Read Online This Darkness Mine by G.R. Yeates - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: G.R. Yeates
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light and ash, I see the mask that sits atop the stairs; ancient, wilted, dead and dry. Grey sundered flesh pouring from a patchwork clown interior, I can feel how it will not hurt or pinch me but form a special, silent union, knitting itself over my skin until my skin is no more. A tear issues, wet, from my left duct as I hear the marble crack of my skull’s bone breaking, reshaping, pushing into the hollows of the mask. The living part of me left being my eyes as my brain softens into a papier-mache ball, which rots and rolls in the misshapen cave system of my reformed skull’s interium. My mouth distorts following the lines of a leer, flesh and muscle creak under the unnatural, permanent stress. Nothing tears, nothing bleeds, nothing falls away.
I sit, shoulders aching under the unsteady weight and I rest the knobby chin into my hands and stare down the stair, waiting for someone to come, someone to whom I can give this burden. It’s so quiet up here I can hear the dismal, chanting engines of the universe running down.
I kick the mask and its visions down the stairs into the rotting darkness. It makes wet, mushy, hard sounds that are too human for me to take. I open the door to my room and pass on inside. Here is sanctuary.
Here is my window, my route out of here.
This be it then.
An end to my time in the city.
Where to next?
The window is open and I can hear what’s muttering to itself outside, shining with the midnight light of a thousand broken beetle shells. Soft-mouthed teeth stand in unburied rows stinking of sweet grave-meat and the things that crawl, listless, in such soggy stuff.
I go to the sill and lean over it, peering out to see what I knew I would. Colour, light and life swallowed up by the shifting shadow-mass that slithers underneath, grazing raw the skin of our dimensions, I cannot touch it anymore than I can see it but I can feel it.
It is waiting for me.
I mount the sill, holding myself steady with the rattling wattle of the frame.
Endings, if we have them, should be dramatic, so I let go. Pushing myself out, into the seamless night and it catches me, worm-soft, and it hurls me, a pale streak of disintegration, I travel fast and light through the walls of reality.
Into another place, another time, another space.
******
I walk the empty miles to a point in the wilderness where I can expire. The world has worn itself out around me. Leaving shadow-meats clinging to my fragile cage of hypothermic bones. I can taste boiled worms in my mouth and smell the rot of all things in all the air here. This dead sphere and its hungry creations can have me, collapsing, my head goes clear and all my consciousness spreads soiled wings of slithering butcher’s paper in which to wrap me tight. What comes to the surface will survive in the conditions we have made. Peeling skin absorbing anoxic moistures. Soft nugget eyes, white as white, unsensitive to the caustic veil of the shadowed rainstorms.
******
He sits on the front pew, by the far aisle, in a church that lies abandoned on the backstreets that lead away from deserted boulevards and dragon-adorned courtyards. He sits in a crumpled grey suit and washed-out baby-blue shirt. The church is an empty space but for him. The sleeves are too short on his jacket and the trousers are too tight at the knees. You can see the stitching has frayed, becoming somewhat shabby and loose in places. He tugs at the cuffs with delicately manicured fingertips. A breath of exasperation escapes him and he crosses then re-crosses his legs. He is tired of all this waiting. You cannot see his face, not because the church interior is a dim gloaming of sepulchral stone, and not because the light filtering through the windows is an obscuring schizophrenia of tainted colours.
The reason you cannot see his face is because he is wearing a mask.
It has two politely curving horns and you can see where the red paint has thinned out over the years, newspaper print showing
I sit, shoulders aching under the unsteady weight and I rest the knobby chin into my hands and stare down the stair, waiting for someone to come, someone to whom I can give this burden. It’s so quiet up here I can hear the dismal, chanting engines of the universe running down.
I kick the mask and its visions down the stairs into the rotting darkness. It makes wet, mushy, hard sounds that are too human for me to take. I open the door to my room and pass on inside. Here is sanctuary.
Here is my window, my route out of here.
This be it then.
An end to my time in the city.
Where to next?
The window is open and I can hear what’s muttering to itself outside, shining with the midnight light of a thousand broken beetle shells. Soft-mouthed teeth stand in unburied rows stinking of sweet grave-meat and the things that crawl, listless, in such soggy stuff.
I go to the sill and lean over it, peering out to see what I knew I would. Colour, light and life swallowed up by the shifting shadow-mass that slithers underneath, grazing raw the skin of our dimensions, I cannot touch it anymore than I can see it but I can feel it.
It is waiting for me.
I mount the sill, holding myself steady with the rattling wattle of the frame.
Endings, if we have them, should be dramatic, so I let go. Pushing myself out, into the seamless night and it catches me, worm-soft, and it hurls me, a pale streak of disintegration, I travel fast and light through the walls of reality.
Into another place, another time, another space.
******
I walk the empty miles to a point in the wilderness where I can expire. The world has worn itself out around me. Leaving shadow-meats clinging to my fragile cage of hypothermic bones. I can taste boiled worms in my mouth and smell the rot of all things in all the air here. This dead sphere and its hungry creations can have me, collapsing, my head goes clear and all my consciousness spreads soiled wings of slithering butcher’s paper in which to wrap me tight. What comes to the surface will survive in the conditions we have made. Peeling skin absorbing anoxic moistures. Soft nugget eyes, white as white, unsensitive to the caustic veil of the shadowed rainstorms.
******
He sits on the front pew, by the far aisle, in a church that lies abandoned on the backstreets that lead away from deserted boulevards and dragon-adorned courtyards. He sits in a crumpled grey suit and washed-out baby-blue shirt. The church is an empty space but for him. The sleeves are too short on his jacket and the trousers are too tight at the knees. You can see the stitching has frayed, becoming somewhat shabby and loose in places. He tugs at the cuffs with delicately manicured fingertips. A breath of exasperation escapes him and he crosses then re-crosses his legs. He is tired of all this waiting. You cannot see his face, not because the church interior is a dim gloaming of sepulchral stone, and not because the light filtering through the windows is an obscuring schizophrenia of tainted colours.
The reason you cannot see his face is because he is wearing a mask.
It has two politely curving horns and you can see where the red paint has thinned out over the years, newspaper print showing
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