Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.83: The Windermere Arms Redux

The saloon bar of the Windermere Arms, not far from Eastcote Station. Worn but comforting in its shabby grandeur, both Aleister Crowley and Roland Franklyn supped here during their disparate investigations into the occult mysteries of Horsingdo

Sadly, like so many local hostelry’s these days, it remains largely empty and bereft of the cosy conviviality which once characterised so many of the borough’s pubs: a social analogue of the bleakness which, since the 1950s, has insinuated itself into the praeternatural topography of the region.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No 82: Other Edens

An empty field close to the base of Burn Hill. Whilst the latter site is awash with the region’s bloody witchlore, this quiet field has been meditated upon by centuries of Horsingdon’s mystics and dreamers, some of who have claimed that it once functioned as a portal to uncountable worlds of transcendant, edenic wonder - at least for those gnostics who had become illumnated to their true, spiritual nature. Whatever the case, that doorway has been long-closed to the good folk of Horsingdon, with no hope of its reopening in times such as these.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmssions from Horsingdon, No.81: Black Bowers

Horsingdon’s Black Bowers are not readily revealed, and the Folk who tend them are cautious as to their exposure - delineating as they do those rare spaces at which this world intersects with unimaginable realms of numinous horror. 

Indeed, the Folk of the Black Bowers protect these thresholds with murderous intent, to the extent that such portals are typically surrounded by a horrendous local folklore; yet the terrible, bloodly deeds about which such tales speak are as nothing when compared with the actual, metaphysical atrocities and monstrous transmutations affected at such sites in the prehuman past, and by inhuman powers.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.80: Late Blooming

Spring arrives late in Horsingdon. Always.

No one is entirely sure why this is the case - although the Folk of the Black Bowers claim to be in the possession of (especially) ancient texts, in which it is supposedly written that the wind hearabouts gibbers with the voices of Those Who Wait, and that the very soil of Horsingdon mutters with Their consciousness.

If these tales are true, perhaps the instantiation of such monstrous, praeternatural presences within the local topography speak to the reasons for the strange, temporal drag which afflict the region’s seasonal shifts.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transnmissions from Horsingdon, No.79: Alchemical Architecture

The plans for ths disused block of apartments are said to have been conceived by Isaiah Boreham (one of the older scions of the Boreham family). A student of alchemy, Isaiah Boreham apparently incorporated esoteric geometries into the building’s design; fortunately, there are few alive today equipped with the means or knowledge to unravel the alchemical formulae lurking within its architectural cryptography - formulae which (or so it is rumoured) possess the power to effect certain monstrous and primordial transmutations of both the flesh and the soul.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.78: Pallid Masks

Long fallen into decay, even when they were first built Horsingdon’s Art Deco houses hid ancient secrets behind the pallid facade of modernity.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.77: Local Witchlore

The hazy, deteriorating light at dusk in Horsingdon obscures as much as it illuminates, falling languidly upon the region’s suburban gardens and the old, small brick sheds one often encounters in those parochial spaces. Whilst ostensibly indices of quiet, pedestrian lives, these outbuildings sometimes hide the decaying remnants of the region’s witchlore: a broken puppet whose features have been pierced with rusted nails; the fading lines of a strange symbol drawn in red chalk on the floor; grimy bottles containing foul-smalling philtres - or perhaps holding the preserved but twisted form of some small, unidentifiable thing.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.76: Industrial Hinterlands

The industrial hinterlands of Trentford and Horsingdon barely conceal, beneath the worn veneer of grimy modernity, their own particular horrors. Rumour clusters thick around certain warehouses and facilities, intimating the existence of monstrous presences and spectral fields within their bounds: an unholy and horrifying fusion of occult secrets and fringe technologies, such fields and presences are the speculated products of ethically-deruglated experimentation and unthinkable existential dread once born from the crucible of Cold War nuclear fire.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.75: Trentford Mere

Trentford Mere is a scrap of ancient wetland, not far from Croxley Common. It is a space resonant with the forgotten, spectral horrors of its drowned, archaic past. 

Some say that a series of squat monoliths trace an alien sigil across the weedy floor of the Mere; in local Trentford pubs, resident storytellers will regale the gullible listener with tales of lost, lonesome travellers who, finding themselves in the vicinity of the Mere, are soon after dragged beneath its black and oily waters by wet, scaly claws. 

