John Shirley Blog

A double handful of remarks and observations from John Shirley

//Some scientists speculate the cosmos is a gigantic 3-D computer program–that “nature operates like a computer program.” This is a gigantic vanity. It’s not that nature is modeled by a programmer; it’s that programs are inspired by patterns seen in nature…and feebly imitated, in small measure. The vanity of the hyper-analytic mind has mistaken its own faint, surfacey modeling for the superstructure of reality. 3-D is not enough “D”.

//It’s fashionable to speak of “the present moment”–and that’s good. But there are levels of mindfulness most don’t experience. Even the first level of mindfulness, being in the present moment–self-remembering–can be startling. Suddenly you’re in the real world. Birdsongs, insects, car sounds, sounds of children, the 3-dimensionality of things–suddenly seem to ‘appear’. This was here, around me, all along?

//Libertarianism? Fine–when we can count on unregulated people not to pollute, not to endanger employees (eg, killing 11 of them at a time on oil rigs), not to make dangerous pharms, not to commit consumer fraud, not to wreck the economy, not to insanely drive up the cost of health care, not to need guidance while flying planes; not to need cops, fire dept or infrastructure. Arrange those changes & I’m all for it.

//Looking at trees with new apples strange to think that they apples are communicative, a call to other species, “Eat this and spread my seeds”. Flowers also are communicative between species. Plants calling silently to animals, to insects, “Let’s trade.”

//Does falling organize the world? Isn’t gravitation falling? It’s indicated by falling; by things pulled downward, toward a center of mass. Gravity, anyway, organizes the world; it gives us an up and down, a surface we can walk on, collects mass to offer resistance we use for propulsion; it makes it possible to drop trash in a trash can and have it stay there; to put forks in drawers; to remain seated at my desk.

//For unknown reasons, when consciousness is increased enough the possibilities for free will are mysteriously (not supernaturally–mysteriously) increased. I don’t quite understand why–or, I almost understand it, but I don’t think I can express the why and how of it.

//Old age is right and proper, however dismaying it may seem as we age. What use is a candle that is not lit? It merely takes up space. When it is lit, it gives light, but it also melts. A candle that gives light but does not also melt away is either an abomination of nature, or a miracle. If it’s a miracle then it is not in our province to construct it.

//Conditions have weight. Behavior has momentum.

//There’s a misunderstanding that the right-hand-path, to use a short hand term, is about abasing or losing yourself or demolishing yourself. Not true at all. It’s simply about being in right relationship to the divine source of consciousness, and the Bodhisatvas who try to mitigate, and eventually end, the world’s suffering. But it’s not self annihilation. It’s more like a reshuffling of the inner person so that the ego takes its rightful place, as just one more part of the inner machinery. It’s like taking the keys away from a drunk driver.

//Machines that pollute are only half invented.

//The word “God” has psychological weight that distorts our understanding in a way that’s analogous to a gravity well; to gravitation bending spacetime. We can’t hope to understand the external intelligence as long as we insist on calling it God.

//Music temporarily changes our relationship to time; it reconciles us with time’s disintegration of form.

//I think that the universe is front-loaded to create life just the way it’s front loaded to produce gravity or suns or atomic motion. But I don’t see a creator being necessary. It’s just that in this (one of many?) universe the probability of life is built into the structure of things just as the structure of things is built into the structure of things. How did the strong/weak forces come about? They’re in the nature of materials at hand at the big bang; the probability (not inevitability) of life is presumably in some wise also simply in the nature of matter. There is no need to assume that life requires a supernatural spark and therefore there’s no need to assume that it arises purely by chance as such–if things are innately organized to produce it, *just because they are*, that is no more supernatural than that things are innately organized to produce gravity. It’s not intelligent design–because it’s not design. Life is not designed in; it’s just likely due to some only barely (so far) intuited immanent structuring of matter and energy.

//My character is smarter than my calculator.

//Many scientists think there’s a black hole at the center of every galaxy, central to the formation of galaxies. What is a black hole but a void, an almost infinite gravitational compaction rendering space as a sucking vacuum. Nature it appears does not abhor a vacuum but relies on it. Many philosophers have noted the necessity of death and emptiness; the importance of unoccupied space to occupied form. It should be no surprise when that principle extends to a galactic scale. Principles are as macroscopic as they are microscopic. It is also noted, in the most recent research at this writing, that the massive black hole at the center of a galaxy spins off material which somehow revitalizes the galaxy’s capability of creating stars and planets. From death, life.

//Depression is a concession.

//Everyone shares the unfolding of the universe. We call it “time”.

//We feel insignificant in the vastness of the universe but one could probably travel halfway across the galaxy before coming across another truly intelligent lifeform. It takes an enormity of planetary resources to add up to the building blocks of life and a great many other factors must converge to make possible intelligent life and then civilization. We conclude, then, that while it’s out there somewhere, it is comparatively rare. Any intelligent being then in the vastness of the universe is a rarity. Hence we are no longer to be considered insignificant as individuals.

//People without regret are either fools, self deceiving, or psychopaths. Everyone’s done something wrong, and regret shows you know it and want to do better.

//Organized religion is like organized playtime—it’s for children. But children need reassurance; reassurance is a form of compassion.

//It may be that life at best is just a series of consolations for death. Still, if you identify with perception itself, and not with the memory/personality lost at death, then perhaps death is simply immersion of point of view into the great sea of consciousness. But for most people this is cold comfort. Who knows? I am merely convinced that the root of perception is an extension of a permanent part of the universe.

//Corporate interests rule and will continue to rule. Their alliance with the theocrats will mean only science that makes the rich richer and the environment poorer will be allowed
and hence, ignorance will thrive and when ignorance thrives, corporate interests rule and will continue…

//The stars are a contradiction. They are each one a gigantic sphere of nuclear energy burning furiously in the sky, large enough to consume a planet like ours many many times; they are so big they can be seen across countless light years of interstellar space. But we see them as glimmers, scarcely there, and there are so many that, in contrast to the vastness of the universe each one is indeed tiny. Looking at them dramatizes their vastness and tininess at one time. The scale of the universe is contained in the sight of a single star.

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15
Jul 10

Through Black Glass: on Reanimating Lost Cyberpunk for the 21st Century

[I wrote this piece last year for H+ Magazine, re the background and origins of my novel Black Glass--and talking about a certain time with William Gibson in Los Angeles]

Early 1980s, I was sitting in my West Hollywood apartment with William Gibson and a certain movie director who had some buzz going. More than one kind of buzz. We were talking about adapting a story from Burning Chrome for this guy — a story that was as cyberpunk as anything is — and my defining recollection is how frequently the director excused himself to the bathroom only to come back sniffling, trembling and talking with even more rapidfire megalomania than before. Besides adapting the story, I pitched him a script, which was then rather blandly called Macrochip, based on some idea sessions Bill Gibson and I had, and that Peter Wagg (producer of “Max Headroom”) had optioned. And I remember that this director, who enjoyed macho posturing, said, “Just as long as it’s got big fucking balls!”

He didn’t use our script, nor get back to us about Macrochip, and Gibson’s career became stratospheric (Gibson earned it, by dint of talent and hard work). He was soon occupied, say, helping “Mick and Keith” with their stage design for a major tour, and didn’t have a lot of time and… we never did anything else with the story. In the late 1990s I made a feint at turning it into a novel, which I called Black Glass, but by then my writing had sidestepped into a kind of urban fantasy and I wasn’t thinking cyberpunk.

But last year, gazing about me at the great wide world, I remembered Black Glass and was inspired to finish it — because Black Glass dramatizes technology as metaphor, a phenomenon coming clearer every day.

Not that technology as metaphor is new. Going way back, there was the symbol of the steam train chugging across the plains, literally the embodiment of industrialization imposing its badass steel wheels on the natural world. In Lang’s Metropolis and Chaplin’s Modern Times, machines were metaphors for the mechanisms of plutocratic repression. But sometimes we miss the corollary, that real-world technology itself is metaphor, quite outside of drama, as much as that steam train was. Technology is an innately dramatic expression of our condition.

Think back to when technologies were imposed on us that passed labor along to the consumer — when we all began doing unpaid work for corporations. Customer service personnel were replaced by programs that required us to press 1 if we wanted this, 2 if we wanted that, 7 if we wanted to scream. We now do the work of gas station employees, conducting the money transaction ourselves, filling our own tanks. Supermarkets started self-service lines where you and a laser scanner do the checkout person’s job, and airlines now make us check ourselves onto flights at a touch-screen station. It can seem like we’re serving the machines at least as much as they’re serving us.

But it’s the corporations we’re serving. All that technology is, itself, metaphor for our submissive relationship to the multinationals.

Recently a news story from Tokyo flickered through internet news pages: A 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher’s sudden divorce from her online husband in a virtual game world made her so angry that she logged on and killed his digital persona, police said Thursday. The woman has been jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer…

The lady identified with the virtual world so thoroughly that her online reality had become more real to her than the “meat” reality. I know: happens every day. But how very metaphorical indeed…

Now, the underlying story and premise of Black Glass was conceived in an era when cyberpunk writing was more about the existential poetry of science-fiction, more about the sheer sociological drama of technological impact, than about the possibilities of technology or glorying in prediction. We took a step back from it all.

