MrRedPajamas 1 week ago

And even in the winter the carcass of the RedPajamas odorously swell and the skin buckles and fissure horrendously, for that loathsome oaf rots even in the winter when temperature so low falls that all other cadaver freeze into silence; his stench so vile that even the numbed nostrils of someone spending hours in the negative thirty Celsius weather can feel that abominable odour… that rancid stench of Christian nutter, that sinisterly lingering psychopathic derangement of bigoted arsehole. The disease in this one so far gone is that not even the wintry cold in Antarctica can stop the course of decay; and yet, from the mists emerge, again, the sultry shape of a brown hairy monstrosity, the macho-man, the real Sasquatch; he lingers out from his ancient tomb, the eldritch cave wherein prevails disordered chaos and lamentable filth, he rolls every night in his own dung, this insectivore knows not to mix the textiles–

Karl Shuker, on writing of the story in 1995 (I think), in an article, describes the events as follows:

Possibly the most famous of these cases occurred at Stronsay, one of the Orkney Islands off northern Scotland. On September 26, 1808, John Peace was fishing east of Rothiesholm Point when he saw what seemed to be the carcass of a whale cast up onto the rocks, above which were flocks of circling seabirds. He rowed up to it in his boat and examined it, and found that it was a very peculiar-looking creature, which did not resemble anything known to him. At that same time, farmer George Sherar was watching Peace from the shore, and was able to confirm all of this. About 10 days later, moreover, he was able to see it for himself, because it was washed ashore on Stronsay, lying on its belly just below the high tide mark.

When Sherar discovered it there, he measured it, and found it to be 55 feet long. Others also measured it, and obtained the same result. It was very serpentine, almost eel-like in general build, but possessed a 15 ft. neck, a small head, and a long mane running along its back to the end of its tail. Most bizarre of all, however, was that it seemed to have three pairs of legs, and each foot had five or six toes. Sherar salvaged some vertebrae and the skull of this extraordinary creature–which became known as the Stronsay beast.

Details of its discovery and description ultimately reached Patrick Neill, secretary of Edinburgh’s Wernerian Natural History Society, and at a meeting of the society on November 19, 1808, Neill released some details on this subject. At the next meeting, on January 14, 1809, he gave the Stronsay beast a formal scientific name–Halsydrus pontoppidani, “Pontoppidan’s water snake of the sea” (after Eric Pontoppidan, an 18th Century Norwegian bishop who had collected many sea serpent reports).

At that same meeting, a Dr. John Barclay, who had examined some of the beast’s remains in Orkney, presented a paper in which he described the vertebrae, skull, and one of the creature’s legs. His paper, accompanied with detailed diagrams, was published in 1811, within the society’s Memoirs, and attracted a great deal of attention. The vertebrae were very striking, resembling cotton reels, and were cartilaginous, but the leg was not a real, jointed leg at all; it was merely a fin.

To many people these features meant little, but they meant a great deal to the eminent naturalist Sir Everard Home, who was working on an exhaustive study of the basking shark Cetorhinus maximus–the world’s second largest species of shark. When Home heard about the Stronsay beast, he felt sure that it must have been a shark. This is because the only creatures to have cartilaginous vertebrae are sharks and rays, and the only creatures to have cartilaginous vertebrae with star-shaped calcification are sharks. Furthermore, when he compared the Stronsay beast’s vertebrae and other remains with the corresponding portions of a known specimen of basking shark, they matched very closely.

But the long-necked, six-legged, mane-bearing Stronsay beast looked nothing like a basking shark–so how could this drastic difference in appearance be resolved? In fact, it was quite simple. When basking shark carcasses begin to decompose, the entire gill apparatus falls away, taking with it the shark’s characteristic jaws, and leaving behind only its small cranium and its exposed backbone, which have the appearance of a small head and a long neck. The triangular dorsal fin also rots away, sometimes leaving behind the rays, which can look a little like a mane–especially when the fish’s skin also decays, allowing the underlying muscle fibers and connective tissue to break up into hairlike growth. Additionally, the end of the backbone only runs into the top fluke of the tail, which means that during decomposition the lower tail fluke falls off, leaving behind what looks like a long slender tail. The pectoral and sometimes the pelvic fins remain attached, but become distorted, so that they can (with a little imagination!) look like legs with feet and toes, and male sharks have a pair of leglike copulatory organs called claspers, which would yield a third pair of legs. Suddenly, the basking shark has become a hairy six-legged sea serpent!

Over the years, almost all of the Stronsay beast’s preserved remains have been lost or destroyed, but three vertebrae are retained in the Royal Museum of Scotland–the last remnants of the world-famous Stronsay sea serpent. The creature’s mystery, conversely, continues to the present day, and for very good reason. The longest conclusively identified basking shark that has been accurately measured was a truly exceptional specimen caught in 1851 in Canada’s Bay of Fundy. While the average length for its species is under 2612 ft., this veritable monster was a mighty 40 ft. 3 in. Yet even that is almost 15 ft. less than the Stronsay beast. Even the largest scientifically measured specimen of the world’s biggest fish–the whale shark Rhincodon typus–was only (!) 41.12 ft. long. So was the 55-ft. Stronsay beast really a basking shark, or could it have belonged to a still-unknown, giant relative?

