THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (31 page)

“Adaya, look at me, no, I love you.  Please, how—”

And she did whisper, “I
died
.”

Rising, wild as a Ghul feasting upon a man alive who is fighting for his life, she spun in manic contortions.  Her limbs tangled, her arm popped out of its socket and her legs spun in knots upon the floor.  In grief and agony and terror she screamed,
“Aiah!  Aiah, aiah!”

“Adaya!”

“Ia!”
she cried. 
“Ia!”

I could bear no more.  So many years, a lifetime of obsession blind to what would be, selfish above all and in defiance of all nature,
I
had done this.  I had brought my Adaya to this torture of pain and madness.

As she screamed and began to claw at her face, as the blood rose in jagged gashes and the foam choked out of her throat and mouth and bubbled onto the silks, I babbled the incantation which would open the gate of Death, and release her soul from the tortured flesh of the emptied slave Hadjara.

“N’gai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y’hah.  Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth, wza-y’ei!  Wza-y’ei!”

And so, for a second time—slain by my own will, my savage pride—Adaya began to die.

~

Her pain ended.  I sobbed, and crawled over her.  I pulled her stilling hands away from her bloody face, I wiped the foam from off her cheek.

Giving her last breath, she sighed, “I love you … be with me forever …”

“How, my love?” I beseeched her.  “How?”

And she could breathe no more.  I only know her last words because they formed, frail and voiceless, upon her lips:

“Help me to return to you.  Help me to find you in your dreams.  Dream of me, help me …”

And the body drifted down into the tangles of moistened silk, and was at peace.

My Adaya was at peace.

And I?  I now was a murderer of love.

~

I arrayed the body at rest as gently as I could.  I wanted her limbs to lay gently, her spine to not be twisted in the agony.  In death, the eyes of black and flecks of gold brightened once more to green.  The hair crept inward and faded to sandy brown, and only the dead vessel of the pale woman I had murdered, Hadjara, lay beneath me.

~

I hid until nightfall.  If any despite the secrecy of that dwelling had heard the screaming, they were too fearful to confront me.  Was such a nightmare common in Babylon?  Did they fear me so much, a necromancer, that none would confront me?  Had Hadjara been as nothing in this cruel world?

The shadow of Nyarlathotep protected me.  No one came.

I bundled the body gently, and I washed it, too ashamed of all I had done to ask the dead Hadjara for her forgiveness.  Would she wander the world in torment, a restless spirit?  Had my Adaya ascended to heaven, or would these two women I had slain whisper in death to one another, and despise me?

Was there a heaven after all?

I carried the body out into the desert, leaving Babylon to the north in deepest night.  I had a promise to fulfill, however horrid it might be.  I carried the silk-wrapped bundle for miles, until I could not hear the howls of jackals there beneath the moon.  The scavengers would not have her.  But I laid her body upon the highest dune, and there I chanted the words of the gift-feast, making of her flesh a tribute to the Ghuls and their sacred ways.

~

I would need to return, to steal back into Babylon for my gold, my supplies.  I would need to purchase a camel if I hoped to elude the soldiers and escape.  But not yet.

I could not bear to return to that hopeless city yet alone.  As I walked away, tracking down the dune away from Babylon to find the river and fill my waterskins, I did hear the mournful chanting howl of Naram-gal behind me.

By his people, the vessel of Hadjara was taken.  My debt for those who had saved my life in the Mosque of the Undervaults was paid.

But what of Hadjara herself?  Adaya?  In truth, I had tormented and killed them both.  I would never again be pure.  Is forgiveness only deserved by the worthy?  Or is it the worst of men, the fallen men, who are the ones who have the most cause to pray for their own salvation?

High on the dune, the feast had begun, I was certain.  I walked on and the sand sprayed up behind me with the wind.  Of my beloved, nothing remained but memory.  She had begged me to set her free and for her love, I had done so.

The agony of the Real had been too great for her.  But in dream ...

In dream ...

