The Starry Wisdom

by D. M. Mitchell

  Outside the thick woollen curtains, the wind whispered between chimney pots, an idiot voice spilling its senseless secrets to the night sky, an empty litany over rooftops laden with greasy snow.

  The room’s single occupant sat at a small wooden desk, the only furniture apart from an old bedstead with threadbare mattress and stained yellow sheets. In fingers stiff with cold, the young man held the note to the unsteady lights for the hundredth time, he stared at the printed characters in smudgy black ink. In one spot, where a heavy snow-flake had clung momentarily to the cheap paper, the words became almost illegible. Once again, he found that he was totally unable to recall the features of the heavily-dressed figure who had pressed the folded message into his hand, then hurried past, slipping silently into a dark, brick-lined mouth between dusty shop windows. That had been only a few hours ago, with dusk gathering round him as he waited in an exposed shelter in the bus depot, vacantly watching the snow on sloping rooftops opposite turn fluorescent blue in contrast to the darkening sky. Now, in the marginally warmer confines of his bedsit, the lines of text floated up in the waxen gloom, as impenetrable as when he first read them on the returning bus, surrounded by hunched, steaming passengers. The phrases seemed to lift from the coarse white paper, hanging before his eyes like the pieces of some meaningless puzzle.

  “THE FRATERNITY OF DARKNESS”. Fellow seeker, you are invited to a Meeting of our August and Hallowed Society. The Veil of Reality shall be lifted from your eyes, and you shall look upon the radiant darkness at the heart of existence. You are most urgently requested to attend our next gathering, as a Brother and Friend. Our Conclave is to be held at the Old Burnt House, Bridge Street, promptly at the hour of nine. May your path become One with ours!

  His first reaction upon reading the cryptic invitation had been to crumple the paper and toss it into the slush-choked gutter at his feet. Though he had once held a passing interest in the occult, to the extent of buying several expensive books on the subject, he had since reverted to a cynical scepticism toward anything purporting to conceal ‘hidden secrets’, and regarded those who espoused such views as credulous fools. Perversely, it was this very loathing for occultists and their irrationalist doctrines that had undermined his initial dismissal of the note – for though there could be no ‘occult’ as such, the absurd posturings of its adherents could perhaps provide an amusing distraction from the dreary treadmill of modern life. And it was this sentiment, together with a nagging annoyance at the contrived mystery of the note, that had formulated his decision to attend the meeting.

  Taking his overcoat down from its nail behind the door, and placing the folded invitation into the inside pocket for protection against the wind and snow, he checked his watch, snuffed the guttering candles, and quitted the darkened room. He made his way cautiously down the wooden stairs, dimly outlined in the meagre light from the skylight above, then along the hallway past silent doorways, and out into the arctic chill of the night wind. At this hour, the streets leading down towards Lower Denborough, and the industrial district bordering the River Den, were relatively quiet. Commuters and shoppers had long since returned to their homes, and the clientele of the town’s many public houses were ensconced in their smoky tap rooms, already savouring their third or fourth pint.

  The slushy grey snow was beginning to freeze underfoot, sparkling with yellow diamonds of reflected street-light. The Old Burnt House, a local landmark, was situated in the centre of Denborough’s now-depressed factory-zone, and, as far as he knew, had been empty for many years. Stepping out of a long alley-way between the lowering black bulks of disused warehouses, he came into a wind-scoured square of ancient office buildings, a cobbled bank which sloped down to a small stone bridge crossing the river. And beyond this, the squat hulk of Burnt House, its frontage half-blackened by fire like the features of a lopsided, disfigured face. He paused in the middle of the narrow bridge, briefly considering the abandonment of his expedition, which now seemed rather ridiculous and pointless. He stared over the parapet at the icy black water of the Den; reflected clouds scudded across the shuddering face of the moon. Then the moment’s indecision passed; he coughed between gloved fingers and nudged on up the other bank.

