by Vincent Daemon
There are dark and terrible things that lurk within the utmost deepest recesses of the human mind. Blackened, bleak things that all humans seem to hide away, block out, chemically roadblock or pretend aren’t there. Base urges of dark deceit. Sickly biological imperatives. The sleeping brag of God and whine of bad, neither really existing. Their only worries are their petty cold-creature comforts and their crotches. Money, material goods, and fucking. The wretched, selfish act of procreation, nothing more than further spreading this virus of humanity. But who’s “happy,” what is contentment of existence? Is it perhaps an ideal unobtainable, another allusive illusion conjured like some sickly ego-magick to ease the dark intrusive thoughts of stark terrors that come in the lonely din of witching hour silence?
I sleep on a mat in the corner of a small and oddly angled room, ten paces from my roommate (an old friend putting me up in this time of worldly collapse. I get looked at like I'm crazy when I explain that dimensions are bleeding through). He sleeps often, when home, speaking his unnerving dreams aloud most every session of not-so-blissful slumber. I, an insomniac by nature, hear every utterance of his abstract horrors most every night. One evening he bolted up in the darkness, asking about “Carlos’ severed arm.” I don’t know a Carlos, but apparently something awful had happened in Jason’s somniferous deliriums.
Sometimes I’ll take a boatload of some good hard opiate just to relax and perhaps catch my own bit of somnium. If that’s not an option, I’ll either stay up as long as possible, or, on rare occasions, take some speed in a fuckall of frustration, just to be able to feel something other than the persistent dread of hopeless lonesomeness and unending futility. Either way, after a couple of days I crash hard for a good seven hours or so. Then come the dreams that transmute into hypnagogic reality...and that’s when the shadows come. They don’t feel like “ghosts,” yet they hover about the stairs at strange angles of not just my cramped room in this deranged and unheated squat, but within the fabric of the decrepit house itself.
As for the house, no one knows who owns it. We, the six of us, pay a very minimal amount to a completely unseen and unknown being, by mail, once a month. There is no maintenance. The house itself is a decrepit deathtrap of dry rot, black mold, cloudy water and plumbing problems, and astonishingly sketchy electricity. The other dwellers are interesting enough folk, little as I have in common with them (beyond Jason). They cannot see what I see.
The sink bothers me. I moved into a cluttered environment with a sink that was always filled with toppling foodware covered in a thick gloss of wet mold and teeming with filthy insects of multiple varieties. Silverfish in hoards, centipedes in every rotten cup. And one big black spider that I’ve seen once but never again. Of spiders I am not fond. The dining area has an odor resembling that of a trash can filled with dead baby birds baking in the Pennsylvania midsummer swell. It is thick and repellent, not good for the mind. Sometimes, while working to get something uncontaminated to eat around the pungent filth, I swore I could see the fuzzed and moist molds begin to pulsate and throb, grow and kind of sluice around to other parts of the rotting sink as if by their own peculiar volition.
But I digress. The shadows: things that move in darkness more obscure than even the void of pitch in which they watch and sneer, seemingly waiting for an action upon which they never act. That is, until tonight. In my narco-haze of hypnagogic insomniac misery they finally came forward, revealing themselves in full.
Now, don’t be fooled, I’ve seen the one up close on one occasion, and that was the night I moved in. My roommate was at work and no one but the dog was here, a terrier-lab mix aptly named Roadblock, though he’s a good beast. Anyway, I was in my room and toiling on the computer. It was raining lightly outside and I had a good opiate buzz going. I was fairly productive and working on a new essay for my column. In fact, I write this now to be placed as my final piece, but more on that later. They have at least allowed me this. Anyhow, it was intensely quiet but for an Old Fezziwig disc playing faintly in the background. Having been writing and researching for hours and drinking mass quantities of Gatorade, I began to get the piss shivers. So I got up and stretched, and made my way from the moderate darkness of the room to the impenetrable obscurity of the hall. The bathroom’s right there, so I slipped in and did my thing. Finished, I opened the bathroom door, which is right in front of a steep set of stairs, and proceeded back to my room.
My peripheral vision noticed something was off with the stairs. So I stepped back two feet, looked to my right, and there I saw it, plain as day, slightly silhouetted by the ambient street light gleaming in through the front window. It was easily eight feet tall and just stood there on the stairs, no face, no features. Just a shadow draped in something resembling a burlap shroud. It stood completely still, staring at me, as I stared back. No sound, no malevolent feelings. Quite the contrary, the feeling was bordering on total disregard. It was just a being like myself, lost and trapped, displaced and disconnected. I turned to go back to my room, truly believing this to be some drug-vision trick of the eye. But a moment later I decided to go back and look again. There it was, leering in the same spot at the center of the stairs, faceless yet looking at me. At that point I felt a discomforting moribund connection to something I’d never felt before. It was cold and sharp, direct. Between us there were shared pains of many different shades.
