The Monogram Monogram: Part VIII

The white light that surrounded Karl Kessler was not comforting, nor was it angelic. It was noise, screaming, endless audio-visual noise. It burned through even his hands and eyelids, and he was sure that even if he jammed pencils in his ears he would still hear the flesh-shearing shriek that burned all around him. He didn't know how long he hung there—not long enough to forget that there was something beyond all this. He couldn't change the fact that minutes seemed like hours.

After a time, he was no longer alone. The fuzzy fingers of static that crawled all over him were displaced and replaced with warm hands made of flesh. He nearly screamed until he remembered that a scream was also a name, but there was no reason to be afraid. The person who had confronted him in the vast white void was Dr. Melcher.

“How did you...?”

“I was going to reveal my origins to you, Charles. I just didn't have time. My own ego got in the way—I should have been looking at you and realizing you had fallen asleep. It's no surprise that Marvel was able to track us. There were bound to be negative consequences for dreaming in the world that serves as one's Dreamland.”

“O-of course. Um. Now how did you...?” He cut himself off. There was a more important question, though once more he was irritated at being reduced to asking questions. “Where is this place, and how did you get to it?”

“This is the Lost Stream. I told you about it, remember?”

“I remember, even though I was asleep.”

“Oh, come now, Charles—I know you were tired but you couldn't have fallen into too deep a...”

“Why do you keep calling me Charles?”

“Why do you keep calling me Dr. Melcher?”

“That's your name. I learned it in...”

“...in a dream, Charles. Sorry, Karl—for Karl Wagner, correct, one of your or our selves from...Bowery at Midnight?”

“You call it that too? With Wagner and Brenner, their dual role?”

“I'm relieved, Karl, that we share that commonality. Even here, in the Lost Stream, where even memory can be removed from existence, we can't hang onto the past. That's what Bowery at Midnight is about, isn't it?”

“What?”

“In our dream, Brenner was so desperate to fight against death that he became the most ruthless of criminals, to squeeze out blood-money from every tap he could find in his city. You remember his gang-leader face, so much wiser and bitterer than the officious Nazi Nardo. With his pilfered funds he created zombies, wanting to turn over every grave. Take away every loss. Beneath every villain there's a reason. Brenner must have lost someone, and that's when he stopped having your 'goodness.' In my dreams, he hated you for being naive—you were evil, a blockage in his quest to get back at whoever that nameless person of his past was. That dream was supposed to be about how death is death, and you must accept your mortality.”

“And, what...then...are the other dreams about?” Karl had to ask. He would do anything to avoid staring into the Lost Stream, where again, all the colors from all the things happening within in ran together into that crackling white.

Melcher sighed. “Well, you already know what Ape Man and Return of the Ape Man are about, even if you maybe don't remember those ones enough to have titled them. Black Dragons is about how people are usually not how they seem and trust is flimsy. And Invisible Ghost...”

“Social isolation? Dependent relationships?”

“Probably.”

Kessler bit his lip. “So you're not actually called Dr. Melcher, then.”

“No...no, not really. That name was a signal, I think—Marvel hid in the Divide, and all the alterations we induced in each other formed the first base of his power. That power gave him the strength to build a human body. I...was hesitant to tell you my true name before.”

“And now?”

“Now...I am still hesitant.”

Karl frowned. “How...bad can it be?”

“Melcher is a name related to Malcolm, which means 'king.' In the Bible, one can see the root of this name: Melek. Melek was the name of an ancient God that the ancient monotheists distorted into something evil—a rival and enemy of El, their One True God. You'd better know Melek, I think, by the name...”

A flash of machinery, priests working aimlessly and endlessly at its knobs and switches. Nude slaves pouring into a rabid and bestial mouth. Steam flashing from Hell and metal.

“Moloch.” Karl took in a deep breath, after he spoke the word. “Your name is Moloch.”

“I am Moloch. Or Melek. Once upon a time, I was the twin brother to the creature history names as El. We weren't Gods, at least I don't think so. We were the sons of an abstract being comprised of a slurry of energy and matter. El was...unbalanced. Once the local worshipers of Shamash turned from their God to worship Him, it began affecting His mind. Feeding His ego. The cult of Shamash died off, but it was echoed later in time when people found Yahweh or Allah instead. Echoed...mind you...”

