Throughout the years he was allowed but brief and rare glimpses of the shrouded figure he surmised to be the abbot of this arcane fraternity. Never a word did he hear from that almost amorphous personage. It appeared that he spent most of his time in mystic contemplation. Then one day Brother Enos (as he had come to think of himself) was startled to hear the shimmering crash of a great gong reverberating throughout the nitrous low walls of the monastery. He knew something momentous must have occurred, and he half-expected one of the brethren would come to his cell to inform him what had happened. Yet it was with a mounting sense of alarm verging on panic that he roused to the bitter whine of the bone trumpet summoning him at the midnight hour to join the brethren for a procession down unfamiliar halls and ramps leading to an obscure quarter of the vast hive-like complex, the full extent of which he had never been given to suspect.
Butter lamps rested in niches along the halls, giving scarcely any illumination at all, though perhaps it was enough for eyes long accustomed to the byways of the night. The monks carried on a low chanting in some language that seemed alien to Harker even after all his studies. Once a great deal of this had transpired, the group, numbering a dozen or so, filed into a chamber that rose a good deal higher than almost any other he had seen. In the middle was a broad wooden table ringed with candles. At the center of this was a veiled heap of irregular outline. He wondered that the old abbot did not preside over what looked more and more to be a sacramental feast. Then he realized what the silken veil must cover. The masked hierophant had finished his business in this incarnation.
What would happen next? What was the nature of this ceremony? Was it a simple memorial, designed to speed the soul of the late lama to his next incarnation? Or would it somehow decide the succession to the holy throne? He would have to wait and watch.
One of the hunched, cowled shapes now held a book whose opened pages shadowed his spread hands. A new chant rose, this time in the more familiar tongue of Tibet. "Fly, fly, O Nobly Born, from this house of clay, and thou shalt behold the Obsidian Night! The Maw of Chaos! From it thou earnest; tend thou unto it! Know it for the Void of thine inmost Self! Skirt thou the perilous slopes of Sumeru and seek instead the gates of Sarkomand. Shun the ravishing sights of the Elder Deities, and know thyself as one of the Wrathful Deities." On and on it went, and Harker began to recognize it as a hellish parody of the notorious Bardo Thödöl, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
At last silence returned. Now the celebrant, having put down the book, held aloft the inscribed and rusty blade of a ceremonial knife a foot long. Others lifted up a section of the silken cloth, and the priest began to cut, to slice. Enos Harker grew increasingly terrified, sensing what was coming, yet unable even to consider the possibility with his conscious mind.
The gloved hand held out the quivering, putrescent flesh to him. with a few muttered syllables. Involuntarily, Harker’s mind supplied the gospel words, “This is my body; take, eat.” And be did. It seemed inevitable, and he even felt ashamed of his qualms, thinking of Father Abraham obeying God’s command to slay his firstborn son.
(As my employer related these shocking events, I could nor help but recall vividly how he had earlier required me to fetch for him the disgusting passage from the Necronomicon concerning the “corpse-eating cult of Leng.” Apparently he was quite well informed on the subject already.)
IN the months that followed, the destiny of Enos Harker was made clear to him. Since his return to the States, Dr. Harker’s researches had been devoted in the main to corroborating the secrets of his initiation from Western occult sources, and to finding some way of understanding them in light of Western thought, which again formed the inescapable atmosphere of his thinking.
First of all, he had managed plausibly to locate the mystical philosophy of the men of Leng as an apparent hybridizing of Manichean Gnosticism, which, as is well known, penetrated both China and central Asia well before the tenth century, and the shamanistic Bönpa faith of Tibet and Mongolia. This accounted for the strange, inverted parallels to Vajrayana Buddhism, which had largely supplanted the Bönpa in neighboring Tibet, as well as the striking dualism that opposed a set of elder deities with another set of wrathful deities.
It seemed that, on a penultimate level of being, higher than that of waking perception but lower than the Ultimate Oneness of the Void, there existed a whole geography of dream continents and oceans, with exotic names like Sarkomand, lkranos, and Mount Sumeru. It was from this strange realm, the home of the Ancient Old Ones, the Undying Masters of the Leng sect, that dreams and revelations came.
The highest point of the bizarre pseudo-Buddhistic cosmology was the universal void in which all supposed truths were revealed to be half-truths and fell away. Here chaos without form or name, beyond Namarupa, held sway. All beings were considered illusory, momentary refractions of this Bliss-void, which certain scriptures named Azathoth, others Achamoth, or Vach-Viraj. But there was a series of divine demiurges, half-real personifications of the Chaos to provide a face to whom mere humans might relate as worshipers to a god. Of these there might be many or few, depending upon the tasks and the needs of the time.
The most important of these were a pair of entities called Lloigor and Zhat, though their secret names were Nug and Yeb, and they were also known, when the stars were in certain configurations, which they now approached, by the names Klulu and Nyarlathotep. These were the avatars they would assume to ring down the curtain on each world-cycle. They might walk among men in human form, sowing madness and chaos, for these were deemed by them spiritual enlightenment* Nyarlathotep had appeared once in human form as the Egyptian pharaoh Nephren-Ka, while Klulu strode the doomed shores of Atlantis with the gaunt visage of the priest-king Kathulos. This was long ago, but at the end they would emerge again, Klulu rising from the subconscious depths of hapless human minds in a torrent of fatally maddening night terrors, while Nyarlathotep would come forth in human form again. In the meantime he would by no means leave his sons, the men of Leng, as orphans. In every generation he would live among them, psychically projecting his essence (or tulku) into a chosen vessel. This, of course, was the hierophant of Leng.
The indwelling of the deity caused a gradual transformation of the natural flesh into an exalted substance which took on more and more of the original likeness of the entity within, which was not to be seen by men. Upon the death of each vessel, the successor would be chosen by manifest signs. The sacred essence would be passed to the new avatar by means of physical ingestion. Then the acolytes would present to him the Yellow Sign, the Pallid Mask, and the Silken Mantle. He would pursue a life of telepathic linkage with the Klulu avatar on the Dream-Bardo, so as to know when the end of the age was imminent. The time had to be soon, for the faith of the cult of Leng, which had once (as they believed) spanned the globe, had now retreated to this single monastery, a predestined ebb such as occurs toward the end of every cosmic cycle.
There were other Byzantine complexities, such as the multitiered organization of the men of Leng; many of them were not privy to the deepest secrets and doctrines of the sect but acted chiefly as passive mediums for the voices of the Ancient Old Ones who made their directives known from time to time. The great revelation, which the reader will by now have surmised, is that Enos Harker had been chosen as the latest, and apparently the final, avatar bearing the tulku of Nyarlachotep.