Chapter 7

The approach of summer was unwelcome to the Black Spring Clan. We depended on the caravans for our meat, and as the days grew hotter, the caravans became fewer. In the extremity of starvation, a ghoul will feed upon the carrion of beasts, and even upon fresh meat, but no ghoul can remain in good health without the putrefying flesh of human corpses. Animal flesh, which their stomachs have great difficulty digesting, contains little nourishment for a ghoul. The people of the dwindling caravans grew wary, since it was not uncommon for a man to wander out of the glow of the campfires to relieve himself, never to be seen again.

It was around the time of the solstice, by my rough reckoning of the heavens, when the entire clan followed a ragged caravan for three days and nights in the hope of a death, either of man or beast; but though the camels staggered as they walked and the men were thinner than the ghouls who stalked them, no one died. I hunted during the day, while the clan sought shelter from the sun, keeping a constant watch for anyone who wandered away from the wagons while the caravan was on the move. At night the clan caught up with me, and I slept for several hours while the caravan made camp and the mature ghouls hunted just outside the glow of the fires. The men kept guard with uncommon vigilance. At least four of them remained awake all night, armed with swords and bows, and wearing armor. No one ever left the fires alone.

“The light would blind us,” Gor murmured as we lay together on our bellies on the crest of a dune, gazing down at the encampment. “If we attacked, we could not see to fight, and they would slaughter us with their bows.”

He spoke in his own tongue. I had acquired the language of the ghouls, although I could not yet speak it perfectly.

“I will try to steal into a wagon and kill a woman. Maybe I can drag her corpse away without being seen.”

Gor shook his head.

“They watch too closely. Someone must have warned them at the last well.”

“We need meat,” I reminded him.

He made a clucking sound with his tongue.

“This part of the year is always hard. There will be better hunting when the days grow cooler.”

“The caravan road is dying. What will you do when the camels cease to pass through the land of the Black Spring Clan?”

“Who can say? Perhaps we will hunt the villages that lie to the north.”

“They are owned by the Red Hill Clan. There will be war.”

“There has always been war between our clans.”

“If I had a bow, I could kill a man from here. They would have to bury him and leave him behind.”

“You do not have a bow, Alhazred.”

“Why do the ghouls never use bows, or swords?”

He thought for a few moments in silence.

“They are the things of men. We are not men. It is not our way.”

“Such weapons could help you in the hunt.”

“It is not our way,” he repeated.

I did not pursue the argument. There was a fatalism in the nature of the ghouls that could not be moved by any rational demonstration. They lived as they had always lived. They could not imagine change.

“We need meat,” I repeated after a while.

Gor merely grunted.

I will hunt for you, Sashi said in my mind.

“You?” I told the djinn in a scornful tone. “What can you do? You have no strength.”

Gor looked at me.

“The chaklah talks to me in my head.”

His black eyes widened slightly, but he said nothing.

I can stop the breath of a man. It is our way of hunting.

“Yes, when you hunt in packs. A man would cast you off if you hunted alone.”

A woman, then.

“A woman would cast you off, also.”

An idea came into my head. I turned to Gor, who watched me with an indulgent expression, as though observing the antics of a mad relative.

“Last night, did one of the clan say he had seen a child in the white wagon?”

“Two children,” Gor said. “They keep them in the wagon. My ghoul only caught a glimpse of them just before dawn, when the wagon curtains were opened.”

“How old are they?”

Gor slid down the dune and walked to a hollow where a group of male ghouls crouched on their flanks, talking amongst themselves. He spoke to one of the ghouls, then returned.

“The boy is perhaps seven years. The girl is younger, five or four years.”

Hope surged in my heart. Sashi felt it and began to hum with happiness within me.

“Hunt the girl first. If you are successful, then try the boy.”

She had never left my body from the time of her entry inside my skin. There was a stirring within my chest and bowels that raised a sickly sensation and made me swallow my spittle. My skin expanded as though all my limbs were filled with air, and suddenly the pressure vanished. I had not eaten the white spiders, so I could not see her.

“Is she outside of me?”

Gor nodded, grinning at an empty patch of the night air.

A gentle touch brushed my cheek, and I realized that Sashi had kissed me.

The wait seemed long, but could not have been more than a quarter of an hour. Hope raised impatience in my heart. After three days and nights of frustration, at last something was being tried.

“The chaklah returns,” Gor murmured.

A tingling covered my skin, and with an inward pressure pierced it like a thousand fine needles. It was not painful, merely strange. I closed my eyes and saw Sashi’s smiling face. She nodded in delight.

