Writing
'The Man With the Bleeding Eyes', although completed in 1998, is Robert L. Pepper's first full length fictional publication inspired by many years of horror reading and sound absorption. He has toured musically in 14 countries and has had visual art exhibitions in 5.
'The Man With the Bleeding Eyes' is a story about living physically in ones dreams or nightmares. A trio of characters delve into the occult sciences and get trapped into a spell that imprisons them between the dream world and reality. 'The Man With the Bleeding Eyes', is inspired by authors like Arthur Machen, Gustav Meyrink, and H.P. Lovecraft.
Trapped in a world of dreams with no escape. Under a spell that can't be broken, visions of another world or are they real? "There are some people that choose to live by other means, besides life in the natural, physical world and in all of its habitations. They wander and travel to many exotic places to find what they are searching for. This text is about these few individuals who traveled to the land behind the sun, or the land of the physical state of dreams." "Death to the Moon! Forever Reign the Sun!" Lucian
Ebook available through Amazon.
Click Here
Special hardcover edition of 100 available through the artist via paypal. $30 plus tax shipping. Go to the "Add to Cart" button below for Paypal. Below is the first chapter for enjoyment.
Hard Cover
Gloss Cover Finish
60lb Natural 420PPI 94 Opacity
Square 8.5"x8.5"
164 Pages
'The Man With the Bleeding Eyes' is a story about living physically in ones dreams or nightmares. A trio of characters delve into the occult sciences and get trapped into a spell that imprisons them between the dream world and reality. 'The Man With the Bleeding Eyes', is inspired by authors like Arthur Machen, Gustav Meyrink, and H.P. Lovecraft.
Trapped in a world of dreams with no escape. Under a spell that can't be broken, visions of another world or are they real? "There are some people that choose to live by other means, besides life in the natural, physical world and in all of its habitations. They wander and travel to many exotic places to find what they are searching for. This text is about these few individuals who traveled to the land behind the sun, or the land of the physical state of dreams." "Death to the Moon! Forever Reign the Sun!" Lucian
Ebook available through Amazon.
Click Here
Special hardcover edition of 100 available through the artist via paypal. $30 plus tax shipping. Go to the "Add to Cart" button below for Paypal. Below is the first chapter for enjoyment.
Hard Cover
Gloss Cover Finish
60lb Natural 420PPI 94 Opacity
Square 8.5"x8.5"
164 Pages
Carolyn O'Neill poses with a copy!
Carolyn O'Neill poses with a copy!
Chapter 1
The Man
With the
Bleeding Eyes
By
By Robert L. Pepper
There are some people that choose to live by other means, besides life in the natural, physical world and in all of its habitations. They wander and travel to many exotic places to find what they are searching for. This text is about these few individuals who traveled to the land behind the sun, or the land of the physical state of dreams.
Death to the Moon! Forever Reign the Sun!
“The twilight of the gleaming moon shines upon my brain. It infects my cerebral dome with stories of nothingness, twisted forbidden tales of boredom. Dripping off my shoulders it holds me prisoner to this Earth. The clouds are my protectors. But they are not so strong. For, they burn away. Your stare is too strong for their protection. Memories of a normal life, worship you and the Earth, I would not! I might forever be your prisoner. Because you have no soul, unlike your contrast, the heavenly sun! I have but one thing to say to you Moon. May you never survive the night! May the stars crash into you one by one! Tiny pin needles sticking into your body, poking holes into your surface. The sun would burn them up. May the black holes swallow you up like the pits of Tarturus swallowed Satan and his angels! May Orion slay you with his sword and throw you into the jowls of the great lion. The sun has cast you out! Reality is no more. There is no clearer Moon. Just burning hazy fire, sparkling with the land of many dreams." Lucian
Chapter 1
Awaiting a Nightmare
Excerpt from my Journal
Burning is the sensation I feel from my interior bodily abyss. I must have stared at the sun for the whole day in my zombie-like trance. I watched her all day in a phantasmagoria of intertwined paranoid thoughts. I feel like I am in a drugged, catatonic state. But my state is more of a natural meditation, influenced by magic. It is real. Red, charred, and bleeding is my skin when I look at my tiny pocket mirror when night falls. I only feel pain and depression at night. I always experience these feelings when I'm in my nightmarish trance state. I always walk for hours before I go into my daily trance induced state. I struggle and try to lose myself in the mountains to be happy, but I can't figure my way out this time. I am lost. I wandered for the whole day. Sometimes I wander in my lethargic state and wind up in the strangest places.
