Centuries past when Helious reined the skies and mortals bowed to him – the Lord of Light – it was still the Ocean which was the feared deity. For it drowned men, killed then who tasted it and swallowed the light to spread the insanity of night fall. Ocean; mother of darkness, slayer of the Lord of Light and bringer of terror which consumes men grown.
Behold, the last glorious moment of the gracious Helios and prepare for the rule of the vengeful Mother of Darkness.
I would be a rebel, I would break all of your laws. I would walk without shoes and shower without a room. I would fuck without a condom and love without a heart. I would see if you could then find some reason in my madness or pass me off to the psyche ward with chains in my arms. I would cut myself open and lay it on the table for you to sketch on. I would be a blasphemy, a spawn who was left alive for too long. I would shout out obscurities till the break of dawn and I would laugh at your Lord as you put your hands together for His cause. I would smile till I die for you would be at my command. A mere whisper from me would fuel this accord. I would always be a memory and my voice would echo in your halls. For your sticks and stones may break my bones but my words would always hurt.
It was a camp site in the wilds. A bunch of young college graduates were celebrating their freedom before they would sign up for their six figure salary jobs with corporate power houses who would suck every bit of life out of them in the next ten years. Right now though, they were not bothered about such facts. They thought they had closed a chapter of their life and were celebrating.
His job was to pitch the tents, serve warm food and make sure no one gets lost in the woods. However, the presence of all the young people around him recalled a memory he worked hard at suppressing. One night when the campfire burnt bright and everyone was gathered around it with beers and quilts he abruptly started his story.
“I was at a mall, which had apartments on the higher floors. The importance of this detail is not very clear to me but it just gives more of a reason for the interaction of the people I would be mentioning subsequently.
“I was browsing through the shops when a little girl with pig tails entered the mall or as far as I can remember simply materialized out of thin air. She had in her hand a small box of sorts and with that box, there was a note. She was at a considerable distance from me but strangely I knew what the note said and still vividly recall those words, “When the red line meets your pin, I would trigger a chain”. Apparently, I was not the only one who noticed the little girl because just when I was trying to decipher the text on the box a man in a black pullover, sporting cropped blond hair ran up to the girl. It seemed the box and what it said meant something to him, he squatted in front of the little girl and in a panicked voice asked her, “Where did you get this from?” The answer to the question was not important to him and I believe he didn’t even think he will get an answer, that phrase – which was being repeated over and over again – was there just to fill an otherwise awkward silence between him and the little girl. That question was just his verbal reaction in fright.
“The little girl simply stood there; amazed, speechless and at the same time emotionless as the words being uttered by the man jumbled up into a senseless chant. He was not even looking at the girl, his eyes were fixed on the box – the only answer he wanted was the translation of the note into something he could understand. He took the box from the girl’s hands and slumped on the floor. His panicked filled voice silenced and he looked at the box in amazement and intrigue. It was at this moment that something glimmered on his wrist and I noticed the leather band with metal studs, much like a goth rockstar’s, that he was wearing. In between the metal studs on his band there a small paper pin, something which must have been once lodged there without as much as a second thought but was now a part of the cipher which accompanied the mysterious box.
“It seemed it was not just me who made a connection between the innocent little pin on the man’s wrist and the box. The momentary calm on the blonde guys face vanished as quickly as it had appeared and he bolted upright and announced, “It’s a bomb!”
“From the moment the little girl had entered the mall I was in a state of trance and retrospectively thinking I am amazed at how detached I was from everything around me. The proclamation of a bomb being present in a fairly crowded mall must have created quite a lot of havoc, however, neither did I notice it that day nor can I recall anything of the sort today. All I remember is that as I stood there bewildered and shocked at the knowledge of a ticking bomb so close to me I could not get my eyes off the young woman who to me appeared as suddenly as the little girl had a few minutes ago. She had short hair which came down till her jaw and sort of framed her round, innocent and cute face. The girl was dressed in white pants and a top which hugged her attractive figure.
“She entered this utterly confusing and strange situation with an aura of someone who can fix everything. For a split second it seemed that she knows exactly what to do as she walked up to the blonde guy saying, “Give me that” and then snatched the box from his hands. To me it looked as if the moment of panic had almost passed, that was until she went to the staircase and simply dropped the box from the edge. At first I thought that maybe the box will fall through the gap staircases usually have between them but then I looked over the edge and saw the box bounce off a step to a lower one and then disappear out of sight. At the same time another woman started going down the flight of steps, unaware that she is actually walking towards a bomb.
