The wind was the most violent in the winter months when it bit at your heels like a rabid, starved dog. It howled in the night and barked in the noon, where the heat of the sun warmed it with a frigid fire. While many of its prey locked themselves up in dense faux fur or jackets, only a few men and women loved its bite. Willing masochists of the winter. Joseph Mardon-Caldore was one of the victims of the frigid teeth.
He sauntered around the city, snow up to his shins, in thigh length shorts and a thin clothed button up. His eyes were alight as a gust of cold sank its hissing teeth into his flesh, digging deep and freezing his veins. Many called him a mad man, and he called himself ‘no one but a lover of the winter days.’ He was commonly sighted in the park, laced in ice, sat upon a frozen bench with blue fingers and a runny nose. He was never there without his camera.
He always loved the look of ice beneath a lense, for as he often amused, “The eye is weak when compared to the camera, and any who would look upon the world without a lense to their pitiful eye is an amature aesthete and no artist worthy of even a shadow of respect.” (He was an enthusiastic rambler.) Joseph was quite an admired photographer, finding his way into museums and magazines. He was quite famous for his crystalline landscape images depicting the gorgeous Maine winter forests cast under the purple of a snowstorm approaching on the horizon.
He commonly painted his pictures, though they were kept close to his heart and far away from anyone else. No one wants to see an amateur's work. Roughly painted on a small canvas though the drunken haze he was commonly in. His work was sketchy, rough, and overall poor quality. But it was his own and he cherished it nonetheless.
That fine morning he could be seen sitting contented on the bench in the snowy square., That was the day on which he expected to receive affirmation of the publication of a splendid new piece. His nerves wracked his brain. It was quite new content for his style, and the thought of rejection haunted him. Though confronting it was a fear he was not quite willing to face yet.
By noon, a man came down from the publication company and handed him a letter. It had a peach colored wax stamp pressed with the words “OLD PORT PHOTOGRAPHY AND PUBLICATIONS” in small ink. He eagerly ripped open the letter with the tenacity of a hound, and frowned, for it contained the copy of the photo he had turned in. Joseph continued to scan the letter with eager, anxious eyes.
“Dear Mr. Mardon-Caldore,” the letter addressed, “We regret to inform you that you that we will not publish this photograph in our magazine on the basis that our readers and critics will not be pleased with the new addition. The content of your photograph is far too gory and disturbing for us to publish. If you intend to publish this crime scene we invite you to find a wildlife journal, and not a respectable publication such as ourselves. Old Port Photography and Publications will not indulge in such violence depicted, nor will we indulge the behavior of our published photographers.” At reading the body of the letter, Joseph bit his lip hard. How on God’s Earth could they not have liked his photo? He had thought it beautiful.
The image in question was an image depicting a great horned owl carrying a rabbit carcass in his talons. The owl had an intelligent look in his yellow eyes that Joseph could not resist. He had snapped it earlier in the week. How could they have not liked it? Nevertheless, he continued.
“We will not publish your photographs further if you publish this, for we do not respect a gory photographer. Good day.” The letter was signed by the executive of the publication firm, and then the rejection was finished.
Sadness over took Joseph, he spent the rest of his night where he commonly spent his sad ones; at the local night club.
The lights buzzed above, pulsing in the music. The music itself roared like a beast. Pills ended up in Joseph’s mouth, and beer in his belly. He went home as the sun dipped below the horizon, bitter pills still in his throat.
Once within his own home, he closed the door behind him, locking it tight as he always does and retreats to his study. He sat in his shabby armchair and set the returned photo down on the desk. The owl was still so beautiful in the purple morning sky. He picked up his brush, his watery cup, and his palate of paints. Wetting the brush in the water; He began to paint. The colors roughly falling upon the page in a way he was happy with and all others would think hideous. He had lost track Sun. Once low in the sky, it was now long gone as the hours ticked on unceasingly.
It was not long until he heard a shrill cry which tugged him sharply out of his painted trance. Then another came along, even closer than before. It was a shriek he associated with an owl or another type of raptor, and then again, there it was, so close it felt as if it was in the very room. He considered it only in his imagination, though the thought was ripped from him when he heard a voice inside his study.
