The Weird Part 155

In the morning, Clare was gone. I sat at the kitchen table, worrying and wondering if she'd gone off like some marsh spirit, wandering the Levels in the morning mist. Twenty minutes after I'd drunk my second cup of tea, she was back, looking rosy-cheeked and cheerful, and announced that she'd been for a walk down the lane and had met a nice horse in a field. The ca.n.a.l-haunting woman whom Richard had described seemed to have flown like the mist itself, upwards into the sunlit air.

I had to go to the Centre that morning, so Clare said she'd come with me. I spent the next couple of hours going through records, while Clare I learned at lunch had pa.s.sed the morning in looking through the information section, learning about the Lake Villagers.

'I'm surprised how much is known about them,' she said, over soup and bread in the Centre's cafe.

'Well, peat preserves things. If the structure's there, then you can build up guesstimates from that. I'll have to show you some of the computer reconstructions: I've got some on CD back at home.'

'It's fascinating,' Clare said. 'Like a world built on water.'

I stiffened, antic.i.p.ating ca.n.a.l revelations, but all she said was, 'It must have been b.l.o.o.d.y cold in the winter.'

It wasn't exactly warm that afternoon. We went into Glas...o...b..ry for a cup of tea and there was a distinct sense of the year beginning to wind down, a faded quality to the light, a bite on the wind's breath.

'I keep thinking of that afternoon we spent down here,' Clare said in the cafe. She was looking down at the table, playing with her teaspoon. 'Do you remember? Everything golden and grey, and the birds in the reeds.'

'That was the day we saw the cormorants.'

'I've dreamed of them, you know.' She spoke with a sudden rush, as if confessing something forbidden. 'They keep changing. Sometimes they're black and sometimes they're white.'

'Things stick in your mind,' I said. 'When I was a kid, we went to Tenby for a holiday there's a fortress on a rock, just beyond the bay, and I still dream about that sometimes.'

She nodded, but she looked slightly disappointed, as though she had been expecting me to say something else and I'd let her down. We did not discuss when she might be going back.

Next day, I went to the museum, but Clare did not come with me: she said she wanted to sleep in. Still nervy about signs of depression, I didn't attempt to dissuade her. When I got back to the house about mid-afternoon and found a note saying that she'd gone out for a walk, I wasn't worried.

But she didn't come back.

It was dark by six and I was starting to get seriously freaked out. I tried her mobile and got her answering service, left messages. I got the car out and drove into Glas...o...b..ry, wondering whether she'd gone into town. But I did not see her along the road, and she wasn't in any of the pubs. I drove back, hoping to find her at home, but the house was as dark and silent as I'd left it.

I didn't want to ring Richard, but if it turned out that something had happened to Clare, I wouldn't have been able to face myself. His landline rang and rang; I tried his own mobile and that, too, was switched off. I left more messages, tried to decide whether it was too early to call the police and then decided that I'd rather look like an idiot than risk Clare's life. It was cold outside, with the stars hanging heavy and burning over the low black land.

The police took me seriously, though with a certain weariness, but said there was little they could do. If Clare continued to be missing, then they'd initiate a search, but until then, all they could do was keep an eye out and wait. The implication was that I should do the same.

When the doorbell rang, all my foolishness came cras.h.i.+ng in on me. She had got lost and forgotten her key, that was all. I threw the front door open.

'Clare, I'm so' But it wasn't Clare. It was Richard.

He didn't seem to know anything about my phone messages. He said that he was there because he had had a dream. He was dishevelled, a bit stare-eyed, and he smelled dank, the sort of smell you might acquire on too close an acquaintance with the greasy waters of the s.h.i.+p Ca.n.a.l. Both this, and the account of his dream, were completely out of character: the only thing that made me listen to him at all, rather than insisting on rest and a bath, was the fact that he knew Clare was missing.

My mind, wandering in areas that I did not understand, started to invoke further paranoia. This was all some weird game, either involving me or, worse still, directed at me. They had set it up between them, it was all planned. But then Richard started to tell me about the dream itself.

'She was walking in a dark place. She was lost, and there was a storm, but no rain. I knew that it was cold, and then I saw that she was out on the mere. You know, where we went for a walk? Where we saw the hide? And the hide was in the dream, too I knew that if she could get to it, she'd be okay, we could pull her back. But then I saw the birds.'

'The birds?' But I already knew which ones he meant.

'The cormorants, or whatever they were. Long necks, sharp beaks. They were white when I first saw them and as they flew towards her, they changed to black. Then it started to snow and the snow was black, too, like little beads of jet, and it covered her, she stood still like a statue and when I touched her, I realised she had turned to peat and she crumbled into the water.'

