Black Wings: A Post-Modern Vision Quest

By: Isobelle Fox
Copyright FASPIII 2004

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Diary of Shell:

********

Time:
A river without end,
Flowing ceaselessly
To and from nothingness;

Though it seems we are
Its passengers,
We are in fact its pilots,
Without whom it has no guidance,
And nothing to give it shape

********

Nothing is simple anymore, but I’m not sure whether it is I or the times that have changed. Or both.

Perhaps the convergence, the ordinary collision that most people experience every day- with other people, with the world, with themselves- has begun to move in reverse for me. I think I am getting farther away from the things that matter......or closer- maybe so close that I cannot discern the difference anymore.

I am out of my depth to be sure. I have been all of my life.

I think there is something written in my genes, on the very back of my eyes, in the profusion of cells amongst the nerve fibers there- which I cannot explore, but which I am certain is quite important. Despite my efforts to grasp its content, it eludes me, like the image that hides behind the reflection in a mirror, the true image which is distorted and covered by a poor imitation of the viewer.

I am of the mind that it may well be the key to changing the order of events that have brought me here to this point. But what then?

Its all a hazy mess now, but I seem to remember first becoming aware of all of this in a dream. It must have been a dream, though I do not recall having actually awoken from it.

In that dream, I was someone else. I saw through her eyes, I felt her heart beat. She was older than I am, far older, though one could not tell by looking, and she remembered me (as I had always been), watched me in her reflection, crystallized in rainwater.

She wrote something on a piece of yellow paper and told me- This Is For You. But You Must Not Read It Yet. It Can Only Be Read When The Time Is Right. And then she was gone, leaving me standing in a deserted house, old, decrepit, the rain pouring through holes in the ceiling, through the broken and destitute frames of windows that looked out on nothing.

I was myself again, (as I am now). I was holding a feather. It belonged to her; it was the message, the yellow paper, but it had changed.

Now, when I think about it, about everything that’s happened, I see myself walking in circles, downwards or upwards, along the helix of this hidden matter, every step carrying me not towards my destination, but over it, along it. And all the while the words to a song I cannot name keep repeating over and over and over and over again in my head.

"You cannot catch her, you cannot catch her, watch her fly away..."

It makes me blind with anger sometimes. To be there, and not to be there, to hear the words and see the signs, unable all the while to reflect upon them or to recall them later.

I keep seeing the symbol too: Two concentric circles and an arrow. Every time I close my eyes, there it is. Someone must know the meaning of it.

So now, I am walking. Searching. If I walk long enough, I will find her, or him, or it. Whatever.

At night I sleep in abandoned buildings or under trees, in the shadows with whom I share a certain kinship. I feel that I am getting closer every day. Or farther away. Or both. But I cannot stop now. The river has captured me, and in its undertow I am being carried, though towards what I cannot say for sure.

********

At the center of all things,
There is a silence so profound
That it cannot be borne

It is the silence of God
And Creation is the chaos
With which we fight it

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Chapter One:

********

And Mammon approached the Twins,
Laying His hands upon their foreheads,
And uttering, with a smile:
"Fruitful, indeed."

********

Shell had been walking for weeks when he came to the house on the corner of Greene and Davis Street.

Worn and ragged, he was the picture of a man in the last extreme- his tattered black trench-coat soaked through; his ancient red leather back-pack, full of his few remaining worldly possessions, torn and tattered; his eyes sunken deep in a malnourished face, haunted and world-weary.

He was a spectacle, but he never the less went largely unnoticed everywhere his travels took him, seeming to shrink into obscurity and shadow. And today, beneath the weight of the rain and the oppressive grey clouds, in the midst of such ruins as are the battlements of Greene and Davis, the image of this broken man was at home so much so that Shell was virtually invisible. Not that anyone was watching.

Row after row of houses in various states of morose decay, their doors hanging loosely from rusted hinges, windows shattered, paint peeling, had greeted him as he proceeded towards his destination. No longer entirely certain what force it was that drove him on, he placed one foot mechanically before the other.

Was it will?

No, Shell thought, my will ceased its pleading days ago.

He had watched the faded numbers on the crumbling curb side now for two blocks as they descended, knowing that soon he would stand before his destination. And finally, finally, he was here: 1242 Greene. Right on the corner, with the hulking corpse of a dead oak leering across the weed-choked lawn, and the porch-eave in a shambles.

It was just as he remembered from the dreams (if that’s what they were). He was glad to be here. The search was over.

From somewhere nearby, in the darkness of another abandoned house, there came the threatening growl of a feral dog, mad perhaps with hunger. The sounds of its desperation bespoke foaming rage, the gnashing of unseen teeth. It must have been a sickening vision of bones and fur. But Shell didn’t see it. He didn’t even hear it. He was standing ankle deep in a cold puddle at the edge of the side walk, his mouth hanging dumbly open, staring into the grotesque death's-head image that 1242 Greene proffered.

Two black, sightless eye sockets full of cracked glass, and a toothless maw yawning widely.

Slowly he gathered himself and stepped over the curb onto the sidewalk, and over the sidewalk onto the lawn. Closer now, he was sure he could feel the house breathing, the wind whistling chromatically through the halls and in and out of holes in its roof and walls, brushing against him gently as it swept in a dank draft out of the front door. Or maybe it was his imagination. The rain was falling more lightly and there was really very little wind, after all.

A few more steps and he was at the door, looking in. Over the threshold, now. Inside.

Darkness, unaided by the remaining sheets of dirt covered glass in the windows. An overturned chair. Mud on the exposed wood of the floors.

