Stories of Rudolph, two of three

Dear Editors of the Lurid Mysteries of the Unknown Magazine,

Have you ever thought about the North Pole? I don’t mean the well-documented passage to Inside Earth; I mean the place where Santa Claus lives.

Disregarding for the moment the actual reality of all those tales, have we fully considered the ancestral events and realities of pre-Neolithic Europe that gave rise to them? Even at the risk of sounding like a cheap von Däniken knockoff — and I do not want to dim the glory of that great man by the tawdry association of my own vastly inferior ideliocules — isn’t the North Polar cohabitation of that curious pair Mr. and Mrs. Claus of shockingly inhuman nature, surpassing even the curious arrangements of the Gods of Olympos?

Let us consider this, if we dare — if we are not so bound by the hides of unbudging scientific orthodoxy, or so cowed by the arcane rituals of approval of its callously self-appointed gatekeepers of ritualistic scientistic lore — let us consider the setting.

Two creatures, Mr. and Mrs. Claus, clearly of a kind separate and much superior compared to their servitors and the common mortality that worship them, live in a separate, deserted (shades of Hiroshima? dare we speculate?) area, and appear to possess near-supernaturally efficient means of transportation. Even today, the technology to visit every single home all over the globe is barely imaginable — what could have spurred the cave men of the ancient world to think up such unthinkables?

Or what of the toy factories, so glibly romanticized by the storytellers of today? Factories are a distinctly modern idea! Only a very advanced society would have been able to engage in such concentrated mass production of trinkets — or rather trinkets to them, but almost magical sources of joy to those receiving them. As thoughts of colonialist Europeans come to wild lands carrying glass baubles rise to mind, one cannot avoid wondering if the Europeans’ ancestors were similarly impressed by the baubles of a vastly more advanced habitation in the far north — but surely this all is unbearable mockery to the science types who have decided these damnable things cannot be said out loud.

What factories churned near the North Pole in days long gone by? What crude and half-formed worker-shoggoths toiled in them, only later to gain the name of “elves” or “gnomes” from barbarians unable to comprehend their true mechanically biological nature?

What engines and satellite feelers, what untiring machine eyes, kept track of the “good children” and “naughty children”, or those primitive tribes that either did or did not follow the dictates of their alien mentors?

And, above all, what pair of intelligences housed in the shapes of a man and a woman, eidolons of the desired end result of their stellar mission, lorded over all this, the first dawnings of human civilization? What teachings and commands were handed down before all this was lost under the coy names of “Santa Claus” and “Mrs. Claus”?

What are those rites that survive in the chimney — the milk and the cookies — the story of the flying machine fronted by a red warning light and roaring like a herd of bestial reindeer — the bottomless bag of gifts — and what of the space helmet-like conical hats? What antennae did they conceal — and what of them doth remain in the inaccessible northern climes?

I propose to lead an expedition to the North Pole to inquire into these and other things the scientific orthodoxy does not want us to know; and as I return Einstien-like, Feynmann-like, like Hawkings bearing his dice, I want your proud publication to have the exclusive.

My calculations for the necessary funding and the probable location of ancient-astronautical ruins are appended.

enthusiastically waiting for your answer,

Hale J. Bopp, B.S.

Stories of Rudolph, one of three

I seem to be churning these out now; as you can see, this is the first story of three. The next drop tomorrow and the day after that.

* * *

“Being Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is like being the Pope”, the drunken reindeer told me in the dinkiest bar of the Thule Air Force Base.

I kept my mouth shut and nodded, since he looked like trouble: matted splotchy fur, shaking forelegs holding a pint quite a few beyond too many, and eyes more red in their bloodshotness than his bruise-purple lump of a nose.

“Like”, he went on, “there’s one Pope, and when he can’t cut it anymore, they throw him away. Boom. One day the most beloved man in all of Christendom, the next — boom! — he’s a monk somewhere in fucking Cambria and the abbot doesn’t give him a leave. No nothing.”

