Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time Read online

  Commotion followed after and I heard a great noise A blinding light pierced the curtains. The temple rumbled. I felt a strong wind and then, only Ishme’s voice, growing dimmer and dimmer, roaring, “By Yog-Saduk, the Keeper of the Gates, and Aniburu, the Fearsome Planet, I order you to help me!”

  A silence ensued and I started weeping uncontrollably. I couldn’t imagine what had happened behind the curtains. Then my Mistress appeared, bloody and with tears in her eyes, and lowly whispered, “A fissure cracked through space. I saw the cavernous void. Ishme is no more. It has taken him.” Then she collapsed.

  My chronicle ends here and, even though there is more I could say, with Ishme’s passing, the story is finished. My Mistress was eventually restored to her temple in Ur and, at long last, she joined Inanna and the Gods in Heaven. When she changed and her eyes became like spindles of flaming fires, and her form in expanse as huge as gigantic cedar trees, I heard her voice filling earth and sky, saying, “Do not fear, Smenkhkare. If there is fear, it’s only in you. I’ll go and look for Ishme and if he still lives, I’ll come and tell you – but the spaces beyond are much vaster than I had imagined.”

  Once she left, I never saw her again. By my reckoning, that was over seven hundred years ago.

  Whenever I tell my story, men call me mad and a liar, saying no man from Kemet on the Nile can serve in a foreign land, but they don’t know that I wasn’t always known as ‘Smenkhkare’, for I’ve had many different names and sometimes, I confuse them. For I know now more of my mystery. Every one hundred years, I must go to steamy swamps and shed my skin. I make strange, sibilant sounds and, once the process is finished, I emerge a new creature.

  I remember in dreams the ancient Lady once saying, “We are all a part of it.” I’ve come to believe I am more so. The mystery of my beginnings I still search out, though I’ve partly convinced myself that I am one of the unwilling eyes of the Seeder from the Stars.

  I’ve left Crete and, after centuries of other lives, I’m finally returning to the Land of Two Rivers. Sumer and Akkad are dust and gone, and I travel as a merchant to Babylon. I’ll bury this papyrus scroll. If, in the aeons to come, I don’t forget, I’ll dig it up again when the time is right and remember.

  I’ll remember Ishme, poor Ishme, and the God-Woman, and what mysteries happened, what mysteries I lived and what mysteries lay behind the forbidden curtains. What really happened? I believe only two on earth have ever known – and one is dead.

  Julio Toro San Martin lives and was raised in Toronto, Canada, but was born in Chile. His only other short story published to date was in Innsmouth Free Press Issue #5. He hopes, barring his slow writing, to eventually write (and get published) in every conceivable short story genre and subgenre before embarking on writing a novel ... or maybe not. Maybe he’ll write a play instead.

  The author speaks: Reading about the Sumerians and Akkadians in the “cradle of civilization”, I became interested in their idea of order, or the mes, and how, if these things fell apart, for them I imagined it implied there would be chaos. What can be more Lovecraftian than that? And Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon the Great and one of the first writers (if not the first) known by name, can there be anything for a writer more interesting than her as a subject for a story?

  Lovecraft’s short story “The Other Gods” was one of his first stories I ever read. I wrote my story as a sort of companion piece to it, since, much as I’ve been able to tell, as an influence on other writers, it lies pretty much like the wastes of Kadath, cold and alone. I didn’t strive for 100 percent consistency between the two, though, and also, Enheduanna, beloved of Earth’s Gods, is more fortunate in her story than Barzai the Wise is in his. Another influence may be a certain story by Clark Ashton Smith, which may contain a hint as to who or what The Seeder from the Stars really is. But maybe not. And perhaps Smenkhkare is the same as that mysterious pharaoh from Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty. But maybe not. I wrote this story in a cloud of agnosticism and unreliability. Borges was also an influence.

  DEUS EX MACHINA

  Nathaniel Katz

  Every religion, no matter how supposedly beneficent, has exclusion at its heart. Did you think Dionysus an exception? Are you that naive, brothers? Every one of our secret society was an outcast of Dionysus. We were not wanted by your gods, but we refused to be playthings, compliantly knocked aside at our masters’ whims.

