Thanatéros

~28.11.2014~
 “It is a fair and noble arrangement
This business of life and existence,
Where everything we take from the earth
Will be taken back and returned.”
Woods of Ypres – Keeper of the Ledger

“Death is a tease!
To venture into the thought of despair and pull yourself back together again,
Knowing you had once stood on the edge and almost dove in.
Everything had driven me there, another lesson, best learnt young,
When you want it you can’t have it, when you don’t want it, it’s done.”
Woods of Ypres – Darkest Blues: Relief that nothing can be done

“’Nothing lasts forever’

Said the black hole to the star.
Look into the mirror,
See the black hole that you are.’”
Thrawsunblat – Song of the Nihilist

“We are the wounds and the great cold death of the earth.”
Agalloch - …And the Great cold death of the Earth

“Suddenly the dark, the thickest Stygian dark

Pressing on all sides with vertigo,
Running from the quickest in the sickest abyss
My spirit’s lifted by an angel of woe.”
Cradle of Filth – Death, the Great Adventure

“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”
Howard Phillips Lovecraft – The Outsider

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
Edgar Allan Poe - Eleonora
 I
Requiems are in the house

If you go twenty-six miles up north from the city in which once stood the voivode that was
sainted, you will enter the small commune of Crooked Tree, a place at the foot of the north-eastern
Carpathians.
It is marked by rows of cherry-trees on both sides of the road and an acacia forest on the
hills on the right. Moreover, there’s a gas-station and car-wash at its entrance. After you left it
behind, you’re heading towards a bridge. If you look around you from that stone bridge, you can
see vestiges of houses – just partial, grinning structures of concrete – and fields without any patch
of grass, which seem scorched, lifeless and arid. Some of the houses who are still standing have a
yellow stripe under or over their windows. Those are all wounds from The Big Flood.
White-trash priests said that it was the work of God, who was disappointed with the people
of Crooked Tree for whatever obscure, petty reasons.
People always die there. Although it is a human instinct to hide hideous facts, I cannot hide
this from you; yes, people died in great numbers.
It was a terrible flood. The sky was black for two weeks straight and it rained mercilessly,
endlessly. People went missing, children were lost in the arms of the furious water that rose above
its shores with the wildness and brutality of a Viking raid; parents searched and then, in some
cases, mourned for weeks and then cursed both God and the water.
The villagers searched for those who perished in the monstrous waves, so they could bury
their bodies according to the Christian tradition. Often, they didn’t have what to put in the grave.
People believed that God was pissed-off and that he wanted to lynch them. It was that, or
the fast melting of the snow that towered on the mountains that surrounded Crooked Tree and the
neighboring communes. I’d go with the second. I always went with the second.
After you’ve crossed the bridge and admired the very first ruinous landscape, you drive up
the road, through the houses, and there lay, on your left – heralded by the smell of myrrh and
chrism and hopelessness - a wooden church, like those in the times of yore. That’s the church for
the western folk of Crooked Tree. It was all build with money from the people and it stands proud
and tall like a herald of an imaginary wealth.
 If you enter the gates and take a look to the right, your eyes meet with an ancient cemetery,
ridden with broken and bended wooden or stone crosses that seem to grow right from the earth
like tendrils of corn.
They are so old that the letters inscribed on them are Cyrillic.
The towering Crooked Tree monastery, with its ship-like shape is right beside that place of
quietus. They only go there in Easter and the summer, when myriad tourists come from all over
the world to admire its exterior painting and architecture. Now, it’s beautiful how one can stride
from the church to the monastery right through the crosses, stomping on the paths through the
remains of the deceased, like a patron saint of failure and oblivion. In the summer, when
everything’s green, pure and demure, the vegetation grows abundantly on the crosses and
tombstones, and for a moment, the people forget what they represent.
Though years of sieging rain have washed the sainted faces away and erased the angels’
wings, people are still coming there in summertime. And they take photos, alone, together, in
throngs, in all possible ways, and show them to the people they care about, so they could see the
relic that is the monastery.
Then the big wooden gate, studded with iron, is opened with an old heavy, rusty key - and
the tourists are allowed to enter within it and even photograph or record what they’re seeing. They
look to the paintings and touch them, as fascinated as the first man who saw fire.
Its belly resembles a cavern, in which people carved shrines and places to burn incense and
light candles. The insides are, too, painted. Somehow, these are more faded than those on the
exterior. It must be the breath of solitude and the sighs of the aging time that does this to the colors.
It’s small to the edge of claustrophobic, and knowing that there’s a cemetery at an arm’s length, a
cemetery that’s so old and full of horrific tales, doesn’t help at all to feel free.
Inside, people sit on rudimentary chairs or benches; of course, usually they stay on their
knees. You’re not allowed to be comfortable when praying. Then there’s the cold: it’s insanely
cold inside the monastery, for the sun can rarely shine so bright as to penetrate the aphotic cobweb
that is the trees’ crowns. There aren’t that many surrounding it, but those that are were endowed
with opulent and thick wreaths, as to offset the overall emptiness and ghastliness of the
surroundings.
People say that sometimes, at nighttime, you can hear ghostly choirs of Gregorian chants
coming from the church; if you’re lucky, you can even see the silhouettes of the monks marching
– for whatever reason – through the crosses, gleaming in the nacre fabric of the moon rays, with
spectrally-glowing paternosters that flicker tiredly, mimicking the mood of the monks.

If you exit the monastery by the stone-gate from the belfry, you will be able to see the
second graveyard. This one’s bigger and more contemporary. There are somewhere around ten
thousand graves in it. Imagine how many people have died. A fucking lot… A tremendous amount
of breaths and souls have been buried there, among rocks and roots; many young, many old, many
simply overdue.
In the Easter morning, somewhere around five, the Christian flock of Crooked Tree hurts
the umbrage of the night with its light, as the believers march to the graveyard with lit candles and
place them on the tombs of those who are not among them anymore. They also pray for them, as
if prayers could bring them to life. There won’t be any death left if prayers would have had any
goddamn effect. That would be ghastly: a world without death. Just think about it.
I used to go up in the belfry with my childhood friends and watch from there all those
candles blazing in the night, like a galaxy of fireflies or a forest of stars. We were sure that the
dead felt gratitude for those frail – yet servile – lights. And from there we could see the people
marching through the graves like vermin through a corpse, stomping on those who had no
significance for them, with no respect whatsoever for the pernicious bones underneath.
Now quit this second graveyard and go up the road somewhere around two hundred meters
and read the letters that are still visible on the blackened façade of the next church: “Ein Fest Burg
Ist Unsergott”. Then your God is dead, I daresay.
Right across the street, there’s a disco-club. There’s much revelin’ in there, I can tell ya.
They use to get drunk or high and go across the street and pee on the walls of the church, or even
enter its deserted and angels-forlorn interior, so they could fuck uninterrupted. There ain’t no love
in the absence of God.
This church’s windows are all broken. Their racks lie in the grass or inside the building,
like giant square skeletons of rusted steel. Right beside this German church, there’s a little, modest
house. It used to be inhabited by an old man who looked shockingly like Nosferatu. He had pointed
years and prominent canines and a face that was menacing at any given time. He was the father of
one of the teachers from Crooked Tree.
 It’s perilous to venture inside this church, for everything falls apart in it. Attempts have
been made to climb all the way up to the belfry, but the stairs are way too putrid to hold anyone’s
weight, no matter how thin or fat. Would an angel thread with its softest step on them, they would
still crumble.
The devil now inhabits that corpse of a building. I heard him, I swear.

Right next to this church, there’s a monument for the fallen heroes from World War II.
Those funny guys at the disco – they piss on that too. Or they fuck right on the barrel of the cannon
that’s displayed there. No one ever gave a shit. No one does now, all-the-more. No one really gives
a rat’s ass about anything here, to be completely honest.
Sometimes the wind blows through the ancient garlands that are placed on the monument,
whispering the heroes’ names, remembering them. Where man fails, nature prevails; that is why
ivy has coiled round the monument, intertwining itself with the nightshade that colonized the stone
first. Time has erased the soldiers’ names. You can barely read them – and God know there’s a
whole bunch of names to be read and honored.
There’s a candle-holder in the proximity of the memorial; I used to light some of the
candles with the burning tip of my cigarette, looking at the monument as it told me tales of bravery
and courage and taught me how to be a man.
Exit this area; go up the road again. There’s a bar, the town-hall, the park which in autumn
looks like a huge, dried-out potpourri, a little store and on your left, you can see the dispensary.
There are queues of old people from dawn ‘till dusk there. There are only two doctors in Crooked
Tree.
One of them thinks that everything can be cured with pills. The pharmacy is flooded with
people who need those pills. The pharmacist curses the doctor between her teeth, but of course,
she sells the drugs the people need to numb their pains. The people take them and they curse the
doctor too, because they think that he feeds them on pills like some feed cows with grass. That’s
pretty much the circle of disease in Crooked Tree: get sick, take pills, numb your pain, fucking
die.
The other doctor is a great guy, actually, though alcoholic. He’s lost some of his teeth
because of his drinking problem. He once told me that there are eight known species of aliens and
that the governments are hiding this piece of information from us. How did he know? Don’t ask
me.
He only dresses with retro clothes and only smokes Camel. Would one open the door to
his office, he would have to cut the smoke first, with a knife; or maybe a machete.
The dispensary is pathetically small and tragically unequipped and if the lights falls at a
proper angle, it looks like a Chernobyl-esque vista.
If you cross the street, there’s yet another deserted German church. It was built in 1902. It
was filled with breaths until 1940.
Right at its gates there’s a huge bronze crucified Jesus, hoisted in the air like a scarecrow.
People lay flowers and candles at his feet. The interior of this church is rather modest, or even
downrightly dull. There’s a beautiful statue of the Vierge inside of it, which purportedly cries
blood. It’s made entirely of marble if the memories from my childhood don’t deceive me. It shines
some tithes of beauty upon ruin, like a taxidermied sun that somehow manages to throw some
light, though dead.
Nothing has remained inside the church but that statue and the rows of splintered benches,
used now only by the thespian shadows of the night and the bats that cling onto its rusty
candelabrums, as a landing site.
When I was but a kid, I saw a lighting strike the cross on the roof. A big, white, furious
bough of electricity which burned on my retina.
As the rest of the churches, it is terrifying at nighttime. Grizzly. Darkness falls over them
with the weight of a sea. And then they begin to resonate – and their halls are filled with whispers
and shouts – echoes from the demented gods that inhabit them. They’ve been driven mad by
solitude and ruin, rain and disease.
All angels are silent in blighted places. Perhaps ruin confuses them because they are
accustomed to behold only beauty, magnificence and collective.
Have you grown fidgety and restless? Don’t worry, the next church – and the last, I swear,
although there is one more - is at two hundred meters away. This is a splendor! Its steeples are
adorned with gold-paper, its windows are all exquisite stained-glass and it’s surrounded by an
impeccable greensward and taken care of daily by people specially hired by the priests; they are
paid with redemption.
 The paintings on the walls within it are above impressive – the pictures are vivid and full
of color, especially Christ’s descent into hell. That is terrifying, but not as terrifying as the faces
of the archangels, God’s artillery – so serious, stone-carved. In this one there aren’t any benches,
but every wall is studded with wooden thrones, and each one bears a tag with the name of the
family that donated or manufactured it. There you can feel like a king or a queen, depending on
what you have in your pants.
People built this too. Priests have taken money from them to build it, although 80% of the
people they took money from were retired old-folk, to which their pension barely permitted to buy
medicine and food. But does God care? Of course not. He is happy that he has so many houses
where he can retire whenever he wants.
Faith does, indeed, cost.
If you go up – if you can, always go up – the highway and take the second road to the right,
you will end up in another cemetery. This is the Jewish cemetery. It is secluded – out in the
wilderness - and supposedly one of the most haunted places in Crooked Tree. It is ghastly, I can
assure you. Although many times I have wandered through its crosses to find peace, it is goddamn
fucking ghastly.
It’s funny.
Hysterical, in fact.
That with this many believers and so many homages and so many sacred places, there
couldn’t be a place more fit for Death to live in than Crooked Tree.
Oh, dear Crooked Tree – ye hatchery of dead souls and futility….
 II
A sight of God

I t’s winter now, my favorite season, when snow masks the ugliness of this world.

The birches in the graveyard, with black bark and laced with snow look as if they were
suddenly and immediately scorched, or as if the dead drew breath at once and thus drained them
of vitality.
Ravens fly above the crosses and winnow the snow with their wings. The raven is a
constitutive part of a cemetery, as the white dove is for the storm. There’s always a white dove
when there’s a tempest coming – there’s always one raven when there’s a spirit going. That’s the
way it goes from times immemorial.
Underneath the ground, the dead dream ceaselessly. Underneath their graves, flowers find
dints through the dirt and grow up, surrounding the coffins. You can hear them conversing when
the icy winds blow through the trees. They say that Death is but a dream. A dream interminable.
The hills on which I grew up smell of fresh baked bread. The river that cuts through the
village is frozen over and the stars reflect their faces in its mirror. If you stop in the middle of the
bridge that’s built over the river, you can see the mountain rising its summits through the fog,
scratching at the floor of heaven; its versants murmur the tales of the outlaws that once rode them.
The clearings and the little forests whisper my name, ushering me to the cradle of pine cones from
which I rose a pantheist.
The mountain seems to pulse with a self-sufficient life-generating frequency. A white haze
veils its silhouette. If you defocus your sight, it seems to approach you, blinding your eyes with
the snow that caresses it, gouging your eyes out with its violent design.
In summer, when terrible storms hang their asphodel flags above the horizon, heralding
themselves through rolling thunders that dislodge the firmament, the mountain answers them in its
ancient tongue, gnashing its petrified joints as if it would want to reach them and calm them down;
and when from the fecund, black womb of the clouds the rain marries lightning and come down
on the world in what looks like a downpour of electricity, the mountain is silent and content,
because it’s being purged, cleansed.
In this Northern, blizzard-besieged vista I once saw God. I was lying in bed, half-asleep;
all the rest of the world was sleeping, unaware of the things that spewed out of my necrospectives.
For a week, people were terribly frightened by what they supposed to be a gigantic dog
which appeared at night, through the mist, from the woods. One night I heard from outside – for
the walls of my room were thin – a fugue through my orchard; at first, I thought it was a stallion
which God knows how it ended up running in my goddamn orchard, because the noise was intense
and resembled that which is made by hoofs, but when I looked outside, through the branches of
the sour-cherry tree which blocked my window, I saw my God.
He had a pair of deer horns, gilded with twinkling little stars, goat legs, a great white beard
which balanced in the wind and a flute fastened to his waist with sakura flowers. He was
accompanied by a pack of wolves, which ran next to him and jumped happily in the air, singing
their sonatas for the moon.
Then two angels descended from the sky, blazing like meteors through the ashen exterior
of the world; they crumbled like atomic bombs in the orchard, surrounded by flame and a sweet
scent which made me dizzy. They tried to pursue God, but when he turned his gaze towards them,
wild vines of ivy grew from the Mother and blocked their way.
And I beheld all these from my window. I couldn’t believe my own eyes; I rubbed them,
but they were there still. The angels, with their white manes blowing in the chilly wind on one
side, the God on the other, with a humane gaze and an artful smile on his ancient face.
Ain’t nothing that God could do in front of nature.

I always said it: the devil may be terrifying, but not as terrifying as the sight of the angels
leaving the gates of heaven, war-bound. The devil, too, is here in Crooked Tree: he’s there when
people hang on the gates of their houses to witness the funeral processions – which are not sparse;
he is there when they walk home at night, drunk and hopeless and unwilling to acquire some
hope… He is the abandoned buildings that can be found throughout Crooked Tree, but most
importantly: he is in their minds – and they fear him, and ward him off with tricks from the times
of yore. Not that he would have anything to do with them.
The devil is in superstition; the devil, dear, is in people.
There are also angels and cherubs in the village. They watch the infants sleep and they sing
once the dawn comes – accompanied by the chimes of the icicles from the trees. Beautiful. They
have a mutual respect with the devil – for each needs the other. That’s the way it goes from the
explosion. They sit on the rooftops, leaning with the wind, smiling and laughing, looking at the
stars that are their homes.
I saw angels every time I entered my home.
Yet I saw no angel in the woods.
There I saw satyrs and that’s where I watch my own life passing me by without much
interesting events, as I grow old at the same pace with the flowers of summer when touched by the
autumnal frost.
 III
Misfit owl

Jimmy – poor old, desperate Jimmy. Every time I arrive in Crooked Tree, the world
conspires to bring Jimmy to my sight, asking for a cigarette, for a bread or for some money or for
God knows what. I rarely give him money, for I know that he’s going to spend them on alcohol.
And that always goddamn pisses me off.
“Be a man. Always be a man”, he once told me, “be a man, for Christ’s sake or this world
is going to die”. Right on.
He’s always dressed decently, though his clothes are probably inherited from his father or
given by some hearty folk: he always wears a jacket and a tie – both old and crumpled, but what
matter’s the intention, isn’t it. He always speaks nicely, with a grave, broken voice that seems to
come from his very bowels, and he bursts into tears whenever someone gives him a bread, a
cigarette or money. He’s like the concierge of that goddamn bridge, for he lives nearby it and he
seems to just appear from nowhere, spew out from the ether exactly when I pass near it; and every
time I cross it I hear him, with that deep, hoarse voice of his: “Hey Gaday!” And every time I turn
around smiling.
He shakes my hand powerfully – he’s a stout guy, though he limps and looks like he’s in
his eighties. He always has a soul-crushing smile on his lips; that kind of smile that would appear
on a barren woman’s face as she watches a group of kids playing. That soul-fucking-crushing.
“Hey, can you give me a cigarette, please? I’m waiting for some money; some guy from
Germany comes today to pay me for those ointments I made him, you know. I swear to God.”
He always waits for money, but that money never really comes. However, the ointments
are no joke. He gathers all sorts of plants from the meadows and the woods and dries them, then
shreds them and thus he does his magic. He’s read a lot of books on the subject, he once told me.
That’s wherefrom he learned how to make medication for a lot of diseases. Deuced old Jimmy, the
druid.
“Yeah, sure”, I reply, giving him a cigarette or whatever he needs. Then he bursts into tears
– a man crushed by everything in this fucking world. And the tears cut through his old, wrinkled
cheeks and beards and fall on his shabby jacket, rising small puffs of dust that evaporate
immediately.
 “Man, I have no money, for God’s sakes. God knows how long’s going to pass until I
receive it; they’ve cut my pension, the fucking morons, again – I don’t even have money for a
bread!”
And so I buy him a bread. I know he’s not lying about his situation. Destroyed people
rarely venture into the pleasures of lying.
Once I buy him bread or give him a cigarette, he invites me to his house, for a cup of coffee
or whatever he has to offer. When he has food, he’s more than happy to share it. I and my lost
childhood friends always had a shelter there – always warmly and happily welcomed in the druid’s
shack.
He also practices Tarot. Yes, in a fucken Northern little village. He’s told me a lot of crap
which purportedly was going to happen to me – only goods things. They probably didn’t happen
because they were good things. And good things don’t happen if you just sit on your ass and wait
for them.
Oh, is his house a fucking mess… Books besprent all over the place, an ancient TV which
only receives one post and displays an always trembling picture; on his table, there’s always a
book opened on a page on which there seems to be The Milky Way and a planogram of the
constellations; next to it, there’s a book on plants, a little rusty knife, roots and whatever, a jar, a
mortar and instruments of the sort, all filthy and stained with dried-out plants and eerily-looking
fluids. In the stove, there’s a fire burning, fueled by the wood he gathers from the clearings or
some kind neighbors.
He has two big wooden beds, overhung with some gigantic bedcovers.
There’s only two rooms in the house – one in which his deceased mother lived – in which
he barely enters and the other one, that I just described. He’s cooking in the hallway, where he has
an ancient cooker stove, or right in the room he inhabits.
He’s been in jail, for kindling political revolt in a – thank God - dead-and-buried political
regime. Two times, I think.
And now he’s barely carrying his days on that limping foot of his. If Death or God would
be merciful, Jimmy would die and perchance, wherever he’d go, he’ll always have smokes, bread,
alcohol and money. Yet I’ll still hear, whenever I’d cross the bridge, “Hey Gaday!” and I’ll always
turn around smiling, searching for my pack of smokes. Now is it a good, humane thought that of
wishing someone’s death for their own benefit?
 My parents always told me to stay away from that guy. Why? Because he’s a misfit, of
course. Misfits are not so welcomed in Crooked Tree.
I told them to let me be and that with that logic, the whole fucking planet would die alone.
No one should be that alone and that fucking penniless and hungry.
I’m pretty positive that his grave will only have one candle atop of it – and that’s going to
be from me. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for undone, scant spirits. Probably because
I’ve seen them as kindred. And they are all drawn to me like moths to the flame.
On my fingers, a ring for each broken soul I knew glistens with a pathetic, pale white sheen,
injecting me with as many histories that are not mine, but in which I was, for a period of time, an
event.
Sometimes I feel like I’m like the king of a ruined, torn-apart kingdom of sorrow. A beacon
for long-lost souls, who once they find their paths, leave me behind, smirking satisfied. I am
probably to complete anyone, but I’m hexed to remain forever mournful, forever incomplete.
I once was beautiful. I once was the friend that everyone wanted in their lives.
But you know, a human is like a drop of water:
Once it’s cold, it grows rough around the edges and it becomes ice, a snowflake.
 EXORDIUM
Samyaza

