August 6, 2015
Wall of horrors without form
I see ony tendrils and eyes
Place-holders for the unseeable
A landscape alive with malice
Howling down, a storm of flesh
Make my escape, strangely calm
Seated on the back of a horror
That once was my best friend
Bone, chitin, membranes, eyes
Loping on impossible appendages
The face alone recognizable
Amid a terror scarcely less
Than the one I flee for my life
Inspired by this.
August 2, 2015
I see them there, every time I pull up: the three stacked traffic lights at the intersection of Van Buren Avenue and Lewis Street. People drive by them every day, twice a day or more, without noticing.
But I do. I know their secret. I see it every time one goes dark, imperiously stopping me or sending me on my way. Tiny skulls, in shadows of amber, crimson, or jade, leering out of the glass.
I’ve tried pointing them out, bringing people into my confidence about the evil that has overtaken that intersection. But they all laugh or cluck their tongues, saying things about LED lights and optical illusions. But I am not fooled; I know better.
Those lights are the locus of all that is evil in the world, a poisonous seed spreading tendrils throughout a tranquil garden.
I know what I must do.
July 27, 2015
Canto the Fifth
In those caverns deep where no light will dare
The Seeker of Knowledge waits patiently there
With great red-rimmed eyes and features of stone
He seeks to know all and he seeks it alone
Bargains he will make and deals he will strike
For knowledge alone without malice or strife
For that’s what sustains him, that what he craves
All new information stored deep within the caves
But be wary of him and his treasures do shun
For it’s knowledge he gathers but of it he gives none
For the deep set Seeker is where good facts go to die
And you will die too should you meet with his Eye
July 19, 2015
Near the end of the Golden Age of the Abbasid Caliphate, engineers digging an irrigation ditch uncovered a most curious item. Accounts differ as to whether it was found there or plunged to the site in a ball of fire from the heavens, but all agree on the nature of the object: a nearly perfect cube of a material that was smooth as obsidian, warm to the touch, and roughly the size of a man’s head. Astonishing its discoverers, the cube was surrendered to the Caliph reigning in Baghdad and his House of Wisdom, the greatest grouping of scientific minds of this or any age.
It was called sagheer kaaba or little cube by those who found it, in reference to its shape as a near-perfect cube. Many in the House of Wisdom found the sagheer kaaba to be pleasingly evocative of the holy Kaaba in the Great Mosque, the House of God. For this reason, it was felt by some in Baghdad that the sagheer kaaba must be divine in and of itself, a gift from Allah.
The Caliph warned sternly against this, promising to punish as idolaters any who bowed to the sagheer kaaba in prayer and ignored the directive in hadith and surah that only the holy Kaaba in Mecca was to be used for such. Nevertheless, the Caliph allowed the study and display of the sagheer kaaba within the House of Wisdom as a curiosity.
One of the greatest minds of his age, the polymath Ibn Al-Haytham was the first to discover a curious property of the sagheer kaaba during an experiment in physics. The object had the curious property of generating an electric current in any conductor it touched–or even was brought into close proximity with. Ibn Al-Haytham was able to use the sagheer kaaba to power a variety of small automatons he constructed for the Caliph’s amusement, and the fragmentary Baghdad Chronicle records the Caliph’s son being delighted by a “mechanism of skittering brass legs like unto a spider” with the cube perched on top of it.
Study continued after the deaths of Al-Haytham and the reigning Caliph, with increasingly elaborate devices being designed to draw on the sagheer kaaba‘s power, which was found to grow at a geometric rate in response to the demands made upon it. It powered baths, moving walkways in the palace, lights that burned without wicks or oil, and a series of catapults and crossbows arrayed in the city walls for the purpose of defense.
In time, too, the younger Caliph wavered in his father’s attitude toward the sagheer kaaba as an focal point of worship. Arguing that its wondrous properties could mean nothing but a divine origin, the Caliph and his household began directing their daily prayers to Allah to the small cube rather than the great one. The House of Wisdom’s best scholars noted with unease that the cube seemed to increase its power output as a response to these prayers, and several quietly quit their posts and left Baghdad.
When the great imams of Baghdad learned of the Caliph’s actions, they demanded that he cease his heresy at once. He agreed through a messanger and announced that the sagheer kaaba had been destroyed, but thereupon he and his household were largely confined to the palace and did not appear in public. Observers from the House of Wisdom noted that the Caliph’s palace was increasingly fortified, and that the sagheer kaaba-powered defenses had begin appearing inside the city walls, at the palace’s battlements.
