Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (14 page)

“I’m not sure how long I remained in this trance state: it felt as if I were a viewer of day-to-day Atlantis for years, but in point of fact it was really probably around an hour or so. The last image I can recall being shown to me was that of the destruction of Atlantis itself, an event known as “The Hour of Godseye”: I saw a number of explosions lay waste to that terrible and glorious city, explosions that unleashed great black and red horns of smoke into the sky. Then I saw the island itself sink into the sea, watched it get swallowed up by the hungry ocean. All of this disturbed me greatly. Why had the Atlantean people committed a mass suicide in such a spectacular fashion (as I was sure that it was a deliberate act: the explosions had obviously been controlled)?

“When I came back to my senses, I found that the ritual was over, and that the barn was all but deserted, save for Frater Tsalal, my friend, and myself. In an excited fashion, I began to relate to them all of the wondrous things I had seen. They then told me that I had been in a trance state for an hour, and that while I had been in this trance state I had written out a letter. Confused, I asked them what they meant, and they informed me that while in the trance I had demanded a writing instrument and some scraps of paper. When these requested items were thus provided to me, I began writing on the paper while remaining in a trance. Essentially what I had been doing was a kind of automatic writing, or so I first assumed. Curious about all of this, I asked to see what I had written, and they handed over to me the ‘letter,’ which had been written onto a few sheets of ordinary lined paper.

“To put it as bluntly as possible, it appeared that while I was in this trance state my body was possessed by an ancient Atlantean priest who went by the somewhat flamboyant name of Vor-Thol-Farrazza. And while he was briefly in control of my body, he had taken the opportunity to write out a warning to our modern-day civilization. At first I was skeptical about this; I wondered if perhaps Frater Tsalal had written out the letter himself prior to the ritual and lied to me about my having written it. The only flaw with this hypothesis was that the handwriting in the letter was my own, and to prove it to myself afterwards I took it and another example of my writing to a graphologist, who carefully compared the two and declared that they were indeed both written by the same person. Which left me with the following conclusion: either Frater Tsalal was a master forger (which I doubted: he looked like the sort of person who would be unable to open a jar of jam), or I had actually written out this letter in my trance state.

“I wish that I still had this letter, as I would have enclosed it with this note you’re now reading, but I was so repulsed by the knowledge which I gained from it that I ended up setting fire to it in disgust. But I recall enough of it to summarize it to you. Vor-Thol-Farrazza (for the sake of brevity I’ll refer to him simply as “Vor” for the rest of this account) was a theological scientist during the Last Days of Atlantis. In many ways he was a man much like myself, a hermetic and erudite fellow in search of ancient knowledge. At the time of his temporal existence, he had been a member of Atlantis’ Party of Science, whose symbol was a pyramid with an eye in the center, this pyramid being encircled by a snake biting its own tale. The Party of Science’s base of operations was the palace of Zukong Gimorland-Siragosa, this palace resembling a giant black pyramid that was thousands of feet high: the top point of the pyramid employed anti-gravity generators to hover 500 feet above the base, and inscribed into the center of this tip was an enormous unblinking eye. Vor, a student of the great scientist known as Gruad, was one of the most acclaimed scientists in the kingdom of Atlantis: it was he who had figured out how to imprison the monstrous Lloigor Yog-Sothoth in the Great Pentagram of Atlantis. In any event, prior to Atlantis’ destruction Vor had been in charge of a special committee authorized by Emperor Bas-Dalu-Valik, the purpose of this committee being to take all of the then current religions and spiritual belief systems of the world of Antiquity and synthesize them into a new unified and harmonic theological system, which would then become the official state religion of Atlantis. Essentially, the task that Vor was undertaking was the exact same thing as what I had been attempting to do with my Yellow Notebook, just on a much grander scale.

“For many months, Vor toiled in the great circular libraries of Atlantis, working around the sundial to create this new and improved religion, and in this task he was aided by his fellow scientists, along with a few of Atlantis’ most erudite priests and priestesses. Finally, they succeeded in their task: but there was just one flaw. That is, the primordial ur-flaw: the problem of evil. The priests and scientists of Atlantis wondered, why do children suffer? Why do human beings age and die? Why does metal rust, and food spoil? How to explain decay? In our so-called enlightened age, to answer some of these questions we turn to the second law of thermodynamics, which defines our concept of entropy. But the priests and esoteric mathematicians of ancient Atlantis were far more innovative and creative in their approach to these questions.

