To the reader, sonic partnership for your journey through the codex: https://alchemisland.bandcamp.com/track/somme-nambulent-i
1916. The violent tapestry of a red century’s troubled childhood is invisible beneath the bloodstains. The war which was to end before Christmas drags on into its second year of breakless harvest. On the shattered continent the rutting stags of European royalty vye for final supremacy. Winner takes all the marbles.
The blood related leaders of the warring factions like a cadre of pale ghouls. Black and white photographs of them during the balmy long summer before the War, lunching in Europe’s great houses. They are pictured at revel, in Babylonian splendor. The tastemaking jewels hung at their necks full of cursed stones. The finery in which they are swaddled doing little to distract from incest’s queerer revenges; boss eyes, corpse complexion, misshapen countenances dripping down onto themselves like water damaged paintings. Here, the dumb, the fat and the short of breath would encounter the pithy sleights and insults that mutated into a bloodtide.
Europe is a ruin. Great firestorms can be seen from the cliffs. Sunburst tornadoes of animate fire pasting infernal light against the pallor of Dover looking out onto them. An ocean black as a tramp’s nails the perfect canvas. Along its ceaseless surface destructive shapes collude.
Exquisite pawns are placed upon the chessboard. Pawns whose like the Martian arts had never gazed upon before. Death dealing pawns in odd bondage masks, who wield strange arms and haunt the shell battered remnants of French fields or wade through impossible terrains: the sickly mustard nimbus permanently floating above the clod like a ghost ocean: like a vast punchbowl of blended canaries, like a bathtub of homemade ochre, like the fading ectoplasm of a burst sun.
Death visits every home along the coast. In Renaissance dreams, anxious mothers run fingers through their fallen sons’ dirt matted hair. More than the crotal shriek of passing bombers, the civilian populace fears the underboot gravel crunch, the heel toe prescription walk of an army man on the drive. They spend evenings around a wireless listening for pronouncements. Inflated propaganda, delivered with aristocratic aloofness. A hundred killed landing at Calais. Mary Celeste troop carriers haunting the marinas of the future.
Surreality reigns. Along coastlines, war priests erect military temples. Odd zoetropes, factories and fortresses and fastnesses built from black stone like the impossible geometries of Lovecraft’s manses. In the factories the limping artificers forges are alight with the urgency of Ragnarok. Day and night workers toil in boiling heat. Amoral foundries staffed by Scouse Andvaris vomit out armaments whose divine power compels one to reexamine old stories of mythic wonder weapons with more credulous eyes. Further we fly into the propellers of the future, more we evince myths of awesome antique power not as mere over-reverence of forebears but rudimentary occult knowledge of nuke-addled futures. Atlantis neither myth nor ancient history, but prophecy. Only the impossibly heavy knowledge of atomic science enables mankind to ascertain the alarming truths which his ancestors of equal or greater cogence had occulted into the mythic canon.
It is in this environment that we find one private Wilson.
Men smoking roll ups line trenches. Muddy golems with king’s crowns where a rabbi’s parchment should be. They do not speak, acknowledgement is seen as a conference of misluck. If they choose to speak, ironical jest and macabre humor lands best. Little talk but much song: songs of steel, shrill choir of android noise, autistic symphony of variations on the theme of metallic clashing, honey coated hero songs from Welsh and Highland fusiliers whose warrior blood dispelled all fear. Here at the Front which was the center, all ides are bewared.
Bestride the duckboards the wary kneel with blackened faces, like ghost fearing Minyans. Scrawny men regard with jealousy the blood bloated rats. Tangy adrenalized blood emboldens rats, who if cornered will leap at sensitive parts. Men craft protective charms, whittling idols and beads from diminutive vegetation. Bitter roots entangle here. Only hardy plants grow, those sufficiently alien in origin to filter out the poisons leached into the soil. Perverse regeneration occurs at the temporary cessation of battery. Strange fronds. Weird hanging trees with malleable branches, more tentacle than limb. Flowers petalled sun yellow with scarlet calligraphy along bold fringes, sprouting from thick stamens designed to spite guillotines. Butterflies with markings redolent of human forms, enormous lapping wings like the gaudy ears of silk elephants.
