Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

“Next stop Petersham Station…”

      At least Richard Hempton was pretty sure that was what the voice had said. But with CityRail you could never be entirely sure, as the intercom systems on Sydney’s trains were usually so poor that although the train drivers were speaking English they may as well have been speaking some obscure Mongolian dialect, so unintelligible were the sounds that often emerged. He peered out the window, sighing at the uninspiring inner-western suburban landscape visible from this particularly stretch of railway line, as his uninspiring and somewhat haggard visage peered back at him in reflection. Anyway, no matter if the driver couldn’t be understood over the speakers. Hempton knew where and when he had to get off, and Petersham was the place in question.

      The occasion was a meeting with John Braxton, who lived in this part of town. Braxton worked part-time at the Inmost Light occult bookshop in North Sydney; Hempton was an occasional visitor to that bookshop, which was where the two of them had first met when a mutual acquaintance introduced them one day. Hempton had been interested by Braxton’s admission that he did not believe nor take an especial interest in much of the shop’s intriguing range of books, and a friendship had grown out of that first conversation in the storeroom at the back of the shop. Braxton said he only worked at the Inmost Light thanks to the efforts of the aforementioned mutual acquaintance in securing him a job there; having been unemployed for some time, he could not really refuse. But the job was OK, he claimed, and it provided a source of income.

      Hempton crossed the pedestrian bridge and made his way up to Crystal Street, and thence to Stanmore Road where the old fire station was. This was where Braxton stayed; Hempton had found it rather curious when he’d first mentioned this fact, but apparently the old place (it had been built in the 1880s) no longer served its original function and was in fact being converted into a theatrette for film screenings. Braxton’s uncle Louis was something of a fan of silent cinema and was keen to start up a film society for the inner western suburbs, using the old fire station as its base. While this work went on, Louis Braxton had also converted one wing of the building into residential quarters for himself and his nephew.

      “Hey, hey,” a voice called. Hempton looked up to see Braxton wave at him from the second storey window. “Hang on and I’ll come down.”

      Hempton waited by the large (and currently locked) metal gate, looking up idly at the old white-washed edifice. A fine Thursday morning it was. Quiet, too; not much traffic about, though he could discern music coming from within the building. Braxton dashed downstairs to unlock the gate and let Hempton into the yard. “No one else around?” Hempton asked.

      Braxton shook his head, locking the gate again. “Louis declared a day of rest,” he said. “He quite often takes Thursdays off to go into the city for whatever business he needs to see to.” He ushered Hempton into the building, past the two ancient fire trucks that still sat down on the ground floor, and up the stairs to his fairly cramped room. This was evidently where the music he’d heard from the street was emanating from, as a solid wave of black metal noise hit Hempton as he walked in the door. “Better turn that down, eh,” Braxton muttered, dodging his way past a small table over to the stereo system in the corner. He pressed a couple of buttons and the hell-for-leather drumming, squalling guitars and growling vocals dropped in volume.

      Hempton sighed. Braxton was still big on that black metal stuff, obviously. “Don’t know what you see in that, I must say,” Hempton said, seating himself in one of the chairs around the table. “I mean, I like metal, but that Norwegian stuff is too much for me.”

      “You and your conservative heavy tastes,” Braxton said, flashing a wicked smile and holding the CD case up. “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas by Mayhem,” he said, “You ought to listen to it sometime, you know. Get back in touch with your inner Viking. This’ll help. And it’s got that pure Norwegian winter chill to it. Put it on in summer and it’ll cool down your place better than air-conditioning.”

      Hempton smiled and shook his head. “Thanks but no.” He looked around the room, which was dominated by a bookcase and the stereo in the corner, plus an armchair next to the stereo and the table at which he was seated. Another door led off to what was no doubt the bedroom. Small and cramped, though not without its charms, he thought. And it obviously provided enough comforts for Braxton, which was what counted. “What’s the book there?” he asked, indicating the large book lying open on the armchair.

      “Ah,” Braxton said, picking it up and passing it to him. It was a hardback of evident age; the title had once been readable on the spine, but the lettering was now faded so he opened it to the title page. Alhazred’s Necronomicon: A Historical and Critical Study by Dr Richard M. Preiser, PhD University of Tübingen, with Additional Commentary and Notes by Dr Jonathan Howard, PhD Yale University. Paris: Editions Legrand, 1901. “An old one,” Hempton said, stating the obvious somewhat. “Where did this come from?”

      “Got it from Diana at the Inmost Light,” Braxton said. “Remember you met her? This is one’s she’s told me about for a while.”

      “I thought you weren’t interested in this stuff.”

