Never more to curse her hive;
Walled-up 'neath the pyramid,
Where the sand
Her secret hid.
Buried with her glass
that she,
At the midnight hour might see
Shapes from other spheres called;
Alone with them,
entombed, appalled
— to death!
Justin Geoffrey
Queen Nitocris' Mirror!
I had heard of it, of course — was there ever an occultist who had not? — I had even read of it, in Geoffrey's raving People of the Monolith, and knew that it was whispered of in certain dark circles where my presence is abhorred; I knew Alhazred had hinted of its powers in the forbidden Necronomicon, and that certain desert tribesmen still make a heathen sign which dates back untold centuries when questioned too closely regarding the legends of its origin.
So how was it that some fool auctioneer could stand up there and declare that this was Nitocris' Mirror? How dare he?
Yet the glass was from the collection of Bannister Brown-Farley - the explorer-hunter-archaeologist who, before his recent disappearance, was a recognized connoisseur of rare and obscure objets- d'art - and its appearance was quite as outre as the appearance of an object with its alleged history ought to be Moreover, was this not the self-same auctioneer, fool or otherwise, who had sold me Baron Kant's silver pistol only a year or two before? Not, mind you,- that there was a single shred of evidence that the pistol, or the singular ammunition that came with it, had ever really belonged to the witch-hunting Baron; the ornately inscribed 'K' on the weapon's butt might stand for anything!
But of course, I made my bid for the mirror, and for Bannister Brown-Farley's diary, and got them both. 'Sold to Mr, er, it is Mr de Marigny, isn't it, Sir? Thought so! - sold to Mr Henri-Laurent de Marigny, for . . .' For an abominable sum.
As I hurried home to the grey stone house which has been my home ever since my father sent me out of America, I could not help but wonder at the romantic fool in me which prompts me all too often to spend my pennies on such pretty tomfooleries as these. Obviously an inherited idiosyncrasy which, along with my love of dark mysteries and obscure and antique wonders, was undoubtedly sealed into my personality as a permanent stamp of my world-famous father, the great New Orleans mystic Etienne-Laurent de Marigny
Yet if the mirror really was once the possession of that awful sovereign — why! What a wonderful addition to my collection. I would hang the thing between my bookshelves, in company with Geoffrey, Poe, d'Erlette, and Prinn. For of course the legends and myths I had heard and read of it were purely legends and myths, and nothing more; heaven forbid!
With my ever-increasing knowledge of night's stranger mysteries I should have known better.
At home I sat for a long time, simply admiring the thing where it hung on my wall, studying the polished bronze frame with its beautifully moulded serpents and demons, ghouls and efreets; a page straight out of The Arabian Nights. And its surface was so perfect that even the late sunlight, striking through my windows, reflected no glare but a pure beam of light which lit my study in a dream-engendering effulgence.
Nitocris' Mirror!
Nitocris. Now there was a woman — or a monster — whichever way one chooses to think of her. A sixth-dynasty Queen who ruled her terror-stricken subjects with a will of supernatural iron from her seat at Gizeh — who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the water-gates — whose mirror allowed her glimpses of the nether-pits where puffed Shoggoths and creatures of the Dark-Spheres carouse and sport in murderous lust and depravity.
Just suppose this was the real thing, the abhorred glass which they placed in her tomb before sealing her up alive; where could Brown-Farley have got hold of it?
Before I knew it, it was nine, and the light had grown so poor that the mirror was no more than a dull golden glow across the room in the shadow of the wall. I put on my study light, in order to read Brown-Farley's diary and immediately - on picking up that small, flat book, which seemed to fall open automatically at a well-turned page - I became engrossed with the story which began to unfold. It appeared that the writer had been a niggardly man, for the pages were too closely-written, in a crabbed hand, from margin to margin and top to bottom, with barely an eighth of an inch between lines. Or perhaps he had written these pages in haste, begrudging the seconds wasted in turning them and therefore determined to turn as few as possible?
The very first word to catch my eye was - Nitocris!
The diary told of how Brown-Farley had heard it put about that a certain old Arab had been caught selling items of fabulous antiquity in the markets of Cairo. The man had been jailed for refusing to tell the authorities whence the treasures had come. Yet every night in his cell he had called such evil things down on the heads of his jailers that eventually, in fear, they let him go. And -he had blessed them in the name of Nitocris! Yet Abu Ben Reis was not one of those tribesmen who swore by her name - or against it! He was not a Gizeh man, nor even one of Cairo's swarthy sons. His home- tribe was a band of rovers wandering far to the east, beyond the great desert. Where, then, had he come into contact with Nitocris' name? Who had taught him her foul blessing - or where had he read of it? For through some kink of fate and breeding Abu Ben Reis had an uncommon knack with tongues and languages other than his own.
Just as thirty-five years earlier the inexplicable possessions of one Mohammad Hamad had attracted archaeologists of the calibre of Herbert E. Winlock to the eventual discovery of the tomb of Thutmosis III's wives, so now did Abu Ben Reis's hinted knowledge of ancient burial grounds — and in particular the grave of the Queen of elder horror — suffice to send Brown-Farley to Cairo to seek his fortune.
Apparently he had not gone unadvised; the diary was full of bits and pieces of lore and legend in connection with the ancient Queen. Brown-Farley had faithfully copied from Wardle's Notes on Nitocris; and in particular the paragraph on her 'Magical Mirror': . . . handed down to their priests by the hideous gods of inner-Earth before the earliest civilizations of the Nile came into existence — a "gateway" to unknown spheres and worlds of hellish horror in the shape of a mirror. Worshipped, it was, by the- pre-Imer Nyahites in Ptathlia at the dawn of Man's domination of the Earth, and eventually enshrined by Nephren-Ka in a black, windowless crypt on the banks of the Shibeli. Side-by-side, it lay, with the Shining Trapezohedron, and who can say what things might have been reflected in its depths? Even the Haunter of the Dark may have bubbled and blasphemed before it Stolen, it remained hidden, unseen for centuries in the bat-shrouded labyrinths of Kith, before finally falling into Nitocris' foul clutches. Numerous the enemies she locked away, the mirror as sole company, full knowing that by the next morning the death-cell would be empty save for the sinister, polished glass on the wall. Numerous the vilely chuckled hints she gave of the features- of those who leered at midnight from out the bronze-barriered gate. But not even Nitocris herself was safe from the horrors locked in the mirror, and at the midnight hour she was wise enough to gaze but fleetingly upon it . .
The midnight hour! Why! It was ten already. Normally I would have been preparing for bed by this time; yet here I was, so involved, now, with the diary that I did not give my bed a second thought. Better, perhaps, if I had . . .