The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales (14 page)

One of the major objections to the “Megabiblioteca”, as it was popularly dubbed by the press, was that the building was not specially created to house a pre-existing collection, and, since its construction, it has been dependent on a process of extraneous acquisition, taking on a mass of volumes donated by public and private publishers. As a consequence, much of its stock is duplicated. Roving around the shelves, a browsing reader cannot help but be struck by the fact he is likely to find the tiers occupied by multiple copies of the exact same edition of a book, often occupying the entirety of a shelf. This policy of deliberate duplication appears to be a consequence of expediency. Without it there would be whole tracts of empty space, like missing teeth in a smile, and the Borgesian aesthetic of innumerable books themselves forming the architecture of the library would be fatally compromised.

•

Douglas Marlow had obtained his position as librarian in the Megabiblioteca quite by accident. He had been resident in Mexico City for less than a year when he attended a party given by the Minister of the Interior at the huge fortified ministry building on Bucareli. He had been invited along by a Mexican editor who worked at the Pasaje Publishing House, where he had been employed on a temporary basis as a translator, but the editor himself had failed to attend. Forced to mingle, Marlow had drunk a large volume of mezcal, gratis, and his indifferent Spanish blossomed under its effect. By the end of the evening, he had been offered a post as a trainee librarian, assigned to the English language section, after having struck up an interminable conversation with a bureaucrat.

His work at the library was not onerous, and he spent much of his time cataloguing stock, helping with enquiries, and occasionally assisting in the cloakroom, whenever required to do so.

During the second week of his employment, the library took possession of a crate of English language books, which Marlow was instructed to add to the institution’s existing stock. One of the books contained in the crate bore the title
The Abyss of Voola
. He was told the crate had come from the private collection of a notorious and unbelievably aged occultist in Chihuahua, who had tried to commit suicide and failed, despite having blown out half his brains with a revolver. Marlow learnt more from a series of papers that had been inserted inside the front cover of
The Abyss of Voola
, some of these papers were handwritten, some typed, but all apparently by this occultist, whose name was Wolfgang Martz (b.1860 d.?)

Martz believed himself to be in astral contact with creatures called the Voolans, a race of incredibly advanced entities, who dwelt deep inside the hollow earth and influenced mankind by telepathic control. Bulwer-Lytton had first written of them, but his facts were not entirely correct, for he had intuited them only feebly, and even then veiled them in a puerile Utopian symbolism.

•

An excerpt from
The Abyss of Voola
transcribed by Dr Wolfgang Martz, 1920 (translated into English from the original German):

•

In 1914, Martz joined the staff of the Mexico City insane asylum. He took up his position having theorised that certain patients suffering from “delusions” had access to other forms of consciousness. Martz believed that his contact with the Voolan entities placed him beyond good and evil. Morality, for Martz, was a question of expediency and advancing human development, that is, preparing the way for the reign of the Voolans on the surface world. He began experimenting on those inmates who were without families or associates who might take an interest in their condition, enabling him to act free from outside scrutiny. Orderlies and other doctors were bribed as necessary to maintain a conspiracy of silence. Rather than seeking to ameliorate psychoses or manias, it was Martz’s mission to intensify them. This he would attempt to do by means of physical and mental torture, including the use of psychotropic drugs, electric shocks, sleep deprivation and even sexual abuse. He took notes of his patients’ reactions, subjecting them to violent interrogation from that time onwards.

Most of his efforts were completely worthless, and his actions only served to hasten death in those who came under his control.

However there was one instance in which he achieved some startling results, with an elderly American inmate, an ex-officer in the Yankee Army during the U.S. Civil War. He was referred to in Martz’s notes only as “Major X”. This gentleman had obviously been a person of some note before the crushing bout of amnesia and violent paranoia that had led to his confinement. As soon as he was in Martz’s clutches, the doctor ensured that he was beyond the assistance of the American consulate in Mexico City. Major X was in his early seventies when “treated” by Martz. He claimed to have been betrayed by Pancho Villa and to have written several books, including a diabolical dictionary.

In fact, Major X had been an initiate of a secret society in the United States during the 1890s. This society, called the Sodality of the Darkness, differed from the usual esoteric organisations in being atheist in its philosophy. It regarded claims of secret wisdom as being purely fictitious, to be deployed only as a means of literary inspiration. Amongst its West Coast members were George Sterling and W.C. Morrow, while its East Coast members included Winfield Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers. Despite being atheist in character, it seems that the imaginative current the group unleashed eventually overwhelmed some of the group, leading to suicides or madness.

In fact, the Sodality of the Darkness had, between them, succeeded in obtaining the text of a book called
The Abyss of Voola
. Winfield Lovecraft had written it down, from his dreams, in 1892, and suffered from madness and physical deformity thereafter. He claimed that the book was actually a living thing, with a will of its own. He was incarcerated in the Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island and Major X (who Martz theorised must be the soldier and author Ambrose Bierce) then had the book in his safekeeping.
The Abyss of Voola
is a record of the dynastic rise of the Voolans and their final mental assault upon the upper world in order to bring it completely under their control.

