Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
And at last, never again truly looking at me, my father ceased his discourse.
They called it a suicide, which of course it was, born of my mother's death, which is true. And policemen came. They took my father's books. The bottles. The obsidian skull with the third eye bored in its side...
I don't doubt that these men could tell me more stories, if drunk enough, of the things they have seen and collected in my hometown. For there is a force a work in Arkham, at work even when its cults have been arrested or driven out or perhaps even secretly killed. These men are our guardians. Their backs are walls...albeit flimsy ones. But the only ones we have.
I graduate this year from the academy, myself. And I will return to live, and serve, in Arkham.
I will do this for my parents.
And around my neck, like some sheriff's badge, I will wear the necklace my father gave me...the stone disk, with the star, with the eye, and the flame at its center.
The Face of Baphomet
“Some
say the worshiped image represented the face of Mohammed,” said Rosier. “Others said that it was the face of a child, or a bearded man. This last might be why there are those today who believe it was, in fact, the Shroud of Turin the Templars were secretly revering.”
“Interesting,” muttered d’Urberville, though he did not reveal that he had heard the theory before.
D’Urberville’s host, Basil Rosier, paced across the room holding his glass of wine before him like a candle. It was the oldest wine that had ever touched d’Urberville’s palate, a treasure in itself. The bottle had come from an extensive collection of similarly ancient vessels, their glass cloudy under cataracts of dust. The wine collection was on the opposite end of these passages and rooms beneath Rosier’s manor-house. The subterranean room they currently occupied was the largest of these chambers. The ceiling was low, the walls of dark stone, but the air was not damp. It was kept diligently dry, so as to preserve the chamber’s varied contents.
Rosier went on in the lofty tones of an historian lecturing a novice. “Some said this enshrined, mysterious object was the body of a hermaphrodite, or a phallus.”
D’Urberville could not help but interrupt his host, though he kept his anger concealed. “The enemies of the Templars were obviously just trying to shock the Pope with such ideas.”
“Were they?” Having reached the far wall, Rosier turned about, his smile a curved scimitar. “Or did they sense something closer to the truth? There’s a pattern here. A phallus is a fertility symbol – naturally. Hermaphrodites have both sets of genitalia. ‘Baphomet’, the enemies of the Knights Templar called the image they worshiped. ‘The Golden Calf’, they called Baphomet. Baphomet is most commonly thought of as a horned demonic visage. I submit that the Golden Calf, the terrible Baphomet, was actually more akin to the Horned God of Celtic beliefs – a fertility god – than to the Satanic entity our good Pope Clement the Fifth envisioned.”
“Why,” d’Urberville asked quietly, even as he seethed behind his composed, even features, “would an order of disciplined warrior monks, charged with guarding the Holy Sepulcher of Solomon, having taken vows of poverty, chastity and humility, come to worship some heathen fertility idol?”
“They were in Holy Lands. A totally alien, exotic culture. They were exposed to strange
things... and as insular a group as they were, strange, uh...habits...may have fermented amongst them.”
“Prostrating themselves before some mysterious head that spoke to them and granted them strange powers? Rites where they spat three times on an image of
Christ
? Orgies of sodomy? Rituals where they stripped and kissed each other at the base of the spine, then on the navel, then on the lips?”
“You have to look no further than the college fraternities of your own United States, Mr.
d’Urberville, to see how strange rites evolve within a secret society. And you have to look no further than your country’s recent spate of priests charged with child molestation, rape and homosexuality, to see how a man who has taken a vow of chastity can delude himself into thinking he is still a proud servant of God, even as he is slipping his vows off with his cassock.”
D’Urberville felt the blood drain from his body as surely as if it were absorbed through his feet into the cold stone floor. And he saw that bright scimitar in Rosier’s face widen, edging past its expression of pompous showing-off to one of malicious delight. Yes, no matter how much d’Urberville had sought to hide his feelings, the older man had sniffed them out and was
toying with them, savoring the taste of d’Urberville’s anger, as he had savored the dusty wine.
“There are bad priests, as there are bad policemen, bad teachers, bad parents, bad politicians,” d’Urberville replied, his voice as cold as his bloodless flesh. “But I contend that the Knights Templar were not bad men. Their only sin was that they amassed too much wealth in the Holy Lands, too much power. The Pope was jealous, intimidated. All the charges against these brave men – men dedicated to lives of charity, to Christ -- were false. They were arrested, tortured and burned for no good, honest reason. They were martyrs.”
Rosier sniffed his wine, tasted it, smacked his lips and then casually asked his American guest, “Tell me, d’Urberville, are you a Freemason?”
“No.”
