The Lovecraft Code

by Levenda, Peter;

  He then continued in English.

  “We of the Daasin are an ancient people. We trace our origins to Sumer, a land that was older than Egypt, older than any other on the face of the Earth. Our capital was the city of Cutha or Kutu, the city of the Sumerian Underworld. Today that city is an archaeological site south of Baghdad.

  “I worked at the Baghdad Museum at the time of the American invasion of 2003. I was one of the workers who rescued our priceless heritage by bringing artifacts to our homes and burying them where the soldiers and the rebels would not find them. Once the fighting stopped, we returned those artifacts to the museum. Many objects were lost. Those too big to carry off and some that simply didn't survive the bombings.”

  He was silent a moment, his eyes filled with sadness at the memory of ancient statues and cuneiform tablets turned to dust after having survived for more than four or five thousand years only to succumb to twenty-first century weaponry.

  Aubrey was sitting a little behind Gregory Angell, and to the side. This was going to be Angell's show for awhile, and Aubrey thought it best to sit it out and let the professor handle the questions. Doctor De Vries had joined the meeting initially, but decided the camp would be better served by her work elsewhere.

  Outside Fahim's tent the security detail stood guard.

  “Our world is in danger of being destroyed, Professor. Not just the world of the Daasin, of the people you call the Yezidi, but the whole world. I was a curator at the Baghdad Museum. I was a student of history, like you. But what I see now is something very different. There is an uprising taking place throughout the Middle East, and its origin is in Mesopotamia.

  “This is not a Muslim uprising, or a Kurdish uprising. It is not Sunni or Shi'a. It is not Yezidi or Nestorian or Assyrian or Alawi. Everyone is involved. Druze, Sufis, Samaritans, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, Daesh, al-Nusra, the Peshmerga ... these are groups that have serious differences with each other, separated by centuries of hatred and violence. Yet now they are united as one and no one in the West seems to understand that.”

  Aubrey was paying very close attention to every word out of Fahim's mouth. This was further confirmation of the chatter that had been detected the past several weeks or months. They were getting close to the truth, to the source of the problem, and he wondered if the Yezidi leader would give it a name.

  Angell, for his part, thought the old guy was half-mad.

  “What do you mean they are united as one?”

  “I don't mean they have buried their differences. No. That will never happen. What has taken place is something I have never seen before and which has only taken place once in our history, going back to the glorious days of Sumer and Babylon. No. What is happening now is that there is another group, a terror clan, operating underneath all of the others, inciting each one to greater and greater excesses of violence and bloodshed. These are not Muslims or Christians or any kind of religion or denomination we understand. They are more ancient than any of these, and yet perhaps the root of all. They glory in the torture and mutilation of women and children. In the execution of old men and young boys. They are idolaters and blasphemers.

  “They are worshippers of the Lord of the Underworld, the Lord of the ancient city, Kutu.

  “They are followers of the priest of the Underworld. In Arabic, his name is Al-Qhadhulu. In the old language: Kutulu.”

  The spoken name hit the tent like a bomb. The old Yezidi men began murmuring among themselves as Aubrey sat back and breathed in the word like a confirmation of everything he and Monroe had been working on for decades.

  Gregory Angell, however, was not amused.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked Aubrey, turning to face him. “What bullshit is this?”

  Aubrey simply shook his head, a sad smile on his face like the memory of an old foe.

  “It's no bullshit. At least, not to the men sitting here. And not to the millions of people who are now on the verge of changing the whole world, pawns of this underground—underworld—cult.”

  Fahim noticed Angell's disbelief and apparent distress, and reached over to touch his arm.

  “You are Professor Gregory Angell. Of Providence?”

  Angell nodded.

  “You are of the same family as George Angell, also a professor, a century ago?”

  “Yes, I am a member of the Angell family. I am a descendant of George Angell.”

  Fahim bowed his head, and then looked up.

  “George Angell knew my grandfather. They spoke together many times, in the old days. Before the Great War. Before I was born. He visited my family at Lalish. He was welcome.”

