by Brian Lumley
Khumnas felt the other’s unease reaching out to him. He fought the feeling down. It wouldn’t do to lose his nerve now – and it certainly wouldn’t do for Mhireni to lose his. The man was strong as an ox; without him the tablet could not be raised. ‘Yakob!’ he snapped, covering his own nervousness, ‘Yakob, what’s wrong with you? So there’s a storm brewing – so what? As for this tablet: its message is in code – and the code tells where the treasure is hidden!’
Khumnas had worked out that last part for himself. It was the only answer … wasn’t it? There must be a treasure of sorts, else Guigos had not gone to all this trouble. As for putting an end to the rotting old leper: it had seemed until a few moments ago that would no longer be necessary. Now, since Nature had not seen fit to take her course after all … they would kill him, at the right moment, and leave him down here for the ages to turn into dust.
Guigos glanced once again at his watch. 11:51 – almost time to read the second line. ‘Haul away,’ he commanded once again, his voice coarse with a sort of eager, barely controlled lust. The Iraqis strained; the great lever tilted a fraction; the tablet grated upward from its recess, revealing the second line. ‘Rest,’ Guigos rasped. And: ‘Listen – soon you will begin to see … strange things.’
Khumnas and Mhireni glanced at each other, frowned; the latter opened his flabby mouth to form a question but Guigos saw it coming and cut it off:
‘No questions, not now. Just listen. It is the air down here, which acts like a drug. It is that and it is the ancient protection of the place. Like the so-called “curses” on the tombs of the Egyptian kings: superstitious rubbish! But you may see things to frighten you – except you will not be afraid because you will know that these things are mere visions, hallucinations, ephemeral as mirages.’ He lied, but he had to lie else they would flee. The ‘freak storm’ had been one thing, but what lay ahead was far, far worse.
11:52, and now Guigos read the second line. Thunder rumbled again in the hoary caves as he pronounced those weird words, his fingers tracing them even as he read. And now it seemed that strength definitely flowed from the tablet into Guigos’s withered mummy’s body. He got to his knees, lifted his head and laughed bayingly – then choked as something was ejected like phlegm from his mouth. But it was not phlegm.
Guigos clawed at his throat, fell on his side, coughed up an apparently endless stream –
– Of frogs!
The Iraqis couldn’t know it but they were Egyptian frogs – the spotted frogs of the Nile, rana punctata – and they were not the product of hallucination but of black sorcery! Ash coloured, dotted with green spots, the things hopped and slithered everywhere, apparently fleeing Guigos’s yawning, rictus-contorted mouth in terrific haste. They formed a squamous column, a batrachian army that streamed past the staggered Iraqis and out of the lesser cave into the greater; and at last it was over. The sound of their massed flopping faded away.
Guigos lay sprawled upon the stone floor, coughing blood now which he wiped from his mouth with the sleeve of his robe. Weak as a kitten, he somehow raised himself up on one elbow. ‘Up!’ he croaked. ‘The next line. Fetch it up …’
Wide-eyed in flickering torch-light, gaping, the Iraqis were frozen in position at the lever, goose-flesh crawling on both of them. Finally Khumnas found his voice. ‘What by all that’s – ?’
‘Hallucination!’ cried Guigos at once. ‘A fever-dream. I warned you what would happen, didn’t I? It was worse for me than it was for you. Now come on, man – the treasure. We’re nearly there!’
‘Pull,’ Khumnas hoarsely ordered, prodding Mhireni in the ribs with a sharp elbow to startle him from his trance of horror. ‘Pull, Yakob.’
‘But – ’ Mhireni began to protest, his lower lip trembling.
‘It was a vision,’ Khumnas cut him short. ‘Think of it, of what you saw. It could only be a vision – you know it!’
Mhireni shook his head, said: ‘I have a feeling about this. I have a very bad feeling.’ But he joined Khumnas in straining at the lever. And again the bronze rod pivoted an inch or two, and a third line of runes rose up into sight.
Guigos grasped the upper six inches of protruding tablet and blew dust from the graven characters. He silently read, his yellow eyes blazing, then laughed like a madman.
‘What does it say?’ Khumnas was eager as Guigos himself. ‘Does it mention the treasure?’
