by Laird Barron
“So, some aristocratic fascist types made a secret practice more elitist to better actualize solar energy for the revolution by embracing entropy? A practice which apparently is connected to fascist youth, mafia types and the monied, displaced aristocratic types? Which lead a bunch of corpsepainted youth to pick up the performance of a forgotten Russian Futurist Opera and they are having a shadow war over this with some old guard communist blood scientists?”
“Precisely!”
“Excuse me if I’m slightly incredulous, but is there any way to justify these claims? Given our communist blood scientists are apparently ensconced in a wholly secret military wing of a ruined empire—and apparently remain a fifth column in support of communist space colonization?”
“Yes; that’s why you are going on a drive with me. I’m going to demonstrate the veracity of my claims before you see the ‘Victory Over the Sun.’ Then you can decide who to believe. Did you enjoy your coffee?” Sophie’s voice warms slightly.
“It tastes a bit ferric… now that you ask…”
“Well, the dehydrated blood can’t shed its taste. Tell me how you feel tomorrow… for now we are headed to illuminate the mysteries for you.”
Kelsey spits angrily, uncertain if this was an elaborate joke at her expense. Failing to irk Sophie, she sullenly glowers in her seat as they continue far from the beaten path.
The bunker complex was hidden deep in a timber forest—the car abandoned kilometers back. Brutalist cement functionality and complex diagrams of blood and stars in brilliant crimson pinned to walls, the whole place stifled with dust. Kelsey shot everything with her cellphone in the echoing rooms, lit by a road flare indifferently held by Sophie. Their voices echoed as Sophie demonstrated an uncanny familiarity with the building. It was too elaborate to be a hoax—and the documents were primarily in Russian preventing Kelsey from doing much to verify, let alone correlate, their contents. Sitting at the yawning entrance, Sophie cut lines of rufous powder on a mirror as she idly chatted about the particulars of the tour. Snorting the lines left the mirror dusted with a dark coral hue.
When Kelsey inquired what it was that they were snorting somewhere in the wilderness—Kelsey had stopped keeping track where; she wasn’t even sure how long she had been riding with Sophie—Sophie cryptically replied, “The red Sol invictus,” and offered the mirror.
Kelsey didn’t think twice. As they left the place, she voiced her lingering question: “So who is behind all of this?”
“No one. Every empire awaits its barbarian and every barbarian awaits their demon of inspiration. We are simply demons of inspiration…”
In a haze, they made their way deeper into the bleak boscage. Their thoughts privately ensconced as they crunched through faint drifts of snow.
In a gossamer haze—at least for Kelsey, Sophie adopted her characteristic detached and silent mien following her abstruse outburst—they made their way from the building. Walking in amicable enough silence; a journalist and her recherché Amazonian interlocutor-cum-subject of journalistic scrutiny.
Kelsey, becomes fully engrossed in reflection, mentally inventorying the pieces of an impenetrable enigmatic puzzle that she feels incapable of coherently expressing as a sensible assemblage; boots crunching in the thin snow as they climb yet another ridge in this portentous hinterland. Yet, this time, their climb is rewarded with an excellent observation point of the chiaroscuro of bodies in motion across a snow-dappled field. Sophie grins enigmatically.
“I told you I would bring you to your goal, Magpie, and so I have,” Sophie intones in her laconic aristocratic elocution. So they begin trudging down the ridgeline at a brisk pace; Kelsey too preoccupied with not slipping to voice any additional questions. Heading down from on high to a crowd like a murder of crows flocking carrion. Making their descent, the crowd continues to accumulate and swell, black-clad legions flocking on virgin snow and building bonfires around a concrete protuberance in the center of the field. As they reach the fringes of the crowd, Sophie blows Kelsey a kiss and vanishes into the crowd, abandoning Kelsey to make her own path through the teeming throngs.
