by S. T. Joshi
Brice exchanged an embarrassed glance with the man on his left, who also faked the song. Bald crown, walrus mustache, sagging cheeks blotched with rosacea—it was Richie, a friend of his from the streets. They pretended not to recognize each other, however, as if both were ashamed they would stoop to such an indignity just for a handout.
Brice had to admit that the church, whatever denomination it was, put on a good show. As the hymn became more fervent, the pattern on the wall brightened from blue to white, the shifting, swirling intensity of color giving the design an illusion of three-dimensional depth.
When the brightness grew almost unbearable, the silhouette of a cowled figure strode in front of the glowing pattern until it stood beneath the circle’s center. Brice wondered briefly if it was Leon … but no, this figure wore a robe, not a hoodie. It towered over the standing congregation, yet there seemed to be no dais to elevate it. And when it raised its arms in exaltation, the robe’s sleeves slid down to reveal hands with fingers that were too long, too splayed.
Brice had no time for fear, only a stupefied astonishment. For the sinuous lacework pattern on the wall suddenly uncurled, the undulating lines exploding forth as gelatinous tendrils. The tip of each elastic appendage shot out and slapped down on the head of an unsuspecting congregant. A suckling mask of translucent protoplasm enveloped Richie’s silently shrieking face, the membrane distending and stretching the obscured visage into a grotesque new configuration.
Only when Brice felt the soggy smack of ooze on his own head did he comprehend the miracle of which he was now a part.
The burning slime embraced his entire body, melting and molding his flesh like modeling wax. Brice shrieked with the ecstasy of religious conversion, yawned open his mouth to receive the viscous communion that poured down his throat to transubstantiate him from within. He realized that he had been touched by a real, living, tangible god. A god who would remake him in His image.
For the first time in years, Brice was no longer tempted to succumb to despair and die. Not with the purpose that now coursed through him, the mission that he must perform.
* * *
Hours later, yet still well before dawn, he shuffled into the foyer of the homeless shelter. Understaffed and overcrowded, the facility consisted of little more than one large dormitory room lined with cots, all of which were already taken. The sole attendant on duty sat at a desk by the entrance, reading by the light of a low-slung shaded desk lamp so as not to wake the occupants.
“Mr. Brice?” She greeted him, as she always did, with a desperate cheerfulness. Her name was Maureen, a volunteer social worker fresh out of college who hadn’t been there long enough to become jaded or embittered by the intractable urban malaise. “We haven’t seen you lately. Are you … okay?”
She obviously hadn’t looked up until he’d passed her. Brice did not turn around. Paper rustled as he thumbed a sheet off the stack in his arm and passed it back to her. The page adhered to his fingers until she peeled it off with an exclamation of distaste.
Then he ambled on into the dormitory, where benighted sleepers awaited his evangelism.
The Wall of Asshur-sin
DONALD TYSON
Donald Tyson is the author of Alhazred (Llewellyn, 2006), a novel about the mad poet who wrote the Necronomicon, and also the collection of occult mystery stories The Ravener and Others (Avalonia, 2011), which concerns the investigations of strange and uncanny occurrences by the Elizabethan sage Dr. John Dee and his friend, the alchemist Edward Kelley. The Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft (Llewellyn, 2011) is a biography of Lovecraft. Tyson has also written numerous nonfiction books on the history and practice of Western occultism.
1.
A FITFUL GUST OF WIND CAST A WRAITH OF SAND through the open window of the Land Rover. Fine grains salted the sweating neck of Eric Tenisan. By turns the wind obscured and revealed the horizon, playing with his expectation like a mischievous child. The Bedouins called this remote part of Yemen the Land of Lost Souls. It was a fanciful way to describe so bleak and empty a waste, yet strangely evocative.
He glanced at the profile of his beautiful young wife, Sheila. No matter how hot the sun, she never perspired. Her gaze was fixed on a tiny red spider that clung for life at the lower corner of the windscreen. The spider had been with them since they turned off the paved highway. She had said little for the past hundred miles. With an habitual gesture, he fingered the irregular edge of the gold medallion that hung around his neck on a chain through the hole at its center. The medallion had been with him for so many years, he was barely aware of doing it.
“Most of the dust is being stirred up from the road. We’ll leave it behind soon.”
The spider flew away. Released from her meditation, she smiled acknowledgment and turned to watch the Cyclopean stones flash past her window. The desert was piled with massive rounded boulders that projected up through the sands like the bald skulls of buried giants. Long black hair at the side of her face veiled her features. As he so often had over the brief months of their courtship, he wondered what might be on her mind.
The steering wheel lurched and he caught it in time to guide the car across the surface of a huge rock. It was white and gently domed, like the shell of some vast lunar egg. He remembered it as though he had seen it yesterday, even though it had been over fifty years—but who is so empty of romance that he ever forgets the road that leads to Asshur-sin?
