Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 40

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (Mountain)–Entry #26

Thanks again for keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. For those who haven't been following along, the story so far can be found here and the one additional entry since then can be found here.

If you like what you've been reading, please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance. Donations also keep me writing, because I will have to switch over to guaranteed paid work soon otherwise.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck.

"The smallest variation, the tiniest echo of a change would mean everything," Gabriel said to me about the new alt-Earth he had tasked me with placing under surveillance. This place where the people of the Far North had finally come down to drive out the European invaders. They followed the path of ancient glaciers, in numbers, set in their purpose, floating above them the vast, the luminous apparitions that were the ghost whales tethered to the minds of the spirit walkers. Made manifest to others through the strength of the connection. Walrus riders and a huge species of yak that had crossed the Bering Strait in this reality. Polar bears trained as soldiers. It had all been in place for some time; the question had simply been what forces would drive rival factions together into common cause and under a common leader.

Invasions, in my experience, usually did it. An invasion could be as initially benign as a trading mission or emissaries of some far-flung foreign religion. But little by little something in the intruding mindset could not let go of the strong impulse to impose, to intervene, to transform.

"The smallest variation," Gabriel had said, during one of our post-Marty conversations in the angels' library. I spent a lot of time there in my off-time, drinking in as many books as possible, always searching for some sign, some hint, of Marty's presence but also of something that might presage the angels' downfall. It was as if Gabriel sensed this was my slight rebellion, for that is where he sought me out, taking me away from my studies. Or perhaps he just thought it was a neutral site.

Gabriel now had become more skeletal in appearance, as if he'd lost weight, and this quality accentuated the lines of his cheekbones and made a kind of half-invisible light or glow emanate from his features. He would sit in the chair opposite me and start up on a topic out of the blue, as if continuing a conversation I didn't remember starting.

"There's no sign of your avatar in the winter city," he said another time. "No sign at all. We're afraid the presence we detected there may have killed him."

I knew this wasn't true. I couldn't tell you how, but I sensed that my avatar was alive. Could I prove there was a link between us, like the link between the northern peoples and the ghost whales? Some indefinable, ethereal, half-imagined line of connection that threaded its way through wormholes in time and space, that was limitless in length and would always be there. No, I couldn't prove it, but I felt as if it were there, in that moment, when Gabriel said what he did.

I made some noncommittal reply that indicate disinterest. I was still thinking about the ghost whales and the battle I had seen waged between the invaders' artillery and the diaphanous bulk of a ghost whale, its minder situated on a hill overlooking the rock-strewn valley that had once been a riverbed, where the main conflict raged. The shells shot into the whale's wraith-body, tearing great gouts of ectoplasm loose, only to wink out before they came out the other side. Retaliation took the form of a whale-song that beggared belief. After the first time I heard it, I had my luna moths (in this world muted brown-and-gray amid the stones) edit it out of the transmission I monitored. That first, that only time, I experienced the weapon that was whale-song, I felt as if despair had suffused me and I was a mountain who wanted to leap off the top of a mountain. There was a circular quality to the sensation that made me feel sick. I had a sudden image of creating avatar after avatar of myself at my base and each avatar climbing to the top of me just to jump to its death. Over and over again, forever. An assembly line of stark madness that once begun could never be turned off.

The sound itself seemed at first line the most mournfully beautiful music that anyone has ever heard in their entire lives. It emanated from deep inside the whales, in unison sometimes, and it echoed out and rattled the stones on the ground and overturned tents and sonorous fled out in all directions so that animals far distant would scramble for shelter.

The invaders tried to stuff their ears but the vibrations got into them through their mouths, into their skulls. They bit down on sticks, they inflicted pain and torture on one another to distract themselves. Something inside a few of them would, each time, malfunction and they would fall and writhe, and then be still. Others grew tolerant, and these were the infantry who were shoved to the front lines, to minimize the effects.

