Excerpt

[author's note: this is an excerpt from a short story I started writing for no particular reason, which we'll call "spiders" - you'll notice the touches of vampiric folklore here but it was more of a Dungeons & Dragons type thing, involving... well, spiders, in what way you may yet find out. Stay tuned.]

"Evil work this is," Willem muttered, signing himself. His words made and destroyed shapes, turning to snow in the cold and floating around his head. "All this to say I've a mind-"

"Have a bloody mind all you like, Will, what little mind you do have, that is-" Corrum barked, pulling meaty weather-worked fingers through the thick mess of his beard, which was rusted brown but going iron grey all over these days. "What choice we 'ave, like we 'ave choices and ever did, you bloody macker." His blood was pounding inside the walls of his skull and the bitter cold was gnashing the tip of his nose and squeezing tears out his eyes and the bones in his hands ached with it, with what little feeling he had left in them anyway. And Will wouldn't shut his fucking gob, his flapping, stupid gob and the shovel kept bouncing off the frozen dirt, chipping a handful of turf with every thrust and his arms felt like lead -

"A necessary evil's still an evil s'all I'm saying, Corrum, what part of this 'ere bussiness doesn't cast a shadow on your bones is all I'm askin-" And at that Corrum stood up straight (gods, but his lower back was so tired from the digging it felt all his bones had smelted together into a lumpy mess) and blew out his lips and nose and wreathed himself with his white breath and eyed the gangly, gaunt-fleshed man with something cousin to hate. Watery-eyed big-mouthed fuck. He pulled back the heavy wool hood from his head and let his hair out (as big a mess as his beard), and stepped up from the hole.

"Tha's it, Will, you fucking dig 'afore I put you in the hole." And he threw the shovel (not amicably) so Will's mitted hands caught before it smacked him square in the face. He pouted, and Corrum thought he looked stupid when he did (but at the moment there was nothing Will could do that wouldn't of made him look stupid) but the lad kept on and the thunk of the iron fetching into the cold earth drifted up and was lost in the ageless boom of the wind.

The older digger sat down on a stump and using his cloak thrown over his head as a kind of shield he packed and worked his tobacco out and rolled it, and made his fire and lit up and sat back and let it ease out the knots and twists of his thoughts. The sky was a mirthless grey, coloured only by the hard stratii of passing clouds. It wasn't snowing, not in the proper sense of the word, not really - the flakes were like indifferent chips of ice, never landing, only rising and settling and floating about and getting in your eyes. And it was a hard kind of cold that came out of it, the kind that let you know on unpleasant terms that winter was here and soon the real trouble would begin. Corrum kicked his boots against the ground to flush his blood into motion, worked his hands to massage out the bite of numbness, and watched Will dig. He exhaled his anger with the smoke with every heartbeat until it had deflated, and then the dread set in. Every thunk of the shovel seemed to punctuate it, even as light began to flush out of the sky and shades of purple began to saturate everything to a sombre greyness.

He turned his head east, to the city walls. it would be good and dark before they got back now.

He jumped - the snapping of wood struck him and set his gut alight with cold fluttering and his lip trembled until he gnashed it with his teeth. He had squeezed his eyes shut without knowing and opened them to Will climbing out of the hole, flushed and breathing hard and throwing something out with him.

"Thing's gone 'an broke, Corrum. It's all fucken rock and craig down there, spine just shattered - damn it, it's deep enough i'n't it? Tell me it's deep enough-" He went on, as Corrum told his heart to slow its drumming, and got to his feet. The cold seem to suck out whatever fire was left in him and he was shaking, from the cold, mind you.

"Aye, Will, aye - shut up, Will. It's good. It's as good as can get, I imagine. We'll make do."

"And if not?"

Corrum rolled his words around the inside of his mouth for a good bit.

"Well, try and sleep anyway, Will." who laughed out loud, a little higher in pitch than he would've liked. Corrum wrung his hands and stepped over the shrouded figure, reaching down to grasp at one end -

"C-Corrum..." It was the edge to the voice that stopped him cold, the abbandonment in it, the restraint. And he sighed besides himself. Will was right, he'd almost forgotten (but that's a lie, isn't it? You never forgot, but you certainly were hoping Will had, then maybe, just maybe) but he hadn't so he got up again and walked over to the axe. Will whined a little when he took it in his hand. "Corrum, by all the Words do we 'ave to?" The old digger straightened his back. Yes, let him think you have more iron in you than he, let him remember it this way.

"You saw the wounds, Will. And where they found her." His tone was grim and authorative. He would never have thought it, but then the digger spoke like a king. "Think of the last one, the babe - eh? - they couldn't do it, and by God remember what happened? Remember the nights, until they found... Yes, Will, evil work it is." And his shadow fell over the woman's shroud. "And sometimes evil is what must be done." Will turned away. He didn't know whether to damn him for that, but he let it go, he was thinkin too hard - squeezing the handle too hard with his hands - tasting his spit. Later on, he would be thankful. It took eight swings, eight even for a man of his size, and when he twisted the head around he was glad Will never saw the way his hands shook.

They buried her like that, the snow falling on their shoulders, and even in silence their breath hung about them as light went out of the day into night. The shovel was broken, they did what they could with the spade and their hands and when they were done they stamped the earth - which seemed so much less than they'd removed - down until the cold had but sucked all the breath from their lungs. There was no moon, and God say it was a dark night.

-fin- 

The Event Horizon of Nightmares

Stellar gas blazes brightly in death as it is whisked about the accretion disk of a black hole...

