I remember the broken world from where I came. Replaying the final moments of it over in my mind as I try to make sense of it all as – unbidden – my feet carry me down the summer sunlit street. To my left and right things stare at me through windows, their true likenesses masked by a display of false normalcy.
Wives and children with hate-filled eyes snarling at my invasion as I pass through their lives.
I force my pace slower – refusing to show them fear – even though my heart is beating fast enough to burst, threatening to spurt my heart’s hidden fluid over my silent tormentors.
My eyes move back to the dead grey pavement before me. I remember the broken world before my Inner Eye had opened as I walked.
Very few could be referred to as beautiful without my pessimism scoffing. I was overly critical of the flaws in the personality of others, but the Shakespeare in me could say that the sun raised with her smile without any argument from my darker half. Other women wandered the streets with little thought or regard. Her purpose shamed them so, all who met her belittled infants in her gaze. Her puppy brown eyes roamed from her butterscotch skin under her hood of long black hair.
I loved her.
That was my first thought, the first memory. The love I felt for the Dark Angel that – by chance – entered my life and changed the man she met to such a degree that humanity evaded me. She left me at the mercy of the curse of the unique. Her tender dark skin blessed me with each of its kisses, turning me into a sanctified freak among the staring corpses that surrounded me.
Carried by my sore feet. The street passed me by. Their eyes around me were unseen to me thanks to her memory.
Her eyes were the broken brown eyes of a shattered doll. Her smile was a crescent of brightness encapsulated in full, warm lips.
On impact had it all broken? Shattering into a fine rain of crimson? My imitation of her pseudo-death was an instant I replayed, hiding behind all its powerful radiance.
In the houses around me, the Demon people left me be, her gift of passion holding them at bay. The end of the street came and went as I moved onto the main thoroughfare, making my way out of town toward the sea of countryside that separated the islands of spurious life. Around me the houses changed, the streets altered but the shadows that lingered behind the eyes of their occupants did not.
Her presence had woken something in me, I knew. A spectral Eye that saw beyond the masks that some of us wear, down to the spark of life that drove them, allowing me the knowledge of mankind’s passing under the weight of Earth’s New Regime. They were as evil as she was Angelic. Enjoying the loneliness and pain we few remaining humans felt. Presumably allowing our continued existence for that purpose alone. The world was now a passionless contrivance that served only to bury the old and give birth to the unloved. Its only depth was seen in the flat echoes of former profundity rather than any recent concoction of alluring thought. The soulless response in their majority, their lives unaffected by her passing, the touch of an Angel meaning little to those who are blind to beauty.
I had lost her.
That was my second thought. An unbearable burden to drag through a compassion-less world, one more toy for the masked devil’s pleasure. She had transformed me. A catalyst for the soul I feared I still possessed. Then she abandoned me leaving me as an outcast even among the outcasts.
At first, the world appeared to me as it always had. My Inner Eye taking its time to grow. I noticed my neighbour’s characteristic lack of Godly grace and my family’s contempt at magnanimity, but I paid the malevolence no attention, thinking it a misconception of my morbid mood.
The Eye had opened and I saw the blank curiosity in the eyes that met my own, a curiosity that burned with an oddly passionless intensity when the area around them was filled with people buried in matters of pain or deprivation. My horror turned to repulsion as I noticed the sheer volume of those who could only feel pleasure at the cost of another creature’s pain.
My feet stumbled to a halt and I allowed my gaze to travel upward to the top of a tall building that rested on the very edge of the town. It was quite an unremarkable pile of steel and brick, looking as if it had been abandoned a thousand years before, crumbling under the weight of its thirteen stories, but it was remarkable to me, and probably me alone. It was the building that the Angel I loved had thrown herself from, leaving only me to speculate on why, giving no clue to explain her actions. My eyes travelled down to the cracked concrete at its base, my imagination merciless in its depiction of the near-black stain of ground in blood that was never there. I looked away, to the road that led out of town to the wilderness surrounding it.
Again I began to walk.
Slowly the houses around me continued to thin, the patches of green between them growing. Less of the masks around me made their surveillance known, perhaps allergic to the unstoppable creeping force of nature, the only thing more mindlessly undesirable than themselves. For a while, I knew I would feel a kind of contentment, my feet wandering the world as my mind wandered its memory, both finding their journeys tiresome, painful and somehow strangely comforting.