“Where are you going with this?”

“El began to turn his followers against me, creating rituals that simulated my murder. He claimed that I induced people to throw their children into ovens which sat beneath an idol of myself.”

“Did you? Do you?”

Karl spoke the question haltingly, but they both laughed. They understood the Divide now.

When Moloch stopped laughing, he said: “So much for Black Dragons. You're trusting me now.”

“That one's a racist piece of trash, anyway.”

“No, I never killed children, or demanded sacrifice. Not like Belphegor, another local 'king,' and not like...El Himself. The war against me eventually became overwhelming. Too many of my followers were murdered or persuaded to the join the El cult. I was forced to locate a piece of ancient machinery from the dread city of Wal-Un-Porga, and by modifying it I was able to alter its appearance and its targeting system. Though it would burn out after a single use, I had built what Dr. Dexter would construct later, a Gateway. It crossed through the Lost Stream into the B-Side. I made it look like one of the blazing ovens they accused my followers of using to murder their own spawn, full of roaring flames, and I allowed them to perform their ritual on me in reality. El underestimated me. I'm mortal, somewhat, but his ritual was too crude to inflict real damage on me—I don't care how ceremonial a dagger is, it still can't inflict anything I'll just shrug off.

“In any case, I seemed to perish screaming in a sudden burst of flames. I'm sure my twin called it an act of divine providence, and from their perspective, never again did I return to their continuum. El was victorious. He would be butchered, in his own time, by blood transfusions from Sol Invictus and Odin and others, who diluted him with paganism. It was inevitable, really, and the only sin of it is a refusal to acknowledge it. Now I'm diluted as well, but that's simply because I choose to abstain from Godhood. I'm human, with human dreams. But I don't know if I assumed that role to fit your dreams, or if I, being a former God, once dreamed you, and you are merely a shard of me...of the Thrün of Tzaa.”

Karl was disarmed twice over. “The Thrün of Tzaa.” Like a clockwork mechanism, like a nearly-lit strand of thread on a great, interconnected spider-web, he thought back to the library. Had Marvel arranged that somehow...his reading of the weirdly-pulpy grimoire that the library just so happened to have? The book seemed distant from him now, and he realized at once that it was simply a thing in a dream. The convenience of his finding it was like a thing in a dream...

Moloch felt Karl think this over, without intruding on his thoughts. Something was wrong. If there was a book on Earth-20181-A that depicted the Thrün of Tzaa, it should show El or himself. As one entity (granting consent silently and naturally), they mulled over the memory of the book, with Karl feeling Moloch's sudden apprehension.

The book recorded a different name for the Thrün, the Son. Instead of the demigod Melekthrunsthaaa there was the vast and complicated Agthrunsthaaa.

A bloom of pulp erupted in their shared mind, and both of them cried out, desperately trying to avoid the first syllable of that long name. From Karl, Moloch knew Lovecraft. The name seemed to stand out now as one of those strings of unpronounceable syllables the pulp writer was fond of. Somehow, a name like that had power—a name belonging to no language except for the babbling of lunatics. “Agh” was anxiety's scream, but “Agthrunsthaaa” was anxiety cracking the mind wide open and scrambling the contents.

That was what they faced now. Moloch grew cold.

“We shouldn't have thought that,” he said. “In the Lost Stream, things become strange, like I said. We can exist here in a material sense, but we shouldn't. In the same way that one shouldn't read old grimoires.”

“I-I don't understand what's going on, Moloch. Are you going to be alright?”

“I don't know. History on Earth-20181-A now records that Marvel is the son of Tzaa, with access to all of my progenitor's abilities. And yet Marvel's origin was as one of the humans resurrected or imprisoned on the Gaudium object.”

“Who is Tzaa? What does he have to do with any of this?”

“Hopefully nothing. His name isn't like that other name, Agthrunsthaaa, but you can use your imagination when you understand him to be the father of two Biblical deities. He is a virus-god, an idea that Lovecraft might have liked. His realm is in the disgust of the fecundity of growing things...a perversion of life, life as a thing to be hated.”

