Pyrate Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1 (4.0)

by David Conyers

  “After reading over the translation and making a few minor corrections, I came out with this message:

  Beyond the beyond is chaos. The gate/door lies not here but in the great tower which is elsewhere but near. Here is the jar. The jar brings plague, famine and death. The jar is plague, famine and death. The jar is the scourge of doom, the breath of chaos, molded by the very hand that smites. Carried by those who fled from the (north?) it was and here it rests, waiting until the time is right to open.”

  Intrigued by the message, Ze’ez listened silently as the others discussed its possible meaning. No conclusion could be reached. It was readily decided that four men would accompany Yaquud to open the bronze door in the morning. Ze’ez experienced that tingling sensation in his spine again; he was of the opinion that the matter should be forgotten—he sensed danger ahead.

  Icy fingers of dread caressed Ze’ez throughout the bitter evening. He shivered under his bedding for an indeterminate amount of time, worried about the turn of events. Irem was eerie enough with its toppled monoliths and ugly statuary without this new development. The translation, with its references to chaos, the tower and the jar, was disturbing. A black depression settled over him, clouding his thoughts. He was aware of strange forces gathering in the City of Pillars...

  He gradually swam into awareness under the steadily increasing glare of the sun. Looking around, he saw that he was outside the tent... outside the city, in fact. He espied the ruins, shimmering in the dawn light, not too distant. Apparently he had been walking in his sleep. This revelation in itself was not as alarming as the thoughts that crowded his head. He had dreamed of a massive black tower protruding from the sands, jutting skyward like a skeletal finger for over a mile. This tower was older even than Irem, undecorated except for a huge symbol embossed on one side: an immense spiral design with jagged lines, like lightning, extending outward from the hazy center.

  Ze’ez hastily made his way back to the encampment. He assumed that the nightmare and somnambulism had been initiated by Yaquud’s reading of the inscription and its mention of a tower. However, once with his companions, he heard talk of shared dreams—while only he had seen the black tower, six others had dreamed of the unsettling symbol; all the men had felt a formless dread. For reasons that he could not explain, Ze’ez kept the details of his own nocturnal vision to himself.

  Yaquud and his hand-picked team prepared for their descent into the subterranean passage. Armed with picks and shovels, the men somewhat reluctantly trailed Yaquud, who was plainly eager to embark on the mission. To his relief, Ze’ez was not chosen to go under.

  Rashim, one of the men behind Yaquud, later described the descent. The way was slow, the gloominess of the narrow, high-ceilinged tunnel stifling. Centuries of dust layered the bulky, roughly hewn steps. Their passage caused motes to linger in the musky air, bringing coughing bouts. Rashim was consumed with the thought that hundreds of tons of earth were above his head; he was convinced that the passage would collapse at any instant.

  At length they stood before the gigantic bronze door. It was fifteen feet in height, ten wide, adorned with a series of crude bas reliefs and the same inscriptions that Yaquud had copied the day before. The intrepid explorer’s footprints from the previous day were deeply etched in the dust.

  One of the men began to take photographs of the spacious alcove, while the others minutely examined the door for a means of ingress, but to their dismay, no hinges of any kind were visible. There were also no hidden levers of similar devices. Yaquud impatiently ordered the door pried open with the shovels.

  For ten grueling minutes the men toiled, shovels wedged in the hairline cracks that bordered the barrier, with no discernible results. With a final burst of strength, Rashim heaved all his weight onto his tool, breaking its long wooden handle. A grating rumble began, reverberating against the earthen walls. Suddenly Rashim understood: Grinding against the walls, the door began to topple outward. Three of the men had time to react; one, Balili, did not. The mammoth door landed with a ground-shaking clang!, slapping choking clouds of dust into the air.

  Balili was crushed in an instant. The others barely had time to cross the alcove to the passage; still, they were assailed with severe coughing fits and, in one case, vomiting.

  The third survivor fled to the surface when he was able. Yaquud and Rashim waited—the latter against his will, for Yaquud had tightly gripped him by the arm—in the passage. When the dust settled they gingerly ventured back inside the alcove. There was no chance of lifting the heavy, foot-thick door to retrieve Balili’s remains, Yaquud decided. He then stepped over the edge of the door and entered the dark chamber beyond. Rashim wanted desperately to return above ground, but Yaquud called out to him, bidding him to follow. Rashim hesitantly did as he was told.

