THE NECRONOMICON ~ The Cthulhu Revelations (7 page)

SCROLL IX

The Mask of Being,

In Which Cthulhu Veils Himself

The shape of Cthulhu and of his Brethren is known to us from idols crafted by his worshippers, and his images graven in all the elder ages by the Deep Ones.  And too, I have seen his visage, rising in my dreams.

The race of Cthulhu is
Mnemba (Clarice:  octopoid)
, translucent as crystal, of pulpy sinew and curdled ichor, yet limbed and structured upon enormous webs of rind and bone.  The Great Cthulhu is a draconian Thing, a Beast bipedal, with heel to haunch and legs back-bending as do the limbs of the jackal or the desert wolf.  He is gaunt with rot, his skeleton sheathed with translucent emerald flesh, a glass-veiled
(transparent?)
heart surging with yellow curd of blood, ichor pulsing through the spiderwork of his veins.  From his spine there rise membranous wings which clot upon the sky, and over their breadth there whorl the liquid rainbows of blackest oil.  Atop all, a crown of horror, the head with its eyes—slit-jeweled and immemorial—is surrounded with polyps and with barnacles; and ever the writhing, the hundred tentacles veil beneath the ravenous maw of the
Mnemba
, a beak of gristled bone.  From the bony ridges of this gnashing circle shall thunder the roar of triumph, calling forth the End of All.

Yet what the idols revealeth not is His terrible vastness.  This is ever the vision of my nightmare, and as I know it is a dream-sending from Cthulhu of what shall be in his awakening, this I will bear for you once more, so that you may receive it:

As a mountain does he walk, the wave is born of his rising, the stones he grips upon crumble beneath claws the size of a
rukh
’s imperious clutches.  Fingertips pop open with corpse gas and pus, sending forth squelching bubbles, venomous tide-pools in which a man or beast could drown.  And many shall.  And from below, following the searching of the claws, the grasping of the earth, the bulk riseth.  The grease bubbles up, the parasites from the many reflections
(dimensions?)
which clustered for aeons upon Cthulhu’s rot shall scuttle down and struggle in their torments and their dying.  Bereft of the ocean’s vastness and its crushing pressure, these Things shall burst asunder whilst still scuttling upon the legs of locusts, breathing nothing, drowning upon air.

The depths will drool and squelch with echoes, blasts of blackest steam will rise as the effluvium pooled beneath Cthulhu’s corpse is given unto the open air for the first in countless ages.  The horrific foetor riseth, the stench of a million corpses, for though Cthulhu shall riseth up from death, his body is ever festering, ever healing, seeking to decay and collapse within its rot, held together by his will and by the lingering of Vhoorl within his veins.

Tiered jellies over sinew, the limbs stretched far, as a mockery of the shape of man, a Titan, the abomination stands.

Arms outspread to a crimson sky, gassy sacs distended at the joints, giving forth the effluvium and emerald gases, jellied filth drips from him in a rain.  Some few idolaters underfoot revel there in their drowning, swallowing of his glories.  And so they perish, exalted.  From his face, the tangle of tentacles rises, writhing, cored through with rot wherever their razor-tendrils fester, and there in trumpeting the grayed sun doth shineth forth through every hole in the tentacles’ rotted skins.

Such is my confession, my vision, and the dreaming of Akram and Adaya.  When you dream thus, when we come to you in the Real of Otherness, know that he is coming.

SCROLL X

The Feasting of Cthulhu Upon Our Dreams

Cthulhu has come not only to slaughter and to reign, but to feed upon minds and the feeble offerings of our fears.  Our world is one of millions to which he has descended.  In tearing away the veil and crossing the Void into our universe, he died; for the nature of the fractures between the spheres is such that his ichorous flesh could not endure the stricture of its reflections into the rudimentary cages of length and width and breadth
(Dee:  “These, the three dimensions”)
.  And while the manifestation of his flesh was thus destroyed in his emergence, the Chaos of his dream-self lingered on.

As psyche only, the Great Cthulhu did gather the essences of Vhoorl unto himself, recreating the image of his flesh about his being, and so regenerating the plasm of his form from the will alone.  Vhoorl his homeworld whorls within another universe, a higher reflection.  Having been of body and sinew reborn, the flesh of Cthulhu now is strained.  It is phased, flickering both in our world whilst ever resonant upon the distant world of Vhoorl.  And so he is the manifest and the presenceless, the Beast Within Two Worlds, the Spawn of the Stars.

