Whispers From The Abyss (10 page)

Hammich scowled, not understanding.

Telly smiled grimly. “Did you know there was an earthquake near here about a week ago?” he asked.

Hammich nodded. He’d heard it had been a small quake, deep in the earth’s crust. A common oceanic occurrence, as he understood it.

“I think this was trapped down there,” Telly added, “and the quake jarred it loose.” He laughed. “Such providence.”

At the boat’s bow, Edwin dropped his binoculars and peered nervously at Hammich. “Pop!” he shouted. “There’s more! They’re—they’re everywhere! Look!”

Hammich browsed the surrounding waters and saw them. More of the masses. Thousands more. Of all shapes and sizes, floating, waiting, dreaming. Rivulets of fear coiled through him.

“They’re drawn to the words in this,” said Telly, opening the book. His tone was somber. “My grimoire: a copy of an ancient text.”

Questions swarmed through Hammich’s head like angry bees. His eyes moved to the book and though he was afraid to ask he did so anyway. “What’s it do?”

“Many things,” Telly replied, standing. He motioned towards the legion of floating masses. “They are dead, in a way. This will help wake them, give them purpose.” Telly flipped to a page at back of the book and started reading from it. His tone was low, practically a whisper. The words he spoke were foreign, guttural, commanding.

His whisper transformed into a chant and the clear things began to stir. The white filaments glowed neon bright. Their masses spread wide, sprouting long whipping tentacles. The sea became frothy with their frenzied movements. A shrill keening soon filled the air, an angry, hungry sound.

A war cry.

Hammich, horrified, staggered to the boat’s wheelhouse and tried to start the motors. They wouldn’t start. Edwin joined him under the canopy and tried to help. It was no use. The clear mass behind them was entwined in the propellers, preventing them from turning. Hammich looked back at Telly, who’d begun to weep freely.

“I’m sorry about this, my friends,” he said, a strange resolve shining in his wet eyes.  “I truly am. But this is war and they require oblation.”

Hammich’s face went slack.

Edwin went to say something. Before he could get the first word out, however, clear tentacles leapt from the waters, rushing into the boat and wrapping themselves around both he and Hammich. Barbed and no longer pudding-soft, the tentacles squeezed hard, cutting into the two men and lifted them high into the air. The men screamed. The tentacles quivered and tore them in half, letting their blood and entrails pour into the sea.

At once, the keening stopped. The waters stilled. The masses vanished beneath the surface. Their tentacles thrashed rhythmically, propelling towards the Great Deep. Towards their enemies.

Still weeping, Telly waited a good five minutes to allow himself to calm down. Then he went to boat’s controls and fired up the motors, which started immediately. Anchors up, he pulled the boat around and plotted a course for the mainland, for Ipswitch.

For Innsmouth.

There was much to do in the days ahead. The next phase of the war had begun and he needed to prepare what remained of his family for the horrors soon to come.

I stood in front of the temple entrance. It was unlike any building I’d ever seen.  Instead of straight lines, the facade was cascade of spirals carved out of the face of the mountain, in pale rose stone. The entrance was a dark and open mouth, cool and inviting.

“This is ancient Cas-hal-Min,” said Jemplim. “Quite deserted for thousands of years.”

“It’s so very beautiful,” I replied. The temple was decorated with the statues of women. In Europe we called them the stone mothers, women with fertile-ripe bodies, breasts and stomachs and thighs. Instead of faces, these desert statues had ropes of carved vines, or, perhaps, featureless snakes.  I pointed to the statues flanking the temple’s entrance. “You call them the Mi-Zar, the ancient mothers, don’t you?”

Jemplim frowned at my in-elegant use of his dialect, and I smiled. After all these months, he had not gotten used to the sound of my accent. Jemplim spoke beautifully cultured English. It pained him to hear me mangle his native tongue. But out of politeness he allowed me to practice the language. English seemed out of place here, it felt too modern. It was better to speak the old language of the desert.

I heard music, dream-like, evocative and familiar.

“
Elizabeth do you hear that?” asked Jemplim. “The wind brings music.”

I heard the music, in the far distance, as sound carried on the desert wind, a mirage of sound reflected over the sand.

“We should be going now,” said Jemplin. He touched my arm, gently and gestured to the jeep.

Jemplin was native to this land. I’d hired him six months ago to be my guide. Over the course of our search, we’d become close. Close enough, almost, to forget why I’d come here. I regretted what I had to do. Jemplin was a good man. I was going to hurt him. “No, Jemplin,” I said quietly. “I’m going inside the temple.”

“You can’t,” he said. A look of panic flooded his face. “You gave me your word.”

“I’m sorry, but did you really think I’d come this far and no further?”

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t allow it, Elizabeth.”

