For any who might follow me.
—
It is the third day of the new cycle. Waxing crescent. Year of the ox. A time of plague. Soon I leave the shackles of time and ascend to Godhood.
I have not been alone in the research bringing me this far. Most of it is adaptation from those who have come before me. We build on the ancients. Then we simplify it on YouTube. Then we forget it all and start again. Then we shout opinions like they’re facts. But I’ve been looking at the ones who came before.
Trismegustus and Flamel and the usual suspects. More recent jokers like Crowley but what did he ever say of use? The writings of the modern mystic Murphy Stigpole go before us all, particularly “Muci et Radices in Tenebris” and of course “Pueri Pueri Libri de Deo Fiendo” of which I was very kindly given a first edition. A birthday gift from my uncle Moloch. I was 12. A Child’s Little Book about Becoming a God.
Stigpole himself exploded in Tunguska in 1908. I believe firmly that his mandrake was not fresh or he would’ve ascended.
He insisted he had to be far from civilisation. This is not important unless you think you might explode, and it was the travel that cost him. Classic procrastination. He didn’t have the temperament to succeed. The mandrake CANNOT go more than 48 hours from harvest to use. As for avoiding civilisation, you just have to be undisturbed. I know a walled garden in Battersea Park. It’s where my sister stopped me the last time. Nobody even goes there in midsummer daytime. A winter night in plague and it’ll be empty – even of doggers.
Place the roothead between your feet. Make sure the burning torch is ready and you have memorised the order of the rites. As the power comes into you you will start to inhale that power. Finish the ritual as well described by Stigpole. Start the burning. At the correct moment breath out your final breath as a mortal.
Begin to inhale. So long as the connection with the mandrake is fast you will not falter in that inward breath for three long hours as the power comes into you. The rootbound head will scream your mortal breath out for you and you will take on the spirit. If the mandrake is too old it cannot sustain this unfaltering suspiration. If the mandrake explodes, you explode. This is what must have happened in Tunguska. Stigpole’s mandrake failed him. It was too old to hold the force of screaming that long. Similarly I believe if you lose faith in your ability to aspire ceaselessly for perhaps three hours while concentrating, remembering and inflicting pain on yourself as the mandrake screams at your feet, you might hitch breath for a moment with taking in the power, and you might implode, exploding the mandrake. I feel this is what recently happened to my old rival in Beirut.
Enough of this talk of explosions though. I will not blow it. Neither I nor the world will end at midnight.
I am ready. All it requires is breathing in ceaselessly for three hours whilst setting parts of yourself on fire, silently remembering each word of the six volumes of Carth and ceaselessly tracing the Natrax course with your finger in the honeycomb. With the correct preparation, with memory and strength of will, I cannot fail. I have done the work. Now for the reward.
I harvested the mandrake this morning. A perfect round head, surprisingly eloquent in feature, rolling mad eyes, funny, dangerous and vegetative like a politician.
The professor did not make herself known when I opened the portal to collect it. The sinkdark crunches underfoot now though everywhere, carpeted with the carapaces of bugs both alive and dead. I had to watch behind me, and shake them off my legs before I left. Those bugs have multiplied beyond any imagining. That damned professor is encouraging their propagation, but for what cause other than food? It is no matter. I ascend at midnight.
So. Yes. For those who might follow me. My final meal was overcooked Ambrosia rice pudding. Food for the gods. I cooked it forgotten on the hob for a good long hour. I’ll never get it off the pan, but Gods need not do the washing up and I was able to eat the bits that weren’t black. I then accidentally dumped a whole bucket of salt in the bath and got in anyway. My skin feels acid dry and pinched. Clean and burnt and purged. Ready.
In case I explode but the explosion is small enough that you all still live, as with Stigpole at Tunguska and that idiot in Lebanon and the other five before them, use this as a starting point. The work is complete though I feel. Now it just needs the moment. At midnight tonight as the clock turns, trust that you will not hear an explosion from Battersea Park. You will not. Be faithful.
Did that mandrake root head just wink at me?
AlBarclay 