‘The greatest treasure in all the world, aye!’ Guigos nodded his skull of a head. ‘But a good many visions, too, before the secret is revealed in full – and none of them pleasant. Now listen – and watch!’
He read the line again, out loud, and there was a power in his voice that gave the lie to the feeble body which housed it. Something had entered Guigos, was entering him even now. Something from the tablet and its hieroglyphs. He drew an awesome strength from them. They gave him renewed life, and they drove out the death in him. They drove it out in many forms.
As he came to the end of that third line of morbid runes, so Guigos collapsed again, drawing himself into his robe so that he almost disappeared under it. At the same time the inner cave was lit, however briefly, sporadically, with livid flashes of white light: lightning so bright and close that its light blazed in through the observation hole in the outer cave and penetrated even here. Then came the thunder, seeming to shake the very rock with its booming and sending down rivulets of centuried dust.
But while the thunder and lightning were stunning in themselves, there was that about Guigos which fixed the Iraqis’ eyes upon him alone. For beneath his robe the mummy writhed and wriggled, causing the entire hummock of cloth to twitch and jerk. It fluttered and billowed as if disturbed by myriad small movements. Then the folds of that garment parted and a cloud of leaping motes sprang away from the almost naked, frantic figure beneath. A cloud of lice!
Unlike the frogs, the lice did not pass Khumnas and Mhireni by. They settled on them, a biting, scratching, lousy itching cloud of them that set the two yelling and leaping all about the small cave, tearing at themselves in their panic and their passion. It lasted only a few moments before the lice departed, streaming out of the cave as one individual, but that was sufficient time to leave the terrified Iraqis bleeding from countless small bites. And this time it was Mhireni who recovered first.
‘Visions?’ he panted, choking the word out as he advanced menacingly upon Guigos. ‘Mirages? You lying old bastard! I don’t know what sort of trickery you’re up to, but that was no vision, no mirage.’ He held out his arms, dribbling scarlet on the dust. ‘This blood is mine – and it’s real!’
‘Treasure, Yakob Mhireni, treasure!’ crooned Guigos. ‘Think only of your wages, man. If you are a man … ?’
‘What?’ Mhireni scowled, baring his teeth and raising one great fist like a club.
‘No!’ cried Khumnas. ‘Don’t hit him. Let him get on with it. Can’t you see he’s crazy? But he’ll lead us to the treasure, sure enough.’
‘Huh!’ grunted Mhireni. ‘Crazy, him? Crazy like a fox. And treasure? I see no treasure in any of this.’
‘But what if there is?’ Khumnas pressed.
‘Aye,’ Guigos crooned. ‘What if there is?’ Then his voice hardened. ‘Enough of your threats, Yakob Mhireni. You’ve been well paid, and there’s more yet to come. Now get on with it.’
Mhireni gritted his teeth, stalked back to the lever bleeding and scratching himself, at flesh which already tormented with its small stings and fires. Guigos watched him go, checked the time, and his face grew livid with rage. He snarled something under his breath, and Khumnas thought he heard him say: ‘Three, I need three! Where’s that wily Greek got to?’
Out loud he rasped: ‘Come on, you two, come on! Up with it. It must be up by midnight.’
They hauled on the lever and it moved easier now, and line by line the tablet came up – that monstrous carved stone with its ten damnations. Ten of them in all, before this thing would be finished; and their number was significant. For w
hen the Lord had given the world the great boon of His ten commandments, Satan had answered with this …
Dimitrios Kastrouni had gone back for his watch. He did not want to lose it; it had been a gift from his father on his nineteenth birthday and formed his single connecting link with his past. When he had discovered its absence he’d remembered his wrist snagging on something as he crawled to the edge of the cliff. That was where the watch must be. And of course he’d found it there – and in the same moment found that time had narrowed down. Now he would get back only minutes before midnight, and then only if he hurried. Still, a minute or two could make no difference.
So Kastrouni had believed, but that was before the storm came up. Storm? It was the weirdest freak of a storm that the young Greek-Cypriot had ever seen – and in Larnaca on the east coast of Cyprus he’d seen some bad ones! But even they had kept themselves to their season; this one wasn’t seasonal at all.