Late 1970s and well into the ’80s, Bill Gibson, Bruce Sterling and I used to correspond. (using physical “snailmail” letters, in those days.) Around the time Neuromancer was published, I wrote to Gibson speculating on how using a word processing program would affect prose writing. He wrote back to me, as always, on a manual typewriter:

“If someone’s going to have style at all, they’ll reach a point where the recording medium is ‘transparent’ anyway… My aversion to the thing is pretty mild… computers per se bore the shit out of me, all that techtalk and the furious enthusiasm of the hobbyist… I think I’ll probably get one before I need to have one…I think a processor might affect my style for a little while…”

Yet when he invented the word ‘cyberspace’ it was on a manual typewriter. We weren’t very deep into technology then — we were deeper into observation, and experience. Cyberpunk writers were influenced by James M. Cain as well as Alfred Bester, and Black Glass reflected that. Gibson was typically all about “the street’s uses for technology” and I was about two-fisted men and women struggling with repression in a near-future dystopia. But was that even relevant anymore, when I returned to Black Glass in the year 2007? My sensibility was more or less hard-nosed pulp, with surreally artistic overtones, the way that punk rock is largely structured noise elevated by the poetry of defiance. That’s not very Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow — guys who personified the 2007 paradigm to me.

Yet when I looked around at the great wide world of 2007, I found Black Glass in it. The novel is a futuristic cyberpunk tale about a man emerging from the four-year dormancy of a special prison where his mind was shut down and his body was ordered to work for the state. On release, this ex-cop, Candle, gets embroiled in a fight with one of the 33 corporations that control the world, ’til both he and the corporate overlords are blindsided by an unexpected nemesis: a ‘mindclone’. More properly: this is a ‘semblant’ program — a program that sends an indistinguishable realtime animation of you to virtual conferences, say, or takes webcam calls for you. It knows what you’d say and says it for you, and no one’s sure if it’s really you or not. But a new ‘multisemblant mindclone’ composed of certain powerful men and women, combined into one program, degrades into a psychopathic personality that takes on a life of its own… and in the background street rebels allied with Candle operate a Black Stock Market using cloud computing.

The consciousness-suspension prison is an obvious metaphor with perpetual relevance; the struggle with the big guns of the Fortune 33 is everyman’s struggle in the 21st century; and semblants are an extension of the mind-state that woman in Tokyo was in when she got arrested. We shift our center of identity into digital representations. We overlap with our technology. And sometimes that’s a useful enhancement — other times it only magnifies what’s wrong with us, as with hackable e-voting machines.

And then there’s that Black Stock Market—what’s more relevant in the age of bailouts? So Black Glass was relevant. I just had to update its tech, environmental and cultural references and recognize that my pulp-inflected metaphor may be at the pop end of art, but it’s vitalized by the pointed honesty of its symbols. In the updated Black Glass, Candle stalks through the mordantly named “Autopia,” where people live in improvised structures composed of abandoned gasoline-engine cars. He negotiates “Rooftown,” a towering shanty complex populated by refugees from the great swamp of global warming. The street has its own uses for things, and Candle uses technology exclusive to the rich and powerful, a flying self-driving car, to infiltrate his enemy’s restricted skyscraper compound.

It all came together — because technology itself is metaphor, and when I look around at it, I find that technology is speaking to us. Technology itself is telling us stories. Only, you’ve got to have the nerve to tell them. And there’s one thing Black Glass has for sure…

It’s a “pulp novel of ideas”—with big fucking balls.

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15
Jul 10

Some Remarks From the Author About the Lost Cyberpunk Novel

[this is the introduction to the novel published by Elder Signs Press--]

Black Glass was conceived under a different name and as a different kind of project, in the early days of cyberpunk, by myself and William Gibson. That’s not William Gibson the playwright; I mean the author of Neuromancer and Spook Country and all his books in between. We had collaborated on a couple of projects before this one. I don’t remember who came up with the main idea or the general story of Black Glass. I know I wrote up an elaborate tale based on our discussion; I’m the one who fleshed it out and Bill approved it. But then the project got derailed, we both got diverted, and Bill was swept off to collect awards, count his royalties, chill with rock stars, and work on other projects. Subsequently, long subsequently, I remembered the book and inquired; Bill is a busy guy and turned the whole thing over to me.

So some years later I have written the novel, which I think of as the Lost Cyberpunk Novel; I have written it in its entirety. No one else should be held to blame.

Cyberpunk fiction, as written by Bruce Sterling, Lew Shiner, Pat Cadigan, Richard Kadrey, Rudy Rucker and William Gibson (oh—and me), has more roots than the obvious Samuel R. Delany novels (like Nova and Dhalgren), John Brunner novels (like Shockwave Rider and Stand on Zanzibar) and, well, writing by Philip Dick and Alfred Bester and JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock’s NewWave sf, generally. Its antecedents reach back into noir; into hardboiled crime fiction and certain kinds of detective novels. Agatha Christie? Hell no. But James M. Cain? Hell yes. Dashiell Hammett. John D. MacDonald—my memory is that Gibson and Sterling both mentioned, to me, having read most of John D. MacDonald. We all read Jim Thompson, too, probably. And certain very gritty, darkly urbane spy novels were important to cyberpunk: Len Deighton and especially early John LeCarre.

Many of William Gibson’s short stories and early novels share a tone and surface texture not dissimilar to LeCarre and, at times, to the hardboiled, hardnosed detective writers. Crime novel heroes are people on the edge; even when they are working for the law, they don’t mind breaking it along the way; they womanize, they slap gunsels around, they smoke, they drink. They’re moody sons of bitches who slouch down dirty sidewalks under flickering streetlights. Cyberpunk characters have that same grim, doomed, resigned, but simmeringly angry feel about them.

All of these ancestors flock from the past and come home to roost in Black Glass. This is, unabashedly, a crime novel set in the future; its hero, Richard Candle, while a nuanced guy into meditation, is descended from old-style pulp detective heroes. He’d have been perfectly comfortable in Black Mask magazine.

I haven’t tried to be as technologically updated as, no doubt, some of the new crop of cyberpunk writers are. Things happen so fast now I’d never be caught up and wouldn’t fit into the current mode of compacted, cryptographically intense expression. I have not culled a great many terms, memes or tropes from Wired Magazine or Jane’s, or the edgiest technoblogs, or 4chan. But the story has been updated, according to my lights, from the original project; it is both “classic” cyberpunk and a modern science-fiction novel. It is also a John Shirley cyberpunk novel; hence the recurrence of musical references, music as a kind of setting, lyrics, rock-inflected characters, and other idiosyncrasies that hopefully are more endearing than annoying. I didn’t try to write the book in a ‘postmodern’ style; it’s not post-Gibson, either. I wrote this book, in this era, more or less the way I wrote those books back then. That’s how I write the stuff.

The language of Richard Candle’s future society would probably be mostly understandable to us, but would have far more new slang and neologisms than I have provided it with. However, I have undertaken to provide a little, a taste, of the lingo of his time. I doubt if it is language that we will really see in the future but I feel it has the ring of real slang about it and, to my ear, it works. I have provided the Black Glossary to explicate certain terms. And I’d like to point out that, as now, people in the future will not use slang terms in every instance in which they might apply. Sometimes they use them, sometimes they use something else.

Black Glass, perhaps, brings cyberpunk full circle. In a way, it’s a “pulp novel of ideas”. But it is a work of cyberpunk science-fiction; it is woven with science fiction imagery and lit up by science-fiction ideas. It is a crime novel, a novel of the street, and it’s a novel of political attitude: most cyberpunk novels reflect a jaded reaction against authority; an assumption that a world dominated by corporations is a world that was stolen from you before you were born.

But my main hope for Black Glass is simply that readers will enjoy it as entertainment.

J.S., February 2008

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07
Jul 10

Thin Young Man With Sandy Hair and Blue Steel in his Hand

[The following was originally the prologue of my forthcoming novel WYATT IN WICHITA. I decided to cut it as leaning too far into fiction--I was trying to write a novel about the young Wyatt Earp with a reasonable amount of historical basis--and it's also a little too pulp-western in tone. Still, I like this vignette, and feel it's a pretty good short story in itself, so here it is, in its only publication]
#
U.S. Marshal Lars Van Galen knew he was dying as soon as he tried to sit up: his heart skipped a beat, and the dusty interior of the ghost-town shack seemed to recede into a shadowy distance. The coldness spreading in his hands and feet told him that the bullet-holes in his side and thigh had poured out an ounce too much blood. That’s what it came down to, an ounce difference, more or less, the docs said. The belt he’d tied around his thigh and the old gingham curtain he’d tried to plug his side with hadn’t availed of much. Strange, too, how cold it felt to him, in here—he knew it was the afternoon of a hot and humid day in the Kansas summer. He tried to get to his feet, but slumped back, shaking. Couldn’t even stand…

A hard place to die—in a town already dead itself. It had been a cattle trading terminus, once; then the railroad had chosen to go to Ellsworth and Wichita, taking the cattle trade with it, and all the water had dried up. Now it was abandoned, occupied only by crows, two murderous thieves and a dying lawman.

Hold on, you old fool, until the job’s done, he told himself, bracing his back against the wall. Those two hard-cases would come to him, momentarily. He might do for the sons of bitches yet.

If he could just finish the job–that much he could leave behind. He had no kin, his wife and son both having died on him. He had no money to leave anyone at all. His will left his saddle, his guns and his broken gold watch to Miss Jandia Coleman, a fancy girl at Windaman’s Fine Wines and Spirits, otherwise known as the only surviving saloon in Plain’s Edge. Jandia was the closest he had to a friend, any more, the others having died or moved on. Maybe she could sell his guns and the saddle for seventy dollars or thereabouts. She’d likely use the money for the laudanum she was becoming too fond of.

