THE EYES THAT NEVER SLEEP

None of these theories was supported by a shred of evidence. I myself am a medical doctor, and so as a man of science, I refrained from idle speculation. When the family turned to me, a long-time friend, for help, I asked to see his journals. I believed that his writings would provide clues to his disappearance.

On my first day as a sleuth, Dalton’s mother handed me something Dalton called My Book of Disquiet. It was discovered posthumously in a trunk in which there were hundreds of papers—notebooks, letters, manifestos, plays. Some typed, some handwritten. Some in Greek, some in Latin and French. All spanning a lifetime.

None of that surprised me, given the initial themes in the Book of Disquiet: tedium, futility, weariness, doubt. But the further I dug, the darker the themes became:

The Great Lie of Western culture is that life is worth living. How that can be when we are ruled by temporal processes that end in hideous decomposition. I submit that if we were to knock on graves and ask the residents would they like to live again the answer would be a resounding ‘No!’.

Dalton’s view that life was more of an affliction than a blessing stemmed from his diagnosis of terminal cancer. Death’s black hand was upon him, and there was nothing modern medicine could do to stave off the inevitable.

I understood only too well his predicament and the philosophy of disenchantment it had engendered. I had been battling colon cancer for some time and was emotionally drained from the regimen of chemotherapy. I often felt weak and listless. My hair was gone, and my stool was more blood than faeces. From where I stood, the future only held a slow, painful, ignominious decline, a wasting away of the robust man I was in my youth, to a withered, feeble, cadaverous old thing in a wheelchair, dependent on others and unsure of what awaited me on the other side.

All I really had left of my once agile mind was an enduring curiosity about the nature of things. So, I continued my research the following day in Dalton’s study. Dalton’s most recent entries spoke of his dealings with a sinister antique dealer who went by the name of Olympia Stephanopoulos. Dalton had purchased many occult books from the woman. His favourite was the ancient tome I Gorgona, or The Gorgon, an obscure text written by Diomedes Siculus. To my knowledge, this was the only translation of the original in existence.

Even before I opened the musty tome, I knew that it was about the three snake-headed sisters whose very gaze could turn men to stone. As an undergraduate, I had read Ovid’s canonical description of the Gorgons as having hideous bearded faces, bulging eyes, puffy cheeks, enormous vibrating tongues, huge boar-like tusks, brazen claws, serpent hair, winged backs, and serpent belts. Monsters pure and simple, things equally at home in either Dante’s Hell or a John Carpenter film.

Diomedes Siculus, however, characterized the Gorgons as women of compelling beauty created to be Protectors of the Earth. In his history which takes place some 8000 years before the rise of Greek civilization, Diomedes describes the Others who sought dominion and control over the earth. The Gorgons were created by the ‘Gods’ to stop the Others and their terrestrial sycophants. Their job was to infiltrate human collaboration cells and assassinate their leaders by turning them to stone. According to the Gorgona, the Gorgons and the other Olympians were all that stood between the earth and the invaders.

The entire volume read like bad pulp fiction leavened with Scientology. So rather than drilling further into the text, I began exploring the ecology it inhabited. Surely, I thought, there must be clues more useful than antediluvian attempts at science fiction.

 Dalton kept the Gorgona atop what he had called a soul pillar. It was an unusual piece of sculpture, to be sure, for it looked as if it had been grown rather than carved from stone. It consisted of four wide-eyed male figures, all of which looked like Dalton if he had been flash frozen. Further, the sculpted human faces that filled its four sides had a lifelike quality to them that went beyond mere sculptural verisimilitude. Although it was to all appearances an inert piece of matter, it vibrated with an energy that made my body tingle and my arm hairs stand on end.

It also bore a curious inscription on all four sides: ‘THE EYES THAT NEVER SLEEP’. It suggested constant surveillance by Dalton at all four points of the compass. That just deepened the mystery.

Regardless, I assumed the pillar was relevant to my investigation. I chipped away bits from the Daltonesque images. I took them to a local lab. On a whim, I took along strands from Dalton’s hairbrush. A week later, the lab reported several oddities. First, the macro-structure was more like coral than stone. Second, the internal composition was organic—but with reverse chirality in the amino acid sequences—something that does not occur naturally on earth. Third, at the molecular level, there were hints of faces within faces within faces, a fleshy fractal geometry, mysterious and otherworldly. Finally, the overall fidelity of Dalton’s likeness to the man was no feat of sculptural legerdemain, but rather the remains of the man himself.

This really stoked my interest. I had begun as a Phillip Marlowe gumshoe, but now found myself moving into deeper existential waters where only the true scientist or mystic ought to swim.