O nce Az arrives in Crooked Tree, he powerfully inhales that nostalgia-laden atmosphere

that he had felt in his nostrils for his entire life, and lets it flow through him like a viscous, tar-like
fluid. He looks around him with a prudent, fearful look, as if he’s expecting to be hit at any
unpredictable moment by some hidden assassin; he constantly turns around, paranoid and drugged
to the core with a thousand memories that he tried to withhold for such a long time, and reaching
the German church, he pensively watches his reflection into the bronze-Jesus, smudges his lipstick
and, with an absent gesture, throws his pony-tail on his spine. Then he stares at that cold and
damned savior and mutters to himself: “Peace.”, and then leaves him behind, while looking at the
priapic, frayed cusps of St. John the Baptist’s Church, who rises in the air like some gargantuan,
golden monster.
He walks on the road home and sees the same scornful, puzzled looks that have wounded
him since forever, and smiles, not without titanic efforts, like a madman, at each and any one, with
a charisma that he learned from the shadows that became his abode. A kid points at him with his
finger and shows him his tongue; Az reciprocates the gesture and laughs.
He observes that absolutely nothing has changed, and it leaves him a bittersweet taste into
his mouth; he hastens the pace of his gait to avoid the splinters of hateful gazes that crash unto him
like raindrops on the windshield, accompanied by the assonant chink of the silver chain that he
fastened to the chest-pocket of his long, leather coat and the tumbling of a distant thunder, lurid
and perfect in its display of sky-rage. He torches a Pall Mall and takes a deep whiff, and he exhales
violently as he emits a strangled, whispered scream; he staggers on his legs, slams his hands into
his temples while gaping his eyes wide open, eyes which are seared by dandelion-like veins of
blood.
‘Defocus, for fuck’s sake’ he screams within his own head. ‘Defocus`.
And he screams and he fails at defocusing, at cutting himself out of the primeval darkness
of his memories. An old woman looks at him like at a baby-snatcher and recedes behind the gate,
while his gait turn to a maddening, feral gallop. He blazes on the bridge, takes up on the wooded
hill, upon which his home is and drained of power like after fucking a dominatrix, stops and putting
his hands on his knees and closing his eyes, painfully inhales a gust of icy wind that claws at his
frail lungs, once ridden with pleurisy; he feels it stitched to his back and he pants like fucking hell.
Somehow, the idea of returning to Crooked Tree whips him in excoriation.
And woods close around him, the sky trembles like a water-reflection that has been
disturbed by a thrown rock, a thousand ghosts bisect his vision, mist rises like insane from the
mountain and swivels around him in adoration and he tries in vain to control the vertigo that has
become his mind.
He reaches home with a single thought into his mind: that of reaching home. And he
euphorically slams the door behind him, while his hair cobwebs his eyes. There is a powerful odor
of nutmeg which claws at his nose from every direction; that’s the smell of home for him. While
waxing philosophical about his recent juncture, he smashes a Pall Mall into his mouth and looks
at the sofa that beckons him; resisting its lascivious call, he turns towards a suspended wooden
cabined, withdraws, with trembling hands, a pack of coffee that is probably overdue, and while
the filter sighs ceiling-bound steam, Az watches the woods outside and is overwhelmed by his
Golden Age syndrome.
He sometimes feels like an old insect trapped in a ball of amber; and as you can see the
silhouette of the insect, but cannot see inside of it, so you can see Az in that flame of sepia, but are
unable to tell what he feels, what does he hold inside. And he wails into the flames of his world
like a cutthroat of Zeitgeist.
Suddenly unwilling to be walled-in, he hurls his baggage in a corner of a room, turns off
the filter and leaves for the hills; they are pregnant with guns and projectiles from the World War
II. Two brothers have once found one and they tried to cut it; one was sawing it off while the other
spilled ice-cold water on it so it would not fucking explode. How that didn’t go south is a mystery
to him, because he knows that things tend to go south as fast as they are born in Crooked Tree.
That’s the way it goes.
There’s an entire cemetery beneath the mantle of those hills. Dinosaur bones and war
memorabilia, all buried together like people in a Gulag. Sometimes people find them while hoeing
their fields of potatoes or corn, they collect them and sell them to museums for a shitload of money
which they spend on food and clothing. Sometimes they even donate them, unaware that they could
make a fortune out of those fruits of the past.
He directs his steps towards Buck’s Hill; it was once a forest, but the communists cut it
down and sold the wood. There somewhere, in a place that only he knows, in the ribs of the hill,
there’s a cave that descends into the intestines of the world, with a sharp entrance that reminisces
of a staple remover’s fangs. Once you get into its interior and walk some sinuous, narrow paths,
there’s Samyaza, tied to a rock, face-up the ceiling, encircled by glistening crystals and diamond-
clear little springs of ice which come from the mountain through the petrified veins of the Mother.
The stone-walls are gilded with symbols unknown to humankind, which seem to endlessly glow
with a cathodic-bluish nuance.
That’s the navel of the Earth.
He’s been there for four billion years, facing that ceiling of stone, listening to the rippling
of the water around him.
‘Oh my God, kid, I haven’t seen you in ages.’ says Samyaza, and Az can see the pattern of
his eyes moving behind the dusty rag that covers his eyes and he can hear his ancient, enochian
breath.
‘Right back at you.’ he says, and he is so happy to see him, his sole living friend, that he
can barely hold a venomous bead of tears in the prison of his eyelids. He somehow manages to do
so and feels proud of himself, given than not long ago he was running paranoid towards his home
like an abandoned prom queen.
‘Still trying to figure it all out, don’t you?’ asks Samyaza, with a parental, soothing tone
that goes right to Az’s heart.
‘More than ever.’ he replies while sitting himself on a rock that reflects a thousand galaxies
of glowing mushrooms.
The angel seems pissed-off and commiserating at the same time.
‘Listen… I don’t even know how many times I’ve told you… your kind will never find the
secrets of the architecture of life, kid, or the secrets of the pillars that sustain this suicidal world of
yours. That’s the way it goes, whatever it is. Before you were even a plan, before the first ray of
light impaled the darkness, thousands of creatures were created – creatures that could break you
into pieces just by looking at you. You can’t, but I can hear them claw at the glass that divides
night and day and I can hear them howling their throes through the cosmic abysses.
They can’t figure it out either. And for that matter, I can’t figure it out either. We both
don’t know what we are or wherefrom we come.
It may sound stupid, but ignorance is the greatest gift that has been given to your kind. You
would go insane if you would take a peer behind the curtains.’
‘I think I’m already insane, so I wouldn’t really fear it.’ he replies.
‘Mind your behavior with me, boy.’ thunders Samyaza’s voice. ‘From billions of us, only
me and some very few loyal brothers were courageously enough to leave. And we didn’t leave for
us – we left because of you – because we loved you and didn’t want you to be confused, alone and
helpless. I became a pariah for you, so you owe me more than you could pay me in one hundred
lives.”
‘I’ve heard this speech a lot of times, friend.’ Az says, trying to control a very strange
feeling of superiority, a dismal feeling of superiority that he wishes he would have never
experienced in front of his male consolatrix.
‘You heard it, yes, but you are more stubborn than a goddamn ass. I want you to understand
it, not hear it. Hearing is very easy and convenient, I know, but I want you to realize how significant
you and your race are. Well, you aren’t really a human; you’re too… I don’t know… voyeuristic
to be one. Too curious and especially, too silent. Silence does not characterize your race, so you
know. What the hell are you?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to figure out.’
‘Aren’t you a sweet damsel in distress…’ says Samyaza, and a fake-malicious smile takes
over his features.
‘Says the one that’s tied to a fucken rock…’
‘Don’t do the mistake of underestimating me. I could free myself at any moment – I’m still
an angel; I can move whenever I want and I could tear this world apart like an orange – but I don’t
want to. I have everything I need, even though I’m fettered to this rock – and if I can have
everything I need here, then you can have it too, while roaming free. By the way, I’m glad you left
Crooked Tree.’
‘Why..?’
‘Death seems to have built its abode here’, says the angel, with a deep, philosophical voice;
‘I wouldn’t want you to die. I mean, you’re really nice for a human, or whatever you are. Yes, this
place has become just a huge graveyard of hopes.’
‘I know. That’s not recent at all. Nothing new… That’s why I left in the first place.’ Az
says, and he realizes that he lied to his friend for the first time in their long history together, for he
never leaved because of death or fear.
 ‘I know. Sometimes, when confined in night – that vestige from the Beginning -, in that
sweet, pulsing, flowing tar, I can hear it mourning throughout these mountains and hills. Death
mourns too – I don’t think you have any idea how painful it is to be righteous.’
‘For an angel, your insight is pretty poor.’ Az says and dear Samyaza laughs.
‘You stay just for a day tied to a rock and we’ll see how you’re dealing with that.’
Az laughs too, sincerely, for the first time in ages.
‘You’re possessed with Vassago still, aren’t you? You’re too witty.’
‘Yes, certainly.’
“The devil isn’t as black as he is painted… Are you feeling better, I hope?”
‘Yes, I do, indeed. Thank you.’
And he is feeling better, but the feeling is somehow strange and alien.
‘Anytime. Come see me before you leave. I’m so alone and despondent in here. You
promise me?’
‘Count on me, my dear friend.’
Az presses his cold hand on Samyaza’s feverish forehead.
‘One more thing’, he says, ‘tie this blindfold a little tighter so I may not see the light.’
‘Sure.’
He does what he is asked with a tremendous care; although he is pretty sure that the angel
does not feel pain, or at least he does not feel it in the same way humans do, he wouldn’t do
anything that could probably harm him.
‘Ah, much better now. Thanks a bunch.’
‘I have to go now. I have no idea where, but I have to go.’
‘I know, Gaday. Do what you have to do. And remember, you matter, you all matter. You
matter so much that angels and demons fight over you, and that is absolutely fascinating. Coming
from an angel, you shouldn’t ever doubt it.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘Farewell, oneiraut’, he concludes, with a bitter smile.
‘Faretheewell, Samyaza.’
And Az Gaday leaves his winged friend and descends on the wooded hills; mist is rising
from the mountains in giant fleets and once again, in that Norwegian setting, he experiences the
friluftsliv. It creeps from the trees, rocks, air and water and crashes into him, roaring magnificently
within the engines of his spirit, Zippoing his soul with remembrances: some of them beautiful and
soothing, some of them more venomous than a black adder and sharper than God’s tongue, but
nonetheless his.
He sees the ghosts of those that once inhabited those geographical forms, twisting and
swiveling their designs through the mists, in total communion with nature; they go round and
round, round and round, like snowflakes in a beastly blizzard, and they sing in their ancient tongue
the requiem of the world, the death of man and the thriving of the vine.
He feels an urge to smoke – he feels that if he won’t, all that phantasmal and almost
cosmetic beauty will bring him to his knees, in a Sisyphean sob. He pats the pockets of his coat,
finds the pack, takes a cigarette, and he realizes, with a shudder, that he only has two more butts
in there.
‘At least now I know where I have to go’ Az mutters to himself and descends upon the
forgotten paths of the hills, enshrouded in mist, like a Mephistopheles dressed up for a
pandemoniacal congregation. The sky behind him is of a quartz-like nuance, and you can almost
see the bony fingers of the night preparing to take down the drape of daylight.
And Az can almost hear a Solstafir-esque droning sound spewing from the woods, and he
hastens his gait to avoid shedding tears on the shrine of beauty.
 V
From a bruised canopy

I t was Christmas Eve; fucking insanely cold night. A spinal frost talons across his back

as he remembers.
Az and his friends were cracking sunflowers seeds and were laughing heartily, as ever.
They, the bunch of misfits, united in their own little wooden church. They were seated on a pile of
logs which scented of sweet resin, right next to the saw-mill, beside the bridge. That and the old,
cadaverous mill from the other bank of the river were their quarters. You could have found them
there anytime, smoking, playing cards and draining huge amounts of canned beer or juice.
That’s when a meteor came crashing through the clouds, in a robe of blistering fire. For a
few seconds, the sky was lit like it was daylight – a huge ball of luminosity which burst in a
pandemonium of flames, burning the nothingness of the sky, churning the layers of the heavens.
Its splendor was blinding. As he was the only one that was on his feet, he got the best view of it.
The butt of the cigarette fell from his mouth as it gaped in amazement, and died with an almost
inaudible suspiration when it touched the snow.
“Holy shit!” he screamed, arrested by stupor, for he never saw something like that in his
entire life. “Holy fucking shit!”
All his friends turned immediately towards the source of his wonder. A choir of “Holy shit”
and “Jesus Christ!” followed instantly, as the ball of fire was still visible, like it had been arrested
at the customs of the troposphere.
“Goddamn”, said one of his friends, “what the hell was that?!”
“A meteor”, Az said. “Or a comet, who the hell knows…” But somewhere deep inside of
him, he knew, even back then, that another flower of Heaven had perished or gone mad and thus
plunged into this dying world.
There was a lot of astral activity up in the skies of Crooked Tree. They saw another meteor
once. That was in full daylight and they watched it shatter the celestial mirror, with its smoky
mane, until it crashed somewhere behind the acacia forest, spitting a trumpet of thick, black smoke
over the woods and sending a sonic boom throughout the clouds.
 Raining stars were incredibly beautiful and clear. They used to lay down on the piles of
stones that were put on the banks of the river in order to stop the waves in case of God getting mad
again. From there they watched the sky, feeling microscopic, useless and part of something they
couldn’t understand. Sometimes they got lost in contemplation for hours, stretched out like that on
the rocks, like dying fishes on the arid shores of the sea. And it was always the smokes running
out that aroused them from their nirvana-like trance.
And there were times when there were strange lights in the sky – moving around across it
with blinding-speed motions, severing through the green-penumbral fingers of the aurora. It looked
like a coalescence of spirits, the aurora – all spirits are green, for they are nothing but shards of
nature. When it appeared on the night-sky, it illuminated everything with its glitter. The small
clearing from the back of Az’s house seemed to have spit the colors of its trees up on the sky. The
clear river too. And that aventurine-green haze swallowed all Crooked Tree, like a spectral mantle.
As above so below.
But like the below, the skies above Crooked Tree were deserted, barren and seared; the
angels that didn’t dare leave that floating piece of Hell became demented – mastiffs of failed light
who pissed on all ten commandments and dressed themselves in the ecumenical frock of darkness;
and neither angels nor demons dared to visit the places that were inhabited with such a lush
necrofauna. Heaven-thrash.
Az is the son of the sky, so you know. Maybe a son of that ruinous portion of Elysium. He
was born on the fiercest storm of the year; the night-sky was all gangrened, rotten; thunders roared
in the sky, lightning pierced from their fiery abodes, whiplashing the earth, trees leaned their
crowns to the ground, cracking from their joints and the river-water rose furiously, tumultuously,
as if Chulhu was aroused from his sleep. His father had to carry Az’s dear mother on his arms to
the ambulance, for the waters rose from the ditches and threatened to confine them to a watery
grave.
And when his mother screamed in labor, the sky screamed too with her, and then he
screamed, and then the world screamed as he trampled it underneath his feet for the very first time.
He was born of the sky, the clouds and dust from the cosmic infinity.
He was born of storm, and soon enough…
He became it.
 VI
Nepenthe

“Behold, he cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see him, yea, even they which pierced him
through; and all kindreds of the earth shall wail before him, Even so, Amen.”

J immy Crane looks out through his patched window and watches how the light gradually

