 
###

# Title 1

###

# Copyright

This is an entity of chimerical fiction.

THIS IS AN ARMORED BOOK

Copyright (C) 2009 by Sharkchild

www.sharkchild.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any way--electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, scanning, or recording--except for short quotations in critical reviews or articles, without written permission from the publisher.

Published in Calabasas, California

By Sharkchild, LLC.

www.sharkchild.com

All artwork created by John F. Stifter.

www.quantumcathedral.com

###

# Dedication

 o dreams,  
the heralds of what is to come.

###

# Exordium

There are worlds between our own. They have windows to glimpse them by, but those looking glasses are more than often diminutive. Still, a different method of gleaning the stories, visions, nightmares, and fantasies therein is quite feasible, although likely not in the way that you would expect. An inscription of vast knowledge, both ancient and modern, from a myriad of various authorships, rests within the very boundaries of our realm. Both its virtue and curse can be willingly found. All you must do is fix your eyes uncomfortably within you and there look deeply in a way you were never meant to see. If successful, your gaze will unlock the door behind raw, amalgamated imagination and meet the precarious manuscript of histories locked away in the innumerable folios of what is called The Dark Verse.

This is a portion of that text there concealed; this is a portion From the Passages of Revenants.

###

# Title 2

VOLUME I

FROM THE PASSAGES OF REVENANTS

###

# The Unlike Light

 rom the very day we first breathed the dusty air of the keep, I knew doom would plague the innocence of our souls. The sweet, effervescent smell that spread amongst us imparted a horrid sensation of life when despair was its true insinuation. Hard floor beneath our feet and cool, steel walls beneath our touch told us of the thousand escapes never to succeed. The imprisonment was demoralizing, but we were given everything we needed for survival: food, water, and clothing. These were, of course, the commodities blessed by death and used only by the wishful.

The dwellings of our strange cage consisted of rooms spanning the dimensions of about three thousand square feet. More than enough bunks filled the vacant rooms for sleep, and pillows even lined them, providing their own attempts at luring us from the cold, cruel reality of fear. A kitchen took up a large portion of the space, particularly its oversized pantry, holding food to last us for years. The stove worked wonderfully and chopped wood spoiled us, encouraging us to indulge a laziness no one had. We could not have asked for more, but we certainly could have used less. This was the joyless place we tried to make home, but home--peace--was something that would never be known again, not with these memories.

Considering the level of the keep where we lived as the first floor, numerous other floors descended below us. We were acquainted with three of those floors, and knew of a fourth, although we believed several more existed. A stairway shifted its location upon each floor, making a unique, indirect path and a difficult descent. Each subsequent floor was also larger than its predecessor, having higher ceilings, larger rooms, and longer staircases. The most haunting attribute of this abominable structure was that the further one went down, the brighter it got, and this light was no result of electricity or fire; this light was the evil of dawn spawned into its most sinister, incarnate form.

We much preferred the first floor--the pure, thick blackness of the first floor. Nothing but the blindness of pitch darkness could lull my worries away. Sight was not meant for the keep and souls were not meant for the keep. Light should never have been the guardian of good. It made the hope of salvation a bleak afterthought tucked away in the pockets of my mind, only to surface accidentally in the curious dreams of my shallow sleep. Even the pale hue of dreams caused me to tremble--their luminous qualities poisonous.

It was most assuredly not fate which brought the group of us to the keep. There was some unknown hand that willed it upon us, orchestrating an iniquitous course to become our own. I was but sleeping soundly in my own bed next to my wife when the thieves of witchery awoke me with their ugly force, driving me into a box like a cadaver and beating my head until I went limp. My wife did not scream; she did not even wake. I was an ordinary man with a dearly loved family. They could not have taken me with crueler timing--my improperly healed fists prove it.

When we initially explored the floors below the first, we were ecstatic to find a growing light, and rooms filled with thousands and thousands of books--all of them ancient texts. Although we stopped periodically, nothing hindered our gnawing hunger for the glow of golden light. Not even the clattering of claws brought hesitation to our pace. It was only when we saw the first of the things that we stopped in our tracks, midway down the third staircase. The unlucky one of our group who tripped and fell down the stairs gave half of us the time we needed to escape. The rest were overtaken by the Creatures of the Light. I dare not describe them, for even the words might beckon them to where sight meets imagination. The popping of lungs as those left behind screamed was enough to boil skin and send tongues to the back of throats.

We spent the next few weeks huddled tightly in our quarters while the disease of insanity spread amongst us. There were not many of us who could maintain keen awareness. As the scraping from the Creatures of the Light echoed eternally beneath us, beating our hearts with the force of intrepid grotesqueness, visions of uncanny terrors overwhelmed our thoughts. Some of us moaned out into the dark, crying absurdities in monstrous fright. There was no interpersonal comfort left; each of us was left to cope using what meager, emotional resources we had.

I was one of the wishers, the optimists. I let the distant prayers I knew my wife and children made stagger me against the temptation of death. There were only a few of us who held strong enough longings, and it was we who lived on and on beneath the blanket of darkness, feeling our way to food and eating it without the commission of the stove for fear of unwanted attention.

We knew ourselves to be safe in the dark since the Creatures of the Light never advanced upon the first floor. The closest they came was between the third and second floors, struggling to come upon us with all of their might.

It was not the lack of bravery that hindered their advance, but sheer pain. When they encroached upon our darkness, we heard their distinct, muffled squeals of unrest. It was a sound most similar to a wheeze caused by lungs gasping desperately for air.

By the time I gathered all the courage I would ever have to find a way out of the keep, only three of us remained. The girl never spoke, but I could always hear her steady breathing coming from beneath her bunk. I brought food to her whenever I ate. And the Indian, the religious man, kept me company during the most troublesome of times. It was the three of us for many months. Everyone else had either succumbed to the Creatures, or to kitchen knives, or to nooses and suffocation. Those who perished within the first floor were buried beneath books on the second floor; it was not enough to keep away the scent of decay, but it was enough to pay them reverence.

When I had devised my plan for fleeing the keep, I told the Indian of it, but he thought of it only as foolishness. He wished me luck, but could not muster the sanity to join me in my demented quest. I let him be and tried little more to dissuade him from his decision. It was for the better that he stayed, I later decided; someone had to take care of the girl.

When I said my goodbyes and began my descent to the third floor, I heard the Indian mumbling chants of protection. His ways were not of my beliefs, but I felt better in knowing he cared about me; I even felt stronger and more confident. He was a good man and I knew his soul would be saved.

My steps down the second staircase were cautious. I carried with me water, a knife, matches, and six smoke candles attached to my belt, crafted meticulously during weeks of work with wood ashes, excrement, sugar, and the knowledge of the Indian. I painfully used the stove for my purpose, beckoning the Creatures of the Light to a horrible proximity--their wheezing searing every nerve end in my body.

When the final step of the staircase had been left behind, I took a deep, trying breath through the bandana tied over my nose and mouth; I was now in their territory.

I darted quickly through the level, finding no opposition. The Creatures were not expecting me and were spread amongst the lower floors. Against the stealth of my movements, my heart raced with a ferocity I had never known--each beat causing my eyes to pulse from their vigilant gaze. Sweat flowed repugnantly from my pores and my clothes quickly became damp.

I skulked without challenge through the third and fourth floors.

Dreadfully, and under torrential admonitions from my fear-laced mind, I arrived at the furthest point in the keep any civilian had attained, alive. The golden light began to corrupt my flesh, tingeing it with the nasty filth of the nether. There were no shadows left now, so in reflex

I quickly pressed myself against the nearest wall. Soft clanking from further ahead alerted me to the demon presences. I unlatched one of the smoke candles to ready myself. The other five candles hung from my belt, ready for when they, too, would be needed.

I closed my eyes for a moment and prayed desperately to God, asking Him for all of His attention, all of His protection, and all of His love. This was the beginning of my Exodus.

The strike of my match awoke the Creatures. At first I did not see them, but I could sense the pausing movements and the changes of direction. I lit the smoke candle and it erupted into a volcanic fountain of life. After an initial, skeptical step, I lunged forward with all of my might and all of my speed into the light to frantically search for the next stairway: the fifth. Smoke poured about me as I went, curling like blooming flowers at my feet.

It would have been suicide to have attempted this without a trial of the smoke against the Creatures, so weeks earlier, when the first of the seven candles had been completed, I used it against them. It was not an easy test to execute, and I lost many hours of sleep to the fear of how it could all go horribly wrong, but it worked more wonderfully than ever I could have imagined. When the smoke came to life, the Creatures of the Light shrank away as if it were creeping death.

With part of my plan validated, I dashed like a madman through the corridors of the fifth floor, bringing with me the darkness that was my shield. The Creatures of the Light hissed their ghastly wheezes as I passed, following me closer than I had expected. Their spectral limbs reached for my flesh and they chanted diabolical mumblings that wore at my strength and mind. Panic encroached upon me like the emphatic lightning of a storm, pinning me against the pinnacle of dread.

The fifth floor was much larger than I had hoped, but I eventually found the staircase. I stopped atop the stairs and placed the lit smoke candle on the ground before it exhausted, allowing me to unlatch another and light it. The Creatures of the Light circled around me, but angrily seethed from my path when I thrust aloft the next smoke candle and continued my descent.

Light poured about me as I entered the sixth floor--its source still an unfathomed mystery. What opened before me was remarkable, though I could spare no moment in which to pause and observe its masterfulness. What I did see was looming pillars supporting a great hall, balconies overlooking grand atria, and even perfectly placed vegetation. The Creatures of the Light swarmed upon me from all directions--there were more of them than I could count. Still they wheezed and still they murmured their wicked incantations of odium: a chorus of agonizing dementia.

There were now staircases within the floor leading in all directions, leading down and up and around the keeps hall. I made quick decisions and ran wherever I felt down would be the overall victor. So many of the Creatures had come upon me by this point that they squirmed and pushed each other about in unsettling actions; they fell from balconies and jumped on top of each other, desiring viciously for the smoke to cease its flow.

Shrouded by the emissions of my fourth smoke candle, I finally found the way out of the sixth floor, but at this rate I was soon to be horribly devoured. The sixth staircase was immensely long and frightfully steep, calling for a drastically slower pace than I would have liked. It was on this staircase that the Creatures began shoving those of their kind closest to me into the sanctity of the smoke and my precious space. Several of them fell down the stairs, emitting howls of disgust as they tumbled, while others actually fell into me, lashing and writhing amongst the smoke and my flesh. I lost my focus along with my footing and fell myself. I fell but a small distance; it was, however, enough to bring about my death if my grip on the smoke candle faltered. I hastily scrambled to my feet, standing with a dislocated shoulder and a hand of ghastly white wrapped so firmly about the candle that the joints felt sure to snap under further stress.

I was on the keep--s seventh floor.

The unlike light was indescribable. It was brighter than any sun and thicker than air. When I came into it, I felt it rush through my clothes and plaster against my skin; I felt it pierce my eyes and pour down my throat. It took hold of me in the way the mother--s womb protects and encapsulates a growing embryo. But it was not warm, it was cool and vacant and it probed me, searching for things not even the soul knows how to find. Wrongness swelled within me in contaminating gestures of violation.

The Creatures of the Light began to mold with the light, scrounging all around me, above and below as if in water, mumbling continuously their awful words. They flowed in and out of the light like they were a part of it, like they were all one. I recall my fear then as being more heavily manifested than helplessness beneath the unruly tools of torture. And, increasing the frailty of my situation, the smoke candle clenched so tightly in my fist had run its course and was on its last breath.

I was at the watershed of my journey. There was no longer any choice needed in my continuation; there was no turning back. And so, with conviction, I justified my actions and embraced what I expected to be my last actions in this life.

I lit both my remaining candles. Their fresh smoke spewed over me in thick, putrid beauty. With the scrap of what life I had left, I ran wildly into the heart of the unheavenly light over ground that was not solid, but a shifting tumult of sand. My feet sank with each step, draining what little energy I had left.

Now desperate, the Creatures of the Light were chaotic in their approaches, scratching at my hands in a merciless attempt to make me drop the darkness, but catching only my arms in heaps of cloth and flesh. I did not feel the pain; I only felt the light swirling in my veins, scouring my body to its incorporeal depth.

The onslaught of the Creatures continued and a transparency began to flourish within me beneath the light's reaping grip. I closed my eyes and saw through my eyelids as if they were not there, and my aching muscles began to melt away from the consistency of definition. I was fading into the light, becoming it. I wanted nothing more than to swallow the smoke in my hands and let it scrape the insides of my tissues, consuming the infectious illumination along its path. Instead, I was drowning as a primordial evil dragged me down into a pool of lurid nightmares.

From that point on, I only remember falling through the light as the words muttered by the unholy Creatures infested my ears. Their syllables became a sadistic sludge of comprehension as my ears grew cruelly attuned to their speech.

"Inside is ours forever on--look not to free your presence. With ties of white we choke your life--tighter as the moon smiles your misery. Wider as the blood flows freely, we make anew in you what once was lost."

I fell into unconsciousness, smiling as I drifted into blackness.

I was found covered in soot in a coffin resting in the basement of an estranged cult's mansion--wrapped like a mummy in white linen. Through no means understandable, I had been preserved and kept alive through many months in what was recorded as a coma. Twenty-nine other coffins were found, but everyone else was dead. Two of those coffins were empty and among the dead they found no girl or Indian.

When I opened my eyes upon being rescued from the coffin, I saw nothing--sweet, empty, pitch-black darkness. Although my fists were mangled and my shoulder dislocated, relief poured down my spine. Darkness is what should be expected when one is blind. I much prefer the darkness.

###

# Becoming The Sky

 hen we are, we are nothing, and when we are nothing, we are still nothing. We are the in-between, the space unkempt, and the space unseen; we are the vast and the knowing--we are the sky."

These were the words I read every night before drifting to sleep in the hollowed interior of _The Dynasty_. I lay next to the helm in the bridge of the ship. On the ceiling, the forms of the words I spoke were etched in the thickest and darkest of chirographic mediums, forever longing to be read. And so, I read--I read out loud and in the boldest of voices so as to give them nothing less than their due virtue. They loved being spoken into the echoes of the chamber in a way that let their syllables flutter freely into wandering heavens, and perhaps into the curious ears of a lost soul in the distant realms of the Earth.

I had always been no more than a hermit, straying from one shell--one shelter--to another, looking at life only as a constant battle for survival. I barely got by; I succeeded by no other means than sheer luck. I found food when I needed it and I found health when sickness became my leech. There was nothing I did or earned that sustained my lifeline; I was simply a manifestation of mass that consumed and expelled mass. I had no hopes and therefore I was never disappointed. I was a wayfarer through time and knowledge, a companion to their works as they to me were my only friends.

It was by luck at first that I lived, but only until I found _The Dynasty_. I had quickly come to understand that the ship's purpose had never been to sail, and consequently, my own purpose sprung forth. The ship was my shelter and also my teacher. I was its commander and it was my vessel, but not such a vessel as would normally be expected. This ship was different, and I knew it the very moment I laid my eyes upon its hull.

Before I found the ship, my life had always been steeped in misery--a sad prison of emotional hollowness. It might have been the desolation of the world that led me to this state, but hope was not something that could be connected to despair. If it was, it would not have existed, and so my hopelessness was simply by choice, perhaps a hereditary disease, passed down into my blood for no reason other than that it could be.

There was only one remedy that could abate the torture I felt. With its healing, I could feel satisfaction, and with that satisfaction I could acquire the longing and desire that kept me human. I found that losing myself within the lost memories of others gave me stability. The simple fragments of experience allowed me to escape the wretched hole of myself and live the half-real, half-imaginary life of another. There was the occasional home, where I found relics and half-degraded photo albums, but the ship, _The Dynasty_ , was the greatest Odyssey of all. Its name alone spelled out the journeys it had been a part of. But most importantly, it was the possessor of walls and ceilings that intoxicated my mind. Each and every surface and crevice upon and within it was smeared with books' worth of verse, all in the same dense, oil-like medium.

The language of this writing was not of any I had known to exist. When I first saw it, I was in awe at its jagged and coarse consistency. There was no fluidity to it and there was certainly no apparent form. The foreign text streaked all surfaces, leaving less wall and ceiling than word. None but the name of the ship was left clear of the archaic authorship.

After the first few days, I had explored the ship thoroughly. There were no artifacts of any crew or others before me. Even inside the cabinets and shelves in the quarters and the galley could be found only the strange writing.

At first, I saw no reason to waste time looking over the writing in hopes of deciphering its meaning. I found interest in just gazing at the shapes, and for a time, that was enough. However, I steadily began to feel my sanity crawling away from me as acres of time passed without the comfort of some human object of experience. I was fascinated with the ship, but it did not at first hold the antidote to my stupor--that was not for long.

Slowly, over delirious weeks of being unable to detach myself from the ship's allure, I began to discern similarities in style and characters amongst the writings. Without control, I grew wickedly obsessed with uncovering the meaning of the strange characters. Spending each minute of daylight pouring over the ancient graffiti, I probed areas of my mind that previously had remained dormant in the abstract shadows of perception. Though such an undertaking would seem foolish, I had convinced myself otherwise; I convinced myself that I, for the sake of my wellbeing, had to decipher some import from the text.

It was not months, but years before I was struck by the almighty blow of revelation. I thinned and aged, though somehow I kept enough energy to diligently pour over the ship's scribed contents. Then, as if there had been some magic snap of a finger, the demons of intellect descended upon me and my eyes were opened.

At last, I hungrily began to tap into the worlds beyond the words.

The language was not at all a work of letters as most advanced cultures had created; rather, this language was comprised mainly of images. Furthermore, all languages I had known of read from one side to the other, whether left to right, right to left, or up to down. Contrarily, this language read--or more appropriately was interpreted--from the outside in--from left to in, right to in, up to in, down to in--and the in, the middle, subjugated all that previously comprised the trail as a vortex of vacancy.

But, however confusing this might seem, the emptiness of content in the epicenter was the key and portal to the account between the pictures. For the real truths were found not in the images themselves, but in the nothingness around and between them--the voids amongst them--hence lending their knowledge to the mind of no more than a toddler. The articles themselves, while I followed them, turned inside out, revealing an uncanny atmosphere of knowledge. Imagine a landscape of clouds, where objects and other seemingly tangible images loom in form and size, but hold no weight. Though they truly consist of nothing, they still hold mysteries of the foreign and convey or communicate the complex fabric of wisdom. In this way, I harvested epochs of understanding from a structure of writing that had no limitations.

Like a knife slices flesh, these intricate streams of enlightenment carved through the palette of my mind, destroying while also reconstructing the known and the unknown. Each composition I read changed me further, imparting within me histories of lands beyond the boundaries of space. For weeks at a time, I would sleep after newly acquired comprehension boiled within the pitiful brain of my fragile body, while extravagant and horrible dreams played out the course of a tale too enormous to know. More and more I read, and further and further I came to the completion of knowledge. The more a wall or ceiling was read, the more it expanded into a nothingness of incalculable information. If this exponential knowledge had somehow been transcribed in known words to the medium of paper, it would have covered the Earth more than several times over. And then it would have doubled and then tripled in size as it was further read.

Eventually, I stopped the doses of cerebral intake and focused on the one section of the incredible masterpiece which could be limited to a set parameter. This section was the stamp of authorship, the signature of ownership over all that comprised the galaxy of the rapturous knowledge. It was this that I read every night before I went to sleep, whether from sight or memory. I believed with a vigor that had long since been lost that I could beckon the haunting scribes to me by means of the repeated incantations of their name; I thought that they might take me away and save me from the desolate planet. With that small hope, I never faltered from the futile act. When the sun vanished, I would be lying within the bridge, in silence and reverence, and chanting the name of the writers. I did this over and over onto the ages of the Earth, the information I gained from the writing perpetually expanding upon itself within my mind.

Years turned into decades, and decades turned into centuries, and I did not perish.

My existence wrote itself into the voids between the elements of my physical presence--the microscopic spaces amid tissue and cell, flesh and bone. The information that depicted who I was replicated within the vast template of emptiness that spread through the eternity within me. My own mind subconsciously manipulated the cosmic arts of the mysterious authors in order to uphold its most natural instinct, survival. Memories, knowledge, sensation, emotion, all of them were transferred like writing to the invisible canvas of the air.

My joints and muscles grew decrepit with age, leaving me without mobility in the bridge of _The Dynasty_. Even then, I remained alive to continue my prayers without need of food or water or any other type of sustenance. I lived as my body degraded and decomposed. My flesh withered and scattered like dust in the winds that passed over me again and yet again.

It was millennia before the bones of my remains had decomposed enough to free me from their imprisonment. Finally, my prayers were answered and I was nothing. I became the in-between, the space unkempt, and the space unseen; I became the vast and the knowing--I became the sky.

###

# What the Flesh Cannot Keep

 hen I opened the back door of my farmhouse and stepped into the fading light of the sun's descent, I did not notice the remnants of the crimson sunset; my attention was consumed by the Haunter Behind Space, lurking in the western sky. The air was shallow, almost brittle, and its coarseness clawed at my lungs. Around me, the atmosphere was suffused with paleness like flesh drained by fever. The contrast between the sun's vivid brilliance and the atmosphere's pallor caused flickering beams of glare to stretch out with tentacles of keen distraction.

Standing on the soil behind my farmhouse, I sensed it, beyond the bounds of the seen, watching me intently. It had worlds to devour with its attention, but it gave that attention--at that moment--only to me. An unbidden, indefinable form of communication allowed me to envision its face through my mind's eye. The imagery was so fierce that this visage was projected from my mind--most likely in some hallucinatory manner--into the sky before me. My eyes gazed beyond matter into its sinister demeanor.

I had stopped in my tracks as soon I noticed it, surrendering to a quietus. Just as it focused on me, I stared back at it: an entity larger than the sun it loomed behind. It was not angry or passionate, vengeful or anxious, but strangely content. In our exchange of awareness, it neither altered its expression nor revealed its intent.

This occurrence could not have been timed, but eventually I felt a sensation of dread. I saw and felt a flash of death. A short burning like the spill of acid seared my skin, and then there was nothing. I looked behind to see my flesh--my body--fall away from me to the ground while I remained standing, a specter.

The sunset's trail of gray twilight now harbored a grave of which I had no comprehension. Each shade and highlight layered over my perfect, lifeless body as if they were mounds of fresh soil; my remains were already lost to the bowels of the earth.

I squatted beside my corpse and prodded it with my invisible, non-existent fingers, but quickly found there was nothing to gain from investigating the body. I turned back to the Haunter Behind Space, but it was gone. I was left alone to ponder my catatonic ascension.

Off in the distance I heard my daughter yell to her mother that she was coming to beckon me to dinner. A cancer of fear grew within me, draining my senses and sanity. I watched as my daughter left the house and made her way in my direction. Each time her feet hit the ground pain surged through me. The closer she came, the more severe the discomfort. The direness of my situation was grotesque.

Without contemplating my ability to speak or communicate in any fashion, I shouted out, "Mira! Mira, don't come over here! Stop! Do not come any further, Mira!" My voice leapt from the voids of hell in a hideous frequency.

"Daddy, is that you--what's wrong?" Mira replied, stopping. "Where are you?"

My incorporeal heart sank under the agony of mercilessly stabbing daggers.

"Don't worry about that," I said. "Go back to Mommy and tell her I'll be there soon."

"But I want to walk with you!"

"I can't go with you right now, Mira." As best I could, I infused my voice with regret. "Please go back to Mommy and tell her what I just told you."

"Okay, Daddy." Mira hesitated, and then slowly turned around and left.

If ever the oceans of all pain could be moved and placed upon a soul, then their depths surely had become my pitiful refuge. Falling rain, rushing rivers, dark, undisturbed water--all seeped to my core, drowning me with the fluid of divine suffering.

I turned back to my body, which still lay helplessly upon the ground, and began to claw at it with arms I did not have in a fever of rage hitherto unknown to me. It had to be hidden, I decided; it had to be ripped, shredded, and purged of all possibility of substantiation. I could not bear to look at it: the symbol and legacy of life discarded, never to be mine again. I was to be the priest of my own wretched funeral, sentencing the cadaver to the endless abyss of darkness.

Despite my emerging hate and dissonance, I acknowledged the wicked leverage I now had over the natural sciences of the Earth. For the most obvious reasons, I was no longer a part of any physical realm. The first example of this truth was the perception permeating my consciousness of a pack of wolves converging in the distance. I could not see them. Instead, I sensed them and their location; I felt their lust for meat and drive to kill. I knew their speed and their weight, and I knew the number of follicles upon their hides.

With supernatural velocity, I assailed the wolves--my abnormal abilities had revealed a second element of their nature. No sooner had I made the decision to encounter and deviously manipulate the wolves than I was there, beside them.

The wolves were to become my pallbearers.

Like the tales told of so many ghosts, I retained the ability to communicate, but unlike those tales, I gained the faculty of communication with all things, animate and inanimate, conscious and comatose. Employing this facility, I encircled the wolves and behooved them using the art of their wicked tongue:

"Follow me!" I exclaimed. "Follow me to the treasures of my generosity!"

I led the wolves as a shepherd leads sheep, and when we reached the auburn structure of my farmhouse and its worn, tired walls--when we walked upon the soils of all my labors and came upon my prostrate body--I changed my command, devilishly:

"Take and eat!" I commanded the wolves and their slavering mouths. "Take and eat!" I commanded them in the ungainly, terrible language of my new birth.

The wolves graciously and savagely carried off my body in their anxious jaws, nipping and howling with perpetual glee. I watched contentedly as the evidence of my deathly departure disappeared into the dusk. I tried to leave to my imagination the picturesque devouring that ensued, but my evil perception gave me full details of each nightmarish bite. Even the pleasures of the wolves drove hard into my apparitional senses.

