don’t have to claim any form of affection for them. They’re here, they’re not going anywhere, they don’t give a tinker’s damn if you believe in them or not (it won’t stop them from going Ruben on your ass), and … oh, yeah, by the way: They are not happy with us.
[So very not happy with us. The title of this piece should have given you a subtle hint as to the depth and breadth of their unhappiness with us.
[I would, however, completely out of context for reasons that are my own but that I hope you’ll eventually pick up on, like to paraphrase a line from the film version of The Exorcist for the benefit of my own conscience: I may mix some lies in with the truth, and truth with the lies.
[As to the matter at hand … it’s after midnight; time to let it all hang out.]
A
is for Abomination; it is also for Aberration, Abhorrent, Abortion, Atrocity, Awfulness, and several other words beginning with the first letter of the alphabet in many different languages, all of which — whether you can spell or pronounce them or not — amount to the same thing: Omigod, look at that ugly fuckin’ thing, somebody kill it quick! Many of these beings (which have feelings that are easily hurt, believe it or not) struggle up through Stygian depths yet to be imagined, let alone discovered, by paleoseismologists (who’d be the group to first find the traces) to get here; others cross time, space, dimensions, and take dangerous shortcuts through the multiverse in their attempts to make friendly contact. And what do they get for this? At the very least, they get called all sorts of hurtful names. One of them explained it to me in these terms: “Imagine driving way out of town to your family’s home for Christmas. You’re driving through a blizzard — we’re talking real Second Ice Age, Big Freeze stuff here, right? A drive that should have only taken thirty minutes takes you damn near three hours, but you finally get there. You’re exhausted, you’re starving, your bladder’s the size of a soccer ball, but the sight of the warm holiday lights within your family’s home makes it all worthwhile. You head up to the door, your arms filled with all these great, terrific, really killer boffo presents, and you let yourself inside, all smiles and Christmas greetings for everyone, filled with the spirit of the season — I mean, it may as well be the final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life. First thing that happens — your grandmother takes one look at you, her eyes roll back in her head, and she drops dead from the terror. Then the children as one scream in horror, shit their pants, and run for the basement. Your mother grabs a carving knife the size of a machete, Dad fires up the flamethrower he’s had in the downstairs closet since his two tours in Vietnam, and your sister starts hosing the room with a TEC-9. Now, don’t you think that would put a bit of a damper on your disposition? Hmmm …?”
B
is for Bogeyman, also Bogieman, Boogeyman, or Boogieman. Doesn’t really matter how you spell it, or what variation he takes on in whichever country where parents still use him to emotionally scar their children at as early an age as is possible, outside of a seventies disco song by KC and the Sunshine Band with a killer bass synthesizer line, he doesn’t exist. He never did. Stop using him to frighten your kids. This really sticks in their collective craw. Suck it up and be a parent and exercise well-tempered discipline like you’re supposed to, or use condoms next time, fer chrissakes. You’re supposed to be adults.
C
is for Colophon. You have been led to believe that this denotes a publisher’s mark or logotype appearing at the beginning or end of a book. It is not a mark; they are a race of parasites that came to Earth hidden within the binding of The Book of Forbidden Knowledge, the text that the Fallen Angels stole and gave to humankind during the first War in Heaven (which was technically more of a skirmish prompted by the Great Mother of all hissy fits, but that’s neither here nor there). Once The Book was entrusted to humankind — giving to it, among other things, the knowledge of Language, Music, Poetry, Art, Science, Writing, Dance, etc. — the Colophon scurried from their hiding place and began, bit by bit, to destroy the first of the Forbidden Gifts: Language. Before the Egyptian coffin beetle, before the advent of nanotechnology, before the first cancer cell ever set up shop in a sentient being’s bloodstream and began chewing away from within, the Colophon, smaller than all of the aforementioned (their initial number, which has now increased ten-million-fold, was somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred and seventeen million to the two hundred and sixtieth power) have been amassing their forces for a nonstop assault to take back language from the human race. The Tower of Babel was their first truly Great Victory against us. Other victories have been smaller, but get enough scratches and you can still bleed to death. Example: Have you begun to notice how, suddenly, no one knows the difference between a contraction and a possessive? Or how quickly ink begins to fade from the pages of books? Or how, regardless of how many times you reload a page online, you keep getting more and more garbage characters? These are just a few of the Colophon’s tactics. Their ultimate goal is to erase all printed language and destroy all digital language. Armed with the totality of this knowledge, they’ll enter our brains and wipe out all traces of even the basest form of verbal and written communication. We will be left with only the most vague, nebulous wisps of memory that we were once able to exchange ideas through sounds that came out of our mouths or were represented on the page by arcane symbols. We will lose the First Gift because we were not worthy to possess it in the first place.