This. This made me incredibly uncomfortable, and I retreated back to my squalid little room, trying as I might to put the experience into some kind of compartment in my head, an essentially futile task. When Jason got home I asked him about it.
“Jason, is there something a little strange about this house?”
“Oh...hahaha...yeah...a few things. I guess I forgot to mention that.”
I didn’t find it so funny. “Apparently.”
“You saw the big one...didn’t you? The eight footer? We’ve all seen it. Along with a coupla others...smaller. They don’t bother, really. Just occasionally are there...then not.” He paused. “They move things, too...watch out for that.”
“Hmm.” My feelings were initially mixed before I almost began relishing the idea.
“I thought you might dig it.”
“Yeah, kinda. Let’s see how it goes.”
Initially it was no bother. On some nights the smaller shadows, two of them from what I could tell, would hide in the shelter of the angled corners of the room, watching me write or play guitar or get high. Probably even while pleasuring myself as well, though I never really checked to see. I’m sure they saw it all. They’d occasionally hover over me while I was trying to sleep (usually another exercise in futility) so I was quite aware of their presence. It happened mostly on nights my roommate wasn’t home, and sometimes when he was. They seemed to have no particular interest in him, but loomed around me often and for long periods. Sometimes their presence would render as sound—a distant and disconnected child’s laugh mixed with some kind of odd music, a mix of carny-classical-jazz that doesn’t belong in this dimension—an awkward yet incessant and mildly intense, flittery sound. It was sometimes a bit daunting, never particularly uncomfortable, but more fascinating and fairly intriguing. These were sounds inimitable to how we as humans understand music.
Before I go any further, let me tell you how I ended up here in this ramshackle suburban squat, sharing a room with a tormented friend, in a house with four other sketchy and distant people with their insane dog, surrounded by sentient mold and these blasted angles of shadow beings obsessed with me during the dead of night. Not to mention, whatever the hell it is that’s started to scratch from the inside of the unopenable gnome-door at the foot of my bed-mat—that’s a story in and of itself.
Elizabeth Lynn was the love of my cursed and nomadic life, my soulmate and the only person who ever accepted me—for the infinitely fucked up being I am—as me, as is. I loved her deeply, soulfully. To a point, anyway, apparently. “You’re me!” she used to say in all her cuteness. She was a different sort of creature herself, of the rare para-perceptive mind, as I am. But one morning I watched her facial features change. I noticed her eyes go as flat as this newfound deadness took over her face. Just four hours earlier she was her...and then she wasn’t. The words she spoke were of ego and pain, some odd choice between myself and the hollow promise of material riches. She chose the promise of wealth, and the brightest light I had ever known, ever seen, had suddenly gone dark. Being who and what I am, I know I'm not always the easiest person to deal with, but her spur of the moment decision (during perhaps our first argument in two years) stuck fast like the freakish mold in the goddamned sink. Her egocentric pride and desire to belong overrode our bond of mind and soul. I can still feel her, still smell her in the early morning if I’ve slept, or in the thick of night when the shadows lurk and reach into my wrecked soul, while I'm longing for her warmth and the divinity of her taste. She broke something never again attainable, something important in the fabric of this realm of unending pain, this apocalypse of existential quirks with a unified loathing for this dying world. She turned our world into an ashtray. I told her the dimensions were bleeding through, that my worst fear was waking up to a “her-not-her”—an alien. And I did. She once had the most beautiful smile and evil-drenched sarcastic laugh. She was a real beauty inside and out, in every way she could be; now unrecognizable after one night. She once loved me for just being me. Now she hates me for the same reason.