Bearing in mind that one of the world’s largest known sharks, the formidable megamouth (Megachasma pelagios), remained wholly unknown to mankind until November 15, 1976, when the first recorded specimen was accidentally hauled up from the sea near the Hawaiian island of Oahu, the prospect of undiscovered species of giant sharks still eluding scientific discovery is far from being as unlikely as one might otherwise assume.

Karl Shuker, as often is the case, embellishes and describes with flowery prose the events, and speculates widely towards the end in a manner that is perhaps excessively enthusiastic. There is little reason to fancy the ‘thing’, a new species; it is large, for a basking shark, it is true, but nevertheless, there are things that suggest that rather than a new species, this would be a sub-species or certain individuals with a peculiar mutation (more of which later).

From the witness testimony taken down by Wernerian Society in Kirkwall, in November 1808:

Thomas Fotheringhame examined the Stonsay Beast shortly after the carcass washed ashore

Compered Thomas Fotheringhame, house-carpenter in Kirkwall; who solemnly declared, That being in Stronsa during the gales of wind in October last, he went to see the strange fish that was driven ashore in Rothisholm Bay: That he measured its length with a foot-rule, which was exactly fifty-five feet, from the junction of the head and neck, where there was the appearance of an ear, to the tail: That the length of the neck, from the ear to the shoulder, was ten feet three inches, as nearly as he recollects. And being shewn a drawing of the animal, he declared, That the neck appeared to him to be too long: That the fins or arms, or, as they were called on the island, the wings of the animal, were jointed to the body nearer the ridge of the back than they appear in the drawing: That the toes were less spread out, and tapering more to a point, unless when purposely lifted up; but were not webbed unless of the space of an inch and a half in breadth, where they joined each other; and the length seemed to be about eight inches: That he measured one of the wings next the head, which was four feet and a half in length, and in shape, from the first joint to the extremity, it resembled a goose-wing without the feathers: That the hollow between the snout and the upper part of the skull, appeared to him not to be quite so deep as represented in the drawing: That in every other respect the drawing appears to be so exact, that if the fish had not been mentioned, it would have brought it back to his recollection: That from the ridge of the back to the belly, the body appeared to be four feet in depth, and the circumference rather oval than round; but that he did not measure either: That the mane or bristles of the back extended from the shoulder to within two feet and a half of the tail, and the mane was thin, about two inches and a half in breadth towards the shoulder, and two inches in breadth at the tail: That the skin seemed to be elastic when compressed, and of a greyish colour, without any scales: it was rough to the feeling, on drawing the hand over it, towards the head; but was smooth as velvet when the hand was drawn towards the tail: That the extremity of the tail was about two inches in thickness, and somewhat rounded; and as he saw no part of the bones, he cannot say whether any part of the tail had been broken off or not: That the eyes appeared to be no larger than those of a seal: That there were two spout holes on either side of the neck, about an inch and a fourth in diameter, and at the same distance from the head as appears in the drawing: That he lifted up the snout, and examined the throat, which was too narrow for him to admit his hand: That a part of the bones of the lower jaw, resembling those of a dog, were remaining at that time, with some appearance of teeth, which were soft, and could be bent by the strength of the hand: That he observed no nipples, or organs of generation; the belly having been burst open by the violence of the sea: That the stomach was about the size of a ten gallon cask; and the bowels about the bulk of those of a cow: That the bristles of the back, which had been pulled off through curiosity, were luminous in the dark, while they continued wet. And all this he declares to be the truth, &c.
(Signed) Thomas Fotheringhame.

Affidavit of John Peace

Affidavit Kirkwall, Nov. 19. 1808.
Compered John Peace, tenant in Dounatoun in Rothisholm; and being interrogated, solemnly declares, That on the 26th day of September last, he went a fishing off the east part of Rothiesholm-head, when he perceived, as he imagined, a dead whale, on some sunk rocks, about a quarter of a mile from the Head: That his attention was first directed to it by the sea-fowl screaming and flocking about it; and on approach of it, in his boat, he found the middle part of it above the surface of the water: That he then observed it to be different from a whale, particularly in having fins or arms, one of which he raised with his boat-hook above the surface of the water: That this was one of the arms next the head, which was larger and broader than the others nearer the tail; and at that time the fin or arm was edged all around, from the body to the extremity of the toes, with a row of bristles about ten inches long, some of which he pulled off, and examined in the boat: That about ten days afterwards, a gale of south-east wind came on, and the surge drove the fish ashore on Rothiesholm-head: That he measured it by fathoms and found it about nine fathoms, rather more than less, that is, about fifty-four or fifty-five feet in length: That he observed the six arms, or wings as they are called on the island; but percieved no part of the bristles then round the edges of the fins or arms, and supposes, that being in a putrid state, they had been beaten off by the sea, or wasted away: That a small part of the belly was broke up when he saw it then, from which the stomach, which he took at first for the penis, was about four feet in length, and about the thickness of a half anker cask: That he supposed it to have been the penis, from the one end of it being joined to the body; but on seeing it after it was opened, he concluded it to have been the stomach, as it resembled the second stomach of a cow: That he did not measure the circumference of the animal, but it appeared to be of the thickness of a middle sized horse round the girth, of twelve or thirteen hands high. And being shewn the drawing of the animal, and desired to point out the resemblance or difference, he declared, That the joint of the foremost leg was broader than represented in the drawing, being more rounded from the body to the toes, and narrower at the upper end than at its junction at the toes: That the limb itself was larger than the hinder ones, and the uppermost joint or shoulder was altogether attached to the body: That in all other respects the drawing appears to him to be an exact resemblance of the fish, as it lay on the beach: That the mane came no farther than the shoulder, and extended to the tail, part of which appeared to have been broken off: That the length of the neck, the situation of the snout-holes, and of the eye; the shape of the snout, the position and distance of the limbs from each other, appear to him to be exactly preserved in the drawing: That he observed no nipples or organs of generation. unless as above mentioned: That the part of the body which the stomach had fallen out, was between the two limbs that are situated in the middle of the animal. And all this he solemnly declares to be the truth. And declared he cannot write. Eodem die.

