An Unfinished Story That I Don't Remember Writing
A fragment of weird religious horror from my archives
Dear Living Dark reader,
Whenever I browse through the bristling papers, pages, files, and archives of my unpublished writings—an activity that comes over me from time to time—I invariably find many things that I have no memory of producing. There are, for example, heaps of notes for stories and essays that once suggested themselves but that I never developed or pursued to completion. There are also many partial drafts, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a few pages, that similarly came to me at some forgotten point in the past and propelled themselves with an internal energy that soon played out and never returned, leaving them stranded in fragmentary form. Reading such fragments is like reading someone else’s words. Who was I when I wrote them? What came over me? What was the original seed idea, and where did I think it might be headed? What did it feel like to be inspired by that particular energy? Why did I write those few words and then abandon them?
I included a great deal of such material in the two volumes of my private journal that were published a few years ago (Journals, Volume 1: 1993–2001 and Journals, Volume 2: 2002–2022). In particular, those books contain scores of seed ideas and partial drafts for what could have become short stories or novellas, or maybe, in one or two cases, an entire novel. For many years my journal was my primary creative repository and outlet, a flow that I kept private even as I entered my career as a published writer. Those story ideas and fragments were part of that flow.
Today, as I was poking around my electronic archives, I found the item below. I literally have no memory of writing it, though by examining the file properties I can see that it’s not something from the dim and distant past but a fairly recent creation: It was written on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 19, 2020. That means I may have written it at work, perhaps while taking a late lunch break from my vice presidential duties at my last college. Between then and now stands a tangled barricade of events, both personal and global, that were dramatic enough to account for my total blankness about this partial piece, including such things as the Covid pandemic and my relocation from Texas to Arkansas during it. I’m sure you understand, because I expect you probably share my feeling of an ongoing time warp that enveloped us all some years ago and still hasn’t let up.
In any event, this morning, as I read through this lost and abandoned draft of what would likely have become a weird or cosmic horror story—written at a time when I hadn’t produced any new fiction for several years, my muse of fiction having gone dormant or perhaps left me for good—I found it not bad, in fact pretty good, and wondered where it might have led if I had taken the time to pursue it. And it occurred to me to share it here with you. Though it’s untitled, I have assigned it a title that seems the obviously appropriate one, based on how the fragment ends.
If you read it and perhaps find that any thoughts suggest themselves to you for where the narrative might have gone after this introductory section, I would love to hear them in the comments.
Warm regards,
Rahmat Ghraam
A fragment of an unfinished story
by Matt Cardin, 2020
For decades I have been practically infected by the power of some words spoken by a man I never met. I literally stumbled across these words in written form while browsing through the stacks of yellowed, fragrant paperbacks piled against the rear wall of the Savior’s Mercy thrift shop.
I used to like to visit the shop during my lunch break, when I was freed for an hour from the prison of my desk at the Hamill-Kreston Life Insurance Agency. The agency office was located a block away from Savior’s Mercy, and those stacks of musty books, some of them literally moldy with age, were my secret haven during those deadly dull days of data entry and policy research. My bosses, Misters Hamill and Kreston themselves, never let me work directly with clients. My desk was shoved against a side wall near the rear of the office, from whence I could hear them flattering, threatening, cajoling, and bantering with people in their separate offices to my right and left, on either side of the main area. I could also watch our receptionist, Layla, interact with the public at her significantly larger and nicer desk near the front of the office, where she was displayed like a department store mannequin to any passersby on the sidewalk outside who bothered to look through the plate glass windows. I often imagined, or rather suspected, that clients and customers never even knew I was there. The only people who ever looked at me were Hamill and Kreston themselves (Layla certainly wasn’t going to), one or the other of whom would emerge from his office at least once a day to stand there in the doorway, scratch his considerable belly, which was barely concealed beneath its taut casing of a white button-up business shirt, and idly warn me to meet my quota. Which I unfailingly did.
It was on one such afternoon, right after Kreston had not only stood there and scratched his belly but offered up an onion-scented belch to confirm his complete disdain for me, that I fled to Savior’s Mercy and nearly fell to the grimy carpeted floor as I was stepping toward a new stack of books to examine an old copy of H. Rider Haggard’s She, which I had long wanted to read, and whose unexpected appearance was a sheer delight. In my excitement, I accidentally put my foot down on the cover of a book that lay separate from the others. It slipped beneath my weight and threw me forward into my intended stack, which promptly transformed itself from a teetering tower into a deluge of dead birds. Crumbling covers and pages cascaded everywhere in a flutter of papery plumage, flopping to the floor like a literal murder of crows. In the ensuing silence, I regained my balance and glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. The shop’s sole employee, or at least the only one I had ever seen, was apparently working in the back room where new donations were received. My dignity was spared. Nevertheless, I restacked the books as best I could, even though some of them (including Haggard’s) were now all but destroyed. Then I turned my eyes down to the floor to discover the nature of the offending volume.
