The Fall of Khazad-Dûm CASSIUS CROON HAD BEEN GOING THROUGH A SAMUEL L JACKSON PHASE LATELY, AND THAT EXPLAINED HIS KANGOL CAP AND ZEBRA SKINS AND HIS SUDDEN PASSION FOR TEQUILA. It also justified his current choice of girlfriend - a Cockney chick named Claire. She was dressed just like Surfer Girl out of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, and like that infamous character, she could suck head nice and deep! <<You ought to give that shit up>> Croon warned. It was the eve of the Catheter visitation, and he was looking for any excuse to drop her. <<You know it fucks with your motivation.>> <<Speak!>> She sidled on to his lap, wrapped a milky thigh around the back of his chair. <<You'd hook yourself to a ventilator if you thought it would save your lungs some work.>> Croon snuck a toke from the pipe she was cradling. <<Baby, I'm conserving.>> <<No baby, you're preserving. Sometimes I'm convinced you're really dead, and all that alcohol you drink is really just formaldehyde.>> <<Screw you.>> He pushed her from his lap. She landed ass-first on the floor, breaking into girlish giggles. <<I'll kill you>> Croon warned. Just then there was a knock at the door, and Jasmin ran off to answer it (how very un-Surfer Girl of her!) <<Dice, Strife>> Croon nodded, welcoming his old mates. <<Well, it seems our party is complete. Let's cut to the chase, and bottomline it.>>38 JULY 5 2009AD, (-3.4TERRAN RECKONING), and all weekend pirate radio stations and online bulletin boards had been crackling with news about Khazad-Dûm, the first major event of the summer. On the construction sites and motorway pylons, Skull'n'Crossbone flags were flying. In the unemployment queues and welfare carnivals, punters were spreading intrigue. There was plenty of speculation. The tabloids claimed that it would be an apocalyptic nightmare, set deep inside the mines of Yorkshire. And the playlist was the who's who of the British underground, plus something brand-spanking new: the Dark Stranger, a mysterious name without a face. Nobody had ever heard of him, but word was he was going to bring the fucking house down. Tough talk, Croon thought... he heard the same every summer. But he was feeling jaded at the age of 33, and he figured he could do with a reboot. Him and half of Britain, it seemed. There must have been 5000 maniacs jostling for position in the makeshift queue at the mine shaft, and what a festival of sleaze they represented! There were Reptilian Junglists, NuDruids, Splice Girls, rudeboys and homies, gangstas from north and south; there were pseudo-Rastamen, identifiable by their preference for crack cocaine over the sacred ganja, as well as the original. Old School football hooligans were brawling with straight-out satanists (and that was just the blokes!) There were Austin Powers in various stages of degeneracy, covens of Bat Girls and Catwomen, even the odd John Merritt tragic and a shimmering in the air which could only have been Wells' Invisible Man. There were also a sprinkling of Samuel L Jackson's mingling themselves through the mob, marking different stages of his career... most focused on the cyborg cowboy phase of the early 00s. <<Maybe you should change your look>> Claire suggested. <<They say villains are out of style, and superheroes are coming in.>> <<Well then, here goes my superproton plasma pill>> Croon said. He popped an LSD tab into his mouth, grabbed Claire by the hand, squeezed tightly, and the four of them plunged through the gate. AN HOUR LATER IT WAS their turn to go under, and they shuffled into a creaky old service lift. Slowly, uncertainly, they began their descent. Croon smiled bleakly: the lift looked like it should have been decommissioned in the Thatcher years, and it seemed an awfully long way to the bottom. Thankfully, after only three electrical failures, the lift stuttered to a halt, and the door crunked open. Beyond stretched a narrow shelf lit by bare fluorescent bulbs. Croon wandered out, swearing, bemused. There was nobody to be seen, and no sign of a party. <<Hey, maybe we stopped on the wrong floor>> Dice speculated. He was a football hooligan. Croon pointed to a series of small arrows scratched through the soot to, several hundred meters distant, a dimly illuminated staircase. Steps spiraled down into the murk. <<This place reeks>> said Claire, who thought herself too old for motorway parties. <<I can hardly breathe from the dust.