The Halloween Doctrine

On Dani Compose

“These are violent times for valentines, childd.”

- Spiderjaw Slagg

This is a story about tall tales and hatred.

Men wiser than myself use science instead of women; always have. They’re not around anymore. They were suicide bombed into extinction.

Way over there in xxx8, they used science instead of women to figure some important things out. Things second and third were: bitches ain’t shit, and god bless the dead.

The first was serious business.

A science representative participated in an interview with The Riddler Times after decades of radio silence.

He said, in layman’s favourite tongue, that the hands of god were connected to a sphere and inside the sphere there was a tonic of fear and hatred.

Nobody knew what that meant; after they said it they disappeared.

Back into the labs.

There was a haste running through the veins of his letters and it generated a murmuring discord beneath the public psyche.

Facefirst into the grave.

Here’s something...

The West and East were populated by 2 uncontested species, respectively, during the real beginning of this narrative. We jump ahead. Watch this:

In the West they had trees in line like pillars stretching back past the vanishing point. They were all tall and generously girth’d. There must have been billions of them there. The space between them was barely enough to fit a palm. Nigh palmwide.

There was a vague government- so vague- and there was a hierarchy that made sense if you were there. The centre of the country yielded the oldest and wisest and loudest of all the trees. Along the right-coasts and most anything that bordered a body of water stood the soldiers who could die for anything. Their bark was flaky and stupid. Save for that...

They were all nearly identical; carnivorous, gnarled mouths, eyes shielded by thick sunglasses, and every so often one of the branches was an arm. The formation of the arms was the wedge what separated them, like the trivial science of old. That wedge afforded them names. The sunglasses made them forget the names. The songs they wrote made them remember whatever they could imagine.

This spectrum was what kept them occupied when deflating from military. And they were always busy with their military. As Marcus TreeDoom said, “We’re up to something.”

And here’s what’s up with the East: it was covered with with mad skeleton men. They didn’t build structures as much as they piled upon eachother. Ants.

They walked around with bombs in their chests and had a thing against trees. It all stemmed from the soil labelled “power struggle.” And...

They had no culture beyond forgetting why they wanted everything dead. They told tall tales to justify why they were napalming entire civilizations with their tumbling frames. They drew archaic designs on their bones with each conquest. They didn’t like nothin’.

There was a war that had them possessed from the moment they could form ideas. All they wanted to do was consume, their jaws oblivion, and their teeth an opaque, cleansing fire.

They had an especially tall tale for the tree people across the ocean. They let time expand their wounds and exploit what faults lay in their faith, plural.

And another thing...

The West was constructed in the image of Kamladis, the Greek God of Circles.

And over there, whistling through the jungle, was their entertainment; an entertainment what drove a wedge between the scientists. This grand revelation came days before their sudden eradication.

The bad half stepped back while the ugly half gravitated towards it.

The ugly half, the last half to evaporate in the wake of all-encompassing suicide bombings, extracted a very puzzling result upon the crest of years of research. They said that every living thing had a threshold of hatred. They said that there was a certain amount of cells – a sphere – that had to be filled with hateful satisfaction, otherwise it would shrivel up and destroy the waking mind. Some people gluttonized theirs and required more. Some people starved theirs and needed less. But they can’t kill their stomach and they can’t kill the hate.

In times of antiquity, the famous tree people told more and taller tales. They were unaware, plural, at the time, but this was how they filled their furious cells.

Their tales rode on a thick, syrupy current of tragedy. Their characters were oft betrayed, sold out, murdered, and suffered. When revenge was had it was glorious revenge. These were principallycautionary tales. They principally kept their negativity above starvation. Their humour was black and their endings were like a sewer.

When they shifted away from taller tales they changed their medium: Instead of fiction, they indulged in decidedly non-fiction. Members of their own community were exploited. Weaknesses were ripped into and downward spirals observed with rapt surgery. Removing the fiction, strangely, fulfilled them more. Like switching from oils to bread.

They hoisted up their own people to sit upon chairs of celebrity. Semicolon infamy. They were showered with accolades. They were praised with showers. They were rained praise upon. And in the same breath as a reinforcement, there came a vicious claw that grabbed and tore at them. It came from the mouths of everyone. The accolades were withdrawn and whatever condition that made them unique was magnified until it enveloped them completely.

Then they disappeared.

It unparched them.

So here it is...

The hunger for hatred had fruition’d into something abstract. The stories grew tired and lives can be only just so unique. Just so had them fashioning a revolving door of grandiose scope, but they got sick of it with the same sickness that gave them life.

