Posted on by Lydia Ink

Into the Asylum

There are days I wish it were over.  I don’t want to know who I am and I don’t want to face another night.  It’s different when the sun goes down.  I know and they know and the world just goes on, ignorant.

When I was a kid, I would read every fantasy novel I could get my hands on.  I was the skinny kid saving his pennies for the dictionaries on Middle Earth and I was the kid alone on the playground acting out the last epic battle of good versus evil.

Teachers would pull my mother aside and tell her I made other children uncomfortable.  They told her the reason other kids picked on me and ridiculed me was because she allowed me to stay in my fantasy world.  I’ll give my mother this; as overworked as she was, she stood up for me.

Occasionally she would pick me up early from school, sign me out, and we would have ice cream in the full light of day.  I know that she felt it was us against them, but I didn’t know how many battles fronts she was fighting.

She didn’t come home one night.  They found her remains three months later, down by Navy Pier.  She didn’t die there.  The police still call it an open case.  The cops that investigated her murder even came around to check on me in foster care. I know she didn’t die easy; it wasn’t quick.

I was thirteen when she died, and foster care was one of the worst things that could have happened.  When they tapped on my window and I cried for help, my foster parents didn’t believe me.  At one point they institutionalized me for schizophrenic behavior.   That was worse because then the bastards could walk right in–the loons invited them in all the time.  Nobody questions why a homeless schizoid dies alone–they pack them off to cold storage with a shrug and a “too bad.”

Strange, though, the loons never turned.  Never.

I would have won if a weary old priest hadn’t heard my screams one night.  He didn’t believe they could crawl along the ceiling and hide in shadows, but he gave me a golden crucifix that has never left me. That stops them, scoffers be damned.

You don’t know how desperate and crazy you can sound when a white clad orderly is standing in the doorway with a straight jacket for you and one of the cursed ones is smiling at you from the ceiling; they would crawl around like flies.   I think many of the inmates went crazy after they arrived.

I sleep in the church’s basement now.  I do odd jobs, so they let me.  I sleep well there, despite the unbelief of the old priest who saved me.

I miss my mother.

I work hard to avenge her.  That’s what she did, worked hard.  Maybe it will all end with me.  Or end me.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Accolades and Approval

It makes very little difference now whether they believe me.  Actually, I’m not sure at this point why I thought it mattered at all. I’ve so immersed myself in his journals and maps that I felt I owed it to him, I suppose. He gave me purpose a dark purpose in finding… me.
I can see myself sitting here, as if I’m already dead, looking down upon my slumped form, near the fading and flickering candlelight. There must be a trickle of air coming from somewhere for the flame to continue; for me to continue.

I know that we all face death but as I fill in the final pages of his journal, I will state here I wish my death were just a little different, a little easier. How long will it take, alone, the water going, no food? I dread the light leaving me; I wish I could die before the flame of the candle extinguishes forever. I try to resist the water–there is very little, but it only prolongs my agony. I try not to touch it but I become so parched and my lips crack and bleed so I wet my mouth with it and live, just a little longer it would seem.

I do not know why I continue to write. There is no hope. I pray however that if I am ever found that I’m dust. I do not want my remains or even my bones scrutinized by curious untutored eyes or clucked over by others who perhaps have found clues to this place. I understand now why, if you are beloved by someone, that burial or burning is necessary.  One must hide away the horrors of the grave. Since the death of mankind we must face decay, but we must protect the process from those who, though may feel pity, will rummage around your remains to find the clues that brought you to such an end. In my case this journal, his journal and my death will suffice.

I am a minor character here and a failed one; my death is proof.  I do not care that others may succeed where I have failed; success may prove a larger, deeper curse.  The ending of my life is no less like any other, driven by the desire for accolades and approval, but it affords introspection that the rush of admiration by mankind very few can afford, me for example.

Mankind. How many of our small group would scoff at that usage to describe humans. It bothers me less now; the skirts I denied for the trousers that freed my body to tramp about these God forsaken caves were of immense importance to me. The admiring looks from enlightened men at the form of my body were important to me. Yes, it was hypocritical of me. I ignored their glances and felt a glad triumph too.

Never mind. I forgot about their glances and their admiration when I opened his journal and continued my infatuation and the love affair I have with a dead man’s writing. When I first saw myself trapped here, when I heard the cries of those whom I hired for this expedition, when I heard their silence, my first debauched thought was who will succeed where I have failed? Who will find what he had left to be found while I decay here, forgotten?
 

Perhaps we are mankind. Perhaps my sudden freedom of body has put me on the same level of any man who did not have to worry about the weight of decorum or the worry of bearing children in a momentary lapse of physical pleasure. When I had put behind the fear of consequence, I became a man in my perusal of acclaim and power. Yes power. What wouldn’t a woman do to stay young all her life? What wouldn’t she do to have the ages before her to further her sex and educate her mind with all the powers of the ancients? She would soar because I would lift her up. Her. I would be Dr. Frankenstein and I would be the creature all in one. The world would be a better place because I am a woman and can handle the weight of power without the want of worship.  My words and dreams betrayed me, all I wanted was worship.

