Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (28 page)

Wow, an honest-to-God secret passage! Could this be the entrance to Prof. Mancini’s long-lost “Black Studio?”
Timothy wondered, the surprised expression on his face matching that of Moses upon his encounter with Zagzagel the Burning Bush on Mount Horeb. He crawled into the hidden room on the other side of the fireplace, and once inside managed to find a light switch on the wall next to the sliding panel. He gave the switch a click, not expecting anything to happen, but the lights slowly flickered to life, letting Timothy see that he was in a small room, dusty from disuse, with wooden floorboards. At the other end of the room was a door. The walls of the room were decorated with a variety of framed paintings that were clearly the work of Prof. Mancini.

I’ve found it! The Black Studio of Prof. Fausto Mancini
! Timothy thought excitedly. He began inspecting the paintings hanging on the walls, starting at the west wall. These were more Biblical scenes, only much more violent and morbid than those adorning the walls of St. Durtal’s Church, being representations of some of the bloodier and more disturbing events depicted in the Old Testament. One of them illustrated one of the numerous genocides from the Book of Joshua, in which Joshua and his army invade a conquered city and massacre all of the remaining men, women and children, blood running down the streets like a vermilion tsunami. Then there was a painting that depicted a scene from Exodus, where the Lord smites the entire first born of Egypt. Another painting showcased the ending of the Book of Isaiah, in which the Lord’s chosen ones are forced to stare out at the dead bodies of those who rebelled against Yahweh, these corpses being gnawed at by worms and scorched by flames for all eternity. Yet another painting showed a man holding a little boy by the feet and swinging the lad headfirst into a stone wall, bashing the child’s brains out: this painting was simply entitled “Psalm 137,” a Psalm Timothy knew by heart: “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” These paintings depicted a world governed not by the New Testament’s God of Love, but the cruel, bloodthirsty and jealous God of the Old, who spilled oceans of blood with impunity, whose Pharaonic massacres boggled the mind, a wrathful deity that the horror writer and essayist Matt Cardin identified as a chaos monster, a demon from beyond space, a monstrous alien force that revels in cosmic destruction. These paintings served as a reminder that Christianity, in some ways, could be just as black as the darkest occult practices.      

Timothy then turned his attention to the paintings on the east wall. In contrast to the Old Testament paintings they faced across the room, these paintings depicted scenes of Hell, demons and witchcraft. One painting, entitled “The Cacodemon,” was a portrait of a large red monster with a spherical body and no arms or legs, its orb-like mass crowned with demonic horns, and located in the center of its bloated mass was the creature’s face: a lone green eye over a large gaping mouth twisted into an evil grin, this mouth full of sharp pointy teeth. Another painting was entitled “The Waltz of the Imps,” and it portrayed an army of green and brown skinned humanoid demons with glowing red eyes. These imps were marching through the quivering bowels of Hell, past morbific Mt. Erebus, the bodies of dead infants impaled to their cocks, while all around them the souls of the Damned were tormented by fire, ice and maggots. Another painting depicted a large-breasted woman, naked, lying on the altar of a desecrated church and masturbating with a crucifix while in the air above her demons were manifesting out of the ether: these demons were the size of cats and black in color, with horned heads, three eyes, forked tongues, and leathery bat wings, a host of pellucid spermatozoon evoked from the choirs of Beelphazoar. 

What made all of these paintings so disturbing to look at was their almost documentary photorealism: there was nothing abstract or stylized about these works, rather, like the images painted on the frescoes of St. Durtal’s Church, they suggested that they had all been
drawn from life
, from things that the artist had actually seen with his own two eyes. Suddenly, the professor’s relationship with Richard Pickman began to make perfect sense.

Timothy decided to explore what lay beyond the studio’s other door. So he opened the door and stepped into another darkened room. He found a light switch and flipped it on. This room was a little larger than the room he had just left: if that first room could have been considered a gallery, this second one was more like a proper art studio, with metal filing cabinets, storage boxes loaded with art supplies, an easel, and so forth. But in the center of the floor there was a large upside down pentagram drawn with what was either red paint or blood, sealed within a circle, and not far from this circle there was a red triangle, also upside down, and in the center of this triangle was a wooden stool that looked as if its seat had been scorched with flames over the years. Timothy noted that the easel was located within the circumference of the pentagram. In one corner of the room there was a large stone altar, its surface covered with a dried red fluid that had to be blood, along with a few stray red hairs. Resting on top of the altar was a wicked-looking sacrificial knife with a jagged blade, a blade that was also covered in old, dried blood.

