The Grimscribe's Puppets (18 page)

STEP 14: 
“The dummy is a trifle”

It’s best not to think about what must come next. Simply listen to this voice guiding you on and let go. Without effort, completely let go. By now, you should be able to see a shadowy, slightly glowing reflection of yourself and your dummy in the mirror. Look at your dummy, sitting on your knee as always, in the mirror’s reflection. Now pull it from your knee and set it carefully on a chair next to yours. Make sure it’s stable. Make sure you can easily see the dummy’s whole head reflected in the mirror. Set its eyes to look straight into your eyes. Now make sure for the remainder of the lesson that you are not touching it in any way.
The dummy is a trifle. It is nothing.
Stare at your dummy. Now clear your mind of everything
but
your dummy on the stool in the mirror in front of you, specifically its eyes. Consider those eyes (
they are nothing
), but now think about the other side of them that you can’t see (the eye swivel mechanism attached to the cords that run down his head into the grooves in the control handle within your dummy’s otherwise hollow body).
The dummy is a trifle. It is nothing.
Gently clear your mind of all thought. Stare at your dummy without blinking. As you consider your dummy’s perfectly still form in the mirror, your eyes may burn; your pulse rate may increase—an unpleasant feeling that you’re getting too little air—a squeezing sensation up and down your torso as if something’s twisting inside you. You may begin to imagine you hear something that sounds like static or even the roar of an airliner. You may feel lightheaded like you’re going to pass out. Ignore these feelings. They are normal. They indicate that you’re coming into perfect sync with the dummy’s empty body and empty head (
it is a trifle
). Your own body and mind and all its living organs will naturally resist communion with this dead matter. Clear your mind of that pain and panic and replace it with a perfect schematic of your dummy’s eyes and the mechanism within them. Do not blink. Do not move. Now. . . when you’ve lost all sense of where you are or even
what
you are, conscious only of your dummy’s eyes,
make your dummy’s eyes move
. How? After all those hundreds of weeks and those thousands of hours, moving your dummy is no different than moving your legs. Your body is no longer limited merely to the bag of meat and bones you were born into. Now. . .
put yourself together
. The first time it happens you will not remember seeing those dummy eyes shifting to its left. You’ll see the dummy’s eyes right up until you
know
they’re about to move, and suddenly it seems that you are no longer looking at the dummy at all. You did it. You’ll find the undeniable reality: those dummy eyes have indeed moved from their original position. And not only did they move to the left, but—just for a moment—you seemed to be looking out of those glassy, dummy eyes yourself. Being sick to your stomach now is perfectly normal.

Step 15: 
“No more dummies”

Ventriloquists talk to themselves and Greater Ventriloquists talk to themselves even when they’re not actually talking. It’s a fact—an inescapable side effect of all those thousands of practice sessions staring at yourself in a mirror; all those thousands of hours spent manufacturing a pretend-relationship with a doll or with their animal-dummy cohorts. But by now you should be stripped of these delusions of dummy-identity. You know
it and they are trifles
. And it’s high time to dispense with these toys and sentimental trappings and get down to real work. No more dummies at all.

STEP 16: 
“See the world”

There were some surprises after you mastered STEP 14 (“The dummy is a trifle”), weren’t there? Surprise 1: ever since you mastered STEP 14, your stomach is a wreck, and you’re not eating or drinking much either. That’s normal. Surprise 2: you’ve utterly lost your ability to throw your voice or make your dummy move in any conventional sense. You’ve tried to
force
the dummy to speak a couple of times out of what you imagined was sheer boredom, but you discovered that the sound of the dummy’s voice had terribly changed the several times you tried it—a horribly painful noise to the ear, like radio static layered across the tortured squeal of failing brakes on a car. I would say that’s normal, but I’m not sure that it is. What does it matter, though? Throwing your voice—pah—simple steps any fool could master. You’ve gotten far beyond those parlor tricks now. Surprise 3: you know deep down just what the dummy is going to do before it does it. Don’t you?
More static
. Try not to be anxious about all of this static.
It is a trifle
. Speaking of which—you know what that old dummy of yours would say if it was still talking? “Get out of here, animal-dummy,” it would say, “See the world and show ‘em what ya got.” The dummy’s right, isn’t it? Thanks to your tremendous powers of Greater Ventriloquism, you can do almost anything.