Suicide had turned into such a romantic word to me, the nobility of self-sacrifice raised to its ultimate degree. Someone once told me that it was easy to love the dead and that they never did anything wrong, but I don’t believe it. It would get tiresome loving that which couldn’t love; realism would eventually seep in, destroying the perfect vision. We, the living few, are too selfish with our affections to squander it on the unresponsive. Loving the memory of the dead would eventually sour unless the dead were an Angel and you knew your love to be true.
She was and I do, so it’s needless to say that the shallow mass that has replaced mankind must take the weight of her demise, or at the very least her disappearance. Their thoughtless behaviour eroded her opinions, and then their selfishness robbed her of her strength.
I will gladly mourn for her passing, but they must pay for her pain.
The black road stretched into the distance ahead of me, the buildings around it now completely replaced by the gold and emerald farmland. Sunlight lit the scene in harsh tones, driving out almost every shadow, a glare that turned fields into solid colours with no hue, every trace of sentient life gone from view. I believe the road is a fusion of all who travelled it, a compound of all their thoughts and fears, it thinks, it remembers, every fact locked away in its tarmac memory, the tyres that ran over it filed away for future reference. Its recollection reaches back further than the cars that used its surface, back to a time of packed earth and horses and carts, a time long before their takeover.
The road on which her earthly life ended had a memory, of this I am sure, it may be the only fact of which I am sure. My whole life could be a lie. It could be a figment of my lonely imaginings, but the manifestation that saw my soul to safety, the Angel of Perfection, I could never disbelieve in. I could be my very own lie, this I could believe, but if anyone dared to say that the road had no memory or that Angels didn’t exist, then I would tell them my Road Tale and settle back for their inevitable scorn to commence at such an unbelievable story, although every word is true.
Regardless of what they may say, all my tales are true.
I was travelling home that evening, the sun dipping low in the sky, the horizon of beautiful scarlet that could turn the most hard-hearted man into an awe-struck wretch, belittling us with its majesty. A scene that could make even my old battered Ford look good despite the insipid knocking that constantly emanated from under its dented bonnet. The world was surreal, caught in a magical time between night and day, and for a moment I knew, insanely inspired by this Shakespearean light, that I could live forever or die this very night.
I had to smile at my morbid whimsy, before pushing the idea from my tired mind so I could concentrate on the red-tinted road before me. I was always prone to such diseased romanticism, plucking lurid elements from the most mundane of circumstances, often revelling in my sick imaginings as others around me recoiled, their faces comic masks of disgust. It was ironic that, in mere months, I would see how false their masks were.
Perhaps it was my imagination that camouflaged the things I saw on the hard shoulder of the road, things I glimpsed in the dimming sunset from the corner of my sleepy eyes, or it may have been that I did not want to see. Perhaps, despite my cruel-minded ramblings I was as normal as the next man, a great deal more than normal as it turned out, and there are things we are simply not meant to see.
Or perhaps the road wasn’t ready to reveal itself yet.
The radio played tingly from the cheap car stereo, a faceless man rambling to a sexy voice talk show host, her slow speech tugging his dull monologue into something of interest to her listeners. Finally, the man – whose name was Jacob – relented and left the poor woman alone without saying a single syllable that made the slightest sense to me.
This was the scene – a little unusual, but not unbelievable – my sleepy half-visions on the road’s edge notwithstanding. On either side of the road, the countryside flowed, hills like waves of a stormy sea, hiding the small petrol station until I was almost upon it.
I twisted the wheel in my hands and raised my foot from the accelerator and the beat-up vehicle ground up the concrete forecourt, past the petrol pumps, to ease to a standstill outside the small road store.
The engine was off, its knocking ceased, and I opened the driver’s side door. I slid through, slamming it closed behind me. I peered at the sign above the grubby, badly painted front door. ‘The Way station’ it read, and I stood and stared, wondering who in their right mind would bother naming a petrol station. I then reached out and pushed open the rickety wooden door.
Inside the air was cool, smelling slightly of aniseed and an obscure metallic odour that I couldn’t quite place. I stopped a moment and glanced around the room, pinpointing the large fridge beside the counter that faced a tall magazine rack, and wandering over. I was the only person in the room.