D
is for the Damaged Ones. [Author’s Note: One of mine.] As an eight-year-old child I awoke in the woods in the early hours of dawn, naked and shivering where they had left me after they’d finished the night before. I tried to stand but my legs were weak and my feet too slick with the blood still trickling from my backside. I crawled forward, wondering why I was covered in silver quills. They weren’t quills, but needles that had fallen from the pine tree under which they had left me. The needles had become soaked in dew, and in the first rays of dawn, the thousands of them over my body looked like quills or gray fur. I stopped crawling when it felt as if my chest were going to explode. I stopped crawling when it felt as if things were falling out of me from back there, where I could not turn my head to see the trail. I stopped crawling because there was no place to crawl to, and no one waiting there for me. I raised my head and saw a great wolf standing so close to my face I could feel its hot breath tickle my matted hair against my scalp. “Are you a werewolf?” I asked. The great wolf shrugged. “That is one name for us, I suppose.” I began to cry. “Are you going to bite me and turn me into a werewolf, too?” The great wolf shook its head. “There’s no need. You have already been transformed. You will forever be marked. You are now no longer part of the human world. You are a Damaged One. No curse, no bite, no full moon is needed to steal away your humanity. You are a monster, as are we all.” I lived through that night, and I remember well the words of the great wolf on that morning. There is no need to be bitten, no reason to be cursed. On the street, nearly every time I venture out into the world — which I try to do as little as possible — as I walk I look up and see another one of us. Our eyes meet, and we know each other like members of the same family. Our eyes flash silver. They flash loss and anger and regret. Then one of us always crosses the street. It is not yet time to acknowledge each other’s existence. There is, it seems, much more damage yet to be done. [Author’s Note: Some mornings, as I begin to shave, I think of all the anguish that I’ve brought into the lives of those who love or have loved me, and I wish for a straight razor instead of one with a disposable blade. Then the mirror flashes silver and for a moment my eyes are gone and in a blink it’s just another bright, bright, sunshiny day.]
E
is for the Elder Gods (often mistakenly referred to as “the Great Old Ones”). They’re actually not nearly as old, or as powerful, or as frightening as they’d like for you to believe. Lovecraft [Author’s Note: Or so say those dictating this to me.], it turns out, was not a good choice for a PR man. Seems old Howard, aside from having more than his share of whack-a-doodle tendencies inherited from his schizophrenic mother, was not only paranoid but something of a racist to boot. He ran to a neighbor’s house in a shuddering panic because he was convinced that he’d discovered a cluster of “Negro eggs” in the basement of his home. Thus did he begin to graft his anti-human, pro-uncaring-universe philosophy into what they told him. All of that gobbledygook in all of the so-called Mythos stories? Mostly recipes and gossip. [Author’s Note: They speak of this with a curious mix of embarrassment and rage. One of them added this: “Do you think anyone remembers that Cthulhu was an extraterrestrial and his ‘house of R’lyeh’ was a goddamn spaceship? Oh, and let’s not forget where R’lyeh was located — at the bottom of the freakin’ sea! Now, you tell me — would you have any real primeval fear in your heart for a race of beings whose giant, bat-winged, slobbering, tentacle-faced leader — supposedly possessed of all the knowledge from pre- and post-history — didn’t have the sense to install something akin to a GPS system in his ship so he didn’t drown everyone when they landed? Yes, they’re really big. Really big. And most of them are dumber than a bag of hair. But
