Anonyma Read online

  I awaken in another world as a higher version of myself. No different in appearance or mind. Only in the gravity. A lightness of body that likens itself to a gentle dream. I mark the manner of this gentleness and knows it as deceit. A dream-complete. The true ritual. This is how it begins, in Doom-sleep.

  XII.

  Pink dust looms on high over the treetops. Lie down here, the wind whispers. Sleep. Sleep! Lie down here, be lulled by the leaves. Lulled deeply into sleep, pleasant sleep! But what do they want of me? Why did I go in? I have only the knowledge of partial death, tied to the sad living world by spirit threads I cannot cut.

  How I have come to be here—beneath branches of lavender, roots of gold, I have no recollection. Granite eyes extend to the lord’s constellation. Glorious vanity, shuddering on moist shoulders in the last known place before the woods. I mark the mangled mess of dreams and wonder.

  I take pleasure in absurd insomnia, as one takes pleasure in a fine, weightless disgrace. Incapable of the fullness of life, I am only a witness to the artifice of the woods. The riverbed breathes. Blue lightning breaks the sky in pieces. Strange slurring words of untraceable language travel from the deepest reaches of the land… and human skin in piles, feast—bait for something lurking beyond my senses.

  I lower my head to the emptiness of my convulsions and think, “What do I fear?” Floundering through the brush, slicing lengths of flesh- as violent and as wistful as in life. The rigid air clouds over, alien and diseased, in a matter of moments. Panic-stricken, I amble through thick, metallic mud as blackness spreads over the electric sky. Plunging into the protection of the muck as the strikes shake the treetops, I taste the insidious liquids of the forest. Alien scents shock the senses. As I emerge from the mess, I notice countless scrapes from submerged tree roots. My belly bleeds the dark wisdom of the woods.

  Nicholas is out there, somewhere—spirit mandibles at the intersection of horizon and hell. Viewing restraint as silk, black hair as velvet, brilliance as precipitation. I wonder if he has taken me from the bath of blood. If he has even found my body shriveling there—the quiet aftermath. The sky bleeds its silver magic, hardening men. Horrifying me. I allow myself to be seen by this unsacred darkness, through the frigid air and firmament. I feel a kick. I am being twinned in this fragility, as hollow as the deepest mold of the earth.

  The mud fades from the deep stink of metallic fumes to a frothy pink scum. There I find other men, other women—bodies soaked and sunken, in and out, tear-salted eyes glued open. My stomach, scabbed and bruised, retracts at the sounds of death emitting from their mouths.

  Here drown the first subjects I will witness. My mind holds a glittering memorial to all once seen and felt outside of the woods. On approach, thirst becomes insatiable, but I know this: drink from the stream, and I will lose my mind in the erotic anguish of these vanquished spirits, soaked through with the dark dreams of deceit. Twilight urges me toward dread. Towards faintness of will. I walk forward to mourn the mob of bodies in the froth, who, without sight or hearing, will not know me. I wipe away my tears on the perfect peeled skin of the dead, and return to the depths of the diseased brush. Gold roots. Blue light. Shrill piping of a sickened dawn. My tongue crawls out in want of water. There is nothing without pus or poison. Nothing untouched by the alchemical decadence of doom-design. Even this will mark me as a pariah in the Afterworld. Disobedience is accessory to ruin, even here in the woods.

  I had avoided my own nakedness like death. Fought the onslaught of twisting bodies. Little flowers, my only vice, were arranged in a nighttime theatre of the heart. I hold one yellow rose to my cheek, only to watch it shrivel into dust. As we all will. My skin is flaking. With one sharp sweep of my hand, I release the dust of my flesh, snowing over the mud.

  Resting against a stone, I wonder if delirium is the bird’s final instinct. Finding this in myself, it is the only natural conclusion I want to come to, contemplating the immensity of death. I have forgotten my desire. And like the wilted earth forgets me, I collapse—a long fall into the field of darkest blossoms, illuminated only by my endless night.

  Spirits don’t stand guard over these people, and never within reach of the woods. I feel their absence in these lands, more so than on earth. But with the richness of sights so profound, so confusing, there is something of a meditation to existence only.