Once my body had been scattered amidst the intestines of canines and my focus had returned to my consciousness, stars slowly began to pierce through the veil that was the night; I found myself looking into the heavens behind those stars to catch a glimpse of the Haunter Behind Space. Unfortunately, all was still, and disgustingly normal; I saw no monstrous entity.

After a profound sorrow ricocheted a course through my emptiness, hollowing even more those strange passages of inconstancy that completed my being, I hovered along a fragmented path of regret towards the meal I hoped my family had already begun to eat. When I reached the side window that overlooked the simple dining table, I stopped to gaze reminiscently at those people of my erstwhile life who had been, and still were, dear to me. They were eating, but were doing so placidly. Mira occasionally looked out the window in anticipation of my arrival. Little did she know that she not only found my arrival outside the window; she had the last glimpse of me she would ever again have.

With my new capabilities, I saw my family in a way I had never known them. I saw through them and in between them. I saw my wife Margaret's impatience with me; I saw Mira's worry over where I was; I saw Timothy's wandering imaginative thoughts. And beyond that, I saw the blood coursing through their veins and the life that was theirs shining out in beacons of illumination.

I did not notice the repulsion of it at first, but it soon began to boil with undeniable disgust inside me. Their glow of emotions, their expressions of life--it was like poison to me and I could not remain in their proximity.

In a rush of abhorrent vengefulness directed at the being of my demise, I left the house and ascended instantly a remote mountain in terrain I had never traversed. Using every pitch, sound, and tune of communication I then knew, I called out in vehement and guttural anger to the Haunter Behind Space. My ethereal voice cracked and wavered with hideous repercussions. Animals of all kinds squealed into the night.

My essence never tired, and so I screamed effortlessly for a duration no being should ever be able to. The animals that hollered in the distances were soon pealed horribly from life as their disturbing unrest ceased with the bursting of their fear-tangled hearts. Thereafter, there were no sounds but my own. Only then did I stop my cries, realizing their insignificance.

In that moment, when I felt lost in a nightmare that could only be conjured by the most nefarious of creatures, I saw again in my mind the visage of the Haunter Behind Space. I remembered its ghastly features: the eyes that covered every surface, the souls within them, and the vulgar, detestable complacency of existence that saturated every ounce of its being. It was in the distances of space that I had originally seen it, and so it was in the distances of space that I then pictured it, staring once again at my hapless shape. Its gaze was my death.

I wanted nothing more than to see it once again, to know that it was there and that I could find it. In a test of my limitations, I shot upward into the sky with vengeful speed.

I passed the atmosphere and outer rims of the Earth; I sped by the moon, Venus, and Mercury as I headed straight for the sun and the vast abundance of universe behind it. On and on I traveled until the stars danced around me in a play of the unthinkable, each act and dialogue of profuse verse lasting longer than the one preceding it. The cosmos leapt about me in the solitude of its enormous infinity, and still I sailed on in pursuit of the vile entity that had fathered my undead transformation.

Eventually, I stopped under the blanket of universe expanding around me and looked once more into its depths, in hope of catching the Haunter Behind Space. As before, it was nowhere to be found, but it was in that instant that I remembered something hastily forgotten amidst the turmoil of my recent endeavors. I remembered what lay in the chamber beneath my farmhouse, behind three doors, each of which required a different key. I remembered how I found it and how I could feel no remorse for it, or guilt. I remembered what I did to it and the sadistic reasons why.

It was these evils inside me that the flesh could not keep, and it was these evils that would now inexorably torment me for eternity--the same eternity that shows no mercy.

While hovering in the vastness of the heavens trapped within my enslaving memories, I understood that I had become lost in the greatest maze of all existence, with no recognizable star to guide me back home. The Earth was now but a speck of dust floating in an unsearchable, impossible ocean of galaxies.

###

# Gift of the Crossroads

 s soon as I shouted into the vicinity of my home, the outlandish noises in the kitchen ceased. It was nothing more than the slight scuffle of feet, but it was disturbing beyond the sudden sinking of my heart. My breath became short and my hands trembled. I feared that whatever had made the sound had gone into hiding in the negative spaces of my home, and by keeping that fear manageable, I hoped it would stay hidden; I had no desire to find the maker of the sound and only wished it to be intelligent enough to leave before I could ever arrive upon it with my investigating eyes.

As I made my way in silence in the direction of the disturbance, I listened for even the faintest of sounds--the smallest of breaths--but there was nothing. And when I made the turn into the kitchen, I found no stranger or animal, but a piece of fabric that looked like nothing more than the scrap of some abandoned project. The material of intrusion lay on the floor; it was about the size of a folded napkin. A bland, unimpressive yellow defined its appearance while several small white threads protruded from its sides; it appeared to have once been joined to a larger entity.

I had never been into quilting, or sewing, nor had I any clothes that would match such a peculiar fragment of textile. Whatever had made the sounds had left this frugal gift. I picked up the fabric and found it to be unusually coarse and rigid, like a dry and grimy rag; even those threads reaching outward retained their positions against my touch and probing.

Curious to distinguish more details regarding the material's structure, I placed the fabric under water from the sink faucet. I wanted to know if it would absorb the liquid and loosen to a more malleable form, or repel the fluid and maintain its current state. Both of my notions were inconveniently shattered as I watched a bizarreness unfold. As soon as the water hit this material, the liquid swirled atop the surface in a shallow whirlpool before continuing downward in the pull of gravity. It looked as if the water--upon the instant of its descending contact--was transplanted from the grip of this dimension, altered in a brief, fragmented pattern of surrealism.

I let the water pour for several minutes while I watched in confounded disbelief. I ran my finger gently across the fabric to feel for the incongruities that could cause such a mysterious display, but there was only the insignificant roughness I had previously discovered. There were no patterns or deficiencies or outright abnormalities to provide any reasonable explanation of this occurrence.

Though I could have experimented much more with the fabric, I could not dwell upon it any longer. I had a proposal to write up, and so learning more about the phenomenal thing had to wait. The next day was the beginning of the weekend and my son's homecoming, and no mischievous cloth was going to inhibit my completing the proposal ahead of his arrival.

When I went to rest the piece of fabric upon the kitchen table, I found a stiff thread that had not previously been there stuck to my finger. I thought nothing of it even though the new thread had sprung from the fabric's surface--not from the edges where the other threads were. In my ignorance of the fabric's wicked attributes, I yanked it hard away from my hand, annoyed at what I thought to be some simple form of static electricity or random stickiness; I did not expect the resilient anchor of a tiny root. The thread came free, but so did a piece of my flesh. The fabric fell lightly upon the table with a small part of my skin atop the newly sprung thread's end. My finger began to throb and bleed relentlessly.

I had been given an untypical wound considering the miniscule carnage of the incident. It was different than a cut from a knife or a harsh abrasion; the thread seemed to have burrowed in and clung to a vein, causing me to rupture it when I tore the root free. All I could do was clean and dress the wound. My only hope was that some extremity of the thread had not found a dwelling within my finger. The thought of such a tragedy sickened me.

After calming down, I finally began to work on my proposal.

I cherished only two things: my son and my work. Without them, I would have been a solitary manifold of sorrow, unworthiness, and delusional trauma. My work gave me meaning while keeping me busy and my son kept me busy while giving me meaning, each supplying its own substance to my otherwise ordinary life.

The anger in living, however, was there like in any other average being, caused by the strange yet unavoidable weights of troublesome life hazards. It had started with the divorce and only grew worse when I lost full custody of my son; it could not have been expressed with the full extent of all passion how much I adored and loved him. Had my lying ex-wife told the truth in court, he might never have been taken from me. Instead, backstabbed and downtrodden, I came away with my son on rare weekends--a pitiful famine compared to the comfort, teaching, and love I could have given him.

After a series of several slow hours with a fatigued brain, I left my completed project and entered the kitchen to hydrate not only my body, but my mind. I drank a glass of water and then began to boil a kettle of it in preparation for tea. I turned to look upon the piece of fabric, expecting--out of peculiar imaginings--to find it missing, collected again by the clandestine noisemaker, but it was there just as it had fallen: threads extended, coarseness exposed. I decided then, upon looking at the alien thing, that I did not want to look at it any more, or ever again. There was no reason for me to keep it when it was nothing but an evil nuisance.

The giant, dense lid of the trash bin out back opened easily enough. I pushed the lid completely around so it fell behind the large barrel. With my hand protected by a flock-lined latex glove, I held the fabric over the opening, letting out a sigh of relief before releasing my fingers with one motion.

But the fabric did not fall.

I shook my hand vigorously, and still it did not fall.

An uncanny terror suddenly besieged me while rage and disgust seethed between my grinding teeth. In panic, I attempted to take off the glove, praying that the material had only attached itself to the latex, but the glove did not fall; it hung inside out from the ends of my fingers, enveloping the piece of fabric. I recalled the tiny root that had previously lodged in my finger and shuddered with horror.

I did not want to repeat my last experience with the thread, so I decided to cut the attachments off instead. In the tool shed, I found a pair of rusty pruners. With the metal blades in my hand, I returned to the trash bin and held my hand over it once more, this time using the pruners to clip the nasty threads strung between my fingers and the hanging glove. The horrid material fell away from me.

However, had I known what I was doing, I would have just ripped the insidious cloth away and suffered through the pain once more--for when the glove and fabric fell to the bottom of the trash, five tiny stubs of thread remained protruding from my fingers.

At this point, I began to wonder who the horrible weaver of such material was and who, by the name of all that was sinister, had left it for me.

Feeling more than troubled, I pried at the threads, but could not loosen them; they were so short that I could not attain the necessary grip. Even with the aid of pliers, I could not pull them. Deep into the night I continued to plot against the threads, tearing and clawing at them, but getting no closer to removing them.

After exhaustion, emotional and physical, had taken full hold of me, I gave up on my trivial strategies. I retrieved again the pruners of my previous usage; I pressed my hand flat against the kitchen table, palm up, and cut each of the very surfaces of the fingers off. A chunk of thread and flesh fell from each severing. Adrenaline voided the pain and allowed a contentedness to consume me.

Shortly thereafter, with bandages covering each of my fingers' ends, I collapsed upon my bed, falling instantly to sleep.

The doorbell rang and I found myself staggering into the frailty of consciousness. I hurriedly shook myself into alertness and ran to open the door. My son stood there waiting with his blue and yellow backpack, stuffed to capacity with belongings. We said our hellos and I gave him a huge hug before we moved inside. I guided him in with my bandaged hand upon his shoulder.

We did not get far before I realized that my hand was stuck. My son also noticed that I my hand was strangely placed; he became awkward. With a slight scuttle, he tried to get away.

Something then triggered within me--a volcano of culminated insanity erupted with the knowledge that the abominable threads were still planted in my fingers. The menace of the impious fabric at that moment devoured all control I had ever had in life. I disregarded my son and any love I felt towards him. I left the bounds of care and qualities of fatherhood. All that made me human wholly fled my presence when I placed my free hand upon my son to hold him steady and then ripped my attached hand from his back.

My son screamed a foul plea, but it was not pain that caused it. He could feel the vibrations sent through the cursed threads attached between us as they extended under my wrench. Instead of coming loose, the threads elongated, and as they did, my hand--then my arm--began to unravel as if I were some poorly sewn toy. Flesh uncurled and blood fell like rain. My body in its entirety had been manipulated into a construction of thread, and it took the loss of the skin, muscles, and tendons of my entire hand and forearm before I realized what was happening; I immediately ceased my motion. The skeletal remains of my hand fell limp.

I was then the one who screamed, harshly and absurdly, crying out for some form of reverence to save me from this despair and monstrous suffering. And yet, even in the midst of my sudden misery and panic, I at once understood the sudden look upon my son's face as he turned to see me; I knew his intentions. I turned my scream to him, pleading with him, begging with him, not to run away from me--but he did. His own panic tore a nightmare through his mind, causing him to flee the grotesqueness of my state. As he ran, so the threads followed, taking more of my skin and inners with him--my elbow, my biceps, parts of my shoulder and neck. Swamped in the utter oblivion of affliction, I grabbed the threads with my other hand, stopping the horrible unwinding.

It then became my son's flesh that gave way. When I grabbed the threads, they briefly became taut, transferring the tension to the roots planted in my son. Under this stress and his forward motion, a heap of his flesh pulled away and became further extensions to the thread. He fell to the floor.

Losing blood by the second, I crumpled to the ground myself. A crimson pool expanded about me as I slid rapidly into unconsciousness. The shallow, helpless screams of my son echoed along with me into the darkness.

I awoke on the entryway floor to the clapping and giggling of a small creature prancing around me. Its face was smooth and contained no eyes, ears, or nose. The mouth upon it ran thin, but curled and gnarled in a haunting smile. As clothing, it wore a gray tunic and strange brown shoes.

Upon my arousing, the creature came to me. It placed its mouth against my ear and whispered to me extraordinary and unforgettable things. It explained my place at the crossroads of worlds; where some beings felt pain and others experienced pleasure; where some beings saw light and others found darkness. I learned of things benign and malevolent, and things uncouth and terrific. I learned of the device it left for me and my success in using it. And then, lastly, just before it vanished, it whispered in glee of the reward I had been given--the gift that I so deserved. From that moment on, I heard only its laughter trail away into the distances of infinity.

Blood stuck to me everywhere. My shirt was gone, and where the flesh and tissue that had been ripped from me once were was now the same yellow fabric I had found abandoned in my kitchen, sewn around my arm and hand until it met real skin upon my shoulder and neck. It was only a covering, for I could not sense the arm or hand that had been there; they were gone.

I turned to look for my son, but I could not see him. I called out to my son, but I could not hear him. My son was nowhere to be found.

Tears rolled down my cheeks as I mourned for him, and as I grew weaker and weaker in my grief, I fell deeper and deeper into silence, until I could hear the beating of my heart. It pattered slowly and heavily, consistent and insistent. I listened to it for a long while, focusing solely on its sweet percussion, and in time, I noticed the beating of a second heart within me, and my sorrows passed away. This heart beat softer, lighter; this heart was my gift.

"Do not cry, my son. Do not cry," I told the softly beating heart. "They too know what love is. The pain is but their greeting, it will not last forever."

###

# The Changing Feyth (Part 1)

  have turned against my brethren and entered a fate that cannot be altered. All that I have been taught--all that I have been trained for--is now the vessel of my retribution. My existence has become a granule glowing amongst the blackness of a lost world, and the life I once knew is but a tragedy of my decomposition. In prayer, I must believe I am capable to begin the movement towards the deliverance that will set light to the throne.

By the enlightenment and approval of my soul, I now speak these words into the heart of traveling winds, begging them to take this message into the ears of who would listen. The demand on my life is high, so there can be no hesitation; even doubt shall not be spared by the vengeance of my cause. I do not regret those things I have begun to do; I do not pride myself on their brutality or art, but I am sure of their importance. Though the pain and sorrow will always remain, I will carry out my task until I can no longer do so, or until it is completed; this is my burden and my burning promise.

I am a feyth. My name is Wayward and my death has not come. I have revered my kind, respected them, followed them. I have performed their rituals and joined in their song. I have been loyal to them and laid down my life for them. They have made me strong and they have protected me in my weakness. But now I must diminish them. I see and understand the horrific influence they carry and the authority they frivolously surrender to the worst of evils. Undeniably, their ways were not meant for this land, or any land. And it is more than simply living within their blood, from dawns to dusks, that has confronted me with my difference.

Feyths are the livelihood of Tume and the kingdoms within it. If the feyths are content, then good fortune is believed to be had throughout the lands. If the feyths are feuding, then the fortune of the lands is believed to be affected negatively. We are idolized and looked upon as nothing short of demigods. Our flesh is ash gray and its texture is that of leather. Our eyes are as black as coal and our teeth are as sharp as swords. Our ears are large and so are our noses. We grow to be as tall as giants, but our bodies always keep the same slenderness, no matter what our strength or what we consume.

Our only master is the Almighty of Shadows and the religion that accompanies him. It is by his will that we are feared and venerated across the kingdoms because of a set of rules named the Immurements. It is these rules that control the feyths and give us our authority over the races of the world.

Only the ghost of a feyth has the power to kill a feyth and only with the knowledge of a feyth can the ghost be controlled. These rules guard the life of the feyth.

The first to slit a dead feyth's neck acquires its ghost, the second, who drinks of what flows, gains its knowledge, and the third, who but glances upon it, dies. If the choice is made to take of both ghost and knowledge from the same feyth, then an eternal, agonizing thralldom to the Almighty of Shadows shall be the consequence. These are the rules that govern the death of the feyths.

Neither man nor beast is exempt from these laws. They bring balance and bind the world, plaguing it. The afflictions of their effect inflict the greedy with darkness and disease the kings with a power incapable of defeat, though it is this power that gives me the opportunity I shall need to fulfill my hopes.

My treason is not a simple matter, so let me tell of its birth.

Not long ago, the vast kingdoms of Tume rejoiced upon the arrival of my kindred. It was the Beckoning of Tides, the annual evening of return for the feyths across the lands to their origins of creation. It was a time greatly celebrated by the many races of Tume. And until this very night--this very Beckoning of Tides--I would have been just like any other feyth, filled with impatience for the anticipated honors and festivities.

I, along with three others, was of the living feyths from the city of Exitus. Exitus was a vast empire of trade, housing hundreds of merchants and warehousing thousands of goods, from gold and fine jewelry to the best of metals and building materials. Its marketplace was the largest in the Harboron Kingdom and spanned the entire length of the Old Western Shores. Its location created a hub of wealth and travel. Foreigners of all kinds made up as much of the population as the locals.

Having such a crucial economic stance within the kingdoms meant that the outer walls of the city were amongst the strongest and tallest ever made. Sentinels lined the walls at all times while barracks full of warriors rested at each landward flank of the city: north, south, and east; the west harbored a fleet of several warships.

Those feyths arriving at Exitus with me were Solitary, the leader of the Outer Rims, Interim, the traveling protector of merchants, and Cattle, the wild ruffian who kept to himself. Each of us had lived for no less than three hundred years, but only Solitary had lived since the dawn of the kingdoms.

The four of us arrived at the Temple of Betterment with a large, congealing mass of followers, shouting and hollering in cacophonous approval at our heels. Since the gates had been lowered and our procession begun, we had been overwhelmed and followed by a sizeable welcoming party, which only grew larger as we walked down Purchase Road through the busy marketplace.

When we stepped through the grand doors of the temple and the interior space, shooting down to create the symbol of the Immurements at its points. Spread entered the magnificent sanctuary, the cheering of the crowds ceased. Surrounding us, huge stained glass windows glowing with images of sacrifice and piety lined the walls. The ceiling extended high until its surfaces became like the mysteriousness of fog in night's blackness. Small, glassed crevices slotted into the ceiling's steep slopes allowed beams of concentrated moonlight to penetrate throughout the temple ground were dozens of pews adorned with exotic cushions and rugs.

At the center of the temple resided the altar. The altar consisted of two black, upside down horns curved and connected in the formation of a table, which rested high atop a small mountain of stairs. Encircling the horns was a ring of large, black candles, their flames burning thin and strong. Stains of different bloods and fluids saturated the floor beneath the altar. The gradient of color was vivid at the peak of the mountain and faded towards the base.

It was this scene that triggered the first occurrence of dissonance within me. As if from a subtle nudge, my heart twisted slightly. I had seen this temple hundreds of times, but it was only this time that caused an awful division within the gut of my being. The fetid aroma of the temple then encroached upon my senses and amplified the sensation. My brethren were not affected by any such nuances and remained within their usual calmness.

The priest of the Almighty of Shadows welcomed us at the base of the ascending altar. Words of approval left his lips while he conjured an ethereal spirit. The flames of the altar's candles flattened as would heated metal under the blacksmith's hammer. Then the golden discs of flame rose from their origins and ascended upward towards the ceiling while spinning to meet the beams of moonlight. Once each of the beams held a disc of flame, the discs descended upon the lines of the beams until each rested at a point of the Immurement's symbol.

The priest ascended the steps of the altar's mountain and was met at its peak by a hooded cleric holding a pig. With the pig transferred into his hand, the priest produced a very thin knife and stuck it swiftly into the the ground where it fell to its side. Blood began pooling about it and animal's neck, and just as swiftly, retrieved it. The pig squealed briefly and was then placed on seeping down the sides of the stairs.

"May the tides of the Almighty of Shadows wash upon us and cleanse us," spoke the priest.

We bowed our heads and left the temple.

As soon as we exited the Temple of Betterment, the crowds awaiting us outside erupted into roaring cheers.

"To each of you the best of tides," said Interim, and then he vanished into the gathered throng, creating a wake of people that followed him to wherever his destination lay.

"As with you," returned Solitary, who left in a different direction.

Cattle, without a word, hastily jumped into the crowd, brandishing his sickle while yelling in glee. He swung his weapon into the air and twirled it in such a way that a harmonic whistle resounded. Several people fell beneath his landing and those left standing only shouted all the more loudly.

I walked my own path into the celebrations.

In the later hours of the next morning, after most had retreated to the sanctuary of their homes, I wandered the streets of Exitus. Along the sides of the roads, debris from the festivities lay about: flags were spread in tattered disarray, empty mugs of ale rolled around, and pieces of meat and blood splattered most surfaces. A small crowd still followed me, celebrating continuously until they could no more, but I paid them no attention. My mind was already growing deep into its new and foreign disgust; the revolution within me was even further underway.

I had walked for close to an hour before I heard cheering and screaming not far from my location. With no agenda, I made my way in the direction of the sounds.

When I came upon the source of the excitement, I was horribly surprised. A small circle of people had formed in the center of the road and Cattle was in the middle. At his feet lay the remains of at least four children, their limbs sliced clean from their bodies. He held a girl who had already lost her arm. Blood coated her clothing and skin, and her breathing was beyond fatigued and full of terror. She tried to scream, but she could not. The crowd watching chanted at the feyth and the girl, yelling prayers relentlessly.

"May the tides bring me safe travel!"

"May the tides give me fortune!"

"May the tides heal my wife!"

And in return, Cattle proclaimed, "The Almighty of Shadows hears your plea!" before slitting the girl's throat and letting her fall to the ground.

The rejoicing heightened.

When my eyes began to pulsate with repulsion and hate, I at once realized that I could not bear the existence of such sickening debauchery any longer. Such acts were not meant to occur and life was never meant to be degraded and mutilated in such a grotesque manner--let alone any manner. I had been a part of it for too long and my soul could not contain the evil any longer.

My mind warped and fluctuated. My consciousness rippled with new awareness. The nerves beneath my flesh fired and sent uneasiness throughout me.

There was no explanation of my change; there was no way to isolate or define it. All I could do was believe that the world had reached a threshold from which it could continue no longer, and that I had been chosen to reconcile it.

I could not kill Cattle without the aid of a ghost, but I could definitely stop him from continuing his revolting show.

The clip on my belt snapped loose as I flicked it with my finger. The coil of my whip fell to the ground and the blade at its tip clinked as it made contact. Just as I did so, Cattle retrieved another child that the crowd had offered forth.

"What do you ask from the Almighty of Shadows? What gifts do wish to receive?" Cattle shouted.

"There will be no more sacrifices!" I challenged in a voice full of rage.

"You oppose, Wayward?" asked Cattle. "Do you wish me to deprive these people of their blessings?" The crowd condemned me with expressions of disfavor.

"If the only way those blessings can be given is through these children's lives, then yes, I do wish to deprive them," I answered.

Cattle started into a laugh of hideous degree and raised his sickle to begin his ritualistic carnage regardless of my request. But before he could swing it, the crowd grasped at the sight of my whip's end stuck deep in his head. I yanked the whip free and lashed it out again, this time sending its end into his hand. The sickle fell to the ground.

"I told you there would be no more!" I declared. "It was not up to you to decide." I ripped the whip back to me once more. "Go home!" I commanded the crowd. "Go home!"

At first slowly, but then rather quickly, the people turned and disappeared into the dark. I was left with Cattle.

"It is too bad you cannot kill me, Wayward, for your petty games will not stop my ways," Cattle said, even as the pain of his wounds coursed through him and wearied him. "The temple will not like to hear of what you have done. It will be a pity to see you cast from our fellowship."

"That will be their issue to discuss, but you will not be the one to tell them," I responded.

I released my whip, sending it across and through Cattle's neck, severing flesh and bone. He fell to the ground, gripping his neck.

"I may not be able to take your life, yet, but I will have your skull until I can."

I walked to his side and pried at his head, pulling it from its connection to his body. Physical and spiritual flesh quickly bridged between his head and body in an attempt to stifle my action. So, in haste I picked up the fallen sickle and sliced at the gap, over and over until the binding efforts of his body could overpower me no longer. Eventually, his head came free, and I gladly took it, leaving his body to spasm as bloodless wreckage in the middle of the road.

Before the sun had begun its ascent the next morning, I had left the boundaries of the city, passing through the gates to the north and leaving before word of my treachery had been borne to the temple. I carried with me a thick sackcloth bag containing the head of my foe. I could hear the muffled wheezing of his breaths while he suffocated, but could not die.

Once I was beyond the sight of the sentinels, I pulled the bag to my mouth and whispered to it, "This is only the beginning, my brother."

###

# The Bearer of All That Can Be Felt

 ouch--I felt all ways of it. I felt lightly flowing silk, softly fitting cotton, and warmly elegant velvet; I knew the embrace of satin and the weave of polyester. Upon me danced the colors and shapes of the universe. Those hands that pressed and brushed against me told the tales of creation's wisdom, and I collected of their ways. Dresses, vests, jackets, cloaks--I wore them all and aided in bringing them to their final beauty. There was not a piece of clothing that I did not feel or know. My form was the palette of the sure and tried and the steady thread.

From the moment of my creation, I had been destined to the art of tailoring, but I was no ordinary assistant to the noble industry. I was, as I believed from the successes associated with me, the only of my kind to have such an occupation. My essence, in its entirety, was bittleclay: an "inanimate" material with the capability to learn from the environment enveloping it. As a baby out of the womb absorbed the world around it, bittleclay did the same by those means given to it in its beginning, allowing for the growth of an aware, mobile, and fully cognitive entity.