Kelsey cannot begin to capture the absurdity of the fete she flows through, ringed by boisterous celebrants. The stage a bricolage atop a concrete pillbox bunker she observes from amidst an audience that oscillates wildly in dress—leather, spikes and war vests prevail yet there are smatterings of dresses complimented with the occasional standard uniform of club kids everywhere (neon, gaudy, impractical fashion) alongside black hoodies and bandanas, patches largely confined to declarations of partisanship, who glower in covens amidst the revelers—murmurs, barks, sotto whispers and beckoning entreaties in innumerable tongues. Piercings and tattoos so common as to be unremarkable, and among chest pieces and sleeves, facial tattoos and marked hands, legs and necks there is a profusion of the familiar maggot ouroboros—ink-black tentacles lapping at pulsating flesh—and the singularly ominous jovial countenance of a sow. Hundreds of young people—their faces primarily bedecked in the organic black smears on bone white base. Kelsey impulsively buys ecstasy from a gaunt teenager speaking broken English from behind a bandana depicting a burning cop car as she observes young people slamdancing around and occasionally jumping over dotted bonfires. Some ad hoc roadies start setting up gear on the stage as she idly wonders if, for the second time, she will witness the ill-fated meeting of livestock and machete. Kelsey makes her rounds somnambulantly, surprised by the occasional patch, a twin to hers, of skeletal snakes constricting a dying sun.
A frenzied susurration rips through the crowd gaining volume until it climaxes in a deafening roar as elegiac figures draped in layered, jet black robes—there is no set list or MC, apparently the audience simply knows who is playing at any given time or simply doesn’t care—takes the stage as the ecstasy fully kicks in; buzzy with a hint of what was certainly crystal meth. Kelsey watches in wonder as faces enscorreled behind sigil-scarred porcelain masks take their positions.
A threnodial basso ostinato slowly establishes itself, carving through the riotous cacophony of the crowd. A militaristic thrum of rapidly kicked drums winding its way into the mix complimented with a complex syncopation of jagged guitar riffs tangling themselves into a disjointed coda—vamping itself till ready. Finally, a moment of ecstatic release, a cavernous scream, vast and stentorian, tears itself from within the figure behind the microphone. A momentary pause—barely perceptible—before an all out aural assault falls upon the crowd like a distorted avalanche. Deafening and overwhelming, stark and total, a ferociously barbarous siege materializes, obliterating all feeling and puncturing ear drums like a well-honed ice pick. The crowd explodes into rapturous, monstrous violence under the sway of the ferociously abominable, clamoring dissonance. Something akin to standing on the runway as a jet takes off, a relentless auricular pummeling as lanky bodies are flung with wild abandon into a centrifugal maelstrom. The snow quickly blackens with the stomping cadence of boots, red with blood from fights breaking out and casually swung limbs. The music an execrable tintinnabulation in every ear-shredding register of hearing. The silence between songs and sets blurs into the overwhelming noise of the affair—mutilated sound remaining as a dreadful susurrus. Kelsey is unable to determine if it is the drugs or if she really sees someone pushed into a bonfire and held down in the conflagration, if the flash of knives is a phantasmagoria, if the sound really is such a deafening and overwhelming presence, if the wails from the stage express lamentation or command further acts of prolonged, punctual violence.
The moments bleed into hours as the crowd transfixes itself upon wanton acts of aggression, howling for more. There is no banter, no announcements, no intermission; simply a limitless, multifarious bulwark of myriad distorted sounds crashing down upon the audience.
This eternity of interminable grim, stark cruelty weaving its way through the bacchana finally comes to a rest—silence. The crowd no longer enthralled by blast beats and ceaseless, unearthly, throat-splitting screaming. The
field is laid waste—churned by the inelegant pirouettes of flailing bodies and casually sadistic brawling, smoke settles upon the quieted scene—a windswept, blasted heath in ruins. Kelsey is mildly surprised the bunker top stage stands after the grim revelry. She grew up in rustbelt punk scenes, impromptu venues obliterated by carnival fireworks detonated inside, screaming smoke alarms, broken fingers and noses streaming blood. The aftermath still feels like a ceasefire between the environment and the individual; somehow more intense than surveying walls charred with pyrotechnics and boards splintered by steel-toed boots. A dire and portentous quietude settles upon the becalmed crowd as a Brobdingnagian inky square comes up over the stage emitting a subtle, indifferent menace.
