Hell Canto...(pt.1)

(<This being the true and factual account of one's journey through the lower realms, as documented by Carlton Tucker, adventurist and somnambulant seeker of the eternal. The use of "Gentleman's Curatives" is at once admitted and admonished, and for the sake of the reader shall not be elaborated upon. Needless to say the fetish of the Amazonian shaman and the Viking berserker are different technologys affording similar experiences.)

Like a voyage to the centre of the earth, the hellscape tunnels through the core of my being. The landscape of hell is a roadmap over my flesh. Damned to a self made hell by my own admission. Would that I could undo the cursed learning I had acquired in the Chineys. After bringing them the good book and the musket bullet I did unconsciously absorb their notions of the Bhuddah, and their skill of projecting one’s soul out to explore the heavens. Damned to a self made hell by my own curiosity. I had been awaking each morning viewing clear and stark the symbol of the dragon, Ogdru Jahad, and he was wreathed with the pentacle and placed upon a spiral. Wrought in black and white by my own hand above the window frame. And it was this simple action that entered me into hell.

There is a road of bone that leads to hell, where the voices of every species past and future whisper simple truths to passing souls. Nerve language, the coded frequency of unconscious animal minds. The road of bone leads to a gated stone courtyard, two benches flank it either side. Each passing soul must sit in contemplation of itself before the final truth is discarded and they move beyond, to the Chamber of Silence. Those who cannot discard their will and ego will not endure the effrontery of their own self judging them, and these, they are accosted and harnessed and in every sense they are brought down. Brought low, taken out and through the frenzied miasma of teeth and claws and pure anxiety which is the red, the animal mind space. This is where the demons set up their camp for me, they wait in the subfrequencies outside of conscious thought, and time means nothing here. So they have been here forever.

Hell reacts to the damned one’s fear, it sets a table before him and lets him choose his mode of torture. Only to reveal an even further iteration, a doubling of horror. There is no cessation in hell, always extrapolation, always growth, always chaos. My hell is not a solitary experience, others are put to the wrack before me. Instead of me. Because of me.

And I was dragged down by my tulpa, my thoguth. A form which was my own self image. My own admission of hate and damnation, and it did screw it’s face in torment for my ineptitude, as it was torn to rag banners by the demons awaiting me on the plains. And I did stand on the sand which boiled and fizzed with vibrations such as to cut the flesh on my legs to the bone, and looking down found that they really were fleshy and stripped and dripping red ichors. The pain was a sharp fleeting whip up my spine, before the creaking ache of the exposed bone settled into a more subtle and more agonizing reality.

The demons who attended my arrival took no pleasure in my pitiful exultations, bound and gagged and blinkered as they were, sheathed and wreathed in long lengths of thorny barb, so as to bind their bones and voices. They worked in tandem to fit me with a yoke and a cart, which was fastened by callipers and shot through with bolts behind my collarbone. Even in hell there are lessons to be learned, and my first lesson was to take my medicine. The demons flayed and hounded me as I strove to bring the cart up behind me, and looking behind me finding the cart to be filled to the brim with mewling babes. And the demons did toss the screaming wretches into the furrow I had tilled and poked them under the earth with blackened claws. And on this day I learned that hell has day and night. I saw their sickly sun not setting per se, yet diminishing in size none the less, and a caustic yellow moon burst forth from a fissure in a far off crypt, to cast a wan and freezing glow upon my labours. Night in hell would be much the same as day were it not for the frost and ice that suddenly formed and clawed its way over every living and dead thing. The earth cracked and blackened, then turned to a singular sheet of bright white ice, scintilla sparkling through its blank mass. The cart was stuck fast, and the furrow I had tilled was filled to brim with solid frozen water. The demons made hollow whooping noises and left me then, skittering over the frozen waste with legs like branches tapping on window panes. I was stuck fast in my cart and naked, wounded and moaning. Yet I knew I had been here a day, could recall my name and my mother’s face and knew I could endure.