“I thought you might be of the order of Freemasons who have named themselves after the Knights Templar.”
“I am not a Freemason.”
That great grin, again. “But you
are
a d’Urberville, aren’t you? That’s an old name. It has the clashing metallic ring of the Crusades to it.” Rosier gestured around him at the furnishings and exhibits of this, his own buried museum, as secret a place as any Templar shrine. “I know old things.”
D’Urberville set his wine glass down on the edge of a table. As he straightened, meeting his host’s sparkling eyes squarely, he confessed, “My family is descended from one of the hundred and forty knights burned by the order of Pope Clement.”
“I see. So your great interest in the Templars, and your emotional investment in their reputation after nearly seven centuries, is well justified. Though I find it curious that any of those poor men who were burned alive would have left descendants...having taken a vow of chastity, as you point out.”
D’Urberville thought Rosier might chuckle smugly then. Both seemed to hold themselves back, in the interest of good manners. “My father is the descendant of a brother of the knight of whom I speak. But his blood is still in my veins, just as much, however it found its way to me.”
“And you should be proud. I understand that. And angry, as well. It wouldn’t be the last time innocents were sacrificed, victims of false charges. Just look at your country’s Salem case. Appalling.” Rosier made an agonized face of sad disgust. “However, I myself feel that there is a truth to the legend of Baphomet. In fact, I know there is. And if you didn’t believe there was something to learn of these truths, why did you seek me out? You heard I had certain relics in my possession, did you not?”
“Yes. But that doesn’t insure their authenticity. Even the Shroud is a brilliant and convincing fake, I'm sorry to say.”
“Ah...but you’re still curious to see my little...idol.”
“As I would be curious to see a Holy Grail or an Ark of the Covenant. Much as I would totally disbelieve in their authenticity.”
“You’re a man of little faith.”
“I'm a former priest,” d’Urberville retorted, his voice for the first time conveying the anger he felt.
Rosier looked shocked and dismayed, though d’Urberville couldn’t be sure if his exaggerated expression was a fake. “Oh, I’m sorry to insult you, my friend. Now I see your interest more clearly yet. But if it’s not too rude...
former
priest?”
There was no longer need for – and d’Urberville had no more patience with – secrecy. “Yes. I’m no longer a priest. My superiors felt that I was too...obsessive, perhaps...about certain subjects. That I needed more discipline. But it was my own decision that I was unsuitable to go on. A regrettable decision. But I am not one of your perverse, deluded priests, Mr. Rosier. I never broke my vow of chastity while a priest and in fact I haven’t broken it yet. I’m not a priest any more but I still uphold the principles to which I made vows, just as my ancestor did.”
“You vowed to humility, then, as he did? But you have a lot of family pride, for all that.”
“May I see this relic you supposedly own, or not?” d’Urberville snapped.
Rosier looked distressed again. “Please, Mr. d’Urberville, don’t be so rude. Do you know I seldom allow anyone to see this relic, let alone even enter this room? Once National Geographic magazine learned of the relic in question, through a former friend of mine, and offered to pay me for an interview and photographs of said relic. I denied them access. I have never even allowed anyone to photograph it, in fact, or even sketch it...to reproduce the image of Baphomet in any way, just as the face of Mohammed is not to be reproduced. Not that Baphomet is, after all, Mohammed.”
Rosier was right in one thing: d’Urberville had to swallow his pride. He forced his voice back to civil tones, cooled the molten heat out of his gaze. He took up his glass again, the act of sipping wine helping him to regain his composure. “I apologize for my behavior. I’m honored and appreciative that you would agree to let me see the idol.”
Rosier came to the younger man’s side and squeezed his arm like a dear comrade. “Oh, apology accepted. Come now, let’s have our look, shall we? Let your eyes take in what no one in your family has viewed for over seven hundred years.”
D'Urberville allowed his host to guide him across the chamber. “Where did you acquire this thing?”
“In the Middle East. I can’t reveal more, except for this: I also acquired a rare book from the same source, a book written many years before the Templars, in the eighth century in Damascus by a man called Abdul Alhazred. It was this book that helped me understand and identify the countenance of Baphomet. The book is called the
Necronomicon
. Have you heard of it?”
“No.”
“A pity. It’s very enlightening. I’m sorry, though; I never show that to anyone.
Anyone
...”
There was a depression in the wall, almost a shallow alcove, to which Rosier directed his guest. D’Urberville had glanced at it numerous times already, suspecting that the image of Baphomet the Templars worshiped was there. His suspicions were now confirmed.
