The Myth of Falling

by Charlee Jacob

  They stared, trapped by its gaze, snared with incantation. They were shocked cellophane, never to pass, unable to move—save for a slight crackling twist in the wind. That part always lifted, last, from the fire.

  Children cut from the left side of Genesis, arrayed before the pearlized blaze. They were blessed and anointed as mine and yours, nursed by locusts, then cut and sheaved as wheat.

  Salvation comes at the feast. (A lover or an appetizer?)

  Salvation comes to the feast. (A guest… or an immovable force, critical of the cooking?)

  Eat, proclaim, and know that your place will always be assured, by mother’s side.

  She stood over the crib. It was empty, soulless. Souls had gathered, since midnight put the ghost to bed. It wobbled, cradle’s sides touched, rocked by the rising living wind. It always moved, every year, as it filled again, seasoned by grizzled fathers calling all baritone from the flames.

  In a few hours the All Souls Day celebrations would commence… from El Dia de Los Muertos to The Witches New Year. Then Saturnalia, Yule, and other Winter carnivals. The Spring revivals and pageants. Summer circuses and festivals. Autumn harvests and fairs. Jubilees of blood as she wandered abroad, seeking harlequin. Always coming full circle.

  INFINITE CAIN

  It’s what Dire did to his sixty-six little victims that made everyone hate him. Atrocities tattooed onto young bodies so deep they could never be removed. Blasphemous names and evil sigils branded onto their faces, tender torsos in rigid keloid, walking- wicked grimoires for the rest of their lives. Flesh expertly peeled, separate layers fine as the thinnest parchment, sickest text imaginable until they became books with skin’s flapping pages.

  When the skin flapped fast, the words on it somehow changed into pornographic—and criminal—outrages… pictures that moved like movies until one couldn’t bear to look at them full on. And no witnesses reported seeing the same things twice or even seeing what other witnesses saw. It was impossible, of course… wasn’t it? That these disgusting, damnable cartoons ‘evolved’?

  It was a shame the country had no death penalty. But Dire never killed. He just left freaks.

  After much consideration, the judge came up with a sentence as bizarre as Dire’s crimes.

  “You’ll spend the rest of your life, natural or unnatural as that may be, walking this nation you viciously traumatized. Wearing only a G-string to observe the barest modesty, you’ll constantly be a slap in the face to our citizens. Each victim’s name will be scorched into your hide.”

  Dire chuckled. “Reckon I’ll be dead in a day, won’t I?”

  The judge smiled. “Don’t worry. A personally assigned guard will see to it that your life isn’t cut short by the righteously outraged.”

  Dire didn’t think it would be too bad. He flaunted the list of kids whose existences he’d forever sabotaged, even as he indulged his passion for self-exhibition. But what they threw at him—vilest road kill that hovering cop wouldn’t let him wash off.

  Even going to the loo became problematic. No petrol station operator or public roadside rest stop would let him use their facilities. Initially this seemed hilarious, shitting on the grass in front of ‘decent’ folks. But then Dire had to clean it up. He even had to sleep outside, usually on moors when there were any or on country lanes or in city alleyways behind refuse barrels where none might threaten him—so the guard could grab some shut eye. Often Dire nearly froze to death, treated less than an animal. Meanwhile the cop drove along behind him in a heated car, cozy with a cup of tea. Not poor Dire, with the names of sixty-six tykes in itchy scars everywhere. He couldn’t even scratch them since he was heavily manacled. Huh, and they said HE was inhuman.

  THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW.

  Many of the victims were in psychiatric facilities. Yet some showed up, month after month year after year. They jeered as he was forced to do his business. Then they picked it from the trash bin, throwing it hard so it stuck to him. Or they chanted the demonic names he’d carved into their flesh—which really shook him up.

  Dire whined, “Don’t be doin’ that! Never know what’ll answer…”

  Children began to go missing along the route of this endless journey the media dubbed ‘Infinite Cain’. When the little ones were found, nothing Satanic or pornographic had been done to their skin. Because they had no skin. They raved infernal gibberish nobody understood.

