As soon as he got back home that night, Alex headed straight into his bedroom. After turning on the gas lamp, he looked around at the gloomy confines of his living quarters, various decorations attracting his eye, such as a movie poster for the film Cloverfield (that depicted a headless Statue of Liberty overlooking a burning Manhattan, with the tagline “Something Has Found Us” at the top). Feeling slightly guilty that, rather than working on his thesis (which was based on his readings of Dr. Daniel Charles Barker’s “The Geocosmic Theory of Trauma”), he would instead be spending some of his precious free time playing what was by all accounts a highly dodgy computer game. Then again, you only live once, as the popular saying went.
Alex powered his computer on, and while he waited for the desktop to load up he opened the game box. Inside there was a CD in a plain sleeve, plus a flimsy sheet of white paper. On the front of this sheet of paper was an image of a blocky black key, while on the other side were typed words, consisting of the game’s instructions. This is what they said:
Ritual Quest
(Satanism Simulator)
Save yourself from living in blandness.
Collect three items x perform a ritual.
Controls
Space to start
Arrows
ESC to exit
A for a better TV
And that was it for the instructions.
Alex installed the game on his computer. While waiting for the installation to finish, he went onto YouTube and watched the video for the new Nine Inch Nails single “Came Back Haunted.” The video was directed by David Lynch. It was 4 minutes and 17 seconds long, and at the very start of the video there was the following warning: “This video has been identified by Epilepsy Action to potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised.” Alex thought the video was pretty cool: he liked the repeated strobe effect image of a tick overlaid onto the body of a young ballerina, and the shots of a cloud of smoke expanding in the corner of a black and white room were pretty crazy as well.
Once the installation was done, he slipped on his headphones and booted the game up. The title screen consisted of the words RITUAL QUEST in jagged red and black letters, above the same image of a ragged upside-down red pentagram that looked identical to the one on the cover of the box. This was set over a blocky green landscape that Alex guessed was supposed to be a representation of a forest of some type. The top half of the screen was a black slab of night sky, with gray clouds scrolling lazily across it. Every now and then the words and the pentagram seemed to flicker. The only “music” was a repeating and sinister ambient note, like the heartbeat of Hummpa-Taddum, that great Babylonian Worm whose epoch survived the Year Zero Y2K event horizon. Alex hit the space bar on his keyboard and the game began.
Alex quickly realized that the game embraced a deliberately primitive and lo-fi graphical interface, looking somewhat like an antiquated Atari 2600 game from the early 1980’s. The character controlled by the player was nothing more than a large black box, an abstract representation of the Deleuzian Gothic Avatar. The game began in an outside location, the same forest that appeared in the game’s title screen. On the left of the screen there was an altar surrounded by four flaming torches, while on the right was a giant green slab with a thin vertical black door, no doubt a castle or some manner of haunted house. At the top of the screen was a thin black status bar with white letters that said: “You need: 3 items for the ritual.” The “music” playing in the background was a constantly looping series of ambient bass-like notes that seemed to go from a high to low pitch every few measures. Alex hit the right arrow key on his keyboard and watched the black box enter the castle.
The screen changed to the lobby of the castle, a gray room with large white windows. Alex kept the box moving to the right until he came to a new screen. He now came to a number of screens that were designed to be corridors. These corridors were made up of dark gray walls and light gray floors, with black rectangular gaps in the walls serving as doors to rooms. Crude, yes, but this barebones graphical style forced Alex’s mind to fill in the gaps and use his imagination: he saw in his mind’s eye himself wandering down endless corridors made up of sentient stones that muttered anti-prayers to the Crow Princess, suits of armor whose once-shiny outer surfaces were now covered in patches of moss that were forming tiny continents to some hypothetical “Fortress Europe pulsation” (to nick a phrase from Nick Land’s cybergothic exegesis), and doors that led to dungeons where weeping follicles from the head of God wailed self-pitying poetry. The actual rooms in the game itself were a bit more graphically elaborate than the corridors that connected them: one room had a palm tree, another had an indoor garden with three trees, a third was a black chamber with 2 large upside-down white and red crosses, a fourth was some kind of shrine, and the fifth was a garishly red chamber with a large blue crystal levitating in the center. Within each of these chambers there was an object that could be picked up by moving the box over it: the palm tree room had a “piece of a Mason temple,” the indoor garden chamber had “a faggot” (as in, a bundle of sticks tied together), the room with the upside-down crosses contained “a pentacle,” the room with the shrine held “drugs,” and the crystal room had, appropriately enough, “a crystal.” Once three of any of these five items had been picked up, no further items could be gathered, and the status bar at the top of the screen displayed a new message: “Perform the ritual.” All the player then had to do was exit the castle and move over to the altar on the first screen, in which case the ritual would be performed. Depending on what items the player had, a number of different outcomes were possible.
