From the bleak wastes of extra-dimensional exile we call forth the irredeemable engines of Atrocity: infernal machines of perverse complexity bred in the fetid bile of the Psychoplasmic Womb, the ectopathic Hurting Hives. The Omnibeasts – living machines, galactic dreadnoughts – crush constellations in their paths, dense clouds of stellar debris swirling in their wakes. By means of vast, spiralling disks as large as flattened moons, studded with towering spikes – jagged stalactites – of cosmic crystal, the Omnibeasts generate their own gravitational fields which they consciously exploit to power their invincible momentum through time and space. They are the perfect machines of mass-extermination. Their soft bellies are moist with suppurating venoms that evaporate oceans and atmospheres. Their extensive armoury includes vast interconnecting mandibles that can pluck asteroids and satellites effortlessly from their orbits; whirring disks of chainsaw teeth that can crush continents; viral enzymes that secrete psychotropic plagues, pestilences that mutate flesh; their drooling, layered palates masticate matter, energy and consciousness.
Our endless minds re-invade the curdling soup of biologically active human detritus that is all that remains of our former bodies. Our hunger is endlessly vast.
Gluttonously sated. Whole solar systems are engulfed with the blood-red radiance of spontaneous supernovae: the rush of ultra-endorphins that floods our beings with its sensual incandescence.
Humanity has an eternity of exquisite torture to contemplate and endure. Its limitations are governed only by our own infinite imaginations. The creative resourcefulness of beings whose very thoughts are interwoven with the positrons and quarks of sub-atomic physics; the fusion reactions that fuel the ascent of star systems; the intangible forces of gravity and the bleak cosmic tides: we, the architects of the Quantaplex...
– WE ARE INFINITE
WE ARE ETERNAL
WE ARE HYPERBREED
WE ... ARE
Static everywhere...
THIS EXQUISITE CORPSE
C.G. Brandrick and D.M. Mitchell
‘The disease is infectious,’ said the dwarf, holding membranes to his eyes and pointing to the building. ‘That ancient church is a savage place. Its main function is to regulate the dreams of the young. It opens and closes certain thoughts like a sore, and shows them to strangers. That woman there, with the face of a crow, was taken in several weeks ago; – at night the sexton puts his hand in her head in a display of venal affection. His heart will never grow tumours, but in his sleep a huge rose grows from the stigmata in his side. You see, his memories have been whispered abroad and now he seeks to measure his shadow with a piece of cord to ensure the permanence of his soul – the substitution of darkness in the place of scars.’
The dwarf moved on weeping and laughing, and I was taken to a garden of broken figures carved with the mastery of cunning architects. Their beautiful groins were choice remnants of some ancient splendour. Such mental excitement and disorder I had never seen before. Animals and things which have no existence, confused the identity of people who insisted on raising their mocking heads; making me suspicious of the shadow cast in front of my eyes. This shadow was red and made me walk cautiously, imagining sounds and noises at my heels in the street; – grimacing animals in the dark in league with an erotic phantom.
Here, beneath a boiling virus-sun, my nerves screamed at the siren song of millennial death, as exotic mutations fucked themselves and each other to death in a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of imagined anatomies. New diseases of which people had never even dreamed bestowed by the fever from some nemesis star – while they immersed themselves in the pleasures of virtuality, all potential had died. Our social cells are zoological gardens of unchecked sex and slaughter. The streets of each city echo with the laughter of the partially devoured who dance naked and headless strewing their bloody seed indiscriminately. Their bleeding erections shower stars and flowers which are gathered by eviscerated children crowned with barbed wire.
This is the legacy of our New/Old Gods.
I became seized by a wild, reptilian gnosis, trailing my old flesh behind me in a wide train, which was collected fastidiously by my retinue of sightless bridesmaids whom I had personally blinded in a paroxysm of lust. I’d decided on experiments which separated me from the average man; – an inordinate egotism like two blind faces raised in prayer – drawn from the master chymist. I was suddenly tired and at peace with degenerate changes. Hunger came and memory weakened. Silence fell and both mental disorder and paralysis of the mind occurred as a warning of the flesh against the tyranny of the soul. At once my lady appeared, blown in on a huge carnation of shit-stained newspapers, her fingers of broken glass reaching to me in anthropo-phagous desire. Her name was Rape and this is written in the menstrual blood of jackals on the temple wall.