Though I despise the masses, self-worship glared out at me every time I glanced in the mirror and my subjugation was clear every time I groped for his journal. Was he laughing now? Perhaps from his perch in hell he can see me here, fading away, beckoning me to join him in the nether regions. I shudder to think of his ability to drive me there. What torture will he have for me in the glow of hell’s fire?

The candle flame is flickering and growing weaker. I can hear the slush of my blood in my head and body, the silence is that severe. Perhaps in my last hours, in absolute darkness, I can thwart his deceptions and my folly and appeal to God. Wouldn’t that turn heads at mankind’s last judgement?

Posted on by Lydia Ink

To Dread the Dark

We try not to think of it too often. It.
The situation was this… we pushed our limit, we overreached, we took out the part of us that God put in, labeled free will and we shook it liberally all over our skin, hair, hands and feet.
Don’t get me wrong, don’t think I’m one of those people who blame God for everything. We knew what we were doing, and we knew we really should stop.
But we didn’t.
I’m not sure how old he was or where exactly he came from. I know he was very old, but he was prodigiously strong. I understood his strength when I saw him, when my mind connected with my vision and nudged my soul (something I most assuredly believe in now, my soul) and said “the legends are true, the stories are at least based on fact and man are you in a world of hurt.”
Alex, poor guy, his mind didn’t nudge his soul and the legend, now a reality, which we went out to meet, snapped him like a toothpick. Sometimes on my better days, when I don’t see Alex gasping like a fish out of the water, I believe he had enough time to think, “I have a soul and I’m going to God and I’ll be okay.”
I really don’t know. On my bad days, I cry like a baby and go visit Alex’s Mom. She hates me but I mow her lawn and fix stuff around the old shack she lives in.
Please don’t think Dana and I ran, we didn’t. Dana lifted her cross and peed. I lifted my cross and felt something like an electric shock thunder down my arm and blow out my fingertips. For a minute I was ashamed because I had just finished a joint. How could this work, how could I keep this horrible monster at bay after finishing a joint?
He was tall; you know. Very tall and he had this ironish white hair that sort of matched the paleness of his skin. When Dana and I lifted our crosses (we pinched them from the old, tumble-down, Catholic Church that is there on Moore House Street), he snarled at us and for a minute, despite Alex all in a heap, I felt sorry for him.
How did he get that way? The same way we did; arrogant, stoned and seeking a thrill?  Maybe because he wanted to or maybe because he was ambushed. He circled around us but my days in the army settled that maneuver; I told Dana we needed to go back to back and keep him at bay.
Three hours until sunrise. Three hours with Dana’s wet pants dripping on dry leaves. It exhausted us; always looking down, looking up, Alex in a heap. Every noise we figured he was coming up from the ground or coming down from the trees.
You do not understand what it’s like, you never will, to dread the dark.
 

Posted on by Lydia Ink

The Ice of Her Curse

It’s minus one on the Fahrenheit scale, and suddenly I’m thinking of Germany. No, not some beauty queen whose hippy parents named her after the country they conceived her in while trekking along in their journey of sexual discovery, no I’m thinking of the country itself.
I was there once, well after the wall that divided the east from the west fell. When I turned to look one last time before boarding a plane back to Chicago I thought, I won’t do this again.  Perhaps I never saw it at all.  How could any old world country slough away the dregs of the 21st century and rediscover the beauty and might of their own brilliant culture?

I’ve never gone back and since it’s minus one on the Fahrenheit scale and my chances of even waking up and seeing Chicago again in broad daylight are slim to none, I guess I was right. That’s how curses work, I suppose.

My Dad spent some time in West Germany after the war. He met my mother there and married her; she was from Iowa. They settled in the burbs of Chicago and all I can remember about my Dad was the sighing he did over West Germany; the sounds of their language, the churches that survived the bombs and the awful night he spent on a dare with some buddies in a burned-out village that no one rebuilt.

“Too many memories, too many sad moments.” He spoke as if he’d had been raised there. Then one day, several years after I buried him, I thought–how the hell did he have enough knowledge of the place to even make the statement he did; “Too many memories, too many sad moments.” I fell asleep right after that question, but the question was sitting on my bed the next morning waiting on me.

That question waited for several years and cropped up here and there, especially when I thought of my Dad. So I went to Germany. I don’t really know why, other than idle curiosity. It was winter and their Christmas markets were in full swing and the women were all beautiful and the wine and beer tasted good. I wandered here and there and wondered no longer why Dad thought only good of that country.

The rubble of the village he spent the night in on a dare wasn’t hard to find. I never got the impression that Germany was vast by any means.  Actually, sometimes I felt pretty hemmed in by mountains and people. I stood amongst the ruins while my guide stood some distance off. I felt I could stay among the ruins and rest for some time since I had just gotten off the Autobahn with the same guide who didn’t have the courage to follow me into the ruins. I scoffed; here was a fellow who went at a speed I wouldn’t attempt on the Midwestern prairies, turning around and looking at me while cars zoomed by asking if “American worry?”

