The bird continues to sing, out of tune, hideous.
Lovecraft chews his lip, con-templative, and takes the notebook from his pocket. He writes two words – a title – and closes the book.
That night, he dreams of the spirochetes in his father’s bloodstream. He enters with them through the tiny fresh cut in his father’s penis. It’s some kind of reverse conception through this temporary door. It’s the breakthrough into another universe. The spirochetes spin like galaxies, bursting through from outside, joyously breaching Father’s outer walls. Lovecraft’s final human thought is to pronounce the barbarous words which open the gate, the dream incantation which becomes meaningless to him even as he utters it.
‘Treponema Pallidium.’
‘I dreamed that I was a syphilis bacterium invading my own father’s body,’ Lovecraft tells the dark room. Shadows hang in drifts from the rafters. In the hot dark, Lovecraft guiltily masturbates, finally dribbling infected come into a soiled handkerchief. No-one strikes him down. No God, no Satan.
No Heaven, no Hell. There is no judgement. The night is empty and sweats darkness.
‘IT LOOKED MORE LIKE THE FATHER THAN HE DID!’
The final breath seems to last forever. It buzzes there behind his teeth. He knows it is one of the Calls and tries not to utter it.
There is an eye in the disturbed mirror. It fills the space within the frame, protozoic, contemplating nothing but itself. The gilt frame of the mirror contracts towards a lens shape, as though it were the lids of the ophidian eye slowly closing.
Sonia’s cunt dilates in the New York summer heat.
The room is stifling and smells of the ocean. Lovecraft enters her convulsively, clenching back the nausea that bubbles in his throat. She loops her legs around him and lets out a long breath. She bites his ear, whispers some Slavic endearment. He does not recognise the words. He hears only the guttural grunting of something buried deep in his spine.
Atavistic sound of huddled inhuman things below disarrayed stars. The clock stops ticking and he empties his terror into her arctic gulfs, her cold wastes, her cellar spaces, going inside and out simultaneously. His prick goes soft inside her, with a great oceanic seizure and he finds himself walking along the traintracks.
‘Clearly, I was not made for marriage. Mine has been a solitary life and I find that I am best able to work under those conditions. I have, it’s true, often felt a certain kinship with many of the so-called Decadent authors of the last century, although I find in their work a lamentable tendency towards super-stition which I most certainly do not share. Illness and solitude do indeed produce a heightened state of creativity but we should beware of attributing to our delirious imaginings any objective validity. Never-theless, it has been my experience that from the rich soil of morbidity grow the most fantastic flowers of the Imagination.’
He passes the carcass of an empty carriage, rotting in the half light. Red rags are hung from the broken windows.
Weeds grow between the sleepers. From inside the abandoned carriage, he can hear the sound of a woman or a man whimpering. The windows flare with a putrid light and Lovecraft catches a glimpse of some diseased, abnormal thing rearing up against the glare. The whimpering increases in volume, becoming cries of pain or ecstasy. From out of the grainy, luminous dark of this unnatural evening come the mocking cries of whippoorwills. Psychopomps, human-headed birds, they watch from the reeds, attending Lovecraft’s disintegrating soul. When he passes through the gate, they will eat what remains, digest it and release the waste into the sleeping heads of humanity. Eating souls, shitting dreams.
Lovecraft pulls up his collar, following the rails down to the gutted corpse of a fishing town. Dark empty houses lean together across wet cobbled streets. Cranky spires and steeples twist towards a black sky abandoned by stars. The windows of the houses are hidden behind worm-eaten shutters. He looks towards the gutter, where a dismal glow shines up through the bars of a storm drain. Something moves down there, casting its own foul light. All the way down the cobbled street to the sea, he can see that same light feebly shining from each drain opening. Something huge beyond imagining is alive beneath the town, beating like a heart, extending its pallid fibres up into the homes of the townsfolk to change them and make them part of its nauseous substance.