  It made no difference. All knew it was Dire.

  “I’ve kept my eye on him 24/7,” the cop insisted, a much decorated hero of twenty years service, the last six spent as Dire’s caretaker.

  Somebody jumped the guard. Others tied him up.

  “Sorry, mate,” they said apologetically. “You’ve been on this duty too long. He’s worked his hoodoo on you at least six times that we know of. We ain’t blaming you. It’s the sentence of the people.”

  They figured an hour for each child, starting with the original sixty-six, then adding the recent half dozen.

  “That will be seventy-two. Are we agreed? An hour’s torture for every victim,” said the mob’s leader who did all the talking. The others shouted.

  Dire argued, “Nah nah. It’s meant as 666. Obvious, I should think.”

  “You saying you want six hundred and sixty-six hours of torture, eh?”

  Dire grinned, eyes screwed tight until they were no bigger than maggots. “It’ll please my master.”

  “We don’t care to please your sulphuric bugger-all master. Seventy-two’s what it is. No number of the Beast. No last requests for you.”

  Infinite Cain made no sound as righteously pissed ‘hoi poloi’ burned, cut, gouged, and stretched him. They beat him, breaking with admirable calculation every bone, pulling splinters of it through his muscles. They held his mouth open, pouring in honey and ants, scalding water and hog piss. He made nary a peep except when he huffed, “Amateurs!”

  They gathered the kids, even those in padded wards, some with pages of fleshy horror flapping necrotic rainbow spells in the wind. Only the recent six—the flayed ones—weren’t present to claim justice, being in special injury units.

  Even the cop heard Dire scream now, through the wax plugs the mob had put in his ears, cotton gauze and duct tape over these. He shivered, listening. After what he’d seen of Dire’s work, the cop had honestly believed his quaking days were behind him.

  Yet he forced himself to watch. The children were out of a nightmare movie, no expression on their pale, ravaged faces except for open mouths, eyes rolled up to the whites.

  They looked dead. The cop wondered if they would remember any of this. Could they remember anything anymore?

  Even kids with wits enough to heckle Dire when he passed through their towns seemed presently catatonic… sleepwalking necronomicons with Dire’s blood all over them.

  Dire said something before he was unable to speak again. The cop memorized it.

  “Good lads! I’ve corrupted the lot of you!”

  Three days. The kids had him to themselves for the final 24 hours. Dire wasn’t even alive for the whole ordeal. Just bloody bits remained. There was no corpse. Infinite Cain? Not bloody likely.

  The cop reported to his superiors.

  “Take a month off. You’re entitled,” they told him.

  He went home. He stripped, silently watching as the names of the final six victims—his own—began appearing on his skin.

  ESSAY V: METAPHYSICS

  Metaphysics [Greek. Meta to physika alter physics, fr, ‘meta’ beyond, alter + physikos relating to external nature…] That division of philosophy which includes ontology, or the science of being, and cosmology…

  Metaphysical 1. Of or pertaining to metaphysics; hence, abstract or abstruse: as, ‘metaphysical’ reasoning. 2. Having, or pertaining, to real being or essential nature of reality: as, metaphysical truth. 3. Obsolete Preternatural or supernatural…

  Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 5th Edition 1943

  “I realize in myself the impossibility of
reason: suffering great misery. I am as one who should have plumed himself for years up on the speed and strength of a favorite horse, only to find not only its speed and strength were illusory, but that it was not a real horse at all, but a clothes-horse. There being no way… out of this awful trouble gives that hideous despair which is only tolerable because in the past it has ever been in the Darkness of the Threshold. But this is far worse than ever before; I wish to go from A to B; and I am not only a cripple, but there is no such thing as space. I have to keep an appointment at midnight, and not only is my watch stopped but there is no such thing as time…”

  — Aleister Crowley

  Does this seem pompous—or Psychopompous? (or even psychobabble?)

  Merely pathetic, another writer of red excess in black dreams, rendered in purple prose, who can’t stop obsessing about a bad childhood? (Not simply ‘bad’. I’ve had a doctor and a homicide detective tell me that my dysfunctional family was the worst they had ever heard of.)

