Abaddon - Chapter 1

[Author's note - Many thanks to M. J. and P. J. A.
Croft for extensively correcting my Latin. I
also apologize to the ghost of Karl Edward
Wagner for nicking his idea. He will know
which one I mean.]

Wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein

Friedrich Nietzsche

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

St. John the Divine

But now, in this valley of Humiliation, poor Christian was hard put to it; for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him: his name is Apollyon. Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back, or to stand his ground. But he considered again, that he had no armor for his back, and therefore thought that to turn the back to him might give him greater advantage with ease to pierce him with his darts; therefore he resolved to venture and stand his ground: for, thought he, had I no more in mine eye than the saving of my life, it would be the best way to stand.

So he went on, and Apollyon met him. Now the monster was hideous to behold: he was clothed with scales like a fish, and they are his pride; he had wings like a dragon, and feet like a bear, and out of his belly came fire and smoke; and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

Part One

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 10 2010

Here at last. Small for an ex-Imperial Capital. Buildings, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Greek, Byzantine, Romanesque, Romanov, Roman - piled up in no particular order. For all the Gzel Czaer Matias Corvinus is a ‘majestic palimpsest of three thousand years of European history’ (quote from ‘Let’s Go Vzeng Na’ 2008) it is a very small one.

Looking east across the square - Gzel is the word for square, no idea how pronounced - can see the palace of the Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, a token of that monarch’s unhealthy fascination with this area. During WW2, the palace was both an SS and KGB headquarters, and an SS General had the unfortunate distinction of being tortured there in his own torturing cellars. Now, it is a museum, the Musé Sissi. To the north of it is the old Polish town hall, originally a mediaeval guildhall, for many years the Soviet Commissary. Now it seems to be the Hilton Matias Corvinus. Polish, Austro-Hungarian and Russian eagles alike sit around its eaves (you can tell the Austro-Hungarian and Russian ones easily - they have two heads). Some of the eagles nursing bulletholes.

Behind where the Zil taxi dropped me off is the Orthodox cathedral, notable for having a Catholic campanile. Easy to see where the Orthodox saints have been excised from the campanile and replaced with Catholic ones. The same process seems to have happened in reverse on the cathedral façade. The city has been swapped back and forth between Cath. and Orth. for the last thousand years, not forgetting a short sojourn under the Mongols. The saints on the upper stages of the façade famously only survived the Mongol conquest because Ogedei Khan was unable to find a stepladder. Guidebook says façade originally covered in gold leaf before Vzeng Na’s glorious forty years under Communism, but cathedral still an imposing building.

Opposite the cathedral, with minarets deliberately built to be a cubit taller, is the Ottoman mosque, abutting a northerly section of the Bey’s wall. To be honest, mosque is mostly minaret. Ottomans did not have much time to build it in before the Hungarian reconquista, but wanted to make their point. Hungarians wanted to make their point too - tops of minarets are flat where the roofs have been remodelled to make them shorter than the cathedral again.

To the left, looking from the cathedral, an archway inlaid with cut and painted tile leads through the Beglerbeg’s wall into the Garden Citadel. Archway v. ornate, but has stone gateposts big and squat and ugly enough to support vault doors of Federal Reserve Bank, not to mention ominous holes in the arabesques overhead that evil head-destroying substances might be poured through.

Air is an enticing reek of strange foods, peculiar and ill-advised automobile fuels, and exotically poorly maintained sewers. Cars are nearly all Czaer 2000’s, products of Vzeng Na’s one and only car factory, bizarre copies of Isetta bubblecars. Driving one a point of national pride, it seems. Only a very few of the most important businessmen, pimps and gunrunners seem to drive Lexi and Mercedes, and there seems to be little middle ground.

Across the Gzel, in what was once a Soviet Museum of the Patriotic War, new American imperialists have set their mark, a branch of Starbuck’s. Notice ‘Starbucks’ spelt out in Roman and Cyrillic characters. In one of the comfy armchairs near the window sits Ivan. Recognized Ivan as only man in caff wearing red carnation in buttonhole (actually only man in caff with buttonhole, but digress). Ivan’s suit, like most suits round here, not a perfect fit, but a reasonable one, and what it’s fitting is quite pleasant too. This police inspector does not live on donuts alone. There is a gymnasium somewhere in Na for certain.

Ran down steps and waved. Heel fell off shoe on period cobbles, went arse over tit into fire hydrant, which still has pointy Communist stars on it just where it kisses the forehead.

Ow.

Saw pointy Communist stars for some minutes.

Ivan a nuclear-powered dreamboat. Shows me a picture of his wife, who is of course gorgeous, the cow. He carries a gun, a dinky little Russian thing which he says is better than James Bond’s Walther PPK. He says the bullets from it go through steel plate.

As day was warm, suggested we sit outside on pavement. He objected as only pimps sit on pavement, with their bitches apparently. Quite excited at thought of being his bitch, so insisted. Smiled at old gentlemen passing by. They all smiled back, but their wives reined them in and scowled at me. Man with a big smart jacket and two girlfriends wandered past and said something obviously rude to Ivan. Ivan in hysterics by the time the sun set. Getting along fine, it seems, and always a good idea to know the local police chief, biblically even.

