So it was, that, only two days later, I found myself in a small laboratory, once again distilling liquids, preparing extracts, and readying tongues for my grim ritual.
My work went well, and I received regular delivery of fresh corpses for my tea-making. Who these corpses were, where they came from, or what happened to the bodies after I’d accomplished my dark work, was knowledge I was not privy to. I simply performed my responsibilities without question or reticence.
In my leisure time, Hugo and I would take long walks around the upper city’s jewelled terraces, and we would sit under blue lamplight and admire the bizarre, otherworldly architecture of the urban centre: the strange plasters and impossibly curved pillars composed of a seemingly ivory-like material.
Except for her brilliant mind and jovial attitude which remained stubbornly unaltered, Eliza Hugo, the young Priestess, seemed wholly different from the old woman I had once known. Her body, face, mannerisms, even her voice, were altered and alien to me now, which I reasoned must be the natural inevitability – if her outlandish claims were true – of her two hundred years in this strange country. All this despite her supposed death and burial in the soft New England soil, only scant months prior!
Nonetheless, I was pleased to reconnect with my former mentor, and as I grew accustomed to the strange rituals and practises of the city, I began to see for myself a future among the people of R'lyeh Nouveau. I even contemplated signing my name in Nyarlathotep’s black book.
What a fool I was!
You must understand! I never meant for things to go so far. I had only wished to break the monotony of my life, to extend my knowledge and the knowledge of mankind. Yet now, day by day, I was performing black rituals and worshipping dead gods, and thinking thoughts that would be alien to myself just one year ago.
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Only a queer accident woke me from my stupor.
I had been assigned a masked slave as an assistant, and one day while working in my lab, I instructed him to acquire a large box from its perch upon a rickety shelf. The man, in reaching up, stumbled clumsily against the shelf, dislodged the box, which fell heavily upon his neck, and he collapsed to the floor with a morbid thud and moved no more.
At once I rushed to the fallen man to render aid, but saw it would be in vain: for the box had crushed his vertebrae, and his head hung limp at a sickeningly obtuse angle, and I knew that he was dead.
And when I placed my finger against his wrist to check his pulse, and felt nothing, save the cold, clammy skin of death, the potent smell of embalming chemicals leapt up to stab and sting my reeling senses.
Suspicions arose in me, dread terrors flowed unabated, terrible thoughts I had tried so desperately to ignore, but could ignore no longer – my hands shook as I removed the dead man’s mask and confirmed for myself the horrible truth etched upon his face – the grim, cruelly twisting smile so familiar to Morticians, and only rigor mortis can produce.
Yes, the masked man was dead, and had been dead for a long time. He was the walking dead, a corpse-slave, a necro-servant, his organs extracted, mummified and preserved through embalming alchemy and necromanic art. And in that gaping maw, between the rows of chalky-white teeth and pale blue-grey lips, I saw a loathsome, fleshy stump of tongue, cleanly cut.
My madness broke, and as I reflected on all I had seen and done, an abject horror took me. I ran shrieking into the mountain-shadowed streets, and finally saw the city for what it was: a dead Necropolis.
Where as I had only dabbled in necromancy, the citizens of this unholy land were truly seasoned masters. Here they practised every form of blasphemy depicted in the Necronomicon. Their crops tended by necromanic slaves! Their perverse lamps lit with the oil of the soul. The walls of the temples were transfixed flesh and bone!
And that omnipresent stench of embalming fluid; so creepingly did it menace my nostrils, assault my sense of smell, and assail my very soul!
