And as I watched, the dead monsters continued to pile up on the pavement.
There was only one thing he could do next, but he did not do it.
Ervin stayed put. I found him sitting there, staring out to sea – and, on finding me close enough to listen, he entered what he thought would be a conversation with these words: ‘I’m used to the City, where the Markets have recently gone 24-hour, to cope with global trade in Bond Washing and Bed & Breakfasting ... where, if you didn’t know, investment transactions only take place for recouping as much Capital Gains Tax, without any particular intention necessary to maximise the growth or income yield of the investment itself. Now I’m out of all that, I miss it. I didn’t think I would – I couldn’t bear much more of the wheeler-dealing, the crowded wine bars, the insiders, the under-the-counters, the Unlisted Securities, the Third Market, the Big Bangs, the cancerous growth of Unit Trusts to every corner of human life as we know it. You know, stranger, I was once Fund manager on a Unit Trust solely underpinned by Albanian Venture Companies specialising in secondhand car dealing!’
I nodded.
The sea mist began to roll off the tired waves of a late dusk. I had nodded having intended at the outset not to respond at all. For, by responding, I would divert the natural course of those events that I really yearned to keep out of my control. You may have heard of it – actionphobia – the intense fear of taking a positive step, in case it rebounds on you. Have I told you all this before? Anyway, I have been an action-phobic even from before I was born.
My body did things I could not prevent. Like twitching. Breathing. Sleeping. Blood-beats out of synchronisation with my heart. The turning of the worm. I could not bear it.
I could only walk to where my legs took me and, tonight, I’d wanted to go to the discodrome to meet my future wife, but ended up by the beach ... with Ervin.
He continued, encouraged by my nodding. He explained that he had made his investments liquid, by selling the properties, stagging the new issue Shares, encashing his Unit Trusts when the Bid-Offer spreads were at their thinnest, auctioning off his Index-Linked Bonds and Government Tap Stock. And with all his assets liquid, he took the bus as far as it would go, and walked the rest of the way to the edge of the sea, as if he knew instinctively that was where he should be.
During a period of silence, we both stared out at sea.
The lights of a distant liner indicated where some of those City Golden Boys that Ervin had once known were lurking, drinking and dancing the night away, cruising into a Future which is (or was) just as uncertain whatever the amount of money you possessed.
Then, the worm turned. I saw the misty moon skid behind the dark patches of an encroaching summer storm.
The sky was like oil on water. I shivered, for the mist had disappeared (it seemed) into my self-breathing lungs.
Ervin’s head of hair moved as the waves and he saluted something that presumably only his mind could see. He had evidently ignored my absence. For I had gone, minutes before, towards the round shelter on the prom, where I could safely relieve myself without too much bother. But it was all a waste of time, for I had not eaten nor drunk, it appeared, for centuries. I felt as if I were becoming a prehistoric monster freshly emerged from the tidal primeval slime.
Eventually, Ervin followed me up to the seats in the shelter, where a courting couple were playing Trivial Pursuits in a neigh-bouring cubicle.
Ervin’s renewed attempt at striking up a conversation was:
‘Better to be under cover, when the sea becomes the sky...’ I nodded. Damn! I could not help myself. And, he was right, for rain came in waves. I once had a pain which came in waves. The doctor said it was water on the brain and, tonight, my eyes smarted at the possibility of a new onslaught.
Ervin thought I wept. For the pity of it all. The couple next door were no doubt banking on a future as dependable as the past (despite its obvious drawbacks). The rain spluttered to a halt, after its initial hope of flushing the Earth clean of all but its friends the fish. Me nodding, nodding, like the laughing policeman dummy at the end of the pier.
‘One’s body and mind are the only real assets,’ Ervin ventured. And he undid his garments, as easily as a stripper whose audience is on heat.
I nodded.
