Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator Read online

  Phyl-Undhu

  Phyl-Undhu

  Appendix-1: Abstract Horror

  Appendix-2: Exterminator

  Notes

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  Time-Spiral Press, 2014

  ... even in the few seconds that had passed since his arrival at her side, he had seen a patch of illumination go out, a swathe of lights – a whole precinct or district – turn suddenly dark. The lights did not return; there was a ribbon of blackness cutting across Spearpoint that had previously been illuminated. And as he kept watching, another ribbon appeared below that one – the lights flickering on and off this time, as if some ancient, overstrained generator had just cut out and then restarted, before losing the battle against the darkness. It didn't end there, either. In seemingly disconnected parts of Spearpoint, squares and rectangles of darkness appeared – not just in Neon Heights but in the upper levels, taking out parts of Circuit City and even the angel spaces. The squares and rectangles pushed out fingers and filaments of blackness, joining disconnected areas, squeezing the visible light into narrow, harried motes and margins, as if the visible lights were people being herded into stifling pens by armies of dark enforcers. – Alastair Reynolds, Terminal World (p.101)

  The Certainties are those matters, only, which if not held true, make of all holding true or false an insanity. … Of the Heavens, whether there be such or not, nothing is known. We are compelled to concur with the wisdom of the ancients, when they say of paradise ‘it is the topic of fools’. … Of the 1023 Hells, we know, from adamant principle and thus with perfect confidence, of their times, the order of their times, and – descending from the order of their times – their dominant qualities, of their superior and inferior gods, of their connections and doors, and the angles of their doors, of their names and the numbers of their names, to the ninth degree, of their seals and sigils, of their torsions, of the cries they release and the cries they hold, of their populations as to numbers, of their maze-types, bonds, and hooks, of their weapons, of the tools of their weapons, and the calls of their weapons, and also many other things. – Tchukhzsca, the Certainties (prologue, i-iii)

  All so shed. – Unattributable.

  Phyl-Undhu

  §00. Utter nullity. In the words of the ancient sages of ruined Ashenzohn, it was the endlessness that ends in itself. Dark silence beyond sleep and time, from whose oceanic immensities some bedraggled speck of attention – pulled out, and turned – still dazed at the precipitous lip, catches a glimmer, as if of some cryptic emergence from eclipse. Then a sound, crushed, stifled, broken into gasps. Something trying to scream …

  §01. Does thirteen billion years really seem like such a long time to you? It was too late for that question. She was no longer in the place where it made sense. To forget was a shelter indistinguishable from waking, on some paths, and manifestation of the outer gates had already been accomplished with excessive harshness. Now the rustle of a curtain, the tic, tic, tic of a wind-flustered twig on the window pane, relieved her from those hideous cosmic durations, which had pulverized all refuge until only raw exposure remained. What had been worse were the hatches, nested inside each other, as they scaled down out of the icy, intolerable void. Something that was like a wind, but was not a wind, blasting, sucking, tugging directly at the mind. She scarcely dared to hope that the world had closed again, so quietly. She rummaged through the corners of each though, suspiciously, searching for insidiously self-delusive designs. “Madness is no escape,” she had told herself, or been told, advised, by a voice that held the keys to indescribable …

  “Nightmares?”

  “No,” she mumbled the necessary lie, as her sleep had before. Even in their recession, the cruel subtleties impressed her still. The slow excruciation had masked itself cunningly, spinning a second, inaccessible sleep-gate from the fabric of dreams, then a third, perhaps more, each sealed with intricate puzzle-locks. Exact recollection fractured among fake awakenings. She had thought, for long ages, that the episodic impossibility of reaching beyond this Matrioshka labyrinth was the whole of her life. Crossings beyond crossings. Now the palpable menace had dissipated. Only its husk remained. Vague direness. What are you inside?

  “Can’t sleep?”

  “Sorry.” She shifted again. “Am I keeping you awake?”