I couldn’t help myself. “I thought the Papal office was for life?”

He laughed — and you know, reindeer should never laugh. Uncanny valley and all that. That neighing is bloody scary even if they’re sober, sane and more than two feet from you. Break those three and it’s something that’ll give you nightmares every which day to Christmas come.

“Life! Yeah, that’s what they tell people! It’s the same fucking thing with us — do you seriously think the same reindeer would be up to the flying for decades and decades? The fat guy, sure; he’s nothing to do except wolfing down cookies and milk and the occasional drink; but it’s death being the lead reindeer all over the world. The temperature differentials alone are poison on your bones!”

He took another gulp, and then looked into his pint as if expecting to find something of great value there. “I really thought I would be it for good. I was the best navigator in a century, I was. I could turn the sled around in half a second on a dime. But, you know, it’s merciless business. You get the flu the twenty-third of December one year, you get a sub, a young thing that’s good but not as good as you, and the next thing you know you’re just not wanted anymore. I was the best Rudolph there ever was, you know? If he had kept me he wouldn’t have needed this bloody GPS nonsense.”

“And it’s all about the nose, you know. The nose’s just sham. It’s the nose all day long so no-one thinks to look if it’s the same reindeer. You know?”

The chimney voice

Okay; now for something topical.

* * *

“Come here, child.”

The voice from the chimney was raspy, old, whispery. Little Timmy did not like it at all, so he just went on his way and brushed his teeth like his mother had told him to, and went to bed.

An hour later Timmy, unable to sleep because of the great day of gifts and bedecked trees and all tomorrow, once again passed the living room doorway, this time with a glass of milk in his hand; and the house was all dark this time.

“Come closer, little child.”

The voice from the chimney was the same; a wheeze, a wheedle, from the darker abyss of the fireplace in the back of the dark emptiness of the living room.

Timmy hesitated for a while, and then ran back to his bed, unquiet and troubled.

Another hour passed; and as Little Timmy couldn’t sleep, he thought.

As an inevitable consequence of this, he found himself back for a third time, peeking into the living room darkness; and he whispered: “Are you Santa?”

There was no answer from the chimney.

Timmy gathered all his little courage, and stepped into the dark room, and all too quickly found himself with the fireplace looming in front of him, smelling like a burnt maw of hell.

There was a faint rustling noise from up above, and a few drops of meltwater patted down on the hearth; meltwater Timmy thought they most probably were, but some liquid drool or the other, surely.

A whisper reverberated down the chimney for the third time: a voice cold dead and inhuman, and it said: “Finally within tentacle reach” — and come morning, his parents found Little Timmy not, and never saw him again.

* * *

The topic being, of coure, Tor.com’s December for Cthulhu. What did you think it would be?

Wondering

Do you ever wonder how many Christians know more details of zombies than of their brand’s vision of Heaven and Hell? (“Oh, they can be destroyed by going for the head. But whether they rot away otherwise or just keep on going — well, in Romero, Brooks and King — what? I haven’t heard of no stinkin’ Purgatory!”)

Do you ever wish you had paper with a watermark reading “HELPIMTRAPPEDINAPAPERFACTORY”? (Do you ever wish you could use it for handouts to dozens and dozens of students… just so that one of them would have an eerie evening upon raising it by chance against a light?)

Do you ever think microwave ovens, dryers and other beeping appliances should have the option for different “ringtones”? (Do you think there would be puns… oh wait, of course there would be. Oh the horror.)

Penguin strike force

Oh, this mind of mine. Phil Plait posts about a big iceberg in Australian waters; and a few minutes later I’ve left the below as a comment there:

And on the floater, a penguin with a monocle and a sneer is saying: “Remember, troops: The Australians are a wily bunch. Don’t get snookered by the drop bear line; just go straight for the stomach, then head for the zoo gate. Don’t get all sentimental because they’re humans; they’re vicious gun’s-sons, they. Don’t forget getting our king back is why we started this iceberg endeavor, and it’s what we’re gonna do.”

