Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred (25 page)

Those who have served their purpose are killed in an efficient manner, by strangulation with a cord around the neck, and their bodies are burned. Then the ashes are gathered and deposited into the Nile, where they are carried by the current to the sea. It is possible to reanimate the same corpse twice, by subjecting its resurrected flesh to the putrefaction and reduction process that was used to separate its essential salts, but this is seldom done since there is seldom any need. Those who are reanimated by the priests of Nyarlathotep are never permitted to die, save by mischance, until they have offered up all their knowledge, and the priests are satisfied that they have nothing more of value to give.

hebes is a city of monuments, both to men and to gods. The eastern bank of the river is thick with temples, obelisks, and great statues. The temples, though much decayed with time and neglect, are connected by magnificent avenues lined with carved figures, and are reflected in artificial lakes and ponds, all of which give the city a grandeur not to be found in other cities of our race. On the western bank of the Nile are buried the royal dead in lavish tombs. Many of the tombs of the necropolis have been looted by the cult of animators, yet others still remain hidden beneath the sands, awaiting discovery.

To those possessed of the second sight, the moonlit streets of Thebes are not empty but filled with solemn throngs. Ghosts walk along the avenues that join the temples in silent, stately processions; lines of priests bear smoking trays of incense before the closed wagons that contained the statues of the principal gods and goddesses of the land, for it was the practice of the priests to parade their gods before the people, though they were always kept carefully concealed behind the curtains of the carts that bore them to and from their temples.

The great god of Thebes was Amur), who is sometimes represented as a man, or as a man with the head of a ram, and less often as a ram itself. To him was erected the largest of all temples in our world, the temple of pillars that humbles the pride of those who pass across its sand-strewn paving stones, for each pillar is ten times the height of a man, and they are so closely spaced that they seem to press down on those who walk between them. Not even the monuments of the Old Ones can belittle its grandeur.

Within the secret depths of this temple in ancient times, the primary statue of Amun was preserved. It had the property of life, for it was a magic of the priests of this land to animate the statue of Amun in the temple and to induce a kind of shade or spiritual essence to dwell there that expressed the personality and purpose of the god himself. The ignorant have written that Amun dwelt within the statue, but this is false; the statue was host to his emissary, who spoke and acted with the knowledge and power of the god, but the god dwelt elsewhere. He dreams still in Kadath in the cold waste, with the other gods of this world.

A traveler from our lands who was a necromancer learned from the ghouls of Thebes the legend that a large cache of precious objects lay buried beneath the floor of the temple of pillars. The wealth of the temple had been hurriedly interred by the priests so that it would not be looted during one of the numerous invasions of Egypt —who the invaders were is not preserved in the legend. By some mischance the precious things were never unearthed. Perhaps the invaders killed all the priests who had precise knowledge of their hiding place. How the ghouls learned of the location, they did not disclose.

The traveler hired two workmen who were accustomed to laboring beneath the moon and could be trusted not to speak of their affairs, and undertook to unearth the treasure. After several hours of digging they came upon a statue of Amun. It was in size the height of a man, and formed of bronze overlaid with gold leaf. The value of the object was slight, for it held no precious jewels or large masses of gold or silver, and in appearance it was quite ordinary, save for one detail—its enormous phallus was obscenely erect. This aroused ribald jests from the workmen, but the traveler quickly set them back to digging, and went aside to examine the statue more closely.

He drew a breath of surprise between his teeth, for his skill in necromancy revealed that the statue was alive. The hundreds upon hundreds of years it had rested beneath the dry sands of the temple had not extinguished its identity. The spirit present within the bronze body became aware of the traveler after several minutes, as though waking from a long slumber. The traveler felt a question in his mind, like the tickle of an insect walking upon his skin.

Where are the priests of the temple?

He sent his thoughts to the statue through its eyes.
Dead, all dead and fallen to dust.

He felt the awareness of the spirit in the bronze expand as it looked outward; for this it did not need physical eyes, but was able to perceive all directions at once. Its words came to him in a whisper of despair.

