The Tale of Our Childhood Part IV/V

Qom, yeh fucked up the order. Just label yer Part Two as Part IV of the series and we'll be fine.

Bahstahd.

Anyway, I'm back. I would've updated earlier if the fucking net neutrality thing hadn't interfered with my Gmail. This story is a bit more personal, because the only other person involved with it besides me was my sister. I didn't mention I had a sister previously, and there's a reason for that.

When I was just blooming into puberty and flagrant gayness, my then-sister and I were walking in the woods behind my house. I didn't really think forests were that creepy back then, but that's because it was all before that stuff that Marcel was on about a few posts ago. This was probably one of my first real contacts with forests being creepy, because I'm just going to spoil some of the mystery and say I don't really have a proper explanation for what happened.

My ex-sister and I hadn't fully explored the woods, despite the fact that we'd lived in the house in Alberta for a few years. I guess maybe that was our silent oath that day: we had to explore the parts of the thicket that we hadn't seen yet. Well, I hadn't yet counted on my sister turning out to be one of the most sociopathic bitches to ever walk this Earth, so of course I was caught off-guard in a couple of ways when we stumbled across the chasm. I was shocked at first because it was a very deep canyon; and I was surprised a second time when my sister decided that this was a good time to dispose of me.

How I avoided snapping my neck, I don't know. My reflexes must've kicked in, and I musta pulled a sick twist and I'm not fooling anyone am I. I was just lucky, that's all. But I fell, for what was probably just twenty feet but felt like more, while that bitch just stared down at me without a hint of emotion on her nine-year-old face.

I pulled myself up and started choking back tears. Somehow I sensed that apathy in her face, and I didn't want to cry in front of her. (Plus, I was starting to realize just how homo I was and am, and I certainly didn't want to appear to be a sissy. Though I pride myself on being such a thing, now.) But fuck, it hurt like shit. So I pulled myself up...

And in front of me was a cave.

But it wasn't really a proper cave. Well, I mean, if a cave is an indent into the Earth leading into an enclosed rocky space, then it was a cave. But it was what was in it that made it improper. It was a shallow cave, compared to a lot of caves I'd seen before, but the back wall of it seemed like it was textured with something. When I say "textured", I'm talking like a fucking video game texture. It was animated, though. It was like a field of stars--like I was looking out into outer space or something. And in this field of stars, I could see a bunch of different worlds. Like, not just Venus and Mars and that shit. Like, other versions of the Earth. Where the continents were shifted, where the oceans were different, where there were new colors where the green should be. It was strange.

Now, it's very easy to just say that I was seeing stars from being, I dunno, fucking pushed off a cliff by my insane sibling. But there was something about it that seemed to be more than just a symptom of brain damage. There was something about it that began to drift into my dreams, giving me visions of alternate Dereks and Garrys and Slimechaps...

But that's another story for another day.*

That's all for now. See you around, bitch-chumps.

* Heh heh.

The Abbey of Serpentis, Part 2: The Morris Disks

Hello, everyone. Qom here. I'm back to continue my reports on the so-called "Abbey of Serpentis" that I started describing in the previous post. You'll remember that I mentioned that one of A.S.'s relatives, who goes to the UMN Morris campus which is not far from here, mentioned briefly to one or more of us that floppy disks were being planted around the school grounds--supposedly by the Serpentis cult. A.S.'s relative managed to contact the people who recovered these disks, and he sent the data off to us all a few hours ago. What resulted is pretty weird, I gotta say. There were five disks in all, each containing several image files and one text file. I'll post the contents here in order. Because some of these images are a little disturbing, I'm going to put a jump in and give a shock warning. Don't worry, there isn't any gore, they just might trigger a few people due to their unsettling nature. So. More after the jump.

The Tale of Our Childhood, Part III: The Abbey of Serpentis

Is this my first non-comment post? It is, isn't it. Well, hi. I'm Qom. Ex-star student of Alberta High--suck it, Jacob. (I shouldn't say that. I actually don't know him that well. And plus, he got out too.)

Derek told me about this series at one of our parties this weekend, and so I decided to take his place for Part III. He's got some janitor-ing to do today anyway. So I figured I'd talk to you about...the Abbey of Serpentis.

Hopefully, that name's got you hooked already! Because holy shit, it's the best over-the-top cult name you could possibly imagine. A.S. and Derek jumped on its ridiculousness right away when we heard of it. I'm sure one of us has already mentioned the long afternoons we spent in the elementary school library, reading up on old stories. What old stories? All of them. All of the weird, fantastic true tales of the occult, of madness and monsters, of ghosts and goblins. We discovered our Loveland frogs, our kongamato and mokele-mbembe, our LGMs and BEKs. For an elementary school, the library was strangely equipped for these sorts of studies. Whoever donated these books deserves to be canonized. They had Frank Jenkins' UFO paperbacks. And that led us into The Life of Mocata.

