Druidic
Grimscribe
An Angry Room
I. A View to Die For
A man in an angry room, pacing, mechanically pacing, shuffling through stifling air, pausing now and then to lean against one or the other of the room’s two narrow windows, raising his hands to cup the sides of his face as he gazes through the accumulated film of dust and grime, gazes at the faded red brick of the decrepit building across from him, (perhaps a warehouse, perhaps a factory) so oppressively close that if either window were open he could reach, stretch and touch the pitted walls before falling to his death. But the windows are tightly shut despite the stifling heat and their ancient frames are splintered and weathered, wood so warped that the windows stubbornly refuse to move. Unable to find relief from the monstrous heat, he can only gaze at this narrow canyon where a cool and alluring darkness, at certain times of day, seems to flow like a black whispering river. He hears the whispers, inside and outside his skull. Whispers caused by such bad air. Bad air and the terrible rancid odor that is everywhere; as if something had died, not long ago, not in the distant past. The temptation to break the glass is almost overpowering.
II. The Hag Flyers
As if invoked by the violence of that impulse, a bird swoops down into the narrow canyon between buildings and seems to skim across the tide of darkness that slowly rises from below. The man has seen such birds before and they always inspire a visceral loathing in him. They seem grotesquely misshapen, their heads in particular; ill-proportioned skulls with thin, almost translucent flesh stretched over the bone beneath. He watches, fascination and disgust equally strong, as one glides and begins its ascent from the darkness of the ravine, passing through the lower twilight and emerging suddenly into the brilliant and merciless sunlight beyond the windows. In this light the claws gleam wickedly with a metallic luster. They remind the man of shining instruments of torture while the albino face, glimpsed too briefly to be certain, seems to be a distorted human face, one of cunning and evil...perhaps the pale visage of a wizened hag on a black soaring body. As he watches, it effortlessly claims a prize from the crumbling wall of the building opposite. He hears the thin harsh shriek of the pierced victim even through his sealed windows.
III. New Arrivals
At some point of time, he can't recall how long ago because of the grayness that has swallowed his memories, an infestation of a new kind of vermin befell this afflicted city. He has come to think of these newcomers as Scuttlers: vaguely spider or crablike, bodies round as plates, large as a man's hand and pale as the ghastly faces of the rapacious birds that prey on them. They climb and scamper with amazing speed over the rough, uneven surface of the disintegrating bricks in that crumbling abandoned building, a building that may once have been a warehouse or a factory. The structure's long, narrow and arched windows are sealed over with cement and brick, all painted a dead leaden gray, but one remains open like a dark inviting maw; and the man has watched these scuttling horrors crawl in and out of that blackness many times, exiting with glistening objects hard to identify, and held above their bodies by a secondary row of appendages that resembled small tentacles. The thought of smashing the thin fragile glass of the windows and affording these things possible ingress into the room is more than unpleasant, yet the heat is so torturous he considers it still in moments of near madness.
IV. Knock Knock
His attention is diverted from these nightmarish things to other mysteries no less outrageous when, suddenly, he hears the soft whispering, growing not from inside his skull, not rising from the cool flowing shadow river forbidden to him, but clearly from the hall (?) beyond his door: the black whispery hissing and herald of even more extravagant performances to come. Soon there will come a knocking upon the room's single frail-looking door, an antique relic that has invariably resisted his most determined and energetic efforts to open, and it will be barely audible in nature, so tenuous, so ghostly, so pathetic in its impotence that it enrages him. (The soft black whispers recede as if to let this delicate plea for admission be fully heard.) It infuriates him beyond reason. He prefers the heavy crushing blows, the banging, the thunderous demanding that will eventually replace it. For the briefest of moments, he imagines answering this summons when it comes, feeling the certainty that at such a moment, and only at such a moment, would the portal yield to his desperation. But the thought brings no desire to rush for possible freedom; for a crawling Fear will replace his rage and he will then decide against such a reckless action, just as he refused to heed the brutal summons of assaults in the past. He knows there is a sequence now--for the moment tenuous fragments of memory have returned--and he feels certain he has lived out these actions before. Memories flash, dance like brief glints of sunlight on the darkling surface of a lake, and then are gone. His ability to recall feels like a badly edited movie, manipulated for effect. A sequence of pleas and demands, pleas and demands. And threats. The meaning of the sequence is beyond his understanding: how could a nightmare possibly be understood by a man living inside the nightmare?