 In retrospect, I should have immediately notified the authorities. But I was too stubborn to allow anyone but myself to solve the mystery and take the credit for doing so. Little did I know that I was working my way toward monstrous and unguessable horrors. Those things that even the darkness feared.

I turned Dalton’s study upside down looking for clues. I eventually found a blueprint of the estate. To my amazement, it revealed a multi-levelled architectural monstrosity with dozens of passages leading down to an enormous central chamber from which radiated even more passages like spokes on a wheel. It reminded me of the mega-dungeons I had traversed as a dewy-eyed undergraduate playing various roles in the iconic game of Dungeons and Dragons. Although I did not expect to encounter eldritch forces or some radical reinterpretation of the laws of nature, I knew once I entered, the world I knew would be in my rear-view mirror.

I left for the day fully intending to return the next with proper tools of subterranean discovery, from lights to spades, and a precautionary firearm. When I returned, I found my way to the basement proper, itself a rather breath-taking expanse of finished space that included a bar, gymnasium, and pool.

Once there I searched for the sub-basement door. I found an elevator of the sort used by shipping departments in industry. It had a one down and one up button book-ended by open and close buttons. I held my breath and pushed down.

Although the blueprint’s rendering of depth and length markers had faded, I did not expect to travel far. But after a few minutes of downward motion, I realized that the elevator shaft had to be hundreds of feet long.
When the elevator stopped and the door opened, I was faced a large arch leading down a tunnel. Etched along the arch were the words HALL OF RETRIBUTION. I took that to mean something bone-chilling awaited me at the end of the conduit. But how bad could it be, I asked myself. The normal laws of reality—gravity for example—were still in play. There was no bending of light, no warping of time, and Euclid’s geometry seemed intact. Thus, battalions of monsters and the undead seemed unlikely inhabitants of whatever ecology existed.

But I was not oblivious to the fact there remains a hiddenness to the world, one that cannot be mathematized or described. We sloppily call it supernatural, when it is in fact wholly natural but far outside the realm of human comprehension, the way all too real X-rays lay beyond human visual perception.

I pressed forward. The tunnel itself was half as wide as one used for a subway. Its construction was most curious since it had not been dug nor drilled. Rather, some intense heat had cleanly smoothed the surface into an igneous sheen. The sort of atomic glass work one might expect from an unfathomably hot fire equal to that in the sun’s corona, focused and directed by a meta-engineer.

A bit further, I came to lines of sculptured figures cast from the same material as the soul pillar in Dalton’s study. Only these were not blissful, composed faces, but ones contorted by agonizing grimaces and tortured, unnatural poses, poses that defied the rules of human anatomy. It was as if something had turned a human body to soft putty or clay, and then in a fit of perversity twisted it into otherwise physically impossible stances.

The first ones that I saw consisted of three intersecting bodies with two as acting as pillars and the third running through them as a crossbeam. Others were solitary figures where feet were jammed into mouths, and mouths into anuses. Arms ran through stomachs and out through backs, and vice versa. In some instances, arms served as legs and legs served as arms. Some held their own heads.

Bizarre as that may seem, the most startling feature was their uncanny resemblance to various captains of industry. And not mere capitalists, but those known for their full-throated enmity to environmental regulation and human rights. A veritable Who’s Who of former naysayers and climate change deniers that had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. I wondered if Dalton had become a homicidal serial vigilante. An extreme turn from his subdued opposition to industrial pollution.

I counted fifty sculptures. Or should I say potential sculptures since I believed them all to be the result of some grotesque chemistry whereby the human body had been transformed from flesh and blood to something akin to coral.

I again took samples and had them tested. All belonged to someone who had once gone on two legs and called itself a man, but now would be equally at home sunk in the Great Barrier Reef.

 The more I pondered the matter the more I became convinced that I needed professional guidance. At this juncture, a criminal investigation without an actual crime would just muddy the waters. So, I visited my friend, Phyllis Steele, who is a professor of religious studies at Princeton, and asked her what, if anything, she knew of the I Gorgonia and Soul Pillars.

 She said:

 ‘According to an obscure Bronze Age myth, the departed souls of Zeus’ loyal human followers would be grafted into their sculpted faces already on the pillars. They would then act as watchdogs of the cosmos, alerting Zeus and the other Olympians of any potential threats. Their shibboleth was “THE EYES THAT NEVER SLEEP”.

‘That idea was replaced by the more popular myths we know from Bullfinch’s Mythology.

