mutilated their mouths in excruciating initiation rituals to reclaim the gift of black song. Charobim would neither confirm nor deny these accounts when Darius probed him in the deepest hours of the night, when drunken B.U. students would catch glimpses of unearthly lights and colors from a fourth-floor window of the gargoyle-haunted Fenway Towers. The methods of the past were abrogate, Charobim declared in his true form as Nyarlathotep. New science had granted the ability to produce essential harmonics in purer form, and the phonetic codes that Darius had transcribed from the old tomes in the tower library of the Starry Wisdom Church were the keys.
The first prototypes had failed to reproduce the sounds properly and had only succeeded in thinning the membrane between the dimensions in the abandoned buildings where Darius had tested them. He had gone back to the design, had spent hours with his laptop on the vanity beside the swivel mirror, the two glowing windows exchanging information, his blood-shot eyes and blood-stained fingers serving as the interface. And now he sensed that success was nigh. He could almost taste it.
He pulled on a blue latex glove and gingerly lifted the larynx from the Petrie dish. A pair of spiral wires trailed from it, their gold contacts brushing against his wrist as he turned the organ this way and that, admiring the translucent pink sheen of its semi-sexual aesthetic.
He opened the cabinet at his feet and removed an object that had once been, and still resembled, a battery-powered Aiwa boom box. He had gutted most of the electronics and replaced them with a small fan and silicone ductwork which functioned as an esophagus for driving breath through the vocal folds, and a digital chip programmed with the incantations: the Sanskrit, Enochian, and Lengian vowel sequences distilled to ones and zeroes.
He had encoded the mantras into data strings at the Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences, a complex he loved for its non-rectilinear Deconstructivist architecture—the walls teetering at sickening, random angles around him while he worked. Some sensitive students found the place nauseating, but it delighted Darius, and he reveled in the critique of mathematician andarchitectural theorist Nikos Salingaros , who said, “ Housing a scientific department at a university inside the symbol of its nemesis must be the ultimate irony.”
Darius took a screwdriver from the bench and removed the left speaker grill to reveal the custom port he had installed in the boom box. He plugged the contact wires into their jacks and secured the bionic voice box in its latex brace, making sure to position the labia over the air channel. The juxtaposition of bionic bovine tissue and ghetto tech gave him the same thrill it always did, and he took a moment to admire his handiwork before realigning the metal grill and replacing the screws.
He picked up the finished device and made for the door. “Later, Professor,” he said with a two-finger salute, then paused with his hand on the door handle. It occurred to him that if his newest prototype did the job, this might be the last time he would see Dr. Martin, and he realized he had developed an unexpected affection for the man.
The hypnosis usually wore off within a couple of hours, and Darius had gotten used to flashing the old coot’s retinas at least once per session to gain an extension of lab time, but now he set the boom box on the floor and dug his smartphone out of his pocket. With a tap he inverted the sigil, then showed it to Martin, who was looking up from his stick sculpture like a dim-witted child, an expression of good-natured curiosity puffing his salt-and-pepper whiskers into a smile that would have shocked his students. But the smile faded as the sigil sunk in, and his brow furrowed into its natural state. “Who are you?” he asked.
“An admirer of your work. Listen: you should leave the city for the weekend, okay? Just a
The first prototypes had failed to reproduce the sounds properly and had only succeeded in thinning the membrane between the dimensions in the abandoned buildings where Darius had tested them. He had gone back to the design, had spent hours with his laptop on the vanity beside the swivel mirror, the two glowing windows exchanging information, his blood-shot eyes and blood-stained fingers serving as the interface. And now he sensed that success was nigh. He could almost taste it.
He pulled on a blue latex glove and gingerly lifted the larynx from the Petrie dish. A pair of spiral wires trailed from it, their gold contacts brushing against his wrist as he turned the organ this way and that, admiring the translucent pink sheen of its semi-sexual aesthetic.
He opened the cabinet at his feet and removed an object that had once been, and still resembled, a battery-powered Aiwa boom box. He had gutted most of the electronics and replaced them with a small fan and silicone ductwork which functioned as an esophagus for driving breath through the vocal folds, and a digital chip programmed with the incantations: the Sanskrit, Enochian, and Lengian vowel sequences distilled to ones and zeroes.
He had encoded the mantras into data strings at the Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences, a complex he loved for its non-rectilinear Deconstructivist architecture—the walls teetering at sickening, random angles around him while he worked. Some sensitive students found the place nauseating, but it delighted Darius, and he reveled in the critique of mathematician andarchitectural theorist Nikos Salingaros , who said, “ Housing a scientific department at a university inside the symbol of its nemesis must be the ultimate irony.”
Darius took a screwdriver from the bench and removed the left speaker grill to reveal the custom port he had installed in the boom box. He plugged the contact wires into their jacks and secured the bionic voice box in its latex brace, making sure to position the labia over the air channel. The juxtaposition of bionic bovine tissue and ghetto tech gave him the same thrill it always did, and he took a moment to admire his handiwork before realigning the metal grill and replacing the screws.
He picked up the finished device and made for the door. “Later, Professor,” he said with a two-finger salute, then paused with his hand on the door handle. It occurred to him that if his newest prototype did the job, this might be the last time he would see Dr. Martin, and he realized he had developed an unexpected affection for the man.
The hypnosis usually wore off within a couple of hours, and Darius had gotten used to flashing the old coot’s retinas at least once per session to gain an extension of lab time, but now he set the boom box on the floor and dug his smartphone out of his pocket. With a tap he inverted the sigil, then showed it to Martin, who was looking up from his stick sculpture like a dim-witted child, an expression of good-natured curiosity puffing his salt-and-pepper whiskers into a smile that would have shocked his students. But the smile faded as the sigil sunk in, and his brow furrowed into its natural state. “Who are you?” he asked.
“An admirer of your work. Listen: you should leave the city for the weekend, okay? Just a
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