I felt the tension of that trip ease out of my shoulders and my feet sort of sink into the earth and I wondered why I had come all this way just to say I stood in the very German ghost town my Dad spent the night in, so long ago.

“Too many memories, too many sad moments.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. When I opened them again, she was standing there with a look of hatred that made me shiver with cold.  Dressed in rags, her hair wet and ragged, clinging to her face and neck, she was a few paces away from me. I swear I could hear the drip of water drop from her blue finger tips. My German wasn’t all that good and her voice rasped like rusty hinges, but my demise was on her lips and I felt the ice of her curse sting into my skin.

I think the only reason I didn’t die on the spot was because I heard my guide calling me.

“Come away, come away from there.”

“Did you see her?”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“You had to have seen her. She was standing right there.”

“No. I don’t know why you wanted to come here. Years ago, soldiers, they stay there on a dare. They never come out again. One left a wife and a baby on the way. No one comes here.”

“What?”

“Yes. I know you won’t believe, but it’s true. They never find them again. Their bodies, nothing.  The place is cursed. No one staying there is the same again. It changes people, it’s like they become ghosts.”

I wonder as it becomes colder and colder in Chicago if I’ve existed at all. 

Posted on by Lydia Ink

No Such Soul Should Suffer

He knew immediately the moment he looked at her.  He also knew she was unaware.  His regret was tangible, a piercing ache encased his heart because he knew of her kindness, her sense of decorum, and no such soul should suffer.

Such an old word, decorum.  He felt ancient using it and scoffed at himself inwardly because when he was young he would only use that word in an exaggerated sense.  “Let’s try some decorum, please,” if one of his frat brothers burst forth in an over dramatic way or in an uncouth manner when their then young, male bodies would sound in gastric relief after a night of debauchery.

His nights wasted in such matters were over, just as definitely as were all his frat brothers.
A movement caught his eye; her.  She moved up the aisle toward him and their brief eye contact forgotten by her almost instantly.  He stood stock-still and only let her pass him with difficulty.  Only when her genuine though weary smile changed to a look of frowning hurt did he step back with an apology.  He stepped back into the shelves, his elbows knocking down can goods and the noise brought drowsy looking stock clerks to their vicinity.

He watched her take over.  “It was an accident, no harm done.”  He had enough sense to kneel with her and make a grab for the rolling canned peas and lima beans.

“I’m sorry.  So sorry.”  His voice was hoarse and raspy.  He hated the sound of his own voice.  He kept silent as much as possible, remembering that once upon a time he would sing to crowds of fawning young girls in intimately dark venues where music was as scrutinized and savored as that of the body of a lover.

No longer.

She reached forward, her slender wrist exposed from beneath her coat only for a moment.  She busied herself with placing the can goods back upon the shelf.  The memory of her steady pulse just beneath her skin caused him to shudder, fighting attraction.  He expanded his large hands grasped the rolling can goods and held them in a steady grip, then shoved the cans upon the shelf without looking at what he was doing.  She smelled of lavender soap and a day’s work.  Her fingers were ringless and her makeup smudged.  He watched as she shivered and glanced nervously at him.  He wanted to expand before her, levitate and lift her into his embrace.  Instead he backed away, “I’m sorry,” he said again.

She frowned and shook her head slightly.  “You worry too much. It was an accident.”  Her voice was soft but firm.  She turned without another look at him and continued to shop.  He glanced out the store window, the snow floated down in large lacey white flakes against the black hazy night sky.  A veil of white lace for her lovely hair and face.  A fitting night.  Cold and harsh the winters in this land, the winds so merciless.  What was this beautiful woman doing here?

It would be a cold walk to her car.  Why was she so late, looking for vulgar food in tins and dusty shelves?  Why wasn’t she home, in her bed, asleep with her cat at her feet, both purring with contentment?  Why wasn’t she with a husband; a candlelit supper waiting on her?  Shouldn’t she be in the shelter of strong and warm arms to protect her or next to him safe and sound?

He could hear her hum a tune in the next aisle, no doubt a song of comfort, trying to push away unwarranted fears.  He felt strengthened; he felt as if he could breathe in and pull all the contents of the store toward him, including her.  He felt as if he could walk through the aisle that separated them and capture her in his arms, rise above everything and whirl her about the ceiling with no effort at all.  He could hear the rhythm of her breath.  He could feel her heartbeat, steady and serene.  He could taste…

Darkness is easy to find when the living endeavor so hard to light the night. No one noticed the blur of darkness he became as he took her into his arms, nor noticed her brief struggle.
It’s not beautiful the sound that indicates his search for her life force; the growl, the frigid feel of his lips upon her soft, warm and exposed neck.  The agony for him was that moment of ecstasy every woman offers in opening herself up to a need, even as diabolical as his.  Her shudder, her pity as fleeting and erratic as the flight of a butterfly and for a moment he wonders if this is the one he should keep, if this is the one who would… but no, her terror is too complete and he finishes his hunt in the deepest, darkest part of the night.