In A Dark Light
05-29-2018, 05:50 PM
A recent rediscovery of mine here, unearthed from the depths of my dropbox account. I seem to recall I was attempting something vaguely experimental with this one, purely for my own enjoyment and with no aim towards publication. Still, I might as well share it on here, just in case anyone finds any modicum of enjoyment to be gleaned from the piece. (Warning - contains vampires.)
An Alabaster Romance
by
T. N. Allan
There is a God walking down the sidewalk, a deific vision of a woman, cast in the finest Deco traditions of a full century past. Succulent red fabric billows across the shapely silhouette embraced within its voluminous folds, blonde hair a golden host to the tiny fractal forms of diamonds. Bejewelled, her hands sparkle, fingers tapering to the points of carmine spears, as though dripping with the effluence of the sacrificial lizard.
Her feet remain bare, forever cold flesh pressing down hard into the gum caked concrete, blessing the spit and piss of the city with the touch of her skin.
Stepping in,
stepping out,
the lustful touch of eternity,
hungry for sensation.
If she is breached, she leaks the sweet crimson ruin of immortality out into the world, like an upturned container of coffee-bean spirit spilling down onto the crusted skin of poverty’s eldest and most sickly child.
mocking,
knowing,
suckle my prosperity,
She carries herself with the confident sway of youth everlasting, safe in the knowledge that the elderly are a degenerate disease to which she is blissfully and perpetually immune. If the streets still crawl along to the rhythm of humanity then she remains oblivious to the beat of any one individual music.
One is not enough.
She needs the feast.
She can taste the spritz and sprays of life, the odours and the liquids which seep and slip through the porous clothing of skin. The air is pregnant with the promise of evening. For some it shall be a still-born thing, destined to remain confined within its narrow walls, inside of tower block prisons, where it shall overdose on narcotics, resting uncomfortably in the hollow cavity of an empty bathtub, clothed in funereal dress. For others it hangs rich with the promise of new alliances, of couplings and beatings, of decadence and degradation.
Alcohol and Coffee.
Blood and Phlegm.
Cum and Piss.
She desires to taste of them all, to suck dry a selection box of humanity, be it at a gush or at a drip.
‘I am a God, blessed with the holy trinity of hunger, strength, and desire. I will not be denied the pleasures of flesh and gristle.’
And why no music to accompany such divinity?
Perhaps a minimalist wave of synth,
ethereal, not quite music,
a surrealists painting of drawn out warbles, life stealing drones,
ripping the listener out of this world,
subverting them into a realm of acute angles,
where architecture is as ecstasy,
divinity in form,
body as messiah,
cyclopea,
The city is electric, the sun a foreign body, a portent of doom for the sickly pale, for those alabaster children who haunt the night with their faces painted in the deathly style of the androgynous idols whom they smear across their hovel walls. Gender ebbs and flows, slips and slide. She feels at one with such people, the children of the Gothic, who so black out their eyes and white out their skins.
She will not eat of those kindred to her soul. If she is a God, and the body is messiah, then these deathly children are disciples all, speaking the holy doctrine in their books and in their songs.
A group of such deathly children cling to a street corner, eight in number, shivering in their fishnet clothes, sucking on the warmth of a black stick cigarette. The cigarette passes between them, the burning tip dancing in the night air, conducting cancerous symphonies as it weaves through the world. One of the females admires her as she passes them by, seeing the allure of Cleopatra in her eyes; the same yearnings, the same passions for decay, for the corrupt. Boredom with the potential—no, the promise—of violence.
These are poor children, scions of the grave, though no less pure in their sentiment or for their being so unfortunately afflicted by life. Their taste would be divine, but a sacrilege, even if only to the God of her own self.
Scouring the maze,
a labyrinth of perpetual boredom,
paper, so much paper,
and the bleating cries of car horns,
choking on the grit plagued fumes,
or else the noose of the men in suits,
they who always know what's best,
procedure is all and the day is everything,
no time for eating,
food should move fast,
should skid through grease,
until it rots in gullet,
a leaden lump for tomorrow’s agony,
WELCOME TO THE BURGER VALLEY
WHERE THE HAPPY MEATS
MAKE FOR HAPPY EATS
The sign screams its neon message out into the world, burning through the frontal lobes, searing itself into the brains of those too hurried to stop and read. Her pace is constant, never changing, never altering, the swaying of her shapely hips a fatted metronome of seduction. The deathers have decided to follow her, laying a scent of cigarettes and incense in her wake, preserving her footsteps in a sour and dissolved aspic.
