Whom Gods Would Destroy, Part II: Archangel

By Tyler Kimball

Whom Gods Would Destroy: An Occult History of the First World War continues in its second volume, Archangel, chronicling the otherworldly adventures of the Nine Giants through the devastated countryside of Belgium and Germany, and the paranormal fringe of the Great War. Enter

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chaoskampf Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088164099

Book preview

Whom Gods Would Destroy

An Occult History of the First World War

Part II: Archangel

By Tyler Kimball

WHOM GODS WOULD DESTROY, Part II: Archangel

Preceded by

Part I: the Architects of Hell

And to be followed by

Part III: Armageddon

Cover art derived from Percy John Derf Smith's Death Forbids and Death Intoxicated, plates from the 1921 etching series Dance of Death(Part I), Lenin, der Günstling, by Karl Czerpien, published in Swiss magazine Nebelspalter #46, Nov. 15, 1919, under Chief Editor Paul Altheer (Part II), and George Paul LeRoux's 1918, or The Last Communique (Part III). Back art taken Seregey Solomko's God With Us."

This manuscript has been prepared in Garamond, 13 point, with footnotes set at 12, with the title set in Manorly.

First Edition

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2023 by Tyler Kimball

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any means without permission.

Book II: Archangel

This end of the world will occur without noise, without revolution, without cataclysm. Just as a tree loses leaves in the autumn wind, so the earth will see in succession the falling and perishing all its children, and in this eternal winter, which will envelop it from then on, she can no longer hope for either a new sun or a new spring. She will purge herself of the history of the worlds. The millions or billions of centuries that she had seen will be like a day. It will be only a detail completely insignificant in the whole of the universe.[...] The universe is so immense that it appears immutable, and that the duration of a planet such as that of the earth is only a chapter, less than that, a phrase, less still, only a word of the universe’s history.

- Le Fin du Monde by Camille Flammarion

The Realm of the Unreal

​Acting First Sergeant Vida Henry of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry stepped into the night air of Houston for a smoke, when he heard a young man weeping. Intrigued and mildly disturbed, he walked to one of the white infantry barracks at Camp Logan, where he found a distressed man holding a newspaper clipping of a girl. Sgt. Henry asked why the man was crying. The man apologized, and said that he was easily upset sometimes. Sgt. Henry asked if the image – a washed out photograph of a Caucasian girl, five years of age, with jutting ears that resembled the man's- was his daughter.

​The man said no. It was a girl name Elsie Paroubek, who had been murdered in 1911, suffocated and stuffed into a drainage channel. When Sgt. Henry asked if he knew her at all, the man said no. The Sergeant reported that this alarmed him, and he pressed the man further. The man claimed that the death of such innocence troubled him, day in and day out, and filled him with a vengeful wrath – Sgt. Henry did not directly record what he said, but noted that it was Biblical in his write up of the incident. This assured Sgt. Henry that he was not the girl's killer, but he was still weary of the man's emotional volatility.

​The Sergeant asked the recruit's name, and he answered Henry. The Sergeant asked if this was, by coincidence, his family name, and the recruit clarified that his name was Henry Darger. The Sergeant, in turn, stated his own, which prompted a question about his rather unique given name. He said it meant 'life,' in Spanish, though admitted that most people mistook it for a female name. Darger said that if it was any consolation, he had been misnamed 'Dodger' throughout his life (emphasized by Darger's Chicagoan accent). He talked about how he was afraid of battle, and his eye problems that made it difficult to use a rifle sight, but he was willing to fight to avenge the atrocities the Germans committed against the Belgians, particularly the children. The Sergeant told Darger that he understood, but that he needed to be quiet and get inside of his barracks. Darger complied.

​The Sergeant wrote up the notes for a possible report on Darger's activities, but never filed it, viewing it as a non-issue involving a white recruit. Sgt. Henry, and the rest of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, had been keenly aware of the rising tension between the newly arrived black soldiers and the citizens of the segregated town.

​A majority of African-American voters backed Woodrow Wilson in 1912, only to see further expansion of segregation and the removal of prominent black officials from government positions. After black leaders expressed their dissatisfaction with this betrayal, Wilson doubled down, stating that segregation was a benefit to American civilization, and that if colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it. The 1910s were something of a downturn in American race relations, and the situation in Houston was one of the decade's many flashpoints.

