Whispers From The Abyss (2 page)

Plan three is the Godzilla option, then. We optimize ruthlessness and hunger and muscle mass acquisition, implant it in one of the Korean girls (and damn, I hope those poor bitches are getting TWO extra rice bowls a day, maybe even a fucking radish or something), wait for it to chest-burst itself out like that Ridley Scott movie, and escape in the confusion. But the problem with making a monster is that you can’t turn it off when you want it to stop knocking over buildings.

So I guess it’s number four. One of us becomes… it. Whatever those things are that the
iden-inshi
came from.

4/20/13

Kiro is balking. We flipped a coin to decide who was going to be transformed, and I lost. I’d hoped I’d win and he’d honor it, but no way am I going to change into some kind of sea-monster. He can’t proceed without me.

Stalemate.

4/21/13

Kiro and I have agreed to work on the project together, on the assumption that when it’s ready, one of us will take it and help the other escape. It’s going to be him. I see those dissolving girls in my nightmares. My bruises are mostly gone, though it’s still hard to take a deep breath… they gave us a Korean doctor who said I had cracked ribs, nothing to do but wrap them. I asked for painkillers and they said I need to keep my head clear. They’ll regret that.

4/23/13

Kiro coughs up little dots of blood. My bargaining position with him just got a lot stronger.

(later)

Oh, and I should mention that we’re still inserting and implanting with the old material. It’s going great. We’re doing it one at a time, examining the subdivision to ensure that it’s as human as possible, then letting it gestate in a petri dish before implantation. Those cells still terrify me. They suck up as much agar as we can give them.

Once they’re implanted in the host mother, we no longer get to know what happens. I hope they get two bowls of rice, radishes, and a whole chicken.

5/5/13

Happy
Cinquo de Mayo
. The serum is ready. I asked Kiro if he’d heard anything about his daughter. He hadn’t. I pointed out that he’s old and I’m young. He coughed blood. He caved.

Tomorrow, I infect him. We’re going to make it look accidental.

5/6/13

Six hours after injection, and no change yet. The ‘genetic therapy’ Kiro received is
iden-inshi
with the brake-lines cut. My guess is he’ll eat everything in sight, turning it into muscle mass with the efficiency of imaginary nanites. Maybe develop gills. Maybe an embolus—he said some of the attack victims on that island showed signs of being attacked with something like a biological syringe, like those Israeli spiders that bypass the normal reproductive gear entirely by stabbing straight through the abdomens of their mates.

5/8/13

Kiro collapsed in the lab, feverish and delirious.
Mierda
.

5/9/13

They won’t say anything about Kiro.
Mierda
.

5/10/13

The chief biologists, Eun-Mi and Chung-Hee, are acting like there was never anyone named Kiro, like no one has ever been named Kiro, like
Japan is as imaginary as Narnia.
Mierda, mierda, mierda
.

5/13/13

The procedures for extracting tissue, isolating dead dictator DNA, reviving it, inserting it into ova, reviewing its subdivision and gestating it in vitro are all formalized. I’m starting to feel obsolete. I better get my game face on for those immortality treatments… or city-clearing bio-weapons.

Toilet paper. You throw it away when you’re done with it. I need them to not be done with me.

5/14/13

Kiro’s back! Says he just had a fever… he’s different though. He looks weaker, paler, puffy, but at the same time he’s moving better. Before, he was stiff and formal, an old man keeping his body together. Now he’s like an engine. I’m not the only one who’s noticed. The guards watch him all the time now.

5/16/13

Kiro’s used the code again. He just said “Soon.”

5/21/13

Dios.

I woke up to screams and tried my door and it was locked. I hammered on it and no one let me out. I heard gunfire, and something howling loud and deep and awful. One more scream. Then silence.

Then Kiro’s voice, telling me it’s all okay. But it isn’t Kiro’s voice at all, it’s his pronunciation through a bullhorn two octaves lower, thanking me and trying the door. It may take a while to find the key, he says, or should he just break it down?

I begged him to stop and he laughed. I never heard the real Kiro laugh, this was like a bass drum or a cough or a barking walrus.

“You will see,” he said, or it, the thing that used to be Kiro. “Eun-Mi will understand if she is lucky, when her child explains. OUR child.”

I asked him what he did to her and he said the dreams were full of love. That the
iden-inshi
is a love letter from something older and wiser and greater, something willing to suffer and sacrifice to make us more like it.

I asked about his daughter and he said, “I will find her and I will give her this same gift you gave me. The same prize I can give you. You will see my new self and be amazed.”

I started screaming then. He laughed along with my shrieks. Then he left to get the key. His footsteps make the floor shake.

Before he walked away though, he asked me how I would get out of a military base in the middle of
North Korea without him. What my fate would be if I was left behind, alive and pregnant with ex-Kiro’s get.

