Archive for October, 2009
If Ancient Texts are Anything to Go By
Friday, October 16th, 2009
The Black Goat of the Woods, Shub-Niggurath, pranced obscenely through the red-litten clearing, its worshippers copulating frenziedly beneath its myriad udders. Soon, they would seize their obsidian knives and begin to slash at one another in an ecstacy of sanguinary lust. Shub-Niggurath would feast, but would take the best bits home for its Thousand Young. Especially its favorite, Shubbie the 422nd.
The Vermilion Gopher of the Plains, Aug’-Durlett, popped menacingly from one of its myriad holes. A nitid effluent of its malevolence poured forth, blotting out the sun. Traffic on I-70 came to a halt, and there was much rending of metal and spilling of entrails. Aug’-Durlett’s 230 Wives and 1973 Young would eat well tonight in yellow-litten Yah-Squireel.
Hamstur the Unspeakable, Tawny Gerbil of Doom, raced disturbingly upon the shrieking Wheel of Abomination. The slumber of sensitive souls was disrupted across the globe by a myriad ear-piercing squeaks, and even the mighty wizard Fak-bel Knaplung vainly pressed its withered hands to its shockingly hairy organs of audition.
The Ebon Cricket of the Sinister Bamboo Palace, Shrikk the Inaudible, played upon its shockingly malformed limbs a paean of charnel desecration and soul-destroying horror. Dogs throughout east Asia howled in anguish, annoying the just and unjust alike. Yabu Dabi-Tzhoo, Lord of Kay-Na’ein, lept through a foul depiction in stained glass of the Vivisection of the Myriad, and vanished from mortal ken, leaving behind an appalling stench.
Myriads flooded the streets as the Sigil of Unpleasantness, alluded to in the Pleistocene Upchuktic Manuscript, fulminated and was not consumed in the sky above Lichtenstein. Interminable was the wailing and many were the unattractive facial expressions manifested on the green-litten visages of the unhappy Lichtensteiners, for they could feel the fat profits from the tourist trade sublimating from their wallets, retail establishments, and entertainment facilities in the abhorrent effulgence discharged by the Lime-Green Sign.
Much was the inadvertent discharge of bodily fluids and other organic substances as the myriad Calamari of Chaos floated to the surface of the Pacific Ocean, broadcasting their unhallowed and vile thoughts to all within line-of-sight and, after nightfall, those reachable by reflection from the Heaviside layer.
As the human race, insignificant pustule on the acne-scarred backside of Planet Dirt, wailed, moaned, and perished, the Great Old Ones, including Retrievotep, He Who Inexorably Returns, and Nemah-Toad, She Who Burrows Within, began to feed.
And short-lived but heartfelt was the lamentation engendered therefrom.
End
The Viennese Nights’ Entertainment
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
The story was, when the siege failed and the Turks retreated from the walls of Vienna, they left behind sacks of coffee that became the basis for the city’s coffee houses. A couple decades later, the most popular coffee houses traded on the exotic mystique of the beverage’s origins, with sumptuously cushioned benches surrounding mother-of-pearl inlaid tables and a room full of gurgling hookahs at the back. During the coldest months, they added storytellers to draw customers. The most popular were Iskander, at the Bachmann’s, and Mahmood, at the Royal Crest.
They were brothers — twins — and not actually Turkish, but Vienna-born sons of an Egyptian merchant. They’re best remembered for the story duel of January, 1702.
It began when Mahmood whiled away a sleety Monday evening with an impromptu tale involving three dwarves, a hippogriff, and a sieve that turned sand to gold. Iskander retold the story for the next day’s dinner crowd, with a fourth dwarf and the hippogriff changing to a gryphon. The sieve, now, turned sand to silver and silver to gold.
On Wednesday, Mahmood’s version of the story had six dwarves and a two-headed serpent in addition to the gryphon. The dwarves were royalty, three brothers and three sisters, and there was a grand wedding at the end. The sieve turned sand to silver to gold, etc., but it also turned gold back to sand.
Thursday, Iskander had a dozen dwarves wind up in a grander wedding after adventures involving a gryphon, a hydra, and a tortoise that had extra heads where its feet should have been. The sieve turned wind to the sweetest music. The story took all day to recount.
On Friday, the brothers prayed together at noontime and dined together in their father’s house at evening.
On Saturday morning, Mahmood began telling interlocking stories of a dozen dwarvish warrior-kings and the gryphons, rocs, sphinxes, orophants, hamadryads, and other wondrous creatures. Before he even got to the sieve, his brother began telling his version on the other side of the city, elaborating each thread of the story with feats more daring and creatures more wondrous. They continued non-stop, neither pausing to sleep, sustained by ever-stronger coffee and rolls nibbled between sentences. By midweek, the brothers dreamt aloud of giants, ghosts, djinni, clever maidens, untrustworthy tailors…
Their listeners shuttled between coffeeshops, wondering how the story — for the two tales wove now into one — would end. The brothers seemed to finish each others’ sentences, even though they were half a mile apart, telling of miserly stepfathers, unlucky grandmothers, spiderwebs wide as oceans, volcanoes spewing rubies, flocks of mechanical birds, winter queens…
Their listeners stumbled, half-sleepwalking, from one to the other, lost in worlds of summer kings, immortal mask-makers, courageous dwarves in hippogriff-hide cloaks, indigo gryphons weeping for unrequited love, sieves that sifted light from darkness, coffee from plain water, truth from coffeeshop tales…
…and woke in a city blank with new snow to find they’d each dreamt a different ending.