​The successful demand of white workmen to have a separate water tank installed at Camp Logan became the crowning moment of humiliation, and officials in Texas deliberately sewed racial discord in the immediate wake of the Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma, an armed rural uprising on 2 August 1917. The rebellion surprised authorities by uniting young tenant farmers across Oklahoma's racial lines (whites, blacks, Seminoles, Muscogee Creeks, and other Native groups) to protest against conscription and other issues facing agrarian workers (and more abstract grievances against entanglement in the distant wars of European empires). The uprising used the organizing and intimidation tactics of secret societies, including night riding against enemies, and integration of elements of the eponymous and contemporary native religious ceremony also known as the Busk. While the rebellion ended the next day in a gunfight that saw three combatants dead, it was used as a pretext for violent suppression of socialists and syndicalists, particularly the Industrial Workers of the World. The police and union-busting backlash essentially destroyed the Oklahoman labor movement, and further splintered American socialism in the wake of Daniel De Leon's death. Many socialists were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for seditious pacifism, most famously Eugene V. Debs, five time Socialist Party presidential candidate (Debs v. United States).

​On August 23rd of 1917, Darger went to Prairie Street to watch a screening of The Fall of a Nation, a now lost anti-pacifist propaganda film about an invasion and conquest of the United States by a European Confederated Army, essentially a supercharged Central Powers. Most unsettling to Darger, there were multiple scenes of atrocities against war veterans and children. He sat in discomfort, both from the material and his chronic eyestrain, and began to blubber. The film was a pseudo-sequel to the Birth of a Nation, simultaneously screened by the theater. This was almost surely a deliberate attempt to fan the flames of the current controversy over black soldiers in Houston, as screenings of the film had previously precipitated riots and racially motivated murders in cities such as Philadelphia and Lafayette, Indiana.

​While we can't be absolutely certain whether the movie theatre in question was the Lincoln Theatre at 711 Prairie Street, or the Isis at 1012, the Lincoln screening Birth of a Nation is outrageous; The Lincoln theatre's building was a professional office center for Houston's African-American population. The theatre was known to present films and live performances targeting a primarily black audience, and was, at the time, owned and primarily operated by African-American real estate agent O.P. DeWalt.

​Outside of the theater, Darger watched a crowd of people, largely children, looking at a web. It was a dull yellow brown, and the crowd said that it read WAR, but Darger's poor eyes could not make-out the letters.

​The American phenomenon of the Gold Bug, also known as a prophecy or educated spider, saw a tongue-in-cheek period of coverage during the Great War, though it had been in vogue since the middle of the 19th century, and was used to mock William Jennings Bryan's leadership of the Democratic Party, famous for his Cross of Gold speech in favor of Bimetallism[1]. As the legend goes, spiders across America began to weave the words WAR, ARMY, and NAVY, in webs across the country[2]. They were particularly common in New Orleans, judging by newspaper reports, though Oklahoma and Texas produced more than their fair share. It seems to have some historical roots in African-American folklore, drawing from the West African practice of Nggam, divination via the movements of spiders and crabs. Professor G.E. Beyer of Tulane scoffed at these reports, especially full phrases such as VICTORY AMERICA, WIN WAR, U.S. WINS WAR, WHITE KAISER, and WILSON WINS.[3] The golden-silk orb weaver, of the genus

Nephila, was the most common species, due to its jagged, golden webs which can, indeed, look like they spell letters, albeit in a rather sharp, runic form – WAR in particular is easy to make out in their patterns, as noted by Prof. Beyer. Some species are also rather large, capable of eating lizards and small snakes, causing them to build up complex, overlapping webs to support their size. Though one of the prophetic spiders' common predictions, WAR ENDS NOVEMBER, 1918, is rather chilling considering it was noted in the Times-Picayune or New Orleans on 30 September 1917. I seriously have more tangible proof for this spider's psychic powers than most human claimants, so maybe her descendants went on to warn pigs of the slaughter.

​Darger retreated several blocks to a restaurant on Congress Avenue to hastily scribble notes in his journal/scrapbook. His fervent work drew the attention of an elderly man, who shuffled over from the far side of the bar, inquiring as to what Darger was working on. Darger closed up his journal, a copy of the Bible with scrap paper inserted between the pages. The old man, in turn, showed him a book of his own, filled with sketches of strange aircraft.

​Darger showed the man his sketches and notes of a war against children, and a race of giant winged demons he named the Blengigomeneans. The old man, fair and small, introduced himself as one Charles Dellschau, draftsman of the Sonora Aero Club.

