THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (24 page)

Pulsating spheres, connected by weblike membranes.  Tentacles, and mouths.  A hundred eyes, a thousand.  Sphincters pulsing and gushing forth invisible tides of slime.

I caught the merest glimpse of that ancient Beast, and I screamed, fleeing the Nameless City and the Horror I had awakened from the deep.

As I screamed until my throat was torn, some mad echo of the twice-woven words of Nyarlathotep, the Lord in Ebon, sang and echoed within my raving mind:

Go forth!  Wake!  Rise!

GATHERING THE EIGHTH

Elegies of Babylon

SCROLL XXXIX

The Untold Truths of Babylon

I ran all the night.  I could hear the roars, the slurping gulfs of stretching and tightening membranes as the Thing pursued me.  Only when these were echoes, and then silence, did I slow to a trot and then an exhausted and wild crawl.

~

Only the grimmest of my survival skills brought me out of the waste and unto Hadhramaut once more.  My sandals were lost, I had wrapped my feet in rags and the sands had burned my toes to blackened stumps of scabby flesh.  Much of my water evaporated or I had spilled it in my flight.  When sanity returned, I found myself under the fires of the day, stumbling in a half-crawl like a beast, with the vultures wheeling overhead and waiting for me to fall.

I found the shade of an overhanging outcrop of meager stone.  I tore the back away from my robe, urinated upon it, and wrapped its moist sackcloth around my fevered scalp.  I caught a monitor lizard which had burrowed into the shadowed sands, tore out its belly and drank its blood.

~

Waiting for nightfall, I caught my bearings, and was relieved beyond all measure to see that I was near to a canyon through which passed the Path of the Shedded Coil, one of the tenuous caravan routes which led south toward Hadhramaut itself.

I stumbled alone through the windswept hours, and collapsed where I found the Gray Oasis near the spice-town’s outskirts.  There, I drank of the pool and swallowed so much water that my belly twisted and I vomited forth all, as well as blood.  I slept for an hour and tried again, and at last I began to believe that I would survive my time in the dread Khali.

The Nameless City.  That which stretches and cannot crawl.

Could I ever dare to walk the inner desert again?

Not all was lost, however.  The discs of Anar’kai were still with me.

Of that which I learned from the discs, and the art of necromancy, much is contained within these scrolls.  The language of the viper-striders is not one which is comprehensible to man.  I would stare through my magnifying prism at the glyphs when I was near to sleep, and holding the discs in one hand and the black amethyst of Naram-gal in the other, I would dream.  The kindly yet taunting Lord in Ebon would come to me, and speak to me of all that the glyphs did mean.

~

In those nights alone at the Gray Oasis, dreaming thus, I learned some little of the viper-striders, who called themselves the
Sheshek’ul’thrai
.

In ages past when men were few in number and feared the beasts who thundered across the grasslands, the viper-striders enslaved our ancestors and made blood sacrifice from their many births, glorying in the primal vitality of our frail mortality and our superstitious nightmares.

Our ancestors lived only to give birth, and to allow the Sheshek’ul’thrai to feed upon their children.

I call those people slaves, but these people who were chained thus by terror did worship the viper-striders as their gods.  How could they not?  The Sheshek’ul’thrai were mighty, they created artifacts made of metal and moving crystals which cast rays of light that could burn a man to cinders.  But they were the last of their kind, a race millions of years old, and nearly universally infertile.  Fewer than a hundred still remained when they did beckon the human males to lay with their women every year, and so to multiply … not to bring forth infants for the sacrifice, but to create a race in legion who would build the great guardian city on the mighty cliffside, over the last caves where the Sheshek’ul’thrai remained.

So was raised the Nameless City.

Temples cut the sky, glorious towers were raised upon the plateau above the grasslands.  Ages passed, glimpses of which I still do not understand.  There was the Deluge, there were tempest and whirlwind.  The moon turned blood-red for an age and with many earthquakes the waters receded.  Only a wasteland remained, a mile-deep wilderness of mud.  Over the years, this crackled and turned to powder, and then to sand.  A mighty desert covered all.