The performance occurs as scheduled, flawless; he sits and stares fixedly at the door, his jaw tightens, his fists clench and unclench repeatedly, his body drips. He waits and sweats in the intolerable heat of the room. The urge to do violence to someone, to something, is maddening. Finally, the thunderous pounding reaches a crescendo...and stops. But the sequence is not complete and the man knows the next action will continue it. For now he can only wait, lost in his confused thoughts.
Perhaps I was born here, he thinks. Perhaps I have lived my entire life here, here in this angry room. It’s an amusing but bitter idea and one he can hardly take seriously. No, an utter lack of intimacy, of familiarity, mocks the absurdity of such a notion. This room was never his.
A desperate hope, however irrational: he feels that if only he could find something to shock his memory, something to grasp--some object, magical as a talisman, some object from his past--he might understand all and wake from this circular labyrinth.
V. Envoys of Death
And the sequence continues.
Above him, a subtly different but similar sound has begun, the hellish buzzing of myriad insects increasing in volume. It's an angry raw sound that surges demonically, rhythmically, rising and falling, like the hissing waves of a black sea. His eyes are drawn upward to a black swarm that flies and crawls over the peeling paint and dangling plaster of the ceiling. He wonders again, like unremembered times before, how an army of vermin could enter a sealed room. There is something nightmarish about their sudden appearance and even more so of their subsequent performance. It intensifies his belief that he is lost to a nightmare. perhaps a coma victim lying within the white antiseptic walls of a hospital, inert and unresponsive to the ministrations of doctors and nurses. Again, he feels the need for violence rising within him, an urge that feels...natural. But with an effort of concentration he focuses on his breathing, wills his muscles to relax and stands back instead and continues to watch. The insects are large, unnaturally bloated, bluish-black in color like the face of a strangled man. He watches as the squirming body of these winged things form lines, disgusting crawling lines that appear to be random at first but soon take a form, a definite resemblance to symbols, squirming symbols that soon bleed into shapes of unmistakable letters, thin flat ropes of English letters twining madly overhead, living letters that inspire the horror of the unnatural in his soul. The letters are few but sprawl across the entire length of the water-damaged ceiling, horribly alive and pulsing with black venomous life. They form a word, perhaps a name, meaningless to him...R-O-N-D-O-
He wants to scream, to howl, to destroy these filthy things with his anger. Rage and cruelty rise within him, emotions primal but familiar; they feel true to his essential nature. He would torture those things if only he could, rip off their wings and laugh as theyn try to fly sway from him. Even in his present situation, the pleasure he receives from such a fleeting thought is considerable.
.
Suddenly, he remembers the strident tocsin their appearance alway heralds...
VI. The Corporation Calls
A battered rotary phone, old-fashioned and corded, rings. It sits on the floor in the middle of the room and appears only when needed. At the sound the flying things scatter, merge smoothly into a buzzing black cloud and flow with inconceivable rapidity into hiding places, secret places in the room he can never find.
. It is an unpleasant sound and he debates the wisdom of answering it. But why not, he thinks and why not the room seems to agree for the harsh tone has become less unpleasant, less demanding, less like an angry voice. He reaches for it, grips it, but hesitates to remove it from its cradle. The pale plastic feels cold, clammy to the touch, too much like soft sick flesh. He raises it slowly but holds it as far from his face as he can.
“Hello,” he says and waits for a reply.
“ I must speak with Rondo,” the voice flatly states. "It is a matter of the greatest importance." This is a calm, cultured voice; not gelatinous and hollow, not bestial, not mocking this time, not in the least. He feels certain he has heard this voice before but finds it impossible to reconcile with a face or name.
A shadow rapidly passes across both windows and the room is strangely darkened as if the hag things were of far greater size than he remembers. From beyond the glass he hears the piercing shriek of an impaled Scuttler and imagines the absurd thing scrambling hopelessly over the eroded wall, trying desperately to escape. But the Hunter has found the prey and all it can do is shriek and perish.