Standing framed in the arched depression was an oblong wooden cabinet which resembled nothing so much as a coffin, but with hinged double doors. The wood of the cabinet was old, but how old? Even if it dated to the time of the Templar’s trials, it might be a fake concocted as evidence against them. But wouldn’t it still be of interest even as a fake? In fact, d’Urberville preferred it that way. He
wanted
the relic to be a fake. Because if it wasn’t...if the idol, whatever it was, should be authentic...but that was impossible. Only if Baphomet proved to be an image of Christ would d’Urberville believe his ancestor would have paid homage to it.
Rosier lit a candle on a small table to either side of the alcove, then flicked some switches on the nearby wall to extinguish all the electric lamps. He explained, “The image is faint and takes a while to discern. The lights bleach it out.” He laid his fingers lightly on d’Urberville’s arm. “Are you ready?”
D'Urberville felt a repulsion at the man’s lingering touch, but maintained his control and didn’t withdraw. “Please,” he said.
Rosier removed his hand from d’Urberville, confronted the upright cabinet and unfastened the clasp at its front. D’Urberville found himself craning his neck to see over the other man’s shoulder as he delicately swung both doors outwards on their hinges. Having unveiled the cabinet’s interior, Rosier then stepped back behind d’Urberville to give his guest an unblocked view.
D’Urberville squinted, his brows knotting in intensity, and took a few steps closer to the cabinet...holding his breath, as if afraid the moisture in it would somehow stain or sully the allegedly ancient artifact within.
But it seemed to only be an oblong slab of tarnished metal, or a mirror now nearly opaque with the dull patina of age. A blank, featureless slab. The most he saw upon it was his own shadowy reflection, quavering in an eerie liquid way as the candlelight writhed. Was that the message and meaning, then: that Baphomet was personified by the face of its current beholder?
“What,” he began, but then he saw that there
was
something there, and leaned closer yet. At face level, where he had thought he saw only his own reflection, there was a subtle image on the slab. A face, fainter and more vague even than the features of the Turin shroud. So faint that it didn’t seem so much painted on the slab as buried inside it like the face of a man submerged in cloudy water, or frozen in a block of ice.
The most obvious feature of the obscure image was the ram-like horns above its head. But the rest...no wonder no two people had seemed to convey the same impression. A bearded man? Yes, he could imagine that. There did seem to be a beard to the face. A child? Perhaps – the face was slender and its eyes disproportionately large. But they were scarcely human. They were too dark, apparently without whites or irises.
Perhaps d’Urberville’s eyes, in growing more accustomed to the gloom, were perceiving more details the longer he gazed on the painted image, but it seemed as if the image were darkening, growing clearer, less vague. He could see now that the beard wasn’t of hair, but of thick entwined fibers almost like a nest of thin tendrils. And oddly, the clearer the image seemed to him, the less and less human it appeared, until d’Urberville found himself shuddering at the sight of it.
“Just as I thought,” he muttered to the man behind him, but without taking his gaze off the visage. “A fake to discredit the Knights. A demon.”
“Not a demon,” Rosier replied, in a strange reverent whisper. “A
God
.”
“God...”
“Baphomet... no. Not the correct name. Golden Calf? No. Black Goat is more correct. Alhazred’s book taught me that, my good Father d’Urberville. The image is that of the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. A fertility god, yes. But not Celtic. Much, much older than that. The Black Goat’s name is Shub-Niggurath. Some call the Goat female, some male. A hermaphrodite...though more correctly, the Goat reproduces through parthenogenesis...”
D’Urberville heard all this, but his attention was focused more and more intently upon the image, almost as though the reason he could see it more clearly every moment was that he had been drawn into the cloudy water of the metal slab to join the face. The face no longer resembled a painting to him. It was too vivid for that. It was like a photograph, recorded on that strange alien metal. The slab seemed like a screen receiving a transmission of that horrible visage from some far, far away place and time. And plane.
Behind him, in soft seductive tones, Rosier went on, “Perhaps the Goat’s influence over us is to procreate, to colonize, to be fertile – as it is. Perhaps that explains the orgies of the Knights amongst themselves. The mindless compulsion toward intercourse that you will see among animals of the same sex, caged together.” A soft chuckle. “But despite the influence of Shub-Niggurath, they were able to at least resist breaking their vows with the opposite sex. However they were inspired, their rites bonded them. They broke old vows to forge new ones...”
No, those weren’t ram horns curled above the hideous, otherworldly countenance after all, d’Urberville realized. They were coiled appendages, like tentacles.
