The ghost walked through my doorway
With a suitcase in his hand
I said, the ghost walked through my doorway
With a suitcase in his hand
Put his hand upon my shoulder
Took my shoulder in his hand
He said, "Son, I've come to see you
Come to see you on this day"
He said, "Son, I've come to see you
Come to see you on this day"
I've brought a box of memories
And I believe I'm gonna stay
from "The Uninvited Ghost"
by The Barrow Wights
Alexander Horowitz woke to the sound of his doorbell. As he shook
the strange dreams out of his head, he noticed the cat looking down at him
with a curious expression.
"What, Grimalkin?" he asked. "Something up?"
The cat looked over at the door with that strange, half-expectant
expression. The bell rang again.
"Coming!" Alex shouted, pulling himself off of the sofa-bed and
running a hand over his head. He could just feel the hair shooting off in
all directions... oh well, what did they expect, this hour of the morning?
He looked at the clock. Almost eleven. Who gets up this early?
There was a robe on the back of a nearby chair, and Alex threw it
on over his t-shirt and sweats. Grimalkin leapt down from the arm of the
couch and followed him across the room.
"Who is it?" Alex asked, placing his hand on the knob.
"My name is Doctor Crowe," the voice said from the other side of
the door. "I need to talk to you."
"What about?"
"The past."
Alex looked down at the cat. Grimalkin looked up at him with an
unreadable cat expression. Alex shrugged and flipped open the latch above
the knob, then pulled the door open.
"Well, come on in," he said to the bearded figure waiting in the hall.
"Thank you," Crowe replied, stepping into the apartment.
The door opened into the kitchen, and Alex gestured to a chair at
the kitchen table. "Have a seat. I just got up, so you'll have to give me a
second." He stepped off toward the bathroom.
Doctor Crowe looked around the small apartment. It was slightly
unkempt, and bizarrely decorated; strange antiquities combined with kitschy
knick-knacks... Crowe read this as signs of a conflicted personality, drawn
to the timeless and the ephemeral in equal amounts... someone unsure
whether his place in life was of the eternal, or of the moment, perhaps.
"The past, you say," Alex said from the next room, presumedly the
bathroom. He had apparently left the door open so that conversation could
proceed while he was occupied. Hmm. A flouter of taboos. "It's a big
subject."
"And one you're interested in, I see."
"What?"
"Your art collection."
"Oh. Actually, it's not so much 'art' as it is 'anthropology'; I
have an interest in pre-Christian religious artifacts."
"Were you an anthropology major, then?" Doctor Crowe looked over
Alex's collection. The pieces certainly had a primitive air about them...
though several seemed quite unsettling, though he was at a loss to explain
why. They were mostly small figurines of clay or stone, some abstract,
some clearly meant to represent animals of some kind. Oddly, there was
something unsettling about them, a shifty sort of quality that made them
seem to change minutely as he stared at them. They reminded him of the
inkblot tests, somehow... they meant something, but only to the beholder,
and there were no right answers... but then again, there were. See the
wrong thing, and you were insane.
Doctor Crowe began to think he was seeing the wrong thing. He
looked up at a framed print, a bullight poster. Somehow, the image, in all
it's brutal cruelty, was more comforting than the simple statuettes.
"No," Alex replied, "Philosophy. But I probably would have switched
majors if I'd stayed in school. This is what I'me really interested in. Is
that what you came to see me about?"
Philosophy major? Hmm. "No," Doctor Crowe said, "I'm here to ask
you about Professor Firth."
Doctor Crowe had been half-expecting a sudden crash as Alex dropped
his shaving kit or whatever in shock and horror, but there was no change
whatsoever in the pattern of sounds coming from the bathroom. "Firth? My
old teacher? God! That's old news for sure." There was a pause, and when
Alex spoke again it sounded like he was brushing his teeth. "Blss eh rnn
pp?"
"Beg pardon?"
Spit. "I said, has he turned up or something? He went missing back
in the sixties, after he killed that kid... what was it... Smythe, Bill
Smythe."
"So you think he did it, then?"
"Huh. Of course. I was there. It was at this rock concert..."
"I know, I've done a bit of research. Did you actually see him do it?"
"What, are you writing a book?"
"No, I'm a doctor. A psychiatrist. One of my patients has been
having flashbacks, and I became curious."
Alex came around the corner, wiping his hands on a towel. "Well, I
didn't actually see him do anything, but there were people who did. Tore
Billy up pretty horribly. Who's the patient?"
"Can't say, obviously. Doctor patient confidentiality, you know.
You said Billy was 'Torn up'? Does that sound like something your Professor
was capable of?"
Alex walked across the kitchen to the refrigerator, pulling open
the door. There were some newspaper clippings affixed to the front with
fruit-shaped kitchen magnets. One seemed to have something to do with an
archaeological dig in Egypt; Crowe could read the word "Osiris" but little
else. Another clipping was a picture of Noam Chomsky, with a fake mustache
and goofy teeth drawn in, and the word "Duh!" in a word balloon over his
head. Another clipping seemed to be a "Dilbert" strip. "Would you like a
V-8?" Alex asked his guest.
For breakfast? Crowe shuddered. "No, thanks."
Alex pulled a soft-drink sized can of the tomato beverage out of
his refrigerator and shook it three times, then popped the lid, tilting his
head back and taking a long swig. When he lowered his head there was a thin
line of red liquid on his upper lip. Quelle vampiric, thought Crowe.
"Who can really say what anyone is capable of?" Alex responded,
thoughtfully. "I mean, if you asked me, 'Do you think Firth would slaughter
a fellow human being?' the week before the Acid Test, well, I would have
said, no, emphatically. In hindsight, I'd have been wrong. But friends of
those Manson girls, or the My Lai soldiers, or the Kent State guardsmen,
they'd have all said the same; 'No way they'd ever do that! No way!'" Alex
said the last in a funny "hick" sort of voice, which emphasized the
everyday nature of the horrors he'd referenced and, by including himself by
association, as one of those unable to recognize their fellows' capability
for horror, he managed a bit of ease-putting self-deprecation. Doctor Crowe
was impressed with Alex's social skills; but mentally noted that they
seemed just that, "skills". Underneath he sensed that Alex was not very
sociable at all. Not at all.
"I mention that," Crowe said, "Because many of the witnesses said
that Firth did not kill William Smythe at all."
"Yes, well, there were a lot of drugs floating around. The sixties,
you know." Alex smiled a queer, smirky grin.
Crowe interlocked his fingers, with his wrists on the table and his
index fingers to the sky, church and steeple. "I've read a lot of
literature on psychedelics, Mister Horowitz. Though distortions of
perception are common, true hallucinations are very rare."
"True hallucinations?" Alex pulled up a chair and sat opposite
Crowe. He placed the juice can on the table as if it were the cheapest type
of beer. Still that same half-smirk.
"Though the common usage is broader, an 'hallucination' as
scientifically defined is a non-existent object that, to the observer, has
all the attributes of a solid, three dimensional form. Most psychedelic
'hallucinations' tend to be fleeting and peripherally glimpsed, flitting
bats or floating fish that the observer can almost - but not quite! - see.
What the witnesses reported at the Miskatonic Acid Test was very, very
different."
Crowe expected Alex to press for more information, but Alex just
looked at him, waiting.
Finally the words burst out through Doctor Crowe's clenched teeth.
"Monsters! There were monsters!"
Alex threw his head back and laughed. "Monsters? Oooh!" He made a
boogety-oogety gesture with his hands. "Scary!"
"So that wasn't your experience?"
Alex's perpetual smirk turned toward sarcastic astonishment. "Are
you kidding? Come on, monsters? Oh, maybe a goblin or two, a few
leprechauns, but no... mmmph!... monsters!" The last word he delivered in a
sort of Boris Karloff growl.
Doctor Crowe smiled, but didn't laugh. "Certainly, the idea is
patently absurd. Yet, to a scientific mind, so is the idea of a shared
hallucination."
Alex settled down, considering the matter briefly. "It's not my
field, of course, but isn't there something called 'Mass Hysteria'?"
"Debatably. It's kind of a hot-button issue in psychological
circles; the idea that it can even happen seems like superstitious nonsense
to followers of some schools of thought, while it is in perfect accord with
others."
"And your opinion?"
"Open." Crowe settled back in his chair, affecting an open,
confidant's air. "I'll tell you, if someone had brought this case before
me, I certainly would have dismissed it under just those terms. But
something about this entire affair nattled at me; I began to study the
literature on 'mass hysteria', both pro and con, and I found that there
isn't a single case of this so-called phenomenon that isn't attributable to
other means."
