Byronic Heroine

Bad Days Come in Sets...

2012-01-17T02:02:00.003-05:00

I have decided bad days come in sets. Not set sets either-it can be as few as two or as many as...well let's just stick with "many" for now. I have had many bad days lately and today was another. Yet still, I've been a busy beastie in my absence: writing, reading, drawing, watching anything from anime to Sherlock and several things in between, organizing, teching, listening to music, creating music, studying Japanese--and that was just today. I feel suddenly like this is opening to Tangled...no, I am not going to sing. Tomorrow might be another bad day, but I won't let it keep me down. With luck, I might even manage to say a few words here. For now, I wish you a lovely night. まったね。 (That's see you later for those of you not so Japanese minded)
-MS

Sick...

2011-06-16T00:04:00.002-04:00

Do you ever just feel ill? I just feel ill today...mentally I mean. (if I were physically ill I would probably not be blogging...) Such thoughts flow through my head that I cannot help but question my mental state. Sigh. Do you ever wish that life would just get on with it? Whether good or bad, I think it is the waiting for that pendulum to swing that is the hardest. Just pick a side and swing already I cry, rather than leave time standing still like this. Any outcome, any direction is preferable to this toxic stagnancy. I hope to write again tomorrow--maybe I can keep it up for a change--it might even help (albeit only a little).
さよなら！
-MS

Between...

2011-06-15T04:52:00.002-04:00

I remain trapped in between the realms...still not a part of anything it seems. I would like this cycle to end now, but wanting has no power for change it appears. I really don't think I can do this anymore. I'm not sure what that means in the end. But when objects bound together remain in constant tension something somewhere must eventually give. The question is what part will give first. In any situation it is always the weakest link in the chain. In this case that is moi. I don;t know what that means really. Perhaps I fear knowing, yet time will move me towards it whether I like it or not. I hope you like the new look. I hope to write again tomorrow.
さようなら。
-MS

The Morgue...

2011-03-25T23:01:00.001-04:00

I've climbed out of my coffin long enough to scribble a little something here. The cobwebs are building back up here due to my unfortunate neglect of this place. I still want to redecorate and perhaps I shall...we will see.
-MS

Hello World...

2011-03-09T11:45:00.003-05:00

Just a quick moment to say hello and let you know I'm still around. I haven't been here recently as I've been hibernating--it's bloody cold here just now. Presently I'm sitting at a desk, cup of Starbucks in hand, stealing occasional glances at a window that seems to be peaking at me. Hopefully the window doesn't notice. I still intend to redecorate around here--if my artistic side will come out into the cold anyway. A close friend recently gave me a push towards my blog. I suppose I didn't think anyone was reading. For now I wish you konichiwa and hope to see you all soon.
-MS

Blackness...

2011-01-14T22:50:00.006-05:00

Another day, another series of events occurring seemingly chronologically that seem to make no sense. Working on many things at once, both good and bad. Above is a picture from a movie that could be fascinating or horrid depending on what direction the director takes it: Black Swan. In other news, I'm watching xxxHolic again. Such a wondrous show. CLAMP, if any of you are reading this you are all brilliant! I wish I could join...ahem. Now that I've composed myself, I will wish you farewell (for now). I'm planning on redoing the layout again. We shall see if I can climb out of the blackness long enough...
-MS

Cornered...

2011-01-11T17:40:00.002-05:00

I'm tired today, insomnia strikes again...Ugh. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to post yesterday but I have returned today. Is anyone reading this anymore I wonder. I've said that often but I suppose the longer one lives the more they are doomed to repeat themselves. The price of being cyclical creatures I fear. I feel cornered lately. Cornered by life, cornered by other beings, cornered by my own demented brain that simply doesn't seem fit for this particular planet. There I go ranting on a needless topic again. How can a topic be needless you may ask? Technically it cannot and that word is useless filler. However, try as I may to adhere to some logical standard, I couldn't make myself alter the phrase. I now go to find some air for breathing is labored just at the moment. When will I finally react like a cornered cat and not a pet kitten...
-MS

Further Up and Further In...

2011-01-09T23:22:00.000-05:00

Recently my closest friend quoted these words of Narnia to me and it set me thinking about the great Northernes and that master of writing. C.S. Lewis was a man after my own heart in some respects and a completely different creature in others (I doubt he growled randomly at poor passers by). I wish I could have met the man before he traveled to that yet undiscovered country. Yet perhaps one day I shall even so...
-MS

I Don't Do Resolutions...

2011-01-08T20:25:00.002-05:00

Apparently I lied. Please accept my apologies for that. I had forgotten that the month of December is torture for moi. Now that we are beyond those holidays so many celebrate by tormenting others, I am in the state of mind to write. A new year has rolled around. To many it is a time to consider the failures of the past year and resolve to change those into successes this time around. For those as old as moi, it's merely another spiral in the endless cycles of time. Not to mention my failures are always innumerable and a change of year has no effect whatsoever upon that. I will be writing again tomorrow.
-MS

Cobwebs...

2010-12-22T10:26:00.002-05:00

I was inspired by a favorite author of mine to visit my poor neglected blog. After dusting the place, clearing away the cobwebs and rearranging the furniture, the place is beginner to look better. I wanted to say feel there, but I stuck with look for no apparent reason. I have been living life in a hole for a while while studying masters of writing. I shant name any just at present, but know that they are masterful. I'm not particularly museful today. But I wanted to give my readers undeniable proof that I am still alive and this blog has not been abandoned. I will write again tomorrow (probably) and hopefully every day thereafter.
P.S. - If you happen to see a crazy female with a cat hat on screaming about chasing a mouse, know that you have just met me...
-MS

Sigh...

2010-07-17T23:45:00.002-04:00

Today I am out of creative titles so something simple will have to suffice. Been unwell lately. I wonder sometimes if going mad would be easier or if I'm already there and that choice is past. Then again perhaps it really is all pointless in the end. But I suppose if I really believed that I wouldn't be tying these words out now would I? Somehow I haven't managed to completely give up on it all just yet. I suppose that is an integral part of what makes us "human". That little glowing spark that refuses to go out. It burns stubbornly against the night whether we want it to or not and we cannot get around its existence.
For now my spark stays lit somehow despite the depressing odds. And though I sit in a black pessimism hating the world half of the time, I must admit that there are things I love. So perhaps the angels are worth demons after all. Then again I'm probably just mad...

Memories...

2010-06-14T14:22:00.002-04:00

More time has passed yet somehow I seemed not to notice. I find myself fighting the same battles and wondering if time really is moving or if I'm caught in a never ending cycle of sameness. Today's musing concerns children. Recent events have reminded me of things long forgotten. Do childhood memories that have been locked away for years crop back up because we are finally able to confront them or is it simply because they are triggered by similar sets of circumstance? So many things hold the power of memory within them, but what is it about childhood that holds such power? The picture above reminds me of me as a child. To explain would take pages, years and something of the power of the art away. A friend recently told me the arts are the back door to the soul. I wonder what darkness has crept into my soul over the years that I cannot yet remember...

Wind...

2010-04-27T20:59:00.002-04:00

A fine good evening to all who enter here. I know it seems an eternity between posts but honestly I find it hard to actually create anything right now. I've even paused in much of art for a while--picking it back up in large part as you can tell from the new decor. I find it impossible to stop entirely, but I haven't done any large projects lately.
Depression continues to eat away at me but I seem to be better at treading the waters than once I was. Watching Criminal Minds as my present distraction. On the violent side but it works for me. Perhaps in seeing the darkness in others one's own darkness seems a little less shadowed. But this is merely a mind game we play with ourselves. And as the hopeless charade continues I wonder if any of this really matters or it's just empty words lost in the wind...

Cotinues the Journey...

2010-03-22T22:00:00.003-04:00

My journey along this strange path continues as the title of this post implies. It's been like base jumping lately; huge heights and really, really dark depths. At the moment I seem to be standing on some kind of level rock halfway down but I can't see anything.
The picture this time comes to us from a new season of Kuroshitsuji. I loved the first season and now comes a second with new characters. Hopefully they will make it different yet similar.
In other news, I have become terribly terribly addicted to caffeine...actually one particular amount of caffeine in a drink at Starbucks. I've been trying to curb my fix with some level of success. Now I'm going for espresso by itself and I add a little something myself. This may seem a mundane thing to inscribe here--and perhaps it is. However, I find that our lives are a series of seemingly mundane events that over time align to make the spectacular whole--whether it be for one side or another.
In other news, I have lost one of my housemates. She is missed and has returned to her "home". The large house may yet get emptier as another considers other options. I wonder if homes watch their inhabitants and miss them when they leave or are glad to be rid of them...

Weary...

2010-03-02T15:40:00.002-05:00

I wish I was in Harajuku right now. Instead I sit in a large public building hearing scraps of conversations that are not my own, a television in the background that is too low to understand and Linkin Park's Papercut coming forth from my laptop (which might explain why the tele is seemingly low). I find myself having two experiences simultaneously. One, that this is not my life and I am dreaming. And two, this is my life and I am in a sort of stasis. I feel I must wake up either way yet I cannot seem to. Every step I take to awaken seems to move me somehow further from my goal. I am uncertain therefore how to proceed. This discourse however enigmatic is not really useful to any of you I imagine. Winter still continues here. I am tired of being wet and of staring at whiteness. I seek green growing things and the shocks of colors among them I have become fond of. Instead I am given gray skies and bland nothingness.
Perhaps as we spend more time upon this dirt rock we call a planet we become more and more disinterested in the whole thing. The cycles upon cycles upon cycles that mankind seems doomed to repeat over and over again, like a sort of universal promethious, wares upon us until the soul is too weary to lift itself. For now I leave you with this dreary malaise for my soul cannot at present lift itself. Perhaps tomorrow will be brighter...

So long...

2010-02-13T09:58:00.004-05:00

It's been a long week. Right now the outside world is awash with white. I'm sitting in my living room, alone at the moment. No one else stirs is this large house. The world seems slower at present--perhaps it's just that my mind is slower right now. I know not. My life has been more unique of usual. (Unique to me anyway) My high's are higher, my lows less down (mostly). Perhaps the world is changing and soon I won't recognize myself in a passing reflection. There will be nothing of me. Nothing of Madison. Just a shadow of what once was. A hint of it in the melancholy undertone of my smile, the darkness hiding within my eyes. Perhaps soon I will be someone that you cannot recognize, perhaps I already am.
Does anyone read these anymore I wonder...

On the road..

2010-02-12T11:02:00.001-05:00

Life continues I suppose. Yet my heart has been lighter of late. Some things have changed for the better since we last spoke, some things for the worse. Yet through all of it hope still grows and company remains true. I shall write again soon. Bonsoir...

Almost but Not Quite...

2009-12-30T12:02:00.004-05:00

I now come to you upon the eve of an eve. Not doing well at present but I find these things come in aggravating cycles so eventually the sphere will turn round again. Unfortunately that's not really growth, tis merely traversing the ruts one has already fallen into. It seems I dig them deeper each time. However this depressive talk smacks of self pity. Onwards!
I've recently picked my artwork back up again. My hope is to improve it to a level similar to Kaori Yuki. This may take a while all things considered. Her art is dark and light without sacrificing beauty--few achieve this. Not that I wish to emulate her style, merely I wish to advance my own. In other news I am writing another compilation. This time it is a novella--that's all the detail I shall include at the present time. And now I must bid you adeiu. It is cold and gray here and I am off to Starbucks to assuage my present state. May the road rise up to meet you, whoever you are...

Destruction Therapy...

2009-12-14T17:13:00.006-05:00

There are times on this crazy journey we call life where we pause at a park bench and look back at the road we have traveled and wonder (either at the progress we have made or the lack thereof). Today was one of those times in my journey. I was going through some old emails (I do not at present remember why I began going through them) and I disagreed with myself many, many times. To some that may not seem impressive, but to me it is astounding. Not that I was so wrong before, rather how much more I realize now (perhaps I'll look back at this post after a while and feel the same--you never know). Another unintended consequence of this past perusal is that there are going to be some changes around my blog. I cannot tell you exactly what they will be as I do not precisely know. What I can tell you is what I am thinking
(you're reading this so I'll assume you're interested).
My blog originally started as some kind of communication between me and another (it actually served to initiate one of the most profound (and ongoing) areas of my life--but more on that later). It began in 2006 and was hosted by Opera at first. In all honesty I think I wanted to display my pain at that time and to marry it to artistic instances. However the relationship was a rocky one to say the least; a divorce was in order. A blog full of art is one thing, pages and pages of painful (for reader and writer--though with differing reasons)prattle over situations unknown to almost all reading it. Soon it became clear that Opera was not as editable as I would like and after much researching I arrived at Vox, whose artistic merging of interests and editing capabilities appealed to me very much. However due to their disabling of anonymous comments I once again uprooted shortly afterward and found myself here. Here is where I have and shall continue to remain. But I digress...
The point of this overflowing of words is that in reviewing my past I have seen what I before now had not--some people call this maturity--and in point of fact, I have grown beyond what this place used to be. So, from this day into the future my blog will be...far "realer" than it has been before. "Realer" is the best term I can think of to explain this concept running around my head. It will still be the creatively destructive artistic haven you know and (hopefully) love, but it will include many more of the complicated and crazy facets of my true self. So prepare for a more mature "Mad"der version of The Byronic Heroine!
It is early evening now as I leave you to check up on things in my large empty house. I am not used to this continual silence. I hope it doesn't last long...
Bonsoir,
~Madison Skye~

Time...

2009-12-01T00:32:00.002-05:00

Time is tricky, it slips away and before one realizes it has passed them by it is a million miles away. I have been busy of late so please forgive the absence (assuming anyone is still reading). I'm living in a meadow at the moment. Dead things all around me grow stiff in the winter wind; it is badly in need of weeding. Yet at times I fear too much time has passed to let me weed it, I have let the season's change and Death now holds sway over land and sea and sky. I hear the waves breaking at night, know they are getting chillier with each passing day but I cannot fight the urge to watch them--sometimes all night long. Perhaps this morbid fascination will leave me one day, perhaps I will remove it like a cloak and discover what I truly am. Or perhaps I am simply stuck in a frigid meadow, helpless but to wait for Spring's return. For now I shall depart from you and leave a picture of what I wish the meadow were, instead of the bone colored shell I see before me. Anon and a day and still we remain, does it ever end...

Falling Flakes...

2009-11-07T14:41:00.002-05:00

More time passes, winter arrives with falling flakes and I sit brooding on so many subjects that to list them here would pass an eternity. Been doing a lot of reading--mostly classic literature. My general dissatisfaction with this life remains. People are fond of saying life is a gift, but they forget that it becomes a curse. Or perhaps they never know those portions of this realm in which we dwell. Perhaps their lives are truly a gift. I know not.
Like David Copperfield "I am born", but that does not mean I wish it.
In other news I have been bemoaning the current state of Sanctuary. That show has such potential and those bloody writers are squandering all of it. (That and Nikola has been absent from the past few episodes.) I now depart hopefully my melancholy will abate, but I doubt it. I am perhaps built for such a state--I know not. What do we love alone...

I Will Not Bow...

2009-10-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

Fall

Now the dark begins to rise
Save your breath, it's far from over
Leave the lost and dead behind
Now's your chance to run for cover

I don't wanna change the world
I just wanna leave it colder
Light the fuse and burn it up
Take the path that leads to nowhere

All is lost again
But I'm not giving in

I will not bow
I will not break
I will shut the world away
I will not fall
I will not fade
I will take your breath away

Fall

Watch the end through dying eyes
Now the dark is taking over
Show me where forever dies
Take the fall and run to Heaven

All is lost again
But I'm not giving in

I will not bow
I will not break
I will shut the world away
I will not fall
I will not fade
I will take your breath away

And I'll survive, paranoid
I have lost the will to change
And I'm not proud, cold-blooded fake
I will shut the world away

I will not bow
I will not break
I will shut the world away
I will not fall
I will not fade
I will take your breath away

And I'll survive; paranoid
I have lost the will to change
And I'm not proud, cold-blooded fake
I will shut the world away

Addicted...