“This is all pretty, uh, metaphysical, doctor.”

“I'm not really a doctor. And yes, it is, but we are in a metaphysical realm. We must begin traveling. Remember that Marvel brought you here. I suspect that he is here also, and we have to journey to him.” He pulled that tight black thing even tighter about himself. “Hurry. I'm getting colder.”

They began to walk, and it was like there was a path beneath their feet. But at the same time, with every step, Karl felt like he was going to fall down into an open sky. He had always imagined, he realized, that that was what it was like to try to walk in Hell.⁹

“Where are we going, exactly?” Karl asked.

Moloch coughed. “Dreams are stories, and as we wander through our dreams we are bound to a narrative...Marvel will have a castle waiting for us at our story's conclusion. The Tower of Babel, as it were—that Tower led to the confusion of language, and we're going into a snowstorm that confuses minds.”

Karl sighed. Moloch clearly had it in his head that he was dying. As a result he was choosing to talk in bullshit rather than straight answers. In any case, he generally got it. There was a guaranteed “final confrontation” that had to satisfy some urge somewhere. Just like in dreams.

As they walked, there was nothing to do but talk. Looking to their left and right, they saw flashes of things that could have been; lives they could have dreamed into being. Moloch saw a demented elderly butler named Casimir, who wandered in dark passages attending to the needs of a cruel doctor; otherwise he was Paul Renault, who lived on the Caribbean island of St. Sebastian, bringing the dead back to life as monsters just as Frederick Brenner did. (Names were tangible in the Lost Stream and they would stick in your head and crowd out names of real people you once knew.) Karl could have been Frank Chandler, an occult expert who used magic for the forces of good. He was also kindly Dr. Werdegast, gentle and relaxed but tortured and vengeful, and hateful of cats.

Moloch didn't want to forget himself—if he did so, the same would follow with Karl, and vice versa. He knew he would have to talk, but once more he couldn't resist speaking like he was on his deathbed. “I think what has happened thus far, Karl, has been my fault.”

Karl didn't ask.

“Your alternate selves appeared on Earth-20181-A because I attempted a magic spell that I learned in my studies. The Cantrip of Altosagha. Altosagha being the root-word for 'alter ego.' Ego, as you can surmise, is the '-agha' part of that word. At some point in history, Marvel must have created the Cantrip. It is Marvel's power that allowed me to accomplish my goal, the creation of independent doppelgangers who were nonetheless subservient to my will; the things the spell calls 'alter egos,' differentiated from simple doubles or doppelgangers. I needed to see if it could be done...I was a younger man. I did this when we were about seventeen, in human terms, anyway. I had to reteach myself everything once I crossed over to the B-Side, and became a humanoid. It was easier to learn the second time around.”

Kessler recalled himself at seventeen and smiled thinly.

“The Cantrip of Altosagha pulls one's dream-selves out of the Dreamlands and makes them into real people...except they have a bond to the conjurer, being from the conjurer's imagination. By using it without the proper spiritual training I attracted Agthrunsthaaa, for he is the master of the Cantrip...it's tied to the influence and grip he's had on the layers of the Dreamlands.”

“My only response is,” Kessler said then, “that I am intrigued by the prospect of Marvel's other name being at the root of 'ego.' It does have to mean something more than a monosyllabic scream, right?”

“All is possible in the Dreamlands. Some beings similar to myself can travel in time. Maybe that syllable was implanted in the minds of ancient humans in some universes. Ego is simply the pronoun 'I,' ultimately. Freud chose it as a stand-in for 'I' when describing the second layer of the mind. The common colloquial references to ego, as in excess pride, perhaps more properly apply to the Freudian id, the...selfish baby aspect of the mind.” And he laughed then. “Etymological genesis by way of time-travel—I have told you the B-Side was strange, stranger than your world in ways I can't succinctly say, but I am still a madman among my people for thinking of such things.”

“Is it still considered common to reach into a literal, tangible dream-dimension to casually remove the identities one takes in dreams and fashion them into literal, tangible people?”

“...I am not sure. We are recluses, aren't we, you and I?”