So were born Arabia, Yemen, Sumeru, Akkad, and all the rest, the deserts of our birth … barren, strangely fertile.  We live in a world of high and restless oceans, and our shores are a thousand feet above the lost earth which once had been.  The windy sky above that grassland is now the sand beneath our feet.

~

And this was not all.  From the discs and my walks in dream with Nyarlathotep, I did learn the secret of resurrection from the glyphs of Anar’kai:

Once the body dies, it is rendered unto ashes.  The remains can be animated, twisted into horrible dances in a mockery of life, but such Risen are only emptied vessels.  Life cannot return to a barren garden.

But the essence of
intellect
woven on webs of memory, that which lingers after death and which we call spirit, or a soul, lives on.  In this, Anata did not lie.  These restless spirits do wander our world, grieving and never understanding what has befallen them, until they fade away.  To heaven?  To oblivion?  To chaos?  I do not know.

But the viper-striders possessed a glorious art, with which they rewarded the worthiest of their servants.  A young and living body can have the mind and soul stripped from it with horrors of revelation, casting out the spirit and leaving the breathing vessel as its husk.  To such a mindless body can be anchored the memory-webs of a restless spirit.  In turn, the spirits of the dead can be snared and tangled inside the emptied body.  The body is still the younger, but the dead essence of the
other
returns thus to the glory and wonder of life.

~

All of this I did learn, as I healed, hid myself from men who I was now apart of, and journeyed north to the ruins of Babylon itself.  I knew the secrets then of resurrection, but the viper-striders’ art had a twist to its glorification, brilliant and depraved: 
they
did not weave dead souls into the bodies of mortals, no.  They wove mortal souls into the bodies of their
own
dead.  So did the honored humans, the mad minds of the resurrected, find themselves imprisoned in the flesh of bipedal serpents.  That was the secret of Anar’kai, the last high priest among the Sheshek’ul’thrai.

Was it his mummified corpse which I had discovered?  Had my disturbance of his rest awakened the curse, the Thing which had climbed out after me?

~

However miraculous and arcane were the secrets of Anar’kai, I needed more.

I needed to know how to resurrect a dead soul in the flesh of a
mortal
woman.  Adaya my beloved would only live thus, for there were no Serpent People to use as vessels.  All were not only dead, their mummies had turned to ash.

Of this art, if Anata’s half-truths bore their fruit, I would learn all I needed to know from the lesser discs of human priests, buried beneath the Tower of Babel.

My time with Fatimah and the Seeking Vulture had brought me much wisdom of ancient Babylon and its legendry.  Some little, what you the reader must know in your own journeys, I will speak of here.

~

After the fall of the Nameless City, of all the great cities of the ancient world which were built by men, only one rose mightier than Irem:  and that was Babylon.  This city was nothing if compared to the greatest labyrinths within our world—the ice-wrought mazes of Antarktos, the basalt spires of the tentacled ones, or R’lyeh itself—but within the frailer Kingdom of Men, Babylon was all.  It was in its golden age a hive of humanity, a glorious chaos of all mortal dreams, sins, pleasures and self-destruction.

Yet Babylon itself was a child of an elder place.  The foremost and sacred city before it was named Eridu.  In Eridu, there was raised the great ziggurat of bitumen which gloried in the worship of the silencer of dreams, Enki, the enemy of Cthulhu.  But Enki was a false god, and the floods swallowed Eridu.  For Enki did not exist, and when his priests cried out, no one came to save them.

The Deep Ones destroyed the city, slaughtering the men and children and taking the women down into the airy grottoes beneath the waves, where they mated with them; and this I will speak of in its time.

~

As the waters of the Gulf of the Arvan Rud rose once more, ages of men were forgotten.  Floods and devastations wiped out entire generations and every inscription of those years was lost beneath the waters.  But ever on the
edge
of the water was built a new great sacred city.  Many ruins are forgotten.  After the deluge of Eridu, the waters and the shore of the Arvan Rud crept north, until the shore came to rest where Babylon lies today.

The dream of Eridu’s Abzu-temple did live on, and so was reincarnated further upriver and inland.  Men who believed that “God spoke to them,” fraught with the revelations of Cthulhu’s nightmare, were regarded by their peoples as holy men.  For all dreamed as one, and only these holy ones beheld in unity the vision of R’lyeh.  This second-constructed echo of Eridu’s temple, in time, became the Tower of Babel.