  “It’s OK honey.” Jack Turner’s voice had already shrugged off its drowsiness like a dead snake skin. He re-angled a pillow to prop himself up against the head-board. “Something in particular that’s bugging you?”

  Alison sat up next to him, her body stiff with tension. “Suzy mainly, of course.” She paused momentarily, “… and I guess some other stuff.” Bad dreams, thick with traps and false dawns, had been recurrent recently – but she wasn’t referring to that.

  “So you think this Suzy problem is serious?”

  “Don’t you?” There was querulous edge to the response that she had failed to entirely suppress. It wouldn’t be Jack who had to deal with this, she thought grumpily. Still, he was asking. That was good. She took his hand, squeezing it slightly.

  “She seems OK to me …” he mumbled.

  “Oh, Jesus Jack! The school has set up some kind of exceptional meeting to discuss what’s ‘going on’ with her. Does that sound ‘OK’ to you?”

  “So, what is …?” He trailed off. Neither of them had yet switched on a light. The darkness made their exchange seem spectrally insubstantial, oneiric. “You know what honey, if we’re going to talk this over properly – and you’re right, we should – it would be better to get up for a while. If we stay here it’s just going to feel like insomnia.” He was already swinging his legs out of bed, reaching for his ridiculous tartan dressing gown. “A glass of wine would help me focus.”

  “Really?” She smiled, and began roughly mirroring his actions. “Wine? Now? At two in the morning? When we’re both working tomorrow?” It was meant to sound light, but it didn’t. Moonlight painted black webs over her face.

  She scanned the dimness for her favorite night-dress, an over-sized tattered jumper that had once been maroon, but was now an odd shade of bruised gray. The left elbow was completely gone, but it was warm, the weight and scratchiness comforting. Locating the shadowy mound near the curtain, she hooked it towards her with one foot, and pulled it on. To give up on sleep like this was a relief. It was true.

  §02. Jack had already fished a half-consumed bottle of Shiraz from the fridge by the time she reached the kitchen. She sat at their large time-scoured table and let him pour her a glass.

  “I’m seeing Suzy’s teacher tomorrow, straight after work,” she said. “There’s not much to discuss until then.”

  “Do you know what it’s about?”

  “‘Frightening her classmates.’ That’s all I’ve been told.”

  “Frightening them?”

  “That’s all I’ve been told,” she repeated, lengthening the leash on her irritation.

  “OK, OK …” He held up his hands defensively. “It’s just …”

  “… absurd. Yes.” She sighed. “I’ve been dealing with this for almost a week. By dinnertime tomorrow we’ll know what it’s all about.”

  “But it’s keeping you up?” he persisted.

  “Oh, I don’t know Jack.” It was her turn to throw up her hands, almost knocking her wine glass over. “It’s not a rational thing.”

  “She’ll be OK,” he mused vaguely, swirling his unconsumed wine into a slow vortex, mind caught in the red swirl. “Although actually, since we’re here, there is one Suzy-related matter that concerns me, a little.”

  “That stupid game,” she predicted.

  He looked up, surprised. “Y
es … that’s right.”

  “Feels like it ate our daughter sometimes, doesn’t it?” A ghostly smile.

  They’d never spoken about it before, as far as he could remember. Not even casually, in micro-fragments, or humorous allusions. It was odd – perhaps slightly sinister, for this prominent time-wedge, driven diagonally into their family, to have become so entirely unmentionable.

  “The thing that’s been bugging me is that we don’t know anything about it. Driving home the other night, I tried to calculate how much time she’s spent in there. A thousand hours? It can’t be less than that. It’s not that I want to go down the ‘young people today!’ road …”

  “… but we know nothing at all about their lives.” She was sure this completion of his sentence wouldn’t count as an interruption. He’d let it hang half-way, long enough to offer an invitation. The pseudo-telepathy was a little marital solidarity on the cheap. They probably needed that right now. There was a roughness rolling in from somewhere. It was going to be hard. She shivered slightly.

