I expected the cool hardness of jade, but instead, the stone was warm, perhaps from the sunlight, and the texture was wet and slippery. I jerked my hand away and looked at my fingers, expecting them to be wet; they were dry, though the sensation of the oily stone remained. I did not want to touch the thing again and could not stand looking at it, so I backed away from the shrine and hurried to catch up to Satindra, who squatted further down the road, waiting for me.
“What’s wrong, Little Brother?” he asked as I joined him, still staring at my fingers. They felt tainted, somehow, as if I had touched something unclean. I had the urge to wipe them on my robes, though they were not actually dirty.
“There is something wrong with the statue in that shrine,” I told him, scowling.
Satindra chuckled. “I think that today, you are determined to find something wrong with everything,” he replied. Thinking that perhaps he was correct, I sighed and resigned myself to our daily trudge.
We walked for several days more, each day passing more of the shrines with the black-green soapstone idols. The road became increasingly pitted and overgrown with weeds, narrowing down to almost nothing, but the shrines seemed only to grow larger, each statue taller than the last.
Even stranger, the number of people we saw along the road dwindled as the idols to the local god grew larger. The fields once full of workers were now empty, the rice overgrown and unkempt, as if the crops had simply been forgotten. The fields that had gone on forever now ended in forest, and the forest was reclaiming those fields.
Eventually, we came upon some simple bamboo huts much like Grandmother Mei’s, but these were empty and beyond them, the forest was dark and forbidding. The remains of cooking fires were still smoldering, in some cases, and half-finished cups of tea sat beside dirty rice bowls that swarmed with ants. After investigating one of these houses, I turned to Satindra and said, “It’s as if everyone has just disappeared. This is unnatural. I don’t like it.”
Satindra tried to laugh off my fears with his usual grace, but failed. His laughter sounded hollow and misplaced in the silent, empty village. “Don’t worry, Brother Wen. I’m sure there is some explanation. We should find a place to sleep.”
Though we were not superstitious men, Satindra and I did not sleep in the village. We ate the last of our rice in a field nearby, where we could to see the huts without being too close to them.
Every night since Grandmother Mei’s, I had slept poorly, my dreams fraught with screaming old women and huge black birds with sharply curved beaks. Now the birds dripped oil and opened their mouths to shriek with Grandmother Mei’s raspy voice, “Cursed! Cursed!” I woke in the night, sweating and tangled in my robes. I looked about for Satindra and found him crouched beside me, awake and alert despite the late hour. His eyes were so wide that I could see the whites even in the darkness that shrouded us.
I followed his gaze to the abandoned village. There were lights moving among the previously empty huts. I started to say something to him, to suggest that we go speak with the villagers, but he silenced me with a hand squeezing my arm. Never had I seen him like this, with every nerve taut and straining, so I bit my tongue. After some time, the lights moved away and Satindra turned to me.
His eyes looked doubly huge with his face so dark. The night around us was eerily silent, not even the wind stirring the fallow rice fields. “I don’t think those were people,” he whispered.
“What do you mean?” I replied, squatting beside him in the dirt so that we were almost at eye-level.
“I saw their faces. They didn’t look right.” He shook his head emphatically.
“What did you see?”
Satindra swallowed hard, as if something large and ill-tasting were caught in his throat. His huge eyes remained fixed on my face, unblinking and intense. “Dakini.”
Dakini is an ancient word that refers to an otherworldly, inhuman being: a god or a demon.
“We should go,” I said.
To my horror, Satindra shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. Though his hands were shaking, he stood, his eyes still fixed unswervingly on me. “This is why we were sent here, Brother Wen. Your people need to hear the dharma. The Guru sent us here to free your people.”
I shook my head and stood up, too. Satindra was a full head taller than I, so I still stared up at him. “No, Brother Satindra! The Guru could not have foreseen this! We cannot go alone; it’s too dangerous. We should return to the monastery ....”
