Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (13 page)

Twenty minutes later and I was standing in the center of my cluttered yet comfy apartment, which was located on the top floor of a decrepit-looking apartment building in the heart of The Seeds, which is Thundermist’s equivalent of a ghetto: land values had plummeted in this section of Thundermist, thanks to the majority of the Freckle Slayer killings having occurred there back in the day. I wasted no time in scanning each and every page of the Yellow Notebook onto my computer. I had the following day off, and it was my intention to read the entire thing then before I took the next step of calling Bruce and telling him that I had recovered his lost property. Ah, how excited I was that night, when what I really should have done was set the notebook aflame and scatter its accursed ashes to the four winds! I had forgotten Oscar Wilde’s immortal quote: “When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.”

II

The following day found me reading Bruce’s Yellow Notebook. It didn’t take me all that long to read the whole thing, but then again, I’ve always been something of a fast reader. And though I initially found its schizophrenic content to be puzzling, the further I read into the notebook the more it began to make some sort of weird sense to me. Essentially, I realized that what Bruce was trying to map out in the Yellow Notebook was a blueprint for a new religion, one that took a vast multitude of New Age concepts and wedded them to the more positive elements of all the world’s major religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism.

But no, that’s not entirely accurate. It wasn’t so much that he was creating a new religion as it was that he was seeking to
rediscover
one, a belief system that he believed was originally both taught and practiced amongst the people of Atlantis, that mythical long-lost kingdom that has fascinated so many people for so many centuries. Bruce obviously believed that Atlantis was an actual place, one that had practiced a supremely ethical religion that he thought was far more advanced than the ones that we’re familiar with today. In a sense, he was then a sort of theological archeologist.

If Bruce’s more recently dated entries were anything to go by, it was evident that he believed he had nearly succeeded in bringing the particulars of this forgotten religion to full restoration. However, there was something which troubled him, a hole in his theory that he referred to somewhat abstractly as “the Flaw.” The question “What is the Flaw?” appeared numerous times throughout the Yellow Notebook, including the page I previously mentioned in which Bruce had written out the question over and over again, apparently in an infantile burst of frustration. As I concluded my initial reading of the Yellow Notebook, I realized that Bruce had still not answered his own question, that the enigmatic lacuna still haunted the yellowing pages of his research. Or maybe he had, and had just not felt the need to write it down, though this struck me as very unlikely. It would seem that he still did not know what this “Flaw” in his religion was.

Later on that evening, I sent him an e-mail: I had found his e-mail address written on the contact information on the inside cover of the Yellow Notebook, though we also had it on file in our database at Covers as well. I explained to him that I worked at Covers, had recently ordered some books for him, and that I had found his misplaced notebook, the one he had accidentally left behind, and that I wished to return it to him. Bruce replied back to me only a couple of minutes after I sent him this e-mail. He thanked me for having recovered his precious notebook, and asked how I planned to go about returning it to him. I e-mailed him back with instructions to meet me outside of Covers at 2:50
pm
the following afternoon, ten minutes before the start of my shift for that evening. After he replied back to me agreeing with this arrangement, I powered down my computer and went to bed, my eyes very tired and strained from all of the reading that I had done that day.

The following afternoon I stood outside the main entrance of Covers, the Yellow Notebook in my hands. At 2:50
pm
on the dot, an old VW Type 2 “Hippie Van” pulled up to the curb, its exterior surface decorated with colorful psychedelic artwork: it looked like a time machine that had just teleported itself from the Haight-Ashbury district of the 1960’s. Music was playing loudly from speakers within the van: the song was “Wasted Time” by The Eagles, off their 1976 album
Hotel California
. Bruce eventually emerged from this relic on wheels. When he saw me standing there waiting for him with the Yellow Notebook in my hands, he smiled uncomfortably and walked over to where I stood, and I noticed that he was wearing a black t-shirt depicting the cover art of Pink Floyd’s
The Dark Side of the Moon
album. He thanked me (somewhat profusely I felt) for recovering his notebook, and he even tried to give me a small cash reward, which I politely turned down.

