by Brian Lumley
‘You’re saying that he is in fact a phoenix, just as Kastrouni supposed?’ said Trace.
‘That is to be poetic. Kastrouni was Greek and of course had poetry in him. Khumeni may well be the source of certain phoenix legends, but he is not, in fact, “a phoenix”. I repeat: he is the antichrist. But let me get on:
‘I was busy with a colleague on some ruins on the western shore of Galilee when Kastrouni stayed with my father in Zippori. I only used to see the stranger at night, when I’d come in off the desert in my American jeep. He was intense but courteous, and he always avoided talking about his business with “Old Joe” – by which my father was fondly known to me. Anyway, he stayed a fortnight, left certain items behind, finally went back I supposed to his Greek islands. I never saw the things he left – not then, anyway – but my father had mentioned that there were books, certain shards, and a smattering of conjectural writings ancient and modern …
‘But the upshot of his visit was this:
‘Prior to my father’s illness – a heart condition, gradually worsening – he, too, had been working various ruins on the shores of Galilee. We had sometimes worked together during the day; at night he would return to his studies and translations. Now, however, when by rights he should be resting, he took up again his wandering and excavating in the desert with renewed vigour – but on his own, utterly alone. I warned him that he would make himself ill; it made no jot of difference; he was grown as intense, even more so, than his recent visitor.
‘Our work being what it was, we had friends in all the lands around. Even in the worst political and international storms – short of actual war; you understand – we could normally gain access to archaeological sites of interest across the local borders. And now, I noticed, my father had renewed certain Jordanian and Syrian contacts. You will appreciate that at that time these were delicate dealings indeed: there had been a war, and others were brewing; Syrian boundaries came right down to the western shore of Galilee; the Jordanian boundary was of course the Jordan south of the lake. Do you see what my father was thinking of, what he was preparing for?’
Trace nodded. ‘He wanted to go and have a look at Chorazin, right?’
‘Of course! And finally, with the cooperation of our military, that is exactly what he did. I will explain in a moment …
‘As for myself:
‘I was young, fit, my work was hardly important in the grand warlike scheme of things – I was “drafted” into the Army. And when I could arrange it, I was part of the “special operations and scouting parties” which gave escort to my father on his trips across or around Galilee to the northern shores. But would he ever let me go into Chorazin with him? Would he actually let me enter that damned, doomed city of ruins? Never! No, the military must ring the town about, so that he could go and dig and do whatever he did there entirely alone.
‘And in a year his work killed him. It happened like this:
‘I was serving with a Defence Engineer unit down in Sederot east of the Gaza Strip. We were looking after the Beersheba – Qiryat Gat railway. Then I got news that my father was taken ill at home. I went to him and found him very sick indeed. He told me he was ready to die, that perhaps he was afraid of living! And over and over again before he died, as he rambled weakly about this and that, he would say to me: “He was right, Jonathan Ben – he was right!” And he would say: “Are you strong, son, are you strong?” I would answer, “Yes, I am very strong – what is it that I must do?” Then he would say: “Ah! If only I were young and strong again. Then I would do it – or try to do it, or assist in its doing – myself. But I’m old.”’
Gokowski leaned forward and bowed his head over the table at this point, and Trace waited a moment before gently probing: ‘Yes? What else?’
Gokowski looked up. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I loved him very much.’ He took a deep breath, continued:
‘In my father’s last moments he called me to him and whispered, “I’ve been down there, in the secret vault beneath Chorazin. Saul, the proof of it is there. The place is evil. Jesus knew it, perhaps He sensed it coming. And just as He was here, so now he is here! The antichrist walks amongst men. He has done so since the very hour when Jesus died in Golgotha!” And then he, too, died …’
Again Gokowski paused, and after a moment’s silence:
‘I served a second year and was then released to carry on my father’s work. It was the end of 1953 before I could complete his outstanding backlog of translations, which I considered a debt of honour since he’d been paid in advance. After that – then I was a free man, free to do whatever I wanted to do.
