Builders of the New Babel

By Stuart Hopen

An insidious battle rages for the post of High Priest of the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss. As the Archons work to replace their dying leader, they hide behind a new threat to humanity. In dealing with the ordeals of reordering their order, the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss always demand to be the only ones who will ever give the orders! Babel rises again from the pits of its ruined foundations, raining devastation and confusion upon long suffering humanity! As in the ancient days, an unnameable force infects the tongue and afflicts the ear. How can the Twilight Patrol possibly defeat an unnameable force that attacks the very meaning of meaning? Could this actually be their very last adventure?
Also: An Outstanding Short Story — "The Fountain Red" by Stuart Hopen

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bold Venture Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463581681

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The Twilight Patrol

#7: Builders of the New Babel

Stuart Hopen

Bold Venture Press

Copyright

The City Annihilator © Copyright 2018 by Stuart Hopen. All rights reserved.

October 2018 | eBook and Paperback edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the publisher and copyright holder. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities between actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, please purchase your own copy.

Bold Venture Press, Sunrise, FL

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www.boldventurepress.com

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

What Has Gone Before

Builders of the New Babel

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

The Fountain Red by Stuart Hopen

The Editor’s Cockpit

About The Twilight Patrol

About the Author

About Bold Venture Press

For Gina

Introduction

The Twilight Patrol — Rare Pulp Magazine Treasure or Outrageous Hoax?

The Twilight Patrol is considered the rarest and most obscure of the Depression era pulps. The title, previously all but unknown, came to national attention recently, when the only existing copies of all seven issues fetched the astonishing price of $50,000 in a private auction. The magazines date back to 1935, but look as if printed yesterday. The pulps were sold in protective plastic sealed bags that can never be opened without risking damage to the absolutely pristine condition. Though a badge of authenticity completed the package, they still give off an aura of unreality, like objects snatched from dreams.

I first learned of the series back in the 1970’s, when I read an article in a mimeograph and photocopy pulp fanzine with a literary bent called Brow-Beaten to a Bloody Pulp. According to the article: "Very few people have read any portion of the Twilight Patrol stories. Nobody living has read the whole thing. It is surely not for everybody’s tastes—but the series has admirers among those patient seekers who are willing to hunt among the darkest and dustiest of literature’s most obscure and esoteric cellars. Those who believe it to be genuine have called it the greatest of the old pulps, combining elements from the best of its contemporaries.

The fanzine contained a number of black and white cover reproductions, and some of the pen and ink interior art. A few plot summaries and excerpts accompanied the text.

The author was quoted as saying, These may seem like harmless pulp adventure stories, but they are parables about the conflict between science and spirit — and the way to deal with both as equally important. It is a mythology about the nature of truth and reality. It doesn’t matter that no one is reading my work. I’m not writing for this age. I’m writing for decades hence, when the meaning and message will assume a different kind of significance. The works need to be made available because they are masterpieces. But they are the species of masterpiece that no one wants to read, and no one ever reads them but me.

I was struck by the intensity of the creator’s dedication, his commitment to his artistic vision— even if he was only buying into a myth that all neglected writers invoke in order to keep themselves going, a dreamy delusion of immortality shared by many on their way to literary cremation.

I recall, very vividly, sensing a kind of magic at work, some kind of potent, forgotten and half forbidden aesthetic. It was darker, and even more subversive than comic books that had already seized my youthful imagination—a magic not diluted by the prudish and prissy Authority of the Comics Code.

It seemed sadly ironic the series was finally gaining some measure of fame because of its exorbitant sale price, owing to its extreme rarity, which owed to the fact that no one ever read it.

There was also a mystery at play here, in addition to the sad, almost mystical irony, but in order to understand it, one would have to break the seal that has entombed the seven issues of The Twilight Patrol and read their contents, thereby destroying the very quality that makes them so precious in monetary terms.

I started my own search for copies of The Twilight Patrol. It hasn’t been easy. Whole original copies are nowhere to be found. I worked to slowly accumulate whatever crumbling fragments I could find of old issues of the magazine, all of which were in far too poor a condition to have any value, except — as the antique dealers ironically put it — for reading. I’ve been forced to supplement these fragments with pages from rare old paperback reprints from the 60’s, and bits and pieces from questionable and illegal pirated editions.

