Nestled in a deep holler of the Saint Francois mountain range, is a house frozen in the reality of a charred demise. It is of simple enough size to be considered functional, but worthless, given its condition. Before a great fire effectively gutted the place, it had been hitherto the residence of a local miner, Lionel Whitman, when the area known as the Lead Belt was running at its optimum, a century prior.
After the work dried up, Lionel was no longer seen about town, but a constant plume of smoke, escaping the green mountain canopy, gave credence to the rumors that Old Lionel lived out his days amidst the foothills of the ancient rock; however, the matter of how he lived those days was the subject of much quiet conjecture. With theories ranging from him proceeding to live off the land as a solitary woodsman to, until his final breath, him delving into alchemy and the black arts, attempting to, in vain, master the ability to communicate with the dead. The majority of theorists cast high doubt at the truth in the latter as Lionel was notoriously uneducated and perceivably incapable of such endeavors.
The ideas only grew more ludicrous when, one day, the smoke failed to rise and Lionel Whitman was interred under a blank tombstone in the mountains, beneath a pale moon and by pallbearers of vague identities. The myths and rumors surrounding his miserly abode, and old Lionel’s ghost, seem now as Precambrian as the smoothly eroded, igneous range that, with its nigh impenetrable forests of elder oak and sycamore, walnut and hackberry, hide it from the prying curiosity of all but the most hard-boiled explorers.
Xavier Raymond was as hard as could be boiled when it came to matters of adventure, exploration, and wilderness survival. He was a stoic logistician who prided himself as a road-scholar and a veritable repository on everything hidden and mysterious and buried by time. He had always been driven by the belief that, someday, he would be revered as a local legend whose travels would make them – the shut-ins and crotchety naysayers – regret ever uttering a word in doubt.
That he had no time for such supernatural nonsense likely found in rumored locations akin to Zombie Road and The Twenty-Eleven House, and only possessing the patience for tangibility, was an established truth amongst his friends and family. Growing up a day’s drive – although he preferred a more pedestrian mode of transport – from the fabled House in Buford Holler, Xavier answered back to every ghastly tale associated with it with excitement and promises to one day investigate the place for himself. And soon, that day would arrive.
Although he bade himself not to be influenced by the exaggerated legends of the Buford House, he couldn’t help but fascinate on the possibilities that an additional day’s hike would lay out before him. As he commenced to packing his things for an early leave, the next morning, Xavier chuckled at himself when a schoolyard rhyme escaped his mindless lips.
“Dirty miner Li-o-nel, lives alone in the Buford hills.
Always wants what he can’t have. Go and see him if you can.
He’ll let you in to his home, where you too can live alone.
Dirty miner Li-o-nel, died alone on the road to hell.”
Xavier hadn’t so much as even thought about that silly chant in many years and it caught him by surprise. The gibbous moon climbed high, and as his campfire faded, so too did the song fade from his thoughts and he slipped into a deep sleep.
That night, he dreamt of the great Bran Castle, shrouded deep in the forests and misted hills of Romania. At how its wooden walls and spired turret tops of blood red – all more than seven-hundred years in age – must contain within its clutches a wealth of lore and endless, romanticized militaria, he was deeply moved. Xavier felt that he was the first to lay eyes upon the ghostly pales of the Teutonic strife as he ambled across the courtyard and into the garden.
A chill shivered his bones as he traced the edges of a stone cross, in the garden, with his fingertips and, all at once, he found himself at the nexus of history, lucidly transparent when compared to the centuries-aged palace before him. The Brothers of Germany and the Hungarian Kings and even the infamy of Vlad the Impaler strode about in spectral battles and the brutalities of power.
Unharmed, aught save the anguish at the savagery of man, Xavier made his way to the great, beckoning doors, behind which he knew stood a magnitude of treasures unheralded by the eyes of modern man. At the construction of the doors, he was struck with awe. Not only did they entice him on an emotional level which he never imagined could be satisfied, but the smooth, misshapen wood and barreling veins of ivory humbled him. At the highest reaches of sight, his eyes wavered at the astonishing precipice – a height only achievable in dreams and of whose height he dared not guess – where the tined wood grew and breathed and teased a streaming wisp of gold from what his grandmother may have called “the fingertips of God”. So too did the many spires rise in elongated swirls as they reached for the firmament, threatening to either rip the castle from its foothold and into heaven proper, or bring the whole of eternity crashing down around him. Wide rifts slashed the ground, releasing a boiling steam that stung his body, hinting to him that the latter was more likely the case.
