INHUMATIONS

I. The Volume in Question, an Introduction

This is a story about a book.

More precisely, it is an account of the only known copy of a book called Inhumations, written by the mysterious recluse Victor Kraken and published in 1971 by the now-defunct Cylinder Press of New Orleans, Louisiana. We will discuss the myriad qualities of this volume, physical attributes as well as contents, but by far its most important characteristic is that it possesses the singular virtue of being indestructible—a fact for which we should all be grateful, as it has been the grim fate of Dr. Kraken’s masterpiece to fall repeatedly into the hands of the most incompetent, arrogant, vulgar, selfish, obtuse, shallow, irresponsible, dishonest, crass, ignorant, asinine, slovenly, puerile, braying, idiotic, cowardly, backward, lazy, oafish, filthy, slobbering, myopic, obscene, destructive, malevolent, chicken-hearted bibliographic custodians in the long history of the human race.

II. Of the Volume’s Origins, Matter, Nature, &c.

Victor Kraken was the world’s foremost authority on death. He claimed as his purview not only the event itself but also the innumerable mysteries surrounding it. He studied with avid zeal every method, cause, consequence, and effect of death, as well as the endless proliferation of rituals, practices, and superstitions devised to cope with it. He asserted, moreover, that by means of intuitive, clairvoyant gifts discovered and developed independently by him, he had many times passed through the portal of death and could therefore report with certainty how things fared in that distant dimension. Finally, near the end of his life, Dr. Kraken resolved to leave a permanent record of his knowledge. Four years later, Inhumations appeared—nothing less than a definitive, encyclopedic survey of its subject, a feat made all the more impressive by being both scientifically rigorous and rendered in a sinuous prose with exquisite, dazzling panache.

The text itself is organized around the central conceit named in the title—places of burial, bone orchards, graveyards. A lifelong resident of New Orleans, Dr. Kraken spent countless hours strolling among that city’s crypts and mausoleums; thus each major section of his book is named for a particular cemetery—St. Louis, Lafayette, Greenwood—and these in turn are subdivided into rows, plots, and so on. Furthermore, all sections, even the smallest, come garnished with some curious scrap of information culled from Dr. Kraken’s research. A chapter on voodoo, for example, begins with a quotation from a note scrawled in blood that Kraken once found stuffed into a corpse’s mouth:

baby stuck in the birth canal
blue head pushing through
the water in the basin steams

Yet it would be inaccurate to characterize the tone of Inhumations as ghoulish or morbid. On the contrary, the volume possesses a decadent majesty and flair for the dramatic that render an encounter with its pages one of spellbinding intensity.

When he’d completed his manuscript, Dr. Kraken took it to the only man he trusted to create the book he envisioned—Charles McIntyre, founder and owner of Cylinder Press, a French Quarter shop that specialized in producing the finest handcrafted books in the world. Dr. Kraken’s instructions were explicit. Every last detail of construction would be accomplished by hand—and there would be only one copy. Accordingly, each element that went into the volume—paper, ink, muslin, thread—was handmade. The printing was done on a manually operated press. The binding was hand-sewn. The boards and black morocco leather of the cover were hand-cut and hand-pasted. The title and author’s name on the front were hand-stamped in Gothic type with handmade silver leaf. As a finishing touch, McIntyre sewed a broad red ribbon—cleft like a serpent’s tounge—into the spine and tucked it along the inner groove of the front hinge. The whole process took nearly six months. But when at last the volume lay complete on McIntyre’s workbench and the two men stood gazing down at it like a pair of lovestruck parents, the result proved the craftsmen. Kraken and McIntyre knew they’d made history.

Naturally, one wonders why Dr. Kraken insisted on this unusual approach to publication. In retrospect it seems clear that he’d foreseen far more than he’d revealed about what lay in store for the book and so took pains to prepare it for exactly the journey it subsequently undertook. To McIntyre he once remarked that he planned for Inhumations—the object itself no less than its contents—to serve as “a living allegory.” In time, he predicted, after human beings had done to it what they simply could not help doing, the book would survive. Then, said Dr. Kraken, it would proceed to teach, to transform people—even save them. The volume would usher in a new world—and thus Victor Kraken would posthumously triumph over death.

On the last Tuesday of October 1971, Dr. Kraken and Charles McIntyre together delivered Inhumations to the Special Collections room on the top floor of the New Orleans Public Library. Five days later—on the evening of Sunday, October 31—Dr. Kraken died. The following morning, the staff at the library made a shocking discovery.

Inhumations had vanished.

