Anonyma Read online

  “I want only to exist as a slight tremor in the belly of those I once knew. A timeless ache, a memory, nothing more.”

  I feel a sharp pang in my stomach and bend over in pain. This draws the Doom Artist’s attention to me again. He steps away from examining the contents of the boxes and approaches me.

  “Might you look at a scroll in my presence, Anonyma?” I feel a rolling sensation in my stomach. If I carry life, this life is worried.

  What must I know to save this womb-blossom from Doom Design? A miraculous illness, forgotten in the moldy pages of the book, had re-emerged in concentrated waves in the southern hemisphere of the Afterworld. This much I knew from the Scaearulldytheraeum. I agree to see the pages as a mother may agree to trade her life for her child’s. This was, after all, what I was doing.

  The chamber sinks into disease. I cannot stop reading. The night infection spreads. My eyes shift from the dissolution of gold ink to the corner shadows. I knock the scroll out of his hands. It has the tell-tale scarlet stains of wood from the Black Forest. No decree can come from there without the stench of hostility. No doubt the drippings of Dread-Tongue. The demands of another Doom Artist—one far more evil than he.

  The impulse was rewarded with a phantom applause, ricocheting off of the black walls. Here I am incensed and impaled. Eternal pretenders wed with downcast eyes. Blind moths unburden themselves on the rim of reason. Silent noise reels over the beams supporting the cube. I dine on detachment, marking the ignorance of endless spaces. I hold out my hands to Autura and he slaps them down. She whispers to me, “A dead thing owes no one.” He shoots her a shattering dark look, and begins to read a verse aloud.

  “I am the sublime minority—no delusion in the slime can wash away this truth.”

  Deep sorrow slips from her, into me. I, the benefactress of blood, the falsified mistress and desired sorceress of slime. I brush my hand through her long, red hair. A waterfall of scarlet strands, gliding between every finger. With the bewilderment of apparitions, the cruelty of nature, new life grows within me. She knows the universe within herself, no longer separate from its law. At irregular intervals and a touch of shimmering, the Doom Artist’s madness opens her up. He continues.

  “They will bury the moon, black out the sun, return the souls of earth to the black planet, Ulldythaer.”

  It is a pastime of gaunts, to allow for unholy remembrances, stirring up a cloud of elder evil. When this is one’s amusement, there is little room for diplomacy, let alone escape. As my thoughts drift from myself to Autura, to the life I suspect lives inside of me, the Doom Artist stops reading. He mutters, disdainful of the scroll’s contents himself. A voice calls out from above.

  “She will give us the new slime!”

  The Doom Artist examines me closely, suspicion fading. I have no biblical ambitions within me. Only a dream of silence. Of an adjusted peculiarity, at home somewhere uncharted, as yet undiscovered. Safe and at peace. Few could guess at the extent of my seriousness. Laughter bursts from the ghouls, pale eyelashes fluttering with each wince of hideous noise. My tongue grows heavy, stopping speech as readily as fright had on earth. I imagine waking, an unhappy return into the realm of colorless life. Eyes reset, opening on my white breasts covered in blood, Bezalel on top of me, beating my body back into life. Most women know this stain in the book of eternity. She who obeys the profane rules knows no freedom, no escape. To be impure is to be alive, and there is no guilt in that racket.

  The Doom Artist abruptly places a hand on my stomach. The cataclysm of the soul has passed. I feel the movement of life in me and draw a curtain on premonition. It has served for nothing but a dry ache in the tomb of my heart. Despite surgical curiosity and a frenzy of passion, I manage to hold back my inkwell of emotions. A quiet reservoir of magic lives within me that not even the slime can reach.

  I fidget with the milk-white feathers that line my gown, flushing with gentle confusion. My heart bleeds an expression of profound sadness that my face fails to show.

  “Why this?” he asks.

  “I have adopted a fundamental indifference to all things natural.” I answer, feeling unworthy, unprepared for this life.

  “Many a phenomena I have witnessed myself,” he says, “magic in a world devoid of God.”

  “What will become of these women?” I interrupt, drawing his attention away.

  “They will be dispersed, Noyade.”

