You only realized just how lost in thought you’d become when you tumbled nearly head over heel over a gravestone. No, it wasn’t really a gravestone, was it? Caught underfoot, either way. You pause in your stride, chest rising and falling in time with a jackhammering heart. Gravestones are tangible, solid items. They hold weight, they signify a specific intent on behalf of those surviving the deceased. As You steps back, unsettled, the monument not meant for memory or honor warps and vacillates at your feet. A smear across your vision, never resolving, never fading. A vision unclear even as You squint hard at the object. Was it even an object at all? It is a smudging of paint and charcoal across what might have been grass… but, no. You mourn the assumptive solidity of the surface texture under your sneakers. Paying too close attention, now, you see it is not grass. Not even plastic grass.
You shake loose the limb protruding from the monument’s center, the not-quite-hand which wrapped around your ankle mere moments prior. The process leaves behind long, crimson scratches across your marble-smooth skin. The sky above you (but it is not “sky” at all, is it?) stretches wide and long just too close to your head for comfort. Claustrophobic in its flattened proximity. You turn your attention to the rows and rows of stony structures winding their way down the steep incline You find yourself cresting. The silence is unnatural, thick and heavy and leaving an acrid taste of bile in the back of your mouth.
You are lost. It dawns upon you as you fail and fail and fail to recognize the most basic elements of “forest” for the trees. Are they even trees at all? Twisted, knobby, organic spindles and spires clawing upwards to the flat-painted sky. You resolve to wait right here for Sprocket to come fetch you. He always found a way to loop you back into whatever conversation you wandered away from. It occurs to you he may not be able to find you this time, so removed physically from the table as you are. You shove the thought out of your mind and swallow hard. Sprocket will come because Sprocket always came. You can hear him now, familiar ringing tones of anticipated laughter bubbling up as a spring from the rocky ground beneath your feet. The Not-Quite-Sky shakes, a halting breath drawn into itself. Beads of condensation pool into clustered Not-Quite-Clouds and the whole world skips a beat.
You are Not Where You Once Were. You took a breath and found the air too stale. molding paper, wet dirt, rotten fading floral. The air is dead, clinging to your throat and choking out life where it remains caked into crevices of your epiglottal stop. You are not dead, interloper amongst a world of halfhearted wholes. The wind whistles and climbs to a low, whining moan. A shriek. A wail. A rising falling lilting cadence of sobs. Condensation beads along your face into clusters of sweat, stinging your eyes as it drips down your brow and clings to your microscopically thin hairs. Droplets of Not Quite Mud stain your sneakers. This is no place for you. Rain. The saline on your face is joined by a warm, wet downpour. You are Not Where You Once Were, shaking hands brought up to shield your face from the biting sting of a growing gale, shaking and shaking under the weight of failing to transubstantiate into Not Quite Hands. Into Not Quite You. Your neck runs cold, chilling blood to follow suit, your hair lifting and sighing into loops and knots with the wailing wind. Stray strands separate from silky brethren now coated in Not Quite Dust, and loop drooping and sticky around your throat. The air is nearly water, is absolutely Not Quite Air. You drag ragged gulps into your mouth anyways, living living living thing that you are, and take a step forward.
Terrible, terrible, all is lost! How can I possibly move on? What use am I, a man with no woman at his side? A god without rumor ¹ upon his lips? A barren winter with no Spring to whisper merciful warmth upon my frozen eyelashes?
- rumor . (placeholder noun). The dialect spoken here is called hearsay, and specific phrases spoken in hearsay are called rumors. The word rumor has been here used to indicate a placeholder in hearsay for a word which was otherwise untranslatable².
For a horrific moment, You’s voice is their own no longer. Ripp’d untimely from their mind and sent sprawling, weaving, knitting from a stranger’s aerial view of their insides pumping and seething along. And now, another voice entirely carries itself along the wailing wind. The wind flings and distorts their thoughts, shattering the bounds of their fragile ego. Were they even themself, just then? The funeral bells still echo in their inner ears, sending them swaying off kilter as they stumble forward yet another step. The steep incline grows treacherous as rocks and husks of dead spiders with legs curled up against their innocent chests both skitter out from underfoot and tumble whispering down the slope. You realizes too late this sobbing despair is not their own. They are You, Not Where They Once Were. They do not sound like this.
“Some purveyor I am! Spring has sprung from her stained glass cathedral! Once more I am naught but blood and bone. Where is the flesh of my flesh? The blood begotten of only my blood? Spring has stolen all away and wasted her warmth!”
You recognize the voice as belonging to a man, and you lean against the monuments-not-gravestones for support. Hair tangles at your feet, and stray teeth stick against the soles of your shoes. You sway in place at the bottom of the hill, jolted to a halt and dumbfounded at the sight of a man sobbing behind what appears to be the only monument stone lacking a half-rotten corpse. His blonde hair falls too heavy with grease over his shoulders, obscuring his face from view. His suit is black, fathomless ink woven into velveteen fabric with starspattered golden embroidery. Light refracts around him, sinking into the black hole hue of his mourner’s suit, such that You can hardly make out his form against the deep grey of the stone.
