Fire the Submarines!

Sir Basil Paprika returns. Did he ever leave? What tangled webs is he spinning in the background of the human psyche? Whatever it is, it leaves a weird taste in my mouth - something like pineapple and cotton candy.

I am a man very much devoted to the practice of keeping up with the news. I am a veritable news hound, constantly updating myself on political, economic, scientific, artistic, and athletic developments in all corners of the globe, to the point that many of my peers consider me either an aesthete, a renaissance man, or an eccentric. Indeed, I consume consuming several different newspapers a day, and though it has had a somewhat adverse effect on my breath, I have learned a great deal about the world in the process. Regardless, I remain unprepared for some of the more bizarre items sometimes encountered in the World Events section. Witness the following:

A civilian painter who twice set fires on a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine last year so that he could get out of work early was sentenced to 17 years in prison on Friday. … [the man], of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, started the first fire on May 23 with a plastic bag filled with rags, igniting a blaze that burned for 12 hours, and caused between $400 million and $500 million in damages and injured five people, prosecutors said.
-Reuters

Hundreds of questions leapt instantly to mind. Was the man mad, or did he just think it was funny? Why was this not on the front page of every newspaper, as it was clearly the awesomest story of the day? Did I already swallow the second half of this article? Was his job really that bad? What was his TRUE motivation? I had to dig deeper. I devoured every item I could find concerning the incident, until I finally discovered a revealing confession from one of the criminal’s closest friends. After I spent the evening recovering from severe ink poisoning, I recorded the man’s speech and immediately sent the manuscript to a publisher. Thankfully it was rejected, which allowed me to self-publish and maintain my journalistic integrity without being forced to adopt anyone else’ style. H.P. Loveboat’s confession is printed in full below.

Regards,

Sir Basil Paprika

The Confession of H.P. Loveboat

Few men now believe the tales I tell, bound as I am with strips of cloth to this mouldy bed in a padded room, but I do not despair, for it allows me to live the life of my mind without further damaging the life of my body, to bethink myself of the ancient and eternal and vaguely squid-like evils that inhabit the darkest depths of the earth and of the minds of men. But now, having found a kind soul willing to transcribe what will no doubt be my final words to the world of modern men, I am compelled by anxious fears to state all I can about my fate, and its relation to the madness of a friend I once held dear. 

He was a lonesome man by nature. The last remaining scion of a once-great New England family, he was an early devotee of arcane wisdom. He read the I Ching at the tender age of 2, and over the next few years eagerly consumed The Diaries of the Mad Arab, the complete works of Aleister Crowley, the poetry of Dionysus, Apellius’ Golden Ass, Madness: A How-To Guide for Those Seeking Ancient Evil, and a biography of David Blaine. He grew so tired of constantly rereading The Necronomicon that he eventually fell to using it as toilet paper. I met him during this dark time, just as he was beginning a new issue of MAD Magazine. I saw him change from a vulnerable young man, concerned only with pooping and spitting on things, into a hardened scholar, willing to stop at nothing in order to find the truth or finish his breaded calamari appetizer. The more he learnt, the more the perverted imagery of his secret sylvan library overtook his life, and he traced its lines with his fingers across every surface he encountered until the mere transitory imprints his fingers left through condensation would not suffice, and he took to the medium of painting to fulfill his desire of stamping the beautiful but dark and haunting images down upon the world with more permanence. His life as a painter was inspiring, and though the owners of the property were often not satisfied with their new garage, he refused to be repressed in his work, and persevered until he got a good job painting submarines, which apparently need painting. 

He was fiercely attracted to the powerful machines that could delve to the deepest depths of the world, and the designs with which he adorned them spoke to the most ancient and vulgar passions of men amidst the indifference of the universe. The sailors for whom he bent his skill to the utmost loved his work for the imagery of malevolence it scrawled across their warcraft, however his excellence did not stem from his desire to please others, but from his obsession. 

Every time I entered his apartment, I noted that the piles of books that surrounded his paintings had grown higher and higher. His reading was voracious, insatiable. The entire floor acted as his own personal library, a library all the more impressive for the fact that it had only one subject – ancient superstitions of monsters and demigods. What brought about his monomania, I cannot say. Perhaps it was a boyhood tragedy that left him in isolation from other children with a stigma attached to his name rooted in the enigmatic supernatural events that surrounded his heritage that he was determined to uncover no matter what he had to sacrifice to evil gods and entities that dwell beyond the veil of human perception and no matter how crazy people thought he was, or perhaps he just got a bit too far into being our party’s Dungeon Master. Regardless, merely opening one of the books, filled as it was with incomprehensible alien script and vile and inhumanly wrought images of dark cruelties and blood-soaked non-Euclidean geometries, nearly drove me mad within a brief second of page-flipping. Concerned, I inquired into the mental health of my deeply obsessed and increasingly paranoid and unpredictable friend. 

“You alright?” I inquired.
“Yeah,” he responded, twitching, “I’m fine.”

Reassured that I had done all I possibly could, I left him for the evening. The next morning, unpredictably, he was locked up in an asylum. The events of the night, such as they are, show to me the enormity of what he had discovered in his research, and why he was so devoted to his work. His intent had always been to use the submarines as lures. The depictions of human sacrifice and insanity that he etched upon the hulls of the craft were not mere fatalistic and morbid obsessions, but bait to draw towards the surface an unspeakable horror. I would try to go to the work of describing it, but conveniently, I cannot speak of it.

That night, one of the boats came back to harbor full of gibbering idiots that had, a mere two hours before, been perfectly rational idiots. The sailors could barely speak a full sentence. Many seemed obsessed with a squid of some sort, others with ancient rituals, and others who were known for being less subtle babbled something sounding like “Cotulou,” or “Cuthaloo,” or “Cutfulhu” or some other similar non-copyright-violating sound. Whatever they were saying, the meaning was abundantly clear to my friend, who had only to look into the eye of one of those poor men stripped of their sanity to know that they had seen something straight from the bowels of hell that had shown them the unrepentant and arbitrary cruelty of the universe towards mankind, and for their glimpse of the true evil that lies hidden at the bottom of the they had he was at fault, and that he had finally allowed his desperate search for knowledge to overcome his love of both himself and his fellow man and that he did not reckon the price would be so high until he was brought face to face with the ancient evil, etc., etc., and it all drove him mad in the end. 

When he had finished setting fire to each and every submarine in the lot that his brush had ever touched, and he sat there panting in the smoke and floating ash, the police who first arrived on the scene thought he looked like he could use a day off, and thus attributed this motive to him when no other reason made itself readily apparent. He went down in history as the man who had caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages simply to get a half-day at work. But he deserves better than this. He deserves the praise and adulation of the entire human race, for his actions were meant to protect us. I have never known for sure what my friend saw when he looked into those sailor’s eyes, but I do know that he saw destruction, rage, vengeance, annihilation, what colour their eyes were, and apocalypse. The path he had hoped to follow as long as he could was certain to lead to damnation at the hands of the same ancient god he sought, and so he abandoned his doomed quest for knowledge in the most effective and probably pretty fun way he could. They now call him mad, but what man can truly say what madness is? Must one instantly be declared mad as soon as one devotes years of their lives to an isolated study of arcane and probably destructive ancient mythology only to abandon it by causing millions of dollars of damage as soon as one realizes that the sacrifices one has been preparing to make for years have come to fruition? Truly, no one could hope to make such a claim. 

The twist? Years later, for unrelated reasons, I too went mad. THE END