This form of whale-song did not last long, and this combat was not quite so one-sided as you might think, for ghost whales hit by too many artillery shells would break apart and dissipate, go back whence they came, while their minder on the hill screamed and screamed at the lost connection. Also, by some unspoken code or uncanny rule meant that the ghost whales did not engage in it unless first attacked…but the invader could not remain disciplined enough not to attack after a time, for the other effect of the ghost whales was that to be under their ghastly shadow for very long made the invaders forget their purpose. A soldier under that huge shadow would soon find an unnatural affinity with the world around him and cast aside his weapon and head for the wildest part of the landscape around him. Few of these soldiers made it far in their desertion to some more ancient imperative—shot by their own comrades or by the army come from the north. But even dying, cut through with bullets, half a leg shot away, such a soldier might be found admiring with something approaching the ecstatic a single sedgeweed or a sleepy bumblebee or a trickle of water from a dirty stream.

These details did not escape me, for often my humble luna moths would be right beside that soldier, powerless to intervene, and watch as they died in a foreign land, under foreign skies, for no good reason. And there were thousands of these individual stories to examine in detail each time the war raged up until the point where, for whatever reason, this reality re-set and everything went back to the point six months before where it had begun. Caught in a time loop, and the more I examined it, the less I could fathom the reason for it. Sometimes I wondered if the ghost whales or the other spirit connections had somehow interfered with the space-time continuum, but if so, I did not know how. And as I cross-correlated data and looked at every situation from every angle—noting even such details as the angle at which a soldier fell, so as to compare it to the last cycle—I became increasingly frustrated. There were no changes. Nothing I could discern.

I went amongst the commanders of the northern army after each cycle, when they started afresh their plunge south in a bid to cut the invader's army in two and thus also cut half of the men from their supply lines to the east. I thought I could notice a doppelganger of new hesitation, a sense of knowing they had done this before, but their orders were always the same. Any minute changes in tone of voice, for example, could be put down to my injecting my knowledge into the analysis.

What else did I know? No King Komodos came to this alt-Earth. No version of Marty existed here. No Industrial Revolution of the same scope and length would occur, just little outcroppings that the future would forget. While manipulation of the unseen world, both among the Europeans and those of the "new world," would proliferate if this hiccup were overcome. Gabriel said all indications were that the northern army would sweep the Europeans into the sea and establish a loosely-joined empire to last four hundred years while the Europeans descended into a malaise exacerbated by the late appearance of the Black Death.

In the library, I asked Gabriel, "Why is it so important to solve this mystery?"

He thought for a second, as if considering several answers. Then he said, "We should know the reason. We should already know." And a shadow passed across him and I heard an echo of a terrible sound, and he was gone again.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (Mountain)–Entry #26 originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on November 15, 2011.

Michal Ajvaz at Weirdfictionreview: New Fiction and Interview

(Image accompanying Quintus Erectus by Ajvaz, photo of Caplin Rous.)

We're very pleased this week to feature the brilliant Czech writer Michal Ajvaz on Weirdfictionreview.com, with an interview and two pieces of fiction. Please go check it out–direct links below. "Quintus Erectus" and the interview are exclusive to WFR.

The Miraculous Side of the Universe: Interview

"I was accused of being too weird by critics who were proponents of the realistic story. And I can imagine a book that is really too weird: a book whose weirdness doesn´t come from the soul of its author and which substitutes this absence of true weirdness (which doesn´t need to be too weird in many cases) by piling up superficial effects."

"Quintus Erectus"

"The quintus was extremely cuddly; but I must confess that its cuddliness wasn´t pleasant for me. When it tenderly nuzzled my face with its false face, where a tongue of an animal suddenly appeared in an improper place, and when the quintus began to lick me with it, I didn't feel good."

"The Secret War"

"The Europeans continued to hold to mathematics, even after they began to perceive mathematical equations and calculations as bizarre dramas, as evidence of the work of the same blind forces as those that cultivated logical deduction and flowed through ma­chines, forces which drove an unceasing, monotonous division and unification. The Europeans were made nauseous by multiplication because now they perceived it as a diseased swelling, a proliferation anterior to any kind of sense and order, a growth which had arisen by the dull repetition of the same numbers and their resigned coa­lescence in the whole."

Michal Ajvaz at Weirdfictionreview: New Fiction and Interview originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on November 15, 2011.

