Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (47 page)

When he did not answer, Adon
shrugged and seemed to relax. He sank back into the chair.

“There is plenty of time for that
later, my boy,” he said. “Later, I will ask and you will answer. But now, for
old time’s sake, I will answer you. I know how unforthcoming everyone has been
with your questions. That must be frustrating. You will remember, in all our
years together, I never answered a question from you but with the truth.”

“The truth? What truth do you serve?”
the Rider hissed. “The
tzadikim
were
right. You poisoned my learning with your alternative paths to God. You tried
to corrupt me.”

“By the truth
you
serve, perhaps,” Adon said. “I never tried to corrupt you. I
led you down the path I knew to be true. You are a seeker, Rider. You were
turned from the Throne, I believe, because Metatron knew you would find what I
found, because you had an interrogative mind. You knew that the absolute,
unquestioning dogma of the Order was flawed. You saw the glory of the
hekhalots
and yet still you wondered
about the hand that built them. So did I, two thousand years before you were
born. So did I.”

The Rider tensed. His curiosity was
getting the better of him now. Adon knew it well. So many questions. And he
knew it was true, somehow, that Adon would answer everything he thought to ask.
Unlike Faustus. Unlike Kabede. Unlike the angel. Whether what he said was true
or not, the Rider couldn’t know. But he did want to know what Adon believed. He
wanted a reason for all his former teacher had done.

“You ascended to Heaven with Rabbi
Akiba.”

“Yes. I first heard mention of the
Old Ones in my studies of the
Olam-ha
Tohu.
”

That which preceded Creation. A
forbidden area of study.

“I learned of the gate to the
Olam-ha Tohu
which lay beneath the
Throne, and so I dedicated myself to the study of Merkabah, so that I might see
it. After years of work, I successfully navigated the upper reaches and the
hekhalots
, alongside Akiva ben Joseph,
Ben Azzai, and Ben Zoma.”

“When you descended upon the Throne…what
did you find?”

That damned smile slipped wider
across his face, and he leaned in once more. He had him, he believed. It was
all over his damned face. What could he possibly think he knew that would
entice the Rider?

“When we descended upon the Throne,
Rabbi Akiba was content to bask in God’s glory.”

God
,
the Rider noticed. Not HaShem. He no longer feared the Lord then.

“I looked upon
Belimah
beneath the Throne, into the
Olam ha-Tohu
. I did not understand what I saw at first. It was a
power, an intelligence above and beyond Heaven. A power greater than the God I
served. I declared what I saw to my fellows. Rabbi Akiba would not look, but
Ben Azzai and Ben Zoma did. Ben Zoma’s mind was blasted away, and the seraphim
swarmed over Ben Azzai and I with flails of fire. Ben Azzai was destroyed. To
escape them, I severed my tie to this world.”

“The root,” the Rider said. Not the
root of his faith, as Kabede had interpreted, though he had destroyed that as
well.

“The root,” Adon nodded. “That
silvery etheric tendril which connected me to Creation.”

The Rider had heard of such a thing,
but it was supposed to be imperceptible by all but the Angel of Death. It was
like the soul’s umbilical chord, which connected it both to the infinity of
Creation and to its physical form, that invisible lifeline of will, which a
Merkabah Rider followed instinctively back to his physical form. It was
supposed to extend from the crown of the head. He had heard of eastern yogic
masters who had supposedly learned to perceive it somehow.

“But how?” the Rider asked.

“I had suspected I would be punished
for seeking the
Belimah
. I made
preparations for escape. I taught myself to perceive the chord well before I
made the journey. It took many years of meditation and Oriental techniques. It
was a desperate measure, but I did not want to suffer the same fate as Ben Zoma
or Ben Azzai. I was nearly obliterated anyway. I plunged into the fiery fall,
down into Gehenna. But because I had never died, I was not bound to
Gehenna’s
torments, nor even its
boundaries. I found myself able to pass between the spheres of Creation, even
into the world of dreams, which borders all, even the
Olam ha-Tohu
. The demons and punishing angels could not perceive
me. I could not affect them either, so I explored that place. I learned things
there in its depths and more at its boundaries.”

