All this and more did my secret mentor teach me.
And as I passed through one degree after another, I was shown ever deeper levels of the life of the sect. I met various brothers and sisters in the Libertine path; bound myself to them with mutual oaths of pleasure and pain; was permitted to watch as they performed acts which hitherto I would have deemed impossible, un-imaginable. With eager anticipation did I greet the promise that I, too, should learn the secrets of such ecstasy!
After some time I attended my first meeting of the whole membership. The clandestine convocation took place in the church I had first visited. I was strictly charged to arrive after things were under-way and, alas, only to observe, for my novitiate was not yet quite complete.
Obediently I complied, arriving at 2 a.m. on the designated date. Even from the street the raucous roar from within was plainly audible: so that I wondered that no one ever called the police. But the area, as I have said, was blighted, and its inhabitants did not seem the type to regard any noise as untoward.
I entered the church, straining to see through the deep gloom into the mass of wriggling forms, but advancing no closer than I had been told. Need I say that the sight, what I could see of it, was sublime? I had never dreamed that the group had so huge a membership. The pews, being of the detachable variety, had been cleared away, and before the altar there seemed to be a mountainous pile of bodies, heaving and swaying with wild abandon. Groans of ardour filled my ears; the crack of the lash could be heard, and the accompanying gales of laughter and tears; oils, blood, and other fluids arched through the air to splash on flesh and stone. Oh, that I might be a part of it! I thought to masturbate but lacked the chance, as erection had already come unsummoned and ejaculation followed in its wake. In the wonder of it all I nearly lost track of the time. Happening to catch a glimpse of my wristwatch I realized it was time for me to be away. For I had been warned not to stay for the full duration. This was not explained to me, but I imagined that at the conclusion of the festivity, the lights should come up, and the participants would not wish to risk being identified by anyone not yet fully initiated and committed to the sect.
So with reluctance I departed, all the more eager now to complete my tutelage and to participate in the next celebration.
V
My final task was rape. I was grateful that up till now none of the sexual assignments required the unwilling involvement of others, since legal risks were not to my liking. Of course it was in the interests of the sect to avoid them as well, and this was no doubt why certain other crimes were not mandated. But this one was deemed important enough. If I had lain out my plans carefully before, I was doubly meticulous now. I believed I saw how I could carry it off undetected, and right on my own campus to boot.
Marilyn was to be my victim. And if all went according to plan, she would never learn the identity of her attacker. One of the major fraternities was sponsoring a semester's end costume gala not very many days hence. I knew that on the appointed night, Marilyn would be in the same area of the campus, returning to her apartment from the office where she did part-time secretarial work. I knew the route well, as I sometimes accompanied her.
It was a simple matter to inquire at the local costume shop as to which outfits were most in demand. Ascertaining that several young men had already rented pirate regalia, I did the same, choosing a silken bandana large enough to cover my face. I planned to be long gone by unmasking time, and there would be several other pirates from which to choose a culprit. Any of the drunken fraternity members would be a plausible suspect.
On the night of the party, I stepped into the fraternity house long enough to make sure that there were a number of other bogus buccaneers present and then returned to set my vigil. Right on schedule my fiancée took her customary short-cut through the bushes. I sprang upon her, knocking her to the ground and silencing her with a sharp blow to the back of her head. She was stunned and could marshall no resistance. Let me say simply that I hiked up her skirt and sodomized her. She groaned incoherently, vomited, and then fainted mercifully away. As it happened, she could never have seen me straight on, costume or no costume.
Later I learned that she had been discovered soon after by campus security, shaken and disoriented as might well be imagined. She took an academic furlough for the rest of the year and returned home. Naturally I have written her letters of sympathy and support.
My course of preparation finished, I now waited for the next assemblage, where I would at long last know the joy of fellowship with those to whom I would be joined in body as well as soul. For this, my first participation, there was set but one final restriction. I must still arrive after things had commenced, though this time I might remain through the finale. I was happy to oblige.
