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From the Journal of Braddock Cranston
I tell you, it’s a damned rum business.
I’ve been saying that now for years and years, but it’s always so damned rum. Always. I wish I had another word for it but somehow “quaint,” “queer,” “bizarre,” “odd,” and “curious” are all so lacking next to the simplicity of rum.
Every time I think I’ve solved it, another door opens. Six more doors. A dozen more—and Hercules thought his hands were full with the hydra! But he’d go barmy down here, wouldn’t he, our poor Herc? It takes men of sterner stuff to make it in this place. Passing from world to world, Labour to Labour, without end, it’s not easy, you know. It’s always been less Hercules than Sisyphus down here. After all, I did once call this place “Hell,” during the time I thought I was dead and had found my eternal punishment. But that was a long time ago indeed, and I know better now. I know now there is no God or Devil, nor a Heaven or Hell for either of them.
No—this world of Tiers2 is finer than any Heaven, and worse than any Hell.
Some Tiers, though, certainly do bring Satan to mind. We all know that there are plenty of worlds contained here that must have had some hand in inspiring the horror stories of both ancient and modern Earth…
I’m starting to fear that the place I’ve just discovered is one of those very worlds.
Damn, it’s quiet here.
I don’t know if this is one of the Tiers which past explorers have previously mapped. It certainly resembles a good dozen or so of the Tiers I’ve explored, but I can sense that I at least have never been here before. So on the off-chance that I’ll be adding to the general body of knowledge, I’ll try to describe this place to the best of my abilities. The description won’t be a long one.
This Tier consists of a seemingly infinite series of darkened rooms. The rooms are like those of many other Tiers of the Exteriority,3 in that they consist of blank white walls and ceilings with pale tan or grey carpeted flooring. The rooms range in size from that of a small water closet to that of a large banquet hall. Wooden staircases can occasionally be found leading to higher or lower floors, but there is nothing to differentiate these floors from each other in any way. Some rooms have windows through which day- and moonlight flow, but the glass of these windows is too foggy and blurred to see anything through. The facing of these windows is often nonsensical, as the open space they hypothetically open into is usually occupied by another of the Tier's rooms. These rooms are usually empty but sometimes contain basic wooden furniture or other household fixtures, like showers. Curiously enough, the faint smell of gunpowder haunts each room, with the smell being stronger in the larger rooms.
I do not know of any guaranteed entrances to this Tier, but I found a doorway to it in the tavern on Tier Q5V%7. As I write this, the doorway is still open, and I can leave any time I like, though I do have a lurking feeling that deeper explorations will eventually shut this door. That, combined with the darkness, has discouraged me from going too far back.
The image above is of the front entrance.
Like I said, it’s deathly quiet in here.
The physical facts before me are few, but I’ll try to deduce a little more about this place from what I’ve observed. The darkness of the rooms creates a naturally foreboding atmosphere, which can, of course, also be found on many other Tiers of the Exteriority. I believe this Tier serves as more evidence for my theory that the Exteriority is, in a sense, will-reactive, possibly being alive and responsive to our fears. I believe that either it creates these darkened Tiers to frighten us on purpose, or that we somehow create them from within ourselves using its power.
And yet there’s more to it than that. This Tier, more than any others I’ve faced, seems to elude empirical analysis. Indeed, my emotional response to my surroundings seems to be the only tool by which I can understand them. And so I must record that I have a strange feeling of tremendous grief within these walls, almost as though this Tier serves some sort of funerary function.
That smell of gunpowder…could this be a battlefield?
It doesn’t look like a battlefield. The walls are undamaged, and there are no bodies or bones. There is nothing to indicate that anyone else has ever been here at all, much less that they’ve fought here.
But it feels like a battlefield. I am not a mental sensitive, but that pungent grief seems to permeate through every inch of this place. As if it was the site of a terrible and ultimately futile massacre.
Perhaps I’m not looking far enough. Perhaps it’s not these rooms, this endless haunted house, which is the battlefield. Perhaps the real battlefield is what is outside the various chambers.
I can’t get out there, though. These windows, bless them, are too good at their job. I cannot break them.
I’m going to take some more photographs, and then
I tell you, it’s a damned rum business.
I’ve been saying that now for years and years, but it’s always so damned rum. Always. I wish I had another word for it but somehow “queer,” “odd,” “quaint,” “bizarre,” and “weird” are all so lacking next to the simplicity of rum.
Every time I think I’ve solved it, another door opens. Another possibility, another adventure. I have a strange feeling that some sort of terrible secret is waiting for me on this Tier.
