Ancient Exhumations +2 Read online

  Markson smiled, relaxing a bit. “The term ‘skirt’ seems to demonstrate the black humor of the Aztec priests, doesn’t it? In truth, Coatlicue had already birthed the four hundred progeny of her new incarnation before you arrived, yet they still clung to their mother as a source of nourishment — creating the semblance of a skirt. They were unwilling to be weaned, however, until your little fire posed a threat to their safety.” He chuckled slightly to himself. “I’ll wager she was more than happy be rid of her malevolent brood.”

  His face clouded over slowly before he added, “I also brought Jenkin with me when I came here today.”

  I told him of Jenkin’s daring charge at the beast and how he’d miraculously provided me an opportunity to escape. I offered my condolences at his loss of such a loyal companion. He had assumed Coatlicue had killed the dog, but he did not seem surprised it had sacrificed itself on my behalf.

  “A brave dog and loyal friend, old Jenkin. I’ll miss him in the time I have left.”

  He paused to gain his composure. Before he could continue, I placed a reassuring hand upon his shoulder. I felt only sympathy and understanding for him at that point.

  My next question was an obvious one: “What do we do now?” The subject change helped revive my new found friend’s spirits.

  “Well, you needn’t be concerned about a few diamondbacks being loose in the neighborhood. I am sure Sheriff Waterman will be happy to arrange a snake hunt. It will not only be good fun for the townsfolk, but they will jump at the chance to rid the area of any creation of Farland’s, I’m sure.

  “As for the our lady of the crypt, that shouldn’t be too difficult either. The good sheriff and I originally discussed sealing up the crypt forever with concrete, a plan I think we shall now instigate.” He turned and gave me a reassuring look. “Don’t worry, I’ve locked her in again for now. I told you I came prepared!

  “She nearly brought her house down upon herself when she was locked in the first time, what with all the banging on the walls and rampaging through the vaults in her fury! So I doubt she’ll try that again for fear of collapsing the roof on herself. Poor thing,” he joked, “those catacombs are over three hundred years old, you know, and not so strong anymore. Her essence may be immortal, but the Conquistadors buried her for centuries and so shall we. There’s not much else we can do without knowing just what manner of entity she really is, and I see no safe way to find that out. Farland hoped to bring his statue to life, but in reality, he, like the Aztecs before him, merely provided a vessel for that alien abomination to inhabit.”

  I finally asked him about the change that had come over Farland. What did he think could have happened to him?

  “It seems he forgot the most important thing — that an artist’s finest creation is himself. Maybe he never understood that art’s true value lies in its ability to remind its admirers of the sublime heights man is capable of reaching. Art need be no more than proof that man’s perception, insight, and sensibility — his soul — can reach an incredible degree of transcendence. The greatness of every civilization throughout history is measured by its artistic accomplishments. Empires fall, and their advancements and learning often fall to the wayside, forever lost in time, but somehow the remnants of their art survives, a silent testament to the genius of that particular people. Farland couldn’t see that; he thought the art itself was more than the mind and soul that created it, and thus he was willing to sacrifice his values, morals, and goals to achieve that art.”

  I must now agree with Markson’s assessment of Farland, although it took a long time for me to fathom it all.

  Markson proved as good as his word, supervising the concrete pouring himself, just a few days later. Sheriff Waterman and his deputies volunteered to do the work early one morning, guaranteeing the job could be completed long before dark. Waterman told me later that Markson had etched a five-pointed symbol into the still-wet concrete at the last moment as an added precaution, although he did not know the significance of it. I regret not taking the time to ask Markson the meaning of that symbol before he passed away just one month later.

  Waterman added that I should have joined him and the others for what they called their “Diamondback Jubilee.” The hunt was so popular that several of the local men set out every day for a week. Waterman finally declared an end when he realized over four hundred rattlers had been killed.

  Markson never asked how my book would end. Actually, that was something I could not decide myself, so I finally gave it up altogether; instead, I took the advice of another friend, I wrote a dirty novel — I sent him a signed copy in thanks for the suggestion. He called just last week to say he had enjoyed the book and, since it’s selling well, everything seems to have worked out for the best.