dims in intensity with an indescribable mina, in which nostalgia, sorrow and happiness mix
together and give birth to a catatonic mask that seems like it has just been ripped-off from
Thanatos’ face.
A threadbare book lays recumbent in his lap, another one sits under the warm flame of a
wax-stalagmited candle. The fire burns in the stove with the sound of a waterfall; several flasks
are strewn all over the table and each one sends a specific fragrance into the overall stale air of the
room.
With the corpse of a Monte Carlo tactically walled-in between his dry, skin-shunning lips,
he chops a sheaf of herbs on an ash-infected fragment of a plank, and as he stays like that, with his
head bowed above his objects of interest, with a long beard that seems a braid of snowflakes and
feathers and eyes that ceaselessly emit a tear-like fluid, he looks like a druid that has been iced-
over and brought back to life into the 21st century. The old, crumpled photos that lay curled on the
cabinet and the cobwebbed glasses and cups do nothing but to enhance the smell of temporal
rottenness.
There is a rattling sound at the door, a creak and then a dog enters the room, with a winding
tail, and jumps with his front paws into the lap of the wizard.
‘Dad’s got to work, Lex’ Jimmy says, nursing the dog’s ears with his hands. He lifts them
up and laughs at how amazed Lex is by what happens to him. He licks his human friend’s stern
hands while emitting a moan of happiness.
‘What do you know about anything?’ Jimmy asks him. ‘You know whack, that’s what you
know”. The dog jumps in the air and woofs, and then he goes and crouches beside the warm
terracotta of the stove, puts his head between his paws, and inchmeal, his eyes get closed, while
Jimmy looks at him with an unending smile on his face.
 Lex, who is a beautiful Golden Retriever of a large size and a gilt-brown nuance, is one of
his very few friends. The attachment that he developed towards him sometimes scares him. He
can’t sleep at night if Lex’s not beside him, standing in his protective, defensive posture at the foot
of the bed or near the stove, which is his favorite place to be. A German customer gave him Lex
as a gift, and from that point on, they never parted. There is something in the dog’s eyes that
functions like nepenthe for him and his solitude. Every time he looks into his eyes, like two
oversized beads, he cannot help but realize, with a shudder, that he is purer than any human he had
ever met; sinless, pure and kind. And he loves Lex all the more, and he wouldn’t trade him for any
human companion in the world.
As Lex dreams of whatever he dreams while listening to the music of the fire, Jimmy fishes
another butt from the huge ashtray and lights it up with a match that sends a sickening and
nauseating sulfuric smoke into his nose, which burns his nostrils. His eyes well with tears. He
sucks from the cigarette and laying it on the edge of the table, mixes up some oil with the freshly-
cut herbs, agitates the flask and puts it at the foot of the table. He reaches the taped-over remote of
his Enochian TV and shuffles through quavering-imaged channels. He catches the news up on one,
and setting his business aside for a moment of respite, lays his back on the collar of the chair and
listens to what he thinks is a good-for-cock lady has to say.
Nothing new. It is the same old political circus of a country that is less likely to ever wake
from its slumber; the same old puppets and the same old puppeteers, the same pseudointellectuals
that jump at each other’s gullets and the same old ass-lickers and coprophagists that bury the
country in mud and shit. He listens with a smirk of contempt. All around the world, the weather is
playing practical jokes on people: tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanoes going insane, hot summers,
Icelandic winters all over the world.
‘This has to be fucking Revelations’ he mutters to himself. ‘Let it come, who gives a shit.’
And while his master sits in the chair, watching the television with a hateful look, like a
tatterdemalion Elagabalus on his throne, Lex is aroused from his profuse slumber, perks up his
ears and exits the room with a very interested look upon his cute face. He goes outside, while his
paws send echoes from the carpet-less floors and disappears into the heavy northern night, which
fell, with the weight of a sea, over Crooked Tree.
‘Where are you going?’ says Crane, whistling after the dog, who comes back, winds his
tale furiously, in harangue, and then goes back outside. Jimmy can hear him snarl like a demon.
 ‘What’s there? Hmm? What’s there, Lex dear?”
Now Crane thinks he hears a kind of laughter coming from behind the glass of the window,
and some branches being walked on. Lex begins to howl and bark violently and then a rock goes
through the window, covering the table with a hundred sharp shards. Jimmy jumps up from his
seat, scared to death and runs to the door to see what’s happening. A second, and then a third and
a fourth rock goes through the window, and his ancient china and his mother’s dusty teacups
crumble with terrible, inhuman gnashes.
‘What the fuck’s happening?’ Jimmy asks once he’s outside, and then he sees the
silhouettes of three stout guys standing in his yard, each with a handful of sharp stones, and a
chiaroscured shape standing somewhere behind them.
‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ the old man explodes in anger and making a few fast steps
in their directions, steps that show that even if he’s fifty, he’s not as weak as they probably thought
him to be, and in a moment of mental forgetfulness jams a concrete fist into the face of one of the
halfwits, who screams and falls down in a tumble of snow and immediately nurses his nose with
the palm of his hand.
‘Holy fucking shit!’ one of them laughs when he sees his mate down, all bloodied up. ‘The
wizard’s got some fuckin’ power!’ His voice is a broken, animal-like squeal, which breeds such a
hate and contempt that Crane unwillingly and unknowingly shudders, though he has absolutely no
fear.
‘Malakian, get the fuck out of my property or I’ll bash your teeth in, I swear to God’, Jimmy
snarls. Joe Malakian laughs and walks towards the destroyed window, takes a peer inside and turns
towards Crane:
‘Makin’ some potions, eh? Let’s see what you have in there, magic-boy.’ As he is on the
brink of entering the house, Crane puts his hand on the guy’s collar, turns him into his direction
and then again, a fist flies and intersects flesh. It is obvious that Malakian is surprised. He spits a
thread of blood while looking down and then he rises to Malakian.
‘Did you just fuckin’ hit me?’ he asks Jimmy. ‘Answer me, you piece of shit!’
‘Joe, please don’t!`, a scared feminine voice screams from a point that Crane cannot figure
out, but then the shape that he formerly saw behind the idiots contours itself up in the form of…
‘Get out of here, or I’ll slap you cold!’ Joe says to a flower of a woman, who seems to be
in her twenties, with hair like a fire’s cloth and two eyes that lose their color into the umbrage.
 Out of nowhere, there’s a crack of pain inside Jimmy’s head, as Joe slams a rock into one
of his temples. His vision gets all blurry for a moment, he stumbles on his legs and then falls on
the threshold, trying to gather some strength to rise up and stand for himself. But while doing so,
he can see a foot approaching his face with blinding speed, and then the stitch of his memory is
cut down and he falls unconscious unto the crust of unwelcoming frozen snow that cuts his skin
and leaves cat-scratches all over his face.
‘Now let’s see what you’ve got inside, you fuckin’ heretic’ says his assailant and he enters
the house, tossing on the floor everything he can put his hands on.
The young woman advances in fugue to him, and with a voice that would impress even a
devil, asks him to leave the house and the man alone.
‘Am I talking in fuckin’ languages to you?’ Joe says and slaps her tear-ridden cheek. The
lady trembles, and begins to silently weep. She doesn’t even rise her head from its descendant
position, as if she has too much hate for the image that her eyes would meet. Joe Malakian’s chimp-
like companions join him into destroying what else has remained untouched in Jimmy’s abode.
The TV blisters in a thousand shards, the china breaks with an awful sound, but in the midst of it
all, Lex rushes forward through the window that resembles a carious-teethed mouth, and jumps
right over Joe’s chest and slams him to the ground and runs outside.
Joe, who is too terrified to do it himself, rages to his friends:
‘Kill that fuckin’ dog!’
As the two turn towards the door that goes outside, both in line, there’s an awful, can-like
sound, a gnash of snow, and the metallic inserts of a 45˚ leather boot, sustained by a long and
slender foot that is enrobed into a pair of tight, pitch-black leather pants bisects the gap of the door
and frontally smites one of Joe’s thugs’ sinciput, full-front. From his point of view, it was almost
like the night itself focused in a metal pillar and kicked him at the speed of a comet. The impact is
so bestial and savage that he flies for a second, hits his head on the edge of Crane’s cooking stove
and then falls to the ground like struck by lightning and begins having a commotion that shakes
his body incessantly. His eyes turn towards his brain, and a white foam flows from the corners of
his mouth. The second companion screams and leaves the house with Lex on his trace. The gate is
violently closed, and the sound echoes throughout the small clearing, and across the water of the
river and shards itself on the rotten-wood walls of the mill. Lex quits his pursuit of the bastard and
unassumingly joins…
 With a grinning Lex right next to him, Az Gaday steps inside the house with all the terrible
glory of a Xul that enters Babylon to engender chaos, pestilence and death – he enters a ghost,
with a face that is eaten by make-up induced pallor, mascaraed eyes that look like burning pits of
tar, a mane of blonde hair that dangles in the wild winter wind like some ghostly apparition. The
impact that he has on Joe Malakian is tremendous; the wretch is trembling from every joint, like a
Parkinson patient, but still he manages to look at Az with an abhorrent gaze, that is all the more
abhorrent because of his lack of intelligence.
Az looks around him with an air of disbelief. He tries to make something out of what he
sees, but he fails. He cannot find any meaning in what he beholds. He couldn’t find any when he
saw Crane’s body tossed like a paper-doll on the threshold. He looks at Joe Malakian and advances
to him, while trying to control a demonic urge to mutilate him, and then, with his peripheral vision
he sees the lady that is crouched in the corner of the room, and his features suddenly soften. He
breaks a bead of tears with his eyelids, he crouches beside her, takes her hands and lifts her up,
easily and with precaution, as if she’d be made of glass, his chains all aligning on the calves of his
feet, and stares into her onyx eyes, and, for a few seconds, he is enthralled by something he had
never felt before. Her simplicity crushes him.
Then he looks again to Malakian, who supports the same excoriating gaze in his eyes, more
like an impromptu then something he is intending to deliberately do.
‘Who are you?’ Az inquires, moving towards him, and every move is accompanied by a
rustle of chains, which spreads a dissonant, bell-like sounds that crushes unto the walls of the
room.
Malakian is mute as God during the Holocaust. The young lady looks at him as if she’s
seeing a ghost, but also with a strange and ominous fascination. She looks into those pits of toxic-
green hell and sees nothing malicious at all and then she looks at that somewhat androgynous face
and it’s like staring into the face of death.
Lex growls like a demon and approaches Malakian at the very same pace with Az.
There is movement in the hallway and Az, Lex and Malakian look towards the sound with
vexed eyes. Only the girl remains contemplating that tenth acolyte of Scholomance that sits before
her. She falls to think that those leather pants, boots and coat aren’t really clothes, but something
that grows from within Az. And he breeds such a suffering that she asks herself, in a dash from a
rallying, stampeding stream of thoughts, what exactly he is, and if, indeed, he’s a human, and a
not a fabrication of her mind, how could he live so internally destroyed, for the fire she sees in his
eyes can be nothing but the fire of an combusted, scorched ego. She tries for a while to mount
some real evil into his eyes, but there’s no support for it; and she tries to equate him with something
vicious and satanic, but she fails.
In the frame of the door now stands Crane, on lax feet, with blood covering half of his face
and beard and looks at Az and then sends a hateful look towards the wretch that hit him.
‘Az…’ he mutters and falls down like a child that tries to spearhead his walking.
‘Jim!’ Az screams and immediately runs and supports Crane’s weight and places him down
on a chair. Then he turns towards his new prey, with dreams of dismemberment and pain. Lex too,
draws nearer and nearer, and his teeth seem bigger and bigger with every step he takes.
Az forgets everything and pins Joe to the wall. And Joe thinks that he’s fuckin’ impressive
in force for such a slender guy.
‘I’d prefer we get out of this without any violence’ he says, but his every atom fights against
what he just said, and every cell of his body screams “Death and violence!” ‘So I will ask you one
single fucking time, who are you? If that girl wouldn’t have been here, I would have given you an
altogether different treatment, but confined to the circumstances, I will not touch a single hair of
yours. Pretty melodramatic, right? I’d fucking say so. So spit it all out.’
Joe Malakian, the mute, looks at Az and asks himself “What the hell is he saying?”
The girl rises instantaneously and is on the brink of opening her mouth to say something,
but lo, Malakian ceases being mute, and he snarls through his carious teeth:
‘Don’t you dare, you whore!’
And in the span of a second, he sees five silvery reflections and he feels a tremendous heat
into his left cheek.
‘You can’t talk like that to a lady!’ the totem of death says and prepares to deliver yet
another hit in his victim’s face. ‘Do you know what the problem is with people that have been born
as bastards to their age? They find a lot of goddamn problems with the people that do live in that
certain age, and you know, I don’t like your behavior, worm. It is very, very injurious!’ Az’s face
trembles as if he’s possessed, and contorts between grimaces more grotesque than Ian Curtis’
during Joy Division concerts and the sad, mime-like smile that always haunts his complexion.
‘Az, stop! Leave him alone.’
Gaday turns to the one who spoke, Crane, and looks at him with a dumbfounded look.
 ‘His name is Malakian.’ he continues, and his face displays the difficulty of speaking, and,
to some extent, of thinking, because he can still feel that rock in his wounded temple and his
scorched brain pulses in agony.
The girl looks at what’s in front of her with big, round eyes, and she cannot tell a thing.
She’d like to speak, but the strangeness of it all just viciously stomps her in her mouth whenever
she tries to open it. There is something that smells like insanity emanating from Gaday that both
unsettles her and in a very odd way, fascinates and excites her.
‘What the hell is happening here?’ asks Az and all demonism flees his face and his heart
and his chest and soul the moment he utters the words, because, for a brief moment, he forgets
about the face he’d like so much to maim.
‘It’s not his fault’ the girl says and Az crawls on his knees, with eyes that get bigger and
bigger, like inflated balloons, and he says to himself that never in his life did he hear such
musicality like in those four words.
‘It’s not his fault!’ she now screams, and urged by her impetuous outburst, Malakian
springs on his feet and runs away, looking back over his shoulder to see if that shade isn’t on his
traces. But it isn’t. As he flees, he yells that he will kill them both, but whether they do not hear
him or feign that they don’t, Az and Jimmy don’t say a word, for Az is captured by the blasphemed
Venus that sits in the corner of the room, paralyzed in time, fright, fascination and a very queer
growing libido, and Jimmy is looking at Az and sees how abstruse is the light that plays inside his
eyes as he watches the young girl. Eyes full of humanity, mercy, goodness and understanding.
Eyes that he sorely missed in the puritanical environment of Crooked Tree and the Crooks. He’d
hug the bastard, but he thinks that it’s not really the best moment to do it.
‘Whose fault is it then?’ Az asks the girl.
‘Alcohol’s’ she responds and bows down her head in sorrow and shame.
‘No, no, don’t do that!’ Az says, lifting up her chin to stare into those onyx lakes. ‘Tell me,
what’s your name?’
The girl shrugs and wavers when Az touches her chin. His hand scents of a mixture of
cologne and cigarette smoke. She loves it and tries to inhale as much of it as she can. Encouraged
by the delicate timbre of his voice and the mellow touch of his hand, she finds it in herself to stare
him in the eyes and respond:
‘Aurora Malakian’
 Az shivers at this display of dignity and courage and wishes to bite her fleshy lips until
they’re all bloody. He wishes to kiss her all over her little and sculptural body. And he tries to
control this fetishistic thoughts and imagines kissing her softly on the rose of her mouth. He barely
hears an echo of Crane’s voice, like an underwater explosion:
‘Malakian?! What are you to that fucker?’
‘He is my brother’ she responds and Az has another frenzy attack and imagines cracking
his skull wide open. Crane opens and closes his mouth like a fish, unable to give an answer. Even
Lex seems to be a little uneasy at this gruesome testimony. Az crouches beside her and smiles at
her, and for a moment, she sees how beautiful darkness is; how warm, inviting and pleasuring it
is. And she smiles back to that now almost childish apparition. He smiles warmer than any smile
she has ever seen in her life.
Az takes the pack of cigarettes out of a pocket, lights one and throws the remaining
cigarette to Jimmy who is barely awake. He forgot that the old man was hit in his head pretty
fuckin’ badly. He immediately rises up:
‘Hey man, are you okay?’ he asks Jimmy as he checks the wound in his temple with a
concerned look.
‘Yeah’. The reply is faint and barely audible.
‘Let me take you to the bed. You need to lay down.’
Crane accepts and is slowly lead to his bed; with the cigarette into the extreme corner of
his mouth, Az lays him down and points at the cigarette:
‘Gotta buy some more of these. Will you be good?’
‘Yeah, good. Go. And take this young lady home. And the one you almost fuckin’ killed
in my hallway.’
‘Oh, shit’ Az says, reminiscing what he did. ‘Jesus, I went berserk.’
‘That never happened before’ he says to himself.
‘How the hell did you know what was happening and when did you return from the
Fortress?’
‘You need to rest now. But well, Lex and today. We’ll talk about it when it’s gonna be the
right time.’ He leaves Crane there and goes to the girl, lifts her up and says that it’s time to go. She
seems reluctant but then he smiles again; and he looks so very tragic and beautiful at the same time
that she can’t help but stand up and follow him.
 Once in the hallway, Az asks her to wait. He takes a bucket of water from a cabinet and
throws it in the head of his first casualty, who opens his eyes, spits water and saliva and screams
like insane when he sees Az who, in this very moment, hates himself for permitting the demon
within to surface. He feels pity for that dilapidated face. The guy starts running for his life,
stumbles in the snow, falls, rises and repeats the same cycle again.
Then Az and Aurora get out in the northern night, which fell heavily, dank and humid, over
Crooked Tree, the Crooks and the world. The intensifying downpour of snow announces a soon-
to-come blizzard. Aurora’s face is eaten by sadness and Az’s face is too. By the sadness of
becoming, for a brief period, everything he hates. He looks at the dainty presence beside him and
asks her where she lives.
She thinks for a moment and then she says that it’s probably not a good idea for him to
take her home.
‘Why?’ Az asks innocently, but then the answer reveals to himself. And once again, he
feels so much older than he really is. Once again, he is thrown into his shell, regretting his ever
coming out of it.
‘Say no more’ he continues before the girl opens her mouth to respond him.
‘I have to go now’ she says and takes her way on the bridge. Az asks himself how the hell
did they get there so fast.
‘Okay, be cool’ he says and smiles again, but now that self-hate and grief that he feels kill
all the childish happiness that she saw when he lay next to her and once again he experiences how
goddamn fucking disappointing is to be an underdog. And she feels so terribly sorry for him,
suddenly and without any particular reason.
Az looks at her departing through the grayish curtain of snow and when her silhouette
disappears, as if she stepped into another dimension, he leaves, too. But still he thinks about that
face until he reaches the small boutique next to the bakery; he enters and is so sad that he doesn’t
care about the looks that are thrown to him by the drunkards that gamble and gag with idiotic
laughter. The vendor, whom he knows since he was but a kid, is a rather old man that enjoys having
one too many glasses of vodka, has hearing problems and very coarse and destroyed hands, as a
consequence of him being a mechanic and beating his alcoholic wife.
‘Hell, look who’s here!’ he says as Az approaches the stand. ‘Where have you been, kid?’
 ‘Hell indeed. I’ve been in the Fortress. That’s where I live now.’ He replies with an aloof
voice.
‘Nice to see you, kid’ the bartender says and smiles at him, and tries to wink, but closes
both eyes, given that he’s drunk.
‘You, too’ Az says and offers his hand to the man, to shake it and tiredly laughs at his failed
winking.
He asks for two packs of Pall Mall and something to eat, throws everything in a bag and
leaves. As fast as he is outside, he unseals one pack of smokes, lights one up, and observes that
that spiral of smoke has the very same nuance as the falling snow. Somewhere on the hills, a wolf
howls and Az listens to the sound and how it is carried throughout the air. And he’d like to respond
to that lonely brother, but he’s in the presence of humans. Instead, he feels a writhing of the ink
on his shoulder – how it screams to scream!
He now returns to Crane’s shack, with the bag of food and the pack of smokes, and always
looks at the sky, like he expects something to come out of it, a sign of something from someone
and he wonders what Samyaza’s up to and breaks into a schizophrenic fit of laughter.
‘What he’s up to! Jesus…’
And that sky snows him over with oxytocin and yet-to-come hope. There’s always hope,
and he knows that. There is a severe longing that he feels towards the Fortress, towards those cold
and unwelcoming city lights, that exquisite Art Nouveau hotel room in which he is accommodated
for almost two years now and in which he can almost hear the whispers of the void, and more like
anything else, for the Church of Hades.
‘God fuckin’ damn the day I came back’ he mutters to himself. The idea of longing is
machine-gunned before his mental eyes. ‘I really take some pretty fucked up decisions sometime.
I barely returned and I’m already in the eye of yet another storm.’
He enters Crane’s courtyard and is welcomed by Lex. He’s missed that beautiful soul. And
he now watches as the dog tumbles through the snow and he laughs with all his little, blackened
heart. Inside, Jimmy’s sleeping. Aroused by the rustle of chains and the high-pitched stomps of
sound from the leather boots, Crane opens an eye and seeing Az, closes it back in relaxation.
‘Here you have a pack of smokes and somethin’ to eat’ Az says, placing the bag on a chair
and trying not to make too much noise.
‘Thanks, man. What the hell did you do in your afterlife?’
 ‘What?’ asks Az and laughs at the randomness of the question.
‘You did some pretty fucked up shit, son, let me tell you. Something to deserve this
shadow-lived life.’
‘It’s not a penitence, man. It might seem to be, but it’s not. The shadows are less excoriating
than the light. I’ll leave now.’
‘Oh come on, you have to tell me how the hell you’ve ended up here.’
‘I was crossing the bridge and I saw Lex running towards me, barking like hell. And I had
a very strange feeling that something wasn’t right. So I came here.’
‘Blessed be, man’ says Crane and shakes Az’s hand.
‘Well, blessed be Lex.’
At the hearing of his name, the dog comes, jumps on the bed and somersaults like insane,
with the tongue hanging out from his mouth and eyes of pure happiness.
‘Gotta go now. Rest. And you should do something about those windows. If you know
someone that can put them back, I’ll give you the money to pay him.’
‘Don’t worry. I have some glass in the warehouse; I’ll fix it myself first thing tomorrow
morning.’
‘Great then. I’m gonna need to hear more about Malakian, though’ Az says.
‘Sure, whenever you need, man’
Without saying anything else, Gaday quits Crane’s house and goes home, through the
raucous wind and the blizzard that moves, atrophied and silent, across the firmament. He’s eager
to get home, drink something hot and listen to some The Cure. Maybe that’ll cradle him to sleep,
if nothing else. Or maybe it’ll keep him awake for the entire night. In fact, he hates sleep. If there
were superpowers in the world, he’d like to get that that will make him live without never having
to sleep again.
‘Imagine all the things I could do’ he says to himself.
Now is paramount to get home, play some old The Cure, to defuse his rigid chord-souls
and think about something, probably of the Fortress and his brothers and sisters from the Church
of Hades.
When he reaches home, the moon manages to escape from within the womb of the blizzard
and sits palsied on the iron sky like some eye ridden with cataract, and shines some frozen, ghostly
rays on the Earth, cutting it like lasers. The house is invaded by a silvery aura that breeds coldness
and fatal torpor. And while Az is lulled to sleep by the valium waves of the music and a warm and
caressing cup of coffee rallying throughout his veins, something looks at him through the window,
something huge and of a cavernous design, with eyes aflame; there’s a flutter of wings and the
sound of something rupturing, and Az lifts up his head, but blames it on sonic pareidolia and falls
instantaneously in a sleep fraught with dreams and laced with melancholy.
 VII
Dreamthrenody

F rom the peak of the mountain, he looks at the place where heaven was; a vast vale

covered with concrete-thick mist and pierced by columns of stone and magenta smog. He feels so
useless and little that he’s trying to pull his heart out with his bare hands, but the hands go through
him like through a hologram.
Myriad angels crawl through mud and industrial smoke like worms through carrion. They
crawl and try to flap their wings, which fall down, too heavy to support them. Their eyes are insane
with fear and terror and hopelessness and their screams stigmatize the sky which bleeds
incessantly, like a wound injected with draculin. Constellation throw their rainbow colors on the
silhouettes of the damned, in nothing else but mockery and scorn.
And the belly of the black hole grinds their corpses and throws in the air a million bloody
feathers which fill the void. The sound is unbearable – sounds of metals clashing together, screams,
supernova bursts and the aloof echo of the spheres, that play now in atonal arrangements, splinters
of a deep and maniacal laughter, Aurora’s voice – all coalesce together in a sonic monster that
breaks the bones inside his body and presses out blood from his ears.
Watchers sit now around fires like hobos around their barrels. He can see the Earth from
there and how it blooms with nuclear petals – and he can hear screaming, even from that
unimaginable distance. And he wishes he had a power to stop all of it, or, at least, to drop a
meteorite on their heads and interrupt their conflict and put them to sleep.
‘Retreat!’ he hears and sees a retinue of angels break forth through the atmosphere and
plunge into the cosmic void, chatting that all is lost. And he sees Samyaza there too – and Samyaza
sees him and mimics: ‘I’m sorry’ with sunburnt lips and Az falls down in a terrible fit of crying.
And then he sees Aurora, mounted on Samyaza’s back. And she mimics too – but he cannot tell
what she says.
‘Crush me now!’ he screams, looking at an interminable space, gushing with planets, stars,
comets and anthelia and dawn sundogs that spew such a beauty that poisons his brain and drives
him mad. He cries and then he laughs and tries to rip off the skin off his face.
 ‘You were born in an age in which pathetic fallacy was the reigning principle’ he hears a
voice say. And is mad with uselessness and feeling so microscopic that he wonders if he has ever
been alive and not enclosed in a dream sequence. But indeed, the planets and the sun and the moon
and the stars – all, all of them talk to him! All of them sing and talk…
And looks again at that paraphernalia of surreal distant worlds, and how mathematical
everything around swivels, and with what precision the black hole gnaws and tells himself:
‘Everything’s okay, man, you’re in someone’s head. It’s okay.’ So he lays his head on a
Belt of Venus and listens to the moan of the universe and the agony of the Earth. His tattoos pulse
underneath his clothes and they burst in viridian flames and he is suddenly sucked through a
gapping cosmic mouth and exits through his own eyes like Tigris and Euphrates through Tiamat’s.
And he wakes up with a scream and, for a moment, tells himself that he’s insane. For a
moment, he really thinks that he needs professional help or else he’ll end up killing himself.
‘God fucking dammit!’ he says and tries to breathe, but his chest moves in a rhythm that
only it knows. And rising his vision, he sees, behind the window, a silhouette of frost and mist-
like consistency, with a parhelic circle round its head, and rushes there to see who the intruder is
– at the very same window from which he saw God – but he’s too late. There’s the same flutter of
wings and he mutters:
‘Pareidolia my ass.’
The branches of the sour-cherry tree are frozen and dangle in the wind like little bells and
over the horizon, Az sees the garnet-red of a teething dawn. The full moon glissades through the
vaporous clouds like a swan on the surface of the lake, onto other eons that need its nacreous light.
Az can’t stop thinking about the dream he had – he shudders at the recollection of that pain,
at that idea that people suffer because their suffering is insignificant on the universal scale and no
one does or will ever care about it. He watches himself in the bathroom mirror – the wolf that is
tattooed upon his heart and the phantom-deer that enshrouds the wolf and his heart ‘tween its
horns; he looks at his face and says to himself that age doesn’t seem to affect him at all, and looks
to his eyes, that can change immediately from the nethermost love to the utmost scorn and
misanthropy, and to the overall hermaphrodite, epicene features of his face. Make-up has ran over
his cheeks and he cleans it with a tissue, washes his face and for a moment, desires to punch that
mirror and the guy that looks at him.
 ‘You should be goddamn dead.’ He says softly. ‘You’re dead. They killed you. Light
scared you away and murdered you.’
Then he speaks again:
‘Aren’t you a melodramatic ass?’
‘Fuck off.’
Fragments of a song hover over him, and he begins to hum as he contours his eyes with a
make-up crayon: ‘We wither and blow where the smoke goes’.
‘It’s probably six in the morning, and I’m contouring my eyes’ he says while breaking into
uncontrollable laughter. ‘Jesus, man, I need some help, man.’ He laughs but then the laughter
gradually dies and he looks at himself in the mirror with a crestfallen glance:
‘How did I become so tragic a being? Where’s the kid that used to laugh all day long? I
miss you kid, but you’re forever dead to me and I’m not able to cradle you back to life. I’m sorry.’
‘Why am I so goddamn paralyzed inside and how did I end up to be afflicted personally by
everything bad in this fucking world?’
And singing continuously, as if nothing happened, raising his voice in some wild vibratos,
puts the kettle on the stove and draws the coffee from the wooden cabinet, and is hit by an olfactory
mix of nutmeg, cinnamon and saffron, which he sniffs like it would be a drug.
He misses the Fortress and hates Crooked Tree from the heart already, and in a moment of
extreme lucidity, realizes that nothing but the awareness and consciousness of the past is what
differentiates animals from humans. That, and nothing else. And he hates his longing for the
landscapes of Crooked Tree and for the longing for Samyaza, his stellar friend. As the coffee boils,
he looks into the kettle with a fascinated look.
It announces to be one of those few days in which he’s happy – for no actual reason, he’s
happy and loves any living thing, and he can stare for hours at a patch of light that falls on the
floor in a particular pattern. And he can live and breathe in that poisonous, depressive and septic
world and he can see the beauty in people and mankind. It’s one of those days in which he’s not
himself but he likes that other version.
The rays of dawn intensify in their piercing of the sky with reddened, polished spears, and
somewhere in the woods there are some nightingales chirping, heralding spring and anchor. And
he can feel it all: he can hear the birds and visualize their silhouettes, he can see the millions of
rays that knife the sky wide open, he can hear the languid passing away of the snow, he can hear
how the snowdrops and other flowers hoist their heads through the frozen ground – through its
veins of frozen water. And for a moment, he wonders how he became a grave with so much life
around him. But he knows the answer already. He even knew it when he was but a child.
He lights up a cigarette, pours himself a cup of fresh, hot coffee and accompanied by the
music that seldom stops when he’s home, admires the foggy crown of the mountain and responds
to its signals. ‘I have to return back to the Fortress’ he says to himself.
He misses those chemical-drenched dawns and sunsets, and the muddy, derelict streets, the
absolutely terrible buses and the grinning walls of his apartment. And he also misses the summer
in that place – that beautiful, amnesiac shroud of orange light that seems to be filtered through
Midas’ fingers. But most of all – The splendorous Church of Hades, and all the friends it gave him.
That’s the only place where he can be himself without being looked at wrong, without being
criticized and shunned away.
‘I’ll find out about Malakian and visit Samyaza and then leave this fuckin’ hole’ he says,
and he reminisces the face of that girl – and its simplicity and crushing beauty and he can almost
swear that he knows that face, that fair and bright complexion, but cannot put his finger on it. And
the grievous light entrapped into her beautiful, big black eyes. ‘I could love someone like her,
couldn’t I?’ But somewhere deep inside, knows that she will never love him back, never love him
without criticizing him for how he looks and for what he thinks about the world. ‘Should I add
another one?’ he says, glancing at the rings that gild his fingers.
‘Who knows…’ He concludes and empties the cup of coffee and crushes the butt of the
cigarette into an ashtray, squeezing its burning tip, watching the trails of dust-like cinder that spurt
into the cool morning air.
 VIII
Whipcord nightmarelash

