Clutching The Darkness

Chapter 19: Tartarus

The town had become covered in increasing darkness, as the Sun was slowly dying out. The once copper light had become a fluttering ember in the void of Noblesville. And to adhere to the disparity light, the town had come alive once more. The parasites still swarmed and sucked away the oxygen in the grass. Infrastructure: lights, curbs, parking spaces, roads, bushes, everything had become twisted and malformed.

All a dastardly abomination, all rooted from my perceptions. And I wasn't sure why I thought or saw the things the way I did. I couldn't articulate the views that well, all I knew was that somewhere in the recess of my mind, I saw the town in this way.

To light my way through the hell, the ground had started to crack and let out flows of magma and lava. Some streams branching out from the river Styx had started to flow into the lake of fire. Pops and sizzles and the horrific smell of sulfur, ash and other gases started to pollute the already oxygen deprived air.

I groaned and heaved my way across the landscape, encountering cars molted down into fiery burial sites. Weird, I thought, but I knew there was a nuanced meaning behind it. The lepers and transmutants stalked the scorched earth, their bodies flinging about like desolate beings.

They had no value to them any more. Simply soulless. But I knew that their human counterparts were the same, just mindless zombies with their selfishness. Sure, there could have been the optimistic homeless and perhaps the sympathetic layman, but none were ever around when I needed help.

So, I still carried with me hesitant fear, but that did not dismay my deranged mind. I saw obstacles. I saw things capable of being killed. Of being crushed and cracked at the whim of my hands. And I craved for the satisfaction that it would bring me. Maybe it was from the heaving or perhaps it was from my sense of excitement, but drool began to run down my maw.

I leapt at a transmutant, barely giving him enough time to deflect the strike. His scales cushioned the blow of a bat, but many of them flew off like cracked shingles from a demolished house. It growled in hunger and pain, before I shattered its teeth in. "Oh, you make such a splendid song! Keep singing! KEEP SINGING HAHA!".

So I made him sing until his voice died out. Killing them with a blunt object wasn't as effective as stabbing them through the eyes, but I had to work with what I had. And that just makes it more fun! Part of me wished it weren't.

I wanted to go home. To lie in bed. To just say goodnight to all the preoccupations I always skewered myself with. To just momentarily forget the struggles, the stresses. Not have to worry about an economic class. Not dread meeting any of my friends. But I knew I was beyond that now. My life had transcended into a living nightmare.

But even to cling onto that naive notion of sleeping away my problems, I kept doing so to protect my sanity. The duct tape holding my mental state was fraying and quickly losing its adhesive. Or maybe it was already gone. I wasn't sure, how could I be? The Sun will go down. I had an objective, an ideal to rid myself of my worries. I no longer had to worry about how I appeared to others. How others thought of me. Those others were mostly dead. Haha...hehe....

"Peace will reach you when it's all gone. Peace for us both. Remind yourself of that Calidris. You have done superb, but do not fall into your own conceit. That could kill you prematurely, and a grave tragedy that would be."

I'M SO HAPPY TO SEE WHAT'S NEXT! OOOH, maybe there'll be time to make a slaughterhouse! I liiiiikeee DIE HARD! IT'S A GOOD MOVIE. AH, MOVIES! YES, I'LL EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE SO I CAN HAVE THE MOVIES TO MYSELF! HAHAHA! The only sounds I hear in my head are that of a voice that sounds like me and a laughter that laughs at my dire circumstances. AH! Can duct tape survive lava? Let's try it out!

It burned. It definitely did. But none of those burns ached me more than the time my tongue and cheek had been bored through with Volca's— Nasima's power. I had become used to the pain, at least that's what I told myself. After the suffering, I would just soothe myself either way. No time to mope, no time to cry. Just onward movement. I coughed up a bit of blood on the way; the poison wasn't still done attacking my system. Smooth hands on my shoulders like painkillers to my body's injuries.

I was beginning to reach a clearing from the buildings, when I found myself staring at a large cemetery. I knew that in the real world, the original reality, there was no cemetery in Noblesville this close to the university. So, this was most likely a projection of Iustitia's sight.

Something was off though, as I approached the tombstones, I noticed that they were organized in columns. Six of them, with the final sixth separated away from the others.

In each column, a name was put over all the headstones in the same column, and astonishingly, I saw some of those chess pieces from before. Each column had twenty-nine graves; except the fifth and sixth row, but the names that were put in each headstone were scratched out. Even more curiously, each column seemed to have the same name, well atleast same length of the name.

The first column contained pawns littered over each grave. At the base of the stone, lied the corpse of a bellbird.

The second column contained bishops, with the bodies of hummingbirds strewn about.

The third had rooks, coupled with the cadavers of rainbow-colored lorikeets.

The fourth was dotted with pieces of the knight buried under the figures of a pigeon.

The fifth column had twenty-eight graves, all of them having the piece of a queen stationed under the headstone alongside the body of a Zenaida dove.

The sixth column had twenty-eight graves as well, each sporting the king piece. Nothing else.

I hadn't noticed it before, but there was another grave near the sixth column, separated away from the row by iron fences closing in on the grave. It was the only tomb with a legible name: B I L L Y. It was aged twelve years. The corpse of a cockatoo laid at the bottom.

But that didn't make sense. Billy didn't get to live that long to begin with. Why would it depict him as if he lived for twelve years, is a mystery I didn't have a rational answer for.

I left the graveyard with more questions than answers. With more insatiable humor and bloodlust. Kill...want to kill something. I'm so FUCKING bored, I want a movie...HAHA, LET'S MAKE A SNUFF FILM!

Something bothered me though. At the moment I began to think about movies, I was unable to think of titles. At most I could remember a blurry mental image of different movie scenes but I couldn't splice away the memory for its details of time, emotion or any other identifying factors.

I was losing all semblance of the only thing I ever truly found amusing: films. Amidst my madness, I frowned.