“How we’re gonna get back, boss?” a junior penguin squawks. The terror of being stranded in Sydney is plain in his eyes, though the antarctic-white balaclava hides his expression.

The leader frowns, or makes the equivalent penguinine expression, and waves a wing dismissively. “Sydney Air Force base. We break in and steal a few Aardvark strike fighters. Why do you think we waited half a year and had Flapper and Coldbeak sent to Russia for pilot training? Speed is of essence, and you don’t want to try to outfly a Hornet on your own, chick my boy! Now, we have a mole inside the zoo that says —”

I think next the spy report would be interrupted by Smock, the electronics expert penguin, who’s detected the NASA satellites following them; a fierce debate on “They wouldn’t nuke us from space, would they? They would! Let’s swim for it!” follows, resolved only when Monocle St. John Ross-Shelf, the expedition leader, decapitates the craven coward Happyfoot in ritual single combat. Some ninety pages later this leads to young, heroic, and tragically inexperienced Calve Glaciersson piloting one of the escape planes; his mistake sends it into a dive that takes out the Australian parliament and triggers a full-scale nuclear confrontation and conflagration between the nations of penguin and man.

What?

I do too have good ideas for children’s books!

Computers and skulls

Happened to move from one room to another today at the university, the move courtesy of the ineffable machinations of Gruad the Greyface, Our Beloved Boss-in-Chief. (Internet tip #45: “Why, even if he came across it, he would have to be an utter prick to take offense at such a passing flippant… errrk!”) During this, noticed that once you move your computer, you’ve moved 80% of everything you need to work with, in and within mathematics. (Most of the other 20% is coffee and other stimulants. (Probably not Viagra, though.))

Also, you’ve moved roughly 80% of what distracts you from your work. (Most of the other 20% is related to Gruad and his administrivia. Also, “work”? Blood and ashes no; it’s an enjoyable or at its worst inoffensive pastime the nameless They happen to pay me to do, for some reason or the other. How nice of Them. I wonder if I could worm out of them a grant for “reading books I like” for a year or two?)

The other 95% of the stuff in your standard academic room is mostly decoration: stacks of papers, ten-year-old lecture notes and exam answers, thick books of arcane lore with disquieting titles, dribbly candles, a skull (mine is from Markus Mayer), a used* ritual dagger, and similar needful things.

(“Er, that skull… what’s the deal with it?” — “Those damn first-years don’t know how to be polite. Anyway, you came in to ask something, did you not, worm? Speak now; I grow impatient. Also, mind slipping those calipers around your cranium? Your skull looks big enough to contain a two-liter flask.”)

* : as in, “second-hand”.

Dangling legal bits

All opinions expressed here are those of my employers. If they won’t otherwise express any positions on lolcats, they shall have mine.

All characters appearing in this work are true. It’s all true! They rabbits, they tole me in my dreams, they tole me everything! coincidental.

By clicking “Submit” you agree that BigCorp is entitled to modify, improve, deimprove, excarnate, incarnate, discontinue or terminate you or any of your relations at its sole discretion and without prior or posterior notice to you. All hail Satan! Any further rights not specifically granted herein are reserved.

You understand and agree that your use of this software is entirely at your own risk and the software is provided “as is” and “as Lucifer wills it”. This includes total abjuration of any legal redress for any damage to your data, hardware, person, possessions or relations, whether they be the result of floods of maggots or brimstone-reeking shadows or some other cause related or unrelated to this software. (Yes, this means you can’t sue anyone over any damages once you have clicked “Submit”. If you happen to read this later, well, our organ harvesters are on the way. Please stay calm and do not harm your organs; they are precious to us.)