They didn’t commit this to paper, but they didn’t have to.

They didn’t like paper.

So with the same cellular hunger that had them betraying their own people, they turned their branches Easterly and shouted.

There were strange things over there.

There were demons over there. Nobody could fathom them. Who in their right mind would?

Want to fathom them?

Their history was recorded only in the foggiest, so they were once again able to invent.

They were savages. They ate at their own people. If hypocrisy was detected, their flaws were overdrawn as something only an infernal creature was capable of. Immaturity to the point of self destruction.

We drink, but they drink more, and who could drink that much?

Only a maniac, for certain.

There were treacherous whales what eavesdropped on the trees, mumbled reports to eachother, and sending it all the way to the opposite coast. Uncontested, they owned the sea between the opposing societies, like owning the sky and space above terrain where nothing lived. Their imagination soared something like twenty four seven. They had big ideas; if they were in the sky and space, the land above that must have been heaven. They wanted to go to heaven sans the death. This they spoke of only to eachother.

Regardless of their mystery, they were employed by the tree people as soldiers; when war was to arrive, they were outfitted with artillery. That Submarinist Rumour Channel was responsible for most of the ill feelings on both sides, neither giving much credence to the agenda of the two way street.

At around the same hour, the mad skeleton men had become painfully aware of those trees in the Ouest. Tall tales from that sort of origin had made their way over, and they were forced to ponder rumours of the tree peoples’ decadent sort of hatred. The hatred what took the shape of celebration drove them into a mania. They abandoned the smouldering wreckages of surrounding worlds and gathered their forces. They amassed en mobbly and constructed a crucible from which plans could be extracted. Kings made it sound like dinner time.

Something had to be done about this fucking vegetation.

The last great tree celebrity went by the title of Bliss Crashtonne. He was elected an idol on the grounds that he came from a broken house. They loved the breasts out of it. But his kind never lasted very long in the public eye, and before long they were done. Just as astonishingly as it came.

They chewed him up and let him drip from their jaws to let him know they wanted nothing to do with him.

So just like that he was rolled on back to the farthest coast, away from the front lines, into a colony of their past obsessions. It was the special place for old celebrities. All the trees faced east, across the Pacific Ocean, so he was carried to the back end. Over their heads, thousands of miles.

He had been aware of the place just like everyone else.

When he got to the back of the line, there was no sort of anything back there.

All he witnessed was a war torn shore with a dread hanging low.

He didn’t remember much concerning the frenzy of his downfall, but he remembered the word “colony.” And while he couldn’t define it, really, he had a good idea what it meant.

And here’s what I have to say about Bliss Crashtonne, and suit.

His celebrity was predicted by his friends due to the familiarity of it. While his broken house got the sympathy vote, the population was strangely predictable, and they wanted insaniacs. Every popular surname prior to him had seen things they couldn’t account for. One might even say they were haunted.

He, like them, was haunted by visions what crept from beyond the grave. They came at him like flashbacks, rather than in his dreams. They’d taunted him like clawed fingers for ten and one half years. He never came forward with his revelations because those afflicted by any sort of bad dementia were to be shipped off to the Shore of Shame. Had he known that he would end up there anyway he would have quested to be a revolutionary. But nobody ever told him shit.

More than his desire to be famous was his desire to avoid expulsion, and so he let them run their cold extremities down his personage. Let them buy him things. Let them speculate. He never wanted in but he was finding things to block his exit. Chairs. Lamps. Galleon bits.

They loved him because he appeared to merely flirt with his condition. He juggled the dementia in the air with coyness and sparkly pool balls. He could have been faking it. He could be doing something ironic. For all they knew. But they didn’t want to know. They wanted to love him.

Crazies – the ones overcome by the sights until they turned ugly - were to be shunted into whatever hell could mesh with their compassion, but he could carry a conversation and showboat, so he was an oddity.

And, believe it, there were many others afflicted by the dementia. Like aids, it could be said that everyone had it to some degree. Some released their hands from the floodgates. Others reinforced them with whatever vice they could get their awkward branches on. Depending on how they were raised.

There were enough horror stories in the media to warrant th’ fear being put over everyone. They drew a line, but they got as close to it as they could.

Like the circle that governed their existence, the vice became their careful observation of those beautifully sick.

There was a controversial study conducted wherein a bunch of secret stuff was done. The long and the short of it was that the crazies shared the exact same hallucinations. The closest thing to a Man of Science was a Tree of Witchcraft, but they both would have said the same thing: “There’s a connection here, gov.”