G race Malakian steals from the snowy street and enters the huge courtyard of Saint John

the Baptist’s Church. Somewhat afraid, she stays aloof from the crowds of believing Crooks and
scowls at them maliciously and she cannot help but see that they do the same thing – their looks
cut into her, in criticism and downright abhorrence. And she hates them all the more.
The wind rakes at her cheek like sandpaper and it penetrates her rather flimsy clothes.
There are myriad couples who enter the church, from which she can hear the verminous ferment
of the Crooks and the pompous and broken voice of one of the priests making a hullabaloo by
itself, like an echo in an abyss. She looks so out of place that she would gladly commit suicide
right on the fucking threshold. A man eye-scans her tethered habiliment and expels a shot of air in
mockery and assailment. She looks at him and she has the chutzpah to try to feign some goodness,
but she fails. Instead, she would cut his heart right out of his damned chest.
‘Fuckin’ idiot’ she hisses through her yellow teeth. The bells from the belfry now
extemporize funereally and disperse the mist with their sound waves. The grizzled atmosphere –
that ashen, depressive light – seems to enshroud itself around the inwrought edifice while the giant
wooden door is closed behind Grace; and she thinks she just stepped into another world.
It’s dark inside the church – there are only a few impotent candles that try to illuminate but
are drowned by the heavy chiaroscuro. The balcony is full of children, Grace observes, and almost
every chair in the vast hall is occupied. All saints look upon her with goodness, kindness and
understanding, and her heart begins to gallop and she falls into a vertigo of nightmarish visions.
She kneels down and closes her eyes, to get rid of that dismal dizziness and looks at the painted
angels and devils, saints and heretics and she is scared to the marrow of her bones. She expects a
devil to descend from the painting and eat her heart right on the spot. Or an angel, that would crush
her bones. ‘Oh, I repent!’ she says to herself. ‘I repent!’ The candlelights dance on the walls and
engender twisted, ghastly shapes, and for a moment, she thinks that one of the angels just showed
her a row of razor-sharp teeth and moves with a writhing of ancient tincture. She feels a lightning
of gelid terror climbing up her spine and ending up strangling her, clutching its arthritic branches
on her gullet, in an almost fatal embrace.
 As the scents of incense and chrism hit her nose, she almost loses her senses and she can
feel those sacred smells burn her nostrils, as if she’s possessed and the devil within is aroused by
those repulsive, nauseous spices and the odoriferous opium of the people that floats in thick clouds
within the church.
‘Look what he has done to me’ she mutters, but her voice intensifies gradually, like a storm.
‘Look what he has done to me!’ she now screams and lifts up her ragged blouse.
‘You all look here!’ she screams and burns them with her bewitching eyes. The blouse now
unveils a series of serious cuts into her skin, some of them with coagulated blood still hanging on
the edges, some of them still bleeding, and at this sight, the eyes of the children are veiled by the
hands of their parents. Her back looks like a dry, rimose desert.
‘Somebody get that woman out of here!’ someone says in the background and then there’s
a lot of furor among the Crooks.
‘Look what he has done to me!’ Grace keeps on yelling, turning in every direction, to let
them see the chaos of wounds that furrows her angular back. Her mouth is a grin of despair and
excitement.
‘Alcohol took your mind, finally!’ one of the Crooks thunders. ‘It finally got to you, you
sinner! Take her out immediately! How dare you defile the house of God, you wretch?’ He looks
and sounds like a puritan and he disseminates such a hate through his whizzing voice that that
would be enough for him to burn in hell for eternity.
Grace doesn’t even seem to hear him. She continues her grotesque masquerade with
always-renewing forces. But then a hand is placed on her shoulder – and the grip is so violent, that
she yells for a moment. Then she hears a voice whispering, and thinks that it is the devil, to take
her into inferno:
‘Let’s go home, you animal. Let’s go home and I swear that today I’ll kill you, you fucking
whore. Just wait till we get home.’
She turns towards the voice and she shudders and sees the most horrendous and ghastly
image of all possible: her husband looks at her with a gaze that wreaks havoc within and stabs her
with icy spears right into her bustling heart. There’s so much hate in there that it peels her skin off
and she feels like peeing herself and has a very strange feeling that she is not to live too much after
this. She finally feels the noose tied around her neck. And she looks at her husband, and feels
somewhat sorry, because he was a good man. Until alcohol took his mind too, and then hers and
then Joe’s. Only Aurora wasn’t stained yet.
‘That fucking whore’ she says.
They pass through the rows of Crooks like pariahs.
The man now drags her outside the church like one would drag a dog that doesn’t want to
move, and incessantly whispers death-threats and commination, and looks at her with such a
contempt, that she would gladly die on the spot than to look into it or feel it on her old, shaky skin.
While the winter air blows like insane and cuts like razorblades, the two get outside, and there,
amidst the abrupt blizzard, lies Aurora, clad in tears. She looks at her mother with a combination
of cattiness, clemency and alienation. Grace seems a stranger to her, someone she doesn’t know.
She feels like she’s just been hurled into some sick mare. Her father looks at her but says nothing
and her mother begins swearing her for no apparent reason and Aurora swallows tears and mucus
and tries to delete those words from her brain, from her memory and heart.
‘You goddamn slut, what did I do to deserve this?’ her husband says to her, in the same
shattering, venomous whisper. ‘What did I do to get involved with such a terrible waste of skin
like you?’
‘Dad, don’t say that’ Aurora says, chocking on her own salt-brined eye-water.
‘Shut up, Aurora’ he responds. ‘Just shut up’ How much he loves that gentle and pernickety
little woman! How much pain resides in his heart for seeing her suffer like that!
As they pass on the street, all people look at them. The man smiles to all of them, in an
attempt to veil what is happening, in an attempt to avoid all the shame.
‘Cursed be the fucking day I met you’ he says, more to himself. ‘Cursed be! I would have
killed you a long time ago, but I didn’t because of this girl. Because of our daughter, you piece of
shit! Do you remember how it is to be a mother? Do you, you dog? Do you remember how it is to
be called “mother”? You’re insane, Grace, you’re insane – is it a gift from your mother? Didn’t
she go mad? Didn’t she, I ask you?!’
Grace is mute and she withholds a terrible fit of crying. And it makes it so hard that she
can’t set it free; she feels it pulling off her internal organs and cutting them. Her heart beats so fast
that she fears it’s going to explode and places a hand upon it, trying to calm it down or at least jam
it down into her chest in case it’s gaining ground.
 ‘How did you cut yourself, you cow? What were you trying to prove, that you are, indeed,
a vermin, a parasite that should be amputated from this society?’
Grace is tongueless, but she fondles, with frozen fingertips, a small piece of barbed wire
concealed in one of the pockets of her gown.
Between Aurora and her father’s looks, under the malarial sky, there’s the mutual
agreement on a fait-accompli. A mutual agreement on an inevitable, ghastly fact that has to be
done as soon as possible. And they would both gladly hurl themselves in front of a running car
than do it, but they have to.
‘Everything’s gonna be okay, kid’ the man says to Aurora and puts a protective arm around
her shoulder, and arriving near a liquor store, he says: ‘Wait a minute; dad has to buy something
from here. Won’t be long, I promise!’
‘Dad, please don’t’ the girl says, obviously disappointed with her father’s desire, still
holding the weight of her dilapidated, ruinous mother. ‘Won’t be long’ the lips of the man say, but
there’s no sound, and, opening the door, disappears into an acrid pellicle of smoke.
Aurora falls to think about Az, – she just thinks about him as a person and after some
meditation and turning around not to puke at the inhaling of her mother’s breath, asks herself “I
wonder what a guy like him does daily.’ And even there, in thought-realm, she destroys herself on
the concrete of his complexity and realizes how simple she is.
How simple light and all its adjacent aspects is.
 IX
Hell unleashed with coffinlips

W ords are very much like paramours to me: I love them, I cherish them, I show them

their quintessence and sometimes – just sometimes – I let them tie me to the bed and do to me
whatever they want to. Words are everything an old, bitter, atmospheric man like me has ever got.
The people of Crooked Tree are not so keen on words; they use them with the sole purpose
of slinging mud from one to another. Never did they use the words but to complain and pray to a
God who had fallen deaf from times that can’t even be remembered.
Words keep Death and oblivion at bay – their absence hastens them.
I’ve heard words from the earliest period of my life. I could hear angels whispering to me
while I was in my cradle, I could hear demons marching through the paths of the often carious
skies that coiled around the Crooked Tree canopy, scheming of destruction; I could hear stories
from the wind – you can’t even imagine how many does the wind have to say – and the very words
of matter itself – I could hear the voice of every atom of everything, and I trembled.
I grew up in a dyadic manner: in my parents’ library and on the meadows, the forests and
the mountains. I picked up thousands and thousands of words from those books and I populated
Crooked Tree with myths – I made Crooked Tree a living, breathing, screaming and kicking myth.
I thought – and skeletal butterflies, with tiny bone-wings flew on the purple air of the
Acacia Hill, stars yelled as they were displaced from the cosmic cloth, Venetian skies were hoisted
on the storms and Death stood, for a moment, to behold, with a dumbfounded look, how I fought
against it.
Ugly and violent was its design – I saw it once while on Buck’s hill: tall, gaunt, clad in
chains, faceless, with two burning pits for eyes, interred in its hood, with a great, spiked mace in
its bony grip; I spoke and it screamed and vanished; in revenge, it reaped some of the Silent
puritans of Crooked Tree. I – a hierophant and destroyer of light – I kept Death at bay as much as
I could.
Yet I was fucking terrified by it.
And so were the people of the village. That is why they stumbled on Sundays in the
churches and listened to the priests’ mumbling, in terrible cold, on their knees. And they agreed
with disgustingly pious voices whenever the priests asked for money. And yet they did not fear
God, but the fucking flames of the hell underneath.
They made the sign of the cross whenever they went to sleep, they awoke or set to the road,
whenever they started their work – that was their self-sufficient, insect life – to be knelt and
conformed, misled and fooled by the fucks that weren’t more superior than them in any way. To
give everything they had to those who had so much already.
They talked when it was too late – when pallbearers already paved the way to the cemetery;
then they cried over their loved ones and talked and screamed about how good they were. And
there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Never did they do so while their loved ones where alive.
When someone committed suicide, they were buried face-down and their coffins weren’t
allowed to pass near churches. And it was better so. No communion and no requiems for them,
either. The church does not give any nepenthe for those who were dilapidated by the hardships of
life, for those who screamed for help when they needed and fell on their knees, unanswered, alone,
hungry, penniless and thirsty.
And so the bull rot and the stars broke.
There are also good people residing in Crooked Tree; for what it’s worth, they left to other
places, where they could build themselves a future. Far away from death and oblivion. Some of
them remained, but didn’t ever forget how beautiful is to be a good human, how good it is to help
your neighbor, how pleasant it is to speak and listen, and to care for the nature that provided them
anything they wanted.
Thanatos told me that he spoke to the wretches in their nightmares; he said:
“And I said unto them: speak, or thee shall perish.
But they did not listen.
And I said unto them: “Listen, or thee shall perish.”
They did not, and so Death, in its magnificent splendor, sought shelter in Crooked Tree,
and blackened its history, present and future. Words have not been given to let them there, in a
corner of your mind,
Words have been made to change. Words have been made to inspire.
I used them, and I became the bull and the stars will shine forevermore, I became Crooked
Tree – Death and Life alike, gathering shards of myself and while replete with power, I gave them
to every person that needed love and protection, and thrust them in the hearts of the wretches that
have mudded my kind and my people.
I swore on the crest that I will kill Death and become a spring of Life, which although
lachrymose, frail and miserable, can still give birth to beauty - I became nature and sky.
Do not mistake me for a human, for I am not. I am ghost of times past.
The whip of the angels.
 X
Sparagmos
Therianthropy

A z Gaday, the whip of the angels, lights another cigarette, pours himself another cup of

coffee and promenades through the house with a rather melancholy state. All those things seem
foreign to him, like they’d exist in another continuum. There hasn’t been that long since he visited
the house that he inherited from his parents, but all the dust that inevitably falls over everything
makes it look like it was abandoned eons ago. He caresses some books from the wooden bookcase
and leaves, with his fingertips, imprints in the powdery dust and then he expels a column of dizzy
air to them, and watches how they collide. And then he looks at the liquor cabinet and all the
bottles that lie there in oblivion, uncorked and unfulfilled, the myriad magazines, arranged in
alphabetical order thanks to his OCD to see everything fall perfectly into place, and to the
multicolored marble that he stomps on, which looks like a kaleidoscope.
Outside, the sun is gradually rising, wounding the welkin with its fire. Everything cracks
in relaxation, in the absence of frost, and apricity cuts its way to the Earth, through the clouds,
through the windows of Gaday’s house, through the frore bars of his velveteen heart. And while
he beholds all these with always anew fascination and humbleness, the phone rings somewhere in
the distance and elicits him out of his baneful contemplation of the false idol that is the nature
around him and the sky above him. He moves ghostly through the house, guided by the ringtone
and he finds his phone underneath the still warm blanket with which he covered himself at night.
‘Hello?’ he answers with a grave voice and for a second, he distances the phone from his
ear and coughs shortly to bring his voice to its normal tone and feels smoke irritating his throat
and grimaces.
‘Hey, is this Az?’
‘Yeah, who’s this?’ he inquires and the expression on his face tells that he doesn’t really
give a rat’s ass on who is at the end of the line.
‘Mike, man!’
Az is at a loss of words and asks himself who this Mike that disturbed his morning tradition
is.
 ‘Mike, your fuckin’ high school mate?!’
Gaday doesn’t know what to think and he closes his eyes and sighs and then opens his eyes
violently.
‘Oh my fucking God, man!’ he screams, ‘I completely forgot about you!’
The voice at the end of the line laughs warmly and somehow sad at the same time.
‘Heard you’ve returned. Couldn’t you have announced me or something?’
‘I’m not intending to stay a lot’ Az excuses himself. ‘I was in the Fortress and felt a sudden
urge to see Crooke Tree, but I’ve had enough of it already.’
‘Tell me about it. Hey, wanna catch a cup of coffee later on? We haven’t seen each other
in like ages! I’m sure there’s a lot of things we can talk about, you know. It would be nice to catch
up.’
‘Sure man. I’ve got to go and see Crane and I’ll give you a call after that.’
‘Crane? You’re still going to that guy? I mean, you know what the people say, Az.’
‘I couldn’t care less what the people think. By the way, how did you know that I came
back?’
‘You’re kidding me now, aren’t you? You’re not so easily mistaken, my friend. No one
around here looks like a fucking aristocratic vampire besides you, you know?’
Az bursts into sincere laughter.
‘Well, yeah, I’ll give you that. Okay, see you later.’
‘Yeah.’
Az throws the phone back on the bed and the killed cigarette into the gapping mouth of the
fireplace and then proceeds on dressing up and going over to Crane’s.
He dresses himself up with a pair of black jeans, a blouse that despite the fact that it looks
so very tenuous does a great job at keeping him warm, a woolen scarf, his leather coat and his
leather boots and he’s ready to go. Once he steps outside, a thousand microscopic needles of frozen
air bury themselves into his skin. The hair in his nose gets stitched to his nostrils and he places the
scarf over his mouth and nose, up to the eyes, and breathes a little more becalmed and relieved.
In the distance, the mountains stay frozen on the reddened background of the sky and their
heads are covered with halos of thick mist and as Az looks on them, he can’t really believe that
they’re real, but more a fabrication of his mind and then he wonders if everything that exceeds a
measure that the human brain can accept is nothing but something vile that the mind has created
in order to make it acceptable.
The menstrual light of the sunrise squeezes through the towers of the mountains and talons
at the snow, turning it into the dismal snowbroth that Az hates, and as he draws nearer and nearer
to the bridge, he sees the silhouette of three persons gaiting their way up the hill: a man and two
women that seem to be in some sort of silent harangue, because the man constantly gesticulates
and looks at them.
‘You had nothing to do at this hour than fucking argue, you wastes of skin’ Az belches
superciliously. And then one of the silhouette turns to him and arrests him in its visual field. Az
stares at it, too, and stops walking. It’s one of the women, Gaday is sure of that.
‘The hell you’re staring at…’ he jests sophomorically and then resumes his walk.
The snow screams underneath his feet with a rusty, metallic voice and the wooden bridge
cracks from its joints like an old man. The surface of the river is completely frozen and Az can
see, through the crystal-like ice, right into its algae-infested guts. The flow of the water drains him
vampirishly of vitality, and doesn’t permit him be an ignoramus towards its aggrandizing
commotion underneath the ice, as if it has human reason and the power to influence people.
‘It’s like the blood in my veins’ Az muses while he watches that bluish rivulet.
Some rocks bounce inside the river and hit the ice with an assonant thump. He can hear
them raking at the glassy ice as they are carried away by the water, thumping incessantly on their
way downstream.
Inevitably, Crane stands at the end of the bridge and ushers Az, who instantly smiles like
a fool, towards himself with a waving hand. Jimmy smiles with both his mouth and his eyes and
screams over the wind:
‘I’ve got some money, man! I’ve got some money!’
‘That’s perfect’ Az responds as he reaches him and shakes his hand.
‘Let me buy you a beer, come on.’
‘No, keep your money for worse days, Jim. It’s on me this time. Let’s go and serve
something warm. You know I’m not a great fan of alcohol.’
‘That obsession thing, right?’
‘Yeah, I’m afraid I might develop an obsession with it.’
‘Fuck, okay. Where do you wanna go?’
 ‘How’s that bar near the church called?’ Az asks, scratching his chin.
‘At the Wind’s Hands?’
‘Probably. Come on, let’s go. By the way, have you fixed your window?’
‘Didn’t have time, Az. This customer of mine came over and paid me for some unguent for
rheumatism I made him a couple of months ago. He even gave me something extra for the long
waiting.’ Crane said with a radiant smile, patting the left pocket of his shabby coat.
‘I’m glad for you, Jim. Don’t spend them all at once. Listen, I’ll go back to the Fortress
first thing in the morning, so let’s enjoy ourselves now. Although, I must say, that broken window
of yours worries me. What if someone’s going to enter your house while you’re away?’
‘And do what in there?! There’s nothing to take, man…’ says Jim, feigning a smile.
Az realizes that Jimmy’s right and hides his sad face from the man’s sight.
As they go towards the bar, people look at them with fearful looks, but they especially
focus, of course, on the black silhouette of Gaday, who marches through the snow and creates a
painful contrast with its pristine whiteness. The only blots of whiteness that can be found on him
are the silver rings and chain who send little spears of light everywhere when they collide with
that of the sun rising up over Crooked Tree, from its mountainous lair.
They feel somewhat more superior than any of those of scorn them as they are together.
Two steppe-wolves in the dark and shadowy forest that is Crooked Tree, two steppe-wolves that
do not indulge in the pleasure of Schadenfreude.
Two steppe-wolves that do not want to fit.
Even though it is rather early, the Crooks are already up and shining, inundating the center
of the village and the small terrace of a hole of a bar, where Az remembers having the worst coffee
he’s ever drank. And as he watches in the direction of the sunrise, he sees, far-flung and sun-clad,
the forests of the small city of St. Porras, and he feels such a longing towards them, that he breaks
a fit of crying it his stomach; and those forests beckon him and he waits for wooded hands to drag
him there, on the abrasive surface of the highway, at that place that brings him so much memories
from his childhood. But he knows that there, too, is nothing but death and oblivion, graves of old
friends, graves of old hopes and angels that bow their heads and cover themselves underneath the
siege of rain and the canvas of crooked, paraplegic lightning that are omnipresent there in the
summer, like that mini-city would be situated next to the very origin of such natural perpetrations.
 Somewhere in the maze of his brain, an old song that he loved and still does looms its
beautiful head; a song that takes him back years ago – and looking in his front, he sees not the
street of Crooked Tree, but a certain street in St. Porras, one that unveiled, at the end of it, the
splendor of the residual mountains and their wooden hair, and he gasps for air and looks like a
hunted deer, and when Jim puts a hand on his shoulder, he looks at him with a feral gaze, like he
doesn’t even know him. And Jim realizes that his old friend does have, indeed, some loose screws
somewhere in that pond of tar that is his mind.
‘My memories will be the end of me’ Az Gaday mutters, but Jim is able to hear those words
and he shudders in incapability.
‘I have to call someone’ the young man says, withdrawing a cigarette from its pack and
lightning it up. He then gives the pack to Jim, who also takes out one. As they stop for a while, Az
calls Mike, although he doesn’t really feel in shape to talk to anyone at that particular moment,
and he prays that Mike won’t answer. But he does and Az expels a “Dammit!” through his dry
lips.
‘Hey Mike, it’s Az. Listen, I’m with Jim and we’re headed to The Wind’s Hands, so if you
want to join, come over.’
‘Great man, see you there. I just have to put some clothes on me and I’ll be on my way.’
‘Okay, see you later’.
Az ends the call and throws the phone in one of the pockets of his coat with an absent
gesture. Crane puffs from the cigarette with big, innocent eyes and he looks like a child in Az’s
eyes. He feels so very bad for that lop-sided and unoffending creature that stands next to him.
And the light filters from the clouds and falls on the silhouette of St. John the Baptist’s in
red, flesh-like strips, and as he beholds it, Az’s eyes kindle and burn more brighter than those fires
of Beltane, Lughnasadh, Imbolc and Samhain combined, and all that fire coils and slithers like a
snake at the foundation of that symbol of hypocrisy and guilt and kisses and licks it with
incarnadine lips.
‘Are you okay?’ Crane asks, pulling Az out of his pyromaniac whims.
‘Yes, of course’ he responds, more sudden than he wished to.
The monument and the German church are silent and forlorn, like tombs, and crack in the
submissive strangle of the frost. Across the street, music can be heard from At the Wind’s Hand,
booming through the air, chasing away the misty consistence of the air which is still cold enough
to make Crane and Az breathe rather uncomfortably, but as they enter the bar, are welcomed by a
warm air which scents of smoke, alcohol and coffee, a gust that makes them relax their muscles.
All gazes turn, in the span of a breath’s death, upon the two friends, which now march through the
puce, velveteen sofas and black wooden tables to the maroon marble stand. Az realizes, with a
smile, that the music is something from the ‘90s, one of the few things that he can stand hearing
and he asks himself what could’ve turned the Crooks to listen to anything else but the crappy,
primeval sounds that can barely be labeled as music that they normally listen to.
‘It’s not The Cure or Type O’ Az muses ‘but it will do.’
The bartender, who’s a rather short guy in his mid-20s, chubby, with blonde hair and who
always dresses in pink shirts and jeans, greets him from behind the bar. They know each other
from the period in which Az still lived in Crooked Tree and that was the sole place where he could
drink a coffee that didn’t taste like shit.
‘Az, my man!’ the guy says and exits the stand and embraces Az, who wants to retract a
few steps back but fails and is caught in the bartender’s stumpy arms. Steadily and with precaution,
he pats him on his back and asks him how things are going, and also looks into the bar and sees
that although heads are bowed upon their booze, they are all still looking at him and Crane.
Somewhere in the back someone screams over the music:
‘Hey what the fuck, is it Halloween already?’ He bursts into laughter and is joined by his
companions, who all look like animals, drenched and soaked with snow.
‘Shut your trump!’ the bartender retorts as Az closes his eyes and counts to ten while
smiling. ‘Don’t mind him, Az’ he continues ‘he hasn’t really anything in that fucking head. It’s
probably there to prevent rain from gathering in his neck.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m used to it.’
‘Sure you do, but you shouldn’t. I bet it’s freezing outside, so the two of you could use
something to drink. Come on, it’s on me. What can I serve you with?’ He is so buoyant that Az is
sure that his demeanor is more a self-defense mechanism than something real. ‘Whisky, vodka,
wine?’ the bartender continues dapperly.
‘I’ll make an exception and I’ll have some boiled wine, Angus’. He’s happy that he
remembered the guy’s name and thus avoided the awkward situation in which he should have
driven the conversation in a point where the bartender should have said his name. People fucking
hate that.
 ‘An exception from what?’ Angus asks.
‘Oh come on, you know me’ Az responds with a feigned fury ‘from my drug of choice, my
friend, coffee.’
‘Damn, yes! Right!’ the bartender says and laughs, again – too felicitous to be genuine.
‘What will you have?’ Az asks Crane.
‘I’ll just buy myself a beer’ he responds.
‘It’s on me’ Angus intervenes and places a tankard of foamy beer in his hands.
‘You should have drank something warm, for fuck’s sake’ Az says. ‘We’ll be there’ he
continues, pointing to a sofa somewhere in the corner of the room.
‘Okay, man, it won’t be long.’
As they go to the spot, Az says to himself that he can, maybe, combine business with
pleasure and returns to the bar, where he asks Angus, with a whispered voice, if he knows who Joe
Malakian is.
‘Of course I do. It’s a small world. But why?’
‘We’ll talk later. I’m just interested in this guy.’
‘Are you gay or somethin’? Angus asks and he is so painfully sincere and his question so
stupid that Az bursts into such a tremendous fit of laughter that he again attracts all the gazes of
the people that by then were averted on the object of their visitation. Az wipes a few tears from
the corners of his eyes and replies to Angus, still chocking himself with laughter:
‘No, of course not. We’ll talk later. Jesus fucking Christ!” he laughs. He looks at Angus
and then at Crane, who sips from his beer at the table and realizes that he missed having a
connection with someone, missed laughing, but knows somehow that his laughter won’t last, that
it is, also, a self-defense mechanism, and for a moment, hates himself for not being able to be
100% genuine with the people that try to give him a good time and cheer him up and as he turns,
Mike enters the bar and comes right at him, shakes his hand violently and tells him that he’s so
glad to see him.
‘Right back at you’ Az replies, but he feels somehow strange to say this, given that he
almost forgot Mike completely and that he has very few memories with him, an aspect that he
knows that won’t give too much fuel for a conversation. Mike grabs a beer and joins Crane and
Az and starts talking trivialities, Az being very picky about his words, trying to avoid the
conversation going into a dead end, and when he’s asked what’s life like in the Fortress, he replies:
 ‘It’s fine I guess; trying to figure it all out, you know. It’s hard to follow up on my courses
at the University, ‘cause I’m also working, so… But it’s okay.’
‘Where do you work?’ Mike asks, emptying his bottle of beer, ushering Angus to bring
him another one. It’s obvious that he really is interested in Az’s workplace, and maybe, more
interested in what if is, indeed, more to life than that dead village.
‘I’m a tattoo artist. Artist… I’m a tattooist.’
‘Of course you’re an artist!’ Mike says and Az can’t help but see dancing flames of envy
in his eyes. But somehow he escapes the silhouette that watches him through one of the windows
of At the Wind’s Hands, partially veiled by puce curtains, tied with red tassels of the same
velveteen material like the sofas.
After two cups of boiled wine – extra spiced for his pleasure – Az’s tongue seems to take
on its own rhythm and starts talking about high-school times with Mike, and now and then engages
Crane in discussing other topics so he won’t feel left out of the conversation. As Mike complains
about bone-pain, Jimmy offers to help him with one of his pomades.
‘Instant relief, I promise’ he says.
‘It’s like every time I go out I’m struck with color-blindness.’
‘I wanted to ask you if you can’t find some workplace for me, man. That’s why I called
you’.
And somewhere above Crooked Tree, a storm cooks itself up from the grandiose mists and
snow, and churns the top of the trees and rakes the tin-made roof of the bar. The atmosphere
becomes ashen, mythical and as Az takes a peer outside, he sees a giant murder of over-sized
leathery crows; a butterfly made of tiny little bones lands on the window and Az almost jumps
from his seat, not because of fear, but because of surprise. He can hear the ticking of the butterfly’s
feet on the glass.
‘You okay?’ Mike asks him, and he says yes, violently shaking his head to chase away that
necro-chimera, and then he looks through the window again, and that conflagration of feathers and
leather still lingers on the steel-like sky of Crooked Tree. He wishes that Samyaza were there to
tell him what’s going on with those sudden, fragmentary visions of his that seem to be stolen from
some embered tumult from the nethermost depths of Tuonela.
‘Jim, take a look outside’ Az whispers. ‘What the hell is that?’
 Crane draws the curtain and looks outside. Az can see his eyeballs rotating in every
direction.
‘What’s what? Those clouds? It’s a storm heading this way, certainly. Why the hell do you
look like you’ve just seen a ghost?’
‘It’s only your imagination’ Az poorly and pathetically excuses himself.
‘I can see them’ says a voice and as the three of them meander their glances, Az’s heart
skips a beating, he turns pallid and feels the sheen of an electric dagger pruning his spine like a
mastiff a rabbit’s.
Eyes of the color of nightmares, shining like a fervid late-afternoon summer-dream, long
red hair that falls in streams of fire on pure, snowy shoulders, a vampiresque face that seems to
loiter in a self-generated penumbra. And Az knows where he’s seen that face that now cleaves his
heart like a silver poniard. She smiles to him as if she knew him since the day he was born and
when she asks him to quit the bar for a minute, because she wants to say something to him, Az
feels rather buoyant and doesn’t even remember getting on his feet and exiting the bar.
“White rose in red-rose garden is not so white; Snowdrops that plead for pardon/ And pine
for fright/ Because the hard East blows/ Over their maiden rows/ Grow not as this face grows from
pale to bright.” Az mutters.
As fast as they step outside, a bone-butterfly flies and resumes position on the tip of the
girl’s nose, who begins to laugh like a child and Az can feel his heart deice at the feet of his Godiva.
He watches how her fire-hair jumps when she suddenly turns her head from one side to another
and feels that if he doesn’t sit down, he will crumble. Amidst of it all, the girl stops and looks at
him and says with a rather neutral voice:
‘We’ve taken Ma to the asylum today.’ She stares directly into Az’s eyes, and he moves to
have a better view of that ossified monochrome rainbow that is crucified into her eyes. He tries to
make something out of her presence and observes what a beautiful contrast her red hair makes
with his black attire, and wishes nothing but to crush her at his chest. He comes to his senses just
enough to be able to ask her:
‘Why are you telling me this?’ Az asks with a voice that doesn’t seem to be his, but some
aloof creature’s.
 ‘Because you care, don’t you?’ she asks, still gallowing his soul with her constellation-
eyes, and unable to resist himself anymore, he takes her by the shoulders and squeezes her body
beside his and is drugged with the scent of black orchid that her hair diffuses into his nostrils.
‘I do’ he replies and for the very first time, he really feels that he cares about something.
And the feeling of it all is rather strange, gorgonizing.
Smelling her hair is like taking a sip out of Lethe – Az’s history gets veiled and he feels
like there is no world anymore, only a huge spotlight that’s frozen on them.
She distances herself a little from his chest and looks at him, big-eyed, benighted and
enthralled. Her lips tremble almost unobserved and she rises herself on her toes and kisses Az’s
pallid cheek.
‘Will you help me?’ she whispers in his ears.
‘Yes’ he replies automatically, with a low voice, even though he doesn’t have any clue in
what this aid consists in.
There’s a lot of clamor inside the bar and Az can hear someone scream: “Men, chill up for
God’s sake”. A guy that he never saw before comes and abruptly slaps Aurora in the face:
“Does Joe know who you’re in collusion with, you fuckin’ slut?”
The murder of crows wails, with a metallic screech and the sky shakes like a bad CGI as
Az takes a deep breath and launches himself in the guy; there’s a cascade of sharp fists falling into
his face and seeing the whiteness of the fragments of teeth that are shunned from his victim’s teeth,
Az disfigures it more with new forces. All the people gush out of the Wind’s Hand and witness the
bloody theatre – so dense and demonic is Az’s assault that they are paralyzed with fear and do not
intervene to free the now poor pile of meat from his assail.
Aurora manages to cut herself out of the picture, to place herself far-flung from the
massacre.
Both Mike and Jim spurt over Az and try to pull him off of the guy but he turns towards
them with a feral look and they step back, for there is something so bestial in Az’s complexion
that scares them to the very marrow of their bones. With a final, almost deathly blow, Az unmounts
his victim and spits over it and screams:
‘Does maimed fucking beauty make my blood fucking boil!’
As fast as he stops, he can see a crowd of angered drunks coming his way with anything
they could put their hands on, with up-to-no-good looks on their faces. It is only the overdose of
adrenaline in his body that makes Az take Aurora’s hand and usher her through the cars and the
monument’s garlands. They both jump through a broken oculus of the church and collapse inside
its womb.
‘We are safe here’ Az says and kisses her forehead and is surprised that she doesn’t abhor
him for displaying such a satanic angst. Instead, she embraces him and suffuses him with her
nymph smell; he buries his nose into her hair and caresses her back with the palm of his hands.
The wind howls through the windows and licks Az’s skinned knuckles like a barbed wire and
disturbs a murmuration of bats that holds a seminar over the altar, clinging to the candelabrums.
He gasps and feels like the wind is eating new wounds on his hands. He looks at them and sees his
rings buried in pulsing balks of reddened flesh; he shakes them and the pain is horrendous.
They can hear commotion on the street but Az tells her that no one would ever think to
enter there, but there’s a flutter that echoes inside the empty church and a sound that resembles
applauses, who appear just like the Universe wanted to prove how wrong he was. There is a flash
of green and blue light and Aurora asks Az ‘What’s that?’
‘What’s what?’ he says, and when he turns, he sees a swiveling-mist form that concretizes
in a human shape.
‘Braaaaavo!’ it screams as it applauses, ‘that was absolutely fabulous. Az, thou pang in the
Ain Soph! That was the most brutal beating I’ve been given to see in a while. All that blood! Aren’t
thou the sweetest of thine kind!’
It laughs maniacally and Az places himself in front of Aurora.
‘Oh, ease up, I won’t do thee any harm, my child’ the silhouette says, still flickering like a
flame in the process of concretizing itself.
‘Who and what are you?’ Az asks. He is not afraid of that apparition and it seems like
Aurora isn’t either, for she looks at it from behind Az with a fascinated look upon her face. Az
realizes that he cares more for Aurora’s hands that embrace his waist that the specter before him.
‘I will tell thee who I am, dear. I am – well, used to be – an archangel.’ The silhouette
engages in a demented spectacle of ballet, lit by the waxing moonlight. And it continues to talk
while it pirouettes and jumps through the air with an ineffable grace and ease.
‘My name is’ – pirouette – ‘Mephisto, my ‘I’d be God’ child. Oh, I love my name – it has
such a pleasant sonority, doesn’t it?’
 ‘Where were you when these innocent people were attacked? Were you dancing like you
are now?’ Anger is too fierce in Az’s heart to ask himself wherefrom Mephisto came and why. His
eyes burn, lucifugous, with hate.
‘And that is why I like thee, dear child! You have a demon in thy front and thou have the
guts to try to hold it accountable. Most people wouldst pee themselves and black out. But not thee
– oh, not thee – thou assassin of Elohim. Where was I? I was following thee, dear. Why didn’t I
do anything? Well, first of all, I’m a demon and my kind doesn’t really have a history of helping
yours. Two, you were there! You were there to protect them, Az Gaday! Try to lie to me that thou
didn’t feel, just for those brief moments – when you looked her brother in the eyes and scorched
his soul or when you buried your fist in that bastard’s flesh – like a God, like something undying
and more potent than anyone else!’
And as that murmuration of bats screams its woes, clinging on the pernicious lustres and
the moon glides on the sky with sweet, xylophone-like sounds, Aurora Malakian watches Az and
Mephisto – those aerial bullets in the heart of Adonai – with her pin-up face occulted by stray
veins of catamenial fire and her heart swollen by an overwhelming feeling of love and affection
towards Az, who is so insane and proud as to chat with a demon as if he’d chat with a human
being. She clutches her little, delicate hands on his waist and knows that he will be the light that
will never die, the light that will never abandon her, the light that will shine upon her life.
‘Thou, Az Gaday, wouldst love to be a God, wouldn’t thee? Thou wouldst love to have the
power to make a change, wouldn’t thee? But thou don’t, child, and that is why thou hast buried
thy face into that death-mask, and that I why thou have cut thyself out of the age thou are living
in.’
‘You know nothing about me’ Az says.
‘Alas, but I do – even now, right in this moment, thou hate thyself for permitting the animal
inside to surface. Even now thou hate thyself for thou know that thou will never accept this world
and it will never accept thee. Thou wouldst absolutely love to be a God, because thou love
humankind too much to witness it committing a slow but sure suicide. Tell me, Az, when was the
last time thou went outside and didn’t wish to commit suicide? When was the last time thou
enjoyed the company of another human being or the last time when you said that ‘This isn’t my
job’? Oh, poor and hapless Rephaite! Alas, thou art so tragic a being yet thou hold so much light
inside of thee that you could illuminate this world like a second sun!’
 ‘Shut up’ Az says and slams his temples.
‘No, dear Az. ‘Tis time thou know thyself and the power thou hold. Thou will never
become a God and let me tell thee – sin-eaters like thee perish young, alone and despondent. This
world is not thine and it doesn’t owe thee anything. Thou look upon people like thou wouldst be
their creator – but thou art not. Thou art but another creation. And I know thy kind, Prometheus.
Who do thou think thou art to think that everything bad that happens in the world is thy fault? ‘Tis
thy social awareness that makes thee – paradoxically – so socially awkward. Thou wish it all would
stop - all the destruction, folly and chaos, because Az Gaday, you may hide thyself in the shadows,
but thou crave for human closeness like a star craves for the lascivious embrace of the black hole.
And I love thee so much, thou destroyed child, and I can’t stand seeing thee destroy thyself.’
‘You. Know. Nothing. About. Me.’ Az hisses through his teeth.
‘I was there when thy lungs almost bailed on thee – do thee remember how thou felt the
mattress of that unwelcoming hospital bed lower itself every night as if someone was sitting on it?
Yes, yes, of course thou do. ‘Twas me, Gaday, watching over thee. Do thou remember every time
thou turned around, feeling watched? I was there! I was there to look after thee, so thou wouldn’t
hurl thyself in oblivion. The Universe made thee a gift – ‘tis also a sign. Turn around and look at
it and for the first time in thy life, fight against thy Golden Age nostalgia and impotence. For the
first time in thy shadowed life, say ‘I don’t care – ‘tis not my problem’. Cease desiring to be a
God.’
‘I don’t want to be a God!’
‘But thou do, child! We are so much alike!’
Mephisto waltzes as bats descend on his shoulders and the moonlight rotates around him,
like a centrifuge mist.
‘I fell for a noble cause, like thou did. I also wanted to be a God, to have the power to help
everyone. But thou can’t Az, thou can’t save everyone! I still feel the fire of the atmosphere
burning me and I laugh every time I feel it, for it reminds me of the honorable thing I did. And
Samyaza, thy dear friend, too.’
Az and Aurora watch how Mephisto gradually disappears.
‘Shine, Az Gaday, scourge of everything that is holy and in conformity! Shine like a sun!’
his voice echoes and breaks itself upon the ancient walls of the church. ‘We may yet meet again!’
 Az crumbles on his knees and cries, raking at his temples with his fingers and he feels the
anger towering in his soul – anger against Mephisto, who unveiled in the span of minutes what he
hid for a life-time inside of him. Aurora descends, lifts up his head and kisses him on the mouth
and embraces him. She smiles at him – and all the goodness there stomps on him.
The sky is so full of stars that once there, one couldn’t help but be struck with the Magpie
syndrome and try to reap them all and the moon is sanguine – just like Az’s heart, lips, soul and
eyes.
Just like Aurora’s lips who writhe on his.
‘Let’s go home’ she says, and Az lifts up his head and looks at the young woman. He’s
carpet-bombed with love and feels purged, for a little while, of everything vile.
 XI
Schism

