Darkmanse Season Two Teaser: July 15, 2020: Wally and Eddie

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the time track, it is 1985 in suburban America and a teenage boy name Wally Haskell has found his mom’s old Hasbro-brand Ouija board tucked away in the sewing room of the family split-level among a stack of board games with names like Trivial Pursuit, Mastermind, Risk, and Clue. He enlists his best friend Eddie to experiment with the board. Wally and Eddie have considerable success, contacting dead relatives, famous historical figures, and even a boy from the nineteenth century who was drowned in a bathtub. Wally and Eddie aren’t really conversing with ghosts, however, because Ouija boards are conduits to the astral plane, not the realm of the dead. The astral plane is teeming with mischievous elementals that feed off of the vital essence of the living, and they will pretend to be anyone you want them to be if it will help them to gain access to you—such as a dead relative, a famous historical figure, or even a drowned boy from the nineteenth century.

But that’s not the point.

Wally and Eddie’s musical tastes start to change. Their enthusiasm for Phil Collins and Genesis begins to wane and they start listening to heavy metal, drawn to the genre by the pentagrams and other diabolical imagery on the album covers. Wally and Eddie grow their hair long. They wear concert shirts to school with cool names on the front like Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, and Dio. Wally and Eddie become inveterate mall rats. When they’re not loitering at Spencer’s or the Oriental Pearl, they’re in the Space Port gaming arcade playing games with names like Galaga and Donkey Kong, or sneaking into the movie theater to watch R-rated slasher movies. Wally and Eddie have to sneak in because they’re only sixteen, which is too young to be admitted to R-rated movies.

But that’s not really the point, either.

The point is that Wally and Eddie become enthusiastic dabblers in the occult, and dabbling in the occult carries certain risks, such as inadvertently transporting yourself to a certain domain of the Abyss ruled by a certain demon lord named Doresain. Little do Wally and Eddie know that unsuspecting dabblers such as themselves are one of the main food sources for the vast roaming pods of ghouls and ghasts that inhabit Doresain’s realm.

One day at the mall, Wally picks up a copy of the Simon Necronomicon from Walden Books and takes it to Eddie’s house to show him. Wally and Eddie perform the rituals described in the book, and one night, as the Great Bear hangs by its tail from the Pole Star, they open a gate between the worlds and promptly fall through. The next thing Wally and Eddie know, they are swimming to the surface of a dark and dreary lake. There are thousands of such lakes in Doresain’s realm. These lakes are called “oculi.” They are how the food gets in.

Wally and Eddie emerge from the dark waters of this particular oculus and take stock of their situation. It doesn’t look good. The featureless terrain extends in all directions. Black ash for earth. Hardpan for as far as the eye can see. This place is a waste land. Eddie points to the eastern horizon where a massive dust cloud is building. As the dust cloud draws closer and closer, and grows bigger and bigger, he and Wally see what’s causing it. A frenzied pod of ghouls is headed their way. There must be hundreds of those awful things in that ghoulpod to be kicking up a dust cloud so enormous.

Wally and Eddie start to run.