      Braxton shrugged, sitting down in the armchair, running a hand through his shoulder-length dreadlocks. “The standard stuff is dull as ditchwater. The whole Western magical tradition is old hat. Hermeticism, kabbalah, Golden Dawn, Freemasonry, witchcraft, paganism, astrology… you name it, it’s bollocks, really. So small and unimaginative.”

      Hempton raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t have thought that was something you could accuse occultists of being. I’d reckon that to come up with some of the shit they do come up with requires the greatest imagination…”

      “Well it does, to a degree.” Braxton reached over for a can of drink sitting on the table. “But it’s so, well, localised. It’s so human-centric and Earth-centric, there’s no wider vision to it. For something which is supposed to supposedly be transcendent and otherworldly and other mystical clichés, it’s got such a narrow focus. But the stuff Preiser talks about doesn’t.”

      “How so?”

      Braxton sighed. “OK. Look, I’ll warn you in advance that this is going to sound really weird, and it’s probably going to sound like it’s on the level of the lovely Mr Hubbard’s operating Thetans or whatever the hell he called them. But this is the general idea…”

      So Braxton launched into a short disquisition on this bizarre mythology which Hempton had never heard of before. It wasn’t widely known, Braxton said, it was real occultism, something which was really hidden and secret (unlike the nonsense you could buy in the New Age section of any bookshop), but there were those who knew of it and had passed on the myths through generations, through centuries and even millennia. Some of the myths were even said to predate humanity and to have come from advanced civilisations that preceded our own.

      Essentially this mythology dealt with stories of a pantheon of godlike beings, aliens of vast powers with outlandish names like Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep and Tsathoggua, which had ruled the Earth in the hundreds of millions of years before the fairly recent advent of Homo sapiens sapiens. Different writers gave diverse interpretations of these myths, which had a vast cosmic sweep spanning the whole universe that Braxton appreciated. Some held that there had been some war between these various deities which continued in some mystical sense to this day, others held that the sheer alienness of these beings placed them beyond all essentially human considerations such as war and relationships. The former camp usually claimed that these beings were variously hostile or friendly towards humans, and that for some unimaginable reason this Earth was a vital cosmic nexus in their fighting; the latter camp usually held that these beings were completely indifferent to man—perhaps so far beyond the pale that they did not even recognise our existence—and that the Earth was irrelevant. It merely happened to be here by cosmic chance, as did we and as did they.

      But (Braxton went on), the human mind being what it is, humans struggled to comprehend these things in terms which they could understand, even though the reality of them transcended the most sublime and grandiose ideas of the mystics. So cults formed around them, cults which persisted through centuries and millennia, and which still existed secretly today. In all times and in all places the official religious authorities did their best to stamp these cults out, but they still existed in hidden places. And even though some writers on the myths claimed that the entities were indifferent, it still seemed that some occasionally responded to the cultic adulation in weird ways.

      “So where do these myths come from?” Hempton asked.

      “Handed down orally through untold ages,” Braxton said, taking another swig at his drink. “Supposedly there were civilisations that preceded ours, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Below the glacier in Greenland there apparently lie the ruins of a human civilisation that existed about two million years ago that usually gets called Hyperborea. You know the ancient Greek stories of Hyperborea, well, they give it that name. And there were supposedly human civilisations up to twenty million years in the past, too. Fragments of their written records are still around.”

      “Twenty?…”

      Braxton nodded. “Twenty million.”

      Hempton snorted. “This is beginning to sound like that bloody Forbidden Archaeology book you were telling me about.”

      Braxton smiled. “Good old Cremo and Thompson. Actually that was another book Diana suggested… but anyway, like I said, fragments of their writings still exist, usually in quotations in later books, which in turn survive largely in quotes in other books. And so it goes on through the ages, just like Manetho’s history of Egypt. Of course these things have been collected again in more relatively recent times, in books like the Necronomicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, De Vermis Mysteriis…”

      “Hang on,” Hempton interrupted him. “I know that first one you mentioned.”

      “You do?” Braxton was genuinely taken aback.

      “Well, don’t they have it at the Inmost Light?”

      “Oh, that thing,” Braxton said with a dismissive wave, and in a tone of voice which curiously suggested relief. “Oh my, no, not at all.” He reached down beside the armchair, lifting up a book that had been lying next to it unseen by Hempton. It was a smallish paperback that had a black cover, bearing a modified pentagram symbol and, in large white letters, the word NECRONOMICON. “This the one you mean?” Hempton nodded. “This is a fraud done for a practical joke twenty years ago, the publishers admitted as much. Just like those disclaimers you see in books and films, any similarity between this and the real book called the Necronomicon, which was written by an Arab fellow called Abdul Alhazred about twelve or thirteen centuries back, is purely coincidental. Although a lot of magicians claim they get results with it nonetheless. The real thing’s been banned for centuries. Hardly any copies still exist, supposedly.”