  Fahim managed a smile, gesturing at his poor tent and shabby furnishings.

  “And now you are welcome.”

  “I didn't know George Angell had visited your people. He would have been ... what, in his seventies by then?”

  “Oh, yes. He was here at the time of Woolley and Lawrence. My family helped them to find the old places, the buried cities of our ancestors. Carchemish is near here, near the town of Jarabulus, in Syria, which attracted many archaeologists in those days. Famous names, like Hogarth and Thompson. Your ancestor knew them all. But it was while he was at Ur with Woolley in 1922 that he learned of the existence of the Book.”

  The Book. The reason he was there in the first place. Maybe he would find out what the old man knew and then he could get out of Turkey and back to his apartment in Red Hook. But what he had said just now did not ring true. If George Angell had visited Iraq in 1922, that would have made him eighty-eight years old, only four short years before his death. What was the old professor doing traveling around the world at that age?

  As if sensing his guest's disbelief, Fahim tried to explain.

  “Your ancestor had been consulting for a police department in your country. There was a forbidden religious ceremony of some kind in your state of Louisiana. I believe this was before the Woolley expedition to Carchemish. There were artifacts found at the site of the ceremony, including an idol. George Angell recognized them as Mesopotamian in origin. The Sumerian tablets had been discovered not long before, and there was a great deal of excitement over them. Professor Angell was one of those who were involved in the translation efforts. He came to understand that there was a Sumerian connection to the idol and the other artifacts from the Louisiana site. He knew we trace our origins to Sumer. He visited my grandfather to see what could be learned about that culture.”

  Angell shook his head vigorously, as if trying to dislodge a mosquito or a bad dream.

  “Do you mean to tell me that the people worshipping in the swamps outside New Orleans were Yezidis?”

  Fahim looked startled at the suggestion.

  “Oh, no. Of course not! That is what I am trying to explain. We of the Daasin are protectors of the ancient knowledge. We are guardians. We are servants of God. The others ... those whom you seek ... they are demoniacs. They worship the Lord of Death. Our people have guarded the entrance to the Underworld for thousands of years. To keep it sealed. Closed forever, until the Last Days when the dead will rise and smell the incense.”

  He leaned forward, his forehead almost touching Angell's own, as he whispered:

  “The others want to open that entrance. They want to open the Gate. That is why they want the Book.”

  While the Yezidis had a reputation as devil-worshippers—an idea promoted by travelers to the region and, in the twentieth century, publicized by such adventure authors as William Seabrook in a book published in 1927 that claimed there was a chain of “seven towers of Satan” stretching across Kurdistan and as far as Tibet and Mongolia—the association was ill-founded. There were those who disagreed, of course, and who would see their reverence for a “Peacock Angel” as de facto evidence of idolatry or some other form of satanic practice. And then their shrines, with their bas-reliefs of a serpent rising up from the ground at the entranceways, gave rise to more speculation.

  And then there was the Black Book.
r />   The sacred scripture of the Yezidis has never been seen by those outside the sect. There are writers who have claimed to have seen it, and there have been several published versions of it, but it is generally understood today that none of these “sightings” and publications represent the actual Black Book.

  What Fahim was talking about, however, had nothing to do with the Yezidi Black Book.

  The Yezidis are divided into clans or tribes. Some of these are hostile to each other, reflecting old grievances. Others are more geographically-based, with some clans native to Turkey, others to Syria, Iraq, and even Armenia. The clan represented by Fahim was a group that was formerly based in Mosul, near Nineveh, but which now floated between Mosul, Baghdad, Lalish, and Sinjar. This focus on moving between the ancient sites is a key characteristic of Fahim's clan, which is seen as an anomaly among the Yezidi tribes that have stronger ties to a specific place. The geography of Fahim's clan was, in a sense, multi-dimensional. They represented a line of priesthood that extended back into the mists of history, back to the original Sumerian city-states, and their development was a response to a hideous threat that had the potential to destroy every human being on the planet.

