Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013

by Various Writers

  I loved watching language grow in him. Loved watching him begin to bind up his world with words. Now there’s this... I don’t know. Now I’m thinking that my first instinct was right: silence. Reverent, fearful silence of what could be wrought. Of what was waiting for us, under the new shine of our repaired lives. Beneath the polish, down there in the black muck of our history. My history.

  Who was it that said there was a sentence out there for everyone, or... hold on. Wait, was it two sentences? Yeah, two sentences, two strings of words, and one of them? One sentence will heal you and the other will destroy you. And you may or may not hear the first, and you’re damned lucky if you do, but you’re guaranteed to get the second. Was that Dick? It sounds like Dick. Fucking PKD.

  But it’s all in the binding, isn’t it? Language is the binding agent. For time. For meaning. It’s the sense maker, the descriptor, the boundary state between what is and what isn’t. A goddamn net we build over the abyss so that we can dance across like the bugs we are and instead of dancing like reasonable beings, like sensible goddamn insects, instead of being aware of our place, what do we do? Shit, what? We build worlds. Is that smart? Who decided that was a, y’know, a smart thing to do? Whose brilliant fucking brainwave was that? Considering the... the tensile strength of our widdle monkey mouth noises. Of our insect chitter.

  But there it is. The guaranteed sentence has come. The sentence has been handed down. Our sentence is up. It follows, doesn’t it? It follows that there’d be an answer to the Word that God used to speak the world. The anti-Logos.

  I think it follows.

  We deserve it, maybe. I’m more and more convinced, actually. We deserve it. All meaning has broken down. We’ve done most of the work for them, stripping it all out from our side, leaving a brittle shell of significance. There’s only garbage in the system now. Garbage and noise. Maybe that’s all there ever was. And now it’s done.

  With every unbinding syllable that passes his lips, it’s done. In his innocence, he is finishing the world. I don’t even know why I’m asking, it’s not like you’ll ever be able to tell me, but did they find the woman? I’ll never know. Did they find her after th— //

  00:10:47 // —fect is, the effect, it’s... it’s just about the most startling thing. I cannot begin to tell you what it’s like, can’t even get close. Religious in its intensity. Your gut goes cold when it happens. You fill up with filthy ice water and something in the back of your brain, some ancient monkey-type thing screams a monkey-type scream, another useless, empty noise, and does a bright, spastic dance before dying. It dies, and your eyes keep seeing the same thing they saw before, whatever it is. A chair, maybe. A flower. Ashtrays. Your father has a lot of those here. Boxes of ashtrays.

  Only the word for the thing you’re looking at is gone. And the meaning that it had for you, the stuff that filled the word out, it’s not there anymore either. It becomes all surface, and you know, you just know, that if you touch it, if you merely brush that surface with the tips of your fingers, that it will crumple away like rice paper and the howling hollowness it concealed will come through, riding the ghost of what you thought you knew about th— //

  00:11:36 // My hope is that the most basic things wi— //

  00:11:38 // —kay, but see, he doesn’t have the words for chair or flower or ashtrays yet. Which is why I can still talk about chairs and flowers and ashtrays. I’ve actually, well, I’ve gone and scattered ashtrays around the place; so many that I keep expecting your dad to show up in a phantom nicotine haze to stub one out, y’know? But he likes to play with them and yes, I cleaned them first. He has no idea what they are, has no word for them, so they’re safe from the effect. For now. I figure, these ashtrays? They’ll be my canaries in the mine. Because the effect, which is... wait. Where was I— //

  00:12:14 // —ing on with his weak Crowley-wannabe crap, I mean, my god! Was that supposed to be impressive? I guess it was, after a fashion. Man, we were into that shit, weren’t we? So stupid. Play-acting in rented rooms with like-minded weirdos.

  And y’know, it always bothered me. It bothered me how quick we were to dismiss a thing when it happened, if it happened. We were too quick to say psychological construct or autonomous ego-fragment. Too quick to call hallucination and way too eager to blame the drugs. We’d invoke Jung, as if that explained shit, as if that explained a goddamn thing about it.

