Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time
Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles
Historical
Lovecraft Copyright © 2011 Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula
R. Stiles.
Smashwords Edition
Individual stories copyright © 2011 originating authors.
Meddy Ligner, “Found in a Trunk from Extremadura”, first published as “Manuscrit Trouvé dans une Malle d’Estremadure” in HPL 2007. © 2007. Translated from the French by Paula R. Stiles. “Ahuizotl” translated from the Spanish by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
Cover illustration: Francisco Rico Torres
Cover and interior design: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Library
and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Historical Lovecraft [electronic resource] : tales of horror through time / edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles.
Type of computer file: Electronic monograph in HTML format. Issued also in print format. ISBN 978-0-9866864-3-6
1. Horror tales, American. 2. Horror tales. I. Stiles, Paula R. (Paula Regina), 1967- II. Moreno-Garcia, Silvia
PS648.H6H57 2011a 813'.0873808 C2011-901093-3
Published by Innsmouth Free Press, April 2011. Visit www.innsmouthfreepress.com
Smashwords
Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your
personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away
to other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If
you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and
purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of
these authors.
Table of Contents
The God Lurking in Stone, Andrew Dombalagian
The Seeder From the Stars, Julio Toro San Martin
Deus ex Machina, Nathaniel Katz
If Only to Taste Her Again, E. Catherine Tobler
Shadows of the Darkest Jade, Sarah Hans
The Chronicle of Aliyat Son of Aliyat, Alter S. Reiss
Silently, Without Cease, Daniel Mills
The Good Bishop Pays the Price, Martha Hubbard
The Saga of Hilde Ansgardóttir, Jesse Bullington
An Interrupted Sacrifice, Mae Empson
Pralaya: The Disaster, Y.W. Purnomosidhi
The City of Ropes, Albert Tucher
Ahuizotl, Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas
An Idol for Emiko,Travis Heermann
The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins, Molly Tanzer
Black Leaves, Mason Ian Bundschuh
The Second Theft of Alhazred’s Manuscript, Bradley H. Sinor
What Hides and What Returns, Bryan Thao Worra
Amundsen’s Last Run, Nathalie Boisard-Beudin
Red Star, Yellow Sign, Leigh Kimmel
Found in a Trunk from Extremadura, Meddy Ligner
Introduction
The inspiration for this anthology came to us easily. We have an interest in history and historical fiction. One of us has completed a PhD in Medieval History on the Knights Templar (Paula) and the other spends a vast amount of time reading about Prehispanic Mexico and the Tudor period (Silvia). And history, of course, is an important element in Lovecraft’s stories, whether it comes in the shape of the Necronomicon’s false provenance or allusions to New England’s 17th-century witchcrazes. To Lovecraft, a tainted past is the rotten core from which present-day horror germinates.
Lovecraft comes from a long line of New England writers of dark fiction, both before and after him, including the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King. New England of his time possessed a sinister history full of paranoid Puritans, hatchet-wielding daughters, dour and isolated farmers, and Cape Verdean whalers with connections extending across the seven seas (hence his obsession with the ocean). Lovecraft was also fascinated by the “long view” of weird fiction that was popular in his time, extrapolating frightening pasts for humanity that extended back to the Paleolithic and even further.
In this volume, we decided to take that interest in history, in the past, which Lovecraft’s stories show, but to jump back in time instead of anchoring the tales in the present.
We received vast amounts of tales set in Victorian England, because that seemed the setting de rigueur, and at one point, despaired that we might have to change the title of this volume to ‘Cthulhu With a Cravat and a Top Hat’. Soon, however, stories with other locations and time periods began to trickle in. Eventually, we assembled 26 stories, two of them translations from French and Spanish, set in ancient Egypt, Prehispanic Peru, Stalin’s Russia, and many more places, and ranging from the Neolithic to the early 20th century.
The result is a collection of stories that span the world and the centuries, and which we hope Lovecraft and historical fiction enthusiasts alike will find as unique and exciting as we do. Enter our eldritch time machine … if you dare.
— Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles
Ancient History
The God Lurking in Stone
Andrew Dombalagian
When I found him, flies were buzzing across Marduk’s vacant face. He sat without shade by the river’s bank. He stared down at the sand around him. Already, the hot morning had begun to bake his back into a reddish sore. My brother would not know to move out of the heat, even if his skin began to blister.
Marduk did not twitch a single muscle until I stood right next to him. He turned his dim, grey eyes towards me. After slow, grinding thought within his head permitted him to remember who I was, he cracked a simpleton’s grin. When his mouth opened, two gadflies flew out, freed from their toothy prison.
“Tigranes, look. Look what I make.”
He pointed to the squat heap of silt and clay before him. I could not recall anything that had ever excited Marduk as much as the terraced hill built at his feet.
“Mother was worried that wild dogs had eaten you, her idiot son, and here you are, playing in the sand like a child.”
“From my dreams, Tigranes. Gods showed me. Showed me big villages. Full of temples. Like this. This one.”
“Why would the gods bring visions to a fool who burns his eyes by staring at Utu’s radiance in the sky? You could not see a serpent crawling towards you, much less visions from the gods.”
“The shapes. Gods show me shapes. Can’t make them. Hard. Hard to make. I can’t copy. They look scary. Have you seen, brother? Do gods show you? Do you see cities?”
“What are you babbling about now, Marduk?”
“I belong to gods. Oonana says that. She says I belong to gods. That why they show me. They show me ‘cause I am theirs.”
The crazed crone had spread more nonsense to his feeble mind. The gods had allowed Oonana to live to eat the bread of forty-and-two harvests. Our neighbours claimed that her withered body stored the grain of wisdom. All of her ravings were inane and fit only for an unfit mind.
The truly wise ones were the ones who had abandoned Marduk in the rugged uplands. Father should never have brought Marduk into our home. He should have left him on the hillside for the dogs and vultures.
