[TALE] Yellow Eyes
Some say that vice grows in darkness, but such people flatter themselves. They mistake their daylight surface for their personal depths, ignorant – or perhaps fearful – of the things hiding within. Darkness reveals vice. All it takes is a little coaxing for the human beast to awaken. When life presents us with a world black as night, with the howling silence of pouring rain and a subterranean sky that seems alive with dark intentions, we begin to sense the ground within us tremble. In that moment, the waters of Styx bubble through the surface, and we know ourselves to be a denizen in the land of ghouls and monsters.
The sun had not shone for what had felt like a whole season of life, blotted out by dark clouds so heavy they could touch the sky only by virtue of their size. My waking days were a dismal dream of pouring rain and leafless trees, of trudging through lands of dead concrete and unending night. But despite this, the sterile fluorescent lights that shone in the pig troughs of the offices and warehouses I visited in my work had become more hateful to me than even the perpetual night. For though the black sky left no glimmer of joy in my heart, it was at least alive. The hateful offices were only white-lighted tombs.
So I would go, rain-soaked and pale, on long excursions through the empty streets of the city. It was a flooded maze of noisome forms twisted beyond comprehension by the darkness and the downpour. The sky had become such an oppressive lord that my eyes now lived in the filth. The gutters had become like impetuous little kingdoms to me, overflowing rivers of leaves and trash pooling around the sewer grates and flooding the sidewalks. When I did look at the sky, all I saw was the bent metal of streetlights or the gaunt branches of trees whipped by the wind.
On one such restless excursion into the pouring night, I went deep into the industrial blight of the city. It was a place of graffiti and chain link fences, of vast tangles of highways, overpasses and concrete all drowned in ink. I was trotting through a dark underpass that smelled like piss even through the rain. There the glow of the streetlights was a pure futility; the perpetual night drank most of the light they offered and the churning waters glimmered with whatever remained. The murmurs of this moribund urban wasteland could not be heard over the thundering deluge.
As I rushed through the downpour in this dark world, wet and alone, I sensed a mounting weirdness. It was like a haunting presence that loomed over me, a leering call that came as much from inside as from without. In a quick succession of moments, the very rain itself seemed to stop, and the lights seemed to dim into a ghastly gray. The waters laughed sardonically under a sky that grinned with alien delight. I had walked straight out of the waking world and into the land of the dead. And there, amongst the waters, was a glimmer of the most unearthly white, a dirty shine, wholly artificial…
I was mid-air in a ghoulish leap before I had even registered that it was not the waters that glimmered. The beast within had seen before I did, and my hands grew claws as they scooped up the little plastic bag that floated in the bubbling pool. Its dirty shine was not a mere reflection of streetlights, but a tangible mass that I could taste by sight alone through the redlined plastic. Rain poured from my hair, running like tears of lost humanity down my gaunt cheeks.
When my weak reason caught up with the beast and saw the white powder inside the bag, I spun around in a sudden rush of paranoia. It was like the crushing feeling of being watched that comes with the night haunts of hypnagogia, and my eyes tracked the whirling rain for any sign of an intruder. The laughter of the rain had risen to an almost deafening cacophony, and I quickly stuck the little bag into my coat pocket. The water ran down my hands in tiny streams, emptying into the marshland of my coat. I was still alone.
My muscles quivered with new life as I turned again and hurried up from the trough of the underpass. My mind grinned like the sky above, and I hid like an animal behind a great bridge pillar. On the pillar was psychedelic graffiti in hideous colors; around me were barren tree branches that clawed at the alien night. My own claws fished the bag from my pocket, and the shifty eyes of a lying predator looked about for any unseen watcher. I licked my lips with anticipation as I tore apart my prey. I then scooped some of the powder unto a trembling claw.
With a single motion I drew the substance above my fangs. I purred softly with the surging power. I no longer felt my lips, and no thought passed through my mind. The rain had gone silent behind the thumping of my own heartbeat. I savored the night, made love to the darkness, and called ghoul and monster my brother. I was no longer alone.
A lone woman hurried through an underpass, the rain shattering around her. A cold wind blew her wet hair about her as she ascended from the rushing streams of the concrete trough. The night crept dangerously close around her when she passed beneath a bridge, and she was shook alive by a terrible sight. There by the pillar, sinking in the mud, stood a beastly figure in a wet coat. It made no move, uttered no sound, but its eyes glowered with a wolfish yellow. She quickened her steps, rushing back out into the streetlight and the shattering rain.
I closed my eyes. There was only heartbeat and darkness, and the rasping sound of my quivering breaths.