  There we were, on a first name basis with all the best Archons. Clueless and wise. Reading the books. My god, the books, the fucking books! Tearing into those damned things like they were cheap supermarket paperbacks, breathing them in day and night, and when they got into me? Inside me? When it ceased to be a metaphor, that breathing? What did you all do? When I couldn’t get the burnt ozone taste of Enochian out of my mouth? Or whatever flavour of the week chakra-tweaking bullshit we were doing, did you help me? Did any of you help me? What did you do when barbarous names clustered like tumours in my lungs, tore out of my throat while I twisted in my sheets? What did you do? It’s meaningless, he said, and they all agreed. You, too, light of my wasted life, mother of the eschatological agent that is our child, my child. Fuck you. Fuck all of you and your post-post-modernism. It has whatever meaning you decide to give it, he said. You’re too sensitive and besides, you’re not banishing properly, he said. Everyone nodding sagely. We were fools, laughing in the ruin of our lives.

  Hipsters ruin everything. Occult hipsters ruin every last thing. Once they get their hands on the right tools.

  Not banishing properly, my ass.

  I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. The fuck you part, not you, not like that. I just... if you could see him! As he is now. Oh. There’s a light to him that’s not light. There’s a... oh, so special. He is. I could never... and you did, I mean, you did help me, even if you were helping yourself first. We got out of there, at least. Baby, things were good, right? We got clean and we got, fuck, we got rational, finally, and we were happy there for a— //

  00:13:51 // I mean, shit, she never saw it coming. I certainly didn’t. Traffic noise covered the hum, which I didn’t recognize yet, not then. And then the soft, small, pale shadow that rose, wriggling, bloodless, from the skin of her hands and her face as she bent over him and cooed like the older ladies like to do and the smoke of her burning began, because that’s what it was, my love, a kind of combustion, subtle fuel being consumed, yes, and I’m sorry but the smoke of her burning, the smoke of it rose forever and ev— //

  00:14:09 // Okay. Well. His... Jesus, I don’t even think you can call them episodes, not really, but his episodes are getting worse. More frequent. It’s disorienting. I don’t know when I last recorded. A cabin full of hoarded garbage and I can’t tell you what three-quarters of the junk even is anymore. Most everything is paper, now. Paper thin and thinning. I know it’s happening when I sleep, when we’re both sleeping, but I have to sleep sometime and I miss... he must do it in his sleep. I mean, I did, when it got really bad, right before we quit. He must.

  What’s left? I’ve got, lessee... okay, okay, okay. The basic concepts of furniture and, well, walls. The cabin itself, I guess. We are at least comfortable. And fed. The food I bought on our way here is still comprehensible, hidden away behind the refrigerator door, and therefore edible. The refrigerator, obviously. The television and the DVD player and the cartoons he likes. The migraine hyper-clarity of Pixar seems somewhat resistant to... ah, but we’ve had that fucking Cars monstrosity on a loop and if that doesn’t send me out of my goddamn mind, I... okay. Okay.

  But that’s about it. Everything else is lost... dim shapes seen dimly through an indeterminate fog of weakly bonded meaning. Is this what severe autism must be like? I keep tripping over these weird objects. Like shallow metal disks, with confusing divots at regular intervals along their flattened edges. Damn things are everywhere, I want to— //

  00:15:02 // ... truth is, I can’t even work this stupid machine properly anymore. I’ve checked it and, y’know, it’s clear that I’m, fu
ck, I’m clearly pressing rewind when I think I’ve pressed record. Or fast forward. Losing my fucking mind and I know, I know, that I’ve gotta get this to you somehow. There’s a post office in town but the road is this vague track, really, the suggestion of the idea of a possible road and buried in a couple feet of snow besides and I don’t know that I could make it. I wonder if the things that speak through him have maybe had a go at the road. If he erased it a little on our way here. Might explain our isolation, the lack of cops. There’s no justice here; I would welcome sirens. Welcome the restraints, the sound of him crying as officers tore him from my arms and delivered him to yours. I’d be grateful to be put on that map. As kidnapper, monster, any label, so long as it stuck.