  The chamber was vast and empty. Or almost empty. No treasure carpeted the floor, no bodies resided in sarcophagi. The only object present was shockingly prosaic: a rather large, gray jar, which stood in the center of the room. Yaquud was already kneeling before it, running his hands over its surface. “It is smooth,” he observed, plainly expecting otherwise. He released a hiss of tension when his hands found something. “There it is,” he breathed. Wiping dust from the area, he indicated the same spiral symbol that Ze’ez had seen in his dream.

  The rest occurred in quick succession: Yaquud, his voice more fervid than ever, bleated commands to Rashim. They carried the ancient five-foot-tall earthen jar out of the chamber and, with considerable difficulty, up the stairs. Several diggers dutifully assisted, summoned by the sounds of exertion. Once above the ground they carefully cleaned the artifact’s surface. The discovery did not impress the men; they were upset about Balili’s death.

  “This is it!” Yaquud ranted to himself. “The jar of plagues, older than mankind; indeed, older than time!” His eyes were feral, his voice strained. He dragged the jar into his tent for closer examination.

  Rashim, that night at the camp fire, related the events of the day, how he and Yaquud had found what the leader called “the Plague Jar.” He trembled when he said that the clay was cold and damp to the touch, though the subterranean chamber had been utterly dry. Furthermore, the jar did not seem to have contents; at least, Rashim felt no shifting weight. Perhaps the jar had once contained spices or diseased clothing that had long since deteriorated to dust.

  All throughout his tale, Rashim absently scratched his hands. When this was brought to his attention, he mumbled something about them “itching like a mangy dog.” He went on to explain that his flesh had been numbed by the disconcertingly smooth clay of the jar. Most ancient relics were rough and grainy; the jar was neither.

  As for the jar itself, it stood five feet off the ground, and was two feet wide at its base and top with a tapered neck. Its middle section bulged outward. Its mouth was sealed with a dark gray plug and a translucent layer of wax. Under the wax a star-shaped design could faintly be seen. Unnoticed before was a series of minuscule ideoglyphs, below the embossed spiral symbol on the jar’s surface. Yaquud was engaged in deciphering the glyphs.

  Young Achmed related how Yaquud had spurned his assistance with the new translation. He did, however, inquire if Yaquud recognized any of the writing. Yaquud stared at the symbols for a minute and replied: “Yes, I can identify the glyphs that represent ‘jar’ and ‘plague’ often. That is of course ‘chaos,’” he pointed to the spiral design, “while these seem to be measurements for constructing a new form of metal,” he concluded, indicating the lower dot-group lines.

  When Yaquud made his way to the main camp to eat he was asked about his progress. Shaking his head, he refused to reply. His sullen mood affected the men; one by one they went to their tents. Ze’ez saw the opportunity to question his eccentric colleague.

  Yaquud was exhausted. He, too, scratched incessantly at his skin, Ze’ez noticed. He promptly took advantage of Yaquud’s discomfort, plying him with inquiries. First he asked—demanded—to know who the “mad Arab” was
and what his book had to do with the expedition. Abdullah Al-Hazred, it seemed, had lived during the time of the Ummayad Caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He was a poet, a collector and chronicler of forbidden lore. His only surviving work, the Kitab Al Azif now known as the Necronomicon, had been translated into various other languages. This book contained an account of Al-Hazred’s sojourn in Irem. Using elder astrological maps to correspond with certain clues left by Al-Hazred, Yaquud was able to plot a course to the City of Pillars. Astrology is an exact science, one that requires precision and patience to utilize.

  Yaquud continued, seemingly relieved to talk at last about his dark knowledge. Ze’ez’s flesh crawled as the expedition head spoke. He had heard of the Necronomicon. There is an incomplete copy in the Cairo Museum, he had heard. It is a forbidden book, fearfully whispered of by learned men and peasants alike. As for the exact reason the book was considered blasphemous, Ze’ez did not know—nor did he want to.

  He did ask what this mad Al-Hazred had done while there at the City of Pillars. Yaquud eyed him shrewdly and replied: "The mad Arab made the Red Sacrifice here, to open a gate." The way he said the word gate sent chills up Ze’ez’s spine.

