Into The Next
So long did I wander, in vain efforts to find again the beautiful melody. So that the days and nights seemed as one long fog in my mind and I could not recognize dawn from dusk, haunted all the while by a desperation-like to the most poignant of addicts..
BY ZACH TOMBLIN
IMAGE BY CAMEO VENCHIARUTTI
When first I heard the faint lull of the music flowing desultory from an open window, somewhere south of Aporod Street, I knew that if the hands of heaven were to compose, for all of creation, a melody, it could be no sweeter nor half as exquisite as that gleaming tenderly in my enraptured ears. Awestruck by its virtue, it held my wearied sinew in glow! How like the choral verse of some champion seraph, parading in my soul.
So swiftly did it come and so great was it, this chiefest of musics, touching me in my empty desolation. Yet just as quickly did it crest and fall, until all that hummed in the din of my scant walls was the lack of it, forever.
This, I could not abide.
So long did I wander, in vain efforts to find again the beautiful melody. So that the days and nights seemed as one long fog in my mind and I could not recognize dawn from dusk, haunted all the while by a desperation-like to the most poignant of addicts. Through the swollen gutters and furrows reeking with the fell denizens haunting them, of which I was as one, but am no longer. Wandering forever lost in this maze of slum and sorrow. This path tread only by the gaunt and sleepless, seeking that which does not come. Not to them.
Down the gloom-shadowed streets, I limped. For emaciation bound my stride. With every step, I moaned, as the pain of my exertion was great. My naked feet worked raw, bloodied, freezing, against the cold cobblestones. Yet amongst my fellow aimless, no sympathetic head turned. No kind eye offered its ease in the form of a knowing glance. This was to be expected, afflicted as we were. Shunned and detested, and I, cloaked in my tattered mantle, its harshness appreciable at the merest glance. Those around me simply lulled, listless of destination and morose. Carried about by whatever mundane winds drew them this way and that. But not I. For I was the exonerated, the liberated. As Icarus from his labyrinth, I had been freed. Set to earth to wander in search of my dear melody. Whispering to me without voice . . . offering to me a purpose, though its nature remained a mystery.
In time, I came to stand before a scant and leaning edifice, too tall and too thin. A ruin, seeming to breathe with stale air, to speak with the voice of a rot. It towered above me, threatening me under its shadow and I wept before it. Wept in joy! For from within its sallowed timbers, flowed ever faintly my music. My sweet lord! Guiding me tenderly, to its gentle recourse. Obeying the herald of my love, I ascended the few stone stairs of the awkward little threshold and began at once, clawing at the soiled knob with fingers nearly frozen to the bone. In whatever vain attempts I might make to free it from the bolt! I know not if it was by my efforts or by some weird spell, but just then, the door gave. It really, truly, gave. Opening with a strange jolt; the music spilling almost eagerly from behind it. Speaking sweetly to me and encouraging me on. All with a warmth kinder than one might imagine a mother’s first words to her newborn and bawling burden.
The interior of the building was dark, for there seemed not to be any windows about the place. Rather, every few yards dangled a coarse knot of wires, on the ends of which hung whirring bulbs, lit with dimly glowing tungsten. Illuming the darkness only faintly and tinging it with an eerie and greenish hue. The corridor itself seemed to stretch on interminably with walls unadorned. I found my eyes wanted only to stare at the way ahead. The way that drew me closer to my melody and where it lay waiting, for me and me alone.
It stood before me now, my abject and final obstacle . . . and it was unlocked. As I stepped into the room, I was astonished to find it lay host to architectural marvels scarcely to be believed. The fact that such a tremendous space could exist inside the confines of the crumbling heap I had entered through, was wholly beyond my ability to account for. Its domed roof, rivalling Brunelleschi's great work. From it spanned prodigious pillars of chiseled basalt, boasting details both minute and exquisite. Decorating its many walls, heaped in various disarray, lay a profusion of books and trinkets the likes of which I had never seen. Shelves flooded the walkways, spilling over with all manner of baubles and curious eidolons. While over the whole of the place lay a thick veneer of dust, so that breathing in the chamber proved harsh and unwelcome. The mustiness of the room was oppressive, and I feared a great many things awash in the sea of trinkets had sprouted with secret mould.