The open field begins to feel claustrophobic to Kelsey—grievous and intimate—dominated with the black monolith devouring the horizon. Despite the flat purity of the painted absence of landscape, Kelsey feels a discernable toothful roil of entangled tentacles pushing through the lustrous vacancy. Then the opera takes the stage.
Baroque figures chipperly entond cataclysmic gibberish, a disjointed hokum beneath a low red moon in the vault of night. Roles adopted by nightmarish harlequins communicating psychotic pronouncements. There’s no rhyme or reason to the opaque ensemble of demented stock characters twisted into parodic madness, the costumes a minimalistic symbolism of bleak defiance. Kelsey becomes mesmerized by this comical juxtaposition with the steadfast, gloomy grimness of the preceding acts. In rapt attention to the punctual performance—she simply lets go.
The colors inverted, black snow under a white sky dappled with flickering black stars; all overseen by a second, secret blood-red moon that revealed itself raw and bleeding nailed to the vault of night. Astral blood pooling upon the snow. The square that seemed to devour the horizon, a grim monolith of paint and intention, was an open gate. Retaining its inscrutable darkness; ill-defined, hazy as if stuck between transparencies. A sable square pasted upon an ivory sky. Its tendrils greedily sucking at so many in attendance—ghastly, unseeing marionettes in a death spiral waltz. Faces unnerving—a smooth porcelain surface—bodies animated by threads.
Upon the field some appeared bestial, corrupted flesh twisted, spouting malignancy—faces porcine gasps of need. On the ridgeline stood Konstantin, or at least Kelsey took the carmine smudge of pulsating energy to be him. Feral leering women dotted the landscape. Their bodies bathed in a sheen of animate fire, their potency obvious. When they opened their slavering jaws packed with serrated teeth and bathed her with tongues of agitated enmity against all that stands, she felt at home.
Casting an inscrutable, imperious gaze upon the placid, calculated figure of reason and ambition; Kelsey turned to walk away amidst the amoral and scandalous throng. Hemmed on all sides by the bleating, insensate rabble snapping on her heels with delirious fervor and misguided worship.
She felt like a primeval Titan, unbound from the strings of the fantoccini that she looked upon with a gaze as blankly grand and pitiless as the sun, mysterious as the initiation of the moon.
Trailing pandemonium in their wake, the Abyss stretched behind them idly trailing elegantly tapered fingers across the stretched skein of the real. A mouthpiece of mystery and cryptic grandeur punctuated with sudden and furious violence.
She braved the depraved depths of a nightmarish demimonde. Crushing gilt guardians of drowned secrets. Amidst sterile bone walls riddled with secrets she saw the reborn flesh prepared to seed the galaxy ever threatened by the wistful architects of destiny. She strode over the charnel house altar of debased rulership—Rex Tyranis Mundi. Casually immolating as the imperfect creations of barbaric calculation. The scarlet brand on her chest named her hostis humani generis—and those that fled before her tasted fear. Dazzled by impetuous blinding light. She came in purging fire, feasting on bones amidst the carrion, devouring restraint and barrier.
In cities of shadowed twilight she unearthed paradoxical occulted enigmas and devoured them without apology. She howled into the ether and was answered from on high as power ebbed from her.
Dazzled, she emerges from her trance in a dingy Moscow hostel.
Presently
Kelsey barrels down the highway, unsure of how she came into possession of Sophie’s car—let alone where she is heading. Something happened at the climax of the uncanny play—absent from her mind but undoubtedly true, picking at the fringes of her memory like a splinter in the roof of her mouth. There was something beneath the facade—something immense and occulted, dynamic and intoxicating, trailing arson and bloodshed in its wake. The expression of a cryptic vendetta between the occupants of a shadowed demimonde—perplexing in its bewildering clandestine agenda. Did it serve anyone, this recondite esoteric performance. Was there some arcane secret secluded from prying eyes at the heart of the matter?
