PATCHWORK LANDS

While I have little love for the concept of synchro-mysticism or conspiracies surrounding the Illuminati talking to each other through movies and television shows instead of just picking up the phone, sometimes the most unassuming of pop culture entries does offer treasures for those on the trail of the Barghest Wyrd to think about. And seeing as one of my guilty pleasures has always been hunting down the trashy paperback novelisations of old ’80s and early ’90s action films, a collection that has proven to be all the cheaper to expand since the advent of online secondhand booksellers, I remain spoiled for choice.

In a few cases this opens up a whole different and vastly more interesting plot, such as the original novella by Stephen King which would go on to become The Running Man, but mostly these disposable texts slavishly describe what was originally seen on the screen. Not that this is a bad thing necessarily, as even those script like narratives can offer up clarification about small details lost in the celluloid haze. Yet regardless of literary conceit there are occasions when the book brings some far deeper lore, and surprisingly enough the tie in adaptation of Terminator 2: Judgement Day by Randall Frakes did just that.

What initially piqued my interest was a throwaway section at the very start of the book, one that was for some reason omitted from the final treatment of the film and would not be seen on screen until much later in that already spiralling franchise. The literary description of the time travel device which Skynet developed to eliminate the leader of the human resistance in the past is a little laboured perhaps, and lacking in any real scientific underpinning, but I found it intriguing for completely unintentional reasons. And the connections it allowed me to draw with another Keelian topic may just surprise you all.

     The chamber below had become a hell of energy with the young soldier at its center. The drone and crackle of the generator built to a pounding thunder. John’s heart was racing as fast as the rings. There was a ripping scream, as if a god were being disemboweled. The room filled with hot-white light. Without the goggles, they would have been blinded.
     When the glare faded, the floating rings were empty. They slowed to a stop, seared and smoking. In that endless instant of time displacement, Kyle Reese had vanished. Oddly, in its place was a sphere filled with whirling debris: crushed beer cans, faded yellow newspapers, dated 1984, and a slice of a dumpster, filled with garbage from that year.
     Fuentes slowly lowered his goggles. "Madre de Dios!" Winn cautiously approached the edge and looked down. Sparks sputtered and then died out. The debris settled. "It works!" Winn said, excitedly, then continued, "That’s space from 1984. It’s been displaced, swapped with the space from now." [1]

As you can see in the above quote, taken directly from Randall’s novelisation, once the displacement procedure ends the human chrononaut is exchanged with a sphere of not just time but space belonging to the year 1984. Smog, cans and concrete, Reaganomics as archaeology teleported forward in time to a future that has little use for such consumerist, late stage capitalist trash. And once I began to ruminate on those fictional ideas my thoughts turned in passing to one of the few researchers within the sphere of the Barghest Wyrd that I consider an enduring influence.

John Keel is widely credited with bringing the concept of window areas into the mainstream. Shorthand for those places which seem to attract more than their share of out of place events over many decades, while usually also tied to a local electromagnetic anomaly of some kind, it was perhaps a natural leap of logic for him when faced with increasingly bizarre encounters. A man who would likely dismiss the reality of my chaotic canine wholesale, even he became partly resigned to the idea that everything strange infesting our realm may be in some ineffable way connected to the existence of mad, laughing gods.

Indeed, while Keel appeared to be ambivalent at best about those actively involved in the occult, his insistence on seeking out the origin of what he considered Fortean phenomena led him into unapologetically mystical territory, albeit while maintaining a healthy gloss of pseudo-science. His denizens of the super spectrum, loosely based on the properties of the various wavelengths of energy as they interact with the material realm, bare at least a passing correlation to the supernatural entities of universal folklore. This was a connection laboured multiple times, though not always favourably, in his mainstream writing.

The appeal to esotericism in all but name drew me to The Mothman Prophesies in my teens, as it likely does many who first find his work, before reading The Eighth Tower and Our Haunted Planet in my twenties. Operation Trojan Horse and Disneyland of the Gods were both devoured at some point after that too, plus numerous shorter essays and badly recorded conference lectures as well. My personal brand of Forteana has long shared that same thread of strange as spectre, and as a chaos magickian who seeks the gods in the weirdest places I consider him to be a kindred spirit of a kind. Equally confused, at any rate.

Returning to Frakes’ work, and the way that instead of simply inserting the naked soldier into 1984 the machine swapped the area he was supposed to appear in with a small bubble of space from 2029, we see a potential explanation for the kinds of localised high strangeness that Keel faced emerge like a Lovecraftian Old One from the sea mist. Though what I am offering here seems speculative the idea soon begins to make sense, especially when the weight of recorded events support such a huge leap of logic. Yes, Inhabitants of distant realms are actively interacting with humanity, but by accident rather than design.

