THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (28 page)

What remained of the facade was only a faintest glory:  a few stubborn shards of marble around each archway, a few alabaster inlets upon the steps.  But regardless of how the Tower had been lain low, these clues were enough to show me the way.

~

That night, I crossed from the ruined Palace of Nebuchadnezzar and descended toward the east.  There, many unknown ruins still stand in massive piles, unnamed and unexplored.

The Tower’s own ruin was a hill, and the ziggurat’s remnant appeared only as the angle of two massive black walls.  Dried creepers and trickles of salt stood petrified upon its flanks.  Nine-tenths of the Tower’s entirety had been crumbled and taken by the river, or lain as buried piles about its base.  But I knew that the tombs and shrine were deep indeed.  Not only was the Tower hollow, but the tombs themselves had been lain so deep below the temple’s interior that they were actually
underground
.  This detail conflicted with many readings I had made, for many sages believed that the tombs were
inside
the temple and so lost, not
under
it; but in dream the Lord in Ebon had told me that these were lies.

The tombs were intact, and the lesser discs of the shadow priests were waiting there for me.

~

By the time I did come to the ruined Tower’s base, and recognized it by the tiny marble shards still clinging to its walls, I was confident that I would find my way inside.  I climbed the one surviving stair, and having been made wise by seeing the seal in the pillar of the Hanging Garden, I knew to look for a similar secret place:  a near-invisible inset square at the base of a wall, its edges filled in with river-clay.

When, after five hours of searching I found such a seal beneath a veil of dead creepers and vines, I laughed once more in relief and delight. 
This
seal was half-buried by dried mud, and blocks of rubble masked all but the very height of it.  But I was filled with strength at my discovery, and I did throw the blocks aside, dig at the sand, pry away the clay borders with my
jambiya
, and leverage open the seal itself with my ironshod staff.  My failure at the Hanging Gardens had been a lesson, a secret revealing what I must do to find the one true way.  If I had not gone into the Hanging Gardens and dug at the pillars of the aqueduct, I never would have learned how to discover the secret seal into the Tower of Babel.

Opening it at last, I grinned as the trapped air of the temple’s depths washed over me.  The Tower, I knew,
would
be hollow in its way.  It would be drilled through with a hundred descending air-shafts, through which a man could barely crawl.  Even though the main shaft into the oracular shrine of the Fluting One was surely buried too deep and impossible to find, one of the
lesser
air-shafts did indeed lie beneath the seal.

This is the entrance I had found.  The tombs did lie beneath and deeper still, waiting for me.

The crawl would be perilous, and I could carry very little within.  I drank some of the foul river water.  I kissed my Ghul amulet and lashed it to the discs of Anar’kai from the Nameless City.  These treasures together I corded around my neck, tighter than ever before.

I selected the finest of my torches, brought it to light, and put flint, steel and tinder in a pouch within my robe.  The shaft proved to be so narrow that I would need to crawl, and if I crawled with the torch held out in front of me, I would burn myself and choke upon the smoke.  Instead, I turned myself around.  I put my dagger between my teeth, and crawled backward into the shaft with my torch held out before me.

So did I struggle on and down, through the descending shaft, with burning eyes and labored breathing, until the shaft finally let upon a subterranean corridor.

Stretching, lowering myself from the shaft’s gullet and into the narrow hall, I finally stood where no living man had been for over a thousand years.

My torch nearly died, stifled by the staleness of that air.  The corridor ran in two directions, and I selected the more descending path.  This way went deeper for some twenty paces and then bent at an abrupt angle, forming two narrower corridors.

To one side, there was a cistern filled with bones.  To the other, another hall descending into darkness.

There did I find the tombs, and there too did I find the cistern of the spider-beetles.

SCROLL XLIII

Of the Spider-Beetles,

And the Terrible Secrets

Of the Tombs Beneath the Temple

Babilu
.  I must tell you of all I discovered in the deeps:

~

The corridor to the left, the hand of the damned, let upon seven tombs with seven seals.  The three nearest to where I stood were plundered, for I could see that the seals were shattered and that robbers had crawled inside of them.  I had reason to believe that the discs of the shadow priests which I sought would be made of
orichalcum
and of gold.  Surely any tomb reaver, even one unversed in ancient tongues, would see that the discs were precious and would steal them.

