Containment: The Death of Earth
Page 1
CONTAINMENT
(The Death of Earth)
A Novel and Grimoire
by Charlee Jacob
Necro Publications
2017
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CONTAINMENT
© 2017 by Charlee Jacob
Cover art © 2017 by Egle “Cathy” Zioma
This edition © 2017 Necro Publications
ISBN: 978-1-944703-44-8
LOC: 2017908955
Ebook formatting & cover design:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
fatcatgraphicdesign.com
Necro Publications
5139 Maxon Terrace
Sanford, FL 32771
necropublications.com
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PART 1
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
PART 2
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Chapter 4
Chapter 5
PART 3
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Chapter 6
Chapter 7
PART 4
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Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART 5
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Chapter 10
Chapter 11
PART 6
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Chapter 12
Chapter 13
PART 7
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Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART 8
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Epilogue
About the Author
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“By its very nature sacred time is reversible
in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a
primordial mythical time made present.”
– Mircea Eliade, Myths and Reality
————
“Philosophy is written in that great book which ever
lies before our eyes—I mean the universe—but we
cannot understand it if we do not first learn the
language and grasp the symbols in which it is written.
This book is written in the mathematical language, and
the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometrical
figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend
a single word of it, without which one wanders in
the name through a dark labyrinth.”
– Galileo Galilei, The Assayer
————
“…cio’ ch’io vedera, mi gembiava un riso dell’ universe.”
“… That which I beheld seemed unto me a laughter of the universe.”
– Dante Alighier, Paradiso
PART ONE
The Myth of Falling
(From Original Grace)
“Rest beyond choice in the dust-appointed grain,
At the breast stored with seas. No return
Through the waves of the fat streets nor the skeleton’s thin ways.
The grave and my calm body are shut to your coming as stone,
And the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open.”
– Dylan Thomas, from “If My Head Hurt a Hair’s Foot”
————
“All who came to him were filled with terror at the first glance.
As to the cause of this, he himself used to say that he had seen
a piercing light resembling a human face. At the sight of it
he feared that his heart would burst into little pieces.
Therefore, overcome with terror, and he instantly turned his face
away and fell into the ground. And that was the reason
why his face was now terrible to others.”
– Heinrich Woelflin
««—»»
Narrator
In this place of longest solitude, removed from illusions of sacred and profane spaces, I watch those spaces.
I would frown…
But those of my kind do not frown, neither from being witness to dreams nor saintliness nor outrage.
Expressionless, I observe every shape that life manifests. There is no embodiment—no outlet—for whatever emotion sentimentality could embody in me.
My face is stone.
O Thou, God the Living One, whose Glory, Honor, and Kingdom shall extend unto the Ages of the Ages.
Chapter 1
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The complexity of a mind not fully human (one step forward onto earth, two steps back into heaven) defies the predictability of microbial man. To know you are bereft of God’s love creates the box your turbulence takes its quantum leap from.
– from The Enantiodromia
The Book of Time and Space
————
The boy remembered the first time he was brutally punished by the Angel. This did not include minor slaps or solitary kicks into a corner. As a baby, he’d known better the taste of blood than the flavor of milk.
He’d been walking for a couple of years, perhaps still too young to understand what she was asking him.
“Do you dream of falling?”
Her features never changed, not that he knew if they were supposed to. He felt sure his own changed, for the boy detected movement in his face when he was happy or as he thought very hard. He’d touch the corners of his mouth to verify if they stretched up or down or his forehead furrowed.
Dream of falling?
What was (Dream) anyway? he wondered.
“No,” he said.
She commenced to beating him.
She’d never been so savage to the boy before. He shrieked in shock and pain, wailing in terror as his very bones crackled. She beat him without anger, without judgment such as he’d glimpsed in illustrations of God in the sacred Book of Time and Space she had provided for his education.
She grabbed him by the throat, squeezing until he couldn’t breathe. She pulled him up from his little bed until their faces were close. She told him in her usual flat voice: “Never scream. And if you must weep, do so quietly.”
She released him. He curled up in a tight ball as the Angel glided from the room, back to her own room next to his. He carefully muffled sobs into his pillow, lumpy with small stones, until he fell asleep.