Regardless of the truth of such claims, the right-minded folk of Trentford make a point of avoiding the Mere - especially at night.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.74: The Witching Seat

A simple seat beneath a lone, leafless tree atop Horsingon Hill: once the site of one of the region’s notorious witch trials, the tree is said to have sprouted from out the unmarked mass grave within which the bodied of hanged witches were interred. It is said that those who remain seated on the coarse wooden bench until the witching hour will be vouchsafed a vision of things to be.

There are few now who would undertake such a venture, given that it s said that the previous bearers of such oracles have left this site awestruck with horror - forever after refusing to speak of the terrible prognostications revealed to them by whatever spirits of the Outer Dark stalk the Hill at night.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.73: Witch Houses and Spite

The greatest conspiracy - the most insidious and underhand of secret designs - is an intrigue of horror: it is a treasonous connivance instantiated by the middle-classes in their attempts to colonise Horsingdon’s folklore - or indeed the folklore of any locality - by their slick, artless, and dishonest linguistic virtuosity: disguising what is a wantonly self-serving literary endeavour as allyship, and by way of the false and degenerate claims clustered around clever semantic machinations, around paltry declarations of having penetrated to the authentic heart of things, and around hollow assertions of somehow having become one with (at the very same time as transcending) the inscrutable ‘folk’.

And all the while, having achieved this presumed state of primordial identification - albeit by way of a distorted, self-serving notion that your safe psychogeographical peregrinations and perambulations through an ‘edgy’ part of town somehow confer you with messianic status - the cold, empty, angrily gendered witchouses of Horsingdon spit contemptuously in your eye.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.72: Sacrificial Bonfire

A burnt circle of grass atop of Horsingdon Hill offers evidence of sinister ritual activity - at a site with long, historic associations with witchcraft - by way of what may have been some kind of sacrifical bonfire. 

Yet more sinister is the fact that the aftermath of such speculated occult activity stands in close proximity to the sealed access tunnels leading to the very heart of the Hill...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.71: Vents

Two long-sealed access points atop Horsingdon Hill, leading down to a partially-built underground reservoir whose construction was mysteriously abandoned in the mid-1950s: silent, immovable sentinels, guarding the interior secrets of the Hill - or perhap protecting the upper world from whatever lurks below...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.70: Hidden Horses

This stone horse head - one of the many similar decorative motifs lining the Victorian redbrick walls which mark the boundary of Horsingdon Woods - peeks out from under a thick blanket of ivy: a partial, folkloric reminder of the dreadful forces said to lurk about the crown of Horsingdon Hill itself - forces which, it is said, sometimes take the form of monstrous, spectral horses and which, at other times, only announce their frightful presence by way of a terrible, neighing bray resonant with the awful hollowness of some vast and empty abyss.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissionsfrom Horsingdon, No.69: Makeshift Transmitter

Horsingdon exhibits its own peculiar history of that curious breed of eccentric which seem to populate these isles - as is evident by the vertical precarity of this makeshift transmitter mast: the product of a local conspiracy theorist’s attempts to intercept - and interpret - the alien and inscrutable signals with which the region’s airwaves are awash, and which appear to have as their conduit the many silent, sentinal-like transmitter arrays currently dotted throughout the borough and adjacent parishes. That it hasn’t been forcibly removed by order of Horsingdon Borough Council is, perhaps, the least of the mysteries surrounding this curious artefact; especially so, given that the deranged and disordered mind from which such an enterprise first sprang has thus far proved immune to the predations of the praeternatural horrors whose manifestation appears to be so closely associated with the malign frequencies afflicting Horsingdon. Perhaps there is a lesson there for us all.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.68: Outer Gateways

In the more disreputable and dilapidated quarters of suburban Horsingdon, one occasionally encounters gateways set within crumbling, whitewashed walls. Oftimes, on the other side of these peeling, black-painted doors one encounters densely-overgrown scraps of neglected garden: the wasteland detritus of the former lives of long-forgotten residents; but there are amongst these gateways some which bear the apotropaic mark of the Folk of the Black Bowers - all but invisible to those unfamiliar with the Old Ways and their systems of signification. These gateways, once identified, are best avoided, for they sometimes lead to those occulted zones and unseen regions of Horsingdon’s topography from which - at least for the casual traveller - there may be no hope of returning.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.67: The Empty Tower

Its pitiless Brutalism stark against the grey monotony of Horsingdon’s skyline, this tower block has stood empty for over a decade. Few dare to enter its confines these days - and those that do invariably report, in the aftermath of their encounter with the tower’s interior, feeling stricken by an overwhelming sense of discordant unease.