His skin bubbled up, as it would under the grill and his eyes melted. I loved him too much, I knew. For I cried (the first time that I had actually made myself cry) as his bones popped out like puppets, performing for all too short an act, before they dripped away. His nose became one with its own snot. His lips were covered by a blubbery caul. The stomach oozed out of his navel, like so much shit. His legs were turning transparent, revealing body plankton swimming between the branches of the bones. His feet flopped off like fish towards the sea. His vital part was sturdy one moment, then it too disentangled itself from the wild seaweed hair of his crotch and exploded in a spray of white foamy semen.
His assets were now all truly liquid.
And I drank of him. Took my fill, for the first time.
Till my half-diluted brain fell through several floors of my body, landing on the prom like a live cowpat. I cannot bring myself to put it back.
The couple seated nearby played on.
‘You want to answer General Knowledge? Well, here it is; who invented money?’
The answer was not man. But God, for He made fish first. And before that, the sea. Before that, nothing.
Ervin sits astride the goose-stretched neck of a Great Old One as it traces the coasts of Britain like a map-maker. And I certainly hope Ervin has a girl in every port. On second thoughts, on remembering those three floozies in the pub...
THE SOUND OF A DOOR OPENING
Don Webb
All we had wanted to do was create a little hoax. It seemed harmless enough. We had the perfect cast: writer, magician, computer expert. In the end the magician disappeared, the computer expert died with a horribly broken body, and we all rotted our brains with madness. Before I act in my madness, I will leave a record of our strange adventure as a story. I’ve tried not to write it, but the thing that urges me to seek out that madness on the island wants to leave a record.
An ironic reversal, it was to have been my fictions that created the illusion of fact.
So as I mutter certain spells that keep certain things from taking shape in the shadows of my room, consider my cautionary tale about those who would play the Tlon game.
It began in Wing Lee’s Deli on Polk Street in San Francisco. The topic of Lovecraft came up, following the Mu Shu Pork and before the fortune cookies. The computer expert, a regal black woman – let’s call her Maya Eolis – mentioned that most of HPL’s sites had a real-world basis.
St. John’s Church in Providence was transformed into the Starry Wisdom Church for The Haunter In The Dark. We pooled our information on the topic. The magician, in reality a soft-spoken psy-op (psychological warfare officer) – let’s call him Gabriel Thorn – quietly asserted that R’lyeh, where Lovecraft had enshrined the dead and dreaming Cthulhu, was a real place, Nan Matol near Ponape. Gabriel had pulled my leg a few times – so I was really quite surprised when Nan Matol turned out to be a real place with strange basalt architecture. The natives worship the squid god Kutun. For those who laugh off the Cthulhu Mythos, I leave Nan Matol and the Encyclopedia Britannica as an example of the shape of the world to come.
We retired to Gabriel’s house and watched a Lugosi/Karloff video, Towers Of Fear. There’s a pretty horrible scene at the end with man-faced dogs with horrible growths from their eyes. Gabriel said that the dog scene and subsequent nightmares inspired Frank Belknap Long to write The Hounds Of Tindalos. Tindalos, he maintained, was a Nan Matol word meaning ‘power’ – cognate with the Polynesian mana.
‘If Lovecraft,’ I said, ‘developed a peculiar power in his writing by grafting his dreams onto something real – why don’t we reverse the process?’
‘Start with something imaginary,’ asked Maya, ‘and gr
aft something real onto it?’
‘Exactly,’ I said.
Gabriel smiled.
I began by inserting a paragraph in my Museum News column wherein I dealt with coming attractions at large American museums.
“One casualty of the Amenhotep III exhibition will be the retrospective of Hans Poelzig’s plaster models.
Although Poelzig was a minor figure associated with the Bauhaus, the one-week exhibit was to include several items seldom seen in the U.S. including his Modell Für Eine Kutlukapelle and his Schrecklich Krake, which many may remember from the UPA film Unterzee Kulten.” Poelzig, although he had done some very strange things (like design the sets for The Golem), had not made a Model For A Cthulhu Shrine nor a statue called Horrible Squid. Nor had UPA ever made Undersea Religions. The week my article appeared Maya posted the following query on Usenet ALT.SCIFILM.