​Born in Prussia on June 4th, 1830, Charles August Albert Dellschau had retired by 1900, moving into an attic in Houston. Between 1899 and 1922, Dellschau illustrated fourteen notebooks with drawings of airships, and kept a diary of the club's exploits. Darger asked if he actually knew these ships and their pilots. Dellschau claimed that he left the actual piloting of the aero-crafts to others, a secret society of inventors and aviators established in Sonora, California in 1864. He acted as a historian, keeping press blooms (news clippings) on aviation triumphs and accidents, and fashioning them into collages on butcher paper. He had recorded the airship flaps that preceded the war, including the work of Hawley Hannibal Barker, and followed the story of Burrell Cannon, who claimed to have flown an airplane in 1901, one year before the Wright Brothers, on a couple of occasions in Pittsburgh, Texas. Cannon was inspired by the angelic vehicles described in the Book of Ezekiel and the Club's principles of gas engine flight. God had told him that he would be the first man to fly in a true airplane, the Ezekiel Airship. Dellschau said it was a strange thing, showing the tandem wheels within wheels and paddles which powered the craft. They were going to show the thing at the 1903 World's Fair in St. Louis, but its transport train was destroyed by a storm, and Cannon believed that God had willed him and his designs to never again fly.

​Another sensational article came from the 17 January 1897 edition of The San Francisco Call, covering an interview between scientific correspondent Frank M. Close and a Hindu viticulturist wandering Northern California in a flying machine powered by an electromagnetic, radium-based apergent drive, a term derived from the sci-fi concept of apergy, or anti-gravity.

​Dellschau's current goal, however, was to get into contact with John William Dunne, a British soldier and aeronautics engineer who had fallen ill just before the war, retiring from active flight. Dunne was a dreamer, Dellschau said. Airframes and engines came to him in his sleep, along with prophecies of doom such as the destruction of Saint-Pierre by the ashes of Mount Pelée and industrial disasters across Europe.

​Dellschau was sure that the British military had scooped up Dunne, to make airships. The man could dream through time – and the physicists were just now describing the connection between space and time. Dellschau imagined a new Aero Club, building time-ships rather than airships, planes of the higher planes.

​It all made Darger's head hurt.

​Darger showed Dellschau his own collection of newspaper and magazine clippings - of children, Catholic saints and similar iconography, military images, and any other old thing that caught his fancy. Darger found that Dellschau was keenly prepared for this meeting, carrying around several volumes of notebooks in his rucksack, and a set of watercolors.

​Darger asked for proof of his membership in this fantastical Sonora Aero Club. Dellschau showed him a dense text containing information on the society's discovery of NB Gas, an antigravity propellant or lifting Fluid. It was allegedly discovered by Peter Mennis, a miner, prospector, and genius inventor that Dellschau admired greatly. Mennis had used this substance, which he nicknamed Supe, and rotary plates called electrandes, to create a rudimentary balloon-airship named Goose, before moving on to more advanced designs. Mennis was also a bawdy alcoholic, and the usual protagonist of Dellschau's tall tales.

​The Aero Club was said to be part of a larger conspiracy known as NYMZA. Dellschau named aviation pioneers Otto and Gustav Lilienthal, and inventor Ottomar Anschütz as correspondents of NYMZA. Controversial airplane designer Gustave Whitehead was also in communion with the Club, albeit confined to Connecticut. Dellschau clarified that Whitehead was also German, originally a Bavarian named Gustav Weisskopf. As with Dellschau, some of his claims are considered fanciful, though there is growing evidence that Whitehead had in fact flown in one of his heavier-than-air vehicles one to two years before the Wright Brothers.

​When asked what this 'Nymza' – as Darger recorded it- stood for, Dellschau said it was Hebrew, named by one of the Jewish-German leaders. It was cabalistic, befitting such a cabal, with the 'A' standing for Atzilut, the highest realm, the spiritual and philosophic ether. The N stood for Eternity, the Y for Foundation, the M for Kingdom, and the Z for Radiance – likely corresponding to the terms Netzah, Yesod, Malkhut, and Zohar in Qabbalah. But Dellschau insisted that one couldn't go around saying the name everywhere, so he wrote their name as ĐM=XØ – Delta Mu=Chi Phi, which Darger recorded as something involving Space-craft(διαστημόπλοιο - diastimóploio) and spatial-philosophy (possiblyχωρικόφιλοσοφία - Chorico-philosophia).There was a war on, and though he was a German by birth, Dellschau was an American patriot – even if, he admitted, he had fought in the Confederate States Army. But he signed his Amnesty Oath and knew what was good for him. Darger said that he understood, claiming to be German as well, and, oddly, Brazilian.