The room was filled with the memory of great flapping wings and an aroma suggestive of cyclopean halls of mummified ancestors. This brought me spasmodically to orgasm. She was the Bride of The Crawling Chaos and kept her lovers’ heads in glass cases. I kissed her ruptured navel and she raised my face with her metal hand. The air around us boiled with the radiation from God’s black watchful eye above us, which dripped disapproval and cellular mucus. In the presence of my weakness of mind, I could no longer close my eyes to her powers. They had noticeably transcended her death, especially in the direction of a more intimate knowledge.
Being in contact with darkness deeper than the shadows and warmer than her thighs, I knew the hideous secret of her kiss. There’s only madness in her touch – each beat of the heart sending her voice along my arteries, felt at various places on the surface of my body. A round hole at the centre of her torso opened as she danced, her chant coupled with the murmurs of whispers in faraway galaxies. She held oceans within her. I could taste her salt and feel her tides on my eyelashes. From deep recesses within my mind, colossal tentacles unfurled. I felt myself chanting until I vanished, coiled like a snake, new knowledge bleeding into my skin with ripples of alternating dilation and contraction.
She played sex games with me, burying me in tumours and roses. Her fingers thickened and trailed away in the darkness which died. Sleep entered the room and my faces swirled between heartbeats as the whispering drew closer.
Obsessions and phobias, morbid fears woke me as another of The Withered Ones joined us, sickened with dreams. The parasites of sleep were howling in the dawn. The carnival had ended with the light and they stumbled away diseased and swollen with erotic images and the sounds of the Dark God’s laughter on the wind. My lady stood askance, a tear on her cheek. I approached her softly. It was time for her to die again.
The murder was simple and when I left, I kissed her hair.
The transfer of energy inherent in mysticism and repressed ideas throbbed here like an erection which justified the expediency of my thoughts. My hands moved cautiously to prevent her bleeding – Rape, my little phantom who’d undressed old people and held the dead erect on sticks. Her name screwed around the tips of loathsome and lecherous mouths.
I looked up at a distended face, spread across the whole sky like a balloon filled with guilty conscience. My sins had caught up with me after centuries of successful elusion. I almost laughed, like a child’s glass toy which, when upturned, instead of producing a miniature snow-storm, creates a rain of blood and small animals’ intestines. God wore a bleached horse’s skull above his black leather jacket and spoke in crossword clues.
I set her robes alight and the sparks were like spurting blood lodged in a sluice-keeper’s corpse. Blowing the ashes from the horrible heads of the singing flowers, I sobbed as she melted like white perspiration. She burned with the steady dullness of artificial light. How many spirits were out that night!
Her virtuality rose several feet above her remains and I choked with surprise at a small folded membrane hanging from her lips. She was now death’s bride and my sex stirred sleepily like a snake on exposure to the sun. Waves of air caressed my body. I heard a noise behind me and
turned to see the dwarf writhing and gasping at the horror before him.
He spoke to me. ‘After death, she’ll continue to enjoy, for a time, the image of you, until you grow dim like a vanishing shadow.’ His words ended and I held the dead figure erect.
Smiling, I thought, ‘I see what is invisible tonight – an idiot god suffering with darkened eyes. A memory of sanity outlines his shadow to me.’
A stranger carrying a head in a bird-cage, knocked loudly and long, yet all remained dark and silent as before. Shading his eyes from falling sparks, the dwarf came floating out, hissing round our heads. He’d removed his eyes with his hand. A pool of clear light filled the lugubrious courtyard.
As the rain fell on the dead, locked with hungry eyes like a priest, we saw a discontented philosopher whom a child had left gathering flowers.
THE COURTYARD
Alan Moore
2004, Farrakhan Day, and ten thousand fireworks explode over Brooklyn, the heart-stopping starbursts a uniform blue through the tint of the glass pseudo-firmament. ‘See all them lights, boy? Them’s nigger-stars. Make a wish.’
Clinton Street, down in Red Hook, is strobed cobalt.
