Fic: The King in Metal (3/15)
“The King in Metal”
Author: DJ_the_Writer
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Charles/OFC
Beta: wikdsushi
Characters: Charles, Dethklok, OCs
Warnings: Cursing, Drugs, PTSD, off-screen sex
Summary: Charles endures pretty much the worst family reunion ever.
Lovecraft references ahoy!
Chapter 3
When Charles returned to Mordhaus, he was caught up in meetings and teleconferences, the latter of which was done during his physical therapy to maximize time. It was nice to have his right arm back (Angela indicated in various non-verbal ways that she heartily agreed) and it would be nicer when he was lifting weights to keep himself in shape rather than to recover. A shattered bone (not to mention the bullet lodged in his rib cage) put him in traction for much longer than he would have been willing to put up with if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. Once he could write again, there was an endless - even by his standards - number of documents for him to sign. His arm was worn out again and he barely managed to type a quick, non-committal email to his sister about the trip.
“Free up the week in August,” he told Angela, then went back to working on next month’s Facebones script while dictating more business emails to her. His day ended as it usually did, with a check on all the boys to make sure they were either sleeping safely or simply unlikely to die while he was asleep. Back in his office, Angela was still at his computer, typing up responses. She told him to just go to sleep, which he didn’t object to. The longer he could avoid talking about the trip to Denmark, the better.
She didn’t bother him about it. In fact, the days passed without a mention beyond what was required for scheduling. He focused on the boys, who had at least ventured into the recording studio but had yet to emerge with anything they were satisfied with. Nathan put up the most objection to the product of his own work. It was never heavy enough, never brutal enough, and the medieval armor wasn’t helping, and Knubbler still hated it.
Charles, who almost never ventured into the studio to disrupt the unusual occurrence of the boys doing their damn job, checked in to find Knubbler quaffing what looked like a liter-sized can of Red Bull. “I have a question for you.”
Knubbler’s eyes went a happy green. “Shoot, babe.”
“Don’t call me that.” It wasn’t the first warning, but it wouldn’t be the last. “What does a Bar Mitzvah actually mean? Ceremony aside.”
“Heh.” Knubbler looked amused at the question. “Being a bar or bat mitzvah means you are of age and obligated to perform the 613 commandments in the Torah. The ceremony is actually just to announce it in case anybody in the congregation didn’t know. Once you turn thirteen - BAM! You’re a bar mitzvah. And you’re that for the rest of your life.” He added after another healthy gulp of a very unhealthy drink. “Twelve if you’re a girl.”
“What if you feel no obligation to perform commandments?”
“Nyeh!” He had such an irritating laugh. Now Charles remembered why these conversations almost never happened. “Like half of them you do by default anyway! As long as my suit doesn’t have linen and wool in it, I’m good! Fasted on Yom Kippur because I was passed out? Racking ‘em up! That’s a way better rate of success than meeting with my parole officer.”
“I’ve seen you put bacon in your ham sandwich.”
“Love it, Charlie baby! Can’t get enough of the stuff. Like any good apikoros.” He moved to throw Charles a casual punch in the arm, which never came close. “Too embarrassed to ask your nephew?”
“Uh, I don’t think he knows this stuff. Or, I don’t know what he knows. I just know that the synagogue is so Reform, they have a remote-controlled ark.”
“What? A shonda!” Knubbler’s eyes went red for a second, then went back to green. “Ech, I can’t bring myself to be surprised. Besides, kid’s not even Jewish! It’s your sister who’s his mom, right? You don’t have a brother?”
“Right.”
“Matrilineal descent, babe. Unless she converted before he was born.”
“Ah, no, she did not.”
Knubbler shrugged and took another swig. “Yiddishkeit today, huh? Hey, want anything from the kitchen? I’m making a run.”
“Some cheese for your bacon and ham?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of popcorn shrimp.” Knubbler gave him a thumbs up before disappearing into the elevator.
************************************************
The following week, Charles Ofdensen did not leave Mordhaus. Except for the two days where he wasn’t there.
Dethklok the band, Dethklok the corporation, Dethklok the world power - everything continued as normal. The band continued to sit in the recording studio, eating French toast and coming up with new ways to insult each other. The door to Ofdensen’s office was locked, and his phone line was often busy, but he returned calls (mostly with stiff answering machine messages) and he answered emails. He issued orders to his loyal army when orders were needed. He approved requests from employees. But he did not appear.
In his office, Angela sat at his desk, surrounded by empty coffee cups and cans of Red Bull. She had a massive headache, but she couldn’t call anyone in to deliver Tylenol, and she couldn’t leave her position while a call was in progress. Charles was leaving a message on a machine, playing phone tag with a producer in Las Vegas, and she was typing it up as he spoke it. The computer program which simulated his voice still had flaws, and navigating a long conversation with a live person and making it sound real without an excuse of constant distractions while she selected from his list of common recorded phrases was still a bit beyond her, but her expertise with the program was pretty fluid. It didn’t help that Charles was a very fast talker in real life and people expected that of him. It wouldn’t work forever; a lot of meetings were being put off until the living, breathing manager returned from the trip he hadn’t taken, because he was definitely still in Mordhaus, if anyone dared to ask.
It was not a good time for her. Because it was just easier, she slept on the couch with her laptop open so she could answer something incoming in a split second. She didn’t sleep well, not because his couch wasn’t comfy (it was) but because of the overwhelming nature of the situation. She didn’t dare to sleep for more than four hours straight. She began to wonder how Charles did it on a regular basis and got away with it.