As more and more of portions of the magazines came into my hands, I was amazed to find they seemed perfectly tailored for my unique and demanding literary tastes. They were rich in invocations of the folkloric and mythic elements of the depression era pulps, forming the bedrock of our cultural collective subconscious.

I found myself swept up in a fantasy of an epic fantasy, something straight out of H.P. Lovecraft — as if I were chasing the Necronomicon of pulp magazines. The Twilight Patrol pulled me into its dream — I followed the dream, to see what it might reveal.

The work brought me to the outermost boundaries of unreality — arriving at a point of pure imagination, and then it led me back to my own life, showing me reality in ways I’d never seen it before. It was as if someone had designed a Tarot or I-Ching tailored to my peculiar sensibilities, and it revealed a kind of truth that was naked in its fraudulence.

The most remarkable coincidence of all occurred when I discovered enough pages from The Twilight Patrol to learn the series had been penned and illustrated by someone named Stuart Hopen. People might think this is my handiwork, but I hadn’t even been born when the magazine was published. According to the old fanzine, Stuart Hopen, though not named in the article, was merely a pseudonym, a house name, in keeping with the prevailing custom of most pulp publishers, so they could easily replace any author with the fans being none the wiser."

I have not been able to learn anything about the real author of the work—for that mystery has proven as elusive as trying to learn the nature of the true self.

I know it sounds like a satire of a post-modern cliché — a writer pursuing the work of a writer with his own name who isn’t himself, praising the work as if it were not his own to lend an objective air to what would otherwise be self-indulgent hype—especially in a plot that sounds uncomfortably like the antics of someone intent on fooling others, but is only fooling himself.

Beneath its pulpy surface, The Twilight Patrol is an extended parable about the nature of the conflict between science and spirit, a mythology about the nature of truth. It is something very much needed as we enter an age that is becoming increasingly post-physical, and in which the interface of idea and matter is increasingly uncertain.

America wasn’t ready for this message in 1935. Perhaps that’s why copies of The Twilight Patrol vanished from newsstands back in its day. Perhaps its distribution was also sabotaged by rival publishers. The editors of The Twilight Patrol often complained that their financial luck was so ill, it seemed they were the victims of the malevolent conspirators portrayed in their very pages — the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss.

Or perhaps the original magazines have become so extraordinarily rare and obscure because they didn’t exist at all.

— Stuart Hopen, 2017

What Has Gone Before

Captain Hollister Congrieve is a scrappy orphan who became one of the most feared aces of the Great War, a patriot ever alert for trouble.

Trouble has found Congrieve, in spades, in the form of Cassiopeia Peyotrovna Lampreyv, the deposed queen of a hidden Carpathian kingdom. She is gifted with a preternatural skill for handling planes and men. A rare form of hemophilia turned the whites of her eyes to blood red and left her with a constant need for blood transfusions. The queen has beguiled Congrieve to join her fight against the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss, a secret society of sorcerers conjuring true magic by destroying beautiful things.

Congrieve and the queen are accompanied by Captain Orville Wootin — Congrieve’s closest friend. A mad genius, brilliant airman, spymaster, poet and philosopher, who never fails to deliver the goods — except when he’s out of his mind; Peyotr Lampreyv — Cassiopeia’s fourteen-year-old son, afflicted by the same genetic disorder as his mother; Chaim Ben-Zimra — The queen’s private physician, a rabbi, a cabbalist and mystic with a preternatural understanding of the dark forces threatening our mortal realm; Lael — A shapeshifter, spy, and assassin, she is beautiful and mysterious, part of a strange union of agents known only by their purple eyes. She is never who (or what) she seems.

In previous issues, much to his mother’s dismay, Prince Peyotr has been abducted by his true father, Count Alexander Bulousov, a powerful wizard and high-ranking archon in the order of the Mysteriarchs. Cassiopeia vowed to get her son back. She also has vowed revenge upon Wootin and Congrieve for depriving her of world domination, keeping her from gaining exclusive possession of Ttii, the world’s most potent narcotic, which she had wrested from the horrific science cult known as The Pact.

