Relic

Caleb observes every detail as space and time perish. 

Reality is constructed on an ambiguous paradigm, a wild architecture reflecting the works of men scrambling to make sense of the unknown. 

Every block is disorderly and mad.

Past the corrugated warehouse walls and streets, indulged in tenebrous garages, are broken automobiles risen with hydraulic lifts. Flickering incandescent lights ping and tick until burning out with an audible pop. 

Through worn weeds, there are coiled vines. Dark thread connected pole-by-pole spun and wrapped like tightly webbed kite string.  

Shattered and hollow bottles mingle with adolescent toys, used needles, and moldy orange rinds.

A crescent-shaped rictus glistens from a shattered street lamp, and a cyclone of insects drifts down in a steady helix. 

In the shadows lies used condoms, splintered crates, rotting meat infested with maggots, broken glass, and useless household artifacts. 

A realm beyond all fantasy. 

Malevolant, tactile and dissociative.

Blown lightbulbs, skull-colored and vaguely translucent.

Beyond, in the dark gutters, runs a fecal ooze stinking of human waste and rotting fish guts. 

The city is beset with all things unknown. Charcoaled factory walls of darkened brick. Boot and tire imprints grown with weeds. A coarse and pungent foul indigo drainage where cataclysmic tides of teal dross sway in rusty sewer pipes caked in muck.

In the stillest moments, the madness can be felt and heard.

Time passes without remorse. 

Flesh. 

Bone. 

Life decaying unto death. 

Everywhere.

Caleb knew that beneath the facade of the material lies a truth yet to be discovered.

A relic hidden in the mystery of perception. 

***

Past hardware stores, meat markets, and little tobacco shops is a strong smell of food in the hot noon like working mash. 

Mute faces watch from dirty glass windows.  

Caleb observes a cacophony of bums and beggars and wild street preachers. They scream of a lost world and the impending punishment for those unsaved. 

He admires them with their hot eyes and dogeared bibles. 

God's barkers that have gone forth into the world like the prophets of old. 

He stands along the crowd's edge for some stray scrap of news. Still, he recounts nothing but moss-pasted stones and conspicuous passageways.  

Caleb passes the main city crowd to find aged brick walls, jagged and plummed by harsh weather. 

He eyes the city graveyard.  

Thin dark trees, through forged iron bars, collect the metropolis of the dead.

Slanted construction, bizarre and oblique, cross-shaped stones whose names grow pale and dull with years. 

A celestial body packed with decaying samples of a mortician's trade. 

Caleb regards each one of them. 

“We recall neither birth nor death,” he says.

He still knows their stories and their timelines.

“Death,” he mutters. “All roads lead here.”

Dusty bones, rot, and death. 

***

A grumbling backdrop of faint summer lightning swallows the darkness momentarily before vomiting it back out. 

A delicate downpour follows.

Caleb sits against the wall of a worn sarcophagus to keep dry.

In the quiet moments of rainfall, he hears their cries.  

“Even insects can scream,” he says. 

Something so small that it's practically invisible to the naked eye. The birth pangs of this creature shall soon coil up into something segmented and black from the darkest recesses of the earth. As it slips inside, the aphid cannot articulate the agony.

In its dying moments, it attempts to scurry up a nearby tree stem and take refuge in one of its fleshy leaves. It gathers company with an ant feeding on the aphids' honey. 

Their bent antennae touch momentarily. 

Whatever small beast that possesses the aphid burrows grotesquely into the ant.

An action so natural and insignificant.

“The magic all around,” Caleb says. “Nature.”

Caleb regards the aphid as it erupts with a minuscule and pressurized hiss. The ant skitters back to its hill and disappears.

Once the rain stops, Caleb saunters past the graveyard towards the city's underbelly.

The drunks and homeless are huddled in sporadic areas like mere statues. Beyond them, a sea of walls, abandoned alleys, and car lots. 

Shadows make a monochromatic gothic harp of even darker corridors beyond.  

Caleb opens the manhole and descends like any other sandhog. 

