by John Shirley
watches her curves divine—
watches her legs beckon the stars to come down and unfold red poppy music, come down and bejewel her seeds of living.
She turns. Stops.
Considers him.
Proud. Open. Fearless face
and set of form.
Offers him her smile.
Skin to inmost he is warm.
Rose-soft voice. “I offered all for you to come,” she says.
Offers him her hand. “Come inside and I will show you.”
Follows.
There is a warm fire. A bed lush with furs and feather-filled fabrics. Seasoned meat is in her hearth.
Rouged red and black and blue primal masks made of wood and autumnal husk hang on the walls. Brass charms and silver charms flare in the flickering hearth-light beside them.
On the table stands the swift and terrible mêlée of a yellow-jade dragon and a green-jade snake.
She pours wine into a fine-wrought silver mug. Hands it to him.
Warm wine.
Seizure. The wicked bite of poison that crush a man’s constellations, choke all the wings and spires of his hours.
Witch.
Witch-woman. Black beast beneath. Full of worm-cavern secrets and the black delvings of rat-filled halls where the dust of Yohk and the disquiet of pale stars are moist with underground things. Witch-woman. Who does not flinch when blackness bulges with the Zhophek’s terrible signs, and his retinue’s unpleasant wings flutter from the unwholesome places to consume the cycle of light. Hand and mouth devoted to dreadcraft, each full of rite-spun errands obstruct the good fortunes of men with reasonable habits.
Witch. Masked. Scented for soft cascades of glissando affections. Seductress. Fake the molten sweetness of connection she offers.
Sword up. Poised. Ready for her skull or heart. Ready to outlast.
“I will not fall to your witchery.”
“Good Sir, I am no witch. I am only a hand of the Good Mother . . . A healer.”
Sword tip pressed to her white belly.
It’s sharp, ready
to open
and mark with RED.
“I saw this place . . . And you, in my dream. All was faithfully this.”
She looks at the sword. Shows no fear.
Bell-soft: “The Good Mother offers comfort to travelers.”
“You think to put down my steel with wine. Believe breast and green cunt will exhaust me, send me off to the coils of sleep.”
“I seek only to refresh you—”
His grasp is ice.
Deep is his sword.
Deep is the laugh of His Master.
Hand flees hilt.
Backing away.
No girl.
Before him stands His master, the wizard Messtisl.
“You serve me faithfully, Attha.”
On his knees.
Head bowed.
“My Lord.” Eyes asking questions.
“My messenger could not be trusted without being first tested. This was your test.”
“Master—”
Future-slanted hand raised to silence him.
“You carry a seeing stone. It allowed me to gaze upon you.’
“I had to know if you would truly walk in death to perform the task I set before you. Your next journey is no less dangerous, and no shorter. Here is the ring you will deliver to the Oracle of Balon’Marr, and the map to guide you to her. You must arrive before the moon of Red Sulmanopses sits like a leering skull low in the sky. Complete this task for me and upon your return I will give you jewels and long health, and the girl of beauty and perfume and unvanishing glamours will be waiting for you.
“Now rise. The ribboned gardens and viper-jawed cemeteries of your task await.”
Stands.
“It will be done, My Lord.”
Bows his head deeply.
“Drink this potion, Attha. It will bar fatigue for seven days and nights. Ride hard and firm, phantoms and night’s balesome wolves will be at your heels.”
As commanded he drains the cup.
“This locket contains a lock of the girl’s hair and a simple enchantment of mine. It will keep you warm when the storm-bloated winds croak and bark. Take it. Place it about your neck. Your blade will keep the journey’s lesser harms at bay.”
As it rests upon his broad chest warm spreads within him.
“If he comes to you, heed the owl’s advice. Allies are hard to come by when darkness weaves. Now go.”
Rides
deeper into
the West . . .
Scent of glut . . .
Brute-worm, shaking their silent, eyeing blood and bone . . .
Wood thick with beards of open mist, riddle and ghost . . .
The sun recedes . . .
He has gathered wood.
A small fire.
A chunk of meat on a stick sizzling.