Rotten skeleton wharves tilt crazily towards the unseen sea. Lovecraft carefully picks his way across the slick, crumbling timbers and stands on the on the edge of what seems to him the primal ocean. Black elemental waters, black sky. The void is full of tides and noises and the deepsea, primordial smell of Death. Air turns to poison vapour as the venoms of her cunt foam and roar, crashing against the rocks. He is on the perimeter of manifestation, on the turrets of the ruins overlooking the Abyss. The ghost-songs of the whippoor-wills resolve into insane fluting loops of synthesised sound. He recognises, from his own descriptions, the weird piping of Nyarlathotep which is the sound of the membrane trembling in ancient Night.
Lovecraft walks to the rim of existence and faces the ocean of unbeing. That is not dead which can eternal lie And with strange aeons, even death may die There is a sound and the black tides begin to recede, drawn back by the gravity of something haunted and immense which fills the sky. The seabed is opened up to view revealing decayed timbers and the bones of shipwrecks and all the corpses of the monsters of the deep. Lovecraft’s body trembles uncontrollably. What nightmares lie beneath the inscrutable waves! What awesome terrors, what unbearable sights mankind has been spared! And now Earth’s oceans thunder and hiss, apocalyptic, rising up impossibly, peeling back to expose the naked planet, the abyssal depths and peaks, the colossal scale of derelict, unknown continents. At last, tainted piss runs downs Lovecraft’s legs as drowned R’lyeh rears up, unveiled in many-angled glory. The world is uncovered, the seas retreat like a filthy cloth drawn aside to reveal the face of an idiot leper. World eaten by maggots, boiling and bursting like a corrupted apple in space. He is witness to the revelation of the cosmic deformity of the Earth, planet of cancerous unclean energies. In terror, he curses the Mother, curses the great dark ocean and the cuntworld that is KUTULU’s kingdom. His shrieks are swallowed by the blackness and the curses curdle and clot in his throat, becoming invocations. And now, there is visible not only the physical intrusion of the unmade city, but its extension into higher spaces and latitudes.
His mother screaming mad in the Butler Hospital.
Endless howl of Nyarlathotep, the Faceless One, as the Gates come crashing down. The whole world sick and insane, peopled by drooling halfwits, morons swarming witlessly like maggots dying on a corpse.
City of unknown luxuries and abominations, endlessly generating itself. He is surprised by how familiar it seems. He has dreamed it so many times, this fragment of the entirety that is KUTULU, which is planetary consciousness and the Mother of Masks.
Lovecraft scribbles through the night, possessed.
CHAPTER III – The Madness From The Sea The gap between eye and hand is closing. The words begin on the page, not in his mind. He is conscious of them only after he has written them. So much to write in the space of a breath. Visions of things ‘miles high’. (‘Miles’ being the only word he knows to suggest the way in which these thoughtforms extend in all directions simultaneously while occupying finite spaces on this plane.) He invents the blasphemous Necronomicon, only partially aware of the fact that he is evoking the Book into being. He is Abdul Al Hazred, ‘Slave of the Presence’. The Void flows as ink through his pen. He is unwriting the Universe. Thin and sickly, hunched over a desk, defiling white paper. The headaches, the break-downs, the terrors, the fragile child surrounded by books. Shadow of the devouring mother hovering over his sickbed. The Soul-Eater and the Gate. The pen nib sparks and ignites the paper and he makes contact through the Door of Fevers. He sees the worms eating the world, the insects in their millions chewing their way into Reality, gross and monstrous reptilian presences tearing at the walls. Black limbic fire of prophesy. Unwitting, pa
nic-stricken, he cracks open the doorway that leads into the labyrinth of the Forgotten Ones through the fourth level of the spine. YOG SOTHOTH, the doorway that fucks itself, the eye in the mirror of water. Racing through the linked veins and capillaries of strange tunnels. Scrawling on the ancient walls. Lovecraft divides and opens like a gate, opens like the Book, but will not let them through. He hears Mother’s mad graveyard voice and stops the energy deep in his gut. The primal knot clenches inside. The last word of the story is ‘eye’. He wipes his brow and closes the notebook. And closes the doorway.
18 is the number of the Crab, the worm-eaten Corpse and the Fence which divides. It is the number of the solitary, inward-turning path. Lunar Gateway of Resurrection.
