by Athanasios
After another ten-day search in the dark, Kosta finally located the stairway. Near the hidden entrance, he found a corroded, ancient cross and bent down to rub some of the dirt off its surface. Some deluded, early Christian zealot, under the influence of Patriarch Theophilus’ mob, had nearly done what Kostadinoupoli’s St. John Chrysostom called, “Vanishing from the face of the earth, every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient world.” They had almost been successful, Kosta thought with a chill.
He suppressed a shudder and felt for the edges of the stone door, pushed five specific points in exact order, and ancient pulleys screeched the door open. At first, clouds of dust hid the doorway, but soon dispersed, revealing the foot-thick stone-hinged opening, much like any other door. He walked through the opening easily enough, pushing the door shut behind him. Kosta was very careful. He didn’t want anybody else to know about the resurrection of the Royal Library. He was absolutely sure that no living person knew of the lost entrance, let alone its exact location, but was prudent, nonetheless.
He stood for a moment, and snuffed out the light on his helmet. As his eyes adjusted to the dark he sensed phalanxes of shelves, with heaps of scrolls and leather-bound vellum, leafed volumes and rows, stretching past perception. He sensed the vast breadth of storehouse; its edges stretched for hundreds of feet to his left, right and before him. Every other library and archive that Kosta had visited— private, secret, rare or unique — was now forgotten. Some of those places had contained rare volumes on forbidden subjects and lore, which would’ve damned or maddened lesser men, yet there he stood, sensing pregnant danger in this dark. All other past dangers paled in comparison to that which he now felt. This danger was latent, rolled up in parchment, bound in vellum or forgotten pelt. The dark, itself, or the reading of these words, freed them, allowing them to coalesce into their most vicious possibilities.
Their danger lay in their essence, what they were — lies. Lies were valuable. The best lies were able to stand the test of time and weren’t measured in black and white, fact and fiction. Rather, they became society, respected thought, accepted dogma. If enough people believe these lies long enough and hard enough, they will them to become fact. The belief of these lies transmuted them over centuries into truths, for which faithful millions had killed and been killed.
Christians were told that somebody had died and three days later, had come back to life. This was an old lie that many believed and continue to believe. None of it was real, rather, it was the product of human imagination — and all-powerful want and desire. This lie had been believed and told long enough, that it became a something, without which faith couldn’t continue. This particular belief illustrated that if something is desired for long enough, imagination makes it real.
In the past months Kosta had read myths that spoke about the creation of all life. These creation stories explained that when the cosmos was alone and there was nothing else, it wanted to breathe and experience and, therefore, started life. It then furthered experience and went on to touch, to eat. In time the cosmos wanted to experience more and made the overwhelming abundance of life we know today. These myths explained that all the diversity of life was made so the cosmos can experience itself. Nobody knew what was before the desires for experience. The need to live became more basic than thought. It was unquestioned. The questions came with why life existed at all. Clerics, priests and philosophers, whose musings filled libraries, had tried to answer with mixed results. History called them Pagans, Christians, Luciferians, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists. It was all a matter of personal choice. That was the essence of what Kosta had read, of all the combined lies: desire.
He came across many references to two copies of a singularly unique tome, whose owners believed each was original, but was actually a reproduction of the Idammah-Gan Codex — a single, hand-written book. One copy was located in the private library of a self-styled, poseur Satanist in the south of France. The other was much harder to access. It was kept in the bowels of the Vatican, in its Secret Archives, which spanned over thirty miles of shelves. The Secret Archives held heretical works, by men such as Copernicus, Galileo and the like, who were later exonerated by the light of reason and science. The Vatican had held onto these works because in the past they were dangerous, inflammatory and if dissipated to the population at large would damn the world.
