THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (9 page)

For my Adaya to be untouched, inviolate, I would bury her in secret, and alone.

And so it is that in the night I carried her to the Oasis of Zarzara, three leagues into the desert,
sahra
.  Striding through the chill and wind in solitude, arriving there just ere to sunrise, I prayed thus:  for my Adaya, the afterlife would not be the end of all, but rather a rebirth.

Would then that I knew my destiny.  O Adaya, forgive me.

~

With my spade and my own fingers I did bury her beneath the date palm which offered the sweetest shade, near to the waters of Zarzara.  Her shroud I did well anoint with amber and spice of myrrh, for I knew these sweet scents of eternity were offensive to the digging beasts of the
sahra
.  With layers of fronds and stones each set upon her, I did set her to rest.

She was my beloved, a daughter of Judaea.  Although her ways were ever a mystery to my own, I sought desperately to honor her in the ways of her people.  I knew precious little of her tribe, only what I had heard from merchants in the night, for she rarely spoke of the mother who had died, the father who had forsaken her.  I myself had no religion, no belief.  I was in exile, not only from the people of Sana’a, but also from my own grieving heart.

I no longer knew myself.  The gift of the nepenthe is its own curse as well.

~

Having buried her, I drank of the morning waters, and I did grieve.

I sang my most beautiful song of songs over her grave, and laid there in the shade until exhaustion stole over me.

In falling prey to slumber, I had a precious memory of Adaya return to me.  How before that moment had I never remembered?  Had the veiling of that past torment been a trick of my own wisdom, a nepenthe born not of spice, but of the heart in all its need?

The memory was this:

As a child, first having fled Ghanara, I did see a bleeding woman garbed only in sackcloth and crown of thorn.  The bladesmen of the emporium cried out to the blood-hungering crowd that she was an adulterer.  She was stoned.  In my fascination, the sick and twisted pleasure with which I watched that miserable woman in her suffering, I was not only ashamed of myself, but I was ... what?

As every stone fell, I experienced pleasure.  In the black shadow of myself, that aspect of my spirit which I strive to deny in all of its desires, in the Beast, I was fulfilled.

The woman died gazing across the marketplace, looking into my eyes alone.  Only I would meet her gaze.  To the others, she was not a tragic loss, a woman of exquisite beauty even in death.  To those who had killed her, she was a husk, a depleted vessel unworthy of further thought.

I cried that night, not only for the poor woman and the horror of her killing, but for myself, the damage I had done to my own spirit in taking pleasure in her suffering.

That was the first night in which Adaya had embraced me.

~

Adaya was my lover in dream alone.

I was a boy, and she a virgin.

We never more than touched, but she was and shall be my love forever.

SCROLL XIV

Of the Crimson That Is Desire

(This scroll was uniquely titled thus by John Dee.  From the elaborate script of his pen in this passage, it seems that he was deeply moved here by Al-Azrad’s adoration of Adaya.)

~

(This is the scroll-song, translated into English, which Al-Azrad did compose and sing over the grave of his Adaya.  It is perhaps one of the most haunting passages in
Al Azif
.)

~

Mersiye
(Elegy) ~

The Funereal Song

For the Maiden of Judaea,

O Adaya

~

Ever in her memory,

I am the beloved of the lost.

We dreamed as one,

Echoing thrum of jackal heart,

She was the only,

She is everything.

~

In death, Adaya,

Forever you are mine.

In the Empire

Of the Blackened Mind,

Unto the crest of cavern’s fire,

Yet cradled in nepenthe,

There my maiden breathes.

~

There, in Dreamlands, she embodies

Sheer transparency of starlight.

In Palaces of Nothingness,

From off the twilight’s sculptures

Of fire and of shade,

Gathering my every breath

From star and blossom into song,

Measuring the weft of every moonbeam,

Adaya, O weaver of my dreaming

Turns my lucent soul within her hands.

~

In lingering in the Empire,

She draweth down the moon,

She with spellbound fingers

Twirls the sacred crescent from the sky.

