Preliminary Notes from The Valley of Doom

A report from a blighted place.

In the Valley of Doom, a buzzing, lumbering Scissor Fly sucked up sand through its foot-long proboscis. In the sand were bits of crinkling candy wrappers and tiny organisms with even smaller plastic knives. Inside the Scissor Fly’s digestive pouch, the organisms sliced into walls of tissue cells which in turn spat chlorides and boiling oil at them. The Scissor Fly sucked up enough sand to uncover a headless doll that had been buried there. The doll was almost like a baby, but all rotten.

There was a brown residue left behind after the river dried up. The rocks and broken beer and broken liquor bottles were all covered in a layer of sticky slime. The slime had slowly hardened into a kind of brittle armor and then became soft again, like a treated hide. Not far away, dead frogs floated upside down in a wastewater retention pond.

A stinking green pus bubbled up out of a borehole in the ground. It hissed and foamed and turned the dirt black wherever it spread. Some of it was collected in a Florentine Flask and heated over an open flame by some giggling alchemists. The pus dried and hardened, and became a child’s femur bone. That sort of thing can happen in the Valley of Doom.

At another time, some of the pus was taken, and sealed inside an Abjection Chamber. It turned into a pair of bloodshot eyeballs, or a deck of playing cards. Really, it probably became both at once.

The clouds never drift away from the mountain ranges around the Valley of Doom. They stay where they are, keeping the peaks hidden. Ash falls like snow. A camel is driven in circles with a nylon whip, turning a wooden wheel.

Two Smear Worms fight over a lump of fat spilling out of an old rubber boot. They secrete battery acid from glands all over their bodies and bite at each other with rotting teeth. An Interceptor flashes its light in their eyes and their eyes dribble out of their sockets and they writhe on the ground in blind terror. Left alone for a moment, the lump of fat remembers being held in a cage suspended from the ceiling of a high stone tower. It remembers the sound of a mallet endlessly striking a ripe gourd. It remembers the sound of television, which doesn’t exist anymore, echoing from another chamber, somewhere far away. Two bodies tearing at each other’s hair on a stage, shouting at each other, the words all replaced with shrill bleeps. It doesn’t know what to do with this memory, which it’s sure doesn’t rightly belong to it.

Flesh puppets are led by a pinched shape in an overcoat single file to an information kiosk, where their skin is ritually taken away. The windows of the kiosk are all broken. The heat leaks out everywhere, but it’s always so hot in the Valley of a Doom no one really cares.

A death’s head enclosed in a shimmering red sphere floats over the landscape. It sees a pile of blackened USB drives. It sees a spattered gulch. It sees a brood of Psycrabs sleeping in the husk of a crushed bulldozer. It sees a shattered concrete bulwark. It sees a Meta Mollusk swimming in a large basin of oil. It sees a dog holding a blowtorch in its teeth, foam dripping out of the corners of its mouth. It sees a perfectly circular hole in the side of a hill. It sees a knife stuck into an animal skull. It sees the dark and buried. It sees worms wriggling in a fissure of rock. It sees a cactus with a spine wrapped around it. It sees an immense vat of quicksand. It sees an arm covered in angular scars, dragging itself towards an overturned trash barrel. It sees a display of various organs, each held in place with a long, sharp pin. It sees a Night Fox with its right front foot caught in a crippling trap, wearing a mask over its face with a scrolling LED display: “IT IS GREAT TO BE DESTROYED IT IS GREAT TO BE UNFORGIVEN”. It sees a body encased in black rubber with spikes driven through its elbows and knees. It sees a swarm of metallic blue beetles scrabbling across the shifting sand. It sees a grand piano wrapped in thorns and nettles. It sees an electrical circle in a dry lakebed. It sees a pile of stained gauze. It sees a penetration. It sees an aluminum wall covered in claw marks and wandering scratches. It sees a pipe gushing sewage. It sees an old newspaper tangled in a dead bush; on the front page is a large photograph of a robot malfunctioning. It sees the entrance to a vast bunker system. It goes down and floats through the tunnels for hours. It finds stacks of moth-eaten sandbags. It finds blackened walls and chunks of debris. It finds a nest of blind shadows. It finds large rooms full of broken machines. It finds the stale echo of a great ambition. It finds no sources of light, no corpses with shoes on. It floats back outside, into the heat. It sees a swarm of locusts. It sees faceless workers bent over, gathering cupfuls of ash. It sees an Exo-Mantis trapped in a tar pit. It sees an enclosure that stretches beyond the horizon, containing nothing but graves. It sees an arm full of holes, motionless. It sees an enormous mound. It sees a shredded flag. The death’s head sees these things in the Valley of Doom.

It sees a noxious ditch. It sees a wide space. It finds itself denatured.

It sees the Spirit welling up.

The Demon King of the Valley of Doom sits in his Demon Hut at the bottom of a deep ravine. He sits slouching in shadow on his throne made of bleeding upholstery and smashed circuit boards. A trickle of glowing green water flows past the entrance; all visitors, to be granted an audience, must be willing to drink from it. This is the way it has always been. The Demon King slouches on his throne, his head rested in one hand. In his other he holds a triangle of newt-covered bread, which he lifts to his mouth and bites into sometimes, although it tastes like cardboard. He feels very tired. He feels very old. He would like to die soon, but knows that it won’t be permitted. This is how it is in the Valley of Doom.