by Matt Cardin
Ignoring them as best I could, I made my way down to the bespectacled man. He stammered and finally stopped in his nervous explanations when I approached, and the cluster of people turned to stare at me.
I asked, “Where is Professor Williamson?” and my voice emerged as a harsh demand. It also seemed to reach me from a distance, and I noticed that I didn’t feel a part of the situation at all, but rather like a spectator watching a theatrical presentation in which I and the others were performing.
The jittery little man played his part admirably. “I was just explaining—” he began, and then tripped over his own jitteriness. His role was obviously that of the Flustered Mousy Man, whereas mine was at least partly that of The One Who Flusters. He finally gave up and gestured miserably toward a door behind him that appeared to lead into a conference room. “He’s in there.”
“Is he alone?”
Mousy Man was growing more unhappy with each passing second. “Well, no. There’s somebody in there with him. As I’ve been telling these people, a very agitated young man showed up a few minutes before seven and demanded to see the professor. I told him we were busy, but then Nigel came out and chatted with him for a minute, and seemed quite interested in what the young man had to say. Fascinated, actually. They went into the conference room half an hour ago and haven’t come out.”
“Have you knocked?” By this point I was all but yelling, and the other performers’ eyes were widening as they shifted visibly away and left me alone to dominate the stage and my unfortunate foil.
“Well, no,” he said, and began shifting from foot to foot. “I didn’t feel comfortable interrupting them. And the young man, he was quite . . . passionate. His eyes were wild, like—” He cut himself short and looked to someone, anyone, for help, but I could read the unspoken words in his anxious and forlorn expression: like your eyes.
I opened my mouth to speak another line, but a sudden loud thump from the conference room silenced us all. It sounded like a heavy chair or table falling over. Then: a wild, incoherent shouting that froze my blood. For even through the thick oaken door and the hysterical tone, I recognized the voice and accent of my friend Marco.
I bolted past the stunned group of spectators and grabbed the door handle, only to find it locked. Now another voice, panicked and British and sharp with terror, answered Marco’s, and the rest of the scene played out offstage, behind the locked door.
WILLIAMSON
(Terrified)
What are you doing?
MARCO
(Frantically yelling)
You must not! Those who know it fully would perish! The Gate is in the great and the small! You cannot let the madness become sanity!
(There is a tremendous sound of shattering glass.)
WILLIAMSON
Stop it! What are you doing?
(Shouting and pounding on the door)
Roger! Open the door! Roger!
(Rising to a shriek)
NO! STOP!
(There is a sound like a knife stabbing into a side of beef. WILLIAMSON’s words shatter into an incoherent screech, followed by a liquid choking. A second sound emerges: a wet tearing like the shredding of damp cloth. WILLIAMSON’s voice falls silent.)
MARCO
(Screaming as if in mortal agony)
The Gate above and below! The One in the many! Oh God, the teeth! The TEEEEETH!
(Silence, textured by the sly, slick tinkling of some heavy object being dragged through shards of glass.)
(BLACKOUT)
(END OF SCENE)
The play was over. The spectator feeling dissolved and I stepped off the stage into reality. Everything was completely, horribly present and actual. A woman in the crowd was weeping. A man had run halfway up the stairs toward the rear exit and then stopped, and now stood there blinking in befuddlement as if he had lost his way. The rest of the group stood and sat in various states of paralyzed shock.
Then the spell broke all at once and panic set in. Some sprang for the exits while others rushed toward me. Everyone screamed and shouted something different to do, until finally someone ran out to the hallway, blundered into an unlocked maintenance closet, and returned with an enormous claw hammer. I snatched it from him and set to work on the door handle while somebody else phoned the police.
The handle separated and crashed to the carpet after six stout blows. Clutching the hammer like a talisman, I pushed the door open and took a faltering step forward while the others clustered behind me in a sudden, awed silence.
The room I had entered was a standard conference room stocked with a long, narrow table and eight plastic chairs. One of these was sprawled on its back amidst the wreckage of an overturned barrister’s bookcase, whose windows had exploded on impact with the edge of the table and then the face of the floor. The resulting spray of glass was soaked with what looked like gallons of blood. The net effect was a floor carpeted with crimson diamonds and jagged, bloody eggshells.
My eyes followed a distinctly differentiated blood trail through the carnage, tracing it to the point where it disappeared behind the table. As if caught in a nightmare, I crunched unhesitatingly across the crimson carpet to gaze upon what it was that I had gone there to prevent.
Nigel Williamson—physicist, astronomer, Cambridge professor, brilliant iconoclast—would never have the chance to reveal to the world his grand theory concerning the inner purpose of the universe as embodied in the chaotic irrationalities of the quantum realm. His intellectual brilliance had not been enough to save him, for now he lay on his back behind the table where Marco had dragged him, the nine-inch piece of glass Marco had used to eviscerate him still protruding from his side. His frozen expression of horror must have matched the one that slowly began to twist my own face, but if so, I was unaware of it. My eyes, my mind, my awareness, my very being, were all filled to bursting by a sight that blazed with a too-real intensity and became an instant symbol of everything I had realized and endured: the blood-spattered, empty-eyed face of my friend Marco as he crouched over the professor’s body and mechanically devoured his innards.