Alex scowled. "Really? I mean, I remember reading something about
epidemics of maniacal behavior sweeping whole towns during the middle
ages..."
Crowe slapped the table, an excited gleam in his eye. "Yes! The
perfect example! St Vitus' dance it was called, and you're correct, it
would afflict entire areas, the entire population seeming to be possessed,
dancing wildly for hours and screaming about being 'beset by devils'."
"Sure sounds like mass hysteria to me. Unless you're saying they
were (snicker) actually possessed by devils?"
Crowe rolled his eyes, ever so slightly. "No. As I said, a logical
cause exists. One quite pertinent to our discussion, I should add." Crowe
paused for effect.
"Well?"
"The towns in question were invariably proximate to rye fields, and
the peasants involved subsisting on a died comprised largely of rye
products. Are you familiar with the original source of LSD, Mister
Horowitz?"
"Owsley?" Alex grinned to show he was being facetious.
"Not quite," Crowe responded. "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, though
it would be later chemically synthesized, was originally derived from
Ergot, a poisonous fungus which grows on - da-da-da-dum! - rye!"
Alex laughed heartily. "So those St. Vitus' dancers were actually
tripping? Groovy, man!" He flashed a peace sign.
"According to some theories, yes. Of course, Ergot is a deadly
substance in its pure form; though there were deaths reported as associated
with the dancing frenzies, those that disagree with this theory argue that
widespread Ergot consumption would have been far more fatal than the
'dancing madness' seemed to have been. To my mind, however, that doesn't
disprove the theory; we can't be aware of what other factors might have
served to dilute the toxin, whether some process used in the grinding or
baking of the rye, or a bad taste that kept people from devouring more than
a token amount of the infected grain, or just that peasant stomachs were
stronger than we suspect -" Crowe grinned at this - "But the fact remains
that here we have an alternate hypothesis to the 'mass hysteria' theory,
one that fits the facts admirably."
Alex looked thoughtful. "Then... you think that other incidences of
so-called 'mass hysteria' through the ages might spring from the same
source? Natural Acid Trips?"
"It's possible, maybe even likely." Crowe sat up in his seat. "In
fact, one author I read spent some time in this very area researching just
such a question."
"Really?" Alex asked, very interested now. "Who?"
"Hunter, Dr. Ivan Edward. He was looking into the witch hysteria of
colonial Massachusetts, into which the town of Arkham played a not
insignificant part..."
"What?" Alex said, startled. "The Salem Witch Trials?"
"And the attendant hysteria in other towns, of which, of course,
Arkham's own 'Witch Frenzy' stands out."
"You think this had to do with rye fungus?"
"Well, not precisely. Hunter theorized that the witch hysteria,
triggered, as you recall, by teenaged girls who had strange fits and
claimed to see invisible entities, was caused by the girls' exposure to an
as-yet unidentified psychedelic substance, possibly a plant or fungus,
possibly even..." Crowe grinned here, "A toad."
Alex laughed out loud. "Oh, come on."
Crowe motioned him to consider the idea. "You may have heard of the
teenage fad for 'toad-licking', inspired by the fact that some species' of
toad secrete an enzyme that contains the substance bufotenin which, though
not a psychedelic by definition, does have some mind-altering effects along
the lines of some of the psychedelic amphetamines."
"Sure, but that's just an urban legend. Right?"
"Yes and no. Few toads secrete this enzyme, and none of those
species exist in this area in the first place, and even if they did many
sources say that the concentration of bufotenin in the toad's secretion
isn't sufficient to cause any effects in, well, a 'toad-licker'; aboriginal
races that make use of the substance utilize a dried and concentrated
extract. But, on the other hand..."
Alex waited, looking skeptical. Crowe continued. "The girls
involved in the Salem case had been indulging in pagan rituals with Tituba,
a Caribbean native who practiced a religion similar to what we now know as
'voodoo'. Who knows what herbs, what mushrooms that young woman might have
brought with her from her native land? And did the young girls in question
indulge in the ritual that involved 'kissing a frog' to place curses on
enemies?"
"You think they might have been kissing psychedelic toads?" Alex's
smirk threatened to burst from his face.
"That's Hunter's thesis, which I think does have some measure of
value. The popular view of the Salem Witch Trials is that they were the
result of fakery by spiteful children, or at least," and Crowe made
quotation marks with his fingers, " 'mass hysteria'. But there are many
elements of the story that render that explanation inadequate. The odd
correspondences in the confessions, the nature of the 'fits', the apparent
manifestations of physical symptoms... these are anomalous in terms of a
psychological explanation, but which tally with a pharmacological
solution..."
"Or," Alex grinned, "With genuine witchcraft."
Crowe cleared his throat. "While it seems true that Arkham's most
infamous colonial witch, Keziah Mason, was practicing some sort of ritual
magic, I don't think that the same necessarily holds true for Salem. Beyond
that, a psychedelic explanation could explain the weird tales that
accompany accounts of Mason's life, tales which are usually written off as
the embellishment of over-enthusiastic prosecutors. And, anyway, you most
certainly can't believe that 'witchcraft' is a more compelling explanation
than 'hallucinogens'! Occam's razor, and all that!"
"Settle down, Doc, I was just kidding."
"Oh. Getting back to my point; I strongly suspect, with some
support from the literature, that users of psychedelic drugs quickly
develop a sensitivity to the mental and physical states of fellow users, a
sensitivity that can seem paranormal."
"What, you mean like 'group minds'?"
Crowe smiled knowingly. "You can't read about hippies without
hearing about how acid gives them the ability to 'read each other's
thoughts', but what I believe this signifies is an almost instantaneous
recognition of signals given off by one's fellows, which are then reacted
to in a way that seems, well, psychic."
"So that, when the Salem girls would simultaneously scream and
point at an invisible being, they were just unconsciously reading each
other's signals through heightened ability given them by psychedelics, and
'seeing' an hallucination through acid-induced power of suggestion?"
"Yes. That's about it."
"Interesting theory," Alex smirked.
"Well, come on!" Crowe snapped. "You saw it with your own eyes! Not
the witch trials, of course; I mean, you saw the same sort of thing happen
at the Miskatonic Acid Test... a mass freak-out, with rampaging
hallucination horrors!"
"I'm not really sure what I saw."
"Just think about it... doesn't it make sense? Just about everyone
there was tripped out on LSD, plus booze, marijuana, and God knows what
else. I've interviewed people, you know; I know how it went down. The
palpitating wave of terror that surged through the crowd... the sudden
screaming... the appearance of 'monsters', which seemed overpoweringly real
to everyone who saw them, yet which many present didn't see at all... even
the murder fits in, either as a result or a trigger for the 'hysteria'. It
fits. A new chemical psychosis. Massed acid hysteria."
Alex shrugged. "All right, I'll grant you that it's as good an
explanation as any. So, if you've come here looking for some sort of
confirmation, fine. Put me down as a 'yes'. You can quote me on the back of
your book. That's where this is going, am I right?"
It was Crowe's turn to smirk, a little. "Well, yes," he began, "I
do believe there's a book in this, you're correct about that. But there's a
little bit more to the story, I believe. More than most people believe. But
not, in fact, more than you believe."
Crowe waited for Alex's reaction. He was cool, there was no doubt
about that, still wearing that half-grin. He stared at Crowe for a moment,
then pushed his chair away from the table. "Okay, Doctor Crowe, why don't
you just stop with the Colombo routine and come right out with it? What are
you getting at?"
"Simply this. At first I thought, based upon Hunter's theories and
a bit of deduction, that the horrors of the Miskatonic Acid Test were an
example of a spontaneous mass hallucination, triggered by psychedelic
drugs, eerie music, and power of suggestion. But a few things kept cropping
up in the reports I read, and in the accounts I gathered from the few
survivors who were willing to talk to me, a few little things that kept
bothering me - sorry, I sound like Colombo again."
"Hmmph."
"I kept it all swirling inside of my head, until it suddenly
jelled. My hypothesis was largely correct; there was a drug-induced mass
hallucination... but I was wrong about its being spontaneous. No, it was an
event that didn't simply conjure itself up out of the ether. It was
induced!"
"What!?" Alex seemed once again ready to burst out laughing. Go on,
Crowe thought, keep up the act.
He smiled knowingly. "You are, of course, familiar with the concept
of 'set' and 'setting'? They're an insight of Dr. Leary's, from the days
when LSD therapy was considered a potential psychiatric breakthrough. Back
when it was legal."
"Those were the days," Alex said, raising his V-8 can in a mock toast.
"Leary and his colleagues discovered that the key factors that
determined the course that a LSD 'trip' would take were 'set' and 'setting'
- the mindset of the subject, combined with the setting in which the trip
took place. Bad trips, so common in the cold, clinical settings that the
early experimenters dosed their volunteers in, were virtually eliminated by
the Leary model.
