by Brian Lumley
“Thus, on the fourth day, instead of doing as bidden, I set about protecting myself as best I could from Cthulhu’s wrath, working a veritable frenzy of magicks to keep him from me…to no avail! In the middle of the fifth night, wearied nigh unto death by my thaumaturgical labours, I slept, and again Cthulhu came to me. And he came in great anger—even great anger!
“For he had broken down all of my sorcerous barriers, destroying all spells and protective runes, discovering me for a traitor to his cause. And as I slept he drew me up from my couch and led me through the labyrinth of my castle, even to the feet of those steps which climbed up to the topmost tower. He placed my feet upon those stone stairs and commanded me to climb, and when I would have fought him he applied monstrous pressures to my mind that numbed me and left me bereft of will. And so I climbed, slowly and like unto one of the risen dead, up to that high tower, where without pause I went out onto the balcony and threw myself down upon the needle rocks a thousand feet below…
“Thus was my body broken, Teh Atht, and thus Mylakhrion died.”
As he finished speaking I stepped closer to the swirling wall of mist where Mylakhrion stood, black-robed and enigmatic in mystery. He did not seem so tall now, no taller than I myself, and for all the power he had wielded in life he no longer awed me. Should I, Teh Atht, fear a ghost? Even the ghost of the world’s greatest sorcerer?
“Still you have not told me that which I most desire to know,” I accused.
“Ah, you grow impatient,” he answered. “Even as the smoke of the Zha-weed loses its potency and the waking world beckons to you, so your impatience grows. Very well, let me now repeat what Cthulhu told me of immortality:
“He told me that the only way a mere man, even the mightiest wizard among wizards, might perpetuate himself down all the ages was by means of reincarnation! But alas, such as my return would be it would not be complete; for I must needs inhabit another’s body, another’s mind, and unless I desired a weak body and mind I should certainly find resistance in the person of that as yet unborn other. In other words I must share that body, that mind! But surely, I reasoned, even partial immortality would be better than none at all. Would you not agree, descendant mine?
“Of course, I would want a body—or part of one—close in appearance to my own, and a mind to suit. Aye, and it must be a keen mind and curious of mysteries great and small: that of a sorcerer! And indeed it were better if my own blood should flow in the veins of—”
“Wait!” I then cried, searching the mist with suddenly fearful eyes, seeking to penetrate its greyness that I might gaze upon Mylakhrion’s unknown face. “I…I find your story most…disturbing…my ancestor, and—”
“—and yet you must surely hear it out, Teh Atht,” he interrupted, doom once more echoing in his voice. And as he spoke he moved flowingly forward until at last I could see the death-lights in his shadowy eyes. Closer still he came, saying:
“To ensure that this as yet unborn one would be all the things I desired of him, I set a covenant upon my resurrection in him. And this condition was that his curiosity and sorcerous skill must be such that he would first call me up from the Land of Shades ten times, and that only then would I make myself manifest in his person… And how many times have you called me up, Teh Atht?”
“Ten times—fiend!” I choked. And feeling the chill of subterranean pools flowing in my bones, I rushed upon him to seize his shoulders in palsied hands, staring into a face now visible as a reflection in the clear glass of a mirror. A mirror? Aye! For though the face was that of an old, old man—it was nonetheless my own!
And without more ado I fled, waking to a cold, cold morn atop the Mount of the Ancients, where my tethered yak watched me with worried eyes and snorted a nervous greeting…
• • •
But that was long ago and in my youth, and now I no longer fear Mylakhrion, though I did fear him greatly for many a year. For in the end I was stronger than him, aye, and he got but a small part of me. In return I got all of his magicks, the lore of a lifetime spent in the discovery of dark secrets.
All of this and immortality, too, of a sort; and yet even now Mylakhrion is not beaten. For surely I will carry something of him with me down the ages. Occasionally I smile at the thought and feel laughter rising in me like wind over the desert…but rarely. The laughter hardly sounds like mine at all and its echoes seem to linger o’erlong.
