Ashes and Entropy

by Laird Barron

  Kelsey is feigning the ghost of professional interest as she absently stabs her fork into an overpriced salad while Leo Carter struggles to transcend her pique over the assignment.

  “Look, plenty of people would kill to report on anything with this much potential,” Leo whines, “this could even become a book, it could be what that last story never did—or should have been before you decided to fuck your entire career up.”

  Kelsey was famous—well infamous—for two things. Firstly, her story about the French Black Metal Underground; that thing in Nantes. It had everything: insinuated connections to organized crime and human trafficking, nihilistic violence, occultism, a narcissistic artiste frontman/cult leader, a barely attended show, an incident with a goat and a machete, several arrests, a cache of automatic weapons and, most importantly to her bottom line, the mystique around the split EP between Obscene Sacraments of the Serpentine Liturgy and Despair of Dying Rats. Secondly, her immense blunder in publically joking at a banquet about her married boss soliciting her and exposing himself to her—an advance she rejected to his chagrin. The humiliation of this public disclosure made him reclusive (yet still well ensconced and connected) and her a total pariah. If it wasn’t for her foresight in grabbing a duffle bag full of the eponymous split to her only major piece of reportage (“Vice and Inhuman Violence”) she almost certainly would not have the luxury of sharing an apartment with three other people while cycling through entry level positions and desperately trying to find any work that didn’t make her imagine slashing the hollow-eyed, slack-jawed drones around her to ribbons with a machete or feeding their hands into a paper shredder or emptying magazine after magazine of hollow points into their meaningless, banal, bland fucking faces—her therapist referred to the censored-for-therapy version of this as displaced blame and poorly attributed anger over her fall-from-almost-grace-or-at-least-a-Q-score, along with worrying degrees of hostility. She was taking antidepressants. Everything was fine. She just needed a story, any story worth doing and she at least could wander around on a paltry per diem and hope a mangled clickbait version of her work would keep her out of a fucking cubicle.

  Kelsey emphasizes her displeasure with a sharp stab to a stray olive, “Oh, I’m totally not becoming pigeonholed into marginal stories about youth music—” her eyes make a rapid orbit—“the girl who gets sent to cover the fringe stories about the intersection of wild teenagers, poor impulse control, and quote unquote satanic music—I’m flattered, and I am going to fit in so well nearing thirty.”

  Leo sneers politely. “Yes, I know so many people come to you with the offer of an advance and comped travel to cover anything—what was your last piece, I must have missed it?”

  It was going to be this sort of exchange.

  Leo continues, “Because you are a colossal fuckup—and I’ll have you know Roman is a good friend of mine—and a fucking mess whose sole notable traits are writing a story about idiot teenagers dabbling in Satanism and acting like an ungrateful whore pretending that she’s some starry eyed innocent; you are the perfect person for this unbelievable clusterfuck that seems well suited to your few scattered talents. Don’t think I didn’t see you looking at the menu and calculating if you can cover a meal before ordering the cheapest thing that isn’t complimentary. This is covered. Eat some cake if you want. Don’t talk, listen, think about how you are going to have a second chance you truly don’t deserve. Thank me, then get the fuck out of my sight to go traipse around Europe running down some story that bleeds so profusely an idiot could make it read and make it golden.”

  Then, the pitch as Kelsey demolishes tiramisu along with a bottle of some garnet-colored Turkish wine that tastes like floral cassis and blackberry jam. The hook is: there is some sort of cultural revival going on in the black metal scene—which would usually be a boring mix of Nazis, Nordic Nationalism and Noise, the four N’s of boilerplate black metal, sometimes with a marginally interesting garnish of church arson—only this was surrounded by a far more wondrous and strange set of pieces; so many that the story didn’t quite fit together. And the uncanny nature of this debacle made it worth covering.

  The particulars were: the “Victory Over The Sun” Tour featuring a bunch of bands that no one had ever heard of—Ancient Grudge, Carbonized Victim, Forest of Hate, Kindertotenlieder, Guttural Response, Das Lied von der Erde—each show climaxing with the performance of the titular Opera, some nonsense by the Russian Futurists—did you know there were futurists in Russia? How, no one seemed quite sure. This is weird, neglected art (with a capital A) is not really associated with dudes in corpse paint—basic literacy often isn’t, let alone being conversant in their own ideology, as simple as it could be. Still, not enough to build a story on—then the juicy details come in.