Examination of the beast by George Sherar

George Sherar was a tacksman of Rothiesholm. He watched the crew of John Peace’s boat examine the beast before it washed ashore and then examined the carcass when it washed ashore later.

Compered Mr George Sherar, tacksman of Rothiesholm, in the island of Stronsa; who being interrogated, solemnly declared, That on the 20th of October, being in Rothiesholm-head, he saw the crew of John Peace’s boat examining something on the water, which he took to be a dead whale: That about ten days afterwards, a gale of east wind having taken place, he went to see if the whale was driven ashore, and found it in a creek, lying on its back, about a foot under water; and from the view which he had of its figure. length and limbs, his curiosity induced him to return a day or two after the gale had abated, when he found it thrown upon the beach, a little below high-water mark, and lying on its belly, as represented in the drawing: That he returned next morning with a foot-rule, purposely to measure it, and found it to be exactly fifty-five feet in length, from the hole in the top of the skull, (which he has brought to town with him), to the extremity of the tail: That the length of the neck was exactly fifeteen feet, from the same hole to the beginning of the mane: That he measured also the circumference of the animal as accurately as he could, which was about ten feet, more or less; and the whole body, where the limbs were attached to it, was about the same circumferece: That the lower jaw or mouth was awanting; but there were some substances or bones of the jaw remaining, when he first examined it, which were not away: That it had two holes on each side of the neck, beside the one on the back of the skull: That the mane or bristles were about fourteen inches in length each, of a silvery colour, and particularly luminous in the dark, before they were dried: That the upper part of the limbs, which answers to the shoulder-blade, was joined to the body like the shoulder-blade of a cow, forming a part of the side: That a part of the tail was awanting, being incidentally broken off at the extremity; where the last joint of which was bare, was an inch and a half in breadth: That the bones were of a gristly nature, like those of a halibut, the back-bone excepted, which was the only solid bone in the body: That the tail was quite flexible, turning in every direction, as he lifted it; and he supposes the neck to have been equally so, from its appearance at the time: That he has brought in, to deliver to Mr Laing, the skull, two joints of one of the largest limbs, next the head, with different parts of the back-bone, beside the bones which were formery sent in: That there were either five or six toes upon each paw, about nine inches long, and of a soft substance: That the toes were separate from each other, and not webbed, as far as he could observe; and that the paw was about half a foot each way, in length and breadth: That a few days thereafter, a gale of wind came on, and drove it to another part of the shore, where it was broken to pieces by th surge, and when Mr Petrie came out to take a drawing of it, no part of the body remained entire: That he endevoured to convey an idea of the animal to Mr Petrie, by drawing the figure of it as accurately as he could, with chalk, on the table, exactly as it lay upon the shore, after which Mr Petrie made six or seven different sketches or plans of the fish, before he cold bring it to correspond in each minute particular, with the strong idea which he retains of its appearance: That he was the more attentive to its shape, dimensions and figure, in order to be able to give an accurate account of it to any travellers that might come to Rothiesholm; and that he is ready to make oath, that the drawing is an exact resemblance of the fish, as it appeared when he measured it; and corresponds in all particulars with the idea which he entertains of the figure, dimensions and proportions of the fish: That the substance of the body appeared like coarse, ill-coloured beef, interlarded with fat or tallow, without the least resemblance or affinity to fish; but when put into a lamp, and the lamp placed on the fire, it neither flamed nor melted, but burned away like a gristly substance: That he perceived no teeth in the upper jaw; the lower jaw and tongue being awanting, and the palate also away: That the aperture of the throat appeared to be so wide, that he might have put his foot down through it: That the joints of the limbs were not united by a ball and socket, but were lapped over each other, and united by some means which he does not comprehend: That there were two canals, one above and another below the back-bone, large enough to admit one’s finger, and extending from the vertebrae of the neck, to the extremity of the tail, containing two ligaments, which, he supposed, enabled the animal to raise itself up, or to bend its body in a spiral form: That a tract of strong easterly wind had prevailed, before the body was discovered upon the shore, and he saw he body on two or three different occasions, after he had measured it, and before it went to pieces. And all this he declares to be truth, &c.
(Signed) Geo. Sherar

Mr William Folsetter lived on Stronsay and examined the beast some time after it was first sighted.