‘As for the Gorgonia, I had never heard of it until today. Coincidentally, you are the second person today asking questions about it. An Olympia Stephanopoulos was just in my office asking if a copy had been recently donated to the university. She said hers had come up missing.’

She gazed out her window.

Then she said, ‘You’re in luck. That’s her sitting on that bench in the Quad.’

I dashed out the door, but before I could reach her, she walked to a van. The door slid open, she jumped in, and the van drove away.

I followed.

I had not gone far when a car passed then pulled in front of me. A Middle Eastern man emerged with three very short-hooded figures. He ordered me out of my car and into his.

He drove us to Red Bank. We stopped in front of an import export business called Anu Shipping. He ordered me out of his car and into the building. Once inside, we made our way up a stairwell to the sound of the voices. We came to a large metal door with a small glass window at eye level.

 Before I entered, I looked through it. There were six people with their heads across chopping blocks and six hooded figures holding axes behind them. An unshrouded man was nearby dressed in hieratic attire. The high mucky-muck of whatever bizarre ceremony was about to take place.

As we entered the room, the soon to be beheaded joked and laughed as if they were at a high school reunion. There was an ease and camaraderie among them despite the macabre circumstances.

The proceeding stopped when my captor suddenly turned and looked me square in the eye. I was mesmerized by his gaze and under his total mental domination as he telepathically ordered me to step forward. He spoke to me with his mind.

Where is the Gorgonia? I must have it to complete this ritual. I think you know where it is.

Since I did not want to be added to what was sure to be a pile of heads, and since his mind power was splitting my head in two, I told him.

‘I hid it in my backyard. I can take you there.’

‘Not necessary, for even now I can see it is beneath your gazebo. You are an unsanctified outsider, and most assuredly in the camp of the Gorgo whether you know it or not. Thus, while I am loath to use you in our beheading ritual, you cannot be permitted to leave. Once free you would most certainly report us.’

At first, I thought they would behead me, but that thought was fleeting and soon lost as they dragged me toward a large ceremonial bowl filled with a percolating green slime. It exuded a mist that burned my eyes and throat, an exhalation from hell itself.

Everyone save me began calling the name Lamashtu:

Mighty Lamashtu, daughter of Anu, Lamashtu, the misshapen and malformed, Lamashtu, slayer of children, drinker of blood, eater of man, today we sacrifice to you an interloper who has defiled our sacred ritual. Come now and slake your thirst upon this heathen.

No sooner had he made that incantation than something enormous leaped out of the slime and perched on the rim of the ceremonial bowl. Its eagle talons gripped the rim so hard the stone crumbled. Green slime dripped from its hairy body. It had the head of a lion, the teeth and ears of a donkey, and it was very, very angry.
 
I was no more than four feet away from the great bowl when I spotted its ladle, a large wooden spoon of sorts, cut and carved from thick forest timber. I shook free of my handlers, grabbed the ladle and began swinging at the hooded heads. Once hit, they dropped like bags of dirt.
 
Lamashtu grabbed at me with her claws. I batted them away and battered her forelegs to keep her at bay. The hooded ones tried to surround me. Rather than swinging at them, I ran toward the Semite and cracked his skull. He dropped. When he did, the hooded things dissipated in an ashy mist.
 
Likewise, Lamashtu slunk back into her fetid, slimy womb, leaving me the only thing standing. The sacrificial victims began moaning and wailing. They rose up and came at me. I bashed in the head of one and the others retreated to a corner, looking like so many wounded animals.

What had begun as a quest to sate my curiosity had ended—or so I thought at the moment—in a desperate attempt not to be eaten by a monster or beaten by feeble disgruntled zealots.

As I climbed down the stairs, I tried to put the whole thing behind me. I wondered if I should report Lao and his little death cult to the police. Yet, if I have learned anything in life it’s that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and marked by hungry monsters. Better to silently slink away than involve myself any further or wind-up in the bughouse ranting about mythical beings, Greek and Sumerian.

But there would be no unceremonious slinking. The Semite and his monster had been stunned not killed. For a moment later, I heard the shriek of that hell bird and the clump of many feet coming my way. It seemed that one of the Semite’s many tricks was the power to resurrect and multiply his army of axe-wielding dwarves.

I had left the timber ladle upstairs. And as I ran into the alley, I could see nothing that would serve as a dagger or cudgel or sword. Nor was there anyone in sight who might render help should I cry for it. So, I just kept running for my life.