She knew where he was. Not to the minute, but he sent her an occasional text or email from his current location, an open Wifi network in Providence, Rhode Island. This he didn’t bother to hide from her. Why he was going was more of an issue; he promised an explanation when he got back. It wouldn’t be a thorough explanation if she knew anything about Charles, and she figured she knew him quite well. She’d been playing him for almost twenty-four hours when he called in. She noted, bitterly, that he seemed the less stressed of the two as they went over the answers she needed immediately from him. He asked about the band but didn’t require a long answer.
“I should be back on schedule,” he said, which was good, because it made her feel slightly less homicidal. “How, ah, are you?”
“Fine.” She did not want to say ‘lonely and stressed’ over the phone. But she felt one word communicated a lot. “Just be back soon.”
“I keep my promises,” was his response before he closed his phone. She wondered if he was really in Providence, or it wasn’t a misdirecting signal because he didn’t want her to know the real place.
Charles had a mini fridge in his apartment with ice, which she put in a bag over the aching spot on her head. He also had a ton of pills, mostly prescription, that on other occasions she would have been less presumptuous about reading the labels of, but eventually she found some Motrin and took a double dose before sinking back into the chair again.
She had free reign over his computer, except for some files which were hidden and locked behind passwords. The really important stuff he kept on a computer that was not hooked to any server, and he was constantly making gestures after she had cursed him out over his obsessive secrecy, as it seemed to endanger not her life (taken as a granted) but his. She knew he had a document in his safe that he’d had translated but never read, that drove people mad. She knew he’d seen it in a dream while he was legally dead on a stretcher, and that he only let people see bits and pieces - after the first few deaths. She also knew that he didn’t know what the bits he had read meant, and that it bothered him. The itch to read it all was something he couldn’t scratch, or just hadn’t yet.
One thing she did know, and didn’t like, was the enormity of the number of things Charles wasn’t telling her, or anyone else, except maybe the person or persons he was meeting in Providence. If he was really in Providence.
She scanned his private Amazon wishlist, which was always fun. It was primarily made up of books on the occult and the Ancient Near East, primarily newer releases as he probably owned the older ones. There was one “Dealing with PTSD” title that remained un-bought. Recently-filled orders included new academic research compendiums on Norwegian mythological texts, some music-related items that were obviously for the band, and one book called “Encounters with Intermarriage” by a Conservative rabbi. She really didn’t know when he would find time to read it.
His personal files were kind of cool to sneak around. Sometimes he scanned in concert design ideas, or produced them in Photoshop. He had contingency plans for literally everything: Dethklok being eaten by a giant troll, Dethklok eating a giant troll and becoming smaller trolls themselves, Dethklok developing an appetite for troll blood, and how to take down a 50-foot troll version of Nathan without harming the vocalist. At the bottom of that part of the list was a note:
do not eat unicorn very gamey goes right through you
Angela decided to take his hastily-typed word on this one.
************************************************
College Hill in Providence was a buzz of activity as Brown University prepared to open its doors and dorms once again to brilliant but mostly over-privileged youth and shelter them from the world for another year. No one noticed another sloppily-dressed graduate student, complete with ID badge and a worn baseball cap proclaiming his loyalty to his university of choice. Charles had actually been to Brown before, again not as a student but as a researcher, but never as Charles Ofdensen.
The meeting was arranged by Klokateer 64, who was a trustworthy administrator of the Gears who were no longer on any official list (including himself) and their numbers retired. It was his idea, even though the meeting was with Dr. Willet, the working false name for 238. Willet had stumbled onto something buried in the John Hay Library at Brown and it was significant enough to warrant a call from the boss, because the Hay did not release any of its special manuscripts or ancient collections. 64 added, somewhat nervously, that it also might be a good idea to “check in on” Willet and his research. He did not imply treachery - he would have just said it - but there was something Charles needed to see with his own eyes.
Since 64 wasn’t given to panicking, Charles disappeared from Mordhaus on the employee shuttle, dressed as a Gear, and made his way south to Rhode Island.
The documents in question, or some of them, were in the special archives, but under an “unidentified” section that was therefore less likely to be cataloged properly. When Charles arrived, 64 had the identification ready that would admit Charles as a visiting graduate student from Cornell. Usually students applied for permission to see books, and sat in the reading room while they were delivered, but 64 had an employee pass care of Willet that got them down into the musty stacks, where Brown kept their medieval illuminated manuscripts, their anatomy book made out of human skin, and their copy of the Necronomicon. Charles had seen it on a previous visit, and he didn’t feel the need to peruse it now, even though the text was slightly different from the one in the Mordhaus library. Touching that thing always gave him shivers.
“Here we are.” 64 had the document in question flagged by being pulled slightly out of alignment with the other books on the shelf. They weren’t bound, but stored in cardboard boxes often wrapped in plastic that contained parchment and papyrus scroll. In this case, it was lambskin. Charles recognized the smell and the coloring around the edges, where the bleach to make it into paper hadn’t gone in deep. “It’s not the lines,” 64 said, handing him a magnifying glass. “There’s an additional text underneath. Probably in some fruit juice or oil, so it would fade quickly. Then it was written over.”
They retreated to a corner with a table and Charles bent over the parchment. “Accidentally?” Parchment was expensive to produce. Something that looked almost blank would find new use, especially because parchment was sturdy in comparison to papyrus paper.