  Protests or financial ties or funding or association with some New Age Science-y cult into some really outre health advice that maybe is engaged in some sort of medical experiments through recruitment called The Mouth Of The Solar Conclave. Further involvement of some sort of secretive mystical order called the Brotherhood of the Black, Corpulent Sow… which wouldn’t be a big deal if they weren’t heavily involved with some sort of extreme right aristocratic political…. Thing, it is all very unclear as they are, apparently, secretive—unlike the historically gabby fascists the press couldn’t stop quoting…. and if a team of four men in black boar masks with MP5s hadn’t carved apart a visiting dignitary motorcade with a hail of gunfire in the former Soviet bloc—that is, before dragging him out to the middle of the street, dousing him in kerosene and setting him ablaze… Well they probably wouldn’t be newsworthy. Who cares about what a bunch of rich, incestuous noblesse-oblige mouth off about while pretending that feudalism will return amidst blow and blowjobs from anemic cabana boys? Which led to an inquest given the “unapologetically bestial and cannibalistic nature of this criminal family” as some government official had stated off the record. Finally, there was some Amazonian gang following the heels of this. Brawling and releasing missives and laying waste like some pulpy B-Reel exploitation trash—an all women’s gang with matching tattoos and some sort of pagan occult practice and they are allegedly political lesbians? It’s all perplexingly ludicrous. And the Opera was… doing something. It couldn’t be possibly good—operatic is a term used to describe metal by people who have never heard opera besides Wagner and want to give their cultural detritus a little more artistic legitimacy by lexical proximity. But there was a ragged trail following in its wake; blissed out club kids and Eurotrash ecstasy fiends rubbing shoulders with socialites and fashionistas a hair's breadth away from spikes, tremolo picking and musty, spined leather. Before categorizing the ensuing street clashes between the brutal butch aesthetic of contemporary fascism and the paramilitary response of hoodies and bedraggled bandanas all awash in a haze of teargas—law enforcement across Europe was running out of supply to meet the flaming streets’ screeching demand and had been purchasing stock from the IDF—but that was business as usual… probably. Leo finally summed it up, hastily handing off this haphazard jumble of parts. “Mysteriously perverse and macabre things are afoot… now go run down the lurid details and make me not regret giving you this unwarranted second chance… the shows aren’t booked it seems, they’re just happenings, so make sure you find an in.” He forks lukewarm salmon into his mouth and waves a dismissal. Apparently the presence of someone so odious makes his digestion recoil.

  Leaving the restaurant, Kelsey half assumes this is a joke Carter is pulling on her, the whole thing is ridiculous. Then she watches the grainy CCTV footage on untranslated Belarusian news.

  The video is an egregious “terms of service” violation of most video hosting services and keeps getting taken down. The provenance—at least according to the title—keeps changing: Belarus, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Albania. So does the group, the description credits them with being anything from a resurrected Red Brigades to stormtroopers of the Glorious Dawn. Disregarding the hazy, unfocused particulars regarding th
e why, where and who of the clip in question. The what and how of the massacre are magnetic … the grainy footage can’t obscure the fluid motion as two figures wheel around the corner. Black military-looking gear and stubby little guns that rat-tat-tat despite the soundlessness of CCTV, the sound is somehow just palpably there in the granulated feed. Rapidly joined by their compatriots from a nearby alleyway, who stride into the picture with guns blazing to cut down the fleeing valet. Descending like inky porcine vultures, they converge to tear the struggling figure from the car. They drag the screaming man; his face is a terrified, twisting blur—no poor resolution can mask the frantic terror of the man’s final moments. Whatever words he leaves for posterity are unknown as, almost idly, his knees are shot from behind; collapsing him into a prostrating bow before the fuel can appears. The zippo flicks. The feed temporarily whites out with the nearby blaze before it adjusts, the decaying figure at the center of the inferno the last image before the sawtoothed, insensate grin of a boar closes in on the camera and cuts the footage with a deliberate shot of black spray paint. The comments frequently contain the cryptic couplet:

