It was 2014. I was a freshman in college, and fresh out of luck. I had applied to this university (which shall remain nameless) because I wanted to study anthropology, and this place had an affordable program for the area. But the same semester I started attending, the college went into dire financial straits.
The president of the college, and every single member of the board of trustees, had misappropriated so much money that the list of majors that were cut in my two years attending this university, and the majors that remained, were equal in size. Anthropology and related fields, such as archeology, were among the first on the chopping block. But I wasn’t expected to immediately choose a major to go into, which meant I had time for backup options.
Most students would drown their existential dread in a can of Bud Light, but I was neither old enough to drink, nor well-connected enough to get convincing fake IDs. So I tried joining various clubs; the gaming society was insular, full of Magic: the Gathering players who likely took out small loans to afford their decks and D&D cliques who locked themselves in rooms in order to play campaigns that had been going on since long before I had begun attending this school. Two different book clubs sneered at me when I told them I preferred Dickens to Rowling, and I was barred from the culinary club after my experiments with oregano caused a small fire.
But, after almost two months of misery, I found somewhere I belonged. Along with anthropology, the university’s film school had been one of the first cuts made when financial issues started. However, because of a clause in his employment contract, the dean of the film school was kicked upstairs into an admin position among the College of Fine Arts; let’s call him Dr. Whaley. He had gotten the greenlight for a “film appreciation society”, with the caveat that he would not be paid to run it. I learned all this from the first session I attended.
There, he told all assembled something I’ll never forget: “The only person who should have a say about whether or not a film, or any piece of media, is valuable, isn’t a decrepit body of zombies calling themselves an academy, or a washed-up twenty-something who thinks that ‘being loud’ and ‘having a valid point’ are the same thing, or a member of academia who insists that film started going downhill with the invention of the talkie. You, and you alone, can decide what makes a film valuable to you.”
Over the rest of the semester, we watched several seminal works of cinema, ranging from Citizen Kane to A Clockwork Orange to several films by Hitchcock, but also more modern classics like Nolan’s The Dark Knight or How To Train Your Dragon. Dr. Whaley wanted us to appreciate all forms of cinema, and also point out that the sacred cows sometimes deserved to be slaughtered; we spent most of October discussing how poorly Gone With the Wind had aged, for instance.
By the start of the spring semester, I had been made the treasurer. We only had a few people in the club, other than myself and Dr. Whaley. There was Sidney, a senior who had taken film studies as an elective before the program got cut, and was staying to finish out a math major, who acted as vice-president. Tyler was a fellow freshman who was in the same boat as me, having chosen a literary studies major since the archeology major was now dead and buried. And then we had Quentin.
Quentin kept to himself; we all assumed he was a science student, maybe a psych major, because of the way he dissected the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange. I took a psych class, but never ran into him; at the time, I assumed he was just in a more advanced class than I was. He looked old enough to be a grad student, but Dr. Whaley seemed okay with him.
In the middle of the spring semester, Quentin told us he had a film project he wanted to share, which surprised all of us. Sid asked, “What part of being a psych major involves you making a film?”
Quentin had an explanation ready. “I’m taking a poetry class, and we’re gearing up for the final project, which is writing and recording a poem in video form. They have cameras you can borrow from the library; it’s pretty funny. I think you’ll like it.”
Dr. Whaley was willing to support his students (that’s what he called us, despite it not being official by any stretch of the imagination) and invited Quentin to share his project with us at the next meeting.
March 15th came, and with it, Quentin’s presentation. We all met in the usual classroom on the third floor of a building in the Quad, as Quentin fiddled with the projector. He had his project saved on a bright purple USB stick that had the branding of some marketing firm on it. The file he played was titled “Gravy.mov”. “This isn’t a solo venture,” he explained. “A friend did the puppetry in it. I just provided the voiceover.”
The film opened on a shot of a BLT, held like a hand puppet, with a pair of olives atop toothpicks acting as eyes. As the hand manipulated the sandwich in sync with the poem being recited, its contents fell out onto the ground. The voice narrating was definitely Quentin’s, but put through some kind of filter. I still remember how the poem went:
“Gravid, by Quentin N.
