Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time (3 page)

She finished and left to continue her work.

With the passage of time, Sargon died, a mortal death, and passed into legend. The Kingship of Sargon then devolved to his heirs: first, Rimush then Manishtushu and then the so-called God-King, Naram-Sin.

During the reign of Naram-Sin, the nephew of Enheduanna, shattering revolts broke out throughout the whole of the civilized lands of Sumer and Akkad. Shortly before this, I’d been warned in hushed tones by my Mistress that the Gods of Sumer and Akkad were in strife and preparing for battle. I was terrified and shook in awe of this coming apocalypse.

It began when Lugal-Anne, vassal King of Ur, turned against us. Having no respect for the semi-divine being my Mistress now was, he cast her Crown of
En
-Ship off, bid her commit suicide, and then smashed the holy and adored things of the temple. On a day when fire began falling from the sky, we fled with the temple household and our meager possessions, and wept on the hills, tearing our hair and scratching our eyes in grief.

During a blinding storm, on the road to Uruk, I experienced my first vision of Earth’s Gods. I saw mysterious Lady Tiamat, towering in the clouds, engendering disorder and flames and coaxing Lotan, the vile serpentine dragon of many heads from the sea, to hinder our escape with hell-winds, upthrown by his foul, membranous wings.

Weather-beaten, tired and near collapse, we managed to make our escape to Uruk and find exile in the temple of An.

Soon, messengers arrived and said a great army was marching from the Zagros Mountains. Where the army stepped, they informed us, the
mes
, the very Laws that governed in order our cosmos, dissolved. Darkness heaved and took on distorting, palpable form. Once it crossed the Tigres River, Lugal-Anne was seen to join them.

My Mistress, hearing this, was worried.

She’d put up curtains in the Sacred Room of An and, upon hearing the news, she immediately rushed behind them, to pray for the
mes,
that our order might not completely break.

I remember dimly the elaborate words she spoke, but my weak, scribal hands will still attempt to transcribe, albeit poorly, the magnificence I heard. She prayed, “Lady Inanna, hear me, you whose shield is the moon and whose star is Venus. You, whose least simple command cannonades like a streak of gold across the fervent atmosphere. I kneel before you, to pray for the
mes
of this sphere and their continuance, for the harmony, alignment and form they bring. Without them, what will become of the strong, well-built cities? Cities of architectural symmetry and splendour, great altitudinous towers and sylvan gardens, founded under Order and the Laws of Civilization, by the black-haired people so many years ago. People of art and music, workers in words, in metals and gold. These are your people, who built mighty ships and when the ships sailed out, they returned with cargo, laden from remote, mystical lands, for your greater pleasure. Do not let the good people perish, or does my Lady now favour strife over love, darkness over light, unworked rock, chaos, lawlessness, enmity, and discordant sounds? Is this what you want, my Lady? Shall I also break what you brought with your ordering presence?”

She sang all night and, emerging in the morning, she stood before me disheveled and tired-eyed. Moving towards me, she slowly said, “Smenkhkare, it’s Ishme who is coming.”

Chaos reigned at that time.

The King of the Four Quarters of the Earth, Naram-Sin, couldn’t protect us, since he was embroiled in deadly battle with Iphur-Kisi of Kish.

The King of Uruk, Amar-Girida, went to Enheduanna, to supplicate her to sing her beautiful hymns to the Gods, to help Uruk and fight Lugal-Anne and the dread King from the Mountains, Ishme, whom all men called the ‘Creature’. He begged her to summon the Seeder, as she’d once done.

“It’s impossible,” she said.

From a high place, I saw the advance of Lugal-Anne and Ishme’s army. In their march, tremours hit the earth, buildings shook and the sky became dark, bilious and smoky. The army came in spastic motion, coiling and pulsing out of existence. I recall hearing an old priest, holding a bronze sword, yell at the sight, “Now, at the end of all things, let none seek to stop me, as I break free from the Lords of Creation!” Then, running into the temple, he killed himself. Many followed his example. Prescient with defeat and fear, King Amar-Girida let their armies enter the city.

“You are weak and you bring this on us,” the King said. “I will now fight alongside Ur and Kish.”

The city was spared, but we weren’t. Lugal-Anne wouldn’t stop until he’d destroyed the
En
-Priestess and her nephew.