Behind the counter the door stood half open, the room behind it in darkness neither sound nor movement reaching me as I idly leafed through the glossy magazines, past outdated issues of Playboy and Fast Car magazines and other periodicals that I couldn’t now name. I stepped back from the rack, leaving the magazines where they were and peered through the door behind the cash register. Slowly I moved over to the counter, squinting into the darkness behind it for a second before the oddity of the situation struck home, my eyes, this is before my third Eye was activated, capturing the register, the digits of the readout flashing. Its draw was open, the black plastic tray empty, and one solitary spot of blood marring its otherwise flawless ebony surface.
Have you ever felt terror? Not fear, but the blank panic that ceases all the senses and turns your muscles rigid?
For perhaps as long as thirty seconds I was in that state, my body suspended in time, solid as a statue as my poor mind tried to place that spot of blood into some scenario that I could deal with. In short, I felt a blind moment of terror, I felt the world had turned into a jungle, a predator hid behind every bush, or at least behind every half-open door.
Looking back, I have to smile, for as bad as I thought that moment was things could get a hundred times worse. I have discovered that reality is such a delicate thing. Needless to say, the Angel saw it and the road locked it all in its memory.
As if in slow motion the door swung open, my eyes moving to meet it as something exploded from the darkness, a bolt of steel on a collision course with my skull. Sparks of light illuminated my brain as the projectile hit its mark.
Suddenly my lights went out.
Time passed, God only knew how long, I certainly didn’t, before the physical world returned to me again. My arms were painfully twisted behind my back, secured at my wrists with some kind of cord, my ankles bound just as tightly. I twisted my head, and my eyelids flickered open to catch the dim orange strobe of the passing street lights.
I was in the back seat of a car, my car. The backs of the seats obscured my vision, and the angle only allowed the barest view of the vehicle’s other occupants. Long black hair moved as the two people spoke to each other in hushed tones, their heads disappearing into the black night sky beyond every time we moved from a pool of street lamp light into darkness, their silhouettes fading in and out like snap fades from an art-house movie. I listened straining to hear any clue to my fate, my body soaked in fearful sweat, hot urine flooding my thigh shamefully. I twisted my body, my feet sliding from the seat, falling against the floor of the car with a dull thud, and I laboriously wormed my way up to a sitting position.
Oh! God! How I wished I hadn’t.
What I had seen wasn’t hair, and it wasn’t black.
They were spines, like a porcupine, and they were red, caked in red. As each spine moved, with a sound that resembled a wire brush on steel, tiny flakes of what must have been dried blood fluttered off. The figure in the passenger seat turned, I trembled, and my teeth slammed together like castanets, my chest contracting as my heart pounded painfully hard, inane phrases of supplication spilling from my lips.
The multiple flakes of blood fell from its head as it turned to face me, creating a halo of red around its pasty blue-white face.
Its eyes stared at me through the fine red mist, pupil-less eyes of a uniform dark purple, the whites almost transparent, half-seen things undulating inside, it blinked, silken lids sliding for the briefest of moments over the vile windows to its soul. The pale skin pulled tight over its pulpy bones, both emaciated and distended, like a corpse left too long in a moist ditch. Below its cheekbones, its cheeks were sheared away cleanly, level with its row of upper teeth, and what sharp tiny teeth they were, making its mouth designed to bite, to rend flesh. The bottom jaw was bisected at the chin, opening like a dead shrivelled flower, allowing the mouth to open like a snake, a vast maw to swallow a man whole.
I moaned, half crying out in bone-seizing terror, and as a reply, the creature’s bottom jaw quivered open and it let out a whooping, piercing noise that sounded to me like a malformed laugh.
Beside it in the driver’s seat, its companion glanced sideways fluidly. The bones beneath its flesh seemed to pulse, giving it a slug-like movement. It bore no resemblance to its companion other than this and its quill-like hair: its eyes were easily four times the size they should have been, pupils huge and pink, like a rat and it was – if such a thing was possible – even more horrible than the thing sat beside it. A jutting chin reached almost to the steering wheel but despite its size, it could not contain the lolling elephantine tongue. The leech-like thing dripped a bitter-smelling slime that burned the seat’s upholstery as it touched it.
