Ripples of grief

Chapter 26

Before her lay a tangled nest of knots and glimmering cogs, vipers crawling among them and twisting the lights, contorting their gazes into single beams of dull moonlight with the apparitions clawing at any trace of the artists paintbrush ahead, painting it all – there lay signatures among them all. In a crimson, stagnant past when it glimmered with ill-intent. But she saw only the dim lights and the blotted murmurs of a conversation once had. One that no one would remember as their corpse blackened and withered with decay, and a deep slumber of a rotting, fading mind enveloped them in those scrawls of ill-lit, blotted pages. It was all scrawled with the urgency of a swift goodbye, or a jolting death. One full of agony gone so fast – and forgotten in that ineffable, poltergeist slumber of eerie echoes and flashing then fading lights of smiles among the mist. Something had scrawled in a sleeping state and lured her closer with long lines and knots, among the lights of a Christmas market, children laughing with looming, uncanny phantoms. They had drawn over it, they lured her. Her gaze was pulled. But only for a moment as she tore away from the puppeteer's strings, the artist's paintbrush. Those were ribbons tied on a gift, trailing away into the ash that happened after every birthday, every mark on a page gifted among a tapestry of dreary despair. One year closer to that day with every star painted with a single flick of the hand, a single line among so many – but it was simply the prophecy stitched in thorns of grey, threadbare ash. There were so many trails, and yet that path took her to a threadbare blanket of comfort. Offers of a warm embrace of shadows. Ink tendrils that clarified everything. She supposed fatigue could scrawl over everything you saw, but among thorns there was always light. Painted on or not, it was always there, tempting the vipers from their blankets of shadow with their vile, grotesque scales of glimmering crimson, reflections in a lake of blood, stagnant and slow flowing from a wound as the soldier perishes. With those golden yellow eyes glinting with dread.

But that golden thread could only choke you if among the tangled nest of thorns scrawled across a page, ink-black silhouettes against a dark, dark sky. She may step on them but that was all the blood that spilt in crimson lakes – nothing more than that. Nothing more than an echo of water dripping among the endless shadows. A drip, and she felt toward another scrawl of lassitude, reaching, grasping, begging with cruel mockery in those eyes before her simply staring back blankly. At least she couldn't see the bloodbath before her over every inch of skin and flesh on gaunt, brittle bones. For that darkness was a blanket – with no flame, there was no smoke of knowing that the candle would be put out one day. The ash would cover it all. And all would be that piercing shadow, veils layered over veils over widow's veils, marking the flame of life that had vanished. Among these scrawls of fatigue, she perhaps knew that that was the only comfort, that a smile was cold. That a kind word meant nothing. That the petals would always fall like feathers of a dove. And that a cloak was warmer than hollow joy and childish elation in dreams and nightmares. But there lay that false, glimmering light that she grasped in her hands; in its glinting threads it simply brought closer those strings, and the talons that lay stone cold beside her at every step, limp as a quivering, inert carcass. Those threads that brought her closer, threadbare tendrils dragging her forward into the shadows, not toward the house's cold embrace, held too that gaze – they glared into her own, emerging from the tendrils as if they rolled over vile rivers of webs of complexity. Then they vanished along with that reaching, clutching tendril, the last entrails to be cleaned away. And she was left alone among the silhouettes of so many lost dreams, darkness her only solace as she wandered – where she wandered was always back there. Home. Away from the flooding river that she waded through, and the vipers that leaped out and choked her, her flesh pale after they vanished, and she began to wander through bleak curtain of darkness to that flickering light.

And toward that flickering, crumbling blanket of home, cracks in the ashes, lights glinting through of false eyes and deceitful, cruel figures – so thin like the delicate line of an artist, drawn with such precise passion that it almost seemed mad that it was done in a moment. In a single swipe of a hand on a page so much of fate could be darkened. Or lit ablaze to drift away to dust. The shadows could extend, snatching away the threads of money she held in her hands, signing every other flame with that hollow sacrifice, that ritualistic hum from within the gaze of the occultist. And in those eyes also lay an ice – because flames could never be cold. And yet just as cracks lay in ashes, light aged with a rapid spread of veins, crumbling walls of a smile – a smile so childish you'd think it was cold, unknowing of the ineffable dread that fell and never muted its incessant cries. That was the smile among all tears; a brief moment of monotonous familiarity, almost uncanny – for this image before her, scrawled in swirling, drunken lassitude, was not home. Rivers covered in ash, unable to flow with anything but dull footsteps full of dreary anticipation.

