“Like anyone else would have been, I was repulsed by Vor’s message to our people, which was, essentially, a warning to me to terminate my quest to piece together the long-lost religion of Atlantis. As you already know I destroyed this letter, but how could I myself forget this warning from the past? It wasn’t as if I could just erase this knowledge from my mind… as it is, I’ve always had an almost flawless memory anyway. I was facing the same conundrum that vexed the priests and scientists of Atlantis; knowing what I now knew, that everything in this universe is primarily cattle, how could I possibly go on? What was the point of living when our own lives were revealed to be utterly pointless?
“Of course, some of my skepticism still remained. It must be remembered that when one is in a trance state, one can believe anything. I decided to go about trying to see if I could actually steal a glimpse of one of the Entropiors with my own two eyes. But how exactly could I go about doing this? Realizing that the Entropiors use phenomena to blind us, I decided to conduct an experiment in which I strived to reduce, as greatly as possible, nearly all examples of outside stimuli.
“This is what I ended up doing. I’m sure a young man as clever as yourself has heard of the infamous ‘White Room’ experiments conducted by one Dr. Bruckner at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and it was a variation on this experiment that I set out to recreate, with the aid of my trusty manservant, who wishes to remain anonymous: for the sake of my narrative, I’ll refer to him as Igor, and no, he isn’t a hunchback.
“This was how it all played out: we converted one of my laboratory’s spare rooms into a spherical chamber which we then proceeded to paint entirely white, to create the illusion of limitless space. In a chamber such as this, no other objects were allowed, no furniture or decorations, so as to give the test subject’s attention span as few distractions as possible. Igor strapped me down to a chair which made it impossible for me to move, while earplugs went into my ears so that I couldn’t hear a thing, aside from my own thoughts. Waste tubes were attached to my genitals and anus so that I could go to the bathroom if the urge struck me, while various nutrient and water tubes were connected to my body, to keep me alive during the experiment. The final touch was an epidermal injection into my spine, which Igor was kind enough to administer: this had the effect of numbing my entire body below the neck, so that I could no longer feel it. It literally felt as if I had become a floating head, and I no longer felt attached to my body. Igor sealed up the chamber, and thus free of distractions, I began to concentrate as hard as I could.
“There are some who claim that isolation is one of the quickest paths to insanity. Perhaps there is some truth to that belief. Maybe I did lose my mind in that isolation chamber: I certainly lost all sense of time, all sense of day or night, even all sense of self. I was alone in the alone, with no idea as to what was going on in the outside world… and a few days into the experiment, the very concept of an ‘outside world’ ceased to exist in my mind. All around me was a void of white, with nothing to focus on—I couldn’t even stare down at my body thanks to the epidermal injection to the spine, and seeing as how I couldn’t feel my body either, I began to wonder if maybe that, too, was nothing more than an abstraction. It was as if my body had dissolved and I had become pure mind, an astronaut sailing through a featureless abyss; I felt as if I had become trapped in one of Hergé’s infamous white nightmares, the very ones that had inspired Tintin’s travelogues in terrifying Tibet. The boredom, as you can imagine, was excruciating.
“I’m not sure exactly what day of the experiment that the Entropiors first made their presence known to me: as I said, in that isolation chamber time was just a word that had lost all meaning for me. The first of the Entropiors manifested itself as a blurriness that I could just make out of the corner of my eye, to my left, though I was unable to turn my head to look at it because I was immobilized. But gradually this blurriness began to assume a distinct shape, and as it came into focus I could make it out in greater detail. It was somewhat lizard-like in shape, being slightly larger than a gecko, with four legs and a long tail, and its body was covered with green and black scales. Four wings sprouted from its back: a bat wing, a raven wing, a dragonfly wing, and an oversized wasp wing. Its head was essentially a long eyeless annelidian protrusion that resembled the prostomium of the oligochaetes, with a shrew-like mouth lined with pointy teeth located on the underside of the fleshy protrusion.