>> Dice struck a match and tossed it into the stairwell - it pirouetted around for at least a minute before disappearing in the inky depths. <<We've been duped.>> <<Wait.>> They all stopped talking and listened hard. Faint steps and laughter could be dimly heard, echoing up the stairway. Beneath that, the four could discern the dull rumble of a Riptide bassline. That and an ominous, sometimes fading drum-beat: doom-doom, doom-doom. <<Me first!>> Strife cried, diving into the unknown. THE STAIRWAY WAS LIT BY NO EXTERNAL source and was utterly dark. They groped their way down flight after flight of stone and concrete steps, and at one point Croon glanced back; but he could see nothing, except high above him the faint flicker of a safety siren. What were stone stairs doing in a mine? Something didn't seem right. Periodically he caught music, rising from the underworld: the voice of an Aborigine or a Jamaican gun boy singing, muttering words that ran down the sloping roof with a sighing echo. He could not catch what was sung. The walls seemed to be trembling. Every now and again drum-beats throbbed and rolled: doom, doom39. The sound grew gradually louder as they progressed; the air, clammier. Finally, after what must have been a thousand stairs, there was a pool of smoke and dull light, and before they knew it the group were walking through the outskirts of a subterranean rave. Loudspeakers loomed out of the fog, their combined amperage echoing through the tunnels to produce acoustics which could only be called sublime. Torches the height of trees lined the perimeters of the dancefloor, while lasers probed the dusty air above. There was also a bit of hologram activity in one distant corner, prototype guns bursting from walls, firing green bullets into the crowds of ecstatic nutters. <<Down, down>> an MC was rapping. <<This is the way to go down!>> Well, they were already a long way down... how much further did these niggas want to sink? Looking up, Croon beheld a wide aperture high in the yonder wall; it slanted upwards and, far above, a small square patch of blue sky could be seen. The light from the opening fell directly on the DJ's stage: a simple oblong block, about two meters high, upon which was laid a great slab of white stone. It was ringed with a sequence of what looked like Nordic runes40. Cassius Croon could read 14 alphabets including Sanskrit, Arabic and Hangul. Unfortunately, he did not know one letter of Nordic rune. HIS TRIP STARTED KICKING IN THEN, SO he sauntered out wobble in his trademark style. Purists might dispute him, but Croon considered himself a Junglist - he went to all the rallies in the early 00s and still listened to pirate radio. But his tastes had mellowed over the years, and he had slowly lost track of style. He knew what was happening in the Iranian student underground, was well-versed in the new tribal movements in Indonesia... but when it came to his own backyard Croon was definitely one spy in the cold. Well, he thought, let's renew some old acquaintances... He started skanking with a gang of girls kitted in full Amazonian battlewear. This had the predictable effect of strafing Jasmin, and she stormed off to the chill-out cave. <<Ah, stuff it - I'll go talk to her>> Dice offered. <<Fine, I'll just stay here>> said Croon, who was now fairly fucked from the LSD. He didn't see either of them until the end of the show. Shuddering basslines and frenetic snares, interspersed with eerie synthe riffs, carried him through the hours. It might have been the drug talking, but the music reminded Croon of an industrial bore, tunnelling relentlessly into ever darker and more plutonic states of mind. The bass was the roar of the generator, the drums were the rotating drill, and the eerie synthe bits were exposed faultlines. There were plenty of samples too, rare jewels from innumerable black exploitation movies (Pulp Fiction included). The beats stopped, the Terminator 2 line was dropped in: Hasta la vista, it said, baby41. Then the burst of an Uzi machine gun tore the fucking place apart! <<It's him!>> the Amazons screeched. <<The Dark Stranger! He's starting his set.