  But then, this place? Nothing sticks here. It’s lonely. Isolated, already almost not-here. Always so empty of anything human, even with the cabin here, even during summer. In winter? It’s a charcoal sketch, the road in from the town a smudged afterthought.

  I take steps out onto that smudge, thinking I’ll just start walking till the world firms up around me, but I can’t leave him. You wouldn’t, so I can’t. I don’t dare take him with me.

  00:16:05 // He must do it in his sleep. This place, this cardboard place, this toy house of chittering shadows, it’s bursting with the opposite of significance. I can feel them behind every surface of each baffling, impossible, drained and hollowed un-thing. They finger at the seams, casual, patient. They pick at them.

  They never left. They slept, that’s all. For a while, they slept, and while they did we awoke and grew up and imagined ourselves capable, thoughtful, powerful. Masters. All our keys shining on a loud ring of self-important jangles. What they did, they did it in their sleep.

  00:16:32 // —uldn’t do it. Not that way. The planning even, trying not to think about the details, thinking about anything, really, anything else, anything but the terrible reality of it. Working myself up to it, doing all the old, awful, circle work, the dissociative techniques, triggering a frenzy of non-dual awareness, sublimating everything I was, every trace of human feeling, going from the white behind my eyes to red so red red red to the core and finally through that to the black gnosis, the tombstone awareness of what had to be done and coming to, finally, rising from pressured depths to break through awareness at the moment just before the moment with the pillow clutched in my earthquake hands and the scent of his sweet breath rising up still new somehow from beneath me in the dark and he stirred, oh, remember how we’d watch him sleep? He stirred and you should see him now, darling, the reverse-universe light of him, that black halo shines so and he said dada in his sleep, no hum behind it, no anti-word yet to cancel out what I was to him, to myself, and his little hand reached up, curling into a fist, and I couldn’t do it. Not that way. Any way. Of course I couldn’t do it.

  I can’t do it. I’m not some low-rent Yahweh, I can’t just hang him out there for our si— //

  00:17:45 // —formation encoded across all possible media, right? Epigenetic change. It follows! We got out, got healthy, got normal and just in time we thought, or I thought, certainly I felt saved, finally, by you, by his arrival, holding him so perfect and clean, but we were fools because my soul was carrier, my mind was host, my sperm was black with ancient curses. Conception is the basic trauma.

  We were fools and yeah, we didn’t banish properly. I’ll admit it. How could we ever? There’s no banishing this. It was already too late. Too late for you and me, for the culture, for the species. It was too late the moment some monkey pointed at the young, smooth-faced moon and made a sound.

  We’re a small, reasonable, grey dream curled up like a grub in the smoking bowers of their madness, and our son a brief flash of awareness that signals reason’s end. He is the last. He will illuminate their blind, tenebrous dance for a moment, before we are returned to the audient void.

  00:18:38 // There should be an order to it. There should be an order to it. Keep us in your mind, my love. For my part, I will try to aim him, if I can. Leave the most basic things for last. Something to breathe, a patch of ground to stand on, or at least the idea of those things. The distance between us will cease to be. To hear you sigh in my ear as he speaks the end would be forgiveness enough. Enough to drown out the howling. As it all wears away, let it be us three alone at the last.

  He’s waking. I— //

  Back to Top

  Interview with Scott R Jones

  With the exception of the final question, the following are excerpts from an audio interview with Martian Migraine Press from March of 2012

  You write in the afterword for Soft From All The Blood that you find writing embarrassing. Most writers we’ve met tend to let you know right away that they write, but not you. Can you explain why?

  Well, horror writing is embarrassing, for sure. I don’t know why. I think it’s basically admitting, in a really kind of intimate but also public way, that you’ve thought about these things. Just to get them onto the page, you have to think about them. Cannibalism, knife play, mutations, demons...

  Mutant demons.

