GHOST PIPE Vol. 00 / never issued
The veil is unreasonably thinIndependent research / no witnesses

A field guide to refusing the sun.

GHOST
PIPE

The forest has a basement.
Something down there is listening.

White stems. Bowed heads. No interest in daylight. Where these little bastards bloom, the other side presses its ear to the soil.

Read what was unearthed

Not a church. Not a nursery. Definitely a situation.

no chlorophyll.
no allegiance.
take the hint. Ghost pipes in a forbidden botanical specimen plateFive pale, nodding flowers emerge from a tangled root system, surrounded by an imperfect ritual circle and handwritten annotations. ☾†⊕‡ a listening organ?not roots.wiring.
Fig. 01 — Monotropa uniflora

Where it blooms, the other side touches back.

01 / botanical heresy

The sun is
a landlord.
Stop paying.

The botanists are correct
about the plant.
Wrong about the arrangement.

They will tell you it is a flower. Fine. A telephone is also a piece of plastic. Explain the voice.

Ghost pipe does not bother with the sun. It makes other arrangements. Under the leaf litter. Through the fungal switchboard. Down where the old agreements are still binding.

I have a theory. I have several theories. I have been asked to stop bringing my theories to the garden centre.

Witchcraft is not asking nicely. It is imposing your will on a universe that has become too comfortable saying no. A ritual is a strongly worded letter with better geometry.

And these pale little flowers? These are the places the letter gets through.

PEER REVIEWED BY THE SOIL

02 / a minor working

Impose your will.
Use your indoor voice.

You do not need a crystal. You need a little nerve and something you haven't already apologised for wanting.

  1. Name the impossible thing.Not a person. Not a shopping list. A small defiance. “I will finish what I began” is a perfectly respectable curse.
  2. Give it a shape.Letters are just sticks wearing authority. Rearrange them. Make a mark the daylight would struggle to explain.
  3. Let the roots handle the paperwork.No blood. No fire. No picking the plants. The forest has enough problems without your craft supplies.

Fig. 02 / intention transducer

An ornamental ritual sigilAwaiting an unreasonable request

The apparatus is listening. It is trying not to make it obvious.

Browser-only ritual. Nothing sent. Nothing saved.

03 / recovered fragments

Notes from
the thin place.

The ink is mine.
The handwriting, increasingly, is not.

keep these in the order
they arrived. NOT the order
they happened.

001The knocking is polite.

Three from below. Two from above. I initially blamed the pipes, until I remembered the house has no pipes on that side. I have left a note asking it to respect office hours. The note has been countersigned.

004Regarding the missing Tuesday.

There was a Tuesday here. I labelled it. I put it between the Monday and the Wednesday like everybody else. Now there is a small white flower and an invoice for seventeen minutes of moonlight. I am not paying it twice.

009Do not give the moss your name.

Initials are sufficient. The moss is a bureaucrat. It will ask for your mother's maiden name and a forwarding address. Tell it you are merely browsing. You are permitted to be rude to moss.

000This entry was here first.

Before the notebook. Before the ink. Before the unfortunate business with the garden centre. One sentence: “When the flowers bow their heads, something underneath is standing up.” I would like the author to stop using my pen.

An observation. Not a warning. Probably.

“You call it the other side
as if this side has been behaving normally.”

Transmission ends / the roots continue