2009-10-21T16:37:00.001-04:00

It's like you're a drug
It's like you're a demon I can't face down
It's like I'm stuck
It's like I'm running from you all the time
And I know I let you have all the power
It's like the only company I seek is misery all around
It's like you're a leech
Sucking the life from me
It's like I can't breathe
Without you inside of me
And I know I let you have all the power
And I realize I'm never gonna quit you over time

It's like I can't breathe
It's like I can't see anything
Nothing but you
I'm addicted to you
It's like I can't think
Without you interrupting me
In my thoughts
In my dreams
You've taken over me
It's like I'm not me
It's like I'm not me

It's like I'm lost
It's like I'm giving up slowly
It's like you're a ghost that's haunting me
Leave me alone
And I know these voices in my head
Are mine alone
And I know I'll never change my ways
If I don't give you up now

It's like I can't breathe
It's like I can't see anything
Nothing but you
I'm addicted to you
It's like I can't think
Without you interrupting me
In my thoughts
In my dreams
You've taken over me
It's like I'm not me
It's like I'm not me

I'm hooked on you
I need a fix
I can't take it
Just one more hit
I promise I can deal with it
I'll handle it, quit it
Just one more time
Then that's it
Just a little bit more to get me through this
I'm hooked on you
I need a fix
I can't take it
Just one more hit
I promise I can deal with it
I'll handle it, quit it
Just one more time
Then that's it
Just a little bit more to get me through this

It's like I can't breathe
It's like I can't see anything
Nothing but you
I'm addicted to you
It's like I can't think
Without you interrupting me
In my thoughts
In my dreams
You've taken over me
It's like I'm not me
It's like I'm not me

Traps...

2009-10-16T13:14:00.007-04:00

It is strange how little we know of ourselves in the end. Perhaps that is why some take advantage of others--without knowledge of self how can one fight back? All I know is that traps are laid for us in our very composition. Do you ever wonder what hope we really have at the end of the day? As you climb into your bed to know oblivion for a few hours do you ever consider how little we are in the scope of this universe? I do. And often when I lay in that state that is not quite awake but not yet dreaming I consider that maybe there is no point to any of this. Perhaps there really is no good at the end of this tale we call life. And yet, though life's stormy waves crash upon me, I must believe there is hope. Somehow beneath it all that one tiny spark still burns, still refuses to give in. Will that spark ever grow into anything more or am I truly trapped, unable to break the chains that bind me, those cords so fatefully tied?
In the Greek pantheon the most powerful gods were the fates. It was the fates who determined the destiny of all. Can anyone know their fate? And if you could, would you really want to? Or would it be like reading the end of a novel without the middle. How can a journey's end be satisfying if you miss the journey? Here I remain with my musings at present, uncertain, somehow unwavering and unsatisfied with the prison bonds I still accept...

Hidden...

2009-10-12T23:29:00.002-04:00

Time is a funny thing. It flies by us, at times nearly knocking one over with the force of its wake. And at other times it creeps along with us like prisoners in a muddy swamp. But what is this constant motion hiding from us I often wonder. As dark clouds can hide the moonlight, does time hide something as it drags us along whether we want it or not...

Offers...

2009-10-11T19:44:00.002-04:00

Have you ever had an offer made to you that you know you absolutely must refuse though a portion of you wishes to accept? For one like moi, it is the offer itself that drives to madness, not the refusal. An offer once refused loses most of the tempting power it holds. But as it sits there, hanging in the air that stretches between you, it captivates. Why is that I wonder? And what is the point of any of it...

Mist...

2009-09-27T20:07:00.002-04:00

Mist is in the air playing with the sunlight as if to tease it and here I am wondering at it all. You have all heard me, heard my rantings, my depression, my creativity and my praise of others. You have heard me mention on more than one occasion how ancient I am/feel. Today however, for the first time in a VERY long time, I felt young. Not only young, but VERY young. I stood with others who I have only known for the comparative blink of an eye speak of their shared history, their common record and in that moment, I was able to feel for the first time in a long while. I now bid you adieu and wish you well...

Here and There...

2009-09-20T23:24:00.006-04:00

Been busy yet again, how many times have I said that here I wonder? The mind of a creative is not exactly attuned to timetables of the universe. I've been buried in ink and fishnet.Now returned to you from the depths...well actually I haven't been that depressed. Many things to occupy my mind-perhaps one day I really will finish a book. {Writing, not reading mind you...} In other news I recently saw 9. Ackner has a very unique perspective. Kudos to the artists. Danny Elfman's praise goes without saying. Overall I enjoyed the movie even though I left the theater feeling it had pages of untapped potential. If I were a stitchpunk, I would be 6 without question. {For some reason I can't see something without asking such questions...} For now I bid you bonsoir and hope to return soon. Until we meet again, or I fall off a cliff...

Undercurrent....

2009-09-03T18:48:00.005-04:00

The cold echoes in the wind as autumn falls and winter inches towards us as the frost creeps over the grass; death by life. I've been troubled lately, too troubled to write here. A new machine provides my instrument to speak my thoughts here-the pen is always mightier in the end. I sometimes wonder if human beings stare at the stars because we so desire to be among them. Is space cold to a creature of light? Or is it a relief for one who must burn to come into the freezing blackness, for then they will glow all the brighter? None can know what fate may hold in the end...

A Chill in the Air...

2009-08-26T13:21:00.002-04:00

I feel the wind sweep toward me, a warm breeze with a cool undercurrent; autumn approaches. As another season begins I appear to you once again. The long absence is due to my latest bout with depression and general negativity. Hopefully it will keep away longer this time and I may inscribe my thoughts here more often.
Today's musing concerns my literary appetites. I have most recently been reading The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. I find this book to be well told, elegant, witty and brilliantly complex. If you have never read this book I highly recommend you do so. It has been called long by some, but every page is worth it as far as I am concerned. Tales of vengeance are most decidedly one of my favorites. They always have been. I suppose this is so of everyone who has ever been damaged in some way or another by someone, especially when it is someone they were close to. Death is certain the hour uncertain...

Turns of the Moon...

2009-07-27T12:17:00.003-04:00

Several turns of the moon later I find myself here again. Haven't had the time or the energy to put type to text until today. Being insanely artistic means one is always busy doing something or other I suppose. Today's musing concerns the power of the mind. It's fascinating isn't it? Humans literally have the ability to create something simply with their minds (there are enough people taking placebos after all). The thing I have to wonder about is why. Why do our minds have so much power over us? Is it simply that our minds control the complicated neural pathways running throughout our bodies? Or is it something deeper than that, something akin to a soul? I have no answer, merely questions. In the end I always seem to have questions. More and more questions until one day I get lost in the labyrinth of musings I have created. Uncertain how to want to find my way back...

Bloody Insomnia...

2009-07-15T02:33:00.005-04:00

I sit at home still awake despite the hour (bloody insomnia) waiting. Waiting for what? Who knows. A macabre circus plays through my thoughts. Do the stars hold power over sleep or is it merely that we cannot tear ourselves away from them long enough to rest? Tonight is one of those times when I begin to wonder if my blog has simply become a tome of complaints and carrying on. I certainly hope not. I dislike that kind of rambling self pity immensly (even if I am at times guilty of it). The dawn may take time to arrive, but when it does, it is always beautiful...

Brilliant...

2009-07-07T02:04:00.003-04:00

I have just finished reading The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It was lovely, haunting, beautiful and horrible all at once: in short it was brilliant. I highly recommend it and absolutely adore Silas. If you are stubbornly uninterested in works of fiction but find me intriguing, read the book to learn of me. I grew up this way. A host of otherworlders guiding my steps one day at a time. Books providing my learning from an a much earlier age than most others I have met. I have not left my "graveyard", but I fear the time is closing in on me. I know that I must, that it is right, that I should, but for all of this knowledge I sometimes do not want to. Time will eventually reveal all its secrets if you are willing to wait...

Under My Skin...

2009-07-01T22:57:00.004-04:00

I was awake as I lay in my bed, enveloped in the darkness. I glanced around at the room for the hundredth time. I had long given up trying to remember when I had last actually slept. Time was a slippery thing to me and clocks only told me numbers, too many numbers. My eyes ran over the desk in the corner with its useless piles of papers that hadn’t been touched in a month. I saw the large dresser with its menagerie of trinkets and baubles that lay in a random pattern of chaos across the top. My eyes began to scale the walls. I found myself fixed upon the eyes of the miscellaneous people in the pictures that stared ahead with long-dead, leering eyes. Those pictures had meant something to someone who had once lived here. Had that someone been me before? I couldn’t remember. I had left them there simply because they held meaning. It was something real, to someone, somewhere, once upon a time. Then, I saw the large mirror where I was reflected, even in this dim light. My pale frail frame and my fair hair offered stark contrast to the dark camisole I wore but it was my eyes that caught me. Who was this staring back at me? A question that taunted me until I turned away; I couldn’t bear to hold the awful gaze.

I rolled out of bed and went to get a drink. The light in the hallway was such a difference from the dimness of my room that for a moment I couldn’t see. I stood there blinded, feeling much like a deer, caught and frightened by the headlights of a car. Blinded. Trapped. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the light of the room, I began to see the details of the room: the open window allowing a cold breeze to stream in uninvited; the now dusty collage I had painted a year ago, a riot of color in a gloomy world; the golden pothos that sat on the table next to the window, wilting slowly from neglect, its beautiful vines still struggling to snake upwards. I knew how it felt as I tentatively began walking down the stairs. They were cold and smooth as glass against my bare feet. When I reached the bottom I stood there, holding to the banister as if I might fall when I let go. I focused only on breathing until finally I was able to release it. How pathetic I am I thought to myself, how frail. I moved my focus away from me and back to my surroundings.

The kitchen had faded ivy wallpaper that seemed as old as the house itself. The years had left their marks on the walls. A miscellaneous tale of scuffs, scratches and dust that I could not understand, but I liked it nonetheless. It wasn’t pretending to be something it wasn’t; it was honest. I scurried over to the fridge ignoring the fear creeping slowly across my bones as best I could. It had always been like this. A memory assaulted me unasked and unwanted. The hospital that day had been fairly empty. They had taken me to a room and set my wrist while I sat there silent and chilled. It must have been odd for the nurse that I remained so quiet as she cracked the bones back into place. Had she noticed the shadows in the room I think she would have been quiet too. The shadows swarmed and swirled in a slow macabre dance surrounding us, occasionally brushing past me. That day, when I heard the cries of what seemed thousands, I feared I was either dying or losing my mind entirely. I had only later learned that the hospital had been in use as a sanitarium when I was there. So then the nurses had at least heard the voices.

The coldness of the refrigerator brought me back into the present and eased the constant pounding in my head. I stood in the open door letting the chill wash over me for several minutes as more time slipped away; I longed to follow into that black oblivion. Where does time go when it passes us by? My heart clenched suddenly along with my lungs, and my stomach was troubled by a strange sensation of sliding... slipping. I ran to the sink emptying my stomach of the water I had just consumed. I wiped my mouth and shuddered, seeing a red light reflecting off the window over the sink. I turned.

He stood there, smiling, his sharp teeth a stark contrast to this house of darkness. I backed away only to bump into him behind me...no in front of me. Where are you? I tried to run but I was paralyzed, frozen like a stone to my spot. He lifted a pale hand adorned by long black claws and moved my hair away from my face, tucking it behind my ear, a strange act of gentleness. I shivered as I felt the same weakness that I always had in his presence invade me.
The memory came with the weakness, with the cold. It had been a winter night then, a dark winter night. I had snuck out of the house, I never did know why. He stood in the snow staring at me as I skulked around in the snow like some sort of small criminal. At first I took him to be a criminal. But then his pale blue eyes caught my dark ones, holding me prisoner with a petrifying gaze like the basilisks of old. I knew true fear for the first time in my life and understood that he was no criminal: he was far worse. I came out of the memory suddenly, instinctively shrinking back from his freezing touch and accidently slamming my head into a hanging light. As the world tipped at an impossible angle he began to whisper something, almost inaudible. A song came to mind, “cause you know babe that I can't get you out from my in...you're under my skin, under my skin...” I screamed then, screamed and screamed until I lost consciousness.

It was the knocking that woke me I think. I didn’t know what it was at first. I was too lost; my mind remained disconnected from life. I tried to focus on the noise, muddled as it was, tried to force myself to listen. There it was again. It was familiar somehow, like a melody on the radio, a song whose name you’ve forgotten. Then, as if I had suddenly awakened, I realized what the noise was. It must have been the neighbors who called them I thought—screams in the middle of the night do tend to alarm people I suppose.

She found me curled into a tiny ball in a corner in my closet. How had I gotten there? I didn’t remember moving from the kitchen. She asked me how I was, I looked at her...through her, don’t really see her do we my pet? his voice whispered to me. “No, she isn’t real enough” I answered. I felt him smile inside me, a slithering, sickening motion that nauseated me. My muscles spasmed, responding on their own to him. I tried to crawl away from him, from the sickness he caused. He grabbed me pulling me towards him. The woman stared at me as he dragged me across the floor, his crushing form enveloping me, or I was I enveloping him? I grabbed my head as the pressure on my lungs increased and screamed dragging my sharp fingernails down my face babbling “Death would be kinder, the mind slipping away into the void, the endless wheel spinning in the darkness. We’re all tied to it, bound by the hands and legs. Oh get it off, get it off, off!” I screamed as I clawed myself, collapsing in a fit but remaining conscious somehow.

The woman spoke and fire seemed to fall from her tongue upon me. I jerked away from her hard, slamming my body into the ironwork of the bed. I turned and clung to it, to the chill of it. Stop I tried to scream, but she had begun again. I was useless to prevent her when I could barely see her. I could only burrow deep into myself. Run, run, run...run, run, run...it played over and over in my head, a demented mantra consuming my thoughts. Suddenly I felt a hand that was like an inferno. I tried to wrench away from her as my mind was slammed back into my body. I opened my eyes and clawed at my face, rising.

“Get away!” I shrieked. She smiled at me, asked me if I wanted to be myself again, without him. I panicked, “YES! I said then yelped “NO!” She simply watched me as I struggled inside myself. I began to pace frantically. “Stop...don't...yes...please...No I....help me!” I cried in broken sentences as I felt him slam me to the ground and hold me there. Still she watched in silence. I was able to stand again after what must have been an eternity and tried to run only to sit back down and curl my body into a tight ball. I sang to her, or me, or even him, that song in my head...“He's under my skin...he’s under my skin...he’ll always be in...oh gods!” I cried becoming more and more frantic. Her eyes continued to watch me, their intelligent kindness suddenly infuriating me. I rose and stepped towards her, suddenly every inch the arrogant powerful villain instead of the writhing cowering victim. She narrowed her eyes at me and spoke with that tongue of flames. I fell again and lay flat staring at the world as if I was an observer and not part of it. He held me down (or was it that he had fallen on me?) his oppressive weight making it impossible to move. My breath came in quick gasps, my lungs fighting to do their job, fighting his interference. “Help...me...oh god...please...I...PLEASE!” I begged, screamed, and cried, not even sure what I was asking as the tears ran down my face, mixing with the blood in my cuts, scrapes and scratches. She came to me and laid her now cool hand on my head. Everything in me screamed, spit, howled, hissed and jumped while I lay as if dead. Her clear eyes were the last thing I saw before I blacked out.

When I awoke, I felt as if I run a marathon. I was sore and tired, my head was heavy and my body was bruised, but I could breathe. I tried to open my eyes but they refused to obey, as if they knew what was best. I gave up, too tired to resist, and let sleep capture me once more. It was the best sleep I had had in years. When I finally rose, I was able to eat without my body rejecting it. I went outside—she said it would be good for me. (She was right as usual.) The sun was shining, the birds singing, a warm breeze blowing softly. I stared at the world as if for the first time. Had the sun always been this bright? Had the flowers always smelled like this?? I suddenly realized as I bent to pick a lily that I felt no foreign presence in my mind, no force on my chest, no pain...anywhere. At first I felt fear at the absence, but as I stood there able to breathe freely I forgot to be afraid. I smiled then laughed for the first time in over a decade. A different song was playing now, I sang merging my music with the rest of the world “it's gonna be a bright...bright...sunshiny day. And everything's gonna be ok, yeah everything's gonna be ok...”

Years...

2009-06-29T16:48:00.002-04:00

Saw The Phantom of the Opera recently. It's been years since I last saw that film. Lovely music, lovely art, lovely everything. Except of course the hero character who cannot hold his own against the phantom, let alone win the girl. More later but for now I bid you adieu for the bells toll and it is my time...

Instructions...

