Khai of Khem

by Brian Lumley

  For the time being, however, he might as well make himself comfortable. Wedging himself into position, Khai waited in darkness until he heard sounds echoing through the thin limestone wall from the chamber beyond. Then, gazing once again through his peephole, he was at last rewarded by the sight of Anulep leading three girls into the chamber from one of the passageways. The Pharaoh’s high priest looked once, pointedly and with narrowed eyes, directly at the spot where Khai’s own eyes stared back at him, and then he turned to the girls.

  To each of the three Anulep gave a taper which they lighted from the lamp atop its pedestal. Then, as they went about the hexagonal room lighting the flambeaux, the Vizier bade them wait and strode from the room into the second passageway. He returned a few moments later with six members of the pyramid’s Black Guard. The latter were dressed in leather sandals, red kilts and tall bronze helmets. On their wrists they wore wide golden bracelets, and they carried long, curving and wickedly sharp daggers in their black leather belts.

  As for the girls: they were dressed in flowing, virgin-white robes, their features almost completely hidden behind gauzy veils. It was an odd sight, Khai thought: these small, slender female figures, two Khemish girls and one Nubian—a girl of high birth, Anulep had told him, stolen from her homeland by Arabban slavers in a secret raid—surrounded by vast and nightmarish walls of massively lewd limestone; and the Pharaoh’s men: tall, black and powerfully muscled, their sharply filed teeth showing white behind thick, grinning lips. Frowning in the darkness of his hideaway, the boy felt the short hairs at the back of his neck rising in a sudden and nameless fear.

  II

  ENTER THE PHARAOH

  Now the girls were led to one of the walls, a guardsman at each shoulder, and there their arms were lifted up and their wrists locked in manacles above their heads. As this happened, Anulep, in a voice soft and oily, explained to the girls that they now symbolized total subjugation, offering themselves in abject bondage to Pharaoh, their Lord, Master, God, and Husband-Extraordinary. None of them seemed in the least concerned about being manacled in this fashion, and as Khai peered at their veiled faces he wondered what was going on in their minds.

  Were they terrified, he wondered, at this ceremony, where soon they would become the brides of Khasathut and enter into his harem? If so, they did not show it. Perhaps they had been made to inhale the hen’ay fumes, of which Khem’s high elite were currently enamored and which it was rumored the Pharaoh himself had introduced from lands beyond the islands of the Sea-Peoples. The hen’ay was a resin which when burned made sweet waking dreams for all who inhaled its heady smoke. The magicians of Khem had used opiates for as long as Khem had existed, but recently Pharaoh had added several refinements of his own.

  Of one thing Khai was certain: the maidens would all be beautiful. Pharaoh’s brides were always beautiful, his entire harem, which by now must be vast. Indeed, the pyramid must be a veritable beehive of queens. Khasathut had taken his first trio of wives seven years previously, at the onset of his reign, and thereafter at regular quarterly intervals. Employing his considerable knowledge of mathematics while he waited for the midnight hour (at which time, according to Anulep, the Pharaoh would make his appearance), Khai determined the current strength of the harem. He calculated that since this was the third quarter of the seventh year, Khasathut now had a total of eighty-one wives!

  Eighty-one wives? As far as Khai knew, no one had ever seen them and he wondered where they could all be. There were many rooms in the heart of the pyramid, no one knew better than he, but sufficient to house eighty-one wives? And who did their cooking? And where did they eat? For that matter, where did they bathe? The pyramid simply wasn’t equipped for it. And wouldn’t they expect a degree of privacy, as befitted the wives of a great ruler? Of course they would; but they would surely never find it in the pyramid. For all its size, the open spaces inside the vast monument were not unlimited. . . .

  As he was puzzling over the problem, Khai heard the bronze gong sounding from deep within the pyramid. It was a sepulchral sound in these stony confines, whose echoes seemed to linger ominously; but its effect upon Khasathut’s huge Nubian guardsmen was immediate. Before the echoes of that single note had died away, the great blacks had backed off from the manacled girls until they flanked the jeweled throne three to each side. There they stood rigidly to attention, filed teeth hidden now behind tight lips, while Anulep took up a position directly behind the throne. Tall man that he was, the high priest dwarfed the throne; but he, too, stood to attention while he waited for Pharaoh to enter.