He interrupted me by gripping my arms hard and giving me a little shake, as one would a hysterical woman. “You would dare to question the enlightened Guru?” He released me abruptly and I staggered back.
Satindra whirled away from me and began walking resolutely toward the village.
I watched him for a few moments, debating what to do. The night air seemed to rush into the space left by Satindra’s quick departure, enveloping me in dark, cool silence. And then, beyond the quiet of the abandoned village and the overgrown fields, I heard a sound, faint but persistent. At first, I could not identify it. Then I thought it was the buzzing of insects. Finally, I realized that it was human voices, chanting a repetitive mantra.
I ran after Satindra.
The tracks of the dakini were easy to spot; they had not bothered to hide their movements, and we followed their trail of muddy footprints and broken branches deep into the dark, dense forest, where trees and bushes tugged at our robes and we tripped over huge roots. Here, we lost the trail, because the darkness was too omnipresent, but now we could hear the chanting and the high-pitched, frantic notes of a zither.
The people were in the center of a clearing, where they sang in the darkness without benefit of a fire. I couldn’t see the zither player in the darkness, but I knew he was off to the right somewhere, because I could hear the slithering, off-key notes. He played no tune, just as the chant seemed to have no rhythm. I had thought that perhaps, upon approaching the chanters, we would be able to discern their words, but I realized, as we approached, that the words were gibberish, meaningless, though they repeated them with conviction.
In the dim moonlight, we could see that the villagers were mostly naked, though a few still wore shreds of clothing. They were turned away from us, kneeling on the ground, facing something at the center of the clearing. I had to peek around Satindra’s bulk to get a glimpse of them – it was impossible to walk two abreast in the close forest – but I could see that a few were dancing ecstatically to the tuneless music. The din was horrible and I covered my ears to drown out what I could. It made me feel confused and hopeless, as if the veil between sanity and insanity could be breached by this combination of sounds.
There was a stench that made my eyes water. It smelled like rotten meat, sour milk, feces, and blood all together. I fought the urge to vomit.
Satindra stopped in front of me and I ran into his back. I clawed at him, trying to make him move so that I could look at the people in the clearing, but he was frozen in place. Standing on my toes, gripping his shoulder, I was able to see a little around him, where the moonlight illuminated the dancers. For a moment, I glimpsed with terrible clarity the twisted bodies, arms and limbs akimbo in unnatural positions, scattered on the ground. Among them were the tiny feet of children and the gnarled hands of the arthritic elderly. The dancers moved around and on top of these motionless forms, seemingly unaware of them, naked bodies gyrating horribly, eyes wide and mouths distorted.
Beyond the dancers was the thing they worshiped. It was so tall that it blotted out the stars behind it, dwarfing the huge trees, and I squinted to make out its features. Was that a long, crane-like neck or arms? Was that a deformed head or a stooped back? Like the statues in the altars along the road, it was a thing that could not be seen completely, as if it undulated without moving.
Suddenly, Satindra turned and wrapped his arms around me, crushing me to his chest. His hand held my head against his shoulder. He mumbled something as he held me hard against his robes. I didn’t st
ruggle at first, thinking that perhaps he was frightened and hugging me against him in fear, but soon, I ran out of breath. Crushed against his chest, I could not inhale, so I fought him. Taller and stronger than I, Satindra won easily and, as I thrashed against him, he chanted softly in my ear, “Don’t look, Little Brother. Don’t look at it!”
I awoke some time later back in the village. Satindra sat beside me, guarding me from the possessed villagers lest they return, his eyes wide and unblinking as he stared into the darkness. When I asked him how long I had been unconscious, whether we should go back to the monastery, whether we had any food, his only reply was to repeat his bleak chant: “Don’t look, Little Brother. Don’t look at it!”
These were the only words Satindra spoke throughout our journey back to the monastery in Gandhara. The trek was dismal. Satindra was no longer an inspirational young monk, but instead, a mad, sorrowful man who sometimes screamed at strangers and other times wept uncontrollably for hours.The weather turned foul and we trudged through mud up to our calves. We both grew pathetically scrawny, bones showing through our skin, but the other travelers shunned us because Satindra still moaned his disturbing mantra. We survived on will alone and the rare, meager donations of those truly generous followers of Amitabha who knew their duty, even if the monks to whom they gave alms were dirty and mad.