2009-06-23T16:15:00.003-04:00

Touch the wooden gate in the wall you never saw before
Say “please” before you open the latch,
go through,
walk down the path.
A red metal imp hangs from the green-painted front door,
as a knocker,
do not touch it; it will bite your fingers.
Walk through the house. Take nothing. Eat nothing.
However,
if any creature tells you that it hungers,
feed it.
If it tells you that it is dirty,
clean it.
If it cries to you that it hurts,
if you can,
ease its pain.
From the back garden you will be able to see the wild wood.
The deep well you walk past leads down to Winter’s realm;
there is another land at the bottom of it.
If you turn around here,
you can walk back, safely;
you will lose no face. I will think no less of you.
Once through the garden you will be in the wood.
The trees are old. Eyes peer from the undergrowth.
Beneath a twisted oak sits an old woman. She may ask for something;
give it to her. She
will point the way to the castle. Inside it
are three princesses.
Do not trust the youngest. Walk on.
In the clearing beyond the castle the twelve months sit about a fire,
warming their feet, exchanging tales.
They may do favors for you, if you are polite.
You may pick strawberries in December’s frost.
Trust the wolves, but do not tell them where you are going.
The river can be crossed by the ferry. The ferryman will take you.
(The answer to his question is this:
If he hands the oar to his passenger, he will be free to leave the boat.
Only tell him this from a safe distance.)
If an eagle gives you a feather, keep it safe.
Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that
witches are often betrayed by their appetites;
dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always;
hearts can be well-hidden,
and you betray them with your tongue.
Do not be jealous of your sister:
know that diamonds and roses
are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one’s lips as toads and frogs:
colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.
Remember your name.
Do not lose hope—what you seek will be found.
Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn.
Trust dreams.
Trust your heart, and trust your story.
When you come back, return the way you came.
Favors will be returned, debts be repaid.
Do not forget your manners.
Do not look back.
Ride the wise eagle (you shall not fall)
Ride the silver fish (you will not drown)
Ride the gray wolf (hold tightly to his fur).
There is a worm at the heart of the tower; that is why it will not stand.
When you reach the little house, the place your journey started,
you will recognize it, although it will seem much smaller than you remember.
Walk up the path, and through the garden gate you never saw before but once.
And then go home. Or make a home.
Or rest...

The Tea Party Contnues...

2009-06-21T21:23:00.005-04:00

Another day, another drink, a continuing descent into a deeper level of madness-thus the tea party goes on. And now I sit here brooding only because there is nothing better to do. Those around me sit watching a film about an unnecessary transformation a young woman goes through. The fashions are occasionally stirring but I have seen the same tale a million times in a million ways. The pointless superficiality of this world becomes so tiring after you have been around as long as I have. And yet the world can still surprise. Have you ever told the truth at any point since you were born...

It Never Lasts...

2009-06-20T14:48:00.002-04:00

No matter what it is it never lasts. Life rears its ugly head and consumes you without so much as a thought. Such is this realm we dwell in. You would think I would have gotten over it by now wouldn't you? It's not all doom and fire, I know this. Yet the ratios seem obnoxiously unbalanced. Ah well. Recently I read Neil Gaiman's blog. I had the exact same thought of lightning bugs corresponding with lightning that evening. Life is such a strange thing. Death stranger still. Who knows what lies at the end of all things...

Different...

2009-06-19T17:49:00.003-04:00

Well today is different in that I am currently not brooding or depressed; this is a big thing for me. Today's musing is on the topic of influence, specifically influence from those surrounding us. A single person we encounter (of varying importance) can change an entire day for the better or worse. It therefore stands to reason that each one of us has the ability to make or break those around us. My day was changed today by someone very dear to me having a chat with me. Whose day will you change...

Depths...

2009-06-17T14:00:00.002-04:00

Today's musing concerns obsession. It is truly frightening how deeply we can be affected by the things and people around us. An idea, a person, an event can so grip our minds, our hearts, our souls, that we are completely captured by it. We can become lost in the labyrinth of our mind so easily that it is a wonder any of us can string logical thoughts together and put them on paper. This is not to say obsession must be negative. Beautiful things have been born from the minds of those so focused on a singular ideal. However terrible things have also risen from the minds of those consumed. Obsession, like anything else, mirrors the person who holds the obsession. It is they who decide how far it will go, how far they will let it go. What does one do when they have become lost in the depths of their mind...

Black, Black Heart...

2009-06-15T14:29:00.004-04:00

Something ugly this way comes

Through my fingers sliding inside
All these blessings all these burns
I'm godless underneath your cover
Search for pleasure search for pain
In this world now I am undying
I unfurl my flag my nation helpless

Black black heart why would you offer more
Why would you make it easier on me to satisfy
I'm on fire I'm rotting to the core
I'm eating all your kings and queens
All your sex and your diamonds

As I begin to lose my grip
On these realities your sending
Taste your mind
I'm naked underneath your cover
Covers lie and we will bend and borrow
With the coming sign
The tide will take the sea will rise and time will rape

Black black heart why would you offer more
Why would you make it easier on me to satisfy
I'm on fire I'm rotting to the core
I'm eating all your kings and queens
All your sex and your diamonds

Destructing Constructs...

2009-06-10T16:29:00.003-04:00

Apparently my moods are shifting faster than I can keep up with. I have destroyed my creations and left the walls of this place blank. It is amazing how closely linked creation is with destruction isn't it? Perhaps in a day or two, or even today, things will change to my liking. Until then, excuse all the blood...

The Effect of Outlook...

2009-06-09T15:03:00.003-04:00

So, been a while. I was busy helping friends pull off a production and now I return to you no worse for the wear. Today's musing is on outlook and how much it affects outcome. It is simply astounding what one's viewpoint can do to their life. I myself am learning this lesson, albeit slowly; I've seen snails crawl faster than this. If all one thinks about is death, all one sees will be death. If all one thinks about is life, all one sees will be life.
This may seem small to you, but to me it is amazing because of its simplicity. So I suppose the ultimate end one recieves is the one they were looking towards. Curiouser and curiouser...

Feathers...

2009-05-30T17:51:00.003-04:00

Today's musing concerns the odd and somewhat troubling way in which those who are alike call to one another. It is an odd thing that one can walk down the street and know, in general, much about the people and others they pass with a look. Or at least I can. Regardless, humans are drawn to one another, especially if a common bond ties them together. As obvious as this may seem, it is still amazingly miraculous that our souls speak in this way. And now I must bid you adieu. What awaits us at the end...

The Master of Rampling Gate...

2009-05-29T00:00:00.002-04:00

THE MASTER OF RAMPLING GATE by ANNE RICE

Spring 1888.
Rampling Gate. It was so real to us in the old pictures, rising like a fairy-tale castle out of its own dark wood. A wilderness of gables and chimneys between those two immense towers, grey stone walls mantled in ivy, mullioned windows reflecting the drifting clouds.
But why had Father never taken us there? And why, on his deathbed, had he told my brother that Rampling Gate must be torn down, stone by stone? "I should have done it, Richard," he said. "But I was born in that house, as my father was, and his father before him. You must do it now, Richard. It has no claim on you. Tear it down."
Was it any wonder that not two months after Father's passing, Richard and I were on the noon train headed south for the mysterious mansion that had stood upon the rise above the village of Rampling for 400 years? Surely Father would have understood. How could we destroy the old place when we had never seen it?
But, as the train moved slowly through the outskirts of London I can't say we were very sure of ourselves, no matter how curious and excited we were.
Richard had just finished four years at Oxford. Two whirlwind social seasons in London had proved me something of a shy success. I still preferred scribbling poems and stories in my room to dancing the night away, but I'd kept that a good secret. And though we had lost our mother when we were little, Father had given us the best of everything. Now the carefree years were ended. We had to be independent and wise.
The evening before, we had pored over all the old pictures of Rampling Gate, recalling in hushed, tentative voices the night Father had taken those pictures down from the walls.
I couldn't have been more than six and Richard eight when it happened, yet we remembered well the strange incident in Victoria Station that had precipitated Father's uncharacteristic rage. We had gone there after supper to say farewell to a school friend of Richard's, and Father had caught a glimpse, quite unexpectedly, of a young man at the lighted window of an incoming train. I could remember the young man's face clearly to this day: remarkably handsome, with a head of lustrous brown hair, his large black eyes regarding Father with the saddest expression as Father drew back. "Unspeakable horror!" Father had whispered. Richard and I had been too amazed to speak a word.
Later that night, Father and Mother quarrelled, and we crept out of our rooms to listen on the stairs.
"That he should dare to come to London!" Father said over and over. "Is it not enough for him to be the undisputed master of Rampling Gate?"
How we puzzled over it as little ones! Who was this stranger, and how could he be master of a house that belonged to our father, a house that had been left in the care of an old, blind housekeeper for years?
But now after looking at the pictures again, it was too dreadful to think of Father's exhortation. And too exhilarating to think of the house itself. I'd packed my manuscripts, for - who knew? - maybe in that melancholy and exquisite setting I'd find exactly the inspiration I needed for the story I'd been writing in my head.
Yet there was something almost illicit about the excitement I felt. I saw in my mind's eye the pale young man again, with his black greatcoat and red woollen cravat. Like bone china, his complexion had been. Strange to remember so vividly. And I realized now that in those few remarkable moments, he had created for me an ideal of masculine beauty that I had never questioned since. But Father had been so angry. I felt an unmistakable pang of guilt.

It was late afternoon when the old trap carried us up the gentle slope from the little railway station and we had our first real look at the house. The sky had paled to a deep rose hue beyond a bank of softly gilded clouds, and the last rays of the sun struck the uppermost panes of the leaded windows and filled them with solid gold.
"Oh, but it's too majestic," I whispered, "too like a great cathedral, and to think that it belongs to us!"
Richard gave me the smallest kiss on the cheek.
I wanted with all my heart to jump down from the trap and draw near on foot, letting those towers slowly grow larger and larger above me, but our old horse was gaining speed.
When we reached the massive front door Richard and I were spirited into the great hall by the tiny figure of the blind housekeeper Mrs Blessington, our footfalls echoing loudly on the marble tile, and our eyes dazzled by the dusty shafts of light that fell on the long oak table and its heavily carved chairs, on the sombre tapestries that stirred ever so slightly against the soaring walls.
"Richard, it is an enchanted place!" I cried, unable to contain myself.
Mrs Blessington laughed gaily, her dry hand closing tightly on mine.
We found our bedchambers well aired, with snow-white linen on the beds and fires blazing cosily on the hearths. The small, diamond-paned windows opened on a glorious view of the lake and the oaks that enclosed it and the few scattered lights that marked the village beyond.
That night we laughed like children as we supped at the great oak table, our candles giving only a feeble light. And afterwards we had a fierce battle of pocket billiards in the games room and a little too much brandy, I fear.
It was just before I went to bed that I asked Mrs Blessington if there had been anyone in this house since my father left it, years before.
"No, my dear," she said quickly, fluffing the feather pillows. "When your father went away to Oxford, he never came back."
"There was never a young intruder after that?..." I pressed her, though in truth I had little appetite for anything that would disturb the happiness I felt. How I loved the spartan cleanliness of this bedchamber, the walls bare of paper and ornament, the high lustre of the walnut-panelled bed.
"A young intruder?" With an unerring certainty about her surroundings, she lifted the poker and stirred the fire. "No, dear. Whatever made you think there was?"
"Are there no ghost stories, Mrs Blessington?" I asked suddenly, startling myself. Unspeakable horror. But what was I thinking - that that young man had not been real?
"Oh, no, darling," she said, smiling. "No ghost would ever dare to trouble Rampling Gate."

Nothing, in fact, troubled the serenity of the days that followed - long walks through the overgrown gardens, trips in the little skiff to and fro across the lake, tea under the hot glass of the empty conservatory. Early evening found us reading and writing by the library fire.
All our enquiries in the village met with the same answers: the villagers cherished the house. There was not a single disquieting legend or tale.
How were we going to tell them of Father's edict? How were we going to remind ourselves?
Richard was finding a wealth of classical material on the library shelves and I had the desk in the corner entirely to myself.
Never had I known such quiet. It seemed the atmosphere of Rampling Gate permeated my simplest written descriptions and wove its way richly into the plots and characters I created. The Monday after our arrival I finished my first real short story, and after copying out a fresh draft, I went off to the village on foot to post it boldly to the editors of Blackwood's magazine.
It was a warm afternoon, and I took my time as I came back. What had disturbed our father so about this lovely corner of England? What had so darkened his last hours that he laid his curse upon this spot? My heart opened to his unearthly stillness, to an indisputable magnificence that caused me utterly to forget myself. There were times here when I felt I was a disembodied intellect drifting through a fathomless silence, up and down garden paths and stone corridors that had witnessed too much to take cognizance of one small and fragile young woman who in random moments actually talked aloud to the suits of armour around her, to the broken statues in the garden, the fountain cherubs who had had no water to pour from their conches for years and years.
But was there in this loveliness some malignant force that was eluding us still, some untold story? Unspeakable horror... Even in the flood of brilliant sunlight, those words gave me a chill.
As I came slowly up the slope I saw Richard walking lazily along the uneven shore of the lake. Now and then he glanced up at the distant battlements, his expression dreamy, almost blissfully contented.
Rampling Gate had him. And I understood perfectly because it also had me.
With a new sense of determination I went to him and placed my hand gently on his arm.
For a moment he looked at me as if he did not even know me, and then he said softly, "How will I ever do it, Julie? And one way or the other, it will be on my conscience all my life."
"It's time to seek advice, Richard," I said. "Write to our lawyers in London. Write to Father's clergyman, Doctor Matthews. Explain everything. We cannot do this alone."

It was three o'clock in the morning when I opened my eyes. But I had been awake for a long time. And I felt not fear, lying there alone, but something else - some vague and relentless agitation, some sense of emptiness and need that caused me finally to rise from my bed. What was this house, really? A place, or merely a state of mind? What was it doing to my soul?
I felt overwhelmed, yet shut out of some great and dazzling secret. Driven by an unbearable restlessness, I pulled on my woollen wrapper and my slippers and went into the hall.
The moonlight fell full on the oak stairway, and the vestibule far below. Maybe I could write of the confusion I suffered now, put on paper the inexplicable longing I felt. Certainly it was worth the effort, and I made my way soundlessly down the steps.
The great hall gaped before me, the moonlight here and there touching upon a pair of crossed swords or a mounted shield. But far beyond, in the alcove just outside the library, I saw the uneven glow of the fire. So Richard was there. A sense of well-being pervaded me and quieted me. At the same time, the distance between us seemed endless and I became desperate to cross it, hurrying past the long supper table and finally into the alcove before the library doors.
The fire blazed beneath the stone mantelpiece and a figure sat in the leather chair before it, bent over a loose collection of pages that he held in his slender hands. He was reading the pages eagerly, and the fire suffused his face with a warm, golden light.
But it was not Richard. It was the same young man I had seen on the train in Victoria Station fifteen years ago. And not a single aspect of that taut young face had changed. There was the very same hair, thick and lustrous and only carelessly combed as it hung to the collar of his black coat, and those dark eyes that looked up suddenly and fixed me with a most curious expression as I almost screamed.
We stared at each other across that shadowy room, I stranded in the doorway, he visibly and undeniably shaken that I had caught him unawares. My heart stopped.
And in a split second he rose and moved towards me, closing the gap between us, reaching out with those slender white hands.
"Julie!" he whispered, in a voice so low that it seemed my own thoughts were speaking to me. But this was no dream. He was holding me and the scream had broken loose from me, deafening, uncontrollable and echoing from the four walls.
I was alone. Clutching at the door frame, I staggered forward, and then in a moment of perfect clarity I saw the young stranger again, saw him standing in the open door to the garden, looking back over his shoulder; then he was gone.
I could not stop screaming. I could not stop even as I heard Richard's voice calling me, heard his feet pound down that broad, hollow staircase and through the great hall. I could not stop even as he shook me, pleaded with me, settled me in a chair.
Finally I managed to describe what I had seen.
"But you know who it was!" I said almost hysterically. "It was he - the young man from the train!"
"Now, wait," Richard said. "He had his back to the fire, Julie. And you could not see his face clearly -"
"Richard, it was he! Don't you understand? He touched me. He called me Julie," I whispered. "Good God, Richard, look at the fire. I didn't light it - he did. He was here!"
All but pushing Richard out of the way, I went to the heap of papers that lay strewn on the carpet before the hearth. "My story..." I whispered, snatching up the pages. "He's been reading my story, Richard. And - dear God - he's read your letters, the letters to Mr Partridge and Dr Matthews, about tearing down the house!"
"Surely you don't believe it was the same man, Julie, after all these years... ?"
"But he has not changed, Richard, not in the smallest detail. There is no mistake, I tell you. It was the very same man!"
The next day was the most trying since we had come. Together we commenced a search of the house. Darkness found us only half finished, frustrated everywhere by locked doors we could not open and old staircases that were not safe.
And it was also quite clear by suppertime that Richard did not believe I had seen anyone in the study at all. As for the fire - well, he had failed to put it out properly before going to bed; and the pages - well, one of us had put them there and forgotten them, of course...
But I knew what I had seen.
And what obsessed me more than anything else was the gentle countenance of the mysterious man I had glimpsed, the innocent eyes that had fixed on me for one moment before I screamed.
"You would be wise to do one very important thing before you retire," I said crossly. "Leave out a note to the effect that you do not intend to tear down the house."
"Julie, you have created an impossible dilemma," Richard declared, the colour rising in his face. "You insist we reassure this apparition that the house will not be destroyed, when in fact you verify the existence of the very creature that drove our father to say what he did."
"Oh, I wish I had never come here!" I burst out suddenly.
"Then we should go, and decide this matter at home."
"No - that's just it. I could never go without knowing. I could never go on living with knowing now!"