  DYSFUNCTIONAL. Now that’s psychobabble.

  It’s one of the understated categories they lump people into so society can shrug more of us off. Dysfunctional can mean anything from families who just don’t communicate well to—well— families like mine.

  (From Essay #2, a quote from R.D. Laing said that an individual who is not psychotic may exhibit psychotic symptoms, attempting to adjust to life within an ‘insane’ family.)

  Am I making excuses for myself ? I think I’ve done all right, considering what I dragged myself out of. I didn’t become promiscuous, didn’t become a drug fiend, didn’t live a life of crime, never (at least not intentionally) hurt anyone. All of this could be subject to change without notice.

  I’m not afraid of death… although I do reserve the right to shudder at certain modes of dying.

  I’ve written horror since I was seven-years-old, a particularly bad year for my family. I credit this outlet with helping me cope, no matter how this eccentricity or others born out of it may have scandalized some.

  Horror has a lot to offer, whether you just enjoy reading it or because running with the wolves has taken you through many moonless nights.

  It has earned the right to its place among writings dealing with death. Not because it can lift us back up to heaven after we’ve fallen so far (to be really saccharin), but because of how it deals with the metaphysical fight at rock bottom. We’ve taken the plunge into fatalism and emerged out the other side of universal pathology. For some writers, it’s a matter of designing the evolution of their own morality. Self-defining and revelatory, after escaping one that utterly failed them.

  With enough imagination, combined with personal horror, virtually anyone can devise an individual metaphysics. (i.e., Convoluted Zeitgeist For Dummies). We’ve believed as we had to, frequently contradicting legitimate behavioral patterns purportedly based on iconic thought forms. It may not be the purest form of truth but that is different-by-necessity for each person.

  The subject of fear in all categories is ontological, not to be constrained or reduced to explanations dealing with physical matter. As it is a reaction to both natural and supernatural states, its properties aren’t confined to material laws. It slips in and out of the single, reality acceptable to (pseudo?) scientific minds. It follows no standard of methodology and being conjured not stirred, mixes less with reason than with intuition.

  The fact that I refer to horror in metaphysical terms— both new and obsolete definitions—could merely be the height of (pompous) conceit. Well, a mystic is never a conformist but some are definitely exhibitionists. Much of horror is about the soul, dealing with what’s hidden, the definition of the word ‘occult’. It is obsessive on the subject of death… the soul in all its grace and conniption fits. Concealed things, strange and unknown, that people pretend they don’t want to see yet can’t tear their eyes from.

  Deaths we flee that may preserve us.

  Shadows. (Others.) Mystery. (Ours.) Out of all the slop may eventually emerge a grain of the sacred. (It’s good to find something to believe in. It’s worth facing the charge of conceit. Better heresy than sanctimony.) I’ll press each talismanic word to my breath, then confess to whatever I’ve summoned here.

  With this creative—or creature—derangement are we initiated into the world.

  Is the pretense of power-through-arcane-knowledge only subterfuge?

  Highways, castles and catacombs, secret swamps. Subversive beauty: the vice of pain and virtue of grief. When the faces of the dead have an alter-realities counterculture superimposed over them, what do you see?

  Why, when the forests have no more wolves, are the mountains full of them?

  There is blood in the veins, yours and mine.

  DRIFTWOOD

  In the morning there should be a vague notion of Peg’s eyes, remembered in glass. There’s nothing behind but the glimmer of bubbles that are responsible for how the eyes hold their ‘faux’ shape. For what would eyes be—especially of one beloved—if not for their shape? Glittering curves ought to turn each lover into an oracle of the soul, capturing, captivating, and ultimately remaking us.

  ‘Ultimately’, in the same reference as… nothing behind him…

  Predictably, there is nothing before them either. Except for my limitless love, snared willingly, again, by their luster.

  “Her hands will be just like agates,” promised the company’s sales rep. “Additionally and conditionally to contract, they will be likewise cool to the touch. As per specification, Mr. Aaronson.”