Walking the now familiar pathway through dilapidated tenements and reeking garbage cans, I neared the old church as Bunyan's Pilgrim neared the Celestial City.
The muted clamour of voices within stirred my soul and thrilled my loins. Inside, all was again dark, but I knew the floor plan of the place well enough by now that I did not miss a step. Flinging aside my clothes, I ran to take my place at last amid the passion-crazed mob that once more formed a veritable hill of bodies before the desecrated altar. Atop the altar itself stood the leather-robed priest, intoning some barbaric litany whose significance I could not guess. The din of the mass beneath him made it quite impossible to distinguish more than random phrases. But this was hardly of concern to me then.
In the moment itself I was cognizant only of the press of flesh to every side. I sought entry wherever I could, making no distinction in that shadowy place as to colour or gender. That around me were veterans of the sexual combat I could tell by the variety of scars and scratches that could be seen close up, along with other reddish welts less easily identifiable. The night passed in this way, bereft of time, bereft of reason. I found myself lulled by fatigue and by the priest's droning chant, of which I once believed I caught the nonsense syllables ‘Iä! Shub-Niggurath’ Indeed he was fairly screaming it toward morning, near the crescendo of that ceremony of debauch, when the lights finally came up.
And then it was that I, too, began to scream. For the sight I saw then sent me fleeing mad and naked into the cold dawn air. Though I was not conscious of anyone pursuing me, I sped down the littered streets, oblivious alike to the damp chill and to the glass and metal fragments upon which I trod. At that early hour there was yet no-one about on the streets to stare at the strange and ridiculous spectacle I made. Finally, my exhaustion from the night's revelry overtook the new strength my terror had lent me, and I collapsed, nauseous and bleeding, in an alley many blocks from the church.
How long I remained unconscious I cannot say, but eventually some police patrolling the area found me lying in my own vomit among the heaps of trash, and retrieved me.
How did I come to be in this rather remarkable position? I was now actually feeling the cold for the first time, my nerves having recovered somewhat, and this new shock made it difficult to think. Fortunately I stumbled upon this lie: I said I had been set upon by muggers and been completely stripped and beaten. Given my several bruises and cuts, both from my night's debauchery and my subsequent flight, this must have seemed plausible enough, albeit strange. At any rate, the patrolmen appeared more or less satisfied. They kindly provided a rough blanket to cover my nakedness and drove me home.
And it was there I remained, disoriented, confused, unresponsive to communication, and unable to meet my responsibilities. It has been all I could do to recapture my wits sufficiently to reflect and re-evaluate. I have come at last to repent of my ways and to renounce my former pursuits. I imagined that no perversion, however loathsome, could cause me to turn back, yet now I am resolved to celibacy and wish I had always been so.
I had expected to behold the beatific vision in the profaned sanctuary that morning, but what I saw has instead robbed me of any further desire for sex. For there, revealed by the glare of the lights, was no
solid heap of swaying orgiasts, but rather chains of bodies spread over the pulsing and gelatinous surface of a tentacled, amoeboid horror, the revellers grotesquely arrayed like suckling whelps as the thing fed greedily on their sexual vitality through the questing pseudopodic phalluses, teats, and vulvas it sent forth!
BLACK STATIC
David Conway
STATIC everywhere...
– Razor hail maelstrom of endless orgasm. The Hierarchy of the Scourge materialises in a blizzard of sensual excess; monsoon of sulphurous secretions, lethal grapeshot of virulent spores. Synergy of sex and death.
Venom, pheromone and phosphorus. The Gordian Knot of chromo-somal destiny unravels...
– Clusters of obsidian, composite eye modules slide languidly across the featureless polyhedron of transfigured flesh. Crashing waves of pure terror, unutterable exhilaration, convulse the pulsating gel, the anti-symmetry of my inexplicable being. The squirming ganglia of numberless, autonomic neural colonies are wracked with seismic convulsions, plasmic tsunami.