      “Oh.” Hempton felt oddly disappointed. Then he frowned. “Well, you were right about one thing, this whole mythology sounds bloody weird. You don’t believe it, do you?”

      Braxton shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s a damn sight more interesting than any of this other wishy-washy new age nonsense we sell at the Light. Something really occult and hidden, unlike the usual Judeo-Christian magical tripe out there.”

      “So what does Diana reckon of all this?”

      “Oh, she’s well into it. She takes it pretty seriously. So do a few of the other folks who come into the Light regularly. You get the occasional Goth character with the Baphomet T-shirt or something stupid like that, but most of the people who make enquiries about it look like ordinary folks. Still, you know what they say about it always being the quiet ones…” He took another swig of the drink. “Don’t think she’s so keen on Preiser, though. She reckons that he’s got a few interesting things to say, but that most of the time he wouldn’t know his Alhazred from his arsehole.”

      Hempton snorted. “Doesn’t inspire one with faith, a comment like that. Anyway, I was under the impression we were doing lunch.”

      “We were indeed,” Braxton agreed, standing and switching off the CD player, then going off into the other room to fetch a light jacket for himself. “How does Italian sound?”

      “Sounds fine.”

      “Excellent. Got a nice place down the road we can check out…”

Another couple of weeks passed before Richard Hempton and John Braxton met again at the old fire station in Petersham. This time, though, the latter had something to show off.

      Old Louis was there that Saturday afternoon, sitting in one of the chairs around the table. Like his nephew, he was impressively tall (standing six feet in height), and Hempton had often thought this was how John Braxton would look one day when he was also sixty-five years old and bald, instead of twenty-five and well dreadlocked. Hempton liked Louis Braxton, sharing the older man’s interest in silent cinema and the fascination with historical recordings which both he and his nephew had. Although both Hempton and the younger Braxton had a liking for fairly loud modern music, usually differing degrees of heavy metal, the two also had an interest in the historical aspects of recording which Louis encouraged. Every so often Louis would spring something on them both, some bizarre obscurity from the early 1900s that he’d somehow acquired.

      Louis took something of a magical view of these old acoustic cylinders and discs that he unearthed from various places. As he explained it, the acoustic process, which entailed the performers playing into a horn instead of a microphone, preserved something of the physical essence of those performers despite the technical crudity of the process (and usually of the results too). When you listened to Caruso, what you heard was Caruso himself; the physical sound of his voice, something of Caruso himself, was captured in the acoustic grooves in a way that wasn’t quite possible with microphone recordings. Playing these acoustic records brought the past back into being, so that when you heard the Brahms cylinder of 1889, through all the surface noise and a century of wear and tear, Brahms himself and the little Viennese drawing room where he made the recording came back into shadowy existence for the brief minute that the recording lasted. There was something in this vision that appealed strongly to Hempton.

      “Now,” Braxton said, lifting up the Preiser book, “I’m sure you’ll remember this.”

      Hempton nodded. “We were talking about it the last time, weren’t we?”

      “We were indeed. And Louis and I have been talking about it lately as well. Turns out the old man knows rather more about Preiser than I did.” Louis nodded, and in his gruff bass voice, proceeded to tell Hempton the story of Dr Richard M. Preiser, PhD University of Tübingen.

      Preiser had been born in 1854. Precise details of his life were not numerous, and his early years were something of a blank, but the important points were known. Not unlike Nietzsche, he had come from a family possessed of strong Christian beliefs, and it had been expected that he would follow his father as the leader of his local church. However, although Preiser’s early faith had been reasonably firm and conformist, his later outlook on Christianity was not an unthinking one, and at the University of Tübingen (where he was awarded his doctorate in 1884) he had been exposed to the critical New Testament scholarship that had flourished in Germany during the 19th century, as well as some of the early Catholic Modernist writings. As a result he found himself somewhat disillusioned with his old Christian faith and espousing a somewhat militant atheism, which led to an irrevocable split from his family and saw him leaving Germany in 1886. He was supposed to have visited Nietzsche in Sils-Maria during that year, and moved to Turin, where he stayed for a few years. In 1890, however, he made a decisive move, and took up lodgings in Paris.

      Preiser soon found himself in his element amongst the fin-de-siecle decadents of Paris, and before long this former staunch Christian was moving in dark circles. His known associates from this period included a number of conventional Satanists (one of whom was thought to have been the model for Canon Docre in Huysmans’ Là-Bas), as well as some who were linked to less familiar cults who practiced rites that were much older than any of the world’s known religions, rites which honoured the gods of the strange mythology Braxton had been telling Hempton about a couple of weeks ago. It was through one of these cults that Preiser had first met Jonathan Howard in 1894.

