Tales of Alhazred

by Donald Tyson

  “The arrival of your camels caused quite a stir among the brothers,” he said in Greek with a smile. “We get few visitors here, and most of them are Christians.”

  “I hope we are not an inconvenience,” I said, sipping from my cup.

  “Not at all. You are a novelty. You may stay as long as you wish. But tell me, Abdul Alhazred, what brings you to Sinai?”

  From the side pocket of my dusty white thawb, I took a parchment and passed it to him.

  He unfolded it and studied it for a moment, then laughed. “I haven’t seen one of these in years. I thought they had all perished.”

  “Is it genuine?”

  He studied the parchment more closely and nodded. “That is my predecessor’s seal at the bottom. It was before my time, but I’m told he had a hundred of these penned and sent out to all corners of Christendom and the Caliphate. Where did you happen across this one?”

  “In Damascus. I keep a house in Damascus. My serving girl bought it from a traveling merchant in the marketplace.”

  “I hope she didn’t pay very much.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He shrugged with a smile. “Well, it’s a fool’s errand. When I say that, I cast no aspersion on you, of course.”

  “The parchment offers to pay the sum of one thousand pieces of silver to anyone who can locate the lost relic it mentions. Is the offer not genuine?”

  “Indeed it is genuine. We keep a store of silver coins set aside just for this purpose, as instructed by my late predecessor, Abbot Cyril Junius. But you should be aware that since this letter was sent out some twenty years ago, at least three dozen treasure seekers have tried and failed to find the relic.”

  “Even so, I wish to make the attempt. I have a natural gift for finding lost articles.”

  “By all means, you may try your hand … try your hand, that’s rather good, isn’t it?”

  He laughed at his own wit, and I forced a smile.

  “The parchment says little about the relic. I was hoping you could describe it more precisely.”

  “Well, it’s a hand, isn’t it? The severed left hand of Saint Nilus the Elder, who used to live in a cave near here with his son, Theodulus. That was before the followers of the Prophet Mohammed drove all the solitary Christian hermits out of the mountains.”

  I looked around the chamber. “I’m surprised this monastery wasn’t looted and swept away with them.”

  “Thank our strong, high walls for that, and the wisdom of your Prophet, who signed a decree that this monastery and its monks should never be molested.”

  “About the hand: how shall I know it when I find it?”

  He finished his wine and leaned over to set his empty cup on the table. “All we have is monastery folklore to guide us. My predecessor was a bit of a fanatic about the subject, but I know far less than he did. Let me think. It was said to be a left hand intact down to the middle of the forearm, mounted in a base of silver and ringed with seven rings of gold from the base up to the wrist. Each of the fingernails is set with a different gemstone. The hand is mummified, you see, and if it exists, is probably as hard as wood.”

  “The left hand? Are you sure?”

  “So the chronicle says. The rest of the relics of Saint Nilus were transferred to Constantinople under the order of Emperor Justin the Younger and placed in the Church of the Holy Apostles, but for some reason the left hand was overlooked. That was over a century ago.”

  He paused frowning and seemed to hesitate, undecided whether to go on.

  “Why would it be overlooked?” I asked to prompt him.

  “It’s a silly story, really. I don’t know if I should even tell it, especially not to a … non-Christian.”

  “It would be quite helpful to have as much information as is available, if I am to search for this relic.”

  “There is a story—a fable, if you will—that the left hand is cursed. It is said that Saint Nilus would bless with his right hand and curse with his left hand. It’s a silly story the younger monks sometimes tell each other at bedtime, to give themselves the shivers. I’m sure that such a holy monk as Nilus would never curse anyone.”

  “Yet it is possible that if the agents of the Emperor Justin heard this story, they may have deliberately left behind this relic.”

  “Or even destroyed it,” Climacus agreed. “Although, given the veneration heaped on relics during that period, it’s doubtful anyone would dare to do such a thing. Abbot Cyril became convinced that it was hidden somewhere in or near the monastery, and that its malefic influence was blighting our crops and sickening our livestock. He was an old man and his mind was not quite sound near the end of his years. He had these horrible nightmares that would cause him to wake up screaming, ‘The hand! The hand!’ Poor man.”

  I shook my head and lowered my gaze in mock sympathy. “But the offer is genuine and current?”

  “Yes, indeed. If you find the hand of Nilus, I will personally present you with a thousand pieces of silver that were minted at Constantinople. We must honor the contract sent forth across the world by Abbot Cyril.”

  I stood, and he rose from his chair as well.

  “If you will give us the freedom of the monastery and its grounds, my companions and I will begin our search immediately.”

  “You have it. You may go anywhere you like, with the exception of the private cells of the monks, who cannot be interrupted while at prayer.”

  “Naturally, we will strive to avoid any disruption in the routine of the brothers.”

  He put his hand on my arm. “There is one other thing. It’s foolish for me to even mention it, but I feel I must if you are to know all the folklore about the relic.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “When you do find the hand, don’t touch it. Nothing more than superstitious nonsense, I’m sure, but the stories say that the touch of the hand is death.”

  2.