BigCorp reserves the right to modify these terms from time to time at its sole discretion and without any notice. This may include ex post facto modifications; it will certainly include those if you bring on a lawsuit. It also includes the insertion into these terms of your confession for any and all crimes, atrocities, misdemeanors and sympathy-sapping opinions BigCorp wishes to include, including bloody acts based on paranormal visions of unsavory nature, physically impossible feats of century-spanning lawbreaking and/or giraffe-rape with Elvis. Also the deaths of Jimmy Hoffa, JFK, RFK, MLK and the substitution of a Satanic double for LBJ, FDR, Mother Teresa, Howard Taft, and an innocent baby of BigCorp’s choice; plus many other exciting and highly titillating possibilities. This, too, may come up and get public if you try to sue. Bring it on, customer worm.

That’s what I think whenever I see a legal bit anywhere.

Lama of unknown origin

(If you continue reading this past the first sentence below, well, I think you know what is coming. And if this is beyond your understanding, do not google.)

To quote the philosopher Laotze’s older brother, Goatze:

“What is seen, cannot be unseen. When the tapestry of illumination yawns before you, then you shall understand this more fully.”

Why no, I shall not provide a link to Goatze’s home page.

However, I shall give you a scene from a Mongolian monastery.

And warn you that this is going to get worse.

* * *

“His Holiness the 23rd Rinpoche Goatze Lama, the Inferior Khutukhtu of Khalkha, bids you welcome, o gracious guest.”

“Oh, Mr. Guest, why do you pale so?”

“Oh. That is merely a mural, twenty feet high and one hundred across, that depicts spirits of the previous twenty-two lamas giving their traditional opening-of-the-lotus greeting to the newly reborn Goatze Lama. It, which some call the Reverse Bow of Opening, or the Red Well of Infinite Depth, or the Sacred Heart Viewed From Below, is one of our most holy and most common theological motifs — oh, turn around, gracious guest: there is the Lama himself, already greeting you with the unfolding of the sacred red rear lotus.”

“Gracious guest? Why such a scream? And why are you running away?”

“What, your Holiness? Yes. Yes, I suppose he will run into that place if he keeps running in that direction; there is naught else but merciless desert without a single llamaserai in that direction. Should I alert that place of his arrival, and ask them to prepare their ritual of welcome for him?”

“Very well, your Holiness. I will try if the phone is working.”

“Work, machine! Work in the name of the apparently sacred Reg Lama of Brixton which made you! I abjure, conjure and llure you, you machine! Ha! Hallo? Halloo? Can you hear me?”

“Good! Is this the Nunnery of Two Nuns and One Bowl?”

* * *

Poe’s Law, German philosopher version: “The reality of das Ding bekomes zupreme diffikult to see vhen das Ding an sich ist ein Ding-Dong perzon.”

Have I got news for ya

Partial repost: Three pieces, two old and one new, of demented, bad Christmas poetry courtesy of yours truly.

New times

Silent night
Quiet night
All are a-bed
But one still moves
A bearded zealous fella
With odd parcels for places —
Police shot Santa
“A terrorist for sure!”

And the second, which rather sounds like something I should found a cult around:

New Santa

Ho!
Dasher, Gasher, Blaster!
Donner, Blitzen, Endzeit!
On, my beauties!
Fill the night with the tempest of your passing!
On! On like a stormcloud! Like a trumpet blast!
From the frozenest, busiest Hell,
From the darkest place of eyes,
From where all good and evil is seen —
Over the sleeping world like a thief in the night!
Like a plague at the gates!
All is seen, all judged;
A mistletoed door is no barrier to me!
All are seen, all judged;
Now avert your eyes from the skies!
The day of your judgment is here,
The night of your rewards has come:
Your skies thunder, and your roof groaneth;
Your hearth-embers a-scatter
Your lids almost a-flutter —
Mystery of mysteries tonight, for
Your Yule God is here!
Now him all hail! Hail! Hail!

