This novella was originally published in Angry Old Man Magazine, Volume 2, in 2018. It has undergone a few updates and visuals. No further angel meat was consumed in the process. Enjoy!
And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
1 Kings, 12:11
I Dreamed of Chains Singing
“If being hauled down from the heavens by singing chains was an occasion to wax poetic, then the celestial beings had a better grasp of tragedy and pathos than we humans had.”
It was around the time of the story Carnivorous Butterflies being read that Bonestorm began to grow weak. The story, taken from a book by one John Hyrcanus, was not set down in verse. So there was suspicion that it could have been a prose poem. Marie contended that the story could have been an allegory for Bonestorm being assailed by poetry. “Clearly any guilty verses wouldn’t be in his account,” she said.
I couldn’t disagree more. I handed her a page she hadn’t yet read.
I don’t know why he does this to me. I tell him that it is dangerous. It isn’t to him, of course. So I read on and dream on in spite of myself. We know exactly where the butterfly incident took place. It lies in the northwest quadrant of the park, on a path that bends to the right behind a line of trees. A park bench marks the spot. The ravine is also there. We went looking for evidence the other day but found nothing.
Hyrcanus’s version of the story is wholly prosaic and therefore safe. But the rest of the book is in verse and is therefore unbearable. Flowerbomb and I read angelical writing numerous times. The thermodynamics of the celestial spheres were firmly rooted in cold fact, though their mysteries were revealed to us in nightmares. But once we happened upon poetry, and I told my companion that I could not proceed further, he threw fits and said it wasn’t fair to him. So he went on reading his left pages and dreaming the left side of revelation. But his visions stood up with gashes in their sides. He felt their inadequacies. He dreamed nuts, but not bolts; yin without yang; bone with no skin. The fire of my nightmares would burn my soul without the neutralizing effect of your ice, he said. He allayed my fears by claiming that, since I would only do what was expected of me, which was read the right-side pages of Hyrcanus, I would not be reading poetry. Only our revelations afterward would amount to anything close to it. What faulty reasoning! How much of a dupe did he imagine me to be? A quatrain was enough to make me gasp for air. He kept a petulant face and didn’t talk to me for weeks. I tried in vain to defy his accusations.
If the nightmares of Flowerbomb and Bonestorm ceased to interlock like our first copy indicated, then what remained to be determined was how Flowerbomb, all by himself, managed to plunge into the byzantine contraption that was John Hyrcanus’s oeuvre.
That evening, Vespasian told us that he had a book by one John Hyrcanus. It was a strange specimen, with a desultory, threefold theme: a vitriol against the European Enlightenment, a drawn-out non-Euclidean description of a comeshot across a vegetable garden, and a planar analysis of the devil’s pitchfork. “Hyrcanus is irony-free,” Vespasian told us with a chuckle. “In the brief biography at the end of the book, he claims descent from the Maccabees, hence his nom de plume.”
“When was it printed?” Marie asked.
“In 1874. Or five,” Vespasian said.
“Way too obscure to have been subjected to Nazi scrutiny and burning,” said our Teutonic lady.
“The book was a translation from the German into English,” Vespasian said, meaning that the original publication could have been much earlier. “I’ll begin searching for a German copy first thing tomorrow morning.”
Flowerbomb did not mention the Hyrcanus book owned by Vespasian, titled Our Effervescent Menace. Instead, he cited a certain Kitaab min al-Kutub, or Book of Books, a short tract written in Egyptian Arabic, which would make John Hyrcanus a polyglot whose bibliography moved effortlessly from tongue to tongue.
It did not live up to its titular billing. It served, instead, as a stopover to two more works, one called Hoch Himmel, or High Heaven, and the other nameless to us, probably because our idiot still chose to only read the left-side pages of books.
Vespasian’s following morning was unsuccessful. So I read Our Effervescent Menace in Arabic (which was a translation from the German, itself a translation from the original Enochian). Marie read Book of Books in English (which was a translation from the German, which was itself translated from the original Arabic).
