THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (5 page)

They too saw the spire in their sleep, they heard the voice of the thundering silence.  Only Akram and Adaya dreamed as I did dream.  In their slumber, they too beheld the horror of the sunken city, heard the voiceless chanting,
‘Cthulhu ftaghn.’

So did I trust Akram and Adaya above all.  This nightmare we all beheld seemed fated, a sharing of impossibility, a promise misunderstood, speaking only to we three.

~

And too, in Sana’a with my own friends, the dream was the deepest of all that which united us.  When I once awake screaming, asleep in an alley, it is Akram who woke and held me.  And to him, I confessed everything.  And it was Adaya, who in pretending to sleep had overheard us, who told us that she too knew the nightmare, and for this reason the other children feared her.

From that night on, we held our nightmare’s secret away from every stranger, and so nearer to one another, Abd, Akram, Adaya.  It is not until the night of Najeed, and my brazen confrontation, that the pact of silence was betrayed.

I was the one who foolishly sung our secret to the winds.  In having done so, I am guilty of Akram’s death, and that of Adaya as well.  Of this I have much to say:

~

(The same narrative appears to course uninterrupted into Scroll V.)

SCROLL V

A Nightmare Made of Gold

Unified by the nightmare, we three confided everything to one another.  The older orphans, once my protectors, did fear and then forsake me.  My times with Akram and Adaya became all.

I shared my silver and my food with them, and they revealed to me the places of hiding, the rooftops of escape, the cisterns of shade and sleeping.

I continued in my songs and the selling of secrets, but there was a wondrous darkness upon me.  In finding that these two other children had suffered the same nightmare of R’lyeh, I did not despair; rather, I delighted as one liberated.  I spun my songs more boldly, weaving them with images of the Sleeper Beneath the Sea.  Turning away from me in the night and yet unable to quell my voice the other children came to regard my shadow as the
rabisu
, the leaping demon who terrifies dreamers with his illusions in the night.

Were they so wrong?

I, a child-father with two needful spirits of my own, with Akram and Adaya reliant upon my silver, learned that the other orphans were more a threat to us than kindred.  These lesser jackals, the “dreamless ones” grew more fearful of us still; and in fearing, cast for us only stones and hateful curses.  So did we three find ourselves at last alone.

Branded a vagabond, I endeavored to take Akram and Adaya away with me.  We three left the caravan emporiums of Sana’a, letting the other urchins take our place.  They believed that they had ruined me, and perhaps they had.  But we three, we faded into the night with silent purpose.  We let the jackals have their beggar scraps of meager trade.  Being the more cunning, Adaya and I sang instead at the eastern gate, where the spice merchants come forth from the horrors of the wasteland.

There, we learned more of secrets, and more of death.

It is the east gate of Sana’a, yet still, through which come the gold and spice and ivory and laughter.  The east gate is that of the starker wanderers, the silent and the desperate.  Through the east come trinkets of Asia, rumors of Irem of the Thousand Pillars and clay-shards dug from Babylon.  Through the east come warlock and
fakir
, exile and leper, astrologer and the maimed man who is dethroned, who stands yet mighty in his mind.

The language of the eastern gate is not one of silver, but one of scrolls, of relics, of tales which tell of Ghul and shroud and tears of blood.  It is the gate of blackest tales, of miracle and nightmare.  To such men and crones as walk in from the east, the
redeb
music of Akram fell unwanted, the sensual dances of Adaya met with murmurs of desire.  Yet she was but a girl.  My song, only, of R’lyeh and the Sleeper in the deeps, enchanted those parched ones who strode out from the east.

We sang our darkest entreaties to those who carried spice, who carried their tales of death in from the wasteland.

My own song was the most haunting, the most riddled and uncrystallized, and so I was to our listeners by far the most enthralling.  Where Akram would play of the
rebab
and Adaya would sing of water and spice and horizons which curved as the virgin’s turning breast, I would sing not in words, but in the dream-song of that black voice which we three did taste whenever we slept, the glimpses of the veilings of the Sleeper in the Abyss, of Cthulhu.