~

Yet unknowing

She is lost, awash in laughter,

There she weighs my spirit’s wane

In a spindling of her fingerprints.

She and I, with songbirds

Glory in the majesty of flight.

~

For she

Is the beauty of the rarity of rain,

The desert misting in rains’ flight,

The crystal lingering of manna on the
hapau
trees.

More truly than the flesh she left behind,

Here she is herself, simplicity,

Wedded sweetly to her imperfection.

~

And beholding me, so she loves,

And so she doth remember love and life,

And so

She is lost to me.

~

Ever in my memory,

O Adaya,

You are the beloved and the lost.

We dreamed as one,

Echoing thrum of jackal heart.

In life, she was the only.

In death, she is everything.

SCROLL XV

The Watcher at the Oasis

Having sung my heart to the body of my beloved, and having slept, I woke with the next sunset to the flurry of wings.  An oasis is not only a sanctuary crafted of sweet waters and cool breezes; it is a place of the birds of passage.  These ever-beautiful creations fill the palms before they endure the fire of the day, coveting the moisture and the shade.  At sunset, they soar across the desert in its chill, lofting on the thermal winds seeking their next horizon.

Yet in waking me that twilight, the cacophony of the birds was not only one of wings, but of cries of alarm.

I drew my
jambiya
and looked all about, fearing bandits or
badawi
grave robbers.  Perhaps, I feared, even the foul Najeed had followed me to render himself as my assassin.  But no.

There was a silhouette of black against the blood-red of the setting sun, its heels set to its haunches, and as it crouched it sniffed the scent of me from the air.  Its snout was of the
wulfen
, a predatory face of canine cast.  It lifted its too-long fingers to the breezes.  The thing was so gaunt, its waist was pinched as narrow as that of a wasp, and then I knew:

My mother, the Shepherdess, had in all her whispers—the desert elegies sung for me as her child—spoken true.  The myths of the Ghuls, the deathless and corpse-eating prowlers of the desert, were no myths at all.

The Watcher at the Oasis, this thing, was a Ghul.  Once more, it scented the moistened air.

The thing did sense me as I lowered my blade in comprehension.  Seeing this, it did not flee, it did not approach.  I believed that it would kill me, and despite my blade I bore no illusions that I could survive such a confrontation.  For this was a Deathless One.  The thing had mastered the desert and hunger and had snapped the chains of death itself.  How could I, not even yet a man, hope to vanquish it?

And so I bowed my head over the grave, and whispered a prayer to be with my Adaya.  It was a blessing, it seemed, to die where her body had been buried by my own hand.

But when I dared to raise my head again, not even the echoes of birdsong were to be heard.  Only the wind.  The Watcher had left me to my love.  The Ghul had gone.

SCROLL XVI

The Temptation of Aharon

After the fulcrum moment of the Watcher at the Oasis, I was reborn.  Not only was I alive, but for the first I had a glimpse of understanding into the truer nature of the worlds.  What some called superstitions:  the Ghuls, who stride the waste and lord over themselves undying?  To my mind, these were proven to be real.

It was not so difficult for me to believe in them.  The Empire of the Blackened Mind, the Otherness, the nightmare of Cthulhu, these were to me facades which despite their own realities had never touched my life of the waking world.  But all of them were real, were they not?  All of them had been experienced not only by myself, but by Akram and Adaya as well.

The Ghul at the oasis had certainly been real and of this earth, and I had beheld its silhouette before the setting of the sun.

I was yet enthralled by the ways of youth, the ways of simplicity.  I had seen, and so what I had seen was true.

~

Of course, the world of grief and exile held its own complexities.

I had sworn that I would never return to Sana’a, the death-place of Adaya and so by my heart accursed.  Yet still I needed food and water to survive.  My shame, in deciding to live on, was to leave Adaya’s grave.  But as I recalled her farewell words to me, in her death and in my dreaming, I found that it was not love alone which dwelled inside me and gave me the breath of life.  Greater than this, there was a curious mask upon the face of Hope.