“Yeah. Yeah, we are.” Karl stuck his hands in his pockets. His feet were raw under him; he wanted to stop traveling, to stop wandering deeper into madness. He thought he remembered a desire to become mentally ill as a child. He didn't want to dismiss the idea that there was misunderstood knowledge, wisdom, and, yes, even stability in what was commonly called insanity by the general public. He assumed that the mind contained fantasy kingdoms full of ideas worth writing about, or trying to pitch in Hollywood. That was probably what Marvel had latched onto, when he had claimed to be a West Coast screenwriter.

Of course, he was aware of the fact that that desire to plumb the depths of “madness” could have been a false memory. He walked faster, hoping to reach their destination sooner, trying not to think about how it's more advantageous to walk than run in the rain. Yet he would rather be distorted than forced to endure a long nothingness. Nothingness was a slack tongue that had forgotten flavor—puffed up lips, meaningless hand movements. A lack of objective, forever.

But before they knew it, it was upon them. It was easy now to reconsider the possibility that Agh, or Agha, invented Ego. The thing was huge, made of rigid stone—straight, angular, ruined, and pristine. It was hard to look at, and had a different appearance every time they blinked. But always, always colossal, and giving the impression of being...Carpathian.

“How do we even enter such a thing?”

Moloch said it at the same time as Kessler. They looked at each other, and nodded. They had to just keep walking. That was all there was to it.

They may have crossed a drawbridge over a moat that might have had a horde of crocodiles within it—under an archway which may have had a portcullis. The brickwork around them was mossy and spoiled; regal and proper. The halls were abandoned and crowded with servants...it went on, and after a time Kessler was walking with his eyes closed. Moloch's steady hand touched his shoulder when they finally reached a stable space. A bubble of solid events, maintained doubtlessly by Marvel's will.

It was a corridor, which appeared to be on a high floor. Kessler couldn't recall climbing any stairs, even when his eyes had been closed. In any case, the torches mounted on the walls illuminated a series of ten portraits, which Kessler silently took as “family portraits.” Somehow, these ten men were significant to Marvel. From an arbitrary sequence he observed: an Asian man wearing a uniform that belonged to a cheesy science fiction film; a bald monkish white man with a sinister old face; a stern bearded man who seemed to be clad in the outfit of a Nazi; a handsome man, dressed for political office, with a nearly-theatrical grin; an obese teenager who was so fat as to be androgynous; a bony, hulking thing that had to be a special effect, looking like an agile, prone Frankenstein's monster; an out-of-focus figure in a poorly-rendered photograph, whose gender, race, and demeanor were hidden; a priest, wearing thick spectacles and sporting a cruelly conservative hairstyle; a pudgy white suburbanite, perhaps a schoolteacher, dressed casually; and finally, a loathsome fleshy thing that looked a bald human without eyes, whose skin was pale and teeth were long.

“Ignore it,” Moloch said. “It's part of Marvel's dream.”

“Shouldn't we study his dream, so that we can be prepared to confront him?”

Moloch did not reply. He was looking hungrily at the torches, craving their heat. His timeline was becoming thin because of what Agthrunsthaaa had done to him. But with a slight struggle he ignored the light. “We have to keep moving. We'll face him soon enough.”

There was a winding staircase ahead that had to be from an old movie seen in one of their childhoods. They walked long and far up this staircase, again completely unaware of the true dimensions of this castle. Soon they were in a surprisingly small room, and present was Agthrunsthaaa.

There was no drama to him. He kept the same form he always did, wearing the stylish but plain suit, tie, and slacks. His shined shoes glistened along with his round glasses and polished teeth.

“Thank you for coming all this way, gentlemen. Rest assured, you had little choice in the matter, but it is still meaningful to me.”

“We've assembled what you are, Marvel, and if you meant for us to come here, why don't you just kill us already?” asked Kessler.

“You don't know the full extent of what I am. You will both die, assuredly—one in mind, the other in body...and history, and existence, admittedly. Kessler, it seems you are lucky. I hold nothing against you because you are a helpless mortal. I will ensure that the destruction of your mind is as painless as possible.”