There was no sleep for me on that night, just a numb trance in which fat black shapes whipped by my stricken vision, and forces without physical form tore ragged chunks from my body, like sharks tearing at chum in the pitch Arctic ocean. There is no order to events in hell, one can shift back and forth through past textures and visions. As the moon receded into its crevasse, it crumbled and broke against the crag and tumbled into its participles, billions of irradiated souls in frenzied orgy, rebirthing and copulating into sick lunar light. They were in turn eaten up by the mountainside, slaking the thirst of some naked elemental beast. I had the notion to escape my bindings from the cart, whereupon it leapt to frenzied life, shuddering and shaking its load of frozen babies over the thawing earth, dragging me along and rasping my skin to streamers.

We travelled in this manner for some time, the sentient horse-cart and I. Underneath the carriage yet fastened securely, my head periodically bounced against the fleeting earth and rendered me unconscious. I came to at rest, underneath the now smashed and stationary cart. Men in chains were hurriedly skewering the spilled load of the cart, depositing into sacks, marking ledgers. I crawled from the wreckage, feeling lighter than I had for aeons.

We had travelled some distance, having rounded what could only be described as an inverted axis. The landscape stretched over and around my head completely, as if I had slipped through the soil of hell and were looking out from in. Walking the inside of a toy balloon.

And it was here on this inverted landscape that I was given a number and marked in hell’s ledger, the better to keep an account of my journey and my tribulations. Chain gangs roamed the plains here, lugging great tomes of indecipherable cuneiform. And they did see me and did draw my countenance, and transcribe my words, though the words poured out in a blank torrent of unfocused noise and aggression. The plains were formed from the mulch and the backwash that pours from hell’s great metropolis, Quas Atol. If one were to examine the soil of hell they would find myriad treasures, teeth, splintered bone, gouged eyes, ragged scraps of skin and paper burnt or torn or otherwise inscribed with damned dreams. All names and places I have transcribed phonetically, for in hell there is no language that can ever be understood, only guessed at and written down as one hears it. And this was how I came to know the city of Quas Atol.

It squats at the basin of the plains, sucking down wayward souls and inertia borne effluvia, sucking and pulsing with a monstrous tidal life that is its own damnation.
The city of Quas Atol is sealed on all four planars, it decides who may live and die and live again within its walls. And as I followed the chain gang of scribes they entreated me to join their number, holding out chains and hooks and tomes for me to bear. But I am no scribe, and took no comfort in their flagellation, and so entered the City of Quas Atol without my even trying. The necrotic walls gave way and led me naturally into its sanctum.

Here began my induction proper into the rigors of damnation, for Quas Atol is a city of amnesia. The damned here cannot remember the reasons or actions that led them here, and so are caught in a mental feedback loop of recrimination and self-doubt. At any time a demon or damned soul may seize upon an idea and run through the streets screaming its revelation, only to find a few moments later it has lost the train of thought and must descend once again into silent reverie. No physical torture exists in Quas Atol, the masters of this keep have worked out punishment sublime beyond the boundaries of the body. It was here in Quas Atol that I hit upon the notion of disguise, and made to cover my body in the thorny barbs that many demons wore as raiment. But no sooner had I started this endeavour than I forgot my original purpose, and tore the brackish weeds from my arms and legs and squirmed upon the dirt in pitiful agony, staring at hell’s sun and wishing that I could break free. And in this state of pain and anger I hit upon the notion of disguise, and made to cover my frail form with cruel barbs and gnarled twigs. I will spare the reader a further repetition, yet in this manner they may see the pointless torture that exists in Quas Atol.

Only outside influence can break the solipsistic loop of thought that Quas Atol brings, and my cessation came in the form of a great parade through the backstreets of the city, where I lay in filth and dribbling despair. Made up of monstrous elephantine forms, topped by riders wrought from bones of flame. These were flanked by weedling rags of membrane that blew tribute and fanfare and cleared a path for the parade, observed by the denizens of this city, some screaming in wonder and fright and others joining their number, to be taken as fodder for the demons that drove the procession ever onwards.