     Paranormal incidents take place in massive waves, sometimes grouped years apart. Poltergeist manifestations erupt simultaneously with UFO flaps. Angels, demons, hairy monsters, and sea serpents all surface at the same time that UFOs are stopping lone drivers on remote back roads. Window areas suddenly explode with all kinds of ghosts, UFOs, monsters, animal disappearances, people suffering inexplicable lapses of memory. (A window area is a geographical location where unusual events have occurred over and over again, century after century.) Ufologists try to explain the flap phenomenon by pointing out that it takes a long time for the space ships to go back and forth from their home planet. 
     Occultists nourish a more complicated belief - that the earth passes through zones in space inhabited by terrible spiritual beings. Each time we enter such a zone, the beings ooze through holes in our ‘‘etheric envelope,’ these holes being located in what I call window areas. [2]

When attempting to solve the problem of Keel’s ever present monsters and eldritch interlopers we need to completely suppress the assumption that all of what we see, every inch of this Earth or light year of space is in fact native to what is considered our base reality. Because if Frakes’ fictional bubble was constantly wedged open, to the point the area in Los Angeles where Kyle Rees was dropped off did not even belong in our timeline yet was indistinguishable from those locations around that did, then it would be impossible to know if the very ground beneath the tarmac actually belonged somewhere else.

Following that logic there is a chance that the Earth may instead be made up of many such open windows, areas that appear native to this dimension by virtue of us staking out farmland in their rolling hills yet which may instead remain tied to another place entirely. Not just wrinkles in time but whole plateaus of space stuck to the flypaper that we consider to be real, bringing alien electromagnetism with them too by virtue of their non-terrestrial origins. And thus those who dwell in the weirder side of non-fiction must wonder if that base reality is really just a jigsaw created from pieces of other puzzles.

The working theory that our reality is less a crisp new cotton sheet flawlessly woven from a single material and instead a patchwork quilt made up of many overlapping fragments of a hundred, perhaps hundred thousand other realms instead will be controversial. Arguing that creatures such as Bigfoot and the Mothman are not coming here but rather staying where they belong will raise further questions, ones rooted in the fact that these entities seem to be gifted with certain special abilities when sighted on Earth. Ignoring bullets. Causing camera malfunctions. Leaving less than a blood puddle when they eat the farmer’s dog.

Ghost lore has a long tradition of so-called cyclic, stone tape apparitions. Pseudo-spirits that return on a semi regular basis, recorded into the fabric of the location and seemingly unaware of those who witness their moonlit sojourns across the battlements. A false identification based on a work of fiction from the 1970’s, but I digress. Still, my proposition revolves around a similar idea. One which instead renders the denizens of this energetic multiverse, a term which is itself sadly inadequate when discussing the vast cosmic sprawl beyond our half blind senses, as inhabitants mostly out of phase with our physical realm.

A far less reported type of manifestation is the phantom village. Often taken to be timeslips when they are given a questioning nod in books of paranormal encounters, as if such an explanation somehow legitimises the idea that buildings could haunt a given location while lacking a supposedly god given soul, these may instead be phantasmal glimpses of the other worlds that overlap our own. Permanently anchored to a given geographic region, and viewable as if through deep water to a select few. The lands of the Fae are real, and we hammered a motorway right through their once splendid ballrooms.

     It is certainly startling when "contactees" hundreds of miles from West Virginia recite details identical to the things Woody had told us privately.
     Derenberger is not a learned man. "Indrid Cold" and his funny companions told him they were from a planet called "Lanulos" which was in "the galaxy of Genemedes." (Actually Ganymede is a large satellite of the planet Jupiter.) Woody claims that he has been there and visited a number of cities where the people wear "colorful shorts" and all signs, posters, etc. appear to be written in a squiggly Oriental-like writing. The air and the temperature are identical to Earth's. [3]

What passes for the people of that other place may tell similar tales of the strange things that happen in the areas that bleed into ours. Odd bipedal ape men in khaki shorts and plaid shirts that drink foul-smelling liquid from weird metal containers, toasting puffy little foodstuffs over roaring fires while leaving nothing but steaming organs where deer once stood. Seemingly ignoring bullets and rendering cameras useless as we walk on by. The tents ablaze with lanterns that drift in and out of sight as the energy ebbs and flows. Humans just as guilty of interloping there as we say the creatures that Keel described visiting here are.

And science, rooted in the ongoing observation of a base reality that it has long believed to be cut from the same contextual cloth would know no better of course, so could offer no opinion on the rough stitches in space which actually exist out there. This is not a call to barbarism, however. Nothing can be gained from entering into a new age of unreason. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology. All have their place. What they do is valid, anyone who has witnessed recent advances in medicine or quantum theory will attest to that. But when the lens is shackled to the realm it dwells within little beyond that can be seen.

Thus the Barghest Wyrd tracks muddy paw prints through culture, acting as a multiversal facilitator of the strange, a chaotic void god given access to many interconnected realms by virtue of their already knotted nature. Inhabitants of those other, not quite distant places are just as likely to fall afoul of its howl as anyone else. The entity knows no bounds, has no limits. An appeal to Cosmicism, perhaps, but a valid one regardless. For as the black dog runs around those distant patchwork lands it might have a similar role, likely going by a myriad of other equally inadequate names as madness follows in its wake.

[1] Randall Frakes, T2: Terminator 2 Judgement Day, Bantam Books, 1991, Page 24.
[2] John Keel, The Eighth Tower, Saturday Review Press, 1975, Pages 112-113.
[3] John Keel, Strange Creatures From Time And Space, Fawcett Publications Inc., 1970, Page 180.