Compered Mr William Folsetter, tachsman of Whitehall, in the island of Stronsa; who being interrogated, solemnly declared, That having heard that it was a dead whale that had come on shore in Rothiesholm-head, he did not see the body till about the 28th day of October, when it had gone to pieces: That he saw about nine or ten feet of back-bone, and some bones of the paws, and what he supposed to be the stomach, which last he had the curiosity to open; that it was about four feet long, and as thick as a firkin, but flatter: That the membranes that formed the divisions, extended quite across the supposed stomach, and were about three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness, and at the same distance from each other, and of the same substance, with the stomach itself: That the section of the stomach, after it was opened, had the appearance of a weaver’s reed: That he opened about a fourth part of the supposed stomach, which contained nothing but a reddish substance, like blood and water, and emitted a fetid smell: That he was very doubtful at the time whether it was really the stomach or not; but that each end of it had the appearance of terminating in a gut. And all this he solemnly declares to be the truth, &c.
(Signed) Wm. Folsetter

The said Mr George Sherar being again interrogated, declares, That he examined the supposed stomach, after it had been opened by Mr Folsitter, and that he laid it open to the farther end: That there was something like a gut at the end which he opened, about two inches long, with a small aperture: That the stomach had the same appearance from end to end, and contained nothing but a substance like blood and water: That the large bone, of which a drawing was taken, was considered as the collar-bone; and that it was situated with the broad and thick parts downwards, and the open part towards the vertebrae of the back: That he observed no appearance of fins about the neck or breast, or other parts of the body, except the six paws already described. And all this he solemnly declares to be the truth. &c.
(Signed) Geo. Sherar

The speaking of “legs” and other descriptions of the appendages is somewhat confusing, but the local usage amongst the people on the island, according to Peace’s story, appears to have been “wings”, like the fins of a shark. Illustrations were drawn with three pairs (6) of appendages, but as comments in the testimony here provided tells, the two lesser ones were smaller than the first set, again, indicative of, perhaps, a  (male) shark.

The following is the rendition of the story by Charles Fort in “Lo!”:

In the Mems. Wernerian Nat. Hist. Soc., 1-418, is published a paper by Dr. Barclay, who tells of the remains of an unknown monster that had been cast up by the sea, in September, 1808, at Stronsa, one of the Orkneys.(28) We’ve got a hold of something now that was well observed. As fast as they could, observers got rid of this hunk, which for weeks, under a summer sun, had been making itself evidential. But the evidence came back. So again the observers got a rope and towed it out to sea. Sultry day soon — a flop on the beach — more observations. According to different descriptions, in affidavits by inhabitants of Stronsa, the remains of this creature had six “arms,” or “paws,” or “wings.” There is a suggestion of stumps of fins here, but it is said that the bulk was “without the least resemblance or affinity to fish.” Dr. Barclay told that in his possession was part of the “mane” of the monster.

As we can see, many details here are confused (and not just because of Fort’s queer manner of writing). The carcass was never pulled to shore (it washed up after a second storm), and it took place from late September to November, by no means during the summer. Such is the reality of this sort of tales. Mistakes are impossible to avoid in the retelling of such stories, and the author might take creative liberties and embellish the story with details that previously did not exist.

Karl Shuker treats the carcass as being entirely up on cliffs, but the original observations by Peace make it clear that the body was mostly submerged on a sunken rock before it washed up during the second storm.

A section of the spine was delivered to the Scottish Museum in Edinburgh, where it by 1980 was still kept. I do not know if it still is. This fragment was indeed shown in an episode of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World from 1980, when dealing with sea monsters; and clearly, without any doubt, it is the vertebrae of a basking shark. The vertebrate segment, from where in the shark I am not sure, was not much larger than that from a 4.7 meter (16-foot) shark to which it was compared. It might be thought that it was because the sample (consisting of 3 or 4 vertebrae) was from near the head or the tail of the shark, but those are still generally of not too variable dimensions.

Apart from the apparent smallness of the sample vertebrae, the described girth of the shark is small; even in bad decomposition the robust bulk between the fins will remain fairly well under most circumstances, and it’s size is not impressive. This suggests that the specimen was not of unusual girth, but of exceptional length.
That it was measured correctly cannot be conclusively assumed. Perhaps measures were converted and converted poorly. Assuming they were not, it was by far the largest Basking shark ever, in life measuring a full 17 meters. There have been findings of basking sharks, where vertebrae have been counted, such as in the very badly decomposed carcass that washed up on Vancouver Island, British Colombia, Canada, in 1947. It was 12 meters long (40 ft), and nothing but the vertebrae and the skull remained, stringed together by rotting oily tissue. The vertebrae were counted, and there were 135-140 of them; which is noteworthy, for a normal basking shark has only between 102 and 105.

Perhaps there is a mutation that occurs every now and then in the basking shark for some reason, that makes it add vertebrae, making it longer, but not larger in bulk. Although the Vancouver Island carcass of 1947 is the only one that has, to my knowledge, had its vertebrae counted, many of the carcasses that wash up are in the upper reaches of the basking shark length at above 10 meters, and it can be speculated that, where some mathematics done, they could also be found to have extra vertebrae. It is of course also worth pondering that sharks not quite of such impressive bulk are mostly disregarded as what they are; sharks; whereas those of remarkable dimensions become vague monsters. The basking shark has also been suffering from tremendous pressure from fishing, and it is potential that this is responsible for the fact that nowadays specimens over 10 meter are uncommon and specimens upwards 12 almost unheard of. (There are indeed stories of sharks upwards 13 and 15 meters, but they are of dubious documentation and sourcing).

This is another version of the story, which has an incorrect date of September 25:

There, in 1808, the first, and perhaps best-known, of a series of episodes relating to the carcasses of, what appeared to be, long-necked sea creatures were washed ashore.