​Darger was unfamiliar with the Hebrew or Greek language, and Dellschau spoke in an odd manner – not only had he retained elements of his native Prussian German, they had merged with a thick Texan accent, further aggravated by rushed, rambling and highly idiosyncratic speech patterns – 'a great heaping jumble of words.' Darger wished to hear stories about the Civil War, a topic that fascinated him, and asked if what was shown in Birth of a Nation wastrue.

​Dellschau ignored these requests, and spoke of the Sonora Aero Club at length, an organization of 'great foolishness,' mentioning a grotesquely fat aviator named Christian Axel von Roemeling [recorded as Romling in Darger's journal] who crashed his vehicle Hawk several times, which everyone else blamed on his 385-pound frame. Von Roemeling fervently claimed it was sabotage, and ended up in a relationship with the proprietor of their communal boarding house, a Madam Glantz [Ms. Gantz in Darger's journal]. Another member of the club, O'Harry, a rather unhinged former stagecoach robber and bundle of bones, also pined for Madam Glantz, and rigged their bed to collapse on the wedding night. This O'Harry would later attempt to rob a stagecoach Dellschau was riding in, and was shot dead. Nobody missed him.

​Dellschau mentioned the inventors and their creatively named airships- Michael Gorey [sic] and his Maybug, the Dove of Heinrich Baumann, Otto Krause's Idea, and Professor Carolus' Ride Me. He had personally worked with a Jordan [Jourdan in Dellschau's journals] and Homer Trump to draft a series of Aero Trumps. He said that they might seem like liars and swindlers, but they were right, and everyone knows that man can fly now.               But it was with the death of the charismatic, plain and rough Peter Mennis, with his big hat and bigger ideas that the group began to fall apart. Mennis had gone up in his Airostant Goose, and, like the fate of Otto Lilienthal, broke his neck in a crash. Some companies swooped in and tore apart Peter's work, and Doctor Michael Gorey was sent to an insane asylum by hungry money lenders and the government men. Darger noted that, at that moment, Dellschau leaned in and said that Peter Mennis was a wichman, called Operator. He was one of the big men, the great men, and only he could make the NB gas, because it was mixed with his blood. That's what the B stood for, but nobody knew what the N stood for. His people had come down from the north of the state, from a city called Telos under Mount Shasta, made famous by Frederick Spencer Oliver's A Dweller on Two Planets. Mennis had gone up sometimes, and struggled with something malicious up there in the middle of the air.

​Darger confessed that he had dreams of something similar, a fear of the upper air and of a malevolent tornado or Moskoestrom (the name of a particular whirlpool) he had come to call Sweetiepie. He talked about his fear of being swallowed up by the bad weather, and his nightmares of seeing a young woman or girl who was a storm of some sort, some sort of exploding, spiraling cloud over the water, choking or dead but screaming. Somehow, he said, she was a living explosion. Darger said that the world was a big explosion, a big swirling vortex of war and violence and chaos, like Dante's Inferno in a tornado, a war storm.

​Dellschau grew very dark and withdrawn and said that Mennis had warned of Air with Air bombardment, pioneered by some Texan inventor named W.H. Brown. He mentioned the 1915 novel The Man Who Rocked the Earth, by physicist Robert W. Wood and Arthur C. Train, and how Wood envisioned bombs that would work by smashing up or breaking down the atoms of hydrogen or helium to destroy cities with their energy. Mennis had experimented with such things, using gravity or some similar force to decay atoms in the desert, but grew very scared of what such weaponry could do to the world.

​Dellschau said that after Mennis died, he returned to Houston to become a butcher and live in his stepdaughter's attic, but wondered if the others had gone their separate ways and continued experimenting, resulting in all those airships everyone kept seeing. Dellschau sent letters to – and this sent a chill up my spine – both Barker and a Baron von Boehm, but had never been able to establish regular correspondence. He laughed and blamed his half-forgotten German and half-learned English, but Darger recorded that he looked sad.

​Dellschau's best lead came from the railway tycoon Arthur Stillwell, who retired from his oil prospecting in 1912 and became a prolific author. Dellschau had read Stillwell's Universal Peace – War is Mesmerism, and sent him a message about the Aero Club. Stillwell lived an uncanny life, and claimed to have made major choices in his life based upon the advice and prophecies of brownies or fairies."

​Darger had heard of Stillwell, but not his fairies, and Dellschau countered by noting that many great men had fairy companions, even great intellectuals and modern men of science, like the poet Yeats and George Ellery Hale, an astronomer oft visited by a little elf who told him where to build telescopes. Napoleon was instructed in apocalyptic mysteries by a little red man in Egypt. There were elves all around us, interfering with history.

