After only a few exquisite moments of exploration, the lights began to flutter, lilting into near darkness and dimming into sallow bleakness, a fruiting corpse smeared across dissolving walls. I hoped the effect foreshadowed some wonderful event, a brief distraction to buy the next performance time for a proper showing. I was not disappointed.
Within moments of the flickering, a vast emptiness overcame the atmosphere, a clearing out of unseen spaces for the facilitation of a massive predator, a kind of living melancholy. It descended upon me through the distilled sadness that comprised the kingdom of apartments. It was the sum of all tears gone hopeless and dry in their ducts, inscrutable for their infinite smallness, an elemental of purest failure. I could feel it grasping desperately at quite particular parts of my mind, if not my soul, seeking out what most resonated with its highly selective dietary needs. Fortunately, I am not a despairing creature, nor am I one to hold onto my failures—so I offered little by way of sustenance.
I was about to chide my invisible attacker over the futility of its quest when it finally managed a handhold somewhere within the thoroughly broken parts of me. What afforded the scrabbling sorrow its traction appeared to be a bit of submerged memory. The recollection was rigid and cold, like the touch of a machine god. I could feel it approaching realization with the determination of a bloated corpse returning to the water’s surface. And so, I departed one lost memory for another, more deeply recessed remembrance.
I found myself in a familiar darkness, beneath a terrible storm. Thunder and lightning surged across the blackened sky. Mother lay dead in my arms, her blood hot upon my tongue. It was not the copper of ordinary blood, but the sweet fire of roses and secrets, all of it burning quietly behind my lips. The flesh of her heart glided down the back of my throat.
That’s when I realized the Vanishing Nowhere was true to its name. It was more than a battered dream, it was on the cusp of being entirely forgotten, filling itself up with anything that might weigh it down, to keep it from the jaws of nothingness. My buried shame was nothing but a flailing lifeline for the grasping, and I was in far more danger than I knew.
Even as I kept my memories just out of reach of the clutching gloom, I could feel nothing but pity for the dream on the very rim of death. My denial of its will to survive sent explosions of hypocrisy blooming into my darkness, illuminating my many scars from the Dead Mother—where some of her still remained, like an infection, growing tumorous, trying to fill me with all the convictions of the whited dead. Convictions such as the will to survive despite all else, a singular cosmic drive, overthrown only occasionally when the survival of the group takes precedence. And there I was, trying to cast out a drowning man from my tiny lifeboat, the fear of capsizing making a worried coward of me.
My next actions should have been my first—I held out a terrible memory, and then another, and another. Hand-feeding the desperate dream brought it into me, where it began to lay down deep, thirsting roots, anchoring itself to my newly discovered woes. But the painful reacquaintance with my neglected past was prerequisite for the dream’s survival. It fed upon me till it was drunk and fat from ripest misery—drab walls renewed themselves in thick sheaves of liquescent wood rot and scuttling vermin, and so the temple to depression blossomed like a blackened meadow filled with burned flowers, strong with the scent of smoldering beauty. In the distance, far above me, I could hear the construction of a new room, a live-born space of specific horror—my horror, where the blood of my new family outlined the places where I had slain them. Where I had eaten them.
The room retreated from me—I was a spent morsel, a husk. Perhaps I’d always been empty, I was forced to consider, and had only just nursed a void. Over the course of my many and sundry battles, I’d been struck by monsters and gods alike, and kept my feet—but never had any blow diminished me so thoroughly as the memory which now stood revealed. I collapsed to the ground. And for my troubles, the apartment house mimicked the sounds it had plucked from my ultimate sadness, no doubt the equivalent of turning a canteen upside-down—an attempt to coax one last drop of nourishment from its hiding place. A terrible memory came spilling from without my overturned mind—of the time when I took them all from the world:
They could vanish from sight within an empty white room, sever the spine of a charging razorback in seconds, scale a wall like scuttling spiders—my sisters were, in every pore of their souls, hunters. That night beneath the storm and darkness of night, we played one last game together, with knives and smiles and blood and death. It was our mother’s wish that we do so. It was necessary, and we understood why.
I remember when they tricked me into that attic, with vanishing footfalls and feigns aplenty, their abrupt laughter coming from impossible places, knives sliding across my skin like bladed breaths. The tiny room seemed to shrink, closing in on me, denying me the use of my strength. When the door closed from behind, they were upon me. Their speed was inhuman, moving over and across me with their blades dragging behind them, freeing my blood into the darkness, giggling like pull-string dolls, eyes blacker than funerals. I dove into the deepest silence I could manage, hoping to lose them in my wake. But it was no use, I was trying to outswim barracudas. They were only toying with me, and we all knew it. It was the nature of our game. I could never hide from them. Never evade them.
At the best of times, I was only their plaything, and that night—the worst of times—my heart wasn’t in it at all. I could never hurt them, not even for Mother. I just sat upon the floor, waiting for them to take me, my whole purpose forfeited. My test failed—I wasn’t the one my mother needed. I lowered my head in surrender.
