Illustration by Dempow Torishima

Translation by Daniel Huddleston

1

When the on-site disassembler came to the synthorgan factory carrying his packing case, he stared for a moment at a worker who had assumed an awkward attitude toward him, apparently puzzled upon seeing another of his kind for the first time. He must have been born quite recently—his hair was jet-black and glossy, and his skin was fresh and young. The cycles sure run fast here, he thought with pity. He had just started to introduce himself as a worker from the fishery, when the young worker’s face twisted into a severe expression.

“That’s my name. I won’t have you referring to yourself as ‘I.’”

Just the same as before. The old memories didn’t come back right away, so there were many cases where self-identification didn’t go very well. They probably couldn’t help latching on to a word that would provide a definition of who they were.

“I’m the on-site disassembler,” he added simply, and then got down to work.

When the disassembler had finally finished disassembling the placoderms and was covered in oil, he requested the president’s signature on the paperwork. The body tissues of presidents and directors were injected into his skull as recording media. By way of his eye socket, that swollen finger came feeling around inside his head, and he wet himself.

He had a headache as he got into the lift, the corpse of that coffin eel still wrapped around all four walls as though trying to climb up on the nearly four-meter-tall cage. The cage shuddered and slowly descended. From between gaps in the elaborate ribs surrounding him on every side, the skeleton of a subordinape who appeared to have been swallowed whole was peeking out.

The lift stopped. He stepped off onto an island of rotting flesh and was loading his packing case on the flatboat when his eyes paused upon a small, steeply ascending island located directly beneath a vertical drainage pipe. It seethed with the gases of decomposition.

“What’s the matter?” asked the pilot.

The disassembler turned his short neck and indicated it with his jaw.

“You’ve tried how many times already? It’s hopeless. It’ll just be a parrot this time too.”

“I know. You’re probably right,” the disassembler said as he started walking out into the shallows of the putrefying muck.

“That gas is dense. You watch yourself.”

He waved a hand lightly behind him and pulled his scarf up over his nose. After crossing over to a tiny island covered in bas-reliefs of bones and organs, he sank to his knees in putrid filth that teemed with cockroaches and nematodes and headed toward a figure that was buried to its chest on the side of the highest hill.

It was looking up at the underside of the faraway deck. Its face was exactly the same as that of the worker he had met just moments ago. When, breathing heavily, he made his way to its side, its eyes moved. They turned toward the disassembler and stared.

The disassembler knew full well, though, that this was nothing more than a reactionary response. The magatama was always passed on to the newborn worker, so nothing of their former intellect could remain in those who had turned into parrots. The disassembler lifted up the parrot’s half-body, and they regarded one another, face-to-scab-covered-face.

“Hey there, you remember me?” Rows of sparse teeth began to quiver. “ ’Ey…member me?”

The disassembler’s eyes grew moist. He recognized his tears as a form of self-pity.

Suddenly, he heard the sound of someone whistling with his fingers. It was the pilot urging him to head back.

“All right,” he said. It was as he was setting the parrot back down, however, that the disassembler’s fingers detected a small, hard bulge in the body’s breast pocket. He undid its button and stuck his fingers inside. What came out was a magatama that gleamed with an emerald light.

2

At first, the worker thought himself—the pregnancy being little more than a biological and existential misunderstanding— submerged in water. This was because everything appeared distorted to him. He wondered if he had perhaps finally awakened from a nightmare in which he worked at a cruel synthorgan factory. After all, the room he was in looked a lot like the rooms in which the people of his hometown had lived. However, the familiar furniture and household appliances that were lined up against the wall were far too numerous, haphazardly pushed up against one another like animals snapping at each other’s throats. The dim light was coming from a torchburr. Had there been a room like this at the base of the synthorgan company building? The terror of when he had been thrown from that structure came back to him, and he tried to get up, only to discover that he couldn’t move in the slightest. It was as though he were buried to his neck on a sandy beach.

home><away> nothing>deep>depths>·<shell <seal <yoke<sin <

Suddenly, lonely thoughts that beggared his imagination came welling up, and his eyes filled with tears. Without spilling over, they remained quivering on the surfaces of his eyes, only to be swallowed up in waves of concentric circles emanating from the midst of his field of vision. From somewhere, he could hear a sound like a backed-up sewer pipe.

sign> flow> merge> destruction> · <desperation <void <execu- tion <world—his thoughts ached as though themselves possessed of a sense of pain.

Days spent in longing for a return from that place of exile beyond the bounds of society—days enough to turn boulders into sand. He could remember them as his own. Is this somebody else’s memory again? He was thinking that it was, and the chain of thoughts that nested around the axis of that single point grew outward in every direction, forming a shell all around him, until they began both to complement and overturn one another. Only in scattered fragments could he unlock their meaning, and when consciousness returned to him in that room, he could for some reason practically taste the presence of someone standing on the other side of the wall, and of corpses sealed within the disorderly layout of a multilayered, labyrinthine housing crystal lying farther in behind him.

Someone started walking toward him. It was not a worker from his own company; he looked a lot like the disassembler from the fishery. Though hadn’t he just been wondering where he worked himself? Coaguland…number four, it was the Fourth Coaguland Reaffirmation branch. He felt a pressure near his retinas, and the wall appeared again, and the disassembler appeared from a doorless entryway, confusing the worker. “You were pretty slow to wake up. I’d just about given up on you.” The voice that came to him sounded like it was passing through water. “We are presently located inside a vintage landfill stratum. The metabolism’s slow here, though, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

Fwaa ii zii—

What is this? was what the worker had intended to say.

“It must still be hard for you to speak. Can you tell, by the way, that you’re being preserved inside a director’s body?”

Images rose up in the back of the worker’s mind of a director caught in the grip of several canvassers…of organs and multiple yoked-in brains being smashed one after another. A shudder went through the corpuscyte that covered his entire field of vision, causing the disassembler’s face to waver about.

“This director took fatal injuries in a canvasser attack. They brought him in to the synthorgan factory right away, but there was no way to restore him, so they threw him out. Yeah…no hope of helping them once they’ve had their brains destroyed.” No, that isn’t right. Those yoked-in brains are internal prisons that greatly limit the functionality of cogitosome-bearing corpuscyte. “You’d turned into a parrot and were buried in an island of rot. For some reason, you were carrying a magatama. During pregnancy, the magatama moves to the embryo, so what you were carrying most likely belonged to someone who was swallowed by a coffin eel. Magatamas govern the intellect and memory of subordinapes like us.”

They were not merely memory organs for individuals. They reminded workers in great detail of all kinds of things they had no way of learning by themselves, and in much the same way that landfill strata created counterfeit copies of things using eide from the past, they had also succeeded in making those things real.

Now he stood unmoving in a dark alleyway, staring silently as many of his kind began to come and go along a street where time had frozen over. One of the parishes that had once flourished in the inner world of the canvassers—which had long afterward remained compressed and frozen inside the magatama—was unpacking into his neural network like a tightly folded paper being opened to reveal a completed diagram.

“Since you’re using some stranger’s magatama as a foothold, it isn’t clear whether you’re the same worker as before.”

The worker started walking. He was twice as tall as everyone else, but nobody seemed to notice. He tried touching a pedestrian on the back, but his fingers merely sank into him and got tangled up in the strings of letters there. It dawned on him that a subordinape was something chosen out of the collected data of the fifty thousand people that a canvasser’s magatama contained. That data was then modified and forcibly incarnated. He realized also that while here in this parish, he was himself in a comatose state.

“If you’re wondering who it was that merged you so splendidly with the director’s body, why that would be your own newborn self. Not that he understood what it was he’d accomplished, mind you. I had originally hoped to play the role you’re playing right now myself.”

As he advanced forward, spatial distortions began to appear here and there, and the worker noticed that the space around him was dotted with gaps.

“Should’ve known I wouldn’t be brave enough to be sealed alive in corpuscyte, though.”

The reason the warps and the gaps were appearing was that in regions where the medium differed from the rest— most likely near things like the cogitosomes that were scattered throughout the director’s body—only space constructed through classical physics was being displayed.

“At the fishery, I couldn’t even try to use a parrot unless I took it apart for disassembly practice.”

The worker was headed toward a place of extreme distortion. It was a park where sunlight dappled through the trees. There a man in a white lab coat was sitting on a bench, nodding at no one in particular as he stared intently at a cliff face towering above the treetops. There was no mistaking that the cliff was made of landfill strata. Was there something special about the cogitosome handling its construction? It appeared that it was showing him space from before the end of the world.

A man in a suit appeared to his right. He held a can of coffee out to the man in the white coat and spoke: “With things having come to this point, I find it odd that you aren’t getting registered to be Translated.”

“Double-translation is an imaginary cyclical transaction. You should know that. Here even the magatama itself is nothing more than a concretion that the <World> brought into existence. Most likely, the replacement by ultimaterial that was done in order to effectively use our limited computational resources has caused some kind of—”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“—harm from deprivation?” He stood up, gripping the can tightly. “All of this has already happened.”

“Probably so. Like they say, history repeats itself.”

“Not like this.”The man in the white coat tossed an object, which at some point had transformed into a light bulb, into an ultimaterial bin, and stared firmly into the face of the worker.

“Can’t you feel a presence there behind you?” “I’m not the type to believe in ghosts.”

“After you came out of your coma, you had your share of freakouts, though. ‘It’s the man I saw in my dreams,’ you said.”

“And that’s been taken care of through cerebro-physiological means. Now I just have dreams about everybody floating in the darkness.”

“Exactly. That’s because Hanishibe is still drifting through interstellar space alone in that spaceship even as we speak. By continuing to speak, he’s protecting us. The coordinates are—” “I’m sorry, but it’s time for me to go. Work is work, even in a world like this one. I’m off to the canvasser now, so I’ll see you later.”

The man in the suit crossed over the manifestation boundary as he departed, and disappeared. Dazedly, the worker moved away from that place. He knew that the scene he had just witnessed could not exist according to the law of causality. In other words, this was not the past.