  The stolen souls will vomit up the filth of their passion in the river. Seethe with the dark vehemence of the woods. Turn to stone as they sleep in waking life. A pale sludge will ooze from the eyes and ears, as it is in the Scaearulldytheraeum. The bodies collapse as such, evaporating within minutes. One must wonder at what cost such things occur. Their faces are painted with the quiet corruption of youth, and I think where and why and how and who has done this to them?

  No means of confirmation sets me at ease. Only deeper into terror. With wide eyes shivering, glancing over my shoulder, I turn—nothing. Nothing to be seen, save for the missing horizon, buried in a regiment of bark and brush.

  Pleasure thrives on forgotten guilt. Penetration after penetration. An orgy of sound and body, consummated in the deep mud of the river bank. Without breath, I hide behind the thickest tree, watching. I hold my own hand as all glitters around me. Forgotten innocence in the depths of detachment. I faintly recall the sharp penetration—Nicholas Bezalel inside me for the first time. Bristles scrape my inner thighs in the dark. The gutting of the nervure like angel hair from the spine.

  All sensations are lost to me but the phantom slithering. I cannot make sense of the shapes at my feet, only shapes—pale and serpentine. In the lull beneath the darkling crescent, the ecstasy of invisible insects is not lost. Heat stirs deep inside the unseen parts of me. It trickled down my legs and disappears into the mess of mud. My legs are floating, floating. I weep in this ecstasy, falling back against the somber weight of the woods.

  Now I am awake. I am waking. The bodies soak in the ever-changing mud. Their bellies are bloated. I look down and see my own hyaline protrusion. A great big bulb of black glass from the mid-torso, and I get the sickly feeling. The deeper I go, the stranger it will become. Souls in installation as spirit meat—both sustenance and procreative wonderment. So even I must be brought to wonder—where is this devil who requires so much? And what use might have I, now? Who is the doom artist of the dark woods?

  Platinum dust flies off the bark upon impact. A galloping sound grows as I gaze into the mist of worlds. Motionless in fear, my mind racing to the Mare of a Thousand Wounds, I am unable to even cover my ears from the onslaught of sound. My horizontal softness, crushed. The faint sensation of slithering returns over my toes and my darkened guts erupt with longing. This passion knows no hand or heart of man. Only the tiny life, present in some spectrum within my will to conjure. I must protect her from all of this death.

  XIII.

  Fallen gods draw dreams on earth, in disorder. They want grace, not echoes from infinite worlds. It would be fitting that the death-divide would merge the profane and unclean with the disdainful dreams of a hateful god. In this death, it finds the erotic, the playful. Not fury or indifference. The great god’s hands are unclean and not hands at all. Rather pools of hateful glaze, swimming through the elements, through me.

  In my own eyes I find the quickness of life – unprepared. I continue in the fatal tradition of laughter, but a sliver of warmth ascends from gut to mouth. I emit the mass of my juices. Born in overarching filth, pink mist, and insect resin, I stumble in slow motion-- as decrepit as my experiences are mediocre. Wounded by inconsistency, I cradle whispers as children, and hurl them towards the eternal landscape.

  Looking up to a sea of stars, one planet sits in orbit of this dream existence. One blue world without a name, always hovering.

  A gentle white powder graces my face and chest, soothing the senses, warming the surrounding air. I have emerged from the woods. In spite of everything, I feel a quiet bliss raining down, in anticipation of the night. I was born a great dreamer. Tor
mented within by the halls of possibility, braving the earth with the sensation of absolute failure. Gleaming, stretching, glittering worlds exist beyond the bounds of the body. This flesh, the artifice of God, himself dead, floating in the loveliness of crumbling statues and bleeding bodies.

  A vengeful gale rushes past; a streak of yellow sailing into the black ignominy of the heavens. Each moment brings a new heaviness to the chest and face. From the paralysis of love, I grow silent, seeing only flocks of dark birds gather over a sea of petulant slime. With acidic wrath that could disintegrate metal, a bath of pain as warm as terror’s inverse. Miraculous sucking! Delirious moon! The grey flags wave in the ships like insects in file to oppression.

  A column of rain frightens the scarlet serpents lingering at my feet. A sharp gale throws my body against blonde grass, terror swimming through still blood.

