textfiles/magazines/DDE/dde17.txt

                     :        :::.                  :   ____,   
    In Memory,       :        :: :                  :  |_  _; Karl Marx
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      --)(           :    :::.          ::::        :    ||  "Aufheben!"
        ()=          :    :: :igital    ::. rection :    []
          HOOKAH!    :    :::'          ::::        :                       
       13 March 1994  :       Text File #17          Mongoloid Telecom
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                            Usurpator
                          by Az A Thoth

     I had a friend named Corley once.  He might have been a
great man but for his premature death.  He had known things,
Corley had, from all the research he always did in that room of
his in the old Victorian house perched atop the crest of the hill
on Halit Street.  
     He'd lived alone in that house for a long time, with very
little contact with anyone.  He was the kind of hermetic man that
rumors seem naturally to become connected with.  
     He had very few friends, most of them being only through
exchanged letters.  I had known him since childhood, though, from
when his parents had still been alive, and I was one of the few
people that commonly called on him at home.  In fact, I made it a
point to see him weekly. 
     He was a quaint man, quite taken with old mannerisms, and
often sat in a large cushioned chair before a crackling fire in
his study, wearing an old purple smoking jacket and reading from
any one of the innumerable volumes from the estate's library. 
He'd never needed to work, his deceased parents having left a
sizeable inheritance, with which he was quite philanthropic.  
     His one passion was collecting rare, out of print books.  A
variety of topics interested him, from ancient religions to
herbalism to philosophy, and he was extremely well read.
     Then one day he began to burn his books.  It was a sudden
thing; I came over to find that the study's fire was being fueled
with a particularly thick volume on Egyptology.  I asked him
incredulously why he would dispose of his most treasured
possessions, and he replied that I simply would not understand. 
I asked him to try me, and so with a smile half of vindication
and half of fear he took me down to the house's cellar, which I
found he had converted to a laboratory equipped with rudimentary,
and in some cases primitive, devices used along the lines of
chemistry.  
     Shelves of bottled powders and liquids lined the walls, many
of them labeled in Latin and another language that I did not
recognize, though the design of the letters reminded me somewhat
of Arabic. On a wooden table in the center of the place there was
a large block of ornately carven wood, about three feet to a
side, engraved with strange and hideously beautiful images which
seemed contorted in either dances of ultimate joy, or writhings
of most extreme pain.
     There were powders scattered in strange patterns about the
block of wood, which as I looked closer seemed in fact to be a
box.  I could barely discern the outline of the lid so skilled
was the carving, and the wooden hinges were so craftily concealed
as to hardly be noticed at all until closely scrutinized.
     As I stared in a mixture of loathing and wonder at the box,
Corley laid his hand gently on my shoulder.  
     "It's in there, Roger," he said quietly.  "It can hear us,
it can smell us, it can even see us, I think.  The wood doesn't
block out its senses like it does ours.  I don't even think the
wood does anything at all.  Something keeps it in there though,
the carvings perhaps, or something else we can't even make out."
     "It, Corley?"  It was not a question as to whether something
was indeed contained within in the box, but a question as to the
nature of that something.  That carven thing was simply too
foreign from the minds of men for me to question that something
beyond the mundane was connected to its existence.  I only
wondered detachedly what "It" was.
     "The odor, Roger, the odor," Corley hissed in a low voice. 
He began to rant as he explained then, but in a controlled,
faraway manner.  His eyes stared always at the box,
mistrustfully, as though he feared its contents could at any
moment burst forth from their container.  "Pungent and salty and
burning in your nose.  You can taste it, its so strong.  I smelt
it when I opened the box just a crack.  I didn't even open it far
enough to see what was in there, just enough that I could smell
it.  I could still smell it when I shut the box, but only for a
moment.  Then it dissipated I guess, but God, Roger, it was
unlike anything."
     "This is why you're burning your books, Corley?  I still
don't understand..."
     "Of course you don't understand, Roger."  Corley's voice
began to rise in pitch and for a moment I feared hysterics, but
he managed somehow to control himself and continue.  
     "Of course you don't understand...I haven't explained
anything yet.  I haven't told you where the box came from, now
