THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (8 page)

The Dreamlands are of wonder, and beauty, but there is horror there as well.  And it is known to me now that if one should meet with horror and believe that they have died within the Dreamlands, that the body within the Real will die as well.

Thus are the two worlds, ours and the Real of Otherness, entwined.

In dreaming together, Adaya and I came to understand that we could walk as one sharer within the Lands of Dream.  And, upon our waking, we would remember all the glories we had beheld.  There, we dreamed as one.

But the Lands of Dream carry a graver price, for they are born not only of the dreamers’ shared and mingled wonderment, but also of our primal fears.  There are terrors in the Lands of Dream to which only Cthulhu would loom as a greater abomination.  These nightmares reside within us in an ancestral sharing of elder memory, a core of ourselves where those who gave birth to our sires’ sires left their terrors in an eternal imprint upon our souls.  These loathsome dreads are made manifest against our will, the reflection of our mortal dread:  the ultimate fear of Death.

And in learning all of this, of the beauty and the nightmare which swirl as one in the Lands of Dream, I now do name this Otherness the Empire of the Blackened Mind.

~

There was a time when I did believe that I could dream my dear Adaya back to life.  I learned in my years of wandering the wasteland that even in dreams, the dead are lost to us.  But still, there are domains of majesty in dream, there in the unearthly kingdoms to behold.

For dreams are memories of moments which never happened.  This is not to say that dreams are false, no.  The Lands of Dream shift in tidal oneness with the rhythms of the earth, yet these eternal lands are never bound by the laws of Time.  In architecture and structure, in the ways of their peoples and the temples which they have raised, the Empire is centuries behind our own.  It is a reflection of our memory which never was, our age of Matriarchs, our golden age.  There, some shards of the ancient Myth of the Gilded Waters do live and breathe in truth.

For there are indeed glorious peoples within the Empire of the Blackened Mind who dwelleth there alone, who when they themselves dream, dream of our own reality as their fantasy.  Too, there are dreamers who are native to the Real, who in crossing in their sleep into the Empire’s domain know and find themselves to be journeyers in a land which never was, and yet which is enthroned upon the True, an
aspect
of reality, as a facet is but one fragile mote of a shining jewel.  Well it must be remembered that a death in the believed Dreamlands is a death of the dreamer’s flesh.  The body cannot linger when the mind it cages hath died in horror.  As the mind dieth elsewhere, the body crumbles here.  All of these miracles of beauty and of dread are unified, enmeshed in the riddling kingdoms of the Empire of the Blackened Mind.

Yet what of such glories, when the end is yet to come regardless of our will?  All of these truths remain as the futile wisdom of a stranger I have now become, a mad hermit of the alleys of Damascus, aged and alone.

I return to my storied yesterday.

~

To my youthful hope, to be with my Adaya once again, it seemed that in dream it might well be possible for we two to live forever.  Yet how then would I dream of my Adaya, when she herself had perished?

As wheels of sand, ever churning, flow the lingering paradoxes of the Empire of Sleep.

The riddle which vexed me was my own belief in her oblivion.  In dreaming, I knew that the Empire was real, and so it was.  Yet there I also knew that my Adaya was dead.  How could I divide my mind, so that I believed in the Empire of the Blackened Mind, while forgetting that I believed in the death of my Adaya?  That paradox was the secret.  If I could forget her unreality, she would become real within the Dreamlands.  If only I could impel myself to disbelieve Adaya’s death, and I did dream of her alive … in the Empire,
would
she live again?

I believed.  But my doubts could not be excoriated.  I tormented myself in sleep, dreaming of her always but forever unable to make her real.  In my nightmares she did die again, a thousand times and more.

~

There was a way.  The sages knew, the stories I had sung and whispered mocked me with their possibilities.

There is a word of power among the Greeks, and that is
nepenthe
.  Nepenthe is a willful forgetting of the utmost essence of the self.  It is not oblivion, but rather a divine revelation in which the tortured aspects of the elder self are shed, as are the ashes of the Phoenix; and so the greater, ever-younger self is thus reborn.

In forgetting the man, the soul becomes the child.