“It’s too aligned with the old text to be accidental. Look to the corner of each letter.”
64 snatched a lamp from a shelf and brought it in close so Charles could examine the stains beneath the ink letters. The bold black letters were in a Babylonian script, but he recognized the near-invisible lettering to be Elamite, meaning it was from post-Sumerian Iran, probably in the 3000 BCE range. Elamite script was incredibly hard to read because it wasn’t related to any nearby languages like the many proto-Semitic ones. He could sound out the familiar word for ziggurat, and the word ‘destroyed’ but no familiar ziggurat names popped up. He saw yet another familiar word, but he would need time with the rest of them. “This is a flood text.”
“Yes.”
“Does 238 have a working translation?”
“No, sir. He said you have more Elamite resources than he does. I thought since you were here, you might want to see it yourself.”
They would take a digital scan with 64’s camera. “So this trip is really about Willet,” he said, meaning 238.
“Yes, sir.”
Charles didn’t question it, too focused on finding anything he could translate on the spot, coming up empty. “Computer.”
64 opened Charles’s backpack and retrieved his laptop for him, setting it on the table. There was no internet service down here, but he didn’t need it. He got to work immediately, calling up dictionaries and resources stored in the computer. It was several hours before he had a halfway decent translation.
On [calendar date] I came up from [unknown location], where the ziggurat of [unfamiliar name] once stood. It is now a flat land. I paid a guide to show me the spot that was the top of the mountain, where the water sang forth that covered the earth.
“A flood wouldn’t have flattened a stone ziggurat,” 64 observed.
“And enough water to flood the world - or the Near East to the Black Sea - shouldn’t be spurting out of a building in the middle of a desert.”
“In the Bible, the Flood is caused by rain.”
“Texts don’t always match,” was Charles’s response.
The work went very late, and the next day, they went to see Dr. Willet in his Georgian house on Hope Street. Before becoming a Klokateer, Dr. Willet had been a PhD student in anthropology. When he agreed to do as ordered for this mission, Charles paid for him to go back to school and finish his thesis (alongside other research) at Columbia before doing the mandatory faking of his death and disappearing, so that he really was a doctor of philosophy, but his last name was not Willet.
“He knows we’re coming,” 64 said after an uncomfortably long wait at the door, and a man answered who must have been Dr. Willet. His features were there. The thin face, the sharp corners to his cheeks, the curious expression - it was Willet.
Plus about forty years.
The man Charles had last seen was in his mid-thirties. He had long black hair, and it still was long, partially to cover his brand, but now it was gray. His features, while intact, were partially slumped (as was his posture) as tight skin had become pale folds of loose flesh. The spark of genius in his eyes was muted, and hidden behind bushy white eyebrows. “Sorry to keep you waiting, sir. Please come in.”
The wait was explained - Willet didn’t move very fast and he seemed to creak as much as the old wooden floors beneath him. With shaking hands he served them tea. His skeletal hands could barely grasp the cups. Charles assumed an explanation was coming, perhaps faster than the tea, but he wasn’t holding his breath on that.
“I don’t mean to be presumptuous, sir, but you of course have all the information I’ve been sending you?”
“Yes.” The emails from Willet had actually been quite regular at one point, with large gaps when he was working on something.
“I would have contacted you about my progress - not just on the parchment in the Hay - but I wanted to be certain before bothering you with what I thought might be nonsense. And I am afraid still might be.”
“I’m already here,” Charles said. He wanted to be formal, but his heart went out to Willet, and whatever had happened to him. That explanation, he was sure, was to come.
Willet did not disappoint. “This project began when I was going through journals referring library donations to the university available at the Providence Historical Preservation Society. Eventually a group kept popping up - the Miskatonic Anthropological Society. They were active in the early 1900’s, from about 1903 to 1927. Some of them were identified as professors of archaeology and ancient history at Brown, Harvard, and several other universities, along with a good number of amateur enthusiasts, particularly linguists. As I did other research, I also collected clippings on the society, whenever they made the local papers, even if it was just to announce a meeting and where it was hosted - usually on College Hill but they had no official association with any university.
“Not much came of this until I was also able to locate the journals of several members - mostly amateur linguists and historians, unfortunately - who were active in the society in the early 1920’s. Their collections, which were sold with their estates, included diaries, which were listed and sold in bulk to the Preservation Society. I’m quite sure that I’m the only one to specifically request the journals, as they had the look of something that hadn’t been opened in half a century, while the other items had made their way to museums and private collections. These particular men were interested in the Middle East, and at least one of them was fluent in Akkadian - which is still taught at Brown so I suppose that isn’t so amazing. Anyway, all their journals spent a good deal of ink focused on events taking place in May of 1926, when a recently-returned colleague from the east, who isn’t identified, appeared with an ancient artifact. He was, they said, rather eager to be rid of it, and simply handed it off to the society president before disappearing.
“The item was a black disc. It had been excavated by the man himself at an archaeological site in Iraq, where nothing else significant was found at the time, or so I learned later through other modes of research, none of which list it as a found item. Normally you wouldn’t think a black disc, measuring exactly three feet in diameter, and six inches thick, wouldn’t be interesting, but as they began to inspect it, it became more puzzling.