Both are dead. The boy struggled, but became tangled in his sleeping blanket. I sealed their mouths and noses and cut off their breath.

I conveyed this good news to Gor, who closed his eyes and released a long puff of wind between his lips.

“The meat will not be much,” I reminded him. “They are scarce more than infants.”

“It will be enough.”

The alarm came before dawn. Within the white wagon a woman began to shriek. The men guarding the camp ran to the wagon babbling their confusion, and the shrieks of the woman, who must have been the mother, gave way to long wails that rose and fell on the desert air.

There was nothing else for the men of the caravan to do but bury the corpses near the road and move on. After the clan retreated beneath the earth from the sun, I watched at a distance as the graves were dug and two small shrouds were lowered into their hungry mouths. A woman in black threw herself on the larger of the two corpses, and had to be pulled away screaming. Her boshiya came loose from her face, and I saw by the blue dots and crosses and stars tattooed on her chin and the lower part of her cheeks that she had been born a Bedouin, for it is only the wandering desert tribes that tattoo their women, in defiance of the laws of the Prophet. A man held her in the circle of his arms, and stared around at the hills that lined both sides of the road, as though seeking an enemy he could slay with his eyes. The harsh expression on his sun-darkened face was a blend of frustration and fury.

He knows.

“Yes, Sashi, he knows,” I agreed. “The knowledge does him no good.”

The caravan moved on in mid-morning. When it was certain that no archers remained behind to watch over the graves, I came down from the hills and unearthed the bodies from between the marker stones at their head and foot. It was an easy matter to carry them a safe distance from the road, since they weighed little. My knife cut through the bindings of the cotton shrouds. Their flesh had not begun to darken. The face of the girl was angelic in its purity. Never have I seen a more beautiful child. By contrast, the expression of the boy was distorted by a remnant of the terror that had gripped his heart in death.

I stripped the bodies and set them naked on the sand for the sun to ripen, then sat in the shade of a boulder and watched over them to ensure that no jackals or vultures tried to steal the prizes.

After sunset, the ghouls began to arrive. They danced and sang in their rough voices, so great was their joy. Starvation for the entire clan had not been more than a few days away, or at most a week. The body of one child would not have been enough to feed the clan, but two made a satisfying meal.

Gor gave me the honor of eating first. I used my dagger to slice a piece of meat from the inside of the girl’s thigh, having a care not to take too much. My belly was as empty as all the rest, but a human can endure hunger better than a ghoul, and can go longer without food before becoming too weak to hunt.

I chewed the tender meat while the rest of the ghouls clustered around the corpses and tore off their portions. Nothing would be wasted, not even the marrow of the bones.

Gor squatted on his haunches beside me, a happy grin on his black lips, his chin and curved teeth stained with blood. He licked his lips with relish.

“We must go into the land of the Red Hill Clan,” he said. “There is no more hunting here until the season changes.”

“I agree. We must hunt in one of the villages in the north.”

“The Red Hill Clan will not be happy to share their land.”

I grinned back at him, still chewing.

“If they attack, we will kill them all.”

He laughed his choking laugh and nodded.

There was a curious bitterness on my tongue as I swallowed. I rolled my tongue around in my mouth and examined the flavor. It was not like anything I had tasted before.

“How was the meat?” I asked Gor.

“Good. Good meat. Bitter, but good.”

I remembered the face of the father, staring up at the crests of the hills as he clasped his screaming wife, how his dark eyes had glittered like the eyes of a serpent poised to strike. Horror swept through me. Leaning over, I vomited and spat repeatedly.

“Are you mad?” asked Gor, watching my performance with incomprehension.

“The meat is poison,” I gasped.

Drawing forth my water skin, I rinsed my mouth and spat again, but the bitterness remained on my tongue. Indeed, it grew stronger with each passing moment.

“You must throw up the meat,” I told him. “It was poisoned to kill us.”

He stared into my eyes, comprehension at last dawning in his mind. Other ghouls paused in their feast to watch curiously.

“You cannot be sure. The meat may be good.”

“It is too great a risk. The bitterness is unnatural. You must vomit it up. Everyone must vomit.”

He laughed his choking laugh and looked at me with sadness in his eyes, and something more, a kind of love.

“If we cast off the meat, we will starve.”

“No. I will follow the caravan and kill a man. Tomorrow night you will feast again.”

“They would be watching,” Gor said, and I knew he spoke the truth. “They would kill you, and we would still starve.”