In centuries past, nepenthe was a gift of spice wine, or the envenomed vapors which rose from the cavern-clefts of oracles.  The mysteries of Eleusis did coil round the worship of nepenthe, and the Hierophants of Arcadia knew its truth.  But in Sana’a and my own century, there was known to me one dark gift only which came from the Utter East, and that is the violet frankincense.  That alone, the stories told me, was the last gateway to nepenthe in this age.

Frankincense in and of itself is but a spice.  But the violet strain of this spice is a crystallized corruption of itself.  By the mad, it is whispered that the
violet
spice is born of the fungal leavings of the
Yuggothai
, those astral stalkers which are known as the Mi-Go.  Of these sagacious and unearthly Things, the Fungi Who Stride the Ice, I will speak elsewhere.  But my first understanding of the treasures born of their waste was the violet frankincense, the spice kissed with their leavings.

This spice was found only rarely in the east gate caravansary of Sana’a.  But I was the jackal of that city’s secrets.  I gave myself, body and soul, to a sallow merchant who demanded
me
as his price for the frankincense of the Yuggothai.  And this I paid.  There in the caravansary, seven nights after Adaya’s death, I did purchase a dram of this precious spice, this violet liquid crystal.

Verily, it is worth ever more than its weight in gold.

For the violet, in truth, when burned and breathed as smoke brings in truth the sacred nepenthe of ages old.  I sat beneath a rooftop tent, and burned the frankincense in the night.  There, in the cloying and sugar cloud of its burning, this spice did bring me into the Lands of Dream.

~

Behold, the dream rendered by the mists of Yuggothai:

I dreamed more vividly than ever in my life.  I balanced upon the border of the Dreamlands, even as my entranced eyes still were closing.  There in the Otherness I did believe, and an illusory palace rose all about me.  As I strode from courtyard to courtyard, the palace became the Real.  This was the dark gift of the spice:  I forgot all of my sorrows, and so too did I forget that Adaya had died beneath a blade.

Nepenthe.

I did desire her, and I did dream of her.  And there, adrift in my grief and ecstasy, lost in the Palace of Nothingness, the slain Adaya did rise and come to me.

My soul could not question the impossibility of her presence, for it sang with an all-consuming joy.

So did I find myself enraptured.  From out of the courtyard gardens she glided to me, we touched hands.  We kissed, and we did lay together as never we had in life.

Having loved her I did rise, and hand in hand we walked the halls of the endless and ivory palace.

She was silent, she a princess, and I her inamorato.  Guided by my desire, she flowed with me neath cascades of birdsong and currents of leaf-shadow, out of the last courtyard and through to the endless halls, until we two discovered an ornate stair, which led down into the palace’s beguiling under-realm of emerald and twilight.

Seventy were the steps we descended in our bliss.  The coolness of shadow filtered through the lingering echoes cast in wild-song by the birds, yet soaring far above.  By the time she and I came to alight upon the twentieth step descending, the air began to warm; and we sensed a burning far below.

The staircase spiraled ever down, and flickering shadows of firelight began to dance upon the alabaster walls.  Gusts of heat turned the moisture of the air into a mist.

With doubt and trepidation, Adaya did falter.  I looked back to her upon the higher stair, and tears shone in her eyes.

Did she understand that she had died?  At that moment, in the nepenthe, I myself did not remember she was gone.  And so she was there, caged in my fever dream.

She said nothing; I kissed her brow, and upon my gentle insistence she did stir and acquiesce.  So by the draw of one trembling hand, I did lead her further down.

Scarlet radiance flared and the heat washed over us.  We stepped into a grotto encircled with licks of flame, an ancient polished cavern filled with an ever-reflecting glory of shadows and of light.  The little fires did leap from narrow fissures jettied all along the cavern’s walls.  And in the midst of that cave of eld there stood two priests from the land of Khom, arrayed in ochre robes and cloth of gold.

They raised their heads, not in the least dismayed then to behold me.  They were
pshent
-bearded in the manner of Egyptians:  not as the merchants and bladesmen are in my day, but rather by the arts of ancient Khom herself, the dead realm of the Pharaoh.  Ringlets of gold—and translucent crystals, each hollow stone filled with water—did ring their beards.  These two men were of that race, the Khomites, dark and wise:  their kohl-rimmed eyes were ancient, and in regarding me their eyes reflected every fire.

Adaya in fear did quail from them, and weep.