Ignuus Fatuus flares soar up and hang in the air, reigning temporary day. Animate fireworks who long to prolong their paltry radiance. The glory of a thing at its end; realization of hitherto occulted virtues in the shiver of death-cast shadows.
The light they shed is ill. Albino ferns of eggshell sparks audaciously blazing above the ruination. Coils of spicy gas like lung-biting ghosts rise from rent canisters sticking out of the mounds; warped canisters like mace dented platemail. The low moon is like a tallow vision of Death’s ceaseless scythe, at harvest the livelong day. Around the weird corona of the flares, encroaching dark like avalanching coal.
The hellscape is illuminated. Bodies riddled with bores easily accessible to rats and carrion things which make subterfuge of wilting flesh. The vampiric moisture in the blood fed bogs leach organic compounds of color with alarming rapidity. Skin like the pale ashes of burnt witches peeks through cloven clod. Shot bodies alchemise into pungent puddles. K&C magazine says Germans dip grenades in human puddles so that poisonous shrapnels are seeded by their explosion.
Foggy lakes of unknown depth formed in shell craters drag the unfurtive to ancient bog deaths. The lake surfaces psychedelic with oil adopt a predatory stillness. The war-tired lose their wariness and the scopes of nature’s hireds train upon exhausted, half-mad hearts.
Ardent of zeal, Private Wilson volunteers for a suicidal reconnaissance mission across no man’s land. In embryonic voiceless verse Wilson writes of conflict in the voice of Homer. Of a lust of glory coiled within the visceral citadels of his inmost, that longs glorious death. The visorless helm of sense of duty compels him toward the ultimate alienation that is death. Wilson’s boots struggle for purchase on the ladder. Further along the line kneeling men raise bayoneted helmets above trench lips then grimace at the infernal immediacy of returning sniper volleys. Wilson’s back dangerously exposed as he dismounts the ladder, clumsily flinging one leg up and over. He drops on his front and does not cushion his fall. Prone, he slides until he reaches the network of rat tunnels criss-crossing no man’s land. The muted noise of Wilson’s passage seems deafening.
Floundering among corpse lights. Spectral topiary of rising gas. One hundred sickly hues expressing a nauseous palette, extending from vomit green to the flameborn olive of pus pregnant gashes. Wilson zips past oddly neat shelves of skulls where huddled troupes had been killed all at once by falling shells. A mud grotto into which the bones had been occulted by constant churn. Tumult capped, the worm churches of their empty eyes stare out at Wilson and fear climbs the ladder of his vertebrae like an orgasm gone wrong. Horrifying, horrors visit him. Past traumas from war and long before hound him. He recalls books he read concerning the gruesome barter of Aztec religion, whose priests bribed the sun with human life on the gore hot tips of pyramids with foundations of sacral bones. Out here one million markerless graves. Out here one million cures for lust of blood flourished.
Though Wilson has pored over the ratway maps, etched them into his eyes, war’s glitchy static spins reality and steals his sense of direction. Now on his hands and knees, Wilson bounds like a burning dog through light flooded canals. He moves instinctually, while a heightened reality exaggerates incoming sensory data. His automatic functions must be manually sustained. Without conscious effort his breathing ceases and makes his chest tighten like an anorexic’s belt.
Overhead an exploding bomb ripples the midair. Fast fading circlets of black smoke spread out from it then slough into dark wisps like Djinn glimpsed through a broken telescope. Where Wilson opts to tarry he impresses himself upon the soft ground. Beneath him, a sucking Typhon womb which uses the soldiers it eats to gestate abominations. Mud slides endlessly, lending flux to the landscape. Solid ground offers neither friction nor purchase; it is like the sinking cobbles of some ill conceived marsh city. Wilson’s slightness enables him to torpedo himself along the slick ratway basin. He slices puddles and parted tides exhibit themselves like raised wings. Barking spasmodically the metronomes of death carve their erosive horizontal axis through the midnight air.