I don't want to go back to my trances. I don't want to find the way back to my nightmares. I just want to live like I used to live, simple but safe! I never know what happens to me when I wander in my demonic delirium about the town, because I lose consciousness. The woods feel like the natural place for this type of possession.
The first time I ever went into my trance state was deep in these woods. The phantasmagoria was so addictive. The scenes, the people, everything in my dream world made me feel so content, so peaceful. At first when I acquired my visionary states, my second vision world was so much more interesting than the world of my past upon Earth.
Today my trances are still more interesting then the normal world, if you like to go far beyond the realms of horror.
The trees are so dense that the only thing I can see is the glowing of the mushrooms and the radiance of the velvet moss in the moonlight. The cold is setting in and I am freezing. The pain of my charred face is unbearable. Blood is trickling down my face and the droplets freeze to my collar. I will not see the sun until tomorrow. I used to think I needed her so bad. Now I detest the next time I will see the morning sun. When I first watched her I thought I saw the palaces of the gods, but now I don't care at all. I am so tired and I can't sleep. My trance of the day satisfied my appetite for sleep. I sit in a burnt alcove, which is carved inside a tree, and I try to keep warm, but the cold eats at my flesh and freezes my bones. My teeth ache from the cold and hunger stabs my stomach like pointy jabs of a knife. But I wait and smile because I know my trance will come again and relive me of my excruciating pain. I am a hopeless addict waiting for my next deadly fix.
My eyes open and I wake to the insidious rising of my awaited addiction. Burning red, glowing orange, and radiating yellow fields fill the air. They obliterate the night with an unearthly force. Almost instantly the rays penetrate the pupils of my eyes. They enter my eyes and fill my brain with a friendly, warm glow and my eyes start to bleed. I'm too lost in my unearthly possession to realize my physical pain. As I absorb the omnipotent rays I start to lose sight of the lush green wilderness around me. The pine trees melt and shift into long green grassy hills. The growth is so new and abundant that it glows with a saturating intensity that gives everything around it an eerie shade of green. I sit alone and I see miles of hills, all with the same striking, but yet mortally disturbing, green growth.
Now it is time to live my nightmares once again.
***
A Fine Example of a Vision
For hours the skies rained with a heavy downpour. The oceans fell from the skies when I arrived at the wedding reception. That day was probably the most humid and rainy day I have ever lived through. So much rain fell from the clouds that day that the storm could have made an ocean out of the largest desert in the world. The lightning storms were frighteningly violent. It was surprising that so many people showed up that night. The date was August 23, 1996. On this day my cousin Peter took the hand of the lovely Chantal to be his wife.
The first thing I saw when I arrived at the joyous reception was Chantal. Tall, rather slim, with a pasty white complexion, and the most sparkling green eyes, was the figure my eyes gazed upon. Her long white ruffled dress resembled clothing out of the Renaissance. Her taste in clothes, as well as most of her lifestyle, was quite unique from what I heard previously from my cousin. The reception was painstakingly decorated with elaborate detail. Ice sculptures stood everywhere. Hundreds of plants filled the room. Ribbons and candles were everywhere. The food alone might have fed three times as many people who attended the celebration. Excess and waste always seemed to be involved with my family in these kinds of ceremonies.
The delicious food, the luscious decor, the expensive costume, all seemed so pointless to me. For one simple reason, I always detested those traditional ceremonies and the people who attended them. The only part of my family I ever spoke to be my immediate relatives. Mother, father, brother, sister, and my daughter were the only individuals that I was close to. I did not choose to attend that ceremony of shallowness and stupidity, but as a favor to my dear mother I decided to attend.
If I am in a situation where I really don't want to be, the food is not going to help, neither is the decor or costume. In fact the situation turns the best trimmings into the most detestable.