III. Of Its Provenance, or, Where in the World Has This Thing Been?

We now know that the book reappeared a few weeks later on the doorstep of an ordinary suburban couple in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Lockharts were childless, yet when Barb Lockhart found the book lying next to her morning newspaper like Moses among the bulrushes, she scooped it up with a maternal flourish and, teary-eyed, pressed it to her bosom. Later, when her husband, Red, strode through the kitchen in his plumber’s togs to snatch a slice of toast from the toaster, he found his wife sitting in the breakfast nook, rocking the enormous tome in her arms. “I done told you, I’m through bein’ Baptist forever,” he growled, but Barb only smiled. She spent the rest of the morning in the den with her feather duster, the book spread open on the coffee table. In her happiness, she turned her chores into a kind of dance—dusting, shuffling, batting her eyes at the book—until she’d rendered the room spotless four times in a row.

By early afternoon, though, she’d begun to feel uneasy. She struggled against her burgeoning forebodings but at last admitted that there was something spooky about this book—and not just the way it had appeared out of nowhere. She began to feel that it radiated a kind of dark energy, a sinister, devilish magnetism. She’d heard that Satan could produce evil hallucinations in his victims—and, just as she remembered this fact, Barb herself began to hallucinate wildly. A whirlwind of violence and demons and shameless sexuality flooded her senses. Terrified, she crawled over to the book and, for the first time, struggled to read a page. The words she saw seemed to rise off the paper and swarm like insects into her eyes. Barb lost all control. She ran shrieking to the garage, returned with an armful of her husband’s wrenches and pipes, bludgeoned the book to pieces—along with the coffee table, a lamp, a stack of shelves, and some flower pots—then burst into tears.

When Red came home that evening and learned what had happened, he gathered the scattered fragments of the book into a box, drove out to the dump, and hurled the box as far as he could into the endless piles of garbage.

Thus the long odyssey of Inhumations began.

Here, no doubt, is the place to elaborate on the volume’s defining attribute, mentioned above—its indestructibility. In brief, Dr. Kraken, by means still unknown to us, endowed his masterpiece with the power to reconstitute itself no matter what the indignities visited upon it. Over and over, as we shall see, the book has inspired those in its vicinity to grotesque acts of violence—yet time and again it reappears, vibrantly intact. We have almost no reliable eyewitness accounts of the process, although a night janitor in a Birmingham, Alabama, asylum swears he once saw a flock of pages scooting across the floor like inchworms. Otherwise, we know only that the book endures, growing stronger and more imposing with each successive victory over annihilation.

A full chronicle of the book’s adventures cannot be rendered in our allotted space and in any case would prove tiresomely repetitive. Let the following summary of selected details, then, stand as representative of the whole. After being flung into the Knoxville dump, Inhumations turned up again in a cornfield in rural Ohio, where a pair of farm boys found it, fed fistfuls of its pages to a goat, then threw the remainder under the wheels of a train. A few months later, the book appeared in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just long enough to be set on fire by a gang of transvestite dope fiends. Some time later, it was seized by a female serial killer, who drove it to Memphis in the trunk of her car, then used it for target practice in a vacant lot, barking the name of an ex-husband after every shot. In Birmingham, an orderly discovered an asylum inmate sitting at his barred window thoughtfully leafing through the volume. As punishment, they drugged the inmate into a catatonic stupor; the book was shredded. Later, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Inhumations figured prominently in an alleged terrorist attack that turned out to be a hoax. Nevertheless, the book wound up a pile of ash at the bottom of an incinerator. In New York City, the volume generated paranoid rape fantasies among the female population, for which it was promptly sunk in the Hudson River . . . and so on.

All these episodes share with the Lockhart encounter several crucial elements—namely, an initial period of infatuation or intense curiosity followed quickly by a dawning awareness of the book’s manifest strangeness, which leads in turn to an eruption of fear-driven behavior for which the book is held responsible and therefore destroyed. We have already noted the true nature of Dr. Kraken’s work, which in any case few bother to investigate. What accounts, then, for the gap between the book itself and the shadow it casts in the minds of those who approach it? We can only surmise that Inhumations acts as a kind of psychological trigger, a catalyst that releases all unresolved conflict in a subject, drawing that energy to itself like a lightning rod, perhaps even feeding on it. To one under its spell, the book contains, as it were, only a single sentence: I am precisely that knowledge—that self-knowledge—you must not under any circumstances permit yourself to learn.

IV. Conclusion & Admonition, a Prophecy

Yet the strangest fact of all is that everything that has happened to Dr. Kraken’s book seems to have been an essential part of his design, because in the summer of 2005, as though on schedule, Inhumations disappeared for the last time—and hasn’t been found since.

Today we are left only with speculations. Those of us who have actually read the book and presume to have gained some insight into its secrets are unanimous in our conviction that Inhumations will return. Perhaps its long prologue of suffering is complete. Perhaps Dr. Kraken’s promised reign is at hand.

We call on the world to take heed, for only one thing now is certain—Inhumations, Victor Kraken’s Bible of Death, will never die.