Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred by Donald Tyson Read Free Book Online

entering the underground city, if you turn always leftward, keeping the leftmost wall touching your fingertips in the accepted manner of penetrating to the heart of a maze, you will come after a winding and descending progress to a great chamber much larger than the others, having a high and domed roof painted deep blue with pigment made from finely ground lapis lazuli so that it resembles the night sky; scattered densely across the dome are shining pinpricks of light, like stars, giving illumination to the chamber. Each is a colorless, faceted jewel. By what art they glow with so bright a light is not to be comprehended from their inspection, for the source of their radiance lies hidden. The light has a coldness that burns the skin of one remaining too long beneath its rays, and for this reason it is unwholesome to covet these stones. They are arranged to represent constellations that do not resemble those of the heavens, for they are the stars of a night sky other than that of our world.
    It is needless to covet these gems, as precious stones of a more ordinary kind may be found lying upon the floors of rooms, partly hidden beneath a carpet of dust, where they were scattered in haste when the dwellers in the nameless city abandoned it. It may be speculated that the dwellers used the colored jewels for commerce, in the way we use copper and silver coins, so many are to be gathered with so little effort. A handful of these stones is sufficient to provision the traveler with abundance, though he may spend years following the caravan roads or voyaging across the seas to the far places of the world.
    The entire expanse of the curved wall of the starlit chamber, excepting the gaps of its two open doorways, is covered from floor to the base of the blue dome with raised paintings that depict strange landscapes and unearthly cities. In the center of the floor is a low, circular dais of strange, green stone tending to white through which the light penetrates and reveals milky depths. This single huge stone is of so uncommon a type that most who gazed upon it would fail to identify it, but it can only be the green stone coveted in Cathay with such lust for its health-giving properties. Deeply carved triangles intersect on its surface at irregular angles, so that looking long upon them produces an ache in the head, and in a circle at the center of these interlocking triangles is inscribed the sign of five branches associated with the Elder Race that ruled the earth before the coming of the Old Ones.
    At the perimeter of the dais, raised metal pins of the thickness of a fist, unadorned with any markings, may be depressed into the stone with a light pressure. The metal of which they are made would be unfamiliar to our alchemists, but it has resisted tarnish and corrosion through the ages with a nobility akin to pure gold. One pin may be pressed down at a time, and it will remain lowered only for an established interval of hours, after which it returns to its former level. There are seven pins, one for each of the paintings on the wall.
    By sitting with legs crossed upon the center of the dais and pressing any of the pins, certain of the glowing jewels in the dome are extinguished, so that only the painting opposite the pin remains illuminated. After a time, the scene depicted takes on life and begins to move. The soul is drawn out of the body and flies across vast spaces to the land of the painting, so that the scene becomes the world. However, the soul does not remain disembodied but takes up residence within an inhabitant of that world, seeing through the eyes of the creature and hearing through its ears. It is possible, with an effort of will, to control some of the beings the soul enters, though others of a higher order of evolution become aware of the attempt and resist violently.
    The experience of soul travel is unlike any sensation of physical movement, for it produces a feeling of endless falling through an abyss of colors,