  Curiously, he could see no sign of interior illumination of the building before him, nor even of recent habitation, even at such close quarters. With growing trepidation and uncertainty, the young man approached the ponderously ornate porch-way, an incongruous, Egyptian-style portico of soot-grimed sandstone, and knocked as loudly as his muffling glove would permit. His shadow fell onto the panelled door, sharply outlined by cold moonlight. Around and below, the dead factories of Denborough stood like the mausoleums of some long-vanished, chthonic race. He was on the brink of turning to retrace his steps in the snow, when the door opened in a surprisingly smooth and silent arc. A dim figure separated itself from the pervading gloom of the interior.

  With a short greeting and request to examine the invitation, the nondescript agent of the melodramatic “Fraternity“ led the way along a lugubrious, unpainted hallway to an identical doorway giving access to rooms at the rear of the building. From somewhere beneath the bare floor-boards he caught the faint susurrus of rushing water, presumably a subterranean conduit emptying into the River Den. Without looking back, or uttering a further word, the sullen guide inserted a modern-looking key into an anachronistic Yale lock, and admitted his guest into the chamber beyond.

  The stuffy, over-heated air of the room seemed to fill his eyes for a moment, making them water. Through a teary haze, he could discern the tableau within, inadequately illuminated by antiquated gas-jets affixed to the walls. In a roughly semi-circular arrangement, a number of embarrassed individuals sat on rickety wooden chairs, like the members of some depressing church attendance group.

  His taciturn guide stepped into this circle, gesturing to an empty seat on the further side of the room. As the young man settled himself into the uncushioned chair, the doorman retreated from the room without further comment, and the uneasy gas-lights shrunk to mere glowing tips.

  He now had the chance to take stock of his surroundings in detail. The room was square, high-ceilinged and windowless, the walls panelled with the same brown-stained wood as the passageway. The scuffed, black and white floor tiles, like a giant checker-board, hinted at past usage as a Masonic temple. The stifling heat was generated by two huge gas-heaters, standing guard at either side of a battered wooden pulpit, probably extracted from some derelict church. Behind this podium was another featureless doorway. As he began to search the inner pockets of his great-coat for the cryptically-worded handbill, half suspecting an elaborate joke staged for dubious motives, this door swung open, and a tall figure stepped out and crossed to the pulpit.

  Immediately, he felt the heavy atmosphere of the place thicken; an oppressive weight seemed to settle on his shoulders like some unwelcome, parasitic avian. From the silence of his desultory companions, punctured only by laboured breathing, he knew that his discomfort was shared.

  The newcomer took the stand. Like his companion in the hallway, he was curiously anonymous, dressed inconspicuously in an outmoded suit of nondescript colour and material. In fact, it would have been impossible to state with any degree of certainty that they were indeed two different individuals, or whether the doorman had merely taken a circuitous route around the chamber, to re-enter from the rear. In the sickly light of the gas-lamps, his face seemed oddly waxen and smooth, wholly devoid of the marks and wrinkles which endow character and life upon the human visage. Similarly, his eyes were so dark and sunken as to be almost invisible, though they swept the huddled assemblage like the cold light of a dark beacon.

  Without pausing for explanatory introduction, the Speaker began the address, his voice as buzzing and disembodied as a ventriloquist’s.

  At first, the monologue appeared to consist of nothing more unusual or dangerous than a basic exposition of the central tenets of spiritualism and theosophy, although the strange accen
t and vibrating tone of the Speaker’s voice contributed a slightly dislocating effect to the discourse.

  And so the point at which the innocent narration ceased, and a kind of menacing mesmerism began, was impossible to define. Likewise, the prosaic and conventional elaboration of certain primitive myths and legends which followed, in turn subtly blended into an evocation of a more ancient and primal cycle, concerning the continued existence upon the Earth of wholly alien and inhuman deities. The bizarre terminology and denominations of this obscure mythos, though totally unfamiliar to the rapt audience, yet seemed to evoke faint echoes of pre-knowledge from the deepest wells of racial memory.

  As a miasma of hypnotic control sank into the minds of the listeners, the discourse took a further shift into the realms of blasphemy and delirium. The vile revelations and insane heresies poured forth like a torrent of evil sickness.