“Does anyone know anything about the film Unterzee Kulten directed by G. W. Pabst?” Sure enough someone posted back that its sets were by Hans Poelzig and that he remembered reading that there would be a showing of the sets somewhere.
Then Gabriel posted that the film Unterzee Kulten had been released with the title Geheimnisse Einer Unterzeewelt and its graphic depictions of the obscene rites of certain Polynesian sea-god worshippers had caused the film to be banned in most countries. A single print circulated clandestinely in the U.S. and its imagery inspired the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft to create his Call Of Cthulhu.
Well this remark brought Lovecraft fans out of the woodwork. The master surely hadn’t seen any film to base his work on. And – as we had hoped – one guy claimed that he had seen the film and that it was too tame to have moved Lovecraft to dream of strange-angled towers rising in the Pacific.
So Gabriel posted asking if the guy had seen Geheimnisse Einer Unterzeewelt or the edited later release Underwater Secrets? Of course the guy had seen neither since we had made up both, but wanting to get off the hook he said that he probably saw the edited version. Now the film existed as a fact in the mind of one man.
Someone else posted that she remembered reading about Underwater Secrets in a back issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Well what she was really remembering was seeing Gabriel Thorn’s name connected with a Star Wars fanstory, but the best hoaxes – we reasoned – grew out of other people’s cryptamnesia.
We let them tell one another lies on the government-supported anarchy of Usenet. A couple of months passed and we chuckled as our lies grew into facts.
Things were beginning to die down, so while I was doing the layout of Museum News I inserted the following ad:
“Private collector seeking print of UFA film – Geheimnisse Einer Unterzeewelt. Must be uncut version of Pabst classic. Top dollar paid. Writer SEEKER c/o this magazine.”
A few weeks later, I received this letter from Lisle, Illinois.
Dear SEEKER,
I too have been looking for Geheimnisse Einer Unterzeewelt for many years. I can provide a photocopy of the book which inspired the film. This book, as you no doubt know, is an extension of the Yuggothic alphabet by Guido von List. If you would like a photocopy of Das Geheimnis Der Unterzeerunen, please let me know and I’ll mail it to you. Because I know of the tortures that seeking after the mysteries can cause, I am more than glad to provide help to another’s quest.
Guido von List, a renowned expert in Indo-European linguistics and mythology, was the leader of the Germanic occult renaissance of the early twentieth century. If you would ever come across a copy of the film, I would give anything to view it.
Sincerely,
A Fellow Seeker.
Of course I wrote back immediately for a copy of the book. As soon as I dropped the letter in the snorkel box I regretted it. I had given a fellow prankster my own name and address. “Yuggothic” indeed – a term coined by Lovecraft. Whoever wrote the letter had great skill in meta-communications, he was able to get me to do his will.
I immediately suspected Gabriel.
So I prepared to e-mail a note to Gabriel.
“Dear Gabriel,
The rules are that we don’t fuck with each other’s minds.”
But when I logged on to MCI to send the note, there was a note from Gabriel in my inbox.
“Dear Don,
Nice try, but I’m not snapping at the bait. By the way, how did you get the letter mailed from Key West?”
So I didn’t send my message. I had to figure this out.
Was he fooling me – or was somebody (Maya?) fooling us both? Or were there two people fooling us separately? I spent the afternoon re-reading John Fowles’ The Magus and debating hypotheses.
I decided the best course of action would be to act as if Gabriel were trying to fool me. So I logged on to MCI the next morning planning to send my message. There was a message in my inbox from Maya.
“Dear guys,
Which one of you sent me the flyer for the Rainbow Cliff Hotel near Kapinga? Somehow I don’t think it’s coincidence that I’m getting Micronesian hotel promos. This isn’t the rules we agreed to.”
So I logged off without sending any message. I would wait for the guy in “Illinois” to make the next step.