The Sister City
With this one we’re back to my first year as a writer, 1967, and one of the first half-dozen stories I sent to August Derleth at Arkham House. You know something, I’m still astonished that Derleth even gave me a shot. Not that my stories themselves were bad, but the way I presented them most definitely was. Try to picture it: sitting at his desk, Derleth opens the cardboard tube that I sent—surface mail, to save on postage—from Berlin. Inside he finds a story, or rather a scroll, that he has to nail to his desk top in order to read the damn thing! And it’s typed single-space, sometimes on both sides of the military, scribble-pad sized sheets! It’s a wonder he didn’t go out of his mind! But no, he was gathering stories for Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and this one was the right size and shape. “The Sister City” made it into TOTCM, since when it has seen many a reprint, not least as a chapter in my novel Beneath the Moors.
This manuscript attached as
“Annex ‘A’” to report number
M-Y-127/52, dated 7th August 1952.
Towards the end of the war, when our London home was bombed and both my parents were killed, I was hospitalised through my own injuries and forced to spend the better part of two years on my back. It was during this period of my youth—I was only seventeen when I left the hospital—that I formed, in the main, the enthusiasm which in later years developed into a craving for travel, adventure and knowledge of Earth’s elder antiquities. I had always had a wanderer’s nature but was so restricted during those two dreary years that when my chance for adventure eventually came I made up for wasted time by letting that nature hold full sway.
Not that those long, painful months were totally devoid of pleasures. Between operations, when my health would allow it, I read avidly in the hospital’s library, primarily to forget my bereavement, eventually to be carried along to those worlds of elder wonder created by Walter Scott in his enchanting Arabian Nights.
Apart from delighting me tremendously, the book helped to take my mind off the things I had heard said about me in the wards. It had been put about that I was different; allegedly the doctors had found something strange in my physical make-up. There were whispers about the peculiar qualities of my skin and the slightly extending horny cartilage at the base of my spine. There was talk about the fact that my fingers and toes were ever so slightly webbed and being, as I was, so totally devoid of hair, I became the recipient of many queer glances.
These things plus my name, Robert Krug, did nothing to increase my popularity at the hospital. In fact, at a time when Hitler was still occasionally devastating London with his bombs, a surname like Krug, with its implications of Germanic ancestry, was probably more a hindrance to friendship than all my other peculiarities put together.
With the end of the war I found myself rich; the only heir to my father’s wealth, and still not out of my teens. I had left Scott’s Jinns, Ghouls and Efreets far behind me but was returned to the same type of thrill I had known with the Arabian Nights by the popular publication of Lloyd’s Excavations on Sumerian Sites. In the main it was that book which was responsible for the subsequent awe in which I ever held those magical words “Lost Cities”.
In the months that followed, indeed through all my remaining—formative—years, Lloyd’s work remained a landmark, followed as it was by many more volumes in a like vein. I read avidly of Layard’s Nineveh and Babylon and Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia. I dwelled long over such works as Budge’s Rise and Progress of Assyriology and Burckhardt’s Travels in Syria and the Holy Land.
Nor were the fabled
lands of Mesopotamia the only places of interest to me. Fictional Shangri-La and Ephiroth ranked equally beside the reality of Mycenæ, Knossos, Palmyra and Thebes. I read excitedly of Atlantis and Chichén-Itzá; never bothering to separate fact from fancy, and dreamed equally longingly of the Palace of Minos in Crete and Unknown Kadath in the Colde Waste.
What I read of Sir Amery Wendy-Smith’s African expedition in search of dead G’harne confirmed my belief that certain myths and legends are not far removed from historical fact. If no less a person than that eminent antiquarian and archaeologist had equipped an expedition to search for a jungle city considered by most reputable authorities to be purely mythological… Why! His failure meant nothing compared with the fact that he had tried…
While others, before my time, had ridiculed the broken figure of the demented explorer who returned alone from the jungles of the Dark Continent I tended to emulate his deranged fancies—as his theories have been considered—re-examining the evidence for Chyria and G’harne and delving ever deeper into the fragmentary antiquities of legendary cities and lands with such unlikely names as R’lyeh, Ephiroth, Mnar and Hyperborea.