No one is quite sure why this is - although it is rumoured that the tower’s foundations reach down to a subterrenean grotto once sacred to Those Who Wait...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.66: Saucers over Horsingdon Redux

More from the inscrutable ‘Cold’ by way of another curious image in my inbox. Enigmatic, saucer-shaped objects ablaze with a nuclear radiance born from the lightless desperation of some unimaginable alien abyss: ready to disclose, perhaps, those nameless mysteries long hidden in shadow with their praeternatural brillance? Or burn the world to bitter ashes with the irradiating intensity of their terrible light...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.65: Saucers Over Horsingdon

Forwarded to me by the mysterious ‘Cold’, the above image appears to show two glowing saucers skimming across the rooftops of Horsingdon, whilst an equally luminescent - yet monstrously misshapen and globular - mothership hovers pendulously above...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.64: Dead Sounds Redux

The suburban airwaves of Horsingdon thrum and resonate invisibly, imperceptibly, with the sonic coagula of occult signals and sedimented layers of alien broadcasts - and with the hauntological echoes of ancient ritual chants, whose attempts to usher in an apocalyptic future only ever lead to any number of temporal evolutionary dead ends.

The cloacal debris of these dead sounds continues to be transmitted by the arrays that have increasingly colonised the Horsingdon landscape since the 1950s - dead sounds weaponised to the degree that, on occasion, they may effect some minor praeternatural intrusion for a brief moment of horror; but such moments rapidly retreat from view to take the form of half-remembered folklore: tales to be told as a brief reprise from the grinding tedium of an unchanging present, and from a world increasingly bereft of and blind to wonderment and terror.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.63: Obsevation Post

A small Ministry brick bunker or observation post overlooks witch-haunted Wealdstone Brook near the point at which it wends its way past the foot of Burn Hill. The bunker was constructed in the early1970s after a number of unnerving incidents of paranormal activity had been reported in the vicinity - most involving an apparition of something described as both ‘unnatural’ and ‘inhuman’ rising out of the shallows of the Brook, and coinciding with the disappearance of three local people.

About a decade previous to these events, the paranormal investigator Roland Franklyn - who was at the time conducting research into the history of occult activity throughout the region - visited the same locale, noting that this particular site had not only been sacred to Those Who Wait since at least neolithic times, but also claiming that even up to the present ancient and terrible rites - often involving blood sacrifice - continued to be enacted here, at night and in secret, by a cult led by the hidden descendents of the Boreham line. Fortunately, it seems that, since the building of the lookout post (although now long untenated), such activities have abated.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.62: Charitable Causes

Amongst the second-hand bric-a-brac of Horsingdon’s charity and junk shops, one occasionally chances open some rather strange and curious items...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.61: Storage Facilities

This warehouse was a secure Ministry storage facility during the 1950s, but has remained vacant ever since that secretive government agency withdrew its presence from the region; yet despite its present state of disuse, the warehouse remains safeguarded behind a wall of high wire fencing. The reasons for this are unclear, although the local constabulary occasionally receive reports of strange sounds and a curious, phosphorescent blue light emanating from the building’s interior.

Whilst no longer corporeally tenanted, perhaps the dilapidated building yet remains haunted by the  spectral echos of whatever inhuman technologies which were once ensconced within its walls.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.60: Monstrous Arcana

Partially screened by a row of trees, this Ministry building, whilst seemingly unoccupied, continues to broadcast its cryptic signal - a signal which acts as the carrier of a monstrous and alien arcana. It is said that of those percipients who have heard the signal once, few would ever willing listen to it again. Who - or what - is responsible for the broadcast is also a question subject to much speculation; but given the terrible nature of the signal, perhaps it is for the best if this question remains forever unanswered.