The grizzled matron of the hinterlands was mercifully replaced by a noble old world Germanic woman who was pointedly eccentric, and fed the boy’s intellect. She was built of the objective, analytic, and stern emotional disconnect he craved in companionship, yet she was airy and ethereal such as he. “There is something here,” she at random one day announced to the boy as she strung his garments on a rope in the washroom. She looked upwards at the second story floorboards and professed, “I hear footsteps up there when I am alone during the day, and I don’t like whatever it is.” The boy just stared at her. It was the first time another had acknowledged at-point-blank this particular mundane piece of existence. She told the boy that the house stood on a battleground and that the ghosts of war break things in the night. The boy knew this and the two were briefly silent in mutual understanding. She then went to the mantel and took down his own portrait and brought it to him, placing it before his face so as to make him look into his own eyes. She covered his mouth in the portrait with her finger and said, “I see your eyes are full of sadness and you too can see it when your smile is covered.” She knew as he, that he was Wednesday’s child.
As it happens with all folk common and exceptional alike, childhood waned in a bleak pale dawn revealing a stormy horizon. The noble Germanic woman abandoned the boy as had all parental figures when the phantom maelstrom intensified and he was left feral with back against the blackness, where he was left to fend off the wolves of humanity with the torch-scepter of his own spiritual creation. Thrust into this frenzied and wild world at half strength, the suffocating blackness couldn’t be held at bay. He was enveloped by groaning shadow elementals. They held him down and terrorized him in the night. They blurred his metaconscious in the day, presenting the elixir bottle with the devil lurking in its bottom. “Won’t you partake in this last offered cup?” screeched one of the void figures. “Or disappear into the potter’s ground?” offered another. They all looked on craftily rubbing their hands together, such flies plotting to inoculate carrion with their eggs. Without understanding or memory of doing so, The Youth having been left to his own devices, partook and the psychedelic befouled his spirit evermore. He descended the proverbial rabbit hole, was there arrested, and was to be suspended within its yawning toxic chasm until lessons enough were learned to devise a means of escape and redemption. At the bottom he found himself in dark spaces. Early upon his entry, a veteran denizen of the night who was hobbled and deformed by his own depravity offered the prophetic words, “If you start down this path you will meet the worst of This Earth.” With abandon he went forward into the thicket and into a world of slime-coated blackened crags choked by menacing night-purple flora possessed of autonomous minds and nervous systems. A horizon-wide black entity mountainously filled the distant landscape—its true nature only recognizable in the mind’s eye such as in dream—and also such as in dream, the descent down this path was punctuated by the ever-present sensation of being chased by ghosts albeit the stark lonesomeness was hefting an unbearably heavy load on the soul. He was a conduit within a conduit. This mystery was confounding even to an individual who relates to all things nether and arcane. Warm hues were all but forgotten to comprehension. What is orange? Nothing should be orange. It’s the most loathsomely cheerful of hues. In that cracked brain flourished the rampant kudzu of psychic illness. Obsessive thoughts harnessed him then unbridled him and left him dilapidated. Some think that a thought forgotten must not have been important enough to remember. But what if this ebbed on the side of err? What if a profound and precious truth was tragically realized fleetingly and just as soon lost in that phantasmagoric swoon? One can never say, albeit golden-aged truths were exhumed from cosmic grave dust in this wasteland of terror, and devastatingly slipped through a porous mind fluttering into the ether once again—laughing—knowing their chance for rediscovery was an abstract concept akin to the meaning of what can only be measured in words as “beyond impossible.” Here, you visit places only accessible via dream. A dream is all you need to go there albeit a special and exceedingly rare one. You may only be given this dream but once. Such were the games the elixir played on his soul. His mind was left fractured beyond recognition. Peering into himself, he found a broken mirror that he couldn’t make sense of. The reflected pieces were generally chaotic and each deconstructed. He had to endeavor to leave this place and find another to quietly repair this damage. Somehow he had known content as a youth. Was this a luxury not to be afforded to one devoid of innocence or could it be reclaimed? Determinedly he arose and with weak constitution and retarded mental fortitude, quested epically to find where through the light may be penetrating the canopy of this dismal bog he was hopelessly lost within.
