The Starry Wisdom

by D. M. Mitchell

  The boy’s hair is huge, piped like slick black ice cream in a towering pompadour. Cold little eyes, and a yellow silk handkerchief hiding his face from the nose down. His forehead is boiling with acne.

  To scattered applause from their girlfriends and pets the support band go off and the floor is engulfed by a riptide of puberty casualties, all wearing Ulthar Cats T-shirts or swastika drag. They surge forward, obscuring the undersized spic.

  I turn back towards Joey and try not to shout, momentarily thrown by the sharp sonic pressure drop after The Yellow Sign’s set. ‘He looks young. Did you ever get aklo from this kid?’ Joey shakes his head.

  ‘Fuck, no. I got enough problems already with flashbacks and booze. As for young, someone told me Carcosa was forty.’ He nods here emphatically. Highlights dance in his green lenses like fire-flies drowning in creme-de-menthe.

  Joey is trying to say something else but it’s lost in the squeal of the feedback and popping of microphones.

  Booming like mongoloid storm-gods, the road crew are counting their brain cells. They crouch, scuttling; unreel cables like spiders.

  The band slouch onstage and the audience start making animal noises. It’s fucking grotesque. There are three Ulthar Cats, with the lead guitar/vocalist now stepping up to the microphone. If I remember their CD correctly, her name’s Randolph Carter.

  Her voice is remote and indifferent; predictably masculine given her stage name. She says bored ‘hellos’ to Red Hook and Club Zothique then monodrones through the first song’s introduction. I think it’s called “Zann Variations”.

  ‘In cobble-yards, through the smashed eyes of a derelict warehouse, old violins play/Where a smoke-river, factory black, crawls below the stone bridges, old violins play/And the crippled dogs whine in their sleep all along Rue d’Auseil.’

  To be fair, Randolph’s lyrics get better when she gives up English completely halfway through the third verse: ‘Crash bridgelict eyeolins, crobble yog sothoth ngh’haa ygnaiith fhtagn in cractory whine-yards/ beloke sleepled R’lyeh nga’haa tekeli-li.’

  ‘That’s aklo!’ yells Joey.

  I guess Randolph took it before she came on. Its effects last the rest of an hour-long set. Even chat between songs is in gibberish. Audience reaction seems favourable.

  Unbelievably, some sing along on the ones that they recognize.

  Stephen, the fifteen-year-old who beheaded his family, scat-singing nonsense words over the tunes that he’d written. Confused of Seattle with his unintelligible tales of horror, or Wino Roy dribbling phonemes, a reeking salivary patina over his chin.

  Joey exits the bar halfway through “MiskaSonic” and, quite understandably, doesn’t return. As the show ends, I brave the meat pinball machine Club Zothique has become, nudged and shouldered from bumper to bumper.

  I’m looking for Johnny Carcosa.

  He’s outside the club with some nondescript greaseball acquaintances, three of them muttering there on the neon-scarred steps of this formerly Catholic church.

  Johnny’s over-sized suit is a pale powder-blue in this light.

  Hair like licorice topiary.

  When the other spics vanish I make my approach.

  ‘Hello, Johnny Carcosa? I’m sorry to itch you, man. Joey Face said I should talk to you if I was looking for anything.’

  Carcosa, turning, regards me with river-bed eyes.

  When he speaks, though you can’t see his lips, a faint ripple of breath stirs the sheer lemon film of his veil.

  ‘Joey Fathe ith an ath-hole who takth too much ecthtathy. Watchu wann’, anywayth?’

  I must look just like a Fed in this crowd of fourteen-year-olds. ‘What have you got?’ Up close, Johnny Carcosa could be anywhere between twenty and fifty, those acne tracks old plastic surgery scars. His voice: genderless, ageless.

  ‘I got it all. How about thith?’ He produces a strange triple-pretzel of greenish-white coral, three apertures, each rimmed with cruel-looking quills. ‘It’th a cock-ring from Innthmouth.’ Next, wallets of postcard-sized prints entitled Pickman’s Necrotica. ‘Pickman’s a geniuth, man. You thee thith?’ (A repulsively detailed engraving entitled “Miss Lowell is laid in Mount Auburn”. I wave it aside.) ‘I want aklo, man. Joey said you could get aklo.’ Eyes narrow, between silk and scar-tissue.