After a few minutes of play, Alex came to the conclusion that Ritual Quest was less a game and more along the lines of some kind of conceptual performance art, or an evocation of the Forgotten Ones that lurk beyond the raven curvature of our universe (No* the feathered and fish-scaled winged serpent, Nexhagus the Elder Jester of the Pre-Create and brother of Choronzon, Loroo the Tenuous One Who Lurketh in the Space Between Stars, to say nothing of Nagrikshamisha, She, Hai, Iannu, Ignaiye and Megor-Marduk, as the Maatian grimoires classify them). There were no enemies as such in the castle, and it was impossible to truly lose the game: the worst thing that could happen to the player was if he or she picked up three items that caused the ritual to be dull, in which case they were mocked with a message that said “The Dark Lords do not favor,” followed by a game over screen that informed the player “you die old and boring.” The main purpose of the game (aside as an exercise in diabolical atmosphere) was to see which configuration of items led to the most interesting rituals. Of course, even these more interesting rituals led to a grim fate for the player, with the end result being his or her soul being trapped in a crystal, or burnt to ashes, or slain by a demon named “Blank Frank.” After having discovered a number of the different endings, Alex decided that his favorite was the one you got when the ritual was performed with a piece of a Mason temple, a pentacle, and drugs. This would result in the evocation of Baphomet, in which case the game would cut to a pixelated close-up of the goat god’s face, followed by an image of planet Earth getting swallowed up in red.
Still, Alex found the game to be somewhat unnerving. Perhaps because it was such a lonely experience: the castle you explored was all but abandoned, with no other NPCs to interact with, and not even any monsters to slay (or be slain by, which would at least provide some cathartic release). And yet, as he played the game, he couldn’t help but feel that his character was in danger, was being watched at all times by invisible presences. This sense of paranoia soon manifested itself in a more intimate sense: he began to feel as if he were in danger, as if he were being watched. Of course, this was jumping at shadows, and he decided it was all of those creepy urban legends about the game that he had read. Alex had always found urban legends spooky, everything from Pokémon’s Lavender Town Syndrome to Squidward’s Suicide and things of that nature. He remembered the night years
ago when he had watched the haunted video tape sequence from the film The Ring, and how for an hour afterward he kept dreading for his phone to ring.
Finally, after much trial and experimentation, Alex had only one possible combination of items left: the piece of Mason temple, the pentacle, and the crystal. After collecting these items, he returned his avatar to the altar outside to perform the ritual. But then something unusual happened. As soon as his avatar touched the altar the game suddenly became completely silent, and a new message appeared in the status bar at the top of the screen: “You are possessed by a demon.” When Alex realized he could still move his avatar around, he made it go back into the castle, and now saw that he was once again being instructed to find 3 items to perform a ritual. But how? he thought. There should only be two items left. He collected the drugs and the faggot, and then, to his surprise, in one of the hallways he came across a new object: what looked like a book. He moved the square over it and was informed that he had collected a copy of the Necronomicon. Instructed to perform the ritual, he returned outside and approached the altar.
As soon as the square touched the altar, the image on the screen vanished and a new image appeared in its place: Alex suddenly saw himself on the screen, facing himself. There he was on the screen, seated before his computer, with the rest of his bedroom behind him, almost as if the game had hacked into his webcam. That would be the rational explanation, were it not for one simple fact: Alex’s webcam was currently unplugged. Another problem with this webcam theory was that the reflection of him on the screen wasn’t a true reflection, partly because not only was it not mimicking the actions of Alex (for at that moment he was gazing at the screen and blinking rapidly in disbelief, while the version of himself in the game was just gazing back at him dully, unblinking), but also because the eyes of the Alex on the screen were… different. They looked less like human eyes and more like cartoon eyes, like the kind of eyes you would see on a character in some Japanese anime. Alex found all this somewhat unsettling, especially because the game remained completely silent.