We definitely loved fiction: Lovecraft, Bierce, Poe. Being a flowering pagan, I was a fan of anything that depicted wizards, mages, ghost-hunters. I was especially obsessed with William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories for awhile. I loved the nonsense names of the spells from those stories: the Incantation of Raaaee, the Unknown Last Line of the Saamaa Ritual. So cool.

We looked for what we called "fantasy breaches" as well. Signs that the fiction world was bleeding over into ours. We discovered, through Harry Ashton-Wolfe, that Fu Manchu may have been real, as the Parisian criminal Hanoi Shan. Some obscure printings of W.B. Seabrook's The Magic Island contained references to Bela Lugosi's Murder Legendre. Of course, there were dozens of people who were all James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, and Eugene Francois Vidocq was both Jean Valjean and Javert.

But yeah! I was gonna talk about the Abbey of Serpentis.

One of the books we found contained some of the weirdest stories we'd ever heard. Stories about the hungry ghosts or jikininki, something called Tzaa, and, finally, the Serpentis cult. The most stereotypically amazing cult of all time. They were said to live in the sewers of several major cities, including Saint Paul during its "Saint Mudd" years. Let me say that again: a cult called "Serpentis" operated out of the sewers. A lot of folks apparently believed that the Abbey worshipped Satan, and to tell you the truth, I'm disappointed that they didn't. But they did worship some sort of snake-being--naturally, given the name. This creature was sometimes called Ophiuchus, or Abraxas, or Damballa. He seemed similar to Gekkos from The Life of Mocata, really, but this being was far beyond a Cthulhoid serpent-demon. Abraxas was said to embody the entire cosmos, and as such was the "Emperor" of all existence. Pretty intense.

Anyway. The Abbey would do the usual. Sacrifice people to their god. Have weird sex. Live in the effing sewers. They seemed pretty cool.

This is where it gets weird.

According to one of A.S.'s relatives, who lives just over in Morris, there's been talk about an "Order of Serpentis" that's been leaving floppy disks around campus, and making posts about them on the Morris Confessions Facebook page for the U Campus. I'd post pictures of these posts, but that requires traveling through the unrepentant filth that is that page. Presumably whoever's responsible is just someone who's also read that book. Given how close Morris is to Alberta, it could well be that they went to the same elementary school as all of us. Still, it's kinda weird.

Maybe I'll email A.S.'s cousin and see if I can get any updates on that. Sadly, just Googling Order/Abbey of Serpentis doesn't yield anything about the Ophiuchus cult that I'm talking about. If it'll help anyone who wants to do research on such a topic, here's a poem from that original book that I copied down. I think it was called "Snake Skin".

Ophiuchus

OΦ⛎CH⛎S

Lost snake-god,

He calls upon his minions to spread

His snake-skin across the mountainside.

His invocation is two crossed elbows

Across a scissors-sliced body.

The elbows are from severed arms and cross like this:

~

See?

Perhaps once his name was Marfik.

That means elbow.

That would be very funny, wouldn't it?

His body is red.

The last thing he saw was a glint of light;

not from the blade but from the camera.

He is one of the many reflections

Glimmering in the Great Snake's scales.

The skin is dead, but it is still everywhere.

It clothes the side of the mountain where the altar fires burn.

I should try to find another copy of that book. I don't know if it's still at the old school or not.

Graduation

The Alberta High School Class of '14 graduates today, and that means Qom and Jacob are finally getting out! So much for the "trapped forever" quip, Derek.

We'll update again soon, once the parties are over. Derek, Garry, Marcel, and I are all still working at the school over the summer--those middle two have their TA jobs for summer school. So we'll be keeping occupied, but don't worry. We'll still be here.

The Tale of Our Childhood, Part II

Hey lasses, lads, others. Weird stuff's been going at the wiki, but we're not worried about it. Just relax and listen to another one of Grandma Derek's shitty stories.

Marcel reminded me of this when we were Skyping last night about "DanillintheLionsDen". I told him I was looking for weird stories from when we were kids. He reminded me of this one. I just copied it over from the Skype chat. In his text color, no less!

"SO. YOU REMEMBER. THATWEIRDGROSSTREEINFRONTOFMYHOUSERITE.