T here is an opening in the dark night-sky through which the moon impales the

mountains; the winds winnow the snow from their jagged heads and spreads it into the atmosphere.
Everything is of a bluish tint – ghostly, unworldly, just like the eyes in which Az Gaday looks
palsied and enamored, like a revenant Pygmalion. He is lost in them – it’s like watching into the
very core of the Cosmos. He trembles at the vastness of it all – the vastness of life, of sorrow,
hopelessness and the vastness of love that comes crumbling on him like a mountain. Aurora, warm
and demure, shelters herself at his chest and dozes like a sleepy cat, rocking her – Az observes –
small, delicate feet.
‘Tomorrow I will leave’ he says and she says that she knows and rotates a finger on his
chest while withholding a bitter tear in the corner of her eye.
He knows that Samyaza won’t mind for his not going to say goodbye. He knows that Az
will always come back in Crooked Tree whenever his memories will get the best of him.
‘Take me with you’ she suddenly affirms. ‘Take me with you in the Fortress’
He is utterly amazed.
‘I can’t’ he says. ‘You won’t ever be happy with me.’
‘I will; I know that I will’
‘I’m not happy with myself, thus I can’t make anyone else happy. I get sad sometimes –
very, very sad, suicidal almost – and when I’m like that, I can misdemeanor with people. You
don’t deserve to be the victim of my deviltry. You are too beautiful and innocent.’
‘I am assuming that risk’ she says with hope gleaming in her eyes.
‘Aurora, you will never understand me… You will never understand the origin of my
sadness. We may be very happy for a period of time, but then you will end up rummaging for
reasons to leave…’
‘I would never do that!’ she screams.
‘Yes you will. You will, you beautiful soul.’
‘I’m behaving with you as if I’d knew you since I was born, though I never knew you
before. From this alone you should know that I am willing to assume risks.’
 ‘Listen to me: I prefer candlelight to electrical light; I am, sometimes, struck with a fear
that I cannot explain, when I am outside – and I hurry to get home or my heart will explode; I can
stare for hours at a vista that appeals to me; I can listen to a song over and over again if it strikes a
certain spot in my heart. My dreamhouse is somewhere aloof from all mankind – somewhere in
the mountains, surrounded by forests. I sometime burst into tears because I feel alien to this world,
I feel like I’ve been hurled in something that I cannot possibly understand. I can’t stand the sun –
and this is because of a medical condition – and that is why the sunset is the time when I can go
outside. Sometimes I am fascinated with the world and I would like to give everyone I meet on the
streets a hug, but then a fucker slams into me although there’s space for ten people on the sidewalk
and I fuck it all and barely can stop myself from mutilating him. I abhor religion and churches, I
abhor conformity, people who do not fight for themselves, people who only care about themselves
– and that is why I barely go out – those are the only things I can see. I find a fault with everything
in the span of seconds. I can tell you a lot about a person just by looking at it – all these years of
social inactivity have sharpened all my senses. I would like to destroy everything sometimes and
just leave nature take its course. I am nature, Aurora, I am not a human. I’m as moody and crippled
as it is. Now tell me, would you like to be with an alien like me?’
Aurora can see the genuine sadness in his eyes and says, taking his face into the palms of
her hands and kissing him:
‘You’re more normal than most people I know. Yes, I would.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. As I said, you will find something at me that you won’t like, and almost
unaware of yourself, you’ll start digging around it to show me what a terrible, misanthropic
vampire I am.’
Aurora says nothing… She lets her beautiful, incarnadine head on his chest and hurriedly
wipes a few tears from her cheek.
‘He’s not right’ she says in her mind.
‘Thank you’ says Az. ‘Thank you for everything’.
‘For what?’
‘For being, for a period of time, my nepenthe. I will always have your eyes, scent and face
in my heart.’ Az says and kisses her lips and crushes her body into his.
 XII
My love, neon pulse

F ew are the things that could please an indigo child like me more than traveling by train.

It’s a beautiful, refreshing thing to do.

It was early in the morning when I went up in the train, put myself comfortably on two
seats and lay my head in the palm of my hand, trying to get some rest. But I couldn’t. I never could
rest or sleep in the train, for I had to observe everything – to see every place I passed by and I must
tell you, from Crooked Tree to the Fortress, there’s a lot to be seen.
The forests that gild the spine of the earth look like giant drills coming up from the Mother,
metalized by the frail light and the snow. In that particular morning, the forests looked like the
scales of a huge fish; when the sun finally rose from its limbo, the huge fleets of clouds resembled
some kind of melting, incandescent foam. I veiled my eyes furiously. I fucking hated the sun and
I still do. It always blinded my eyes and my ways.
I drew the curtain but left a small patch uncovered, in the corner, wherefrom I could peer
outside while I dozed like a little child.
The train drove above an abyss of firs that silently spewed mist and halted the rays of the
globe of fire.
The picture of the girl permeated my brain; I could see her in the concrete, in the woods,
in the motions of the train on the rails, in the sky; pretty much everywhere. It felt tremendously
good – it felt right, so right that I smiled and I felt happy like I’ve never been before. “What a
beautiful world”, I thought as I buried my face in my chest and put my feet on another seat,
comfortably.
An examiner came and asked for my ticket, and after I handed it to him, I fell asleep, rocked
by the sinuous motion of the train that shooed through the morning air.
I arrived in the Circus of Horrors – for the Fortress train-station is nothing but that – and
headed directly to the coffee machine; I had to avoid a murder of gypsies, ill people, beggars and
tatterdemalions who could have ripped you into pieces for a buck. As I took the coffee and waited
for the change, a gipsy came and told me to give it to him; I sighed, with my eyes closed, trying to
withhold within me the desire to bash his head on whatever was nearest, but instead I just went
away, furiously grinding my teeth.
My brain wove stories all the way to the Fortress. Stories about us, but all of them
disappeared as I faced the myriad cold, impersonal lights of the town and the grinning façade of
the hotel into which I was accommodated, that building in which I could have sworn that I, beside
Mrs. Anne, the caretaker, was the single soul. It was only me, the humid, cold air and the tens of
thousands of tears that I wept for anyone but me.
I could see spring throughout the blocks – I felt it in the air and I inhaled it deeply. The
light of the summer sunsets to come was cooking itself up somewhere aloof in the sky – the sole
light that I could stand to fall on my skin.
I couldn’t go to the hotel, because I knew I would become overwhelmed and fall into a fit.
Instead, I directed my steps towards the Church of Hades, the Goth club in which I rot for so many
times. Incredible place – spacious, warm, revitalizing.
The coffee did its job; I felt a little warmer and comfortable in my own skin, though still
haunted by the revenant of my beautiful Aurora. Her eidolon was tattooed on my retinas.
The mighty Church of Hades - Its ceiling was gilded with old candelabra; the bar with
bones, plastic bats, posters with horror movies and Goth rock concerts; purple, green and blue
lights whirled all over the place while people danced like drugged, in trances, kissing, biting each
other’s swirling wet bodies clad in leather.
The wooden banner over the bar read: “Turn Off, Tune In, Drop Dead”.
Those were my people: the maladjusted that wore piercings, leather clothes, make-up and
chains. Those that looked like they were freshly dug out of their graves. We were the last barricade
against the Death of the senses – and we were, at the same time, the death of conformity, the death
of light and the reign of the primordial shadow. We were Death and Life alike, gods to the godless
– angels of rapturous dark light.
Those loved cadavers of mine danced dreamingly, catatonically, in concord with the
melancholy rhythms of the music, far away from all outside excoriation, far away from any
criticism. Stroboscopic lights lighted the faces of the Saints of the Goths: it shone on one’s pitch-
black, raven hair and green eyes and it reddened the other’s lipstick and disheveled hairdo.
The Church of Hades had this embalming effect on whoever thread on its threshold. For
me it was pure, untainted nepenthe to step into a world which I accepted. I laughed looking at the
lust-injected faces, their love for Death, the sole judge of all, and as I sat there, I wished she were
there to celebrate with me the triumph of the quietus. To be there with me, disconnected from the
ghastly, disgusting outside world.
And as if my thought spawn life and reality like in some Amerindian story, the chiaroscuro
flickered as the lights closed and the blue neons were brought to shy life. “This twilight Garden”
ripped us all from our continuum and there she came – my sole scion of love, my beautiful adored
Aurora, moving her body in a white dress that shone phosphorescently in the blue, like it was made
of a thousand albino fireflies, with eyes that blazed tar upon her golden locks, and lips of cloud-
soft carnation, trimmed with black.
She came, a demure Lemures, dancing softly and erotically through those living corpses,
whispering me towards her, shadowing me forth from my seat – my love, a nebulous pulsar
endowed with the power of motion – and all those corpses sighed as they bit their necks and kissed
them and unveiled their pure, succulent, white breasts to the mouth of those vampire-metawhores,
as if my endearment were the pivot of their sudden, dementia-like affection.
And yet she came, wading through sweat and leather, spikes and night, losing her dress at
her feet and stepping outside of it like she stepped out of her body, ushering me to the temple of
her chest with motions that made me sick with love and raging libido; I crumbled on my knees,
with my eyes pierced by the stroboscopes, my vision slow-motioned in the front of that
sculpturesque feverish dream. She danced like a witch – and then she kissed my lips and all the
fires of Pyriphlegethon rallied in my blood with hallucinating speed; wolves howled in the
mountains and a wolf howled inside of me, ripping apart my insides with its fangs and claws.
I bit her lips as we joined the other corpses, losing ourselves in carnal pleasure, in that
twilight garden of ours. I kissed her breasts while raking with my nails on her back, praying to
whatever gods to give me the ability to endure the catastrophic erotica that burned inside of me
like molten lava, praying for something that could have stopped me from burying her inside of me
to enthrall every atom of her beauty and sensuality. I wished to tear her to pieces.
Absinthe was lit on the bar and it burned with the color of the Jesus of the Goths, in his
loved memory. And the color threw shadows on her, and she looked like a fairy, a muse spawn of
that elixir of the lunatics that offered them moments of insomniac whims but took their minds as
a toll.
 Her tourmaline-black eyes unfurled on me impenetrable spells – her body, her feverish,
ectoplasm-like body kept me in trance while it moved, naked, pinpointed to my view like the image
of a tearstained Mary to a crucified Jesus; she whispered in my ears words of honey and silk and I
danced with my closed eyes and my mouth opened, drugged to the core, a mere puppet on the
strings of love. She kissed my trembling body with lips so soft like they were made of butterfly
wings.
The neon twisted our burning, phosphorescent bodies and mutilated our shadows on the
floor. And all others danced on those dream-like tunes and bit their paramours, maddened by the
scent of feral, bestial love that chained them as the music started pouring from the speakers. The
man’s voice went through us and permeated our souls, and ushered us to pure, brutish eroticism;
and we all listened and did not care if the world had ended in that moment – all, a dead family in
the decayed womb of the Church of Hades, burning in the fires of pleasure and carnal sin, averted
from any judgment, be it divine or mortal. There is no Death left for those already dead.
The floor grinned like a gapping cosmic wound; no one cared, no one looked, for they were
all drowned in their own phantasms. Her utmost passion was flowing inside of me, destroying,
tearing me apart like a savage djinn; and yet I did not stop to ardor her pale, translucent skin, as
she sighed her most personal phantasies in my ear, with a breath that demented me. She smelled
like the salvia I used to smoke with my friends when we were terribly cold.
Did you ever imagine how destructive would be to find out that dreams have no meaning
at all? How your life would fracture in the span of a millisecond? I did, and I crumbled on her,
drained of all vital power like I’ve been sucked by a myriad vampires and I told her to never leave
me alone. And she said that she will always be there and left me gasping for air on that bloody
floor, in a fetal position while she played with her lips on my neck-flesh, playfully sucking and
biting.
And I agreed, too drugged on her scent and the music that broke my heart into a million
tiny-tiny pieces to say anything; visions of hell and rising forests, and burning heavens and a
purged world coalesced in my mind. Visions of better places spawning from the cadavers of spaces
that were a thousand times darker than those molded by Bosch’s mind.
And my dark, satanic, sarcomens paramour whispered and sighed to me words that she
must have read in a god-send book, for they were too beautiful and mellow to have been designed
by mortal minds.
 I asked her if she’d stay with me for the rest of her life, stoned as I was on the surrealism
of the scene; and she said yes, she’ll always be there for me.
“But never ask me to come again”, she said.
And I did not.
At least for a while. It should be a rule to never question the origin of the beautiful things
in your life. You know what they say: never look a gift-horse in the mouth.
My Aurora faded away with the notes of the song; I awoke in a profound sweat, carried by
two Death-eaters; they placed me on a seat, for my feet seemed to have been made by some sort
of heated chewing-gum.
‘Hey, what’s wrong, man? Are you okay? Are you feeling well?’
‘I am, I believe, okay. Where did she go?’ I said, while I was endeavoring to come to my
senses.
‘Where did who go?’

