Months before he saw the light, he heard it, speaking strange words, pouring them down some dangling gossamer thread into his ear.
It spoke in verse about his mind, the journeys it had made and the greater distances it had yet to travel.
Rather than being afraid, he found the voices oddly comforting. He was a lonely man, he was a weary man; the voices soothed him. He thought, if this is ‘going mad’ then this is surely the best way to get there. No screaming angry conversations warring in the brain, but a pleasant other, reciting poetry and soothing away the pain.
He did not see the light until seven weeks after he’d first heard the voice. At first he was just aware of a trickle, a tiny beam that seemed to be bouncing in the top left corner of the room, right at the edge of his worsening field of vision. It seemed to jump across from wall to ceiling, joyously skipping between surfaces as the voice spoke gently and purposefully, mirroring the rhythms of the speech.
The man was able to ignore the growing light though, passing it off as a result of his crumbling eye-sight, or as a common hallucination associated with the curvature of the eye.
Each night though, it grew larger and it gained some depth and distinct form. When the voice came to him again, on the third day of the ninth week of the phenomenon, he turned his head from his television and faced the thing.
Strange and shimmering it floated, translucent, like some arcane jellyfish, wispy and stretching, small arms of light constantly moving, reaching out, perhaps reaching for him. In its centre was its glowing heart, and from this pulsing emblem came the voice, beating with the same meter as the voice; light and sound aligned.
Each day, the thing grew larger; the voice, even calmer; its tentacles, closer to the man’s face. “One day soon,” said the voice, “my fingers will enter your eyes.”
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2 comments:
That sounds very beautiful, but very disconcerting. Especially the one bit of its words we get, with all its sinister potential. Knowing your style, that's the way to take what it said ;)
I just did my own hallucination except in a reversed sort of way. It reminds me of something you might write. Could use a postcard that was just a big, empty blue sky.
It's lovely. But like bryan said, there is something threatening in its voice.
Have you ever seen a book called The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris van Allsburg? Same kind of idea as you are employing here...a picture with a few lines to give it a sort of disconnected context in a story, and then leaves the imagination running wild. This particular post reminds me of that childhood favorite...
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