Gathered Dust and Others (8 page)

“Thanatos.”

“How grim.  Perhaps it is the name of your favorite band?”

“It’s my profession.”

Beautifully, he smiled.  ”Ah!  I
thought
I recognized you when I saw you gazing at me through that cloud of cigarette smoke.  Well, dear me.  The oldest profession in the world – next to whoredom, of course.  How delightful.  You’ve come at last in answer to mumbled prayer.  God knows how often I’ve called to you, kneeling in this squalid den.  I always knew that you would be shockingly beautiful.”

I sighed.  “Mortals usually fear and loathe me.  Rarely have I been so adored.  You’ve touched me, and in gratitude I shall bestow upon you my most tender kiss.”

He gazed beyond me into darkening heaven.  “Will it be a kiss of oblivion?  I couldn’t stand any kind of eternity.  Will you grant me shadow absolute?”

“Certainly.”

His eyes twinkled.  “Joyous day!  I am your own.”  He knelt before me, and his lovely eyes shimmered like a pair of happy stars.  I fell to my knees beside him and let my semblance of flesh slip from me.  Rapturously, he gasped.  I brushed his mauve hair with hands of bone.  His liquid eyes were bright with tears.  Oh, those eyes!  Lovelier than the prettiest of stars.  Leaning to me, he kissed my grin.  I caught him as he gasped, and held him close.  I felt the fleeting tremors of his heart.  Raising to me his weary face, he gazed at me with those alchemical eyes.  Yes, I would grant him eternal darkness, but I could not surrender his awesome eyes.  I plucked them from his nodding head and thrust them into gathering twilight.  They sailed beyond the moon, burning with the beauty of his fading soul.  Sighing, I wound myself around him, ushering him into the shadow of my eternal embrace.

These Deities of Rarest Air

A Prose-Poem Sequence

I.

I press my weakened knee upon the ground and cry the call, for I would know your shadow on my brow, blossoming, and sense the arcane things endow my mundane mind with ceremonial task, rich ritual, the pleasures of daemonic design.  I cry for they who come to press mouths upon my eyes, beneath which they sink so as to suck my burning brain from out its dungeon, my smooth skull.  Allow me to let loose this essence of mortality that welds me to this world, this earth; then let me crawl into some cosmic place where weakened limbs are démodé, where pangs of fleshy pain are but a jest bequeathed by mirthless gods.  I will dance as I eschew oxygen for that other element.

Yet I, still pressed upon this solid ground, cannot ascend unto yon floating clouds, and my one task is to claw into the mud in which I write your immemorial name, the name that once more I call to those dark clouds with mouth that sucks in the current of this paltry age.  I ache to suck a rarer clime, where I can drift as acolyte of smoke among the nightmares of an alien dimension, where earth and its happy doom is but a memory that makes me chuckle into the void – the endless abyss in the gulf of night where I would waft with chilly cosmic tempest that is the exhalation from your maw, that mouth with which you speak my mortal name and claim me as your own.

II.

I cannot see the flowers at my feet, the emblems of remembrance at my tomb, for smoke and shadow cloud what once were eyes; but I can sense the soft bouquet of rose and smell the wilted lily’s rank decay.  I drift through weightless air on buoyant feet until I find again the gems that were your eyes, jewels that burn with self-substantial fire, ignition that pronounces you a god, embedded in your basalt eidolon.  I fall to shattered knee on polished floor of one posthumous place, a floor that is littered by the remembrance of flowers from your once-living devotee.  She could not last forever.  Had I lips I would moan your name as dark psalm, the name I almost seem to recollect, that once I whispered in the realm of life.  Although we both are dead, dread lord, I heard your uncanny call in termination’s dusk, and from my final slumber I awakened, to rise from rotted wood and strata of earth, to you and to a memory of life.  I thought in death to become a thing of air, lifted from the elements of time; but I am still a creature of debris, transformed into neglected dust and mud.  Like you, I am forgotten and bereft.  Like you, I find no solace in the worm.  To you I would exhale liturgical utterance and clasp my hands in unholy solitude.  Yet I am but a puppet of the grave, animated by your alchemy, and all that I can offer you, dread lord, is veneration of a hollow heart, and veneration from a mouth of filth that falls more apart with each impotent whimper, until I am returned to my filthy bed, where I will worship you if I am able, wrapped with worms.

III.