  Now Khai was more puzzled than ever, for it would seem that this tiny bejeweled chair was fully intended to represent Khasathut’s royal seat. Why not a real, man-sized throne? Surely Pharaoh could never cram his massive frame into—

  But there Khai’s thoughts came to an abrupt, astonished end, for suddenly he saw something which could not possibly be. A figure had emerged from one of the passageways. A figure wearing Khasathut’s long-headed crown and clad in his royal, golden-yellow robes, which in turn were embroidered with his double-looped cross, the tai-ankh. To all intents and purposes, this then must be the Pharaoh himself . . . but how could it be? The man (was it truly a man? Khai wondered) was barely five feet tall, grotesque and limping, quite alien in its lop-sided, crippled-insect movements.

  The Pharaoh—or Pharaoh’s exotic pet? An ape, perhaps? But no, it was no ape. It was indeed . . . Khasathut!

  Khai knew it as soon as the creature spoke, recognizing the voice of this travesty immediately. Though less powerful than the magnified whoosh and gasping roar which Pharaoh’s subjects were used to, the voice was nevertheless his. Quickly recovering from his shock, without giving himself time to ponder the meaning of what he was seeing, Khai looked closer. He now desired to see—to know—everything.

  The features beneath the long crown were much the same as had been the old Pharaoh’s. Khai had been only seven years old when Thanop’et died, but he remembered the previous ruler’s face: the long jaw; small, round, piercing eyes—slit down the middle like a cat’s—with their thin, straight eyebrows; the sharply sloping forehead whose line was carried on by the long, backward sloping crown. All of these features were visible in Thanop’et’s son, Khasathut. There was something of his mother in him, too: her smallness, for one thing, and the paleness of her skin. . . .

  How old would Khasathut be? His father had been immensely old: one hundred and fifteen years, it was rumored. Since Khasathut had been born before the old man was forty, he, too, must now be well advanced in years. Yet his actions—something in his ways—reminded Khai of a child: a very old, very powerful and malignant child.

  There was nothing childlike about his awful voice, however; and now, as he moved forward with a swirling of his loose yellow robes across the stark and stony chamber, he commented on the girls. “Beautiful,” he said to each one in turn, peering at their eyes above their veils as he passed before them. “Beautiful. Charming. Oh, yes, Anulep—I am well pleased!” But while Khasathut’s comments were warm, his tone remained as cold as a deep, rock-cut tomb.

  “The Pharaoh’s pleasure is mine,” Anulep intoned, bowing from the waist until his forehead touched the back of the throne.

  Now the diminutive Pharaoh approached his throne—moving, Khai thought, almost like a Nile crab, sideways—and mounted the tiny steps to turn and seat himself facing the manacled girls. As he took his seat, Anulep straightened up, then bent momentarily to whisper something in Khasathut’s ear. Khasathut uttered a weirdly baying laugh. His and the Vizier’s eyes went back to the three girls.

  By this time, the Nubian girl, whose white-gowned figure was flanked by the two smaller, golden-skinned Khemish girls, was beginning to take an interest in things. The three had quite obviously been drugged, for so far they had simply leaned against the wall with their arms made fast over their heads. The one closest to Khai where he crouched in darkness had even appeared to fall asleep, her head hanging limply
against her arm.

  They were all awake now, however, and by their uncomfortable movements, Khai judged them to be feeling the strain of their awkward positions. The blood must have completely drained from their hands and arms by now, and the drug was beginning to wear off. The black girl was recovering much faster than her white sisters and her eyes were large as they stared about the room. Finally those brown eyes of hers found Khasathut’s where they stared back at her.

  Pharaoh licked his pale, thin lips and stood up. He seemed to tremble as he stepped down from his throne and sidled across the floor to where the girls were chained to the wall. He went to the Nubian girl and stared up at her, his octopus eyes unblinking and his tongue constantly licking at his lips. Staring down at him, the girl’s eyes seemed to reflect—disgust? terror?—as they focused on Pharaoh’s own yellowish orbs.