The rain was pouring excessively like in the ancient time of the great flood. The celebration was getting a little too stale for me. Rain or not, I have been at the festivities for hours, and I anxiously could not wait to depart. I left without saying goodbye because everyone was engaged in the obstreperous riot. I hurried past the loud, drunk celebrants and in my anxious dash I knocked a small painting off the wall. To my surprise no one noticed. The painting revealed a scene that was quite interesting. It showed hundreds of trees being blown with a great apocalyptic wind. The trees were bending violently with the wind's force. Strange musical notes were flying in the air from the trees. The notes were frantically mixing with dead leaves that were blowing from the twisted tree branches. As I quickly tried to reinstall the painting a small paper fell out of an envelope that was attached to the back. I hung the painting and out of curiosity put the paper deep within my pocket. Opening the front door, with my matte black umbrella shielding the storm, I gave one quicker glance to the painting. I stopped abruptly in my tracks. The painting changed. The very painting I saw of the wind became something completely different. It was a staircase with an open door to the left. Shining through the open door was a bright yellow light. The staircase was very old and dirty. It was deteriorated by age. The title was still called "Hope". It was another piece by C. Machen. Welsh by birth I believed, because I remember seeing many of his works throughout the years. Except the painting was a completely different scene. At first I was shocked. I couldn't believe my eyes but after my initial shock my thoughts were completely changed. It was as if my brain was wiped clean of the trauma. New thoughts entered my mind. I thought to myself of what an obscure painting it was to have at such a celebration. It brought the feelings of despair and depression within my body as I glanced upon it. The urine colored yellow light plagued the hallway with the same infectious spectacle. The title of the painting was quite deceiving.
I battled the dark, evil, dripping clouds for three blocks. The rain became one flow, one force. My umbrella was ripped to pieces by the wind, so I made a quick attempt to run and hide for shelter. The local cafe was open. The cafe was dimly lit and quite crowded because of the intense rain. The cafe radiated an eerie feel within its surroundings. The decor was very old and worn. Peeling paint and faded colors gave off a strong sense of nostalgia revealing old times to those who remember. The rain seemed to attract everyone. Young adolescents, whose conversation amplified the longer I stayed, drank their coffee or beer in celebration of a dreary dark day. With the lack of the outdoor environment the younger crowd almost exploded with energy being confined to the little cafe. The older crowd sat and played a friendly game of cards and smoked their cigars. Everyone seemed to be comfortable with the surroundings, except for an unusual mixed crowd in the corner who stared directly at me as soon as I entered.
The only table left, unfortunately, was the table right next to the peculiar crowd. I sat down and started to get a strong sensation of hunger. The waitress came over and I ordered a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin. As I lit up my cigar I overheard parts of the conversation from the peculiar crowd next to me. An old Arab man with a pointy goatee and handlebar mustache, which was a shiny white color, was talking about lighting. He was telling a young English woman, dressed in a red gown with long black hair, the effects of lighting on human behavior. He was explaining if you were to attend a party that has strong lighting, the light would be too overwhelming for the eyes and that many people would feel uncomfortable and would leave the party early. If dimly lit, the experience would make the individual a lot more relaxed and in the end the people would have a better time. Then a tall husky man, in a black silk cloak, spoke with a lisp, and explained that dim lighting would be appropriate for the stage setting of a nightmare. Then he burst out in a horse-like laugh and patted the other two on their shoulders.
My coffee and muffin arrived. I was so famished and damp that I started shaking. As I ate, I read the paper that fell out of the picture in the lobby. It was a poem.
Fire
"I started a fire the other night,
it burned so high the clouds melted,
the stars popped like firecrackers,
it seemed to reach for the grand fire,
the sun,
it sang with crackling noises,
in a symphony of warm destruction,
engulfing everything in its path,
consuming,
the hunger of my creation seemed to never be fulfilled,
red, yellow, and orange filled the sky,
the buildings glowed with fear,
that they would be destroyed that very night,
the shadows seemed to move so fast,
the buildings seemed to shake like they were in a chaotic dance,
my creation for all to see,
was so beautiful as a musical symphony,
but I the creator could only see,
could only appreciate,
because everyone tried to capture me,
as if I had murdered,
and they cursed me for my masterpiece."
On the other side of the paper was a set of strange musical notes. They were very much like the ones on the painting that I saw at the celebration. They were very unorganized and deceiving. It was hard to comprehend what the song could have sounded like. It almost seemed impossible. It looked like a composition mainly created for percussion, but there were other strange notes that didn't seem to correspond to any instrument I could possibly think of at the time. There was one word at the bottom that looked as if the name of the instrument was given. It read, "Ban kine."