The last time he crossed this dome of rock, he had been a wide-eyed seventeen-year-old mounted awkwardly on the back of a camel, doing his best to pretend he knew how to ride so that his father’s Arab diggers would not laugh at him behind their hands. The road had not existed. It was his first experience as the paid member of a field expedition, and he could barely contain his excitement. Through the shimmering heat of memory he saw the sweat-stained white shirt and gray hair of his father, the great Norwegian archaeologist Olaf Tenisan, who rode his white Arabian horse with familiar ease across the treacherous dome of stone.
The sand from the open roadway hissed annoyance at the escaping vehicle, and then they were lost among the flowing boulders and sensuous rills where the wind wept in dizzy eddies. He leaned forward to gaze up through the tinted edge of the windscreen at the sun. It was just past noon.
2.
“DARLING, ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU WANT TO walk the Wall?” he had asked her a week ago in the darkness of their Cairo hotel room.
They had just finished making love and lay in the bed side by side with a single crisp cotton sheet drawn up to their hips, surrounded by a gauzy veil of mosquito netting. The ancient air conditioner beneath the window was unequal to the task of countering the night heat. Rather than listen to it banging away in futility, he had turned it off and opened the window wide to the breeze from the Nile.
When she said nothing, he spoke again.
“The climb alone is almost a kilometer, and it’s more than three across the top in the hot sun, to say nothing of the descent down the ramps and the hike back to the truck.”
“Of course I want to climb the Wall, Eric. I’m looking forward to it.”
Her tone was subdued, almost indifferent, a curious contrast to the enthusiasm with which she had begged him to make this irrational trek back into his past as part of their honeymoon adventure. He should be accustomed to her moods, he told himself. She changed like the sea. It was her unpredictable nature that had first attracted him—that, and her strikingly original beauty.
“Who was that man who spoke to you at dinner?”
“I didn’t speak to anyone.”
“That dark man with the odd symbol tattooed on the back of his hand.”
“I don’t remember. Let me sleep, darling, I’m completely exhausted.”
The tip of her cigarette glowed once, then she ground it out in the ashtray on her bedside table and turned her back to him in darkness. He lay on his left shoulder and vainly sought to distinguish her outline while he listened to the slow beat of his own hear
t.
What business had a man in his late sixties to take a young bride less than half his age? Months ago, when he first saw Sheila staring up at him with rapt attention during one of his public lectures at Cambridge, his routine had been comfortable and predictable. He had long since reconciled himself to a solitary and sexless life. An elderly housekeeper fed his tropical fish and took in his mail while he was away from his residence at the university on lecture tours. What more did an aging professor of archaeology need?
If asked at that time, he could have confidently stated where he would be and what he would be doing on any day in the coming year. Yet here he was, only a few months later, lying in a hotel room in Egypt with this strange and beautiful woman at his side.
Even today, he had no idea what it was about his manner or interests that had attracted her. True, he was a respected authority in his field, though not nearly so renowned as his father. No one could hope to fill Olaf Tenisan’s boots. But his father was dead, and that made him arguably the world’s leading authority on Asshur-sin and its artifacts. Yet these were scarcely qualities to attract the love or stir the desires of a worldly woman such as Sheila Marsh. She had her own more than adequate source of income, so it was not his money she was after. He had eventually convinced himself that she must truly love him, and he had begun to love her in return.
3.
THE MAMMOTH ROCKS OF THE LAND OF LOST SOULS formed a natural road that declined at a slight but noticeable angle. He downshifted, and the Rover’s engine whined as it slowed the vehicle on a steeper than normal slope. For a dozen kilometers the way twisted like a dying snake, the weaving stone buttresses that rose abruptly on either side concealing the path to come and the path behind. He attempted no more conversation, but forced himself to be aware of the landscape around him—of the bit of green high in a stony fissure on his left; of the gray lizard atop a boulder that ate the withered corpse of one of its cousins with quick motions of its almost human-like hands. In the midst of life there is death, but here there was far more death than life.
In spite of his resolve, his mind slipped into memory.
“Are you happy?” he had asked her on the train platform the day of their arrival in Yemen.
She had brushed strands of wind-blown hair away from her large, ice-blue eyes and gazed up at him with the serious yet enigmatic expression that had become so familiar.
“Deliriously so. From the window of the train I watched a little girl with a great clay water pot balanced on her head. At each step it swayed back and forth, threatening to fall, and the girl kept raising her hand as if to steady it, but never once did her fingers actually touch the pot. She was walking east, so I knew it was a good omen.”
It was the kind of thing she said from time to time. He had come to expect such cryptic remarks and no longer tired his brain trying to decipher their meaning.
She turned from him to handle their baggage. With mingled feelings of love and possessiveness in his heart, he watched her stride across the train platform to argue with the almost somnambulant porter. Once again he found himself marveling at her indifference to the heat. Her conservative gray travel suit retained its crease from the morning. He had never seen her perspire, even though her pallid skin, so white that it was almost blue beneath the blazing Arabian sun, always looked slightly moist. This was just an illusion, but at times it disturbed him. Her complexion reminded him of the ivory underbelly of a frog, and the impression was not lessened by her large and oddly prominent eyes.
She had confided early in their relationship that her entire family was cold-blooded by nature.
