The Box

I woke into a world of blackness.  Stifling, compressed blackness.  The air was dying as I gulped at it.  I was on my back.  My arms rose, my fingers searched, found wood.  My feet kicked out.  They struck wood too.

I remembered.  I was in a coffin.  Buried deep underground.

After they fried me in the chair, they buried me in the jail yard.  Not that I was dead.  People like me, with black souls, we live forever.

The judge said I was the worst he’d ever met.  Cruel, vicious, with no remorse.

Remorse?  Why would I feel remorse?  I killed only one man, and that was when I was crazy mad on ice.  I enjoyed driving the knife into his chest, cutting out his heart, planting the red shiny throbbing meat on his face.  No, I couldn’t feel remorse.

I wasn’t dead … the thought kept buzzing in my brain.

I was alive, in a box, underground, no hope of escape.  Hey, who said no hope of escape?  I had to get out.  Like, if I was alive I couldn’t stay down here forever.  My fingers dug at the wood.  My nails scratched, scratched, scratched.  I sucked out the splinters, spat them away, kept clawing.

Perspiration sprouted on my face.  It trickled into my eyes, down my cheeks, down my neck.

How long would the oxygen last in the box?

I kicked up hard with my feet, again and again.  I figured if I could smash a hole in the coffin, then I could claw my way up through the soil.  But the wood was hard.  It didn’t give, didn’t budge.  I tasted salt in my mouth, the sweat was pouring out of my skin.

I sucked at the air.  I could still breathe.  I was sealed in a box but I could still breathe.  Hey, maybe it was someone’s idea of torture.  First they fry you, then they put you in a box where the air never runs out.  Shit!  Now I was kicking harder, harder.  My toes were in agony.   I curled them over to lessen the pain, kept on kicking.  My hands were up now, my fingers scratching, clawing, scraping.  The splinters went in deeper under my nails.  I sucked them out.  They felt as long as toothpicks.  I spat them away, tasting blood mixed in with the salty sweat.

I figured they wouldn’t put a murderer in a fancy coffin.  Like, the coffin would be made of really cheap wood, right?  So I kept kicking.  Then I used my fists, pounding on the wood above my head.  I had superhuman strength.  I lashed out, fists and feet.  Sooner or later the wood would split.  Once it did, I could force my way out and claw my way to the surface.

The wood was solid as steel.

A voice laughed beside me.

“Well, Kincaid, together again.”

I punched the air with one hand, struck flesh.  I recognized the voice.  It was Webster, the man I’d murdered.

“What are you doing here?” I screamed.

“Those of us who die innocent, we get to make requests.  I asked to spend the rest of eternity with you, Kincaid, in your coffin.”

“Why?”

In the darkness I felt Webster’s body turning toward me.  I felt his hands groping my neck, my face, exploring its way down my body.  I tried to push him away.  I had no strength.  He shifted even closer.  His breath was foul on my face.  “Relax, Kincaid.  There’s nothing you can do.  We’re going to be in this box together for all time.  Now it’s my time to be a little crazy…”

Zone Rouge

Father Paley trudged across the battlefield, the mud sucking at his boots, the blighted Earth trying to claim another soul. A pistol crack echoed across the desolate landscape and he paused to listen. Three hundred yards distant, spectral in the morning mist, he saw the dim shape of his Commanding Officer in similar hunched anticipation, but a moment passed with no further alarm raised and both men moved on in their solemn, silent sweep.

The day was cool but Paley sweated within his vulcanised rubber suit, condensation trickling down the inside of the pitted glass faceplate that further obscured his view. It was a blessing, in a way, the sight of so much death and destruction too great to bear unfiltered. Paley had been there in the early days, shortly after the Armistice, when the stench of decay had seemed to seep into everything, and facing what man had done to the Earth had weakened many of his colleagues to breaking point and beyond. Now, five years later, Paley was the only remaining member of the original regiment, and even he knew that it could not go on much longer.