While I could not hear them, I knew they were standing over me, my wonderful sisters. “It will be our secret, dear brother,” they said in whispered unison. I could feel them slip my bone-handled blades into my limp hands—the knives which formed the principal scaffolding for my skills with a blade. They were warm and wet with blood, my sisters’ blood, as my sisters had drawn them across their throats. It was all they ever wanted in the world—to join me in spirit.
Here was the real test, to see the task completed, without shedding a single tear. I held the two of them close, their whispered blood falling across my shoulders and down my back, gossamer waterfalls of bottomless red. Their sweetened smiles were like hot tears against my skin, and they whispered again, “Whatever joy is left in this world, dear brother, we will find together, as one. Now, do what you must. What we all must.” There was no visual memory of what came next, only the deepest refusal for knowledge, a pictureless recall of events wrapped in such darkness as I’d never known, before or since. I do not know if I cried. I hope that I had, test be damned.
Afterward, the floor shook as if the world were coming apart beneath the rage of a mad god—my father would not come to me like a lamb, but as a lion. His test was violence, pure and red. My forebear’s axe moved through the world without resistance, passing through stone and steel as easily as smoke, its killing edge irresistible as time. The old mansion within which we sheltered cracked and split as he charged.
When at last we came together in perfect violence, I truly believed the resulting calamity cowed the storm that hung above us—lurking and looking upon our contest with some interest, no doubt. His first blow sent my knives tumbling from my hands where they met the falling axe, casting my body through the air, a wall, and a third-story window. Laughter like the end of the world followed me the entire way, gnawing at the raw tips of my every nerve. What I took for more thunder became the sound of my father smashing through the wall next to the window he’d sent me through—axe raised above his head, descending from the black, stormy air, laughter exploding past his frothing, gaping jaws.
Asserting my own strength, I lunged into the air, thrusting my shoulder into Father’s hurtling mass. Reality might have buckled slightly as I denied the inertia of his attack, delivering us both deeper into the dilapidated manse, crash
ing through its layers and roaring through what was left of its cellar door. The underground darkness was quick to obliterate us, but not before I hoisted the axe-bearer from where he struggled upon my shoulder and threw him into the churning pitch.
Not entirely to my surprise, there came no hint of the near giant man crashing down, only empty silence waiting to be filled with the din of war. My father, like myself, was friend to both darkness and silence. Suddenly, the silence broke as my father’s axe was tossed carelessly into a corner, clanking down upon the cold stone. Then came the sound of stiff joints being cracked loudly, in preparation for a final confrontation of the most primitive and brutal kind. A voice exploded through the darkness. “Come, boy! Show me what you’ve learned!”
His fist struck like a hammer, pulping gums and ejecting several teeth, freeing blood into the sheltered darkness. I needed to demonstrate my mettle, become the stanch anvil the hammer was struck against, and so I proved worthy of his first blow—I still stood, if only barely. Unfortunately, the same could not be said after his succeeding attack. I was thrown from the floor and sent crashing into the damp stone, my bones screaming their limits, my mind exploding into sparks of pinwheeling awareness. His third blow struck the wall, ancient rock yielding to an oversized fist, as I’d recovered enough to sidestep. Lurching forward, I launched my own oversized fist back into the fray, where it collided with rows of exposed, raw-red teeth—Father’s perpetual rictus grin. He was every inch unfazed, if dispossessed of several of his own teeth.
Every bit my father’s son, it was my second blow that took him from the earth. He smashed through a nearby support beam, bringing some of the ceiling down, roaring indignation through dust and collapsing wood. Not wasting a second on the spectacle, I charged through the avalanche, leaping up and delivering an airborne kick—all my weight and strength, doubled by inertia—squarely into his chest. The giant flew backwards into the blackness of an adjoining room. Silence again.
I couldn’t afford to lose my momentum, which was my father’s hope. I rushed into the room, prepared to seize and smash whatever I came upon. My father had always been an enigma to me—his scars, his monstrous demeanor—but, even more than that, his violence. It was anarchy. One moment he was raging, the next, cold as winter stone, effecting no predictable cadence to his chaos. Here was no different. As I charged into the room, a soft encumbrance met with my left foot, tripping me face-first into the wall. More rattling teeth and bones. I had neglected to notice the huge foot sticking out, patiently waiting for me to run into it. My father was as much fox as wolf.
It was utterly dark, so I might have been forgiven for thinking my opponent had taken a sledgehammer to my kidneys, but I knew better—his fists were no less, if not more than tools made for splitting rock. The pain dropped me to the floor, and before I had the chance to roll to my back, a great booted foot stomped me into the wet stone. I had become only an insect to be crushed out of existence, nothing more. Repeatedly came the thunder of my father’s devastating footfalls, each monstrous impact compromising both the scaffolding of my body and the integrity of the floor. His booming laughter grew with every crunch and crackle my body gave up.
Yet anger was not sole ally to my father. Summoning my own fires, I vanished in a plume of vagrant darkness, my father’s gigantic foot passing through empty space. In an instant, I rose up before my forbear, my massive fist swinging upward. The attack was weighted with as much anger as the need to impress. Even in a battle to end his life, I would make him proud. His head snapped backward, offering me only an instant to act. I seized the exposed throat of the man who had raised me—imparted his exquisite violence, made me a man—and I tore it out.