  Terror freezes my throat as his expression fizzles into regret. The women lower their heads, spitting out the misery of the sky. The chapel of his heart is emptier than theirs. Bitterness and damnation, followed by the tenderness of foolish dreams. But dreams should not be this way, should they? A hideous heart trembles the inverted sky and memories become treasures, lost to time. Deep cackling rains down from the firmament. Fear seeps into the features of the Doom Artist. He ushers me towards the hallway.

  “Go.”

  “No, you can’t disperse them!”

  I look to Autura, the only one not yet trembling. The soul-fear soaks her limbs in distress. She can no longer move them. The night has reached her organs.

  “If my name is despair, am I not a conqueror of novelty? Human lives have little value here, unless they are carriers.”

  He looks down to my stomach again. A great shadow passes the northern cathedral window. The skies darken, sounds of flapping circling the cube with phantom curiosity. Fear flashes in his eyes. The Doom Artist remains still until the sound fades and light returns to the chamber. He walks me outside with a guiding force that prevents me from turning back. I ache for Autura, for the others.

  “Please,” I plead. “Let them live.”

  He walks me to the ship and lifts me in, setting the hook within me himself, as though it is a privilege. The Doom Artist blows a kiss to the dark horizon as snow and sand intermingle at his feet. I look at him one last time.

  “Let them live.”

  For a moment, his façade washes away, revealing deep exhaustion. After a sigh, he replies.

  “A dead thing owes no one.”

  The sea of slime has changed color. Once a sickly green, it now exudes an earth-like tone of blue. The surface glistens with orange crystals and ivory threads—alien vegetation. The worms have grown quiet.

  I recall the contents of the sacred boxes on the journey. One girl holds a hand, one an ear. Another a penis. Autura’s contained a heart. Mine remains sealed.

  I whisper gentle inanities to myself, kissing the surface of the curious box and throwing it into the sea. I have no desire to know its contents. The remnants sink. Loam froths up like soap bubbles from the slime. Looking back, I see the white banks traversed by unknown emperors disintegrate in the tidal thrush. In the distance, the great gold cube pivots on its edge. Artlessness, being too common, brought about the rigor of the rising tide. Ghastly ice blocks dangle from the twisted scaffolding that protect the cube from elemental decay. The balcony breaks away. Swallowed by the sea of slime, creeping back into its crestless ease as though nothing had happened.

  With all I have, I have not seen, and yet am still entirely myself. I am young, thoughtful on the threshold of the strange world, but will not die of grief.

  The old monotony is lost to me now. I wear the silk of my dead sisters, thinking it allows them to breathe somewhere far from here. I feel a sense of my old self stirring. Smell the roots of autumn, waking. Taste the tongue of the green lady. Eat the fear of worms. Whisper songs of the dark firmament as though these texts had meant nothing to me at all.

  Here I would not know, but strive to know. Here I would be familiar with things unfamiliar, experience the repeated monotony expected of all, and shame would fall between every crack of the soul exposed to inclement internal weather. In the denouement of death, the body will have been enough. When sickly and when wretched, enough. Tired, unwell. Enough.

  Here, a frail flower. Here, cold death. A dead God haunts the breast of innocence. There he lives and breathes anguish beyond repair. His vani
ty was infinite, to be planted in women and men, stirred by lightning, calmed by wind, reflected in the belly, gleaming in the head. The divine absence burns up the light of a thousand tombs and lives again. A bird escapes the flames, the debris of death, and soars into the whiteness of the infinite night. His heart is hardened. Hers, delirious. Vomit drips from their noses and evaporates. A pale mouth presses against hers. Her eyes roll back, intoxicated, choking, pus and no air, no air. She reawaken on the ship, greater than dust, with a stirring thirst for pink roses.

  XIV.

  Everything is lost in the somber contemplation wreaking from the slime. The soul becomes enormous in it presence. Uncontainable. One can only reconcile themselves to the shadow’s antithesis: a memory of light, elsewhere.

