He was delighted that I knew who he was and explained to me that he considered these his wilderness years. He saw himself as one of the misunderstood minds of the age. From his perspective, he was a mysterious Van Gogh of magic; an angel fallen from grace that sought restoration. He described how the disreputable and sordid goings on that often filled his time in Britain had finally caught up with him and his magical order. For my part, the more he spoke, the greater my fascination grew and I began to covet the very powers he claimed to possess. Perhaps I thought that this notorious man might instill in me the life purpose I so dearly sought and failed to find in Opium? Perhaps finally I could find a way to fill the void of my own existence?
As his story further unfolded, I gathered that many of his followers had provided him with the financial means to continue his bizarre practices and rituals. These individuals – damaged by connection to scandal - had long since deserted him and now he was almost penniless. He still had an expensive drug habit to feed and also needed monetary support to maintain his occult studies and practices. It became clear to me that there was an opportunity to form a symbiotic relationship. I offered him my help. I was willing to sustain him with a regular injection of cash from my substantial inheritance. This financial backing was conditional, however. I told him that I wished to learn his peculiar form of magic and how to wield its power. Indignatio countered with a proviso of his own – he would accept me as his apprentice once he had completed a ritual called The Twenty Anthers of the Spirit. This enactment would allow him to become Ipsissimus and be elevated to a position higher than any other mortal practitioner of magic on Earth. This achieved, only then would he grant me my desire.
Our agreement settled, we moved from place to place across Asia, often in a fog of opium smoke. We stopped periodically and performed the necessary rituals, which allowed Indignatio to gradually work his way through the Aethers. We left scandal and little else of significance in our wake each time we moved on. Already, I was becoming dissatisfied with the arrangement. I had seen nothing within his ritualistic shenanigans to make me believe that the abilities he sought were real and even at that early stage in our relationship, I began to doubt his claims that he could access powers beyond that of ordinary men.
Our quest for knowledge continued. We crossed the Himalayas, moved south through India and took a steamer from Mumbai to Cairo. We trekked many miles across the desert, stopping at various points along the way to perform ceremonies to gods with almost unpronounceable names. Finally, near Benghazi, Indignatio drew a triangle in the sand, slaughtered three lizards and poured their blood into each point. Then he brutalized an Arab youth, whom we’d met at a nearby settlement. The boy had mercifully been fed large amounts of opiates to dull his senses. The final act was to slit the young man’s throat within the triangle just as had been done to the reptiles. Being an accessory to this crime filled me with revulsion but, worse still, it turned out that this youth was not the orphan Indignatio thought him to be and we barely made it back to Britain alive.
There still had been no manifestations of unearthly power in any of the ceremonies so far but Indignatio insisted that we were nearing the culmination and begged me to persevere until his apotheosis. Reluctantly, I agreed but covertly resolved to finally be free of this madman. Indignatio had begun to scare me and I worried that, if I abandoned him with his work unfinished, I might become one of his victims. Certain now that he would fail, I vowed to leave him as soon as this farce was brought to an end.
For the final ritual, we returned to the temple at his home at Wyrm’s House on a windswept Dartmoor.
In a room set aside for his practices, Indignatio sat in a large, ornately carved and throne-like chair. He gripped the arms of the seat, wheezed and leaned forward. I noticed that his bulbous bald head was covered in beads of sweat. It was obvious that during our months together, his health had deteriorated – no wonder considering the substantial narcotics we had consumed. This was the worst physical condition I had seen him in and considered whether he could survive long enough to achieve his ambition. And yet, those intense, piercing eyes were of a creature that had inflicted so much pain and never wavered. I began to question if the sheer strength of his malice could outlive the oncoming death and decay of his corpulent body.
He leaned towards me. ‘Do you know what magic really is?’
‘Tell me,’ I replied.
‘Magic,’ he pronounced, ‘is the imposition of one’s will upon the forces and laws of nature. Achieve this and you can achieve anything, become godlike.’ He then sat back in his old chair looking supremely satisfied with himself. ‘I am ready.’
I said nothing more. Too much of my initial enthusiasm had become disillusionment. Following this man had made me an accessory to murder and other sadistic acts that haunted my sleeping hours in the form of recurring nightmares. Soon, I consoled myself, I would leave Indignatio to his own devices, and head back to the city and hope to finally free my drug-ravaged body from its dependencies. Then, perhaps, I may find a way to atone for my crimes and begin my life anew.
Indignatio seemed oblivious to my apathy or perhaps simply did not care as long as he had my money to sustain his ambitions. He began drawing a pentagram within a circle on the floor of the temple with a large stick of chalk. When he had completed this task, he laid a staff topped with a golden skull in the centre of the star. During this activity, I merely stared around the room, noting its ornate, wooden throne, black candelabras, velvet curtains and large portrait of Baphomet hanging on the far wall.
‘Tonight,’ Indignatio proclaimed, ‘I will call out to the nameless one that gifted us the terror and ecstasy of existence. He is the oldest of all the gods.’