The Stronsay beast was first sighted on September 25, 1808, lying on rocks at Rothiesholm Head, in the south-east of the island.

There, John Peace, a local man, fishing off the coast, was puzzled by the sight of seabirds flocking around what looked like an animal’s corpse on the rocks.

Turning his little boat, and watched by another Stronsay man, George Sherar, Peace made his way to the carcass. But what he found was unlike anything he had encountered before. Lying on the rocks were the remains of a large serpent-like creature, with a long, eel-like neck and three pairs of legs.

At the time, the corpse was inaccessible, so closer examination was impossible. However, ten days later, one of Orkney’s notorious gales blew the decomposing remains ashore, where they were found just below the high water mark.

Sherar now had his chance to examine the corpse, which he did – meticulously studying it and measuring the dimensions of the “sea monster”.

The beast was described as serpentine, measuring exactly 55 feet long, with a neck measuring ten feet three inches long. The head was like that of a sheep, with eyes bigger than a seal’s. Its skin was grey and rough to the touch. However, if stroked from the head down the back, it was said to be as “smooth as velvet”.

Six “limbs” extended from the body and a bristly mane of long, wiry hair grew from the beast’s shoulders, down to its tail. These silver coloured bristles were said to glow eerily in the dark.

The fact that the brittles glow is simply indicative of bacterial activity in the decaying carcass.

The sketches that were made after witnesses testimony do fit well with the basking shark hypothesis if we disregard the peculiar and considerable elongation at which it points.

Three months into the predicted five-month journey to Mars, the stars were no longer visible in the direction of the red crescent. No one knew why. It was as if something unfathomably immense had blotted out the stars behind the planets – Saturn was still visible in the distance as a faint speck of light on the hideous blackness. Butch Aldritch reported the news to NASA’s space centre in Houston on August 20, 2021, from aboard the little vessel as it innocently slid towards Mars on its mission, the first manned mission hoping to visit the drop zone on the planets surface where the modules of a future permanent base had been dumped by an earlier mission.

From the cameras and other equipment, the enormous blank space was sent back to earth where it puzzled technicians, scientist and government officials alike. Viewing the stars with the naked eye from anywhere on earth did not reveal any aberration, no blank spaces that had not been there before, nor did any telescopes on earth, or any orbiting space-telescopes. It was only from the rotund hull of EAGLE-1 that the peculiar thing could be seen. Experts were confused. Some suggested it was a result of some unknown quality of the windows on the vessel that was responsible, or some reflective cloud of space dust. No one knew. And as the days passed for the four person crew of EAGLE-1 on its way to Mars, the tensions rose and rose. Squabbles in the cafeteria. The urine container on the lose no longer conjured up laughter but shouts and anger. And outside the blackness seemed to be expanding, until by August 30, it blotted out half the universe from their vantage point.

“We don’t know what it is”, the man from the Kennedy Space centre said. “We can’t see it from earth or any other observational spot,” he continued, “but we can see it from your cameras. The only advice we have is to proceed as if it isn’t there. Try to maintain good spirit and order.”

“What if I can’t?” Butch Aldritch asked.

“Execute Order B7-EL12 in the Emergency Manual.”

“Really?”

“Only if absolutely necessary, of course.” The voice blurred and soon faded into nothingness as they entered radio shadow. Butch Aldritch got up from the radio seat and walked out of the communication room, setting course for the cafeteria. They seemed to know something he did not. Why else would they have authorised the execution of that dreaded order? He knew what it was. Pushing a button to release gases to put everyone a board to sleep and quickly enabling the automatic and remote piloting programme. He’d hate to do that.

At what the clocks communicating with earth said was 14:25 on September 4, the blackness stretched almost all the way back to earth as far as they could see. A minute thereafter the strangeness begun.

A rasping sound came abruptly along side all sides of the ship, the rasping of steel girders and claws, and the vessel begun to slow. With trembling and shaking making cups detach from their holders until the entire inside was full of levitating debris, panic followed. There was no way to contain it. If the EAGLE-1 Martian Lander was a car, they had just wrecked their wheels on a nail carpet laid out by the space police.

“The fuck was that?” asked the worried voices of the crew. Butch Aldritch could offer them no solace or support. He was just as scared as they were. And then the vessel tossed and turned with a suddenness he could never have imagined would exist in space; and he wondered for a few frightened seconds if they had been struck by some space rock or debris hard and large enough to pierce the lander. But they didn’t die. So that could not be it.

Swimming through their air the entire crew made their way to the communications room. They tried to contact earth, but it was impossible. They tried their best, but the only response was a wheezing as of troubled breathing coming from somewhere that was not earth. It was coming from nowhere in particular, they twisted and turned the settings, but the wheezing was still there. “It must be coming from that black cloud”, Butch said to his crew. They all looked at one another, pale with fright and anxious to get home, besieged by eerie reminiscence of the lost days on earth, the simple times and a place where up was up and down was down, and everything followed some logic they could grasp. That was not so any longer.

Someone hit the frequency wheel on the radio by accident as they shifted restlessly in cold sweat and unnameable horror.  A voice. It was a voice, speaking, somewhere! Was it Houston? Reflected from somewhere if they were lucky! They turned up the volume.