  With knives! I remember when I was writing Coronation, which is the second story in Soft, when I was writing that I was also reading, for the first and last time, thank god, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. And a passage in that, y’know, a passage describing a murder or murders, just something really appalling and horrific, coming right after an entire chapter on the merits of different brands of mineral water or something... this passage comes out of nowhere and hits me right upside the head and I get physically ill. And part of that, that sickness, y’know, running to the toilet to puke and everything, part of that was due to the realization that Ellis, well, he had to go there, to that place, in order to put it down on paper. There was no distance, in that moment, between the writer and the reader and I felt too close to that guy, too in his head. The paper was too flimsy a barrier between his reality and mine.

  Which is great, because it means the writing worked the way it’s supposed to, but also kind of embarrassing, because that’s his head, or my head, spilled out. In public. It’s a shame, a shame that I guess the good writers have to bear. But we do it, usually in a compulsive way, and hopefully it’s entertaining.

  Some would say that writing like Ellis’ is courageous, since he “goes there” and these days you hear a lot of writing coaches and inspirational speakers talk about how writers are brave. Do you agree? Does writing take courage?

  Can’t speak for others, can I? But no, I don’t think we are. No writer is out there saving the world, and I don’t necessarily trust the ones who say they are. I mean, there are probably brave writers out there? And maybe lots who need to feel brave to do what they do. But I’ve never felt that. You know, you can’t escape addiction, so choose yours carefully, right? There’s worse things you can do to yourself than write, it doesn’t hurt you or anyone else all that much. Okay, maybe a little. But it’s still an addiction. The language virus working itself out in an interesting way.

  Sounds like Burroughs...

  I love Burroughs. He’s my cure for writer’s block.

  How does that work?

  It’s just his ability to see beyond the ego that writers develop. Can’t recall how he said it exactly, but there’s an interview with him out there that has him saying something like “look, the book is already there and the good writer takes dictation” or finds them, in the ontic sphere or the Platonic realm or whatever. Checks them out of the astral Library. Finds them and copies them out. The poet Jack Spicer used to say the same thing, that the poet needs to rid themselves of all the ego-fictions, clear all the cheap furniture from his head and then just, y’know, just listen. Listen to the Outside, to the spooks and the Martians.

  That’s what I try to do, mostly unsuccessfully, when I get blocked. Realize that the block is, somehow, me: my identity and my needs and personal crap. And then just stop and listen. Late at night, usually.

  …

  Maybe three of the seven storie
s in Soft From All The Blood could be called Lovecraftian...

  Well, Greetings from Sunny R’lyeh, yes, definitely, and Notebook Found In A Deserted Houseboat, that’s a nod to Bloch and HPL. Coronation is a speck of Bierce filtered, magnified through HPL. The Frozen is another nod, but to Derleth, really, more than anyone else...

  That’s four.

  Oh. Yeah, there’s four. That’s four out of seven. Alright, it’s a big old Lovecraft-fest, I guess!

  I was going to say that your protagonists are not of the usual type. Mostly they just seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Yeah. I got tired of writing about Men of Learning learning too much, right? That’s the pastiche trap. “Now that I know what I know, I wish I didn’t know it, oh god, the hand at the window, etc.” So in Greetings, which I’m not especially proud of, because it’s a clumsy attempt at cyberpunk with a little Cthulhu thrown in...

  A lot.

  Okay, a lot. In it you’ve got these media punks who just consume everything, that’s their way, their mode of being, and should we feel sorry for them that they consume a little cosmic madness along the way? No. I wanted to say something about sanity as a commodity, I guess, which I think we as a society might be just giving away without knowing it, but I don’t think I said it all that well.

  And in Notebook, I wanted to just explore the idea that it’s a harsh, weird world, and sometimes when harsh things happen to decent people, it just opens a door and invites more of the same into their lives. I wanted to take that as far as it could go, so we have a protagonist in Notebook who thinks he’s lost everything, but he’s wrong. And the Universe, cold bitch that she is, educates him as to her nastiness and brutishness and shortness. Though not so much with the latter. He’s a victim, totally.