by Matt Cardin
The more he ponders it, the more it sounds and feels like a narrative being altered and overlaid by multiple rewrites, each intended to accomplish a greater opening to an emotion compounded of equal parts bafflement and spiritual revulsion. In the latest revision, the letters are addressed directly to him, and their author is rendered fictional, to await complete obliteration in a version yet to come.
“Why me?” he asks, even though he is growing increasingly terrified at the thought that the specific identity of the New Paul may be supremely unimportant in one sense and all-important in another.
The voice responds to his unspoken fear: “In the beginning was the Logos, which speaks not only in the lines of Holy Scripture but in the lines of the real itself. Our new apostle’s writings and their accompanying signs and wonders declare a great rewording in which the notions of ‘me’ and ‘thee’ may be forgotten.”
A pen, formerly unnoticed, rests beside the pages on the desk. His hand begins to itch. The voice intones, “The Word is a living thing. Like a farmer sowing seeds, one sows the Word but knows not how it grows. If all were written down, the world itself could not contain the books.”
The multitude gathered outside in the piazza emits a sigh of anticipation and agreement.
He watches with shock and fascination as his hand picks up the pen and begins to add to the words of the final page, defiling its inviolable sanctity, writing in clean, crisp, orderly lines that cut across the jumbled chaos like the bars of a cage.
ITS IMMANENCE: Jerusalem and R’lyeh—might they always have been interlaced with each other? The physical Jerusalem and also the mythic vision of its bejeweled celestial fulfillment—both revealed as mere shades, devolutions, abstractions of the primary reality of those crazy-slanted, green-dripping towers and slabs emerging like the archetype of a chthonic city from the subterranean waters of the collective psyche, like bony black fingers rising up from Mother Ocean.
Christ and Cthulhu—might they both be hierophanies of the same aweful transcendent reality? Christ as high priest in the order of Melchizidek, Cthulhu as high priest in the order of the Old Ones, both of them bridging the gap and healing the division between our free-fallen souls with their burden of autonomous, inward-turned selfhood and the greater, all-encompassing reality of God-by-whatever-name; both implanting their own deep selves within us, thus undercutting and overcoming our categorically contradictory attempts to heal the primordial rift through conscious effort. These psychic disturbances that have so terrified us of late, all the collapsing distinctions between thought, imagination, and physical reality, so that a stray wish or undisciplined notion may cause finned, clawed, and tentacled atrocities to appear, or may even alter one’s own physical body in awful ways that some of us have been unable to undo afterward, as in a nightmare from which one cannot wake because one has awakened inside the nightmare itself—may these not be the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to send the paraclete to “guide us into all truth” and “convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment,” and of his promise that his followers would perform even greater miracles than he himself had performed, and of the apostle Paul’s teaching that the divine spirit living within us will show us directly those primal mysteries which “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived”? Surely these last words, quoted by Paul from the prophet Isaiah, aptly characterize the marvels and monstrosities we have recently witnessed.
Still writing, still horror-struck, he sees in his peripheral vision the Voice moving away from him in a swirl of smoky shapes. The new scriptural corpus is complete. The Church can now achieve alignment with that which truly is. What might be a wholesome human form dressed in liturgical vestments and wearing the papal mitre might also be a mutated manshape sprouting dragon’s wings and surmounted by a head like a cuttlefish, and this dual superimposition of high priest might be walking on the floorstones or gliding above them.
The crowd assembled in the piazza might be a wild-eyed multitude of ragged and terrified survivors or a stalk-eyed horde of flopping fish and toads.
The vast visage painted across the dome of the twilit sky might be a white-bearded transposition from the nearby chapel ceiling or the imprint of an extra-cosmic monstrosity now burned eternally onto the face of heaven.
The granite obelisk planted in the piazza’s center might be a skeletal black finger rising from Mother Ocean. The curved walls enclosing the crowd might be alien stone hewn into an architectural impossibility.
The incarnate voice emerges onto the balcony. The crowd roars, raising hands or fins or webbed claws and screaming in desperation or delight, singing a hymn of horror to the face in the sky.
The voice begins to speak, delivering its opening blessing: “Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!”
Inside the ornate room he continues to write, binding the pages with a meaning that can only be known, not spoken.
The answer, Francis, must surely be found in the implicit order that lies buried in all this chaos. Embracing it is our salvation. God’s ways are not man’s. To Him a thousand days are as one, and one as a thousand. He is terrible to behold. Our religion, all the world’s religions, may once have kept Him out, all unknowing of their true role, but now they, we, have become His conduit, again ignorant of our purpose until it is upon us to fulfill.
Gaunt faceless gargoyles hover on black leathern wings above the assembled multitude, showering whitefeather plumage as they beam benevolence from gold-glowing countenances.
The Lord God sits on His throne above the throng, towering above the basilica in a redblack inferno. His crown burns black. His beard coils green.
