Before you can know what a Danelope laments I'm sure you are asking the same question everyone else is has asked. What is a Danelope? Very good question. Let us start with the etymology of the word Danelope then.
Danelope is an English word. American to be specific. It first appeared around 1988 in a small borough in Pennsylvania called Erie. Danelope is a clever bastardization of the Byzantine Greek word anthólops witch according to Wikipedia is first attested in Eustathius of Antioch (c.336), according to whom it was a fabulous animal "haunting the banks of the Euphrates, very savage, hard to catch and having long saw-like horns capable of cutting down trees."
Now that we know where the word Danelope derives from let us not get it confused with the animal that shares the same etymological background as the Danelope. While the antelope is beautiful big eyed African or Asian Bovidae the Danelope is not of this dimension let alone of this world. The Danelope is a disembodied trans-dimensional symbiotic alien spirit which inhabits the limbs of unsuspecting and susceptible human hosts.
In this particular case the poor bastard who had his appendage absconded with never physically lost his limb to the Danelope but his mind was definitely in question. The host, Brono, did for the most part loose autonomous control over said limb. Don't worry, it's not all that bad. Look at it this way. Brono didn't loose an arm or hand he gained an indispensable part of history who happens to become a very good friend.
How do I know all this? Well, quite frankly I was there. It was Fall of '87 and I was attending my first year of collage at Penn Sate Behrend just outside of Erie, Pennsylvania. I had cruised through high school without ever opening a book and graduated dead middle of my class of some 850 collage potentials. Before I could move on to State Collage, Penn State main campus, I had to do my time at the state pen or Behrend as the alumni like to call it. It was there at Penn State Behrend that I met Brono. On a completely unnecessary side note I never made it to Penn State main campus. At least never for scholastic reasons.
Brono was an all American boy who served his god and country in the American Armed Services as a Petty Officer Third Class in the Navy. They made sure he was properly medicated and fit for duty to server his Commander in Chief all the way up until the day he requested permission for freedom to speak freely. His Captain granted Brono permission to speak and Brono spoke earning himself a section eight, mental discharge, right out of the armed service and right back into school. Penn State Behrend not to put too fine a point on it.
Brono would tell me about how the drugs made him feel. How the world seemed to him while medicated. He was flat line. He wasn't depressed but he couldn't feel joy either. Happiness was a distant memory he dreamed about while hunting an elusive marshmallow butterfly. I would listen as he described time. He would loose days or weeks and wake in places he'd had no idea how or when he got there. Sometimes he would even remember taking the pills from the little cup the nurse gave him.
Maybe it was the 38 odd medications they built him up to keeping him even while on his tour of duty aboard an American battle cruiser. Uppers. Downers. Blue pills. White pills. Beta-blockers. Ones to make him sleep. Ones to keep him awake. Anti-depressants, Bi-polar medication. Solutions for ADHD. Others for any other psychosis or neurosis they diagnosed him with. What was real and what was a dream blurred in the way pepper spay cleared ones perspective of the moment.
Maybe my friend Brono was crazy. Regardless the Captain didn't take long to dispatch Brono after he spoke freely. Brono described in extremely unpleasant graphic detail what he most wanted in the world. He wanted to hear the sounds the Captain's skin and subsequently muscle sinew and bone rubbing against the main guns as he was fired out of them.
When I say extremely unpleasant I'm talking about the kind of Quentin Tarantinoesque graphic detail that Clive Barker and Stephen King would cringe at while holding each other for comfort. Maybe it was the 38 odd medications Brono was on. Maybe not. Only the Danelope knows. We all would laugh when Brono described these events.
So now you have an idea of what the Danelope is and you have the basics of where this creature comes from but I'm sure you are wondering what the heck a Danelope looks like. In a nut shell, if you take your thumb and pull it in to meet your two middle fingers to form a muzzle of sorts and then allow your piny and index finger to remain erect like antlers you have the physical manifestation of a Danelope.
