In The Carrel

Chapman suffered.

Chapman did not know from what he suffered, but his body acted as host to different diseases, welcoming them to the all- night party of his soul. But he failed to enjoy the get-together.

Chapman sat and pondered his lot.

Chapman recalled the events of his life as a concertina of timeless agony. The whole world was simply a stage between countless entries and exits of dead-lash passions. Amidst the relentless struggling through the muscle of words as if such a vast vesicle were an unsilken skein clogging the brain after umpiring  Finnegans Wake versus Unknown Kadath.

Now, in this half-dream state, he visited a dark library beyond the back of the back of disused terraced houses. The even darker librarians leered knowingly and nodded towards a carrel where Chapman could study anonymously for a night.

The librarians stamped them in and the librarians stamped them out, whilst those previously unstamped were devoured in search of some clue to the mystery of Chapman’s slow-departing soul.

Chapman browsed the nameless pages of the fabled Necronomicon.

Chapman dreamed of stately spires in an unfamiliar city, one infested by a herd of mutant chickens lately escaped from a desert island.

Chapman dreamed further of the Infinite Cuckoo as it sat and brooded and chewed at the core of things.

Perhaps, he thought, somewhere in these unlent and unlendable books, lay the answer to his troubles and he carelessly quoted from the pages, in the hope that some cipher would emerge … like magic. Except magic in dreams was like non-magic outside of dreams.

Chapman found himself perusing the pages of “The Cape of Good Horn” by one who thought he knew, but eventually knew he didn’t. The text was too long for a dream; but dreams are excerpts, in any event.

#

… My first survey of Taleh-Shedar was one of fertile desolation, unman-made meadows careering in patchwork to the far horizon, untilled farmland alternating fallow, crop, fallow, crop, set-aside and, over further slopes, lazy natives shaded in cornucopias of cosiness with stone umbrellas, lackadaisical lackeys swinging in stone hammocks from leaning, unkempt boles…

…Hundreds of backbent peasants chipped slowly at the arid soil with simple stone implements as two scrawny oxen pulled a roughly hewn plough through infertile crust and the scene was repeated into the distant ‘fields’ stretching before my companion, G. Ken, and myself. Wattled huts squatted among the reeds of stagnant pools and long-titted women ground meal in stone bowls beneath the twilight heat of a milky sun…

…Their earthly accoutrements were seemingly from a deeper lore, of carven figurets kept beneath the thatch, of a religion steeped in timeless sorcery. Peculiar rites were supposedly enacted around stone totems to the thin wailing of granite flutes. Sex was taboo for fear of the pale consistency oozing from purple-knotted loins. Plains of white slime were said to sag and curve beneath the very crust of the saline fields and the most handsome native youths have been known to sacrifice themselves to its germinal undertow. Creatures were purported to wriggle distraught feelers from the white catacombs networking the whole country and to clutch the limbs of young men, drawing them downward by some unfathomable geocentric force…

…Strangely enough, as the days continued in utter ennui, the peasants’ ceaseless prodding at the hard ground reminded me of the desperate probing of birdbeaks in search of temporary worms and their indeterminate glances hinted at side-eyes on bobbing heads…

…Dream or fact, I am still unsure, but as I lay on my front (habit of many sleeping years) I felt creep sluggishly through my entire body a subtle paralysis, a vague certainty that if I tried to move I would find it impossible. It is difficult to explain the phenomenon – I was balanced on a knife-edge of potent indecision. My eyes, as it happened, were facing the tent entrance and, amid the gloom, I barely discerned a dark shape entering. All seemed to be an illusion, an illusion within another illusion called a dream, an illusion of slow motion, viscid swimming movements, and I could not define the shape at all before it pounced on my back. The next few moments were part of a hazy background of false memory: a vital prodding, a tight clasp of claw on spine, a furry fumbling. Then, in a fish-eyed miasma, rose my companion, G. Ken, mightily from his bunk nearby, sword raised high in the darkness and, with the power of a giant bird of prey, the blade swept down upon my assailant. The last horrific moment of what, for the time being, I must call dream was the sound of metal clanking on stone…

…As a jaundiced dawn seeped along the horizon, waves of allegory and sculptural myth-arrangements vibrated in the very air around me. I could perceive sheaths and stone cloaks, mottled in gold and horn, decking the sprung spines of the arched probers of the stiff sod. I heard the gurglings of hidden unholy swamps fermenting beneath my feet, separated from me by the thinnest crust of shingly soil. I knew, as if intuitively from a dream I had not dreamed, that there, in Taleh-Shedar, was where the Earth shielded its demonic innards with the least cover…

…Coming into a slight cleft or vale, I saw, throgh the shimmering of unadulterated fantasy, the physique of G. Ken arched over. I remember the jolt that spun my dream on its head. Ideals shattered – pollution – blinding horror. Disease was his birthright. Putrid flesh layered upon putrid flesh – and I turned literally inside out. I bounded from my niche – I don’t know what powered me – was it the occult strength of the myth-drenched rocks – was it some theosophical radiation from Earth’s geomantic, centuried root? Whatever motor moved me, I was a fleeting flash of action across a strip of land and I grabbed the two-headed sword from beside the renewed rutting of G. Ken. I raised it mightily over my head, brought it down, like a giant eagle settling upon its fodder, into the mass of limbs … and slashed, slashed until my force was spent amid the red rubble that had been G. Ken, that wondrous man and friend. I imagined I heard him make a last collapsing moan as I dropped the massive bifurcated blade to the clanging ground…

