Weirdbook 31

by Doug Draa

  “I’m sorry, Mr Wizacki,” I murmured.

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “You did a good job. You, too, Chief. This town needs men like you. Listen, guys, I don’t want this business blown up in a courtroom. Not good for the family name. Hell, I’m no saint, but I’ve got plans—nice plans—for the city. It wouldn’t be a good time for my family to be dragged through the mud. I’m sure you can dispose of that sack of turds, eh? I’ll lay on a decent funeral for my kid. I’ll think up something for his death. You guys just forget the whole affair.”

  The Chief nodded understandingly. The Mayor turned to the tiny figure beside me and shook him by the hand. “Listen, Mr Halmosi, tell your boss that his carnival can have the run of New York for as long as he wants. You get any kind of trouble, you talk to me. Understand?”

  The Dokta grinned his best Hungarian grin and it followed the Mayor all the way out of the door. “We owe you many thanks,” he said to me. “We have rid ourselves of a terrible enemy, and we would like to repay you, Mr Stone. How can we do this?”

  I went to the coffin. “The lance,” I said. “Is it safe to remove it?”

  The Dokta nodded. “Urruzaal is trapped in the body, held there by the sigils and spells that we have painted over the flesh of his host. You desire the lance?”

  “You never know when these things will come in useful.”

  NecRomance, by Frederick J. Mayer

  Dedicated to Clark Ashton Smith

  “A Lost Chapter From The Book Of Eibon”

  Barbarian horde of near hairless

  paleful skin

  over running even mountain cold

  wasted lands

  their scything sharp abyss kissing swords

  found within

  even Sfatlicllp’s own consorts from

  Voormis clans.

  Hyperborean lords near fearless

  baleful in

  this on-going slaughter oh so bold

  by these bands

  their birth unknown but that towards

  evening sin…

  Ebonian crystal sorceress

  KuMiHo

  owner says “dead will of you cuckold”

  necromance

  spells and philtres of desire dark lore

  ever so

  said of hearts eaten protection from

  such sex dance.

  Beastian plants sup cannibal flesh

  of Tcho

  consummate grimore knowledge old

  and by chance

  gain anthropophagic made force for

  attack blow

  Homofloran man forms early this

  night now are

  more human than mandrake design told

  go to East

  from setting sun take devour that shore

  mind guide Zhar

  be yours given cosmic “steel” to come

  kill & feast.

  Guardian of garden of Eden bliss

  under Star

  Infernal as flower evil sowed

  is as least

  fire fruit flora meretrix faithful swore

  lovers are…

  Euglenans close house of black gneiss

  mage therein

  Eibon in rapture female cajoled

  darkly sans

  live concubine carcass leans forwards

  ghoulish grin

  forbidden fruit tells scourge source comes from

  offers plans.

  Mhu Thulan magician knows coitus

  scheme given

  dire incantations romancing mold

  lewd commands

  ebullient sorcery shield wards

  now begin

  Stygian expulsion Eucharist

  eat to go

  teraphim necrophilic hold

  cracked monstrance

  deviant genomic predator

  free from so

  exorcist Quachil Uttaus come

  age vengeance.

  Black barbaric blossoms’ detritus

  roots of foe

  decomposing bile weapons corrode

  bane silence

  deflowering expelling no more

  dust below.

  THE MUSIC OF BLEAK ENTRAINMENT, by Gary A. Braunbeck

  You should see the expression on your face right now—all the trouble you’ve been through in order to get the clearance to interview me, and I start off by talking about household appliances and math instead of those twelve people I killed. Not that anyone gives more of damn about them now than they did ten years ago—after all, what’d the world lose? A dozen mental patients who were a drain on society’s pocketbook. None of them were ever going to be released, they were lifers, and as far as I ever knew none of them had any living family.

  Huh? Do I feel bad about it? What the fuck kind of Journalism 101 question is that? No, I don’t feel bad—I feel horrible about it. You weren’t there, you didn’t see those faces, those eyes…Christ. Those lonely, isolated, frightened eyes.

  You want to know something that the news reports back then never mentioned? Not a one of them tried to run away, to get to safety. It was like shooting tin ducks at a carnival booth. Hell, some of them seemed to welcome it.

  I tried to explain everything to the authorities at the time but I was pretty…out of control. No, wait, scratch that—I was so fucking scared it was like I wasn’t even me any longer, I was trapped somewhere inside myself just watching it all happen and…ah, never mind. But I’ll tell you the same thing I told my lawyer and the court—I was not insane. Not for one second.

  As you can tell from our posh surroundings and this lovely canvas jacket with the wraparound arms that I’m sporting, they didn’t believe me.

  Look, it all started because Steve and I got this idea about using entrainment to visually illustrate how the human body can—

  —excuse me? Oh, sorry.

