Thursday, October 31, 2013

Halloween Horror Radio!

Halloween is one of the better holidays, of course, if only for the added frission of liminality that spices up our standard spooky tales.  I've been harvesting mp3s of some of the better Old Timey Radioshows out there in the interwebs, and I thought I'd share a few here!

There have been a few absolutely classic adaptions of Lovecraft's work for the radio.  The Outsider is perfectly fine, though it pales in comparison to The Dunwich Horror, which uses a War-of-the-Worlds style news program structure to add to the fun.  One of my particularly favorite Lovecraft stories has also been transformed into a quite good radio show: The Rats in The Walls, which is a pretty terrifying title on its own.

Another absolutely fantastic bit o' radio horror comes from good old Vincent Price's old show, The Price of Fear.  Titled Specialty of the House, it is really a masterpiece of slow burn subtly and over-the-top fun that one would expect from Price.

FINALLY, a famous bit of horror radio, set on a Pennsylvanian drill rig, is The Thing on The Fourble Board, which has some excellent voice acting.  

Happy Halloween!

Introductions


Thursday, October 24, 2013

Une Geographie Infernale - Gedsbry Abbey, Northumberland, England

From its rough perch on The Giant’s Hill, the tumbledown ruin of Gedsbry Abbey frowns down over the River Coquet, a reminder of old days and ancient practices long forgotten. The Poor Brothers of St. Christopher settled in the rough hill country of Northumberland sometime in the late 1090’s or early 1100’s, though the specific c date of their arrival is uncertain. We do see their Monastery included in the accounting of Sheri ff Odard for the Great Roll of the Exchequer in 1131, allowing us to place them roughly in the early 12th Century.  The land, including the famously haunted hill upon which the Brothers built their monastery, was granted them by the King.  Perhaps the Norman conquerors hoped that the famously rebellious people of Northumber country would be calmed by the presence of God-fearing monks? Unasked at the time, however, was the question of which “God”, exactly, the Poor Brothers feared?


The Brothers venerated Saint Christopher who, among other things, was the patron saint of epilepsy, a malady long associated with prophecy and occult vision. Apparently they got something out of the deal, since the Brothers soon gained a reputation for divining the future with unusual accuracy. One Brother Oswulf, noted for his prognosticatory abilities, was said to have prophesized the calamitous storm of 1192 that collapsed the roof of a local lord’s hall, killing everyone within. The unfortunate Lord’s land was quickly
bought up by the Abbey. Similarly, an Abbot Martin accurately foretold of the catastrophic fl ooding of the Tyne in the spring of 1215. This warning was ignored by the people of adjacent villages, who subsequently suffered great loss of life and property while the Brothers, having moved their fl ocks to higher ground, enjoyed something of a monopoly on wool and mutton for many years after. Soon, commoners and potentates alike would travel to the Abbey, seeking an audience with its mystical Monks that saw the future in strange trances. Thus, while bereft of the relics normally associated with a wealthy abbey, the Brothers of Gedsbry did a brisk enough trade in fortune-telling to buy up numerous properties up and down the valley.

Rumors of the source of these visions all seemed to point to a distinctly non-Chrisitian origin, however. The Giant’s Hill, upon which the abbey is built, has had a long history of haunting and mysterious events. These began with the first Roman chronicles from the area, who noticed that the site was of particular abhorrence to the native Celts known as the Votadini. One Severus Magnus, a Legionnaire of equestrian rank, wrote of the mysterious rites of the Picts who, slipping across the border on moonless nights, would hold unholy sacrifices atop a place he termed the “domum gigantes”. Here, he wrote, their wild chants would be answered by terrible voices coming up from the ground that, in exchange for blood, instructed pictish shamans in all the secrets of the earth.

The retreat of Rome and the advent of the Dark Ages did little to lessen the weirdness of the locale. The Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria, dominant in the 7th and 8th Centuries, left many chilling tales that found their way into the libraries of many monasteries. The most famous tells of the hellish vision of a young man named Oswiu. Lost and wandering in the dark, he came upon a hill lit with unholy flame and circled round by a horned serpent that whispered blasphemies to the stars. Tending the fire atop the hill was a giant man blue with woad and girt with wolfskin, while naked celebrants danced and writhed in the relight. Among the more human celebrants, Oswiu is said to have recognized neighbors and prominent land-owners. He fled the scene, and reported all to the King. In the subsequent weeks, many people were rounded up by King Ceolwulf and drowned in the North Sea for the “grievous sins” of sorcery, necromancy, false prophecy, and paganism. Shortly thereafter Ceolwulf himself, perhaps hounded by the horrors he had heard and witnessed at the trials, abdicated the throne and retired to a monastery for the rest of his days.