Elizabeth Lynn was the love of my cursed and nomadic life, my soulmate and the only person who ever accepted me—for the infinitely fucked up being I am—as me, as is. I loved her deeply, soulfully. To a point, anyway, apparently. “You’re me!” she used to say in all her cuteness. She was a different sort of creature herself, of the rare para-perceptive mind, as I am. But one morning I watched her facial features change. I noticed her eyes go as flat as this newfound deadness took over her face. Just four hours earlier she was her...and then she wasn’t. The words she spoke were of ego and pain, some odd choice between myself and the hollow promise of material riches. She chose the promise of wealth, and the brightest light I had ever known, ever seen, had suddenly gone dark. Being who and what I am, I know I'm not always the easiest person to deal with, but her spur of the moment decision (during perhaps our first argument in two years) stuck fast like the freakish mold in the goddamned sink. Her egocentric pride and desire to belong overrode our bond of mind and soul. I can still feel her, still smell her in the early morning if I’ve slept, or in the thick of night when the shadows lurk and reach into my wrecked soul, while I'm longing for her warmth and the divinity of her taste. She broke something never again attainable, something important in the fabric of this realm of unending pain, this apocalypse of existential quirks with a unified loathing for this dying world. She turned our world into an ashtray. I told her the dimensions were bleeding through, that my worst fear was waking up to a “her-not-her”—an alien. And I did. She once had the most beautiful smile and evil-drenched sarcastic laugh. She was a real beauty inside and out, in every way she could be; now unrecognizable after one night. She once loved me for just being me. Now she hates me for the same reason.
So I left most of my meager possessions and moved a hundred miles back to my home town. Again. This place I’ve been trying to escape for a lifetime. A somber habitat whose tendrils apparently have some sort of hold on my life, perhaps my soul. That’s how I ended up rooming with Jason. As to the angelic princess turned demonic angel whom I still love despite the amount of intense pain and dire heartache that was caused, I can only wish the best for her while on her on own dark journey into this melting reality. She will not like it. When ready, she knows how to find me. Or perhaps I should say did know how to find me. Part of me wants to be lost. Now you know.
This particular night the frequency is different in the biting cold of this unheated house, in the midst of a storm-driven power outage. I can see them clearly as I write this beneath the sloping thirty-three degree angle under which I work and sleep. I have one vanilla scented candle, heart-shaped and tacky, and I’ve no idea where the hell it came from. Three wicks. It is lit, projecting just the right illumination to bring on the full menagerie of angles seen and unseen. It's flickering light casts shadows within shadows dancing in angles within angles. The room has become a different place altogether, as though the bleeding dimension has finally overlapped with this one, with mine. Everything I’d said to Elizabeth Lynn has happened, as I dreamed and thought and felt it would, although the bleed-through is rendering this realm no longer malleable to my touch. I am confused, for now it really is as I had said.
Horrible and sinister alternate places are crashing headlong into ours, altering minds—switching out the souls of the blind, the unaware, the sleeping—in the blink of an eye. Whatever this was, it tore away the best part of humanity, an invisible epidemic of stolen souls, leaving shifted personalities and darkened eyes in its wake. Of course, this theory could just be my own stressed and half-mad mind rationalizing things that “just happen.” But that is not what is happening. This is also physical, molecular. The particles from here are blending with the particles from there and reorganizing into something wretched. This is a mass mutation of hatred coming from elsewhere, from something bigger and perhaps blind to all that we think we are, these useless sacks of sentient goo, really no better than that quivering, giggling mold down in the sink.
“Just happen...” Did the shifting multiple angles of my room “just happen?” What about the three shadow-beings glaring at me from the disorienting flicker of the now Escher-scape of this tiny room in which I am trapped? I lay back and watch this in a sort of dulled amazement. I’m not really sure how to react.
Outside I hear strange and unidentifiable sounds of creaking, squealing metal accompanied by a low hum, and the sounds of unknown baying creatures and human terror filling the stormy night. The metallic sound is emanating from the sky, unlike anything I’ve ever heard before, and for all the disquiet it brings, all of it, there’s a nice accompaniment happening in hideous synchronicity to the dancing throb of the flickering walls. Same for the swelling flute-like netherworld music that only I can hear, hearkening back to the ugly days of minstrels and freak shows filtered through the tainted illusion of a silent film. It’s slightly louder than usual, and I still can’t figure out its source. It just exists. Or perhaps it’s the mold. This resonance always accompanies the two smaller shadow beings, who are now leering at me by the closet as I write this.
The one thing that disturbs me most of all is the aforementioned gnome door. And that’s because it has started to rattle violently—and it locks from the outside. The door is supposedly unopenable.
It rattles and bangs in primal rhythmic bursts. There should be nothing in there. I don't like this one bit. It keeps me frozen in place here beneath the dagger-sharp outer corners and undulating walls that twist and reshape before my eyes, while the smaller shadow beings creep hazily toward it—that dreadful small door at the foot of my mat.