And just like a blanket is never smooth, never once perfectly flat as a child lies, asleep, quivering almost in fear, but no one saw their nightmares – they never lay still, writhing, the blanket creasing and vipers crawling in, whispering stories of terror. And perhaps that meant the nightmare ended, that it all trailed into cold comfort – but there would always lie cracks in the walls of the corridors it created, shadows crawling out like vipers from a nest, endlessly trailing away with the fleeting swiftness of smoke and the uncanny benevolence, almost gentle as the mother's voice as the limp corpse lies before her. A single winding path had enveloped the lights she'd expected beyond the glimmering jaws of that wooden, scarred complexion, a single eye of glass to look through. But the walls loomed so close above, and there were so many cold gazes even as she stumbled through the single crease in the blanket of childhood, cold warmth; they streamed with malice through cuts in sickly, gaunt skin that cracked and dried with grains of sand falling with a dry river's tears from the ceiling. It bled from sores and wounds that were spread over every surface, and the serpentine smoke just bled and bled from sickly, gaunt walls as she wandered through in faint exhaustion. She supposed she had expected light, anticipated blinding hope and joy in every warm corner of the house, candles lit and shadows hiding, not tempted out – but behind every facade are crumbling dreams, grey, ashen trees uprooted by figures in the dark, cloaked and crooked in their gaze – and in the roots of every dream is a nightmarish, vile silhouette lurking in the walls. For every facade hides nightmares of childish imaginations. Then she turned to the two shadows left among a forest, arms around one another in the love of such hopeful, young souls who venture out through that path. And yet once they see the first crumbling brick, that viper seems to emerge. And never leave. Only hidden by the two figures, almost cloaked in pale skin that seemed youthful, full of life, with gazes benevolent, yet dreary in the shadow their joy cast, tempting out the monsters under the bed.

They would always lurk somewhere in a cold, damp corner of the house, always stay for every eternity that stretched ahead in that single path, that single corridor that seemed to go on forever. But surely there's a death in eternity. One that simply lies unnoticed among the cruel, mocking bells of a graveyard as two hands are tied by a noose. A blanket of disdain lies among the despair remaining after joy burns away; she looked at the picture again, the light grey shades of the eyes with green hues reflecting into the ever-stretching shores – time ticks forward but there still lay a disdain in that glare, a hatred that stretched out into the sands of dry, dry shores despite the single moment it captured – if they were crying perhaps it was out of joy, but as she glanced down and saw the stacks and stacks of headlines: Arras, Ypres, Verdun, The Somme. The shadow seemed to dance before her, and the very thing the stare had burning hatred for seemed to linger and mock the desperation they had. They could try so many times, but as she gazed at the picture, then glanced around to the ceiling that dripped water in a pulse of war and hunger, caws of the raven, a toll of the bell echoing, ringing out, then fading and vanishing to ash. Both would remain eternally in this prison of a serpentine intestine, with cold flesh pressing up against their phantoms as they wandered, lurking in the pulsing flesh behind one another, never quite meeting each other's gaze as they chased each other, tied by a wedding noose for unrelenting eternity full of cruel thorns, and glimmering threads of that golden dissonance. And just like that serpent an ember always seemed to linger, throbbing with an intermittent light for the shadows to be tempted forth once more to bite their own tail in that unrelenting pathway of cracks in the walls and anticipation of light. And yet all it did was drain their complexions of life, snatch away the memories tied to it, and leave smiles among those ashen trees of hopelessness. Yet though the water dripped from the ceiling through thin, damp walls, and though those words echoed even in small steps toward happiness, there still lay a light glimmering in the corner of her mind. Always there. Wavering. Flickering – constant for a moment before halting. And falling silent.

There are so many monsters that hide under the bed in the light of innocence, of so little seen – he had had them too, like a life that was full of wonder – of unknown terror. There were many that had vanished as the shadows crept in, like the talons of those vipers. But now she wondered if they were still there just in the cracks. As tears began to fall, cascading among the tranquillity of hopeless rambling, of incessant sound. So quiet she barely noticed them. Those threads of gold held pure dissonance with the cold, damp walls that she had almost felt close in as they had become sparser; less lights to tempt out vipers, fangs that could pierce every newspaper and minds and lives and those thorns of childhoods. Cutting short the flame. And yet that smoke will end. A trail of stairs climbed, and water dripped from the walls. With shadows looming. Watching. Because the light that remained was an uncomfortable blinding one. Among narrow corridors, a flame can so easily burn away the comfort, leaving a hollow carcass to be buried in the ground, blanketed once more by a veil of darkness.