lafindumonde
01-16-2007, 02:42 PM
There is a manuscript written.
There. I've said it. It's done.
I find myself reluctant to even write about the existence of that accursed thing. That dreadful writing, enough to make one's skin crawl.
I turn, I close my eyes to try and wash the knowledge of it away. It's still there, taunting and jittering in the dark.
I fear that its power does not lie in the structure of the sentences found within the document but that it lies in the very ideas it succeeds in conveying and this I fear without question. Those meanings and counter meanings evoking a response in myself and those who have read it. A vital response. We are trying to keep ourselves alive minute by minute for god sakes.
With an unknown variable looming above our heads, we try to continue to live. But some of us have already changed and I am afraid of this eventuality. The erosion and annihilation of life it spreads through its paragraphs is altogether cancerous.
This cancer, the idea, has led me to a necessary seclusion so as to not contaminate those I hold dear with my doomed and pitiful presence. I have refrained from speaking of it for so long and yet I find myself writing it all out before me in an attempt to better understand my plight. I fear that this manuscript that I am creating may also carry the same poison inflicted by the original. That wretched copy which I failed to turn my eyes from when I had found it at the foot of my door.
I am its proxy. Its servant.
Even in these dark days, I have turned my eyes to a religion that was altogether shunned in recent years to find some form of hope or to plea for clemency. My impending doom is beginning to lower and the darkness it brings with it is clouding my eyes in its gloom. The wait for the inevitable is frightening me. I hear sounds at night, wondering if they are the harbingers come to take me; a faint scratching at the walls of my living quarters, vague footsteps echoing through some ghostly hallway that I have the unfortunate opportunity to hear. These portents have been gaining steady residence in my every day life. As my friends have left me one by one, they, these disembodied sounds, have come to take their place.
I fear their touch.
In an attempt to make my passing into this dreaded state uncomplicated, I have done away with all of my earthly possessions through various means. I have burned photographs, defaced and destroyed books, left furniture to be used by others. My room, an empty shell truly, bears only a bed with an
accompanying pillow, a writing desk with an accompanying chair and the tablet of paper and pen
that I use to write this work that I pray will not find posthumous fame.
My wardrobe has dwindled only to the bare essentials and I find myself wearing the final attire of someone hours shy of being buried under the earth. But having read what I have read, I will just cease being the individual that I have come to know when the time comes. There will be nothing to bury as I will still breathe. I will continue to walk but under a new visage.
Within recent days, wicked dreams have accosted me in the night. Dreams so vivid as to be mistaken for reality. The figures stuck in the bizarre show of my sleeping mind were those acquaintances of mine who have changed before me, having read the reviled manuscript. In these visions - I have deemed them visions due to their nature and horrible realism - my acquaintances were faced with an otherworldly affair in the normal confines of daily life. These affairs were benign, in and of themselves, but took on a sordid tone leading up to a final confrontation ending in their transformation. With what it is hard to say nor to imagine. I believe they were the harbingers that I find troubling me to this day.
The situations of the dreams held no valuable import, only that they ended in the same, dreadful way. In a shift of the individual's consciousness and the annihilation of their personality only to become something more insidious. A hellish drone of some invading legion.
Having had one of these visions just last night, I can recall it better than those that have come
before. In the vision, I played the part of the voyeur. I watched as a bodiless eye while the events
transpired.
A smartly dressed man diverted his attention from a well-traveled street to a sprawling alleyway to his right. His next steps took him into the alley itself where he walked for a time until he could see the horizon and the city beyond from where he stood. As he looked up, he could see the sun and a few sparse clouds in an otherwise cloudless azure sky. He stared for a few scant minutes, so much so that his eyes were strained by the light of the sun. what he saw next defies any form of explanation however yet I bore witness to the same sight and knew it to be a concrete phenomenon. Before him, dotting the cloudless sky beyond, were several black circles varied in size suspended in the air like eyeless sockets. They remained motionless, kept aloft by some unseen mechanism, some engine deep in the core of their being that helped to differentiate them from the standard entities of this terrestrial sphere. They were not of the waking world yet they existed. Black circles like the periods that end sentences. A handful of black coins hanging from invisible strings.
A sense of dread followed their introduction as they remained motionless, boring entire holes through the fabric of the atmosphere. And there they remained. Guardians of some unknown force.
It was at this moment that my point of view shifted to that of the wayward fellow caught in this predicament. His hands were my hands, his eyes mine as well. I stood in the alleyway staring blankly at
the orbs. I closed my eyes, his eyes truly, as if to shake their presence and to return the situation to normal yet when I opened them, they were closer than before, nearer to my face, his face. I attempted to turn, to escape but my feet, his feet, held fast to their spot as if they were firmly rooted.