We arrived on the Guru’s doorstep shells of our former selves. The Guru could get nothing sensible out of Satindra, of course, so eventually, he came to me to ask what had befallen us in the terrible wilds of the Empire of Han. I could make no words in reply.
Now, knowing that death awaits me soon, at last, I can write about the events that occurred, though they seem so much like a dream after so many years. Even now, however, there are parts of the story that I cannot reveal, which I will take to the funeral pyre. These horrors destroyed poor Brother Satindra, who died muttering his cursed phrase to the last, mere days after our arrival in Gandhara. He left me alone to carry the burden of the horror and now, at last, I will be free of it, for perhaps in death, I will at last no longer see the jade crane when I close my eyes, blotting out the stars with its vastness, or hear the chanting of the mad acolytes dancing naked at its feet. There was a time when I sought the peace of enlightenment, but now I seek only the silence of death, where these terrors may be obliterated in nothingness.
Sarah Hans is a resident of the Airship Archon, currently docked in Columbus, Ohio, though on the weekends, she can be found at science fiction conventions across the Midwest. She primarily writes horror and steampunk stories, and you can follow her convention schedule, or read more about her work, at www.sarahhans.com.
The author speaks: Many of Lovecraft’s stories explore the idea of outsiders from a more-civilized realm, often Men of Science, exploring a more primitive, less-enlightened world, where they find themselves doomed by ancient and unfathomable gods. I used Buddhist monks because I am, myself, a Buddhist and I rarely have the opportunity to write about Buddhism in a horror/science fiction/fantasy setting. Inescapable insanity is my favourite of the horror themes Lovecraft mastered and this story was born as an attempt to combine all these elements.
THE CHRONICLE OF ALIYAT SON OF ALIYAT
Alter S. Reiss
It was in the fifteenth year of the reign of Aliyat son of Aliyat son of Obedagon, of the line of Callioth, that a stranger came to the city of Ashdod, an exile from the kingdom of Judah in the hills.
The guards at the gate made a mockery of this man, for he was a stranger and he wore a cloth over his face, that none might see him. Then the stranger unhooked the cloth from one of his ears, that they might see the corner of his face.
When the guards saw the corner of his face, they could not speak, so great was their fear, and they fell down upon their faces.
Word of this was brought before the King and he commanded that the stranger be brought before him. “Who are you, Judean?” said the King, “that you come into the city with a cloth before your face, that none might see you, and before whom the guards at the gate have bowed in fright?”
“Hear me, O King of Ashdod,” said the stranger and he spoke in the old tongue of Ashdod. “Judah in the hills is like a stick that is rotten in its heart. They drove me forth, so I have given their king over to leprosy and their people to the slaughter. I have come before you, Aliyat son of Aliyat, to offer you a precious gift that will see your enemies driven before you and will see the walls of your city rise up, even to the heavens.”
At this, the nobles who were in the court made mock, saying, “Who is this that comes to the court of Ashdod, who speaks in the old tongue of Ashdod? Let him go back to Judah in the hills, where he can follow sheep with unshod feet, and drink young wine.” And indeed, the stranger’s feet were unshod and the fringes of his coat were covered in the dust of the road.
“Well that you mock, O children of Ashdod,” said the stranger. “And well that you laugh, O sons of Callioth. Judah has laid waste to your land and built cities in it, even to the plain of Gaza. In the North, Assyria grows strong and proud and her armories grow fat with arrows, which thirst for your blood. Well that you mock and well that you laugh.”
But Aliyat son of Aliyat, of the line of Callioth, did not laugh and did not make mock. “Show us, then,” he said, “a proof of the gifts that you offer.”
“Certainly, O King of Ashdod,” said the stranger. “Have them bring before me a male slave and a female slave.”
