To Rouse Leviathan Read online

  To Rouse Leviathan

  To Rouse

  Leviathan

  Matt Cardin

  Featuring two collaborations with Mark McLaughlin

  Hippocampus Press

  —————————

  New York

  Copyright © 2019 by Hippocampus Press

  Works by Matt Cardin copyright © 2019 by Matt Cardin

  Works by Matt Cardin and Mark McLaughlin copyright © 2019

  by Matt Cardin and Mark McLaughlin

  Publication History: See p. 373.

  Published by Hippocampus Press

  P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156.

  www.hippocampuspress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

  Cover art by Michael Hutter, octopusartis.com

  Cover design by Daniel V. Sauer, dansauerdesign.com.

  Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos.

  First Electronic Edition, 2019

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 978-1-61498-270-8 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-61498-271-5 (ebook)

  There is here involved [in the phenomenon of weird supernatural horror fiction] a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it.

  —H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927)

  [The] antecedent stage [of “religious dread” or “awe”] is “daemonic dread” . . . It first begins to stir in the feeling of “something uncanny,” “eerie,” or “weird.” It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting point for the entire religious development of history.

  —Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917)

  The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic element is best developed.

  —William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

  Let the day perish on which I was born. That day—may it turn to darkness. Let gloom and deep darkness claim it. Let the blackness of the day terrify it. Let those sorcerers who place a curse on days curse that day, those who are skilled to rouse Leviathan.

  —Job 3:3, 4, 5, 8

  Contents

  PART ONE Divinations of the Deep

  Preface: Divining the Darkness

  An Abhorrence to All Flesh

  Notes of a Mad Copyist

  The Basement Theater

  If It Had Eyes

  Judas of the Infinite

  PART TWO Dark Awakenings

  Teeth

  The Stars Shine without Me

  Desert Places

  Blackbrain Dwarf

  Nightmares, Imported and Domestic, with Mark McLaughlin

  The Devil and One Lump

  The God of Foulness

  PART THREE Apocryphon

  Chimeras & Grotesqueries

  Prometheus Possessed

  The New Pauline Corpus

  A Cherished Place at the Center of His Plans, with Mark McLaughlin

  Acknowledgments

  Publication History

  PART ONE

  Divinations of the Deep

  Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him. Then God spoke.

  —Genesis 15:12-13

  He made darkness his hiding place.

  —Psalm 18:11

  Preface: Divining the Darkness

  The Hebrew scriptures tell us that when God began to create the world, “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). The English word “deep” is a translation of the Hebrew word tehom, which many scholars have speculated is a cognate of the Sumerian Tiamat. In the Babylonian creation epic known today as Enuma Elish, Tiamat is described as a deity of darkness and watery chaos that was slain by her children, the Babylonian gods, who then used the halves of her body to create the world: half for the sky, half for the earth.

  In light of the possible connection between Sumerian mythology and the Judeo-Christian scriptures, the presence of the primeval “deep” in the Genesis creation story takes on a decidedly sinister aspect. As with Tiamat in the Babylonian story, in Genesis tehom is a primeval chaos that is fashioned by an anthropomorphic deity into an ordered cosmos. As in the Babylonian story, the primeval chaos of Judeo-Christian scripture is not completely done away with. It is merely . . . subdued. It continues to exist in the background of Hebrew thought, eventually becoming associated with the depths of the ocean. At one point Yahweh even allows tehom to reclaim the cosmos: in the story of Noah and the flood, the waters come not only from above but from below: “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of heaven were opened” (Genesis 7:11). Thus, the flood was not just a flood, but an unmaking, a temporary return of the earth to its original formless state.

  For a certain type of person, this all raises the question of whether God is truly the final power in the universe. Since the deep existed with God from the beginning, is it not possible to conjecture that it is at least as powerful as he? In light of the link between the Hebrew and Babylonian creation stories, is it not possible to speculate still further that tehom, like Tiamat, predates God? That God is perhaps the offspring of the deep? If these speculations are accurate, then God is living on borrowed time, and we are left with the disturbing conclusion that both he and his world—the world we take for granted, the ordered world of life, light, and logic—are merely foreground to a background of death, darkness, and derangement. Eventually, inevitably, the great deep will rear its monstrous head and reveal to God and to us the true nature of our universe and our selves.

  There exist a few scattered souls who claim that we can glimpse this reality even now, while the charade is still up and running. We encounter the deep, so they say, in the dark mysteries of life: in horror, pain, nightmare, disillusionment, and death; in the places where light and reason seem to be absent, or to have only a precarious foothold; at the seams of the universe, where sometimes a thread comes unraveled and a ray of darkness shines through, and the light does not overcome it. But to seek such glimpses is always dangerous, and to ask such questions is to court the ultimate disaster, for we can never know in advance what form the answers will assume. We can only know that they will arrive as the unexpected, the uncanny, and the inconceivable. And there are, after all, so very many ways, both witting and unwitting, that each of us attempts to divine the deep.