Once the black armies entered, soldiers loyal to my Mistress fought to protect the Temple of An, which was also our fortress. Against the combined might of Ur, Uruk, and the shadow kingdom, however, they were no match. The enemy advanced easily.

Screams of dying men assailed our ears, from all corners, amplified a thousand-fold throughout the enclosed corridors. I carried on me a sword to protect my Mistress. When I entered the Room of An, she looked at me strangely. “It is back, Smenkhkare,” she said. “The Seeder is back.” And then she walked behind the curtains.

As this happened, a soldier hurriedly broke into the room. He implored us to flee. He said the Creature was coming. Realizing his pleadings were useless, he resolved to stay with us to the bitter end.

We stood a few paces from the entrance. Unholy noises of dying men continued to sound the depths of our despair. I stared at the opening, into the dark hallway. Seconds passed, agonizingly slow. Confused war-cries bellowed and I felt every fibre, nerve, and tissue in my body ache. The blackness of the open entrance took on the illusion of a solid tableau, the more I looked at it, and then, out of the blackness, a darker outline began to emerge.

As I saw a cyclopean shape grab the soldier, I was blinded by the man’s viscera and blood, meat and limbs, which sprayed the room. My hand grasped the hilt of my sword tightly, as if to break it, but before I could make a mad, desperate swing, I was on the floor, weaponless. The air itself heaved and swayed to and fro like a beast in the room. The soldier was a grotesquery of pieces and I a hopeless wretch, lying before the towering arc of Ishme.

He stood a monumental shape, hooded and in a long cloak of black, a cloak which seemed to embody more negation, an absence of all light, rather than colour. It twined and slithered around the contours of his body and from its bottom, where legs should have been, instead swirled and twisted outwards massively pink, tentacular limbs, coiling and writhing purposely like heavy pythons. Under the darkness of his hood, I discerned – oh, but how can I explain to you the sadness and horrified wonder I experienced when I saw those large, grey, abnormal lips and engorged, abscessed tongue, or the small, blinkless, couchant, yellow eyes? Hands, swollen and cracked like crevices of grey stone, or the foulness of his smell, which was as if worms were inside, gnawing on his innards?

Carrying a ponderous sword, he proceeded to walk, or glide, fluidly, towards the curtains, his awkward and distended robe flowing and his tentacles leading and searching. As he did this, the hulking shape said, in a voice hoarse and deep, yet, in a manner of articulation recognizably like Ishme’s, “Do not try to stop me, Smenkhkare. I know who and what you are, even if you don’t.”

When he was near the curtains, Enheduanna stepped out and stood defiantly in front of him. “Do not do this thing,” she warned.

Like a wounded animal, Ishme gave a sudden, long-winded moan then, lowering his face, he eased it towards hers. He passed it in her view, so she could scrutinize it. Upset, I saw her contract and then compose herself. Staring at her, he asked, “Am I hideous to you? Is your work hideous to you?”

Perplexed and saddened, she answered, “What do you mean, Ishme?”

He gave another bellow and yelled angrily, “It’s because of what you put in me! You should have let me die, rather than live and suffer this shame!” Then, looking at me, he said, “When I ran away, Smenkhkare, hidden in Nippur, I began to change. A hideous thing, I remained hidden. Ashamed, scorned of men, I fled to the Zagros Mountains and there met a man, who explained to me secret lore passed down from ancient times. He divined that my transformation, because I possessed a part of it, was caused by the Seeder. I killed the man and began my kingdom on the mountains.”

He then turned towards my Mistress. “What lies behind the curtains? If my first cure came from there, then whatever is there can cure me again; isn’t it so? I must see the beast. Then I’ll be a man, again.”

He pushed my Mistress and she struggled to hold him back, saying, “No, Ishme, it can’t be trusted!”

Breaking free of her grasp, he entered the room and, in distress, she followed him.

All this while, I’d tried to help, but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed. I trembled with fear for them both. I exerted and worked myself into a frenzy to move, but it was as if my body were a foreign entity and I an unbodied mite trapped within. I lay on the floor and, after they passed behind the curtains, I willed myself even more desperately to move but to no avail.

“Do not go there, Ishme!” I heard her yell.

He thundered, “Get away from me, sorceress! Move! It’s your fault all that’s happened to me!”

“No, Ishme – do not say that! How could I have known?”