In the extremity of my concern, I grabbed his wrist. He did not pull away.

“I tell you, the meat is poisoned. You must vomit it forth.”

“Alhazred, you know so little of us.”

“What is there to know that concerns this poison?”

He smiled sadly, watching me.

“Ghouls cannot vomit.”

I fell back on the sand as though struck and released his arm. He patted my knee in a comforting way.

“Perhaps it is not poisoned. We will see.”

In an hour, the cramps began. I felt them in my stomach, clenching and relaxing, like a fist closed and opened. They moved down into my bowels, all the way down to my anus. My throat and tongue became numb. The younger ghouls began to murmur their distress. Gor had talked to the elders, and they remained silent as they squatted on the sand around the bones and remaining flesh of the two corpses and endured the discomfort that soon turned to pain, and then to agony. They hugged each other in their arms as though chilled, even though the night was hot, and shivered together.

I held Gor in my arms as he died. The tight, knowing smile never left him. He seemed almost to enjoy the joke the men had played on his clan.

“You are one of us,” he told me after his sight failed him. He clutched my arm and drew blood with his talons, but I let him grip my flesh.

“We are the same,” I agreed.

My words seemed to comfort him. He died with his eyes open, reflecting the starlight, a breath still issuing from his mouth.

I stood between the bones of the corpses and stared around at the bodies of the ghouls, distorted by their death agonies. Not one survived. How had the men of the caravan known which poison would be effective, and how had they possessed it? They must have procured the poison for just this purpose at some village or oasis on their journey. It was a terrible retribution. The Black Spring Clan was no more. No, I corrected myself, that is untrue—I am Black Spring Clan.

So sorry, my love, I am so sorry.

“You could not have known, Sashi. It is fate.”

Had I possessed the strength, I would have taken all the members of the clan back to the pit, but I was starving and the pit was three days away. I could not bear to think of the vultures feasting on the corpses, as they surely would when the smell of death reached them, so I searched the hills until I found a cave large enough for my purposes. Through the last of the night and all through the following day I carried or dragged the ghouls into the cave, arranging the bodies in rows so that they lay one on top of the other. When all except Gor was in the cave, I closed its mouth with large stones, which I rolled into place with the last of my strength. Then I found a shadow to lie in and slept.

When I awoke it was dark. Gor’s corpse lay beside me, bound up in the shrouds that had held the bodies of the children. It was not heavy on my shoulder. The bodies of ghouls are lightly framed except for their bellies, which are large to hold several days of meat, in the same way the camel holds a reservoir of water. By traveling both beneath the stars and the sun, I reached the pit in the night of the second day, my water exhausted, my belly still hungry.

I drank deep from the black cold water of the spring. It was necessary to see to my own hunger, or I would not be able to finish what I intended. Hunting was easy at the spring, since it was the only open source of water for many miles. I killed a snake and a desert rat and ate their flesh. Humans can eat anything, Gor had once said to me. That is our strength.

Unwrapping his body in the cave of the dead, I stood over it and let the muse that has always been a part of me find the words to sing in his honor. How long I sang, I could not tell, but my voice became hoarse, and the darkness gave way to dawn. When I had used all the words to praise him, I cut a small portion of flesh from his back, where I judged the poison would be weak, and ate it. The bitterness was slight. I would not have vomited the flesh, even had it been strong. With my dagger I sliced the flesh from his limbs and trunk, and set it aside, then cut through the sinews that connected the bones. His brain and eyes I drew forth with the wooden spoon that was kept for the purpose within the cave. I piled the bloody bones with care on the bone heap of his ancestors, but his skull I bound around my waist over my thawb with a piece of cord from the shrouds. The binding raised the hem of the garment from the ground.

What will you do, my love?

“We will see why the earth moans so piteously in the depths,” I told Sashi with determination. Until that instant, I had not realized what I planned.

The great cavern was as I remembered it, rock sides glowing with chill radiance, when Gor and I had viewed it together from the ledge. I began to descend the awkward steps that wound around its curving interior, so broad and deep that each was an effort for human legs. From time to time a thundering moan issued up from the darkness. This should have aroused fear, but my heart was empty. I felt an impatience to reach the bottom, so that I could learn the secret that had forever been lost with the ghouls who had ventured down the stair before me. Gor’s father had been the bravest of his clan, but he had never descended into the bowels of the earth, nor had Gor walked this path. Now I walked it for him, and with him.