"But what if one wanted to deliberately induce a 'bad trip'? By
putting the subject in a state of fear and a setting where they felt
overwhelmed and threatened? Manson and other mind-control mini-gurus tried
this sort of thing with the successful results that we've witnessed on many
a TV movie.
"But I suspect the minds behind the Miskatonic Acid Disaster were
more subtle, and more ambitious, than Manson, who just sought personal
power. No, these men wanted to conduct a philosophical experiment, albeit a
sick and twisted one. In the interest of 'science'."
"What sort of experiment could it have possibly been?" Alex asked,
wide eyed.
"Why don't you tell me, Alex?"
If Doctor Crowe had expected an explosion of protest and fervent
denials, he was to be disappointed. Alex just smiled, as cryptically as
ever. "So that's the angle, is it?"
"Why don't you tell me?" Crowe replied, ever the psychiatrist.
Alex held up a finger for patience, then stood slowly. Crowe tensed
almost imperceptibly, but Alex was just heading toward his kitchen counter.
"I've heard it all before, Doctor Crowe," Alex said, as he began digging
through the pots and pans in one of his cabinets. "Right from the start
there were whispers that the whole fiasco was a misguided plot concocted by
Firth and myself for some unfathomable purpose, a plot which went horribly
wrong... or horribly right." He loaded the sentence with sarcastic
exaggeration and mock-scary inflections, with a particularly Karloffian
emphasis on the final phrase.
"And the rumors are...?" Crowe cocked an eyebrow.
"Dead wrong." Alex looked Crowe directly in the eye.
"Ah." Crowe looked away. "Interesting choice of words."
"Thank you Sigmund Freud," Alex snarled, as he placed a large
mixing bowl onto the table with a ringing clatter. Then, in a totally
different tone: "You want some pancakes?"
"No thanks."
Alex shrugged, and walked over to the refrigerator. He opened the
door, and the sound of blowing air hissed through the room like a stunted
wind. "Look, you can believe what you want. Write about it if you want to.
It doesn't make any difference to me. I know the truth, and that's what
matters." Alex pulled a half-dozen eggs and a milk carton out of the
refrigerator and placed them on the table with some finality.
"So what is the truth?" Crow replied, with the doctor/patient air
that he had so carefully developed over the years, inviting openness,
trust. Doctor Crowe could share your sorrow. Doctor Crowe could help.
Alex looked the doctor in the eye for a moment, held it, then
turned his attention to the kitchen counter, from a drawer of which he
pulled a spatula and a manual egg beater. "Truth. Well, that's just the
question, isn't it."
Alex placed the implements on the counter, then turned and leaned
against it. Crowe stared at Alex's queerly distorted reflection in the
shiny curved metal of the mixing bowl, then looked over at the man himself.
He looked simultaneously relaxed and animated, as if the subject he was
discussing was as familiar to him as an old boot and at the same time
exciting as an explosion. "Professor Firth was a brilliant man. A brilliant
philosopher. And what is philosophy but the search for truth? Not the
common truth, the 'what happened when' truth of the sort that you're after,
but the eternal truths, the verities, the realities of existence. Which
aren't, when you peel away the curtain, very 'real' at all.
"Philosophers have studied reality for millennia. And the harder
they look at it the shiftier it seems. Nowadays it seems science has caught
up with philosophy; and the closer hard scientists get to the absolute
building blocks of reality, the less 'real' they become. Quarks, tachyons,
Heisenberg, Einstein, paradox on paradox. Zeno of Elea once proved
logically that it was impossible to travel from one spot to another,
because there were an infinite number of points in between any two points
that the traveler would have to pass first. Nowadays it seems Zeno was
right for the wrong reason; we can't go from point 'A' to point 'B' because
neither point actually exists!
"Philosophy, as you must be aware, was originally considered a
science. Now, of course, it's a humanity, considered one part literature
and one part social studies. Professor Firth had a vision. To make
Philosophy once again a science, with all the nuts and bolts and
experimentation that entails!"
"Experimental Philosophy?" Crowe responded. "Sounds a bit silly."
"Yeah, well, Relativity sounded silly at first as well," Alex
sneered. "See where that led."
"It led us to where we can now blow up the planet."
"Yes. Well. That would certainly be an interesting experiment,
wouldn't it?"
Crowe found this a bit bewildering. "Experiment? To prove what?"
"Oh, any number of things. Simply to see if Man were base enough to
actually do such a thing, for one. My hypothesis is, 'Yes, he is'."
"And how could one be an impartial observer for such an event? It
would seem to me that the experiment might have a profound effect on the
experimenter, one that might make data collection a tad difficult." Doctor
Crowe smiled.
"Oh, for the sake of argument, let's say that the experimenter has
made a deal with otherworldly creatures like the hallucination horrors you
mentioned earlier, and they'll convey his discorporeal essence to a safe
distance where he can observe unaffected. Quite a lot could be learned from
such an event. Quite a lot." Alex looked thoughtful.
Crowe brought the conversation back to the point at hand. "Well, be
that as it may, I doubt that your Professor's experiments had quite that
sort of scope." Alex gave out a little laugh. Crowe went on. "Tell me about
the experiments."
Alex half-unconsciously twirled the large silver mixing bowl as he
considered what to say next. "Well, he'd been well along in his work by the
time I met him. But he told me that he'd started initially with variations
on the Prisoner's Dilemma - you must be familiar with that."
"Refresh me."
"It's a philosophical problem stemming from Game Theory... the
Prisoner, separated from his compatriots, has the option to confess and
give up his buddies or keep silent. If he chooses the former option, he
will go free if they keep silent, while they go to jail. If he keeps
silent and they rat him out, he goes to jail and they go free. If both he
and his buddies rat each other out, they all go to jail. If he keeps quiet,
everyone goes free.
"It was a simple matter to set up a similar situation in class.
Students split into groups, a problem posed, the opportunity to cheat
dangled before them ever so subtly. Now, if one group cheated, and none of
the others did, that group would easily get high marks. But if more than
one cheated, the game would be up and both would fail. Yet the problem was
so difficult that each team would just as likely fail if they tried it
without cheating."
"So what happened?"
"In Scientific Method, each experiment must begin with an
hypothesis, the experiment being conducted to either confirm or deny it.
Firth's hypothesis was confirmed." Alex waited, smiling.
"And what was it?"
"That they would all cheat."
"Your professor sounds like a delight."
Alex laughed, genuinely. "Well, he was cynical, I suppose; but some
would say that the darkest cynic is merely a committed realist."
"And did he fail the students, just for kicks?"
Alex laughed again. "Hardly. No, they all got rewarded with high
marks. He wanted them to believe they'd gotten away with it. So they'd do
it again."
"I gather Firth wasn't particularly interested in Game Theory."
"No. His area of inquiry was much more far-ranging and profound."
"And it was?"
"The nature of human Evil."
Doctor Crowe chuckled. "I'm sure that kept him busy!"
Alex smirked. "Yes. Well. It's a wide-open subject."
"So how did these 'experiments' proceed? As a psychiatrist, I'm
fascinated."
"No doubt. Let's just say for now that they proceeded along those
same lines for a while. Mind games on the students. Nothing even
particularly unethical. Psychologists have conducted similar tests on
unsuspecting students. The famous 'brown eyes vs.blue eyes' experiment, for
example."
"I gather it didn't stop there."
Alex grinned. "No. Of course not." He tapped the mixing spoon
against the side of the bowl absently, producing a soft sort of ringing
ping. "There were so many more levels to approach. He discovered this
during the course of a game he invented, called 'murder'.
"The question he'd been asking himself was 'How far can I get it to
go?' He'd gotten students to cheat, to turn Judas on their friends, to
steal, and - delightfully perversely! - to betray their lovers..."
"Do I dare ask how he did that?"
"Oh, that was simple. He took the students that were involved in
committed relationships - some for quite long times - and placed them in
situations where they would be working closely with students of the
opposite (sometimes same) sex whom he could tell they felt attracted to
and, with a few subtle nudges, nature took its course. He had a ninety
percent success rate!"
"Sounds like the Professor's best subject for a study of human evil
would have been himself."
That smirk again. "Maybe. But I was going to tell you about the
game of 'Murder'.
"Now, the first thing to know about this game is that no one
playing can know that it is a game, or the game is over. Only the
games-master can know. The students involved must believe implicitly that
what is occurring is actually real.
