The Little Letter That Would

To put the following in context I must alert you, dear reader, that I am weird. Very weird. So, two years ago, out of the blue, I received a strange piece of mail at an old mailing address. It was addressed to my ‘art studio’, something I had not realized I had. It was a large, man-made envelope made of retail ads and within was a DVD. Curious. The DVD came from a gentleman who is known for being, uh, eccentric and for sending parcels out for people. Well, I was a lucky recipient. Not sure how the gentleman got my address, to be honest, but he did. When I first got the DVD I was worried that it was porn, or, gads, snuff, or who knew what. What it was, was odd. What I watched. It begins with the gentleman videotaping himself driving around and talking about buildings in the area where I presume he lives. There are also some sort of interviews but, alas, no porn or death. I need to sit down and watch the entire thing. I do. I will. I guess. BUT, I let the package sit on my desk for over a year as I formulated What To Do as a response. I had wanted to film something and really do it up but, well, I never did. I did finally pen a response though and like to think that it’s, well, it’s something. You’ll find it below, though I have to admit that I cleaned it up from its initial writing. Sure, misspellings and the like are swell as a ‘letter’ but it’s something more now so, well, here you go. 

12.29.15

They say that if a man lives long enough he will run into his double.

I can tell you without fail that this is true.

Living in the backwoods of Michigan there is a family that is of no relation to myself but I tell you, I swear to you that each member looks just like me, men and women alike. I came across them as I was taking the Package North. I had held the Package for far too long and I suppose this is what happens. This is the end result. Maybe these people were always that way and it was me that was changed. Maybe they and I had both changed. I can’t tell you for sure. The longer I am with the Package though the less that walls seem solid. The more the whisper of the winds becomes the howling of things writhing just out of our vision. Things old and hungry and waiting.

But there’s more.

These are nothing. They are footsoldiers of a god that serves a hundred other gods, a lineage going backward and upward into infinity.

We are not ants to them.

We are not atoms to them.

We are less than the nothingness between the atoms. We are part of a dark tapestry woven simply to create the fabric of a world that is worth far more than we, and offers far more than we could ever offer Them. Oh, but the howlers, they come, they sniff, and they feed. We are the table scraps that keep them in check.

And the people up North?

Are they even of this plain?

Are they even of this world?

Are they two way mirrors, watching us and watched from within their eyes by something else?

And the Package, oh yes.

The Package.

I found it on my doorstep. Sitting in the snow. No address. No footsteps to show who or what had brought it. When I picked it up I heard it whisper my name, softly, as if it was a secret to be held between us. We, lovers intertwined in the darkness of ages I couldn’t even fathom. We who had never met  before, this Package and I.

We mock them, the Others, with stories, poems, paintings, film, and song, attempting to gather the tiniest of notion of what they are but not realizing that they are us, we are them, and for them we are an escape from vast infinities that to them become mundane. Wars that stretch beyond time. How can a blind man witness the face of God?

The Package.

I left it out in the cold.

Refused it.

I found it later that day under my bed, chanting.

I put it into the fireplace and when I set fire to it the thing laughed and lurched out and onto my rug. I stabbed it. I kicked it. I beat it with a bat and it never so much as dented.

That night I dreamt of it. I was within it in a vast ocean of tentacles. I clawed to stay above the waves of them, screaming prayers into a laughing black sky. Something rose from that tentacle sea, a white form with long arms and no face upon its great head. I heard its voice in my head and it told me.

North.

To the Sisters.

Take us to the Sisters.

At first I refused. At first I wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Knew I shouldn’t.

But the next night I went under the waves and my god, the things below. The things attached to those tentacles. Things that were little more than mouths that would devour you only to vomit you and do it again for all time. Sharing you. Sharing your misery amongst themselves. Spreading your essence, your soul think enough that you could feel even more pain, more horror.

I woke shaking, the Package laughing at my horror.

I knew I would not survive a third night and set out that day at four in the morning.

North.

The family’s home, shack, was beside the woods. They were watch keepers over the Sisters. I think they are their children. I went into those deep, dark woods and heard the other children of the Sisters singing to me in a tongue I recognized but did not know and the Package began to sing along with them.

It was a song of blood.

I found their Sanctuary deep within the woods, far from the snow and cold, near their nursery, where their children grew to be great beasts that stalked the shadows behind us. I placed the Package on an altar of roots and bowed to the Sisters and backed away and waited. The Package, after five long minutes, told me to leave, to run, run, run away, back to the human world before the Gates of Nothing opened to pull me in.

And I ran.

I haven’t stopped running.

I write this to you from a hotel.

I will mail it from my home when I stop to get some things. I drove past there last night and saw shapes in the windows.

The children of the Sisters are there. Waiting for me.

I pray they abandon my home long enough to gather what I need.

If not, if not…

I will run.

I will keep running.

And if the road runs out then I will pray that in the cold darkness of death there is salvation and a god that still loves our damned kind.