Fumbling noises I heard, a loud bang, and then a body fall. After which, Ishme hollered triumphantly, “There you are! What manner of thing are you? I only want to be human! Speak to me! I’ll make you with my sword!”

Commotion followed after and I heard a great noise A blinding light pierced the curtains. The temple rumbled. I felt a strong wind and then, only Ishme’s voice, growing dimmer and dimmer, roaring, “By Yog-Saduk, the Keeper of the Gates, and Aniburu, the Fearsome Planet, I order you to help me!”

A silence ensued and I started weeping uncontrollably. I couldn’t imagine what had happened behind the curtains. Then my Mistress appeared, bloody and with tears in her eyes, and lowly whispered, “A fissure cracked through space. I saw the cavernous void. Ishme is no more. It has taken him.” Then she collapsed.

My chronicle ends here and, even though there is more I could say, with Ishme’s passing, the story is finished. My Mistress was eventually restored to her temple in Ur and, at long last, she joined Inanna and the Gods in Heaven. When she changed and her eyes became like spindles of flaming fires, and her form in expanse as huge as gigantic cedar trees, I heard her voice filling earth and sky, saying, “Do not fear, Smenkhkare. If there is fear, it’s only in you. I’ll go and look for Ishme and if he still lives, I’ll come and tell you – but the spaces beyond are much vaster than I had imagined.”

Once she left, I never saw her again. By my reckoning, that was over seven hundred years ago.

Whenever I tell my story, men call me mad and a liar, saying no man from Kemet on the Nile can serve in a foreign land, but they don’t know that I wasn’t always known as ‘Smenkhkare’, for I’ve had many different names and sometimes, I confuse them. For I know now more of my mystery. Every one hundred years, I must go to steamy swamps and shed my skin. I make strange, sibilant sounds and, once the process is finished, I emerge a new creature.

I remember in dreams the ancient Lady once saying, “We are all a part of it.” I’ve come to believe I am more so. The mystery of my beginnings I still search out, though I’ve partly convinced myself that I am one of the unwilling eyes of the Seeder from the Stars.

I’ve left Crete and, after centuries of other lives, I’m finally returning to the Land of Two Rivers. Sumer and Akkad are dust and gone, and I travel as a merchant to Babylon. I’ll bury this papyrus scroll. If, in the aeons to come, I don’t forget, I’ll dig it up again when the time is right and remember.

I’ll remember Ishme, poor Ishme, and the God-Woman, and what mysteries happened, what mysteries I lived and what mysteries lay behind the forbidden curtains. What really happened? I believe only two on earth have ever known – and one is dead.

Julio Toro San
Martin
lives and was raised in Toronto, Canada, but was born in Chile. His only other short story published to date was in
Innsmouth Free Press
Issue #5. He hopes, barring his slow writing, to eventually write (and get published) in every conceivable short story genre and subgenre before embarking on writing a novel ... or maybe not. Maybe he’ll write a play instead.

The author speaks:
Reading about the Sumerians and Akkadians in the “cradle of civilization”, I became interested in their idea of order, or the
mes
, and how, if these things fell apart, for them I imagined it implied there would be chaos. What can be more Lovecraftian than that? And Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon the Great and one of the first writers (if not the first) known by name, can there be anything for a writer more interesting than her as a subject for a story?
Lovecraft’s short story “The Other Gods” was one of his first stories I ever read. I wrote my story as a sort of companion piece to it, since, much as I’ve been able to tell, as an influence on other writers, it lies pretty much like the wastes of Kadath, cold and alone. I didn’t strive for 100 percent consistency between the two, though, and also, Enheduanna, beloved of Earth’s Gods, is more fortunate in her story than Barzai the Wise is in his. Another influence may be a certain story by Clark Ashton Smith, which may contain a hint as to who or what The Seeder from the Stars really is. But maybe not. And perhaps Smenkhkare is the same as that mysterious pharaoh from Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty. But maybe not. I wrote this story in a cloud of agnosticism and unreliability. Borges was also an influence.

DEUS EX MACHINA

Nathaniel Katz

E
very religion, no matter how supposedly beneficent, has exclusion at its heart. Did you think Dionysus an exception? Are you that naive, brothers? Every one of our secret society was an outcast of Dionysus. We were not wanted by your gods, but we refused to be playthings, compliantly knocked aside at our masters’ whims.