Anger must be an excellent antidote to fear, for surely something worked to alleviate my natural alarm. I did not undress that night, but rather sat in the darkened bedroom, gazing at the small square of diamond-paned window until I heard the house fall quiet. When the grandfather clock in the great hall chimed the hour of eleven, Rampling Gate was, as usual, fast asleep.
I felt a dark exultation as I imagined myself going out of the room and down the stairs. But I knew I should wait one more hour. I should let the night reach its peak. My heart was beating too fast, and dreamily I recollected the face I had seen, the voice that had said my name.
Why did it seem in retrospect so intimate, that we had known each other before, spoken together a thousand times? Was it because he had read my story, those words that came from my very soul?
"Who are you?" I believe I whispered aloud. "Where are you at this moment?" I uttered the word, "Come."
The door opened without a sound and he was standing there. He was dressed exactly as he had been the night before and his dark eyes were riveted on me with that same obvious curiosity, his mouth just a little slack, like that of a boy.
I sat forward, and he raised his finger as if to reassure me and gave a little nod.
"Ah, it is you!" I whispered.
"Yes," he said in a soft, unobtrusive voice.
"And you are not a spirit!" I looked at his mud-splattered boots, at the faintest smear of dust on that perfect white cheek.
"A spirit?" he asked almost mournfully. "Would that I were that."
Dazed, I watched him come towards me; the room darkened and I felt his cool, silken hands on my face. I had risen. I was standing before him, and I looked up into his eyes.
I heard my own heartbeat. I heard it as I had the night before, right at the moment I had screamed. Dear God, I was talking to him! He was in my room and I was talking to him! And then suddenly I was in his arms.
"Real, absolutely real!" I whispered, and a low, zinging sensation coursed through me so that I had to steady myself.
He was peering at me as if trying to comprehend something terribly important. His lips had a ruddy look to them, a soft look for all his handsomeness, as if he had never been kissed. A slight dizziness came over me, a slight confusion in which I was not at all sure that he was even there.
"Oh, but I am," he said, as if I had spoken my doubt. I felt his breath against my cheek, and it was almost sweet. "I am here, and I have watched you ever since you came."
"Yes..."
My eyes were closing. In a dim flash, as of a match being struck, I saw my father, heard his voice. No, Julie... But that was surely a dream.
"Only a little kiss," said the voice of the one who was really here. I felt his lips against my neck. "I would never harm you. No harm ever for the children of this house. Just the little kiss, Julie, and the understanding that it imparts, that you cannot destroy Rampling Gate, Julie - that you can never, never drive me away."
The core of my being, that secret place where all desires and all commandments are nurtured, opened to him without a struggle or a sound. I would have fallen if he had not held me. My arms closed about him, my hands slipping into the soft, silken mass of his hair.
I was floating, and there was, as there had always been at Rampling Gate, an endless peace. It was Rampling Gate I felt enclosing me; it was that timeless and impenetrable secret that had opened itself at last... A power within me of enormous ken... To see as a god sees, and take the depth of things as nimbly as the outward eyes can size and shape pervade... Yes, those very words from Keats, which I had quoted in the pages of my story that he had read.
But in a violent instant he had released me. "Too innocent," he whispered.
I went reeling across the bedroom floor and caught hold of the frame of the window. I rested my forehead against the stone wall.
There was a tingling pain in my throat where his lips had touched me that was almost pleasurable, a delicious throbbing that would not stop. I knew what he was!
I turned and saw all the room clearly - the bed, the fireplace, the chair. And he stood still exactly as I'd left him and there was the most appalling anguish in his face.
"Something of menace, unspeakable menace," I whispered, backing away.
"Something ancient, something that defies understanding," he pleaded. "Something that can and will go on." But he was shaken and he would not look into my eyes.
I touched that pulsing pain with the tips of my fingers and, looking down at them, saw the blood. "Vampire!" I gasped. "And yet you suffer so, and it is as if you can love!"
"Love? I have loved you since you came. I loved you when I read your secret thoughts and had not yet seen your face."
He drew me to him ever so gently, and slipping his arm around me, guided me to the door.
I tried for one desperate moment to resist him. And as any gentleman might, he stepped back respectfully and took my hand.
Through the long upstairs corridor we passed, and through a small wooden doorway to a screw stair that I had not seen before. I soon realized we were ascending in the north tower, a ruined portion of the structure that had been sealed off years before.
Through one tiny window after another I saw the gently rolling landscape and the small cluster of dim lights that marked the village of Rampling and the pale streak of white that was the London road.
Up and up we climbed, until we reached the topmost chamber, and this he opened with an iron key. He held back the door for me to enter and I found myself in a spacious room whose high, narrow windows contained no glass. A flood of moonlight revealed the most curious mixture of furnishings and objects - a writing-table, a great shelf of books, soft leather chairs, and scores of maps and framed pictures affixed to the walls. Candles all about had dripped their wax on every surface, and in the very midst of this chaos lay my poems, my old sketches - early writings that I had brought with me and never even unpacked.
I saw a black silk top hat and a walking-stick, and a bouquet of withered flowers, dry as straw, and daguerreotypes and tintypes in their little velvet cases, and London newspapers and opened books.
There was no place for sleeping in this room.
And when I thought of that, where he must lie when he went to rest, a shudder passed over me and I felt, quite palpably, his lips touching my throat again, and I had the sudden urge to cry.
But he was holding me in his arms; he was kissing my cheeks and my lips ever so softly.
"My father knew what you were!" I whispered.
"Yes," he answered, "and his father before him. And all of them in an unbroken chain over the years. Out of loneliness or rage, I know not which, I always told them. I always made them acknowledge, accept."
I backed away and he didn't try to stop me. He lighted the candles about us one by one.
I was stunned by the sight of him in the light, the gleam in his large black eyes and the gloss of his hair. Not even in the railway station had I seen him so clearly as I did now, amid the radiance of the candles. He broke my heart.
And yet he looked at me as though I were a feast for his eyes, and he said my name again and I felt the blood rush to my face. But there seemed a great break suddenly in the passage of time. What had I been thinking! Yes, never tell, never disturb... something ancient, something greater than good and evil... But no! I felt dizzy again. I heard Father's voice: Tear it down, Richard, stone by stone.
He had drawn me to the window. And as the lights of Rampling were subtracted from the darkness below, a great wood stretched out in all directions, far older and denser than the forest of Rampling Gate. I was afraid suddenly, as if I were slipping into a maelstrom of visions from which I could never, of my own will, return.
There was that sense of our talking together, talking and talking in low, agitated voices, and I was saying that I should not give in.
"Bear witness - that is all I ask of you, Julie."
And there was in me some dim certainty that by these visions alone I would be fatally changed.
But the very room was losing its substance, as if a soundless wind of terrific force were blowing it apart. The vision had already begun...
We were riding horseback through a forest, he and I. And the trees were so high and so thick that scarcely any sun at all broke through to the fragrant, leaf-strewn ground.
Yet we had no time to linger in this magical place. We had come to the fresh-tilled earth that surrounded a village I somehow knew was called Knorwood, with its gabled roofs and its tiny, crooked streets. We saw the monastery of Knorwood and the little church with the bell chiming vespers under the lowering sky. A great, bustling life resided in Knorwood, a thousand voices rising in common prayer.
Far beyond, on the rise above the forest, stood the round tower of a truly ancient castle; and to that ruined castle - no more than a shell of itself any more - as darkness fell in earnest we rode. Through its empty chambers we roamed, impetuous children, the horses and the road quite forgotten, and to the lord of the castle, a gaunt and white-skinned creature standing before the roaring fire of the roofless hall, we came. He turned and fixed us with his narrow and glittering eyes. A dead thing he was, I understood, but he carried within himself a priceless magic. And my companion, my innocent young man, stepped forward into the lord's arms.
I saw the kiss. I saw the young man grow pale and struggle and turn away, and the lord retreated with the wisest, saddest smile.
I understood. I knew. But the castle was dissolving as surely as anything in this dream might dissolve, and we were in some damp and close place.
The stench was unbearable to me; it was that most terrible of all stenches, the stench of death. And I heard my steps on the cobblestones and I reached out to steady myself against a wall. The tiny market-place was deserted; the doors and windows gaped open to the vagrant wind. Up one side and down the other of the crooked street I saw the marks on the houses. And I knew what the marks meant. The Black Death had come to the village of Knorwood. The Black Death had laid it waste. And in a moment of suffocating horror I realized that no one, not a single person, was left alive.
But this was not quite true. There was a young man walking in fits and starts up the narrow alleyway. He was staggering, almost falling, as he pushed in one door after another, and at last came to a hot, reeking place where a child screamed on the floor. Mother and father lay dead in the bed. And the sleek fat cat of the household, unharmed, played with the screaming infant, whose eyes bulged in its tiny, sunken face.
"Stop it!" I heard myself gasp. I was holding my head with both hands. "Stop it - stop it, please!" I was screaming, and my screams would surely pierce the vision and this crude little dwelling would collapse around me and I would rouse the household of Rampling Gate, but I did not. The young man turned and stared at me, and in the close, stinking room I could not see his face.
But I knew it was he, my companion, and I could smell his fever and his sickness, and the stink of the dying infant, and see the gleaming body of the cat as it pawed at the child's outstretched hand.
"Stop it, you've lost control of it!" I screamed, surely with all my strength, but the infant screamed louder. "Make it stop."
"I cannot," he whispered. "It goes on for ever! It will never stop!"
And with a great shriek I kicked at the cat and sent it flying out of the filthy room, overturning the milk pail as it went.
Death in all the houses of Knorwood. Death in the cloister, death in the open fields. It seemed the Judgment of God - I was sobbing, begging to be released - it seemed the very end of Creation itself.
But as night came down over the dead village he was alive still, stumbling up the slopes, through the forest, towards that tower where the lord stood at the broken arch of the window, waiting for him to come.
"Don't go!" I begged him. I ran alongside him, crying, but he didn't hear.
The lord turned and smiled with infinite sadness as the young man on his knees begged for salvation, when it was damnation this lord offered, when it was only damnation that the lord would give.
"Yes, damned, then, but living, breathing!" the young man cried, and the lord opened his arms.
The kiss again, the lethal kiss, the blood drawn out of his dying body, and then the lord lifting the heavy head of the young man so the youth could take the blood back again from the body of the lord himself.
I screamed, "Do not - do not drink!"
He turned, and his face was now so perfectly the visage of death that I couldn't believe there was animation left in him; yet he asked: "What would you do? Would you go back to Knorwood, would you open those doors one after another, would you ring the bell in the empty church - and if you did, who would hear?"
He didn't wait for my answer. And I had none now to give. He locked his innocent mouth to the vein that pulsed with every semblance of life beneath the lord's cold and translucent flesh. And the blood jetted into the young body, vanquishing in one great burst the fever and the sickness that had racked it, driving it out along with the mortal life.
He stood now in the hall of the lord alone. Immortality was his, and the blood thirst he would need to sustain it, and that thirst I could feel with my whole soul.
And each and every thing was transfigured in his vision - to the exquisite essence of itself. A wordless voice spoke from the starry veil of heaven; it sang in the wind that rushed through the broken timbers; it sighed in the flames that ate at the sooted stones of the hearth. It was the eternal rhythm of the universe that played beneath every surface as the last living creature in the village - that tiny child - fell silent in the maw of time.
A soft wind sifted and scattered the soil from the newly turned furrows in the empty fields. The rain fell from the black and endless sky.
Years and years passed. And all that had been Knorwood melted into the earth. The forest sent out its silent sentinels, and mighty trunks rose where there had been huts and houses, where there had been monastery walls. And it seemed the horror beyond all horrors that no one should know any more of those who had lived and died in that small and insignificant village, that not anywhere in the great archives in which all history is recorded should a mention of Knorwood exist.
Yet one remained who knew, one who had witnessed, one who had seen the Ramplings come in the years that followed, seen them raise their house upon the very slope where the ancient castle had once stood, one who saw a new village collect itself slowly upon the unmarked grave of the old.
And all through the walls of Rampling Gate were the stones of that old castle, the stones of the forgotten monastery, the stones of that little church.
We were once again back in the tower.
"It is my shrine," he whispered. "My sanctuary. It is the only thing that endures as I endure. And you love it as I love it, Julie. You have written it... You love its grandeur. And its gloom."
"Yes, yes... as it's always been..." I was crying, though I didn't move my lips.
He had turned to me from the window, and I could feel his endless craving with all my heart.
"What else do you want from me!" I pleaded. "What else can I give?"
A torrent of images answered me. It was beginning again. I was once again relinquishing myself, yet in a great rush of lights and noise I was enlivened and made whole as I had been when we rode together through the forest, but it was into the world of now, this hour, that we passed.
We were flying through the rural darkness along the railway towards London, where the night-time city burst like an enormous bubble in a shower of laughter and motion and glaring light. He was walking with me under the gas lamps, his face all but shimmering with that same dark innocence, that same irresistible warmth. It seemed we were holding tight to each other in the very midst of a crowd. And the crowd was a living thing, a writhing thing, and everywhere there came a dark, rich aroma from it, the aroma of fresh blood. Women in white fur and gentlemen in opera capes swept through the brightly lighted doors of the theatre; the blare of the music hall inundated us and then faded away. Only a thin soprano voice was left, singing a high, plaintive song. I was in his arms and his lips were covering mine, and there came that dull, zinging sensation again, that great, uncontrollable opening within myself. Thirst, and the promise of satiation measured only by the intensity of that thirst. Up back staircases we fled together, into high-ceilinged bedrooms papered in red damask, where the loveliest women reclined on brass beds, and the aroma was so strong now that I could not bear it and he said: "Drink. They are your victims! They will give you eternity - you must drink." And I felt the warmth filling me, charging me, blurring my vision until we broke free again, light and invisible, it seemed, as we moved over the rooftops and down again through rain-drenched streets. But the rain did not touch us; the falling snow did not chill us; we had within ourselves a great and indissoluble heat. And together in the carriage we talked to each other in low, exuberant rushes of language; we were lovers; we were constant; we were immortal. We were as enduring as Rampling Gate.
Oh, don't let it stop! I felt his arms around me and I knew we were in the tower room together, and the visions had worked their fatal alchemy.
"Do you understand what I am offering you? To your ancestors I revealed myself, yes; I subjugated them. But I would make you my bride, Julie. I would share with you my power. Come with me. I will not take you against your will, but can you turn away?"
Again I heard my own scream. My hands were on his cool white skin, and his lips were gentle yet hungry, his eyes yielding and ever young. Father's angry countenance blazed before me as if I, too, had the power to conjure. Unspeakable horror. I covered my face.
He stood against the backdrop of the window, against the distant drift of pale clouds. The candlelight glimmered in his eyes. Immense and sad and wise, they seemed - and oh, yes, innocent, as I have said again and again. "You are their fairest flower, Julie. To them I gave my protection always. To you I give my love. Come to me, dearest, and Rampling Gate will truly be yours, and it will finally, truly be mine."

Nights of argument, but finally Richard had come round. He would sign over Rampling Gate to me and I should absolutely refuse to allow the place to be torn down. There would be nothing he could do then to obey Father's command. I had given him the legal impediment he needed, and of course I told him I would leave the house to his male heirs. It should always be in Rampling hands.
A clever solution, it seemed to me, since Father had not told me to destroy the place. I had no scruples in the matter now at all.
And what remained was for him to take me to the little railway station and see me off for London, and not worry about my going home to Mayfair on my own.
"You stay here as long as you wish and do not worry," I said. I felt more tenderly towards him than I could ever express. "You knew as soon as you set foot in the place that Father was quite wrong."
The great black locomotive was chugging past us, the passenger cars slowing to a stop.
"Must go now, darling - kiss me," I said.
"But what came over you, Julie - what convinced you so quickly -?"
"We've been through all that, Richard," I said. "What matters is that Rampling Gate is safe and we are both happy, my dear."
I waved until I couldn't see him any more. The flickering lamps of the town were lost in the deep lavender light of the early evening, and the dark hulk of Rampling Gate appeared for one uncertain moment like the ghost of itself on the nearby rise.
I sat back and closed my eyes. Then I opened them slowly, savouring this moment for which I had waited so long.
He was smiling, seated in the far corner of the leather seat opposite, as he had been all along, and now he rose with a swift, almost delicate movement and sat beside me and enfolded me in his arms.
"It's five hours to London," he whispered.
"I can wait," I said, feeling the thirst like a fever as I held tight to him, feeling his lips against my eyelids and my hair. "I want to hunt the London streets tonight," I confessed a little shyly, but I saw only approbation in his eyes.
"Beautiful Julie, my Julie..." he whispered.
"You'll love the house in Mayfair," I said.
"Yes..." he said.
"And when Richard finally tires of Rampling Gate, we shall go home."