There was a long silence after he recounted his dream, but it was just a nightmare, nothing more. Wasn't it? Richard was staring ahead into the heart of the fire as if trying to conjure its warmth back into his bones. He said, 'She's out there, Jude, and we have to find her. We have to bring her back.'

His eyes were burning and he looked thinner since I had last seen him, as if he'd aged in the past few days. I did not know what to make of his dream, but it was easier to leap up and go out, knowing that I'd already contacted the police and could do no more if we stayed home. Knowing that action was always easier than just sitting, with the unspoken accusation ringing in my head: it was under my care that Clare had become lost.

'Let's go, then,' I said.

October had borrowed a night; when we stepped outside it felt more like the middle of January, a raw moonless landscape with the mist breathing off the ditches. A bone-coldness, seeping in even through my Barbour jacket and fisherman's sweater. I thought of Clare staring into a ca.n.a.l for hours at a time, and I grew colder still.

We took the car out to the bird sanctuary, driving slowly with the window down so that Richard would spot her on the road, if she should come that way. But we pa.s.sed no one on the road and once we had turned into the track that led to the bird sanctuary car park, the night closed in, a clammy dark with the stars swallowed by cloud and the reedbeds swimming out of the mist.

Richard was out of the car even before I'd switched the engine off, walking quickly towards the hide. I had to run to catch up with him and he did not turn to see whether I was with him or not. He was looking straight ahead, like someone possessed.

We reached the hide. As we did so, a breeze sprang up, but it didn't seem to make any difference to the mist. I thrust my hands further into my pockets and found something brittle and sticky in there. I pulled out the black bird's wing that I'd found on the way to the hide, the last time we'd come. I remembered leaving it on the rail. There was no smell, but the b.l.o.o.d.y flesh had not clotted, it was still moist, and cold as ice. I was so revolted that I nearly dropped it, but then I heard Richard's voice, calling my name, and I stuffed the thing back into my pocket and ran along the walkway.

He was standing in the entrance to the hide, clutching both sides of the doorframe. His face was suffused with a kind of strange joy. He said, 'Jude! It's okay. She's here.'

'What? Is she all right?' I had visions of Clare collapsed, huddled against the wall in a disorientated daze, but when I pushed past him into the hide, limp with sudden relief, no one was there.

'Richard, where is she?'

'She's there,' he said. He gave me an odd look, as if I was behaving like an idiot. He pointed to the shuttered window of the hide. The shutters were raised, angling out onto the reedbeds. It was pitch black in here, apart from the tiny light of my torch: I couldn't believe that he'd managed to see anything.

Then I looked through the shutter, and saw for myself.

There were more than three birds. This time, there was a flock, perhaps twenty or more, flying from east to west. I saw a smear of pale light in the east, like the grey minutes before dawn, and on the western horizon, just above the reeds, a thin red line in the sky with the storm clouds rising above it. The birds were straggling, and the ones in the east were white, but as they pa.s.sed the hide, I saw the darkness melt over them, changing them to black.

Richard whispered, 'Jude, can you see her? Can you see?'

The reedbeds were the same, but nothing else. There was a kind of house opposite the hide, a hut on stilts. It stood in a patch of reeds, but I saw, as you see in dreams, that they were black, with crimson tips that looked like ragged bulbs of flesh. Clare stood on the bal.u.s.trade that surrounded it. I leaned out, shouting.

'Clare! Clare, can you hear me?'

A shutter rattled, from across the water. A black oblong opened at Clare's shoulder, and something looked out of it. I saw myself looking at my own face, but it was changed: I looked older, lined, bitter. Across the water I saw myself raise something and wave it in mockery: something black and dripping, like the blood-drenched wing of a bird. Then the face changed and was no longer mine, was no longer anything human.

There was a splash. I looked down, and Richard was in the water, ploughing through the reeds towards the opposite hut.

'Richard! Don't go, come back!' I might as well have been whispering. As the last of the birds reached the hide and changed, I saw Clare bend over the rail and reach down a hand to pull Richard up. The bird in the sky changed to black. I saw its reflection, s.h.i.+ning white in the water below, the light breaking the water up into a thousand dazzling splinters and the hide, the fleshy reeds, the gleam on both sides of the sky, everything was gone. I was alone, and it was night, and it was cold.

I would like to say that after I made my way home in a daze, I woke up the next day to find it had all been a dream. But Richard's rucksack was there to remind me, and Clare's belongings, and a message from the police to ask me to let them know if she appeared. She did not. There was a hunt, and they dragged the waters of the bird sanctuary. I went with them, although the place terrified me. They found nothing. They asked me a lot of questions, but I did not get the sense that I was under suspicion. The case made the papers, and after a while, the authorities and the media lost interest.