New Agent Representation and New Projects

Just a bit of official news: Ann and I are now represented by Sally Harding from the Cooke Agency. I'm happy to forward any inquiries about book rights or new projects to her, but the international rights division can be contacted at rights at cookeinternational.com and the Cooke Agency's general email is agents at cookeagency.ca. We've known Sally for awhile, referred writers to her, and we are happy to be represented by her. (Also thrilled that her clients include Karen Lord and Jesse Bullington.)

With The Weird anthology having taken up all of our time, we've been between projects, but I can say that Ann is beginning preliminary work on two anthologies she will be editing solo, we're sending out the bestiary antho soon (mentioned on this blog in the past), and we are together working on the ultimate, huge time travel fiction anthology, mostly reprints. In terms of my own fiction, I'm continuing on the Journals of Doctor Mormeck, finishing up Borne, and beginning to collaborate with Karin Lowachee on another project.

In addition, The Situation web comic with Eric Orchard is in the final stages of lettering, and will go up on the Tor.com website soonish. My other project with Eric, Bellysnatcher, is about one-third completed, and is based on a notebook of paintings and drawings he sent me. I also expect art from Richard A. Kirk in the next few months to start on Fungicide: New Tales of Ambergris.

Wonderbook: The Essential Illustrated Guide to Writing Fantastical Fiction, for Abrams Image, is now scheduled for spring 2013, giving me a little more time to finish it off. John Coulthart is the designer on that project.

Meanwhile, Weirdfictionreview.com has turned out to be a big success and will be a nexus for our other efforts over the coming years. This week we've already posted work by Leena Krohn and the latest episode of the web comic. Tomorrow, Michal Ajvaz, with Kafka on Wednesday.

As Ann and I go forward, we are eager to balance and realistically pursue our various passions, which basically take three forms: to be of use in preserving the history of fantastical fiction and adding to a general understanding of it, especially the weirder stuff, to continue to write the fiction that is most personal to me in conjunction with Ann's love for finding and publishing great fiction, and to be of use to the future of this kind of fiction through efforts like the Shared Worlds SF/F teen writing workshop.

Obviously, this is all a lot of work and a lot of things to keep balanced, and we're indebted to the wonderful people who have been willing to help us with much of it. This has made it a lot easier to make various efforts a reality, and we'll be specifically mentioning people soon.

One casuality of other projects, however, has been the Last Drink Bird Head service awards, which we simply were not able to get off the ground this year. We promise to find the resources to resurrect it next year.

New Agent Representation and New Projects originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on November 14, 2011.

Win a Copy of the Lambshead Cabinet: What Fictional School Would You Like to Attend?

Over at Weirdfictionreview.com we're running a little weekend contest. Go check it out and give us your choice for where you'd like to go to school…

Meanwhile, Des Lewis and Maureen Kincaid-Speller continue their explorations of The Weird compendium.

Next week I'll return with more of my serialized novel, The Journals of Doctor Mormeck and news about the US publication of The Weird (next year).

Win a Copy of the Lambshead Cabinet: What Fictional School Would You Like to Attend? originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on November 11, 2011.

Weirdfictionreview.com: Grotesque Art, Miskatonic U., Kafka, and More

(Sneak peek of next week's "Reading the Weird"–catch up on episode 1 and episode 2 before part 3 runs next week.)

If you head on over to Weirdfictionreview.com today you'll find a great piece on the grotesque in art by Nancy Hightower and an interview with Tanith Lee, on top of a Thomas Ligotti interview, fiction, and much more.

Tomorrow we're posting a sampling of eerie paragraphs from our The Weird antho and a Miskatoni University feature.

Next week, we have the next installment of our original webcomic, fiction from Finnish writer Leena Krohn, a feature on Franz Kafka, exclusive interview with Margo Lanagan (including an awesome photographed handwritten page with edits from her classic story "Singing My Sister Down"), and essays on Alfred Kubin. In addition, we will have two pieces of fiction (one new, one reprint) from famed Czech writer Michal Ajvaz, along with a new interview. And, to top it off, we'll feature our managing editor and World Fantasy Award-finalist writer Angela Slatter.

In future weeks, we'll be running fiction by Tanith Lee and Steve Rasnic Tem, original features on the likes of Michel Bernanos, and more interviews with Lucius Shepard, Stephen Graham Jones, Liz Williams, and more.