“Hey, are you listening?”

Double-translation, interstellar spaceships—as he was strolling along unable to collect his thoughts, he bumped into an invisible wall. There were limits to the scale of the space that a magatama could contain. The other side of the wall was covered in fog through which another town could be dimly seen.

“Even you must’ve sought after answers any number of times. Why are we employed by directors? When did we sign such contracts? What are we getting in compensation? Oh, we remember these things dimly. That we signed a contract, that we received a baptism. But why aren’t these things consistent even in our own memories? What were these directors and humans originally?”

Those who are forever damned…those who long to return… those who trick us into servitude.

“Why are there magatama even inside the canvassers? Does it mean that those disgusting things—I don’t even know whether they’re alive or machines—are our original forms? Why? Why? Look—you must be able to see it!”

The worker looked across the parish town, and simultaneously he was looking down at it with a bird’s‑eye view. Dimly, he could make out the ghost of the <World> constructed by the web of interconnectivity created by the canvassers’—no, the cherubim’s—Whispering. But without whisper-leaves of his own, it was only possible to comprehend as a real image the parish with which he himself was affiliated.

“Whenever a fundamental question occurs to you, the lice appear and devour your thoughts.”

The worker strained his eyes at the rows of houses and streets on the other side of the fog. Transforming his arms into Code, he pried open the invisible wall and stretched out his hand toward the mist-enshrouded town.

“So we forget the inconsistencies right away. The same questions occur to us, and we forget them again. This cycle has been repeating for generations. When the nymphs hatch from the lice egg cases—”

Those weren’t louse nymphs. They were bits of Code as well, implanted by the directors in the roots of their hairs to prevent the lice egg cases from hatching—in other words, to prevent the activation of the snowpetal bugs, which were a self-defense mechanism of the magatama.

“—they cover your head like an umbrella and suck out every last bit of your soul. Even if you’re disassembled afterward, there won’t be a magatama inside.”

That was because the snowpetal bugs would form temporary whisper-leaves and bequeath all of the magatama’s data to the canvassers’ <World> network. In the present, however, where such dramatic reaffirmation was taking place at the livable boundaries beyond which a certain sort of life support became indispensable, the cherubim—and thus their <World>—was on the brink of destruction.

“If that happens, you’ll be left a CP-type, suffering from hyperfrequent hemo-φιλíα:.”

Regardless of business conditions, many things would be needed to preserve and reunify the inner world of the cherubim: magatama to serve as its seeds, its slate-blue development medium, cogitosomes to expand it, and corpuscyte to protect the cogitosomes. Even if this were to lead to a repeat of the world’s end…

“W‑what are you doin—?”

The worker was staring at the roads and the buildings of the two towns as they began to connect one to another, and at the same time, he was staring at the corners of the disassembler’s mouth as the director’s hands tore them apart; it opened wider and wider until the sides of the disassembler’s face had split in half.

The worker grabbed hold of the magatama stored inside the disassembler’s skull, then pulled his arm back out. The disassembler collapsed like a puppet whose strings had suddenly snapped.

On the second floor of a certain hospital in the midst of the expanded city, however, the disassembler, who had been lying comatose, opened his eyes, turned toward the worker—who was watching over him through the window from above —and nodded.

As he hallucinated the ghost of a planet. Of a <World>. As he was laid bare to the directors’ hunger to return home.

Sisyphean copyright © 2013 by Dempow Torishima

The post The Disassembler Searched On appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This year marks the first time that The Twenty Days of Turin, written by Giorgio De Maria in 1975, has been translated into English. Its translation couldn’t be any more timely: De Maria’s novel, partly a reaction to the violent fascism that plagued Italy during the 1970s, perfectly reflects the bleak political landscape and uncertain times we find ourselves in today. De Maria was quite the visionary in many ways—his work anticipated the rise of social media and reality TV decades before their advent. We talked to Ramon Glazov, who translated De Maria’s Twenty Days, to gain more insight into the book, how he translated the text, and the author’s fascinating albeit troubled life.

Weird Fiction Review: Can you give us a brief summary of The Twenty Days of Turin? Why should people consider reading it?

Ramon Glazov: The Twenty Days of Turin is a lost gem of European weird fiction, written during Italy’s “Years of Lead” in the late 1970s. That was a very violent, paranoid time when dozens of communist and neo-fascist groups were waging terror campaigns involving kidnappings, murders and public bombings. The chilling part was that many of the fascists were backed by the authorities and were off-limits until it was too late. People were scared of being killed as soon as they stepped out of their houses and also scared that the government wouldn’t be on their side. It became a taboo-ish topic to speculate about too loudly, and to write sci-fi or fantasy about it was nigh unthinkable.

In The Twenty Days of Turin, Giorgio De Maria took that situation and fused it with cosmic horror. His stated goal was to write an “allegory,” but he went beyond that and ended up creating his own disturbing mythos from scratch. In his world, hateful entities feed on the sanity of Turin’s citizens and massacre them every night as they mill around in an insomniac fugue. The protagonist, an amateur investigator, tries to decipher their motives and suspects they have human accomplices.

Some of the things De Maria dreamed up seem eerier now—and closer to life—than when the book was first published. For starters, he predicted that a phenomenon similar to social media would overtake our culture. He knew virtually nothing about computers; his novel doesn’t mention them. Still, he anticipated that society would desire something like Facebook—even if his version works through pen and paper. What De Maria gives us is a creepy force that exploits people’s loneliness to suck up their private information, which is to say, their souls.

Loserdom and terrorism, of course, go hand in hand. We know that too well now, and De Maria saw it too. The rampaging demigods he creates manage to be terrifying and pathetic all at once. It’s hard to think of Lovecraft’s deities as losers, but De Maria’s entities have that added level of bleakness. They’re omnipotent, nobody dares challenge them, yet they’re losers—much like humans who carry out gun massacres, only magnified in scale. That’s the part of the novel that really shook me.

WFR: It sounds like the author, Giorgio De Maria, had an interesting albeit troubled life. Can you tell us more about the author?

RG: I’ve been told by his daughter, Corallina, that De Maria only became a novelist because of a tragic incident in his life. He started out as an enormously talented pianist, trained at Turin’s top music school, the Conservatorio. For kicks, he used to write very brutal sacrilegious songs and perform them at weekly salons for his oddball literary friends. He was also, according to his friend Emilio Jona, fond of sleight of hand tricks to show off his manual dexterity…

Then, around 1960, when he was in his mid-thirties, he developed a cramp in his hand that killed his piano career. Nobody ever figured out if it was psychological or purely physical, but it became one of his life obsessions. He would spend long hours in front of the piano trying to force his hand to play again. So when he took up writing, it was in a state of exile from a previous calling, and this pain comes up again and again in his fiction. One story of his, “The Death at Missolonghi,” imagines a situation where Lord Byron is cursed by a supernatural power that strips him of his ability to write. It explores the anguish of a character who’s suddenly cut off from his destiny and feels like a depleted shadow of himself. The Twenty Days of Turin has an amateur musician protagonist whose recorder is linked to the state of his soul.

In the 60s, De Maria moved from song writing to theatre scripts and novels. He was working for Italy’s national broadcaster, RAI-TV, and got commissioned to write a dystopian teleplay called “The Appeal” (Prova d’appello). The script described a game show where death row inmates can get pardoned if they persuade the audience that they’re charming and wholesome. Viewers at home phone in their verdicts and the inmate lives if the clap-o-meter hits 110. Basically, De Maria thought of reality TV before reality TV—with the poor condemned protagonist trying to act sociable while he’s frightened for his life. The broadcaster cancelled the program, claiming it was “not appropriate for our scheduling, though it might be a good work, insofar as it envisages a repressive and terroristic use, with apocalyptic prospects, for this very medium of television.”

After the 1970s, De Maria had a mental breakdown and turned to Catholicism. I’m told he didn’t write much literary work after that and was a bit too odd for the Church’s liking as well. He would rant about archangels walking the streets of Turin and things of that order. The last phase of his life was rather sad and reclusive.

WFR: How well known is The Twenty Days of Turin in Italy? How about Giorgio De Maria? How did you personally discover it?

 RG: When De Maria began his writing career there was still a thick line, drawn by middlebrow cartographers, between “literature” and genre fiction. Writers had to choose one or the other. Even a respected author like Primo Levi—who moved through many of the same circles as De Maria—found it daunting to get into sci-fi in 1966 after he was already famous as a Holocaust memoirist, and did it under pseudonym. It didn’t matter that some of those literary authors, including De Maria, were privately huge fans of pulpy sci-fi and detective stories. De Maria was with Turin’s literary set, not the sci-fi set, and this was hard to break past back then.

As a result, even though his fiction during the 1950s and 60s included telepathy, futuristic surgical procedures, alternate histories and ghosts, De Maria, to my knowledge, never once published a story in an SF/F magazine. Most of his work ended up in Il Caffè, which was a literary journal—Italy’s equivalent to The Paris Review.

The Twenty Days of Turin wasn’t marketed as sci-fi, nor as giallo, nor as a horror novel. You won’t find it listed in the huge Vegetti catalogue of Italian sci-fi titles, for instance. It was “literature,” but with more pulp in its DNA than was normal for Italian literature at the time.

So it was an incongruous book by the standards of its era. In 1977, a leftist author like De Maria was supposed to be didactic, to write fiction that had a “social purpose” and end the story with a left-wing moral that wasn’t too hard to puzzle out. A “serious” social issue like terrorism wasn’t viewed as a legitimate subject for weird fiction or sci-fi or pulpy mystery stories, which weren’t considered “serious.” De Maria ran against all that. The Twenty Days has a dark, ambiguous ending and it’s very obviously about terrorism—which speculative fiction at that time hardly touched.

