To more fully enjoy this story in living, breathing HTML,
please visit our website at:
/~vivian
Now offering over 140,000 words of pure prurience!
--------------------------------------------------------
Journey to Sxtlan
by Vivian Darkbloom
Synapse I
It is only with great reluctance that I dare reveal the
outlandish details of the twisted and bizarre tale that it has
fallen to me to tell, a warped and dusty decayed cobweb whose lot
it has befallen me to spin, whose devilish outlines only the most
credulous and tolerant reader, one with the most active
imagination, who is willing to suspend all but the most tenuous
laws of science and reality as we know it, and allow the tortuous
turnings of the crazed narrative embedded in the mad scrawlings
of my own notes, writings that I barely remember scribbling
through the grotesque state to which my mind had been reduced by
the series of events, the fantastical babblings brought on by
fantastical occurrences no doubt induced in part by powerful
hallucinogens, but notwithstanding other such factors, the
particulars of which, should they become known, would shake to
the very core the delicate foundations of knowledge upon which
modern scientific scholarship, as well as cosmological and
evolutionary theories have been based.
The facts set out herein only hint at a thin echo of the terrible
rantings one may encounter in that horrible infamous tome, The
Sexronomicon, in which one will find the crazed ravings of the
mad Arab, Haz-al-Otto Harems. Yet, as incredible, nay
unbelievable, as such things may be, I cannot but set in words
the recounting, if only as a warning, an etiquette of hazard
audaciously plastered on the door of the church, a signpost to
alert the unwary, "Proceed only at your own peril," though no
doubt the terrible meanderings will turn back all but the most
heady traveler, for even within the tale itself do the gentle
tendrils of enticement surround and entwine the heedless
adventurer, until before one knows it, one has become hopelessly
entangled in the sticky, perilous vines of poisoned
prognostication, only to tumble helplessly into the depths of the
most terrible darkness.
Brave and daring reader, you have been warned. Your chance to
turn back will soon fade. Indeed, would you be well advised to
return now, to set aside this recounting of such an awful tangle
of dreadful occurrences, while still you are able to recover the
blissful and innocent brilliance of the daytime sun as might be
pleasantly enjoyed by the average gentle person, one yet
unacquainted with such knotted and decadent wanderings into the
realm of irrevertible shadowy confusion, one who, with the
unknowing bluster, perhaps of youth or some other folly, still
might believe in the impossibility of becoming irretrievably
bewildered solely from the product of fancy and intellection, who
could still conceive a state from which one could recover the
semblance of normality, one happily unbruised by the chilling
titanic danger lurking beneath the seemingly harmless visible
fragment of the alphabetical iceberg, bereft of any inkling of
the terrible maze lying as a sinkhole beneath the thin appearance
of verbal symbols, believing blithely the impossibility that one
find oneself hopelessly bewildered and alien from the mere
sentences of a tale such as as might shatter all remnants of
sanity, leaving only bare thin threads of logic and reason in
their wake.
It was such a state of youthful folly indeed, in which I found
myself partaking carelessly the fruits of abandon, perched so
precariously as I was atop the ivory tower of scholarly
contemplation, properly matriculated and enrolled in a tidy
schedule of studies in an erudite and worthy institution of
higher learning as might befit a youth of my intellectual stature
and curiosity. For the sake of those who might be indiscreetly
intruded by the eager fact-seeker, the name of the institution of
which I speak will remain shrouded in concealment.
We may refer to it simply as "Miskatonic." But let us just say
that it was a lesser known academy, but nonetheless of
significant repute, nestled in the placid country setting of a
small town, sufficiently distant from the rough-and-tumble
currents of coarse civilisation, yet not bereft of cultural
events such as might be provided by the earnest performances of
fellow students arduously engaged in polishing such hoary
classics as might benefit embarkation on a career in music or
theatrics, in the theatre or auditorium situated along two edges
of the rectangular courtyard surrounded by Roman-style pillars,
bordering the plaza within which dwelt the sinister yet seemingly
random tile mosaic in black and white.