Mother always commanded me to bring him along when I guarded Father’s flocks with sling and staff. I would leave Marduk on the grassy hill and tell him to brain any wild dogs that came near. I told Marduk that the wild dogs were brown and that father’s hounds were grey. No matter how many times I told him, his thick head would not remember. Marduk had once smashed the skull of father’s favourite she-hound.
“Come on, now. We need to get to the square.”
I hauled Marduk to his stumbling feet and set him walking home. As he shambled up the verdant hill rising from the river, I looked down at his trivial construction on the bank. Marduk had piled and shaped the clay into a series of heaped squares. Each level was smaller than the last, creating a series of tiers that escalated to the pinnacle. At the top was perched a mockery of our village altar, left empty of its rightful shrine.
From the top of the hill, Marduk called out for me. He did not see that my foot had trampled his temple into nothingness.
~~~~
The nomadic traders had come early from the cedar forests to the west. Traditionally, our village would have reaped the harvest before the traders’ arrival. There would be stores of grain, animal skins, dried meat, and pots of fermenting beer to offer. In exchange, we would get tools of sharp stone and exotic woods, preserved fruits, and goods that had seen the distant sea.
But harvest was still days away. There was little to barter with and everyone was in a rush to amend this plight. Alongside our neighbours, my entire family was hurrying in the fields to reap, slaughter and store so we could trade before the caravan departed. With our family so busy, we were sent to market to barter for a few important things.
My eldest sister, Ishara, admired herself in the polished surface of the obsidian mirror held by one of the nomadic traders. She turned and posed, coaxing the string of blue stones around her neck to look their most appealing. The cloth she knelt upon cradled nothing but useless adornments and trinkets.
“These are not the things our family needs.”
“Tigranes, I have already gotten the flint blades, dried figs and salt that father asked for. I finished my tasks, even with Oonana bothering me.”
“What did that hag want?”
“She was casting warnings about a man travelling with the caravan. She claims he is a wicked sorcerer from far to the south. He carries a long blade that brightly shines, but it is not made from flint or obsidian. Oonana says he walks with wild beasts that kneel before him and lick his feet like servants.”
“Sounds like the sort of muck that Marduk might believe. No wonder he hangs around the old woman with the other tiny children. It would be fitting, if only he weren’t twice their size and with half their cunning.”
“Don’t you ever tire of abusing him? No wonder he disappears from you all the time.”
“Where did he go this time? He was just here.”
“I wish you fortune finding him again.”
“Don’t waste your wishes. I’m not going to waste my effort on Marduk again. If the gods want him, I will leave him to them.”
~~~~
Ishara and I brought home the goods Mother and Father wanted before harvest. No one raised an eyebrow at Marduk’s absence. Our parents, siblings, cousins, and other relations had supper without even noting that my supposed-brother was missing. Everyone felt burdened to have him beneath our roof. I was merely the one with the daring to admit this disgust.
I was awakened that night by whisperings that flittered down from above. I did not want to confront what was waiting for me, but if I did not attend to my troublesome duties, everyone would wake up and be furious. Our family did not care about what Marduk did as long as I kept him from bringing shame to our house.
Marduk had raised the ladder reaching up from the common room through the exit in the roof. Climbing up after him, there on the roof, I found my useless sibling sitting under the soft, pale glow of Nanna’s throne. His body swayed like a brittle reed in the dry wind. He was speaking in hushed tones, even though there was not another body to be seen.
My reaction was baffling. On a normal night, I would have tossed a pebble at his head to break Marduk from his dullard’s trance. This night, however, I crept closer to listen in on his mutterings. His voice was thicker, and his words were not those of a man with the addled mind of a child.
“One thousand pillars will rise from the southern sands. They will glitter with gold and jewels for centuries before they are swallowed by the merciless deserts of oblivion. Why should Irem’s fate be other than that fallen city with no name? The reptile and serpent men no longer crawl and slide through those narrow halls and arcades of nameless antiquity.
“This servant race will know the destructive touch of ages before all is through. Cyclopean megaliths beyond their comprehension have already crumbled or sunk into strange eons. These primitives’ mud bricks and reeds cannot even survive the paltry river floods that are outside of their pitiful strength to control. The ziggurats and pyramids that will awe their mewling descendants have not even germinated in the dreamy minds of their artists, yet the decay of those low wonders is already written.
“These clans bicker over rocks and stones to fashion into tools. Cults and armies have already danced in the tallest mountains and deepest forests with blades of iron and stranger metals, calling for the glory of their Old Ones. These people scratch and claw at the dirt and sand like the beasts they have hardly risen from. They have only begun to label the heavens with their meaningless words, ignorant of the true names of the beings chained to those damned spheres.”
Here, in Marduk’s incessant, unnatural ranting, I found myself peering over his shoulder. He sat much like he did that morning on the river’s bank. However, rather than a childish construction of clay, an oddly-shaped hunk of smooth stone sat before him.
The stone was large, larger than Marduk should have been able to carry onto the roof. Of its shape, I cannot say anything for certain. My first impression was one of a stout spire of cut stone, standing straight in the air with its peak reaching the level of my seated brother’s seared eyes. With each tilt of my head, however, it seemed to bow and sway. One moment, it appeared to bend outward, only to deceive me with the appearance of its five sides curving inward on themselves.
The lines, dots, and curls carved into those smooth surfaces were a puzzle. Oonana had often spoken of painted etchings in distant caves. But while the crazed miller woman had described images of men and beasts, these designs mimicked nothing but their own irrelevant forms. I would have believed Marduk himself might have carved this stone from his own senseless imagination, but where would he have found the tools and presence of mind to do so?
My idiot brother seemed to share some secret, not just with this stone, but with luminescent Nanna on high. When the light of Nanna’s pearly glow caught on the contours of those carvings, I suspected that they moved and flowed like river water, creating new designs and patterns. In these shifting shapes, hints of colour twinkled in my eyes. The colours of twilight, rush fronds, goat’s blood, dried barley, and others I could not name, shimmered like illusions along the edges of those graven lines.
Suddenly, I realized that Marduk was pulling on my arm. He was frenetically trying to seize my attention. In shock and disgust, I shoved him away, sending him sprawling like a turtle on its back.