  And with it came moments of disembodied vision, of increasing duration; monochrome glimpses of porous, grey worlds and rotting, diseased planets, viewed against a maelstrom of dying stars. A titanic city of gigantic, tottering stone towers throbbed with impossible sentience, riddled with the bore-holes of termite-like parasites. A bloated monstrosity, the size of a small moon, hung in airless suspension above a distant range of nightmarish peaks, dripping milky filth. Its enormous, cycloptic eye wept and cast a greenish ray upon the teeming, writhing masses below, making them scream with electric pain and gnash their flecked, clacking mandibles in obscene chorus. Then, when sanity seemed threatened beyond hope of redemption, the psychic grip of the Speaker began to loosen, and awareness returned to the dull, earthly scene of the room in Burnt House.

  Shaken and stunned by the hallucinatory visions, the circle of listeners slumped forward in unsteady chairs, retching and crying as if some dreadful poison were coursing though their veins. And yet, before recovery of orientation and stability could resolve, another wave of irresistible command surged over the ravaged gathering.

  Like so many soulless automata, they jerked upright, pathetic puppets held in the gaze of black, dilated eyes. The Speaker moved back to stand by the door through which he had entered; the simple passage-way upon which it now opened seemed like the pylon to all that was unholy, unhuman and mad. The young man stumbled to his feet, grasping a chair back for support. Impelled by the projected will of the Speaker, he joined the shuffling line which had formed, following a stooped old man in a soiled overcoat.

  With deranged intensity of vision, he stared at the dandruff which whitened the dirty collar before his face, the thinning strands of yellowish-white hair. Before he realized that the somnambulant column had moved forward, the unmarked door closed behind him with a hollow finality.

  The Speaker turned to face them, his pale face a devilish, contorted mask unable to conceal the alien motivation churning beneath the sly verisimilitude of the surface. As the embalming gloom of the inner chamber surrendered to sight, the oily gleam of hundreds of large glass specimen jars leered down from wooden shelves lining all four walls. And it was from the urine-coloured liquid filling the jars that the dim light of the box-like room originated, painting the haggard faces of the hapless group an unearthly ochre hue. With the deliberate motions of a hierophant performing a task of arcane worship, the hypnagogic master reached up to the serried ranks of glass, transferring a single jar to the bare table at the centre of the floor. Within the stained fluid, a vague, curving shape shifted almost imperceptibly, whether from the disturbance of its vessel, or from some inherent vitality. With his back to the entranced captives, the Speaker dipped a smooth, pallid hand into the round mouth of the jar. An acrid, formaldehyde stench permeated the enclosed air of the chamber. With incredible swiftness, the keeper reached into the group and grasped hold of the young man with a crushing, iron grip. Held between index finger and thumb, a glistening black root, or worm, twisted wetly, then leapt forward under its own volition to penetrate the open lips of its startled victim. Around him, the jar-lined shelves and blank, staring faces whirled into a delirious spiral as consciousness surrendered to the mounting darkness.

  Under the inverted bowl of the frozen night sky, a somnambulant column of worshippers shuffles across the windswept flagstones of an unlit courtyard behind the Burnt House. As the grey light of dawn seeps into the blackness above, outlining the broken walls enclosing them, the penitent figures gather around their silent leader in a ragged circle. With a curious gesture, he directs their collective gaze upwards, to a pre-determined point in the heavens.

  There, a single yellow star commences a deliberate and intelligent series of flashes and darknesses, a cryptically-encoded message from beyond the abysses of time ... a malevolent, signalling eye.

  ZAMAN’S HILL

  Alan Moore

  Moonfire, decanted by huge, prehistoric machinery into the die of the hills, quenched to lead and by day the far slopes lost in steam. Birdless dark in the pine-deeps. Toboggan scars drop from the path into haunted, perpetual twilight and down to the lake; the drowned hamlets beneath a vast acid lagoon, void of fish. Shreds of wallpaper drift in the submarine kitchens, a memory of waterweed.

  Mineral energies sucked up like snot through the bronchial roots taint the sap with old grudge, coded Thatcher-year sunlight deciphered in camp-fire to ash and to spark. Soon we all reek of flame with its taste in our water, an Inferno cordial.

  We stare at the bright fissured hide of the firelogs, red-hot alligators crawled from a burned Nile, breathing smoke, we inhale the wood’s madness, the contour-mapped rings of its DNA memory encrypted the length of each bark-armoured spine, so that some of us know a compulsion to sleep in the gut of the blaze, or to give it our blood, and the twelve-year-olds skirmish with bottles and toasting forks.

