The Myth of Falling

by Charlee Jacob

  The three scientists began winding like scourged shrouds. Their tongues met and struck in a single unsuspected moment, choking them on what they couldn’t swallow. The fourth doctor set up extra cameras, out of reach, then paged for back-up. He was half-elated, half-horny, wholly terrified.

  We could never turn away from our faces as the shadowed mirrors of beloveds. We couldn’t let go of this stupefying statue, a Rodin of utter madness beneath the pulsing black blood of the world’s future, forfeited down our throats. But when we heard our unborn child cry, our tears rolled, combined into a destiny of glass between us, blinding us to all but the frosted pane where what should have been the next horizon shivered and starved.

  THE HUNTERS

  It was a name you heard only once yet it forever chilled the air around you, and the wind that forever echoed it has become the enemy god who dances sideways in your dreams.

  There’s a dead body in the forest, ‘murder’ is whispered in poetry by a black-green shape of moss. The arms and legs are only barely visible, having crawled out from the maggots in the ivy. There are other ‘limbs’ whose wet decayed shapes have been traced in the soil by creepers.

  Some basement child once got loose, some hybrid Whately scapegoat the village men got drunk and righteous about. Poisonous mushrooms grew where the macrocephalic head bled. Swollen with spores where fungal stars fell.

  So… have you been out hunting again since that time, two deer seasons ago? When that big twelve point buck you blew the head clean off of charged you instead of toppling over… bearing down on you in the switchgrass with carved stone idols for hooves? Their collective mouths chanted dismember’s litany until every tree in night’s forest turned white.

  You run with the rumor of the raw moon in your ears, across the spot where years before you and your plaid jacket pals played that cosmic version of ‘Deliverance’. That shadow-skulled boy is now part of the nightmare memory of the landscape, across the spots where—one by one—the others found that hollow murmurs of earth where rot and gut-spunk endured in resurrected parasite molds and the leaves still faintly struggle, their deceased terror still trying to shove its way toward a rusted dawn this part of the woods and universe hasn’t seen in an eon.

  And the gore pumping neck on that relentless headless deer, and then wind that never forgets the guttural name of its mutual faithful SPEAKS IT, thunder-clamped crushing through kudzu, SPEAKS IT in chunks clogging your exhausted brainwaves. SPEAKS IT in a giant voice, red with revenge.

  It knows you are the last of the shotgun fuck-heap vigilantes self-professed shit-dicked protectors of humanity, knowing if allowed to escape that you will haunt the road into the forest, spreading fear’s infection by shouting the story. You’ll convince folks if you show them where you cored out your ears years ago so that—not for any reason—can you hear that name, belling back in infinite repetition, scourged memorial by charnel wind.

  THE PITCH

  The kids watched from the chain link separating their elementary school from the old woods, as the man went through inexplicable movements—removing forty-two large suitcases from the back of a van. He then unlocked and opened each. After this he took a drawstring sack from the back of the vehicle and began placing—human fingers?—from deep within this bag into every suitcase.

  The children turned to two teachers assigned to monitor the recess yard. Both women frantically tried to call 911, getting no answer.

  “Hey! Open up. Let us in!”

  “Can’t you hear us out here?”

  They banged on the school’s doors, getting no response there either. They yelled through the windows, pounding on the glass. They saw students asleep inside, heads on their desks. The teachers for these classes were nowhere to be seen.

  The man had started out mumbling. They thought he was talking to himself. As his voice rose, they decided he was repeating over and over some barbarous prayer, too horrible for their charge’s precious little ears: the great bloody egregious. Clouds gathered with the spooked speed of time-lapse photography, and suddenly there were raggedy wisps of gauze souls falling through those clouds.

  “Don’t send us back!”

  “You promised!”

  “You said no one could ever hurt us again!”

  “Please!”

  Their cries played like sped-up, slowed-down music. The children in the yard were terrified as the man raised his thick, scarred arms up to these former/future helots-to-depraved-fire as they drifted down. Every war had its hostages.

  Coming to ground, a few pointed to places within the ancient forest where flesh had used and discarded them to the earth in its weathering vicissitudes. Apparently even death and saints were mutable. Slowly each chose the suitcase which held the fetish of every individual’s severed finger. They climbed into the suitcases, folding like nightgowns of worm-chewed silk. Many still sobbed the politics of betrayal.