“Brother. I called you. You stared at rock. You did not hear. I called you.”
His witless speech had reasserted dominance over his empty mind. Had I really been staring for so long at that stone? Perhaps demons of night had been playing a jest on my mind, filling it with false sensations. I resolved that my brother’s bizarre speech and the oddities of this stone were all products of my weary thoughts.
“Why did you bring that rock onto our roof?”
“My rock. I got from market.”
“You actually traded something of value for this useless hunk of rock?”
“No. Gave to me.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“Trader from South. Oonana talk about him. He had big knife. It was shiny. I could see faces in it. Oonana say he has magic. She say he has many faces. She call him ‘faceless’. What she mean? How he be faceless? I saw his face. Only one face. I see no wings. Oonana say he flies. At night, he flies. But no wings. She call him ‘Pharaoh’. Oonana say means ‘king’. Black Pharaoh. Black King from South. Why king be trader?”
“You are the only fool in town who listens to her lies. Now help me push this rock off of our house. Father will be mad if he finds it on his way to the fields in the morning.”
“Don’t push! My rock! Black Pharaoh gave me! Don’t break!”
“Keep your voice down. Everyone will be furious if we raise a commotion. Fine. You can stay up here with your rock. I am bringing the ladder down after me. You can stay up here all night with your rock and that crazy woman’s stories. If your rock tells you to fly like that trader, go ahead. Just jump off the roof, flap your arms like a hawk, and you will fly away from me.”
~~~~
When Utu reclaimed the sky throne from Nanna, Marduk was not to be found. When we all climbed out to finish bringing in the harvest, my idiot brother and his rock were both gone from the roof. I did not see him sitting on any of the neighbouring roofs adjoining our house and none of the other families climbing out from their homes noticed anything amiss.
I peered down the front of our house. It was the only wall bordering on the lane and was adorned with only narrow, high-set windows. Father lowered the outside ladder to the ground. There was no trace of a rock, or a rock-head, having fallen to the earth.
Father and our uncles led the flocks out of the town walls. The he-beasts among them would be slaughtered. Their skins would be scraped clean then stretched out on the roof, pinned down by heavy stones, and left in Utu’s light to dry. We would not be able to tool the bones and horns into anything useful before the traders left. We would have to make do with what we could get for the hides and meat.
Mother, Ishara, and I marched out into the fields alongside our cousins. We carried long knives and sickles made from new flint to cut down the wheat and barley. We worked until Utu’s throne sat at its baking zenith before resting. A cousin brought forth a basket of brown bread and a goatskin bag filled with fresh milk.
While we ate in the shade of uncut stalks, Oonana approached. She ignored the tides of sweat running down her frail body. Her violent raving could not be abated by heat or hunger.
“The Southern Trader has gone. He left in the night. He flies south to the land of the great river. Beneath the sandstone gaze of a man-lion, in bright robes, he is worshipped by cults that proclaim him their dark god. He leaves behind his vile curse! Where he walks, madness and destruction follow! Even if every knee bent in honour at the town altar, no respite of the gods would protect us!”
Interrupting her wild gesticulations, Oonana looked squarely at me. A twisting, terrifying fire danced in her eyes. The crone rushed forward, charging like an enraged beast. She kicked me to the ground and flailed at my chest with clawing hands. Amid shrieks and curses, her fingers tore at my skin. With her savagery, Oonana sent every heron and toad into flight from the scene of chaos.
Mother and Ishara tried to pull the old woman from me, but with uncanny strength, the hag pushed them into the barley. I grabbed the flint sickle beside me and swung in a powerful arc. The freshly sharpened blade sank deeply into her flank. Stunned by the wound, Oonana staggered away.
Onlookers had collected, drawn by the sounds of the skirmish. Oonana shoved her way through the crowd, casting aside everyone that offered her a hand. She ran to the river and tumbled down the grassy banks into the rich waters.
The beast had been lying in wait for this meal. When Oonana fell splashing into the dark water, a great, toothy reptile rose up to claim her. The monster snapped its jaws down upon the doomed old woman and dragged her into the wide depths.
I rubbed the sickle blade on the soil to remove the blood. Everyone returned to their plots of land. The gods had elected to protect Oonana no longer. Whether by beasts, flood, or famine, those doomed to die would meet their fate. They would be spirited into the Lightless World to drink ash and eat clay.
~~~~
“Tigranes, are you sure you are not hurt?”
“Oonana was feeble, even in her fury. I am fine, Ishara.”
“Perhaps she had the same evil dreams, as well. Maybe her aged mind could not handle the burden and that is why she broke into this fit.”
“What evil dreams?”
“Mother confided in me that she and Father had terrible visions last night. Our uncles, aunts and cousins had them, too. But their impressions were all just vague feelings of misery and unease. They had lingering sensations of doom, accompanied by the music of demons. My evil dreams were far more vivid.”
“What did you see?”
When Marduk would pour the disjointed memories of his dreams into my ear, they mostly fell uselessly to the ground. My sister, on the other hand, even if prone to flights of fancy, was a hard worker and a level mind. When Ishara spoke of such slumbering hallucinations, I was more apt to lend credence and listened intently to her story.
“At first I saw only a wide, black emptiness. I could hear the same music as our family in their nightmares – the cruel beating of drums and the inharmonious wailing of flutes. Lights, like bright torches, flickered in the vastness, yet all remained dark. I had a grim impression, as though I were walking through an endless graveyard. Those multitudes of light hanging in the null vastness were as dead as a field of men slaughtered by heartless raiders.
“A towering temple suddenly emerged, bubbling up from the viscous plume of the audient void. It was made of massive bricks of dried mud. They were so big that I imagine an entire riverbank of clay and mud would need to be dredged just to mold one brick for this monstrous house of the gods. Tier upon tier was heaped to great heights. Four steep pathways cut with steps led up to the pinnacle at its immeasurable peak. From every doorway issued moans of agony and shrieks of maddened laughter.
