Bone Pattern

His Shadow Falls into His Hands- October 14, 2014

I am slowing down in my writing.  Sleeping a lot, back in my own bed.  The cavern in the earth acquires an air of unreality.  Let me spill myelf to you quickly, then.  Quick with an arterial pulse.  Let me bleed myself empty, and hope the poison stops where it is.

There we were, in that cavern in the earth, with the bone pattern chasing itself around its own emptiness overhead.  There we were, myself and Fisher and the puppet man cast down to kneel at our feet, shadow twisted into wire running into his open skull. Fisher creeping toward him, trying to stand and dragging himself instead. His shadow running ahead, fleeing from my flashlight.  I stood mute and staring as Fisher and his counterpart met.

The man might have waited there for centuries.  Like a graven angel guarding a tomb he might have sat for unnoticed eons.  If I hadn't seen him mere weeks ago, I would believe he had waited for us for all the span of my life.  He might have waited for all that time, so eagerly did his hands close over Fisher's wavering shadow.  Closed upon it like a solid thing, a construct of flesh.  Something with the power to make Fisher scream.  

His hands closed around Fisher's shadow and somehow they pulled him close.  Flesh on the immaterial absense of light drew them both together.  That little impossibility was enough to pull Fisher fully into the sight of the great and empty eye at the center of that space.   It was enough to pull its attention toward us all.  

It was just an empty space.  A focal point for bone to turn itself around.  I know that.  Knew it then.  Even for all those days I spent pinned beneath it.  It doesn't matter.  The empty place at the heart of the pattern, the eye, the door.  It opened.  It reached for Fisher.  Let the empty-headed man go and reached for him.  It left that man in his torn and dirty suit crumpled on the filthy floor. Left him motionless and dead.  The stillness in which we found him only a taste of this true inanimate slump. Long shadow tendrils walked themselves free of his head.  Traced blasted lines in the dust as they made their patient way to Fisher's prone body.

I have felt the empty space inside him.  There was nothing in that vast gulf.  No fetal horrors.  Just the void turning in his belly.  A cold space of wind and night.  That's what I thought, or hoped.  I suppose even then I must have known better.  So when the bone pattern reached its dark arms into Fisher, I knew enough to back away.  I stumbled away, came up against the ladder.  I wondered why I didn't turn and climb.  Leave Fisher sacrified to the dark and the door and the turning eye.  Something held me there to be witness to a beauty impaled by night.

My feet held me there, unwilling and thrilled to watch the man who might have been my friend, or my killer, reduced to shrieking nerves and eyes as empty as the one above us. Void plunged into the chasm in his flesh and drew forth void in turn.  A cold and twisting shape birthed itself from his emptiness.  Long, long fingers jointed in a thousand places curled themselves over the lip of his wound.  Pushed his flesh apart, tore him wide.  Freshets of blood looked unreal in my cold LED light. 

Void wound itself together into a shape of knives to rip Fisher asunder and pull itself into the world.  A ravening skeletal shape taller than all the trees of our green and fecund world dragged itself one bone, one joint at a time through his quivering body.  A carrion creature come to feed at the rotten places, all the softest spots.

At last I my hands found the rungs of the ladder.  At last my fascination broke.  I was free enough to climb.  To run.  Not that it would have done me any good.  I was two rungs up the ladder when her boots knocked me back into the earth.  The Weaver dropped like an arrow from above, cast me sprawling on my back.  My flashlight spun away into the dark, turning the room into spinning shadow and flickering image. Gasping and uncertain, I watched her step away from the ladder, head held high.  

Her face was marred.  More than the wound the puppet man had scored into her face.  The Weaver bled void now.  Twisting shadows dripped and waved from her skin.  The man, the suited man who lay dead now at her feet, must have done this to her.  His slashing knife had done its job after all.  Shadow had reached from this place to seed itself even within the Weaver.  More than that, the spiral eye had sent a man, an agent, a puppet out to do this thing.

And now the Weaver had come, with her flying wool skirts and heavy wooden boots.  In the flickering light, she turned her bleeding face up to the joyous bones.  Her face bladed like a hatchet, ready to split this place to kindling.  The Weaver stood with her hands filled with cords that flashed like steel.

She stood above us all, all but the eye, and would not be pinned. 

The Weaver narrowed her eyes and unfurled her cords.

I cannot tell you what she did.

I cannot even try

Not tonight.  

I am so tired.

But even tomorrow, I don't know.  How can I describe it?

I need to sleep again.  Perhaps later I will find the way to tell this.

We are almost done now, you and I.  Just wait a little longer.