Ashes and Entropy

by Laird Barron

  This rejoinder elicits a bemused chuckle, “Clearly you are adept at skullduggery, Queen of Life.”

  The interruption barely pauses Kelsey, her words clawing their way out of her throat. “And who are you, cryptic rescuer? Are you another warden or are you a Virgil to guide me in this benighted subterranean perdition?” Despite her bravado, Kelsey realizes she is unarmed, in an impractical dress, underground in a strange city, discussing philosophy in a catacomb while some unknown, cacophonous bacchanal of the monied gentry takes place close by. Clawing at the back of her thoughts is the realization that, for all this context, she still hasn’t caught up with her ostensible subject—drawn instead into a demimonde of arcane conspiracy and brutal violence for enigmatic stakes; portentous and potentially related but obscurely connected at best.

  Nonplussed, the figure offers a formal and elegant nod of his head, “Efreitor Konstantin Steinsch,” his heels click together. “Loyalist to the ideals of the true spirit of the revolution and scientific researcher of Laboratory 7. For ease you may call me Konstantin.”

  “Well, Konstantin, what would be most helpful for me is some context regarding why I was abandoned by my ostensible guide here and what the clamoring down the passage actually signifies. Yet, I am equally intrigued by your presence and the rationale for your rather pugnacious—or rather, literally cutthroat—rescue?”

  A bemused smile creeps across Konstantin’s tightly drawn lips; “Oh Queen of Life—bright and joyful—do you not know the coldness of white winter? The chill of bleak, black graves? Why is it you serenely reflect on the blossoming of carmine flowers knowing all things born are destined for death?”

  “Everything may be born to die, but that does not account for your conduct or why the two of us are meeting in this peculiar tableau.”

  “There is a rather extensive history and context to these events, that is most certainly true, all things contain multitudes,” Konstantin gently responds. “My purpose tonight is to simply observe your progress in piecing together this rather complex happening. I can offer you this rather important context: declaring victory over the sun—to claim to be on the side of extinguishing it—is to reject life. The rather pedestrian aristocratic nihilism of the idle rich, the criminally oriented and the corrupted magicians makes a particular sense. Theirs is a brutal symmetry of aims and wants. They see the world as a fantastical cradle for their debased tastes. They seek to make the world like them; monstrous hogs wallowing in filth hidden from the prying light. They may find some useful idiots among the painted masses but they do not love them nor do they seek to gain much from them but obedient little toy soldiers like this lot,” he offhandedly gestures towards the supine figures. “The rampage of the barbarous women is a response to this state of affairs. They seek not to build but to leave the world a trackless ruin red in tooth and claw; screaming fury and splitting skulls with axes and amidst wanton orgies of ‘liberation.’ They certainly are not responsible for the Opera; they distrust almost everything proximal to civilization. They see it as an opportunity to spread their rather riotous gospel.”

  “And you serve neither master, am I correct to surmise this, Konstantin?” Kelsey asks, hoping to direct conversation towards his purpose.

  “All things die yet live again within the house of existence, ever-building. For the sun does not think of its orbit; thinks not of the earth—life and death, rising and falling, all of these are a dream we must awaken from anew. The energy of the sun is the fuel of life, the fuel of revolutions—we seek to understand and control it, to shake ourselves free of the yoke of death. The revolution must not be condemned to transience atop this world but should spread the energy of the sun across the stars.”

  “Forgive my ignorance; you believe we should awaken from a dream to aspire towards immortal star colonization?” Kelsey hopes his rhapsodic momentum will bring him to divulge some juicy detail.

  “We seek an ecological gnosis alongside dialectically material scientific practice,” Konstantin responds with a precise curtness that belies enthusiasm, “but only to those capable of revelation; as for the pigs… one can sanctify their process as a sorting out of… undesirable elements… if you would like to know more we provide services in meditation outside of Gura Humorului—the monasteries established there are aesthetically pleasing and were built to survive the withering glare of the sun and the harshness of winter—like all great things: they were built to endure their era. We find them inspirational. I hope to see you there. You should linger enough to take in some of the night’s entertainment before taking your leave.” Konstantin gestures towards the flickering light down the corridor.