Through the arid dimness, my sensation landed on a far corner, imploring me that there would be found my sole salvation. That which I had pined after in hopeless want. Even amongst the infinity of trifles, my radiant light shone clear, and when I saw it, I knew. I recognized it as if it were the face of my own mother, whose countenance had grown foggy in my mind long ago. It was a small wooden box, hardly the size of my hand. Carpentered of a faint-pinkish wood and whose gentle lustre was perceptible even through the thickly matted dust covering it like worn velvet. Taking it not from its perch, I opened it expecting to find a mechanism of such guile and craft as would prove a modern marvel. But to my surprise, there was only my sweet, sweet music.
The box itself was empty. Yet somehow flowing from it was the same exceptional swell that had ensorcelled me at its first advent. Proving all the lovelier for my new proximity to it.
Captivated though I was by the ecstasy of the music, I could not fail to notice it was no longer just the box and I alone in the room. Rather, it now hovered in strange hands. Standing to my left was a man. A short man. One whose greenish complexion seemed to blend itself intrinsically with the sickly hue of dust floating in the stale air. At first, he merely eyed me, purposefully, fingering the box as he did so. As if my advent, here, to this place, had been somehow prearranged. And this was simply the final cog in some adroit plot laid out long in advance.
He spoke not a word. And as I stared at his uncouth, I couldn’t help but compare him to some grotesque larvae! Altogether unversed in articulate movement.
Pushing my immediate loathing for the man down within myself, and mustering any semblance of composure, I began a discourse that would, hopefully, end in my leaving with the box.
“Sir, please! Hear my words and mark them well . . . I may not look a man of exorbitant means, this well enough is true, but by god in heaven, if there is such a heaven that is not to be found within that box . . . please sir, I must have it. I must!”
At once he seemed afraid and likewise very angered by my words. His nose wrinkling, in what seemed the obvious refusal of my request. Upon noticing this, a flash of ire turned my face hot. And I bubbled with rancour. Yet still I beseeched him. Pleading on my knees, begging with hands clasped in supreme suppliance.
“Please, sir! Please, I cannot stress my fondness for the thing . . . I would trade anything—everything for it! Should it cost me my immortal soul, I would gladly part with it. Please, sir! Please!”
The man simply snickered at my pleading, pacing about his library of innumerable hoarded treasures. His lumbering gait, filling me with noisome fire. My consternation fast fell into a rage. Before I felt the pain of movement, I was across the room reaching for the man’s throat.
Despite my rage, I stayed my intent, grabbed him by the arms and shook him, violently, spasmodically. Displaying a strength I knew not my withered limbs could possess.
“You pudgy little grub! The box belongs to me! It spoke to me! And if you’re planning to withhold it from me . . . why—why I'll just have to smash your wormy little brain in! And then we’ll just see what you have to say about that! Won’t we?”
The man smiled, revealing a mouth full of thin teeth. Then he spoke.
“I’ll tell you what . . . the box is yours. Of that much I’m sure. It played for you after all. And I’ll give it to you, for nary a pittance. But only a promise . . . ” a slight lilt hitting his voice as he pronounced prom-i-s-e. “If you promise never to listen to it . . . while you sleep.”
“Yes!" I screamed, “Yes! I promise! Now give it to me! Give it here!”
I snatched the box from his open hand, snatched it and ran. Ran from the house, ran from the hallway. Flying as if pursued by couriers of hell! And as I ran I imagined I heard a laugh come from behind me, a dry, sour, old laugh. As if the dust had been given a voice to express its sardonic exuberance and it found it all too funny. And then a noise like a great tremor, as if the earth had split open and reclaimed something it had never intended to let meet the light of day.
