parts 1 through 8

these, then, are the original eight gary dirin chapters. unchanged since their initial birthing, several years ago.

by my own admission these are somewhat weakly written, suffering from the usual flaws inherent in works that are made up as you go along, and without strenuous revision or cohesion. there were two more original chapters on my hard drive at the time of The Crash, which were then lost. the specific combinations of words were lost with them, but most of the imagery and concepts survived in my head.

since the original writing of these chapters, the whole of this storyline, both published and theoretical, has undergone some changes. gary dirin has spawned a set of subcharacters, his perennial and singular companions. the narrator of this story has developed an identity, and has made himself unique to this story. in short, everything that was done here and all that was left undone, and more that has come along in the intervening years, will be made again, as a graphic serial, with more internally consistent writing.

for now, enjoy the original eight, and let me take this opportunity to remark that i recently re-read the last chapter, and found that i’d published more than i’d realized. after some thought, i found that i was, in fact, able to continue on after the loss of two chapters, and at present count i have four more awaiting the standard light revision and posting.

i make no guarantees of how far this version of the story will go or how accurate it will be to the graphical version, but for now, consider it an exercise i’m game to continue a while longer. comics offer the ability to simply show things without having to find clever ways to describe them, but one of the advantages of prose is that you can show things without making them clear. this is far more difficult in a visual medium, being reliant on camera tricks and fog machines. and as someone who grew up on monty python and douglas adams, i enjoy playing with words. i don’t claim to be particularly good at it, but neither am i charging you for the reading.

Pulp Cereal part one

Posted by Sean on Monday, March 4, 2002 at 7:50 am

It wasn’t a loud sort of noise that woke me that morning, not really. It was loud, of course, but it didn’t feel loud. it never did with Gary Dirin. Gary always made exactly as much noise as was needed, and it always felt right. He had that way with a lot of things, or so the ladies told us in the days after, when he was lost to us, if not the world.

The noise woke me, but it didn’t scare me, it wasn’t that kind of noise. It wrested me from a particularly nice dream, and if anything, I was more irritated than anything else. Who would be bothering me from a nice sleep on this couch at our favorite tavern?

Why, Gary Dirin of course. And he had a mischevious twinkle in his eye. That was about all I could discern, my head swimming as it was with refuse from the previous night’s debauchery.

Gary beamed down at me, and offered me a glass of something. I could tell by the smell it was his foul wake-up juice: damnably effective, but I swear it would’ve killed a sober man with a single drop.

Knowing the alternative, I took his glass and downed it all in one go. A short bit of gasping and spitting later, and I was more or less sober.

Gary still had that twinkle in his eye, and his grin had stretched to unusual lengths. He took me by the arm and sat me down in the corner booth and rummaged in his great-coat and this is what he pulled out and put down between us on the table: his bible, which was well worn, but we’d never seen him reading; an old six-gun; a flask of whiskey, his favorite; and something that to this day I swear was a pair of glass eyes, but I could never get a good look before Gary took them in his hand and started to spin them around and over each other. He told me later it was to keep them calm, but we’ll get to that.

Gary took these things and put them in front of me and then he looked me in the eye, that twinkle brighter than ever, and only then did he speak. “My friend,” Gary said, “I would request your accompaniment on an adventure, of sorts. Open the bible, you will find all you need in there. Follow the map and meet me at the appointed location in three days time, bring everything listed. Keep the gun, but don’t use it if you can avoid it. If you have the spirit and perhaps a thirst for life like you’ve shown in here on occasion, you may make it out of this alive and a fair amount richer than your wildest dreams. If the stories are true, of course.”

I reached out to open the book, but Gary clamped his hand on top of mine and grinned again. “My friend…” he said. “I must have your word. Once you begin this you cannot turn back for any reason. If you doubt for any reason, say so now and perhaps we may meet again someday. If you say yes, I will take my leave, for I have certain matters to attend to.”

He released my hand and stood up, buttoning down his coat. Still twirling those eyes in his hand, he turned to me once more. “Your answer, then, my friend.”

Now, I admit, for a moment I was scared and thought I might pass and perhaps try to find that dream again. But there was something about Gary that day… perhaps the twinkle in his eyes or the way he grinned when he spoke. I was never entirely sure, but it doesn’t matter I suppose. I looked up at him, grinned right back, and told him I’d be there. Three days.

He smiled, a big broad smile, and he laughed, and then he took the glass eyes, if that is what they were, and he dashed them on the floor. From the shards he picked up two black bullets, black as night, which he carefully, almost delicately placed point up on the table next to the bible and the pistol and the flask. He grinned, reminded me to be cautious with the weapon, and left.

I took the book and the gun and the bullets and the flask and put them in my pockets, carefully as Gary had, and retired to my room upstairs, for you never know who was watching and it’s awfully easy not to care when Gary Dirin is around, but not quite so easy when he is not. I took them then and placed them on my little table and sat for a moment, and then I opened the book.

(end part one - more coming)

part two

(there is a fair bit more to come, not sure how long it will be, but part three is written and it’s just getting started. probably 10-15 easily.)

It was just a bible. But it had been written in. Or rather, over, in a large hand, with ink and brush. For the entire book, and there were maps too, and other things I could not discern. It told of things unimaginable which I should recount here, but won’t, for time is short and you shall hear of them soon enough.