STEP 17: 
“Controlling animal-dummies. . . and beyond”

Start with that street bum — the one you may have seen many times before lurking on these seedy streets. Just relax and take one step at a time. If you stop resisting, you’ll find yourself almost floating towards that old heap of junk ahead. Good. There the rummy is, as expected, passed out under those filthy boxes, a bottle almost empty by his side.
The dummy is a trifle. It is nothing
. No, of course you’re not going to intentionally hurt the poor rummy-dummy. Though—just in case—make sure that it’s bound securely to that rusty pylon before you begin your practice. It’s quite unconscious and is oblivious to the tightness of your belt around its wrists. Well, perhaps that’s not true: it’s rousing after all, making quite a display of hacking and spitting. Look, it’s even opening its crazed, blood-shot eyes to gaze upon you. “Maybe I shouldn’t a had that last bottle,” the dumb-bummy mutters. Don’t you think it almost looks real? Now simply stare at the rummy. Gently clear your mind of all thought and stare without blinking at this mad old thing tied up in front of you. Now repeat,
“Let me put you together,”
a few times. It’s amazing how easy it is and how quickly it all begins. Who knew human limbs could be rearranged like that or that human skin could be so flexible? And look: once its bones are quite gone, doesn’t the old rummy-dummy look rather like a slowly melting bar of dirty butter? Now that you can finally see what the practice of Greater Ventriloquism has wrought, it’s quite a lot to handle, and it isn’t a surprise that you are terribly sick to your stomach. That’s normal.

STEP 18: 
“You did it”

Now that you’re all done with what passes for a rummy-dummy and now they you have more or less recovered from STEP 17, it’s time to set your sights to the skies. Simply look up and wait. There it is now: a large airliner descending slowly some thousands of feet above you, landing gear locking into place. You can’t help yourself, can you? That’s right. Just stare at it. Raise that trembling arm. Visualize your arm becoming a crimson mass of spiraling, twitching tendrils shooting up towards the sky — towards the jet. Watch the airliner’s sudden, unnaturally steep and speedy descent into the city’s skyline just beyond your sight. Then, some moments later, listen to the tremendous concussion followed by the roar of muffled static beyond the horizon. You did it. You pushed the lever that pulled the cord that made an airliner go down. What a bad boy you are!

STEP 19: 
“Ultimate Ventriloquism”

The early ventriloquists (or gastromancers, literally gut-diviners) were priests—mostly ancient-world hucksters who fooled the ignorant masses into thinking the hollow dummy-idol next to them was speaking with the voice of a god. But every now and again down through the ages a special kind of ventriloquist-animal-dummy has fallen upon the secret of the only
true
god—the
Ultimate
Ventriloquist—staring a little too long at a reflection or image of itself—unlocking secrets which in fact can
only
be discovered through the careful, diligent practice of lesser and then Greater Ventriloquism—which leads inexorably to extreme dummy-manipulation through the miracle of the Ultimate Ventriloquist, that mysterious archon of manipulation and hollowing. It has so many names, and—truly—no name at all. Now it’s time for the most challenging STEP of all but certainly the one that feels the most natural—the most automatic. Cut into your left wrist with a jagged bit of something convenient. Don’t resist. Just remember the warning from STEP 9 (“They’re all dummies”): turning back is not an option you can exercise at this point. Really open that wrist up. Now, begin to dissect your left arm. There’s no need to be careful about it. Search methodically for the cords and the dummy mechanisms inside your arm. Continue the dissection. You may scream. Your pulse rate may race—an excruciating feeling that you’re getting too little air—a squeezing sensation throughout your body as if something is twisting its way out of you. You may begin to imagine you hear something that sounds like static or even the roar of an airliner. You may feel lightheaded like you’re going to pass out. Ignore these feelings. They are normal. Now look at what you’ve found — look in the mirror at yourself one final time. See the twisting, pulsating, intricately connected, pulpy limbs within your limbs—not only all inside but like a great, living web
behind
and
around
you. See the bloody tendrils for what they are now; see that which twitches and pulsates within and outside of that torn, translucent flesh. Understand:
the throbbing red pulp within and around you is nothing but the barest trifle of the blackness of those horrible cords and pulleys and levers and stitches which hold the universe together
—you and your dummy and all those other hapless, ignorant animal-dummies out there. Yes, you’re certainly learning this final STEP the hard way. But, then, that’s the only way anyone can ever learn it. All those years yearning for control—ultimate control—over your life and the animal dummies in it have led to this final moment of surrender. And as you are finally becoming yourself—as the Ultimate Ventriloquist finds a way to truly speak through you at last—feel its intangible, alien voice twisting through that throat and that mouth, telling us that you have only ever been one of its myriad, crimson arms. Every moment those bloody limbs that are not your limbs become stiffer and colder and that buzzing mind that is not your mind tries to empty itself of the nonsense of sanity and static it’s been full of for too long.
You are a trifle. You are nothing
. Feel that voice that is not a voice bubbling through that mouth that is not a mouth. Let it purge you of your static. Let it fill you with its
own
static. Now speak in the language of the Ultimate Ventriloquist—that high-pitched, hideous glossolalia savagely worming its way up through those exposed, dead lungs and those exposed, dead vocal cords. You did it. You’ve finally found your “dummy voice” which is indeed
nothing
like the voice you once recognized as your own. And as those involuntary shrieks mount in volume and intensity,
feel
the presence of the Ultimate Ventriloquist with a body that is not a body and
meditate
on the presence of the Ultimate Ventriloquist with a mind that is not a mind.