A hand grabbed me abruptly at my shoulder. I turned and saw a large gold ring with a ruby the size of a cherry mounted on its surface. It was carved with eight concave sides. It was on the man's hand that wore the black cloak that grabbed my shoulder. The ring sparkled with a blinding glare. In a nervous jerk I jumped out of my seat spilling coffee all over my shoes, which burnt my toes. The poem flew out of my hand onto the floor. The man tried once again to grab me but missed the second time.
He said with a mysterious low growling snarl, "Do the fowl speak? Do you hear them chanting?"
The party of three laughed and mocked me with an obnoxious howl. The howling insults pierced my ears and I ran out in fear when the man who wore the black cloak approached and started to follow me.
Looking behind me several times I realized the man decided not to follow me any more. The rain drenched my suit and the cold chilled my body. Chills like electric shocks went through my body, not to mention the adrenaline that flowed through my veins from my fear of the man who wore the black cloak. This town was filled with lunatics. I knew my cousin would find some half-assed town to have his wedding in. He always liked obscure places in the middle of nowhere.
I was staying in an apartment three more blocks from the reception and I couldn't wait to get home to Gwen. Gwen was my daughter. I thought the wedding would be too overpowering for a girl of only eleven years to experience. I didn't even want to be there.
I raised Gwen from a child after the death of her mother. Her mother was killed one year after her birth. She was involved with a group of scientists, which she had known since college. She would frequent their laboratory and bring them wine and the best coffees. They knew each other for years. Her friends were excelling in their scientific endeavors, while she decided to lead a different life of being a mother and took my hand in marriage. She did dabble in her own scientific work but she was mainly dedicated to her children. Her college years brought her very close to her scientist friends and she was almost inseparable until she had a child.
Her friends started to get involved with very risky experiments. They experimented with deadly poisons and strange components of explosives. They always told her that their experiments were leading to something extraordinary, but they couldn't share the information with her until the experiment was completed. Every couple of days there seemed to be another disappointing failure after the next in the laboratory. Every morning the laboratory was filled with a strange thick red mist. You could barely see your hand in front of your face. My wife Madaline, started to feel strangely ill after her visits to the lab. Her illness continued for quite sometime until she decided to take a break from the laboratory. It was too late. Some insidious chemicals that weren't cataloged in any known chemistry books slowly poisoned her.
I came home one day and there she lay on the couch. Her eyes were bulging and her veins popped out all over her body. Her mouth was wide open as if she tried to scream. Her arms were outstretched as if she were trying to grasp for someone or something. Her skin was horribly deformed. This happened two years ago. The mysterious scientists still continued their research, needless to say, with better safety. They never could explain what actually happened. They didn't even seem to care too much about what happened. They worked like robots, always listening to their odd music that rattled the glass tubes all around the lab. I asked them why they played such odd cacophony. They said it helped them work better, much better. One scientist explained to me that maybe that's why the mist became poisonous, because the music stopped. In the end, the scientists all agreed that during one of the explosions that some chemicals were combined and released in the lab where Madaline came in contact with them. They said Madaline must have had a bad reaction to one of the chemicals that led to her death. What was extremely odd was that none of the other chemists shared the same disgusting, surprising death after inhaling the fumes.
I was one block from home and I was really losing my patience. Running up the stairs, shaking like a leaf, trying to find my key, I heard screams coming from the third floor. I rushed to find my key and dropped it on the floor. I was staying on the third floor. The scream didn't sound like Gina the baby sitter. Soon enough the door was opened. Cautiously, I made my way up the old wooden stairs. Normally after hearing screams I would have run, but my cafe experience scared the daylights out of me and I was nervous as all hell. The door slammed shut with a loud bang and the glass cracked. Trying quietly to make it up the stairs, to avoid being heard, I made more noise than I had hoped.
I looked around and the stairs seemed to sway and move. After rubbing my eyes in disbelief, I opened them again. It wasn't my eyes! The stairs were moving with a slight waving movement, like I was looking through a wall of heat. I also noticed upon my ascent of the liquid stairs the change in the color of the walls and of the hallway trimming. From what I remember, the halls were all painted in a disgusting faded pink color. As I climbed the stairs, sharp, black paint strokes were revealed. As my journey of the stairs continued, black glossy shades of paint were appearing everywhere. They soon took over the disgusting pink color. The heat seemed to be unbearable and I felt like I was going to faint.