I found it extremely amazing how much expression Brono could get out of his hand. Subtle movements of the antennas in combination with human like tilts at the wrist gave the Danelope a very convincing presence. It reminded me of an animation exercise where you have to animate a basic shape such as a sack of flower and make convey emotion clearly. This was to be done without eyes or a mouth. Brono had exceeded this lesson with his Danelope.
In the early days of Brono's relationship with Dan, his pet name for the parasitic alien living in his limb, he had no idea his arm and hand were possessed or what a Danelope was. Then again Brono didn't have a very clear view of what was going on in general much to Dan's advantage. From our conversations about his time it was clear my friend had a hard time know when he was. He would wake up and days or weeks will have gone by. He'd have no idea how he got there or how long he had been there.
It took Dan some time to adjust and learn how to manipulate the appendage he how inhabited. Imagine going from the biped that you are now with a head and two arms and cram all your essence into a hand. That's where Dan was. Brono still had a mind of his own as clouded with chemicals as it was and would try to keep his hand from doing what ever it wanted. This as all very frustrating to Dan and Brono congruently.
On more than one occasion aboard Brono's Navy vessel Dan had influence the unsuspecting Brono's actions. Little did everyone know, including Brono, That when his ship ran an exercise in repelling boarders and Brono sat in a lawn chair on the main deck with a bucket of highly charged capacitors. It was the Danelope who was chucking these improvised depth charges at the unsuspecting Navy Seals. This behavior was later attributed to the massive amounts of medication Brono was on as was the existence of a disembodied trans-dimensional symbiotic alien spirit.
On a side note, no one was killed during this exercise. Brono explained “Several of the Navy Seals had to be treated for minor nerve damage and burns but all ended well.”
“Your orders were to repel the boarders and protect the ship right?” I would express.
I believe Brono should have been recognized for creative and innovative thinking. Regardless Brono still had no idea that his limb was slowly being taken over and he would soon come face to face with his own hand and one of the best friends he will ever have.
Full awareness of his situation came at 3:00 AM on a hot summer night in 1996, somewhere in the South Pacific. The entire ship was running silent for a sonar test. All unnecessary equipment and personnel were to shut down and make no noise. Brono was in the radio room with a bottle of Jim Beam he smuggled about earlier that week while to boat was at port. His hand was staring at him. The Danelope had taken full control and his antlers or more accurately feelers were slowly twitching as the hand tilted it's self in the way a cute puppy tilts his head when you say it's name.
Brono took another hit of Jim Beam. He didn't mind his hand looking at him seemingly sizing him up as a scientist would poor over the body of an alien body from Area 51. For some reason this seemed normal to him. What was most unnerving was the Danelope spoke Russian or a derivative there of and Brono had no idea what his hand was trying to tell him.
Brono now had a uncontrollably deep desire to learn Russian and in frustration began banging his head against the bulkhead of the ship. This did not help him understand his hand, the situation, or Russian any better but when an extremely angry Executive Officer burst into the room without regard towards the blood on the bulkhead Brono looked at his hand and understood something simple.
“why are you doing that? Why are you disrupting the sonar test?” The XO demanded.
Brono could only reply. “Because.” In a gritty, raspy desperate voice, “it feels so good when I stop.” It wasn't long there after that Brono was let go from the Navy with a medical discharge.
This is the point where I met Brono, at Penn State Behrend where he was taking Russian 101 to learn to communicate with his hand, Dan. I was an undecided major claiming to be the only art student at Behrend as they didn’t have an art department. I thought I was so clever. Apparently there was a lot to be learned by all.
I met Brono through mutual friends in a service fraternity called Alpha Phi Omega. Being the artist type and against organized things like fraternities my friends made a kind of mascot or honorary member. I could hang out without the commitment. Brono was a full blown member of this co-ed group from the land of misfit toys. For a group I didn’t want to be a part of I fit right in.
At parties the Danelope would make appearances. At first everyone thought it was just drug induced fun or maybe Brono had a few too many what ever he was drinking. In time everyone started to have their own version of Dan. Drunk fools with hand puppets. Baked hippie fraternity brothers sat with resin on their shadow puppets cracking them-selves up to no end. Jerry Garcia would have been proud.