Here's a little snippet previewing next week's Ajvaz selections…

"The Europeans were made nauseous by multiplication because now they perceived it as a diseased swelling, a proliferation anterior to any kind of sense and order, a growth which had arisen by the dull repetition of the same numbers and their resigned coa¬lescence in the whole; they dreaded division because in it they saw disintegration, made more horrifying still by the unnatural disinte¬gration of wholes into parts of equal size. Addition was yet worse, as it meant a progressive decline in new units, heralding the de¬struction of all divided shapes and the enthronement of One that is nothing, the victory of the monster of the Whole."

Weirdfictionreview.com: Grotesque Art, Miskatonic U., Kafka, and More originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on November 10, 2011.

Compendiums, The Weird, and Life in General

It's been a weird week—one that started with receiving our The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories and also having my wisdom teeth removed, even as we continued to post a lot of content at our new site Weirdfictionreview.com. Painkillers have left me floaty, drifty, and susceptible to highs and lows, which is only intensified by The Weird itself. This is a project, clocking in at 750,000 words (TOC here), that has consumed our lives for two years. It's drained us, exhilarated us, left us for dead in pits of despair, energized us, and now it's real and out in the world. I've learned more from compiling this anthology with Ann than any other book we've done, and perversely it's both delayed some of my fiction writing simply because of the work involved and been essential to inspiring other pieces of fiction.

There is also, for the anthologist, and in this particular case especially, the overlay of ghosts as we flip through the pages of The Weird. We remember with intensity every hard-fought struggle for permissions, every obsessed tunneling through mountains of material to find what we sought. The moments of discovery and equally wrenching moments of feeling we were all-in and working on something that was rising claustrophobic around us in the form of stacks and stacks of books from the last century… which we would never see the end of. The frustration of thinking we wouldn't get a particular story only to keep pushing against a brick wall and have it give way. The endless end-arounds to supposed dead-ends that wound up working out. Those moments of being in contact with people who shared our enthusiasm and passion…and those other moments when we're fairly sure our ravings as we emerged from our self-imposed exile to interact with the world came off as incoherent babblings.

There's been nothing to compare with the unnerving, ecstatic, and at times truly horrifying nature of this project—not a book I've ever done that came close to the kind of endurance required, and even so, sometimes we're not entirely sure we came out the other end. Doing a book like this in the amount of time we had, ranging as widely as we did, leaves scars. You wonder sometimes if you've been strengthened by it or irrevocably weakened by it. is this the beginning of something or the end? Are we now in a kind of afterlife?

This no doubt sounds like melodrama, and I wish that on some level it were melodrama…but when you're in the middle of living it day to day this is just the reality of such a large and various project, one rarely attempted in the history of the genre. The secret history of acquiring these stories, of daily imposing one's will to overcome the inertia of the sheer staggering scope of it all, cannot even be told, of dealing with over one hundred negotiations across two editions of the anthology and print and ebook formats. There is still a question in our minds, and always will be, of whether The Weird was worth the strain it put on our lives and our friendships…but there is too in flipping through the anthology an overwhelmingly strong sense of pride and accomplishment. Together, Ann and I created an anthology that represents everything we love about literature and the book is out in the world. It is being read. It is being appreciated. It will be of use to new generations of writers and readers. It will continue to enrich our lives through everything we learned, all of that knowledge enhancing our future projects.

And when I flip through Gio Clairval's new translation of Bernanos' "The Other Side of the Mountain" or re-read her note-perfect translation of Cortazar's "Axolotl"—akin to experiencing a perfect symphony playing the perfect piece of music—I am transported into a reverie I can't really describe. Seeing Ben Okri next to James Tiptree Jr. and Elizabeth Hand. Daphne Du Maurier. Leena Krohn. Clive Barker. All of these stories that have meant so much over the years. Just as I remember picking up Alberto Manguel's Black Ice anthology in one of those magical moments that you know will change your life forever, we hope The Weird will have something of the same effect. Also, too, Weirdfictionreview.com would have been impossible without The Weird anthology, and working on the website has been an absolute joy and pleasure. It promises to be a nexus for our activities for several years to come, a place that coalesces and concentrates our enthusiasms.