Pied Piper,
dark piper,
charming the ratkin,
not to suffer the children,
towards a cave of light,
of carbon bright and plastic food,
Crossing the threshold is to cross the gulf of worlds. On the outside there exists a reality of unpaid bills and insufficient diversions, whilst the inside plays host to a realm of cartoon adolescence and make believe well wishes.
Her arrival is noticed, elasticising necks, halting meals, preventing conversation. A child chokes as he is caught mid swallow, his coughs keeping time to the latest banality dribbling out of the mounted wall speakers.
(Choke—Verse—Keep them going
Cough—Chorus—Keep them in place)
The fragile tunnel of his airway clears before either the song or his still developing lungs can reach their respective death knells.
Disappointing? Perhaps.
A smile of relief marks his face, but what is that smeared around his idiot lips?
blood/ketchup
No matter. There shall be red enough from everyone in due course.
She thinks it will be a delightful sight, the abstract viscera as it spills its noisome load upon the ceramic tiles, upon the linoleum floor. Doubtless the floor has seen its like before, though not, she thinks, in such a quantity as is her intent.
The deathers bundle themselves into the foyer behind her, strangers in a strange land; so what else is new?
beat
A stand off.
b...e...a...t...
(Begin scene)
The Vamp casts her eyes across the foyer at the booths and the occupants contained within.
Man 1: ‘Whose funeral is it then?’
Man 2: ‘Don’t stare at them, honey. They look a rough sort.’
Child (Female) : ‘Why are they dressed like it’s Halloween, Mummy?’
The deathers stand silent, awaiting the Vamp and the performance they know is about to begin. The Vamp slowly teases the rings from her fingers, passing them back to one of the deathers.
The Vamp: ‘I like to work with my hands free.’
Suddenly, she launches herself at the nearest booth, leaping onto the plastic table and snatching up the nearest victim, her strength belying her supple frame. To the horror of the assembled diners, she sinks her teeth into the victim’s neck, spraying blood all about the booth. Panic stricken, the diners attempt to flee the scene, but the deathers block the only exit, trapping the diners in the foyer with the Vamp.
And so the feast begins.
oh god oh god oh god oh god she just ripped that guys throat out is he dead he must be dead he isn’t moving gotta get out
why are these freaks blocking the doors oh god is she going to kill all of us oh god don’t let me die please don’t let me die I don’t want to die I’ll do anything
this has to be a trick hidden cameras of something a set up this can’t be real people don’t drink other peoples blood how many is she going to kill #### #### #### how many until its my turn
this isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t
thank #### for that an easy way out
God she must be God look how easily she tears them apart how intimate her knowledge of the human body I’ll follow her forever more a purpose at last even in this city a future
And for a moment it’s a puppet show, a carnage of severed strings amidst which she stands tall, a grotesquely beautiful rendition of Punch rendered in the moment immediately after having taken the life of that ubiquitous bitch Judy. The deathers stand and watch, little more than the children they are desperate not to be, gaping at the evening’s entertainment. There is no candy striped booth beneath which the hand of God can hide away, manipulating events unseen, and so she stands, bathed in blood, and accepts the silent adulation of her audience. The feasting has stolen the night away, the darkness of glass running wet with blood.
claiming her jewels,
reclaiming ornamentation,
stomach fattened,
bigger inside,
figure remains,
beauty holds fast,
returning to night,
The world phases back into existence with all the putrid odours and juices of its being still intact. The atmosphere still hangs heavy with the cloying sense of permanence, the belief that nothing about this world matters and will continue not to matter for an eternity to come. The deathers have always suspected as much. Only now do they know it to be true, to be a stone cold certainty. Praise be to God, for she has shown them the one true way. They backed the winning side and lost. Not many are blessed with the ability to realise their situation so thoroughly. Philosophers, of ages past and present, would have gladly paid the sacrificial price of their own sanity in order to reach such a relative state of enlightenment.
Traffic stands halted in the street, wheels spinning round to no effect. Birds hang from lampposts, atrophying in the sodium glare. Proceeding through the city, the black-clad procession, with its spear tip of brightest red, passes unseen beneath the oblivious eyes of the ignorati. Open graves yawn deep and wide, awaiting the funeral parties who mourn the interment of empty coffins, lamenting the loss of people who never existed. News sellers call out in silence, selling bundles of blank white paper.
vaulting,
rising,
the city,
the prison,
life as is,
compare,
life as seen,
The windows of the rising tower blocks are so many watermarks, promises for an identical tomorrow in a world where time has stood still. Every building, every gathering of people, chewing up time and spitting out only bones in return. It is better to be the prey of a living predator, of a blood hungry God, than to suffer such a fate, for in the rending of the flesh from the natural form of the mortal frame, there might just be glimpsed the intricacies of the universe of the self, as the alabaster romances the red.
