Through a Mythos Darkly

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  “I did know enough not to confide in anyone. Except Dr. Exeter. I thought he must have plenty of experience counseling ministerial students who were afraid of losing their faith”

  Bill laughed with irony. “Oh, he does. Plenty of experience. And over the years he’s given plenty of advice, just not to troubled students. He advises the University authorities, and they send their hired flunkies to separate the sheep from the goats. You’re one of the goats, and I don’t mean the Shub-Niggurath kind.”

  Eyes widening, Allen stuttered, “You, ah, don’t mean he wanted me killed?”

  Handing Allen a can of Coke, Bill retorted, “What else?”

  “Thanks. Well, what do I expect from you guys? And what did you mean about your being ‘cultists’?”

  At this, the pair looked at one another as if to say, “Here goes!”

  Mort spoke first. “We belong to an old religion not approved by the Old One worshippers.”

  “What, you mean you belong to the Hastur faith or the Tsathoggua church, or something like that?

  Bill gave a bitter bark of a laugh. “Hell, no. A religion usually thought to have gone extinct centuries ago. It was all but wiped out, but it went underground. Had to. It survives mainly by getting passed down through families who have to pretend to worship those monsters.”

  Mort added, “I wouldn’t bet bigwigs like Exeter really even believe in that stuff. It’s just that their power, their positions, depend on it.”

  Taken aback, Allen realized he’d never even considered the possibility.

  “What we believe in is a god who came down from the stars ages ago to enlighten men. He had to suffer, and it’s our privilege to follow in his footsteps. But things are about to change—big time! He promised to return soon, and to turn the tables on the persecutors, the idolaters, the devil-worshippers. So we keep an eye out for people like you. People dissatisfied with the Cthulhu nonsense and open to something else. Would you want to know more?”

  “Um, do you guys have a name?”

  “We’re the Nazoreans. Don’t know exactly what it’s supposed to mean. Just inherited the name.”

  “Never heard of you.”

  Mort fell to expectant silence, but Bill took the opportunity to reassure Allen, “Look, if you don’t buy it, you can just walk out of here. We’ll give you a ride to anyplace within a reasonable distance. But I don’t know where you’d go. They’re after you now.”

  Why think anymore about it? They could at least provide temporary shelter, and their faith, what little he’d heard about it, sure didn’t sound any more outlandish than the one he’d embraced until now. Hell, he was even planning on going into the Cthulhuvian ministry!

  After a few weeks went by, a student raised her hand in class to ask Professor Exeter what had happened to Allen Abernathy. He wasn’t the sort to just drop out. Exeter had expected this to come up sooner or later. “I miss him, too, Ms. Gilman. It’s my understanding that he is participating in a special seminar at our sister school, Brichester, across the pond. I’m not his academic advisor, so I don’t know the details.”

  Nor was that all he didn’t know. He actually had no idea of Allen’s whereabouts. He was well aware of his student eluding the hunting dogs he had sicced on him. But he wasn’t worth further trouble. The important thing was that he had been knocked off course for the ministry, where his doubts would surely have infected others whether he intended it or not. Exeter was content to think no more about it. He had other matters on his mind, like the paper he was preparing to present at the upcoming ecumenical dialogue event in Sauk City with Ghatanothoan and Hasturian theologians in attendance.

  It wasn’t long before Allen agreed to be baptized into the Nazorean faith. Or rather, rebaptized; he had some years before received Cthulhuvian baptism. The rite had symbolized Great Cthulhu sinking beneath the waves of the Pacific and his expected rising to break the surface in the Last Days. Any theological meaning to the Nazorean immersion had been forgotten. All anyone knew was that it marked one’s entry into the fellowship.

  That was good enough for Allen. He had found himself a new home in the Nazorean underground community. Their beliefs tended toward vagueness, all real detail having been eroded by centuries of oral transmission. Each generation of believers knew less than the one before it, except insofar as their predecessors had embellished the old stories to fill the gaps. No authoritative texts had survived the incessant persecutions. With his love for theology, Allen found this at once fascinating and frustrating.