I breathe into the fitful air as the alchemy of consumption has begun, as all my physicality wastes away, as I become an element of air until I am an exhalation lifting to the skies, a vapor in a draft of wind.  As I evaporate into the clouds, like some meditation on mortality, I take on the aspect of a whispered word that may, by chance, be nothing but a name, a name that one may whisper in a prayer to some strange thing beyond sane dimension, a power pulsing in-between the stars into which my essence is inhaled.  I filter through the clouds now wet with rain, like some forgotten word once writ on water, forgotten by the faces far below that open mouths so as to drink the downpour, mouths that cannot remember me with speaking.  And thus I drift in anonymous void, like some sad ghost that has lost its earthly hold, and fly toward the thing that, pulsing, sucks me into nothingness divine.  And there I am surrounded by rare sparks, ignition that issues from a flaming throne, where chaos chatters idiotically, and the Strange Dark One offers me a pipe, which taking I press to malformed mouth, so as to join the disturbance that makes the dark air tremble, the psalm of sound that will go on and on, beyond the death of time.

IV.

We climb the haunted hill to its highest tip, to one place where memory is entombed beneath the clouds, those clouds that seem to form fantastic beings who watch our secret play.  The thing reclines upon the tabletop tomb where once it ate, where once it had been eaten, long ago.  Its hollow bones are blanched by burning sun.  We remove the dust of time from off the bones with our unhallowed tongues, the dust that is not bitter to the taste; and we remember, vaguely, the flavor of sweet soft flesh, partaken beneath the silent watchful clouds, the flesh on which we dined so long ago, devoured in remembrance of our gods.  The book of ritual is clasped in hand of bone, the book he held at time of sacrifice.  You take it from his frail fossilized hand as I move my lips to that cavity that was his mouth and housed the tongue that moved with ours in praise to they who dwell above us in the clouds.  You take the book of ritual in hand and speak the words that turn the white sun red, as the bones beneath me crumble into dust, as I recline upon the tabletop slate and turn to gaze into daemonic sky as your sweet mouths clamp onto my tissue and pay homage to our gods

V.

An arsenical moon, disrobed of clouds, hangs in suicidal sky, and I drink that moon like laudanum and sprinkle into its nectar crushed pearls of starlight.  I take that horned moon and slit the wrist of heaven, and smell the seepage of cosmic blood that taints the scent of night.  I conjure forth the wind that soughs through dancing trees and sounds like the rustling of purple satin curtains that hide my antics from the dreary crowd.  I seep between those curtains and stalk the night in memory of you, Mateo, beneath that vaulted tomb, the sky.  I take your spectral hand, my lovely lad, and kiss it with pale lips on which passion has cooled but that remember still your taste.  I pray to you, my deity of love, and dance with memory in the lost places one can only find in dream.  Sing to me, Mateo, my deity of sorrow,  so that I may follow your voice through mortal air, unto a place of ghosts that know nothing of unwanted passion.

VI.

I step into the subterranean place and breathe chthonic air that still contains a memory of that which oozed from your infernal prehistoric lungs.  I sense the recollection of your home, that darker planet deep in cosmic void, unadorned by glow of moon or star, from which you fell through non-dimensional space and time to sleepy mud beneath our ancient hill.  I find it here, upon your obsidian dais, among the jewels that have never known the light of dawn, and marvel at the expert articulation that may be uttered by an artifact.  I shine my torch onto your representation, and sense that you recoil from the touch of ersatz illumination that filters artificially through darkness.  I kill the light and see you with my senses, as the gems that are my eyes adjust to darkness, wherein I see things in a different fashion, as I suck in air that reeks of your bequeathed diseases; and as I peer into the air of this dimension, the place begins to shape itself anew, until I understand that I now stand within the ebon caverns of N’Kai, in which I bow my altered form, no longer human now but serpentine, and weep your praises with my dying breath.

VII.

How queer, these things that one can sense in darkness.  It is not imagination; it is not, I fear, even madness; and memory, or its tatters, is a damnation that threatens to grow unambiguous.  I recall the scent of morning, mostly sweet and succulent like meadow dew, yet tainted slightly by an indistinct debauch.  I remember my first sight of blurry dawn as weighty lids arose, meekly and minutely.  There is recollection of muted yet excited voices, of the faces of men that take on solid outline as the light that spills in through high windows caught the features of these fellows.  I did not deign to open my eyes too widely, unused as they were to earthly light, nor did I shift as one of the mortals bent over me with a chilly apparatus, one part of which he placed against my chest as its other end was fastened to his ear.  How distasteful it was, to be touched and violated; but my limbs proved stiff and heavy, and would not move in protest beneath mortal hands; nor could I split my mouth in protest as a needle was injected yet again into my heart, as something from within that implement flowed through me, something smooth and cool and sinister.  Rough mortal hands clutched at me, and I was lifted from the surface on which I reclined, carried some little distance and then dropped into an uncouth pit from which I could discern the fragrance of freshly violated earth.  Words, muttered in discouragement and anger, faded, and I sensed that I had been abandoned in the lonesome place.

