Alhazred

by Donald Tyson

  “I do not think we are alone,” I said to Sashi.

  There are ghosts here, she agreed. They cannot harm us.

  “Would it be safe for you to leave my body in this place?”

  I would be safe. I move quickly, and ghosts are no threat to me.

  “While I sleep, I want you to explore and learn what you can about this chamber. Perhaps there are more of your kind, or other types of djinn, who might tell you its purpose.”

  I will learn what I can, and share it with you when you awake, my dear one.

  A gentle pulling sensation came across the front of my chest and face as she forced her tenuous body through my skin, followed by a soft touch on my cheek that I recognized as a kiss.

  Some impulse made me take three of the white spiders and eat them before preparing myself to sleep. I had learned to disregard ghosts, but if this chamber was haunted by the ghosts of the inhabitants of the city, it was an opportunity to study their form. The green stone felt oddly warm against my skin, as though heated from within. Scant moments after my eyelids closed, I slept.

  The tall man in the black cloak walked beside me across the sand, which resembled frozen silver waves beneath the moonlight. He had been speaking for some time, but my mind was unfocused, so that I did not comprehend his words. With an effort I brought my awareness back from where it drifted and listened.

  “If you are to walk among men as my agent, you must pass unremarked. This your present disfigured state will not allow.”

  “Make me whole again in face and body,” I said.

  “I cannot.”

  “Is there no magic that can restore my manhood?”

  “Perhaps. It is a work beyond my capacity under these poisonous stars. They weaken my power.”

  “When will the stars come right?”

  “Soon, Alhazred. In the meanwhile, I give you this glamour to deceive the senses of other men. While you wear it, you will appear to be whole in face and body, even though you are unchanged.”

  He stopped and turned to me, then made several gestures upon the air and spoke a word.

  “It will fade in the space of a dozen hours unless you renew the force of the spell.”

  I imitated the gestures and spoke the word, which sounded harsh and strange on my tongue. My skin tingled.

  “Look upon your own appearance,” the dark man said.

  He raised an ebon hand and drew aside his shadowy caul of silk. In the oval of his hood, as in a mirror, I saw my own face restored to its former beauty. I cried out and reached to touch my cheek.

  The cry in my throat awoke me on the green stone disk. Opening my eyes to the chill glow from the jewels in the dome, I saw ringing the stone dais a throng of palely glowing spirits. In form they resembled Nile crocodiles, but they stood upright on their short hind legs and slashed at me with their transparent fore claws, each as long as a curved dagger blade. At the same time they snapped at my face with their massive jaws, expressions of fury blazing in their reptilian eyes, which had pupils in the shape of slits like those of snakes.

  The silent savagery of their expressions terrified me. I shrank to the center of the stone disk. Then I reflected that they were only shades of the dead, in spite of their ferocious appearance, and noticed that their teeth and claws never passed beyond the edge of the disk. Some invisible barrier kept them from climbing onto its surface. I stood up and looked over their heads. They were all pressed against the stone, leaving the rest of the chamber empty except for Sashi, who crouched on the folded legs of her djinn body and watched with her enormous eyes.

  “Can you come to me?” I asked her above the snapping snouts of the ghosts.

  She shook her grotesque head.

  “Then I will come to you.”

  With more confidence, I stepped from the green stone disk through the bodies of the ghosts and walked to where she squatted, ignoring their attempts to slash at me with their claws. I felt them pass through my body like cool puffs of air. Sashi grinned, showing her needle-sharp teeth, and leaped upward to embrace me, pressing her face into mine. In moments she was once again inside my flesh.

  “These are the inhabitants of this city,” I said to her.

  The ghosts are everywhere. They do not stand guard over their corpses, but wander the halls and haunt the chambers.

  “Why are they so angry?”

  This was for them a holy place. Your presence defiles it.

  “Just as well for me that they have no power. What did you learn?”

  There are levels below this level. In them dwells a creature that once lived in the desert, and knows the language of the djinn. It says that this chamber is a kind of gateway for traveling to distant places in the soul body while the body of flesh remains empty.

  “A soul portal?” I looked around at the painted murals. “How is it activated?”

  The creature did not know, or would not say.

  “Can you go back and ask it again?”

  No.

  “Why not?”

  I ate it.

  I closed my eyelids. The lovely human face of Sashi gazed back at me and shrugged in apology.

  I was hungry.

  “No matter. Perhaps the creature knew nothing more.”

  Talk of food awakened my own appetite, but I decided to examine the stone disk more closely. If the chamber was a portal, there must be some way to activate its function. Ignoring the attempts of the ghosts to prevent my progress, I knelt on the disk and traced with my fingers the deep grooves of the carving in its surface. No opening or hidden lever revealed itself to my touch. Grasping one of the brass pins at the edge of the disk, I tried to pull it up but found it immobile. As I released it, my palm pressed against its rounded surface, and it slid down smoothly into the stone. Immediately, the light was extinguished from the majority of jewels in the domed ceiling of the chamber. Those that remained aglow were angled in such a way that their rays illuminated the painted panel on the wall nearest the depressed pin. The other six paintings lay in shadow.

