Table of Contents

Compendium Obscurata

1. The Empire Never Ended

2. The Immortal Science of Murder

About the Author

1. The Empire Never Ended

This is the story of a murder -- and I, the unfortunate author, am the murderer.

When I was young, I had a recurring dream in which I sat on a dirty wooden floor between towering, canyon-like shelves and leafed through stacks and stacks of old, dusty books, looking for something; but I didn’t know what it was. Floorboards creaked under the feet of unseen customers elsewhere in the labythinthine space while ancient particles of dust, illuminated geometrically by edges of light from the little windows, outlined eddies and currents in the musty air. It could have been the archetypal bookshop of eternity, present to my sleeping mind through some ethereal Platonic quirk.

These dreams occurred on seven consecutive nights and they lasted, subjectively, hours and hours. My eyes would float across the page, seeing but not understanding, until suddenly, finally, I would come to the word 'cloud', and my gaze would stick fast to it.

At that moment I would feel a sensation all over my body of such coldness and wetness that it was as though I had been drenched under a heavy rain. After this I would wake up, eyes wide in the darkness, my pounding young heart working its way through an adult-sized dose of adrenaline.

Soon after those dreams, I began keeping a journal. In all my reading, no matter what the genre, whenever I come upon the word 'cloud' in a book, I copy the citation down. At those moments I can feel a palpable chill at the mere sight of the word and I remember the dream of my childhood, and I am helpless in the grip of the clouds.

2. The Immortal Science of Murder

All I could see outside were shades of white and gray. Nothing was visible except for clouds. The ground was gone. The other buildings normally observable from my window were gone. The trees were gone. The sky didn’t seem to be gone, since I could see it in brief glimpses if I looked straight up.

The clouds appeared to be mostly cumulus, the fluffy type of clouds that scurry across the sky on a fair weather day like cartoon sheep. It was as though my building had been lifted into the atmosphere and set down level with the tops of a complex of well-developed cumulonimbi on a stormy day, when on the ground below all is downpour.

I opened the window, but had to destroy the window-screen2 with my pocketknife before I could stick my head out and look around. A light breeze touched my cheek, and the clouds moved past in gigantic, serene labyrinths.

One was just below my window, and I reached down to touch it. It was wet and cold, and surprisingly firm. I would have rated its firmness at somewhere between a mattress and a loaf of bread. I wondered if it would hold my weight. When I put my head back inside, the stale, slovenly stink of my room was revealed by its contrast to the delicious, clean smell of the outer air.

Thinking scientifically, I first scooped up some of the cloud into my water bottle and closed the lid. I wondered if it would need to be refrigerated in order to last long enough to be studied later, possibly under a microscope, or, if the university would allow it, in the chemistry department’s GC-MS.

I held my computer mouse by the cable and dangled it over the edge of the sill. The mouse sank in a little ways, but didn’t fall through. Same with my keyboard, then my table lamp, and finally my chair. The chair fell over, but stayed up.

It proved quite difficult to get the chair back into my room through the window. Eventually I had to climb out and shove it through from the other side. I wished I had put on my boots first, because my socks were soaked through immediately.

A purer fear expression I have seldom seen, even in example diagrams. With some difficulty I removed the sock from his mouth.

“Shhh,” I said. I examined the blood- and saliva-laden sock. It was one of mine. “What are you doing out here with my sock in your mouth?” I asked. “Don’t answer that!” I held up the knife.

He looked from my face to the knife and back, and nodded.

“Well, it looks like somebody has got you all set up for something nasty out here, doesn’t it? You’re helpless.”

Meaning curled out around us like flower petals in the morning.

“Hey! I just thought of something. Pursuant to our discussion not yesterday but a few days ago. There actually is an experiment that you can do to determine whether God exists. See, if God exists, then the soul probably exists. And if the soul exists, it’s definitely immortal, or else it wouldn’t be a soul, just another type of body. And if there’s an immortal soul, and if the evidence of the many religions of the world is to be believed, then after death the soul leaves the body and has, eventually, some sort of contact with God, for good or for ill.”

He started shaking his head, first just a little, then more and more, faster and faster, moaning and weeping.

“What do you think?” I asked him. “Go ahead and answer.”

“No,” he said, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. “No, no, don’t do it, man. You don’t want to do this. Please. You and me are cool. We’re cool. We’re friends. You don’t need to do this, man, I know maybe you feel a little crazy, it’s okay, it’s okay, we can get you help, there are doctors, psychologists, they can help you, man. Just please, don’t do this.”

I raised the knife. “I was asking you about God.”

“Sure, yeah, God, I mean, what do you want me to do? I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t do this.”

“Just answer me honestly. That’s what I want. It should be easy. Just look inside yourself, find the true expression of the true state of your inner being, and tell it to me. Do you believe in God? Would you like to try an experiment that will settle it one way or the other?”

“Oh, sure, yeah I believe in God. There’s no need to try the experiment, man, I was just faking the atheism thing. This is college, it was just my pride, I was just trying to look cool, you know, progressive, of course I believe in God.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“I believe in God,” he said, then started crying. “I believe in God, I believe in God, I believe in God!”

But he was lying, and I could see it in his face, so I cut out his lying heart, and a few of the more honest muscles in his face, thinking I might find a use for them later. I had to disassemble the face down to the skull in some places to get at what I needed. However, it was not his facial muscles for which I found a use, but his blood. As it flowed down his twitching body and began to splash and drip onto the grass, I noticed the thick mist at his feet grow patchy, then threadbare. In a moment, it had vanished, and a widening pool of clear, transparent air began to spread out around us.

I held cupped hands to his neck, gathering blood until it ran down into my sleeves, then throwing it into the air all around me. The clouds melted away like dry ice in boiling water.

Then I left and walked through the woods down to the beach. It was a fine, clear day, and I swam in my clothes out past the breakers, where I treaded water for a while, then took off most of what I had been wearing and let it fall down into the deeps. I let the pocketknife go, too, and the little pieces of muscle and bone, and wished there had been any way to keep a little of his blood.

I floated for a while in the loving, life-giving ocean, then swam back to the beach, found where I had left my car, put on my spare clothes, and drove back to school.

to be continued...