They exist among us in secret. Their ancient war has spilled across the borders into our world, and what passed for blood from their undying energies inked the provisions for a halfhearted truce. They are the two great primal forces; the superpowers of the afterlife. One spawned by light, the other by darkness. One tasked with repurposing everlasting souls into mortal shells, the other with banishing them into a perfect, lightless prison.
They come in many forms but all of them discreet, misleading. Some mortals regard them as angels. Others worship them as gods of destiny. All reduce them into familiar myth and superstition to dull the world-shattering implications of their existence. Ultimately, the two warring camps take their most consistent and harmless forms: stalwart storks and ravenous ravens. Any human word or symbol would be a cliché because they’re as familiar as the laws of physics or the number of fingers on one’s hand. The true mistake is man’s habit to value one to the exclusion of the other. Because the two forces necessitate each other, they’re two sides of the same supernatural coin.
Who would believe the truth even if it stared them in the face? Many choose to ignore it, content to live in the safety of lies, the delusion of control. Mortals find comfort in the belief that they devise their own fate and pass time at their own steady pace. Yet deep down they know they’re merely sojourners from this realm to the next. Behind every wall and through every crack, other worlds exist beyond the senses. Parallel to the human dimension and in perfect opposition lie two realms: Helium, kingdom of the Balloon Man and the great white Storks, and Soul City, dungeon city of the Grim Reaper and his insatiable Ravens.
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There are several layers to true darkness. It’s like when you go freediving and the transparent, color-tinged water gets bluer and bluer the farther down you go, to a perfect violet shade. You’re an insignificant speck and the single breath you hold in your lungs is the only thing that prevents you from becoming one with the bleak, eerie, Godforsaken landscape. It’s at that point right before pitch-blackness when you realize you’ve already ceased to exist.
My name is Janet Buenviaje. I was born one day in October. One day, pick any day. I was abandoned on the porch of a children’s home when I was just a few days old so nobody really knows the exact date. My first name supposedly means “God’s gracious gift” but, as it turns out, I’m His unwanted gift. My family name is just as full of irony but it’s not worth ranting about because it was just the name of the children’s home where I grew up: Nuestra Señora de la Buen Viaje.
Withdrawal’s weird. All I need to do is get up from this foldable camping chair on the porch where I’ve been sitting all night philosophizing about the universe and my place in it, but standing up feels like way too much trouble when you weigh it against the alternative of non-existence. This is what happens when I run out of vortioxetine. I turn into a puddle of anxiety. Add to that my latent psychic talents and you’ve got the perfect condition for nightmares.
Did I say nightmares? That isn’t accurate because in fact there’s just the one and it’s always been the same. Nightmare, vision, whatever you want to call it. I know its peaks and valleys like the back of my hand.
First, there’s the strange room whose walls are covered from floor to ceiling with computer monitors. With a steady, almost insectile hum, the hard drives fire data at the speed of light, tallying mutations in sequences of genetic codes. Infinite strings of destinies. A voice whispers distinctly: {Lachesis}, the name of one of the three personifications of fate in Greek mythology. Then I’m whisked away into the post-Apocalyptic ruins of the world. Every grain and chunk of rubble littered as far as the eye can see echoes the entomo-mechanical buzz of the supercomputers. Amid all this chaos, a solitary figure walks wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a black gown. He appears human except that instead of a face, he has a raptor’s beak.
The whole thing ends with the ravaged land growing wings and rising as a flock of angry blackbirds, all determined to blot out the heavens in both shape and sound. And it’s always at this point I wake invariably soaked in cold sweat.
The bad dream is a fairly recent affliction, as though it was triggered like an alarm, pre-programmed in ever crescendoing intensity. But I’ve known its chilling soundtrack ever since I was a teen. The noise has hung around me like a shroud and I didn’t use to mind it so much when I was younger. Now it seems like I was ever only this bisexual metalhead who couldn’t function without meds, who’d drown out the tinnitus with constant noise, who couldn’t go to sleep without loud music blaring in the background and who’d wake up as soon as it turned off. That was the kind of person I’ve been, always wired and restless inside.
I can count on one hand all the times I’ve been free of this curse. The first was when I lay in bed with Marisol and listened to her whispered secrets. Sol; living, breathing, all-natural white noise machine. The first time I made love to her, everything fell into a deep hush. I caught a spell of peace, too, when I moved here to Concepcion, a tiny seaside village in Southern Luzon, where the air’s salty and fresh and the people still haven’t been tainted by materialism and greed. Once a week, Sol takes a drive from her work and friends in the capital to my self-imposed exile down here in the province.