“Whatever Shub-Niggurath wants from us, I can’t be certain,” Rosier confessed. “But we’ve devoted ourselves to learning. For generations, we’ve been striving toward that end. But our quest has not been easy. We’ve been persecuted terribly, as you yourself know. You thought me insensitive to the suffering of the Templars, but now you see I hid my affiliation from you as you did yours from me. Just as I lied about my acquisition of the idol. I did indeed find Alhazred’s book in the Middle East, but this treasure has been in my family for centuries.” Rosier’s tone earlier had been all posturing and performance, but now his words couldn’t sound more heart-felt. “We’ve found it difficult to convert new members to our holy order. Men worthy to convert. But when I met you, when I suspected your sacred bloodline...it was like a gift.”
D’Urberville's eyes were becoming strained, but he was unable to blink. Was it the guttering candlelight or could the tendrils of that beard be seething with movement like plants stirring at the bottom of the sea? Could those black emotionless pupils be glittering, reflecting ember-like
glints from the glowing candles? Could those two tentacles atop the head be flexing, as if to uncoil and reach out of the slab to him?
“Sir
d’Urberville,” Rosier whispered. D’Urberville heard the rustle of clothing, the clink of a belt. “Turn and face me.”
Without questioning, still without blinking, d’Urberville pivoted his body fully to face his host. Now the candlelight glittered in his own eyes. Now he knew why he had not been destined for the priesthood. At least not in that order. His destiny had been awaiting him here, all along.
Rosier had disrobed. His paunch was as heavy and pale as a satyr’s. He held his arms out from his sides, as if offering himself as a sacrifice or sacrament. He turned his back to d’Urberville.
And, like a trained acolyte, d’Urberville knelt and kissed the
base of the man’s spine. He remained on his knees while Rosier presented him his front. D’Urberville laid a kiss upon the man’s navel, and then allowed Rosier to help him to his feet. Rosier embraced the younger man, who did not resist, and they pressed their lips together. As he kissed Rosier, d’Urberville felt tears trickle down his cheeks. They were not tears of self-horror or self-pity, but rather of joy, for after all these generations – after his family had known such disgrace and dishonor in its past – the name of d’Urberville had once again been initiated into the Order of the Knights Templar.
Cells
“Dr.
East, your wife has been calling for you.”
“I know, Mrs. LeBlanc. I can hear her from here.” Noticing how the private nurse was trying to peer curiously past him into his workshop, Carl East closed the door so that only his face was wedged in the crack. Mrs. LeBlanc softened slightly. His face was not the face of an apathetic, unconcerned man. Rather, he looked so drained of color and energy she might have believed that his wife’s cancer was contagious. He seemed to be dying with her. It was no wonder he was apparently avoiding seeing her, now that the end was drawing close, now that Violet East was delirious with the cancer in her brain and morphine was being administered to alleviate the agony.
“It’s difficult for you, I realize, but...”
“So many divorces, Mrs. LeBlanc. So many unhappy couples even when they do stay together. But my wife and I...we truly
love
each other. We’ve been married seventeen years, and we’re still in love. She is my best friend, Mrs. LeBlanc. I’ve never been embarrassed to say that, even to my male friends. They’ve teased me. Laughed at me. But I think they’re jealous, because they don’t have that. Such a simple thing, to let someone close to you like that. But so few people will do it, for all our love songs and romance novels. And even when they do open themselves they sabotage it in so many ways. But we were
happy.
So happy. And we could have had so many more years. We’re only in our forties. We could have had
decades.
Why does this have to happen to us, when we had what was so rare? Does that seem fair to you?”
“No sir...it doesn’t. I guess you can call it irony.”
“I call it evil. And I won’t accept it.”
The face wedged in the door looked odd – maybe frightening. Mrs. LeBlanc hesitated. She saw a computer monitor’s glow behind Dr. East, heard a steady liquid burbling. “I know it’s hard to accept these things, Dr. East, and it really isn’t any of my business, but I think she needs you right now...”
“That’s the drugs talking. And the pain. It isn’t
her
She knows I have work to do in here. We discussed all this.”
“It could be any time now.” She was getting a bit irritated again. Work? What kind of work? He needed to wake up and go hold his wife’s hand right now, help her on her way. If he didn’t, he’d never forgive himself when he realized what he’d done. “Denial is normal, I know, but...”
“I don’t deny that my wife is dying. I just deny that Death has a right to take her.”
Mrs. LeBlanc thought it odd that a Beckham University biology professor should make death sound like an entity. “Look,” she sighed, “I’d better get back to her.”
“Please do, Mrs. LeBlanc. Please stay with her.” The anger that had made East’s face increasingly unsettling dispersed, and once more he simply looked exhausted by his tragedy. “Mrs. LeBlanc...do you believe in the afterlife?”
