Dead of Night

3. The Black Tablet

Despite the darkness, for night fell early during these seasons of the year, it was not too late for Zarnak to make a few phone calls. From an anthropologist friend who was an expert in American Indian cultures, he learned that the Mutsune tribe were related to the Zuni Indians, and that their culture was obscure. Little was known of their beliefs, as they were extinct in California, but they were known to have feared a demon whom they called Zu-che-quon; even less was known of this dark demon, but another call to an old friend who was on the staff of the library of Miskatonic University in Massachusetts recommended that Zarnak consult, if at all possible, the Book of Iod for information on this demonic entity. The text itself was fabulously rare; only one copy was known to exist, and it was in the translation by one Johann Negus, from which the translator had rigorously excised many fearful matters of which he deemed it better that mankind remain mercifully unaware.

A work of such rarity was not in Zarnak’s private collection, although many other obscure and suppressed volumes were. However, Zarnak took down a lengthy manuscript indited by several different hands over many generations, bound in snakeskin. The book consisted of excerpts copied from many little-known texts, and one of these was the Book of lod. The quotations had been copied from the only extant copy of the book, preserved in the locked shelves of the Huntington Library of California, and the copyist had been a man named Denton, whom Zarnak had known many years before. He read:

The Dark Silent One dwelleth deep beneath the earth on the shore of the Western Ocean. Not one of those potent Old Ones from hidden worlds and other stars is He, for in Earth’s hidden blackness He hath always dwelt. No other name hath He, for He is the ultimate doom and the undying emptiness and Silence of Old Night…

There was more in this vein; Zarnak read on, skipping quickly, until a passage near the very end of the excerpt arrested his attention with a sudden chill of menace:

… He bringeth darkness within the day, and blackness within the light; all life, all sound, all movement passeth away at His coming. He cometh sometimes within the eclipse, and although He hath no name, the brown ones know Him as Zyshakon.

They knew him anciently in elder Mu, and in Xinian under the Earth’s crust, they worshipped Him in strange ways by the ringing of certain small, terrible bells, as Eibon telleth. He feareth nothing more than the light of day, which He abhors, but even artificial light is enough to drive Him down whence He came. He is the Bringer of Darkness, the Hater of Day, and Ubbo-Sathla was His Sire. As a crawling clot of darkness, and as a writhing of clotted shadows shall ye know Him.

A note in Denton’s hand explained that the last eighty-nine words of this excerpt were deleted from the expurgated copy of the

Huntington Library, and had been found in a citation by Von Junzt, who had obviously enjoyed access to the uncensored text.

Zarnak closed the manuscript volume and replaced it on the shelf, brows furrowed in deepest thought.

The next morning, Doctor Anton Zarnak travelled by taxi uptown, to the residence of Don Sebastian de Rivera and his niece. The cab drew up before a handsome building on a quiet street lined with old beech trees. When a butler, apparently of Hispanic descent, answered the bell, Zarnak identified himself and was ushered into a sunlit parlor where Dona Teresa awaited him.

“My uncle will be down to breakfast at any moment,” the girl said. “Surely you will join us?”

“For coffee only,” Zarnak smiled. “I have already eaten. I prefer my coffee black, with no sugar, please.”

A pretty Mexican maid named Carmelita served them both. Silver dishes on the sideboard held steaming bacon, sausages, scrambled eggs, toasted muffins. A frosted decanter held freshly squeezed orange juice. The coffee was a superb blend of Columbian beans.

When Don Sebastian appeared, Zarnak found his host in shocking condition. Despite his relatively youthful age, the man was shrunken, wasted, his gaunt shoulders bowed as if beneath some intolerable weight, his features pasty, prematurely lined with age, the eyes shifty and red-rimmed.

Don Sebastian accepted without comment the information that Zarnak was an antiquarian, interested in ancient artifacts. During the meal they conversed on American Indian artifacts. Zarnak’s host seemed almost pathetically pleased by his visitor, as if normal human contacts were somehow denied him, except for his niece and the servants.

