The Courtyard by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows.
Title: The Courtyard.
Author: Alan Moore.
Artist: Jacen Burrows.
Genre: Graphic novel, fiction, horror, Cthulhu mythos.
Country: England, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2003 (adapted from story written in 1994).
Summary: Adapted from a short story, this is a chilling tale of Lovecraftian psychological horror. FBI man Aldo Sax has an amazing service record with the FBI. His legendary skills at piercing together the most baffling of cases has gotten him assigned to what may be his most confusing case yet. Several murders, no, more like lethal dismemberments, from the most unlikely of suspects just don't add up. And what leads there are, all point to a drug called Aklo and The Courtyard.
My rating: 7/10.
My review:
♥ Our rooming house has a shared bathroom. This morning, when I went to shave, there was shit in the wash-basin. When I turned on the water to sluice it away, I discovered it was also on the faucets.
Germaine. The schizophrenic in the next room. With only a hardboard partition dividing us we're getting horribly close to full co-habitation. She's 35. Hippy parents. "Germaine." I mean, Jesus Christ. They probably ran the poor cunt through a guantlet of crank educational fads, taught her drugs and free love were okay, then divorced. Fine for them. They're not woken by Germaine's imaginary pals every morning at five.
My feelings concerning Germaine's mom and pop are exactly the same as I had for their daughter while shaving: I just wish these people would clean up their own shit once in a while.
..Three old tenement buildings, their brick turned the colour of scab, eye each other across the bleak courtyard. Cul-de-sac trashcan enclosures dab ghostfish and hornet-hung fruit on night's pulse-points. The tenements huddle; guard hideous warmth.
An inverted whirlpool of concrete and shadow, the tenement stairwell is dragging me up from the lampless sea-bed of the ground floor (unoccupied: nothing can live with those terrible pressures) through wife-beatings, bad food and baby screams fathomed above.
♥
The word bursts inside me like summer thunder, sends scarabs and swastikas rippling over the screen of my eyelids.
"Wza-y'ei."
A mental floor gives way beneath me. I realise I know what the word means; have known all along.
Wza-e'ei is a word for the negative conceptual space left surrounding a positive concept, the class of things larger than thought, being what thought excludes. It applies to so many things, not just anomaly theory but everything that is conceived.
I'm still reeling, eyes closed, from the resonances and implications when yellow silk brushes my ear and another word is murmured, not drawn from the world's common tongues and without an equivalent:
"Dho-hna."
I drink it in, breathless. A force which defines; ends significance to its receptacle as with the hand in the glove; wind in mill-vanes; the guest or the trespasser crossing a threshold and giving it meaning.
"Dho-hna." How could I have forgotten?
A pinwheel of nautilus fronds is dissolved into sparks by my vitreous humour as huge old grammatical structures collapse into place.
Aklo isn't a drug. There's no drug with mind-altering properties halfway as powerful. Aklo's a language. Ur-syntax; the primal vocabulary giving form to those pre-conscious orderings wrung from a hot incoherence of stars from our birthmuds pooled in the grandmother lagoon; a stark, limited palette of earliest notions, lost colours, forgotten intestines.
Johnny Carcosa delivers the third hit, one more chain of terrible syllables lisped in my ear:
"Yr Nhhngr."
New dendrites twitch blindly together, unthinkable fusions occurring. Beneath me, a vortex of marvellous coinage is opened.
I let go and fall.
♥