This mask, I learned, was Hatred.

I desired nothing more than for Adaya’s murderers to die.  But more than this, seeing the Watcher at the Oasis had caused me to question many things.

There are many even among the
Sufi
and the sages who in their heart of hearts truly never believe in miracles, or the horrors of the netherworld.  Comforting themselves with intangible visions of man-gods and lovely angels, they never allow themselves to fear the true Things which crawl amongst the shades, the Things which revel in our horror and long to devour us.

But for myself, cursed by the dreaming of Great Cthulhu, and finding that others knew of the dream’s every detail ere I ever shared of them, I knew that there are many things in this world that are more real than ourselves, more real than the narrow cages of the few things we dare to believe in.

Mortals are sentient beasts, but beasts nonetheless they remain.  We are fools, slaves to desire and pleasure and denial, prey to hunger and relentless in our flight from the truths of cruelty.  In return, those truths care not if we believe in them; they simply are.  And so the sight of the Ghul, although it terrified me, did not cause me to deny it in horror, to loathe it, or to believe that I had fallen into madness.  Rather, it gave me Hope, and the power to remove Hope’s mask and find my destiny.

I would have my revenge upon Adaya’s murderers.

~

I knew then it was possible for the flesh to live beyond the grave, and for a lost Ghul to rise again and return in a flesh which even the desert could not kill.  Could it then not be possible to bring my beloved Adaya back to life?

Even if she were to return as a Ghul, I would love her.  If that were the secret of immortality, then so be it.  I would resurrect her, I would commit the same blasphemies upon myself, and as Ghuls we would live forever.

Are not the desperate hopes of youth so fragile?

~

It is evil, to hope for the beloved’s resurrection against her will.

The desire for another’s eternity is not a weakness, yet it is the most merciless of strengths our hearts remain compelled to understand.  Such desire is a longing for the forbidden, to shatter the mortality of the beloved and to make of her an idol of carven flesh.

Love is not only longing, it is the coveting of more than all that is truly possible for man.

I knew the tales of such blasphemies very well.  Such thoughts were the lure of the Black Pharaoh Nephren-Ka, who in his own oblivion knew all that we desire, and who curses us by giving that wish to us as the most deathly gift of all.  Immortality is a wicked treasure, as dire to give as it is to receive.

But all men wish it, either for their lovers or for themselves.

So do sages set their names into the Blackened Codex of Azathoth; if they do not adore a woman, still they adore the lure of wisdom of the stars.  Those who compel themselves into obsession for ever more of desire are touched upon by the unreal.  Such is the nature of the Empire of the Blackened Mind, consensual longing born of sorrow.

If Ghuls did exist, could I not raise my Adaya?  Could I not beg the Watcher to resurrect her, and then to change me to stand beside her?

Such an innocent I was.

It is evil, to hope for the beloved’s resurrection against her will.

~

Such ruminations filled my mind as I walked back from the oasis through all the shadowless fires of the day.  I found myself, parched and sun-stricken, at the lesser caravansary seven leagues west of Sana’a’s great walls:  the encampment named Jumani-Sab’a, the Place of the Seven Pearls.

There I did meet Aharon the sage.  There was but one caravan there in the high-sun of the day.  Its guards warded me off, hounding me away from the camels all laden with grain and spice.  The merchants, seeing that I was deluded from my hours beneath the sun, gave me a berth of silence and nothing more.  The women made the signs of the horns with their slender hands, and none would speak to me.  But the holy man, Aharon the desert wanderer, rose in his tattered robe and he did fix upon the wanting, the pain, the fire within my eyes.

He alone was kind enough to trade my empty waterskin from the Oasis of Zarzara.  For payment for the sharing of his own water and the sanctuary of his shade, he asked only of me the last of the amber and cinnabar with which I had anointed Adaya’s shroud.  Thus he gave me a full waterskin of his own, and the shadow of his wind-frayed tent, a skeleton of wicker sticks and rags of linen, leaning to and fro upon the sand.