They prodded the connection with long witch fingers and announced that the illusions were caused by a toxin in the air. There was a mist that hung low on certain regions – narrow to the trained eye – with a mere fistful of citizens being affected. It wasn’t a real mist, but if people were to look had enough, they could see it. This leant to the idea that some areas were ghettos of dementia. Some said it was merely the comfort of being around their infected brethren, and it spread out like a fist turning into seven palms. But nobody listened to some.

And this isn’t a story about the architecture of madness comfort circles.

The public loved to watch their elected famous trees squirm, and they loved (even more!) to hear what they had to say. Everything was projected through a lens of what they could never / refused to understand.

Bliss Crashtonne cited stories about zombies turning levers more than twice their size. The second most common story was of headless women being shoved into a rocket and shot into space.

They repeated ad nauseum.

“Swallow it, sonn.”

So he was there on the shore with a trunk full of madness. It was silent for as far as it was. There were cliffs and hills chopped off, jagged rocks just beyond the driftwood. It was like a deserted island. The last tree from his parent society was far behind him.

All alone. Oddly enough. Despite the news coverage to the contrary.

It wasn’t long before the waters several hundred yards from the shore were parted by the business end of a submarine. It came out of nowhere; it was polished out of antiquity, but just barely. His roots trembled the sort of shake which trumpets the figuring of something out. But he didn’t know what. Somewhere far off, dots were being connected.

Killers. Serial kidnappers. Aliens. Nefarious fascists. Who uses submarines? Where is everyone? Serial Nazis.

The submarine got as close as the sandbar would let it. Saltwater perspired off its hull.

Bliss just stood there. It was sunny and the rocks were being baked enough to bake on. Everything seemed to be happening so perfectly that he just had to see the thing through.

From the submarine leapt men, and he knew they were men cause he saw them in his head.

He owed them his fame... but...!

They trudged through the water all the way up to his earshot. He let them come.

They were dressed in medical blue except for lab coats. There was something supernaturally pale about them, and regunaturally grim. It doesn’t matter how many there were.

Regardless, there was still one of him. They moved in formation with furrowed brows. They stood before him in the shape of a crescent moon.

One third of them brandished long rifles which they aimed squarely on his face. The only one to speak said “motherfucker you’re comin’ with us.” Their pupils were dilated, their palms dusty.

They all slapped those dusty hands upon his bark with a loud clap and dug their nails deep.

They then hoisted him high in the air and carried him into the submarine. Their knees broke the water apart. The friction didn’t phase them. Nothing was touching them.

They stuffed him through a hatch at the top.

They submerged and left. As astonishingly as they came.

PART III

The East was governed only abstractly by a round table of kings. Nobody else wanted to know the history of the conflicts that kept them moving; the kings cracked the books and told them why. They were the first to look Westward because they’d always had it in their peripheral vision.

Their hoards were growing restless. The ashes of their nemeses had barely settled and already they were up and snarling for more. Mumblings from within the palace had lead to rumours of the devils to the West getting a lot deviler.

These guys, who the hell do they think they are? They betray their own people. They bathe in glamour. These were not things. They were... men.

The Centrefolds of the Tree population kept eyes trained to the East so strongly that they never faced away from it. And they were talking, too, and when they spoke, they didn’t mumble. They yelled everything. All the time. Even the preliminary assumptions. Even the second guessing and the doubling back. They made everyone as confused as they were. They drew the public in so close they couldn’t see the whole thing, lo, the hole they were filling.

Those skeleton peoples in the East were growing restless. They’d eliminated everyone around them and they were getting ready for a full scale assault on their fine democracy, whatever that meant.

They’d seen it before, “I don’t mind tellin’ ya!”

They kidnapped Bliss down nigh of the fathom where the jellyfish practiced supreme authority.

Their moaning punctured the steel in select places, squished against mechanical grinding and, like, groaning. They went deeper and deeper. The vessel compressed from all angles and everyone had todeal with it.

The salt content was skyrocketing somewhere above 119.

The strange men brought him before their supreme master. They dumped him down on some wheels and guided him through winding corridors. The submarine was deceptive, affording Bliss enough space to stand at attention. Nobody spoke, but they sure as shoot worked.

It was all there: large levers and not as large men. No rockets; he was sure they’d be introduced later.

“I’m going to die down here,” he thought to himself. He repeated it aloud, but nobody replied.

