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There Aint No Justice 101
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| There Ain't No Justice |
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| #101 |
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- A Moment of Culmination -
by David Artman
In that moment of seizure, Hunter's sturdy, powerful heart contracted and
froze, drowned in chaos' thick malaise.
Undaunted and chastised, Hunter Scales's consciousness sunk penitently
into that unwholesome mire, the past poised in suspension through the
dissolution of his senses. 'Curiously like the tales of life passing before
one's eyes....' He --if enough remained of this ego to earn a gendered
pronoun-- marvelled that introspection held any temporal sense now. Then his
thoughts were drawn to wonder at the enormity of imaginative energy spent
through all persons back into simian antiquity in each one's final mind's
cinema. That he could pen but one long- pondered verse on this, his last
moment's lucidity.
That one phrase could have wrought more desecration on the charnel
edifices of Modern Man than any long-fused dynamite stick he threw in his
unfocussed youth.
The frames of his jumpy reel fluttered forward to jeer and accuse his
unblinking, yet myopic, mind's eye. They do not come like some burst of
newsreel, captioned and accompanied by off- key, staccato ragtime trinklings.
Rather, they were edited by the eternal, infernally pious director into a
melodrama nearly as lampooning as the cartoon.
Like a jaunty and careless Bosco had young Scales strolled onto Yale
campus; entering class of '18, stress on 'class.' Gently cushioned from the
suppurating carnage of Europe, while funded by his father's arm sales to the
same Five, he was at leisure to pursue what course he would --as long as it
was Economics. Not to be daunted by the acquisition of a mere diploma, he had
fallen ravenously to studies of the capitalist technique, keeping always an
eye on industrial developments throughout the Eastern Seaboard: from noble
Boston's shipyards to flogged Charleston's reconstruction.
In all though, the cruelly simple manipulations and machinations of the
free market refinery interested him not one whit. Early in his education, he
petitioned the Elders of the University to allow him, effectively, to 'test
out' of his Economics degree, using the weight of his family, "so instrumental
to the effort of our old friends" (as the Chancellor had remarked, referring
either to the Unionists or Allies or both) and the logic that he was, after
all, the third son of his father and would need little business skill to
manage what inheritance would some day --"God forbid!"-- be his to manage.
This rational, so weak in his father's glutted eye, washed over the Elders; he
had enrolled, by semester's end, in a hodgepodge course he dubbed
"Metaphysical Studies."
The whine of surging blood filled his senses; the Old One's crushing
vengeance had pulsed to his dissonant brain and was causing multiple strokes.
To Hunter, there could be no more bitter scene than that last recollection:
his vision quest for a grail beyond the bottomed Christian one-- for now not
the least tatter of that idyll remained to furl before his darkling sight.
There had been an instant, not an hour earlier, that the pure brilliance
of his long-subsumed dream had pierced the leaden mantle of its perversion.
Hunter had stood amid the clutter and piles of books in his sanctum, one book
split open in his wide, smooth palm, and seen the text's encryption for what
it was: an ashamed misdirection, the self-conscious warning of a guilty
malignance. Behind the coded Arabic lurked the greatest of dynamite, a
powderkeg unconserved and riotously neglectful of spatial bounds. He glanced
over its instruction fleetingly, never dwelling on a particular phrase or
incantation lest the cognition loosen the forces so tautly bound in the
phonics... and in himself. Yes, in that instant, he had felt again, at last,
that profound disturbance with his impending intentions that had nearly frozen
his arm in mid-throw a cloudy eleven years ago, outside of Tanner's Pub, even
as its hand held a sparking, pregnant stick.
Scales's liberal but intent studies had pulled him from Yale's polished
austerity to Middlesex's vibrant passion. There he found the right alloy of
modernist angst and revolutionary fervor to fuel his first meritable works. He
even shortly won a critics post on the magazine which first published his
pastiche of Gothic and metaphysical poesy. His Americaness, it was hoped,
would provide a needed injection of modern cosmopolitanism to the pulp. Yet
Hunter fell quickly to Marxist disparagement of the very new order that he
was, as Yale and entrepreneur, to propound. It was merely that, in contrast to
the chance elitism of capital enterprise, the communal ideals of the enlivened
radicals around the cafes struck a far more sonorous chord with his quest for
universals; he more and more often was to be found in pub, cafe, or den,
surrounded by like-impassioned youths and speaking with intensity of the
ascendancy of the ubermenshen.
It was at one such congress that Scales first met Illya Regis. Their
attraction followed the course of frank abandon that was so popular to the
licentious energy of the subculture. Soon, however, the fine difference in
their drives was to begin a corrupting effect on his Glorious Evolution; her
particular deepest bent was for destruction, pure and simple, of the entire
social edifice, "worn and weary in its ruts;" and as for what followed: the
strongest would decide for the best. "Feudalist retro-evolution" (as was
argued by one pedant of their circle) meant nothing to her overmen; they were
strong through wisdom as well as daring in the face of flaming deconstruction.
They would slaughter the weak out of compassion, not powerlust.