The residents have been petitioning almost ten years for a name-change since our chief executive fucked up the Syria thing in 1995: Ten thousand fireworks over Damascus.
Our rooming house has a shared bathroom. This morning, when I went to shave, there was shit in the wash-basin and, as I learned when I turned on the water to sluice it away, on the faucets.
Germaine. She’s the thin schizophrenic girl in the next room though with only a hardboard partition dividing us we’re getting horribly close to full co-habitation. About 35, born 1969, hippy parents. “Germaine”. Jesus Christ.
I imagine they ran the poor cunt through a gauntlet of crank educational fads, taught her drugs and free love were okay, then divorced. Fine for them. They’re not woken by Germaine’s imaginary pals every morning at five.
I’m afraid that my feelings concerning Germaine’s Mom and Pop are exactly the same as the feelings I had for their daughter while shaving: I just wish these people would clean up their own shit, just once in a while.
Through my window, the stuttering light of blue flowers exploding outside; distant ambulance sirens in shimmering science-fiction voluntaries. Is it just me who finds sirens beautiful? Miserable Divas in something Wagnerian, threatening fire, plague or murder.
Just over the street there’s a run-down Pachinko arcade where the neighbourhood Flack-dealer juggles his junk. I catch this on the Nano-cam wadded in gum on my room’s window ledge. Did I mention already that I was a Fed?
What I’m bothered about is the depth of my cover on this. Only Perlman in Washington knows that I’m here. I hate Blackwork. Carl Perlman’s an asshole. I’m running on Blacktime and Blacktime’s not good for me, pension-wise.
Farrakhan day. I can hear all the spear-chuckers partying under the Harlem dome even from here, slabs of bass shuddering out down the river. I spread out the photographs there on the bed and regard them by firework light.
All fifteen are without heads or hands, torsos sculpted like those garnish vegetables that you get at the fancier restaurants, carved into roses; the separate layers of skin, fat and muscle peeled back in triangular flaps into flowers of meat.
Here’s the pisser: We pulled in a twenty-year-old bookshop clerk from Seattle whose brother-in-law had found twelve human hands individually wrapped in the freezer and summoned the Bureau. He coughed for six murders, no question.
We naturally figured that with the distinctive M.O. we could get him to cop to the other nine sooner or later, but no. He insisted he’d only done six. It was here we began to encounter some problems.
The first was this wino we picked up for vagrancy, who, as it turned out, was carrying three human heads in a K-Mart bag. Just like Confused of Seattle he owned up to three of the crimes, but no more.
We assumed at first this was just some copycat thing, but it turned out that all of the murder details had been kept from the press. Furthermore, neither man knew or knew of the other. It’s all some unlikely coincidence, right?
Of the six unattributed victims left, four are related: A grandma; a mother and father; their nine-year-old daughter. The one son surviving is suddenly moved to confess that he whacked the whole bunch. Kept their thumbs as mementoes.
Three culprits for thirteen identical murders with two further killings as yet unaccounted for. No links between the accused, or at least nothing direct as yet. Is this fucked up or what? In the flickering blueness the photographs dance.
Perlman wanted me here for a reason. It’s not that he likes me. He told Ed Byrne I was a smug little nazi. It’s just I have high abstract patterning skills, so I get all the Twilight Zone jobs.
What I do, it’s anomaly theory. I go through the evidence carefully winnowing out the most troublesome details, obscure little fragments that don’t fit our profiles and thus often get overlooked.
Take this current case. Two series-killings, one multiple murder (the family job). Three white males. One’s aged fifteen, one’s twenty and one’s thirty-eight. One’s a vagrant, one works in a bookshop and one’s still at school.
No connections.
The fifteen-year-old who dismembered his folks, sis and grandma is clean-cut and bright. He likes classical music, with only one rock album in his extensive collection:
“The Ulthar Cats” – noisy, obscure New York art-fags. They suck.
Now, Confused of Seattle, he doesn’t like music at all. He just reads, mostly old horror paperbacks. Poe and like that. Tucked halfway through Ligeia we find this old ticket, says “Club Zothique”, used as a bookmark.