​Stillwell's entities prophecized his marriage to his wife Genevieve Wood, advised him on business deals, located oil fields, channeled poems and books, and told him to build the town of Port Arthur, Texas. The spirits woke him one night and had him gaze into his bedroom wall as though it were a scrying glass. He saw disaster befalling the port of Galveston, of busting dams and thousands drowned in a Biblical deluge as a mighty wind howled like a beast, the Great Hurricane of 1900.

​Foretelling an even greater disaster, Stillwell began a search for other extraordinary sensitives and channelers, coordinating with fellow oil prospector William Knox D'Arcy. He had apparently found something or someone near his Kansas City operations.

​When pressed, Dellschau thought that it may have been the legendary gold of King Tartarax of Quivera, a sort of northern variation on the El Dorado legend found in the ancient territory of the Wichita and Pawnee. Quivera was likely fabricated by The Turk, a native informant of the conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who appeared to be leading the Spaniards on a wild goose chase towards a land of gold-rich giants. The Turk was executed by strangulation upon Coronado's return to Mexico, but his ruse bought his people some time. The golden monarch's prophecized return had been the subject of several Nebraskan and Kansan newspaper hoaxes in June of 1889.

​Of course, all of Stillwell's searching and correspondence came to naught, and the mesmeric evil of war swept across the world.

​Darger said a mock toast to 'Auld Lang Syne,' though Dellschau seemed puzzled by the gesture, and went quiet. There was a sudden rattling noise, like something metal crashed to the floor upstairs. The bartender shivered, Darger noted, and the hairs on his own neck stood on end. Dellshau leaned in and casually stated that this building is haunted. Sometimes, he said, you could hear breathing sounds, or odd stomps. Dellshau, despite Darger's obvious interest in the ghost stories, explained the mundane history of the establishment – it started out as a bakery, became a trading post, a druggist, and a public house, the oldest business building in town. Dellshau reminisced about how the Kennedys, the old owners, used to hand out biscuits to the Confederate soldiers.

​Dellshau then left, with barely a goodbye, fretting the thought of carrying his precious books home through a coming storm.

​Darger mustered the courage to mount the stairs. He stopped moving at the penultimate step, thinking he had heard another set of footsteps that kept moving. But they were smaller, lighter, and he noted that he simply hoped that a cat was on the loose. He opened the door, and felt cold, though perhaps, he wrote, it was just the chill of fearful anticipation.

​He entered the upper floor, where he saw a girl clutching a toy ball, weeping. At that point, his shoulders quaked, and he asked what she was doing up there, if she was supposed to be alone. The child did not turn, nor did he, when he felt a great presence breathing down [his] neck. There came a sudden, indistinct pressure that he likened to someone squeezing his head, with both thumbs pressing against his eyes. He quickly retreated down the stairs, unwilling to look at the darkness behind him.

​The bartender asked why he had gone upstairs. Darger admitted it was nothing but wild curiosity. The bartender told Darger that there were some strange doings upstairs. Darger asked if people had ever seen a little girl up there. The bartender, a large African-American man who quickly re-introduced himself as Carl, said that most people mentioned glass shattering, bottles tumbling around, and some kind of presence that just felt evil. A few people mention seeing something that seems to be a grown woman standing in the corner, but no little girl.

​Darger paid for his drinks, left the closing bar, and started his walk back to the base as it began to rain.

​There were rumors around camp that local police shot and killed Corporal Charles Baltimore in an altercation at noon. Two Houston police officers, Rufus Daniels and Lee Sparks, fired warning shots to break up a gathering of black men playing craps on a corner in the San Felipe district, with several of the gamblers fleeing. Officer Sparks entered the nearby house of one Sara Travers in pursuit of the suspects, and, after a fight over the legality of a warrantless search, beat the woman and dragged her outside. An African-American private, Alonzo Edwards, offered to handle the situation. Sparks proceeded to pistol-whip the private and arrest him. Corporal Baltimore inquired into the whereabouts of Private Edwards. Sparks struck him with his pistol and discharged his firearm thrice. Baltimore fled into a nearby home, where he hid under a bed. Sparks and Daniels chased down Baltimore, beat him, and arrested him without informing military officials.

​The soldiers of the Twenty-fourth rapidly organized and began to plan an all out attack on the local police. The release of a roughed-up but very much alive Baltimore quelled the uprising, but the anger remained. While Baltimore's murder turned out to be a false report, multiple witnesses confirmed the other incidents of police brutality. Major K.S. Snow canceled all evening passes and strengthened the camp guard, only to find soldiers stockpiling ammunition from the supply tent. He gathered his men to reprimanded them for their vigilantism. One soldier, who had smuggled in his rifle, fired it, claiming that a mob was marching on Camp Logan. The panicked and furious men scrambled for guns and ammunition and fired wildly into neighboring buildings.