“Art thee painting mine own visage? I doth behold splendid in thy brushstrokes, doth I not? Though thee very much shouldst consid'r a m're accurate technique of recreation. Thee has't putteth mine own head on upside down.” The voice was shrill and deep, sending an unwarranted shiver up his spine. Joseph spun around in his armchair, dropping his paintbrush on the carpeting when he saw what sat poised on the top of his packed bookcase.
A large great horned owl perched on the bookcase gripping it tightly with sharp talons. He had light blue glow emanating from beneath his feathers in a ghastly way. Though his feathers were not the first thing one would notice about him. His head, which normally should face forward, the top of the skull pointing towards the noon sun, was twisted in its place, sitting wrong in every way. His beak opened upwards instead of down and his eyes looked down in their sockets to gaze up to the sky. His eyes, those ghostly blue, blank eyes, stared so smartly at Joseph and spoke of many wonders.
“Ah, I do understand entirely. You do not have the capacity for the comprehension of the language structure of early modern English. Not to worry. I can lower my eloquence to your human level for the night if it will give you the capability to respond in near intelligence.” He had such a human voice, like that of an old man who sits in libraries day and night, pondering over the tomes and their logic. The voice was uncanny coming from his beak which moved separate from the words, as if he were a puppet of his own tone.
“Wh- what… what are you?” That is all Joseph managed to utter. He was met with a laugh as a response before the owl spoke.
“A smart man would know, though he would be corrupted as you would be.”
“What?” The sentence was less an answer, only giving him more questions.
“Knowledge is a curse, for a tome is a door with no locks and many keys. You may open a door to find enough keys to unlock London’s every door, yet find yourself with nothing ever to unlock.” The owl continued to utter nonsense from his misaligned head. It was haunting as he twitched his head, the crack of his mutilated spine and neck could be heard with every jerky, puppeteered movement.
“Man is cursed with so many keys and not nearly as many doors, and so they unlock as many as they can and come out with the opposite ratio. Eventually, man will use every key and be struck with too many doors. What will man do then, when he has too many locks for his one key?”
The owl had begun to make a tainted tad of sense to Joseph, and he had a sudden determination to answer the owl’s riddle. He opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by the owl’s ruffling of his feathers. With a sudden twist, the owl rotated it’s head entirely around, bones and vertebrae sounding musically demented, as if they were log in a fire.
“He… he would open the door the key goes with and get more keys?” Joseph tried to answer, and the owl smiled. He did not think owls could grin, but it did.
“So, man gains access to more keys, in turn opening new doors, getting more keys, and opening more doors, and getting more keys, and opening more doors…” The owl seemed to continue the cycle of speech for hours, though Joseph had no heart to stop him, for he seemed enthralled in his screeches. “What if man runs out of all but one door?” he finally asked.
This time, Joseph could answer. “He opens it and gets more keys that lead to…” He trailed off, “What does he do?”
“The obsesses over the tomes. He becomes the tomes. Nothing in the world will make sense to the library man for he becomes so absorbed in his knowledge. What makes you think that a man consumed by knowledge will ever stop giving other men keys, yet he can not give them doors? What happens when the world runs out of doors?” The owl left him with this to ponder, twisting his chin sideways, not quite correctly.
“What can I do to avoid becoming that man?” The owl cackled, grinning wickedly before taking off in a burst of ghostly blue flames. The vivid heat washed over Joseph as his entire bookcase burst into wicked flames, the owl’s human laugh echoed off every wall.
“Leave knowledge to the mad men.” And with that, the flames disappeared and the owl returned to the charred post, the bookcase in ashes.
Joseph sat, shocked, before being pulled out of his trance of surprise by a long, drawling howl that reverberate off every surface. The haunting banshees scream rung in his ears as he swiveled around where the owl’s sharp eyes had been drawn.
He was met with the sight of a large bloodhound. The deep red fur was laced with deep scabs and scars, scattered like a spider’s web across her. She had large sunken yellow eagle eyes, sharp and dangerous. Her bottom jaw was unhinged at the left side, falling off and dangling. Her tongue hung lulling out from her throat, shaking with her deep breaths. Her sharp teeth shook with her jaw, jutting out from below her hanging lips on the top. The baggy skin let way to an emaciated stomach, her ribs visible. She was terrifying and hideous, as a hound should not be.