"Without going into great detail, the Professor's game went like
this. An assortment of students were brought to a secluded spot on a field
trip. 'To study the creations of long-lost races, get a feel for our place
in the physical universe' - There's a place up in the hills upriver where
there are some prehistoric standing stones; used to be a town there,
Dunwich. Just cellar holes and the occasional skeleton of a barn now. But
very isolated, very eerie. Perfect for the game.
"Now, as the game is played, it is discovered that one of the
students has brought along a 'loaded' gun. He's a paranoid type, a freshman
from one of the Professor's other classes, someone that no one knows really
well but who rubs everyone the wrong way. He's brought the gun because, he
says, he's worried about bears or brigands. His rationale isn't really
relevant; the Paranoid has already laid down the groundwork so that the
other students will believe him capable of anything."
Doctor Crowe scratched his beard. "You seem rather familiar with
this escapade. Perhaps you were there?"
"Oh absolutely. I played the Paranoid." Alex grinned. "I was a
Freshman then, but the Professor had seen a sort of kinship in me, and
realized that I would be perfect for the role. Something edgy about me. Had
you noticed?"
It was Doctor Crowe's turn to grin. "It's my business to notice."
Alex cleared his throat. "Anyway. So there we were, out in the dark
woods. My gig is to just sort of annoy people during the day, really just
generally grate on everybody. In any group of people there's usually one
who stands out as sort of the natural leader; there was one in this group
too, I forget his name now. Funny how that can be, isn't it? I remember the
name of the girl that sat three rows ahead of me in the old bus we took to
get out there even though we hardly said two words, yet I can't remember
the name of the Type-A gorilla who tried to kill me."
Doctor Crowe's eyebrows raised. Alex noted this, with pleasure, and
continued. "Surprised? Of course, that was the whole point of the game. To
see if we could drive a man to murder in the space of a day and a night.
"And guess what? I'm good at it! Man, by sundown that sonofabitch
hated me with a virulence. Once King Gorilla had made his presence known, I
of course singled him out, getting in his face, whining, bitching, making
ungallant comments to the women, everything in my rather copious bag of
tricks. I tell you, I'd have killed me after the first hour of that. But
I'm not a Type-A kind of guy.
"Of course, the Professor and I had arranged that he would find
plenty of excuses to disappear... running on ahead to check the terrain,
taking a few students to investigate a side-path, etc. As erstwhile
commander of the expedition, he couldn't 'let' me do my 'asshole' routine
when he was around. So he disappeared as often as possible, leaving a
different student 'in charge' each time (never Gorilla Jones, which ticked
him off even more). Once, he left me in charge, and wow! what a jerk I got
to be then!" Alex smiled and sighed. "Good times.
"We reached the ruins at dusk. They were at the top of a thickly
wooded hill, and all the paths leading up there were tangled and overgrown,
though occasional bits of litter told us that other people must come up
there. It was as if the forest had decided that it was its duty to keep
outsiders from seeing the ancient stones atop the hill... or so I said, in
a scared voice, as we stepped out into the clearing.
"I've seen some eerie sights in my life... you don't know the half
of it, Doc... but I'll tell you, the sight of that tableau atop that
desolate hill, half-lit by dusk and rendered ghostly by the pale light of a
gibbous rising moon was one of the creepiest things I've ever stumbled
onto. There weren't a great number of standing stones or anything, just one
or two, not particularly large as megaliths go; those, and a stone burial
chamber. Oh yes, and a sacrificial altar.
"Now, of course, no one knows whether that long raised slab of flat
stone was used as an altar at all, let alone for human sacrifice. The race
that constructed it is long gone; so long gone that the local Native
American tribes speak of the area as having been the Holy Ground of the
Forgotten People, implying that it was old even when the first of their
ancestors arrived in the area of the Upper Miskatonic. But when you looked
at it in that haunted New England twilight, you could almost see the
half-naked dancing figures, the struggling victim, the upraised knife of
the priest. And you could almost feel their Gods looking down on them with
a sort of sick glee, dark, perverse Gods that our ancestors knew but whom
time has mercifully swept from the theological pantheon.
"You know those Gods, don't you, Doctor Crowe? Haven't you seen
them, in dreams from which you woke up sweating and unable to scream?
Haven't you felt their presence in the shadowed dark, and shuddered because
with that awareness of them you realized that - just for a second - they
also became aware of you?"
Crowe coughed, then shook his head. "No, I can't say as I have."
Alex met his eyes with a glass-shard glance and held them until
Doctor Crowe found an interest in his thumbnails. "No? Well, I have, both
before and after, though I'd say I'm a bit more comfortable with their kind
these days." Again that inscrutable smile.
Crowe waited a moment for the story to continue, then prodded. "So
you got there at dusk..."
Alex seemed to snap out of a reverie. "Yes. And then the game
really began."
Alex looked at his hand. The smirk, for once, seemed to have
drained from his voice. "The Professor suggested that we make camp in the
vicinity. Not in among the ruins, of course... that would have seemed, I
don't know, sacrilegious, though can you really commit sacrilege against
Gods that are long dead? Desecration to their graves it would have been, I
guess. No, we set up our tents around the perimeter; but there was a
firepit in the center of the altar-area, so Firth decided that we would
have a camp-fire and swap philosophical nuggets instead of ghost-stories
and marshmallows.
"Of course, as mentioned previously, the real plan was for me to
prod and provoke a man to murder. So we pitched our tents, then gathered
around the fire, which was large enough, but somehow not enough to
completely drive away the chill that settles in once the sun sets on the
hills of northwestern Massachusetts.
"It was a strange scene. There weren't any drugs involved at this
point in the Professor's gamesmanship; yet still a creeping feeling of
unreality settled in upon the camp. Our faces seemed haunted in the flicker
of firelight, as though generations of vanished prehistoric Yankees were
projected upon each one of our features, fleetingly, ephemerally. And more
than that, there was a real sense that there were forms, shadows, figures,
watching us from the periphery of the circle of light cast by the fire,
strange ghost-men that one could never quite see clearly but which never
quite disappeared, even when looked at directly. You know what I'm saying,
Doctor Crowe? You'd see them out of the corner of your eye, and turn to
confront them, but instead of vanishing the way a good peripheral
flicker-ghost will do, they'd fade into the background and you knew they
were still there, and that you were looking right at them and seeing them,
but they weren't there at the same time. It was a hackle-raising mood in
that circle; yet no one mentioned it, but unless I'm no judge of human
character we all felt it.
"Not the Professor, though. He seemed as focused as ever on his
little experiment. And, since no one else dared to leave the quaint comfort
of the firelight, no one objected when Firth announced that he was going to
head out into the woods to gather up firewood.
"Which was my cue. Now, the mood was uneasy at best, and nerves
were frayed beyond repair with even the stickiest of duct-tape, so it
seemed as natural as anything when I pulled my gun from my knapsack, with
the excuse that I felt 'uneasy... might be a bear out there somewhere'.
Naturally Mister Type A didn't want a loaded gun in the circle 'cause he
was afraid I'd accidentally shoot someone, which event my
not-entirely-affected nervous demeanor made seem not unlikely at all. After
putting up a whiny defense, I 'reluctantly' agreed to place the gun nearby,
out of arm's reach but still close enough if it were needed.
"It was a stroke of genius on my part to put it on the altar.
"In short sequence the unreality of the situation grew. The
Professor hadn't returned... I loudly moaned that he'd been killed. I upped
the volume and intensity as I went along, pleading for us to 'just run to
the bus and get the hell out of here', starting at every raccoon-rustle,
insulting Type A at every chance, challenging his manhood, the works.
"It was effective. I could smell the steam rising off of the top of
his head. It was time to bring the game to climax.
Crowe looked at Alex, hoping that the incredulity and disgust he
felt didn't show on his face. "You tried to induce the boy you call 'Mister
Type A' to kill you. Didn't that seem, well, wrong?"
Alex held his hands out, palms up, chuckling. "What was it
Nietzsche said? 'Right and wrong are just words on street signs.' No, wait,
that's 'right and left'."
"You know what I mean."
"Look, Doc, you have to see it the way we did. These kids came to
college to learn, to broaden their horizons; what's the worst thing they
could claim when it was all over? 'We learned something not very pleasant
about ourselves?' Man, that's Truth, me and Professor Crowe were in the
Truth business, and that night we were just plain givin' it away. No coupon
necessary."
Alex paused and leaned over, closer to the spot where Doctor Crowe
was sitting. "And it's a scientist's duty to expand the field of Human
Knowledge. And that's what we were doing, the Professor and me. Maybe it
was a little arrogant on our part, maybe a little cruel... I don't regret
it, and I'm sure the Professor would agree if he were here."
"But he's not here."
"So take my word for it. Whatever you want to think, it doesn't
matter. What matters is Truth, and we discovered a little bit of it that
night in the hills.