I could hear a low humming permeating the alleyway and in the instant that I next closed my eyes, it was the last time I, or my acquaintance, would ever see color, shape and shimmer ever again. I knew this only because I felt the muscles that controlled my eyelids contract as if to open them but I saw nothing. Utter darkness became his, my, newfound vision.
This darkness lasted until I found myself awake and sweating in my bedclothes. This terror has been with me ever since and is the impetus for my writing this blackened memoir.
I find myself wracking my brains, trying to discern any sort of pattern, any disastrous flaw in the design of those pages that graced my hands so recently. Any way out. The more that I write, the more my hands feel less my own and the more a low humming becomes steadily noticeable. Soon, I fear, that it will become all pervasive and all that I will know.
The more I write this, with a black noose slowly lowering over my neck, the more selfish I feel. My words are infected. They feel riddled with disease but I am compelled to finish before black becomes my horizon and black becomes my knowledge and black becomes my name.
This will be my only gift. My last will and testament that most certainly will bring blood to the backs of the throats of those who may read it. They will be marked as I have been. Then the nights of the long wait for the black circles to appear. The nights of sweat-drenched sleep with the scraping and clawing of things down dimensional hallways not known before.
I am afraid to finish writing. This night, with the moon gleaming through my window, feels ripe for an onslaught. A quiet war while I sleep. Nightmarish circles suspended, slowly devouring my eyes, overriding my sense of self. If I finish this, it may be my last contribution to the world. By tomorrow morning I will have changed.
There is one possible exit. I am uncertain if I am more afraid of the attempt, the aftermath or tomorrow morning if I fail to make my escape tonight. In my hand, I hold what might very well be the key. For once, I might know a night's peace. A night without dread. The pills bash and slide against each other, the pill bottle a translucent orange. It's hard to fathom such a decision but it's simple really. Either doom or release.
Doom.
Or release.
I can hear the humming, that eerie droning of my dreams, reverberate through the plaster walls. It feels as if someone has been standing behind me this entire time, monitoring my progress, ensuring that what I write will become the plague they need to let untold amounts of pain flood out of these pages to start the process of annihilation all over again.
Not for much longer.
Perhaps, with my selfish death, I will have averted that which they, those scavenging bastards, most longed for. Another way into this world. Another manuscript cursed with their touch.
I will never know.
I can only hope.
No eyes of black. Only the long black sleep.
I am finished here.
There. I've said it. It's done.
I find myself reluctant to even write about the existence of that accursed thing. That dreadful writing, enough to make one's skin crawl.
I turn, I close my eyes to try and wash the knowledge of it away. It's still there, taunting and jittering in the dark.
I fear that its power does not lie in the structure of the sentences found within the document but that it lies in the very ideas it succeeds in conveying and this I fear without question. Those meanings and counter meanings evoking a response in myself and those who have read it. A vital response. We are trying to keep ourselves alive minute by minute for god sakes.
With an unknown variable looming above our heads, we try to continue to live. But some of us have already changed and I am afraid of this eventuality. The erosion and annihilation of life it spreads through its paragraphs is altogether cancerous.
This cancer, the idea, has led me to a necessary seclusion so as to not contaminate those I hold dear with my doomed and pitiful presence. I have refrained from speaking of it for so long and yet I find myself writing it all out before me in an attempt to better understand my plight. I fear that this manuscript that I am creating may also carry the same poison inflicted by the original. That wretched copy which I failed to turn my eyes from when I had found it at the foot of my door.
I am its proxy. Its servant.
Even in these dark days, I have turned my eyes to a religion that was altogether shunned in recent years to find some form of hope or to plea for clemency. My impending doom is beginning to lower and the darkness it brings with it is clouding my eyes in its gloom. The wait for the inevitable is frightening me. I hear sounds at night, wondering if they are the harbingers come to take me; a faint scratching at the walls of my living quarters, vague footsteps echoing through some ghostly hallway that I have the unfortunate opportunity to hear. These portents have been gaining steady residence in my every day life. As my friends have left me one by one, they, these disembodied sounds, have come to take their place.
I fear their touch.
In an attempt to make my passing into this dreaded state uncomplicated, I have done away with all of my earthly possessions through various means. I have burned photographs, defaced and destroyed books, left furniture to be used by others. My room, an empty shell truly, bears only a bed with an
accompanying pillow, a writing desk with an accompanying chair and the tablet of paper and pen
that I use to write this work that I pray will not find posthumous fame.
My wardrobe has dwindled only to the bare essentials and I find myself wearing the final attire of someone hours shy of being buried under the earth. But having read what I have read, I will just cease being the individual that I have come to know when the time comes. There will be nothing to bury as I will still breathe. I will continue to walk but under a new visage.