Forever she would dwell within my heart.  I hoped with all my will that if I were to dream of the endless Palace of Nothingness, our trysting world of birdsong and twilight, there I would be able to close my eyes in gardens of paradise, hold out my hand, and find my smiling Adaya there to take my fingers and to guide me to the cavern of flame where the Khomite priests had denied us our adoration of the Dreamlands.

Could such be?

Only the echoing howls of the Ghuls were to answer.

And so did end my dream of love, the resurrection of my Adaya.

GATHERING THE NINTH

Before the Lord in Ebon

SCROLL XLIX

The Pure Heart Becomes the Darker ~

My Discourse of the Unveiling of Truths

In Defiance of the Lord in Ebon

To this night I remember little of my last night in Babylon.  When the reverie of grief began to lift from me in its veils, I found myself astride one of my camels, with another tethered and following behind me.  I had the black jewel, the lump of gold, seven waterskins, my maps and writings, a scimitar, a bandolier of throwing knives, my staff and my own supplies.

How had I returned to Babylon?  How had I reclaimed my gold, my scrolls and all the rest?

When I struggled to remember, only utter blackness and the echoing laughter of Nyarlathotep sat enthroned within the void of my memory.

~

There was nothing that I could feel.  My body demanded that I endure; I ate, I slept in the day, I looked to the horizons of the moon as I traveled in the night.  Once, I believed that I spied the silhouette of a Ghul racing over the dunes of the northern wasteland, but the sands were rising into a storm and it is well when I looked again that there was nothing.

I journeyed north and west, into new lands far from Babylon and Sana’a, to the city of Palmyra, or Tadmur, the city known to caravans as the Bride of the Desert.  Once there, settling myself in anonymity and ever watchful for any who might have followed me, even there I did not know peace.  The voids in my memory were no worse than the things that I
did
remember; all was pain and the shame of a coward’s obsession.  Only the wanderlust, the journeys in the sand, seemed to bring me a thin shard-measure of peace.  I considered even traveling as far as Damascus, and there becoming an astrologer.  Or perhaps, even, I would sing again.

But there were wonders in Tadmur, scrolls and relics which Fatimah would have swooned over.  I would journey to Damascus in its time, yes.  But why not tarry here in Tadmur?  I had struggled and tormented myself with wanderings for many years.  My body, however I myself did not desire it, demanded solace.  And knowing that I might well spend the rest of my life alone, I delved into the only glory which seemed to ease my nightmares and troubled dreams:  wisdom.

Tadmur proved to be a lovely sanctuary, thriving and yet strangely tranquil in all its flows and tides of onrushing mortality.  It was—and is still, although its age is ending—a city of birds and winds, of sages and stargazers.  I have found much indeed to treasure in the scroll markets, recording what I need to know in my own librams and then reselling the least of all that I had gleaned; and too, keeping the most priceless of ancient works for my own.  I shaved many a sliver of gold from the mass I kept in my leather satchel, and every time I made a purchase I was certain to offer of myself a different name.

In time, the walled circles of the city began to confine me; and if I was going to purchase more of those scripts of wisdom, I would need to reveal myself to some of the sages a second time.  This I could not bring myself to do.

However my desires, I would believe myself to stand outside of the Kingdom of Men forevermore.

~

I considered spending the rest of my life in the tranquility of Tadmur.  There the women are beautiful, the songs sung by orphans—boys who were so like Akram, and the girls a torment to my memory—were less anguished, more sweet than those sung in mystical Sana’a.  But neither the songs nor the women could ease my heart.

Instead, I lost myself in those tides of dreamers and false prophets, marveling at the many ways of men.

The city had been conquered by the warriors of the Prophet, yet its peoples were left to worship as they would.  A curious thing.  In the privacy of their own gardens, the Tadmuri did worship Baal, Astaroth, and even still the memories of Athena and Cybele.  Somehow, although I knew these gods and goddesses to be merely illusions, the fervor and diverse faiths of the Tadmuri gave me hope.

Who am I, the hopeless, to deny the faithful the solemn joy of their beliefs?

For myself, I did marvel at the ancient pillars inscribed there with the wisdom of Queen Zenobia of old.  I learned from her engraved scriptures that there were tombs beneath the city, which were said to lead through catacombs which reached into the netherworld itself.

