DOOM 94 Read online

  I don’t know if it was the fresh air or the relief after all that tension, but the full affect of the various alcohols I’d consumed over the course of the night finally kicked in. My legs and tongue stopped working right, but I felt great. My friends were walking with me, their mouths staggering and legs slurring too, we trudged over the snow, we were on an arctic expedition that had found shelter from solitude. Being together with everyone is the same as being nowhere; you have to find a solitary road to share with a few others, and we had found it. They had forgiven me my terrible sins, they had accepted me, it meant I really was a prince, and even the girl with the yellow hair and brown eyes had spoken to me, and I wasn’t thinking of Milēdija at all. I was free. I was content in that bloodied snow.

  Zombie added:

  — But maybe it was just some girl shaking out a tampon.

  * * *

  [ 2 ] I know, and knew back then, that this is a Black Sabbath cover.

  9

  There was a door on the third floor with the number 23 on it, the universal number for disaster. 2 + 3 = 5. Even all the doors in Master and Margarita had numbers that added up to five. This particular door led to the algebra classroom. Its shelves were filled with the types of books no-one wants to read, not even when you’re bored out of your mind and desperate. Back then there were far more interesting things written elsewhere: like on the green desks. We’d painted the desks ourselves that summer. The paint under the desks never dried completely, so at first you’d see girls walking around with green smudges on their knees, but now they were more careful about it.

  There we were, all thirty-six of us. Our homeroom teacher was also our algebra teacher. She loved the subject and, when she’d come into the classroom, would always say something like:

  — We’ll work on three planes: we’ll solve ‘standard’ problems, and parallel to which we’ll work on new materials. I’ve also found some interesting assignments from the Math Olympiads.

  There was a lot to calculate, and in three different directions — sometimes we even tried. But once one of the kids from the back of the class, Jānis Labrencis, pushed his notebook away and said: ‘I bow my head in the face of this problem’. I thought it was pretty clever if him, so I gave up too. The rest of our group had given up a while ago without any witticisms. Algebra was a different, abstract world. The smart kids in the front row believed that it existed objectively and had even made successful contact with it. To those of us farther back, it remained an unknown and invisible thing that could punish you at the end of the semester for your ignorance. But for now the end of the semester was a ways off and we felt good. We sat in a cultured manner and played sequence — a bastardised version of poker, without lies or pretence.

  I was having zero luck with cards that day. Nothing but Charles (the King of Hearts) and David (the King of Spades). I couldn’t do anything with them in sequence. I folded, and sat watching my classmates. What personalities, what destinies! What legs! Diāna, Linda, Guntiņa. I recognised all of them without having to look up any higher. And there, right up front with the smart kids, Milēdija. I couldn’t see her legs. She turned around and looked at me, and smiled. I did nothing. It was possible she was smiling at someone sitting behind me. I stared at the green surface of my desk. It was scribbled with the same stuff as in the bathroom stalls. Death, Entombed — carved by an unknown hand. Maybe it was Death. I’d responded with Anathema, and had even added a considerably detailed drawing of their complicated logo. The unknown metalhead should appreciate it, but he’d do it silently. In turn, I’d responded to the words ‘Hairy morons’ with ‘Pimplehead’, and had gotten a ‘Come and get it, retard!’ I could sense that a note was headed my way. It was close. Guntiņa tossed it onto my desk. My neighbour was sitting hunched over his cards.

  I took the note. The words ‘To Kārlis’ were written on the front. I glanced up at Milēdija, who looked back at me and pointed — pass it on! I knew full well that Kārlis sat right behind me. I tossed the note to him and returned to my thoughts.

  Someone had also carved a pentagram into the desktop. The one with two points of the star at the top. Just like the one you can see in the northern stain-glass window of Amiens Cathedral. Who knows why it was now associated with Satanism. Next to the pentagram was an upside-down Latin cross drawn in pen, also now associated with the same ideology. It’s actually called the Cross of Saint Peter. You can see it on the papal throne.

  Kārlis tossed the note back onto my desk. It didn’t have ‘Stay Brutal!’ written on it, just Milēdija’s name. I tossed it onto the desk in front of mine, and then drew an equilateral triangle on my desktop, and another smaller triangle inside that. In the spaces between the edges of the two triangles I wrote ‘SATIRNE GAN SANTALINI’. You were supposed to draw this symbol with the blood of a bat on parchment paper and then place it on a sacred stone. Then you were supposed to place the paper under the threshold of a door. The first girl to cross over the threshold will immediately take off all her clothes and dance around naked until she drops dead, unless someone removes the parchment. That’s what the Grimorium Verum says. Man, how I’d make someone dance if I had parchment paper and a bat!

  Of course, you need the draw the symbol in the right material. The metalheads from the Other School told me that once a teacher had noticed one of the students had a bloody hand. She’d made the student open his hand — he had some sort of symbol carved into the skin of his palm. The scar was seeping blood. The teacher asked:

  — And what do we have here, hmm?

  The student had replied:

  — Faith.

  What symbol was it? No one knows. Some cult that secretly had shown up in Jelgava.