  I have come to a place on the outskirts of the shore. A crystal palace, wrapped in mud. Where once were severed heads on spikes, now hover bodies in glass. Wisps of life, as lanterns, in the darkness. Tangled up as monstrous artifice—conscious of their misfortune and knowing only one ending. These are ghosts in motion-- through thoughts and dreams, as violent and undiminished as the wind. The works of another Doom Artist.

  I know she as myself because they have said I am this, this is me.

  They bury their faces in sickness. The glow fades in, and out, and in, and out—a distant lightning in the procession of storms. I stand in the corner beneath them, watching the swaying of forms without full comprehension. Breath is frail—a fading defiance. Naked, pale, limply hanging—stiffness of limbs, bones merged with glass, cracked lips, murmurs, moans and calloused fingertips, bursting. That’s the worst of it. It means they will never touch another person—in passion or in pain—again. From the waist down, there is nothing but shredded flesh, flowing as tattered muslin may. With each brain-stem tethered to long, serrated needles as sinister as any machine, there will be no movement back, or forward. Nothing but the eternal floating that has thusly been assigned above the web. In times of distress, heads tilt down to look at the delicate strands. The vibrations carry through their skulls, easing every thought and pain into a dreary pulse.

  I am she because they see me as she.

  There is no tincture so deadly as bias without sleep. The only sound is the delicate clicking of a blood drop, falling mouth to mouth, nourishing the ghoulish web watchers. A single drops falls on my lips and I taste the sorrow of the universe. Muscles contract in passion’s inverse. Saliva dribbles from each gaping maw. Against a jagged fragment of bone, flesh strings and intestines tangled-- they sense themselves to be the last alive, suspended above the imperial scurrying. Threads of dreams, spun out like the darkest of the wicked arachnid’s web, glisten with static drops. Bloated, glistening tubes like rotting flower stems outside the gates of the Silver City. Hate is imprecise, but it has found a home here.

  I am not she because I am she.

  Sleeplessness is the will-killer. Suspended in the electric cradle, they lose might with each growing shock, awake to their own dismemberment. Skeletal waists, still intact but heavy with sickness, ache with the eternal sensation—instinct. A strange ecstasy bleeds into the air. The temptation of disgust. They watch through bloody eyes, the web without relief, lids ripped and gone. They see the punishment for living—bodies dragged from floor to ceiling, pressed to the needles, left to rot above the sparkling web alongside them as imperial decoration. They become aware of beauty as malformation, its wickedness the preserver of revulsion. Condemnation throbs- the old tradition. Chants of unrest are silenced by severed tongues, but language alone is not life.

  All is numb in this sky of impossibility. Broken bodies –vessels of flesh through which one experiences the earth—keep living. Keep living.

  I am she without myself, because this is not me.

  Men who deal in dreams should know better, or know nothing at all. Captive hearts, in glass. I imagine toothless gums in infancy, teetering on the edge of the web, pouring drool. It pours and pours, cascading over the woven strings like liquids of passion on porcelain flesh.

  I am not she. I am not he. Should I be? Should I be? This is what they tell us. What they tell me. But I am not one of these.

  The metal clanging continues behind the cathedral wall. In the unknown hours, I expect Saturn himself to emerge after the devouring of his children, breaching the wall to set down upon faultless bodies with his deadly enormity. As they do with the web. As they do with the earth. What other enormity could commit such crimes against the living? Only a Doom Artist. Worse and worse they get. Small spirits climb the golden beams, scratching. They teach the survivors how to speak without tongues to each other, that everything will be ok, that there is a life beyond this. But is there?

  There is ritual below them—beside me. Ritual and concentration. Heavy with rotting, like morality. So often it is in these God-soaked places where the shaft between dirt and dollar is so poignantly felt. The web-watchers—ghouls of spite, gaunt and disheveled in their frayed, yellow robes-- say there is no God for them, but they have only known lost energy in these broken places. A thousand eyes scream the error of the dreaded Imperium. Those who birth magic in opposition live on in this world.

  Ghostly eyes peer out from the silver mist beyond the web. It takes only three days of the guttural emptiness for me to realize their souls sail on the threads of the colossal web—no longer in the confines of a fleeting body—beyond the hatred of earth and interpretation.