Despite all, scarred and tormented as I was with horror and with heartbreak, I was tempted to learn the truth of this.  But it was difficult to think of such adventures, knowing that any Ghuls I might meet there would not be my protector-friends, but strangers and likely savage against my cause despite my amulet of the Cabal.  For the tribes of the Ghuls are many, and many are at war.

I remained in the city alone with all my scrolls, and drowned my sorrows in the regalings and legendry of elder ages.

Although I made some few friends among the scroll-sages and even their daughters, I found in the deep of night that when I would pause in my studies and gaze out upon the moon, I could feel nothing.

~

I considered taking my own life, but I remembered well the horrific revelation of Anata:  that if I did so, my wandering spirit would be mindless, heartless, and while it was possible that the spirit of Adaya might find me, I in turn would not know her.  She would suffer a tragedy once more, knowing that I had slain myself and thereby made it impossible for the two of us to ever be reunited in eternity.  We would be divided until the end of time, dead and dreaming, lost forever in our own isolate worlds and never to touch again.

I could not bear for her to suffer that nightmare.  Not after all I had done, the blasphemies I had committed to be with her.

~

The nights were long.

In setting Adaya free from the flesh of Hadjara, I did not feel joy; only the vast loneliness of a man defeated in every way.  In seeking purity, I had become corruption.

Still, I have ever been a prideful fool.  I began to regret not what I had done, but that I had not denied my Adaya her liberation.  I could have enslaved her within her flesh.  If she could but bear the agony, I could have found a way to ease her suffering and keep her at my side.

Yes?

Such cruelty.

I did not believe this with all my heart, but in my suffering I did pretend that it was true.  I believed if I had kept her, I could have compelled her to understand.  Once the horror of her rebirth had faded, despite her agonies, perhaps she would have loved me ever on.

In deluding myself thus, I did sorrow and consume much spice to ease my grieving.  It was in Tadmur that I once again found a merchant who possessed some of that rarest essence of the Mi-Go, the Yuggothai:  the violet frankincense.  This I did pay dearly for, and entire nights were lost to me as I bathed my soul in as much nepenthe as it could bear and still reside within me.

The last night of the frankincense, I did burn all that remained, and in sleeping exhausted under the reflections of a golden gibbous moon, I did dream once more and find myself in Sarnath once again.

~

This I dreamed, in the ever-greater reality of the Empire of the Blackened Mind:

~

The temple where I had stood when first consorting with Nyarlathotep had crumbled.  Much like the Tower of Babel, its once-majestic tiers were now nothing more than one enormous mound of rubble, a dream destroyed.  Of the great idol of the lizard god which had stood in spellbinding translucence upon the temple height, nothing there remained.  Marveling at the enigmatic doom which had come to Sarnath, I crouched and balanced precariously upon the rubble, and dared look down.

Green mists were coiled around the night, the clouds and flowers and silhouettes of palaces had all been choked away.  The moon herself was invisible, save as a bulbous yellow smudge bleeding behind the emerald sky.  Beneath her, where the rays of moon-glow had once danced, the lake was bubbling and in turmoil, as if its deeps were churned by a great heat.  Strange lights danced over the lake’s surface.  The flowers were no more; the flutes were silenced.

Off in the distance, the marshes had bled forth into the city and made of it a quagmire.  The mighty walls of Sarnath all lay shattered, the brazen gates sundered and tossed aside.  The porcelain houses were leveled, the gardens burned, the lakelets filled not with the moon’s reflections, but with blood.  And in the rubble-strewn streets I could discern the horrible scarlet smears of meat, in many different sizes; these being the death-grounds where men, women and children all alike had been pulverized into gore, as if a Beast of enormous wrath had rampaged through the city and reveled in their slaughter.

As I gazed all about, I wept in disbelief.  I covered my face with both my hands.  A straying gust of wind swirled about me, spraying dead leaves up around my naked legs; and I did raise my head once more.  Far below, where the stairs to the temple height had once been lain, I could see the black figure fast approaching.  He was walking up through the air, feet touching nothing, unhindered by the rubble and not stirring the emerald mist where he had trod.