Deep inside the cramped submarine there was a room, and therin laid a tangled web of pipes. And therein laid a restless spirit. It shook and rattled the pipework from the inside.

“HuuuuoooOOooohhhHUUUUUooooOOOh!” it spooked.

Bliss shuddered at the thought of anything down there being real, but with promptness he quivered:

“What’s going on?”

It was only Bliss and the pipes down there.

The mess collected all its scattered consonants into a booming alpha male voice.

“We are scientists you piece of nig!”

He trailed off with a sorry “I...”

The pipenet shrugged off some bits of slime; “You are going to witness it! Only you can speak in that fucking tree language! I want the last piece of literature in that fucking tongue to tell this tale!”

“I’m-“

“Are you literate, son of a bitch!...?”

“I- Yes, I am, but this all seems-“

“Witness!”

A tremor ran all up the pipes and then, just like that, one of the walls folded up and away.

He must have triggered it. He thought.

What was hidden behind the wall thrust into reality with the assistance of carefully arranged lights.

It was a piece of paper – a schematic. It was supported by a poor man’s pedestal.

Bliss fixed his eyes on the thing and searched his mind for a cipher.

The lines slowly came together, and the labels jumped out at him. But before he could exclaim his success, the pipe boss spoke:

“It’s a war machine! HAHAHAHAHHAHA!”

The paper detailed a design for an oblique machine. Certain labels cited lasers and steam vents. There was a nightmare about it. Bliss began to invent connections and formulate the most eloquent ways to test them. Trial and error cushioned by doves.

“Are you the ones... who gave me the nightmares, then?” Bliss was still studying the piece of paper.

“Your intellectual fetishes have lead us to success, sir!”

“So... yes?”

“You should be writing this down!”

Bliss started scratching a twig against his branch, mimicking the actions of transcribing.

“Okay... continue?”

Slime shot towards the ground. Grime loosened. Some steam shot out, but he wasn’t sure from where.

“We are the scientists! We are a glorious race of men that were driven into the ocean by the terrorism of the land dwellers! The tree people were the ones who usurped our kingdom! For decades we watched the politics unfold from our watery prison. Those same trees enveloped their inhereted hateful faith and perverted it even further. And then they began to alienate their own kind for their own amusement. Are you getting this?!”

“Of course. Yes. Yes, pipes, I am writing this down.” His time was divided between the design and the plot.

“We had not the ability to take your kind due to the congestion and nationalism. You were too strong, child! And you still are! But, once you became segregated, we could cull you as fuel for our fantastic war machine! We could use the wood of your god damned famous bodies to give the heat necessary to burn the diamonds to work our lasers!”

Bliss stopped. Everything was moving so fast as to submerge his emotions. His reactions were purely in theory.

“And... okay, explain the war machine? I’m getting the thought that I missed a big chunk here-“

“We will take back our country! We will retake our rightful place as lords of this world! We will declare war with our magnificent death machine, and we will win! Everywhere will be our house!”

Bliss continued writing with nothing on nothing. He was overcome with panic and he began missing some key points. He sort of wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. More than that, he wanted out of the room.

“Okay. Good. And, followup to nothing you said, what’s up with you being pipes? Just... if you’re ready.”

“We are all dead you piece of shits! I’m deader than the rest of them! I’m a ghost and I’m haunting this nonsensical tangle of pipes! But I’m the fucking boss! Do you understand! I’m the fucking boss! I’m the fucking boss you fucker!”

“Okay. There’s a thing. And... anything else?”

“For now! I hate everything!”

Underwater life drove the dead men a little bit mad; a condition flirted by their affection towards submarines and steam. The divisions what once parted the duelling ideologies collapsed, colliding the halves into one fine fuck.

That one half that laid out the science for celebrity watched their festish’d opera unfold on the new society. Every two hours a gangly periscope would break the surface. They loved it. The other half just got to work on the weapons.

They were always about the dirty work, but much of their paperwork ended up about people, divided from the celebrity science by a feeble chainlink fence. At the end of the day, both of their best laid plans concerned people. The militaristic side was governed by the pipebastard, a once great general who was blown to pieces by a bomb filled with acid. He sequestered himself into the most criminal of their warships, with the leaders of peoples science sitting in loftier cabinets, clapping and giggling in ginger delight. The pipebastard hated them, and would have killed them if he were able.

He wasn’t able to do anything.

It made him the craziest of them all.

It all came to a head at around the same time.

Up there with the landstanders, a war was erupting. The bosses of both sides had traced the politics over and over, and perhaps a mutual delusion as reached. Both had to go.