He found the boy at the foot of a withered tree, half buried in a morass of mud and dark, gelatinous flesh that was studded with shell casings which glinted in the weak sun as the boy writhed in his shallow grave. Paley kept his distance for a moment, watching the boy and idly scratching at the back of his right hand, cursing the thick gloves that prevented him from finding any relief from his discomfort.

The boy wore a German uniform, but the sounds that issued from his straining mouth were no Earthly language. His neck twisted as he sought to face the cleric, but his eyes were gone, and his head swayed and bobbed blindly, until Paley crouched at the edge of the pit and made a soft, soothing call. The boy’s head whipped towards the sound, tendons tearing and reforming beneath the grey, beardless skin of his neck as he strained to turn towards him. His lower half, beneath the mud, quivered obscenely. Hungrily.

Paley rose, fumbled in his satchel and pulled out his service revolver. Throughout the war, stationed in nearby Ypres, he had never had cause to use it, had never even drawn it in combat; now he checked the cylinder and found that only one cartridge remained, the other five gone in service to his mission; It had been a long morning. He took another look across the field, watching for his C.O., but the boy was the only soul in sight. Satisfied, Paley pulled off first one glove, then the other, then reloaded the Webley and took a moment for a deep, satisfying scratch at his inflamed hand. It was an offence to remove any part of his suit in the Red Zone, but he was sure that he was unobserved and it was too late to worry about the other reason for keeping his gloves on.

The red welts on the back his hand seemed almost to throb in pleasure at that thought.

Paley pushed the idea away and pointed the revolver into the pit, murmuring the authorized, amended Viaticum, the Latin as alien and familiar to his ear now as the keening whine the boy gave out as he understood what was to come next and raised his arms to protect his sightless face.

Five years since the cessation of hostilities and the outbreak of peace, perhaps another three since this boy’s parents had received word of his supposed death, but still, here, in this forgotten, forbidden corner of the killing ground, he feared dying.

Yet in all his time in the Red Zone, day after endless day breathing the noxious, sulphurous air and trudging from one trench to the next as he tried to bring peace and surcease from suffering, Paley had never seen anything which suggested that higher thought remained. It seemed more than likely that in their transformation, under the effect of whatever hellish chemical concoction had permeated the land and warped their bodies, his charges had of necessity lost their minds, but whether it was human understanding and fear or simply the basic animal urge to exist, to continue to exist, the boy’s movements were the same. Paley saw the German pistol, the barrel protruding from a mass of congealed bone and sinew that could scarcely even be called a hand any longer. He finished the benediction, lowered his head, then fired into the boy’s sunken chest.

This was the closest he had yet come to battle, but it no longer scared him. What he did was an act of mercy, not war. The boy choked out a guttural bark of regret, then let his arms fall at his sides. A trickle of black, tarry blood trickled from the hole in the front of his tunic. His head lolled back and made Paley think of a frail, blind bird, struggling for each shallow breath. He holstered his Webley and carefully slid down into the pit beside the dying boy, taking the child’s misshapen hand in his own and whispering softly into his ear.

Across the field, listening intently, Paley’s C.O. waited for further alarm, then trudged on, satisfied.

A minute later, with the boy’s life over once more, Paley sighed heavily. He let the boy’s limp hand go and sat in the pit a little longer, using the barrel of his revolver to scratch at the angry red flesh on the back of his hand until the itch finally faded for a little while.

Then he reloaded the Webley, noted the time, date and location in his field journal and carefully eased his gloves back on, then stood carefully and climbed back up out of the pit.

How to Carve a Jack-O-Lantern

It was full fall the day the crawler emerged from the woods and sniffed the dusk. The old ash trembled slightly as the hungry thing burst out from underneath its roots; a clump of orange and yellow leaves dropped unceremoniously to the ground. October, yes – late October when doors open and defences are low. The crawler smiled its ghastly grin.

The crawler had bony, vine-like limbs, and could walk on four legs or two. Its bulbous head was a bright orange, save for a thick, brownish horn which sprouted from the top and twisted imperceptibly, sunflower-like, towards the darkest dark. Its teeth and claws, huge and triangular, were also orange, dyed from years of cannibalistic digging into the flesh of its weaker kin. Fire glowed from the cavernous sockets where other creatures may have had eyes.