‘Meanwhile “Jonathan Ben Meiris”, Dimitrios Kastrouni, had written to me from Athens commiserating and saying he would try to come and see me soon. But his letter also carried a warning: if I was carrying on my father’s work, I would do well to leave alone any explorations or excavations in Chorazin. He had been mistaken to attempt to enlist my father’s aid in a certain venture; he had not realized how unwell was the old man; he feared that he may well have given “Old Joe” bad counsel. He would say no more but simply begged that I trust and be guided by him; finally, he strongly advised that I avoid all manner of contact with anyone calling himself George Guigos.
‘And within a six-month, what should happen but that a representative of that very creature came to see me! Except that I was not to know it, not then, for this hireling of his called him “Khumeni”, a rich Armenian who dealt in purloined and smuggled archaeological antiquities. As openly as that? Not quite. No, he did not simply approach me and say: “My master, George Khumeni, wishes you to dig for him in a certain place and send a certain article you will find there to a certain address, payment for which work will be very generous”, but in the space of less than one hour’s conversation, that was indeed the gist of his message.
‘And where was I to dig? Chorazin! And what was this thing I would find? It was one of two stone tablets graven with letters in a tongue defunct for thousands of years, the most ancient of all Hebraic languages.’
‘I know of them!’ said Trace, whose mind had been working overtime. ‘I read about them in one of the books Kastrouni gave to me. The book was Morgan Selby’s Journey’s & Discoveries in the Holy Land. Ab’s witch fostermother inscribed them, one to concentrate the forces of evil and the other to exorcise them.’
Gokowski leaned over the table and gripped his arm. ‘Do you still have this book?’
Trace looked glum. ‘In England,’ he said. For a moment Gokowski looked disappointed. Then:
‘It makes no difference. I know of Selby’s work – and of his blasphemies – and doubt if there’s much that I don’t already know. Anyway, you are correct. Now then, this Khumeni wished me to remove one of the Chorazin Tablets and dispatch it somewhere, then close up the place as before and never return there. Which tablet was he interested in, do you suppose?’
Trace thought about it for a second or so, said, ‘The text under the ascending node – so that he could summon Satan’s power, through Demogorgon, wherever he had the tablet!’
Gokowski shook his head. ‘I can follow your reasoning but you are not in possession of all the facts. Ab was born – spawned, littered – in Galilee. 347 years later his first rebirth took place there, and likewise each successive rebirth or renewal ever since. He is imbued with the powers of Satan and Demogorgon and can call upon them anywhere, at any time – as you have surely witnessed! But the tablet with the ascending node is all-powerful, all-evil, and as such it is the very instrument of his resurrection!’
‘He renews himself through the tablet,’ said Trace, ‘and the tablet must stay in Chorazin.’
‘Indeed! Now think: why has Chorazin never been excavated or more than cursorily explored? If we could check backwards through two thousands of years, I believe we would find that Khumeni – let us continue to call him that – has kept close watch on the place, obstructing all and any such exploration. Now especially, with modern war raging, an
d the threat of tanks in those high places over Galilee, and perhaps crashing through to certain caverns … it must have been a worrying time for Khumeni. Still, the tablet under the ascending node must stay there – but what of the other?’
‘The tablet of exorcism?’ Trace scratched his nose, shrugged. ‘What of it?’
‘Why, surely, if that should fall into the “wrong” hands what then? Could Khumeni really afford the chance exhumation of that sole, solitary means of his own defeat and destruction? Of course not. The vault had harboured it long enough. It must be taken out of there.’
Trace was puzzled. ‘So why didn’t he just go back there and get it?’
‘Because he may not touch it! It is abhorrent to him! Anathema! Some other must bring it up and deal with it. Someone with access to the place. Very well, you might reason, then why did he not simply supervise the work? Why let some outsider in on the vault’s secret? Oh? And how long do you think he intended I should survive after I had carried out his wishes?’
‘But what would he have done with the tablet anyway?’ Trace asked.
‘Destroyed it, of course. Crushed it, removed it – and its threat – forever.’