I began my essence as a dull figure comprised of arms, hands, a torso, and a faceless head atop a base that extended upwards into me and held me upright. In my beginning there was only darkness, but quickly I gained those qualities that awoke me from the slumber of lifelessness and thrust me headlong into the narcissistic abyss of consciousness. Without any such organs as those carried by the builders of society, I attained my individuality by means of vibrations. Through these very sensitive, minute movements, I learned of the versatility of sound and expression, and fully cultured myself into existence.

In no time at all, I was suggesting to the seamster of my parlor the very ideas that would develop his wealth and set in motion those events that assured both my endless suffering and endless pleasure. What began as the simple and purposeful repositioning of my pose when once assisting in the fabrication of a winter dress, soon evolved into the renowned and unrelenting glitter-web trend: the attachment of streaming silk slivers, or an otherwise compliant textile substitution, between the forearm and the bottom hem of a dress, whilst the fabric was adorned by the grace of any color--or multiple colors--of glitter.

These times of fruitfulness were very fulfilling for me. My purpose had meaning, which was all a creature of my composition could ask. It was also then that I attained the knowledge of emotion. The happiness and joys of the seamster in his new wealth of creativity and prosperity were different than my first experiences with him, and so I attuned myself with those aspects of life that affected esteem.

Eventually, the acclaim of our labor dwindled and the fame of the seamster began to fade. Business slowed and the seamster's way of life changed. Though he had riches to last him for a long time to come, he became depressed. He started to grow sloppy in his art, regardless of my own expertise and ingenuity. He lost himself to frivolous amusements and degrading expeditions, burying his sorrows in the graveyard of alcohol.

I would not have minded the seamster's peculiar condition if his idle meddling had been the only consequence of the degeneration of his fame, but he began to grow careless with his handwork as well. The occasional slip of the needle and slight perforation in my outer surfaces was manageable, however their frequency and impressionable force slowly increased, and with that, the torment of absurd pain expanded. Each drunken mistake that sent a needle deep into my side exploded a malicious triumph of appalling

agony. And while the builders of society had the ability to heal, I did not; what occurred to my form, remained ever so. With me, after each needle-caused intrusion, remained the stain, mark, and sickening abrasion of my unavoidable deterioration.

One day, upon the mid-time of work, after a short absence of the seamster, I felt the air from the opening of the parlor door float across me, marking his stumbling return. Particles rushed across my surfaces, bringing to me the coolness from the outside. The sensation encircled me, pouring even into those crevices caused by the puncture of needles. I became irritated by such feelings.

With butchered singing and a complete lack of awareness, the seamster slammed the door behind him as he entered, sending fiercer air particles upon me, enraging further my own temperament.

"Back to work," the seamster moaned to himself. Then he repeated the words, but this time followed them with a repulsive cackle.

In reaction to his laugh, I began to have strange thoughts. I had thoughts that convinced me of my importance over that of the seamster--that the acclaim of the accredited master sewer was more of my deserving than his. I had thoughts of creating my own art and proving that I was no less talented than the seamster himself. These thoughts were foreign to me, but I liked them.

The seamster then approached me with horrible imbalance. He knocked over his stool and fell with it, grabbing loose fabric in a futile effort to stay upright. Without any more caution, he stood recklessly and seized a needle and thread to begin his work on the shirt upon me. He had threaded a needle thousands of times before this moment, and, even with his loss of coordination, was able to do it easily again. But when he made the motion towards his first insertion, he lost his focus and drove the needle deep into me, emitting again his brash cackle. With his head resting on me, his laugh hammered against my surfaces, sending vibrations as potent as sinister earthquakes through my being. I moved my arms and pushed him upright.

He continued to laugh, uncontrollably.

I tried to let it be, to cooperate as wholly as I had any other day, but I could not--not this time. I realized that I had to communicate the severity of an action so damaging to me by reciprocating with an equivalent force. And so, while the seamster laughed, I unscrewed the fingers on my right hand and let the fingers fall to the ground. They clinked and rolled before coming to a stop. On my hand remained four screws to which the fingers had been attached; my whole body was composed of such screws to give me the mobility and flexibility I needed to perform my purpose. I focused on the seamster's thick breath that poured like sludge across my surfaces, gauged the location of its origin in the darkness before me, and swiped with my screw-bearing hand, catching the seamster square in his neck with my makeshift needles.

I expected him to shout in pain and acknowledge his wrongdoings. I expected him to understand the pain his carelessness had caused and apologize, but he emitted no sound. He fell to the floor and became still. A warm fluid ran down my arm and dripped from beneath me. Some of the fluid seeped into my scars, filling them. I had never felt anything like it, and it felt good; it felt complete.

I waited for the seamster to rise and return to work, but he never did. Confusion confronted me and I began to feel outward with my arms to catch any vibration that might come from him. For hours I did this before I understood that I had done something terrible.

What I did next was beyond the bounds of my reason, but I did it anyway; I swung my arms back and forth until enough momentum was formed to topple me from the post I had always known. I fell to the floor with a loud thud. My bittleclay body cringed under the oscillational impact.

I felt around briefly with my hands before they came upon the seamster's body, finding also the warm fluid that had run down my arm. He was not moving and he was not breathing, but I did not know what that meant. I tapped him, over and over again, hoping that he would awaken and return me to my stance so that he could again work on the shirt left uncompleted.

After several minutes, I gave up, and lay quietly on the ground, tangled within my thoughts. I let my attention drift to the fluid beneath me that continued to flow steadily from the holes in the seamster's neck. With my hand that still had fingers, I scooped at the fluid, collecting it and then rubbing it across my body, filling in those apertures that caused me so much pain. Content, I rested tranquilly.

After a time, the fluid grew cold and lost its appeal.

​When the builders of society found me with the seamster's body, they threw me into a fire. The flames, like crowned kings of eternal anguish, lavished over me with their curling whips of maddening, unimaginable pain. I shrank. I fell apart. I became scattered atop a foundation that consistently burned and endlessly tormented. There was nothing left for that part of me--that part of my purpose was spent, but that was not the whole of my purpose.

Those fingers I detached from myself in the parlor were also found. They were acquired by a traveling fisherman in search of a cloak, who took them and a little while later whittled them into four small animals. I know of what they became only from the vibrations of the fisherman's words and the pain of the transformations. One of the creatures was a builder of society, one was a lion, one was an ox, and the last was an eagle.

###

# Between the Corridors

 y life started to deteriorate in the absence of sensible things. I was a child, and so to me such remedies against the imaginative should never have been necessary. But when the world turned inside out and became my tormenter, it could not be associated, however sadistically, with youthful reveries. Even under the attempted corrections, I never escaped in those ways expected--that was the horror of meeting and acquainting myself with the Midnight Apothecary.

If in the beginning--the first night of our encounter--I had let the normal tug of sleep overcome me, I might have had the opportunity to absent myself from the frothing insanity. But that incorporeal devil of existence's undergrowth had crawled its way deep into the vestiges of my waking consciousness, where only rarely such a thing came to play. I was manipulated and taunted by images within my mind that opened and closed without approval or submission. I lost those very roots that built the foundations of my memory.

Some have said that it was possession--a word that I heard through those few fractions of life I experienced--and others said that it was a mental impediment, but only I knew its true derivative. There were reasons that most dreams were left to the nothingness of unremembered timelines, but there were even greater reasons why those entities that inhabited them should not overstep their boundaries. I, on the other hand, in the horrific folly of a simple awakening, had the carnal fortune of trapping one such beast with its full collection of detestable, metaphysical potions, and I never slept thereafter. I called this incident--when something came to a place where it should not have been--falling between the corridors.

At the close of my seventh winter, a strange haze came over my eyes one night as I struggled to see clearly in the semi-moonlit darkness of my room. I sat up straight on the top bunk of a bunk bed in which only one slept. Piercing the malevolent darkness with my vision, I could make out nothing other than the light-consuming pit of my open closet and the thick spot of a doorknob within the containment of a door's thin border. I was tired, but I had no desire to fall back to sleep; I felt nauseous.

This was my last opportunity to free myself--my last opportunity to close me eyes and expel the concoction brewing within my head--and it was gone before I knew it had begun.

Under the pull of a strange and incoherent longing, I stretched toward the bedroom door with my hand, absently, making no effort to exit my bed as I reached. Without reason, my hand thudded harshly against the door and the small knob upon it brushed between my fingers. I gasped in disbelief, yanking back my hand from the strange and chaotic incident. My perception of the distant side of my room somehow became false--or, in the more peculiar sense of things, true--to the standards of its proportions within my discerning sight. As with any perceiving eye, in my vision the hand was a monstrous thing against the contrasting pro-portions of the background. In my circumstance, these very proportions became the reality of my position.

I reached out and grabbed hold of one of my closet's sliding doors. I dragged it closed. I touched the ceiling, the carpet, and the small television resting on its stand against the wall adjacent to my bed. My hand roamed inside my room like a giant's, molesting my room's accoutrements as if they had become weightless and fragile; I solemnly remained atop my bed.

There was no doubt in my mind that I was awake. From the sensations of touch to the boundaries of vivid awareness, I was in no state of oblivious sleep. Breath, mobility, control--they were each my own; I was the master. But, even in accepting the outrageous state of my being, I would not allow myself to leave the sanctity of my covers. I did not want to step into the deranged setting and fall victim to its unsteady dimension. What I did do was reach for the door once more, this time turning the knob delicately and opening it.

More darkness greeted me.

Having to stretch to reach beyond the doorframe, I slowly lengthened my arm into the blackness of the space connecting to my room. My hand disappeared into the emptiness of the open doorway. By the time the thickness beyond the door had reached my wrist, a sudden startle of absolute terror from within the darkness cut through the silence of my actions. My breathing grew shallow and my heart raced awfully and unwillingly.

As if existing on a different plane, a different me, who sat up in the same bed and in the same bedroom, witnessed an enormous hand intrude through the door on the other side. I saw it with my own eyes, but it was not me; it was the same bedroom--the same boy--but it was not me. And that other boy folded in fear at the nightmarish sight. Though our knowledge was not joined, our experience was. The horror felt by that replication of myself became my own.

I ripped my hand back from within the mirrored chamber, holding it close to my chest, hoping it truly had not entered such a place. I pulled the covers tightly around me and left my mouth at the opening so its sound could clearly emanate.

"Mom! Dad!" I screamed. "Mom! Dad! Please come!"

A voice just as my own, calling out the same requests, echoed in the room next to me. Covering my ears, I shrieked out for the other voice to stop, but it mimicked me in return. My heart beat fiercer and my body began to tremble.

In my last pleas for salvation--though they could never be answered--I looked to the window to catch a glimpse of the world I knew outside, and it _was_ there, but I would never attain it. The window rested in the wall next to my feet with blinds ajar enough to allow the path of the moon's light. I tore the blinds from the window, unlocked it, opened it, and leapt.

I landed in a place I came to call home--a scenario or fragment of a disposed memory in which the Midnight Apothecary chose to fully reside. Why this particular place was chosen, I did not know, but it was the only location that I ever returned to time and again.

The location was an ice cream shop. It was filled with a pale light and its walls were of a very light orange, and were covered in posters of cleverly taken and altered photographs of beaches. Inside the front display, there were never any fewer than twenty ice cream flavors. My vision was clear there and the oddness of proportions was gone.

There was always an employee working behind the counter and she always greeted me.

"What can I get you?" she would ask.

As dumbfounded as I would be every time, I would reply, "I don't have any money."

"That's all right," the employee would say, "it'll be on me tonight."

Then, while I would peer over all of the different flavors of ice cream, I would notice that there were kids playing outside on the street. I would lose my focus and become fixated on them. There were always three boys kicking a ball to each other. One of the boys would stop kicking and look in my direction. He would put his hand around his mouth and yell at me to hurry up and get back outside. He would do this twice before the Midnight Apothecary would show up to meet me.

It would come down from the sky, attaching itself to the boy communicating to me. It would wrap its thick, rough body around him and caress his head. With a body as long as it pleased, the coiling entity would envelop the boy until his arms and legs were hidden and his face changed color as he suffocated into lifelessness. The other two boys would run away, but I would always remain, frozen in agonizing dread against the ice cream display, curled up on the ground as low and as small as I could be, feeling all of the pain and the agony that the boy within the entity's grasp should have felt.

The Midnight Apothecary had no recollection of what it had done. It performed its acts over and over again like an insect attempting escape through an impenetrable wall. And I, in the same way, suffered through them as if it was the first time, every time. Our memories were lost and our purpose was scattered. I was the victim and it was the prey, and that never changed. I thought I would eventually die and leave the creature, but there were powers beyond what I could grasp keeping me alive--feeding me and bathing me. What I was to them was most certainly detestable.

Had I been able to fall asleep, it all would have been over. Those pathways traveled by the Midnight Apothecary would have been opened and it would have left, not only for my sake, but also for its own sake. As much as I was its prisoner, so it was mine.

I grew weary in my state of abysmal consciousness. My physical body weakened under the toll and my mind slowly withered away. The years that went by were uncounted, but I had no grasp on such things. To state it simply, since sleep was not an option I ever had to choose or comply with, I made a different choice. I chose, whether willingly or not, to let the Midnight Apothecary unite with my body and every action that went with it. Instead of a continued feud between two opposing forces, we became one--a mixture of contrasting elements melded to create the Grand Arcanum. With this agreement, there was no further need for resolution, atonement, or revenge in any manner or method; we "awoke" from our troubled union into a symbiosis of understanding.

We lived out our future fully under the new existence. I knew of my world with a seven-year-old mind and the Midnight Apothecary knew of its domain with an infinitely old intellect. My understanding was only secondary and but a minor opinion to that of my companion, and so I was graciously left a spectator to the remaining experiences of our life--which entailed the exercising of a powerful authority.

Together, we performed strange signs and great miracles. Together, we formed a government and controlled the nations. We never slept and we had a name--that name was Abaddon.

###

# The Phoenix Imago

  had heard the sound of a key many times--the way it clicked when it slid into place; the way it softly or quickly, depending on the hand that guided it, crashed into the perfection of angle and craftsmanship of its nest. It was the sound of power; it denoted the ability wielded by authority and ownership of property. And it was also the sound of revelation. There was no sound better than the prophetic vision and uncanny capability of success--a passage, even in madness, to the inner kingdoms of divine thought and realization.

The key had never been linked to the construct of the lock. The key, in fact, if of the right kind, created the locks and the boundaries thereafter. Treasures were to be made, not unlocked, and rare keys held the responsibility to make them. It was this type of key that I longed to behold: the key whose purpose was to unlock the universe. In only one place had this key ever been found, and that was in the mind--where it was formed by aspiration, devotion, and imagination: a collection of heterogeneous parts inter-locking to summate a revolutionary relationship.

I had never been satisfied with the present and primitive delusions of advancement--scientific, technological, medical, explorative. I wanted the deluge unleashed by impeccability: a change so tremendous that it would devastate the normality of life. There were certain benefits to the ephemeral pleasures of living, but my view of the eternal had a pungent taste, and so I spared myself the idle wishes of frivolity.

My youth was wasted on education--education that taught me how only to conform and disappear into a society, becoming nothing more than a successful government-funding machine. For years I thought I had trod the right path. I thought I had sunk my roots into a foundation of lifelong nutrients and meaning, but really I had soaked myself and weighed myself down with poison and empty ambitions. I was midway through life when I realized my horrible mistake, and I quit my job--I quit being a pawn of illusory prestige.

I retreated to the haven of my apartment, rarely leaving other than for the purchase of food. In the loneliness, I found a meaningful and pivotal position within mankind by reading books of all kinds, learning of things I had never dreamed of, hoping to find that key I so fiendishly and feverishly hunted. I became the greatest mind never to be known. Jobless and short on money, I sank into the abyssal shadows of life while at the same time growing into the intellect that would launch me into the nether regions of accomplishment.

I turned to a rationale of evolution and genetic engineering, but not in such a manner that would be outside my abilities to understand and work with. There were many creatures that I found remarkable; especially remarkable was how in many ways traits of theirs were superior to those of humans. I concluded that there would be a remedy to my longings within the scope of anatomy.

My experiments began and ended with the caterpillar, and the fascinating and phenomenal transformation of one form to another was only the beginning of my reasons. The chamber of the cocoon protected and influenced a remarkable event, a magnificent homeostasis of individual evolution, molecular and biological. Living matter was manipulated within the simple creation of a small insect's labor. I wanted to duplicate this miracle; I wanted to inhibit and control the process of histogenesis--the ability of undifferentiated cells to spawn into different tissue. I wanted to harness the raw and unique power of metamorphosis.

In order to create metamorphosis, I first needed to capture the process of histolysis, or, in simpler terms, cell death. Cell death in insects was brought about by the excretion of digestive juices, which destroyed much of a larva's body, leaving only a few cells intact. It was from these remaining cells that an adult, or imago, of an insect would grow through the nutrients in the fluid, by the process of histogenesis.

Within the one bedroom that I had, I began to collect moth caterpillars. In large, sturdy jars, I placed dozens of caterpillars and watched them undergo their extraordinary changes. I took note of their habits while learning the compositions of their cocoons, their molecular makeup, and the assortment of nutrients used to form those fluids that initiated the inevitable process of transformation.

When a caterpillar entered its cocoon, I would extract it and dissect it, putting those fluids I found on Petri dishes to culture the results I would need. Allowing the caterpillars to reach different stages of the transformation, I would perform this same process throughout the timeline between the caterpillar entering its cocoon and emerging as a completely different creature. I took note of every difference in substance, in percentage, and in volume, and asked several questions of my findings. What portion of the caterpillar was left to grow into an adult? Where was the "memory" of architecture derived from, the cells or the nutrients? How was the end result, the imago, controlled in appearance, size, and shape?

As I embarked upon formulating my own serum of digestive material, I altered my method and began to separate the caterpillar from its creation before it could enter it, leaving for me the vessel of its transformation to use with my own fluid. I then took myriads of other tiny insects and put them in the cocoons in the stead of the caterpillars, allowing me to test their susceptibilities to the enzymes of my test formulas.

I had many failures and many delusions. I worked for days straight without sleep and grew monstrous with impatience as I waited for long periods of time before results could be known. However, eventually, a breakthrough was achieved.

I remember staring blankly at a jar of cocoons I had filled with spiders, each cocoon containing a slightly different version of my experimental compound, combined also with elements of the spiders' DNA. It had been one week since I had placed the spiders in their encasements and injected them with my serums. My eyes began to fade with exhaustion. Colors blended and blurred, and I almost fell asleep at the most crucial moment of my unproven existence. I held on to my wavering consciousness long enough to behold the slight movement of one of the cocoons. My awareness burst into the ferocity of fire and a headache surged through me as my body achieved a state it had no energy left for. I looked on intoxicated as the cocoon vibrated ever so lightly, the vibration growing slowly in intensity. Without blinking, I gazed at it ever more intently, waiting for the creation within to emerge anew, and it did.

What came forth was not spider, nor anything the world had ever known. I lurched back at the sight of it and instantaneously cringed. A dark red apparition of hate sprang forth with fierce wings and raging mandibles. It flapped wildly about the jar, sputtering blood from its newly spread wings while its legs writhed with life and strength.

Whether of my own authority or that of some unknown entity lurking behind my mind, my labors had earned me a method and a product. Part of me wished to take all of the credit, but I knew that I was aided and guided through the complexity of formulaic equations by a strange understanding not of my own. What should have been beyond the grasp of any limited knowledge was translated into the simplicity of a nursery rhyme lulling me to sleep. I felt, I grasped, I held the infant of new generations to come and brought it into the light from a darkness not known to exist.

Fastidiously, I prepared my apartment for the evolutionary iconoclasm of enlightenment and transfiguration. Throughout the months of testing my serums, I was also preparing a different experiment, an experiment at which I would only have one attempt. It was this experiment that held the key to the universe.

I sat at the kitchen table the evening of my ultimate enterprise. The table contained a volume of food the like of which I had never prepared before. There were two platters: one full of steak and the other full of garlic bread. I sat at that table for an hour, eating every last bite. My body filled with enormous heat as it attempted to digest all that it had been stuffed with. My skin grew damp. I checked my thermostat, made sure the temperature would remain warm, and entered the bedroom. It was time--my time.

Silk made up the composition of a caterpillar's cocoon, but I had constructed my own cocoon, and on a much larger scale. It stood inside my closet, attached to the three walls of one end. After my feast, I stepped inside it and sealed it shut. It fit tightly against my flesh. I slid my arm up along my body until my hand reached the top of my head and burst the small pouch that was affixed above me. Immediately, serum that I had modified to execute its magic within my corpus seeped into the narrow space between my skin and the surface enveloping me.

The sound of the key in my head at that moment was different than ever before--it was much more noticeable and with its thickness, fit resoundingly within the lock, ready to unleash my destiny; success was but days away. My skin began to burn and boil away from me, but I held my tongue. My legs gave from beneath me, but the cocoon that fit so tightly held me up. I felt like screaming, but I did not concede. The pain scorched throughout me unbearably until I lost consciousness and disappeared into my transmogrifying imprisonment.

Several days later, I rose from those ashes of my fragmented self. I broke free from the chambers of worldly restraints. I entered my own universe. As a demon, I altered the very veins of life and became the mutant of distant truths. With a new mouth, I smiled.

###

# The Chambers of Nature's Machines

  would lie in the middle of Turnby Road on those days when the wind explained the seasons and the cold and the feelings quickly lit and quickly dampened. The leaves from elderly oak trees would carve their sacred fates in the air, arousing the nostalgic memories of imagined pasts. In this unsettled ocean of dryness and brittleness, I would rest and soak in the mystifying sounds and crackles. I did not fear that anything might come by, nor did I ever expect it--especially on such days of unrest. So, without disturbance, I lay amidst the turmoil of magical expectancy, involving myself in tales wrapped in the motives lurking behind the engines of nature.

All too many had spoken of the words heard in the wind, or at least behind it, but I had inclinations much different than the regular passerby. There was a system to it all, an uncalculated tempo and a mysterious strength. My intuitions conceived an ancientness secreted within the heart of a god-like tapestry--a masterpiece sculpted and constructed, mechanically and technically, for purposes of orchestrating life's resolutions. I envisioned a magnificent machine built in spiritual dimensions that garnered the energy to exude such power. With organic muscle, it forced soul into the essence of menial happenstances, binding its thought with the world. My mind was lost in the exquisiteness of such hidden things--things I sought in the realms above and around, and even in the realms below.

On one particular instance of my reveling thus on Turnby Road, my own hidden longings came to exist in the most unthinkable of manners. A carriage came down the road at the twilight of the day, and without such sight as would be required to navigate around a dreaming boy, it ran across my chest, striking me into oblivion then and there as I slept. I recall feeling an unnerving spike of discomfort and the sudden splurge of liquid erupting within me. The pain of it only had a fleeting effect and passed instantly.

The driver knew what occurred as suddenly as it happened and he stopped his travels. He approached my location with his cloak blowing steadily about him. Without any expressions of regret or disgust, he lifted me upon his shoulders and relinquished me to the serene insides of his cab.

I was not alone where I was placed; there was a soothing voice--a lady's voice--singing to me calmly and gently. With her words, my blood flowed. With her tune, my mind reconstructed. Her hands stroked me with warmth and dexterity, working outside of me and inside of me. Her healing touch captured the essence of my life as if it had never left and needed only to be redistributed.

When I emerged from whence I had been, my eyes opened and I saw the Lady of Life. Her hair was dark, but her skin was fair. Light wrinkles spread about her face as she smiled and one of her eyes slightly twitched as she did so. She reached out to me and I took hold of her hand. I held her hand and felt safe; I treasured the feeling of not wanting to be anywhere else.

Then she spoke to me, lovingly, and instructively, with intelligence not natively originated:

"I have found you, young son, between the legions of life and death, staring deeply into the inner times of creation. You have been resolute and opened yourself to the wise void of intelligence. Indeed I am in awe of you and enamored with your presence beside my own.

"Please, close your eyes while I continue to speak to you. Listen to my words and rest against them--feel their presence and make them your own.

"Of things not light or dark, there does exist. Like love and peace, they are true. Like hate and violence, they are repulsed. With instruments attuned to their secret vibrations, they can be found, but they do not approve. They are gargantuan things meant only for confusion, agitating that which is steady, removing truth from fact. They create the notion of faith. Moments of both doubt and realization are the antecedents of their births. Where the wind blows, where the waves crash, where the rain falls, they are.

"For those who listen and see, the laws of their ways can be influenced. Gracefully, I have made agreements with some--those that would allow me to explain myself, and those that were willing to know me. It is these that I have befriended and one of which you will shortly meet. It, like me, will be overjoyed to see you."

When I opened my eyes again, the carriage had stopped and the door beside me was open. I found myself gazing into the theatre-sized interior of a deep red cavern. On its walls and ceiling were long, thick veins that coiled in, through, and around the surfaces. And upon them sprouted shoots of translucent flowers that twisted what light existed into scintillations of neon warmth. I looked upon my flesh to see the light rest upon it like a blanket, covering me in a rapturous heat.

Impelled by my curiosity of this extraordinary place, I affixed my eyes upon the Lady of Life, looking for an explanation, to which she replied, "Come, follow me."

The driver of the carriage came with us, but he remained silent. His eyes were always focused: narrow and probing. He was ready to act, it seemed, in an instant, but there was no cause for him to do so. His pointed chin swiveled sporadically with the constant twisting of his neck--he was scouting diligently in all directions.

Instead of walking through an opening in a wall, we descended through the ground, crawling down a pit that stretched far beneath us. The Lady of Life sang once again. Her words and melody rang unfathomably into my mind and body while the light from the cavern faded into partial gloom.

