and the rising bloody tide
soulless pitch black witness
the return of the living dead
oceans of blood all at once boil over
to carry the bodies away
mass confusion into submission
the end of the world is today.”
- Dog Fashion Disco, The Sacrifice of Miss Rose Covington
So by now you get the premise. You get it that something/s is/are after me, that I am now harboured within my parents house, or what used to be theirs but is now mine. Like I said before, I didn't kill them, I got all of this via inheritance. Natural causes grabbed them, cancer in my mother, heart failure got my dad. Got no sisters or brothers to fight over the remains with, no kin to tie me down. Just little old Patrick getting through the years on my lonesome.
I told you how I left Johannesburg, my whole shpiel on running away from the rat race. I didn't tell you the full truth though; from there it wasn't a straight on ride down to my parent's home and me taking over. In fact I left that hellhole a few years back, and not because I couldn't take it, but because I had more depraved desires to feed. I needed my fix, and that tended to be whatever the next fix was that I could find. Women, drugs, games, freedom… whatever took my fancy.
No I’m not like normal men; I don’t constantly crave the thrusting of phallus in coital positions. I only want it every now and then, and believe me, when I want it I get it. That’s always been the way with everything; when I feel the need to be on some trippy plane of existence for a week or two, I find the best LSD I can get and spend the next while viewing life from a different angle. Squeegee-ing my third eye as Bill Hicks would call it. And that’s all I do. I hunt for my next high, in whatever form it may be, I engulf it, I absorb it, I become excessive. I become Slaanesh.
“Slaanesh?” you say? I can hear the Warhammer players giggling in the background, sneering at your ignorance. I giggle inside slightly, but then realize that yes, you’ve never been enlightened in the ways of geekdom, not many people have. For you all who know not the term, Slaanesh is a fictional God figure from the Warhammer 40 000 universe. It plays the part of the excessive, the artistic, the depraved charlatan. The proud, the beautiful and ultimately most of the greedy fallen worship its androgynous form. In all essence it is the true essence of the ultimate high that you want more of, come down too quickly from, and can never ever have enough of.
And that was my downfall. My intensity, my obsessions… they were the paving of the path to my damnation.
to make my eyes be like deceit I believe the sting proves heart to me"
First stop was Durban. No wait, it was in the Drakensburg, near Clarens at a small pub in the middle of the new section of tourist geared shops in that square of a town. For anyone who’s been there, you know exactly what I mean. The town consists of one square, which functions like a large two way traffic circle. There are probably maybe ten houses maximum on the roads that branch irregularly off of the main square and the rest are curio shops, sweet purveyors, pubs, hotels and a book shop with, for some reason, an extensive section on sexual growth. Kinda hints that there really isn’t much else to do in that town…
And there I was, strolling around by myself, looking around at the sites. Not much, as I’ve said before, so I moved off to the pub in the tourist square and decided to empty a few Black Labels down my throat. Two hours later the shops looked a little bit more interesting and I ended up strolling, albeit a bit erratically, through the small isles filled with expensive and mostly kitsch items for the more rustically inclined. I tried my best to keep my revulsion hidden, for things like that tend to turn my stomach, especially when the vendors claim that it is “art”. However it was in one of the smaller shops that seemed to specialize in wooden caricatures of animals who haven’t frequented that area in over fifty years that I found the second reason for my current situation.
And my God was it ugly. In the middle of the almost bright yellow pine wood giraffes and elephants I found one figure, a darkish tinge to the wood, and at first it seemed very badly sculpted. It was of a man, gaunt as only “African art” can portray in wood, and with the standard heavy eyelids and thick lips on a symmetrically oval face. No bigger than a foot tall it seemed to have a flaw by the neck, as if the head sat too much to the right of the figurine. My first impression was, as I said before, that it had been very badly made, and obviously the sculptor had never actually studied human anatomy which I presume is one of the first lesson in most art schools. But yes, if was ugly, fucken ugly. And I wanted it.
I forked out about a hundred Rand for that little idol, tucked it into my satchel and strolled off back to the Pub, happy with my small acquisition. The rest of that night was a blur, but somewhere in that haze I remember introducing some woman to my new friend Soloman, the name I’d bestowed upon my misshapen figure and getting very odd looks from her friends. Nevertheless, excess achieved I woke up the next morning and found my self in one of the local B+B’s.
Sitting at the table that morning, munching on some badly cooked eggs and bacon (I remember that clearly, wondering how in all the hells someone could fuck up bacon and eggs) I finally got a proper, unhazed look at my new wooden companion. At first it seemed that the sculpture had changed somehow, felt heavier, yet thinner too, but when I looked more closely at it I realized that I had indeed missed a few of the minor details and what I held in my hands was not a badly sculpted impression, but a broken one.
The figure was very thin, and much effort had been put into etching out the curves of a rib cage, a thin spine and bony arms and legs. The thin lines which I had mistaken as a bad attempt at adding detail to the lips were in fact the teeth of a skull and on closer inspection it seemed that not only was the head set too much to the right of the figure, but that another head seemed to have been next to it and was now broken. I felt a bit of chagrin at how I had been ripped off, paying good money for an idol which had been defaced some time in its past. But then it seemed fitting that such a thing could come into my possession. Like me, I guessed, it had lost a part of itself somewhere down the line.
And I left Clarens feeling a little more fulfilled, a little happier, even though I couldn’t help but wonder why someone had gone to the painstaking effort to remove the little carving’s head; for I noticed the telltale markings of a saw blade, and near the end the vicious breaking of the wood as if the cutter simply sawed deep in enough to get leverage, and then tore its twin head away.
Little did I know of its true meaning, instead my new companion, Soloman I remembered calling him the night before, and I got onto the bus and made our way into Kwa-Zulu Natal, not knowing the pleasures, terror and hopelessness that awaited us there…
“Just scratch the surface
And you will find
Something to blame for all lost time….”
- In Flames, Trigger
No comments:
Post a Comment