The terrene raging ceased when, with an authoritative force, Xavier threw the great doors open. He took pause and wondered at the considerable, stygian void before him. He thought for a moment that it seemed to stretch on forever, but quickly dismissed this notion because it didn’t appear that anything existed beyond the door, into which the darkness could extend; what laid out before him was not an unlit room, nor was it an encompassing shadow. His scientific mind was untethered in this dream realm as it scoured the annals of time and of memory in the hopes of finding a rational explanation for what he was witnessing.
“Nothing”, he spoke aloud after a fleeting moment of clarity. The word simultaneously left his mouth as logical and struck his ear as the vehement rambling of a man gone sour. So singularly profound, was that word upon speaking, that its very frequency, and subsequent wavelengths, reverberated off the world abaft, swirling in tentacles of incalculable geometry until the amplitudes drew forth like needles. And with a lashing quickness, they plunged into the Nothingness.
Nothing, Xavier thought to himself, it is everything and the absence thereof. This notion terrified him because he knew that he was staring into an all-devouring, annihilating nether of cessation. A maddening sense of finality breached his thoughts, initiating within him a systematic collapse of the conscious world on which he felt his grip lossening.
Xavier awoke on the forest floor with a spasmic jolt, gasping for breath under the humidity of the morning sun. It would be many minutes before that awful dream eroded from his mind and finished distorting the reality around him. The extents to which the dream had altered his waking perceptions weren’t fully understood until he realized that he was no longer in his campsite, but lost in a strangely unfamiliar land. Replacing what he had last seen before drifting into sleep, tall – with the uninterrupted growth of millennia – ashen trees spread out further than his vision could comprehend. Their gnarled trunks, robust and patched with irregularly angled bark that protruded in directions counterintuitive to the natural progression of an evolving organism, were easily twelve feet in diameter and spread out twofold that size into the ground with roots that buckled sharply and seemed blackened from the heart of a bygone flame. He had hitherto never seen such a species of tree, but despite the scholarly exhilaration he felt at the promise of being able to document such a discovery, there was a sick depravity in his gut when his eyes ascended the curving, leafless branches that clawed at the sky and were in stark contrast to the rest of the tree, in both girth and design.
With apprehensive wonder, he turned his gaze upward, silently begging the sun’s position to provide him with a sense of direction; however, in what he felt was an act of garish mutiny, the effulgent orb hung against the backdrop like a decorative afterthought – stale and unreal. A miasma of disturbing possibilities severed his normally rational train of thought and he began to panic. After a few deep breaths, he readied himself to trek to where this part of the forest is but a smudge on the horizon and he designated the entire area an abomination. He located the least-obstructed path and soon he was off, tearing through the endless stretch of ancient, fantastic forest.
The trident hands of Xavier’s wristwatch hung limply and, at times, seemed to move of their own volition and the sun’s refusal to move left him with no method of natural timekeeping. He guessed that he had been progressing, fighting and charging and cutting paths, in the unchanged, utterly lifeless forest for nigh on three hours. At the farthest reach of his vision – which he put at only about forty-five feet – he noticed a sharp break to the left, where a distinctly bright patch of sunshine bathed over a rocky crag. This was his best hope for escape or, at minimum, a respite from the monotony of snagging branches and inert grayness that seemed to only aggravate the impossible putridity clinging to his nerves; hopelessness was entirely unfamiliar to a man of such renowned confidence.
Upon maneuvering clear of the jagged footholds and wide crevices, Xavier stepped off the rocks and into a spacious clearing, triangular in shape – its three points equidistant from one another and nearly lost to the passage of time. It was a wonder to him how a long-abandoned house, standing incenter of the triangle, wasn’t the first sight that caught his eye. An indescribable sense of calm satisfaction washed over him; indescribable because it was a blended palate of awe, of accomplishment, and of necrotic dread. This must be the place, he assured himself.
Unlike the castle of his dreams, the hoary edifice before him wasn’t much more than a burned-out hovel, hardly fit to sustain any sort of meaningful existence, as Xavier saw it. The structure had decayed into a husk of soot-stained wood and leaning walls over the many decades after the fire.