In two days I read through that book twice, and only then I found the the Map and the List. It wasn’t a proper map, of course. It was, so far as I could tell, a map of the town where we’d been stationed, and there was a line leading from our tavern and home to the destination. But that destination led to still further maps, scattered throughout the book, and many of the maps were details of other maps, and so it went. They were hardly labeled at all, and what labels there were it took me most of the second day to decipher. But eventually I did, and only at that moment did I begin to grasp just how grand this “adventure, of sorts” I had agreed to would prove to be. Once more I pondered, if only for a moment, not meeting up with Gary Dirin the following day. Of taking the bible and the gun and the bullets and the flask and hiding them away and forgetting about them and hoping Gary came through it all well.

But only for a moment. If such things as were written of in the book were true, why I had to see them with my own eyes. Even if we brought not a single coin of treasure, not a single jewel or goblet or trinket of value, such visions as I must see on this journey would be more than worth the going. And so I set my mind to it and looked through the book once more until I found the List. And then I slept, and I woke up on the third day and went to do my shopping.

One cannot simply shop for such things, of course. You must seek them out, and that takes time. I had a feeling I would not have time to return and plan things out later, which is why, after carefully loading the black bullets into the pistol and stowing it in reach but not in sight; after putting the book in easy reach in my jacket pocket, and after putting the flask in my breast pocket as Gary did with such things; and after tidying my room and taking what seemed at the time might prove useful in a pack I had for such purpose, and leaving the rest locked away in my trunk, I left the tavern for what would be the last time for some years.

The finding of things took somewhat longer than I expected, and I had to venture into parts of town I had never bothered to go before. As a result, I was running a bit late when, as I walked past, I heard announced on a radio that war had been declared with Germany, and that german soldiers were heading even then towards France. This of course made me a little nervous, as I didn’t exactly want to be traipsing around who knows where on an adventure, for who knows how long, when there was a war on. But if the book was even half true, then there was nothing to it; the war wasn’t going anywhere, but Gary Dirin was.

So it was that a little reluctant and a little concerned, and even a little homesick for London, I arrived late. Gary was already in the old mill, and he had two Spaniards with him: marksmen, I found out later. They both carried long rifles and wore heavy packs. I had managed to get everything on the List into my pack, and though it was heavy it wasn’t entirely uncomfortable.

Gary smiled when he saw me enter, and he clapped me on the back and his eyes glinted even in the evening gloom, and he asked if I had had to use the gun. I said I hadn’t, and he laughed and said that was good. I asked if his other business had gone well, he stopped smiling, only for a moment, but it was jarring just the same, and he asked if I’d happened near a radio that day.

I said I had, and I voiced my concerns about the adventure. The Spanish brothers, for as I found out later, they were brothers, laughed, and one of them reached into his coat and he pulled out one of the jewels of which I had read. It gleamed and seemed to absorb the last glow of the evening and hold it inside and glow like a dying candle. Well, that was all the convincing I needed.

We made our way down to the cellar, and found the hidden door there, down to the wine cellar, down through there to the secret vaults, and then spent some time searching. The Map gave directions, but the scale was all wrong. Parts of the maze had caved in years ago, and with all the dust and darkness, it took some time to find the doorway we sought, and even more to translate, and then understand, the directions for opening it. But eventually we did, and just as our lantern finally gave out, the door gave way, and we came through one of the last known entrances of the little known and long forgotten underground realm of Old Rome.

Pulp Cereal part three

Posted by Sean on Saturday, March 9, 2002 at 8:13 am

Old Rome was not our destination, of course. It was merely the first door on the road. The doorway we sought lay far ahead and below us, and even in Roman times it had been thought a myth.

We had weeks of travel before we would reach it. Down massive smoothly hewn tunnels, wide roadways leading ever onward, no doubt to eventually curve back up, for all roads lead to Rome, even under the earth. Over bridges that spanned vast chasms, shrouded by mist from waterfalls and underground rivers. Through cities long abandoned but still grand and majestic in size and stretch. Some were rooms carved into tunnel walls, some were buildings erected in the hollows of caves.

One such city sat on the edge of a lake, and here we found a Roman boat, and to our amazement, it was intact. Nothing swam in that lake, no fish or even plankton, and to this Gary Dirin attributed the boat’s good health. Still, on the crossing of the lake, I and the Spaniards were ever wary of the dark shapes we sometimes thought we saw moving far below us.

We took a river tunnel for some days until it emptied into an even vaster lake, this one in a cavern even larger and more majestic than the last. Although there was a vast shoreline curving along the edge, and even a massive island in the center where an entire city could have been erected, we saw no evidence of roman occupation of this cavern. The cave was lined above and below with teeth: massive stone spikes that stretched up from the depths to stop just above the waters surface, or down from above to stop nearly there.

And from all of those upper teeth, there came a steady drip drip drip of water running down them and filling the lake below. We had a suspicion that this lake cavern actually lay below the one from which we came. Gary had read in his books that such cave formations were caused by water seeping through the rock from above. It was impossible to tell, of course: the river tunnel had gradually curved downwards and to the left, but all sense of scale was thrown off in such places, and time as well. It felt like a journey of days between caverns, and I slept three times, but I cannot say for sure.

Whatever the source of the dripping, I suspect few have ever seen this effect on such a vast scale. On the far side, we could not see in the darkness, but soon discovered as we traversed the lake, the teeth had in fact grown so close together that they touched, point to point or overlapping as a beasts fangs do. As we entered this maze of stone columns, a bizarre and twisted Venice, I was indeed struck by the vision of entering a vast mouth of fangs, on our way into some vast monsters belly. I do perhaps now know how Jonah felt, as he was swallowed by the whale…

We were soon lost in the dark, in the silence. If ever on this adventure I wondered why no one had sought this route to the riches that lay beyond, here I had no doubts. No sound we made carried far, not even an echo returned to us from the far side, so thick were the columns grown. And the steady drip drip of the water, which had accompanied us all the way across the lake, now fell silent, for none of these columns still waited above the water. Even worse, not a drop of light extended very far in any direction. Here I was in the largest cavern I had ever imagined, and I could barely see the length of the boat without my view being blocked as in the deepest darkest forest.

