As he got closer to the estate, Timothy saw that atop the building was a big egg-shaped dome made out of green copper, and rising out from the center of this dome was a pole with a flag attached to it, and printed on this flag were two letters, F and M: the initials of Prof. Fausto Mancini. The moon lingered in the sky above, half its face obscured, like the visage of an insane and deformed moonchild peeking maliciously from behind a curtain woven from the void, while the stars seemed oddly unstable, as if they were capable of plunging from their fixed positions at any moment. Timothy tried to not let himself be distracted by all of this as he made his way to the mansion’s main entrance. The front doors of the mansion were tall and made of bronze, and Timothy by this point wasn’t surprised to find them unlocked as well. So he pushed the creaky door open and stepped into the mansion.
To his disappointment he quickly saw that the mansion’s foreboding exterior was much more evocative than its bland interior. Many of the rooms were bare, and what little furniture that was there was covered with white sheets. Even the walls were dull to look at, being mostly unadorned, with the exception of a few fairly commonplace-looking crucifixes. None of the lights in the estate worked, but moonlight filtered through the windows of the house, creating jagged patterns of light on the floor, the shapes reminiscent of the sort of geometric perversions one could find while studying the mathematics of Hell, and this let Timothy see where he was going.
He eventually found a studio, and saw it was nothing to get excited over, containing a few old art supplies and some stacked up, unfinished canvases that Prof. Mancini was working on at the time of his death. The mansion’s most interesting room was the library, its bookcases filled with titles that struck Timothy’s fancy: he spotted various writings of the saints (such as St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul and St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle), the Scivias of Hildegard of Bingen, books about angelic hierarchies and demonology, medieval treatises on alchemy, some of the theosophical works penned by Helena Blavatsky, and many editions of the Bible, some looking quite old. This library was testament to the legend that Prof. Mancini was exceedingly well read.
Also in this library was a fireplace, and hanging above it was a painting, one that was obviously the work of Prof. Mancini. This one portrayed a Biblical scene, illustrating Christ’s discourse on the sheep and the goats (also known as the Judgment of Nations) from the New Testament’s Gospel of Matthew, in which the Son of Man, upon returning to this world and being seated on his throne of glory, gathers all the nations before him and separates them, like a shepherd separating sheep and goats, with the sheep going to his right side and the goats going to his left, the goats being symbolic of sin and wickedness, destined for eternal punishment. It wasn’t a great shock that the goats were placed to the left of Christ, as the left has long been considered an unfavorable direction in various religious and mythological belief systems. One had to consider how the Left Hand Path of Magick was related to Hecate, the Greek Goddess of Witchcraft, or, on a related note, the Vama Marg of the Tantric cults, associated with women and the moon, the black twin of the Dakshina Marg, which was itself symbolized by the phallus and the sun. But Timothy realized he was mentally digressing.
Timothy stared at the goats in the painting, noting their slightly demonic appearance. Then he stared down at the fireplace, the interior of which was empty: even the ash had been cleaned away. He realized that if he got down on his knees, he could easily crawl into it. He recalled the final line of Prof. Mancini’s epitaph: “I praised the Goat upon my knees.” Maybe the fireplace conceals a secret passage, like in the movies. Well, I’ve come all this way, it couldn’t hurt to check, Timothy thought. So he got down on his knees and stared into the fireplace, but it was so dark he couldn’t see a thing. Reaching into his duffel bag, he pulled out a flashlight, switched it on, and aimed the beam of light into the gap. On the wall towards the back of the fireplace was a soot-stained stone sculpture depicting the twelve major symbols of the zodiac. Timothy trained the beam of light onto this sculpture until he found the symbol representing Capricorn: the goat-fish. Timothy reached out to touch it, felt that it was slightly loose. He gave it a counterclockwise twist, and with a rumble the wall panel slid away, revealing a darkened room beyond it.