I stood on that chair until I rejuvenated well enough to go home; and while I walked those
putrid and muddy streets to the hotel, I couldn’t help but wonder where did she come from and
where did she go after she sucked me dry, as if her absence was the sole catalyst of my senses and
rational thought. And I also kept on asking myself what came over me to unfurl my passion on
someone I barely knew, someone that was more of a stranger to me, more of an illusion than
something palpable.
Was her a vision, a construct of my impassioned mind or was she a shard of reality that
perpetrated the world I had created for myself to escape the chains of a monstrous locus? I couldn’t
have told dream for reality or vice-versa.

As I fell asleep, lulled by “The Return of the She-King”, I dreamt of a great valley, and as
I walked through it, scourged by a hydrocarbon rain, my gait orchestrated by the music of the
thunderous welkin as if the Morningstar had fallen again, there came to pass that there was a great
ziggurat at the foot of a huge granite mountain, surrounded by phantom-roses and lily-of-the-
valleys who were rocked by a gentle, summerly breeze; and a herd of bone-deer ran beside me and
above the frayed entrance of the ziggurat there were spectral owls that hooted to the aching belly
of the sky, and there, inside of it, scrawled on the vestigial walls which were covered with a queer
glowing moss and colonies of lapis lazuli, with a stern yet beautiful calligraphy, there was the
message:

“Scourge me,
Defile me,
Rape me,
Crush me,
Destroy me,
Cut me to pieces,
Trample me underneath a million feet,
Drown me,
Skewer me,
Burn me,
Poison me,
Strangle me,
Cut me,
Everything < 12 grams.

I fell down, overwhelmed and then I understood and I ran with the deer, and I could see
my flesh dripping from my skeleton; and it came to pass that only bones remained of me, and I
was so weightless that I was more like flying than running. I jumped with the herd in the colorful
air and slithered through interminable forests of pine and oak like a fire gust of wind, and sipped
from ice-cold streams that gushed forth from the aorta of the mountains, while my beloved, aerial
paramour danced through the clouds on the music that symphonized my phantasm.
‘Never wake up’ I said to myself ‘never again wake up’.
And she smiled and waved at me, as she was carried by the steamy air of the dawn, like
my very own, marcasite-colored, Nicotiana alata.

I woke up, all burning in the oil of that dream and I shivered, stricken with a panic-attack.
All the objects in my room seemed alien to me. Even the old photo with a girl that I once knew
pulsed with strange life.
 I ran in the bathroom and washed my face with ice-cold water. It stung my face like a
thousand microscopic bumblebees; my eyes were buried in their sockets, my hair lay chaotic all
over my face and shoulders. The eyeliner was flowing on my cheeks leaving black traces like I
was weeping black tears. I took the lipstick and crushed it on my lips and the corners of my mouth.
I pushed it so hard that it broke and fell in pieces on the cold marble floor. I struck the polished
glass with my forehead and saw my reflection in tens of little shards and, at last, joined the
fractured lipstick, crying and laughing, stopping whenever her image carpet-bombed my
cadaverous, slowly rotting mind. I had to get out to prevent myself from self-destructing. The
surrounding abstractness was unbearable. The walls seemed to grow mouths to devour me, the
ceiling distorted and flowed like water to drown me.
I went on to the halls of the hotel, in one of the balconies and stood there for a while, with
my head supported by the palms of my sweaty hands. I slowly squeezed my temples and imagined
that I had some dirt in there, and by squeezing it out I could get rid of the colossal headache that
cleaved my brains. And then I told myself that I have become the post-punk age, that I seemed to
have been molded by all the crises of my age, which turned me into a cold, mad bastard that has
been born in antagonism with anything that moves and breathes.
And then I knew that I have buried myself so much in the astral plane of my mind, there,
in that dark yet beautiful place, that there was no path of return for me anymore. That I doomed
myself to leaving alone in a world of my own creation once I hated the one I was living in.
Two monsters were fighting inside of me, both wearing the label “Desire”: that of doing
something to lift myself from my suicidal, maniacal state and that of remaining confined in my
world of shadows, far away from the humans that disappointed and pissed me off so much, in that
world where no one could have ever hurt me.
I suddenly felt imprisoned in a cocoon of barbed wire. At least I was sheltered from my
putrescent dreams; if only I could live without sleeping, my life would have been a lot better; I
wouldn’t have gone insane at so ripe an age, I would have been relatively normal, normal enough
to carry on with my life and maybe someday – just maybe – even have a family. But every time I
thought about the future, every time I thought about making some changes in my life in order for
the paths to lead me there, to the breast of a beautiful, caring woman and the warm smile and gentle
touch of a baby, the world seemed to thrust a boot down my throat or to tactically place all the
idiots that it had in its arsenal in my front. And change seemed to distance itself from me, because
I became the same sanguinolent, misanthropic waste of skin that I have been for the greater part
of my life every time someone stomped me on my tail.
I looked into what remained of the bathroom mirror and I didn’t even recognize myself.
And I couldn’t believe that something like me is allowed to exist, for I was way too dangerous for
myself and thought of ending it all right there, of pushing my engine into the dirt.
Pulvis et umbra sumus.
 XIII
Cor Noctis

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we
are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an
eternal glory that far outweighs them. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is
unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (Corinthians, 4:16-18)

A urora looks through the window of her room at how the courtyard gets gradually more

lighted as the sun rises over the forest. Though she is not outside, she can tell that it’s still very
cold – and she can tell it because of that light; it inspires coldness, that kind of morning cold that
dies until the afternoon.
She’s dressed with a pair of pierced jeans and a long-sleeve which reaches her fingertips,
being a little too large for her; although she just awoke from a restless sleep, her hair lays in order,
voluminous, on her shoulders. She looks like the very crest of innocence as she gazes listlessly
and overcome with ennui through the window, clenching her little, perishable fingers on the cup
of coffee. Her thoughts are far away from that place of sorrows in which she is living. Her thoughts
are at that beautiful demon and his cowardice to save her from there. She knows that Az has
thought it all over well, but feels, however, that he was unjust when he told her that she won’t be
able to understand him.
That’s not what the angel in the cave had told her. He told her that she was meant to bring
light into his life and that he was meant to be her lantern in that vast and dark field of corn that
was hers.
She looks at the phone, and expects it to ring in any moment, but then she realizes that she
didn’t give him her number. And she does it all over again, like a suicidal maniac that hides every
sharp object in his house and pretends to have forgotten where he hid it, in a shallow pursuit of
trying to protect himself from himself.
Aurora knows that her father has awaken – she can hear sounds coming from the kitchen
and cabinet-doors being slammed, and she knows the only two reasons for which he might be
there: it’s whether coffee or sleeping pills. He hasn’t eaten that much since her mother’s
confinement into the asylum. And neither did he sleep. Now he took fistfuls of pills to help him
get a little, though all contorted and deprived of any comfort. He became more like a ghost – he
glided listlessly through the house, looking more through things than at them, looking more
through her than at her, with black memories gnawing at his failing heart. Sometimes he just
entered her room and patted her head in silence. And she won’t say a word. She knew not what
she could have said to him, because he scared her to the very marrow of her bones, and not because
he would become violent – no, few are the times in which he dared to put his hand on her – but
because he seemed a total stranger to her, just as did her brother, who was probably drunk and
sleeping in some ditch, making a fool of his family and staining his name with mud, and as did her
mother, who now probably lived inside her head, slowly consumed with dementia.
The girl rises and opens the doors of her closet and chooses the best clothes she has, and
with every gesture she makes and with every time she looks at her own reflection in the mirror,
she roughens and sharpens her features to prevent herself from crying. She tries to smile, but her
lips won’t take the order. She rummages through that cornucopia of ragged attires, choosing the
less tattered and the better looking ones.
“If you won’t save me, I’ll save myself” she says.
Within her flesh, her spirit burns and little does she know that when that occurs, great things
are bound to happen.
In the moment she loses her jeans, the long-sleeve and her white satin underwear, which is
ruptured a little bit on her right hip (but does not fail to be filled with plenitudinous, young flesh),
revealing fully voluptuous and replenished shapes, it seems that the sun suddenly and beastly
pivots upwards, to avoid laying glance upon such an innocent and beautiful vista.
She’s now dressed with a gown violently gilded with floral motifs, that make a great
contrast with her violent-red hair, a pair of black shoes for which she saved money for a month,
she kneels and lifts up a loose board in the floor and retracts the wallet with her savings, that she
placed there to be out of her family’s reach and she descends the stairs, with precaution, lest she
disturbs her father, who, as she was certain, took another fistful of pills, as proved by the bottle
that lays opened on the table, on which a myriad other things lay in disarray. He’ll probably stay
in that drug-induced sleep for days.
Aurora quits the house and takes the path that goes from the forest in which her home is to
the nether parts of Crooked Tree. She was right, it is cold, despite the rising of the sun. She shivers
a little but then manages to once again roughen herself and descends through the trees like a blot
of mirthful color. From up there, she is able to see how the village gains life as time fleets by – she
can see the cars moving like vermin, the people – merely ants – walking and running and shouting.
She is happy that by the end of the night, she’ll be far away from it and the thought of it
makes her smile until she reaches the very center of Crooked Tree. The people look at her like she
is a progeny of the devil. Old and middle-aged women give her impertinent, contradicted looks,
as if she’s part of a demoniac convent of witches. They glance at her dress and exhale in
dissonance, but she doesn’t really care about anything else but her newly-found gaiety. She enters
one of the stores and asks for everything that constitutes the beauty kit of a young woman like her
and then, with renewed hope in her heart, leaves for the shack of poor, old Jim.
She’s finally understood what the angel meant when he said what he said.
As she gazes at the surroundings through the magenta morning light, and at the sky,
cauterized by the crescent sun, she realizes that she’s part of a greater something, and that very
thought becomes a strong impulse for her to reach Az and never let him chase her away again with
his misanthropic babbling.
The little path through the clearing that leads to Jim’s house is covered in bedewed verdure;
here and there, small patches of forgotten snow melt steadily in the warmth and the air sings the
death of the winter and announces the beginning of a very tepid spring. She can hear the murmur
of the river as it thickens with the snow that melted up in the mountains, and the chirping of some
pilgrim, spring-heralding nightingales.
She sees Jim working at something in the courtyard and for a moment, the thought of all
of it scares her, but something – something occult, unknown - inside her ignites and compels her
to enter the man’s courtyard and slowly walk her way towards him, remarking his tranquil face as
he labors.
And it’s not the very present that bombards her little, humane heart with encouragement to
address Jim, but a glimpse of days to come, days of happiness, days of affection at the bosom of
her insane, green-eyed agathodaemon. And never did she care less for the opinions, lives and
futures of others than she does now. She only cares for the trembling, shadowy touch of someone
– or something – she’s barely met but knows that it’s fit to fulfill every condition.
If one would have strolled across that little, green pathway, one could have seen how
gracefully she bows down her firehead over the old man’s silhouette, reminiscing of a thirsty deer
weeping down the constellation of its antlers into the viridian waters of a forest glade; and how he,
after meeting her gaze, lowers his own from that dear, vampiric woman, as if she is the queen of
an eldritch, shade-haunted region of the Carpathians and he a mere age-disfigured hierodule who
has not the right to desecrate it with such an impudent gesture as a glance.
She tells the old man something and he hastily goes inside and produces a sheet of paper
and a pen and clumsily writes on it, with a trembling hand, while smiling to her. She smiles back,
and the scene looks like it’s the meeting between an old father and his long-lost daughter.
There isn’t much talking after that. Aurora writes something on the other half of the paper,
tears it in two and offers it to the old man, lends him some of her money for his benevolence and
after a few hours of cheerful preparations, she rocks her pretty feet on the seat of a train as it passes
through forests that look like huge drills coming up from inside the mother and she marvels at the
loftiness of the nature that surrounds her. From time to time, herds of deer spring from the bushes
that are close to the railway, scared by the daemonic noise, and run towards the forests, wide-eyed,
moist-eyed.
As Az exercises his expensive art on some guy’s skin-canvas, as her father dreams
pestilent, drug-induced nightmares, as her mother screams, insane, and looks for something to end
her life with, as Jim cooks his meal with what he bought thanks to Aurora and as her brother finally
goes home, she is mesmerized by how beautiful the Mother is when clad in the cloth of the
palaeogaen night. Bats dive from the heights and cling to her window like some winged cocoons
of leather and fur, bringing notions from the ether; the pale sheen of the moon – a mere gigantic,
white disco ball – washes the surroundings with its antiseptic phantom-water. Everything seems
to be drawn to her, like moths to a light bulb.
She’d like to sleep, but the vista won’t let her – it has a certain magnetism that prevents
Aurora from averting her gaze and succumbing to repose. All the way to the destination, she turns
her pretty head from right to left and left to right and drinks the splendor of the voyage with her
eyes. She’s alone in the compartment and she’s thankful for that. Someone’s presence would
destroy the spell of grandeur that binds the whole world, the spell that enthralls her in that very
moment as she gazes, smiling, at the forests, and the lakes, and the stars that gleam in the nocturnal
welkin – and right then she understands one of the reasons for which Az isolated himself.
 XIV
The Thing on the Doorstep

D
‘ oes it hurt?’ Az asks Andrew, the man who’s being tattooed.

‘It pinches a little’ the man cackles nervously.

‘It’s a painful art, my friend’ Az says and smiles encouragingly. The buzz of the tattooing
pistol is steady and annoying. He draws with calculated speed and watches how the sting goes
back and forth into the skin, depositing ink within it. He’s just finished the shape of a diamond on
Andrew’s back.
‘I’ve finished the shape of the diamond’ he informs his subject.
‘What the hell? So fast?’
‘Yeah’ Az laughs ‘it doesn’t take so long to make the shapes. It’s a whole other business
with applying the colors and the shades. That’s also the part in which you pee yourself because of
the pain.’
He can feel Andrew cringe on the table and laughs.
‘I’m just kidding, man, relax. It doesn’t hurt more than when doing the shapes, though it
takes considerably longer.’
Az is dressed differently than his usual attire. He only wears a pair of tight blue jeans and
a fishnet undershirt, through which his tattoos are relatively visible. He doesn’t even wear his
make-up – the lipstick and the eyeliner - and he doesn’t have the rings on his fingers, and that is
because when he works, he wants to feel as relaxed as possible. His hair – if similar to a lion’s
mane when not at the saloon – is now carefully serried into a pony-tail that almost reaches the belt
of his pants.
He even behaves differently, and all in all, he’s a whole other person. He’s careful to the
brink of obsession with the pistol and takes his time, without hastening things and he is pretty
talkative for no apparent reason.
‘I can tell you even now that it’s gonna be awesome’ he says to Andrew.
‘Man, I hope so. It’s my first, you know. I want it to be the best and if I like it, I’ll probably
get more anyway. Getting tattooed for the first time it’s like getting laid for the first time, isn’t it?
You do it once, you want more of it!’
 As Andrew speaks, Az draws the first lines of the light spectrum going on from the right
of the diamond, but after the man’s remark, he distances the pistol and laughs:
‘You’re very right, man! Well, I’m sure you’ll be pleased with it.’
He often wanders how he can be so different at work, without even forcing himself to. He’s
pleased with himself in those moments in which he forgets all of his crises and focuses on the skin
and the ink-pistol, and also forgets that no-one expects him home and that he doesn’t even have
friends. That is probably why he doesn’t have fits of panic-attack at work.
Tattooing is the sole thing that still fills him with a feeling akin to accomplishment and
also with the so-much-needed self-respect. It also provides him with more money than he can use;
after paying the rent, the expenses and his food, he still remains with a large sum that he can use
for his exquisite attire, for buying books, records, antiques and whatever he wants. He even opened
an account in which he placed a large amount of savings for days in which his art will, eventually,
stop flourishing. He often thinks of saving enough money to buy himself a house, somewhere at
the foot of the woods, where the only sounds he could hear would be the howling of the wolves
and the sibilant slithering of the wind through the trees.
As his thoughts go back and forth, just like the sting of the pistol into flesh, from his future
plans and his orders to focus on what he’s doing, Aurora appears into his mind and a new movie
appears; a movie in which she’s there, in that house, in which they both sit on chairs, outside, and
watch the ballet of the leaves as they are stricken by Midas’ hand.
The spring is warmer than Az could have ever predicted; those chemical-sunset blazes
already appeared, and he’s not sure if that was a thunder that he heard in the afternoon, muttering
somewhere in the distance, or the passing of a very heavy truck. Although he’s professed his choice
for winter as a favorite season, he’s greatly thankful for the coming of the summer; there’s
something in its air that changes him almost completely. Something that awakens in him the
passion for life, for the beautiful and for social activity.
Little does he know that for every time the needle goes into the skin, at least one of his
dreams advances with ferocious velocity to smash into his reality.
Hours pass by, and still the buzzing of the pistol never ceases, and the needle punctures
forth without fatigue. It’s every tattooist’s job to engage his subject in discussion in order to make
him stop thinking about the pain, just like a nurse’s is to tell a child to look away from the sting
when he’s getting vaccinated. So does Az, who’s pretty much amazed by how much small-talk he
can produce and how much he can speak about various themes with Andrew, who is getting restless
and fidgety on the table.
‘It’s almost finished’ Az says and wipes some perspiration from his brow. He grabs a towel
and moves it across his forehead and his chest. ‘It’s a thing of beauty, I promise you. Just a little
bit longer, and I’ll let you get up on your feet and admire it yourself. By the way, I forgot to tell
you: I’ve done this tattoo for so many goddamn times that I can do it half-asleep, haha.’
‘Seriously?’ Andrew asks. ‘It’s so popular?’
‘Sure. I mean, the band’s got the status of a deity. You bet that a lot of devoted fans got
this eternally on their skins. Is it just me, or is the rock star the nearest thing to a God right now?’
‘Yeah, you bet!’ Andrew ejaculates, then he immediately resumes his talking at very
nostalgic level: ‘I love Pink Floyd man. They’re absolutely stunning; getting their logo on my
skin is the least I could do to prove my loyalty.’
‘I like them too’ Az says and smiles. ‘Pretty oneiric stuff; but I can’t listen to it for too long
a period of time, or I’m making abstraction of this world and enter a very deep state of anxiety.’
‘It’s transcendental shit, man. It’s not for anyone; you gotta be a certain way to enjoy their
music.’
‘You’re right. Andrew, you’re done. You can rise’ Az says with a certain degree of pride
in his coarse voice. He lights a cigarette and waits for Andrew’s opinion why sucking at it thirstily.
Andrew rises from the table and first he shakes his legs to chafe them and then walks to
the mirror and throws his head over his shoulder, and for a moment, he freezes.
‘I have no words’ he says as he turns to Az, who sits in the middle of the salon with
embraced arms and a happy countenance.
‘Didn’t I tell you that it’s a thing of beauty? Yes I did’ he laughs. Andrew can’t stop looking
at it.
‘Man, I know it’s just a fucking diamond and some rays, but this shit’s important for me –
I can’t – I really can’t thank you enough for doing such a good job.’
‘Glad you like it, Andrew. Now, you probably know that there are some certain after-care
tasks to do in order to keep it beautiful and shiny: you’re forbidden to walk with it on sunlight for
at least two months – it will turn green and ugly. Don’t ever scratch it or keep it under water. If
you’re working out, you should stop until it’s completely healed.’
‘Okay, man’ Andrew nods his head affirmatively, humiliatingly.
 ‘Also, apply regularly this cream on it’ – says Az as he produces a little plastic box from
a drawer – ‘it’s Cetaphil. It will moist your skin and keep it on healing continually. Don’t soak it
in it, though. Just apply a smooth, thin layer and spread it all over the tattoo. Now, enjoy your new
acquisition, man. You’ve paid me in advance, so we’re good on this chapter. All the best’ Az
concludes, powerfully shaking Andrew’s hand.
‘To you too, Az. And thank you again from the very heart!’
‘Don’t mention it.’ He smiles. ‘It was my pleasure. Always a pleasure from my side.’
After Andrew gathers his clothes, Az guides him to the entrance, still assaulted with words
of gratefulness, and then closes the door and instantly removes his undershirt and wipes his body
with the towel. He puts all his instruments in order, washes what’s dirty and stained, throws some
ink-spattered gloves in the trash bin and then, taking a comfortable, thin chemise of black silk on
himself, quits his salon, closes the door with the key and leaves, finally, for home, after a whole
day’s work.
The night, he finds, is pleasantly warm and tranquil. He liberates his hair from its
confinement, and it is instantaneously rocked by a gentle, warm breeze that blows from the hot
etheric clouds.
Where not obscured by the magenta urban auroras, brambles of stars shine dimly; Az
observes how overcrowded are the streets of the city – shoals of couples, young and old alike,
children with parents, teenagers headed to night-outs and white nights. The warmth awoke them
all from the slumber-like inactivity of the winter season. With his hands in his pockets, taking the
less traveled sidewalks, he reaches the bar next to the hotel; he enters and quits, almost
immediately, with a carton-cup of coffee. He lights up a cigarette, while endeavoring to keep the
liquid in balance, and then heads to the hotel. While walking, puffing from the cigarette and
drinking from the coffee, all gets dark before him and he hears a booming voice, professing:

“Roses, their sharp spines being gone,

Not royal in their smells alone,
But in their hue;
Maiden pinks, of odour faint,
Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint,
And sweet thyme true;”
 The voice disrupts into warm laughter and as it echoes through the streets, that pitch-black
haze diffuses and Az is left speechless on the sidewalk. He drops the coffee, which spatters all
over his jeans, and then he looks around him to find the culprit of such a tremendous surprise.
Though he’s seen and heard a lot of weird, preternatural signals since he was but a little child, he
did not expect this. Recollecting that voice incessantly, he suddenly realizes who’s it is and finds
it in himself to smile and mutter, although the meaning transmitted message – for that he reckons
it has to be – is still unknown to him:
“You bastard.”
He walks towards the hotel while incessantly looking over his shoulder, to be prepared in
case of another sonic intrusion; the halls of the hotel are deserted and immersed in a scant darkness.
He can hear people chattering in their rooms and is again crushed with a cyclopean solitude. He
inserts the key into the door and enters his room. It’s pitch-black darkness, and he narrows his eyes
as he turns on the dim, orange light of an electric chandelier that is placed at the head of one of the
two beds. The music still plays uninterrupted from the speaker of the computer; he places his
coffee on the desk and heads towards the shower.
While under the assault of the warm, revitalizing stream of water, he can still hear broken,
scant pieces of the music coming from the room. His hair stitches on his back like a fatigued whip
and his muscles relax like on command. He feels slumberous and reckons that he could sleep for
days straight. He exits the shower while wiping his hair and changes the music; Pink Floyd now
resounds throughout the walls and he regulates the volume and the bass of the speaker, to fully
experience those razor-like tunes.
It seems like the music filters inside of him and activates deep, unknown emotions, for he
lays on the bed, naked as he is, and feels unable to move, pierced and pinned down by a terrible
oneiric lassitude. He inhales and exhales at such a slow rate that his heart stops its tumult and beats
according to the rhythm of the song. Synapses go in and out of connections, thoughts flicker on
and off, and dreams ignite like firecrackers. It looks like the music that he hears was made solely
for the purpose of his dreaming about the rocking-feet woman, the fire-headed Venus. The blanket
that covers the bad is velveteen and it brushes comfortably against his skin; it is so relaxing and
warm that he’s prone to slipping into another world – one of dream-fabric, a Lovecraftian space.
And the music still gives strange impulses into the heart and drowns him into a lake of
opiate-like air: “It’s a sin that somehow/ Light is changing to shadow/ And casting its shroud over
all we have known.” It ceases to be a pure sonic thing – it becomes a spiritual journey, and still
that guitar-tone carpet-bombs him with bullets of relaxation and dream-like torpor.
A beating at the door comes like a beating from some parallel, far-flung world. It takes a
while until he dismisses that shroud of chimera-like sloth over him; finally Az gets up on his feet,
wondering who the hell knocks at his door at such late an hour, and most importantly, why. He
throws a shirt and some knee breeches on himself and raises his voice, as the knocking stagnates
in annoying repetition:
‘Just a moment, please!’
‘Goddamn it!’ he mutters to himself.
It’s “Comfortably Numb” that ignites the atmosphere the moment he opens the door,
stumbles on his feet and succumbs underneath his knees. His arms go round a pair of dress-covered
feet and his face goes into a field of flowers. His eyes well instantly with tears and after a few
seconds he cries whole streams of them:
‘Care for a little company?’ she asks him while she laughs like a child, but he still lays
inert on the ground. A couple passes by them and look at Az like he’s a raving lunatic. He raises
his gaze and says ‘You’re not real’, with bulgy, incredulous eyes.
‘Pinch me’ she says and again liberates a chink-like laugh.
Az looks like he’s prone to go off his own head; he touches her feet, he pinches them
violently to assure himself that it’s real flesh and not some aerial phantasmagoria. He plays with
the folds of her dress, he caresses her hands, and ultimately rises on his feet, embraces her tightly
and rotates her through the air, while seeking her lips with his. They clash together and stick to
each other for minutes.
‘What are you doing here and how did you find me?’ he asks her after he’s sane enough to
think in a rational way.
‘That’s none of your concern’ she says smiling, and if by then, Pink Floyd’s “Yet Another
Movie” succeeded in deepening the surrealism of the scene, now Az doubts that she’s real, but
more of a kind of lamia, a vision akin to that he had in The Church of Hades. But then she embraces
him and drags him on the bed and buries her pretty face in the curve of his neck.
‘You’re really here?’ he asks her, bending his head towards her flame-covered ear.
‘I’m really here.’
 Though she answers to his question in the affirmative, the spiritual pain of not knowing for
sure if what happens is real or the curio hex summoned by the filthy, void-like mouth of some up-
to-no-good cacodemon is excruciating. She seems to possess all the attributes of materiality and
at the same time the queer radiance and timelessness of a ghost.
‘Let’s go out!’ Her child-like voice perpetrates his manic focus on the seemingly intractable
conundrum.
‘The city is so beautiful! Here –‘she says as she goes to her purse and produces a CD case
– ‘put this somewhere safe; we’re going to need it later on.’ She sees that he hesitates and speaks
again, more emphatic: ‘Come on! Faster!’ Az doesn’t even have enough time to see what the CD
contains. He drops it on the floor and immediately lifts it up while Aurora laughs at him from all
her heart, like she never did laugh before in her life. Happiness contours new outlines on her face
like a sculptor does it on its stone-subject.
Before he knows it, Az inhales the warm and soothing air of the spring through his nostrils
again. She takes his hand and panders it slowly while looking into his eyes. That pair of eyes –
those galactic holes in that beautiful, god-designed skull – makes him shrug off the spell of
discredit off his mind. He stops and kisses her and once again asks her how she found him. And
once again, she replies that’s none of his business. She drags him like one would drag a stubborn
collie.
‘Tell me that this will last a life-time!’ she says, confidence and hope burning in her eyes.
‘Do you want this to last a life-time?’ he replies. ‘If you do, then I’ll be happier than you
can imagine to oblige’.
‘I do. I really do from the bottom of my heart!’ she screams and jumps into his arms like a
child into his grandfather’s. They laugh and their laughter seems everlasting – if one would have
had desires to make a painting of happiness, they would have been the perfect models.
Hours fly by and they still run like the Lucifer on the meadows of his childhood – they still
enjoy each other’s laughter and love innuendos and cannot have enough of themselves. Az looks
at her at how happy she is to discover the mysteries of the urban area, how sapient and excited she
looks at clothes through the windows of the stores, how amazed she is by the muzak of the cars
and the garrulous pedestrians. And he says to himself that urban lighting has been created just to
throw its hues into her hair and make it look alive and more beautiful than ever.
 At long last, they follow back the road to the hotel, with their hands clenched on each
other’s waist. Amazingly enough, Az’s perspective seems to go out of its normal equilibrium
already – the darkness of the halls, the nights of smashing mirrors with his fists, the sleepless nights
in which he tried to bite off himself or drag his misery-choked spirit out of that cage of
blasphemous flesh – all seem faraway, surreal – dreams of far-flung times and a far-flung
personality. There’s somebody else in his mind.
The room smells like musk, saffron and nutmeg; somewhere behind the curtain, a herd of
angels whip the urban, chemical air with their beautiful, dainty wings.
As fast as they are inside, Aurora inserts the CD into the computer and slams Az on the
closest bed. The aural, lustrous sheen of the moonlight dances through the rich curtains, on what
Az realizes that is All Hallows Eve’s “The Dreaming”; Aurora’s hair falls like a cascade of blood
upon his face and the room is filled with tens of ghosts of green lights coming from all the
electronic devices that are plugged in.
‘Let me show you how I can break your neck with my breath’ she says and cauterizes his
skin with a kiss.
‘Let me pray at the altar of your breasts’ he replies and talon-like fingers rake upon her
back.
‘Let me pour wine on your soul!’
‘Just if you quench my lustmord libido…’
‘BlAzphemy!’ she chortles scintillatingly.
Their arms coil around each other like snakes in Medusa’s head. There are millions of
splinters of fiery gazes knifing through the overcharged air. Clawed hands go through silk and
fishnet, and lips through flesh, and the summerbreeze cools their bodies that are prone to burn like
Samhain fires.

‘
 XV
The farewell kiss of dementia

Grace Malakian opens her eyes and sees the fiery-red rays of the rising sun reflected in the
dirty windows of the asylum; she looks around her and searches for someone that could give her a
pill for the crushing pain in her chest. She feels her heart beating like the pistons of a train and
feels like it’s going out of her flesh. She tries to scream, but her powers are long gone – she’s but
a vegetable now, confined to numbing inactivity. Her lips part, but nothing comes out of them,
though she hears, inside of her head, the intensity with which the scream would come out if she
would be able to emit it. All the pills she’s been fed with since she was brought there worsened
her condition.
Her eyes are those of a hunted animal – she looks around her and her pain compels her to
try to attract someone there, in the room, by any means. She lifts her hand on the little cabinet next
to the bed and slowly, steadily pushes down a glass of stale, repugnant water, hoping it would
break and the noise of it would arouse the on-duty nurses; it falls down but as it hits the floor it
doesn’t break. Her eyes burn with anger and desperation as she stares at the ceiling; her whole
body trembles from every joint and still she tries to scream and howl like a demon but her vocal
chords refuse to obey to the impulses of her dormant, inoperative brain.
She still looks around with those victimized – yet terrifying - eyes; there’s no sharp object
with which she could cut her life-thread and thus save herself from that subhuman state, for the
doctors took them all when she first attempted suicide. There is, indeed, a bottle of sleeping pills
on the cabinet, but she knows that she’s unable to reach it. Madness takes the best of her and she
grins and twists in that prison of useless, decaying flesh, trying to get out from that pool of self-
loathing. She looks at the bottle of pills as if it’s the very Grail. Slowly, she directs her hand
towards it, while making titanic efforts to keep it going in the same direction, for it trembles
atrociously and doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about her dreams of control.
Her body is smothered in a devilish fever; the now hot and sweaty blankets that cover her
are like a layer of molten lava, and they stick to her skin like some disgusting seaweed. She cannot
keep her eyes open because of the marvelous effort to clench her thin, bony fingers on the sleeping
pills. She looks like the very effigy of humankind’s dolor.
 But then, when all seems lost, she feels a heavenly gust of chilly air and suddenly, the
much-desired object is placed in her hand and her fingers are placed on it carefully, one by one,
by a warm and fine hand. She cracks open her fatigued eyelids and looks through that haze to see
a suited man, with a long, rich mane of white hair dangling as if alive. His eyes are of a translucent
white with pinkish irises and all his appearance is of a beautiful pallor that contrasts with the
somber color of his suit. A smell of myrrh comes from him and drenches all the room in it.
‘Grace Malakian – such an inappropriate name!’ the apparition says, though Grace cannot
tell if indeed he moves his lips when he talks or not. She blames it on her incapability of wide-
opening her eyes and the lethargic fever that rages in her body.
‘Woman, once a very beautiful woman; once happy; two children – yet never mother.
Married – yet never wife.’ As he speaks, the suited, peculiar man draws nearer to her – no! He
seems like he floats towards her! ‘Once a child no less happy than Aurora – your very own flesh
and blood! Do you remember the first time you saw her little face, and her bead-like eyes? The
first time you took her into your arms, as she was still drenched in your blood and she emitted her
very first wail into this world? Yet this is not your fault, dear Grace.’
Now his face is dangerously close to hers, and she shudders, although there is nothing
malignant in his countenance, but quite from the contrary – he seems to succor her fever with a
preternatural coolness that stems from his person. He places one of his alabaster hands on her
forehead and she sighs from the pleasure and comfort it gives her.
‘No, Grace. It is not your fault – it is a glitch in the matrix of this’ – and he places a finger
on her forehead – ‘mind… I am sorry for your suffering, and though not from this reality, I cannot
say that I know what you’re going through. There are different kinds of pain, and my kind doesn’t
experience them all. Look at you… – he says and two white tears roll on his cheek – ‘Is this what
my father has subjected its creation to? To this gaol of futile, ephemeral meat? To this suffering
and madness? But I am gliding away from the subject of my visit…’ He lowers his head and Grace
is silently weeping, her chest quacking with strain.
‘Do not cry!’ the man says and he caresses her tear-ridden face, ‘Do not cry, you lost soul.
Oh, I am so sorry for you – yet I won’t dare intervene in the natural progress of things; but I will
do this’ he continues and clenches yet firmer her fingers on the bottle of pills. ‘You do what you
think is best for you – stay and suffer and break my heart or go on your own terms, honorably.’
He bows down and kisses her head and then trickles his hands all over her body, drenching it in a
smooth, tranquil sea of coolness.
‘Farewell, my suffering daughter. Close your eyes for I dare not look into their depths, lest
I destroy myself because of my impotency to help you.... I will wait for you.’
As she closes her eyes, still weeping bitterly, the apparition vanishes with the sound of a
breeze and a flutter of wings. She now smiles and cries uninterrupted, exorcising herself. She looks
at the pills and smiles and remembers Aurora’s face and in a lucid moment, she asks for her
forgiveness. There’s a movie before her eyes and it contains sequences of her life – Aurora and
Joe’s first steps, the day her husband asked for her hand, their first moonlighted dates. And while
she watches that beautiful film, her bosom ripped apart with crying, she rotates the bottle’s lid and
while the credits roll downward, with her name as the producer, she takes a fistful of pills and
closes her eyes. Her organs sing a symphony of lethargy as they begin to fail and go to perpetual
sleep.
Her heart beats at tragic speed and as she apologizes mentally, with the last shreds of mortal
life and mortal lucidity, it pops open like a decayed pomegranate; her hands fall lightsome on the
mattress and her soul wanders other – better – worlds. She dies with the words ‘my children’ on
her livid, skinless lips as if Death, as a last desire-accomplisher, gave her some moments of lucidity
to furthermore vilify the Life that maddened her.
Death came as a much-desired savior.
And she left life as a victor, with all the dignity that a human being is capable of.

***

She opened her eyes and saw that a pair of hands was holding her from underneath her
womb; and she looked down and saw a million lights – like a mundane sky or the reflection of the
welkin in some frozen, giant ocean. Then she looked up and saw the same face she saw while
moribund; it smiled to her and told her not to be afraid. At last they descended from the heights
like some meteors and while she could hear a very strange, otherworldly music, they stooped upon
the balcony of some building which looked like a hotel. They landed softly, as if they didn’t have
any weight at all, and her benefactor said:
‘Look inside’.
 She gazed inside and she could see everything clearly, for the drapes were completely
drawn. There, on the bed, stood Aurora, more beautiful than Grace could have ever fancied, at the
bosom of Az Gaday, who slept silently and smiling, keeping a protective hand around the girl’s
snow-white shoulders. Grace could hear her breathing as if she was just a step away from her and
she could smell her skin, which scented of a cheap yet very pleasant perfume. Her young flesh
seemed to pulse with happiness and newfound life. And as Grace stared, crying ceaselessly, she
thanked Az and begged, a thousand time, Aurora for forgiveness.
There was something adimensional and timeless about that scene; all those lights that
played shadow theatre on their sleep-benumbed bodies; the myriad smells that concocted together
a harmonious atmosphere and the happiness – God, the happiness! – that floated in the room and
was almost palpable.
‘It’s time to go, child’ the man said. ‘Close your eyes.’
She obeyed and she once again felt the ground shunning her contact and the sibilant wind
underneath her body; after a short period of time, she was told to open her eyes again, and she did
and saw her husband, crushed to sleep by the same things that brought her eternal relief. He slept
so profoundly that he seemed a statue. Sadness had dug deep ditches underneath his eyes and little
did remember of the man he knew. His body, a mere skeleton, lay in painful positions in that
repose, as if he turned numerous times. The air of the room was septic, for he didn’t clean up since
she was confined. Tear stains were visible in the subtle layer of dirt that covered his face. At once,
Grace approached that sleeping, sad carcass of the man she loved and kissed his cheeks, forehead
and ultimately, his rigid lips. How beautiful he was still!
‘He sacrifices himself for me’ Grace said, turning to her aerial friend.
‘He is. That’s why I fell. You, humans, know the power of the sacrifice – and you alone
know what true love is.’ he responded and smiled bitterly. ‘Go upstairs now’
She once again obeyed to that voice that seemed to be that of the ocean or of the very sky.
She went upstairs and said her goodbyes to Joe, her spendthrift son. He slept his alcohol and drug-
induced sleep.
‘Can you help him?’ Grace asked. ‘Can you do something for him?’
‘There will be a time of awakening’ the man responded. ‘We all have our demons – this is
his’ he continued. ‘But everything will be fine.’
 Grace glanced upon the silhouette of her child and he kissed him too, with her transparent
lips and caressed his face with her hand.
‘I know what’s next’ she said. ‘I am prepared’.
‘That is very good’ she was responded.
While the moon fell yet downward, preparing for her fugue out of Phaeton’s way, washing
the surroundings with her waning light, Grace abandoned the house and went to a place of
enormous, crushing beauty.
 XVI
Coccyx

As Az opens his eyes, he fearfully rises to see if the coming of Aurora was real or yet
another devilish dream. When he observes that his hand is underneath that mud-born Venus, he
lays again on his back and thinks about the eeriness of the occurrence. The conundrum being still
unsolved – and looming frantically in his mind whenever he tried to chase it away – he couldn’t
get much sleep. His eyes are of a reddish tint because of that and he feels a little dizzy.
Aurora turns a few times, sending her warmth towards him, and then raises on an elbow,
kisses him and says:
‘I think something very bad happened.’ She looks like a child after waking up from a
nightmare, seeking comfort from a parent.
‘What do you mean?’ Az asks her, happy that she took him from his thoughts. ‘Where and
what happened?’
‘I don’t know… I have a terrible feeling that something happened. Maybe home.’
‘Everything’s alright’ Az says and he caresses her face. In the morning light, that flows
beautifully and so warm through the window, she looks like an angel of rapture. Her hair – that
seems to defy the laws of physics, for it lays perfectly as it was a night before, as if she slept
without really touching the pillow with her head – is now more bloody than before, with strands
of yellowish light. Her black eyes – just like black holes – drag the rays into their depths and
acquire a particular glowing. Her skin – Az observes whilst kissing it – is silky and divinely
odoriferous.
‘I am hungry’ she suddenly changes the topic of the conversation.
‘Then let’s go and eat’ Az answers ruffling her hair and tickling her after delicately
slamming her on her back. Though she is by no means a teenager, she retains all the gaiety, lust
for life and etat d’esprit of one, in spite of her black, rotten past. And Az knows that he’ll never
find the words to express his respect and love towards that.
‘Come on, get dressed’ he says to her.
‘I don’t have anything else besides the dress I came with’ she says and once again, her
features roughen in attempt of spiritual control.
‘That will do until later, when we’ll go and buy you some more.’
 ‘I don’t want you to buy me anything’ she says, feeling the shadow of her past creeping
over her shoulder and whispering to her ear words of poverty and insignificance.
‘Well, that might be so, but I do want to’ he says and smiles to her beamingly. When she
takes her into his arms, the shadow screams in pain and leaves. While she dresses, Az gets himself
busy in the bathroom, lining his eyes and his lips and applying a thin layer of white powder over
his face.
‘Do that to me’ she says, appearing in the door. ‘I want that too’.
For a moment, Az is at a loss of words, although the fact that she is a woman, and make-
up never really had another better place to be placed on than on one’s face; it is a gesture of
empathy more than need, Az feels but at last he subdues and finely lines her eyes and powders her
perfectly-skinned face. He contours her lips with black lipstick and she watches herself in the
mirror and pirouettes.
‘I look fantastic, don’t I?’ she asks him.
‘I have no words to express it…’ he says, looking at her as if she’s some ancient goddess
rent in human flesh. He is overwhelmed by the strange ancientness that she emanates, which makes
a great contrast with her youthful looks. He is overwhelmed by the fact that such a good thing
could happen to him even if he didn’t raise a finger to make it happen and for a moment, he again
feels small, at the hand of something utterly incomprehensible and vastly omnipresent, a menacing
cosmic, universal force.
The sun is up and shines over their silhouettes. Their appearance attracts stares like a
magnet attracts iron, but not so many as in the village, for in the city, people are more accustomed
with fashion fads, with misfits and everything that doesn’t perfectly fit in. That’s why, probably,
Az feels so safe in the urban area.
They ate breakfast at a small restaurant Az knew, a cozy and quite secluded place not very
far from the Church of Hades, and then they ran through myriad clothing stores, wherefrom Az
bought Aurora all the pieces of attire she liked. She never said that she wanted them, for she didn’t
want him to spend his money for her, but after numerous assurances that it was not in the least a
problem, she seemed a little more eager to profess her like or dislike and desire to buy or not.
All day long, they blistered through the city, through numerous parks and little bars where
they ate, drank and enjoyed themselves.
 ‘What is the meaning of this?’ she asks him, while they sit on a bench within a very rich
park, with fresh verdure through which the sun sent sharp poniards, pointing at his make-up.
‘It is a celebration.’ he cryptically answers.
‘What for?’
‘For death’ he replies with seriousness and devotion. ‘I am very afraid of it. By making
myself look like it already touched me, I have a sense that I’m keeping it at bay. If I am not, it
shows the respect I have for its tremendous force.’
In response, she lays her head on his shoulder and then her mobile rings. The fact that she
doesn’t expect to be called by anyone makes that portentous feeling she had in the morning to
return with thousandfold force. She looks at Az, as if asking for his opinion whether to answer it
or not, and decides to answer it.
After a short conversation, that drowns her pretty chest in convulsions, she turns towards
Az, with tear-filled eyes.
‘I must go home, Az…’
‘What happened?’ Az asks, raising from the bench, kneeling and looking into her eyes.
‘Mommy’s dead.’
Az is rendered mute. He feels weak and impuissant and knows not what he could say, but
he realizes that nothing can keep It at bay.
‘Can I go with you?’ he asks, staring into her crystalline eyes with all the empathy he is
capable of.
‘No, this is not your problem, dear’ she answers, striking his forehead with her trebling
hand. ‘This is only my concern.’
‘Come on, let me go with you; I have some things myself to take care of back in Crooked
Tree. I have to pick some things from the house’

***

For the second time in such a short period of time, they are both rocked by the sinuous
motions of the train. Aurora looks through the window with chagrin, while Az wonders what she
feels. Her hand is in his, and he endlessly endears it.
 ‘She’s lost control’ she says at one fling. ‘She’s probably lost her mind a long time ago,
but still managed to somehow give signs that she’s okay; but then madness started its cannonade.
She’s whipped herself with a piece of barbed wire… She drank more and more with every day
that passed, to the utter horror of my father, who never did hit her although I always felt that he
wanted to whenever he saw her crawl, unable to stay on her feet. And yet, this disoriented, mad
woman was the being that gave me the chance to see all of this.’
While she speaks, she keeps the knife of her stare thrust in the vista that lays beyond the
glass of the window.
‘We never had a normal parent-child relationship because of her issues; her hatred towards
herself – in those scarce moments of clearness – was too big and it was always targeting all those
who surrounded her, though I am sure it was more like a gesture made by the demon of insanity
that possessed her and that deep inside, she fought it all the while. And now she’s gone and may
it be considered ghastly or not, I am happy that it came to an end. For she was my mother, and no
one’s ever wanted to see a mother suffering like this.’
She, at last, turns her gaze to Az, who is petrified with remorse, and she huddles at his
chest. Immediately, his hands go protectively around her shoulders, slowly caressing them and her
head. Almost on the spot, she falls asleep in that rather uncomfortable position – her legs loll from
the seats – at the bosom of Az, who watches her and listens to her breath and ceaselessly pats the
blaze that scorches in his lap – fire that breaths and scents evanescently of perfume.
As he looks through the window himself, at those landscapes he’s seen for so many times,
he hears the bark of a dog, so close that he trembles with horror for a moment, as if a dog was right
in the door of the compartment. When he looks that way, nothing’s there. Is that an ominous portent
for yet more ominous future happenings? He is not sure, but he thinks that the barking belongs to
Lex. It can’t be an illusion – he is sure that the barking was real – or at least rendered real, although
not really there. He looks at Aurora, to see if her sleep was disturbed by the same aural pareidolia,
but the fact that she still sleeps profoundly assures him that she didn’t hear anything. Az is afraid
that his fits of cadaverous visions won’t ever stop haunting him, and that they will destroy the
relation with that angel of a girl, that dreams in his lap like Aphrodite in Ares’. ‘At least she’ll
make them more endurable’ he mutters to himself, still gasping for air and reality.
He succumbs to a restless sleep and is aroused awake by Aurora, who informs him that
they’re there. Both still sleepy – and not from lack of sleep, but from that sudden and unannounced
short-life of their happiness – they descend from the train unto the platform of the Crooked Tree
terminal. Black clouds roll into the sky, angry, with mutinous moans as if it were made of a phalanx
of unrevenged ghosts. And under that sky, tolerance cannot survive, and tens of gazes turn on the
two lovers, who look like they were freshly brought to life from some dismal, obscure Gothic
story. But it is a secret principle – and as dead as secret – that human closeness can overcome
everything, that two are better than one, that two can overcome hundreds; that is why they stay
proud and sport their uniqueness through rows of narrow-minded Crooks with subtle smiles. There
is something in Az’s eyes that scares them away – those fires of green that can smolder with
friendliness or scorch with hate – and that is the devotion that he has towards his Aurora. He feels
like if someone dares to look at her as if she’s Frankenstein’s bride, he’d gouge out their eyes with
a Bic pen.
It’s not raining, the mass of verminous clouds just sits threatening as they proceed towards
the Crooked Tree center. The winds are rather cold and they fasten the buttons of their coats. Az
remembers the ancient superstition according to which the wind blows wild whenever someone
commits suicide.
‘She’ll be buried tomorrow at dusk. She committed suicide so she won’t have the same
service like the rest of the people. I want you to come with me. I don’t feel very well’ she says,
while staring into a blank point.
‘Everything will be fine’ encouraging both himself and her. ‘I will, of course, come with
you. What do you want to do now? Go home?’
‘Yes, I think it’s the best idea; I have to see what my father’s like – he must be ravaged
beyond repair right now.’
‘I understand, sweetheart. Can I guide you home now?’ he smiles, recollecting the first
time he asked her the same question and was answered in the negative.
‘Yes, please’ she says on impulse.

