Swords of Steel Omnibus

by Howie K Bentley et al.

  And he spoke unto them: “Some are The Grim. They harkened from remote antiquity. They are the ones who walk in league with The Death Gods and slip into our channels during our weak moments. They will the wild upon The Earth. Others are but benign analogs of residual trauma stained upon crude matter. A whisper of what was once a parent’s purpose abruptly extinguished at the caprice of chance and damned to traipse sad corridors on an eternal quest for mother. No matter dark destroyer nor guardian nymph, they all are characterized by their strangeness. You close your eyes in dark meditation and try to realize a colour that no one knows the name of. Such is the true nature of ghost. Endeavoring to know them is vain pursuit as their ways are purposefully made inaccessible to us by whatever governing force dictates all that whatever thing experience is. Know this! The following is a true story. A wiser man once told me that a song is nothing more than three chords and the truth. This is my song. This is my song to my ghost. These are my three chords devoid of pomp, caprice, and all things superlative.” His voice decayed in epic sustain, and somewhere in that starshine ether, his words and their images were conveyed via the mind’s eye unto that lowly campfire throng. Through a tunnel cosmic and saturated beyond perception, the stranger’s life unfolded casually and vividly in their respective dreamscapes from its genesis on. Through a waning conduit to reality he spoke, “You will find improvisational truths here. Since my emergence from the womb I have walked a canopied subterranean path of none but singularly bizarre phenomenon.” Their minds were bridled and placed within placid remembrances of the venerable mongoloid.

  Now to The South. Before he transmogrified into his current state he began as any child—fresh, abounding with potential, and doted on by a myriad relation who believed in him. He was born on a Wednesday to a psychic mother who kept cursed black sand in decorative bottles. In his nursery hung a poem proclaiming Wednesday’s child to be full of woe. He was predisposed to gloom. His colic would tear his parents apart. Despite this bleak inevitability, he entered the springtime of life with abundance and sun. His youth was marked by high tides under ephemeral glances of heaven painted rich Carolina blue and smeared soft peach by carousing spirits in the sky. Girls in cultish white dress lead him down the shell-laden beaches. He remembered their kind faces and not their names nor identities. Their mousy locks sheen with youth, they danced wildly with abandon in the origin surf winds. They were stranger kin. They were telepaths. They imbued him peripherally and abstractly via astral energies with the encouraging truth that it’s never too late to be brand new. They disappeared hovering beyond the beach into the shadow of pine where through their lullaby of high cotton and jumping fish faded into the deep wood. With their dissipation came the crossing crescendo of a soft organ’s cadence floating ever gently across amber fields, and once again he was hand in hand with the elder woman en route to a strawberry patch where spat forth Clovis points from its hoary depths when black soil drank the August rain and purged its secrets. It was the edifice that presided over this tranquil montage that bonded the energy of the past and present. It was perhaps more human in spirit than the humans themselves. Any thing or place maintained by humans becomes personified—this is pointedly true of houses as they become living and breathing things pulsing with the energy and will of their inhabitants who smear their life force into their fiber through loving maintenance. The tending humans pamper crude matter until it teems with life force. It teems with the limitless shoals of wriggling little souls. Without the human they’re incarnate. The human brings them into being and indubitably provide the materials with love and fastidiousness until they ultimately expire, leaving the domicile alone to languish woefully and vainly longing for their keepers’ return. And unto this journey of perpetual longing the house returns to nature, tearfully, moss-eaten, sodden and bowing, until its final death rattle while gently it lists under the pressure of one final funeral shroud of snow. A pile of brittle timber imbued with the swollen emotions from births, deaths, and holidays celebrated by the long since deceased. It begins to cough. It begins to shake. It is languishing, starving, and naked not unlike a cadaveric prisoner of war. Now just a pile of bones and residual psychic discoloration on the soil as the area and remnants themselves are ghosts as its ghosts who once loved in it and loved it.

  Such was the venerable colonial haunt and its country labyrinth hedges which belonged to him the child and him alone during the long rays of summer. There he pioneered old barns where remained the restless spirits of war horses, crumbling fire pits where his forbearers leisured, bean bins with hiding serpents, and sandboxes with ancient toys encrusted in the red clay beneath the beach sand. Ominous and ever-present in the distance was land ceded by evil spirits where Indian burial mounds callously lay level in the wake of diesel belching behemoths. This land was also his yet never dared upon. The house’s foundation served as the bowels to an innumerable and forgotten number of structures before it. It was more a yawning and indifferent hole in the ground, a sepulcher pit and a general portal rather than a proper foundation. The property’s land records long ago inexplicably went missing. This colonial revival house of his parents’ parents was where he first perceived “them.” A dim and distant warning, lurking and knocking upon its slimy limestone underbelly was ever-encroaching—ill fungi-like, tenacious and patient as it dwelt. In its third floor southeastern bedroom he’d remain wide awake, staring at walls painted pale blue which took on bizarre luminescent properties as the moonlight played its spectral trick upon them. This paint was ancient and harkened back to days gone when children now dead fancied its then vibrant hues. Now they stood bleached and neglected, yet untouched for nostalgic and unbearable memories of those long since dead kin. As a child (in some abstract perception) this wasn’t lost upon his developing conscious. His bedroom window afforded a wide view of a moonlit garden and its well where gray spectres would dully float, dart and sometimes dance upon the bowling green when the night’s atmosphere felt tentative and fitful to the little one.

