Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred (40 page)

The father approaches the fire with his child, and stands close so that his body, when joined with the four seniors of the rite, forms one of the five points of a pentagram around the fire. In the outer ring the women begin to sing a wordless song composed all of vowel sounds that are droned on the breath in the nose and back of the throat, and the young men to play music on flutes and flat drums that are struck with curved sticks and have silver rattles set in their sides. With the song and music they raise their emotions to a fury and sway their bodies rhythmically forward and back.

The most senior of the four who surround the fire with the father begins to make invocation to Shub-Niggurath in their own language, which is unknown outside their race but does not resemble the ancient tongue of Egypt nor the language of the Hebrews, as some scholars have written on the evidence of spurious assertions by those who have claimed to know this race. It may also be written with assurance that this invocation is not in the language of the Old Ones, save only for the single phrase
a’ai y’gatu I’il ro’kanah Sbub-Niijtjurath,
which is many times repeated, and serves as a kind of chant of power to punctuate the various parts of the invocation.

As the music and wordless song rises in strength, the father passes the naked babe through the smoke and flames into the hands of one of the four elders, and as the exchange is made, a great shout goes up from all assembled. Five times the child is passed through the fire, but this is done swiftly so that no harm comes to it from the flames, though the irritation of the smoke in the infant’s eyes and lungs causes it to cry lustily. A secret may be revealed not written elsewhere, and perhaps unknown outside of the camps of the wanderers themselves, for not even Ibn Schacabao alludes to it in his voluminous texts. The infant is passed from man to man in such a way that its progress around the fire imitates the interlocking rays of the pentagram drawn with one continuous stroke of the pen against the course of the sun; for it is well-known to students of the necromantic arts that the pentagram is inscribed as a sign of power only when drawn with a continuous line that joins its end with its beginning.

At the fifth great shout, when the pentagram has been completed around the fire, a young goat white and spotless is led into the circle by the mother of the child. It walks calmly, without resistance, as though aware in some dim way of its higher purpose, and submissive to the will of the goddess. Two girls in the first season of their flowers hold it with ropes tied to its forelegs to prevent its escape, should it attempt to flee the fire, but this is said to be seldom necessary. The mother of the child draws back the head of the goat with one hand, and with the other cuts its throat, as the father thrusts the wailing infant beneath the fountain of blood that issues from the wound. The baby is bathed completely in blood before the goat stumbles and falls dead, while the frenzied observers of the rite make an enormous din by shouting, clapping their hands, stomping their feet, and beating on metal pots and shields with sticks and stones.

The elders pick up the carcass of the goat and cast it upon the fire. As the smoke from its burning coat rises into the night sky, the senior among them takes the child from the blood-stained hands of the father and elevates it directly above the fire as high as he is able to hold his arms to prevent the child from being burned. What happens next is a mystery of this race, that all observers of the rite are pledged on their life never to reveal, and none have done so, for it is universally believed to be unlucky to speak of the mysteries of any people, and that such irreverence to sacred matters calls down upon their heads the wrath of the gods. However, it may be written that a presence in the form of a mist or smoke descends from the stars against the course of the smoke rising from the fire, and it envelops the body of the infant and is drawn within its flesh.

At the very moment the presence enters the child, it ceases to wail and becomes silent and alert. Those who gaze into its eyes detect an unnatural awareness that is the sure sign of the indwelling of its familiar demon. Although the mind of the babe is unformed, the mind of the demon is complete and mature. It is years before the awareness of the child and the awareness of its familiar spirit become merged in harmony.

The rite concludes with much celebration and fornication, which takes place just beyond the ring of wagons and the illumination of the fire. If either of the two girls who led out the sacred goat is a maiden, she is ritually deflowered on that night and her virginity given as an offering to Shub-Niggurath, and this is considered to increase the luck for the child. An attempt is always made to find at least one virgin for the rite, but this is not always possible, and where none is available the rite proceeds to the discomfort of the parents, who look upon the lack of a deflowering as an ill omen. The people dance, drink wine, and feast, but they do not partake of the charred flesh of the goat, which is permitted to be wholly consumed in the fire. To insure this result, wood is constantly added to the flames for the remainder of the night. The rite does not conclude until the first light of dawn, when the revelers retire to their wagons to sleep.

he goat with a thousand young gives the roving race that worships her abundance and fertility and a measure of good fortune in matters of chance that is above the allotment of common men. The luck of the Thugian allows him to commit housebreakings or thefts without discovery, and if he is found out and taken, to escape his captivity with ease, so that no bolder band of robbers walks this earth. It also assists in the more sinister act of murder, which they commit against strangers not solely for the greater glory of their goddess but also for profit. When they kill openly in sight of men it is in the heat of passion, but when they kill for money it is done coldly and in secret.

