The Sound of Violence

Hello darkness, round the bend

The words are clothed in the familiar. They are imposters, I know they are wrong. But that is not all that is wrong. The music comes through in ragged asynchronous waves. My eyesight pulses dark clouds of incomprehension with every beat of my troubled heart. The tune is warped and yet I know it all too well. I heard this music when I was a child. Happier times. It was beautiful then, and it is beautiful now, but something is changed and that beauty is a terrible lament that claws in anguish at my beleaguered mind.

My eyes struggle to focus. Predatory waifs swim this way and that across my pupils. Circling. Beckoning. Drawing me inwards to a place I must avoid. Rocks lie expectantly there. With eager, bladed edges. I blink hard in a quest for more clarity. My palm is pressing to my temple. Hitting the reset button on my brain. Slow. It’s all too slow. I was moving hurriedly just a moment ago, now everything is on pause and I’m not working how I should. How I used to. I’m short-circuiting and I don’t know what any of it means anymore.

Light licks around the periphery of my vision. There is a blurred image now. In the midst of the blur is a dark figure. He is the source of the music. He is the music. He. The words. His voice. Male. 

That voice. It is not the voice from the original song. It is not a voice I have heard before. All the same, there is a dark and foreboding familiarity here and that familiarity makes my blood run like a stark blue mountain stream.

Now I am liquid and that liquid is spinning down an unseen plughole. My oh-so-limited and delirious sight shifts and I feel nauseous. Threatening to vomit myself into a state of disintegrated shame. I feel the inevitability of my fall. Sucked downwards by a sordid gravity.

Something speaks to me. Some sense or instinct. It is not my voice but it resides within me all the same. It tells me that to fall would be the worst thing I could ever do. Detached from both the voice and my very self, I wonder why I would entertain the meaning of those words. Falling seems like the only thing I can do now. The only thing I was ever any good at.

The inertia of indecision keeps me right where I am. Leaning against the cold wall, I push myself upright and I try to move my leg in order to propel myself forwards. It is numb and will not comply. Not at first. I grit teeth that I almost forgot I had, tensing all of the muscles in my body. A bold logic; that an army of muscles may just rally my wayward legs and urge them on to do what I most need them to do right now.

After a further, protracted threat of intransigent inertia, something happens, and I lurch forward. 

Only as I am in stilted and uncertain motion do I wonder whether forward is the right direction to go. Forward is the obvious choice. Forward is the only choice. Forward is how time rolls and it affords no choice in the matter. But what if I am pointing in the wrong direction? What if I am in fact travelling backwards?

Do we ever know this for certain? In our fantastical world of order pasted precariously upon the abyss of chaos, how do we ever know in what direction we travel, let alone where we are headed? 

In the end. 

Does it even matter?

I travel towards the music, but in conflict with my innate expectations, it doesn’t become any louder, instead it is now muffled. Muffled as though my ears have been temporarily deafened by a loud noise. The quality of that distorted music coming from the busker in the confines of this cold, dead womb of a tunnel frightens me to my very core. 

Busker.

Tunnel.

A hazy memory of the wall I was leaning against. I felt it. I reach out again. The proximity of the wall reassures me. Dragging a finger along in my wake I feel cool tiles. I’m either in the underground or a tunnel affording pedestrians free flow under the roads and bridges of this city. 

This city.

My thoughts are unclogging and beginning to flow a little more freely. My spirits lift, only to dive back down into the despondent and cloying gloom again as I see this for what it is. A false dawn. A few paltry thoughts of little use. The rest of my mind remains off limits to me.

The tunnel means something though. 

And so does that busker. 

That busker and that infernal song of his. A song that I always loved. Until now. Now that song is the soundtrack to something that is so very warped and wrong.

I stagger forward and as I do, the light fades from around me. The light fades and then it is gone and I am being swallowed up in darkness so total it consumes me. A dark maw swallowing me whole. The acid of eternity awaiting me. Burning me over the aeons until I am raw, laid bare and ready for my true punishment and purgatorial penance.

For a moment I think that I am gone. That this is it. That this was what was so wrong; the waiting, hungry darkness. But I am still thinking and I’m not so sure I would continue to think if I were to have moved on. Surely I would either cease completely, or become something noticeably different? 

I am not so different.

I remain flawed. Hurting. Incredibly and indescribably sad. The painful weight of that sadness has not diminished. I feel it still.

I still feel.

I want to stop thoughts such as these. They hurt. I hurt. I hurt all the more for thinking about my hurt. It is an itch that I incessantly scratch until I open the old wounds and bleed some more.