The crawler’s favourite thing to do was eat. It ate its own kind, when it could. It ate other things. It ate the animals from the woods. Its favourites were the little animals, the rabbits and baby deer stumbling on new legs – not because they were weak (the crawler, though small, was frighteningly strong) but because they were innocent, and hurting the innocent amused the crawler. This was also the reason the crawler liked to sink its claws into little human children and drag them into the woods.

Usually the crawler stuck to the woods, where it could easily slink among the tangles of branches, blending in with the dead leaves. But sometimes it liked to go out.

Beyond the threshold of the woods, an old house loomed over the horizon. The building was tall and solid, its double doors locked and braced against the elements like a set of clenched teeth. The windows, too asymmetrical to pass for eyes, stared out at the world regardless.

The crawler had been to human houses before. It was generally best to creep around the back and slip in that way, never making eye contact with the façade. Today, though, the crawler felt free and invincible. And so instead of creeping around the back, it crept around the front, beelined for the porch, and began to mount the steps. It smiled again, a lipless contortion of its fanged slit of a mouth, as its first claw gripped the wood. Then, it looked up…

…and lurched backward in horror, its fiery grin inverted. For on the porch, nestled on top of an incongruous bale of hay, was a head.

Not a human head, but the vacant, severed head of another creature like the crawler. Its face was frozen in a perverse grin, and its eyes still glowed faintly, as if the killer had found a way to prolong his victim’s suffering by keeping it in this torturous, semi-alive state.

A twinge of something that crawler had not felt in many hundreds of years – pity? compassion? – washed over it. Cocking its head for noises inside the house, the creature crept up the porch and peered into head’s vacant eye sockets, curious to see if there was any life inside.

What the crawler saw made it recoil. The head was a mere shell, sliced open and emptied of all brains, bones, and cartilage. Within the shell, a perverse mockery of the fires that burned within the crawlerkind, was a weakly flickering candle.

The crawler’s frown deepened. In a gesture of uncharacteristic tenderness, it blew into the shell and extinguished the candle. Philanthropic duty done, the crawler scuttled down the driveaway and onto the street, skulking from home to home in search of other amusements. But at every house, the crawler was greeted by more of the ghoulish, grimacing heads.

A warning.

What creatures could be capable of such large-scale brutality? The crawler was strong (why, only fifty years ago, it had snuck up on a farmer, scurried up his back, and snapped his neck before the man had even a chance to shout) and some of its kin were stronger. So what earthly being could have overtaken so many of them?

The crawler did not want to meet such a being.

And so, before the moon had even fully risen in the pinkish sky, the crawler scuttled back into the woods, feeling something it had never felt before: terror.

The crawler made its way expertly through the undergrowth, emboldened by the tree cover, pausing only when it came to a clearing. The ground in the clearing was soft and slightly damp under its claws, and it wondered if there would be worms to dig or beetles to eat. Suddenly, the crawler heard footsteps, and voices. Still perturbed by the things it had seen at the houses, the crawler scurried up a dying oak tree and listened.

It could see them now. A group of five humans – young, but strong-looking in the way that human young are hardier than their elders. They stumbled as they walked, however, and talked far too loudly for the woods. Sticks of smoke hung from their chapped lips, and polished brown glass glinted in their hands. The leader of the pack dragged a sledgehammer, and the smallest of the youths, who brought up the rear, had a white sack slung over his shoulders.

The youths settled in the clearing and began to take swigs of the foamy liquid that bubbled over the lips of their shining glass bottles. Thirst quenched, the largest of the five walked over to the discarded sack and dumped it out. A dozen severed crawler heads rolled onto the ground. Before the crawler could ponder the meaning of this, the youth picked up one of the heads, tossed it high into the air, and swung at it with the sledgehammer. The head exploded into chunks of orange.