Martz abandoned his post at the asylum after Major X died a raving maniac screaming for oblivion. Martz fled to his native Germany thereafter, before the Mexican authorities could take action against him, and was in possession of
The Abyss of Voola
.

Until his disappearance in 1934, which occurred during the Night of the Long Knives, he was a loyal supporter of Adolf Hitler, whom he regarded as a puppet of the Voolans. Martz (in an odd echoing of Bierce’s fate) had escaped execution and returned to Mexico under an assumed name. Martz was regarded as a dangerous eccentric by the Nazi regime, which saw in his account of the Voolans a mythology antithetical to the Wagnerian Volk mythology they were trying to promote.

•

And so,
The Abyss of Voola
had found its way to the Jose Vasconcelos Library. Marlow, the English librarian who handled the book thought little of it (he despised anything esoteric, being a staunch rationalist). He had glanced only at the first page, and it was filed away, carelessly, on the English language floor.

The first complaints began the following week. A student of the drama, who had loaned a copy of
Hamlet
by Shakespeare, found it possessed a corrupted text. The script incorporated quotes taken from another, then unidentified work. Moreover, the typeface was different. It was only when the librarians discovered the changes were taking place across the whole of the section on English drama that it was regarded as a serious issue rather than an unfortunate coincidence or a practical joke.

After the script had been carelessly replaced on the shelves and left there for a couple of days, the Bard’s text had been entirely displaced. Marlow recognised one of the invading excerpts from the first page of the book he had earlier filed away carelessly. Upon consulting it again, he realised that quotations from
The Abyss of Voola
were the source. The contamination had spread outward, in all directions, from the book. It was a textual fungus, or disease of language, that proved beyond the institution’s ability to control. In that first week, every single volume in the library had been infected, although those furthest away from the nucleus may only have contained, initially, one or two errant letters of an incongruous typeface. Moreover, as the text spread, it adapted to the language in which the host text of each book had been written.

Those who loaned books from the library suffered from horrible, fragmentary dreams. They dreamt of a decayed city of inverted steeples shrouded in fog, of black stars in a blood-red sky, of being dead-but-alive, and of searching after a cryptic symbol of no human origin, a symbol which alone brought oblivion. They were tormented by a voice seeming to call from a great distance, a voice muttering unintelligible words, a voice that bubbled and spat like hot tar.

The Megabiblioteca was closed again, with the excuse being offered that further structural work was required. In fact, every single member of its staff had become mentally disturbed. They could scarcely avoid discovery of the source of the infection,
The Abyss of Voola
, once the dreams of reading all night began, and curiosity as to the further contents of the book had got the better of them all.

The authorities then came up with some other vague excuse about a contaminant in the water cooler supply, and thereafter all enquiries went unanswered. The national shame was too much to bear. The whole edifice was locked and boarded up.

Despite the Megabiblioteca having been quarantined, the infection had still got out. Those who had borrowed books from the institution and taken them home, soon found that, for them, all books were becoming
The Abyss of Voola.
Anyone who read from it suffered hysteria and a sense of ecstatic revelation, an epiphany swiftly followed by a series of recurring dreams, and finally brain damage. Marlow had torn his eyes out of their sockets, and then consumed them, in some ghastly belief that by doing so he would see only the underworld of Voola. He believed that the book had been directing his actions since the beginning, and had duped him into filing it haphazardly on the shelves.

The afflicted dreamt of their own corpses emerging from funeral parlours and from hospital morgues, to wander the streets, each one muttering the same plaintive query in accents like bubbling tar. They dreamt of descending into the caverns of the earth, down and down, hypnotised by a telepathic summons until they reached the dread torture chambers. In their dreams they had thought themselves to be descending, but the legion of somnambulists were actually all gathering at the Megabiblioteca, outside its closed confines, and were stunned when awakened. Many of the Mexicans, being cynical and long distrustful of their government, believed that a biological weapon was being tested upon them, and conspiracy theories abounded. But no conspiracy theory, however wild, matched the reality of what was taking place.

For
The Abyss of Voola
did not exist. It had never existed. Men’s minds had brought it into life, by writing over the text in existing books. And the Hollow Earth was but a symbol of the insides of a skull, and the alien thoughts that burrowed therein. The Voolans are co-existent only with consciousness and the ability to dream, for what we call “reality” is, without subjective perception, impossible. The brains of mankind house the Voolans. Or perhaps, vice versa. One cannot say for sure. And alas, if you who are reading this are able to comprehend what is merely an adulterated text, then you may already be amongst the ranks of the contaminated.