“THE ENCYCLOPEDIAS OF MADNESS”
A faceless, nameless thing, no longer than a fly, flashed its wings so rapidly that they were unseen by mortals. It appeared to be a living bullet, a faint smear of blurry blue.
It glided noiselessly through an inviting, emerald glade where an enormous crooked tree breathed, shivered and waited. The tiny creature did not stop there.
Somewhere nearby it flew over a machine glowing red-hot. A man’s legs jutted out from an opening in the back, jerking and pumping wildly. If the creature had the capacity to listen, it would have heard the muffled shrieking of the man locked inside. But the faceless creature did not stop here, either. By an unseen guiding line it moved on without stopping, as if careless.
It flew over a diamond lake. It briefly bowed its waxy head, but could not see the gasping figures just below the surface, trapped like mosquitoes in ancient amber. Its being was unconcerned as it flew onward between two immense, blood-splattered towers, ominous in their ebony silence, awaiting an audience for its passion play.
It finally stopped and came to rest on the blistered shoulder of a burning man who stood upright and could not acknowledge its presence. There was a brief sizzle and the creature was gone, to reappear instantly somewhere else, forced to replay its agonizing existence over and over and over again.
The man stood, wrapped in flames, and wrestled with his conscience. “I know with an absolute certainty that there are no babies here, therefore this thing that the demon is spinning headfirst on a rusty nail simply cannot be a child.”
The massively muscled, red-skinned demon twirled the “baby” again. He would slap it hard on its bottom with a leathery palm and it would spin erratically on the wooden platform, giggling, and then shivering fitfully as the nail struck nerves in the brain.
“Foolish ex-man child.” The demon branded this thought into the man’s head and he heard it sizzle like frying worms. His eyes were void of orbs; only black holes were visible. “All here are lies. Not one grain has truth as its foundation. Remember, in the form of a warning, that this is the first thing I ever told you.”
The “baby” shivered on the nail.
“Only your horrific memory of this scene, in all its maddening cruelty and unfeelingness, is real. Nothing else is real.” A matted ripple of hair caught fire on his chest, then his blood-encrusted beard.
“Come,” he murmured to a burning bodybuilder that was crawling to him on scab-crackled knees. “See this.”
The words wetly splashed like boiling vomit in the man’s brain. The demon reached in the fur of his crotch and pulled out his member; it writhed around like a living thing and spit a hot green jelly.
“No, my child,” he thought. “This will not torture you. Watch.”
Below the enormous eighteen-inch member, hidden deep within the folds of bloody fur, hung two of the blackest stones the man had ever seen. They began throbbing back and forth. The crusty bodybuilder had situated himself between the massive thighs of the demon, who drew him nearer by the back of his head until he forced the bodybuilder’s mouth to engulf the living purple head.
A large squelching sound came from the two ebony orbs, like gallons of liquid whistling through metal pipes.
Large swellings appeared on the throat of the baked bodybuilder as he tearfully swallowed gallon after gallon of liquid. He could not breathe.
Finally, the demon pulled the dripping member slowly from his throat and shook off the last drops. They hissed on the shimmering yellowed floor.
The scene bled black and began to dim in the man’s consciousness. Was he passing out?
“…2… 3… Now, awaken!”
The man opened his tear-filled eyes. He was lying on his back, covered with a linen sheet, in a spare lab he recognized. No comforts here. He was a large man; his biceps were as thick as the thighs of the only other man in the room.
“You see, Dr. Mountfountain, you can be hypnotized. I told you.” The speaking one was an ugly, smallish man with a goatee and a bitter, pocked face.
“No.” The man’s eyes blinked with terror. “It was real! I am actually able to live the thoughts of a man in Hell.”
He sat up on the metal table. The linen cloth fell to his waist, the other noted, unveiling the expansive hairy chest and flat slab abdomen. The other man, a doctor as well, ran his hand over the thick thatch of brown fur on Dr. Mountfountain’s chest, pretending to search for a heartbeat… somewhere.