  Don’t bother trying to apportion individual measures of guilt. All the members did their part. We all read and critiqued the script; we all helped compose the rituals and invocations. We all disseminated those occult texts so frowned upon by your j ealous gods. We were roles, instruments, nothing more. The Playwright wrote our drama, wrote what became your Tragedy. The Merchant funded us. The –

  Me? You want to know who I was? I was the Actor. But you knew that, already.

  We were one of the last in the festival, that celebration of accursed Dionysus, and we were well aware of the public’s expectations. In addition to being blasphemers, we were also talented men of the stage, you see, and we sat in that open-air theater and looked upon the others as the crowd whispered our names. Watched satyrs, summoned, prancing upon the platform. Saw those gods that we’d sworn against appear and descend to the stage, the mortal plain, from that great, behind-the-scenes machine, that Crane, towering so close to us.

  The clay eyes of the gods were terrible. To look upon them and plot such things ....

  But we persevered. We stared into their masked faces and we did not look away.

  The Traitor was not in attendance and you will not find her. She slipped through Dionysus’s clutching fingers, so what hope have you mortals? She used to be one of those maenad followers of Dionysus, a member of that most revered circle of that most sacred cult.

  Or did you think those followers of Dionysus, those maenads, willing? They are deceived and bound, fellow citizens! Open your eyes! You have allowed the gods to shape your perceptions, to shape your thoughts and your world. And now you try to claim that you follow them freely. How blinkered you are, my brothers. Those maenads, those raving ones, as you call them, are attached to Dionysus, pleasure and instinctual abandon their chains, even as their will is put to the sword by that god’s base nature.

  But enough of the Traitor. She escaped, she helped us, and that is all you will ever know of her. Torture me, if you must. Torture all of us. We can tell you no more because we know no more.

  The play that we produced would have been the crown of any other life. You leaned forward to see better; you watched, rapt, as we strode upon the stage. Our dialogue shaped your reality. Seduced from your sacrosanct paths, you were plunged into our drama.

  Do you know what I hate about the customs of our drama, fellow citizens, judging public? I hate the endings of our plays. We have managed to make life into art, to render our own souls upon the stage, and learn from our flaws and virtues. And then, time after time, we ruin it.

  I have wept at the creations of Euripides. And then, as his plays draw to a close, he deprives us of resolution. He turns away from the humanity that he has created and, instead of finding mortal solutions to mortal problems, invokes the divine.

  It is delusion; can’t you see that? The gods do not intervene! The gods do not care! The gods merely dissemble.

  Time after time, they appear on stage, force-feed us those damned lies, try to comfort us by their presence, and tie those messy strings of life into a pretty bow with which to adorn their wretched amorality.

  It disgusts me.

  When I descended to the stage, lowered by the Crane, did you think I was one of them? A god as all the other actors had so briefly become?

  I remember little of what followed: of striding forward, hands outstretched; of our Chorus’ suicide, of their sacrifice; of the words spoken as they drove those daggers into their hearts.

  I remember little of it, but the evidence is all around me in the toppled altars, the burned buildings, the slain priests.

 
We made a deal with an Entity. It has no name. We do not know what it is.

  We released a hunter among the flock.

  We killed your gods, fellow citizens. That Being that rode my flesh like the driver steers the carriage; that Being that strode to masked Dionysus watching our plays and drove a blade through his neck to see that all-too-mortal blood pour out; that Being was our prayers given physical shape, a god-killer born of invocation and drama on holy ground.

  It is not gone, that Being that we summoned. I woke up, as you all know, memory-less and dying in the midst of the carnage, but it did not go back to sleep. It has been released.

  It will not sleep again until the gods are dead, the world changed forever.

  We have liberated you, even if you are too faith-smitten to see it.

  Mortals – we give you the reigns to your world!

  Do with us what you will.

  Nathaniel Katz blogs about genre fiction at The Hat Rack (evilhat.blogspot.com). This is his first published work of fiction.