I had dreams, too. They were always the same: two dark birds, flying west. I thought a lot about the bird sanctuary, about the kind of place it might be. I thought of the people of the Summer Country, living in the liminal lands between sea and pasture, summer and winter, life and death. The area around Glas...o...b..ry was known to be the land of the dead, the Celtic lord of the dead dwelling beneath the Tor. I did not know if this was what I had seen, some kind of ancient conjured h.e.l.l, filled with spirits that I, with my imperfect human sight, could only see as birds. But I gradually came to think that it was simpler than that: that just as we had gone to the hide to spy upon the life of birds, so something somewhere else had also set up a hide, to watch us, and when the time was right, to take.

Dust Enforcer.

Reza Negarestani.

Reza Negarestani (1977) is an Iranian writer and philosopher who has worked in different areas of contemporary philosophy, speculative thought, and politics. These studies inform his stories, which tend to use the sh.e.l.l of nonfiction forms in a Borgesian way, often as a delivery system for the weird. His most recent book is Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008), which is at once a horror fiction, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire. Perhaps the most innovative and audacious weird text of the decade, the book fuses Lovecraftian horror and Middle Eastern history with occult war machines and the US 'war on terror.' 'The Dust Enforcer' is a chapter from Cyclonopedia.

Pazuzu, the Sumero-a.s.syrian demon of epidemics (the southwestern desert wind) is an occultural operative of the xero-informatic Abomination or Dust (= 100 = NO G.o.d), and possibly the most awe-inspiring cultist of Tellurian Dustism in ancient Mesopotamia. For wind is truly the high acolyte of dust, as well as being the dust-enforcer. In his Notes on Reliquology, Parsani put forward Pazuzu as a schematic diagram of the middle-eastern population and its peculiarities.

Pazuzu specializes in scavenging the stratified Earth and its biosphere in the form of dust, which then is uplinked to alien currents flowing in the universe. These combinations of dryness and wetness are carried back to earth to disseminate disease. According to the a.s.syrian axis of Evil-against-Evil, Pazuzu the demon feeds on dust, which is qabbalistically equal to No G.o.d (=100). Pazuzu scavenges the surface biosphere of earth as dust clouds or inorganic bacterial relics; then conducting them to xenochemical hydro-currents, or what in ancient Greece was called cosmic wetness (hydrochemical singularities). This is why Pazuzu is a.s.sociated with the emergence of plagues. Pazuzu then carries the plagues back to the surface biosphere in the guise of dust-soups, arid floods, messy rains, unheard-of epidemics and xero-informatic communications which usually manifest in the form of demonic possession (The Exorcist). This process of dust-scavenging and plague-engineering takes the form of an accelerating non-Aristotelian spiral or cycle when the terrestrial hygiene industry incrementally spreads more anti-pest agents and over-produces defense mechanisms (to ward off plagues) which once again are scavenged by Pazuzu's pest-industry. In this sense, the accelerated rate of resistance ironically intensifies the emergence of plagues and dust-floods, speeding the journey of plagues back to the surface biosphere. When it comes to recollecting all that exists as dust, there is no need to be fastidious.

The horror of Pazuzu is usually embodied as a winged bipedal human-like beast with talons instead of feet and a head concretized through an almost fleshless dog- or lion-skull. The long reptilian p.e.n.i.s of Pazuzu (a pest-seeding machine or a disseminator, according to glossaries of epidemiology) is a later pestilential modification to its body, which strangely has two pairs of wings instead of one, as if two wings are not adequate for its missions. Pazuzu is also visualized with the right hand upward and the left hand downward, heralding the Pest-Cycle of dust whose axis is a double-flight (Pazuzu's tetra-winged body) or a ferocious inter-dimensional 'line of flight' (Deleuze and Guattari) from the Earth to without, and from without to the Earth: the tactical line of the xero-informatic Abomination (dust) and the traffic zone of its bacterial data. Pazuzu exhibits several morphological anomalies and peculiarities which separate him from other Akkadian, Babylonian and a.s.syrian demons. According to the first excavated Bronze statue of Pazuzu (Iraq, post-Paleolithic era, 800-600 BC) these morphological features include: Extremely thin legs bearing an unusually skinny torso. Chest bones are clearly visible as if it suffers anorexia or fatigue; a body struck by famine and carrying its ailing flesh with difficulty. Its wasting body narrates the cyclical desert famine of the Middle East, accompanied by vast locust-swarms (as vehicles of desolation) and other pestilential omens. If the body of Beelzebub (ba'al zebub) insinuates a legion of flies, with their perverse collective enthusiasm to come together over a fresh deliquescing carrion or a yellowish lump of excrement, Pazuzu's anthropo-insectoid body bears the black humor of all bodies it overruns, strips naked of flesh, all the bodies chewed and peeled off by a sky-blackening swarm of locusts, by the hurtling body of Pazuzu, dehydrated and reduced to a twisted spectre of bone and wrinkled skin. Make yourself many, like the locust! Make yourself many, like the swarming locusts!