  Another note was dropped onto my desk. This one had my surname on it, in the dative case. I noticed almost immediately that the handwriting was different, so I didn’t experience even a theoretical wave of emotion. The message inside read: ‘What are you doing?’ I scanned the classroom. No-one looked suspicious, except for the one girl who always looked suspicious and usually that meant nothing.

  I drew a circle inside another circle, and two crosses positioned inside the inner circle. This symbol is for when you want to become invisible. And who doesn’t want that? The only other things you need are black beans, the head of a corpse and, or course, alcohol. You put one bean in each orifice of the corpse’s head, draw the aforementioned symbol on its forehead and bury the head at a crossroads. Then, naturally, you take the alcohol and pour it over where you buried the head. You do this seven nights in a row. On the seventh night one of the beans will have sprouted, and the spirit of the corpse will be sitting next to it. The spirit will ask, ‘What are you doing?’ And it will reach out to take the bottle. But you don’t let it have it right away.

  — Jānis, what are you doing?

  Ms Siliņa was standing by my desk.

  — Nothing.

  I answered confidently, as someone who knows he’s innocent, but this time it didn’t land quite right.

  — So it seems. Let me see your notebook!

  Siliņa had this policy — she demanded that her students always follow along with the class work and take notes on everything. But this time I hadn’t written anything down. All I’d done is draw a gravesite. Pūpols taught me how. He spent hours drawing the graves of everyone around him. Usually they were for the teachers. ‘Sure, sure, Līcis,’ Pūpols would say, and draw Līcis’ grave. He didn’t always do it because of a specific reason or reprimand. Today I’d drawn our teacher’s grave just because. A tasteful cross and headstone with her name and surname. Pūpols usually added cause of death, but I didn’t do that, and wanted to draw our teacher’s attention to this one positive aspect. But I said nothing. Siliņa placed a finger on the drawing of her grave.

  — What is this?

  She asked the question with genuine interest, like the scientist she was. Now she was trying to make out the name on the headstone. I felt extremely uncomfortable and wished that she woul
dn’t.

  Suddenly the classroom door flew open and an unfamiliar, redcurled head looked in to announce that I was to report to the principal. The principal was a lazy woman and usually sent some diligent student out to run these errands.

  I slammed my notebook shut and stood up. Some people said I went pale. But that’s not true. Whether you’re a natural-born rebel or one of the little guys, there’s always something catastrophic about getting called in by the authorities. But this time, first and foremost, I felt relieved to be out of the gravesite episode, and second, that I maybe didn’t really have to go to the principal’s office, but that the unfamiliar girl was here to kidnap me.

  No such luck. The principal’s office was full of people. Of course, the principal was there, as was another woman whose title I’ve forgotten. But there was also Cips and Anrijs, my metalhead friends from the Fifth Line!

  And Death, too.

  — What’s going on?

  But the principal asked me:

  — Well?

  But I said:

  — Yes, ma’am?

  And she said:

  — What can you tell us?

  And I asked:

  — About what?

  And she added:

  — What do you all do together?

  I paused. We do a lot of different things, and I wasn’t sure that they were things these women could either understand, or that could even be explained. The principal must have read my mind and elaborated:

  — What cult are you part of?

  The principal caught me up to speed. The four of us go around proclaiming the end of the world, shouting out satanic mottos, worshipping death and disseminating our beliefs. And we drink in cemeteries. I was surprised at how accurately she had described our activities, but I didn’t know where she’d got the information. But part of what she described was all new to me. What’s more, according to her intel, our home base was the attic of one of the apartment buildings near the school, and our leader is some older man with a huge beard. It was these last details that let me deny everything in total disbelief. I was so convincing that the principal said:

  — That’s what I thought, too, that it’s all just a bunch of nonsense. After all, you’re all such normal boys!

  And all four of us nodded in agreement. Right now we were ready to be totally normal. The principal added:

  — And the part about the man with the beard?

  By Jupiter, I honestly had no idea what that was about, and the other three were equally and earnestly dumbstruck.

  The woman whose title I can’t remember offered her hypothesis:

  — Maybe you boys just listen to your music a little too loudly at times... Maybe you sing along... maybe some older person hears the lyrics and gets scared...

  Then Anrijs spoke up, laughing lightly:

  — We can’t even keep up with those raps to sing along!

  He obviously said it to show how removed we were from anything dangerous. But we didn’t listen to rap.

  — We don’t listen to rap!

  Death had spoken. He was sulking.

  — I mean, what I mean to say is that we’re normal, but we don’t listen to rap, either.

  The principal suddenly looked tired.

  — We don’t have to go into the specifics. Go back to class.

  Cips had a final, direct question:

  — Who told you all those things?

  — Go back to class.

  And once in the hall she shooed us all off our separate ways, so we wouldn’t have the chance to discuss things. I was the last one to go, standing for a moment longer trying to wrap my head around it.

  Then that crazy Nellija from the other class came out of nowhere and asked:

  — What was that about?

  — What?

  — In there.

  — Nothing.

  — Some deep shit?

  — Where?

  — What’s with you?

  — Why?