I’d promised that once we set foot in the courtyard, I wouldn’t attempt to enter the temple. Taboo he told me; sealed over with curses; it would be disrespectful to the dead to set foot in such a place; the temple was old and decayed and it would be dangerous to step inside. He’d given me many reasons why I shouldn’t enter the temple–but not the true one.

I took a couple of steps towards the temple entrance. When he grabbed my arm, it surprised me. He was such a gentle man. I’d never seen him raise his hand, against any creature.

“I’m begging you, Elizabeth. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Jemplim, I do know, and if you try and stop me, you know what will happen.” Already the heat shimmered in front of the stone Mi-Zar guardians. They trembled.

“This temple is the resting place of something old, something that should remain alone.”

The wind floated through the courtyard, bright-scented with the smell of desert musk.

“I know that, Jemplim.”

“You know? You lied to me?”

I nodded. “I know what’s in the temple. She waits for me.”

“Do you think that the old one will give you your children back, and that you will be happy, again? Elizabeth, she is not what you think.”

“I didn’t know that you knew about my children,” I said. I thought that I’d been so clever, so discreet.

“It seems that we have both been withholding the truth, Elizabeth,” said Jemplim. “When a woman seeks this city, it is the first thing that we think of. We made enquiries. I know that you lost your children. But I’d hoped that your story was true. I convinced myself that you were looking only for knowledge, not for the gifts of the mother.”

“Why did you bring me here, Jemplim?”

“You would have found the way. When she calls to a woman, they find the way.” He stared into my face. “And, I did not want you to be alone at this time.” He stroked my throat. “The stone mother will not give you back your children, Elizabeth.”

“She will.” She had made the promise in my dreams. That’s why I’d traveled across the world to find her.

“She will not. She will give you something that looks like them, sounds and thinks like them, but underneath there will be something other, something old, and strange born in the distant skies. The things that are waiting to be born, Elizabeth. The women of my family know this. The times of bitterness have taught them. That is why she’s reaching out to others.”

“You have no choice, Jemplim.” I kissed him gently, lightly as a mother would kiss a child. “Go back to your tribe. We’ll make our own way, or perhaps we will stay. This temple has been deserted for too long.”

“If I go, I’ll bring the men of my tribe to kill the creatures that come out of the temple. They will not be your children, and we will not endure such things to live.”

“You will try, Jemplim, I never expected anything less of you.”

He stared at me, trying to read the language in my face. But he never truly understood me, we came together a little ways. But no further.

I tried to take another step, but Jemplim held me tightly. The stone guardian turned her head towards us, the stone tentacles beginning to unwind.

I did not think that a man could make such a desolate cry.

Jemplim left me.

I continued my journey, to tread the path, so many other mothers, had trod before. My children. Nothing would keep me from them.

The stone mother knew that, she understood the language of my heart, and old and alien as she was, I would speak to her.  And if my children helped the old mother bring her own children to life, then what of it?  I understood her. We spoke the same language.

B. I. #54 09-08

Halfway along the seven hundred steps leading to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.

Ultimately, I have to say this: "I am surprised by everything that happened." A laconic phrase—not the sort of thing for which I am known, I suppose, but what I'm known for and what I am are two different things. One would hope so, right? Until just now, in fact, I would have argued till I was blue in the face that there could be no worse fate than being known for exactly the sort of person you actually are.

Q….

The
Midwest. Of America. The country, not the continent. Of the North American continent.  The middle west of the country that is itself the middle of the upper half of the landmass on the Western hemisphere—the one we cut a little sliver of the canal through right at its narrowest point, to stimulate trans-Oceanic trade, but then again you probably know all about oceans, don't you? There was a book I read once—a kid's book, but I read it recently, not during my own childhood, as I had found a dog-eared and wrinkled copy of it in a classroom—in which the main character receives a postcard from…was it her brother? Or maybe she sent the postcard. Anyway, the postcard depicted a lake scene, and the brother, or maybe the character herself, wrote over the lake image: "Wish you were here—glub glub!" That still strikes me as funny, even now, but only because there is sufficient distance between the character discussing the postcard and the actual terror of drowning that I am able to crack a smile at the thought.

Does my laconic nature—as opposed to my loquacious demeanor, anyway—come from my life in the
Midwest? Far from water, far from the natural centers of trade and traffic, places where it makes sense to develop polylingualism(1), or at least the gift of gab? Well, the word "laconic" comes from "Lacedaemon", the region of Greece whose capital was Sparta. It's called Laconia now. By "now", I mean up until a few minutes ago. There's nobody left to call it anything, right? Right? The Spartans were rough customers, baby-killers and fascists to a man and woman. But they had a knack for turning an unadorned yet pithy phrase. When Lycurgus, the founder of Sparta's militaristic society, was pressured to initiate democratic reforms, he told his interlocutor "Start with your own family." My own family was rather democratic, at least early on, but I still think of myself as pretty laconic, in speech if not in writing.