We all have that one addiction. This is mine.

Then, in the midst of my self-piteous pain, I am struck by the smell that I think was there all along. All of it. All of it was there. All along. It was me that was missing. I still am.

There is an overpowering smell of burning. The infamous stench of hell. Sulphur. A giant match lit in the confines of the cave-like place just prior to my ill-fated arrival.

Only now do I think about why I am here. How I got here. This is a half-remembered place from a distant past. This is not who I am. Not any longer. I got out. I left the city. It was too much for me. They were drowning me. All those people. I couldn’t breathe. They moved on an invisible tide that I never felt, but I felt them. Every time they moved with the breath of that tide, I was crushed, battered and broken.

So I fell to my knees and screamed. And when I was done screaming, I stayed on my knees and I crawled out and I kept crawling. I didn’t find my feet until I could breathe again. I kept going until there was air and the poison of the city I’d been struggling to pull into my lungs was far behind me. Even then, it took several weeks for all the black dirt of the city to leave my body. I’d sneeze great globules of fat black slugs that had been wriggling inside me and feeding on my soul. 

This city is no place for me. It’s no place for anybody. It contains a darkness that leaches onto your very being. It spits poison at your back and brings you down with a coward’s blow.

Which begs the question…

Why did I come back?

I escaped this lunatic asylum and eventually found peace. I discovered that the madness was not within me. It was here. This was the place that people came to find their fortune, lose their way and then lose their minds.

But I got out.

Didn’t I?

I’m sure I did.

Only I don’t remember.

I don’t remember much of anything, a mist has descended upon my past and it is hidden from me. There is only this tunnel and this busker singing a familiar yet dissonant song. Playing dischords on his guitar. A broken and battered guitar with only three strings. A cheap guitar painted black with a balding paint brush, painted carelessly, the brush strokes violent and mean. 

Looking up from that strange, uncared for and violated instrument. Wanting to look away from both the guitar and its singing owner. 

My curiosity getting the better of me. Besting me and dragging me along for the ride.

Dressed in black. Of course he’s dressed in black. What else? His DM boots, the footwear of choice for a blandly subversive army with little discipline let alone cohesion. Apathetic, middle-class, armchair anarchy for the masses. Black trousers, not the de rigueur skinny jeans with optional tears at the knees and further up along the thighs. Black shirt, buttoned all the way to the collar, and worn under a thick black ex-army great coat. A fallen preacher who lost his way long before he lost his dog collar.

Looking up.

But not wanting to look up.

Knowing with a dread certainty what my eyes are travelling towards.

The dirty black paint was on the boots too. Badly painted boots. Black on black. The unnecessary decoration making a statement. The statement an unheeded warning.

I already know what my eyes are about to encounter and yet I keep going. I cannot stop. I already pressed the lift button and there is no big red emergency override, in it’s place there is a hole and the hole is my despair.

Painted.

A macabre painted face.

Painted in darkness.

Painted with that cheap and lumpy black paint. 

No. It’s not the paint that is lumpy. The lumps are underneath the paint. In the face itself.

Those lumps. They move as I stare at them. Alive and terrible. Medusa’s hair gone down into its lair, prowling, pushing and probing hungrily and angrily against the walls.

I stare in horror in what he has made of himself. He seems oblivious to my presence in that moment, his eyes closed, lost in the song that he sings over and over. He has painted his entire face with the black paint and he hasn’t stopped there with his deliberately violent brushstrokes. He’s painted his ears, neck and hair. Erasing what he once was. I find myself wondering why he didn’t just tip the contents of the paint pot over his head and rub it in with those gnarled black hands of his. His black painted hands. Still playing those dischords on that broken weapon of a guitar.

He’s singing away and the tune tugs at my heart strings. This song. I love this song.

It is fitting.

I would have chosen this song in any case.

He opens his eyes. The whites of those eyes startle me. They are the only contrast on his entire head. He’s filled his mouth with that gloopy and poisonous black paint and now I can hear it in his words. The words are liquid and venomous as he sings…

And I despaired, in the sounds of violence

The final word of his song is punctuated with an impossibly loud report. I don’t hear that sound as much as I feel it.

That is when I smell the burning.

The sulphur of hell.

Then I am tumbling like a drunken clown and a numbness is reaching out to catch me. I land in its embrace and there is another tunnel down which I am falling.

Falling until I stop.

I stop, and I tell myself.

“Not this time.”

Then I rise up.

Not this time.

I rise up and I go again.

Hello darkness, round the bend