“All this time I had been so busy focusing on this one lone Entropior that I had failed to observe others just like it materializing all around me. Some were attached to my face (and presumably my body) like leeches, while hundreds of others covered the blank metal walls of the isolation chamber. Which, I suppose, made sense, as the walls were still made up of matter, which was what the Entropiors feasted on. I should point out here that though I could see the Entropiors, I couldn’t feel them.
“So there I was, paralyzed, unable to do anything but stare in horror at this most disgusting spectacle. How precisely the Entropiors ‘aged’ the matter they feasted on, I have no idea. But things were quickly going from bad to worse. It was as if large swatches of the white void before me began peeling away, revealing the Outer Church that lay behind it… as if our reality were just wallpaper covering up a wall of a haunted house. This was a most gradual process, but each new glimpse of this proto-reality filled my soul with fresh spasms of existential terror, until finally, the walls of my prison were gone and I was gazing upon what can only be described as an alien world, or dimension, one that was as fantastical and morbidly evocative as Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead painting.
“I will now attempt to relate to you what I saw, or rather what I thought I saw. Picture, if you can, a collection of asteroids hanging above a nebular void, while above these asteroids the sky was filled with giant holes, and within these holes were the compound eyes of enormous bugs. The floating asteroids looked as if they were made of candle wax, and they appeared to function as the homes of the Entropiors, and these asteroids were teeming with stationary bio-luminescent plants, along with skeletal towers that soared high into the air like extraterrestrial minarets, while gliding around the spires of these towers were large floating orbs of quivering, blood-encrusted flesh. For some reason, the song “Fracking Fluid Injection” by The Knife was playing in the background during this transdimensional travelogue.
“Floating in the center of these asteroids was a very large rock with a hollow center. Within this hollow center there was a large cavern, in the heart of which was a big crater filled with some sort of bubbling amniotic glue that seemed to be a lake, and hovering above this ‘lake’ was a being that I will now do my best to describe: it resembled a gigantic and strangely proportioned fetus, with a gargantuan head that was vastly bigger than the body beneath it. This being’s brain cavity seemed to account for most of its body weight, that’s how out of proportion the head was to the rest of the body. Its legs were miniscule and largely vestigial, while its arms were unusually long, with bloated hands and webbing in between its fingers. Its face consisted of two small black holes, while its mouth was a vertical fleshy slit, looking very much like a vagina. Its skin was of an unhealthy whitish-gray hue, and it was perched atop a large biomechanical surgical table (that was also levitating above the lake). Overall, the being had an extremely sickly and withered appearance, bringing to my mind the image of a witch’s abortion that had, through some hideous transubstantiation, metamorphed into a sadistic demiurge, a stillborn Spiritus Mundi.
“Jutting out from the bubbling liquid below this being were four pointed towers that resembled the sinking steeples of drowned churches. The pointy tips of these towers were generating some kind of unholy electricity, with this electricity arcing from the tip of one tower to the others. Somehow or other, I perceived that these four towers were infernal desire machines, the reality generators that the enormous-headed fetal being before me used to create our own reality. I watched in amazement as the individual Entropiors u
sed their fragile-looking wings to fly themselves towards the top of the floating being’s head, which proceeded to peel open like the blooming petals of some flowers of evil. The Entropiors flew into the being’s brain cavity and vanished from my sight, though after a few moments they emerged from the being’s vaginal mouth and flew down towards the four pointed towers, where they then vanished into the electrical storm.
