Later on that evening, I sent him an e-mail: I had found his e-mail address written on the contact information on the inside cover of the Yellow Notebook, though we also had it on file in our database at Covers as well. I explained to him that I worked at Covers, had recently ordered some books for him, and that I had found his misplaced notebook, the one he had accidentally left behind, and that I wished to return it to him. Bruce replied back to me only a couple of minutes after I sent him this e-mail. He thanked me for having recovered his precious notebook, and asked how I planned to go about returning it to him. I e-mailed him back with instructions to meet me outside of Covers at 2:50PM the following afternoon, ten minutes before the start of my shift for that evening. After he replied back to me agreeing with this arrangement, I powered down my computer and went to bed, my eyes very tired and strained from all of the reading that I had done that day.
The following afternoon I stood outside the main entrance of Covers, the Yellow Notebook in my hands. At 2:50PM on the dot, an old VW Type 2 “Hippie Van” pulled up to the curb, its exterior surface decorated with colorful psychedelic artwork: it looked like a time machine that had just teleported itself from the Haight-Ashbury district of the 1960’s. Music was playing loudly from speakers within the van: the song was “Wasted Time” by The Eagles, off their 1976 album Hotel California. Bruce eventually emerged from this relic on wheels. When he saw me standing there waiting for him with the Yellow Notebook in my hands, he smiled uncomfortably and walked over to where I stood, and I noticed that he was wearing a black t-shirt depicting the cover art of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album. He thanked me (somewhat profusely I felt) for recovering his notebook, and he even tried to give me a small cash reward, which I politely turned down.
After a minute or so of banal chit-chat, Bruce told me he had to run and began walking off. Originally, I had no intention of telling him that I had read his notebook; I had worried that he would view such an admission as a total invasion of his privacy. Yet as I saw him walk off, I was suddenly compelled to confess, “You know, I read your notebook.”
He stopped walking and turned around to face me, an eyebrow raised. “Oh?” he asked, in a tone more curious than upset. “And what did you think of it?”
“I think that what you’re trying to do is admirable… maybe even noble,” I said, not sure where these unrehearsed words were coming from. “But I think I know what the ‘Flaw’ in your religion is.”
“Would you then be so kind as to enlighten me?” he asked, a hint of eagerness in his voice.
“The ‘Flaw’ in your religion is that there is no flaw,” I said. “You’ve failed to take into account the problem of evil… and any religion that doesn’t try to provide an explanation for why evil exists is hardly a religion worth following.”
Bruce paused and considered this, a thoughtful expression on his Sphinx-like face. “You know, you just might be onto something,” he eventually said, upon snapping out of his trance. “I’ll have to meditate on that. Thanks for the insight, though.”
“No problem,” I said. “And good luck.” I watched as he climbed back into his van and drove off. Then I entered the store to begin my shift.
III
I had thought, at the time, that that would be my last glimpse of Bruce Kadmon and his weird Yellow Notebook. In a way, I was half right in this prediction, as I never saw Bruce himself again. However, about five months after our final encounter in the flesh, in March of 2013, while sitting in my living room reading the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, I heard a knock at my front door. Outside was a UPS man, holding a package I had to sign for. I received quite a shock when, upon carefully unwrapping the parcel, I once again laid eyes on the Yellow Notebook, along with a few sheets of paper on which many words had been typed out.
My first reaction was to pick up the Yellow Notebook and flip through it, and I saw that it was for the most part unchanged since my first reading of it five months ago, though some new content had been added to the final pages. I laid the notebook down and picked up the sheets of typed paper, feeling very confused. Why had Bruce mailed to me his beloved notebook? I decided to consult the sheets of paper to see if they would shed any light on this puzzling question. I now reprint here the entire letter that Bruce wrote for me, with not a word omitted:
“Dear Frederick,” (so began the letter), “I hope this package finds you in good spirits. I’m sure you remember me, Bruce Kadmon. And I’m also sure you remember my precious notebook. If you’re reading this letter and holding my notebook in your hands, it means I’m dead. Dear me, I suppose that’s a morbid way to begin a letter, but why mince words? In my will I made it clear that my notebook, and this letter that accompanies it, should be sent to you upon my death. So now that you have it, be assured that I am no longer a member of the living.