  Kelsey walked into the votive candle-lit room, hovering at the edge of the inky dark. From there she witnessed the unfettered want for orgiastic violence, languid, punctual cruelty and boundless need. Overseeing the viscera-spattered red masquerade slick with sex was an immense pestilential sow riddled with tumors atop a palanquin of human bones. The sow sat in placid judgement amidst a chorus of cries and shrieks and the dull thud of beaten flesh. Kelsey gazed for several shocked minutes until her instinct for self-preservation sent her briskly weaving her way to the surface and out into the starry night—the revelry limited to drunk and debauched fights in the streets, occasionally the flash of a knife in the dark.

  The safe house was empty when she entered save for a crudely scrawled card atop her possessions:

  When presented with a ring that fits no finger, swallow it. We have woven our shawls amidst famine demanded by those fattened on the honorifics of a dead world. We have learned our magic amidst the embers of our grandmothers’ knowledge. We have known hunger, want, craving and fear and we are unbowed. We see their fruitless crown passed between vacant faces—and want none of it. We know not to what end we go but we shall meet it laughing, defiant.

  Kelsey swiftly changed into her street clothes—now amended with a rather brutal knife in sheath; the type where the hilt is solid brass knuckles—folded and packed the dress into her backpack and got back to hitchhiking.

  Her head rattling against the passenger window of one of many anonymous rides as she crawled towards the black tide, she dreamed of a cyclopean city of ochre dust and exotic spices. And in the market penitents dragged a black bull with a bone-white face to a woman arrayed in a dress of layered scarlet veils. The face of the bull was anointed in ambergris and salt and the crowd bellowed to her: “Show us thou art a god!” And wielded with decisive hands, her bronze knife opened the bull’s throat and she planted its blood and sweat on their foreheads with a kiss and declared: “Dream and see.”

  And in their dreams alabaster hyenas prowled black sands, howling at a low red moon on the outskirts of a cyclopean city of obsidian night—the spires of the city punctuated with the gossamer glimmer of her emerald eyes. And then they saw her—robes of mauve, anointed in the blood of a wolf and a lamb, striding into the Stygian depths of the cracks of this world…

  Kelsey woke up outside of Kolozsvár—Cluj-Napoca; whatever, the name seemed unsettled as any Transylvanian space handed off between languages and rulers. There were more men in jackboots and motorcycle jackets, with shaved heads and the Golden Sow back patches than she had seen anywhere previously. Less a metal scene than a simple overt fashy glowering of sullen young men standing in circles smoking cigarettes punctuated with carnivorous smiles. The city seemed to have rolled out its welcome to them—it made sense in a perverse way that a hotbed of Romanian ultra-nationalism would welcome aristocratic rule; what could be more senselessly authoritarian than an area virulently opposed to acknowledging a Hungarian minority of all things. Kelsey stuck to the fringes, snapping the occasional photo surreptitiously and planning to get back on the trail. Gura Humorului wasn’t an insurmountable distance away—even if the porcine bacchanal seemed more like a militant glowering looking for a victim rather than a Roman victory march, there was a palpable feeling of potential violence waiting to be unleashed that lent an alkaline tinge to the air.
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  Kelsey snagged some weird journal—Hylæa Nul—from the gutted burned remains of a squat—the circle N blotted with soot. She told herself she would read it after she hopped a likely ride putting her back on course. But for now, she could swear the skyline looked ready to burst into flame. She could swear the thread was getting hot as she drew near.

  The Mouth of the Solar Conclave had a sterile, almost painfully bland and inoffensive meditation center in Gura Humorului—where she fruitlessly tried to find something deeper than banal expressions of vaguely New Age thinking tinged with Marxist jargon encouraging meditation and a healthy body with a slight fixation on blood screening for impurities. The thread here simply seemed terminal—whatever interesting ideals may have inspired the two near-decapitations in Budua were nested somewhere deeper than this municipal sterility. However, they did operate a rather inexpensive hostel that had hot water.