Apart from that, all he could leave behind was one more finished job—and the prairie of 1873 just a mite safer.
He tightened his hold on the blue-steel Army revolver till his knuckles went white. He had to get a good grip on it, if he hoped to use it, but he felt like he was wearing thick woolen gloves—and they were getting thicker. Still, he hoped to kill at least Angus O’Reilly, before O’Reilly and Tolliver finished their own job. Right now, their job, as they saw it, was to kill a U.S. Marshal.

Stupid to have gone after them himself. They had crossed territorial lines, after their crime, making them federal fugitives, but he could have sent word for the County Sheriff…Only, the Sheriff probably would have made excuses and not gone.

He strained to see his pistol clearly–he had lost the ability to see sharp up close when he’d past fifty-three years, and his present weakness made things even blurrier. He held the gun out at arm’s length, propped on a knee, and peered at it, fumbling with the loading gate. He got it open, spun the cylinder. Three rounds remained unfired in their chambers. That was the end of his ammunition…It might be enough, if he could point the gun straight.

But oh Lord, the weariness; that feeling in his middle parts, like someone clamping him hard with a blacksmith’s gripper; the cold burning in his leg. Maybe just lay back and go to sleep. Why die painful?
Come on, you son of a buck, rear up one last time and be of some goddamned use.
He closed the loading gate, turned the cylinder to put the first round in place. Working hard at it, he thumbed back the hammer spur, cocking the gun. Funny how something that had come effortlessly for so long, as natural as breathing, had gotten to be as hard as lifting a buckboard’s axle. But breathing itself was hard to do now…

The pain was almost gone, lost in a fog. He knew that wasn’t good. Pain meant you were alive…

He cocked his knee too, propped the gun butt on his kneecap—and just then the door opened and a man came in. Van Galen squeezed the trigger…

Nothing happened. The fall he’d taken in the dirt outside had jammed the firing mechanism; it would cock but the hammer wouldn’t fall. He sighed, and waited for the tall, thin silhouette in front of him to blow him to kingdom come.
Funny how you never thought about those words, though you used them a thousands times. “Kingdom Come.”
He was about to find out if there was a kingdom to come…

“If you’ll point that gun somewheres else,” said the figure in the doorway, “I’ll see if I can help you, Marshal.” Not Tolliver or O’Reilly, by the voice.

“Who…would you be?”

“I was riding by,” said the young man. He was still blurry to Van Galen, but his voice and his gait, coming closer, all said he was young. “I heard the shots. I rode up, and I saw a couple of fellows moving around back of this shack—maybe fifty feet back, by that old smoke house. Looked like they were concerned to get the drop on you. Coming real careful.” The stranger went down on one knee, lifted the Marshal’s shirt out of the way, and the improvised bandage. Shook his head. “Don’t look good.”

“It…it ain’t good boy. This here wreck of a shack is the last room I’ll see…If you’ll take my effects…to Plain’s Edge…Undertaker has my will there…My name’s…” He had to pause, try to get some spit in his mouth; it was most too leathery to talk with.

“Yes sir. I know you—you’re Marshal Van Galen. I saw you over to Ellsworth, more than once, when I was bringing in buffalo skins.”

“Listen boy–you shouldn’t be…” Van Galen had to swallow hard to finish the sentence. “…shouldn’t have your back to the door. They’ll kill you, them two, just…just in case, like.”
The young man nodded, half turning to face the door.

“Maybe I can get you some water, a smoke, anyways.”

“No, boy—oh there’s nothin’ I’d like more. But…no time.”

The young man shifted, hunkering back to think. He had sandy hair, a lean face, a pale mustache that was still more vanity than mustache, a sharply defined nose and jaw; grave gray-blue eyes. Sandy blond hair.

Not so different from what his own son would’ve looked like, as a young man, Van Galen thought, with a pang that hurt more than his wounds.

The slim stranger lifted his head, listening; Van Galen had seen a wolf do it that way, once. The young man’s eyes flicked to the walls, moving to follow a sound the Marshal couldn’t hear. His hearing was faded with age—and with dying.

“They’re coming,” the young man said. Van Galen thought that was what he said, anyway, judging by the movement of his lips. He’d spoken so softly it was barely audible.

The young man drew his own side-arm, a cap-and-ball pistol from the Civil War—probably a gift from an older relative. Van Galen saw the young man swallow, and there was just a little tremble in his gun hand. The boy was scared. Natural enough, but it wouldn’t help him.

“No use,” Van Galen rasped. He worked up some wetness in his mouth and went on, “No use asking them boys for quarter, they don’t give none. You give me your gun, I…” But he knew that was a mistake. “No. I’d miss. I’m too weak to squeeze a trigger. You got to do it…”

“Me?” The young man licked his lips. Slowly, so as not to make much noise, he stood, the gun dangling at his side. “I was a constable—over in Missouri–but I never had to shoot on the job. Never did much but wrestle down drunks and runaway pigs. Wounded a drunk brakeman one time in a fight in a…well, a bar… but I wasn’t trying to kill him. “That…” He shook his head.

Van Galen gathered what little strength he had. He had nothing left to leave the world—except advice. “You got to do it, if you want to live. Got to. Now, what you do is, when it’s time to shoot–don’t hurry. They’re going to be in a hurry. That’s bad for the aim. And they’re drunk—they always got a bottle with ‘em. That’ll maybe give you an edge. You take enough time to aim, and say to yourself it’s up to the Lord if you live. Got to accept you might not live—or you’ll be afeerd, and that, it’ll kill you right there.”

The young man nodded, his head cocked. There was a vibration in the floor—the gunmen had come around to the front of the shack. One of them had set his foot, probably, on the step.

“And boy…” Van Galen continued. “Boy, you…stretch out your arm, point your gun like pointing your finger. Squeeze the trigger. And…Turn sideways so you’ll make less a target…And if you…” He never got to say the rest.

The young man had heard him, and turned sideways, pointing the gun at the door—just as it burst inward, and O’Reilly, big and red-faced, teeth bared, hair all bloused out like a desert plant, came lurching in; behind him was the slick-haired, fox-faced Tolliver, the gambler. Both of them wanted for murdering a jeweler up in St. Louis; both with their pistols in hand. They stopped, startled by the boy—
“Who the hell!”

“Just kill him, you knothead!” Tolliver shouted, cocking his gun

But all this time the young man was taking aim, his gun-hand shaking a little but pointed straight enough. He fired, and the old revolver bucked back in his slender hand, recoiling so it pointed nearly at the ceiling; but he instantly lowered it back level to fire again as O’Reilly staggered back, his Dragoon firing wildly. A window shattered above Van Galen, and he felt bits of glass raining down on his bare head. Already the shack was filled with gun smoke; an instant, acrid blue fog.

Tolliver snarled and shoved O’Reilly aside, bringing his gun to bear but the young constable was firing, and firing again, and twice more, seeming to find a sort of calm inner rhythm, and Tolliver went spinning back to fall across O’Reilly, who was staring in amazement, mouth quivering, eyes glazing.

Tolliver’s gun rose up from the floor like a rattlesnake—wavering there—and the young man stepped to one side, and fired twice more. He took a step closer to the outlaws, the gun smoke billowing around him with his movement, and pulled the trigger again, but this time there was only a click. He had discharged every bullet.

The young man stared at the dead men for a long moment…and then took a deep breath. Coughing from the powder smoke, he returned to hunker, again, by Van Galen’s side.
”
I believe they are done for,” the young man said.

How very thick the gun smoke was, in the room, Van Galen thought. So thick and black, like soot from a locomotive. But maybe that wasn’t gun smoke. Maybe that was the final darkness coming. Peaceful and cool.

“Boy,” Van Galen heard himself say, his own voice echoing in his head. “Listen…some…last advice…don’t tell folks you done this. Nor say I done it—wouldn’t want you to lie. But see, boy…you don’t want to be known…as a gunman. Ain’t wise. Best they think…you’ve no wish to use a gun…Other…otherwise…”

“Why, I think I’d do it that way, anyhow,” said the young man. “Having no wish to use a gun, I mean, unless I must.” His voice sounded so far away now. “But I’ll take your advice—you sure know the job. I’d not have come out of here alive had I not heeded you, sir.”

“You done fine. You, so like…my Lou, he’d a-been…oh, I’m failing. Tell me this, boy…what’s your name? I would know it before I go…”

“Why sir, my name’s…”

But the darkness drew its own shroud over the Marshal, then. He did not hear the young man name himself.

“…Wyatt Earp.”

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04
Jul 10

Writers and the Internet–Downhill Slide?

[this piece originally appeared in RU Sirius's online publication 10 Zen Monkeys]

The internet has some advantages for writers, which I gladly exploit; it offers some access to new audiences, it offers new venues… But it has even more disadvantages.

A recent study suggested that young people read approximately half as much as young people did before the advent of the internet and videogames. While there are enormous bookstores, teeming with books, chain stores and online book dealing now dominate the book trade and it may be that there are fewer booksellers overall. A lot of fine books are published but, on the whole, publishers push for the predictable profit far more than they used to, which means they prefer predictable books. Editors are no longer permitted to make decisions on their own. They must consult marketing departments before buying a book. Book production has become ever more like television production: subordinate to trendiness, and the anxiety of executives.

And in my opinion this is partly because a generation intellectually concussed by the impact of the internet and other hyperactive, attention-deficit media, is assumed, probably rightly, to want superficial reading.

I know people earnestly involved in producing dramas for iPod download and transmission to iPhones. Obviously, productions of that sort are oriented to small images in easy-to-absorb bites. Episodes are often only a few minutes long. Or even shorter. Broadband drama, produced to be seen on the internet, is also attention-deficit-oriented. I’ve written for episodic television and have known the frustration of writers told to cut their “one hour” episodes down to 42 minutes, so that more commercials can be crammed in. Losing ten minutes of drama takes a toll on the writing of a one hour show — just imagine the toll taken by being restricted to three-minute episodes. Story development becomes staccato, pointlessly violent (because that translates well to the form), childishly melodramatic, simple minded to the extreme.