“Oh my,” the other doctor gasped. With feral speed, the little man withdrew a syringe from his lab coat and plunged it into his upper thigh. “I expected you to enter imaginary worlds, and wholeheartedly believe in them, but now you have gone too far, Doctor — and you actually believe in their existence. We’ll have to put you into a straightjacket and give you shock treatments. You poor fool.”
Dr. Mountfountain was far too trusting. It would be the last time.
The demon lovingly drew his oozing, swollen purple head to the lips of the man.
“Kiss it,” the demon did not say, but the man felt it penetrate his forehead like a hot poker.
He kissed the enormous purple beast that seemed to have a mind of its own. It slithered quickly over his lips, its head seeking entry.
The demon, Red, let the member fall between his legs, all interest for the moment gone. The man heard it make a hissing sound as it fell in a puddle of liquefied sand. Red grabbed the man’s hand and drew it to his blistered lips.
The demon covered the top of the man’s hand with kisses, and then released it. “I love you, my son.”
The man felt this was also a complete fabrication. There must be many primal layers all being affected at once. It would probably fill many encyclopedias to speak of every incident, what was really happening, and what was intended.
The man came to understand, in no time, that what you want is given to you, but without the hope of ever enjoying it. In utter pain you realize no such thing can occur as someone kissing your hand (for there can be no love here — it is an expression of derision and mockery), because everyone is hopeless. And few people have lips. The mouths of all are permanently open in an ultimate eternal scream. The eyes of all are glazed over with the simultaneous experience of every toothache, every dismemberment, every slashed face, and the flames billions of degrees hot, and every other pain that ever happened all wrapped up in one never-ending moment. Nothing can get better; hope is not the end product of any suffering here. You must always realize that the torture will continue (creatively) until the end of three trillion infinities (to the billionth power). Then you say, “Ah, the hallucination was more torture!” But that itself gives no hope, either. Nothing does. And so despair continues to grow at a geometric rate.
What had actually happened when the man tried to force his reality to conform to his dreams was unendurable, but he had to face it nonetheless. So, right now, inside this moment, the demon was covering the man with what looked like yellow, molten metal. He aimed the member higher until the man’s mouth was filled and the liquid flame ran out of his mouth, and shredded his chest.
A yellow demon approached the red one that was abusing the man. Yellow was twice the size, and seemed twice as muscular. His pale topaz hands were covered with caked and bloated blisters. Yellow bent at the knees and reached under Red, then thrust up into his rectum. He let his other hand join the one inside.
Yellow braced himself with legs spread wide and pulled the red buttocks apart. The man stood, in shock and horror, and heard a tremendous cracking and snapping, and then Yellow stopped. He drew up from below his belly a member even more swollen and rotten — looking like Red’s — and allowed it to squirm through the wide pulsating anus. Yellow closed Red’s ass around his wet member and began pounding it into him.
Yellow reached around Red’s middle with both arms and ripped open his belly. Ecstasy followed as Yellow pounded Red from behind while running his hands through the steamy, spilling bowels.
In a moment (he had known the whole time, really), the man realized, in profound sadness, there was no Yellow demon, only Red.
And Red was providing this nightmare to the man.
Later (when time seemed to pass, but that is illusion as well), a wooden-looking dwarf came to Red and jumped up on his heavily-muscled leg.
The demon grunted as he punched his hand liquidly into the dwarf’s spine. He played his fingers in and out among the stringy tissue (the man felt it tear through his soul and was not puzzled). Red found the right nerves. The puppet’s right eye twitched uncontrollably and his teeth chattered. Apparently Red was shredding a few nerves in the process. The dwarf’s mouth clicked out of time with the words; Red’s voice sounded from within.
“Oh, foolish thing that once was a man, look at me, and lose the last vestige of hope you might have kept. I am ever-present.” The dwarf’s mouth, smeared with red liquid, opened and closed, but the voice was still not his. “I am ever-present in your existence, because I am you. In one thousand generations, you will regret seeing your younger self, and despair of a path I cannot exit. Know that, and despair! Your sense of identity is on trial here. Never anything else.”