Na, says Ivan, is and always has been arranged totally around its central tourist attraction. In the very earliest days the Greeks, and maybe even the Persians, built temples here to gods of their respective underworlds. Here, he says, is the site of the world’s only recorded temple to Angra Mainyu. Not sure who Angra Mainyu is, but smile and nod politely. The Romans, says Ivan, were also obsessed with the site, the Emperor Heliogabalus making a pilgrimage here, and the Emperor Trajan conquering all the land between here and the mountains just so he could dedicate a temple. The site was as important to the Greeks as Delphi. At Delphi the single priestess, known as the Pythia, sat on a chair balanced over a fissure in the earth. The fissure was supposed to contain the body of the monster serpent Python, guardian of the Centre of the Earth. Python had been slain by Apollo for some reason or other, and from the corruption of its body foul miasmas rose into the priestess's nostrils, allowing her to foretell the future, possibly insofar as the future was 'sitting on top of this fissure is going to get really old really quickly'. But, says Ivan, Delphi was widely known by everyone who was ayone in the Ancient World to be just a pale imitation of the far older, greater and more terrible Oracle in the cold lands to the north at Na. (Have been to Delphi; have looked down the priestess's fissure. Agree that Na's is the only one of the two that looks as if it really could go all the way down).

There is even reputed to be an old proto-Celtic stone circle round the place. It wasn't just the religious and artistic life of the area, Ivan says, that was dictated by what was revered here, but also the local economy, from the very earliest times - in Roman days, it was considered a prime source of fertilizer from the thousands of bats which used to live inside the entrance, and the locals were known as ‘vespertiliani’ or ‘bat people’, as many of them lived down in the dark among the chiroptera, in little crazy wood-and-raffia villages clinging to the rock. Tacitus complains that ‘these people seem to think Caesar cannot tax them, as they live not on the Earth, but in it’. Since time immemorial, all the sewers of all the surrounding districts have fed into the mouth, and it should, Ivan admits, smell appalling, but it swallows the stench, just as it swallows light, and sound. (Knew this from the guidebook - if you yell into it, you get no echo back, apparently.) (Just checked another, scarier guidebook, which says you sometimes do get an echo, but not in your own voice, because it’s Satan mimicking you from the Pits of Tartarus and trying to draw you down to Hell, etc., etc. Prefer first old wive’s tale, less scary). The town grew in the nineteenth century purely because of this incredible ability to absorb sewage; other cities on the plains around it had to construct huge and elaborate systems for poo disposal. Na, says Ivan, still has, even today, not one single sewage farm. ‘If the devil’s down there’, Ivan grins, ‘we’re all crapping on his head daily’.

Ivan knows about the group of Americans in town who believe it goes right down to the Mohovoric Discontinuity. He says the Soviets believed that in the 1950’s, and had their own Mohole project here. He says their equipment is still visible down there if you squint through binoculars. The Russians, he says, were not successful (looks v. satisfied when he says this).

A street kid tried to tap me up for dollars. Wouldn’t take local currency, cheeky little SOB. At the same time as he was tapping me, another kid was trying to sidle past and grab my wallet. Ivan just looked at him. The kid took one look back and scarpered. Ivan laughed. He says kids like that are a constant problem. They’re the kids of Smoke addicts, he says. The word he uses is Дым, which means Smoke in English. I’ve never heard of it, and he’s quite surprised I haven’t. Oracle Smoke, he says, is the drug of choice hereabouts. I ask him what sort of drug it is, and he waves his hands about vaguely and says ‘probably an opiate’. It certainly sounds like crack or heroin, addicts lose all interest in reality, not even sending their kids out to whore and steal like decent junkies should. The kids do the whoring and stealing off their own bats, as they starve to death if they don’t.

“Where does Oracle Smoke come from?” I say.

He shrugs. “They make it somewhere, I imagine.”

“You mean you’ve never seen it?”

He nods. “I have. It is carried into Smoke houses in glass bottles, wrapped around with cooking foil. Coke bottles, so I hear, are especially favoured. The bottle is heated, inside the foil to stop it cracking, and the family gathers round. As the flame gets hotter the Smoke rises from the bottle and fills the room. It is more addictive, I imagine, than heroin, sex or chocolate. Our narcotics officers have orders to wear respirators. I have lost more than one man to the Smoke who did not.”

“Was that boy on Oracle Smoke?” I ask. Ivan shakes his head. Oracle Smoke, he says, sucks the life out of a user almost overnight. “There is no soul any longer”, he says. “The skin tightens, because the addict fails to eat. The eyes steal back into the head. Besides”, he adds, “Smoke users don’t speak that intelligibly. They talk in strings of gibberish. Some believe what they say predicts the future.”

“And does it?”

“It predicts their own future. They die within a month, invariably.”

Ivan says he’ll show me the Museum tomorrow. I asked him if it worried him, living on the edge of what the Greeks and Romans thought was the entrance to Hell. He laughs and says he spent the first ten years of his life in Hell. He explains - until he was eleven, rock and roll music was forbidden in Vzeng Na, with the exception, it seems, of Pat Boone, as the local party chairman had all the Boonester’s records. Ivan launched into an impromptu solo of Ain’t That A Shame, and his fellow customers in the café responded by throwing litter and good-natured abuse at him.

“You see”, he says with a wink, “the police chief is the only man who can get away with Pat Boone karaoke in this town.”