All this may be an extension of the basic communication format forged by the internet: email, chatrooms, instant messages, board postings, blogs. Email is usually telegraphic in form, compact, and without the literary feel that letters once had; communication in chatrooms is reduced to soundbites that will fit into the little message window and people are impatient in chatrooms, unwilling to wait as a long sentence is formulated; instant messages are even more compressed, superficial, and not even in real English; board postings may be lengthier but if they are, no one reads them.

Same goes for blogs. They’d better be short thoughts or — for the most part — few will trouble to read them. The internet is always tugging at you to move on, surf on, check this and that, talk to three people at once. How do you maintain long thoughts, how do you stretch out intellectually, in those conditions? Sometimes at places like The Well, perhaps, people are more thoughtful. But in general, online readers are prone to be attention challenged.

Reading at one’s computer is, also, not as comfortable as reading a book in an armchair — so besides the distractions, it’s simply a drag to spend a lot of time reading a single document online. But people spend a great deal of time and energy online, time and energy which is then not available for that armchair book. Occasionally someone breaks the rules and puts long stories online, as Rudy Rucker has done, admirably well, posting new stories by various writers at flurb.net. But for the most part, the internet is inimical to stretching out, literarily.

The genie is out of the bottle, and we cannot go back. But it would be well if people did not misrepresent the literary value of writing for the internet.

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30
May 10

Duality and Non: At the Science and Nonduality Conference

John Shirley

“There’s a guy over there petting the fish,” murmurs one San Rafael hotel worker to another, as they watch a young man with features like an Indian Raja stroking the big golden carp clustering beneath the big lobby’s artificial waterfall. He sits there smiling, and petting the fish.

Welcome to Science and Nonduality Conference. Doctorates gleaming, academics cluster like bright fish here, encountering beaming idealists. Barefooted people–some of them freshly arrived in RVs trimmed with Tibetan prayer flags—occasionally find themselves more mystified than mystical in conversation with earnest men in horn rim glasses, rumpled suits, brown shoes, and a tendency to drone during mathematical elucidation.

Filmmaker Maurizio Benazzo (“Shortcut to Nirvana”; “Consciousness and Beyond”) is one of the key organizers; a tall, gangly man with a Sherlock Holmes profile, he opens the conference with reminiscences about his circuitous journey as a seeker, which culminated in the book I AM THAT by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. Benazzo chanced to film the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and describes the event as a wake-up call, like being hit by a Zen master’s stick. Yet Advaita calls him to “never be disturbed by what you see”. How to reconcile the painful grit of the 9/11 reality with this admonition? Somehow the linkage of Science and Nonduality seemed a way.

Benazzo introduces Dr. Stuart Hameroff, whose talk is titled “Brahman and Atman are alive and well in quantum spacetime geometry”. A physician with a shaven head, pharoahnic beard and a Hawaiian shirt, Hameroff represents the University of Arizona’s Center for Consciousness Studies. He notes life’s dualistic “Cartesian theater” and proposes that the lag between perception and cognition is at the root of the appearance of dualistic separation. Hamaroff envisions a quantum jump “back in time” to compensate for the gap between perception and consciousness. “Penrose suggested in his 1989 book The Emperor’s New Mind that Platonic values including mathematical truth, ethical values and beauty are embedded in the fine structure of the universe, specifically in fundamental spacetime geometry at the inifinitesimally tiny Planck scale.” These subtle forces may be resonating in “microtubules” which form the tiniest parts of living cells including brain cells where “quantum computation with objective reduction may be somehow involved in consciousness.” Our direct conscious connectivity to the cosmos might be found at these levels, transcending dualistic separation.

Microtubules, in fact, are a touchstone of the conference, which often returns to the wonders of the human brain at the microscopic and submicroscopic levels–the graphic symbol of the conference arrays microtubules symmetrically around a mandala.

Science and spirituality; contrasts and convergences. Physicist Daniel Sheehan tells us about Casimir Force as “electromagnetic zero point fluctuation” which can “shift equilibria and alter activation energies, transition states, and reaction rates”. He is immediately followed by a fresh-faced young Englishman, Jeff Foster, who improvises on “waking up from the dream of separation” and the possibility of absolute freedom in the midst of ordinary life. The luminous simplicity of his talk slowly brightens the audience like a light-dial gradually turned up. “The experience is the experiencer,” he says. “There is no final truth in this–that’s when we move into fundamentalism. . .This isn’t to deny that there is an experience…We drive ourselves mad trying to understand what is so essentially simple. It’s like the mind wants to come to rest on one of the opposites. ‘Is there a world or not?’. . .It’s totally paradoxical–this is nothing appearing as anything. This is ‘no one’ appearing as ‘someone’…It can’t be known! Anyone who claims to know is believing their story about what is true….There is only Mind. It is not my stories and your stories and his stories—there are just stories.” Like J. Krishnamurti, Foster seems to indicate a state of mind that bridges the paradoxical linkage of is and isn’t; pointing the way to that state without trying to limit it with definition. “Not a word I say is true. I know that. Because they’re just words; it’s a story…I spent my lifetime believing I was right—and it was exhausting!…Silence and noise are actually the same thing. The noisiest noise is an expression of silence.”

Besides the inevitable Americans, the conference has attracted people from Brazil, India, Iran, Scandinavia, from all over Europe–the widely traveled, in more ways than one. Elderly gentlemen in neatly clipped beards interpret the symbolism of Vedantic gods and exchange stories about horrific diseases they barely survived in India; young men trade harrowing tales of ayahuasca and remarks like, “You remember the name of that woman hanging with R.U. Sirius—that woman who used to get high on tarantula venom?”

Commerce percolates on the fringes of the conference where someone offers “hand woven mindfulness mantles,” others offer “Zen-poker” techniques, and yet another new design for Tarot cards. (The conference was centered on its panels and talks, however, commerce was relatively minor and offsite.)…In the main lecture room a gray haired professor argues for “conservative” quantum physics as opposed to “speculative” quantum physics. The conference encompasses the solid science of University of Helsinki scientists Bergstrom and Ikonen holding forth on “nonduality of mind and matter based on empirical findings”–and the perhaps less plausible claims of another lecturer extolling a “biodynamic craniosacral therapy” in which “cerebral fluid is the carrier of liquid light”.

Jeff Foster was refreshing, and so was that wry critic of excessively guru-centric spirituality, Jody Radzik: “Many people rely on the ‘folk theory’ of nondual enlightenment to help them understand what they’re going for. . .” Folk theories are ‘explanatory models’ of enlightenment. “They work sufficiently well to serve everyday purposes…but they’re often full of non-critical assumptions.” He asserts that real nondual awareness leaves “a recognition” in you, of your real identity, and warns that peak experiences are not actually nondual consciousness, per se—people mistakenly “come to associate peak experiences as realization. How are you going to see what’s normal in you at all times if you think it’s way out there and huge and mighty and awesome? You are kind of preventing yourself from seeing what’s immediate and now because you’re expecting it to be something ‘spectacular’.”

Nonduality and science converge fairly comfortably in some conferees, especially Stuart Hameroff. When I ask Dr. Hameroff if his ideas had been cross-pollinated, before the event, by other conference speakers, he mentioned Daniel Sheehan’s talk about Casimir force: “…in fact there is a calculation of the Casimir force acting significantly on microtubules. If the force is not random, it could reflect Platonic information embedded in the universe and guiding our choices and perceptions, as Penrose suggests ensues from Planck scale geometry. In my imagination I see microtubules as a kind of musical instrument being played by the cosmic Casimir force.”

Apart from nonduality the three most repeated words at the conference are epistemological, ontological, and quantum. I asked Dr. Hameroff if he feels “quantum theory” was becoming a general tar brush for modern spiritual models, only leaving things muddier in the end. He acknowledged that, “In some circles quantum is a buzzword, and that’s about it. And some apply quantum physics incorrectly to metaphysics, consciousness and spirituality…Many serious quantum scientists steer clear of metaphysics, consciousness and spirituality. But if you look closely, there are indications in the classical/quantum duality of an underlying nonduality, and important applications. Henry Stapp is a good example of a serious scientist who raises connections between quantum physics and consciousness. The ideas of Sir Roger Penrose most directly make a link between science, consciousness and what could be viewed as spirituality, but Roger won’t talk about it. He finds the notion of spirituality ‘not useful’.”
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While the conference reveled in diversity, a consistent theme was the teachings of Nisargadatta. Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo’s Neti Neti Media, inspired by Nisargadatta, was one of the catalystic organizations—‘neti neti’ being a Hindu expression: “Not this, not this”. A reminder to turn away from identified fixedness.

Still, the conference sometimes seemed a bit identified with Nisargadatta, especially as extolled by Dr. Stephen Wolinsky, founder of the Quantum Psychology Institute–and to a lesser degree, the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh and the Dalai Lama.
But of course, shamanists were on hand. One couldn’t miss Dr./Loibon – Ol Doinyo Laetoli le Baaba. Le Baaba is an eye-catching, articulate exponent of shamanism fused with nondual philosophy—a resident of Los Angeles, he’s adopted the scarification, tattoos, and traditional costume of his African Masaai forebears.

Sufis, Jewish philosophers, Transpersonal Psychologists and Christian mystics were conferees as well, easily finding overlapping ideas and points of agreement, their discussions seeming to validate Aldous Huxley’s “perennial philosophy”.