Slowly, insidiously, Illya's twist on Neitzschean 'progress' burrowed
into the crystalline core of Hunter's vision of psychic evolution. His pure
and disciplined method and myth of the Ancient Asians slowly was encumbered by
Illya's rarefied and dogmatic occultism. Not content to channel her spirit,
she would vent it: one day in furious deliberation over some Cabalist tome,
the next in delicate alchemy in the university labs where she labored to breed
the perfect detonator: her own fanatic quest for a higher order of magnitude.
In time, he began to perceive more and more of the skulking dread
entombed in the dead texts and was seduced closer to the aberrant rage that
lurks in all who have seen the onslaught of the industrial age, that
revolution of finance without conscience. Within months, it had taken little
more than three pints and one rallying tirade from Scorsby --Illya's mentor--
to bring him swaggering and pregnant with bitter power to the entrance of the
lawyers' local, Tanner's. His wind-chilled hands did not even tremble as he
struck a spitting match and ignited his charge.
Yet, as he arched his back and channeled his frustration along his taunt
arm, he had seen, even across the flurry-driven street, a relaxed and stately
man leaning on the pub's bar and laughing. That humanity-pervading signal of
communion and peace, upstaged by his stick's spluttering menace, called down
to the so newly grown crystal of his dream's core and froze him on the brink
of infamy.
Cool waves of pain streaked down his limbs, convulsing them and forcing
the surrender of their balance on the rocking sloop; Hunter began a
slow-motion decent to the boat's deck. The beast of entropy, which his
focussed utterances had drawn up from the murky depths of the ocean, moved
around the bow to study each twitch and flail of his dragging tumble to the
deck. It sent forth tendrils of potential, tweaking his motion an inch this
way, an inch that; now --this very slit second-- the right foot freed from
friction, lifting arduously away from the possession of gravity, the first
fraction of a wind gust providing the last causal link to his impact on the
salt-washed paneling. He finally lands, each ounce of his weight now
transferring to his ill-positioned left arm. One of the series of gravid
additions begins the fracture of both his radius and ulna; the point of
searing pain is almost holy in its transcendence over the general agony of his
apoplexy and subsequent strokes.
He felt, through the chorus and solo of his penance, a hollow, angry
laughter flash from the dissolute entity as it lapped a splash of brine across
the compound fracture's torn flesh. The mirth, and Hunter's drawn scream, cued
a gel haze from which the memory of similar amusement and agony panned and
resolved.
Illya had merely chuckled at Hunter's vacant boggling over her
revelation. "It's how these times are, chuck!" she had dismissingly admonished
him from across the lamp-lit table. The shadows of the pub closed around his
vision, only his inspiration's becalmed, patient expression swam amid the
taunting recollections of shared ecstacy which wrestled for his chagrined
attention. "How could I not 'be' with Scorsby? He embodies the nihilistic
passions which must purge this tepid world."
"And, ergo, I do not...."
"Embody...?" here one brow on her Hellenic front arched. "Not hardly. You
love the middling good of the present too much."
And she stood and strode boldly off to the last three weeks of her life.
For a long while after her death by a dropped vial, war raged in the
conscience and consciousness of Scales. One faction marshalled argument from
his tenacious reason while another pumped his softened soul for emotion. He
had given an ever- swelling part of his five years at Middlesex to her arcane
and violent quest. But he had always held back on the rage; she was right
about his stubborn compassion. But he had gone along with her and Scorsby's
conspiracies, sabotages, and murders. Yet he had still wrote and published his
concerned admonishment and behests to the yoked masses. Nevertheless, he had
always found time to risk translation of those Middle Eastern texts which
exceeded Illya and Scorsby's linguistic abilities.
"Damn all that has past!" he had screamed, grimacing tear- streaked at
the pubs smoke-darkened rafters. No one stopped the man that rose from his
seat to ask him about the black smoulder in his eyes; all knew at their
innocent cores that the glow was but the last light of the soul interred
behind those orbs.
Raindrops eased down from the moon-marbled sky to sculpt fluted red bowls
from Hunter's pooling blood, and the ancient impatient menace which even now
absorbed his tattered essence assumed a diffident air. The agony of this
frustrating man could be milked no more; the genetic blessing of shock, common
to these frail beings, had enshrouded his sparking nervous system. There
remained now only the last bilious second or so, that insignificant summation
of the closing life, the denouement of derangement and obsession.
The fury of all evils reclined beside the slow-settling form of his
severed puppet. It had shown promise of liberation, after centuries,
millennia, aeons --no difference-- for the envoy of jealous entropy. Wound
deliberately into impetus, it had jerked admirably along the prophesied path,
in the beast's planned cadence. Such concentration of purpose had not been
seen in nineteen centuries on this planet, and the destroyer had ensnared this
one soundly, much to his Nemesis' sadness. Though a few moments of awareness
had slowed the tool's forging, the final artful influence, in that drinking
hall some several eternities ago, proved the last juncture for redemption.
But no, it actually had not, and the chaos meanly parcelled out an extra
second of quivering breath to the dying human; it raged anew and branded the
gasping spirit with its last desperate years of degeneration.
