Empire of Fu Manchu

Somewhere in the Rub Al Khali,
Kingdom of the Saudi
May 11th, 1940


In his tent in the dead land of Rub-Al-Khali, Günther Duhrn slept and dreamt. In his dreams, he walked through a vast desert near the end of all things, where crumbling ruins of unthinkable age jutted like skeletal fingers into a copper sky and an obscenely swollen sun bathed the ground in a dull crimson twilight. He loitered aimlessly among the long shadows of broken pillars and gloomily poked around the fragments of shattered bas-reliefs with his booted foot. Somehow he knew that this was the land of Tasuun*, brimming over with memories, drifting sands, buried dead cities, dusty, mummy-infested crypts and necropolises of shattered cupolas. Duhrn had no idea how he had come to be there.

When he wearily crept into his bedroll at the close of another day of fruitless search for the lost city of Thousand-pillared Irem, Duhrn had planned only to make a foray into the Dreamland. Unlike the Nameless City, which no man had beheld and therefore was not in the living memory of men, Irem had been a true city entirely of the material realm. In ancient times it had sat like a leech at the juncture of the caravan paths crossing the deep desert and had grown fat, prosperous and indolent from it. Then some disaster , natural or man-made, had destroyed it and the sands of the Empty Quarter had covered it – but in the Dreamland, surely, there were those living still which had visited it, or even inhabited it: of this Duhrn was certain. He remembered opening the Gate of the Silver Key, and crossing the Temple of the Pillars of Flame, and also remembered clearly his intention to seek out the great port city of Celephaïs, where he would scour the taverns and question travellers and merchants, trawling for memories of Lost Irem, although nothing had come of this – and instead he now found himself lost in this ruined desolation under an oppressive and monstrous red sun, many times it’s proper size. And he knew not why he was there.

Suddenly he caught a movement in the corner of an eye: something had moved clumsily in a yawning black portal leading into the lower crypts of a crumbling necropolis. As is often the case in ordinary dreams, but rarely in the Dreamlands, Duhrn was divided into an unsuspecting actor and a disembodied and powerless spectator: feeling nothing but a mild curiosity, Günther Duhrn approached the dark maw-like opening, while Günther Duhrn tossed in his sleep and tried, and failed, to scream out a warning – he knew without the shadow of a doubt that some horror beyond human comprehension waited in the darkness.

He descended stairs that were hardly more eroded than when they were made thousands of years earlier, having been protected against the ravages of wind and sand and not used save for any number of funeral processions in long-gone and unsuspected ages.

Long before reaching the bottom of the winding staircase, he was engulfed in complete darkness, and the fear of the mute and watching Duhrn rose to new heights of frenzy. But the Duhrn that walked through the darkness did so with his customary arrogance, as if he honoured those crypts with his mere presence.

The whisper came suddenly, and made Duhrn’s blood freeze in his veins. It was a wet, laboured hiss, a stinking wet exhalation right next to his face. The thing that whispered in the darkness was so close that he could feel it’s diseased foetor, his vivid imagination immediately bringing to mind the most fearsome images of what might stand, or be otherwise positioned, right next to him in that black abyss. As cold sweat broke out on his forehead, Duhrn’s hand searched the hilt of his enchanted SS-dagger.

‘Duuuhrn… miserable worm… I know what you seek and what you plan to do with it! You go to your doom, and gladly will I hasten your journey!’

‘W-who are you?’ Duhrn asked, trying and failing to maintain a level voice. ‘And was it you who brought me here?’

‘It was me. But you would do better asking who I was – although my hate for you is without limit and I will not answer that question!’

‘Then stop wasting my time!’ Duhrn said, managing a perfect simulacrum of supreme contempt in his voice.

The thing laughed, a sound alien enough to make Duhrn’s hair stand on end. ‘Very well, I will occupy your precious time no more then, worm. I’ve brought you here to let you know where you can find Irem of the Thousand Pillars, so that you can complete your quest and rush to your private apocalypse. Here!’

For a fraction of an instant, a faint blue-green light flickered as a glowing immaterial orb materialised in the air between Duhrn and the whisperer, and travelled lightning-fast from the head of one to the other. And during that briefest of instants, that flicker of light between darkness and darkness, Duhrn caught a glimpse of what he had been speaking too.

He woke up screaming like a man on fire, sitting up in his bedroll, clammy with cold sweat. Try as he might, he could no longer remember what he had seen or exactly what had been said - but he did know where to find lost Irem of the Thousand Pillars.


*Tasuun is the creation of "Weird Tales" writer Clark Ashton Smith​