My strings of memory held no recollection of the events that took place directly after I fled from that awful place, that awful laugh. I don’t remember falling asleep, but I must have for when I awoke and awake I did, all was bathed in darkness. A darkness so perpetual, so tangible, that I knew it was not that of my room, nor any room. All around me, hummed the faint beating of birds’ wings, muffled, as if far away to my senses, yet very near. Such a scene seemed impossible. How could this be? It was then I knew I had been betrayed. Betrayed by the recesses of my thoughts, by my very dreams! Panic festered in me, for where then was my music? How was I to find it? Here, lost in some dark and inordinate sphere? Was I asleep even now? Was this some perverse echo? In this way, I existed unsure of all but myself and even that felt wrong. I could not identify my arms, nor my legs beneath me, where then, were they? I could see nothing, feel nothing. Was I bodiless? Was I alone? If I was floating or falling I could not have known. The passage of time too, seemed illimitable, yet so disorganized had my senses become. I could not differentiate a millennia from a moment, in this dim void they seemed but interchangeable ideas, empty of further meaning.
“The box itself was empty.”
ARGH!
So foolish had I been not to recognize my surroundings, for though space had ceased to encompass me, I knew well, my box. The threshold of existence yawned and I fell into its maw. All I had been had fallen away, leaving me lost. Bodiless. Awash in the ether.
Light now poured through the black, ripping through the serenity of the abyss. Searing my being raw. I had no flesh and yet it burned. Pain in essence alone. The box was opened.
I felt myself scream without voice. Crying out in greater agony than ever I could ever know with body. To my horror, my tortured shrieks were perceived as music! The same music that had so enraptured me. My music!
Oh, torturous perception! Shrieking dissonance! Reflecting from every fractal of accursed sensation! Searing, burning, gouging, clawing, piercing, stabbing! Abhorrent discord! The great wind of the hollow world still screams unearthly in my absent ears.
It was clear to me then. Here, within my world, my box, I existed as perfection. Flawless, lightless, harmony. Tainted by the corruption, flowing in from beyond the lid of the box. Pollution. Cacophony. Smearing the purity of the music, not to be observed by the outside. Rupturing my being like an eardrum pulse beating in blackened moans. Filling fibres altogether inexistent, with a kaleidoscope of seething darkness, madness, and pain. Fit to scrape the meat of sanity from intangible bone. To madden and strip flesh from the fleeting self.
If each digit of it could be etched on every inch of this earth, it would not stand for a fraction of the torment that was now reality.
How long had I foolishly sought sleep? Clinging to life as if it were ease to suffering, when long have I known it was the cause?
Now I am but the music, the music that plays to the gaunt.
You cannot know, as I know, what it is to be as music. But you will. You will know as I have. You will endure, as I have endured . . . for you see the only way I can hope to escape this fate, this horrible reality to which I have been cursed, is for another to take my place. To burn the torch in my stead, while my soul is let to fade . . . How I long to fade. To flicker out like those others before me. To shed this formless nightmare and to take up again the abode of the finite and fleeting. And I shall. Peace will come to me at last. It will come to me through you, dearest one. So it is, I leave this parable in the form of a dream, this dream. This dream which we share . . . just as I had dreamed that first night I was given the box. For how else can I hope to explain it to you my, dearest one? The favour you have done for me! The weight you have lifted from me and the burden you have so unwittingly undertaken.
Alas, do not trouble yourself over such things now.
Hush. And shush.
Simply sleep your sleep and enjoy.
For when you wake, and you will, you too will know all too well what it is to be the music.
Savour one last melody . . . for me . . . for the gaunt and the sleeping.
Zach Tomblin is a Canadian author who grew up in the small town of Paris, Ontario. As a boy, he frequented the small woods that ran alongside the Grand River and the bones of the old Grand Trunk Railroad. His creativity was born in those woods.
Image: Into The Next (Cameo Venchiarutti)
Edited for publication by Louis Simonin, as part of the Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing Program.
HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by Humber’s Office of Research & Innovation.