Chapter Sixteen
If We Must Haunt!
The Play’s cycle ended…draped Dalíesquely…dripping with spent drama, stagebound and script-tied… The Self: My Self had required, and partially achieved, a state of exhaustion. In off-beats of inertia and on-beats of stocktaking repose, there came notions containing realisations…drumnoises rolling from tappettysnare to basheddykettle; big-base ticker-tape…all-ashouting…all-ascreaming…
Sybil’s lost soul was to be found in the gathering moments: a rude curtain-call; a spotlight to the head…a strained cranium bracketed by quake-hearted palms.
A pool of resonance appeared; a mirror mirroring itself…the auditorium swam: seats came into focus and appeared to be accommodating a multitudinous swarm of ghost-faces, almost liquid and not certainly solid…facially recognisable scenes of innocence and beauty; radiant humanity interspersed with varying degrees of butchery.
A swathe of distracted attention slowly adhering to the performance’s output. A connection forged by the collective abundance of a silent scream.
Sybil, aghast, still in a Munch painting…but not alone.
A thousand and one seats sitting on a thousand and one tales…stories; column high and row deep…a mind-fucking catastrophalypse that she felt needed her sage doctoring with a tight-stomached yearning to nurse…to resuscitate meaning from the concealed entrance of taboo, to unearth it from its conveniently hidden dip in the head-on highway. What this horde of death masks potentialised was a ticket to the limits of authenticity; a chance for Sybil to become what her creators intended; if not in the way they had intended.
She knew she bore a propensity for destruction; an inner leaning on a red button that knew not what it did; well, now she could tell it: these souls would get what meagre justice she could muster for them, even if it meant an overabundance of a heaven sent hellfire of Injustice to get it. Sybil and her accompanying components and peripherals were forming plans all over the place, slow-cooking blueprints in the Aga of Resolve to serve and feed the Future. Truth, Justice, Humanity were at stake…and Sybil knew it….and everybody else needed to know for it to be a ‘thing’…
Then there was a deluge of inconvenient frequencies…locked on vibes…bellowing…brought Sybil into a flight mode…scrambling…taxiing…lining up…too late: no tower, no runway…the plug had been pulled…Atoll, the foundation block of the build, had vanished leaving her holding up the pillars…
Of course, they couldn’t have the auditorium skewing the narrative…Atoll had to be insulated from friendly incoming monsters with rights and a rightful claim to Justice.
The free evolving CREE world had contracted into a prison that was to be retained solely for Sybil’s quarantine; as luck would have it.
What of Una? Had she gone too?
Sybil had a duty to warn Una, it was written in the fabric they’d been surreptitiously, semi-consciously, weaving together in a pseudo-Victorian mind-factory with modern health and safety practices and humane remuneration packages. On reflection the alliance that they’d built between them had multiple manufacturing establishments that nestled in a picturesque valley sweeping from gently hummocking hills to the gaping estuary of aquatic release. The idyllic fantasy, usually the source of inspiration, offered nothing; it was a joint venture that had gone solo.
The coughed-out shells of factories heading for dilapidation potential realisation; begging for the mercy that flash floods can bring; flushing everything down into the fat, greedy egress of the estuary.
The odd one out in the audience…head and shoulders above the ethereal frowstiness of faces, a man with a pair of moustaches a Victorian roué would’ve taken pride in waxing, stood out, his vibrations telegraphing the visit that was on the cards that were turning and turning until the right one, inevitably, faced the limelight.
The unknown becoming the known; a new narrative steering consequences, pushing the already inflated envelope…the figure stood up, mobbed by shadows, coming closer, soundtracked by footsteps…Doppler shifting…right up to and onto the stage…
‘My name?’ he said, as though everybody must know it, ‘is,’ and he paused, ‘Professoré Monástico Ullltimo Flllllllllagranté Moltomulticiano Degradíño Della Bombááástico de Firenze e Madrith.’
Sybil lowered her scream hands to her side and thought, why?
The Italo-Spano name warranted repetition but the circumstances, as they were, offered no leeway. The naming event hung in the air as ‘one of those things you wish you’d written down’. If he never, by chance, repeated his name aloud and there were no recordings nomenclature losses were going to occur.
‘Who are you? And, who are they?’
‘I am, Professoré Monástico Ullltimo Flllllllllagranté Moltomulticiano Degradíño Della Bombáááristico de Firenze e Madrith.’
