Trolley No. 1852 Read Online Free PDF Page B

complete,” said I, looking around
but seeing essentially nothing save for the foxfire-like etchings.
“This is a queer trek indeed.”
    “It’s worth it, though.”
He tugged my sleeve just to give me a bearing. “Remember what I
said—the women are lookers. ”
    “Yes,” I grated.
    “Best-looking one of ‘em
all is the madam—Miss Aheb—though she don’t, you know, turn a trick
herself. I only seen her once but… her body… It’s enough to make a man bay
at the moon.”
    A cruel trust on my part but I couldn’t help
but rib my “Christian” friend about his continuing hypocrisy. “By
perfect, I’m certain you mean that all that God creates is perfect
and therefore exists in a totality of beauty, eh, Erwin? You
couldn’t even remotely be founding your observation upon the venal
sin of lust…”
    Erwin said nothing in response, until I
assured him I was joking.
    “Very funny, Mr. Phillips.”
    I chuckled over several
rude bumps in the rail. “But, excuse me, Erwin, did you say the
‘madam’ of the club goes by the name of Aheb? ”
    “Yes, a furren name, I s’pose.”
    Furren? I pondered, then, Ah, he
means foreign. “It’s actually Egyptian
and…” I paused in the clattering dark. “Almost
sinister…”
    I could sense him peering
at me. “Sinister? You should see her, man. Ain’t nothin’ sinister about her.
She’s beautiful. ”
    “So you’ve said. It’s
simply the name,” I related. “As you know, I was once a professor
of history, but my most refined field of study was that of secret
ancient mythologies. I’m referring to the mythological queen of a
pre-dynastic Egyptian culture known as the Ahebites whose cryptic
ruler was a notorious witch-priestess called Isimah
el- Aheb. We’re
talking circa 5000 B.C., Erwin, which pre-dates the first official
hieroglyphs by over fifteen hundred years. The story of Aheb,
though very obscure, was similar to the mythologies of ancient
Greece—Homer’s Iliad, for instance, or the legends of Zeus and Poseidon—only rather
than portraying the conquest of good over evil, we find quite the
opposite— fictions, I mean, written either to entertain or to fabulise the
inception of humankind.” I raised my finger in utter dark. “Ah, but
there are always those who attest that certain fables aren’t fables
at all, but fact. ”
    This, of course, I in no
way believed, but the mythology at large was one that had long held
my interest. Whose interest it was not holding, however, was that of
Erwin, who merely replied to my dissertation with an unemphatic
“Oh, uh, really?”
    I needed to put the
pedantry of my bygone university days behind me; after all, I was a
man on his way to a whore-house. Common working folk such as Erwin
would not be roused in the least by such an arcane mythos. It was
merely curious, though, the name of this “madam”: Aheb. How could
it not cause me
to reflect upon those fascinating older-than-ancient myths which
detailed the supernatural revel of the Ahebites and their
sacrificial reverence to an immense commune of limbless gods hailed
as the Pyramidiles? These hideous deities existed as but pallid
hulks of flesh, never moving, only thinking, only perceiving. The
Pyramidiles, yes. Their human agent upon the earth was the obscene
sorceress Isimah el-Aheb who had enspelled her people to bow down
to these revolting cosmic abominations, paying homage to their
nether-dimensional bulk by way of enfrenzied orgies and ravenous
blood-baths which in turn generated the psychical horror on which
these gods so thrived; indeed, it was the carnally beauteous
el-Aheb who orchestrated rampant earthly horror in veneration; and
to whom the Pyramidiles had blasphemously blessed with the gift of
immortality via the sickish mold-green tincture that was but one of
their wicked secrets. To her also they’d whispered their arcane
manner of writing: a form of gematria, the substitution of numbers
for letters. Once learned of all the