Soon, I saw the door of my third floor flat. Cold, it looked like it had never been touched. As I anxiously reached my final flight of hallucinogenic stairs, to my left I realized that the side door to the attic was opened and a blinding yellow light appeared. It was shining and projecting onto the right side from my door. I screamed in panic not knowing why. I tried as fast as I could to get to the top. I was almost in a paranoid-drugged frenzy, staring at the door that was the only thing that was not hazy or moving. In fact the door was the clear dark blue color it always was. Nothing about it was distorted. A quick shrieking noise howled for a split second. Then in an instant the figure of the dark angel death plunged towards me from above. The gravity pulled him towards me as fast as a meteor falls to the earth from space. With a quick and violent stab issued by the dark figure, I saw the blade appear through the center of my chest, entering straight through my back. Blood splashed all over the walls leading up to the ceiling as I began my ascension up towards a yellow velvet light. The pain was more than the pains of a thousand deaths, because the one who exists for the pure pleasure of killing gave the fatal blow. At that moment I was pulled straight up through the ceiling, traveling faster and faster into the realm of the disgusting yellow light. I screamed the one word of which I could think of, "Gwen!"
The Man
With the
Bleeding Eyes
By
By Robert L. Pepper
There are some people that choose to live by other means, besides life in the natural, physical world and in all of its habitations. They wander and travel to many exotic places to find what they are searching for. This text is about these few individuals who traveled to the land behind the sun, or the land of the physical state of dreams.
Death to the Moon! Forever Reign the Sun!
“The twilight of the gleaming moon shines upon my brain. It infects my cerebral dome with stories of nothingness, twisted forbidden tales of boredom. Dripping off my shoulders it holds me prisoner to this Earth. The clouds are my protectors. But they are not so strong. For, they burn away. Your stare is too strong for their protection. Memories of a normal life, worship you and the Earth, I would not! I might forever be your prisoner. Because you have no soul, unlike your contrast, the heavenly sun! I have but one thing to say to you Moon. May you never survive the night! May the stars crash into you one by one! Tiny pin needles sticking into your body, poking holes into your surface. The sun would burn them up. May the black holes swallow you up like the pits of Tarturus swallowed Satan and his angels! May Orion slay you with his sword and throw you into the jowls of the great lion. The sun has cast you out! Reality is no more. There is no clearer Moon. Just burning hazy fire, sparkling with the land of many dreams." Lucian
Chapter 1
Awaiting a Nightmare
Excerpt from my Journal
Burning is the sensation I feel from my interior bodily abyss. I must have stared at the sun for the whole day in my zombie-like trance. I watched her all day in a phantasmagoria of intertwined paranoid thoughts. I feel like I am in a drugged, catatonic state. But my state is more of a natural meditation, influenced by magic. It is real. Red, charred, and bleeding is my skin when I look at my tiny pocket mirror when night falls. I only feel pain and depression at night. I always experience these feelings when I'm in my nightmarish trance state. I always walk for hours before I go into my daily trance induced state. I struggle and try to lose myself in the mountains to be happy, but I can't figure my way out this time. I am lost. I wandered for the whole day. Sometimes I wander in my lethargic state and wind up in the strangest places.
I don't want to go back to my trances. I don't want to find the way back to my nightmares. I just want to live like I used to live, simple but safe! I never know what happens to me when I wander in my demonic delirium about the town, because I lose consciousness. The woods feel like the natural place for this type of possession.
The first time I ever went into my trance state was deep in these woods. The phantasmagoria was so addictive. The scenes, the people, everything in my dream world made me feel so content, so peaceful. At first when I acquired my visionary states, my second vision world was so much more interesting than the world of my past upon Earth.
Today my trances are still more interesting then the normal world, if you like to go far beyond the realms of horror.
The trees are so dense that the only thing I can see is the glowing of the mushrooms and the radiance of the velvet moss in the moonlight. The cold is setting in and I am freezing. The pain of my charred face is unbearable. Blood is trickling down my face and the droplets freeze to my collar. I will not see the sun until tomorrow. I used to think I needed her so bad. Now I detest the next time I will see the morning sun. When I first watched her I thought I saw the palaces of the gods, but now I don't care at all. I am so tired and I can't sleep. My trance of the day satisfied my appetite for sleep. I sit in a burnt alcove, which is carved inside a tree, and I try to keep warm, but the cold eats at my flesh and freezes my bones. My teeth ache from the cold and hunger stabs my stomach like pointy jabs of a knife. But I wait and smile because I know my trance will come again and relive me of my excruciating pain. I am a hopeless addict waiting for my next deadly fix.
