Etched Deep & Other Dark Impressions

by David Niall Wilson

  "Fill the void that is my soul."

  She heard his voice calling to her, deep, wide-eyed gaze sweeping the river's banks for his form, the comforting presence of broad shoulders and broader smile. She saw only crocodiles, watching...waiting. She shivered as his words brushed her heart.

  "Drain the sacrificial draught...

  Of flame and wave."

  SHIFT

  The waves roared their challenge to her from the rocks far below, shimmering with a soft sheen of moonlight. She slowly tugged the cork free from the wine bottle, arms straining, then the soft pop of release and success. No glass this night. Only the bottle, the cliffs, the waves–his eyes, her heart, dancing over moon-swept water to a distant shore and–back?

  She drank, tipping the bottle and letting the rich red wine slide over her lips and tongue, down her throat to bite and grip with glowing talons, warming her and drawing her mind inward. The waves defined her, shivering through the hiss of spray and the pounding of the surf.

  "Dark to light ascend,

  To dark unfold..."

  She rose, wrapping her cloak about her more tightly, the wine forgotten, gazing out over the sea. She closed her eyes, breathing in the cool air, the salt of the wind kissing her tongue lightly and she spread her arms wide, a slender, wingless bird. She stepped from the cliff in a smooth, graceful motion, arms outspread and soaring, out and down.

  The wind whipped her hair back and whispered softly as she dove.

  "The silk-soft offering of union

  Folds tight around one soul,"

  She cut through the air in a graceful arc toward the water's surface, sharp reef and surf-rounded stone littering the waves and a deeper, blue-black hole in the center where she would plunge, deep, hugged and cushioned by cold water and the distant, hopeless whisper.

  "To hold and comfort you,

  No dream spared,

  As you/I/we implode.

  She sliced the water's surface cleanly, trailing wild, uncontrolled flurries of bubbles in a long ribbon from her lips to the surface. She dove deeper, embraced by water and memory, engulfed in dream, her eyes closed and her mind open.

  SHIFT

  The walls of the cell were cold and damp, colorless and marbled with mold and fungus. No window marred the smooth surface, which was decorated here and there with steel rings and chains of iron, leather straps, and shadowed corners promised darker gifts.

  Her wrists were held tightly by manacles short-chained to the wall above her head, her back tight and naked against smooth stone, legs spread in offering to shadows that reached to carve the letters into soft flesh, sharp talons of memory and sensation, words that said all, and nothing.

  "Dream of me,

  Oh spirit of pain and love..."

  Water dripped endlessly, steady drip-drop-drip of insanity eating into her soul and jumbled among the sounds, lingering in the hollow echo of each drop, his voice.

  "Fill the void within my dreams."

  Soft skittering in the darker shadows, syncopated back beat to her heart, trip-hammer quick. She shivered. Steady footsteps sounded in the darkness, beyond the stone doorway and she shivered in quick, frantic struggles that accomplish nothing but the tightening of fear's grip on her heart and the punctuation of helplessness.

  "Mount the throne

  Of ecstasy and angst,"

  Leather soles slapped stone in time to the words. She lowered her eyes and waited, dangling tapestry of tender flesh, awash in goosebump textures and cold, colder than she could recall.

  "Sink within, disperse,

  And pierce my heart."

  She felt the words now. No sound, no sensation; they were, and she knew them, nothing more. Her heartbeat slowed and her breathing grew more regular. Her struggles ceased and her bonds became support–her imprisonment protection from...

  "The loss of self and solitude

  Melts to fluid essence."

  Her eyes were closed, but she felt his hot breath sliding over her skin, sensed him near. He did not touch, but fingers brushed the air beyond her flesh, tingled along the lines of her veins and traced the path of her blood.

  "Reborn and cast within

  a mold of fate ...you/I/we

  reborn."

  The intimacy became too much and she allowed her eyelids to flicker. Light invaded her dark world and his breath departed in a soft whoosh as leather bit air, bit flesh, her scream ripped free and her eyes wide as the lash peeled from her and drew back once more.

  SHIFT

  The sunlight rose gold-hued and soft over the city skyline and she stepped gently down the overgrown trail. The wrought-iron gates of the cemetery rose before her, steel-taloned claws raking at the sky and striping the ground with skeletal shadows. She moved between the gates, half-fallen on rusted hinges, careful not to brush the dark metal, colder still than her flesh, her heart.

  "Come to me oh Priestess

  Of mirrored hearts."

  She slipped past row after row of low-cut stones, monuments to the masses, lingering imprints of lives. Each whispered to her softly. Each breathed gentle memories up through the soles of her feet and into her heart, but she heard only one voice clearly.

  "Drink the wine

  That is my blood."

  She stepped through a small, inner gate beyond a lower fence, no less cold, or dark, but more intimate. The gates hung open behind her, and yet there was closeness in the air, boundaries folding about her and the biting edge of finality in the air. She tried to pull the tattered silk, the soiled jacket tighter, but nothing altered the bone-chilling bite of his loss.

  "Lay back on an altar,

  Of bone and fire."