  The stories are hinted at in the Sumerian religious and historical corpus, those fragments that have survived. Texts like the Enuma Elish and the Atra Hasis: broken tablets in cuneiform, pieced together by myopic wizened researchers in the cramped basements of the world's universities, texts missing beginnings, endings ... the Epic of Gilgamesh with its humanoid hero and its battle with Humwawa ... and muttered tales of the ponderous, monstrous being that desired nothing but the slaughter of innocents on the Earth, and especially of the priesthood that was created to deny it victory; the imprisonment of its agents in the Underworld: a cavern deep beneath the Sumerian city of Cutha...

  ... and the Book that was written by an apostate, a man who had divined the secrets of Cutha and of the Being that dwelled in the vastness beneath it. The spy from Yemen who found himself trapped in Mesopotamia when the armies under the Prophet arrived to destroy the temples and smash the idols. The Prophet, whose tribe had its origins itself in Cutha. The tribe that had been in charge of the temple complex in Mecca, the great stone Ka'aba: the tribe of the Quraish.

  “The Book you seek is the one that was written in haste by Abdul Hazred, a man who called himself the ‘Servant of the Forbidden.’ He was an Arab, not one of us. He was not a Muslim, at least not when he came to us in the seventh century, although it is said he converted later under threat of execution. They say he was a Sabaean. He was a worshipper of the god they called Yaghuth, who is mentioned in the Qur'an. Their Prophet had ordered the idol destroyed, but there were those who maintained its worship even unto modern times, often at risk of their lives. We understood this, since we were also threatened by the armies under the Prophet. The Arab came to us in those days to learn what he could of the old faith, the religion from before the Prophet, before the Christians, before the Jews. One of our priests took pity on him, for the Arab was half-mad.

  “As the armies of the Prophet moved on Mesopotamia, to the original land of the Quraish their ancestors, my clan picked up and moved farther north. The Arab went with us. He told us of his gods, Yaghuth and Al-Qullus and Hubal, of A'ra and Azizos and Manat. He spoke to us of the cult of Qos of the black basalt shrine of Wadi Hesa, and of many others. We could understand from his descriptions that these gods were those we had defeated in ancient times, and this made our elders afraid. Perhaps the followers of the Prophet were right in destroying these idols, if the Arabs of Sana and Mecca and Medina were still praying to them, trying to rouse them from their slumber in the Underworld.

  “Our priest instructed the Arab, telling him that these gods must be kept in chains below the Earth. He gave him the formulas for restraining them, in case the clan was captured or killed by the Muslims. These the Arab wrote down in his own hand and preserved them secretly so that our people were not aware, for we never commit these sacred things to paper or to stone.”

  In spite of himself, Angell found he was fascinated by the old man's account. He had heard many tales told by Yezidi headmen in the past, but had never been close to any of them. They kept to themselves and were suspicious of outsiders since they had suffered at their hands so many times over the centuries. But now, in this moment of desperation, Fahim was saying things that Angell knew had never been uttered aloud before in front of a non-Yezidi. Even then, they would not have been revealed before anyone who was not one of their priesthood. Thus, Angell was acutely aware of the unique situation and even of the honor, but that sentiment was sidelined due to the imminent threat.

  “Our people moved north, as I said. To Mosul. And then to our homeland in Sinjar. The Arab went with them, even as far as Lalish and the tomb of our Prophet, Sheikh Adi. The armies of the Muslims were already as far as Baghdad. They were trampling on the ground over the lost city of Cutha. We could feel it in our bones. We could feel the great imprisoned Lord of the Underworld moving about in his dreary palace under the Earth, shaken by the tremors of so many feet and horses.

  “Thus it was in fear that our priests revealed some of the secrets of our faith to the Arab, for it was necessary that the Old Ones not be roused from their slumber. The Muslims would not know the formulas, would consider such things unclean. So, as has been told to me by my father, and to him by his father, back for countless generations to the time of the Muslim invasion of Mesopotamia, the Arab learned the essential methods for keeping the Old Ones chained and the Gate between our world and theirs forever closed.