On the west side of the living room, into which he had stepped, there was a hallway full of dusty grey light with a doorway on the right side and another at the end. The light came from this last door which stood open, revealing a small part of the room beyond.

On the east side, the entrance to another room, and stepping around the corner, a kitchen, and a short hall with another door, perhaps a bathroom, perhaps a closet. Stay away from there, Shell though, but he wasn’t sure why.

The rain was dribbling in a puddle on the kitchen floor, eating a hole in the curled linoleum. There were the paw prints of several different animals here and there, among them rats.

The sound of the rain dripping onto the floor was too much, its rhythm disturbing, and Shell retreated back into the living room.

He had thought he would spend the night here, but he was beginning to have doubts. It wasn’t just the state of the place, which, all told, was no worse than a dozen other hovels he had squatted in over the last month. It was the atmosphere.

This was a powerful place. That was why she had Dreamed him here, he thought. Such places were necessary, their inherent energy making the Dreaming possible. But while a few of the locations Shell had seen were naturally endowed, others were receptive because they had been made that way: churches, graveyards, and their like, all saturated with the psychic residue of profound sorrow or living faith. And in some cases, by the lingering shock of something horrible.

He could feel it, humming quietly in the drafts from down that hall, from the rafters overhead in the attic. It was even in the walls of the room where he stood. But it was a low resonance. Like a whisper.

Taking a step towards the hall, Shell scratched at his unshaven face and frowned.

Stronger there.

Another few steps and he stood looking down the narrow confine, at the lazy play of debris in the churning air, in the light from the bedroom at the end. The dust motes seemed to move in a deliberate but indecipherable dance. My imagination again, he thought. But no, there was something to it. Indistinct, but real none the less. Suppressing a growing urge to turn and leave as quickly as possible, Shell drew a deep breath and summoned his courage.

Everywhere I’ve been, he told himself, in her Wake, travelling in her foot steps, I have found another piece of the puzzle. There is one here as well, in the heart of this place, waiting for me. I must be strong.

And so, resolved as much as possible, he took a few steps towards the door at the end of the hallway, and was about to enter the little swirls of dust when the entire world went black and he felt, just for an instant, the floor crashing against his knees.

A moment later, and still all was blackness, but Shell found himself conscious, and felt with his hands across the wooden floorboards, across pieces of rotting carpet where they still adhered.

I’ve gone blind, he thought. Oh, God, I’ve gone blind.

But no. After a moment, when his thoughts had cleared a little, Shell noticed something: there seemed to be a sense of dimension and proportion to the darkness, as though it merely adorned the walls of some large space. And as the certainty of this grew in the back of his mind, he began to look harder, seeking something tangible.

His efforts were rewarded, but at first what he discerned was meager, and formless. In the distance, or so it seemed, there was merely a play of motion, the blackness of one part of the void somehow differentiated from the rest. It was swirling, twisting, like a furious vortex. It was..

It was... swarming. And it was getting closer, rapidly.

Even if there had been time to react, there was nowhere to go, nothing that could be done.

As the tempest reached and enveloped him, Shell felt nothing, but from the depths around him there suddenly flashed such a managerie of horror that he could not even scream.

Nightmare images rushing forward from out of the shadows, bombarding his minds eye: broken bodies, impaled on sharp edges, their convulsions of suffering beyond imagination, and with it a chorus of voices crying out in agony from all around him, among them frightened whispers and pleadings. But above it all, there was growing more clearly every moment, the image of a great blue eye, and the sound of laughter, full throated laughter churning amongst and adhering to the sounds of dying gasps and ripping flesh, all of it slowly transforming into a horrible metallic scraping.

Shell was clawing his way across the floor, unsure of whether he was going deeper into the room at the end of the hallway or back towards the living room. He could no longer breath in his panic and was growing faint, but terror drove him on in a pathetic scramble to find an exit from the influence of the assault.

Weaker and weaker he grew as his lungs burned for air, his chest heaving, his own rattled attempts to draw a breath finally becoming alarmingly loud and cutting through the din of laughter and screaming and scraping.

And then there was nothing.

When Shell awoke, the light in the little bedroom was brighter than it had been. The storm outside had broken and, he thought, the quality of that light, such as it was, probably meant that the evening was drawing towards its close.

For a moment he didn’t move. He was afraid to. But slowly he rolled over so that the ceiling became the east wall, the light from the window pane on the south wall shining across it, and there he saw the message, written in something dark upon its yellowed surface. It simply said:

Exodus 3:5

And beneath it was painted a pair of wings.

Shell made haste in leaving the house, and spent the night in a metal shed two blocks away with his trench-coat for a blanket and his back-pack for a pillow. Surpassingly he didn’t have nightmares. Instead he dreamed that he was standing on edge of a large valley, looking down into it, where the wind was sweeping ceaselessly over a smooth, polished surface of stone. It felt like he was waiting for something to happen, something to unfold there in the valley, but it never did.

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Shell would never know exactly where it was he had been that day. He would remember the address, and he could have found his way back, had there been a reason to, or had he the courage. But, had he asked someone about the house itself, he would have gotten no useful response as it wasn’t a place anyone knew about or cared about, and what had transpired there was lost to time.

That someone had died there, by great violence, he had no doubt. It was even possible that there had been more than one death. And of the fact that at least one of the souls that remained there, trapped in that darkness, seething in its own venom, was itself a killer, there was also little doubt.

But the essence of the place, what it really was, would remain a mystery.

It didn’t matter to Shell. It was the mystery within the mystery that mattered. And now he carried that, written down in his tired old diary, like a holy relic.

Exodus 3:5

That was the message.