  He saw these dark wonders as beauty and it in no way broke nor oppressed his effervescent spirit. He took the uncanny as mundane drudgery and weird phenomenon as commonplace occurrence. At five years of age he told his mother to look under a dank niter-coated rock in the forest under which she discovered gold. It was not that he knew what was under the rock—rather than merely a compulsion to suggest she check, as perhaps by random obsession or driven by exterior forces. He had not the words to articulate the inner monologue then no more than he ever would into decrepitude. All things weird seemed to cavort around the child. Where we went there was the weird. He was integral, center, and perhaps the very vortex from whence it came and where it flourished. He always had strange neighbors. There was a house in his midst where two women lived. They kept the company of psychics, all of whom (it was relayed in rumor) informed them that there was a shockingly beautiful yet melancholy spirit in their house. A wide-eyed gypsy prophet said a barn once stood where the house now was. It was perched upon a precipice cresting a dramatically steep hill. It would have been an obvious lookout point to scroll the rolling Carolina landscape of the agrarian days. She—waiting eternally for her beau to return from the great war of aggression, unbeknownst to her that what few shreds of his mortal remains could be scraped from the gory true northern soil were hastily and carelessly cast into a nameless mire amongst a motley disarray of skull and limb, none belonging to the next. She would go to that barn to weep where its soil routinely drank her brackish cascades which fell with profusion. Moreover, there was a soldier’s headstone in a grove all but fifty yards from where the little boy laid his head on his pillow each night and went to sleep only to become a conduit to all the spiritual vortex on spree in his tiny world. There was causal connection between this weathered stone and the ghost girl of the barn. His metaconscious assured him of this, though it was never outwardly contemplated.

  His neighbors were a carnival of oddities indeed, but oh, how there was one clan but the worst! They
dwelt across the fields and their boundary could be seen through the hoary bubbly pane of his bedroom window—the woods wherein the ebony witch dwelt. Oh that witch, how she gave him a fright! She lived beyond the great dismal bog in the distant woods wherefrom the wild dogs barked. She was the skeletal officer of two retarded waifs, aggressively reclusive and without spouse. She would oft creep to the wood’s edge and besiege those she chanced upon with unsolicited words which were always vague and foreshadowing. A singular vivid memory of seminal origin within his metaconscious, the boy recalled, was her cryptic words issued with a raised crooked boney finger, pointing as they croaked droll from her rancid mouth gaping below sunken dead eyes. “Don’t let my children poison your mind.” He knew she was attempting to manipulate him as those are the silver-tongued words of deception giving itself away to the savvy. He knew it to be the opposite and the mongoloid children were innocents.

  The Indians constantly kept candles burning on the left side of their cabins which faced in her hut’s direction so as to illuminate and sanctify their domiciles against her negative energy. Superstition ran rampant in these hinterlands. Some lit their dwellings against her out of pure intuition without any exposure to folklore regarding such matters. It was a simple primal necessity. It was at an early age he became metaconscious. He pondered what was at the forefront of one’s mind and what was abstract and peripheral. The forest Indians and common people all had their mantras and maxims. He wondered if the common folk understood the seminal genius of their metaphors or if they simply repeated them in blind servitude to the colloquialisms of their birthright. They, the troglodyte hinterland rovers who indulgently blathered their maxims—was it feigned wisdom? Was it total complacency of speech such as their literal interpretation of scripture? He felt that it was most likely they traipsed through their lives with utter complacency in perspective. Surly he thought, profound truth and revelation was lost and/or at best transmogrified, through their injudicious heaping of superfluous fluff upon their language. He couldn’t help but dwell on the words carefully chosen through discourse and how they resonate throughout life. One should use analogy sparingly and with precision he believed, as they are the exposing calculation of one’s intellect. His inquiry into such matters drove him quite often to the brink of sanity. His path into strangeness had begun early on indeed, and his cup flowed over with beauty in cosmic weirdness of which he imbibed to excess.