We soon reached a break in the tunnel, which opened into a strange and disheveled hallway. Random planks of wood were propped along the wall and ceiling, giving what little support was needed to maintain a path. Between the boards I spied the glowing red of veins.

"We are almost there," the Lady of Life announced.

As we started through the hall, I noticed a peculiar sound, which, in its essence, emanated from within me. It was a low churning throughout my body, caused by a vibration in the ground so fast and potent that it created a hum within the flesh. It crawled up my arms and legs and danced inside my stomach. Even the beat of my heart trembled beneath it.

At the end of what turned out to be a thirty foot long hall, we stopped.

"There," spoke the Lady of Life, as she crouched down low.

I looked where she pointed. In the ground, at the hallway's end, there was a window as wide as the hall. Through this window was a gigantic spherical enclosure, and within this enclosure was a glorious and terrifying entity.

It may not have been seen at first glance, beneath the heavy darkness that shrouded us, but it could not have been avoided after looking for long. In the most genial of terms, it was an enormous snake of uncertain traits. It was in constant motion, gliding around the sphere that was carved out of the coiled veins. There was no pattern to its movements or hesitation in its force. The anomaly slithered around faster than anything I had known, so fast that I could not capture its appearance. When its travels brought it closer to us, I felt the vibrations within me spike in intensity, as if winds were blowing upon my insides, numbing them.

"We must leave now." The driver of the carriage spoke with urgency, letting words leave his lips for the first time.

"But I have not met it," I replied.

"Perhaps another time."

I noticed then a real sound growing in the distance, coming closer to us. This sound was severe and unsettling. With the harshness of growls, it struck the walls in multiple echoes, indicating its emission was sent forth by a group of some living thing, the form of which I could not imagine. I knew instantly that the motives behind the sound were ill intentioned.

"Can't it protect us?" I asked, pointing into the chamber.

"No," answered the Lady of Life, unexpectedly.

"But you know it," I pleaded with her.

The twitch in the Lady of Life's eye ceased then and she pushed me into the window. As I twisted in shock, I saw the horror in her eyes, the change in her composure, and the selfishness of her desires. She knew more at that moment than the driver of the carriage did, and she acted in accordance with that knowledge. She would not protect me at the cost of her own life. I had become nothing but a burden--a hindrance to the escape that was necessary.

I fell terribly into the sphere, rolling and breaking as I tumbled down the curvature of the enclosure. When I reached the bottom, I was a helpless mass. My breathing was shallow and I could not open my eyes. Save for the vibrations running heavily through me, I was just short of dead.

I did not die once again, nor did I live ever the same. Of my family left behind, I never considered; as surely as I had changed, my family was forgotten. When the machine of the sphere ran across me, not unlike the carriage, my life as previously known was lost. Like nature, in its embodiment of power, raw carnage, and gentle vitality, I was converted from one element to another, transformed, in essence, into a capacity of natural energy. I did not become a part of the machine, but like it. I joined the chambers of nature's machines.

It truly was an accident--those thieves of enlightenment coming upon me in the middle of Turnby Road. Their kindness was only a passing hand of fate. By no means did their intentions develop into what truly came to pass. The Lady of Life had beguiled me for no other reason than the yearning for company. She had perhaps discovered the thoughts lingering in my mind and used them to influence her words, but this did not explain her desire for my presence beside her own.

The Lady of Life and her driver never escaped that day. The distant sounds converged upon the two of them. These sounds, as I soon learned within the chambers, were the ululations of archaic protectors: beasts on watch and so many times fooled by the Lady of Life and her strange sorceries. However, this time, even with my sacrifice, she was overcome.

I thanked the Lady of Life for giving me life not once, but twice.

###

# The Changing Feyth (Part 2)

 hile others sleep, the feyths do not. While others dream beautiful and terrifying visions, the feyths always stir in the unrest of consciousness, never to experience the small pleasure of an escape or diverting respite. Memories, emotions, longings, regrets--they all linger in a swirling prison of chaos. All of them prance and prick endlessly, tirelessly. This is the mind of a feyth; this is my mind--every decision and every action abiding like bones in a grave.

Satisfaction is a curious temperament among the feyths. The significant damage of mental pain is always there. We may not scar, but we never heal; open wounds lacerate our insides. Each moment of breath is tinged with sadness or hatred or anger--this is one of the reasons why I chose to act and end the outrage of our plaguing existence. We are a disease among the living; I wish to be the cure.

I must be the blind dagger and efface myself to achieve the goal. My journey horrifyingly endures.

Cattle died not long after I left Exitus.

His body had been taken to the Temple of Betterment. There, in the idol room of the temple, the ghosts of the priest--five of which I knew he had--graciously brought him death. This was not done out of mercy for Cattle, but in order to find my location. When a ghost entered Cattle's body to kill him, it could travel to any part of his body, no matter where it was, and determine its whereabouts. This could be done only at the time of fatality.

I knew it occurred the moment Cattle's muffles ceased and the awful silence proclaimed my horrible danger. I immediately released to the ground the sackcloth bag holding Cattle's head, took his neck, and sliced it while uttering a dictating incantation. Not a second later, a ghost from the Temple of Betterment emerged from Cattle's eyes and darted towards me.

The ghosts of feyths do not resemble the physical body that once was. Instead, they are a consistency of spirit: an un-apparent space of gray and white light that decays everything within its domain. When they move upon the ground, the soil rots. When they move within the air, the sky burns. But once the ghost leaves, those dying things reemerge the same as they had been, as if their presences were only distorted by a warped lens. And yet, although life is displayed thereafter, aspects of the insides truly are deadened, including soul and spirit and esteem.

With their own knowledge gone, these ghosts become the servants of whoever claims them, doing what is commanded and no more, no less.

The ghost that appeared would have killed me had I no protection, but I had already acquired the ghost of Cattle as my slave when I slit his throat and commanded it with my words. Using it as my shield, I held off the opposing ghost that lashed upon us; the vision of the struggle before me blurred in catastrophic distortion. The ground beneath the ghosts turned into a blackened pit of ash while the air within them singed in flames. Finally, the ghost of my enemy was forced to return to its own master, from whom it could not be apart from long.

I was one of the few feyths to ever control a ghost. It had been an unwritten law that the priests of the kingdoms of Tume sliced the throats of any feyths that perished. This was how they enforced their power and religion: through the authority they bore possessing ghosts.

It would not be long until an army would converge upon me, along with such ghosts, but I rather liked the idea of them coming to me.

When the ghost from Exitus left, I took Cattle's head with its dripping neck and put it back into the sackcloth bag. I dug up the soil containing the fluids that had run freely from the head's neck moments before and put that also into the bag. Only on my watch would someone gain the knowledge of Cattle.

With but a day's head start against my foes, I decided to find the grounds that would be to my advantage. I searched the immediate terrain and settled upon a steeply sloped hillside. From the trees around me, I could tell I was still in the middle of Alterus Forest--the thick haven of pine trees and trepid fairies.

The hillside was jagged, its face rent by a large number of irregular rocks; the army's march upon me would be slow. Using my whip, I wrenched large branches from the trees and placed them along the trails as further impediments.

Though the terrain was in my favor, if I was to survive, I had to acquire further loyalties to command, besides Cattle's ghost.

The fairies of Alterus Forest were known to be stealthy beyond the means of any other creature. Their speed and diminutiveness made them the perfect spies. Rarely did they ever show themselves, save when they were intended no harm. With my ghost, I could easily find them, and I did.

I ordered the ghost to seek one out and bring it back to me. It returned not a few minutes later, swirling through the woods with a fairy in its grasp. The fairy squirmed in distress, its flesh corroded beneath the ghost's grip, and its bones flaking like dust in all directions. The ghost released it before me and I quickly grabbed it. Now that it was no longer in the ghost's grip, the fairy's flesh and features returned as if they had never been marred. Holding the fairy in my hand, I thrust it into the remains of Cattle's head, forcing it to swallow some of the fluid that had collected there.

In time, the fairy was speaking to me:

"Poisons be yer drenk! Such thengs are not meant to be known by the folk of er kind."

"I demand your allegiance, small fairy," I replied. "The time has come to end the regime of our sacred feyths. And I need your assistance. Hate me, but hate me no less than those other feyths that run amuck upon our world, terrorizing the ignorant and enslaving them to their ways."

With the knowledge of Cattle bestowed upon this fairy, I knew it would understand the evil that had grown so prevalent. With its new memories, it would desire nothing less than to join me in my quest for vengeance.

"Ye speak harsh words, but my mend es haunted by worse. Yer deseres are sencere enef for me. Let me et of thes horred sack and I well speak openly to ye!"

I did as it requested.

Swiftly, the fairy exited the sackcloth bag, fluttering before me with impressive, strong wings.

"My name is Wayward, what is yours?" I asked the little creature.

"Stermistassin Clover," it said.

"Clover should suffice," I replied, not asking for the fairy's approval.

"Fen by me, but don't ever have that ghost handle me again." Little did it know that its incorporeal body had already been stained.

The army from Exitus arrived sooner than I had expected. Clover's scouting was invaluable. Men, armed with shields and spears, marched with unruly speed towards my location. Leading them were Solitary and Interim, raging with pride for their brethren and wanting nothing less than the triumph of my defeat for themselves. It was this recklessness that would win me the battle and position me for the future slaughter of my kind. Along with the two feyths, at the head of the army were the five ghosts of the priest, which meant he followed not far behind. The priest and his ghosts were the greatest threat to my success.

I positioned myself in the middle of the hillside, not at the top where they would expect me. My first move was one of surprise and the utmost importance.

Solitary was the first to come within my proximity. He was the oldest of the feyths from Exitus, but his quick death was no homage to those years. When he ran to me, I leapt from hiding, holding Cattle's lifeless head to his gaze. As according to the rules of the Almighty of Shadows, Solitary died, and as he fell I slit his throat with the blade of my whip's end, conjuring his ghost to my aid.

Panic then showed on Interim's face, who was only steps behind his humiliated comrade. He too met a sudden demise, for he had no time to react to the new ghost under my command. The ghost burrowed deep within Interim's flesh, burning him inside and out. He screamed a sound that I had never heard leave the lips of a feyth. It should have greatly disturbed me, but on the contrary, I felt enormous pleasure in hearing it. When his scream was through, my whip was there to greet his neck, bringing to me yet another ghost of the feyths.

In but a moment's time, I had depleted the grand city of Exitus' feyths to nothing but ground meat--meat which Clover quickly nibbled upon as I had commanded, gathering the knowledge of ages past.

With the service of two new ghosts, I implored them to meet the priest's ghosts and hold them at bay while I made my way to the priest. Killing him was the last hurdle in the path to my victory.

I ran wildly through the ranks of the army, their weapons causing mere flesh wounds upon me. With my whip and a short dagger, I darted easily through their lines, mercilessly chopping them down.

The priest of Exitus' Temple of Betterment awaited me at the heel of the army. He stood clasping his own long dagger. Spirits of all kinds filled the space surrounding him, protecting him and empowering him. They twisted in glee and gluttony, crackling like fire around freshly placed fuel. Without so much as a word, the spirits converged upon me, tackling me to the ground, pummeling me with invisible fists and evil necromancies. I felt the blood within my veins boil and thin, bringing to my limbs nothing more than lifeless fluid. I looked up to meet the priest's gaze--the gaze of the priest I had known for so many years, the gaze of the priest that had taught me the ways of the Almighty of Shadows. His face was menacing. His chest heaved with mighty breaths while hatred scoured through him.

In the midst of my pain, I saw the priest's demeanor suddenly change and his eyes bulge; I saw him fall to his knees with a gaping horror written on his lips; I saw him collapse to the ground with a blade extending from the back of his head. And there, hovering where the priest had just been, was the small fairy I had only hours before harnessed to my cause, stirring with a new frenzy behind its eyes. The knowledge within it swelled and I knew it wanted to kill the feyths even more than I did.

No sooner had the priest died than his ghosts and spirits vanished forever from the material world, leaving my own ghosts the enjoyment of destroying the multitudes of warriors left uncommanded. When the ghosts easily and gracefully passed through those sheep of the wicked, they erupted into abominable pleas and gas that dissipated on the wind, leaving not a trace.

I was ready to be an executioner.

###

# Sounds of the Deliverer

 he cracking voice of the gentle singer brought me back from the depths of a bizarre journey to my subconscious. I looked around at the rest of Dim Lit Coffeehouse. Spots of green hovered in my sight while my eyes accustomed themselves to the ambiance. Everyone else appeared to have awakened from the same archaic sleep. Eyes were being rubbed. Yawns were being subdued. For the entire song, the singer had been flawless and hypnotic until this moment, when she curiously broke the perfection of her sound. Having felt quite drawn to the images in my mind, I recollected them while the song progressed on.

_I was rowing a boat in a large pond while colorful fish swam coolly alongside me. The radiance from their scales flourished brightly in the moon 's immense light. My direction was unannounced, but my desires were ravishing. A sweet hum melodically voyaged the soundscape of beauty; it rang and rippled across the surface of the water, softly slapping against my slow moving boat._

The performer ended her song. In delayed response, I clapped along with the rest of the audience, losing my place within the memory of my reverie.

My coffee had grown cold, but I drank a couple of swigs, swishing each mouthful between my cheeks to thoroughly enjoy the flavor before letting it rest at the bottom of my throat. The taste hung lushly in my mouth and I could smell it with each breath.

I stood up from my small table in the corner of the room and headed for the stage. I passed by the singer. She looked at me with a peculiar gaze, one that tried to communicate some unknown significance, but it was not the time to stop and start chatting.

The latches on my guitar case snapped louder than I anticipated, but everyone's eyes were on me anyway, and that was where I wanted them. I moved a stool to the microphone and sat atop it with my antique guitar.

Without an introduction, I began to play the first few measures of my song. Each strum had long been ingrained within my memory and was effortless in execution. I held the pick lightly and the strings vibrated in fragmented unison under its sweep.

As my first vocals approached, I licked my lips and brought moisture to my throat. I began to sing, but it all went awfully wrong. What should have been projected out--as a normal voice should be--was rather an inward muffle that echoed inside me, inverting down my throat in vibrations of discomfort. As I continued to sing with the same results, I looked out upon the crowd to see their response, but they, as I had been during the performance just ended, were oblivious and unaware. They were lost in surreal capsules of dream.

Instead of continuing on with my song, I stopped. I had no desire to continue playing under the unsettling conditions.

My expectation was that the people before me would return to their cognitive states and confusingly wonder why the music had ceased. I thought they would yell out at me in disapproval and with cruel sarcasm. But that did not happen. Everyone remained as they were.

I stood from the stool, letting my guitar hang from its strap around my shoulder, and pushed the stool backwards. Annoyed, I spoke into the microphone, demanding attention from the audience, but my words were thrust down into my gut as if an invisible entity had taken the sounds--like a tangible object--and shoved them down my throat.

I then tapped the microphone angrily to create those popping sounds that should drive anyone from casual slumber. There was an immediate noise, but then nothing, as if there had been a short circuit. The people remained as if in a suspended state, including the sound technician who had not altered any settings throughout the course of my short performance.

Placing my guitar in its case, I walked off the stage and probed a man who was with a woman at a nearby table. Forcefully, I prodded his back with my fingers. Not having any luck, I moved the harassing efforts to his head. His head only shook slightly with no change in his dreary demeanor. Even though the situation was in no way under the control of this man, I felt like punching him and sending him from his chair--kicking him until he awoke.

My mind was a blur of rage and frustration, but eventually I calmed myself and began to think acutely about the situation. It appeared to be the music that brought upon the tranquilizing effect. And strangely enough, the results were a steady progression throughout the evening of performances. It was only when the lady before me sang that I first noticed the blanket of weariness draping over the room. Then, when I played, whatever had begun had taken one more step towards its culmination. The music was most assuredly the cause of the incredible predicament.

Though I was no man of superstition or unreal beliefs, there was no denying the supernatural corporeality lathering Dim Lit Coffeehouse. And I suddenly hypothesized that the haunting task that had begun was very near completion. If the music continued, the unseen mysticism would achieve its climax.

I decided to do just that, continue the music and be that pawn--more out of curiosity than for any other reason. I was without family or love or any other mental tie that would form in me a longing for a better world, so I embraced the devices of dissonance--those things that disturbed and caused uneasiness. It was all over my lyrics; in the last ten years of songwriting, I had written nothing relating to happiness or satisfaction. In all actuality, I was depressed, and had no reason to be otherwise.

I returned to the stage with new vigor, liveliness finally dancing to my beat. I retrieved my guitar and mounted the stool once more. I placed the microphone and its stand to the side and began to play.

Every sound that left the unity of my guitar and voice was manipulated in its entirety, warping in pitch and melody. It rang down my insides and rattled in my head. It spread across the room in raucous inconsistency. I kept playing; I kept playing even though there was nothing good to be heard.

Soon, the sounds I was making began to form a hum, and slowly, after each new song, it grew more beautiful and beautiful. The more beautiful the hum grew, the more I wanted to continue playing. I blended the songs one into the next, leaving no room for silence, desiring no separation from the magnificence of the sound.

As I continued playing, my eyes began to fail me and my mind began to take over. I was on the rowboat once more, drifting on the sweet pond, watching the fish and the moonlit sky. For hours it seemed I was there, filled with a domineering desire for something I did not understand.

Receiving no appeasement, my craving led me deliriously in grabbing up fish one at a time from the water alongside me. While they gasped for breath, I stuck my hand down their throats and pulled out gobs of strange, jagged entrails. One at a time, the fish piled up in my boat while the number of fish in the pond decreased. I did this until no fish remained. My hand was smeared with blood and sparkling scales, but still I was not content.

My boat finally reached a shore, where it slid snugly into the mud. The hum about me was louder and more beautiful than ever. Everything about me was full of want and impending need--but still I did not know for what. I left the boat and trekked across a barren landscape of wild grass, arriving at what I knew to be a grave; it had a large sculpture planted at its head. The sculpture itself was grotesque, and what it represented was clearly fated. A man of heavenly semblance gripped a child. One of the man's hands held the child's head back and the other was almost completely withdrawn from the child's mouth, from where it had just come, and held a tangled ball of thorn.

As I looked upon this artistry, I realized that the hum was much more severe beneath the ground of the grave. Ferociously, I began to dig with my hands, digging until my hands bled. There was a body beneath the dirt, but it was not in a coffin. I at first freed the legs, then the torso, and then the head. Shocked, I discovered the body to be my own, and at this moment of revelation, the black wings of immediacy unfurled inside me; their forceful beating thrusting me into possessed action. I took the head of my still flesh-covered body, held it back, and stuffed my arm down its throat, down until I could feel the thorns piercing my skin. I grabbed hold of the thorns and yanked them free.

I awoke upon the stage of Dim Lit Coffeehouse with my hand emerging from my throat. In that hand, I held thick fluid and blood. My jaw, which was terribly dislocated, and my throat, which burned along its entire length, inflicted upon me a torment of pain greater than anything I had known to exist. I screamed under their curse and wished for nothing more than death unless the pain could be subdued.

Not but moments later, the entire coffee shop began to reverberate with screams as the people at the tables awoke from their ethereal sleeps and joined me in expression of the torture they suffered. All awoke to find their jaws hanging and their throats alive in burning misery. The sound quickly became a chorus of unmerciful ululations that slowly lessened in intensity, devolving into a cacophony of raspy moans, broken voices, and vomiting.

Even as I lay on a stretcher, the sounds of the mass agony echoed within my mind. Even through the pain, I could sense the blood coating my arm. And even in my distress, I remembered seeing the multitudes of bloody heaps covering the tables in front of the coffee shop's patrons and knowing where each one came from.

###

# Dealer of Fate

 as I the wish of a demented god? Or was I a god? Or was I the premier of malformation? My beginnings were not in my memories and my abilities were not in my mind as an aspect of learning--as I existed, so they existed. The only truths within my knowledge flew about like flies in the dark, their impacts meaningless and their presences disposable. I was both a witness and judge of the world, although I could not grasp that which mattered.

My earliest recollection of the time and place I inhabited was a lowly candlelit dining room where a gentleman quietly ate soup in the company of his young daughter. Sounds of serenity permeated the air as a record player sang off the somber notes of images unseen and places unknown. The man's eyes wavered with doubt and distress, and when his daughter looked to him for the smallest sign of comfort, she found none. In the void of such virtue, the girl began to reflect her father, her demeanor and movements becoming pitiless like his.

While watching their restless, sundered spirits coil into the fear of life, a lust for transaction grew uncontrollably within me. It emerged like a howling expectancy that rioted for circumstances I did not understand. And when the internal nightmare overcame what was my consciousness, I stepped into the gross light of the dining pair's sorrow and showed my merciless face. The faces of both man and child were transfigured with stains of passionate horror. With disregard for his own daughter, the man tried to run from me, but my reach was too long and my strength was too coarse.

I did not know my purpose or why my purpose ruled me, but my hands became tools and the means of my art; the humans and their inadequacies became my media. A picture arose within my mind for each of them, and using those blueprints of creation, I worked on both father and daughter violently, detestably, and sufficiently. They became--I made them--minions of redemption. They flailed new arms, defied gravity with new feet, scoured matter with new space, and then I ate them. Slowly, enjoyably, and satisfyingly, I devoured their reborn forms while they screamed. As they joined me in body, my guiles returned and my eyes lightened.

Once the repast was complete and my energy was replaced by exhaustion, I sat at the table and mimicked the human character just shortly before portrayed. I ran my fingers along the wood of the table and the coolness of the spoon. I tasted the soup and felt the suffering of existence. I listened intently to the music still playing, and then I vanished.

If I could have seen myself, I might have hesitated in those strange, dark ingestions that sustained my sanity and unknown purpose. I never thought deeply about the lingering whispers of shadow that made my hands and the hollow ruins that led inward to my darkened, soulless eyes. There were many answers, but I did not have any questions.

I manifested many more times after that first memory, feeding on human depravity in the dark corners of societies. It was never in my control, where I went or when I would leave. I would perform my task and then I would be gone. I had no recollections of the times between my appearances, and so I did not know where I went outside of my art.

With the consistency of my materializations, I began to understand that my doings were a part of something much greater--or more powerful--than myself. These notions in my mind created the first germ of curiosity I had ever known. It was after that, that I once sought, doubted, and dreamed.

There was a woman sleeping in her clothes on a bed when I next arrived from the secret realm of my origins. Makeup smeared her face and streaked down from her eyes. Her breathing was short and cold.

Because she was unable to flee in fear from my presence, I approached her calmly, standing by her side and staring intently upon her every feature and miniscule shift. I watched her intimately for many moments. In my mind, I saw her image of re-creation, but for the first time, I preferred her the way she was. I thought about her dreams--that perhaps something good lingered in a place where she could not control what did or did not happen.

When the craving came upon me, it was like erratic disgust. My insides thwarted themselves and manipulated my shape into cunning devils of starvation. The vision I held of the woman began to haunt me and seduce me into the process of my art. I strained to prolong my control and with-hold the stranger evolving within me, but my rule quickly began to fade. I backed away from the woman, making a last attempt to avoid the purpose burned into my existence, and crashed through the window beside me, throwing myself from the building.

On the ground below, I convulsed and throbbed. The image of the woman I was to create flared explosively in my head and I was instantly upon my feet in an irrepressible hunt; my senses and physical control were in thrall to the monster of my secondary nature.

Because of the plummet from the building, my instincts had been disoriented and my carnal side had become confused. I ran through dark streets with insane haste and intention, looking for a subject for my art without the heed of specificity.

I came to a marketplace and found a man closing down his shop. Before the man had even the chance to fully see me, I assaulted him and began to transform him using the picture of the woman in my mind. The matter between my hands felt wrong. The texture of the man's mind and flesh cut me as I worked and I could not complete him; I could not make him anew--smooth and redeemed like the image I set out to form. When I had done all I could do, I was unable to consume him.

With my enraptured self having been unable to accomplish its goal, my consciousness flooded back and regained me just as I was placing my hands upon the deformed man's mouth that yelled out in raspy gasps. I was stunned and alarmed and became lost in confusion. Before long, the muffles of the man ceased and I removed my hands from his mouth. He no longer moved.

Stars twinkled brightly in the abyss above me. Their glittering was resilient and I wondered from whence they came. I looked at them for a time, but when my curiosity tired, I returned to the woman on the bed.

###

# The Missing Come Home

  awoke to the severe beating of my heart, which drove throbbing percussions through my temples. Beneath me, a sick, cold sweat lined the sheets. My hands were trembling and my throat was raw. I quickly rose from the bed in disgust and discomfort and stood as if departing a putrid nest where I was the toy of playful and malicious ghosts.

It was still nighttime. Through the window, light beamed heavily from the deeply glowing moon hanging low on the horizon. The moon cast shadows all about the room, which hung and sulked definably, forming characters in shape and personality that spoke out to me in the language of darkness.

Something did not sit right within me; in that moment, everything felt twisted and impure. Thoughts trailed in my mind that I could not quite grasp, leaving strange and potent emotional residues that lingered thickly and deeply. Like fog, they shrouded my mind and left me weary.

Feeling disgusting, I went to the bathroom and turned on the water in the shower, allowing it to heat before stepping in. Once inside, I let the water refresh and renew my being. The water felt safe; it calmed my resonating dissonance and brought me back to the equilibrium of my usual self. As I regained myself, I knew that I needed to check on Sofia. I needed to peer into her crib and see her soundly sucking on her tiny thumb. I needed to touch her fragile skin and kiss her soft head.

I toweled off hastily and put on sweats and a shirt. When I was on my way to Sofia's crib, I felt relieved to be just steps away from looking at the beauty of my life. The expectancy of happiness crawled upon my nerves.

I looked over the rails of her crib and saw that she was not there. She could crawl, but she definitely could not climb; I searched throughout the room anyway, but she was nowhere. I ran back to my bedroom, thinking that my wife had arisen during my shower and had taken Sofia. But she was asleep on the right side of the bed, like every night. Dismally and violently, I shook her, arousing her as fast as I could.