Eventually, the Caliph’s eldest son returned from campaigning against the Mongols in Iran and attempted to meet with his father. Denied access–again through a messenger–he snuck in through a secret oubliette. The next day, shaken and trembling, the Caliph’s son summoned the imams, the House of Wisdom’s scholars, and the commander of the Baghdad garrison. Without giving an explanation other than heresy and continued idolatry, he insisted that an attack on the palace begin at once.
When an emissary sent to the Caliph returned full of crossbow bolts, the luminaries of Baghdad agreed to the assault. They soon found out how efficient the new defenses were, though, and if the records are to be believed close to 10,000 men were wounded or killed in the battle–cut down by all manner of infernal machines. The troops that did pierce the inner sanctum were sworn to secrecy, but several accounts of moldering bodies locked in the harem and the sagheer kaaba floating in glory on a throne of gold nevertheless survived.
The new Caliph declated the sagheer kaaba to be a thing of the devil, a demon set loose upon the earth, and attempted to destroy it. The Mongols preempted this, however, with their great assault on Baghdad’s weakened defenses. With the sagheer kaaba‘s miraculous machines no longer functioning, the enlightened city of Baghdad fell to the invaders in only 12 days.
Unreliable accounts indicate that the sagheer kaaba was delivered to the Khan as a curiosity along with the Caliph’s severed head. In any case, its last known whereabouts were in the titanic convoy of plunder that left Baghdad in 1259 bound for Karakorum.
July 16, 2015
HOPEWELL, MI – It has been said that human subcultures are fractally nested, and that there is no bottom. Pundits have also claimed that in the age of the internet, people with interests so specific and so far outside the mainstream can come together and commiserate in ways that would have once been impossible. Putting both of those ideas to the test is the emerging subculture of “benchwarmers.”
Despite what the name may suggest, “benchwarmers” are not people who are left on the sidelines during sporting events. As an anonymous “benchwarmer” put it in an interview with the Hopewell Democrat-Tribune, “we call ourselves ‘benchwarmers’ because we’re on the bleachers all the time.” In other words, the “benchwarmer” subculture is made up of people who regularly drink bleach.
One might think that, given bleach’s propensity to cause chemical burns, that such a subculture might go extinct after its first outing. However, the “benchwarmer” that spoke to the Democrat-Tribune disagreed. “We start with a very low concentration, just enough to get the taste and the burning sensation,” she said, “and then we gradually increase the percentage of sodium hypoclorite.” This accelerates the formation of scar tissue that protects the drinker from the full effects of the caustic chemical.
Gathering on web sites and forums like “The Bleachfields” or “Sodium Hypocrites,” the “benchwarmers” share their stories of internal injury, oral and coleorectal scarring, and different ways of diluting bleach so that its ingestion does not cause instant and painful death. The sites also maintain “Benchwarmer MVP” lists with information about fallen members of the subculture and the highest percentage of sodium hypoclorite they were able to ingest before death.
“Cloroxian1977 is still a legend on The Bleachfields,” said the anonymous source. “He was able to get up to a solution of 37% NaClO before his organs ruptured.” Our source maintains that the dream of a human being who is able to drink pure, undiluted bleach–100% sodium hypoclorate–remains the dream of the subculture.
Responding to criticisms that “benchwarming” is a suicidal fixation and most likely a manifestation of a mental illness like pica, the Democrat-Tribune‘s source became defensive. “It’s a very freeing, cleansing thing, and extremely important to our mental well-being,” she said. “People ingest dangerous amount of chemicals all the time, we are simply more open about it.”
At press time, the “benchwarmers” associated with The Bleachfields online forum were attempting to have their first in-person convention at the Southern Michigan University convention center. The head of that facilty told us that he would not be “party to a suicide pact” and had refused to let the space. In a response, the campus diversity officer blasted his concerns as “exclusionary” and “divisive.”
July 2, 2015
There it was, again: the unmistakable outline of a cuttlefish, all eyes and tentacles beneath a looming mantle. Drawn in what seemed like chalk but indelible and raised to the touch–a paint pen, perhaps, or something similar. Like the others, it was on metal rather than the surrounding pavement, a street elevator door this time rather than a drainpipe or capped steam radiator.
I added another pin to the map that was evolving on my cell. Since seeing my first cuttlefish graffiti a month ago near the Modern Times bookstore, I had noticed them proliferate across the city where I worked as a delivery driver. Always on metal, always on white, always more and more of them.
Once, I delivered a package to a deli whose owner was trying to scrub one of the glyphs off of a standpipe. It resisted his best efforts with rubbing alcohol, turpentine, and even sandpaper. I lent him a bottle of the Goobusters liquid we use to get rid of sticker residue, and not even that potent petroleum distillate made a dent.