As the years passed my body healed completely and I grew from a fascinated youth into a dedicated man. Not that I ever guessed what drove me to explore the ill-lit passages of history and fantasy. I only knew that there was something fascinating for me in the re-discovery of those ancient worlds of dream and legend.
Before I began those far-flung travels which were destined to occupy me on and off for four years I bought a house in Marske, at the very edge of the Yorkshire moors. This was the region in which I had spent my childhood and there had always been about the brooding moors a strong feeling of affinity which was hard for me to define. I felt closer to home there somehow—and infinitely closer to the beckoning past. It was with a genuine reluctance that I left my moors but the inexplicable lure of distant places and foreign names called me away, across the seas.
First I visited these lands that were within easy reach, ignoring the places of dreams and fancies but promising myself that later—later!!
Egypt, with all its mystery! Djoser’s step-pyramid at Saggara, Imhotep’s, Masterpiece; the ancient mastabas, tombs of centuries-dead kings; the inscrutably smiling sphinx; the Sneferu pyramid at Meidum and those of Chephren and Cheops at Giza; the mummies, the brooding Gods….
Yet in spite of all its wonder Egypt could not hold me for long. The sand and heat were damaging to my skin which tanned quickly and roughened almost overnight.
Crete, the Nymph of the beautiful Mediterranean…Theseus and the Minotaur; the Palace of Minos at Knossos…. All wonderful—but that which I sought was not there.
Salamis and Cyprus, with all their ruins of ancient civilizations, each held me but a month or so. Yet it was in Cyprus that I learned of yet another personal peculiarity—my queer abilities in water…
I became friendly with a party of divers at Famagusta. Daily they were diving for amphorae and other relics of the past offshore from the ruins at Salonica on the south-east coast. At first the fact that I could remain beneath the water three times as long as the best of them, and swim further without the aid of fins or snorkel, was only a source of amazement to my friends; but after a few days I noticed that they were having less and less to do with me. They did not care for the hairlessness of my body or the webbing, which seemed to have lengthened, between my toes and fingers. They did not like the bump low at the rear of my bathing-costume or the way I could converse with them in their own tongue when I had never studied Greek in my life.
It was time to move on. My travels took me all over the world and I became an authority on those dead civilisations which were my one joy in life. Then, in Phetri, I heard of the Nameless City.
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the Nameless City, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his inexplicable couplet:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
My Arab guides thought I, too, was mad when I ignored their warnings and continued in search of that city of Devils. Their fleet-footed camels took them off in more than necessary haste for they had noticed my skin’s scaly strangeness and certain other unspoken things which made them uneasy in my presence. Also, they had been nonplussed, as I had been myself, at the strange fluency with which I used their tongue.
Of what I saw and did in Kara-Shehr I will not write. It must suffice to say that I learned of things which struck chords in my subconscious; things which sent me off again on my travels to seek Sarnath the Doomed in what was once the land of Mnar…
No man knows the whereabouts of Sarnath and it is better that this remains so. Of my travels in search of the place and the difficulties which I encountered at every phase of my journey I will therefore recount nothing. Yet my discovery of the slime-sunken city, and of the incredibly aged ruins of nearby Ib, were major links forged in the lengthening chain of knowledge which was slowly bridging the awesome gap between this world and my ultimate destination. And I, bewildered, did not even know where or what that destination was.
For three weeks I wandered the slimy shores of the still lake which hides Sarnath and at the end of that time, driven by a fearful compulsion, I once again used those unnatural aquatic powers of mine and began exploring beneath the surface of that hideous morass.