      Howard was an Australian by birth, of the same age as Preiser, who had moved to America with his parents aged six and who had received a doctorate from Yale in 1890. He had gone to Paris shortly afterwards and fallen in with an occult group who revelled in the title of the Black Order of the Seven Suns; whilst still in America he had been introduced to an affiliated group who had provided him with an introduction to the French group, and from them he had learned much which he now began to show to Preiser.

      Louis paused for a moment here to take a puff on one of his omnipresent cigars before continuing. “I gather that young John here was telling you some of the particulars of the interesting Cthulhu mythology,” he said. Hempton nodded. “What did you think of it?”

      Hempton shrugged. “I don’t know. Sounded pretty unlikely. Then again, I suppose so do most mythological systems.”

      Louis chuckled. “Yes, I suppose they do. At any rate, Preiser and Howard believed it strongly, and they gave themselves to researching the subject as thoroughly as possible. This included reading the complete text of the Necronomicon.”

      “The real one and not that fraudulent paperback I showed you,” Braxton chipped in.

      “Indeed. One of their main interests, however, was a book which had been given to Howard by one of his fellow members of the Black Order of the Seven Suns, François Legrand. Small volume by the name of The Library of Kadatheron. Strictly an amateur publication; the cult member in question had been a printing and book-binding enthusiast who had printed this book as something of an experiment, and gave the few copies he made to his fellow cultists. He also printed up Preiser and Howard’s later books for them. Unfortunately no copies of the Library seem to exist any more. Not in print, anyway.”

      Hempton frowned. “What do you mean, not in print?”

      “I’m coming to that. Sorry if this has been something of a long story. To get back to this Library of Kadatheron. This book was a compilation of writings that circulated in manuscript among the Black Order and their affiliated groups, which purported to be a transcription and translation of the written records of a lost ancient city called Kadatheron. This city was supposed to have reached its peak something like around eight thousand BC or thereabouts. No one’s entirely sure any more where it was, though the common consensus says it was somewhere in the Middle East. Reportedly it contained a considerable library of writings inscribed on large brick cylinders, with the history of other great lost ancient cities in the area such as Sarnath and Ib.

      “Now, Legrand had pieced together his book from different manuscripts held by different groups in Paris and elsewhere, all of which purported to be transcriptions of various parts of the Kadatheron cylinders, he’d done it basically to test his equipment and also to bring these various manuscripts under one cover for convenience. And amongst all the old blasphemous texts which Preiser and Howard consulted in their researches during the latter half of the 1890s, The Library of Kadatheron held a particularly strong fascination for them. John, you might like to take over the next part of the story…”

      John nodded, reached over to the stereo system and pressed a couple of buttons on the CD player. From the speakers there came a voice, somewhat thin and reedy, speaking in a peculiar and somewhat barbaric-sounding language that Hempton did not recognise. The odd recitation lasted about a minute and a half; a hint of record surface noise and the compressed quality of the sound led him to think that this was an old recording.

      “Right,” Braxton said, “Old is the word. Dating from somewhere between 1910 and 1920, in fact. That, my fine feathered friend, is the voice of his Beastliness, Aleister Crowley, reciting the Call of the Second Aethyr in Enochian. Picked that up, funnily enough, in Red Eye Records a few months ago, hideously overpriced but couldn’t resist it. Crowley’s got nothing to do with the story, really, but Louis suggested I play that as a lead in…”

      “And,” Louis continued, picking up the thread, “Just as Crowley recorded one of his own magical numbers, so too Preiser and Howard recorded theirs. Except that they recorded theirs some time before Crowley. By 1900 Howard had moved to London permanently while Preiser mostly stayed in Paris and made occasional jaunts across the Channel, and in 1900 Howard came into possession of an Edison cylinder recording machine. Story goes that he’d actually been inspired by reading Mr Stoker’s Dracula, which had been published three years earlier, back in 1897, and you’ll remember how one of the characters in that actually recorded his diary onto wax cylinders instead of writing it. Apparently this idea had interested Howard, and so he managed to obtain the use of one from somewhere.

      “Now, much as François Legrand had chosen to test his printing and binding equipment with the Kadatheron papers, so Howard decided to test his recording machine with the same texts. Apart from anything else, he liked the idea of recording these texts, which had originally come from cylinders of brick, onto cylinders of wax. An ironic coming of full circle, I suppose. Therefore, when Preiser was next able to come to London in late 1900, the two of them set about reading a number of the Kadatheron texts onto cylinders. These recordings included a number of ritual incantations which were designed to produce positive results.”