  Clean enough, Kelsey settled down with the journal. Even if the contents were already posted on the internet, original scans would lend an air of gravity to the proceedings. The read was thankfully anything but dull.

  For all the reading and skullduggery with cults in the demimonde of Europe, Kelsey realized she wasn’t any closer to understanding her goal—if there was even a goal to comprehend, some arbitrary fact was waiting to be disclosed, she swore, that would make the whole journey make sense. She slept restlessly to dreams of black hens bobbing in unison as they walked towards her with their backs to the crimson horizon growing ever more cavernous. The next morning Sophie was waiting out front with espresso.

  “You won’t find anything here, you already know that,” she drolly drawls, propped against some unfathomably expensive antique car. The paint—nimbus-tinged robins-egg blue—flashes with quicksilver lines juxtaposed strangely with the girl with the ember crimson hair. “But I have an offer for you, a good one, so listen carefully. You can take the espresso, get in the car with me and for your trouble I will explain the mouth of the sun and take you to the performance—rather helpful assistance for your present endeavor, I might add. I’ll even show you proof of what I say. Or,” she sharply inflicts, “I can leave you to flounder—sink or swim, it is your choice alone. If you have determined you do not trust me,” a pregnant pause, laden with doomful portent; “there is nothing I can do for you. But pick fast, my little Magpie; the clock is running.”

  Kelsey doesn’t hesitate; snatching the coffee brusquely and curtly nods—whatever her rationale, Sophie was a source and no matter how careless she was with Kelsey’s life… that was neither here nor there; the story trumped all other considerations—Kelsey had traveled this far off the beaten path… how much further could the rabbit hole go? And so they rode off—smooth like liquid gold cutting through the countryside. The picaresque environ unnoticed and unremarked upon by the two women.

  “... So the story?” Kelsey breaks the silence sipping coffee on white leather upholstery that probably costs as much as a reasonable apartment.

  “Yes, the story,” Sophie enunciates each syllable for emphasis, “tell me first… do you think you have the pieces lined up?”

  “... You mean did a military scientist nearly decapitate two men in latex masks in some fucked-up ossuary near some fucked-up rich people’s mummy orgy a la Eyes Wide Shut surrounded by corpses while some pig covered in tumors looked on?” Sophie’s silence fills the car and Kelsey feels compelled to continue, exasperated. “I mean… it makes sense to the extent that any of this makes sense? Sure, my rescuer is an obscenely youthful looking octogenarian who killed two armed guards faster than I could turn around and talked to me about the sun before I saw all… whatever that fucking party was. Is the countryside crawling with paramilitary looking corpse-painted weirdos fighting and burning each other to death over the BACK PATCHES that they are wearing and I haven’t seen the thing I’m supposed to report on but at least twice some effete foppish dandy who is some sort of black magician arranged to have me killed—before some woman lit up an alleyway with automatic arms fire and the aforementioned murder. So… ultimately: no!

  “None of this makes any fucking sense. Black Metal has always been a tinny production of tremolo picking while double bass drums kick and someone screeches like a stuck pig and they posture like Gilles de Rais for the same lunkhead zines and burn down churches and stab gay tourists to death in honor of Odin. It’s stupid. That isn’t opera, rich people don’t care about it. New age holistic medicine cults don’t care about it. For fucks sake WOMEN largely don’t fucking care about it because it’s a fucking adolescent male power fantasy of caving someone’s head in with a claymore in some primeval weald. The atramentous bosk indifferent to the shedding of viscera on virgin snow and so on... And all that ‘darkest of thickets’ obsession they picked up from a dude who wanted to own slaves and fucked out of date thesauruses… none of this makes any sense to me? The thing in France: it made sense! They were dumb dead-end dudes who were bored being raised on a diet of pleasant, bloodless sterility and wanted some excitement so they fucked around with half comprehended occultism and postured like some Black Metal mafia;” Kelsey pauses and sighs, “I’ve been shot at, seen 100% of the corpses I’ve seen in my life in the last week or so, seen some things I’ll be talking about with a therapist for years to come and it’s so cartoonishly baroque that no one will ever believe it is true. That’s what my pieces are, Sophie, gimcrack and bunkum for the jaded about the insane, just soundless fury signifying… something.”