Still clinging to an upper branch of the tree, the crawler recoiled. On the ground, the human picked up another head and lobbed it to one of his companions, who swiftly shattered it with a kick.

Their young defile the dead, the crawler thought.

And it yearned to reveal itself to the youths, to chase them out of its woods, to let the slowest four escape but cut the fastest of them off at the border and feast on his flesh. But fear stayed it. The crawler had seen the severed heads on every porch, saw the swollen bag that even these wayward youths had managed to collect. The humans were more dangerous than the crawler had ever fathomed. So instead, the crawler hid in the tree and watched in silence, waiting for them to leave.

But the killers didn’t leave; and with each defilement it witnessed, the crawler’s indignation grew. At last, the final head was destroyed, and the youths collapsed. Bodies drained from exertion and minds numbed by drink, the youths were soon slumped on the ground, surrounded by pumpkin guts.

The crawler crept closer. The youths breathed, but did not see, did not hear, did not move. Noises and chirps did not wake them. Prodded, they did not stir. They were not so fearsome after all.

The crawler approached the largest and strongest of the unconscious youths, and, using the gentlest of motions, brushed the smooth side of a claw across the young man’s forehead. The boy slept soundly.

And the crawler grinned, its flames burning brighter. It wondered how brightly they would glow when it cracked their skulls and replaced their brains with candlelight.

END

The Ballad Of The Valkyrie And The Psycho-Killer

Death walks beside you tonight.

The grim reaper passes by me but he is not death. He is a boy in a mask with a plastic scythe, playing pretend. I am the true reaper.

Children dressed as ghouls and goblins run past, begging for sweets.  They growl and they shriek, but I am the real monster.

“Nice costume, bro!  I love those Jason movies!”

A skinny teenager in a skeleton suit, black with glow-in-the-dark bones, walks over to give me a high five.  I am unused to being addressed with anything other than screams or whimpers, so I do not respond. I stand there holding my hatchet.

“Staying in character, huh?  Way to commit, dude!”

He and his friends continue loudly down the street as I stand and watch them curiously, the sound of my breath amplified in my ears by the mask.

When books are written about my life, they will say many false things.  Like the skeleton-boy, they will assume that movies have inspired me to do the things I have done.  That couldn’t be more incorrect. Does the cobra watch a film to learn how to swell his regal hood and strike?

They will say that I hated humanity.  That I have done these things to avenge the wrongdoing of all of the bullies and abusers in my misbegotten life.  But I don’t hate anyone. Does the lion hate the lamb as he rends its woolly flesh?

I appreciate my prey for the sport they offer.  And while they may not provide sustenance for my body, I can assure you they provide food for the soul.

A band is playing loudly outside of a local bar, and a crowd is drinking and carousing.  This is the one night of the year when I am able to walk the streets and not raise an eyebrow, and I intend to take advantage of it.

“Five bucks dude.”

A large, muscular man in a tank top puts his arm in front of me.  I realize there are barricades on either side of him.

“Five bucks to see the show, man.”

I stare at him. I do not want the attention his death would bring.  And I do not have any money. I also do not want to turn around. So I stare at him.

“I get it, you’re a slasher-killer guy. Nice costume.  Very scary. But it’s five to get in or I gotta toss you out of here. Come on man, a line’s forming.”

“Here you go.”

From behind me someone hands the muscular man a ten dollar bill.

“For both of us.”

I turn to see the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life.  She is an angel as sure as I am not.

The muscular man waves me away like a fly, and I step through the barricades. I turn to see the angel walking off toward the bar. She does not turn to look at me.  I walk behind her at a distance, admiring the sparkling white wings swaying from her back.

But she is no angel after all.  She is dressed like a warrior, with plastic armor and helmet, and has a plastic sword strapped between her wings.

A warrior angel?  No. A Viking angel.  What is the word for that?

Over the course of the next hour, she smokes too many cigarettes. That is a bad habit, but some say murder is too. A few men stop to talk with her at the bar, but she does not seem to be interested.  She turns to look at the band, a sad look in her eyes, and that is when she notices me standing behind her.