“Then I saw Marduk. He marched down from the pinnacle of the temple in triumph. His face was set in hard, fierce determination. There was a cunning in his eyes and a malice that I have never seen anywhere before. Tigranes, please tell me what Marduk has been doing? You watch over him. Where is he?”
“I do not know. I do not care to know.”
~~~~
That night, my fists clenched in sleepless furor because, anew, my brother’s shapeless words haunted the roof of our house. His distorted speech merely kept me in irate wakefulness, but did not initially wake me. What stirred me from sleep was the heavy, pulsing sound of wind, as though the air were disturbed by the beating of large wings.
When I climbed to the roof, I brought Father’s obsidian knife with me. I concealed the blade, but would not hesitate in resorting to it if needed. I had already freed the world from one mad mind that day.
Marduk was again staring at that rock, chanting phrases of veiled meaning. He did not hush his voice, or perhaps the night air amplified his words just for my ears. His fevered thoughts were of an even stranger bent tonight. It seemed that Oonana’s wild ramblings, denied entrance into the Lightless World, had been passed along to my brother.
“The old woman has taken into oblivion the secrets of her lineage. Flowing through her blood was an ancestral memory of the flesh digested in her forebears’ stomachs. Those were not the bones of deer and mammoth left behind in long-forgotten caverns before the Great Thaw. They picked those femurs and fibulae clean of flesh and marrow, but those tiny bones covered in supple flesh, harvested fresh from the young livestock, were the true delight.
“Now they have all fled to distant Leng. Only that festering old woman remained to pick apart at humanity, although she preferred to feast on their minds and sanity, leaving the meat to rot on the living bones. Nevertheless, the banquet of ghouls shall be rejoined. Already, on a rain-sodden isle of blight far to the north and west, the Great Mother has sounded the call for her children to devour the scratching, squealing bipedal beasts who believe themselves sentient.”
Marduk had been a revolting vermin in our house since the day Father rescued him from the barren hillside. His vacuous face and abbreviated thoughts nagged me like a swarm of gadflies. He had brought embarrassment to our family and vulgar frustration to my life.
Never before, though, had I felt him so intrinsically repellent. Deep within his heinous, cryptically shocking words, lurked something alien in his nature that made his very existence abhorrent to my eyes. The godless words that had slithered foully from his lips confirmed that I would be purging twin abominations from the world this day.
I protected my eyes from even fleeting glances at that shining rock of shifting form and unimaginable mental horror. I lunged at my fiendish brother when he turned his own eyes to meet me. The milky veil was lifted from his eyes and in their depths, I saw forbidden secrets, waiting without patience to emerge. In my haste to extinguish those secrets forever, I tackled Marduk and wrestled him into submission.
I held his throat against the precipice of the roof, leaving his head suspended above the dusty lane below. Nanna’s light danced on the notched surfaces of the obsidian knife. The glassy, black blade glimmered against Marduk’s neck. His eyes, almost rolling back into his skull, turned up to look at me one final time.
In that instant, I saw the weakened eyes of my idiot brother, containing his old, harmless, imbecile spirit. Beside his face, having rolled along the roof in the scuffle, lay the menacing, multicoloured shimmer of that horrendously enlightening stone. My sight betrayed me and my eyes became affixed to the leering secrets that danced across its etched surfaces.
The unbearable truths of Time and Space wriggled their way into my brain to fester like maggots bloating themselves on a ripened corpse. That stone opened doors for me, revealing the expanse of worlds that should not exist. I bore witness to darkened stars that consumed the light of the heavens to feed their captive masters. In caverns vast enough to swallow all the rivers in the land, I observed writhing hordes of contorting bodies clinging to the walls of the Inner Earth. Those beasts waited for the summons into wakefulness that would herald the new age of the hunt. All the while, these tormenting insights were chorused by a cacophony of pipes and drums from the ends of eternity.
When my fractured mind returned to my family’s roof from those far-flung abysses, I found myself alone in the cold wind. Marduk and the stone both lay broken on the ground below. Kneeling in stunned shock, I could still feel the sting where my hand had gripped that wicked rock as a weapon against my brother. The insanity of wisdom would not let me spare him.
Amongst the fragments of bone and stone littering the ground, my uneasy senses beheld movement, but not from my brother. An amorphous creature, resembling the abnormal spawn of a slug and serpent, slid across the dirt towards Marduk’s body. In grotesque shades of black and green, the thing was a faintly luminescent amalgam of bubbles and eyes that stared everywhere, but saw nothing.
Leaving a viscous trail of slime, and unleashing an odour that wafted up the height of a tall tree to assault my nose, the fluid beast crawled onto Marduk. It flattened itself out and inched towards his face. Morbid curiosity and an undying familial connection compelled me to slide down the exterior ladder to inspect my brother.
The wound I had dealt him made it impossible, yet my brother was rising to his feet again. He ignored me, at first, and he focused his attention on the rubble of his precious stone. From the remnants, he selected one shard – a stone of many faces and angles that shone with a light other than that of Nanna on high. Marduk tightened his fist around the stone and would not expose it for the duration of this, our last confrontation.
The blood was still fresh on his brow, but the gash I left on his skull with the ignoble stone had healed with unnatural celerity. His bones, assuredly snapped and smashed in the fall, had all knitted back into cohesion. His eyes were cold and knowing. The madness from the raw magic of the stone was diminished from his aura, but from his bearing, it was clear that a vastly different person was inhabiting Marduk.
“The Trapezohedron is still imperfect, but there are whole epochs left to correct that.”
“What are you that has stolen my brother?”
“Suddenly, you care for the animal you spent a lifetime cursing? He will harass you no more and yet, you are not joyous. The buffoon has served his purpose and his destiny has reached its end. Marduk the ascending god has been born. My eyes see centuries forward and back. I shall grow this stagnant collection of farms into a mighty city and force your race into a civilization. My temple will be built from their mud, wood and bones. From the pinnacle, the prayers of the worthy will reach out into the spheres as a beacon to the Great Old Ones.”