  “How does the jar fit into the scheme of things?” Ze’ez asked.

  “That puzzles me—it does not ‘fit in,’ as you say. Al-Hazred never mentioned it. But it makes sense...,” he mused. “Something else only now starts to make sense. As you know, the library of the Jebel Druze Institute in Syria contains what purports to be the only pre-Uthmanic manuscript copy of the Koran to survive the Caliph Uthman’s standardization of the canonical text. Having commissioned his scholars to produce an ‘official’ recension, he had all the earlier, variant versions burned—but this one escaped the conflagration, carried to safety by heretical savants who cherished certain of its unorthodox readings, Surahs dismissed as ‘Satanic verses' by the conventional authorities. Among these is a passage in which the Prophet speaks of the doom of Irem in terms something like this, as I remember: ‘Recall what doom thy Lord did visit upon Irem, the many-columned, how he did smite them with the devils of the jar and did feed them with the bitter clusters of Zakkum.’ Most of those who know of the passage at all make it a corruption of the text, a copying blunder—because it makes no sense to them. One or two connect it with tales of genies in lamps and bottles.”

  Ze’ez had followed all this attentively. Most of it was indeed familiar to him, as Yaquud had anticipated. “Yes, I believe the passage is paralleled in a unique hadith peculiar to the Zaidi sect in Yemen. But even that tradition sheds no further light on the matter.”

  “True enough,” Yaquud agreed, one of the few times the two scholars had agreed on anything for many years. “But I should say this,” indicating the newly unearthed artifact, “does shed some light on the matter.” With that he fell silent again, lost to a new train of thought. The interview was at an end; Yaquud stood up and meandered back to his quarters, leaving Ze’ez with more questions than before.

  The night was unaccountably cold. Ze’ez considered the low temperature to be an ill portent of things to come. He exhausted himself by worrying and shortly fell asleep. He woke at noon. Five party members were sick; Rashim’s skin was by now inflamed, covered with tiny pustules. The day’s digging had been canceled due to the outbreak of sickness.

  The sky darkened prematurely that afternoon; a sandstorm was approaching. The men were secluded in the slight shelter of their tents for the remainder of the day, eating only tinned foods. The night was again cold with what Yaquud had once called the “spectral wind.” By morning the sandstorm had stopped but the sky remained overcast.

  Unrested, Ze’ez ventured outside the tent to find the majority of the ruins buried, with new dune formations looming on the horizon. The canvas tents were torn in many places; one was little more than tatters flapping in the warming breeze. Only one truck was visible—the other had been lost beneath the sands.

  The brooding atmosphere and bleak weather proved too much for several team members’ minds. One had fled into the desert, never to be seen again, while another had slit his wrists. Rashim’s skin was sticky with yellowish discharge from the pustules. He had loosely wrapped himself in a blanket. A loud report was heard: He had placed the barrel of his rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The two men who shared Rashim’s tent were mentally unhinged by the event. In a matter of perhaps five minutes they had managed to kill each other.

  The survivors, with the exception of Yaquud, gathered to discuss the immediate agenda. They agreed that they should depart from the doomed city with haste—with or without Yaquud and his damned jar.

  Dr. Kashan led this new faction. He resolutely marched to Yaquud’s tent, pulled the flap aside—and let out a bark of disgust!

  Once at Kashan’s side, Ze’ez and the others saw Yaquud sprawled half across his small table. His skin was worse than Rashim’s: bubbly with pestilence, obscenely decorated with seeping sores. His left hand feebly clutched the plug of the jar—he had opened the Plague Jar!

  They entered. The sickly stench of the tent’s interior was almost overwhelming. Kashan lifted Yaquud’s oozing face from the table; the fluids had congealed—it pulled clear with a loathsome sucking sound. His face was gaunt, lined with deep-set grooves, as if he had aged twenty years in as many hours. His mouth gaped idiotically, revealing empty tooth sockets with bleeding gums. Only the rapid heaving of his bony chest proved that he was still alive.

  "Yaquud! Yaquud, what happened here?” Kashan shouted. Frantic, he shook Yaquud by the skeletal shoulders, causing his head to loll jerkily from side to side, until his eyes popped open. They were glazed with milky cataracts.