“First they attended to the inscription along the side. It was in a Sumerian dialect, but it took them quite a while to figure out that it was also written, for some reason, backwards. They translated it to the best of their knowledge, but couldn’t make sense of it. There were too many unknown words that might have been proper names. Unfortunately, none of the members recorded the original script in their journals. Only the translation was included in one journal. ‘Left only to _____, none shall die.’ Then they turned to the stone itself. It was of a peculiar hue, black and shiny like volcanic rock but also of a green tint, and they could not identify it as any stone or metal made on earth. The topside was smooth, but the bottom had mismatched holes and carved groves, as if this was the top of some device, and it had become detached, but no such device was found at the site in Iraq. The disc had unexplainable qualities - sometimes it was very heavy like stone, sometimes very light like hollow wood, but it always weighed exactly 8 pounds no matter when they weighed it. It had a ... phantasmal quality that made them all quite uneager to keep it in their homes. Eventually a young Mr. Carter agreed and he was the first to die.
“He grew weak, and his stomach rebelled, and he had unexplained rashes that resisted the popular treatments of the day. When he died, since he was somewhat of a weak constitution anyway, no one thought much of it in connection to the disc, which passed to a Mr. Ward. He, too, suffered a similar death. After the fourth member passed away - one who had spent time with it but never had it in his house or his possession - they endeavored to destroy it, but could find no hammer that was strong enough to smash it. What exactly happened to it, the accounts differ. One journal says they tossed it in the Providence River, another that they buried it deep in a construction site. The point is, it went out of their lives, and they were so terrified of their association with it and each other that the society dissolved entirely.
“At this time I endeavored to closely examine the personal papers of all of the journal authors, which were still in storage with the Preservation Society, and that’s where I discovered it. Dr. Clark, a resident lecturer at Boston University, without letting the others know, broke off a piece of it along the jagged bottom and had it sent abroad for further examination. It came back to him with no answers to be provided by the European universities, and he had it in his possession until his death. His items were auctioned off in lots, or went to his son, who passed down items to his son, who is still, as it turns out, the owner of the old house on the edge of College Hill, which he rents to college students. After some ... persuasion I managed convince him to allow me to rifle through his attic, which is where I located the shard.” Willet stood up, and pulled something out of the pantry. It was a long metal cylinder with a metal cap, a lead container for a glass cylinder inside. And in it was a chunk of black ... what appeared to be stone.
“Do mind yourself, sir,” Willet said. “It’s highly radioactive.”
Charles knew that if it was instantly deadly, Willet wouldn’t have brought it out, so he took the cylinder for himself and looked closely at the rock. There was something ... malevolent about it, beyond the radioactivity, which he couldn’t sense. He didn’t realize he was in a cold sweat until Willet put it back in its lead container.
“That explains the deaths,” 64 said. “They were poisoned by radioactivity. But it doesn’t explain how it became radioactive.”
“At its present levels, the shard is enough to make someone sick over a good period of time, and kill them over about a year if they’re in constant contact with it. The disc was many times larger than this, so no wonder they were dead within months.”
“But for it to become radioactive - “
“For it to become this radioactive, it would have had to exposed to something on the level of an atomic bomb back when it was deep in the ground,” Willet said. “At a stratification in the middle of the Sumerian Empire.”
“The whole site would be radioactive.”
“And yet that site is now the location of a highway rest stop. Bedouins live nearby and no one gets sick. There is the possibility that their information was wrong, or there is the more extreme possibility.”
Charles was used to extremes. He just nodded to go on.
“Some ancient scholars - and even modern scholars - believed that time is not straight, not circular, but a spiral. While we advance, we still come around the same corners sooner or later. This was how people coped with the circular nature of the year - the life-death cycle of the seasons - while still growing old and having events occur in a cause-effect fashion. Now imagine if instead of a yearly circle to the spiral, we had one much larger - say, in this case, 5000 years. Something that happened 5000 years ago is coming around again - now that we are in the nuclear age.”
“The disc was from the future?”
Willet shook his head. “It is from the past. It was in the past, and it was used for something, but what made it radioactive back then has yet to happen. This is an incident so major that it makes time itself momentarily collapse. Like a slinky that you’ve squeezed on just one end so all the layers are pressing together.”
64 wasn’t buying it, but he was trying to be polite and hide it. Charles ignored him. “That doesn’t explain your own physical reaction to the shard.”
“No.” Willet settled back into his chair. He seemed even older now, when it was all off his chest. “The incantation - with the right words, the ones I left out. They can be pronounced. You shouldn’t say it. You shouldn’t try the rituals the shadier members of the society tried, the ones they recorded in their journals. I’ll provide you with all of the information ... but I won’t say it myself. I can’t do that to you. You’re too important.”
Charles nodded, trying to formulate what he would do next. Then he let it sit with his employee. “What do you want to do?”
“I’m standing on the edge of something great, sir. I’ve come too far - obviously I’ve gone way too far - to come back now. I want my experiments to continue.” He added, “It is my sacred duty to die for Dethklok, after all.” Willet smiled with teeth yellowed from age he hadn’t lived.
Charles gave his instructions on the way back to Mordland. “Give him whatever he needs and keep me updated. And make sure he sees a doctor.”
64 said grimly, “Yes sir.”
To be continued...
------------------------------------------------------
apikoros - A Greco-Roman term that's made its way into the Jewish lexicon to mean someone who holds heretical views.