Four wings instead of two: The wings seem to be feathered (later statuettes confirm this hypothesis: the feathers become visible as remiges, the powerful flight feathers which provide the main propulsive force during the powered flight of the rapax bird) and emphasize a demonic l.u.s.t for flying, for speed and migration. Such wings engineer a flight corresponding to desert whirlwinds, dust devils and other meteorological phenomena of deserts which are believed to have been created by Anzu, the beast of flight, who stole the tablet of destiny and eventually was slain by Ninurta. The Sumero-Akkadian epic of Ninurta portrays Anzu as the forerunner of later flying demons, the engineer of demonic flight and of beasts with feathered wings which are linked to cyclogenesis, sonic havoc, spiraling storms across deserts and dust devils. These four wings render the demon a perfect vehicle for carrying pestilential particles (Namtar) and delivering them to their destination without delay, always promptly on time.

A snake-headed p.e.n.i.s, a pest-fertilizing machine which confirms Pazuzu's kins.h.i.+p with Humbaba (Khombabos, the guardian of cedar forests and the city of G.o.ds, who was defeated and killed by Gilgamesh and Enkidu). Humbaba has the same reptilian phallus and is believed to be the son or brother of Pazuzu. Both Humbaba and Pazuzu are able to reflect a prognosticated future of each individual: Humbaba's labyrinthine face (with unicursal human entrails as the beard) recalls the early art of Haruspicy (divination using the liver or entrails) in ancient Mesopotamian cultures, later developed by the Etruscans. Pazuzu as the demon of the south-west wind is a.s.sociated with Rammalie (an Arabic word for communication with other worlds and aeons through patterns on pebbles and desert sand). His roaring flight introduces rhythmic ripples as crypto-vermiform parasites upon dunes which c.u.mulate transiently as short-term inorganic memories of desert winds; then, ripples and other intermittent patterns can be deciphered as runic alphabets of epidemic journeys and plague-propagations aerated by desert winds and narrated on sand. Abdul Al-Hazred as an adept rammal (sand-sorcerer) probably wrote Al Azif through the dust-infested language of Pazuzu, who constantly enriches its howls with pest-spores in order to expand the hallucinatory s.p.a.ce of progressive arid diseases.

A dignatary's beard, bringing Pazuzu into the fold of Evil-against-Evil and making of him an apotropaic character. Pazuzu, like other demons who belong to the axis of Evil-against-Evil (for example Ugallu), can simultaneously spread terminal plagues and cure certain maladies. According to the a.s.syrian Axis of Evil-against-Evil, every human is constantly a puppet of demons, suspended from the labyrinth of their strings. During illnesses, witch doctors attempt to repel hostile demons from the patient and summon a protector-demon to possess the sick person. Pazuzu is among the chosen demons, one who could even pa.s.s the last guardian Lama.s.su or the Repellent of Evil: a Pazuzu-demon guards the niche in the bathroom of Ashurbanipal's palace at Nineveh, Iraq.

An almost fleshless head that cannot be distinguished clearly, Pazuzu's head diagrams the metamorphosis of three carnivorous animals frequently appearing in the Babylonian / a.s.syrian pandemonium: the rabid dog, the Shogal (jackal) and the Kaftaar (hyena). Ibn Hamedani, in his book Aja'ib Nameh (The Book of Marvels), calls Kaftaar 'a terrible beast'. The hyena, from an afro-asiatic lineage, is possibly the most cursed, obscene and lewd animal in Mesopotamian folklore. Ibn Hamedani tells horrifying stories about this desert-beast who has s.e.x with its prey while devouring it. The Hyena emits high-pitched cacophonic cries of mirth, enough to drive a lone desert traveler mad. Rabid dogs are the sp.a.w.ns of Abzu (Abyss), and the Shoghal or jackal connects Pazuzu to the Egyptian Anubis and the dead.

PAZUZU-DEMON.

UGALLU-DEMON.