As he lived, so did he die, and in death he was reborn.  While after his emergence his body was full reformed; while even in aeons past did Cthulhu stalk upon this world to wage his war upon the Elder Things; still, in the sinking of R’lyeh, his corporeal husk was ruptured once again.  Such is the eternity of Cthulhu, mortal immortality, dying and undying.  Enshrined within his tomb beneath the spire of R’lyeh, the body can only wake once more to life when our feast of dreams has strengthened his psyche to the point of re-conception of his self.  And so does he lie dreaming, eroding, becoming.

This is no weakness, this is the way of the immortality in flesh and mind yet unified, the ever-birth and death of Great Cthulhu, most mighty among the Old Ones.  Timeless he stands, the flickering of the body lorded over by the mind in twain, and in only ever other moment is he imprisoned.  The dream-pulses of Cthulhu cascade with the unbreathing ecstasy of his rage.

It is said in fable that the stalkers of the desert, the Ghuls, did choose their deathlessness bereft of dream in order to silence the horrific sendings of Cthulhu inside their minds.  In this way, the Ghuls name themselves the forsaken and the free.

For we mortals, however, who choose not the path of the Ghul and the devouring of our own kind, there is no such mercy.  Thus the mortal paradox:  we are the free, and we are the caged prey.  We imagine illusions greater than any god.  In so imagining, we learn and we are lords of creation; but in dreaming, we feed Cthulhu and so bring forth the End upon us all.

SCROLL XI

The Revelation of Cthulhu,

High Priest and Tyrannis of the Brethren of Vhoorl,

And the Higher Lord He Doth Worship

There is a greater secret of Cthulhu, the revelation of his reverence.

Be it known that if Cthulhu be truly a god, he too doth worship.  He is the one high priest of his own kind, the tentacled ones, the Brethren of the Stars.  Too, some do whisper that Great Cthulhu is the high priest of the Great Old Ones as well.  For Cthulhu is the mind of legion; of all his race, he alone is the dreamer and the nexus of their will.  As he is mind, so the Brethren are the body.  The Brethren sendeth dreams by his command, and so are Dagon and the Deep Ones made to rise and mingleth with the women of our kind.

Our kingdoms are to overflow with children, souls in legion, risen in their billions for the reaping.

And what then of the greater riddles?  Who does Cthulhu worship in his solitude?  Does he bow to a higher power, or does he deign to serve as the high priest of a lesser puppet to his will?  None knoweth.  I believe he hath two lords, and they are the ‘Umr at-Tawil, Yog-Sothoth; and so through the gate revealed, there riseth ever higher the Only, the One of Chaos, Azathoth.

Verily is Cthulhu a conduit of Yog-Sothoth; for with his dreams in death, he does craft bridges of souls and so bring forth the resonance of the gates which lie between the worlds.  So too does he empower himself, and through him as their hive-mind, the Brethren of the Stars draw the essence from the stones of Vhoorl itself into the wounds which were gashed in the monoliths of R’lyeh.  R’lyeh was ravaged in the war with the mighty Elder Ones.

Far beyond the southern seas, R’lyeh is swallowed in the silence of our world’s oceanic netherworld, the Abzu.  There, deep in the nether, are many of the visions of Cthulhu silenced ere they can corrupt the dreams of men.  It is well that the ruined city lies beneath the waves, for were it elsewhere, Cthulhu would already stand reborn and ravening.

May it be, that as the bridges and the gates between the Abzu and Vhoorl are raised through the reflections, R’lyeh stirs and its gashes are healed.  And so in our age the city yet may riseth, aswirl with the malignity of its own firmament, entwined both with our lesser sphere and the greater of Vhoorl’s own, unified, unconquerable.