      At this point Louis paused for another puff of the cigar, and reached down to the cardboard box that had been sitting by his side on the floor since Hempton had come in. He lifted the box up onto the table and laid it there, opening the lid for Hempton to look inside. The box contained seven black wax phonograph cylinders. “These,” Louis said, with a hint of portentousness in his voice, “Are some of the original cylinders recorded by Richard Preiser and Jonathan Howard in October and November 1900. The original recordings, and not some CD transfer like the Crowley cylinder you heard a moment ago.”

      Hempton whistled appreciatively. “Now this is something.”

      Louis smiled. “It is,” he said. “Not the complete set of the original masters, only seven of the forty which they made. I’m pleased to say, however, that this is the largest collection of them all in the one place. Two are known to have been destroyed by Preiser and Howard in 1906, though for obscure reasons. The other thirty-one surviving cylinders are dispersed through a number of other collections, some public, some private. At any rate, none of them contains more than three cylinders.”

      “So how long did it take you to get this many?”

      “Hmm, a while. Taken me quite a few years and quite a few thousand dollars to get them together.”

      Hempton had another look inside the box. “Have you played them at all?”

      Louis sputtered. “My God, no. Far too dangerous to play them.”

      Braxton snorted. “You’re not still serious about that, are you? God almighty, uncle, we’re talking about a bunch of wax cylinders which are nearly a hundred years old…”

      Louis glared at him. “If someone found a knife that was a hundred thousand years old, the age of it wouldn’t matter if it was still sharp enough to cut them, Jonathan. These things are a risk…”

      “So,” Hempton interrupted him, puzzled by the direction the conversation was taking, “What is dangerous about them?”

      Louis sighed, and carefully extricated one of the cylinders from the box. “Have a look inside,” he said. Hempton gingerly took it from him and peered through the centre of the thing. Around the interior circumference of the cylinder he observed what looked like Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions, minutely but precisely incised inside the inner edge of the cylinder. He turned the cylinder round and found the same symbols at the other end, twenty-five of them arranged in regularly spaced groups of five. “All of the cylinders are marked with those,” Louis said, “Preiser and Howard’s means of, shall we say, copy protection.”

      Hempton frowned. “How so?”

      “I’ll field that one,” Braxton cut in, “There’s a book I’ve seen at the Inmost Light which describes them. They’re a sort of rune, if you like, and if you say a wrong word near them it triggers off whatever spell has previously been encoded into them. Lot of mystical bollocks but uncle here believes in it…”

      “Preiser’s correspondence contains warnings to that effect,” Louis put in. “According to him, at the end of each cylinder either he or Howard would recite the appropriate trigger phase—obviously to save themselves from anything untoward, they waited until after the cylinder had been made before actually carving in the symbols—so that, if anyone attempted to play them back without the appropriate protection, well, they would find themselves in trouble…”

      Hempton frowned, finding this frankly absurd. “So not only are these the original masters, they’re the only copies as well?”

      Louis shook his head. “Not exactly, no. In the 1930s acetate transcriptions were made by one of Howard’s latter-day followers. He used some pantographic device, such as was occasionally used in the early days of recording to make copies of cylinders—much more tedious and time consuming than copying discs of course—and was thereby able to copy some of the cylinders without causing any damage, since there was no actual sound made in the process.”

      “And what happened to these? If copies were made, why not just use them, if you’re so worried about setting something off with these?”

      “No one knows, that’s the problem. They seem to have vanished at some point. In the unlikely event they were ever found, they’d be in too poor a condition to be of any use.”

      Hempton shook his head. “This is all quite peculiar, I must say,” he opined with a sigh. “Even if I believed it, which I assure you I don’t, it would still seem like a bizarre length to go to, just so that no one else could play the recordings. I mean, why even bother making them…”

      “Because,” Louis said, “There’s always been a tradition of secrecy in occultism. Look at the Golden Dawn. All of their writings were kept in manuscript to make sure they didn’t become too easily available outside of the Order. Once it gets into print it’s another matter, and these days, of course, you can buy the Golden Dawn material in book form from my nephew’s shop. No doubt you can get it off the Internet somewhere, too, along with Hermes Trismegistus. Presumably Preiser and Howard took a similar view of their recordings. Didn’t really want them to fall into the hands of the uninitiated. So they’re not on CD and easily available from your nearest record shop in the way that Mr Crowley is.”

      There was silence for a moment. “So,” Hempton said, breaking it suddenly, “Why do you want them, Louis? For some reason I get a vague feeling that your interest in these things goes beyond the merely historical and into the practical. Would I be right in saying that?”

      Louis said nothing. “Just tell him,” Braxton grumbled from his corner, “You’re going to have to tell him anyway.”

      Louis sighed. “All right, all right. Let’s… well, let’s say that I have connections…”

      “He means me, by the way,” Braxton chipped in, “Me and the Inmost Light, and some of its customers.”