For hours I descended the stair. The journey was monotonous, and the cavern appeared to have no bottom. Before long the vaulted roof had been lost in darkness above, just as the depths were concealed in shadow below, so that it was all but impossible to be aware that progress was being made. My legs ached. How much more they would complain on the ascent, I thought, and laughed softly. No one had ever ascended the stair.

The unvarying tedium coupled with my fatigue lulled me into a kind of dream, so that I nearly stepped onto empty space before I realized that the stair had ended. Not ended, I corrected myself, falling backward from the abyss. I could see it continuing further down the vertical wall of the cavern. There was a great gap where many of the projecting stones that formed the steps had fallen away. In the pallid light shining from the rock, I could see the irregular broken patches where the treads of the stairs had once joined the side of the cavern. The stairs had been shorn away as though from some titanic impact.

I peered downward, feeling disappointment. The damage did not appear recent. No sign of the floor of the cavern was visible at the end of the shadowed cylinder of its walls. Another moan rumbled up from the depths, mocking me. The gap was far too wide to leap across, and the wall between the two ends of the stair looked smooth apart from the marks of the tools that had cut the great cavern from the earth.

Something stirred at the opposite side of the gap in the stair, and I narrowed my eyes to better see through the dimness. There was a kind of gray bulge attached to the wall of the cavern just above the steps on the far side of the gap. I had not noticed it before because its color was almost identical to the color of the wall itself. As I looked upon it, the rounded side slowly opened, and a creature of nightmare stepped forth.

How does a man describe what the mind refuses to see? It was in size twice my height, and of the color of polished jet so that its limbs shone with a luster in the wall glow. Its chitinous body was shaped all in angles and folding lengths, like the body of a mantis. Four limbs supported it from the stones of the stairs, and two smaller limbs waved before its face as though testing the air. In its tear-shaped head numerous tiny eyes glittered. A ring of ropelike tentacles surrounded its mouth, which opened and shut from the sides and dripped a kind of dark ichor.

The thought came to me that I should flee, but I reflected that the same great gap that kept me from descending further prevented the monster from ascending. What a blessing this gap was to the men who dwelt on the surface of the earth, if such things as this lived in its depths. How fortuitous that the stair had become divided.

“You are not the thing that rumbles in the depths,” I told it in a loud voice, seeking to raise my courage, for the sight of the monster stirred a tickle of fear within me.

“You are different from the others,” it hissed and sighed, its mandibles clacking.

The words, though clearly expressed, were not in any language known to me, yet I understood their meaning in my mind.

“I am Alhazred, of the Black Spring Clan.”

“You are not the same. Your shell is white instead of black.”

“The others were ghouls. I am a man.”

“I will feed on you as I fed on those who came before you.”

I forced a laugh from my throat.

“You cannot ascend.”

“True, I cannot ascend,” the monster agreed.

It came into my mind to wonder why, if the thing could not cross the gap, no ghoul had ever returned up the stair.

With a whizzing like that of flat stones flung through the air, the ring of black tentacles around the mouth of the monster spun out and surrounded me. They felt like wire when they wrapped themselves about my arms and legs, and I know I would never break loose from them by force. They were eight in number. Effortlessly, they lifted me from my feet and drew me across the gap toward the opening and shutting jaws of the nightmare. I cursed myself in my mind for my stupidity. It was not difficult now to imagine how the ghouls had died.

Heat radiated from its armored body. It transferred me from its mouth tentacles to its forelimbs with surprising delicacy and held me close to its glittering little eyes to examine my head. I felt the exhaust of its breath on my cheek as it pulled me toward its mouth. It stopped and held me motionless, regarding my face.

“You bear the mark of Nyarlathotep,” it said.

Remembering my dream, I touched my forehead, which was smooth and unblemished.

“I have no mark. It was a dream.”

It ignored my words.

“You belong to Nyarlathotep,” it said to itself in its strange clicking language, as though meditating in its own mind what to do with me.

Before I could speak in response, it returned me to its black tentacles and extended me across the gap in the stair to set me on the steps with a light touch.

“Tell your master that Nee’sak’hela always repays her debts.”

“I have no master,” I shouted in anger.

The chitinous thing turned away as though I had said nothing and entered the gray bulge on the wall above the stair. The aperture of the sack closed like an anus behind its body. A deep groan echoed up from the depths of the cavern, vibrating the stone beneath my sandals. For a while I stood staring at the place where the thing had vanished, but when it failed to emerge, I realized that I had been dismissed without ceremony, as a man dismisses a small child or pet animal, and would gain no second audience for my unanswered questions. With weary legs, I turned and began the long climb.