It was a tiny, flat thing that looked to be barely a hundred pages long. It featured a dull brownish cover adorned with dull brownish text and an abstract image in the middle. The fading of age had rendered the contrast between the background and the title so slight that I could barely read the words. I sank to one knee to have a closer look.
As best as I could make it out, the title was The Source and the Receptacle, although it could have been The Sauce and the Respectable. The author appeared to be one Walter Douglas Ingram. The cover illustration, sandwiched between the title and author, consisted of a dull field of rusts, ambers, and russets, all emanating in vague lines like sunbeams from a central point, but muted and melted together to form an ambiguous nest of uncertain vectors and textures. I reached down a hand and stroked my forefinger across the surface. It proved surprisingly smooth; something about the illustration had suggested a kind of rippling or rolling, like waves, or like bunched clusters of cylinders and tubes.
I opened the cover gently, taking care lest the old binding break, and turned to the title page. Although the paper was dramatically yellowed, the title The Source and the Receptacle was confirmed in clearly legible print. Beneath it, the author—or rather, as I learned a moment later, the compiler and editor—was listed as Thomas Herbert Murray. I frowned and took another look at the cover. Although damnably difficult to read in its chromatically flattened context, the name Walter Douglas Ingram still seemed the most likely interpretation of what appeared there.
This, as I was swiftly to learn, was only the first of many peculiarities.
I spent the rest of that lunch hour browsing through this strange book, seated cross-legged on the dirty floor of the thrift shop, nestled among the piles of paperbacks hovering on all sides of me, and it was there that I discovered the words that changed everything. The book proved to be not a single-author volume but an anthology of writings by multiple individuals. Or in some cases they were not writings but what appeared to be direct transcriptions of words spoken to or heard by the editor.
The dominant theme was that of religion and spirituality, accompanied by copious helpings of the occult and esoteric. However, this was undercut by annotations from Ingram that appeared to represent excerpts from his personal journal or diary, and that injected a jarring element of the whimsical, humorous, and sometimes opaquely absurd into the otherwise august tone of the book’s more refined and exalted elements.
Many mystics were present, most of them Western but some of them Eastern. From the Christian tradition, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa of Ávila were heavily represented. Some words from the latter were accompanied by a clumsy attempt at a sketch of Bernini’s famous sculpture depicting the beloved Saint’s ecstasy. The only thing the artist (Ingram/Murray himself?) had gotten even minimally correct was the orgasmic expression on Teresa’s upturned face. The rest was on the level of a child’s drawing.
Of the non-Christian sources, Sankara and Ramakrishna were the chief Hindu presences, while al-Hallaj and Rumi were the chief Muslim ones. There were also quotations from various scriptures—the Old and New Testaments, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching—as well as occult and esoteric texts such as the Corpus Hermeticum and Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine.
Then there were the passages quoted from the works of one Rahmat Ghraam, whose name was unfamiliar to me. Even now, I can see them printed on the pages of that book in my mind’s eye, their content as vivid and precise as on the day I first encountered them. Though I am not possessed of a photographic or eidetic memory, I can still mentally read them word for word and line for line. Upon that first reading, they impressed me—as in, they made an impression, like a stamp or seal on my soul—that has never disappeared.
They also opened a door that has never closed, though I have tried many times to find out how.
The Living Dark is free to all readers. If you find value here, a paid subscription or one-time donation helps sustain the work. Paid subscribers receive access to the full archive plus the quarterly Living Dark Reader, a PDF journal for slow reading and reflection.
The inner work of the creative life:
READER REACTIONS:
“It easily earns its place on my shelf of texts that have challenged and changed how I think about writing and the creative life.”
“What I’m thoroughly enjoying is the way Matt Cardin weaves those deep, existential questions in and out of the practical, grounded realities of writing itself … This is a book that doesn’t just talk about creativity; it inhabits it.”
“Matt has put into words things that have been alive in me for a long time, but which I have never articulated myself.”
“There is potential here to change your life … Cardin’s writing stirred something dormant in me.”
“This is definitely more than a self-help book on creativity. Matt Cardin’s range of scholarship, casual reading, philosophical spelunking and theological scholarship here forms into one single vision…If Colin Wilson and Krishnamurti and ST Joshi had written a tome on the essentials of creativity, it would be something like this.”
“It was incredible finding an author able to describe how to unlock the skills I’ve been working on even further.”
“This book is by far the best book I have read on creativity. I hope it will reach many people and help them freed from creative block, procrastination, paralyzing self-doubt, and perfectionism.”
“This isn’t a how-to book about writing. It’s a book about why writing matters, and what it’s actually touching when it’s real.”
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“[An] intimate journey into the mystery of creativity and spirit… Cardin weaves practical methods, personal stories, literary references, and mystical insights into a lyrical meditation on what it means to create from the depths of the soul… both deeply personal and universally resonant.”
— BookLife review (Publishers Weekly)
“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn, author of Writing the Shadow
“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson, author of On Writer’s Block and The Secret Life of Puppets
“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and co-host of Weird Studies
“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden, author of Seeing No Self