Wow, an honest-to-God secret passage! Could this be the entrance to Prof. Mancini’s long-lost “Black Studio?” Timothy wondered, the surprised expression on his face matching that of Moses upon his encounter with Zagzagel the Burning Bush on Mount Horeb. He crawled into the hidden room on the other side of the fireplace, and once inside managed to find a light switch on the wall next to the sliding panel. He gave the switch a click, not expecting anything to happen, but the lights slowly flickered to life, letting Timothy see that he was in a small room, dusty from disuse, with wooden floorboards. At the other end of the room was a door. The walls of the room were decorated with a variety of framed paintings that were clearly the work of Prof. Mancini.
I’ve found it! The Black Studio of Prof. Fausto Mancini! Timothy thought excitedly. He began inspecting the paintings hanging on the walls, starting at the west wall. These were more Biblical scenes, only much more violent and morbid than those adorning the walls of St. Durtal’s Church, being representations of some of the bloodier and more disturbing events depicted in the Old Testament. One of them illustrated one of the numerous genocides from the Book of Joshua, in which Joshua and his army invade a conquered city and massacre all of the remaining men, women and children, blood running down the streets like a vermilion tsunami. Then there was a painting that depicted a scene from Exodus, where the Lord smites the entire first born of Egypt. Another painting showcased the ending of the Book of Isaiah, in which the Lord’s chosen ones are forced to stare out at the dead bodies of those who rebelled against Yahweh, these corpses being gnawed at by worms and scorched by flames for all eternity. Yet another painting showed a man holding a little boy by the feet and swinging the lad headfirst into a stone wall, bashing the child’s brains out: this painting was simply entitled “Psalm 137,” a Psalm Timothy knew by heart: “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” These paintings depicted a world governed not by the New Testament’s God of Love, but the cruel, bloodthirsty and jealous God of the Old, who spilled oceans of blood with impunity, whose Pharaonic massacres boggled the mind, a wrathful deity that the horror writer and essayist Matt Cardin identified as a chaos monster, a demon from beyond space, a monstrous alien force that revels in cosmic destruction. These paintings served as a reminder that Christianity, in some ways, could be just as black as the darkest occult practices.
Timothy then turned his attention to the paintings on the east wall. In contrast to the Old Testament paintings they faced across the room, these paintings depicted scenes of Hell, demons and witchcraft. One painting, entitled “The Cacodemon,” was a portrait of a large red monster with a spherical body and no arms or legs, its orb-like mass crowned with demonic horns, and located in the center of its bloated mass was the creature’s face: a lone green eye over a large gaping mouth twisted into an evil grin, this mouth full of sharp pointy teeth. Another painting was entitled “The Waltz of the Imps,” and it portrayed an army of green and brown skinned humanoid demons with glowing red eyes. These imps were marching through the quivering bowels of Hell, past morbific Mt. Erebus, the bodies of dead infants impaled to their cocks, while all around them the souls of the Damned were tormented by fire, ice and maggots. Another painting depicted a large-breasted woman, naked, lying on the altar of a desecrated church and masturbating with a crucifix while in the air above her demons were manifesting out of the ether: these demons were the size of cats and black in color, with horned heads, three eyes, forked tongues, and leathery bat wings, a host of pellucid spermatozoon evoked from the choirs of Beelphazoar.
What made all of these paintings so disturbing to look at was their almost documentary photorealism: there was nothing abstract or stylized ab
out these works, rather, like the images painted on the frescoes of St. Durtal’s Church, they suggested that they had all been drawn from life, from things that the artist had actually seen with his own two eyes. Suddenly, the professor’s relationship with Richard Pickman began to make perfect sense.
Timothy decided to explore what lay beyond the studio’s other door. So he opened the door and stepped into another darkened room. He found a light switch and flipped it on. This room was a little larger than the room he had just left: if that first room could have been considered a gallery, this second one was more like a proper art studio, with metal filing cabinets, storage boxes loaded with art supplies, an easel, and so forth. But in the center of the floor there was a large upside down pentagram drawn with what was either red paint or blood, sealed within a circle, and not far from this circle there was a red triangle, also upside down, and in the center of this triangle was a wooden stool that looked as if its seat had been scorched with flames over the years. Timothy noted that the easel was located within the circumference of the pentagram. In one corner of the room there was a large stone altar, its surface covered with a dried red fluid that had to be blood, along with a few stray red hairs. Resting on top of the altar was a wicked-looking sacrificial knife with a jagged blade, a blade that was also covered in old, dried blood.