“It was your insight about the ‘Flaw’ in my religious system on that day you returned to me my notebook that began my road to ruin. I became obsessed with trying to explain the existence of evil and suffering, which I now saw as the hole in things that spoiled the harmony of the pattern I was weaving together. The only comfort I could take during that dark night of the soul was the fact that the same question (that is, how to explain the existence of evil and suffering) had tormented both philosophers and theologians far more intelligent than I for centuries. ‘In brief, I have postulated a monistic evil, which is the source of all death, deterioration, imperfection, pain, sorrow, madness and disease. This evil, so feebly counteracted by the powers of good, allures and fascinates me above all things. For a long time past, my life-work has been to ascertain its true nature, and trace it to its fountain-head. I am sure that somewhere in space there is the center from which all evil emanates.’ So wrote Clark Ashton Smith in his short story ‘The Devotee of Evil,’ and the question that obsessed his Satanic Creole alchemist Jean Averaud obsessed me as well. The more I analyzed the problem, the more I began to ponder a question that I found to be equally disturbing, which was this: for many years I had been working under the assumption that the citizens of Atlantis had practiced a method or system of religion so advanced that it made the belief systems we’re so familiar with seem like crude fairy tales designed to amuse children in comparison. Yet if they had actually formulated and practiced the greatest religion ever conceived by the minds of Man, why had their civilization been seemingly sucked into a sea of oblivion, swept right off the face of the Earth? That’s what came to trouble me more than anything else. The idea that the flaw in their religion that I had spent so many years of my life painstakingly reconstructing wasn’t just the existence of evil, but something far more sinister, something almost Platonic in its archetypal malignity. All the more galling to me was the knowledge that I would never really know what had actually happened to Atlantis, assuming that the kingdom had ever even existed in the first place.
“Unorthodox problems require equally unorthodox solutions. It so happens I have a friend who’s a member of a small coven of witches that was based in Cincinnati, Ohio. They own a farm outside the village of Mt. Orab, a farm where they conduct highly specialized sex-magick rituals, rituals in which the members of the coven astrally project themselves backwards in time, so that they can witness actual historical events as remote viewers. This coven believed themselves to be the genetic descendants of the priesthood of Atlantis, and were planning on carrying out a series of rituals with the intention of reconnecting with their past lives, or something along those lines. When my friend found out about my interest in Atlantean culture, she suggested I accompany her to her coven’s farm and partake in the ritual. A proposal I found to be somewhat dubious: being raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, I’ve always felt a taboo fascination with the occult, while at the same time believing that dabbling in it can expose one to demonic spirits from the Dark Side. Nevertheless, academic curiosity triumphed over childhood superstition, and I agreed to partake in their Akashic Working.
“So I accompanied my friend to t
he coven’s farm in December of 2012, the date of the ritual being December 21st, the Winter Solstice. The ritual took place in an abandoned barn on the farm owned by the coven. Funny, whenever a barn figures into the plot of a horror novel or short story, it almost always serves as the place where bizarre occult rituals take place (consider, for example, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dunwich Horror’). But I digress. Large banners depicting Nazi-like alien runes were hanging from the rafters near the ceiling, and a most curious and foul-smelling incense was being burnt. The interior of the barn was quite crowded, and I counted at least thirty people present in various states of undress. Presiding over the Working was the coven’s master, whose magical name was Frater Tsalal. He was an anemic-looking bald man with piss-yellow eyes, and he was clad in a hooded black robe.
“Before I knew it, the ritual had begun. It started with the cult members banging large tribal drums in an arrhythmic, off-tempo fashion. Frater Tsalal began chanting out barbarous names of evocation, similar to the long strings of vowels that one often comes across while studying Gnostic treatises. Meanwhile, my friend and I began spinning madly around, like two tops, trying to get ourselves as dizzy as possible (we were also clad in black robes, which made me feel more than a little foolish). It was this spinning, combined with the frenetic drumming and Frater Tsalal’s hypnotic intonations, which created within me an altered state of consciousness. I guess the strange herbs and incense the coven was burning may have also added to the effect. Eventually I became so dizzy that I collapsed to the ground, the world whirling around me, and that’s when the weird thing happened.
