May 11th
The clock tells me it’s another day although the sun hasn’t risen this morning, or rather it’s obscured by some indefinable menstruum, the world being lit by a diffuse subterranean purple glow. The noises outside have abated and when I awoke, my companions were sitting cross-legged around the cocoon, which pulsed slightly. I crept to the window and gazed out, breathless and shocked at what I saw. On the lawns, under the trees, as far as I could see was a multitude of seated forms, mostly human, but many strangely transformed, all staring in anticipation at the hospital.
Between the trees I could see the bay which lay about a mile away to the south. A titanic amorphous pylon jutted from the water, slime and weeds dripping from its surface, black, glistening figures clambering across it enigmatically. James’ voice startled me to attention.
‘Doctor, Daphne is ready.’
I shambled across to him like some great reptile and looked down at the cocoon. All movement had subsided.
James handed me a scalpel and, numbly, I took it. ‘Please Doctor. It has to be you. None of us are allowed to touch her.’
I clumsily made a lateral incision and parted the lips of the wound like a huge vagina. In a flurry of flapping and whirring, the room was engulfed in a cloud of small golden butterflies. The patients began to hop and dance like delighted children, their misshapen faces tinted by the golden light from the hymenoptera.
‘Look inside Doctor. He has come.’ All trace of mockery had vanished from his voice. I reached inside and gently scooped out the small form of the child from the half-eaten remains of his mother and, holding him up to my face, gazed fully at the visage of the new messiah. His eyes opened and met mine and a vision swam before me – wheels of fire and light – burning cold, searing away my body, leaving something pure and terrible – great formless creatures, shifting and laughing, eating each other and being perpetually reborn – all this in a microsecond. Then James took him from me, leaving me with an overpowering feeling of loss.
‘Thank you Doctor. You’ve helped us so much. When you’re ready to join us you’ll know where to look.’
I tried to speak but only produced a grotesque hissing, so I sat numbly as they left the room. A little later there was an exultant shout from the crowd outside and I raised myself to the window. Beneath a strangely lit sky, James held the babe aloft for inspection. A man, bull-like with long wild hair and beard, pushed to the front and, weeping, laid a gold crown before the new king. On the front of the crown a snake writhed around a diamond crucifix. Another man, taller with jet black skin, held out an arm around which writhed a huge snake. Finally, a beautiful bronze-haired, green-eyed girl held out something red and dripping which the child took in its small hands and began to eat. I lay down and slept.
Date Unknown
I’m alone in the building, maybe even the city. I’ve gathered the remains of the nurses into a pile but have given up trying to match limb to torso. Sometimes a horrible hunger gnaws at me but I’m not yet ready for that final transitional step between the old world and this new one.
I think of Him a lot and wonder if I’ll meet Him again. So much madness has fallen from the stars and yet I wonder how often this has already happened in the dim history of this little sphere. He did bear a resemblance to His virgin mother – there’s no denying. But I must admit He probably looked more like His father.
LUVKRAFT VS KUTULU
Grant Morrison
The Great Old Ones from the Outer Dark, the Skeletons in the Cosmic Closet, the Forgotten, the Withheld, the Lloigor, the whole howling, flayed, obscene, transcendent Anti-Pantheon from Spaces Beyond and Between...
All real.
All time and space bent back and snapped credit card-style. Einstein’s universe, fucked like your sister by ravening cosmivorous theorems and feral mathematics of the ninth dimension, falls to its knees in an instant...and the sun turns to coal and the seas to a swill of industrial pollutants, seething acids and boiling faeces given brief unendurable consciousness. The sky is skinned like a zebra hide while numerous ‘monstrous new constellations’ contort into view in what can no longer be called with a straight face ‘the heavens’. Huge cathedral-engines of pistoning flesh twist into being from nowhere to trample the human race beneath crawling buttresses which rise and fall, thundering like supersonic guillotines, as they lawnmower through the cities and the countryside, the rainforests and the hollow mountains filled with nosy fuckers who failed to see this one coming. Everything is ground up and consumed in gale force rains of sulphuric acid. All life dispatched like the pathetic body in the bath in some bald cunt’s basement.