Touches the locket.
Fixed on a silken image of
the girl of beauty and perfume and unvanishing glamours . . .
Stands.
Gazing into the blackness.
Its gleam, vertical as any Immortal,
cast shadows long in Night’s bodiless tempest.
Black stormy eye and
whirlwind-blade in his hand
stormy-decorum READY
he listens, stretches his eyes
into the realm of bat and along the road
for the bite of forces that plot to end life.
Baleful things that were abed waken—
Strange stains, rising from inhabitants of the lightless underground, flavor the shadows.
Night winds snarling with hunger are upon him . . .
MOON
in a place without walls.
Alone.
Attha
his heavy-cloak tight about him
listens
for the owl
in autumnaltrees . . .
(KEW on my mind again..........)
(Joan La Barbara Shamansong, Morton Feldman Rothko Chapel, David Diamond Night Dances for orchestra, Opus 114~ ~~looped and intertwined)
In Old Commoriom
By Darrell Schweitzer
Paliphar Vooz met the tempter at a routine orgy in old Commoriom. This was, indeed, in the old days, long before the city was abandoned in an ill-described hurry and given over to nameless horror. It was in a time when the decadent nobles still lolled away long, sweltering, jungle evenings seeking the extremes of pleasure and pain, some new sensation which might yield, at least, a transient spark of light, like what you see when a smoldering log is bestirred in darkness; some new thought or experience desperately hunted out. Something.
On this particular night, Paliphar Vooz lay sated. On the couch next to him, lizard-headed demons devoured a corpse with great relish, their heads wriggling as bits of flesh and splatters of blood flew everywhere, but no one seemed to pay them any mind. The air swirled with smoke and incense and the strong-smelling vapors of opiates and far rarer drugs. A bat-like thing, but with the form of a man, flew from one end to the other of the great, palatial hall, swerving around the sputtering lamps that hung from the ceiling on golden chains.
Somewhere someone screamed, whether in ecstasy or terror it was hard to say. Vast, naked masses of bodies still writhed on the floor and in the alcoves, rising and falling rhythmically, susurrating like an ebb tide.
It was under these circumstances that a gentle hand touched him on the shoulder and shook him, and a soft voice whispered, “Will you come with me? There is more than this. Many are the wonders left to behold.”
And Paliphar Vooz turned blearily, and beheld rising before him what seemed at first to be a column of black, gleaming smoke, but which then resolved itself into the face of a beautiful young man, like an exquisite marble mask floating in the darkness, and then he made out a slender figure in an iridescent, sparkling black robe, like a patch of starry sky torn from the heavens.
This a
pparition reached out a hand to him, and he took it. The grip was firm and warm, almost burning. He allowed himself to be hauled to his feet, and joked under his breath, muttering, “Well, my calling calls at last.”
It might have been one calling or another, for Paliphar Vooz fancied himself a poet, though he’d never gotten around to writing much verse, and he wore a philosopher’s gown, though he’d not done much philosophizing beyond the sort of rote recitation that impresses the dull masses and earns one the requisite copper pazoors which make further meaningless existence possible.
Now here was, perhaps, something more, for the stranger was reciting what sounded like, “Behold, the gates of birth and death are open, and the clockwork of time has paused in its turning,” or words to that effect, to which he, if he’d been a bit clearer-headed, should have been able to respond in kind.
Instead he slipped and fell splashing into a puddle of something foul. It was hard to tell what. Once more he was helped to his feet, and the other whispered again softly, almost seductively, “Will you come with me?”
The other’s face floated in the darkness like a gleaming mask, whether a youth or perhaps a maiden, he could not tell, or some kind of demon, he could not know . . . and yet he allowed himself to be led into a dark place, a space between spaces, where creatures like luminous, skeletal fish or serpents wriggled by; and then the darkness parted like a curtain, and he stood before the great king of Commoriom, who lay unconscious in his vast, golden bed surrounded by his wives and concubines, dreaming dreams of blood and splendor. Paliphar Vooz saw those dreams flickering like shapes of flame.