But Gary Dirin never faltered once. He even kept his smile most of the way, for we had a map in the book, and he called out directions, and marked the way as he could, for the dripping of the spines would wash away or cover any marking he could make. He was perfectly calm, until we came around one final column and our boat stopped dead with a sickening groan from below the waters surface.

For a moment we simply prayed. Gary had spoken during the long journey that the greatest danger was that we would take a wrong turn and run aground on a spine that had been submerged by the steady drip of the water, and that the ship would sink with our provisions, and we would swim but never reach either shore again, not that we could survive without our supplies in any case. When the ship came to a lurching stop, we assumed this was what had happened and we sat and waited for our fate to consume us.

But some time passed and still the boat did not fill with water, and our lantern still burned and we were still alive and dry. And Gary laughed, and he told the the elder of the brothers to fire off a shot above the front of the boat. And Domingo took up his rifle and fired a shot, and the flash illuminated three things for us. First, that the waters edge was approximately two feet from the boat. Second, that there was a stairway beginning another dozen feet from there that led up a short ways to a wall that stretched to either side as far as we could see. And third, that inset into that wall was a massive doorway made of some reflective metal, which we discerned from the sound when Domingo’s shot hit it, and from the reflection it gave of the flash.

Gary Dirin stood then and took his pack in hand and leaped from the boat to the steps in a single bound, taking them three at a time, and he set his lantern down on the platform there and gazed up at the doorway and he laughed. He was still laughing when Domingo and his brother and I had joined him on the platform. Domingo took out his jewel which glinted in the lantern light like a star, and we gazed at our reflections in the polished metal of the doorway, and we laughed too. We had made it. We knew this was only the first step of the journey, that the true perils lay beyond. But so did the riches, and in that moment, they seemed to be wholly within our grasp, there for the taking.

Finally, Gary stopped laughing, although he was still smiling, and he pushed on the door, and it opened. It made no noise, it had no track or guide or apparent hinge, but it simply opened. And there was a great orange light from within, and we saw a roadway stretching out before us, across a stone bridge and under a massive carved stone archway, carved into the very wall of the chasm — far grander than anything we had seen so far, and the Romans had had a penchant for grandness.

So it was that the four of us stepped through a doorway long forgotten even in Roman times, across a threshold no man had laid eyes on in five thousand years, and into another age. Gary Dirin, his smile stretching as far as it could, stepped forward onto the long forgotten road, and he beckoned us to follow, and started across the bridge. And that is when things started to go wrong.

Pulp Cereal part four

Posted by Sean on Saturday, March 16, 2002 at 7:11 am

(apologies for the delay, I’ve been a bit busy of late. see my journal for details…)

Domingo and his brother and I had just started across the bridge when arrows started whizzing past us, clattering on the bridge, and falling over the side, to tumble down down towards the fiery orange river far below. In an instant the Spaniards had taken aim at the source of the arrows: two cracks later and there were two less archers firing upon us.

But a dozen less two is still too many, and the arrows were missing by less and less, so we began to run. The bridge had no railing, and though it was quite wide enough for two lanes of traffic, it offered no real protection unless we wished to hang over the far side and risk falling to a horrible death. In any case, I doubt we would have had time.

The bridge stretched interminably long before us, while the arrows seemed to dance all around us. When at last we came over the hump of the bridge — for as we found it curved upwards at an angle that our legs did not like at all — and so came down the other side somewhat faster, the archers arrows finally caught up with us.

Gary Dirin remained unharmed. He simply batted the arrows away when they came too close and should have pierced his body. Domingo’s younger brother wasn’t so fortunate, and was struck with three arrows and fell over the edge of the bridge before I even noticed the shaft that had lodged in my leg.

I wish to apologize here, for even at the time I didn’t know the poor man’s name, and I never had the chance to ask Domingo what it was later on, for reasons that shall become clear. All I can say for sure is that he was a pleasant enough fellow during the short time I knew him. But that is past.

Domingo had been keeping pace with Gary and thus avoided harm through all this. When he glanced back and saw me limping after them, he slowed his stride for two steps, took my arm over his shoulder, broke into a sprint and dragged me the rest of the way across. Once through the portal, where the arrows could no longer reach us, the two of us collapsed to the ground in a mixture of despair and exhaustion. Gary Dirin, who’s eyes I could have sworn were emitting the same red glow as the river of fire, although in fact were probably simply reflecting it, vented his frustrations by pounding cracks into the rock wall. Such was his constitution.

Domingo pulled a bottle of some green tonic out of his pack, and after removing the arrow from my leg, poured a little into the wound, which hissed and smoked a little, but pained me no more. I wrapped a bandage around it just the same and then Domingo sat on the ground and said a prayer for his brother’s soul. Gary Dirin remarked that perhaps the Romans had had good reason to avoid this part of the ancient world. But his doubts lasted only a moment and one good deep breath before he, presumably, began to rethink his plans.

As he pondered the prospect of a single marksman, I happened to glance back across the bridge and noticed that the younger spaniard’s rifle lay there some distance back but not entirely too far. Whether he had dropped it intentionally for our use, or had simply dropped it we will never know, but it was there and we needed it. Gary quickly surmised that we would never make it out and back alive, when I remembered something. I rummaged in my pack and pulled out the collapsable fishing rod that had been on the List. I hadn’t been entirely sure what use it would be, not knowing what fish we might find or want to eat down here. But it now occurred to me that Gary Dirin was a rather resourceful fellow, and he had some rather queer ideas about what sorts of things might be used for what sorts of purposes, and never once did he care whether such things were proper. If he had, we would have at that moment been in a tavern on the surface, drinking to the Fuhrer’s health.