It chuckled to its companion, and the duo of monsters gibbered and cackled back and forth as I helplessly, unbelievably watched in horror.
The road was the one I had travelled earlier, but the surroundings were not. It was dark outside now, the lights overhead seeming to lean toward red rather than orange. The scenery beyond was of a foreboding, featureless limbo, but I knew that the road was the same, the only normality in the Daliesque nightmare in which I had stumbled.
My snake mewed captor bleated, pointing with one five-knuckled finger at something that I could not make out in the distance, the spines on its head ruffled, spreading out like a peacock’s tail.
I shook. My eyes stinging with sweat, fear and tears, limiting my already limited vision. My mind swimming against the tide and losing the battle with ill grace.
The building came into view on the outskirts of town. Its darkened windows were like many eyes glaring down onto the battered old Ford as it rolled up to its base, the critical eye of a dark God.
Snake turned to me, reaching over the seat with its large five-knuckled fingers, the savage claws they carried split and chipped. I shrieked a shrill keening sound that rattled the windows as the things palms pressed against my face. Its long fingers wrapped around my head, the nails clicking together as they met at the back of my skull. I heard the doors open and Snake pulled me sadistically over the front seat.
Beneath me my feet scrambled, desperately trying to keep me upright as the creature effortlessly dragged me along, its huge hand covering my eyes and nose, leaving me to gasp in moist air from around its foul flesh. My feet came to steps leading upward and momentarily lost their battle to keep me moving under my own steam, leaving the creature to pull my weight along by my head alone. It was as if the darkness had grown hands and was dragging me upward through layers of dank nightmare into a place so hideously black that no one would’ve remained sane once seeing it. The pain was a complete thing. Not an internal heretic that wished to start a rebellion, but a king that already ruled it all. It was a wrenching, burning sensation that tried to force my head from my body and failing that, managed to rid my mind of rationale.
Here I drifted, raging in this infinite black limbo, raging in both pain and insanity for a time too long to measure. My senses were starved of everything but the pain. No vision and no sound but my terrified screams. For the second time I was buried in darkness, this time with the growing belief that I’d die here, and in this infinite blackness, my body would forever tumble, gathering no gravestone, attracting no mourners.
With an almighty roar the barrier across my eyes broke and I felt myself flung into the air, my shoulder hitting something hard and rough, scraping away skin, drawing a curtain of thick blood, my body span and continued to fall, out-distancing my falling drops of blood. With a crash of clattering metal, I landed, smelling odious garbage around me.
I lay still, letting my senses return to me in their own time. I was in no hurry to see what other horrors waited for me. Slowly I opened my eyes and peered around the large room in which I had been so rudely deposited as – twenty feet away – the door closed.
They say that in the midst of life, we are in death, but I know that the reverse is also true.
It was then that I first saw her sitting on her heels in the far corner of the room. She was half in shadow, only the odd strip of her dark skin visible. She moved slightly toward me and I screamed, trying to move away, wriggling with my arms and ankles still bound tightly.
She slipped closer to me, moving from shadow to shadow until she was merely feet from me. She reached to me and lifted me effortlessly to a sitting position, then withdrew her hands again. My eyes caught sight of her black varnished nails before her small slim hands disappeared back into the darkness.
Outside the closed door I could hear Snake and his friend scamper back and forth, twittering to each other, their shadows moving across the lit cracks around the door. My eyes moved back to the barely-seen woman before me.
She was gone.
I felt sweet-smelling breath, warm and gentle on my cheek and again I shrieked, my torn nerves unable to deal with the slightest surprise. I scampered away, finding my arms and legs free of their bonds. I rushed to the other side of the room and hid in the shadows, turning to face the woman, who stood in the thin beams of light from around the ill-fitting door frame.
She opened her hand, allowing the strands of rope to fall on the floor and stepped another step into the light. I saw something huge and black moving in unison behind her, still hidden in the shadows.
She wore a simple long dress or robe that hung off her bare shoulders and stopped only inches above her bare feet. In the darkness, I could not tell if it was made of dark material or whether it was just encrusted filth, and the absurdity that this even entered my mind wasn’t lost on me.
I mumbled something to her, trying to ask where I was or what they wanted with me, but the words came out distorted by my absolute terror, consisting of sobs and moans.