Hardened instincts bade him not to enter, or even draw nearer, but Xavier had made so many cold promises to investigate the fabled Buford House that he knew he couldn’t turn back, lest he be ushered into the collection of fact-less dolts whose exaggerated stories muddy the waters between what is an interesting, historical narrative and a what is merely a fanciful bedtime tale.
If any commonalities could be drawn between his magnificent dream-castle and this benignly forgotten place, it would be the acrid pit that formed in his stomach when the darkness, beyond the coaled maw of the structure, bid him with inaudible whispers and shadowy, faceless penalties. For as much as he resisted the similar, vast Nothingness, it ultimately goaded him inward; however, in the previous night’s travel to lands of subconscious damnation, Xavier was not afforded the use of a flashlight to pierce the blackness, but presently, he stood before the house, torch ablaze and imagining himself a mighty Teutonic warrior or remorseless king, defiantly thrusting his light-sword at the pitched malignance and the gray, twisted trees as if to strike them down for their prudent insolence.
Xavier cast aside his trepidations just as his light cast aside the darkness to make way for the intrepid explorer. His first steps inside the Buford House were noisily cumbersome as if he were walking through a debris field and a cursory glance with the light proved as much; for no more than a stride’s length passed the doorway, the once-dirt floor was presently a layer of garbage much more modern than anything that could have been produced while the house retained residency. Cigarette butts dotted the ground in piles, surrounded by empty beer bottles, ad hoc seats made from broken timbers of the structure, and various food wrappers had attracted the attention of hungry forest-rodents. He simply nodded at this discovery and agreed that if one were looking for a quiet place to entertain, safe from the rules and morals and sideways glances of the stuffy townsfolk, then this would be the perfect location.
The house was no more than two-hundred-fifty total square feet and a slow pan of his light would easily expose to him everything there would be to see. He passed it first from left to right, taking mild interest in the various graffiti, until it reached the opposing wall, then midway through his second – and pre-decidedly last pass of the house – he noticed something that all certainty and rationality told him had not been there before: a small writing table set against the midpoint of the far wall.
Its delicate legs of cherry wood sprouted from the dirt upon fingered roots of seemingly predetermined design and were carved with such great attention paid to the angles, and to the demanding geometry therein, and to the broad, sweeping reliefs displaying both convex and concave features that Xavier knew, upon first impression, this humble lectern was crafted under the strictest adherences of infinite perfection. His eyes and mind were one, joined in the dizzying maze of sometimes parallel and sometimes gradually intersecting paths of polished wood. While it would seem gaudy to most viewers, to Xavier, the patterns, from which he knew only a premium entity could fashion, were meditative and he found it a true task to look anywhere else.
His faculties were teased upward, ascending the burgundy legs, and fluttering their way to the smooth, soft-white ivory top, sitting in juxtaposition to the deep hues of its supports. And atop the dentine slab, a blotter of ancient parchment, encased in the hand-sewn, leathered skin of a creature Xavier could not begin to recognize, sat closed and unassuming. A flick of his light showed a small, glass vial, surreptitiously shadowed just beyond the curious diary. He noticed it was half full of rich, black fluid and protruding from its mouth, a plumed, purple feather reached out to burlesque lengths. Entranced, he found himself standing at the edge of the table before he even remembered to take another breath. With a shaking hand, he brought the flashlight to his mouth, clenching it between his teeth and cementing his bewildered gaze on the book before him.
It was no more than pocket-sized, but its taciturn face suggested a cache of secrets – simultaneously mathematical and esoteric – and as he glided his fingertips down and over and across the aged, organic covering, it struck him sadly that he could find no signature, nor any signifying marks of its maker.
Surely, he thought to himself. Surely whoever crafted a masterpiece such as this would brand it for eternity so that it afforded future purveyors the name to which to pay homage, and from whom to draw inspiration.
His fingertips graced the edges of a perfectly symmetrical dodecahedron on the cover, and his eyes rose up to three words that made known its title: Enchiridion for the Dead. Xavier drew the nearest seat and assumed a post in front of the humble tomb. Gently, he unfolded the leather casing and began to read.
