There’s a group of them, probably around ten or so. It’s dark out here, save some light glow of starlight and a few unextinguished bulbs inside hastily-closed storefronts. Ever since I beat their friend to a bloody pulp a few weeks ago, I knew the rest would come for me. It’s a strange fact of criminals that they can both reject morality and embrace it all at once — I had wronged them, and so my transgression would be rectified in the same manner it had occurred. Out of fear and acceptance, I stand stark-still on the sidewalk while they continue their advance. Not much was to be done. I could run, but they’d catch me right quick in my drunken stupor. I could scream, but the urbanites a few stories above would dismiss it as the rambling of one of the multitude of crazies that roam the streets. A bit nobler to just stand, austere in the face of an old style of justice.
The men speak no words and show no weapons as they approach clad in black. Fists and steel-toed boots are plenty lethal, provided the owners are sure enough of their intent. They’ve now closed to within striking range, and a duet of punches to my chest bends me over. A singular kick to the groin from the rear puts me on the ground. Again, I muster the strength to say. A trill of kicks finds purchase in my spine and the cells therein splinter with ease — a mass grave of my own biology. Crimson the spectral web of veins inside of me, crimson its newfound estuaries onto the coarse pavement. Crimson the bricks I see as a grand hell-haze with blurred vision and crimson the constellation of eyes of those huntsmen gathered radially around my near-corpse. I draw in a final breath, labored with blood and mucus and organic detritus from my obliterated organs, then meekly whimper _deliver me through, dear brothers. Give me some sweet rest.
Gazing upon the victim’s murder scene primal and horrible from his apartment window, the observer grimaced, turned on the tips of his toes and delivered himself ten paces to his apartment door. He twisted the deadbolt shut and caressed the brass oval mechanism. The lock was the only thing between the observer and evil external.
After seeing what he saw on the street that night, he could do nothing more than collapse on the floor next to the door for some semblance of comfort and whimper to himself in totalizing fright and confusion. Crinkle-cut carcasses of cockroaches and silverfish like burnt out lightbulbs dotted his vision as he closed his eyes in exhaustion.
Lifted by anonymous angels to the dream realm, the observer slept. A salty sweat fell from his face and congealed into a pool on the ground circular as if drawn by compass. Those oaken floorboards on which he lay had endured an eternity of human primality, and as they were seen from the foundations below by wolf-spiders in their hovels the planks wept.
He dreamt of a great cavern deep within the Earth and a wizened man alone on a small wooden skiff paddling with tremendous difficulty across an oil-filled pond. The man peered up at him and he awoke.
A diffuse daisy halo atop the cheap Gothic apartments cross the gritty asphalt of Barrow Street alerted him to the Sun and its trillion-fold exploding nuclei. The celestial exuberance brought him some comfort, some modicum of hope for himself. The observer willed himself upwards until his feet took root in the ground, his limbs grafted onto that dead hardwood of yore. With a shudder borne of morning fatigue, the words I need to get out of here percolated out of him. He hadn’t the faintest idea why that horrible crime occurred, and his utter lack of knowledge compelled him to get away. A primal urge to escape whatever vile mechanics of men had led to the incident welled up from deep within him. He wanted no involvement whatsoever — no police interviews, no prying questions from neighbors or acquaintances. The situation could only be escaped by leaving, going far away from the environment in which it occurred. Idlewild airport, as he still called it, wasn’t more than a few hours walk away. And so he went.