      “…Who have something of a vested interest in the contents of these recordings,” Louis went on, ignoring the interruption. “The book, The Library of Kadatheron, is lost. The manuscripts which made it up are also lost. These recordings are the only known remnants of those writings, despite the dangers involved, and they’re keen that whatever can be saved of the writings of Kadatheron should be saved. I have, of course, grave doubts as to the quality of these recordings, but they’re all we have to go on. Must do our best. And we’ll need your help, Mr Hempton.”

      Hempton frowned. “Mine? But what can I do…”

      “You’ve mentioned before having a cylinder phonograph. Do you still have it? Is it in proper working order?”

      Hempton nodded. “Yeah, I’ve got it and it works.”

      “Excellent!” Louis said, exultantly clapping his hands together. “Then with your permission, I’d like to borrow it. With all the renovations going on here at present, my own equipment is safely locked away in storage. I’ve managed to acquire, albeit only for a short period, some recording equipment with which to copy the cylinders; unfortunately I will need to actually play the things, I don’t have the interesting pantographic device that would make things more complicated but still easier, so shall have to take the necessary precautions. But don’t worry, your machine will come to no harm.”

      Hempton frowned. “Must say I’m relieved to hear it.”

      “So within a couple of days I should be in a position to begin the work. Once we have everything on tape we can then get around to transcribing the texts. And, if you would also not mind, I’d be happier if you could also look after the cylinders themselves for a few days. Be safer with you, probably, than they might be here. I mean, nothing untoward should happen, it would require a particular magical phrase to trigger any safeguards on the cylinders. Just in case you were worrying…”

      Hempton shrugged. “As it happens, I wasn’t. But sure, whatever.”

      “Excellent. Very well, then, I’ll leave you two fellows to your own business. I’d best get back to mine.”

      With that he excused himself and left the room, off to some other part of the building. Once safely out of earshot, Hempton said, “The old man believes this shit he’s talking, doesn’t he?”

      Braxton nodded wearily. “I’ve been hearing this garbage all week, ever since he discovered I was reading the Preiser book. Louis has been into this nonsense for years, I knew that, but I didn’t know just how deep he was into it. Keeps saying how important and how wonderful this is.”

      “So who are these connections of his that he was talking about?”

      “I don’t know them myself. Personally I try to have as little to do with the people who come into the shop—though you were an exception, obviously—cos most of them are freaks and idiots. But somehow I managed to get some of them connected with uncle. As far as he’s concerned, my getting a job there was one of the best things that’s ever happened.”

      “Hmm.” Hempton looked into the box again, and studied the cylinder he’d been looking at earlier, looked again at the curious incised runes. “Do you reckon any of it’s true? I mean, that stuff about these things being cursed?”

      Braxton shook his head. “I reckon it’s about as likely as those backwards Satanic messages they supposedly used to put on metal albums in the 1980s. Got a sort of 1980s Judas Priest or Ozzy Osbourne ring, doesn’t it, listening to this record may lead to hearing damage and/or death…”

      Hempton snorted. “Yeah.” He sighed again. “So I’ve got to look after them.”

      “Yeah. Only be for a few days, though. He gets his sound set-up on Monday and he reckons he can do all the copying work then. After that he’ll take them back off you and put them in safe storage somewhere.” Braxton looked at his watch. “According to this here time-measuring device, it’s now one o’clock. I vote that we head off for some food before that restaurant place shuts, and then I’ll give you a lift back to your place with those cylinders…”

Richard Hempton sat in the sunroom of his apartment. He’d been lucky to find this place, on the top floor of a three-storey block in Tamarama, with a view from the small sunroom looking downhill to the ocean, uninterrupted by other buildings. He liked to sit here watching the sun go down, and so it was this evening. The box containing the cylinders lay on the dining room table. Hempton sat watching the sunset, but he was not paying as much attention to it as he normally did, not really taking it in. He was puzzling over the matter of the cylinders.

      He really had no idea what to make of it all. Clearly Louis had no doubts about the seriousness of the whole thing, right down to the contents of the recordings. God almighty, records from a city that existed ten thousand years ago. How likely was that, he thought. He did know, of course, that the first settlements at other centres like the Biblical Jericho had been dated at around the same time. But this—what did he call it, Kadatheron? That was it—yes, this one he’d never even heard of before. With a library containing the records of other cities and civilisations that were lost even by then. And if this Kadatheron had hit its peak around 8000 BC, as Louis had said, then that would imply that it had been around for some time before that. Too unlikely for words. But Louis obviously believed it. And, going on the conversation they’d had earlier that day, he wasn’t the only one. A group with a “vested interest”, he’d called it, in what Preiser and Howard had to say.