He plunges on, noting with trepidation the mounting presence of human remains; to either side the ditch banks consist more of bone than soil. Packed tightly the trepanned craniums. Ribs and fingers jutting out. An assembly of marrowed staves, such as Isis gazed upon when she arranged her brother-husband’s elements for resurrection. Wilson sees that this impossible ossuary contains gargantuan skulls, long narrow skulls from Atlantis, bunched skulls with thick collar bone eye sockets, skulls yet sporting swarthy flesh with retreating edges, like dying leaves. Skulls real and imagined shift beneath him.
Flares loom a half klick ahead. He arrives at a circular clearing, exhibiting faint recognition in him. On the tripod of his right arm, he rises to his knees and pygmies forward, hugging the earthen boundary which girdles the clearing. Camouflaged by accreted filth, he is like a shambler who walks the night unseen. He rises to the lip, invisible save for the azure catch of his eyes, and peers over. Cunning fox light bathes the enemy trenches that he is to sketch. He stares out an insane stare, comprehending nothing. The mad cartographer attempts to reason but the shattered crystal ball of his mind offers nothing prescient. Still, some cogent part of private Wilson, brainwashed beyond a need for cognition, reaches for his satchel and retrieves pad and pen and begins sketching. His pencil sings like the throat of Thoth creating everything. It glides along, filling every blank with stark photographic detail.
Afterwards, he urinates on himself. From his pack he takes a portable trench periscope and stares at it, puzzled. He turns it in his hands, wondering if it is not a steering mechanism, having the look of something which is inserted before being twisted. He searches for its component element but finds nothing. He tosses it away. Next, he finds a strange curio in his pocket; a locket with a shifting face whose purpose he cannot ascertain. This he tosses also. He crawls this way and that around the clearing until he reaches the lane by which he entered. His efforts shake loose a photograph from his shirt pocket. He stares at the image of the stranger who gave him birth. The photograph vexes him, though he does not know why. It crunches in his bailed fist. The warped afterimage looks like the rudiment of a sympathetic hex.
He journeys backward through the ratways to his trench, carried by instinct and miracle. An angel aims his mad stagger. Somehow, his trained body endures the impossible missions set by a mad emperor in his soul. Wild-eyed Wilson staggers forth from no man’s land toward the exposed hump, where the ladder is. He barely ducks, drunk with fatigue or brave with insanity. He pirouettes, almost. He attempts grace but missing the ladder entirely tumbles headfirst into the trench. A volley which intended his demise coughs overhead, zooming toward alternate assignments. He is returned, at least the flesh of him.
Inside dugouts, the Corporal’s lacquered mustache glints micah-like in close candlelight. The walls shake like Parkinson’s at the fulfillment of the bombs. Airy millets attend him, would-be corn kings. A rude beige ziggurat of army issue flan judders on the plate before him, above which he holds the sketchbook that he is perusing with increasing chagrin. The artist Wilson, summoned, steps forth from gloom, unfocused and inattentive. To all prompts he nods affirmatively then shrugs, refusing any conversation. He is bedlamed. Craiglockhart fodder.
The Corporal holds onto the sketchbook. He examines it from time to time, no less puzzled through familiarity. One leaf depicts a squamous abominite perched in the clouds, conducting fatal overtures above lines of nationless trenches. Another shows a goblet containing a liquified man, one eye swimming amidst essential soup, clutched in the taloned hands of a star-robed seer. Another shows a poorly drawn elephant twisting a viper made of fur and molar into a vaginal shape.
The End.
Alchemisland 
Leave a comment