A
Oh! Sir, there are, in this town, Mountebanks for the mind, as well as the body.
Samuel Foote, “The Devil on Two Sticks,” Act III
Athanasius Kircher analogized the Earth with the human body — in his great work, Mundus Subterraneus, he filled the earth with veins of fire, arteries of water, and great gusting lungs. In his suppressed work, Mundus Tenebreus (originally published in a very limited edition in Amsterdam before being placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by Pope Clement X in 1670), Kircher took his analogy further, giving the earth a mind, a will, and a voice.
The Voice of the Earth (per Kircher) was more than just the long-suffering hiss of squeezed rock or the sudden groan of the earthquake; it was an actual Voice, human-like (after a fashion), speaking words and expecting to be understood. Its source was a mystery to Kichner; he likened it to the Letters of Flame inscribed on the walls of Belshazzar by the Finger of God. “Mene mene tekel upharsin” — portentous, but with their meaning occluded. Kichner spent the last years of his life searching for that meaning, driven eventually to madness and despair by their ceaseless whisperings.
But others were luckier.
Enoch Soames heard the voice, but (unlike Kichner, poor Jesuit) he was an Ascended Master; he knew when to listen and, just as importantly, when to ignore. Sustained by his belief in beauty (and certain Tantric disciplines) he had grown into a fine old ridiculous age and was just now sipping the first of his afternoon Pimm’s Cups (a recent affectation – before that he’d been a dedicated Cuba Librettist) at his favorite watering hole, le Bar du Vingt-et-Unième Siècle. He wore a self-consciously seedy go-to-hell hat atop his tangled mop of greying hair and a vinous sports jacket (with tails) that he’d picked up at a St. Vinnie’s down on the corner of Traveler and 2nd. In his lapel perched a delicately-scented Silphium flower, fresh cut from a Hellenic highland.
Soames was eating heavily salted peanuts by the fistful and disinterestedly watching Re-Animator (1985) playing silently on the bar’s television, when he once again heard the voice, emanating from somewhere beneath him.
“ — I contend you are mistaken,” said Sir Archy, the words in media res but his rough and crude accent instantly recognizable to Soames’ practiced ear.
“Never! For look! There he is!” Came the clipped, triumphant reply of Lady Augusta. Their voices echoed etherically, produced by the vibratory effects of the well-tuned Air Loom they’d constructed in their subterranean lair. Soames frowned, as much at the interruption as at the offensive scents which immediately assailed him: the effluvia of copper and sulfur, the vapors of vitriol and hellebore, the stink of putrefaction and roses – olfactory phenomena indicative of an imminent attack. Sure enough, just as Soames was downing the last of his drink and reaching into his pocket, in burst Eustace Tilley in grey silk top hat and a freshly polished monocle, screaming incoherently and brandishing a gun.
“Found you at last, you soppy twit!” he shouted before firing wildly into the bar.
Tilley was armed with a Savage Model 1907 semi-automatic pistol, .38 caliber and with nine rounds in its magazine, a real collector’s item. The bark of the gun was a throaty roar in the dim confines of le Bar du Vingt-et-Unième Siècle, but Tilley succeeded only in killing the bar man (a bland little nonentity who had, while alive, been cruel to animals) and slightly wounding Afsanah Khatibi (a young woman who would one day make remarkable contributions to the solution of the Navier-Stokes smoothness conjecture, for which she would claim a Fields Medal).
Meanwhile, among the chaos of exploding bottles, screams of fear, and arterial spray, Enoch Soames, Ascended Master, tore a hole in time and slipped away to the Eocene.
Fifty million years ago, Enoch Soames was placidly observing a cackling flock of wading birds building mud nests in the shallows of Lake Gosiute when Tilley caught up with him. Soames felt the familiar tingle of the magnetic warp as the Air Loom gang pinpointed his location, and moments later Tilley leapt out from behind a clump of palm fronds. He had exchanged his pistol for a falcata forged by the master swordsmiths of ancient Iberia in the 3rd Century BCE, its hard steel blade flashing black under the merciless Eocene sun. Eustace lunged towards his hated foe, the sword describing a perfectly murderous arc as it descended towards Soames. But in spite of his excellent form (Tilley’s footing was impeccable, a testament to his fencing masters, the cant of his hip and tilt of his shoulder transferring the totality of his smooth muscular action into maximal force for the blow) he succeeded only in decapitating a marvelous Pseudocrypturus cercanaxius, resplendent in its mating plumage — Enoch Soames had again slipped through a crack in time.