Back and Forth...

2009-05-28T17:46:00.003-04:00

I thus return from holiday. Never got to see Poe as it turns out but the time was well spent with friends; a few new acquaintances were made as well. All in all I'm tired and rather numb towards everything at the moment. Today's brooding consists of the strangeness of life. It seems I cannot go anywhere without out some string of peculiar occurrences following me around. Have you ever felt like that? It's like being some kind of demented magnet. In the end there are always more questions than answers and no one avoids the inevitable...

Holiday...

2009-05-21T22:00:00.007-04:00

I will officially be on holiday for a few days. Visiting with some friends of mine. I'll let you know how Poe was when I return. Until then I hope time finds you well on this spinning blue sphere until I return...
Bonsoir...

Death Becomes Me...

2009-05-19T17:06:00.005-04:00

The day finds me tired and sad. I have no desire for anything in this life anymore and yet still I live; this peculiar paradox is cruel in it's simplicity. Recently I read The Bloody Chamber. One begins to wonder where this woman's insight into depravity springs from. What form of torture did she endure, or is she merely a connoisseur of it? Answers I may never have. But I don't care enough to bother seeking them out so it is balanced. There is no such thing as coincidence, only the inevitable...

Away From Me...

2009-05-11T22:19:00.005-04:00

I hold my breath as this life starts to take its toll
I hide behind a smile as this perfect plan unfolds
But oh, God, I feel I've been lied to
Lost all faith in the things I have achieved
And I

I've woken now to find myself
In the shadows of all I have created
I'm longing to be lost in you
(away from this place I have made)
Won't you take me away from me

Crawling through this world as disease flows through my veins
I look into myself, but my own heart has been changed
I can't go on like this
I loathe all I've become

Lost in a dying world I reach for something more
I have grown so weary of this lie I live

I've woken now to find myself
In the shadows of all I have created
I'm longing to be lost in you

I have woken now to find myself
I'm lost in shadows of my own
I'm longing to be lost in you

Away from me.

Notebook...

2009-05-09T12:22:00.003-04:00

I will now explain a few details of the story below. I did not include them at first because I did not wish to change the mood of the tale. The Lady in the House of Love is taken from a collection called The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and author of this tale is Angela Carter.
The other day while perusing an old notebook of mine I found this quote: "the beastly forebearers on the walls condemn her to a perpetual repetition of their passions.". This quote is descriptive of my life and I could not discern where I got it. I had not previously read The Lady in the House of Love. I did not know to read it. It was something I felt I must know so I went to the place where all information can be found. The internet is a beautiful thing isn't it? Within a few searches I had found the title of the piece. A little more electronic wizardry and I had it.
This story could be a description of my life, both what my life has been and what it is presently. The woman lost in her arcana trying to escape what fate has cast for her. "What if..." the cruelest words ever spoken...

The Lady in the House of Love...

2009-05-08T00:30:00.004-04:00

At last the revenants became so troublesome the peasants abandoned the village and it fell solely into the possession of subtle and vindictive inhabitants who manifest their presences by shadows that fall almost imperceptibly awry, too many shadows, even at midday, shadows that have no source in anything visible; by the sound, sometimes, of sobbing in a derelict bedroom where a cracked mirror suspended from a wall does not reflect a presence; by a sense of unease that will afflict the traveller unwise enough to pause to drink from the fountain in the square that still gushes spring water from a faucet stuck in a stone lion's mouth. A cat prowls in a weedy garden; he grins and spits, arches his back, bounces away from an intangible on four fear-stiffened legs. Now all shun the village below the chateau in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes.

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into a country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.

Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit.' Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?' She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.

The castle is mostly given over to ghostly occupants but she herself has her own suite of drawing room and bedroom. Closely barred shutters and heavy velvet curtains keep out every leak of natural light. There is a round table on a single leg covered with a red plush cloth on which she lays out her inevitable Tarot; this room is never more than faintly illuminated by a heavily shaded lamp on the mantelpiece and the dark red figured wallpaper is obscurely, distressingly patterned by the rain that drives in through the neglected roof and leaves behind it random areas of staining, ominous marks like those left on the sheets by dead lovers. Depredations of rot and fungus everywhere. The unlit chandelier is so heavy with dust the individual prisms no longer show any shapes; industrious spiders have woven canopies in the corners of this ornate and rotting place, have trapped the porcelain vases on the mantelpiece in soft grey nets. But the mistress of all this disintegration notices nothing.

She sits in a chair covered in moth-ravaged burgundy velvet at the low, round table and distributes the cards; sometimes the lark sings, but more often remains a sullen mound of drab feathers. Sometimes the Countess will wake it for a brief cadenza by strumming the bars of its cage; she likes to hear it announce how it cannot escape.

She rises when the sun sets and goes immediately to her table where she plays her game of patience until she grows hungry, until she becomes ravenous. She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.

The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a fine point. These and teeth as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.

The walls of her bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. At the room's four corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, pungent fumes of incense. In the centre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long candles in enormous silver candlesticks. In a white lace négligé stained a little with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each morning and lies down in an open coffin.

A chignoned priest of the Orthodox faith staked out her wicked father at a Carpathian crossroad before her milk teeth grew. Just as they staked him out, the fatal Count cried: 'Nosferatu is dead; long live Nosferatu!' Now she possesses all the haunted forests and mysterious habitations of his vast domain; she is the hereditary commandant of the army of shadows who camp in the village below her chateau, who penetrate the woods in the form of owls, bats and foxes, who make the milk curdle and the butter refuse to come, who ride the horses all night on a wild hunt so they are sacks of skin and bone in the morning, who milk the cows dry and, especially, torment pubescent girls with fainting fits, disorders of the blood, diseases of the imagination.

But the Countess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming it. In her dream, she would like to be human; but she does not know if that is possible. The Tarot always shows the same configuration: always she turns up La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution.

On moonless nights, her keeper lets her out into the garden. This garden, an exceedingly sombre place, bears a strong resemblance to a burial ground and all the roses her dead mother planted have grown up into a huge, spiked wall that incarcerates her in the castle of her inheritance. When the back door opens, the Countess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Crouching, quivering, she catches the scent of her prey. Delicious crunch of the fragile bones of rabbits and small, furry things she pursues with fleet, four-footed speed; she will creep home, whimpering, with blood smeared on her cheeks. She pours water from the ewer in her bedroom into the bowl, she washes her face with the wincing, fastidious gestures of a cat.

The voracious margin of huntress's nights in the gloomy garden, crouch and pounce, surrounds her habitual tormented somnambulism, her life or imitation of life. The eyes of this nocturnal creature enlarge and glow. All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges; but nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition, nothing. She resorts to the magic comfort of the Tarot pack and shuffles the cards, lays them out, reads them, gathers them up with a sigh, shuffles them again, constantly constructing hypotheses about a future which is irreversible.

An old mute looks after her, to make sure she never sees the sun, that all day she stays in her coffin, to keep mirrors and all reflective surfaces away from her--in short, to perform all the functions of the servants of vampires. Everything about this beautiful and ghastly lady is as it should be, queen of night, queen of terror--except her horrible reluctance for the role.

Nevertheless, if an unwise adventurer pauses in the square of the deserted village to refresh himself at the fountain, a crone in a black dress and white apron presently emerges from a house. She will invite you with smiles and gestures; you will follow her. The Countess wants fresh meat. When she was a little girl, she was like a fox and contented herself entirely with baby rabbits that squeaked piteously as she bit into their necks with a nauseated voluptuousness, with voles and field-mice that palpitated for a bare moment between her embroidress's fingers. But now she is a woman, she must have men. If you stop too long beside the giggling fountain, you will be led by the hand to the Countess's larder.

All day, she lies in her coffin in her négligé of blood-stained lace. When the sun drops behind the mountain, she yawns and stirs and puts on the only dress she has, her mother's wedding dress, to sit and read her cards until she grows hungry. She loathes the food she eats; she would have liked to take the rabbits home with her, feed them on lettuce, pet them and make them a nest in her red-and-black chinoiserie escritoire, but hunger always overcomes her. She sinks her teeth into the neck where an artery throbs with fear; she will drop the deflated skin from which she has extracted all the nourishment with a small cry of both pain and disgust. And it is the same with the shepherd boys and gipsy lads who, ignorant or foolhardy, come to wash the dust from their feet in the water of the fountain; the Countess's governess brings them into the drawing room where the cards on the table always show the Grim Reaper. The Countess herself will serve them coffee in tiny cracked, precious cups, and little sugar cakes. The hobbledehoys sit with a spilling cup in one hand and a biscuit in the other, gaping at the Countess in her satin finery as she pours from a silver pot and chatters distractedly to put them at their fatal ease. A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates she is inconsolable. She would like to caress their lean brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. When she takes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom, they can scarcely believe their luck.

Afterwards, her governess will tidy the remains into a neat pile and wrap it in its own discarded clothes. This mortal parcel she then discreetly buries in the garden. The blood on the Countess's cheeks will be mixed with tears; her keeper probes her fingernails for her with a little silver toothpick, to get rid of the fragments of skin and bone that have lodged there

Fee fie fo film
I smell the blood of an Englishman.

One hot, ripe summer in the pubescent years of the present century, a young officer in the British army, blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled, visiting friends in Vienna, decided to spend the remainder of his furlough exploring the little-known uplands of Romania. When he quixotically decided to travel the rutted cart-tracks by bicycle, he saw all the humour of it: 'on two wheels in the land of the vampires'. So, laughing, he sets out on his adventure.

He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance. He is more than he knows--and has about him, besides, the special glamour of that generation for whom history has already prepared a special, exemplary fate in the trenches of France. This being, rooted in change and time, is about to collide with the timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is as it has always been and will be, whose cards always fall in the same pattern.

Although so young, he is also rational. He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip round the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man's welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?

A single kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.

The waxen fingers of the Countess, fingers of a holy image, turn up the card called Les Amoureux. Never, never before ... never before has the Countess cast herself a fate involving love. She shakes, she trembles, her great eyes close beneath her finely veined, nervously fluttering eyelids; the lovely cartomancer has, this time, the first time, dealt herself a hand of love and death.

Be he alive or be he dead
I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

At the mauvish beginnings of evening, the English m'sieu toils up the hill to the village he glimpsed from a great way off; he must dismount and push his bicycle before him, the path too steep to ride. He hopes to find a friendly inn to rest the night; he's hot, hungry, thirsty, weary, dusty ... At first, such disappointment, to discover the roofs of all the cottages caved in and tall weeds thrusting through the piles of fallen tiles, shutters hanging disconsolately from their hinges, an entirely uninhabited place. And the rank vegetation whispers, as if foul secrets, here, where, if one were sufficiently imaginative, one could almost imagine twisted faces appearing momentarily beneath the crumbling eaves ... but the adventure of it all, and the consolation of the poignant brightness of the hollyhocks still bravely blooming in the shaggy gardens, and the beauty of the flaming sunset, all these considerations soon overcame his disappointment, even assuaged the faint unease he'd felt. And the fountain where the village women used to wash their clothes still gushed out bright, clear water; he gratefully washed his feet and hands, applied his mouth to the faucet, then let the icy stream run over his face.

When he raised his dripping, gratified head from the lion's mouth, he saw, silently arrived beside him in the square, an old woman who smiled eagerly, almost conciliatorily at him. She wore a black dress and a white apron, with a housekeeper's key ring at the waist; her grey hair was neatly coiled in a chignon beneath the white linen headdress worn by elderly women of that region. She bobbed a curtsy at the young man and beckoned him to follow her. When he hesitated, she pointed towards the great bulk of the mansion above them, whose façade loured over the village, rubbed her stomach, pointed to her mouth, rubbed her stomach again, clearly miming an invitation to supper. Then she beckoned him again, this time turning determinedly upon her heel as though she would brook no opposition.

A great, intoxicated surge of the heavy scent of red roses blew into his face as soon as they left the village, inducing a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough almost, to fell him. Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lined the path, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant, their huge congregations of plush petals somehow obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications. The mansion emerged grudgingly out of this jungle.

In the subtle and haunting light of the setting sun, that golden light rich with nostalgia for the day that is just past, the sombre visage of the place, part manor house, part fortified farmhouse, immense, rambling, a dilapidated eagle's nest atop the crag down which its attendant village meandered, reminded him of childhood tales on winter evenings, when he and his brothers and sisters scared themselves half out of their wits with ghost stories set in just such places and then had to have candles to light them up newly terrifying stairs to bed. He could almost have regretted accepting the crone's unspoken invitation; but now, standing before the door of time-eroded oak while she selected a huge iron key from the clanking ringful at her waist, he knew it was too late to turn back and brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be frightened of his own fancies.

The old lady unlocked the door, which swung back on melodramatically creaking hinges, and fussily took charge of his bicycle, in spite of his protests. He felt a certain involuntary sinking of the heart to see his beautiful two-wheeled symbol of rationality vanish into the dark entrails of the mansion, to, no doubt, some damp outhouse where they would not oil it or check its tyres. But, in for a penny, in for a pound--in his youth and strength and blond beauty, in the invisible, even unacknowledged pentacle of his virginity, the young man stepped over the threshold of Nosferatu's castle and did not shiver in the blast of cold air, as from the mouth of a grave, that emanated from the lightless, cavernous interior.

The crone took him to a little chamber where there was a black oak table spread with a clean white cloth and this cloth was carefully laid with heavy silverware, a little tarnished, as if someone with foul breath had breathed on it, but laid with one place only. Curiouser and curiouser; invited to the castle for dinner, now he must dine alone. All the same, he sat down as she had bid him. Although it was not yet dark outside, the curtains were closely drawn and only the sparing light trickling from a single oil lamp showed him how dismal his surroundings were. The crone bustled about to get him a bottle of wine and a glass from an ancient cabinet of wormy oak; while he bemusedly drank his wine, she disappeared but soon returned bearing a steaming platter of the local spiced meat stew with dumplings, and a shank of black bread. He was hungry after his long day's ride, he ate heartily and polished his plate with the crust, but this coarse food was hardly the entertainment he'd expected from the gentry and he was puzzled by the assessing glint in the dumb woman's eyes as she watched him eating.

But she darted off to get him a second helping as soon as he'd finished the first one and she seemed so friendly and helpful, besides, that he knew he could count on a bed for the night in the castle, as well as his supper, so he sharply reprimanded himself for his own childish lack of enthusiasm for the eerie silence, the clammy chill of the place.

When he'd put away the second plateful, the old woman came and gestured he should leave the table and follow her once again. She made a pantomime of drinking; he deduced he was now invited to take after-dinner coffee in another room with some more elevated member of the household who had not wished to dine with him but, all the same, wanted to make his acquaintance. An honour, no doubt; in deference to his host's opinion of himself, he straightened his tie, brushed the crumbs from his tweed jacket.

He was surprised to find how ruinous the interior of the house was--cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster; but the mute crone resolutely wound him on the reel of her lantern down endless corridors, up winding staircases, through the galleries where the painted eyes of family portraits briefly flickered as they passed, eyes that belonged, he noticed, to faces, one and all, of a quite memorable beastliness. At last she paused and, behind the door where they'd halted, he heard a faint, metallic twang as of, perhaps, a chord struck on a harpsichord. And then, wonderfully, the liquid cascade of the song of a lark, bringing to him, in the heart--had he but known it--of Juliet's tomb, all the freshness of morning.

The crone rapped with her knuckles on the panels; the most seductively caressing voice he had ever heard in his life softly called out, in heavily accented French, the adopted language of the Romanian aristocracy: 'Entrez.'