Primitive societies chose their shamans from the ranks of the sick, the deranged, the outsiders. Such people can always be recognised. Frail and disconnected, they are the tenuous physical expressions of the Portals. In this way all the Doors are in plain sight, yet hidden.
Lovecraft is ushered into the quiet, dusty study of the late Professor George Angell. The Professor nods towards a leather chair, which creaks reassuringly as Lovecraft lowers himself into it.
‘“Jostled by a nautical-looking negro”,’ the Professor says glumly, replacing a book on his shelves. The spine reads Unaussprechlichen Kulten. ‘What a way to go.’
He stands before the window, silhouetted against the dark trees and the burnt-out evening sky, and fixes his gaze upon Lovecraft. ‘I am forever being visited by thin, dark young men of neurotic aspect and you, I’m afraid to say, are no exception to the rule...’
Angell’s voice continues, receding into a drone.
Lovecraft smells old, varnished wood. Far off shouts and the laughter of Christian boys from the calm corridors of Miskatonic University. Rational light illuminates the room.
The low sun turns the study into a decanter, filled with old wine.
‘So what brings you here, my boy?’
‘I wrote an article entitled The Cancer Of Superstition, which you may have seen,’ Lovecraft begins.
‘The irony of my choice of title has not entirely escaped me, of course. I am also the author of a number of modest tales of the uncanny. I believe, and I say this with some little pride, that I have produced what I can only describe as the pornography of the Coming Age. I have come here to confirm my belief that the World of Reason still holds dominion over the primeval depths of the human imagination.’
Angell sits down and lights his pipe. ‘An interesting theory but quite naïve, I’m afraid.’
Lovecraft swallows hard. Something catches at the back of his throat, like a moth fluttering there.
‘I, myself, once held to a similar position,’ the Professor continues. ‘But I found to my cost that I was sadly misinformed. Reason is the flimsy mask on the face of Chaos, my boy. It works very well as a disguise but, like all disguises, it conceals the truth.’
‘Then our whole world is a nightmare,’ Lovecraft says.
The voices from beyond the doors and windows change now and become strange, like the buzzing of unknown insects. Lovecraft shifts uncomfortably and coughs. There is a pain in the pit of his stomach. Something moves there in its tiny salt ocean.
‘Only if you fear it,’ the Professor says. His eyes narrow and go out, becoming empty of humanity, like the ghost-eyes of a crab.
‘Perhaps I should leave now,’ Lovecraft says. The failing light turns bloody and dense and he begins to choke on it. Weird liquid forms swarm around him, becoming visible.
‘There is nowhere to go until you remember,’ the Professor says. ‘They are not dead but only dream. You must wake them within yourself and use them to step through.’
He rises and rises and his shape is all wrong. The planes of the study slip out of joint. Books scream on the shelves and tear each other apart. Trees outside the window twist into spastic shapes. Every-thing is dispersing.
‘Filth of her cunt ... rotten ... the world ... it’s in us ... the mother ... the reptile ... godforms in the backbrain ... evolutionary ... we’re afraid of them ... dragging us down but we must ... we must embrace them ... integrate them ... have to integrate all levels for the next jump ... the next ... a horror ... her cunt ... syphilitic ... I failed to understand ... the horror ... shining ... Iä ... Cthulhu ... Mother...’
‘This is Hell,’ Lovecraft whispers. ‘I have come to Hell.’
Angell, starshaped, revolving in chaos, bends over him. ‘Quite the reverse,’ he says and opens Lovecraft like a door.
A half-human boy writes in his diary of the time ahead when he will be remade in the image of his father. High in the barn, in the alchemical light, he dreams of lost polar corridors into the invisible and the breaking of alien seals in the caverns of the ocean and wonders how he shall look when the earth is cleared off and there are no earth beings on it.
The last breath leaves with a sound like the ticking of a broken clock. In Arkham, along the Miskatonic, in New York and Paris and London and Rome and Tokyo ... breaking through ... torn black membrane ... the nameless colour ... the egg of unbecoming ... crowned serpent ... flowering abyss ... unfolding lens...