  He did what he could to carry his share of the load supporting their rural farm settlement. He dared not be seen in public working at some mundane job, since he thought he was still being actively sought. He was afraid his intellectual skills and theological training were going to waste, atrophying. But one day things changed.

  When evening prayers were done, Mort approached him with a smile on his face.

  “Brother Abernathy, I have some exciting news. I think you know we have a colony of Nazoreans over in Palestine and Syria. They sometimes assist in archaeological digs. But they also work on their own, selling any finds on the black market. Well, they’ve now found something we never dreamed existed. It is a partial manuscript of the Nazorean scriptures.”

  Allen’s ears were open and his eyes wide.

  “You don’t mean the ‘shunned and abhorred New Testament’?”

  “Part of it, anyway. They’re sending us a copy of the papyri. We can’t wait to read it! But we can’t. It’s written in ancient Greek! Who knew?”

  Bill had come up to join them. He said, “That’s why we’re coming to you. Am I right that you studied ancient languages at Miskatonic? We were hoping you might be able to translate it for us.”

  “Hmm. Greek, you say? Well, I spent most of my efforts on Latin and Arabic so I could study De Vermis Mysteriis and the Al-Azif. But I did some work on Byzantine Greek so I could cross-check the Arabic text with the Greek Necronomicon translated by Theodorus Philetas. It’s not quite the same, but I think I could manage it. When do you expect the copies to get here?”

  A new chapter in Allen’s life had opened, and he was thrilled. Most people gain their religious beliefs either by heredity or by osmosis. He had repudiated his parents’ faith and replaced it with that of the Nazoreans. It was not a matter of evidence. When was it ever? He grew to love the group of people who had welcomed him. To embrace them was perforce to embrace their beliefs. Why not? And now he had found the venue he never thought he’d have, where he could teach as he had been taught, though the content was altogether different. But here he was, surrounded by eager, albeit informal, students, sitting in a semi-circle on the floor, drinking up his teaching of scripture like parched flowers enjoying the rain. All was well. Their scripture, their savior, whom he (and they) now knew to call “Jesus,” had many good things to say. The ideas and stories Allen was expounding were captivating, challenging, enriching. The glowing treasure contained in the new scripture instilled in him a deep and sincere faith in Jesus the Nazorean.

  All was well until the day a bright student, Bill’s wife, raised her hand.

  “This passage really puzzles me, Brother Allen. Maybe you can clear it up for me. ‘Some of you standing here will not experience death till the kingdom of God comes with power.’ Doesn’t that sound like he’s promising his Second Coming would happen in that same generation? But that was, like, two thousand years ago, right?”

  Stewert Behr—Deanimator

  Pete Rawlik

  1. SIX SHOTS FROM THE SHADOWS

  OF MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE STEWERT BEHR, MUCH HAS BEEN written, and even more is whispered. It has been more than half a century since I first met the man in the hallowed halls of Miskatonic University’s School of Necromancy. We were students then, enthralled in our studies of the anatomy and physiology of the Resurrected. Our fellows had pursued more commonplace studies, focusing on the ailments of the still living masses that made up the bulk of the plebian populace of th
e Americas, but Behr and I had chosen a different course. Under the tutelage of the eminent physician Lyle A. Shan we sought the training necessary to serve as physicians to the Resurrected themselves, those dark luminaries whom the Emperor himself had gathered and bestowed upon the necromantic gift of immortality.

  Such paths in life have their price, and neither Behr nor I were possessed of the wealth needed to fulfill our studies, and thus had to pool our resources. We shared books and equipment, meals and notes, and out of necessity we shared a home. It was a ramshackle Victorian with three bedrooms and a dilapidated roof. To Behr’s delight it also possessed a basement, which my friend used as a laboratory for his experiments in necromancy, slaughtering and resurrecting animals: rats and rabbits mostly, the occasional cat, when it presented itself.