After a minute or so of banal chit-chat, Bruce told me he had to run and began walking off. Originally, I had no intention of telling him that I had read his notebook; I had worried that he would view such an admission as a total invasion of his privacy. Yet as I saw him walk off, I was suddenly compelled to confess, “You know, I read your notebook.”

He stopped walking and turned around to face me, an eyebrow raised. “Oh?” he asked, in a tone more curious than upset. “And what did you think of it?”

“I think that what you’re trying to do is admirable… maybe even noble,” I said, not sure where these unrehearsed words were coming from. “But I think I know what the ‘Flaw’ in your religion is.”

“Would you then be so kind as to enlighten me?” he asked, a hint of eagerness in his voice.

“The ‘Flaw’ in your religion is that there is
no
flaw,” I said. “You’ve failed to take into account the problem of evil… and any religion that doesn’t try to provide an explanation for why evil exists is hardly a religion worth following.”

Bruce paused and considered this, a thoughtful expression on his Sphinx-like face. “You know, you just might be onto something,” he eventually said, upon snapping out of his trance. “I’ll have to meditate on that. Thanks for the insight, though.”

“No problem,” I said. “And good luck.” I watched as he climbed back into his van and drove off. Then I entered the store to begin my shift.

III

I had thought, at the time, that that would be my last glimpse of Bruce Kadmon and his weird Yellow Notebook. In a way, I was half right in this prediction, as I never saw Bruce himself again. However, about five months after our final encounter in the flesh, in March of 2013, while sitting in my living room reading the
Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
, I heard a knock at my front door. Outside was a UPS man, holding a package I had to sign for. I received quite a shock when, upon carefully unwrapping the parcel, I once again laid eyes on the Yellow Notebook, along with a few sheets of paper on which many words had been typed out.

My first reaction was to pick up the Yellow Notebook and flip through it, and I saw that it was for the most part unchanged since my first reading of it five months ago, though some new content had been added to the final pages. I laid the notebook down and picked up the sheets of typed paper, feeling very confused. Why had Bruce mailed to me his beloved notebook? I decided to consult the sheets of paper to see if they would shed any light on this puzzling question. I now reprint here the entire letter that Bruce wrote for me, with not a word omitted:

“Dear Frederick,” (so began the letter), “I hope this package finds you in good spirits. I’m sure you remember me, Bruce Kadmon. And I’m also sure you remember my precious notebook. If you’re reading this letter and holding my notebook in your hands, it means I’m dead. Dear me, I suppose that’s a morbid way to begin a letter, but why mince words? In my will I made it clear that my notebook, and this letter that accompanies it, should be sent to you upon my death. So now that you have it, be assured that I am no longer a member of the living.

“It was your insight about the ‘Flaw’ in my religious system on that day you returned to me my notebook that began my road to ruin. I became obsessed with trying to explain the existence of evil and suffering, which I now saw as the hole in things that spoiled the harmony of the pattern I was weaving together. The only comfort I could take during that dark night of the soul was the fact that the same question (that is, how to explain the existence of evil and suffering) had tormented both philosophers and theologians far more intelligent than I for centuries. ‘In brief, I have postulated a monistic evil, which is the source of all death, deterioration, imperfection, pain, sorrow, madness and disease. This evil, so feebly counteracted by the powers of good, allures and fascinates me above all things. For a long time past, my life-work has been to ascertain its true nature, and trace it to its fountain-head. I am sure that somewhere in space there is the center from which all evil emanates.’ So wrote Clark Ashton Smith in his short story ‘The Devotee of Evil,’ and the question that obsessed his Satanic Creole alchemist Jean Averaud obsessed me as well. The more I analyzed the problem, the more I began to ponder a question that I found to be equally disturbing, which was this: for many years I had been working under the assumption that the citizens of Atlantis had practiced a method or system of religion so advanced that it made the belief systems we’re so familiar with seem like crude fairy tales designed to amuse children in comparison. Yet if they
had
actually formulated and practiced the greatest religion ever conceived by the minds of Man, why had their civilization been seemingly sucked into a sea of oblivion, swept right off the face of the Earth? That’s what came to trouble me more than anything else. The idea that the flaw in their religion that I had spent so many years of my life painstakingly reconstructing wasn’t just the existence of evil, but something far more sinister, something almost Platonic in its archetypal malignity. All the more galling to me was the knowledge that I would never really know what had actually happened to Atlantis, assuming that the kingdom had ever even existed in the first place.