Things always come in threes, thought Soames, lazily bobbing in a rubber innertube in the blue waters of the Adriatic in 1905 CE. To his right was the fairytale beachfront city of Abbazia; on the sand a young aristocratic Russian boy blushingly traded seashells with an equally young female specimen of the English haute bourgeoisie. As Soames regarded them, he felt the astral tug of the Air Loom as it tried to separate his soul from his body — a quick recitation of the Plutonium Sutra broke their contact, but the resultant psycho-lymbic shockwave caught the two young children on the beach, permanently rewiring their brains for synesthesia. Soames, feeling guilty about this inadvertent bit of brain surgery, paddled hard with both hands away from shore. He was seven-and-a-half miles away when Eustace Tilley emerged from the sea in an M-class Soviet attack submarine.
The hatch opened and out ran Tilley, losing his top hat in the brisk sea breeze as he clambered down the ladder on the conning tower midships. Cursing mightily, he sprinted towards the twin barreled 45-mm automatic gun mounted forward on the sub’s patrician prow. The weapon chattered, painting a furious line of death in the blue sea that nonetheless burst only the empty inner tube, for Soames had lifted his arms above his head and slipped under the waves and through time once again.
Enoch Soames spends the next hundred years in pleasant solitude among the vast fungal forests that fringed the brackish Bay of Texas in the year 50,000 CE. Humanity is long extinct, but for company on his long contemplative walks he has a gaggle of fat, pig-sized, waddling rats to attend him, a rare survivor of the Anthropocene. They gambol and nibble on the pale stems of fifty-foot fruiting bodies while Soames versifies thusly:
etiolated time
wriggling
backward upon itself with Brownian
motions etc etc
Soames has written fifty volumes of this and similar stuff, penning them in ink distilled from mushroom juice on lizard leather he makes himself. He takes some pleasure in the fact that, by virtue of cold hard demographics, he is the greatest poet of the age.
A leaden sling bullet breaks his revery, whistling through the air and smashing into a mushroom stalk a few inches from his nose. Soames digs it out and looks it over, noting the inscription: Pet(o) Eno(ch) Stagnovilla culu(m). He appreciates the onomastic Latinization of his name, but decries the crudity of the expression.
More leaden bullets rain down around him, the giant rats scatter and Soames is forced to seek shelter behind the thickest mushroom stalk he can find. Peeking around it, he sees a group of Balearic skirmishers advancing on his position, slings awhirl as they prepare for another volley. Behind them, on the crest of a great dune, Eustace Tilley sits astride a sturdy Roman pony, his monocle aglow with the ecstasy of command as the Legio XII Victrix musters into a line around him, preparing to follow the slingers into the fungus forest.
Soames tries to beat a hasty retreat through time, reaching for sometime pleasant in Ptolemaic Egypt, when he realizes he has been lobster-cracked; the Air Loom gang had not been idle these hundred years — rather, they had laced a net of spiritual mercury all around the year 50,000, trapping him utterly. As reality boils away from him, Soames reflects grimly on his lost volumes of writing, which he is sure will be eaten by the giant rats.
Soames wakes, and a quick sampling of the telluric currents informs him that he is in an old lava tube deep beneath Mt. Shasta in 1947 CE. The chains on his wrists and ankles clink and clatter as he stirs, eliciting nasty laughter from several persons, only half of whom seem to have human throats. Through the bars of his cage Enoch Soames surveys his captors.
Clustered around the nefarious mechanism of the Air Loom itself is his old enemy, the gang: false-bearded Sir Archy hiding their feminine curves beneath a heavy topcoat; the aristocratically sadistic Lady Augusta; Bill the King capering and crowing like a jackdaw; and the silently malevolent Glove Lady, whose leather clad fingers loving stroke the machine’s levers of bedevilment. With them, alternating between fuming rage and sumptuous gloating, stomps Eustace Tilley in his high-heeled boots and dapper frockcoat.
“We have you at last, Soames!” shrieks Tilley. “No more will you be free to commit with impunity your crimes against Art, for you are now in the dark grasp of the Lords of the Earth!” Soames shakes his head and, with an infuriating smile, quotes Baudelaire.
