Julia’s hands started to shake. Her chest ached. Thoughts spilled through her mind in sickening, dysphoric waves. All was silence save the echoing of her ragged, scattered breaths inside her helmet and a kind of high-pitched tone that seemed to be getting closer. Her vision dimmed as a ring of fog consumed her peripheral vision. She slumped against the doorframe and swallowed hard.
Beneath where the alien-things spun softly, there was a ring of deck plating around the reactor that was clear of the putrid, fleshy mass. Circumscribed around the clean plating was a half-meter wide arc of ruddy red, as though some great brush had painted it there. At the leading end of the arc there was a man on his knees, facing away from her. He was stuck to the deck as though gravity were normal and naked from the waste up, his brush-tip pants soaked through with sanguine ink. Arranged neatly on the crimson smear was a length of lumpy, purple-pink tubing that coiled between looping symbols like cursive text. There was no sign of the other crew, only the scattered biosigns from the squishy pink membrane. On her visor the kneeling crewman’s dog tags registered. They were displayed floating next to his head. It was her father.
Julia whimpered. She started to rush towards him, but fell forwards as her center of mass shifted towards the deck. What felt like .7G dropped Julia to hands and knees. Her boots and gauntlets squelched through the membrane, spattering gory yellow mush across her torso. It was like puss erupting from an infected scab. She puked into her faceplate. Salty, panicked tears peppered the thin spray of bile. For a few ragged, sobbing breaths she closed her eyes, telling herself it was a dream, that she would wake up in the pilot-tank, groggy from a bad defrost cycle any second. The high pitched ringing grew in her mind, unfolding into a crowd of babbling thoughts demanding that she stand and run, fight, anything. Julia opened her eyes and tried to focus on the spew riming her faceplate. She stood cautiously, her head swimming and looked again at the man.
Her father leaned forwards, the muscles in his back tensing viciously. He lurched upright again, his palsy redoubled. There was a wet sucking sound and he gasped desperately. He heaved once, then began to lay out a fresh length of the tubing in the shape of another glyph. In a daze, Julia waded towards her father, blubbering between limp lips. As she stepped around him, the high tone grew from a whimper to a wail inside the helmet. His face was taut and empty, his eyes a solid glaze of cataracts. In his hands he clasped the grisly length of hose where it emerged directly from his belly. His intestines were uncoiling from a gash in his abdomen.
There was a sound suddenly like a woman screaming as Julia shut down the optical feed on her helmet. Sensor systems painted ghosts of the horror on her visor in hard green wireframes, nightmares pressed down into data points and rendered as simple polygonated shapes. The scream was still going as Julia slung her sidearm towards the thing kneeling in front of her. She scrabbled at the trigger, strobing the room with muzzle flares and a bright, cordite stink. The thing in front of her pulsed with each impact, tilting ever backwards until it flopped to the deck. She stood rigid and quivering until, sometime later, the scream died away.
Julia was hoarse and shaking. There was a ragged rasping to her breaths as she heaved again. There was enough regurgitated apple-sweat in her helmet now that she had to wait for the suit to vacuum it clear before she could take a breath. A bright yellow trefoil flashed on her HUD along with a readout of a near lethal radiation spike. Her sensor systems ran haywire, registering movement all around the reactor, but no image rendering. For three thundering heartbeats she could not make herself clear her visor. The fuchsia shelled monstrosities were already skittering towards her on their many limbs when she did. Their many antennae fluttering; their foremost claws opening.
Julia shrieked. The shaking of her hands set off her sidearm. It flashed twice. There was a burst of chitin and viscous white foam among the many grasping limbs and the murderous crayfish creature fell aside, it’s hairy bean of a head more than half exit wound. For an instant the other two creatures paused.