“I'm sorry,” he replies after a lengthy silence, his voice sounding thin and unreal. “Mr. Rondo isn’t able to speak to anyone. Not at the present moment, at least. But Mr. Rondo felt it might interest you to know a package was sucessfully delivered to an address in Halcyon--as promised some time ago--” The man has no idea what the words he utter mean or why he feels compelled to utter them. The word 'package' seems to evoke unpleasant connotations in his mind: and he imagines such a package wrapped in brown butcher's paper; a slick and sickly bulging package. But is it an authentic memory or a reverberation of troubled nights, an echo of his frequent bad dreams...a dream echo within a nightmare? It feels like the memory of another...bleeding into his consciousness...
There is the briefest of pauses from the caller on the other end. “I’m sorry, too” the cultured voice responds, no amount of emotion shading his words. “It's quite regrettable. He had interesting contacts you may not have fully appreciated. He was integral to our future plans for expansion and his loss is a blow to our Organization. Certainly, a great personal disappointment to Mr. N. It has necessitated the most extraordinary corrective action. There are those who wish to do us harm-- other Organizations, as I'm sure you know--and the Charles E. Voor I.S.H Corporation has long been a particularly nasty thorn in our side. Indeed, I'm sure Charles has taken great satisfaction in the expert butchery of his handyman from Halcyon. His Fixer was an extraordinary man, a man of great violence and great intelligence as well, a rare combination in, a real monster; we could have used him in our Organization if his loyalties hadn't been sadly misplaced. Such a waste. Mr. N is quite beside himself with regrets over this whole affair, although his wonderful sense of humor is a great comfort to us all in trying times. Be certain to give our condolences to Rondo's loved ones…”
“I’ll pass them along,” the man manages to croak. And then slowly, agonizingly so, he replaces the clammy phone in its pale as bone cradle. He knows that in the next few moments the phone will be gone, not to reappear until it's required.
VII. Greetings from Halcyon
There are three pieces of furniture in the angry room. A dilapidated sofa wirh three small silk pillows, an ancient armoire, a straight back wooden chair. Taped to the bottom of the chair is an over-sized postcard, undated, yellowed with age. On the front is the picture of a gray scuffed door with a small tin plate reading restrooms. A large crude phallus has been sketched beneath the plate clearly marking it a men's room.
On the reverse side are a few sentences written in a cramped and perhaps hasty hand. Above them, written by a more eloquent hand is a single sentence--Found scrawled in blood on a restroom's wall in Halcyon N.J.. This clearly refers to the words beneath and they are:
They have moved among us since time immemorial. We are their Meat and Drink. They desire from us nothing as gross as physical sustenance. They hunger not for our flesh or our blood but seek a more subtle, more refined nourishment
They seek Amusement.
Call them demons if you must. Those of us (and I refer to human beings like myself) in their employ think of them only as The Others. Their powers, while extraordinary and godlike by human standards, do not preclude the assistance of mortal hands. They have never created human evil—the abundance of it is simply too great—but They manipulate it cunningly. They arrange and conduct Their ghastly orchestrations to maximize effects of hilarity and horror. Their Art must always climax with the Absurdity They cherish so dearly...
We, their human allies, labor in their service; and our reasons for doing so are as varied as the imagination can conceive. Misanthropes, sociopaths, deviants…all the species of the lost and damned. Many would freely do the ghastly Work our employers demand of us, even while others toil in Their fields less willingly. But all know the rigorous demands of excellence that our masters insist on, even as we know the equally rigorous punishments that reward failure or betrayal. One common emotion unites us all.
A terror almost inexpressible in words.
VIII. An Angry Room
And the room seems angry again. The carpet is beginning to show spreading crimson stains, and the past is slowly bleeding through, positively seeping now, and the blood is forming a symbol, something much like a pentagram but more complex. If only his memory could pierce the shroud of gray formlessness that blinds it, he would recall he had seen something very similar to this pattern tattooed on Rondo’s chest...that night when, with the artistry of a professional, he dismembered Rondo's body.
The blood seeps, the rapacious birds cry from beyond the windows-- how strangely like human laughter that cackling that issues from their throats!-- and the room seems more oppressive than just a few minutes before. The temperature is rising again and soon the heat will be almost unbearable. If only the antique air conditioning system would work, all this might be more bearable.
But amenities are few in this angry room.
A man paces, mechanically paces, in an angry room.