The lightning seemed centred over Chorazin. Indeed, the entire storm had its centre there; where black clouds boiled like a slowly revolving wheel low overhead, in a sky grown dark in less than fifteen minutes. And yet there was no rain: just the brilliant white lightning and its accompanying peals of thunder. Not that the thunder bothered Kastrouni, for he’d experienced as bad before – or very nearly – but the lightning was different.
Up here over the Sea of Galilee Kastrouni was exposed: exposed to the lightning and by it. Every flash limned him against his surroundings indelibly and marked him as an intruder. He had come out alone to ensure (ostensibly) Guigos’s and the Iraqis’ security, but now in this storm he could have the opposite effect: if he was seen he could well attract attention. Which was why he was obliged to go circuitously, moving from hummock to crumbling wall to whatever broken ground he could find, always trying to give himself cover and at the same time attempting to gauge his movements so that they coincided with the utterly dark lapses between lightning flashes. And it was slowing him down.
With minutes left before the midnight hour, suddenly Kastrouni recognized his surroundings, saw the donkeys huddled together and trembling where lightning turned them into momentary spectres. And still no rain.
It was strange … very strange. It seemed to the Greek-Cypriot that the air was charged with a force akin to electrical energy: he could feel his skin creeping to its touch, except that this wasn’t dry like an electrical charge but slimy as the skin of a long-dead fish.
He found the slab where it stood open over the gaping dark entrance to the secret place, went quickly forward and began to descend the steps, then paused to light a candle. As he did so and while the flame on the wick sputtered up to cast its light ahead, so he heard something from far below. Kastrouni’s sharp ears fastened on those sounds; they froze his blood, froze his feet rigid to the steps. Eyes bugging, his hair prickling on the nape of his neck, he craned forward, listening.
There it was again: mad laughter welling up, almost but not quite drowning out … screams? What in the name of … ? Laughter, and screams, and … buzzing? The buzzing of –
Of countless flies!
They came up out of the darkness like a cloud, swarmed toward Kastrouni – flew round him so close he felt the wind of their wings, so massed together that they became a blue-black metallic sheen of motion – before passing him by and streaming up and out of the entrance into the night and the storm. Flies, yes: blowflies big as bees! Carrion flies, born in rotten meat or the running sores of living beasts!
Horror crawled on Kastrouni’s spine. Whatever was down there was not for him. He would not go down. He backed up the stone steps, ran to a crumbling wall and crouched there trembling, his eyes glued to the dark opening of the vault. And no sooner was Kastrouni out of the place than the screaming welled up once more, screams such as he’d never heard before and hoped never to hear again. They told of agony, those screams, of pain unendurable, of Death’s sure approach. But what sort of death?
Money could not keep Kastrouni here now. Neither money nor treasure nor any kind of promise. He was not especially superstitious, no, but neither was he a fool. Men were dying down there, in a way or ways unimaginably cruel. Guigos had to do with it, he knew, for it was the old man’s laughter he heard – or would have been his in his youth! Strength was in it, a hideous strength not born of earth but hell, and it welled up even louder than the now frenzied screams of the dying Iraqis.
And as the laughter and screams faded away – even as Kastrouni gathered up the reins of a donkey and numbly untied the beast to lead it away – so there came the whirring of many wings. Smoke boiled from the opening under the slab; no, not smoke but an almost solid black column that jetted up like oil from a well, except that oil has no volition. For this jet scattered, spread, whirled like a new cloud under the greater clouds in the sky, then fled into the night on a million wings.
Members of that aerial horde struck Kastrouni and the donkey where they crept away, and one flew full in the Greek-Cypriot’s face. He thought the thing was a flying cockroach and struck it down, but it felt big as a sparrow in his hand. Then, as lightning flashed again, he saw what the whirring cloud was made of: locusts!
First flies and now locusts? Kastrouni thought he must be nightmaring. What sort of Pandora’s box had the three opened down there? Treasure? More like the font of everything unclean! He made to mount his donkey … then dragged the beast quickly into the shadows cast by a mound of rubble, as a new sound pricked up his ears. It was a mewling, a moaning, a sobbing; it was all three sounds in one, and it grew louder as something came gibbering out of the depths and into the night. Mhireni!