  Aghast, Kashan sharply withdrew his hands and stepped back with one fluid movement. Yaquud, standing of his own accord, positioned his head as if listening. A distant low-pitched rumbling could barely be heard. A smile tugged at the corners of his cracked lips. The next instant a high cackle rose from his wiry frame, piercing the interior of the quarters, finally ebbing away to a faint echo. “Kashan, is that you? I cannot see clearly...”

  “Yes, we are here,” Kashan hoarsely whispered. “What did you do to the jar...?”

  “Opened it! Called for the Demon-Sultan—”

  “You’re mad! I shall destroy the jar!” Kashan shouted.

  “Away! Away, fools! Back from the jar! It is mine,” he bleated, rudely shoving the men aside. “I had hoped to open a gate—and it appears that I have! But not as I ever dreamed! No, not as I thought...”

  The rumbling brewed outside, increasing with each passing second. “Fool that I was!” he now screamed at himself, bloody spittle flying from his frothing mouth. “Fool! The Blind Idiot God is bereft of mind, it cannot be bargained with—”

  He continued to rage, while the distant rumbling grew in crescendo, cloaking his ravings. He groped the air in front of him, grasped the jar and hauled it against his chest with maniacal strength, still screaming. Back bent, he stumbled out of the tent and into the empty waste, clumsily but doggedly dragging the jar behind him.

  Outside the darkened sky had become gauzy. High in the sky a churning vortex had formed, half-luminous in its slowly rotating center, with stabbing lightning bolts that lanced forth. The shape was convoluted, rolling erratically, horrifying in its sheer immensity. The swirling cloud of negativity crackled with dark undercurrents, drifting lazily across the sky—directly above the fleeing Yaquud!

  An electric tension tingled Ze’ez’s flesh. He watched alternately fascinated and terrified by the blooming spectacle. The others had fled, for the exodus had begun.

  Kashan emerged from Yaquud’s tent with the latter’s papers, notebooks and a handful of undeveloped 35mm film. “Documents,” he wheezed, racing toward his tent for his own belongings.

  Meanwhile, Yaquud zigzagged wildly across the debris-strewn sands. The nebulous sky-shape followed, multiplying in girth, suspended in the supercharged atmosphere like a malignant thunderhead. As its mass increased it
seemed to lower itself to the earth.

  Ze’ez’s terror-blasted mind tried to grasp the tableau. What had Yaquud done during the night? What had he unleashed?

  The gyrating sky-shape had assumed a semisolid state, with multitudinous tentacles whipping about, while in the center blazed a luminous circle, almost like a vast staring eye. Thin, elongated feelers, pale gray and glistening, reached down to clutch their prey. It looked for all the world as if the Andromeda Galaxy had taken on the flesh of a single creature.

  A glimpse was all Ze’ez witnessed, for he turned away to flee, running for his life. Kashan and three others were already in the truck. Together they sped from the scene of madness. Behind them came a tremendous earth-shaking explosion and a brilliant burst of light, then the worst hail of sand yet experienced by the men. The sudden blast nearly overturned the truck. There was a casualty: One of the men, Jafara, was permanently blinded when he turned to gaze at the source of the inferno.

  Ze’ez remembered nothing of the journey to the outskirts of the Empty Waste, where four men of the returning party—one had died en route—were found by a nomadic tribe. The battered truck had been lodged in a sand dune, devoid of fuel. Ze’ez regained consciousness to find himself in a hospital ward, isolated from other patients. Only the burn scars on his body, from that last encounter, attested to the fact that he had ever been in Irem.

  Ze’ez did not recover from his severe malnutrition and heat stroke; in fact, his condition worsened. He requested writing material—he wanted to transcribe the account of the expedition before the details faded from memory. In four weeks he had filled two notebooks. During that span of time, he received a bulky package from Dr. Kashan, who had died a few days before, in another ward of the hospital.

  Jamison blinked his tired eyes. His head hurt from feverish concentration. Dr. Winwood had concluded the narrative. He glanced at the wall clock; the time was half past seven. A sheen of sweat coated his skin— the account had disturbed him more than he cared to admit.