I’ve never been to this place before. Correct?
I don’t believe that anyone has ever been here before, truth be told. It’s not in my list of Tiers—Tier Q5V%7 has quite a few known exits, but this doesn’t match any of them. My list is fairly up-to-date, I like to believe, but I’m sure some of the younger folk would disagree—if nothing else because of my age. At the very least, they would surely disagree with my altering some of the names they’ve given to certain Tiers in my own personal records, in an effort to make them more a touch more sophisticated. I’ve little patience for the influence of so-called “computer culture” on the social atmosphere of the Exteriority—these children will do anything in order to stay haut ton. I can only imagine what life is like now on Earth, in its 21st Century, with a generation like this…
I joke, and I digress, but only because it’s really quite oppressive in here—the atmosphere and everything. So very dark, and quiet too. Moreso given my sureness that I am the first human being to have entered this Tier.
So far the whole place seems to consist of an unending series of plain, darkened rooms. Fairly standard tosh, as Tiers go. I’ll scout a bit, and then report back.
…I’ve been to some strange Tiers—the Thermochromic Overpaint, for instance, and Kingdom Cryptiqqa as well. But this place is much different than those. It’s all just dark rooms, like I said, but it’s got a beastly toxicity about it.
I wish I could describe it, but the grief here is so painful that I feel myself choking on it. I felt it as soon as I walked in: the darkness of this place is made of grief. It’s the sort of grief that I know can only come from one of the most awful terrors a man can face in life. Something like a murder, or a crib death, or a war…
Yes…a war…
You know, it’s not often I think upon my life as it was before I came down here, searching for Tom. Too painful, perhaps. I was never a soldier, I know that, but I did see war firsthand a few times. I saw men killed at the Boer conflicts, and I think at the time I tried to heal some of them. Perhaps once, in the old days, I was a doctor—I have been so many things now that I cannot fully remember. But I do know the howling wail of war’s grief, that’s for certain. I know what it is like to see friends and wives and children driven to weeping by the knowledge that one will not come back. I know what it’s like when a world’s heart breaks in two, and the rich life’s blood comes gushing out.
I only wish I knew what sort of war was fought here. For there must have been one.
Whatever it was, it left this place hollow—yes, hollow is the word for it. The darkness of this place isn’t simply dark, or even simply a physical extension of the great grief of this place. It’s deeper—a void within the light.
The more I ruminate on it, the more I can sense that the grief radiating through these rooms stems from the absolute emptiness of this place. It’s a sort of—a sort of pointlessness really. Like war itself.
I think I was wrong—about there being a secret here, I mean. I can see now that there is no goal to this place. None whatsoever. And that, more than the darkness, is what contrasts it so strongly with other Tiers I’ve visited.
There are certainly many Tiers in which there are no goals, no objectives, no hidden meanings. They too are pointless, from a certain point of view. There are also many which represent nothing but formless chaos. But that, too, is something. Formless chaos has substance; it is not hollow. This place is hollowness redefined.
And that hollowness is pure poison.
I wish I knew what that was called—something that is not the dark side of something, but is rather its corruption—its wasted potential—
Cancer, maybe, is a good name for it.
But it eludes names. Not unlike the Ancient Nemesis of myth, who I find myself thinking
I tell you, it’s a damned rum business.
I’ve been saying that now for over a hundred years, but it’s always so damned rum down here. Always rum. I wish I had another word for it but somehow all the synonyms for rum are so lacking next to the simplicity of the word itself.
Every time I think I’ve solved it, another door opens. Another world, another Tier—
I’ve never been here before, but it’s familiar enough. Blank white walls and ceilings, and that dreadful off-white carpeting on the floors. Endless rooms, silent and dark. Foggy windows that can’t be opened. Wooden stairs. It’s certainly all something I’ve seen before in other places.
But this place feels dourer, more funereal. It’s like it was once a temple of tremendous mourning. The weight of the place is—
Weight? What weight?
The air is suddenly so heavy. I feel so tired, like I’ve been walking many miles.
This is odd. I haven’t felt like this since—
Oh dear. This takes me back.
It takes me all the way back to when I first entered the Exteriority. Back in ‘08. Those were the mad old days—I was only fifty then. I went to that old house, the house in Ireland—the house where the witches had once dwelled and danced and weaved their fell magicks—the house described in that book. The author, bless him, tried to hide the location, tried to say it had been destroyed, but I found it, and I found too that it still stood. It was still waiting for someone to come along and take full advantage of it—to lean on its softness until they crossed through into here—
I have been told 116 years have passed since I gave myself over to that insanity, and performed the rituals in that house. I only hope people know that I did not do what I did for any sinful or selfish reason. I came here to search for Tom—my friend, Tom Goodyear, who upon being spurned by a Spanish soprano back on Earth told me he wanted to run away from the world.4 He succeeded, damn him—he ran right out of our dingy old Earth…
And I pursued him. I entered on the ground floor, like everyone else does. And I got to looking.