I dream prolifically. This isn't always apparent - dreams are as ephemeral as cobwebs and tatter at the merest touch - until you ask yourself whether or not you were dreaming, until the question itself fades away like footprints in silt. Nevertheless, I dream constantly - whole towers of dreams, stacked on atop the other, so much that every time I roll over I am dreaming something new. So much that I find myself re-tracing my steps into familiar dreams and recurring dreamscapes. One of which I meet with Steven Hawking (bereft of his body-crippling disease) in a dilapidated, ancient house, and he talks to me about subatomic particles as he tears meat apart in his hands. There are the variety of chaotic, cartoony escapades with the rogues gallery of friends and familiar faces (those silly, sunny kinds of dreams) - and there are the recurring nightmares. Some are outrightly terrifying - the waking dream of being stalked by a formless, even amorphous predator which always catches me and leaves me obscurely dying only to awake unsure of my physical state. Some are abstract and disturbing; trying unsuccessfully to shave my beard, over and over, with new and more complex razor blades to no avail, sometimes until I graphically slit my own throat or someone else's. Some are ferociously sexual, just carnal desire gone mad and deliberate and uncontrollable and are terribly vivid - ranging from the excruciatingly pleasing to shaming, malnourished fantasy (I remember one, where my own lust outreached my physical limitations, which spiraled into a kind of gang-fuck of my ex-girlfriend by proxy - alight simultaneously be desires and jealousies accelerating into infinite). There are labyrinthine dreams that leave me emotionally hollow, like my heart is beating out against a rusted cage of barbed wire and draining out - bittersweet memories of love and hotly shadowed affection as incorporeal of reflections in a mirror. And there are dreams of violence, rewarding and nauseating, until I feel I can sum all of them - all of these - up into a faceted jewel of baser instincts. I can always seem to trace them back, one by one, to something or another - whether its my own personal sense of longing, or shame, or dissatisfaction, or lust.

I'm talking about nightmares and event horizons because I wrote a story from beginning to end in my head last night when I was in a black mood. It is simple and I think in that austerity it is unforgivable and horrifying. A man speaks with the devil; whom I conjured up to be a kind of Tom Wait, from a rotoscoped depiction of the singer I stumbled across on YouTube. They speak for a long time, have a conversation - and then he comes to a sudden and inescapable conclusion, and goes on to commit a series of horrific murders. You know, I don't write very much horror. But in that mood it seemed all I could think of, until the clockwork of my left-brain was twisting thoughts into shapes - an overweight man in a cartoon-dog suit with blood caked around his mouth and teeth - and then it just took off. But I'm unsure of what it produced. Stephen King never wanted to have Pet Sematary published. He found it to be an ugly story. An essayist, Terry Keller, found it to be an uglier story than I think King could have put his finger on himself - resonating morbidly with primal male desires. I think of that story when I think of the relationship I worked so hard to destroy. I think of that story a lot, come to think of it.

Michael Herr once said that there are places "so grim, they turn to black and white in your head [...]". I was in the war in Afghanistan and as can be expected I saw some horrible things. Some people would deem them traumatic, I don't really think so - when you've established the rules of your own personality reality to a point where it permits and accepts these things, you tend to get over them. You can soldier on. Trauma stems from an inability to accept a reality, I think. I remember (I'm going to omit names, out of respect) a member on our patrol who was struck by a directional IED (improvised-explosive-device). It was overlooking a previously excavated site that had made us inevitably vulnerable - we had to check that hole, every time we passed, it was mechanic. What if the insurgents used it again? It was almost ironic. The blast punched shrapnel through both his legs, shattering his femurs, as we checked the hole. When we got to him his flesh had gone so white it was like ash, and his blood was so crimson. The stink of it, too, that charnel, meat reek, stank up into the blistering air and the dust turned to mud and grime around him as he thrashed, making and breaking shapes. The medic and TCCCs packed the holes as his eyes rolled up in his head and he fought the dissembodied spectre of his own death every inch of the way, coming to and going out. They had cut off his pants and you could see his cock, shriveled into his flesh. Death is graceless. Fascinating. Upsetting. But he fought, and although he died, you could see him fighting. I'll never forget that intersection, or the smell, or that image.

But it doesn't haunt me. I don't try and forget that image - it stands to and for what I did in the summer of 2010. The bad comes with the good. That wasn't the only difficult story to come out of that summer, but it is amongst some so light-hearted and entertaining I can't help but smile at their memory.

I remember the feedback from dealing emotional damage, though. Oh yes. I remember the crevassing of her face, and I remember being staggered by the shattering of that bedrock - coming untethered in my own flesh and left to drift. That I'll never forget. The good, neither, acting like children in the sun - pushing her in a shopping cart and pretending to hit the curb. Sappy, huh? Well, fuck you.

The event horizon of a black hole is the point at which the body's gravitational pull is so great that not even light can escape. Where surviving light is bent around the accretion disk and all other matter accelerates infinitely into the singularity and is consumed to a point  of infinite density and 0 volume. It just goes on falling, forever. Black holes are terrifyingly real monsters in space, some 64 billion times the mass of our sun, undead stars devouring all matter without repose, without even appetite. They are forces of nature gone mad.

There is an event horizon to dreams - nightmares especially. A point where there is no waking and you cannot help but succumb to whatever it is your subconscious is trying to impress upon you. You just continue falling towards, into, until you wake up - until the reality of that dream is extinguished, until the end of relative time.

It's amazing how much destruction you can work, without even realizing. How deeply you can dig out fissures into the continuum of a relationship. How moral lapses turn to black and white in your head and become incongruous with the effect they're having on your reality. It's amazing how that familiar territory is rekindled, and how those habits are quickly taken up again. How natural it is, for us to make chaos, to tear apart rather than knit together. It's like there's an event horizon between morality and immorality and once you cross you just continue to accelerate.

I putting way too much pretension into this. Get over it, right? Or, 'why'd you do it?'. I mean, its made me so miserable.

"I wanted to destroy something beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see."