  It was, what I thought, a cat screaming that drew me to the cellar that fateful night in the fall of 1900. The terrible screeching cry shattered the night and startled me from my slumber. I grabbed a brass poker from the fireplace, and, only half awake threw open the door and stumbled down the stairs to the subterranean level. The room was dimly lit, a half-dozen flickering oil lamps cast queer shadows as something moved in the darkness. Behr was cowering in the corner. There was blood on his coat, blood and dust. I knelt by him and checked for a pulse; he was still alive. I went to move him, but something growled from the dark.

  Instinctively I swung my makeshift weapon, and the metal rod connected with something, something that screamed in anger and pain, something that screamed like a man. I swung again, and in the dim light caught a glimpse of something that was only partly human. The rest was something that might have once been an arm or a leg but was now nothing more than a pulpy disorganized mass of mud and dust. It was a horrible thing, a revenant with fetid breath and a shambling gait. It knew I was still human, still alive. It knew I had what it needed to make itself whole. It bared its teeth, and the fangs that would draw forth my blood glistened in the darkness. Its words were barely that, but I understood the command clearly enough: “Feed Me!”

  Conditioned from birth, I lowered my weapon and craned my head to one side, exposing my neck so that one of the Resurrected could take what it needed. The undead master lunged forward and I cringed as the sound and terror came rushing across the room at me, but it never came.

  Six times did the roar of the gun explode and fill the room with light and a deafening, earth-shattering blast. Six times did slugs of hot metal bore their way into the head of the Resurrected. The thing stumbled and as it fell it screamed, for it knew that it was dying. It had been promised eternal life, immortality, and it had done things, terrible things to survive, and all that was suddenly meaningless. It had killed so that it could live forever, and it had failed. As it fell to the ground it shattered, it crumbled into dust and then was lost amidst the darkness and dust of the basement laboratory.

  “Damn,” cursed Behr. “The Resurrected was too strong.”

  I stood there in shock, the voice of my colleague echoing in my head. “Behr, what have you done?”

  He looked at me with a wild, crazed sense in his eyes. “I’m sorry Danielle, I thought I could handle it. The invocation worked with the smaller animals, the younger ones. I thought it would work on this one as well. It was only twenty years since it had been brought back. I thought for sure it wasn’t too old. The incantation … the Resurrected was too seasoned, too strong. Damn it, it wasn’t fresh enough!”

  2. THE DARK PLAGUE

  It had been in the summer of 1776 that the founding fathers issued their Declaration of Independence and plunged the American colonies into war with the British Empire. Since then, the tables had turned, where once the world had knelt before the House of Hanover it now quaked at the armies of the Imperial States of the Americas. From the capitol in Manhattan, the empire stretched from Quebec to Alaska and south to Panama where the Iberian Republic had combined their forces to curtail American imperialism. The expansion of the necromantic ideal had been confined to a single continent, but the whole world knew that it was only a matter of time before the founders renewed their push south. The unification of the Americas was one of the guiding tenets of the imperial foreign policy as codified in the Monroe Doctrine of 1825. In 1905 Monroe was still administering that doctrine, and personally oversaw the war machine that was developing in the deserts of Mexico, and the Gulf of California.

  All this was merely preamble to the revelation that Behr was a Republican, an anti-imperialist who sought an end to a war that hadn’t even started. Unlike his fellow Republicans, Behr did not seek to change the policies of the Imperium, but rather he sought to change the Imperium itself. Necromancy was a dark plague, an unnatural evolution that had not only upset the balance of world powers, but that of nature itself. “It is unseemly for a single man to live beyond his allotment, Danielle, imagine the burden of an entire nation of the undead. It is an abomination, if not before God, then before the natural order of things.”

