Famous First Words

Why the powers (long may they hold court; long may they shit light on the heads of the damned) had sent it out from Hell to stalk Jack Polo, the Yattering couldn’t discover. Whenever he passed a tentative enquiry along the system to his master, just asking the simple question, “What am I doing here?” it was answered with a swift rebuke for its curiosity. None of its business, came the reply, its business was to do. Or die trying. And after six months of pursuing Polo, the Yattering was beginning to see extinction as an easy option. This endless game of hide and seek was to nobody’s benefit, and to the Yattering’s immense frustration. It feared ulcers, it feared psychosomatic leprosy (a condition lower demons like itself were susceptible to), worst of all it feared losing its temper completely and killing the man outright in an uncontrollable fit of pique.

“The Yattering and Jack”. Clive Barker.

Hell came up to the streets and squares of London that September, icy from the depths of the Ninth Circle, too frozen to be warmed even by the swelter of an Indian summer. It had laid its plans as carefully as ever, plans being what they were, and fragile. This time it was perhaps a little more finicky than usual, checking every last detail twice or three times, to be certain it had every chance of winning this vital game.

    It had never lacked competitive spirit; it had matched life against flesh a thousand times down the centuries, sometimes winning, more often losing. Wagers were, after all, the stuff of its advancement. Without the human urge to compete, to bargain, and to bet, Pandemonium might well have fallen for want of citizens. Dancing, dog racing, fiddle-playing: it was all one to the gulfs; all a game in which it might, if it played with sufficient wit, garner a soul or two. That was why Hell came up to London that bright blue day: to run a race, and to win, if it could, enough souls to keep it busy with perdition another age.

“Hell’s Event”. Clive Barker.

Ilustración de Marco Hasmann.

Cuando yo regresaba, a las cinco y cuarto, había siempre en el descansillo un mono. El mismo mono siempre, un mono grande, con el pecho huido o raquítico y en la piel una rara palidez. (Los monos se masturban como monos, pensé; pero quizás éste haya sido vícitma de alguna forma de deseo semihumana o atroz.) Al principio me extrañó su presencia. Dejé luego de prestarle atención su presencia. Dejé luego de prestarle atención, con el egoísmo propio de las gentes que ya no viven en mi país y han desarrollado hábitos extranjeros de impremeditada crueldad. Pero yo no podía darme cuenta entonces de esta insensible pérdida de antivas virtudes ni considerar al mono más que como un elemento no insigne o pronto olvidado de la situación. 

En esa época yo era escritor. Es decir, había conseguido después de un largo aprendizaje físico llegar a ciertas formas de retracción espiritual en las que podía combinar de modo casi automático una serie de palabras de categorías gramaticales distintas, previamente escogidas en el diccionario como materia de visión. Las composiciones resultantes imitaban en su estructura interior formas geométricas sagradas, como el cuadrado o el círculo, y se ajustaban a ellas con helada perfección. 

“El mono”, El fin de la edad de Plata José Ángel Valente. 

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.

A considerable number of hunting parties were out that year without finding so much as a fresh trail; for the moose were uncommonly shy, and the various Nimrods returned to the bosoms of their respective families with the best excuses the facts of their imaginations could suggest. Dr. Cathcart, among others, came back without a trophy; but he brought instead the memory of an experience which he declares was worth all the bull moose that had ever been shot. But then Cathcart, of Aberdeen, was interested in other things besides moose—amongst them the vagaries of the human mind. This particular story, however, found no mention in his book on Collective Hallucination for the simple reason (so he confided once to a fellow colleague) that he himself played too intimate a part in it to form a competent judgment of the affair as a whole…

“The Wendigo”. Algernon Blackwood.

So Pete Crocker, the sheriff of Barnstable County, which was the whole of Cape Cod, came into the Federal Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis one May afternoon—and he told the two six-foot Hostesses there that they weren’t to be alarmed, but that a notorious nothinghead named Billy the Poet was believed headed for the Cape.

A nothinghead was a person who refused to take his ethical birth-control pills three times a day. The penalty for that was $10,000 and ten years in jail.

This was at a time when the population of Earth was 17 billion human beings. That was far too many mammals that big for a planet that small. The people were virtually packed together like drupelets.

Drupelets are the pulpy little knobs that compose the outside of a raspberry.

“Welcome to the Monkey House”. Kurt Vonnegut.

Ilustración de Chet Phillips.

All right, I’ll tell you why the Girl gives me the creeps. Why I can’t stand to go downtown and see the mob slavering up at her on the tower., with that pop bottle or pack of cigarettes or whathever it is beside her. Why I hate to look at magazines any more because I know she’ll turn up somewhere in a brassiere or a bubble bath. Why I don’t like to think of millions of Americans drinking in that poisonous half-smile. It’s quite a story -more story than you’re expecting.

No, I haven’t suddenly developed any long-haired indignation at the evils of advertising and the national glamour-girl complex. That’d be a laugh for a man in my racket, wouldn’t it? Though I  think you’ll agree there’s something a little perverted about trying to capitalize on sex that way. But it’s okay with me. And I know we have the Face and the Body and the Look and what not else, so why shouldn’t someone come along who sums it al up so completely, that we have to call her the Girl and blazon her on all the billboards from Times Square to Telegraph Hill?

But the Girl isn’t like any of the others. She’s unnatural. She’s morbid. She’s unholy.

“The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”. Fritz Leiber.

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.