  “The way I see it, we have three roads before us,” Altrus said.

  “What would those be?” I asked as I adjusted the wick of my brass oil lamp to give a larger flame.

  “One, we make a genuine effort to find this relic. Two, we substitute another mummified hand in its place.”

  “That won’t work,” I cut in. “The Abbot’s description was depressingly detailed.”

  “In any case, where would we get a mummified hand?” Martala asked from her seat atop one of the sepulchres. “It would need to be prepared in Memphis.”

  “I don’t think Abbot John meant that the hand of Nilus was mummified in a formal way, with natron and spices. I think he just meant dried out.”

  “Well, we may be able to find one of those here.”

  “But not one banded with gold and set on the fingernails with five different precious gemstones.”

  “And the third road,” Altrus said, annoyed that he had been interrupted, “is that we forget about this relic and simply steal the silver coins.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” I told him. “I’d rather not alienate yet another Christian monastery. If we cannot locate the hand of Nilus, we will steal the silver, but I intend to make an honest attempt to find the hand.”

  “It wasn’t our fault those monks died on the Mountain of Shadows,” Martala said. “They were trying to kill us. We had to defend ourselves.”

  “Indeed. But I’m hoping we can avoid killing any monks while we are at Sinai.”

  “We can try,” Altrus agreed. “I’m not promising anything.”

  “Why are we in this dark hole?” the girl asked.

  “This is how Christian monks bury their dead. They put them in little holes in the walls under their monasteries and churches. I presume they do it so that ghouls can’t tunnel through the ground to reach them.”

  “Wouldn’t the other treasure hunters have searched here first?”

  “Probably. That’s not why we’re here.”

  We were in a long hall lined on both sides with burial cavities that held pile
s of bones. The skulls of the dead had been arranged with a kind of macabre sense of humor to face outward, so that they seemed to be watching us from their holes. The center of the hall was lined with stone sepulchres.

  Holding the lamp at the level of my waist, I began to walk from one sepulchre to another, reading the Greek names cut into their sides.

  “What are you looking for?” Martala asked. She moved her legs aside as I bent to read the inscription of the stone box on which she sat.

  “The resting place of the previous abbot, Cyril Junius.”

  She didn’t ask why, but slid down and used the flame of my lamp to ignite her own. Going to the far end of the hall, she began to study the inscriptions.

  “I’d help, but I can’t read Greek,” Altrus said. “I learned how to speak a little of it while I was in Egypt, but not how to read it.”

  “It shouldn’t be hard to find him,” I murmured. “Where else could he be?”

  “Do you think the arm of Nilus is buried with him?”

  I didn’t bother answering. The inscriptions were crudely cut into the sides of the stone boxes and hard to decipher. I had to concentrate.

  “Here he is,” Martala called from the far end of the hall.

  I hurried over to her with Altrus trailing languidly behind me.

  “Help me open the lid,” I said, setting down my lamp.

  The stone lid was heavy but smooth on its bottom. It slid to the side when all three of us put the strength of our backs into the task.

  “Don’t push it off, turn it to the side so that it lies across the box. I want to be able to return the late abbot to his resting place when we are done with him, and leave no sign that he was ever disturbed.”

  Martala stared at me with delight.

  “You’re going to use the raising ritual of Dass, aren’t you?” she said.

  “That is the plan.”

  “Must I always be the one asking what is going on?” Altrus said.

  “As you know, Martala and I study necromancy.”

  “I’ve heard the screams from the cellar.”

  “Lately we’ve been working on a ritual to raise the dead in their flesh. That’s more difficult than just raising a spirit of the dead. The ritual comes from a land to the east they call India. It’s very powerful but precise. I mean to use it on Cyril here.”

  “Why Cyril?”

  I shrugged like a ghoul. “Who better to locate a relic of the dead than one of the dead? Abbot Cyril was obsessed with the hand of Nilus during his life. If any of the dead can find it, he will find it.”

  “How many times have you worked this ritual?”

  “This will be the first time.”

  “But we were close to success on two occasions,” the girl said with excitement. She loved necromancy with a passion that was almost disturbing, and of the two of us, she was the better necromancer.

  Altrus sighed and crossed his arms on his chest. “How long is this likely to take?”

  “Not long; a few hours. Why don’t you stand watch at the door to the stairwell, so that you can warn us if anyone approaches.”

  “No one is going to approach; the monks are all asleep,” he grumbled, but he went to do as I suggested.

  “Did you prepare the powder before we left Damascus?” Martala asked.

  “I have it here.” From my pocket I took a glass vial and held it up to the lamp light. It contained a few ounces of a yellow mixture.

  “The powder of Dass,” she said.

  “We only get one chance, so we must be accurate.”

  “I’m ready,” she said, and I knew she spoke the truth.

  From another pocket of my thawb I took a leather packet and unrolled it across the stone lid of the sepulchre. It was my traveling necromancy kit, where I kept those items I thought might be of use on my journeys away from Damascus. From one of its pouches I extracted a piece of white chalk and drew a circle on the stone floor around the abbot’s sepulchre with the girl and me standing inside it.