My book consisted of a number of conjurations: the summoning of spirits, pyromancy (divination by fire), and, yes, the breeding of flesh-devouring butterflies. The conjurations were elaborate, consisting of geomantic rituals and evocations. The most interesting portion of the book was a protracted chapter called How to Maintain a Harem of Fire Nymphs.
Since flame retardants like Nomex did not exist back then, I couldn’t begin to imagine how Hyrcanus succeeded in courtship with the scorching kind. This brought my assessment of magick full circle, where, like before, I could not decide whether it was all an ornate sham or a mystical perception of the physical world chock-full of metaphors, or useful diagrams of inner space.
Flowerbomb dreamed one night that he was the inhabitant of a flat land in the shape of a pentagram. He was bound to the upper and lower left corners, which represented air and earth. He held the former in his lungs and the latter at his feet. The other two elements of water and fire—upper and lower right—were unaccounted for, since Bonestorm was at that point not participating. Flowerbomb’s nightmares would keep him locked down to those points until there was a change.
I Dreamed of Chains Singing
(MARIE)
Flowerbomb wrote:
I dreamed of chains singing. It was not me that their cold steel held down. It was others. But it was I who became enslaved by their singing. I was locked down by a choir, which was cold to the ear as the links would have been to the flesh of those in captivity. I tumbled through the clouds, bearing witness to those who fell with me. From behind me came the voice of one who also fell. ‘These chains that bind us sing now the Flogging Song.’ I did not understand what he meant, nor understand who he was. All I could hear was the choir of chains and a loud rustling of feathers.
Bonestorm wrote:
I dreamed of a man plucking angels from the heavens as easily as if he had been snatching overripe fruit from a tree. In the morning, after coffee, we bundled up and headed for the park, taking a volume of The Zohar with us and a diagram of the sefirot. We shuttered with fright as each of us revealed our nightmares to the other. But after having pieced them together into a cohesive whole, we had ourselves a hearty laugh.
I, for my part, some ninety years later, dreamed last night of a dreadlocked archangel shooting up heroin. He told me to mind my own business, in German. I’ve always believed celestial beings to be reckless junkies who get made over by the faithful as benign, which the archons were definitely not.
When Vespasian’s copy of The Interlocking Nightmares of Flowerbomb and Bonestorm had blown apart to the four corners of a downtown Berlin intersection, due to the passing of an autobus, most of Bonestorm’s account was spared, with the exception of four pages. The portion of the book that had blown about was mostly the first half, where the accounts did not yet diverge.
This morning, I was back at the café where the incident took place, finishing up Book of Books. I had problems focusing, finding it hard not to pass it all off as gibberish. Vasmatzidis had told me on numerous occasions that, once penetrated, the cryptograms and -graphs unlocked a novel way of perceiving the material world.
The very same waiter who served us that day told me that he had found a sheaf of our book’s pages, and had held them for us in his locker back behind the kitchen. I asked for them and he brought them to me graciously, along with a refill of my coffee. I put down the Hyrcanus book, tired of German, and found to my alarm that I had in my hands seventeen pages of Bonestorm’s account. There should have been only two missing pages. The pages the waiter gave me were numbered 241-257. Yet, as I recalled, the book we had salvaged from the accident was missing 249-250 and 81-82. My head got so cloudy, I forgot to leave the waiter a tip.
Back at the hotel, I set to reading the missing pages. So Flowerbomb let his grudge die. Bonestorm came back to him with open arms. They took up their habit at the park. They took delight in reading Hoch Himmel, which I admit I nearly couldn’t. (Vespasian had shown up with a copy that morning, and I tried in vain to turn it down. It was in German, so it fell to me to read it.)
The Berliners had nightmares determined by the day’s readings and locked them together the following morning. The revelations must have been of enough interest for them to continue with that game of theirs.