After breakfast, Zarnak was shown Don Sebastian’s private collection of rarities. There were some fine examples of Zuni silver, set with polished but uncut turquoises, miniature totem poles from the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and examples of bead work that would have been the pride of any museum. Zarnak innocently mentioned the mound-builders of the southwest, and was, however reluctantly, shown the artifacts he had come uptown to examine.

For the most part, the artifacts were innocuous: As Dona Teresa had said, they consisted of clay pots of withered corn, pottery shards, beadwork belts, and bracelets. Certain motifs in the beadwork held a sinister connotation for Zarnak, who had been up much of the night consulting reference works on American Indian anthropology. The mummy in the mound had been given to the worship of dark subterranean forces, it became evident.

The black tablet was not in view. Eventually, Zarnak was forced to inquire of the obsidian pendant, saying (quite truthfully) that he had heard of it as unique and curious. With obvious reluctance, his host displayed the peculiar object.

It was irregular in shape and the volcanic glass from which it had been carved was oddly heavy in the hand, unnaturally so. Holding the black pendant to the light, Zarnak discovered it hewn with an odd design, resembling a hooded man-shaped figure surrounded by fawning, groveling shadowy shapes, curiously repellent. Strange characters in a tongue unknown to human science ringed the emblem about. The object was unique to Zarnak’s experience, but he recalled to mind another passage from the Book of Iod that might prove of relevance: “Power and peril lurk in those images They brought down from the stars when the Earth was newly formed…”

Dr. Zarnak engaged his host in conversation as he strolled about examining the superb small collection. While the gaunt, wasted man seemed distraught, even feeble, his speech was coherent and his knowledge of scientific matters extraordinary for an amateur. It was apparent that his intellectual faculties remained unimpaired. And Zamak’s keen knowledge of medicine led him to the conclusion that whatever had so deeply troubled Don Sebastian was of a mental and not of a physical nature. There were no obvious symptoms of disease.

Zarnak asked for, and received, permission from his host to take a rubbing of the carvings on the black tablet. Later, having returned to his residence at Number Thirteen China Alley, he studied the cryptic characters with bafflement, consulting text after text from his extensive library. The writing was in neither the Tsath-yo language of elder Hyperborea nor the Naacal of primal Mu, nor was it R’lyehian. The faint possibility that it might be in the queer characters of the Aklo tongue led Doctor Zarnak to peruse certain texts of fabulous rarity.

This study led him eventually to a copy of Otto Dostmann’s book, Remnants of Lost Empires, published in Berlin in 1809 by the Drachenhaus Press. Therein he found the notorious “Aklo Tables” and compared the curious hooked and looped characters to those in the rubbing he had taken from the tablet from the mound: They were the same.

In translation they read: Keep me from the Light, for Night is my friend and Day my foe, lest Zulchequon consume thee utterly. He then studied those parts of the Livre d’ lvon wherein the Lord of Darkness is described and came to a sudden realization of the extremity of peril in which Don Sebastian de Rivera had lived daily since the excavation of the burial mound of the Mutsune shaman.

Light—even artificial light—held the Dark One at bay and helpless to visit His wrath on mortals. Only during the hours of darkness could He strike and slay, to avenge Himself upon the disturber of ancient relics never meant to be exposed to the luminance of day. Whatever perversity of greed had caused Don Sebastian to cling to the black obsidian tablet had placed him in perpetual peril all these years; and this was the season of the year in which the overuse of electricity, together with sudden electrical storms, frequently caused power failures—

Disturbed by these discoveries, which seemed ominous, Zarnak telephoned the town house of Don Sebastian and his niece. Some sort of trouble on the line had rendered their residence temporarily beyond the reach of telephonic communication. Zarnak went to the window and drew aside the heavy drapes: Night had fallen, and the sky was a sullen and sulphurous hue, wherein lightning flickered. The radio warned of sudden and unexpected electrical storms, which might paralyze portions of the city with the brief loss of electrical power to certain areas.

Zarnak doffed his robe, donned his coat and took up a slender black case that was seldom far from his side by night or by day. He then rang his tall Rajput servant and ordered a taxi.