With jittery flickering movements, the darkness waved a shadow over the latch, which I heard slowly lift and slide, ancient paint crackling away as it did so. My chest tightened and I could barely breathe as the door kicked open and the most indescribably nasty little creature burst out. At first it was still, breathing deeply and sniffing the air, staring about the shifting room and its charged atmosphere of unknown particles and worlds colliding. It was on all fours, but raised to a hunched two-legged stance, shaking with an unfettered fury. It resembled an anorexic possum with thick short wiry-sharp hair, like grey pins, almost quills. Its rodent-like head displayed a nightmare of jagged, razor-sharp teeth. Its inordinately large mouth drooled. The eyes were rounded and glowing red, beneath a brow furrowed with intense hate. It finally turned and caught my terrified gaze. This thing peered deeply into me from the foot of my small bed-mat, its chest heaving with barely controlled rage.
I couldn't move, could not comprehend, could not even think. I was now fully immersed, trapped, in an unfamiliar world I understood less than the previous one I’d resided in. Reality, as I had always perceived it, had finally answered my lifelong questioning of its stability, and I was, admittedly, stricken with another stark terror: the paramount fear that I was right, had always been right. Fuck. Well, to a degree, anyway. I was being shown the complete transmutability of this reality into that reality; for certainly, another reality had crashed into and utterly subverted mine.
The strange classical-carny-flute music continued to play its morbidly sweet and discordant tune of notes we do not have, that most of mankind is either too dim or simple to acknowledge. Some, however, are apparently not only sensitive but highly open to it, under the right circumstances. But I’ve no idea what they are. Consequently, it does not matter.
Amidst the chaos, sound and shadow, and deathly movement of that horrid little thing breathing and glaring at me with its heaving swells of pure malice, along with my catatonic yet amazed being, I felt as if sudden communications from even more bizarre yet present, unseen beings were seeping into my skull. Could these be the perpetrators of those ghastly, high pitched squeals and scrapes and rumbles felt in the chest that seemed to emit from some place hidden in the clouds above? It wasn’t the three shadows, nor was it the perpetually staring, unblinking animal at the foot of the bed-mat. I could only remain still as that rat-thing might react in some violent, furious fashion to any movement, any direct eye contact. It was appalling, it didn’t belong here in my room, nor in that crawlspace, nor in this world—or was it that world? Goddamnit.
The music tensed and jerked like a cramping muscle, once peaceful discordance becoming loathsome, morbid cacophonous din. These were ugly sounds, like pins to the ear or sonic ipecac poured down the throat. I wanted to vomit, but my empty stomach only left me convulsing with savage, dry heaves. The beast at my feet seemed to languish in my terror and misery, practically laughing at these acts of built-in human emotion played out as involuntary dismay of every sort. I swore its fanged rodent mouth was twisting back into a leering smile.
The large shadow creature formed out of the angled penumbra on the other side of the shifting room. It came to me, a few feet from the bed. It seemed bigger, taller now. Claiming it as eight feet tall would be an understatement. The ceiling seemed not to exist, but was instead merely some kind of loose particle-aether imitating the ceiling. To my perception it had dissolved, transmuted into something else, that only some deep ancient intuition had even the slightest concept of, but no words for.
In full disclosure, my life had always been a strange affair, and I've invariably been a magnet for phenomenological occurrences, but this was fucking incomprehensible. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, to cry at the dire knowledge being dispelled and projected in countless immutable ways. Awe and terror had become one.
It then lunged, that monstrosity at the foot of my bedding, the horrid little thing scurrying up my legs, over my crotch then stomach until it sat upon my chest. It leaned in, placed its wretched face to mine, and growled some form of gibberish as though I was supposed to understand it. I did not. It then dropped to all fours, laying low, resting on my solar plexus and leering, judging, as if contemplating its next move.
The large shadow-being then loomed over me, looking down and saying nothing, but projecting a voice into my skull in a language I’d never heard but fully understood. It was more or less untranslatable, but I now knew what I had to do. This universe, this world, was no longer mine. There was another layer, another transmutative systematization coming from the wicked cosmos. Mankind is too dim to ever fully comprehend or properly understand. Man is primarily a closed beast, but for the seemingly chosen and not as nomadic few.
This thing on my chest was from somewhere else, and somewhere else am I supposed to go. It was making these sharp, dreadful gosling sounds and ululating howls to the music of madness, the shadows projecting like stereophonic echoes of coughing horror. The flames from my candle were beginning to drip upwards to the ceiling, disappearing in blue sparks as they hit the undulating particle barrier.
The rough beast continued to stare and gurgle as the smaller shadow beings came and beckoned me with odd gestures to rise to my knees. As I sat up, the creature climbed over my shoulder and down my back.