This silence, however, proved to be short-lived, because about a minute after Alex’s visage appeared on the screen, a horrible noise began blasting from the speakers of Alex’s computer. Alex had heard terrifying noises in video games before, such as the nerve-shattering repeating drone sound effect that played in Shadow’s first dream in Final Fantasy VI. But this noise was worse, so much worse. It sounded like the primeval roar of some Anteverse-bred Category V Kaiju emerging from the Breach on the floor of Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean, or the subterranean howling of Cthelll, the broiling cauldron burning in Earth’s center in constant patripassian pain. In conjunction with this sudden squall of noise, a visual change began to appear on the screen itself. An anomaly was beginning to manifest in the air behind the shoulders of the Alex on the computer screen. It looked like a gray monster from an old 8-bit video game from the 1980s, only blown up to an immensely magnified degree, making its outline look quite blocky. As the gray goo nanomonster slowly began to become less opaque and more tangible, pixelated blood began streaming down from the corners of the electronic Alex’s cartoon eyes.
Still, it was the sound itself that horrified Alex more than anything else. Desperate to stop it, his hand shot forward and held down the power button on his computer’s chassis, forcing it to shut down, and as the screen went black he whipped off his headphones.
It was at that precise moment that he realized that the horrible sound wasn’t coming from his computer’s soundcard and speakers, but from a point directly behind him.
“Vital spark of heav’nly flame!
Quit, O quit this mortal frame:
Trembling, hoping, ling’ring, flying,
O the pain, the bliss of dying!
Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life.”
—Alexander Pope, The Dying Christian to his Soul
“The poet must visit Hell;
he need not stay there.”
—Craig Laurance-Gidney, “Strange Alphabets”
SOUNDTRACK
“Strange and Unproductive Thinking” (David Lynch) title song
“Black Mamba” (Cut Hands)
“Sonata II in A” (Thomas Vincent)
“All Things Are Quite Silent” (Shirley Collins)
“Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” (Talking Heads)
“Voodoo” (Adam Lambert)
“Overture (from Macbeth)” (Third Ear Band)
“Crucible of Flame” (Mari Yamaguchi)
“Purple People Eater” (Judy Garland)
“Lavender Town’s Theme” (Junichi Masuda)
“The Decline of English Murder” (Alan Moore)
“Sims Will Build”
“Caribou” (The Pixies)
“Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night” (Coil)
“Early Winter” (Gwen Stefani)
“Nyarlathotep” (Burning Star Core)
“The Snow” (Coil)
“Atlantis” (Donovan)
“Wasted Time” (The Eagles)
“Atlantis” (Sun Ra)
“Fracking Fluid Injection” (The Knife)
“Time” (Pink Floyd)
“What in the World” (David Bowie)
“Heart of Glass” (Blondie)
“Look at Your Game Girl” (Charles Manson)
“Miss the Girl” (The Creatures)
“When You Were Young” (The Killers)
“Go Your Own Way” (Fleetwood Mac)
“Circle” (Siouxsie & the Banshees)
“Underneath ” (Adam Lambert)
“Rabbit Snare” (Throbbing Gristle)
“Turn You Inside-Out” (R.E.M.)
“Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental)” (Vince Guaraldi Trio)
“Sanctus” (Libera)
“Big Church (Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért)” (Sunn O))))
“The Great, Bloody and Bruised Veil of the World” (Current 93)
“The Holy Hour” (The Cure)
“The Blood” (The Cure)
“Demons” (Imagine Dragons)
“Came Back Haunted” (Nine Inch Nails)
“Asleep” (The Smiths) end credits
About the Author
James Champagne is the author of Grimoire: A Compendium of Neo-Goth Narratives. His work has also appeared in the anthologies Userlands: New Fiction Writers From the Blogging Underground and Mighty in Sorrow: a Tribute to Current 93 & David Tibet. He was born in 1980 and lives in Rhode Island. This is his second collection.
About the Artist
O.B. De Alessi is an Italian artist born in 1984 and currently living in London. Her work has been exhibited in Europe, South America, Australia and Russia. She also illustrated the cover of Luna Miguel’s poetry book Estar Enfermo and she is the author of I Murder So That I May Come Back published by Kiddiepunk, as well as the illustrated short story “Sunora” published by Libri di Pixel.
Table of Contents
The Cursed Quilts
Tir-Na-Nog “Martyrdom does not end something, it’s only a beginning.” —Indira Gandhi
The Snow Globes of Patient O.T.
The Yellow Notebook
The Fire Sermon
The Aphotic Zone
The Demons in the Fresco
Ritual Quest
Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking Page 24