Its cult following in Turin can be divided into two categories of fans. First, you have the literary subculture De Maria rubbed shoulders with. Some of the critics who’ve championed the book, like Pier Massimo Prosio, come from the same generation as De Maria. Then you have a second group, mostly sci-fi fans, who encountered the book as teens and became obsessed with it ever since. A lot of them are Generation Xers with a taste for Lovecraft, Ballard, Cronenberg, thrash metal, graphic novels and so forth. Luca, the friend who introduced me to The Twenty Days, belongs in that category. I’ve also stumbled upon readers younger than me—undergraduates who got the book recommended to them by their creative writing professors.

Turinese are private people who tend to stick closely to their own circles, so many of these fans went for decades without knowing how many other fans there were. Two years ago, when I was going through the process of locating the De Maria Estate, it emerged that Luca had actually met the author’s son Domenico without realising it. They’d hung out together as teenage truants and listened to Black Sabbath in De Maria’s house at the exact time he was writing The Twenty Days. Luca only discovered this when Domenico recognised him forty years later!

This September, the book will be re-released in Italy by the Turin publishing house Frassinelli. Now here comes one of those eerie coincidences that follow De Maria’s work. The Frassinelli company was founded in 1931 by the typographer Carlo Frassinelli. It turns out that Carlo’s son, Giancarlo, was murdered downstairs from the De Maria family home! He lived in the same apartment building and knew De Maria’s wife because they were both occultists belonging to Turin’s “Gurdjieff Circle”—people who followed the teachings of the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff. Giancarlo was regarded as a “guru” within the group, but ended up paralysed after a stroke. He was stabbed to death by his carer, a nervous young man, and people around him suspected that he’d deliberately incited the kid into doing it—a kind of suicide by proxy. This has no connection to the publisher’s decision, since Frassinelli Edizioni is no longer owned by the Frassinelli family, but it’s spooky nonetheless.

WFR: In your introduction to The Twenty Days, you make an interesting connection between the Library and social media. This is rather interesting because the book was written some 30 years before the advent of social media. What is the Library in The Twenty Days of Turin and how does it relate to social media and blogging in our current age?

RG: Try to picture an evil alliance between 4chan, Craigslist and the Catholic Church. That’s the Library.

It emerges as a type of reading room where people can submit their handwritten diaries or peruse the diaries of others. Nothing like it existed when De Maria was writing, but today it’s everywhere: crowdsourcing, amateur content, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, DeviantArt and the like.

De Maria was interested in the darker implications of such a phenomenon. The loneliness, the perversity, the rage… His Library ends up accumulating all the nastiest, most shameful things that people want to vent and purge: the true sludge of their souls. And those people find themselves with the horror that that stuff is on public display, that the Library might dox them to anybody for a trivial fee.

Even after the Library’s first incarnation leads to an epidemic of massacres, lonely citizens are still tempted to do it again. That’s the pitiable part. It’s enticing to vent your miseries, to have a place to spew that soul-sludge. When De Maria’s narrator first encounters the remains of the original Library, it’s a huge, disgusting pile of mouldy paper. Later, the book gives us garbage and human waste as a motif. It’s the most literal form of “shitposting” imaginable.

To make it doubly twisted, the Library is endorsed by the Church as a goodwill initiative. The building that hosts it is a real place in Turin, the St Cottolengo Little House of Divine Providence. It’s a charity hospital notorious in Turinese urban folklore for supposedly housing “monsters”—patients too deformed to see the light of day. The word “Cottolengo,” in the local parlance, has become a bit like “Bedlam.” An apt place to keep a proto-4chan!

WFR: What was the process like in translating The Twenty Days and what sort of challenges did you run into?

RG: Italian gets stereotyped as a “musical” language. With De Maria this is truer than usual. He began as a musician and in some of the novel’s finest scenes he still thinks like a musician. My favourite example is the chapter titled “The Voices.” The narrator visits an occult researcher who claims to have a tape recording of the book’s terroristic entities conversing over the airwaves. The scene is all about build-up—not just dramatic action but crescendo, decrescendo, diminuendo. It starts mildly enough, then an eerie soundscape develops as the recording plays. Harsh subterranean noises evolve into vowels and consonants, then syllables, then words, then sentences, until we can hear a chorus of malicious creatures arguing and plotting massacres. It’s an awful lot like an orchestral movement, and throughout it De Maria makes full use of the Italian language’s onomatopoeic potential. Translating that, finding the right-sounding English for the job, took heaps of work.

WFR: The Twenty Days of Turin was written during the 1970’s which was a time of political unrest in Italy. I believe there was a neo-fascist coup and also a radical left-wing paramilitary group. What was the political scene like in Italy during the 70’s and how did it influence The Twenty Days of Turin?

 RG: When the magazine Sipario interviewed him in April 1978, De Maria had this to say:

“I believe that the scope of the fantastic… is the most suitable one for conveying a reality as complicated as ours. […] It’s no coincidence that The Twenty Days, which seeks allegorically to portray the violence that reigns over my city, has even caught the notice of journalists, and not just literary critics.”

The Twenty Days keeps the political context implicit rather than mention it in the open—and with good reason. While De Maria was writing, people were being kidnapped and murdered on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis: judges, journalists, politicians, union figures. Terrorism was hard to discuss, except in circuitous ways. Even book reviewers who wrote up the novel for La Stampa shied away from using the ‘t’-word. The closest they got to that was through coy phrases like: “a book dipped in the stream of cruel and timely metaphors.” As late as 2009, De Maria’s obituary in the journal Studi Piemontesi praised The Twenty Days without ever mentioning the Years of Lead. It put all its emphasis on De Maria as a fabulist, an heir to Poe, an imaginative writer in the nineteenth-century mold. That’s the diplomatic way to champion something truly weird and risky: making it appear traditional.

What De Maria captured best about his political surroundings was people’s evasiveness and silence when they’re faced with a horrendous reality, the many ways they blank out and rationalise what they’re seeing. He observed how his fellow Italians reacted to the mundane traumas of terrorism and imagined how the same society might respond to cosmic threats “one cannot even mention… without feeling reason crumbling.” It’s not a reassuring picture.

WFR: What sort of literary influences played a part in Giorgio De Maria’s work? I believe you listed The Trial by Kafka as one in the intro.

RG: His tastes ran mostly towards nineteenth century romanticism and fantastic literature, plus a few German-speaking modernist authors like Kafka, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann. Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus—about a composer who deliberately infects himself with syphilis because he believes madness is the source of genius—seems to have fascinated De Maria early in his career. He said in one interview that reading Kafka was a “revelation,” so I suppose that’s where his passion for “weirdness” came from. According to his daughter, his other big loves were Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, along with sci-fi and adventure fiction in general. In the Sipario interview, though, he claimed to have a low opinion of Italian fantastic literature, calling it “a very feeble tradition.”

To answer the biggest question many readers might have: I can’t be certain if De Maria was familiar with Lovecraft, though he might’ve encountered Lovecraft’s stories in 1960s magazines like Urania, which ran translated sci-fi for Italian audiences.

WFR: You talk about Turin in your introduction and it seems like a very disquieting place. It definitely adds to the unease the reader feels when reading The Twenty Days. Can you talk more about the setting and how The Twenty Days manages to be such an unsettling story?

RG: Dozens of things collude to make Turin spooky. It’s an out-of-the-way city in the northwestern corner of Italy. Its baroque architecture gives it an odd look that inspired surrealist paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. A curious number of famous writers have either committed suicide in Turin or suffered mental breakdowns there.

The city has a long history of occultism. While De Maria was writing his masterpiece, Turin was the home of Gustavo Rol, who was either a genuine X‑Man or the greatest faker in history. His reported feats included teleportation, mind-reading, bringing statuettes to life, summoning the ghost of Casanova so Fellini could question it for film research, terrifying Mussolini by correctly predicting the date of his death and other disconcerting party tricks.

What’s important is that these Turinese occultists don’t typically look like shroom-heads or characters from Harry Potter. It’s a culture where well-mannered individuals in boardroom attire might also happen to hold séances or do even weirder things in private. Gustavo Rol’s following contained a large number of top professionals and even the town’s leading psychiatrist. Lorenzo Alessandri, a painter considered to be the “Black Pope” of Turinese Satanism, played down his notoriety and claimed he was just a regular Catholic.

In a city where so many wholesome, conservative-looking people led double lives, De Maria found a perfect backdrop for his uncanny tale.

WFR: I find the cover to The Twenty Days to be rather fascinating. Can you tell us more about it?

RG: The image is based on a lithograph by the iconoclastic Belgian illustrator Félicien Rops titled Satan sement l’ivraie or “Satan Sowing Tares.” It refers to a parable in the Book of Matthew that compares Judgment Day to a wheat harvest, where God will gather up the “wheat” (his followers) and burn the poisonous “tares” that Satan has sown in the field.

The cover of the novel’s original 1977 release used a version of the same image, but I haven’t been able to find out whether it was chosen by De Maria or his publishers.

I note in my introduction to the book that wheat harvests in Europe traditionally happen in July, and this is also the month De Maria picks for most of the supernatural violence in the story.

The post Interview: Ramon Glazov on “The Twenty Days of Turin” appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

The bicycle is an ancient model, deliberately picked for its thick, heavy frame and pedals, bare of rubber cover, whose serrated ridges as the hours go by cut first into callus, then the flesh of feet that press upon them.

The crankset, big as a gear from a belfry clock, is covered in the same tenacious rust that attacks brakes and handlebars. Each bicycle has its own particular skin disease: this one is flecked as if by a colony of metal-eating fleas that fatigue the steel itself, the wound from rust’s bite bigger with each passing day. That one seems overtaken by a paralysis of the joints; the handlebars never turn without a howl now, while the brake levers are pairs of jaws that won’t close.

The seat leather… but is it really leather? It seems cut from a triangle of emery cloth, of granite, so easily does its mere touch bruise muscle. Or is it leather chiseled off a mummy from a display case in some tumbledown museum of natural history? Whatever it is, in the hours to come, the seat leather will join the ranks of your enemies. For if you must confront the road, never forget that you will have to battle your own machine.