“If being in trance was not enough this new situation completely numbed my senses. I know the bomb went off because I felt a tiny shiver under my feet but I never heard an explosion. Everything after that was a blur, I soon found myself leaning over the railing, looking at the floor below me where I could see a pool of blood being formed. I then heard the voice of the blond guy as he shouted the same question over and over at the cute faced girl; “What the fuck is wrong with you, what the fuck is wrong with you?” I peered over little further and confirmed the notion that the blood belonged to the girl who was climbing down the stairs. The blond guy’s voice could not be heard anymore and he was down on his knees next to the dead girl. He just stared at her and everything was silent for what seemed like an eternity until a sob escaped the lips of the cute faced girl. She crashed to the floor as if her legs gave away and in between her sobs she tried to defend her actions. However, her speech was barely audible and all I could pick was, “…but, but… I wanted… care… didn’t think this would happen… save you” It was evident that her confession was directed to the blonde guy and the look in her eyes made it obvious that at that particular moment all she cared about was his forgiveness. However, all her sobs did was break the man’s solitude and he looked at her with a face which screamed of anger, pain, hate and vengeance.
“If things weren’t strange enough already, they got even bizarre. Other than the irregular sobs of the girl everything was silent but what was louder was the anger on the man’s face. Without a word he reached for a walking stick someone had dropped earlier, rolled it in the crimson pool in front of him and started smear the dead girl’s blood all over the pure white pants and the light colored top of the cute faced girl. A sick sound of thick, sticky blood being rubbed from the stick to the clothes engulfed the environment. The sobs of guilt turned into moans of pain but the repulsive sound of blood was what actually broke the silence. They both kept sitting exactly where they had slumped on the sight of the dead girl while the man continued painting the girl with blood. The absolute silence on his part made everything even more eerie.
“I didn’t realize it until much later, but as I was held captive by the grotesque picture in front of me my feet started moving towards the exit. To me it felt like I was floating away, I looked around amazed at the fact that I was moving without my knowledge and when I looked back I found that the man had the girl pinned against the wall and was smearing blood on her face, her hair, her neck – everywhere – with his hands. The girl had stopped crying, her eyes had a vacant look and she was as silent as every inch of space around her. There was still a hint of innocence on her blood dripping face but now she seemed entirely lifeless. It was not her who was standing against the wall anymore but she something which was protruding from it. The man’s face no longer had any sign of anger but in fact had an extremely disturbing impression of calmness. He looked more like a painter brushing on the canvas than a lunatic covering up another person in a dead girl’s blood.
“I don’t remember anything after that, I don’t know how I and when I exited that building. I just recall that the girl against the wall and the man holding her there faded away. I did not hear anything about this incident after I woke up at a hospital days later, nor did I ever try and find anything about it. I am left with this absolutely horrible memory though and the stark contrast between what the cute faced girl was when I first saw her and what she last looked like when she last faded away remains with me in the same way as they show the before and after pictures on the TV.”
He went silent after that sentence, his story had taken away the music, laughs and chatter of the camp site long ago. Everyone was staring at him, either wondering about the authenticity of his story or trying to shake off the picture of the two dead girls, wondering whose death was worse; one who transcended or the one who still might be breathing but for all practical reasons is just an object protruding from some wall.
Got a story published at Ex Nihilo, which is a monthly online publication with the purpose of creating a platform for sharing and interaction on art work by young people. Anyway, linking it here.
There is something about the entire environment of a hospital ward which is extremely depressing. Its not about having some loved one admitted in one of the rooms, it’s the general aura of the place. Long, marble floored halls, with doors running on both side. The entire place is in utter silence at least twenty hours a day minus the occasional click of the nurses’ heel. Sometimes a patient would leave one of the many doors in the corridor open, which would result in the eerie echo of random coughs, sneezes, the rare moaning of someone in pain and sometimes when it’s extremely silent the wheezing of a old lung. Every night there would be a scream of anguish, denial and pain when someone or the other passes away. Again, the emptiness of the halls will echo the sobs like a lost child at a park after dark.