From somewhere in the vast emptiness of the black cloud that blotted out the stars – even Mars was half-invisible by now, faded into a light orange blotch with unclear borders – a voice was speaking, a clear voice, but without any hint of the human. That was not to say it had any hint of the mechanical either, it was clearly something organic, something soft and mushy from the gurgling and shifts in pitch, it was talking, no, singing, singing a soothing tune in a language they had never heard before. Then, a disjointed sentence, somewhere in that garbled mess, it was in English!

“—what they call earth”—and then it was cut-off, chattering resumed in those vile guttural foreign tongues.

There are things, Butch Aldritch thought, things that are too horrible to see. The eyes cannot fathom them, the ears cannot hear them. And those things live in interplanetary space, they swarm like schools of fish, hither thither in uncontrollable madness, infernal beasts of the cosmos, the invisible nameless larvae of the Outer Gods, and when the unhuman shriek echoed from the radio, he knew they had been detected by those beings out in the emptiness. Butch Aldritch too, screamed, as his crew turned into sprays of red paint and purple dust as some abomination unseen squeezed them, and screamed until he had no breath left as he saw, made visible by the blood of his crew, the hideous, slithering form that came through the wall as if it had no material basis at all and made for him with precision and cunning even though it had no eyes, no mouth, no sensory organs of any kind. That which is blind yet sees, he thought to himself, that which knows all and yet nothing, that which is everything and nothing… that damn things front was like an earthworm, a pig and a human being all at once, he could see the flesh, or whatever it was, twitching, going circles, little flaps folding and unfolding, taking the shape of his own face. Butch Aldritch was by then far past making any noise at all, his throat sore, but even if he had been able, he would not have. He didn’t need to scream anymore. He now knew that this was what his life had always been going towards, knew that this was the conclusion and a new beginning… madness rides the Martian winds! The beast with a thousand young, Shub-Niggurath! His mother had said his father had died before he was ever born, but now he knew that was a lie! His father was alive and would never die, he understood at last where those dreams and things all came from, the primal source, the bubbling insanity at the nuclei… He smiled, and all was well and forgiven. For the first time in his life, he felt loved.

It was uttering some faint whining sounds. He could not tell if it was the passing of the noxious gases through the lungs – the odour of stale gin, the chemical factory of vodka, the smell of old cigarette smoke, rotten flesh and a faint sweetness of diabetes – or if it was saying something. He pushed his head carefully closer to the door.

It was talking.

Words were coming out of that hideous abomination’s mouth! They were incoherent, for its thick fat mouth was hanging loose from the flesh like a poorly fitting skin-tight suit, wrong size for this reptilian thing.

“Emiru is just soooooo cute,” it seemed to say. “I think he looks wonderful, and Sono too, I love him…” Then some giggling. He had no idea that this meant. It was some sort of coded-language, he would have guessed. The thing was apparently speaking in its mobile phone.

The light came on outside. He saw it.

It was fitting its key into the lock. Fat was bouncing, shifting, and roaring as it did with the noise of thick papers quivering in the wind; the clothes ill fitting hung like fragments of cloth on a football whose structure was vibrating with uncanny movements and seemingly independent twitching and convulsing. Was that thing a human being? The door opened up. As it did, he saw that thing turn its face toward his door, and he saw it, full-on, like he had never seen it before.

He could have died had his mind not mercifully blotted out the horror he had just been confronted with.

The face was like a warped pink hairless bulldog, chins hung like loaded hamster sacks bloated and sick. The cheeks were flushed red from alcohol consumption and the eyes were distant and rolling impatiently in their sockets. A river of drool that the thing was unable to contain drivelled down from the corner of the mouth. Its hunger seemed insatiable; it was chewing something white, he could see as the mouth in a second opened; limp lips hung like sausages. A piercing more as a steel pipe punctured the lip in the middle.

There was more to it, but he could not bare looking at it anymore.

He reeled away and vomited on the floor and the door.

The door outside closed, and that dreadful thing was gone. It had left cracks in the landing outside, little depressions from its feet. Feet that were not visible, for the hideous ethereal corpulence hid them so well.

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he
does not know why he is not one of the others. -Georges Bataille

The conflict between that which is and is not rendered clear by the sight of those that you are not, and knowing your own worthlessness, a bestial jealousy bubbles up like a magma plume towards the earth surface, which buckles and bends and finally gives way to a flood basalt, a loathsome eruption of reprehensible thoughts and feelings and actions-

Wanting to  vanish, invisible, as one peers into the depths of the mirror and the brain refuses to fathom that it is stuck inside that thing which the mirror reflects. The despair and horror upon that reflection felt is grounds for panic and anxiety of untold proportions. The gaze flickers and finally veers away, peers down into the toilet bowl, into the ceiling or at the door, into the sink, studies instead the dust that has settled on the shelf immediately blow the mirror.

Everywhere, they go about their daily things, the others. Surrounded by still more others, they talk, exchange things and thoughts and feelings, messages here and there conveyed, sometimes they fight, nonsensical dramas that spice up their little lives, and here and there they hug one another, closeness so far detached from the void that is me, that which does not exist. From the frames of other’s minds I am absent, moving betwixt the shadows, a total indifference, a memory soon forgotten. All the things that never happen to me and will never happen creates a conflict and envy for that which is not me that is not simply the result of aimless and naïve escapism, but also the result of some fundamental internal rejection of the exterior which foments anxiety and loathing at the thought of being seen by others, which is curable only by the destruction of the physical body, and therefore impossible.