  ▼

  Great black Ghouls line the southern ridge. The crystal tower gleams betwixt the sea and sun. People scurry in every direction away from the breath of black magic. Something is coming.

  I feel the loss of myself in the deep shimmer of the fields.

  Strange voices chirrup—gentle warnings against the soil. I come to an abandoned train car, hovering over limerock tracks.

  The train car is suspended in a fetid stillness. Emerald air soaks the atmosphere in toxins. Wild, grotesque- the perfume of death wades in and out of my nostrils. I am safe here, seeing through the eyes of the Iedeen, a savior of invisible light.

  There are beasts aplenty in these lands, but none so horrid as those from the black moon of Ulldythaer. With elongated face like shorn rams, black teeth, and a heathen-gait, the Uldred-keind are the emissaries of evil from the outer firmament. I have learned such things, woven in black ink, from the book.

  A procession of armored Uldreds enters the train car. I come to believe they are of a higher kind, having never known them to step on foot. I can see through the shattered window. An Uldred officer ejects a long pane of pointed glass from his weapon and thrusts it forward, decapitating a dying woman. The wounds in her stomach begin to grow teeth, as does the flesh dangling off of her neck. She is dispersed with orange powder.

  I wriggle free of the Iedeen’s protection in a daze. Blood oozes from my tears, tiny particles of powder dancing over my lids. It is now that I learn of the great terror of the Afterworld.

  My spirit leaps from lamb to anguish. Angel-Lord Menchen, twelve eyes soaring apart, leads the immortal demon Uldreds to the landscapes of men. With dark sighs, they search the bogs for the afflicted.

  They come from a place darker than any earth. His enslaved multitudes, eternally thirsty in the cold meadows, pulling snakes up from the ground for sustenance. Thunderous pounding rolls out over the hills, warning the world of his anger.

  They are given their eye cages, sheaths and blindfolds, to hide their senses from the horrid Doom Artist. Few have ever dared to look. I run from the fields, eyes blurring, feet stinging, until the red noise no longer haunts my senses.

  An ancient garden compels me to stop-- eyes sparkling once more behind gloomy brush, blinded by the hard, the clear, the silent-- by that which lurks and flees in fear. The Angel-Lord reaches down with scarlet God-hands as the moon grows dark. Sacred flowers wilt in his presence. Darkness sinks into the great expanse, child-worms shriveling in the wind beneath wings of old roots, chilled of inner life. They are golden, they are afraid--they are gli
mmers of the absolute deep. Green cocoons break open, bells sound from afar under red clouds. I hide from them.

  I hide as the deep rumbling forces bitterness into my ears. There are those that say that the darkest of things remain silent. I remember moments in this way. The onslaught of hostile forces breaking me, my body, my heart, and mind without noise. But here, as I contemplate evil and blood, my eyes try this demon scene. I hear something like a song from the firmament-- the rabid cry of those who watch from other places with heavy laden eyes, crystal breath, and hope within their breasts. The Afterworld is a fortress of horror. They spread their black decay through the night, through the day. Those who live in grace will perish beneath these arches, their souls shimmering in one last gush of light, without sound.

  XVI.

  The stars are motionless over the forest-- a silent chamber of madness. Spirits stare out as I traverse the blue wood. The wrath of God bleeds down through the thickets. I shudder, holding the memory of our dead child against me. Blood runs down her throat. My soul dreams of other things. Our father. Our village. The black bird tapping against the window of her bedroom,

  I was told I have a sisterdaughter in the world. They have yet to find her. The young boy in town said she was caught up in a fence, her long locks tangled between posts.

  Sisterdaughter likes the apple orchard. The thrill of natural life.

  Rats plod over the cold ground, as lost as she. Bells toll without sound. In age, she may find herself a woman of smiling madness, eyes heavy with all that has been read and sought.

  She is my sisterdaughter.

  In prior autumns, I have been nearer to death. Shadows with silver voices broke reason. Eyes of ice and gold passed by in judgment. I dream of a bright, warm day. The fiery browns of autumn. The warmth of bread and blues of wind. The cows sleep. The birds sleep. The bugs sleep. I couldn’t accept such a sanctuary as my own.