Builders of the New Babel

A mighty modern luxury train enshrines a jeweled miniature of a wretched and ghastly history. During every second of merciless time, from dawn to night’s deepest blindness, a grim figure prowls the rocking compartments. With a dagger drawn, he peers about warily. He is a priest and murderer, and the man for whom he looks will sooner or later murder him, and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such is the rule of this dismal sanctuary. To become the priest, one must slay the priest, and hold the office until slain by one stronger or more cunning. The post held by this precarious tenure carries with it the prerogatives of the king of Damnation, and surely no crowned head ever reigned in such a Hell of nightmares. The train becomes a rolling abattoir as it snakes its way across the country, ready to ascend the resurgent Tower of Babel. At last, the Twilight Patrol has a unique opportunity to wipe out the entire leadership of the unholy order while they are gathered in a single place. But they dare not strike. Not yet!

CHAPTER ONE:

The Tenth Sense

September 15, 1918

What price must a mad poet pilot pay before the world made sense?

In the months since Orville Wootin had gone absent, while he was fighting distant battles on the floating islands of the Pact, a new insidious threat was spreading chaos and confusion throughout the land.

A plague of inexplicable, fantastically huge explosions wracked the European continent. In the wake of sudden devastation that tore cities apart, all lines of communication were thoroughly compromised. It wasn’t simply that wires had been cut. Something far more profound was underway. Human interchange had been traumatized at a primal level, as if the forces that had pancaked skylines had distorted basic linguistic neural pathways in the survivors. People became afraid to talk about things that really mattered, even to their bartenders. They took conversational refuge in the superficial.

Wootin’s spies— and all other spies— were being spied upon. Secrecy ceased. The world became a glass house with diaries on naked display.

This was the quality of life in the terrible days near the end of the Great War. Stripped of cloaks and curtains, the business of government and the military ground to a halt, and the constant chatter of coded message fell to dreadful silence. But the business of government and the military could not remain stalled for very long. It cranked up again, offering up blatant fabrication and mendacity as a modest cover for the onslaught of revealed secrets that no one was prepared to handle. Every report was being contradicted in a thunder of informational noise. There were so many conflicted meanings, the entire population fell into paralyzed agnosticism. No one believed anyone else anymore. No one knew what to believe.

Orville Wootin had received astounding, but thoroughly preposterous, reports that parties unknow were rebuilding the legendary Tower of Babel. The first reports seemed to be speaking metaphorically. Then new informants insisted they were reporting absolute facts— literal facts, though these reports were followed by protests, rebuttals and disclaimers in many different tongues. One had to consider the circumstantial evidence: destruction falling from impossible heights, the sense of being under constant observation from those heights—even the confounding nature of the conflicting reports. All of these factors bolstered the claims of the literalists. And yet it was the nature of fantastic stories to get out of hand. Perhaps the reports only seemed real because they were based on an ancient myth that still resonated deeply in the soul of the West.

What price must a mad poet pilot pay before the world made sense?

Everything, thought Wootin, he must pay with everything he’s got.

***

Thunderheads had smeared the moon and stars, making the night dismally black. Orville Wootin drove his Spad through the stifling air over the Democratic Republic of Georgia, the borderland between the occident and the orient, trying desperately to puzzle through the bewildering reports he’d been getting from two of his most trusted agents.

A dazzling lightning bolt flashed across the Georgian sky, striking and brilliantly displaying the tower that should not have been there. The edifice stretched far above the heights of the tallest skyscrapers. In the spectral afterglow of the glaring light, the tower’s upper portions were indistinct, a bare hint of a hazy presence, a trick of the eye, a suggestion of a metal frame and light-weight latticework, like a scoured-out etching half-erased from the upper reaches of the atmosphere. As Wootin drew closer, it was becoming very real. Up close, it was the realest thing he’d ever seen.

Solid portions of the tower were encased in reinforced concrete walls rising to 5,000 feet above a circular base100 miles in diameter. Delicate bridgework extended beyond that, reaching ever higher, practically invisible as gossamer in the stratosphere— a tracery upon the ether. Bare frames and skeletal scaffolding stretched upward, at least 33,000 feet, building higher, the shapes twisting as they rose, like a cyclone of girders and braces. The top levels seemed fragile, to all appearances ready to fall apart, yet they supported gigantic telescopes that spread outward in the thin air.