Therefore, rather than search the three opened and defiled tombs, I proceeded down to the fourth.  Its seal was easy to break, being made only of clay.  I shattered it and crawled into the sepulcher beyond.

I did not find a sarcophagus.  The mummified body of the priest was laid upon the floor, on its belly, with a stone upon its broken spine.  I lifted this aside, and saw that the priest’s hands had been bound behind his back.  The ropes were parched and frail and at my merest touch, they fell away into dust.

Although the body was surrounded by a ring of gold amphorae, alabaster vases, silver vessels and jars filled with desiccated spice, I left these minor treasures where they were.  The true prize, the lesser discs of necromancy which the priests were said to have each been buried with, I could not see.

The body needed to be lifted.

Holding my breath, I carefully laid my torch upon the floor, and I turned the withered body in my hands.

I cried out in fear when the corpse fell apart within my grasp.  The broken spine snapped apart.  The legs fell away and ashen powder puffed up from the sockets of each hip.  The torso I still held cradled in my arms.

The face of the priest was gaunt and black, the cinnamon-hued flesh having been slathered with resin which had turned into a crumbling crystal veil.  Triangles of this substance fell from the filled-in eye sockets as I brushed the resin away.  The mouth had been sewn shut, and the torso was strangely heavy.  Looking down, I learned why:  the belly had been cored out by heat, and where the flesh of the belly should have been, there sat an enormous mass of solid gold.  This, then, was the leaving of the liquid gold which had been poured down the corpse’s throat.

Why had such horrible things been done to a dead body?  The shadow priests had died one by one of illness and old age, long after they had chanted their spells, long after their sacrifices had allowed Nebuchadnezzar and his Queen to ascend unto the sky-gates of Yog-Sothoth and so to the Endless Hall.  Surely the Babylonians who had buried them here had been following their King’s command; and so I knew such people had feared their King even after he was lost.

But had those superstitious people feared the priests as well?  Moreso, it seemed.  But why had the embalmers honored these priests’ remains with such difficult burials, and why the pouring of gold?  Why were the corpses bound thus?  Their backs broken?  Did the people who had buried them know of the oracular shrine beneath their feet?  Had any of them ever beheld the Fluting One?

So many questions, never answered.

But there was something far greater, for when I said a prayer for forgiveness and used my
jambiya
to pry open the stitched mouth of the corpse, I found that something else had been inserted after the pouring of molten gold.  There, resting upon a black remnant of tongue, sat the orichalcum discs of necromancy.

The discs!

I cried out in victory, and tears sprang forth from my eyes.  I cut the sides of the papery mouth and pulled the discs forth.  Curiously, they were quite similar in shape and in art when compared to the discs of the viper-striders which I wore, the treasures of Anar’kai.  But these lesser discs were covered not in spiraling hieroglyphs, but rather in writing.  To my relief, I could see that the inscriptions were in Akkadian and Babylonian.  I would be able to read them easily once I escaped from the foul tomb, and so learn the last secrets of necromancy, and add the wisdom of the Fluting One to the incantation which I was going to create and so bring forth my lost Adaya.

I reclaimed my torch, I strung the discs upon my chain with my other treasures.  I rose and departed, leaving the desecrated body where it lay.  No vengeful spirit rose, no curse was laid upon me.  I was tempted to open the three other tombs yet sealed, but why?  I had little time to waste there in the dark, and the treasures I had sought were mine at last.

~

My torch was reaching the halfway point in its burning, and although I did not fear for my life nearly so much as I had when hunted by the unseen Thing beneath the Nameless City, I still did fear that I might wake something terrible in performing my desecration.

I had the lesser discs, however many other copies there might be.  It was time to leave.

I returned to the corridor intersection.  The other branch of the tunnel tempted me.  I looked around the corner, but there the tunnel ended abruptly in a pit, the cistern which I had seen.  There, down in the void beneath me, I could see enormous stacks of skulls and bones.