  He was tilted towards her attentively, and noticed. “Cold?”

  “Metaphysically cold.” She smiled weakly, but genuinely, to take the edge off the verbal chill. “You know that old TV thing: Winter’s coming.”

  “Now you’re being melodramatic,” although he didn’t really think so. “It won’t seem like anything much, looking back.”

  §03. It was already winter, and the darkness was slow to ebb. Through the unveiled kitchen window they could see across the street, which was patchily illuminated by sparse suburban street lighting, cold bluish neon feeding shadows. A random speckling of warmer night lights dotted the houses opposite. Roofs were dusted with early snow, catching the luminosity of Earth’s dead satellite, which hung, huge and low, in a purple-black sky. Hunter’s moon, Jack thought, without great confidence. It was a term he knew only from fictions. Horror stories.

  “And how about the ‘other stuff’?” he asked, after a while.

  So, he’d heard, and remembered. She was impressed. “Work oddness. I’m not sure if it’s anything, really …” She no longer thought she wanted to return there.

  “If it’s keeping you awake, it has to be something …”

  There was no escaping it. Perhaps it would be good to talk it over, although that now seemed unlikely. “There’s a case … it’s getting to me somehow. I don’t know why. At least, I don’t think I know.” Which wasn’t true, or even a sustainable lie.

  “An especially creepy cult?”

  “No, nothing like that. I mean, sure, it’s creepy, in its own way …”

  “And that way would be?”

  “It’s almost too – how should I put it? – too calm, too rational … too civilized … I’m sorry Jack, this is stupid, isn’t it?”

  He ignored the evasive self-deprecation. “So what’s the belief-system?”

  “Technically it’s a Makharov Type-IX cosmo-deist inversion – fatalistic, pessimistic, apocalyptic … If I were a collector, this would be my prize specimen. It’s near-perfect. Except …”

  “… they’re too nice.” He’d been well-primed. That was exactly what it was – at least part of it.

  She released an odd bubble of laughter, then shook her head, as if to clear it. “No coercion, no isolation, no real economic exaction, sure there’s charismatic leadership but – here’s the weirdest part – I met her.”

  “The leader?”

  “Yes, in a coffee shop of all things. Stranger still, it was my client who insisted on it, introduced us. It was ethically … I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t. She was charming, polite, clearly highly-intelligent. My client obviously likes and respects her. It’s nuts.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “He’s scared.”

  “But I thought …”

  “No, not of her, or the group. He’s scared of the philosophy, of his own beliefs. There’s nothing to stop him walking away, but he can’t walk away from himself. He wants not to have thought certain things.”

  “Can you help with that?” he asked, skeptically.

  Smart Jack, she thought, you get it. She shrugged. “I’ve tried to explain what the therapy can do, and what it can’t, that the only difficulties we’re able to deal with are those of dependency. He even seems to understand it. If there was someone else he could turn to, he probably would. But where does he go? A priest of some kind would be the obvious answer, but the only sense in which he’s religious is this one, and it’s the source of the problem. He can’t philosophize his way out – that’s why he came to me in the first place.” She scowled in frustration. “You’d be at least as useful to him as I am, more I’d guess – your interests are closer to the topic.”

  “What is the topic?”

  “I’m finding it hard to help him,” she said obliquely. “No, it’s worse than that. I dig him deeper into it.”

  “Into what?” It took a struggle to keep the frustration out of his voice.

  “‘The End is a Thing, and an Intelligence,’ that’s what they say. ‘And we can converse with it’.”

  “This … ‘thing’ has a name?”

  The color drained from her face, suddenly.

  “Allie?” He reached across the table to grasp her hand. It was clammy, abnormally cold. “Allie, what the hell is it?”

  She jolted back, as if from somewhere else. The ghastly parody of a smile struggled onto her lips. “It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. Really.”