​Sergeant Vida Henry saw the foolishness of this running about in the heavy rain, and rallied the men into an organized attack, ordering his hundred-and-fifty-some men to supply themselves and march on the Houston police station.

​Even with Henry's leadership, discipline broke down rapidly, and the unit attacked white-occupied houses and vehicles along the two and half mile journey to San Felipe. There, the poorly-organized police force finally intercepted the soldiers with a unit of six officers, three of whom were fatally shot at the scene. Two soldiers would later die of injuries, apparently friendly fire. The soldiers moved to attack a police car, disarming and shooting the occupants, and fired on an open vehicle carrying a man in olive uniform, mistaking him for a mounted policeman. The rioters soon realized that this was a member of the Illinois National Guard, Captain Joseph W. Mattes, and mutilated the corpse to hide his identity. At this point, understanding the weight of their actions, the formation dispersed, with Sergeant Henry returning with the remaining men.

​Vida Henry shook the hands of the soldiers under his command, ordered them to lay the blame on his leadership, and said that he was going to commit suicide. Once his soldiers departed, Henry shot himself.

​Darger stopped in his tracks as a crack of thunder tore through the downpour, illuminating the night with the clarity of noon. He turned around, and ran back to the bar, trudging through eight blocks of fresh, sucking mud that seemed to writhe with more worms than I have ever seen in my whole life.

​There was something up in the air, he wrote, some kind of presence in the storm, like a great ghost or angel of darkness, like the whirlwinds that take up prophets or the pillars of smoke and fire.

​A frog landed on Darger, seemingly from the heavens, and began to panic at the Biblical implications.

​In early July, 1914, frogs rained in South Dakota[4], and in May 1915, thousands of small frogs fell over Weatherford, Texas during one of the heaviest rainstorms in years[5]. Meteorologist Waldo L. McAtee[6] would cite multiple incidents throughout the middle of America – from the Dakotas down to Oklahoma and the Texan coast – of worms, minnows, and frogs falling from the sky, usually in May to the end of Summer; he likewise cited an incident in which French scientist Francis Castelanu witnessed a massive rain of fish over Singapore. The 23 August 1917 fall was relatively mild in scope.

​Darger thought of the war. He had been uncertain about it until he heard of the popularity of the Sacred Heart among the French. The nun Claire Ferchaud had pushed president Poincaré and the French generalship to consecrate the armies to the Sacred Heart, and to place the emblem on their flag and uniforms in a great crusade against Germans and Freemasonry. The Republic had clerical laws, but millions of Catholic soldiers had pledged themselves to fight for Our Lady, in the name of civilization and the protection of children. And the Madonna had appeared to soldiers in the trenches.

​Darger remembered the speech President Wilson made on 8 November 1915, quoting Ezekiel 33:2-6 to inspire Americans to take up the mantle of the watchman on the shore. America must stand vigilant against injustice and the suffering of children. And if God sees the sword come down upon the land, he will blow his trumpet, and whosoever ignores this warning, shall have the blood of the innocent upon his own head.

​When he found the bar again, Carl was closing up. He begged the man to let him in for the little girl's sake. He couldn't leave her up there, with whatever horrible force lurked upstairs. Carl worried about the rumored race riot breaking out down town, and he wanted to get home without being lynched. Darger started crying, he said that the little girl was scared, and he left her with that thing like a coward.

​Carl unlocked the door, and waited inside as Darger walked upstairs. Carl ran up to hand him a lantern, before retreating. Darger said that he stood on the upper floor for a moment of calm, holding the lantern aloft. Carl called to him, asking if he saw anything. Darger wrote that he would have said no, but he felt the storm raging in his head again. He turned his head, and saw the girl in the corner, dark skin and black hair contrasted against a shadow darker than night. His voice quavered and his head throbbed, but he powered through and told her not to be afraid, that he wanted to talk to her, to get her out of here.

The little girl stood up. He read this as her accepting his help, as he stopped making noise. He claimed that he grabbed her under her arms, and she was there, real and warm, but he was too afraid to turn her around, suspecting some ghoulish face illuminated in a flash of lightning. The storm howled outside, and Darger could hear the sound of labored, feminine breathing on the wind. He gasped as the pressure intensified, stronger than the gale, something cruel digging into his eyes as if to blind him. He bolted for the stairs, but there was something lurking there, fighting him in the raging storm of fish and frogs.