“What things?” the Rider pressed. “From
who?”

“From one called Adam Belial.”

“Nyarlathotep.”

“Yes. You did meet him recently,
didn’t you? He alone could see me, and I him. Like two thieves meeting in a
dark house, we knew each other for what we were.”

“What lies did you learn from that
one?”

“No lies, Rider. Nyarlathotep helped
me to understand all I had seen. For a thousand years I traveled with him, to
the borders of
Gehenna
, and Creation,
to his own court at Sharnath. For the thing I observed was not above and beyond
Heaven, it was beyond Creation itself. I, the master, became the pupil. Just as
when I brought you to the borders of the material world and showed you the
Yenne Velt
, Nyarlathotep showed me the
true nature of the universe in which we live. Or rather, the lie of it all.”

He was excited now, and he rose from
his chair.

“The Great Old Ones do not come from
an older universe created by God, Rider. We are forbidden from studying that
which came before Creation. That is because what came before Creation, Rider,
is the natural state of all things. Chaos. Unfettered, roiling, nuclear Chaos.
And in the murky water of Chaos are the Great Old Ones. Just as we are taught
that God existed always, so have the Old Ones. The God who made this universe is
an abomination, Rider. An anomaly. A flaw in the perfection of Chaos, who
imposes an unseemly, unnatural Order upon everything.”

The Rider winced to hear these
blasphemies, but still he listened. Was this true? Were his innermost fears
realized? Were the Lord and The Great Old Ones of one family? Chaksusa had told
him the Old Ones were of an earlier universe, created by God. That wasn’t true
then. He had also said the Great Old Ones gnawed on the edge of Creation. Could
the country of Chaos be greater than Creation?

“The Old Ones are matter,” Adon went
on. “Chaos is matter. The primordial stuff, the thick, black embryonic fluid of
the universe. It surrounds Creation, Rider. The God you serve is a thing of
spirit. A mutant. A blank spot among the endless matter, crammed into an
infinitesimally small corner of All That Is. The Great Old Ones shunned Him,
and left to His own devices, He made His Heaven and His angels, and soon after,
this universe, much as we are told He did, with the powers of words and numbers.
There was another ingredient, Rider. Words were but the catalyst.

“Not content with the dream-like
realms He inhabited, God stole bits of matter from the unending Chaos and
infused it with spirit. He even trapped some of the Great Old Ones themselves as
they lay dreaming, cutting His ingredients from them and reshaping it like he
did Eve from Adam. The legends of sea monster Rahav, and of Tanin’iver, the
blind dragon of which Cordovero wrote, are not legends at all. The Blind Black
Dragon is one of the Spirit God’s prisoners. Others, you have already seen.”

Shub-Niggurath, the Rider thought.
Ossodagowah, others mentioned in the Book of Zylac. Nyarlathotep himself. And
this Blind Black Dragon. Chaksusa had mentioned him. That Which Strains Against
Against Its Chains, he had called it, and Sheardown had mentioned it too. He
had said it would swing wide the doors for The Great Old Ones, once its fetters
were broken. He remembered the dragon-like statue beneath Red House too.

The legends of Tanin’iver and Rahav
came from Kabbalah and the Talmud. Tanin’iver was the spiritual steed of
Lilith, a colorless intermediary by which her joining with Samael could become
possible. The Treatise On The Left Hand Emanation said that were he
‘created whole in the fullness of his
emanation he would have destroyed the world in an instant.’
The very name
meant Blind Dragon. Long had the Rider puzzled over that passage.

As for Rahav, it was supposed to be
a sea monster, thought to be the great Leviathan, slain or imprisoned by the
Lord for refusing to aid in Creation. His carcass beneath the waves was said to
give the sea its smell.

Adon went on.