“Unorthodox problems require equally unorthodox solutions. It so happens I have a friend who’s a member of a small coven of witches that was based in Cincinnati, Ohio. They own a farm outside the village of Mt. Orab, a farm where they conduct highly specialized sex-magick rituals, rituals in which the members of the coven astrally project themselves backwards in time, so that they can witness actual historical events as remote viewers. This coven believed themselves to be the genetic descendants of the priesthood of Atlantis, and were planning on carrying out a series of rituals with the intention of reconnecting with their past lives, or something along those lines. When my friend found out about my interest in Atlantean culture, she suggested I accompany her to her coven’s farm and partake in the ritual. A proposal I found to be somewhat dubious: being raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, I’ve always felt a taboo fascination with the occult, while at the same time believing that dabbling in it can expose one to demonic spirits from the Dark Side. Nevertheless, academic curiosity triumphed over childhood superstition, and I agreed to partake in their Akashic Working.

“So I accompanied my friend to the coven’s farm in December of 2012, the date of the ritual being December 21st, the Winter Solstice. The ritual took place in an abandoned barn on the farm owned by the coven. Funny, whenever a barn figures into the plot of a horror novel or short story, it almost always serves as the place where bizarre occult rituals take place (consider, for example, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dunwich Horror’). But I digress. Large banners depicting Nazi-like alien runes were hanging from the rafters near the ceiling, and a most curious and foul-smelling incense was being burnt. The interior of the barn was quite crowded, and I counted at least thirty people present in various states of undress. Presiding over the Working was the coven’s master, whose magical name was Frater Tsalal. He was an anemic-looking bald man with piss-yellow eyes, and he was clad in a hooded black robe.

“Before I knew it, the ritual had begun. It started with the cult members banging large tribal drums in an arrhythmic, off-tempo fashion. Frater Tsalal began chanting out barbarous names of evocation, similar to the long strings of vowels that one often comes across while studying Gnostic treatises. Meanwhile, my friend and I began spinning madly around, like two tops, trying to get ourselves as dizzy as possible (we were also clad in black robes, which made me feel more than a little foolish). It was this spinning, combined with the frenetic drumming and Frater Tsalal’s hypnotic intonations, which created within me an altered state of consciousness. I guess the strange herbs and incense the coven was burning may have also added to the effect. Eventually I became so dizzy that I collapsed to the ground, the world whirling around me, and that’s when the weird thing happened.

“Suddenly, I was no longer in an abandoned barn on a farm outside of Mt. Orab, Ohio. Instead, I found myself floating above the streets of long-lost Atlantis, as it was 30,000 years ago. At least that’s what I recall happening… after all, trying to capture an experience such as this with mere words strikes me as being an exercise in futility, but I shall give it my best shot. Images began flashing before my eyes like spontaneous insights, regurgitations of my Triune brain. I saw Atlantis at the height of its gaudy glory, and before me was Zukong Gimorland-Siragosa, its largest city: its streets were made of paved and polished seashells, its slender towering spires of sparkling green emerald that were connected to each other by a vast network of spider web bridges, its vehicles constructed of giant wheeled conch shells. Atlantis was an island nation, located in a spot which I believe is somewhere in the North Atlantic, and its population consisted of olive-skinned, furry-bodied, somewhat Asiatic people dressed in the most exquisite hand-crafted clothing imaginable. I saw these people bartering beneath festive tents in the city marketplace, witnessed their ritual sacrifices conducted in the name of Daoloth, the Atlantean God of Astronomers, atop temples covered in coral reef… I saw exuberant celebrations featuring thousands of dancing spectators, religious festivals in honor of kraken mating rituals, orgiastic parades involving the consumption of strange drugs, secret offerings made by adepts of the Black Temple to Chozzar the Pig God of Shadows, rallies in support of the Party of Science, the crucifixion of Lilith Velkor, and always, in the background, that swirling, utterly mindphasing music, a song I later identified as the title track off Sun Ra’s classic 1969 album
Atlantis
, which Frater Tsalal’s coven had been playing in the background during the time period in which I entered my trance.