Only a few saw the Danelope for what it truly was. Pure genius. We wanted one. Not an imaginary one but a real live disembodied trans-dimensional symbiotic alien spirit to inhabit our limbs and speak to us in some language we would have to learn if we were to socialize with our new friend.
One friend of ours, Bill, who wore a bandanna around his head in the way the young bride wore a velvet ribbon around her neck in the Ann McGovern ghost story, had an imaginary Danelope in both arms. Their names were Ed and Fred. Fred floated on Ed because Ed was dead. It was diverting to see this guy walk around the house with one hand, wrist up in a Danelope prone configuration, resting the live Danelope, fully alert, on it.
On a side note, it would be quite a few years before I ever saw Bill's forehead without a bandanna on it. Oddly enough to my surprise his head did not fall off. What a relief!
I had what was called a two headed Hydra-Danelope. Yes, it looked silly with my arms joined at the elbow flailing left and right weaving back and forth like a hydra monster from Greek mythology. Each hand sporting a Danelope head ready to strike out at any passer by or flirt with an unsuspecting girl. It usually got laughs and as perpetually drunk as I was at collage it was very good cheap entertainment! Alas my Danelope for all its comedic relief was not truly a limb possessed by a disembodied trans-dimensional symbiotic alien spirit. This brings us to the Danelope's Lament.
Just like the infinitesimal odds of the right combination of amino acids, monomers, and polymers which formed the primordial soup from which we crawled once a charge was applied, Brono had become a multi-faceted bio-signal receiver iterated ad infinitum throughout his system . Capable of intercepting signals from another universe.
How could this form of synthesis have happened? I'm assuming the combination of 38 odd highly sophisticated designer drugs the military had Brono on combined with his own unique energy waves created just the right amount of vibrations in his strings to produce a biophysical equivalent of the fractal antenna which is in each and every cell phone allowing him to receive signals other humans have not experienced yet.
The strings are something the Danelope was fully aware of even if the average human isn't. Dan used a particular set of stings which help make up massless particles called gravitons to transmit his own disembodied spirit from the membrane his universe is on to the one ours is on. Specifically from his world and dimension to Brono's. O. K. This is getting a bit out there, I know. Let's back up a bit and explain what and where the stings come in.
The average high school student knows that everything is made up of atoms. Most of them are aware that atoms are made up of point particles which have electrons whizzing around the outside of them. By the time high school ends a few students even remember that inside this little bundle of point particles and elections you will find protons and neutrons. This is where we loose 99% of the students but not Dan. If you look even closer the protons and neutrons are made up of what have been called quarks which are made up of tiny vibrating strings, called so due to their shape. Some are open ended strings and some are closed ended. We are now on the quantum level where the Danelope works his magic.
Now what even the brightest high school student probably won't know unless they went into physics or philosophy in collage is that everything that we see in our world is defined by the vibrations of these subatomic strings. They define the color, shape and density of the building blocks that make up the matter that we are and live in. The only difference between the matter that makes up a building and the matter that makes up a super model whose face is plastered on the building is the vibration of these strings.
The Danelope, like the mathematical physicist Edward Witten whose one of the principal authors of the sting theory here in our universe, understood that some strings could leave the membrane of one universe and theoretically travel to a parallel universe on a parallel membrane. The open ended strings were trapped by the 4 dimensions that trapped Dan and Edward to their membranes. They were bound by time and the 3 directions; up-down, forward-backward, and side to side. Massless particles like gravitons could leave the 4 dimensions and Dan found a way to attach a message. The message was his very own spirit.
Dan knew that space was far more dynamic and changeable than even Albert Einstein thought. Dan found out that humans in our dimension were far more dynamic and changeable than even he thought thanks to advanced medicine. Unfortunately once Brono left the Navy and found a doctor that cared enough about him to listen, the number of medications he was on dropped considerably. He went from 38 of the best commercial pharmaceuticals that designer labs could offer to just two. The only two he really needed.