Then I stopped and I turned to see the nature and quality of my pursuers. From the evidence, it was clear the proverbial jig was up: The Semite and his army of decapitating dwarves poured out of the warehouse door as if they were exiting a clown car in some Theatre of the Grotesque. Lamashtu, presumably too large for the door, and given to obliterating the fragile works of man, exploded from the warehouse, sending the metal door shooting across the alley like a ballistic missile and taking the wall on either side of it with it. A living weapon that any army in the world would sell its very soul to recruit.
 
I ran as fast as I could but Lamashtu’s steady wingbeat, soft at first, got louder and louder, like airborne tom-toms pounding out the formidable battle rhythms of an unstoppable foe.

I wondered if she would eat me, and how. Alive, or roasted on a spit having rotated for hours above a bright orange flame.

Whatever her ultimate intent, she caught up to me and sunk her talons into my shoulders and raised me into the sky, screeching and cawing as she flew in a great circle above Lao and his minions. I assumed she meant to drop me on my head and let my brains explode on the pavement.

Although the Semite kept yelling for her to bring me down, she flew victory laps like I was a prize. More than that, she would, as I have seen raptors do with rabbits, drop me only to swoop back in and catch me with her talons. I was in horrific pain from the penetrating claws and my own bodyweight pulling down on them. I would have welcomed a quick drop on my head.

When she finally landed, the dwarves began extracting my shattered body from her claws.

‘Kill me now. I beg you, kill me now.’

Lao said, ‘I think not. I haven’t fed Lamashtu for a day or so. You’ll do nicely as the main course at a banquet in her honour. She wants to devour you alive, of course. Fresh meat still squirming is so much better than a dead thing with all its vitality gone.’

I lay there looking up into Lamashtu’s leonine face. She swung her massive paw with enough force to take my head clean off but missed my it by inches. She hissed and roared.

The Semite smiled, ‘Now now, my dear. There’ll be time enough for that. Our little friend here must be sanctified before you can make a meal of him. Daddy’s orders. I should never have offered him to you without first performing the sacred rituals. But don’t worry, you’ll get to eat him, body and soul, nourishment to maintain your incarnation on the earthly plane to do Anu’s will.’

They carried me back to their make-shift industrial slaughterhouse and temple. The Semite—I still didn’t know his name—tended to my wounds so I would not die prematurely. And he gave me something for the pain. Then they bathed me, taking care to anoint me afterwards, and then emblazon me with all manner of runic symbols up and down my body. Sumerian cultists take their work seriously, right down to the type of ink for each symbol and how it is inscribed.

The pain medication worked like a charm, it calmed to such a point that I felt a grudging admiration for the Sumerian attention to religious detail. I started talking to the Semite as if we were old school chums.

‘Look here, before your date eats me, how about telling me what’s so important about the I Gorgonia.’

He said in a matter of fact way: ‘The Gorgonia is important because it is a palimpsest. Beneath the mundane history of the Gorgons lies a second text—the key to their physiology. The Gorgons are functional immortals created by Zeus to prevent this world from being transformed into something more suitable for Lamashtu and her kind. She can only tolerate brief visits here. That is why she lies dormant in that foetid pool of acid and hydrogen sulphide over there. By contrast, the Gorgons were created to adapt to any environments for the express purpose of seeing that this one remains unchanged. To that end, they murder our familiars, specifically those in industry that are helping us transform this world into one hostile to man, but friendly to my friend in the vat.’

I asked, ‘So the sculptures I have seen were not sculptures at all, but men turned to stone by the hideousness of the Gorgon’s face?’

He smiled, ‘No. The sisters—Medusa, Stheno and Euryale—are rather fetching. Superlative beauties in every sense of the word. There are no snakes. But their long flowing tresses have been genetically altered to obey mental commands and, when so directed, bind together into coils, at the bottom of which are venom sacks. The venom is sprayed into the face of the intended victim.’

‘Forgive me. Venom may be the wrong word. Really, it’s a bacterial pathogen known in Latin as lapis facit sylphs. The sylphs use the metabolic energy supplied by the body to produce a calcium obdurate, a kind of super limestone, far denser and smoother than coral. The sylphs multiply rapidly through the body until it is entirely crystallized. Of course, the process is terribly painful. Hence, the victims are often found with tortured faces and contorted bodies. Sometimes the Gorgons tinker with them to make artistic statements.’

I said, ‘I know. I have seen their work. And it ain’t pretty. But how are they able to manipulate stone like that?’

‘The Gorgons have mental control over the process. They can stop and start it at will, alter the consistency of the victim’s body from solid to a workable protoplasm. It’s very clever. Sad that Zeus and his wards are at loggerheads with us.’