Sit as little as possible: the constant drizzle makes the leather’s friction on your skin even more painful. It’s like a stinging sensation growing between your legs. Don’t sit down.

Nothing to be done about the rain. The squall will scour your sides all day long, mixing with your sweat, clinging to your pubic hair in brilliant pearls. Nothing more annoying than the relentless drip-drip-dripping from the tip of a prick that’s become a drainpipe, the constant feeling like you’re urinating and can’t stop.

The cold, of course, is something to get used to. Especially on the downhills when, naked on your cast-iron grasshopper, you’ll scatter with your front wheel the iridescent mass of gas bubbles, some of which cling to the bike frame, to your skin. Try to pop them right away, before the metal tarnishes at their touch, or your skin starts breaking out in hard blisters.

The desquamation can last whole days, always working deep down, digging into dermis, fat, muscle. The bubbles stick especially to the hollow of the groin and the insides of the thighs. Nor do they scorn the armpits. Best thing, of course, is to avoid the bubble clusters stagnating on the road, across the yellow lines, but the compact mass of the peloton significantly reduces your maneuvering room. Moreover, condensation on the visor of your gas mask warps your sense of distance, and a collision is always to be feared.

One single commandment: NEVER STOP PEDALING. To which one might add: never lift your head too high, to avoid any pointless torque on the tubing between the gas mask and the crankset-powered air-production system. The rubber already has a hard time resisting the corrosive gas, and any sudden movements might result in a tear. It might seem obvious, but never forget: stop pedaling and you cut off your own air as surely as if you turned off a tap.

Never set foot on the ground. Urinate or defecate while you pedal standing up. Never stop.

As for flats—best not to mention them. As soon as your feet quit rhythmically pushing the pedals, the air pressure inside the mask will drop too low to push back the gas seeping in.

Then you’ll have three or four seconds before you feel a swarm of razor blades flay your larynx and explode in your lungs. The pain is tough to take, though it won’t kill you. Some cyclists start coughing so hard they burst a vessel and their chins get sticky with blood. Other let out long streams of scarlet urine, as if an invisible razor had just castrated them mid-race. Most of the time, you see them zigzagging before leaving the road and collapsing on the sidewalk’s sharp edge. And there they stay, paralyzed by pain, or twitching spasmodically like a worm severed with a pocketknife, until they can get back in the saddle and start pedaling again. No one helps them. Not pedestrians, whose bare feet squelch on the damp asphalt, or cyclists.

When the rain stops, artificial suns flood the road with harsh, unbearable light, and the bubbles play at being magnifying glasses, needling your skin with myriad luminous points each red-hot as the tip of a cigarette. Who hasn’t, as a child, toyed with making just such a weal rise from the back of a hand or a fatty thigh gushing from a pair of shorts, by focusing the sun through an old camera lens? Here, the pain is multiplied one hundred percent.

Constant contact with the rubber gas mask always ends up causing severe dermatoses, and you must fight the urge to slip your nails under the protective rim to itch yourself, since the gas will slither right in.

The signal to start is given in the morning, “morning” simply being an arbitrary and comforting way of locating yourself in time. There is no sky here, no real sun or moon.

Only an unbroken line of spotlights stippling the metallic vault over our heads, the gray ribbon of the road with its dotted yellow dividing line. To either side, sidewalks, then the dead-end red brick wall, devoid of door or window. No one looks at us, no one watches us. Why would they? Riveted to our machines as we are, we cannot stop pedaling for even so much as a moment.

The signal to start is given in the morning, surely too early, to go by the weight of exhaustion still stiffening muscles. Afterwards, there’s nothing but the constant squeal of tires on asphalt, the creak of the crankset or poorly greased gears. No way of talking, the masks smother voices, and the respirator tubing only carries a series of indecipherable gurglings. Besides, better focus on the road, keep an eye out for tacks that might’ve been scattered in the night. Victims of flats are often older, vision failing, ones who’ve lost or cracked their glasses. Besides, the mask is designed to make it hard to wear it over a pair of glasses, no matter how small.

The course is long. Very long. Straight at first, the road takes one turn, then another… the monotony of the wall and sidewalks cancels any sense of landmark, no way of knowing if the ribbon of asphalt makes a circle or just keeps going on and on, ever farther, to infinity. I think it’s a circle, but in that case, how to explain the endless changes to the asphalt’s morphology? Drawing a map amounts to a utopian notion; no cyclist ever encounters the same hill, the same curve, twice. No way of knowing what awaits you around the next bend. I keep thinking that the road is a closed circuit, but I must bring myself to face the fact that it warps during the night. Like an undulating snake, a gray snake, flat and striped with yellow.

On the sidewalks, the pedestrians push and shove one another. Their nudity makes them not know what to do with their arms. Some swing them rhythmically; others—women especially—cross them over their breasts; others still walk with their hands crossed behind them like schoolchildren of yore… or prisoners. (Don’t use that word.)

A long, high glass wall keeps the gas from them, and the greenish glints playing on the panes give their skin an odd aquatic tinge.

It’s said their toenails are polished with a magnetic varnish that carries a charge individual to each of them. In this way, optical scanners scattered throughout the asphalt identify the walkers, calculating the average time of each group. If the computer deems their pace too slow, the glass wall reveals its vents, letting in a quantity of gas proportional to the accumulated delay.

Then we hear them gasping, coughing, spitting. Invariably, they start running clumsily, and the women’s heavy breasts jolt and quiver like masses of gelatin on a lunatic platter.

Many envy the pedestrians; the physical effort imposed on them indeed seems less restrictive, but there may be other drawbacks…

The route is a tunnel marked off in hours, not miles; the route is a pipeline of pain we must ride on leaden machines in the ceaseless whine of pedals, the screech of ill-oiled chains, the stridency of brakes, or the tremendous din of a bike crumpling in two.

At night, a door opens in the brick wall. An entrance invisible in the daytime, which no one can ever find. One final push of the pedal, and then the bike is hung in the gloom of a chamber where oxygen lashes our legs, forcing back the clusters of bubbles that try to enter in the our wake. The wall closes again.

Take off the masks sticky with sweat; the skin where its straps dug in will remain raw all night. Some cyclists stay there, right by their machines, for fear someone will steal a part from them in the night. They’re probably right.

The room is empty, bare. At the far end, the doors to little booths gape open on the decomposer-reconstitutors: at least that’s what we call the white enameled devices in the middle of each 3 by 3 foot closet barely lit by a frosted bulb of measly wattage. Close up, they’d look just like toilets, if it weren’t for the network of ducts and the radiation lamps. All excremental matter is immediately broken down, each particle resuming its pre-intestinal aspect, and the regenerator lamps try and restore to it all an adequate nutrient content. The pasty material then removed from the tank has neither taste nor color. When the nutrient content drops to zero, when the regenerators can no longer extract anything from our excrement, we pop open some canned food, or chew a bar of alimentary concentrate. The regenerator allow us to live on these for at least three months, mining and making the most of the teensiest nutritive particles our digestive systems have discharged. At first, some cyclists vomited after every meal, while others obstinately refused to swallow the slightest mouthful. On the door of my booth someone’s scrawled four words in pencil: “Trash fed by trash…” I’ll have to erase that.

Those who arrive after the doors have closed must keep pedaling all night long, or get used to suffering. They probably try as much of both as they can stand…

The guards have donned fireproof gloves to put the cap back on the blackened jerry-can… but the cap won’t screw back on the spout deformed by the explosion. It’s some kind of acid meant to absorb the radiation, I think (so they say). The only drawback is it explodes on contact with liquid, which makes handling it rather tricky. Sometimes, a shadow slips away from the group, grabs one of the jerry-cans, and pisses into it. The results are instantaneous. Flames rocket out, white and blinding as lightning, blazing like a laser, right between the guy’s legs… For a few seconds, a magnesium glare lights up the room. I look around to try and spot the edges, but the flame never lasts long enough.

It can’t be said suicides have gone up… I mustn’t be disingenuous.

Recently, rocks have been ricocheting off the surface of the water without sinking in. The effects of solar lighting vary from place to place, greening your face in the valley, yellowing your shoulders on the flatlands, blurring your belly on the hilltops. Trees have been growing upside down, roots turned skywards, foliage buried under the grass. Chestnuts would explode the minute you made as if to touch them, sending burrs flying in all directions. Sometimes the wind would steal sounds and mix them up, a thunderclap would come out of your mouth, words you spoke would hang from a condor’s beating wings… the (don’t talk about how it was before). Besides, there’s no proof these images are real, doubtless my diseased memory has distorted much more rational facts. The bicycles clink and rattle in the shadows, lining the walls of the room. Only the tandem corner is empty. Nowadays all couples are separated. Little by little, as the hours go by, the crouching forms stretch out on the floor, the wreck of a conversation will dwindle to a monologue soon worn down by fatigue.

No rules oblige sleepers to remain in the lower chamber; we are all free to climb one of the stairwells with steps caparisoned in red wool that lead to the upper floor. However, few indeed undertake such a journey; no sooner are their bikes hung than exhaustion nails them to the floor. Up above, table with giant feet bear massive silverware whose mere weight could sink a ship.

A line of blue-green plates and dishes runs to the vanishing point of a hall hung with oppressive velours. A banquet for an army or a crowd, but the guests will be forever absent. The next few rooms, with their high beds, hordes of pillows in all sizes, flanked by candelabra rooted in floorboards that smell of beeswax… But it is raining on the empty soup tureens, and each drop is like the tapping of a woman’s long, pointed fingernail, a tinny music that fills the tarnished plates and mildews the tablecloth. The shower often pierces sheets and blankets, and an unhealthy moisture encourages mushrooms deep within the mattress. Dead birds overflow the credenza drawers; pages of books from the library are now forever faded, and only vast white pages remain, so beautiful they seem to be reserved for epitaphs, or deaths of historical importance…

Once, Maria cruelly bit my hand; I dropped a candle on the woolen rug. It was so damp that the flame went out at once.

