Prop 4

[Laraqua]

Bizarre letter.

Page 1.

Sie war es, die unsere Welt als Gefängnis erschaffen hat. Unsere ganze Realität ist in gewisser Weise eine Manifestation von Malkuth. Sie hat die Welt aus ihrem eigenen Sein geformt. In den alten Zeiten verehrte man sie als' Mutter Erde' oder' Die Große Mutter' .

On dank waters, the glowering tendrils of a dead sun. This pool is a jagged wound, a maw of shivering fluid in the ash and basalt lunarscape. There is no activity on this haunted plain that which encircles this oasis of filth.

On its crooked lip are a dome shaped hovel wrought of bone, scrap metal and some rotten smelling "mud" Over the structure's entrance hangs a sheet of tanned human skin. The only sound audible is that of you breaking the surface of the water.

The egress from this location is a laborious travel to the east, in the direction of a stone spire, which is cantered forty five degrees to the left. What you may notice while traveling towards it is that it seems to be both grand and minuscule. No matter how close you approach it remains the same.

From the edge of the pool, it seems to be the size of a small mountain but on reaching it, you find you could lean against it and rest. The shadow it casts is expansive and resembles a broad mantle or wing.

Leaning against the spire it is possible to hear the movement of wings and traces of some feral cry. Upon inspection, you espy some vague shapes in the haze around the sun or by the hovel but nothing specific. If you wait nothing comes or swoops down, no matter how close these sounds come. It remains this way for what seems forever and then you can hear the sounds again.

At the base of the spike, on close inspection of the great shadow that it casts, you will find a perfectly human sized hole. It looks like it was cut out like some disc of dirty ice. Getting down on one's knees and being foolish enough to peer in, you see a dusty corridor carved in limestone and veined with moss. You hear the hiss of something that may be steam or the slow exhalation of a snake.

On closer examination a slender rope extends to a unseen floor. It is attached to a outcropping of rock on the underside of the opening. With some experimentation, with both stones and a book of matches, you deem that there is a floor of basalt and nothing moves across it. The passage, which also runs to the east, is humid and ripe with the smell of decay. You can still hear the sounds of invisible animals and shadowy birds behind you. How can it be any worse?----

[Laraqua]

Page 2

Sidotta Rimice was a child in the Italian countryside during the second world war. She and her parents hid in a barn, when fighters were flying overhead; a dropped bomb set fire to the barn and its hay. Her parents were killed in that barn, and her legs were crushed under a falling beam. For the next four days, she passed in and out of hallucinations, she lost blood, went hungry, cannibalized her parents' corpses, while waiting for rescue.

She went insane, a little bit.

Her rescuers found her, a little mad crippled girl, sated from the raw meat her parents' dead bodies offered. In blood-her own blood, her parents' blood, and many other people's blood-she had drawn symbols over the beam that pinned her to the ground. These were the maps of hell, pathetic blasphemies in the eyes of some, powerful occult lore to others.

These were the maps of hell, never published before, until now. Today, on the tenth anniversary of the day Sidotta Rimice was cruelly vivisected by satanists, who wanted to study her brain for hell's secrets. It is in the memory of a sad life, a mad life, that we now publish Sidotta Rimice's seminal Maps of Hell.

"Down through circles and trenches. Down and down into the screaming rock and the molten flesh of Hell.

"Down where lovers, who have promised never to part, are fused together in a tangle of shrieking flesh. Towering, selfless love turned into hate and madness.

"Down through infinite arctic wastes where people wander alone and naked and freezing, never reaching any destination.

"Through the streets of suffering cities where the stones of the houses bleed and beg forgiveness. Where taps drip and fires don't light and hearts burn endlessly,

"Down and down.

"And down through the pointless grinding banality of Hell."

~Grant Morrison