An Alabaster Romance
by
T. N. Allan
There is a God walking down the sidewalk, a deific vision of a woman, cast in the finest Deco traditions of a full century past. Succulent red fabric billows across the shapely silhouette embraced within its voluminous folds, blonde hair a golden host to the tiny fractal forms of diamonds. Bejewelled, her hands sparkle, fingers tapering to the points of carmine spears, as though dripping with the effluence of the sacrificial lizard.
Her feet remain bare, forever cold flesh pressing down hard into the gum caked concrete, blessing the spit and piss of the city with the touch of her skin.
Stepping in,
stepping out,
the lustful touch of eternity,
hungry for sensation.
If she is breached, she leaks the sweet crimson ruin of immortality out into the world, like an upturned container of coffee-bean spirit spilling down onto the crusted skin of poverty’s eldest and most sickly child.
mocking,
knowing,
suckle my prosperity,
She carries herself with the confident sway of youth everlasting, safe in the knowledge that the elderly are a degenerate disease to which she is blissfully and perpetually immune. If the streets still crawl along to the rhythm of humanity then she remains oblivious to the beat of any one individual music.
One is not enough.
She needs the feast.
She can taste the spritz and sprays of life, the odours and the liquids which seep and slip through the porous clothing of skin. The air is pregnant with the promise of evening. For some it shall be a still-born thing, destined to remain confined within its narrow walls, inside of tower block prisons, where it shall overdose on narcotics, resting uncomfortably in the hollow cavity of an empty bathtub, clothed in funereal dress. For others it hangs rich with the promise of new alliances, of couplings and beatings, of decadence and degradation.
Alcohol and Coffee.
Blood and Phlegm.
Cum and Piss.
She desires to taste of them all, to suck dry a selection box of humanity, be it at a gush or at a drip.
‘I am a God, blessed with the holy trinity of hunger, strength, and desire. I will not be denied the pleasures of flesh and gristle.’
And why no music to accompany such divinity?
Perhaps a minimalist wave of synth,
ethereal, not quite music,
a surrealists painting of drawn out warbles, life stealing drones,
ripping the listener out of this world,
subverting them into a realm of acute angles,
where architecture is as ecstasy,
divinity in form,
body as messiah,
cyclopea,
The city is electric, the sun a foreign body, a portent of doom for the sickly pale, for those alabaster children who haunt the night with their faces painted in the deathly style of the androgynous idols whom they smear across their hovel walls. Gender ebbs and flows, slips and slide. She feels at one with such people, the children of the Gothic, who so black out their eyes and white out their skins.
She will not eat of those kindred to her soul. If she is a God, and the body is messiah, then these deathly children are disciples all, speaking the holy doctrine in their books and in their songs.
A group of such deathly children cling to a street corner, eight in number, shivering in their fishnet clothes, sucking on the warmth of a black stick cigarette. The cigarette passes between them, the burning tip dancing in the night air, conducting cancerous symphonies as it weaves through the world. One of the females admires her as she passes them by, seeing the allure of Cleopatra in her eyes; the same yearnings, the same passions for decay, for the corrupt. Boredom with the potential—no, the promise—of violence.
These are poor children, scions of the grave, though no less pure in their sentiment or for their being so unfortunately afflicted by life. Their taste would be divine, but a sacrilege, even if only to the God of her own self.
Scouring the maze,
a labyrinth of perpetual boredom,
paper, so much paper,
and the bleating cries of car horns,
choking on the grit plagued fumes,
or else the noose of the men in suits,
they who always know what's best,
procedure is all and the day is everything,
no time for eating,
food should move fast,
should skid through grease,
until it rots in gullet,
a leaden lump for tomorrow’s agony,
WELCOME TO THE BURGER VALLEY
WHERE THE HAPPY MEATS
MAKE FOR HAPPY EATS
The sign screams its neon message out into the world, burning through the frontal lobes, searing itself into the brains of those too hurried to stop and read. Her pace is constant, never changing, never altering, the swaying of her shapely hips a fatted metronome of seduction. The deathers have decided to follow her, laying a scent of cigarettes and incense in her wake, preserving her footsteps in a sour and dissolved aspic.
Pied Piper,
dark piper,
charming the ratkin,
not to suffer the children,
towards a cave of light,
of carbon bright and plastic food,
Crossing the threshold is to cross the gulf of worlds. On the outside there exists a reality of unpaid bills and insufficient diversions, whilst the inside plays host to a realm of cartoon adolescence and make believe well wishes.