‘And you did,’ said Trace, nodding. ‘Not destroy it, no, but you did bring it up out of there. By which time you were studying the bits and pieces Kastrouni had left with your father, and beginning to piece it all together for yourself. You brought it up and you brought it here. You’ve appointed yourself its keeper; it is “the thing” you “watch over!”’
‘Yes and no,’ said Gokowski. ‘You go too fast and assume too much. First of all, I was not like you a thief. I was not a looter of tombs. No, I turned Khumeni’s offer down. And after that, as you have said, gradually I began to understand something of what Kastrouni had passed on to my father. But as the next four years went by, so too my fortunes changed – drastically!
‘First I took to drinking. I must have been, or certainly came close to being, an alcoholic. A woman of Jenin, a high-class whore, seemed to go out of her way to seduce me and keep me seduced. She literally robbed me, both of my senses and of my worldly goods. I was almost bereft by drink, besotted with this woman – bedevilled! Before, I had been a man of means; but by mid-1958 … it was as if a curse had descended on me. A black cloud of locusts of the spirit had settled on me, were devouring me. But then –
‘– Again word from Kastrouni. A large, rambling letter of many thousands of words, in fact. And this time he told me everything. What’s more, he’d been back to Cyprus by then and had met up with Guigos/Khumeni for the second time; and I, too, was told of what he believed he saw that night in the villa north of Larnaca! And what did he want me to do? Go down under Chorazin, set charges, blow the place back to hell!
‘Since those events in Cyprus he’d been busy. Khumeni might be stalking him, but so too was he stalking Khumeni. Certainly he had it in for him! He was determined, one way or the other, that the creature must be destroyed. Ah! But just like you, at first I thought Kastrouni must be raving. And anyway, what did I care for him and his crazy fancies? I was still under this cloud; my money was all used up; I was sinking fast. At which time – back came Khumeni’s man, and this time his offer was even better than before. My remuneration would be great; all my lost wealth would be restored; I could start life afresh.
‘Now then, before I say more, perhaps you are still wondering why Khumeni did not do his own spadework, as it were? I think I can explain:
‘On his last trip to Chorazin as Guigos in 1936, Khumeni had had big problems. Kastrouni was the cause of most of them, first of all when he failed to make himself - available? – and again when he got back to Haifa and worked once more, for a little while, for the then British administration. For then he had actually reported Guigos, had made a statement that he had seen Guigos kill two men – Khumnas and Mhireni – “somewhere” in the desert. He didn’t mention Chorazin because that was a place he’d already promised himself he never would go back to! But with the accusation of a double murder hanging over him, Guigos – or Khumeni, as he was to become – was now obliged to smuggle himself out of Palestine! When the administration was taken over by the new State of Israel under David Ben Gurion in 1948, so were all the records. And now ten years later they were still extant. Guigos/Khumeni was still wanted for questioning.
‘Anyway, for whatever reason, he would not go back himself, not then. But don’t believe for a moment that he didn’t try other alternatives besides me. There were raiding parties galore sneaking in over the Golan Heights in those days – and who to say that they were all terrorists, eh?
‘But once again, let me cut it short for you. As I’ve explained, I was desperate. I accepted Khumeni’s money in advance, used what little authority I had left to go to Chorazin, eventually found that terrible subterranean place and removed the tablet with the descending node. None of this was easy, but somehow I did it. I sealed the place up again, took the tablet home with me overnight in my jeep, did everything as I had been instructed. Yes, and in the morning I would take the stone to a certain house in Haifa, and that would be the end of that. Except –
‘– I had read what was written on the stone. And indeed it was an exorcism. In the most terrible words you can imagine, in a tongue so ancient that even I had difficulty with the translation, the pronunciation, that stone was the world’s ultimate solution to every evil thing! And not only that, it was the catalyst which finally purged me …
‘Charlie, I do not know if you are a believer. I cannot say if I was a believer – until that night. Anyway, I dreamed. And I was … visited! I saw … something! It was beautiful and it was awesome. It was gentle and it was powerful. It asked me if I had no fear for my soul, and I said I had. It asked me if I desired to be damned above all other men, that my name should rank only with that of Judas. And I said that I did not so desire it. And then it said to me, “When this man’s servant returns to you and asks why you have not done his bidding, ask him what is his master’s secret name. And when he asks of what you speak, tell him his master’s secret name. And tell him also that his master’s name is Legion!’