First of all, he saw only a shape, a shape imbued with a faint luminosity since it caught and reflected in its yellowed surfaces what little light there was in the ill-lit room; this shape resolved itself into that of, of all things, a hoop-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a dress fifty or sixty years out of fashion but once, obviously, intended for a wedding. And then he saw the girl who wore the dress, a girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended, as if untenanted in the dank air, a fabulous lending, a self-articulated garment in which she lived like a ghost in a machine. All the light in the room came from a low-burning lamp with a thick greenish shade on a distant mantelpiece; the crone who accompanied him shielded her lantern with her hand, as if to protect her mistress from too suddenly seeing, or their guest from too suddenly seeing her.

So that it was little by little, as his eyes grew accustomed to the half-dark, that he saw how beautiful and how very young the bedizened scarecrow was, and he thought of a child dressing up in her mother's clothes, perhaps a child putting on the clothes of a dead mother in order to bring her, however briefly, to life again.

The Countess stood behind a low table, beside a pretty, silly, gilt-and-wire birdcage, hands outstretched in a distracted attitude that was almost one of flight; she looked as startled by their entry as if she had not requested it. With her stark white face, her lovely death's head surrounded by long dark hair that fell down as straight as if it were soaking wet, she looked like a shipwrecked bride. Her huge dark eyes almost broke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; yet he was disturbed, almost repelled, by her extraordinarily fleshy mouth, a mouth with wide, full, prominent lips of a vibrant purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth. Even--but he put the thought away from him immediately--a whore's mouth. She shivered all the time, a starveling chill, a malarial agitation of the bones. He thought she must be only sixteen or seventeen years old, no more, with the hectic, unhealthy beauty of a consumptive. She was the chatelaine of all this decay.

With many tender precautions, the crone now raised the light she held to show his hostess her guest's face. At that, the Countess let out a faint, mewing cry and made a blind, appalled gesture with her hands, as if pushing him away, so that she knocked against the table and a butterfly dazzle of painted cards fell to the floor. Her mouth formed a round' o' of woe, she swayed a little and then sank into her chair, where she lay as if now scarcely capable of moving. A bewildering reception. Tsk'ing under her breath, the crone busily poked about on the table until she found an enormous pair of dark green glasses, such as blind beggars wear, and perched them on the Countess's nose.

He went forward to pick up her cards for her from a carpet that, he saw to his surprise, was part rotted away, partly encroached upon by all kinds of virulent-looking fungi. He retrieved the cards and shuffled them carelessly together, for they meant nothing to him, though they seemed strange playthings for a young girl. What a grisly picture of a capering skeleton! He covered it up with a happier one--of two young lovers, smiling at one another, and put her toys back into a hand so slender you could almost see the frail net of bone beneath the translucent skin, a hand with fingernails as long, as finely pointed, as banjo picks.

At his touch, she seemed to revive a little and almost smiled, raising herself upright.

'Coffee,' she said. 'You must have coffee.' And scooped up her cards into a pile so that the crone could set before her a silver spirit kettle, a silver coffee pot, cream jug, sugar basin, cups ready on a silver tray, a strange touch of elegance, even if discoloured, in this devastated interior whose mistress ethereally shone as if with her own blighted, submarine radiance.

The crone found him a chair and, tittering noiselessly, departed, leaving the room a little darker.

While the young lady attended to the coffee-making, he had time to contemplate with some distaste a further series of family portraits which decorated the stained and peeling walls of the room; these livid faces all seemed contorted with a febrile madness and the blubber lips, the huge, demented eyes that all had in common bore a disquieting resemblance to those of the hapless victim of inbreeding now patiently filtering her fragrant brew, even if some rare grace has so finely transformed those features when it came to her case. The lark, its chorus done, had long ago fallen silent; no sound but the chink of silver on china. Soon, she held out to him a tiny cup of rose-painted china.

'Welcome,' she said in her voice with the rushing sonorities of the ocean in it, a voice that seemed to come elsewhere than from her white, still throat. 'Welcome to my chateau. I rarely receive visitors and that's a misfortune since nothing animates me half as much as the presence of a stranger ... This place is so lonely, now the village is deserted, and my one companion, alas, she cannot speak. Often I am so silent that I think I, too, will soon forget how to do so and nobody here will ever talk any more.'

She offered him a sugar biscuit from a Limoges plate; her fingernails struck carillons from the antique china. Her voice, issuing from those red lips like the obese roses in her garden, lips that do not move--her voice is curiously disembodied; she is like a doll, he thought, a ventriloquist's doll, or, more, like a great, ingenious piece of clockwork. For she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and now the mechanism was inexorably running down and would leave her lifeless. This idea that she might be an automaton, made of white velvet and black fur, that could not move of its own accord, never quite deserted him; indeed, it deeply moved his heart. The carnival air of her white dress emphasized her unreality, like a sad Columbine who lost her way in the wood a long time ago and never reached the fair.

'And the light. I must apologize for the lack of light ... a hereditary affliction of the eyes ...'

Her blind spectacles gave him his handsome face back to himself twice over; if he presented himself to her naked face, he would dazzle her like the sun she is forbidden to look at because it would shrivel her up at once, poor night bird, poor butcher bird.

Vous serez ma proie.

You have such a fine throat, m'sieu, like a column of marble. When you came through the door retaining about you all the golden light of the summer's day of which I know nothing, nothing, the card called 'Les Amoureux' had just emerged from the tumbling chaos of imagery before me; it seemed to me you had stepped off the card into my darkness and, for a moment, I thought, perhaps, you might irradiate it.

I do not mean to hurt you. I shall wait for you in my bride's dress in the dark.

The bridegroom is come, he will go into the chamber which has been prepared for him.

I am condemned to solitude and dark; I do not mean to hurt you.

I will be very gentle.

(And could love free me from the shadows? Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?)

See, how I'm ready for you. I've always been ready for you; I've been waiting for you in my wedding dress, why have you delayed for so long ... it will all be over very quickly.

You will feel no pain, my darling.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking, behind the hedge of spiked flowers, Nosferatu's sanguinary rosebud. The beastly forebears on the walls condemn her to a perpetual repetition of their passions.

(One kiss, however, and only one, woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.)

Nervously, to conceal her inner voices, she keeps up a front of inconsequential chatter in French while her ancestors leer and grimace on the walls; however hard she tries to think of any other, she only knows of one kind of consummation.

He was struck, once again, by the birdlike, predatory claws which tipped her marvellous hands; the sense of strangeness that had been growing on him since he buried his head under the streaming water in the village, since he entered the dark portals of the fatal castle, now fully overcame him. Had he been a cat, he would have bounced backwards from her hands on four fear-stiffened legs, but he is not a cat: he is a hero.

A fundamental disbelief in what he sees before him sustains him, even in the boudoir of Countess Nosferatu herself; he would have said, perhaps, that there are some things which, even if they _are_ true, we should not believe possible. He might have said: it is folly to believe one's eyes. Not so much that he does not believe in her; he can see her, she is real. If she takes off her dark glasses, from her eyes will stream all the images that populate this vampire-haunted land, but, since he himself is immune to shadow, due to his virginity--he does not yet know what there is to be afraid of--and due to his heroism, which makes him like the sun, he sees before him, first and foremost, an inbred, highly strung girl child, fatherless, motherless, kept in the dark too long and pale as a plant that never sees the light, half-blinded by some hereditary condition of the eyes. And though he feels unease, he cannot feel terror; so he is like the boy in the fairy tale, who does not know how to shudder, and not spooks, ghouls, beasties, the Devil himself and all his retinue could do the trick.

This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.

He will learn to shudder in the trenches. But this girl cannot make him shudder.

Now it is dark. Bats swoop and squeak outside the tightly shuttered windows. The coffee is all drunk, the sugar biscuits eaten. Her chatter comes trickling and diminishing to a stop; she twists her fingers together, picks at the lace of her dress, shifts nervously in her chair. Owls shriek; the impedimenta of her condition squeak and gibber all around us. Now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. She turns her head away from the blue beams of his eyes; she knows no other consummation than the only one she can offer him. She has not eaten for three days. It is dinner-time. It is bedtime.

Suivez-moi.
Je vous attendais.
Vous serez ma proie.

The raven caws on the accursed roof. 'Dinnertime, dinnertime,' clang the portraits on the walls. A ghastly hunger gnaws her entrails; she has waited for him all her life without knowing it.

The handsome bicyclist, scarcely believing his luck, will follow her into her bedroom; the candles around her sacrificial altar burn with a low, clear flame, light catches on the silver tears stitched to the wall. She will assure him, in the very voice of temptation: 'My clothes have but to fall and you will see before you a succession of mysteries.'

She has no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress, only the fangs and talons of a beast of prey. To touch the mineral sheen of the flesh revealed in the cool candle gleam is to invite her fatal embrace; in her low, sweet voice, she will croon the lullaby of the House of Nosferatu.

Embraces, kisses; your golden head, of a lion, although I have never seen a lion, only imagined one, of the sun, even if I've only seen the picture of the sun on the Tarot card, your golden head of the lover whom I dreamed would one day free me, this head will fall back, its eyes roll upwards in a spasm you will mistake for that of love and not of death. The bridegroom bleeds on my inverted marriage bed. Stark and dead, poor bicyclist; he has paid the price of a night with the Countess and some think it too high a fee while some do not.

Tomorrow, her keeper will bury his bones under her roses. The food her roses feed on gives them their rich colour, their swooning odour, that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures.

Suivez-moi.

'Suivez-moi!'

The handsome bicyclist, fearful for his hostess's health, her sanity, gingerly follows her hysterical imperiousness into the other room; he would like to take her into his arms and protect her from the ancestors who leer down from the walls.

What a macabre bedroom!

His colonel, an old goat with jaded appetites, had given him the visiting card of a brothel in Paris where, the satyr assured him, ten louis would buy just such a lugubrious bedroom, with a naked girl upon a coffin; offstage, the brothel pianist played the _Dies Irae_ on a harmonium and, amidst all the perfumes of the embalming parlour, the customer took his necrophiliac pleasure of a pretended corpse. He had good-naturedly refused the old man's offer of such an initiation; how can he now take criminal advantage of the disordered girl with fever-hot, bone-dry, taloned hands and eyes that deny all the erotic promises of her body with their terror, their sadness, their dreadful, balked tenderness?

So delicate and damned, poor thing. Quite damned.

Yet I do believe she scarcely knows what she is doing.

She is shaking as if her limbs were not efficiently joined together, as if she might shake into pieces. She raises her hands to unfasten the neck of her dress and her eyes well with tears, they trickle down beneath the rim of her dark glasses. She can't take off her mother's wedding dress unless she takes off her dark glasses; she has fumbled the ritual, it is no longer inexorable. The mechanism within her fails her, now, when she needs it most. When she takes off the dark glasses, they slip from her fingers and smash to pieces on the tiled floor. There is no room in her drama for improvisation; and this unexpected, mundane noise of breaking glass breaks the wicked spell in the room, entirely. She gapes blindly down at the splinters and ineffectively smears the tears across her face with her fist. What is she to do now?

When she kneels to try to gather the fragments of glass together, a sharp sliver pierces deeply into the pad of her thumb; she cries out, sharp, real. She kneels among the broken glass and watches the bright bead of blood form a drop. She has never seen her own blood before, not her _own_ blood. It exercises upon her an awed fascination.

Into this vile and murderous room, the handsome bicyclist brings the innocent remedies of the nursery; in himself, by his presence, he is an exorcism. He gently takes her hand away from her and dabs the blood with his own handkerchief, but still it spurts out. And so he puts his mouth to the wound. He will kiss it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would have done.

All the silver tears fall from the wall with a flimsy tinkle. Her painted ancestors turn away their eyes and grind their fangs.

How can she bear the pain of becoming human?

The end of exile is the end of being.

He was awakened by larksong. The shutters, the curtains, even the long-sealed windows of the horrid bedroom were all opened up and light and air streamed in; now you could see how tawdry it all was, how thin and cheap the satin, the catafalque not ebony at all but black-painted paper stretched on struts of wood, as in the theatre. The wind had blown droves of petals from the roses outside into the room and this crimson residue swirled fragrantly about the floor. The candles had burnt out and she must have set her pet lark free because it perched on the edge of the silly coffin to sing him its ecstatic morning song. His bones were stiff and aching, he'd slept on the floor with his bundled-up jacket for a pillow, after he'd put her to bed.

But now there was no trace of her to be seen, except, lightly tossed across the crumpled black satin bedcover, a lace négligé lightly soiled with blood, as it might be from a woman's menses, and a rose that must have come from the fierce bushes nodding through the window. The air was heavy with incense and roses and made him cough. The Countess must have got up early to enjoy the sunshine, slipped outside to gather him a rose. He got to his feet, coaxed the lark on to his wrist and took it to the window. At first, it exhibited the reluctance for the sky of a long-caged thing, but, when he tossed it up on to the currents of the air, it spread its wings and was up and away into the clear blue bowl of the heavens; he watched its trajectory with a lift of joy in his heart.

Then he padded into the boudoir, his mind busy with plans. We shall take her to Zurich, to a clinic; she will be treated for nervous hysteria. Then to an eye specialist, for her photophobia, and to a dentist to put her teeth into better shape. Any competent manicurist will deal with her claws. We shall turn her into the lovely girl she is; I shall cure her of all these nightmares.

The heavy curtains are pulled back, to let in brilliant fusillades of early morning light; in the desolation of the boudoir, she sits at her round table in her white dress, with the cards laid out before her. She has dropped off to sleep over the cards of destiny that are so fingered, so soiled, so worn by constant shuffling that you can no longer make the image out on any single one of them.

She is not sleeping.

In death, she looked far older, less beautiful and so, for the first time, fully human.

I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness.

And I leave you as a souvenir the dark, fanged rose I plucked, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave.

My keeper will attend to everything.

Nosferatu always attends his own obsequies; she will not go to the graveyard unattended. And now the crone materialized, weeping, and roughly gestured him to begone. After a search in some foul-smelling outhouses, he discovered his bicycle and, abandoning his holiday, rode directly to Bucharest where, at the poste restante, he found a telegram summoning him to rejoin his regiment at once. Much later, when he changed back into uniform in his quarters, he discovered he still had the Countess's rose, he must have tucked it into the breast pocket of his cycling jacket after he had found her body. Curiously enough, although he had brought it so far away from Romania, the flower did not seem to be quite dead and, on impulse, because the girl had been so lovely and her death so unexpected and pathetic, he decided to try and resurrect her rose. He filled his tooth glass with water from the carafe on his locker and popped the rose into it, so that its withered head floated on the surface.

When he returned from the mess that evening, the heavy fragrance of Count Nosferatu's roses drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing, velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elasticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour. Next day, his regiment embarked for France.

Covers...

2009-05-04T00:58:00.001-04:00

The old saying "never judge a book by its cover" should be amended to "never judge a book by its cover or dust jacket flap". I recently attended a book sale the local library was hosting to get rid of extra books. I purchased several items-most of which I knew next to nothing about. So far I have perused three of the eight or so items I purchased. Two out of the three have disappointed me greatly and offended me on top of it. They are now designated to the vertical file. It is interesting the differing perspective in this realm. The different ways writers define the world around them to their readers. You would think one who has been around as long as me could not be struck by these differences any more, but I suppose we are always learning no matter our age or mindset. We all fall for devils in disguise...

Random Thoughts...

2009-05-03T00:37:00.001-04:00

Another evening has come to greet us the moon grinning like a murderer. Like some kind of celestial Jack the Ripper, I think I may draw that. I have been focusing more on my art lately; who knows what I (finally) may be able to accomplish one of these days. I really need to work on my anatomy. Thank the Art Gods for "how to" books; they're less expensive than classes and more helpful too. I now bid you bonsoir. What's said is said...

Misao's Farewell...

2009-05-02T00:00:00.001-04:00

Delicate line between heaven and earth...
The calm of the ages,
all the world's worth.
Such minuscule measure,
while we think it so grand...
Just five specks of smallness,
This soft quiet land.
So frail and so fleeting,
in the end you will see
Simple dreams were Horatio's philosophy.

For all the truth,
all creation,
all secrets of yore
Can be told in an instant,
by then they're no more.

Ah, The Unexplainable
All worries unsettled,
heartache unresolved...
All questions unanswered,
with death, shall be solved.

We already teeter,
this sheer cliff so high.
When we fall to corruption,
insecurities die.

To end is to start;
to surrender is to know.

Despair and depression,
together they grow.
Hope shall meet hopeless
when there's nowhere to go.
-Misao Fujimura

Another Day In The Life...