I searched the ground desperately for Father’s knife. With growing despair, I realized the obsidian tool lay back on the roof. Marduk smiled in defiant victory, sensing my fear.
“Do not hope to kill me. It cannot be. Your bloodline will not know the glorious burden of my yoke. You will march north and abandon the fertile lands of the flood. In the bitter rock of the highlands, you will lay the foundations of your ill-fated progeny. The weight of ceaseless subjugation will weigh on your people and they will never know triumph in their bitter knowledge.”
Against the hypnotic might of his command, I could muster no defense. In accordance with his whims, my feet carried me down the lane and out from the town walls. The comforting safety of drudging toil was left behind. In the be-nighted world stretching out in all directions before me, I marched north into the crushing liberty of the unknown.
For all the disappointing promises that lay sequestered in those distant peaks, the crushing pressure of the secrets relayed to me ensured that the world would never again look as bright. Long after the names of our gods had fallen into the grave of eons, there would forever be a pall cast over the whole of existence. In a doomed universe, where ever-hungry ghouls lurk in the shadows, and blithering idiots are reborn as tyrannical gods, how may hope survive the rise and fall of empires in the sand and stone?
~~~~
Andrew Dombalagian lives, writes and dreams in Havertown, Pennsylvania. He works as a writing tutor at his university: Penn State Brandywine. His fiction and poetry have appeared in the collegiate publications, Crimson & Grey and Penn in Hand. “The God Lurking in Stone” is his first professionally published story and he is thankful for the support of his fiancée, Ellen.
The author speaks: Ancient history has always been a fascination of mine, so I thought it would be fun to surpass the historical and take my story into prehistoric realms. Set in Neolithic Mesopotamia, “The God Lurking in Stone” was born out of a curious idea to explore how Lovecraftian elements, such as Nyarlathotep, may have shaped the gods and mythologies of ancient civilizations. I also wanted to offer a possible origin for the Shining Trapezohedron featured in Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark”.
The Seeder From the Stars
Julio Toro San Martin
Always, the High Priestess communed with her Lady, Inanna. We lived in the great temple ziggurat and out of all her servants and retainers, I alone can boast that I was the closest to her in her detached affections. My Mistress was the En-Priestess of the Moon God, Nanna, but his daughter, Inanna, was the deity most dear to her heart.
I served her in the high place closest to the stars, charting the heavens and their revolutions. I saw from above the great city – clearly, the vast buildings, houses, orchards and agricultural lands. My name is Smenkhkare.
Always, she’d say strange things to frighten me, and that I didn’t understand. I knew she was possessed of the divine and that I, a mere commoner, could never know of such things. But I was proud to be the friend of such a mighty princess and serve her, body and soul, in the Temple of Ur.
Because my Mistress was a member of the Royal House of Akkad and En-Priestess of the Moon, her decrees were unquestioned. She handed out many secret prohibitions, such as: never peer behind the curtains of the Holiest Room.
The years rolled unnoticed in the Temple of Nanna, in the now-far city of Ur, and great were those early times. Great was the drink of youth we enjoyed. Great, especially, were the hymns of my Mistress, Enheduanna. If I praise her too much, it’s because I can do no else and if I speak of myself but little, it’s because I am not important.
~~~~
Ishme arrived from the ruined city-state of Kazalla, from west of the Euphrates River, in the seventh year of my Mistress’ En-Ship. Without father or mother and orphaned to the world. He’d been found amid toppled blocks of burnt mud, clothed in filthy rags, and eating dirt and crawling bugs. I was assigned to tutor him in the duties of the temple, but early on, he showed promise of greater things. Secret rumours spread that one day, Ishme would outgrow the temple and leave to be a great administrator. Because I was the boy’s principal teacher, he was moved to call me ‘Father’. I was pleased with this.
My Mistress took an early interest in the boy, also. She taught him much of her secret wisdom, but of the hidden thing of darkness that was whispered to live behind the curtains in the Room of Nanna, she remained quiet.
When sometimes, because of the rashness of his youth, he’d say something untoward towards the noblewoman, I’d scold him severely. “Do you think of him as our son, perhaps, Smenkhkare?” she’d insinuate and laugh.
Oh, never let it be imputed to me that I, Smenkhkare, ever harboured any sacrilegious thought towards the Holy One of Nanna!
One day, as the three of us walked the lonely corridors of the dark temple together, a crazed man approached and attacked my Mistress with a sword. Ishme jumped in front of her. Quickly, the rest of the temple household, having heard our commotion, arrived and subdued the man.
~~~~
All night, my Mistress knelt by the bedside of Ishme, praying her beautiful poems under the stars. Her poems had power to soothe the Gods, had power to change their wills, or could summon screeching Ereshkigal from the nether hells. But this day, the High Gods remained silent.
I knelt beside her. I looked at her eyes and saw, for the first time – the second would be many years later – that they were watery. I reached out and touched her shoulder, covered by her woolen robe. I touched her just this once and she didn’t stop me.
“Why did the boy do such a thing? I could have protected myself,” I heard her say. We both wept together.
Then she arose and left the room.
Hours later, after the temple physicians told me the boy’s health was worsening, I went to look for my Mistress and found her behind the curtains. Strange now were her songs, strange yet beautiful, sung in a language I didn’t understand and that disturbed me deeply. I let her finish.
When she emerged, I looked at one of her hands and saw she carried something. I could not make it out.
Entering the boy’s room, she ordered everyone out, except for myself. Then she placed the thing in Ishme’s wound.
I heard the boy cough.
I looked and saw the boy’s wound was healed. The child looked at us, perplexed. Then he turned to Enheduanna, opened his arms, and hugged her tightly.
~~~~
Shortly after my Mistress’ assassination attempt, great anticipation engulfed the temple. Sargon, her father, was coming to Ur. From atop the stony girths of the temple, Ishme and I watched, engrossed, as the Great King with his hundreds of military men, carrying weapons of flaring bronze and sturdy bows, marched in ordered phalanx into the celebratory city. Later in the day, a small band of mercenary men arrived and encamped on the outskirts of Ur. We knew they were hostile towards my Mistress and her father.
