Grimoires full of their names. Hells full. More. So many they fought each other over square inches.
Everyone in the building, all within a mile around the CDC, projectile-vomited in the same poisonous instant.
“The list of all lists. Eh, Adam?” the stranger said. He stretched out his arms, radiant in carnage and curse. His next words were, not from some fiendish work of spells and sullen demons, but from the Bible’s New Testament, with a smile full of irony, “Else, what shall they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they, then, baptized for the dead? And why stand we in jeopardy every hour?… The resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption.” Adam, in his shock, mildly reflected on the fact he’d never been baptized, unless one counts tons of water from the Pacific Ocean.
Adam caught another movement. Another figure. Someone pale, walking through one containment wall to exit through another.
Adam knew this person. My God… the first patient he ever examined, infected with the California flu. At the CDC.
But he’s dead!
Dead, and now gone…
The dark-haired man disappeared as well.
Adam cried for help, contamination alarms still going off. He tried in vain to open the door.
He understood that more than revenants had been released when those blisters broke.
And he wasn’t in any position to help a single soul.
««—»»
Laura quickly filled two suitcases with clothes, meds, gauze, anything she thought she’d need in her frenzy of packing.
“Marianna, Adam says we go, so we’re going. I don’t know…maybe the hills. Or a cave on Bald Mountain! What do you say? Want to spend the Night on Bald Mountain?”
The cat sat, purring, on her bed, not having seen her in four days. Not since Tuesday when Laura called the ambulance.
Laura—with her long-time furry friend following—went downstairs to Adam’s study.
“Well, where are they?” she asked, checking the desk and file cabinet.
Marianna meowed as she pawed an ornately carved Art Nouveau armoire. It was easily almost a century and a half old. Indeed, the notebooks lay stacked inside, the journals so large they resembled a set of Encyclopedia Britannica.
“He’s kidding,” Laura murmured. “How in this incarnation am I going to move them, then read them—F.T.L. or not. Marianna, flex a muscle! Never mind. I’m the beast of burden here.”
She headed out to the garage, a separate building from the rambling old house. The tree-lined street where she and Adam lived was never densely populated, but now…
It was full of very unusual people and animals. They all wore clothing lost in time: buckskin and beaver skins or antebellum hoop skirts; three-cornered hats or Civil War uniforms; or rags and slave chains. They were also emaciated, scarred with crusted sores, clothes stained with the effluvium of fever, dysentery, and internal bleeding.
Laura pulled her gaze from… Did she even have a name for them? Ghosts? and recognized at least three of her neighbors—including the lady next door who had taken care of Marianna that week—dead on their lawns. They bore the same marks of contagion as the oddly-costumed beings walking about.
Laura picked up her cat and ran back inside the house.
“Trip’s off,” she said, feeling the fright set in.
Part Six
The Myth of Reality
(Caught in the Double Helix of Too Many
Symbols of Death—Genuine and Pretentious—
Where Is the Exit to Life?)
————
“Religious man experiences two kinds of time—profane and sacred. The one is an evanescent duration, the other a succession of eternities…”
‘The Sacred and Profane’
Mircea Eliade
————
“Mortal eye…may not pierce the dark secrets
of another world, or penetrate the deep abyss
that separates earth from heaven.”
‘Wake Not the Dead!’
Johann Ludwig Tieck
————
Narrator
Circle: the fingertip of creations touch;
the press of nature’s kiss;
the third eye of knowledge;
the teardrop before it slides, first, into an ellipse,
second, a comet;
the egg which, fertilized, develops into savior or
serpent;
the mote becoming either shine or shadow;
the head bowed down over its crucified body;
the swirling song of hush or shout which invokes the
transcendental;
the dots for the ‘i’s’ in diabolical, justice, and
exorcism;
the clock kept by the blind timekeeper as she
walks towards the precipice above the long
lampoon’s expiration;
the persevering shape of nothing;
the entrance and exit from the prefigured
moment.