  “And he wrote all of this down in a book. As our ancestors fled to the safety of Mount Sinjar, the Arab went further east with our secrets. It is said he went to Persia, and from there perhaps to Afghanistan where some of the old people had fled centuries earlier and where the old gods were known and their incantations preserved.”

  Fahim stopped to take a sip of coffee. Angell decided to jump in at that point and ask, “And the book? What happened to it?”

  He could sense Aubrey stiffen behind him. This was what they had come for.

  “The book was never out of the possession of Abdul Hazred, the ‘Servant of the Forbidden.’ He took it with him to Persia. It disappeared after he died, a crazy mystic more than one hundred years old in the streets of Damascus. Then it surfaced somewhere in Europe after the Crusades. Then it disappeared again. Later, much later, after the Second World War, the book was deposited in the Baghdad Museum where I was archivist. I don't know by whom, or why. I only know that I kept it out of the hands of Saddam's men and then escaped with a young Yezidi girl and the book to Syria.

  “It was known as Al Kitab Al Azif, an Arabic expression meaning the buzzing of insects. This means the cicadas that eat our grape vines. Their sound is unusual and, to someone of Abdul Hazred's sensitivity, extremely ... suggestive. He believed the sound was made by the cicadas reacting to the presence of the Old Ones. Of course, by that time he was completely mad.

  “The book was written in Abdul Hazred's own hand, in Arabic, but was translated into Greek shortly after the Arab's death by an Assyrian priest. The priest felt that the buzzing of insects was a reference to the strange words that are found in the book, words that are not Arabic or Farsi or even Kurdish but which come from the ancient tongue of the Yezidi: Sumerian. In Europe they would have called it the ‘language of the birds’ instead of insects, a coded language understood only by the initiated. As the book is concerned with the dead gods of the old times, and the means to ensure they remain dead, the priest gave the book the title in Greek by which it is best known.

  “Necronomicon.”

  The silence in the tent was palpable, a living thing that sucked the spirits dry of all the men squatting there. There was no movement. Not even an intake of breath.

  Angell was stunned. A fantasy had become reality. Two worlds had suddenly encountered each other, clashed, fused, and created a third: the one he now was living in.

&n
bsp; The Necronomicon was a joke, a running literary gag, an invention of his family's sick, twisted tormentor. Yet here were Lovecraft's despised Yezidis, telling him it was real. And there was nothing more real than sitting in a tent in a refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border, surrounded by armed men, and with the ever-present threat of a mortar attack or a suicide bomber to sweeten the pot. He knew they weren't lying, but they couldn't be telling the truth either.

  He turned to look at Aubrey.

  “You're buying this?”

  But before Aubrey could answer there was a penetrating, high-pitched scream coming from somewhere outside the tent.

  The sound of men running brought everyone out of their reverie. Angell and Aubrey jumped up, uncertain what to do. Fahim pushed through them purposefully, as if he knew what had just transpired.

  Strangely, none of the other men in the tent made any move to retrieve their weapons and join the crowd outside. Instead, they looked at each other with meaningful glances and remained in their places along the tent walls. Aubrey noted that, but did not comment.

  After all, this is what they came for.

  The two Americans followed Fahim out of the tent and onto the now darkened pathway between the tents. The scream came again, more insistent. It was the voice of a woman, or a child. Angell noticed that his security minders were nowhere to be seen, and this—more than the screams—terrified him.

  He raced after Aubrey who was now at a full sprint towards the source of the screams. A small crowd of men and some women had formed in a clearing ahead of them, making a kind of rough circle around someone in its center.

  Angell pushed through behind Aubrey and stopped dead.

  It was the beautiful, blue-eyed woman from earlier that day. Only now she was disheveled, her glistening black hair in Medusa-like coils damp with perspiration around her face, staring straight at him. Her mouth stretched unnaturally wide as yet another scream burst forth like a hand grenade tossed into the crowd.