  An Abhorrence to All Flesh

  No longer mourn for me, when I am dead,

  Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

  Give warning to the world that I am fled

  From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.

  —William Shakespeare

  Wretched man that I am!

  Who will rescue me from this body of death?

  —Romans 7:24

  1

  It seemed a harmless enough invitation, and in fact a welcome surprise, when my friend Darby called to summon me to a party at his brick mansion just beyond the city limits of Terence, Missouri. By his description I understood him to be planning another one of his “famous” parties that had played so large a part in our early years together.

  “Wine, women, and song,” he announced as the program for the evening’s festivities. Even through the curious crackle of static in the earpiece of the telephone, I could hear the calm, assured attitude of my old college buddy coming through, and I se
cretly rejoiced that he had at last seen his way clear of the funk into which he had fallen upon our graduation eight years ago.

  “When did your parties ever involve wine or women?” I said. “They were always more beer and bachelors, as I recall.”

  “And so it may be again,” he cheerfully replied, apparently unruffled by my good-natured jibe. “You will be there, won’t you, Todd? It simply wouldn’t be the same without you.”

  “You can count on it,” I told him. “An invitation from a gentleman of your stature must be counted an honor.”

  He laughed out some pleasantry and we hung up, leaving me to marvel at the unexpected revolution in his mood. After having heard nothing from him for—God, how long was it? Three years! And then to have him call and announce a party just like it was old times? I could hardly force myself to wait patiently for the night after next to arrive. Surely we would spend the evening indulging in another of those wide-ranging and wildly colorful conversations that had always been such a heady joy to an intellectual dabbler like me.

  As I pondered this pleasing prospect, I wandered from the den to the kitchen in search of an easy dinner. A moment’s idle rummaging through the refrigerator turned up a covered dish near the back of the top shelf that contained a generous portion of the casserole that I had prepared and partially eaten two days ago, so I slid it into the oven and soon sat down to a hot meal at my cheap dining table.

  I chewed the first bite obliviously, hardly tasting the food at all as fantasies about Darby’s party flickered through my brain like mental movies. There I sat, expounding on literature and film and philosophy while the other guests eagerly asked for more. There Darby stood, half-annoyed at the way I had stolen his spotlight. Then a hideous taste invaded my mouth, and my gorge rose with the threat of vomiting. My fantasies popped like soap bubbles as all my attention flew back to the immediate reality of my kitchen, and the casserole, and the revolting lump of vileness on my tongue. I spat the offending mouthful into a napkin. Closer examination of the pulpy mass revealed an entirely inappropriate maggoty presence, and I must have run at least two gallons of water down the sink as I retched and drooled and wondered just how it was possible for the damned things to hatch and grow in a refrigerated environment, or for them to emerge still wriggling and writhing from a hot oven.

  2

  The next evening I made my preparations for the party with as much care as possible. Having attended so many of these gatherings in the past, I knew the conversation would most likely escalate or, as was sometimes the case, degenerate into an informal contest of wits, a good-natured but increasingly heated competition to determine who could display the greatest erudition—not in terms of depth, of course, but of breadth. It was at times like these that I most enjoyed my own dilettante style of learning. The old phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” most certainly described me, with my smattering of knowledge from many different fields of inquiry. And a good thing it was, since I could never know for certain what topic Darby would choose as the centerpiece for the evening’s conversation.

  At such times I was also the most smugly happy with my own library. The larger of my two bedrooms served as the repository for most of my books, but the evidence of my bibliographic obsession also adorned shelves, desks, mantels, and tables throughout the house. These volumes represented many enjoyable years of impulse buying at numberless bookstores, especially second-hand ones. I often took pleasure at the thought of what this diverse collection might say about my character, intellect, and depth. I was also fully aware that it was this bit of unrepentant narcissism that led me to anticipate the imminent gathering with Darby and his friends so eagerly. After all, where else could I expect to find a captive audience (nobody left one of Darby Cole’s parties until it was made clear that permission had been granted by the host) that would act suitably impressed at the extent of my literary sagacity?

  I seated myself comfortably on the brown sectional sofa in the den and spread out a stack of books before me—paperbacks, hardbacks, clothbound, leather-bound—culled from the nooks and crannies of the house. Subjectwise, they centered around the broad field of knowledge that was of greatest interest both to Darby and to me: religion. For starters, I flipped through a few pages of my worn leather copy of the Bible. The familiar stories, and especially the bizarre and dark aspects of the Judeo-Christian deity that flickered past my eyes in scattered verses, were enticing as always. But I soon wearied of biblical matters and moved on to an introductory college survey text on anthropological approaches to the study of religion. The Holy Scriptures of the Christian church were so deeply ingrained in my psyche that I had no need to brush up on them. Were they not a part of my cultural inheritance, a component of my very blood and bones?

