Famous First Words

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Lovecraft. The Dunwich Horror. 

MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, —as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? —from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of visionaries; and in many striking particulars —in the character of the family mansion —in the frescos of the chief saloon —in the tapestries of the dormitories —in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory —but more especially in the gallery of antique paintings —in the fashion of the library chamber —and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library’s contents, there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the belief.

“Mi amigo el escultor se proclamaba genio incomprendido y era, sin lugar a dudas, lo segundo. Puede que sus obras fueran sublimes o que no pasaran de mera pacotilla, pero él luchaba consigo mismo, se desesperaba, como un escarabajo que, al trepar por un montón de arena, se cae de espaldas y patalea en el aire hasta recobrar su posición natural, las seis patitas sobre el firme suelo.
Aunque esta comparación sea expresiva y a mí me guste, realmente no da cuenta cabal del estado de las cosas, porque mi amigo jamás lograba enderezarse. Permanecía agitándose en la arena, los negros miembros de su alma bullían hacia un cielo inmisericorde. Un silente cielo gris.”

Pilar Pedraza. Pequeña pasión. 

Apocalypse.A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition - to which the patients themselves were not invited - was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses. As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office. They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role. Primly she buttoned her white coat as Dr Nathan approached, holding his gold-tipped cigarette to one nostril. ‘Ah, Dr Austin … What do you think of them? I see there’s War in Hell.’

The Atrocity Exhibition. J.G. Ballard. 

Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.

Let’s say you have an ax. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry, the man was already dead. Or maybe you should worry, because you’re the one who shot him.

He had been a big, twitchy guy with veiny skin stretched over swollen biceps, a tattoo of a swastika on his tongue. Teeth filed into razor-sharp fangs, you know the type. And you’re chopping off his head because, even with eight bullet holes in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face. On the fol ow-through of the last swing, though, the handle of the ax snaps in a spray of splinters. You now have a broken ax. So, after a long night of looking for a place to dump the man and his head, you take a trip into town with your ax. You go to the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on the broken handle as barbecue sauce. You walk out with a brand new handle for your ax.

The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your garage until the next spring when, on one rainy morning, you find in your kitchen a creature that appears to be a foot-long slug with a bulging egg sac on its tail. Its jaws bite one of your forks in half with what seems like very little effort. You grab your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the last blow, however, the ax strikes a metal leg of the overturned kitchen table and chips out a notch right in the middle of the blade.

Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the hardware store. They sell you a brand new head for your ax. As soon as you get home with your newly-headed ax, though, you meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year. He’s also got a new head, stitched on with what looks like plastic weed trimmer line, and it’s wearing that unique expression of “you’re the man who kil ed me last winter” resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.

You brandish your ax. The guy takes a long look at the weapon with his squishy, rotting eyes and in a gargly voice he screams, “That’s the same ax that slayed me!”

Is he right?

John Dies at the End. David Wong.

For there be divers sorts of death - some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God’s will) and, none seeing the end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey - which indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay.

“An Inhabitant of Carcosa”. Ambrose Bierce.

Ilustración de Kate Ashwin.

Last year, the people in charge of the picnic blew us up. Every year it gets worse. That is, more people die. The Frost Mountain Picnic has always been a matter of uncertainty in our town and the massacre is the worst part. Even the people whose picnic blankets were not laid out directly upon the bomblinewere knocked unconscious by the airborne limbs of the neighbors, or at least had the black earth at the foot of Frost Mountain driven upon their eyelids and fingernails and up in their sinuses. The apple dumpling carts and cotton candy stands and guess-your-weight booths that were not obliterated in the initial blast leaned slowly into the new-formed craters, each settling with a limp, hollow crumple. The few people along the bombline who survived the blast were at the very least blown into the trees.

“Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre”. Seth Fried.

Ilustración de Brandi Strickland. 

 It is said that fifty-three years after his liberation he returned from the Golden Cloud, to take up once again the gauntlet of Heaven, to oppose the Order of Life and the gods who ordained it so. His followers had prayed for his return, though their prayers were sin. Prayer should not trouble one who has gone on to Nirvana, no matter what the circumstances of his going. The wearers of the saffron robe prayed, however, that He of the Sword, Manjusri, should come again among them, The Boddhisatva is said to have heard (…) 

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could. 

Therefore, there was mystery about him. 

Lord of Light. Roger Zelazny.

This was a golden age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying … but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice …but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks … but nobody loved it.

The Stars, my Destination. Alfred Bester.

Le decimos leer y somos nosotros, que corremos entre los bloques de edificios, y sacudimos los troncos de los árboles empapados de lluvia, y cazamos a las arañas en sus telas, y recogemos cascos de botellas de leche y de botellas de champán, y buscamos cobre, bobinas de cobre caídas entre las matas que crecen en los solares, y junto a los huertos, y al sol de las escombreras que hay al lado de cualquier obra. Somos mi amigo y yo, mirándolo todo, palpitando y leyendo a la vez, y haciéndonos tenaces con la tenacidad de las ortigas, de los amarantos, de as malvas que nacen al borde de las vías del tren, o en los basureros, o al pie de los muros de las fábricas, y embebiéndonos del salvajismo de los juncales y las mimbreras de la orilla del río, e infiltrándonos del vértigo de las torres eléctricas. Y todo esto lo vamos a creer lectura en nuestro leer interminable, sin reparar en que al mismo tiempo estamos latiendo como palpita con su pulso regular una estrella de neutrones o gira despaciosamente la blanca luz de un faro. Porque lo que hacemos es respirar, ser cada uno de nosotros a todas horas, hablar con inquietud y mirar con los ojos muy abiertos, por ejemplo, cuando entramos en el cuarto modesto de la biblioteca de la escuela, y nos detenemos indecisos ante un puñado de libros ilustrados, ordenados en sus estantes metálicos de tuercas y orificios, por los que asoman los extremos de los volúmenes más altos. Así partimos, en busca del secreto de las tardes, marchamos a la captura de la claridad de esos días, y juntos atravesamos la quietud del colegio, y a todo esto también vamos a llamarlo leer, porque para nosotros dos, para mi amigo y para mí, nada va a existir más allá de nuestros libros. En realidad, de tal modo ocurre, lo que hacemos es respirar el aire rutinario que nos rodea, y que para nosotros es ante todo un aire lleno de abecedarios, de caligrafías, y de signos ortográficos y de puntuación, de palabras recién estrenadas, de frases subordinadas en lugar de clases subordinadas, de pliegos encuadernados que viven despegados dentro de los libros. Y nosotros vamos a llamarle leer a todo eso tan difuso y tan concreto, que a fin de cuentas es ir viviendo, o ir viviéndonos.

Los Príncipes Valientes. Javier Pérez Andújar.