By the time the Poor Brothers of Saint Christopher came on the scene then, we see that the Giant’s Hill had already become a grisly haunt of ghosts and goblins. Why then did these strange Monks from the continent settle there? Some scholars believe that their choice was not in spite of these rumors, but rather because of them.  Although the record is muddled, it appears that the Brothers were not entirely naïve about occult topics, for in all the pertinent records we fi nd the Poor Brothers wrapped in a cloak of mysticism and
rumored diabolism. For starters, whence came the Poor Brothers?  By their own accounts, they had fled persecution “in the east”, and that their order was originally from the first missions sent to Egypt, perhaps making them Coptic. What secrets had they learned in that ancient land?

This Egyptian connection is important, and it may be that the Brothers had already tipped their hand. As noted above, the Brothers of Gedsbry Abbey had a special enthusiasm for Saint Christopher. In some traditions, St. Christopher was said to have been one of the cynocephali, strange creatures mentioned by Herotodus and Ctesias in the Ancient World, and by Paul the Deacon in his “Historia gentis Langobardorum” in the Middle Ages.  Specifically, St. Christopher was believed by some to have had the head of a dog. A dog-headed figure associated with holy death and mystic visions? A similarly figure is found among the Egyptians in the form of the most occult Anubis, the ancient dog-headed God of the Dead.


It is recorded that, when the Poor Brothers of St. Christopher traveled up the River Coquet to their new home, they carried with them an icon or statue of their Saint in the form of a robed, dog-headed man. Beyond this similar iconography, there is an additional piece of evidence linking the Poor Brothers of St. Christopher to Egyptian mysticism and the Cult of Anubis: mummies.

Anubis, in his role as the God of Death, was often portrayed by the Egyptians as an embalmer. It was Anubis who gave the Egyptians the art of preserving and protecting the bodies of the dead, a central component Egyptian religion. Northumberland is, of course, far to damp a place for traditional mummi fication. However, though it lacks the dry wind and sand of the African deserts, the north of England is rich in peat bogs, which are just as capable of working the magic of mummification on the remains of mortal men and women. Buried deep in the acidic muck of the bogs, the bodies of the dead are cured and the soft tissues preserved with an excellence that would arouse the envy of a Pharaoh. Skin, hair, cloth, all well preserved, though of course the bones of the dead quickly dissolve away, leaving a distorted and disturbingly sack-like bog mummy behind.

These mummies are common in Northumberland, associated with both the Celtic and Norse settlements of Late Antiquity and the early Dark Ages. Internment in the bogs was of a clearly ceremonial nature, the individuals having been fed a final meal of bread baked with ash before being ritualistically killed via strangulation or, less commonly, bludgeoning. The mummies are also often found in association with offerings of iron weapons or tools, an extravagant waste of rare metal that speaks to the importance of these bog burials. Christianization of the North resulted in a marked change in burial practices, of course; after the sixth or seventh century C.E., one does not find bog mummies.

Except…there is a period where bog mummies become common again, temporally and spatially coinciding precisely with activity at Gedsby Abbey. Beginning in the mid 1100s, and continuing on until approximately the late 1300s, bodies were being inhumed in the swamps five miles north of The Giant’s Hill. These remains, their bellies stuff ed with ash-laden bread, limbs bound, and throats slashed, are often found with small iron statues of a dog-headed man. It is a remarkably consistent return to form after many hundreds of years without, apparently, any intervening continuity.

In 1244 C.E., a combined secular and ecclesiastical enclave was convened to address the concerns expressed by locals regarding the unnaturalness of the Brothers of St. Christopher. Fortune telling was bad enough, but it seems that people were disappearing with alarming regularity, never to be heard from again. Additionally, witnesses remarked on the strange, midnight processions to the northern swamps the Brother’s seemed so fond of taking, particularly around Walpurgisnacht and Samhain. Finally, the cemetery around the church, sacrosanct land that was the special charter of the Brothers, was being disgracefully neglected. The conclave went even further, citing the Brothers for heresy and “un-christian” burial practices. The Abbot, along with key Brothers, were “removed” (and almost certainly burned as wizards), while a new hierarchy of Dominican Brothers were brought in to “correct” the unorthodox members of the community.