The slaves were brought before him and he extended a finger toward them. The slaves were struck with leprosy, so that their faces became white with it, and they fell to the ground. “Thus I have done,” said the stranger, “to Uzziah son of Amaziah, when I was cast from Judah of the hills. He who was a mighty king now sits outside the city, in a separate hall, and even the slaves of his people will not enter there to be defiled by him. Thus shall I do to all the enemies of Ashdod and to those who conspire against it.”
The men of the court were amazed as they looked upon the male slave and the female slave that had been struck with leprosy, so that their faces had become white with it, and that they fell upon the ground and the men of the court grew fearful of the stranger. “What would you have from us,” said Aliyat son of Aliyat, “that you will do these things on our behalf?”
“Build for me a temple, fifty cubits in length by fifty cubits in width, with a roof of strong timbers, so that I may conduct the worship of my god, where none shall see and desecrate the rites of my god.”
The workers of Aliyat son of Aliyat built a temple for the stranger, of fine cut stone, fifty cubits in length, and fifty cubits in width. It was decorated on the outside with gold and precious jewels, and none but the stranger would enter the precincts of the temple. There were brought bullocks and great-bellied sows for sacrifices, and male slaves and female slaves. Soon, the stranger did as he had promised and delivered gifts unto Aliyat the son of Aliyat.
For a time, the stranger talked with the priests of Ashdod, sharing with them his lesser secrets. Many things he told them, which they had known and then forgotten, and which sorely troubled them. Gabridagon of no father, High Priest of Moloch, who conducted the awful rites of Moloch and who guarded the secrets of Moloch’s temple, spoke for a time with this stranger. Then he was seized with a great fear, so that he fled the city of Ashdod and the lands of the Philistines, and he was never again seen in the lands of man.
When he saw that his wisdom was not wanted, the stranger gave to the people gifts. Gold and silver he gave and fine old wine, and poppy juice for their delight. Male slaves and female slaves he gave also, comely in form, who spoke not and who worked tirelessly. Fine horses and cattle, powerful in their work, and the storehouses of grain were filled without the work of the harvestmen.
The gifts the stranger gave to the king of Ashdod were greater than these. The enemies of Aliyat son of Aliyat among the nobles and among the priests were stricken with plagues, or were seized by fits so they died, or were found on dry land w
ith their bellies filled with water, as though they had drowned. Ashkelon bowed its neck to the king of Ashdod and even the prince of Gaza sent him tribute, because the power of Ashdod grew great in the land.
As the gifts the stranger gave waxed and grew large, so too did the price he demanded. Animals of every sort were brought to his temple, to feed the hunger of his god, and slaves in their hundreds. Not even the blood of offerings left his temple and the smoke of his sacrifices did not rise to the sky.
In his youth, Aliyat had heard the voice of the people, but as his power grew in the land, he heard not the voice of the people, or of the priests of the gods of Ashdod, or of the noble families of Ashdod. When an enemy of the king was killed, Aliyat would send the sons and the daughters of that man to this stranger, so that they went into the temple and were never seen again.
In those days, the priest of Dagon in the high temple of Ashdod was Melichibal son of Abedizevuv son of Amnon the Israelite. He was struck with a plague of the kidneys and he died in the temple, while making the morning offerings. The people were sorely afraid, for Melichibal was beloved and he had spoken ill of the nameless priest of the hidden god.
Ishbal, son of Melichibal, tore his hair when he heard tell of the death of his father and cut his flesh with a knife, but he did it in a secret place, so that none might know his grief, and he wore rich clothing, with his sackcloth beneath. “When the king hears that I do not mourn my father,” said Ishbal in his heart, “he shall make me priest of Dagon in the high temple of Ashdod in my father’s stead. And when the king comes to bring the royal offerings on the festival of the dying moon, I shall strike him with my mace of office and he shall die. Thus shall the blood of my father be avenged.” For Ishbal knew that his father’s death came from the King.
Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time Page 6