“Something new grows inside her,
A lemming, a lemur, maybe a spider.
It writhes beneath the dermis thin,
Threatens to pierce her virgin skin.
She screams and writhes and shakes,
Praying that soon, her water breaks,
And the thing within her aching womb
Finds itself in her father's tomb.”
While we laughed at the absurdity of the sandwich puppet, Dr. Whaley turned pale and ducked out of the room, saying he needed to make a phone call. Quentin followed him out right as the second stanza started.
The hand stopped ‘speaking’ and the person who owned it asked, “We good, dude?” And then, a sledgehammer slammed down and crushed the hand. The audio track froze on the tone the hand’s owner made, a crescendo in the background, as Quentin’s voice picked back up. The video kept playing, however, as the hand was beat to a pile of gristle and bones.
“It will be born some time anon,
Eating the Whore of Babylon.
From its maw, it utters a cry,
That will dry the sea and rot the sky
Mother writhes and mother screams,
Mother sees the child in her dreams.”
Sidney started crying from the shock, turning away from the screen. “Quentin, what the fuck?!” she yelled. Tyler and I turned just in time to see him doing something to the door from outside. He looked at me with a vacant expression on his face, nodded, and then left. Tyler tried to open the door, but Quentin had jammed the handle with something, and he wasn’t strong enough to break the glass on the window to the outside.
I barely noticed at the time; I was glued to the screen. My mind was filled with equal parts fascination and disgust, pity and curiosity, as if I was watching a surgery where the patient is awake and screaming because the anesthetic didn’t take, but the doctor insists on going in order to save the patient’s life. Then, when the third stanza started, the broken hand… changed.
Lumps of flesh and bits of bone recombined into something that looked like a cross between a human mouth and a lamprey’s sucker. It started to devour the remains of the sandwich as Quentin’s voice spoke.
“It shall be cesarean,
And then the child will be born again.
Polka-dots dance across her vision,
As the doctor makes the first incision.
Blood flows from unsullied skin,
As the wet nurse is pulled in.
Gravid, Gravid, Gravity,
Kill the sky and drain the sea.
The child is born, the world is lost
Within a hellish Pentecost,
Child eats mother, sister eats brother,
And the whole world shall be--”
Some base part of me knew that if the poem was finished, then so were we. The sucker-mouth seemed to be attempting to escape the projector’s screen, a bulge forming in the center, trying to make itself three-dimensional. With Tyler trying the door and Sidney still in shock, I went to the computer that the film was playing on and yanked out every cable I could find. The fourth or fifth one ended up being the power cord for the computer, and with that, the poem came to an abrupt halt, the screen displaying a “No Signal” error.
Dr. Whaley came back a couple of minutes later, wearing a pair of sunglasses with red X’s over the lenses and a respirator over his mouth. Even through the face coverings, I could tell he didn’t expect any of us to be alive when he returned. “Where is it?” He asked. “The— the poem, do you have it?”
I unplugged the flash drive Quentin had plugged into the computer. Dr. Whaley placed it in a small metal pouch and closed it like a ziploc bag. There was a soft screech from the projector’s screen, and after that, the strange energy that pervaded the room seemed to simply demanifest.
The club disbanded after that. I saw Sidney in the dining hall a couple of more times, but I never heard from Tyler again.
Dr. Whaley met with me about a week before the semester ended. His office was on the topmost floor of the college’s admin building, and you could see all the way to the county line from the windows. It was decorated with awards that his students had won over the years, signed photographs from actors and directors, and a genuine Emmy award— when I asked about it, he explained that it was from a TV show he worked on in the 90’s. For his privacy, I won’t say which one.
Then we got to talking. He told me that he had offered Tyler a letter of recommendation to anywhere in the country (He had decided to transfer, I don’t blame him) and had told Sidney he would always be a positive reference for her. He offered to do the same for me, but instead, I asked him to explain himself.
“What do you mean?” He wanted to play ignorant, but I wasn’t going to let him.