As a docile public-school teacher, I teach Math and a bit of guitar. The second is unofficial and the first is the more sensible foundation of my musical proclivities. Don’t freak out but the truth is, I see the world in completely different lights; in shapes and angles, in fractals and pixels. When it comes to metal music, I’m completely self-taught. I mastered the guitar just as soon as I picked it up. As it turned out, I can break music down to its core components and find structure. Humans react to harmonious frequencies and progression based on preset logic relations inside our brains, and something that jars against logic jars to the ears. Even the much-maligned growl of heavy metal requires traditional vocal techiques. As the lead singer of the now-defunct gothic metal band Eve Serrated (formerly just Serrated), I was also interviewed once by a Music major whose thesis was about exploring the correlation between classical music and heavy metal.
My students are the teen children of hick fishermen and tenant farmers. Around these parts, they have plenty of sugar canes to practice counting on. Money not so much. Even the fishermen’s catch is dwindling. The mackerel scad, once dubbed “the poor man’s fish”, has become a luxury on the dining table. My teen students’ stutter and abysmal self-esteem were what necessitated our foray into music and the guitar.
I remember the day I arrived and the first time I saw the sea up close. It lay just beyond the welcoming smile of Mrs. Salas, the thin school principal who constantly exudes this aura of frayed elegance. I hastily excused myself and couldn’t help laughing as the surf rushed and drenched my jeans. Its roar and rhythm felt all wrong when in fact it was my own senses that had been set to the unnatural beat of the city. A lullaby as I lie in bed at night or a blanket of silence in my many dives, the music of the sea had never failed to soothe me since.
Until last week.
The drone of Hell’s supercomputers came back with a vengeance. Pretty soon, I was back inside the suffocating shroud of their noise. God help me but I’ve finally figured out what it all means. All those years of auditory torment have helped me piece together my tinnitus’s dark import. Like a superfluous and cruel joke of fate, I know exactly what death sounds like. Can you believe it? The first part of the vision that plagues my sleep? The otherworldly supercomputers record the accumulation of damages to the genetic code of every human being. In other words, the noise I’m hearing is a biological countdown to expiration. The mass expiration of EVERY living soul on the planet.
The second segment of the dream is much harder to interpret. But an unholy feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me it’s a darkness no human mind is ever meant to fathom.
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All at once I’m in the kitchen getting ready for a dive. It’s like this when the infernal timer is abuzz in my brain; I move around in a fog. I decide to leave a note for Sol because she might arrive this morning as per the old schedule. {How can we be soulmates}, I write, {if I don't have a soul of my own?} I pin the note under a fridge magnet before I can chicken out. Our slow falling-out is hurting both of us. The timer inside my head and my oneiric visions have given birth to a secret third presence. Like a fat black Buddha sitting cross-legged between Sol and I, it keeps growing and pushing us apart. But maybe that’s for the best. Sol awakens in people a thirst for life they never knew they had. Sol; her skin baked to a golden-brown heaven so every time she smiles there’s the jarring contrast of pearly teeth. I can never resist freediving for those underwater gems that beckon for three-minute breath holds. A part-time influencer and full-time vet in an animal shelter, Sol’s Fili
With a jolt that’s more mental than physical, I slip through the solid bottom of the boat and back into the water. I sink like a statue flanked by the erratic blackbirds. The medium’s completely wrong but I’m falling backwards at a skydiver’s terminal velocity: sixty meters per second. I can tell because I used to be into motorcycles. But riding is nothing compared to this. Nothing can ever compare to this. I’m being sucked down a maelstrom of hissing, exploding water; a human bowling ball down a slide that stretches all the way to the bottom of the sea. I feel an intolerable amount of pressure and pain building against the tissues of my middle ear. Then I hear a light pop – hard to tell if real or imagined – followed by a gushing feeling of relief as cool water flows past the bleeding eardrum on either side of my skull. I slide out of the sunlight into the twilight zone, two hundred meters below surface, and on till I finally pass the bluest zone of the sea that divers only dream of
Wet and warm sensations all over my face, in a slobbery, affectionate way that for a moment I think I’m back at Nuestra Señora de la Buen Viaje and being woken up by Gamby. Then I remember the stray puppy has been dead over a decade ago and my eyes snap open. A bear of a dog is licking my face – or rather, the blood dripping out of the open wounds in my face – while something close is making a hissing sound like a pit of snakes. I drag my ass through the muddy bank and scream. Another dog turns to snarl at me and then a third, till my brain registers that all three heads are attached to the same giant, thickly-muscled neck. {Kerberos}. Greek mythology from high school floods over me and I whimper. {The Hellhound. Sibling to the monsters Chimaera and Hydra}. All three heads are barking a volley of thunder so I press my hands over my ears to protect them from further damage, but then my eyes fall on the curious mane down the dog’s broad back. I note how the hair is sort of glistening,
