A Continent of Banalities

  The Agents from B.R.O.T.H.E.R.  B.R.O.T.H.E.R. (Bureau for Research on Occult Threats Harming or Endangering Reality) is a secret international institution with offices all over the world. Their purview is to investigate and understand all that is unearthly, esoteric and dismissed by the mainstream of science. Should a phenomenon prove dangerous, it is to be neutralized. Even its agents are unclear on who exactly it is they work for. Three main theories exist B.R.O.T.H.E.R. is an agency under the aegis of the United Nations. Due to the extremely sensitive nature of its purview, it is kept secret even from the member nations.  B.R.O.T.H.E.R. is the modern incarnation of the Brotherhood of Thoth-Hermes, a Hermetic society dedicated to breaking down any opposition between science and esoteric philosophy. According to this narrative, everybody and their mother was secretly an initiate (Benjamin Franklin, Sir Isaac Newton, Hildegard of Bingen, Abramelin the Mage etc. etc.) B...

 Like great men before me, I too have wandered the evil paths where hope is a distant memory. While I cannot claim to be of the same stature as my learned forebears, fact itself might be the reason why I have discovered hells they overlooked in their cartographies of suffering. Here I shall endeavor to describe one. By what door or opening it is entered into no one can say. Perhaps there is a darkened corridor, like a cavernous digestive tract or perfumed tomb through which the damned enter the phantom-life of the café. Perhaps there are as many entrances as there are patrons. Perhaps one does not arrive but simply endlessly is, the past a dream and one's order already placed. Such things do not ultimately seem to matter. One finds oneself standing in line, bone-white tray in hand. Some sort of grand treat seems to have been promised. Outside the café are snowdrifts, looming houses and damp, menacing shadows, as distant and uncaring as the inhabitants of deep sea trenches. The peop...