R’lyeh, the drowned hyperopolis, unfolding itself from the fathoms of the sea and the subconscious, covers the planet like a blush, meticulously converting all matter, all energy, all spirit into fuel for the Supercontext and the Imagination Furnaces of the Great Old Ones. Perfect comicbook thought bubbles rise from the bristling swaying chimneyfields of the extermination multiplexes; exclamations, famous last words, life stories, question marks, in their billions, like balloons at a funeral, literate smoke ascending and sifting to nothing.
And the end comes all at once; with bangs and whimpers equally represented. Uncounted millennia impact into seconds, then compress to a single point containing everything.
The aeons-long dream of Great Cthulhu is over and we are no more than sleep-grit the Prime Minister of Horror picks from the lost bowers of his eye orchards.
Ia Kutulu! Kutulu Fihtan! Ia! Ia! Ia!
Later that day:
CHAPTER ONE: VOMIT FROM THE PLEIADES
...The Witch House Bar and Everlasting Night Club is next door to the Pointless Place on Millionth Street-and-Never, deep in the Ultraviolet Gas Quarter of R’lyeh, the city without boundaries. This, for as long as we wanted it, would be Friday, August 13th, 1999.
At night, which is always, the city thunders and flexes restlessly. We leave the house, swept up in travelling swathes of light and indecipherable image, entering the electron rapids of fast forward video. This Supersituationist derive, throughtown, from our room-and-million-kitchen apartment above the shoggoth middens in Tsathoggua Street, to the Witch House is, as always, one long scrolling display of infinite novelty-rich, self-regenerations. Unstable forms and crackling steel moving in time-lapse around us.
The Taj Mahal...erupting through tar pools and concrete, the muslim dome spun like clay on a wheel and teased into cyrillic onionspires by invisible hands...the Kremlin... wiped and smeared upwards and upwards, evolving a protective carapace in the art deco style...The Chrysler Building...nods its head and sinks to its knees and elbows and is the Guggenheim ..metamophosing, hatching, opening endless doors into endless rooms where wideawake monsters come and go.
Vehicles strip to X-Ray blueprints, redesigning themselves perpetually – a hearse flowing into a black Trans Am that hatches like a bug into a dayglo Volkswagen and puts out spindle legs and runs up the wall, somersaulting backwards to helicopter wildly overhead in a clatter of unfolding propellers. Motheaten tents and stalls at the roundabouts have open suitcases filled with the full range of hallucinomorphic patches, plungers and coils. Mad Arabs offer books to soil the soul and sear the cornea of the mind’s eye. The market’s like a hairball of matted lanes, narrow stairs, gables and awnings and connected stone arches.
Weird old perverts in dusty antique shops sell fish masks and ships-in-bottles. The Innsmouth smell from every mossy stone and dripping grate. Here capitalism is still practised as a perversion by connoisseurs of the bizarre.
The last thing we need are stimulants or blockers.
Our bodies are self-governing autonomous narcotics factories already.
Oubliette is noisily experiencing fusion with the Cthulhic Net as she enters the third stage of the night’s latest mutation the way a train enters a tunnel too small for the train. I have to turn away. Some things are best left to the imagination, where they can be savoured alone in the dark as aids to masturbation
. My own physical transformation gifts me with sudden 360 degree insect vision however and I’m unable to ignore the sight of Oubliette becoming something that looks like a pterodactyl raping and gutting a young couple on their honeymoon. In wraparound multiple compound lens vision.
In the space that fills the gaps in our jostling schizomorphic skyline, the negative sun, blue and boiling with ten billion Hiroshimas per square inch – is fertilising a barely struggling infant B-type star. Ever since the original sun became host to parasitic Quasar pulses containing the unstoppable viral consciousness of Azathoth the Nuclear Chaos, these astronomical rape pageants have become more and more regular. Watching the filthy old neutron star tease younger suns into its gravitational field – some as young as 30 million years – is a sight to scar the cornea of the mind’s eye.
“You think too much,” Oubliette says and falls away into a full stop. I follow, both of us flickering like old film between flashcut streetscenes. The flame and the scream.