She stands up from the bar, draws her sword, and points it at me.

Valkyrie.  I remember the word now.

She walks over slowly, brandishing her weapon.

“I guess you’re wondering why I paid for you, huh?”

I feel something inside of me that I don’t know how to process.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ve got a thing for weirdos and freaks, and you definitely seem to qualify.  That’s a pretty scary costume.”

I take a step forward.  The streetlight gleams off her auburn hair.  She wears thick-rimmed glasses that are not in keeping with her costume.  Her bottom teeth are bunched together. She is perfect.

“Oh I get it,” she says.  “You don’t speak. You just hunt down the cool kids who are drinking and having sex and waste them, right?”

I tilt my head.  She lowers her sword, takes a drag off her cigarette, and looks off in the distance.

“I can get down with that,” she says, more to herself than to me.  “There are consequences in this world.”

Behind the mask, unbidden, the corners of my mouth turn up.

The band starts into another obnoxious song, and those around us scream and swoon.  

But my Valkyrie doesn’t scream.  My Valkyrie doesn’t move. She stands as a statue, sword in one hand and smoke in the other, a magnificent sculpture of sorrow.

I drop the hatchet and hold my hand out to her.

For a while she doesn’t notice, but when she does her eyes narrow.  Then she drops her cigarette and squashes it beneath her boot. She sheaths her sword and takes my hand. I hold her arm out to the side and wrap my other around her waist.  She smiles, even laughs. She leans her helmed head on my shoulder and we sway together.  We are dancing to the rhythm of our own song. When the band stops playing, we dance on.

The Valkyrie smiles up at the psycho killer.

“My slasher,” she says.

And for the first time in my life, I wonder why I need the mask.  I wonder why I need the hatchet.

Because, for the first time in my life, I have found someone that I do not want to kill.

THE END

The Horror Tree

“The wise are silent, the foolish speak, and the children are thus led astray” – Algernon Blackwood

“They say this is the only one like it in the world.” The man said to the boy.

The boy looked at it, there some distance ahead of them, then back at the man. The boy said, “but there’s lots of trees in the world? Even ones that look a little like that, I’ve seen them down by the creek.”

The man looked down from the crooked tree to the boy, “there are lots of boys in the world too. But you are the only you, are you not?”

The boy smirked, toying with the idea, then said, “I guess so, I’m no twin like the two down on Bittacy Street.”

“And are those twins not then each their own person? Their parents didn’t give them the same name, did they? They don’t each do exactly as the other does? Do you think they think the same thoughts?”

The boy looked back up towards the tree, it was bent and though he thought it looked like other trees it certainly had grown differently, then he looked at the man and shook his head. As he did, the boy didn’t notice the leaves and boughs of the tree shake and rustle despite there being not the slightest hint of wind.

The man scratched his beard, thick as the scrub and foliage around them, “so this tree is like no other.”

“But you haven’t seen all the trees in the world, have you?”, chirped the youngster, “so how do you know there’s no other one like it? There could be another me, somewhere in the big wide world, far away in another country, and maybe we’ll never see each other and then always think we the only one.”

The man looked at the boy sternly; his thick, caterpillar brows drew together. As he pursed his lips they disappeared beneath his bushy moustache. The boy watched him tug at his beard. This time the boy heard the creak and knock of wood. As he was about to turn his attention to the sounds from the tree up ahead, the man spoke in a tone that suggested it was best the boy give the man his full attention.

“This is the only one like it in the world. Perhaps you simply need to take a closer look.” He put a hairy, knuckled palm on the boy’s shoulder and urged him forward, closer to the tree. The man asked, “what do they call those trees by the creek? The trees you say look like this one?”

Feeling the forceful hand, the boy trudged forward, thinking to what he’d been told he answered, “willows I think…weeping willows.”

“And do they weep?”

“I don’t know what weep means.”

“It means to cry. Do these willows of yours by the creek cry?”