  His honorary induction into the metaphysical community came in the form of their family ghost and its nocturnal sprees. It brought all into question and commensurately answered all question. Phenomenon of all sort followed. He received sporadic psychic shivers at utter random. He was certain of callous pedestrians crossing his grave in some remote future. The notion that he indeed was dead and unaware, such as his dead companion, became an intrusive notion that walked with him in his shadow as his shadow walked with him at night darker than any other umbra. As an empath he absorbed the negative, tense energy in any environment or situation. The clashing of beasts such as a steed rearing before the wolves of the woods gave him a spell and would leave him emotionally drained, having absorbed all the fear and aggression of each respective animal spirit’s soul. He endeavored greatly not to faint after such incidents. With revelation shifted the paradigm slowly gradating in the metaconscious—his reverence for dark beauty became entwined with humble fear. A foot dangling from the side of the bed was a liability as skeletal hands seizing his ankle in the small hours, imploring him to comprehend their undead plight, wasn’t removed from the spectrum of possibility. He was told folk tales by the elders which he knew the truths of instinctively. He knew of the old decrepit murderer man who was said to be ghoulishly emaciated, shoeless, with ragged pants and stringy hair, carrying a long knife and would lurk the wood along the ancient creek bed where rusted oddities lay submerged and multitudes of unusually plump frogs became trapped in the frozen water during winter without explanation save witchcraft. He saw the twin girls in the Carolina woodland found hanging from their eye sockets in a well in their Sunday dresses. He knew Obadiah Payne, the ghost of a sea captain who angrily rattled anchor chains in the attic. Vague remembrances from strange childhood tales would define him in the broader scheme. These tales were passed down from an earlier age. He was the accidental child born of old parents. This made his childhood a strange recollection from another era—alien to his own—and him an old soul. He himself was antiquarian and anachronistic by nature and birthright.

  Matters became darker as the true elemental and oppressive destroyers crept through him. Him, the portal. His parents’ relationship deteriorated due to the psychic maelstrom raging out of control, and his mother went forever missing and estranged, casting herself into the wild with drooling dead-eyed dementia. In her place a grizzled hinterland matron of the common folk was called upon to tend to the boy as his father toiled. Loathsome, wretched and simple was she. She was no consolation gift in place of a missing mother. His mother figure had been ruthlessly downgraded from an elegant, soft-spoken belle to the lowliest human detritus devoid of compassion and possessing little more intellect than the gastropods trudging the hinterland’s stone walls. The grizzled matron came with her dim adult son as an obligatory companion and he seemed destined to be in her care into their respective expiration. The boy learned that The Dim and Simple tend to teeter on the extremes of the spirit plane. This particular Dim one was a void of light and goodness. He was a vile and dull clod, with a generally incestuous aura, whose soul—if that is indeed was what inhabited his shell—was the most basic of evil. He had a predilection for prowling and voyeurism—in particular during the night, on the outside looking in, behind window panes, and through the eyes of grotesque masks. He was never without weaponry of some sort which was the most unsettling detail about him. He would creep up to the attic at twilight and rifle through the family’s belongings, eventually chancing upon a chest of Hallow’s Eve decor. From its dusty depths he exhumed and procured the faces of skeletons and devils which he ran his dirty fingers over, drooled upon and cooed at upon their exposure to his lamp’s evil orange glow. He absconded with them to his hideaway and would employ them in the evenings to leer at and menace the boy while he ate supper and slept. The boy paid no mind as he was charged with psychic strength and guardian spirits. In defeat, The Dim Evil One in his mask traipsed into a village where he fancied a girl. He became the monster outside her window at night. One night the glass eventually shattered. It was penetrated by his crude weaponry—and without the vile details, it suffices to say that the girl was reduced to bloody gore. The Dim Evil One would hang and the boy slipped away to fight the psychic storm another day albeit prematurely older and wiser.

  In his bedroom at night the boy heard distant trains rumble and whistle which served as a reminder of people moving as he lay stagnant—strange thoughts indeed for a youngling. He was restless and the darkness saw this as weakness. From the intense quiet of the starshine ether moments between wakefulness and sleep, there was some inexplicable great violence in that serenity as to suggest that this state of consciousness was an entry into the psychic maelstrom. The great quiet violence was that which can only be defined as an immense evil in its size and infinite power. This was clear to him though indefinable and not the sort of thing worth discussing with others. The dark energy compelled him oft to malicious behavior that he would reprove himself from as he knew the black energies were gaining strength and he was slipping. Nonetheless in haze he would catch himself tossing wriggling serpents from on high upon the common folk below or creeping upon unsuspecting victims and sending needles into their backsides. Mercifully, the universe opened opportunity to balance the light against dark as it was announced by his father that they were to travel true north to where a new sea was said to exist by voyagers, and the land thereabouts was rife with abundance and pure potential. So upward traveled they, leaving behind the high tides and agrarian glory for the steel-vaulted firmament and tumultuous rhythms of the gre
at northern monstrosities of humanity, unto which the boy was cast upon a psychic theater he was well-prepared to wage battle upon. Up north the venerable brick colonial was exchanged for a cottage perched dramatically upon a terrace where the view was scenic and expansive. There were northern farmlands to explore, conquer and cede. And here, in that old cottage basement was found a planchette and spirit board. His new friends implored him that it was to be left unmolested, but the boy employed it with addiction. It gashed his conduit’s opening, flooding where he walked with storm and strife. The boy reinterred the ghostly device into the cottage’s slimy sub-basement nitre amidst the psychic turmoil and it was great fortune that a new kindred companion was to soon enter the stage.