At Stone Hill, a star stares hard through nets and window grime. I can feel its insistent gaze and know it is light that has travelled over the most hideous emptiness, a wave, a particle, a loop. And that light is piercing the lens of my eye, and hitting my retina and bouncing back through the lens, and through the dirty pain, back out across the sky all the way to the hard surface of the star.
Horror is the road to the source; a beginning where all rivers secretly recede to, slipping under stones and down cracks into caves and caverns waiting for you to come back.
Horror takes your mind off things, horror creeps out of you in a black mass. Insect legs graze your elbow and flick back into your side before you can turn to look.
With Horror, the source is always ahead of you, still to come. You walk towards it in the shade of your impending arrival. Spookily you float distracted like those bad tempered ghosts that only your lack of belief keep at bay.
Horror is the road to the source.
You hack yourself a meaty gash for a mirror, and hobble to shadows on wooden stumps carved from fetishes.
I can’t believe they say it’s going to rain tomorrow. It’s been so lovely for so long, I won’t believe that we will see clouds again. This blue goes on forever and at night it swallows up the universe. Clouds will have such a very long way to come, Rachel.
Rachel is passing through the cycle of dreams. Dull everyday dreams, clockwork proceedings, brother to digestion and cousin to breathing. She sails with putty faced characters and wonders looking for something and then a boy friend she remembers with fondness… But there is one thing interesting about Rachel’s dreams, Rachel has an inhabitant leeching her dreaming habits, perhaps the first ever in evolution to discover this niche to parasite.
Eyeballs flutter under lids, the left leg kicks once, a murmur then the night sequence begins. Sorting down the day, cross-referencing files, worries, drives. So much energy built up each day. An office block –Aunt Elma – wrong shoes - pyjama – toilet will not flush. Later a ride in a car with Dear Old Alfred. Or was it Blair Patterson from 4th floor, Systems. Then it happens; from the corner of her eye she sees it. The DEER is here. Wherever she is in her dreams, it can appear: gentle and uninterested, stepping from glade to open plan offices, turning away from a bus stop or behind the air hostess. It is always incongruous because it is never part of the developing scenario, and then it is gone, leaving its little red footprints.
Rachel started to mention this night presence in her weekly visits to her shrink. She is always tired, and is loosing weight. Could she be anaemic? Her therapist does not seem to think much of it, he is more interested in why Rachel had such difficulty relaxing in public spaces, and why she is becoming obsessed with the thought that she is sick and carrying an infection.
She woke to the flat fizz of drizzle and the sound of cars parting long puddles. She has been pondering it through the evening, and has resolved finally to change her therapist. After being fobbed off for so long trying to get him to discuss her dream, when she finally manages to get him to listen, the very next week he claims to have started to have the same dream as well.
When something truly violent happens to you, you don’t believe it. So your hand reaches down to confirm all is well and is surprised when it comes upon protruding bone fragments garlanding the polished chrome spike jutting, wet from your pelvis.
Strange when you finally know so surely that you are going to die, that all life’s anxiety evaporates and your desire for sex returns.
In the mind of the blood sacrifice clear thoughts tremble. I am a moon ship silver with sweat and I will lead you. Blood will tap upon abattoir tiles and run through cracks and tumble from goblets. Lights will burst out of the offered cranium and soak the ancient stone controls. Inside the red flower coat, thorns will softly enter till white radiance takes over from hurt.
On a soaked rock, the columns under which we took shade cast their shadow.