And as I comforted her, the younger of these two ancient ones did say to me, “Welcome, one who names himself as Abd.  I am Nasht.”

And the elder, speaking in solemn cant, “I am Kaman-Thah.”

I greeted them, and stated that my beloved and I desired to enter the Eden-lost, the enchanted cedar forest of Huwawa.

And Nasht nodded to me, and as he turned his hand upon the air, the flames of the farther cavern wall relented.  There was revealed an ornate portal, Arabesque swirlings of hollowed stone carved from the cavern itself to frame another descending stair.

And I began to cross the cavern in silent joy, for I knew that the Eden-lost did await me far below, a lush netherworld of wonders.  There I would find the deeper gate which opens upon the forest of our dreams.

Yet Adaya would not follow me.  As I turned to lift her—for she now was curled in grief upon the floor—Kaman-Thah did say to me:  “You, Abd can pass, for you are worthy.”

I replied—for the nature of nepenthe is to cloud the memory, and yet to glory in its mist—“Worthy?  There is my father’s darkness in me, and I do revel in it.  I beneath his Fate may be to lie accursed as a murderer, I do not remember.  I am not pure.”

And Kaman-Thah nodded, pleased yet saddened.  He did say, “There is a terrible darkness in you, child.  This is true.  The nature of your soul-shadow you have now forgotten, and so on a drift of spice have you come to me.  But the Dreamlands are meant not for the pure, but rather for those who believe in both the terrible and beautiful as one.  Of all the souls of your city and the spirits of your age, beloved Abd, you are he.”

I was well satisfied.  I
was
worthy.  I was.  I would venture on, I would conquer the daemon Huwawa who guarded immortality.  I would have and rule my Eden-lost, my Kingdom of Nothing.  And so I compelled Adaya to rise, and I enfolded her.

Yet Nasht did say to me, “To the Gates of Deeper Slumber, you alone may pass.  The Forest Enchanted and all the lands which lie beyond will welcome you.  But this bereaved one, this grieving maiden?  She cannot go forth with you.”

And swallowing my rage, I asked, “Why not?”

And Nasht replied, “Because she is not truly here, and you only dream of her.”

Kaman-Thah did say, “She is with death.  She is lost to you.”

And I said, “But this is the threshold to the Otherness of the Real.  Here, the impossible shall reign.  These are the Lands of Dream.”

And Nasht replied, “So they are.  But this moment and this place
are
real in themselves, and in all of the realities, she is dead.  Adaya is not here of her own will, child, but rather solely of your own.”

I gazed into the eyes of Adaya, and she did kiss me.  She did speak then in my dream, for the first and only time.  She said unto me, “Al-Azrad, ever do I love you.  Know this, remember this if nothing else upon your waking.  I beg of you, set me free.  Give me the peace of death.  Live your life, learn the secrets of the Abyss which you must know; and when the end of your time is nigh, release yourself, and so in eternity will you come to me.”

And as I wept and touched the ringlets of her braided hair, Adaya faded from my embrace.

I woke with the same tears upon my face which I had cried in the fiery cavern of Nasht and Kaman-Thah.  I cried out her name, yet I was upon the rooftop in benighted Sana’a, alone.

The smoke of the earlier hours yet lingered, but the crystals of the violet frankincense were ashes.  Many a year would pass before I ever found such crystals to be my treasures once again.

And never since that night have I dreamt of my Adaya again, despite my fervent wishes every night to do so.

SCROLL XIII

The Lament of the Dead

Despite the lingering mercies of the heat and the aridity of high Sana’a, the body of my Adaya had begun to render itself unto the dust.  I extracted from her mouth one tooth, for that is the way of my people when the beloved must be buried.

I wrapped her then in linens and I sealed her shroud with beast-glue of melted fat.  I stroked a veil of cinnabar over her hidden face, shaping it in the symbol of the moon.

My love.

Having done this, in deepest night, I left Sana’a with her enshrouded body.  I forsook the city at that time, wanting nothing more to do with it or its people; and I swore that my beloved’s body would forever remain untouched.  For to one such as myself who knew black secrets, there were tales whispered that those corpses which were buried in Al Adim—the canyon hollow, the grave-ravine beyond that city’s black western gate—were blasphemed by treasure hunters, by necromancers, and worse.