  A few falling from the sky landed behind the chain link fence and, rising, began walking with fluttering ribbons of legs toward their companions of descent. They stepped into living children who pressed to the fence, but didn’t pass through them to come back out. Instead buoyancy swept lost spirit and surprised container of skin and bones through the chain link together. These dead, too, found their suitcases but didn’t fold as easily into them.

  Students and recess monitors alike couldn’t even blink, forced to stand by helplessly as the man retrieved a hammer from the van—still chanting in the guttural rasp of indigent reapers. He knelt, beating the dispossessed/possessed until they fit. “Anna, we’ve got to get through the locked gate,” said one teacher to the other.

  But she couldn’t reply, mouth gasping as a silently- suffocating goldfish on a painted shoreline.

  “Anna? It’s me, Kirsten,” she said to her sister, touching her shoulders.

  The man glanced up from his ghastly business to wink and leer at the hysterical kids in the schoolyard. They cried, utterly inarticulate as if never having been taught to speak. This might have been a sanctuary for the severely traumatized child victim.

  Which, incidentally, it was. It was the reason the school had been built so far from cities, the students all in dormitories, seeing staff psychologists in hopes that eventually at least a few stood a marginal chance at living reasonably sane lives. They had been brought here from the world’s worst situations… snatched from the most evil parents, war refugee camps, human jackals. They had arrived in every condition from hysterical to catatonic and from suicidal to feral. It was a long desperate journey just to get these kids to the point where they could attend classes and be given recess to go outside and play.

  Kirsten ran back to the school and its windows. One was partially open. She hoped there was enough room for her to climb inside. But that morning there had been students doing lessons and only moments ago she’d seen children sleeping (when they shouldn’t be). Now there were only leaves of red and black blowing somberly from room to room, fizzy slicks beneath each empty desk. Scrawled on the blackboards she read in marrow-white chalk: ONCE MINE, ALWAYS MINE.

  Suitcases full, he went about closing and locking, then reloaded them into the van. “Wait! You can’t take away our students!” Kirsten protested as Anna closed her eyes, sinking to her knees.

  Grinning, the man strode to the fence. “You mean… you waited until after I used the hammer, sweating and filling my trousers with milky Jordan, before you finally spoke up? I take whatever I’m given, honeys, given or GIVEN BACK.”

  Kirsten curled her fingers into the chain link, miserable. Anna began sucking her thumb, then chewing on it until it bled. The memories of the psychosexual abuse they suffered for two decades in their father’s dungeon flooded back. Would they ever put the horror behind them again?

  Kirsten turned, hearing red and black leaves rustling in the recess yard. The children were nowhere to be seen. The van’s engine roared but she couldn’t turn around again. Her feet swirled.

  Legs, hips… blowing away i
n the sad autumn.

  ESSAY VI: BOOK OF SHADOWS

  I baptized myself in the buzzing of flies, discovering a new identity in the convictions of a nobler nonconformity, not overshadowed by thieves and sharks. Submerged in oceans of salt theater, I assumed the writhing crown of Medusa. Read here where my finger points and turn to stone.

  It isn’t the disobedience but the symbolism of the disobedience that manipulates space by channeling time.

  Language is both inside and outside the accepted translation of its creator’s generations. Although we may be persecuted on any number of trumped-up levels, we can never be called to bear responsibility for either accusations or genuine evil… not ultimately. Another rebellion takes our place, or years of intolerance spent will validate us simply by virtue of the work surviving what the flesh did not. And the book burnings. And the shift in public appetite and literacy. And the falling before renaissances by initiates of the damned, the jargon of bloody dreams aggressive or subtle, ready to terrorize or charm, endlessly red-eyed with hysteria.

  The working of the story’s opposition represents the final eschatological chapters of mankind—no matter how mundane or general the narrative. It is an occult insurrection, perdition unlimited. In the first appearance of the villains or non-human source of conflict, we introduce the Apocalypse, finally attempting to tame its derangement until the plot’s anti-christ is leashed before the anti-climax… an exultation after the event.

  The tale’s gateway is opened with a personal brand of discipline. It’s held open by denying all sense of shame as it relates to the telling. No matter how torturous the path is through it. There is rejoicing in any secrets revealed. Pain is part of the process when the story is about pain. Horror best represents itself. A sense of liberation is fair if the end delivers any freedom.

  (Claim everything there is to be had. This eerie music is beautiful to only a few.)

  We invent icons for society’s outlaws. Words plucked from the fringe, delivered naked and shivering.