It would appear, however, that these overseers met with little success, and indeed may even have become converts to the particular practices of the Brothers, as the rumors, disappearances, and bog mummifications continued until 1388. Indeed, stories from the period immediately after the Censuring Conclave become markedly grisly, as the Brothers apparently reasserted their control over the area. The vanishings continued, and local shepherds learned to travel always in well-armed gangs, choosing to combine their fl ocks rather than make themselves vulnerable among the lonely hills. Strange, inhuman figures would appear and disappear along the banks of the river, while blood curdling screams and moans seemed to echo up from the Earth. This lead to the belief, common even today, that the area around The Giant’s Hill is riddled with caves and passages through which evil things stalk.

The horrors eventually came to a head in the spring of 1388, with a particularly gruesome discovery. A peat cutter, draining some of the bogs in search of fuel, uncovered a whole cache of mummies, carefully arranged in a circle around a central body that had been tied to a heavy iron chair. This central mummy was a particularly horrific jumble of remains, and only partly human. According to the tale, the head of this poor victim had been removed, replaced by the skull of large hound or wolf, strapped in place on the stump of the corpse’s neck and surmounted with an iron crown. On this unusual piece of headwear was stamped the following phrase, recorded in the annals of the village priest, Father Osric: “Fraternitatem presertim leges Mors Canisque”, Latin for “Brotherhood of the Sainted Dog of Death. Furthermore, around the neck of this composite mummy was found an amulet bearing the insignia of St. Christopher.

Imagine the furor such a discovery must have wrought! All the tales of hellish idolatry, black magic, and demoniacal evil confirmed in an instant! What happened next is difficult to piece together, for those involved seemed to have made an effort to efface their subsequent actions from the historical record. However, this much is known. It seems that, having summoned Father Osric and some of the more important local land-owners, it was decided that the Poor Brothers must be apprehended or driven from the area. To this end, they summoned the local Undersheri ff and his men and, under cover of darkness, they came upon the Abbey unawares in the night.

It is not clear whether they had planned to confront the Brothers with this evidence, or if they had simply decided to attack. Regardless it seems that, despite being surprised by the sudden assault, the Brothers attempted some violence in their defense. A melee soon developed in which many on both sides were killed, some in a particularly horrible and “indescribable” way, at least according to a letter sent by the Undersheri ff after the fact. Some Brothers seemed to have fled into the swamps, while the Abbot and many of the Brothers seemed to have died in a fire that consumed the main church, screaming defiance and blasphemies to the end. I write “seemed to have died” since, apparently, no remains were ever found, not even a charred bit of bone. Also, one must remember the tales of the tunnels rumored to have turned the bedrock into Swiss cheese. Did these “Brothers of the Sainted Dog of Death” escape into the subterranean world?

The ruins remain to this day, a Historical Heritage Site registered with the U.K., though visited only rarely by tourists of the Occult. Strange lights are sometimes seen, illuminating windows briefly as they flit through the Abbey. People have told tales of a huge black dog that stalks through the ruins silently on moonless nights, and at least one man, a poet of unusual sensitivity, went mad after spending the night there in the early 1930s. None have found the tunnels and chambers rumored to lie beneath the hulk of the Abbey, though in truth few have tried. I myself visited it in the mid 1980s, and can attest that there is something unearthly about the place, a brooding watchfulness that seems to resent the clumsy footfall of intruders from the wider world. Still, it is a lovely bit of ruins in a landscape noted for its rugged beauty, and should not be missed by my fellow travelers. Go in the daytime, however, and make sure you leave yourself plenty of time to get back to the village before twilight.
 

From Samizdat, V.1 n.1

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Flash Fiction Archive the Third

Here's a third collection of my Flash Fiction, from my #FlashFictionFriday series on the Twitter.  Enjoy!

Gut-bound hair wreathes hung from the eaves. Insects nailed to the door with rose thorns. Clearly, we had Fairies.

Celebrations of R'lyeh's subduction down the Nankai Trough were dampened by petrologic models of a metamorphic Cthulhu.

Lanterns bobbed through the fog, accompanied by the faint noises of men and dogs. Cursing, I ran for the woods.

Fifty miles back, the crashed Saucer hissed in the thunderstorm. Behind him in the truck bed, the tarp stirred.

"Why buzzsaw arms!?" he shouted, scrambling up the tree. "Science!" I said. Below, B.U.N.Y.O.N.'s eyes glowed red.

The rain of blood may have cast the world into despair and madness but, by God, it really helped our melon patch.

As we dug we found more pipes leading into the house. Water, ozone, salt water, treacle, chicken blood...we kept digging.