Most people now believe that words, ideas and written discourse are not dangerous and would not damn anybody. They were intellectual curiosity and dialogue no more. True danger only resides in the physical, but over the course of his research, Kosta had discovered that danger was also hidden in the pages of some books and texts. It wasn’t the ideas and beliefs of the Martin Luthers, Newtons, Marxes and Hitlers that were dangerous. Rather, it was the lost and better-forgotten texts, which revealed our true nature. Some people couldn’t abide this revelation and went insane, their minds snapping from the weight of this realization. For most people, the real truth was better left unknown, lost and forgotten, the lies never revealed.
Kosta began to murmur under his breath and, after a while, the words, upon leaving his mouth, glowed in the air in front of him. He slowly continued the incantation, as it went past priceless stacks and shelves of scrolls, parchment, vellum and pelts. The incantation continued, turning right, left, around marbled busts and reliefs of Ptolemies, Alexanders, Cleopatras and major political, religious figures, both forgotten and remembered, who, after a millennium of complete darkness, once again saw light.
The glowing words came to an ordinary shelf, among the many others, and slowly dipped to the second from bottom shelf. It then wrapped around a pelt-bound volume, with cracked edging and four equally-spaced steel bindings. Kosta bent down and retrieved the tome, snuffing out the glowing breath like a candle. The incantation would not have worked on anything other than the original Idammah-Gan Codex, and Kosta could not have known it would work until he used it. If he hadn’t found the lost mother of all libraries, and had the original texts been returned to the ancient travelers in Alexandria, he wouldn’t have the Idammah-Gan Codex. There were so many ifs, woulds and maybes, conveniently converging, that Kosta forgot to breath. He became lightheaded and nearly forgot how to light his miner’s helmet.
It took a few hours to weave his way back along the path of the incantation. Kosta burned to sit and examine the book he carried, but knew he could only examine it under daylight. The darkness hid too many unknowns, and he wanted to concentrate on the codex, not on fighting phantoms and madness. He would return again when he was more prepared to deal with these uncertainties. Now, he needed to read the pages of the codex and plan anew. All of his beliefs were gearing up with the renewed hope, provided by the codex.
A plan, designed by a long forgotten, medieval philosopher, was about to be discovered. After a year of searching, Kosta held what George Gemistos Plethon had longed to read. In his search for its recovery, Kosta had learned what it was all about and that he must handle it with caution. The volume detailed all the many lives of the main character in St. John’s Revelations. After a long enough time in our imagination, the mythic Beast had been made real.
TIME: AUGUST 14TH, 1961. WHITTIER MANSION, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A
Balzeer walked lightly down the corridor of the third floor in the Whittier Mansion. At various intervals of the hall, he passed lounging glassy-eyed devotees, some on the floor, some on chairs and couches, all there to experience something different. The beatniks had carved out an attractive scene, which had attracted many like-minded people. Some came to sit and listen to Kerouac, Ginsberg and Bukowski read aloud from Lonesome Traveler, Kaddish and Howl, so they could snap their fingers in appreciation.
The sad fact was that Kerouac had nearly gone mad from drink and was traveling all around the country. Ginsberg was traveling the world, traversing the U.S.S.R., Scandinavia, China and the Communist Block countries. Bukowski had never even come to San Francisco until later in his life. He lived and w
orked in a post office, doing his cultural wailing only in his spare time, while sober, or most likely while he was not.
The Supreme Tribunal passed a dark-haired beauty who watched him in disbelief. Her hazel eyes widened and her petal mouth slightly parted at Balzeer’s touch. His hand traveled down past her stomach and began to hike up her short skirt. She looked around for support from some of the others, who were now starting to watch, but only saw hungry eyes. She was in a drugged haze and could not bring her hands up with enough strength to ward off her bald abuser.
The effort that she made to push him away only spurred him on, as it seemed that she was only grasping for him. She could not manage to speak, to tell him to stop pushing his hand down her panties and parting her pubic lips. Her grunts and groans were stopped as his mouth closed on hers, and then there was only the sound of a slow scuffle.