I did sing:

Agafh’th kahnta, entorei, entorei.

~

(Dee has transliterated this as written, but the meaning is unknown.  This may in truth be a corrupted remnant of the Aklo tongue. ~K.)

~

The tongue of dreams I sang, and chilled the hearts of all who heard, and they did wonder of my visions.  These chantings of R’lyeh were born of darkness, and the darkness of my song was beautiful.  At times our listeners were the men of far Damascus, at others the warrior women from the Utter East; and always the old dust-men from Jerusalem, who met my sweet boy-voice not with curious smiles, but with tears.  But all who did listen to my song, in fearing me, were moved.  So the silver flowed ever greater, until the night of the gore-moon.

To many such listeners, the strings who resonated with my tales, I became the only singer who was sought.  In time, some few wanderers and secret-seekers came not for the
markets
of Sana’a, but rather only for my revelations.

And so, perhaps when I was of ten years, with Akram and Adaya I did glory more in secrets than in songs.  We sold treacherous truths, we made enemies all the more.  For children, we grew rich.  The night became our sole domain.  When all the other children and beggars were sleeping, cradled in the frost of their own fears, we three gave reign to our dream of the sunken city, wakening with the sunset and preying upon the veil of breathing night.

SCROLL VI

Of Najeed and Vile Treacheries

(Unfinished)

(This curious scroll begins in the middle, in the midst of one of the most personal of Al-Azrad’s many confessions.  As will be later revealed, Najeed of Sana’a was a servitor and thrall to the Cult of Cthulhu; and in hearing the songs sung by the young Al-Azrad, he came to understand that Al-Azrad was receptive to the tonal dream-visions resonating from dead Cthulhu in R’lyeh.  It appears that Najeed, perhaps in reporting the songs of Abd to the hierarchs of the Cult, was the impetus which caused the three children—Adaya, Akram and Al-Azrad himself—to be considered a danger to the Cult’s secrecy, a threat which should be eliminated.  Allusions throughout Codex I tell us that the Cult of Cthulhu murdered Akram and Adaya, and that Al-Azrad alone escaped their wrath.  Al-Azrad may have fled, but I believe he first attempted to save Adaya and then was nearly killed.  Further decryption of the Dee
Necronomicon
text may reveal this theory to be unsound, but for now this conjecture seems best to fit with what little is known of Al-Azrad’s youth and his later obsession with vengeance in the name of his beloved. ~K.)

~

(From a notation by Dee which reads “The remnant is as follows,” it may be implied that this scroll was damaged, and/or that this scroll was left incomplete when originally written by Abd Al-Azrad.)

(...)

… yet I was lord of myself even then, until came the night of the gore-moon which the wise men fear.  The eclipse I beheld that night did change my path forever, and the blood-moon’s hollow reflection I ever shall remember.

That night, twenty-seven were our listeners, of three caravans:  one of a
malik
, one of a mariner, one of a caravansary liege.  So many were the touches of coin and laughter that I sang alone, and Akram—with Adaya, scab-shinned, giggling and perched upon his shoulders—Akram, he was frantically twirling his scarf in the shape of three folds, so that the coins would roll along the linens pale and into Adaya’s beringed hands.

Beyond our listeners, however, leaned a glowering silhouette—so stood the gristled storyteller who alone understood the song that I was singing, black Najeed.

It was he who knew Cthulhu and R’lyeh were no mere nonsense in a child’s song, but instead were unified with truth and one with nightmare.  The moment when I doomed my friends passed, in song, without my understanding.  But that night of the eclipse, in singing of R’lyeh as Najeed looked down upon me, I had dared too much.  For the gift of one eld golden
solidus
—a rare Roman coin which Najeed had his own secret-bargaining set upon, a coin from the hand of a spice caravan’s one master—had become instead a gift for Adaya’s rapid fingers, and Najeed’s eyes in meeting mine were filled with hatred.

~

After we secured the coin of gold, we departed and hid ourselves.