“Suddenly, I was no longer in an abandoned barn on a farm outside of Mt. Orab, Ohio. Instead, I found myself floating above the streets of long-lost Atlantis, as it was 30,000 years ago. At least that’s what I recall happening… after all, trying to capture an experience such as this with mere words strikes me as being an exercise in futility, but I shall give it my best shot. Images began flashing before my eyes like spontaneous insights, regurgitations of my Triune brain. I saw Atlantis at the height of its gaudy glory, and before me was Zukong Gimorland-Siragosa, its largest city: its streets were made of paved and polished seashells, its slender towering spires of sparkling green emerald that were connected to each other by a vast network of spider web bridges, its vehicles constructed of giant wheeled conch shells. Atlantis was an island nation, located in a spot which I believe is somewhere in the North Atlantic, and its population consisted of olive-skinned, furry-bodied, somewhat Asiatic people dressed in the most exquisite hand-crafted clothing imaginable. I saw these people bartering beneath festive tents in the city marketplace, witnessed their ritual sacrifices conducted in the name of Daoloth, the Atlantean God of Astronomers, atop temples covered in coral reef… I saw exuberant celebrations featuring thousands of dancing spectators, religious festivals in honor of kraken mating rituals, orgiastic parades involving the consumption of strange drugs, secret offerings made by adepts of the Black Temple to Chozzar the Pig God of Shadows, rallies in support of the Party of Science, the crucifixion of Lilith Velkor, and always, in the background, that swirling, utterly mindphasing music, a song I later identified as the title track off Sun Ra’s classic 1969 album Atlantis, which Frater Tsalal’s coven had been playing in the background during the time period in which I entered my trance.
“I’m not sure how long I remained in this trance state: it felt as if I were a viewer of day-to-day Atlantis for years, but in point of fact it was really probably around an hour or so. The last image I can recall being shown to me was that of the destruction of Atlantis itself, an event known as “The Hour of Godseye”: I saw a number of explosions lay waste to that terrible and glorious city, explosions that unleashed great black and red horns of smoke into the sky. Then I saw the island itself sink into the sea, watched it get swallowed up by the hungry ocean. All of this disturbed me greatly. Why had the Atlantean people committed a mass suicide in such a spectacular fashion (as I was sure that it was a deliberate act: the explosions had obviously been controlled)?
“When I came back to my senses, I found that the ritual was over, and that the barn was all but deserted, save for Frater Tsalal, my friend, and myself. In an excited fashion, I began to relate to them all of the wondrous things I had seen. They then told me that I had been in a trance state for an hour, and that while I had been in this trance state I had written out a letter. Confused, I asked them what they meant, and they informed me that while in the trance I had demanded a writing instrument and some scraps of paper. When these requested items were thus provided to me, I began writing on the paper while remaining in a trance. Essentially what I had been doing was a kind of automatic writing, or so I first assumed. Curious about all of this, I asked to see what I had written, and they handed over to me the ‘letter,’ which had been written onto a few sheets of ordinary lined paper.
“To put it as bluntly as possible, it appeared that while I was in this trance state my body was possessed by an ancient Atlantean priest who went by the somewhat flamboyant name of Vor-Thol-Farrazza. And while he was briefly in control of my body, he had taken the opportunity to write out a warning to our modern-day civilization. At first I was skeptical about this; I wondered if perhaps Frater Tsalal had written out the letter himself prior to the ritual and lied to me about my having written it. The only flaw with this hypothesis was that the handwriting in the letter was my own, and to prove it to myself afterwards I took it and another example of my writing to a graphologist, who carefully compared the two and declared that they were indeed both written by the same person. Which left me with the following conclusion: either Frater Tsalal was a master forger (which I doubted: he looked like the sort of person who would be unable to open a jar of jam), or I had actually written out this letter in my trance state.