  “Beautiful,” Pharaoh said. Khai took his eyes quickly from Khasathut and the girls to peer for a moment at Anulep and the guardsmen. They had not moved, seemed frozen as they gazed across the room, their attention unwaveringly upon Khasathut and what he was doing. Something was going to happen, Khai knew, and he returned his eyes to the yellow-clad form of the God-king. . . .

  III

  THE GOD-MONSTER

  Khasathut had just reached up his left hand to remove the black girl’s veil; and now the terror could plainly be seen in her flaring nostrils, her drawn face, the film of moisture on her black brow. He stared at her a moment longer, and his tongue was like that of a snake. It flickered in and out of his mouth, licking back and forth ceaselessly over his lips. Pharaoh’s hand reached up again, fingers crooked, to catch at the neck of the girl’s gown.

  Watching, Khai held his breath. Clearly this was no ordinary ceremony . . . no ceremony at all but something terrible, a parody of whatever the boy had expected. And now the two girls flanking the Nubian bride were also watching, their faces turned inwards to follow Khasathut’s every motion. He looked from one to the other of them, the vertical slits of his eyes unblinking, then turned his attention back to the black girl. His hand tightened on the material of her dress close to the hollow of her throat, then, swift as a striking cobra tore downward.

  The fine linen ripped wide open as, with sudden frantic tearing motions, Pharaoh stripped the girl to her waist, pausing only when her gown hung in tatters. Now the sight of the half-naked girl seemed to incense Khasathut. He stepped back and stared at her for a long moment, the trembling of his body clearly visible through the folds of his yellow robe. The girl’s large breasts were heaving as she began to writhe, fighting to tear her wrists free from the manacles that held them. Sweat glistened on her breasts and naked belly.

  Again Khasathut uttered his baying laugh, more highly pitched and breathless than before and full of a weird excitement. He lifted his hand to his own neck and plucked out the bronze pin that held the folds of his royal robe in place. Freed, the robe fell about his feet, leaving him naked except for his crown, which he now removed and tossed down upon the floor. The Nubian girl at once ceased her struggling and her mouth fell open in sheer horror as she stared at the Pharaoh through bulging brown eyes.

  Peering through his peephole, Khai too gasped with shock at sight of Khasathut naked. Not because the mere thought was blasphemous, which it surely was, but because the God-king was far more monstrously deformed and alien than ever the boy might have guessed. Until now his only visible limb had been his left arm and hand, which had seemed normal enough. Beneath the yellow robe, however, things were hideously different.

  Indeed, the only thing that seemed normal about Khasathut was his penis. But even this, because it was the organ of a full-grown man and firmly erect, looked inordinately large and freakish on the shrivelled, twisted body of Pharaoh. His right arm was only half the size it should have been, with the elbow correctly placed but having a forearm no more than six inches long. The hand at the end of that freakish arm was a stump of webbed fingers that lay twisted across his breast.

  His legs, too, were deformed, the right being several inches longer than the left, which accounted for his crablike walk. His body, with skin so smooth and pink it was almost translucent, was completely hairless; and between his shoulder blades there showed the taut mound of a small hump.

  Worst of all, however, as if the list of loathsomeness were not already long enough, was Khasathut’s head. That incredibly long head—like the skull of some ancient, evil bird—which sloped backward and carried on the sloping line of the forehead for at least a further fifteen inches. No wonder he wore the great crown!

  In short, with all of his deformities, Pharaoh was a completely and utterly alien monster!

  And now the monster stood up straight as he could and leaned forward. His crippled, webbed right hand fell forward almost of its own accord and for a moment caressed the Nubian girl’s left breast, then caught and held her large, squarish nipple. Quick as thought, his good left hand, which still held the long bronze pin from his discarded robe, rose up to thrust the metal sliver lengthwise through the center of the girl’s nipple and into her breast. Only the ball of the pin, which instantly turned red and began to drip blood, protruded: a scarlet berry on a black velvet background. It seemed that time stood still and for a split second nothing further happened. Then—

  All three girls began to scream—screams of desperation, of all hope lost—and the black girl commenced a wildly agonized threshing, banging her head again and again on the solid wall behind her. And as their screams rang deafeningly loud in that hollow chamber of torture, so Khasathut clapped his good hand to his ear and bent his head until his right ear pressed against his shoulder. In this position, shutting out the sounds of their screaming, he staggered back across the stone floor and almost fell into his throne.