He conferred with his daughter and counselors in the temple, instead of in the customary palace of the ancient kings of Ur.
“The whole of the city-states of Sumer,” I recall the Great King saying, “are not pleased being ruled by just one city. They want their autonomy back. It isn’t safe here, anymore.”
“I have sung to the Gods,” my Mistress said, while braiding a lock of hair dispassionately, “and will sing again. They are always pleased with my offerings.”
“It isn’t only the Gods that keep you safe, daughter, but also the sharp edge of my battle-axe. When I go to the distant north, what great army will stop the rest of the Sumerians, as now Uruk and Lagash do, from rising against you? Your death and dethronement from the High Place of Nanna would be a great blow to my ambitions. Come with me and be safe.”
My Mistress laughed fearlessly and showed those terrible eyes, while saying, “My Lady, Inanna, loves me as she loved you long ago, when you were taken from a basket and placed as the Cup-bearer to the King of Kish. She helped you usurp that dreamer, Ur-Zababa, and now helps you in this empire that you create for Akkad. But she helps me, also. She’s given me a pet. With this pet, I’ll strike such a fear into the traitors’ hearts that they will cower like defenseless babes and dare not rise against me.”
“Do this, then,” Sargon said, with a ferocious look. “Show this beast tonight. But if, by tomorrow morning,” he warned, “the forces of our enemies are still encamped, I’ll flay them alive and then you’ll come with me to the far north, where already great hosts of my armies march.”
He left immediately. We were left speechless at what we’d heard pass between them.
~~~~
A mist-enshrouded evening came.
That night, as the High Priestess sang her songs in the Inner Sanctum, Ishme and I went to one of the higher places of the storied temple. It was especially dark that night and the strong fog, which was heavier in some places and sparser in others, made visibility a jest. Yet, still, we tried to see what we could across the teeming land. From our vantage point, we could barely make out, dim in the foggy distance, the vast, sprawling campfires of the enemy. Ishme, who at eight years old, barely reached my waist, held my hand with a full and nervous anticipation.
Suddenly, a slow wind began to pick up, gnawingly cold, and in its rising crescendo, through the darkness and the fog, we felt the rudiments of something huge awakening high above. Ishme pointed deliriously up. We heard a loud scream and saw, vaguely, a black presence, broad-winged above us, in the night sky. The wind blew terribly and the scream grew louder, and a rising panic began to overpower my senses. Ishme hugged my legs in fright. Now totally terrified, I grabbed the boy in my arms and rushed quickly into the safe womb of the temple. From inside, I could hear the frenetic shrieks grow dimmer, as it flew away, and then, after a small interval of silence, began the desperately mad screams of the encamped men.
In the clear morning, Ishme and I returned to the spot where we’d stood that night and noticed the enemy was gone. Ishme pulled at my tunic, and pointed excitedly at the spot and yelled. I could tell the boy was proud.
Later that day, I went into the city to gather news. What I learned I gathered from several citizens in beer halls, who were intimate with some of Sargon’s spies. These spies, it was rumoured, later went mad and the king put them to death.
I learned that once the creature, with thunder-loud shrieks, had appeared over the enemy, they hastily sought to arm themselves for war. In this confusion, overtaken by this nightmare wraith, the men saw from the bedeviled skies spores of luminous matter fall. These spores, wherever they fell, grew astronomically fast into frenzied monstrosities of chaotic life. All that was heard was a babel of screams, from beasts and dying men, and then, as if for the climax of some grand cacophony of sounds, the Seeder from the Stars itself dipped into the pith of those unfortunate men, wildly tearing and ravening with abandon.
Sargon left that very day to continue his conquests in the far north. When he left, I could tell he was deathly afraid and in great awe of his daughter.
~~~~
Lazily, the years unwound afterwards. Ishme continued to improve in favour and it was certain one day he would leave to become a well-respected Ensis of the empire. I trembled to think of this, for after all, was he not ours?
During this time, I began to be plagued with inexplicable dreams of an archaic Nile, that long, meandering river being the place from which I’d originally come. In my dreams, I was no longer Smenkhkare, but another, who couriered secret messages and who fought alongside King Scorpion to subdue the red, sceptered crown of Lower Egypt. I lived and relived this troubled man’s life, yet if he ever existed, it would have been centuries before my time.
I also began to notice a gradual change come over Ishme’s behaviour. He became detached, less welcome in his affections. At first, I thought this was because he was becoming a man. In time, however, this episode passed.
When the day arrived for him to leave the temple and continue as an administrative assistant, he told me to follow him to the Holiest Room of Nanna. Already, the stub of manhood was thick on his face. I remember him looking at me and saying, “I’ll never leave to be a governor of this empire. I’ll never serve it in that capacity.”
His refusal was incomprehensible to me. I knew the old ghost that troubled him before was now resurfacing. I decided to confront him. I said, “Ishme, Sargon didn’t mean to hurt you when he killed your parents and caused your people to suffer, when he razed your old city of Kazalla to the ground. It was done as policy. He wanted to unify and they refused. It is the way of this world. Did not his daughter, with Sargon’s blessing, take you in? And see, today, you leave to be a great man in his empire. You cannot hate him, or more especially, she who is like your mother?”
Ishme looked at me with the eyes of a son; they softened. But suddenly, another thought struck him and they hardened to stone. He said, “It isn’t so simple. It isn’t so simple, Smenkhkare.”
I tried to reason with him, “If there is something else bothering you, Ishme, tell me. I will help.”
“I can’t!” he yelled at me. “You love her too much!”
“It is so,” I answered. “I am loyal to Akkad and always will be.”
“If you love me, come with me behind the curtains of Nanna. Let us see what lies behind them.”
The boy was now extremely agitated and spoke madness. I refused to entertain his wish.
He said, “What lies behind the curtains, Smenkhkare? Haven’t you ever wondered? Let me pass!”