Inexorably the toffee glacier advanced, grinding the hills to dust as it approached town. Never piss off a Candy Wizard.

The vines were meant for soil erosion. Grew fast, strangled a Company man who came to check. I collected seed carefully.

"Canopic jars?" I asked, peering into the pantry. "Canning time soon," she answered, feeling the edge of her knife

The trick in birdwatching is to remain perfectly still, sometimes for hours. I'm good at it myself. Oh! Turkey Vultures!

"Work ain't what it used to be" said Poseidon, polishing sand grains as slightly acidic waters ate away at his carapace.

Butterflies gathered on the mud, wet with piss. Maybe, I thought, he'll be home tonight. Wings shimmered in the heat.

"detect can I that None" .pauses He. "?fabric space/time in problems any seen you have, accident Chronoengine the Since"

The rain ended, the clouds scattered, but something wasn't right. Had there always been two suns? Had they always been blue?

The raccoons are a real problem, for sure, but I'm more mad at the people that sold them the guns in the first place.

Plotting global seismicity on a map centered on the south pole, words emerged. Of course, I don't appreciate profanity.

The rocket, with a record of Earth's history, science, and art, rose into the sky. "Now," he said "to destroy the Earth."

The ceiling glistend with egg jellies. Chitin debris littered the floor. "Son," he said, "clean up after your pet."

Sara leaned off the dock with her torch. Wriggling, silvery things swam to the light. "We'll bring Dad to us" she said

"Teeth are taxonomically valuable." They unfurled a tentacle, "For instance, dentomorph b3 is common in garbage strata

The War against God was surprisingly short, once we found the bastard. (He was in the Gaps, buying overpriced khakis.)

The tangled bush was too lush when everything else died. It moved without wind. He should have buried him somewhere else

We got the iceblock into the warm garage to melt. If you squint, you can see the shape inside, tall, twisted, dark.

Putting down a vengeful spirit was the easy part. My hair smelled like holy herbs, and the security deposit? Lost cause.

"I'll take it."
"Sight unseen?"
"Sure."
"Look, it's a Mk 2. Patched frame, iffy pump-"
"Blonde?"
"Yeah-"
"I'll pay cash"

"Oil ain't the only thing under these salt domes. Take a listen." He hands me the headset, and I hear a moaning chant.

A jagged piece of bloody onyx had been stabbed into my door. "The Shorn Priests of Ix!" he gasped. "What did you DO?"

I watched stars arc through the sky, dimmed only by the feeble red glow of a low sun during the planet's short summers.

"Something's got the dogs riled up," he said, looking through the shutters into the yard. The ten animals dug furiously.

"This new Generation! Lazy! Focused on 'technology'!" Old Man grumbled. I felt the chert blade of my spear, and grinned.

"Annabel Lee" was the fastest ship of her type, scudding between Cloud Kingdoms like a falcon. Her Capn was a driven man

"Tower status?"
"On schedule! At the gem gate of the 3rd heaven!"
"Soon we'll meet God!"
"And then he better watch out"

She had a rum flask, cloth, the knife and cup, and two names, one burning in her mind, the other freezing her heart.

Snow falls, flurries soon building to a blizzard. Shoulders hunched, she walks on, dragging the ruined sleigh.

He dug through most of the cook shack to find the cans he'd saved, fat and swollen. Outside, the men weighed their gold.

The sand hissed under his shell as Poseidon drug himself across the badlands. He'd left an ocean here, some time ago.

"Oil wells hidden in LA, right? Well," he said, swirling a vial of soul residue, "our extractors are similarly discrete"

Choking, she spat out the fruit, eventually retching behind the tree. "Yeah," said the snake, "takes getting-used-to."

Teeth falling out, sinking, naked in class; unlike his Grampa Randolph, Bob Carter never got the hang of the Dreamlands.

Libraries were the worst, full of wide-open minds, thoughts sieving through them, a real feast. It tested even his will.

"Odd folks," he said, "but six months rent in advance. Lotsa crates. Seemed real excited about the marshes here about."

"Miles of pure sea salt!" Leaning on his rake, he gazed across the flats. He saw me fidgeting. "You can piss anywhere."

He was desperately ready for peace, but the rest of him voted against dying. Sobbing, he lurched forward into the night.

"Calm," Master wheezed. "Find the storm's center, simply BE." Breathing, I let my eyes unfocus and saw it: a dolphin.

After all that jostling, It's bendy, many-legged host finally got comfy.
The bananas had been loaded onto the ship.


