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Appendix 5J
Transcript
Transcript taken from miniature tape found on May 13, 2007 in abandoned village designate “Dragon’s Nest” in Al-Anbar region, near Syrian border. Recorder was non-functional due to extensive sand and salt water damage, but the tape was salvaged.
(10 seconds of blank tape)
(Deep breath)
You probably wouldn’t like me if you met me. Not because I’m an unethical disgrace to my profession – there’s only a few of you who would even know about that – but because I just don’t get along well with people. That’s why I work alone. Which is part of the reason I’m in this fix.
I like to think of myself as a freelance archaeologist. Think Indiana Jones. He wasn’t quite as much of an unethical disgrace to our profession as I am, but he was pretty bad. Think about it: how much damage did he cause to that tomb in the first few minutes of the first movie, all because he was on a treasure hunt for that stupid little gold idol? Those traps were still functional after sitting untended for thousands of years! How did the builders do that? That kind of discovery – that kind of knowledge – is worth ten of those ugly little statues. But he wrecks the joint. And he’s our good guy because he’s out to put that trinket in a museum.
Well, that’s me. Only I’m not out to put that trinket in a museum, I’m out to put it in the hands of some wealthy collector.
Hey, I tried to do it the legit way: teaching classes, writing articles for journals, taking hours to brush the sand away from a single urn at a dig. The real thing isn’t anything that anybody would want to watch a movie about, but I loved every second of it. Still do, really. I could’ve retired years ago – to a big house somewhere tropical, not some tiny apartment on the edge of a college town – but I just can’t get enough of the search. The discovery. Oh, it could take years of research and weeks of backbreaking work when I was doing it the right way – there were never any treasure maps – but it was all worth it as soon as something appeared out of the sand.
So why did I quit if I loved the job so much? The pay sucked. I got a PhD in this shit – that’s right, I’m Doctor Unethical Disgrace To His Profession to you – and I made less per year than some of our well-heeled museum patrons put up their noses per month. I’d still be chipping away at my student loans if I hadn’t got into something that paid.
And it does pay. I know more than one rich religious nut who takes enormous satisfaction in gloating over the Fallen Idols of Babylon the Great. One even…well, treats them like Jehu treated the temple of Baal in 2 Kings, Chapter 11, verse 27. It causes me actual pain to think of it, but who am I to tell a man what to do with something he’s just spent six figures for?
More than one of these religious nuts has offered me pretty much anything I want in terms of funding for a search for Noah’s Ark. I could have milked that teat for pretty much the rest of my life if I’d wanted to, but I never took the offer. I’m a thief, not a crook.
Now I kinda wish I hadn’t clung to that last scruple. No good deed goes unpunished. I could be looking at aerial pictures of Mount Ararat right now and pretending that rock formations are petrified ship parts instead of being…wherever I am. I know where I thought I was – a sense of direction is a major asset in this job, especially the way I do it – but I don’t think I’m there anymore. I wonder if I’m anywhere.
Confused yet? Good. We’re even.
Oh, I know rightwhere I was when this whole fiasco began. I was someplace I wasn’t supposed to be, as per usual. In this case, Iraq. Hey, cliché or not, it really was the cradle of civilization. That, and as long as the rich nutcases are paying me for idols from “Babylon the Great”, I like to give them idols from Babylon the Great. Once again, no good deed goes unpunished. Anyway, it’s a lot easier to get in and out these days, now that a paranoid dictator’s picket fences have been replaced with nothing substantial. Chaos is easy to sneak around in, and if worse comes to worst, what Our Troops will do to me is a lot nicer than what Saddam would’ve done to an “American spy”, or what the locals would do to a grave robber.
So I’m wandering around Iraq – don’t ask me where, you wouldn’t know where it was if I told you. Hell, I’ll bet five-to-one odds that you can’t find Iraq itself on a map. Not even if it was labeled. Shame on you for that, incidentally. Our Troops are dying in a country that you can’t even locate because you didn’t pay attention in Geography.
Forgive me. I ramble. I ramble because I’m going fucking nuts. Or so I hypothesize. I’ll give you the supporting data for that hypothesis in a minute.
