon the edge.  If I had not spent so many years fleeing from the bladesmen in Sana’a, climbing market tentpoles and leaping across rooftops, I am certain I would have fallen there and died, too exhausted to try again.

But I climbed up and out, my clothes and hair filled with dust.  I gagged and vomited up strings of earth and blood.  I rolled, found my torch and grabbed it.  This was foolishness, for I was half-blinded with the sands and in fumbling for the torch I had forced its head deeper into the ashen floor.

With a last furtive puff of smoke, the light of the fire died.

SCROLL XXXVIII

Of the Veiled Abomination

And My Flight from the Nameless City

Nothingness.  Blindness and nothing more.

My breath hastened as I fumbled for my flint and steel.  Crouching down, I laid out the last of my straw and scraped little showers of sparks into the darkness.  Although I believed I could feel my way, I did not want to return to the cave’s exit in utter blackness.  Worse, my struggle up from the hole before the pedestal had spun my senses so, I had no bearing of where I was.  I could feel my way to the pedestal and then know my true direction, but did I dare to crawl so near to that hole which I could not see?  Falling into it again would surely mean my death, a horrid end in the sightless dark without water or hope of salvation.

My hands were shaking too hard to light the fire.  I calmed myself as best I could.

After some minutes in the dark, I lit the straw at last and passed the fragile flame there to my last torch.  Bold radiance flared and I saw just how perilous my stance had been:  I was facing the hole, and my hands were not three inches from its brim.  Coughing away the torch’s gouts of black and angry smoke, I backed away from the hole and the pedestal with all haste.  I turned, touching the discs of Anar’kai against my throat, eager to find the cave mouth where I had entered.

From nowhere, I heard an echo of rasping laughter behind and far below me.

~

I turned.  The sands trickling into the hole were no longer hissing, but falling in heavy clumps and scoops of ash.  Someone—some
thing
—was scrambling up from the hole to rise and stand before me.

A silent whisper filled my mind: 
Find the city, Samir.  Find the canticle of your beloved, find your destiny!

Have I said that I had lost the power to fear?  Ah, I felt it now.

Enslaved to my terror, I could not run.  My limbs betrayed me.  I could only walk backward, slowly toward the exit, as I held my breath and gaped where the man—or thing—was rising from the hole.

There was nothing there.

I took in a ragged breath.  And what was that?  An echo of my exhalation, a seconding of it?  Surely a trick of the grotto’s acoustics was toying with me?

My limbs began to free themselves.  I walked backward ever faster.  In front of me, I could see no creature at all.  But I could hear and see impressions being pushed into the sand.  Footprints were being made, but there were no feet to make them.  Each print was enormous, and the feet had not toes, but rather talons.

~

Instinct overwhelmed me.  I turned with my arms outspread, and I ran.

The cackling again.  Whatever it was, this invisible Thing, it delighted in my horror.  I could hear it breathing and limping behind me, its unseen bones crackling as it strove to quicken its hunting gait.

I sprinted the last of the distance, scrambling up the sand piled at the cavern’s exit and once more out into the blessed moonlight.  Casting my torch aside so that both my hands were free, I ran as if the hounds of the infernal were at my heels.  The discs of Anar’kai clashed against my neck and jangled against my cheeks.  The ancient metal ring which held them snapped, and I wheeled to a halt, frantically snatching the fallen discs up from the ruins and running on.

There was a guttural, wet popping sound from far behind me.  The cackling of the invisible Thing turned into screaming, and then to a roar.

Looking back only once over my shoulder, I could see a cylindrical, imprisoned sandstorm whirling where the cave mouth had been.  Something enormous was growing there over the sands, flowing over the cliff, pressing the tumbling ashes down with its mighty bulk.  Serpent-like tentacle tracks showed where the invisible limbs were growing, scooping sand, whipping the ash into the air.

As the thrown ashes pelted down, they outlined the form of the Thing which was rising up out of the earth.  It was changing still, shape-shifting from whatever humanoid form it had first assumed, into something amorphous and wrought with a maniacal complexity.