  Yet at times my experience in the crypt comes back to me in nightmares during which I relive the entire episode. It all happens in slow motion, so I see each detail clearly. One image haunts me such that I felt compelled to return to my study of Aztec mythology. The original statue depicts a nearly obliterated form descending from beneath the skirttail of the goddess, and it is a clearer vision of that same form that I see in my dreams. It appears to me as a palely glowing, blue-white human face with serpentine features; its lineaments are those of a woman. I wish Markson were here to tell me what it means, as I fear it is the face of Coyolxauhqui, the jackal-minded daughter of Coatlicue. Had she too been reborn and did she escape the tomb along with her brothers before the crypt was plugged with cement? All I know is that after one of these dreams, I dare not venture sleep again until early morning, long after the moon, Coyolxauhqui’s symbol, has set. Until then, I sit by the window, staring out at the night sky, wondering — how long has the moon had a tail?

  Dark Demonize

  “Look at the images of those holding up my throne and you will understand …”

  — Inscription from the tomb of Darius I at Naqsh-i-Rustam

  By two a.m., Martin was so exhausted that he began reading some of the weirder passages aloud as he translated the ancient manuscript:

  To call forth the Efreet Fahramoosh, the Mage must clutch the Eyes of a Corpse while reciting the Doehl Chant, that through the thus-enlivened Orbs, he may gaze upon his Enemies from afar. By then crushing the cadaverous Organs of sight while performing the Banishing Ritual of Windy Vaju, the Efreet is dismissed.

  The Daemon Badmazeh can be cajoled to rejuvenate useless or severed Limbs if summoned by a Mage who consumes the still-animate Tail of a Lizard as he incants the Ritual of Renewal. The Daemon is banished by the Banishing Ritual of Mah.

  He had finally reached the last page of the chapter concerning the calling up of imps, demons, and djinn. With an end in sight, Martin found the strength to continue:

  By imbibing a Token of Blood, then uttering ‘Aiyedeuh’ but once, the Daemon Brachamashoot is raised as an intangible Manifestation from the Depths of the Black Abyss that he may grant two Boons. The Daemon may then be discharged in part by speaking the Word of Summoning once more. The Word must not be intoned thereafter for one full Cycle of Mah, lest the One closest to the Mage be afflicted with malefic Possession; if the Word is not spoken again during that Period of Time, the Mage is forever freed of the Daemon.

  “Yeah, right,” Martin chuckled to himself, “and praise be to Ahuramazda!” He yawned as he closed the centuried treatise. In his opinion, the text was nothing more than a collection of old wives’ tales and occult gibberish, an opinion certainly not shared by his boss, Professor Waltham.

  Professor Alfred Waltham claimed he had purchased the two-volume grimoire for the price of twelve goats from an elderly bedouin he had come across somewhere on the desert plain of Marv-i-Dasht, near the ancient ruins of Parsa in central Iran. Two years of drought had left the nomadic herdsman desperate for any means to provide for his starving family; no circumstances less dire, Waltham had assured Martin, could have persuaded the man to part with such venerable writings.

  Although neither he nor the be
douin could read the weathered incunabula, Waltham was so convinced of their value that he abruptly terminated his study of the nomadic tribes to return to Miskatonic University in May, 1933, three months earlier than planned. He subsequently hired Martin Dodd, a graduate specialist in pre-Islamic Middle Eastern languages, to undertake the translations that Waltham felt certain would ensure great academic fame for the both of them. It struck Martin that the old scholar craved the recognition of his peers a bit too obsessively.

  The bedouin had insisted the manuscripts were all that remained of the Kurush Nameh or Book of Cyrus, a legendary collection of occult secrets reportedly compiled by the Magi, the powerful priest magicians of the Achaemenid Shahs, at the behest of Cyrus the Great (“Kurush” in the Persian language of Farsi). The majority of modern scholars dismissed the Kurush Nameh as pure fable, the same scholars who had for so long denied the very existence of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab.

