Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred (24 page)

Above these numbers are golden plates little larger than the flat of the hand, which have been hammered and raised by the goldsmith’s art to present scenes containing fantastic figures in meaningful display, so that each plate conveys a lesson that is composed not of words, but of signs or emblems. These images are unlike any other representations that exist in the world, and are known only to those who have walked the pillared hall, for no hint of their existence has ever been whispered beyond the gate of the Sphinx. Concerning the images upon the plates, it is both unlawful and imprudent to write. Let it only be revealed that some of the figures are human, others older than our race.

At the far end of the chamber of pillars is a small door of cedar wood without adornment. A priest of Nyarlathotep stands vigilant beside it, and will only admit one who can give the sacred sign of that order with his hand. The slightest hesitation or error in presenting the sign results in death, for upon the right index finger of the priest is a small lance dipped in the venom of the black scorpion of the wastes, the merest drop of which in the blood causes putrefaction and death within a span of moments. The scorpion is one of the creations of Nyarlathotep, who placed it upon the world for his pleasure; over the ages its form has divided and changed, and the potency of its venom has diminished, but the black scorpion of the wastes is unchanged from its making by the Chaos That Creeps, and its venom is as it was in the old times.

The priests of Nyarlathotep who use this place of power go robed and hooded in black, and keep their faces wrapped in a veil of black silk in imitation of their master, who wears these garments when he walks abroad across the world beneath the moon. They can see outward well enough through the silk, but their faces cannot be identified by any who look upon them, and they seldom speak but communicate with each other by means of elaborate gestures that are to them a language. They enter veiled and depart veiled, so that none knows the identity of the man who stands beside him.

The chamber beyond is large and square. In its center rests a smaller copy of the Sphinx in black stone, exact in all its details except that its head is not that of Kephren but of Nyarlathotep. It stares down upon the man entering through the door of cedar as though affronted by his presence, and the expression upon its face, if this word may be rightly applied to describe its visage, is sardonic and malignant, though without a trace of human features that would render its expression familiar. The priests indicate with their language of signs that it shows the true liniments of the great Sphinx before they became eroded by the sands of ages and then cut away at the command of Kephren.

The face cannot be described in any human tongue, for our race possesses no words adequate to the task; let it suffice to write that it is somewhat like the face of the god Set, though depictions of that god are but a faint shadow of the original image upon which they were based. The images of Set fail to capture the malignant horror of the face upon the smaller Sphinx, or the sense that it is aware and watchful, or its expression of supreme contempt. Before its gaze the priests prostrate themselves in worship, first gashing their arms with knives in the belief that the letting of human blood is welcomed by their god. In consequence the floor of the chamber before the statue is stained with blood, and though it is washed daily, it can never be made wholly clean.

Leading away from this place of worship is a broad corridor in the wall behind the idol, and set in its sides are other passageways that open into chambers filled with mummies that have been stolen from the royal tombs of Egypt. Not only the kings and queens are present in these chambers, but their children and their relations by blood. When tomb raiders ignorant of the value of the mumia of kings discovered the burial places of the royal dead, they took the gold and other precious things the tombs contained and left the corpses as things of no value; but to the priests of Nyarlathotep, who followed their footsteps unseen and unheard, it was the mummies that were precious, and for the gold they cared nothing, for gold is a substance of this world, but the corpse is a thing of the next world.

There are no greater necromancers upon the earth than the priests of this cult. Any traveler seeking the study of necromancy must come to the Sphinx, or his education is forever incomplete. Admission is difficult to obtain, but with sufficient proofs of skill, and the winning of the trust of those who deal in the marketplace for the cult, it can be achieved, but only by binding the soul in service to Nyarlathotep and his dark works. All who enter the gate of the Sphinx bear the mark of Nyarlathotep upon their bodies, where it remains until death, and indeed endures beyond death, for it can never be expunged. What is revealed in these pages is forbidden, and it remains to be tried whether the power of the Chaos That Creeps can reach across the sands from Giza to Damascus to strike down the writer who has betrayed his oath.

he necromancers of Giza concern themselves not with the corpses of common men, but only employ those of royal blood or wizards; for the nobles when revived and made to talk may be able to describe the hiding places of rare books and gold buried in the earth, and the wizards to teach their methods, although oftentimes it happens that they are reluctant to reveal their secrets and must be encouraged with fire and blade. In this way, the cult has become both wealthy with ancient treasures and the repository of wisdom lost to the world. They are not to be trifled with, for their power and their agents reach to distant lands, so that a man marked for death in their council is foredoomed.