Through a window a red room with one malignant letter of the anti-alphabet scrawled on the tiles. Dead kids. Sick scrapbooks, dusty with atomic waste. Creaking gibbets. A crawling mold on the map of the moon. Serial killers etching novels by the light of purple candles in the locked bachelor pads that line the infected Sewers of the Qlippoth. Blood in the inkwell, the pen never runs dry.
Eerie orange lamp flickers candle down and become a blue flame with a little ghost’s face grinning inside. I anchor there and stop dead in the rotten, wet heart of the Quarter. Oubliette’s all around me at once, supertuning her biological spectrum to a rate of ten thousand phyla per second. For just a moment she is the living embodiment of the infinite diversity of life itself...and I want to fuck her all the way to the root of the atom.
Hot rain gusts suddenly, stripping human skin posters from the billboards, peeling our shadows off the cobbles and washing them downwind with the newspapers and leaves.
Some fucker is bellowing in Aklo, the guttural root language that was the cradle once of all swear words. We’re outside a raucous, overlit Shoggoth stye where nervous blue men and women titter weirdly and line up to lose their virginity in several hundred ways simultaneously. A crowd, emerging from the WitchHouse, gather to watch, bubbling like stew on the boil.
The Ultraviolet Quarter holds them all in its orbit, holds us all, filings in a magnetic field.
CHAPTER TWO: BEYOND THE COLOR FROM BEYOND
Brown Jenkin runs the Witch-House. The angles are all wrong but non-Euclidean geometry is the only way to pack in the millions-strong crowd. Jenkin – a sickening fermented thing combines in his DNA all the worst aspects of ferret, monkey and bearded baby and that’s the way he likes it. Tonight he’s gnawing holes behind the walls, creating freakish geometrical aberrations into which he’ll pack more customers.
Squeezed into prisms, labyrinths, clusters of unlikely cubes and planes in the unending mathematical intricacy of the Witch House are the clientele; a scintillating cross-section not only of the Quarter’s bohemian nightlife but also of a higher-dimensional omnifunctional entity which Brown Jenkin serves in his capacity as familiar. Everyone who is everyone is here tonight, in the most literal sense.
We thread through the cataracts and op-art folds in the toga of spacetime, looking for our contact, eager to light the fuse of the evening.
Pickman’s Daughter is ‘white with black shoulder-length reiterating guilt complexes’. It’s the only description we have but it’s enough....
Oubliette spots the painter’s living abortion in seconds, tucked away like a needle in a haystack of chiaroscuric feedback in the red gloom of the salon. She’s kissing witches gin from a corrupted Unholy Grail that suppurates through her fingers like the Tarot Seven of Cups – Debauch – and is then a nursing bottle, a pint mug, a Coca Cola green glass classic with tits, a gourd. And it’s true; her impressive complexes flow and fern and frame her like black fractal embroidery. They’re obviously not real but they suit her.
Older than lies, she keeps a portrait of herself in the attic and likes to fuck in front of it; a monstrous study in oils of a corrupted toad-like creature on IV, cancering out on stained hospital linen. Painted by Dad.
The Multiple Personality software stored in the Selfplex Primal Void is frilling into action, generating countless possible selves from consciousness-vacuum fluctuations. Tripping on the ripple from the NLP generators, we surf through the Selfplex menu options; we need to access the maximum rapport function. With NLP
cybernetic systems activated we can monitor, mirror and pace the behaviour everyone we encounter, allowing us to cut-and-paste seamlessly into any social situation.
So it is that Pickman’s Daughter greets us like long-lost friends although we have never met and probably never will in any meaningful sense.
“I practise a kind of origami, as applied to the physical form,” she says, in an attempt to make us think she thinks we’re stupid. Oubliette is cool, sipping Jesus-vintage Chardonnay from a colostomy bag. I grow a flashing angler fish bulb from my chin and perform the words ‘Fucking awesome, Pickman’s Daughter.’ as a four-word play, over and over again. The reactive dissonance amuses the old fraud as we knew it would. She stops and spins – an exploded barrel with eyes – then resolves down into something I can make sense of, talking all the time.
“My father was a twisted nerve of a man. He found some flaking pigment on the walls of the real world and picked it off with his nail. His masterpieces were simply attempts to capture what he saw behind the gloss and the emulsion. Behind the ghastly facade of THIS/NOT THIS.”