  The procession of ships moves carefully through the currents, unable to move with ease over the waves of slime. A splintering white dock emerges in the distant fog, revealing cloaked travelers from every vessel, carrying bone lanterns of strange green light. Captured will o the wisps or some other such creature, in anger, flickering over the currents and onto the dunes.

  One such passenger from the lowly ships approaches me, cloaked in purple, face obscured by both hood and mask of metal.

  “You are the visitor in Doom-sleep?” it asks, the hissing tone of his voice hurts my ears.

  “I am.” I answer.

  It motions towards the dock. Turning in the opposite direction, I see nothing but sands turning into a valley drowning in blonde grass and buried serpents. Hesitating, I turn back and follow him to the dock.

  Closer inspection reveals the ships to be perilous. Dead bodies attached to giant hooks sit in single-file rows. I turn to run, but am halted by the robed creature, elephantine face now visible after the unlatching of its metal coverings.

  “One can cross the sea intact,” he begins, motioning for me to sit. I remain standing. “But madness awaits them.” I examine the nearest body. A young girl, dark skin, tawny-haired and fragile, the hook dug deeply into her lower abdomen. No blood.

  “Is she living?”

  The creature points skyward. I look and see a hovering translucence over the ship. Feel a shower of life rain down upon me.

  “Joined again on the other shore. Yes, they live.”

  Nodding, the creature holds the white hook to my eyes, then sets it into my stomach without warning. White dust pours out of the wound. I lower my eyes in horror, teeth chattering, senses screaming, feeling myself being pulled backwards with alarming force—a shadow figure fading in front of me. I identify as my own body. Unable to succeed the vastness of myself, I succumb to the moisture and the journey. Floating upward in an arc, spirit tether keeping me secure. Showers of silver, streaking past the moon, reflect on the tethered spirits, all.

  With pride, I thrust myself over the waves, bound to my corpse. I am not free in this state, not alive either. Though this gliding through air and foam bears something of an elemental promise. Crossing through the sea is difficult, though not a difficulty of nature. The wild, ecstatic night accompanies me through this agony of learning, and I sense a silent faith grow within my chest. Even pain-in-bones abates to the wild coos of nocturnal creatures, unfamiliar in this realm of After-Earth. Fuscous liquid thrashing—a familiar violence. Monumental waves soaring in impossible directions, menacing gales from the dead heavens, the faint glow of enormous sea worms ebbing in and out of the currents, bashing the side of the ship in territorial rage.

  After endless hours, the faint outline of a structure looms in the distant night. A giant gold cube, supported by an angled disc, emerging from slime.

  Demon eyes dilate upon the scene—absurd illusions. All familiar, and growing. The cube, upon closer inspection, glows with a Rubiginous hue. We reach the dark shore of the heathen place. I emerge from the ship wearily; raven hair curling from dampness and humidity. An anaemic bird-like creature, albino and neurotic—huddles by the palace door, caked in mildew and algae, counting fungi sprouting from golden plaster.

  Floating ghouls carry giant orange worms with a thousand legs from the slime. A fisherwoman, slowed by her pendulous breasts, shaven head gleaming in the light of the rising moon, drops a worm, approaches me. Dreadful sounds ring out from the doorway. A phantom ebb of lurid notes. Haunted songs for a haunted scene. The fisherwoman watches as I float back into my body. Once rejoined, she hurls me onto the dune. Struggling to stand, she points to the enormous, rotting doorway. I stand, limping to the entryway, averting my gaze from the hideous creature pricking his claws on splintered driftwood.

  The intestinal halls of the gold cube palace lead to an enormous chamber. Azure draperies, like waterfalls, cascading down over ivory stone. I stride along in earnest as cloaked servants writhe and gesticulate towards their master, sitting atop a mangled green throne.

  Red eyes gleam madness at leisure. The electric monotony of human genius. A tall, wretched forehead, yellowing grimace, fingers made of smoke that fail to grasp. His face, drawn close to mine, radiates a disease of wealth. In eras on earth all too familiar, he may have been a transcendent figure. Waves of copper heat tear through me. Growing wild with fever, I collapse to the cold floor. He speaks with an explicit artificiality--A trickster, with all the trappings of a hidden minacious temper.