​The ghostly woman glared at him from the far corner of the room with eyes too wide on her milk-white face. Darger claimed that those eyes weren't empty sockets, but they were blacker than they should have been, pupils on a brown ball that bulged as if hanging out, less human that deer-like. She simply watched.

​The second figure came for Darger, prowling and moving like a sheet through water. Darger said that it was like the bedsheet ghosts of child's play, but fearsome and cruel, and with a pointed head that he likened to the hoods of the knights of the Ku Klux Klan. What should have been comical filled him with pain and dread, one long white finger groping at his face, attacking his eye. Darger escaped the thing's clutches, but there were spots in his vision as he crashed down the stairs, weeping. He cried out in terror as a bullfrog slammed into the window with enough force to crack the glass and splatter its guts across the outer wall.

​Carl followed him outside, asking what the hell happened, as scared as Darger until he suddenly began to laugh. Darger soon realized that he held a bundled curtain in his arms. Too embarrassed to explain what had happened, he apologized for wasting Carl's time, handed him the spare curtain while muttering about his bad eyes, and ran off into the rain.

​Henry Darger hid in his bunk, shocked by his experience and the fractured news of the night's violence. He dreamed, briefly, of the film's atrocities, of Sgt. Henry, and of that spectral little girl and the groping thing under the sheet. He feared it would be there under his bed, and he half-remembered his childhood in the institution, when he would jump out of bed so a monster couldn't grab him and drag him under.

​The next morning, Darger heard the news of Sgt. Henry's suicide. They had only spoken once, briefly, but there was something terrible in that. He quickly realized that he had no real way to contact that old man, Dellschau, and he wouldn't be in Houston for long. People came in and out of Darger's life, never lingering. He loved stories, but he never had his own. Only scenes. Darger wrote compulsively, trying to weave a narrative that wouldn't end, a story that Darger could be a part of, where he could protect people. When he finally screwed up the nerve and braved a haunting, he became a laughingstock.

​In another, weaker coincidence in the world of Outsider art, August Natterer was transferred to an asylum in Rottenmünster, where he continued to develop his apocalyptic art. Natterer, also known by the pseudonym Neter, used by his psychiatrist to protect his family name, was a German engineer and electrician who succumbed to a severe schizophrenic dissociative episode on April Fool's Day, 1907. He believed that he saw the Last Judgement in a series of 10,000 images that flashed by in a half hour during a moment of stopped time – the clouds paused as a white spot stood all the time like a board in the sky. The parallels with UFO encounters of later decades are striking. He explained his mission:

​God himself occurred, the witch, who created the world – in between worldly visions: images of war, continents, memorials, castles, beautiful castles, just the glory of the world – but all of this to see in supernal images. They were at least twenty meters big, clear to observe, almost without colour like photographs… The images were epiphanies of the Last Judgement. Christ couldn't fulfil the salvation because he was crucified early... God revealed them to me to accomplish the salvation.

​He soon attempted suicide, and was committed to an asylum. In addition to his apocalyptic visions – including what he believed to be a prophecy of the Great War, Weltachse mit Haase (World-Axis with Hare, originally drawn in 1911 and reworked in 1919)- he developed a belief that he was the illegitimate child of Napoleon with a mission to redeem the world.

​In Rottenmünster, where Natterer would remain until his death in 1933, his work focused more concretely on the Apocalypse. In late August 1917, he drew an image of a white figure emerging from a flatted profile of a man's head entitled the Antichrist, a central theme in his new batch of work. This Antichrist, with its white robes and capriote-like hat, greatly resembles a member of the Ku Klux Klan and the entity encountered by Darger at roughly the same time.

​By the next morning, Houston was under martial law, with the city searched house-by-house for deserters of the Twenty-fourth's camp. Darger worked up the courage to speak to one of the black soldiers about his side of the story. The police had gone on their rampage first, but the soldier didn't seem alarmed, only angered. The false reports of Cleveland's death were simply the last straw in a nigh endless string of abuses. It didn't matter if that incident was mere rumor; the others weren't. The soldier said that the army was shipping his battalion back to New Mexico by train, and he wanted to keep his head down. He said he didn't want to cause any problems with a strange white man, and returned to his work.

​Darger received an honorable medical discharge later that day in a hasty statement from his commanding officer. The legal apparatus of the camp was far more interested in processing two hundred impending court-martials than dealing with one subpar recruit. The military debated whether the proceedings would be held in Houston, San Antonio, or the initial proposal of El Paso, and how best to handle the potential local firestorm and the growing media circus.

