by Greg James
So, I clean. So, I tidy. So, I rearrange. And it does no good, serves no purpose.
Merely puts everything back in place to rot.
Torn apart again.
Epileptic convulsions take hold and go through the roof. Shatter-glass convexes push out into concave, buckle and twist, suck on your piss-teeth and shit out the cortexial-hot pain. Liquid burns the soles and the soul. Minute syringe holes hide the quantities imbibed, so settle down and sleep, it’ll be better tomorrow. Your muscles will stop speaking to you through the lacerated lips of dead schizoid children. Give us death, not the cortisone pump. Drag out my serotonin dose, make me strung out. I’d sooner be thin and listless than vital, alive and vile. Concrete floors crash and strike about our skulls and we see the cracks spreading through everything, leaving the preserve that is in us, in you, in him. It is the reanimator. The Giver of Strife. Makes us stagger and fall. Fools at perches over our uneven stalls. Buy from us. Take it away. Generous distribution of your life’s worth. Car boot sale of the soul, wrapped in plastic and antique newspapers. Sticking to fingers. Stenching up noses. Making eyes waterfalls. Use something else or different. The important thing is not to cure but to create the addict and tell him what to take. The point is not to kill god but to make him an absence that must be filled. Something’s missing. Idols required. Apply within. All fakers, no takers. Bestial army boys and football hooligans parade arm-in-arm down the streets. Let me take you by the hand. Not much to be done then but sit back, relax and shoot me up some dirt until I get the gut scratchings.
So near, yet so far.
So much is sadder than it should be. The axis upon which the world sits is not perfect - so does it tilt itself towards sadness? Does it favour grief and misery over the softer things? If you say no to this, is there a pause in your voice? Do you avert your eyes, even though there is no-one to avert them from? Do you think back to a private time that made you turn away from someone you should have held a hand out to, reached earnestly for?
I think so.
Because I do too.
So much is sadder than it should be and so much is unanswered.
Do you think so too?
I have nothing left to give.
You have used me up.
Dried me out.
As I walk my way into the upper depths of atmosphere, piercing the coal black with tears of light and ash, I see the mask that sits atop the stairs; ancient, wilted, dead and dry. Grey sundered flesh pouring from a patchwork clown interior, I can feel how it will not hurt or pinch me but form a special, silent union, knitting itself over my skin until my skin is no more. A tear issues, wet, from my left duct as I hear the marble crack of my skull’s bone breaking, reshaping, pushing into the hollows of the mask. The living part of me left being my eyes as my brain softens into a papier-mâché ball, which rots and rolls in the misshapen cave system of my reformed skull's interium. My mouth distorts following the lines of a leer, flesh and muscle creak under the unnatural, permanent stress. Nothing tears, nothing bleeds, nothing falls away.
I sit, shoulders aching under the unsteady weight and I rest the knobby chin into my hands and stare down the stair, waiting for someone to come, someone to whom I can give this burden. It’s so quiet up here I can hear the dismal, chanting engines of the universe running down.
I kick the mask and its visions down the stairs into the rotting darkness. It makes wet, mushy, hard sounds that are too human for me to take. I open the door to my room and pass on inside. Here is sanctuary.
Here is my window, my route out of here.
This be it then.
An end to my time in the city.
Where to next?
The window is open and I can hear what’s muttering to itself outside, shining with the midnight light of a thousand broken beetle shells. Soft-mouthed teeth stand in unburied rows stinking of sweet grave-meat and the things that crawl, listless, in such soggy stuff.
I go to the sill and lean over it, peering out to see what I knew I would. Colour, light and life swallowed up by the shifting shadow-mass that slithers underneath, grazing raw the skin of our dimensions, I cannot touch it anymore than I can see it but I can feel it.
It is waiting for me.
I mount the sill, holding myself steady with the rattling wattle of the frame.
Endings, if we have them, should be dramatic, so I let go. Pushing myself out, into the seamless night and it catches me, worm-soft, and it hurls me, a pale streak of disintegration, I travel fast and light through the walls of reality.
Into another place, another time, another space.
I walk the empty miles to a point in the wilderness where I can expire. The world has worn itself out around me. Leaving shadow-meats clinging to my fragile cage of hypothermic bones. I can taste boiled worms in my mouth and smell the rot of all things in all the air here. This dead sphere and its hungry creations can have me, collapsing, my head goes clear and all my consciousness spreads soiled wings of slithering butcher’s paper in which to wrap me tight. What comes to the surface will survive in the conditions we have made. Peeling skin absorbing anoxic moistures. Soft nugget eyes, white as white, unsensitive to the caustic veil of the shadowed rainstorms.