Something in Julia burst. She turned and sloshed through the meaty filth, fighting the aberrant gravity of the reactor pod as fast as she could. She was sprinting by the time she reached the hatch and leapt into the access shaft. In the sudden microgravity her momentum carried her into the far wall. She tried to deflect herself down the access shaft too late. Something popped in her shoulder and she spun down the long meters to the airlock. With each rotation she could see those membranous bundles on the backs of the mi-go expanding, flapping to accelerate them towards her.
“Huntsman!” Julia shouted into her comm.
The tiny icon chimed into being, her only friend in the world.
“Huntsman, fire on this location.”
The icon flashed red. Below her dozens of pink husked digits flexed excitedly as the fungal shellfish closed in.
“Emergency override Red Cap.” Julia gasped. “Fire damn you!”
There was a light brighter than anything, then the world vanished. Her whole body rang with displaced whorls of electrons. The beam struck like lightning, infinite and overwhelming and then gone. The force of it’s passing bounced Julia off the wall. There was no sign of the creatures, only the alternating views of Huntsman waiting above through the peeled and melting remnants of the airlock and the freshly punctured reactor pod below. Within the reactor, a new light bloomed, roiling up the access shaft in syncopated shockwaves that sent Julia reeling into the Huntsman. She just managed to mag-clamp one foot to the ship as the weird gravities below amplified and shifted, pulling everything down.
“Huntsman!” Julia screamed. “Go!” She clamped a hand to the hull as the ship fired its thrusters at a full burn. Loader arms melted in the heat, the last of the airlock gantry tore away as the still searing emitter assembly of the ships cannon slipped free and crashed into the Pluto Special. The shuttle spun away as the Huntsman shoved it’s way out of the docking harness and into open space.
Julia scrambled forwards and fell into the pilot-tank wearily. For an instant she was floating alone in the beige nothingness of the tank. Then, the AR left her huddled on the rough oaken floorboards behind the shiny register in the little bakery. Julia clutched at herself and shook, taking long, slow breaths of her dwindling atmo. There was someone there then, an old woman, kneeling next to her, running wrinkled fingers through her hair and shushing her softly.
“It’s all right now baby.” Her Granny crooned. “I’ve got you.”
Julia couldn’t hate the AI here, in the AR while it held her gently, stroking and cooing as her real grandmother had countless times. She could only snivel and gasp as she sank into Granny’s virtual lap and let the program snuggle her close.
“I got you a present Granny.” Julia mewled incomprehensibly.
“I see dear. It’s just like the bakery your grandfather had on Io. Thank you.” Granny sighed. “Rest, we’re going to have to freeze you again now baby, there’s still isn’t enough air.”
Julia could only nod in acceptance and stare out the plate glass at the store front where a new star was briefly born in the icy skin of Charon. As her metabolism slowed and the cold embrace of emergency cryo crept up from her bones, pushing the pulsing vision away, into the emptiness, Julia imagined that among the twinkling radians of hard radiation she could see hundreds of streaming limbs flailing fervently at the emptiness of the void.
The Lost Book of Grimm: Hermeneutics, Intertextuality, and Psychocthonian Extrusions into Objectivity
Michael M. Hughes, PhD, Independent Scholar
The 2008 discovery of Das Verfluchte Buch (popularly known as The Lost Book of Grimm, but more accurately translated as the Damned or Cursed Book) has provided an enormous amount of new primary material of interest to scholars across a wide array of disciplines, including linguistics, philology, anthropology, and folklore. Despite the near-uniform rejection of the manuscript’s legitimacy by leading Grimm scholars upon its discovery in the archives of an anonymous private collector, the recent authen
tication (via Furnow et al., 2010) leaves no uncertainty that this collection of “damned” folk tales was compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm for their own personal collections, but considered unsuitable for publication. As the first philologist to work from the original text (now in the special collections of the Humboldt University of Berlin) I have unearthed links between the Verfluchte manuscript and an obscure pagan cult (most notably chronicled in Unaussprechlichen Kulten by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt (1839), Düsseldorf edition). My philological/anthropological exploration of the “unspeakable” or “nameless” cults received a chilly reception from academics (Ribeiro, 2010; Knowles et al., 2012; Wells, 2013) but has not, in my estimation, been refuted.