“You are a genius, for what you are. But be a genius of what you might become! Your mind has opened the door to a deeper, better world. Your children will go through it… OUR children. It is up to you whether you accompany them.”

He is back.

I hear the key in the lock.

Sikowitz lifted his head and blinked against the sweat running off his brow. The room wasn't hot; no glaring spotlight was present. Otherwise, the interrogation room resembled those from television.

"Finding death," Sikowitz answered in a voice that suggested a long night of screaming, "is never welcome."

He wanted to lie down, sleep. The detective's questions and the cramped room were making him feel dizzy, almost ill.

The lean, narrow-eyed detective sat back. A toothpick danced from one end of his mouth to the other. "Is that right? You're saying you
found
the body?"

"Yes."

"So how 'bout the blood on your hands? Was that unwelcome, too?"

"Of course. That wasn't ..."

Sikowitz couldn't finish. Not with the pain expanding in his abdomen. It came out of nowhere and made him forget the accusing stare coming from the opposite side of the table.

The detective grunted. "Wasn't what?"

Sikowitz clenched his jaw and swallowed a lump of mucus the size of a human heart. "That wasn't ... pleasant." He shut his eyes, willing the pain away.

"Uh-huh. That doesn't explain the bloody hands. But lemme guess. You were trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

Sikowitz opened his eyes, found his vision full of water, and closed them again. The pain was spreading. "No," he croaked. "Not ... back together. Back ..."

The small room filled with cries of agony. Sikowitz groaned and screamed and whimpered as his stomach revolted against the whole, seeming to double in size, testing the flexibility of soft tissue while strangling his other organs. His lungs burned. It felt like he'd pulled an Ozzy and snorted fire ants and now they were inside him, biting, gnawing,
devouring
the pinkness one infinitesimal chunk at a time.

The image of Mark's body flashed across his mind.

It was happening, he realized. What happened to Mark was happening to him. And it was coming on fast.

"Hell, Sikowitz," the detective said. "The flu act only works in movies. I wouldn't let you out of this room if--"

"Sh-Shut up," Sikowitz demanded. Things had changed. There was no time for banter. "Listen."

The detective leaned forward and raised an eyebrow. "I'm all ears, boss. Please. Tell me a story."

Eyes closed, pain cycling through his every cell in strengthening waves, Sikowitz spoke. "W-When I found Mark, he was already dead." The swelling in his stomach moved through his intestines, inflating them like party balloons. "B-But ... he was unbroken. I touched his throat to check for a pulse and felt
s-something
move. I thought he had swallowed, but there was no heartbeat. H-He was cold. Ice. And then ... things--organs, I thought--started b-bubbling out and
popping
a-and I tried to push them
back in
. I panicked. But they weren't organs, th-they lashed out at me, th-they grabbed at me, th-they--" Sikowitz screamed with his entire soul. "Oh God, my stomach," he shouted, wrenching the arm handcuffed to the table, yanking, yanking, yanking until the skin broke and blood flowed and several bones in his hand snapped and his screams redoubled as he flopped the tethered hand up and down, up and down until ...

Sikowitz dropped, his head slamming against the table.

Officers rushed into the room.

Several men touched the body before they noticed Sikowitz, though losing body heat, was shifting.

The detective watched, dumbfounded, as tendrils writhed beneath the flesh of the dead man's neck, flicking and stretching toward the opening of his ear.

A creeping terror leaked into his mind.

Not back together, the detective thought as his stomach emitted a subtle gurgle. Back in.

Published in the May, 2012 edition of Noise Line  Magazine.

Austin
Police have now confirmed that Nation Of  Disease vocalist, Krankheit (real name Darren Cross), has been charged with the brutal, on-stage, murder of band member Stahl (real name Stuart Smith) at this year’s South By Southwest Music Festival.

Canadian duo, Nation Of Disease have been steadily on the rise since the release of their debut album “Darkly Dreaming” on
Out Of Time Records
, a small European record label. At their inception the band were a three piece: Krankheit - vocals, Stahl - keys and programming and female vocalist Lorelei. Lorelei (real name Linda Lawson) who left the band after this first release, citing the age old “musical differences” as a reason. Following the departure of Lawson, the band began to tour heavily in the US, presenting a gradually darker and more intense sound and their live shows became increasingly ambitious mixed media events. A quick trawl of the many fan shot videos on Viewtube show a stark difference in style of the material from their early electro-pop sound, to the later dark, industrial sound they developed. The bands second album, “X-Instinkt,” was released by well established US Indie electro label
Broken Circuit
. With widespread distribution in North America and the increasing buzz surrounding the band, it was only a matter of time before the band began attracting much larger interest and sales.