In two weeks a bulky xerox copy was stuffed in my mailbox. My German isn’t great but I gathered that Das Geheimnis Der Unterzeerunen had been published in Vienna in 1908. The book consisted of a dictionary arranged by glyph with transliterations from the “Yuggothic” into German. Guido von List had translated “Y-goth-e” as “path sinister” and claimed that the glyphs were found at Nan Matol(!), Easter Island, and Stonehenge. He suggested that the angular shapes of the glyphs themselves might open hidden path-ways in the mind, if consciously meditated upon for that purpose.
If this was a forgery someone had done a hell of a lot of work to produce it. If it wasn’t a forgery someone had done a hell of a lot of work to find me.
Both ideas were pretty scary.
So I decided to ignore them.
For two months when I got a message from Gabriel or Maya I deleted it sight unseen. The easiest way to defeat a hoaxter is to refuse to play.
While I wasn’t watching, things progressed too far.
One night I decided to try one of the exercises in the List book. I selected one of the glyphs, the one with the K-sound. I drew the glyph in dark green ink on a three-by-five card. I sat down on the floor of my apartment (in a semi-darkness illuminated by one dark green candle). I stared at the angles and curves of this (supposedly) otherworldly symbol. I kept my eyes half-closed to avoid eye fatigue. Soon a reverie began which passed into a dream.
I was looking out on the ocean as the sinking sun made golden furrows in the waves. As the sun sank I became aware of my surroundings. I was standing on a sandy knoll, behind me (to the East) was a paradise of palm and sand. To my left (the South) was a rocky island rising from the darkened sea. Buildings rough-hewn and strange jutted at crazy angles – most of them trailing off into the winedark sea. Someone lit a torch which burned a bright green. My attention wafted like a breeze from the knoll to the haunted island.
I saw that it was Maya holding the torch and beside her reading from parchment (in his lamb-like voice) was Gabriel. He would pause in his readings as though waiting for a response, sometimes the sound of the waves or the cry of the seabirds seemed almost to form words. He continued to read, and an almost palpable shadow seemed to rise from the ruins. The shadow poured up to Maya’s and Gabriel’s feet. They continued their strange ceremony and the darkness began to crawl up their bodies enfolding them entirely. Just as the darkness swallowed them I could see a strange starry place reflected in their eyes. As the darkness made the seal complete, the green flame disappeared with a hiss.
Then I was alone. The darkness returned to its normal place as shadows. I started to examine the ruins more closely, but then I awoke.
My candle had gone out. No doubt that change plus the suggestible state I had projected myself into had accomplished this vision.
Micronesia. It was from Gabriel.
Dear Don,
We’ve played at casting shadows so long, I know you won’t believe me when I say that we have stumbled on the real thing. The ruins of Nan Matol are gateways – pointers to some sort of otherness that goes beyond the consciousness of ordinary men. This is more than a glimpse into a different reality tunnel; it is a whole ‘nother reality.
I suspect the strangely angled gateways are opening new paths in our minds, just as they must have opened new pathways in the minds of the builders. If those builders were in fact human; and not as the natives say beings that came from the sky in stone canoes.
This is what I’ve looked for all of my life. All of my life I have been dimly aware of another world, a world of vast rushing presences, forces that were scurrying off to perform actions of great consequence. These actors were real not the shadowy illusions of this world. Because I always sought such great activity I sought out a military intelligence career. I felt most alive there. In some ways I am retracing the steps of Elizabeth I’s arch-spy, Dr. John Dee.
He too was drawn to the events of his time (and like myself) influenced them with a word or two in the right ears. But eventually he was drawn to another level of action.
You must come here. This is what you want as well.
I remember the night we ate at the Magic Castle in Hollywood and I introduced you to Forrey Ackerman, you talked about science fiction as a quest for otherness. Well what you want is here. Not some occultnik projection of dull sameness into realms of impoverished fantasy, but something unknown.
Come soon while I am still visible to you in this world. Come while I can still teach you, before you have to seek out this wisdom on your own.
Gabriel.
Why was he doing this? Did he really think on the small money writing earns me I would be able to jaunt out to the Pacific? Was he trying to prove his power over me?
The Starry Wisdom Page 11