The following evening, she returned.
Again, she asked, “Do you dream of falling?”
He still had no idea what (Dream) signified, but he swallowed with a bruised hesitation and replied:
“Yes.”
She demanded, “Describe it to me.”
Now he panicked for he could not. Oh, why did he say yes? Oh God, what did she want to hear? What should he say to her to pass what must surely be his first test?
He shook, knowing what was coming.
The Angel tore into him again.
It was worse than the evening prior. He jumped from his bed to run from the room, but she grabbed him by the hair and yanked him back. His body turned purple everywhere but he made no noise, afraid that if he did, the punishment would increase. He gasped as the breath was knocked out of him. His bowels seemed to explode. Some of his little teeth scattered about the small room. Words on the ceiling in anc
ient alphabets bore witness to his suffering, his splattered blood assuming the shapes of their letters as it arced onto the walls.
The Angel kept on, tireless, not one drop of perspiration, as again she grasped him around the neck, their faces so close he feared she’d sense his silent tears.
She said to the boy: “Never lie to me.” Then she let go and departed.
The boy watched as the Angel walked away, in the dress she always wore. Her back was revealed, along with the terrible scars on her bared shoulders—scars where wings had once been.
Next night.
She returned.
Same question.
“Do you dream of falling?”
“Yes,” he replied.
And it was true. He wasn’t quite sure why, perhaps he wasn’t yet meant to understand, but this time he had an answer.
Would it be enough?
“Describe it to me,” the Angel ordered.
And it came from him, some in words he hadn’t even learned yet. The boy had suffered it after the Angel left him the night before.
Suffered (Dream).
Or nightmare. Or revelation. Or both. Just as Time and Space were one in the same. It seemed even stranger to him after waking from it because it seemed as if he’d lived it. He had been here and there, here and there, again and again. A loop of time and space, never-ending, beginning again every time he fell asleep.
He related (Dream) of falling to the Angel:
“I fell.
“I fell.
“I fell.
“My body tore, buffeted by cosmic winds and the grim cairns of stars that reinvent darkness. Eons and ages form a dead language shrieking extorted poetry until it turns the insides of my ears to pulp.
“You caught me before I struck the barbarous square inch of the final cruel mind. You pressed me into your hot flesh, your face a horror to behold. Your own body was racked, mangled by a figurative eternity, as you whispered into the serialized workings of my inner ear.
“I have waited so long for you.
“I fell.
“I fell.
“I fell.
“My bones sang, thrumming, softly tuned at nebula. I flailed the silken skin of my arms and legs, silent distances closed by wormholes of pure white light.
“You caught me above a high chalky cliff, soothed my fever against your cool cheek, your face vaporescent and beautiful. Diamonds sketched with gospel prose covered the shining plain below, and your breath smelled of roses as you murmured into my healed ears:
“‘I have waited a long time for you.
“‘You fell.
“‘You fell.
“‘You fell.’
“And you watched me. You watched as I reached out for bright objects, blind objects. Anything to slow the manic yet gut-knuckling descent. You heard me cry out: rage or terror. Did the world hear it? you wondered at me. Had the universe recorded it? Were your screams destined to fall upon the deaf microbes buried deep within the dry blackened planet?
“You caught me, your expression at turns flushed with madness and paled by horror. You pressed your teeth to the scars on my forehead, I heard your sotto voce under your breath of faint blood:
“‘I have waited!’”
The boy finished, not knowing how the Angel would react. She nodded and began to leave for her own room.
“Well?” he called after her meekly, respectfully.
She turned and said, “The last Nephilim could have dreamed no less.”
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The arrival of the prodigy is always a prophecy—one not always too soon revealed. Tragic whispers from ancient heresies will produce a savage harvest, a metastasized cancer of subjective downfall.
– from The Enantiodromia
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The boy’s study Book, from the Angel. (Translated, the word ‘enantiodromia’ means: where the deepest point of saturation with darkness gives birth to a rapidly expanding point of light.)