In all of this, Ann has been my partner, and I hers. There is no one I would've rather survived it with, and if there is one unambiguous aspect of the struggle to make this anthology all it could be, it has been sharing the journey, the joys and the low points, with her. Even to the point that if the opportunity arises to do another massive book, of say international fantasy, I'd do it.

Compendiums, The Weird, and Life in General originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on November 10, 2011.

What Story Have You Always Known?

I am struck, in Maureen Kincaid-Speller's latest post about reading The Weird anthology, by the sentence "I cannot remember a time I didn't know this story." She's referring to Saki's "Sredni Vashtar," but I'm curious, dear readers, as to what story you have known as long as you've been alive? Or, at least, it seems that way…

What Story Have You Always Known? originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on November 9, 2011.

Weird Fiction Review: Ligotti, Jean Ferry Translation, and Intrepid Story-by-Story Weird Readings

Check out the latest entries posted at Weirdfictionreview.com today, including an extensive interview with weird fiction legend Thomas Ligotti and one of his favorite "under-rated" classics by Jean Ferry in our fiction section.

We've also got a post on some heroic readings-in-progress, story by story. As we say there, although there is a lot of coverage forthcoming for The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories in the UK is November 10 (Book Depository has free shipping to the US), in the meantime a couple of intrepid reviewers have already begun to tackle The Beast, story by story: D.F. Lewis and Maureen Kincaid-Speller. This is an act of extreme heroism, as far as we are concerned, no matter what their reactions to the anthology over all and we applaud them for it. Here are the relevant links to their read-throughs:

D.F. Lewis's "Real-Time Reviews"

(he also coined the term "srednidipity while reading The Weird)

–Post introducing the anthology and covering the stories by Alfred Kubin, F. Marion Crawford, Algernon Blackwood, Saki, and M.R. James.

–Post covering stories by Lord Dunsany, Gustav Meyrink, Georg Heym, Hans Heinz Ewers, Rabindranath Tagore, Luigi Ugolini, A. Merritt, Ry?nosuke Akutagawa, and Francis Stevens thus far, with the post being updated as Lewis finishes each new story.

Weird Fiction Review: Ligotti, Jean Ferry Translation, and Intrepid Story-by-Story Weird Readings originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on November 8, 2011.

The Weird on Weirdfictionreview.com This Week: China Mieville, Thomas Ligotti, Tanith Lee

(Corvus's page and Book Depository listing with free shipping to the US.)

As you may know from prior entries on this blog, Ann VanderMeer and I launched Weirdfictionreview.com this past week with a great selection of interviews, features, comics, fiction, and art. Week two is no different. Here's a run-down of what we posted today and, under the cut, previews from the rest of the week…

Excerpt from China Mieville's Afterword to The Weird compendium:

"These are strange aeons. These texts, dead and/or not, burrow, and we cannot predict everything they will infect or eat their path through. But certainly your brain, and they will eat the books you read from today on, too. That is how the Weird recruits….This is a worm farm. These stories are worms."

Reading the Weird, Leah Thomas's original web comic, episode 2:

"The point is it was awful. He liked attributing deep meaning to my brothers' lazy idiocy."

Webcomic Creator Leah Thomas Interview, talking about Sandkings, Scary Stories, and More:

"Is there any family that isn't weird? My parents are both full-time social workers, so 'weird' doesn't really exist for them anymore. In any case, I am grateful that they raised me on a steady stream of strange."

Classic Algernon Blackwood story "The Willows":

"But this cry found no expression, for as my eyes wandered from the plain beyond to the island round me and noted our little tent half hidden among the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out at me, compared to which my terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at all."

Coming up Tuesday through Thursday of this week:

Exclusive interview with Thomas Ligotti: "I believe that if a work of weird fiction fails the reason for its failure is that the author is innocent of the emotional states and experiences that are necessary if one is to conjure a sense of the weird in the reader."