My eyes open and I wake to the insidious rising of my awaited addiction. Burning red, glowing orange, and radiating yellow fields fill the air. They obliterate the night with an unearthly force. Almost instantly the rays penetrate the pupils of my eyes. They enter my eyes and fill my brain with a friendly, warm glow and my eyes start to bleed. I'm too lost in my unearthly possession to realize my physical pain. As I absorb the omnipotent rays I start to lose sight of the lush green wilderness around me. The pine trees melt and shift into long green grassy hills. The growth is so new and abundant that it glows with a saturating intensity that gives everything around it an eerie shade of green. I sit alone and I see miles of hills, all with the same striking, but yet mortally disturbing, green growth.
Now it is time to live my nightmares once again.
***
A Fine Example of a Vision
For hours the skies rained with a heavy downpour. The oceans fell from the skies when I arrived at the wedding reception. That day was probably the most humid and rainy day I have ever lived through. So much rain fell from the clouds that day that the storm could have made an ocean out of the largest desert in the world. The lightning storms were frighteningly violent. It was surprising that so many people showed up that night. The date was August 23, 1996. On this day my cousin Peter took the hand of the lovely Chantal to be his wife.
The first thing I saw when I arrived at the joyous reception was Chantal. Tall, rather slim, with a pasty white complexion, and the most sparkling green eyes, was the figure my eyes gazed upon. Her long white ruffled dress resembled clothing out of the Renaissance. Her taste in clothes, as well as most of her lifestyle, was quite unique from what I heard previously from my cousin. The reception was painstakingly decorated with elaborate detail. Ice sculptures stood everywhere. Hundreds of plants filled the room. Ribbons and candles were everywhere. The food alone might have fed three times as many people who attended the celebration. Excess and waste always seemed to be involved with my family in these kinds of ceremonies.
The delicious food, the luscious decor, the expensive costume, all seemed so pointless to me. For one simple reason, I always detested those traditional ceremonies and the people who attended them. The only part of my family I ever spoke to be my immediate relatives. Mother, father, brother, sister, and my daughter were the only individuals that I was close to. I did not choose to attend that ceremony of shallowness and stupidity, but as a favor to my dear mother I decided to attend.
If I am in a situation where I really don't want to be, the food is not going to help, neither is the decor or costume. In fact the situation turns the best trimmings into the most detestable.
The rain was pouring excessively like in the ancient time of the great flood. The celebration was getting a little too stale for me. Rain or not, I have been at the festivities for hours, and I anxiously could not wait to depart. I left without saying goodbye because everyone was engaged in the obstreperous riot. I hurried past the loud, drunk celebrants and in my anxious dash I knocked a small painting off the wall. To my surprise no one noticed. The painting revealed a scene that was quite interesting. It showed hundreds of trees being blown with a great apocalyptic wind. The trees were bending violently with the wind's force. Strange musical notes were flying in the air from the trees. The notes were frantically mixing with dead leaves that were blowing from the twisted tree branches. As I quickly tried to reinstall the painting a small paper fell out of an envelope that was attached to the back. I hung the painting and out of curiosity put the paper deep within my pocket. Opening the front door, with my matte black umbrella shielding the storm, I gave one quicker glance to the painting. I stopped abruptly in my tracks. The painting changed. The very painting I saw of the wind became something completely different. It was a staircase with an open door to the left. Shining through the open door was a bright yellow light. The staircase was very old and dirty. It was deteriorated by age. The title was still called "Hope". It was another piece by C. Machen. Welsh by birth I believed, because I remember seeing many of his works throughout the years. Except the painting was a completely different scene. At first I was shocked. I couldn't believe my eyes but after my initial shock my thoughts were completely changed. It was as if my brain was wiped clean of the trauma. New thoughts entered my mind. I thought to myself of what an obscure painting it was to have at such a celebration. It brought the feelings of despair and depression within my body as I glanced upon it. The urine colored yellow light plagued the hallway with the same infectious spectacle. The title of the painting was quite deceiving.