Anyway. Wandering Iraq. An area of Iraq that was disturbingly quiet and empty, even for an uninhabited stretch of desert. Quiet is better than too much noise – say, shouting locals or gunfire, for example – but there are usually at least a few critters in even the most godforsaken wasteland. Look at penguins. I was starting to worry that they’d all taken to their burrows because a sandstorm was coming up. The desert critters, that is. Not the penguins.
In any case, there wasn’t. Sorry to disappoint you, but there will be no “lost in a sandstorm” in this story. Besides, I know how to handle myself in a sandstorm.
Instead, this city just kind of appeared out of the heat haze. At first, I thought it was a mirage. That city wasn’t supposed to be there any more than I was. Admittedly, it wasn’t a very big city, not by modern or western standards, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could hide, either. Nor could you build it in the less-than-a-week since these military surveillance photos I have in my pack were taken (something else I’m not supposed to have, of course, but for once my patron is the one who gave it to me. What? Just because you couldn’t operate a globe even if you owned one…in my job, you need to know where you’re going).
The city looked like it had come straight from ancient Mesopotamia, mud bricks and all. Except there was no way in God’s Earth or Lucifer’s Hell that a real Mesopotamian city would be still standing, let alone remotely that well-preserved. If this was a touristy area, I’d figure it was a historical reproduction. But I think it’ll be a few years yet before Iraq gets its tourist industry up and running.
I went looking around in there anyway. It looked like an actual, perfectly-preserved Mesopotamian city! Of course I went in!
I didn’t look around in the houses too much, just enough to make sure no one was going to jump out at me with an automatic weapon.
I was safe. Whoever built this place, they were as gone as the actual Mesopotamians. Funny thing is, it looked like they just left. There were no fires burning or meals set out or any of that Marie Celeste bullshit, but the houses definitely looked lived in. There were carpets on the floors, tapestries on the walls, blankets on the beds, tools that looked worn by use instead of time – one even had a column of horizontal marks on the wall, like the ones my mother used to put on the kitchen door every year on my birthday, so I could see how much taller I’d gotten. And none of this was laid out like a museum display: frat-boy sloppiness, obsessive-compulsive tidiness, and everything in between were all represented.
I knew that if I started to examine those houses with anything like the rigor they deserved, I would never leave. So I kept walking. Breezed right through the marketplace, too. I was looking for the temple. My employer wanted idols from Babylon the Great (he won’t know the difference and he won’t care – as far as he’s concerned, idols is idols), and that’s where to find them.
The temple was at the center of town, just like it usually is. Even today. St. Patrick’s Cathedral is in midtown Manhattan, isn’t it?
This one had a minor, but interesting, difference from others I’ve seen: there was a stairwell in front of the altar that led down into the earth.
Of course I went down there. They wouldn’t put the stairs to a storage cellar in the middle of the temple, so I figured it was probably a tomb – maybe for the local high priests or something. There was only one way to find out for sure.
I was only a few steps down when I started running into surprises. First of all, the stairway didn’t descend through earth, but rock – sandstone, to be specific. It even looked like it joined with a natural cave just a little way back. Weirdest of all (but only if you thought about it), it was dank.
But I only paid attention to all of that for about five seconds. That was when I noticed some odd gouges in the walls that turned out to be cuneiform, so I turned on my flashlight and started reading.
It was a variation on the standard Enûma Elish Mesopotamian Creation myth, one that focused a bit more than usual on Tiamat.
By the way, if you just thought of a five-headed dragon from a role-playing game, or worse, a Saturday morning cartoon – bzzt! Wrong! But thanks for playing! Tiamat was the Great Mother in Sumer and Babylon. But we’re not talking some New Ager’s fluffy-bunny Mother Goddess who just wants to give everybody a great big hug. She was a primordial god-monster who “roared and smote” in the chaos Before. She and her husband Apsu were the waters that filled the Abyss – she was the salt water, he was the “sweet” water. Hmm…all life came from the waters. Seems that Sumer and Babylon were a bit ahead of their time.
Anyway, they did what married couples do, and they begat the Elder Gods, who are pretty much as freaky as the ones that H.P. Lovecraft described. Then the Elder Gods did what gods always do, regardless of the fact that their spouse is also their sibling, and begat some younger gods.
