It’s strange how I always find myself coming to myself in the pitch black.
This city stinks. The foul and the filth of the crack-whores and the vagrants hovering around my face in a way that makes me want to wipe my mouth, and then wash my hands. But get up from the ground - I have to.
Buildings loom over me on either side, but I am unaware of them. The ground beneath my feet is coarse and difficult to find your footing on, but I barely even notice that. Here and there a pale light struggles through grimy curtains. In the distance there is the sound of a siren, and over there is the sound of loud hip hop music. I hate hip hop music. It has no point. And it sounds terrible. What the fuck kind of name is “Hip-Hop” anyway? Sounds like something kids do in a schoolyard. Give me Thin Lizzy, or Motorhead, the real classics.

It then began to dawn on me slowly... I had no fucking idea where I was! I stopped walking for just a moment and looked around me, peering into the gloom, searching for something, anything that looked even remotely familiar. Nothing.
How long was I out?
What had I been doing?
I strained my memory for answers to these questions, but none came. I was in an alley, that much was clear. Grimy and polluted with the leftovers of some leper’s guts, it smelled like. It was so dark, the air itself seemed thick with the blackness. The few gloomy beams that made it out of the lonely windows did nothing to penetrate it.
I stopped walking and felt in my pocket for a lighter, I knew I had one. I hoped I had one. As my hand slid into the hip pocket of my jeans, I became aware of something sticky all over it. I withdrew the lighter and struck it. There was something on my hands, something thick. It smelled coppery, like... blood. I took a closer look. Sure enough, it was blood. I felt a little off-balance as my heart began to beat a little harder. Was this my blood? That didn’t seem likely. I was not aware of any pain anywhere, but then, I wasn’t aware of much at all at this point. I gradually became aware that there was blood all over me... on my jeans, my jacket, in my hair. I turned to face the direction I had come from. I could never tell what it was that drew my attention back in that direction, but I’m not sure that it was a good thing.
My eyes had adjusted to the gloom by now, and a little way back into the alley, I saw something, lying on the ground. A bundle. A rather large bundle, and then it all came back to me in a flood that toppled me from my very precarious perch on the edge of reality into a nightmare of my own making that for all the rest of my life I was to beg God to free me from...


- - -- - -

She was not pretty, far from it. But, fuck it, I had nothing better to do with my time. Drunk as a loon, I knew she would never remember this night. I prefered it that way anyway. The last thing I need is some slut from a bar leaving me messages that I knew I would never respond to. Her breath stank of whiskey, but her skin was sweet. Why the fuck it entered me to take her out in to the fucking alley I’ll never understand, but here we were. Ripping at each others’ clothes like a pair of stoned teenagers.
Movement at the end of the alley caught my eye. I drew back from her mouth for just a moment to see if there someone there, and there was. Feeling only marginally embarrassed I indicated for her to just hang on a second while I determined if this intruder was gonna be a problem for us, or if he would just move along.
As it turns out, he was going to be a problem.
In fact, it wasn’t a he, it was a they. Three guys, coming down the alley toward us. One of them seemed a real hulk of a man. Huge stooped shoulders. He walked with a slight limp. I thought I saw the glimpse of metal at the end of the one’s arm. The girl I was with was far too far gone to know that trouble was making its way toward us. She just staggered against the wall and mumbled something about fuckin ‘em. I thought for a moment that if it wasn’t for them, I’d be fucking her right about now, but that thought was very quickly driven from my mind as it became increasingly clear that these guys did not have good intentions.

“Can I help you guys,” I asked, trying to sound like I was not in the mood for this shit, which I wasn’t.
“That’s a real pretty girl u got there, buddy,” came the guttural reply. I looked back at her for a moment, mentally disagreed with him, thought better of discussing her lack of beauty while she was present (despite the fact that she would certainly not even hear me), and looked back at the thug standing across from me. He looked mean. I realised then that I was rather frightened. Three guys, not small, one that looked like something from a bad horror movie. And it was pretty obvious what they intended.
As I looked toward them, in my peripheral vision I was scouring the ground for something I could use as a weapon...
“So, what can I do for you gentlemen?” I asked, not meaning a word I said – I would do nothing for them, no matter what they asked, and they were certainly not gentle men.
“Just get out of the way, buddy, no reason why u should die over this.”
“Excuse me? You think I’m just gonna step aside and let you have your way with my wife?” She was, of course, the furthest thing from that, but I could think of nothing else to say. Maybe in some irrational part of my subliminal mind, I believed, (ludicrously) that they would consider a husband more formidable than just a drunk with a hooker. I was wrong.
“Have it your way, then,” he said.

