Veered off my dice in this dour curled end-word
And that wan Talent…
I shook my head. Was that correct? Was it anywhere near correct?
The trouble was that I couldn’t remember how the lines were supposed to read. I had the vague feeling that none of these versions was the right one. Obviously, they couldn’t all be right. But why couldn’t I remember my favorite poem, more familiar to me than my Social Security number?
Uncle Alvin’s warning had been “First it poisons, then it devours.”
Now I began to interpret his words in a different way. Perhaps The Necronomicon didn’t poison only the book it was in physical contact with, perhaps it poisoned the actual content of the work itself, so that in whatever edition it appeared, in whatever book, magazine, published lecture, scholarly essay, commonplace book, personal diary—in whatever written form—a polluted text showed up.
It was an altogether terrifying thought. Uncle Alvin had not warned against placing it with an important edition; his warning concerned an important book. I had placed it with Milton and had infected the great poems wherever they now might appear.
Could that be right? It seemed a little far-fetched. Well no, it seemed as silly as picturing Milton, the poet himself, in a Shriner’s hat. It seemed just dog-dumb.
But I determined to test my wild hypothesis, nevertheless. I got to the telephone and called my old friend and faithful customer in Knoxville, Tennessee, the poet Ned Clark. When he said hello, I was almost rude: “Please don’t ask me a lot of questions, Ned. This is urgent. Do you have a copy of Milton’s poems handy?”
He paused. Then: “Robert, is that you?”
“Yes it is. But I’m in an awful hurry. Do you have the poems?”
“In my study.”
“Can you get the book, please?”
“Hold on,” he said. “I have an extension. I’ll pick up in there.” I waited as patiently as I was able until he said, “Here we are. What’s the big deal?”
“Sonnet XIX,” I said. “Would you please read it to me?”
“Right now? Over the phone?”
“Yes. Unless you can shout very loud.”
“Hey, man,” he said. “Chill out, why don’t you?”
“I’m sorry, Ned,” I said, “but I think I may have made a big mistake. I mean, a heavy bad mistake, old son. So I’m trying to check up on something. Could you read the poems to me?”
“Sure, that’s cool,” he replied, and I heard him leafing through his book. “Okay, Robert. Are you ready? Here goes: ‘When icons in a house mild lights suspend, Or half my ties in this stark world have died.…’ ”
I interrupted. “Okay, Ned. Thanks. That’s all I need to hear right now.”
“That’s all? You called long distance to hear me say two lines of your favorite poem?”
“Yes I did. How did they sound to you?”
“As good as Milton gets.”
“Did they sound correct? Are those the words as you’ve known them all your life?”
“I haven’t known them all my life,” he said. “You’re the wild-haired Milton fan. He’s too monumental for my taste, you know? I mean, massive.”
“Okay, but you’ve read the poem, at least.”
“Yes indeedy. It’s a big-time famous poem. I read all those babies, you know that.”
“And these lines are the ones you’ve always known?”
Another pause. “Well, maybe not exactly,” he admitted. “I think the punctuation might be a little different in this book from what I’m used to. But it mainly sounds right. Do you want publication information?”
“Not now,” I said, “but I may call back later for it.” I thanked my friend and hung up.
It seemed that my surmise was correct. All the texts were now envenomed. But I wanted to make certain of the fact and spent the next four hours telephoning friends and acquaintances scattered throughout America, comparing the lines. Not every one answered, of course, and some of my friends in the western states were groggy with sleep, but I got a large enough sample of first lines to satisfy me.
Walt Pavlich in California: “One-Eye can so draw my late sow’s pen …”
Paul Ruffin in Texas: “Wind I consider now my life has bent …”
Robert Shapard in Hawaii: “Wound a clean liver and the lights go out …”
Vanessa Haley in Virginia: “Wind a gone slider and collide a bunt …”
Valerie Colander in West Virginia: “Watch a corned beef sandwich bow and bend …”
These were enough and more for me to understand the enormity of my mistake. All the texts of Milton that existed were now disfigured beyond recognition. And I had noted a further consequence of my error. Even the texts as they resided in memory were changed; not one of my friends could remember how the lines of sonnet XIX were supposed to read. Nor could I, and I must have been for a decade and a half one of the more constant companions of the poem.
The copy of Al Azif was flourishing. I didn’t need even to pick it up to see that. The gilt edge shone like a gold bar fresh from Fort Knox and the morocco binding had turned ruby red and pulsed with light like a live coal. I was curious how the inks would glitter, so now I did pick up the volume—which seemed as alive in my hands as a small animal—and opened it at random.
I was right. The different colors of the inks were as vivid and muscular as kudzu and looked as if they were bitten into the thick creamy pages like etching. However disquieting these changes, they had resulted in a truly beautiful manuscript, a masterpiece of its kind. And though I knew it to be a modern handwritten copy, it also seemed to be regaining some of its medieval characteristics. Most of the pages were no longer totally in Arabic; they had become macaronic. Toward the end pages a few English words were sprinkled into the Eastern script.
Oh no.
