gloamingdaydream

Three men were killed at church last Sunday. They’d been praying in a ritual when a madman with a gun walked in and spray painted their guts clean off. The only release these cultists have is death, and so they have been taken.

A detective came in this morning and started his round off by knocking on random doors, asking for eye witnesses while simultaneously scouring for clues. A hugely inefficient method, one scarcely used by sole investigators, it suits the masses more. A multi pound pizza throwing competition where you stick three pounds of cheese onto the wall, it never fails but it also ends with three pounds of waste, not stuck down the people’s throat. Now imagine this session reduced to a singular player, all the fun is quickly taken out and food is still being wasted, although at a much lesser clip. Regardless, the detective marched on with dedication for hours at a time, and for a moment I suspected he’d come knocking around on my door, but he never did. Maybe a part of me wanted him to so that I could witness his shenanigans first hand, but it failed to pan out.

I spent the day hungry, searching for a soulless place. A man came up to me and told me that three fried fish had dried and burnt out, hanged by the spot where the citylights tuned in. It was like a witch hunt, but its object was off limits and fit for consumption. I knocked on Peter Neighbour’s door two blocks away and asked if he had been visited by the mysterious chap who names himself detective.

“Oh, him? You mean Erik Grillby’s?” Said Peter.

“Isn’t that the one dude from Undertale?” I asked. “Also, how do you know his name in the first place, anyways?”

He refused to answer my question, claiming that all living beings to this day must forthwence claim their right to secret privacy. I asked if that meant whether privacy must be kept secret, or whether secrets must be kept private, he said it was both and neither simultaneously.

I wondered whether today would be the day I asked whether Peter’s last time was actually
“Neighbour”, but I chickened out once again. After leaving his crib, I pranced around in the cold, sharp rain, its puddles circumventing navigation. After visiting a comic book store and exiting in agony after the horror show of their artificial conventions put on with a scared smile, I made my way to church. Its insides were mostly empty besides the fact that the shooter’s ghost had calmly stood in the center of a destruction that had yet to be fixed. I asked him why he killed those people, and at first he didn’t seem capable of hearing me, but after a minute of pestering he relented and took a look at me.

“Because I had to do it.” He said.

“Why? Why you, specifically?” I pressed.

“This was not a crime of passion,” he continued. “Nor was it one of pleasure. I would dare say it was one of alchemy, a crime of alchemy.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?” 

The rest of the conversation followed a similar pattern of which he’d use to remain cryptic before eventually disappearing into thin air. I observed my surroundings, the crushed benches that had been flipped and broken in a total rush, if apparent circumstances were to be believed. 

I went back home and listened to a six hour long album titled “the ever living spirits of blasted lagoons”. Critics lauded it as the supposed heir to Post-Rock, but the band’s former titles did not leave much to hope by for one such as myself. Regardless, I gave them a shot for this newest release, one that may prove to be short lived. Immediately, the record started off with a jarring, tinkering sound which served as a sharp contrast to their usually calm and tempered notions of the past. An explosion of spice, slicing through the pain of connection and severance built up through lifetimes worth of social culture and spotlights, crowed on by millions of images. The cows were built to take this brick and shatter it before it became too heavy, and so this album was the final result of decades worth of built up pressure.

That night, I heard a large bang outside my front door. Taking a peek from the upstairs window, I saw the image police wandering the premises, chasing an electric slime eel around the quarters. An elongated W splattered across the trash, looking for nourishment to consume.

The image police knocked on Ram’s side door, interrogating him regarding “suspicious activities” in which the icon on his sweatshirt appeared to have the same logo as blood splattered messages on multiple crime scenes, with the latest being one of a recurring pattern.

__________________________

“It’s all lies,” he confirmed when I confronted him about it the next day. “They’re trying to pin it on me, it’s obvious. There wasn’t anything there, the guy just killed them and ran away, there wasn’t any time for him to leave any messages or anything. Besides, we all know who did it, they just don’t feel like looking for him all over town!”

“What else did they ask you?” I continued to probe, curious to know more about what type of people the image police were.

“One of them, the one with the square cube for a head, asked me if I was familiar with the term collective crime psychosis. I said no, and he described it as an institutional, hallucinatory-ARGGGHH!”

Ram’s window had exploded into pieces, sending pieces flying towards both of us as we tried to dodge. Luckily, we had been standing further away, near the center of his room, so they hadn’t done much damage. Regardless, Ram was furious and vowed to enact an exact type of specific revenge upon these frauds, he walked over to his locked closet and took out an iron bat, then started swinging wildly.

I walked down the stairs of his apartment and ran into the infamous detective who mumbled under his breath about “being close to solving the case.” I waved to him three times before he noticed me.

“I’m painting the world.” He said in a matter of fact tone.

“What?”

“I’m painting the world. I’m painting every green you see, every shape that holds you up, piece by piece. You are also a painter. I can see it with my eyes. Do not blind yourself with that helmet. Paint yourself first before painting us all.”

