And now, the ritual begins…
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DOUG’S BLISSFULNESS MEANDERED along pleasantly with the droning voices of the crowd. He began shivering feverishly as the temperature in the tent rose. Around him, people were in various stages of stupor, laughing and smiling as if high. Most people had stripped down to their underwear, or just got naked. Apart from Doug, whose thoroughly drenched clothes stuck to his clammy skin under his jacket.
A gong sounded and the crowd went silent as Farleece and her dancers returned to the stage in a graceful flutter of lunges and pirouettes. The dancers too had shed their costumes, now naked apart from their face masks and makeup. Farleece, the slim and pale raven, twirled naked through the crowd. Above her she swung an ornately decorated silver turibulum, suspended on a glittering chain. Thick plumes of incense billowed out from the squat censer’s holes, its heavy smoke wafting over the audience, muting the burned clover smell with the earthy, balsamic pine scent of an orthodox church.
All those around Doug were captivated by the naked dancers, expressions of tense wonder on their faces, like they were watching a high-wire circus act.
The vocal drone intensified, and a procession of several dozen red-robed figures entered the tent from either side of the stage. Hoods obscuring their faces, they each carried a small silk pillow in their white-gloved hands. Resting on each pillow was a small cylinder — similar to the one Doug had, but all had a dulled bronze sheen. As the robed figures circled the stage, Farleece and the dancers wound around them in a serpentine motion. The robed figures slowly swayed from side to side.
A group of five figures emerged from behind the stage. Wearing thick black sleeping masks over their eyes, they were all dressed in the same collarless suits as Bruno and Tiberius wore, but these colored in a dusty tumeric orange. Their heads had been freshly shaved down to the scalp. Each carried an assortment of wood, metal and glass parts — incongruous junk held like some holy relics. In a neatly choreographed series of movements, they stepped through the swaying red-robed figures and naked dancers, onto the stage. In unison, and still apparently blinded, they assembled a tripod structure out of the junk. Atop this tripod they placed a cylindrical glass object resembling the beacon of a lighthouse. From the base of that beacon jutted out numerous metal arms with clasps on the ends. At various places across this contraption were words printed in a Cyrillic script. It looked like an an old box camera to Doug, but one that had collided with a 1950s Soviet satellite, and crashed down to Earth. The orange-suited figures stepped back from their completed contraption.
The red-robed figures filed one-by-one up onto the stage, each in turn securing their bronze cylinders onto a clasp. When finished, they filed off to the front of the stage and sat down.
The beacon started rotating, its multi-faceted surface shooting out beams of light that refracted through the cylinders, projecting colorful abstract shapes across the tent’s interior.
Doug felt nauseous. The audience became immersed in a pallid light, their faces blurred in the pulsing glow; a nose contorted across a face, ears flapped over eyes, arms twisted around torsos, rubbery legs lifted up over heads and flailed as if in some storm that Doug was excluded from.
He closed his eyes and put his head between his knees. There, in foetal position, came visions of a mesh of trees before the blackened blue sky, of rolling clouds, a rocky beach strewn with thousands of small glass cylinders, running shoes floating atop a stormy sea, of yellowed eyes without a face, haloed nebulae in deep space, a shimmering donut spinning at the speed of light, screaming toward Doug over an endless grey sea.
The contraption on the stage let out a howling glissando. Then the harsh punctuation of a handclap cut through the aetheric wail. Doug looked back up to the stage.
“Behold the illuminations! Harken to the song!” The pale-faced Bacon had reappeared on stage and was bellowing out again.
“You are all now in the zone…” He stooped below the contraption and fiddled with the metal appendages that held the glowing bronze cylinders, scrutinising each small adjustment with a squint. “Feeling the vibrations…” With every movement the spinning rainbow of abstract shapes on the tent roof were reduced in color spectrum, toward a verdant blueish green hue. Accordingly, with each small reduction in spectrum, the howling siren became less and less alarming, and began to take on an almost pleasant tone.
“In its song we can hear the voices of souls from across the millenia. And this afternoon it sounds like the souls are singing in a minor key,” Bacon declared. “In its light we can read the inscription of those souls’s memories, the hallowed hollow where angels hibernate until the words call them back into life.”
The red-robed figures at the front of the stage clapped twice in unison; the sound cutting through the air like gunshots. The howling siren became muddied with layers of single notes so close they hummed against one another, causing Mayor Mike, treasurer Stan, Dr Hubble and Osmar to seemingly vibrate in the thickening sound.
“The Omnitemporal Everpresent Hyperstition State is an invoked condition that forms a central socialising activity in Golden Years’s tribal lifestyle,” Bacon continued babbling through the thick noise.
