That Is Not Dead

by Неизвестный

  I noticed then a singular figure crouching on a pile of rocks before the flames. I would have seen him at once if the dancers had not commanded my attention with their noisome antics. He sat in a place of honor, Lord of the Flame, and yet he was only a boy. The oddly shaped stones of his perch, I was now certain, were human skulls. The boy watched the dancers and waved his arms frantically, tongue exposed, eyes squinted in his tiny head. He leaped and capered upon the skull-throne like a hairless simian, his expression one of sheer idiocy. He could not have been more than nine years old.

  This boy-chief wore a strand of green stones about his scrawny neck. His forehead bulged above dim, unblinking eyes. His fingers were overlong and his feet were twisted inward so that he would have to use his arms to walk in an apelike manner. Yet he could leap and clap and howl with disturbing ease, and this he did while his people performed their grotesque ritual for him. From each of the boy-chief’s shoulder blades rose a curving bone spur, as if a set of bat-like wings might one day sprout there. These spurs extended the flesh of his back, yet like so many of his people, the skin looked drawn, tight, and ready to burst.

  I recognized the green stones about his neck. One such stone had captured the soul of Father Espinoza and led him to this place.

  I screamed, loud enough to be heard among the wild cacophony of pipes and drums. I could not prevent it, for I had spotted Father Espinoza among the revelers, dancing naked with a crooked flute in his mouth. His flesh was newly pocked with ritual scarring, and the green stone hung about his neck on a leather thong. His beard and hair had been shaved completely, but I knew him. It was this shock of recognition that caused me to cry out. I might have invoked the holy name of Jesus, or it might have only been a wail of astonishment and pain. I do not remember this detail.

  A mass of bloodshot eyes and hideous faces turned toward me now. The chaos of drumming and fluting fell apart, diminishing until the only sound was the crackling of the great bonfire. Even the idiot boy-chief was silent. He too stared in my direction, his jutting chin and saurian eyes evoking a mockery of human arrogance.

  The transformed Espinoza spoke my name aloud, and I fainted.

  I awoke some hours later to the smell of roasting meat. My mind was an empty vessel, my memories temporarily stolen by some force that I cannot name. Some might call it the grace of God, but I no longer believe in such ideas.

  I lay on a pile of dirty hides inside one of the domed teepees. The desert heat was lessened by the shade of this squalid dwelling, yet still sweat drenched my body. My first recognition was my own nakedness. The savages had removed my threadbare robe, leaving me only a loincloth not much different from the traditional Quechan garb. A second realization came to me then, as the shame of undress quickened my pulse: I was not alone in the hut.

  The bald hunchback who had visited the mission sat over me, watching with his single watery eye. Uneven teeth protruded from his ruin of a mouth, and the puckered flesh of his empty eye socket had blossomed into a swollen mass. As I looked upon his nightmare visage, the memories of my ordeal came flooding back. Fear stole my breath away as my empty stomach growled. I had not eaten for several days. My lips were parched and inflamed from my time among the dunes, my face chapped and red. The hunchback handed me a gourd full of water.

  I took the vessel and drank its contents, sloshing the cool liquid down my throat. Never had I been so grateful for the simple gift of freshwater. I thanked Christ silently that these heathen grotesques were civilized enough to offer me this refreshment at least. Yet still I was afraid. The smell of the hunchback’s unwashed body filled the hut. I recalled the horrid ceremony and the idiot-child who was the chieftain of this unholy settlement.

  The hunchback spoke to me in crude Spanish. I was too hungry, scared, and exhausted to be surprised by his linguistic ability. “Why you come here?” His misshapen teeth and lack of any true lips further distorted the words, but somehow he formed them.

  I told him my name and station. “I came here to find Father Espinoza.”

  The hunchback nodded. “You find him.”

  “Yes.” I forced myself to sit upright. “Where is he? Where is Espinoza?”

  “We bring to you,” said the hunchback. “At feast. Tonight.”