A reworking.[/I]
I. A View to Die For
A man in an angry room, pacing, mechanically pacing, shuffling through stifling air, pausing now and then to lean against one or the other of the room’s two narrow windows, raising his hands to cup the sides of his face as he gazes through the accumulated film of dust and grime, gazes at the faded red brick of the decrepit building across from him, (perhaps a warehouse, perhaps a factory) so oppressively close that if either window were open he could reach, stretch and touch the pitted walls before falling to his death. But the windows are tightly shut despite the stifling heat and their ancient frames are splintered and weathered, wood so warped that the windows stubbornly refuse to move. Unable to find relief from the monstrous heat, he can only gaze at this narrow canyon where a cool and alluring darkness, at certain times of day, seems to flow like a black whispering river. He hears the whispers, inside and outside his skull. Whispers caused by such bad air. Bad air and the terrible rancid odor that is everywhere; as if something had died, not long ago, not in the distant past. The temptation to break the glass is almost overpowering.
II. The Hag Flyers
As if invoked by the violence of that impulse, a bird swoops down into the narrow canyon between buildings and seems to skim across the tide of darkness that slowly rises from below. The man has seen such birds before and they always inspire a visceral loathing in him. They seem grotesquely misshapen, their heads in particular; ill-proportioned skulls with thin, almost translucent flesh stretched over the bone beneath. He watches, fascination and disgust equally strong, as one glides and begins its ascent from the darkness of the ravine, passing through the lower twilight and emerging suddenly into the brilliant and merciless sunlight beyond the windows. In this light the claws gleam wickedly with a metallic luster. They remind the man of shining instruments of torture while the albino face, glimpsed too briefly to be certain, seems to be a distorted human face, one of cunning and evil...perhaps the pale visage of a wizened hag on a black soaring body. As he watches, it effortlessly claims a prize from the crumbling wall of the building opposite. He hears the thin harsh shriek of the pierced victim even through his sealed windows.
III. New Arrivals
At some point of time, he can't recall how long ago because of the grayness that has swallowed his memories, an infestation of a new kind of vermin befell this afflicted city. He has come to think of these newcomers as Scuttlers: vaguely spider or crablike, bodies round as plates, large as a man's hand and pale as the ghastly faces of the rapacious birds that prey on them. They climb and scamper with amazing speed over the rough, uneven surface of the disintegrating bricks in that crumbling abandoned building, a building that may once have been a warehouse or a factory. The structure's long, narrow and arched windows are sealed over with cement and brick, all painted a dead leaden gray, but one remains open like a dark inviting maw; and the man has watched these scuttling horrors crawl in and out of that blackness many times, exiting with glistening objects hard to identify, and held above their bodies by a secondary row of appendages that resembled small tentacles. The thought of smashing the thin fragile glass of the windows and affording these things possible ingress into the room is more than unpleasant, yet the heat is so torturous he considers it still in moments of near madness.
IV. Knock Knock
His attention is diverted from these nightmarish things to other mysteries no less outrageous when, suddenly, he hears the soft whispering, growing not from inside his skull, not rising from the cool flowing shadow river forbidden to him, but clearly from the hall (?) beyond his door: the black whispery hissing and herald of even more extravagant performances to come. Soon there will come a knocking upon the room's single frail-looking door, an antique relic that has invariably resisted his most determined and energetic efforts to open, and it will be barely audible in nature, so tenuous, so ghostly, so pathetic in its impotence that it enrages him. (The soft black whispers recede as if to let this delicate plea for admission be fully heard.) It infuriates him beyond reason. He prefers the heavy crushing blows, the banging, the thunderous demanding that will eventually replace it. For the briefest of moments, he imagines answering this summons when it comes, feeling the certainty that at such a moment, and only at such a moment, would the portal yield to his desperation. But the thought brings no desire to rush for possible freedom; for a crawling Fear will replace his rage and he will then decide against such a reckless action, just as he refused to heed the brutal summons of assaults in the past. He knows there is a sequence now--for the moment tenuous fragments of memory have returned--and he feels certain he has lived out these actions before. Memories flash, dance like brief glints of sunlight on the darkling surface of a lake, and then are gone. His ability to recall feels like a badly edited movie, manipulated for effect. A sequence of pleas and demands, pleas and demands. And threats. The meaning of the sequence is beyond his understanding: how could a nightmare possibly be understood by a man living inside the nightmare?