It is so:

The city of Babylon came to encircle the Tower in time.  In that age the Tower was the Etemenanki, the heavenward spire of Marduk, another of the falsified gods of men.  As the kingship of Babylon grew mad with nightmare and turned to blood sacrifice and all its wretched depravity, the worship of Marduk fell into disrepute.  The lords were slain, and the powers behind the thrones crept back into their shadows.

Another age ended, another rose.

Although Marduk’s rites were still held upon the Tower’s highest spire, the Tower’s mighty base was hollowed, and far more sinister rites were held within the depths beneath it.  There, in the black recesses beneath the Tower’s core, priests in robes of vermilion worshipped the sacred miracle which spoke to them in nightmare, that which they named the
Kulullu
of the Abzu.  And the
Kulullu
commanded that these dreamers bow to worship not only the power from beneath the sea, but too, the powers among the stars:  the Great Old Ones.

~

As the core of the mortal hive, Babylon was ever controlled and vied for by hidden powers.  At times it was ruled by the princes who were actually the Yuggothai, the Mi-Go in disguise and veils; at other times, its priest factions were enslaved in thought by the Yithians or the viper-striders.  Near to its end, the city of Babylon was held in uneasy truce by the Cults of Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep and the King in Yellow.

But with each invasion, devastation, overthrow and secret tyranny, the records of Babylon were taken away to nether cities, destroyed, shifted and forgotten and written again.  The true history of the city, lost in caverns, bears no resemblance to what even the wisest sages now believe.  What I have learned has come from the visions in the Shining Trapezohedron, the tablets of Hadoth and Irem, the whispers of Klocha and Fatimah and the petroglyphs chiseled away from temple walls in the underworld by the Ghuls themselves.  I know enough only to know that I see through the
first
of seven veils.  Babylon the Great is the whore of secrets, eternal and unknowable.

~

There is much confusion in what I have told.

Such is my feeble remnant of the truth, and it is labyrinthine.  These complexities gave rise to the legend of the confusion of tongues, and the mystery of the mighty Tower of Babel.  But Fatimah, Anata, and the Lord in Ebon did conspire in my dreams to further enlighten me.

These secrets I dwelled upon as I made my way ever north, away from the inmost desert of the Khali.

~

With three camels, fully equipped for the expedition, I rode north from Hadhramaut, skirting the desert’s core.

I knew where the ruined Tower of Babel was, and where the Hanging Gardens had come to lie.  With the lore of Nyarlathotep enmeshing upon the tattered fringes of Anata’s partial wisdom, I knew there were
two
places where I might find the nether portal into the tombs of the human priests.  I would excavate the Hanging Gardens, and then the Tower itself.

How could I fail?  Already I began to dream of the many vessels my Adaya could possess.  I would choose a beautiful woman indeed.  My pride began to overwhelm me, and so it became hubris.  Having survived the Nameless City and its Horror and the fires of the Khali, I believed I was prepared for anything.

In my obsession, I had forgotten only this:  great in mind and frail in body, we searchers dwell in the Kingdom of Men; and wherever there is buried treasure, there is greed.  In finding my way to Babylon, I was walking into an assassins’ nest.

SCROLL XL

Of My Coming to the Ruins,

The Way of Ten Thousand Teeth

And the Mosque of the Undervaults

The Babylon of our age is a city in ruin, but still it is home to many souls upon its fringe.  The ruins beside the river are its heart, but none dare to dwell there; the inhabited dwellings surround this in a ring.  Therefore, the remnant of occupied Babylon is a city in the shape of an emptied circle, ringed about a void of ancientry.

A century before now
(Clarice Whateley has penciled here:  “Circa 630 A.D.?”)
, the city was still ruled by the Persians.  But the legions of the Crescent came in conquest, and the Path of the Prophet was laid there.  Seized and fallen, the ruin of Babylon was a heap of sundered treasures and buried secrets.  As the holy warriors drifted to battles elsewhere, Babylon was left as an emptied hive for treasure seekers.  Caravans still touched upon its fringe.  Gold and spice still journey now through its umbrage, but with the warriors departed, control of the spice-trade often rests in the night on the shoulders of mercenaries.