The face is of limited relevance for a rigorous archeological investigation into the demonic. Even the most distorted, disfigured and grotesque faces cannot be identified as evidence of a demon (xeno-agent) that is to say, (de) faciality cannot be a const.i.tutive element in diagramming a demon (especially in the period from the rise of Mesopotamian civilizations to the end of antiquity and the early Middle Ages). All radical xeno-demons have a diagrammatic seal of their own; they are always delineated by anomalous cartographies or diagrams based on which their bodies, positions, and arrangement of their appendages (organs?) are presented, built and (re)composed. Or else they are identified by their coming in pairs (one a recognizable ent.i.ty and the other an obscure twin of the familiar ent.i.ty; examples include the Phoenician and Etruscanian demons). The most well-known demonograms are as follows: The right hand upward, and the left hand downward suggests a swash-backwash model of epidemics; it is the seal of pest enforcers.

Outstretched hands, one pointing east and one pointing west solar demons. The Romans borrowed the same diagrammatic position from Babylonians for their crucifixions. This demonogram later influenced the religious iconography of Mithraism and then Christianity, the most prominent examples being, of course, the iconographic portraits of the crucified Jesus.

Bodily organs (appendages) connected to each other by curves and circles which construct a closed or sealed labyrinthine convolution.

Smaller wings attached to the main wings, or possession of more wings than are necessary for flying and migration.

Horns forming spirals (in contrast to general belief, horns are not satanic agents) or horns pointing to each other which signify arch-demons.

Legs open, far apart so as to draw a triangle, also known as the three-dotted profanity, which is among the most significant diagrams of unlocalizable or betraying demons.

The demonogram of Pazuzu (the right hand upward, and the left hand downward) is the unique ABYZmal cartography of disease; it signifies the rotation of The Wheel of Pestilence. This demonogram confirms that Pazuzu (like Ugallu) belongs to the legion of plague-dissipating demons. Demonograms demonstrate the abstract distribution of demons; they are plans for demonic mobilization mobilization in a military sense.

They believe Mesopotamia and the whole Middle East is overclouded by some kind of fog of war which is peculiar to the near and middle-eastern regions of Asia. That you must practice blindness, must dry out your lungs and return to dust in order to coalesce with the reeking pit of the Middle East. The inhabitants of a village near Tell-Kuyunjik, which is believed to be the ancient site of Nineveh, told us that this arid fog is the haze of Pazuzu, the searing mushroom cloud of Middle East. To live in dust requires a certain degree of demonism which western people deem too much for humans. Jackson West does not think the Middle East is a geopolitical region, he thinks that the Middle East is alive. Not metaphorically; it is alive in a real sense, waiting to let loose its sentience. 'It is alive but it doesn't need to survive, because it has a life of its own' this was the last thing West told me before reconnoitring Mosul with his sons to locate that Iranian oil smuggler and that guy Omar who claims to have the diaries of Ibn Maimum, the Persian occult-saboteur, guerilla expert and conspiracist who a.s.sisted the Al-Fatemid to overthrow the Caliphate regime in Egypt.

1st Lt. Ali Osa, US 1st Battalion,

41st Infantry Regiment.

Tell-Kuyunjik: Nineveh 36 24' N 43 08' E.

Excursus VI (Xeno-agents and the a.s.syrian Axis of Evil-against-Evil).

The human defense mechanism is the most consistent ent.i.ty on this planet; its self-fertilizing paranoia is capable of grasping and identifying every contact only in terms of a potential incursion. When this paranoid consistency (or consistency of paranoia, since paranoia, ironically, tends to be consistent) attains autonomy, it becomes ruthlessly schizoid by pa.s.sively opening itself to unknown threats from the Outside or xeno-agents. The anthropomorphic security system is a Pandora's Box of unrecorded diseases, emerging from the consistent resistance of the system to outside invasions on the one hand, and the consistently escalating invasion on the other hand. In this sense, the human security system is a projection of the intensity of the conflict between the xeno-agent (demon) and the system that registers new indefinable plagues mapped at the outer limits of the demon and the system.