We, the Nameless, the Faceless, the Undying –
Hyperbreed, Omnibeasts – seep, collide and explode onto this plane. Our limitless bodies span multifarious frequencies of time and space, the super-geometric, abstract dimensions defined by the interface of the Ultrasphere and Quantaplex. We unleash the arsenal of the Catastrophes: the unbearable cacophony of the Endless Scream; the ecstatic tortures of the Misery Spores; the unspeakable Rapture. I clothe myself in the raiment of Light, the celestial mantle of Atrocity: Our Will be done on earth as We have done in Heaven...
– We unearth continents by their very roots. Ocean brine is transmuted into shimmering expanses of liquid mercury. Or lava. Excrement. Blood. Tectonic plates are prised apart and slotted back together at random like pieces in a child’s jigsaw puzzle. The biosphere is our plaything, subject to our slightest whim. We break it, refashion it, destroy it endlessly. The potential of even its crudest elements is inexhaustible. Whole populations fused into a single, screaming organism: an amoebic monstrosity, hundreds of square miles in area, millions of shrieking mouths uttering an incomprehensible babble of polyglottal panic, forced to wallow in and feed upon the steaming dung that explodes from countless, distended rectums. A towering Babel of steaming, bleeding, shit-encrusted flesh...
– We rove about the surface of this planet at will.
Sometimes slowly, rolling across the hemispheres like a sluggish tide of glutinous, plasmic flesh. Sometimes at the speed of thought, molecules luxuriating in the shrill dissonance of our own mass-consciousness’ constant, involuntary interface – the ceaseless exchange of information and sensation – the symphonic chaos of Ultraspace.
Vast, incomprehensible shapes glide through the bile-coloured sky, eclipsing the radiant fury of a disinterested sun, solar flares erupting from its seething surface like roman candles. This dawn rose on the blood red day of centuries. Its setting heralds the aeons-long darkness of millennial night: the victory of sublime Chaos over the folly of Reason; anguish and futility engulfing the fragile mirage of humanity’s banal, mediocre ambitions...
– I preside over scenes of epic slaughter. The pure breadth and terror of my limitless vision concocts orgies of inventive violence and sexual perversity, the endless permutations of which I choreograph with the random precision of quantum manipulation. I revel in my irredeemable divinity. I inflict the meaningless agonies of the Embryo Vats, the Howling Loom and the Narrow Spawn; contrive psychotropic plagues which culminate in complex ballets of ritual slaughter and synchronised mass-suicide. Language reverts to its primal origins: a sonic carcinogen that literally devours brain tissue and nervous systems; a single conversation is sufficient to reduce its participants to comatose vegetables.
My wide skirt of semi-translucent flesh conceals row upon row of buzzing chainsaw teeth that can grind granite into sand, reduce diamonds to shimmering dust. The moist expanses of my layered palates are highly sensitised to the sweet delicacy of human flesh, the metal acridity of blood...
– The taste of souls.
My hunger is boundless. I feed it voraciously. The conical, erogenal structures that stud my heaving, corpulent flank glow with the vivid iridescence of endless arousal, ultra-endorphins bombarding the hydra-headed proliferation of my insoluble neural labyrinths. My serrated teeth spin muscle and skin into dripping red strands, gossamer fine like a spider’s web. My taste buds explode with effervescing pleasure. The searing disintegration of masticated souls surges along the coarse surfaces of my many tongues, scorching my salivating palates with its unique, irresistible piquancy.
The pupil-less facets of my composite eye modules glint with the cold sheen of onyx, meandering with lazy satiety across the irregular planes of my moist, diaphanous flesh. A thousand miles to the East, in the broiling ocean of molecular acid that was once the Pacific, there lies a nameless island whose only inhabitants for millions of years had been marine birds and ocean-going reptiles. There is some irony in the fact that so inauspicious a location should prove to be the terrestrial cradling of our celestial seed. A single beam of pure, aetheric energy is transmitted light years across the galaxies from the primal nucleus of Maximus Prime: fulcrum of the Quantaplex, for millions of years the impassable threshold of the Hyperbreed’s extradimensional prison.