According to The Book of Jubilees, God sent the Watchers to instruct the children of men. They only fell (not literally as I have already established) after cohabitating with human women.
According to The Bible, God sent the Flood to destroy the cursed offspring of these improper unions, the Nephilim. (Word Nephilim not in Genesis.)
According to ‘A Genesis Apocrypha’, Lamech suspected that his wife, Bat-Enosh, was being unfaithful with a Watcher. She became pregnant and when he was born, it was obvious from the baby’s physical similarity to the bene ha Elohim that he could be nothing but a Nephilim. They named him Noah, whom God spared during the Flood.
Draw your own conclusions.
Chapter 12
————
“The dead travel fast.”
from “Dracula’s Guest
– Bram Stoker
————
The earth unzipped.
The phantoms of each man, woman, and child who ever perished from disease; every pack, herd, and pride, every school, every flock and murder, once dead, now sought to unravel from the clay; and to embrace their living kind as an accursed kiss dissolved in a pestilent wind. The oceans and seas burned with the red tides. Flora rustled and were purged to nothing by swarms of locusts, ants, weevils, beetles, worms, and moths both living and dead—finally only dead.
The haunted hunted, some with revenant wolves in their stomachs, others disembodied parasites hoping to leech a portion of the sacrosanct they could not possess in life. Still others meant no harm, confused as to this new condition of astral revival with yet bore upon the casual bodies the buds of fevers that had swept them away.
There was not a speck of earth where someone or something hadn’t died in the roughly 4.5 billion years of the planet. Even deceased bacteria and viruses hexed back from crisis.
The visible difference between alive and uncanny wasn’t usually enough to give warning of their approach—save for the slick pustules of smallpox, black and red sores, and cankerous rashes that obliterated all features. Abscesses shined from a distance, in the darkness, in the dawn.
But a fever might only make the eyes seem bright. A wasting made them fashionably thin, until the bloody cough rattled through those in their path. Rabies looked like nothing from behind until they turned, then turned on you with foam-flecked courtship passing through delirium.
Existence crawled by, fermenting in its failing nectars. Crucial seasons which initially passed away so colorfully now knelt before pale megadeath. It was dissolution by contagion, grinding blood and gristle from Being unto Void: the intrinsic cipher of the newly nonessential.
When the palm blisters burst, the CDC had four scientists in full protective blue suits working on various potentially hazardous projects. Hearing the alarms go off in Adams bio-containment, they had reluctantly gone to investigate the clandestine number 5. But they were unable to contact the number 5 team, nor anyone else for that matter. Since it ca
me from bio-containment level 5, the four were first tempted to flee. But according to protocol, the entire CDC was on lockdown. They had no choice but to knuckle down or knuckle under.
“Dr. Grigori,” said Dr. Rubenstein, “Paul Anson and the others are dead. Only we, you, the five of us remain. Even the lab animals have sickened and died. Even the office plants! The deceased display visible signs of numerous virulent contagions which appear to have been released from your level 5 area.”
Dr. Mason added, “The only one we think we’ve thus far positively identified is smallpox.”
Adam asked, “Variola or Haemorrhagic?”
“This is a mutation we’ve never seen. Initial stages amplify to mortality within hours instead of days,” Dr. Chat informed him. “Makes the India 1 strain look like a hiccup.”
“Vaccinia?” Adam asked.
“Zip. And from the lab animals the pox made a trans-species jump as if it had a vector wormhole,” Dr. Chat admitted.
“And you say there are others,” Adam said. Even though he knew who was really responsible, he felt to blame. Thank God, Laura left before this happened.
“Yes,” answered this time by Dr. Medveydev. “We suspect equally lethal new strains of Typhus, Cholera, and Bubonic-Septicemic-Pneumonic Plague. The Rickettsia Typhietal, Vibrio Cholera, and Yersinia Pestis are visibly different under the microscope. And these are but a few we’ve been able to isolate since yesterday morning, when the alarms alerted us that your BL-5 security had been breached.”