“Macabre.” You breathe out, involuntary in the face of that from which the word itself is derived. A perpetual mourner, a living corpse. Ever moaning and weeping in this valley of tears. You collapse to one knee in deference. Bow your head and hope against hope that he will not bid you join the eternal ritual. You have never cried at a funeral.
A shifting of fabric, a crunch of rock and grit and dead grass underfoot as the man rises to stand over you. You dare not breathe. You keep your eyes trained to the floor, to the grey stone, to the well-oiled leather black shoes with toes pointed at your own not-quite-mud-splattered sneakers.
“Macabre I may be but no Macabre am I.” The Macabre speaks after heavy, hefty silence. You feel his eyes raking over every feature of your body. His voice creaks and groans with the weight of Atlas’ globe never shrugged. Cold sharp needle-like talons press into the skin of your under-jaw and you resist not at all as the Macabre lifts your chin to examine your face. His eyes are the color of magnificent rot, festering cobwebs in abandoned churches of long-forgotten summers spent in small towns. You swallow hard, try not to breathe, though your heart beats wildly against your ribcage and you are all too aware of how little integumentary membranes can do to stop a talon from tearing open a vein. You have never felt so exposed, an animal with its stomach under the teeth of a predator. The Macabre is rotting, though no maggots bloat his under-eye bags. His eyes well with tears, staining his sallow, sunken cheeks with glimmering golden ichor.
“No – N - No Macabre am I!” The Macabre wails, mouth yawning unanswered prayers as he turns to face his own Not Quite Sky. So preoccupied, he fails to fully retract his talons in time. You feel a small red scratch bloom along the underside of your chin. You are grateful it wasn’t a gash, and duck your head to your chest once more. What can you say, in the face of a god? What could you say, that would neither sound stupid nor find you on the wrong end of an emotionally volatile talon? Silence, sometimes, is the best option, and You exercise this to its full effect.
The image is burned into the underside of your eyelids, to haunt your dreams forevermore. Sinew torn too thin across his cheeks and chasms gorging open to pop fat, wet orifices lengthwise along his sunken cheeks. Teeth too sharp and plentiful to be human and blackened with mold, blood, and tea played peekaboo between the remnant strands of sallow skin. You might have vomited, bitter bile rising up to splash your back molars, from smell alone. Your bones buzz in casings of muscle and fat, moved by his wailing. His sincere and all-encompassing despair. You glance back up in time to glimpse the Macabre raking his razor-sharp talons down what little remains of his rotting face. They catch in the gaps and tear new seams open to burst with golden, shimmering ichor. The smell is horrific. The sight is sublime.
You do not comprehend and could never comprehend the depths of his grief. The limits of your human lifetime box out implications you’d rather not contend with, censoring ideas which might have kept you awake at night for years to come. In shock and wondrous awe, You reache out to the man, brushing their knuckles against the loose fabric at his elbow. The Macabre takes no notice, except to draw his elbow closer to his own torso.
“No Macabre am I! Not what I once was! Macabre no longer… whence has he vanished, that stringer of Destiny’s Harp? Where is he, Weaver of Wishes?” The Macabre mourns his own halfhearted End, chittering and moaning in equal measure. Bloodstained fingertips smear liquid gold into his filthy, matted blonde mass of curls. They snag and snap at every instant, threatening to tear waist-length tresses from his own scalp. Foam and spittle collect at the corners of his mouth, on the tea-stained surface of his canines. His wild, grey-blue eyes dart and bounce about the dead air.
“He is here, with me.” You find yourself capable of speech at long last, discomfited by the tune playing out before you. This will quickly crescendo into hysteria, if you don’t find some way to stop his momentum. Horror and disgust transubstantiate into compassion – and wouldn’t yours, too, under threat of total annihilation and no end to the interaction in sight? Forgive yourself. You knew not what they would set in motion.
The Macabre considers this affirmation, and fixes You in his glassy, grey gaze. You glimpse yourself reflected in his quavering pupils. Your hands remain clasped in front of yourself, still kneeling, still deferential. Humble.
“No…” The Macabre shakes his head as if to shake loose whatever thought You lodged in his mind. He refutes their refutation of his despair, at first a whisper, then a roar. A wind at his back to whip curls about and tangle blonde strands in the harpstring structures of his torn, rotten cheeks.
No, I am not who I once was! i am lost to the dusty, overlooked corners of history! No, I am Not Who I Once Was, I am Not Where I Ought To Have Been! Why would you lie to me? You, who cannot even hold a tattered syllable of my true name between your useless teeth! Leave me, you pestering fly buzzing muttered hollowed-out niceties! Leave me!
And so, as he willed it be, so, too, was it done.
- prophet was the word he used – a word which no longer holds meaning in this world. The syllables were ancient and creaked ungainly in his mouth, scraping along his teeth on the way out. You had no way of knowing this, so they merely heard the crackling warble of disjointed consonants as a peal of thunder, followed by distant funeral bells.