The larger shadow being was by the gnome door, holding it wide open, its extraordinary words projecting into my skull, suggesting this was what I had to do. I had no control, none of this was my choice, but rather a random choice made by an infinite cosmos that does not care. Much like all the other entities that hide deep within, eternally there, always felt, but forever unseen. There is no “god” as most humans think and wish upon with silly prayers as though they were in some fairy tale. But there are a number of other things lurking that really just don’t care, and are generally not even aware that you are here or there. The things that do know recognize us for the primitive vermin that the human species really is.
They beckoned me to all fours, like that desiccated otherworldly possum thing, like the beast that I am. As I crawled across the floor, I looked back and saw my body still there on the bed. And at that moment I saw the most dreadful thing, appalling to every sense and then some. That uncanny rodent demon was climbing down the throat of the other me, that me’s mouth distending, his jaw cracking. The throat rose with an immense lump as the rodent horror slithered itself in and down, the tail slipping into my other’s mouth and disappearing like a nightcrawler back into its mud-hole.
Was that me? Or is this me? To dwell on this would make the somewhat functional me writing this diatribe a madman to the point of violently lashing out at a laughing, undefeatable cosmos. Or perhaps it would be suicide if the shock didn’t do me in first. I couldn’t look at it anymore. This is me. Down on the floor. Writing these words. Crawling to the door.
The shadows are guiding me through the gnome door. I’ve realized that the floor is also now a loose particle slop much like the ceiling. It does support me however, like a wavering, beige colored jello. They let me write this final document of my experience in the hope that others will read this and understand, will know what to do once the great collision occurs in each and everyone’s reality bubble. I’ve two marked envelopes to the couple of people who may understand, who might attempt to publish this madness to make others aware of what is coming, that nothing is truly what it seems yet nothing is everything; that mankind’s mutable place in anything is the pinnacle of futility.
After I enter the door, I am to toss this manuscript out. The shadows will place it on Jason’s bed, upon which he’ll see it in the morning, make copies, and send it out.
I am now facing the door, at the threshold of a world I once knew now alien and unknown to me, much like my former lover’s eyes, to which another me is already here, yet someone else entirely. Just beyond that doorstep I see only a stifling, terrifying black, a void of which I may fall or float into or implode within, but I’ve no choice. That new thing—in this once somewhat familiar, now particle-seeping place—is not me. I am whatever becomes in the void, inside that door. A death-to-birth in one fell movement of a moment.
I leave here with only disgust for our world of allusive illusions and blatant dishonesty, traits now ingrained in an infestation of self-righteous idiots and quasi-elitist bullshit sellers, bold faced liars of great lies about their lives of abundance while secret hells occur behind closed doors. I cross this threshold as I can take no more heartache, no more soul crushing deceits to explode like atom bombs in the midst of peace. My mass is not long for this world, and these shadow beings are pushing me into another realm, something insidiously happening in this realm for far too long. I am one with it.
I look forward with a fairly legitimate fear of this particle-driven unknown. Will I just become part of the Void? Will I enter the dimension overlapping ours? Is this the great cosmic shift? Am I just dreaming? High and not aware of it? It doesn’t matter now, for I am crossing the threshold.
My body feels nothing at first, then a slight pins-and-needles reclamation of such. The scent is sweet, familiar, perhaps of a beast like me. What begins to fade into my vision is far beyond any proper description, but this is now a world and it is forming into something amazing, perhaps the place I always should’ve been. Colors I’ve never seen before fill my eyes with their brilliant display, and I know that scent. This manuscript is beginning to dissolve from my grip, particle disintegration taking it back before I can finish.
I’m still in darkness but it’s beginning to form around me like raising neon sandcastles, coming into beautiful shape from the void of nothing. I hear a sound, something akin to a voice, distant and muffled. It hides within the consequence of the enveloping particle world around me, caught up in a sort of whoosh.
To my absolute astonishment, my soul suddenly feels aflame with new life and I realize I am home, reforming, getting whole.
That voice, my name, it hides within the colors of the scents, coming from all directions but nowhere, frequency vibrating particles still—they do not want me writing this—the manuscript, the pen, are rapidly fading from my faded hands as I find myself a new form in this new land.
That voice, those colors, that scent—
I need a vision—
Then I see—
Now I see—
With all the fire and light in my soul I see the voice slowly coming together as a solid form particle, much like myself. I don’t know what I am but I am.
Now I see—
I am—
A vision—
They are—
A vision—
A voice—
They are—
Colors and a scent—
Disassociated familiarity—
Oh, mother of gods, it’s so beautiful, you’re——
by Edgar Allan Poe & John Shirley
online only
on the FREEZINE of
Fantasy and Science
Fiction
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