  Martin knew the Indo-European Achaemenid kings had shattered the powers of Babylon, Egypt, Greece, India, and Arabia, finally bringing some twenty-three nations under the rule of the world’s first real empire.

  Kurush founded the Persian Empire in 520 b.c. Among his more notable successors were Darayavaush (Darius the Great) and Khschearscha (Xerxes the Great). Each king had enhanced the notorious fortress capital at Parsa, which Kurush had carved out of a mountainside, erecting sculptured palaces of an ever grander scale in hope of outdoing his predecessors. Hundreds of gigantic friezes and sculptures depicting mythological beasts adorned the sprawling metropolis at its height. Giant two-headed griffins, bulls and lions locked in deadly combat, sphinxes, and other composite zoomorphic sentinels of stone decorated the temples and palaces, stone reminders of the might of Persia’s kings. Most impressive of all, however, were four colossi that guarded the cyclopean Gateway to All Lands at the city’s entrance. These gigantic winged bulls towered twenty-two feet above their pedestals and mimicked the likeness of King Xerxes himself with their braided beards and cylindrical, fretted tiara crowns. The Greeks had so despised the sprawling metropolis that they dubbed it Persepolis, the “Eater of Cities.”

  One of the more fanciful embellishments to the Kurush legend asserted that the king had ordered the foremost sorcerers and magicians of subjugated kingdoms brought before him, beginning with the necromantic high priests of the Babylonian deity Marduk. Through torturous means, he is said to have extracted secrets that would provide his armies with unparalleled military prowess. The secrets were recorded by the Magi within the pages of the Kurush Nameh and entrusted to the fearsome adepts of Atar, god of fire.

  Persia’s seemingly endless victories, attributed to the powers of the Magi, continued well into the fourth century b.c., at which time the Magi withheld their knowledge from Darius III, a leader deemed by them to be weak and ineffectual.

  When Alexander the Great besieged the Persian Empire in 320 b.c. and slew Darius III, the Macedonian conqueror became so entranced by Persepolis that he chose it as the capital of his empire as well. Yet in the midst of a subsequent celebration feast, Alexander had inexplicably ordered the site burned to the ground, an action that still puzzles scholars today. Legend has it that the fearless conqueror was so repulsed by horrific secrets offered to him by the Magi that he ordered the city be put to the torch that very night; the god of fire himself would provide the means to obliterate such unnatural horrors for all time.

  Bedouin tradition claimed the Magi of Atar split the Kurush Nameh into two halves and assigned each half to a trusted member of their number. These guardians were immured within a secret hypogeum located beneath the holy of holies. When the burning temple collapsed, the guardians were baked alive by the hellish heat from the inferno above, and the Kurush Nameh was thereby lost to mankind, seemingly forever.

  However, in 1931 a team of European scholars began disinterring Persepolis from the layers of ash and rubble that had covered it for centuries. Waltham purchased the manuscripts from the bedouin four years later, after touring the partially resurrected ruins.

  The bedouin claimed to have discovered the texts in 1931 during a looting expedition to the site. While digging for buried artifacts, he stumbled upon the entrance to a subterranean chamber near the stairway of the Tripylon. The ancient flooring had collapsed under his weight, and he had landed between the charred remains of two human skeletons, each of which had an iron box clutched tightly to its long-dead bosom. Believing the boxes contained gold or jewels, the thief snatched them from their bony cradles, climbed to the surface, and escaped with his discovery. Thereafter, he swore the ground shook furiously as he fled the ruins, frightening the superstitious fool half out of his mind. The following day he learned from the excavators that a minor earth tremor had caused a cave-in during the night, a cave-in which obliterated all signs of the looted chamber.

  Skeptical of this story, Martin had pointed out that although the lavishly inscribed texts praised “Mighty Kurush, Shah of Shahs” and an encoding device dating from the Achaemenid period had been used to write the text, these factors alone were not sufficient proof of the texts’ age or authenticity.

  After straining over the faded, flaking, hand-lettered leaves, often for twelve hours each day, Martin had grown accustomed to headaches and chronically blurred vision. Still, it bothered him to realize that, despite his own Herculean efforts, Waltham would undoubtedly take all the credit for any noteworthy discoveries in the translation.