  Somehow the crotch of a woman is sculpted, a split stump with knickers pulled up the fork, a crude amputee idol that calls to the ghost-dogs who scrawl canine histories, written in piss in her flank.

  These are Machen-hills, skull-hollow, echoing reverie of skeleton, arrow-head; fossil imperatives; grey-lobed with slate; webbed by ganglion worms. The intent of this landscape is buried: immense geological crania, stratified sentience under the scalp-grass, military crew-cut of Forestry trees.

  In pursuit of the cortex, the bedrock of purpose and memory we must go deeper, explore the decalcified brain’s subterranea, down through the nightmaring stone to a secret Pre-Cambrian core: Dan Yr Ogof, a limestone delirium three hundred million years old, its grey matter shot through by the tetanus vein of the Llynfell, whose calcinous rivulets spread like a tectonic syphilis birthing slow, massive hallucinations that accrue, centimetres to measure the centuries, limaform visions of Moonmilk and Helectite, strange half-complete hypnagogic impressions of possible life-forms chewed into the calcite, stained bloody or yellow as tallow by iron, dyed pale statue-grey by the manganese.

  Here is an underland coral remembering long-vanished tropical ocean, the reefs of Primordia. Here are the mudflowers grown into a hideous Michelin man, a toad-figurine, white and obese, head half melted with rain-eaten eyes.

  Knots of tentacle coil from the underlit scarp where the flowstones and curtains form jellyfish rills and a gigantic femur, two-thousand-year-old alabaster stood knee-socket deep in a rockpool. The stone threatens terrible life, dreams of meat, draped like fat in streaked translucent veils from the underhang; fashions a geo-organic menagerie, every conceivable quirk of biology prefigured here in these waxed carboniferous ruptures, this hog-bristle stubble of stalactite, fat roe of cave pearls. In shower-spattered streets below ground, dim, pellucid, our fingers trace wet shapes: the cold, pregnant message of R’lyeh.

  WARD 23

  D.M. Mitchell

  April 27th

  The behaviour of the patients in Ward 23 has become noticeably strange these last few days. They appear to have become invested with a strange sense of joyful anticipation; their expressions resembling those of small children waiting for Xmas. When I questioned B——(a hebephrenic woman in her e
arly forties), she began to dance and sing tunelessly, ‘He is coming back and we’ll all be free.’ The other patients nodded happily and one pressed my hand solicitously in his pudgy little fists, grinning up into my face with the zeal of a recent religious convert. Maybe we need to change their medication. Maybe they’ve got their hands on our supply of ketamine.

  It’s also worth noting that the change is confined to this one ward out of the whole hospital. It could have been worse, I suppose. It could have been the violent patients in the restricted wing. Those in Ward 23 have become fraternal and previous childish squabbles have been forgotten, for the time being at least. They’ve even been indulging in group activities, unorganised by the staff, chanting strange nonsense rhymes together and dancing in bafflingly complex arrangements. It’s all very reminiscent of religious ceremony and usually centres around Daphne, a beautiful, ethereal catatonic woman whom they place at the centre of their movements and who sits in silent fugues throughout.

  The only person who never actively participates is James, a dangerous paranoid case whose violent history is belied by his calm and reasonable manner. I intend to broach the subject with him later today.

  I’ve developed a very sore throat – a sort of thickening around the adenoids which is making speech difficult. I’ll have to see a doctor, I suppose – a real doctor, that is. But the NHS is so dilapidated I’ll probably have to wait hours and I hate waiting for any-thing or anyone.

  Later (same day)

  Call me eccentric, but I rarely bother to read the newspapers or even watch television – not only do I believe that their contents hold little objectivity, but I also suspect they produce the same brain-numbing effects as the sedative drugs we administer to the patients. Today, however, I was alarmed when I picked up a copy of a tabloid journal in my local newsagents, and discovered that certain patterns of behaviour in the outside world bore parallels with those of my patients. As I turned the pages, I was horrified at the reports of increased violence and mayhem which must have been building steadily for some time unbeknownst to me; upsurges of religious mania, random slaughter, sex crimes and mass suicides similar to those in Jonestown and Waco.