The younger gods were pretty rowdy – isn’t that always the way? I tell you, these kids today – and Apsu got sick of it pretty fast. So he made the rather extreme decision to kill them all. Tiamat wasn’t on board with killing the grandkids, but when they made the more-justifiable-but-still-rather-extreme move of killing him first, she changed her mind. She chose one of the Elder Gods (who were her own children, remember) as her new consort, spawned a whole host dragons and serpents and bull-men and lion-men and scorpion-men and storm-demons and other assorted monsters and demons with him (have to wonder if that counts as child abuse), and came after their divine asses. They were on the run, too, until Marduk, one of the youngest of the gods, said that he would kill her if they would make him their king. They agreed, of course – what were their options? Besides, it wasn’t like they’d be any worse off than before if he failed to uphold his end of the deal.
So as soon as they’d completed the coronation and the ritual to make the power transfer irrevocable, he rides out to meet Grandma. She takes the form of a huge dragon and comes for him, confident in the fact that no one’s been able to hurt her yet. Unfortunately for her, Marduk (who happens to be a sky god) has a new strategy: when she tries to eat him, he holds her jaws open with winds and fires arrows down her throat into her heart.
Cue celebrations: the New Order has triumphed over the primeval, shapeless Things in the Dark, and the world as it now is, with the gods that now rule it, can come into being.
You probably wouldn’t guess, just from reading it, how political it all is. Thing is, there were older versions of the story where the gods Ea and Enlil ruled the pantheon, and Anu, not Marduk was the one who defeated Tiamat. But when the city of Babylon became the political center of Mesopotamia in the time of Hammurabi, the stories got rewritten so Babylon’s patron god was running the show.
Christ, listen to me! Still the professor. Probably because I don’t want to think about it.
You see, that was as far as I got in my reading when the door closed behind me. Some big stone – I think it might have been the altar – slid out over the entrance to the stairs and just fell into place. If it was the altar, it must have weighed a couple tons. There was no way people could have moved it that quickly or that quietly – I may have been involved in my reading, but I was also staying alert for signs of cave-in – so it must have been a genuine Indiana Jones-style trap. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have a Short Round to trigger the release for me.
I didn’t panic. Yet. Well, not much. After a few minutes of screaming and banging on the rock and trying to lift it up out of the entrance myself, I pulled myself together and started looking around. Specifically, I started exploring the caves in hope of finding some outlet to the surface.
I spent the next few days wandering as far as I dared, always making sure that I could find my way back to the foot of the stairs. I was as careful as I could be with my food and flashlight batteries, but I was a little less stingy with the water. Partly because being stingy with water just doesn’t work – it just weakens you, and if you get thirst-crazed enough, you’ll drink it all at one go, possibly puking it up and wasting it entirely – and partly because the dankness of the caves made me think there was water to be had somewhere around here. Maybe I’d even find the spring for the town’s well. And if the rope and bucket should be down at the time, then that would pretty much make my day.
No such luck. I searched an area of those caves that had to be bigger than the town itself, but no well. I did find a pool, but that was strange in itself – I could’ve sworn that the place where I found the pool and its grotto had been solid rock when I walked past it the day before. That worried me. If I was missing things, or, worse yet, not realizing when I wandered from old territory into new, I could get lost at any time. And if I did get lost, that was it. I’d wander around until my flashlight batteries gave out, then my food. After that, it could take days of fumbling in the dark before I died of hypothermia or starvation (not thirst. Wet as it was, I could get enough moisture to survive by licking the walls). If I was really lucky, then I might fall down a crevasse or something. Even if it didn’t kill me right away, the shock, pain, and damage would really speed up the dying process.
Still, that pool was a good find. At least my water-supply problem was solved.
Or so I thought.
When I took a drink of the stuff, I spit it out instantly and had to waste a mouthful of my precious carried water to rinse it away.
It was salt water. Sea water. In the middle of the desert.
For some reason, that sent me running back to the stairway. I don’t know why. It’s just some…instinct, something in my lizard hindbrain, started screaming “Monsters! Run away!” at me.
I panicked some more when I got back to the stairs. Spent a little more time screaming and banging on the rock, not stopping until I broke something in my hand. I put my hand in my mouth, pointless and unhygienic as that was, and I tasted the moisture from the walls.
It was saltwater, too.