There was no getting around it: I would never be initiated as a hierophant. I refused to learn Enochian. The tightly wound buds of mystery would not bloom forth as the flowers of logic others proposed them to be. The mention of the singing chains and the man plucking angels from the sky still wasn’t enough to convince me that I should learn how to read that angelical tongue. I would continue to take Vasmatzidis’s word for it.
By the third page, it was clear that Hoch Himmel was autobiographical. John Hyrcanus did indeed claim the Hasmonaean lineage and wasted no time in doing so. He said his paternal bloodline went back right to a lost brother of the High Priest, who could do nothing but watch the Nabataean, Herod the Great, bring an end to the royal house. This lost son served as a lowly prison guard at Machaerus, the Herodian fort where John the Baptist was imprisoned before his death.
Hyrcanus gave a synopsis of one of the most interesting Biblical stories: Herod Antipas, nephew of Herod the Great and governor of Galilee, was jealous of John the Baptist, whom the people held in high regard. The real cause of Herod’s ire, though, was probably John the Baptist’s denouncing him as an adulterer: Herod married Herodias, the widow of his own brother Philip. That vixen held a blackness in her heart for John as well. One day, Herod celebrated his birthday with great pomp. His nubile niece/stepdaughter, Salome, danced with much pathos and naked abandon before the gathering of neighboring monarchs. Herod, smitten by the sight, and eager to show his guests his might and mien, offered the deserving dancer anything she wished. Too scatterbrained to request anything on her own, Salome ran over to her mother, Herodias, who made her run back to Herod and ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Herod himself was aghast at the request, but not wanting to wilt before the eyes of visiting heads of state, kept his word. The Forerunner was dispatched.
John’s remains were spirited away—the body to Sebaste, the head placed in an earthenware vessel and buried on Mount Olive. The work was carried out by one Joanna, the wife of Chuza, one of Herod’s stewards. There are conflicting versions of what subsequently happened to John’s remains. According to some, his relics were taken to Cappadocia, in present-day Turkey; according to others, to Alexandria. His head is said to be in Aquitaine and also in Boston.
Flowerbomb had a nightmare of an opportunistic procurer of relics, a man from Arimathea; Bonestorm had a nightmare of the Paten, the silver platter that, despite being buried under gravel in various lands for many years, gleamed still with a brilliance rivaled only by the sun. Flowerbomb had a nightmare of a boat that sailed from Palestine to Glastonbury, England, with a stopover at Marseilles; Bonestorm had a nightmare about a spear, a chalice, and a platter carefully wrapped in linen.
Flowerbomb dreamed feverishly of a knife that carved away the years; Bonestorm dreamed of a fork that hauled those years into the gaping maw of oblivion.
The knife, called Samson’s Slicer, was fashioned from the ass’s jawbone the robust, long-haired judge had used to slaughter Philistines. It was kept in the court of Ahab, king of Samaria, whose wife Jezebel had used it to slice off bits of lamb to offer unto Baal. When a peace was established between Ahab and Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, the knife went to Jerusalem. It was clutched years later in the trembling right hand of Zedekiah, who was at dinner while he learned that Nebuchadrezzar was fast approaching the city. The knife made its way then to Babylon, where it stayed until the Persian invasion. It was kept in a satchel of someone among the retinue of Ezra, who, with the Achaemenids’ blessings, led a great part of his people back to the Holy Land, where it collected dust under the altar of the temple until the First Crusade, when, along with many other things, it was taken to Constantinople.
The fork, called Sennacherib’s Bane, came from Nineveh, capitol of Assyria. It was one of the weapons used by the princes to slaughter the hegemonic king after he had attempted to storm Judah. One of those sons of the king sought refuge in present-day Armenia but was turned back. He did not dare return to Assyria, for the new lord, Esarhaddon was vicious; so he fled to Ecbatana, where he died in peace years later. The fork found itself on the plate of one Harpagus, who, thinking he had eaten mutton for dinner one evening, had unwittingly eaten the remains of his son—a ruse put to him by the ruthless Median king Astyages, who sat too at the table. Harpagus then conspired with Cyrus to overthrow the despot.