“Yes, sir. I...just don’t know what it must be like.”
East knew better than to believe her. She had no faith. Still, he told her, “My wife believes. She believes very strongly. And so do I. She got me to believing, despite the stance of those who do what I do. My wife is very widely read...and she introduced me to concepts of metaphysics my colleagues haven’t even heard of, let alone subscribe to.” East thought better of what he was revealing, and got to his point. “I believe there is a spirit, but that it’s simply a scientific reality beyond the scope of contemporary science.”
“I sure hope so, Dr. East. It sure would be nice.”
He would tell her no more. “Thank you, Mrs. LeBlanc. Now, please go to her.”
Nodding, the nurse turned back toward the house. East’s workshop was contained within a converted stable adjacent to a vast barn she thought would make somebody a nice apartment, though she had never seen inside. On her way back across the cool night grass, she thought about what East had said. He was right; what he had with his wife was rare. She and her husband had just filed for divorce themselves.
He couldn’t go up there. Couldn’t see what she had become at the last. And he couldn’t place the tank in the room with her, not with the nurse keeping constant vigil. He had explained this to Violet before – before she lost coherence – and she had understood. She had smiled to reassure him. “I’ll come find the tank. I'll know where to look. And you don’t have to be with me when I go, Carl, because I won’t be gone long.” She had had even more faith than he in this all along. Now she was crying out, but it was like Christ crucified and feeling forsaken. The suffering getting in the way. He only hoped that through the suffering, through the drugs, her subconscious, her will, her
spirit
held on to her conviction.
Christ had cried out. But Christ had come back.
“I don’t want you to see me like that anyway,” she had reassured him, then. She was down to ninety-six pounds, but the mass in the tank weighed one hundred and forty -- the weight she had carried before. Well, minus twenty pounds.
It would seem a huge mass of protoplasm to anyone not familiar with the experiment. (He tried not to think of it as an experiment. That implied possible failure. This must not fail. It was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.) But East thought of the mass as tiny, compared with what he had grown and could have grown.
He had been inspired by a series of experiments by Dr. Phillip White of the Rockefeller Institute, had duplicated much of them in his workshop and later in the barn.
Like White, he had begun with a tiny wart of a growth taken from a tobacco plant. This, rather than the specialized cells of, say, a stem or a leaf. In a special solution of nutrients, he had allowed the cells to multiply, unhindered, unchecked. He dubbed the growth a “couch potato”, since it only had to sit and grow obese, without work, with no specialized identity. Undifferentiated cells with no purpose or responsibility other than to eat, to grow...
The theoretical rate of multiplication for White’s cells – and East’s – was 10,000,000,000,000,000,000-fold over a forty week period. At this rate of growth, had White not cut away and disposed of the culture of cells, at the end of that forty weeks he would have ended up with a solid mass which would fill the solar system to its very rim.
Theoretically speaking, of course. And given the vast nourishment necessary.
But White had continued to dispose of most of the growth throughout the course of his experiments. East had followed suit; he was constantly pruning, slicing away, like a surgeon. Sometimes he imagined that he was cutting out Violet’s cancer, and burning it. But every day it grew back, and he had to do it again...
Carl East had disposed of much of his growth. Though not as much as Dr. White had disposed of.
East lifted his head with a small gasp. After one vertiginous moment he remembered where he was. The workshop. Shortly after the nurse had left him he had put his head down on his arms at his desk, fatigued.
He was badly shaken from his dream. It had been awful. In it, it wasn’t Violet's spirit which found a new home in the blank mass of cells, in its tank of nourishment awaiting some purpose as a canvas awaits paint. It was the cancer which took over the mass...becoming a 140-pound tumor. After all, wasn’t that what the cancer wanted to do? Engulf and obliterate Violet entirely? And didn’t its mindless will now seem to be stronger than her own?
He smoothed back his hair with his hands, his eyes falling on the spines of the books on their shelves above his desk. Some Violet had owned when he met her. Others they had sought out together, in preparation. Modern works by Colin Wilson, rare moldering texts by all but forgotten hands. Violet might once have been burned as a witch for possessing any one of these older tomes. What would East’s fellow professors think if they knew he had spent as much money acquiring two volumes of the eleven-volume
Revelations of Glaaki
as they would spend on a vacation to Bermuda with their healthy wives? And what would they think if they saw what those pages contained, the madness purported to be history and science? Why, they might well wonder, was there a bookmark in the pages which told of the origins and conjuring – the growing – of something called a
shoggoth
...an amorphous aggregation of cells that could be telepathically molded by those who dared to use these creatures as slaves?