The Doomsday Canticle: Part I is a chapter by Jack Rusher, published here Tuesday, April 13, 2004. It is part of Stories.
A Lovecraftian horror novel in the round, written by my friends at Brokentype, FTrain, Logodrome, and myself. The succeeding chapters are located, in order, here, here, here, and here.
1. In Search of Lost Mind
His eyes scrape open like a rusty iron gate. The dark room, the stinging reek of disinfectant and the puddle of spittle beneath his face are as familiar and hard to place as an old acquaintance encountered at random in a crowded train station.
Stray memories rise to the surface of his dark, churning, liquid mind; bright bubbles that pop open, revealing minor epiphanies. He is a patient, or a prisoner, at an asylum for the criminally insane. A mustachioed Viennese doctor has infected him with malarial fever to exorcise his demons. A sinister bald doctor from Portugal awaits the opportunity to ply him with an ice pick. He knows these things are true, but he cannot remember why he is here or for how long he has languished in this cell.
Struggling against the blankness inside him, he gropes for lost knowledge, seeking the secret places that hide the reasons for his confinement. In sickness and darkness, he longs for the comforts of civilization: a cigarette, a cup of coffee, a well crafted sacrificial dagger.
The memories of his youth in Boston, his enrollment at St. Alban’s, his tenure reading classics at Yale, sculling, playing tennis, and driving too fast with too fast girls after drinking too much gin, do nothing to illuminate his present predicament. Something happened later, something terrible.
Working forward in time, he arrives at a name, Moses Wilhelm Shapira, that acts as the key to the box in which his mind has locked the truth. While studying Shapira’s famous forgeries he found something, the same thing that led Shapira himself to empty his head with a revolver in a cheap hotel room in Rotterdam forty years before.
His quest led him first to the archives of the British Museum, to study the artifacts of Shapira and the repudiations of those artifacts authored by Charles Clermont-Ganneau, and, later, to the Holy Land itself.