“It was at that moment that I realized I had uncovered a stratum of reality that even the ancient Atlanteans, with all their wisdom, had been unable to penetrate. As I’ve already pointed out, they assumed that our reality was created by the Entropiors, and that our sole purpose in life was to function as a food source for them. But now I saw that the Entropiors were more like aphids, and that their true purpose was to drain energy from matter and ‘feed’ it to the being before me. The four towers, then, served as a gateway into the dream world generated by the mind of this being, the dream world being what we perceived as reality. The Entropiors used this ‘gate’ to enter our universe of matter, drain energy from anything they could find (be it human beings, animals, plant life, buildings, even the stars themselves), and then return to the higher reality, the void behind the rim of existence, to give the energy to their dark god. The Entropiors, when not engaged in this vampiric activity, would cluster on rocky platforms beneath the floating being, where they would then prostate themselves, heads lowered to the ground, and in this position they would wail prayers to the floating being, chanting its name over and over again. Because my ears were blocked up I couldn’t hear the word they were chanting, but I could feel it in my bones: and that mantra was ‘Abbalath.’
“I was now so overwhelmed by all of these alien sensations that I began screaming out for Igor, instructing him to bring the infernal experiment to a halt. I’m not sure what happened next as I quickly lost consciousness. When I awoke, I found myself in a straitjacket in a padded room at Butler Hospital, being administered to by a Matsu-Gravas GV-4 “Nightingale” medical bot, with no idea as to how I had ended up there. Later on I found out that Igor had delivered me there upon the termination of the White Room experiment, where he had found me ‘raving mad.’ And thus began a period of lengthy convalescence.
“I know what you’re probably thinking at this point of my narrative: that my vision of the Entropiors and my glimpse into the infernal realm of Abbalath was a mere hallucination, that in my isolated state, deprived of all external stimuli, my mind had filled the void with its own eldritch content. And that’s what I had thought at first myself, during my time of recovery. I had gone into the White Room with the intention of ‘seeing’ the Entropiors, and I had seen them… but what if what I had seen was nothing more than a figment of my own deranged imagination, an illusion generated by my subconscious?
“It was around the time I was entertaining these skepticisms that I happened upon a most interesting article in a back issue of Fortean Times magazine. Contrary to what one may expect from watching movies, life in a mental hospital can be exceedingly dull, and I passed a lot of time by reading. This article to which I now refer to concerned itself with a mysterious individual known as Dr. Leroy Jekyll, who vanished under very odd circumstances in 1973. Little is known of Dr. Jekyll’s past, other than that he served aboard the U.S. Navy destroyer escort USS Eldridge in 1943, when he had been around 20 years of age. That’s the ship that the U.S. military supposedly used in an experiment to render it invisible to enemy radar via a cloaking device created by giant electrical generators, but I’m sure you already know about the Philadelphia Experiment and Project Rainbow so I won’t bore you with the details. Dr. Jekyll had some sort of nervous breakdown in late October of 1943 which saw him discharged from the military. Following this incident he began to display a peculiar fascination with the subject of Time. According to papers left behind after his disappearance, he believed that we’re surrounded by particles of time, which constantly eat away at everything, breaking down matter with toxins. He didn’t view time as some abstract concept, but as an almost vampire-like parasite that was invisible to the naked eye. It appears that like me he too stumbled upon the existence of the Entropiors without even realizing it!