She knelt, her head level with mine and again the thing behind her mirrored her movement. She smiled, her eyes wide, her lips parted slightly to show her perfect teeth.
“You’re far from home aren’t you?” She said in a voice that wasn’t in the slightest bit unusual apart from the fact that I felt that I’d find myself happy to die while listening to her.
But I prayed I didn’t get my wish.
“A long way from home”, she said, shaking her head, “You’ve slip-slid into a place you’ve no right being in.”
I opened my mouth to speak again, stuttering over the letter ‘w’ repeatedly until she raised her index finger to silence me. Her hand sliding gracefully into the darkness again she turned and, her unseen shadow following her again, she moved to the door, looking through the crack. She raised her hand again and motioned me over beside her. Glancing over she frowned and shook her head like she was witnessing a childish act from someone who should know better. Silently she mouthed the word ‘now’ and I reluctantly moved over beside her, keeping my eyes on the black mass hidden in the shadows, occasionally seeing it move a little, but not enough to see what it was. Her hand grasped my shoulder and she pulled me close, near enough to feel the heat rising from her flesh.
Fearfully I turned my head away from the thing in the room with us, hoping that her lack of fear meant it was benign, and I looked through the gap between the door and frame into the room beyond.
Snake and its companion busied themselves with preparations of some kind, lighting candles that were taller and wider than the woman stood next to me while the other creature, its back to us, was barking orders while it arranged things from an ornate box onto a low table in the room centre.
I looked over to the woman beside me, trying to ignore the dark movement behind us; she squinted through the gap into the next room, her face showing curiosity but no fear. She glanced at me, then turned and moved to the other side of the room, toward a wall that couldn’t be seen through the junk covering it.
Something pressed against me and I fought against the invisible assailant, pushing away against the wall at right angles to the woman’s, the unseen thing disappearing back into the darkness.
The dark-skinned woman ran her hands over the wall, slipping her fingertips into a crack behind a length of rotten board and tugged, ripping it from the wall, revealing a broken, grime-smeared window behind it.
A low howl shook the room, the floorboards beneath me vibrating, turning my legs to jelly. The woman half twisted to the door leading further into the building and stared at it, her eyes darting to me, the light from the doorway glinting in them, turning them into searchlights momentarily before she turned and frantically began ripping boards from over the window.
The dark room was alive with movement, the walls seeming to undulate with a life of their own as the half-seen thing moved through the room. The howl slammed around the room again and I slapped my hands over my ears and watched helplessly as the woman ripped the remaining boards from over the window, and smashed it open.
Light suddenly flooded into the room from two directions as the door to the inner room was thrown open Snake standing in it.
Light flooded over the woman, driving out all the shadows from the room and despite my fear, I felt my jaw drop weakly open as I stared at a walking, breathing image of art.
What I had seen behind her wasn’t some hideous monster, it was her wings, huge ebony wings with feathers like shards of sharp volcanic glass that spread as she twisted to face the monster in the doorway, one wing-tip slashing across the wall over my head, cutting a groove into it, sending a shower of chipped brick and plaster over me.
She faced Snake and snarled, her face momentarily seeming to unfold from her mouth like a flower. A half-second image of teeth half a foot long before she was herself again, a smiling beauty who meant serious business.
A wing struck out and slashed across Snake, rending deep lacerations in what passed for his chest. Its arm clutched the wound, his head thrown back with the force of its shriek. The Dark Angel rushed forward, grasping at the creature, dragging it in, her wings folding around it, hiding the monster from my view.
The glass feathers rattled as they clashed creating a sound like a waterfall that almost, but didn’t quite, drown out the pitiful sounds of the creatures’ shrieks of pain. Feather tips scratched across the ceiling and floor, some squeaking over the window glass.
From under the canopy of feathers, a grey, sticky substance flowed, seeping in through the gaps between the floorboards.
The Angel pulled away, her wings folding, the feathers sounding like rain and I caught a half-second glimpse of what remained of Snake before I turned away my head and, my vision kept averted, rushed over to the open window.
I peered down the thirteen stories to the cracked concrete far below, the wall offering only the barest handholds. I cursed and, uncontrollably, burst into tears.
Something touched me and I turned in the Angel’s arms, she slid them around me with an unbelievable gentleness, my face pressed against the top of the dark dress that hugged her small breasts and hips.