  The author speaks: In Ancient Greece, the gods were like regular people – just stronger, faster, smarter, braver, more beautiful, and long-lasting. During plays, performed as rituals during the Celebration of Dionysus, the gods were thought to actually walk the stage in the body of the actor. The actors-cum-deities would be mechanically lowered into the scene and resolve the characters’ dilemmas – the literal origins of the term ‘Deus ex Machina’. Which, for a Lovecraft-themed anthology, begs the question: what else might be coming down?

  IF ONLY TO TASTE HER AGAIN

  E. Catherine Tobler

  The winds were blowing low and remained warm when our five boats returned across the wine-dark waters of the Red Sea. It was late in the season – the winds should have begun to cool by then, for it was later than any of us planned, but the Queen of Punt had been exceptionally generous in her welcome of us. The days spent in her kingdom seemed longer than an age, the nights filled with wine, figs and the attention of slim, young boys. The Queen spared us no expense, so that we might return to Djeser-Djeseru with riches none expected; so that she might receive the grand favours of Hatshepsut, the King’s Great Wife, the Lady of the Two Lands.

  Our boats came into port with great fanfare. Though it was late into the night, Hatshepsut had roused a great portion of her court to bid us welcome home. Torches burned bright like stars to illuminate a path across the water for us and musicians sounded their rattles and bone clappers the nearer we drew. The oarsmen caught the rhythm and drew us closer to our homeland.

  As it would slowly become known, these attendants and musicians had lived in the port for some weeks now, rotating their shifts so that some would be prepared when we appeared. From Punt, there had been little reasonable way to send word when our return was delayed. Did Hatshepsut believe the Queen of Punt had eaten us? She was a beautifully round queen, to be certain, but we had not witnessed such behaviours during our stay with her.

  These attendants who welcomed us were weary-eyed. My own brother stood among the musicians and tucked his bone clapper away, to slip his hand around my arm and help me from the boat. The land seemed to rock under my feet, even with his support. He was tall, my brother; I would always remember him as such, even when the horror took him.

  He made only one comment as to our late return, but there was no reproach in his low voice. Perhaps there was concern, but I said nothing of it, only nodding as the men I had traveled with these long weeks began to unload the cargo from the ships. Five boats, each packed to brimming with boxes of stone and baskets of reed; tall trees of myrrh and frankincense with their roots bound and kept wet during our journey, so that we might plant them for the Lady of the Two Lands. Lapis and silver, panther skins and elephant tusks. Beautiful lengths of cassia were tied in fat bundles; soon, the cassia would perfume the halls of the court, wending its way into my own rooms.

  Hatshepsut welcomed us at the palace, when, at last, we had made our long way there. She stood at the end of the long stairs which led to the temple. I could see only pride in her stance, the still-warm wind that carried us home now caressing the Queen’s fine linen gown. Her dark hair was tightly wrapped, gleaming with oils. When she drew me into her arms, to whisper a welcome into my ear, I could smell these oils. Warmed by her body, they smelled of lotus and olive. I pressed my own lips against her cheek, tasting a trace of those oils. They tasted of home.

  The world would speak of this journey and triumphant return for lifetimes to come, she told me, as the offerings were carried up the terraced walkways and situated so that Hatshepsut might explore each at her leisure. She stepped from my side to do just that, opening one reed basket to trail her hands through the grain inside. There came then a low whisper – perhaps from the grain as it slipped through her fingers – but later, I would have cause to doubt that. She opened the boxes and baskets at random, the air seeming to warm around us as she did. A shiver still skated over my skin, and I felt strangely sick, as Hatshepsut kneeled before a box wrought from gold and opened its chained lid.

  The scent of myrrh lifted into the warm air, the box packed with gleaming globules of incense. It was perhaps the fatigue that gnawed at me; it was the length of the journey and the stresses encountered therein. These things combined to assault me then, to make my vision darken and fade. There was that low whisper, again – Grain through the Pharaoh’s fingers, I told myself – but that sound rolled across my shoulders, down my spine, and then reached for Hatshepsut.