  She stepped to the center of the small clearing, to the long, low-slung tomb of marble, its inscription old now, and worn. She laid her hand on that stone, felt the smoothness, the timeless quality of things remembered, but static. No changes left, only time, and the cold.

  She slid onto the stone, laying back, her long hair sweeping across the stone, her shoulder blades pressing against the stone, her heart covering his.

  "Offer yourself,

  Sacrifice to sacrifice."

  She closed her eyes, letting her thoughts drift, falling into the words and the images, remembering. She felt the small scarab, placed about her slender throat by his hand...again and again...time no enemy, but a cycle spent and renewed. The pendant became the single source of warmth in her universe and she slid inward, concentrated herself on that glowing portal as tendrils of thought/mind/soul sifted in and through that gate, calling her to him once more.

  SHIFT

  She lay on stone, but not the stone of his tomb. The floor of the shelter was colder, surrounded by heaps of rags disguised as human beings, wrapped in the borrowed/stolen tatters of clothing and their battered visions, squatters on a plain of empty dream. Each of them was a world. Each heard his/her own voices.

  She opened her eyes and saw one drawing near, stepping carefully between bodies. He made straight for her without hesitation, and she breathed a soft sigh of release. The scarab was so hot it nearly burned her skin.

  His eyes met her gaze, cool, calm, cold as ice but filled with the promise of heat.

  "The sweet-sharp blade of my prayer,

  Slices soft skin to pierce our heart."

  He stood directly over her, and she caught the gleam in his hand, felt the soft tug of regret, then peace. The blade rose, worlds fell away. And he, dove-white and shining rose, arms spread and brought together, hot knife sharp and falling, slicing her breast cleanly and diving to her heart. She felt the bite, arched gasping from the stone as the fiery release of herself slicked the floor, his words clear and bright and her hands gripping the wrists, driving the blade deep and true.

  "To drain and savor you,

  No drop spared as you/I/we

  Run red..."

  SHIFT

  She rose slowly, feeling the warmth and running her fingers gently over bare arms and soft, clean silk. The stone tomb
pressed up from the earth, supporting her once more, warm in late-morning sunlight. The air was ripe with the scent of decapitated lily-corpses, slowly wilting remains lining the small grove. She slid to the ground, no longer cold, and turned, tracing patterns on the smooth white stone with her fingers.

  His breath caught her, surprise brush on the back of her neck, his large hands resting lightly on her trembling shoulders. His fingers walked slowly around, found the pendant, tracing scarab-beetle legs and he rested his head on her shoulder.

  Then he was moving her, turning, bringing her in a slow circle until her gaze found the smaller stone where it jutted from the earth, glinting in the sunlight. Softly gasping she pulled away, kneeling in the soft grass and reading, tracing inevitable words reverently. Two words, numeric patterned symbol of this life she felt–or, did she remember it? Rising, she turned and met his gaze. . .

  SHIFT

  Gathered around her now, small worlds pressed tightly one to the next, not colliding, blending instead and circling. Candles flicker in a soft dance and scented smoke from a tiny bowl-fire brazier circles slowly above, whirling captive of ceiling-fan breezes leaving echoed swirls of shadow on the floor as they block the rays of the bare, yellow-bulb eyes suspended above.

  Soft voices, murmurs of chanted dreams, bittersweet and longing drift about the room. In the center of the circle she lays on a pillow formed of the faded brocade jacket. Her arms cross her breasts in a cross-hatch hug of finality. There is a hum from the heater, close by, her coveted space now warm and still and those nearby no longer crowding, but watching.

  At her throat the candlelight glitters off the scarab, winking at each in the darkness, beyond the veil glimpse at warmth denied. The chant becomes a long soft sigh and trails to nothing. White-coated invaders bully through the circle, voices too loud and eyes too blind to know the ritual in its completion.

  Lifted and borne away the shell of what remained and in that motion, soft-gold chain links broken and a tumbling glitter. None moving until the room, once more, is silent, until the space is a vague shadow of her outline...nothing more, and in its center, glowing, lays the scarab, winking like a single, watching eye.

  "Come to me, oh goddess

  of mirrored hearts."

  The voices fall to silence. Small worlds shift and blend and in that shuffle the pendant moves to new hands, eager clever hands that re-bind broken links. Slipping over long, soft blonde hair, lifted to let the scarab rest, pillowed between soft breasts. Her eyes close and she dreams as the voice whispers, calling her home.

  DARK MAN

  The dark man sat, his fingers bent to claws

  Ripped the fabric of his soul, and reached

  Inside, tearing, rending without pause

  Until his armored heart's walls had been breached.

  Carefully he sliced out special dreams

  And brushed away the mildew and the mold

  Then cleaned the space he'd opened, held the seams

  Awaiting something glittering, and gold,

  Someone who had looked within his mind

  And seen those cobwebbed dreams behind his heart

  Had worked her way within the ties that bind

  To claim those broken dreams as works of art.

  She sewed and wove and whispered to his life,

  You hold my dreams, and you shall call me wife...

