“—But had she then grown taller since her malady?” were the words he next cried aloud; his speech having returned to its usual form.
I overcame my immobility, willing myself to draw nearer “Mr. Arnold”, so as the better to observe his condition. As soon as I was within less than a yard of his trembling frame his eyes flickered open and his gaze locked onto my own. The expression in those eyes was impossible to define; it seemed a compound of myriad forms and reminded me of a kaleidoscopic series of disparate analogies in co-existence. I was reminded of the following (all as aspects of a single mysterious whole); of the moon viewed at sunset, of the dying ember of a candle stub, of the motion of a hungry spider, of a blemish wrought by leprosy, and of something I can only put into words as the geometry of the color yellow. All these elements flashed over my consciousness in an instant, but so too did a much less nebulous realization, one that caused me to utter an involuntary cry of amazement, a cry which echoed in the dim confines of the lofty and vaulted ceiling of the chamber.
The irises of the eyes of “Mr. Arnold” were, I distinctly recalled, a light green hue, but now, but now, they had inexplicably turned jet-black. The orbs that observed me were not those of “Mr. Arnold” at all, but of some intrusive entity that appeared to have taken occupancy of him and which had neglected to completely disguise its presence within.
As if in response to this suspicion on my part, his eyelids flickered, then drooped and finally closed, and he turned away from me with a groan, burying his face in the cushions upon the divan. He did not cease to speak, however, and to communicate in that other voice I have already described. His muffled exclamations consisted solely of a series of names. Since it was with some considerable difficulty I was able to discern anything he uttered, the list I set down hereafter cannot be considered exhaustive:
“Ashoreth, Bacon, Glanvill, Democritus...”
And then, with “Mr. Arnold’s” face turned away from me, there came, as I stood there virtually stupefied, another physical transformation—and this one much more striking than any I had up to now observed. The full, but neatly trimmed black hair of my patient began, perceptibly, to grow. Like the movement of the minute hand on a timepiece it was scarcely discernible at first, and apparent after an interval in which disbelief can no longer be suspended. Within the passage of three minutes or so—during which I stood aghast—his voluminous tresses caressed the nape of his neck, and, within three more, passed his shoulders! The whole upper portion of his back had become hidden in the disheveled mass of raven-black hair before the process arrested itself and ceased altogether.
For my own part, I was transfixed, as if ensnared in the mind of another. The natural laws of the cosmos seemed suspended, along with my sense of volition. I had become a passive agent, a mere chronicler of events. It was with a sense of helplessness I realized the situation that had brought “Mr. Arnold” to this pass was beyond the amelioration of any physician—or indeed of any outside human agency. Here was a malady where death was not the end, but instead a form of hideous metempsychosis—a transformation beyond the capacity of human thought to comprehend in all its horror.
I could no longer hesitate and forced my limbs to obey the dictates of my mind again. I reached out my hand to the prostrate form upon the divan, turning “Mr. Arnold” on his side so he faced me once more. I had not realized, with his back to me, and the covering mass of disheveled raven-black hair, the full extent of the alteration wrought upon “Mr. Arnold”. I should have noticed his apparel no longer fitted him, and the contours of his body had shifted radically; to assume all the characteristics of the female form. All this should have been obvious before I reached out a hand to grasp him by the shoulder and turn him towards me, even though, given the bizarre circumstances, my attention was understandably disordered and unreliable.
But that particular alteration to which I refer was not what constituted the culminating horror of horrors. It was the sight of the face of “Mr. Arnold” that caused me to scream uncontrollably, and thereafter to flee the spectral castellated abbey, hurtling frantically across the vast surrounding plateau, with my every step seemingly leaden, as if I were already drowning in nightmare.
•
I am told I was discovered the next morning by one of the villagers, lying on the shingle beach beneath the sheer face of the cliff, with my clothes torn and covered in blood. I was told I raved incessantly, like some lunatic and had to be taken to the Mad-House. But, for my own part, I have no memory of the immediate aftermath—yet, what of the hideous face? Alas, that memory is an indelible stain upon my thoughts. Night after night it rises from the well of dream. During the day, persons glimpsed in shadow wear it like a mask. It troubles every mirror in which I see my reflection.
Had the face of “Mr. Arnold” been merely the corpse-face of the Lady Ligeia, I might not have lost my reason. But it was something greater and much more profound, something almost incommunicable. I know not what forbidden knowledge the Lady Ligeia possessed, or what revelation she had passed onto her husband, but I believe a black heaven had torn asunder every last shred of her identity and subsumed it into an expression of some ultimate, inhuman force made putrid by a hunger for bodily immortality in what is a transitory world.
It was the timeless face of all those who have rotted in their tombs in past ages and, so too, the face of all those who will rot in their tombs over the course of the centuries left in wait for us. Yes, my face was contained therein, as it will be after my death. Fools! How else could it be so, how otherwise in a vortex of infinite complexity? What I saw was the All and the One. It was the Alpha and the Omega. They say I am mad when I insist upon telling them what I saw. Idiots! It is they who are mad and blind! My eyes beheld the truth—the truth, I say, concerning she who had ascended to the heavenly throne through the power of her own incomparable Will—see how, despite those fools, I do not hesitate to reveal the truth, for I tell you now that Ligeia’s face was the cadaverous face of Almighty God!