The performance occurs as scheduled, flawless; he sits and stares fixedly at the door, his jaw tightens, his fists clench and unclench repeatedly, his body drips. He waits and sweats in the intolerable heat of the room. The urge to do violence to someone, to something, is maddening. Finally, the thunderous pounding reaches a crescendo...and stops. But the sequence is not complete and the man knows the next action will continue it. For now he can only wait, lost in his confused thoughts.
Perhaps I was born here, he thinks. Perhaps I have lived my entire life here, here in this angry room. It’s an amusing but bitter idea and one he can hardly take seriously. No, an utter lack of intimacy, of familiarity, mocks the absurdity of such a notion. This room was never his.
A desperate hope, however irrational: he feels that if only he could find something to shock his memory, something to grasp--some object, magical as a talisman, some object from his past--he might understand all and wake from this circular labyrinth.
V. Envoys of Death
And the sequence continues.
Above him, a subtly different but similar sound has begun, the hellish buzzing of myriad insects increasing in volume. It's an angry raw sound that surges demonically, rhythmically, rising and falling, like the hissing waves of a black sea. His eyes are drawn upward to a black swarm that flies and crawls over the peeling paint and dangling plaster of the ceiling. He wonders again, like unremembered times before, how an army of vermin could enter a sealed room. There is something nightmarish about their sudden appearance and even more so of their subsequent performance. It intensifies his belief that he is lost to a nightmare. perhaps a coma victim lying within the white antiseptic walls of a hospital, inert and unresponsive to the ministrations of doctors and nurses. Again, he feels the need for violence rising within him, an urge that feels...natural. But with an effort of concentration he focuses on his breathing, wills his muscles to relax and stands back instead and continues to watch. The insects are large, unnaturally bloated, bluish-black in color like the face of a strangled man. He watches as the squirming body of these winged things form lines, disgusting crawling lines that appear to be random at first but soon take a form, a definite resemblance to symbols, squirming symbols that soon bleed into shapes of unmistakable letters, thin flat ropes of English letters twining madly overhead, living letters that inspire the horror of the unnatural in his soul. The letters are few but sprawl across the entire length of the water-damaged ceiling, horribly alive and pulsing with black venomous life. They form a word, perhaps a name, meaningless to him...R-O-N-D-O-
He wants to scream, to howl, to destroy these filthy things with his anger. Rage and cruelty rise within him, emotions primal but familiar; they feel true to his essential nature. He would torture those things if only he could, rip off their wings and laugh as theyn try to fly sway from him. Even in his present situation, the pleasure he receives from such a fleeting thought is considerable.
.
Suddenly, he remembers the strident tocsin their appearance alway heralds...
VI. The Corporation Calls
A battered rotary phone, old-fashioned and corded, rings. It sits on the floor in the middle of the room and appears only when needed. At the sound the flying things scatter, merge smoothly into a buzzing black cloud and flow with inconceivable rapidity into hiding places, secret places in the room he can never find.
. It is an unpleasant sound and he debates the wisdom of answering it. But why not, he thinks and why not the room seems to agree for the harsh tone has become less unpleasant, less demanding, less like an angry voice. He reaches for it, grips it, but hesitates to remove it from its cradle. The pale plastic feels cold, clammy to the touch, too much like soft sick flesh. He raises it slowly but holds it as far from his face as he can.
“Hello,” he says and waits for a reply.
“ I must speak with Rondo,” the voice flatly states. "It is a matter of the greatest importance." This is a calm, cultured voice; not gelatinous and hollow, not bestial, not mocking this time, not in the least. He feels certain he has heard this voice before but finds it impossible to reconcile with a face or name.
A shadow rapidly passes across both windows and the room is strangely darkened as if the hag things were of far greater size than he remembers. From beyond the glass he hears the piercing shriek of an impaled Scuttler and imagines the absurd thing scrambling hopelessly over the eroded wall, trying desperately to escape. But the Hunter has found the prey and all it can do is shriek and perish.