In a recent interview, Lorelei, who these days prefers to be known as Linda, puts the bands development into perspective:

“When we started out, we were really just doing kind of gothy electro pop, sort of Depeche Mode with male and female vocals. I’d known Darren since school, we’d both been in the choir and we’d wanted to do a band for ages. Then Darren found Stuart hanging out in a record store. Stuart is one of those super talented geeks...he really knew his way around computers, synthesizers, all that stuff. We recorded all of the stuff on our first album in Stu’s apartment. He made it sound so good. We got the album out in Germany first, but it got us such a boost, to know people actually liked what we were doing. I guess copies of the album must have made it back into the US cause we started to get offers for gigs.”

Additionally she gives a sense of where things began to change:

“Outside the band though, Stuart was kind of weird, he was really into all the Aleister Crowley occult shit. I thought Darren thought it was just a bunch of crazy shit too, but the more he hung out with Stu, I guess...the more he seemed to take it seriously. Not that cheesy goth, I wanna be a vampire shtick, he was way more serious about it than that. I mean, jeez, you should have heard some of the stupid shit Stu would come up with, like how your brain is meant to react to certain sounds and frequencies. That was when he started to get really obsessed with creating sounds that he figured nobody had heard before. I think he even wrote some of his own software to convert images into sounds.

“It all just sounded stupid to me, but then they started working on the songs for the second album...I mean, I just didn’t see why it all had to be so distorted and noisy. I couldn’t really see how I was going to fit into this. I mean, I’m in it for the songs...you’ve heard stuff like “Cannibal Man” and “Extinction Process,” what could I do in those songs? Nothing.

“Plus they started talking about making the show more and more extreme. I was really into the whole cybergoth thing at the time, I loved the look and heavy music you can dance to. The guys were obviously going in a whole other direction, so I quit. Best thing I ever did really. The notoriety gets me loads of TV presenting gigs these days.”

When asked about the band’s contentious name, Lawson claims they had originally had other ideas:

“When we started the band we were gonna just be called Nationhood, but then Stu came up with the whole Nation Of Disease idea, Darren loved it. I guess I was out-voted.”

By this point, Nation Of Disease shows were now a heady mixture of art and violence that would have put the theatrics of the old guard, such as Alice Cooper, to shame. The band became dogged with censorship issues for their use of questionable content in their stage shows. Stahl’s performances routinely involved him writhing in buckets of pig’s blood and entrails, while behind him video screens beamed loops of hardcore violence, sex, and occult imagery. Again, a further trawl of Viewtube for concert footage shows audiences becoming increasingly aggressive during this period. Stage diving and fights became regular occurrences with injuries among the crowd commonplace. Attempting to draw a correlation between violent imagery and violence itself is beyond the scope of this article, but clearly as Nation Of Disease became more successful and more extreme, so did the behavior of their audience.

Several fans were arrested after a particularly brutal incident at a show in Los Angeles. Court action is still pending, the two assailants are both claiming they were influenced by Nation Of Disease’s infamous track “Cannibal Man.” It would appear that they took the chant from the song’s chorus, “Face Eater! Face Eater!” quite literally having assaulted and attempted to bite the face off their female victim, Caroline Cornishe. In light of recent events, it seems unlikely now that Nation Of Disease will be appearing in court on charges of inciting violence as had originally been suggested.

While the band’s shows had now become infamous, so was their turn over of touring crew. I spoke to several ex-members, and while no one wished to be quoted on the record, it became very clear that all was not well inside the band. The relationship between Cross and Smith seemed to be fractious at the best of times and the pressures of touring only seemed to emphasize this. One can only speculate that the inevitable intake of drugs and alcohol made the situation worse. However, I did manage to get a short phone interview with ex-crew member Phil Eastlake:

“Yeah I was front-of-house sound for Nation Of Disease for the last couple of years. I’ve toured with quite a few bands, and from a technical point of view, theirs was a pretty easy show, sound wise. The bulk of the sound was run from laptops onstage by Stu Smith, though he’d trigger some live keys and samples over the top and Darren would do live vocals. I think the guys doing the visuals had a much harder job than me, I was really only dealing with a two man band.”

I couldn’t really draw
Eastlake to comment in detail about the relationship between Cross & Smith, but he did add the following comment:

“Look, I don’t really have anything to say about the way those two were with each other. It was kind of a love/hate relationship. They knew they needed each other to make the band work. But the whole occult stuff people talk about...I swear there were times when they couldn’t make a decision without reading cards, and yeah, that stuff about scheduling shows based on the moon’s phases...Yeah that one is true. But those last run off shows, man, it was hard keeping it together onstage. Stu would kind of zone out...he’d gotten these weird-ass noises that he’d keep triggering from one of the samplers. The more he used these sounds, the more out of it he’d get. Really strange jarring dissonance. It was a real fucker to try a mix into the tracks. I asked him once how he made those sounds. Got some garbled nonsense about fractal geometry and extra-dimensional something or other...said he’d recorded something from “the outside,” yeah outside, whatever the hell that means. Maybe it’s just me, but whatever those noises were, man, they did make weird shit happen. They made the crowd get real ugly. They made Darren pretty fucked up too.”

