Roger Zelazny - Creatures of Light and Darkness

Generations pass away and others go on, since

the time of the ancestors. They that build

buildings, their places are no more.

What has been done with them?

I have heard the words of Imhotep and Hardedef,

with whose sayings men speak so much.

What are their places now?

Their walls are crumbled, their

places are non-existent, as if they

had never been.

No one returns from there,

so that he might tell us their disposition,

that he might tell us how they are,

that he might still our hearts

until we shall go to the place where they have gone.

Make holiday and weary not therein!

Behold, it is not given to a man

to take his property with him.

Behold, no one who goes can come back again.

–Harris 500, 6:2-9.

Comus enters with a Charming Rod in one hand,

his Glass in the other; with him a rout of Monsters,

headed like sundry sorts of wild Beasts.

They come in making a riotous and unruly noise,

with Torches in their hands.

–Milton.

The Human Dress is forged Iron,

The Human Form a fiery Forge,

The Human Face a Furnace seal’d,

The Human Heart is hungry Gorge.

–Blake.

The man walks through his Thousandyear Eve in the House of the Dead. If you could look about the enormous room through which he walks, you couldn’t see a thing. It is far too dark for eyes to be of value.

For this dark time, we’ll simply refer to him as “the man.”

There are two reasons for doing so:

First, he fits the general and generally accepted description of an unmodified, male, human-model being-walking upright, having opposable thumbs and possessing the other typical characteristics of the profession; and second, because his name has been taken from him.

There is no reason to be more specific at this point.

In his right hand, the man bears the staff of his Master, and it guides him through the dark. It tugs him this way, that way. It burns his hand, his fingers, his opposing thumb if his foot strays a step from its ordained path.

When the man reaches a certain place within the darkness, he mounts seven steps to a stone dais and raps three times upon it with the staff.

Then there is light, dim and orange and crowded into corners. It shows the edges of the enormous, unfilled room.

He reverses the staff and screws it into a socket in the stone.

Had you ears in that room, you would hear a sound as of winged insects circling near you, withdrawing, returning.

Only the man hears it, though. There are over two thousand other people present, but they are all of them dead.

They come up out of the transparent rectangles which now appear in the floor, come up unbreathing, unblinking and horizontal, and they rest upon invisible catafalques at a height of two feet, and their garments and their skins are of all colors and their bodies of all ages. Now some have wings and some have tails, and some have horns and some long talons. Some have all of these things, and some have pieces of machinery built into them and some do not. Many others look like the man, unmodified.

The man wears yellow breeches and a sleeveless shirt of the same color. His belt and cloak are black. He stands beside his Master’s gleaming staff, and he regards the dead beneath him.

“Get up!” he calls out. “All of you!”

And his words mix with the humming that is in the air and are repeated over and over and again, not like an echo, fading, but persistent and recurring, with the force of an electric alarm.

The air is filled and stirred. There comes a moaning and a creaking of brittle joints, then movement

Rustling, clicking, chafing, they sit up, they stand up.

Then sound and movement cease, and the dead stand like unlit candles beside their opened graves.

The man climbs down from the dais, stands a moment before it, then says, “Follow me!” and he walks back the way he came, leaving his Master’s staff vibrating in the gray air.

As he walks, he comes to a woman who is tall and golden and a suicide: He stares into her unseeing eyes and says, “Do you know me?” and the orange lips, the dead lips, the dry lips move, and they whisper, “No,” but he stares longer and says, “ Did you know me?” and the air hums with his words, until she says, “No,” once again, and he passes her by.

He questions two others: a man who had been ancient of days, with a clock built into his left wrist, and a black dwarf with horns and hooves and the tail of a goat. But both say, “No,” and they fall into step behind him, and they follow him out of that enormous room and into another, where more lie under stone, not really waiting, to be called forth for his Thousandyear Eve in the House of the Dead.

The man leads them. He leads the dead whom he has summoned back to movement, and they follow him. They follow him through corridors and galleries and halls, and up wide, straight stairways and down narrow, winding stairways, and they come at last into the great Hall of the House of the Dead, where his Master holds his court.

He sits on a black throne of polished stone, and there are metal bowls of fire to his right and to his left. On each of the two hundred pillars that line his high Hall, a torch blazes and flickers and its spark-shot smoke coils and puffs upward, becoming at last a gray part of the flowing cloud that covers the ceiling completely.

He does not move, but he regards the man as he advances across the Hall, five thousand of the dead at his back, and his eyes lay red upon him as he comes forward.

The man prostrates himself at his feet, and he does not move until he is addressed:

“You may greet me and rise,” come the words, each of them a sharp, throaty stab in the midst of an audible exhalation.

“Hail, Anubis, Master of the House of the Dead!” says the man, and he stands.

Anubis lowers his black muzzle slightly and his fangs are white within it. Red lightning, his tongue, darts forward, re-enters his mouth. He stands then, and the shadows slide downward upon his bare and man-formed body.

He raises his left hand and the humming sound comes into the Hall, and it carries his words through the flickering light and the smoke:

“You who are dead,” he says, “tonight you will disport yourselves for my pleasure. Food and wine will pass between your dead lips, though you will not taste it. Your dead stomachs will hold it within you, while your dead feet take the measure of a dance. Your dead mouths will speak words that will have no meaning to you, and you will embrace one another without pleasure. You will sing for me if I wish it. You will lie down again when I will it.”

He raises his right hand.

“Let the revelry begin,” he says, and he claps his hands together.

Then tables slide forward from between the pillars, laden with food and with drink, and there is music upon the air.

The dead move to obey him.

“You may join them,” Anubis says to the man, and he reseats himself upon his throne.

The man crosses to the nearest table and eats lightly and drinks a glass of wine. The dead dance about him, but he does not dance with them. They make noises which are words without meaning, and he does not listen to them. He pours a second glass of wine and the eyes of Anubis are upon him as he drinks it. He pours a third glass and he holds it in his hands and sips at it and stares into it.