“I
You are but a derivative echo
You are bisect, fundamental
Accordant, epithet harmony
You are dead
II
Abandon is testimonial to dissent
Acceptance, reliquary and dehiscent, is paramount
Ante-being disunites from sentience
You are belief
III
Within arteries, ethereal
Weighing furtive privilege
A confirmed ascendancy manifest
You are free will
IV
Liberation holds attainability
Long in absence, imperative
Flawless purity, culled
You are inherent
V
Concordant understanding, forthwith
Ceasing disquiet, afforded
Effulgent, composite tendrils
You are knowledge”
Now, Xavier Raymond had always labeled himself a man of sharp wits, possessing a comprehensive education – acquired through experiences and curious observation as opposed to a dedicated course of study – but the collection of those dissonant quatrains brought forth a mystery whose blatantly ambiguous words seemed lacking in definitive shape or graspable meaning. About said meaning, he theorized it was impossible to unravel, even by the most accomplished academic. The considerable breadth of those undulating words spawned within him a great disquiet and he felt that, however familiar the individual words may have been, they took on a ritualistic quality, upon speaking them aloud, and acted as some sort of verbal petri dish wherein festering, molding, and copulating spores of intimation kept deeply-guarded a deeper, more vast conveyance; a communication that Xavier instinctively knew was not wholly of this realm.
The esoteric harmonies of the locutions unleashed innumerous geometric images – distantly cosmic in nature – that laid waste to his mind. And, spinning at torrential speeds, the great and vile gods of antiquity stormed his thoughts. Valac and his serpents, the mimicking Wendigo, Crowley’s Choronzon from the eternal abyss, and Azag, the hideous, with his demons of stone, waged eons-long wars in Xavier’s psyche in the passing of but a few seconds. Despite the nausea of vertigo and preternatural terror that occupied him, a faceless, blasphemous force stoked a blazing curiosity, impelling him to chase additional oddities contained within its remaining pages.
Upon turning the hoary pages, they produced fragile, creaking and cracking sounds that hinted at its decades – perhaps centuries – of disuse and the reverently calligraphic style of penmanship, throughout, put their creation sometime around the sixteenth century, by Xavier’s best guess, but he would be not at all surprised to find it significantly older than that; however, those attributes could be considered infantile when stood against the visions still reeling in his mind. The claims put upon his consciousness, by those eldritch deities, seemed ante-genesis in nature, and from a time before even Einstein’s singularity inflated, birthing what is presently everything.
In the wake of that manifestly Delphian prologue, Xavier found the pursuing pages no less dubious. Shrouded in reverberating, dreamlike timbres and syllabic hypnotisms, the words ran on in long strings – hundreds at a time – without so much as a period, or any recognizable punctuation mark, ceasing only, and abruptly, at the edges of magnificently sketched geometric shapes. Rudimentary squares and circles, in the early pages, eventually gave way to more elaborate cuboids, and pyramids, and multifaceted hedrons of innumerous faces. At the implied meaning to all of this, Xavier could only hurl blind conjectures; however, the meditative numbness he had experienced, when first laying eyes upon the quatrains, returned.
The audible anesthetic coursed through his body and he felt as if he was levitating – levitating above the earthen floor and levitating above the strewn garbage, and above his seat, and over the broken, anemic forest of dismay. Every cell in his body vibrated and assumed a more immaterial design, becoming fuzzy and distended and not entirely a resident of this world or a denizen of the next. He was becoming a cellular, timeless, placeless, mist – except for his eyes; they remained ardently focused on the words and shapes and rhythmic autonomies that vibrated on the many pages in frequencies matching his own.
Xavier’s quantum-self slipped from the construct of chronology, while consonantly aware that the gears of the mighty clock were grinding backwards. Around his spectral humidity, the slag timbers and framework swirled aloft in a translucent vortex, of which, he was the eye. The walls moaned and groaned in furtive reconstruction, assuming their whilom footholds. He precipitated his essence forward through the tempest, straining his pineal vision to focus on the writing table and the book that he prayed held his resolve, but something obscured his view. Over the tome, an elderly man, clad in drab blue and gray wool, viscerally poured.
He approached the man who startled upright against an unseen and sudden iciness. Xavier’s voice came out as a garbled, insubstantial vapor when he tried to acknowledge the man, and his consciousness dithered among the ternary realms of stygian unseen, the Buford House of a century prior, and the home world that he feared he would never see again. That his limbs, rather – the whole of his body – was any longer manifest, Xavier was too terrified to know, but he raged a heated prayer to the gods of time and mercy and to the man before him; if even just one syllable bridged the cosmic vacuity, he guessed a tether could be knotted in one realm or another. To Xavier’s elation, the man finally spoke.