Don’t bother trying to apportion individual measures of guilt. All the members did their part. We all read and critiqued the script; we all helped compose the rituals and invocations. We all disseminated those occult texts so frowned upon by your j ealous gods. We were roles, instruments, nothing more. The Playwright wrote our drama, wrote what became your Tragedy. The Merchant funded us. The –

Me? You want to know who
I
was? I was the Actor. But you knew that, already.

We were one of the last in the festival, that celebration of accursed Dionysus, and we were well aware of the public’s expectations. In addition to being blasphemers, we were also talented men of the stage, you see, and we sat in that open-air theater and looked upon the others as the crowd whispered our names. Watched satyrs, summoned, prancing upon the platform. Saw those gods that we’d sworn against appear and descend to the stage, the mortal plain, from that great, behind-the-scenes machine, that Crane, towering so close to us.

The clay eyes of the gods were terrible. To look upon them and plot such things ....

But we persevered. We stared into their masked faces and we did not look away.

The Traitor was not in attendance and you will not find her. She slipped through Dionysus’s clutching fingers, so what hope have you mortals? She used to be one of those maenad followers of Dionysus, a member of that most revered circle of that most sacred cult.

Or did you think those followers of Dionysus, those maenads, willing? They are
deceived
and
bound,
fellow citizens! Open your eyes! You have allowed the gods to shape your perceptions, to shape your thoughts and your world. And now you try to claim that you follow them freely. How blinkered you are, my brothers. Those maenads, those
raving ones
, as you call them, are attached to Dionysus, pleasure and instinctual abandon their chains, even as their will is put to the sword by that god’s base nature.

But enough of the Traitor. She escaped, she helped us, and that is all you will ever know of her. Torture me, if you must. Torture all of us. We can tell you no more because we know no more.

The play that we produced would have been the crown of any other life. You leaned forward to see better; you watched, rapt, as we strode upon the stage. Our dialogue shaped your reality. Seduced from your sacrosanct paths, you were plunged into our drama.

Do you know what I hate about the customs of our drama, fellow citizens, judging public? I hate the endings of our plays. We have managed to make
life
into
art,
to render our own souls upon the stage, and learn from our flaws and virtues. And then, time after time, we ruin it.

I have wept at the creations of Euripides. And then, as his plays draw to a close, he deprives us of resolution. He turns away from the humanity that he has created and, instead of finding mortal solutions to mortal problems, invokes the divine.

It is
delusion
; can’t you see that? The gods do not intervene! The gods do not care! The gods merely
dissemble
.

Time after time, they appear on stage, force-feed us those
damned
lies, try to comfort us by their presence, and tie those messy strings of life into a pretty bow with which to adorn their wretched amorality.

It disgusts me.

When I descended to the stage, lowered by the Crane, did you think I was one of them? A god as all the other actors had so briefly become?

I remember little of what followed: of striding forward, hands outstretched; of our Chorus’ suicide, of their sacrifice; of the words spoken as they drove those daggers into their hearts.

I remember little of it, but the evidence is all around me in the toppled altars, the burned buildings, the slain priests.

We made a deal with an Entity. It has no name. We do not know what it is.

We released a hunter among the flock.

We killed your gods, fellow citizens. That Being that rode my flesh like the driver steers the carriage; that Being that strode to masked Dionysus watching our plays and drove a blade through his neck to see that all-too-mortal blood pour out;
that Being
was our prayers given physical shape, a god-killer born of invocation and drama on holy ground.

It is not gone, that Being that we summoned. I woke up, as you all know, memory-less and dying in the midst of the carnage, but it did not go back to sleep. It has been released.

It will not sleep again until the gods are dead, the world changed forever.

We have liberated you, even if you are too faith-smitten to see it.

Mortals – we give you the reigns to your world!

Do with us what you will.

Nathaniel Katz
blogs about genre fiction at The Hat Rack (
evilhat.blogspot.com
). This is his first published work of fiction.

The author speaks:
In Ancient Greece, the gods were like regular people – just stronger, faster, smarter, braver, more beautiful, and long-lasting. During plays, performed as rituals during the Celebration of Dionysus, the gods were thought to actually walk the stage in the body of the actor. The actors-cum-deities would be mechanically lowered into the scene and resolve the characters’ dilemmas – the literal origins of the term ‘
Deus ex Machina
’. Which, for a Lovecraft-themed anthology, begs the question: what else might be coming down?