  “And her breasts?” I whispered , trying to focus on the sample. But the computer sims didn’t relate to the finished product. I thought he answered ‘driftwood’ and looked up.

  “In warm crystal,” the salesman replied with a glinting tooth. He personally guaranteed it.

  Yet, how could anyone assure…? How could I even ask…? That at midnights during programmed meteor showers, they would fill with lucid milk and replay like dreams are supposed to do.

  Every hypnotic moment we’d shared while she lived, fixed and unequivocal.

  I must have frowned. Appeared pensive. Hesitant. Because then he stepped too close. In that sticky manner of undertakers trying to be sympathetic, saying, “I pledge on my oath, sir, that her lips will be provided in a new fast-twitch graphics mirror, figuration reflective in a slick trick of the kiss.” He smelled of salt and fish.

  I signed on the dotted line. At the time, it felt as if I were buying a coffin for Peg all over again. Or, sleeping on her side of the bed, my face buried in her pillow so I could smell her scent all night. As if I’d sought and found the witchcraft necessary to bring her back to me.

  How did those Lazarus deals usually work by story’s end? Not so different. There was less delivered of optimistic time-slips, solemnly sworn at the graves of their mothers, speaking as a whole of the manufacturers as a plural covenant… sent to float between the moons (still in dispute concerning a different warranty).

  Who was that delivered the package, setting it on the porch? Not in any FedEx uniform but wearing a cloak so wet it reminded me of a fallen sail.

  Then suddenly he was too far for me to see his face. But I saw—or thought that I had seen—how he moved. Folding around an uncertain center, arms and legs stiff as wood. A bit of the sea, a lot of the sand, and forests and ships that used to be…

  I screamed after I opened the box, furious, frightened. I spun around, sunlight through the windows bent as the shadows of doomed men, darkening, swallowed by some cosmic event.

  Something from a different era when the dead were GUARDED and their souls PRAYED FOR.

  Hadn’t I prayed for Peg?

  Yes… to pity me. To return to me. In the tide, a goddess of driftwood.

  In this century, this millennium how we cling to the magical thinking of ancient fathers.

  All I had were her eyes. They stared with an unsettling melancholy from a fountain bowl for whom rose petals fell. There was a portrait hologram suspended abo
ve, showing Peg holding a bouquet. The petal came from this, seeming to turn from roses of light to the solid petals, a symbol of regeneration.

  There must have been more to her than this meager set of marbles. Far from the worthy shrine I had devised for her.

  She said she’d always take care of me. Some of us are born lost.

  “We couldn’t give you more than this” insisted someone else, come out of an office door to deal with my complaints: the company’s clean-up red under his collar, a speck of blue ‘woad’ paint.

  He gave me a list of reasons. I had waited too long. The body was too decomposed. Her extreme illness, lingering cruelly for two years, had corrupted the suppleness. Chemo degraded the basic elements. Artists were only as good as the materials they had to work with.

  “How do I even know that these are replicas of her eyes?” I demanded.

  “I give you my most solemn word, Mr. Aaronson,” he replied, using his practiced veneer of sincerity. “On the grave of my…”

  “…your mother? I shudder to think what you would do with the remains of your own, doubtlessly sainted, mother,” I snapped.

  “Saints? Oh, never them. Who collects what the land rejects?” he went on, obviously not getting it.

  I saw a reflection in an office window. Sunlight bent, shadows of, swallowed by. And this fellow, flesh of his face, of his arms in the short sleeves of a cheap business shirt, now darkly wooden sworls, filigree from a shipwreck perhaps. Those clothes—wet to the (what?) skin, as a ruined sailcloth. The blue paint, under my collar, covering my filth.

  I rushed home, locked myself in and all others out. I sat in front of Peg’s portrait, shedding rose petals into the bowl, focused on something I have engineered to seem within reach when reality decrees it must be very far away. I remain there, devotional, in trembling supplication, denying the foreknowledge of ‘wrong’, as only people who stubbornly wait to die can (must) do.