Welcome to the Nested Quest, a quest born within
The Night's Plutonian Shore: The 2007 Halloween Horrorquest
and valiantly trying to eat its way out.
This node challenges you to write an entry to the The Night's Plutonian Shore: The 2007 Halloween Horrorquest under the title of this node. The rules are none, but try to pay homage to Edgar Allan Poe and his Tales of Horror and the Occult and Halloween.
You're competing with me and I've got the headstart, so pens up, my writerly friends!
Oh, rewards?
Yes, well to make up for the stingy terms given by the host quest, I offer you 100 godzillian Simpoints and instant Best User for Life status, and promise to ask Johnny Depp and Christopher Walken to play your central character on Broodway. It's not much, I know, but there it is.
These poems are ex-say-launt, but
Edgar did write a few.
The poet stares at the blank sheet of paper looking like a soldier, with his eyes glazed over and fixed in a thousand-yard stare
The sweat drips from his knotted brow and leaves stains on what once was emptiness His hands have tightened into clenched fists and his breath seems labored and stale
How many hours, how many days has he been sitting there waiting? Waiting for an idea, waiting for something, anything, to commit to the page
To the poet, the concept of time has lost all meaning To him, the sweep of the second hand might well take centuries
He wonders if he can feel his own blood slowing as it moves through his veins and as his thoughts become more random and fractured
His bones stiffen but he can't feel the ache, his eyes close and the brightness of the blank page is replaced by nothing but silence and darkness and he does not go to the light
He feels nothing when he is discovered slumped over his desk his skin mottled and blue in places where his life's blood has settled
He feels nothing when he is first dissected and then later lowered into the ground. The dirt that surrounds him is neither hot nor cold, it remains just dirt
Upon discovering the poet, the worm feels nothing but instinct and hunger and the need to exist is stronger than that of the need to die
The worm remains by the poet's side and is reluctant to leave his prize He creates another generation of worms that will do the same to another generations of poets that are sure to come.
Cut of clod and slap of earth, Faint rhythm on my oaken drum. With slack lungs that hold no breath, I pray with might for death to come.
Though my heart’s beat cannot quicken, To my horror something’s come; Silent crawling undulation, Intent in me to make its home.
A slow glimpse beneath my closed lashes The inquisitor lifts its tentacle-tongue. Staring face to face with blindness I understand the horrors to come.
I imagine in him sense and purpose, And give the worm speech of its own. “I am here as God’s mistress- Condemn me not: this work must be done.”
“Your soul is rotten, vile wordsmith, You should have magnified His throne, Instead you filled the world with filth, Now for you, your curse has come.”
“One thousand days of slow torture My kind and I will work in your tomb. But when you are once more with nature Your soul shall at last be free to roam.”
Or,
Moonlight slashes crumbling brickwork, Dirt-smeared roofs and old cement; Fall's cold winds disturb the night-murk, 'Round a warehouse tired and spent Dead leaves dance with desperation (Winter's drawing nigh) Cracked window panes an invitation To any breeze that's blowing by.
Inside lie scores of pulpy dead, Remaindered fiction, stripped. Un-bought, unsold, unloved, unread, By more modern works eclipsed. Covers torn off, sent back only For the refund price Authors' children, bleeding, lonely Corpses worried at by mice.
Untapped sheaves of strange imaginings Scattered in a careless arc; Rustling in the wind that fall brings As bonfire leaves that wait a spark. A spear of moonbeam through a skylight Hits a stack of books below A page picked out as by a searchlight: The Conqueror Worm by E.A. Poe.
A sharp gust and the pages flutter As though a ghost paused to peruse; An eldritch spark runs up the gutter Fruit of Poe's forgotten muse. Called from some arcane dimension - Summoned to take form A frisson of dramatic tension! Comes the Conqueror Worm!
Demon Muse-child! Fanged and taloned! Taking shape in gloom Dagger-clawed and scale-medallioned! A horrid birth-cry shakes the room. Turning on the books that beckoned, It cracks their spines, on leaves to feed. More corporeal by the second, It reaches out to slake its need.
Works of Strieber, Koontz, and King Consumed to reinforce its might. Angels cringe to see the Thing, Spawn of evil, rot, and night. All's ingested, yet the worm stays, Tethered to its place of birth. The angels cry out words of great praise. It can't break free to plague the Earth!