      No, it was too weird somehow to be quite real. Hempton found it much easier to believe that the “vested interest” these anonymous people had in the cylinders was purely a historical one. In and of themselves, the Preiser and Howard cylinders were of considerable historical interest; maybe their discovery was not quite of the grade and importance as the discovery of the recordings of, say, George Orwell or Jean de Reszke would be, but still nothing to be sniffed at. And, as Louis had said, they were unspeakably rare—Hempton wondered exactly how much he’d paid for these seven cylinders—and rarity in itself usually conferred some value. He could understand that. He couldn’t understand Louis’ insistence on this curse thing, and the quite deadly seriousness with which he viewed that. He’d even warned Hempton about it again before John Braxton had driven him home earlier in the afternoon. The curse was the silliest part of the whole deal. It was all too 1922-tomb-of-Tutankhamen for Hempton to take seriously.

      He felt his stomach grumbling again. Time was passing and he felt like food once more. He dressed himself and wandered down Campbell Parade along the Bondi beachfront, drifting through the crowds that still lingered about the place. Not feeling like anything too heavy, he went into the McDonalds there and had some of their alleged food, before making his way back up to his apartment. Once there, he came to a decision. He would prove to Louis Braxton that this curse business was only so much rot. He would play the cylinders of Kadatheron and live to tell the tale. See what old man Louis thought of that.

      The old cylinder phonograph—a relatively late 1912 model that had been passed on to Hempton from his grandparents—was kept safely stored in a cupboard in the sitting room. He unlocked this cupboard and gently removed the venerable machine, sitting it on the dining table next to the box of cylinders. He then opened that up and gently pulled out a random cylinder—since he didn’t know what was on any of them there was obviously no point deliberating over which one he wanted to play or thought he should play first—and mounted it on the phonograph, cranked the machine up, and started the playback. There was surprisingly little surface noise, Hempton noticed as the cylinder began; obviously it hadn’t been played very many times…

      “Third Anthem from the Library of Kadatheron,” a resounding, German-accented baritone suddenly burst from the acoustic horn. “From the Seventeenth Cylinder in the Museum at Bulaq.”

      Hempton sat in one of the chairs by the table, listening to the recording. Louis was right about one thing, a really good acoustic recording could sound like the person was present in the room. Preiser, whose voice that obviously must have been, certainly sounded there as if that were the case.

      “This hymn is offered in praise of — and —, those who bring knowledge of all lands and all times to their favoured servants,” came a second voice, this one with more of a British tone. Jonathan Howard, evidently. Hempton was damned if he could make out the names uttered, though; perhaps Kshthuale was the nearest phonetic equivalent to the second name that he could make. “— is our golden lord and in his care we are free from all dangers. Our enemies fly in terror and madness before the revelation of — and his light.”

      “This hymn is offered to the honour of —, beloved of the darkness,” Preiser went on, uttering another indecipherable name, “Who casts doubt in the hearts of the evil men who oppose the brotherhood of Kshthuale.”

      Here the two voices fell into a curious pattern of whistling and droning chant that lasted for about fifteen seconds. Hempton listened carefully and was able to determine that distinct vocables were being uttered, but they were strange and barbaric-sounding. Hempton could not have even attempted to transcribe them phonetically. Then the voices continued in English.

      “This hymn is offered for the love of Azathoth,” Preiser went on, “From whose fiery bosom all life has its beginnings. Blessed be Azathoth who is father of the gods and of the demons, who is creator of the world and the stars, who is the chaos from whom order must follow before returning to chaos.”

      “Blessed be Azathoth,” Howard recited, “Whose most secret name brings death to those who may not hear it or power to those who may wield it.”

      “Blessed be Azathoth, and accursed be those who would oppose his truth.”

      “IÄ!! AZATHOTH!!” the two voice suddenly shouted in unison. More of the curious whistling and droning for another few seconds, then another passage in English.

      “This hymn is offered in thanks for the manifold bounties of our lady Shub-Niggurath,” Howard continued, “Shub-Niggurath who is the Dark Mother of Earth.”

      “All praises be to our lady Shub-Niggurath who brings joy and life to the people of Kadatheron.”

      “IÄ!! SHUB-NIGGURATH!!” the two chorused again.

      Then, after a brief pause: “Twenty-fifth day of October, year nineteen-hundred of the common era,” said by Preiser.

      Hempton snorted. Yes, well, THERE were forbidden and horrible rites, for sure. How comically poor, he thought. That sounded more like something that a hack horror author with little to no imagination and even less talent might concoct in five minutes over a sandwich rather than a ten-thousand year old secret…

      “ASHGTHO’ TH’MANAIIGH UV’SHAGG’DH,” the machine abruptly ejaculated. Shit, Hempton thought, he hadn’t noticed that the cylinder hadn’t actually finished. Hmph. That incomprehensible guttural noise must’ve been the magic words Louis was so afraid of. Hempton looked around the room. Well, no great changes taking place.