A Shonda - A shame, a pity (Yiddish)
Yiddishkeit - the Jewish world (Yiddish)
Author: DJ_the_Writer
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Charles/OFC
Beta: wikdsushi
Characters: Charles, Dethklok, OCs
Warnings: Cursing, Drugs, PTSD, off-screen sex
Summary: Charles endures pretty much the worst family reunion ever.
Lovecraft references ahoy!
Chapter 3
When Charles returned to Mordhaus, he was caught up in meetings and teleconferences, the latter of which was done during his physical therapy to maximize time. It was nice to have his right arm back (Angela indicated in various non-verbal ways that she heartily agreed) and it would be nicer when he was lifting weights to keep himself in shape rather than to recover. A shattered bone (not to mention the bullet lodged in his rib cage) put him in traction for much longer than he would have been willing to put up with if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. Once he could write again, there was an endless - even by his standards - number of documents for him to sign. His arm was worn out again and he barely managed to type a quick, non-committal email to his sister about the trip.
“Free up the week in August,” he told Angela, then went back to working on next month’s Facebones script while dictating more business emails to her. His day ended as it usually did, with a check on all the boys to make sure they were either sleeping safely or simply unlikely to die while he was asleep. Back in his office, Angela was still at his computer, typing up responses. She told him to just go to sleep, which he didn’t object to. The longer he could avoid talking about the trip to Denmark, the better.
She didn’t bother him about it. In fact, the days passed without a mention beyond what was required for scheduling. He focused on the boys, who had at least ventured into the recording studio but had yet to emerge with anything they were satisfied with. Nathan put up the most objection to the product of his own work. It was never heavy enough, never brutal enough, and the medieval armor wasn’t helping, and Knubbler still hated it.
Charles, who almost never ventured into the studio to disrupt the unusual occurrence of the boys doing their damn job, checked in to find Knubbler quaffing what looked like a liter-sized can of Red Bull. “I have a question for you.”
Knubbler’s eyes went a happy green. “Shoot, babe.”
“Don’t call me that.” It wasn’t the first warning, but it wouldn’t be the last. “What does a Bar Mitzvah actually mean? Ceremony aside.”
“Heh.” Knubbler looked amused at the question. “Being a bar or bat mitzvah means you are of age and obligated to perform the 613 commandments in the Torah. The ceremony is actually just to announce it in case anybody in the congregation didn’t know. Once you turn thirteen - BAM! You’re a bar mitzvah. And you’re that for the rest of your life.” He added after another healthy gulp of a very unhealthy drink. “Twelve if you’re a girl.”
“What if you feel no obligation to perform commandments?”
“Nyeh!” He had such an irritating laugh. Now Charles remembered why these conversations almost never happened. “Like half of them you do by default anyway! As long as my suit doesn’t have linen and wool in it, I’m good! Fasted on Yom Kippur because I was passed out? Racking ‘em up! That’s a way better rate of success than meeting with my parole officer.”
“I’ve seen you put bacon in your ham sandwich.”
“Love it, Charlie baby! Can’t get enough of the stuff. Like any good apikoros.” He moved to throw Charles a casual punch in the arm, which never came close. “Too embarrassed to ask your nephew?”
“Uh, I don’t think he knows this stuff. Or, I don’t know what he knows. I just know that the synagogue is so Reform, they have a remote-controlled ark.”
“What? A shonda!” Knubbler’s eyes went red for a second, then went back to green. “Ech, I can’t bring myself to be surprised. Besides, kid’s not even Jewish! It’s your sister who’s his mom, right? You don’t have a brother?”
“Right.”
“Matrilineal descent, babe. Unless she converted before he was born.”
“Ah, no, she did not.”
Knubbler shrugged and took another swig. “Yiddishkeit today, huh? Hey, want anything from the kitchen? I’m making a run.”
“Some cheese for your bacon and ham?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of popcorn shrimp.” Knubbler gave him a thumbs up before disappearing into the elevator.
************************************************
The following week, Charles Ofdensen did not leave Mordhaus. Except for the two days where he wasn’t there.
Dethklok the band, Dethklok the corporation, Dethklok the world power - everything continued as normal. The band continued to sit in the recording studio, eating French toast and coming up with new ways to insult each other. The door to Ofdensen’s office was locked, and his phone line was often busy, but he returned calls (mostly with stiff answering machine messages) and he answered emails. He issued orders to his loyal army when orders were needed. He approved requests from employees. But he did not appear.
In his office, Angela sat at his desk, surrounded by empty coffee cups and cans of Red Bull. She had a massive headache, but she couldn’t call anyone in to deliver Tylenol, and she couldn’t leave her position while a call was in progress. Charles was leaving a message on a machine, playing phone tag with a producer in Las Vegas, and she was typing it up as he spoke it. The computer program which simulated his voice still had flaws, and navigating a long conversation with a live person and making it sound real without an excuse of constant distractions while she selected from his list of common recorded phrases was still a bit beyond her, but her expertise with the program was pretty fluid. It didn’t help that Charles was a very fast talker in real life and people expected that of him. It wouldn’t work forever; a lot of meetings were being put off until the living, breathing manager returned from the trip he hadn’t taken, because he was definitely still in Mordhaus, if anyone dared to ask.
It was not a good time for her. Because it was just easier, she slept on the couch with her laptop open so she could answer something incoming in a split second. She didn’t sleep well, not because his couch wasn’t comfy (it was) but because of the overwhelming nature of the situation. She didn’t dare to sleep for more than four hours straight. She began to wonder how Charles did it on a regular basis and got away with it.