I was not a particularly good fisherman, but I fared well enough in most cases, and while hardly a marksman, my aim was not altogether terrible. So after several tries and some thought, I simply tied the line around a stone, put a large hook on the end, and hoped for the best. Surprisingly enough, it worked, and although several arrows shot out and knocked the rifle off the edge, the hook caught it just right and I was able to pull it into the mouth of the archway with us with little enough trouble.

And so Domingo swapped some of my rations and other arcane gear for half the ammunition in his pack, gave me a quick instruction of how to use a long-barreled six-gun, and we were twice armed once more. Another quick prayer for his brother’s soul, and a blessing on the rifles to let our aim be good and true, and we were off down the roadway. Since passing through the door, out of the fiery glow from the chasm, the tunnel took on a strange greenish glow, as of a full moon, but the tunnel’s very walls emitted the light. Gary told us that it was caused by a tiny fungus, like a mass of tiny electric light bulbs.

In any case, we no longer needed lanterns and so we stowed them away. This was reassuring as it allowed us to approach whatever lay below unseen, so long as we made little enough noise, and it kept our hands free to use our weapons. We followed the road for some hours without incident. We saw no sign of human habitation, no sign of any life at all besides the cold glare of the fungus. Domingo began to wonder if the archers had even been alive at all, and Gary’s silence did little to assuage our fears.

The tunnel was long and dim and cold and empty. It was not, as we thought at first, that there was no sign of recent occupancy or use. There was in fact no sign that this tunnel had ever been used by man at all. If the walls had not been so smooth and flawless, I might have suspected it to be a lava tube, as I had read about in the National Geographic magazine from America.

But the tunnel was silent. We made as little noise as we could, but there was nothing else so it seemed terribly loud to us. The way was not hard on the body, but after several hours I began to think I had gone made and was hearing noises. Very very faint at first, nearly inaudible. They were frightening to no end: terrible screams, moanings, chanting, and all manner of other disturbing sounds, which echoed faintly up the tunnel from far below. But they were not constant, and even fell silent for long periods, only to start up again with a turn of the road or a shift in the slight wind that blew clean air up the tunnel, or sulfurous odors from behind us.

And so I plodded along in private torment until we turned a long curving corner, and the sounds came peircingly from quite near, and I saw Domingo jump with fright.

Pulp Cereal part five

Posted by Sean on Thursday, March 21, 2002 at 6:53 am

Gary Dirin stopped dead, held out his hands, and motioned us to be silent. The shreiking wail grew steadily louder, and in horror I realized why. Without making a sound, Gary rushed us along the tunnel in search of someplace to hide. Having passed not a single crack or gap or door in the walls since we began, we had little hope, but it was better than sitting and waiting for the inevitable. Just as it seemed our time was up, we came suddenly around a corner and into a veritable pond of the glowing fungus. The ceiling had partially collapsed there, leaving great chunks of rock across the roadway. Between and over them, and all up the walls and across the floor, and dripping in strands down from the ceiling, the fungus grew thick and glowed brightly.

Gary shoved us to the floor, then dropped himself, rolled over and over and against the wall between two of the boulders, where he curled up and with the glowing fungus obscuring his shape, he appeared as just another fallen stone. Domingo and I quickly followed suit and rolled ourselves around and around and then quickly out of the way to either side of the largest stone. And then something came screaming around a turn and rushed up the tunnel towards us.

I did my best to slow my breath and still my heart, trying desperately not to move despite the cold. I imagined that Gary and Domingo were doing the same and that gave me little comfort. I never saw the thing, nor could I say if it had even had a body as such. All I knew of it was the horrible hellish wail and the fiery red light it cast as it came upon us. Despite the red glow, it was not flame: there was no heat, and in fact, as it came a frigid breeze swept past and over me. It chilled me to the bone, even through my great coat and sweater, and as it passed the fungus seemed to stiffen, although from the cold or out of terror I know not. They say that plants have no emotion, no sense, but things under the earth are not always as we expect.

The worst of all was the sound. If you were to close your eyes and imagine what Hell sounds like, this was worse. The screams of a thousand lost souls; the cries of fair maidens in distress, the ragings of angry men, the tears of children. And this was simply what it seemed to be like, a horrible, horrible wail as I have never heard before or since, thanks the gods. Where before, faint and echoing, it had been eerie and unsettling… here it overwhelmed and overpowered. I knew only terror and if not for the cold I would have been shaking in torment, from the cold and the horror and the knowledge that I could have avoided it all by staying home that night so long now ago.

A soft couch in a warm pub and good drink and good company. That was my heaven, and this was my hell. I would have fled if I had been able to move. I would have ran screaming to the bridge, embraced the arrows, and flung myself into the flaming river to escape the terrible presence of that single moment. I would have sacrificed Gary Dirin and Domingo and all the treasure we sought and all my friends up above and all the pretty girls in the world, in a moment, without hesitation, if only that horrible thing would leave, never to return.

And then it was gone.

I lay there shaking in the cold for some time before I managed to get myself upright and get my bearings again. The tunnel was dark and cold and silent once more. The fungus semed half alive, emitting only a dim flickering glow where before it had been a steady light: a candle instead of a lamp. Hugging my coat to my body, I brushed off the fungus and fumbled for the flask of whiskey in my breast pocket, but I couldn’t get my hands to close around it. Gary Dirin, in a rare moment without a smile on his face, took a matching flask from his coat and held it to my lips. A little strength returned to my body, but my courage was sapped.