“I smell it on you, man.” She howled, her voice not nearly as human as the owl’s. Her detached jaw did not raise when she spoke, nor when she howled did anything but her head and tongue twitch. The disembodied voice only shook Joseph sharper with fear that struck his tightened chest. “You are hungry.”
Though he had the strong temptation to look to the owl for support, he didn’t dare take his eyes off the bloodhound.. Despite his fear, he pushed out shaky words. “Fo-f-for wh-wh-wha-what?” He shook out, muttering quietly.
“You’re fascinated. Do not deny why you were drawn to the bird in the photograph. He was a killer, and man is drawn to blood like a vampire bat.” She barked, drawing nearer to Joseph as he drew his legs up on the chair. “Morbid fascination drives you all. It is disgusting and enthralling, is it not, owl?” She asked the owl directly, looking up and getting a hoot of agreement. “You men are disgusting, yet I can relate to the horror.”
Joseph, despite his fear, found himself thoroughly offended by the term ‘disgusting’ being used. “I am not disgusting.”
“Are you not?” The hunting hound asked, cocking her large, drooping head and looking intently at him with intense yellow eyes. “Do you never imagine the dark, morbid scenarios? Your executive never gets trapped in an elevator which plummets to hell? You never get served the severed heads of your friends? You are never intrigued by a predator with the blood corpse of prey in his talons?” The hound gestured to the painting with her wet nose. She stepped closer.
“So what?” Joseph argued, “At least I don’t kill.”
The hound barked inhuman laughter, lunging forward, causing Joseph to flatten against the back of the chair, only to notice that the owl was perched atop the back, staring down-no, up, at him encouragingly. “You are a beast. No matter what man thinks he is, he is a monster. A freak of morbidity is all you men shall ever be.” She barked in a strange laugh once more. “Why do you think my jaw is no longer?”
He did not answer. He did not want to know.
“A hound who says too much to her master loses her tongue. A hound who hears too much loses her ears. A hound who sees too much loses her eyes.” She snarled every word with an ancient disdain that came from deep within her soul.
Joseph had no response. He only sat there, staring at the hound.He heard a crash. Once again, he followed the hound and owl’s eyes to the source.
A massive opossum sat on his desk, fiddling with the canvas it had just thrust from the desk. It looked up at Joseph with large, bloodshot eyes. They seemed tired and terrified, and his must have looked the same. The beast hissed, grunted and growled at him, clawing out before shaking and convulsing, flipping over in what seemed like death.
A possum’s mocked death was common knowledge, and for that reason, Joseph did not believe her act, though he found himself second guessing his assumption as the light caught on a small bundle of red and white at the possum’s underbelly. Joseph’s intrigue drew him in for a closer inspection and it was apparent that the possum had no underbelly to speak of. Blood had seeped from the open wound, soaked into the fur and skin surrounding the large hole which was now the home to fat, white maggots.
A burbling acidic mixture of lunch, beer, and pills began to rise from Joseph’s stomach. Joseph could not control it as he wretched on the floor. The sound awakened the possum from her faked eternal slumber. Maggots fell from her onto the desk and writhed about before finding her paws; squirming into her once more to continue eating. She winced as they did so.
“Sir, good sir, you do not happen to have any arsenic lying about?” She asked, her voice far more embodied than the others. The disturbance in her voice came from the considerate amount of pain that coursed through each word. “It is the only thing I have yet to try, yet the maggots may eat it up before I can.
Joseph tried to speak, this time finding it easier to get words out, for instead of fearing, he simply felt terribly sorry for the beast. “No, I don’t keep that sort of poison in my house. Why would you be needing it? You will die soon of infection if not for the wound.” He pointed out, thinking the facts to be as obvious as the pain she was in. The owl hooted something, no doubt sarcastic, to which the hound cackled.
The possum laughed, so human that it was painful to hear her cry out in pain at the end of the chuckle. “No, no, sir. I will not die. So is the curse of existence for one as foul as I. I will not die.”
Joseph frowned. He wished so suddenly to be able to put this poor beast out of her misery. “I have rat poison if you would like?”
“The maggots enjoy the stuff.” Again, he felt his lunch come up in his throat.
“The boy believes himself to be smart. Explain to him before he loses himself in broken logic.” The owl said from behind him, the dog snorting and the possum nodding and shivering.