There are walls all around us. The Berlin Wall might be no more, but walls prevail all the same, everywhere, and not just at the U.S.-Mexico border and Israel. Walls between people as impenetrable as steel and concrete, as divisive as mountains and political dissension. Little universes, solar systems, planets with satellites in orbit. They tell their little stories, which maybe be loathsome and repulsive and vapid and every-day, as they say, yet a conflict with that which is essentially nothing remains, that is to say that which is me. Memory fails when there is nothing of essence to remember. Feelings flail in the wind and the carrion birds set their dinosaur feet down to eat on that cadaver.

The years run on by and soon one realises that by that long time, most people had done something, had stories to tell, even vapid sick ones, and one realises as such that one is lost, and that it is too late to do anything, and that those that have anything that one does not have, must all be destroyed, incinerated and killed; this is the logical conclusion of those feelings, the childish revenge fantasy that results from having being wronged and betrayed by factors beyond the control of anyone, a haunting jealousy that eats away a jaded heart and leaves a sour after-taste that is only obliterated by the acid reflux that follows.

And all the innocence must be taken away, all the things that are not ugly and monstrous be destroyed; there will be sprawl everywhere, single-family homes and fat soccer moms and fat bearded office drones with bald heads and deep rift zones down their faces, there will be only crime and poverty and capitalism, and there will be only dreadful things, and we will have to endure eternally the pointless suffering and the countless waves of pain that wash over us. There is only despair.

 In the reception at the clinic off Rue de Eternité the pace was relaxed, almost leisurely. The older man in the reception with facial features worn under the relentless gnawing teeth of time still had a full head of grey– or was it more towards the white spectrum?– short-cut hair. Hizaki was sure this was the right place. The sign at the door was simply a big white cross on a square black background, which gave him a flash of a star-less night in a half-forgotten burial ground for the war-time dead. The innocent façade revealed nothing of the dark secrets indoors, save the ominous black-painted steel chimney that reached into the sky.

This was where people came to die. Hidden in the maze of alleyways in the 14^th Arrondissement of central Paris, it was known all about Europe as the place where people went in through the big wooden double-doors and never again came out; dispersed into the already polluted atmosphere of Paris, their bodies returned to the earth, to nature; their sufferings terminated; and now before the reception he stood in his ugly red- and white dress with needless detailed embroidery whose purpose alone was to enhance the sensation of 18^th century aristocratic taste, a bourgeois decadence utterly derailed; a big fluffy skirt that made his otherwise quite small buttocks seem almost as wide as a bed.

The old man was scribbling crabbed notes on yellowing paper from a golden scroll; but as he noticed Hizaki’s presence, he looked up, eyes full of utter boredom and resignation. His eyes they seemed to want to shrink into his head.

“And what might we do you for?” he asked with a voice weak and trembling, as if frightened, but it was definitely not Hizaki and his wide buttocks that he feared, it was something else, something general.

“I want to die”, Hizaki stated plainly. The atmosphere of this reception was oppressive, but he could not tell if it was all only the work of the old man with the whitening hair.

“Go in to the waiting room”, the man replied shortly.

WAITING ROOM it said on the door to the left, and Hizaki proceeded to open it gently, for this was a place of silence. The sounds of the city seemed unable to penetrate the walls and windows. One could hear a pen fall to the floor in some room hidden behind a homely timber door, on which sat a sign saying WELCOME, jotted down by colour crayons, like the work of a child or a liberal youth group.

There was only one other person in the waiting room, a young woman with scars on her wrists and music tranquilising her via earphones. She looked like she was sleeping, eyes closed but still revealing movement, surely that of dream, Hizaki reasoned. Maybe the waiting time was long.

Soon he was proved to be wrong, for a nurse appeared in a strange pink outfit more like something out of a fetishists closet, with wide mouth in an amused grin and thick red hair teased up in the back, and Hizaki thought there was something familiar about this person, but he failed utterly to connect the woman to any clear memory.

“You there,” the nurse said – voice was strange, dark, almost with a manly quality, but it could surely not be that it, like himself, was just a man in women’s clothes? – “come with me.”

And Hizaki followed in silence. He wondered why no one had asked him who he was, what his name was, who they were to notify.

“I know what you wonder,” the nurse said, “but we do not care who you are, where you come from, we ask only to know why you want to die.”

Hizaki said nothing. He was led into a small well-lit room with orange wall-paper and a paper lamp in the roof emitting a warm yellowish light. It made him think of his childhood room on the second floor of the old family house. He was told by the nurse to sit down on a chair, and did so in silence.

“Why do you want to die?” the nurse repeated the question.

“Because I am getting old,” Hizaki said, “soon I will no longer be beautiful. My face is sagging from the rottenness of age. Without my beauty and my agile fingers, my reaction time is getting worse, what worth will I be to anyone? I wish not to be a burden upon the people close to me, and to the people which I care about. Therefore I have decided that the only reasonable reaction is that I… am better off dead, for their sake.”

The nurse nodded and left the room. The patient, who now had applied to die, was left alone in silence for a while.