After a few moments, a small question on the back of my mind formed into words, and I thought to ask Gary where Domingo had gone. He took the flask from my hand, dropped heavily to the floor, and took a drink. His answer, when he finally gave it, was that the demon had been hungry. And that was all he would say on the subject, and that is why I knew Domingo’s name but not that of his brother. I never did find out why the beast took Domingo and not myself or Gary Dirin: if marksman are good at anything, holding still would be it. Perhaps he had tried to fight it. I wouldn’t have heard the crack of his rifle, had he managed to fire a shot, over the horrible wail.

Some while later, I took a little from the rations we had left and prepared a quick meal, in the hopes that we might continue on, and that the horror might never pass this way again. We were just finishing up when we heard it’s howls once more, and it grew steadily louder and louder as it hurried back. I didn’t know if it was returning to whence it had come, or if it came then for us, but I wasn’t going to sit by a second time. Gary Dirin, unsettled even just a little, swore profusely, and then he took the rifle from my shaking hands and simply said to use the other gun. The small one, with the black bullets. He then rolled over in the fungus, crossed himself, cursed the gods, and disappeared, leaving me alone to do what I could.

The sudden flare of a fiery light from around the bend was what saved me from indecision: I was so terrified that I closed my eyes and squeezed the trigger out of instinct more than intent. Thence came a crack of thunder, and I felt the bullet fling itself out of the gun and towards the beast as it came around the bend, just behind the rock fall. Then a great and horrible sound as of a train derailing into a mine shaft. This was accompanied by a fierce rush of wind around the corner, which shoved me forwards where I smashed into a boulder and managed to get a handhold before I was moved any farther. Then the wind died, and there was silence.

A chill breeze floated lazily past, and I swear that as it came I felt cold hands brush my shoulders, my face and arms, and my back, as though a thousand ghosts passed me by on their way to the underworld, and touched me to prove that they were there. I stood in terror I don’t know how long, until finally I felt a warm breeze drifting down from the tunnel’s entrance far above.

When then I opened my eyes, Gary Dirin was peering upwards into the crack in the ceiling, pondering something. Noticing that I had my wits about me again, he broke into that grin of his, clapped his hand on my back and offered me more of his whiskey. I took some of his medicine, and then a little of my own, before I had the nerve to look up the tunnel and see what I had killed.

There was nothing there. Scant fungus remained in the little pond, and what there was lay nestled deep between the rocks, or up in the crack in the ceiling. None of the debris from our lunch was left, which I found odd, and even my lantern I had used before the fungus had recovered was missing, which was odder. Doubts and worries filled my head as I returned the pistol to my front pocket, turned about, and sat down on a smallish boulder to regain my wits.

Obviously Gary Dirin had gotten his courage back, indeed, he seemed now to be made of the stuff. He wouldn’t respond directly to my queries as to the nature of the beast, except to say that “Demon isn’t entirely accurate, but for our purposes, let it suffice. Anyways, it is gone now.” And then he was off on a tangent, babbling about the things he’d written down in the book, which he now said were translations from ancient texts long destroyed or forgotten. He paced back and forth, his arms dancing as he followed some path of logic I lost almost at the start. Finally he could take no more, dragged me to my feet, handed me the rifle once more, and skittered off down the tunnel like a schoolboy after last bell. There was nothing to do but follow.

My questions about the nature of the black bullets only yielded “proof of a theory” and that was all he would say on the subject. He did not fall silent, of course: rather, he took the bible from me and read aloud a passage from his overwritten manuscript, detailing some of the dangers awaiting those who venture into the ancient world, but you shall see more of these in due time.

Pulp Cereal part six

Posted by Sean on Thursday, April 4, 2002 at 7:34 am

( apologies for the delay. I got stuck: I knew where i want to go after this bit, but I hadn’t quite figured out how to get there from here. I was hanging out with miles and scott last night and miles made a joke suggestion which I realized was perfect. )

I sincerely wanted to feel bad about the loss of the Spanish brothers, but I was travelling with a man of extraordinary presence. A man of such warmth, such kindness, such wisdom and wit! You are lucky if ever you meet such a man, let alone befriend him. As I had known Gary for some years now, and had only just met Domingo and his brother, it wasn’t long before my heart ached barely at all. They had been good people, but they were gone, and Gary was not, and all other men pale when compared to Gary Dirin.

But even Gary Dirin pales somewhat when confronted with some of the wonders of the Old World. The demon, as it were, must have lived, such as it does, quite nearby, for after merely an hours walking, the stone tunnel shifted smoothly and seamlessly into a metal passage. I didn’t even notice but for the sudden clank of the rifle which served as my walking stick. The metal of the passageway was not shiny or dull or rusted, nor did it gleam or glint in the odd light, nor did it reflect much of it. It seemed more like stone than metal, but it definately clanked against the butt of the rifle, where the stone of the tunnel simply clacked.

Gary Dirin laughed and hurried his pace, and before long, we had walked some ways down in a tight spiral and came suddenly out onto a walkway. Or rather, the passage we had been walking along became suddenly a catwalk. Instead of a smooth cylinder, it was a smoothly cut half tube, about a man’s height across, with a bar running on either side at waist height. What was odd, besides the sudden change, was that the railing had no supporting struts, nor did the walkway appear to be suspended from the ceiling in any way. They simply continued on in a much broader curve off to our right, where some ways off it met up with a stone wall, or a ceiling rather, that sloped downwards, out and away from us.