The fork then went to Persepolis, where, a century-and-a-half later, a group of drunken Macedonians set up camp. It followed along in the baggage train of a general, Seleucus or some other, going to the River Indus and stopping back at Antioch. The Maccabean revolt centuries later brought about a time of Jewish independence, and it was then that Sennacherib’s Bane was used at the court of the Hasmonaeans. There is harebrained speculation that it was used by one of the five thousand when Jesus had fed them with two fish and five loaves of bread. Most likely it stayed in Palestine until Jerusalem had been destroyed by Hadrian, who rebuilt the city as a provincial capital and named it Aelia Capitolina. From there it ended up in Constantinople.
Samson’s Slicer and Sennacherib’s Bane had come together at the royal dinner table of the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus, who was so cautious with them that he decreed death should befall whosoever touched them.
The two of them now had a chance meeting for the first time in just under a millennium, in a Berlin basement, wrapped together in linen and placed on a table that waited for two years to receive a platter said to have been in the possession of the procurer of relics, whose name was Joseph, who parted willingly with the platter so that he could at last die.
Hyrcanus was skeptical of the utensils’ authenticity but was convinced that the platter sitting before him on the table once held the head of St. John. The fetishistic accouterments for the feast were complete, but the fodder remained missing.
Hoch Himmel, full of Enochian Watchtowers and angelical vectors, then lapses into a recipe book for serving angel meat. There is Sautéed Seraph, Poached Principality, and a confusing concoction of Charbroiled Cherub, which it is a sin to eat without a generous coating of Gorgonzola and a snifter of red wine.
(Enochian Watchtowers)
It was at this point that Bonestorm became seriously ill. Hyrcanus’s account was safe for him, but there were interpolations written in the Enochian script that were first-person accounts of tumbling downward through space. Bonestorm said that his allergies acted up when he completed two lines of text. He had been reading angelical poetry. If being hauled down from the heavens by singing chains was an occasion to wax poetic, then the celestial beings had a better grasp of tragedy and pathos than we humans. They did not end up in Tartarus, or Hell, as they feared; nor did they fall to earth, yet; instead they found themselves on the shore of a sea of chains. Steel chains stretched all the way to and across the horizon. They had no choice but to set forth onto the sea. They began to sink. And because their wings were bound by chains that sang the Binding Song, they could not fly up to safety, and they drowned in the sea of chains.
I vomit but I continue reading. I cannot help myself. Hyrcanus wishes to dine on angel meat. He has come across a method for ensnaring angels. He then goes ahead and scorns all the skryers throughout the ages, calling Dee and Kelley charlatans, dubbing Francis Bacon a futile twit, and casting aspersions at the Illuminati set, which he calls a ‘desperate, esoteric circle jerk’. He has found a way to hunt down angels, and it’s open season. The voices of the songs that the chains sing are those of two hundred already-fallen angels, Shemyaza and others, whom John Hyrcanus employs. Hyrcanus learns from the captain of the Fallen that good angels are flogged on the regular. They are pure in their service of the Lord, but they are not above the Lord’s sadistic tastes. This is confirmed by Hyrcanus’s very first capture, whose name is Saraqael.
“Whence came you?” Hyrcanus asks, gazing up at his new acquisition, who stands up in a large cage hanging from the basement’s ceiling.
“From the east, beyond the mountain of pearl,” replies Saraqael.
“Were you happy there, with your Lord?”
“I was.”
“Are you happy now?”
“I am not.”
“Can you tell me a story? Does your kind traffic in the sins of invention? If you tell me some interesting stories, I will set you free.”
“I don’t wish to return.”
“And why not? I thought you were happy there.”
“Because I don’t like being flogged.”
“Who flogs you?”
“Other angels.”
“At whose behest?”
“Ialdabaoth’s.”
“You are an archon?”
“Yes.”
“Are there other archons?”
“Many.”
“Are they all flogged in turn?”