Adam paused, pulling his beard. He was unsure how to ask the next question without sounding breached himself. He’d been allowed to watch the news during his containment. From what he’d gleaned, the one source of death didn’t have anything to do with the other. “Have you seen anyone, anyone, who doesn’t belong in this facility?”
The four glanced at each other. They moved more slowly than usual, cumbersome in the gear they were understandably fearful to remove, plus having been awake for over 24 hours.
Dr. Chat’s expression couldn’t be seen through his faceplate. “Yes. Several intruders passed through.”
“And there are more outside,” Dr. Medveydev told him.
“Frankly, it’s chaos,” Dr. Rubinstein put in.
“Gentlemen, please. Let me out so I can help!” pleaded Adam. “I have no symptoms. My And none of the—intruders—have bothered me.”
The four scientists shook their heads. “That’s impossible,” Dr. Mason said. “You are the subject in number 5…”
Angry now, Adam held up his hands. “Look, the blister is gone! The sirens went off as soon as it burst. So, keeping me in here when the ‘host of whatever’ is now out is ridiculous.”
He wanted out, too. To find his wife. He needed to be with her. “Let me out!” He pounded on the glass. “Whatever is happening, you need my help!”
Intruders everywhere.
Oozing from walls.
Scabbed over.
In black rose rash.
Bleeding out.
Translucent. That state of being between solid and transparent. Spectral but visible to everybody.
Adam kept pounding on the glass. Why? To warn his colleagues? To startle the ghosts into fleeing? Let me out… His fists ached.
One by one the scientists collapsed, masked visors splattered with blood, pus, mucous, tissue.
No… Adam pounded one last time, then slid to the floor, defeated.
««—»»
Laura rubbed her eyes, reading book after book, seeing little that made sense to her. Nothing connected. It was all scattered pieces of borrowed knowledge, personal observation, and mystically insoluble psycho-babble prose. She focused on the next paragraphs.
One who falls at exactly the acceleration imposed upon him by freefall (gravitational acceleration) feels no weight. He seems to float in midair, to be weightless. Except that, unless encapsulated, he might experience the drag of air resistance. For free fall’s true sensation he would need to be above the atmosphere’s major portion. A sideways motion could alter the descent into an orbit. Yet orbits deteriorate over time, overcome by gravity, and collision eventually occurs. The greater the distance from the ground, the longer the fall combined with higher velocity.
Our souls incarnate repeatedly in etheric orbit, unless we have caused ourselves to crash. However, a body—or a perfected soul—may permanently escape the fall, providing it is hurled upward with sufficient speed as to reach escape velocity.
The body may never impact, barring interference by the gravitational fields of any other objects larger than itself. It may simply erode over the timely vibration of its own mortal molecules. The soul may continue its momentum into another dimension, another universe, to undergo a permanent intentional change into a being of its own Impulse.
(*Note, the nirvanic soul hopefully succeeds at the expense of the kinetic body, if the occasion arises. To be the reverse is to suffer calamity that galvanizes into executing an entropic chain reaction, which may damage or even destroy the laws of physics dealing with one or more universes.
– The Enantiodromia
————
etiam periere runiae.
Translation:
Even the ruins have perished.