The one that Amos got super excited about the first time he saw it? Boy's gotta weird tree thingy goin' on. He thinks that that oak tree in the school garden is Old Cyrus. WHO YOU GOTTA MAKE A PAGE FOR BY THE WAY.

SCUM.

Anyway. You know the tree. The one that has another tree growing out of it. So it's some sort of weird elephant trunk beastie? Yeah. You know of the things of which I speak.

Well, I remember once when we wuz havin' a sleepover at my place. We were telling spooky stories--it was mostly Garry and A.S. doing it, but I pitched in a few too. We did it over Pictochat 'cus o' me parents und their noise policy. (Derek Note: Ah, yes. I remember this Chat of Picto. And how...unbelievably shitty it was.) We were gettin' right freaked out, when suddenly we heard this loud meowing sound. Like a cat, but I didn't own a cat AS YOU FULLY KNOW. So we started looking outside (being as quiet-like as possible) to see if there was a cat out there. There wasn't. And we were all freaked 'cus we all agreed it sounded like it was coming from the living, where we wuz stationed.

We went back tuh storytellin'...Garry probably told somethin' confusing, A.S. maybe did too, he was startin' to get pretty obscure in those days...and the only nice was the sound of the wind outside. Maybe tapping from styli on Nintendo DS screens. It was probably about one in the mornin'.

And the MEOW GOES OFF AGAIN.

This time we really freaked, and we knew we had some weird nonsense on our hands--the weird nonsense had really leeched into our personal atmosphere at that point but we weren't crazy yet. So we knew we hadda sneak outta my house and go out into the night to seek BOLD ADVENTURE. Or somethin'. And so we started putting on our shoes as quietly as possible, gettin' flashlights, all that--Garry was cautious, but Jacob and Qom were all excited 'cus they were youngins. That was before Jacob left us, as you'll recall. Amos probably started quoting a dumb book or something. I just wanted to know if that obese guy who lived across from me had let his cat out agin, 'cus bein' the Good Samaritan I am, I was gonna give it back to the old guy even though he was a huge jerk (PUN INTENDED, BECAUSE HE IS/WAS FAT).

So we go out, start lookin' for this idiot cat. Jacob wants to play Ghost in the Graveyard. I tell him NO, THAT GAME IS FOR BABIES. He rolls his eyes 'cus even in those days he was a Master of Sass. We're wanderin' around in the dark, trying to catch the cat...

WE HEAR THE MEOW ONCE AGIN.

This time it comes from down the road. Towards the skatin' rink. We decide to start heading there, but I'm thinking (I don't know what you all were thinking then) that that meow sounded really weird. Not cuddly, like a real meow. More gravelly. More beasty-like. But also maybe more human.

We go down to the ice rink, and we're still lookin' around. I'm gettin' a bad feeling. A.S. said he was too, but that may've been for dramatic purposes. That's when Qom yells out that he sees somethin'.

It looked like a bundle of fur. 'Pon closer inspection, it was a cloak of some kind. It was blowing in the wind, but I thought I saw it shift a little. So I lead y'all, walkin' up to it...

All of a sudden I hear this SUPER LOUD growl as the cloak snaps back. There was a homeless guy under it, but I knew right away there was somethin' wrong with him. He...was hairy. Had a hairy face. But not just a beard--like, fur, all over his face. And he didn't have ears on the sides of his head either. He had pointy ears on top of his head.

I swear he was a cat person.

Suddenly, with a blur o' speed, he ran away, leavin' his cloak behind--but not before letting out one o' the most hideous screams I ever heard. Not a cat scream. Also, not a human scream. I'll never forget that, and I'm actually being dead serious for one of the few times in my life here. You probably remember it too. We ran back to the house. Locked ourselves in. But quietly. Still didn't want to wake up my folks.

We tried to go to sleep after that. I remember driftin' off at least. As I fell asleep, I remember thinkin' that that cloak was still back there...

After you chumps left, I did go back to the place. I wanted to find that cloak. But no dice--it was gone.

I still don't know how to explain that, but sometimes, when I look out at that gross tree in front of my house, I think that just a little bit off to the right, down the street, there was that guy. And I wonder where he is now."

So, yeah.

I'm going to fucking level with you, I don't remember this story precisely. But I do remember having a couple of stupid nightmares about werewolves. Maybe these two things are linked? Or maybe I read too many fucking Goosebumps books. Lord knows that Stine was fucking obsessed with werewolves.

Alberta's not that big, so maybe I'll swing down to that rink tomorrow. Marcel and I need to hang out besides work/Skype anyway.

Later.