  I realized that the only light in the teepee came from a small fire of twigs and grass. Outside the entry flap gleamed a sliver of starry sky. I had lain unconscious all day and well past dusk. Suddenly, I remembered the two mules. I had little doubt that the feast my caregiver spoke of would include the cooked flesh of those poor, undernourished beasts of burden. The Azothi had likely slaughtered them and taken the simple gifts that I had brought. At the moment, I was so hungry I did not even mind the thought of dining on tough, greasy mule flesh. I had done so twice before this, in the season of drought, when there was no other provender. The Arizona Territory is a cruel and unforgiving land, and missionaries are above all else survivors. They must endure the harshest of deprivations in the name of the church and its teachings. Such suffering, they say, is good for a man’s soul.

  “Come,” grunted the hunchback. He motioned me to follow him then led me out of the hut into the greater village. I walked unsteadily, ashamed of my near-naked body, yet the few shambling natives who moved between the domiciles paid little attention to me. The hunchback took me to the largest of all the domed teepees, where a stream of white smoke poured from the roof hole toward the blinking stars. Near the great well, the bonfire burned low, and the scent of the roasting mules lay heavy upon the night air.

  Inside the big dome—a reeking sweat lodge—some dozen male Azothi squatted in a ring about a dancing flame. Among their number were the other two who had visited the mission: the half-faced man and the one with the malformed rib cage. I will not describe in detail the various deformities of the other men in this council, for I have revealed too many of these horrors already. I trembled in the heat and stink of the lodge, afraid and repulsed yet determined. I asked the Lord to help me endure this audience. Even such wretches were worthy of the Word of Christ, who walked among the lepers and the damned. Perhaps these miserable oddities of existence needed salvation more than any other tribe I had yet encountered. I hoped Father Espinoza would attend the sweat council as well and explain his part in the strange behavior I had witnessed.

  They placed me in a position of honor, and the hunchback translated my words as I spoke to them of the Messiah and his message of peace for humanity. The monstrous tribesmen listened intently, silent as stone. At times, their eyes turned to regard one another in unspoken agreement or mutual wonderment. They listened as if they had heard all of this before. I realized then that neither Father Espinoza nor myself was the first missionary to visit these wretches.

  I told them the story of the Virgin Birth, the miracles of the Christ, his death and resurrection. I invited them to visit the Mission Puerto de Purísima Concepción to discover the glory of my god, which was also their god. They only need accept him into their lives to be transformed, to be filled with the joy of heaven and the blessings of the one true God.

  When I had finished my sermon, I gave a solemn prayer for their village, while they watched in detached curiosity. I raised my head, having finished the benediction, and was shocked by their reaction. They howled and beat at the earthen floor with their malformed hands. It took a moment for me to understand that they were laughing at my sermon and prayer. Some of them rolled on the floor, clutching distended bellies. Others wept as they guffawed and shook.

  Apparently, I had greatly entertained them with my religious storytelling.

  I endured the laughter with a stoic calm but eventually found myself laughing along with them. Their mirth was an infectious disease to which I had no resistance. The hilarity ended when a hideous crone brought into the lodge a large clay bowl full of steaming meat. She placed the meal at the center of the congregation and departed. The Azothi insisted that I have the first piece. I was ravenously hungry, so I did not refuse. The bone
s had been removed and the meat was greasy yet tender—not at all like the bitter, stringy meat of the mules I had eaten during the year of drought. Seeing my enjoyment, the Azothi council joined me in the meal. In no time at all, we had scraped the big bowl clean. The meat had been seasoned with some unidentifiable spice. Perhaps that was the reason for its succulent flavor, or perhaps it was simply my own state of extreme hunger. Even rancid fare will taste palatable to a starved man.

  As my hunchbacked translator chewed a final mouthful, his one eye turned to regard me. I noticed then that the entire council was observing me in the same curious way. Perhaps they wanted another story of Jesus and his miracles. I considered telling a parable.

  “Espinoza,” said the hunchback. Drool and grease dripped from his malformed mouth.

  “Father Espinoza?” Finally I would get to speak with the man I had come to rescue from this strange place. “Where is he?”

  The hunchback gestured to his unpleasant mouth. I failed to understand.