Timothy walked over to one of the metal filing cabinets. He opened the top drawer and began fishing through it. He noticed a very large folder simply entitled “St. Durtal’s Church.” He pulled this folder out of the cabinet and flipped it open. He noticed that this folder was subdivided into sections, each one named: he saw sections labeled “Jesus,” “Abraham,” “Mary,” “Moses,” and many other Biblical figures. Within each of these sections were preliminary sketches of the character in question, along with photographs of the real-life parishioners who had modeled for Prof. Mancini. To provide an example, in the “Adam” folder Timothy found photographs of Anthony Moreau (the church’s sexton during the 1940’s), and within the St. Cecilia folder there was a photograph of Anna, Prof. Mancini’s red-haired wife. On the back of all of these old photographs, Prof. Mancini had scribbled in pencil the names of the models that were photographed on the front.
I’ve hit the motherlode, Timothy thought as he flipped through this folder. Henri and the SDACC would probably love to get their hands on this. Finally, he found what he was looking for: a folder simply labeled “Demons.” His hands trembling, Timothy opened up the folder. Within it were two photographs, black and white like all the others. These photographs, unlike the others in the folder, had been taken in this secret studio, the very room that Timothy now stood in. In each photograph, a demon could be seen seated on the stool within the red triangle near the magical pentagram of blood. They looked exactly as they had appeared in the fresco in the dome of St. Durtal’s Church: human faces and bodies, curved horns growing from their heads and bat wings sprouting from their backs.
With a sick feeling of dread in his stomach, with an existential nausea that seemed to taint the very depth of his soul, Timothy somehow knew, even before he flipped any of these final photographs over, that he would find no names scribbled in pencil on their backs. Or would he? As far as he saw it, he had two choices. He could not flip the photographs over and keep the whole thing a mystery with no solution, let it remain a ghost story and nothing more, retain the last tattered shreds of his innocence. Or he could flip the photographs over and receive some kind of resolution, even though it was a resolution that could potentially forever shatter his view of reality.
Timothy stood there in the secret studio of Prof. Mancini, his hand frozen above one of the photographs of the demons, unsure of what he should do next. Meanwhile, across town, on the ceiling of St. Durtal’s Church, Eve’s hand remained outstretched on the Garden of Eden fresco, poised to pick the apple off the Tree of Knowledge while the Serpent looked on, and even though her fingers would never touch the forbidden fruit in that fresco, of the final resolution there could be no doubt: in the end, the Serpent has never ceased whispering his sweet lies to us all, and few of us can resist the temptation to know what should never be known.
RITUAL QUEST
For Slimegirl
“The Great Old Ones may be called forth by the formulae of the New Age, but one must remember… that Will is not a function of the ego, and that any shred of ego or ‘lust of result’ attached to the Mage during their invocation will be pounced upon and torn to shreds along with the Mage himself. The Vulture upon the Tower of Silence will pick out his eyes, while his flesh is torn asunder by the razor-sharp beak of the Ibis of the Abyss. That way lies madness, and extinction.”
—Allen Holub, in his Comment to Part Two of Soror Andahadna’s The Book of the Forgotten Ones (The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1977)
“The universe is an iceberg tip jutting out of chaos,
drenched in dark matter.”