A Contaminated Text
Hamlet: …My Lord, you played once in the university, you say.
Polonius: That I did my lord, and was accounted a good actor.
Hamlet: And what did you enact?
Polonius: I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol. Brutus killed me.
(Hamlet Act 3, Scene 2, 87–92)
When the José Vasconcelos Library opened in Mexico City in May 2006 it was mired in controversy. The opening was not public, but was by invitation only, and the whole project was forced through by President Vicente Fox who saw the building as his final chance to establish a permanent cultural legacy. Named after the celebrated Mexican philosopher and Government Head of Education, José Vasconcelos (b.1882 d.1959), the gargantuan modernist building was designed by Alberto Kalach (b.1960) to hold over two million volumes and seven hundred computer terminals in its forty-four thousand five-hundred square metres of space. Alas, it was beset by structural problems shortly afterwards. Its fantastical design, inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges story “The Library of Babel”, was found to be structurally insecure, and additional building work was required before it reopened in November 2008. The interior of the library is of a completely open plan design, with the staggering quantity of books themselves forming a titanic vista on all five levels. The volumes are housed in open tiers of metal bookshelves that project over the central hall, jutting out, as if suspended in immensity, and flanked by a veritable labyrinth of glass-floored walkways. The books are classified according to subject matter and language. As well as being classified by subject matter, there are whole sections of books written in English, German, Portuguese, French and so on.
One of the major objections to the “Megabiblioteca”, as it was popularly dubbed by the press, was that the building was not specially created to house a pre-existing collection, and, since its construction, it has been dependent on a process of extraneous acquisition, taking on a mass of volumes donated by public and private publis
hers. As a consequence, much of its stock is duplicated. Roving around the shelves, a browsing reader cannot help but be struck by the fact he is likely to find the tiers occupied by multiple copies of the exact same edition of a book, often occupying the entirety of a shelf. This policy of deliberate duplication appears to be a consequence of expediency. Without it there would be whole tracts of empty space, like missing teeth in a smile, and the Borgesian aesthetic of innumerable books themselves forming the architecture of the library would be fatally compromised.
•
Douglas Marlow had obtained his position as librarian in the Megabiblioteca quite by accident. He had been resident in Mexico City for less than a year when he attended a party given by the Minister of the Interior at the huge fortified ministry building on Bucareli. He had been invited along by a Mexican editor who worked at the Pasaje Publishing House, where he had been employed on a temporary basis as a translator, but the editor himself had failed to attend. Forced to mingle, Marlow had drunk a large volume of mezcal, gratis, and his indifferent Spanish blossomed under its effect. By the end of the evening, he had been offered a post as a trainee librarian, assigned to the English language section, after having struck up an interminable conversation with a bureaucrat.
His work at the library was not onerous, and he spent much of his time cataloguing stock, helping with enquiries, and occasionally assisting in the cloakroom, whenever required to do so.
During the second week of his employment, the library took possession of a crate of English language books, which Marlow was instructed to add to the institution’s existing stock. One of the books contained in the crate bore the title The Abyss of Voola. He was told the crate had come from the private collection of a notorious and unbelievably aged occultist in Chihuahua, who had tried to commit suicide and failed, despite having blown out half his brains with a revolver. Marlow learnt more from a series of papers that had been inserted inside the front cover of The Abyss of Voola, some of these papers were handwritten, some typed, but all apparently by this occultist, whose name was Wolfgang Martz (b.1860 d.?)
Martz believed himself to be in astral contact with creatures called the Voolans, a race of incredibly advanced entities, who dwelt deep inside the hollow earth and influenced mankind by telepathic control. Bulwer-Lytton had first written of them, but his facts were not entirely correct, for he had intuited them only feebly, and even then veiled them in a puerile Utopian symbolism.
•
An excerpt fromThe Abyss of Voola transcribed by Dr Wolfgang Martz, 1920 (translated into English from the original German):
Who are the Voolans? It seems clear to me that they are not denizens of Outer Space, but denizens of Inner Space. They haunt the interiors of hollow worlds. Ancient they are, but only in reverse, for they have come backwards in time from the ultimate future. For them the track of time is from end to beginning, and evolution is a process of return to the slime. Gods they were once, but fiends are they now.
They praise naught but the joys of pain, of dragging down the universe with them in their own horrible death agonies. Men they adore, for they are sport, and their delight is in torturing them, and reducing their minds and bodies to travesties.
All praise the Voolans! For they shall lay waste the illusions: all beauty, all hope and all love!
Of their form let me tell.
Voolans are akin to squid, and they possess eight tentacles. They crawl on all surfaces, floors, walls and ceilings. Their oily skin is black or coal-grey. Of eyes they possess four, all yellow, without pupils, equidistant around the diameter of their heads. Their two mouths are large and their teeth are long and sharp, fang-like. Upon human flesh they feast, once the victim is mutilated by weeks of drawn-out torture.