The scientists attending were for the most part comfortable with the nomenclature of nondualist spirituality. The conference might have seemed more scientifically grounded if skeptical scientists had been directly involved. David Scharf of Maharishi University of Management oriented his talk around rebuking Victor Stenger’s skeptical work, “Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness”—Stenger was not on hand to reply.

There were more than 600 other people at the conference, however; there were dozens of talks and workshops; there was the experiential room, for closer engagement with yoga, healing exercises, and people like the American Sufi Sheikh Kabir Helminski, who offered a workshop on Rumi; Amit Goswami discussed scientific evidence for God; Daniel Pinchbeck ran a workshop on “psycho- technic civilization”; James Tomarelli, a representative of John Bennett’s school, offered an experience of the Gurdjieff Movements.

This was the first conference on science and nonduality—likely a learning experience for the organizers. The conference was fertile with ideas, peopled with idealistic seekers, given gravitas by a group of real scientists. It was a kind of alchemical experiment melding concept and experience. Sometimes, the meeting of the rational and the emotional produced a synthesis with a life of its own…
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07
Apr 10

WARNING

Please report to the nearest cable input to have your brain chip recalibrated. We are aware that you are under the impression that you do not have a brain chip implant. That is symptomatic of the transmission-surge that caused damage to its datacore. Neural feedback caused your memory of the chip to be wiped. You will be at risk of making your own choices until the chip is recalibrated. REPORT IMMEDIATELY to…

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06
Apr 10

THE CAMERA ON THE ROLLER COASTER

[a lost story by john shirley]

Maybe he was too old for roller coasters. Standing at the top of the line, waiting for the next train of roller coaster cars on the Big Shebang, Simon wasn’t sure. They heaved you around and they G-forced your joints till they clacked and he already had arthritis and his bones had gotten brittle lately. But he wanted to relive a few things, while he had time. And it was the kind of early-summer day he remembered from childhood, at the boardwalk; the smell of the sea wafting from one side, the smell of popcorn a salty counterpoint to the cloy of cotton candy and caramel apples; shading his eyes against the sun, he could see the linked cars rippling their way to him, the riders still smiling from the ride as it grated to a stop.

He thought he felt someone looking at him—he was usually right about that—and looking up he saw a security camera swiveling on the roof of the roller coaster controller’s booth. It stopped swiveling and fixed on him. Through the windows of the booth he could see a man glancing at a row of TV monitors. There were other cameras, on the roller coaster, on those slender arches you passed under, at the peaks and valleys of the ride. For your safety and security, said a little sign.

Then the ticket taker was opening the gate, taking Simon’s ticket, ushering him onto a seat. Riding all but alone, a few kids in the cars behind him. Off he went with a lurch, and grabbing the rail that clasped him in place. Up, up, along a plateau, down, a short plunge…

He saw himself as a boy. Getting in and out of fights. Arguing with his father. Kicked out of school, punished. . .

Back up again. Climbing…

Back in school, doing better, more confident, making friends with teachers, good grades. Girls. Doing pretty well with them.

A plunge. Sickeningly steep…a valley, a climb…

Discovering drugs, grades sinking. Girls—but one getting pregnant. An abortion. Wondering what the kid would’ve been like. Giving up drugs…college. Doing pretty well…

Another roller coaster pinnacle. They were grinding slowly up. That camera on the arch they passed under, looking at him…The camera somehow taking part in his life. Simon knew his image was on a monitor in that booth. Up and up, the chains on the cars groaning.

Career in journalism. Hard to make it work. Harder than he’d thought. Laid off. Another job. Years of tedium. Not liking it. Quitting for a position at a news magazine that doesn’t pay as well but somehow it has possibilities. This one clicking, getting a journalism award, a raise, better assignments, marriage, the kids…Divorce. Drinking. Feeling tired of the whole thing. They wouldn’t let him write what he wanted. More drinking…The kids having problems. One of them doing a short stint in juvenile hall.

The cars plunged down the other side, the kids in the roller coaster cars behind him shrieking. A long long slide down…Then back up to the final plateau.

Giving up drinking, writing a book, getting married again. A better marriage. Not happy in it but better. The kids finding their way. The troubled son seems to like the Navy, the girl marries well.

Wife dies….Kids gone. No more inspiration. No reason not to drink. Feeling old. It had all passed so quickly. It was over. Missed chances—so many.

They were plunging down the farther side…past another camera…Feeling like he was in that booth seeing himself caught by the camera, a grainy figure on the monitor sliding past…They were coming to the last plateau, the glide to the end of the ride…

Retirement. Mostly not drinking…His doctor wanted him to get that pacemaker but he resisted. “I mean, what for, doc?”

The cars were rolling up to the ticket booth, Simon’s heart was pounding from the unusual adrenaline…Getting out…looking up, right at the camera and into it…Suddenly feeling dizzy, and so heavy, like a giant pair of fingers was squeezing his chest the way you’d roll up an ant…staring up at that camera as his legs stopped working and he collapsed.

Going black. Sliding upward through the top of his head out of his body. Just a hovering point of view. Can’t quite remember his name. That was when he had a past. There’s no past, no future, just now. Not knowing where else to go he found himself somehow entering the camera. Seeing, then, with its electronic eye: the people gathered around the collapsed old man on the top of the roller coaster. Bending over him, murmuring, calling 911 on their cellphones. Then he feels constricted here, frightened, so he turns, switched the angle of his point of view within the camera, turned toward the digital guts of the device, was aware of the electricity running through it, round and around through the machine, the electricity connecting to the current that flowed into the device from the wires powering the roller coaster, the lights at the boardwalk amusement park; the current in the wires coming from the power station…connecting to the rest of the city, the rest of the world….a part of all electrical current everywhere and the world’s electromagnetic field, humming, vibrating, reacting to solar input, the sun beating down on the boardwalk…

Riding the current round and round and round…up and down, the ride never ending…And watching, through the cameras as, the next day, people went, once more, riding the roller coaster at the boardwalk.

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04
Mar 10

Haiku for 2012 Fantasists

New Age believers
Idiots, with flowers, chant:
“Mayan Calendar!”

Stories — 1 comment
03
Feb 10

THOSE WHO COME TO DAGON

This is a Lovecraftian story I wrote for “High Seas Cthulhu” – hopefully this will promote that anthology, and High Seas Cthulhu 2 which is now in the works. And now:

THOSE WHO COME TO DAGON
John Shirley

The Journal of Caleb Ward

June 21 (?) 1806

Leseur, the Bosun of a lost ship, declares me foolish to expend strength dashing off these lines, for all of us in the launch of the late HMS Feveringale feel the weakness of eleven days at sea without food and little more than a mouthful of fresh water for two days running. I hope that though we perish in the launch, my papers might be preserved and found with my body, if inclement weather does not consign it to the deeps. How I could wish for a rainstorm to bestow drinking water on us, if the storm did not blow overhard; one such gale, rendering but little rainwater, took our launch’s only mast. O for fresh water! The equatorial heat is relentless, and I feel my throat chafe against itself, and burn with salt. Sometimes Tantalus has his way with us, when we scent the greenness of the West African coast, and espy a bit of palm or liana floating in the sea, but the current never carries us close enough to bring hope of a landfall.

The Reverend Mothe, though his voice sounds like a rusty pump, continues to spout of Providence, to be of good cheer, for God will not forget us. I have not succumbed to the temptation to ask him why God should remember us and not the scores of men (and the cook’s wife) who died in the fire, or in the consequent sinking of the Feveringale.

I have long been one of “The Lord’s Stray Lambs”: My regard for His creation was blackened by the knowledge of my inherited fate, even before we few survivors of the catastrophe were cast adrift, for as a young man I watched as my father died of a cancer; his going was slow and terrible. He had not seen forty summers. I know that my grandfather, and his father, died in the same way. The disease is in our blood and I fancy I feel it working its malignity upon me already. So it was that at close to the age my father was when he was stricken, I gave off clerking at the bank and took to poetry and the penning of Observations for the Weekly Journals reckoning that at least I might live out my greatest hopes for myself, for a few months…

And then this! Cast adrift in an open boat! Yet it may be that this death by drowning or thirst is preferable to death by the slow inner consuming of cancer. It may be that this is a mercy after all. I could only wish I had died quickly on the Feveringale.

Any who chance to find this hasty journal will remark that the edges of the paper are scorched. I did manage to snatch a few necessaries from my trunk, even as the flames that engulfed the ship seared the trunk’s right side—I burnt my fingers lightly doing so—and to one whose hope is to write for the Boston Gazette, quill, ink and paper are more necessary than the dueling pistol and compass I snatched up as an afterthought. (I do hope my handwriting is legible, there being more than enough swell and pitch and salty spray to make writing difficult. I fear my ink may dry out and sometimes I am tempted to drink it).

We had survived an encounter with privateers, Captain O’Brian having outrun them when they lost a mizzen, and we had triumphed over a breached gun-room which flooded because a drunken sailor forgot to close a port—we weathered these vicissitudes only to have the ship burn down around us for the misplacing of a candle! Dr Bessemen insists it was not he who left the candle too close to a case of spirits, but the fire commenced in his quarters. His loblolly boy, not having survived the fire, cannot protest his innocence.

In truth, so far as we know, only those of us in the launch survive–dour old Bessemen, Gaddle the squint-eyed first mate, sallow, glowering Leseur (whose presence has always made me uneasy), the sailors Brackin and Milford, Sargeant Sparks of the Marines, and myself. We are all quite burnt and bearded now, looking like people any one of us would have avoided on the street in Boston—or perhaps London, for I am the only American, on a voyage that should have taken us to the Canary Islands, and though our nations are at peace, I have been more than once the object of a fully unjustified suspicion. Would I be so absurd as to sabotage a ship in which I myself am sailing?