  “For Christ’s sake Allie, you’re scaring me to death. What is it?”

  “The name … Oh Jack, I know it sounds stupid, but I’m having a really bad time with the name.”

  “This is about Suzy too, somehow, isn’t it?” He had no idea how he knew.

  She nodded, minutely, brokenly. “Don’t laugh Jack, but the connection is Suzy’s ridiculous ‘invisible friend’.”

  “‘Phil?’” he recalled immediately. It was a phase that had lasted longer than the time since its end.

  “Yes, it started with that hideous stuffed octopus, remember? Bob and Sally bought it for her – which I’ll never forgive them for – and she refused to let us throw it out, even after it had disintegrated into shreds. It got absolutely disgusting, and then when I put it in the washing machine it clogged up the filter …” She paused unnaturally, frozen, as if a wave of entrancement had passed through her, and then resumed, without any sign she had noticed the interruption. “… those gray-green threads of some indescribable material. Then Suzy would be mad. ‘Why was I trying to ruin her cottopos? What did I have against Phil?’ You remember?”

  “Sure. It went on for years.”

  “And then, when we finally got the filthy …” (zone out) “… cottopos into the trash, it was still ‘I don’t believe you, Phil told me that’s nonsense. Phil knows much more about that than you do. Phil tells me different. Phil tells me secrets …’” Something had happened to her voice that chilled him to the bone marrow.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did she call him ‘Phil’?” Her gaze was black ice.

  “I don’t …”

  “Why? Why that name? It came out of nowhere, didn’t it?”

  He struggled through mental fog towards some clear recollection. Nothing came. “It was just a random thing I guess.”

  “‘Random’.”

  “What’s this about, Allie? I’m not understanding at all what this is about.”

  “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  “I think we’re way beyond that point.”

  She laid her hands flat on the table, took several deep breaths, started over. “Cult extraction therapy is a slow spiral inwards towards the central beliefs.” Her voice had slowed too, stripped of inflection, as if she was reading from a manual. It was a distancing tactic. This was how she put difficult material in order. He remembered her sounding this way, as she enumerated the options available to them, when Suzy had broken her ankle on the slopes of Mount Lovell, six hours
hiking distance from civilization. It had been OK that time, in the end. “It’s important not to start with matters of doctrine, or get to them too quickly. The cult experience has to be cognitively neutralized. You start with the social dynamics, then the rituals. The beliefs come last. So it wasn’t until we were deep into the process that I first heard it.”

  “It being …?”

  “The name. Suzy’s ‘invisible friend’ name. The intonation was identical, like an old recording being played back, just for me. Jack, it was horrible. It sounded the same – exactly the same – but I heard it differently, as if this time I was hearing what it truly said, what it was. I’ve never been so …” Inertia would have led her to say ‘scared’, but she stopped, because that wasn’t it. It had been much closer to grief, although it wasn’t that either. It had been the impossibility of continuing to live, suddenly understood, but in a way that was not at all personal. Everything was impossible – that’s what it meant. Everything was over. There was a revolution, slow and implacable, like the wheeling of the galaxies, in which even the incandescence of the stars was a concentration of coldness. “Icy necessity,” she murmured, reluctantly remembering. “It was the name of fate. This isn’t making any sense, is it?” Her eyes were clogged with emptiness. Where reflection should have been, there was only the soul-scouring vacuity of some abandoned, and then long-desolated hell.

  §04. Some nights seem not to end, except inside themselves. They are filled with strange turns, leading to unwanted doors. Sleep is supposed to protect us from them.

  Jack glanced at his watch, which wasn’t there. Panicked now, by an obscurity far beyond his tolerance, he rushed into an imbecile buffoonery. The humiliation was pitched up into agony, even as it rolled out, but he was unable to stop himself: “Phil? Their ominous cosmic thing is called ‘Phil’? You mean like ‘Philip the Magnificent, Destroyer of Worlds’?”