...and so I scan my shelf of books, looking for one to catch my eye. I search and locate the usual suspects, but then, there between the Satanic Bible and Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems, I can see a thin blue book, beckoning me to pull it from its hiding place so it can corrupt my unsettled mind. I reach up and drag the book from the shelf. I stare at the cover and watch as Eddy appears from the mist clean into my view. With a half grin, half smirk, he dupes me into thinking this was my idea, but he knew better.
With a few eager turns of the opening pages, I encounter what I have been searching for, the contents. I light another cigarette and scan the list of 62 fragments of a crazed mind of the stranger known simply as Styx. Through a cloud of smoke filled rings I cast my eyes upon the opener: Virgin. I smile thinking about how Eddy would react to that word. A virgin to him could be many things, but I agree upon one thought, a virgin to Eddy, is one who has not yet been corrupted by his words. With the first chapter of the book, the virgin is no longer, already tainted and no further than 7 pages in before his sinister magic has attacked its first victim...
...VIRGIN delivers its package of word playing mystique, and only 5 lines before the victim is snared, his target marked, zeroed in and slain. Short, precise with a jaw breaking evil, hidden and entwined in a stanza of darkness. He says he didn'€™t slay her but I know SHE no longer breathes. We'll never know and Eddy is not one to be challenged. Whether he did or didn't, it matters not, the victim is dead and he canâ't leave it alone...he must feel the pain and butchery, no doubt with crimson fingers.
With a mocking title, the reader is to believe that LOVING is how he would describe the corpse, the cold corpse depleted of life, yet hidden in plain view is the one word that can only describe this piece...not any piece, but a master...piece. With blood stained feet, we are forced, barefoot into the alley where chapter 4 awaits, yet as we tiptoe down this darkened lane, we find ourselves being watched, yet the voyeur is nowhere to be seen, lost in the night, silent and INVISIBLE, and soon we have no recollection of who was there or why.
As we leave the cover of the alley, we pass through streets aware of movement behind the curtains, a silhouette in the window, we pick up pace with an eagerness to escape. Something follows, somewhere between the shadows and I, it comes alive, it smells the fear painted across my face with a wire brush, the only sound is the grind of his teeth, ivory against ivory, salivating at the thought of tasting my SUCCULENCE. I turn to face my intruder, but a pale faced woman smiles with lips of deceit. Is this impostor in disguise, is it him, is it her, the figure stares and feeds on the sight of my shaking hands. I catch my breath and fight to inhale, my throat tightens as blood stained fingers strangle my life, I close my eyes and know this is my LIBERATOR from this nightmare.
I awake from the dream and find myself wandering lost upon the road to nowhere. I was hungry, hungry for death. Had I been tainted in my nightmare? And there stood a man, he was to be my first victim. As I drained his life I let him fall and there he laid like a ROAD KILL stain. And so, a killer I AM, and nothing can stop me now! I stepped across the small ravine and there lying face down in the stream was a blue smudged book, with pages gently flapping in the breeze. I knelt down and picked up the book...it fell open at page 14. IMPOTENCE jumped at me from the faded page. I stare in amazement, I understood the poem, it was distracted, broken, distorted with truth and lies and split into fragments of a crazed mind. Capital letters smacked me, single words trapped in brackets of steel and volcanic verbs mixed in upper and lower cases. I was dragged from the page to INTREPID, this was me, it is me, I am caught crossing the line lingering with a dagger in hand ready to stab my ghost.
I read OBSCURITY GIRL... and find I have no idea what it is about, but then STYX is a complicated character to understand! I stand and begin to walk across the burning desert sand, dreaming. She was a temptress and I was tempted, FATIMA, teased and taunted and she will pay for that...soon. With emotions of revenge and anger I travel swiftly, planning, scheming and dreaming of how she'€™ll pay. Her life will be sucked dry and that flaming light of hers will be extinguished. This Australian sun burns the skin on my neck, I shall write a song about this; I'll call it 'CRISIS IN OZ' and I'll write it because (that rhymes well!) that Fatima played the game and lost!
The burning disc was two faced and soon became the Luna beacon, spreading an eerie light In The GLOAMING. Dark spirits danced around me sending a chill down my spine. I pulled myself tightly into my cloak and raised my hood to banish me from the chasing shadows.
