The Ghost Within

Saturday, June 22, 2013 K.Z. Freeman 0 Comments

I was there when the spire became indistinct and the question whether it was solid or not became a real one. We sat at its feet, on the main square in a circle of friends. We were smoking, passing the joint around when I for a moment though someone might have laced the weed with something highly hallucinogenic.

Back then, before the thing went crazy, the spire felt safe. None of us really understood why. Perhaps it was because we figured people who lived in it could see so far that any danger would be reported should it come. Or perhaps because it felt like it connected the earth with the heavens. Or perhaps it was simply because a lot of people hung out there and being in the smack middle of activity was kind of fun.

In that moment when the thing first made a sound none of us had ever heard before, we all shat ourselves. My friend even did so literally, reinventing the notion of a brown note. The sound was so low and ripe, potent and with razor-sharp overtones, that my bones drummed. My teeth rattled. People screamed, and I later found out those who screamed the loudest were the ones who couldn't hear themselves for the account of their eardrums being as good as gone.   

Keyden was the first to ask what we were all thinking. Actually, she didn’t ask it, she screamed it. “What the fuck’s going on!”

None of us had answers and all of us wished we could run faster. But for some reason, my brain had decided to run in the wrong direction. While everyone began to sprint away from the spire, away from the insanity, I ran towards it. I saw the tower vibrate and noticed something spreading from the reality of it. It was a field of discoloured air, a mesh of intertwining patters and shifting, kaleidoscopic light. When the sound of it hit me I forgot my own name. There was nothing left of me then that I could distinguish or understand, no sense of self, no sound of my own feet, no sound of my heart beating or people yelling, just a long, endless and infinitely deep ‘wuuuuuuuoooooooooooo’ noise. The universe had collided with itself. My skin began to burn and itch when the expanding field hit me, but I went on, towards it, into the entrance and between the people running. Their clothes and skin flaked off and drifted into the air like moths of a pyre as they ran. Some collapsed while others kept on running for a few more moments.

I looked at myself, saw my own bones shining neon green through the skin. But there was no pain. No worry and no fear for me. Nothing. No feeling except an infinitely bizarre displacement, as though everything I was looking at was seen from the wrong end of some cosmic binocular. Then I forgot everything I knew as I was built anew.

Read the novella here.

Cover art by http://reku-a-day.tumblr.com/