Demon Core: Part 9

[heya_baru]

Part 1

Hadean Schitzotrategy

As Borisovich continued his siege into the gardens of my psyche, my friend from Kazakhstan put me in contact with Dr. Marek Svoboda, sociologist at Charles University, and a specialist in UFO cults. Via email he was able to illuminate some of the darker corners of Pytor’s Cult:

The Stalkers (their name, not mine) tend to deliberately obfuscate their metaphysics— disseminating disinformation and mistranslations, turning Pytor’s writings into a Junko Junsui-style ARG, and so on. They’re a very modern mystery cult in this regard; whereas other secret societies gate their membership behind trials of loyalty, Stalkers force their potential recruits to part the seas of the hyperreal. They do not have symbols like the masons, mystic numbers or axioms like the OTO, or any other trifles from the toolbox of Victorian boys’ clubs. Rather, the stalkers see themselves as postmodern insurgents, severing reality, and embedding their own meshes of the unreal inside the wound. If, in your research, you come across facts about Pytor’s life, or his Humming Geographies, that seems contradictory, that’s them. Pytor outlines this strategy in paragraph twenty-eight of CtMCC.

Svoboda was right; just in the days before I received his email, I had found a memorial post for Pytor on a social media website, attributed to his estate, that listed a slightly altered birthday, as well as a different biography: Pytor did not study engineering in Ukraine, but instead neurology and psychopharmacology. Comments on Russain social media were also split on his cause of death, with some stating he went missing in Kazakhstan, and others stating that his remains were found off the coast of Severny island.

That paragraph that Svoboda mentions is as follows:

In resistance, one cannot use the tools of the tyrants against them; the magnetosphere is an object of tellurian science, described in absolute mathematical quantities, a domain of hegemony whose power can be quantified. Compared to us, he is Marduk upon his throne, libidinous with oppressive desire, sword and member at the ready. For us, a different kind of strategy is required: Tlönian Schitzo-engineering. We must become memetic suicide bombers, planting strategic falsehoods and delusions, spreading them throughout the desert of the real until our un-truths become a new generation of truths, made real by collective perception. The tellurian agents that created the magnetosphere did so with their minds, willing ions into existence with ferrous brainwaves. We can do the same: opening up our earth to new beings, new portals, by obliterating or relationship with truth. By using the commonly accepted equation for memetic entropy, S = W*log10*Sm, we can arrive at an initial insurgent un-truth: an unsolved mystery. In fact, that mystery shall be the disappearance of this paper’s very author.

My own questions about Borisovich come to rest in the neglected corners of my apartment as I lay sleeplessly in bed, they burrow under borrowed books and study me through unblinking eyes. I meet their gaze but receive no answers while I beg silently for somnolence.

My great-grandfather’s home returned to me as I fell into darkness; I was seventeen when my grandmother enlisted me for a final pilgrimage to his estate in a forgotten hamlet outside Trondheim, where he lay under the shadows of confer and death alike. In his youth, my grandmother told me, he remained inside his home for the first decade of his life, his bones rattling inside cheeks uncolored by sun, until the day his father threw him naked into the mud, in order for god to rescind a famine so terrible that crows would fly inside to peck fruitlessly at the dreams of the town before dying under moth-eaten beds. We found his home not by map, but by the trail of flowers left in the streets by mourning children.

Trees cloistered the village with the persuasive authority of a million verdant spears, permitting none but the rolling breaths of fog over their guard. The sun did not arrive until noon, her warmth refused by the season. After a day of exchanges in broken Norwegian I learned to prefer the company of trees and gravel roads outside the estate, but the village seemed as weary of me as I was of her, every afternoon walk revealing only new shadows under the branches of the confers, new turns in the dirt paths that wreathed Myrdammen, the lake at the heart of the hamlet.

My great-grandfather, dead of mind before god returned to claim the rest of him, would awake every morning and ask for his wife, herself buried beside the fetid and freezing waters of Myrdammen five years prior. At first my grandmother would attempt to console him, as morning after morning, with the regularity of the snowfall, she would deliver to him the unchanging news of his wife’s passing. In vain did she pray for the cessation of his grief or the return of his memory, as his anguish would grip him by his neck, deliver him from his death bed, and lift him into a fury incompatible with his frailty. Nightly he would light the fireplace with my grandmother’s apologies and roast Myrdammen’s waterfowl.

Depleted of grace and wet with tears, my grandmother abandoned the truth and fed him words to the contrary in his final week of life; she’ll be right back, she would say as she lifted the white linens to his chin, she’s just gone out to town for the afternoon. A part of me could not bare the bitterness of her deceit, but on the night of his death I did the same while I sat by his bedside with a book. He felt the end of his thread slip between his failing fingers and asked for his wife in his waning hours; I told him she had left for Myrdammen to feed the grebes that nest in her muddy banks, as I had seen my grandmother do the same. She would be back before god sighed her snowy breaths over the treetops, I said, returning to my book.

The next day, Trondheim’s sluggish hiemal sun did not find him in his bed. My grandmother and the rest of his family executed a search party across the estate’s many unlit halls. After he did not show himself in any of the guest rooms or bathrooms, we moved on to closets, cabinets, sheds, and under the unanswered prayers that swallows used to build their nests in the attic. I was the first person to notice the footsteps gouged into fresh snow, leading west, towards the lake.

It was my second uncle who found him, his pale corpse clothed only by the thinnest veils of virgin snow, a single hand extended from his muddy grave to caress Myrdammen’s frozen surface, a decrepit Hylas rejected by the spirits.

Over a decade later, Myrdammen’s tenebrous dirt paths still weave themselves around me in sleep, only they did not lead to the water’s edge, but to the gate of an ancient town, a perversion of the Norwegian hamlet that consumed that distant winter, her oneiric twin alike in all ways save for the splinters of terror it drove under my nails while I walked the barren streets. The snowy pavement gave way to a circle of frozen earth, the stout Scandinavian homes bowing down before a terrible eidolon that grew from the soil and drove itself into the sky—a tower made not of masonry or steel, but flesh. Corpses, pale and bent into shapes that allowed them to slot together like stonework, gave form to this appalling architectural work, an askew watchtower of gaped jaws, twisted flesh, and genitals. I approached the door with a suffocating knot in my chest.

A distant chant from inside spilled over dead, stopping once I tapped on the door: Hun skal komme tilbake.

My grandfather opened the door, the dim moonlight cutting pale mountains into his frown. I intended to ask him why he was trapped in this place, is this was some kind of hell known only to him and the grebes that strayed too far from the waters? Before I could call the unpracticed Norwegian to my lips, his head split in two, as if bisected from crown to throat by the sharpest razor of god; a blue light bloomed from the fleshy seat of his brain, burning the dream out of my mind. I found myself again in my bed, the red New Mexico dusk creeping past the curtains.