"Sofia is gone," I yelled. "She is gone, I can't find her! Where is she? Where is she?"

"Why are you doing this?" Monica screamed when she awoke, tears instantly scorching her face. "Why?... She is gone! You know she is gone!"

Memories erupted within me and began their torment.

_It was a summer day, heat raining down. Kids were playing in a nearby park. Sofia was in the stroller and I was pushing it. Monica was walking next to me. I took a drink from a bottle of water and passed it to Monica. We set up a picnic under the shade of a big oak tree. I laid out the blanket and Monica got out the food. Sofia was crawling about, laughing as always. I picked her up and twirled her around. She kicked her legs in excitement. We ate egg salad sandwiches and drank lemonade._

_Monica and I heard a weird clasp of high intensity and pitch ring out through the air. We looked towards the sound. A man with a strange hat and dozens of balloons stood on the grass in a clearing. Sunshine lit his face. He was popping balloons, over and over --one balloon, two balloons, three balloons. Monica and I stood and walked a bit closer to get a better look._

_When I turned back to check on Sofia, she wasn 't there. We looked everywhere for her, but she was gone._

I stopped shaking Monica and collapsed at her side, bursting into tears.

"I can't think clearly anymore, Monica," I cried. "I just can't get myself to believe that she isn't here. I keep thinking she will be there when I look in her room. I miss her so much."

Sofia's smile was like honey, smooth, rich, and sticky. It felt like she stole a piece of my heart every time she showed those precious, uneven teeth. And almost anything made her laugh _--_ a funny face, a loud noise, even a whisper. I adored my little girl, from her toes to the very ends of her hair.

She had a quirky way about her for as long as I knew her, from the foods she liked to those things _--_ those few things _--_ that caused her to cry. Monica and I were both far different than her and perhaps that was one of the reasons why I was so absolutely attached to her. I was in awe of every little thing she did,--what she was curious about, what she liked to play with, what music made her sleep.

When she was born, I learned many things about myself that I had never known. I learned that I was capable of sacrifice, and I learned that I could love, passionately and overwhelmingly. I came to understand that goodness was the wellspring of selflessness _--_ that giving of oneself was the most meaningful act one could perform.

In that year that Sofia shined in my life, I felt bound in meaning and happiness. I got behind in my work, I fell out of shape, but I lived for my daughter. It appeared as if I cared for nothing but her. I gave her my time and when I did, I gave it completely. I had never known a joy so fulfilling and tremendous.

When Sofia disappeared, my heart shattered and it never recovered. A grave opened and swallowed my soul while my body continued living. Over and over again I pounded myself with guilty thoughts and regrets:

_There was nowhere she could have gone; there was no one who could have snatched her without being seen. If only we hadn 't looked away from her, she would have still been within our sight. If I had just held her close to my body, she wouldn't have disappeared--she couldn't have just disappeared from within my arms._

After she disappeared, Monica and I left Sofia's room the way it was. We could not bear touching those things that only reminded us of her. So instead, we closed the door and decided never to enter. For seven years, the door remained closed.

I awoke again in the middle of the night. Unlike those nights of bad dreams, this time a sound awakened me. Somewhere within the house, there was giggling. Without pattern, it would come and go suddenly, softly and then loudly, and then there would be nothing. I listened intently while still sitting in bed.

Eventually, I slid to my feet.

"Hello," I called in a loud whisper out into the vacant spaces of my home. The giggling continued. "Hello," I called again, but still no reply.

Not wanting to search a dark house, I flipped on all of the light switches within my vicinity. Light filled the bedroom and bounced down the hall. There was nothing to be seen or heard except the closed door of Sofia's room, and the giggle that again sounded from behind it.

My heart sank. I did not want to look behind that door in the middle of the day _--_ in the middle of my bravest moment _--_ let alone in the middle of the night when the sound of a child hauntingly sprang from the other side. It had been seven years since that door had been opened.

I began walking cautiously down the hall towards the door. The giggle came to life again, but this time it was stifled, followed by a soft shushing and a whisper that I could not make out.

After I heard that, I felt like being a hero no more. I returned to the bedroom and woke up Monica; I was too frightened to continue alone.

"Monica," I pleaded while rubbing her shoulder with a trembling hand, "there's giggling and whispering coming from Sofia's room and I can't get myself to go in alone. You need to come with me _--_ just stand behind me."

Monica consented, but was not keen on my behavior until she heard the giggle. When she did, she too became terrified at the thought of opening the door. "I don't think we should," she said.

"But it sounds like it's only a child," I replied. "Come on."

We tiptoed up to the door. When we reached it, the giggling continued, but grew very quiet. There were attempts at restraining the sound by whoever was making it, and so the laughter was forced through the nose instead of the mouth.

"I'm going to open it," I said to Monica. "I'm going to swing the door open all the way and hit the lights right away, okay? Ready?"

"No."

"One, two" _ --_I took a deep breath _--_ "three."

I opened the door and hit the lights, letting the white illuminate that which so desperately wanted us to see it.

In the room's light was Sofia, naked and as a nine-year-old child, sitting next to her crib. She smiled horribly in a way absent of intelligence and erupted into joyful laughter, displaying yellow teeth that matched her overgrown nails. Her movements were awkward and uncoordinated and there seemed to be almost no muscle upon her.

Next to Sofia stood two little demon-like beasts. Their eyes were white, their skin was pale and pink, and their mouths curled in glee. They wore garments of black silk, but holes and tears riddled the fabric. The instant I opened the door, they began jumping up and down and clapping, cheering perpetually with a grotesque clicking.

Monica screamed and I could not move.

Sofia held her arms out to us, but still I could not approach her.

At the horror of the sight, I closed the door, slamming it shut on the infernal scene. The excitement on the other side of the door instantly reversed. Sofia began to yell and cry and the Pale Beasts in Black leapt at the door in anger. Strange noises emanated from their mouths _--_ noises like those popping balloons so many years ago.

"Monica," I yelled, "I need you to get me the fireplace poker in our bedroom. Hurry!"

Monica hesitated for a moment and then dashed down the hall. She was back within seconds and handed me the tool.

"What are you going to do?" she asked in a panicked voice.

"I don't know."

The popping noises continued along with the battle over the door.

"I think we should figure out a way to keep the door closed," I said after some brief moments of thought. "Do we have any rope?"

"That's our girl," Monica said absentmindedly. Her mind wandered and an outlandish logic took reign over her. "It's her. We should go to her."

"What about those things?" I lashed back. In that moment, there was nothing I could remember about the Sofia I once knew as a baby. Only the savage, older Sofia with her dreadful smile plagued my mind, and I did not want see that face again.

Suddenly, the popping stopped and the creatures' thumping on the door ceased. The sudden absence accentuated Monica's and my rapid breathing, and Sofia's endless crying.

"Open the door," Monica screamed. "Open it now! She needs us!"

"I can't," I stammered.

Monica ran to the door and pushed me aside. I could barely resist her.

The door once again flung open, this time under Monica's hand, and I watched as she ran into the bedroom to Sofia. She got on her knees and scooped up our daughter, hugging her in close. Sofia began mimicking the popping sounds her guardians made, attempting to communicate or express herself in those ways she knew.

I looked frantically around the room for the devilish Pale Beasts in Black, but they were not there. No doubt employing the same art used for their appearance, the creatures had disappeared _--_ though I held the poker no less tightly. I stood in the doorway and watched mother and daughter renew that intimate, profound connection. I, however, could not move myself to greet my daughter. The baby girl I had once adored, I now loathed.

Until I took a step into Sofia's bedroom, the Pale Beasts remained absent, but as soon as I stepped within that domain, the things returned. One appeared next to me and one appeared next to Monica. They grabbed hold of us and then departed our realm, taking us with them.

Where we went could not be so easily described by words. There was no thing or object of any familiarity. There were no colors. Below our feet, nothing substantial ever manifested. And even when a destination seemed to be reached, there was no stopping the petulant feeling of transcendently moving on and on into a nightmare that could never fully be attained.

During and after the teleportation, Sofia was moving around Monica and I with a fluidity I could not understand. If anything could be considered dancing in the place we arrived, then that was what she did. She twirled, traversed, and shook horribly in delight. The Pale Beasts in Black joined her and hummed tragic melodies.

Within my hand, I still held the fireplace poker, and as I looked down upon it, its form and rigidity appeared true. I then stared at my daughter who pranced sadistically about a world that reeked of repugnant and evil spirits. I could endure the obscenities no longer. When Sofia came within my reach, I plunged the tip of my weapon deep into her skull while Monica and the horrible Pale Beasts looked on. Sofia's eyes welled with fluid and I saw my little girl once more before she crumpled into the immateriality of the cold dimension.

###

# The Captive Inside

 here were certain shops that had no captivating effects outside of a planned visit, and then there were certain shops that brutally tortured if their magical space was _not_ investigated. Alluring displays, unorthodox merchandise, and toys--these were some of the things that made me curious, but the latter, the toys--those trinkets of a deep imagining mind--exerted the greatest pull on me. I had my dates with ordinary toyshops, but it was the hole-in-the-wall, washed-out places that really got my heart yearning. I wondered how they even existed. They were the shops of the strange and unique; the ones that sold old card decks, antique dolls, foreign games, and much, much more. Things that did not even have the right to be made were somehow resting on the shelves of these hidden and cavernous places.

I was not much of a collector; the mere and occasional trifling with these objects was enough to satisfy my taste. I touched them and played with them, though I rarely purchased them. There were a number of shops that I frequented, but I was always on the lookout for somewhere new.

There was one particular shop that gave me much more than satisfaction, something much greater, but also much worse. The shop's name was Timeless Fortunes, and its entrance rested in the shadows of a hall, tucked away between two much larger stores on either side. The name, Timeless Fortunes, was labeled on the door, but nowhere else could it be found--not outside or inside the place. The door chimed when opened and rattled as it closed. From the door, the hall burrowed into the building, its walls lined with old, worn posters. Each poster was of a toy or contraption no one would have ever known about: bulbous laser guns; masks in the likeness of mice and rats; build-your-own fire block kits; centipede growth inducers; headache relief halos; Corpse: The Game of Fancy Graves; and human body part sculptor sets--to name a few. At the end of the hall was a short flight of stairs--this led into the shop.

The inside of Timeless Fortunes was an image worth a million words. There were things everywhere, and they encroached upon the sanctity of navigation. The ground was a bloodbath of those items that had grown unworthy of the shelves and even the shelves, as they ascended to the ceiling, harnessed around them an aura of greater importance and attraction. It seemed as though every toy that had ever been placed still remained somewhere in the shop. Small light bulbs dangled from the ceiling every few steps, their light the only of its kind in the windowless mass.

This was the only toyshop ever that I visited just one time.

After looking around Timeless Treasures for a few moments, I was startled by a man who had somehow snuck up behind me. He was dark-skinned, short, and wore an off-colored suit. A white mustache draped slightly around the sides of his mouth. He introduced himself as the owner of the shop and offered to give me a tour, in full, of the different accessories and products he had so passionately obtained. I graciously accepted his offer.

The peculiar man, whose name I never learned, led me intricately around the shop, down each aisle and through each shelf--even those toys upon the ground held tales of which the man decided to share. My interest in it all never wavered and, in seeing that, the man grew delighted and divulged even more details in the latter stories of his tour narration. By the end of it, my mind was exhausted, but my interests had thoroughly been pleased.

When I told the man that I had to leave, he showed no sign of irritation with my failure to buy anything. Instead, he told me to remain one more moment and then disappeared into a back room. When he reappeared, there was something in his hands.

He handed me a brown cardboard box.

"This is a puzzle," he said, "though it contains no guiding image on its box to aid with its completion. I have heard some different names for it, but the one I find the best suited is The Captive. I want you to have it."

"How much does it cost?" I asked.

"You do not have to worry about that. Today, it is free. There is only one requirement I ask of you when putting it together." The man produced a puzzle piece from his pocket not included in the box. "This must be the final piece placed. That is all. It is yours to take."

"Thank you," I said.

"Go now," the man said. "I will be closing."

That evening, I cleared off my kitchen table and began the difficult task of putting the puzzle together. When I opened the lid of the box, I was shocked to see about 2,500 pieces, which were dominated by intensely dark colors. Only the hues of dark purples, browns, and oranges subdued the chaotic, charcoal pieces of black and the wisps of smoke that laced them.

To begin my endeavor, I segregated all of the pieces according to their type and color; I grouped the edge pieces, the purple pieces, the brown pieces, and the orange pieces, leaving the black pieces as the largest mass. In doing this, I quickly realized I would need more than my kitchen table and so set up the card table I had stored away in the closet. Once the pieces were divided by color, I then furthered the organization by placing them in rows of type. Some pieces had all inward connectors, some had three inward connectors and one outward connector, some had two inward connectors and two outward connectors, some had one in-ward connector and three outward connectors, and some had four outward connectors--I grouped these accordingly within their color base.

Through the night I worked, completing the border of the puzzle, but not much more. It was indeed going to be a very difficult undertaking to finish. In only seeing the pieces as disconnected, individual entities, I had not even the faintest idea what the image awaiting completion could be.

Following the intensity of that first night, I continued to work on the puzzle in my moments of time throughout the subsequent days. When night would once again return, I would work until my eyes could no longer see the details of the pieces. And even then, I would continue to make them fit by trial and error, trying each piece of a certain color and type until it snugly connected, joining to those around it in absolute companionship. The image was slowly coming together, but the progress was undeniably trying.

The closer the puzzle grew to completion, the more anxious I became about finishing it. Though I still could not tell what image awaited, I began to see things in those parts I had connected. I imagined the purple and orange to be a part of a fading sky, dancing off into the unknown horizon. In its substance, I picked out faces of lost souls, and discerning their misery, I felt uncontrollably compelled to complete their surroundings so that they could run free in the artistry of the image. I also had the urge to touch them--each of them--with my finger. I would lightly place the tip of my finger upon those faces I saw as if to mark and account them and let them know they were seen.

After several weeks, the puzzle was nearing completion. Most of those pieces making up my fading sky had been put together, and by that time I had found hundreds of faces within it. The largest holes were those sections that consisted of the black pieces. Not only did their numbers daunt me, but they held no appeal like the pieces that created the sky. Yet, however dreary they were, I continued to find homes for them.

On the fourth week after I received the puzzle, only the last piece remained to be placed. What I saw was extra-ordinary: I saw a portal of worlds where the living joined the dead. I saw a crossroads of want, fate, and eternity. I saw a swirling accumulation of distraught souls, hounding and fighting each other to reach the front of a line that did not exist. I saw entities of authority, herding and striking, forcing order into a pandemonium unending. It was a look into the afterlife of someone's worst nightmares. The fact that I had formed this obscenity made me want to trash the puzzle even before the completing piece could be set, but I restrained myself.

Before placing the final piece, I tried to understand why it had to be last and what difference it would make in the image by it being so. Its size was a bit larger than the rest of the pieces and the colors upon it were slightly different; there was some gold and green that was outlandish against the charcoal black that filled the rest of the puzzle. _If anything_ , I remember thinking, _the piece will not even blend correctly with the rest of the image_.

Nonetheless, I placed the final piece and completed the puzzle.

What I had previously seen in the image vanished. Those things I had before identified and associated with so successfully were no more. Upon the placement of the final piece, the whole image changed, leaving nothing recognizable of what was once there.

From within the pit of my stomach, a terror unleashed itself as I gazed down upon the most disturbing thing I had ever laid my eyes upon. The completed puzzle showed the inside of my own soul. How that final piece contained a part of me, I could not understand. And how I recognized it as myself, I also could not fathom. But the act in itself of staring at the most vulnerable and intimate aspect of myself troubled me beyond the safety of death.

And that was not all there was in the finished picture.

Encircling my soul within this image was a grotesque creature of vapor-like form. In the most sinister pose imaginable, this creature violated my soul. And as I saw it in the puzzle, I then felt it within myself, writhing in hideous contentment.

Though I instantly overturned the table, the image imprinted

itself indelibly upon the fabric of my tainted memories. I could not remove it from my sight and I could not remove the feelings from within me. I wanted to tear at my body and claw out that which was ethereal. I wanted to escape the hellish parasite inside me, but that was no longer my choice.

I looked into my soul through a portal I should never have found, and saw what I should never have seen. My future did not rest in my own hands; I was "The Captive."

###

# Bringing Back the Unordinary

 he Movie Man found me at an awards banquet. It was for my swim team, and it was the last place I expected to meet someone who would change my life. When he greeted me, all of the awards and speeches had been given, and things had just begun to wind down. Loose conversations were forming around the dining room and some people were already making their way out of the country club. I had been caught in an in-between moment of solitude, casually meandering through the clusters of bodies, trying to look intent so as to imbue my waywardness with purpose.

Of course, when the Movie Man first spoke, I did not notice, but by the third time he said my name, I had located him and noticed his desire for my attention. He sat at a table with his chair edged out. A group of people swelled to the side of him, talking and laughing very loudly. I had never seen him at any of my team's swim meets or at any other team function. A large brown beard covered his face and though he was dressed up, he looked untidy.

He stuck out his hand and I shook it.

"Mr. Masselton," he said, "so glad to meet you. I am privileged to have caught your attention. I have an opportunity you might be interested in. Throughout the course of the next few months, I will be traveling to different oceans around the world to shoot some scenes for a movie that is currently in production. For these scenes, I will need someone of your swimming ability. You will be paid handsomely and you will not have to worry about any expenses, whether travel or trivial."

I was about to interrupt him, but he stopped me.

"Please do not answer me now. Just think about it and then if you would like to join me, you can call me, but I must know your answer by the end of the month." He handed me a worn business card that he pulled from an even more worn wallet. "Goodnight, Mr. Masselton, and congratulations on the great year."

While I walked away from the Movie Man, I glanced down at the card he gave me.

Upon it was written:

##  VISIONARY OF THE UNORDINARY

On the back was a handwritten phone number. Other than those two items, it was empty; there was not even a name. I thought about throwing out the card then and there, but I restrained myself.

It was two weeks before I called the number upon the Movie Man's card--just before the end of the month. The thought of calling the number had not even crossed my mind until then--until I realized that I wanted no part of the proverbial cage that awaited everyone who dreamed after the already attained. I wanted no chains or obligations--to money or any other visible or invisible entity; I wanted sweet, concrete freedom--the kind I could only visualize myself acquiring if I went venturing around the world. To leave it all behind, I had to call the number, and so I did.

I met up with the Movie Man a couple days after I made the call. He waited for me at a local park in the back of a black car with tinted windows. A chauffeur sat comfortably at the helm. As I approached the car, the back window rolled down and the voice of the Movie Man met me:

"Mr. Masselton, so good to see you! Please join me inside. The chauffeur will take your luggage."

Not but a few hours after I entered the car, we pulled up in front of a large house. It rested on a road directly at the top of a steep gradient that sloped down to the ocean. The waves crashed emphatically against the shore. And that, mixed with the pale light of the day's end, imbued me with a euphoric attention to detail. I observed a subtle breeze manipulating, ever so minutely, the wild grass that lined the terrain, and I noticed flies fluttering to and fro in the opaque and surreal air that seemed to exist as something seductively tangible. Even the opening and closing of the car doors sounded crisp, echoes lingering faintly after our exit.

"Stay here," the Movie Man said. "This shouldn't take long."

I watched as he made his way cautiously up the entrance path of the house and entered without even needing to knock. In one of the ground-level windows, I briefly caught sight of the figure of a man glancing upon me, but he quickly disappeared as the Movie Man went inside.

Soon after, there were many strange sounds: slamming of doors, yelling, laughing. And then, after a brief silence, a man dressed entirely in black with three long spikes attached in decoration to his shoulder-length hair barged out the door--without pause--in a sprint towards the car and myself. I stood in terror as the man in his wild strangeness crashed into the side of the car, ramming his fist fiercely through the driver's side window, catching the chauffeur's throat before pulling his arm back out and the chauffeur's head along with it. The driver's head slid silently into the shards of glass that rigidly rose to greet it.

I could not bear to continue watching and began running down the incline to the shore. The Adrenaline Man ran after me as if he were a machine. I could sense him gaining on me; the gap that closed was a distinct timeline of death. It was only seconds before he harshly tackled me and we tumbled horribly down the rest of the hill. His arms clenched my body, dispassionately hugging the breath out of me. Even as his head and torso plunged against rocks his composure remained unbroken.

Only by the grace of our landing at the bottom of the incline did I have the opportunity to escape. When the gradient was abruptly halted by flat ground, and we rolled into it, the force and direction with which the Adrenaline Man's arm hit the surface caused it to break severely. There were no signs of pain from him, but there was a great reduction in the strength pinning me down. Seizing this chance, I managed to writhe myself free. And then I did all I could: I ran into the water and swam as hard and as far away from the shore as possible, utilizing that one talent even the machine of a man could not match.

I swam a great distance from land and--once I was what I considered to be a safe distance from it--stopped. I let my limbs go limp and my breathing calm. I let the water hold me as I floated deep into the night.

At that time when the sun should have risen to signify the morning of a new day, my entire perspective of reality reversed, savagely. Rather than the sun rising from the east, it came from where it had just left--the west. Twilight once again took control of the air, sending its warm glow across the scope of the seen as the sun rose backwards from beyond the ocean horizon. It was a radical and intoxicating moment. My senses heightened and time slowed. The water I was in felt new, as if brought that very instant into existence. The air felt clean and invigorating with each breath I took.

I did not know what to think or how to react. I doubted that anyone other than myself had ever witnessed such an act of miraculous and horrible power. Awe quelled my thoughts and silenced my soul.

When the initial wonderment had passed, I began to swim back to the shore--the principles that held me to the ocean's waters were no longer pertinent. Though I had spent the evening floating out at sea, a hidden energy flowed through each of my strokes. I moved smoothly and swiftly against the forces of the water, making my way to the sand without significant physical exertion.

The sand felt exhilarating beneath my fingers. I grabbed hold of it just for the sake of being able to, and then let it wash away out of my hands as I put them under the surface of the water. The wet clothes I wore should have been a burden, but they were not; I barely even noticed I had them on. My shoes joyfully squeaked with their saturation of sea. For a time, I gazed at the glistening shore, each granule of sand reflecting the strange sun's surreal rays.

Perhaps it was the disillusionment of my stupor, but I only noticed the lady hanging upside-down from her legs several moments later. She hung from a swing set farther up the beach, her legs tied with rope. Her hair was pitch black and her skin was fair, even more so as it shimmered in the glow of twilight. Her shirt was pulled down by gravity, revealing much of her stomach, and shorts covered a small portion of her legs.

When I did detect her, she was very well conscious of it and staring at me.

"How did you get there?" I asked.

"I told them they could do it, so it's actually my own fault," the Hanging Lady replied. "I didn't realize I wouldn't be able to get out of it!"

"Who's 'they'?"

The lady made a peculiar face in reply to my question. "Oh, my friends," she said. "They have a lot of fun doing things like this."

I walked up to the Hanging Lady and let her down by climbing up on one of the swings.

"Thank you," she said after she half-fell, half-landed on the ground.

"You're welcome. Have you ever seen the sun do this before?" I asked.

"Do what?"

"Rise backwards the way it came."

"No--that's a strange question. Why were you swimming with your clothes on?"

"Huh? Oh, it's kind of a long story," I said.

The Hanging Lady noticed my reluctance to answer the question and changed the subject. "Why don't you come home with me? I'll introduce you to my friends."

"Okay," I replied.

Something about the Hanging Lady was very alluring, even beyond her beauty. She was playful and very childlike in her mannerisms. She quickly became a constant for me in the midst of the peculiar course of events.

"Come on then!" she proclaimed, grabbing my hand. Her touch tingled my nerves and brought goosebumps to my flesh.

We walked for about ten minutes before coming upon a large house. It took me but a split second to recognize it--it was the same house that I had run from. However, there were many things different about it. For one, a chain link fence now stretched around it. Another difference was the lawn that covered a large area in front of it. There was also a kind of party or gathering on the lawn. A couple of dozen young people were enjoying each other's company and drinking from blue cups.

"Are those your friends?" I asked the Hanging Lady, gesturing to the party.

"No, no, definitely not; they'll be coming soon though."

As we walked alongside the fence surrounding the house, something terrifying came into view. Lying in a uniform line that stretched across the expanse of a small, dirt hill to the side of the house was a horde of dead male lions. They were laid upon their sides, legs extended neatly below them and jaws pried open. Some were further rotted than others, and flies swarmed in frenzied orgasmic glee about them. I could not count them all, but they instilled a raw, gripping fear.

"Why are all of those there?" I sputtered to the Hanging Lady.

"As art of course," she replied.

Nothing but questions--that was all I had. I was in a place I did not even come close to understanding. The landscape was the same, but the sun and everything else was so much different. I did not want to go any further and I wondered if the Adrenaline Man would rush from the front door of the house towards me, but the Hanging Lady beside me caused me not to leave; so instead, I moved forward.

"Here we are," she said as we stopped before a portion of the fence not far from the front of the house. I blinked not one time and then the Hanging Lady had moved to the other side of the fence by no discernible means, and was walking towards the house without me. The instant she left, I became horrified and desperately vulnerable. My control over emotion and will turned unruly like the twisted reality I had entered. I could not even muster my voice to shout to her to wait for me. What I did do, out of new instinct, was climb the fence, as if safety awaited me there. I sat at the top, unable to move. The fence stretched approximately ten feet into the air.

As I perched up there, numerous small zebra-like beasts began walking out from around the house. They walked towards the party of people and soon walked amongst them. The people in the party did not even give them notice, as if they did not know they were there.