You can sleep in these beds, you even sleep better there, a deeper sleep than the room downstairs. As the whiff of mold acted as a potent anesthetic, in its way. Upon waking, however, a slight worry assails sleepers regarding the uses made of them during their hours of unconsciousness, for rare is the occasion when sleepers do not wake with each orifice of their bodies feeling forced and painful.

And so Maria—

(Don’t—)

In the blemished mirrors on the upper floor, I can perfectly make out my face purpled by the swellings of asphyxia. And on the canopy bed’s still-white sheets, I can see perfectly well that my shadow is red.

HOWEVER, I will refrain from drawing any hasty conclusions, exhaustion and malnutrition maintaining me in a torpor from in which it is sometimes hard to tell dream from reality…

***

I can no longer remember just how I got here. Like most of us, I woke up in the room down below after the explosion, my head empty and yet heavy. Since that day, my sense of touch has diminished considerably, and I have the hardest time holding a pencil in my numb fingers. My memories have gradually faded away, surely from shock. Some whisper that we are dead, that we expiate our sins in the first circle of an absurd hell, but I find this theory far too romantic. No, for me, it’s more—

The fact is, each new arrival is brought in by a hearse, and unloaded on a stretcher amidst the others, who will teach him the rules… But I believe this is a vulgar practice meant to keep us in a certain state of unease.

I know the gas is corroding my brain cells—first my memory, then my perception of reality. The near impossibility drawing differentiations and making logical connections will not make me give up my desire to know, to… understand.

Are we prisoners in some forgotten jail, of some computer warden ignorant of changes in historical context?

Ignorant of the fact that the empty eye sockets of its programmers are now forever fixed on a white sun, so white their dark glasses have melted away?

And the machine continues to function, on insufficient data. Continues to drag, from their cells, convicts who have forgotten the very cause of their incarceration. Ensuring, through the intermediary of its android jailers, that sentences are handed out, never to be commuted, for lack of new data?

That’s just a theory, of course, and I lack the strength to carry out the verifications needed to refute it; besides I’m not at all sure my data is objective. The disaster and the gas have destroyed my mental workings… Unless… unless this is just the first phase of some kind of brainwashing, the prelude to an undertaking that escapes me.

At other times, I like to imagine that the blurriness of thoughts is an effect I strive for consciously. Then I convince myself that this entire monologue is recorded in a memory circuit… a magnetic tape speaks through my mouth, and I’m just an android with an official number, employed in the Funnyway Penitentiary, in charge of welcoming new prisoners when they come out of the usual post-conviction brainwashing.

My monologue is a speech type whose sole purpose is to increase their mental unease, to make them lose all bearings… to break them.

A fictional speech, but gangrenous.

My name is Alpha‑3, I belong to the section for the suppression of speed fetishists—I—

Who knows?

I will NEVER know if I am a prisoner or a jailer…

Besides, what would be the point?

What pleasure, what satisfaction would I derive from the certainty of being someone sentenced to life, instead of an android on the fritz, ready for the junkyard…

Or the opposite.

The bicycle is an ancient model, deliberately picked for its thick, heavy frame. We usually say that there are trap-cycles, one hidden in every dozen. Like a deadly bullet in a firing squad, eleven of whose twelve rifles are loaded with blanks. I don’t know how much credence to give these legends. Our machines are changed during the night according to a schedule difficult to determine for people like us, without watches or calendars. An entirely subjective estimate might be every six months. The machine from hell would have suddenly razorlike pedals, a seat that can burst into flames in a matter of minutes, lead wheels with sticky tires, and especially, the ability to triple its weight on uphills. We call it the black bicycle, or even the cycle of Asmodeus. They say its timbre is curiously crazed, never making the same sound twice.

But I’m not saying these things to frighten you; we too have our legends, our myths…

You’ll find your bicycle next to the others. If the handlebars are sticky, it’s due to sweat. If the pedals are hard, it’s because hundreds of feet have failed to get the better of the hatred stored in them.

You’ll learn to foil its treacheries, to beg for its favors… You…

Tomorrow, when it’s time to leave, my mask will keep me from muttering a word of encouragement, so I’m taking advantage of this moment to wish you “a good trip.”

Or as they say around these parts…

FUNNYWAY

The post Funnyway appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

It was like a gigantic pyre rising from the center of the gray, argil plain. A colossal intertwining of branches atop which the city seemed bizarrely unbalanced, with its towers broader at the base than the summit, its keeps oddly narrowed toward their crenellations, such that from a distance they might be taken for factory smokestacks that went on forever. The fortifications around the city had the same truncated-cone look; it was as if like the sentries pacing their wall-walks might at any moment topple into the void and go sliding down the steeply banked sides, helmets slashing showers of sparks from the black, gleaming slabs pierced here and there by spindly embrasures. Drawing closer, it became clear the mountainside where the city took root was entirely covered in countless logs, freshly pruned, sawn, scalped, reduced to the state of anonymous timber, forming an inextricable tangle that piled up against the outermost stones of the city’s surrounding wall. Whence the curious impression of a pyre thrown together pell-mell for some feverish sacrifice.

To gain entrance to the city took long days of navigating this labyrinth of wood, wood at first sticky with sap and then, nearer the summit, dry and studded with splinters. A path where every step might at any minute disturb and shatter the equilibrium of imbricate trunks, an instant death sentence beneath a hellish, thundering avalanche of logs, such that travelers feel like they’re picking their way through a giant game of pick-up sticks where the slightest misstep immediately leads to a crushing disqualification.

I, for one, quite clearly recall that no sooner had I stepped through the only gate than I sought the coolness of a church with blue slate walls, fleeing in the heart of its shadows the heat and unbearable smell of sawdust that had accompanied my entire climb. Instinctively, my fingers reached for the marble font normally beside the collection box on the first pillar. The merest touch of that icy liquid on my joints immediately dispelled my migraine, early warning signs for which had been buzzing at my temples. I rested my palm in the middle of the chipped Carrera conch, in the little iridescent puddle where a few rare glimmers danced, filtering through the stained glass windows. Pulling my hand back with a painful effort that betrayed all the exhaustion of my journey, I touched my thumb to my forehead, lips, and belly… The heady smell of fuel gave me a shiver.

I stayed there for a moment, leaning against the pillar, savoring the cold marble through my sweat-soaked shirt. From somewhere deep in the crypt rose a baby’s cry, frail, no doubt surprised to find itself naked and in unfamiliar hands above the baptismal basin while drops of kerosene pearled at the sacred cruet’s spout and splattered on its forehead, between its brows.

I left the church, eyes lowered, returning to the cobblestones of the sun-drenched street where in the burning dawn, the arabesques of one final farandole were dwindling away. Low to the ground, the wind blew a rolling wave of red confetti that stuck to my bare legs, gummy with sweat, like so many strange and fanciful pustules. Sick with the carnival measles, I made for the cracked fountain where a cluster of verdigrised bronze tritons spat ethyl alcohol by the mouthful, slick and almost viscous. Methanol, maybe. The harsh reek—nuanceless and even industrial—made me curse such a lack of taste and imagination in the choice of fluid. But the exhilarating fumes scrambled my thoughts, paralyzed my brain as if through prolonged exposure to ether, and images unrelated to my worries of the moment intervened between my eyes and reality.

As always, I had to make a violent effort not to let myself drown, knees suddenly weak, lifeless, and tear myself from the swell of ever more pervasive odors. I tore up the sloping street, twisting my ankles on uneven cobblestones rainbowed by steaks of alcohol with starbursts of gold and steel blue. The first pyres appeared right away, lining the sidewalks and thoroughfare. Meticulous stacks of dry, dusty firewood, jealously defended from humidity for years in waiting for this final day. Mountains of cunningly interlocked logs with access corridors and central combustion chambers designed for the entire family… I slowed my pace, offering up my irritated mucous membranes to the scent of knotty, splintering wood, those dark desiccated twigs, kindling, armfuls of rustling, skeletal branchings shattering underfoot in a concert of dry detonations. For a moment I watched the white, bluish hands striped with scratches hauling bunches of bines scrupulously selected long ago in anticipation of this ritual, and then I wandered among the piles of branches, amidst scents and sounds of an autumn forest. It was even hotter now, and my eyebrows could no longer stem the tide of perspiration flooding my brow. Suddenly I wished I could drown myself in the shade of the archways, and an unbearable thirst clogged my throat, swelling my tongue between my teeth.

A dark vault sucked me in… a dance hall with its floor a deep black reflective, its echoes at once near and far: a dome of night blue as the slumber of burrowed beasts. My toes left an incongruous halo of condensation on the marble, testifying to a fever that suddenly took on an obscene dampness in this place where mirrors and windows seemed conceived for something entirely apart from harvesting the dying breaths. At my feet, a handful of confetti had hastily sketched out a planisphere of unknown constellations. A silken shawl, stirred by a breeze, moved across the floor, strange fabric smoke fallen from a dancer’s shoulders to end up drifting the surface of this lake of frozen ink.

An intruder in this world of black snow, with my panting and sweat-stink, all of a sudden I wanted to see if my soles had melted the ice the floor seemed to be, and if my ankles were sinking into a pond of indelible waters, marking me for life in the most ridiculous way.