>> They had hardly spoken these words when there came a great din: a rolling Boom that seemed to come from the ground beneath, and to tremble in the rocks at their feet. Doom, doom it rolled again, as if huge hands were turning the very caverns of Yorkshire into a vast drum. Then there came an echoing blast: a great horn was blown in the hall, and answering horns and harsh cries were heard further off. There was a hurrying sound of many feet... Croon found himself being carried towards the DJ's stage.42 He was deposited a dozen or so yards from the tomblike edifice. The Dark Stranger was lurking in the shadows shrouded in a boxer's gown, head obscured, nothing to be seen of his eyes. The multitudes hushed, real ominously. Croon was expecting a new tune to kick in, loud and menacing. Instead, from the far end of the hall, a roll of acoustic drums was heard, doing their best impersonation of an Amen break43. And then 5000 people started dancing as one. The music grew ghostly, dissonant; the drumbeats lost their steady rhythm; the crowd, who had already begun swaying back and forth, right and left, threw off their sobriety, and held out their arms wide, rigid, as if they were about to take flight. A moment of immobility, and they began to spin in place, using the left foot as a pivot, faces upraised, concentrated, vacant, and their clothes belled out as they pirouetted, making them look like flowers caught in a hurricane. Croon peered up to see how the Stranger was going. He was astounded to notice that he was not dancing or lining up the next track but poised on the slab with his arms outstretched, jerking as if he was possessed. He seemed to be breathing hoarsely, his body clenched, as if he was straining, unsuccessfully, to defecate. The lasers went out. The smart lamps went out. The only light was the feeble glow from the roof. Suddenly, the miracle occurred. A whitish foam trickled from the Dark Stranger's lips, slowly thickened. A similar substance issued from select members of the audience.44 Finally a record kicked in, loud and menacing indeed: Pterodactyl, a torrent of Jurassic yelps and demonic bass. <<Come, brothers>> the DJ murmured <<come, come. That's right, yes...>> The 5000 went ballistic, shaking their booties and bobbing their heads, they shouted, then made convulsive noise, like death rattles. The stuff emitted by the mediums took on body, grew more substantial; it was like a lava of albumin, which slowly expanded and descended, slid over their shoulders, their chests, their legs with the sinuous movement of a reptile. Croon could not tell if it came from the pores of their skin or their mouths, ears, and eyes. The Junglists pressed forward, as in a fervor. Dazzled by the phenomenon, Croon lost all fear: he climbed on to the slab, gazed transfixed at the broiling dancefloor beneath. The foam had begun to detach itself from various devotees and assume ameboid shape. From the mass around the Dark Stranger a tip broke free, turned, and moved up along his body, like an animal that intended to strike him with its beak. At the end of it, two mobile knobs formed, like the horns of a giant snail. The punters, eyes closed, mouths frothing, did not cease their spinning, and they began to revolve, as much as the space allowed, around the central stage. Whirling faster and faster, they flung off loose clothing, women let their hair stream out, and it seemed their heads were flying from their necks. They shouted houu houu houuuuu... Croon could see (or were they only holograms?) various entities acquiring definition. One of them grew vaguely human in appearance, though terribly disfigured; another went from phallus to ampule to alembic, and another was clearly taking on the aspect of a bird, a stork with graceful legs and prominent beak, wings preparing for flight. Meanwhile, the Dark Stranger was MC'ing. He said, in a manic Yorkshire accent: <<Like me, this place is call'd by many names. Earth, the Earth... the lowest element of them all. When thrice ye have turned this Wheele about... thus my greate Secret I have revealed...>> Suddenly, the interface was breached, anew. The ectoplasm rose, assumed serpentine shape - a towering, drooling, hissing cobra. The audience cowered, women screaming, men discharging rounds. Croon didn't try to duck or dive back into the crowd, but stood frozen, as if he was paralyzed. Then the snake hissed, and its voice was classic Yorkshire: <<Brothers, sisters, come to me. Yes, come back to me...<<45 CASSIUS CROON (c)opyright Rob Sullivan 1996-2024. Contact the author for all your criticisms and feedbacks.