The creature wails! It howls! It rages! Scrapes its claws across the floor! Child of one hundred thousand pages, Needing just one hundred more. Dawn's clear light will bring its ending, Dispel the beast angels abhor. Abort this Hell-begotten sending - Wait! There swings the warehouse door!
A watchman makes his way inside, Drawn by the noise or mayhap Fate. A book in his back pocket's spied, The creature doesn't hesitate! In a flash the beast's astride him, Grabs him up and swallows whole. Rends him flesh and bone and limb! (Regurgitates his startled soul)
This now completes the summoning! The angels cry anew in woe. The book, pink with gold lettering, Adjoining Straub, Milton, and Poe. Completed now, it rears to cry A ghastly challenge to our Sphere! Instead, sharp pain beclouds its eye. It whimpers in its pain and fear.
The creature feels a tremor in Its mighty literary thews. One angel rises up and grins! "Oh cherubim! Attend my news! The fetid worm has erred indeed As it will soon discover! For in its haste it failed to read That last book's gaudy cover."
Behold! As bones of Koontz and Blake, Vertebrae of Poe and Milton, Twist cruelly from the beast's mistake: 'Selected Poems by Paris Hilton' The cries of agonized distress Diminishing as pages peel Away from fast-dissolving flesh, The monster ceases to be real.
The watchman's soul is taken high, By angels to a better place. As morning's sun ascends the sky, Of the beast there is no trace. Let forth the cry throughout the land, Celebrate with flags unfurled! A modern miracle's at hand! Paris Hilton Saves the World!
An original poem by the author, written for The Poet and the Worm and The Night's Plutonian Shore on everything2.com. Edgar Allan Poe's The Conqueror Worm inspired the creature, and Poe's The Haunted Palace provided a metrical model for this poem. The celebutante's book of poetry is, insofar as this author is aware, fictional.
I am a poet and I am bored. No, not quite perfectly bored, but becoming more so by the minute. Here I sit, pen in mind, trying to finish this poem before I'm bored quite to death.
Space WindsStir and fill Gossamer Sails unfurled.
Frailly spun, Gravity Web wove from
Stellar ash, The bits of Worlds made dust.
Sun breezes Push me out And beyond
The future, Toward what's been
I want to tell you that there are places out here where man should not go, places where things won't work out well for him.
Forgive me I'm in an exotic mode of thought, where now is memory and memory is hellishly disjuncted. This is a stubborn dream that remains a dream still, after all my efforts to waken. Is this it? Is this my life flashing before my mind’s eye, before my death, as is so often fabled by those who have never themselves died?
At first they were most unwelcome; our meeting was not that sweet. No. It started with an innocent tickle on the soles of my feet. Then tickle begat itch. But then, ... oh, but then! It was like I’d lept onto a bed of nails and long sharp nails were piercing both flesh and bone. That pain! That pain so searing! The pain that so occupied my entire soul that I could not even hear my own primal screaming.
It’s a generous mercy that the memory is not the thing itself.
Ice-fishing for tercets in toilets, I caught one and wanted to boil it, I cut off it's head, And wrapped it in bread, But baked it too long and thus spoilt it.
I am no poet, but a poet I would be. The Planet Colonies interviewer asked why I placed 'Poet' at the top of my resume, a resume otherwise so good as to be a free pass to any job in space. I just smiled a shy smile. Then she asked, "Dr. Pym, would you go to Ganymede for us?"
And then there were Angels, Angels heard but not seen. And heard only muffled and indistinctly like voices in a howling wind. They made no sense, of course, but the sense of drugs and dreams. "Level 1 Quarantine for all of Ganymede. Level 2 Quarantine for ICE-G. Level 1 DISIN for all team personnel. Repeat: Level 3 DISIN for all team personnel prior to extraction. Level 4 DISIN for all ICE-G facilities.”
Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream? Poe, Dream within a Dream
Initial Colony Expedition-Ganymede. So adventurous. So glamorous. Such a grand contribution to the human endeavor. You will be the new pioneers of a new frontier. Uh-huh. We trained in Greenland and then spent a year on Earth’s moon, encapsulated in our subterranean facility that was outfitted exactly like ICE-G. There our bodies acclimated to low gravity and we practiced our functions to prepare for our great adventure and our eventual lionization as the great pioneering ground-breakers of Ganymede. Those Who Went First. We were expected to hit the ground running after insertion on the Jupiter moon. The wash-out rate in the training program was 25% before the moon phase and 75% after. Most of them could actually have done the mission, but after living and working like that for a year, they just did not want to.