“I’m descended from a long line of Yankee traders who made their living upon the southern oceans of the world. There is more salt water than blood in my veins.”
Once, in a teasing way, he had called her his undine lover. She had stared into his eyes for so many moments he was certain he must have offended her, but then she smiled and kissed his cheek.
“My Nordic troll, so big and clumsy and awkward,” she had murmured seductively into his ear.
4.
HIS PULSE QUICKENED WITH EXPECTATION. THE stony ground became more level and the shrouding cliffs on either side of the road parted like a theater curtain. Alive to Sheila’s reaction to her first glimpse of the Wall, he drove onto the crest of the lookout and turned off the Rover’s engine.
The Wall towered on the far side of the valley, its sheer size making it seem nearer than it was. This was the first time he had viewed it stripped clean of its ancient veil of rubble, and it was even more impressive than he remembered. Surely she must feel a similar emotion, gazing at the greatest wonder of the world, from the vantage where he had first seen it, seated on the back of a camel in his awkward youth. But she remained silent.
He cast his wide gray eyes across five decades of time, and still further back, across untold millennia to the very childhood of man. The same potent blend of humility and wonder he had felt as a teenager returned into his heart. He had not felt it for many years.
The Wall of Asshur-sin, wall of walls that rendered China’s defense less than a hedgerow. Fifty years ago it was deemed a miracle. A local Bedouin detected something unnaturally precise in a range of coastal mountains and informed his mullah. After monumental excavations supervised by the elder Tenisan, the wall at last had revealed itself to the admiring eyes of the worshipful. Poets, mystics, and scientists made pilgrimages from the far corners of the world to stand at its base and marvel. But that was half a century ago, and the world, ever preoccupied with the concerns and novelties of the present moment, had turned its gaze elsewhere.
It spanned the gap between the western mountains of the valley like a stone Samson, twisting perspective with its impossible bulk. Eric stretched his mind, yet still could not contain its edges—nearly a kilometer tall and three kilometers across, what meaning had such dimensions? For untold ages the Wall had stood, defending the lost civilization of this desert valley against that most jealous mistress of the world, the sea.
“Magnificent,” he said from the depths of his heart. “I wanted you to see it first as I saw it. We’ll continue down now.” He re-started the engine and released the parking brake.
5.
HE WONDERED IF SHE WAS THINKING OF JOHNNY Azotha, the man with the dark eyes and shining black hair they had met in Egypt. Surely it was no more than his morbid fancy that the man had followed them from Cairo? A coincidence that he should arrive in Yemen at the same time, nothing more. While dining at the English Club in Sana’a, it had been natural that she should seek out his table, since his was the sole familiar face.
“Your wife tells me you go to see Asshur-sin,” the dark man greeted him when he returned to the table with her package of cigarettes. He spoke English well, with a trace of the British accent he had acquired as a student at Oxford.
Eric frowned, thinking they sat too close.
“Most tourists are not keen enough to endure the journey now that the Wall has lost its newness,” the man continued. “But I suppose it has a special significance for you, Doctor Tenisan. You were one of the first, weren’t you?”
“I was part of the initial exploratory dig. My father headed the expedition.”
“Ah, yes, the great Olaf Tenisan. You must be so proud to be his son.”
She had been unusually expansive that night, doing her best to draw him out of himself in spite of his bad mood.
“I had to plead with him to bring me, Johnny, he was like a mule.” She mimicked his Norwegian accent. “You won’t like it, Sheila. All that horrible dust.”
They both laughed. Eric found himself toying with the medallion at his throat. He inched the chain that suspended it around his neck through its central hole. It was an habitual response to frustration. The Arab pointed at it.
“That is a curious trinket. Where did you buy it?”
Eric resisted the irrational urge to hide the spiral design behind his hand. The medallion was shaped like a wheel with cu
rved spokes and an open hub.
“I found it, actually, when I was seventeen. At the Wall.”
It was a subject he did not like to talk about. Sheila would not relent, and for her sake he told the dark man the story.
“The second night of the dig I was restless with excitement. I couldn’t sleep. There was a full moon that night, bright as day, so I got up and walked from where the tents were pitched in the plaza of the ancient city ruins. I climbed—that is, I must have climbed the ramps to the top. The diggers found me there the next morning at the middle of the causeway. I was clutching this medallion in my fist.”
Unconsciously he closed his fingers around it until his knuckles grew white.
“He was completely traumatized,” Sheila finished for him. “Couldn’t even speak for three weeks. No one could pry that medallion from his hand. They say he screamed like a banshee whenever anyone tried to take it away, so finally his father strung a chain through that hole in its center and hung it around his neck just to get him to go to sleep. He has no memory of picking it up. He was flown to a hospital in Cairo and has never once returned to the Wall.”
While his wife talked, Eric found himself staring at the tattoo on the back of the dark man’s left hand. It stirred something buried deep under the layers of his psyche. The blue design depicted a creature that vaguely resembled an octopus. A shudder of revulsion swept through his body. He forced his gaze away.
“I have been there, you know, several times.” The dark man shrugged. “I don’t think so much of it. Only stones piled on stones, after all.”