Track or treat.

This story manifested itself in the band's studio toilet.

- 

The beast moved through his own grotesque physique with the fractional perfection of the most oppressive industrial machinery. His limbs, long and dark, rolled themselves around their hinges and joints so smoothly as to unnerve the most fastidious engineer. The beast’s knees—such was the distorted nature of his earthly apparatus—danced at a crooked tempo around the top half of his body as would those of a preying spider. He tended to keep his arms in front, like a destitute beggar, but when his filthy twig-like fingers were not on display his chipped and yellowed nails would shriek and squeal as they scraped whatever ground was desecrated by his gait.

I shrank into the antique sofa as the figure loomed above me. The furniture in this room was once infused with the illuminatory influence of hope, knowledge, and novelty; but such sentiments had long since rotted to an unpalatable stew. The entire room, and the other souls in it, once flush with the erotic inevitability of new dreams, now stank of sterility, and served only as well as a cracked cauldron might serve any conjuror. The beast himself had not always been as he appeared to me today.

In the cemetery of time there stands a monument so vast as to nullify the most saharan sun. The monument stands as manifestation of my testament today - that the past was brighter; a thing filled with carelessness and drink and the plucking of young flowers. Alas, the tempest of change has weathered its words so deep that the finger of my memory now runs uselessly over a blank plane of dead rock. Night after night I have rested against this crypt, knowing that to tear it down would be to free us all from its torment, but gripped also by the knowledge that to live now can only have meaning if it is to return the monument to its days of gleeful shadow, when we, and all around us, were as paltry to its gaze as mites to the grandest god. The man who builds his own house cannot let it crumble. The desperate gambler, ensnared by chance, cannot quit when he is behind.

The beast, as that is what my friend has become, might yet be transformed. If there is a curse upon us, let it be lifted by our names and by our works. Let it be lifted by the blessings of swift endeavour and the charity of luck.

Please, dear spirits, lift this curse from us.

From my already sunken vantage point, suffocating in an ancient and discarded leisure, I sensed the beast lowering something towards me. It appeared to me as some sort of disk. Its bottom side was encrusted with untellable muck and swirled with a kaleidoscope of freshly hatched maggots. He brought it down slowly, towards my chest, and as the disk, like our hallowed moon, continued its inevitable course beyond its point of eclipse, his face revealed itself with its narrow eyes and baying crowd of stained and rotten teeth. Present also was a number of vessels, each as grim as their courier, each holding an amber-brown liquid that I knew well.

Putrid steam rose into the high room like the spirits of evil men.

“Cup of tea?”

“Are we running the set again?”

A chill of horror ran through my bones.

“No, we’re going to work on new ones.”

-

My dreams are no longer so fitful, dear reader, as before these words were uttered. That very day, the beast did seem to me more human, his movements more serene, his words less mournful of what he had forgotten.

I still spend my muted hours wondering through the shadowed graveyard. I still yearn for the words that once adorned that prideful construction that reaches up into the sky beyond any tree, beyond any vault or temple, but of late I have walked beyond the shadows, and in that light I have seen the dead dreams of other men, and among them, I should swear, I have seen my own thoughts—of fear, of hopelessness—as they were when I first saw the beast in all his frightful nature. Such fears, such nightmares of fresh horror, have escaped me since the beast uttered the words I here describe, and, as free thoughts, those accursed strikes of cerebral torment have found no fertile ground but this – the dry and heavy earth of zero. They are no more.

So now, when I search the stone monument for any path, for any inkling of what once was and what should next come to be, I trace my fingers a little lighter, and, in doing so, no longer do I overlook the pathetic cowardice of a grim fate, and no longer do I shun the spirits of death.

Quite the opposite.

A. Ghost