by Rick Dakan
“Who the hell do we know who reads ancient Greek?” Conrad asked.
“Sinclair might. He’s pretty well educated, especially when it comes to stuff like this, ancient history and books and all that. And you saw it has the Elder Sign on it. Who better to help us?” I forwarded the pics from my phone to Sinclair’s e-mail address along with an explanatory e-mail.
“Let’s hope he can help,” said Conrad. “We need a break here.”
I didn’t hear back from Sinclair for the next three days, although I sent him a half-dozen e-mails and left as many messages on his machine. I also didn’t talk to Conrad much during that time — he seemed to be avoiding me. I got the impression that he feared I might have been somehow compromised by participating in Kym’s ritual, even though he was the one who’d insisted I stay through the whole thing. I could see (sort of) how things might have looked from his point of view since I came out of the event in such good spirits and so impressed with Kym’s sleight of mind skills. In retrospect he might even have been right — part of me was won over to Shelby and Kym that night, although at the time I could not admit as much to myself. But I thought that the core of Conrad’s standoffish demeanor stemmed from what I’d told him about Cara’s attempt to woo me away from him. The fact that Cara had so firmly rejected him as a lost cause while reaching out to me seemed to eat away at him and he kept mentioning it in the car ride home that evening and the few brief conversations we had were just him checking to see if the I’d heard back from Sinclair. “What’s she so mad at me for?” he would ask. “You can’t let her go, Rick. It’s up to you now that she’s rejected me,” he would say.
Not that I was in any way about to let her go. Despite her promise to call me soon, she hadn’t, and I feared it might have had something to do with her seeing me rifling through the box in the van. I spent my days trying once more to contact Cara. I left more messages at the gate, but never got to see anyone I recognized. I also kept finding excuses to stop by the comic book store, hoping that maybe I’d receive another coded message about the next ritual. The rest of the time was split evenly between work and cruising the Cthulhu and Lovecraft enthusiast Web sites that Sinclair had turned me on to, looking for some hints about what Shelby might be up to. Word of the code, including a key for translating it, had gotten out, and apparently there were in fact several different coded messages that had gone out for April sixth. The Hippo House was one of three different meeting places that night, or so the messages posted online seemed to indicate. However, several people looked at these other two and pronounced them fakes — either made by the Starry Wisdom Church to throw people off or Internet creations. As a Sarasota resident I could vouch that the addresses were at least real— I even drove by them to check — but they were just normal houses with no hint of Cthulhu one way or the other.
At last, on the afternoon of April tenth, I got the call from Sinclair. “Mr. Dakan, I’m glad I got through to you. It’s been a harrowingly busy three days,” he said, sounding as excited as I felt.
“What have you found out?” I asked, anxious for every drop of data he had to offer.
“Quite a bit, I think. I know you have been trying to reach me the past few days, but my researches took me out of town and away from my computer. I know you’ll have questions as I go, but if you’ll permit me to begin at the beginning and indulge in a bit of a preamble, I believe I can forestall any number of questions you would have if I were to state my conclusions up front.”
“Fine, of course. Please, continue.”
“The pages are indeed written in Greek,” Sinclair began. “A form of Ancient Greek rather than modern, but a later, decadent form. This is not a classical text, but rather something written in the Middle Ages. This was an important first clue. Now, obviously the pictures themselves are less than ideal, and I was only able to make out a handful of sentences from them, but even so I think we were lucky enough to capture one key word on the second picture. I don’t know if you saw it or not, but it does in fact say ‘KUTULU’ there. Given Mr. Tyree’s twisted interest in Cthulhu, this is only to be expected. But there are two vitally shocking things here. First of all, the word ‘KUTULU’ appearing in a medieval manuscript is quite a revelation, for it implies that Lovecraft had some other source for his stories than merely his own imagination. It is also interesting because using the first letter ‘k’ or kappa to spell Kutulu is not what one expect if you were to translate Lovecraft’s Cthulhu into Ancient Greek letters; you would instead expect ‘chi’ I would imagine. But that is of secondary interest. First we must look to see where else this particular spelling of Kutulu might be found.
“Allow me for a moment to take you back to 1972 when a particular scandal hit the rare-book world. This was of course long before my time in the business, but it’s a story one still hears about now and then. This was an era when academia and libraries in general were a little more trusting than they are today, especially when it came to men of the cloth. A pair of Greek Orthodox monks belonging to a particularly obscure little monastery had come to New York to study. They traveled up and down the East Coast, visiting the country’s best libraries. What no one could have suspected was that they were in fact thieves. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, they were real monks, but apparently their monastery had fallen upon hard times and they took it upon themselves to raise some much-needed funds. They sought out rare volumes and then managed to spirit them out of the libraries beneath their robes! It took some gall, as you can imagine.
