who is candlight
Who is Candlight?
—–
He has a face he won’t let me see. A black mask behind a hood and he only says things quietly. Menacing things, things I can’t bring myself to hear at night, waking to record them early, first before anything else interrupts. Or perhaps not menacing, but terrifying all the same, too hard for my dreaming self to discern or take apart, but instead only record, retreating from some knowledge, things that only my dreams can really know, but won’t, and things that waking I cannot understand, no matter the valor found at daybreak.
He has begun to invade my waking life, signs of him everywhere. Little snatches of conversation as people pass, words I’ve heard whispered before in some strange and other context, a phrase that meant something far more terrible once before. Posters on walls and graffiti scrawled across brick echo his unmoving face back to me, that I begin to feel haunted, his presence ghosted all around me.
—–
“There is your devil” he said. He was not there but his voice was following all the same, watching my dreams with me. Hateful rotting equine skulls, absurd and comic gnashing long sharp teeth, gnawing skeletal tree branches as they float disembodied out from the dark too deep just inside the wood to see beyond, stripping bark with long mad tears. Blind they bite down, and a small girl walks among them and they find her arms and legs, snapping hard and sharp, long canine teeth worm into her skin, writhing beneath it, her bulky sweater providing no resistance. They tear her skin and pull her down to the ground, and the same absurd skulls become bone dogs, small and terrible leaping up at her now, and she is pulled down to the earth by these rotting putrid things.
And she did not go bloody or torn, but somehow to decay with no transition, her eyes gone from her skull, her hair pulled out and gone in clumps, skin sloughed off and stinking. A man walks slowly to the place, the dogs and horseheads gone, and reaching down he picks her up, one hand only gripping her sweater and her flesh. Drags her behind him in one hand, the other trailing a long farmer’s pitchfork. Ungraciously he tosses her limp body on the heap, other bones and dirt and rot tumble at the impact, and with his fork he turns the pile. He walks back to a gray wooden door, and stomping his boots on the step he sets the fork down outside, and goes in.
There is your devil.
And I did not know what he meant, or what he means by it now, a wisdom too deep to penetrate, his voice not mocking but almost, a lesson I am to learn but of what I cannot tell.
—–
Pen to paper. His voice but not his deeds, they won’t come, only images surrounding. The story of a man who acts only in fractals, in reflections on reflections, who seems to know when I can see him, performing, acting a precise part, the veil of which he will not let me penetrate, only bear witness to scenes too mad to call story.
Candlight is in a chair, his hands on his knees, a red curtain behind him. There is a glaring stage light that illuminates everything. A thing with a long beak, a spine, and two flipper feet walks to him, and opens and closes its beak, squawking something that makes me cringe, not for the words but for the sound. He watches it intently, but passively, indicating nothing. It turns and looks at me, there are no eyes in its face, and then suddenly there are two white orbs in the sockets and they bulge too far out, and it shakes its head like it has become violently ill, eyes bulging out toward me, shaking its mad head harder and harder. It begins to drip and spray black foam from its bill, and Candlight behind it only watches, his hands have not moved. The thing begins to hop toward me, its head shaking still, its bill spraying foam, and as it nears I can smell it, something foul. It hops closer, and I suddenly realize I can’t move to get away, stuck watching as this thing draws nearer, a scream beginning to rise like panic in my throat. It stops in front of me and stares. One of its eyes cracks and it begins to bleed like tears, rolling down its beak. I begin to laugh uncontrollably, the absurdity of this thing staring, and as I laugh it begins to laugh. And its laugh is bigger than mine, and it laughs harder, its bloody eye bursting open with the pressure of it, flecks of the blood hit my face. It laughs and it hops closer and puts its bill on my knee. It stares up at me, whimpering, clicking its bill, laughing softly still.
And it falls down dead, expiring by my feet.
On stage Candlight stands, and the lights go out.
In the daylight now I’m standing and he is, he takes a cage and holds it out to me. There is a dove, dead inside. I open it and the bird falls out, to the ground. “This is not a metaphor” he whispers to me, and the birds feathers twitch in a sudden wind.
—–
Who is Candlight?
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