  “Now—now!” he said, motioning to his blacks, directing them to commence some prearranged play. The huge Negroes leapt forward at Pharaoh’s command, two of them clapping hands to the shrieking mouths of the Khemish girls where they flanked the now-unconscious Nubian. Khai, his eyes glued to the crack in the wall, would remember what next happened to his dying day. For the sight was such as to freeze him, so that however much he desired to look away he could not tear his eyes from that scene of absolute cruelty and horror.

  The wall behind the black girl’s head was now red with the blood that dripped from her fuzz of black hair. But for all that she was unconscious, still two of Khasathut’s blacks pinioned her body while a third held her jaws open. As for the fourth and last, he reached into her mouth, took his curved, thin-bladed dagger and sliced out her tongue even as Khai began silently to gag and choke on bile in his secret niche.

  By the time he had regained control of himself and once more pressed his watery eyes to the slot, all three of the girls were hanging unconscious from the wall, blood slopping from gaping jaws; and now the blacks tore away their red-spattered robes before turning to face Pharaoh.

  Khai, too, turned his horrified gaze upon Khasathut where he sat naked upon his jeweled throne. Anulep had gone down on his knees before him, was shuffling toward him with his forehead touching the floor, his hands behind his back. He kept his hands there, Khai knew, because no man’s hand might ever touch Pharaoh; for a mortal’s hand to touch him would be to defile him.

  And yet . . . could one possibly defile this monster? Khai doubted it.

  Finally, Anulep’s polished head rested on Khasathut’s knees, and there the high priest paused. Ignoring him for a moment, Pharaoh said to his blacks: “Get on with it. Wake them!”

  One of the massive guardsmen took out a small stone bottle from a pocket in his kilt. He unstoppered it and held it under the noses of the girls until they jerked their heads and regained consciousness. Only the Nubian girl failed to respond. Khai thought—he hoped—that she must already be dead. The other girls stirred weakly after their initial response, moving their heads from side to side and making awful gurgling noises. They continually spewed blood and bile.

  Ignorin
g for a moment the black girl, the guardsmen formed two teams, three men to each of the flanking girls. They took out their knives and began to skin their victims, peeling down wide strips of skin from their necks to their waists until only the girls’ faces and breasts stood out white against the welling red horror of their upper torsos. Mercifully, before the blacks were half finished, the girls were once more unconscious.

  Khai, too, had momentarily passed out, and only the feel of the cold and abrasive wall against his fevered brow woke him as he slumped down in cramped darkness. Weakly wiping his mouth free of sickness and blinking his eyes to rid them of stinging tears, he straightened himself up again until his eyes came level with the peephole. He no longer looked at the girls, however—not at those dangling travesties of raw meat which had been girls, no—but at Pharaoh. He looked with horror, with fear, with hatred!

  Boy that he was and quite helpless, nevertheless Khai vowed there and then that the Pharaoh, and Anulep—yes, and all of Pharaoh’s guardsmen, too—they would pay! Someday, somehow. They would pay for his family, for these poor tortured girls, for all Khem enslaved by this deformed creature that the people called a god! He looked, he glared his hatred out through the crack in the wall, a hatred so raw and red that his very vision was blurred with its passion.

  Dimly, he was aware of Anulep’s head moving slowly up and down between Pharaoh’s thighs, and of Khasathut’s left hand tapping out the time on the high priest’s head. As if from a million miles away, he heard Pharaoh’s panted command that the guardsmen should finish it, and in the very corner of his eye he saw knives flash, saw bellies open from crotches to rib cages as viscera poured out steaming upon the bloodied floor. He was aware of all of these things, but primarily he saw Khasathut’s face.