(1) As opposed to "multilingualism." Polylingualism implies an understanding that speakers use the features of the languages of which they are familiar—most Americans have encountered someone for whom English is a foreign language and who uses English vocabulary, but who may use the structure of another language when constructing utterances (e.g., the Greek immigrant father of an acquaintance of mine back in Boston used to ask the question "What time it is?", which is sufficiently grammatical in his native tongue—
ti wra einai
?). Multilingualism as a term implies a construction of language in which a speaker expresses competencies in multiple languages. Centers of trade and colonialism—which tend to develop near large bodies of water for reasons both obvious and occulted—tend toward the polylingual and toward the development of pidgins (generally "simple" languages that develop when adults lack a common language with which to communicate) and, later, creoles (stable languages that evolve from intergenerational transmission of pidgins).

Q….

Of course you end up becoming yourself. Humans are not shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, and though the human brain could be described as just that, there are some limits to neuroplasticity(2), and limits to how the social environment we inhabited until just a few minutes ago allow us to behave. Jon Kabat-Zinn put it well: "Wherever you go, there you are." Or, to look at it from the inside out, that is, as though you have just turned me inside out, "neurons that fire together wire together." That aphorism—yes, it is a laconic phrase—is from Canadian psychologist Donald Olding Hebb.

Q….

Yes, it would be fair to say that Canada and the American Midwest have much in common. I don't know if it has much to do with Earth's magnetic fields or longitude; my instinct is to say that there is no real electromagnetic influence upon human brains. That is, at least a Somali who moves to St. Paul, Minnesota doesn't necessarily immediately take upon the attitude, affect, and idiolect(3) of a native-born American of Scandinavian extraction. For that matter, nor does a Swede emigrating to St. Paul, Minnesota.

(2) Essentially, the more a certain neural pathway fires, the less plastic it becomes. Long-term potentiation is vital for memory, the formation of language, and personality. It might also explain the persistence of suicidal ideations, even if the circumstances the brain finds itself in—is the body-box it's running around in wandering through a pleasant meadow, or is that same body-box being compelled, by other brains in other body-boxes, to consume a certain batch of chemicals that the other brains believe can "fix" the broken brain—change. Can a brain even be used to fix a brain? What is the reference point available for Brain no. 1 to repair Brain no. 2, especially as both are separated by layers of body-boxes, and can communicate only through the extremely awkward and vague tool of language, and the hyper-efficient and thus utterly complex and easily screwed-up tool of mathematics? And Brain no. 2 rarely knows sufficient math, much less biochemistry, to keep up with its doctor—Brain no. 1. So Brain no. 2 sometimes just keeps screaming, "Let me out of here!" no matter what sort of medical, psychological, and psychopharmaceutical interventions are available to it.

(3) The bog-standard definition of "idiolect" is the individual, even unique, use of language by a single person. But given that language is inherently communal—even the last surviving native speaker of the Manx language pleaded with the scholars who recorded him for corrections to his grammar and vocabulary—can idiolect truly be individual? Indeed, even if we were to assume axiomatically that idiolect was individual and unique, we'd simply be kicking a can down the road. What is an "individual" other than an abstraction based on observations of socially performed behaviors? You look at my bandana and decide that I am a "cool guy" or am trying to play the role of a "cool guy." I look at my own bandana and think of myself as an ugly half-orc who sweats excessively and whom nobody could ever ever love.

Q….

That's an interesting question, and by interesting I mean terrifying. I'm surprised at both my own terror and by my seeming equanimity in the face of the terror. A few possibilities come to mind.

It's practically a cliché of pastiche for the author to make the false extratextual truth claim that fictional texts are true. One writes a Sherlock Holmes story by first deciding to tell the lie that Arthur Conan Doyle's creation was not his creation, but an actual living person whose continuing adventures are discovered rather than created. It's somehow less satisfying—postmodern pyrotechnics aside—when a character made flesh and blood by the collective imagination of millions turns to the reader and says, "Hey there, I'm just a number of black marks on white paper, and aren't you the sucker for even pretending otherwise?" There's an appeal to and request for sincerity of (suspension of dis)belief followed by a vicious attack on the reader once she or he surrenders the coin of sincerity. When I read that stuff, when Sherlock Holmes turns and winks, not at me but at the author who made him wink, and I get to be the butt of the joke for believing that Sherlock could wink of his own accord, I feel like I've just had a chair kicked out from under me.(4)