2

 He was lying in a comfortable bed with fluffy covers and a radio by his side, playing the music he had always so much cherished: it was Beethoven, Bach and Satie, Mozart and a long list of other dead famous 18^th and 19^th century musical prodigies, conductors with mastery of the arts, and this music in him instilled a mood of dread coupled with a placid acceptance of fate. It was best this way, no doubt he had, he must die, for he was soon to be no longer of utility, no longer of value, a parasite to society. There was nothing medically unsound with him, and he was not even old – next month would bring his thirty second birthday – yet the weariness of life had been creeping up on him for years and years now. It was always the same boring rituals that had to be repeated. Guitar practice took its toll and his arms were sometimes troubled with fleeting pain as he played. Knowing he might not be able to keep on doing what he loved – and that he would no longer be a beautiful aristocratic vampire-fetishist any more – he wanted only to die while he was at his height, at his most beautiful and respected. He wanted not to turn into an ex-celebrity, a forgotten drug-addicted hidden away in his degenerate lover’s mansion.

The nurse came into the room.

“This is the drink which you have to swallow,” said the nurse and gave him a big plastic container with a thick plastic straw sticking out on top. Though the container was not transparent, he could see through the straw the white liquid inside, which seemed to have the consistency of a milkshake.

“It will put you to sleep,” the nurse said. “You’ll just start feeling a little sleepy, before you know it; all your troubles will have faded away. No one will even know what have happened to you.”

Hizaki looked at the container for a while, puzzled, unsure of what he was going to do. Did he really have to die? Then, an image appeared in his head: Kamijou at his bedside, with tears flowing down his cheeks, telling him he was no longer of any use value. Crocodile tears, he knew the shallowness which prevailed all their souls, he knew the thoughtless inconsideration by which he would be flicked aside by the person he had used to fancy his most beloved should he ever become less desirable and less useful, and at that thought, he put his lips around the straw.

“You must finish it all.” The nurse smiled, and again he thought that there was something familiar with those eyes, that face and those quite big teeth. He had seen them somewhere before, and just as he fell into slumber, he recalled a moment – but disregarded it as hallucination – wherein he had shaken the hands of a man with just that hair and those eyes and that face.

3

Hizaki had not expected to wake up again, but he did. At first he thought it was the land of the dead, or hell, or heaven, or wherever the dead people go; for Hizaki believed in a land of the dead, he believed in the immortal human soul, foolish as he was and plagued by bourgeois romanticism, but when he noticed he was still in the very same room and that the attending nurse was still that strange person with the fluffy red hair, he realised he was not dead at all. Did it just fail? Where they going to try again?

But hitting him like bullets from a sub-machine gun came reality bursting into his bubble of inexcusable self-pity:

“We have given you a drink that makes you unable to die – what they’d call immortal. Nothing you do will ever kill you. You will live forever. You asked for death and to be banished from this world – we give you eternal life and suffering. You ask us for solutions, and we give you all there is: struggle, torments and horror. You wanted an easy way out, to get out, jump off the sinking ship: we put you into the storage space, we blocked the exits, we turned you back onto the only road; and you will thank us in the end.”

Tears wallowed out of his eyes.

“Cursed for eternity.” The nurse left the room.

Last seen: August 2009

And when thus one encounter the images of closeness and connection, that which exists only between the other – anything not-me – it becomes again clear that any attempts at anything is a waste of time. Any muscle movement is a waste of time. The bitterness from inside grows, soon to engulf everything in flame, a narcissistic derangement, or the opposite, a self-loathing trip to memory-land, the pasture is always greener on the other side of the river; for always the present appears dry and uninteresting, an indeterminable period of waiting, a waiting for what, one asks oneself, but there is no answer to be given, no hope to hold onto, no reason to bother. Everywhere those sick little runts that scurry back and forth like rats, like dogs, rabid and manic chased by their misdirected instincts, sickness and vileness all around; over there, a politician, telling lies now once more, and there, an economics professor, jotting down his diseased mind on paper, soon for that to be rewarded; and there, those people that are not me, always going about their little adventures.

It is the eternal enigma of the external, of the other; that which happens behind the closed doors and beyond the reach of my eyes, in the corridors of loss and loneliness where only my mind plays at repeat the morbid scenarios I envision. Behold, their touch like a leper’s kiss, their eyes empty yet their voices vibrating with emotion, faked they say, probably that is no exaggeration, and like puppets they dance mindlessly to the piping that through time and space perpetuate itself, the ceaseless reverberations of the mind’s electric pulse, oh, will they ever stop—and there, at the street corner, a little set of stairs, they sit in a row, cigarettes in mouth, discussing their imbecilic triviality heralding their vanity, so to say, a figure across the street, in the rain with umbrella in hand, sing to himself his mother’s bed-time rhymes, and in through a door he vanish, to his life, his little universe, distant and lost.

Drifting through the void that surrounds us all, a void filled with mystery, uncharted dimensions, twists and turns along long empty corridors ending with that bright-green emergency exit-sign, one contemplates the nonsense for no reason save that one cannot help it. Two people meet and caress, kiss, their lips they touch, sickening, yet, confusing; how to react to such a sight, what do they feel as they do that, nervous? Are they shaking to their bones, are they filled with happiness? Tricked by the human bodies home-manufactured drugs, seduced, sedated, tranquilised from the horrors that surrounds them, the fighter-jets that roar past a distant memory then, in that moment, a unity, a strength, that of the union between them, how I regret everything I have ever said and done, everything was always just a mistake.