The telescopes. Omniscient eyes to probe the shadows. To watch everyone. Everywhere.

On every story, there were mammoth cannons and racks of huge shells. There were even weighty cannons on the half constructed, seemingly fragile, upper tiers. And this explained yet another mystery.

Bombardments from these 420-millimeter monster guns had landed as far away as France, England, and Spain, producing the mysterious explosions. The projectiles were hitting their targets with amplified explosive power due to the great height from which they fell.

This was the warning Wootin’s agents had been trying to sound—a new menace concocted by the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss. An Olympian fortress from which they could hurl thunderbolts and monitor the suffering of their victims.

The omniscient telescopes…

Eyes I serve I swear

Eyes wear everywhere I serve

Every Eyes where

Swear I

Yes wear

Ywhere

Very here

Eary where

Weary here

Eyes serve

Eyeseverywhere.

The world starting to make sense? This new insight. This new information. The more information one got, the more it was supposed to make sense… for the accumulation of knowledge was an escalating process, vertically linear, leading to complete and coherent understanding—or so held the most optimistic views. As one got more information, the more the world would make sense… unless… unless you went beyond the saturation point. What price…?

Two screaming figures tumbled head-first from the scaffolding. A clear intuition told Wootin they were his agents falling to their doom. The moment the bolt hit the tower was intensely odd, and its aftermath brought one of those transitory flashes of insight that made it feel as if there were ten senses at work— enough senses for two people.

In a sense,

it was its innocence of sense

that made the tower so true,

that made it make sense,

as senseless

as that might sound.

It explained all

of the mysteries

It explained all of the mysteries that had been confounding Wootin since he’d returned from the floating islands. It was real, of course. It was actually, positively, literally real. It was real as Hell. It was a signal that a profound reorientation was about to take place in the order of things.

The shadow of the tower rolled all the way to the horizon, and was spreading its darkness over the rest of the world.

Another monstrous threat to civilization! Hadn’t he just disposed of one? And the one before that. And the one before that. The ravenous flies. The disintegrating blight. The apocalyptic dragon. The cities of annihilation. The malignant pact. It was starting to get monotonous, all this monstrousness. But that seemed to be the way this universe was constructed. The monstrous insurmountable problems would never end.

In a sense, Wootin was partly responsible for this new abomination. He and Hollister Congrieve had caused the collapse of the powerful medical science sect known as the Pact. And the Pact held the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss in check. Freed of the torments and suppressions of the Pact, the Mysteriarchs of the Abyss had devoted their considerable energies to producing this… this… thing.

Wootin understood the forces that were at work here, and what had happened to this part of the world while he was off in the Far East. Wootin wasn’t what you’d call a believer, but he knew his Bible and he recognized the structure for what it was. An old story about the price of perfection and measures needed to attain it. Everyone knew how the story was going to end. The builders were getting closer and closer to having a perfect picture of what was really going on—someone’s idea of Heaven or Olympus or whatever label you want to place on having all the answers—and the unfolding revelations were already proving to be too much to handle. It was confounding their tongues.

The biblical implications increased Wootin’s sense of dread. A very old story, indeed, and Wootin wished he could run away from it. But the thing was so tall, so immensely vast, there was no away to run to.

How could he possibly mount a fight against this thing he had helped to bring about? He had bombs, a few bombs, and some sticks of dynamite. Maybe he could blast the tower at some precious, critical juncture—a keystone pivot point—that would bring the whole thing tumbling down. Perhaps this colossal, absurd, impossibly huge structure might yield if someone simply dared to oppose it. It was a vain wish. A nightmare of hopelessness masquerading as hope.

Wootin flew higher and higher. He checked his gages, with their moonlit faces of glass. Rising to the heights of the impossibly real tower made impossible demands on his plane.

Ten scents

made him

the essence of tense.

Burning air.

brimstone.

Oil heating. Gas vapors.

Ozone. Bile. Emptiness.

Unbreathable wind. Pouring sweat.

His own terror.

Ten scents.

He searched among the arches and braces—all the structural complexity, all the steel-enforced redundancies, the welded cross-supports. He had bombs, and maybe ten cents