It had been another to long night alone. Only the music from a old 1.2 ghz machine playing softly from speakers that had been bought from a yard sale. Old metal purred out from them still lighting me up inside like a christmas tree on speed. My fingers were twitching, unable to hold still for a moment. Mania is a hard master, you feel whipped from the inside sometimes. Sullen, dark, and yet to damn full of energy to hold a thought for more than a moment. It’s my fucking cross to bear though. Might not seem like much from the outside, from the inside though it can be hell most of all when your emotions seem like they are out of your grasp to control.
I looked around the old room. Same old walls painted white, same little bed, and beautiful old desk. Memories of a lifetime. Love, hate, dispair, most of all dispair. More love would have been nice but what the fuck can you do when you are misfit and outcast. I guess that going out and fighting could be one thing. I pulled back though and kept clear of the world. That place out there past the fence, down the hill where people met and mingled. Who looked at those like me as freaks.
I pulled the old broken down chair out from the desk and sat down, my bare legs sticking under it, my ass sweaty and sticking to the black cutoffs. My desk had once been tidy, always neat and clean. That was before the headache. The one that felt like it had blown the top of my head off. Like vomiting painful light, and I had vomited on the floor. Woke in the remains of my supper.
It wasn’t more than a week later i’d been commited to a mental hospital. Kept there for two weeks. The neighbors said that they had found me walking down the road nude, bruised, talking about cat women and strange men in long coats who had taken me away from Earth to another much more peaceful world. I didn’t remember any of it.
That was almost a year ago now. The once clean as a pin house that i’d lived in was a huge mess. I ate from plastic dishes, where once it had been the fine bowls and plates that my parents had left behind when they had passed away just a few days apart. Massive heart attacks. Once I had taken that as truth. Now I knew it was a lie and doubted very much that the old man had even passed on. Their ashes were high up in my closet in boxes, not urns. They had not wanted them. It would be just a waste of money that in the end would help me survive. We three had agreed. I’d wept at first but after being commited the feeling that they were alive someplace, or even when rolled in the back of my mind like a sore tooth that I could not help but probe with my tongue.
A year, a yar, a jar, a door open. My fingers twitched, and my hand flew out to grab a piece of smooth beautiful creamy white paper. Once when things had been better i’d folded origami often. With love and passion. Models had flowed out from my fingertips, crimps, sinks, reverses. Cranes, dragons, modular shapes, beautiful simple folds to complex ones that had taken weeks to perfect. Even so I had never been much good at creating my own designs. It had depressed me, as well as been frustrating.
I looked down shivering, a pit of hurt, anger and fear forming in the pit of my stomach. My hands acted without me it seemed, smoothing and then starting a fold. It was not a act of a loving creator, craftsman or artist. There seemed something wrong about the creases even through there were more than humanly perfect. Something vaguely disturbing about the angles, the intersections of the crease patterns. There was a creaking in the walls, this was nothing new in a house of this age, most of all in the dining room. The walls of my slovenly little bedchamber though are brick. Whisps of dread curled up from the bottom of my mind reaching from a hidden place far from the normal channels that any sane person thinks in. I pinched down hard on a bit of laughter at the thought that I was not of sound mind and had not been for at least a year now.
I looked up at the clock at the corner of the computer screen. It had been 8 PM or so when I had pulled out the chair and sat down at the old leather topped desk. It was well past midnight now. In my now still right hand lay a origami model. It seemed modular at first glance, but it wasn’t. There were no seams, no joins, and the pocketed angles seemed wrong. It was beautiful, the paper was still a creamy wonder of white. The model just did not seem possible. It fit together like a masterpiece, and indeed was one. I tried to count the apexes of it’s points but could not come up with the same number twice. Three times counting, three different numbers.
My mouth was dry and I pushed back my old wooden chair, it squealed on the tile floor. The rest of the house was in shadow, and just as tumbledown as my room. A deep sense of longing and depression grasped at me as I poured water from a old beaten plastic pitcher to a fine crystal water glass. My feet knowing the way through the darkness of this little house lead me back to my room. I stood sipping water so cold that it hurt my teeth while lookind down on this odd little model. It seemed random at first glace, but there was a certain odd order to it that made it maddening to view for to long.
As I tipped it this way and that the walls creaked again, groaning almost as if a great weight was pressing down on them from without. I twitched away from the desk with a start, wanting to pry my eyes from the fold to look towards the groaning bricks. I could not. I backed away from the desk towards the whitewashed old oak door to my room. My left hand reaching behind me found the knob and turned it, or attempted to. It would not turn, it would not budge in the slightest.
The music that the old media box had been piping through the speakers had ceased to play hours ago. From the speakers there was the slightest clicking noise. Almost a chirp. From the wrong angles and uncountable points of the fold on the desk shadows began to crawl forth. The paper was still as smooth and unmarred as the cheek of a perfect newborn child, but from those intersections, from the strange creases came shadows and now a deep chill.
My back was pressed now firmly against the door. Sweat poured down my bald head to spatter on the floor where it frozen into soild little masses. My breath came out to meet the air and formed clouds of condensation. From the speakers came a high whining fluting sound and the barking of angry hunting dogs. Dogs, hounds, hunting and hungry. I had no fear of dogs, and infact loved them deeply. These were not the baying cries of mortal, breathing, tail wagging, long tongue canine friends though. These were the hunting cries of something outside, a pack of hunters that had been locked away from the bright world of mortal men and women for ages.
The air grew colder and the groaning of the walls became loud harsh creaking. The walls must give away was the thought that rushed through my mind, they have to. In fact I hoped that they would so the sight of the formless eaters of souls making their way through the nameless model would be ended before I was pulled away through the intersection between dimensions i’d made by folding that single sheet of paper into a impossible object of uncountable points and foul angles.
I knew their names, the names of these things. It was impossible for me to speak aloud, but they seemed to hear the thought of it and the single naked light bulb that shone overhead dimmed, it’s light seemed to be made smoky, dirty, sickening. I screamed aloud finally able to bring a sound through my terror. The baying of hungry dogs became louder, as at last the shades, cold hungry ghosts so long locked out of the light. Pushed and held back by elder mages into a void vast, dark, and endless stepped forth to hunt again the bright world of mortals.
February 22, 2013
Twentythird Star
byrd23 