The island is a geomantically-active beacon. Following the molten disintegration of the Copernicus radio telescope it continues to absorb the energy directly.
Copernicus. Though twice separated from the memory by the barriers of time and my own transfigurative metamorphosis, the recollections retain the vivid tenacity of a fever-spawned dream. And the reverie is doubly reinforced by the fading embers of dim, pre-racial memory, telling me that the stringy pulp shredded between my teeth – the delicious firefly of liberated consciousness greedily ingested by the swelling tubers and snaking entrails of my alimentary tracts – was once a child.
I feel neither remorse or empathy, despite the fact that the hazy mirage of half-memory reminds me of my own humble origins. That once I, too, was a mere man...
I had always hated the sea. Feared it, had I been but honest enough to admit it. The tang of brine, its sour suggestion of ripe decay – of death – on a chill sea breeze had always been sufficient to awaken a dark and nameless dread in the blackest recesses of my subconsciousness. In retrospect it seems so foolish, so pitiably weak. But at the time its persuasiveness was such that I could never shrug it off.
You will appreciate then the feeling of deep foreboding that overwhelmed me as we approached Stahl’s island. True, the weather was perfect. Optimum visibility.
The vast swell of the Pacific so flawlessly blue and agreeably placid. But still I had to struggle to conceal my gnawing anxiety, the bitter cauldron of bile bubbling within me.
As we drew closer to the island – little more than a nameless, uncharted rock – the gleaming dish of the Copernicus radio telescope, luminous against the pale blue canvas of the southern sky, seemed to assume an almost surreal aspect, its setting in the midst of this featureless, crystal sea so startlingly inappropriate. Ostensibly, its geographic location enabled the observatory’s dish to fully exploit the low-level refraction and ambient distortion potential afforded by the hole in the ozone layer which by now extended over most of the Southern hemisphere, the euphemistically termed ‘environmental window’. Nobody could have suspected the ulterior motivation of its founder and principle architect, Reinhardt Stahl.
Sweating uncomfortably inside military-issue anti-contamination suits, we made landfall shortly before noon. There were six of us: myself, chief scientific and technical advisor on the mission; Ehrlicson, a bio-chemist specialising in virology, an expert in the field of bacteriological and chemical warfare; and four US marines on secondment from the naval base at Manilla. The grunts appeared to be packing enough firepower to overthrow a medium-sized banana republic; but that was their business.
We had arrived on the island expecting the worst.
/> But I don’t think anything could have prepared us for the reality of what awaited us. Of course, we had heard reports of an unknown viral epidemic which had forced the Copernicus staff to remain almost a year in self-imposed quarantine. Details of that had been sketchy enough to arouse suspicion in some quarters.
However, it was not until a foundering, Philipino fishing vessel ran aground on an adjacent reef that the alarm was truly raised. Taking to the lifeboats, the sailors had at first headed for the island and the supposed shelter of Copernicus. However, something they had seen there had apparently been disturbing and frightening enough for them to prefer to take their chances on the open sea. They were eventually picked up by a Japanese trawler some three weeks later, suffering from heat-stroke, extreme dehydration and malnutrition.
Obviously, the more outrageous elements of their story were being treated with scepticism, if not downright incredulity, as well as being kept out of the public domain.
But one thing was obvious. There was a mystery on Stahl’s island that merited further investigation...
Walking into the observatory’s central chamber – the essential heart of the Copernicus complex – I felt as if I had suddenly turned my back on thousands of years of human civilisation. Abruptly, unexpectedly, we had been confronted with the darkness of the primordial soul, its palpable, undeniable reality.
Copernicus had been transformed into a necropolis.
In the midst of towering banks of computers, still functioning with pragmatic disinterest in everything but their own pre-ordained programming, the dead were everywhere. This was their domain.
The Starry Wisdom Page 4