2009-05-01T00:47:00.003-04:00

I haven't been blogging lately. This is mostly due to an apathetic "what the hell does it matter anyways" attitude. But apparently the stars have aligned or something because here I am blogging at you. Been busy working on ideas and such-perhaps one day you'll be reading my print rather than staring at text on a screen. Until that day, this is as good as it's going to get.
Tonight's musing concerns the human tendency towards hierarchy. Too often I feel any discussion of this focuses on materialism. While it is true that this plays into hierarchy I do not think it deserves all the attention it gets. The truth of the matter, in my humble opinion, lies closer to one's innate desire for worth.
In other news, I have recently gotten back into Death Note. A truly brilliant anime/manga/movie that. Thank you Tsugumi Ohba for a truly original idea-at least as far as I'm aware. I shall eventually make a full review when I finish the anime. And now I wish you adieu. Excuse all the blood...

SOS...

2009-04-21T00:03:00.001-04:00

Bound to your side and trapped in silence
Just a possession
Is it love or only violence
That feeds your obsession

You send me to a broken state
Where I can take the pain
Just long enough
That I am numb
That I just disappear

So go on and fight me
Go on and scare me to death
Tell me I asked for it
Tell me I'll never forget
You could give me anything but love
Anything but love

stripped down to my naked core
The darkest corners of my mind are yours
That's where you live
That's where you breathe

So go on and fight me
Go on and scare me to death
Dare me to leave you
Tell me I'd never forget
You could give me anything but love
Anything but love

Without any faith
Without any light
Can dare me to live
Can dare me to lie
Inside I am dead

So go on and fight me
Go on and scare me to death
I'll be the victim
You'll be the voice in my head
You could give me anything but love
Anything but love
Anything but love
Anything but love
Anything but love
Anything but love...

(Artwork by Madison Skye...)

Mads World...

2009-04-15T00:49:00.002-04:00

I've been away for a while house sitting for a friend. It's interesting to note the difference between personalities when living at another's for any period of time. It's like a wolf trying to live in a canary's cage, it doesn't work well. But now I have returned to my native lands. As I settle in I wish you Bonsoir and we shall chat again tomorrow night when I inevitable cannot sleep. But when I do, I dream dreams that are not dreams...

Of Suns and Words...

2009-04-07T00:03:00.003-04:00

I wonder who it was who first decided to write their thoughts down. I would have liked to meet them, liked to know what sparked the idea. What sequence of thoughts led them to preserve their ideas, to share them this way. Perhaps it was immortality, the desire to live on beyond themselves. That never ending quest to live on despite the odds.
But what does one do when they don't wish to live on? When they're so sick and tired of existence that they could happily embrace death if only he would show up. What can be done for that one? Shall assistance be offered in their quest for self destruction? Should the beauty of life be shown to counter the darkness they see? What if they are so far gone that they cannot see it, their darkness so deep that no light is strong enough to penetrate? At that point is there anything to do but leave them to themselves, struggling in the shadows of this place?
It's always darkest before dawn, but what of the one who cannot see the sun...

Sleeping Patterns...

2009-04-06T00:49:00.002-04:00

Another week has passed us by on our spinning blue sphere. I have been away, lost somewhere between what is and what may be. I suppose in the end everything reveals itself, who knows why we insist on figuring things out before then.
Sleeplessness is today's topic, I may visit this one often but that is the way of insomniacs. The interesting bit of insomnia is that it doesn't matter how tired one is, their brain simply will not let go. Is this some sort of demented defense mechanism gone awry? Or is it some irritating blend of chemicals that have become unbalanced. All of these possibilities and more exist. Reasons for sleeplessness are as diverse and numerous as there are people who experience it. In the end I have no conclusions, merely deeper understandings of the questions...

Musings at Midnight....

2009-03-30T00:00:00.002-04:00

Thus does life continue unaffected by the pleadings of those under its dominion. Today's topic of conversation is dualism. So many aspects of the world around us are not one, but two. And so often these forces oppose each other. It is the paradox that allows these opposing forces to exist within the same vessel. Look around at those surrounding you then look into the mirror. What do you see? A group of seemingly unconnected individuals living out their lives. But what are they really? What is the bond between body an soul that keeps us in this place? What can explain the self-destruction we inflict upon our souls? What strings together the events in our lives that shape us and determine who we are? This web we help weave that we cannot escape...

Victims of Love...

2009-03-29T00:28:00.003-04:00

In the beginning, I tried to warn you
You play with fire, its gonna burn you
And here we are now, in the same situation,
You never listen, I never listen
Now I am thinking of a way that I can make an escape
It's got me caught up in a web and my hearts the prey
Do you really wanna throw your heart away, away, away?

Everybody's hurt somebody before
Everybody's been hurt by somebody before
You can change but you will always come back for more
Its a game and we are all just victims of love.
Don't try to fight it, victims of love
You can't decide it, victims of love, victims of love

Now you've back tracked
You're running away cause it just happened again and you don't want it to end
Trying your best to not let yourself go cold, so cold.
Now you think about the things you thought you wanted to say
But when you open up your mouth it don't come out that way
Are you really gonna throw your heart away?

Everybody's hurt somebody before
Everybody's been hurt by somebody before
You can change but you will always come back for more
Its a game and we are all just victims of love.
Don't try to fight it, victims of love
You can't decide it, victims of love, victims of love
You never listen, I never listen
Now I am thinking of a way that I can make an escape
It's got me caught up in a web and my hearts the prey
Do you really wanna throw your heart away, away, away?

Players...

2009-03-28T00:15:00.001-04:00

Chess, I find, is hardest when one is uncertain which side they are on. It is worse when one must go deeper into the trap set for them to fully escape from it victorious. If one fails and their king falls one in life there is no simple solution, no restart. Why is it that we keep playing when we believe we wil lose...

I Can't Sleep...

2009-03-27T00:40:00.002-04:00

Well, Kuroshitsuji is now finished, at least with the first season. I cannot see them making a second, but who knows right? I thoroughly enjoyed some of the show, especially the interaction between Ciel and Sebastian. The artistry is also stunning. Set in the Victorian Era everything is swimming with detail and patterns. I think this show could be pulled off like Gankutsuou had they done it in that style. I also find it amusing that I discovered the show just before the final episode aired in Japan. I finished the previous episodes just as the final was showing. Irony twinged with amusement. That is all I will say to avoid ruining the plot.
I have not been sleeping well lately. While this is nothing unusual for an insomniac, in this more recent affair insomnia has had nothing to do with it. It is honestly astounding how bound our physical selves are with our mental ones. The interaction of the soul with this physical form we find ourselves in. Something we cannot really measure, no matter how much we may want to. What is it that drives us to solve problems with no answer? Is it the challenge we relish? Or is the quest to understand? Or is it simply the wish to make the pain stop? Like chess we all must move, whether we will or not...

Monochrome Kiss...

2009-03-26T00:27:00.000-04:00

Original:

出会いに色はなくて　モノクロ　吹き抜ける
痛みごと　君　委ねましょう

傷跡　強くなぞる　容赦ない秋がきて
涼しい指　手招くままに

溶けた後のやっかいな　氷みたいな私を
優しくすくって　上唇で遊ぶ

それでもひとつの愛の形を探す
遠くよりも今を結んだ　枯れた瞳は
できればこのまま　包まれて終わりたい
二人で秘めた　淡い肌　月も隠れてる

あれから幾らか　夜　好きにもなりました
依存の海　息も忘れて

夢中のその手前で　生温さだけを残して
引き際の美学　得意げなキス　嫌う

一人にしないで　もう察して　彩めて
どの言葉も　君の部屋では　すり抜けていくの
乱れて　眠って　それ以上を教えて?
笑顔の問いに　迷う吐息　月だけが見てる

次の長い針が　天井に届く頃には
君はもういない　私はもういらない

それでも確かに愛の形を探した
遠くよりも今を結んだ　濡れた瞳は
できればこのまま　包まれて終わりたい
その願いは　夜は　虚しく　朝を連れてくる

優しくて　熱くて　卑怯なキスで

彩ってよ　最後の夜　月が照らしてる

Translation:

The monochrome blows through our colorless encounter.

I shall entrust each of my pains to you

The unforgiving autumn, which forcefully traces my scars, comes
While your cool fingers still beckon me

After I'd melted, you tenderly save
The troublesome, icy me and and toy around with me with a kiss

Nevertheless, I search for a single form of love
Your dried eyes tied it to the present from a time far beyond
If I can, I want to end while shrouded this like
Together, we concealed our pale selves; the moon is hiding, too

How many nights did I come to love since then?
In the sea of dependence, I forget to even breathe

Even with your captivation, you only leave behind a tepid warmth
In the art of knowing when to quit, I dislike your conceited kisses

Don't leave me alone, perceive and color me already
What words will slip out of your room?
Being confused, falling asleep- Will you tell me about things beyond those?
Only the moon is looking at the sighs lost in the questions of smiles

When the next long needle points to the ceiling
You won't be around anymore; I won't need you anymore

Nevertheless, I definitely searched for a form of love
Your teary eyes tied it to the present from a time far beyond
If I can, I want to end while shrouded this like
Your wish and the night bring morning along in vain

Paint it with a tender, passionate, yet cowardly kiss

The moon illuminates our final night

The Ties that Bind Us...

2009-03-25T00:32:00.002-04:00

I'm still depressed so my entries will either be painfully long or terribly short. It can't be helped I suppose. Either way continue on if you are interested enough to bother reading, if not bonsoir. Recently I have come across Kuroshitsuji. It is quite enjoyable. It concerns a young earl and his contract with a demon. It is interesting to note how many stories there are concerning contracts. How many are bound by the laws of an agreement? How many more bound painfully? A truly astounding thought. And how do those once bound end up? Will a miracle save them just before the end? Or shall they scream in the pit as one, eternally bound in the darkness. Ironic that the idea of "hell" is often a pit of fire; light married to darkness even there. Warnings not to play with fire abound, but what is there for the one who has already been burned...

Blind...

2009-03-24T00:24:00.002-04:00

If I could tear you from the ceiling
And guarantee source divine
Rid you of possessions fleeting
Remain your funny valentine

Don’t go and leave me
And please don’t drive me blind
Don’t go and leave me
And please don't drive me blind

If I could tear you from the ceiling
I know the best have tried
I'd fill your every breath with meaning
And find the place we both could hide

Don’t go and leave me
And please don’t drive me blind
Don’t go and leave me
And please don't drive me blind

You don’t believe me
But you do this every time
Please don’t drive me blind
Please don’t drive me blind

I know you’re broken
I know you’re broken
I know you’re broken

If I could tear you from the ceiling
I’d freeze us both in time
And find a brand new way of seeing
Your eyes forever glued to mine.

Don’t go and leave me
And please don’t drive me blind
Don’t go and leave me
And please don’t drive me blind
Please don’t drive me blind
Please don’t drive me blind
Please don’t drive me blind
Please don’t drive me blind

I know you're broken
I know you're broken
I know you're broken

Been a While...

2009-03-23T00:00:00.003-04:00

Been a while. I've been too randomly depressed to bother putting pen to paper, or rather fingers to key. Perhaps one day I'll get over this deranged madness, or perhaps I will sleep cold in the earth--we will see I suppose. Today's brooding concerns the nature of trust. Whole volumes have been written on the subject but none really come close to accurately portraying what it's like. Trust is a peculiar thing. If treated rightly it allows us to form the deepest relationships we have. If mistreated however it can forever damage our ability to form relationships at all. Trust is at once the strongest and most fragile of human capacities. Isn't it ironic...

Seemings...

2009-03-12T00:34:00.000-04:00

It is a strange thing to glance into the mirror and see the back of one's head. I have seen such a picture once, although I do not now remember the artist. But like the man in the picture whose face and hides his expression from us, how surprised we can be when we see ourselves. How often have you seen in yourself and aspect which you despise, or an aspect you knew nothing of? If we are truthful in our answers, it happens every day. At least it does if you are anything like moi. One seems a saint when most they play the devil...

We Will See...

2009-03-11T00:10:00.001-04:00

Another day has come another night is here. The only thing that is certain is that life (and death) is uncertain. Each day is born with its own set of pains and pleasures that affect us in a myriad of ways that would stumble the most elite mathematician. As for moi, who knows which is truer to my nature. We will see what we will see...

Kiss and Control...

2009-03-10T00:44:00.003-04:00

Watch the stars,
Turn you to nothing.
Now blush and smile as they whisk you away.

Part your lips a bit more,
I'll swallow your fear.
I will show you how.
All the bite marks impress
A need to be here,
A need to see.

City lights, like rain,
Dance and explode.
Fall upon debutantes

Reeling from nights that
Kiss and Control,
All of our, broken hearts.

Velvet burns,
The wrists while restraining..
You blushed and smiled,
And said you would stay.

One more time seal my breath,
I'll feed you the sky.
I will show you how.
Steal the glamour from death,
And before you die,
Oh, you should see.

City lights, like rain,
Dance and explode.
Fall upon debutantes

Reeling from nights that
Kiss and Control,
All of our, broken hearts.

Hearrrrrrtssss.
Ourrrrr heartssss.

"We all want to die like movie stars" you said as you jumped from the height of our cutting room floor.
While above us glowing, exploding, our dreams burst forth in light in death.
Hold me and tell me,
"We'll burn like stars. We'll burn as we fall. Watch as the city lights DANCE FOR US!"

City lights, like rain,
Dance and explode.
Fall upon the pain of our lives,

Reeling from nights that
Kiss and Control,
Fall apart, the pain of our lives, has pain.
Dance and explode.

City lights like rain
City lights so caress me
Kiss and Control
All of our, broken hearts...

Hidden...

2009-03-09T00:37:00.001-04:00

Who, I wonder, first taught us to hide. Is it simply a genetic trait programmed into us by our cells? Or is it something more. To be simultaneously afraid of and drawn towards the pitch black darkness of deep night--is that irony or enchantment...

So Little...

2009-03-08T00:03:00.004-05:00

There is so little I actually grasp about this place. So little I understand even now. The truly honest among us can say these words because they have realized them. Is this a sign of maturity or resignation? In the end who can say.
Is this our curse? After biting into the fruit what really did Eve gain besides and intimate knowledge of pain? It was not called the tree of all knowledge, merely the knowledge of good and evil. Caveat Emptor, always read the fine print.
Do you ever wonder if the serpent learned anything as Eve bit into that fruit? Or was he merely another actor upon the stage pointlessly dragged along by time...

Chains...

2009-03-07T00:23:00.003-05:00

A Christmas Carol depicted on of the most memorable and terrifying images in literature: the chain that binds us forged by our own hand. Each of us, no matter how alone we may be, have chains binding us. Sometimes these chains wrap around us so completely that we forget they are even there. We become used to their constant weight upon our burdened limbs. The question never answered by Dickens, is what is holding those chains? On one side stands the victim, the one who helped forge these chains, yet the presence of a chain implies that there is something upon the other side. The answer then becomes different for each of us. Do you know to whom you're chained...

Truth is Strange...

2009-03-06T00:02:00.004-05:00

Mark Twain said that "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is required to stick to possiblilites; truth is not." My version is this: Truth is strange. Life is the strangest thing. You encounter things over and over again, always with a different response if you're anything like moi. Are we simply creatures drawn to the same things?? But what of that we wish to avoid yet end up around inevitable like some serpentine string winding its way around our throats until we choke...

Will She...

2009-03-05T00:05:00.002-05:00

If death I could embrace
in this frozen prison bound
I think perhaps I might
I wish I could be found

A creature born estranged
neither here nor there
the mind become deranged
a wish made in her terror

her eyes of fire burn
her claws thus bathed in blood
and yet she longs to fly
to escape this seething mud

It covers and consumes
bewitches and confounds
will she find her tomb
or will she merely drown...

-Madison Skye

Passion's Killing Floor...

2009-03-04T00:03:00.004-05:00

It's poetry carved in flesh

This beautiful hell of ours
To the deadliest sin we confess
(Tears of joy fill our eyes)
We are safe where disfigured saints
Cry out their prophecies of doom

My heart's a graveyard, baby
And to evil we make love
On our passion's killing floor
In my arms, you won't sleep safely
And of lust we are reborn
On our passion's killing floor

At the first kiss
the seeds of hatred are sewn
Back into darkness we flee
(To tear our hearts out)
We are saved where all faiths fail
Alive inside of our tomb

My heart's a graveyard, baby
And to evil we make love
On our passion's killing floor
In my arms, you won't sleep safely
And of lust we are reborn
On our passion's killing floor

My heart's a graveyard, baby
And to evil we make love
On our passion's killing floor
In my arms, you won't sleep safely
And of lust we are reborn
On our passion's killing floor

(My heart's a graveyard, baby)
My heart's a graveyard, baby
On our passion's killing floor

(In my arms, you won't sleep safely)
And to evil we make love
On our passion's killing floor

Forever more. . .