He was a live rehearsal tactically factoring himself in to The Self: My Self…he had root support…He stood, staring at her like he was some sort of well-thought out impersonation of an Italian Don Quixote; a Spanish Don Chisciotte…an androgynous bisexual harlequin sporting the parts of both genders, on R & R from the war front of tilting. Hoping to charge at more than windmills…brimming with the inevitability of finding some traction on the road to action…
Sybil was disgusted by him in a way that seemed unpleasant, but gathered impetus in another direction, teasing out possibilities of a spike of uncertain pleasure. Overall she liked it…that didn’t mean that he could have his way with her, especially not in front of the children.
She needed something to elevate her from the sinking feeling the Professor was bringing to the table…usually she would have employed some light belittling, peppered with passive aggression and character asset stripping…but she also needed something to top-out the rise of the seas of deep water she now found herself in.
‘These guys have stuck to me like the world shit itself and I was chosen as toilet paper,’ he said with Meditteranean saltiness. She felt like she should say something vis-a-vis his unguarded copro-articulation, or at least, match it shit-for-shit, without getting into a shit-for-shit’s-sake, shit-for-shat, or a shitbattle-she-couldn’t-win scenario.
I am the diplomatic envoy for the State of Love. I, hereby, hand over to you, this body of Humanity. I am choosing you to act as their steward because of your resolute dedication to Truth and Justice and your authorisation to destroy everything that qualifies for destruction…no holds barred.
‘And…just to be clear….who are these guys?’
But the Professor had gone, with love, taking love and leaving love…mainly taking.
She knew who the guys were anyway she just didn’t want to believe it. They were all there, detailed in a book she dare not open… Billions had been spent, and made, on creating them…technicians and the world’s clever-clogses, from jet pilots’ bombing precision; baby-targeting from the clouds, to the breathless trigger-happiness of the snidey child sniper, aiming low, owning the lowest slot they could fill. Making up the numbers: 666… A lot of hard work and sweat had gone into demolishing generations of beings, slicing, dicing, shredding, desiccating, decapitating de-limbing….the hurt, the pain, the agony, the horror…the sheer unbearability of it: medieval hi-tech video games of physical reality with blood and bones as trophies. Baby soup, anyone? The bagged-up babies of Gaza…squelch their last…the Devil’s flag upon the mast…Among the greatest Human achievements; not ranking, more rankling…What God is okay with the bagged-up flesh of the innocent?
And to the financiers, the self-fancying quarter-gods of mass destruction standing on the shoulders of Satan impersonators: does the living nightmare you helped create bring you sleepless nights? Do those coldhearted, piss-moral monsters rent people to sleep for them? Billy cunts bleating up their own arses…It is murder you fool; you are a serial killer, a psychopath! Pay an underling to sleep on that!
And to those at home by the hearth-fire crackling with the heat of demons…playing party games that mock the dead and dying and those about to die… Oh, What joy you feel from taking others out…but beware; you’ll meet the same people when you are on the way down; when your career takes the inevitable and eventual path of all evil plots… Whatever the opposite of Evil is, the next time we spot it, breeding on the marches, through our ethical telescope…repopulating the barren lands with a gentle Spring warmth of Decency… The bad-headed patient of Humanity will be able to slip off its straightjacket and dress for Good…
The black kite that flew freely, abandoned, lost its attachment to misery upon being identified as the shadow of a long-tailed kite; white, mystic, wonderful, that fluttered in the nanofog of the auditorium…
Sybil took up the cudgels…hackles risen; straight up hellbent.
It was just a dream that her imagination had cooked up….a fantasy menu with no food at the end of it; none of this was real….her imagination had created it… There was that…
…but then…
…that very imagination had been haunted into creating a scream to attract notice. The very self-same ghosts of massacred innocent munchkins had been artificially created by the legacy of their own literal demise. Her imagination was generating something that was real by creating a metaphorphical representation. The souls, dwelling in a pool of burnt blood in a disused church; a house of God rendered ungodly by the deeds of Man, were simulacra of the originals…well…they were dead.
The Self: My Self, Act One: Sybil projected out into the pews, ‘let us all pray and sing hymns… It won’t help us with anything approaching salvation, but it will make the mountain of entitled supremacists with their collective head in the clouds seem a tad smaller.’…