At assassination no race is more adept. First they lull the victim into a false camaraderie and share his food and drink, then when they are certain that they are alone with him, one of their number grasps the man firmly around the arms while the other, who stands behind him, casts a scarf around his neck and draws it tight so that he cannot cry out. As these murders occur on the road and usually to merchants in transit from one city to another, and as the assassins immediately bury the bodies so that no trace of their crime remains, they easily pass undetected, and by the time the murdered man is missed by his family, those who ended his life are hundreds of leagues from the place where the crime occurred.

It is a part of their covenant with Shub-Niggurath that each man must murder at least once in the course of a year as a sacrifice to her, in order that her bounties will continue to fall upon their heads. Some among them are skillful in the arts of murder and slay more frequently for their own gain, but even the least bloodthirsty among them meets this obligation to their goddess, and the old or very young or infirm are aided by others more nimble and of greater strength. The obligation begins in the sixteenth year and continues until death. It is a matter about which they do not speak, even among themselves, for fear that some detail of a specific assassination may be overheard and remembered, but those who have been present at the recitation of the covenant with the goddess, which is never written down even in their own language, cannot doubt that they fulfill with diligence this requirement of the pact.

They slay indiscriminately the rich and the poor man, but prefer the rich for the bounty of his possessions falling into their hands. Householders they do not kill, even when it would be a thing of surpassing ease. The death of a local man would swiftly raise an outcry in the village or town before the caravan of yellow wagons could move sufficiently far away to be free from suspicion. The men of the villages may eat with them, lie with their women who choose to prostitute themselves, and even insult or beat them, with no fear of death at their hands, so perfect is their control over their passions in this matter essential to their union with the goddess. This, in spite of their hot blood, which is in other respects ungovernable.

Another part of the covenant states that each man before his twenty-ninth year must offer his first child to the prolific goat. Failure to do so invites the wrath of Shub-Niggurath, which descends in the form of profound ill fortune that soon has fatal consequences. So fearful are the men of this forfeiture that those who are by their natures unfit to engender children, which sometimes happens due to injury or disease of the genitals, seek to steal the children of the towns through which they pass that they may formally adopt the infants as their own, and so present them in the rite of the companion of the soul in their third day of life. Only babes in their first three days after birth are at risk of this abduction. They are stolen from their cribs, even from under the soft breaths of their sleeping mothers, and in their place the thief leaves a stone. This has given rise in some lands to the fable that spirits of the fields and trees steal children, a fiction that the crafty race, who are always quick to tell traveler’s tales for money, go to great lengths to encourage.

If a man has a child that is unfit in mind or body, he may seek to exchange it with the child of a householder rather than slay it with his own hand. Infants who are severely deformed or deaf or blind are put to death soon after birth; only if the mother is tender of heart and implores her husband to spare the life of the babe will he substitute the imperfect infant for one that is sound of limb and in possession of all its senses. In these cases, when a child is stolen from a town, in place of a stone the malformed child is left in the cradle. This they do seldom, for it invites an outcry against them, and those who indulge this whim are severely punished by the elders.

Virgins give their virtue to the service of the goddess within a year of the onset of the menses, while assisting in the rite of the companion, and in return, in accord with the terms of the covenant, they are gifted by Shub-Niggurath with the power of second sight, without the need to consume the white spiders in the fungus caves of the Empty Space. All the women of this race can see the presence of the walking dead as clearly as their cats, and are aware when demons move among them. They have great skill at divining the future. Their preferred method is by the lines in the hand, but they also use a technique of divination that exists nowhere else, which they claim was taught to them by the goddess herself.

It is a divination by means of the stars and the earth. Seven flat pebbles are painted in red ink that resembles blood with signs that express the seven lords of the Old Ones and their affinities with the seven wandering bodies of the heavens. The sign of Cthulhu shows two opposed ax heads; that of Shub-Niggurath resembles a tree; the sign of Yog-Sothoth is three interlocking rings; the sign of Yig shows two rows of triangular teeth; that of Nyarlathotep is a pair of serpents entwined; the sign of Dagon resembles interlocked crescents of the moon; that of Azathoth depicts a lidless eye.

These are cast within a circle drawn in the dust of the ground that has a cross through its center, so that it is divided into four quadrants. The Thugian women understand this circle to represent the twelve houses of the stars, and although it has only four divisions, each quarter is assumed to be further subdivided into three