Edward Gauvin's new translation of "The Society Tiger" by Jean Ferry, called an underrated weird classic by Ligotti: "The tiger walks in a fairly human fashion on its two hind legs; he is suited up as a dandy of a refined elegance, and the suit is so perfectly tailored it's hard to make out, beneath the gray flared pants, the flowered waistcoat, the blindingly white jabot with its irreproachable ruffles, and the frock coat fitted by a master's hand, the body of the animal beneath."

Exclusive interview with Tanith Lee: "My environ was quite strange also. My parents were dancers, moving endlessly where the work was. I was often up at midnight in glittering dance venues. And my parents and I would frequently discuss Hamlet, or Dracula – or Rider Haggard's She. I've no doubt all this had its due effect."

Nancy Hightower on the Grotesque: "The grotesque, however, is not a thing in itself. It's not a genre or trope or an "ism" that can be qualified by a time period. It is an operation, a process that occurs when one is caught in between a moment of humor and horror, or horror and beauty—held in perfect suspension so that neither overrides the other. We are left in momentary paralysis, unsure of what to think, unable to look away."

Ann VanderMeer on the Cute & Creepy Art Show, with video and gallery: "Last month something wonderful happened in Tallahassee, Florida – an event that brought together people from all walks of life and all artistic persuasions."

The Weird on Weirdfictionreview.com This Week: China Mieville, Thomas Ligotti, Tanith Lee originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on November 7, 2011.

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck–Entry #25 (Mountain) and Entry #19 (Avatar)

Thanks again for keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I've now topped 48,000 words. For those who haven't been following along, the story before these latest two entries can be found here.

If you like what you've been reading, please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance. Donations also keep me writing, because I will have to switch over to guaranteed paid work soon otherwise.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck.

Entry #19 (Mountain)

I have not felt like writing, even here, at the core of me, for several days. There is something about familiar routine that is comforting, and in absorbing my loss of Marty and what Gabriel has told me of how I was raised to be more human than mountain…I just have found it easier to go along with what seems normal. It is as if I have a wound that is taking time to heal, and that somehow I cannot truly think of rebellion until it does. I do not think this is a human feeling. It strikes me more as mountain: to let the seasons add to the dirt on my flanks, to let the plants become ever more overgrown, to study the ghost frogs that still cling to my sides like fleshy balloons, and only after I have let everything wash over me take action. This strikes me on a human level as a form of cowardice. This manifests in part of me as shame. This is a spiral of repetition that leads like roots into the core of me, here in this tiny space I have hollowed out where I need no heart and a tiny avatar of me sits down to write in a microscopic journal, the walls lit by a vague phosphorescent green glow.

I think back now to some of the experiments they had me "lead" or participate in, and I think: how naïve. How naïve to ever think that these beasts humans mistake for angels had your well-being in mind. What chaos within the Grim Lighthouse, what a charnal house…but regimented, orderly, stripped of the randomness, trading the sudden unexpected spray of blood for the formal precision of the scapel…is this any improvement or just an acknowledgment of the former? The times I looked into the depths of some angel-made vortex in the laboratory where spun tiny helpless creatures in a time pool, their flailing bodie no larger than the avatar writing these words. I could say I was a mountain. I could say, "I remove myself to a great height and look down and those looking up."

But through this smaller me I have a better sense of the scale of the world and my place in it. Even the compression of making such tiny marks on such a scrap of "paper" conveys a sense of this, even as it makes me somehow also more careful and precise. I like this feeling. It makes me believe I am encountering and cataloguing details no mountain could know: the drops of dew plummeting to the soil from a leaf; the cells within me that contain mirror-images of this hollowed-out heart of mine, my avatar bent over a desk, writing these words; the number of angels that could be shoved into the stairwell of the Grim Lighthouse and made to understand what they'd really done.

Perhaps my avatar, bear-eaten, komodo-devoured, knows better now, too…wherever he might be.

Entry #25 (Avatar)

We came up into the mountains in the forests of the Far East, long past any permanent settlements, the air so fresh it burned, the dark brightness of green leaves and bramble shapr, and the idea of war so very distant. Streams and rivers runneled and tore through the floors of valleys here and strange birds made mournful cries and bears would tumble by oblvious to me whether cloaked or visible. The wildlife had not yet become quite as accustomed to the ways of humans, beyond that of the original inhabitants, whose footprint was light, sure, and specific.