I said, ‘I don’t get the whole mythology on the one hand and sophisticated genetic engineering on the other.’

He said, ‘When both parties came from the stars, they found it easier to get the locals to follow behind them by acting like deities. Superior technology will always seem like magic to primitive kinds. There’s other way to do things. Primitives who are still grappling with technology like fire, the wheel, and agriculture are not cognitively equipped to understand genetic engineering, star drives, interplanetary travel, and cosmic mercantilism. So, everything gets reduced to good versus evil overlain with ceremony and mumbo jumbo.’

As he explained things, I liked him even more. Unfortunately, our male bonding was cut short when Medusa and her two sisters charged in, hair a-blazing. He screamed bloody murder when they shot him in the face with their venom. His pain was such that he began to jerk and writhe in what could almost be called a dance of death. He lurched and stumbled back and forth across the room. With their axes held high and their faces covered, Lao’s diminutive confederates ran toward the three sisters. A charge of the Light Brigade, only shorter with fewer numbers and no horses.

But the Gorgons were unimpressed with their lilliputian bravado. In addition to their petrifying hair venom, the Gorgons were endued with acid vomit. It shot from their preternaturally expanded mouths in a torrent of blue and instantaneously vaporized the combative dwarves.

Lamashtu, roused from her slumber, by all the ruckus, jumped out of the vat and glared menacingly at the sisters. Before she could leap, the sisters turned their petrifying hair venom on her. As the venom spread across and through her, she began the tragic reprisal of the Semite’s terminal dance. She stumbled, tried to fly, only to bounce off the ceiling and walls.

In the meantime, the Gorgons picked me up and carried me out of the room. They got me down the stairs and out the door. A moment later, Lamashtu crashed through a retaining wall. Since she was half stone and half whatever Sumerian demons are made of, she splintered into rocky chunks and bloody green bits of monster flesh and bone.

The Gorgons loaded me into an Escalade. Instead of taking me to the hospital, they drove me to the woods. After the Escalade stopped, the back door opened, and a grinning satyr peeked inside.

‘Can you help him, Pan?’

‘Yes, my nymphs have just the right combination of potions and herbs to heal and refresh him. We can do it right here.’

And so they did.

I kept my mouth shut the whole time. Probably because I was in awe of the nymphs every bit as beautiful and pure as the Gorgons. When they finished, Medusa popped her head in and smiled.

‘Anything you want to ask me, killer?’

‘Now that you mention it. Where are you from?’

‘Proxima Centauri. It’s four light years as the crow flies. Great place to live, but not nearly as good as it is here. We’re trying to keep you from making the same mistakes we did thousands of your years ago. It’s tough because you humans are so stubborn. But one day you’ll get it right as long as we can keep those meddling Others off your back.’

‘Where are they from?’

‘You humans call it Cygnus—bad neighbourhood.’

‘Now what?’

‘We go our way, and you go yours.’

‘What ever happened to Dalton? He’s why I got mixed up in all this in the first place.’

‘He’s in Greece. He called his family a few days ago to let them know he’s okay. I would therefore ask you to stay off his property, especially the Hall of Retribution.’

I asked, ‘If his faces are in the soul pillar, then will he be your cosmic watchdog?’

She said, ‘Not at the moment. He still has work to do on the earthly plane, and we’ve seen to it that his body has healed. But when he finally passes on, then yes, his soul will be grafted to the pillar. Immortality. Pretty sweet deal for a human.’

‘And me. I am on Death’s doorstep.’

‘Not anymore. Pan’s balms should have corrected that. We’ll be in touch down the road, and we can go from there.’

After that exchange, they brought me home. That same day, I listened to the messages on my voice mail from both Dalton and his family.

Doubtless, you are wondering how I knew which one was Medusa. Simple. When she first entered that Sumerian slaughterhouse, she spoke to my mind the way Lao had done earlier.

I want to write about my experiences as much for the attention as to warn people about the Sumerian menace. However, I suspect that the best thing is for me to keep my mouth shut and let the Greek pantheon, real not mythical, handle them. I barely escaped, so calling attention to myself would not be wise.

I suppose I should be thankful that I got to peek behind the curtain of reality and see what’s really taking place. I and Dalton are the only two humans on earth that know there is extraterrestrial life nearby and it’s watching out for us. That E.T. is not some grey-headed big-eyed alien, but, in some cases, much like us in looks and temperament. Most importantly, we both know that the Greeks and Sumerians weren’t just blowing smoke. Their myths are not myths at all, but misinterpretations of real things, consequential things that concern the long-term fate of humanity. Not even Galileo or Einstein knew that.