Then he made a great effort to pass the curtains. I grasped him and would not let him go. As we fought, he yelled angrily, “She and her father – they are murderers and usurpers! She is a sorceress, a witch, and a devil! Can’t you see, Smenkhkare? She is a devil!”
Hearing his insinuations, I grew furious and threw him hard to the floor. It’s then that I said what I now most regret in life. It would be the last lie I ever told the boy. It was then that I angrily told him that I would never speak to him again.
He rushed from the room.
We desperately searched for Ishme, first throughout the temple, and then throughout the entire city and empire. He didn’t want to be found. We could only hope our beloved boy was safe.
~~~~
My own and Enheduanna’s thoughts never strayed far from memories of Ishme. In time, we heard from a potter in Nippur that he’d gone to the Zagros Mountains, many years before. We shuddered when he told us. Tales of distant travelers, and traders in lapis lazuli and other treasures, spoke of the far-off Zagros Mountains and of a mist-enshrouded kingdom on ghastly peaks, over-seen by what was only whispered of as ‘the Monstrosity on the Throne’: a king of evil learning, who worshiped Gods of strange names. The tales were vague, however, and never an exact route was divulged in these rumours. We prayed Ishme had not found it.
As for me, my unwanted dreams continued and became more baffling and bizarre. I dreamt I was a man leading a group of ragged humans out of Africa; a fisherman in a village on a frosty continent; a king in Serannian; a pauper in Girsu; the coiled serpent that talked with dimly-remembered Gilgamesh; a lute musician in the glorious palace of Olathoë, in doom-laden Lomar.
One day, the Princess came to me, with the libation baskets and wearing her Crown of En-Ship, from under which I noticed long strands of grey hair falling, almost obscured by the rich black, around a face still young and pretty. She looked at me sadly and said, “Why do you never age, Smenkhkare? Were you, too, chosen for your role, as I was, by the Gods? A duty you cannot shirk?”
I didn’t know what she meant. I was only Smenkhkare and when I died, I would be nothing.
She smiled and continued, after a pause, “We are all offspring of it, Smenkhkare. Some of us are more closely linked to it.” She then looked at me with a look of new recognition, which made me shiver. “It came from the emptiness of space and brought its secrets with it, a terrible and distant God, unlike the fickle and stern Gods of Earth. Earth’s Gods, who have forgotten the touch of cold stars and love high mountains, seas and virgin forests, who dance on misty mountaintops, they forbid us to come to them and yet, at times, will come and kiss us tenderly in our sleep. It is gone now, the Seeder from the Stars. I haven’t seen it in many years and my Lady, Inanna, who wears the Laws of Civilization tied around her waist, does not acknowledge or speak of it, anymore.”
She finished and left to continue her work.
With the passage of time, Sargon died, a mortal death, and passed into legend. The Kingship of Sargon then devolved to his heirs: first, Rimush then Manishtushu and then the so-called God-King, Naram-Sin.
~~~~
During the reign of Naram-Sin, the nephew of Enheduanna, shattering revolts broke out throughout the whole of the civilized lands of Sumer and Akkad. Shortly before this, I’d been warned in hushed tones by my Mistress that the Gods of Sumer and Akkad were in strife and preparing for battle. I was terrified and shook in awe of this coming apocalypse.
It began when Lugal-Anne, vassal King of Ur, turned against us. Having no respect for the semi-divine being my Mistress now was, he cast her Crown of En-Ship off, bid her commit suicide, and then smashed the holy and adored things of the temple. On a day when fire began falling from the sky, we fled with the temple household and our meager possessions, and wept on the hills, tearing our hair and scratching our eyes in grief.
During a blinding storm, on the road to Uruk, I experienced my first vision of Earth’s Gods. I saw mysterious Lady Tiamat, towering in the clouds, engendering disorder and flames and coaxing Lotan, the vile serpentine dragon of many heads from the sea, to hinder our escape with hell-winds, upthrown by his foul, membranous wings.
Weather-beaten, tired and near collapse, we managed to make our escape to Uruk and find exile in the temple of An.
Soon, messengers arrived and said a great army was marching from the Zagros Mountains. Where the army stepped, they informed us, the mes, the very Laws that governed in order our cosmos, dissolved. Darkness heaved and took on distorting, palpable form. Once it crossed the Tigres River, Lugal-Anne was seen to join them.
My Mistress, hearing this, was worried.
She’d put up curtains in the Sacred Room of An and, upon hearing the news, she immediately rushed behind them, to pray for the mes, that our order might not completely break.
I remember dimly the elaborate words she spoke, but my weak, scribal hands will still attempt to transcribe, albeit poorly, the magnificence I heard. She prayed, “Lady Inanna, hear me, you whose shield is the moon and whose star is Venus. You, whose least simple command cannonades like a streak of gold across the fervent atmosphere. I kneel before you, to pray for the mes of this sphere and their continuance, for the harmony, alignment and form they bring. Without them, what will become of the strong, well-built cities? Cities of architectural symmetry and splendour, great altitudinous towers and sylvan gardens, founded under Order and the Laws of Civilization, by the black-haired people so many years ago. People of art and music, workers in words, in metals and gold. These are your people, who built mighty ships and when the ships sailed out, they returned with cargo, laden from remote, mystical lands, for your greater pleasure. Do not let the good people perish, or does my Lady now favour strife over love, darkness over light, unworked rock, chaos, lawlessness, enmity, and discordant sounds? Is this what you want, my Lady? Shall I also break what you brought with your ordering presence?”
She sang all night and, emerging in the morning, she stood before me disheveled and tired-eyed. Moving towards me, she slowly said, “Smenkhkare, it’s Ishme who is coming.”
~~~~
Chaos reigned at that time.
The King of the Four Quarters of the Earth, Naram-Sin, couldn’t protect us, since he was embroiled in deadly battle with Iphur-Kisi of Kish.
The King of Uruk, Amar-Girida, went to Enheduanna, to supplicate her to sing her beautiful hymns to the Gods, to help Uruk and fight Lugal-Anne and the dread King from the Mountains, Ishme, whom all men called the ‘Creature’. He begged her to summon the Seeder, as she’d once done.
