Seraphs sob at vermin fangs with [vermin] gore imbued

"When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys."

 

Edgar Allan Poe - The Masque of the Red Death

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"I could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me by monkish ingenuity in torture. [...] It was hope that prompted the nerve to quiver -- the frame to shrink. It was hope -- the hope that triumphs on the rack -- that whispers to the death-condemned even in the dungeons of the Inquisition. [...] There could be no doubt of the design of my tormentors -- oh! most unrelenting! oh! most demoniac of men!"

 

Edgar Allan Poe - The Pit and the Pendulum

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It's Halloween, a night to shudder behind one's mask at the shadows dancing beyond the lights of civilization, to thrill at grotesque malformations lurching from house to house demanding plunder. Ah but this year the byways are silent, the porches unlit, the rustle of bedsheet spectres nowhere to be heard. A more tenebrous wraith stalks the border between life and death, the first of what will likely be many pandemics as the human population grows both larger and less stable, swarming mindlessly, ravenously, noxiously over the face of an overheating, defoliated, polluted globe. Poe's Masque of the Red Death prods insistently at our attention as we stumble from room to room in social isolation, our diseased ape minds cloaked in pretense and bravado to ward off the invisible touch of bodily decomposition. You will die. Dare ask the why? In response I would point you rather to The Pit and the Pendulum, remarkable for some of Poe's most visceral imagery while uncharacteristically eschewing the supernatural tinge of his other famous works. From start to finish it reminds its readers that all the narrator's torments are conceived and put into action (at great cost) by human superstition, human viciousness, human sadism and bloodthirst - then, even his deliverance, the deus ex machina in the form of a French revolutionary takeover of Catholic excess, serves only to remind us of the story's opening quote condemning the Jacobins.

It's Halloween, a night to shudder behind one's face mask at the shadows of duplicitous gods, mad tulpas dancing against the dimly lit walls of our caves. Tremble in fear at the latest Chinese plague inflicted on the world, then remember the barely contained "antivaxer" measles epidemics across the U.S. in which the Amish, fundamentalist Jews and California yuppies have all been doing their best to outdo the Chinese as plague rats. We move closer to dictatorship with every election, closer to theocracy with every panic prompting imbeciles to retrench in primitive superstitions, closer to mob rule with every cry of "defund the police", closer to feudalism every time landlords brand their serfs. Humanity has a death wish. Maybe it's time to give in to the imp of the perverse and just let them go through with it? Being alive now feels more and more like Poe's victim of the Inquisition, lashed down in the dark, feeling the innumerable gnawing vermin, insatiable, insalubrious, swarming over your body. No good guys and no bad guys, no right or wrong side anymore, nothing but drowning in an implacable tidal wave of eight billion degenerate cretins, all self-assured of their cannibalistic sainthood, all brandishing their shibboleths, their rainbow flags and swastikas, their racks and thumbscrews. Stuck between the Inquisition and the Jacobins. Shall we unmask the crimson intruder who lurked among us all the while?

So, what's your flavor? Pit or pendulum?