Within recent days, wicked dreams have accosted me in the night. Dreams so vivid as to be mistaken for reality. The figures stuck in the bizarre show of my sleeping mind were those acquaintances of mine who have changed before me, having read the reviled manuscript. In these visions - I have deemed them visions due to their nature and horrible realism - my acquaintances were faced with an otherworldly affair in the normal confines of daily life. These affairs were benign, in and of themselves, but took on a sordid tone leading up to a final confrontation ending in their transformation. With what it is hard to say nor to imagine. I believe they were the harbingers that I find troubling me to this day.
The situations of the dreams held no valuable import, only that they ended in the same, dreadful way. In a shift of the individual's consciousness and the annihilation of their personality only to become something more insidious. A hellish drone of some invading legion.
Having had one of these visions just last night, I can recall it better than those that have come
before. In the vision, I played the part of the voyeur. I watched as a bodiless eye while the events
transpired.
A smartly dressed man diverted his attention from a well-traveled street to a sprawling alleyway to his right. His next steps took him into the alley itself where he walked for a time until he could see the horizon and the city beyond from where he stood. As he looked up, he could see the sun and a few sparse clouds in an otherwise cloudless azure sky. He stared for a few scant minutes, so much so that his eyes were strained by the light of the sun. what he saw next defies any form of explanation however yet I bore witness to the same sight and knew it to be a concrete phenomenon. Before him, dotting the cloudless sky beyond, were several black circles varied in size suspended in the air like eyeless sockets. They remained motionless, kept aloft by some unseen mechanism, some engine deep in the core of their being that helped to differentiate them from the standard entities of this terrestrial sphere. They were not of the waking world yet they existed. Black circles like the periods that end sentences. A handful of black coins hanging from invisible strings.
A sense of dread followed their introduction as they remained motionless, boring entire holes through the fabric of the atmosphere. And there they remained. Guardians of some unknown force.
It was at this moment that my point of view shifted to that of the wayward fellow caught in this predicament. His hands were my hands, his eyes mine as well. I stood in the alleyway staring blankly at
the orbs. I closed my eyes, his eyes truly, as if to shake their presence and to return the situation to normal yet when I opened them, they were closer than before, nearer to my face, his face. I attempted to turn, to escape but my feet, his feet, held fast to their spot as if they were firmly rooted.
I could hear a low humming permeating the alleyway and in the instant that I next closed my eyes, it was the last time I, or my acquaintance, would ever see color, shape and shimmer ever again. I knew this only because I felt the muscles that controlled my eyelids contract as if to open them but I saw nothing. Utter darkness became his, my, newfound vision.
This darkness lasted until I found myself awake and sweating in my bedclothes. This terror has been with me ever since and is the impetus for my writing this blackened memoir.
I find myself wracking my brains, trying to discern any sort of pattern, any disastrous flaw in the design of those pages that graced my hands so recently. Any way out. The more that I write, the more my hands feel less my own and the more a low humming becomes steadily noticeable. Soon, I fear, that it will become all pervasive and all that I will know.
The more I write this, with a black noose slowly lowering over my neck, the more selfish I feel. My words are infected. They feel riddled with disease but I am compelled to finish before black becomes my horizon and black becomes my knowledge and black becomes my name.
This will be my only gift. My last will and testament that most certainly will bring blood to the backs of the throats of those who may read it. They will be marked as I have been. Then the nights of the long wait for the black circles to appear. The nights of sweat-drenched sleep with the scraping and clawing of things down dimensional hallways not known before.
I am afraid to finish writing. This night, with the moon gleaming through my window, feels ripe for an onslaught. A quiet war while I sleep. Nightmarish circles suspended, slowly devouring my eyes, overriding my sense of self. If I finish this, it may be my last contribution to the world. By tomorrow morning I will have changed.
There is one possible exit. I am uncertain if I am more afraid of the attempt, the aftermath or tomorrow morning if I fail to make my escape tonight. In my hand, I hold what might very well be the key. For once, I might know a night's peace. A night without dread. The pills bash and slide against each other, the pill bottle a translucent orange. It's hard to fathom such a decision but it's simple really. Either doom or release.
Doom.
Or release.
I can hear the humming, that eerie droning of my dreams, reverberate through the plaster walls. It feels as if someone has been standing behind me this entire time, monitoring my progress, ensuring that what I write will become the plague they need to let untold amounts of pain flood out of these pages to start the process of annihilation all over again.
Not for much longer.
Perhaps, with my selfish death, I will have averted that which they, those scavenging bastards, most longed for. Another way into this world. Another manuscript cursed with their touch.
I will never know.
I can only hope.
No eyes of black. Only the long black sleep.
I am finished here.