This pit proved to be the brim of a great shaft, in which were thrown the skulls and gnawed bones of the worthy.  An aside in the written
Chronicles of Nebuchadnezzar
had alluded that those slaves who were sacrificed to the Fluting One had their remains tossed into a pit, that rats were poured upon them, and that human-faced abominations called “Rat-Things” were made there by the shadow priests to serve as their familiars in the worship of Nyarlathotep.  The pit was said to be two hundred feet deep, but the pile of bones reached almost to the brim where I was standing.

~

Pulling my torch away and preparing to leave, I was attracted by a curious phosphorescence emanating from somewhere above me, upon the cistern’s graven ceiling.

Looking up, I could see thousands of pale white ghostly bulbs clinging to the cistern’s over-vault.  These glowing clusters trembled, as if touched by a wayward breeze.  But the air was still.

I backed away.  I heard a sound above me, the rustling of dead leaves upon a garden of moistened grass.

The bulbs above me sighed as one, each of them—hundreds of them, thousands—sprouted legs.  The scuttling little horrors crawled in a frenzy down from the ceiling, rushing to stifle the blinding light of my torch.  They thirsted for the heat of the torch’s fire, for fire meant that something delicious was there to hold it.

I had seen such spiders before in the
habrud
of Naram-gal, where they would attach themselves to Ghuls’ under-arms and throats.  There, they would bloat themselves, feasting on the Ghuls as ticks do upon a man’s skin-folds, and in drawing blood from the Ghul—or so Anata had told me—the spider-beetles were infused with some of the Ghul’s black nature.

Eternity.

And so these things had lived here, cannibalizing one another, cleaning the dried flesh from the slave-bones, for centuries.  But now
I
had come, and they did descend the walls to feast upon me.

~

I lifted my torch and began to run, but already some of the creatures had dropped upon me.  I felt the first sting as one bit into my shoulder, then another upon my scalp.  As I ran for the air-shaft, I beat my head with my hands.  I stumbled, screaming, and I fell.

The swarm of the spidery things crawled up my legs, hundreds more.  I tore at my robe, and burned my own legs with wild sweeps of my torch.  The many spiders that I burned popped and fizzled, the juices boiling out of their bodies.  I could see that they had been spawned in the shape of scarabs, each the size of a fingernail; but their bodies were withered and glowing white, and each had not six legs, but eight.

I had seen enough.

Regaining my feet, holding my torch and pinching spider-beetles to death with my other hand, I ran and stumbled to the air-shaft.  There, crawling up into the narrow tunnel, I shoved my back against the ceiling, popping dozens more of the things where they were crawling upon my robes.  I slammed my legs against the walls, and dozens more of the things died.

I crawled frantically up the tunnel.  I crushed many of the spider-beetles, I burned others, I burned even my cheek and my own hair trying to keep the stinging horrors from my face.  My torch burned out, having been used frantically as a bludgeon, and I cast it away.  With two hands I could crawl faster and perhaps even save my life.

There in the absolute darkness, I could feel one of the spider-beetles enter my mouth, and another did burrow into my nostril.

The one in my mouth I was able to crush between my teeth, tasting the acrid smokiness of its ichor before I could spit the still-twitching ruin of it from my mouth.  But the one in my nose had reached the back of my throat, and gagging, I did swallow it.

~

Years later, I would learn from the crone of Elephantine Isle, Klocha, that this infestation would be my body’s end.  The spider-beetle would not pass through my body, no; it would seed my intestine with eggs, and some few of those inside me would not ever leave my body.  They would burrow out from the intestine and into the marrow of my bones, an agonizing process in my old age of some years.  For these creatures are as deathless when compared to spiders as Ghuls are to men, and there in their cyst-nests inside my bones, they would hatch; and the brood they gave birth to would paralyze me and eat me alive from within.

And Klocha did tell me, if ever I should live to be more than seventy winters, I should take my own life to spare myself the agony of the hatching.  But I know not my age, and I believe by my reckoning that as I inscribe this scroll, the time of the hatching is coming nigh.