***

The sky mourns and weeps curtains of frozen rain as the funeral procession slithers on
through the muddy roundabout, side-streets of Crooked Tree. The thunders boom to replace the
silent and dawdling hearts of the pallbearers.
 Aurora holds her father’s hand firmly; the man is – against all odds and vicissitude of the
scenery – smiling; Az Gaday is behind them, with his leather coat dangling in the wind like a
swarm of taxidermied bats. Joe Malakian, who stands next to them, looks at him with a venomous,
inhuman scowl which makes him want to crush him. Although he would like to do it, he just turns
his gaze away, and looks, from time to time, to dear Aurora, who walks through the rain, face-
down, crestfallen and all wet and muddy.
The priest – an overweight chap, with a neglected beard and absolutely no empathy in his
eyes, drives the procession while chatting with the cantor, as if nothing happened – as if a soul
wasn’t to return to the primeval cosmic womb, from which he’d be born again. If the cantor was
present, no psalm was read and no chant was sung for the inert body that was covered with a white
piece of silk. Such things aren’t allowed for those who took their lives.
As they enter the gates of the graveyard, they strafe right, ushered by a mud-covered, elder
undertaker who hides a metallic flask into the interior pocket of his shabby coat.
When she sees the pit that yawns lugubriously, like an abyss who waits for the distorted
scream of the one that jumps to fuck the world at last, consuming the rain and the feelings of those
present there, Aurora rises her head and weeps silently, contently, though one could cannot tell
which tears are hers and which the sky’s.
Az’s hate smolders inside of his chest like a nuclear mushroom. Wherever he looks, he
finds something worth despising. Like Joe’s pathetic attempts to scare him, the priest’s rich
garments and his lack of remorse, the wound in the earth that, like an Elder God, waits for its
sacrifice. He thanks the sky that dirges there where humans don’t.
When the rain falls, we look at each other with other eyes, because only there, under the
assault of it, we see the problems that sculpt in the features of our faces, the sorrows that eat us
from inside and perhaps most importantly, that we are all of the same species, all brothers and
sisters. And that is why we’re always sad when it falls down and the sun doesn’t shine anymore.
There is nothing that binds people more than suffering.
The descent into the now-satisfied cavity is silent and sorrowful, and as Aurora starts
weeping, losing whatever control he had on her own feelings, Az loses it too, but still manages to
retain an external calm look. And he speaks, advancing as the rain lashes their bodies, to the priest:
‘Aren’t you going to say a “Rest in Peace” at least?’
 The priest freezes for a moment, for until then, Az’s image was occulted by the whole
procession, and now he lays his gaze on that pallid face for the first time. It is not a human fear,
but something akin to a glimpse into the future that scares him to the marrow of his bones; it’s like
he stares into the face of a messenger from hell that is to usher him to eternal torment. In a fracture
of time, all the things he did wrong seem to go before his eyes. At last, he manages to mumble,
fixing the ghost with wild, incredulous eyes and unconsciously making a step back:
‘The canon forbids me to do such things for those who’ve committed suicide.’
‘The one who committed suicide is one of your kind; a being of flesh and blood who was
ruined by this life and by this village. I think she deserves at least a felt “Rest in Peace”. You look
scared, Father…’ says Az and approaches the priest more and more, smiling maliciously, ‘Do you
see yourself in my visage? Do you see in me how rotten you are inside?’
Aurora and her father stand mute, unable to believe what is happening. Her father looks at
Az with a respect that he didn’t feel for anyone in his life. Joe Malakian is not afraid – or at least
hides it well, well-knowing that nothing can happen to him as long as he’s surrounded by people
and finds it in himself to scream:
‘Shut up, you freak!’
Az laughs and turns towards him:
‘I will tear your heart out someday, count on me.’
Suddenly, Malakian feels such a nauseating assault of dread that he thinks he’s going to
throw up. A thunderbolt strikes furiously in the distance and pumps agony into his brain, as if Az’s
threat was the very world’s.
‘Father! I want you to say some last words for this destroyed kindred spirit; not from your
God – who doesn’t care anyway – but from here’ says Az, pointing to his heart.
‘How dare you defile the word of God, you blasphemer?!’ the priest ignites, suddenly not
afraid anymore, alimented with courage.
Az laughs at how much he’d pissed the priest off with some words against his Father;
‘Would that have happened if I said something bad about his wife or children?’ Az asks himself
and knows that the answer is no.
‘Haven’t you learned a thing after interring so much people in this unwelcoming dirt?
Haven’t you learnt that God is a cyanide pill we grind in our teeth when we want to kill ourselves?
We suffer because our suffering, on the universal scale, is insignificant, father. No-one fucking
cares about our suffering. And that adds up to our loneliness and despondence and throws us on
the edge of the abyss. And you need that cyanide pill so you feel that your suffering isn’t
insignificant. Now father – the word is pronounced with such a disgust that the priest feels like
chatting with a human embodiment of Satan himself – do you suffer? Do you know what suffering
is? Do you know what empathy is?! Of course not. Of course you don’t. Now let me hear those
words. You make her suffering significant – show her spirit that it is mourned. ‘You are about to
bury a woman – a being of the same godly rank that gave you the opportunity to see what this
world looks like and what life is, and that alone should be worthy of all the posthumous verbal
accolades.’
Thunders bellow in the sky as if that is their way to agree with Az’s soliloquy. The priest
has a livid face, as do all others: the pallbearers, Aurora, her father, her brother and the cantor, who
sit like rain-sculpted ghosts amidst the crosses, graves and the bowing trees. He looks at Az and
feels something ancient oozing from his entire being – an ancient, antiquated, unquenchable rage
– but nonetheless righteous. And it is all the more appalling because it mingles with an
inappropriate – the father thinks – almost inhuman, humane mercy; Az’s eyes that spit fire of
emerald hate mesmerize him and peel his sins off his flesh one by one. As the priest is eaten up
inside by his own contradictory, hallucinatory thoughts, his Adverser speaks again:
‘If God will be furious, I’ll take the blame, though it is disgusting that I, who wear this
death-mask and hide away from the world and the sun, have more empathy and commiseration
that you, who are supposed to be the vessel of his voice, do.’
His words go like daggers through the priest’s heart. At last, his lips part – though slothful
and reluctant – and utter farewell words for the deceased woman; thunders drown his words, but
still he carries on, more and more powerful and determined:
‘And even though I’ – thunder-crack – ‘walk through the valley of the shadow of death’ –
lightning bolt – ‘I will fear no evil, for You are with me.’
As he speaks, his voice is steadily mutilated and deformed by a hideous repressed wail that
pushes against the back of his teeth like Caesar’s forces against Alesia’s. As he finishes the psalm,
he falls on his knees and screams like insane, crushing the grave-mud between his claw-like fingers
and smudging it on his face, while Az, an osseous statue of a demon, looks at him, deprived now
– ironically – of empathy.
 The scene is of an indescribable gloom and crushing righteousness and it blinks like a deja-
vu in the memory of those who witnessed it. They left the cemetery and walked against the rain to
their homes, destroyed spiritually by the surreal spectacle that hurt their eyes and killed their
ideologies.
‘We shall meet tomorrow at your place’ Az says to Aurora, dispersing some strands of hair
from her face. ‘Try to get some rest. I don’t know what else to say.’
‘Nothing, Az’ she responds and embraces him. ‘Thank you.’
‘Yeah’ he says, offering her a very tired smile, turning and taking the narrow path between
the woods.
They part beneath a furious sky, scorched now and then by sanguine, incarnadine branches
of celestial current. The dense fir-trees that surround Aurora’s house hurl a web of twisted shadows
upon the ground and bow their heads in the bestial wind.
As Aurora steps, catatonic almost, inside the house, she’s slapped and falls to the ground;
a voice says: ‘You fucken whore…’ – a voice that reeks of alcohol, tobacco and decayed teeth.
She tries to scream Az’s name, but her lips fail to comply, and a numbing darkness falls over her
like a thin, soft blanket of Death.

***

Az cannot sleep, for the overture of the stillborn storm is too loud; the walls of the house
shake and crack their joints with every aching thunder and the sour-cherry tree throws twisted
shapes in the room whenever the sky is illuminated by lightning; a cigarette sits fatigued between
his fingers, emanating spirals of chiaroscured smoke that colonize the ceiling. He has a feeling of
deep uneasiness and cannot tell why; he muses on the origin of it but fails to guess it.
He is in such a ruinous state that he doesn’t even change his clothes.
‘Yet another conundrum’ he angrily says within his head, killing the cigarette with a fatal
sucking. He lights another one almost unconsciously and, for a moment, does not observe the
screen of his phone lightning up, but he sees, with the corner of his eye, how it goes off. He picks
it up and reads the message – for that was the reason of the telephone’s coming to life –, that is
very short and as ghastly as short; it only reads “Help me”. The sender is no one else but Aurora.
 Az ices over and then deices just to freeze again. A hammer of permafrost smashes
systematically every ring of his spine; he runs outside the house like a patient out of the asylum,
through the ferine, demented fury of the elements. The wind is so strong and vulgar that he has to
lean forward to advance and although every crack of lugubrious lightning can be a death-sentence,
he marches onward like a Spartan Thermophile-bound. Like a knife through the aorta of the night.
His coat sticks to his body and makes his advance all the more backbreaking. His head is
emptied of thoughts and he isn’t even aware of the paths he takes. Pine cones crush his feet and
branches rake at his face like a company of aerial harpies; he doesn’t remember the journey to
Aurora’s house. Serpents of light writhe and coil into the sky and as he enters Aurora’s courtyard,
he looks like a knot of wet leather or a piece of skin that has been shed off by the resurrecting
night. A lightning flashes on the blade of an axe that stands ominously against a wooden trunk.
The door of the house is kicked with such a force that it is hurled off from its hinges and falls on
the floor with a thud.
‘Aurora!’ he screams. As he looks throughout the first floor of the house, he sees Malakian
coming down the stairs with a bat in his hands; it’s nothing but the rush of the moment and the
overdose of adrenaline that makes Az dodge from the deadly blow and thrust a fist in his face;
there is a cracking sound deadened by the symphony of the storm that now unleashes in the first
two or three meters inside the house.
‘Az!’ Aurora screams from somewhere upstairs. Drunk on all his senses, Az rushes to the
door behind which Aurora lays, with bruises all over her face and, for the very first time, disheveled
hairdo. He lifts her up and embraces her strongly, says to her to remain there, kisses her forehead
and then rushes downstairs again, like an amnesia patient that has suddenly reminded of
something. He looks at Joe Malakian, who stands on his knees with a bloodied face and after
planting a vicious kick onto his jaw, runs outside and picks up the axe that was lying in the rain; a
gigantic lightning-bolt crushes dangerously close in the woods and clothes everything in a surreal
silvery light.
‘I’m gonna fucking kill you!’ Az screams as he looks upon Joe with a look that testifies
the absence of mercy and humanity. And his voice becomes a shriek of hubris and tears combined
with mascara flow down his face and make it look like the Haserot’s nightmare; and still he rises
the axe, that skull-bound deathbringer, while every fiber of his body and every atom of his soul
fights against the ghastly monster that threatens to swallow him whole. And as “Warship my
wreck” blasts through the speakers of the Church of Hades and reaches its climax, time fails at
chewing its own tail and Samyaza opens his eyes and blasts upon an ember-eaten sky, accompanied
by a roar of stone and rupturing matter, star-screams and banshee crying, beads of breaking and
falling constellations, earthquakes and lava-ejaculating volcanoes, and the horizon is veiled by
kilometers of pure-white feathers and the angel’s face, pinpointed upon a noctilucent firmament,
is content like Boticelli’s Mars, a plethora of wasted pleasure and freedom; and thousands of angels
break through the glass of the sky, so afraid both of him and Az’s maddened screams that they
would gladly go back in their lair; they tremble as they see Samyaza contaminate the sky with his
stately, cosmic presence; it dislodges the little courage they had in their hearts while kindling like
cosmic debris in their descent.
As that angel of Death victorious, fallacious revenant prepares to descend his lethal weapon
in his victim’s head, Samyaza, leaving a trail of burning and howling time that curls and yells like
a beaten dog, condemned to prosthesis, bursts through the torrential rain and thunderbolts inside
the house and pins Az to the wall; and everything flares in shards of glass and splinters of wood,
Joe Malakian soils himself and screams like insane, with bulged, batrachian eyes that witness
something as surreal as that vista but cannot possibly explain it.
And the angel’s hyacinth eyes burn with a thousand flames of humanity that wreak an
unutterable pandemonium inside Az’s feverish body.
Az wails and raves while pinned to the wall, unable to move, when he sees that his arch-
enemy finds it in himself to run away, and tries to punch and destroy Samyaza, while the angel
yells at him, crying with commiseration and sorrow, to stop:
“Don’t become one of them, Az! Not you!”
But Az fails at listening to his voice, for the one and only voice he hears is that of the
venomous language of retribution, from which the whole vocabulary of hell is compelled; and he
twists in the angel’s embrace, lamenting and weeping like Orpheus, and with a crack of bone
manages to escape Samyaza’s submission and starts tracking his prey through the mud of the
woods, with the blade of the axe reflecting the boiling sky and a satanic smirk on his face. And at
the same time the angels arrive to put Samyaza back to sleep; Az returns and falls to his knees
when he sees that murder of murderers and his friend standing alone against them, unfettered at
last, ready to give him safe passage with the price of his life.
 “Run” says Samyaza, and turns towards his once-brothers, who spread on the sky like a
cancerous Wild Hunt.
And Az runs, but not because of his friend’s imploration, but to break the spine of the
wretch. He runs like a demon spawn of the shadow-regnum, through the trees, while grinning like
a hideous, carnivore mime. Thunders and chiming of chains orchestrate his fugue; his long hair
lays erratic upon his shoulders and back and jumps like a thousand snakes, his lips shine with
smudged lipstick, which looks like black blood and his leather coat swell like flesh-wings behind
him.
Malakian runs, too, while looking behind, like a demented deer, knowing not where he
runs to. As Az’s phantom-like silhouette impales his vision, he emits short bursts of silent yells.
He’s pissed and shat himself from fear. He can hear Az galloping and laughing through the trees
with a laugh that is conversant of the lack of any rational thought, and he almost has a heart attack.
His powers fail him, his knees get gummy and his lungs seem to push like an engine in the dirt,
unable to fill themselves with vital air. His vision gets all blurry and a disgustingly cold sweat
takes over his body; at last, he falls on his knees, unable to move. There is a powerful, blinding
flash of lightning that reveals Az to him, with the blade laughing in his hands, as if it had the power
to talk and it envenomed his mind with its sharp tongue.
‘This isn’t personal’ the mime says to him while he looks at him from above in exactly the
same way in which a weak-spirited woman looks at a mouse or a kitchen-bug. ‘It’s only that I see
in you the very limb of humanity that I’d like to extirpate.’ He produces a coin from his pocket
and shows it to Malakian:
‘Heads or tails, my dear? I’ll tell you how this goes down: if it’s heads, I’ll let you go; if
it’s tails, you’re screwed.’ He flips the coin and another flash of lightning illuminates everything,
as if the sky itself was curious to see on which side the coin fell down. Az looks at it and observes
that it’s heads. He inhales violently and feigns disappointment:
‘Oh my, this doesn’t look too well for you.’
Malakian is petrified with fear, and this fear compels him to scream, but he only emits
some pathetic screeches and groans. As Az rises the axe, to scare the waste of skin, perfectly acting
the part of the Death-bringer, although he didn’t to kill him in the first place, a complete darkness
surrounds him; all sounds of the storm-sieged forest, the sky, the heavy breathing of his victim, all
go away – there is no sound and he is blinded by that pool of black. He makes a few steps and hits
his forehead on something that feels like a wall. Just like a blind man, he takes another direction,
and he hits yet another confine. The axe falls down from his hand, but again, there is no sound of
impact.
As Malakian is on the brink of losing his senses, he sees a silhouette descending from a
fire-eaten sky; a sculpture of muscle and beauty, sporting a huge mane of silvery hair and eyes that
burn a hyacinth hue, endowed with a pair of wings, traversed by lightning there where feathers are
scarce. And it descends beside him and looks at what seems a cube of darkness that lays to his left.
 XVII
Coda

When Az started to hunt his prey through the woods, Samyaza found himself surrounded
by a trembling, rain-washed Sabaoth. Those child-angels looked at him and shuddered whenever
he made a move. Compelled by some unknown forces, they’ve started their assault to put him back
to sleep, and he fought them with always renewing forces – for thousands of years he’s dreamed
of that moment of retribution, that moment of freedom. And he didn’t care at all whether he lived
or not, as long Az and Aurora were safe and sound. Swords flashed in the skies of Crooked Tree
and the corollas of the trees burned down like candles; all the while, strange buildings appeared
there where was nothing before – strange ziggurats that aimed with their cusps towards the sky
and other vestigial buildings that diffused ancient mist. Great was the fright of the Crooks; some
of them fell to their knees and prayed, amidst the tempest, for God to forgive them, for those fires
in the skies and the trembling of the joints of the Earth couldn’t have been anything else but His
descent. The much-feared Apocalypse. The sky was so bright that it was like daylight, the waters
rose and boiled, the soil split like a heart kissed by a stroke,
And there was another sonic boom and a gigantic thunderbolt in the sky when Mephisto,
laughing and dancing, came in aid of his stellar friend. There was no fight afterwards, for the
Sabaoth deserted in front of the forefathers of rebellion, and only the two of them knew the torment
that waited for them back home. As fast as they disappeared into the ember-filled sky, Samyaza
flew towards the slaughter-scene and immured Az into a cube of pitch-black darkness, outside any
known dimension. As fast as Malakian fainted away, the walls of the cube fell down and a rabid
Az got out and veiled his eyes from the bright angel:
‘Come…’ Samyaza said and spread his arms. Az knelt down and cried bitter tears in front
of that father of his and then crawled towards him and embraced his calves.
‘Rise!’ Samyaza bid him, and he did so and dared to look into his eyes, where he saw such
a humanity that he couldn’t control his cry.
‘But how…?’ Az tries to ask, but chokes on his tears. ‘How did you…? Why?’
‘There was need of me, child. And I told you that I could unfetter myself whenever I want.
Do not cry anymore’ he responds, and flutters his wings almost imperceptibly.
 There are sounds of broken branches through the woods and dear Aurora comes running
and jumps in Az’s arms. She looks at her brother, who lies in a pool of mud and urine and feels
estranged from him. She turns her head and buries it in Az’s chest.
‘Are you okay?’ Az asks her and kisses her cheeks.
‘I am. I am okay.’ she says and reciprocates the gesture, and as they turn, from Samyaza
remains only a silhouette of mist, which is dispersed by the terrible wind in all directions, and a
fatherly laughter that could melt ice and displace mountains from their stone roots.
‘You’ll find me home’ says his voice from the boiling ether. ‘I’ll always be there.’
‘Children!’ a voice says, a voice that laughs heartily and warmly. Mephisto, suited-up,
enshrouded in a living coat of squirming bats, waltzes through the charred trees and bows before
them as he suddenly stops from a masterful pirouette:
‘Go home now and never forget this night, for tonight you’ve learned how important those
who deserve are to us. May it be any disaster and sorrow, stick together and everything will be
fine. Make your race proud of such specimens as the two of you by being yourself. And if you
ever need our help, you’ll know where to find us. Now I have to dance – isn’t this life the most
beautiful music of all?’ he says while he embraces the air and runs from tree to tree and caresses
their bark – ‘And it never stops! Oh, this is brilliant, silk for my ancient ears, and believe me, I’ve
heard all the music from the beginning of times – but this! This, the music of the human life and
the human world is their queen! See that Shakespeare was right?’ he asks Az and winks at him.
Mephisto vanishes steadily in the wind, and his words and childish laughter while he
waltzes with the welkin resound throughout the world, Crooked Tree, the woods, through Az and
Aurora’s trembling hearts.
 XVIII
Epilogue or the Tip of the Tail

In the same night in which the father that buried Grace Malakian without any pomp
received a visit from a creature that had a face of living worms and was taught a lesson of humanity,
though no hair from his head was harmed, Az and Aurora bid farewell to Samyaza, Mephisto (who
was the strange visitor of the priest) and Jimmy Crane. Tears were shed and embraces were shared
among them. Crane, who had never seen the two angels beforehand, lay mute and amazed to the
marrow of his bones; Lex, who could feel kindness thanks to his little animal heart, was constantly
trying to lick their hands and feet, but his tongue only touched the cool, post-storm air of the night.
Az was unable to speak, though he wanted to find out what really happened there, and how did
they meet Aurora or vice-versa; he said to himself that that was maybe a story meant to be told
another time. He looked into the eyes of those eerie creatures and for a moment he shuddered with
fear and respect.
After constant struggles, Joe Malakian sought help and reentered the rank of normal
people; after the gruesome encounter in the woods and his almost being killed, he sought it in the
arms of his father and although he still drank and drugged himself, he knew how to control himself.
There was a fear that ate within his heart that if he dared to make something wrong again, he
wouldn’t have escaped the Angels and the Gaday. Since Aurora left for the Fortress with Az, he
stood home and even found a job in a local sawmill. From time to time, Aurora and Az sent him
and his father money, and even visited them.
Jimmy Crane was seldom seen on the streets of Crooked Tree – any living person was
seldom seen on the streets, for the bane of the fiery night in which they thought they were dying
was pumping still in their veins. And somehow, they didn’t even go to church.
As Az and Aurora parted from their friends and got in the train, the girl slept in Az’s lap,
whose eyes still burned a royal green and as he looked upon her face, he thought that to love is
nothing but to fill up something with as much meaning as it can hold.
‘We love persons and things because they mean something to us in this chaos of a world.
Meaning is the single reason, because we need it in order to stay sane. Suffering is but an
instrument patented by the gods, with which our true self is brought to life and with which our
fiery spirit and our freedom as human beings must operate to make this life – which is but a speck
of dust – count.’
When they descended from the train, they walked, silent and smiling, through the streets
of the Fortress and they opened the door of Church of Hades. As it closed, the dusk burned with
summer light and a warm wind blew over and through the buildings. Az threw a glance over his
shoulder, and smiled to that burning sky.