"The circle had grown dark, even though the fire still burned
bright and strong. It was as if a shadow had spread out from the old stones
and was gradually insinuating itself between the flames and ourselves. I
noticed this, of course, even as I was playing out my role as bastard of
the camp-out. And I noticed something else."
Alex looked toward the ceiling and waved a theatrical arm. "The
sky, Doctor Crowe, the sky! It had grown deeper, darker, and the stars
seemed to be shining out of it like flashlights at the far end of a tunnel;
the clouds seemed to form and scatter on the shoulders of strange winds,
winds which gave them forms that suggested horrible, indescribable winged
things; winds that then seemed to delight in tearing these bleak angels
apart and putting them together once again.
"We were being watched."
Once again Alex stared into the bowl in front of him, seeing
unnameable things in his own reflection therein. "I know it's tough to
credit it, sitting here, as we are, in the cradle of hard-headed
Yankeeness. But out there, in the woods, with no undecayed settlement for
dozens of miles, it was easy to sense these things, easy to feel the eyes
behind the clouds, the face beyond the stars, the watching shadows. And
more than that, though you couldn't describe or maybe even comprehend the
faces of the beings looking down at you, it was possible to sense their
mood.
"Expectation. Excitement. Anticipation. Eagerness.
"It was an eagerness that grew as the night continued. The shadows
from the stars were watching us because they wanted something from us, they
expected something from us. They wanted it, and they knew they would get
it."
"What did these voices tell you they wanted?"
Alex scowled. "It wasn't like that; they didn't speak to me then;
they just gave me, gave us a sense that everything would be all right if we
played by the rules, rules we'd never seen nor ever would have seen."
"Well, get on with it," Crowe said, impatiently. "What did they want?"
Alex grinned. "Human Sacrifice."
Doctor Crowe folded his fingers in front of his chin. "I see..."
Alex laughed. "No, I doubt that you do. You think I'm deluded, or
at best in the thrall of some exaggerated bit of memory, its skeleton true
but its details formed from a haze of too much time passed, too many drugs
consumed. Well, believe what you will, o learn'd astronomer, but I who was
there say this to you: there were dark gods all around us, and they
hungered for blood.
"I never got the chance to ask any of the other students who were
present that night if they also felt the same shadowy energies; but I think
they did. I could see it in their eyes. There's something about the eyes,
Doctor, when there are gods about. They jump and track, and flit toward
bushes and shadows, never sure what they're looking for and just as
uncertain whether they can see it or not, but never less than certain that
it's there. The eyes, Doc, the eyes. They move about like jumping beans.
Paranoia, it's called, I guess... isn't that right? It's not my field, of
course. But wasn't it Adler who said 'Perfect paranoia is perfect
awareness?'"
"Actually, I believe that was Charles Manson." Crowe said, half amused.
"Really? Well, out of the mouths of babes and all that. But back to
the circle in the dark. Like I said, all around me nervous faces and
twitching eyeballs, a panoply of paranoia, every eye, every face except
one. Mister Type A, he was tight-eyed and focused, and his face was a
bull's-head of barely -stoppered rage; the gods wanted blood, as I said,
but I think maybe he wanted even just a little bit more. It was time to
tweak the action to its climax.
"I became 'deranged', starting at noises, jumping at every weird
shadow. I wasn't the only one, believe me, but I made sure I was the
loudest. I made a point of going for the gun every so often, picking it up,
waving it into the darkness, and only putting it back down after Type A had
gotten into my face. Then back onto the car's hood it would go, only to be
grabbed again by me a few moments later. This went on for several minutes
before Type A did what I had intended for him to do all along... to pick up
the gun 'for safe keeping'.
"I exploded! I called him every name I could think of. 'That's my
gun! You can't take it! Give it back! You gay bastard!' That type of person
is really vulnerable to any impugnment of his manliness, and Type A
responded exactly how I thought he would, by shoving me around. I responded
in my shrillest whine. 'Faggot! Homo!' You can imagine! The shoving got
more forceful, I got more impudent, and all around us grew a swirl of
energy, a swell of darkness that both fed and fed upon his rage, tending it
and stoking it like a deranged cub scout at a campfire.
"And then, suddenly, it was as if a spent log had tumbled over into
the embers, sending a flock of sparks skyward - he fell over the edge.
"I don't remember exactly what I said, or I'd have filed it away
for future use. All I know is that suddenly that gun was pointed at my
head, and Type A was shrieking 'Shut up! Shut up!' I knew an opportunity
when I see one, so I closed in for the kill. 'What you gonna do, shoot me?
You haven't the nerve, you pussy! Come on, pull the trigger, homo!'
"He held the gun for a second, his hand shaking. I could see it in
his eyes. He was going to kill me. The night had peeled away his civilized
facade and I was looking at the beast within. I grinned, and that was it.
He pulled the trigger.
"And shot William Smythe between the eyes."
Doctor Crowe did a double-take. "He shot William Smythe? But -"
"But it was me he should have shot... that's what you were going to
say, right?" Smirk.
"Actually, I was going to say, 'But he died at the Acid Test'."
"True enough. Nobody, of course, died at the Creepout Jamboree in
the hills. The gun was never loaded. I checked it quite carefully, since it
was my head that it was bound to be aimed at! But, yeah, the do-gooder who
stepped between Type A and me at the last minute was the very same William
Smythe. Funny about that.
"Man! You should have been there to see Type A's face when the gun
went off. Wow! Talk about flipped out! To this day I don't know if the
shock in his eyes reflected the horror of the realization that he had it in
him to kill a man, or just the horror that he 'killed' nice ol' Billy
Smythe and not that wretched Alex Horowitz. Too bad Smythe wasn't looking
my way; I'd have loved to have seen his expression in the split second when
he thought he was bound for the afterlife. Well, I got to see that look
eventu - ah, what I mean to say is, he turned around and I saw his face.
Ooh!" Alex made a wide-eyed, cartoonishly scared sort of grimace with his
face.
Crowe thought that Alex just might have given away more than he
intended. He was there when Smythe got killed! Interesting. But Crowe gave
no sign of his new knowledge. "What happened next?"
"Type A broke into tears. Most gratifying. Smythe reached out to
comfort him, and they shared a little hug. Awww. The rest of the group came
over, and most of them were crying, too. It was a teary mess. But, anyway,
that's not I noticed... and not what Professor Firth, who watched the whole
sorry scene from the bushes, noticed either.
"Remember what I said about 'the gods looking down on us with a
sense of expectation'?" Well, let me tell you, that expectation built to a
near-feverish pitch as the conflict escalated... I tell you, the trees were
practically slavering as Type A picked up that gun, and I could almost hear
an electric hum in the air as he went to fire it... and then -"
Alex held his hands up, palms forward. "Dead silence. The moment
was crystal. The gods held their breath, dammit, I swear they did. Then
Type A pulled the trigger, the sky drew its breath in...
"Then howled! Howled in dismay, howled in rage! I looked up and I
could see turbulence rending the clouds, a veritable tempest churning and
surging across the sky! They had been robbed, the gods had been cheated-"
"Did anyone else see the sky 'churning'? I'd think that's something
that would be fairly noticeable..."
"Well, that's the thing of it. Maybe I'm not describing it aptly;
it wasn't a physical thing, dig? I mean, the clouds weren't actually
moving, not really; but at the same time you could look up and, if you had
the eyes for it, see them swirling and raging. You were seeing through what
was real, and seeing what was Real. Do you follow?"
"Maybe."
"Just take my word for it. I was there, I saw it."
Crowe let it slide with a shrug. "Well, why were 'the gods' so
angry? no one was dead."
"That's just it, Doc. No one was dead. 'Hell hath no fury like a
god that's been cheated out of tricks or treats'. That's from the Peanuts
Halloween special."
"You went from quoting Charlie Manson to quoting Charlie Brown."
"Next is Charlie Daniels. You see what I'm saying, Doc?"
"The gods were mad, they'd been 'cheated'. But cheated out of what?"
Alex grinned again, but it was a grim and weary grin. "What do you
know about Blood Sacrifice, Doc?"
Crowe reacted, taken aback. "What? Blood sacrifice? I, uh, well,
it's been practiced in the past by primitive cultures around the world..."
"But why? Why should such a thing, such a strange, horrible thing
be so universal? Who are these gods that demand our children knifed on the
altar? And for what reason? Sheer malice?"
Crowe's face regained its customary surety. This was a subject he
had a bit of expertise in. "The sacrifice was a means of propitiating the
favor of the gods. Payment, if you will, for favors received, or favors
desired. Essentially a continuation of the barter-driven economy that was
the everyday experience of primitive man."