At length he discovered that this place was adamant that he not leave. It worked its charm. Small glistening ectoplasm droplets manifested from neverness and transfixed him as they magically floated through the air. Droplets undulated into diminutive spectres and marched in undead procession, aphid-like yet humanoid, amongst the thorn-crested highways flanking that dank tunnel. Beings with only a whispered resemblance to anything familiar darted in shadow. He resisted its trance grasp and willed the apparitions back to neverness from whence they came. The scepter glowed with might. It all started with a proactive move and the gumption to make a choice with conviction. He must go one way or the other. Both ways are black and only the heart could choose. Nonetheless, he was resolute. He would return to a time of dark beauty. He would hold power over mystery. And above all, he would return to a time when he believed in himself and everyone believed in him. He moved forward! Into undreamed wastes he braved The Nausea Terra Firma.
The stench came slowly and then steadily. The Sewage Thing would faithfully molest his olfactory senses throughout his journey, shadowing him with tenacity. Along the trail he paralleled the ancient aqueducts where from emanated the dull miasma which filled his lungs and mind. Breathing heavy with cardiovascular strain he shuttered to contemplate the poison wastes entering his lungs, moving into his bloodstream and seeping into his every fiber. The miasma oppressed his very spirit which was entrapped within its now mortally polluted temple. Eventually the thorn canopy opened into what appeared at first to be a rolling moonlit meadow save that proving upon a moment’s acclimation, it was but a fossil-vaulted chasm lit alone by some spectral force. It was, however, a meadow inasmuch as alien flora akin to grass grew there albeit the substrate (whatever chemical agents it was composed of) more closely resembled the sheen black coat of a horse as its gloss defined the contours of the topography. Unlike the terra firma of reality, this took the form of deep water in suspended animation. Upon its glassy ebony banks thronged an innumerable herd of ground fauna which moved in concert as would a vast shoal of fish. It was a field full of rabbits. There was contradiction in them. Something ordinarily docile and sweet took on menacing attributes in their multitudes. They stood ears perked, venerable, stoic and watchful. They were imbued with godly hyper intelligence, had supernatural powers and were merely choosing to be seen. They were dangerous fauna and were the apex predators here. “They kill most who pass them,” The Mind’s Eye whispered. He passed through their realm and into dense forest which with sporadic inexplicability opened upon strange ritual groves where cromlechs from a living remote past protruded from sweet electric green mosses. This was the last lost grove oasis the forest would reveal, and unbeknownst to the traveler, he entered the dark indefinitely. As the electric moss and spectacularly abstract fungi creepily grew before him—slowly yet with animation—he entered into the land of sodden despair.
In this new and even stranger world the rain was a persistent delicate mist that coated everything in its midst incessantly. It was ever-present, ever-moistening, and ever-maddening. The world gave no visual cues as to direction for the monotony of dark brown to black was all-enveloping in this prison of ever-decomposing wet wood. Dead snakes were all around. They were grotesque vipers of storybook variety from distant lands. It was alarming t
o know that they resided here in such profusion. One would think such a fabled and fearsome night-creature would be an oddity, but indeed the forest was teeming with them. It came as some condolence that he was only observing the unlucky deceased specimens but it was commensurately bothersome to extrapolate that these numbers were a reflection of their still-living kindred. The environment itself had psychoactive properties and made travel difficult as its flora perfumed anything animate with noxious dope which incubated surmounting terror of the most abject and personal sort within him. Moreover, there was a creature under his feet that followed him under the soggy rot at length. It wriggled and jostled the spongy bark below. Surfacing only feet before him was an unnaturally large and blackish amphibious monstrosity. It was king in this dreaded swamp kingdom where things tend to grow bigger. It stared at him. Preposterous saucer eyes gleaned intellect with indifference. It consumed him and into obscurity he lay dormant in black suspension. Eons upon eons elapsed as he floated in magic sleep.