In the moment that followed, several things happened at once. I realised that they were about to kill me, without hesitation. I also realised the young lady was dead, too. I reached down and to my left for a steel pipe I had noticed lying on the ground and I saw a something like a bat or a beam of wood appear from behind the back of the big guy. My fingers clasped around the pipe exactly in the same instant as my body began its upward swing. I was going to plant the end of that pipe squarely on the nose of the big thug and then “negotiate” the other two as best I could. Hopefully, the girl would recognise her plight and run off screaming. But it was too late. The big guy was too fast. But he was clumsy too. He swung his bat, or whatever it was at the spot where my head was a moment ago, and with my head not being there to break the momentum of his swing, the bat flew right on past and ended up against the head of my not-so-beauty-queen-whose-name-I-did-not-even-know. My blow landed up against his ribs, just under his arm, the one that had done the swinging. It was a good blow, he suffered a couple of broken ribs from it, and as a result ceased to be a problem for the duration of the next few minutes.
I stood up straight and looked in bewilderment at the young girl. The light was not good, but it was enough to make out the bat, (or whatever) still stuck to the front of her head like some kind of obscene lever. Blood trickled down her face in a little rivulet, past her eyes, wide with shock, and into her open mouth. There must have been a nail or something at the end of that piece of wood, which was now securely embedded in the forehead of a nameless drunken girl in the stinking alley behind a filthy bar in the middle of a sick and twisted city.
She just stood there, stiff and dead. “Why doesn’t she fall over?” I thought absently. Then a deep and dark anger came over me. Not because I cared about the girl, but just because....
The world had enough evil in it, God knew I was one of ‘em, but at some point, it was just too much.
Too much hurt.
Too much hate
The fury began suddenly to escalate inside me, the steel pipe swung this way as I ducked that way. Then it swung that way as I ducked this way. And too soon, it was over. Four dead bodies around me, and still no resolution inside me.
I collapsed.

Falgn0n "my✿ darkness" Daring - 14 years, 4 months, 28 days ago

I came around the corner slowly. Everything inside me was screaming, with all my heart I did not want to see. With every ounce of my will I fought against my legs, and my eyes. I did not want to see.

But it was inevitable.
And I knew it.

There was that scratching noise again! In my heart I knew what it was. It had visited me so many times, in the dead of night, in my darkest dreams. I could never quite see it, and always I could only barely hear it. Like a whispering just beyond the reach of my consciousness. I would snap awake, out of breath, like I’d been running, to the profound silence and utter blackness of my life.

There are things that stir beneath the surface of reality. Things that taunt us, tease us.
Things that hunt us.

Something was hunting me. For years it had been hunting me. I never knew it, of course, but it was there. Always there, waiting. So patiently, waiting. Watching. For some months now, the fear in me had steadily grown. The frequency with which the dreams occurred increased. And every time I woke up to the sheer black sheet of night, a small cry would escape my throat, like an uncried tear begging to be set loose.

The wall felt cold and unyielding beneath the touch of my damp palm. The house itself seemed to sway a little as if to the sound of a slow melody that only the night could hear. It seemed to grin menacingly at me, like an absurdly huge face leering over my shoulder from inside my mind. But I was inside the cavernous mouth of this beast. I could feel the stench of its fume-like breath caught in the back of my throat. It made me want to retch. A cold sweat broke out on my face. Fear like sadness gripped me, the strength draining slowly from my gut, I wavered. If only I could fall away into the black oblivion and know no more of this nightmare dream suddenly stepping into the real world life that seemed more and more like a dream to me.

I felt myself dropping to my knees, my hands landed palm-down in front of them. My head lowered, as if worshipping, the strength now completely gone from me. I was grateful that I could no longer inch my way closer to the sound of that scratchy whispering voice behind the veil of darkness that separated, protected, me from what was around this next corner. A quiet sob eased out of me. And another. I felt myself beginning to shiver, I was so cold. So cold. I rolled up into a little ball and waited for that dreadful…thing…to come and get me. Silently I prayed, hoped and wished that I would simply and quickly die… before it could get to me.

Please.
Let me die here now.
Quickly.
Please…
please?

Falgn0n "my✿ darkness" Daring - 14 years, 4 months, 28 days ago