Timothy walked over to one of the metal filing cabinets. He opened the top drawer and began fishing through it. He noticed a very large folder simply entitled “St. Durtal’s Church.” He pulled this folder out of the cabinet and flipped it open. He noticed that this folder was subdivided into sections, each one named: he saw sections labeled “Jesus,” “Abraham,” “Mary,” “Moses,” and many other Biblical figures. Within each of these sections were preliminary sketches of the character in question, along with photographs of the real-life parishioners who had modeled for Prof. Mancini. To provide an example, in the “Adam” folder Timothy found photographs of Anthony Moreau (the church’s sexton during the 1940’s), and within the St. Cecilia folder there was a photograph of Anna, Prof. Mancini’s red-haired wife. On the back of all of these old photographs, Prof. Mancini had scribbled in pencil the names of the models that were photographed on the front.

I’ve hit the motherlode
, Timothy thought as he flipped through this folder.
Henri and the SDACC would probably love to get their hands on this
. Finally, he found what he was looking for: a folder simply labeled “Demons.” His hands trembling, Timothy opened up the folder. Within it were two photographs, black and white like all the others. These photographs, unlike the others in the folder, had been taken in this secret studio, the very room that Timothy now stood in. In each photograph, a demon could be seen seated on the stool within the red triangle near the magical pentagram of blood. They looked exactly as they had appeared in the fresco in the dome of St. Durtal’s Church: human faces and bodies, curved horns growing from their heads and bat wings sprouting from their backs.

With a sick feeling of dread in his stomach, with an existential nausea that seemed to taint the very depth of his soul, Timothy somehow knew, even before he flipped any of these final photographs over, that he would find no names scribbled in pencil on their backs. Or would he? As far as he saw it, he had two choices. He could not flip the photographs over and keep the whole thing a mystery with no solution, let it remain a ghost story and nothing more, retain the last tattered shreds of his innocence. Or he could flip the photographs over and receive some kind of resolution, even though it was a resolution that could potentially forever shatter his view of reality.

Timothy stood there in the secret studio of Prof. Mancini, his hand frozen above one of the photographs of the demons, unsure of what he should do next. Meanwhile, across town, on the ceiling of St. Durtal’s Church, Eve’s hand remained outstretched on the Garden of Eden fresco, poised to pick the apple off the Tree of Knowledge while the Serpent looked on, and even though her fingers would never touch the forbidden fruit in that fresco, of the final resolution there could be no doubt: in the end, the Serpent has never ceased whispering his sweet lies to us all, and few of us can resist the temptation to know what should never be known.

For Slimegirl

“The Great Old Ones may be called forth by the formulae of the New Age, but one must remember… that Will is not a function of the ego, and that any shred of ego or ‘lust of result’ attached to the Mage during their invocation will be pounced upon and torn to shreds along with the Mage himself. The Vulture upon the Tower of Silence will pick out his eyes, while his flesh is torn asunder by the razor-sharp beak of the Ibis of the Abyss. That way lies madness, and extinction.”

—Allen Holub, in his Comment to Part Two of Soror Andahadna’s The Book of the Forgotten Ones (The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1977)

“The universe is an iceberg tip jutting out of chaos,
drenched in dark matter.”
—Nick Land, “No Future”

Sometimes one can form a surface impression of someone else through the briefest of glances. And most people who saw Alex Vauung for the first time usually came to the kneejerk conclusion, based on his appearance, that he just
had
to have strange hobbies, like collecting air sickness bags or watching propaganda videos put out by the Heaven’s Gate UFO doomsday cult: he was the sort of man that made one think, “Now
there’s
an unusual looking chap. He must be a campanologist, or perhaps a man who knows how to best apply Yuggothian Matrices to the To-Gai Null Spaces.” Alex Vauung was indeed an unusual-looking individual, a 19-year-old man whose brown hair was done up in an exaggerated bouffant similar to the style sported by Jack Nance in the film
Eraserhead
, and his clothes were all vintage, threadbare-looking, ill-fitting suits from Victorian times, though the
Matrix
-style sunglasses he always had on when out and about did give him a sort of cyberpunk vibe. And he did indeed have a strange hobby, in that he was a collector of peculiar and obscure video and computer games. Not necessarily rare games, however: after all, he was a borderline destitute student, and often couldn’t afford such luxuries. His favorite type of peculiar or obscure games were generally the ones that fell within the survival horror genre, especially games that mined a Lovecraftian vein and that tended to include some type of sanity meter in their gameplay mechanics: to name just a few, there was
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
,
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
, and
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
. But even those games, cult as they were, had achieved some mainstream success, however small; still, Alex had managed to add games to his collection that were far less well known, and he usually found such games at equally obscure and unexpected places (such as Kirkbride’s Curios in downtown Thundermist, where he had once managed to not only nab a copy of an old, fairly obscure Commodore 64 game entitled
The Silence of the LAMs
, but also the legendary Red version of
Godzilla: Monster of Monsters
).