“Land was created, and space, and
stars, and most blasphemous of all, human souls. Bastard things born from an
unholy fusion of chaotic flesh and pure spirit. And this last abomination made
God stronger.

God thrives upon refined souls,
Rider. He needs them to expand His influence, to form His universes and
encroach upon Chaos. And He has at last gained the attention of the Others. To
keep them out, He made a great armor, a wall of human souls, that strange
substance forged in flesh and sin and baked in the experience we know as life,
fired at last in the furnace of hell. He girded Himself with it, encased His
universes within it. So the Great Old Ones batter against it even now, seeking
a way in.”

Adon came to stand over him, leaned
on the arms of the chair in which the Rider sat, eager. His eyes were blazing
with the truth he spewed, like a raving alcoholic alight in the throes of sickness.

“There is a way, Rider. Those
trapped within this universe, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Krefth Daal-Zuur,
they have found the chink in the armor, and given it to men through inspiration
and dreaming, seeded it throughout Creation. The knowledge is there, waiting
for men. After ages of wandering the cosmos I returned to earth, moving through
the world of dreams and through body after body. I found it myself at last in
the 1600’s, in the
Sepher ha-Sha’are
ha-Daath.”

“
The
Book of the Gates of Knowledge
,” the Rider intoned. He remembered the name
from his studies under Adon.

“Yes. It was to be our course of
study just prior to your leaving for that foolish war. It was a commentary on
two chapters of the
Book of al-Hazred.
The Kitab al-Azif.
”

Al-Hazred again.
The Kitab al-Azif
. The grimoire
Professor Spates had mentioned to him. The Necronomicon. That was why it had
sounded familiar, and yet also why he had never learned of it. Only the war had
saved him from pursuing the forbidden studies that would have led him to The
Great Old Ones. Adon had been preparing the Rider for that study gradually with
his pagan talismans and alternative teachings. But why?

He realized how much he owed his
late friend Abe Lillard then. Adon had always hated him. The Rider had thought
it was because his father was a Christian. Adon would complain that he was a
constant distraction, tempting him away from his studies. It was true, of
course. Abe had always been a rambler and a malcontent, forsaking both his
Christianity and Judaism for a life of pleasure, free from higher meditations.
How many times had Abe enticed him out the
yeshiva
window to play street games and watch girls? After the
disappointment of being turned away from the Throne and seeing the forces of
Heaven and Hell amassing, he had been so willing to run off with Abe to fight.

So, possibly he had been saved from
total spiritual corruption by an avowed atheist. He silently blessed Abe’s
memory now, and hoped his time in
Sheol
had not been too harrowing.

“Why did you have to return? Why
didn’t Nyarlathotep just give you this knowledge directly?”

“The stars were not right,” Adon
said. “So I was sent back to spread the word, to bring others to the cause
through dreams and dissemination, and always to prepare the way. I had to prove
myself.”

“What is it?” the Rider asked,
hoping to catch him in the heat of the moment. He knew when, he was learning
why, but he still did not know how. “What’s the knowledge you found?”

Adon retracted, shaking his head and
smiling.

“If you don’t know yet, it’s not for
me to say. Yes, I must break my rule, there. For we have gone different ways,
my friend. It’s not for you to know, but to learn for yourself.”

He turned, and put his hands behind
his back, recovering himself.

The Rider looked at the pistol lying
on the desk.

“Why side with them?” he asked. He
had to keep him talking. “The Great Old Ones? I’ve encountered them. They don’t
have humanity’s best interests in mind.”

Adon laughed.

“And God does? Don’t you see that
that’s the point? Truth, Rider. Real truth. And Power. Why would I serve a God
who is but a shadow of the True Power that exists beyond the rickety walls of
this paltry Creation? It is like choosing to stay in a condemned house in the
face of an oncoming hurricane. The Chaos, Rider. I’ve seen it. It’s
overwhelming
. The Great Old Ones
will
break into this Universe. It is
inevitable. The Hour of Incursion is nearly at hand.”

“And you think these things will
make you master of the Earth?”