A laborious trudge Eastward through the drudgery and piss-filled addict- dense streets of lower Manhattan and the melting pot of American mythos in Brooklyn was all that stood in the way of the observer and an aerial reprieve. Not two miles of sauntering had passed before he found some simple solace from the greener, wilder land of the outer borough. In stark contrast to Manhattan’s gray, towering density, he saw trees by the hundreds shedding their yellow scales, molting at a pace not understandable by any other being save a thing divine. Humankind in its varied forms and colors like some spectrum of flesh was present all around him while he walked the streets. Arriving at the airport, the observer purchased a plane ticket to some faraway mountain place in exchange for a few crisp bills the color of fluoridated toothpaste. A trance during the flight followed for him as the metal bird screeching with wings of great alchemy beat mightily through the placid heavens. Soon he touched down with a faint whiff of burnt rubber, and hydraulic glory in the brakes of the metallic miracle brought him to a stop. He reeked of the city that bore him. The overwhelming tendrils of his stench infected the mucous membrane in the nose of the lanky pockmarked near-child in his service at the car rental counter laminated in faux-granite. Economy for you today, sir? The boy from a province of a province inquired through a mouth whose height was artificially limited by orthodontic decree and enforced in Cobalt blue rubber bands. That’ll work the observer emitted, his gaze fixed at infinity four inches above the North-most boundary of the kid’s head.
They exchanged paperbound presidents long dead, and the observer walked to greet his newly-rented, reasonably-priced import. He drove sixty minutes through suburban desolation painted by a fume-scattered dusk. The gentle whirr of his four-cylinder Japanese engine accompanied his ascent and entrance to an alpine forest. Accosted by a grand army of pines the observer crossed into a realm of unending natural splendor. After another thirty minutes down the interstate he took his destined exit stage right, then drove up some county road a few miles. The observer opted to quell the controlled bombs of his mount and leave it parked neatly alongside the muddy ruts of the seldom-used and long-forgotten avenue. It was dark as he wandered in a daze onto a field of alpine meadow-grass and laid to rest. His conscious machinations leapt onto those tufts green and ancient and doughy, commingling with the nature-spirits already present in their verdant homesteads. And so he slept.
No fire was lit that night, but another man bound by fate found the observer enshrined by those tender blades in an offering to the palace of starry idols overhead. This new victim pierced the resting observer’s every grime-encrusted pore with an inquisitive gaze.
Look at this helpless bastard, lying in such a coincidental spot. I’d be remiss to not teach him something about the way things work around here. He don’t think of where the beasts that inhabit this country come from, nor what they want, nor how they live — just wants some simple escape from city-boy drudgery. Phallic concrete and steel all cold and ugly everywhere in the sky, I can’t much blame him. Damn near enough to drive a man insane. Still, a fool to’ve come up here unaware.
I walk a bit closer to get a good look at him afore I intend to put a round in his temple and take what’s his as mine, but a goddam unholy shudder in the trees far to my left rings out the silence and stops me. I can’t so much as move, listening for some other clue as to what’s in them trees. Right quick, a bear blacker’n oil peeks his head out. Thing just about slithers through the meadow towards me and I know my end has come.
I feel its breath on my neck for a beat before a multitude of sharpnesses pierces my skin and tears through the bundles of my muscles without regard for what lay within. A divine yet damned commandment is its only guide as it draws forth a thousand streams of my blood.
The observer slinked upright from his bed of wild delight to see a dawn- illuminated massacre. The grass once minty-green newly aglow in red stains and a heap of this victim’s flesh riddled with the wounds of thousandfold knives. No peace it seems the observer can find, no peace will he ever find. These subjugations abound for him — escape is an option desired but not to be granted under due process of the sole Law presiding.
Slipping in the crimson stew of silt suspended by some horrible admixture of blood and lymph the observer struggled to his feet, thereafter confronted by those coniferous foot-soldiers organized into rank and file and splayed over the sharp mounds of granite everywhere surrounding his valley of crimson remains. Nature bore witness to whatever had befallen the poor victim in the night. The observer, a jury member in amnesiac absentia, could only attempt to divine that which had occurred. No sane explanation sprang to mind, only some partial articulation of a feeling that resonated through his body akin to a requiem. The observer was bound to these two deaths like father to sons, soul-wise and wholly inescapable.