Incidents like the previously mentioned assault at the Los Angeles gig continued to dog the band. Viewtube, again, shows just how unruly the live shows had become. A particularly unpleasant piece of footage from a gig in Portland, OR, shows Darren Cross repeatedly beating the front row of the crowd with a microphone stand before finally hurling the stage monitors at them during the climax of the performance. A bloodied and crazed Cross is seen being dragged off stage by venue security. I understand that Portland PD had been intending to prosecute Cross for assault as a result of this.

Where could Nation Of Disease go from here? Onwards and upwards.

With the increasing buzz around the band it was inevitable that a major record label would come courting. The band’s major label debut, “When The Stars Weep Blood” is set to be released next month on
Polymation Records
, despite the circumstances of Stuart Smith’s death. Having heard an advance copy of the album, I can honestly say this is one of the strangest major label releases I have heard since Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music.” Industry gossip has suggested that
Polymation Records
rejected the initial album due to its lack of coherent musical content. One can only assume that Smith’s murder has generated such a wave of publicity that holding back the album is no longer an option. Either that or they are attempting to recoup their extensive investment in the band.

While the album does contain some of the industrial dance and witch-house elements Nation Of Disease were best know for, “When The Stars Weep Blood” is dominated by pulsing, eerie half-heard radio static, and swathed in unearthly atmospheric drones. The first track, “Great White Space,” develops slowly from massive cavernous drones, while static and glitches finally build from seeming chaos into a loping beat. Distorted synths begin to build a fractured melody, until finally the guttural screaming of Cross, warped by a wall of effects, brings the track to a close. But it’s the closing fifteen minute track that is perhaps the bands greatest work, “Dreams In The Witch House.” I understand the language that forms the basis of this piece is known as Enochian, allegedly the language of angels. The piece begins with bizarre chanting, which gradually assumes a rhythmic structure. I hesitate to use the word melodic, for what appears next are string sounds twisted almost beyond recognition. Again, the vocals are morphed into an effects heavy lament as the track rises to a shrieking climax. It ends with a repeated whispered phrase, gradually fading to silence. The words sound something like: “Aklo Sabaoth” or “Act-loo Sab-bowth.” It’s not entirely clear.

There can be no disputing the facts of Nation Of Disease’s final gig at South By Southwest. Darren Cross took the life of his band mate, Stuart Smith. What was supposed to be a break through performance for the band, turned out to be their swan song. I wasn’t present at the fateful performance, but once again, an audience armed with camera phones captured the whole thing in grisly detail. Despite the best efforts of the authorities to remove the most unpleasant footage from the internet, it takes mere minutes of searching to turn up the footage in question. Audio never comes over very well in these smartphone video recordings, but what you can hear, despite the distortion, is something quite...terrifying. For once I have no real words to describe the sounds that Stuart Smith conjures from his bank of equipment. Watching the footage, one sees Darren Cross becoming increasingly disorientated, then outright hostile. At one point he can be seen dropping  the mic and falling to the floor in what appears to be genuine distress. Then, about mid performance, Cross spends several minutes in a seemingly comatose state. He stumbles around, muttering incoherently into the mic, stopping only to spit up fluid. Finally he drops to his knees and begins sobbing. The crowd cheers, thinking it all part of the show. Then, suddenly Cross lurches to his feet and attacks Smith’s bank of keyboards. He appears to be attempting to break as much of this equipment as possible. The keyboards and laptops get trashed. Oddly, Smith does not seem to mind, or even notice. That is, until Cross turns his attention to Smith with sickening results. While the footage makes it difficult to tell, police reports confirm the murder weapon was part of a microphone stand. Meanwhile multiple fights break out amongst the audience. Large sections of the crowd can be seen attacking each other with their teeth and bare hands.

When the music finally stops, Cross can be seen pounding the remains of Smith’s head with a bloody object (presumably the mic stand), shouting the words, “Make it stop!” over and over. Finally, the noise subsides. The audience seemed unsure how to react, clearly thinking this is just another part of the band’s act. Then the screaming starts.

At the time of writing this article, Cross has yet to have a court date set. Nation Of Disease’s final, horrific performance remains frozen in time, seemingly impossible to remove from the internet and the world of social media.

Addendum:
Two days prior to publication of this article the Austin Police report Darren Cross committed suicide. Although not confirmed, it is rumored that the words: “Make it stop” were scrawled in blood on Cross’ cell wall.