As long as Al Azif was in Arabic it was relatively harmless. Most people would be unable to read the spells and incantations and the knowledge to be found there that is—well, the traditional epithet is unspeakable, and it is accurately descriptive. I certainly would not speak of the contents, even if I was able to read them.
I flipped to the front. The first lines I found in the first page were these:
Wisely did Ibn Mushacah say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For the spirit of the devil-indentured hastes not from his charnel clay, but feeds and instructs the very worm that gnaws. Then an awful life from corruption springs and feeds again the appointed scavengers upon the earth. Great holes are dug hidden where are the open pores of the earth, and things have learned to walk that ought to crawl.
I snapped the cover shut. Those phrases had the true stink of The Necronomicon. You don’t have to be an expert upon the verses of Alhazred to recognize his style and subject matter.
I had read all of these pages that I ever wanted to read, but even so I opened the volume again, to the middle, to confirm my hypothesis. I was right: Al Azif was translating itself into English, little by little. There was only a sprinkling of English in the latter pages; the early pages were English from head to foot; the middle pages half Arabic, half English. I could read phrases and sentences, but not whole passages. I could make out clearly, “they dwell in the inmost adyta”; then would follow lovely Arabic calligraphy. Some of the passages I comprehended were these:
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate; in the Gulf the worlds themselves are made of sounds; the dim horrors of Earth; Iä Iä Iä, Shub-Niggurath!
Nothing surprising, and nothing I wanted to deal with.
But I did understand what had happened. When I had so carelessly allowed this copy of Al Azif to batten upon Milton’s poetry, it took the opportunity to employ Milton’s language in the task of translating itself. With a single thoughtless act, I had given The Necronomicon—call it accursed or unspeakable or maddening, call it whatever minatory adjective you choose—both life and speech, and I saw the potential for harm that I had
set in place.
I flung the volume into my flimsy little safe, clanged shut the door, and spun the dial. I put up the CLOSED sign on my shop door, called my wife, Helen, to tell her I wouldn’t be home, and stood guard like a military sentinel. I would not leave my post, I decided, until Uncle Alvin returned to rescue me and all the rest of the world from a slender little book written centuries ago by a poet who ought to have known better.
Nor did my determination falter.
As soon as Uncle Alvin laid eyes on me Sunday morning, he knew what had gone wrong. “It has escaped, hasn’t it?” he said, looking into my face. “Al Azif has learned English.”
“Come in,” I said. When he entered, I glanced up and down the empty street, then shut the door firmly and guided my uncle by his arm into my office.
He looked at the desk, at the crumpled brown paper bags that held my meals and at the dozens of empty Styrofoam cups. He nodded. “You set up a watch post. That’s a good idea. Where is the volume now?”
“In the safe,” I said.
“What’s in there with it?”
“Nothing. I took everything out.”
“There’s no cash in the safe?”
“Only that book you brought upon me.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Do you know what would happen if this copy was brought into contact with cash money?”
“It would probably poison the whole economy of the nation,” I said.
“That’s right. All U.S. currency everywhere would turn counterfeit.”
“I thought of that,” I said. “You have to give me some credit. In fact, this never would have happened if you had given me a clearer warning.”
“You’re right, Robert, I’m sure. But I feared you’d think I was only pulling your leg. And then I thought maybe you’d experiment with it just to see what would happen.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’m a responsible citizen. The Necronomicon is too powerful to joke around with.”
“Let’s have a look,” he said.
I opened the safe and took the volume out. Its outward appearance was unchanged, so far as I could tell. The ruby morocco was rich as a leopard pelt, and the gilt edge and gold stamping gleamed like fairytale treasure.
When I handed it to Uncle Alvin, he didn’t bother to glance at the exterior of the book, but turned immediately to the latter pages. He raised his eyebrows in surprise, then began reading aloud: “ ‘The affair that shambleth about in the night, the evil that defieth the Elder Sign, the Herd that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have and that thrive on that which groweth out of the tenants thereof: All these Blacknesses are lesser than He Who guardeth the Gateway—’ ”
“Stop, Uncle Alvin,” I cried. “You know better than to read that stuff aloud.” It seemed to me that it had grown darker in my little office and that a certain chill had come into the room.
He closed the book and looked at it with a puzzled expression. “My word,” he said, “that is an exotic and obsolescent diction. What has Al Azif been feeding on?”
“Milton,” I answered.
“Ah, Milton,” he said, and nodded again. “I should have recognized that vocabulary.”
“It has poisoned all of Milton’s works,” I said.
“Indeed? Let’s see.”
I picked up one of the copies on the desk and handed it to him.
He opened it and, without showing any expression, asked, “How do you know this book is Milton?”
“I brought all my copies in here and stacked them on the desk. I’ve been afraid to look at them for two days, but I know that you’re holding a fairly expensive edition of John Milton’s poetic works.”
He turned the open book toward me. The pages were blank. “Too late.”
“It’s eaten all the words,” I said. My heart sank. I tried to remember a line of Milton, even a phrase or a characteristic word. Nothing came to mind.