The boy felt the gnarled fingers squeeze tighter and their pinch insisted he take another step towards the tree that was like no other in all the world. He answered, hoping that the answer would lessen the man’s forceful grip, perhaps even slow their march, “no, they don’t cry…can…can this one?”

The man’s grip slackened, the points of his fingers still held the boy fast but they were no longer pushing into him, trying to burrow into his flesh and bones. The man said, “I’ve never seen it cry. But I suppose it can. It wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t think it’s had reason to cry for a long, long time.”

Trunk and branch creaked and sighed like abandoned stairs under the steps of a ghost. The boy felt like he no longer wanted to be led any closer, but the man’s grip and his steadfast gait told the boy he no longer had much of a choice.

The man continued, “you ever hear the tale of Old Man Willow?”

The boy shook his head. The man stopped. The boy was grateful. There was a rustle of leaves that sounded like a hiss.

“Hm, I’m surprised. I thought a boy who knew about weeping willows would have heard of the saddest, and angriest, willow of them all.”

Not wanting to go on, the boy asked the first question that came to mind, hoping it would keep him at bay from the strange tree ahead, “why was he sad and angry?”

The man shrugged his heavy shoulders, his long and matted hair shifted as he did, “for the same reason any tree gets sad and angry I suppose.”

Sensing that that was the end of the tale of Old Man Willow, and sensing that with the end of the tale he would be made to march closer to the tree that was unlike any other, the boy quickly asked, “is this tree, is it sad and angry?”

“I think it can be. Perhaps it was, back when it had a reason to weep.” With that, the man began forcing the boy forward once more and the boy tried in vain to drag his steps and dig his heels. But the man showed no notice of this, he only pushed the boy forward. A groan came from ahead and the boy felt as if many things just below the surface, beneath the undergrowth, things that were deep down in the soil, were urging him forward now too.

“Then it can’t be a weeping willow then!” The boy cried petulantly, feeling that he would soon start weeping.

“I never said it’s a weeping willow, nor a willow of any kind.”

The boy tried to break away but the man grabbed him tightly by the wrist. He looked up at the man’s face, at the bushy beard and hanging hair. In the mottled shadows of the forest, the boy thought the small patches of exposed flesh on the man’s cheek and nose looked like grey and aged barked. And his eyes were the pale green of sun-starved lichen.

The man did not seem angry at the boy’s attempt to break free, he only held him tightly. Again, there was the groan of old wood and the rustle of excited leaves.

“Well then what kind of tree is it huh? It can’t be so special if it doesn’t even have a name!”

“It does have a name”, the man said and dragged the boy forward.

They were close to the tree and the boy tried feebly to free himself again, this time it wasn’t only the man’s hand and gaze that held him. Dark roots slathered with peat and dirt rose and coiled about the boy’s ankle like rotten wooden worms.

The boy began to scream but a vine dropped from the shadowy boughs and wrapped itself about his throat, choking his cry. The vine felt slimy and cold, again more like a worm than any vegetation.

“It’s called a Blackwood”, said a voice that did not belong to the man.

The boy felt himself yanked upwards by more vines, and tugged downwards by wriggling roots and still the man pulled him closer to the massive trunk. Everything worked together against the boy, in a way that told his aching and stretching young frame it didn’t matter if he arrived at the trunk in one piece.

The boy’s vision was going hazy as he desperately struggled to breathe, through tears and the blur of strangulation he saw that from all the branches, that extended outwards from the tree like a spider’s web, hung the dark vines. It was as if they no longer wished to stay hidden in the draping of leaves. Those that weren’t interested in him were all fashioned into dangling nooses, as if someone long ago had planted gallows from the bloody seed of a hanged man’s heart.

The voice that wasn’t the man’s, or perhaps it was only what the Blackwood’s voice sounded like when it came from barely human lips that differentiated the two, spoke again, “but little boys who follow strangers and know about weeping willows, have a different name for me…they never speak it…they never can…but I hear it all the same…”

The voice paused. The vines pulled the boy up, tighter and tighter, the roots did the same but dragging him down into the mud and the man, still clutching the boy’s wrist, walked right into the ashen bark like he was the tree’s shadow, and the boy felt the flaking strips of wood begin to absorb him. To gnaw him.