“What are you talking about, man?”

“I’ve seen you here before, this is a nice place for you. Your friend is off the rails as well. But once more, I urge you to paint the world again.”

I told him that I wasn’t a painter, that I had never had any interest in painting, and that I would never have any interest in painting. In response, he mimed a knock and then told me this paint would interest me, as it would never run dry. I asked where it was and he said everywhere with a smile on his face, then took his hat off and bowed.

____________

Monday afternoon, I made some time to visit the church where the mass murders had taken place, suspecting that something was up. I’d dreamt that the corpses were still fresh and taken bites out of each other in order to sustain themselves, but that wasn’t the case at all. Everything had been already cleaned up, but for some reason I had been expecting the reverse.

I was greeted by a young woman who asked me if I wanted to know more about the guy. I said yeah, and she told me that he was stuck in a place called the dead zone.

“Where’s that supposed to be?” I asked.

“Right under the lagoon, where all souls come to rest. The desecrated guard the weaver’s solace, it’s a pendant that could render its wearer virtually immortal.”
“And you think this guy is there?”

“Possibly. I overheard a conversation he had with someone the other day, he mentioned death as a quick breakthrough towards the solace.”
“So he decided to die so that he could become immortal? How does that make any sense? Besides, didn’t you say it’s right under the lagoon? Why not just burrow your way under, if there are no entrances?

“I’m tired.”
“What?”

“I want to go to sleep forever.”

“How do I get into the lagoon?”
“Through the eternal staircase, endlessly spiraling down into the abyss.”

_______

A criminal, or a crime. The detective, as I ran into him a second time, asked me for my thoughts. How can we solve this bitter reality we seem to both thrive and despair in? It’s a flip of the coin, pressed and gold, he marched on emboldened. 

I made my way down the stairway at the center of the lagoon, and darkness overtook me. Their lamps had been put out eons ago. Now, they are guarded by the unknown. A melting corpse greeted me at the bottom, its hand torn and skin pooling down onto the ground.

The skull of the apocalypse, made of golden bones, fell apart. The gateway to hell opened.

___________________________________________________

In that place where infamy rests not, a brutal dose of waves hit upon me. The pendant’s light hung low and bright, and I stood out of the way of cackling corpses, their blood showing the path to take. The detective, still was there, his hat in his hands, staring at the weaver’s solace. As I walked up to him, he asked me if I was ready to save this dying world. I nodded, finally aware of every word that passed me. It had been days since we all took a deep breath and waited in the expanse of darkness, and now we were here again, alight and strange. Even now, as I speak and think in the past, I think of my thoughts, and still am. The detective stands there, unruly, his presence unraveling. He is a fragment of the murders, he is the author of the conch that blows when he feels like it.

An inch of space, and then he reached a hand out and dissipated into nothingness, but not before asking me to join him. The dead zone was a transmitter for apocryphic meaning. It was a layer lying under our shows, built to withstand our fantasies. Here we found it, unwilling, a crack in the void.

_________

When I returned home, I was different yet the same, still. I wondered how long the wheels would keep turning, they’d brunt and fallen off long ago but now their ghosts treated us well. Every line of this world was kept in check, waiting to burst at the seams, waiting to be swallowed by the lagoon. 

---

The detective’s monologue

“Three days prior, the sequence set to detonate this world was set into motion by the man who killed the churchgoers. Mass was the first step. The lagoon was the second step. At the lagoon’s edge, astairway leading to the depths of humanity, the dead zone. A place where all souls drift towards intuitively. Their belief in an indefinite floating is false, the dead zone is that destination. It is where murder is born. The weaver’s solace is the sole remnant of a burnt draft, left behind by a being with no traces. It is not meant to exist here and now. The planes that make up our world have thus begun to be pulled down towards the dead zone, the place where it resides. It is an unnatural shift, one that ends with a dreaded confrontation between the dead zone and the realm of life. The murderer, perhaps unwittingly, was the piece that tipped the scales. Whether he was mad or sane is not relevant, he was both simultaneously. And yet, even he, unable to overcome temptation, drowned with the others. He escaped life, and unable to kill death, became one with it once more.

The third entity was the painter. They wandered the streets, the halls of agony, and watched. I came into contact with them on three separate occasions, their memory returned gradually. Or rather, it was a memory of a third reality transposed upon us. This reality was and is a presence that dictates our moves. Not the world, but us, I and the painter. We reside outside the confines of this zone, and thus are the most prone to its control. But I now know how to free us. Death will not undo this eye set onto me. It will latch on and drag me to the depths of eternity. But still, we can be free now. It’s as simple as letting go of the connection. Like a world wide web.” 

______________________________________

Inspirations:

The Silver Case trilogy

Tachi’s writings somewhat

Tachi’s’ inspirations slide

Disco Elysium

My own writings

Don Quixote kinda

Ha! A self murder mystery

Homestuck