For when the gates to Vhoorl are unified, when the lenses of thought are with the stars aligned and stricken through with Great Cthulhu’s scream of the awakening, the sky will rain with blood and the rift to the Otherness shall be opened.  The immovable Void, torn away as a tapestry, will warp unmoving, and so will it come to us.  The airs and aethers, the clouds and heavens of our world shall be stripped away.  The mirrors upon which all realities are reflected
(Clarice has written here again:  higher dimensions?  Alternative universes?)
shall warp in twain, the stars themselves will wheel in unnatural courses, and so shall Al-Ghul, Yad al-Jauza, Fam al-Hut, and all of the Kahkashan come to swirl as one and rise where our vizier sun itself shall then be blinded.

(These are the names of stars in Arabian astrology:  Al-Ghul is Algol, Yad al-Jauza is Betelgeuse, Fam al-Hut is Fomalhaut, and the Kahkashan is attributable to the Milky Way. ~K.)

So by the Cultic sacrifices, by the feast of dreams the stars shall be made right, so that the reflections are all as one.  The sundering of the city shall be healed, the opening of his tomb in fell R’lyeh must come to pass.  The hastening of such is dependent upon the resonance of Vhoorl, the waking and focus of the Brethren, and the gates of Cthulhu’s dreaming which bringeth the reflections of the emerald
(?)
into unity.

~

Cthulhu will rise, and the Last War shall be waged.  As the End of Days begins, another un-god will rise in immortal defiance.

A prophecy does further entreat that the Nameless, the Unspeakable One, shall be empowered by the shaping of the rift as well.  To those who are of the Cult of the Yellow Silk, there is the belief that the King in Yellow will arise and so wage war upon Cthulhu for the right to reapeth of our world.  If this be true, in their tumult shall all mortals then be slaughtered or enslaved.

The Majesty in Yellow cannot be worshipped as our savior, for if he is the victor who seizes the throne of the Abzu beneath our world, we are as lost as if Great Cthulhu himself were to be alone our tyrant.  Whoever the victor of the Last War shall be, we beneath their feet will be lost.  There is no path which leadeth to our salvation.

These only shall be the fates of the Kingdom of Man:  the many shall be the feast, the few shall be enthralled, and our ravaged world of slaughter shall remain Cthulhu’s kingdom.

GATHERING THE THIRD

The Death of Adaya

SCROLL XII

The Empire of the Blackened Mind

(Fragmentary)

(This scroll was apparently damaged by fire.  I am tempted to regard XII as the missing half of Scroll VI, relating the death of Adaya; but I have no evidence of this, and even if this is true, a crucial joining section of the narrative is lost.  It appears that the missing section speaks of Al’Azrad’s tragic final nights in the city of Sana’a.  It appears further that Adaya was murdered, and that Al’Azrad himself had fled, returning only to find that Adaya yet lived on, then to die in his embrace.  See also my preliminary note to Scroll VI for my personal thoughts concerning the fact that Najeed was a servant to the Cult of Cthulhu, and that he was culpable toward Adaya’s death.  He himself may well have been her murderer, or he may have been accompanied by the Cult whom he did serve. ~K.)

~

(...)

... and so it was that Adaya, bleeding from her wounds, did die in my arms.  Her last words were that she loved me, and would do so forever, and that I in my time should come to her.

As I asked her, “How, beloved, can I ever come to you?  And where?” she breathed her last.

Yet I knew then that my theft of the
Mnemba (Clarice Whately has again translated from the Arabic:  “octopus-headed”)
amulet had been the reason why the vermilion-robed ones had stalked me to the cistern; and that, in giving the bauble to her as the love-gift of a young man and a fool, I in my prideful spiting of Najeed had caused her to be slain.

~

But our love was one of dreams.  She still was with me.  Born of nightmare, Adaya and I had spoken not only of our sharing of R’lyeh and its horrors.  Too, we whispered to one another of dreams more beautiful, those which were born of our own hearts.  I told her of the
jinn
of the silver waters, and she told me of her fantasies of mountains, where water itself would turn into a priceless crystal,
ice
, and never flow again.  In our years together—and this was never understood by Akram, and in envy it did divide us, we two brothers—Adaya and I learned too that there exist two hierarchies of dream.

In the lesser, known by all mortals who sleep, linger the mere fantasies which are isolate and forgotten upon waking.  Such fancies are illusions born merely of desire and desire’s fading, and come to nothing.  But the greater dreams are of a world of kingdoms which, like the horror of R’lyeh, is shared in rapture and locked away as a secret by the blessed few.  Some do name this consensual paradise the Dreamlands.