Lovecraft rises up from the depths and places his eye to the tiny peephole which looks onto the shrunken bottle-world that was. From the other side of the mirror, he stares at his puppet dreamself and smiles. Full of fear, the little puppet sees only the titan eye and misses the grin.
A THOUSAND YOUNG
Robert M. Price
I
Sex was my god. I do not blush to admit it. Indeed I have always been at a loss to fathom how anyone could seek any other altar. For what besides sex holds the keys both to life's generation and to its uttermost ecstasies? The knowledge of my vocation has been life-long, passionately felt, though at times dimly understood.
My early years witnessed no especial circumstances or experiences to set me off from other boys, save in this one respect: that I was positively more religious than most, certainly more so even than my parents, to whom my catechism was a mere custodial duty no different in kind than enrolling me in grade school. So no excesses of churchly zeal or over-active conscience were ever forced upon me. I note this lest anyone interpret my eroticism as childish reaction against repression, as was the case with other lustful luminaries such as the puzzling Aleister Crowley.
No, my awakening adolescent sexuality caused no trauma, and did not even find occasion to affront my deeply-felt religious convictions. My faith did, however, cause me to resolve to defer full sexual gratification until marriage would one day make it legitimate in the eyes of the Almighty. But until then, I could wait ... and, of course, masturbate. No text could I find in Sacred Scripture to forbid the practice, imaginary commandments against
“Onanism” notwithstanding. Even then I was astute enough to realize that natural exegesis erected no barrier to natural self-expression.
But from what I have said it becomes obvious that I had privately begun to interpret my creed for myself (since my peers in piety would certainly never have endorsed the opinions I have here expressed). And it was this intellectual inquisitiveness that led me during college years to slough off conventional dogma altogether. Once again, however, this transition necessitated no violent break. Rather, I bade my youthful faith a fond goodbye, seeing in the parting no more than Saint Paul himself had described as a ‘putting away of childish things.'
Once one has been singed with the fire of religious zeal, one can never quite get beyond its influence, no matter what intellectual permutations one undergoes. And so with me. My instinctive questioning after the cosmos and its ultimate meaning simply pursued new and different channels. And, needless to say, so did my sexuality, now free from what strictures even my own theology had imposed. I sampled new philosophies and new flesh with equal relish, and though grateful for the savour of each successive encounter, intellectual and physical, I never could rest content.
In pursuit of the sexual quest one hears of man
y, I suspect, less imaginative souls who become quickly jaded, failing finally to become aroused by whatever previously titillated them. I confess my inability to understand this unfortunate course, except to liken it to drug addiction and its diminishing returns. It was not my experience, for I continued to take the same delight in the tenth virgin as I did in the first. Every breast and buttock was as sweet as the last to me. I sought to expand my libidinous repertoire only because it seemed the natural path of growth. And the sense of dissatisfaction I eventually came to feel arose not so much from weariness with what I had experienced, as from curiosity about what I had not.
I have said that my quest of spirit kept pace with my sexual adventuring during this period. But here the picture was somewhat different. For unless one be a pure dilettante, one cannot simply sample philosophies and worldviews as at a buffet. When one moves from one system to the next, one does so in rejection of the first. And it did not take me overlong to progress through several schools of opinion in this manner.
The Logical Positivists seemed to me to have created a singularly depressing cell in which to imprison the human mind, dis-daining all the concerns of classical philosophy that did not lend themselves to the neat solution of a mathematical problem. A sympathetic attempt to acquaint myself with their tenets assured me that Positivism, or any other myopic strain of Materialism, was not to be my home.
Surely, given my more mystical predilections, Idealism was more convivial to me, yet I could not help but feel that the great spokesmen for this school – Plato, Bishop Berkeley, Hegel – were missing something, as if they had left some important tract of ground uncovered. There was a Reality transcending humanity and its mundane grind, or at least I felt sure of it, but what was its nature? “The Absolute Spirit”? “The Form of the Good”? With all such abstractions I was dissatisfied, all the more since each philosopher superimposed his own version of that transcendental realm as an eternal imprimatur on the temporal establishment to which he belonged: Hegel to the German monarchy, Berkeley to the Church of Ireland, Plato to the totalitarian
The Starry Wisdom Page 2
