So it was, in early March, I set about to collect the materials I deemed necessary to perform the perverse ritual described in the Necronomicon. Many of the chemicals I had already good stock of, owing to my profession as Mortician, and others, including the standard suite of ether, and chemical reagents – acetone, formaldehyde, silver nitrate and sulphuric acid, etc, were easy to obtain via conventional channels.
For the acquisition of certain exotic oils, herbal extracts and plant resins, I made several discreet inquiries and was eventually put in contact with a textile importer who made frequent trips to Baghdad for his wares. I was able to obtain, by special order and at significant cost, the materials I requested, having deemed the locally available domestic equivalents to be of insufficient quality or otherwise unsuitable.
There was only one ingredient, the most critical and principal component of all, whose acquisition gave me shuddering pause: the ritual required a human tongue.
Many a night I lay awake, in fevered agony, torn apart by ardent forces, as I fought against all the ethics and principles that had been drilled into my consciousness during my training and studies. A human tongue: this represented, in no mistaken or uncertain terms, the desecration of a human body, not only an illegal act that would inevitably mean the revocation of my license and my imprisonment were I to be discovered, but also a frank betrayal of the oath I had sworn to as a member of the medical community.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Yet I knew, by nature of my chosen profession, I had amble access to that fleshy, muscular organ.
It would be a simple matter, little more than a single incision with a medical scalpel, made during or after the embalming process. The mouth would then be sewn shut, and no one would suspect the missing organ during the final viewing of the deceased in the funeral parlour, and the body would be transported to the burial grounds for their final interment without incident.
No one would ever know, I reassured myself, and in strictly objective sense, no harm would be done.
The dead are dead, and when a soul departs its corporeal host, the shed body is reduced to mere tissue. One does not venerate a scab, or clipped toenail, and when blood is spilled by accident or violence, that lost crimson ichor is given the same indifference as any other liquid.
Despite these reassurances, my nights were becoming increasingly haunted by dreams of dead places, and of dead things. In place of the mummified cave, I began to dream of inhuman and monstrous shapes, and the mad piping of a hideous, incessant flute.