Voor Altijd

Awake, one eye open to dust and darkness. The other gave him no vision, only dead whiteness and a pain that seemed to pull his eye inward. His face felt in danger of collapsing.1

Boards and nails lay over him; these he pushed away with small resistance. Awakening spun his mind back to years spent in unknown quarters, speaking with mad, shapeless beings that joined and separated at will, taking and leaving bits of consciousness from one another, from himself. It had seemed like he had spent aeons in that dimensionless realm, without time, place, or true form. What was he, really, anymore? Why only stop to ponder it now?2

Bombs. Fire. Gunshots, screaming. A mad dash for somewhere, anywhere. Love, fear: fear for the death of love. Realization of a nightmare, and breakdown. Sleeping on concrete, first on one continent and then on its opposite. Starvation, madness, her voice from the darkness. Axe in hand, blood, no remorse. Raging, blind, a door of light, a transcendental column of singularity, a life left behind.3

Ages in a plane beyond comprehension, light intense and constant in a realm where sight is unnecessary. Maddening amorphous creatures, visions of lost cities and distant worlds the human race will never glimpse in its entire history.4

A drastic return to flesh. More murder, buzzing, gasoline smell. Bodies left as dormant sacrifice to unknown entities that tugged and growled at the edge of his senses. Collapse. Pain. Darkness.5

Pain.6

Collapse.7

An infuriated scream began deep in his belly and took him to his feet of its own power as it climbed up his throat and escaped. He thrashed his way through fractured timbers and broken stones until he stood on level ground, where he realized how dizzy he was. His eye was pulled inward, blind yet brightened by brief light sources where they existed.8

Corpses hung impaled by carpenter’s nails on the walls. Some had their hands and heads removed; he did not recall why. They were all black shapes in the lightless corridors, fastened to walls who were arranged into patterns that did not make sense. In his time beyond reality he had glimpsed visions, and saw them still, of bizarre architecture built within a geometry that was not born of human thoughts. Asymmetrical, containing impossible angles and mammoth sections of unsupported weight, the structures could neither stand nor even exist under the physics of this universe. Attempts to reproduce this architecture had birthed only frustration and unstable, scattered walls beneath a building that was already on the bier of ruin.9

Finally, the building had fallen upon him. Perhaps a centuries-old splinter had taken his eye. But he felt no blood; the eye was smooth and coated only in dust.10

He shook his head, removing for a while such majestic and terrible images. He recalled others here, faces and sounds of those he had heard raging in the distant corners of the basement. Some of them were familiar; he had seen frames around their faces. Others appeared as disfigured monsters, and still more came and went at random, little more than amorphous in memory.11

Little girl calls rang in his ears as they had since the first day. Every day, really, since Rotterdam. Dolly, dolly; always crying for her dolly. Where pity had filled him before had drained, and hence replenished itself with exhaustion and loathing. This strange ghost of a girl was not mirroring his daughter; she was mocking her, mocking his sorrow.12

Mocking him.13

He poured gasoline in the tank, primed the machine. Next time he saw her would be the end. Same for the others whose blood he shared, whose unwritten wills had dragged him to this immortal hell, alone in the ruins of a dead man’s dream.14

He’d find them. Saw through doors, hammer at ancient walls, whatever must be done. Even if they hid between bits of air, ducked behind errant breezes and covered their essences in dust. Perhaps he breathed them in as he thought and searched. He’d pass out of this dimension if need be. Become the barbarian battering down the gates of existence.15

The Vanderdarks were marked for death.16

At once, the pulling sensation behind his eye twisted itself, as though it were cord being cranked to fire some archaic and metaphysical ballista. He sensed sibling sentiments adrift within the mangled corridors, linking chain to his own indispensable rage and bolstering his desire for vengeance. He saw again the faces and wights of those who lingered here beyond the senses, as well as the barely-perceptible presence of those amorphous and unconstant beings who existed between particles of matter, in various dimensions all at once. The latter were no concern anymore. 17

He did not smile; this he could do never again. He only hunted.18

He came to one of the darkest rooms in the basement, stood by the old brick outside wall. Here was a fissure smuggling worldly air within. Upon its current he smelled leaves, ash, and the wetness of early frost. He thought of dismal grey clouds behind skeleton trees, of dead, reaped fields roamed by calling ravens.19

He felt the biting cold of autumn.20

Light from the crack was blocked. Laughter, flickering flashlights, hushed voices. Laughter again, young and empty. Male voices, cracking with pubescence. Females giggling and nervous. His eye pulled inward.21

Creak of boards being pulled away from the rotting door. An insect escaped, a girl squealed. Laughter. They meant to enter and act like fools, make light of their short time in this dark place. Cheap, shallow thrills in what was his tomb of long-suffered memories.22

He took a hiding place behind a wall he knew they must pass, one hand on the cord of the saw. Voices from a place without time spoke their unutterable languages all at once, a mad and unfettered throat song in his head that pushed his eye out and seized him with endless hatred. So voices from more immediate quarters flared and snarled, urging him to manifest the vengeance for which he had become their banner and battle cry. For the Vanderdarks, for these stupid intruders, the hunt begins.23

The mindless children came round the corner, laughing and joking. The young girls cringed and clung together in the back.24

“Voor mijn geliefde dochter, voor altijd.”25

He kicked down the wall.26