“The methods of entering this state have been developed and refined over millennia. As Tiberius Organ himself explained, the most recent rediscovery of the ancient records of brain glass under the Pinnacle Point golf resort is revolutionary. Each fragment constitutes the mind of a person who passed in a blazing instant, all their memories, thoughts and feelings immortalized into volcanic brain glass. Here, we decipher all that information stored in the minds of our preserved ancestors — for your delight, and entertainment, and education…”
Francis gestured toward the contraption and its bronzed cylinder appendages like a stage magician, one bent arm pointing upwards and the other with palm open toward the contraption.
“We name this Voyager. Using Voyager properly we become capable of placing one foot into the realm of death, the afterlife, thus we are reunited with the multiversal fields that course through us all. They connect us. In this reunified consciousness, in this Omnitemporal Everpresent Hyperstitionary State, we are thus able to progress toward the New Atlantis. The arcadia that awaits us all, if we so choose.”
Two more thunderous claps from the red-robed figures cut through the whirling spectral noise. The orange-suited figures each struck their limbs akimbo in different postures, as if spelling out some word or phrase.
“The bodily runic casting you see before you was one such previous innovation, developed in the 19th century,” Bacon explained, “Using the ancient technologies of yogic casting and magical rune throwing, they reveal to us a solar system, and prepare us for further travels.”
The red-robed figures clapped again, and the orange-suited figures replied with an array of new poses.
“This technology was developed in Russia during a revolutionary blossoming of visionary avant-garde culture, another short season where Golden Years was present.”
The orange-suited cohort crossed their arms and stood straight to attention. In each hand they held small wooden mallets with a ball of white cloth tied to the heads.
“Some call this a musical instrument, but it is more than that. It is an ectoplasmic transmedia machine that captures and broadcasts the invisible migrations of the spirit. But, the provisionality of categories aside, we know it is yet another addition to our cosmic realization, a way through death and into immortality. A way to the fortress on the mount. The kingdom.”
The orange-suit cohort circled around the contraption, their shadows cast around the tent walls, warped and flickering. They crouched down, reached out their arms, and in unison began to tenderly tap each bronzed cylinder, like playing a xylophone. They rang out with clean, happy notes that skipped over the purpley drone.
“This machine we call the Voyager, when properly incanted together with runic casting, it opens up our minds to the true nature of our cosmos. It brings our dreams back into the world.”
The images cast on the tent ceiling spun faster. The now all-encompassing noise field separated into further, microtonal layers. As the orange-suited cohort continued to blindly tap out cascades of bright notes, the metal appendages began to shift around the beacon of their own accord, the cylinders like planets careering around the sun.
In the blurry, fractal mess projected onto the tent ceiling, faces appeared. Then animals, landscapes, buildings, like meaning found in clouds. Kingdoms on frozen mountains, fundaments emanating out and dissolving into space, into people and more animals. At the base of a kingdom on a mountain, a figure was drawn. It was Marcus, her hair down and flowing in the wind. Above her she held a sword in two hands, as if preparing for battle, a halo around the blade and her head. She brought the sword down and everything exploded into a shower of crimson stars.
Another howling glissando blasted up from the contraption, then faded out in a wailing gasp. The red-robed figures started to clap rapidly, each plosive shaking the tent walls, letting in gasps of cold mountain air and the luminescent golden light of a sun that was going down into an early evening.
“Moon!” a choir of voices chanted on the plosive of a handclap. Now it was everyone in the audience, naked and sweating, chanting.
“Regret!” They chanted again, the drone floating under their voices.
“Ancient! Hungry! Refuse! Actor!”
Doug’s stomach was churning, his eyes welling up with tears from the flickering lights and haze of smoke. He’d peaked his high and was now coasting in a relatively ambivalent mood.
The light grew dimmer. Doug wanted to pass out before he started coming down.
Then another howl. This one distant, bloody. Clear through the fog of the music, the tent, the crowd, there came several more howls. Closer and closer. Then some barking, some scratches against the tent walls, panting and whining, then the sound of fabric tearing, ripped by claws.
The chanting continued. “Witness! Dolphin! Myth! Bomb! Never!”
The shadowy shapes of hundreds of dogs of all sizes and colors appeared around the edges of the tent. It was a pack swarming in. Following behind them came a herd of deer, led by stags, their strong and proud chests puffed out and charging. The deer encircled the perimeter of the tent. The dogs started to wander through the crowd, sniffing and licking at the prone, naked bodies of the audience. No one screamed or made any fuss. Everyone lay still, crossing over the borderline into sleep.
“Shame!”
CHAPTER 52: Incantation Contraption