But death would not take my father without a fight, as I should have known. I was seized in a monster’s death-grip and smashed through the solid rock of another wall. He released me only long enough to rain down fists like meaty comets, pounding me unrecognizable. I gave him his last rage, and so let my arms drop to my sides. I was thankful for all the blood, as it concealed my tears for him, a gesture he would certainly have disapproved of. His attack slowed until he finally collapsed into me.
His final words as a living man came out in a hiss of air and blood. “Boy . . . I fought this rotting world and lost. But because of me, you whelp . . . you will not.” In darkness and blood and death, I held my father for the first time. But it would not be the last.
The memory of my father ended, renewing my strength. I seized the dismal spirit of the spire, prying back its jaws, denying it the last of my energy for its own. It would have to make do with what I surrendered. Realizing that I would feed it no more, willingly or otherwise, the incarnate melancholy withdrew, begrudgingly dripping my stolen sadness as it went, slamming a thousand doors behind it. I was alone upon the moldering, cracked floor, the undesired memory of sacrificial flesh my only companion, playing across my tongue, passing into the doubtful myth of myself. What had mother done to me? To all of us?
Somewhere, a song began playing, a soothing box of musical notes cranking colored sound into the stale air. There was an instant connection with me, music and memory holding hands—yet it was a recollection without recognition. The house was trying to come back to some semblance of life, my misery bloating its arteries. It was a kind of gratitude, I suppose. An ode to one man’s saving failures. The desperate, dying dream was an indebted thing now, wanting to repay me for my troubles. It was leading me to a room, my room, made especially for—from—me. I rose and made my way past countless derelict apartments, corpses of living spaces. There were entire lifetimes heaped into dirty corners, abandoned dreams without dreamers.
At last I came upon a room with its door ajar, music seeping through, luring me. My next few thoughts seemed trapped by the subdued harmony, flies caught within a web spun from silken sound. I realized that the composition of notes was scored from my own life—my very soul made music, playing through my mind’s eye. It was a somber piece, though not without its share of uplifting notes. But most curious was the theme that played in the sonic underground, far beneath the passing movements, a submerged peal of deepest staccato, wavering and waiting. It somehow had both the quality of a stringed instrument and a vastly percussive creature. The sound stirred beneath the sonic interpretation of my life, occasionally revealed in the depth of a trumpet or cello, even the deep blast of a tuba, but mostly it lived in the drums, sounding out the heartbeat of something hidden and terrible.
I gently opened the door the rest of the way, eager and curious for fresh revelations. Though, to be honest, I was well over my respective limit for fresh revelation. The room seemed far older than what a modern apartment could ever hope to address. I was to dwell here, to the sound of my failed life, basking in the grey glow of desperate immortality, to pace a dirty floor and stare from a single dirty window, in slowest turns of wonder and despair. It was a pleasant enough gift, to be sure, and one I wanted to make no immediate show of rejecting. I didn’t want to ruin a friendship.
My time in the room was indeterminate, as was only proper within a dream. I did as I would, drowsing in pale rooms, covered in a kind of merger of dust and shadow, a soft alliance of two substances barely distinct even within the firmest of worlds. I did indeed stare from the soiled window, glimpsing strange sights—occasional leviathans of some type lurched the opaque distance, restless and monstrous. There were also the sounds of ceaseless sadness embodied within their own dour melodies, cobbled from suicide thoughts and disappointed expectations. This place was the end of all meaningful hope, a morose equilibria for the failed and miserable, where one could fade away, quietly, imperceptibly.
Despite all that, there was indeed beauty in the bleakness, however small—the dull poetry of common failure, the ceaseless drone of ordinary silence, the wan, sickly glow of dying. It was its own art gallery, a perfected habitat for the greyest pieces, and it was in no need of improvement—save perhaps for its inability to sustain
itself, which almost seemed a necessary component for a properly ironic existence. And yet something seemed to linger, undiscovered and out of place—a purpose.
I searched not only the room, but portions of the complex itself, an endless wonderland of misery and waste. And while I glimpsed more than was healthy for a sober mind, I did not alight upon anything slightly resembling a meaningful thing, unspent of its ominous burden. When I appeared before a great iron door, distinct for its possession of an apparent function beyond reflecting fruitlessness, I thought my quest nearing completion. My father had grown sorely bored of our stay in the apartment complex, so I thought to enliven his spirts by allowing him to cleave through the door. It might have opened on its own, as I spied no lock, but my father was in dire need of his own purpose.
The entrance was no match for him, and its remains tumbled like dull broken glass down a narrow stairwell that sank into blackened oblivion. There was no sound and no darkness, just a sort of hallway-shaped absence. But the more I studied the void, the more I realized its nothingness a product of my own, apparently unconscious desire not to see it for what it was. Also, my apartment’s ancientness had either followed me from my room or had slipped itself from the void, as a profound expanse of time opened upon me—a second stairwell, its every step an epoch removed from me, unfurling, leading down.
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