While this was great for Brono and his ability to function in the general populace without drawing too much unwanted attention upon himself it broke the conduit between the parallel universes. Dan was trapped in Brono's limb. Forever.
At first the Danelope's thoughts grasped at the hope of another following his work. He then remembered most of his colleagues thought he was a crack pot and didn't take string theory let alone trans-dimensional string travel seriously. Until recently Edward Witten and his colleagues experienced the same reception of what is now call M Theory. There is still no proof other than the Danelope that String Theory is correct.
The second issue was Brono was no longer a suitable receiver let alone a transmitter. He didn't want to go back to the gossamer dream world he was in while on enough medication to kill a horse. Even to help Dan. At this point it might not help because most aspects of Brono's life has changed. The combination might not be right any longer due to the changes in Brono's own String vibrations.
Third but not least in this little list is a simple fact. The technology to re-create sending a spirit signal on a graviton string transmission to another dimensional membrane may never be developed here and if it was we are centuries away from it. Dan and his host would be dead and gone before this ever came to pass.
Brono did learn Russian and discovered that his Danelope had some issues with his situation. Dan hated toilet paper and admittedly demanded that Brono become a right hand wiper. Other issues weren't as sever but Brono did his best to avoid using the possessed hand for many mundane acts such as picking up hot coffee cups, masturbation, and shaking hands.
While the Danelope and Brono are living as happy as a boy and his hand possibly can, Dan secretly dreams of another string theorist, from any dimension, coming up with a similar spirit transmission device and restoring Dan to his own dimension. Dan will have his antenna on the lookout and you should too. If you ever wake up and find your hand staring at you I might suggest saying “Рад познакомиться с вами. Меня зовут (insert your name here with Russian accent).”
Death silently crept along the dark dark wooded edge of Mill Creek the way only nocturnal creatures of pray dreamt. He was heading towards The Wedding For the Dead. The last time this ominous grim reaper had spent any lingering spell in Erie, Pennsylvania was 196 shuddersome years ago. Much like a lurid colorful leaf eerily drifting to the ground from it's perch high upon the ghost white branch of the disigenous birch it took some time to extend the cadaverous hand of death collecting all the souls cast off by the Battle of Lake Erie. Sure Death has been around a moment or two here and there to embrace the dearly departed over the years. He even took some pleasure at the Pennsylvanian conservative superstitious. How they feared his macabre presence and shivered when he entered the room to complete his unearthly task. Tonight Death had come to fulfill a promise he had made over a century ago and this would take time.
The Wedding for the Dead was to take place this autumn. Autumn, full of decay, death, and beauty, the waning period of the life cycle. At no place on Earth are peek fall colors more beautiful than Pennsylvania. Even as far back September 10th, 1813 Death remembered the fall colors had begun to show and the smell of winter was on the air. Misery Bay cradled in beauty by Presque Isle and the US Brig Niagara sunk to the bottom of Misery Bay dragging four fifths of it's 40 crew members to a shallow watery grave. History had it written this gruesome event one way. Death doesn't have a political agenda to his ominous memory. His recollection was pure. The dead. Disturbingly peaceful. The decaying ghastly in appearance. The wretched souls that he ushered on with undying ghoulish vigilance. Pure.
Death mused over his real name, Imhotep. He believed it a kind of morbid irony when a Jew, murdered some 2000 years ago, who's name means 'the one who comes in, with peace' is made Death. Not only was he Death he was the most accomplished Death in the history of souls. Imhotep could snuff the fire of a new born to harvest it's soul and turn around to wait patiently for the passing of a ancient and nearly mummified woman who remembered a time before the complexities of the modern world. It was no effort for Imhotep to cut short the career of a beautiful young starlet nearly embalm by modern pharmaceuticals while pondering the passing of her cat who's soul now head butts Death's hand luring affection from eternity. All of this was easy for Death, easy for Imhotep to execute. The Wedding for the Dead was not so easy. It went against the rules. Death would surely pay a price. Imhotep would surely pay a price he wasn't sure he could afford.