“After long periods of strenuous astral travel and Akashic workings, Vor and his team came to two final conclusions. Their first conclusion was that the world we see around us, the world which we perceive with our senses, was just an illusion; or, at the very least, a flimsy imitation of a higher (or, perhaps, lower) reality. This was hardly an earthshattering revelation, as later religious belief systems (such as Hinduism and Gnosticism) arrived at pretty much the same conclusion. But the second discovery of the Atlanteans was far more horrifying. They claimed to have unearthed another layer of reality, this one being far superior to our own, and this reality (of which our world is just a shadow) was populated by creatures so incredibly hostile that the Atlanteans couldn’t even bring themselves to describe their physical appearance. These creatures, whom the Atlanteans referred to as the Entropiors, survived on a diet of matter itself. In other words, these invisible monsters were the true cause that lay behind what we classify today as entropy or decay. They created the universe as we know it to serve as a steady food supply, almost as if the cosmos we live in is their own personal garden, or a galactic slaughterhouse. We perceive the presence of these Entropiors as the gradual passing of time, which is actually a sort of slow-motion digestion. It would appear that we don’t waste time: rather, time wastes
us
. The decay of a corpse, the erosion of a landscape, the death of a star, can all be traced back to one cause: the endless hunger of the Entropiors.

“As one can imagine, the Atlanteans were repulsed by this discovery, and who can blame them? They were forced to consider this nightmarish question: what if the foundation of reality were not a stone but the kind of thing one finds
under
a stone? A wriggling and wretched abyss of parasites, a sinkhole of malefic bacteria that has no bottom? This realization plunged the citizens of Atlantis into a state of total existential and metaphysical despair, for now they knew the awful truth behind the appearance of all phenomena, the abominable projector of the reflection that is our reality. Coming to the conclusion that no rational human society could ever cope with this nauseating gnosis, the citizens of Atlantis decided that the secret would die with them. So their entire civilization committed suicide, and they used a network of sophisticated (for that time period) explosive devices to sink the city beneath the sea, where it would be lost forever. And thus was the world once more plunged into a new dark age of blissful ignorance. The discovery of the Entropiors was once again forgotten, until, that is, thousands of years later, when I unwittingly re-assembled the fatal truth.

“Like anyone else would have been, I was repulsed by Vor’s message to our people, which was, essentially, a warning to me to terminate my quest to piece together the long-lost religion of Atlantis. As you already know I destroyed this letter, but how could I myself forget this warning from the past? It wasn’t as if I could just erase this knowledge from my mind… as it is, I’ve always had an almost flawless memory anyway. I was facing the same conundrum that vexed the priests and scientists of Atlantis; knowing what I now knew, that everything in this universe is primarily cattle, how could I possibly go on? What was the point of living when our own lives were revealed to be utterly pointless?

“Of course, some of my skepticism still remained. It must be remembered that when one is in a trance state, one can believe anything. I decided to go about trying to see if I could actually steal a glimpse of one of the Entropiors with my own two eyes. But how exactly could I go about doing this? Realizing that the Entropiors use phenomena to blind us, I decided to conduct an experiment in which I strived to reduce, as greatly as possible, nearly all examples of outside stimuli.

“This is what I ended up doing. I’m sure a young man as clever as yourself has heard of the infamous ‘White Room’ experiments conducted by one Dr. Bruckner at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and it was a variation on this experiment that I set out to recreate, with the aid of my trusty manservant, who wishes to remain anonymous: for the sake of my narrative, I’ll refer to him as Igor, and no, he isn’t a hunchback.