“Do you want to die?” She asked him, sincerity in the morbid question.
“No.” He answered truthfully. His life was still young.
“Then you would run from death if he came for you? The reaper, cloak and all, would you run?” She asked, and Joseph decisively nodded his head. “Then you are as much a fool as I.” She curled her tail up disdainfully at him.
“Why? Death is a fearful thing.” Joseph tried to explain, shivering at just the thought of the reaper.
“If death is coming to take you away, it is your time. You must learn to accept your death. Running away gave me so much adrenaline, the fear was strange, yet I got used to it. Each time death came for me, I would tell him that he already took me and he’d turn the other way. Then my time really came, and he recognized me. He told me I was never going to have death.” She hissed again, shaking on her feet as if it were hard to support her weight. “I laughed in his face. Foolish me. I laughed in the face of death and said, ‘Then I win this game, do I not?’ I will never forget what pain feels like, for I am never allowed what death really means.”
It almost sounded like her voice trailed off into a sob. “What is that?” She seemed confused at first. “What does death really mean?”
“Death is a synonym for relief. He is Alleviation’s brother, and I will never know him the way I should. I wish I could run like I did from him, but I never will.” She hissed, maggots dislodging from her and a fly buzzing around her stomach..
“I’m sorry,” Joseph sighed
“Don’t be. It is my fault alone,” the possum paused, “ Do me a favor, sir?”
Joseph looked up, “What?”
“Welcome him.”
Joseph nodded. There was a comfortable silence between the three beasts and the man as they sat their mourning the loss of death, the loss of a jaw, and the corruption of sanity. The tangible feeling sadness and anger in the room was broken only by the clack of something hard against the tile. Joseph, now getting used to the appearances of the beasts, turned to look to the source, though as prepared as he thought he was, he couldn’t have been..
It shook him like a truck as he saw two large black bucks entangled at the antlers still bloody from shedding the spring velvet. The antlers had no separation as if they had grown together. They were one mess of spikes and blood. Both stags had blank, pupiless eyes that stared forward with anger burning in a white hot rage. They shook their heads with one another. When they opened their mouths to reveal small, sharp teeth in place of the blunt herbivore molars and spoke, they spoke in angry unison.
“Tread light in this fight. I am. Step down. Too long.” The broken sentences ran together to form shattered thoughts. The other beasts seemed frightened of the stags. The hound raised her hackles, the owl ruffed his feathers, and the possum tumbled onto her back in habitual fear. Joseph was very careful not to look at the possum. “Man. What say. You?”
Joseph made a little gesture towards himself, and the deer collectively nodded. Joseph struggled to speak under their strong presence, though ultimately, he did. “What are you?” He asked, seeing it the question most fit.
“A king. An intruder. A murderer. Addicted.” They answered with monotony.
Joseph had another question in his gut which he blurted out. “To what?”
“Conquest.”
Joseph furrowed his brow,, trying to decipher their indecisive speech.
“We fought. Over land. Over power. Over blood. No one wins. A fight fought. From one side. Only two. Come out on the. Losing side. A battle. You will never be. Able to win in the. Long run. Death will. Take you before anyone. Wears the crown. Addicted to conquest.” They answer, side stepping closer in awkward grace, making all the animals apprehensive.
Joseph nodded, starting to understand.
“We fought long. Too. Long. We lost. Together and became. One loser. One corpse on. The battle field. One victim of. Addiction.”
“Who’s fault was it?” Joseph immediately regretted the question as their disembodied, unified voice answered.
“HIS!” The stags snorted and began to struggle again, pushing against each other and baying. Chaos followed as the two stags struggled, neither getting anywhere as they pushed against their own conjoined antlers. Neither could even get a foot of advantage on each other for the other’s antlers were their own, and they were only pushing themselves back.
They stamped, one hoof landing on the bloodhound’s paw. She shrieked, which sent the owl into a blazing blue fear. The possum flung herself back in fear, flipping onto her back again after only just getting relief, the maggots curling into her to escape the light. The owl’s sudden flight sent Joseph tumbling out of the armchair, his foot landing on the hunting hound’s thin, mangey tail. She spun abruptly, blood now gushing from her large nose, ears and eyes as she snarled, blood trailing thickly out of her jaws. She lunged for Joseph, but right as she would have clawed at him, he ducked, and at that moment, a hard antler hit the back of his head.