Down along the banks of one pebbled creek we walked, me and my Remnant, until we came to the place the Remnant had promised me existed: a little clearing, hardly twenty feet of open space surrounded by vines and over-looming trees. At the far side of the clearing, a ruined stone altar sat three feet tall, the top curving crumbled like a bowl. I walked up to the altar, a man-sized giant lizard with scaled, armored skin a steely blue. There was a scent oddly like honeysuckle and lime. Motes of dust and other…things…drifted and swam through the sunlight shimmering down into the clearing.

A stillness also permeated the clearing, but a monstrously watchful one. As if I had just entered unknowing into the maw of a vast beast whose jaws would close on me a thousand years. I felt fear of a kind I had rarely experience, but it was removed from me, remote, tempered by an odd sense of calm.

"Is this the place?"

A sneer from the Remnant, who had been somewhat satiated by the events of the day before, when a brigand had met his premature end.

Yes, this is the place, but the altar is just a marker. Look behind it, under the vines.

Overriding my caution, I did as the Remnant asked. I doubted my death would truly serve its purposes.

A murk of vines and dirt mixed with splintered shards of dulled sunlight behind the altar. The air was heavy here, pungent, and now I felt as if a hole might open up in front of me that led right through the world and out the other side, and that every inch of that tunnel, every crevice and curve, was infested with demons and devils and unspeakably deadly creatures.

But what I found after tentatively using my clawed hand to pull away the soil…was a rib and then another rib and two huge fangs, and an outcropping of an enormous skull, all of it so weathered and yellowed and porous with dirt and worms and the detritus of the forest floor that it fell apart in my hands.

You can bury it again, the Remnant told me.

"What is it?"

You know what it is.

"The bear?"

The bear that is your way home. The Seethers, the Mords, the Third Bears have these escape routes throughout the alt-universes, and very few know about them. The angels know they exist, but they don't know the location of this one.

"But the bear is dead."

You'll see, the Remnant said in a triumphant tone of voice. You will come here every few years and you will understand. Those bones will not be quite so yellowed. The skeleton will be not so dispersed. The seasons will change and change again. More war will come. More devastation, and years of peace, and you, visiting here, among those who truly live here, never aging, will one day, many decades from now, come to this clearing with the altar, and a Presence shall stand before you, and that Presence will be our salvation….In the meantime, I may find ways to entice you into a bit of fun, or maybe not, but the challenge shall be worth the time spent waiting for Seether.

***

Dear Pavlov:

I've finally reached what I sought, and even though I knew that the reaching didn't mean resolution—that I must wait, must be patient, it has come as a kind of shock. I must confess a part of me wants to leave this place now, find some other way, to wander the world in the interim…anything other than cling like a wraith to the same place, like a person hoping to reclaim a memory through repeated ritual. Yes, it is still there. Yes, it is going to save me. Yes, I must protect and guard it for my salvation.

Sometimes I wonder what my brother would do now—I do have a brother; so maybe these letters will hold your interest, by revealing secrets. Assuming I ever post them. Perhaps, too, if I write to you the sheer weight of the patience I will need, the resourcefulness, the not giving in to madness, will be more bearable….(I must confess this place is beautiful; it is not the place that distresses me.) And added to that, I still have my traveling companion, whose advice I must in part rely on, but whom I do not trust. For example, he may be reading this letter over my shoulder as I write it, and yet I wouldn't know. That is how sly and silent his ways can be.

I hope that you are as well as you can be, and with any luck I will someday post this letter, along with the others, and you'll open your post box to a torrent of messages from me, and you will visit me here in my self-imposed exile or I will visit you, and we will have a long, long talk over tea or spirits, and you will tell me even the most mundane things that have happened to you during this time you could not write to me.

I'll end this letter now as my friend is calling to me and his voice in my head, although I wish it were not so, is quite insistent, almost like fists battering on a padlocked door that is buckling but still holds.

Goodnight, Pavlov. My best to you and to all you hold most dear. – Your Friend, K

The Journals of Doctor Mormeck–Entry #25 (Mountain) and Entry #19 (Avatar) originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on November 6, 2011.