The woman was standing back, elbow on a caryatid, and her pale, bluish hand, nails cyanotic from an irrepressible internal cold, lay quite precisely between the breasts of the sculpted torso in an unintentionally provocative posture. A long scarf of gray silk wound round her neck, ends crossing behind her nape and falling again over her clavicles all the way to the floor, surrounding her frozen, naked body in a parenthesis of cloth. Her belly drooped and her breasts sagged. Networks of violet venules traced her flesh just under the skin, bringing to mind finely crazed porcelain. Fragile. Darkness drowned her features; all I caught was a glimpse of a thickened, graceless silhouette, pale and distressing; already her outstretched hand was offering me a cup of some liquid…

I drank. Without a word. Just before leaving, I seized her still outstretched fingers, bowed my head, and placed my mouth on the back of her hand just above the lumpen line of joints. She didn’t flinch, but the minute her wrist fell back, I saw quite clearly the horrible burn my lips had left on her smooth, cold skin, twin swollen lines of oozing blisters. Had I listened more closely, I might have caught, just as I was kissing her hand, a crackle and the unmistakable smell of burning flesh…

She smiled with an apologetic, weary, and worldly air, like a hostess who, upon noting an inadvertent lapse in etiquette during a lavish dinner, begs the complicit indulgence of her guests. I took my leave. Returned to the avenues, the heat, and the row of pyres punctuating the asphalt at regular intervals. Was I really feverish? Probably no more than usual.

I watched as some looked away from me, and others more shrewdly feigned to stare me down without seeing me, as if I’d been divested of all my opacity—made, in a word, transparent.

My detour into the dance hall had done nothing except make the furnace outdoors even more felt. Groups of silent, naked girls cluttered the balconies on either side of the street. Looking up, I could see on their hardened pubes shocks of hair, daubed in red phosphorus like their eyelashes, hair, and nipples. A few of them had shaved their heads and their bare skulls, which crusts of scarlet phosphorus fitted close as a helmet, helplessly teased my mind with the image of a giant match.

I think a few of them smiled my way, but I can’t be sure… I noticed their drawn features still bore traces of fatigue from the night before, from singing, dancing, maybe even fear. For I know bizarre festivities fill the alleys at night, horrible farandoles where boys and girls dance corseted in costumes coated with white phosphorus that spontaneously combusts when ambient heat reaches the fateful limit of 303°K, forcing them to vanish, to flee the streets and open squares as the first glimmer of dawn. From that moment on, woe betide he whom day catches drunkenly sprawled on a park lawn, lounging about in his deadly costume whose powdery white is not unlike the unsettling texture of butterfly wings.

Transformed into a living torch, the unlucky victim will be unable even to hurl himself into the first fountain he sees, for that will only fan the flames ravaging him. And yet they keep doing it. Every night, from one end of the city to the other, through puerile and outdated yet  laboriously reconstructed Italian carnival décor, they spread themselves out, dreadfully vulnerable, offered up, exposed to the slightest friction that might prove too brusque, to the tips of cigarettes some start smoking out of defiance, bravado, and dandyism. They dance without watches or reminders of any sort, since all the town’s clocks are now stopped. They dance on, knowing full well that in these latitudes, night gives way to day without transition of any sort, and that since they’ve lost all notion of time from drink, they will soon be unable to predict where and when dawn will surprise them.

And so the squares, gardens, grand esplanades that offer hardly any places to hide are particularly prized during these ironic and despairing sarabands. “The greater the risk, the better the party,” go the songs, and more than one farandole has suddenly gone up in flames like a living fuse, in a matter of seconds consuming everyone holding hands just a moment ago, leaving but a garland of charred corpses strewn across the flagstones, corpses oddly reduced and deformed by the fire’s devouring, tragically tarry statues that chance has shriveled up in postures straight from the rituals of ancient magic.

Thirst and fever made me stagger once more and seek refuge in the hollows of doorways. Atop a flight of steps, my damp and burning hands flattened against a chiseled marble plaque set above a great bronze knocker. Taking over from my eyes, briefly blinded in the gloom, my fingers deciphered the word MUSEUM graven in tall uprights and sharp serifs.  An ink-black carpet guided my steps between the hedges of gilded chain meant to protect the objects on display from the visitors’ tactile curiosity. The breeze from the still-open door made the festoons of metal links clank in lazy cadence. Right away the acid reek from the row of sculptures overwhelmed me, irritating my sinuses, a drilling prickle along my nostrils, and I grew lost in the contemplation of lemon yellow statues lining the hall. Slender maidens, tapering folds and veils atop which a countenance of absence of beatific nothingness discloses itself. Titans frozen in one final, prodigious spasm. Ephebes with curves soft and firm all at once, and so many more, all standing on their ebon pedestals, freed from sulfur by the chisel of a genius. Brittle masterpieces, of incredible fragility and suffocating smell, which a stray elbow might reduce to crumbs, to powder, which a spark might set ablaze in a torrent of choking smoke, leaving nothing of the work behind but a great flower of soot splattering the wall like the forgotten shadow of something that no longer exists. I have never been able to resist the fascination of these bodies, these actions, arrested by an artist in Sulfur, a medium so ill-suited to immortality; never been able to resist the cognitive heartbreak provoked by these friable and powdery wonders. We want them to be eternal, to be preserved forever from time the destroyer, and instead we find them poignant in their fragility, as if the creator, in picking an eminently perishable material for his art, had wished to highlight the irony of their vulnerability.

I crossed the hall slowly, leaving behind a double row of flammable creations, and entered the library. The smell of leather and paper, in heavy waves fringed with mold and dust, gradually supplanted the bitter whiffs of sulfur, and all I had to do now was let my fingers run over the shelves, counting out the gold-stamped spines like the letters of a prayer wheel… The curiosity of an entire people slumbered here, abandoned to all manner of fungus and rodents: phlogistical treatises establishing fire as the very essence of the body’s composition, abstruse studies on the putrefaction of fish and phosphine emanations as the source of will‑o’-the-wisps, parchment scrolls whose flow of exotic characters dissert on the secret of Greek fire, thirty-volume histories of Bengal lights and fireworks, with a main section of comprehensive reports on Roman candles, missiles, bottle rockets, snakes, and peonies… I continued on my way, pressing the palms of my hands cooled on leather bindings to my cheeks burning with infection. A corridor on high hurled me into the coppery world of pyrometers, a forest of feverish dials, each with a needle more sensitive than the last. As I did not know what units were used to calibrate them, the leaps and quiverings of red cursors as I passed gave me no clear idea of my condition. The corridor led to a vast chamber whose unaffected architecture, based wholly on the interlocking of enormous blocks, informed me that it was most likely located within the city’s walls. No system of lighting allowed me to banish the gloom maintained by two embrasures overgrown with vegetation. So I held my breath, knowing in advance what I would find. Quite soon and without surprise, my blind, outstretched fingers touched the smooth surface of a showcase, and I knew right away I’d made no mistake.

I closed my eyes, trying to imagine the setting around me: rows of glass display cases like high upright aquariums holding within their walls the only canvases of ancient masters, invaluable tapestries, fabrics and silks painted long ago by virtuoso brushes. An entire world of irreplaceable portraits, frescoes, triptychs, painted or woven in their time with the help of materials derived from phosphorus pentoxide, and thus endowed with the disagreeable property of spontaneously combusting upon contact with air.

Whence the necessity of keeping them locked up in a vacuum forever within sealed and leaded glass walls that seem at first to insulate them once and for all from any danger. However, trusting in this apparent fact would be to misestimate gravely the great aesthetic perversity of artists on this planet, for not a single one of these protective panes is thick enough to stand up to a simple hurled stone. Some of them—usually those containing artistic treasures beyond compare—are made of the most fragile crystal, and the mere impact of a stray bird, come in through an embrasure and fluttering randomly about, would be enough to crack them from top to bottom, letting the surrounding air in immediately with a shrill whistling. Not a single one of the pyrophoric media on display would last more than a few seconds under such conditions, and the tapestries would consume themselves, victims of an internal combustion, a destruction written into their very pigments, their wool, their threads, from the first day of their existence, when they were created in an airtight tank by an artist in a diving suit in a total vacuum. What could be more riveting than to imagine this obscene and subtle game wherein an artist strives to destroy by creating—wherein, far from wanting to see his work cast in bronze, he toils to make something infinitely more delicate and fragile in which the seed of death might awaken at any moment. From then on, the constant danger can only keep the aesthete, the amateur in a state of rare and powerful exaltation, heightening his perception of things, a sensation not unlike that of trying, in the space of scant seconds, to commit faces from a railway platform to memory because already you know you will never see them again. I retraced my steps, in no hurry, borne by the fever’s torpor. Numb, and yet terrified at having to return to the heat outside.

It is true that here, on this planet, in these streets, beneath these archways, deep in these marble vaults, people die of strange frigid diseases that kill with neither fever nor sweats. “Adiabatism,” a girl once whispered in my ear long ago, in a single word summing up the problem of these bodies that neither receive nor emit heat in any quantity. Whence their fascination with flame, their entire aesthetic, and their morbid cult of incineration. But all this matters little, since after all, my task is not to ponder but to act. I know that they will feel nothing when they burn, that a child out strolling could have his hand on fire, watching his carbonized fingers shrivel, and not stop chewing on his mouthful of candy for a single second. What does it matter, then, if naked couples wallow on sheets damp with fuel and desperately rub their bodies up against each other, knowing all the while that in a few seconds the boy’s pubis, daubed in a crust of phosphorus and potassium chlorate, will strike his partner’s mons veneris, also abrasively lacquered, and this friction will give rise to the spark that will set them both ablaze in a final embrace. What does it matter?

My role will be over in a few hours, as soon as everyone has climbed to the top of the pyre like castaways clinging to the ridge of a tiny desert island and I myself, through streets now empty, have come to the great council chamber where, in the middle of an immense ceremonial table, lost in a vastness of dark varnish, the only match in all the city awaits me.

Perhaps, like some of their kind in other cities, they will have readied for me one of those shapeless white asbestos jumpsuits with a narrow slit of fire-resistant glass at eye level, but such considerations, though they attest to extreme sensitivity, are quite useless.

