Burnt Offering
by Marc Lowe
“Oh, I have a horror of what was created in my own brain, and shudder at the manuscripts in which I gave that dark idea a sort of material existence! Would they were out of my sight!”
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Devil in Manuscript” (1835)
It has been nine painful years since I began writing the manuscript that would evolve into the 1,123-page-long A Devil in My Head. I have not shown so much as a single sentence of it to anyone, nor do I plan to. Let me explain.
People often ask why I write if I don’t intend to share my work with the public. The answer is quite simple—I write because I have to. During those periods of time before I had engaged in the act, I was plagued by the worst nightmares, nightmares that woke me in the dead of night, terrified. Creatures seemingly plucked from a Hieronymus Bosch painting or an H.P. Lovecraft tale visited me nightly, filling me with such constant terror that, at one point, I nearly checked myself into an insane asylum. Every night my body was torn to shreds and devoured by these non-human creatures; I was constantly tired, constantly on edge, and my limbs would burn afterwards with tremendous pain. I stopped trusting the people around me, certain that any one of them might have a beast dwelling within, waiting to spring forth into waking reality at any moment.
The most frightening of the night terrors—a beast so horrible I shudder to recall its form!—once made to tear off my very head. I remember this particular dream well because it was the catalyst that prompted me to start writing in my mid-twenties (and because there was later a repetition of it—see paragraph five, below). The uncanny beast—which had a large, elephantine head with many smaller heads growing out from the crown of its own—came to me when I was in a state half between sleep and waking. Its face and body were red, as I imagine Lucifer to be, and it was holding, in its right hand, an arrow-tipped staff, and in its left, a stack of blood-flecked papers. It shook the papers at me with one fisted hand while, with the other, it swung the staff very close to my neck—so close that it eventually drew blood, which dripped down my neck and onto my shirt. In a deep and gravelly voice, one nearly harsh enough to make me seriously ill, the beast said something in a language that I could not comprehend; but somehow, through its gestures and the stack of papers it was holding, I snapped out of my trance and came to understand that now, to save my very life, I would need to write. Upon waking, I found there was a fresh cut across my neck.
Yes, my writing would serve as my offering, in exchange for the head that rests upon these shoulders! Apparently I’d drawn the proper conclusion, for as soon as I had finished drafting my first complete short story (“A Blood-Red Orange Rind”) the nightmares immediately stopped. It was as though I were pouring the horrors that haunted my dreams directly out of my head and onto the pages. Surprisingly, I found writing these stories to come naturally, though I’d hardly done any such writing previously. I began to think that perhaps I had inadvertently signed some sort of Faustian pact with the beast in exchange for the uncanny ability to produce tall tales. When I wrote, I could practically feel the beast’s eyes watching over my shoulder, feel its hands guiding my own as it grasped and guided the pen. I continued to write daily, and things continued to improve over the course of that year. For instance, I now slept like a baby and felt well-rested in the morning. After writing for thirteen months I had produced a stack like the one I had seen the beast holding; though no living creature, save myself, had ever read it. Did the beast, I began to wonder, come at night during my peaceful slumber and read through the stack, sheet by sheet, until the sun came up? I imagined it did, and this thought both delighted and terrified me.
Soon after the thirteenth month I became overwhelmed with other responsibilities and suddenly stopped writing. Three days later, however, I found that the nightmares had returned. The beast with the elephantine head reappeared to me and spoke its cryptic language; it was then I realized that if I didn’t start writing my first novel immediately, it would have my head as a trophy. Again, it swung its staff until my neck bled, and again when I woke there was a gash where I’d expected one to be. Further, the stack of papers I had written was gone—they’d completely vanished from my study. Had the beast been holding them in the dream? And were they now stained with flecks of my blood?
I began drafting A Devil in My Head on September 9th of my twenty-seventh year. The novel, ostensibly a fantasy about an adolescent boy named Christof, I soon came to see was not a novel about someone else; it was, rather, about me. What, though, possessed me to write such an autobiography? During this period I did not once sense the beast’s eyes upon my stack of paper, did not once feel its bony hand upon my own. It had been as though I were the one writing the work by myself. And, although the nightmares did in fact stop, I found I was unable to sleep at night (while, during the day, I was always tired and on edge). What could be the cause of this restlessness, if not the nightmares? The answer hit me one day when I was working on my 193rd page—the book. It was the book. This thing was driving me mad! Moreover, I came to realize, I was drafting it not for—or not only for—the beast, but for myself. This was the first time I’d felt such deep contradictory feelings about anything so close to me, and it filled me with both hope and despair. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time; I was elated, but also completely and utterly crushed.
Since then I have written an additional 930 pages of the manuscript entitled A Devil in My Head. These pages, I must say, have come at a great cost; for the beast, I’ve realized, has had absolutely nothing to do with this work. Nothing at all. I do not sense it anywhere near me, do not believe that it reads the stack of papers at night when I am asleep, do not imagine that, if I stopped writing, it would lop off my head and disappear with it. There was a brief time when I stopped—that is, I stopped working on the MS completely, because I felt that if I had continued, I would end up taking my own life… And yet, the beast did not return to taunt me. Instead, it was the manuscript that taunted me! It wouldn’t let me stop composing; the text continued to develop, only now it happened solely in my head! It was as though I were writing down those words on paper, though no ink was spilt. And, when I picked up the pen again, things resumed as though no time at all had passed—all of the sequences I’d created in my mind were right there at my fingertips, all of the words and phrases already fully formed. But how—if not via a pact with that Luciferian monster—could this be?
To those who are reading this—all I can tell you is that the novel I have completed today is unholy. I am neither a religious man nor a superstitious one, and yet I am certain that I must burn this thing; for unless I do, I fear it will destroy me completely. I stated previously that I have not shown a single line of the manuscript to anyone else; and now you must surely understand why. Indeed, to share the horror that is A Devil in My Head with another human being would be to do no less than cause myself immeasurable suffering. And so, I hereby commit my writing—all 1,123 pages of it—to the flames. Requiem æternam dona eis…
And now, the pages have been set ablaze.
And now, I calmly watch them burn.
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And now, my words are no more than a pile of ashes.
Signed this 9th day of September, 19—,
Carl J. Madsen
***
The window of the study has been left ajar. When the detectives arrive they will find a pen, a book of unused matches, and an untitled 1,123-page-long manuscript by Anonymous, spattered with flecks of bright red blood.
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About the Author
Marc Lowe is a writer living in southern Japan. He is the author of a chapbook and an e-book, both from ISMs Press, and he recently guest-edited the Sur-noir issue of Sein und Werden. Please visit him on the web at http://marclowefictions.wordpress.com.
“Burnt Offering” © 2012 Marc Lowe
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