Harry, Caresse, and the Crosby Inheritance

Adepts, give heart and ear to Harry Crosby and the memory palaces that he and his woman, Caresse, hid in the Dreamlands, accessed by a projection through past operations, impaled their every faculty on the hypometrics between the bubble demesnes they limned by their combined efforts, and thus survived the payment of the debt. 

They did not satisfy the Crosby blood with the usual toil at secret arts and obscure colloquy, nor with their unusual degree of telepathy, but foremost through obsessive desire to expunge the visions from their minds, sights that so forced themselves upon the pair after their dabbling revealed long-dead horrors wreaked by Harry's wizard ancestor. His blood-born authority to enter the old sites also marked him as the blood-bonded holder of an obligation, a commission...

What they did to complete and discharge the centuries-delayed obligation, they did only by compulsion, and only with the operational knowledge their witless trespass into the saturated space of the ritual centers had forced into Harry's mind, the first of the Crosby line to enter a place whose extra-terrene stones ached with the urgency of an operation interrupted, waiting in abeyance, aching for release and meaning for its energies. 

Caresse (née Mary Phelps Jacob, "Poly," who was also the divorcée Mrs. Richard Peabody, yes, THOSE Peabodys) found her exciting jaunt through strange odors and amusing nonsense words quite at an end: to the impatient sigils and wards,  the soul-linked lover of the operation's doomed inheritor had every bona fides to enter and not be destroyed. 

Entering, she, too, became the cunning stones' instrument. That place of power took no chance of partial reception of its centuries-delayed discharge of a burden terrible even for stone — insufficient impression of the operation may well be followed by revulsion and flight — the unquiet intelligencing runes upon the rock drained themselves to the last spark, a maximum projectance and the utmost amplification consistent with not simply cooking a mammalian nerve-center — such force bypassed the normal visual and semantic perception, channels both primitive and easy for an adept to block. 

Harry and Caresse were no adepts: he was a dabbler, though puissant in blood; she was a day-tripper, but her secret heart was stronger than her man. 

The knowledge and the vibratory symbols, the How and the When and the What, that would open hyperspatial circuits and transfer energies and verify the success of the operation so long hanging fire — the monstrous impression of these orders smashed flat the Crosby pair, too much, too much the overload for any decadent pair of misovereducated snobs as yet unhardened by the bloodshed, the concentration, the existential violence of true wizardry.

They went mad.

The deeds of their geas, those they hastened to perform, and thus discharged the active presence of the symbols that buzzed and rumbled behind their eyelids, sleeping or wakeful. And with the sublimation of the operant symbols, Harry and Caresse felt their minds loose the killing pressure of all the knowledge of the operation's conditions and counter-indications, its indices of outcomes desired, possible, likely, and unlikely but at all costs to be avoided — the shape of the writhing, insistent, tail-chasing conditions had filled their skulls with migraines and hallucinations well up to sophisticated discourse (mostly harangue, blandishments, imprecations and such pep-talks as only the intelligencing scripts and thoughtful diagrams of your true wizard can whisper evening and morn). 

There was no agency or deviation to be grasped by their captive egos, trapped as witnesses to acts of their own hands, of their own captive back-brains savage pleasure in rising to the fore and touching the life of the phenomenal world: small mercy, for those undisciplined selves in such occupation possessed not even the mechanisms of denial or loss of consciousness to protect them, and rarely even the balm of sleep: such was the principal and the interest of Harry's ancestral debt, paid by uncomprehending tissues and bones.

The occupying knowledge vanished in a torrent of forgotten connections, and the Crosbys retained only the sensory memories and the bodily ruin from their weeks as the puppets of a forgotten transgression. They had seen, and they had burned, and they had not forgotten the shape of things, nor the blood they spilled, nor the voices and sounds of music no child of earth can hear and ever again bear to look upon the stars; but they were as hollow vessels, and tattered books washed clean of ink.

So Harry the blood-adept and Caresse his erudite bride became pilgrims in quest of the outlying shapes and meanings of the sites where they had shed blood and croaked hateful syllables, there to remove what energies or reverberating sigils they could match to the empty places carved out of their minds. These efforts took them into ancestral memories and ancestral memory palaces; to the lands of Dream, of Earth and ringèd Cykranosh; to collegia and temples on planets far from Earth; and at length delivered purification, or at least surcease of memory, from their earliest flirtation with true magic, through to their initiations and courses of Physick and Chronometry in the sanatoriums of Yuggoth.

Harry and Caresse ended their days prosy and simple, given to cliché and fond of sentimental stories where virtue is rewarded, the boy gets the girl, and no one ever chants syllables that bloody throat or tongue. Their children thought their parents simple, their grandchildren dreaded their sing-alongs and parlor games, and none of their family ever suspected the old fools' love of cats to be the gratitude of one rescued at the nadir of despair.

No, there are just too many cats at Granny's and Grampy's...

31.3.2022 — third(ish) draft