  It’s been proven that externally-imposed sound vibrations can have a profound influence on our physiology. We’ve all experienced this phenomenon—it’s called entrainment. Say you’re sitting in your kitchen trying to balance your checkbook and you begin to notice that your shoulders are hunched up and your back is tighter than normal. Suddenly the refrigerator snaps off and you heave a sigh of relief. Your shoulders drop, your back loosens up, and your whole breathing pattern changes. What do you think just happened? Certain biological rhythms have unconsciously “entrained” themselves to the 60 cycle hum of the refrigerator’s motor.

  Right—sound caused your body to temporarily alter itself from within.

  Think you can bear with me for a minute or two while I bore you with some specifics?

  No, Steve was the Music major. I was the Physics dude.

  I was doing some research into the work of Hans Jenny. He was a Swiss doctor, artist, and researcher who helped pioneer the field of Cymatics—which is basically a very specified and intensely focused form of entrainment, geared toward using sound and vibrational waves to heal the human body. He followed the work of a German physicist and acoustician named Ernst Chladni who, toward the end of the 18th Century, created intricate sand patterns by vibrating a steel plate with a violin bow. Jenny employed the modern technology of the day to carry out more precisely replicable experiments. He used a sine wave generator and a speaker to vibrate various powders, pastes, and liquids, and succeeded in making visible the subtle power through which sound physically structures matter.

  Now, imagine hearing a tone, and watching as sound waves involute an inert blob of kaolin paste, animating it through various phases in a nearly perfect replica of cellular division—or watching as a pile of sand is transformed into life-like flowing patterns, mirroring fractals—the symmetrical geometric forms found in nature—simply by audible vibrat
ion.

  Jenny described our bodies as being “nested hierarchies of vibrational frequencies” which appear as discreet systems functioning within larger, more complicated systems, which themselves are contained within even larger and more complex vibrational structures, right? All physical existence is determined by vibrational frequencies and their formative effects on matter.

  You can view the whole universe in this way, from sub-atomic particles to the most intricate life forms, to the nebulae and galaxies themselves—all are resonating fields of pulsating energy in constant interaction with one another. The science of it all aside, I find it profoundly moving to think that sound in all its forms might very well be the glue that holds our consensual reality together.

  I was really excited about this when I was explaining it to Steve, and I didn’t want to bore him, so I started putting it in musical terms. The universe exists—beneath all or most other layers of perception—as essentially a vibrating-string note among a wild symphony of equally vibrating harmonic or non-harmonic quantum notes being played on similar strings—

  —yes, like an orchestra. Exactly like an orchestra.

  Steve asked me if it were possible to show him how this process worked, so he and I repeated one of Jenny’s early experiments. We placed a small wooden ring containing about 20 cc. of kaolin paste on top of a magnifying lens, then attached a crystal to the lens and applied a small sound current, creating a specific vibration…which can vary, depending upon the frequency or the current if you apply electricity directly. Just as a speaker vibrates, displacing air and creating specific sound waves according to the frequencies it’s subjected to, the vibrating crystal transmitted its oscillations from the sound current frequencies, through the lens, and directly into the paste sample. Light was projected up from beneath the lens, through the paste, and into a camera lens looking down from above. I was able to photograph the disturbances—the standing wave patterns—created in the paste as it vibrated in response to the sine waves—the music—to which it was subjected. Steve played some of his recent composition on the cello, which was attached to the lens by a string of piano wire. A bit on the primitive side, I admit, but effective nonetheless. The moment was captured, then it was just a simple matter of instantly freezing the shape the paste assumed and encasing it in amber.

  No, we didn’t freeze sound, we froze a specific instance of sound physically altering matter.

  The next thing we did was even simpler. We ran the music through a basic computer visualizing program—you know, one of those extras that come bundled in with music playing software? Right. We decided to use the Fractal Pattern option, and I gotta tell you, the flow of images that accompanied the music was quite lovely. So now we had both the music and the fractal visualization for sensory input.

  This really got us both going.

  Steve had just finished a new composition—he hadn’t given it a title yet, he always sucked at titles, anyway—but he was stressing over it because something was missing. He kept lamenting how it was impossible to gauge a person’s emotional reaction to music, aside from what they themselves would tell you after hearing it.

  I thought of Jenny and Chladni.

  I thought of all the Cymatic equipment gathering dust in the Bioacoustics Department.

  And I thought about how both Steve and I were in danger of losing our scholarships if we didn’t come up with a term-end project that would floor everyone.

  Have you heard the piece of music that Steve composed for the initial phase of the experiment? No? Too bad—it’s a beautiful piece of work.

  It begins with an acoustic guitar rhythmically picking out four simple notes, the sound of raindrops pinging against a cold autumn window, four austere notes that remain constant and never change, then builds in musical and emotional intensity, culminating in a three-minute finale where the guitar is joined and then replaced by an orchestra whose individual instruments compliment the underlying four-note foundation in the same way that wind, thunder, and lightning accompany a sudden spring downpour. The music is both glorious and sad, tinged at the edges with a certain disquieting darkness, an unnamable fear that we all experience during strong storms; as this section nears its end the four-note foundation suddenly stops, leaving only the melancholy musings of the other instruments, which mix into one another like the stray thoughts of one for whom the rhythm of the rain brings a sense of peace, but when robbed of that rhythm, when finding there is no longer the hypnotic pinging of those raindrops against the cold autumn window, is left to their own devices, slowly succumbing to the sadness and disquieting fear that that the sound of the rain had helped them avoid facing. In these final moments one could close one’s eyes and easily picture the drab grey sky and the cheerless, soaked, bleak world.