Unlike Martin Bergman's still profoundly religious demonology which insists that a demon should be exorcised not to save the possessed but to a.s.sist the demon to escape from the 'mammal meat' according to the a.s.syrian Axis of Evil-against-Evil, the demon infects a person to extract a wide array of pest-insurgencies from the security system not by possessing it (in the sense of seizing a property from the monopoly of the Divine for example, the human as belonging to G.o.d), but by turning the Divine and its secured properties into intermediate parasites (pimps) for incoming diseases. In the a.s.syrian politics of demonism, the Divine and its world are turned into a pest-feeding farm. Their resistance and blind oppositions are encouraged because each instance of resistance harbors more incursions from the Outside. Pests, xeno-excitations, cosmic diseases kick in when capacity is reached and the security system of the anthropomorphic agency starts to crack and waste, consequently trying to survive at all costs which in turn causes a wider array of pestilential activities. In this panorama, survival and security reinforcement (as opposed to the dying system) 'turns on' the demon to no end. Modern criminology refuses to acknowledge the presence of demons, in the same way that secular disbelief condemns the inanity of a demon possessing a helpless human: if demons exist and are that powerful then why would they possess a wretched anthropian? Such an objection misunderstands the mechanisms involved in the communication between xeno-agents and the human security system. For demons maintain their outsideness precisely through a power of overkilling (sheer exteriority of a force), inflicting more power than is needed just to unlock a gate. Demons simply crack open the prey. The overkilling power effectuates an openness outside the system's capacity to afford it. Once openness cannot be afforded by the system's capacity, it turns into an instance of butchery rather than an act of emanc.i.p.ation characterized by human 'access' to the outside. Overkill is a spectacle staged on the fundamental incapacity of the system to cope with the outside. Through overkill, the xeno-agent performs its demonic spectacle and effectuates its exteriority which the system cannot afford. The exteriority of the demon cannot be captured by the desire of the system for openness, and for this reason such exteriority overkills (butchers open) the system. To possess a strong man is certainly enough to flaunt the demon's power, but all the better if the possessed is a child or old woman, to signify the outsideness of the demon through which overkilling power is generated.

On the a.s.syrian Axis of Evil-against-Evil, the demon does not seek to dismantle (anthropomorphic) ident.i.ty; instead it tries to make ident.i.ty a gate for summoning new demons from the furious clashes between xeno-particles and the resisting system. Beyond the borders of ident.i.ty lies the indifferent realm of unconditional (absolute) madness, or that which can never be schizoid, since schizophrenia germinates on the wasted remains of boundary, territory and capacity. Schizophrenia needs a minimum degree of organization and system to spread, to be mobilized, to transform into agitations and to interlock with xeno-excitations and demons. Schizophrenia is engineered through the synergetic oppositions between xeno-excitations (demonic particles of the Outside graspable as uncontrollable intensities) and the forces of the boundary; it is restlessly mobilized through attacks and counter-attacks, one attack from xeno-particles, two or more counter-attacks from the system. The furious resistance is exponentially intensified and progressively overrun by xeno-agents until meltdown, the becoming-GAS of all particles.

Schiz-fluxes only flow on differentiated zones, meaning that there must be at least two opposite sides ident.i.ty and its nemeses. Since the rise of Foucauldian psychoa.n.a.lysis, the only image of a schizo represented in pop-culture is the external image of madness, that of an inconceivable, semi-paralyzed madman lurching in the manner of an intoxicated spider. The schizo can be found everywhere except in madness. Schizophrenia comes with delirium (Jnun), the pa.s.sion for terminal disease (which presupposes health), war-torn realms of organic survival, attacks and increasing counterattacks diagrammatically narrating their tireless, attritional engagement on a draco-spiral which sometimes melts, sometimes evaporates, burns incompletely and blurs into particles instead of dissolving into nothingness. Everything excitingly schizoid, capable of attracting the merciless invasion of xeno-particles and igniting criminal excitations, happens on the borders of ident.i.ty and its regimes which balefully put up their resistance against any malicious force. In order to draw schizo-lines of communication from the Outside, a rigorous course for dismantling ident.i.ty is necessary, yet any serious attempt for total eradication of ident.i.ty intrinsically excludes the s.p.a.ce of xeno-excitations and ends up in autistic nihilism.

In the Middle East, the Arabic word Jin (or Jinn) refers to a race created by Allah prior to the creation of humans, made of fire and thus capable of shape-s.h.i.+fting (unlike the human, which was created from dust and water, the bacterial mess of dust-soups). In the Quran and in Islamic demonology unlike in Christianity Shaytan (Satan) is not a fallen angel but the first Jinn (Man's nemesis) created by Allah. According to the Quran, angels have no Will; as a result, they have no ability to disobey or choose. However, Jinns, with their unfathomable intelligence, can choose their paths; they have the Will to disobey or obey, be loyal or be a traitor (Khazoola). A Jinn or Djinn is male, the female side of this race is called Jnun (in plural form), a polysemous word which also means delirium, maddening love and terminal schizophrenia (corrosive tidal waves of xeno-excitations).