I will take the match, I will set it on my lips burning with fever, attentive to the quick crackle before ignition, and then with a sweep of my arm, all I’ll have to do is toss it out the window into the nearest fountain overflowing with alcohol. And then…

Then I’ll walk away amidst the first cracklings of the conflagration flowing from fountains in streams, streams to pyres, I will walk out of the city, through the whirlwind of sparks the wind blows into every opening. Perhaps, all the same, I shall wear the asbestos jumpsuit for the sole pleasure of seeing it darken in the whorls of soot…

I will leave through the city’s main gate, careful not to turn back until I’m about to enter the maze of trunks covering the hillside. Then I’ll see smoke, hard and thick in curls and scrolls surging upward like a living tumult atop the towers, making them at last like the factory smokestacks of my imagination, and the conflagration will growl and rumble behind the ramparts with a mighty, muffled roar. When I set foot on the plain, I will turn back once more, to sear deep into my mind the image of the hill become a gargantuan pyre, a mound of flames in the middle of the desert, and listen to the heavy shuddering of the inferno.

When the final flames die away, I will turn back, scaling the hillock once more in the sharp crackle of charred bark. I will climb toward the summit, toward the blackened ramparts, hugging close to my chest the little box of white wood, with its schoolboy-notebook label of two parallel dotted lines framed by the usual thick pink margin. Gently, from the hollow of my palm, I will pour between the four walls of this paltry and fragile receptacle the ashes of a people as vain as the hope of success. At night, my nails sullied with blue ink, fingers tight around the slender stem of my little penholder, I must inscribe, in laborious calligraphy, the name of the city, the planet, and its inhabitants in writing my fiery breath will dry that very instant…

© Éditions Denoël, 1980

The post Sun of Sulfur appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

“The Ruins of Granada” (1899) is unique in that it is one of Spain’s first speculative fiction stories and its author, Ángel Ganivet (1865 — 1898), was known mostly for his “serious” writing which helped genre fiction enter the mainstream of Spanish literature. Early in the century, the distinction between “fantasy” and “science fiction” was more fluid than today and thus “The Ruins of Granada” evokes the feel of the “contes philosophiques”—philosophical tales used by early scientists in which a fictional frame provided the context for discussing a scientific theory. The influence of this predominantly nonfiction form can be seen in much nascent science fiction. We feature this story as part of our Strange Scifi Summer; the story was unable to be included in The Big Book of Science Fiction for reasons of space. If you enjoy this story, be sure to visit our interview with Marian and James Womack.

‘Would you care to come with me,’ a scholar said to a poet, ‘and see the ruins of Granada?’

‘I have, for some time, for a long time now, wanted to visit that corner of old Spain. If I am a poet, then I am a poet of ruins. There is nothing interests me as much nor moves me so deeply as contemplating the sense of hopelessness contained in the wretched remnants of things which once were and which now are not. If there is anything more beautiful than life, then it is the bitterness and disenchantment that existence leaves as its residue. Life is like a child who diverts us with his innocent games, and the ruins which life leaves behind itself are like a man of wide and varied experiences who always bears on his lips words that can explain great secrets.’

‘In ruins, what attracts me the most is the idea that they are places where something that we once knew only by reading ancient authors has been resuscitated or come back to life. And I prefer the ruins that are left behind after a catastrophe to those which remain after the destructive action of time; there is something natural about the ruins of Greece or Egypt, something that has developed over the years and which shows how briefly the work of man lasts, even those works that seem to be the greatest and most solid; there is more glory in the ruins of Pompey or London or Granada: these are places where life was suddenly brought to a close, and when they are excavated we discover a few centuries later life, exactly as it once was, petrified at the moment of its extinction. For me, a volcano, which can suddenly engulf a city, cover it in flames, is a sculptor inspired by pure chance. After some time, it is curiosity that opens such an immense sepulchre, and the marvellous work of art appears, the image of an entire civilisation, at a particular moment in the history of humanity.’

‘That is how an archaeologist sees it; there is a more beautiful way to interpret this vision; an artist does not see a petrified version of life, but a new kind of life, life in which man is no longer necessary, in which ideas live and interact in the very air, inspired by the poetry that rises from the ruins. I guess that the ruins of Granada will fill me with the idea of love, that I will sense there the sighs of a woman who loved much, who died loving, who loved so much that scented roses and red carnations grow over her grave, calling out to everyone who passes by…’

‘And is there poetry only in those vague ideas? Is there not also poetry in monuments that have been cast down, and in the skeletons of men? I have thought often about the discovery of the ruins of Granada and what it makes me think about is my desire to see a city suddenly annihilated. Historians say that the eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii was presaged by certain strange phenomena which spread panic and enabled almost all the city’s inhabitants to escape to safety. The same thing happened when London was drowned in the sea: the fact that the land was sinking was noticed a long time before the final catastrophe and the Londoners step by step abandoned the city in advance. But the volcano which some thirty centuries ago made Granada disappear forever without leaving a single trace was brand new and, as it burst through the earth’s crust with its lava, it did not leave any time for people to escape, so rapid was its appearance and so quickly did it carry everything away, from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada all the way down to the sea.’

‘Well let us head there at once, I am impatient to see these marvels.’

***

The poet and the scholar headed towards an aerostat station and ordered one to take them to the ruins of Granada.

‘Would you like to travel by the land route or the sea route?’

They had the option of seeing the ruins of London and of ancient Brittany as well.

‘We will go by the shortest route,’ the scholar replied.

‘In that case you should travel via Paris. It is,’ the chief aeronaut added, looking through his travel guide, ‘five thousand and seventy two ptometres.’

The travellers paid for their tickets and got into a small aerostat that was to be towed by a huge balloon that ascended rapidly until it was almost lost from sight. A little while later the balloon came down slightly and the aerostat, driven well by an expert aeronaut, began its flight to the South East, with a following wind.

After a brief and happy journey the travellers found themselves crossing the sky above Granada. As they had travelled, the aeronaut had told them the names of the countries and cities they were flying over, in case they wanted to descend. A few times they did go down in order to enjoy from the scent that rose up from the gardens they saw, or else simply to observe the cities with their inhabitants heading hear and there, busy as ants; at times they had to ascend so as not to knock against the peaks of mountains.

When they came to the end of their journey the aerostat descended until the travellers could see all the details of the dead city. The moon was full and the city was silent and the poet wanted to hear the voice he dreamt would talk to him; the scholar wanted to put together the plan of the city in his head and mentally reconstruct how life had been in the city when it had been alive.

‘I can see fragments of a Moorish city sticking up here and there, buried under mountains of rubble whose meaning I cannot determine.’

‘I am thinking,’ the poet said, ‘of a statue. In the middle of the city the ruins form an extended shape that looks like the reclining body of a woman.’

‘That must be the river which they say had gold in its sand.’

‘And the figure is broken in two, by heaps of stones that seem to be a woman’s waist.’

‘That must be a bridge over the river.’

‘And there are columns spread all over the right hand side of the body, that look like two crossed hands.’

‘That must be a Cathedral.’

‘And high up in the city, where the woman’s shoulders are, there is an eminence that seems to be a reddish pillow.’

‘That must be the Alhambra.’

‘And there is a head that lies on the pillow. It is such a perfect image! Everything is there. The mouth, the nose, the forehead…’

‘Those must be the palace and its turrets.’

‘…the dark splendid hair…’

‘That is all that is left of a forest that the lava burnt to ashes.’

‘And those eyes, that still sparkle so sensuously.’

‘Those must have been cisterns or pools, now filled with rainwater, sparkling in the light of the moon…’

***

When dawn began to break they went down to the ground, landing at the red mountain where the poet had imagined that he saw the head of the reclining statue, symbol of the dead city. The scholar walked over the ground, with its ruins and the typical flora of cemeteries, and he examined everything, looking for archaeological remains for his collection. The poet had stopped to look at some turrets, cut short and cracked, but still somehow standing; the only things standing in that desolate landscape portrait. He took an ebony box out of his pocket and stared at it, fixing his thought in it and on it, on a bright button in the lid of the box, and the ideophone started to sing, melancholically:

How silently you sleep,
you cracked Alhambra bones.
A dream many centuries deep
slips across your stones.
You sleep, and death is your dream
though death is far away.
Awake, for there soon will come
the fresh new light of day.
      Your walls in the light of the sun
are painted in shades of gold;
your walls in the light of the moon,
are lit by beams that are clear and pallid:
and you are asleep for ever,
though death is far away.
      In the firmament the stars
give you their colourless light,
wrapped in the shadowed arms
of the sad and blurry night,
and you are asleep for ever,
though death is far away.
      The silent breezes at dusk
rub themselves against you;
the savage autumn gusts
try as they can to rend you.
And you are asleep for ever,
and death is far away.
      A dream many centuries deep
slips across your stones;
should it reach down to your roots
your death would then be close.
Would that I could be like you
and sleep as the aeons passed
and fall from sleep anew
into nothingness at last!

***

‘Eureka!’ the scholar interrupted. ‘I’ve just made a most marvellous discovery. I have gone down this slope to a place near the river, and I thought that the ground under my feet sounded hollow. I started to dig and remove stones and I found I kind of storage chamber, and inside were several mummies so admirably preserved that I doubt that there are any their equal in any of the museums of the world.’

‘Let’s go then,’ the poet said, without much enthusiasm, putting his ideophone away. ‘I don’t like the sight of mummies all that much, but I am a little curious to see people who existed so many centuries ago. At least, I suppose the mummies are human.’

‘They seem to be; let us go and take a closer look.’

When they reached the mummies’ tomb, the poet and the scholar spent a long time uncovering them, touching them as little as possible, for fear that they would crumble away in their hands. This was an excessive precaution, because the mummies were entirely petrified, and could have been carried from one place to another like blocks hewn from a quarry. There were four of them, and they represented four different types of microcephalic mankind, the sort who lived in the world during the Metallic Age, the period between the nineteenth and twenty-second centuries. However, craneoscopic examination did show that they had attained a certain degree of mental development, roughly of the level of apodic man, that is ‘man without feet’, which existed during the age known as the Metallic Age, or the Movement Age.

All four mummies had irregular features, as their mouths were much larger than their eyes, which allowed one to infer that the people of that period spent more time thinking about eating than about seeing; all of them had beards, from which one can infer that this was an age without barbers.