  The bulk of the first volume yielded a veritable encyclopedia of folk medicine, providing hundreds of herbal remedies for various diseases. The final chapter, however, concerned only divination and the raising of imps, djinn, demons, and an unclean spirit Martin equated to the “peri” of Persian folklore, a term not in common usage until the 1770s. He had as yet only scanned the contents of the second volume, but it appeared to deal with religious doctrine and practices concerning a hierachy of cosmic entities who once held domain over primordial Earth. One section warned that these alien entities would “resurrect themselves,” during the time of specific astrologic convergences, to extinguish mankind and reestablish their own planetary dominion. Martin suspected the esoteric material of such sections would eventually require anagogical interpretation in order to reveal some encrypted message intended only for the initiates of the innermost mysteries. The medicinal information might prove valuable, but the rest he deemed worthless religious mumbo jumbo.

  As he began to pack up for the night, he slipped the translated pages into an envelope. Although Waltham would be ecstatic over his progress, Martin wondered what the old coot would think of the more preposterous sections. He envisioned the professor requisitioning cadaver’s eyes and lizards from the university Board to prove the accuracy of the incantations.

  While closing the envelope’s clasp, Martin accidentally sliced his index finger with the edge of the flap. He dropped the offending item and jammed the bleeding finger into his mouth. As he chided himself for his carelessness, an odd thought occurred to him: he was literally “imbibing” his own blood! That in itself fulfilled half the requirements to summon one of the demons!

  He reopened the envelope and spilled the contents out onto the desk. With the bleeding finger still jammed in his mouth, he located the appropriate passage. As a lark, he recited the entire formula aloud, sounding out the unfamiliar summoning word phonetically as ‘eye-dee-yoowh’:

  By imbibing a Token of Blood, then uttering ‘Aiyedeuh’ aloud but once, the Daemon Brachamashoot is raised as an intangible Manifestation from the Depths of the Black Abyss that he may grant two Boons.

  A nauseating stench seemed to seep into the room. As Martin glanced around, trying to determine the source of the sudden odor, he sensed he was no longer alone.

  Near the middle of the room, approximately seven feet above the carpeted floor, an ashen puff of smoke appeared. As Martin watched, the smoke darkened and expanded, like ink disbursing in oil, until an insubstantial globe was roughly defined. The globe lopsidedl
y increased its size, stabilizing only after it achieved a diameter of more than two feet. Within its hazy parameters, an agglomerate of vividly swirling colors, some outside the familiar spectrum, blended and whirled in a convoluted dance.

  Martin leaned cautiously toward the thing. Within its swirling mass, he detected two tiny violet points of light glowing brightly. The points solidified into a pair of seemingly tangible orbs, eyes! Martin realized he was gazing into a pair of darkly brilliant demon eyes! Intimidated, he drew back and blurted out, “What in the hell …?”

  Before he had even finished his exclamation, something slammed against his head with the force of a hammer’s blow. The impact knocked him back, hurling him from his seat and onto the floor. He stared dazedly at the phantasm as he regained his seat.

  Some remote area of his brain recognized the blow as a vehicle of communication, an uncouth means of relaying information. A response to his unfinished question, in the form of visual, auditory, and olfactory impressions, had been crudely and painfully propelled across the room and imprinted upon his mind. If this was the only way the two thousand year old demon could “speak,” Martin considered, then it might be prudent for him to limit the number of questions he directed at the damned thing.

  Martin recalled reading earlier in the ancient text that demons were distinguished as either benevolent “eudaemons” or malevolent “cacodaemons.” He suspected he was dealing with the latter in this case. Yet he wondered if a being incapable of a true physical manifestation could pose a real threat to him, aside from giving him a splitting headache, that is. At the same time, he was shocked to find himself considering the possibility that he was in the presence of an actual demon rather than experiencing some sort of waking hallucination induced by extreme exhaustion. Excitement and curiosity had plainly overcome his instinctive incredulity.