There is a strange smell in the air, a foul reek carried on the rising breeze from the south: a dead whale nearby, perhaps. O and this is cruel, the ink is quite drying out. It does not mix well with seawater but I shall att

June 25, 1806

I was unable to finish my sentence, at the conclusion of the previous entry, for want of serviceable ink, but I recommence my journal aboard the ship which has picked us up, for here ink is plentiful, thanks to the generosity of Captain Hoek, the stout, bluff Dutchman who is the chief Argonaut of the Burdened Pelican: a brig of two masts, a ship neither big nor small. Only the peeling paint on the bow declares the ship’s true name; her captain and crew call her “the dratted ol’ Pelican.”

Three days I’ve been on this leaky old vessel, recovering strength, as the ship works its way north to Holland. Yet it makes scarcely any headway; “’tis all leeway”, says the bushy-browed Captain—he speaks always around the ancient curved pipe clutched in his teeth, a pipe usually turned upside down and empty of tobacco. “The winds, the winds rush agin’ us and agin’ all natural blowin’, for the should northerin’ this time of year, do ye hear? But they blow southwest and we must tack, and beat and tack again and more, and scarcely any progress do we make. We must find an island to stop for water and meat, soon, if the wind do not change…” And so the time wears away, with little progress in our journey—but at least we are rescued!

The other survivors of the Feveringale, perhaps surfeited with the sight of one another, have largely kept to themselves. I have a cabin to myself, once belonging to an officer now lost at sea. The officer was lost along with the ship’s doctor and several other men during an “unnatural blow”, as Hoek has it, not long before we were picked up. (They were pleased to have a new doctor, in our Bessemen, but when they discover his drunkenness and absence of real parts, they will be less sanguine.) Yet the First Mate, Van Murnk, a heavy-cheeked man with hair so blond it is almost white and a face so sun burned he sometimes resembles a Red Indian—a man, indeed, perpetually sodden with drink—claims that those who went missing, including “even Monsieur Galange…took it on their own to hie to the sea, and have not yet left us, mein herr, but follow in our wake.” He would say no more and I had no wish to pursue his meaning and encourage the fallacies and fancies so common to sailors.

Van Murnk is not alone in his oddity; it must be said that it is, withal, a strange ship. The crew seem sullen and fearful except for discrete occasions when they are caught up in an inexplicable and outlandish glee, their eyes feverish, their mien giddy; they have a proclivity for gathering in groups far aft, whereupon they take up tittering and whispering…

Today is Sunday. Captain Hoek rigged church, this morning, and read from Proverbs, a certain desperation in his voice; but most of the crew remained well apart from the ceremony, staring with hollow eyes in the dull light of the overcast morning; with a cast of face both unreceptive and obscurely ashamed.

June 26, 1806

It called for some persuading—they were strangely uninclined—but I have taken a meal with Dr Bessemen, Rufe Gaddle, and Reverend Mothe. The Doctor and Gaddle seemed to share an unvoiced mutual understanding–something dire, judging by their expressions, and the dark glances they exchanged, their resonant silences. The pastor seems to be at odds with them over some matter he does not wish to evince in my presence.

“Have you not heard a sort of droning from below decks and aft?” I prompted, as we sat over our watered-down after dinner porto. “And other sounds I could not identify, a kind of squawking, a squeaking sound that almost seemed to form words? I went to investigate and found the way blocked by Leseur. He turned me back and refused to explain. The fellow was more forbidding than ever—the only one of us not to avail of the ship’s razors since our rescue. A bit of beard is quite natural but he is as shaggy as an old bear. And the look in his eyes! Like a bear indeed—but a bear with a toothache!” Thus I tried to disarm them with levity, to ease the taut atmosphere and perhaps provoke confidences. But my attempts at humor at Leseur’s expense were met with sullen stares from Gaddle and the doctor—who was quite noddingly drunk—and a long sigh from the Reverend.

At last the Reverend said, “Indeed I have heard the noises of which you speak.” He gave the other two a vinegary look of accusation. “Perhaps someone else might share their knowledge of these…sounds.”

“Why,” said the doctor, after a pull at his porto, “they are but sea chantys. And you heard a cat, the ship’s cat. How they do like to tease the poor brute.”

Sea chantys! I most certainly had heard nothing of the sort. But I could draw them out no further, and after some grudging speculation about the weather and hope for a landfall, we adjourned.

I then went to the deck for some air, and met a man there I must describe. I find myself bemused by this most peculiar individual, a man the hue of coal who has only just emerged after several days in his cabin, and who now strides the deck as freely as any of the whites: one Louis Nukanga, an “associate in business” of the Captain.

Nukanga wears a fine suit of clothing, and his head is shaved bald. His only departure from European dress is the copper on his wrists, bracelets that one only sees when he lifts his arms to some task or gesture, and the sleeves fall back. I found myself staring at them as he approached the rail close by me and raised a spy glass to scan the western horizon, just at sunset.

“The island, I feel its loom,” he said (to himself, though I stood close beside him at the rail). “The island…” So he muttered as he peered through the spyglass. He said something more in his own language—I know not what, precisely, but it had the sound of frustrated longing.

It was then that I saw the bracelets, and made out the figures carved upon them. On the underside of the wide bracelet clasping his left wrist was a graven image of a creature I at first supposed some cephalopod of the deep, until I beheld its lower body that was almost like a man’s; the other bracelet showed the image of a thing like a great scaled worm, with the face of a man, and tentacles bristling here and there—rude spirits of the African continent, I’m sure. The images seemed to spring out at me from the bracelets. I seemed to see both too easily, as if they drifted from their metal hosts and floated upon the air. Under each image was writing in a script I could not read; I have seen samples of ancient Sumerian, and while it was not Sumerian perhaps it was not so different. Strange, for that land was far north of the equatorial Africa from whence Nukanga sprang.

I pressed him for an account of his provenance. He hails from the jungles two days march inland of the Gulf of Guinea, a place “not so far south of the Niger River”, so he told me, where he had struck a deal with a Frenchman named Galange who was in partnership with Captain Hoek. A freed slave, educated by his Master in England, Nukanga had returned to a place called, “to freely translate, the Uneasy Mountain.” Here was the home of his youth, but he found the entire village in bondage to M. Galange, who was searching for treasure, commanding a small but well-armed cadre of Dutch and French brigands to force labor upon the natives. At gunpoint, Nukanga’s people dug shafts into the mountain, fruitlessly searching for rumored wealth.

“The search was wont to kill my people,” said Nukanga grinning, “So I showed Galange where he and Hoek could get what they desired, in exchange for a special arrangement for myself…Of course, I have promised them another treasure, in another place, on their return. If I did not, they would have cut my throat as I slept, so that I would not trouble them for my share…but Galange will do no more harm—he has gone from the ship…In a sense.”

I registered his words but distantly; it was his grin that transfixed my attention. His teeth were covered in copper, and each one, I saw in the ruddy gleam of the setting sun, was inscribed with one of the unknown letters of the sort etched into his bracelet. What did his grin spell out?

“You try to read my teeth, eh?” he said, chuckling, lowering his spyglass. “These names you cannot read; their alphabet you are not likely to know. They are names you may yet wish to call out! You may wish to call them… and implore, yes implore for their mercy!” His eyes were glittering with a contained, cruel mirth as he spoke. “But you do not know how to cry out to them, to call for mercy, mercy!”

Stung by his contempt, which he hardly troubled to conceal, I felt constrained to reply, somehow. “I call on no deities, sir, neither yours nor those of my own land,” I declared. “I am a man of the new era, a man who values Reason, and such men, the hope of the world, deny all superstitions—meaning no disrespect to your beliefs.”

“Superstitions? If you meet a god, will you then believe?”

“Yes, if I recognize his godliness! But there are those who claim to bear gods within them—I have heard of such things, in the West Indies, a practice called voudoun—and to meet this ‘god’ is to meet a man deluded!”

“I do not speak of such,” he said, snorting dismissively, collapsing the spyglass with a sharp report of metal on metal. “I speak of…but soon enough, soon enough…” And with that he turned away, muttering in quite another language, and went below. So ended my interlocution with Mr Nukanga!

Only a few heartbeats later I was joined by the captain, who had been drinking with Dr Bessemen. “Your Bessemen cannot hold his liquor—one bottle, or mebbe it was two, and he babbles without sense, and then falls to snore!” He clutched the rail and in his drunkenness seemed to sway in exact counterpoise to the swaying of the westering ship, his upright body like the inverted working of a pendulum. “My friend,” he said, breathing a gust of spirits upon me, the unlit pipe wagging in a corner of his mouth, “what think ye of Nukanga?”

“He seems a strange mix of the learned and the superstitious! And he spoke obscurely of an island…”

“An island? Did he now?” He turned and peered into the gathering gloom, and sniffed the air. “I believe I can smell it. Land.” He removed the pipe and called up to the lookout in the crow’s nest. “Ho! You there! Do you see land to the west? An island?”

“I do not, captain!” came the reply.

“Well watch close! We need the water, damn you!”

He then addressed me, while swaying in place and packing the pipe with tobacco he kept loose in a weskit pocket. “I do not trust Nukanga…he is a Jonah! Since he came on board the winds blow us always west, no matter how we beat and tack, tack and beat. Always west and even south! And our route is north and east!”