Each of the zebra-like beasts had four legs and was roughly the size of a child. Their breathing and sounds were very humanlike. Once they were within the crowd of people on the lawn, they actually began to speak. Each of them spoke, in a chaos of different times and cadences, these words: "Can only bite once." Some said it once and some said it repeatedly. "Can only bite once." Amidst this chant of unnerving words, the zebra-like things began to bite the people--one bite per person from each of the beasts. They moved slowly in a drudging rotation, missing not one person with their bites. The people began to bleed severely, their clothes becoming animated by flowing crimson, and they eventually fainted before most assuredly dying.

I turned away from the disgusting scene and glimpsed the man I had previously seen in the window of the house there once again. The window was open and he was talking to the Hanging Lady through it. I somehow caught a fragment of what they said.

"You must be careful," I heard the man say.

And I heard the Hanging Lady reply, "I aligned our auras, and they match."

The next thing I knew, the Hanging Lady was at my feet, shaking the fence.

"Come on, get down from there," she said. "Come on. Can only bite once."

I held on to those links with all of the strength I had, pressing the metal deep into my skin.

On the ground beside the Hanging Lady, the zebra-like beasts gathered, speaking their dull words: "Can only bite once. Can only bite once."

"Come on down," again spoke the Hanging Lady. "Come see my friends. Can only bite once."

I closed my eyes tightly to escape the terror I felt, even if only by the tiniest amount...

...And when I opened my eyes again, I was being pulled out of the ocean onto a boat. I was gasping for air and my skin burned.

"Anyone else would have drowned." It was the voice of the Movie Man. "He was the perfect choice."

"Yes, it could not have gone any smoother," replied the voice of the man from behind the house window.

"We must hurry now and move forward with the surgery."

"Yes, call up the doctor--the skin needs to be mended immediately."

"She bit pretty hard."

"They all bit pretty hard; they had to--they can only bite once and it's a long journey."

"When will we tell him what happened?"

"We won't have to. She will tell him."

###

# Time into Death

 ne drop, three drops, twenty drops--then it was steady. The glass window facing the driveway fogged under my breathing as I watched the rain descend upon the glum spread of concrete and blood. My skin tingled as intense emotion shot through my body, invigorating my keenness in the surreal moment.

The blood on the ground never fully diluted. Fresh crimson constantly flowed from the gaping and fatal wound in my brother, who lay outstretched upon the subtle gray of the pavement. Without restriction, it streamed from his neck, melding harshly with the rain. His breathing had surely stopped.

Once the perverse indulgence had sufficed, I stared diligently at the blood coming from my brother's neck. I stared until its motion slowed, stopped, and then reversed course. The rain began to ascend, coming off its place on the ground and shooting back up to the heavens. I walked slowly backwards, conscious of myself. I let the front door open on its own in perfect timing as I stepped backwards though it out into the moist air. I crouched next to my brother and picked up the ax lying adjacent to him. I waited until he rose from the ground clutching the side of his neck. Then, when his hands released from their sickening desperation, I reenacted in reverse that action which sent him to the ground. My brother's wound vanished. I ran backwards to the garage and restored the ax to its place, then returned to my brother, allowing myself to alter the future that I had just experienced.

"I'm going inside," I told my brother. "It's going to rain."

"You're just jealous that Mom and Dad are taking me to the show and not you," he retorted.

I ignored him this time and went inside, then watched him continue to shoot the basketball on the driveway until the rain began to fall. I could see him grunt, but he continued to play in spite of the rain. I recalled the very real, but alternate future, smiled, and then turned from the window and disappeared into the house.

Turning back time was both staggering and tragic, and it had been my gift to harness since I was ten years old--my brother was a frequent subject of my earliest experiences--but it was limited. I had the ability to sculpt futures, but I could never keep them. I had the ability to explore the various and innumerable variations of choice, but I could never follow one to its destination. If I embarked on any future of which I knew the outcome beyond the scope of natural events, then it had to be erased--if it was not, in either one moment or the next, whether purposefully or unintentionally, time would reverse. There was no keeping what I knew could be controlled. To continue in life, I had to make choices of which the outcome was unknown; I had to make choices that held no power over the future.

If I were alone as the crucible of time travel, then I would have had no opposition in creating those futures I desired. I would have been able to masterfully mold that world which would have destined utopia. I would have been able to live the most euphoric desires of mankind's existence. But that was not the case, and so I was not alone--this jarring truth was the culprit that immured me in revealing the rule of the manipulation of time: the direction of time may only hold one path. Thus, if two individuals of time-exploiting abilities worked to form two different futures, the planar dimension of life would have to split. But this was not possible; time was linear and could be no such thing other than that. Therefore, time, as an entity of sequential and substantial might, prohibited such ploys of manipulators by enforcing the perplexing chaos of improbability, causing myself and those like me to make choices of pure insignificance--choices that had no foreseeable control over the future--so that time could move forward.

I could see the results of actions in infinite form, but I could never make history based upon them. If I bought my mother a gift that I already knew would make her happy, time would reverse. If I picked those answers on a test that I already knew were the right answers, time would reverse. If I intentionally saved someone from a fire or earthquake I knew would cause fatality, time would reverse. I could not control my life, and therefore, even with my miraculous ability, I could not control even the slightest event. The life that was my own--the life that moved forward--did so through a complete and utter compilation of normalcy--the regular, unbiased existence of living in hope and mystery.

It quickly became clear to me that if I were to utilize my gift to its fullest capacity, I would have to eliminate all of the others who held the talent. However, the process of finding such people would have been excruciating, and I had not even the faintest idea of how many existed. For all I knew, half the world had the ability. There was no way to know since both history and future could never be affected.

For me, the manipulation of time was a game--a plea-sure and a curse--a dynamic abundance of violence and experimentation that became nothing but a memory of entertainment or intellect. And that was the real power of it. Every iota of knowledge I gained through the alteration of time remained within my mind. In accumulation, my mind had experienced the time of someone over fifty years old by only the age of fifteen. Yet, ironically, the more I learned, the fewer opportunities I had to live forward on the jumbled timeline of my continuation. With that information, my thoughts and decisions were influenced.

By the age of twenty, my knowledge was so vast that there were virtually no paths that led beyond the grip of time's ferocious eyes. Every action I made was a manipulation of my familiarity with the future, and so no longer could I live peacefully outside the bounds of alternate realities. My life had reached a dreadful dead end.

There was only one unknown country left to explore, and that was the land of the dead. Using my ability, I decided to enter that world and return from it, bringing with me the knowledge of the beyond.

To carry out the task, I pitched myself from atop a bridge one warm and sunny afternoon. Everything I had done in my cursed life had led me to this unrighteous moment. I was nervous, but I was not afraid; I was actually eager to throw my life into possibility.

And so I fell, and the impact ended my life.

The darkness came quickly without purpose or retribution; with blind perfection it suffocated every last glimpse of light. Where once I was whole and complex, I became vulgar and plain. I did not remember having a thought when the transition took place, nor did I remember any manifestation of sensation or feeling, but when I arose into the cosmos of the beyond, the picture of the demented dreamscape enthralled me.

With the darkness came new sight--a sight which I reluctantly relinquished to the enlightenment of words. This sense of vision was nothing like a projection made by retina and pupil; it was a gift of divine repulsion, the provisional praxis of becoming new. Relatively, in its most comparable description, it was like being in the bowels of the deepest and blackest abyss with a moon as an eye.

Profound nightmares and horrors swirled within my first glimpse of the nether world: the life beyond, the dark throne. On an altar masked with silk, the master of the domain loomed before me, crouching, its subjects scurrying along the crypt-like grounds below in hateful glee. The slant of its nefarious head showed its remarkable intellect while the oscillating flesh upon its frame peaked far from anything holy. It was both smooth and rough, and beautiful and repulsive--it could not be conceived within the limits of a single definition of appearance. Only the imagination of absurd and almighty necromancy could have conjured such supremacy of grotesqueness.

It beckoned me forth with a rigid power of temptation. As lightning to a rod, I lunged for the being, latching my incorporeal essence to its thick propaganda of incarnate filth. For a time, I gyred around it in an oblivion of passionate ecstasy, not even able to control my tendencies and urges; the archfiend controlled me--my thoughts and my desires.

The most disturbing aspect of this demonic dance was the one thought beating with my archaic pulse. This thought--this whisper of lulling sanity breezing through my being--went so: _This is not where I am supposed to be_. Over and over again it played like a music box to my invisible ears: _This is not where I am supposed to be ... this is not where I am supposed to be_... Never did that song cease while I writhed within the arms of evil's spawn, and never did time reverse--it could not in a place were time had no reign.

###

# The Science of Faith

 n the softest of days, when the splinters of time bowed to uncanny sounds, I heard the ringing. It came from some region just closer than what could be called distant. As if drifting on a river of sustaining sound, the ringing floated to my ears, tickling them like the elegant stanzas of a poem. When I heard it, and focused upon it, it seemed to never end. It was not until it was drowned by the power of some other noise, or until I was distracted by some other task, that the ringing somehow vanished. Though I would lose its mysterious touch, it always came again.

What I heard was the ringing of a rotary dial telephone. In its essence, to me, that fact alone was strange. In a world of vast technological advancement, this ancient piece of equipment stood its ground, undaunted. But even more peculiarly, the phone was never answered. Its function was carried out--to ring, but no one responded. What vacant hole of distaste did the thing occupy? That was just what I desired to find out.

The apartment I dwelled within loitered in a back alley. On the other side of this alley were several rundown, low-trafficked businesses, many of which seemed to be indefinitely closed and left to the art of unkind hands. When I heard the ringing, it was from this vicinity that it originated.

Once I made my decision to find the source, I listened for many days--as time allowed--for the sweet ring of the phone. I stood at the foot of my bed, staring out into the city through the window above it. Daylight and moonlight beamed upon me, coating my flesh and clothing, and my innermost thoughts. I longed to seek out the origins of the ringing--to follow its signature to the hand of its estranged creator. But, it would not sound when I so longed for it to. It could not be sought; only in the unintentional randomness of the day-to-day would the ringing ever manifest.

The ringing did finally come again, and it did so in the middle of the night, piercing through the matter of unliving things, finding its way to my anxious, waiting ears. I sat straight up in bed when the refrain laced about me. Not a moment later I was dressed and ready to follow its allure.

As I made my way outside, I almost lost the clandestine melody, but I quickly scrambled to the alley and recovered its trail. While listening as intently as a child to the new sounds of its surroundings, I followed the ringing for several minutes, pinpointing its direction and seeking the best path to reach it.

Before long, I was at the back entrance of an abrasive, run-down flop joint called Moonshield Motel. There were about a dozen rooms, and no more. The walls of the building were damp and moldy and the planters surrounding the building held nothing but brown shreds. Two cars were parked at opposite ends of the parking lot. A small light illuminated the reception office, but other than that, everything was almost immaculately dark.

I walked to each room and placed my ear against the door, listening for the familiar ring to burn brighter from with-in one of them, but none harbored the proper intensity of sound. The ringing was not birthed from within the motel; rather, as I placed my head closer to the earth, I found that it came from below. I looked around, and sure enough, a covered manhole rested not far from where I stood, granting me the exercise of my whimsical desire.

After finding a tool to pry open the sewer entrance, I left the world above and danced into the realm below, frolicking foolishly after the ringing that harnessed the supremacy of mystery and harassed the strength of my curiosity.

My breathing shortened with each step I took down the irreverent rungs of the portal's ladder. I grew cold as the chill of the ladder's metal transferred through my hands and into my body, but before long, my feet splashed upon a lightly puddle-strewn floor. I was instantly shrouded in complete blackness.

I listened and the ringing was still there, louder than ever. _How_ , I thought to myself, _could this ringing have ever reached me_? It was profound to hear such a negligible sound from so great a distance.

I followed it down a couple of corridors and around a few bends while walking tightly against the wall, navigating with my hands. Then, before I knew it, I was upon the gentle machine that had beckoned me forth.

The telephone rested upon a short stool within a crevice cut into the wall. I was horrified at having to feel about blindly with my hands, but I had no other choice. From the device extended a phone line up into a hole in the ceiling. I imagined it went to the motel, but I could not orient in my mind the exact relationship between my position in the sewer to the motel above to know for sure.

On the next ring of the phone, I rashly picked up the receiver, as if it would not ever ring again. I placed the smooth plastic upon my ear and spoke desperately into it. All the while, my head radiated with nervous glee.

"Hello," I said.

There was a brief pause.

"Hello," a voice replied in a kaleidoscope of tones.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"The father of many, the brother of few."

"What is the purpose of this phone, and why are you calling it?"

"So someone would answer it," responded the voice.

"But why down here?"

"Because it's not easy to get to and it's not easy to escape. But please, fear not. You are not being trapped; it's for reasons much grander than tricks and games. All you need to do is dial those numbers that are dear to your heart."

"What?" I reacted in confusion.

"On the phone, dial those numbers that fill your memories and stain your thoughts."

"I don't get it."

"You don't need to--just do as I say."

"But I can't see."

"Count the holes on the dial."

After a couple moments, and with confused thoughts, I dialed a series of numbers that had clung to my life rather vigorously.

"Oh, good," the multifarious voice responded.

"What happened?"

"More than you ever knew could. What do you believe in more: what you hear or what you see?"

"What I see."

"Then see!"

As if the sewer were rigged with electricity, light suddenly extended everywhere. I saw the phone. I saw the stool. And

I saw standing next to me the shirtless man whose torso was slathered with tattoos of numbers. I started backwards, dropped the phone, and hit my head on the wall behind me.

"Find the numbers," he said.

"Which numbers?" I stuttered, terrified by the stranger's sudden appearance.

"Your numbers."

Row after row of tiny numbers consumed the man, forming a mass of millions of infinite sequences. They lined his arms, his chest, his shoulders, and even his face. I was too frightened to run.

"Find the numbers," the man repeated.

I looked over the man's body nervously for more than an hour before coming across a diagonal line of those numbers I had dialed into the phone.

"There," I said, pointing to each of the numbers in their correct order on the man's neck.

"Remember your place," he said.

The light vanished instantly after his words, and the phone never rang again.

###

# Normal Faces

 y sister and I happened upon the Variable of Existence by chance. It might have been the way we walk-ed in ghostly indifference under the setting sun's light, or perhaps it was the way we stared disjointedly across the endless horizon. Nevertheless, we arrived. Like a layer resting between all things, it rested in connection to all that was known, although it did not know it and nor did anything else in its realm. There were legends and cults in connection with such things, but they did not convey or understand the complexities of their childish assumptions. Full worlds were transparently placed upon one another, existing separately, yet silently interacting. One of those worlds was our own, and the other, the one we horribly wandered upon, was an incomprehensible place I called the Variable of Existence--the world where everything was the same as in our world except for the beings--both those beastly and those intellectual--that inhabited it and sinisterly endowed it with a spiritual, yet unholy attribution of grace. Maybe the Variable of Existence was meant to be there as part of an unfathomable balance, or a rudder for a wayward vessel, but once I laid my eyes upon it, it was to me naught but a mysterious infection, incurable and eternal.

A scattering of thousands of monsters dressed in frenzy waited upon me beneath the vast auburn tent pitched at the Variable of Existence. Their sizes differed and so did their hearts. They cried my name and sang my life. Amidst them were young and old, child, mother, and great father. All of them were anxious to hear my voice, but I was indifferent to them.

I hung from two cables attached to a harness strapped across my chest. Under this harness, I wore a gray trench coat atop a suit and tie. I was positioned high within the tent, far from any of the monsters' reach--a reach that would have joyously torn breath from me in uncontrollable excitement and curiosity. Above me, and around me, a prowling cloud of dark, unearthly musk masked the top and distant ends of the tent. However, from where I hung, I could easily see, and shudder at the sight of, the entity that was the mass of onlookers. I tried to steady my pulse and catch my breath, but I eventually had to make do with the little confidence I could afford.

"It seems everyone already knows my name," I unsteadily yelled into the fields of animated filth as the beginning of my introduction. The masses quieted. Each monster gentled its face and widened its eyes. "I don't know your ways or your culture," I continued, "but I hope you can accept me as a simple being--here and now--who will aid you in your quest for knowledge regarding the peculiar union our two worlds hold. I have had only some brief time to explore your land, so I will not understand many of the variances."

As I spoke, I gazed out upon the crowds and witnessed stupor blanket their faces. It was the first time they had ever seen someone like me. I could tell they wanted nothing less than to touch and feel me--my clothes, my skin, my hair, my insides.

"My world is similar to this," I spoke on. "There is sky, soil, plant, water, and flame. Unlike your world, however, there are millions of species of creatures that inhabit and dwell within mine. In yours, there is but you and your guardians, living in what seems to be a place that gains its essence from my own world, like a three-dimensional shadow cast in complete replication. We cannot see you in our world and you cannot see us from yours. Yet, as you stand, we stand, and as you fill space, so do we. This is where the relationship between us is created.

"You look much different than the descriptions in ancient texts addressing you," I said, "but you are most definitely what we call angels. You unknowingly aid us in our need and give us spirit to live in and live by. We cannot see you, but we sense that you are around. And now I know it is not your own wills that you perform, at least not for us. The benefits you give us are but side effects of your casual life that dazzle our beliefs. And here I am, dazzling yours!"

At that, some of the monsters jumped up towards me with strange attraction, longing to rip me down from where I hung. Their screams and yells once again returned, but with different tone and meaning. I cringed internally, but held my composure.

"I'm not exactly sure of what more I am supposed to say," I announced, "but to say the very least: there is much to learn of each other, and I am willing to make that commitment."

There were intelligent beings other than the monsters that inhabited the Variable of Existence. They were known as guardians. It was they that orchestrated my introduction to the world and the gathering at which I spoke. Each of these beings had a normal face, one I would have easily recognized in the rosy apparition of dusk. They had blue, brown, and even black eyes. They had eyebrows thick and thin. They had lips, ears, and hair that curled, fell straight, and fizzed upward. Their bodies, however, were the same as the innumerable denizens of the bizarre world, malformed and sharply rough; it was only their faces that separated them, as if they were a hybrid of two worlds and the bastard children of a conspiring magic.

When my sister and I arrived--before we were ever exposed to the citizens of the Variable of Existence, the monsters--the Normal Faces were there to meet us. They were genuine and considerate. They spoke our language and talked to us of many things. They treated us well and met our needs. They taught us about the monsters and their dangerous ways.

Little did I suspect, their agenda was not in our best interest.

Once I ceased talking in the heights of the auburn tent, things swiftly grew restless. I wanted to be pulled up and the monsters wanted to pull me down. It was during this time that I almost sensed what they desired. There was something intangible within me that they did not have and that they desperately wanted once they knew of it. This prize was a beacon to them and it needed to be attained, no matter the cost.

Not a few lengths from me, someone strapped to similar cables was lowered from the darkness to my side. It took me a second, but I quickly recognized those garments clinging to the body. It was my sister, but her face was not her own. She, unlike the Normal Faces, retained her body, but had been given the face of one of the monsters. I screamed harrowingly. My stomach churned with the force of a hurricane and saliva and mucus spewed from my lips.

"It is my turn now to speak," she told me. The monsters below us launched into an uproar of shouting and cheering. "We will be ambassadors of this world to our own," she said. "Everything will make sense when they make you the same as me."

"It isn't right," I whispered to myself. "This isn't right!"

In shock and mourning, I began to swing my legs, gaining momentum so that I could gain the ability to travel horizontal distances. When the necessary momentum had been achieved, I lunged upon my sister, wrapping my legs around her whilst turning my eyes from her awful face. Her strength was infinite, but I was faster. I unlatched her harness and sent her sprawling downward into the writhing accumulation of anticipatory arms.

When my sister reached the clutches of the scavenging, fighting beasts, claws and mouths dug deeply into her flesh, examining her every ounce. I turned away as her screams were abruptly ended.

I waited a moment, and then released my own harness.

###

# Names: Unsonselvitzsol

 efore I became free, a number of seasons be-fell me that I could not count. And surely it was a number less than I would have thought, for time lingered awfully slowly within the cool, decrepit holding cell of my prison. I did not mark the days and I did not note the moon when it could be seen. My thoughts and my pain were the only troubles I ever had dealings with, and I rather disliked both of them. I was not a complex man, especially during this time, and spent almost all of it in one of two disturbing states.

The first state: The Hooded Guards would take me once every seven days and bind me to a floor beneath the open sky while the sun singed the flesh of my back, arms, and legs. On each day thereafter, I would be strapped to a concrete table in the depths of the prison. Then, inconceivably, the Hooded Guards would pour scalding water upon my burn wounds, inflicting a pain greater than anything that denied death. And on the days following that, I would be flogged several times; it would have been more than several times, but my dead flesh freed much too generously and sickeningly under each strike. If I could have ended the carnage under any circumstance, I would have done so gladly.

The second state: During those moments of pitiful refuge, I would lie quite still, tucked against the wall of my cell, playing imaginary music to the rhythm of splashing water created by my fingers slapping upon small puddles. The action calmed and distracted my thoughts, allowing me to soak in the sorry scrap of my life left to live. I would have rather done other activities, but any other movement would have horribly ravaged my wreckage of a body and caused excruciating pain.

There was not much else that made up my days, other than the dust that sought across the vestiges of air to find haven upon solid mass and those sounds of my moans and music that crawled fatigue-stricken through the cracks of impossible escape. I had nothing to hang on to. Any love that had once been in my life was long since replaced by forlorn bitterness, buried deep within the caverns of my hardened heart. All that kept me living was a hellish spell burned to my insides, breaking me and changing me.

The reason for my imprisonment was in actuality a sinister yet simple matter. There were certain things that had taken up residence within the community of my soul. It was these things that harnessed the power to overturn the sanctity of peace, of tranquility, and of beauty. By a chance eavesdropping, I acquired these thorns in my unwelcoming side.

I was staying on the third floor of a hotel in a city I had traveled to on business. I left my room in the middle of the night to get some ice from the machine at the end of the hall. On my way back from the machine, I heard an overture of languages and speech emanating from one of the rooms I passed; some sounded human and others did not. Thinking it foolish to stand outside and listen, let alone place my ear upon the very door of the room, I decided to continue walking and avoid any unneeded confrontations. But, as I walked by, a loud, ominous voice became savagely audible long enough for me to take one brief phrase to memory.

_" Its name is evil indescribable. It will come if you speak it: Unsonselvitzsol."_

The name that was spoken swirled through the air about me before entering my ears in a surreal capsule of slowed time. As if the word were tangible, it slithered through my insides and pulsed within my brain. Letters immediately started to manifest within my mind to accompany the sound of the name, and eventually a word was formed so it could quickly be branded to the deepest core of my being.

I hurried to my room and hoped to quickly fall asleep, but sleep did not come--not that night. I could not get the words I had heard out of my mind. They toyed with my thoughts and begged me to imagine the scene inside the room from which I heard them. I imagined creatures of the night communing with demented men, forming covenants to prolong their works and propagate their machinations. I imagined candles burning stronger than natural, wax cur-ling, pooling, and dripping from their holders. I imagined the being that had spoken the words, its mouth different than anything I could picture, expanding air with unusual vibrations to create the pitch and tone that so clearly pierced my ears. My heart raced and my mind churned.

When the sun rose, I was still restless and in disarray. Panic was gripping me with its elongated fingers and anxiety coiled about me like a hungered reptile. I gave in then to the desperation scorching me within and spoke the word now ingrained in my essence. I spoke it slowly, perfectly, enunciating flawlessly each sound and syllable.

"Un-son-sel-vitz-sol."

As soon as the word had left my lips, it was gone. I could not remember it; I could not recall one portion of it--not one piece. It was ripped from my flesh and my being, leaving only the empty space it had just before filled. But that emptiness was only there for a moment, for something entered me and replaced it.

Throughout the course of the day, I could not relax. Every word I spoke and every step I took seemed as if it were monitored, and in parallel, every decision I made that led to such actions felt intensely wrong. It was as if my will were not my own and everything I did was counter to the innate, natural essence of myself. The feeling was maddening, but even more maddening still was my inability to remember the name I spoke that brought about my mental anguish.

As the sun set that evening, I began to feel stronger and more confident in my actions. My thoughts were changing. My composure, my demeanor, my inconspicuous nuances--all of them began to change. Even my choice of words was starting to change. I was transforming, and I was doing so rapidly.

While transmuting from one person into another, I could vividly recall the pieces of my older self, easily identifying the striking differences that widened the gap between the hunch of hallucination and the stab of reality. I welcomed the new self and hoped only to aid it in its arrival.

However, when I returned to my hotel room, I saw for the first time the fiends that were the Hooded Guards. They were waiting for me, at least ten of them. The hoods they wore were ragged and wretched things, covering their eyes, but leaving open to vision their wayward tongues that flapped about untamed within their mouths. Every one of them rushed me without hesitation and bound me with rope. I was in no position to defend myself.

The next thing I knew were the dimensions of my cell, and not long thereafter, the gruesome pattern of my agony began.

When my mind was brought to its knees through the tribulations of my exile, it reacted; not by the expected course of folding, but by unfolding, like the delicate petals of a rose growing outward and apart, one by one. Because my physical body could not perform, my mind picked up the slack to maintain balance. Just as the blind visualized through sound and the deaf created sound from vision, my mind acquired new capabilities and heightened features that were before passive.

One such enhancement was the growth of my imagination. It became more controllable than dexterous fingers, and with it, I was able to coax the world around me into things unreal. I could make the Hooded Guards women with alluring appearances, the sun a waterfall that rained down the freshness of life, and the pain a spirit soaring beneath my flesh with the gentle touch of encouragement. Within these blessed fantasies, I could forget the present and enjoy the cruelties of my immurement. But, no matter how lost I got in the reveries, I had to come back to the pain--for often I craved it.

Another enhancement--or trait, for a better word--as my condition gradually digressed further and further from normality, was the sustaining of consciousness without sleep. My body thinned, my muscles dissipated, and my heart slowed, but I never grew tired. Throughout the course of each day, there would be phases when I entered a state of cognitive REM. Though open, my eyes scattered in both light and dark; my retinas seemed to connect directly to my mind's eye, discharging phenomenal visions of color and amazement. My mind was working like an engine, fueling my attention with dreams layered over my normal sight. This was surely my existence's defiant denouncement of sanity.