That night I slept with a small green figurine, rescued from the sunken ruins, pressed to my bosom. In my dreams I saw my mother and father—but dimly, as if through a mist—and they beckoned to me…
The nest day I went again to stand in the centuried ruins of Ib and as I was making ready to leave I saw the inscribed stone which gave me my first real clue. The wonder is that I could read what was written on that weathered, aeon-old pillar; for it was written in a curious cuneiform older even than the inscriptions on Geph’s broken columns, and it had been pitted by the ravages of time.
It told nothing of the beings who once lived in Ib, or anything of the long-dead inhabitants of Sarnath. It spoke only of the destruction which the men of Sarnath had brought to the beings of Ib—and of the resulting Doom that came to Sarnath. This doom was wrought by the Gods of the beings of Ib but of those Gods I could learn not a thing. I only knew that reading that stone and being in Ib had stirred long-hidden memories, perhaps even ancestral memories, in my mind. Again that feeling of closeness to home, that feeling I always felt so strongly on the moors in Yorkshire, flooded over me. Then, as I idly moved the rushes at the base of the pillar with my foot, yet more chiselled inscriptions appeared. I cleared away the slime and read on. There were only a few lines but those lines contained my clue:
“Ib is gone but the Gods live on. Across the world is the Sister City, hidden in the earth, in the barbarous lands of Zimmeria.
There The People flourish yet and there will The Gods ever be worshipped; even unto the coming of Cthulhu…”
Many months later in Cairo, I sought out a man steeped in elder lore, a widely acknowledged authority on forbidden antiquities and prehistoric lands and legends. This sage had never heard of Zimmeria but he did know of a land which had once had a name much similar. “And where did this Cimmeria lie?” I asked.
“Unfortunately,” my erudite adviser answered, consulting a chart, “most of Cimmeria now lies beneath the sea but originally it lay between Vanaheim and Nemedia in ancient Hyborea.”
“You say most of it is sunken?” I queried. “But what of the land which lies above the sea?” Perhaps it was the eagerness in my voice which caused him to glance at me the way he did. Again, perhaps it was my queer aspect; for the hot suns of many lands had hardened my hairless skin most peculiarly and a strong web now showed between my fingers.
“Why do you wish to know?” he asked. “What is it you are seeking?”
“Home,” I answered instinctively
, not knowing what prompted me to say it.
“Yes…” he said, studying me closely. “That might well be… You are an Englishman, are you not? May I enquire from which part?”
“From the North-East.” I said, reminded suddenly of my moors. “Why do you want to know?”
“My friend, you have searched in vain,” he smiled, “for Cimmeria, or that which remains of it, encompasses all of that North-Eastern part of England which is your home-land. Is it not ironic? In order to find your home you have left it…”
That night fate dealt me a card which I could not ignore. In the lobby of my hotel was a table devoted solely to the reading habits of the English residents. Upon it was a wide variety of books, paper-backs, newspapers and journals, ranging from The Reader’s Digest to The News of The World, and to pass a few hours in relative coolness I sat beneath a soothing fan with a glass of iced water and idly glanced through one of the newspapers. Abruptly, on turning a page, I came upon a picture and an article which, when I had scanned the thing through, caused me to book a seat on the next flight to London.
The picture was poorly reproduced but was still clear enough for me to see that it depicted a small, green figurine—the duplicate of that which I had salvaged from the ruins of Sarnath beneath the still pool…
The article, as best I can remember, read like this:
“Mr. Samuel Davies, of 17 Heddington Crescent, Radcar, found the beautiful relic of bygone ages pictured above in a stream whose only known source is the cliff-face at Sarby-on-the-Moors. The figurine is now in Radcar Museum, having been donated by Mr. Davies, and is being studied by the curator, Prof. Gordon Walmsley of Goole. So far Prof. Walmsley had been unable to throw any light on the figurine’s origin but the Wendy-Smith Test, a scientific means of checking the age of archaeological fragments, has shown it to be over ten thousand years old. The green figurine does not appear to have any connection with any of the better known civilisations of ancient England and is thought to be a find of rare importance. Unfortunately,