There would almost always be an old janitor who will be polishing the already sparkling marble at the oddest of the hours. Bottle after bottle of cheap floor cleaning detergent resulting in a stench which wouldn’t leave your clothes till you send them to the laundry. One of the broken wheels of his trolley would squeak and screech from the bizarre of the corners way past the bedtime of any self respecting individual.
The clocks; they seem to be a concept of the outside world in the premises, save for the indicator of the change of shift or the distribution of medicine. Day, night, storm or calm a ward will always be lit by the brightest of lights. No matter what is happening in the world beyond the doors, once you close them behind you, you are in a time warp.
It is in exactly one of these wards where I have been wasting away for the last ten years. I don’t remember the warmth of the sun, the smell of rain, the feel of the summer breeze or the chill of the winter wind. There was a time when the scent of the flowers visitors brought me meant something to me but now it has all been buried under the stink of the chemicals doing rounds in this place. Now my once tanned skin is a sheet of white and my once sharp eyes are always waiting to drown in sleep. My memories, they are fading away and the ones which remain I’ll rather do without them. Faces and faces of people, reels and reels of events, all flip through my eyes, and all the smiles and all the laughter I recall turns into a stab.
The occasional guests who did come said that life has changed outside. People don’t have time anymore and everyone is always running late. They are always in a rush to get from a place they were to a place where they had to be. The had-to-bes never seem to end and no one ever leaves on time. For a few years I pretended to understand the lack of visitors, I fancied that in all the had-to-bes the new world has provided everyone with, my turn just doesn’t come that often. I realized later that the flowers they keep weathering and the faces they keep disappearing.
Me, I only noticed my accumulated attrition the day I decided to pick up my pen again. When anything which ever made you happy and every thought you always wished to remember starts piercing through you, the eventual refuge you find is in a corner of the same pirated mind. You think that maybe if you can save a part of your imagination it may develop and cure the plague which has turned your memories into zombies. This could have been a failure too because my hands were unable to write, but when they planned to take it all away from me they misjudged my intellectual strength.
The creation is in the head, the imagination is an offshoot of the gray matter. Drugs enter our body to depress our senses but what the rest of them don’t realize is that once the five senses are subdued the sixth sense is at its strongest. The jobs being thrown at the over worked processor of the brain are taken off and we become capable of whole new ideals. The plane of normalcy and the extent of creationism is taken to a whole new dimension. We become aware of an entirely different set of thoughts and ideas, of entirely different substance and the non-physical. The human eye can only glimpse seven colors in the spectrum of light but there is an entirely different world which exists all around us; just beyond the boundary of the spectrum we are allowed to see. But where the eyes have their limitations, the power of imagination knows no bounds. It can weave an alternate reality for us, something which only individuals with a profound understanding of self realization can achieve.
It was when I let my conscious self drift in the narrow corridor between floating and drowning in dream that someone finally came for me, someone who never leaves. It’s you who came through all the corruption of the souls who can never realize the abstract. They can never steal you like they took everything else away from me, because to them you do not exist. As long as I have the realization of your existence to talk to, to wake up to, to tell all my stories to, I don’t need my memories, I don’t need pens, I don’t need those phony visitors or their flowers without scent. I have transcended from the material to the immaterial and by god the latter has more matter than actual physics has to offer.
I still remain in the same cliché of a hospital ward but I waste no more. Normal people of the normal world only see the normal version of me being presented to them but behind those glazed eyes, which seldom close, is the reality which would shatter reality, for there can be only one.
The scribble of the pencil could be heard in the cold darkness of the room. A little candle flickered in a corner, right next to which the huge frame of the person responsible for the sound was seated. It was a strange darkness; heavy, foreboding, depressing but strangely calm. It was dark not because of the absence of light but because of its presence. Without that flickering candle it would have been pitch black, dark as a coal mine and silent like the desert. The darkness was in the shadows which danced all around. The air was heavy because of the presence of the figure. The sound of the pencil against the paper pierced through the thickness of the silence like a surgical knife opening up a patient. The room had a life, how dull it may be. The room had a purpose, no matter how sinister it might be.