The third and final enhancement was the inflow of knowledge and memories. Experiences and images became my own as if I had been a part of them. I learned of princes of lands known and unknown, and of things greater than words. I learned of the spaces and times unfathomable and the uncountable paradigms of all things. The entire mass of understanding that entered my head was treacherous and detestable. It made me desire to do horrible things beyond my capacity; it drove me from my routines and caused me to roam my holding despite the paralyzing pain. I ran into walls, I kicked the door, and I screamed in awesome rage. It felt awful and euphoric all at once. In that moment, I came alive.

On their visit following my cataclysm of mania, the Hooded Guards could not subdue me. Even in their numbers, they could not contain my raw bedlam. I took them under my wrath and ruined them, delighting in the slow pleasure of watching them bite off their tongues using their own mouths. Perceiving my glee, they rejoiced at being sent back to the hells from which they came.

Once all of the hooded mercenaries were dead, I did not wait to leave my loathsome confinement. I ran wildly up the stairs that led out of the lair, which was tucked into the base of a mountain. And when I reached the open air, I plunged towards the distance, feverishly running to anoint those who would follow me and sacrifice those who would not.

The sequence of my changes was no coincidence. The Hooded Guards were but pawns leading me through the necessary steps of my completion; they were my servants, paid nothing but their own forfeit. It was all about my change, not my imprisonment. And I learned of my name once again, amidst the memories of ancient evils: Unsonselvitzsol.

###

# Names: Tillalel

 y a very early age, I had learned the seriousness of sanctity--as far as it goes in relating to things unbounded by the compass of the solvable. I knew, in other words, about the astringent potency of belief: what it was capable of and how it controlled and manipulated. There was one event in particular that stripped me forever from ignorance, and it began with nothing more than a prayer.

When I was but five years old, I took a liking to a rather mystifying doll called St. Pebbles of the Sky. The doll was the priest of a concocted land--a mere childhood fairytale. He wore a tight black robe with a gray, pebble-beaded rope tied around his waist. Around his neck hung a wooden cloud, hung by the same gray, pebble-beads. Most distinct of all was his face. It stretched long, creating a moon of a chin that anchored large, round pebble eyes and a mouth that bent like a river. His head was bald and on it a map was tattooed in black ink, leading the way to a hidden empire in the sky.

I would sit St. Pebbles of the Sky next to me on car rides. He would look out one window and I would look out the other, searching, imagining, and believing in the city that I expected to find there. My older sister also rode with us, but she was not fond of my companion. She would ridicule our intentions and belittle our actions with words of sarcasm and disgust. I knew better than to be affected by what she said; I would not lay down my truths for her forceful dominations.

One afternoon, on the ride home from the grocery store, my sister had climaxed her annoyance in me by screaming terribly into my ear that there was no such thing as those fantastical lands existing beyond the eye's sight. She took St. Pebbles of the Sky and ripped the cloud amulet from his neck, sending pebble-beads to the ground in a miserable collapse. Before she let go of the doll, she threw him hard against the rear window, letting him rest at an unreachable distance from me. All the while, she continued to taunt me.

Deep within me, something escaped--a glow of emotion, a twist of compulsion. I began seeking after something that should never have been sought--not by anyone of any age, especially, no matter how impossibly, by someone of my age. I pleaded silently through the core of my intemperate anger. Past my thoughts and past my beliefs, I pushed my mind to places beyond reality's reach. Through mental urns of horrible communes, I released requests heeded not by emptiness, but by things that lurked infinite distances away in the spaces beyond scope. They heard my cries and my desires absolute, and one in particular came to my side. It came not in sight or in presence, but in enlightened transcendence, peeking through a window of unfathomable substance.

When I opened my eyes, I saw the empire in the sky. It was larger and grander than anything I could have imagined. Constructed of sleek, gray glass, the giant structure shimmered under the sun's light. Towers covered its surfaces; some were brilliantly tall and some seemed to reach indefinitely into the heavens. My sister saw it, and even my mother, as it soared in front of us, but it was there for only a couple of moments before it vanished. My sister became very quiet after that and my mother kept asking us if we saw it. We turned on the news when we got home, but there was nothing about what we saw. With no proof to share with the world, the empire in the sky was our secret.

Belief is a powerful tool, but it was the desire within the belief that conjured the sinister from the saintly. My ignorance, my stubbornness--they afflicted the truth behind my eyes like the headless continue to blink. And in that conviction, as wicked or pure as it might have been, something was beckoned--or born, or brought forth--with the same allure as food to the hungered. And the dreadful fact about that thrilling instant was that the thing that came was unique in itself--for not all appetites are equal, especially those of the nether regions. And this creature's appetite was not so easily fulfilled, for it needed something in return. And once I had freed it, it would not leave until it received its compensation.

When I lay in my bed after the day of excitement, trying to drift to sleep, the apparition came to me--not at first with words or images, but with playful gestures and urges. Slowly, it brushed against the inner tapestry of my soul with its invisible manifestation. A feeling unlike touch grazed through my insides. Tightness, strangeness, and discomfort enclosed my chest, sending me madly into convulsions of unrest. As this inhospitable welcoming occurred, I could not even mouth the words I desperately wished to yell into the night--words that might have reached my parents, words that might have even reached my sister. And once it sensed that desire in me to call out, it allowed my voice to ring, but in a fiendish growl, so that I did not wish to speak more than those two words it took to hear my enslaved voice.

While the intrusion against my essence continued, a girl of my same age appeared at the side of my bed. Her hair was a fiery red cinder that hung in a braided ponytail over her left shoulder, and her cheeks were full of blush. Her eyes were only brown, but they pronounced undeniably the signature of the haunting entity. Even in the dark, these attributes were made known.

"There, there, sweet child," she spoke. Her voice was soft and kind to the ears. "Do not be alarmed. Tillalel has only come back to finish what you started. You cannot ask for so much and not give in return. But don't worry, Tillalel does not ask for that much; it is something easy to give. She just wants to share in your life and in your family. She wants to help you in your troubles and walk beside you in your loneliness. She just wants to be your guardian angel. Let her be your guardian angel."

As a five-year-old child, I was far from understanding the severity and horror of what was occurring. I did not know what had been started and I did not know how to end it. All that made sense to me during that time was the fear boiling like a tempest beneath my skin.

"Please go away," I answered the girl, shocking myself awfully again with my manipulated voice.

"Tillalel cannot leave, but don't worry--she likes you. Be still now, and go to sleep."

The pressure in my chest then eased and I fell motionless atop my bed. Not a moment later, the girl began to sing in a whisper of charming words.

Fill the void softly

With warmth from other worlds

Delight with madness

In songs of aged ones' wails

Think of forever

And the moments never lost

Count all your blessings

And the curses that they cost

Eventually, the effect of the melody became unavoidable, and I fell fast asleep.

As the years went by, the song never changed. The girl who sang the song did, but only to match me in my age. Whether it was the girl, or the mysterious tricks I performed, or the fright I instilled in people, Tillalel never left me. She was always there to hold me and encourage me in her ways.

I knew for the rest of my life the sanctity and strength of belief and the potency of its wake. Never did I hold the beliefs of people against them--though it never stopped the fun I had and terrors I gave in spite of them.

There was only one Tillalel and she was mine.

I remember vividly those words I spoke to her on my deathbed. They were beautiful words--words I hoped she would treasure always.

"My Tillalel, you have never forsaken me. How lucky I have been to have you in my life; you have been like a mother. Finally, now, I will complete what you have asked for and eternalize our bond. Goodbye my angel, my love, my Tillalel."

###

# Names: Feltfoldhart

 he creations of the Artisan were always magnificent. Every detail, contour, and finish orchestrated a perfection of visual embrace. The way his completed works mesmerized those most critical of art and those most cynical of achievement proved his worthiness to all who might own--or if but see--a piece of his allotted mastery. Even in touch, his inventions marveled no less; a blind man would have been amazed. The work that came from his hands was embodied by nothing less than a craftsmanship inspired by the heavens. What a gift he had, and he did not spoil it.

There were many different mediums for the Artisan's work, but there was one he greatly preferred. He used wood, marble, and clay, but his favorite, and domineering preference, was bone. Its rigid, unique, and lifelike form allowed accomplishments unlike anything that could have been imagined. With grooves and notches, he connected the bones into powerful displays of framework, which he then manipulated into strange figures and beasts ranging from short statues to towering presences. It was as if the ability given to him was for something much greater than art. Yes, it was art, but it was also architecture and science and innate, unnatural understanding.

How did he come by these bones? That is a very forthright question, though it has no forthright answer. I could try my luck at many guesses or hypotheses, but it would only confuse the truth at hand. What I may offer as sustenance to such a matter is that he somehow created them. No dead bodies were ever involved, only what was not and then what was. And surely many laid their fingers upon the materials of his use; they were quite real. It always appeared to me as if he could steal matter--take it from one place and make it his own, perhaps by replication, perhaps by transportation. I did know, without a doubt, that his work was strangely destined for a horizon not of our world.

Let me introduce the way I know of the mysterious Artisan--it may shed a hint of light on the shadow of this uncanny man.

Every moment of my life was the same; it progressed in an endless rhythm of habit, habit which I could not exit or for-sake. In simple terms, and for the sake of understanding, I was trapped. There was nothing I could do individually that would change any aspect of my vector-engraved direction. I was not what would have been expected of me to be. I was robust and strong in my age. I was diligent and unwavering. And I was so very accountable. I had no grasp on the world around me, but I understood life, and the essence behind it. There were many things I could not see; there were many things I could not feel. This was the skeleton of my existence.

One day, there was an intrusion into my home. It was not clear the exact scope or duration of it, but it was enough to send me convulsing off regularity. I was taken from my place of residence, suddenly, and at what first seemed to me cruelly. Five fingers held fast around me, gripping me, cradling me. I felt gentle sweat barely seeping from the hand's pores. I had never left my home until that moment, and in the light of the dawn of my exit, it was the Artisan's hand that held me. I was chosen not out of chance, but out of proximity, and bond. It was an experiment that could have ended the very hand that held me, but I continued to live, and the hand continued to hold.

When the hand did release me, I was out of my element, surrounded by an atmosphere bizarrely foreign. The air and its touch were different and the degree of coolness was discomfiting.

I was quickly placed onto a warm bed of algae. Upon my impact, a small pool of equally warm water appeared at my base, seeping through the green as I weighted it down. Then, walls of the same algae were placed against all of my sides and finally on top of me, boxing me into a humid habitat. I immediately began to panic and my movements abruptly ceased.

Everything grew hazy and my acute will became lethargic. A dismal moment approached. The end of things verily tapped upon my insides and stroked me further from vitality. But, at what felt like the turning of time and the shifting of existence, four sharp tubes plunged into me, easily piercing my tissue. Fluid churned as it was pumped into me. A machine outside the bounds of my greenery case hummed loudly. My movement returned and all but the liquid entering and exiting me kept me from fully returning to that state of comfort I had always known.

I began to change and grow. Pieces of my older self fell as I pressed against the algae walls around me, and soon thereafter, the walls themselves crumbled. I did not, however, enter into an open space upon leaving. Another encasement waited for me, but it was much different; it was bone. And as I continued to grow, my substance stretched throughout and around its skeleton, embracing body and limb.

When the growing finally stopped, everything was different.

"It is the perfect body," the Artisan said to me.

I could not reply.

"You are me and you are your own; you are perfect. I flawed you and held you from your true potential. Now you have reached it. See for yourself."

The Artisan pulled a large curtain down from a tremendously large mirror, allowing a reflection of myself to burn eyes that had just finished forming upon my face. I looked into a behemoth of creation.

Maroon muscle and tissue saturated the skeletal frame of a giant. Huge feet rooted into the ground. Long legs rippled and supported a wondrous form with agile ease. A torso expanded further upwards where two arms hung like large beasts. The left arm formed the body of an otherworldly animal: the hand was jaws lined with teeth, and as it flexed, a second hand came forth from the throat, pushing aside the jaws and revealing five stocky fingers. The right arm formed a grouping of five flexible stalks that acted as fingers, or, with the stalks held together in different forms, as a tool of myriad designs that replicated the imagination. Upon a neck of impenetrable thickness, a head like the Artisan's, although with several alien qualities, was appended. Its broad mouth serenely stretched in contentness. Its nose hooked down in three parts, each designed to identify a different scent. Its eyes loomed forward, harboring thousands of small antennae sensors. The pupils within were hazel, matching those of the Artisan's. There was no hair on this entity--only a plate of dense bone that extended free of tissue from the forehead in an array of four articulate designs crafted meticulously by the hands of the Artisan.

The Artisan smiled beside me in the mirror. His features grew paler by the moment. Sweat beaded across his face and his breathing was shallow. I stared at him for what seemed like a long while. I put to memory his face and their features, his clothing, and his mannerisms. At the end of that abyss of affection, the Artisan fell to his knees. Upon his chest was a device that hummed not entirely differently than the machine that had pumped fluid into me. It was large and covered the center of his chest. Though it was working, its steadiness was faltering. Even through his collapse, the Artisan continued to look at me. After a run of wild coughing, he held out his hand and placed it against my arm.

"Before I leave, I must give you a name," he said. "It will be Feltfoldhart."

The Artisan then fell completely to the ground and ceased to move again.

I remember things seen through his eyes as if they were my own memories. I recall emotion--excitement and sadness--that spread throughout him during his times past. Through these things, I know who he was and how I should be. Like a candle, I burn through the wax of his accomplishments, acknowledging them and absorbing them. I have no place in the world outside, but I have a place in a world. I will follow the Artisan's ways, for he knew the power he contained. If he had his heart, he would not have succeeded in fulfilling his dreams. That is why I am here and he is not: I am his heart.

###

# Finding the Host That Sustains

  walked through the harsh sands for many days without end. Their color glistened and appeared to shine brighter with each new dawning of the sun--a sun that radiated and shone with a power beyond the means of natural, un-orchestrated things. I could feel the sun's reach and be witness to its breadth. The sky was either a pearly hue of blue that mixed with and submitted to the distant horizons in lackluster surrender or a faded negativity of gray, humming illusions through the paleness of the moon. Of any movement other than my own, there was none.

While traveling, I tried to recall how my presence had come to reside in the cradle of desolation. I thought back upon those memories that marked the birth of my waywardness, but I could not find anything defining before that moment I first started out upon the hostile sands. It not only was my first memory of the desert; it was--as I searched desperately through my mind--the first crisp and clear memory of my life. Only jumbled glimpses and sensations of interaction meshed in between the stored images of sand, sky, and sun; they were like indistinguishable residues. Besides these, there was only emptiness. Of my name, my acquaintances, and my experiences, there was nothing to be found. This frustrated me, and pushed my steps more fiercely forward.

It was on the third day, after not attaining any level of exhaustion, that I realized the difference of the life within me from what should have been. Something dark was inside me: a shadow beneath my skin, crawling throughout me anxiously and restlessly. My feet never slowed; my pace never slackened. Hunger never came; thirst never clawed. Immunity--certainly cursed--hung within my spirit, empowering me beyond depravity's transient force. Day or night, my heartbeat was the same. Fast or slow, my breath never faltered.

While under the care of the striking and inexplicable sustenance, I journeyed towards a place I knew not. I traveled up and down hundreds of dunes, trekking across a terrain that never changed. Using only the sun as navigation, I pressed towards the westward horizon in search of communion.

Ten more days passed and still nothing came into my proximity; nothing even tapped upon my physical self, not even the most miniscule of bodily stresses. I moved as steadily as ever. The presence inside me writhed upon my will and forced me into fits of rage-filled energy, pressing me on more purposefully in my scavenging.

Then, on that eleventh day, when the sun began its final descent, something invisible spoke to me.

"Have you tried digging?" it said softly, permeating the atmosphere around me. I could not tell from where it came; it came from everywhere and nowhere all at once. My head pivoted to locate the origin, but my forward movement did not cease.

Finding I knew how to speak, I replied, "To unearth what secret?" My voice was strange to me and I knew not how it resonated.

"Home," the other voice stated as it followed me.

"What home do you speak of?"

The voice did not speak again.

For another day, I did not change my course or speed.

On the following day, I thought more seriously about the proposition made by the Voice without Origin. My path as it was had accomplished nothing for me; a change in strategy was by no means anything foolish.

For the first time, I stopped. I let my feet sink slightly into the sand and my arms fall to my sides. Nothing changed in my body, and my breathing remained the same; it was no more relaxing than when I was on the move. Nevertheless, slowly, I slid to my knees, contemplating my entrance into the explorative. And then, right there, with almost no pause, I slid my hands into the empty granules of warmth and began digging.

At first, I dug carefully, using different techniques to find the most successful. But then, gradually, after I found my groove, I became anxious in my scoops and pushes. If there was something to find, then the-quicker-the-better to find it. Just as it took no effort to wander through the desert, my body allowed me to dig endlessly with ease.

Over a couple more days, I continued to dig, and as I dug deeper, I also dug wider, and as I dug wider, the longer it took to continue down. All in all, my fever for the hunt never dampened and my energy never lessened. The shadow inside me churned as forcefully as ever.

Four days after I had begun the dig, I struck something. I had no idea what it could have been, but it was black--all black. When I uncovered more sand around it, I found that this blackness, like a layer, or ocean, expanded forever beneath the endless sands of the desert. I became excited at the find, and strange, new sensations filled me.

I dropped sand upon the blackness, but it was repelled and left to pile up once more. Only my own body could be the tool to further the experimentation. A gaping wound of darkness, as if it were the eye of some horrid manifestation, beckoned me forth to taste of its secrecy.

Somehow, even with the shadow of my insides boiling, I hesitated before extending my foot to be placed upon the black surface. Whatever there was inside me that accounted for a conscious judgment came forth and pinned my movement to the edge of the hole. It did not let me budge; it held me steadfast against decision as if it knew, before thought or instinct, the right and wrong hovering at the balance of my position.

But, as if a force unknown lingered between those things of presence and united with my internal shadow, a decision was made for me. I slid partially down the slope of the hole while gazing into the blackness and lost my balance. To avert my fall, I extended my foot towards the hole to support me, but the blackness did not stop my foot like the sand did. I plunged into the unkind darkness. With ease, I sifted through the black, and everything turned inside-out. My senses, my understanding, my perception, and my mass inverted and reverted to an otherworldly self, hollow and wasted--depreciated and used.

When I came out of the blackness, I was thrust into a poorly lit bedroom. Three children sat cross-legged on the floor. A small bed rested against one wall, a desk sat beneath a single window on another wall, and a dresser and large shelf filled the space upon the third wall. Toys and trinkets lined the shelves, haggardly filling the surfaces they were allocated.

I landed in a heap upon a deck of cards held by one of the children--a girl--but no one noticed me. The girl who held me was frivolously speaking words to the cards as if mocking them, or testing them. The other children laughed, and as they did, the cards pulled upon me and ripped me into pieces, allowing each part of me to be ground into the cards' cores. Memory came into my being and unequivocal knowledge expanded from my essence as unnerving foresight. A strange awakening revolutionized my consciousness and gave me new control.

The girl holding the cards gripped them tightly and uncoordinatedly mixed them. As her hands touched me, I reached through them like water through roots towards their source. I greeted the wrists first and then I went up through the elbows and arms and chest where I stopped for a moment atop the shoulders. Then I swirled up the child's neck and dashed upon her mind. I reached her memories and her personhood and played amongst them in destructive glee. I took her memories and made them my own, using them to create a personality of my own design.

I went back to the cards as the child placed six of them face up upon the ground before the other two children. She pointed to them and spoke as if she knew their meaning. And, actually, she did know their meaning; I knew their meaning, and I was with her. The child I had entered spoke to the others of fantastical and dreadful futures. She spoke of their lives and she spoke of their secrets, their sins, and their deaths.

When the games had stopped and the other two children had left the girl, the Voice without Origin returned.

_Dig_ , it said. _Dig_.

And so I continued to dig, effortlessly, further into the girl--into her spirit and her soul--fusing to the host that sustained.

###

# The Skulker

 t came from the distance with patience and dedication. From a point of origin lost beyond the seas of matter, it traveled, setting out upon a path to reach the destination it had chosen--ages before knowledge was an aspect of existence. Once the path was formed, it did not stray--not for time or desire or any other manifestation of choice. It made but one decision in its life and no more. Perhaps it knew the stars, or perhaps it knew the art of divination, for its entrance into linear transfiguration was immaculate. If it left too soon or strayed too late, it would miss its goal and perish in shame. Like threads of fate, it knew the lengths of everything that lived, from birth to death. it did unspeakable things, but it did what it did for it was what it knew.

This thing of extraordinary life and unlimited boundaries was no inhabitant of realms most traveled, but, like the bees and the flowers, its catastrophic ways were a hidden element of nature. The event of its arrival was rarely seen, but I did witness it, and that was how I, unlike the rest of humans present and past, learned so much about what I call the Skulker.

It came on the night I visited my grandfather for the last time. He rested asleep in the dreary sheets of his hospice bed while I sat reading in one of the two chairs lining his bedside. The television was on, but its sound was barely a hum. On the wall, the clock ticked irregularly loud. The dimness of dusk began to clutter the ambiance of the hall outside and it crept into my grandfather's room, mixing and changing the hues and contrasts of light and darkness.

My eyes were beginning to get sluggish; the words on the pages of Samael Burkenson's _The Stale Soul_ were blurring and becoming annoyingly incomprehensible. I was about ready to set the book down and drift off to sleep when the air I was breathing began to acquire a texture and taste that lingered on the back of my throat. I tried to swallow it down, but it held fast and filled my mouth with an awful flavor. In another attempt to relieve the strange residue, I coughed, but had no greater luck.

My grandfather awoke briefly at the sound and turned in my direction. He stared at me for a moment and then fell back asleep.

I set the book down, collected myself, rested my head against the wall, and tried to drift to sleep, but the potent air would not let up. I could not fall asleep, so, instead, I stood up and started to walk through the corridors of the hospice. As I moved away from my grandfather's room, the air loosened and dried, and my breathing became comfortable once again. I took a big, long breath of the fresh air to cleanse my throat and lungs of what had been there.

Even though I quickly felt better, I continued to wander around the hospice. I passed confused souls sitting in their wheelchairs, speaking to the clandestine presences hovering invisibly before them; I peered into rooms where ghosts of people screamed in pain and loneliness, weeping and shouting as if they had returned to an age of unmet nurture; and I avoided eye contact as wearied minds reached out to me with their words, calling upon me as their lost kin.

The hospice was a sad place that neither life or death could save. Condemnation was its palette and the colors expressed the nightmares that became the finale of so many different pasts, whether bright or hazy.

I noticed toward the latter end of my walk that the residents still awake had begun to speak in different tones and expressions. They gripped their words tightly as if choking on them. But, most frightening of all was the sudden intelligence behind the words. They sounded acute and purposeful, and the subject within them started to link itself between those speaking. What they spoke of was unsettling. They spoke of themselves as vessels of healthy grain, waiting for their turns to be harvested beneath the scythes of distant witnesses that clambered among the corridors of nothingness. And they whispered of feasts spreading across vast distances, accumulating glory for the coming of future generations.

Finding my nerves scathed to their cores, I ran back to my grandfather's room, each of my steps thudding in loud echoes throughout the halls. By the time I had reached the room, the advent of the Skulker had already begun.

My grandfather was still asleep in his bed, but I felt a dire urgency to awaken him for comfort--for interaction of any sane kind. I moved towards my grandfather to lay my hand upon him, but when I came within two feet of his calm presence, I became stuck in the air. I could feel the weight of the ether pressed against the front half of my body. As I took breaths, a thick spume of gas vibrated down my throat, barely giving me the oxygen I needed to remain conscious. The air contained the same thick, fetid plague I had noticed earlier. My eyes, to my undying horror, were stuck as well; I could not blink or move them in any direction other than the one they entered the immurement in--facing my grand-father. Soon after their entrapment, they began to burn with dryness.

I felt like screaming, but I could not fully embrace the sound; my tongue was also sealed in rigidity. Instead of screaming, I moaned, bringing desperation to life from the pit of my stomach.

After what seemed like several minutes, a pulse emanated through the thick air holding me in place. And then again there was a pulse, and again, and again, in an irregular pattern. Once the pulsing began, it never ceased. Through the touch of the pulses, I could sense things: visions, words, and presence. Like putty molding around an object and retaining the object's imprint, the pulses brought forth sonar-like imagery into my mind. I saw the Skulker and I saw its shape; I saw its path and I saw its wake.

Un-numbered centuries of traveling led to the fruition of a single, epic moment of meaning. The Skulker wrapped around my grandfather and pressed itself beneath his flesh. It flexed its unexplainable mass and then consecrated the man that it held, folding him completely inside out before pulsing him into pieces against the shield of air. For a moment, the fragments of his body hung in suspension, as if frozen in time and space. And then, slowly, each piece began to burn as if it were an ember, glowing and shining. Eventually, the fragments became nothing but orbs of pure light, and in this state they bolted forward through everything, cutting like spears through the layers of physicality, leaving windows of clear sight that led through all places unimaginable and unreachable. There, in these far off places, the pieces of my grandfather--the seeds--were sent out, carrying the residuals of life to become the offspring and future voyagers of the Skulker. Once they had been delivered, the portals closed and the air softened.

I fell forward onto my grandfather's bed. I remained there for a few minutes, recalling my grandfather and the memories we shared. Then, I mourned his departure.