He was impressed, ultimately, by the ugliness and pettiness of the king’s mind, and he made to go, when the other nodded and guided him gently by the elbow. The two of them walked in darkness again, through solid walls, in and out of rooms and houses and towers, in spaces between spaces, where the senses could not quite follow.
He saw the great multitudes of Commoriom, many of them in their slumber, some in night time duties or seeking pleasures, or amid the commission of crimes nefarious or petty; for though the king and the great ones of the land might seek an escape from ennui in one endless debauch, there were still the common folk who drove the carts and baked the bread and repaired the aqueducts, who carried messages and patrolled the city’s walls against marauders and retiled the roofs. These respectable folk he looked upon now, dreaming their mundane dreams, or performing such mundane tasks as are performed in the darkness, no more remarkable when a purse was lifted or a throat slit than not.
Yet he hesitated, half afraid. It was not the vision itself which troubled him, but the suspicion that he, like his companion, was a spirit, that he was a ghost, carried off from his body – perhaps it, too, now devoured by the crocodile-things while he lay absolutely insensate – already dead and bound for some nether hell yet undiscovered by genuine philosophers, let alone shallow frauds like himself.
His companion reassured him that this was not so, arousing adventurous expectancy within him, and bade him continue on their journey.
Once they passed like smoke through the walls of a certain private chamber where lay his own young, exquisitely beautiful mistress, who had missed the evening’s festivities, claiming she had a headache. Now she slept blissfully in the arms of some other lover. This did not move him. The lover might have been a baker’s boy, or might have been some blue-skinned, beast-headed thing from out of the swamps beyond the city’s edge. It hardly mattered now. His perspective had changed.
He remembered, how after a perfect night with her, when he was very young and filled with expectancies, and those expectancies had just been, it seemed, fulfilled -- before he had the imagination to yearn for anything more -- she had finally shooed him out of the bed, given him a peck of a kiss on the cheek, and dismissed him, saying only, “Leave the door unlatched on the way out.”
Then, this had merely filled him with obsessive desire, and his every moment’s thought was filled with visions of her flesh, until such a time as he could be reunited with her. But now the scene replayed itself, and he went through it again, like an actor well-rehearsed in his role, and when he came to the end, he merely left the door unlatched and once more took his companion by the hand.
“If you should find yourself afraid,” the other said, “take this.” He pressed a stoppered ivory phial into Paliphar Vooz’s free hand.
“I am not afraid.”
“Nevertheless take it, and when you wish to end these visions, and behold only the absolute and unelaborated truth, drink from it.”
“No, I want to go on,” said Paliphar Vooz, for there was awakening within him some genuine desire to know, to see what lay beyond the perceptions of the everyday, to plumb those depths to which poets and philosophers are supposed to pay more than lip-service. As for the exact nature of the miracle which was unfolding before him and affording such an opportunity, he did not inquire, for the philosophical part of his brain was, he knew full well, like a flabby muscle and unused to the exertion.
He would do better to take this a little bit at a time.
They passed, then, beyond the human realm entirely, drifting in the night like huge, lazy moths on a hot wind. They soared among treetops, through the teeming jungles beyond the city’s wall, and there he beheld and shared in and became a part of the dreams of beasts, as his subtle passage disturbed the contentment of some monstrosity that split the night one more time with its howling until it sank down beneath the mud again, with only its fiery eyes visible, blinking open and closed, slowly, like lanterns. His only conclusion was that the feastings and fornications of the beasts were not appreciably different from those of human beings, and of as little interest.
He looked skyward now. His companion led him up, off the earth entirely. He did not gaze back as the city of Commoriom and all of Hyperborea fell away beneath him. One of his slippers came loose and went tumbling away into space.
Now there was before him, far more immense than he had ever seen it before, the horned Moon. It filled the sky, blinding him. His sense of up and down were completely confounded as he and his companion settled among the mountains of the moon, amid great cliff faces of sheer gold and silver, which, he had always heard from the speculations of philosophers – on the rare occasions he bothered with such things – were valued about as much by the inhabitants of the Moon as common mud is on Earth.