He pushed her panties to the side and stroked her mound with an open palm. All the while, his other hand traveled up to cup the back of her head and bring it closer to his. His kisses had turned hard and rough, but his hands stayed tender, though still unwanted and unwelcome. The hand behind her head moved and came over her chest, parting her shirt and, at the same time, tearing it.
His lower hand moved and, with a few quick movements, undid his pants, which promptly fell to the floor. In a matter of seconds, he was on top of her, thrusting into her with slow, languid strokes. He held her ankles spread wide as he pushed forward, the couch banging the wall behind them.
Her head bobbed back and forth, her black hair falling over her face, hiding the tears that ran down it. She hoped that it would soon be over and prayed that she would only remember it as a bad hallucination.
His strokes quickened until he stopped, then he climbed off of her. He reached down and pulled up his slacks, and with a sharp clink of his belt, buttoned up his pants and walked away, never glancing back. He did not see the six other ravenous forms advance on the sprawled, still-gasping girl. The ordeal had only begun for her, and even if he had noticed, he wouldn’t have cared.
There were many other disillusioned men and women, many of them hardly past childhood. They would never be missed. They had come here to connect to something different from their parents’ Judeo-Christian ethics. Some, like this girl, became lost in the crowd as they waited their turn. The life they found was much worse than the life from which they fled. They did not find freedom. As the girl was repeatedly violated, she realized that she had lost all of her personal rights, her fragile protests ignored, if they were noticed at all.
Balzeer McGrath wasn’t interested in either the girl or the others. For him, sex was like pissing, or any other bodily function. He did it when the need arose. Since he’d become an adult, he had never denied his urges and lusts. He had long since stopped being able to distinguish his desires from his needs. What he wanted, he got.
He continued down the immaculate corridors of the mansion filled with antiques. Some had been bought with the house, while others had been collected from various ancient, condemned and damned places, all over the world. Everything was steeped in death, misery or brutal apathy. Even the art was stygian and ghastly, created by madmen who had been condemned for their ruined imagination and subjects of lunacy, by both the church and decency.
De Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children hung on the wall. This was mild fare, compared to the depictions of rape, pillage and massacre that spilled and tumbled everywhere in the inner corridors through which he trod. Every piece of art depicted monstrous atrocities. Unknown, unseen commissioned works from masters were also here. Botticellis, Michaelangelos, Raphaels, Da Vincis and Caravaggios depicted black masses and Luciferian ceremonies. For these renderings, the artists would’ve been condemned, or excommunicated, had their existence been a matter of public knowledge.
Balzeer was the latest in a long line of church leaders who followed a path very divergent from that of the Catholic Church. They worshiped the First and Rightful Son of God, Satanael, not the Weakling Son, Jesus. Balzeer and his predecessors continued in the old ways — open belligerence for those that followed the Weakling’s Citadel, the Catholic Church, and complete submission to the pleasures of the flesh.
The new initiates, and even some of the existing adepts, had shown their desire to make their faith seem more amiable. Their time would surely come, but for now, Balzeer and his dogma ruled.
He turned two more rights and went down a narrow stairwell to the back entrance of the library. As he twisted the brass handle of the mahogany doors, their weight turned on intricately carved, gleaming hinges.
He surveyed the vast room and the book-lined shelves, openly contemptuous of anyone present. To his regret, the room was empty. No one was seated on the leather couches, or the luxuriously upholstered wingback chairs, situated by one of the room’s three fireplaces. The seats would have been comforting, had they not been placed before hearths that depicted the torture and torment of the Venetians’ Inferno. Balzeer had commissioned a promising group of art students to carve them, to his specifications, from a long forgotten volume. It took them nearly a year to complete the project. They finally went mad from the constant exposure to the images. Eleven months after they had started their work, seven bright, young, promising gibbering idiots left the mansion. He remembered them as one would remember a particularly good screwdriver; they had been worth his attention.