He sits on the front pew, by the far aisle, in a church that lies abandoned on the backstreets that lead away from deserted boulevards and dragon-adorned courtyards. He sits in a crumpled grey suit and washed-out baby-blue shirt. The church is an empty space but for him. The sleeves are too short on his jacket and the trousers are too tight at the knees. You can see the stitching has frayed, becoming somewhat shabby and loose in places. He tugs at the cuffs with delicately manicured fingertips. A breath of exasperation escapes him and he crosses then re-crosses his legs. He is tired of all this waiting. You cannot see his face, not because the church interior is a dim gloaming of sepulchral stone, and not because the light filtering through the windows is an obscuring schizophrenia of tainted colours.
The reason you cannot see his face is because he is wearing a mask.
It has two politely curving horns and you can see where the red paint has thinned out over the years, newspaper print showing through here and there. You can also see the smile, the way the papier-mâché lips curve, ever so slightly and ever so politely. He’s a gentleman at a soiree, sharing a sly, underhanded joke with you. He sits where he sits, by the aisle, in the pews, not saying a word, simply waiting. The eyes of the face under the mask are old, wise and bright. He checks his watch, a second-hand purchase telling him a time that is not the time. Whoever he is waiting for, this man, they are late, very late. He tugs at his cuffs with those delicately manicured fingertips and a breath of exasperation escapes him once more. The eyes in the mask catch the light of a memorial candle. Those eyes, those old bright eyes.
You had better not keep him waiting long.
Not this Fallen Angel.
This place is a quiet place. An empty place. Empty of people but not of life. Perhaps, you will pass through it one night, walking your dog or returning home, drunk. Maybe, arm in arm with a woman. Beautiful and young, perhaps.
If you do, spare me a glance.
I’m always here.
In that gutted hollow excuse for structure, last on the left, around which torn yellow tongues of danger tape snap, whisper and lie. Soot stains scurry across the foundations when the wind blows hard. You’ll see a light inside, dim and low, and a figure flickering as if on fire. He sits at his desk, never moving from it, he is working hard through the night.
Every night.
Ever diligent to that purpose which he serves.
This darkness mine.
END
Author’s Note
Thank you for reading This Darkness Mine. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have a moment, I would also greatly appreciate it if you left a review on the site where you purchased this ebook. No matter how big or small it is, every review counts and matters to a writer because without you, the readers, we are nothing.
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Find out more about Greg James at his Website, Twitter and Facebook.
Titles available by Greg James
The Age of the Flame Trilogy – YA Fantasy
The Sword of Sighs
The Sceptre of Storms
The Stone of Sorrows
The Chronicles of Willow Grey – YA Fantasy
The Door of Dreams
Voyage of the Pale Ship
Khale the Wanderer – Grimdark Fantasy
Under A Colder Sun
Lost is the Night
Hordes of Chaos
The Vetala Cycle - Horror
The Eyes of the Dead
Shapes in the Mist
Hell’s Teeth
The Sevengraves Cycle – Horror
Sevengraves
The Thing Behind the Door
Standalone Horror
This Darkness Mine
London Ghost Story
The Clowns Outside
Zombies by Moonlight
The Oeuvre
Short Story Collections
Made for the Dark
Night Residue
Poetry Collections
Untitled I
Untitled II
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for their help, support and contributions;
Lora Kaleva – for always being there for me.
Robyn Porter – for being a great friend and helping me undertake the task of rebranding my first run of horror releases.
Ed McNally & Heather Marie Adkins – for being great friends and banterers of the highest order.
The lads of Great British Horror – thanks for listening, as well as offering your advice and support. It means a great deal to me.
My beta-readers and proof-readers – you know who you are and I can’t thank you enough ever.
Finally, to all of my friends, fellow authors and fans that I have not mentioned above – thank you for your support. Stay sick, stay twisted.
About the Author
Greg James is a critically-acclaimed and best-selling self-published author. He was born in Essex and grew up along the south-east coast of England. He studied literature and media at university and has taught English as a foreign language in the Far East. He has written the acclaimed Vetala Cycle series and the best-selling Age of the Flame trilogy. He lives in London where he can be found writing into the small hours of the morning during the week, and sleeping in on Saturdays.
Table of Contents
This Darkness Mine
Dedication
Part One: Work
Part Two: Play
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author