The parade was decked out in red rag banners, made from the flayed carcasses and hung entrails of the damned. Burn victims danced a coquettish mimsy through the crowds, dragging the sick sleepers of Quas Atol into dead eyed reverie. Soon the whole city was whipped into bloodsoaked frenzy, monks and witches beating skull drums, blowing bone pipes, stirring the gestalt into a single intention. I was with them, dancing on my fleshless feet and grinding my torn stump of a prick against their rusted forms. The citizens forgot who they were, forgot why they danced in the parade, yet the drums span and chanted bogus witch hymns to keep them on their feet. Flashes of madness and beauty and sharp stainless steel needling through to bone, as the Sabbath wound into a higher order of malice, each fiend turning on each, until the streets of Quas Atol rang with razor whipped screams. The metropolis suckled at the soup of the Sabbath, gonging and casting deep sonorous throbs into the firmament, goading and leering at the spectacle. Each fiend was caught in stasis, rapt, as Dubber wound up from, wound up, through the city to meet his audience.



And for a second the ash grey earthsky of hell froze, no slate grey forms scudded across its surface. Dubber’s moon face cast a horny shadow over all, and all forgot everything. Night night.

From this black reverie Dubber worked his magic, throttling stultified memories from the minds of his congregation, steepling his church pit in the fathoms of their souls. Here I learned that demons dream, for we all shared a moment and a mind and in that instant knew each other and Dubber and it was absolute agony. His mind plate set us out and vibrated to the pitch of a bone ear until we all screamed as one and were cast back and down into Quas Atol. We had seen the mind of Dubber, the modus of amnesia, and he knew all that there was to know if only he could remember it.

The city looked even uglier on second appraisal, although truth be told this was my first view of the place with clear perceptions. It was a tribal kibbutz turned inside out, tents pitched over and inside each other and rigged with walkways and trapdoors. I turned back to view the carnage. The hulking brutes that made up the bulk of the procession had set to rage amongst the throngs, obviously perturbed by the visions we had just endured. The sleeping sickness was settling once again, as the weaker souls, the longest here, began to slip back into morbid contemplation. Dubber still viewed his denizens, but he was receding up into the earth and growing flat, his grin transferring into a general malaise that hung Quas Atol on a cross.

Stumbling and in a fearful daze I made to escape Dubber’s gaze, only to come upon the bone steps leading to his sanctum. A monstrous carved effigy of his balloon round face and hysterical grin were hewn out of a colossal bone formation. Much of the architecture of hell is made via natural sources, and much of the natural flora resembles hell’s architecture. Many scripts and talismans were engraved around the seat of the idol, none in any language that was understandable to me. But clear and stark I saw the symbol of the dragon Ogdru Jahad, the world eater, and it did look to be a carving done by my hand. There was not a soul in this crypt to stir me from my thoughts, and I entered a colossal depression whereupon I thought I had carved the symbol as a message to myself, only to forget the original purpose of the message whilst only half way through carving it.

It seems to me I shifted states whilst in this sanctum, leaving behind whatever shell hell had provided for me and sublimating into a null frequency. Dubber had cast an altar in his shrine and I climbed aboard to ease my rest. I saw my victrola record player turn its own handle and spit out the crummy tune of my life, spat out over and over again and recorded until it lost all meaning. Dubber’s journey pasted over mine like billboards worn out and slapped over with new titles. Life over life over worn out tired life. Endless replication had rotted my Dubber’s mind right through like a tooth, and we sat in pointless bliss chewing over nuggets of confection dressed up as enlightenment. I saw the wheel of corpses that was the moon rise up and shatter two times fully, as the wheel of fate that Dubber decried turned on and restlessly on.

His sleepers were his anchor, he forgot who he was and who they were, but they were drawn to his head steam and his infectious amnesia and Quas Atol sprang up, like a skull springs up around a brain. Fearful of their gaze and cursed and craven Dubber sometimes hits a brick wall of causality and stirs the soup of the city’s mind. Unconsciously two forces make to meet and upon meeting recoil with massive repellent charge.

In this fashion I knew the mind of Dubber, and it was wretched and small and mean on a colossal scale, for his citizens, for him, there was no escape from the cycle. I knew his mind and it flash fried my soul, sending me thin and soupy, ghosting me out across the plains where all manner of exaggerated and abstract symbols were transpiring. There is no exit from Quas Atol, one simply has to slide through it. Rather than trying to retain my personality I let it go, threw it all away, and shrank Quas Atol into the palm of my hand, thereby eating it and restoring my memories, and my vigor.