Our wino can’t read and hates music but, unlike the other two, is using drugs. Fairly mild ones, admittedly. We found a baggie of something called DMT-7 concealed in his rectum, a weak hallucinogen. He’d have got higher on Ripple.
The twenty-year-old has a spelling disorder. He writes stuff, short stories, but half of the words are just gibberish. Judging by earlier work, which is lucid, this trend is a recent thing.
Stephen, our fifteen-year-old family butcher, writes songs on acoustic guitar and then does this godawful scat-singing over the top of it. Not my taste, obviously.
Roy the acid-head wino makes terrible sounds in his sleep, but then what else is fresh? Brooklyn’s bulging with noise in the street outside. People are kissing and fighting; fucking each other; fucking each other up.
So: there’s a noise album owned by a kid with a strong predilection for Mahler; a club ticket found on a bookworm who never goes out; a confirmed alcoholic with happy dust jammed up his ass. That’s anomaly theory.
The next part is largely intuitive. Having selected your set of anomalous facts you will find new connections arising which, in my experience, often yield data more useful than that gained by orthodox means. Christ it’s hot.
Club Zothique, for example, is here in Red Hook.
It’s a New Music hang-out that’s well on the way to becoming the next CBGB’s. The Ulthar Cats seem to play here every couple of weeks. Hell, they’re playing tonight.
All the kids there do drugs, mostly speed, weed and Flack, but there’s something else, too, that they call “The White Powder”. I scored a few grammes from this seven-foot spade. The scanalysis says that it’s DMT-7.
Not much of a drug, as drugs go. In its natural form DMT is produced in the brain, which therefore has a natural system to cope with the substance and flush it away. The mild “trips” last around fifteen minutes.
You see, what this is, it’s like taking the leftover pieces from various jigsaws and seeing what picture they make when you put them together. Anomaly theory. Of course, that’s not saying the picture will make any sense.
I collect up the photos and hide them in back of the wardrobe with all my other stuff. There on the floor is my overcoat, sprawled like a chalk silhouette. I’m beginning to feel claustrophobic. I’d be
tter go out.
In the street there are monster Forget-Me-Nots shattered all over the sky, and a dull negro thunder that swells in the distance. The Ulthar Cats play at Club Zothique tonight. Fifty luminous fly-bills adorn the Pachinko arcade.
Down the sidestreets that tentacle out from the club swarm the usual flotsam: old ecstasy casualties; pain-faggot skinheads with “MANSON” tattooed on their nose and a bolt through their dick. Just your typical dream-trash.
Club Zothique: a strange neon cancer grown out from the crumbling stone of a waterfront church, a cheap dance-hall and immigrant dive since the late 1920s, a toxic and lurid agaric of light bulbs, enduring the centuries.
Straight from the street I plunge into an amphetaminefield of concussive music and light, full of underage heat. A support band from Cleveland, The Yellow Sign, are wrapping up a cacophonous set as I make for the bar.
Joey Face, sitting heaped on his stool as if shovelled there, eyes my approach. Thin blonde hair in a pony-tail; green-tinted glasses. He’s probably my age, which is to say thirty. I’ve known him a week.
Joey used to deal Ecstasy under the nom-de-guerre “Rex Morgan, M.D.M.A.”, but it’s agony now. Joey suffers from amphetamine psychosis; drinks without getting drunk to keep hallucinations at bay. It’s too bad. I’m informed he was once a great dancer.
I buy him a drink. We scream amicably at each other above “Leng”, The Yellow Sign’s encore. I ask how he rates them. ‘They’re plastic. They’re riding this Ulthar Cats thing, but they’re posing. They’re not using aklo. It’s obvious.’
Aklo. Some new kind of drug, or its streetname? I risk a bluff; sneer at him knowingly. ‘Aklo? These pussies? Where would they get aklo?’ He looks briefly puzzled.
‘Why, same place as everyone else.’ Here, he glances beyond me.
I turn. By the front of the stage where the tired hippy light show is vomiting crayola puddles across the remains of the audience, someone is standing. Hispanic; flamboyantly dressed; seventeen. Joey screams in my ear: ‘His name’s Johnny Carcosa.’
The Starry Wisdom Page 7