Kessler made a small noise, a noise that shuddered. “I just wanted to find my wife.”

“She was never real, boy,” said Agthrunsthaaa, with a nearly hucksterish voice. “She was the light on the lure of the angler fish. I made her.” And he grinned then.

“Show him kindness. He's suffered,” Moloch said. His voice was so gentle now—murderous Dr. Melcher was so far behind now.

“So have I, more than you can ever know. Better to lose a wife who never lived than a real family whom one could never replace. In any case, Moloch, Kessler is just a thing—a puppet, a shell. A cast-off. And if Kessler is just a cast-off, a piece of fallout from you,” Agthrunsthaaa mused, “then I can make him into a new Moloch, or a reasonable facsimile. I was born in the fires of the Lost Stream, and I will not fade away as you will. Your fading-away will be my first examination of the weaponization potential of the Lost Stream. The Stream permeates throughout the entire Multiverse, you know. Using my own power, plus powers of the Thrün of Tzaa, I can enter any universe I wish. Or render any event non-canon as I wish. I will have dominion over reality.”

“Why would you want that?” Moloch's voice nearly creaked now.

“You invoked me and mingled with me when you spoke my Cantrip. I saw your lineage, and I saw Tzaa, and as the master of the Dreamlands I knew his power would be the way to my success. Dreams are strong but also soft...they're not a sure route to the power of revenge. You used the Cantrip to see if you could, and from there I found the key to my revenge—”

“Who do you want vengeance on?” Moloch asked.

“Don't interrupt. By changing cause and effect with the Lost Stream I can remove you from existence, and thus guarantee that I will always have your power, and the power to remove you. To control canon is to overcome the two barriers of existence, entropy and paradox. Do you get it? In fact, it was toying with canon's power to allow 'clean passage' over paradoxes that led to my creation. My family and I were given peace after our torture in the construct of the Gauds...but that doesn't matter now. That construct was gone long before I destroyed it, when it got too small for me, even if it was the first thing that helped me realize my potential. I've clearly already succeeded, Melekthrunsthaaa. Kessler's book, and many others like it throughout the universe, already record the name Agthrunsthaaa instead. There's no point in fighting me, even if you had to come here. I made it so you had to come here, so I could use the Lost Stream to erase and replace you.

“The name Agthrunsthaaa doesn't have any meaning, save for the fact that it's part of Multiversal history now. A being of my power is bound to get lost in time; becoming ancient by interacting with the myth-makers of antiquity. I am an external context. I was able to graft my own context onto the Multiverse...doesn't that make me more worthy of being the son of a virus-god to you?”

“I'm scarcely a virus, it's true,” the Son of Tzaa said.

“What say you, Kessler?” Agthrunsthaaa asked. “I hope the idea has not become too screwy.”

“I feel nauseous,” Kessler said. “But I'm beginning to understand, and I understand that you should not have the power you want to take.”

“You both speak bravely, openly—I suppose it figures, as you are the same man.”

Moloch stepped forward. “He's brave because I'm brave. I'm brave because I'm not a man, with a man's weaknesses.” And he paused. “That ought to include pride. I can't assume that he didn't dream my courage first.”

Agthrunsthaaa started laughing, and it was a laugh that hurt Kessler as bad as the whine of the Lost Stream—it was that whine, but crossed with the sound of air rushing through a wet corpse. Moloch didn't care; this laughter was nothing to him.

“To me, Agthrunsthaaa, you are still young. You didn't even stand on the sands of Canaan,” Moloch said. “I've dealt with upstarts like you before.”

<< Part VII                                                                                                                          Part IX >>

---

9. Hell is not merely a term that is relevant to psychology (consider the psychology of guilt, shame, sin, crime, and punishment). Hell is a certifiably real place.

When I woke up from the blow Vivian dealt me I found myself in a dank sea cave—you could smell the salt on the air and hear the rush of the waves. I was shirtless and tied to a chair. Oliver stood over me, with Vivian behind him.

She plead for me. I will give her that. She did not try hard, but she begged him to spare me. It didn't matter—the fact that it was happening at all was a sign of how deep the betrayal was. If anything, she was putting on a facade I was meant to see through. I don't need to describe what I was feeling in my heart. But I have to write now about how it felt on my body.