I made camp for the night and burned a candle to illuminate the nineteenth page. DEAD SEAS entices and reminds of erotic times and quickly slams me into reality with the warning of how these harmless games I play could be my undoing. I read NOCTURNE and it brings back that first night I met my fate at the crimson hands of STYX and his voyeuristic tricks. I lay down to sleep and am disturbed in the night by the Devil herself, she manifests herself in the image of my first love. I watch her floating, taunting me, I follow her movement, CRYSTALENA ASCENDING high into the stars and then before she disappears, I watch CRYSTALENA DESCENDING until her swollen lush lips touch mine. She knows I can't live without her, she is my aphrodisiac, my deadly nightshade, she was my CATHARSIS, but no more and she uses it against me. She TOYS with me, spins me, trips me, strips me, and then drains my battery of life and watches my clockwork heart slowly die, again and again.
I awake still shaken by the nocturnal RIDE of emotion and feel the venom within me, boiling, blistering, ready to break free and so I speed off away from this desert and into a cemented reality, home, my SANCTUARY. Here I can cocoon in the syncopated isolation of my crumbling four walls. I sleep soundly in the protective castle of my mind with barbed wire fences, electrified and pulsating. Nobody can CHEAT their way into this prison, nobody, whoever she is, not even a SCHEHERAZADE. It matters not how she dances around in her silky skirt, I won't be tempted, nothing and nobody will get through this submissive passive aggressive boundary, unless she gives in and becomes my sweet bird of PASSAGE and shows me how to travel back in time and put this nightmare of Satanic dreams back into the soul of STYX. The reminder of STYX sparks an ember in my brain and relights a fury which is destined to devour me in a state of suicidal hunger. I scream at the top of my voice "what the fuck does SENRYU TRIO: HUNGUR mean?"...but no answer is forthcoming...and I can hear Styx's laughter amplifying in my brain.
Despite the thrashing wind at my window. My senses tune into a faint knocking somewhere within the house. I walk downstairs and there at my front door is a shadow. I know who she is, but I'll never let her in, never.
Something invades my thoughts and I find myself opening the door. At the door standing there, in her baby pink blouse a black skirt is the woman from the desert. She smiles then her face changes into that of a skull...she screams at me that I have corrupted her, I have ravaged her, and I am nothing but a user and a SPOILER! I turn and run upstairs and jump into the bedroom and slam the door. I hear her footsteps, then the door springs open. No longer is she wearing the skull, she has changed. She enters, dancing slowly, twisting her body provocatively, she is an APSARA. I become transfixed as she touches my face with her tongue. Her tongue searches my face and then my mouth, I taste her bitterness as her saliva rains down upon my terrain. I become suffocated in her CONSORTIUM of kamikaze kisses from her lips of Morphine. I fall back onto the bed, my consciousness waning in the dark. She moves up my body until my face is between her elongated legs, I close my eyes and inhale her fleeting internal ecstasy. I fall into a dream, or is it a nightmare, and feel my body fall into a crashing MELT DOWN of lust and desire. In my semi-consciousness I could feel her purring body wrapping itself around me, draining me of every erotic fantasy I had ever wished upon. Finally her DARK POSSESSION, became twisted in my tortured mind, sucking my soul of reality, slice after slice. My brain became fused with hers, I could feel her enlightenment, or was that another trick of this disguised DERVISH? Offering me her wisdom, and snapping it away before I could touch it. She played with my ambitions and compulsions, squeezing them dry, leaving me with a myriad of empty thoughts, slowly dragging my consciousness underneath the waves of depression and washing me helplessly out into the dark fabric of the sea. How long I was abused by her obsession to rip me open, I do not know, a minute, an hour, a day...time had diminished. I remember waking to haunting WHISPERS IN THE DARK, and feeling the final moments of her thorny tongue escape my mouth and leave me alone with nothing but a hunger for her beautiful dark heart. As light entered my room, there was nothing there to confirm if this event had been real or not, however, there by my pillow was a poem or was it a RIDDLE, written in red ink, or was it blood? The riddle was entitled DARK MISTRESS, it was a myriad of interlocking descriptions of the vague memories I had left from the night. Bare flesh, mad creatures, trapped, chained, snarling, torture, obsession, prison, whipping, pleasure and pain. The solitary page had a RESIDUE of a perfume I couldn't quite place, and then I remembered her elongated legs and her perfume entering my nostrils, her Morphine. The page was signed, but I couldn't make sense of the scrawled name...VACU-LASS. The name meant nothing to me, or did it? I recalled a poem I had read entitled LAWMAN, why I should remember this poem now I wasn't sure, maybe it was my reflection in the mirror. My swollen eyes holding back tears of rage, or was it the woman from the desert, was she a gypsy, the Devil, Apsara, and had I destroyed her, or had she turned the poem around in my head, had she destroyed me? I stood up on shaky legs and my head swam like a helter-skelter of obsession and weakness, the CORE of my vitality felt bruised and tainted, my wounded heart felt enslaved within its breasted cage.