Trace nodded. ‘I see. So in the morning you didn’t go to Haifa with the stone after all.’
Gokowski looked surprised. ‘You believe me? About my dream?’
Trace held up his arms helplessly. ‘I just can’t see you lying, that’s all! What difference does it make? You didn’t do as you were instructed to do, and that’s what matters. So what came next?’
‘Four days went by,’ Gokowski continued, ‘and then Khumeni’s man returned, demanding the tablet. I asked him about Khumeni, asked him to tell me his master’s real name. He looked angry, even frightened, said he didn’t know what I was talking about. I told him his master was once called Guigos and he went pale. Then I said: “He’s had many names – indeed they are legion.” At which I thought he would faint.
‘He left at once and without the tablet; I waited for a little while and then I, too, left. I had already made arrangements for the sale of my house, settled my affairs, contacted friends in the USA. All of which I’d accomplished in the four days since my dream. That is the extent to which it had impressed me! And so I went to America to start life afresh. Alas –
‘– America wasn’t safe. Khumeni was well established there and had both political and Mafia links – which in America are not always especially disparate! I discovered this very quickly, literally had to leave almost everything and get out fast. But where to?
‘Well, my father and I had earlier done some work for the Rhodian Antiquarian Research Society whose headquarters is in Rhodes, and a number of the Greek friends I had made then were now in positions of some power – that is to say, politically well-placed – in the Dodecanese group. By routes deliberately mazy and tortuous, finally I came to Karpathos. The monastery required a great deal of work to raise it even to these spartan standards; but it did have the benefit of being remote and, as you have discovered for yoursel
f, very nearly inaccessible. I bought it for a song, hired a man – the father of these backward boys of mine, now dead, God bless him – and now … now I believe we’re up to date. I have been here for twenty-two years, but it is only in the last ten that Khumeni has discovered my whereabouts.’
Trace considered all he had heard, finally said, ‘I’m sorry if this sounds a bit blunt, but frankly it surprises me that you’re still alive! He almost got to you in America, you say – and today you again came within an ace – and so … ? I mean, how are you still alive? If we really are talking about the antichrist, where’s all this monstrous power of his?’
‘When first he traced me here,’ Gokowski answered, ‘he did indeed send an assassin. Then, too, I was lucky. My man found him first. Whoever he was, he left this world via the same route as the thin American. I feel no remorse: anyone in league with Khumeni dices with death, and worse, as a natural consequence. Anyway, an attempt had been made on my life; I knew now for a certainty that Khumeni had neither forgotten nor forgiven me; it was time to put into effect an early-conceived plan of mine.
‘Khumeni’s aim, of course, remained the same: to destroy the tablet of dissolution. I wrote to him, and – ’ He paused as Trace gave a snort.
‘You did what?’
Gokowski raised his yellow eyebrows. ‘Why not? I was in regular contact now with Kastrouni; both of us were aware of Khumeni’s American businesses, his various addresses; our intelligence in regards his doings had greatly increased over the years. So, as I say, I wrote to him. I pointed out that it would avail him not at all to kill me, indeed that it would cost him dearly. He, like yourself, mistakenly believed that I had the tablet here with me. I told him he erred, that in fact the stone was buried deep in a secret place, and that my executors – several of them, in various parts of the world – were fully instructed as to their reaction in the event of my death accidental or otherwise. Letters would at once be dispatched to all the world’s religious leaders, detailing the nature and the whereabouts of the stone, and more specifically Khumeni’s interest in it. Similarly, the location of the Chorazin vault would be declared; the area would soon be aswarm with all manner of men and digs; access to the place, for any projected use of it by Khumeni, would be quite impossible.’