This was more solid than any dream. They walked a long way through the mountains of the Moon, at times battling or evading immense and ravenous moon-beasts shaped like enormous worms or insects, though sometimes with human faces screaming in outrage at the intrusion of these two outsiders upon their pristine domain.
Since he’d lost a slipper, his one bare foot was soon sore and bleeding from the sharp rocks. He limped, leaning on his companion, whose shoulder felt solid enough, but whose whole body seemed a slender thing of sticks, which he feared might collapse under his own more gross weight.
In this somewhat disheveled state they came to the palace of the King of the Moon, and there found welcome, and dwelt for what may have been days, or months, or even centuries. All sense of time left them as they reclined upon cushions of soft, somehow pliable stone, and the bejeweled and fantastically-garbed moon-folk gathered around them (or above them, for some were winged). He drank the ambrosia of purest moonlight and discoursed as a true philosopher should, to the enrapt audience of the lunar court. For the first time in his life, perhaps, he rose to his calling, as he expounded upon the deeds and works of mankind, describing kingdoms and cities, far voyages across remote seas, treasures discovered, and the knowledge accumulated by terrestrial philosophers. This the lunar king and his courtiers took in with a polite nod. It was only when Paliphar moved on to the wisdom of mankind and attempted to demonstrate the beauty of human artistry, reciting lines from the greatest of human poets, that his audience broke into howling, grunting, barking laughter, loud as thunder, and as cacophonous as that of a pack of baboons. They hu
rled refuse. The lunar king sent his guards with flaming whips to drive the impostors forth from the palace.
It was in considerable pain, much the worse for wear, that Paliphar Vooz, now in rags, and having lost his other slipper now in the resultant mad scramble, limped with his marble-faced companion to the top of a lunar peak and gazed out into space, at the distant stars.
The other turned to him and said, “Perhaps it is time to go on.”
“Yes, it is,” said Paliphar Vooz. He took the other’s hand in his. He still held the carven, stopped phial in his free hand, but he did not open it.
Once more his sense of direction was utterly confounded, and they leaned forward and fell upwards, into the sky. Now the blackness and terrible cold of space closed around them, and they fell for what might have been a thousand years, while he, dreaming, lived out what must have been a hundred thousand impossible lives on other worlds. Every once in a while he would awaken in the night with his head upon a pillow – if there were such things as pillows, or if his form possessed even the most rudimentary accoutrements of humanity and could be said to have a head – to wonder if he really was as he seemed to be, in the midst of life, or merely a mind invaded, or worse, yet, dreamed into existence by a crazy speck of a pretend-philosopher tumbling through interstellar gulfs. Most such creatures dismissed the notion as too absurd for further consideration. A few sought the counsel of doctors or shamans. One alone founded a religion based on the visions of the Tumbling Philosopher – this was not a success; it caused revolution and ruin on a world of three sapphire-colored suns – while several more went mad and a few committed suicide.
Then Paliphar Vooz and his companion dwelt for a time among the intelligent, but profoundly malevolent fungi on the black planet Yuggoth. Later, the two of them rose skyward, streaming light, to escape the ravenous fire-jungle that covered the entire surface of a dying, blood-red star near to the rim of the universe. They conversed long with vast beings that swam like whales in the darkness beyond the last suns, in the truest, outer abyss, where the thousand-light-year length and immeasurable bulk of these creatures was no more or less a speck than a single mote of dust.
Yet everything might still have been a dream – as he attempted to convince himself that it was – when he came to dwell in a place of the gods, and not just of the familiar, anthropomorphic gods of Earth, either. They were there, to be sure, but so too were the countless gods other worlds, monstrous things in more shapes than his senses could grasp; and though some of them were sentient gases or existed in dimensions beyond the usual three, he moved among them as an equal, for he had become a god of sorts on that war-wracked world of the sapphire suns. With all gods, even the strangest, he held converse, until he concluded, in great sorrow, that their comings and goings, their strife and fornications, were of no greater interest than those of the beasts in the jungle outside Commoriom.