“I'm sorry,” he replies after a lengthy silence, his voice sounding thin and unreal. “Mr. Rondo isn’t able to speak to anyone. Not at the present moment, at least. But Mr. Rondo felt it might interest you to know a package was sucessfully delivered to an address in Halcyon--as promised some time ago--” The man has no idea what the words he utter mean or why he feels compelled to utter them. The word 'package' seems to evoke unpleasant connotations in his mind: and he imagines such a package wrapped in brown butcher's paper; a slick and sickly bulging package. But is it an authentic memory or a reverberation of troubled nights, an echo of his frequent bad dreams...a dream echo within a nightmare? It feels like the memory of another...bleeding into his consciousness...
There is the briefest of pauses from the caller on the other end. “I’m sorry, too” the cultured voice responds, no amount of emotion shading his words. “It's quite regrettable. He had interesting contacts you may not have fully appreciated. He was integral to our future plans for expansion and his loss is a blow to our Organization. Certainly, a great personal disappointment to Mr. N. It has necessitated the most extraordinary corrective action. There are those who wish to do us harm-- other Organizations, as I'm sure you know--and the Charles E. Voor I.S.H Corporation has long been a particularly nasty thorn in our side. Indeed, I'm sure Charles has taken great satisfaction in the expert butchery of his handyman from Halcyon. His Fixer was an extraordinary man, a man of great violence and great intelligence as well, a rare combination in, a real monster; we could have used him in our Organization if his loyalties hadn't been sadly misplaced. Such a waste. Mr. N is quite beside himself with regrets over this whole affair, although his wonderful sense of humor is a great comfort to us all in trying times. Be certain to give our condolences to Rondo's loved ones…”
“I’ll pass them along,” the man manages to croak. And then slowly, agonizingly so, he replaces the clammy phone in its pale as bone cradle. He knows that in the next few moments the phone will be gone, not to reappear until it's required.
VII. Greetings from Halcyon
There are three pieces of furniture in the angry room. A dilapidated sofa wirh three small silk pillows, an ancient armoire, a straight back wooden chair. Taped to the bottom of the chair is an over-sized postcard, undated, yellowed with age. On the front is the picture of a gray scuffed door with a small tin plate reading restrooms. A large crude phallus has been sketched beneath the plate clearly marking it a men's room.
On the reverse side are a few sentences written in a cramped and perhaps hasty hand. Above them, written by a more eloquent hand is a single sentence--Found scrawled in blood on a restroom's wall in Halcyon N.J.. This clearly refers to the words beneath and they are:
They have moved among us since time immemorial. We are their Meat and Drink. They desire from us nothing as gross as physical sustenance. They hunger not for our flesh or our blood but seek a more subtle, more refined nourishment
They seek Amusement.
Call them demons if you must. Those of us (and I refer to human beings like myself) in their employ think of them only as The Others. Their powers, while extraordinary and godlike by human standards, do not preclude the assistance of mortal hands. They have never created human evil—the abundance of it is simply too great—but They manipulate it cunningly. They arrange and conduct Their ghastly orchestrations to maximize effects of hilarity and horror. Their Art must always climax with the Absurdity They cherish so dearly...
We, their human allies, labor in their service; and our reasons for doing so are as varied as the imagination can conceive. Misanthropes, sociopaths, deviants…all the species of the lost and damned. Many would freely do the ghastly Work our employers demand of us, even while others toil in Their fields less willingly. But all know the rigorous demands of excellence that our masters insist on, even as we know the equally rigorous punishments that reward failure or betrayal. One common emotion unites us all.
A terror almost inexpressible in words.
VIII. An Angry Room
And the room seems angry again. The carpet is beginning to show spreading crimson stains, and the past is slowly bleeding through, positively seeping now, and the blood is forming a symbol, something much like a pentagram but more complex. If only his memory could pierce the shroud of gray formlessness that blinds it, he would recall he had seen something very similar to this pattern tattooed on Rondo’s chest...that night when, with the artistry of a professional, he dismembered Rondo's body.
The blood seeps, the rapacious birds cry from beyond the windows-- how strangely like human laughter that cackling that issues from their throats!-- and the room seems more oppressive than just a few minutes before. The temperature is rising again and soon the heat will be almost unbearable. If only the antique air conditioning system would work, all this might be more bearable.
But amenities are few in this angry room.
A man paces, mechanically paces, in an angry room.
A reworking.[/I]
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