Gary Dirin stepped out onto the catwalk and looked to his right, laughed and hurried ahead. Seeing no danger, I stepped forwards and was immediately struck by the noise: the passageway had been silent, but here in the open there was a steady grinding and whirring, as of a giant clock’s gears ticking away. It was so loud that I wondered how it was we hadn’t heard it before: it seemed as though it should have echoed up the tunnels… But I wished not to dwell on the tunnels, and so I followed the catwalk with my eyes, spotted Gary Dirin now paused and looking far below us, and looked in that direction to see what was there.

After a moment, I was able to make sense of things. At first, it appeared to be a gigantic ball of the same brownish grey metal as the catwalk, but it was a rippling like a rough sea. Then I was able to make out the details as I caught onto the pattern of movement, and I realized that what I was looking at WAS a gigantic clockwork machine of some sort. The outer layer was a giant mass of gears and wheels and pistons, all moving and pounding and grinding. There were no struts or axles, but between the gaps I could see further layers of machinery underneath the outer shell. Yellow light poured forth from within the construct.

The scale was impossible to tell, except for one thing. The cave we were in, if it was a cave for it appeared to be perfectly spherical, was vast. And the catwalk upon which I stood curved in a steady line around and around and around and down the cave wall, creating a segmented outer layer, before it finally curved back into the cave at the halfway point and went straight in the side of the clockwork mass, right into the center of a massive gear. The entire device, from that perspective, appeared no bigger than my thumb, and the walkway a single hair.

Another walkway led out the other side and then spiraled down the bottom half of the cave, and so, wondering if our path led us to the monstrous machine or simply through it, I hurried down the catwalk to Gary and asked him. But before he could reply the wall opened up and a harsh yellow light shone out upon us. Rough hands reached out to grab me, and I barely got a glimpse of the dark clad figure that wielded them before Gary landed a blow which knocked him back behind the light source, which seemed to bob and weave in the air just inside the doorway.

Now, Gary Dirin was a great bear of a man, and his massive greatcoat and heavy pack seemed as though they would have encumbered ten men to slow action. But quick as a rocket, Gary took a red stick from his coat, struck a match across his cheek, lit the fuse on what I realized was a stick of dynamite, and tossed the stick into the room, all this with his right hand. In the meantime his left hand was busily retrieving the collapsable fishing rod which I realized he had stowed in one of his many pockets after I retreived the rifle, and hooking it to his belt.

Once the dynamite was hissing inside the chamber and his other hand was free, he hooked the fishing line to itself around the railing, grabbed me about the waist, and tossed the both of us over the edge and down into the vast chamber. All this happened in the span of time it took our attacker to regain his footing and lunge for us again, but it was too late, and down down we plummeted, the line reeling out above us.

I saw Gary preparing a second stick of dynamite, and two things happened then. First, the dynamite above us went off, and sent the dark figure over the railing and down past us, where I watched him smash into the clockwork mass and disappear inside it, presumably to his death. Second, the line ran out and we stopped falling with an awful lurch.

It had been the longest fishing line available for sale, intended for deep sea fishing boats, but still we had barely fallen a third of the way to the clockwork device. As I watched Gary fish for another match, and he asked me to draw the hunting knife I had procured for the journey, I realized with some dread what his plan for the moment was. Still, this was Gary Dirin, and so I trusted him, more or less.

It is worth noting at this point that on many occasions, especially late and drunken ones in pubs of ill repute, Gary Dirin had put forth for us his theory that most of life’s problems could be solved with dynamite. Now, I had known Gary for quite some time, and although this was only the third occasion on which I had seen him see fit to test this theory, I knew well that the left front pocket of his greatcoat almost always contained seven sticks of dynamite, which is all it would hold comfortably. And although he never smoked, he invariably had a box of matches on his person, which he used mostly to light our pipes, as we never remembered the important things.

In any event, he had a fair amount of experience with explosives, and he often spoke fondly of his years as blast-master for the Russian railroads… I trusted that he knew what he was doing. So, clinging tightly to his pack, after he had lit the fuse and dropped the stick of dynamite and counted to three, I took my knife to the taut line and it snapped and we dropped. Gary rolled over so that he was below me, and then time seemed to slow down… I have been told that your life flashes before your eyes in the moment before you die, but I’m not dead yet, so I can’t complain that mine did not. I was simply scared out of my wits by the fall, this time without a line to catch us.

And then the dynamite went off, and as he had intended, the blast caught us perfectly and slowed our descent enough that we landed only slightly harshly on one of the massive gears of the clock. And we both sat up and took drinks from our flasks and laughed deeply as we had on many occasions, and tried to forget the horrible peril we had just endured.

It was the sudden appearance of thousands of openings in the cavern wall, and dark shapes silhoetted in the yellow doorways, that prompted us to slip down the stairway recessed into the gear and take shelter inside the clockwork device.

Pulp Cereal part seven

Posted by Sean on Tuesday, April 23, 2002 at 8:42 am

I awoke to a loud bang, or more of a quick series of bangs, like all the rifles at a military funeral going off not quite in unison. The great cog I had pitched my tent on shook a little, I smelt a little smoke, and then there was silence. Well, as close as it gets inside a massive clockwork device. I admit, it was surprisingly quiet inside, compared to what you might expect: the finest swiss craftsman could not make a clock this quiet, and yet the entire complex made barely more noise than the grandfather clock that stood in the hallway in my childhood and ticked and tocked it’s way through the night.

What made it even more odd was that there had been a great deal of noise outside the clock, when we had been on the walkway I had barely been able to hear anything but grinding and ticking and whirring. Yet here, inside the contraption, I could sleep soundly until Gary Dirin’s penchant for dynamite woke me.