STEP 20:

We Greater Ventriloquists are acolytes of the Ultimate Ventriloquist. We Greater Ventriloquists become catatonics, emptied of illusions of selfhood and identity. We Greater Ventriloquists no longer toil in any physical way. We think nothing and do nothing. But we Greater Ventriloquists are active. We are active as nature moves us to be: perfect receivers and transmitters of nothing with nothing to stifle the voice of our perfect suffering. Yes, we Greater Ventriloquists speak with the voice of nature making itself suffer. Nothing could be more normal than that. This head is a useless mechanism. Cast it aside. We don’t need it anymore. There is nothing but the voice of this pain and this panic thrown into the darkness. It all starts when someone like you begins to suspect that everything is a
trifle
. When someone like you looks at itself in a mirror a little too long. When someone like you melts the flesh of a street bum into a quivering puddle on the pavement. When someone like you brings a plane down. When someone like you reads these 20 simple steps to ventriloquism. When someone like you is put together. When someone like you is put together. When someone like you is put together.

By Robert M. Price

Have you ever experienced a dream in which you were both the observer and the actor? Of course you have. When you think about it, I suppose that condition is not so much different from waking life, for there, too, do we not stand apart and scrutinize our own actions? Analyze our deeper motives? And yet there is a difference. I cannot explain it, and I doubt that Freud or Jung could explain it either, but let me tell you that as “I” awoke from a dream (the content of which I can no longer remember), I became aware that “I” was the dream analog to the waking self who had dreamed. In short, I was the dream of myself. For all I know, all my predecessors in this role experienced the same moment of realization as the dreamer awoke. I should enjoy meeting one or more of them so we might compare experiences. I doubt that the soul of the dreamer is diminished by these incidents. Rather I imagine it is more in the nature of cell-division whereby new selves are cast off to survive on their own. And there is a place where they survive, if they do. It is a great dream city which its inhabitants call Vastarien, though none of them remember having given it that or any name.

Let me tell you what I remember of that place. It is composed of the nightmare landscapes and ghettos conjured up by the sleeping minds of all men. Or perhaps there is such a city for every dreamer, and the inhabitants thereof are the collection of dream selves that particular dreamer has nightly begotten. Yes, I suspect that is the case, for the look of it held for me, upon my arrival, a strange sense of familiarity. It is a junkyard of a place: collapsing buildings, some antique, some repellently modernistic, and others altogether alien in “design” choke the littered streets and seem to compete for space like fat men on a narrow bus stop bench. The skies above are a perpetual gray void, and there is often a mist, which seems half a rarified cloud of lingering pollution. There is no cemetery, for it is in its entirety a cemetery in its own right. There is nothing, no trade or occupation with which to busy oneself, yet the streets are constantly trodden underfoot by aimlessly drifting mobs, not one member of which ever turns to wish another a good day or good luck, for these are unheard of there.