She knew where he was. Not to the minute, but he sent her an occasional text or email from his current location, an open Wifi network in Providence, Rhode Island. This he didn’t bother to hide from her. Why he was going was more of an issue; he promised an explanation when he got back. It wouldn’t be a thorough explanation if she knew anything about Charles, and she figured she knew him quite well. She’d been playing him for almost twenty-four hours when he called in. She noted, bitterly, that he seemed the less stressed of the two as they went over the answers she needed immediately from him. He asked about the band but didn’t require a long answer.
“I should be back on schedule,” he said, which was good, because it made her feel slightly less homicidal. “How, ah, are you?”
“Fine.” She did not want to say ‘lonely and stressed’ over the phone. But she felt one word communicated a lot. “Just be back soon.”
“I keep my promises,” was his response before he closed his phone. She wondered if he was really in Providence, or it wasn’t a misdirecting signal because he didn’t want her to know the real place.
Charles had a mini fridge in his apartment with ice, which she put in a bag over the aching spot on her head. He also had a ton of pills, mostly prescription, that on other occasions she would have been less presumptuous about reading the labels of, but eventually she found some Motrin and took a double dose before sinking back into the chair again.
She had free reign over his computer, except for some files which were hidden and locked behind passwords. The really important stuff he kept on a computer that was not hooked to any server, and he was constantly making gestures after she had cursed him out over his obsessive secrecy, as it seemed to endanger not her life (taken as a granted) but his. She knew he had a document in his safe that he’d had translated but never read, that drove people mad. She knew he’d seen it in a dream while he was legally dead on a stretcher, and that he only let people see bits and pieces - after the first few deaths. She also knew that he didn’t know what the bits he had read meant, and that it bothered him. The itch to read it all was something he couldn’t scratch, or just hadn’t yet.
One thing she did know, and didn’t like, was the enormity of the number of things Charles wasn’t telling her, or anyone else, except maybe the person or persons he was meeting in Providence. If he was really in Providence.
She scanned his private Amazon wishlist, which was always fun. It was primarily made up of books on the occult and the Ancient Near East, primarily newer releases as he probably owned the older ones. There was one “Dealing with PTSD” title that remained un-bought. Recently-filled orders included new academic research compendiums on Norwegian mythological texts, some music-related items that were obviously for the band, and one book called “Encounters with Intermarriage” by a Conservative rabbi. She really didn’t know when he would find time to read it.
His personal files were kind of cool to sneak around. Sometimes he scanned in concert design ideas, or produced them in Photoshop. He had contingency plans for literally everything: Dethklok being eaten by a giant troll, Dethklok eating a giant troll and becoming smaller trolls themselves, Dethklok developing an appetite for troll blood, and how to take down a 50-foot troll version of Nathan without harming the vocalist. At the bottom of that part of the list was a note:
do not eat unicorn very gamey goes right through you
Angela decided to take his hastily-typed word on this one.
************************************************
College Hill in Providence was a buzz of activity as Brown University prepared to open its doors and dorms once again to brilliant but mostly over-privileged youth and shelter them from the world for another year. No one noticed another sloppily-dressed graduate student, complete with ID badge and a worn baseball cap proclaiming his loyalty to his university of choice. Charles had actually been to Brown before, again not as a student but as a researcher, but never as Charles Ofdensen.
The meeting was arranged by Klokateer 64, who was a trustworthy administrator of the Gears who were no longer on any official list (including himself) and their numbers retired. It was his idea, even though the meeting was with Dr. Willet, the working false name for 238. Willet had stumbled onto something buried in the John Hay Library at Brown and it was significant enough to warrant a call from the boss, because the Hay did not release any of its special manuscripts or ancient collections. 64 added, somewhat nervously, that it also might be a good idea to “check in on” Willet and his research. He did not imply treachery - he would have just said it - but there was something Charles needed to see with his own eyes.
Since 64 wasn’t given to panicking, Charles disappeared from Mordhaus on the employee shuttle, dressed as a Gear, and made his way south to Rhode Island.
The documents in question, or some of them, were in the special archives, but under an “unidentified” section that was therefore less likely to be cataloged properly. When Charles arrived, 64 had the identification ready that would admit Charles as a visiting graduate student from Cornell. Usually students applied for permission to see books, and sat in the reading room while they were delivered, but 64 had an employee pass care of Willet that got them down into the musty stacks, where Brown kept their medieval illuminated manuscripts, their anatomy book made out of human skin, and their copy of the Necronomicon. Charles had seen it on a previous visit, and he didn’t feel the need to peruse it now, even though the text was slightly different from the one in the Mordhaus library. Touching that thing always gave him shivers.
“Here we are.” 64 had the document in question flagged by being pulled slightly out of alignment with the other books on the shelf. They weren’t bound, but stored in cardboard boxes often wrapped in plastic that contained parchment and papyrus scroll. In this case, it was lambskin. Charles recognized the smell and the coloring around the edges, where the bleach to make it into paper hadn’t gone in deep. “It’s not the lines,” 64 said, handing him a magnifying glass. “There’s an additional text underneath. Probably in some fruit juice or oil, so it would fade quickly. Then it was written over.”
They retreated to a corner with a table and Charles bent over the parchment. “Accidentally?” Parchment was expensive to produce. Something that looked almost blank would find new use, especially because parchment was sturdy in comparison to papyrus paper.
