by Неизвестный
THAT IS NOT DEAD
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Through the Centuries
Edited by Darrell Schweitzer
The Great Old Ones, Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog Sothoth, and the rest, so vividly described by H.P. Lovecraft, have lurked in the dim places of the Earth since the beginning of time. That is not dead, wrote the mad poet Abdul Alhazred, which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.
You may reasonably wonder, then, why no one seemed to notice prior to the events in the Lovecraft stories. Was Cthulhu merely dreaming in sunken R’lyeh all this time, or did the dreams he sent out to mankind subtly influence, or pervert, human history? Were the outbreak of the Dunwich Horror and the resurrection of Charles Dexter Ward’s ancestor Joseph Curwen, both of which occurred in the 1920s, unique events, or have similarly dreadful things happened before? What were the Mi-Go of Yuggoth doing in the centuries before they were discovered in the Vermont hills by Henry Wentworth Akeley, as told in “The Whisperer in Darkness”?
This book proposes that such horrific events did occur down the centuries. They just have not been adequately chronicled until now. Esther Friesner proposes a unique explanation to the explosion of the island of Thera in the 2nd millennium B.C., which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “big bang.” Keith Taylor illuminates what was up till now merely a sinister allusion, of how Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos appeared as a man in Egypt in the days of the pharaohs. Jay Lake and John Langan tell of very different encounters between ancient Romans and forces vaster and more ancient than any of the world’s empires. Darrell Schweitzer tells how survivors of the disastrous Peasants’ Crusade made an even more hideous pilgrimage to the Plateau of Leng. Don Webb reveals the very circumstances under which the English scholar John Dee translated the dreaded Necronomicon into English in the early 17th century. S. T. Joshi, John R. Fultz, Harry Turtledove, Richard Lupoff, Will Murray. W.H. Pugmire, and Lois Gresh all explore the subtle and insidious ways Lovecraft’s cosmic monsters have touched the lives of all of us. If our species still survives, it may be by sheer chance, and not for long, for the horrors are still there, still waiting for the day when the stars are right and they shall return to reclaim the Earth.
Introduction:
Horror of the Carnivàle
Darrell Schweitzer
Probably most readers of this book do not have to be told that H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) was the most important and influential writer of cosmic horror fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, whose prominence in world literature only seems to increase with the passage of decades, or that he is most famous for a cycle of myth, spelled out in such classic stories as “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Dunwich Horror,” which deal with vastly ancient, inhuman beings or “gods” that lie in wait to seize the earth, wipe it clean of human civilization, and proceed toward some nefarious agenda of their own.
Experienced readers of H. P. Lovecraft will immediately recognize the source of this book’s title. It comes from the “unexplainable couplet” of Abdul Alhazred:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
In reality, Abdul Alhazred was a name H. P. Lovecraft either made up or came across as a child, when he’d just discovered The Arabian Nights and liked to play Arab. But as an adult, he put the name to more intriguing, literary use. In “The Nameless City” (1921), he told us that this “mad poet” dreamed of an incredibly ancient, ruined city in the desert the night before he “sang” this couplet.
Alhazred later became known (in “The Hound,” 1922) as the author of the dread Necronomicon, that forbidden tome of elder lore that can drive its reader as mad as its author may have been all along. In the brief “History of the Necronomicon“ (1927), Lovecraft further revealed that Abdul Alhazred was a poet from Sanaá in Yemen who lived in Umayyad times, about AD 700. Shortly after penning his famous work, he was devoured by an invisible monster devoured him in broad daylight in. “Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen the fabulous Irem, the City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.”
There are a lot of mysteries here. Is Irem the same place as the nameless city? What precisely lies eternally beyond death? Was the famous couplet part of the Necronomicon or just a random ditty? Abdul Alhazred was, after all, a poet, who must have composed numerous songs and poems for a living before launching into the Necronomicon, which, as far as we can tell, is a prose work, something of a mixture of a grimoire, a history of pre-human civilizations, and a maniacal screed. In the most extensive passage from it given to us, in “The Dunwich Horror,” we read:
Nor is it to be thought that mankind is either the oldest or the last of the earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen…Man rules where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here They shall reign again.
Never mind the small details. Abdul Alhazred was on to something, at least until that something ate him. As stated above, the core of what is variously called the Cthulhu Mythos or the Lovecraft Mythos is that, invisible and all around us, there lurk ancient and powerful entities and that our “ownership” or “mastery” of this planet is but a transient thing. For countless millennia the Old Ones, Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and the rest have been lingering, waiting for the stars to be “right” so that they may return and presumably put an end to human pretension.
This anthology asks the question: so why didn’t anybody notice these lingering, dreadful presences before the characters in Lovecraft’s stories did, about 1900? If the Old Ones have always been there, how have they subtly figured in and influenced the history of unsuspecting mankind?