In death he awoke to find a glowing golden hue illuminating an exquisite face. “Are you an angel?” he asked. She smiled and silently wiped away the ugliness from him. Her love warded off evil. She stayed with him at length and days would become years. The night terrors returned to him but hunkered in the dark corners of his chamber and loathsomely glowered, unable to penetrate the positive energy provided by The Angel. But lie in wait they did until there was a moment of weakness as angels too must sleep from time to time. The Angel slumbered and her protective powers lay dormant with her allowing a wrinkled portal to begin creeping open. Once the portal was opened they rushed to his side and forced the elixir down his throat and it surged back into those long detoxified veins. He walked with the ghosts. All the best of The Earth that surrounded him withered and all approached The Wretch with ambivalence. The only haunted house one is forced to dwell within is one’s own shell. And thus, his domicile and sanctuary was the embodiment of both, and both were commensurately toxic. All was being lost. The house was alive with evil. In its dark spaces where the gossamers collect, crawling things held clandestine congregations. Deep in its sodden beams cavorted an abominable orgy of slimy wriggling bugs, destroying it with their procreating, and devouring it from the core. In the grey garden outside, flowers grew in profusion amongst the tombs of deceased pets. There was still something positive here in the roots. The light and dark pulled against one another each in desperation. Others would try to occupy the house but it would only be bridled by its masters. Its window panes were etched and permanently emblazoned with the visages of its beloved former occupants who once looked out of them to see the children of summer, the frosts of October, the freshly fallen snow, and first birds of spring. Its blessed chambers resonated with their whispers, the energy of Christmases past, and the energy of funerals past unique to the lineage of its long dead caretakers (a lineage other than their own). They were intruders. The Living were the uninvited guests. They were creating an alien energy, making static and turbulence upon the veil between two worlds. They feared its attic. They feared its basement. They feared the creeping white roots which tenaciously and firmly grasped the crackling underbelly of its sodden beams. They would attempt repairs but were appalled when they exhumed the legions of annelid and aphid which swarmed taking outrage at their exposure. In these unseen nether regions of the house a silent menace was ever-present, ever-expanding, gripping and claiming with each passing moon. The intruders gathered themselves. They were determined to restore the old thing as it beckoned to them with its seductive might. They began to peel ajar a single floorboard from its parlor. With a crack, the innards revealed themselves for the first time since lost antiquity. There, exposed infinite blackness wherefrom lethargically and dumbly arose the deep, dull, obtuse, and brutish odor of many-a-thing eternally rotting. They gasped! Their terror was ever so pointed and ever so abject. The intruders aborted and fled in weeping submission, now the recipients of unwanted cosmic wisdom which was ever-metastasizing and ever-expanding in their minds. Those feeble minds! Those finite minds where the vortex will reach critical mass and fracture their souls to no return. The man was left alone in his haunted house. He dwelt there for time immemorial and from antediluvian antiquity remained dull and silent until the house returned to nature and the spirit found himself a satellite island in alien waters which had long-since drowned the lush terra firma where the venerable edifice stood in times undreamed. He was stranded and fatigued in the center of that black lake. He could see both sides. He saw where he started from. Looking back to his journey’s genesis there was still a discernable scene of sunny shores and firefly-catching innocence. The other side which he was languidly treading towards was a gnarled embankment, offering little hope of liberation from the murky waters and only offering little but certain encounters with night creatures. Cold patches where the current brought fluctuating temperatures—as if some leviathan were agitating deep primordial areas or the water’s undead—were closing in underfoot to touch upon his flesh. He circumnavigated the toxicity. He became strong for the last time and swam across the great black lake in reverse and to a king’s return to summer shores.