  Perhaps she felt nothing, for Hatshepsut moved away without comment. It was easy to tell myself then that I was exhausted and fully believe it. Yet, I stayed by my Pharaoh’s side as she moved down the line of baskets, as she reached a hand up to stroke a low-hanging branch of myrrh on one of the many trees. She began calling out then, orders to her men to see the trees planted in straight lines along the colonnades, by the pools of water. It was my brother who came then, drawing his hand around my arm to pull me gently away. He walked us back toward that golden box and, though I tried to pull myself up short, I was too tired.

  Beside that damnable box we stood. Too long, too long, my brother spoke of things that felt inconsequential when compared to the box at our feet. The box seemed to radiate a heat, a presence, a something which reached for me again and teased the hair at the nape of my neck. It was unholy and dark, this thing, and could my brother not feel it? He laughed low as he spoke of events that had transpired in my absence. I cared for none of them, wanted only to get away from the box.

  When I could break free, it seemed too late. I felt somehow dirty and hopeless, my throat closed tightly. Nausea wrapped itself around my belly, sinking claws into my hips. I fairly ran for my rooms, brushing past concerned friends. Water, I wanted water and cried that everyone stay away, leave me be, give me only silence! Yet, once within my rooms, I found no sanctuary there. The walls seemed largely foreign, the floor uneven, and the fire sparked when I walked too near its warmth. I clawed at the linen which seemed keen on strangling me. Finally, bare of its treachery, I lunged for the pool of water at the room’s far end. It looked nothing like water, then – it looked like liquid galena, black and thick, and I sank into it, onto my knees, wholly under the cool embrace.

  There, I somehow slept.

  In my slumber, the warm stroke of brush and fingers seemed to weave a complex lattice around my body. Strands of light and vein wrapped me and held me down. Small, strong hands pressed me into the tile at the bottom of the pool, but it didn’t occur to me to struggle against these restraints. Let me come through you, a voice seemed to say. This voice sounded like everyone I had ever loved, something dark and terrible, with a weight I could not fathom.

  There was a sense of emptiness when I woke at the edge of the pool, hours later. The fire had burned to embers, the sky full-dark beyond the balcony. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling, at its interlocking patterns of lotus and stars, and breathed. The fatigue of the journey seemed to have left me and so, too, the st
range sensation I’d had upon seeing that golden box.

  The rooms were heavy with the scent of myrrh, which made me vaguely nauseated until, at last, I regained my feet and stood. I found fresh clothing, the cool linen a comfort over my skin, and painted my eyes with the darkest galena before I left my rooms. The halls were quiet yet, but I felt assured in my path. When I thought of the night before, there were strange absences in my memories, but I brushed these aside and focused instead on the tall form of my brother as he lay in his bed, breathing low like the warm wind outside.

  Warm wind, warm water and the incessant whisper of grain through fingers. I reached for my brother with arms that seemed no longer like my own. My fingers wriggled and elongated, curled around his arm and his throat until the tapered ends vanished into his ebony hair. He was sweet – I could taste him through my fingers – sweet like roasted figs and dripping mango, and some buried part of me drank its fill, until this sweetness burst apart and the shell of my brother shattered. Terrible fingers pasted him back together, blackened tongue sealing the seams until one could never tell what horror lurked within.

  Amber sunlight spilled into the Pharaoh’s rooms and over her shoulders by the time my brother approached her side. He had spent the morning making the brightest music for her, while she sorted through the gems and other stones the Queen of Punt had sent. She found great pleasure in everything that glittered with a hint of blue. She wanted to polish every bit of lapis and cover her body in a coat of it.

  How beautiful she would look, my brother told her, which drew her darkening gaze. How dare he? The Pharaoh waved him off – foolish musician – but he came onward, bare feet silent against the floor. That old whisper tickled the back of my neck, ran down my arms and slithered against my belly the closer my brother came, though, when his hand befell the Pharaoh, the whisper fell silent. There seemed some strange fulfillment at only that touch.