In these letters I intend to present you with the rudiments of a viable theological recalibration that will explore the avenues opened up by these shocking juxtapositions, and that, in doing so, will safeguard the possibility of our salvation, albeit in a much modified and, as I fear we shall be unable to keep from feeling it, far less agreeable form.
A Cherished Place
at the Center of His Plans
With Mark McLaughlin
1. The Hatchlings
Where does it come from? The questioning voice echoed in Erik Thornton’s mind for what felt like the thousandth time during that hot, endless night. It was past three, and the stifling atmosphere of his attic apartment pulsated with the maddening heat of his own creative energy. Or perhaps his nerves were just frayed after five solid hours of painting. He could not be sure. In the past, he had sometimes mistaken his weariness and its accompanying sensory distortions as inspiration. Not infrequently, he had deliberately interpreted it that way. Either way, the end result was always the same. His work unfailingly emerged, so people said, as brilliant, electrifying, and shockingly disturbing—a visual explosion of ferocious originality and dark visionary power.
He was pleased to agree with these assessments. For him, the most important fact was that each painting successfully channeled his soul onto the canvas. He had never faced a failure, never had to admit defeat. All twenty-seven of his works, produced over a ten-year span, were the perfect expression, the externalized quintessence, of his deepest self.
At the moment, he was in the midst of creating another one. He sliced the brush downward in a vicious arc, adding a black gash over the two humanoid figures embracing in a universe of chromatic chaos. They were separate yet one, these figures, these effigies. Their arms bled into each other’s torsos, their faces melded one to the other, and they were joined in the middle where their hidden hearts, or rather a single heart between them, throbbed inside those shiny, oil-based breasts. As the scene had taken shape, he had fancied the two figures must ultimately share the same soul, since they were obviously two discrete expressions of the same transcendent self.
But he also knew, and he smiled at the thought, that this was merely his opinion. Gallery directors and art patrons found their own meanings in his images, and they paid handsomely for the luxury of taking his work home and contemplating it at their leisure, in privat
e, where it could speak to them in whispers that might come to sound strangely similar to their own secret voices.
Where does it come from? The question echoed again in his head, and again there was no answer. It seemed that whenever he dwelled too long on the matter, his hand slowed and the work stalled, so he ignored the thought, refused to follow it, and simply let the painting continue to create itself.
He finished up around six, just as the first tricklings of dawn seeped through the wooden blinds covering the rounded window. He walked to the window, tilted the blinds with paint-smeared fingers, and peered down at the street below. The houses looked like tombs in the murky morning light. The manicured lawns of the tidy middle-class neighborhood were as pale and damp as freshly dug clay. With a grimace, he withdrew from the window, inhaled the creative solitude of his apartment, and vowed again that when he had enough money—perhaps earned from this latest round of work, soon to be on display with many of his other pieces at the Mondrago Gallery downtown—he would find different lodgings. This house in American suburbia was no place for a man with a mission like his.
Where does it come from? This time he cursed the echo before resolutely ignoring it again. His work was finished for now. He needed a long morning and afternoon of sleep before tackling his first meal of the day—dry toast with a pot of strong coffee.
As he settled onto his mattress, which lay uncovered on the hardwood floor, he glanced back up at the painting and willed it to be his most powerful work, the one piece that would unlock the next stage of his life and show him where he was meant to go and what he was meant to do. The practical labor was done, but now came the most important part: the spiritual act of filling the painting with the charge of his soul. It was a culminating ritual that he had created for himself years ago, perhaps from some idea he had encountered in a book, or perhaps heard from a fellow artist. The memory was lost, but the ritual remained. He stared at the still-wet painting and willed his soul to enter it. He visualized a fiery ray emanating from his heart. He conjured the physical sensation of energy coiling and blazing within his core and leaping forth to penetrate and permeate the painting. The nebulous figures twined together on the canvas accepted this energy willingly, or so their wide eyes announced.
The name for the painting presented itself suddenly and incontrovertibly: The Hatchlings. This was a coveted moment of grace, one that did not always come, and he silently thanked whoever or whatever had delivered it.
When he had expended his last ounce of imaginative energy, he fell back onto the mattress with a heavy sigh. His muscles loosened and his consciousness began to blur almost immediately. His exhaustion was total. Within seconds, sleep had enveloped him like a soft blanket, like the warm waters of a cottony dark sea.
In a dream, he was walking through tall, wild grass. A black-velvet sky glittered with infinite stars. He approached a pool of dark water with an oily sheen swirling lazily on its surface. A coolness rose from it to press his cheeks and eyes with clammy hands.