  Sitting back up and crossing my legs so that my thawb formed a tent over my thighs, I studied the lit panel. It showed a plateau ringed by the snow-capped peaks of distant mountains. Nothing grew upon the plateau but tall grass. In the foreground clustered a dozen tents beside a herd of beasts with shaggy coats and short horns that twisted downward at the sides of their heads. In the distance beyond the tents a large black building with red tile roofs was visible, surrounded by a stone wall. Tiny figures rode across the plain on horses. As I gazed at them, they began to move, and I saw with detachment of mind that the grass was blowing in the wind. I smelled dung, and heard the howl of a beast that might have been a wolf, or a dog.

  There came a great rushing noise in my ears, and a sense of falling from a high place down a tunnel, as though propelled by an irresistible waterfall. With a shock I regained awareness of my surroundings, and realized that I stood in the midst of an endless expanse of grass that grew as high as my waist. A horse munched the tender seedy heads of the grass stalks beside me. It wore a saddle and bridle of strange design, though the purpose of their parts was clear enough. The horse was no taller than a donkey, and the bristling hairs on its black mane stood straight up from its neck. Its brown coat was shaggy and hung in patches on its sides, as though it were shedding its hair.

  I reached out to touch its neck. It did not try to pull away, and I felt its flesh warm against my fingertips. With surprise I saw that the shape of my hand was not my own, but that of another man. The fingers were thick and short, whereas mine are slender and long. I felt my face, and discovered that I possessed a nose. That alone was sufficient to convince me that I inhabited a different skin.

  Sashi, can you hear my thoughts?

  No response came from the chaklah. Whatever power had impelled my soul through
the painting on the wall had not carried the djinn along with me. That I had traveled through one of the portals in the round star chamber I had no doubt. My present concern was how to return to my own body before it was eaten by vermin. Of the ghosts I had no fear, but the rats and scorpions and bats that lived in the underground city would find my senseless flesh a banquet, unless Sashi was able to defend it. I decided the most important course was to learn whether a similar disk of green stone existed in this grassland by which I might return to my own body.

  I mounted the horse and sent it trotting through the grass toward the cluster of tents, which in shape were round, with conical roofs, and made of leather skins sewn together.

  A squat, ugly woman with black eyes and greasy black hair tied behind her head in a long rope emerged from under one of the tent flaps as I rode past. She wore a shirt of undyed leather belted at the waist, and had leather leggings lashed tightly around her calves and thighs. She looked at me in surprise, hands on her ample hips.

  “Back so quickly, Yoliff?”

  “A sickness in my head,” I murmured, and found that I could both understand and speak the language of the place.

  “You should see the shaman,” the woman said with disinterest, and set about tending her cooking fire, upon which boiled a copper pot filled with something that resembled stew.

  “Yes, I will see the shaman,” I told her.

  Looking around to orient myself, I pointed my horse at the distant walled building with the red roofs, and kicked the flanks of the placid horse to make it trot in that direction. After a few moments I heard a puffing behind me and the thud of running feet in the turf. The woman’s fat hand caught the bridle of my horse and jerked it to a stop.

  “Yoliff, have you gone mad?” The woman stared at me with fear in her eyes. “Where are you going?”

  “To visit the shaman.”

  She cursed and spat into the grass, then turned the head of the horse around until it faced the other direction and began to pull it along beside her as she walked back toward the tents.

  “You must be very sick, not to dread the monastery of the priests. Just as well that you ride off the edge of the plateau, as ride within their walls.”

  Saying nothing, I allowed myself to be led back to the encampment. She made me dismount and had a young child stand beside me and watch me so that I did not wander off while she went into one of the tents. It was larger than the others, and pitched some distance away as though for privacy. When she came out, it was in the company of a short man with a broad chest who was very like her in appearance. His slitted eyes were black, his hair black and standing up from his head much like the mane of the horse. His moustache and beard were both trimmed short, showing most of his sallow, wind-burned face, which was covered with the blue whorls of an elaborate tattoo. The white streaks in his beard indicated that he was not a young man.

  He wore the same rough leather shirt and leather breeches as the woman, but around his neck on a cord of woven grasses hung a curiously carved pendant of green stone. I recognized it as the same type of stone that composed the disk in the round chamber of star jewels. It was as large as the palm of my hand, and carved in the shape of a winged hound with a snarling mouth and blazing eyes, that sat upon its haunches as though on guard.

  The man stood close and stared into my eyes for several moments. He stepped away and gestured for me to follow before ducking back into the tent. I looked at the woman, who stood without moving, a stolid expression on her face. Perhaps women were forbidden to linger within the dwelling of the shaman, I reflected. With a shrug, I pulled up the flap and left her. The interior of the tent was dark and hot. Smoke rose in a thin stream from a fire that smoldered under a great iron kettle and exited through a hole

  in the center of the roof, through which I could see the blue sky. A younger man sat on his haunches, stirring the kettle with a long wooden ladle. He grinned up at me, and I saw that he lacked two front teeth. The same blue whorls that adorned the cheeks of the older shaman also decorated his face.