Again, Lovecraft drops hints. In the prose poem “Nyarlathotep,” he tells us that this entity came out of Egypt after twenty-seven centuries. In “The Haunter of the Dark,” the doomed Robert Blake notes that in “ancient Khem” the god “took the form of a man.” The “History of the Necronomicon” mentions that for a century or so after Theodorus Piletas of Constantinople translated the work from the Arabic and gave it its familiar Greek title, certain experimenters were impelled to “terrible attempts” before the Byzantine patriarch Michael ordered the book burnt. Presumably, these “attempts” involved conjurations or interactions with the Old Ones, which would not have been so alarming if they had not been, in part at least, successful.
And so it goes. Let us assume then that various cultures at various times in history did notice the existence of the Old Ones. In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” we are told that the fungoid Mi-Go that haunt the Vermont hills figure in the legends of the Native American tribes of that region. In “The Shadow Out of Time,” the narrator alludes to Australian aboriginal “racial legends, about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground…and who will some day awake and eat up the world.”
The purpose of this book is to speculate on some of the past encounters humans may have had with the Old Ones. Yes, Nyarlathotep did take the form of a man in ancient Egypt. Keith Taylor tells us that story, as part of his continuing series about Kamose, the sorcerer-priest of Anubis. Esther Friesner suggests that the explosion of Thera, which destroyed Minoan civilization, may have been caused by more than natural volcanism. John Langan and Jay Lake both suggest that the Romans had hideous encount
ers at the periphery of their empire. Don Webb tells what really happened when, as Lovecraft mentioned in his “History,” the Elizabethan scholar and mystic John Dee translated the Necronomicon into English. We also learn here how the Whateley family of “The Dunwich Horror” came upon their ancestral copy and what they proposed to do with it. John Fultz and Will Murray explore the eldritch horrors that awaited the first Spanish conquistadors in the New World. Lois Gresh gives a surprising episode in the early history of Russia’s Romanov Dynasty. I myself provide a little-known sidelight of the Crusades.
Lovecraft’s mythos seems to transcend time. It can be extended into the remotest past, as Lovecraft himself did in both “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Out of Time,” which tell of non-human but civilized beings that faced horrors on earth back in the days of the dinosaurs. We can extend this into the future too—at least until the Old Ones come back and bring down the curtain on history as we know it. Maybe it is better, then, to contemplate the past. Here, we have fourteen stories by thirteen authors that do precisely that. Even these stories are only a beginning. If the rule of mankind on this planet is but a brief interval, then the length of time covered by these stories—barely over two thousand years—is on the scale by which Great Cthulhu lies and dreams: but a fleeting instant.
Nevertheless, on a human scale they are impressive enough. Here are horrors from the secret underside of the older centuries, in which the mere continuation of the human race—let alone the progress of civilization—has never been a sure thing.
Cthulhu wgah’nagl fhtagn, and you’d better believe it.
Darrell Schweitzer
Philadelphia, July 2, 2013.
THAT IS NOT DEAD
Egypt, 1200 BC:
The Herald of Chaos
Keith Taylor
You sing of the young gods easily,
In the days when you are young
But I go smelling yew and sods,
And I know there are gods behind the gods,
Gods that are best unsung.
—Chesterton
The Crawling Chaos had returned to Egypt.
No mortal but one remembered its last sojourn there. No other had lived long enough. Even he, now Archpriest of Anubis, had vague and confused recollections of those years. Mad, guilt-ridden, his skull seared by the vengeance of a god, he had vanished into the desert to subsist as a crazed hermit. Then at last he had returned to the towns of men, approximately sane once more. But his memories of what had actually occurred were mixed with hallucination and nightmare.
The Crawling Chaos was no hallucination. For men and women, though, it fell aptly within the definition of nightmare. Rather than one of its manifold shapes of horror, for its current purpose it assumed the form of a slender young man. Not for the first time, it became he, and walked the Black Land of Khem.
Much of what he found pleased him. Only a year or two before, a Pharaoh had been murdered, and now his son, young and untried, wore the Double Crown. Chiefs and princes vied for power. Justice and harmony—Ma’at as the folk of Khem called it, always fragile—had faded. Savage Libyans in the west, rebellious Kushites in the south, restless and aggressive Sea Peoples from the north all yearned to see Khem disordered.
The Crawling Chaos, the soul and herald of the other gods, knew these and more besides, and it gratified him to see Khem so beset.
He appeared among a squalid folk who had been ancient when the Nile ran a league wide between banks that were now desert cliffs. They, or their forebears, had known him then. Now their remnants eked out a poor existence in the Delta marshes.
He came among them in the royal trappings of a pharaoh, hued sloe-black and silver. They went mad. Shrieking in adoration, they capered around fires in which their stores of fuel for a year were wasted, howling “N’yarlat-hotep! N’yarlat-hotep!” and gashed themselves with jagged fish knives of crudely worked bone. Some rolled into the blazes to incinerate themselves, and still cried while they sucked fire into their lungs, “N’yarlat-hotep!”
The name was combined in an uncouth blending of the Egyptian for “pleased” or “satisfied” and the far more ancient cryptonym of a being who possessed others. Thus it meant, “Pleasing to N’yarlat.” The marsh people by this stage in their decline had only the poorest idea of who, or what, N’yarlat was, and its herald had not come to enlighten them. Thus, they danced and gibbered in frenzy. Mothers throttled their infants or hurled them to the earth and stamped them underfoot. They screamed as their little bones snapped. Men leaned stolidly, hideously on spears until the points emerged from their backs and then writhed, oblivious, in their blood.