The fear of the dark multiplies itself many folds when the darkness stimulates your sense. A blind man’s days are as dark as the night, he knows nothing but pitch black, yet he is not terrorized. Fear grows not from what we cant see, but from what we think we cant see. It grows within us and evolves to enslave us. It dictates our senses and they are triggered not by what is not there, not what we are oblivious of, but by what might be there.
The room stimulates exactly these senses. To whom does that shadow belong to? What was that I saw in the flicker? Why this sudden draught of freezing wind? Did I just see a claw? You don’t realize it but it doesn’t matter what the air is like, you will find it difficult to breath and you will hear another question; why is the air so heavy? You mind starts recollecting everything you hate, everything you ever despised and all of your hidden demons. Once the senses are clicked into motion they turn everything around you into your most terrorizing nightmare. You honestly wish you would wake up, sweating under your sheets and find solace in this one time you actually did wake up from hell.
The man with the pencil continues writing at a painfully slow scribble. His speed is the cause of both serenity and infuriating curiosity. Absence of the slightest of noise will make the silence too loud and the gentle drag of lead against paper is far more comforting than the deafening emptiness of quiet. The scratching of the pencil is infuriating because of exactly the same reason it is pacifying. Its pace is filling the entire atmosphere with a sense of incompleteness and languidness. It is like an imperative decision which you have to take, which has put everything on hold but can’t be taken because its consequences can unleash hell.
Everything which constitutes Room 66 is essential though. Even the slightest gust of wind from an unseen crack is something without the presence of which everything will fall apart. Every fragment is designed to hail the existence of control and the man sitting next to the candle writes out its fate, for the room is only one 6 short of the terror which until now only enslaves your senses.
I don’t know what I said, I don’t even remember what I said. Everyone was standing here laughing with me and then suddenly all I could hear was the echo of my own laughter as the crowd became silent and started to walk away. Must have been something I said, but I can’t even remember my own name let alone what I said five minutes ago. How do I even remember what was happening? Maybe it actually was me laughing at myself and there was no one else to share it with me. They all seem so real though, “Are you for real, are you actually here?” He runs his fingers through his long and dirty hair, an action which has become a ritual for his perpetually confused mind.
Who knows, maybe all of those faces were a fragment of my imagination, an old memory bought back to life. Thing with not having a sense of time, of the present, of memories and sanity is that you don’t know what is now and what was then anymore. My mind is like a VCR, which playback my life and then suddenly jerks back to the present. It’s like waking up from a daydream and finding yourself in the same wreck you were when you had closed your eyes. Who am I kidding, it’s nothing like that, you in your perfect car and designer suit don’t have the aesthetic sense to even imagine what hallucinating a reality lived feels like.
I ache for the day when it stops making sense to me. I see friends around me and then the horror of reality. I know I hallucinate otherwise they would have talked to me. Tell me what is wrong and maybe I can be liberated, or take away my reason and the I can’t judge myself. This here is purgatory, let me be a sinner and burn in eternal fire, make me feel a pain which robs the senses. Reality realized is terror personified, demons displeased are nightmares achieved.
“Hello my friends where had you been? Lately your sight seems to bury a terror in me…”
I walk for a living. I know, not something a lot of people would put under the “Profession” column when filing their tax return but it seems to be working out fine for me. It started from grad school, I was a business student with the entire education system training me to become one with the corporate mammoth. They will cut and crop around everything you are till you can fit into the same frame they have made for the entire generation, of course with a sampling error of plus-minus five percent. At the end of the day we would be no different than the troops out of boot camp, only we would be wearing a suit and a tie under our neatly trimmed hair. Mince every bit of individualism and you have yourself the perfect corporate fuck.
Then one day I decided I don’t want to do this anymore. I did what everyone does when they quit something; I walked away. Though I took the notion literally; I kept walking. I said fuck it to the world and took the road. For a while a l kept asking myself as to where I am going or what am I planning to do? Then there was a little voice in my head that would remind me of all the money I could make, all the Jaguars I could drive and all the super models I could take home for the night – I was going to a good grad school. With time the questions became irrelevant and the voice faded away.
Initially I used to be all alone on the road, then the truckers who were always on the highway started to notice a dude who is always walking, soon I had friends on my walk. Some of the truckers would stop, chitchat and then return to the monotony of their driving, others would just honk and wave as they passed by. I had more friends than I needed.