Oliver evidently had studied the methods of the Inquisition. In the background, I saw something burn red and release smoke. Before I could focus on it, Oliver struck me across the face with a wooden rod. After I cried out he wiped this rod off, and looked at me keenly. “Across the Atlantic, in whatever equivalence to Old Spooky they have in England, canings would be curricula regulars.” Then he hit me again; the bruise howled as it crawled across my cheek. For about fifteen minutes, he struck me again and again, at his leisure. It was impossible to predict the blows' rhythm. It was like Chinese water torture, but instead of water droplets to the face it was blows from a mahogany rod.

Once that was done he retreated the embers that I'd since forgotten. A long rod, thinner than the wooden one he'd just used, emerged from the steaming coals. It ended with a flat, circular brand, roughly the size and shape of a hockey-puck. I flailed back, my bruised lips uttering resistance, but just above my heart his weapon flicked out. The circle irrevocably tattooed itself onto my chest, eating inches into the skin until I feared my lungs would burst into flames—from both the screams and the dark scars that ate down into my flesh.

He let me rest after that, but only barely. When my eyes opened once more, and my screams echoing in my ears finally left me, I saw something white and plastic in his hand. He let me take a good look before he slammed it down into my kneecap. It had been a syringe—filled with what, I have no idea. I tried to ask him what it was, but he spoke first: “It's short term. Only a half hour. Only.” And a moment after that—well. I have still never known what it's like to have fire-ants crawl under one's skin; but I have felt a simulacrum of such.

It may have been hours, it may have been days. I remember thirst and starvation. Oliver slapped me awake, indicating that I'd lost consciousness. When I was fully aware he spat in my eye.

“She's mine,” he snarled then. “She's mine, and she'll be mine forever.”

“Why, Oliver?” I asked.

“Because I didn't come all this way in my life to come up second. That which I've received I've deserved; and what I haven't gotten has been taken from me.”

As soon as I heard those words, a shift came over my eyes. Paradoxically, I was almost numb from pain, and it may have been simple pain that made his shadow dance. In the cave, briefly, it seemed like he had wings, and long horns, or something akin to such.

Once more he took out the long knife. I was still bleeding from where he'd gotten me before, and now parallel to the first cut he made, a shallow slice down my chest from the shoulder, he cut again. This time deeper, relishing the pain. I screamed endlessly but it did nothing. I felt the tickle of the knife's very tip against the outer layer of my muscle. Warm fluid trickled down my chest as I lost yet more blood.

Now I looked to Vivian, but once more, her fearful face paralyzed me. I knew it was false, but she was so convincing.

And there it ended. That was when I parted company from them, and from her. Vivian Gina was lost in the world, wandering, merely a shade at the corner of my eye. As I write that, I begin to understand—the locks begin to open, and I see Mr. Kessler's room empty. But I have to go on. Go on remembering; go on living. These last weeks, I have lived. Writing has made me live, because it has let me bask in the scent of my Virginia again...

That was the day that the Devil Bat began to visit me. Having written it down I understand that it was the flash of shadows in the cave as Oliver danced his murderous war-dance before me; but that won't make it go away. Every night it's come, for years now, grinding on through time like it's nothing while that same time grinds me down in a cruel old man. Once I was so kindly. But by the scars I bear on my body, I also bear on my mind the scars of the Bat's talons.

Yes, that is what happened—I assure you. Oliver Dran stole my wife from me. Then, with no warning, he capped off the theft by strapping me to a chair in a cave and torturing me within an inch of my life.

There is merely one string of details, however, that I've altered.

The start of this string begins with the fact that it wasn't I in that chair, but they.

Do you understand, now, as I do?

A single event can cause a cascade of further incidents, and so it was the rational end of the string that I cut Oliver's throat. Now it makes sense why I trembled when Kessler told me who his first psychiatrist was. But I see a sort of sense in it. I see a sense in everything now. This Monograph has given me a sort of peace...

There must be an ending. I will finish Mr. Kessler's story so that I can publish his case, and obtain the glory I've earned.