(4) NB: playing it straight doesn't always help when it comes to matters of pastiche either. Poe's
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
(1838) ends rather enigmatically with the line "But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow." There's a rather enormous "possibility space" there—who was the figure? Why does the narrative stop there? Why does Pym, through Poe—in the sort of fictionalized textual claim of extratextual truth that undergraduates like to call postmodern though Poe doesn't even qualify as modern—deliver the manuscript to the author without explaining his return to the mainland, and why doesn't Poe himself either press the (imaginary) Pym or simply finish the "real" ("false") story? Good questions all, which H. P. Lovecraft attempted to answer in his own work by filling the possibility space of the "figure [with] the perfect whiteness of the snow" under the Mountains of Madness with
Aptenodytes albus
—fictional six-foot-tall albino penguins. Needless to say, that was an extremely stupid move.

Of course, you didn't ask about characters so much as circumstance. So am I a brain, disembodied thanks to an ice-cream scooper in a crustaceous-fungoid claw(5) , now "living" in a canister the size of a cylindrical Dictaphone reel, being interviewed? Am I a library book simply being read by the post-human beetle with a Yithian library card? Or am I a nameless pawn(6) in Dallas Fort Worth, in 1958, being experimented upon by the same rogue cabal of scientists who would a few years from now use high-powered magnets to rewire Lee Harvey Oswald into a perfect presidential killing weapon. Is that why I hallucinated the prior exchange about magnetic fields, why the letters
DFW
seem compelling to me when I roll them over in my mind?

(5) Why would a Mi-Go want anything to do with a human brain? Consider the lobster. We put them into pots of boiling water despite what most human observers can recognize as the lobster's natural preferences for dark places, cooler waters, and life. We even have developed narratives that disenfranchise the lobster, that rob it of its sensorium and its ability to suffer. It's not a far extension to suggest that an alien would have similar narratives about us and our primitive, inarticulate mewlings about the body, about life, about liberty, about the pursuit of happiness here on the
Planet of the Apes
.

(6) Figuratively, not literally. It's important to note when one is being figurative while experiencing a phantasmagorical psychodrama, as otherwise every utterance can be fruitfully, if inaccurately, read as a truth claim.

As long as it's not one of those things where I wake up and it's all a dream. I have to say I've always wondered what it would have been like to read, say,
The Box of Delights
, when it was first published, when that ending still had the power to amaze. These days, we've all been wired to despise dreamland narratives thanks to too much television-watching. Enthusiastic readers and viewers are neurologically hardened against being surprised or enthralled by cliché; we consume clichés for their soporiferous powers. I know I do. Did.

Q….

You're right; you are the ones asking the questions here.

Q….

My philosophical training, abortive as it was, didn't prepare me to answer any philosophical questions. Honestly, I doubt that any philosopher can really answer any philosophical questions; all they can do is use language to rephrase philosophical questions in such a way that preclude the answers they've already decided to dislike and distrust. The dislike and distrust of any particular answer probably comes from either early childhood training or experiences, or some intrinsic human loathing for the hidden implications of the answers. But I think I can give it the old college try, if I'm allowed to ask you one question.

Q….

I'll explain why I ask even as I ask, all right? Let's say I'm just having an NDE(7) —all I know is what I know, at most. Perhaps my brain cells are already dying from oxygen-starvation, so I actually know rather less now than what I would normally know. In other words, this isn't a moment when I'd be able to experience some profound epiphany or even come up with a satisfying, if flip, answer. However, if you are who you claim to be, and if I am now where you claim I am, you should be able to answer the question I put to you in a way that is both sensible and elegant.

In
At the Mountains of Madness
, we are told that Danforth, like Lot's wife, turns back toward the "upward seething, grotesquely clouded sky." The sight, whatever it was, drove him utterly insane. And this is after Danforth had actually read the
Necronomicon
, cover to cover, with no more ill effect than deciding to continue to graduate school. I consider this lack of information, this unfilled possibility space, a very good move on Lovecraft's part. Anything he described would be a letdown compared to what the fevered brain of the average teenage misfit could come up with. Lovecraft's downfall was too-minute descriptions of every scale and tentacle. But tell me, what did Danforth see?

(7) Most reports of near-death experiences can be categorized into one of several types: the ascent into a beautiful, yet terrible light; the much rarer descent into a terrible, yet beautiful light; the experience of a "life review"—that is, one's own already-lived life flashing before one's eyes; and the experience of a "life preview"—that is, one sees how one will live out one's own life if one agrees to leave behind the light and return to the world of matter. For this reason, I have to say that I don't believe this interrogation to be an NDE. On the other hand, all the reports of NDEs are of themselves reports of only of one of two major types of NDE, specifically the NDE that doesn't conclude with a DE. A N(DE) may be qualitatively different than a N(NDE)—>DE.