“It’s too aligned with the old text to be accidental. Look to the corner of each letter.”
64 snatched a lamp from a shelf and brought it in close so Charles could examine the stains beneath the ink letters. The bold black letters were in a Babylonian script, but he recognized the near-invisible lettering to be Elamite, meaning it was from post-Sumerian Iran, probably in the 3000 BCE range. Elamite script was incredibly hard to read because it wasn’t related to any nearby languages like the many proto-Semitic ones. He could sound out the familiar word for ziggurat, and the word ‘destroyed’ but no familiar ziggurat names popped up. He saw yet another familiar word, but he would need time with the rest of them. “This is a flood text.”
“Yes.”
“Does 238 have a working translation?”
“No, sir. He said you have more Elamite resources than he does. I thought since you were here, you might want to see it yourself.”
They would take a digital scan with 64’s camera. “So this trip is really about Willet,” he said, meaning 238.
“Yes, sir.”
Charles didn’t question it, too focused on finding anything he could translate on the spot, coming up empty. “Computer.”
64 opened Charles’s backpack and retrieved his laptop for him, setting it on the table. There was no internet service down here, but he didn’t need it. He got to work immediately, calling up dictionaries and resources stored in the computer. It was several hours before he had a halfway decent translation.
On [calendar date] I came up from [unknown location], where the ziggurat of [unfamiliar name] once stood. It is now a flat land. I paid a guide to show me the spot that was the top of the mountain, where the water sang forth that covered the earth.
“A flood wouldn’t have flattened a stone ziggurat,” 64 observed.
“And enough water to flood the world - or the Near East to the Black Sea - shouldn’t be spurting out of a building in the middle of a desert.”
“In the Bible, the Flood is caused by rain.”
“Texts don’t always match,” was Charles’s response.
The work went very late, and the next day, they went to see Dr. Willet in his Georgian house on Hope Street. Before becoming a Klokateer, Dr. Willet had been a PhD student in anthropology. When he agreed to do as ordered for this mission, Charles paid for him to go back to school and finish his thesis (alongside other research) at Columbia before doing the mandatory faking of his death and disappearing, so that he really was a doctor of philosophy, but his last name was not Willet.
“He knows we’re coming,” 64 said after an uncomfortably long wait at the door, and a man answered who must have been Dr. Willet. His features were there. The thin face, the sharp corners to his cheeks, the curious expression - it was Willet.
Plus about forty years.
The man Charles had last seen was in his mid-thirties. He had long black hair, and it still was long, partially to cover his brand, but now it was gray. His features, while intact, were partially slumped (as was his posture) as tight skin had become pale folds of loose flesh. The spark of genius in his eyes was muted, and hidden behind bushy white eyebrows. “Sorry to keep you waiting, sir. Please come in.”
The wait was explained - Willet didn’t move very fast and he seemed to creak as much as the old wooden floors beneath him. With shaking hands he served them tea. His skeletal hands could barely grasp the cups. Charles assumed an explanation was coming, perhaps faster than the tea, but he wasn’t holding his breath on that.
“I don’t mean to be presumptuous, sir, but you of course have all the information I’ve been sending you?”
“Yes.” The emails from Willet had actually been quite regular at one point, with large gaps when he was working on something.
“I would have contacted you about my progress - not just on the parchment in the Hay - but I wanted to be certain before bothering you with what I thought might be nonsense. And I am afraid still might be.”
“I’m already here,” Charles said. He wanted to be formal, but his heart went out to Willet, and whatever had happened to him. That explanation, he was sure, was to come.
Willet did not disappoint. “This project began when I was going through journals referring library donations to the university available at the Providence Historical Preservation Society. Eventually a group kept popping up - the Miskatonic Anthropological Society. They were active in the early 1900’s, from about 1903 to 1927. Some of them were identified as professors of archaeology and ancient history at Brown, Harvard, and several other universities, along with a good number of amateur enthusiasts, particularly linguists. As I did other research, I also collected clippings on the society, whenever they made the local papers, even if it was just to announce a meeting and where it was hosted - usually on College Hill but they had no official association with any university.
“Not much came of this until I was also able to locate the journals of several members - mostly amateur linguists and historians, unfortunately - who were active in the society in the early 1920’s. Their collections, which were sold with their estates, included diaries, which were listed and sold in bulk to the Preservation Society. I’m quite sure that I’m the only one to specifically request the journals, as they had the look of something that hadn’t been opened in half a century, while the other items had made their way to museums and private collections. These particular men were interested in the Middle East, and at least one of them was fluent in Akkadian - which is still taught at Brown so I suppose that isn’t so amazing. Anyway, all their journals spent a good deal of ink focused on events taking place in May of 1926, when a recently-returned colleague from the east, who isn’t identified, appeared with an ancient artifact. He was, they said, rather eager to be rid of it, and simply handed it off to the society president before disappearing.
“The item was a black disc. It had been excavated by the man himself at an archaeological site in Iraq, where nothing else significant was found at the time, or so I learned later through other modes of research, none of which list it as a found item. Normally you wouldn’t think a black disc, measuring exactly three feet in diameter, and six inches thick, wouldn’t be interesting, but as they began to inspect it, it became more puzzling.