  Initially, we decided to use individuals, people we knew. They’d come into one of the acoustically-tiled rehearsal rooms and sit in a chair, I’d hook them up to the EKG and EEG machines, and then Steve would play a recording of the piece for them while the fractal program was projected through an LCD screen. The EKG and EEG machines would measure their physiological reactions during the music while watching the LCD, and that was the extent of their participation.

  After three or four people had done this, both Steve and I realized that, well, most of our friends had high blood pressure, for one thing, but more than that, there was no way to holistically quantify the results—at least, not the way we were doing it. All we had was a series of readouts to show how these people’s bodies reacted to the music, nothing to prove that Cymatic theory was even applicable.

  Then Steve got this bright idea about incorporating synthesizers into the experiment. I had to do a lot of begging and fast talking to the Bioacoustics Department heads, and I have no idea what Steve said to the bigwigs of the Music Department, but we were both given access to the equipment we needed.

  I got the use of an EEG—and EKG-measurement/interpreter that served as a conduit between the EEG and EKG machines and the synthesizer bank. The M/I had once been used for Cymatic experimentation—specifically the direct estimations of the main parameters of neurons—time constant of integration, level of internal noise, etc.—received by the cells, or for our purposes, the auditory reactions located on different levels—or in this case, the subjects—hooked up to the system.

  I’m sorry, I’m getting off on a technical tangent. I’ll try to put it in simpler terms, but I make no promises. After all, I’m crazy, aren’t I?

  The basic experiment remained unchanged. A subject would come into one of the rooms and we’d hook them up to the EEG and EKG machines and then have them listen to the music and watch the fractal program, only instead of just getting a simple readout of their physiological reactions during the music, those reactions were filtered through the M/I into the synthesizer’s computer where they were interpreted as an actual auditory event.

  The computer then took all of this catalogued information and fed it into the output ports of the synthesizer banks, which—employing the information received from the M/I—assigned each set of recorded physiological reactions a specific musical scale, as well as a virtual instrument to play the individual notes within that scale.

  This took all of maybe forty minutes—the piece was short, otherwise we’d’ve been looking at days, even weeks, of data processing. Anyway, the person was asked to come back in an hour, and when they did, they got to listen to a musical interpretation of their physiological reaction to the original piece of music, as well as watch a visual representation of those physiological reactions.

  Steve and I were both stunned that it worked.

  So we took it a step further. After we’d done this with half a dozen test subjects, we decided, just for shits and giggles, to play all six reaction pieces simultaneously. Now, all of them were in the same key—the computer had been programmed to make certain of that—but that’s where any similarities in the pieces should
have ended. But that wasn’t the case.

  Incredible as it sounds, when all six of those reaction recordings were played back simultaneously, they fit together. It was as if someone had taken a pre-existing piece of music and broken it up into six isolated parts. Individually, these six reaction recordings were pleasant enough, okay? No real melody to speak of, but not discordant, either. Each one was like a musical tone poem.

  But when we combined them, they created an almost complete piece of music.

  Are you getting this, Miss Reporter? Think about everything I’ve told you up to this point and apply it to those results.

  All consciousness is connected as a primary wavefront phenomenon that allows us not only to resonate to such notes, but to play a few of our own back here where we sit among the other quantum woodwinds!

  Which means, like it or not, that there exists some base wavefront to which all others are connected. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it God, but…it gave me pause, that’s for certain.

  But it didn’t stop there. We noticed there were sounds on the periphery of the music, soft chattering noises, so Steve made a master recording and started to isolate the sounds. It never occurred to us to play it with the visualization program—we were too excited about the music and the sounds. Maybe if it had occurred to us to run it with the fractal program, thing would’ve…never mind. Shoulda-woulda-coulda. You could make yourself crazy cataloguing all the what-ifs.

  So we started concentrating on the Cymatic side of the experiment. If these wavefronts, these vibrational frequencies, could also be employed to heal the body, then why not go for it? We’d proven—at least to ourselves—that there was a definite structure underneath all of this, so the question became, how do we apply it?

  We didn’t have to wait too long for our answer. Of the six people who participated in the original phase of the experiment, four of them reported that they’d been feeling better since doing so. One girl who suffered from migraine headaches—she told us she got at least one every two weeks, on average—told us that she hadn’t gotten a headache in almost a month. Another guy, a halfback on the university football team, had been having severe problems with his back and was on the verge of being cut. He came back to tell us that whatever was wrong with his back, it had cleared up since he’d helped us out. Another person who’d been having problems with insomnia started sleeping like a baby, and the fourth person, who’d been on anti-depressants for years, suddenly started feeling fine. She stopped taking her medication, and hadn’t suffered any setbacks.