“For my part, I am glad the wind has taken you out of your way, for I’d have perished on the sea otherwise. But perhaps you are concerned to protect your cargo, captain? We are driven into the sea-lanes of privateers by these winds…”

“My cargo?” He looked at me suspiciously. “What do ye know of that?”

“Nukanga says he helped you find a treasure, but he did not say what treasure…”

“Aye, if he said so much, it can’t matter if ye know—and you seem an honest man. I would trust you, for I have need of someone to tell my mind. There are few enough—perhaps there is no one—I can trust…Come!”

He staggered away and I followed. We made our way below decks, the captain swearing when he nearly fell going down the ladder. The captain catching up a lantern along the way, we wended a narrow, malodorous corridor, descended two more ladders, each deck’s passageway more noisome than the last, until we came to a locked room. Here a sailor leaning on the bulkhead nodded in sleep, musket clutched against him, keeping some sort of watch.

“Idiot pig!” The captain bellowed, snatching the musket and slapping the hapless fellow so that he stumbled sputtering away. “Ye sleep when I pay you to guard my cargo? Ach, I should hang you!”

Some time a-fumbling later, the captain found his key and unlocked the heavy padlock and bade me come in. Within the low-ceilinged hold were a row of five goodly chests. “In the other hold, below, there is crude tin, copper, and other ores, but here is the real treasure! Now let your eyes feast, Mr Caleb Ward!”

He unlocked the nearest of the chests and flung its lid back. At first I thought it filled with rough rocks of quartz, but when he lifted the lantern over the chest I saw the blue glimmerings, as if from a multiplicity of eyes, shining back from the pure hearts of the gems. “Diamonds!” I cried.

“Quiet! Never so loud, ye hear?” he hissed. “Rough they are, but diamonds right enough. Five chests full! All mine, and Nukanga’s—Galange has gone missing from the ship, I do not like to guess at how it happened. So he will not share the diamonds—so sad! And Nukanga offers four times as many in another place—but only when he is paid, he says, in Amsterdam! It was in Galange’s mind, before we left the village, to make Nukanga tell of this other place—to use ropes and fire to make him tell. But I have no belly for torture, and who knows what friends the man might have, for he has cozened to some in civilized places! So I bear Nukanga, though he sneers and speaks in dark cupboards to the men, speaks things I don’t know.”

He shook his head. “Things…I don’t know.”

He tried to light his pipe on the lantern, and repeatedly failed. In the end I held the lantern for him while he puffed the pipe alight—I was fearful of fire on the wooden ship, after what had happened to the Feveringale. Another kind of fire, a blue fire, glimmered in the chest of rough gems. The diamonds, I confess, made my heart pound. So many! And I was so poor! But I had been raised austerely and was unable to think of larceny, but for a fitful moment.

“Captain,” I said, “I am indeed awed. You will be a rich man! But surely there are mysteries on this ship—there is murmuring, there is something like a chant, late at night, heard in the deep aft…Seeing this treasure, perhaps the mystery is solved. Could not the sounds I heard be a crew in conspiratorial colloquy? Could they not be thinking of making this treasure their own?”

“Eh?” He turned and looked at the door, then hastened to close the chest. “Ye think I would trust them? They don’t know! They think it’s all tin and copper ore. Ye have seen, and Nukanga, and none other! For this crew are not the men we took with us to the interior. Those men wait for us at the village of the Uneasy Mountain.”

“What then, is the trouble with the crew, captain? Is it my imagination?”

“As to that ye have heard— they do something aft, and below, in the orlop! O, aye, there is a sickness on this ship, a slow, infectious madness, like a man crying out in fever…while there is no fever! And something has taken our own doctor, and four of my best hands!”

“But with respect, Captain Hoek, are you not master of your ship? Surely you can penetrate this mystery by demanding an explanation; by entering the orlop where these rites are held, and seeing for yourself!”

“Had I courage… Something about the business affrighted me, so I sent the doctor, that night, as the storm rose…and where is he now? It was that very night he went missing, with them others! The crew say those five was swept o’er board. Myself, I think something…something other.”
“What other, Captain?”

“Ach, my head hurts, I speak strange things when the drink begins to wear off. Have ye not noticed how many crew are hiding below, saying they are sick? How few remain to work the ship? I have almost no one left to turn to–and I say this: if you would find out what goes on below, you would find me grateful.”

He would say no more. But I determined to do as he requested. I shall write a great story for the newspaper—I sense it coming!

I wrote out the previous entry two hours ago. It seems an age.

After I spoke to the captain, I went, on deck to stand brooding by the aft rail. A strong wind blew from the east, filling the sails, driving us west, ever west, at about seven knots. I had heard one of the hands say that it seemed if the captain tried to tack, the wind shifted, to continue pushing the vessel west, as if actively, deliberately frustrating his efforts!

The wind in my face, I watched as the failing light seemed to soak into the glimmering white tips of waves, to re-emerge in the luminescence of the Pelican’s wake. Like diamonds!

I beheld something, then, disporting in the seam the ship cut in the sea. Dolphins? Seals? Sometimes I thought so, other times I thought they were more disturbing shapes; I thought I saw a buckle here, upon one, a strip of cloth trailing from another. There were at least three of them, sometimes I thought there were more. Whenever I supposed I had distinguished their shape, it would seem to change, skirled and washed in the dark sea, and I was again unsure of the creature’s form. The thought came that they might be sharks, with bits of human victims trailing from their jaws…

Then a light opened on the stern of the ship, close to the waterline. It was as if a hatch—something I’ve never seen so low on a ship before—had been opened. Lamplight shone on the water and I looked eagerly to try to see what creatures followed in our wake, but as if aware of my scrutiny, they dropped back into shadow…I thought I saw something, before they went—a human face, staring up at me from the water. Perhaps a dead man, caught in some old fishing line…

I thought to tell the captain—but then the chanting began, the sound coming from that same square of light, the anomalous hatch on the stern. I could not make out what was said. Sometimes I thought I heard, repeated amidst the gibberish, “Dagon…thool-hew…dagon…thool-hew…”

And the inchoate shapes in the wake of the ship seem to hiss and thrash in response. I heard a sibilant squeaking from them—like a dolphin trying to form words, and failing.

A chill spread out from the back of my head, to seep corrosively down my spine, seeming to drain all firmness from it, and I clutched the rail that I might remain standing.

“Come, this is foolishness!” I told myself. “Go now and see what is below and do not let your imagination play upon you! You wish a story to tell—here is one waiting to be found out!”

So I made myself go below, in search of the orlop…stopping momentarily at my cabin for that dueling pistol. I once more had to summon strength of will to continue my undertaking, for I had a sudden persuasive desire to lock the door of my cabin from within and sit on my hammock with that pistol in my hand, my eyes fixed on the door, the gun at ready…

No sir, I told myself. You will not hide from adventure. It is what you came to sea to find.
Thence I set out, making my way, lantern in hand, down two ladders and along the passage toward the stern—toward the orlop.

Just a few paces outside the door to the orlop I found my way blocked, once more, by Leseur, who seemed to huddle into the dim shadows of the narrow passage like a tunnel spider in its den. The light from my lantern seemed to shy from him; to quail just short of him. I was determined, this time, that he would not deter me—and a feverish curiosity was beginning to replace the fear that had crawled from that primeval cranny at the back of my brain, my inquisitiveness tugged by the droning chant from beyond the closed orlop door.

“Leseur—move aside, if you please!” I said, trying to keep the quavering in my hands from reaching my voice. “I have this night entered into Captain Hoek’s service and he has sent me to make certain inquiries in the orlop.”

When Leseur spoke, the sound seemed to come, muffled, from the base of his throat, and a sickly reek came with it, something more alien than a man’s foul breath—and it was a smell I thought I recognized. I had caught it once before…

“You may not pass unless Nukanga says aye.”

“Move aside I say! I have a pistol, as you see—and I will make use of it!”

He turned and put a hand on the door—and there seemed a splaying in the spread of his fingers, as if each was melting into the next. I felt a shivering ring out from his contact with that door; it resonated through the damp timbers of the old ship, so that its seams worked in response, oozing with seawater; I was obscurely aware that water was pooling, very slowly, at my feet. Then the door opened; a glutinous yellow light silhouetted Nukanga from behind: a dark figure but for his teeth shining copper-red in the feebler light of the lantern I held. I leaned to peer around him, but could scarcely make out the room beyond; I glimpsed a great coil of rope, the outlines of a group of men seated on it, their backs to me, facing that anomalous hatch in the stern. The hatch, hastily built, had been of recent devising. And there was the smell of compressed seawater and decayed fish and living muck, that distinctive reek from the bottom-most trench of the sea…
I knew then where I had smelled it before—that day in the launch, just before we were sighted by the Pelican.

“So — you have come to us? I thought you would,” said Nukanga. “Come a little closer and look, Caleb Ward…”

Leseur grudgingly pressed aside—there was just enough room to squeeze past him, an inexpressibly disgusting process, to slip into the orlop after Nukanga. I looked scrutinized the semicircle of crew. There were Brackin and Sparks and Gaddle and Milford and Van Murnk and two others, Hoek’s crewmen, I had seen when I first came…and Bessemen.

But Bessemen was lying upon the deck, curled on his side, within the circle of rope on which the others sat, and he was not alone. He was clutched against a being not quite twice his bulk, a thing green-black and wetly slick; a creature with the proportions of a human woman but at its throat were gills, and in place of human eyes were round yellow orbs on the two sides of its oblate head; in place of hair on its head were tresses of slender fins; its mouth…

O it’s hard to write it; for that means I must again invoke the picture; I must once more see that lamprey mouth, that great round fibrous, membranous sucker clapped over Bessemen’s eyes and forehead, sucking, and pulsing; taking and replacing…and Bessemen squirmed in the thing’s grip, struggled to escape, his hands clawing, his bare feet scrabbling at the deck, finding no purchase, no escape. He was like a feeble child trying hopelessly to wrest free even as it was strangled by a brutish overpowering mother.