So one can imagine his surprise when he came across a copy of
Ritual Quest
not in the dusty, neglected and cobwebbed corner of some electronic esotericist’s basement, but instead in the bright and sterile confines of Data, Thundermist’s largest office supply store. This store was located in the big shopping center that could be found at the base of the hill that served as the home of Saddleworth Clinic, and other stores at this shopping center included a GameStop, where Alex worked part time as a cashier as he made his way through college. Sometimes during his breaks he would visit Data, mainly when he was shopping for computer-related ephemera. But other times, when he was bored, he would look at the meager selection of games that they had on display, and it was on one such night that he came across
Ritual Quest
.

As previously mentioned, Data wasn’t known for its vast inventory of games. They mostly catered towards the casual gamer niche, with titles like
Angry Birds
,
Jewel Quest
, and those generic dime-a-dozen “hidden object” games. Yet it was within this motley assortment of mundanity that Alex first laid eyes on
Ritual Quest
. The first thing that captured his attention was the game’s packaging: whereas all of the other games were packaged in CD jewel cases or DVD cases,
Ritual Quest
was housed in an actual cardboard box, like an Atari game of old. It even
looked
like an old Atari game box, with black being its primary color, the words RITUAL QUEST in all white-caps, and, in the center of the front of the box, a crude drawing of a red upside-down pentagram. Alex saw that this box was the only copy the store had, so he picked it up and looked at the back of the box. There were no screenshots, and aside from a barcode, the only description on the back of the box was these words: “okkvlt lo-fi witchcraft for the whole family.”

Holding the box carefully in his hands, like Dr. Simon Hurt cradling the Barbatos bat-coffin of the Miagani tribe, Alex recalled various half-remembered rumors he had heard about this game, mainly cryptic digital whisperings through urban legends websites such as Creepypasta: how Slimegirl Studios, the small gaming company that had created
Ritual Quest
a few years ago, had gone out of business after many of their key personnel had mysteriously vanished. Then there were the stories of gamers who had been discovered dead after playing it, and so on and so forth. And those were just some of the more mundane rumors. Alex had heard stories about how the studio had kidnapped a schizophrenic woman from an insane asylum, one who had claimed to have been abused by Satanists back in the 1980s, and, thus holding her in captivity, carefully recorded all of her rambling delusions, using them as inspiration for some of the thematic content of their game. Or the legend that the studio’s members were all witches who belonged to a coven named the Vault of Murmurs that practiced Dibboma witchcraft, Nma demonism and Lemurian time-sorcery, and how the Outer Dark witch-dreams brought about by their rituals influenced the game’s imagery. Then there was the even more far-fetched rumor about how the game had been created and distributed by a sinister and shadowy global network of cyberpunk-obsessed computer hackers, with the intention of spreading a malignant hypervirus and launching what they called K-War through the utter snowcrash of the American military-industrial complex: a Skynet apocalypse brought about by Generation Slytherin, A-death obsessed teenagers plotting digital revolutions in the Deep Web’s cryptoliths. All speculative nonsense, in Alex’s opinion. But the game
was
almost impossible to find these days, so he decided to purchase it and see what all the hype was about.

As soon as he got back home that night, Alex headed straight into his bedroom. After turning on the gas lamp, he looked around at the gloomy confines of his living quarters, various decorations attracting his eye, such as a movie poster for the film
Cloverfield
(that depicted a headless Statue of Liberty overlooking a burning Manhattan, with the tagline “Something Has Found Us” at the top). Feeling slightly guilty that, rather than working on his thesis (which was based on his readings of Dr. Daniel Charles Barker’s “The Geocosmic Theory of Trauma”), he would instead be spending some of his precious free time playing what was by all accounts a highly dodgy computer game. Then again, you only live once, as the popular saying went.

Alex powered his computer on, and while he waited for the desktop to load up he opened the game box. Inside there was a CD in a plain sleeve, plus a flimsy sheet of white paper. On the front of this sheet of paper was an image of a blocky black key, while on the other side were typed words, consisting of the game’s instructions. This is what they said:

Ritual Quest
(Satanism Simulator)
Save yourself from living in blandness.
Collect three items x perform a ritual.
Controls
Space to start
Arrows
ESC to exit
A for a better TV

And that was it for the instructions.

Alex installed the game on his computer. While waiting for the installation to finish, he went onto YouTube and watched the video for the new Nine Inch Nails single “Came Back Haunted.” The video was directed by David Lynch. It was 4 minutes and 17 seconds long, and at the very start of the video there was the following warning: “This video has been identified by Epilepsy Action to potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised.” Alex thought the video was pretty cool: he liked the repeated strobe effect image of a tick overlaid onto the body of a young ballerina, and the shots of a cloud of smoke expanding in the corner of a black and white room were pretty crazy as well.