Alex's eyes lit up. "Excellent insight, Doc! Original? Kreske has a
similar theory, but not many have read Kreske. Have you...? No? Well done,
sir, well done."
Then the light in his eyes spread down to his grin, which tingled
with a devil's fire. "But, at the same time, a brown, steaming loaf of
crap."
Doctor Crowe reddened. He had felt pretty clever, dammit! "I
suppose your Professor Firth had a much better theory," he said, with an
icy sarcasm.
"Of course. I've refined it myself in the interim; though I don't
suppose you read my monograph in New Eon? Anyway." Alex puffed himself up
just a little, and his voice took on a slight pontifical tone. "The key to
the ritual of blood sacrifice is not specifically the sacrifice itself,
though its power is indisputable; each death sends strange, furious ripples
across the veil of existence and an induced one so much more so. After all,
the most lively ghosts are those that died violently. But blood is
something else entirely."
Alex leaned over the table with an almost vampiric glee. "'The
blood is the life', the saying goes. Bela Lugosi, Dracula. And it is life;
it's the fluid that carries oxygen to the brain and to the extremities. No
blood, no life. Simple as that.
"But what if blood is something more? What if there's a
characteristic of this crimson fluid that transcends its life-affirming
properties? What if there's a component to it that science can't see, an
essence, a 'spirit'?"
"What if elephants pissed champagne?" Doctor Crowe said, the
sarcasm taking on a sharper edge.
"Vulgar, doc," Alex scolded, then continued expositing. "Just think
about it a second. What's the primary characteristic of virtually all
sacrificial cultures?"
"Insanity?"
"No. Well, maybe. But I'm talking about Blood as a Power Object.
Always, the blood is separated from the carcass of the beast... always, it
is used ceremonially, even after the body is discarded. Think of the
worshipers of Mithras, who would stand beneath a slaughtered bull and bathe
in its blood; think of the sacrificial altar of the Aztecs, with its built
in trough for the blood to sluice down into waiting bowls; think of..."
"Buffy, waiting to slay the undead..." Crowe grinned mirthlessly.
Alex laughed. "Well, now that you mention it... did you know that
vampire legends can be found in almost all cultures, on almost all
continents? The details change, of course, but one thing remains constant:
they drink ze blood!" Alex made a crazy vampire face with canine teeth
extruding and gestured hypnotically with his hands. "But why blood? Why the
emphasis on the supernatural properties of this fluid? Why the mystique?"
"Are you going to tell me Firth was a vampire?"
"No, doc. No vampire. I don't even know if there are any vampires,
really. But our theory postulated a secret essence to blood nonetheless.
And a notion of what that essence might be. Listen...
"Western religious thought gives mankind a soul, an essence of self
that exists beyond the body. With me so far?"
"I went to Sunday School," Crowe said, a bit impatiently.
"All well and good. But the ancient Egyptians, see, went one
better. Six better, in fact. They thought that there were, in fact, seven
souls connected to each human. Without getting into all the details, let me
just say that this theory would go a long way toward explaining some of the
unusual characteristics of spirit phenomena..."
"Seven souls? What mummy movies have you been watching, Alex? I've
never heard..."
Alex made a feh! gesture with his left hand. "You'd be amazed what
you don't know, Doc. For the record, there's the body, the corporeal soul;
the ka, the 'image', the 'personality - this would be your traditional
ghost, Doc ; the ba, or 'nobility', sort of the 'inner angel'; the khaibit,
or 'shadow', a bit of a dark side... this is the ghost that you see of
yourself, sometimes called a 'fetch'; the khu, or 'intelligence', a smart
little fellow indeed; the ren, or 'name', which has a certain life of its
own you must admit. And, of course, the sekhem."
"Something caught in your throat?" Crowe joked, grinning.
"Funny. The sekhem is the most obscure element of the Egyptian
soul-stew. It's referred to as the 'power', but most scholars couldn't
really figure out what it was supposed to represent. Most orthodox
scholars, that is.
"Not until the occultists took up the question did the true secret
of the sekhem become revealed, obvious though it should have been in
retrospect. Men like Tierney and Junzt and DeGriffen looked at the
literature, studied the glyphs and the relics, and found the solution.
"The key was in the Egyptian's very concept of anatomy. To them,
the repository of all that was human was not the brain, as today's learn'd
anatomists believe, but instead, the heart. And the reason they made this
assumption was a simple one... when the corpse is cut open, the brain is
virtually bloodless. But the heart... the heart is full of blood, full of
warm life, full of power, vitality... sekhem.
"Sekhem is the soul of Blood."
"An interesting digression, Alex, but I don't see..."
"We were talking about Blood Sacrifice, Doctor, and it is no
digression! The men I mentioned earlier, those occultists of vision, they
explored the world of the Egyptian, and, with the knowledge of the sekhem
foremost in their minds, followed the blood trail down through the
centuries. And put this knowledge to practice, Doc, make no mistake! These
were practical men of science, albeit a twisted sort of science, men who
knew the value of a well-constructed experiment. And the things they
learned, in the days before they were put to death..."
"They committed murder?" Crowe said, aghast.
"Oh, no!" Alex exclaimed. "Well, maybe. We don't know. These guys
lived centuries ago, Doc, the rules on witchcraft were a bit stricter then.
But their writings survived, hard to find though they might be. And what a
tale they told..."'
Alex's eyes rolled back in his head a little and he began to recite
from memory. "'To the place of sacrifice shall he be led/ and at the altar
shall he kneel/ to the vessel shed his blood/ and from the sky I shall draw
near'" He looked a little sheepish. "It rhymes better in the original
Russian."
"I would hope," Crowe replied.
"What that means, Doc, is this..."
"Imagine if you will, that there are dimensions beyond what we can
see with our eyes. Dimensions beyond the mathematical, beyond what we
consider the 'Real'. Not just other worlds, but whole new realms of being,
separated from us not by physical space but by entire levels of existence."
"I'll imagine it for the sake of the conversation," Doctor Crowe
said. "I have read a bit on the subject. Higher math and theoretical
physics."
"'...for Dummies'," Alex said, laughing at his own wit. "Slam!
Burn!" He slapped the table to show that his zinger was a slam-dunk. Crowe
just shrugged. "I'm kidding, of course. But not about alternate realities.
"They exist, you know. They're out there, co-existing with our own
time-space in a way that can't strictly be described as 'parallel' or
'simultaneous'. Worlds vast and fabulous, creatures weird and wondrous,
people of strange and un-mortal character. And Gods."
Alex leaned closer and began to talking animatedly in a voice that
was an odd combination of whisper and shout. "Yes, Doctor Crowe, I said
Gods. Beings of a nature so alien and transcendent to us, with bodies far
beyond what our too-real flesh can comprehend. Beings of forms at once
dazzling and terrifying. I said Gods, and Gods they are. Gods they are, and
one cannot feel their presence without being overwhelmed. Gods they are to
the beings of their worlds..."
Alex' whisper took on a secretive edge, as if he were about to
impart to Doctor Crowe some arcane and guarded wisdom. Which, in fact, he
was.
"Gods they were to the ancients of ours."
Alex leaned back in his chair and relaxed somewhat, his secret
having been unleashed. "Shocking, huh, Doc? Mind-boggling, huh? Kind of
makes you ponder everything, doesn't it?"
"Mind-boggling would be one word to describe my reaction, yes."
Crowe was beginning to think that a polite exit should be made soon.
"Oh, you're humoring me, Doc, I know it. But think about it for a
moment. Think about the Blood Religion. Think about its pervasiveness, its
universality, primitive and not-so-primitive man driven to sacrifice,
raising the blood-bowl to appease his gods. It's just plain popular, this
slaughtering thing. But why?
"I'll tell you why.
"Blood is the vessel for sekhem, the spirit of Power in man... and
other animals. And sekhem..."
Alex grinned a cartoon villain grin. "Sekhem is the fuel of
manifestation!"
"How's that?"
"The beings I mentioned, the Old Gods, they exist on other planes,
separated from man by walls vaster and more impenetrable than any distance
in space. But they can be summoned, they can be entreated, they can be
appeased. In certain places where the wall is thinnest, or with certain
tools that can pierce through the planes, certain words can be spoken,
ancient verses read, and they will come. Try it. You can feel them watching
you from another reality. It's a trip.
"And if, having summoned them, you wish them to come across for a
visit, well then. You must give them the means. Sekhem. The energy it
possesses unlocks the gates. They can pass through."
"Okay," Crowe said. "Maybe what you say could be true. Say you
could go to Stonehenge and chop up a squirrel and cry 'Red rover red rover,
call monsters right over'. The question becomes, 'why would you want to'?"