  His bony finger extended then toward my own lips.

  “Espinoza,” he said again.

  A congregation of glimmering eyes stared at me from nightmare faces.

  Panic rose in my bloated belly. A sharp pain lanced my gut. I yelped and ran from the sweat lodge into the crooked lanes of the village. Three huts away, I saw what I most dreaded to see in that moment: my two scrawny mules, unharmed and tethered to a post.

  It was not these beasts the Azothi had roasted.

  I fell into the sand, howling and vomiting, writhing and cursing, having entirely lost my senses. What a great and terrible sin I had committed without even knowing it. I might have seized a knife from a passing native and ended my own life then, so great was my anguish. But the Azothi council rushed from the sweat lodge and grabbed me by the arms. Their grip was incontestable. They hauled me toward the great black pit that I had taken for a well and forced me to stare down into the darkness of it. I could not see the bottom, nor could I smell any scent of water rising from its depths.

  Someone forced my head back, and the hunchback came forward with a smaller bowl. He lifted it over my mouth, which the others forced open, and poured a thick black potion down my throat. I tried to spit it back at them, but someone kicked me in the gut, forcing me to swallow the noxious fluid. I fell forward onto my belly, my head hanging over the very lip of the pit, and the Azothi moved away from me.

  Whatever drug they had mixed in the bowl took effect immediately. The living world receded from my perception. I stared into the yawning void of the pit, and that abyss swelled to become the cosmos entire. Stars gleamed and swirled in the dark gulf. I floated among them now, my frail body forgotten. I was nothing but a simple mote of awareness suspended in the Great Nothingness that surrounds and encloses our tiny world.

  I saw other worlds hanging in the depths of eternity, spinning like minute jewels about flaring alien suns. I understood the pit now. It represented that Great Nothingness that confines and sustains all of creation—the secret mysteries of the cosmos, the blasphemous truths hidden from a humanity that wraps itself in veils of ignorance and illusion. I saw the boiling depths of eternity and the swirling night of infinity, the awful immensity of existence itself, the ultimate secret of creation.

  And there, at the shuddering heart of all that is, I glimpsed the vast singularity of seething, ever-changing unflesh that churns without end at the nexus of all possible realities—the amorphous, bubbling god-thing that reigns supreme by virtue of its mindless and limitless power. The bloated and monstrous king of all Creation, the core of the rotting universe.

  The blind idiot-god, the daemon sultan whose ageless name I heard whispered and echoing in the corridors of supernal night.

  Azathoth.

  About this centrifugal mass of celestial chaos, I witnessed a writhing procession of devils and demons, piping eternally the song of creation and destruction, beating madly on drums that are the husks of shattered worlds, and I knew these terrible beings were the angels of Azathoth, who was the true and oblivious master of all conceivable worlds and times.

  Now I understood the horrid ceremony of the Azothi, who worshipped this One True God, and I knew the significance of the idiot-boy who was their chieftain, a living avatar of their insane deity. I saw yet another vision as I lay squirming at the edge of the pit: the Azothi themselves studying the patterns of stars in the desert sky, spilling the blood of women and children into the great pit, raising their hideous hands and faces toward the swollen moon—the mindless core of existence writhing and pulsing, squeezing bits of its limitless confusion into the mortal world.

  Azathoth, reaching across the threshold of the void, breaking open the Gates of Eternal Night, sending colossal tendrils forth in bottomless, questing hunger to invade and consume mankind, leaving the Azothi to watch over the corruption and decay of their dying world. The daemon sultan would save its faithful ones for last, and while mankind fell to chaos and red ruin, the grotesque children of Azathoth, they who opened the way for his infernal presence would rule as senseless tyrants and feast on the flesh of the innocent.

  They were the Pipers at the Gates of Eternal Night. They would fling open those gates when the stars were right, and Azathoth would pour forth upon the earth like the ancient flood.

  They would feed the world to their mad god and help him devour it.