I had time to notice that her bare feet had dotted Snake-blood footprints across the dusty floor before she lifted my head with a fingertip beneath my chin and stared into my eyes.
“Run”, the word was so quiet, barely heard, “slip back into your world before they find out where the door is or they’ll…”
With a roar, Snake’s companion slammed into her from behind, sending her crashing into me, half driving me through the window, her crystal feathers driven like glass nails into the walls around us.
She struggled to turn as the creature wrapped its tongue around her throat, slithering tight, its saliva burning holes in her dress as it touched it. She screamed as the tentacle tongue squeezed, its tip hooking under her arm, half lifting her, driving her nail feathers deeper into the walls and woodwork.
She grabbed at me, clutching me before I fell and dragged me back into the filthy room, a fate only marginally better than falling to my death. I slipped past her, around the battling monster anchored to her slim back, one hand clawing at her, the other impaled on one sharp feather.
“Run”, she screamed to me, “run to daylight.”
I stared at the lovely woman as she twisted and fought with the tongue on her legs, gripping its slithery, slimy tongue and dragging it away from her pale brown skin, unwinding it from her throat. Above her feathers screech over the plaster of the ceiling, ripping joists in two as the monsters’ weight upon her begins to drive them out of the window. I took two steps closer, my hand reached and I grasped a crystal feather, its razor edge opening my palm as she and her attacker tumbled through the window, taking the surrounding wall with them.
Before I knew it I was at the window watching them fall, her wings cutting furrows into the wall, making sparks that lit up the side of the building as they still battled with each other.
I snapped my gaze away before they hit, stumbling through the open door deeper into the building, aimlessly rushing through the rooms and corridors eventually finding, my chance, the stairs leading down.
It was no lighter when I finally got outside, almost falling through the front doors into the street only feet away from where the bodies should be.
I slowed, falling to my knees beside the corpse of Elephant Tongue, its pulpy bones burst like thick-walled balloons, and one huge eye popped, oozing foul-smelling mucus over the soiled concrete.
I looked around the Daliesque Street, all the angles wrong, the colours slightly out of the normal range and the Dark Angel nowhere to be seen.
Leaving my battered Ford where it was I walked away from the corpse, down the street into town. Above me, the sky slowly slid from black to crimson-stained grey.
Slowly dawn broke, and by the time I got to the city centre people were walking the streets once more.
I never saw her again and mere months later I saw no humans again either.
The fields of corn stretched out like a patchwork quilt ahead of me, the summer heat distorting the view across the horizon to one viewed through water. The water tarmac widened and I walked up to where the petrol station forecourt had once been and paused.
Where “The Way Station” had been was now a road that curved in a lazy arc into a car park.
I took it.
Beside the well-maintained road was a high thick hedgerow through which I thought I could hear the calls of children. I followed it until a gap in it allowed me entry, revealing a thousand square feet of glistening asphalt dotted with cars.
In the distance, a building stood. Its sides were fresh and square.
I approached it.
The shopping mall must have taken years to build. It was sprawling, modern, horrific.
I walked into the building, the main thoroughfare was fifty feet wide and there were more people than I had ever seen in one place. I walked past a bookstore, then a clothing store, and found a short corridor that led to stairs.
It was quiet here, though only feet away from the crowd it was as if I were alone in the world.
As I worked I let my mind wander.
When I first saw the shadows behind people’s eyes in the months after my adventure in the other world I thought perhaps I were going insane, so my first stop was a plethora of psychiatrists who all readily agreed, as I had expected them to.
I also read and I thought about what I read.
The things had followed me through whichever crack through to their world I had stumbled; that was the reason I hadn’t immediately begun seeing them I was now sure. Their world was a place where their main pastime was the observation of human pain and I had given them a chance to do more than just watch.
They had done what I had done, just walked into the daylight and made it their home.
I knelt and reached under the folds of the leather jacket that I wore and pulled out the items that I’d carried hidden beneath it.
I closed my eyes.
For a long time, I’ve not known who or what I was. I did not know whether the things I see are real or twisted figments of my version of reality.
The question remained; why me?
The answer was simple; why not?
The monsters had won, and I was just one man.
But I would not go quietly into the night.
I loaded the Kalashnikov, checked the Browning and walked out into the crowd.