I sat outside on the porch listening to the MUFFLED MELODY, of the wind, the rain and the awkward beat of my heart. Then I heard it. Out on the wind was a calling, no not a calling, a mocking...she was still there, it was her wretched howling, a laughter that clouded my senses and filled the space in my brain with apprehension and utter doom. I knew I had become the TENURE, of her dark heart. I could feel it in my hands, ripe, thudding, pulsing, and yet despite the lush scent, it was absorbing me, it was twisting in my hand, slipping between my fingers, it was not a heart, it was a snake. I had become poisoned by the venom of her desire, she was no woman, she was MEDUSA, she was a monster and from the very moment I had seen her, she had begun to fill my body with stone. I was to become her prize, a tortured ruin, encased in stone for eternity. I shuddered, could I break from this?, was Eddy behind this somewhere? Did he work for this monster? I REACHed down into the depths of my memory, there was little left, she had taken everything from me, I was vacant, my memories were now just an endless path of ash, just broken FRAGMENTS, of a wasted life. I could feel the BETRAYAL, Styx had duped me, given me his vision, let me believe I was him, yet all along, I was dying, dying at the hands of Styx, so he could offer me to his bride as a gift of love. His love should have been VERBOTEN, but he thrived on the forbidden, this was his ultimate gift, a gift of sickness and repulsion...what more could his bride ask for.
I could taste the venomous AFTERTASTE in my mouth of the trickery I had been caught up in. I walked back into my room and there on the floor in tatters was the book, the book of Styx. The book was no longer a reading implement, it was a curse, a spell, written by Styx in order to capture and corrupt, and all in the name of love for his red-headed Devil woman, Medusa. I opened the book and read the poem entitled KISSING FROGS, it was another piece that proved I was the intended victim I was the murdered frog prince, poisoned by toxic lipstick coated lips of death. I sat on the floor cross-legged and could feel the SPINDRIFT of lies and deceit wash over my life. Those kamikaze kisses had been my downfall, I had become ensnared, enslaved, entangled, entrapped by her hypnotic eyes, I had lost. I could hear her Hellish cackle entwined with the throaty roar of Styx's laughter.
She was the SERPENT TONGUE and he was the SCULPTOR, together they had spilled their wrath of hatred, lust and disease as a potion of subterfuge, leaving me thirsty and gagging for more. The more I fought against the tide of contempt, the more they fed on my demise, this was their pleasure, their own lust, I had been their conquest, and I had been too blind to see it. Together they had becomes Gods of the afterlife, the living OSIRIS's, the tainted ones. They had SACRIFICEd me in their own perverse manner and I was now changed forever, trapped in the treacherous moonlight that I had accepted at face value, how could I have known the face of the NOCTURNAL man, was actually the God of death and suffering?
I turned the pages of the torn and tattered leaves of the book. I read in sadness and grief the poems entitled MEDIEVAL, JACK and ANCIENT PURPOSE, knowing that these beautifully crafted words were layered with Satanic, razor sharp undercurrents that were dragging me nearer to the time saturated shadows of the underworld. The more I read, the more I was caught in the net of subterfuge and death.
I pulled out the page entitled THORN, as I became too aware of the final line was mocking me, a final insult before my soul became theirs. The line read "reap what you have sown!" I had become a master piece in the LOVER'S ARTistic, evil manifestations; I had become a PARADOX CREATURE of the night, yet I would be forgotten in the real world, I would become the precious memento for the YOUNG RIPPER's IN LOVE, forever abused and desecrated for eternity and a day.
The poison begun to take over and the stone was filling my soul to its brim. As my eyes began to glaze over I read the final two parchments in the book ON THE SHOAL and MARGUERITE, both perfectly written and creating images so precise I could taste them. As I scanned the final poem for a second time, I was attracted to the line "a far away look occupied his smoky eyes..." I gave this another thought, and could sense these eyes were Eddy's, and he was occupied. In fact he was totally occupied and transfixed as he watched the lines on my face break into a smile. He knew and I knew he had made a mistake. The smoke was real, the smoke was from the flames, the flames of something burning. I heard him scream as I threw the torn pages of the book into the fire. As each page ignited and engulfed in flames a little more of the poisoned stone left my soul. I was burning away all that he had made.
[EPILOGUE] With his final heart beat, his final breath, he whispered her diaphanous name...Caitlin!
[Review written by Hooded Stranger]