Once the installation was done, he slipped on his headphones and booted the game up. The title screen consisted of the words RITUAL QUEST in jagged red and black letters, above the same image of a ragged upside-down red pentagram that looked identical to the one on the cover of the box. This was set over a blocky green landscape that Alex guessed was supposed to be a representation of a forest of some type. The top half of the screen was a black slab of night sky, with gray clouds scrolling lazily across it. Every now and then the words and the pentagram seemed to flicker. The only “music” was a repeating and sinister ambient note, like the heartbeat of Hummpa-Taddum, that great Babylonian Worm whose epoch survived the Year Zero Y2K event horizon. Alex hit the space bar on his keyboard and the game began.

Alex quickly realized that the game embraced a deliberately primitive and lo-fi graphical interface, looking somewhat like an antiquated Atari 2600 game from the early 1980’s. The character controlled by the player was nothing more than a large black box, an abstract representation of the Deleuzian Gothic Avatar. The game began in an outside location, the same forest that appeared in the game’s title screen. On the left of the screen there was an altar surrounded by four flaming torches, while on the right was a giant green slab with a thin vertical black door, no doubt a castle or some manner of haunted house. At the top of the screen was a thin black status bar with white letters that said: “You need: 3 items for the ritual.” The “music” playing in the background was a constantly looping series of ambient bass-like notes that seemed to go from a high to low pitch every few measures. Alex hit the right arrow key on his keyboard and watched the black box enter the castle.

The screen changed to the lobby of the castle, a gray room with large white windows. Alex kept the box moving to the right until he came to a new screen. He now came to a number of screens that were designed to be corridors. These corridors were made up of dark gray walls and light gray floors, with black rectangular gaps in the walls serving as doors to rooms. Crude, yes, but this barebones graphical style forced Alex’s mind to fill in the gaps and use his imagination: he saw in his mind’s eye himself wandering down endless corridors made up of sentient stones that muttered anti-prayers to the Crow Princess, suits of armor whose once-shiny outer surfaces were now covered in patches of moss that were forming tiny continents to some hypothetical “Fortress Europe pulsation” (to nick a phrase from Nick Land’s cybergothic exegesis), and doors that led to dungeons where weeping follicles from the head of God wailed self-pitying poetry. The actual rooms in the game itself were a bit more graphically elaborate than the corridors that connected them: one room had a palm tree, another had an indoor garden with three trees, a third was a black chamber with 2 large upside-down white and red crosses, a fourth was some kind of shrine, and the fifth was a garishly red chamber with a large blue crystal levitating in the center. Within each of these chambers there was an object that could be picked up by moving the box over it: the palm tree room had a “piece of a Mason temple,” the indoor garden chamber had “a faggot” (as in, a bundle of sticks tied together), the room with the upside-down crosses contained “a pentacle,” the room with the shrine held “drugs,” and the crystal room had, appropriately enough, “a crystal.” Once three of any of these five items had been picked up, no further items could be gathered, and the status bar at the top of the screen displayed a new message: “Perform the ritual.” All the player then had to do was exit the castle and move over to the altar on the first screen, in which case the ritual would be performed. Depending on what items the player had, a number of different outcomes were possible.

After a few minutes of play, Alex came to the conclusion that
Ritual Quest
was less a game and more along the lines of some kind of conceptual performance art, or an evocation of the Forgotten Ones that lurk beyond the raven curvature of our universe (No* the feathered and fish-scaled winged serpent, Nexhagus the Elder Jester of the Pre-Create and brother of Choronzon, Loroo the Tenuous One Who Lurketh in the Space Between Stars, to say nothing of Nagrikshamisha, She, Hai, Iannu, Ignaiye and Megor-Marduk, as the Maatian grimoires classify them). There were no enemies as such in the castle, and it was impossible to truly lose the game: the worst thing that could happen to the player was if he or she picked up three items that caused the ritual to be dull, in which case they were mocked with a message that said “The Dark Lords do not favor,” followed by a game over screen that informed the player “you die old and boring.” The main purpose of the game (aside as an exercise in diabolical atmosphere) was to see which configuration of items led to the most interesting rituals. Of course, even these more interesting rituals led to a grim fate for the player, with the end result being his or her soul being trapped in a crystal, or burnt to ashes, or slain by a demon named “Blank Frank.” After having discovered a number of the different endings, Alex decided that his favorite was the one you got when the ritual was performed with a piece of a Mason temple, a pentacle, and drugs. This would result in the evocation of Baphomet, in which case the game would cut to a pixelated close-up of the goat god’s face, followed by an image of planet Earth getting swallowed up in red.