have I?  It came from nowhere, Roger, that's where it came from. 
All those books, I read them but never believed it was so
literal.  The ones from Egypt, Roger, the ones from Sumer, from
Mesopotamia...they knew things in those lands in those times,
Roger, other sciences that we've lost.  Someday maybe we'll
rediscover the things we forgot so long ago.  Forgot or maybe had
taken away from us.  They knew how to find doors, Roger, and
that's where the box came from.  I read it in a book...it was
just too amazing not to try just once.  How could I possibly have
realized just what I was really doing?  Now it's here and I can't
find a way to get rid of it.  I don't want any more temptations,
Roger, so I'm burning everything that could possibly be
dangerous...you have no idea what power they had, Roger...we call
it magic but it was a science, Roger, they knew exactly what they
were doing and how they were doing it...the gods?  They were just
names for what they found...they found things that were different
from what they knew, so they worshipped them.  Maybe out of fear,
maybe out of love, probably it was some combination of the two. 
It's in there, Roger, but I don't know what it is.  I have to
live with it...but I won't live knowing someone else could open
it back up...no, not the box, the door!"
     That was when I smelt it.  I think I noticed it before
Corley did.  Perhaps the acrid smell had dulled his sense the
first time he had been exposed to it.  It burned in my nostrils
and burned in my brain, and I wondered in panic where it came
from, for the box had not been disturbed.  
     Then Corley smelt it, too, and he screamed, a garbled cry of
lunatic surprise.  I saw him head for the strange box where it
sat in a circle of chemicals and carven incantations, saw him
reach out towards it.  I wanted to stop him, but as it is wont to
do in moments of extreme emotion, my body stood rigidly frozen. 
As he threw back the lid of the box, however, my moment of
paralysis was ended, and I danced forward jerkily like a stiff
and dead dancer to a rigadoon, half spinning as the left side of
my body resisted for a moment longer the motion I desired.
     I stumbled up against the table, rapidly being overcome by
the odor in the air.  My heart was pounding painfully and
breathing came only in harsh, painful gasps.  I leaned forward to
peer into the box, to see what it was that had come from another
place in this grotesquely beautiful box.  
     But there was nothing in the box, and already Corley knew
what he had done, for I saw it in the eyes that stared past me
into the air around us.
     "I let it out, Roger," he gasped in a voice hardly above a
whisper, tinged with fear and awe and realization.  "It got out
the first time I dared even crack the lid, and it's with us now,
whatever it is that I brought into our world.  Run Roger!  Run!"
     I'm still not perfectly certain why his voice took on such
urgency and terror at the last, what it was he saw or realized.
But when he cried for me to flee, I did so unquestioningly,
because I could feel something too.  A static in the air, and
something more, something that couldn't be seen or touched but
only smelled.  
     I paused only once as I ran from the house, at the front
door when I heard Corley's cry from the basement, a cry of
ultimate knowledge and panic and, perhaps at the last, obscene
and inhuman joy.
     I had a friend named Corley once, but he isn't around
anymore.  Nowadays, the thing that lives in the old Victorian
house at the top of the hill on Halit Street doesn't come out at
all, and only has what it needs brought by phone or postal order
to the house.  
     Something still lives in that house, and it walks in the
body that once belonged to my friend.  It was only an odor, but
it has become something more, and something less, I imagine, now
that it has left the air and entered into the confines of human
flesh.  Whatever it is, it seems content for now to stay there in
the house, with its shelves of strange books and its laboratory
below.
     I have suspicions of its intent, but I dare not return to
that house to find out the truth of them.  I am afraid of what I
might find, or perhaps smell, if I did.
     I know what I will do when I smell that odor again, because
whatever it did to Corley, his scream was horrible, all the more
so for its emotion at the last.  The sound of it is still lodged
in my own mind.     
     I won't let it take me like it did him, and that's why I
carry this gun now, with the single bullet in its chambers.  It
came here alone, but it is surely calling back to its kin.  I saw
the notes in the book that was lying open beside the empty box. 
     Corley never locked the gate, he only closed it.  It is a
simple thing to reopen.  Especially so, I am sure, for one that
came here from the other side.
      

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      Distorted Digital Erection     March 1994     Text File #17
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