reverted talons of its heels, he waited till the monster had disappeared in the darkness; and by that time the spawn of Abhoth were hard upon him.
Raphtontis, with sharp admonitory cawings, floated before him above the giant web; and he was impelled to a rash haste by the imminently slavering snouts of the dark abnormalities behind. Owing to such precipitancy, he failed to notice that the web had been weakened and some of its strands torn or stretched by the weight of the sloth-like monster. Coming in view of the chasm’s opposite verge, he thought only of reaching it, and redoubled his pace. But at this point the web gave way beneath him. He caught wildly at the broken, dangling strands, but could not arrest his fall. With several pieces of Atlach-Nacha’s weaving clutched in his fingers, he was precipitated into that gulf which no one had ever voluntarily tried to plumb.
This, unfortunately, was a contingency that had not been provided against by the terms of the seventh geas.
Fane of the Black Pharaoh
ROBERT BLOCH
“Liar!” said Captain Cartaret.
The dark man did not move, but beneath the shadows of his burnoose a scowl slithered across a contorted countenance. But when he stepped forward into the lamplight, he smiled.
“That is a harsh epithet, effendi,' purred the dark man.
Captain Cartaret stared at his midnight visitor with quizzical appraisal.
“A deserved one, I think,” he observed. “Consider the facts. You come to my door at midnight, uninvited and unknown. You tell me some long rigmarole about secret vaults below Cairo, and then voluntarily offer to lead me there.”
“That is correct,” assented the Arab, blandly. He met the glance of the scholarly captain calmly.
“Why should you do this?” pursued Cartaret. “If your story is true, and you do possess so manifestly absurd a secret, why should you come to me? Why not claim the glory of discovery yourself?”
“I told you, effendi,” said the Arab. “That is against the law of our brotherhood. It is not written that I should do so. And knowing of your interest in these things, I came to offer you the privilege.”
“You came to pump me for my information; no doubt that’s what you mean,” retorted the captain, acidly. “You beggars have some devilishly clever ways of getting underground information, don’t you? So far as I know, you’re here to find out how much I’ve already learned, so that you and your fanatic thugs can knife me if I know too much.”
“Ah!” The dark stranger suddenly leaned forward and peered into the white man’s face. “Then you admit that what I tell you is not wholly strange — you do know something of this place already?”
“Suppose I do,” said the captain, unflinching. “That doesn’t prove that you’re a philanthropic guide to what I’m seeking. More likely you want to pump me, as I said, then dispose of me and get the goods for yourself. No, your story is too thin. Why, you haven’t even told me your name.”
“My name?” The Arab smiled. “That does not matter. What does matter is your distrust of me. But, since you have admitted at last that you do know about the crypt of Nephren-Ka, perhaps I can show you something that may prove my own knowledge.”
He thrust a lean hand under his robe and drew forth a curious object of dull, black metal. This he flung casually on the table, so that it lay in a fan of lamplight.
Captain Cartaret bent forward and peered at the queer, metallic thing. His thin, usually pale face now glowed with unconcealed excitement. He grasped the black object with twitching fingers.
“The Seal of Nephren-Ka!” he whispered. When he raised his eyes to the inscrutable Arab’s once more, they shone with mingled incredulity and belief.
“It’s true, then — what you say,” the captain breathed. “You could obtain this only from the Secret Place; the Place of the Blind Apes where…”
“Nephren-Ka bindeth up the threads of truth.” The smiling Arab finished the quotation for him.
“You, too, have read the Necronomicon, then.” Cartaret looked stunned. “But there are only six complete versions, and I thought the nearest was in the British Museum.”
The Arab’s smile broadened. “My fellow-countryman, Alhazred, left many legacies among his own people,” he said, softly. “There is wisdom available to all who know where to seek it.”
For a moment there was silence in the room. Cartaret gazed at the black Seal, and the Arab scrutinized him in turn. The thoughts of both were far away. At last the thin, elderly white man looked up with a quick grimace of determination.
“I believe your story,” he said. “Lead me.”
The Arab, with a satisfied shrug, took a chair, unbidden, at the side of his host. From that moment he assumed complete psychic mastery of the situation.
“First, you must tell me what you know,” he commanded. “Then I shall reveal the rest.”
Cartaret, unconscious of the other’s dominance, complied. He told the stranger his story in an abstracted manner, while his eyes never swerved from the cryptic black amulet on the table. It was almost as though he were hypnotized by the queer talisman. The Arab said nothing, though there was a gay gloating in his fanatical eyes.
Cartaret spoke of his youth; of his wartime service in Egypt and subsequent station in Mesopotamia. It was here that the captain had first become interested in archeology and the shadowy realms of the occult which surround it. From the vast desert of Arabia had come intriguing tales as old as time; furtive fables of mystic Irem, city of ancient dread, and the lost legends of vanished empires. He had spoken to the dreaming dervishes whose hashish visions revealed secrets of forgotten days, and had explored certain reputedly ghoul-ridden tombs and burrows in the ruins of an older Damascus than recorded history knows.
In time, his retirement had brought him to Egypt. Here in Cairo there was access to still more secret lore. Egypt, land of lurid curses and lost kings, has ever harbored mad myths in its age-old shadows. Cartaret had learned of priests and pharaohs; of olden oracles, forgotten sphinxes, fabulous pyramids, titanic tombs. Civilization was but a cobweb surface upon the sleeping face of Eternal Mystery. Here, beneath the inscrutable shadows of the pyramids, the old gods still stalked in the old ways. The ghosts of Set, Ra, Osiris, and Bubastis lurked in desert ways; Horus, Isis, and Sebek yet dwelt in the ruins of Thebes and Memphis, or bided in the crumbling tombs below the Valley of Kings.
Nowhere had the past survived as it did in ageless Egypt. With
every mummy, the Egyptologists uncovered a curse; the solving of each ancient secret merely uncovered a deeper, more perplexing riddle. Who built the pylons of the temples? Why did the old kings rear the pyramids? How did they work such marvels? Were their curses potent still? Where vanished the priests of Egypt?
These and a thousand other unanswered questions intrigued the mind of Captain Cartaret. In his new-found leisure he read and studied, talked with scientists and savants. Ever the quest of primal knowledge beckoned him on to blacker brinks; he could slake his thirsty soul only in stranger secrets, more dangerous discoveries.
Many of the reputable authorities he knew were open in their confessed opinion that it was not well for meddlers to pry too deeply beneath the surface. Curses had come true with puzzling promptness, and warning prophecies had been fulfilled with a vengeance. It was not good to profane the shrines of the old dark gods who still dwelt within the land.
But the terrible lure of the forgotten and the forbidden was a pulsing virus in Cartaret’s blood. When he heard the legend of Nephren-Ka, he naturally investigated.
Nephren-Ka, according to authoritative knowledge, was merely a mythical figure. He was purported to have been a Pharaoh of no known dynasty, a priestly usurper of the throne. The most common fables placed his reign in almost biblical times. He was said to have been the last and greatest of that Egyptian cult of priest-sorcerers who for a time transformed the recognized religion into a dark and terrible thing. This cult, led by the arch-hierophants of Bubastis, Anubis, and Sebek, viewed their gods as the representatives of actual Hidden Beings — monstrous