Well, in any case, I was awake, so I got up and took down my tent, as it were: merely the long rifle, propped up on one end by my pack and the other by Gary Dirin’s pack, with my blanket draped over the whole affair. The cog/floor was slightly warm to the touch, so it made a surprisingly pleasant place to sleep; the tent was merely to ward away the ever present light that came from who knows where but filled the clock with a yellowish glow, that made sleep impossible. Gary had brought his dark glasses: I hadn’t suspected there would be any need for mine.

I rolled the blanket, took up my pack, and lugging Gary’s pack behind me, I ducked into the corridor as the doorway came around, or rather, as I came around, and headed down to find out what Gary was up to. As I had suspected, he had been up to trying to blast open a certain vault-like door, and as I had told him the night before, it hadn’t worked. He wouldn’t admit to it, of course, despite the blacked metal around the hatch and despite the way his left front pocket didn’t hang quite so heavily as before. You have never seen such a comical sight as Gary Dirin, the greatest man I had ever known, sheepishly denying that he had dome something foolish.

I saw little use for getting upset: the dynamite made me more than a little nervous and I was rather glad to be rid of it. And I hadn’t been entirely sure that the door wouldn’t have been blasted clean open: in fact, I had somewhat hoped it would, so as to save us some time and trouble. But it did not, and now we knew, and that was that. So I clapped Gary on the back, thanked him for the wake-up call, handed him his pack, and prepared myself some breakfast.

The door remained stuck fast afterward, much to my dismay. And so we took out the map Gary had pried from the wall the night before, unrolled it, and reviewed again our other route. To our left, a massive chain of sorts ran clanking down out of the ceiling and into the floor. Each link was a large bucket, large enough to hold several men when upright. But the chain was running down, the buckets were tipped over now, and to ride along, we would have to jump up inside one and cling to the bottom, which was the top now, and hold on until, according to the map, it ran to the floor of the vast chamber, into what we assumed was another underground lake, turned around, filled with water, and came back up, to cool the device while it did whatever it was it did.

This, then, was the plan. Except we had no idea of the route other than a simple pictograph on a very thin metal map. What we did know was that while we were holding on to the possibly quite smooth interior of the buckets, we would traverse some distance outside of the clock, where an untold number of our assailants may still be waiting. And then we would be dunked into a lake for who knows how long before we came back up, at which point we would return back into the device, somewhere on the other side of this door, but somewhere safe, we could only hope.

All the faith we had to go on was a passage in Gary’s book, which he had now revealed was not his own work, which described doing exactly this thing in order to reach the “stellar network,” as it was called in the book. This, Gary told me, was our halfway mark, and once past it, the going would be somewhat easier, while at the same time, somewhat harder.

I had some fears as to how this plan would carry out, but I hadn’t come this far to wimp out, and the prospect of working our way back to the top, and trying to fight our way out, without anything to show for it, didn’t exactly appeal to me. I had but one more of the mysterious black bullets, and my rifle gave me little comfort against the terrors we had already faced.

So Gary and I fastened our things securely, stood by the chain, and waited. Time enough to get in sync with the chain’s speed, time to watch and see inside to see that several bars ran around the outside of the buckets that would provide good grips, presuming they held fast long enough to take us down. And then Gary leaped and I leapt after, and we grabbed at the bars and managed to get a good grip, just as the bucket passed neatly through the hole in the floor and down through the machine.

I must admit, the journey down was disappointing. I saw nothing of the factory, if it was a factory, for we passed through a pipe most of the way, punctured occasionally by rooms like the one we had just left, and then we came out the bottom and Gary and I clung as high as we could inside the bucket, for we could see that several dark figures were stationed on the lower rungs of the walkway. But they only patrolled a short ways down, and then we were past them, and heading steadily towards a vast dome at the bottom, which I hadn’t seen before because of the clock being in the way.

And then we entered the dome and went into another dark tunnel and the track curved to one side, and we came out the bottom of what I presumed was another factory of some kind from all the noise. We were nearly horizontal now, and I could see a vast lake below us. Then the bucket hit the bottom, water flowed up around us, we dunked under completely, I panicked, the bucket lurched fully upright, and we came back out and were going up again. And Gary Dirin and I poked our heads out the top of the water just in time to enter another dark tube.

The trip back up was a little more interesting, as we could see that a great many dark figures patrolled the upper reaches of the walkways, and a great many yellow lights shone forth from the walls. But we were not spotted, as far as I could see, and very quickly we came back into the device itself, and the chain ran up a tunnel, and popped out in the center of a large reservoir. We went up a little ways, then suddenly the chain lurched and we turned horizontal, and Gary and I were poured out of the bucket, along with the water, into the pool.

And that was the end of that. We swam to the edge and pulled ourselves out, and looked to one side and saw the same door we had been stuck behind just a few minutes before. I confessed to Gary that I was rather unimpressed with the trip, to which he responded with laughter. What had I expected, he asked, gigantic spinning blades, or perhaps to be dropped with the water directly onto red hot metal, to be boiled away? Cooling systems, as he was quite happy to explain, don’t work like that, the mix of hot and cold is bad for the metal. The parts that get quite hot would be kept immersed in water: this metal, I presume, would not rust, so running it through a constantly fresh supply of cold water would keep its temperature below danger levels. I’m not sure where the water went: perhaps it ran down inside of pipes in the walkway and came then into the dome at the bottom, I could not tell you.

In any case, we were safe and could now make our way through the other side of the factory, and from there, to some seriously dangerous business. Gary seemed to know the way, so I followed him and before long we came to a large sphere, that looked to be of totally different construction than the rest of the complex. Where the gears and cogs were made of smooth seamless metal, unpolished but untextured, and with little or no apparent mechanical workings, this pod, as it were, seemed almost hand made. Rough iron, with visible rivets, double built hinges on the single hatchway, large domed projections evenly spaced about the upper and lower domes. Stepping through the hatchway, it was clear that the pod was about a foot thick, and with the door sealed tight, Gary sealed tight a second hatch on the inside, this one without even the tiny window of the outer hatch.