“In the years preceding his disappearance, he became obsessed with the idea of stepping outside of what he referred to as ‘the Circles of Time,’ as a way of escaping from the captivity of the time parasites, which he was by then classifying as ‘the Time Vampires.’ When Dr. Jekyll disappeared in 1973, his family discovered hundreds of notebooks in his home, notebooks that were filled up with bizarre-looking illustrations and alien equations that, to date, no mathematician has been able to solve: it would seem that Dr. Jekyll’s notebooks are the 20th century equivalent of the Voynich Manuscript. A few weeks ago I managed to track down one of Dr. Jekyll’s old friends, who described the man thusly: ‘I recall him being tall and thin, kind of a bookish-looking fellow, with horn-rimmed glasses and all that. But he dressed like a street tough. When I knew him, he often sported a leather jacket with the Black Panthers logo on the back: sometimes he wore a beret. He used to always wear this white t-shirt, and on the front of it was a message he had spray-painted in black letters: ‘Osiris is a Black God.’ He never really explained to me what that meant. His apartment at the Hotel Chelsea was one of the most far-out places I’ve ever seen: the space was filled with hundreds of clocks and watches of all shapes and sizes, some very old and some very new: it was almost like a museum of clocks, really. Heck, he even owned a few sundials and hourglasses. It was quite a collection, though the constant ticking coming from the clocks drove me crazy… I don’t know how Leroy could stand it. He had quite a book collection as well: he was really into the New Wave science fiction movement, a fan of writers like J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, Michael Moorcock… he was even a subscriber to New Worlds magazine. I believe he once said that Frank Herbert’s Dune and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker were his two favorite novels. He was always lending me these weird-ass books to read: there was one he lent me, Ballard’s The Crystal World, which I quite liked. And his record collection! So strange: he was really into avant-garde classical music. Cats like Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Tangerine Dream, John Cage, Stockhausen, Philip Glass, Terry Riley… Riley’s ‘A Rainbow in Curved Air’ was one of his favorites.’ But this friend of Dr. Jekyll was just as clueless as to what fate had ultimately befallen the man as I was.
“Perhaps Dr. Jekyll had found a way to escape from the shackles of time, the bondage of Kali… who knows? That doesn’t concern me. What did capture my attention was that the article included several photographs of some of the content of his notebooks. In one picture was an illustration of what he claimed the Time Vampires looked like: I’ve included a photocopy of this picture at the end of this letter so that you can see it for yourself. And Frederick, here’s the thing: it looked exactly like the creatures I had seen during my White Room experiment!
“It can’t be a coincidence… prior to reading that article, I had never heard of Dr. Jekyll and his time vampires theory, and I had certainly never seen that illustration before. It was at that moment that I became convinced in the existence of the Entropiors, or the Time Vampires, or whatever the hell they’re actually called, assuming they even have an official name. Their names are not important, what matters is that they do exist… that what I saw in that isolation chamber wasn’t just some mere hallucination.
“This left me in quite a bind. Even though I could no longer ‘see’ the Entropiors with my naked eye, I still knew that they were all around me, on me, even inside of me, going about their devil’s work. How could I possibly go on, knowing that existence was nothing more than a nightmare dreamed up by that dreadful and sickly being known only as Abbalath? Once again I was in the same existential quandary that had led me to conduct the isolation experiment in the first place, only now I had come to a dead end. Although I am an intelligent enough individual, I lack the sheer abstract genius of a Dr. Jekyll, who perhaps really did find a way to step out
of the hallucination. I decided my only recourse was suicide. Once I complete the writing of this letter and mail it out to you, I intend to kill myself, perhaps by jumping off of a very large bridge, or sticking my head in a gas oven. Though here’s a thought: my uncle Aaron, who was something of a Japanophile, bequeathed to me an antique samurai sword when he passed away a couple of years ago, so maybe I can kill myself with that. I guess that killing one’s self with a samurai sword is way more badass than jumping off a bridge, but then, I’ve never been a very good judge as to what’s considered badass and what isn’t. Truth be told, I feel silly just using the word ‘badass.’
“I’m stalling. Maybe because I know that this letter has almost reached its inevitable zenith. Anyway, that’s my story. As for the Yellow Notebook, I just couldn’t bring myself to destroy my life’s work, even though that life’s work has now led me to death’s door. So I give it to you: do to it what you wish. There’s a small part of me that feels a little guilty about telling you all of this, as I wish that I myself had never learnt about it. Though the more I think it over, the more I realize that it’s thanks to your insight about the ‘Flaw’ that led me to uncover these awful secrets, which led to my own dark awakening. So maybe this is my way of paying you back, old boy. Hope you’ll be able to deal with this knowledge better than I could. Well, it’s been fun, but if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a sword.
Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking Page 13