When the time was right, we filled our bodies with the opiates they craved, dressed in dark robes and began the ritual. I lit the black candles and stood inside the magical circle opposite the double entrance doors. Indignatio was poised in the centre of the pentagram holding the severed head of a goat, which he ceremoniously placed at the uppermost point of the star. He dipped his fist into the torn sinews and tissue of the neck, pulling free some crimson pulp and smearing the tissue on to his forehead. He then came to me and spread the remainder of the bloody flesh on my cheeks.
‘Be witness to my change,’ he declared.
The magus threw his hands up towards the roof of the temple and began muttering his incantations and spells.
For a while, nothing seemed to happen, which came as no surprise to me. My faith in this affair was at its lowest ebb. I sighed as I resigned myself to witnessing another of his failures.
Indignatio picked up the staff topped with the golden skull and struck its tip three times against the wooden floor. Immediately, the temperature within the temple plummeted and I shivered in the icy cold air. Then, we heard a single knock against the entrance doors.
Indignatio flashed me a grin of triumph. ‘I stand here as one willing to pay any price.’ He turned to the doors and cried with arms outstretched. ‘Enter, and do what thou will!’
The entrance burst open with such violence that wood splintered and hinges broke. The howling wind and fetid fog preceded a writhing pillar of pulsating flesh with gangrenous tentacles and smaller cilia that appeared to be edged with thorns. In the centre of the body resided one, stalked red and globular eye. In its wake lay a trail of slime and stinking excreta, which it expelled from a number of black and pulsing nephritis. The creature was a tower of corruption that seethed and fizzed with magical energy as it moved towards us but stopped just outside the pentagram. I turned my head away at the unbearable stench and saw that Indignatio had produced a jeweled dagger from the folds of his robes. The feral grin he gave was enough to convince me that I was about to go the way of the goat. Shocked at this act of betrayal and dumbfounded by the thing before us. I instinctively backed away.
Indignatio’s eyes went wide with alarm. ‘No!’ he cried. ‘You’ve broken the circle!’
I looked down and sa
w that I had indeed crossed the magical barrier. The creature crackled with malevolent power and moved towards the magus, obscuring him from my sight. Then, I heard him scream.
Early in our relationship, Indignatio had described the god-like beings he worshipped as multi-dimensional entities that could intersect our three dimensional world.
‘In our normal state,’ he explained, ‘we can only see a fraction of what their true form is – the part that fills our known dimensions. I want to go beyond our sense of what is real, to move into their form of veracity. Only in this way may I witness the whole truth and perhaps, ultimately, become like them. Imagine that! To become a god!’ Now, I wondered what this fraction that throbbed before me could possibly look like in its entirety?
I crept around the bulk of the nameless thing. Terror gripped my spine and clutched at my gut but I needed to know what had become of my companion. At a certain point, I felt the surface of the floor change. I glanced down and saw that it was slick with blood. When I looked up once again, I finally caught sight of Indignatio and froze in horror. He was suspended in midair. A few of the tentacles had him hung by his ankles with his arms outstretched in some inverted form of crucifixion. I backed away when I saw that his body had been impaled by a number of the writhing thorn-tipped cilia. Rivulets of blood ran down his torso from the various wounds, pooling directly beneath his head and spreading across the floor. I noticed that he was staring at me with those piercing blue eyes of his. For a second, I expected to discern dread lurking there but instantly realised my mistake. What I saw in his expression was ecstasy. He disappeared from view as the eldritch thing moved once more with tentacles and other protuberances flailing. Strips of skin flew through the air and the magus groaned his orgasmic agony to the world. Indignatio then fell silent and the stalked, bulbous red eye turned slowly towards me. It seemed to focus on the bloody mark my mentor had placed upon my face and a large tentacle menacingly uncoiled itself from that nefarious pillar of ancient flesh. It twisted and writhed slowly in my direction.
For a second, I simply stood there utterly transfixed - as if petrified by Medusa. My skin prickled with the proximity of the power of its aura and I became aware that my very existence was being calcined into insignificance against the malevolent fury of this creature. I imagined my worthless soul being ripped from my body, my flesh torn apart and thrown to the void, my bones crushed to dust and my mind split like a nut. I stared at the pulsating flesh and writhing cilia, finally aware of the truth. My body craved its own destruction. Though my mind protested, my flesh desired that horrendous moment of oblivion that would come as I was taken apart piece by piece. I was losing control of my humanity but, in one final surge of courage, summoned the last of my energy and ran, too appalled to look back.
Somehow, I escaped the temple and made it to London where I took up lodgings, paid for with the last of my cash reserves. As the days passed and I watched the normality of city life move by, I began to wonder how much of what I had witnessed had been real and what part of it had been caused by drug-induced delusions. It was then that I discarded the last of my supply of narcotics and vowed to rid myself of such abuses forever.