  The wallowing darkness of rutting pigs

  Suckling at the teat of a stillborn goddess

  The other terms keep turning up half-translated blog posts and rumor and hearsay that couldn’t coalesce into anything sensible. Just endless hazy details and half-denials and the fringes of something vast and subterranean; an eldritch cacophony leadenly creeping back towards Russia, rumors starting in Portugal and Spain before traversing the Balkans in a purposeful, inexorable march. Stuttering, shaking handycam footage mutely witnessing the dancing lights consuming churches. Outcry and gendarmes, official statements and couched criticism. One thing is obvious: this isn’t available remotely as something to be grasped but is some tenebrous revel, reel, shouting and burning announced by wild parties and street brawls. So Kelsey grasps the thread and finds herself across the Atlantic, stuffing her hands into the worn-out pockets of her black denim vest—the sharp, white, goetic scrawls melted in alignment by lighter-touched dental floss announcing her arrival: a black sun strangled by the coils of skeletal snakes emblazoned across her back as she lights a cigarette from a black box. The ashes spiraling from her face in an entropic dance.

  Things started in a blur in Lisbon—a city that was never an auspicious start, the stale air of Salazar still wafting through plazas. The imposing architecture of the city endlessly handed off between Romans, Germanic Barbarians, Moors and Crusaders. Time curled up, rotted and died here—the grandness of the environ dimmed by its static nature—everything was sterile and ageless; sharp vertical lines of cornices and columns looming over the organic shuffle of everyday life.

  Hours after disembarking, Kelsey wound up smashing the black-etched expression of some spine-bedecked metalhead acid-casualty into a bar for groping her. All the while he ranted about “a Black Sun of Nothing devouring the sky.” The exchange was less than pleasant but he set her on the trail. Ancona was what she was looking for; he burbled—so long as she knew what she would see.

  Rushing through Portugal, into Spain; Kelsey got to survey the ashes of the wake when she hit Burgos. The stately cathedral facade blanketed with a haphazard collection of circle A’s, 666, black suns, red stars—elongated downwards spike, two uneven spikes up—the acrid, sterile smell of teargas juxtaposed with the nauseating sweetness of burnt garbage. The scene report was that the city was almost empty—as if some wave swept up every malcontent youth in its wake, black-clad flotsam drawn along by the current.

  The boat from Ancona to Split gave her an opportunity to compose some of her notes and down a grubby water bottle of Slivovitz with a sharpied-on black goat she bought off of some shoeless, louse-ridden street kids at a dismal, nearly empty squat. She sent her first missive to Leo before picking the trail back up.

  11 Days Ago

  Outside of Split she has her first breakthrough. Sliding through the silt of youth hostels and Anarchist squats: the friendly N of occupation a pictorial announcement of intent. Her hair thick with the sludge of diesel fumes—jamming econo, Moscow the end of the line, she jokes. But her entreaties are rewarded with her burner phone lighting up to inform her that the Brotherhood is very interested in her reporting and perhaps she would grace a nameless piaza in Sarajevo where the red roses bloom—the beautification testifying to death—with her presence so some statement could be offered. At least fascists never lose their hard-on for announcing their plans and theatrical staging.

  Hazy sunlight somnambulantly ambles through cheap umbrellas shielding wrought iron tables—a pastoral picaresque counterpoint to the brutalist aesthetic of the environ. Juxtaposed with the harsh fields of communal concrete, their skeins scarred with red resin—the testament to shelling—like the anti shadows pinned to the walls of Hiroshima; another modern Pompeii half a world away. Across from her is a slack young man, aristocratically melting in the sun, his face permanently frozen in a sneer of childish pique. The sharpness of his petulant whine contrasts with his undulating soft hands. Sunglasses and an expensive tailored suit flowing down his gaunt form like oil coating some salted shore. While Kelsey peppers him with questions, he remains indifferent and unmoved before proffering a singular statement.