I was about to resume panicking when something caught my eye. I had carelessly tossed my flashlight aside, and the beam was shining on the cuneiform on the wall. I’d never finished reading it before the door closed, and I hadn’t wasted my flashlight on research since then. Something about it caught my eye now, though.
After Tiamat was killed, the younger gods dismembered her corpse and used it to build the world. That seems to happen a lot. The Norse Gods did it, too. Guess you need to dispose of the body somehow.
The problem with that, though, is that as hard as it is to kill a god, it can be almost as hard to keep them down. They don’t like to stay dead. Look at Jesus.
Pay attention, now, this is where it starts heading off in another direction from the myth I knew. Apparently the local priests believed that they had to perform certain rituals to keep Tiamat’s angry ghost from rising up and destroying the world. Some of the rituals were to bind her, others were to placate her. One of the latter involved human sacrifice. They’d symbolically feed her the victim – preferably someone who had “profaned the sacred” – by marching them into the “Mouth of Tiamat” and then sealing them in.
Guess this was a bad temple to try and rob.
I was admiring the priests’ clever little power play – think about it: they’re responsible for the safety of the world and anyone who complains is an automatic dragonfood candidate – when I noticed some scratches at the bottom of the wall, beneath the text.
I had to look closely before I realized that the scratches were cuneiform, too. They hadn’t been chiseled in, it looked like someone had just scratched the wall with a rock. It was hard to make out, but I was finally able to read it:
Marduk help us and forgive us. We grew decadent and forgetful, and careless about the rites. Now the Great Mother stirs in her sleep, and we cannot get out. There is nothing beyond the gates. We are in the mouth of Tiamat.
At first, I didn’t know what he meant by that. But I’ve had another day or two to think about it. I’ve done nothing in that time but sit here. I’ve been afraid to go back out into the caves again, afraid that I’ll find that pool – or that it will find me. It was salt water, after all.
I know that sounds crazy – I said earlier that I think I’ve gone fucking nuts, didn’t I? – but I still think it’s true. Thing is, something occurred to me as I was sitting here, thinking about that last bit of scribble: the younger gods made the world out of Tiamat’s corpse. Doesn’t that mean that someplace has to be her mouth?
When that thought hit me – and it hit me like an Amtrak going one-fifty with its horns blaring and its lights flashing – I decided that I had to get away from here. Just run into the caves and keep running. I might escape or I’ll probably die, but anything is better than sitting here and waiting for whatever’s going to happen here.
Only I think I may be too late. I don’t know when it started, but over the last hour, as I’ve been sitting here and trying to steel myself to make my run into the caves, it’s become impossible to miss: the smell of the ocean. Even worse, I can hear the sound of waves lapping on the shore out in the caves, in what I think is the direction of the pool.
And I swear that if I listen hard enough, I can hear something, off in the distance. Something splashing as it moves through the water, getting closer all the time.
Something very, very big.
Okay. Enough of this last will and testament bullshit. I need to get moving if I’m going to do this at all. Signing off.
(Recorder clicks off)
(Recorder clicks on)
(Thirty seconds splashing [?] noises.)
(Unintelligible screaming)
(Impact as recorder hits something, clicks off)
Analysis: This record represents our only known clue as to the origins of the paranormal incursion in the Middle East. It also offers tentative identification of several previously unidentified creatures from that incursion (see Appendix 5K, “Enuma Elish Cross-Reference”, especially the sections “Ugallu”, “Girtablullu”, and “Kusarikku”).
However, this record also casts a new light on the disappearance of the Iranian Kilo-class submarine “Yunes” in the Persian Gulf, the sudden drop-off in the population of Somali pirates in the Arabian Sea, the depopulation of no less than three small islands in the Indian Ocean, and the anomalous satellite photos that seem to show an unknown landmass appearing and disappearing in the South Pacific over the course of five hours on July 23, 2008. Not to mention assorted improbably-large sonar contacts, unidentified underwater sounds, and anomalous seismic activities (see Appendix 5L for a full list of possibly related incidents). Where before we feared a Kraken-level marine organism on the rampage, with a replay of the 1954 Tokyo Incident as our worst-case scenario, Tiamat as described in the original sources (see Appendix 5K) is a Ragnarok-level threat. Recommend implementation the Leviathan Protocols.
