If you do not know his strange tale, wander this way… https://hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com/2022/09/02/the-ghastly-fate-of-barry-lupin/ or take your chances plunging headlong into this fresh madness, with no sense of how it all began. We do not promise that one approach is better than another.
When obsession takes hold of a person, anything can happen. In Barry’s case, the need to convert his inner screaming into the written word carried him far from his home. The ground slowly ate the knees out of his trousers – a horror he would have felt keenly in normal circumstances. Unnatural beings came to gaze upon his process, and judged it to be weird, and crept away again just to be on the safe side.
The trouble with sharing stories such as this, is the way people form opinions based on them. It is through tales like these that people come to associate science with the inevitable collapse into madness. These are not good examples to set. Inevitably, some hopeful soul will attempt to emulate the madness in the hopes of growing closer to the spirit of science. This also happens with poets and is why, every now and then we get unfortunate outbreaks of people standing dramatically on cliff edges gazing mournfully out to sea. A project that begets both broken bones from disastrous falls, and appalling verses.
Fortunately for us, the next stage in Barry Lupin’s curious tale breaks slightly with the stereotype of the scientist driven mad by elder gods. It involved the kind of breakthrough we can only hope to find in our own lives. Members of The Scientific Society eventually picked up and followed the trail of relentless screaming Barry had inscribed into the ground. We found him, slowly circling an ominous dark altar deep in the woods. His scream died in that place, no doubt a person can pass through horror and into some state beyond it where screaming all the time just isn’t enough any more.
Instead, Barry stood, transfixed by horror, frozen by it and rooted to the spot. After some deliberation, we just picked him up and carried him back to his home. Our current working theory is that a sufficiency of tea will eventually cure him.
(With thanks to Andy Arbon for the loan of his face)
The Hopeless Vendetta 