Desolation, desolation, the end of days; the glory of God is put out like a reed torch in the river water, and the roof of the house is fallen.

With a piteous cry, the spirit flew up through the crown of the head of the statue and fled, wailing, into the night sky. One of the workmen raised his head to ask the traveler what had caused the strange sound. Lost in his own thoughts, the traveler made no answer, and the man shrugged and continued digging.

Though they labored until an hour before the first light of dawn, they found no other treasure. Perhaps it was too deeply buried to be unearthed in a single night. The work could not be continued a second night without the certainty of discovery by the inhabitants of the city, so with regret the traveler ordered that the empty and lifeless statue of Amun be cast back into the pit, and that the hole be filled. In the morning, there was no trace of the night’s work.

The valley on the west bank of the Nile that holds the tombs of the noble houses of Thebes is a desolate land of sand and rock, surrounded by tall cliffs and steep hillsides. Holes in the ground reveal where robbers have looted the burial places in the distant past, for though the architects of the tombs took great pains to conceal their locations, always there were workmen who knew the places where gold lay hidden, and whose greed was more powerful than their fear of the gods. The tombs that remain undisturbed are well concealed and deeply buried, and may never be found by natural means.

The traveler is wise to only explore the valley of the dead under the light of the sun, never during the night. The valley is inhabited by vampire wraiths who cannot leave its boundaries, but within its towering hills are forever in search of fresh blood, for they feed on the vital essence that is held in flowing blood. The blood itself they do not drink, having no lips of flesh with which to suck, but they are nourished on the humors that exhale from blood in the moments after it spurts forth from the skin. They possess no physical part, yet in some way are able to cut the skin so that blood flows, and in this manner they feed. The cuts of these wraiths are less than the width of a finger, and are easily mistaken for the bite of some unseen nocturnal insect. They are shallow, and so sharp are the claws of the wraiths that make them that they are without pain, and only become noticeable by the wetness of the blood that runs forth.

The danger from these wraiths would seem to be slight, for a wraith can produce no more than a single cut upon the skin in the space of several minutes, and the blood that wells up is no more than a few drops. However, the scent of fresh blood attracts them from their tombs even as biting insects are attracted by the exhalation of the breath, and they press in an invisible horde around the unwary traveler who ventures into the valley by night, each wraith making a new cut upon some part of his skin, nor does clothing prevent this injury.

In a short while the hapless traveler will find himself wet from crown to heel with blood. Because the cuts cause no pain, the wetness is his first awareness of his peril. If he is fortunate and robust of body, he will realize the danger before the loss of blood renders him weak of limb. The wraiths press in an undivided mass around their bleeding prey, feeding upon his vital essence. Singly or in scant numbers, they cannot be detected save with the second sight, but when they feed in unison by the hundreds, their forms exert a pressure upon the skin that is felt as a soft embrace that squeezes the flesh from all sides and makes movement difficult.

There is only one defense against the vampire wraiths, and that is precipitous flight. They move swiftly, but not with the speed of a running man, and the traveler who maintains both his senses and his balance can outdistance them, provided he can find the strength to fight through their united ring as they feed. There is danger in running across the floor of the valley, for it is strewn with loose rocks that turn beneath the foot. Should the traveler stumble and fall, the wraiths will be upon him in a moment, and it is doubtful that he will find the reserves of strength to regain his feet and break from their grasp a second time.

Those who wander into their embrace and manage to escape their snare do so under the light of the moon, which shows the path to their frenzied gaze as they flee. Travelers cut by the wraiths during the dark of the moon are doomed, for it is not possible without illumination to run across the rock-strewn valley floor yet avoid stumbling. A lantern or torch is insufficient since these artificial lights do not cast their glow far enough ahead to provide warning of obstacles on the ground. Many are the men who have entered the valley of the dead at night, only to serve as meat for jackals in the first glow of dawn, for what the wraiths leave, the jackals and carrion hawks consume.