“Now, these monks were modern Greeks, the kind of swarthy descendants of multiple millennia of invasions, interbreeding, and occupation. They retained none of the noble ancestry of their great classical forefathers. They had no love of knowledge, but instead a kind of blind, uneducated peasant faith, which kept them from destroying books they considered holy, such as Bibles. Instead they focused on volumes that were either historical curiosities, such as out-of-date atlases that were valued for their beauty and rarity rather than any true holy insight. In addition, of course, the beautifully illustrated maps in these atlases made them easy to cut up and sell as individual pages. But even though their cause was, in their degenerate eyes, just and right, the two monks could not escape the pangs of conscience, and sought some way to ameliorate their crimes. In this case, misguided souls that they were, they decided to make up for one sin by committing what was, in my eyes at least, an even more unforgivable sin: they began stealing and then destroying books that they thought were evil.
“No one can say how many such texts they destroyed. Even after the two were caught by authorities they never revealed anything about the so-called ‘infernal texts’ that they’d done away with. But it was in those last days, as the police were closing in on them, that one of the two monks made a desperate change in his normal modus operandi. They’d been selling their stolen goods to disreputable dealers and sending the money directly back to their hovel of a monastery in Greece, keeping only enough to cover their very meager living expenses as monks. But now, with their normal dealers scared off by police inquiries and the authorities closing in on them, they had no way of getting back home. They had in their possession one last manuscript, a Medieval Greek text that was in very poor condition and which they’d already destroyed parts of, particularly some very blasphemous illustrations. But, desperate times call for desperate measures, and so one of the two monks — against his brother’s wishes — sought out a buyer for the fragment.
“With all of their normal contacts inaccessible, and knowing the sorcerous nature of the text, he decided to try to sell it at one of New York’s largest and most well-known occult bookstores. Although I imagine that every second in the place made the olive-skinned monk’s skin crawl, he went in and, over the course of two days, negotiated the sale of the book to the store’s owners. They had no idea what exactly it was they were buying, as none of them could read Greek, but the few remaining symbols clearly had occult meaning, and the fragment’s age was undeniable. Since th
e monk was obviously in dire straits they were able to negotiate quite a bargain price for themselves. The book changed hands and the monk went on his way, only to be arrested with his companion three days later at JFK airport.
“The fragments languished for some time in the shop’s back room, occasionally brought out to show off to some of the more distinguished occultists and so-called magicians who frequented the bookstore. It was one of these, a man whose name remains a closely guarded secret, who finally realized what the store had actually purchased. Reading the Greek, he told them that this was a magical grimoire translated in the thirteenth century from an original Arabic text by a ‘mad monk’ who was later torn apart in a marketplace by invisible demons… ”
I all of a sudden saw where Sinclair was going as the story took this familiar turn that was straight out of Lovecraft. “No way!” I said. “Tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”
Sinclair continued on as if I hadn’t said anything, although he did start talking louder and faster. “The book was more than just a magical text, it was purported to be a revelation about the true nature of existence and the universe. It was a guide to the past, the present, and the future, and the truths contained within were enough to drive its author insane. We know it best of course by its Greek name, taken from the very text that the monk had stolen and then sold. It was the Necronomicon.”
“Bullshit,” I said. The supposedly super-evil magic book that appears in many of Lovecraft’s stories and reveals all the secrets about Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones and the rest was, as far as I knew, just something Lovecraft made up for his books. “There was no real Necronomicon.”
“Ahhh,” Sinclair said, “But there was! There most certainly was! Lovecraft himself denied that the book was anything more than a figment of his imagination, and on some level he might even have believed that to be the case. But there are many, many citations of the Necronomicon’s existence outside of Lovecraft’s writings, including several that predate any mention of the book in his stories. No, no, Mr. Dakan, I assure you, the Necronomicon was very much a real text.” I started to object once more, but he talked over me. “Which is not to say that it contained the kind of information that Lovecraft attributed to it. No serious scholar credits the quotations that appear in stories like ‘The Dunwich Horror’ as being anything but literary fabrications. But as is the case with so many great authors, Lovecraft’s best work germinated from a seed of truth. However, if you will permit me to continue my narrative for a few more minutes, we can return to the issue of Lovecraft and the Necronomicon at that time.”
“Fine,” I said, trying to sound skeptical, but my mind was racing. Could there really be a Necronomicon out there? And if there was, I thought I could see where Sinclair’s story was headed and it might explain a lot about Shelby’s cult.
“Once the book’s new owners realized what they had, they became obsessed with the text. The mystery man who’d identified it for what it was agreed to help translate the pages, and a group of other local occult scholars pitched in as well. Here indeed is where things get even more murky and complicated. As I mentioned earlier, the text the monk sold was but a fragment of the original book. Parts had been lost to time, other parts at the hands of the monks themselves. What remained was apparently as confusing and disjointed as it was enticing. The store’s owner, who ran a profitable small press specializing in New Age and modern occult materials, realized what a potentially huge seller he had in his possession, but did not believe that these fragments alone would be much of a hit — once the curiosity value of buying a book containing a few pages from the actual Necronomicon wore off, his sales would slump. He knew that his most successful titles were those that contained complete magical systems that the readers could take home and practice themselves. If he could produce such a text based on the actual Necronomicon, it would sell forever, as indeed it has.”