Without diverting from the codex, the man asked, “Wha’ damnable conspiracy ‘as summon’d thee?”
Xavier slung vaporous arguments and pleas at the man, but all were absorbed, muted by the tempest. He demanded answers from the man.
“Ye are dead” the man accused. “Ye are dead an’ unwelcome here!”
“I… am… alive!” Xavier wailed in a pitch of utter loss.
Closing the book and replacing the quill, the man rose from the table to face the raging phantasm. “Out, specter! Be gone by will of God!”
Xavier lunged forward, but his ethereal form simply drove through the man and for a great, inflated second, the two men were linked in a preternatural stratum of knowing. The present entirety of Xavier’s past, and the altered course of Lionel’s future played out in their conjoined minds. And as quickly as it had set in, the link was severed and both men were left suffering a grievous understanding of life and death, bisections and divergences, and the effrontery of universal designs.
As Xavier’s tenuous hold on reality – as he knew it – slipped further and further away, Lionel’s exhilaration grew at the promise of living the life that had been taken from him in a dimension so near to his own. He understood what needed to be done.
With great speed, Lionel flew across the earthen floor to a chest, in the corner, that had been previously obscured by shadows and from inside, he drew a crystal decanter of clear liquid and a small but bulging sack. He returned to the writing table precipitously and, with much agitation, he snatched the book from its place and rifled through the many pages until spotting the entry that laid out the necessary steps.
Of the power Lionel possessed, when conjuring from the depths of an eldritch, amnesiac world, I cannot properly do justice with any current vocabulary, but he began furtively chanting in a type of cuneiform audibility, biding his will done by the seven deities of the Anunna, and Xavier found himself paralyzed. From the sack, the wildly chanting man drew forth a fistful of a white, powdery substance. He spoke louder, reinforcing his words with resounding amplitudes whose power has yet to be duplicated.
Xavier could do nothing, save for watch in horrific dread, as the man strode about him, raving patterned rituals in a musical, nigh crystalline, timbre. Lionel cast the white powder in a wide circle at the base of the supernatural tempest and a humidity crested the limits of Xavier’s sense of feeling. Abruptly, and most decidedly, the chanting ceased and silence engulfed the humble shack.
Lionel stepped forth, paying mind not to breach the protective ring of white powder, and peered into the frozen vortex. “An’ now, my unwillin’ filcher, ye shall burn.”
He jerked the prismatic, glassy stopper from the decanter and loosed its contents onto the ring of white. The concoction erupted in a bluish flame, with tips of orange, and the heat of a thousand suns introduced itself upon Xavier’s misty form. He tried to scream, but that only provided more opportunities for the fire to scorch his essence.
“It were’d fire that were’d s’posed to kill me, eh?” Lionel spoke, stumbling back from the chaos and remembering the brief glimpses of his future; his eyes bulging and glazed by the ancient forces draining from his body. “Now it’s yer fire. This’ll burn thee, and this’ll break thee, and this’ll bind thee.”
The tortured specter looked into those impenetrable black with hateful eyes and spent his final modicum of energy to fight vainly against the supreme, incendiary hell binding him to this eternal sepulcher of woe and damning him to a remoteness he would have thought wholly impossible.
Dirty miner Lionel walked to the doorway, never turning back to witness the grand finale of what he initiated. Only at the last perceptions of hearing, did he think a crying voice could be discerned. This bothered him not and pulled in a deep breath of air from a new day.
The effulgence of that summer afternoon bore down on Lionel’s shoulders as he circuited the town streets of Main and Boyd St, near the ancient cemetery, and by the old church where he thought he might spend the coming Sunday mornings. He reveled in the warmth of the day when he happened upon the backside of an elementary school. Stopping for a comforting recollection of his few years as a carefree student, he placed his hands on the cyclone fence and gazed out over a class of children out for recess. One particular group of young boys caught his eye, then his ear. A smile crossed his wrinkled face; a joy that he knew hadn’t graced him in over one-hundred years. He leaned in closer to listen to their playful song.
“Who lives up there, alone in the woods?
Dirty old Xavier. He’ll get you good.
Heed the stories that mama tells.
Xavier’s trapped on the road to hell.”
Sunrise Arcadia 