  ‘Joey thaid that?’ He shakes his giant hair-do. ‘I thertainly can’t thyow you anything here. Thee me later, at three o’clock up in that tenement courtyard that runth off Court Thtreet.’ He turns and walks off. I’m dismissed.

  It’s just one o’clock now. Farrakhan Day was over at midnight, the indigo fusillade silenced abruptly. I walk back uphill and along Clinton Street to the one public Faxbooth that hasn’t been pissed in or firebombed, outside Borough Hall.

  I dial Perlman in Washington. He won’t be there, but my access code punches me through to his bulletin board where my round-the-clock update is posted. I enter the booth’s number, then wait for Perlman’s machine to respond.

  Moments pass. Through pursed lips it disgorges a reel roughly eight pages long which I roll up to fit in my overcoat. Starting back up along Clinton, I hear a faint hiss from the dome high above me. It’s raining.

  Outside the Pachinko arcade coloured condoms bask in the blue moonlight and drool a potentially hazardous venom. I cross to my building then trudge up its stairs to my room on the third floor and lock myself in.

  Without pausing to take off my coat I flop out on the bed and switch on the small reading-lamp there on the table beside it. Retrieved from my pocket the fax unwinds, spooling across the room’s vine-patterned carpet.

  Three items, including a brief note from Perlman.

  Sax – Three more in Pittsburgh, same M.O. I hope for your sake this Red Hook lead pans out. Here’s some old files I found that seemed vaguely related. Call Monday – Carl Perlman.

  The other two items are copies of Bureau reports from the ‘twenties, the earliest one an account of child-smuggling here in Red Hook. A Detective Malone of the NYPD named the waterfront church, now Club Zothique, as being involved.

  That was in ‘25. There was seemingly talk at one time of some Satanist thing, but the chief suspect, one Robert Suydam, expired before charges were brought. Two dozen cops died when the house they were raiding collapsed.

  The last print-out concerns FBI operations up in Massachusetts around two years later; 1927-1928. The connection appears to be Suydam, who, shortly before his demise, ordered “ritual artefacts” from a remote gold refinery in Massachusetts; some backwater seaport.

  The name of the port’s been blacked out at a later date. Classified, obviously. I read on. The offence under investigation seems vaguely defined and involves interbreeding: a morals case more than a Federal matter, in my book.

  The document grows more evasive with each line I read. There were lots of arrests, but for what is unclear.

  There’s no charges, no trials. The description “degenerate”, frequently used here, could mean almost anything. These were the Hoover days.

  Strangely enough, there’s a faxed black and white snap of good old J Edgar himself, looking pale and uncomfortable as he faces the camera, standing on some unidentified wharf. Oh, I get it: this must be the classified seaport.

  There’s something behind him that I take at first to be furniture under a canvas, but no. It’s a figure, sat cross-legged, manacled ankle and wrist with a blanket draped over its head. I look closer. What is it?

  A man, over two metres, badly disfigured. We’re talking the Elephant Man. No face visible, only one hand and one foot. Just four digits on each. Barring flaws in the photo, they’re webbed. Hoover looks like somebody just farted.

  Carl Perlman sent these because he thinks some cult thing’s involved, some Satanic thing, even though of our three culprits one’s Baptist, the other two Catholic.

  Perlman’s a know-nothing kike. Still, that thing in the photograph’s interesting.

  It’s just after 02.35. Next door, Germaine engages
in loud disagreement with someone called David. It takes me a moment to realise it’s Letterman. She’s yelling something about his toupée. Guess it’s time to go out and meet Johnny Carcosa again.

  It takes me ten minutes to walk round to Court Street and ten more to find the address. Three old tenement buildings, their brick turned the colour of scab, eye each other across a bleak courtyard, its iron gate unlocked.

  Hypodermics crunch underfoot, frosting the cobbles with glass in a scintillant Disney-dust, one thousand points of light. Cul-de-sac trashcan enclosures dab ghostfish and hornet-hung fruit on night’s pulse-points. The tenements huddle; guard hideous warmth.

  On the courtyard’s east face there’s a mural I can’t quite discern in the creeping blue dark, a trompe l’oeil-effect landscape that seems to stretch into the wall with a shape in the foreground I hope is a tree.

  A cat’s cradle of washing lines, bare save a child’s vest that might have been hung there for years. Puddles, clearly not rain, in the yard’s dips and sinkages. Vile centipedal graffiti that covers the tenement steps in its writhings.