And I’ve been looking for over a century—
Tom would be dead by now, normally, but I know he found Tier F.o.Y., as I did. It’s a great secret, the Tier with the Fountain of Youth, but it appears to those in need from time to time. I remember now the glittering, sparkling pastel pink air and the fresh crisp taste of the water. I remember that as I drank at the base of the great Fountain I saw something in the rippling pool, and found upon a closer look that it was Tom’s shoes…
He, too, had gained eternal life. He, too, would have died long ago were it not for those celestial waters.
This place, this darkness, makes me think of Tier F.o.Y. It is divine in some way.
No. Not divine—profane. Deeply and richly profane. How could I confuse the two?
I suppose the radiant skin of the former often conceals the rotten flesh of the latter.
I must search deeper. Perhaps the great secret I sense is that this place has become Tom's
I tell you, it’s a damned rum business.
[At this point, many of Cranston’s entries open with some variant of the first lines of his first entry. For the sake of avoiding repetition these variants will not be included going forward.]
…The darkness is one thing, but I really wish I knew what sort of War took place here. It had to have been a War, yes?
Only a War could have been so terrible and wretched as to stain the walls themselves with agony.
The dread here is like none I’ve known before. It gives one a headache—
I remember now—a moment from my life on Earth. The pain and the dread remind me.
[Here Cranston repeats the same paragraph he wrote two entries ago about the First Boer War. The only variation is that he mentions he was at the Battle of Majuba Hill, the final and most deadly battle of the War.]
The memory’s like a revenant, I tell you, hanging over the soul. That same spirit haunts these damnably blank walls.
Why do I feel as if I am haunted? That I am the curse here—
It all fits into my theory that the Exteriority is in fact alive, and preys upon our fears. Why else are there so many floors like this one, where darkness and other primal terrors reign over all? It’s simply too much like Earth for it to be anything other than a product of the forces within our minds.
It’s like something out of the old legends, of which I heard too much back on Earth. I became a student of myth when I set out on the path of the occult, and some of those stories still haunt me to this day. For instance, I once heard tell in my research of the so-called Ancient Nemesis, whose name is the summary of the whole of what we know about it. In essence this Nemesis exists solely to be the opponent of that which opposes the Nemesis. It is the ultimate foe, the never-dying adversary. Some have attempted to give the Nemesis a shape, but these descriptions are often inadequate, for the Nemesis is less a real entity than it is an ideal. Nevertheless, some of these guesses may accurately describe forms that the Nemesis has taken. He, or it, or they could have very well been the Devil and other Adversarial figures, or the inspiration for such. Whatever form Ultimate Evil takes, that is the Nemesis. And to call upon it, to invoke it even unconsciously, is to know disaster.
Humanity’s role in the struggle against the Nemesis is vague at best. There appears to be a tier of beings above humanity who oppose it, fighting the majority of the battle. One might be inclined, given the apparent Darkness of the Nemesis, to view these beings as Angels, avatars of cosmic good, but they are said to be every bit as dreadful as those they fight against. They play Great Games with the four dimensions, and with human souls. They step into the dreams of mortals and transform them into their toy soldiers…
All just legends of course—rum rot, and poppycock too. But they seem to have a certain weight.
Consider: what if this place is, in many ways, the center of the conflict? The war?
A cosmic storm that could end up touching every corner of the
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…I don’t understand.
I’m back at the entrance, or what should be the entrance. The stairs are here, but…
But there is no door back into the tavern.
It is as I feared. Exploring this place deeply has closed the one door in and out.
Oh, Tom—I am so sorry. I have not been wise.
At the very least, I have likely lost a great deal of time in my search for you. After all, I shall not die. Not of old age, at any rate. But I could still be trapped for a very long time. Centuries, or millennia. Will you still remember me then?
That we measure our lives in millennia now shows me that corruption is not limited to this place. Eternal life is a blessing, one might think. But to never die is to cease to be human. For death is an essential part of us—it completes our lives. It’s painful, true—but what’s a little sting next to the greater horror of no longer recognizing yourself?