​In the end, thirteen men were condemned to death by hanging in the first court-martial, and another five by the court-martial held six days later. Nearly a year later, on the 31st of August 1918, president Wilson would grant clemency to ten soldiers, commuting their sentence from death to life in prison. On September 29th, five more soldiers were executed for their participation in the riots, with the final man hanged one week later. Not long after, Camp Logan began an epicenter of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919, when army doctors foolishly sent soldiers with the flu to local hospitals, increasing the number of known infected from under fifty to several thousand in the Houston area.

​Charles Dellschau passed away on April 20, 1923. After his death, all fourteen notebooks were thrown into a dump in Houston. Only the intervention of an antique furniture dealer named Fred Washington saved them from rotting away. He placed the notebooks in his warehouse under a pile of carpets, where they were found by a St. Thomas University student by the name of Mary Jane Victor, who used them to illustrate the story of flight. Dellschau's drawings impressed the Art Director of Rice University, Domenic Demenil, who bought four of the books. UFO researcher and artist Peter Navarro bought nine books (he would later sell them to the Witte and San Antonio Museum), with one waterlogged and largely destroyed book lingering in the warehouse until 2009. After this miraculous recovery of his work, he was recognized as one of America's earliest visionary and outsider artists, and his vibrant watercolor art was put on display in several international traveling exhibitions that continue to this day. There are just over two and a half thousand surviving drawings.

​His story is uncorroborated, as he is the only member of the supposed Sonora Aero Club to exist in any recorded form. Census records, birth and death certificates, and voting registers all turn up nothing. It is likely that Dellschau knew he was creating a fictional universe, and simply didn't acknowledge it within the text. Others, such as Navarro, believe that Dellschau had some unknown connection to those late 19th century to pre-War waves of airships. The legible portions of the heavily damaged and largely handwritten fourteenth notebook hints towards this possibility, as the few illustrations show non-dirigible based craft, such as airplanes resembling post-1920s designs, and what may be rocketship experiments dabbled in by the Sonora Aero Club. In addition, the texts allude to experiments in human flight – as in a person without any sort of vehicular assistance.

​After a failed attempt to adopt a child after his discharge in 1917, Darger largely lived out his solitary, reclusive life in Chicago, producing his now infamous, 15,145-page fantasy work, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. He accompanied his rambling text with collages and watercolors that depicted the eponymous Vivian Girls and imagery blending the brutality of the Civil War with strange alien beasts. Much speculation has focused on the seemingly hermaphroditic nature of the Vivian Girls, who are occasionally depicted with male genitalia, and the graphic violence inflicted on children by the monstrous regime of Glandelinia.

​Its sequel, Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago, featured the Vivian Girls exploring and exorcising a house possessed by demonic and ghostly forces that prey on children. It reached ten thousand manuscript pages before stopping mid-scene, just when the Vivian Girls and their brother Penrod rescued Darger's self-insert character from the evil entities of the house. A final work, The History of My Life, began with semi-autobiographical details of Darger's life before focusing on the destructive wake and eventual trial of a bizarre child-tornado entity, Sweetiepie.

​Darger would live in obscurity until shortly before his death in 1973, lamenting that it was too late now to share his work with a world that finally seemed ready to give Darger the interest he craved.

​As for Carl, a ghost seen at the La Carafe is frequently identified with him, silhouetted through the second-floor's windows, occasionally shouting for a last call.

The Rise of the Fallen.

​Siegfried continued, writing that "the Priest, Céleste, and I stared at that ash shadow for what felt like ages, trying to process it. Everyone else seemed to be having a grand old time. The flying Oriental girl mumbled something to the Man in the Burnt Suit as she stepped out of the burning wreckage of the airship she just destroyed, like a macabre version of the Birth of Venus. I kept my eye on the pair, though they seemed completely disinterested in me, as though the confrontation that occurred just months ago was simply business.

​'Roya,' the Russian girl said sweetly, as loud as she could, which isn’t loud at all. Everything she says sounds like a forceful whisper. She walked towards the English Captain, paused for a second, and did a sort of an awkward half-curtsy.

​'How’s my little Anushka doing?' He said, like a father coming home from work. He held open his arms as if he wanted a hug, but she would not let him. She simply leaned her head against his chest and closed her eyes.

​I reached for my luger, but kept one hand around Céleste.

​'What are you people?' I asked while readying the pistol.

​'Interesting,' The Man in the Tarred-Up Suit said.

​'No, who are you? Witches? Aziza[7]?' Céleste demanded. She unscrewed