  A window grates open above in the dark’s upper storeys and there, silhouetted against a rectangle of light, is a figure whose head appears loathsomely bloated until I establish that most of it’s hair. ‘Come on up,’ suggests Johnny Carcosa.

  An inverted whirlpool of concrete and shadow, the tenement stairwell is dragging me up from the lampless seabed of the ground floor (unoccupied: nothing can live with those terrible pressures), through wife-beatings, bad food and babyscreams fathomed above.

  On the uppermost floor, leaning over the retch of the wellmouth to watch for me, Johnny Carcosa is waiting.

  ‘Hey, thorry about all the thtairth, man. Them fockerth, they won’t thend guyth down here to ficth up our elevatorth anymore.’

  It occurs to me maybe he has a hare lip or some similar oral complaint, thus explaining both Carcosa’s faggoty lisp and his yellow, concealing bandana. He gestures towards an apartment door, opening off from the landing.

  The sour ochre hallway beyond the front door is a phantasmal clutter of smoke-stained celebrity photographs, Catholic icons and pleasure-beach souvenirs caught in a nightmarish bardo of wallpaper. From the smell, someone’s been cooking their shoes.

  An unusual number of doors seem to lead off the hall and from one now emerges a woman: short, squat, maybe seventy. Brown, liver-spotted skin. Wide features. Spic, or maybe Eskimo. Rotten-jawed, she gapes up at me nervously.

  Johnny Carcosa steps swiftly between us. ‘Go back in your room, Mom. It’th okay. Thith guy ith my friend. Yg’nthlai ‘ng yaddith, ygg ngai?’ At this momma scowls, mutters ‘Yg’nthlai aklo!’ and shuffles back into her room.

  What the fuck?

  Johnny hurries me on to the end of the hall. ‘Don’t mind Momma. Thyee’th thet in her old country wayth. We’ll go into my room, where it’th comfortable.’ There’s some kind of queer undertone here I don’t care for.

  His room stinks of incense and aftershave and something else, something pungent and bitter; a reptile-house perfume. Green light from a scarf-shrouded bulb falls in submarine dapples across the walls, bare save for Pickman prints over the bed.

  There’s an old-fashioned writing-desk bursting with drawers at which Johnny sits down on a spindly chair and commences some business with spoons, jars and baggies.

  He hums to himself, something slow and atonal. I sit on the bed.

  Something’s itching me: what Johnny said to his mother out there in the hall sounded not unlike all that word-salad dished up by the Ulthar Cats earlier, which I’d assumed was this aklo drug doing its stuff. Just coincidence?

  Waiting for Johnny Carcosa to finish whatever he’s doing, I study the Pickman prints. One, “Subway Accident”, actually seems rather witty. It borrows from Breughel and Bosch but transposes their horrors to Boylston Street subway. In style, he resembles Rousseau.

  Johnny turns from the writing desk, holding a bag of pale talcum towards me. ‘Try thome, man.’ Accepting the bag, I taste some of the dust on a spit-moistened finger. It’s DMT-7, I’m certain of it.

  How can this crap be aklo? This stuff lasts ten minutes or less and that dyke from the Ulthar Cats twitched and sang nonsense for over an hour. Have I got it all wrong?

  I complain. ‘Johnny, this isn’t aklo.’

  Above the silk curtain, his lamprey eyes widen incredulously. ‘Of courth thith ithn’t aklo! It’th jutht the White Powder. You have to take thith thtuff before I can give you the aklo. How much did you want, anywath?’

  Feeling vaguely uneasy, I ask if he can supply two or three hits. ‘Thure. That’th one hunnerd-fifty New Dollarth. Now, do up a line of the powder and I’ll thet you thtraight.’

  What the fuck’s going on here?

  I tell him that I want the three hits to take away with me, but he is insistent. ‘You’ll take ‘em away when I’ve given ‘em to you, but I can’t do that till you thnort the White Powder.’

  Well, okay. If needs be. I’ve ingested worse things than DMT-7 when duty demanded. I needn’t try anything else. Johnny promised I could take the aklo away.

  Measuring out a line in the hollow between thumb and wrist, I inhale.

  The subdued rush brings with it a vivid and colourful foam of hypnagogic imagery rising inside my eyelids. It’s nothing I feel I can’t handle. I just need to open my eyes and the river of mind-cartoons ceases.

  I look at Carcosa. ‘The aklo. You said I could have it.’ He nods and stands up from his chair by the desk, crossing now to the bed where he squats facing me eye-to-eye as I sit.