  “Opsimathette!” he yells to me.

  I forget my imagination and hear rustling behind me. Great gales quiet outside. Throats struggle to swallow. Limbs squirm through vast labyrinths; homeless corridors of a forgotten cosmos. Words become nothing. Danger, as fantastic and exaggerated as my sleeping self, bleeds into their eyes... the eyes behind me. Those that see me as I am. Terrifying visions are born. I spiral down into this gallery of doom and turn around to see eight women standing in a line. All silent, consumed by velleity, carrying delicate carved boxes of considerable delicacy.

  My eyes sweep through the line. Feeling a new weight in my hands, I look down to see my hands grasping a dull grey box, tendrils of gold leaf gathering around polished edges. Prince, or King, or Emperor before me, he is a horror of a thing. Hardly man, but string and bone, looming over these women and myself with cryptic glances. Presiding over the chamber are numerous ghosts, whispering the nonsense of sea worms, songs of inverted memory, the lust of leeches and fetid groans.

  “What is this sea of muck?” I ask, eyes wide, unprepared for any answer.

  “Do you not know?”

  None of us are enchanted by his presence. We have long been immune to such foolishness. This I can only assume. Every one has the wide eyes Bezalel loved. The long locks, delicate limbs. That is the aftermath of worrisome affections. The peculiar monarch assumes my thoughtlessness and voluntary submission.

  “In these lands I am no more than a beast, fit for servicing and discarding, is this correct?”

  One woman stirs. An act of praise, or surprise at my ability to speak. Cupresous locks like the ladies of age-old paintings, striking cheekbones carved of stone. I watch her face closely, though she will not meet my eye. I know her. Here is this difficulty beyond-measure—to exist as oneself when oneself is self-haunted. I refer to the haunt of memories. Autura’s features burst with archaic elegance. She is not as I am, and yet entirely so. Better in every way, yet somehow, vague glances capture a fragment of familiarity. She is not as I am, though I am as she was, once. A beautiful woman, serious and self-possessed. Doused in the juices of hybrid sexuality. Her helplessness bears complications. An ever-present fear of glory. The delicate impressions of young life serve to mark her. She carries melancholy with a singular reluctance, unlike the others, who are entirely lost to the perils of doom-sleep. I’m shocked from my remembrances by he who must not be ignored, amethystine rod smashing the floor.

  “Stand in line, Opsimathette.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I say, alarming the servants and attendees hovering over the chamber.

  “What shall I
call you?”

  I meet his gaze. His expression droops, disenchanted by my lack of submission.

  “I have no name.”

  “There are no creatures without titles! Women without names! Only the definite press their eyes against eternity! All the phantoms and worms of the earth could not dispute that fact…”

  Losing interior sight of betrayal, my heart grows calm within me.

  “I am Anonyma.”

  He has within him the storm of celestial reason, unwound in ancient air, breathing into the chamber. An infection of blue words and exhaustive silences grows within him.

  “Anonyma.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I am master of no-one, not horror or joy.”

  My cheeks burn with apprehension.

  “I am a Doom Artist.”

  He turns his attention from me back to the women, returning to thorough interrogations and examinations of what is inside their boxes. Each of them contains a single body part, very clearly from a male. Leaning closer into the blackness of remembrances, some of the women begin to panic. I remain still, as does Autura. Glaring at her, a frightening sharpness of aspect, she gives in to momentary control. A mirage of safety lives in the distant place she projects herself into. I can see it. Can see her soul, beaming away from here.

  A happy familiarity sweeps through me at the sight of her. She grows distant in what they perceive as thoughtlessness. I see her spirit dance, her gestures, gliding to the farthest reaches of the chamber, alive, delicate, primordial ghawazee elegance.

  There is something that becomes too graceful, too resentful in her strides. In line, they can accuse no one of mystifying the Doom Artist. Cannot reveal her power, her resolve. I see her as she is. Driven to despair by the distant emptiness, she set her mind to a new philosophy. A parody of its former self, once brimming with this decided resolve regarding the conditions of life. She apprenticed her grief beneath his, but not in totality. I hear her voice speak to me without sound.