“You’re telling me someone printed this thing up and sold it?” I asked.
“You can buy it today from Amazon.com, along with several other so-called Necronomicons by other authors and other publishers. There have been a number of hoaxes over the years, some more serious than others. And indeed, even the very book you can purchase based on the Necronomicon text we’ve been discussing is, in many important ways, a hoax.”
“What do you mean? I thought you said it was the real thing.”
“It is a fragment of the real text. The publishers decided to fill it out with a great deal of their own material, along with a long opening commentary justifying some of the rather tenuous connections they draw between the original and various ancient myths and magical systems native to the ancient Near East. The book as printed conflates Sumerian, Babylonian, and other pre-classical magical traditions with more medieval and even modern occult teachings, particularly those of Aleister Crowley, of whom the publishers were devotees. The published version available to the mass market since the 1970s is in fact largely fabricated from whole cloth, albeit with a few patches of the real Necronomicon sewn into place. It’s a very good fake, though, and thus it is almost impossible to tell which parts are from the original text. Some of the fabrications are quite obvious, but about 20 percent of the volume is of possible ancient origin.”
“And you think those pages Shelby had framed are from the original text that these guys in New York based their fake version of the Necronomicon on, right?”
“I believe that might be the case,” Sinclair said, “But there is another possibility as well, one I’m more intrigued by and which I think, at this point, is more likely. Looking at what I could make out from the pictures you sent me, I was able to translate several full sentences, as I said. The sentences from the first page clearly have analogous sentences in the mass-market text, indicating that these share a common origin. But the sentences I could make out on the second page, now these are especially interesting, for they have no analogs in the printed version. From this fact I deduce that they are part of the original text that was not included in the print version and thus represent new material from the original Necronomicon.”
“Why wouldn’t they have included them in their fake?”
“The contents of these pages do not fit very well into the false text these modern-day occultists were endeavoring to construct. Remember, these were men and women who practiced modern magic as laid forth by people like Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. They were, at base level, followers of supernaturalism. Now, of course, it’s hard to determine the true context of these ‘new’ sentences from just the pages you sent me, but what I can make out is very different from the usual magical grimoire sort of prose. For example, there’s one brief passage that says, as best as I can translate it, ‘Body is merely a body. Spirit (or perhaps Mind) is merely a dream. All is stardust.’ And another passage, this one mentioning Cthulhu or, as the text has it, Kutulu. It reads something like, ‘Kutulu waits its awakening to reveal/discover the truth word of no hope.’ Neither of these phrases appear in the mass-market Necronomicons that I’ve seen, and they certainly don’t fit in well with modern magic, which, for all its dark reputation, actually tends to be rather upbeat about such matters.”
“It does, however, tell us where Shelby got some of the ideas for his ceremonies,” I said, excited to be getting what seemed like real answers now. “I remember him saying stuff like that about bodies and stardust during the big ritual at the art show.”
“And,” Sinclair added, “There are very similar, albeit more poetic passages in Mr. Tyree’s Cthulhu Manifesto. I agree with you, Mr. Dakan, I believe these pages are the source of much of your old friend’s newfound philosophy.”
“But where did he get the pages? How do we even know they’re real?” I could imagine Shelby becoming entranced with such an ancient find, knowing as I did his love of old books and esoterica.
“Trying to answer those questions has occupied much of my time for the last few days,” said Sinclair, a hint of pride in his voice. “I
took the train to New York to meet with an antiquarian acquaintance of mine who has some ties to the occult scene in the city. The owner of the store and company that originally published the mass-market Necronomicon passed away several years ago and the store itself is now closed. But I was able to speak with several individuals who were active in that community at the time, including one woman who claimed to have been around when the manuscript was being translated. She said that the original was a closely guarded secret, especially once they realized what they had. It was kept under lock and key in a secure, off-site location in order to prevent theft. This was in response to several attempts by rival occultists to steal it, or so the owner claimed.
“But things changed after the owner died and the store closed. There was massive debt and an auction was held. When the executors of the estate opened up the off-site location they discovered that the original Necronomicon was gone, along with several other antiques and artifacts that were supposed to be stored with it. They reported the items stolen. Then, just over a year ago, one of those other items, an antique Roman gold coin set in a piece of gold and silver jewelry to form a pendant, turned up in the hands of a Haitian drug dealer when he was arrested. He claimed the piece had been a wedding gift from a relative, but police believe it was probably used to pay for drugs in some way. There was no hint of the Necronomicon fragment or any of the other missing items in the drug lord’s possessions, but who knows what he might have had secreted away in his native land.”
My mind went racing with connections to Kym and Shelby that I wasn’t ready to share with Sinclair at that moment. But I really needed to talk to Conrad right away. “That’s amazing stuff, Calvin. Thanks a ton for doing all that research. Did you find anything else?”