“But he was undeniably a mediocre photo-objectivist painter... and a white racist.” My statement seems irrelevant and impertinent but we’re in such poised rapport with Pickman’s Daughter that she simply laughs and goes on.
“Yes, he hated honkies.” Her momentarily bleak smile reminds me of a machete-cut in a pig’s haunch.
“Because he himself was one?” I ask, more out of boredom than anything else.
“He was simply the first human being to depict the squeezings accurately, as the Un-Ones began to crush their forms into 3-D. His work was considered nightmarish and nausea-inducing then but it was simply an attempt to render the impossible onto canvas. I don’t consider that racist.”
“It’s very hard to look at the impossible,” I agree.
Logic in the Witch House is as impeccable as it is maze-like.
“We’re both artists,” Oubliette yawns and to prove it, she etches her name into the table with a phial of concentrated hydrochloric acid.
“What do you know about the Yithians ?” I say abruptly. “The so-called Great Race of time-travelling intelligences?”
For the first time, she seems unimpressed and I suspect some glitch in my Selfplex files. Rapport is flaking away. She refrigerates me with a look and then speaks carefully.
“Completely fictional, like all the rest of this. The names alone are enough to tell you. ‘Yith’, ‘Yoth’, ‘Yuggoth’. It’s like a child being sick in space.” Pickman’s daughter shows her teeth and takes a sip of psychedelic venom. “Why do you ask ?”
“Because you’re the only person who knows the answer. If we were to ask anyone else, we’d be wasting our time.’’
“Yithians! Oh for Dagon’s fucking sake , the entire thing exists in Lovercraft’s head, don’t you understand? This world we’re in is entirely fictional, a dream reflected in the iridescent liquid crystal slime that illuminates and conceals Great Cthulhu’s mind-popping nakedness, a story reversing itself off the page into the ink on Lovecraft’s typewriter ribbon. The torn edge of a paper universe we can’t even see.”
Rapport is the wrong strategy obviously. She extends a tapering glassy probe into her bucket and sips a half-pint of nectar through a thick vein in her elegant snout.
“What does it matter ? We’re only words imagining themselves to be the things they describe. Haven’t you ever wondered what the consciousness is of words shepherded across
a page ? How they experience their own existence. We are a swarm of letters playing at being people. Sentences in Lovecraft’s head dot dot dot.”
Oubliette deftly cuts the Gordian knot of this tedious gnostic sulk before it throttles all our enthusiasm.
“Okay, So where do we find Lovecraft’s head, then?...”
Pickman’s Daughter makes a gothic arch with her eyebrow.
“Because when we find it, we’re going to poke holes in his skull and look inside to see ourselves tiny, running in terror as the sky falls in.”
“You’re taking me literally...” Pickman’s Daughter points out.
“Of course we are,” I say pleasantly. “As clinical schizophrenics, we’re symbol-blind. We lack the conceptual apparatus required for metaphorical thinking. Rolling stones simply gather no moss.”
I can see she’s weakening. It’s impossible not to like us.
“So where would a head like Lovecraft’s do its dreaming ?” Oubliette slithers.
All sound empties to a seven foot radius around Pickman’s Daughter. She’s folding herself into the child an octopus and lotus flower would conceive. Travelling tattoos, queasy magickal notation and malevolent runes ripple in bars and columns across her bellowing brow-sac.
“Where do you think?,” The words scan across her face like news on a Times Square billboard. She dismisses us with a perfect Voorish sign drawn in blue cigarette smoke and we’re plunged backwards through the wall like it’s layers of glue to hit the wet cobbles, exorcised black and blue.
“Where do you think?” Oubliette says, perfectly synthesising the voice of Pickman’s Daughter.
I know she knows what I’m going to say. It’s what we were hoping.
“The Pyramid.”
There’s only one way to see the Millennium Pyramid and we’d learned it from a man who’d lived there for years before coming to his senses. Whately was his Pyramid name and the Dho-Hna Meditation he taught is simply a way to look at what’s always there and recognise it for what it is.
The Starry Wisdom Page 15