  (Only those too afraid to ascend refuse to forgive the forbidden who wouldn’t take the train home again.)

  Altars to verse, talismans of blood/bone/musk, brain cells bursting with rat-memes of invocation.

  Guiltless in Babylon. Searching the horizon for the way out, having already suffered on the way down.

  Hypertext: the fantasy as argument for reconfiguring light versus darkness has splintered. Conceptualization is distorted. It shimmers with heat mirage like the lies Lilith tells the desert.

  Gestures and oratory summon a damaged doll to save herself from the demons in her grimoire, very grim noir.

  I, the gorgon, walk through my garden on the beach. Love has crashed upon the rocks again. Last night another treasure ended up on the bottom where it is hardest to recover. Lost…

  Tearing tiny holes in the fabric of reality. Soon there’ll be nothing left except shreds suitable only for skeptics and gods. Easy to wipe clean what’s left.

  Does this imply that each story is an attempt to begin the universe over? Worlds unto themselves.

  Erotic, evocative, stomach-churning, heretical, blasphemous, spiritual. Soul to the grindstone. Seeking salvation before the final sins are counted. HELL, before the final sins have been committed.

  Intimate I have become with the elements of the caricature gnosis, validating—for myself if no other—customs of sex and death, death and sex…

  If while writing some passage I experience an orgasm, or I burst into tears and grind my broken teeth, or the room grows dark in prescient layers—I have to abandon this poison prose, sometimes for weeks, burying myself in another project. I know I’ve reached a plane I feared to see, yet needed before I could ever reach my own conclusion.

  No limits outside the body: every direction has its own Past, Present, Future, Quantum. Each point of distance is limitless with a prophet at every station. Any and all singularities wink from their pockets.

  Spells are minor offerings of syllables, unlikely adjustments of the brain, signifying nothing. But everything eventually enters the ultimate scripture, The Book Of Shadows, because everything is real. Along the tongue and each tooth exploring another field of conscious sounds. Even if it wasn’t real in the past and isn’t real now, it must finally find its place. Anarchy’s beauty lies in its inevitability. No idea is less than equal to the task of the hallucination that pulled it—screaming—out of nothing. Whispers in the dark carry it along, from ripple to liquid ripple. Breathing in this sea the heart seizes; there is a spontaneous combustion in the loins—without regeneration—and we die again.

  (Censorship is meant to slow you down so they can catch up.)

  If I’m not all here, where’s the rest of me?

  What makes us true believers? Memories of the passing of past lives on our breath. Brows that bear the curses from our having stolen the gold of El Dorado. Visible scars from the sins of karma. Rose lesions from the love bites of goddesses.

  Death wishes. Circles from which we called to Heaven but no one answered.

  I taste more in the decompression, then go down again.

  Time to leave. There are others waiting for me.

  The gorgon has learned to wear a veil.

  AUTHOR'S AFTERWORD

  Why do we write horror?

  Is it because we fear the darkness more than anything else?

  Is it because that darkness is the plainest, most plentiful and self-evident symbol of death?

  Too simple. There must be a lot of reasons, shades of nature to nurture.

  When I first began writing the pieces in this collection—a few years ago—I was getting very sick. Couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, couldn’t remain still. As if some Leviathan-sticky, liver-skinned, peeled-penis demon held me in a vise grip, breath of spoiled peaches and crackling centipede larvae in my face, shaking me and shaking me. I couldn’t sit up to use a computer—my fingers only stuttered across the keys anyway. My handwriting turned into melted Sanskrit. I began to see ‘things’.

  By the time I was finally diagnosed with the Dementia form of Parkinson’s Disease, I was pretty far along.

  There’s so much more to wait for.

  Insanity.

  Darkness.

  Charlee Jacob

  DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI AD TE DOMINE, DOMINE EXAUDI ORATIONEM MEAM… MORTEM JUSTIFICARE…

  OUT OF THE DEPTHS HAVE I CRIED UNTO THEE O LORD, O LORD HEAR MY PRAYER… UNTO DEATH

  BE JUSTIFIED…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charlee Jacob has been publishing, mostly horror, for over twenty years. Fibromyalgia, Osteo-arthritis, and Parkinson’s totally disabled and sidelined her to bed several years ago. Three-time winner of the Bram Stoker award, she only recently was able to return to part-time writing after the encouragement of a friend, author Rain Graves.