  I crossed the floor to approach the elder man, and noticed the arm of a small child floating in the bubbling kettle. The shaman drew me close and passed a burning clay oil lamp back and forth in front of my face, watching my eyes. Setting down the lamp, he took up a bone wand with feathers tied to its end and shook it over my head while chanting meaningless sounds.

  “You have changed, Yoliff. Something is different about you.”

  “It is a sickness in my head. It will pass.”

  “No, it is something else.”

  His skillful thumbs pressed the flesh of my temples and lifted my eyelids. The younger shaman rose from the fireside and came over curiously. The older man stepped back and let the young man go through the same motions he had just completed. The young man waved the bone wand over my hair and probed my skull with his thumbs, then merely shook his head.

  “Go back to your tent and sleep, Yoliff. If you are still sick in the morning, come to me again.”

  I nodded and left the tent. It was my intention to find my horse and ride to the monastery to investigate its inhabitants. Surely a place so feared by these peasants must have features of interest for a student of necromancy. Instead, I stopped and gazed across the plain in gap-jawed wonder. The sun had set while I was being examined in the shaman’s tent. In the gray of twilight a shimmering city of impossibly tall spires and vast obelisks floated above the grass. Several women and a group of children had also paused to gaze at the phantom city. The heavy woman who had taken me to the shaman came over to stand beside me.

  “I’ve never seen the Elder City clearer than it is this night.”

  “Have you seen it often?” I asked.

  She snorted and looked at me as though I were joking.

  “Morning and evening, all my life, just as you.”

  I smiled at her to show that I had only been making a jest, and she raised her eyebrows, staring at me strangely.

  “Who dwells there, I wonder?”

  “Whoever it is, they have been dead since before the beginning of time,” she said with disinterest, and wandered away.

  The light became dim, and the city began to fade into the growing murk. A single star appeared in the heavens. From somewhere across the plain a dog howled, and the call was echoed by another, and another as the pack gathered. I saw them, slinking through the tall grass at the horizon, beyond the edge of the herds of shaggy beasts that clustered together as though seeking warmth, although the night was mild. The backs of the hounds projected above the waving tops of grass, so they must have stood as tall at the shoulder as my breast. I marveled at their size as I watched them skulk around the edge of the herds, hounds larger than wolves.

  The young shaman carried out six clay jars with clay lids while I watched the circling hounds and set them down on the ground in a line. The elder shaman emerged from the tent with his bone wand, his shoulders covered in a feathered cape that had a hood attached. At the brow of the hood was the head of a hawk. Claws of hawks dangled from the hem. The older man went to the line of clay jars and removed their lids, then began to chant over their opened mouths.

  From each jar a cloud of bright points of light, like sparks from a fire, swirled into the darkening air, and solidified into the shape of a man. Each ghostly figure carried a naked sword in its right hand and wore a round shield on its left forearm. They were not as solid as flesh, but more dense than the ghosts I had seen with the second sight. In some way difficult to define they felt menacing, and I took a step backward when the gaze of one glowing warrior passed across my face. The shaman made a silent gesture. All six turned and stalked quickly from the camp in different directions. I watched one of the spirits as it approached the herds. The shaggy beasts did not appear to notice its approach, but the lurking hounds backed away and vanished in the long grass. The spirit reached the neare
st herd and stood like a statue, staring outward at the place the hounds had been.

  The thought of crossing the plain by horse in the darkness with the hounds trailing at my heels did not appeal to me, so I decided to wait until morning before investigating the monastery of the priests. Even as this thought came to my mind, I felt dizzy, as though dropped from a great height, and the sky and plain closed into a narrow passage through which I rushed on a great roaring wave.

  Chapter 12

  The ghosts had vanished from the domed chamber. I looked slowly from side to side, my neck stiff from sitting so long in the same position, and reasoned that they were probably still present, but that the effects of the white spiders had worn off. I noticed that the depressed bronze pin had returned of its own accord to its former position.

  Welcome back, Alhazred, Sashi said in my mind.

  I closed my eyes, and she smiled at me, relief evident in her face. Studying my arms, I saw they were unbitten.

  “You kept my body safe from vermin while I traveled.”

  There was no need. A barrier surrounds this stone that only you can cross.

  “You crossed it.”

  Because you carried me here inside you. When I was outside, I could not cross inward.

  I passed my hand beyond the edge of the stone disk, and felt nothing. If such a barrier existed, it was subtle. It made a kind of sense. No one would wish to leave their body to soul travel if there was a danger that it might be eaten by rats. The magic of the barrier must distinguish between lower and higher forms of life.

  When I tried to unfold my legs, I could not move them. I found that they had no more sensation than blocks of wood. Using my hands, I lifted each and extended it at the knee, then massaged their flesh with my fingers. After several minutes the feeling of a thousand pinpricks came under the surface of my skin. It grew in intensity until it was agonizing, but I endured it silently. When it reached its peak, it began to fade. I slid from the green stone disk and stood. My weakened legs functioned well enough to bear my weight.