Kelsey pushes aside the obvious question of precisely how she came to possess the duffel bag laden with baggied sanguine powder; let alone the stash of handguns in the glove box, the lethal-looking Kalashnikov in the trunk or the passport identifying her as an Estonian national. There is a glimmer of something secluded from reason; consuming youth and hatred and unleashing unreason. A relentless nemesis to some agenda, Kelsey reflects. The answer is out here at the frontier of a ruined empire of fallen ideals—a sequestered divine spark rising up to immolate everything before darkness takes us all.
Kelsey gives a wan grin and admires the entwined corpulent maggots ever devouring each other freshly inked on her wrist. The penetration of mysteries is the relentless appetite of reason. To whatever end she travels to, she muses lighting a cigarette, she will fly with wild abandon. As coral light overlooks pristinely bleak fields beneath the blackened heavens, she is swept up in a riptide of arcane conflict, propelled by feral hunger to crack the heavens and feast upon the bones.
SHADOWMACHINE
by Autumn Christian
The midnight man waited outside our house night after night. His briefcase and his hat were both made of black velvet. The cigarettes he smoked were black. I smelled the cloves from the kitchen window. It was the only window my mom hadn’t bricked over to block the sun from coming through.
My mother forbid me from going to Moonlight Mass that night. She didn’t understand Moonlight Mass could not be missed. The moon needed me. And when mother went to sleep, the moon pulled at my blood. Come. Come. Say the words. Drink from the starcups. I grabbed my bag and the shadowcloak and headed downstairs.
The man did not turn his head as I peeled back the curtains in the kitchen window to regard him. Only his eyes moved. The whites stuck out like beams. I dropped the curtain back into place, and left out the back door.
I headed for the grove.
~
I don’t remember what sunlight looked like. As a toddler I burned my arm in a slice of hallway light. Lesions spread across my arm wherever the rays touched me.
When the doctor told my mother 18 years ago I was a “Child of The Night,” she laughed in disbelief. But the real name of the disease, the disease that meant I’d never walk in sunlight again, sounded worse, like it was bad luck to speak aloud.
Xeroderma Pigmentosum. It meant the light was my enemy, and I’d forever be consigned to dark hallways and underground basements. So we moved out to the country where The UV lights of city street lamps couldn’t touch me
There I found the grove of cypresses, woven together so tight that their limbs were like a cathedral, their heads opening up into an oculus the moon filtered through. In the grove I found The Congregation, speaking the name of my disease like a sacred word.
“Terra,” they said the first time I entered the grove. “We’ve missed you so much.”
Maybe I should’ve thought it was strange that a psychic grove of trees knew my name. But it made sense to me back then.
Nighttime girls like me didn’t get to have ordinary friends.
~
That night of the Moonlight Mass, The Congregation told me to take the north pointing starcup, drink
the cypress-scented blood, and summon my Shadow Companion for the dance.
But I was distracted.
Instead of thinking of the steps of the shadow dance, a kind of backwards dance, with each motion in proper alignment with the constellation Scorpius, I thought of the computer my father bought me several years ago before he died. How carefully he opened the box and set the computer up in my light-blocked room.
He told me, “This computer is your portal.”
The Congregation thrummed, bringing me back to the present. “Your thoughts are elsewhere. This is not allowed during Moonlight Mass.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
And I tried to focus on the bloodface emerging out of the sheer parallel dimension in front of me but instead-
-By the age of 8 I was writing programs to scour the web for pictures of sunlit valleys , trying to recreate memories through implanted suggestions. I entered chat rooms and told lies. “Single mother, age 37, looking for love.” Or, “22, college student, pre-med.” I sent private messages to boys like a schoolgirl whisper, trying to entice them with esoteric phrases.
“Don’t you think loneliness tastes a bit like a lemon?”
On the Internet I could pretend to be a girl who didn’t have seven surgeries to remove melanoma spots from my skin before the age of 15.
He told me, “This computer is your portal,” and a portal is just a simultaneous pathway. A way to go both left and right at the same time. A way to-
The Congregation said, “We are disappointed in your carelessness for the Moonlight Mass.”
I swallowed. “Please. Give me another chance.”
“Forgiveness is a backwards word,” The Congregation said. “And we do not look backwards.”