  ‘Clothe your eyeth. Clothe your eyeth and I’ll give you the aklo.’ I do as I’m told. Two-dimensional creatures swarm over my retina. Escher-precise tessellations. Through cascading jewelry, Johnny Carcosa is whispering close to my ear.

  ‘Wza-y’ei.’

  The word bursts inside me like summer thunder, sends scarabs and swastikas rippling over the screen of my eyelids. ‘Wza-y’ei.’ A mental floor gives way beneath me. I realize I know what the word means; have known all along.

  Wza-y’ei is a word for the negative conceptual space left surrounding a positive concept, the class of things larger than thought, being what thought excludes. It applies to so many things, not just anomaly theory but everything that is conceived.

  I’m still reeling, eyes closed, from the resonances and implications when yellow silk brushes my ear and another word’s murmured, not drawn from the world’s common tongues and without an equivalent: ‘Dho-Hna.’ I drink it in, breathless.

  A force which defines; lends significance to its receptacle as with the hand in the glove; wind in mill-vanes; the guest or the trespasser crossing a threshold and giving it meaning. Dho-Hna. How could I have forgotten?

  A pinwheel of nautillus fronds is dissolved into sparks by my vitreous humour as huge old grammatical structures collapse into place. Aklo isn’t a drug. There’s no drug with mind-altering properties halfway as powerful.

  Aklo’s a language.

  Ur-syntax; the primal vocabulary giving form to those pre-conscious orderings wrung from a hot incoherence of stars, from our birthmuds pooled in the grandmother lagoon; a stark, limited palette of earliest notions, lost colours, forgotten intensities.

  Johnny Carcosa delivers the third hit, one more chain of terrible syllables lisped in my ear: ‘Yr Nhhngr.’

  New dendrites twitch blindly together, unthinkable fusions occurring. Beneath me, a vortex of marvellous coinage is opened. I let go and fall.

  Now it’s later. How long have I been here? The drug has worn off but my mouth is still filled with new language.

  I open my eyes. From his chair by the writing desk, Johnny Carcosa is watching me closely.

  Events have a new continuity now, disassociate clusters of data in pregnant, post-linear arrays: my first steps up the tenement stairs are embedded in those taken now to depart. Paying Johnny is folded around buying Joey Face beer.

  I’m in Co
urt Street. I must have left Johnny Carcosa’s apartment already, which can more properly be seen as an extended arrival. The Wza-y’ei of this is, of course, that the future extrudes a curtailing force into the present.

  It comes to me that, in reality, I am a memory of myself, trudging a memory of Court Street, this construct encysted within a much larger Yr Nhhngr where I’m already in Clinton Street, near the Pachinko arcade, almost home.

  All events are time roses, the clenched fuck uncrumpling into a life as the species folds back to Annelidan ancestors. There lies our Dho-Hna: a meaning bestowed retro-actively by forms as yet unachieved but implicit.

  I see that the Lloigor are simply ourselves, yet unfolded in time to an utter condition beyond the fhtagn of our usual perceptions. Time being a function of matter this freeing of ultimate forms may be hastened by pertinent sculpture.

  I now grasp that this isn’t Clinton Street, nor is it truly me walking across it. We’re both merely part of a brief verbalized reconstruction I’m making to you, Germaine, as I kneel here in your room, bent above you.

  I want you to know that the tape on your mouth isn’t there to prevent you from making a noise: it’s to stop the Dho-Hna flowing in through the wrong aperture, which of course could spoil everything for you.

  I know you’re still worrying over your hands, but please don’t. They’re quite safe, I assure you. The thing is to focus yourself on the Wza-y’ei; the concept of not-hands.

  No. No, don’t black out. There. That’s better.

  I want you to watch this part closely. This is the unfolding, from Glaaki to Lloigor. We make the first cut, the y’nghai, just here. Now, gnh’gua equalling y’nghai are tekel’d to mhhg-gthaa, uguth and Y’golonac.

  N’gaii fhtagn e’hucunechh R’lyeh. Iä, G’harne ep ygg Rhan Tegoth n’thyleii yr gnh’gua? Shagghai, humuk Dho-Hna, g’yll-gnaii ygg yr nhhngr shoggoth, hrr yll’ngngr Nyarlathotep. Gh’ll mhhg-gthaa tekeli-li Y’golonac rrthnaa.

  H’rrnai Cthulhu. H’rrnai Cthulhu nnh’gtep...