The
sunlight is golden, and it falls over the horizon like a slow meteor,
sinking into some distant ocean. I never see the day. My sleep comes with
the light. This book is always in my hands in the evenings when I wake.
Bound in ancient leather, its pages are strengthened by the mould and
yellowing of time, as if its leaves were becoming leathery parchment rather
than dust.
The
letters spill into my eyes. A spidery scrawl, they are the memory of all
things. I remember nothing alone, and each night I begin again, recollecting
pieces of my past. Fragments without cohesion that tumble into the abyss, so
that I am never whole. Sometimes things are taken from me with such force
that I see the fire of my mind as it crackles back into the book.
Stirrings of things undone, failure that I have forgotten; the shame of
being human towers over my life, and I have lost the will needed to wash it
away.
My
finger touches the page, becomes a beckoning claw in the twilight. I see the
torch and reddened eyes burning under the hood of the demon.
It is
back to the beginning this time, and I burst through a huge door,
splintering the rotten wood, and I am standing there at the top of some
basement stairs, my eyes adjusting to the gloom. Keen odors of decay fill my
nostrils. Blue light gleams on the cylinder of the handgun I hold. Wisps of
pale smoke drift from the barrel, and I know I have killed someone.
But
who?
I see
that I am an ordinary man; unshaven, my lean features tending to the rugged
and handsome side. There is hunger in my gray eyes, and I know that I am a
man driven mad. I have killed my child, and I see her face. An angel's face
that I know hides unspeakable evil. She is gone, crushed by bullets from my
gun. Gone in the shrieking of the tempest, her shattered skull crumbling in
the caverns of the dead from which it came. Silence, oblivion, the grave has
closed over her, and now she belongs to the withered claw and the hooded one
who lurks in the darkness below.
Wicked
phantasms gather, sirens of evil sing songs of darkness doubly terrible
under the bleak sky. Cries growing funereal - death wails of an evil that
waited for a thousand years, only to have been turned to dust and death by
my gun.
The
light flashes, crackles from the book to my hand, blackening it to a
corpse's claw. I see my arm wither as the life is taken from it. Then I see
her stirring, drinking my life into her moldered corpse.
Stumbling down those steep basement stairs, I fling myself about desperately
in the gloom, looking for some kind of lamp. My eyes adjust, and sweat and
dust pour on my face. I have found the shovel, but the earth is packed hard
and too hard to dig. And that is not good because I want to bury her body
deep. There is a large trunk in the corner beneath a waxy, cobwebby window.
Perhaps the earth is softer beneath it. Rushing over, I pull it aside.
Now the
book crackles, and the ceiling cracks, and looking up, I see moonlight, and
suddenly I am in a grave, with earth being shoveled on top of me. Cold
suffocation, and I am clothed in a torn dress.
A
silent scream rises in my throat, and then I see myself digging in the soft
earth that had been under the trunk. Digging down deep, until my hands are
blistered and bleeding, and the shovel scrapes on stone.
The
hammer comes down on the stake, and it sinks through my heart, its sickening
crunch the sound of my death, and a flint struck to ignite a flame that will
become eternal burning. I do not know where this image comes from or why it
invades my space now, then my vision goes back to her, and I see myself
dragging her limp body down the stairs to the grave I have dug.
Her
face sinks forever beneath the earth, and when I am done, my tears are from
both sorrow and exhaustion. Sorrow because she was my daughter, and my
curse.
I am
nearly blind with tears as I drag the trunk back over the grave, and when I
finish, I collapse on it and sleep on it. Endless dark dreams and emptiness,
I awake burning with pain, hunger, thirst, and sorrow. Without understanding
why, I throw back the lock and open the trunk. And there is the book, and I
know I will open it, and that it is her book. Then my eyes close.
The
twilight is deep purple, and it falls on the horizon like a final curtain. I
will never see the day. My sleep will be eternal this time. The ancient book
is in my hands, and her angel face is a silhouette on the worn leather.
Mould
and the yellowing of time have taken me, and my body is leather, parchment,
rot, and dust. In the basement, she is rising, her hand pink with life
stolen from me. Tiny fingers break the soil.
I have
read the book, holding it with my hands of splintered bone, and it is her
book. It tells a lonely story, and the ending leaves me forever forgotten.
Yet she is remembered. And now I must sleep, knowing that it is the fang
that lives on while the bones are buried.
. . . .
. . . . . . .