  — Is there something wrong with you?

  — Are you daft?

  And that’s how I finally got to know Nellija. She said that everyone called her Lija, and that we could call her that too. But that’s not what we called her. And I’d never heard anyone else call her that, either. Everyone called her Liar.

  10

  What was better — the Junkyard, or being by myself at home, in front of my stereo? Wasn’t the Junkyard only fun because you could take what had happened there and think about it by yourself back at home, in front of your stereo? And wasn’t the number one fantasy when sitting in front of your stereo, sometimes even standing, along with the thundering lightning and flashing thunder, being at the Junkyard?

  What was the right way to listen to a song? Are you supposed to imagine yourself as the song’s protagonist, or try to relate the song to your own life? Is the song about me or am I about the song?

  I had less time for maths and family drama. These trivial things were being pushed out by metal. My tape collection was so big that I couldn’t gather them all up in my arms at once. I could do the kind of structuring and classification that young minds most loved to do. I had a lot of doom, a solid amount of death, a smattering of thrash and also that other genre that many of us were into now, maybe even obsessed. I can explain exactly why I got into it.

  It didn’t start at the Junkyard or at home. One day during physical education, or maybe in ethics, I was rewinding a tape. Normally you’d do this with a pen-cap or scissors, but I was too lazy for some reason. The Walkman was whining and thumping like a chainsaw cutting through a nail-riddled board. Kārlis turned around and asked:

  — What’s that black you’re listening to?

  I hadn’t heard of this genre yet, but I was immediately interested in music that would sound like that. Black metal is considered the most extreme expression of metal music. But for our giddy brains it was one more bucket of dynamite on an open flame. It was the ultimate — totally black, it had to be the end of the line, we’d reached our goal. Until recently I’d thought that doom metal was the be-all end-all, but now Death and I were sitting in front of the stereo, and he said:

  — The best doom is black.

  I automatically repeated the sentence in pure Latvian:

  — The best fate is black.

  Do you remember Immortal’s Pure Holocaust? Of course you do.

  And Mayhem? Stupid question, I know. And yes, yes, I mean the old-school Mayhem, not the surviving members. But I can’t help it, I have to explain what you all already know.

  Mayhem was founded in 1984 by a Norwegian guy named Øystein Aarseth. He played the guitar and went by the name Euronymous. We never understood how to pronounce it, namely, on which syllable to place the emphasis.

  Euronymous believed that his mission in life was absolute evil. When the band became famous a journalist asked, ahem, I’ve heard that you, the artist, have a good relationship with your parents. That you’re a good son. How does that fit in with absolute evil? Euronymous self-critically referenced human nature:

  — Not even Christians can be good all the time.

  Such a good answer!

  And note that Euronymous, the group’s founder, didn’t sing, but played guitar. Mayhem’s first singer was Maniac. He was soon replaced with a melancholy young guy who went by the name Dead. He really knew how to set the mood. He was the first person in black metal to show up on stage in what was called corpsepaint. This style of face painting was reminiscent of mimes. They were basically the same thing — depressed jokers.

  See, Dead wanted to look dead. He’d bury his clothes for a week or a month, then dig them up an hour before a show and wear them. Sometimes fans could see crickets crawling around on him. Dead would also cut himself during shows.

  One night, when they didn’t have a show, Dead slit his wrists, then wrote a note: ‘Excuse the blood’. Then he shot himself in the head.

  Haven’t we heard that before? A note and a gun. History repeated. That is
, if you ignore the fact that Kurt died in 1994, and Dead died in 1991. Our time shifted back and forth, and rarely stayed in one place.

  Euronymous was the one to find his friend’s body, and he immediately photographed the scene and later used the image as the cover art for their bootleg album Dawn of the Black Hearts. For everything to fall into place, for scripture to come true, there were those who doubted the truth of the story. In this case, detectives Venom and Slayer. After looking at the picture, they said it looked like murder, that ‘everything looked too perfect’. It really was perfect. Legend has it that Euronymous cooked up and ate a piece of Dead’s brain, and that he made necklaces with fragments from his skull — whereas the band’s drummer, Hellhammer, took his femurs to use as drumsticks. And so Mayhem had lost its vocalist. Necrobutcher left the band, too; maybe he started to think the rest of them had more than a few screws loose.

  But legends never die. Things were up in the air for a little while, and then the band was joined by the intelligent young Kristian Vikernes, who had just traded in his ill-suited name and now went by Varg Vikerness, aka Count Grishnackh. What a name! Grishnackh was the Orc captain from the Catholic novel Lord of the Rings. The young Norwegian Orc also had a soloproject, Burzum (another Tolkeinism). He played bass guitar for Mayhem. They recruited guitarist Blackthorn from Thorns, and Attila, from the Hungarian band Tormentor, as the new vocalist. These five men recorded Mayhem’s last real album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, the non plus ultra of black metal. There’s nothing more to be said.

  Later on, Euronymous’ mother asked that they re-record the bassline, so Grishnackh’s playing wouldn’t be heard alongside that of her kind, sweet son… Grishnackh still maintains that the album contains his original bassline.