The youthful pharaoh in midnight trappings looked on with a charming smile. When the survivors lay still in exhaustion, he departed. The marsh people’s conduct had given him some diversion, and word of his coming would now spread, but the amusement he derived from this had limits. He had larger aims in view.
He turned his footsteps to the nearby City of Banebdjed. That deity he held in contempt, like all the gods of Egypt. The local archpriest shared that scorn, as a secret worshipper of N’yarlat. He swiftly recognized, and abased himself before, the human form of the Crawling Chaos, N’yarlat’s soul and herald. The entity asked for tidings concerning the current state of Egypt, and the forsworn priest all but babbled the information.
“Kamose, the Archpriest of Anubis, is the greatest of all Khem’s magicians in this age,” he declared. “He would oppose your aims.”
N’yarlat-hotep was moved to laugh. Two phrases in that brief utterance were risible to him: “greatest of all Khem’s magicians,” first, and “oppose your aims,” second. Unique among those from beyond, he owned a sense of humor.
He endowed the spurious priest of Banebdjed with gifts—remarkable, bizarre instruments he well knew the recipient lacked the wit or knowledge to employ to their full potential. Nevertheless, he would use them. The results might be pleasing.
The lithe, dark manifestation endured the priest’s profuse thanks with grace more terrifying than open malevolence, and then left the Delta for Hikuptah, the immense City of White Walls. Worshippers in a vast subterranean crypt made obeisance to him and cried his name—with more restraint than the marsh-dwellers had used—but came away no less infected with madness. N’yarlat-hotep then exchanged the regalia that burlesqued a pharaoh for Cretan garb, and appeared to the officials of Hikuptah as an ambassador, his retinue and credentials impeccable. The exchanges he had with them were corrupting and conducive to insanity, as elsewhere. In Hikuptah, again, he heard the name Kamose, which, it began to strike him, was faintly familiar.
He did not altogether dismiss it. N’yarlat-hotep did assume for the moment that this must be another Kamose he recalled. He had last troubled the land of Khem all of a hundred years before—and previous to that, in the antique reign of Djoser. Too long for most men to live. The name Kamose was not unusual in Egypt.
The Crawling Chaos turned his footsteps, which left no prints, further upstream. In the Southern Sycamore Nome, he passed from village to village as a traveling scribe. In each, he wrote petitions that were presumptuous and unlawful, and which the villagers would never have thought of making without him. They also contained written spells of discord. There followed riots to be quelled and punished. The prince of the Southern Sycamore Nome eventually had the subversive scribe brought before him for justice. His own magicians surrounded him for the occasion. N’yarlat-hotep accompanied his guards tamely, loaded with bronze shackles. It appeared curious to the prince that he showed no trepidation.
The Crawling Chaos felt none. In the prince, he beheld a world-weary man with a sagging face. Before the potentate had spoken, N’yarlat-hotep discerned that he cared for little but holding the rule of his nome, if he could, in the face of ominous unrest. Alas for your hopes, then, the visitor thought. His black eyes glinted with mirth.
The prince saw it. He decided the fellow must be mad. Still, he questioned him sharply, and the str
anger made courteous but equivocal answers. The prince’s magicians, as the interrogation progressed, showed signs of increasing discomfort; all five were breaking out in hives that itched intensely. N’yarlat-hotep suggested that they might leave before they also lost control of their bowels. The prince, looking into those fathomless eyes again, dismissed them. He realized they were of little use if they were incapable of resisting such indignities from the stranger.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“O Lord of the Southern Sycamore, do you know the name Nephren-Ka?”
“The Black Pharaoh? He who overthrew King Djoser’s sons and usurped the throne? A tale.”
“Nephren-Ka was not the Black Pharaoh. The Black Pharaoh was his master and genius, noble prince, and now…he has returned. I am his merest envoy,” the shackled figure unctuously lied, “but he has granted me minor powers. See.”
He casually moved his arms, and the fetters dropped to the floor of the chamber. Darkness gathered in the room and deepened. An oppressive heat grew with the shadows, bringing with it a reek like corruption. The prince choked.
“Enough! What would you? No more of these tricks. I have seen magicians perform before…I have seen frauds more impressive.”
“Noble prince,” the scribe whispered, “would you prevail over your rivals and increase your standing, as the Black Pharaoh’s power is established and his temples grow greater than Amun-Ra’s?”
The prince did not care for the low, intimate tone. “You offer a mirage. The temples and priesthoods that stand now would never remain idle while this happens. Amun-Ra’s rays reach to the ends of the earth, and his temple is paramount in Khem. Even lesser ones, like the Temple of Anubis…well, Anubis has Kamose for his archpriest. He supports the young pharaoh and has made himself congenial to the priesthood of Amun-Ra. He moves in shadows, seldom appears at court, yet none dares offend him, save the foolish.”