…I walked from my accomplishment – I turned to take one last glance and I was not afraid of the beauty that gloriously filled my smarting eyes. The ground, through the simmering of further fixities of fantasy, was split asunder and shifting layers of creamy white flow was oceanic, panoramic, lapping the sides of the hill. As the sawn tatters of flesh and muscle sank slowly like a poulterer’s discards, ever so slowly, into the plasma, into the placenta of earthroot, earthcore, I heard the hymn of birdcall and saw, grouped around like speculative chessmen, the etheric statues of giant fleshy birds in monkish contemplation – as if praying for the journey to be good. And then I knew that G. Ken would thank for what I had done…

#

Chapman was sunk unto his bones as he read those passages – but implications tolled from distant bell-towers beyond the scrubland. In his library carrel, he read another tome, something called “The Isle Of The Accurst”. The narrator had been voyager on the ‘Valdemar’ and the rest of the crew were lost. Again, dreams automatically separated themselves into excerpts, but this time, Chapman dreamed the gaps as opposed to the excerpts that made them into gaps.

#

I cannot explain how I gathered together enough energy to pull my aching body from the lifeboat, how I overcame the feeling of hopelessness in the dire situation but, knowing nothing could be served by my continued sojourn in the boat, I pulled myself together (which was not a mean task) and jumped upon the blindingly white sand. Gloom, however, still pervaded my every thought as I sat on the firm particles. My meditation was one of inflow and outflow, back and forth, sea and twisted jungle, and no way out. If it were a dream, there was no waking from it. And if it were real life, there was even less escape.

Suddenly, I spotted that great lumps of the torn flesh I had previously noticed hanging from the shattered remains of the ‘Valdemar’ were actually being swept ashore by the onslaught of waves. Fighting back the disgust that welled in my gorge, I forced myself to recognise each piece as it came to rest before me: the ripped stump of a leg, a neatly sliced neck section, a head that had not originally belonged with the previous piece, the lobster-like privities of a man, a foot of still wriggling toes and many other remnants of the crew. Even in my dazed state, I was aghast to see many peices were oddly non-human, presumably mutated by those vice-like waves which I could see still pummelled the sinking wreck of the ‘Valdemar’. Of course, bits of the ship itself were inextricably mingled with this curdled fleshy lumber.

I heard noises behind me in the jungle. This was enormously startling as only the lap of waves had previously disturbed the atmosphere. So, at this sound, an uncustomary urgency shot through me and, noticing a nearby rock whereon rested lumps of the incoming remains, I ran to its cover as quickly as my depleted health allowed. I crouched there for several minutes and listened to the shambling noises that decidedly grew louder. Curiosity eventually overcame my terror and I peered around the side of the rock. It was necessary to cast aside slabs of the incoherent flesh to gain a full view but, when this had been accomplished, a sight met my aching eyes that lanced an unltimate freight of frights through my shuddering frame. For, gambolling amid the gory flotsam was a throng of what I can only describe as ostriches. But no, not ostriches, rather morbid bones that ended, in each case, with a long stump of a neck. I compared it to a plucked, beheaded chicken, one ready for the festive table, half-picked clean in a half-cooked state, standing precariously on thin, jointed, over-sized stilts with webbed feet – and, indeed, such creatures were prancing on the beach.

These geekens, as I was later to call them, scrabbled about in the crew’s mutant remains. They flung shreds and even bigger lumps at each other in evident frolic. They swallowed the tattered remnants. I could only guess they had been attracted to the strand by the stench (which compensated for their own) flung up by the human offal and, in unappeasable hunger, they feasted their own many gaping orifices. Inexplicably, I stepped forward from behind the rock. Yes, I actually ran twoards the monstrous bacchanale, for I had an undreamable urge to join their nameless fol-de-rols. Before the geekens had a chance to react, I found myself astride one of them, feeling the bone and tatters of disgusting skin between my legs, holding on by means of its scrawny wattle. I was bucking like a bronco, clinging on for dear life, a violent rodeo in a caterwauling freak circus.

Now knowing why God had chosen to preserve only myself from the ‘Valdemar’…

#

Chapman knew that the answer was near. The slit-eyed whisper had come.

Chapman gazed along the line of his sight and witnessed an endless parade of sick men returning their overdue books to the dark library, heads lowered, eyes squeezed tight to disguise theit encroaching blindness, muttering bits and bobs of stories to themselves in order to pass the interminability of their death. From their bodies – inside some belly within a belly – there clucked their gestating brood.

And from the curdling of Earth’s core, there brayed the Wurmhead out of Messer Shoggoth out of Yog-Sothoth out of the bubbling idiot-god Azathoth out of the Fowl Tuckoo that welcomed Spring…

Chapman’s real existence had become a series of excerpts. And he turned another page with his disjointed bone-like arm and read with his eyes or with what he thought were his eyes.

The dark library was now far too dark for reading, however. But Chapman heard the many whispers of pages being turned in other carrels.

The answer was indeed nearer than he thought. His revelation from being chosen  was that if there was a choice between reading James Joyce and himself, then what choice was there at all?