8
That gruesome image with its oversaturated quality of ontological vividness remained with me forever, even after the passing of years had begun to blunt some of the other memories. Some of the first of those to go were the ones concerning the immediate aftermath of that final event. I remember there was quite a furor on campus and in the town, and even in the national news media. I know I was asked many questions by people acting in official capacities. But the specifics of it all, just like the specifics of the actions that I and the others took right after we found Marco in there with the professor, have been swallowed up by the image of that bloody face with its blank eyes and mechanical masticating motion.
What I do remember with clarity are my broad reactions to the uproar, since they changed the course of my life and brought me to my present circumstance. At the height of it all, when I feared I might literally go insane from everything, I quit my beloved studies and relocated to another town where nobody knew me and I could live in relative anonymity. I still live there today, and hold down the most trivial job I could find that will still provide me with enough income to afford a shoddy apartment where I hide from the world and hope for a merciful end to my existence. In general, I apply myself diligently to ignoring and forgetting the world outside the bubble of boredom that I have created. But from time to time I buy a newspaper or switch on my little television to see if the direction of world events might have changed a little. And of course it has not, nor will it ever.
For everything is still disintegrating inexorably into madness, and I, unlike most people, know precisely why. Before Marco dragged me into his living nightmare, I was worried like everyone else about the mass cultural insanity that had gripped the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Like everyone else, I noticed that things seemed to be roaring toward an apocalyptic climax, and I had my pet theories to explain it all. But now I see how absurd th
ey all were.
Because what is happening is in fact a profound and far-reaching reordering of reality itself—societal, cultural, personal, and even physical. In essence, the prophecies of Lovecraft and Nietzsche are coming true right before our eyes, with effects that are not only personal and cultural but ontological. Our excess of vast scientific knowledge and technological prowess has proceeded in lockstep with a collective descent into species-level insanity. You only have to watch two minutes of television, glance at a headline, or eavesdrop on a random conversation to learn of it. Ignorance and idiocy. Riots and revolutions. These and a thousand other signposts like them are only the most pointed and obvious manifestations of the all-pervasive malaise that has come to define us. And since, as Sankara observed, we are nothing but particularized manifestations of the Ground of Being itself, we are not only witnesses to this breakdown but participants in it, enablers of the transformation of the world into a vale of horror through the metaphysical potency of our very witnessing. God looks out through each of our eyes, an abyss of insatiable hunger and infinite teeth, and the dark light of His consciousness makes each of us a lamp that illuminates a new and terrible truth.
I find it ironic that the man who cursed me with this vision of the world will not even be aware of it when everything comes to fruition. Marco spends his days and nights screaming out his madness in a prison for the criminally insane. I visited him only once, when the police were still trying to discover where he had hidden himself during his ten-day absence (a question they never answered, nor did I). I almost couldn’t bear to look at him, and when I finally did meet his gaze, I knew at once that my friend was dead. His eyes had gone permanently dark in the manner I had briefly glimpsed so long ago in his dorm room, and I recognized his condition as an advanced case of the same state that would sooner or later manifest in every person on the planet. Something had compelled me to bring the notebook, which I had retrieved from my living room floor and then carefully preserved for no reason I could articulate. When I showed it to Marco, he sprang at me without warning and knocked me to the floor, snarling and shrieking in a feral frenzy. The savagery of his attack stunned me, and before I could recover, he had seized the notebook with his teeth and shaken it to shreds like a dog with a rat. Then he turned on me again, and it was only the intervention of the hospital staff that saved me from having my throat torn out. His doctors said it would be best if I stayed away after that. Later, I heard that he managed to break his restraints after I left, and that in the absence of another object he turned on himself. Before the orderlies could reach him, he chewed off and swallowed two of his own fingers.
What scares me the most is knowing that the transcendent insanity gnawing at the shell of Marco is the same insanity that waits to welcome me in death. All too well do I understand the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, which held that the best thing is never to have been born. To exist at all is to know the horror of no escape. Nietzsche said the thought of suicide can comfort a man through many a dark night, but it is no comfort to someone like me who knows all too well what awaits.
There is only one hope for my salvation. Over the years I have become an assiduous student of Lovecraft, not just his stories but his essays and letters. And I have marveled at the man’s uncanny ability to see so deeply into the truth and yet remain so composed and kindhearted. Perhaps this gentle New Englander knew something that I do not, something he tried to convey when he wrote of the “vast conceit of those who had babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones.” Perhaps the horror exists only in me, not in reality. Perhaps Marco was wrong, and there is no need to fear the truth. After all, It knows only Itself, and maybe I will not perceive It as horrific after I die. Perhaps I will be so thoroughly consumed by and identified with it that “I” will not even exist at all, and my sense of horror will prove to be as fleeting and finite as the self that sensed it. If this is true, then may it come quickly.