What initially started as an idle way to pass the time on my various delivery runs quickly became a mild obsession. As I saw more and more of the things, always on metal, always on something connected to the ferrous sinews that ran beneath the city, I began to feel increasingly uneasy.
The pins on my map were beginning to resolve into a discrete form, and it was not a form that bespoke a crude campaign of stick-it-to-the-man scribbling.
It was a form that suggested the closing of the world in a maelstrom of madness.
June 29, 2015
The hearse arrived at midnight, rolling quietly down the cul-de-sac. A thing of night even in daylight, it was like an oily distortion in the dark air, recognizable only in the dim lights reflected in its gloss and the pair of rheumy beams it cast forward.
It pulls up in the dark, further than can be seen. Up to the house where the police cruisers and an ambulance clustered, flashed, a few hours before? Not the way things were usually done, but perhaps. A false alarm might have turned into the real thing, with nothing left to do but summon the last limousine.
A lone relative, without a car, dropped off from a ceremony where they were the soule mourner? The kindness that one ought to be grateful for turned into icy unease by the thick empty weight of the compartment behind. They rode in the same car just last week, only not like this. Not like this.
Suppose that the late hour and the light are just right that it’s the great Hearse itself, the one driven by the Man in Black who awaits at each crossroad. Come to collect, trading scythe for side panels and robes for road but still inky, still inscrutable, still inevitable. Cut him off in late-night traffic if you dare.
Sleep comes on heavy wings; the hearse does not reappear. A metaphor, if nothing else, of the uncertainty at the end of our own rides therein, no matter how certain we be of our destinations.
May 28, 2015
“T-that’s not hair!” cried James, recoiling in horror. “Those are tentacles!”
“Yes,” said Cephy sadly, her unusual yellow-blue eyes glowing all the more fiercely. “I am actually an octopus driving a sophisticated animatronic puppet.”
“H-how has n-no one noticed that before?”
“Hats, and living in New York City. I don’t even have the weirdest hair secret in my building.”
May 19, 2015
It was that hum that first keyed most people into the fact that something was deeply wrong.
Oh, there had been signs before. Flocks of birds flying south in June, for one. Massive deaths among the ones that stayed, like the flock that beat itself to death against the front windows of the IGA. Lots of people lost their dogs, and lots more found them cowering under couches and in crawlspaces.
But that hum, that ominous pitch-defying hum that seemed like the music of the spheres one moment and a dire portent the next…that ever-uneasy tone that seemed straight out of the sound design for a horror movie.
We knew where it was coming from: cicadas. 17-year cicadas, emerging from their split shells to sing from the treetops. It shouldn’t have been anything to worry about, just an annoyance. But seeing the creatures was what made most people sit up and take notice.
It had only been five years since they’d last come up. The 17-year cicadas were 12 years early for the first time in human history, and nobody had any idea why.
We found out soon enough.
May 14, 2015
It had been a long night for the group of students holed up in Tammy’s parents’ holiday house in the mountains. First, a fierce storm blowing in off the mountains had put the kibosh on their plans to smooch each other out in the sunshine and at the lake. Then the power had gone out; when Bernard went to check the breakers, he never came back.
Eventually, the indoor smooching had stopped and the others had gone looking for him. Michelle had found his body, with the head sucked clean off, stuffed in an upstairs broom closet. She’d also seen a dark shape darting across the landing, and wet webbed footprints soaking into the carpet.
That had been enough to interrupt the smooching, if only briefly.
Picked off one by one, eventually the group was whittled down to the last two. They were cornered by the murderous creature, the shadow that had decapitated all their friends, out by the pool. Illuminated by the spotlights, it was fully visible for the first time: a monstrous, bipedal frog!
Tammy accidentally fell into the pool, horrified at the sight. Erica tried to grab her hand but the frog dove in after her first. Swimming faster than Tammy could sink, Erica couldn’t look away even as she was sure her friend was a goner.
And that’s when they came between Tammy and the pursuing megafrog: giant tadpoles, tails writhing, whose faces were the faces of every head the prowling amphibian had gathered. It hadn’t just been hunger or bloodlust, but a horrifying circle of life that had driven the creature’s depredations.
Batting the tadpoles aside, the frog swam greedily for the flailing Tammy. With her last gasp of breath, she entreated the only person for aid that she could think of in her final moments, the only one she was sure could rescue her:
“Help me, Mr. Darcy, you’re my only hope!”
Excerpts From Nonexistent Books 