Book of the Dead

Prologue

Abdul Alhazred dodged his way down the street, weaving between stallholders and layabouts and mothers with too many small children. He passed the newly built Umayyad Mosque, and briefly contemplated entering, before swerving hard, knowing that there would be no sanctuary anywhere for him now.

He babbled and cursed in between ragged breaths, and even giggled as people stepped from his path, thinking he was mad. Alhazred threw back his head and roared with laughter. He was mad — the Mad Arab — insane, sent insane by the things he had seen, things he had uncovered through his travels and then his further studies.

He looked up, and saw birds circling above him, faster and faster — sparrows, wrens, shrikes, geese, and dozens more species all twisting together in a tornado of feathers and flesh.

He screamed at them, and cursed again at mankind’s stupidity, his stupidity, and… curiosity. A scrap of information here, a whisper there, and he’d been off like a hound on a scent. He had travelled to the ruins of Babylon, and then meandered into the great red deserts of Arabia, that vast and empty sea of nothing but heat and sand and scorpions. And then he had found them — the caves; he wished now he hadn’t. The legends said they were protected by djinn, evil spirits and monsters of death. He had found out too late that in their depths lay things far worse than that.

Alhazred felt the book under his robe. His fingers touched the soft cover of forbidden leather, and pictured the words he had transcribed within in a mixture of blood and charcoal as he had been instructed. Some of the words were incomprehensible even to him — the Old Ones spoke a harsh tongue the primitive mind of man could not possibly understand.

The book, the Al Azif, had taken him half a lifetime to write, and now he needed to hide it, get rid of it or pass it on, the ideas too important for mankind’s future to be reclaimed now by the Old Ones or their vile servants. The information was not just for the living, but instead, was a book of the dead.

Alhazred had been given their secrets, told to him in fever dreams, in return for the betrayal of his race. But the more he wrote down, the more frightened he became, and the more his sanity left him. They had promised him a kingdom, but all he saw was slavery to masters who would look upon him in the same light as he viewed an ant.

He turned briefly, glimpsing from the corner of an eye the shape appear and then dissipate like oily smoke. Too late: they’d found him.

He had fled, stolen their plans, and disobeyed them. With his help, the Great Old One had expected to return to the world of man, to own it once again, but he had outsmarted them all, stopped them, or at least slowed them down.

He sucked in hot breaths, feeling the sweat pour down his body. He was nearly spent as he saw his target, a holy man leaving the mosque. Abdul put his head down and raced toward him. At the last second, he ripped the book from his robe, and jammed it into his hands. “Keep it safe, holy one. Mankind’s fate depends on it.”

He tore away and sprinted down a dark alley, but less than halfway to the end, the shape boiled up again, squeezing from the very cracks in the path and forming now into a shapeless mass of some viscous black substance, studded with disturbingly human eyes. Alhazred screamed: “Shoggoth!”

He looked high and higher as the thrashing tentacled mass grew. Lidless eyes swiveled toward him and a round sucking maw opened like a dark bottomless pit. He dropped his arms, surrendering. He was grabbed then, around the neck, the arms and waist, the black tendrils holding him tight, and sizzling and stinging like poisonous fire.

Abdul Alhazred, the Mad Arab, was lifted to the massive maw and jammed into that foul orifice. Mercifully, his mind left him completely as the jaws closed.