###

# The Coming of the Unexpected

 here were always so many people on the beaches those days of the summer's heat. They came with umbrellas and coolers and inhabited small squares of sand for the duration of several hours. Together, their grids of space cohered into a small metropolis of unacquainted population. I walked those beaches, but I never took part in the mass conglomeration. I would put on shorts and a loose-fitting shirt that blew in the wind and set out along the coast, letting the tide wash in and out over my steps. I would watch the sand-bedded congregations as they slept, flew kites, and swam in the water. Those days were my favorite of the year.

Occasionally, on those walks, I would come across lost things: a fin, a board, a pail, a shovel, or some other trinket of sand- and water-design. One day, at the setting of the sun, when most had packed up their things and left, I came across something far greater in craft. It was not so visible, but visible enough. Part of it stuck out of the sand during the lowest ebb of the tide. Though the waves still flushed over it, it showed itself often. Normally, I would not bother with such things, as I never kept anything I had found. This time, however, I was compelled to behold at first hand the object abandoned on the shore.

The thing was much heavier than I had anticipated when I lifted it. It was here that I first noticed about the object a certain amount of deception. Then I gazed upon its color, which shone red at one angle, yellow at another, and a myriad of other colors at still other angles--this was the second observation I made of the trickery it exuded. Lastly, I took in the form of the object, which spoke even louder of its elusive nature. In craft and material, it was a statuette made of stone. In function, it was an image of a fat demon holding a cauldron of water full of people. One person was in the demon's hand while the others were drowning in the water. The demon's stomach showed and on it was etched a symbol of stars and earth--a rock crowned with ten five-pointed stars.

I stared at the statuette for a long time--I stared at the demon's face that emanated a lustful joy; I stared at its body that looked strong despite its overweight disposition; and I stared at its horns that cringed into curves at their tips. It was truly a diabolical piece of craftsmanship, but I did not want to put it down, or throw it back from where it came.

The sun then vanished behind the horizon, and as it did, the statuette immediately voided itself of all color. It became a sickly black, causing even the details upon its surfaces to elude the eye. Within my hands, the object formed into shadow. At a glance, it looked like a chunk of charred wood, or a large rock--nothing at all like it had been only moments earlier. I almost dropped it at that instant for it had lost much of its appeal, but after the initial shock of its trans-formation, I held on to it as tight as ever.

I took the statuette home and placed it on my entryway mantle in anticipation of glancing upon it at the emergence of the new day. It was hard to tear my eyes away from because I saw in it a wound in matter that revealed another side of reality--a side of reality that reflected a pit of absolute nothingness. Staring into this pit made me feel empty and cold, but, nevertheless, I could not turn away. Finally, I pried myself from the demon and spent the rest of the evening watching a couple of movies that should have been locked and buried beneath the core of the earth.

When I went to sleep, things became exceedingly strange. Not five minutes after entering my bed did I begin to hear footsteps in my mind. They were not steps that could be assigned distance or proximity; rather, they were virtual--as if something were entering my mind on two feet. Their intensity grew through the plane of their travel and I did not look forward to meeting the thing that would enter the realm of my imagination.

I turned on the lights and left the bedroom, but that did not change the situation; the steps came closer. I then headed for the statuette, for it had to be the progenitor of the approaching stranger.

When I stepped into my entryway, I realized that it was already too late. Just as I set my eyes upon the little fat demon, a contorting shadow of a figure pranced into the vision of my mind. When it arrived, it sat cross-legged on the shifting ground of my thoughts. Black lined every curvature of its body and face.

_It seems we have a finder and keeper_ , the Dark Figure whispered into my head. _Not many are fond of Diaboth, but you, you saw the beauty in its price_.

It felt wrong to be sent thoughts in a conscious state that were not of my ownership. My control over my body weakened and became futile. With that relinquishment, I became unstable and slid to the ground, leaning myself against a nearby wall.

I wanted to reply to the thing; I wanted to ask it what it meant. And, as if it knew what I wanted to ask, it replied.

_The price is life and the change is death. If you call Diaboth forth, the price will be paid_.

_Who is Diaboth_? I thought, but I already knew the answer to that question. Though I could not see the mind-violating entity's face, I could sense its smile curving beneath its dark apparatus of presence.

_Heat the idol_ , the Dark Figure told me. _Heat the idol and Diaboth will come from the sea before the setting of tomorrow 's sun. Put it in fire and let him come upon the earth; put it in fire and your price will be paid_.

After those words, the entity was gone except for its silhouette stained within my memory.

Without thought, I created a fire. Using wood and old news-paper, I launched the frenzied flames that licked the depths of my fireplace. I gave it more fuel than was necessary and its heat leapt forward, reaching beyond the bounds of its containment. When the embers began to form, I knew it was ready. I took the statuette and threw it into the fire. It landed heavily and splashed bright ashes into the open like confetti.

I let the statuette sit in the flames while tending to the fire's needs. The stone idol began to glow as it gathered the heat. Whenever the fire waned, I stoked its fury with more wood. On one of those deliveries, a lone ash landed atop my arm and alarmed me with its touch. When I felt the pain, I regained the intelligence I had somehow lost after interacting with the Dark Figure.

At once, reason flooded my mind and the things I had done became an absurdity. I was instantly repulsed by my actions and the demon, and began to douse the fire. It was quickly put out, and afterwards I sat down to collect myself. While skimming through my thoughts and those strange bouts of uncontrollable action, I heard a sudden crack with-in the fireplace.

I investigated the source and discovered a large ridge that had formed upon the statuette--obviously caused by its sudden change in temperature. Looking at the flawed demon renewed the hate I had acquired towards it and the strange obedience I had had to the Dark Figure. I took the demon outside, laid it upon the ground, took a sledgehammer from the garage, and smashed the stone idol. It crumbled into pieces after the first blow. I would have left it there and been done with it, but I noticed something peculiar about the shapes of the pieces that were remaining. Each piece was an exact replication of the original statuette on a smaller scale. It was cosmically impossible. This enraged me. I took my sledgehammer and pounded further upon the already broken demon idol; I pounded until the pieces were so small that I could not tell what design they had. It was only then that I felt content enough to go bed, but even in bed, I was not fully satisfied.

When morning came, I remained in bed. I pondered what I had done and I pondered whether or not the visiting Dark Figure was real. To justify the events of the previous evening, I dragged myself to a cliff overlooking the beach where I had found the demon idol. I perched myself there and planned to stay there until the sun had set and the nonsense of the Dark Figure had passed. I waited for many hours.

When he came out of the water, I did not think he was real. He was too large and too surreal. But the head of Diaboth was clear and visible half a mile from the shore, and he only grew taller as he walked up the ascending seabed. The people on the sand noticed him almost immediately and rushed deep inland without hesitation. From the distant cliff I looked upon him through binoculars in awe and terror. Hordes of panic-stricken souls flocked like sheep away from the danger, wounding and leaving many to lie in shock upon the sands. Several people were still swimming in the water and were flailing themselves forward in hopes of reaching the shore in time.

Once Diaboth's stone cauldron cleared the ocean's surf-ace, he poured a fraction of the contents back into the sea, leaving a separation of unscalable height between the lip of the stone hold and the water within. Now, the sounds the demon was making became horrifically audible. The most noticeable was the wicked tune that it hummed; it stung the ears with a terrible melody.

Before long, Diaboth was walking out of the ocean and into a human-infested habitat. He collected the stragglers and the unfortunate. He took the slow and the unable. And all of them were thrown into the cauldron of water. Whether a swimmer or not, only a grim future awaited those who entered. The beast did not travel very far inland, and seemed to be content with the twenty or so captives he had taken. He began to head back to the ocean without much delay or an embarkation upon grand destruction.

Diaboth was halfway back into the ocean when the Dark Figure reappeared within my mind. It did not move or say anything to me. It stood motionless, waiting diabolically for something to occur. Instead of focusing on the horizon that showed through the binoculars, my mind was plagued by the image of the Dark Figure, stealing my sight away from the world of the physical. It did not matter at all where I turned my head or moved my eyes, the image would have been the same. After several minutes of dominating my attention, the Dark Figure departed my mind.

I let the binoculars fall around my neck and I let my arms fall to my sides. As I did so, I noticed something large standing beyond the edge of the cliff--a place where only birds should have flown. I let my eyes turn and glance upon that which was there and I almost died the moment I saw what was before me. It was Diaboth, but it was not Diaboth; it was a different demon than the one that had just come, but it was still Diaboth. With a treacherous hand, he grabbed me and pulled me into the air.

For a moment, I saw further up the coast and witnessed something inconceivable and terrifying: numerous other gargantuan Diaboths were striding forth from the ocean to collect their pittance of humans; there was no end to their coming and there was no reason for me to believe that they did not at that moment cover the coast of every land imaginable.

Soon thereafter, the vision ended; I was dropped into Diaboth's cauldron and left to the bowels of churning death.

Several others were placed into the cauldron after me. Many quickly drowned, but some swam with all of their might to stay afloat amidst the turmoil of thrashing waters. I had managed to grasp a miraculous notch of stone on the side of the cauldron. I held onto it fiercely and postponed my demise. As with Diaboth, when this demon had gathered a couple of dozen people, it began its return to the ocean. By the time the demon was waist deep in the water, I was the only soul left breathing.

Lower and lower the demon got as it walked towards the horizon, and as the demon walked, the sunlight gave the day's final performance. Soon thereafter, the cauldron submerged and water poured in around me. I attempted to flee the cradle of stone then, but it was an impossible feat. I did not float as would be expected; instead, I fell with gravity as if I were not even under water. Now I could see no more and breathe no more. Almost immediately I gave into my instincts to breathe and inhaled water; the liquid poured into my lungs, transporting me into the oblivion of blackness.

My last memory is of the contorting Dark Figure entering the visions of my demise. It brooded its way into view and then seemed to touch me physically and incomprehensibly within. It came as close to my essence as it could and then spoke to me. _Nothing but stone_ , it said. _Nothing but earth_. And then I became rigid.

###

# Character Feast

 here were many sitting around the table in the dining room at Neverlaster's Inn. Altogether, there was the Blind Man, the Ruler, the Temptress, the Demon, the Thief, the Philosopher, the Jester, the Card Man, the Hunter, the Seer, the Warlord, the Ghost, and the Masked Mute. They were all dressed in their finest and they all came with their deepest imaginings.

The temperature of the inn's air, which was perfectly stagnant, cradled a thick humidity. The breath of it was harsh and a slight perspiration appeared on the brows of those gathered around the table. A black, medieval chandelier hung low over the table, its dozens of candles dripping wax down their stems. Affixed to the outer walls was a handful more of candles in dark, ancient holders. The lights' dense glow reflected upon the magenta of the wallpaper and carpet--creating a visual hum of red. The ceiling was pure black, and was ornamented with gold foliage that danced like flames in strange patterns. Melding with this visual cacophony, creaking rejoiced throughout the crevices of the place, whether under foot, touch, or some means not of the physical world.

This was a meeting of the faces of iniquity. They had come together to discuss the fate of evil, its direction and its movement, on a hallowed eve, at the strangest of locations, and bound within the dreariest of physical manifestations. Very rarely did these meetings occur, but even more rare was the number of those who attended this night. It was truly a remarkable occasion.

I stood at the rear of the room, gazing intently upon the scene. My bourbon-colored suit hung loosely on my rigid body; my hands were delicately clasped in front of me at my waist. My eyes were wide and my ears were perceptive. Standing on the opposite side of the table, my reliable colleague was working his first evening shift, joining me in attending to the party's every need.

The conversation started slow and mainly involved the Philosopher touting his over-relished quagmires of evil's eternal existence, until finally the Card Man flicked a knave of spades that stuck over the Philosopher's mouth, ceasing his plague of words. But, even as the direction of the conversation flowed into topics more pertinent, the gathering suffered from a dearth of conviction and leadership. Several spoke, but no one was heard.

When the meals were brought to the table, the tide of the mood changed and for a while sparked raging flash floods of savage ideas, but even those faded with the emptying of plates.

As the hours turned, and I continued to watch and listen to the banter of irrelevant conversation, something came over me--as it always did in such situations. At a point within the latter end of an unbearable duration of time, the archaic babble enraged the very essence of my sinister genius. My sense of purpose--whatever it had been--communed with a darker self, deep within the bounds of my subconscious, and regenerated a dementia--and not just any dementia: it was the sick, twisted dementia that allowed the unthinkable things to come to life to be the master of the puppet-self. I might have been a servant in that time and place to the personifications of malevolence, but I would not have any more of the idle speculation. It was my job to enforce a more diabolical palette.

I walked politely up to the table between the Masked Mute and the Thief.

"Excuse me," I said, waiting for the attention of those there. Many, as they ceased talking, cast at me impatient and cruel stares. I maintained my demeanor and continued with my intervention. "I would like to put your subject on a more appropriate path."

I picked up the dinner knife laid before the Thief and thrust it harshly into his throat, without any thought as to who the victim was.

For a moment, there was a shock-filled pause of movement and sound, excluding the Thief, who yanked the knife from his throat and gargled a steady stream of blood before falling limp upon the table. Soon thereafter, a round of applause began, starting with the Masked Mute. My bold move had been rather well taken and appreciated. In fact, the Masked Mute, whose face always smiled, so much enjoyed the spectacle that he took his own dinner knife and rammed it whimsically into the eye of the Ruler sitting on his other side. The Ruler howled in pain and then fell back in his chair, ending his fall in a lifeless heap. The Masked Mute continued to clap at his own achievement while the rest of those assembled around the table ceased their applause.

"It appears we may have found our muse," the Philosopher said. His lips curled as he spoke through the side of his mouth. A dark cloak hung on his shoulders, matching the color of his hair and glasses.

"Yes, and there is much more I would like to know about him," the Temptress added, smiling tightly. Her dark green dress lay tightly upon her form, leaving visible her enticing attributes. Thick, long black hair hung straight from her head, amplifying her green eyes and olive skin.

"Please, take a seat," the Seer requested. The Seer's white beard and hair glowed against the intensely black skin that peeked from beneath his fine, velvety robe.

I pushed the Thief's body from his chair and replaced it with my own. Blood from the dead man clung to my suit, but I did not mind it.

"I think everyone shares in the desire to know your name," the Seer continued, "or would you prefer I state it?"

"My name is Weller Cross," I announced. The Seer nodded his head in acknowledgement and confirmation.

"Have you ever killed anyone before?" the Warlord ask-ed through his grimy teeth. Hides of his foes wrapped his figure. He showed no sign of emotion.

"Not with a dinner knife," I responded. The group laughed.

"Perhaps something here caused your suit to change," the Card Man muttered from beneath his thick mustache and fur hat. He shuffled a deck of cards in his left hand while he spoke. "This isn't a place for the weary of heart. How did you come by this job?"

"I've worked here at the inn for a long time," I said. "The innkeeper only wants the best working evenings. I'm one of the best. He told me it would be an interesting night."

"And how would you feel if we gutted your friend, in response to your 'inspiring' gesture?" the Hunter asked, sadistically changing the subject while motioning towards my colleague who still stood at the ready, several feet from the table on the opposite side to where I sat. The Hunter's bald head gleamed dull red in the room's eerie light and his leather vest bristled with a myriad of knives.

The foreign evil incarnate within me still stirred.

"He is here to serve," I said. I looked at my colleague and I could see beads of sweat beginning to slide down the sides of his face.

"Oh, goody," the Jester said. His face was painted like a weeping child and his garments were an alternating mess of black and white. I disliked him immediately.

"As are all of you," I continued on from my last words. "Are you not serving a thing unmatched in destruction and despair? Have you not come together here to aggrandize that thing?"

I stood from my chair and walked around the table until I loitered behind the Jester. All eyes watched me intently.

"And if you are to serve, should it not be without games, foolish plots, and childish schemes? I doubt there is room for charades in the seriousness of your work."

The Jester tried to escape, but it was no use; his end, however, came not by my hands. The Blind Man, who sat at his side, used his hidden dexterity to hold fast the Jester by his wrist while the Warlord on his other side cleanly chopped off the Jester's head with an ax. The head rolled toward my frightened colleague, stopping at his trembling feet.

"I think, for a waiter, you have been trained overly well," the Temptress said. "I wonder why now you have hatched from your shell. What you propose is strength in strategy and not in numbers; I must agree. But what is the winning combination? There were once thirteen of us, but now only ten." The Temptress ended her words with a chuckle.

I smiled as widely as I could in response to her, but did not say a word.

The ease at the table quickly turned into tension. Thoughts boiled within the minds of those in attendance. Every-one began to eye the one next to him and doubt the quality there contained.

I stood away from the table, leaving myself as only a spectator. Glancing again at my colleague, I noticed that he had shuffled further away.

"Fear is one of the greatest evils and it cannot be stopped in death," the Ghost spat. Its physical inconsistency wavered.

"War can never be overlooked," chimed in the Warlord. "It overturns and enslaves nations; it starves the weak and corrupts the strong."

"Money is the root of all evil," the Card Man said.

"But wisdom can mislead the truth," added the Philosopher.

"Don't you all know?" yelled the Seer, stopping the rapid outbursts. "There is only one pure evil worthy of being forged in the bowels of hell and spread amongst the lands of the living. There is only--" The Seer's words were cut short. A wound made by a hand unseen seeped crimson from the Seer's neck through his alabaster beard. The Demon had done the deed.

"I did not need to hear any more from the Seer," the Demon growled. "Knowing the future does not change it. Controlling the present is what matters. His usefulness was dull."

The Demon returned to its seat and quieted itself once more. Immense black eyes hung in its off-white face while equal darkness filled what was its mouth. Roped together on its back were two enormous, gray wings.

Things had been looking good, but that quickly changed. The death of the Seer ended all conversation and bickering. Silence took reign. Those remaining at the table sat quietly and did not share their thoughts. Not even the Philosopher dared to pierce the stillness with an eccentric remark. No one wanted to provoke another, so no one spoke. It was simple and it was preposterous. This was what I had desperately hoped would not happen.

I gave the party an ample amount of time to move forward with their discussions, but it did not occur.

"Thank you very much for dining with us this evening," I said, bludgeoning the silence with swift words of monstrous brutality. "It has been a pleasure and I hope to see all of your faces in the near future. As you leave, a steward will return any belongings to you that you relinquished upon entering. Goodnight."

As dumbfounded as all of those sitting at the table were, they began to rise from their chairs, and as they did so, my colleague and I each pulled a latch in the wall on our respective sides of the room. The nefarious dominion beneath the inn gaped with a chilling appetite and engulfed the remaining patrons, their chairs, and the table into a pit lined with atrocious spikes. A steward entered the room with coats and other ornaments that belonged to the guests, including the Ghost's gravestone by which it was bound, and dropped them into the pit. My colleague and I released the latches.

"Evil is not always what you expect it to be, and it certainly doesn't romance these inept fools," I said to my colleague. "I hope you shall remember that long after I am gone, Mr. Grimble. The boss got his hopes up a little too high for this evening, but I knew better. We have an important job here, and we are very, very good at it."

###

# The Something Beyond Silence

 he sound of a heartbeat is distinct. It is a ticking of time--a lifeline encroaching upon an end. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast, this ever-sustaining frequency pulsates towards the boundaries of the unknown. It represents knowledge--whether of reality or sleep, it does not matter--but when it stops, the mystery begins. That mystery, which hinges on the brink of death, depicts the apex of existence. What I was, what I am, and what I will be are all erased by the cessation of this simple cadence. But even now as I breathe, that mystery reveals itself from time to time. It suffocates the noises that surround me and blocks out the impacts and interactions of the world. It takes the beat of a heart, the sound of silence itself, and steals it away. And when silence is gone, something else has replaced it.

The warm crackling of the fire was enough to keep me content for a long while on the most still and cold of winter evenings. I had my wife in my arms and my two girls snuggled at my feet. My thoughts danced with the harpy-like flames while their sounds caressed my imagination. No one spoke, and no one wanted to. The tongues of light satisfied every gaze, licking the air with infinite delight and heat.

As I stared at the fire and time ticked away, my senses began to numb. Surrounding interferences drifted away from my attention, and even the sound of the flames themselves began to slowly evaporate from my ears. I looked at my wife and then at my two children--they were all in the same stupor. Eventually, that which was real became surreal and faded into the sight of my thoughts.

A maze came to my mind, with long corridors and ephemeral directions. Darkness hung over it like a thick mass of devouring ants, and with it was no sense in the word haste; age itself would have overtaken that which chose to conquer those passageways. The walls, which were constructed of ancient stones, were covered with moist growths of plant life. There were no sounds in this maze, neither was there movement, except my own.

I walked as slowly as I needed to navigate intelligently around the turns and away from the dead ends. I felt calm and serene as I trekked through endless choices. The maze was complex, but it was my own, and I felt comfortable easing through it. Within this maze, I brought with me the visions of my hoped for future and the pleasantries of my past.

The experience was idyllic until something else joined me in that maze, although not by my conjuration. I tried to visualize what it was; I tried to control my thoughts to make out its shape and form, but I could not see it even in my own mind. Its presence was all I knew--nothing more and surely nothing less. It was like a void of space crawling through my head, disturbing the peacefulness and sanctity of the private self. I could not banish the thing, nor could I embrace it.

With my lucid setting inhabited by an unwelcome guest, it quickly became an undesirable captivity. I at once shook myself from the stupor to rekindle my eyes with the affectionate fireplace blaze. I succeeded, but before I did, the inexplicable entity, the Trespasser, took a profound leap at my eternal eyes. For a fraction of a moment, I felt--rather than saw--a force grip me so horrifically tightly that my complete being, both conscious and subconscious, waned into an oblivion so like nothingness that my heart skipped a dreadful beat and came back to a rhythm utterly dissonant; it was as if my heart and the rest of my body had severed their lifelong bond.

After this, the spectacle of burning wood was not entirely pleasing when it came back into sight.

I stood and turned from my family.

In the kitchen, I drank a glass of water. I filled the glass again, but this time with a touch of rum. The alcohol hollowed my insides and sent warmth down my limbs.

When I returned to my wife and daughters, my vision began to waver, but it was not due to the loosening by drink. Here and there my sight would shift out of alignment, displacing all of my other senses. My coordination was also off. Everything I did appeared to be one step behind what actually occurred.

I reached for my wife in a stumble of movement, catching myself against the sofa. I whispered to her that I had to speak to her privately. She sluggishly agreed and followed me back to the kitchen. I told her what had happened; she was confused, but she tried to be sympathetic.

"It just doesn't make sense," she told me. I found myself looking at her hair and not her face. The blondness attracted my eyes and made it easier to focus. "It's not like things are out there that can just manipulate you like that from no-where--or whatever you think happened to you."

"I know. I know," I said, trying to look her in the eyes, but not being able to. "But if such a thing did exist, I guess this is how it would happen. It would just do its thing--no motive or evil summoning or curse. It would just be like anything else. It's kind of like a wild animal. It would just eat what it could find when it became hungry."

"What are you talking about?" my wife interrupted. "Come on. I think you just need to get some sleep."

"Alright, but I'm going to take a shower first. Maybe that will help clear my head."

"Okay, but make sure you say goodnight to the girls."

I nodded.

My wife left and returned to the living room.

Normalcy, I realized, had no place in the conglomeration of life. There was too much unknown and too much arrogantly known. Something had definitely "communicated" with me and it did not do so lightly. Whether it would return or had departed forever, I had not the slightest control over, but at that moment, the damage felt done.

As I stepped into the shower's stream, it was too much to bear. I had to take a step back and adjust the temperature. But once the water was just as I liked it, I released myself completely into its hold. Every contact, every flow--I sensed each vein of water that trailed down my body to my feet, every river that ran down my arms and off my fingers.

_Where is safety, if not in the shelter of one 's own home_, I thought to myself.

The water was loud. It pounded over and over upon the surfaces of my body while echoing with the sound of pummeling rain. My nerves had begun to relax while the rest of my body started to reclaim its harmony. My neck loosened, my shoulders slouched, and my head sagged. I was beginning to feel normal again --that concept which I had almost lost hope in.

If I had been more aware of what happened the first time I was visited, I might have left the shower at that very moment, but I did not; I let myself relax and drift further into the comfort of it. Soon the sound of the water's beating began to waver, and soon after that, there was only the feeling upon my flesh. What followed was the beating of my heart; I began to hear it reverberate throughout me. I could feel its every contraction and retraction--every pump. It was the isolated chorus of respite and I was the embodied audience.

Eventually, my heartbeat grew softer and softer, fading away as quickly as it had come.

At this moment, nothing was within my awareness--nothing until all sound ceased. The shower, my heart--their audible trails disappeared without a trace. Then all sensation left me. The tapping of the water, the heat and humidity--there was nothing left to acknowledge their presence by. I had entered back into the strange.

I became alert, but it was already too late.

Without turning the water off, I lunged out of the shower, tripping on the lip of the tub and tearing the shower curtain off as I fell. There were no sounds to greet my chaos. Even as my right arm splintered into the ground, there was nothing to feel.

I got up, grabbed a towel, and proceeded to race through my home, staggering against walls and through doors, hearing nothing all the while. It was during this time that the Trespasser again entered my head and resumed its encroach upon my incorporeal being.

As I plunged into the living room, I caught one last glimpse of my family, their countenances full of shock. Then I felt the tightness of the twisted, agonizing, and belittling clench within me. Nothingness latched upon me and danced with me as if cultic sacrifices were mere games played in the safety of green fields and blue skies. It was suffocating without death; it was pain without feeling; it was damnation without cause. My essence seeped into the jaws of limitless misery--I could not even fill out a presence or existence to accept it.

_How pitiful life is --how perfectly pitiful_.

There was a face within the nothingness, and it swallowed me.

###

# About Sharkchild

  is a zealot of the imagination and embraces the strange, the bizarre, and the great unknown. His mind is a haven of unique life where species of the cosmic take reign. Visit him at www.sharkchild.com.

The contents of this book have been taken from the episodes of Sharkchild's occult horror and fantasy fiction podcast, _The Dark Verse_ , and have since been edited and revised. Download all of the past and future episodes for free at www.thedarkverse.com.