***

The insects are so heavy at dusk that they scratch about like wildcats wandering for prey. The torrid depths swirl with colonies of parasites and savage rats. Their glowing eyes and buzzing torments trace Caleb’s every move. 

The spiders below are hairy or bald and naked. The clustered water pools harbor collections of amphibian puppets splashing about like reckless theater marionette dancers, the arachnid’s silk torn amid their rampant play. 

Wretched bats dangle in bunches like clusters of furry black fruit. A tapping of unending water plays throughout the underworld like the temperamental oscillation of ringing church bells. 

The flint of a rusty zippo sparks and ignites in the dark. 

Dragonfruit orange circumvented by an acetylene blue ridge lights Caleb’s pale face. 

He stares until his eyes burn while the crisp air works at the flame's subtle decay.  

Occasionally, he presses a rubber-coated flashlight button, steadying the beam long enough to observe the unfamiliar surroundings. 

“I feel you closer,” he says.

He stops to catch his breath and then again pushes the button to illuminate a filthy basilica. Above him, muddy arches are scratched by vampire bats.  

Vomit-colored sewage percolates through fault lines, and dark pipes stick out like rotting organs from the city's wretched underbelly. 

A grim slime slithers and oozes quietly. Archaic stone walls lie in decay; half fossilized with chipped concrete. 

Limestone fixtures perish in an endless void where only creatures of the dark are familiar. Occasionally, he passes a trace of abandoned utility work where the terrain was unfit for men to brace the outlines of civilization.

Caleb finds a cracked bucket surrounded by bones. He does not know to what or whom the chastened pieces may have once belonged. Their origin was contaminated and lost by the chittering teeth of voracious creatures having gnawed and dropped the pieces once they were absent of flesh. 

His grimy boots slosh through the swampy mouth of a hidden cave.

“Closer,” he says. “Ah…there you are.”

***

In a skull wriggles a slick centipede. Brown fibrous hairs flail and tether to the cracked marrow with lengthy brown tentacles. It slithers in and out in criss-crossed stitching through cracked orbital eye sockets. 

Caleb’s shaky hands drop the skull, and it clatters on a jagged rock, smashing the centipede's body like a broken train. 

He brushes aside the squirming centipede. He cleans the relic in a puddle and cuts the light to carefully feel the skull in both palms.

Caleb finds an archaic church pew bench, rests his weary legs, and observes the discovery in greater depth. Neither bird nor cat, he concludes. Something more familiar. Perhaps, he considers, someone. 

“At last…the timekeeper,” he says.

He explores further and notices the cave corridor draws to a stony impasse in which the walls seem to terminate simultaneously. 

“What comes next?”

Caleb pulls his flashlight to study the dark arches of oblivion. 

He looks at the wet ceiling. 

The crescendo of his heart makes him dizzy.

“And here…,” he stutters. “…we go…”

***

Before him lies the most terrible place he has ever seen. 

His senses are mysteriously heightened. The flashlight bulb feels like a scorching fire.

The faint breeze becomes a brazen gust. 

Drip drops from a distant void resurrect a cacophony of thuds.

Something inhuman pushes his trembling body forward. 

Caleb’s quivering hand drops the flashlight to the ground.  

He frantically recovers the lighter from his pocket. 

The dancing flame reveals the baptismal lake a few strides beyond, clear and pure. 

Void of filth. 

Caleb's rigged limbs stiffen and flex as he's pulled nearly chest-deep in the ice-cold waters. 

The skull begins to soften and break. 

An aqueous solution slips through his fingers like a grainy ooze.

The water begins to glow.

A bright pearl opalescence. 

Caleb shudders at his reflection. 

He moans.

He hollers.  

His face begins to sag and loosen. 

Caleb’s skin wrinkles and folds over itself.

His eyes flake and turn to ash. 

The last thing he hears before the world goes black is his own scream. 

***

Time ceases. 

Space folds in on itself.

Reality crumbles.

Nothing remains but a relic.

It should never be found.