      Hang on. What was that smell?

      Hempton sniffed the air. A foul stench like something decaying struck his nostrils. And there was a hissing sound, like air escaping from a vent, making an astonishing shrieking sound. The quality of light in the room changed to a disturbing shade of some colour he could not determine as the volume of the noise and the pungency of the stench increased in force. He raised his hands up in front of his face and found he could see through them. In horror he looked down at his body and found he could also see through it. He clapped his hands against his head and they passed right through. He screamed, but not loud enough to be heard over the godawful hiss of the escaping air.

      The angles of the space in the room contorted in blinding ways as Hempton felt himself expand and contract into a thousand shapes that existed simultaneously in a single compressed point of space and time. A star twenty million miles across and thirty light years distant suddenly appeared in the room next to him and became a black supernova in two seconds, which slowed down into a billion years of time and twenty cubic feet of space. Hempton stared in horror around him as the space to his side expanded into another thirteen dimensions that could not be grasped by mathematics and eternity sped up to only last a second. The sky collapsed below him, below soon became left and left became behind. Space, time, direction, duration and all the theoretical considerations which allowed the mind to perceive them as separate inverted catastrophically, as space moved sideways into time and duration turned inside out into dimension. The universe ran backwards into a black singularity of being, leaving only perfect infinity in its wake, and the incomprehensible hissing sound.

      Suddenly, above the noise of the hissing, Hempton heard another sound. It was a fluting sound coming from somewhere to his left, which was behind and below him. It was not tonal, it was not atonal, it was none of the above. It was fluting, and it sounded as if there were no conscious mind producing the sound. Hempton looked down, which was above and in front, to see what the source of the sound was. And he saw the sound, and screamed to see its source…

Witnesses reported later that it was like the apocalypse had come, and the abruptness of its arrival, followed by the similar abruptness of its departure about ten minutes after the whole nightmare had begun. The blinding light had been visible from some distance, bursting forth from the top-floor apartment and enveloping that corner of the building. The astonishing bass hum which accompanied the light was perceptible from an even greater distance, being audible even above the sounds of revelry down on Bondi Beach. The volume had even been enough to shatter some car windscreens and other pieces of glass in the area. Certainly all of the windows in the apartment block were completely blown out.

      Under the circumstances it was obviously impossible that the other residents of the building should have failed to notice something strange and horrifying going on. Mr Mackendrick who lived directly opposite was the first to see what was going on; he claimed that the air two or three feet from Hempton’s door seemed to thicken until it was almost solid and certainly unbreathable. The sheer force of the solidity of the air repelled all attempts to approach the door. And a stench like an abattoir also peered out from the spaces between the door and its frame, as did a bright light of astonishing intensity, not to mention the deafening bass hum. All of these things—smell, light, noise—seemed to take on a curious near-tangibility in the same way as the air did.

      But it ended, mercifully, if suddenly; the air thinned out, the noise decreased, the light dimmed, even the rank odour faded somewhat. It took some effort to then break down the door, as Hempton was obviously not responding to the calls of those who had now gathered outside to open up; but that was done, too, and four men charged into the apartment while a few of the other residents loitered on the stairwell outside.

      It was significantly colder inside the room than it was outside, that much was undeniable. Mr Mackendrick said afterwards that it was like walking into the cold storage room of a bottle shop, it couldn’t have been more than two or three degrees above freezing; indeed a light patina of frost covered the walls and some of the furniture. An examination revealed no trace of Hempton whatsoever inside the apartment; all the windows were locked from the inside, and the door had been deadlocked and the door chain put in place. There was, in short, no way he could have left the apartment, and yet nowhere that he could have been inside it. The inexplicable disappearance of Richard Hempton was thus a “locked room” mystery of a unique and faintly terrible sort. Other observers noted the presence of the old phonograph on the table with a wax cylinder record mounted on it, as well as a cardboard box near it addressed to Mr Louis Braxton of Stanmore Road, Petersham, to whom they would be returned, and also a patch of curiously burnt carpet near the table.

      Louis studied the cylinders and the curious markings on them intently as his distressed and uncomprehending nephew read out the mystified news reports to him again. He had a fairly good idea, judging from the news reports, of what had happened to Hempton and where he had gone. Obviously no one could have witnessed exactly what did happen in that room and lived to describe it, but going on such descriptions as people had been able to provide, Louis had a reasonable idea of where Hempton was now, and it was fearful to contemplate. Still, he thought, as unfortunate as it was and despite the setback this now provided, the work would still go on. He just knew, though, that he would have to take even more precautions than he’d originally expected…

Return to author index
Return to fiction index
Return to Letters from Outside index

All contents © 2000. All rights reserved.