When a corpse is chosen for resurrection, it is first cut into parts of convenient size and boiled in clean water in a large copper kettle for a full day and night, and during this time the kettle is constantly stirred with a long wooden ladle to prevent the settling of substances to the bottom. The linen wrappings also are placed in the pot along with the flesh, for they contain a measure of the essential salts which the process is designed to extract. The mumia is softened and made fluid by the heat, so that it gradually becomes liquefied and rises to the top of the water. The acolyte tending the pot draws it off periodically using a small silver spoon and stores it in a stone vessel for future purposes.

At the end of the initial boiling, after all the mumia has risen and been skimmed from the pot, the linen strips that bind the corpse are taken out of the pot clean and white, like newly washed laundry, and discarded. The fire is allowed to burn to embers so that the heat is reduced, and an elixir is added to the water that has the property of softening and dissolving bone, teeth, nails, and hair. In this way the corpse is liquefied. When this has been accomplished the fire is fed with wood and made hot again, and the water in the pot, which has already been greatly reduced by these processes, is allowed to boil completely away.

What remains in the bottom of the kettle is a white, crystalline material of an amount that may be carried on the palms of two hands. The priests of Nyarlathotep scrape this from the kettle, using utmost care to remove the last trace, and pound it to uniform fineness in a mortar of rock crystal, using a crystal pestle. The white powder resulting from this operation contains the essential salts of the man or woman whose corpse was boiled, and it is from this powder that the living body may be reconstituted and made to serve as a house for the soul, which is called back into its former flesh by words of power. The salts may be kept for many years in a sealed vessel without losing their potency. There is a chamber in the catacombs beneath the Sphinx that contains nothing but shelves of bottles, each filled with the essential salts of a human being.

A man resurrected from his salts is in every respect as he was at the end of his life, save that the purification process of the priests removes from his renewed flesh the disease or injury that caused his death. It is a great shock to the soul to tear it back from its repose and reanimate it, and in consequence the resurrected are often insane, and scream ceaselessly or dash themselves into the walls, making it necessary to restrain them for questioning. Interrogation can take weeks, for the dead do not give up their secrets easily, and when the corpse used is old, its language may sound strange to modern ears, and contain many uncouth words that have passed from use and memory. The priests are expert in the lost dialects of their ancestors and skilled in all the arts of torture, so that little impedes their purposes except complete madness or a contamination of the salts.

When the salts are contaminated with the essence of other living things, as sometimes happens when, unknown to the priests, the mummy has been the breeding place of beetles, mice, or other vermin, the revitalization of the salts produces a monster that is partly man and partly whatever gnawed his corpse. Monsters bred in this manner seldom prove reliable sources of information. When the priests discover that they lack the faculty of speech, or that their speech is crazed and bestial, they commonly destroy them without further interrogation, for though the memory of the man may remain intact, the verminous parts of his reanimated nature inhibit its expression.

Wizards are treated with greater care, for in their hands, eyes, and tongues is the ability to project death on those who call them from their tombs. As a consequence, when the salts of a known wizard are reanimated, the first act of the priests is to put out his eyes with an iron pick, bind his hands into immoveable gloves of heavy leather, and gag his mouth. When answers are demanded of the wizard, the gag is momentarily removed, but a knife is held to his throat while he speaks, and a single false word results in his return to the grave. It is perilous to interrogate a wizard, and in spite of all these precautions, unfortunate consequences have resulted from the attempt.

A story is told among the younger acolytes of the cult, who have not yet learned the virtue of discretion, concerning the reanimation of the wizard Haptanebal, who was great above the Cataracts before the union of the two Egypts. Long ago his corpse was carried to Giza and laid to rest beneath the Sphinx, but over the years its identity was forgotten, until it became confused with the body of a scribe of the royal court and underwent reanimation without the usual safeguards employed for wizards. The story tells that five of the priests were consumed by spontaneous fire in their bodies before the sixth, who quite by chance was fortunate enough to be standing behind the wizard and beyond the range of his sight, succeeded in killing him with a sword.

The danger in reanimating a potent wizard is always great, but equally great are the prizes that may be wrung from him by skilled interrogators prepared in advance for the risks and resolute of heart. Wizards often take their most precious secrets of magic into the tomb, for they are unable to trust such powers with other men, even those they accept as their disciples or their own sons. By portioning out their wisdom with care, wizards have remained alive beneath the Sphinx for several years, and even been accorded a limited measure of freedom when they have won the partial trust of the priests, who remain ever watchful against deception. However, they are never allowed to leave the catacombs, for their skills are too potent to release on our age, which has forgotten the greatest effects of magic.