—Nick Land, “No Future”
Sometimes one can form a surface impression of someone else through the briefest of glances. And most people who saw Alex Vauung for the first time usually came to the kneejerk conclusion, based on his appearance, that he just had to have strange hobbies, like collecting air sickness bags or watching propaganda videos put out by the Heaven’s Gate UFO doomsday cult: he was the sort of man that made one think, “Now there’s an unusual looking chap. He must be a campanologist, or perhaps a man who knows how to best apply Yuggothian Matrices to the To-Gai Null Spaces.” Alex Vauung was indeed an unusual-looking individual, a 19-year-old man whose brown hair was done up in an exaggerated bouffant similar to the style sported by Jack Nance in the film Eraserhead, and his clothes were all vintage, threadbare-looking, ill-fitting suits from Victorian times, though the Matrix-style sunglasses he always had on when out and about did give him a sort of cyberpunk vibe. And he did indeed have a strange hobby, in that he was a collector of peculiar and obscure video and computer games. Not necessarily rare games, however: after all, he was a borderline destitute student, and often couldn’t afford such luxuries. His favorite type of peculiar or obscure games were generally the ones that fell within the survival horror genre, especially games that mined a Lovecraftian vein and that tended to include some type of sanity meter in their gameplay mechanics: to name just a few, there was Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. But even those games, cult as they were, had achieved some mainstream success, however small; still, Alex had managed to add games to his collection that were far less well known, and he usually found such games at equally obscure and unexpected places (such as Kirkbride’s Curios in downtown Thundermist, where he had once managed to not only nab a copy of an old, fairly obscure Commodore 64 game entitled The Silence of the LAMs, but also the legendary Red version of Godzilla: Monster of Monsters).
So one can imagine his surprise when he came across a copy of Ritual Quest not in the dusty, neglected and cobwebbed corner of some electronic esotericist’s basement, but instead in the bright and sterile confines of Data, Thundermist’s largest office supply store. This store was located in the big shopping center that could be found at the base of the hill that served as the home of Saddleworth Clinic, and other stores at this shopping center included a GameStop, where Alex worked part time as a cashier as he made his way through college. Sometimes during his breaks he would visit Data, mainly when he was shopping for computer-related ephemera. But other times, when he was bored, he would look at the meager selection of games that they had on display, and it was on one such night that he came across Ritual Quest.
As previously mentioned, Data wasn’t known for its vast inventory of games. They mostly catered towards the casual gamer niche, with titles like Angry Birds, Jewel Quest, and those generic dime-a-dozen “hidden object” games. Yet it was within this motley assortment of mundanity that Alex first laid eyes on Ritual Quest. The first thing that captured his attention was the game’s packagin
g: whereas all of the other games were packaged in CD jewel cases or DVD cases, Ritual Quest was housed in an actual cardboard box, like an Atari game of old. It even looked like an old Atari game box, with black being its primary color, the words RITUAL QUEST in all white-caps, and, in the center of the front of the box, a crude drawing of a red upside-down pentagram. Alex saw that this box was the only copy the store had, so he picked it up and looked at the back of the box. There were no screenshots, and aside from a barcode, the only description on the back of the box was these words: “okkvlt lo-fi witchcraft for the whole family.”
Holding the box carefully in his hands, like Dr. Simon Hurt cradling the Barbatos bat-coffin of the Miagani tribe, Alex recalled various half-remembered rumors he had heard about this game, mainly cryptic digital whisperings through urban legends websites such as Creepypasta: how Slimegirl Studios, the small gaming company that had created Ritual Quest a few years ago, had gone out of business after many of their key personnel had mysteriously vanished. Then there were the stories of gamers who had been discovered dead after playing it, and so on and so forth. And those were just some of the more mundane rumors. Alex had heard stories about how the studio had kidnapped a schizophrenic woman from an insane asylum, one who had claimed to have been abused by Satanists back in the 1980s, and, thus holding her in captivity, carefully recorded all of her rambling delusions, using them as inspiration for some of the thematic content of their game. Or the legend that the studio’s members were all witches who belonged to a coven named the Vault of Murmurs that practiced Dibboma witchcraft, Nma demonism and Lemurian time-sorcery, and how the Outer Dark witch-dreams brought about by their rituals influenced the game’s imagery. Then there was the even more far-fetched rumor about how the game had been created and distributed by a sinister and shadowy global network of cyberpunk-obsessed computer hackers, with the intention of spreading a malignant hypervirus and launching what they called K-War through the utter snowcrash of the American military-industrial complex: a Skynet apocalypse brought about by Generation Slytherin, A-death obsessed teenagers plotting digital revolutions in the Deep Web’s cryptoliths. All speculative nonsense, in Alex’s opinion. But the game was almost impossible to find these days, so he decided to purchase it and see what all the hype was about.
Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking Page 23