Long after midnight, when Akram had gone for water and Adaya laid asleep beside our cistern in the Alley of the Yellow Spider, the shadow of Najeed did come to me.  I saw it upon the rooftops, and three were its claws—two hands, and one
jambiya
.  Najeed leapt down to the sands ere I comprehended the threat of what I had seen.  He did show his
jambiya
to me, its acid-etched razor, its hilt of mother-of-pearl, its tip a pitted crescent dried and black with another’s bloodshed.  It was this tip that he kissed upon my lip, and asked for silence only.  This I gave him.

And Akram was yet to return.  Adaya slept on.

Najeed’s whispers against my neck told me many things—that he was drunk on spice wine, that he would kill if made to come to me a second night, and that he feared me more than he feared anything but the dream, the nightmare of Cthulhu and R’lyeh.  Najeed said only to me, “Go far from here, O wretched child, go far from the northern gate.  The men of the caravans, the wealthy ones and their blades, they will no longer hear your vile song of Great Cthulhu.  Yes?  Unburden your nights’ entertainments far from Sana’a, or when I next shall come to you, this blade shall not kiss your lip, but rather the throat of your sweet Adaya when you are sleeping.  We understand?”

This I with all sincerity did promise him, that I alone would leave Sana’a, never to return.  As I breathed this last, he fled, and then only did that fool-friend Akram return with a frown of confusion and the idle slosh of water in his vase.

In the daylight, however, I questioned my fear of Najeed.  How could I leave my only home, on the wings of a coward’s threat?  And when the unknowing Adaya smiled upon me, that same fear of Najeed I came to mock and named as nothing.  Thus we held for some few moons
(Clarice has written:  Months?)
to our stories, our songs, and trade in secrets before the eastern gate.

~

Akram, of the furrowed brow and the sun-browned hands, of the smiles which told of laughter but not of brilliance, he was growing and becoming a poor burden in this regard.  He toiled all the harder to please me, and so I fed him, but his tongue was a torment to the ever-deeper delicacy of this trade.  Adaya the cunning stayed with me, learning, turning secret-keepers’ silences to kindly entreaties.  But poor Akram was a shameful weight upon this darker trade, and this in those last nights he did begin to understand.  Two nights after the first coming Najeed, Akram did leave us.

Adaya and I—especially myself—still brought Akram food, and even scrolls.  For somehow, through a merciful tutor skilled with the resistant clay of an ogrish child’s mind, Akram had been taken in as the scribe to an astrologer.  The scrolls we brought, Akram in turn revealed to his master, who knew better than to question the gift from whence it came.  In this he was truly a man of Sana’a.  In those few deep moons of water and locust cry, Akram would share the decipherments of our treasures, as his master slept in a curtained chamber far below.  It is Akram, then, who unknowingly taught me to read a little in many languages—not by what he told me, but through the scrolls and shards I brought to please his master.  This proved to be Akram’s gift, and the pleasure the writings gave him was a solace to my heart.

And so did ever darker secrets, of past and impossibilities, come to me.

In this time, I was yet too young to understand why Akram’s slowness angered me.  Only by the written word did he come to brilliance; all else was ruin.  It is now I understand that I did love him, but more than this, he was my brother.  And so it was that my impatience with his brute thoughts overshadowed my adoration of his heart.  Such is the curse of brothers, we find one another’s weaknesses and we worsen them.

~

As these moons grew on, and our secrets became Adaya’s wisdom and my tongue itself was turning from cryptic silver into gold—in these nights of enchantment, these nights of Ghul-tale and scorpion whisper—Adaya became a young maiden, and in her own secrecy came to love me.  But these fleeting joys, which I did not embrace in their time, were to end all too soon.  The prideful innocence of we three jackals ended on the night that Najeed came forth the second and last time:  Najeed then of the crazed eye, the burn of branding, the babbling and the knife.

~

(Dee has written:  “The scroll doth endeth here.”  It appears that Al-Azrad had originally intended to confess exactly what transpired upon the night when Adaya lost her life, but if he has done so at any point in Al Azif, this translator has yet to discover the passage.)

GATHERING THE SECOND

Cthulhu, R’lyeh and Nightmare

SCROLL VII

Of the Myth of the Gilded Waters,

The Myth of the Matriarch