My dream

Lukin66Lukin66 Posts: 3,063
edited February 2008 in Poetry, Prose, Music & Art
I was in a house with a theater on the first floor. I was not myself, but I was still me. Everything in the house was old. Victorian. There were heaps and piles of precious things, and everything was rose-colored and teal. If you climbed up the flight of stairs, you saw that you followed a giant, moth-eaten Chinese lantern. It was amazing. There was an old lady, who was very vibrant in her age. She walked like a flower. Her sister lived in a room on the fourth floor. But she wasn't a person. I was placed in a room with a woman named Dianna. I was not allowed to gaze into her face. She walked wrapped in a shawl of blue velvet. The deep indigo blue of the sky at dusk. The first time I saw her, she lie wrapped in the fabric and curled like a child on her platform bed. From then on, I only looked at her in the periphery. She whirled into being at the very edges, and skated along like mist. I was never sure what would happen if I did peer at her. I felt unease and coyness wafting off her in waves and wash along me like a snake. I felt sick when I was in her presence. She was a demon.

In the evening everyone gathered in the theater, gilt with gold and under the surface, pitiful and old. We never sat near each other. Scattered pell-mell in the old red seats, just staring at a lit, empty stage. The thousand yard stare, perfected and reflected back at the scrubbed wood floor and scabbed curtain a hundred thousand times. We were like diamonds that refracted and broke the perfect spectrum.

Besides Dianna and the sisters, I had no idea who else was in the house with us. There was always a feeling of tension and frustration, so thick and stifling, it felt sexual in its origins. I was avoided studiously.

The old lady's sister was by far the most deeply disturbing. I slept on the fourth floor in the same room as Dianna. Our room was filled with flowers. All breeds and manner of them, in such a profusion that it seemed as though they grew straight from the flat and tired carpet.

In a room far down the hall, our matron's sister was kept. Unlike everything around it, the door was resplendent and made completely of gold. It was perpetually ajar. The thing in the room was not a human. It had the bare semblance of a woman with black eyes sunken deep in its skull and greasy hair lying like a dead thing down its face. It crouched and jittered in a stained red blanket, held tightly against its miserable self like a shroud. When it stood upright, it strained against broken legs, long since healed into grotesque knobs of flesh and bone. It chattered like a monkey and laughed like the utterly deranged. I stood and watched 'her' for hours. It never paid attention to anything outside its room, and never strayed beyond the gold threshold.

The old lady was afraid of her sister.

The theater was the only entrance to the great house. The door was an old oak affair from the back. But the front was made of thick steel. Galvanized and wrought so thick, nothing could get past it. In the dry wood were long, ragged furrows, the metal peeking through splinters like bones.

Sleeping was a drug in the house. It came over you as a perfume, thick and viscous enough to slide down your throat and choke you.

Sleep

And sex

And death

And sleep….wakened in the witching hour by a scrabbling, picking noise on the bed. Opening my eyes and seeing the sister, it, leering over the foot of the bed and chittering under its fetid breath. Dianna watched this with glittering purple eyes. She was beauty personified, and elegantly entertained by the monstrosity she had loosed.

The sister grabbed at the red cloak and pulled it closer to its decimated shoulders. Eyes sunken and torn and completely infantile in their blankness. Its jaws unhinged and a garbled shriek grew from its mangled throat. It howled like a puma and told me her name.
deep, deep blue of the morning
gets to me every time
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • Lukin66Lukin66 Posts: 3,063
    haha, nothing? No takers? Alright then
    deep, deep blue of the morning
    gets to me every time
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