Thistle Down...

2009-03-03T00:05:00.000-05:00

The man with the thistle down hair and the cold sense of humor reoccurs throughout literature in hundreds of different guises. Yes I am referring to the main villain from Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrel--though I must confess I have yet to finish the volume. I felt the fountain scene was pure genius. I would detail it here but somehow I feel that wouldn't do it justice. You shall just have to read it or not. You decide...

Tangled...

2009-03-02T00:45:00.001-05:00

A friend once gave me a piece of paper that said "Things are bad, send chocolate". From that day to this that phrase has stuck in my mind because of the the obvious truth in the sentiment. We are designed in strange and mysterious ways. Like chocolate can make one feel better, one persons kindness can make up for the cruelty of dozens. The difficult bit can be the journey taken to find that one...

Side by Side...

2009-03-01T00:30:00.001-05:00

It is astounding how hard it is to notice change, especially whilst it occurs. You may have noticed the blog look has changed a bit. I have increased the number of posts per page to, well let's just say many for the sake of simplicity. When placed side by side it is amazing how differently the mind works now and worked before. Ultimately I suppose I shall look back on this post after some years and wonder that I was ever naive enough to write it. Another month is born, rise to greet it, be polite you never know when you'll need it...

Masks...

2009-02-28T00:19:00.001-05:00

Masks are worn to protect or deceive. Do you ever wonder why you wear your own? When you've been through as much as I have you have no need to ask, the two reasons merge into one another. It becomes a maddening attempt to discover sanity or safety or both. And no matter how hard you run, you will never escape yourself.
Our dreams give us hope, our nightmares fear. Why can the same thing bestow such vastly different gifts, or curses? The legend of the Night Mare has been around for centuries. Some vague half unconscious notion of fear stays with us after sleep, whether it takes the form of an Incubus, a shade, an old Hag or any of the seemingly endless varieties of night terrors that torment. Whispers in the dark...

Possession...

2009-02-27T00:05:00.002-05:00

Listen as the wind blows
From across the great divide
Voices trapped in yearning
Memories trapped in time
The night is my companion
And solitude my guide
Would I spend forever here
And not be satisfied

And I would be the one
To hold you down
Kiss you so hard
Ill take your breath away
And after Id wipe away the tears
Just close your eyes dear

Through this world Ive stumbled
So many times betrayed
Trying to find an honest word
To find the truth enslaved
Oh you speak to me in riddles and
You speak to me in rhymes
My body aches to breathe your breath
You words keep me alive

And I would be the one
To hold you down
Kiss you so hard
Ill take your breath away
And after Id wipe away the tears
Just close your eyes dear

Into this night I wander
Its morning that I dread
Another day of knowing of
The path I fear to tread
Oh into the sea of waking dreams
I follow without pride
Nothing stands between us here
And I wont be denied

And I would be the one
To hold you down
Kiss you so hard
Ill take your breath away
And after Id wipe away the tears
Just close your eyes dear

Tentacles of the Heart...

2009-02-26T00:08:00.002-05:00

Why is that one's heart can be tied to the most unworthy ones? Is it something about the human capacity for love? Or is it darker than that?? Something deeper that snakes its way through the entire being. Like tentacles wrapping around prey, the heart can tie the cruelest of bonds. And once these bonds are fastened, what escape is there for the soul the heart belongs to?
If one cuts their heart out and gives it to another, can it be taken back? So often love turns from beauty to horror. Is that the price of imperfect love, or is their more to the story than that? Are any of us truly able to answer that question? We are all biased creatures favoring one thing over another. Even justice is often a charade employed more by the criminal than the victim.
If you stand upon the edge of the knife, to stray but a little is to fall into those waiting arms...

Cemeteries of London...

2009-02-25T00:13:00.002-05:00

At night they would go walking ‘til the breaking of the day,
The morning is for sleeping…
Through the dark streets they go searching to seek God in their own way,
Save the nighttime for your weeping…
Your weeping…

Singing la lalalala la lé…
And the night over London lay.
So we rode down to the river where the Victoria ghosts pray
for their curses to be broken…
We’d go wandering neath the arches where the witches are and they say
There are ghost towns in the ocean…
The ocean…
Singing la lalalala la lé…
And the night over London lay.

God is in the houses and God is in my head… and all the cemeteries in London…
I see God come in my garden, but I don’t know what he said,
For my heart, it wasn’t open…
Not open…

Singing la lalalala la lé…
and the night over London lay.
Singing la lalalala la lé…
There's no light over London today.

Identity...

2009-02-24T00:59:00.002-05:00

At some point we all must either discover or decide who we are. What happens when ones identity is so bound with another's that the lines become blurred without hope of separation? Is one then doomed to be tied to the other eternally? And if one does attempt to sever such ancient bonds, what price must they then pay? When one attempts to escape their captors death often follows. It is of note how little this truth is told to those seeking escape. It would seem to fit reason that one should be warned rather than left to wonder what crime they've committed or what they messed up. The Gods of old will feed on the Soul, for when the Moon rises and Madness dawns one has only the Princes in the Shadows for company and Comfort and they look into the Mirror only to See another's Eyes staring out...

Trained...

2009-02-23T00:38:00.003-05:00

The darkened mood continues and I would be in a dark hole somewhere but, as Rilke said, I must write. So here I sit, typing away. Temple and Arch. What is it about one's constitution that makes them weakened? Is it trained into us from an early age? It is true that some phobias form easily and others take a lot of effort to reinforce. Does the same hold true of weaknesses? And if it does, how does that help?
The heart that sits in barbed wire bears the scars long after the wire is removed, yet it is no longer protected from those around it...

Another Moon Rises, Another Sun Sets...

2009-02-22T00:03:00.001-05:00

Why is it that depression can attack when it is least expected? A day can be going swimmingly and then suddenly the world spins upon its axis deposting one into the shadows. I'm sure some psychology book contains an answer. But I don't know if it is the answer.
Day becomes Night and the Demons in my Dreams begin their Endless Assault upon my Soul...

Points and Gifts...

2009-02-21T00:15:00.001-05:00

What is the bloody point? We all ask the question at one point or another. I just happen to ask it here at the moment as I am utilizing this venue. At the moment all of life seems conspiring to force me into a singular course of actions that I would undoubtedly regret.
In other news I am reading a book called The Gift of Fear. It is very cool. It explains intuition in the best way I have ever heard. Namely instead of a mystical connection, intuition is far more complicated than that. According to this author it is an underground process by which one's brain processes everything and when connections are made we become aware of the answer, but not the reasons for it. I am of course putting it into my words, the author does a better job of explaining it. Fear truly is a gift...

Lost Time...

2009-02-20T00:42:00.002-05:00

I have been lost between realms for a small while and as such have been unable to post. Rather than trying to make up for it, I will simply let it slip through the cracks, forgotton and forlorn.
Been reading lately--finally had the enthusiasm to pick up a book again. A good deal of material by Neal Gaiman has crossed my desk and I must say I find him a very good writer yet sometimes he puzzles me. I suppose that is as it must be--one can really only be a good author if they leave some mystery in their wake. Perhaps some day I'll read some similar post about myself on an innocuous up and coming author's blog whom I am unacquainted with; Oddness incarnate and Deja Vu combining to make my life interesting...

Angel of Darkness...

2009-02-16T00:24:00.003-05:00

Angel of darkness
Angel of darkness
The world is in your hand
But I will fight until the end

Angel of darkness
Angel of darkness
Don't follow your command
But I will fight and I will stand

When darkness falls
Pain is all
The Angel of Darkness
will leave behind
and I will fight

The love is lost
beauty and light
have vanished from
garden of delight

The dreams are gone
midnight has come
the darkness is our new kingdom

Angel of darkness
Angel of darkness
The world is in your hand
But I will fight until the end

Angel of darkness
Angel of darkness
Don't follow your command
But I will fight and I will stand

Hunt goes on
deep in the night
time to pray
down on your knees
you can't hide from the
eternal light
until my last
breath I will figth( I will fight...)

Now realize
the stars they die
darkness has
fallen in paradise

but we'll be strong
and we will fight
against the
creatures of the night

Angel of darkness
Angel of darkness
The world is in your hand
But I will fight until the end

Angel of darkness
Angel of darkness
Don't follow your command
But I will fight and I will stand

Life = Death...

2009-02-15T00:38:00.001-05:00

Do you ever wonder what choice you will make when faced with a certain decision? What is it to be faced with ones own death? Once we enter this world death is our inevitable fate. Everyone must die. Is it a moment of realization? A moment where one decides whom they are and whom they are not? Is it simply the final choice we make before breathing our last? What are we weak things really composed of? Dust, earth, some cosmic spark of life? Life is as much a mystery as death...

Choices...

2009-02-14T00:00:00.002-05:00

Choice. It is the defining factor of our character. The choices we make, the web of decisions that surrounds us can either imprision or free us. There are those who achieve freedom, the break free from the dungeon into the marvelous sunlight. Then again thre are those that fail in the attempt. It is the ones who cling to their prison, the ones who want to be enslaved that no one seems to understand. Is it training? Is it illness? Is it addiction to something no one understands? Who can know.Which one are you? We all have our dungeons, our caves, those dark realms we find ourselves in. What choice do we make when we realize it...

How is It...

2009-02-13T00:08:00.003-05:00

How is it that the same one can cause both pleasure and pain? We hurt those we love, but why? Is it that pain must walk hand in hand with pleasure? Or is it that we would be unable to understand one without the other. Does Pain court Pleasure in the dark watches of the night...

Ponder...

2009-02-12T00:16:00.002-05:00

Bonsoir. Once again I sit pondering--how often do I do this I wonder. I must brood endlessly, at least enough to annoy those around me. Yet through all of this thought, and occasional action, what really is solved? I am always left with questions. Questions that roam endlessly throughout my brain. What is it to sit up at night thinking of how to cease insomnia? Is it madness perhaps? Insanity? And yes, they are two very different things. What we really know is so little. Even the smartest one of us is merely a child as far as the cosmos are concerned. Lucifer was an angel, what did he end up lord and master of? A bunch of thugs and some rooms full of candles. The knife is poised, does it dare drop...

Trained...

2009-02-11T00:38:00.004-05:00

When the villain gives the knife to the victim, it is because they have trained them to use it against their enemies. Why is it that even when the weapon is given one obeys and can find comfort in their enemy? Clinging to the shadows even when the light offers freedom. Yet the way is hard and the path is thorny. What secrets are shared in the darkness...

Ghosts...

2009-02-10T00:06:00.002-05:00

Is the ghosts of the past that haunt us, or is it rather our own psyche refusing to let go of the events of yesterday for various reasons? Perhaps it is some futile attempt to prove that what occurs matters. In a world where murders go unpunished, where pain is inevitable we want to believe that the past has some lasting important besides the scars it imparts. My soul wanders and how it fares I do not know, but do I care...

Nouveau...

2009-02-09T00:02:00.000-05:00

It seems I keep turning leaves over again and again. Who knows what the future holds for a phoenix who is purified by fire...

-MS

Darkangel Scars...

2009-02-08T00:54:00.001-05:00

I am an angel of darkness
Abhorrent to those who are frail
The strength inside me is my will to believe
In myself, with no self-betrayal

My force is my own preservation
My destiny mine to control
I don't live my life to be judged by anyone
Surviving intact is my role

Lost time is never found again
Screaming through my life of speed at insanity, mach ten
I utilize the life I've been given
Or else it's as if I've never been

I take pains to make my presence known
If it's a negative impression then I'll take the blame alone
I have no regrets and I call my life my own
I have no time for the words left in stone

I acknowledge only one thing
My own authority
Answering to no one, I leave no trace of pity
My independence rules my life

I can't help what you are
For this I won't apologize
Because I leave scars!!
I promise you agony

If you attempt to intervene
Just pay attention to yourself, you're barely existing
I'm thriving on the life I lead
A veteran of human wars

For this I won't apologize
Because I leave scars!!

I practice angelic darkness
My convictions keep wolves from my door
I know what it means to have someone tamper with my dreams
Deflowering my essence, my core

I once sought no recrimination
But now I seek the price be paid
Forever wary, always guarded against anyone
Who's mistaken me for easy prey

Defeatist attitudes are only in vain
As you wonder of my species must I really be explained?
Realize now that I'm ingrained
Knowingly, forever on your brain

Nemeses falter in their plebian ways
Employing methods to usurp my reign, my inner maze
Seeking clues to uncover the clever turn of phrase
Salient words are found amidst the haze

A mercenary I may be, I tend to feel I'm not
My only need is to maintain my lot
I have a lust for life that stands to be my legacy
I'm proud to say, "with my life, I am free"

To leave a mark, necessity, my memory redeemed
I suffer not from lack of self-esteem
Someday, my confidence will be a mass contagion
I assure you this is no self-exaltation

I cicatrize myself upon your mind
You won't forget my actions as you will find
I'm lord and master
Of my own future!!

I am the darkest of angels!!
Indomitable in my will to succeed
I have a goal to ascertain
Entrenching myself upon your brain

These words I've bled upon this page
Have come from inside, how quickly I've aged
My innocence has died and was buried long ago
Eternally joined with a part of my soul

The weak of heart need not apply
I admit they're not for all my caffeinated ways of life
Those who oppose me will end in bitter strife
Defacing human minds until I die

Those with open minds will benefit from my vows
A self-betrothal where I pay no heed to sacred cows

Further discussion time will not allow
Until we meet again, I'll take my bow
You’ll always remember me...

Pawns or Kings...

2009-02-07T00:22:00.001-05:00

Another day where the vines of life climb up as if to choke us. In this realm it is not those who see that are endangered but those who are unaware of what they see. How many of us are able to look up at the sky without wonder? And how easily we find anything to worship. Strange isn't it? That beings as fickle as we are desire something to worship-even if it is only ourselves. We are pawns or kings a man once said...

A Poll...

2009-02-06T11:08:00.004-05:00

Yes I know. I'm posting...during the...day. What can I say, I'm up late. Anyways to the point. I attempted to do something new-mainly there was something to the right that resembled a poll. Unfortunately Blogger didn't to want to allow me to fix it. So, as I still want votes I'm going to post it here. If you want to vote, comment with the letter of your vote OR your selection. Whichever.
Help Me Define My Blog:

A) Too dark, randomly perverse...
B) I must meet your decorator...
C) Dark yet beauteous, a little scary...
D) Apathetic: why do I care...
E) Too many facets, the PAIN...

Deal with the Devil...

2009-02-06T00:40:00.002-05:00

An Archangel in bondage
Bediademed, souled
With a murder of ravens
But no less to behold
Abandoned by Heaven
To the dead, dark and past
I not alone as I pace with a fiery madness
Sent by the pale beams of a guiltless moon

So came the night
Its obsidian light
"In Death's bed I have lain
Paying lip-service to shame

From temptation's peak we will see
The world unfurled at last
Now the wolves of time who stalk Mankind
Shall be as one in grim repast

Commemorating sickle moons
The pack are poised to reap
A scythe of white roses in bloom
Whose twisted thorns will keep
A crown upon a dead man
Daylights crucified in sleep

Alone as a stone cold altar
The castle and its keep
Like faerytale dominion rose
A widow to the snow peaks

Was it the cry of a wolf
That broke the silver thread of enchanted thoughts?
Of Her life as a mere reflection
(As the moon's in narrow windows caught)
That opened like dark eyelids on
The sigh of the woods that the wind fell upon

Like a Siren weaving song
From the lilt of choirs choking
Where the vengeful dead
Belong

She swept from ebon towers at the hour of Mars
'Neath a star-inwoven sky latticed by scars
To unbind knotted reins that kept in canter, despair
Shod on melancholy, fleet to sanctuary there,
In netherglades where onyx idols stared

Was it the Kiss of the mist
That peopled the air with the prowess of absinthe?
Lost souls begging resurrection
From Gods upon their forest plinths
Whose epitaphs read of reascending to win
Remission from despair, from sin

the sorceress prayed
To Death, to rend the slender veil
That Ancient Ones might rise again

Resplendent
In pendants
A demon, bewinged, bedight
prowled her circle seeking entry to run
An arctic tongue upon Her

If blood is what thou carves, foul fiend
I will yield myself to thee
If thou wouldst draw a veil for Me
O'er lengthening scars of age and grief

As the Demon slavered foetid vows
And bore His prey away
In talons itching to perpetrate
The nausea of eternal rape
The Sorceress screaming in His grasp
would rot.
Alone
Insane.
On the twisted nails of trust...