Well, here’s the third, a new one. This consists mostly of a vague idea derailing:

Thule Santa

There’s this Ultima Thule
This place near north pole
Where green goblins toil
And horned beasts neigh —
There rules an immortal
Heavy with sin and worry
White of beard, black of soul
Who once every year is
Allowed to the skies for a while
By the whim of some mad god:
Coal and twigs and emptiness
Are what weigh his sleigh, and
Worse still are its pullers, and
Worst of all the shadows after it.
And, er, sorry to confuse ya:
Ain’t Santa, but his evil brother Bob.
Bob Claus, the ang’l o’ wurst brats.

And it basically tells all you need to know of my poetic ambitions if you look again at those two last words.

Prprpr.

I’ve heard some people name their cats “Mittens”. How this works I don’t have a clue — and isn’t that animal abuse no matter which way you do it? — but I admire the brutal honesty. The cat may not know what’s ahead for it; but at least your neighbors do.

(But shouldn’t it be “Mitten”? You need two of them for a pair, after all…)

Mother’s milk (fiction)

He was a widower with a young child, but it was all okay because they had the house. It made everything so much easier: he had a room to go into when he worked, and spoke with others in distant places, trying to solve their problems with machines, things and programs: most times problems that made him glad he was well away from the up-swinging forehead-slapping hand of the doofus shown the total extent of his doofosity.

She, the child, had a room with softly undulating pink walls, a bed nook, and an up-snaking sun tunnel that she absolutely adored. She loved to dance in the few rays that found their way all the way down to her, though it were the glowing walls that really lit and warmed the room, and not the wan sunlight. The sun was an amusement; but the house was love.

The fourth room had been that of the wife, but it was grown in now, no longer needed for that, no longer a place they could go into, really; and they needed the room to take care of the needs of a growing child.

The third room was the common one: the place where they spoke and laughed and ate together. The house coiled around them, warm, sheltering, muscular, strong. Anyone walking past could see the house was in good health: the solar panels and gyres above it gleamed with preservative oils, and the rich golden woodbark slats and bone-white wattles were straight and clean. Inside, the house thrummed with the energy of their lives: she throwing a tantrum over schoolwork, he worrying over the bills, the house holding and sheltering them both. The bills were troublesome: his pay wasn’t all that much, and though the house made electricity on its own, and food of course, the water tap and the various dietary supplements and raw sacks necessary for full nutrition weren’t free.

Every evening the two gathered around the common-room table; she told how mean the boys at school were, and he told his day by day more savvy daughter just how clueless some people were with modern technology.

It had gone better since she had realized this wasn’t “A. Customer”, a one and same person, that was making all these mistakes; she had been building a quite neurotic picture of that one in her little head.

One could argue such concentrated misanthropy would have been better than his adult, distributed version; but that is tangential.

They sat on the opposite sides of the rough hump of a table, the house humming around them, and he dialed for the day’s portion of the week’s slowly prepared menu. First, a few vegetables grown in sacks and rooftop slits in the upper parts of the house, the product of rainwater and precious tapwater, sunlight and the light of organic glowing things inside the house, and much of the altogether too expensive raw sacks and supplements. Then some meat, good rib-meat the house had harvested from an excess of its own coiling flesh and prepared to perfection better than the original rib-cows from which those seed strains originated.

To drink there was clean water from the tap for him and, of course, warm mother’s milk for the child, squeezed up serpentine channels from the sentimentally seeded bulges beneath the floor that had been prepared there long before the wife’s demise. Now she was gone, but her labor-saving ways remained, and with them, a memory of her, a part of her.

He was a widower with a young child, but it was all okay because they had the house, and the house was living love.

* * *

Endnote: A mention of vat-meat in the newest episode of SGU, and wham! the idea was there. Not that it’s so very original; both vat meats and caring houses are old nuts, and someone has no doubt veered away from the computer house and stumbled to this combination, too.