A thin, angular burning man came to stand before the demon. Red’s words shimmered like blades in the sun. “Fall to the ground, thin man. Shrivel up and leave us.”
The man fell as a skeleton and instantly became like paper, then blew away in a breeze.
“Come here,” spoke no one. Red presented his armpit to the man. “There is no time here, my beloved, but for one thousand centuries I command you to lick this sweat-filled armpit. You may begin now, my son.”
As the man licked the vast armpit, his penis rose straight into the air in humble gratitude. The man felt Red’s fingers break the surface of his back with gentle insistence.
Shivering nerve-shatterings that might have resembled orgasms racked both their bodies as Red’s hands snapped nerve and muscle. Enduring this moment, over and over again, for a thousand centuries.
Not even The Encyclopedias of Madness could remotely describe the pleasure of being united with your own personal demon. As a gift, like a starburst in the brain, Red gave the man the knowledge that he had been the demon sent to keep him on his lifelong path. His own father/lover to share for all eternity.
And this, too, he came to find out in the end, was a lie.
“Yes, my beloved.” When his black empty slits smiled down on the man, red tears fell and sizzled down his cheeks like running sores. “I coveted you many millions of years ago. When I knew that you were going to be ‘in flesh,’ I watched and ached and loved you from a distance.
“It was me that inspired the boy to push you off the wagon so you would jump onto the rusty nail when you were four. I kissed the crust of the scab, because of my desire for you. I led the other, when you were but a mere man, to throw you to the ground that broke your foot. I kissed the sweaty foot from below and you had a sense that someone was there, didn’t you?” The man humbly nodded. “I command you to always love your Fire Father, and always wash me with your tongue.”
“Dr. Mountfountain, your shock therapy is progressing rapidly. You hardly ever tell me anymore of actually living the lives as demons of Hell.
“Now, that is what we agreed upon, isn’t it? Oh, you just have dreams of Hell — you’ve been… ahhh, I see; you’ve been deceiving me all along.” The little doctor paused to consider this. “I see. Carl, strap him in. Yes, Judy, throw the switch.”
…brrrrrrzappp!…
The room was silent for a moment, making sure he was finished. Then it erupted. Many voices said things like, “Why would you even want to write a book like that?” “How horrible!” “The government should string you up for that.”
Professor Delaney stood and walked to the middle of the class, her plastic shoes clacking on the hardwood floor. “Class! Class!” She clapped her hands. “Now, really. One at a time. This is a University, not middle school. One at a time.”
The nude man stood grinning at them, pleased with himself.
The same big, beefy young man spoke. “If this were a former time, you would be hauled off to jail for writing a story like that. It’s shameful, at best.”
“Yes, it is,” the man said. “I agree with you.” Slowly, he began putting his clothes back on.
A young woman, who identified herself as Student Mortensen, spoke. “Chapter One” does not lead anybody to believe the novel will proceed in that manner. You told us before that you made this up. That it was fiction.”[1]
“It is,” he said. “Confused? Good. I intend to tip over every preconceived idea you have about conventional narrative. To you, young lady, I would repeat what C.S. Lewis wrote in the beginning of Mere Christianity. ‘To hell with your standards.’ I forge ahead with my own. Just wait, folks, until we get to the end of Chapter Eight. You are really gonna wanna hang me then.”
“Maybe we really will hang you.”
“And not hear the end of the story?” He laughed. “How tragic!”
He put on his clothes and left.
The next week he came back, stripped off his clothes, quite unashamedly, stacked them neatly again, laid out a rug on the hardwood floor to sit on, and read four or five chapters in a row. A student, Dante, recorded for posterity that when one student objected to the shortness of the chapters, the nude model remarked that his records only showed them as fragments, not in their entirety. Many students reminded the man that he had proclaimed, more than once, that he had written them himself, not found them somewhere.
The old man seemed to enjoy laughing at them.
See appendix, at the end of the book, for an explanation of this mystery.