Gothic

by Philip Fracassi

This close, he can smell her vitality, the length of her lifespan. So much time, he thinks, and sour melancholy washes over him.

Streetlights dot the veins of avenues and streets below, fuzzy as underwater stars in a gloomy ocean teeming with life.

The trick of a mirror facing a mirror. The visual representation of the belittling of self.

“You need to modernize… keep up with the times… If you don’t, this world will step right over you like you’re a dying animal, then just keep on going, leaving you behind to bleed out.”

Personally, as he hobbles into middle-age, he prefers to read “quieter” tales from the horror genre. The historical pieces. The mysteries.

At some point he starts to weep, but for the life of him can’t remember when it started, or if it is ever going to stop.

For a moment—probably caused by a trick of the dark and shadowed room—she feels a pang of fear at his approach. A feeling horribly akin to revulsion. It’s the speed with which he’d suddenly moved, after being so stagnant there in the dark, like a creature who had been lurking and has now sprung toward her, ready to clutch her tight in its long, scaly arms…

But his creation betrayed him, sinister and secret were the words, the phrases, the flow of the plot. It was a locked box. A mystery his tired—stressed, old, worthless—mind could not solve.

A month. He lets the word—the idea as a structure of space-time—bounce around in his head. He sees it as a dark cube floating in hazy gray ether. It seems so small, and yet it ticks. From deep inside that black cube comes a soft, successive, ticking sound.

Diana stands in the cold, the slate gray sky matching the grim coloring of the large mausoleum rising from the earth before her, the limestone weathered to a runny charcoal, the apex guarded by a marble-cut angel, sword raised as a symbol of defense, or vengeance.

Another stone for her to speak to, another placard to ask for guidance.

The window’s wavering old glass is stained a pale rose, giving the room a surreal tint, the stone walls and small benches stained the color of sin.

She has no wish to share the dark with the dead.

Diana leans back against the rough, cool wall, the dull brown illumination giving the room a feeling of timelessness, of ancient memories ground deep into the stones that surround her, resting heavily in the earth—memories waiting to be shared, voices wanting to be heard. She can almost hear the screams coming from inside the tomb before her, echoes of a dark history that will never see the light, along with an artifact bequeathed to her like a curse, a trap disguised as an heirloom. The altar. An unholy grail dripping with the blood of her family name.

Or sometimes, in the Montresor search for truth, a form of persuasion known only to the women in her ancestral line. A form of old magic taught to her as a child, a magic that changed her eyes forever, twined to a rare skill she has long-since perfected. Part hypnosis, part persuasion. Always effective.

The ancient horror that is her burden to avenge.

These last grim thoughts dissolve along with the last of his hope as the final spark of his brain is snuffed out like a candle. His eyes roll into his head, his weary heart pumps the last drops of his life onto the stone, where it is consumed.

The scribe looks down at his trembling hands, at the shifting blackness of the stone beneath his pale skin, angry as a storm beneath the parchment, the voices telling his fragile mind all the horrible, grotesque, painful ways he can end his own life. If not this very night, then soon. Once the work is complete.

the diet of a mad occultist gave him teeth to match a dark heart, twisted as a dead Juniper tree.

To live in what lies beyond, eternally entangling his spirit with madness.

The rooftop has collapsed onto the corpses—the only burial they will receive.

The stone will be part of a new shape soon, one designed by a very select group of craftsmen, a guild of the dark arts who worship the same God as he does, as Croce had, when of this earth. The Dark One. The Mighty Serpent.

Federico Croce is nowhere on this plane of existence. The transfiguration is complete.

It’s a hard world, and you have to take whatever joy it offers, accept it with gratitude, and hold onto it tight.

My final resting place, he thinks morbidly. But that’s what loss does, he figures: brings on morbid thoughts. Loss, death, the infinite beyond. The end of all things.

The work is so delicate, so smooth, that it seems to almost ripple, as if the intertwined vines of ivy are sliding just below a thin skin, like a dense cluster of snakes roiling beneath the surface of an oil slick.

Her face is as forlorn as a small child waiting for her parents to return after being left at the side of a deserted road, watching as the speeding car becomes a puff of brown dust in the distance, not yet realizing she’s been forever abandoned.

He’s whimpering as he goes, scolding himself in wet, harsh whispers. Had Sarah wakened, she might have asked him why he was crawling on all fours. If so, he would have answered: Because that’s what bad dogs do.

And so, for a while, they stand before the painting, side-by-side, saying nothing; temporarily allowing their deceptions and motivations to abate, to flow endlessly through yellowed corridors toward a mysterious, unseeable, end.

She can almost feel the stomach-emptying sensation you get when a ship lolls on a rogue wave, an unsteadiness which pervades throughout your body even after you reach dry ground, long after the rocking stops.

As he sits there, smiling and sipping cabernet sauvignon, watching the women work, he’s surprised to find himself wondering what it would be like to see their insides.

Dark thoughts tumble and toss like an angry sea, his mind caught within a savage storm in full gale. A deep, dangerous thunder rumbles ominously, deep in his brain, reverberating inside his head as if it were an echo chamber.

When you’d been with someone as long as they’d been, emotions became palpable things that existed in the ether, physical energy that could hurt, anger, or comfort. He’d countered her anger energy with a puff of comfort, and the two feelings had meshed gracefully together to form inconsequential. Soon, it would dissipate altogether into forgotten, like everything else.

As if it sheltered a beating heart born from a distant, gaseous star.

Sarah looks up sharply, unaware she’d been zoning out, lost in a tumultuous sea of black thoughts, the tiny boat of her sanity tossed amongst waves jagged as broken glass.

And, so it was, that forgiveness became the norm. The answer to male violence. A flawed solution engrained into her since childhood, her past filled with a history of backing down, of enabling bad behavior.

What is writing if not the metaphorical giving of one’s blood, after all? Isn’t this just more of the same?

Eager to devour. She can sense its desire. Its hunger.

It disgusts her. It shames her. It’s as if she is being baptized in the river Styx by the Ferryman, blind eyes replacing his hollow furnaces of fire, and she cries out for mercy.

Flashes of her life—a child, a teenager in love, her parents, Violet as an adult, visiting her in old age, her husband holding her close—erupt in her brain, images of a life lived, of the life she will never live.

Like they’d entered a place where only the two of them exist: the two of them, and a writhing black mountain of things unspoken.

all the mundane things that emerge in the lives of two people who share an existence, a life.

She smiles again, more easily this time, and Ben notices how beautiful she is, how the combination of vibrant youth and deep-seated pain birthed something new in her features; how it darkened her eyes, gave her soft youth the polish of experience. He wants, in that moment, to do nothing but take care of her. To protect her, help her in any way he can, any way she wished.

He decides he’ll just wait a bit. Stay with her. For now, they’ll stay still, and let the future come to them. Beneath the dim circle of light inside the dark apartment, they sit together in a companionable, if troubled, silence. Outside, the great chamber of night eclipses their world, oblivious to the menace which runs swiftly through its black halls, rides the wind to points far and wide, aiming for distant horizons.

A low hum fills the room, and the stone of the desk brightens to a dizzying, translucent blue, a window to a world no human can ever look upon and still retain their sanity, their humanity. From deep below, as if rising from the bottom of a great sea, something is rising toward the surface. A leviathan emerging from the depths of a different world, an alternate plane of existence.