I checked each morning but there had been no word of Indignatio’s demise in the papers. This did not really surprise me – Wyrm’s House was situated in a fairly remote location. There was a good chance that the dark deeds of that night had still to be discovered. Perhaps I was free of the nightmare? My contemplations and good intentions, however, were short lived because, one night a few weeks after the incident in the temple, I heard a knock at the door of my lodgings. I went to answer it but paused when I recognized those familiar seething, fizzing and crackling sounds. I stood by the jamb, my nostrils flaring as I detected the fetid stench of that unholy creature. I then realised that my trembling hand was moving of its own accord to grip the door handle and I forced myself to step away in terror. My body still craved what I feared the most. I had become addicted to this new form of self-destruction.
I have returned to the crutch of my opiates in an attempt to dull my fear. Each evening at midnight, I hear that familiar rap against wood and I struggle to contain the urge to reply. At dawn, when I open my door, I am met with that familiar trail of putrid slime, filth and dissipating fog leading down the stairs and into the street. It is a confirmation to me that nightmares are real and that there will come a time when I will be able to resist them no longer. Drugs ravage my body but every day that passes sees the greater addiction grow ever stronger. Soon, my limbs will no longer respond to my will and my shredded nerves threaten a descent into madness. There is no ecstasy of existence for me. I am at an impasse – too terrified to live and too scared to die. I exist in the fear of the moment I finally allow the entry of that eldritch and corrupted pillar of evil into my home. What unholy place will it take me to when I finally answer that knock upon my door?
THE END.
SOME LIKE IT PUTRID by Karen Heslop
Jamaica: land of wood, water, reggae and now a teeming scourge of the undead. The rampant plague of zombies didn’t come as a surprise to many people. Really there were just so many movies and television shows you could watch or books you could read before it occurs to people that you know what? This shit could actually happen. What really surprised everyone was that all these books and shows were wrong about one thing. Not all zombies were mindless drones easily tricked into traps and avoided with ease. It soon became clear that the decaying infected in Jamaica were attacking with the sole purpose of spreading the virus. They did not devour their victims and they sidestepped anyone who had already been bitten.
Before that became common knowledge though, persons just thought themselves fortunate to have avoided the seasonal flu. One of those fortunate few was Samantha Fuller, a quality control officer at a manufacturing plant in Kingston. That morning when she stepped out of her apartment complex, she was struck by two things. The glare of the sun in her eyes even though it was only 7:00 a.m. and the fact that a number of her neighbours seemed to still be home. She would have been more than happy to stay home too if the guilt of leaving an entire quality department empty wouldn’t have driven her crazy. She walked briskly to the bus stop so she could get the 7:10 bus to Half-Way-Tree. She hoped it was one of the air conditioned ones so the sweat that was already dotted on her forehead didn’t get a chance to trickle down her face and smear her blouse. To her dismay, she was still standing at the bus stop at 7:30 and sweat had already darkened her white blouse to an unsightly beige.
She noticed a man ambling towards her from across the road. He didn’t stop to look both ways which was a dangerous thing to do at this time of the day and he didn’t even acknowledge the cursing drivers who had to swerve to avoid him. He got under the bus stop with Samantha and leaned against the side of the metal structure. Samantha moved closer to her side of the bus stop and tried to ignore the stranger’s labored breathing.
Samantha heard a gurgled word struggle from the man’s lips but hadn’t been able to decipher it.
“Excuse me?” she asked, turning in his direction.
She stifled a gasp at the man’s appearance. His face was ashen and his skull seemed to be shrink wrapped by his caramel skin. Pink lines sprawled across the sclera of his eyes and dried mucus clung to the edges of his eyelids. His nose was red, puffy and draining. Still, he forced speech from his throat that sounded like clothes being ripped across barbed wire.
“Bus?” he asked.
“Uhm…I haven’t seen it yet.”
The man nodded and resumed leaning against the bus stop. Samantha flinched when he started to cough. She waited for the fit to subside but it only seemed to be getting worse. She watched the man’s body convulse as he struggled to bring up whatever was blocking his airway. As she moved to help him, the man bent over and expelled the mass. Samantha stared at the organ lying on the sidewalk. It was mottled with black spots and covered in slimy green mucous. Dear God, did this guy just cough up his lung? The ma
n had become silent so she turned around expecting to find his body crumpled on the ground. Instead he was standing, his red eyes regarding her in the same way Samantha had seen cats look at lizards. He snarled, revealing sharp yellow teeth and reached for her but she backed away with a screech. As her back hit the side of the bus stop, the bus pulled up. The driver pressed the button to open the bus door and raised an eyebrow at the two people under the bus stop. They were both frozen: the man with his arm outstretched and Samantha with her large bag acting as a shield.
“Sorry I running so late this morning. Had a helluva time gettin’ outta bed cause of this flu. You two getting on?” the driver asked.
The man looked from Samantha to the driver and tottered unto the bus. Samantha shook her head at the bus driver and walked away. She held her head straight even as the passengers started to scream and the sound of the bus crashing into a nearby building reached her ears. She used her pass to get back into her apartment complex and hurriedly made her way into her room. That was the last day Samantha tried to get to work.
During the week, persons knocked on her door and Samantha even considered opening it a few times. When she remembered the man at the bus stop though, she decided to conduct her own test.
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