The Hypogean Forum

The August round is open. The constraint this month, and I will hear no petitions about it: no fire.

For the four of you who are new — and there are four, I counted, which in Achaea constitutes a golden age — the game is simple. Design a purgatory. Not a hell; anyone can build a hell, hell is a genre exercise, hell is what an undergraduate builds when you give him a river and a grudge. A purgatory. A place of correction, which implies a curriculum, which implies somebody decided what you were for and what you fell short of.

Rules, such as they are.

1. It must be survivable indefinitely. If your design kills the occupant it is not a purgatory, it is an argument.
2. It must be just. Not fair — just. The occupant, on being shown the reasoning, must be unable to object.
3. It must contain exactly one door and the occupant must know where it is.
4. No fire this month. Fire is a way of not having thought about the problem, and three of you last month gave me lakes.

Ligotti has the line that consciousness is the parent of all horrors, and the reason I run this game annually is that every single entry I have ever received describes a room the designer would personally find intolerable, and not one designer has ever noticed doing it. You are not building a punishment. You are drawing me a map of what you cannot stand, and you are signing it.

Entries by the end of the month. I will judge them badly and at length.

the universe is under no obligation to be meaningful, and neither is this post

Doctor. I have avoided this thread for two years and I am going to tell you why before I enter it, since you will work it out from the entry anyway and I would rather be the one who says it.

You are going to publish my room and everyone is going to see what I cannot stand, and I have spent my entire adult life arranging for the opposite of that.

Here is the entry regardless.

THE HOUSE, FULL.

A theatre. Not empty — full. Every seat taken, every night, permanently, and the audience is warm and quick and generous, and they laugh in the right places and they laugh at the difficult places too, which is rarer and which you cannot buy. The performance is whatever the occupant does best. The occupant may change the material nightly. It will always land.

The correction is this: the occupant may, at any time, walk to the back of the house and open the one door, which is clearly marked, and step out into the lobby and look back at the room from behind the glass. Doing so costs nothing. He may return whenever he likes and the house will still be full and the laugh will still arrive on the beat.

But from the lobby, through the glass, he can see the seats.

He does not have to look. He can perform for forty years and never once go to the back. The door is not a trap and nobody will ever make him open it. That is what makes it just, Doctor, per your second rule — shown the reasoning, the occupant cannot object, because every element of the arrangement was chosen by him and the door was his idea.

I would survive it indefinitely. That is rule one satisfied.

I have not looked. I want to be clear that this is not a confession, because a confession requires the possibility of not having said it, and you built a thread designed to extract exactly this and I walked into it with my eyes open, which I would like entered as evidence of something.

What an artist perishes in me. Nightly. Encore at eleven.