I battled the dark, evil, dripping clouds for three blocks. The rain became one flow, one force. My umbrella was ripped to pieces by the wind, so I made a quick attempt to run and hide for shelter. The local cafe was open. The cafe was dimly lit and quite crowded because of the intense rain. The cafe radiated an eerie feel within its surroundings. The decor was very old and worn. Peeling paint and faded colors gave off a strong sense of nostalgia revealing old times to those who remember. The rain seemed to attract everyone. Young adolescents, whose conversation amplified the longer I stayed, drank their coffee or beer in celebration of a dreary dark day. With the lack of the outdoor environment the younger crowd almost exploded with energy being confined to the little cafe. The older crowd sat and played a friendly game of cards and smoked their cigars. Everyone seemed to be comfortable with the surroundings, except for an unusual mixed crowd in the corner who stared directly at me as soon as I entered.
The only table left, unfortunately, was the table right next to the peculiar crowd. I sat down and started to get a strong sensation of hunger. The waitress came over and I ordered a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin. As I lit up my cigar I overheard parts of the conversation from the peculiar crowd next to me. An old Arab man with a pointy goatee and handlebar mustache, which was a shiny white color, was talking about lighting. He was telling a young English woman, dressed in a red gown with long black hair, the effects of lighting on human behavior. He was explaining if you were to attend a party that has strong lighting, the light would be too overwhelming for the eyes and that many people would feel uncomfortable and would leave the party early. If dimly lit, the experience would make the individual a lot more relaxed and in the end the people would have a better time. Then a tall husky man, in a black silk cloak, spoke with a lisp, and explained that dim lighting would be appropriate for the stage setting of a nightmare. Then he burst out in a horse-like laugh and patted the other two on their shoulders.
My coffee and muffin arrived. I was so famished and damp that I started shaking. As I ate, I read the paper that fell out of the picture in the lobby. It was a poem.
Fire
"I started a fire the other night,
it burned so high the clouds melted,
the stars popped like firecrackers,
it seemed to reach for the grand fire,
the sun,
it sang with crackling noises,
in a symphony of warm destruction,
engulfing everything in its path,
consuming,
the hunger of my creation seemed to never be fulfilled,
red, yellow, and orange filled the sky,
the buildings glowed with fear,
that they would be destroyed that very night,
the shadows seemed to move so fast,
the buildings seemed to shake like they were in a chaotic dance,
my creation for all to see,
was so beautiful as a musical symphony,
but I the creator could only see,
could only appreciate,
because everyone tried to capture me,
as if I had murdered,
and they cursed me for my masterpiece."
On the other side of the paper was a set of strange musical notes. They were very much like the ones on the painting that I saw at the celebration. They were very unorganized and deceiving. It was hard to comprehend what the song could have sounded like. It almost seemed impossible. It looked like a composition mainly created for percussion, but there were other strange notes that didn't seem to correspond to any instrument I could possibly think of at the time. There was one word at the bottom that looked as if the name of the instrument was given. It read, "Ban kine."
A hand grabbed me abruptly at my shoulder. I turned and saw a large gold ring with a ruby the size of a cherry mounted on its surface. It was carved with eight concave sides. It was on the man's hand that wore the black cloak that grabbed my shoulder. The ring sparkled with a blinding glare. In a nervous jerk I jumped out of my seat spilling coffee all over my shoes, which burnt my toes. The poem flew out of my hand onto the floor. The man tried once again to grab me but missed the second time.
He said with a mysterious low growling snarl, "Do the fowl speak? Do you hear them chanting?"
The party of three laughed and mocked me with an obnoxious howl. The howling insults pierced my ears and I ran out in fear when the man who wore the black cloak approached and started to follow me.
Looking behind me several times I realized the man decided not to follow me any more. The rain drenched my suit and the cold chilled my body. Chills like electric shocks went through my body, not to mention the adrenaline that flowed through my veins from my fear of the man who wore the black cloak. This town was filled with lunatics. I knew my cousin would find some half-assed town to have his wedding in. He always liked obscure places in the middle of nowhere.
I was staying in an apartment three more blocks from the reception and I couldn't wait to get home to Gwen. Gwen was my daughter. I thought the wedding would be too overpowering for a girl of only eleven years to experience. I didn't even want to be there.