It was not long before the corporations I ran from caught up to me. Suited reps would get off their cars and walk with me, offering me sponsorship for my walk. I am not complaining, but not a single one of them ever asked me why or where was I walking. As for the sponsorship, if I needed money I would have been a suited jock just like them. Needless to say but I always declined their offers. However, the corporations were many and apparently there was never a shortage of feisty business grads who would want to sign me. They would try all sorts of gimmicks, I have had them talking to me dressed as hippies, bums, even athletes. I think today that if I would have taken some time off from my walking and gone to a court maybe I could have spent all those years without being bothered so much.
For some reason, which I can’t recall anymore I bought a journal and a pen from one of the “Stop-n-Shop” stores. With my walk, I started to write. I would write anything and everything. What I saw, what I heard and what I thought. Gradually I realized that I had something to care for, I would wrap up the journal in plastic if it would rain, sleep with it under my head, hide it if a car slowed down while passing by. Hell I would even wake up from my sleep to check if it’s still there.
A single journal became two, two became three. One day I sat down to read what I had been writing and the pages told me I had walked far enough. I couldn’t walk away this time because a walk is what I was quitting so I decided to stay in the same motel room I was and get my journal published. Surprisingly, the journals did get published. The publication and the royalties make up quite a huge pay check but I could never call myself a writer. So, I walk for a living because a walk is the reason I get a pay check and that is what I put under the “Profession” column when I file my tax return.
The doctors had tried everything; they had run all the possible tests. He was a normal human being just like you and me. He could walk, talk, laugh, cry; do everything we can do. Then one day he walked to his bed, lay down and then never moved a muscle again. He just stopped, it all came to an end for him or maybe he bought the end to himself. It just seemed that he quit. No, he did not kill himself, he simply went into a state of, what can only be called, a self imposed paralysis. Why self imposed? Because the doctors were never able to diagnose any disease, all the tests came out negative. Then again, what do we know? The doctors for all practical reasons called it a self imposed paralysis just so that they can hide their own professional failure. I mean who in his right mind would enforce paralysis on himself; and that logic resulted in him ending up in a psyche ward.
All day long he would lay there, staring blankly at the ceiling. He was a vegetable, the physio would come and flex his limbs and the nurses would sometimes wash his body. The only movements he ever made were when these people would pull or push at different parts of his body. For some odd reason he instigated a feeling of fear among the ward’s staff. It was even more peculiar because the same staff had rapist and deranged murders in other wards. Some nurses claimed that they sometimes noticed a shine in his eyes, a shine which seemed like nothing but evil, others went as far as to say that they saw a perverse smile on his face, a smile which would freeze blood in the veins. His physios quit every other month with just an obtuse reason that,”there is something evil about this man.”
Eventually he was moved from psyche ward to psyche ward, city to city, psychiatrist to psychiatrist. None of them never really got any time to understand what he was suffering from and gradually he turned into a vegetable even on his medical records and in the mind of his doctors. His case was finally closed under the pretext that he cracked under pressure. No one actually cared about the falsity of this verdict, it was just an official stamp to what everybody already thought of him – a breathing waste. He was informed of this verdict, some of the psychiatrist were of the opinion that if he learns that humanity has given up on him he might convict himself of the “self imposed” punishment. But that didn’t change anything, his life continued the way it was ; mental institution to mental institution, city to city. Only now the doctors didn’t visit him that often, no one wants to face his failures and this one was a breathing, living failure.
It was then that the killings started. Each ward he was moved to saw a murder. A young nurse would be found raped and brutally butchered. Given his acquired reputation everyone accused him. Even though the possibility of a paralyzed man recovering and then having such physical stamina is slim, one can’t refute people’s belief so easily. The police investigation was going no where, the killer never left any clues, the victims’ families and friends demanded justice, the victims’ colleagues were scared and wanted peace of mind. The police was under pressure and since his presence at each hospital of crime could not be crossed off as a mere coincidence the murder case was solved and the earlier accusations were given an official name by the police. He was now a murder. The police couldn’t accept its failure as a law enforcement agency and he was the carpet the dust was shoved under.
The people wanted blood, the police could not afford a living, breathing failure, he saw the electric chair…
…but he never moved.