In Persian mythology, Jnun are descended from Jeh or Jahi, the first anti-creationist agent engineered by Ahriman's own body, the daughter of Ahriman who awakened her father from ten thousand years of slumber to sp.a.w.n a pest-legion. Jahi is the first woman whose mission was to undo the entire pro-creationist project of Ahura Mazda. In Arabic folklore, Jnun are daughters of Lilith. Rub-al-Khalie, the dreadful desert where Abdul Al-Hazred settled for ten years, was inhabited by Jnun not Jinn which operate as female gates to the Outside. Al-Hazred must have communicated with the female side of the Outside (i.e. Jnun) in writing his nocturnally encrypted Necronomicon, a chef d'uvre on cosmodromic blasphemy and on the realism of openness.

Jnun possess men, yet they do not occupy or colonize their hosts. Instead they lay open male hosts to the Outside, an openness in the sense of being laid, cracked, butchered open (as in the case of the Moroccan jinniya, Aisha Qandisha, or Aiesheh Ghediseh, who is also called 'the Opener'). Possessed by Jnun, Abdul Al-Hazred found this path the only reliable polytics to communicate with the cosmodrome of the Outside demarcated in the Numogram as the region of Djynxx or more precisely, XX-djinns. The path to Djynxx or the region of XX-djinns is mapped as becoming-woman via Jnun who, according to Arabic and Farsi folklore, narrate untold stories for the one who is opened and devoured by them. Lilith tells travelers forbidden stories before opening and devouring them. In this sense, Jnun (mapped as the region Djynxx in the Numogram) is a direct link to the cosmic blasphemy and the female current of the Outside. The reason that Lovecraft frequently calls Al-Hazred the 'mad' poet or the 'mad' Arab is that communicating with Jnun, as the female gates (vulvo-cosmic singularities) to the Outside, has one inevitable consequence radical delirium. In Arabic and Farsi the word Jnun also means delirium, maddening love, terminal madness as the result of being laid open by the female cutting-edge of the Outside. However, Jnun is not compatible with the western definition of Madness. It cannot be translated properly, but suffice to say that it is mainly comprised of three elements and is developed through their compositions: Possession, Love and utter Openness. Abdul Al-Hazrad is a majnun, a man laid open by Jnun and at the same time, a majnun man, a madman (majnun) who immediately reminds us of the melancholic tale of Leyili and Majnun, their love story which converges in madness, openness, and a delirious love the Forbidden.

Aisha Qandisha or Aisha Qadisha or Ghediseh is one of the most popular and fearsome Jinniya (female Jinn) in Moroccan folklore. Beliefs and rituals for Aisha have continued into the twenty-first century. She is both a hunter and a healer, sometimes appearing as a beautiful (irresistibly seductive) woman and sometimes as a Hag. When she possesses a man, she does not take over the new host, but opens the man to a storm of incoming Jnun and Jinns, demons and sorcerous particles of all kinds; making the man a traffic zone of sweeping cosmodromic data. This is why she is feared. And she never leaves she always resides in the man to guarantee his total openness, which is not always pleasant. According to the Moroccans, the only way to feel comfortable with Aisha (the new mistress / lover) is by partic.i.p.ating with her, feeding her, exciting her through pa.s.sionate and barbaric music rites with cacosonic rhythms.

The Familiars.

Micaela Morrissette.

Micaela Morrissette (1979) is an American writer who, thus far, specializes in short fiction, fueled by Decadent, fantastical, and weird sensibilities. She is a senior editor for the US literary magazine Conjunctions and a fiction reviewer for Jacket and Rain Taxi. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Morrissette has published fiction in Conjunctions, Weird Tales, Best American Fantasy, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, among others. On the basis of just a handful of tales, she is one of the best of the next generation of weird writers. Displaying the full range of her talents, 'The Familiars' (2009) takes an almost Bradbury-esque idea and revitalizes it to chilling effect.

The boy and his mother wake late in the swampy summer mornings and sit on the edge of the porch drinking their first gla.s.s of water and spooning out their wedges of melon and picking the dead heads off poppies with their toes. They brush their teeth side by side at the kitchen sink and sometimes the mother lathers the boy's cheeks with almond soap and pretends to shave him with a b.u.t.ter knife, chattering in an arch accent that aspires to c.o.c.kney. They fill the wheelbarrow with the boy's stuffed animals and matchbox cars and his wand for blowing bubbles and his kazoo and tambourine and truck down to the pond where the boy lies in the hammock, holding his toys in the air and swooping them up and down and crooning to them, and the mother reads paperbacks in the deep low wicker rocker, pus.h.i.+ng the hammock gently back and forth with her foot.