  I regained my senses, lying next to the pit. The thrashing of my body had turned my face from the deep darkness toward the glittering stars. I looked upon the face of the night and I knew. This was the terrible season the Azothi had long awaited. These now were the patterns of constellations they held necessary to bring their mindless god into the world. First, they would drive the Spanish conquerors from the surrounding lands. Then their conquest of the world itself would begin.

  Someone pulled me to my feet. It was the imbecile child who was the chief of the tribe. He smiled at me, blinking, and put a green stone into my palm. It was the very same stone Father Espinoza had carried—the one that had bewitched him, drawn him here to be slaughtered and devoured by the Azothi. And myself.

  The child spoke to me then in perfect Spanish, and his deep voice was that of a man.

  “Rejoice, Father,” he said. “In thirteen days, the gates will open.”

  I shoved him, meaning only to push him away from me, but he tumbled backward into the black pit. He did not scream as he fell but plummeted silent as a stone into the void.

  I ran, clutching the green stone in my fist as if it were the last drop of my sanity.

  I raced howling into the dunes, and the Azothi did not care to stop me.

  How I escaped death among the dunes a second time, I do not know. Perhaps some charm of the Azothi’s unholy magic led me from that place. It could be that the green stone I clutched was enchanted with some protective spell or curse. Perhaps my survival was simple dumb luck. Yet some time later, I staggered, nearly dead, from the killing sands. My singed flesh was pealing, my tongue swollen from extreme thirst, and I had not slept for days on end. I remember only running through terrible heat, as if the entire world was burning about me. I ran with mindless, moronic glee, desperate to escape the land of the Azothi.

  I collapsed somewhere along the trail to the mission. Walking Ghost and his Quechan brothers found me there, though I do not remember it. They carried me back to the mission, where I awakened a day later, still half starved, my face obscure behind a madman’s tangled beard. Yet my body had been washed and dressed in a clean robe. For a moment, I thought the entire ordeal had been only a dream, and I had just awoken from it into the comfort of my own sleeping cell in the Mission Puerto de Purísima Concepción.

  Walking Ghost sat patiently at the side of my bed, and for a moment I saw the face of the hunchbacked Azothi. I started away from him, but he grabbed my arm and spoke gentle words.

  “Be calm, Father,” he said. “You know me. Look at my face. You know me.”

  Then I recognized him. I raised a hand a
nd found that my fist was still clenched. I opened it painfully to see the green stone lying in my dirty palm. The strange glyphs carved into its substance pained my eyes.

  “It is true,” I said.

  “What is true, Father?” Walking Ghost asked. His war paint was gone. His face was young and handsome. He wore the simple shirt of a Quechan farmer with breaches of soft leather. I stared at him but could not explain myself. So I listened, trembling, as Walking Ghost told me his story.

  “The magic of the Christ is strong,” said the warrior, smiling. “Stronger than the magic of the Maricopa. Thanks to your medicine, Father, we took back our stolen children. We killed many Maricopa warriors, yet we lost no men of our own. My daughter is safe now with my wife, and my brother’s son with his true father. So I must keep my promise. I will walk the warpath no more. I will lay down my knife and axe to plant the corn and squash. I will accept the Word of Christ, as will my children. We will live in peace here in the river valley.”

  “No,” I said. “No, you must not.” Walking Ghost looked at me with disbelief. “The gates will open soon! The Azothi are coming—they need sacrifices! Go and tell the fathers! We must fight! We must kill them, keep their god behind the stars! Thirteen days! Only thirteen days!”

  I must have been screaming, for the sound of my voice brought my brother priests running into the room. Waking Ghost regarded me with awe and horror. I strove to resist the hands of my brothers on my body—I remembered the grasping claws of the Azothi—yet I was too weak and famished. They overpowered me easily and persuaded Walking Ghost to leave me in peace.

  Then the fathers tied me to the bed, so insistent was I that they listen to me. I told them all that I had seen, but they did not understand. I warned them that the Azothi would come for them soon. How many days had passed since the idiot-boy had placed the green stone in my hand? I told them that the people of the river valley would be slaughtered, that everyone here would be sacrificed. Yet they only shook their heads and told me I was sick. They prayed for me, but they would not heed my words.