The water stirred. The disturbance converged on a single point. A yellow-hooded head broke the surface and rose, cool and dry, to confront him with a faceless black emptiness. Two yellow stars ignited within the cowl, two ocular pinpoints of harsh golden light. They sought out his own eyes and peered into them with startling intensity. Without warning, his lungs seemed to deflate. He tried to gasp but his chest was paralyzed. The eyes inside that yellow cowl continued to stare at him, and into him, with an imperious malevolence so vast, so inconceivably ancient, it felt like a blast of hatred from the cosmos itself. And yet there was irony with the hatred, something like laughter, equally ancient and equally awful.
There was no sudden jolt out of the dream, no sudden springing awake and sitting up in bed with gasps of terror and relief. There was simply a torturous eternity of that silent exchange with the figure in the water, an eternity of suffocating under the scrutiny of those baleful eyes in their yellow cowl. Then there was a moment when he came to awareness in his attic, with his eyes already open and his breath rattling in his throat. The sight of his ceiling did not so much replace or displace the dreamworld as cover it up. The dream did not so much end as conceal itself, dipping beneath the surface of the room and taking up residence in invisible proximity.
Dazed, he turned his head in his supine position, saw the ceiling joined to the walls, the circular window with its blinds, the easel and the canvas, the physical normality of the room. But he still felt the dreadful gaze of that yellow-hooded head at the center of the pool. It was still there, still staring, as if lurking behind every shape, surface, and shadow.
It was many minutes before he could rise, first to his elbows, then to a seated position. Finally he crawled to his feet. He wobbled slightly, searching for balance. His body felt as if it had been motionless for years. His joints and muscles protested every movement; his head throbbed. Under normal circumstances, he would have reflected with pleasure on such a memorable dream with such vivid after-effects, since it was precisely this type of thing that often formed the fodder for his work. But he was categorically unable to feel that these circumstances were normal.
Still dazed and unsteady, he turned and found himself looking at his newest work. The Hatchlings. The title was still perfection, but the figures on the canvas had somehow changed. The colors, angles, textures, shapes, all the objective components, were unaltered, but now their true emotional coloration revealed itself as if for the first time. Looking at the intertwined figures encased in their maelstrom of colors, he now wondered how he could have missed their expressions of absolute horror.
2. The Exhibition
“Don’t look now,” said Powers, “but you’re being watched.” Bernard Powers was the director of the Mondrago Gallery on Equine Street. It was the opening night of Thornton’s one-week exhibition, and Powers, ever solicitous and ever the salesman, was handling him.
It had been three weeks since the completion of The Hatchlings. Three weeks, with the memory of the yellow hood and the eyes and the pond gradually fading. He was surprised to find that he almost missed the electrifying terror that had accompanied him constantly for the first few days. Almost—but not quite.
He glanced around the gallery, pleased to see that the evening was turning out just as he had hoped. The exhibition had drawn all the hottest collectors in the city. There were even some new faces present in the crowd, posh and polished couples and individuals who were obviously major players, judging from their custom-tailored clothing, expensive haircuts, and designer jewelry.
His work adorned every wall of the multi-roomed gallery. As the crowd milled from painting to painting, he indulged in one of his favorite fantasies: that lines of fire lanced out from his works to fill the gallery with a glowing blaze. The guests were all trapped unknowingly in a web of his soul energy. He smiled at the delightful mental image.
“Watched?” he answered Powers indifferently, preferring to remain wrapped up in his daydream. “No surprise there. It’s my show, after all. I imagine everybody will look my way, if they haven’t already.” He plucked a champagne flute from the tray of a passing waiter and took a sparkling sip.
“Yes, but this is someone special.” Powers tilted his head slightly to the left. “He’s over there by The Ducklings. Try not to stare.”
Thornton choked on the champagne. In keeping with his usual custom, Powers had misnamed the latest painting in the most insulting way conceivable. Thornton refrained from correcting him, knowing it would be useless, and turned to see the person Powers had mentioned.
The gentleman standing next to The Hatchlings was handsome in a way that embarrassed the word itself. He was in fact a veritable Adonis: high cheekbones, square jaw, golden tan, thick black hair, and a trim yet powerful figure, clad immaculately in a tuxedo whose cost could have purchased a good portion of the art gallery itself.
But for all that, there was something disturbingly wrong with the man. Even from a distance, Thornton could see that he was
cross-eyed. Other factors were more obscure but no less definite. The man’s fingers seemed longer and thinner than one would have expected. Moreover, his tanned flesh had a glow to it that seemed out of place. It was more like the glow that might grace the features of a pregnant woman.
For a moment the contradictory cues in the stranger’s appearance struck Thornton as cloyingly cute, like the unproportioned mess of a Siamese kitten or a fluffy gosling. But on continued observation, the setting of those misaligned eyes in that godlike face produced an impression that was not at all charming. If anything, it felt oddly revolting.
Thornton continue to stare until the man suddenly turned his face and eyes—or at least one of them—directly toward him and flashed a goofy, lopsided smile. Thornton gasped and whipped around to look at the floor tiles next to Powers.
