Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“Appear in black and yellow livery, Pentomorph! I will be avenged! Come here, all of you who like the places and times in which duplicity and trickery are done! Deceive those who see things, that they may appear to see what they do not. Ascend alive from hell, ye imprisoned in sheet flame, and scream me promises! Come, Eparinesont, Oriet, Clam-eron, Casmiel, Sodirno, Premy, and Peatham.

“Rule her with fumigations. Turn her upsidedown and bewilder her with hests of mine, pitchy breath! I propitiate you, Demogorgon from blackest hell, to create ill-will, terror, and sorrow. Oppress, torture, and harass her body, soul, and five senses. Smite her with your left hand and escort her with cruel ministrations beneath the earth and curse in her face with eternal doom! Veer with me! Come, Peunt, Slevor, Dorsamot, Janva, Zariatnctmik, Arios, and Yod.

“You demons, born of black exudings, of black pores, of black skin, of black flesh, blood, veins, sinews, and black bones, howl out from the bottom of all damnation the cries of your signal disobedience. Work for me, Night-Wraiths and Handmaids of Phantom! Come, Tistator, Abac, Iat, Guthac, Derisor, Destator, and Gomeh.

“Ascend alive from hell to where she is and flash out from your fingers jujus, spells, and wails! O Beelzebub, cause her bones to crack and grate against one another, displace her bowels, confuse her, cover her with botches and boils, bulges, and blebs! Come, Agla, Tagla, Mathon, Oarios, Almouzin, Membrot, Varvis, Pithona, and Anexhexeton.

“Smooth Devils, Horned Devils, Sullen Devils, Arch Devils, Shorn Devils, Hairy Devils, Foolish Devils, Devilesses, and Young Devils, all the offspring of Devildom, come with your devilish tricks, quicker than light, and sport with her. May she be smitten down and given a bed beneath some lockjawed hell until the end of time brings eternity upon it and in the doing thereof shall I allow you my inthronization in fire for as long. Aliseon, Hone, Vermios, Erin Catharines. Galbas, galbât, galdes, galdat, Earl Astaroth—

”Venite, venite, venite!

Palas aron azinomas.

Bagahi laca Bachabe.”

He stood there for some time, watching, lost in a fixed and prolonged gaze that seemed to track the smoke’s course to his thoughts as the photograph in the dish curled up in fire, its smiling face turning from the smooth color of lawsheep to dark red murray and then to cancer in the accumulation of flames. It seemed, as it burned, to burst forth in a torrent of abuse. Then there were ashes. The room was suddenly strange and solemn and lonely, like an empty but profaned sepulchre after an attempt to muster the disaffected, and in the stink, heat, and cafard he who made that attempt knew he now lived at the heart of cruelty, now lived where the light goes when it is put out. He knew he must seek friends of the darkness now and, with that terrible truth, watching his own shadow sway on the floor with the flickering candles, snuffed them and crept upstairs to Dr. Crucifer’s rooms in a stupor of — not of confusion, nor of agitation. And it wasn’t remorse or cynicism or fear. A blackness sucked at his heart. There was only one word for it.

“HATE,” said Dr. Crucifer, “is love’s other face: they are complements, not opposites. The emotion owes all its meaning, as I’ve told you, to the demand for love, each expressing an impulse which exists only by an antagonism to the fear that oppresses it, for one can never be a hater without having had this ideal, that one, always loving, will always be loved in return. There lies not a grain of sand between the loved and the detested. With everything right, wrong is always somehow involved, and, like bifronted Janus, we love with the dread of hate in us. Buried in every yes there is a no. It is a Manichean delight: all the time you hate you steal it from love, its sole provocation, for it does not precede the facts that call it forth; it nourishes itself on them. Dichromatism always extends to the complementary colors. You commit in one exactly everything you simultaneously omit in the other. They exist side by side to kill each other, like the heterosporous combination of cedar and chokecherry. What, after all, is the precise morphological distinction between an embrace and a strangulation? L’amour, la mort : every kiss muffles a bite. Inside every lover is manacled Taras Bulba. The anagram of ‘The heart’s desire’ is ‘hate strides here’—the imperfection in the transposition being the apostrophe you can’t cry out.

“Hatred is the appetite which increases as you eat. It is, nevertheless, always in a state of being, a substantial definiteness unto itself. There are many passions which we are condemned to feel only in a reduced form: never love or hate. Both flirt with the impossible, the due practical conceding of each as to inevitability, however, amounting to much, indeed to the sure promise of all. Lovers are half-enemies in the first place, and hatred between half-enemies, often deeper than between opposites, aches for completion.

“The thing confounds scrutinoids absolutely; no more than love does it concern itself with reason but goes through life fixed on delirious hope in order to pledge allegiance to an inverted form of the same ideal. It is not shaped to common recognita nor bounded by the cir-cumvallations of vulgar experience, and the feeble and obvious piety which announces indifference to define the essential polarity to the proposition of love I can only assign to the retarded virtuosity of those unguentarians and barely audible paracoits-of-footwork who, fearing to penetrate into other spheres, higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden, must live life either on their knees or in a crouch like a dog fucking a football! Hate wears a capital letter. Its colors are as bright as poisonous reptiles. It quickens to bolder action than diffidence or dumbness and chafes as motion conquers cold to run full-tilt at an indifferent world screaming that rather than be less one would rather not be at all! We have long considered views on the subject so general as to be trite, so idiosyncratic as to be useless. We overestimate it and underestimate it. Do you ask why?

“Men, in the mass, are amply content to take life as they’re given it, finding the world to be so very comfortable they have no inclination either for its stark ascents and descents. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities of the Rank and Vile! The common wantwit, further, confines the spiritual world to the supremely good. Mr, and Mrs. Bumb from Main St., America, and all their little tits in mittens at Sunday-Go-To-Meeting? Oh yes, but what of the supremely wicked? Mustn’t they necessarily have their portion in it as well? And why not? Why should sanctity alone, and not sorcery, be permitted the children of the earth? I tell you, there are multitudes of us who, thrown headlong into the valley of tears and sightless with rage at the mere premise of creation, eat black pulses and drink wormwood with a joy infinitely sharper than anything within the experience of an epicure! And why? It is the best way of allowing reality to live up to the imagination ! Hatred, indeed, is rare! It is the infernal miracle as love claims to be the supernal, a withdrawal from the mediocrity of things as they’re theologically supposed to be, an ecstasy of scorched devotion unavailable to the muddled, second-rate masses with untenanted souls who have no comprehension of the inner sense of things, a transcendental effort to surpass the ordinary bounds and, by so doing, surpassing the common understanding which, nevertheless, still foolishly hobbles after it with notebook in hand to address, then adjudge it imagined. Malevolence! Wrath! Hatred! I hereby muster all the Hierarchs of Tophet to prove them real!