“First they attended to the inscription along the side. It was in a Sumerian dialect, but it took them quite a while to figure out that it was also written, for some reason, backwards. They translated it to the best of their knowledge, but couldn’t make sense of it. There were too many unknown words that might have been proper names. Unfortunately, none of the members recorded the original script in their journals. Only the translation was included in one journal. ‘Left only to _____, none shall die.’ Then they turned to the stone itself. It was of a peculiar hue, black and shiny like volcanic rock but also of a green tint, and they could not identify it as any stone or metal made on earth. The topside was smooth, but the bottom had mismatched holes and carved groves, as if this was the top of some device, and it had become detached, but no such device was found at the site in Iraq. The disc had unexplainable qualities - sometimes it was very heavy like stone, sometimes very light like hollow wood, but it always weighed exactly 8 pounds no matter when they weighed it. It had a ... phantasmal quality that made them all quite uneager to keep it in their homes. Eventually a young Mr. Carter agreed and he was the first to die.
“He grew weak, and his stomach rebelled, and he had unexplained rashes that resisted the popular treatments of the day. When he died, since he was somewhat of a weak constitution anyway, no one thought much of it in connection to the disc, which passed to a Mr. Ward. He, too, suffered a similar death. After the fourth member passed away - one who had spent time with it but never had it in his house or his possession - they endeavored to destroy it, but could find no hammer that was strong enough to smash it. What exactly happened to it, the accounts differ. One journal says they tossed it in the Providence River, another that they buried it deep in a construction site. The point is, it went out of their lives, and they were so terrified of their association with it and each other that the society dissolved entirely.
“At this time I endeavored to closely examine the personal papers of all of the journal authors, which were still in storage with the Preservation Society, and that’s where I discovered it. Dr. Clark, a resident lecturer at Boston University, without letting the others know, broke off a piece of it along the jagged bottom and had it sent abroad for further examination. It came back to him with no answers to be provided by the European universities, and he had it in his possession until his death. His items were auctioned off in lots, or went to his son, who passed down items to his son, who is still, as it turns out, the owner of the old house on the edge of College Hill, which he rents to college students. After some ... persuasion I managed convince him to allow me to rifle through his attic, which is where I located the shard.” Willet stood up, and pulled something out of the pantry. It was a long metal cylinder with a metal cap, a lead container for a glass cylinder inside. And in it was a chunk of black ... what appeared to be stone.
“Do mind yourself, sir,” Willet said. “It’s highly radioactive.”
Charles knew that if it was instantly deadly, Willet wouldn’t have brought it out, so he took the cylinder for himself and looked closely at the rock. There was something ... malevolent about it, beyond the radioactivity, which he couldn’t sense. He didn’t realize he was in a cold sweat until Willet put it back in its lead container.
“That explains the deaths,” 64 said. “They were poisoned by radioactivity. But it doesn’t explain how it became radioactive.”
“At its present levels, the shard is enough to make someone sick over a good period of time, and kill them over about a year if they’re in constant contact with it. The disc was many times larger than this, so no wonder they were dead within months.”
“But for it to become radioactive - “
“For it to become this radioactive, it would have had to exposed to something on the level of an atomic bomb back when it was deep in the ground,” Willet said. “At a stratification in the middle of the Sumerian Empire.”
“The whole site would be radioactive.”
“And yet that site is now the location of a highway rest stop. Bedouins live nearby and no one gets sick. There is the possibility that their information was wrong, or there is the more extreme possibility.”
Charles was used to extremes. He just nodded to go on.
“Some ancient scholars - and even modern scholars - believed that time is not straight, not circular, but a spiral. While we advance, we still come around the same corners sooner or later. This was how people coped with the circular nature of the year - the life-death cycle of the seasons - while still growing old and having events occur in a cause-effect fashion. Now imagine if instead of a yearly circle to the spiral, we had one much larger - say, in this case, 5000 years. Something that happened 5000 years ago is coming around again - now that we are in the nuclear age.”
“The disc was from the future?”
Willet shook his head. “It is from the past. It was in the past, and it was used for something, but what made it radioactive back then has yet to happen. This is an incident so major that it makes time itself momentarily collapse. Like a slinky that you’ve squeezed on just one end so all the layers are pressing together.”
64 wasn’t buying it, but he was trying to be polite and hide it. Charles ignored him. “That doesn’t explain your own physical reaction to the shard.”
“No.” Willet settled back into his chair. He seemed even older now, when it was all off his chest. “The incantation - with the right words, the ones I left out. They can be pronounced. You shouldn’t say it. You shouldn’t try the rituals the shadier members of the society tried, the ones they recorded in their journals. I’ll provide you with all of the information ... but I won’t say it myself. I can’t do that to you. You’re too important.”
Charles nodded, trying to formulate what he would do next. Then he let it sit with his employee. “What do you want to do?”
“I’m standing on the edge of something great, sir. I’ve come too far - obviously I’ve gone way too far - to come back now. I want my experiments to continue.” He added, “It is my sacred duty to die for Dethklok, after all.” Willet smiled with teeth yellowed from age he hadn’t lived.
Charles gave his instructions on the way back to Mordland. “Give him whatever he needs and keep me updated. And make sure he sees a doctor.”
64 said grimly, “Yes sir.”
To be continued...
------------------------------------------------------
apikoros - A Greco-Roman term that's made its way into the Jewish lexicon to mean someone who holds heretical views.
A Shonda - A shame, a pity (Yiddish)
Yiddishkeit - the Jewish world (Yiddish)