The Relentless Drumbeat of the Universe

"T'were a foul deed! Who accomplished the thing?"

H.H. Holmes

The elephantine thump of cosmic order adjudicates sin and justice, crime and punishment, from somewhere beyond, in a place where the all-seeing Eye of a vast, terrible intelligence looks onward, though the void, at the multiform shuffling insects ensconced on a bit of rock, careening through the endless night.

The Narrator, unnamed, but terribly, terribly nervous (how will you say that I am mad?) is unveiled, naked before this unblinking, ominous, staring-at-everything and seeing all, and through all, cosmic orb; the terrible eye that is the singular "I" of the Old Man.

The old man "had never wronged me," she states unequivocally; yet, in the still, ticking, softness and dark hours, when only the susurrations of his heavy breathing, the still drip, drip of stagnant water, and the terrible beating of a heart, can be heard amidst the chewing of the mice in the wainscotting, the Narrator devises the deed that will put human indignation to the test; put gratitude and human feeling to shame.

It was the "milk-blue orb." It watched him, it waited. Why did he live with the old man? Why did he love him? What was the old man to he? Father? Employer? Master, certainly, but now the body had fallen into the decrepitude of advanced age, and the old man vegetated in somnolent reverie.

And still, that exalted beating of the heart continued, the drumbeat of relentless time.

The Narrator feels the weight of the oppression bearing down upon him, carrying his burden like the Ten of Sticks, toward a predisposed end or ruin. This is burdensome oppression--but each of the ten sticks represents a whipping; flogging the guilty, punishment, a reward for petty grievances, a supplication at the temple of the repair of perceived wrongs.

Our Narrator is nameless, faceless; he is a man without history, plucked from the swelling bosom of time, which rocked him coldly upon the waters of grief; damned and lost, like a manuscript found in a bottle, he comes to us with a burdensome message to impart, something to convey.

Shall we listen? Can we even believe what he says. ...

Thump, thump, thump

It is the relentless march of time, yet again. ...In a furious burst he murders the old man--we think by hatchet, but it is so hard to be certain.

As self-confessed American monster the unlamented H.H. Holmes observed, "It were a foul deed! Who is the villain responsible?"

Thump, thump, thump

The grand and inaudible drumbeat plays a pace. He dismembers, our Narrator does, the rancorous old bones, dripping with the crimson ichor of their age; he buries them beneath the floorboards.

Here, they make up the pulsing, death rattle heart of the whole macabre affair, the still-beating drumbeat rattle of the Sacred Heart, that which gives life and energy to the accursed Eye.

(Because the Eye strips bare all pretense, all illusion; it sees through every obfuscation, lays waste to every egoistic conceit, all outward deception; every fraud and trickery, I say, and all calumny and malevolence--all torn from the individuated monad and rendered and cast away into the yawning abyss, so that the unblinking EYE of cosmic justice, that infernal orb of an angry God, can look not AT you, but through you.

And that eye was manifest in the withered visage of the old man, and so Our Narrator drove an axe (or hatchet, or some sharp-bladed instrument of killing) into his pudding-like, toothless maw.

And then buried him beneath the floorboards. He must have taken some little time to wipe up the splashes of blood; the stench of the old man, his bowels loosening and releasing ere his hideous, shocking extirpation, must have been considerable.

And then Our Narrator sat his favorite chair upon the floorboards. ...And crossed his arms, waiting.

Brooding. His mad mind cracking for the laser-like penetrating gaze of the Infernal Eye, the thumping industrialization of his machine-like heart becoming a silent, slow mockery ringing only in his pale, guilty ears. A knock at the door.

Detectives.

Someone in the neighborhood heard a scream. Oh, our Narrator assures them it did not come from this house.

This house is a house of love, piety, pity; guileless, sin-free and not a mockery unto God, and his all-seeing, staring, infernal Eye.

But beneath the floorboards, the drumbeat of time, the spiritual hammer of the gods, bringing justice down on the head of the guilty narrator, beats on. .Again, there is a knock at the door.

Our narrator answers, and the detectives enter.

Sly, subtly mocking he feels.

He stammers. He stutters, trying to explain himself. Behind their eyes, he sees the vulpine hunger of the predator, coming in to claim their quarry. ...

But slowly.

Their faces crack in lines of laughter.

It is the mocking of maniacs, the tittering and jarring guffaws of fools.

The Narrator feels the storm clouds gathering above him.

The mad looks of the faces on the assembled guests.

Suddenly, the eruption from within goads him to rise from his chair, and, flinging it aside madly, he begins to rip up the floorboards.

Revealed, the desiccated corpse of the terrible old man; his mutilated and shrunken form crawling with the catastrophic hungry predators of the earthen crawlspace.

Yet still the milky orb, still the beating heart.

"Villains! — dissemble no more! I admit the deed! — tear up the planks! — here, here! — it is the beating of his hideous heart!"

And still the spectral beat of the universe, that hideous pulse, goes on.

My book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on Poe, Lovecraft< Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread by Tom Baker