The mad skeleton men were steady launching themselves across the ocean with contact detonators. They sailed through the air, propelled by the momentum inherent in the most powerful catapults in the world. The trees were prepared, attaching artillery to whales and sending them their way. They took up arms with the trees due to their incredible weaponry. More than half of them disappeared into the sea with technology in tow. Those that remained to keep up appearances shot the dead men as they approached the coast, and whatever soldiers actually approached the opposite continent shelled whatever was in range.

Behind the trees, deep in another ocean, the scientists were finishing. While their plot was being massaged, they lifted their fantastic war machine above the water line and let it stare down whatever was kind of even close.

It was a giant metallic sphere with stiff tentacles hanging heavy from its waist.

Inside its hallowed corridors, zombies of science paced back and forth, readying for D-Day.

Bliss was still in council of the pipe boss.

“You know, the terrorists are over there in their continent. I bet if you guys just talked to my government, we could get something going. And, you know, if not, there’s still other land masses with nobody there. You could... start over?”

“We hate the fucking trees! We made you bastards! We gave you confidence, and you swept over the ruins while we were recovering! You stole our woman! And all you did was live and fuck! Your reign will be collected and put in our pockets like so manydollars and cents!”

“Are you all this furious-“

“Yes! We’re dead!”

Those manic depressive scientists skulking around the periscopes, glued to the events transpiring, divided their time between the war and the double-crossing care of the damned whales.

Where before there was a cautious song, now there was laughter and victorious cheering.

They radioed down to the pipebastard and informed him that the whales were armed and dangerous.

He was pissed off.

“I hate those whales more than everything!”

Bliss had become strangely calm having not been murdered for fuel, or eaten for funs. He tried to keep his captors talking to cement his usefulness, at least.

“So... the whales have switched sides... then?”

“The whales made their own side! They’re on my turf and I’m going to kill all of them! They want the land too! I reckon!”

“Hey, you know... hey... don’t be like that.”

“We have insane weapons that can turn them inside out and turn water into piss! Once we take back what is ours we’ll turn our warheads into the sea and purge them in a maelstrom of blood and hilarious brains!”

“I mean... whatever you think is best. By the way, thanks for not murdering me. I... I love writing. Or something.”

“You’ve done some good work here! Deal with it!”

It took one day for the war machine to be fully operational. It might as well have been a minute in war time. After that, they took control of time. They took control ov everything.

They began the attack at the first heatshift of afternoon. It blasted the terrain with pillars of fire and pollution. The trees took stock of the attack, but before they could reassign their forces to combat it, one tenth of the landscape was already lost. Ashes and dust uncurled into the air.

From space it looked like a vengeance flag.

As was the case with the levers and cranks which they operated, their eyes were bigger than their bodies.

The land was lit high with flames, and through the flames stepped battalions of ghosts. Zombies wielding scythes cut down what scattered teams managed to avoid the onslaught. Before long everything was stripped.

From the other side of the country came skeleton men what detonated upon striking anything. They gradually beat down the grandiose shields of wood. The catapults adjusted their target and moved inward. The whales had disappeared once they got bored.

It took one and one half weeks to dissolve the structure of the tree regime.

The scientists’ war machine hovered across the land, stomping any resistance, with soldiers stalking below. Their shoulders hung low like rapists.

Once they reached the opposite shore they battled with the mad skeletons until their presence was completely destroyed. Nothing could damage their giant death sphere. Eventually their barrage stopped, and the Kings had no safe haven to cross the sea to. They retreated back into the desert to read.

What trees remained were motionless – playing dead.

Clusters of them were silent with compliance. They let their mouths grow over and closed their eyes tight.

The zombies raised their weapons high and shouted. The war was won and they were alive again.

The Pipe Boss of the Zombie Scientists submerged for the last time, allowing his disciples to carry on without him.

“This country’s no place for a mess of pipes,” he said. “I’m going to go after those treacherous whales.”

And he did just that.

Their war matured but never shed its skin.

Bliss Crashtonne, their scribe, was planted in the ground and allowed to live as grand record keeper of their fall and rise. They kept him as living proof, telling their tale to whoever could ask the right questions. Questions like: “What the hell?” and “Have you is?”

He was to be revered and protected under their secret, underground system. Their system as one that their children could never understand. No tale was tall enough to do their fury justice, so it’s just as well.

Bliss Crashtonne is the oldest tree in the world and he knows exactly what happened.

“You can check out but you can never leave.”