Arisen and yet still tethered to his animalistic longing for a cessation of the totalizing bloodletting that engulfed his every maneuver he twirled tip-toed and left that stage like some mocking of a ballerina bound for the forest which lay beyond. He marched for three days in lockstep timing with the inner requiem that so commanded him. The heat of the summer had brought forth tenderly bittersweet thimbleberries by the thousands as he trod through stream and meadow and forest alike. He devoured the sacrament to propel him to his end, the mothlike wandering taking him ever-closer to a final solitary plié.
Chickadees and thrushes screamed in biblical agony like some brutish choir. He walked on. Deer peered at him through the pine gaps as if imprisoned for some past misdeed to God, He doling out punishment through pre-destined death by parasitic malady or flaying by claw and maw. His heels blistered in dime- sized bubbles of pus commingling with worn leather and blood and soot like some crude biological poultice but the finality of his innate mission forced out any conscious register of pain that may have alerted his nerves otherwise. Dusk drew close on that third day. Sprinkled with the dust and pollen falling from those grand bark-laden infantrymen ubiquitous around him he collapsed in utter exhaustion becoming coplanar with particolored insectile society. Beetles crawled over him. Still he slept. Ants tested the borders of his nostrils. Still he slept. Moths hovered above his ears. Still he slept. No mechanical being in miniature served to disturb him from the tumultuous dream he dreamt.
In that realm inner to his head the dream-observer saw a vizier clad in robes of saffron and purple draw ever closer to him from its origin in a cathedral of twisted and mangled mammalian forms that towered Northward to as far up as he could see. The vizier spoke in garbled language completely unknown to the dream-observer and yet the meaning and intention which undergirded the Proto- Semitic flood phonemic and altogether despicable was clear. The two bloody atrocities which he had observed were of his own fault — he was predestined to bring with him wherever he went a curse of violence. His punishment was to be dispensed imminently, by decree not of the vizier himself, but rather some power above even he. A gaze revealed by blackened beam from atop the cathedral told the dream-observer of this origin eternal in the accursed zenith of the world. The vizier's blackened face twisted away with his dispensation of ancient justice complete.
A dewdrop fell upon the observer's eyelid and he was sprung away from the fatal land of which he dreamt. Chill-induced convulsions rid him of the chitin-clad tinker-toys which used his flesh as a playground. The brisk morning air brought up lesions on his skin million in number. Still grounded amongst the dead needles and mossy rocks he shifted his perspective upward in a mimicking of that dream- motion and found himself at the base of a mountain tremendous in its scale and pompous in its casting of a totalizing shadow across the remainder of the surrounding range. The goliath like some geologic inevitability glistened with borders alit in mottled pinkish alpenglow. Its multitude of cracks and crevices and faces and craggy protrusions culminated in a visage of some antique man entombed at the summit. On foot now he wound sinewy tension throughout his body and catapulted himself up invented switchbacks of the mountainside. Rodent companions seeking some modicum of food from the observer accompanied him on his trying ascent, some fat and jet-black in gluttonous youth and others haggard and hoary grey in decrepit seniority. No solitude was present for a reason terrible. The observer was irrevocably tethered to an invisible haze which surrounded him and followed him to all places, it not frightened by even the intense photonic bombardment spit out from nuclear mouth atop the sky. Acres of jagged granite impeded his mission upwards but still he persisted, considering the bountiful scratches and scrapes to be no more than harmless leeches. Ascending to ever higher altitudes with each subsequent step his voyage drew closer to complete. The rock underfoot transmogrified into dusty rubies for the final quarter mile and he stopped for a spell to reach his grimy hand into the pool of pebbles. Sifting through the lot in his grasp he found one unique for its perfection of spherical shape. It shone a delightful red and he held it atop his left eye-socket therefore affecting his vision like some crimson contact lens as he strode onwards and upwards. He took the twenty-odd remaining steps in a geodesic path over the crest and came upon a flat, hemispheric summit. To the left lay a cliff. To the right lay a blinding white crescent rim.
I traverse it in partial circumambulation, and prodded by the speared horns of my unseen tormentor, I leap into the vast abyss.