The Black Book revealed us all to Drew. Our names are written there.
We are not permitted to see the pages of the book.
I don’t mind.
“This is how long we have waited,” he says. “So many ragged centuries have the promises lain unfulfilled, gathering the weight of seconds and minutes and hours, while the messengers from Yuggoth prepared the way, while they mined what they needed from this world to build eternal cities for our souls.”
He turns a page.
The girl he found in Seattle tries to speak, and he pauses in his reading to listen. The noises she makes are no longer precisely words. We all think that she will be the first. She was pretty once, and now, transformed, she is beautiful. No, that’s still too small a word. “A flower,” Madeline says. “She will fold open like a rose, and the star winds will come pouring down from the sky and down from the mountains to scour the rocks and lift her up to the heavens. As you each shall be lifted.” We have to carry her up to and down from the roof now, the girl from Seattle. In the gray light from the television, her skin shimmers with colors I don’t know the names for. She was afraid, a few days ago, but now I don’t think she is. Fear of the passage is an affront to the messengers, Drew says. Fear is a poison that binds the minds of men and women to the same stone where Prometheus’ liver is devoured forever by the cruel beaks of hungry birds.
Yesterday, I forgot my name. It was an odd sensation, realizing I no longer knew what my mother and father had christened me, a few seconds of cold panic. But the panic was fleeting, and behind it was peace and assurance. We can’t carry our names with us on the journey that lies ahead.
Drew sets the metal cylinder at the center of the mandala. That will be his chariot across the void. Madeline also has a silvery tube. When we are complete, those of us whom he has brought here to the garden, then he and Madeline will have their own passage, which is not to be the same as ours.
I believe my thoughts do not flow as they once did.
I can almost remember being some other way.
He reads from the book the lines about the flood, and the lines about the crack in the earth that lies below the waters of the flood. The book calls the flood Jachin, and it calls the crack Boaz. We were all taught the wrong words for things, a sleight of hand perpetrated by the Old Ones who would forever delay our escape. We were taught to call the crack San Andreas, and we were taught to call the flood Salton. In names is all the power of a splitting atom, and if you steal names, you steal hope. I go down to sleep each night, and swim among the fish that swim the flood. The tilapia are iridescent angels that glide silently above the muddy, silt-shrouded bottom, and the sun filters down through the seraphim phantoms of croakers and orangemouth corvina. “On a day very soon,” says Drew, “Boaz will shudder, and Jachin will murder her own. And we’ll know, then, that the day has arrived.
“It’s so close now. Cross my heart and hope to die. Bo and Peep, Doe and Ti, as you are the Children of the Next Level.”
There isn’t only the television and the burring voices buried in the static. There’s also an old record playing on the turntable, a diamond needle setting free the Beatles even as our blooming shells will soon set free our souls and even as the fruit of our passage will liberate a million more. The music is a counterpoint to the TV, and it gives me comfort. So, we have the commingled symphony of white noise, the messengers, Lennon and McCartney, and the words read from the Black Book. Taken together, this is the Third of Seven Trumpets. And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. It’s a poem, we are told, and a poem is a metaphor, and we take the stanzas literally at our own peril.
Just before dawn, I watched the lights that sometimes come to wake us, blue and crimson and purple. The lights that dance above the desert and dance above the house and dance above us all.
“Did you hear that?”
“Did I hear what?” I asked the boy that Drew and Madeline found in a whorehouse in Las Vegas.
“It was like someone crying, a long ways off.”
“No, I didn’t hear that,” I answered, and then I asked him not to talk so much.
When was that?
My memories are like the waters that flow down to Jachin, losing themselves to the brine, saltier than the sea.
Drew closes the book and lays it next to the cylinder. Beyond the thin walls of the house, the messengers are moving about, and they are as angels. Their wings tremble at a frequency that sets our bones to humming. They click their chitinous song, so here’s another layer added to the symphony. Blackbird singing in the dead of night, all your life, you were only waiting, take these broken arms, my broken heart, our ruined lives, and fold us into thee. Blackbird singing . . .
Seven for a secret never to be told.
All will be revealed.
The girl from Seattle sort of whimpers, and “Hush,” Drew says. “Hush, hush, hushabye, my sweet.”
Blackbird singing . . .
I bow my head (which isn’t as easy as it was yesterday), and I listen to Drew as he translates for us.
“It begins here, with the seeds of your becoming, but the star winds will be a ferry, bearing the gift of the messengers far and wide. All those devils in their secret bunkers and Federal marble halls, all their conspiracies and machineries will have been for nothing. Their plots will be undone by each inhalation of the very same ones they’ve tried to damn. You will be drawn in through unsuspecting mouths and nostrils, down throats into lungs and bellies. So fuck their digital revolution, and fuck their Office of Spectrum Management. In the end, it will profit them not one whit. The faceless agents in their black suits and narrow ties, those sons of bitches who did their best to bury the Holy Visitations at Kecksburg, Roswell, Tunguska, Spitsbergen island, Paradise Valley. Call them X, Y, Z. Call them what the fuck ever. They’ve lied, and they’ve intimidated all the world over. They show up on doorsteps. They peer through windows, keyholes, and glory holes. They intimidate and spew false intimations. They are the demigods of stasis, and this is the week of their downfall, come round at last.”
I want to close my eyes now.
Soon, pilgrim. Soon.
Thud. Skitter. Thump. The messengers are on the roof now.
“They came to a fortunate, chosen man in Vermont, way back in the autumn of the year 1927. But those faceless men interceded, and sure, they might have won that round, but what’s on its way, they’ll rue the day. When the globe becomes a grove, and the sky is sooty with clouds born of the believers’ cast-off shells, they’ll weep at the futility of all their sour endeavors. Even now, children, they scheme and scramble, deluded, drawing plans for that final battle. All in vain. They’ll roll through the night in black panel vans and ebony Cadillacs, four horses of a misbegotten apocalypse. They’ll come to our door. But they’ll come too late.”
Hosanna.
World without end.
Amen.
7. All Along the Watchtower/Midnight City (1927, 1979, 2015, 2043, & etc.)
YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE, until you aren’t anymore.
This is the First Law.
Thirty-nine thousand feet above the North Atlantic, Immacolata Sexton surfs the oily waves and troughs of Then, and Now, and What Will Be. The steel thrum of the Gulfstream G280’s turbofan engines are the best lullaby she has ever known, and she’s just about heard them all. Though her eyes may well be open, and though she may respond when the flight attendant speaks to her, her present cognitive state in no way resembles wakefulness. The plane races towards England at Mach 0.80, while the consciousness imprisoned in her living corpse knows no meaningful speed limits and travels in all directions simultaneously. She is the perfect voyager day-tripping an ever-expanding continuum of space and time without ever leaving her seat. She’s a quantum-foam tourist, unanchored, unfettered, and her hajj has neither a beginning nor an end. Number lines are for squares.