that was the task set before him. Others had failed. Replacements waited hungrily. More tempting, to Denker, was that capacity which Apollonius Rhodius coined as 'the poetics of uncertainty,' itself reducible to the twentieth- century argot of doing a wrong thing for the right reason.
All this citation makes Denker sound stuffy or cloistered or pretentiously intellectual, so I need to give you an example of the man's humor. He referred to the book as his «ultra-tome-bo» — at once conflating the Spanish
(He further corrupted
I hope you can follow this without too much trouble. Sometimes my memory itself is like a book with stuck- together pages; huge chunks of missing narrative followed by short sections of overdetail. If I have learned one thing, it is that harmonics are important. You may sense contradictions in some of what I am telling you, and I would urge you to look past them — try to see them with new eyes.
Denker's so-called scientific fraud was revealed when his device was taken from his stewardship and disassembled. The machinery held a bit of nuclear credibility, but the heart of the drive was an iron particle accelerator that resembled a World War Two-era sea mine, a heart fed by cables and hoses and fluid.
Empty inside.
Because Denker had removed his fundamental component — the book.
Having spent three-quarters of a billion dollars in corporate seed money and suffering the deep stresses of delivery-to-sched ule that such funds can mandate, Denker cheated the curve. Science failed him, but when he combined science with sorcery, he was able to give his backers what they thought they wanted. All he had to do then was word his interviews precisely enough to feature that hint of arched-eyebrow evasion as to method. Money was already coming at him from all sides.
Most people don't know exactly how an internal combustion engine functions, but they drive automobiles. In kind, Denker's device could transcend space-time boundaries; the point was that it worked. Never mind that on the other side of the boundary might be a group of surly cosmic Vastators, or the displaced First Gods of our entire existence, itching for a rematch now that we have evolved, devised technology, and gotten ourselves so damned civilized.
A long time ago, I used to have a lit-crit friend who was enchanted by the idea of haunts — in particular, living quarters in which resonant works of literature were conceived, the way that James M. Cain wrote
My interest was not in Denker's book. That seemed too risky. So I sought out the place where Denker's book was not so much
The locale, you might have guessed. It is dead now. The structures engird no whispers. The «charge» was long gone, if it ever existed. No negative energy. No ghosts.
Because it had
By then, naturally, the world was dealing with other problems. Disequilibration was, in many ways, the most predictable outcome.
Throughout history, certain individuals had sought to destroy the book, not realizing the futility of the attempt. In the state Denker used it, it could not be destroyed. It could only be discomponentialized — taken apart the same way it had been put together. Except now that it was whole, it could only be handled in certain limited ways, and none of those would permit its possible destruction. Again, as I have said — contradictions. Did Denker have the book, whole and entire, in a single place? We may never know. Thus, when I reference 'the book,' we are speaking of whatever grand assembly Denker managed, which stays in my mind as his true achievement.
One mishandling of the book caused peculiar incipient radiations — or new colors and sounds, if you will. Unfathomable byproducts and side-effects. This was one reason Denker insisted his cumbersome bronze-and-cast- iron device had to be tested in outer space.
This achieved two important goals: It removed the book briefly from the physical surface of the Earth, and it guaranteed Denker's deception would be a long time unraveling.
I saw in Denker's journals that he noted, early in the experiment, that animals were profoundly affected by the proximity of the book. Animals lack the ameliorative intellect by which humans justify insanity.
If one is inflexible and devoted to an illusion of normalcy — stability, permanence, reality — then the break is always harsher. The more rules there are to violate, the more violations there will be, because what we call reality is an interpretative construct of the human mind; a reality we re-make every day to deny the howling nothingness of existence and the meaningless tragedy of life. Bacilli have no such concerns. They just are. They can't be horrified or elated.
Denker's two safety margins were time and space. Many of his translations — the words from the book — were not meant to be in the same place at the same time, not even as ones and zeros in a database. The whole of it, as I have said, was tricky to handle. There was no manual for this sort of thing. This was completely new, untried, unsaid, undone.
In the end, Denker realized that ultimately all his equipment was not needed. The physical hardware briefly won him that fickle Nobel Prize, but all he had really needed was the book. He had already achieved what we have agreed to call a break from reality, but in the end people are more comfortable saying that he just snapped.
I think it is overreachingly grandiloquent and silly to blame Denker for the downslide of the entire planet. Haven't you noticed that long before the incident, we had already become so biosensitive that we could not even travel without getting sick? I think the Earth is simply evolving, and it is not
In the midst of all that I have told you, it might be said that Denker himself fragmented. His mind went elsewhere.
And if you could find me, you could probably find Denker too, but it's not really Denker you're interested in, is it? You're after the book, just like the ones before you.
Now, of course, the fashion is to impugn Denker for the way the sky looks at night. For the night itself, since I have heard that the sun no longer rises. I have not been able to bear witness to the other stories I have heard about the freezing cold or the sounds of beasts feeding.
But once I find a way to free myself from this room, I am going to seek out Denker and ask him to explain it to me.
Inhabitants of Wraithwood
W.H. Pugmire
W. H. Pugmire is a widely published and popular author of Lovecraftian stories, including the volumes
I awakened to the raucous cry of crows and pushed my torso away from the tree beneath which I had fallen asleep. Where the hell was I? I remembered deciding not to return to the halfway house where I was completing my time for three counts of bank robbery, after doing two years in federal prison. I think the prison officials let me out early because they were impressed with my intellect and good manners. I had been the first inmate on record who had requested a one-volume Complete Works of Shakespeare. I ain't no intellectual, but I've been raised by a woman who taught literature and art in college. One of my fondest memories was of my seventh birthday, when Mom took me to a thrilling production of