No two objects of mass can occupy the same space at the same time, and yet, just as it was at my sentencing, I become partly conscious of other people undergoing the torture along with me. Apart from my own, I can hear wails screeching into mad laughter as we’re all, slowly but confidently, dragged towards our darkest nightmare. Our backs slam against the back wall of the elevator and stay there as though we were in the rotor ride of an amusement park. As much as I want to glimpse my fellow victims, I can’t even turn my head as I hang restrained by all the weird g-forces and the superfluous chains that smell of either rust or dried blood. There’s an elevator operator who calls out each floor, all of them going downwards and deeper to the true essence of terror. Only it doesn’t look like there are buttons to control the box; instead, the operator manipulates ropes that disappear into a hole in the ceiling. Eventually, no matter how hard my sanity refuses to accept it, the thing that’s
“I’ll take it from here, fleshie,” Death whispers in a voice oozing with menace, enough to turn a sumo wrestler’s knees into jelly. Unlike Kharon’s voice which sounded like it was borrowed from an ogre, Death’s works on a whole different level of threat-making. Its calmness will paralyze you right where you stand. It’s the perfect voice from beyond the grave: gravelly and frosty,giving the impression that Death is a gangster of the literal underworld. The elevator operator makes the big mistake of doubting what he has just heard and looks over his shoulder for the first time. Like an owl, he swivels his head 180 degrees so I see that for a face he has nothing but two dots for eyes and one eternal frown, basically an upside-down smile, all slit into a smooth, round mass of flesh. The face is as heartrendingly crude as a stickman’s face traced in dirt by a preschooler. But once those inanimate peepers lock on Death, they bulge. No sight could be more apt for the expression “eye-popping
Sol’s Umballicus-bearing image is sitting on a bed in a room that looks vaguely familiar because of the band posters on the walls. She’s hugging my dusty, stringless acoustic guitar and sobbing piteously. Back on Sub-level 5, I must’ve drunk some of the River Lethe’s water mixed in with the slime of the River Styx because it still takes a moment for me to put two and two together and realize that Sol’s grieving. For me. All at once through another psychic sitrep, this time with the speed and force of a hundred grams of ecstasy, I come to have a very vivid picture of everything that has transpired in my absence: {In the hospital, the sight and sound of all those machines surrounding my bed reminds Sol that the substantial part of me, that which once made me me is in danger. The woman lying in the hospital bed is Jan but at the same time not her. Right now a very thin line divides the person from an empty shell. She’s grown familiar with those additions to my body. They’re her best pal
I don’t know whether I should feel relieved or cheated when I find under the wide-brimmed hat, the mother of all anticlimaxes: a beak doctor’s mask, the kind that medieval doctors wore during the Black Plague in Europe and what modern-day revelers sport at the Venetian Carnival. Still, I can divine the reason behind this diluted image. No shape could ever truly contain the deep and pervasive horror that Death inspires and to behold it in all its extradimensional glory is to spontaneously fry your brain. In one fluid, memorized motion, Septimus whirls his overcoat off and into the air and a spirit steps out of a wall of monitors to assume the role of a coat-stand. This spirit is fully skeletal; tragically its head is missing so there’s nothing but its spine protruding between the shoulder-blades, making it otherwise perfect as a peg. Septimus tosses his guitar case in the same direction and the decapitated skeleton also catches this out of habit before stiffening ramrod straight like a
“As a child, Oriana was no stranger to death,” Septimus suddenly starts narrating in my head yet also from somewhere {inside} the father’s bedroom. The words sound disembodied and the fact that the personification of death is talking about himself as a separate phenomenon isn’t lost on me. I catch the faint smell of his cigarette like the fading echo of an echo. “There had been far too many partings around her, as always there are around each and every fleshie. First, there was Granny’s stroke. Next, Uncle Tony’s lung cancer. Then her mother’s traffic accident. It was difficult enough watching the people who make up your world leave one by one, the constant fear of being left all by yourself, but it was even more difficult not understanding what was going on and not being able to talk about it with anyone. It was all the grownups' fault thinking they could hide death by not mentioning it, when death was in every drop of water they drank, every breath of air they took, every wisp of