Their world catacombs the planet, so vast and depthless, as to constitute a hollow earth. And of science they have forgotten more than we have ever learnt, and now their science is akin to sorcery, for their brains are diseased.
They may occupy the body of men as they will it, by means telepathic, and they call them down into their lairs below ground, when the feasting time is come.
And here is the truth: there is no conscious thought of men. All is Voola. The ways of men are as a game to them, and we dance like puppets to their whims. We are their entertainment.
•
In 1914, Martz joined the staff of the Mexico City insane asylum. He took up his position having theorised that certain patients suffering from “delusions” had access to other forms of consciousness. Martz believed that his contact with the Voolan entities placed him beyond good and evil. Morality, for Martz, was a question of expediency and advancing human development, that is, preparing the way for the reign of the Voolans on the surface world. He began experimenting on those inmates who were without families or associates who might take an interest in their condition, enabling him to act free from outside scrutiny. Orderlies and other doctors were bribed as necessary to maintain a conspiracy of silence. Rather than seeking to ameliorate psychoses or manias, it was Martz’s mission to intensify them. This he would attempt to do by means of physical and mental torture, including the use of psychotropic drugs, electric shocks, sleep deprivation and even sexual abuse. He took notes of his patients’ reactions, subjecting them to violent interrogation from that time onwards.
Most of his efforts were completely worthless, and his actions only served to hasten death in those who came under his control.
However there was one instance in which he achieved some startling results, with an elderly American inmate, an ex-officer in the Yankee Army during the U.S. Civil War. He was referred to in Martz’s notes only as “Major X”. This gentleman had obviously been a person of some note before the crushing bout of amnesia and violent paranoia that had led to his confinement. As soon as he was in Martz’s clutches, the doctor ensured that he was beyond the assistance of the American consulate in Mexico City. Major X was in his early seventies when “treated” by Martz. He claimed to have been betrayed by Pancho Villa and to have written several books, including a diabolical dictionary.
In fact, Major X had been an initiate of a secret society in the United States during the 1890s. This society, called the Sodality of the Darkness, differed from the usual esoteric organisations in being atheist in its philosophy. It regarded claims of secret wisdom as being purely fictitious, to be deployed only as a means of literary inspiration. Amongst its West Coast members were George Sterling and W.C. Morrow, while its East Coast members included Winfield Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers. Despite being atheist in character, it seems that the imaginative current the group unleashed eventually overwhelmed some of the group, leading to suicides or madness.
In fact, the Sodality of the Darkness had, between them, succeeded in obtaining the text of a book called The Abyss of Voola. Winfield Lovecraft had written it down, from his dreams, in 1892, and suffered from madness and physical deformity thereafter. He claimed that the book was actually a living thing, with a will of its own. He was incarcerated in the Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island and Major X (who Martz theorised must be the soldier and author Ambrose Bierce) then had the book in his safekeeping. The Abyss of Voola is a record of the dynastic rise of the Voolans and their final mental assault upon the upper world in order to bring it completely under their control.
Martz abandoned his post at the asylum after Major X died a raving maniac screaming for oblivion. Martz fled to his native Germany thereafter, before the Mexican authorities could take action against him, and was in possession of The Abyss of Voola.
Until his disappearance in 1934, which occurred during the Night of the Long Knives, he was a loyal supporter of Adolf Hitler, whom he regarded as a puppet of the Voolans. Martz (in an odd echoing of Bierce’s fate) had escaped execution and returned to Mexico under an assumed name. Martz was regarded as a dangerous eccentric by the Nazi regime, which saw in his account of the Voolans a mythology antithetical to the Wagnerian Volk mythology they were trying to promot
e.
•
And so, The Abyss of Voola had found its way to the Jose Vasconcelos Library. Marlow, the English librarian who handled the book thought little of it (he despised anything esoteric, being a staunch rationalist). He had glanced only at the first page, and it was filed away, carelessly, on the English language floor.
The first complaints began the following week. A student of the drama, who had loaned a copy of Hamlet by Shakespeare, found it possessed a corrupted text. The script incorporated quotes taken from another, then unidentified work. Moreover, the typeface was different. It was only when the librarians discovered the changes were taking place across the whole of the section on English drama that it was regarded as a serious issue rather than an unfortunate coincidence or a practical joke.
After the script had been carelessly replaced on the shelves and left there for a couple of days, the Bard’s text had been entirely displaced. Marlow recognised one of the invading excerpts from the first page of the book he had earlier filed away carelessly. Upon consulting it again, he realised that quotations from The Abyss of Voola were the source. The contamination had spread outward, in all directions, from the book. It was a textual fungus, or disease of language, that proved beyond the institution’s ability to control. In that first week, every single volume in the library had been infected, although those furthest away from the nucleus may only have contained, initially, one or two errant letters of an incongruous typeface. Moreover, as the text spread, it adapted to the language in which the host text of each book had been written.
The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales Page 10