The first mummy they examined had an extraordinarily well developed superior, or coronal, circumference, which fact suggested that this must be a vertical man, or as they used to say, a comedian (which is to say an individual who, whatever accidents he was faced with in his life, always landed on his feet like a cat).

The second mummy, as was absolutely self-evident once one had examined the smoothness and circularity of his skull, was a horizontal or lazy man, a type of which one can still occasionally find living examples in Araby, where one sees them lying down full length, melancholically dreaming in the hopes of paradise, a place that has been announced to them long since by their gods, to whom they still render homage.

The third example was curious, mainly because of the disposition of his spinal column, twisted almost into a bow; this mean that the man must have been one of the curved people, an optimist as they used to be called, given to agreeable living and laughter, and very poorly suited for tasks that required energy and application.

As for the fourth and final mummy, his posterior circumvolution was extremely pronounced—a clear sign of sensuality—and his skull was flat and angular, thus demonstrating his inverted or pessimistic nature, his desire to move against the flow. In short, he was filled with a kind of insubordinate and infertile energy, poorly adapted to the world in which he lived.

This, in brief, was the scholar’s opinion. And his conclusion was that if these four types represented the general constitution of the men who used to live in this city, then there was no way in which they could have developed to do anything useful or worthy, and that perhaps the volcanic eruption was providential. A result which allows us once again to see the way in which God’s actions with regards to his creatures are always watchful, healthy and beneficent.

The poet listened to all this and grew thoughtful; then he took out his little box and looked sadly at the ideophone; the instrument sang the following sad song:

THE SONG OF THE STONE

Life and death are but a dream
and all the world in dreams is grown;
dream is life itself to a man,
dream is death to the stone.

On your closed and dreaming eyes
one idea is drawn:
‘Worth far more than a man who sees
is the blindness of the stone.’

On your hard and rigid lips
one stiff word will form:
‘Worth more than speech to the man who speaks
is silence to the stone.’

Drawn from the depths of your breast
your hope is dead and gone:
‘Worth more than life to a man
is the death that lives in the stone.’

If life and death are dreams,
if dreams are the world alone,
I will give my life as a man
to dream in the death of the stone.

The post The Ruins of Granada appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This summer at Weird Fiction Review, we’re featuring weird science fiction stories that we uncovered while doing research for The Big Book of Science Fiction. To kick off this series, we’re featuring a story by early-20th-century German writer Paul Scheerbart. Another one of Scheerbart’s stories, “The New Overworld,” appears in The Big Book of Science Fiction.

Illustration by Helmut Glatz

“How is it possible,” said Mr. Töpfer, “to bear so quietly all the transformations that are allotted to us here on earth! Great innovations happen every day. Our culture develops at such a rapid pace that elderly people just can’t keep up anymore.”

“Take comfort in reading,” said Mrs. Malwine Pate, “we all must try to comfort ourselves by reading. Why else are so many books written and printed? That’s because we are supposed to read them. Forget the newspapers – read books.”

And so the conversation went between two old people in the great Andean hotel on the summit of Chimborazo, in the spring of the year 3300. Outside the snow was meters high, but in the guest room of the hotel a pleasant warmth prevailed. The morning sun glittered on the frost patterns of the big mirror windows, and Mrs. Malwine Pate asked Mr. Töpfer if she should read something to him.

“Yes,” said Mr. Töpfer, “do read. It helps to forget Europe and America. We are not obliged to always think about the transformations we witness on the surface of the earth. It doesn’t make anything better.”

“On other stars,” said Mrs. Pate, “you will find even greater transformations. I’m going to read a chapter to you which tells about such a transformation.” And Mrs. Pate read the following:

A Spoke In the Wheel

Klips looked like a round loaf of bread. And at the center of the star the Long-Legged Ones wanted to build a great palace. They began by ramming huge, long poles through the center, but that didn’t work out too well, because the poles sank into the ground too easily and went deeper and deeper – and found no support below. All efforts to prevent the sinking of the poles failed – the entire ground gave way and the Long-Legged Ones were forced to withdraw to the outer rim of the star. The builders got a spoke in their wheels: They were forced to give up constructing a palace in the middle of their star. Right there, a large, wide hole formed – a new abyss. And this abyss grew deeper day by day, and on the other side of the star, a huge mountain emerged. The mountain grew higher and higher, while the abyss became deeper and deeper. As the Long-Legged Ones were forced to live on the outer rim of the star, all of their life habits underwent a sudden change. They couldn’t climb the mountain that had formed on the other side, because the mountain grew hotter every day. Soon, the star looked like a pointy hat, and the Long-Legged Ones strolled along their new abyss and looked down into the opening. And they couldn’t enter the abyss, because it was very hot as well. Every inhabitant of the star had six long legs, which made it was impossible to walk much on the rim, because the rim became narrower and narrower. The worst thing was that many residences on both sides of the star were destroyed by the emergence of the mountain and the abyss. They had no idea where to stay. Everybody settled very closely to each other on the rim, and the Long-Legged Ones started to erect very high houses with hundreds of storeys. Then the Klipsians looked out of their windows into the new abyss, and they had no idea what it would lead to. One day, there was a horrible bang at the bottom of the abyss. And the abyss was torn apart deep inside, so that a huge hole was formed, through which one could see other stars in space. No one could explain the cause for this stellar transformation. But all the Six-Legged Ones lived now closely together and got to know each other – in the past everybody would have avoided everybody else as much as possible.

***

“Ah!” said Mr. Töpfer, “so the star has transformed only to bring the long-legged gentlemen closer to one another.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Malwine, “this seems to be the cause for the transformation. When something is transformed here on earth, then there is surely a good reason for that as well. We just can’t figure it out fast enough.” In the meantime, the frost patterns on the mirrors had thawed, and they looked out into the magnificent mountainscape. But when their eyes started hurting from the sheer brightness of all the snow, Mrs. Pate asked if she may read another chapter from her “Klips” novel. Mr. Töpfer agreed, and Mrs. Malwine read the following:

The Telescope

The view into the new abyss was very interesting for the Long-Legged Ones; they didn’t get tired at all of looking downwards, for it was very busy down there. Bubbles constantly rose up – and then a glassy mass took shape and gradually formed into a lens. And one day the Long-Legged Ones saw all the stars below greatly enlarged: A natural telescope had formed down there. Now everybody on the star Klips felt blissful, for the sight of the great stars was far more magnificent than everything else they had experienced until now. One could also see comets – just as if they were nearby. And there one could see distinctly that the comets were colossal light serpents with diamond heads – yes, it was quite visible that the heads sparkled like diamonds. And the strangest beams emanated from those diamond heads – in manifoldly arched curves. And then one saw in close proximity a multitude of little stars of all possible forms and shapes. Klips’ entire environment suddenly seemed to liven up. Some of the Long-Legged Ones were now climbing down into the great cauldron, and they realized that its walls were getting cooler bit by bit. And then there was much more to be seen down there; the whole world suddenly came alive for the Long-Legged Ones. Now they started building chain bridges which then connected both sides of the funnel. That’s how they discovered the locations/spots with the best view through the natural glass lens. And then so many bridges were built that all the Klipsians could settle in the center of the great crater. And there, right in the middle of it, they lived even closer together. But this transformation of the star was still not the last one in a long series of transformations. Single parts of the crust from the lower big mountain cone came off like pieces of skin. Slowly, they bent upwards and over the rim, so that on the rim of the planet high walls were formed behind those 100-storey-high houses; this finally rendered the entire star a colossal tube. And afterwards other natural glass lenses formed on top of one another in the lower part of the crater so that the Long-Legged Ones had to detach their chain bridges from the inner walls of the funnel. One had to constantly mount the chain bridges at much higher positions, which allowed an even better view through the ever-enlarging lenses. And as once again more and more lenses formed in the higher parts of the abyss, one had to go higher and higher inside the huge tube, until finally the peaks of the new walls were connected by chain bridges. This natural telescope improved more and more, and one could see better and better through the lenses. And one saw more and more – and more. And the Long-Legged Ones exclaimed in awe: “Who built us this telescope? Is our star so kind that it transformed into a telescope in order to please us?” And they didn’t know what to think of it. But they had no doubt anymore that their star, which they had called Klips, was an almighty, living giant; only they weren’t quite able to explain how it came about that a giant could transform into a telescope. But then they gazed even more closely through their star telescope and discovered now in many other stars so many more transformations that the transformation of their home star seemed perfectly natural. In order to honor their star, they called it from now on “The Great One” – and spoke of it with great adoration.

***

“That,” said Mr. Töpfer after Mrs. Pate had closed her book, “is quite a comforting story. If such transformations with those kinds of results take place on other stars, we actually don’t need to worry much anymore about the transformations our earth’s surface is destined to suffer.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Malwine replied, “the new swimming islands that have formed in the Great Ocean are likely to make our life only richer in the end.”

“And the great plateau in North Asia,” said Mr. Töpfer, “is probably also going to create something wholly new.”

At this very moment, the landlord entered the guest room and exclaimed breathlessly: “Ladies and gentlemen, just now I’ve received a telegram which says that rift formations appeared in the North Asian plateau. And out of these rifts brand-new, fire-red dragons came flying. And these dragons are very intelligent creatures; they claim that they’ve lived inside the earth for many millennia – and that they are glad to finally see the great sunlight.”

“That certainly sounds like a fairy tale!” said Mrs. Pate, but she read the telegram and threw her hands up in despair.

“How are we,” said Mr. Töpfer, “to endure all these transformations?”

“But,” exclaimed the landlord, “that’s no disaster! Now we don’t need to socialize only with humans anymore. I’m inviting the red dragon people over to stay a few years in my Andean hotel. That way I’ll always have a full house.”

And eight days later there already were two dragon people in the Andean hotel – and the landlord was beside himself with delight – and Mr. Töpfer, too – and Mrs. Malwine Pate – as well –

The post The New Abyss appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.