"To know," Alex said, a serious tone in his voice. "Solely to know."
"So it's science."
"As I said before, Professor Firth believed that philosophy should
be approached as a science. Science involves experiments.
"So we gave it a shot."
Alex's body had taken on a sort of quivering animation, as if his
every cell was bursting with energy and the desire to tell his tale. He
stood up and began to pace quickly and erratically, speaking with a barely
containable excitement. It was as if his narrative had simply taken him
over and was pulling itself out of his pores. Crowe, as a psychiatrist, was
fascinated despite his misgivings.
"I was never really sure what happened up at the campsite, though I
credit myself with a trifle more awareness than any of my fellows. Firth
got it, though. Somehow, he got it; and a realization of just how pathetic
his little 'experiments in human evil' were, compared to the vaster, wider,
deeper cosmos of evil that floated just beyond our veil of experience
overtook him. For days after the event he seemed swallowed in an almost
crushing depression, then as suddenly he seemed revitalized and full of
wild energy. No, Doc, it wasn't a bipolar sort of thing... it was a
revelation, a mystic crystal revelation." Alex snickered at the "Hair"
allusion, and Crowe smiled as well to let Alex know that he caught the
reference.
"Firth and I began our studies then in earnest. We took many trips
to the wild woods and stone-topped hills of New England over the next year,
carrying with us esoteric nostrums and ancient manuscripts, which an
obliging grad student did Firth the favor of smuggling out of the
University's library for him. Miskatonic has one of the most extensive
collections of occult literature in the world, did you know that? I didn't
at the time, but I found out. Oh yes, I found out soon enough.
"What Firth had begun was nothing short of a crash course in
Occultism, with myself as his research assistant. Around the clock we
worked, reading, studying, and, yes, experimenting...
"We started small. Our first summoning conjured a small green mist
that answered questions by shifting its contours, and for a grand finale
briefly took the form of a small horse... later we created a tulpa that
haunted the lecture hall for about three weeks before it finally
dissipated... our worst mistake occurred when, through hubris, we tried to
summon a presence far too powerful for our inexperienced spells to handle.
We stopped it from entering this plane, but only barely; we had nasty
poltergeists in Firth's basement for weeks after. Now, that was terror! But
after it, we had quite a laugh, and discussed what we would do once we had
the skill to handle a being like that. And there were far more powerful
entities than that one waiting..."
"If I may interrupt," Crowe said, scowling, "You'll probably
understand when I say that your tale is a bit tough to swallow.
Poltergeists? Summonings? A Tulpa? What on earth is a tulpa?"
"A thought-form. An artificially created unreal entity. Sort of a
home-made ghost. Hell of a merit badge project, hey, doc?"
Doctor Crowe chose his next words carefully. "Well, let me just say
this. Even if I were to credit your story, and let me say that I don't
doubt that it's perfectly real to you, you aren't really being clear as to
what the point of all this was. Granted, it would certainly be amusing to
conjure up artificial ghosts and talking mists, but you've insinuated that
your Professor Firth was some sort of 'Genius for the Ages' and all I hear
sounds to me like the antics of kids let loose in the occult toy store...
no offense."
Alex looked taken aback a bit, then laughed. "Yeah, I guess it
does! Well, it was a lot of fun, don't get me wrong about that. Science
should be fun, just ask Mr. Wizard. But there was method to our madness no
less than there was madness to our methods.
"Firth had studied human evil, and seen just how shallowly it
sleeps beneath the facade of normality in the average person. The question
then became, what is Evil? If the word is just a synonym for a sort of
primate selfishness, then why do we as humans feel that it is in fact
something greater and stronger than ourselves, an outer force rather than
an inner one? Why are there demons, devils? Do we create them ourselves out
of nothing to excuse our baser natures, or are they actually out there
somewhere, calling out to them old baser natures with a dark, toothsome
siren song?
"Firth and I reasoned it this way. If Evil is indeed a force that
exists outside of man, if there are indeed beings of pure, incandescent
evil in existence, then there should be some way to contact them, and this
method would most likely be along the lines of paths trod by necromancers
of old. We looked through the literature, found some of the methods. The
only question then became, 'Do they exist?'
"We figured, 'Only one way to find out...'"
"You're telling me you tried to conjure up the Devil, is that it?"
Crowe looked skeptical, to say the least.
"Devil? No, no, no! The so-called 'devil' and his zany crew of
happy 'demons' are constructs of the early Christian church, watered down
anthropomorphisms based on very real and very incomprehensible entities."
"Wait, wait. Hold on, back up. You're saying that the Devil, Satan,
Lucifer, whatever he's called, is a myth, which I would agree with, but
you're also asserting that Satan represents..."
"A consciously constructed representation of Evil, based upon the
beings I'm discussing, but smoothed over for the masses. Yeah, that's about
right."
"So Hell is an alternative dimension, peopled by formless
monster-gods?"
"Yup."
Crowe laughed, then shook his head. "Wilder and wilder."
Alex laughed himself, slyly. "Oh sure, it sounds like science
fiction. Yet how much stranger is it than the invisible worlds constructed
by the various religions of the world, believed in literally by billions,
including the most learned and most revered citizens? And also bearing in
mind that this scenario includes most of those religions under its mythos.
All gods, all devils, all heavens and hells are but representations of the
Other Realm, related by those ancients unfortunate enough to encounter its
emissaries."
Crowe thought on this for a moment. "And just how did these
ancients encounter those emissaries? You make the process of contacting
them sound quite involved..."
"You mean the rituals, the ceremonies, the sigils and blood? Oh,
sure, what a pain in the ass! But there's a short cut."
Alex was grinning, clearly waiting for him to bite. Crowe made him
wait a moment, then asked. "A shortcut?"
"Yes. Visionary Consciousness. The mind has a realm within itself
that partakes of the Realm of the Other; and when this mental realm is
accessed, contact with the Entities therein can be achieved, and short
journeys therein may be taken. This state is the realm of the Visionary;
entered easily by the insane, and by the insanely religious. More common
seekers have to struggle a little harder to get there; fasts and wanderings
in the desert are one way. But simpler still is the use of those plants and
fungi that seem to have been deposited on this Earth solely for that
purpose."
"Drugs?"
"Such a politically charged term. I prefer 'entheogenic plants'.
Or, to show my age, 'psychedelics'."
"So ancient man..."
"..Tripped his nuts off and talked to demons. Yup. And they told
him how to find the power spots, how to make the necessary designs, speak
the incantations, and trigger the manifestation. How to open the door. How
to let them in."
Crowe thought for a moment, then a slow light drew across his eyes.
Suddenly, things began to make sense. "The Miskatonic Acid Test."
"What about it?" Alex said, coyly.
"It wasn't just a rock concert, was it?"
"Whatever could you mean?"
"It was some sort of experiment. To trigger a mass psychedelic
vision. To summon 'demons', even if only in the heads of succeptible
teen-agers. Disgusting. Perhaps you should be in jail."
"Oh, don't scowl at me like that, Doc. You're a psychiatrist,
you're paid to mess with people's heads. How many 'complexes' do you
suppose really exist, and how many are simply implanted there by psych docs
looking to boost their trade? Come on, Doc, be honest, did you ever ask
someone if they were abducted by aliens or satanically molested? No? Lots
of your colleagues have, and there are people that now believe that such
absurd things really happened to them, thanks to mind games played by their
'concerned head doctors'."
"All psychiatrists are not 'repressed memory' extremists, any more
than all or even most college professors are the psychological equivalent
of child molesters! Yes, that's right, what you and your Professor Firth
did was abuse, plain and simple, constructed on the same foundation of
misused power and self-righteous egoism that psychopaths everywhere have
used as an operating pricipal to justify atrocities..."
Alex, unbelievably, laughed. "Whoa! Settle down, there, Beavis! You
act like we were the comedy team of Manson and Hitler, for crying out loud!
There's just so much you don't understand about this, so much I wish I
could explain. It wasn't about power-tripping, or some sort of Leopold-Loeb
Nietzche-fantasy; it wasn't about psychological manipulation, it wasn't
about 'self-righteous egoism', though I suppose it might have started out
that way. It was - it became - about something so much larger than any
human being, so much larger than 'ego' - even mine! Suddenly we, Professor
Firth and I, were playing a hand in the highest-staked game imaginable...
no, even higher than imaginable! It was beyond imagination, beyond
comprehension, beyond any notion of what is and is not real... it dwarfed
us, it terrified us. Yet by that time we were in too deep, we knew too
much... we had to see the project to its conclusion."
"And this conclusion was death and madness?" Doctor Crowe couldn't
keep from allowing a hint of a cynical smile to tug at the edges of his
face.