He walked to the center of the room and stopped. His left arm began tracing unseen patterns before him in the air. They remained invisible until he mouthed words and phrases of slithering intimacy, like a lover’s whisper or the slit of a sharp knife. His intonations barely audible, the tracings began to glow with the sickly yellow of a festering wound. Continuing his work, Balzeer raised his right arm and weaved patterns below him. The patterns took on a tone of an angry purple bruise.
Beneath him on a priceless rug, weaved from the hair of slaughtered innocents of a bygone era, a swirling whirlpool of colors materialized. He began to slowly sink into it, unperturbed, until a short time later, he was gone. Only the smell of mutton indicated that he, or his textured whirlpool, had been there at all. He glanced around the chamber into which he had sunk. At each place he glanced, a black candle sparked to life. They only produced enough light to reveal the abominations surrounding him.
All about the room, and at various stages of decomposition, were human remains. Some dangled from hooks, while others were impaled on stakes from beneath and from the sides, hanging like forgotten clothes. Impossibly, considering their state, a few continued to move, unnaturally kept alive to suffer and to provide the room with its needed fuel. The room ran on misery — it was its spark, its essence and its lifeblood. Balzeer had created it during a moment of inspiration. He literally detested getting his hands dirty, but he needed the ever-present sacrifices, so he kept them all alive as long as he could. Some had been suffering for years, others merely for weeks.
There were no animals, because they were incapable of providing the required agony. No animal expected, or wished, for anything besides a painless existence and food. Humans, on the other hand, had a lifetime of dreams and hopes that he could grind into dust.
The physical pain was part of it, but the real fuel came from their mental and psychic torture. He chose people who had the most to lose. Sensitive souls, just entering their adult lives with promise and expectations, found themselves barely surviving, until a bald persecutor came and showed them the essence of true pain. When they were left alone with each other and their shared grief, it all seemed horrible, but somehow, the true terror was forgotten. The mind cannot remain focused on constant pain; humans simply are not equipped to handle pain without some respite.
Balzeer went to a cage in the center of the chamber and knelt down. Using a pair of long tongs, which belonged in a foundry, he brought out a squirming and snapping land piranha. Fully equipped with the trademark teeth and scales of a fish, this contrived beast breathed air, at least for a short period of time.
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He walked over to a strong, still-flailing brute of a man. At one time, he had been a professional athlete. Balzeer had made sure that no one would miss this him; as far as the rest of the world was concerned, he had died in a car accident. As he got closer, the man tried to kick out with his legs, unable to use his arms, as they were impaled against the far wall.
Balzeer stopped short and looked about him. On the floor, he saw another stake, a yard in length, and hefted it with his left hand, still holding onto the snapping land fish. He launched the stake and caught the man’s left leg, just about at his ankle, pinning it to the wall. Balzeer was quite impressed with his accuracy, but did not linger on it. He had more important things to do.
He stepped closer to the man and, mumbling a quick incantation, he pushed the fish forward, into his body, without need for an incision. It was a small fish, barely two inches long. It would not do too much damage, but the pain of being eaten inside out, was that for which Balzeer was aiming. It would burst inside the man from over-eating, like a mosquito hitting an artery. However, that wouldn’t happen for another hour.
He repeated this with five of the eighteen other people surrounding him. Some were easier to handle than the football player, but the results would all be the same. After he had finished with the last one, he turned to the center of the chamber and saw that the pentagram he had fashioned was beginning to pulse with life. It was quite large, intended to shackle something monstrous.
The pulse was a raspy breath, drawn in and out with the effort of traveling a great distance in a very short period of time. The glow further illuminated the rest of the dark chapel. Screams echoed as his charges saw their surroundings in full light. Some gagged, and vomit began to permeate the air.
The pain, inflicted by the munching little land fish, was only part of the fuel being used to usher in the shape, whose outline was beginning to form in the center of the pentagram. The true nourishment that the brute needed was the fear, pain and torment that the rest of the captive assembly released. They were reminded that this agony would continue for the rest of their lives and, if Balzeer so desired, eternity.