I can’t think that way. I have been trapped before, sometimes for decades at a time. Sometimes I have dwelled on timeless Tiers for many eons before I found my way out, exiting in the same moment in which I entered. Every time I have not lost sight of my goal. I will find you, Tom.
I glanced up for a moment, just now, and there is a book on the floor that was not there before.
Has it begun? Has this Tier started playing tricks on me, as others have before?
I will record what I find within the book, provided it doesn’t kill me or drive me mad to read it.
…oh god
it opens:
“I tell you, it’s a damned rum business..."
…I’m not one to believe in such a binary equation as concept and anti-concept. Too limiting, too black and white. This place has taught me that about the truth of infinity. We of my time were too confident that there was the White of God and the Black of the Devil, and that was infinity. But no. Infinity is all the colors of the rainbow, and all the rainbows that bridge the colors between—and all the rainbows between those, and between those—forever and ever on, until you reach colors that men cannot see or feel or think of, and still it keeps on going. Ejected beyond reality, beyond substance, we find ourselves touching infinity, and our feeble forms cannot take it all in. And so we divide it into planes and rooms and Tiers. We experience infinity only in segments. And so this place is a subjectivity—subject to perception…
But even subjective rainbows have their poles at their far ends, and those poles oppose each other simply by standing opposite each other. Not every axis forms a self-canceling duality, but a great many do when it comes to the matter of good and evil. Those two smother each other, drown each other out, and yet in my experience within this place the latter most often wins out over the former…
If this place is infinity, cut up into segments, then surely there must be within it an anti-infinity? Other rooms, other Tiers, but…opposite?
What if that opposite could think? What if it was as alive as any of the other genius loci in this place?
And what if that life was in fact an aspect of the Ancient Nemesis? And I was standing at the front lines of their
I am losing myself to the grief.
I must fight while I still have a chance. But this is War, and War itself cannot be fought.
This place was waiting for me before I even knew it existed. It has been part of my life for a very long time.
It must have sniffed out my immortal blood, back when I first became eternal; I cannot imagine the sort of thirst that must have given it. After all, it was substance this hollowness always craved. And all Wars are merely calls for blood at the end of the day. Wars are hungry by nature.
Its timelessness is my fault—because it fed on me. Because I bathed in the Fountain.
And because…
Oh Lord. I have seen so much blood spilled. There was the Hill, of course, but the Exteriority too has shown me death so many times. I was not always a self-made loner, an oddball from another era who could never fit in. I had friends, and I lost them when the monsters came. I buried their names, but I recall them now—Calvin. Veronica. Ali. And I saw strangers die, too, more strangers than I can count…
All dead. All gone forever.
And of course, I have lost Tom.
Oh, Tom. When I think of him, I lose control, I start to
to Spiral.
Could I really be so foolish to think that he could still be alive?
Even if he bathed in the Fountain, he was a spoiled writer who had never fought a day in his life. He was probably devoured by some nameless such-and-such shortly after he gained eternal youth.
But I made it. That’s something. He could yet live.
If he does, though, there's still the great chance he's forgotten me. The memory does not live as long as the body. And this place would have given him plenty to forget me by…
How foolish of me to waste tears on one who never cared for me as I did him. He had his Spanish soprano, after all. I was just a peer, an acquaintance. Besides, ours was not a love that could exist in our time.
I had hoped that maybe this place was a second chance for us. Here, there are no laws to bind and punish the innocent. There’s no one telling anyone who they can’t fall in love with.
But this place is still a prison.
I am Spiraling…
I am sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire of a doomed love that has rotted and stagnated inside me for over a century.
Why were we damned, you and I?
Now look at us. We have become the puppets of monsters.
The Spiral our love has spun is now the heart of their War. And their entrance—
I am Spiraling
More blood will be spilled. More deaths will come…
Even now, the emptiness is working its way through the whole of the Exteriority, hollowing it out Tier by Tier. Corrupting each of them. Making them pointless.
The people who dwell there are suffering beyond any imagining. The grief is eating them too. Their tears are pooling in the fountain of corruption.
I am changing becoming wallsceilingswindowsfloorsstairs
Spiraling
The hollowed remember all those they have lost. And those who dwell here have lost so very much.
There is no resisting it. This is the Dawn of the Anti-Ex
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—
At the heart of the Shadow Spiral, a forever-young man, barefooted, tends to a lonely grave.
He has not forgotten the one interred there.
Some blame the man for what he became, but Tom Goodyear does not.
He lays a wreath on the grave, and kisses the cold stone.
And even in the heart of darkness, there is a little light.
BRADDOCK CRANSTON
1858 - 2024