Her arrival is noticed, elasticising necks, halting meals, preventing conversation. A child chokes as he is caught mid swallow, his coughs keeping time to the latest banality dribbling out of the mounted wall speakers.
(Choke—Verse—Keep them going
Cough—Chorus—Keep them in place)
The fragile tunnel of his airway clears before either the song or his still developing lungs can reach their respective death knells.
Disappointing? Perhaps.
A smile of relief marks his face, but what is that smeared around his idiot lips?
blood/ketchup
No matter. There shall be red enough from everyone in due course.
She thinks it will be a delightful sight, the abstract viscera as it spills its noisome load upon the ceramic tiles, upon the linoleum floor. Doubtless the floor has seen its like before, though not, she thinks, in such a quantity as is her intent.
The deathers bundle themselves into the foyer behind her, strangers in a strange land; so what else is new?
beat
A stand off.
b...e...a...t...
(Begin scene)
The Vamp casts her eyes across the foyer at the booths and the occupants contained within.
Man 1: ‘Whose funeral is it then?’
Man 2: ‘Don’t stare at them, honey. They look a rough sort.’
Child (Female) : ‘Why are they dressed like it’s Halloween, Mummy?’
The deathers stand silent, awaiting the Vamp and the performance they know is about to begin. The Vamp slowly teases the rings from her fingers, passing them back to one of the deathers.
The Vamp: ‘I like to work with my hands free.’
Suddenly, she launches herself at the nearest booth, leaping onto the plastic table and snatching up the nearest victim, her strength belying her supple frame. To the horror of the assembled diners, she sinks her teeth into the victim’s neck, spraying blood all about the booth. Panic stricken, the diners attempt to flee the scene, but the deathers block the only exit, trapping the diners in the foyer with the Vamp.
And so the feast begins.
oh god oh god oh god oh god she just ripped that guys throat out is he dead he must be dead he isn’t moving gotta get out
why are these freaks blocking the doors oh god is she going to kill all of us oh god don’t let me die please don’t let me die I don’t want to die I’ll do anything
this has to be a trick hidden cameras of something a set up this can’t be real people don’t drink other peoples blood how many is she going to kill #### #### #### how many until its my turn
this isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t fair this isn’t
thank #### for that an easy way out
God she must be God look how easily she tears them apart how intimate her knowledge of the human body I’ll follow her forever more a purpose at last even in this city a future
And for a moment it’s a puppet show, a carnage of severed strings amidst which she stands tall, a grotesquely beautiful rendition of Punch rendered in the moment immediately after having taken the life of that ubiquitous bitch Judy. The deathers stand and watch, little more than the children they are desperate not to be, gaping at the evening’s entertainment. There is no candy striped booth beneath which the hand of God can hide away, manipulating events unseen, and so she stands, bathed in blood, and accepts the silent adulation of her audience. The feasting has stolen the night away, the darkness of glass running wet with blood.
claiming her jewels,
reclaiming ornamentation,
stomach fattened,
bigger inside,
figure remains,
beauty holds fast,
returning to night,
The world phases back into existence with all the putrid odours and juices of its being still intact. The atmosphere still hangs heavy with the cloying sense of permanence, the belief that nothing about this world matters and will continue not to matter for an eternity to come. The deathers have always suspected as much. Only now do they know it to be true, to be a stone cold certainty. Praise be to God, for she has shown them the one true way. They backed the winning side and lost. Not many are blessed with the ability to realise their situation so thoroughly. Philosophers, of ages past and present, would have gladly paid the sacrificial price of their own sanity in order to reach such a relative state of enlightenment.
Traffic stands halted in the street, wheels spinning round to no effect. Birds hang from lampposts, atrophying in the sodium glare. Proceeding through the city, the black-clad procession, with its spear tip of brightest red, passes unseen beneath the oblivious eyes of the ignorati. Open graves yawn deep and wide, awaiting the funeral parties who mourn the interment of empty coffins, lamenting the loss of people who never existed. News sellers call out in silence, selling bundles of blank white paper.
vaulting,
rising,
the city,
the prison,
life as is,
compare,
life as seen,
The windows of the rising tower blocks are so many watermarks, promises for an identical tomorrow in a world where time has stood still. Every building, every gathering of people, chewing up time and spitting out only bones in return. It is better to be the prey of a living predator, of a blood hungry God, than to suffer such a fate, for in the rending of the flesh from the natural form of the mortal frame, there might just be glimpsed the intricacies of the universe of the self, as the alabaster romances the red.