“La Terre est un gâteau plein de douceur,” says he, but in the shadows behind the Air Loom a deeper darkness stirs to life and hisses a fork-tongued reply:
“Mais non, Monsieur Soames. C’est un rêve creux!”
Even a Secret Chief of the Starry Brotherhood may shudder when confronted by the ancient subterrene evil of the Deros, and Soames indulged in a shiver while reflecting on the grimness of his fate.
But, with the curious contrivances that poesy is heir to, it is this, his fate, which saves him, for the menage of his enemies cannot decide upon what precisely his is to be.
“We must kill him! Cruelly, and at once!” froths Tilley, brandishing a mace.
“Waste not, want not! We brought him here for our researches,” insists the imperial Lady Augusta of the gang, “and we shall use him to test all the torments of the Air Loom! We will Kite him, we will Fluid Lock him! He will face the Nutmeg Grinder and the Stomach Skinner! We shall Bomb Burst him and Vital Tear him and Knee Nail him and Brain Bubble him! Such data we shall have, such exquisite data!”
“Silence, all of you. He is ours,” hisses the dero from the shadows, “and we shall drink him to the last drop.” Pulped artists are, of course, a key ingredient in the deros’ elixirs of longevity, and the foul beings anticipated squeezing a good three or four centuries out of Soames. Their red eyes glittered thirstily at their prey, trussed up like a capon at the market.
Their arguments went round and round, each insisting on their own rights over those of their compatriots, seemingly for hours, which is why they did not hear the army of Sasquatches that crept sneakily through the lava tubes and fell upon them. The great enemies of derokind, Sasquatches take any and every opportunity to thwart their schemes. Sensing, in their strange, hairy way, the actions of their foes on the astral plane, they mustered a strike force and fortuitously assailed their ancient foes at a most convenient time for Soames. Great hairy arms battered the Air Loom gang, who fled howling into the tunnels, which the Shamans of the Forest Folk chanted powerful spells against the deros, who twisted and gibbered in fear and impotent fury.
Tilley, mad with rage, pushed through a scrum of ape-men towards his foe, arriving at the cage just in time to see Soames slip his shackles and take, from the false heel of his boot, a small stone vial full of the essence of upas root, which he swallowed hastily. Then, in a cloud of lavender-scented light, Enoch Soames vanished.
Eustace Tilley, brain-poisoned and soul-rotted by long exposure to the radiations of the Air Loom, caught up with Enoch Soames in St. Joseph, MO in 1882. His top hat was busted, his frock coat moth-eaten, but the recoilless .75 in his hand gleamed evilly in the pale light of the moon. Through a lit window in the small house on the edge of town Tilley watched Soames reviewing some papers on his desk, flourishing a pen with particular finality as he affixed his signature to them. He tucked the documents into an envelope, sealed it with wax, and sat back, satisfied. Tilley’s trigger finger itched, but he waited in the dark.
Soames stood, stretched like a cat, and then walked to the far wall where an anachronistic print of Xul Solar’s “The Funeral Procession” (1915) hung on the wall. Noticing it askew, Soames climbed up on a chair and began to adjust it. Tilley silently pushed the window open, levelled the barrel of his gun, and squeezed the trigger.
He went inside, looking carefully over the twitching body of his hated enemy. So many times had victory been snatched from his hands at the last second that he wanted to be certain he’d actually, finally killed Enoch Soames. He toed the corpse, prodded its back with the gun, examined the ruin of his skull; nothing but death was there in the room with him. A chill ran up Tilley’s spine, a shiver that made the monocle pop off of his face and swing like a pendulum on the end of its silver chain.
The spatter of blood and brains on the wall had left a pattern, had deposited a phrase in fact, made up of visceral letters and scarlet words. “Mene mene tekel upharsin,” it said, and Tilley wrote it down, enjoying the cadence of the senseless phrase.
Eric Williams lives on the lithified remains of a Cretaceous seaway in Austin, TX. His collection of original weird fiction, “Toadstones” (2022) is available from Malarkey Books, and he has selected and edited a collection of the fiction-in-translation that appeared in the early 20th Century pulp magazine Weird Tales, titled “Night Fears” (Paradise Editions, 2023). Twitter: @Geo_Liminal
minor literature[s] 