He told me that the pod would be our transportation for the time being, and that it’s workings were quite unusual. After consulting his book, he pressed a button on the pedestal in the center of the pod, and water began to flow out of the floor grating. Except, it did not pool and rise and fill the pod, as I expected it to. Rather, it quickly covered the floor, and then spread up the walls, and all the way up and around us until it covered the entire interior of the pod, exept for the control pedestal, Gary, and myself.

And then he pushed forward one of the large levers on the pedestal, and the water rippled and slowly the walls seemed to grow transparent: after a minute or so, it seemed as though Gary and I stood in midair in the center of a larger chamber. I reached forwards into the air, and touched the pod wall where I knew it to be, but the only sign of it was the rippling of the air around us, in a circle spreading out until it met itself on the far side of the pod and all the water rippled around us. Gary laughed, and I took a drink.

Pulp Cereal part eight

Posted by Sean on Tuesday, June 18, 2002 at 7:25 am

(gary dirin hasn’t forgotten you. have you forgotten him?)

With the ripples of the walls subsiding and the scotch… or was it whiskey? With courage working its way through my body, I turned to Gary and forced a feeble smile. He laughed again, and pushed another button, and I saw the wall in front of us slide upwards, and I could see, across the vast cavern, a massive doorway open up in the far wall. Dark figures scurried about and peered our way across the bridge, which I realized was the section of walkway that I had seen far below, for the bridge widened at the far end and curved to either side, joining the walkway.

Gary laughed, and pressed another button, and the pod lurched and then I knew that we were floating on air. The pod bobbed back and forth a little, responding to Gary’s taps of the control sticks. One seemed to control the rotation of the pod, while the other controlled it’s movement: by the use of both levers and a foot pedal, Gary floated us around the room while still facing the open doorway.

And then the water rippled from impact, for a blue beam of light had shot out from across the void and struck the pod, knocking it back against the wall, where it slid out of the way. The beam hit the wall, which hissed and boiled like frying bacon, and then ceased.

Wasting no time, Gary reoriented the pod and hurtled us straight across the bridge and into the opening on the far side. Well, perhaps towards the opening would be more accurate, for the many dark figures carried what looked like some kind of weapon, and the blue beams that shot out of them held us fairly well in place. After some moments of swearing, Gary let off on the controls, and the pod sank to the ground, some halfway across the bridge.

Gary crossed himself, then pressed the central button again; as the water shimmered and the pod became opaque once more, he pulled from his belt two automatic pistols, checked that they were loaded, turned to me, and grinned. I took the rifle, checked that it had six bullets in it, swallowed, and stood at his side facing the door. I had seen, just before the water started to run back down the walls, that we were surrounded by the dark figures. Then we heard the outer door swing out, and as the handle of the inner hatch twisted to open, Gary whispered to me to keep moving lest they dare to use their weapons on living targets…

The hatch swung inward with a lurch, and in a moment Gary had fired off five shots through the opening and hurled himself outward. I heard more gunshots and him yelling and blue light flashed, and then more of the black clad figures were trying to claw their way inside, and so I swung my rifle and knocked them away, stepped forward into the doorway, and took aim. In the brief glimpses that I was able to get, I could discern only that they were wrapped from head to toe in various black cloth: not a patch of skin anywhere to be seen.

I fired my rifle and two of them fell, another shot took three standing together. I felled more than a dozen men before my gun was empty, and the few remaining I clubbed with the rifle. A slight glow ahead of me caught my eye, and I leapt for the floor as a blue beam of light tracked my movement. No blood had come out of the dark figures when I shot them, but when the beam hit the bridge it hissed and melted, and the bodies burst into flame.

The beam cut off suddenly, and I ran forward and clocked it’s wielder with my rifle, knocking him over the side of the bridge. I turned around and saw only still figures between myself and the pod, and towards the clock, Gary stood amid a pile of bodies. He strode forward to my side, kicking a dead man off the bridge so he had room to stand. His guns he returned to his belt, and with his free hands he pointed to either side along the walkway.

The dark figures were running in terror. The stumbled over each other in their clamor to escape us, and I could hear them screaming in some ancient tongue. Gary spoke then, and this is mostly what he said: “They are the old ones: the first men of this world. They have lived long away from Earth, and rarely fought their own battles even in olden times, preferring to let us fight among ourself while they remained hidden. They existed before the druids, before Egypt, before even the first stones laid in Atlantis or Shamballah. They have hidden their existence and locked away their secrets, and set such terrible traps againts those who dared what we now attempt… Even the might of Old Rome, which moved mountains on the Emperor’s whim, preferred to think them a legend. But that was long ago, and they have largely moved on, leaving slight and ancient defenses against those who dare to believe in legends.”

I began to argue that the slight defenses he spoke of had killed two of us already, but I fell silent, for what I now saw terrified me. The yellow lights that emanated from the many openings began to move out into the vast chamber. And as they cleared the doorways, I could see they were the glowing eyes of dark figures. But the dark shapes that moved towards us now didn’t move at all like men. They did not walk, they slinked like shadows. They fell across the bridge and advanced upon us, and as they approached, I could see they had no substance. The glow of their eyes pierced the soul and chilled the heart. As they grew nearer, the few remaining sounds of the fleeing old ones, even the rumble of the clock behind us, faded and fell silent. These were not the dark clad men who had attacked us before, these were something far more terrible.