Several tales in the Verfluchte stand out as particularly unsettling. Tolheit des Raben, or “The Madness of the Crow,” is the story of a young farmer’s son, Otto, who meets an anthropomorphized talking crow in the woods. The crow promises to teach the boy the secrets of nature, and in one darkly poetic passage, compels him to consume a brew composed of a number of psychoactive plants (die Heilkräuter) (Hyoscyamus niger, Solanum ducamara, and Mandragora officinarum, among others associated with witchcraft and sorcery) to “open his eyes” to the underlying reality of the cosmos:
“Now eat the plants I have brought to you, which will open your eyes,” said the crow. The boy made a fire and boiled the crow’s gifts in his pot [der kleine Kochtopf], then drank it all down because he was thirsty for knowledge, having been mocked as stupid [dumm] by the children of his village. Then the woods grew dark, and the sun and stars turned black as coal, and the boy fell to his knees weeping. “There is nothing,” he cried. “No secrets. Nothing but emptiness.” [Keine Geheimnisse—nichts außer Leere.]
When the boy is discovered wandering outside his village, the peasant woman who finds him screams in horror—his eyes have been pecked out by the crow, leaving only empty, black sockets. The story ends with the boy finding happiness, however, working in his father’s fields as a living scarecrow.
Other stories hint at the presence of a secretive (occult, i.e., “hidden”) cult, which I have linked to the organization known as the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or unspeakable cult (as explicated, however cryptically, in von Jundst). Although the historicity of this cult has been challenged (Hanegraaf, 2009; Kripal, 2012; Leonard and George, 2013) I have shown indirect but compelling evidence of its continued existence and traced its migration from Europe to the United States (Hughes, 2013, Journal of American Folklore). The account of my brief, personal contact with an alleged cultist in December of 2012 was redacted from the paper without my consent (and, it should be noted, the editorial board of the Journal of American Folklore has refused to address my letters of complaint).
The first and most blatant cultic signifier occurs in die Frau des Schneiders [“The Tailor’s Wife”]. Hilda, a pretty, fair-haired tailor’s wife, discovers her newlywed husband performing occult rituals [die Rituale] in a hidden room beneath his shop. Philologists and scholars of German have so far been unable to translate the names mentioned in the ritual, and it has been suggested (Woermann, 2012) that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm simply spelled them phonetically because their source(s) related the names in what the brothers believed to be meaningless syllables. It should be noted that one of the names, Gatanoto, is remarkably similar to Ghatanothoa—an entity described in Unaussprechliche Kulte and—tellingly—in a modern ritual communicated to me by my cultist contact (Hughes, 2013, unpublished personal correspondence).
Hilda’s sudden onset of mental illness, while dismissed by Paula Hessel (Hessel, 2011) as a “typical exaggerated caricature of feminine psychological fragility filtered through Wilhelm’s de rigeur misognistic gaze” is, in fact, a common fate of other characters in the Verfluchte who also fall prey to instantaneous or accelerated insanity—including young Otto (see above), the unnamed girl in Die Frau, die mit den Fröschen spricht [The Girl who Spoke to Toads], as well as an entire village populace upon the discovery of ancient standing stones in Die Leute vom Schwarzen Stein [The People of the Black Stones]. Insanity is, in fact, the major recurring trope in the Verfluchte.
My unpublished 2013 paper, in which I sought to verify and correlate the similarities between the ritual fragments mined from the Verfluchte, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and a modern version communicated to me privately by the alleged member of the extant cult, was largely unsuccessful. However, in a moment of insight, I intuited that the Verfluchte was not simply a collection of folktales—rather, it was a magical grimoire disguised as a book of common folktales (and note Wilhelm’s playful homonymous clue in Grimm/grimoire). This critical exegesis has occupied my studies (and precipitated my decision to leave the confining restrictions of the academy for independent research).