  It was then that he revealed his plan to me. How his studies in necromancy were not intended to benefit the Resurrected, but rather to bring about their end. He would learn their secrets, learn the methods by which they were created, and discover a way to bring them down. He would destroy them all, one by one if need be. He had plans for all the Founding Fathers. Unlike the newly Resurrected, which could be killed by conventional means, the Elders were only vulnerable to sorcery. Behr had found a formula, an incantation: one that turned the older ones to ash. It wasn’t perfect yet, something wasn’t yet right. His phrasing or tempo was wrong. It worked perfectly on the smaller animals, but human subjects proved resistant. He needed practice, subjects to experiment on. He needed time. But once perfected, he would visit them one by one. The Founding Fathers would fall before him and his magic, Jean Charriere, Alijiah Billington, Jedediah Orne, Edward Hutchinson, and even the Emperor Joseph Curwen, would all be nothing more than ashes in the wind.

  3. THE SCREAM OF MIDNIGHT

  It was ten years after we had graduated that the fatal step was taken, and a shrill, inhuman shriek shattered the tropical night. We were junior necromancers, attached to the imperial embassy in Havana. Negotiations between the Empire and the Iberians had become heated, with Ambassador Munoz denouncing Doctor Charriere’s overtures of peace as a fraud designed to give the American fleet time to establish a base in Antarctica. Offended, Charriere went so far as to rap his cane against the table so hard that the wood itself had splintered. The talks had degenerated into cacophony after that, and the moderator, the venerated Tcho-Tcho Lama of Leng had dismissed the envoys, in hopes that cooler heads would prevail the following day.

  But while our masters retired to their compound, Behr and I had other plans. It was not uncommon to see men and women from the embassy partaking of the Havana nightlife, and the two of us had cultivated a reputation of occasional overindulgence, if not outright debauchery. It was, of course, little more than a ruse, one designed to allow us to make contact with radicals who shared our motivations. These included not only local Cubans, but members of other nations as well. For all intents and purposes we were traitors, intent on overthrowing the American Imperium.

  It was in a shadowy basement bar that we had been told to meet a potential new ally. Who this ally was, and which faction he represented, had not been revealed, neither had the reason for the meeting. So we sat in the dark and the heat, waiting for our mysterious new friend to make himself plain. We sipped daiquiris as the time crawled by, and by the time our friends in the underground walked in we were slightly inebriated; at least I was.

  It should be apparent who our new ally was, for I knew him as soon as he came through the door. Ambassador Munoz was a medical man by training, and rumor had it he had carried out his own studies in scientific necromancy, as opposed to sorcery, but this was only rumor. The man brought a blast of cool air with him, and his handshake was like gripping a dead fish, but we weren’t there to cultivate a personal relationship.

  Indeed th
e entire point of our meeting was never revealed, for no sooner had we sat down at the table than there came a sudden shrill whistling and a cacophony of footsteps. The doors to the bar burst open and in poured members of the Imperial Security Forces, and with them came a man dressed in the imperial black leather coat with the death’s head insignia on the collar and his hat. Doctor Charriere himself had come to deal with our betrayal.

  Behr gave them no opportunity and did the only thing he could think of. He stood and, at the top of his lungs, recited the queer incantation he had been trying for more than a decade to perfect. He let those words roll off his tongue and fill the room with an eldritch tone that seemed to set even the air vibrating in an unbearable manner. The security forces fell to their knees and clasped their hands about their ears. One even moaned in pain, but only for a moment. Charriere slammed his cane against the floor and the ensuing sound dispersed whatever magic Behr had initiated.

  Charriere smiled wickedly. “Very good Doctor Behr, very close indeed. Unfortunately, you are not quite correct in your pronunciation. When it comes to necromancy, the acoustics must not only be sustained, but there is a pronounced effect as well. One you have yet to master. A pity really.”

  It was then that the incantation began again. I looked at Stewert, but he was as perplexed as I. What was even stranger was that the incantation was being spoken in a manner in which I had never heard it before. It was accented, and given a cadence totally alien to any Western way of speaking. As before, the security forces dropped to their knees, and clutched at their heads. This time Charriere joined them on the sandy floor. He tried once more to raise his cane and shatter the spell, but Munoz darted forward and wrenched the stick from his grasp. It was then that I realized that it was the Iberian ambassador that was chanting the spell and driving our enemies to the ground, but how those sounds came out of such a small and frail form I couldn’t understand.