"No, Doctor Crowe. That was the ending, but not the conclusion. "
Crowe looked over at Alex. "No conclusion."
"Nope."
"But there will be."
"It certainly looks that way."
Crowe narrowed his eyes, shrewdly. He was reading Alex quite well.
"You're doing it all again, aren't you? Somehow calling everyone together.
What's the idea? Finish what you started? Open the doors to your
'otherworld'?"
"You said it yourself. Conclusion."
"What does that entail, though? How will your experiment end?"
Alex, for once, was silent. There was a slap of paws on vinyl as
the cat leapt suddenly to the top of the refrigerator, from which position
it looked down at Crowe with curious eyes. Finally Alex spoke. "Well,
that's the point of it, right? To see how it will end. To test the
hypothesis."
Crowe mustered his most sympathetic demeanor. He wanted Alex to
trust him, to open up. Clearly the man was psychologically disturbed. Crowe
felt he might have a chance to do some good. And add a strong finish to his
book in the process. "Alex, it seems to me that you and your professor
seemed to be attempting to open the gates of hell, after a manner of
speaking. Is that a fair assessment?"
""In a Christian context, sure."
"Why? I mean, I know that the professor had an interest in the
nature of evil. But to unleash pure evil onto the earth, just for the hell
of it? If you'll pardon the expression."
"Ah, Doctor Crowe. You have two thoughts in your head, both of them
wrong. My little eyes stare right into the center of your mind, and we see
them floating there, puffed like balloons. The first thought is that I am
'disturbed' and in need of 'mental help'. Don't move to deny it, I fully
expected that, from a man of the sheepskin cloth such as yourself. You seek
a motivation for my delusions when you should be seeking a justification
for my actions."
"All right, I'll grant you that. I have never said that I believe
any of your story, except that I am quite sure that YOU believe it.
Granting that, what is my second misassumption?"
Alex slowly pulled the corners of his mouth into the smile that
Crowe had grown so accustomed to, that mirthless smirk. "You assume, my
good doctor, that we did what we did, and do what we will do, in the
service of Evil. That we believed we had sold our souls to the bad 'ol
Debbil and were enacting His Will on Earth. But that's not the case,
Doctor. Not the case at all."
Alex stood up from his chair and began to pace in the jittery
manner that Crowe had grown accustomed to. "I don't say that my actions
weren't Evil, doctor, in a sense. But mankind has grown accustomed to the
idea of Evil serving Good. Kill a family in cold blood? That's Evil.
Execute the killer with lethal injection? Evil serves Good. Nazis kill Jews
by the millions? Evil! By any standards, I would venture. Firebomb Dresden?
Serves Good. Nanking? Evil! Hiroshima? Good, by way of Evil! Do you see my
point?"
"Two wrongs do make a right, is that it?"
"After a fashion. Doctor Crowe, I tell you now what no living man
has learned. Professor Firth and I meant to save the world, not destroy it!
We served Good, not Evil! We had looked into the eyes of darkness, and made
the darkness blink! We saw the shadow creeping across the soul of the
world, and knew that we could banish it with light... but that light itself
draws its strength from deeper darkness! Bringing forth the dark would
summon the light! We had to unleash the darkness to summon the light. Do
you understand?"
"No."
Alex stood behind Crowe. The Doctor looked into the concavity of
the polished mixing bowl and saw Alex standing there, meeting Crowe's eyes
in the reflection. "Pity," Alex said. And there was a sudden flash of
silver, and Crowe's world was a wide-eyed gleaming of pain.
Mercifully, the life left Crowe's body swiftly; he barely had time
to realize that his throat had been cut before he lost consciousness.
"Bleed into the bowl, Doc," Alex said. "That's a good patient."
Moments later, when the corpse was still and the bowl deep with
Crimson, Alex lifted it and carried it to the altar. Grimalkin was waiting
for him, with an exasperated expression that said that Alex had taken far
too long to get to the matter. Alex shrugged. "I like to talk."
He placed the bowl on the floor near the altar, and carefully
inserted the Keptar stones into their respective places in the machinery.
Slowly it came to life, spinning, glowing. Alex held the bowl into the air,
muttering to himself. "Sekhem, Doctor Crowe. The Soul of Blood." Then he
set the bowl down on a platform atop the altar, and a strange energy began
to fill the room.
Alex smiled, then fell to his knees, raising his arms to the sky.
Crowe looked over at Alex. "No conclusion."
"Nope."
"But there will be."
"It certainly looks that way."
Crowe narrowed his eyes, shrewdly. He was reading Alex quite well.
"You're doing it all again, aren't you? Somehow calling everyone together.
What's the idea? Finish what you started? Open the doors to your
'otherworld'?"
"You said it yourself. Conclusion."
"What does that entail, though? How will your experiment end?"
Alex, for once, was silent. There was a slap of paws on vinyl as
the cat leapt suddenly to the top of the refrigerator, from which position
it looked down at Crowe with curious eyes. Finally Alex spoke. "Well,
that's the point of it, right? To see how it will end. To test the
hypothesis."
Crowe mustered his most sympathetic demeanor. He wanted Alex to
trust him, to open up. Clearly the man was psychologically disturbed. Crowe
felt he might have a chance to do some good. And add a strong finish to his
book in the process. "Alex, it seems to me that you and your professor
seemed to be attempting to open the gates of hell, after a manner of
speaking. Is that a fair assessment?"
""In a Christian context, sure."
"Why? I mean, I know that the professor had an interest in the
nature of evil. But to unleash pure evil onto the earth, just for the hell
of it? If you'll pardon the expression."
"Ah, Doctor Crowe. You have two thoughts in your head, both of them
wrong. My little eyes stare right into the center of your mind, and we see
them floating there, puffed like balloons. The first thought is that I am
'disturbed' and in need of 'mental help'. Don't move to deny it, I fully
expected that, from a man of the sheepskin cloth such as yourself. You seek
a motivation for my delusions when you should be seeking a justification
for my actions."
"All right, I'll grant you that. I have never said that I believe
any of your story, except that I am quite sure that YOU believe it.
Granting that, what is my second misassumption?"
Alex slowly pulled the corners of his mouth into the smile that
Crowe had grown so accustomed to, that mirthless smirk. "You assume, my
good doctor, that we did what we did, and do what we will do, in the
service of Evil. That we believed we had sold our souls to the bad 'ol
Debbil and were enacting His Will on Earth. But that's not the case,
Doctor. Not the case at all."
Alex stood up from his chair and began to pace in the jittery
manner that Crowe had grown accustomed to. "I don't say that my actions
weren't Evil, doctor, in a sense. But mankind has grown accustomed to the
idea of Evil serving Good. Kill a family in cold blood? That's Evil.
Execute the killer with lethal injection? Evil serves Good. Nazis kill Jews
by the millions? Evil! By any standards, I would venture. Firebomb Dresden?
Serves Good. Nanking? Evil! Hiroshima? Good, by way of Evil! Do you see my
point?"
"Two wrongs do make a right, is that it?"
"After a fashion. Doctor Crowe, I tell you now what no living man
has learned. Professor Firth and I meant to save the world, not destroy it!
We served Good, not Evil! We had looked into the eyes of darkness, and made
the darkness blink! We saw the shadow creeping across the soul of the
world, and knew that we could banish it with light... but that light itself
draws its strength from deeper darkness! Bringing forth the dark would
summon the light! We had to unleash the darkness to summon the light. Do
you understand?"
"No."
Alex stood behind Crowe. The Doctor looked into the concavity of
the polished mixing bowl and saw Alex standing there, meeting Crowe's eyes
in the reflection. "Pity," Alex said. And there was a sudden flash of
silver, and Crowe's world was a wide-eyed gleaming of pain.
Mercifully, the life left Crowe's body swiftly; he barely had time
to realize that his throat had been cut before he lost consciousness.
"Bleed into the bowl, Doc," Alex said. "That's a good patient."
Moments later, when the corpse was still and the bowl deep with
Crimson, Alex lifted it and carried it to the altar. Grimalkin was waiting
for him, with an exasperated expression that said that Alex had taken far
too long to get to the matter. Alex shrugged. "I like to talk."
He placed the bowl on the floor near the altar, and carefully
inserted the Keptar stones into their respective places in the machinery.
Slowly it came to life, spinning, glowing. Alex held the bowl into the air,
muttering to himself. "Sekhem, Doctor Crowe. The Soul of Blood." Then he
set the bowl down on a platform atop the altar, and a strange energy began
to fill the room.
Alex smiled, then fell to his knees, raising his arms to the sky.
"Ia! Ia! Indrax nethel sekhem f'thrndl! Cthulhu fthagn!"