For lunch there is French bread spread with soft cheese and served with purple pickled eggs and Jordan almonds. They picnic under the sycamore on one of the boy's old bed sheets, patterned with smiling clouds and pastel rainbows, too childish for him now, and suck the candy sh.e.l.ls from the nuts, and see who can flick an ant the farthest. The sheet smells as the boy used to, hot heavy cream, slightly soured, and powdered sugar, and cough syrup, black cherry.

They put on their cleanest clothes and drift through the heat down the dirt road to town, the mother pale beneath a black umbrella and the boy's head swimming in a man-sized baseball cap. They check at the post office for their bills and catalogues and postcards of the town which the mother has sent to the boy on the sly, and they buy a wheel of licorice or a birch beer or a small wooden crate of sour clementines. They also buy a backpack, or some tennis shoes, or a lunch box, for the boy's first day of school, which is nearly upon them. With two pennies they wish in the fountain, and they walk home, carefully matching their steps to the footprints they made on the first leg of their journey.

They plant mason jars in the garden to steep their sun tea, and they blow trumpeting squeals on blades of gra.s.s. They play a game that is both tic-tac-toe and hopscotch with chalk and stones on the cement walkway, and the mother turns the hose on the boy and washes off the chalk and dust and sweat while he shrills and capers. For dinner there are drumsticks, sticky and burnt, off the old gas grill, or hotdogs charred on sticks at the fire pit. Then cold red wine with seltzer water for the mother, and warm milk with vanilla and sugar for the boy, in the swooning, exhausted armchairs of the living room, with the white gauze curtains swelling at every breath of breeze.

The mother reads to the boy in bed, adventure stories about islands or magic pools or n.o.ble lovers or gallant orphans, or the boy tells ghost stories to the mother, in which crushed faces press against the gla.s.s of windows, or trees grown over graves sigh and weep and rustle their leaves. The mother sleeps on one side of an enormous mattress, under an avalanche of pillows, and in another room the boy sleeps in a red wooden bed and his legs and arms tumble over the sides.

It's dawn and the boy has woken early when the friend appears. It unfurls from under the bed. Its features have not quite coalesced. Its skin rises up like a blush. The mouth, full of rapid shadows, comes painfully. As the boy watches, its teeth emerge and its eyes take on their hues. It's both gawky and graceful and the boy is touched by the tentativeness of its existence. Its limbs fold out with small tremblings. The boy moves over in the bed and the friend huddles gratefully into the warm depression he leaves. The boy knows not to touch the friend as it is born. Shyly, the boy indicates that the friend is welcome.

The friend begins right away to tell secrets. Some of them are astounding, and the boy giggles in nervous exhilaration. Some of them the boy already knew without knowing it. The wonderful thing is that the boy has secrets too, and the friend is fascinated, and they whisper under the covers until the mother pokes her head around the door, stirring honey into the first gla.s.s of their new batch of sun tea for the boy's good morning. The friend is under the bed so quickly that the boy has no time to feel alarm. But when the mother asks, was he talking to himself, the boy responds without hesitation that he was talking to his invisible friend. His mother smiles and asks what's his friend's name, and since the boy doesn't know, he says it's a secret.

His mother smiles and looks proud in a forlorn sort of way and brushes back his hair with her fingers and he feels the happy little pokes and tickles of his friend through the mattress, approving him, and all three are happy, and he drinks his sun tea with the honey not quite dissolved, coating his tongue and staying sweet there for some minutes. The damp smell that attends the friend, a stain of its birth, is clogging the air of the room, but the mother says nothing and the boy thinks that perhaps the friend is invisible after all.

That day it rains and the boy and his friend play in the attic. There is a trunk full of clothes and dust and the boy's friend dresses up as the princess and the boy as the minstrel without any money, or the boy dresses up as a monster of the air and the friend as a monster of the deep, or the boy dresses up as a man of the future and the friend holds over his face a helmet that carries the boy through time and s.p.a.ce. The rain a.s.saults the roof of the attic. They have stores of crackers and dried fruit and they plant flashlights all over the floor, the beams gaping up at the rafters. There is a box of paper houses that unfold: castles, a Hindu temple, a Victorian country-home. They set these up and populate the rooms with colored plastic figurines from sets of jungle beasts, dinosaurs, and the Wild West.

The Christmas tree is stored in the attic, still tangled in its lights. The boy and his friend creep in under the lowest fronds, curling themselves around the base, and turn the beams of their flashlights out through the strings of dead bulbs to make them glow.

Between the panes of the windows are cemeteries of moth wings and wasp heads and fly legs. The attic swells into the rain.