Had I fathomed the depths to which I could fall from such a sheer
height at which I found myself, perhaps I would not have strayed
so close to the edge.
Yet, it was precisely to that edge that I found myself drawn. It
was the vertigo itself that served as an inescapable lure.
Often I was accompanied in such ventures by my friend and
companion Clifford, my friend whose name led to much hilarity
from his compatriots. As, in contradiction to the image one might
get from the popular series of small black and yellow books found
on wire racks in University bookstores, he seldom took notes at
all, and was often found in lecture classes without so much as a
scrap of paper. He had a broad and expansive personality, with an
uncanny ability to recall every detail of an hours-long lecture.
Likewise, when he sat down to write, he would type entirely from
memory. This ritual was generally preceeded by a period of
several hours during which he sat silently in front of the
typewriter, visualizing the shape and texture of the ideas and
vocabulary spread across each page that would emerge.
It was one evening when we found ourselves lounging together in
the twilight on the steps overlooking the quad, in that very
magical moment during which the worlds of light and dark exchange
places, the sky all lit with the indescribable pinkish orange of
sunset.
"It's an edge just like this one that one might fall into the gap
between our reality and the next," he said, sipping his wine.
I laughed. "Do you suppose? Would it work the same way if I
turned out the light in my room? I could make it flicker, just to
enhance the occurrences of such gaps."
He looked at me with great solemnity, as if my words had trod
profanely over some grand honorable truth. He held up his glass
of wine. "Do you ever wonder whether this brew of fermented
grapes, the waste product of yeast, might be leading us astray.
Might be deadening our minds instead of awakening them?"
"Yeast shit," I jested. "I don't know. Let me try." I chugged the
whole rest of my glass, and enjoyed the always-surprising rush of
euphoria. "Gee," I said. "I can't tell if it's leading me astray
or not. My mind is too deadened from the brew of grapes."
"I have met a medicine woman," he continued solemnly. Two girls
strolled in a diagonal across the lawn, chattering and laughing
at some frivolity. I did not know their names, but found myself
noticing their shapely beauty, the toss of their long hair, the
pale shades of skin revealed by low-cut blouses, the mysterious
shadows within their cleavage, the full roundness of their
breasts, the delicious hint of young nipples pressed against taut
fabric. They saw me noticing, I'm sure, and acknowledged as they
often seem to do by smiling with more silliness and studiously
ignoring me as they strolled on by.
"The old woman gave me these," said Clifford quietly, opening his
hand to reveal several round cactii, vaguely resembling giant
tweed coat buttons, each having the appearance of a collection of
tiny shriveled little green mammaries.
My eyes widened. "Are those. . .?"
He nodded seriously. "The sacred medicine of expanding
consciousness, of true awareness. That seed of rebellion
forbidden by the fascistic governmental authorities, who would
not want us to uncover the Key to the Secrets of Reality and
Beyond."
"Peyote," I whispered.
"We'll meet in twenty four hours on this spot," he said. "We each
must be entirely sober. And once we have consumed the sacramental
bread of knowledge, accompanied by a glass of the essential
purity of sparkling spring water, we must each venture out on our
own journey, guided by our own spirit." His bass voice emanated
from the bowels of a darkness whose magnetic pull of gravity
portended the termination of all academically light-hearted
inanities to which I was accustomed, to which I might become
alien once acquainted with the velvety black secrets of true
reality.
"Groovy," I said, lighting up a joint, and punching the `play'
button on my portable cassette player, settling back into the
sensuous distorted guitar of Jimi Hendrix. What a delightful
device! Which delivered music on demand at any time and place.
Such was my enjoyment of it that I could scarcely imagine life
without.