“No.”
“And those that are not flogged . . . what do they do while others are?”
“They are of the choir.”
I missed those days in high school when I used to pray and was convinced that the celestial phone was picked up and held to The Ear, when I wasn’t hung up on immediately like the telemarketer I must seem now to God.
When I first heard of this story of the two Berliners who simultaneously read books and darkly dreamed connecting halves of revelation, I was taken by their codependency. As a gulf set up between them, I thought Bonestorm the weaker of the two and placed all my support with Flowerbomb. Now I was not so sure. Bonestorm, though a weakling, showed much selflessness in continuing to read for their collective sake; whereas Flowerbomb threw shit-fits every time his other half cited threats to his health as a reason for not wanting to continue. They were such creatures of habit that they feared the whole megastructure of the world would collapse upon them if a digression should take place: the support beams of their hermetic nightmares would begin to corrode and the whole cosmological architecture would give way.
There are moments in one’s life that, while not even necessarily bad, are so gray and melancholy, that it seems impossible that they should be succeeded by something like a sliver of light. That entire day was such a time. Even a dinner with an effervescent Vasmatzidis was not as refreshing as it should have been. I probably shouldn’t have expected so much from him. His habit of reading hermeneutic tracts through the night and sleeping for only a few hours showed on his face. He could be witty and charming, but never uplifting. It was always ennui with the world that drove one to mysticism in the first place. And though relieved of the world’s tiresome banalities, these people weren’t naive enough to try and procure for themselves some deathless ebullience. I couldn’t recall joie de vivre ever being acquired by anybody.
Vasmatzidis told me what he had read. His remark about how scary it was that I should come across the name of Ialdabaoth, since I was partial to the Gnostic gospels, rattled me a bit, and even shook up the ho-hum world for me. I ordered a slice of pie.
Back in the States, our antiquarian bookseller was close to acquiring a work referred to in the book Vasmatzidis had read yesterday as Iad Bab Zna.
“A very obscure grimoire. Supposedly one long incantation to send binding instruments up into heaven to snag down Powers, the order of angels most susceptible to corruption and collapse.”
“Written by whom?” I asked.
“By one John Hyrcanus.”
I sighed. This Maccabean chap’s oeuvre was beginning to resemble a Matryoshka doll.
Vasmatzidis watched me eat my slice of raspberry and chocolate. “Do you want to try this?” I asked. “It’s divine.” I licked chocolate from the corner of my mouth. He smiled and held out desisting hands. Clutching the fork in my right hand, I decided to include the services of a butter knife. The same instrument used to murder the Assyrian king would now atone for its crime by hauling the rest of the sweet dessert into my mouth; and the very ass’s jawbone Samson used to slaughter Philistines would lop off the final mouthful.
“I don’t think he’s holding angels captive so that they’ll reveal to him God’s secrets,” he said, sipping a coffee. “He already knows God and even shows a predilection for detesting him. He’s doing this to angels for some materialistic reason. Either he’s using them for inspiration to write the kind of stories he’s always needed in order to launch a literary career, or he’s doing it for sustenance. Easy meat. Black-market manna.”
“He’s foraging,” I proposed, my mouth full.
“All that vanity publishing, you know. Wallops the wallet. A-hunting one must go.”
“I wonder what angel meat tastes like,” I said, washing down the last piece of tort with a drink of water. “I’d really like to know.”
“Like chicken, perhaps?”
“They are aviary.”
Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK. If you like what you just read, why not check out my brand-new novel? It’s an LA noir mystery with an alcoholic private detective, vegan crime bosses, guys who cut cocaine with borax, and AI Charles Manson.
Suicide by Jiu-Jitsu? Hmm. Tequila? Of course. Crushed Trachea Blues is live and livid. You in?
So exotic, such a whirl of stories within stories. It's like you released a whirlwind of classical legend, biblical lore and hermetic esoterica all in one go.
Unrelated note - how did John the Baptist's head get to Boston? Is it a Kennedy thing?