LAND -- Cryptolith

Cryptolith Nick Land 65 million BC. The K/T-Missile, Pregnant with the Entity, slants in. 16 clicks per second. Professor Barker recalls this moment catching the trajectory. He coaxes it across the Cataplex-map, through intricate cartographic dances, snakings, twistings. Scars and vectors slot-together. It sticks. Irridium stink of the Entity so strong it hisses. Tick iterations. Ticks, scratches, chitterings silt across the Outside. Barker senses its passage stroke him, nerve-tense as the distant twin, weaving through tatters of cored-out schizophrenia, in the habitation blister. Theta-Station. Antarctic Peninsula. Where it is 2012 forever. He locks in hard against the tug to proximity, each time a little more difficult to Refrain. Last tick of the Time-Lapse. A streaking down towards the Yucatan. Tick freezing the interrupted Tick. Now it terminates the Mesozoic. Mother of a killing-mechanism, ballistic vapour wave: a billion tons of molten calcium toxins, spatters out of the impact-crater. Supersonic particle-storms erase North America. Chalk-Out. Ater this it's just scar-tissue, mammal-time, incessant surgical ticking of the Cataplex, stuttering, teetering ... then the Time-Fault splits your memory in two. It's to protect you. It insists. Without the trauma, the Amnesia, you'd have to think it. You've forgotten this, for now. Much later you revert, clawing back past the blizzard, tottering into it. Into thinking it. The Unutterable. The thought worse than anything in the world. You couldn't refrain. 25th Nov K0+09. Miskatonic. Publication of Barker's The Geocosmic Theory of Trauma. It ellicits scepticism, confusion. Few comprehend what's creeping in. They think Barker is mad, or want to. It isn't because he thinks that the Galaxies Talk and the Earth Screams, everyone knows these things, whether they admit it or not. 17th February K0+11. Miskatonic Antarctic Geosurvey. Site-29. 13:26 hours. During excavations in the cross-cut Mesolimbic splinter-slopes, Barker discovers Anomalous Cryptolith, MU Geocatalog Item: It-277. It Clicks, Instantly. A key, or a Ticket. What was KT? Physico-semiotic lock-in to Tool-Sign Gridstacks. Chitterings. Tick-Interruption. You taste burnt Iridium. Crawling closeness to the Entity. It guides you. Channelling. Folding. Writhing through itself, catch by rasping catch, to tend the tentacle trap. It hears you breathing, exhalations wrapped tight, rodent-panic clutching and sticky right up against the mammal-core. Oozing revulsion-sensitivities of the underside suck at your fear, each shrunken prey-breath countercoupled to labouring rasps, wheezes, grated-whispering, continuously recatching, bubbling, clicking, strobing centipede-nightmares, epidermal rasp of the unutterable heaving mass, a seething, clicking, poly-tendrilled abomination, slime-stroked gill-slits quivering, ticking, as they suck, and suck on the pitiful mammal sob, maimed ruins ,beyond the screen, where it feeds you cannot know, and cannot stop knowing. It is here that you are always peeled open, folding onto the outside, clicking, sucking, feeding, where you are all insides, raw, never numb, already dead, unreachable, limit, check, tick, where no protection can get, it feeds and sucks, leaving you locked outside your inside, with nothing to defend, fleeing the place you never leave, where it feeds and sucks, clicking, palpitating, mucalmultiplicitousnesses of intra-coiling malignancy that mottle and click, tick, feed, endlessly sucking on an ever opening rotten-mass of ulceration, where nothing goes, unless to tick, feed, suck, and It can only think you hear, being so close, so it slithers groping through all your outsides, to be there already, when you arrive. Its 17 eyes glow dead. Gridlock.