“That… film Quentin showed us. It was doing something that I don’t think a normal film can do. Like, nobody’s ever died because an alien in a Marvel film has come off the screen and vaporized them. But I feel like that almost happened that night.”
Dr. Whaley sighed. “There was a short-lived movement of surrealist poets based out of San Francisco during the 1930s. Among their number was a man named Quentin Naismith. His works are… detrimental to reality as we know it.”
“Detrimental to reality?” I looked at him like he had just said something in Martian. “How can a poem be detrimental to reality?”
“By itself, it’s not. But if it’s recited, performed, or recorded, then the words that make up the poem open up holes in reality. Holes that can let something… else through.” He chewed his lip. “You’re from Wisconsin, yeah?”
“Yeah…”
“You ever hear of the Milwaukee Explosion? 1996, entire apartment building and about three blocks surrounding are flattened by a gas explosion.”
“My dad’s a firefighter,” I nodded. “He made us buy an electric stove the instant they became available because of that explosion. Are you saying—”
“We think it was caused by someone playing a cassette tape containing a recording of another Naismith poem, Flagrante. But that’s small potatoes compared to Gravid— the infestation would have killed half the campus.”
“Just because a video was played?”
“The student— that is, the person calling himself Quentin, whatever he was— needed a medium to transmit it. The moving image is one of the more powerful mediums for proliferating an anomaly like that. If it was to more than the three of you, it could have wiped out the county.”
“You act like there’s… more of these. Like you’ve dealt with this stuff before.”
“In film alone, there are hundreds.” Dr. Whaley pulled open a drawer from his desk, and produced a folder that was at least three inches thick. “This contains everything we know about a silent film called The Concordance. Then you have The Maddening Quiet, and home movies like the Garrison Footage, the Kilauea Tape… that’s just in film. Literary works might have millions of possible incursions, thanks to how unregulated self-publishing is.”
I looked at Dr. Whaley, and then at the folder on the desk. “You’ve got to be pulling my leg.”
“I’m afraid I’m not. A lot of people would be alive right now if I was.” He sighed. “So, you have your answer. But… Tristan, why do you want to know?”
“A poem nearly killed a thousand people just by being read? Of course I want to know about it. Why would someone write something like that? Who was it made for? How was it discovered?” I looked at him. “I want to be able to study stuff like this. There’s a college in Ohio that’s supposed to have a decent film school.”
“You’re signing yourself up for a world of hurt, Tristan.” Dr. Whaley sighed. “People smarter and more experienced than you have died or worse trying to study this stuff.” He got out a pen and paper. “I’ll write the letter of recommendation. If you think you’re still up for it in another three years… I’ll come find you.”
“How will you know?”
Dr. Whaley just gave me a grim smile. “Now, what’s the name of this school?”
I ended up doing my bachelor’s thesis on the impact that The Concordance had on early cinema; because of it, the infamous Hays Code had to have a stipulation in it saying that the depiction of ‘occult practices’ for ‘heroic means’ was forbidden. I think that’s what Dr. Whaley meant by the fact that he would know. And sure enough, about a month after I graduated, he ended up reaching out to me. We met up in a shitty little bar in my hometown in northern Wisconsin, and he started explaining how his world worked.
“It doesn’t have any official backing,” he explained. “We’re not a government entity by any stretch of the imagination; if governments do care about this type of thing, it’s probably a military project. Propaganda being able to kill dissenters, hypnotic billboards ads, that kind of thing. It doesn’t pay well, and it’s dangerous.”
“Do you run it?”
“No,” Dr. Whaley laughed. “God no. I don’t know who does; we operate independently, but we all report back to one person calling himself Zenodotus. He thinks he’s being cute.”
“I… is that a reference to something?”
“You’ll get it if you study some of the older stuff,” Dr. Whaley assured me. “I’m only going to be in town for the rest of the day— if you’re serious about helping us out, then I’m here to recruit you. If not, I’m here to dissuade you.”
“Recruit me? For what?”
“Something happened a week ago, in Fargo. We think somebody played a fragment of one of the Posthumous Symphonies. Care to come along?”
After I had one of the worst beers in my life, I decided I was game. I haven’t looked back since.
Nice to see this come back :D