  “What you have to understand,” he emphasizes his nasality with an elaborate sip from the tiny steaming bone china’s peerless Stygian depths; “is that we are a rather exclusive organization and we have no inkling of why we would be libeled with so many jealous pettifog snarls from puissant public servants.” Bile drips down the insinuation like red wine down a razor; his voice rich like butter, reedy and with an unremarkable accent that makes Kelsey think of the mediocre Habsburg spawn mewling and fucking their way across Europe in baroque appointment with equally sequestered and vestigial organs of state. “To answer your obvious question, we are not black magicians, we don’t paint our faces like Zwarte Piet and burn historical testaments to the grandeur of the Imperial Basilica. We don’t dream of some jackbooted Reich grinding well-oiled Dior heels into the scum-encrusted faces of the squalid, fecund masses. We dream of the appropriate place for the ruling and the ruled, for a Europe with borders not the envenomed split of Warsaw Pact and NATO armies—let alone the ex-Nazi, ex-Stasi, ex-CIA, ex-KGB boots and braces crowd getting their dreams of reenacting Saló while buggering their own asses amidst the jetsom of their jizm. In short, we have absolutely nothing to do with some mongrel elements’ dubious dabbling in the occult and overladen symbolism from Entartete Kunst forgotten even by the clambering, social-climbing, lisping catamites entrusted with the sanctity of the arts.” He lights a cigarette with a lazy wave of his hand and the decisive click of a black zippo. “We may all put on robes and retreat to a private chalet to discuss good governance but I hardly think that is unique to Europe—although the flair for cross dressing, sodomy, the lash and sexual humiliation seems to be a distinctly Anglo-Saxon vintage that we remain inured to despite our occasional tête-à-têtes.” He sits upright, a surprisingly fluid motion from repose to militaristic rigidity. “Now that we have concluded our business, I will take my leave of you,” euros idly clattering on the table like provocative unanswered questions—Kelsey overcome with stillness, stunned by the casual arrogance of the proceedings. “Enjoy your stay in Europe, I’m sure you want to spend the remaining years of your looks on something far more fruitful than nosing around in the gutter after some degenerate mongrel who got chastised a bit harshly—or following a parade of malformed malcontents jaunting about to wallow in a sea of crystalline drugs and inarticulate debauch. Your problem is: there isn’t a story, there is no deeper meaning, just a surface tension of disorder that will someday be rectified. Of this I am sure.” He dabs his lips with a black pocket square, the jovial jowled countenance of a sow rendered in jaundiced gold on the corner. “Farewell, I doubt we will meet again.” Kelsey cannot articulate a response before he vanishes into the ether—a surprisingly rapid motion for such an indulgently slothful f
igure.

  Kelsey sits in the uncomfortable plaza chair, processing the arrogant whine that so recently washed over her. As she is reflecting, the wind becomes sharper and colder within the desolate plaza and Kelsey is gripped by an overwhelming sense of herself simultaneously being watched and isolated. A blur of carmine, cobalt and bone-white all outlined in a lurid cadmium suddenly fills Kelsey’s peripheral vision. The woman grabbing her by the shoulder seems to swallow the foreground—Kelsey barely registers the sharpness of the grip or the sibilant hiss of “Do you want to die here?” as she’s roughly dragged to her feet. The woman moves with languid arrogant freedom; each gesture seeming nonchalantly calculated to express her dissatisfaction with her present environ. Yet, she is tersely bustling their newly merged dyad out of the plaza; Kelsey feels magnetically pulled along in the wake. The clomping of boots somewhere between combat and fashion echo as they bolt for the nearest alley.

  The alleyway is oppressive, dark and carries the unmistakable ammonia laden smell of decomposing fish. Breathlessly, Kelsey finally manages to spit out, “Who the fuck are you and why am I being accosted in an alleyway by a stranger? What the fuck is all this?”

  “Because a silly girl wants to talk to pigs and doesn’t understand that swine are quite dangerous.” The barbed contempt of the rejoinder stings brusquely. “But also because a pretty girl shouldn’t be cut down by the likes of them.” The precipice of the alleyway breached, Kelsey can finally evaluate her captor-cum-rescuer from unknown—yet apparently lurking and immediate—danger.

  Cerise hair in an angular flowing cut sits atop a defiant, pierced face with an imperious arrogant snarl. The sharp angles of her face are punctuated with piercings like industrial lines to her features. Her tapered leather vest hugs her form—sharp vertical lines declaring blasphemy and murderous intent bedeck the spaces not dedicated to spikes—the blue mink collar highlights her face. “Sophie Maximenko.” Her name feels more like a command than a response, measured and clipped. “And you, my Magpie fledgling—you have fallen far from your nest without learning to take wing.” Their exchange is interrupted by a dangerous sounding click as Sophie produces a slim, lethal boxy profile from within her vest and pulls back the charging handle. The gun seems almost pathetically small as Sophie unfolds a wireframe stock.