No arcane tome remained unlocked before the voracious appetite in Hunter
for vengeance and validation. His first essay was to complete the fatal
experiment that had claimed Illya Regis; it done, he coolly, dispassionately,
utilized the compound to blast one wing of the Asylum in London. The Nazi
party, a perverted phoenix rising ill-smelted from the injured ashes of German
nationalism, polished the buttons of the cloak of armageddon which he had
donned. His once-caring verse dispelled his audience with a pained yet
vitriolic ejaculation in what became his last published editorial. He folded
in upon his cold contempt and let it fester, mulching it occasionally with the
vision of exploded gentlepersons or bobbies shot dead with an expensive import
he order from his brother.
His public identity was, unfortunately, never linked to the Bombardier,
hated and erratic anarchist. He was nothing but a rapidly aging curiosity to
those few who would listen in the seedier pubs of the East End as he ranted of
final judgement, where all but the warrior-saint would drown in their own
bile. Those lads who felt the thrill of his words quiver through the feminine
back of their companion would cast the occasional copper his way as recompense
for necessitating their cloistered consolation.
It was his hungry bending for these coins which would send him home, not
exhausted and angst-ridden, but newly fired to his study and rage, the two of
which would toss him to and fro until dawn. The compounded humiliation,
frustration, and obsession of his graduation into Hell's honor role set before
him, finally, one task.
In a text which possesses no English equivalent for a name, he stumbled
across a reference to a ritual which would, for the truly impatient, usher in
the era of the Old One, an era which would last but an instant, if time is at
all to be considered, but which would release, in a cascade, every imaginative
kernel with a jangling note of despair and failure, a note which would sound
until Time saw fit to bother with its release and decay. In the rank mire of
his ambition, Scales saw this as the Grail for which he searched, an Unholy
Grail that would not deign to ally itself with one febrile morality or another
but would merely clear the way for the cleanest, most just, most bitterly
expedient ethic that wrest hold of the whirling oblivion. The way would be
utterly open for the wronged to wrong the slavers, and the masters to cull the
inefficient. The quest for this promised procedure caked the last rot on the
smeared gem of the once proud Hunter's soul; it absorbed every waking hour and
the last of his father's bequeathment.
But he did not fail; he ripped the tome from the grappling clutch of a
dying Shao Lin priest.
At ten-forty-three p.m., as the winter solstice swept tearfully across
Britain's dales, Hunter Scales sailed from a private pier, aboard a stolen
sloop, a stolen apocalypse on his smooth palm. The rain was light enough that
it did not soil the thick pages, sheets which little resembled linen stock,
had more the texture of murdered hide. By now, the misleading text's
communication was well interpreted by Hunter; he had not parted with his
intellect on the same evening which he had mislaid his sanity. Their message
seethed with potential and foreboding.
He stood upon the pitching deck and let the wild night surround him,
caress him imploringly, as if --rightly so-- it had a stake in his eminent
profanation. He heard its murmured pleas, felt them echo opposite words spoken
by Illya from across white down, and cursed their futility. He was lost, and
no weak example of the awful might of the vital world would stay his tongue
and psyche. He began the incantation even as his pocketwatch chimed the proper
moment, Greenwich Mean Time.
The words staggered off his tongue, trying desperately to twist into
discord and fling free from the dominance granted the reader in their proper
utterance. Hunter held fast to the building power, all the while a bit put off
by the lack of apparent effect in the surround nature; in shouting the
culminating chant, he expected some herald of the coming purgation.
But Chaos waits on no ceremony.
In front of him, where before there was only white-crowned fluid peaks,
an amorphous form resolved and advance deferentially forward. Hunter's mind
reeled as his eyes realized that the form, which had seemed only man-sized,
appeared so by foreshortening; its obedient advance had covered over a mile
and it now loomed taller than the sloop's mast. The water from which it
vaulted seemed to abhor touching the entity, preferring to cease existence in
an annihilating whirlpool around it. As to its composition, it was nothing
more than the reflection of a glimmer of wan light subsumed in an inky
appetite. It exuded a baleful anxiety subtly tempered by the patience of an
immortal. It radiated an interrogative; with that question: not to be? -- it
tuned all of its force into a silent cyclone of doom shrouded in its wide
volume.
And Hunter knew finally what that request meant, really and ultimately,
and the pure and persistent crystal that was ever at the throne of his mind
and spirit shattered in righteous denial. The ascendance of man could not, it
decried, be on the laddered ribs of its starving obsolete. True ascendance of
the son does not come with the death of the father, but with pitied solace
beside his deathbed. These again proud and passionate --not just furious--
exhortations pummelled the waiting swarm of chaos; it reared and drew its
warhorn from its swollen, cracked lips to let it sink back to the sea.
And the Ancient One, master of all save one force in the universes,
reached out with a quivering claw to encompass Hunter's freed heart and
vengefully crushed it into a messy clod, even as the collapsing muscle shook
loose the sole virtue it interred.
Blood rushed from Hunter's seizing heart, causing multiple strokes which
killed him in the space of three seconds.
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