As the splintered jaws slowly worked on the boy’s arm like toothless, mossy gums, the voice spoke again.

“Yes…that’s the name they use…The Horror Tree…”

The Purest Art

There is a house of dubious repute burrowed into the space between two abandoned factories in one of the more seedier parts of town.

In this place sits the Curator of an attraction that draws a significant number of visitors each evening. Viewers from diverse cultural and social strata, contrasting in appearance and manner and nature, rubbing shoulders and hips, each breathing in the smell of the others. The air becomes a soupy mix of sweat and grime and soap and perfume. They all come to look.

And see. And gape.

The street is sodden and the air carries the stench of burnt plastic. Rats scurry in places unseen eating other unseen things.

The house has a spire that spikes out of its west side and a steepled roof on the other which cuts into the sky like a razor. It has no path and no gate and certainly no door.

Word is spread of the attraction from lips to ears. Whispers.

The lawn is so unkempt and overgrown that the grass reaches to the Viewers chest. It has the shape of wheat. Feral cats hunt vermin in its depths. The rustling of the undergrowth gives away the prey’s whereabouts. Their shelter betrays them.

The Viewer pushes through the grass and up the wooden porch steps which creak with the weight of each heavy step.

The Curator knows the Viewer has arrived.

Shadows fill the hallway, almost pitch black, insulated from moonlight by floor to ceiling red velvet curtains. Up the stairs to the top landing. Resplendent in his tuxedo and top hat, the Curator waits outside the viewing room. He stands silently in the dark. He only gestures to the doorway, to the curtains that hang there in lieu of a door. Pulling a black silk handkerchief from his pocket, the Curator ties it across his eyes and when it is secure he leans to the side and pulls the curtains apart.

A solitary wooden chair faces the far wall. The Viewer is guided to it and there he sits.

It isn’t really an artefact or a work of art. It is a unique thing. A curio.

The Curator closes the curtains and the Viewer is alone to look upon the thing he has come to see.

There is no roof here. The empty stars wheel overhead, the night sky illuminating the room.

The wall has an image scratched into the brick work. An eternity of fingernails clawing at the masonry and plaster has created it, carving the matter into something else. It takes the general shape of a circle but it consists of squares and triangles and other complex shapes and criss-crossing lines.

It is not a circle. It is a hole.

The Viewer stands for a closer look.

The scratches have gouged so deeply that the surface of the circle has smoothed out the brick work.

Closer still. The hole fills the Viewers vision. All he can perceive is the hole. All he can comprehend is the hole. It is black inside the hole. The Viewer pushes his face against the surface, but there is no surface, only a gossamer thin membrane that splits under his touch. The Viewer pushes his head through. It is not a circle. It is a spiral of scratches. A funnel gouged into reality. Or out of reality. The skin of the world is unpicked. Transition occurs.

The Viewer screams.

“I can’t tell what it is.”

The moon rises behind him and the moon sets and the stars grind against the heavens. A deep humming fills the void.

They always scream. They cover their eyes but it doesn’t stop their minds from shattering. The blindfolded Curator fumbles along the wall till he finds the Viewer and he leads him back out of the room and down the stairs. He removes his blindfold there and takes the Viewer out through the hunting grounds, where a kingdom of cats wage war on the rat race, and out into the sodden street. The Viewer claws and foams and wails.

“I can’t see.” He tears at his hair and claws at his scalp until blood trickles over his forehead.

A car is waiting to take the Viewer home. The Curator lies him on the back seat of the car, he can no longer sit up. The Viewers head is full of realisation, or is empty like a void. The Curator whispers something to him before the car leaves.

“It is art. The purest kind. It is nothing and everything. The soul of the world.”

Whispers pass from lips and tongue and teeth to ear and mind.

Once upstairs he dons his blindfold again and draws the curtains closed and takes his place on the top landing.

A stretch limousine drops off another who has come to view. They push through the long grass where the cats hunt.

End