It rippled through minds, hunting suitable lodgings. Swimming through crowds was hard but Bad Ideas are very streamlined.

"Know seed bombs? Seed balls you toss, to green the city. It's like that," he said, hefting a sphere, "but with viruses".

She had an eyepatch and was good with a knife. They called her "Mary of the Seven Tombs." He never felt like asking why.

He dug fast. The Circean glamor occupying the guards wouldn't last long. His spade splintered wood: the coffin, at last.

Dyer, W., 1934, On buried fault lines, observed seismicity, and ritualistic murder: Geognostic Review, v.14, p.134-188.

Volumes from the Crimson Hexagon: A History of The Necronomicon

Necronomicon

PUBLICATION HISTORY

- Written by Abdul Alhazred in ~730 C.E.
- Yazzid III outlaws the Al Azif in 745 C.E.
- Theodorus Philetas translates Al Azif into Greek in 950 C.E., giving it the name “Necronomicon”, meaning    “A Study of the Dead”
- Patriarch Michael orders all copies of the Necronomicon burnt.  Arabic copy believed lost.
- Olaus Wormius produces Latin translation in 1228.
- Pope Gregory IX suppresses both Latin and Greek translations.
- Greek Edition Published in Germany (1440s), quickly outlawed.
- John Dee produces an English Translation in 1575, though it is never published.
- Th e Sussex Manuscript, a partial and very incomplete English translation of the Necronomicon, is published    in very limited numbers in 1597.
- Latin reprint issued in Spain in 1661

A HISTORY OF THE NECRONOMICON

The danger of the written word lies in its longevity; long after the author is dust their thoughts continue to exist, a bridge between different times and different ways of thinking. This danger has long been recognized by those in power, who have enough trouble controlling the lives and thoughts of the living let alone those of the dead, who are beyond the reach of even the direst of threats.  Often the only recourse available to those in power is to transfer their threats and censure onto the works themselves, banning and burning as quickly and as completely as possible in hopes of stemming the tide. Of course there is the danger that, by reacting too violently against a book, you enhance its mystique and demonstrate its potential to those watching.

The Necronomicon is, in many ways, the archetype of such banned and condemned volumes. Written in Damascus in 730 C.E., this volume soon gained a truly fearsome reputation. This is likely a result of its having been penned by a truly Faustian character, Abd al-Azrad (or, more romantically westernized as Abdul Alhazred The Mad Arab), a wizard, alchemist, occultist, mystic, and proto-scientist all rolled into one.


Alhazred lived a remarkable life. He studied in the ruins of Old Babylon, where he is said to have had a nameless thing in a well as a master. He traveled to Memphis, where he learned much forbidden lore from Priests of the Old Gods. He traveled to the Empty Quarter in modern day Saudi Arabia, where he claimed to have discovered Irem the Lost, City of Pillars. More remarkable still was the manner of his death; killed in broad daylight before a horrified crowd, ripped to shreds by an invisible monster.

Before his untimely dismemberment, Alhazred had penned his magnus opus, Al-Azif, a book of hellish magic and terrible prehistory. This volume was quickly outlawed by the Caliph of Damascus Yazid III, although apparently many copies were smuggled both West and East during the chaos of the Abbasid Revlution in the late 700s.

The work reemerged in Constantinople in 950 C.E., translated into Byzantine Greek by the scholar Theodorus Philetas. It is from this translation that the name we all know and love today came: The Necronomicon, roughly translated as “A Study of The Dead”.  The work was quickly damned by the Patriarch Michael around 1050.

The book remained relatively obscure until Olaus Wormius produced his famous Latin translation in 1228 C.E., a volume quickly condemned and ordered destroyed by Pope Gregory IX. As is often the case, this order dramatically increased interest in the work, and numerous copies were produced and disseminated throughout Europe. A new Greek edition, back translated from Wormius’ Latin version, was produced in Nuremburg in 1440, while the famous John Dee produced an expurgated English translation in 1575. Perhaps most famously, the scholars of Toledo, Spain produced a Latin translation in 1661, apparently from an original Philetas Greek volume.

Today, rare copies of the work can be found all over the world. Copies of the 1661 Spanish volume can be found at the Biblioteque National in Paris, in the Miskatonic University Library in Arkham, Mass, at the Widener Library at Harvard, and at the library of the University of Buenos Aires. Two copies of the German
Greek editions are extant, one at the British Museum in London, and a second at the Wallace Library at Shaver University, California. All are heavily restricted.
                                                                                                                                                           (From Samizdat, v.1, n.1)