  But I soon wearied of this book as well, and so I turned to another, and then another. It was a behavioral pattern of virtually geologic antiquity in my life: I passed glibly from book to book and author to author, gleaning a term here, an idea there, storing them all in memory as best I could, attempting to erect a façade of learning. And all the time, the November night outside my windows grew blacker and colder, while the incandescent light of my lamp burned white and harsh.

  Presently, I noticed that I had developed a headache. Rubbing my weary eyes, I glanced at the ersatz antique pendulum clock on the wall and saw with surprise that it was only 12:30 in the morning. From the throbbing in my head I would have sworn I had already spent the entire night hunched over a book. Closing the current volume, whose title I had forgotten, I rose to get a glass of water and try to walk some of the stiffness out of my back and neck.

  As I passed from the den into the hallway, and then to the kitchen, I thought I heard a noise behind me: a tapping sound, maybe, like someone thumping a finger on the window back in the den. I retraced my steps with a dose of unease, since the thought of finding someone crouched outside my window in the dark, watching me read in the glow of my lamp, was anything but comforting. But when I switched off the lamp and peered through the single high, narrow pane into the gloom, I saw nothing but the moonlight shining through the nearly denuded branches of the great oak tree in my backyard. The patterns of silvery white light appeared disconcertingly serpentine on the carpet of fallen leaves.

  After that, I chose to leave the lights off and retire. Once in bed, I was plagued all night by the half-understood ideas of a dozen different writers as they twined their way through my dreams in various symbolic guises. When I woke in the morning to the sound of the garbage man carting away the trash from my curb, a phrase from one of those dreams, a fragment of an unremembered reading from the night before, remained caught in my consciousness. Even after I got up, showered, ate breakfast, and sat down to my day’s work, it still echoed over and over to the rhythm of my breath. Strangely enough, I could not speak it or remember its exact words. It had something to do with loathing, and something to do with flesh. A semi-subconscious mantra, it seemed.

  All that day as I worked at my typewriter, I found myself glancing down from time to time and wondering why I felt such a strange disgust at the sight of my hands, my fingers, my skin, and especially at the thought of the flesh and bones beneath.

  3

  The long driveway to Darby’s house was cloaked with a scattering of late autumn leaves that only a few weeks ago would have made a festive carpet of crimson and gold. As it was, they formed a brittle dead reminder of the dying season. Even through my closed windows I could hear them crunching beneath the tires.

  I counted one, two, three cars already parked in front of the house, which squatted sphinxlike under the starry firmament. I could see soft-edged shadows moving inside the yellow glare of the arched window facing the drive. This was the window to the great room of Darby’s massive mansion. The indistinct outlines of the shadows reminded me of something I couldn’t quite recall. Something unpleasant. My headlights slashed across the brick exterior of the house as I turned to park among the other vehicles, and one of the shadow
s in the window moved and then coalesced into the silhouetted form of a man: Darby, peering out to see which of his guests was arriving late.

  I waved at him as I made my way toward the front door, and he waved to me and then backed away into the room. The smell of burning hickory logs wafted down from the high chimney as I ascended the stone steps.

  The door opened before I rang the bell, and there was Darby, trim, smiling, wearing a cream-colored sweater and holding a drink in a beautiful crystal tumbler.

  “Todd!” he cried, beaming his brightest smile and offering me his hand. “Wonderful to have you here! We had begun to wonder whether you were going to grace us with your presence after all.” His grip was firm but his hand was cold.

  “Like I told you, it’s impossible to refuse an invitation from Darby Cole.” I stepped inside the blue-carpeted entryway and removed my coat as he shut the door. “Besides,” I added, “the others are even more tardy than I am.”

  “There are no others,” he said as he deposited his drink, which appeared to be a vodka, on a small glass-topped table, and took my coat. “This is an intimate gathering, not one of those awful, noisy affairs from our college days.”

  “You shock me, Darby!” I feigned horror while he hung my coat in the closet. “A Darby Cole party with fewer than thirty guests? What about your reputation?”

  “What about it?” He shrugged, shut the closet door, and picked his drink back up. “I’m not as concerned with image as I once was. Now come and greet the others.”

  He led me down the long hallway to the great room, where I was briefly overcome with nostalgia as I observed the familiar scene: the oak paneling, the hardwood floor, the massive oriental rug, the fully stocked bar in the southeast corner, the fire blazing in the fireplace, the vaulted ceiling that seemed as remote and mysterious as a cavern at twilight.