  They are both momentarily quiet, just the smooth roll of tire tread on the highway, before Sophie clears her throat and begins, “Once upon a time—”

  “No, fucking NO; no serious fucking story begins with once upon a fucking time,” Kelsey says acidly, slumping angrily against the window.

  Nonplussed, Sophie replies, “All true stories start with ‘once upon a time,’ Pyewacket; all of them do, people simply forget when they happened. Now listen, you traveled a long way for this: once upon a time there was a great optimism that socialism could not only be made real—but that it would be borne out in every element including arts and sciences. Among dissident, revolutionary and optimistic scientists was a faction that speculated communal sharing of blood could improve health and longevity; after all sharing was not only socialist in praxis but—they argued—the communal sharing would improve the vigor of the blood, imbuing it with the collective benefits of the group—”

  “You’re telling me that Socialist Vampires are why a bunch of youth in corpse paint are busily killing each other and performing opera? And this is more believable—” Kelsey says as Sophie continues.

  “Did I say shtriga? No? Good! As I was saying: this was the starting point for fringe science. Outside of attempts at achieving rejuvenation, if not immortality; there was a focus on immortalizing the Worker’s Revolution. They despaired at the autocratic rule of the degraded revolution and their studies included attempts at resurrecting the dead and developing a dialectical materialist perspective on space travel. Among the fringe of this fringe was the belief that solar energy was the true motor of revolutions—the more solar energy the more vehement the revolutionary vanguard; while the lack of this energy resulted in its languoring. The pioneers of blood rejuvenation were elevated after the death of Lenin—while many considered them the most dire quackery; deeply anti-materialist quackery at that. They were made useful. The Comintern feared the revolution collapsing as its architects gave in to the strain of fatigue and was willing to gamble on the practice and, satisfied with the results, officially instituted their research and praxis.”

  Kelsey stares at Sophie, incredulous.

  Sophie continues, pacifically, “The official history is that the research was discredited and the attempts to justify these practices were censured shortly after the group enjoyed their day in the sun. This is false. Rogue adherents placed themselves in a secret applied military sciences group—where they continued their work even after the armistice that punctuated the Cold War. They had money
and technical officers and their base of operations was remote and the paper trails that are being reviewed to understand the aims of the USSR are far more concerned with the location of nuclear missiles; far less so when it comes to small, incomprehensible science projects.”

  Kelsey sighs, “Okay, so Soviet superscience maybe had some Frankenstein projects and was doing funny things with blood transfusions—maybe they even work to some limited extent, they aren’t that different in principle than platelet-rich plasma injections in lieu of Botox—but that doesn’t explain anything about what is happening right now.”

  “Of course, but you wanted the story—this is it. As I was saying, their persistence does not mean they retained internal coherence. Eventually, there were schisms. A small sect fled their handlers in France. They had deviated significantly from the program and were to be liquidated. They determined that the entropic nature of the universe would doom the revolution to failure. Exempting, if the powers of the sun overwhelmed the tendency to decline. They saw the work of their group as too positive and infused their projects with a decadent nihilism turning against life—they saw war and crisis as the crucible of the revolutionary subject, who would be inherently more adaptable and individualistic than his peers. In short, they espoused an elitist tendency that saw some small faction as ruling by placing their hands on the levers of decay. Their dabbling in criminal enterprise and aristocratic politics fissioned off some further rogue elements who saw the revolution as inherently positioned against the dominant society—they had a particular fascination with outcast groups who could potentially be converted to mob action. Unsurprisingly—given the unruly nature of their fascinations—this rapidly spiraled out of their control and they sought to bring things back to heel. The result of this shadowed blend of science, arts and the occult is presently pillaging its way across Europe—your quarry as it were.”