The blur of hateful day grew more intense as it blazed from the high wide windows, and the ghouls who were my guardians did not return.  More and more, the burning liquid that had been injected into my heart pumped through my veins, and thus I was invigorated.  With a sense of doubtful liberation I clutched at the walls of my pit and pushed hands into its sediment, where I found enough of a hold so that I could pull myself onto my knees.  My eyes now fully functioned, and with them I scrutinized the floor of earth around me and its other crude pits, some of which were hideously inhabited.  There were tables and their implausible instruments, the sight of which brought nagging memory to mind. Of a place where I had labored in stealth, in some secret chamber, combining powders and fluids as I uttered incantations from the Aklo tablets.  I saw within my mind’s depths the beings of another realm that had answered my incantations, creatures that were not angelic.  These fiends pushed against my moving mouth and stole my mortal exhalation until sensation expired and sentient darkness wove around and through me.  Time transformed, and soon I smelled the muted light of new dawn; and lifting my face to that soft light I experienced renewed strength, and crawled out of the shallow indentation into which the ghouls had tossed me.  Creeping to a vast wooden vat that squatted on naked earth, I curled my fingers around its rim so as to regain threatened balance; and as I clutched that rim I studied the unnatural blanched pastiness of my hands, soiled as they had been by earth’s debris.  I steadied on painful knees and bent over the vat’s wooden rim.  I watched the white reflection of the ghastly thing I had become as it wavered in the vat’s liquid, wavered because my shuddering was shaking the wooden tub.  I shook because I was a thing that should not – or should no longer – exist.  Oh, bleached and bony countenance, what horror you portend, what breach of sanity; for I was a madness out of time, disrupted in my final rest by the fluid that had been injected into my diseased heart.  My mouth then found its voice, and I whimpered at my fate.

Uneasily, I stood.  Ungainly, I stalked to a door and shook it from its hinges, then tramped upon it as it crashed onto the ground.  Unnaturally, I breathed, and the sound of that exhalation was conjoined with a groan of unutterable misery.  I walked until the yellow sky darkened and a bloated moon appeared, a fungal chimera deep within an abyss of night.  I walked instinctively, until I found the plot from which I had been robbed.  The ground of my grave had been smoothed, its desecration concealed.  I tried to speak the name that had been etched onto my tombstone, but naught slipped from my mouth except a gag of woe.  When I dropped onto the ground, my fingers found their way homeward into the earth.  The smell of displaced sod began to soothe me, and as I worked I tried to sing a memory of magick that was one portion of the Aklo formulae with which, in other existence, I communed with deities of rarest air.  And the sound of my strangled voice lifted to the fungal moon, which was soon camouflaged by shapes that were not clouds, fiends that fell to me.  They wove around and through me as I reclined within my new-made pit, as I pulled the displaced silt over me, until it covered me completely.

VIII.

Looking inward, she saw naught but phantoms – fiends that, churning, laced her heart with doom.  She did not mind that this was so; for she had wearied of humanity and its unhappy world, where in delusion its inhabitants danced and warbled of nothing beneath their expiring sun.  She loathed them and their senseless frolic, and hated the way their sunlit faces condemned her malcontent.  They could never comprehend her, and thus she felt kinship with fiends alone, those things of smoke and madness that churned around her brain and sank into her heart, where they taught that organ deadlier palpitation.  And thus she secreted herself in one lonesome place, a place of death where happy mortals were disinclined to play; and there she danced with vines of willow trees and sang to startled bats,  and answered the baying that drifted to her on the midnight wind, the howling of some unearthly thing that hungered for blood and tears.  She danced, accompanied by her shadowed fiends, those comrades that melted into her heart and taught it deceleration, an alien palpitation that pulsed inside her throat and lifted to the back of her eyes, her eyes to which were revealed an obscure realm where dreams festered and became merrily diseased.