“It’s impossible,” she said.
~~~~
From a high place, I saw the advance of Lugal-Anne and Ishme’s army. In their march, tremours hit the earth, buildings shook and the sky became dark, bilious and smoky. The army came in spastic motion, coiling and pulsing out of existence. I recall hearing an old priest, holding a bronze sword, yell at the sight, “Now, at the end of all things, let none seek to stop me, as I break free from the Lords of Creation!” Then, running into the temple, he killed himself. Many followed his example. Prescient with defeat and fear, King Amar-Girida let their armies enter the city.
“You are weak and you bring this on us,” the King said. “I will now fight alongside Ur and Kish.”
The city was spared, but we weren’t. Lugal-Anne wouldn’t stop until he’d destroyed the En-Priestess and her nephew.
Once the black armies entered, soldiers loyal to my Mistress fought to protect the Temple of An, which was also our fortress. Against the combined might of Ur, Uruk, and the shadow kingdom, however, they were no match. The enemy advanced easily.
Screams of dying men assailed our ears, from all corners, amplified a thousand-fold throughout the enclosed corridors. I carried on me a sword to protect my Mistress. When I entered the Room of An, she looked at me strangely. “It is back, Smenkhkare,” she said. “The Seeder is back.” And then she walked behind the curtains.
As this happened, a soldier hurriedly broke into the room. He implored us to flee. He said the Creature was coming. Realizing his pleadings were useless, he resolved to stay with us to the bitter end.
We stood a few paces from the entrance. Unholy noises of dying men continued to sound the depths of our despair. I stared at the opening, into the dark hallway. Seconds passed, agonizingly slow. Confused war-cries bellowed and I felt every fibre, nerve, and tissue in my body ache. The blackness of the open entrance took on the illusion of a solid tableau, the more I looked at it, and then, out of the blackness, a darker outline began to emerge.
As I saw a cyclopean shape grab the soldier, I was blinded by the man’s viscera and blood, meat and limbs, which sprayed the room. My hand grasped the hilt of my sword tightly, as if to break it, but before I could make a mad, desperate swing, I was on the floor, weaponless. The air itself heaved and swayed to and fro like a beast in the room. The soldier was a grotesquery of pieces and I a hopeless wretch, lying before the towering arc of Ishme.
He stood a monumental shape, hooded and in a long cloak of black, a cloak which seemed to embody more negation, an absence of all light, rather than colour. It twined and slithered around the contours of his body and from its bottom, where legs should have been, instead swirled and twisted outwards massively pink, tentacular limbs, coiling and writhing purposely like heavy pythons. Under the darkness of his hood, I discerned – oh, but how can I explain to you the sadness and horrified wonder I experienced when I saw those large, grey, abnormal lips and engorged, abscessed tongue, or the small, blinkless, couchant, yellow eyes? Hands, swollen and cracked like crevices of grey stone, or the foulness of his smell, which was as if worms were inside, gnawing on his innards?
Carrying a ponderous sword, he proceeded to walk, or glide, fluidly, towards the curtains, his awkward and distended robe flowing and his tentacles leading and searching. As he did this, the hulking shape said, in a voice hoarse and deep, yet, in a manner of articulation recognizably like Ishme’s, “Do not try to stop me, Smenkhkare. I know who and what you are, even if you don’t.”
When he was near the curtains, Enheduanna stepped out and stood defiantly in front of him. “Do not do this thing,” she warned.
Like a wounded animal, Ishme gave a sudden, long-winded moan then, lowering his face, he eased it towards hers. He passed it in her view, so she could scrutinize it. Upset, I saw her contract and then compose herself. Staring at her, he asked, “Am I hideous to you? Is your work hideous to you?”
Perplexed and saddened, she answered, “What do you mean, Ishme?”
He gave another bellow and yelled angrily, “It’s because of what you put in me! You should have let me die, rather than live and suffer this shame!” Then, looking at me, he said, “When I ran away, Smenkhkare, hidden in Nippur, I began to change. A hideous thing, I remained hidden. Ashamed, scorned of men, I fled to the Zagros Mountains and there met a man, who explained to me secret lore passed down from ancient times. He divined that my transformation, because I possessed a part of it, was caused by the Seeder. I killed the man and began my kingdom on the mountains.”
He then turned towards my Mistress. “What lies behind the curtains? If my first cure came from there, then whatever is there can cure me again; isn’t it so? I must see the beast. Then I’ll be a man, again.”
He pushed my Mistress and she struggled to hold him back, saying, “No, Ishme, it can’t be trusted!”
Breaking free of her grasp, he entered the room and, in distress, she followed him.
All this while, I’d tried to help, but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed. I trembled with fear for them both. I exerted and worked myself into a frenzy to move, but it was as if my body were a foreign entity and I an unbodied mite trapped within. I lay on the floor and, after they passed behind the curtains, I willed myself even more desperately to move but to no avail.
“Do not go there, Ishme!” I heard her yell.
He thundered, “Get away from me, sorceress! Move! It’s your fault all that’s happened to me!”
“No, Ishme – do not say that! How could I have known?”
Fumbling noises I heard, a loud bang, and then a body fall. After which, Ishme hollered triumphantly, “There you are! What manner of thing are you? I only want to be human! Speak to me! I’ll make you with my sword!”
Commotion followed after and I heard a great noise A blinding light pierced the curtains. The temple rumbled. I felt a strong wind and then, only Ishme’s voice, growing dimmer and dimmer, roaring, “By Yog-Saduk, the Keeper of the Gates, and Aniburu, the Fearsome Planet, I order you to help me!”
A silence ensued and I started weeping uncontrollably. I couldn’t imagine what had happened behind the curtains. Then my Mistress appeared, bloody and with tears in her eyes, and lowly whispered, “A fissure cracked through space. I saw the cavernous void. Ishme is no more. It has taken him.” Then she collapsed.