  “You remember your parts of the incantation?”

  “I have them memorized,” she said.

  “Good girl. Follow my direction.”

  We began to chant the long and uncommonly difficult incantation in the language of Dass’s distant homeland, all of it wholly incomprehensible to us. The unknown mage who had translated Dharam Dass’s Black Basilisk into Latin had rendered the incantation phonetically, and it was essential to pronounce the words exactly as he indicated with his little accent marks and vowel symbols. We had both memorized the text. It is almost impossible to work necromancy by reading from a book. The incantations have to be held in the memory. One tiny error and all our effort would be for nothing.

  At the critical moment I sprinkled the yellow powder over the corpse, taking care to cover it from the crown of its head to the toes of its feet. Martala and I took out our daggers simultaneously and cut ourselves on our forearms, then let our blood drip over the powder. I made sure to dribble a few drops into the parted lips of the abbot, who, considering he had lain there dead for over two decades, was in an excellent state of preservation.

  We completed the final part of the incantation, which was the string of barbarous names of the demons called upon to fulfill the ritual and open the gates of the underworld. The Christians say their good men go to heaven when they die, yet pagan necromancy works as well on Christians as it does on pagans or the followers of the Prophet.

  For a moment I was sure we had failed. Then the chest of the corpse heaved and drew in a noisy rush of air, and the eyelids flickered open. The eyes rolled in terror and the arms of the corpse twitched as though he were trapped in some evil nightmare.

  “Look at me,” I commanded in Greek.

  His penetrating eyes fixed on my face, and his fear became an awareness that slowly transformed into malice.

  “I am the master who called you forth from the grave. You will do my bidding for as long as you remain animate. Do you understand?”

  Reluctantly, the corpse nodded.

  “Then arise and stand forth.”

  The dried flesh and joints creaked and cracked as the dead abbot pushed himself from his sepulchre with the unnatural strength that is given to all the risen dead when they are fed on fresh blood. It would not last more than one night, unless renewed by the spilling of more blood.

  He stood swaying, his face gray and black and sunk down close to his bones, his eyes dried in their sockets but burning with a fever of bright awareness. In life he had been a big man. He was as tall as I but much broader in the shoulders.

  “Your task is a simple one,” I told him. “Take me to the hand of Nilus.”

  He slowly shook his head, straining to make his dried neck muscles work. I did not like this show of defiance. It was unusual in one of the dead.

  “You will do it. I am your master and I command you. In life you may not have known the location of the hand, but in death you surely know it.”

  He did not resist further, but turned and shuffled to the edge of the circle, where he stopped.

  “Break the circle,” I told Martala.

  She scuffed away a section of the chalk circle with the toe of her boot. The corpse shambled through the gap, arms partway extended to keep his balance.

  “Take us to the hand of Nilus,” I ordered.

  The dead thing turned in a circle as though questing through the darkness, then set off at a slow pace deeper into the catacombs.

  3.

  The extent of the passages and chambers beneath the monastery surprised me. I reflected that this walled compound had been here for centuries, giving the successive generations of monks ample time to dig. And who knew what was here before the monastery was built? It might be that some of these passages were older than the monastery itself.

  We followed the dead abbot deeper into the darkness, and eventually came upon a small room with an open shaft descending in the floor. The mouth of the shaft was no more than two cubits across. The corpse s
topped beside the opening and pointed downward.

  “The hand lies there?” I asked in Greek.

  The corpse nodded, his neck cracking audibly with the effort.

  I leaned over the hole and peered doubtfully into the darkness. Taking a coin from my purse, I dropped it and listened. Several seconds passed before I heard the plink of the coin falling into open water.

  “Is this a well?” Martala asked.

  “At one time, perhaps. It doesn’t look as though it has been used for a very long time.”

  “The water may be poisoned,” she said.

  “Something may have poisoned it.”

  Neither of us needed to speak; we each knew what the other was thinking.

  “We’ll need a rope to get down there,” she observed.

  “Go back and help Altrus find a rope. I’ll wait here with the abbot.”

  I was pacing back and forth with frustration when they finally returned with a thick coil of hemp rope.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “One of the bells won’t be ringing tomorrow,” Altrus said with a grin.

  We three looked at each other in silence.

  “I can’t go down. I need to stay here to control the abbot,” I said at last.

  “Well, I’m not going down into that poisonous hole,” the girl said emphatically.

  “We don’t know for certain it’s poison,” I pointed out.

  “I’ll go, since there are no other volunteers,” Altrus said.

  “No, I have a better plan. Tie the rope around the feet of the corpse.”

  They secured the end of the rope around the feet of the abbot, who stood unresisting, his eyes rolling back and forth in their sockets as though lost in a dream.

  “Pick him up and lower him head first into the shaft.”

  The abbot was surprisingly light for a man of his stature. I reflected that all the water in his body had evaporated and his blood had turned to dust. We slid him head first into the dark opening and began to lower him on the rope.

  “How deep does this go?” Altrus asked. “We’re running out of rope.”

  The tension on the rope eased.

  “I think he’s in the water,” I said.