The captive revelers revived from their collective swoon to discover this message etched in ash amongst the slow pulsating embers: “In each mystery there’s something true and never too late to be brand new.” Distant in the real country darkness, where faintly discernable firefly lights spangled the oily blackish night canvas, there deep within decayed the whisper of childish woops resonating through the forest. And believers collected themselves and took their first step out of that EVIL EVIL night.
Red Ochre
By James Ashbey
I used to wish that I were less inquisitive, and that I could travel through life without the perpetual urge to follow every mysterious and sinister thing to its hiding place. But here at the end of it all, now that I know what rich rewards await the curious, I regret nothing.
The shelves of the Institute of Archaeology Library in Bloomsbury are replete with wonder of many kinds, and it is all too easy to wander there and become lost in the marbled corridors of the past. On one such visit I found myself lifting from the shelf W. F. Hermann’s Chthonic Cults of Prehistory; an obscure volume which bore no relevance to my studies, but whose irresistible name and charming red leather binding spoke to that childlike thirst for fantasy which in some of us never truly dies.
I sat with the book for some time, and before long became convinced that much of what passes for erudition in contemporary academic circles is mere pretence. Professor Hermann’s far-reaching study of the earthen powers once known to mankind is a scholarly masterwork, and it left me in no doubt of the shocking unity of the cultic practices that prevailed across much of the world at civilisation’s dawn.
In particular I was drawn to a sequence of coloured plates illustrating the homogenous nature of early burial custom, and above all the use of red ochre as a funerary dressing. I learnt that, from the Outer Hebrides to the Levant, early humans covered their dead with that ruddy pigment before sealing them in caves or grave pits. The book’s photographs showed all manner of skeletons, some surrounded by primitive earthenware, others lovingly adorned with shell jewellery and semiprecious stones, but all of them stained a dusky red-brown; the unmistakable hue of red ochre.
I left the library with reluctance, conscious of the onset of evening and my expected attendance at a dinner engagement, but I could not take my mind off what I had read and seen. I offered little conversation to my fellow diners that night, being too lost in reverie concerning ancient funerals and the primal prayers that must have accompanied the throwing down of the ochre. Above the hubbub of the restaurant and the pervasive drone of road traffic, I fancied that I heard the pulsing of crude percussion and the sullen mourning chants of peoples at one with Nature.
The following day I raised the subject of ochre burials with my lecturer, and was surprised to be curtly silenced for pursuing “outmoded” avenues of scholars
hip. I was told that Hermann was a “fringe academic” whose work had been stripped of all credence by subsequent generations.
Undeterred, I resolved to seek out some of Hermann’s case studies for myself. I visited the British Museum and spent hours gazing at red-brown bone fragments and pottery sherds, feeling like a pilgrim who has reached his long-sought shrine. The evidence seemed irrefutable: our distant, scattered sires all possessed a deep and uniform belief in the power of red ochre… but what kind of power? Was it the sort of transient symbolism that prevails in modern ceremonial—hollow pomp to feed the vanity of the living—or was it something deeper, more hard-wired, toppled from its former preeminence and enduring only as the faintest of yearnings that the clamour of modernity compels us to ignore? I had to find out.
Obtaining red ochre is a simple task. Artists and craftsmen have always used it in abundance, and it remains the primary colourant in many paints and textile dyes. Doubtless the scale of my order prompted a raised eyebrow when the ledger clerk of A. Macey’s Fine Arts on Jermyn Street came to balance his books, but by then I was well advanced in my researches.
The ochre was delivered as powdery bricks, each wrapped in linen and labelled with its country of origin. Most of the stuff was French by birth, from the famed quarries of Roussillon, though some of the parcels hailed from South Africa, Mexico and even New Zealand.
The Roussillon ochre I unwrapped with almost episcopal solemnity. Alone in my small London garret I exposed the rich pigment to the lamplight and sat staring at it for some time, reluctant to disturb that which the grinding continents made for us so long ago. At length however my mission prevailed and I proceeded to smear my body with the red mineral, mixing in a little water as I went. Once my skin was entirely coated, I lay down upon my thin scholar’s mattress and slept.
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