  For Patricia Lee Macomber

  Pretty Boys in Blue and Long Hair Dangling

  She tried to compartmentalize it by moving into a single floor of an empty office building. A single long corridor with doors opening to either side. Slide-in plastic labels for each. It might have worked, but the corridor was long, and the offices were too large. The tile on the floor, a checkerboard nightmare turned at diamond angles in the 60s and left to entropy, made her nervous. There were too many windows, and some of them looked back into the hall.

  She used curtains to close these off, different colors for each, the insides awash in dangling chains, pendants, photographs, or whatever struck the right muse. Halfway through, she knew it would never work. She’d built her framework on a set number of rooms, and something had changed.

  A new muse struck.

  Pretty boys in dark blue and long hair dangling–always on the left–wrote obscure Tibetan chants to percussive beats. They met only on the fourteenth day of each month and never in the same place. They drank a particularly pungent Chai variation and recorded their creations straight to digital. Never a CD, never a disk. Nothing but dot-net, and that so clogged with dogma and securely interleavened data that only the initiated could access it. Initiation did not come cheaply, and creating the chants required the full attention of mind and body without karmic dissonance. She wanted to hang with them, but her screen hung on the words ‘Transparent to new Bee’. It would take time, and thus, a room.

  She would need decorations.

  She would have to run cables.

  Where to put them? The green room was nearly finished, hung with spider plants that reached floor to ceiling and lost photos of found ancestors, black and whites and color shots from inside brand new wallets. In this office she played only obscure bootleg cuts from unknown bands, removing instantly any sound that might have reached the airwaves on commercial radio. She had books, all hand-sewn, stapled, or pasted together in print runs of one. Works of art, dedicated to creativity. Some of them have been well-reviewed, but only by her, as she owns the solitary copy–no reprints.

  Obscurity is its own reward.

  Somewhere, she knows, her own book resides on a shelf.

  At least, she hopes it does. With one copy only…and no reviews she has been able to locate…so difficult.

  The Black Room drips with water in tiny Feng Shui fountains, dyed red and bubbling over rocks, sliding around perpetually spinning balls, dripping down stepped cascades of colored stone. Blacklights, hung in the corners, bring a ‘blue-light special’ tinge of afterworld to each and every surface. Bauhaus and The Sisters of Mercy glare down baleful and haughty from where they hang beside fan-art vampires–men, women, children with haunted empty eyes and leering, come-hither lips.

  The words in the black room reflect blacklight white on dried blood paper.

  The leather and dark lace and white enamel required make her ache.

  Aching is required to write in the black room.

  Each has a connection to the box. The box has 24 port cascaded hubs snaked one to the next in Medsuaesque snarls of cable. There are more strands, and the cascade is endless, but there are no more rooms.

  She started in the white room. There everything is organized by sets of rules and lists of infractions. The walls are papered with Strunk & White, pages cut and pasted in grammatical sequence, punctuated by brilliant covers that could have been shorn from their spines and pasted in place but instead are mounted carefully on small clear shelves because each word is sacred. The ties that bind the pages are not made of hemp but strung with gut-wrenched strands of intestinal fortitude. So precise it cuts, the light in this room blinds her and without her shadows she is incomplete.

  That room is sealed. Pages written there bear the red pen wounds of frustration, and she knows, (oh yes, she knows), frustration is the key and must be channeled, re-arranged and dug into the page with sharp, swift, surgical slashes of a medium point pen.

  And there is a shrine.

  Every room has a shrine with names carved or painted, whispered or sent out through digital cables in a quick electronic breath. The creators of literary color and their works. Interviews printed out from the web. Podcasts playing in endless loops. Her words, reams of paper scattered throughout the rainbow, cast at multicolored altars and dusted with the incense of despair. Each bit and piece, chapter and verse written in the proper room, in the proper style, with the proper voice–the accepted voice–the voice that talks to her deep inside gray matter walls when the colors are invoked–the voice that vaguely, somehow reminds her of someone she once new–or was.
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  Each new color spins the wheel.

  Each new inspirational challenge springs potential-to-kinetic in properly formatted leaps of brilliance.

  Each rejection spins the wheel, and now?

  There are pretty boys in blue with no home because all of the rooms are colored and the halls are bare and diamond checkered all at once. She knows this will be her chance. She will be one of them, the first pretty girl in blue, chanting to the center of cyberspace and fulfilled, but first she needs a room that does not exist.

  And so she sits in the center of it all, near the box and the Medusa cables, arms wrapped and twined intricately, crying tears that will run down the wires and into the brain of the box. Tears will clear memory, but an empty, powerless box is of no use to her. She knows it is time to move on and wonders how she will bear to take each room apart.

  The colors and the curtains.

  The photos and the screens with their podcasts and their sound bytes that nibble her nerves.

  The shrines.

  She closes her eyes and dreams.

  It comes in a vision and her dream-self smiles. Her tingling skin ripples with a soft shiver.

  The office building is square, but now she sees a circle. Sliced like a colored pie, each angled segment arranged to fit its rejection perfectly, the box in the center. Plenty of room for pretty boys in blue with their hair dangling (always on the left) and Magenta girls with wolf companions and life stories trickling over sensual lips to dribble ink on vellum parchment–for black and white and Strunk & White–a Carousel of color. Her carousel.