I raised Gwen from a child after the death of her mother. Her mother was killed one year after her birth. She was involved with a group of scientists, which she had known since college. She would frequent their laboratory and bring them wine and the best coffees. They knew each other for years. Her friends were excelling in their scientific endeavors, while she decided to lead a different life of being a mother and took my hand in marriage. She did dabble in her own scientific work but she was mainly dedicated to her children. Her college years brought her very close to her scientist friends and she was almost inseparable until she had a child.
Her friends started to get involved with very risky experiments. They experimented with deadly poisons and strange components of explosives. They always told her that their experiments were leading to something extraordinary, but they couldn't share the information with her until the experiment was completed. Every couple of days there seemed to be another disappointing failure after the next in the laboratory. Every morning the laboratory was filled with a strange thick red mist. You could barely see your hand in front of your face. My wife Madaline, started to feel strangely ill after her visits to the lab. Her illness continued for quite sometime until she decided to take a break from the laboratory. It was too late. Some insidious chemicals that weren't cataloged in any known chemistry books slowly poisoned her.
I came home one day and there she lay on the couch. Her eyes were bulging and her veins popped out all over her body. Her mouth was wide open as if she tried to scream. Her arms were outstretched as if she were trying to grasp for someone or something. Her skin was horribly deformed. This happened two years ago. The mysterious scientists still continued their research, needless to say, with better safety. They never could explain what actually happened. They didn't even seem to care too much about what happened. They worked like robots, always listening to their odd music that rattled the glass tubes all around the lab. I asked them why they played such odd cacophony. They said it helped them work better, much better. One scientist explained to me that maybe that's why the mist became poisonous, because the music stopped. In the end, the scientists all agreed that during one of the explosions that some chemicals were combined and released in the lab where Madaline came in contact with them. They said Madaline must have had a bad reaction to one of the chemicals that led to her death. What was extremely odd was that none of the other chemists shared the same disgusting, surprising death after inhaling the fumes.
I was one block from home and I was really losing my patience. Running up the stairs, shaking like a leaf, trying to find my key, I heard screams coming from the third floor. I rushed to find my key and dropped it on the floor. I was staying on the third floor. The scream didn't sound like Gina the baby sitter. Soon enough the door was opened. Cautiously, I made my way up the old wooden stairs. Normally after hearing screams I would have run, but my cafe experience scared the daylights out of me and I was nervous as all hell. The door slammed shut with a loud bang and the glass cracked. Trying quietly to make it up the stairs, to avoid being heard, I made more noise than I had hoped.
I looked around and the stairs seemed to sway and move. After rubbing my eyes in disbelief, I opened them again. It wasn't my eyes! The stairs were moving with a slight waving movement, like I was looking through a wall of heat. I also noticed upon my ascent of the liquid stairs the change in the color of the walls and of the hallway trimming. From what I remember, the halls were all painted in a disgusting faded pink color. As I climbed the stairs, sharp, black paint strokes were revealed. As my journey of the stairs continued, black glossy shades of paint were appearing everywhere. They soon took over the disgusting pink color. The heat seemed to be unbearable and I felt like I was going to faint.
Soon, I saw the door of my third floor flat. Cold, it looked like it had never been touched. As I anxiously reached my final flight of hallucinogenic stairs, to my left I realized that the side door to the attic was opened and a blinding yellow light appeared. It was shining and projecting onto the right side from my door. I screamed in panic not knowing why. I tried as fast as I could to get to the top. I was almost in a paranoid-drugged frenzy, staring at the door that was the only thing that was not hazy or moving. In fact the door was the clear dark blue color it always was. Nothing about it was distorted. A quick shrieking noise howled for a split second. Then in an instant the figure of the dark angel death plunged towards me from above. The gravity pulled him towards me as fast as a meteor falls to the earth from space. With a quick and violent stab issued by the dark figure, I saw the blade appear through the center of my chest, entering straight through my back. Blood splashed all over the walls leading up to the ceiling as I began my ascension up towards a yellow velvet light. The pain was more than the pains of a thousand deaths, because the one who exists for the pure pleasure of killing gave the fatal blow. At that moment I was pulled straight up through the ceiling, traveling faster and faster into the realm of the disgusting yellow light. I screamed the one word of which I could think of, "Gwen!"