“Well, maybe not eaten,” Uncle Alvin said. “Used up, let’s say. Absorbed might be an accurate term.”
“No more Milton in the world … How am I going to live my life, knowing I’m responsible for the disappearance of Milton’s works?”
“Maybe you won’t have to,” he replied. “Not if we get busy and bring them back.”
“How can we do that? Al Azif has—swallowed them,” I said.
“So we must get the accursed thing to restore the poems, to spit them up for us, the way the whale spat Jonah whole and sound.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We must cause this manuscript to retract its powers,” he said. “If we can reduce it to its former state of weakness, the way it was when I first met it in Columbia, the works of John Milton will reappear on the pages—and in the minds of men.”
“How do you know?”
“You don’t think this is happening for the first time, do you? It has been such a recurring event that restoration procedures have been designed and are followed in a traditional—almost ritualistic—manner.”
“You mean other authors have been lost to it and then recovered?”
“Certainly.”
“Who?”
“Well, for instance, the works of all the Cthulhu Mythos writers have been lost to the powers of the evil gods that they describe. Stories and poems and novels by Derleth, Long, Price, and Smith have all had to be recovered. The works of Lovecraft have been taken into the domain of Al Azif at least a dozen times. That’s why his work is so powerfully pervaded by that eldritch and sinister atmosphere. It has taken on some of the shadow of its subject.”
“I never thought of that, but it makes sense. So what are the restoration procedures?”
“They’re simple enough,” he said. “You keep watch here while I go to my car.”
He gave me the book and I set it on the edge of the desk, well away from any other written matter. I couldn’t help thinking that if Uncle Alvin succeeded in defeating the powers of Al Azif and rescuing the hostage works of Milton, these moments represented my last opportunity to read in the great bibliographic rarity. And simply as a physical object it was inviting: The lush red glow of the binding offered a tactile pleasure almost like a woman’s skin, and I knew already how the inks shone on the white velvety pages. The Necronomicon seemed to breathe a small breath where it lay on the desk, as if it were peacefully dozing like a cat.
I couldn’t resist. I picked it up and opened it to a middle page. The seductive Persian rose ink seemed to wreathe a perfume around the couplet that began the fragment of text: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.” A large green fly had settled on the bright initial that stood at the beginning of the next sentence, rubbing its legs together and feasting on the ink that shone as fresh and bright as dripping blood. I brushed at it absentmindedly, and it circled lazily toward the ceiling.
“That is not dead …”
The lines sang hypnotically in my ear, in my head, and I began to think how I secretly longed to possess this volume for myself, how indeed I had burned to possess it for a long time, and how my ridiculous rabbit-faced Uncle Alvin was the only obstacle in my way to—
“No, no, Robert,” Uncle Alvin said from the doorway. “Close the book and put it down. We’re here to break the power of the book, not to give in to its spells.”
I snapped it shut in a flash and flung it onto the desk. “Wow,” I said. “Wow.”
“It’s an infernal piece of work, isn’t it?” he said complacently. “But we’ll have a hammerlock on it shortly.”
He set down the metal cashbox he had formerly carried the book in and opened it up. He then laid The Necronomicon inside and produced from a brown paper bag under his arm a small book bound in black cloth and placed this second book on top of the other and closed the metal box and locked it with a key on his ring. I noticed that the black book sported no title on cover or spine.
“What are we doing now?” I asked.
“The inescapable nature of
this book is to cannibalize other writings,” he said. “To feed upon them in order to sustain its ghoulish purposes. If it is in contact with another work, then it must try to feed; it cannot stop itself. The method of defeating it is to place it with a book so adamantine in nature, so resistant to evil change, to the inimical powers of darkness, that The Necronomicon wastes all its forces upon this object and in exhausting itself renders up again those works it had consumed earlier. It simply wears itself out, and that which formerly had disappeared now reappears.”
“Are you certain?” I asked. “That seems a little too simple.”
“It is not simple at all,” he said. “But it is effective. If you’ll open up one of your copies of Milton there, we ought to be able to watch the printed words return to the pages.”
“All right,” I said, and opened one of the blank-paged books to a place toward the front.
“The process is utterly silent,” he said, “but that is deceptive. Inside this box, a terrific struggle is taking place.”
“What is the unconquerable book that you put in with it?”
“I have never read it,” he said, “because I am not worthy. Not yet. It is a great holy book written by a saint. Yet the man who wrote it did not know he was a saint and did not think of himself as writing a book. It is filled with celestial wisdom and supernal light, but to read it requires many years of spiritual discipline and ritual cleansing. To read such a holy book one must first become holy himself.”
“What is the title?”
“Someday soon, when I have accomplished more of the necessary stages of discipline, I will be allowed to say the title aloud,” he told me. “Till then I must not.”
“I am glad to know there is such a book in the world,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And you should look now to see if Milton is being restored to us.”
“Yes he is,” I said happily. “Words are beginning to reappear. Wait a second while I find our control poem.” I leafed through rapidly to find sonnet XIX and read aloud:
“When I consider how my light is spent
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