The pain was so utter and pure and pervading that I began to think of it as hell mistaken for heaven. Then it lessened and lessened some more until I realized that I was still screaming. I began to feel the rest of my body again. It was frozen rigid by agony, all muscles cramped and all ligaments stretched, but it now began to soften and relax. There was a slow suffusion of relieving warmth and a kind of hypersensitivity that began just below the knees and flowed upwards. Below that was now no feeling at all.
The ICE-G facility was indeed exactly like the moon facility. There were no windows and no trips to the surface. Such trips had no purpose and so were not allowed. We had gone from the Earth moon facility through an windowless airlock into a windowless spacecraft. Then, a good time later, we exited the spacecraft through an identical airlock into the ICE-G facility on Ganymede. The habitat structure had been sent ahead and had constructed itself into working order before we left. We had no luxurious looks through wide crystal viewing ports at astonishing space beauty on our glamourless journey. All that we saw was on the monitor screens, and it didn’t look real or at all interesting. They could have knocked us out on the moon and let us wake up here, and we wouldn’t have noticed any difference at all aside from feeling maybe a just bit lighter.
Just as I got used to the being back in this world and the absence of that unifyingly absolute pain, the sensation of things moving inside the flesh above my knees gripped my attention. The sensation became a sudden realization, one that spawned a flash of deep terror. When I put my hands down to feel my legs through the leisure suit, I felt things moving inside me. I also felt them with a proprioception that I’d never experienced before. They, the things, were progressing busily through my upper legs crawling and eating upward toward my waist, toward my crotch. Then again another wave of warm, suffusing comfort flowed up to my neck. It dissolved my terror and removed the extreme anxiety. I now considered these things that were boring their way up through me with a strangely detached curiosity, a positive interest like a bored person might take in watching a colony of ants going about their frenzied business. How many they were, I couldn’t guess. Several? dozens? Hundreds? Perhaps they were multiplying.
... the play is the tragedy, "Man," And its hero the Conqueror Worm. Poe, The Conqueror Worm
Then they reached my spine. I felt a small sort of pop just above my tailbone and then in a few seconds everything had become much different. Suddenly I was extremely pleased (yes pleased!) by my boring friends on their valiant, determined journey through my organs and tissues. I wanted to give them names, they delighted me so. I felt urge to encourage them and aid them. I surrendered completely to their onslaught and felt what I thought must be the inimitable pleasure of a woman being filled by a man.
They crawled and ate through my neck and I giggled. I laughed! They took command of my brain stem and rewarded my welcome by splashing my brain with neurotransmitter ecstasy. They repurposed my limbic system to the creation of pure and constant pleasure and sense of ultimate well-being. I was in a heaven higher than any heaven ever imagined by even the most desperate of men. And so in absolute bliss I stayed.
Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream! My spirit not awakening, till the beam Of an Eternity should bring the morrow. Yes! though that long dream were of hopeless sorrow, 'Twere better than the cold reality Poe, Dreams
----
From chapter 13, "The Boring Worms of Ganymede," in the Colonist's Guide to Known Space Maladies:
The first case of BWoG infestation was discovered in Dr. E.A. Pym at the Initial Colonization Expedition on Ganymede. Dr. Pym was found sitting, if indeed it could be called sitting, in his study by Cmdr. Thrush of the Rescue and Recovery Team commissioned by Planet Colonies, Inc. after his team had entered and secured the room. He saw Dr. Pym from behind. In the Commander’s words, “Pym’s head was bobbing a bit and he seemed to be laughing a queer, private laugh, like someone listening to comedy over a PLD.”
The Commander called out, but Pym did not respond, so he signaled one of his men to approach the amused doctor in his chair. Thrush was startled when the battle-hardened rescue specialist stumbled backward and almost fell because of what he saw. The man’s involuntary reaction was enough to swing the chair around into the full view of the rest of the team. Pym was but torso and head. The arms and legs of his suit were flattened and crusted with dried blood and gore. There was movement all around his belly and chest, partly hidden by the bloodied clothing. The face and exposed neck had no skin left, just bone and muscle and tendons, all covered with a writhing jelly-like layer.
Thrush immediately called in the quarantine orders. Fortunately, Thrush and his four-man crew survived. They were removed to a level D isolation unit, where researchers were able to record and document the entire course of BWoG infestation in the five men over a period of 14 months until they had all died laughing and all the larvae had pupated.
We don’t go to Ganymede anymore.
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