He grinned, showing a lot of teeth. “Reliable sources.”
Lizzie thought about that, shrugged. “No great loss to humanity. He was a slimeball. Anyway, he sold the book before — whatever happened to him happened — and it went through several other hands. The photo of the book chained and sealed was taken by Ohan and used during his sales process. One of the people who had the book briefly, an Iranian, removed the chains and opened the book. He was a scholar of Sumerian and Babylonian history and had very noble intentions. He scanned the pages and put them on a scholarly site, with access only to select experts. His plan was to form an international team of language experts to decrypt and translate the text.” She paused and chewed her lip for a moment. “That’s where I came into this. One of my… friends… contacted me after translating a partial chapter. He knew that I was more comfortable with a variation of Sumerian used by Mesopotamian priests. My friend could read their entries, which were written in the margins as warnings to anyone who attempted to translate the original text.”
“I do not like where this is going,” said Bunny.
“No,” she agreed. “Reading the warnings in straight translation is moderately easy for an expert, but they are heavily couched in metaphor and symbology specific to their sect of the priest class. You have to get into their heads and know a lot about their culture and practices to understand the importance of the warning, which means it was written only for others of their sect to ever read.”
“You’re taking the long way around the point, doc,” I said.
“No,” she said, “I’m not. It’s important to know this, because there have been historical references to a lineage of those priests. I once saw a record that covered most of eighteen hundred years, and there’s one in London that lists an unbroken lineage going back to the Akkadian Empire, which was founded in 2350 BCE, and that list referenced an even older one that goes back to the founding of the Sumerian culture. If all of that is true — and I have reason to believe it is — then the priests tasked with guarding that book have been at it for nearly forty-four hundred years and, if I’m correct, possibly as far back as the Sumerian proto-literate period. We’re talking six thousand years ago. Who knows how much farther back it went before the development of cuneiform?”
“And what does all that mean?” asked Bunny.
“It means that people have dedicated their lives to keep the information in that book secret and have kept it sealed since the dawn of civilization,” said Lizzie. “And Mr. Church had someone named Bug — who I assume is your computer guy?”
“Yeah,” I said, grinning.
“Bug did a deep background on James Mercer. He is not European but actually Iranian. Not a spy or anything, just in terms of heritage. The Iranian branch surname is Mehregan, and variations of that name go way back, to versions established well before the rise of Islam. Thousands of years before, actually. So, Mercer’s family is very, very old. His branch has been in America for only three generations, but there is an ancestor of James Mercer mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the first known major piece of writing.”
“So… what’s Mercer’s connection to the book?” asked Top.
“The last known sale of the Book of Uttu was by a third party working on behalf of James Mercer. Mind you, this is stuff I’ve found out with help from some of my own contacts, but Bug was able to verify it. James Mercer purchased the book, but what I don’t know is whether he opened it out of curiosity or opened it because he was following some other agenda.”
“What agenda?” I asked.
Lizzie drove for almost a mile before she answered. The clouds were thick and gray over the desert, but it didn’t feel like rain. Just dreary and sad. Maybe ominous, too, but I wasn’t trying to spook myself out. Lizzie was doing a pretty good job of that.
“If there is a group trying to protect something,” she said, “it kind of suggests that they are trying to protect it from something else.”
“Yeah,” said Bunny, “but the stuff on that Pauline Index is mostly supposed to be naughty shit. Stuff the Church doesn’t want people to know. Like the fact that they’ve edited most women out of old biblical stories, and that maybe we should all stop feeling guilty and enjoy getting laid.”
Lizzie grinned. “Well phrased. Some of it is that, actually… and I may quote you on my next paper. But that doesn’t account for the Unlearnable Truths. Those books are flat out dangerous. They aren’t banned because they promote free and independent thinking, sexual equality and general tolerance. They’re books of very dark magic.” She paused. “If you believe in that sort of thing.”
“Keeping an open mind,” Top reminded her.
“Me too,” she said, though she did not elaborate. “ISIL killed the clerics guarding the book. Ohan sold it, a scholar bought it and began scanning it, and then James Mercer bought it. Not sure how he found out about it, though I suspect he had informants in the right places throughout various church groups and all through academia. He bought it, and I think he brought it to the Door to Hell. He killed two people and used a sacred knife to pin a key page to the body of someone he forced into the role of a sacrificial victim.”
“To what end?” I asked.
We passed a sign that said: Darvaza Gas Crater in Turkmen. Beneath, in spray paint, was Door to Hell. A small weathered-stained sign was hung in front of the words, partly obscuring them. CLOSED.
“Remember I said that the title of the book was incorrect? It’s called the Book of Uttu, but that was a guess because the cover is decorated with stylized spiders. However, the book is not about Uttu. Not really. Uttu, though a Sumerian goddess, was a benign figure. The goddess of weaving and of dry goods. In the translated pages, there is only a passing reference to her and instead another name is used. And that’s what troubles me so deeply. The name mentioned over and over again is Atlach-Nacha.”
“Who?” we all asked at the same time.
“Atlach-Nacha is a gigantic spider god with a humanlike face. In the stories, it comes from another planet and has become trapped here on Earth, forced to live in caves beneath a fictional mountain range in an equally fictional Arctic kingdom. Neither place is real.”
“You lost me on that,” said Top.
She held up a hand. “Getting there. Bear with me. In the story, Atlach-Nacha is trying to reconnect with her home. Not through physical space but via a spiritual pathway. Call it an interdimensional gateway for convenience’s sake. She is trying to spin a web of some kind that will connect Earth with her world. And — just to make this all even less sane — that connection will exist in a dream world, and once formed will allow her armies to come out of dreams and into our waking world.”
“So—” said Bunny slowly, “whoever cooked that up was smoking serious crack.”
“This is sounding familiar to me,” I said. “Dream worlds. Do you mean the Dreamlands? As in the fictional place from the Lovecraft stories?”
“Yes,” she said, as she pulled off the main road onto a side lane that curved around toward the massive firepit. “Though in the case of Atlach-Nacha, the story was written by August Derleth, one of Lovecraft’s friends. Lovecraft allowed and even encouraged his friends to write stories using the gods, monsters and locations he came up with. He encouraged them to create their own and expand it. After a while it was like people were filing field reports from other worlds. They call it Lovecraftian fiction or Cthulhu Mythos. And thousands of writers contribute to it all the time. Even Stephen King has done Lovecraft stories.”
“Yeah,” I said softly.
“When I spoke with Mr. Church,” continued Lizzie, “he told me about a theory that you all played with, that the pulp fiction movement of the twenties and thirties, as well as the surrealist movement of the same era, might have had less to do with imagination and more to do with people having visions of other worlds.”