And Bessemen’s nether parts, too, were entangled with the thing, were penetrated and penetrating, but of this I cannot bear to speak. I stared and choked and turned away, covering my eyes, even as the men seated on the coil of rope persisted in their chant, gurgling and squeaking syllables no human mouth was made to express, invocations interspersed with the litany, Thool-hew eck dagon, thool-hew eck dagon!

“Ho ho, my little friend,” chortled Nukanga as I tried to claw my way from the orlop. “What is the matter? Hm? Do you suppose this man is the victim of a bestial predation?” He locked powerful hands on my shoulders and held me back with little apparent effort. “Not at all! He begged for this! He is but in the throes of transfiguration! And my friend—” He spun me about and looked me in the eye. “He will never die!”

The words struck to the aching quick of me. He will never die!

I wanted to run—but it was as if those words spiked me to the spot. “What?” I rasped. “What do you mean?”

“All men crave immortality–but immortality in this world comes with a price! But wait—what is this I see? For I am a magus of my people, and I see a man’s fate written in his eyes…”

He took the wrist of my left hand, and drew it close between us so that the lantern which I still held shone into my eyes. I blinked and tried to turn away. But with his other hand he took my chin in his big hand and turned my face to him. “Hold! I would look into your eyes…some gaze into a crystal ball to see a man’s living fate but I would look into these soft orbs and see…your death! I see you lying on a hammock of a ship, and I see blood streaming from your mouth! You clutch at your chest and you groan but there is no doctor to attend you! You die the death of your father and his father and his father before him! A cancer eats at you and will take you before this year is worn away! Look—see for yourself!”

And then he struck my forehead with the heel of his hand, and it was as if the vision he had of my death was carried in the blow, from his hand into my flesh and bone and into my brain where it rippled mockingly before my mind’s eye. I saw it clearly, more clearly than I see the paper on which I now scribble this account. I saw myself dying in a hammock, in a small, mold-splashed room; dying as my father had–all the signs of his death upon me. And I saw that it would be soon. And I knew the truth of this vision, as I would know the face of my own father, were I to behold him again. It was the truth of recognition. This was my death.

“But wait!” Nukanga said, as the image dissolved into his coppery grin, his exultant eyes. “That is your death as a man! And there is no escaping your death as a man! But if you were to become other than a man—then the curse of your destiny is lifted, and you will not die that death, you will not die at all…not if you become as those who come to Dagon!”

“No…” My heart shriveled with in me as I began to comprehend.

“Choose! Only choose! Dagon has seen you, from the wake of the ship! Dagon has looked into you from the depths of the sea and Dagon desires you! You are choice, something quite choice to Dagon! Come to Dagon, and live forever…or die alone, spitting blood in that damp, forgotten ship’s cabin…with no one to attend you, no one to pity you, no one to care!”

Then he let go of my shoulders and I staggered away, past Leseur, who was emitting a high pitched bark and a terrible stench—the sound, the smell, of his laughter.

June 27, 1806

It is morning and yet it is not morning.

Somewhere in this ashen mist, the sun has arisen. An etiolated light has diffused the mist. But it is scarcely like real day. We stalk the deck, looking to the West. Our eyes are burning and we can scarce see through the murk, but we sense the loom of the land; we smell stone and beach and fire and jungle.

“This is a volcano island,” said Hoek, beside me on the quarterdeck, peering through the mist, wiping his eyes, peering again. “The kind that gives out smoke but never erupts. Just smoke and smoke and it churns with the fog and this soup we have, to choke in, ye hear? So little wind. Hardly a breath! Would I could turn away from this—but we have need water, we have need supplies…” He looked at me as if he wanted to ask what I had learned in my foray the night before. But I shook my head and turned away and he grunted as if in some personal confirmation.
I could not bear to think about it, let alone talk of it. Only with an inner struggle was I able to force myself to make this written account.

One phrase keeps returning to my mind, this morning…

He will never die!

No. I will not listen to that voice. I would rather die than lose my humanity.

I attempted to seek counsel from the Reverend Mothe. But the pastor will not heed me; he kneels, praying—coughing and supplicating—beside the mainmast. He will respond to no one. He prays with the desperate ardor of one who begins to doubt that he is heard.

I feel safer in my cabin, now, scribbling away, though the candle gutters as if it might go out—but it is even harder to breathe here, somehow. I will go on deck, and see if, perhaps, the wind has changed.

I have been on deck, and I wish I had not gone. The sky was a little clearer—the wind blows from the east again, and has broomed some of the ashen sky; the island broods nigh, dominated by a dark cone nestled in jungle so green it is almost black; streams that emerge from the hills about the volcano running dark down to the sea, like streaks of blood.

We are still almost a mile out from the rocky cove. And we are moving in, despite all the Captain can do.

For after the voice that came from the sea, the Captain wanted to move away from the island.

It was a feeble voice, a squeak and a hoarseness, but Hoek claimed he recognized it. “That is…that is Galange! One of those who was lost overboard! Ach–do ye hear it?”

“In name of God, arête! Turn back, Hoek.” Came the voice, a French tinge to it. Nom de Dieu! Do not surrender. Do not listen. All here is poisoned! Go back, j’implorer! In name of God…kill me! Fetch a musket and kill me!”

I thought to see a man writhing in the dark waves, about a cable ahead of us, but then again not a man, for he had round yellow lidless eyes, and hands that were not hands. And then there was a great splashing about him, and the man gave a cry of despair as other hands, webbed and clawed—hands so dark-green they were almost black, like the jungle about the volcano—clutched at him from all sides, and dragged him under.

Then he was gone. But we seem to hear him still crying, Fetch a musket and kill me!

The captain, his face gone whiter than his vessel’s sails, turned and shouted orders at the affrighted crew. “You there, wheel her about! We will tack, and turn about! We will lower a boat and pull the ship if we must…but we will not go to that island!”

So the few crewmen still willing to respond tried to turn about—and we had not gotten but a few strakes turned before there was a splashing and crackling from the rudder, and the Captain made haste to the stern. I followed him and looked over the rail…and saw that the rudder had snapped away. Or perhaps I should say, it had been snapped away. Something had torn it off. The ship was now drifting rudderless. And the wind was shifting, as if of its own accord…and driving us in toward the island.

Hoek went about the ship, trying to steer the ship by adjusting the sails—but nothing availed us. There was another force pushing us in: swimmers, many swimmers, not quite seen in the murk and dark water; we saw the splashing of their legs, their finny limbs, as they put shoulders to the hull of the ship and directed it into the dark stone arms of the cove.

“Do you fear this consummation?” Nukanga asked me, as he joined me at the bow of the ship…as the island loomed near. “Do not fear it. You do not wish to die young, alone, coughing blood like your father. Surrender to the god whom my people once knew—who many worshipped, in many places, and knew by many names! Once we were a seafaring people, who lived on the shores. But seeking to end the surrender of certain our children to the dark gods of the sea, the village elders took us inland to the Uneasy Mountain. Yet even in the shadow of the mountain were rivers, and upwellings from the stone. And here Dagon called to us, and said, Where you go, I follow! And so it will be with you, Caleb Ward—with Captain Hoek, and with this ship. Why do you think I brought them here? Do you suppose we were ever truly bound for Amsterdam? No, my friend. I have no interest in diamonds. My mother, my sisters, my only brother—all died in Galange’s mines before I arrived! I swore revenge! And to kill Galange and his men was not enough! Galange has already gone to serve Dagon!”

As he went on, I was aware of a struggle behind us—Captain Hoek and a few others shouting, ordering muskets to be used, weapons to be fired, and then someone sobbing that the muskets would not fire for the ash in the air; I heard the slipping wet sound of slick limbs and flippers on the deck as something crawled onto the ship from the sea; I smelled that unholy reek; heard the sounds of struggle, and claws on wood; I heard Reverend Mothe shrieking as he was dragged to the side…A sudden cessation of the shrieking, with the sound of two large objects splashing into the waves…

I did not turn to look. I simply gazed at the great black cone of the volcano and listened to Nukanga: “But you—you shall have an honored place at Dagon’s side!” declared Nukanga eagerly. “Hai! You amuse the god! And it is your only hope…of life! Choose, Caleb Ward…Choose! For those who do not submit to the transfiguration…will become food! And Dagon, and his minions, they eat slowly, my friend—so slowly! They take many months to consume a man…months of sleepless agony! Choose, Caleb Ward! Transfiguration and immortality—or the slow awful revenge of the people of the Uneasy Mountain! Choose!”

June 28 (?) 1806

Can scarcely write. Not sure how long ship aground. Others all taken. Scream in night. Some make other sounds. Soon, myself.

She changed me. Change almost complete. Words come hard. Forgetting old language. H’Beth K’hrauh-sug-uth! New words—yet very old. They come instead. Cthhulu Yog S’hruth Dagon!

Fingers changing. Hard to hold quill. The webbing between fingers; the new claws. My eyes do not focus well, out of water. The sea calls. Must answer.

The horror that is myself, new self—beyond expression. Cannot tell. Cannot say it.

Will seal journal in box with wax. Place this account in boat, set to drift. Perhaps warn others. Tell them: If choice given, choose well. Not as I chose. Choose carefully.

Choose death.

[end}

John Shirley Blogthoughts…rants…meandering remarks…