————
It wasn’t as if he didn’t need punishment at times, nor that he was deliberately bad… Except that he’d been, she explained, created with and for a Purpose, a Mission. The fact that he had correctly related (Dream) proved he was accepted by the Powers. So, he tried to be perfect. For all his now 13 years the boy attempted to accomplish each order the Angel put out.
But eventually a day came, when everything changed.
Waking.
Sand scratched at the backs of his eyelids and scoured the eye sockets. He wanted to rub it away.
Hadn’t the Angel’s Book once referred to a notion—within its numerous discourses on temporal subjects—of the ‘Sands of Time’?
He saw much of Time, as he dreamed of falling, falling being all that he dreamed about. Here Time, there Time, past-present-future Time, absolute Time… Screwed-up Time separated from Space—its sister element, its alter ego, that it must (must it?) always be tied with. Time the element. Time the eternal.
Time the enemy.
Without rubbing or even opening his eyes, the boy listened. This was an essential part of his routine, to determine if blood poured outside again. A soft pattering as it lent itself to the physics of sound…provided the blood fall was light. Not a hard roar of a deluge.
Time again, in repetition, for hadn’t he learned among the first of his lessons that time was not straight as an arrow?
Two incidents: First, the rebellion of Lucifer against God the Creator. Secondly, the bene ha’elohim’s discovery that the daughters of men were fair, and so took them as human wives.
Those who had remained true to God eternally punished those who had not. They swept up the ones shut out from Grace, carried them aloft, ripped their wings from their turncoat shoulders, disemboweled them of hearts/spleens/internal sex organs, then threw the wretched back down to earth amid the tempest of their own gore.
Again.
Again.
In the never-ending loop where Time and Space turned to chase and ruin its own genesis.
“From there I came,” the Angel related to him, “a torn abomination. During one descent, I happened to spy this lone human dwelling. I dragged myself within its refuge before the Archangel Michael and his assembly of celestial slaughter-men spied me. Here I found shelter until my wounds healed.”
The boy had seen her scars, where the wings had been torn off and discarded like the locks of hair at a barber’s. (The Angel had used this analogy and many others. The boy tried to understand. He’d never been outside of the house or even glimpsed beyond its peeling walls.)
She always wore a curiously shaped amulet that hung from a chain about her neck. It looked like an Egyptian ankh at the top and a sideways trident at the bottom. It was unknown to him, and never shown among other symbols revealed in the Book.
The sight of the scars always made him shiver, imagining how it must feel, like having one’s arms ripped from their sockets.
He would plead, “Tell me again about my mother.”
She indulged him. “Thousands of years after the first of the bene ha’elohim disgraced themselves as the Watchers over the world by sleeping with the daughters of Adam’s mankind, your mother mated with one. Her belly full of child, she was drawn up to Heaven, abducted, and then cast down. As she fell, the pressure of descent—gravity’s cruel song—squeezed her baby from her womb. I heard its helpless wail and ran out of the house… Catching you. Unfortunately, I could not save her. Listen!”
The boy heard them outside the walls, not for the first time: The whispered vows of revenge to themselves, to each other. The crying out. The snatches of laughter as some went insane. It was no inquisition—Michael was no Torquemada and fully knew of their crimes. There were no demands for confession or repentance, just an ever-turning, churning wheel of torture.
“The last great conflict between humans occurred shortly after your birth,” the Angel continued in the way she always told the story. “Mankind had always been violent and sadistic… Made in w
hose Infernal image? What is left of that race prowls as brutes beyond the doorway I protect for us. With my charms only you and I see, with my chants nobody clearly hears.”
The boy had never witnessed the ‘brutes’ outside. The windows were covered, painted over in strange markings. He was forbidden to go near them, anyway. He was similarly forbidden to open the front door, a second door in the kitchen, or a third at the end of the hallway. These doors were likewise covered in sigils the great Solomon would have recognized, but what did they keep out? Or in? He had been punished for accidentally veering too close to the taboo portals, so the boy tried to never disobey her in this, the direst of her rules. Besides, he was in terror of what horrors he’d see.
Such as his unfortunate mother, crushed dead against the ground. Was that her punishment?
Over?
And over?
And for what? For being seduced by the Watcher Angel? How was that her fault? the boy wondered in anger. But never aloud, never so anyone would hear.