Cliff threw me a glance of sordid disdain as I handed him the
smoking missile of smouldering herbal escape, starry comets of
intense psychedelic energy flying from the glowing red ember. His
brief flaming glare made me smile only more.
Reminiscent, no doubt, of the time when we had been strolling
along the garden mall of the small local downtown area, I lost in
the heavy metal musical wanderings served to me through the
ingenious device of headphones, allowing me to ignore all
auditory stimulii around me by playing as the soundtrack to the
movie in which I found myself an actor, when Cliff tugged at my
sleeve, urging me to stop. Curious as to what focal point of
attention had drawn his gaze, I discovered a bearded wanderer in
a threadbare black suit situated neatly on a small wooden stool,
striking with decorative mallets in the shape of the small letter
`d' at an odd instrument with sets of metal strings stretched
sideways across it.
Impatiently, I had pulled out a single earpiece to hear what
Cliff had to say. "What is it?" I demanded.
It was at that moment that he had shot me the first of the sordid
glances I would come to understand as his annoyance at my
constant addiction to the earphone-delivered musical world of
portable stereophonic cassette music.
"Would you turn off the damn tape player and listen to the human
being in front of you, creating beautiful harmonies through the
sole effort of living spirit and the desire for artistic
expression?"
Still with my music blaring in one ear, I asked: "What do you
call that weird thing he's playing, anyway?"
"A hammered dulcimer," came the reply. "Would you shut off your
damn machine and listen?"
I considered deeply, for maybe a half a millisecond. "Can't
interrupt `The Wind Cries Mary,'" I shrugged, popping the missing
earpiece back in. He said something more, but I replied "I can't
hear you!" and he soon gave up. Nonetheless, he made me stand
there for about fifteen minutes watching this doofy guy playing
some weird instrument, and I could even hear it through the
headphones, ruining the silence of the breaks between songs.
Back in the wine-drenched fading twilight, I watched Cliff
looking away, stoically putting up with my headphone-and-rotting-
grape-induced reverie. Honestly, the guy could learn to lighten
up now and then.
____________________________________________________________
And so it was that, the next evening, and ice-cold sober, aside
from the rushing onset of nefarious hallucinogenic machinations,
I found myself alone in the hellish blue late-night light of the
full moon, listening to the disturbingly loud din of crickets
gaily chirruping, studying the seemingly random black-and-white
patterns in the rectangular tile mosaic in the quadrangle between
theatre and auditorium, seeing colors where none had ever been
seen before. It was to this seemingly meaningless pattern that I
had now found myself drawn.
This was the edge, whose vertigo worked at my subconscious
yearnings with the tantalizing lure of the perilous unknown. To
stare into the bottomless abyss beyond, as we often would from
time to time, lying on the topmost platform at the edge of the
spiral stairwell, safely secure from falling, but exploring the
inescapable yet irrational human sense of vertigo, head thrust
between the balusters, contemplating the endless tumble into the
depths of a world which light had never seen.
Frantically, importunately I pored over the mysterious tilework,
and wondered what sinister poltergeist messages one might
encounter in the frigid crashing snow of this semblance of a
frozen and abandoned television set, with black and white
molecules dancing in seemingly random patterns between the
colorful particles of sparkling drug-induced nerve decay, as my
mind reeled alarmingly out of control from the intensely damaging
chemistry of synaptic solvents.
Nervously trying to calm down, I fumbled clumsily with matches in
the nearly imperceptible breeze, finally striking up sufficient
flame to ignite a fatly rolled hashish-laced indica joint of
which I inhaled deeply the relaxingly soothing dense intoxicating
vapors.
It was at that moment that the young girl, who must have been but
a mere seven years old, came sprinting and somersaulting across
the courtyard, leaving colorful swirling tracers and trailers in
her wake as she tumbled and spun dancing in an erratic zigzag
diagonal across my field of vision.
____________________________________________________________
[Next]
_______________________________________________________
For more stories, please visit our site:
/~vivian