His last vision as black overtook him was the overwhelming blue light of the owl as he exploded in a rather phoenix-like fashion.
When Joseph awoke, he lay on the carpet of his study. As he slowly sat up to observe his study and desk, he fully expected to see the grotesque animals waiting for him to wake. But everything was neat, his paintbrush laying neatly on the table. The paints were dry and the water murky like an ashy river. His armchair sat facing the desk, as if no one had ever sat in it. The door was closed, just how he had left it. As sun rose outside his window it cast light upon the upright canvas. It was exactly how it had been, before the possum had wrecked it.
He quickly glanced towards the bookcase, awaiting the vision of burnt books, only to see pristine shelves, a little bit of dust settled on the top shelves, ne’re touched by him, nor bird.
Everything was how it should be, and at the same time, nothing was right. There was none of the dog’s blood on the floor, no maggots on the desk, no ash in the books. Everything was how it shouldn’t be; everything was right. He sat heavily in the armchair, contemplating.
Joseph tried to remember every single detail of the beasts, turning over each and every word in his head. They had clearly been trying to tell him something. His head felt heavy and hot as he thought over their words.
That wise bird must have been warning him of wisdom, for when he cast his eyes upon the bookshelf, he suddenly found he could not breathe. The chrisp, unturned pages felt like a cigarette upon his mind, yet, when before he would have felt them only hot and bitter, now their every mystery was sweet and alluring. He could almost hear the owl’s words within his head as he lifted a hand out towards the books, almost as if he wished to touch them, yet he pulled it back to his side sharply as he remembered that the owl’s words were a warning. Perhaps it was not too late?
His thoughts came to rest upon the hound, for the thought of her twisted jaw made his head cold and his face white. She was a horrid sight, yet her gruff voice was rather sweet and true. She must have also been trying to warn him. His eyes rested on the photograph; the owl was so beautiful with its prey in its talons, and yet, as he looked upon it, he felt a different heat inside him: one of fear. He brought his hand up to lightly brush his jaw without thinking, and let out a breath he had not known he held when he found it was still attached firmly. Perhaps he was already jawless, and simply couldn’t tell?
The opossum came next to his mind, with her twitchy movements and her maggots. She warned him too of something great and terrifying: death. Though she did not warn him of what most did. She had instead warned him not to fear him. Her grave words must have been grave warnings of the grave, right? As he thought of Death’s presence, he found himself unable to breathe as if a serpent had wrapped itself around his chest. His face went white as the blood drained away, yet even as he felt cold fear, an inner warmth calmed the harsh cold. Even as he pondered the most horrific thought a man could think, he did not feel horrified. Could this be what she had meant? Is this how one should think of Death?
Those blackened stags came to him next, with their shattered words, twisted like one’s image in a funhouse mirror. They didn’t warn of anything, they only raved. Instead of warning of wisdom, morbidity, or fear, they raved about anger and conquest. What was it they had said, ‘addicted?’ Joseph shuddered as he thought of each and every figure man worshiped as heroes; all of them had killed and taken. Did man ever really stop taking?
He felt different. Not that he could tell how or why, only that he felt changed. It felt wrong to be changed in all the right ways. Was he missing something? Was he whole? Was he broken like the owl and hound? Was he caged like the opossum? Was he addicted like the stags? Was he even human anymore?
Joseph had no answers, so he simply sat and stewed in that new feeling of change. Everything was right and wrong at the same time, up was down, left was right, death was life, and he was changed.
His eyes came to rest on a painting of an owl perfectly represented with blue light from beneath the feathers, the blue eyes, the twisted head, and the ashy tome in its talons. Was that how he had painted it? Of course he wasn’t the best painter, but he faintly remembered painting a brown owl, not… this. Something was off. It must have been. How could it look so terribly right? Everything about it was too perfect.
He looked once more at the painting, and for a moment, only a single moment, it looked like the owl smiled. He knew that owls could not smile, but it grinned nonetheless.
And he grinned back.
YOU ARE READING
Within the Catacombs of the Soul
Storie brevi"They who dream by day are cognizantof many things which escape those who dream only by night." Edgar Allan Poe. A collection of short stories and poems written over the years by Alexis Pool.