But this hope, however appealing, can never sustain me for long. For it is clear that I am already identified with that horrible truth, and yet I still find it a horror. The clear evidence of this identification manifests in my own body, in the fundamental physical drive that compels me to take nourishment and the anatomical structures that have been evolved to accomplish this purpose: lips and tongue, teeth and gums, throat and stomach. Life, as Joseph Campbell once observed, is a horrific thing that sustains itself by feeding on other life. I have gained a new and awful awareness of this fact in the form of a certain nagging sensitivity in my mouth. All day and night I am plagued by an unpleasant awareness of those protruding bits of bone whose function is to grind plant and animal flesh to a pulp in order to sustain this bodily life. Sometimes when this awareness has tortured me for hours on end, I will go to the mirror and draw back my lips to gaze at the truth. This mockery of the facial expression that conventionally expresses pleasure reminds me a bit of the bliss I once hoped to find in philosophies of ultimate beauty. But even that is gone now, swallowed down the bottomless throat of the cosmic mystery that forever feeds on all things.
Do I seem mad? Do I sound like a man who has become lost in his own private delusion of hell? Then let me remind you that you, too, exhibit the same stigmata in your own body. Show me your smile and I will show you your fate.
The Stars Shine without Me
For some reason, I worked for Viggo Brand. Several times each day as I sat at my desk or wandered around my office and went about my regular routine of boredom and unproductiveness, it occurred to me that way: For some reason, I work for Viggo Brand.
Of course I knew the real reasons. I could look back over the pattern of my past and survey the series of causes and effects, motivations and necessities, which had led me to this job in a cramped office on the ninetieth floor of the Brand Building. It was all too clear why I worked for him. The reason could be summed up in a single word: fear. Not fear of Mr. Brand, whom I had never seen, but whose guardian presence presided like an invisible eye over his organization. It was more a fear of not knowing what else to do. I was afraid to do anything but continue working there, because working there was all I had ever done, and I felt comfortable with and comforted by the boredom, even when it sometimes proved indistinguishable from desperation.
But still, although the simple, literal answer was readily available, I sometimes liked to narrow my attention to the present—to that infinitesimal, perpetually dying point of the present moment—and from that restricted viewpoint consider my employment at the Brand Corporation. When I did this, I truly did not know why I was there. Without the present awareness of my past laid out for easy viewing, I could almost imagine that I had never been anywhere else. On long afternoons when the sky scoured over with a matting of dark clouds and the hours seemed to stretch into eternity before and behind me, I could almost imagine that I had never known any place but my office, nor any existence but the routine of monotony and boredom that made up my every day.
The ennui of my situation was augmented by the fact that I did not know what I was supposed to be doing for the company. Beginning on my first day, many years past, I had shown up every morning, and nobody had ever asked me to leave, so I had stayed. The woman who acted as my secretary, and also as the secretary for the eight or nine other employees in my division, and whose name I had never learned during all my long years of employment, would peek in the door to my office each morning to verify that I was present at my desk. When she saw me, she would give a curt nod and close the door, leaving me to lean back in my chair and look out the window, or maybe take a nap, or maybe scribble meaningless shapes on the notepad that awaited me on my desk each morning.
I had become very deft at these illustrations. Often I put great care into them, but then I just left them sitting there, and each morning when I arrived they were neatly stacked with a fresh blank pad on top. Over time, I had perfected a style of doodling all my own. Sometimes I spent entire weeks blackening a single sheet of notepaper with curly lines and boxes, diamonds and stars
, dots and dashes, and jagged, meshy patterns that made my eyes ache when I looked at them later. This had become just another automatic act, like everything else I did for the Brand Corporation.
The Brand Building was an imposing structure. Every morning when I climbed up from the subway and approached the sparkling row of front doors, I would raise my eyes and peer up through the mist to catch a glimpse of the sharp spire, and would think of Mr. Brand living there at the very top in unknown quarters. And I would wonder what he looked like and what he did with his days, and where he had acquired his great wealth, and why he had built this magnificent structure for a purpose that I still did not know after all those years of working for him.
The Brand Building was shaped like a needle, or like a four-cornered pyramid elongated to an absurd proportion, with an exterior surface of smooth, obsidian-colored stone. It stabbed upward two hundred stories and appeared to prick the outer edge of the sky. I remember thinking when I first glimpsed it from a distant bridge many years ago, as I was entering the city for the first time, that the great tower seemed to watch over the dull buildings below like a harsh and haughty ruler. They huddled around its base in crazy clusters, all dirty brick and concrete. I had felt like the proverbial rat in a trap as I drove through the maze of streets and slums, and looked up at the faded façades and crumbling brickwork. Worst of all were the pallid faces I saw framed in the windows. Some were lighter than others, some darker. Some were young and some were old. All wore a look of vacancy and hopelessness.
Then I had come nearer the Brand Building, and the squalor had disappeared at once and given way to a sterile open space many hundreds of yards wide, where Renaissance-style fountains stood dry and flaking, and statues of strange forms lined up in severe rows to flank visitors like me and guide us toward the row of front doors that were always revolving, always turning in perpetual circles to allow unhindered, universal access or exit. After I had been employed there for several months, someone finally told me about the subway access right there on the grounds, reserved exclusively for Brand Corporation employees. After that I never navigated the unnerving maze of the old city again.
