The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.6: Words for Unravelling the World

The buildings and architecture of Horsingdon, like any other urban or suburban conurbation, has become canvas to many examples of graffiti. However, sometimes one can discern within examples of urban scrawl the camouflaged interventions of malign metropolitan sorcerers: those who seek to employ a forbidden arcana to recode primordial cryptographic systems - those which are foundational to the structure of reality as we understand it - for their infinitely wicked ends. In this endeavor, they employ strange and antediluvian linguistic structures which are not of this or any other conceivable world: languages which are not symbolic systems of abstract signification, but are, ontologically, non-representational and inseparable from the world they describe: in a very literal sense, what constitutes a word (at least in human terms) within such linguistic structures is the very thing being articulated - brought into being through the very act of its articulation. In other words, a speech act which transforms the nature of reality through its vocalization or inscription.

The above image being a case in point. This device, I am reliably informed, is but one component of a glyph belonging to the pre-human Nacaal language: a glyph also constituent of a greater ritual invocation which, when performed in its totality, possesses the power to unravel the world through illocutionary alien grammars of negation and undoing.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.5: The Sounds of St. Osmund’s

 

St. Osmund’s Church and Cemetery: services ceased here some four years ago subsequent to the mysterious disappearance of its previous pastor. The building has remained locked and barred ever since. 

Regardless, locals parishioners continue to report evidence of habitation: a peculiarly inhuman snuffling and scratching emanating from behind the door to the north transept (shown in the above photo) for example, or the indistinct intonations of some unearthly music echoing within the belfry, or the sound of chanting issuing faintly from some crypt below the Church on certain nights of the year - as well as other curious and disquieting auditory phenomena.

In any case, were one to take such accounts seriously, one might be obliged to consider the possibility that St. Osmund’s remains tenanted by someone…or something.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.4: The Rot of the Stars.

The 4th of January marks the peak of the Quadrantids meteor shower in the Norther hemisphere. Coincident with this is the curious appearance of ‘star jelly’ in the fields and pastures surrounding Horsingdon Hill. These gelid lumps of white ooze - also known as ‘star-slime’, ‘star-slough’, and ‘the rot of the stars’ - have long been prized by the region’s cunning folk for their alleged occult properties. Further to this, the substance has played an important part in Horsingdon’s witchlore, wherein it is said to constitute the principle ingredient of the vinum sabbati - a libation whose consumption by celebrants formed the central sacrament of the Witches Sabbath. Even today, in the early hours of the morning of the 5th of January, curious figures can sometimes be spied in the fields and furrows at the base of Horsingdon Hill, engaged in a strange harvest.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.3: The Way Through The Woods

 

A path through the woods on the slope of Horsingdon Hill leading to its crown. This same pathway is said to have been witness to the ritual processions of the Horsingdon coven to their sacred grove atop the Hill, until the cessation of their activities sometime in the late 18th century. 

Locals often avoid such ‘witch roads’ on account of their being residually haunted by the lingering aftermath of whatever awful rites were once enacted in their vicinity. Indeed, occasional reports still surface concerning the disappearance of casual hikers - invariably visitors from outside the region - last seen traversing one of Horsingdon’s witch roads en route to a terminally unexpected destination.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.2: Edgeland Broadcasts

Beyond the periphery of Horsingdon’s farthest suburbs, one encounters desolate edgelands comprised primarily of deserted, overgrown industrial estates; however, these zones of abandonment occasionally reveal the rewilded brutalist architecture of an ominously-vacant and derelict state installation - some dread-infused relic of the Cold War. The image above was taken at one such site: a transmitter array entangled by and partially subsumed within the unrestrained verdant growth engendered by Horsingdon’s cursed soil. 

Yet despite the site’s current condition of apparent neglect and disuse, the array - so I am told - continues to broadcast an uncanny and indecipherable signal. 

But to whom and for what purpose?

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.1: Keep Out!

 

One of the vacant and dilapidated premises which dot the uncanny suburban topography of Horsingdon. Its state of abandonment may, of course, be due to any number of reasons. However, in the social imaginaries of long-term inhabitants of the borough, the fact that the building is fenced in and clearly marked with a ‘Keep Out’ sign speaks (albeit obliquely) to a somewhat more sinister history behind this forsaken habitation: for local residents, such cautionary signs warn not only of the impropriety of seeking admittance on account of likely physical dangers posed by the property’s structural instability - they are also deterrent to encounters with…less tangible perils; in this latter regard, the remonstrance to “Keep Out!” is as much about the containment of any malefic forces bound within the building’s confines as it is apotropaic to those seeking forbidden ingress, across an uncertain threshold, to a malignly haunted space.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.55 - The Shadow over Boreham

An image I received via e-mail earlier today: the shadow of ‘COLD’, at the dilapidated grave of a member of the Boreham family who - I am reliably informed - was involved in the founding of MI6 in the early years of the 20th Century. 

Unfortunately, the inscrutable ‘COLD’is never forthright where the content of his missives is concerned: undoubtedly some elusive nugget of information - presumably relating to the ‘incident’ at the decommissioned MoD site near the Ebury Way, with which my mysterious informant currently seems obsessed - is encoded in this peculiar image. Certainly, the close association of a member of the sorcerous Boreham clan with the British intelligence services is a singularly curious. Although perhaps not quite as surprising as one might initially infer, given the interest shown by various agencies in Horsingdon’s praeternatural topographies and the rich but hidden heritage of arcane lore which remain the region’s unseen and terrible legacies.