“This was how it all played out: we converted one of my laboratory’s spare rooms into a spherical chamber which we then proceeded to paint entirely white, to create the illusion of limitless space. In a chamber such as this, no other objects were allowed, no furniture or decorations, so as to give the test subject’s attention span as few distractions as possible. Igor strapped me down to a chair which made it impossible for me to move, while earplugs went into my ears so that I couldn’t hear a thing, aside from my own thoughts. Waste tubes were attached to my genitals and anus so that I could go to the bathroom if the urge struck me, while various nutrient and water tubes were connected to my body, to keep me alive during the experiment. The final touch was an epidermal injection into my spine, which Igor was kind enough to administer: this had the effect of numbing my entire body below the neck, so that I could no longer feel it. It literally felt as if I had become a floating head, and I no longer felt attached to my body. Igor sealed up the chamber, and thus free of distractions, I began to concentrate as hard as I could.

“There are some who claim that isolation is one of the quickest paths to insanity. Perhaps there is some truth to that belief. Maybe I did lose my mind in that isolation chamber: I certainly lost all sense of time, all sense of day or night, even all sense of self. I was alone in the alone, with no idea as to what was going on in the outside world… and a few days into the experiment, the very concept of an ‘outside world’ ceased to exist in my mind. All around me was a void of white, with nothing to focus on—I couldn’t even stare down at my body thanks to the epidermal injection to the spine, and seeing as how I couldn’t
feel
my body either, I began to wonder if maybe that, too, was nothing more than an abstraction. It was as if my body had dissolved and I had become pure mind, an astronaut sailing through a featureless abyss; I felt as if I had become trapped in one of Hergé’s infamous white nightmares, the very ones that had inspired Tintin’s travelogues in terrifying Tibet. The boredom, as you can imagine, was excruciating.

“I’m not sure exactly what day of the experiment that the Entropiors first made their presence known to me: as I said, in that isolation chamber time was just a word that had lost all meaning for me. The first of the Entropiors manifested itself as a blurriness that I could just make out of the corner of my eye, to my left, though I was unable to turn my head to look at it because I was immobilized. But gradually this blurriness began to assume a distinct shape, and as it came into focus I could make it out in greater detail. It was somewhat lizard-like in shape, being slightly larger than a gecko, with four legs and a long tail, and its body was covered with green and black scales. Four wings sprouted from its back: a bat wing, a raven wing, a dragonfly wing, and an oversized wasp wing. Its head was essentially a long eyeless annelidian protrusion that resembled the prostomium of the oligochaetes, with a shrew-like mouth lined with pointy teeth located on the underside of the fleshy protrusion.

“All this time I had been so busy focusing on this one lone Entropior that I had failed to observe others just like it materializing all around me. Some were attached to my face (and presumably my body) like leeches, while hundreds of others covered the blank metal walls of the isolation chamber. Which, I suppose, made sense, as the walls were still made up of matter, which was what the Entropiors feasted on. I should point out here that though I could see the Entropiors, I couldn’t feel them.

“So there I was, paralyzed, unable to do anything but stare in horror at this most disgusting spectacle. How precisely the Entropiors ‘aged’ the matter they feasted on, I have no idea. But things were quickly going from bad to worse. It was as if large swatches of the white void before me began peeling away, revealing the Outer Church that lay behind it… as if our reality were just wallpaper covering up a wall of a haunted house. This was a most gradual process, but each new glimpse of this proto-reality filled my soul with fresh spasms of existential terror, until finally, the walls of my prison were gone and I was gazing upon what can only be described as an alien world, or dimension, one that was as fantastical and morbidly evocative as Arnold Böcklin’s
Isle of the Dead
painting.

“I will now attempt to relate to you what I saw, or rather what I thought I saw. Picture, if you can, a collection of asteroids hanging above a nebular void, while above these asteroids the sky was filled with giant holes, and within these holes were the compound eyes of enormous bugs. The floating asteroids looked as if they were made of candle wax, and they appeared to function as the homes of the Entropiors, and these asteroids were teeming with stationary bio-luminescent plants, along with skeletal towers that soared high into the air like extraterrestrial minarets, while gliding around the spires of these towers were large floating orbs of quivering, blood-encrusted flesh. For some reason, the song “Fracking Fluid Injection” by The Knife was playing in the background during this transdimensional travelogue.