————
Actium-Ac, Aluminum-Al, Americum-Am, Antimony-Sb, Argon-Ar, Arsenic-As, Astatine-At, Barium-Ba, Berkalium-Bk, Beryllium-Be, Bismuth-Bi, Boran-B, Bromine-Br, Cadmium-Cd, Calcium-Cu, Californium-Cf, Carbon-C, Cerium-Ce, Cesium-Cs, Chlorine-Cl, Chromium-Cr, Cobalt-Co, Copper-Cu, Curium-Cm, Dysprosium-Dy, Einsteinium-Es, Erbium-Er, Europeum-Eu, Fermium-Fm, Fluorine-F, Francium-Fr, Gadolinium-Gd, Gallium-Ga, Germainium-Ge, Gold-Au, Hafnium-Hf, Helium-He, Holmium-Ho, Hydrogen—H, Hydrogen-H, Indium-In, Iodine-I, Iridium-Ir, Iron-Fe, Krypton-Kr, Lanthanun-La, Lawrencium-Lw, Lead-Pb, Lithium-Li, Lutetium-Lu, Magnesium-Mg, Manganese-Mn, Mendelevium-Md, Mercury-Hg, Molybdenum-Mo, Neodymium-Nd, Neon-Ne, Neptunium-Np, Nickel-Ni, Niobium-Nb, Nitrogen-N, Nobelium-No, Osmium-Os, Oxygen-O, Palladium-Pd, Phosphorus-P, Platinum-Pt, Plutonium-Pu, Polonium-Po, Potassium-K, Praseodymium-Pr, Promethium-Pm, Protactinium-Pa, Radium-Ra, Radon-Rn, Rhenium-Re, Rhodium-Rh, Rubidium-Rb, Ruthenium-Ru, Samarium-Sm, Scandium-Sc, Selenium-Se, Silicon-Si, Silver-Ag, Sodium-Na, Strontium-Sr, Sulfur-S, Tantalum-Ta, Technetium-Tc, Tellurium-Te, Terbium-Tb, Thallium-Tl, Thorium-Th, Thulium-Tm, Tin-Sn, Titanium-Ti, Tungsten-W, Unnilennium-Une, Unnilhexium-Unh, Unnilpexium-Unp, Unnilquadium-Unq, Unnilseptium-Uns, Uranium-U, Vanadium-V,Xenon-Xe, Ytterbium-Yb, Yttrium-Y, Zinc-Zn, Zirconium-Zr
– Table of Elements and Their Symbols
————
Einstein’s unified field theory states that our compartmentalized concepts of Time-Space and Matter-Energy are not separate entities but are transmutable under the same conditions of electromagnetic disturbance.
Also (not attributed to Einstein) Hysteria-Dreams and Schizophrenia-Dreamless are not separate conditions concerning intuitive and delusional states, but may conclude in transmigration or primary ascension of the crocodile brain of raging primitive development into the ‘raison du coeur’ of the modern organ of imagination and reasoning that wraps within itself each ancestrally vestigial form of gray matter.
– The Enantiodromia
————
“Interferons are proteins secreted by cells which have been infected by viruses or other intracellular parasites (which may include certain bacteria, protozoa, and fungi). Diffusing to neighboring cells, the interferons stimulate the cells into manufacturing antiviral proteins, inhibiting viral amplification.”
– Dr. Adam Grigori, Unnatural Causes
————
Pythagoreanism For Times Deserving of an End
At the deepest level, reality’s nature is mathematical. That which is not part of an equation cannot be part of an answer.
Philosophy can be used for spiritual perfection. …If your goal is to be a hermit, alone in the cloister of a sexless universe.
The soul can rise, uniting with the divine.
…Or fall, expatriated from its own scene of release.
There is mystical significance in certain symbols. Freemasons are not free; Rosicrucians have no roses; the Opus Dei write no symphonies; illuminati glow not in darkness; Jehovah’s Witnesses ain’t seen nothing yet.
The order’s brothers should observe strict loyalty and secrecy. Someone snitched: the only thing irrevocable is immortality’s impermanence. Ingestion is the sincerest form of fattery.
All is number. Everything can be reduced to numerical relationships. Calculating the irrelevant is a decline imprisoned in amber.
The dependence of the dynamics of world structure is based upon the interaction of contraries, i.e., pairs of opposites. Salvation lies in information; what the Juggernaut sees the sightless may carry away as stones heavy beyond reason. Communicate renowned knowledge to me, then remove it before it retrogresses to mere belief and the sinister emblems of blemished ministers. Wanton quantum wets its beak on ad infinitum’s deacons. Chaos, chaos—as still as a revolution.
Containment: The Death of Earth Page 17