“I wish that I still had this letter, as I would have enclosed it with this note you’re now reading, but I was so repulsed by the knowledge which I gained from it that I ended up setting fire to it in disgust. But I recall enough of it to summarize it to you. Vor-Thol-Farrazza (for the sake of brevity I’ll refer to him simply as “Vor” for the rest of this account) was a theological scientist during the Last Days of Atlantis. In many ways he was a man much like myself, a hermetic and erudite fellow in search of ancient knowledge. At the time of his temporal existence, he had been a member of Atlantis’ Party of Science, whose symbol was a pyramid with an eye in the center, this pyramid being encircled by a snake biting its own tale. The Party of Science’s base of operations was the palace of Zukong Gimorland-Siragosa, this palace resembling a giant black pyramid that was thousands of feet high: the top point of the pyramid employed anti-gravity generators to hover 500 feet above the base, and inscribed into the center of this tip was an enormous unblinking eye. Vor, a student of the great scientist known as Gruad, was one of the most acclaimed scientists in the kingdom of Atlantis: it was he who had figured out how to imprison the monstrous Lloigor Yog-Sothoth in the Great Pentagram of Atlantis. In any event, prior to Atlantis’ destruction Vor had been in charge of a special committee authorized by Emperor Bas-Dalu-Valik, the purpose of this committee being to take all of the then current religions and spiritual belief systems of the world of Antiquity and synthesize them into a new unified and harmonic theological system, which would then become the official state religion of Atlantis. Essentially, the task that Vor was undertaking was the exact same thing as what I had been attempting to do with my Yellow Notebook, just on a much grander scale.
“For many months, Vor toiled in the great circular libraries of Atlantis, working around the sundial to create this new and improved religion, and in this task he was aided by his fellow scientists, along with a few of Atlantis’ most erudite priests and priestesses. Finally, they succeeded in their task: but there was just one flaw. That is, the primordial ur-flaw: the problem of evil. The priests and scientists of Atlantis wondered, why do children suffer? Why do human beings age and die? Why does metal rust, and food spoil?
How to explain decay? In our so-called enlightened age, to answer some of these questions we turn to the second law of thermodynamics, which defines our concept of entropy. But the priests and esoteric mathematicians of ancient Atlantis were far more innovative and creative in their approach to these questions.
“After long periods of strenuous astral travel and Akashic workings, Vor and his team came to two final conclusions. Their first conclusion was that the world we see around us, the world which we perceive with our senses, was just an illusion; or, at the very least, a flimsy imitation of a higher (or, perhaps, lower) reality. This was hardly an earthshattering revelation, as later religious belief systems (such as Hinduism and Gnosticism) arrived at pretty much the same conclusion. But the second discovery of the Atlanteans was far more horrifying. They claimed to have unearthed another layer of reality, this one being far superior to our own, and this reality (of which our world is just a shadow) was populated by creatures so incredibly hostile that the Atlanteans couldn’t even bring themselves to describe their physical appearance. These creatures, whom the Atlanteans referred to as the Entropiors, survived on a diet of matter itself. In other words, these invisible monsters were the true cause that lay behind what we classify today as entropy or decay. They created the universe as we know it to serve as a steady food supply, almost as if the cosmos we live in is their own personal garden, or a galactic slaughterhouse. We perceive the presence of these Entropiors as the gradual passing of time, which is actually a sort of slow-motion digestion. It would appear that we don’t waste time: rather, time wastes us. The decay of a corpse, the erosion of a landscape, the death of a star, can all be traced back to one cause: the endless hunger of the Entropiors.
“As one can imagine, the Atlanteans were repulsed by this discovery, and who can blame them? They were forced to consider this nightmarish question: what if the foundation of reality were not a stone but the kind of thing one finds under a stone? A wriggling and wretched abyss of parasites, a sinkhole of malefic bacteria that has no bottom? This realization plunged the citizens of Atlantis into a state of total existential and metaphysical despair, for now they knew the awful truth behind the appearance of all phenomena, the abominable projector of the reflection that is our reality. Coming to the conclusion that no rational human society could ever cope with this nauseating gnosis, the citizens of Atlantis decided that the secret would die with them. So their entire civilization committed suicide, and they used a network of sophisticated (for that time period) explosive devices to sink the city beneath the sea, where it would be lost forever. And thus was the world once more plunged into a new dark age of blissful ignorance. The discovery of the Entropiors was once again forgotten, until, that is, thousands of years later, when I unwittingly re-assembled the fatal truth.
Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking Page 12