My experiments provided remarkable experiential verification of the Verfluchte Buch’s practical efficacy as a grimoire of little-understood magical [cf. Crowley’s “magick”] technologies. The reconstruction of what I now understand to be a primordial ur-ritual—pieced together by mapping the intertextuality between the Verfluchte, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and the modern text—facilitated contact with atavistic elements embedded within my persona—archaic psychic complexes with unusual real-world effects that I describe (Hughes, 2014, unpublished) as psychocthonian extrusions into objectivity. My ingestion of a carefully formulated psychotropic plant admixture (as listed in Tolheit des Raben) was the crucial catalyst for the activation of the phenomena. In an effort to carefully replicate the proscribed setting, I located an arrangement of standing stones—a remarkable rock structure known as the “Hand” (a loci of considerable folkloric power) in rural West Virginia. The precise astrological timing was calculated using Solar Fire Gold 8™ software (Astrolabe Inc., Brewster, MA).
The initial ritual invocation, performed under a new moon and as reconstructed from my painstaking comparative poetic/analytic hermeneutics, resulted in a constellation of extraordinary phenomena I am still attempting to classify. The concretization of psychic manifestations (including but not limited to rushing wind and other aberrant atmospheric phenomena, marks on the body, and dramatic alterations of local flora and fauna), and the inflorescence (or “download”) of novel temporal/spatial insights accompanied by visual ursprache eruptions of glossolalia, pose extreme challenges orthodox naturalistic ontologies. In the dismissals of critics, my experiences were derided as “pseudo-Castaneda drivel” [Myers] and “drug-addled . . . schizophrenic word salad” [Nickell]). Nontheless, and despite the failure of all recording equipment, the phenomena I have documented demand rigorous analysis—not just via the lens of science, but from philosophy, theology, psychology, biology, cosmology, and physics.
The occurrences related in my report argue for the creation of a novel, revolutionary metaphysics in light of their unassailable refutation of scientific reductionism and Materialism. Hence, the academy’s rejection, marginalization—and refusal to even acknowledge—my extensively documented account was not unanticipated. I am encouraged, however, by the popularity of the manuscript among the so-called “occult underground.” Ongoing accounts by lay-scholars and self-described ritualists who have followed my protocol have proven enormously popular; statistics on torrent aggregator websites (Fraser, 2014) show my report to be the most frequently downloaded document under the categories of “occult” and “magic.” This global network of independent scholars are doing the real work, unencumbered by the shackles of outdated science and superstition, and their experiences reshaping and refining the Verfluchte Buch’s encoded rituals are opening up vast new avenues to transdimensional gnosis and communion with extraplanar entelechies.
Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the Miskatonic library special collections staff, Christopher Mullins of Shamanic PlantTech®, and my anonymous contacts in the Unaussprechlichen Kulten. And a special note of thanks to those pioneers (you know who you are) who have continued to explore this primordial path of revolutionary revelation.
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Hey Robert: You have to read this! At first I thought it was a joke or a Sokal-style prank, but Hughes has a solid track record and has published some very good papers, so I actually think he’s sincere. Which is scary! I rejected it (of course!) but I asked for his recent paper because this shit is so fucking nuts. Apparently he’s off-the-grid or locked up—I can’t track him down, and the university said he’d been arrested a while back—but I got a copy of the paper by snail-mail yesterday, no return address. Scanned copy attached. This puts all the other stuff in the crank file to shame, and it’s 47 pages of pure whack-a-doodle! Enjoy. :)
—Augie
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Dear Augie,
Wow. That’s a keeper. Definitely one for the crank file but so very well-written (and surprisingly compelling)! It almost makes me want to try out his “ritual practices for psychocthonian extrusions into objectivity.” LOL.
I’m off until next Thursday on a camping trip. I’m taking the paper along to read to Margi by the campfire. If we find some standing stones, and I don’t come back, I blame you!
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