Mhireni, the strong one, the scarface. But not Mhireni as Kastrouni had last seen him. No, for this was a madman, a man driven mad by fear! He clawed his way up from the darkness, jaws gaping, dribbling froth. His eyes were brown bulging marbles in a purple, bloodied face where his scar stood out like a jagged stripe of white paint. What he had seen, what had happened to him, was beyond imagining; but without the slightest doubt he was totally insane.
Out in the open air what little strength remained in his massive frame now fled him; he crumpled to the ground, lay sprawled there beside the raised slab, babbled and sobbed like a child as he hugged the earth – but only for a moment.
For in the next instant there came a voice – a monstrous voice like the belch of some titan frog – and the name it croaked was that of the fear-crazed Iraqi: ‘MHIRENI! YAKOB MHIRENI!’
The – voice – came from below, and it seemed to pick Mhireni up and stand him on his feet with its sheer force. Also, it was the voice of George Guigos, but amplified and intensified ten times over.
‘No!’ Mhireni babbled. ‘No, not me. Take him, take Khumnas, but not me!’
‘IHYA KHUMNAS IS NO MORE, YAKOB. YOU KNOW THAT. BUT HE WAS NOT ENOUGH. I NEED THREE. I NEED YOU, YAKOB!’
‘No!’ Mhireni cried again, frantically shaking his head. He tried to run, his feet pumping in a slow-motion parody of running. But he was exhausted, by terror, by loss of blood, whatever. His feet pumped and his arms flapped and his chest heaved, but he merely staggered. Watching, Kastrouni felt sick for the Iraqi – felt sicker yet a moment later as something else bulged into view up that demon shaft.
What it was exactly, Kastrouni could not say. Not then or ever. But it was nothing out of any sane or ordered universe. It was the blackly glistening stuff of nightmares!
It frothed, it lapped, it came up like inky jelly through the gap under the slab. And it was alive – and it laughed with George Guigos’s voice! Ropes of black jelly whipped but from it, knocking Mhireni’s lurching feet from under him. He went down screaming, and the stuff flopped over him like sentient black slime. He came upright with a blanket of the stuff clinging to him, his head and hands poking through. It tried to drag him down again. He tore at it, bounded against its elastic constriction again and again. But uselessly.
The stuff laughed. Even as it ate Mhireni alive, it laughed hideously.
Kastr
ouni could not, dare not move. He must stand and watch. He was ill; the earth and the boiling sky reeled about him; he saw but knew that what he saw could not be. And whatever else happened he knew that he must not scream or make a sound, and he knew that he must not faint. Not here, not now …
Still Mhireni bounded, but weakly now. And still the doughy ink-thing threw its ropes and flaps over him. And it burned, that stuff. Like acid, it sluiced away his flesh, flensing him where he strained with his every last ounce of strength. He was a thing of bone and raw flesh now, a black and red blob of a man that heaved this way and that and tossed and shuddered and gurgled as it went down. Mercifully went down, for Mhireni was no longer anything human. And at last there was only the amoeba-thing pulsating half-in, half-out of the vault under the slab.
‘MIDNIGHT!’ the voice came again, and Kastrouni knew that it talked to itself, in the habit of Guigos. ‘MUST HAVE A THIRD,’ the thing said.
It strained upright, took on a vaguely manlike shape – but huge, massive, lumpy and loathsome. The other three donkeys were rearing, kicking, braying their terror to wake the dead. The man-shaped black amoeba heard them, turned lumberingly in their direction.
‘MIDNIGHT – NOW!’ rumbled that awful voice.
It might well have been an invocation – a call to the dark gods of the storm – and it was at once answered. Lightning walked the land on jagged, brilliant, searing legs. Lightning with a mind of its own. It literally walked, coming out of the east, each steaming stab at the earth a pace in the direction of Chorazin, toward the nightmare thing which even now reached out impossibly elongating pseudopods toward the donkeys.
Kastrouni saw it all: bright as day in the white light of the stalking lightning bolts, it seared itself upon the balls of his eyes – and upon his mind forever.
Still more or less upright by the open vault, the man-amoeba stood or slumped, with great ropy arms twenty feet long reaching out to the screaming animals. Two of the donkeys broke flee and fled before those black, vibrating arms could reach them, but the third was tethered much too securely. It could only rear and kick and bray. And yet, easy victim that the poor creature was, the doughy pseudopods held off.
