CHAPTER I: My sympathies have always been with the monster.
But where are my manners? Welcome to the attic. Hope you'll pardon my not getting up to greet you – I'm more comfortable here in the corner. That's close enough! It might be safer if you stayed back a little...I'm not really used to company. But since you're here, why don't you close the door? Makes me feel safer. Lot of crazies out there, hehehe. Are you hungry? I just have leftovers...oh, you just ate. Me too. Well, sit down then. Careful! Your eyes will adjust to the dark in a minute. And then you'll prefer it to the light. Like me. We're a little alike aren't we? Maybe a lot alike. That's why you came up here. It's OK. We can be friends. Now what was I saying? Yes, I remember.
My sympathies have always been with the monster.
My heart beats faster when they are near.
I was born on All Hallows Eve – son of a goblin – schooled in a dungeon – spiritual heir to a world of night.
I don't fear the monster. For at least the monster tells the truth. The monster doesn't bury what it is and what it wants and what it needs under a thick layer of crudely laid civility, beneath which the scent of the animal is barely masked. The monster does not paint its face or adorn its body or diffuse its mind with distractions designed to keep the charnel house at bay. There is no guile in the monster. There is no duplicity. The monster tells the truth. It is we who lie. How strange that we know the shortness of our time to draw breath; the precious nature of each pulse, and yet still we are afraid to live; still we pretend that we will not end as does all flesh, until the very shroud is before our eyes. Then we would live. Then we would set all things right and make amends and cast off lies! Oh how we would live, we say in the October moment of our lives, how we would live if we could only have the time again. Strange creatures we are. And bad liars.
I'm tired now. Do you mind if we rest a bit? Just rest and think on these things? Stay with me a little while. Blow out your candle and stay with me? Oh, I'm sorry...the door is...locked. Forgive me please. I'm just so hungry for company. I think I'm ready to come out of the corner now....
CHAPTER II: My Father is dead.
News is slow to reach the attic. Sometimes it comes floating in on the backs of the dust demons that rise through the floorboards below me; sometimes it drips in electric whispers from the eaves of the roof above me.
Eventually, though, even in my isolation - even in the solitude of this corner where I crouch among bones of regret and slivers of memory - even here, eventually I come to know things; to realize what has happened.
And so now I realize, far too late, that my Father has died.
Not my physical Father, not my spiritual Father, but my....what shall I call him? The Father Of My Imagination? Yes, that fits Mr. Bradbury (I could never bring myself to call him Ray.)
I was a boy once. I was a boy and it was summer. I was a boy and it was summer and I was lonely, so I walked in the woods. I wanted to walk forever but I grew tired, so I stopped and I looked down and found a book.
There among the pine needles and dirt was a paperback book with a golden cover that glinted in the sun. “S Is For Space” it said, “a spellbinding collection of favorites from the Master Of Miracles,” and below that, a man in glasses stared off from the cover. He stared away off into...somewhere...some place beyond me and the woods. I opened the book and read in the sun and there in the quiet of the summer of my 13th year, my mind opened. And I was happy.
His words were dark and sweet on the tongue and good in the mind, even the titles:
"Come Into My Cellar"
"The Flying Machine"
"The Screaming Woman"
and above them all, "Pillar Of Fire."
Ah, “Pillar Of Fire.” How many times have I turned those 40 pages? At what age did I first memorize it without knowing I had? It became more than a story to me. Or rather, it always was. I fought a boy at school once because he made fun of the book. I broke his nose with it. The cover still bears a trace of his blood. I am not sorry.
Mr. Bradbury was my friend. He was my friend in times when I needed so badly not to be alone. I read him and I was sustained. I loved him and now he is dead and yet he lives because he wrote this...and this lives...it is from the conclusion of “Pillar Of Fire:”
"I am Poe. I am all that is left of Edgar Allan Poe, and I am all that is left of Ambrose Bierce and all that is left of a man named Lovecraft. I am a gray night bat with sharp teeth, and I am a black monolith monster. I am Osiris and Bal and Set. I am the Necronomicon, the Book Of The Dead. I am the House Of Usher, falling into flame. I am the Red Death. I am a dancing skeleton. I am a coffin, a shroud, a lightning bolt reflected in an old house window. I am a yellowed volume turned by a clawed hand. I am an organ played in an attic at midnight. I am a mask, a skull mask behind an oak tree on the last day of October. I am The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. I am the ghost of Hamlet's father. All these things am I. While I lived, they still lived. I am all that remembers them! I am all that still goes on of them and will not go on after tonight. A whole world dying tonight. One more drink, pray...one more.”
Goodbye Father. Today I mourn you. Tomorrow and tomorrow I shall miss you.
Don't leave me. Please. Would you stay and read with me a bit? See, I have the book still, here! The light is dim, but perhaps together we could make out the words...
CHAPTER III: The Cask
Come inside. I heard you on the stairs. It's all right. I won't bite you. You are my friend, yes? Good. That's good. Pardon the mess; I just...ate.
You've come to hear a story? Well. You first. Tell me of your world. How fares the big blue marble these days? What news of planet earth? My world is small and my mind hungry. Give the monster a piece of your mind, I pray you.
Yes.....yes.....umm...I see...yes. It seems the coarsening of your culture continues unabated. The lack of civility. The unfocused cruelty. What's that? Do I find it distressing? No. I find it...amateurish.
Do you recall what Mr. Samuel Clemens said? “There has been a decay in the art of lying – the field has been overrun by amateurs.” So it is with the sad excuse for reprisal to which your world has descended.
Oh, the uninspired meanness of your time! The undisciplined meanness tiresome and petty, the predictable meanness of pitifully pre-cut, bite-sized tirades. Deflated. Flaccid. Stillborn. And wholly worthy of contempt.
Come closer and let me speak to you of revenge. Have you the least idea of what it is? Revenge. When I say the word; when I savor the word; does your heart beat faster; does the blood leave your limbs and worthless appendages and soar to your brain and swell your mind with the exquisite, the infinite, the delicate possibilities of the act of revenge? You cannot text that sweetness, my child. Nor can you, in a comment or a post or a hurried insult ever hope to experience the fully-satisfying taste of a revenge well-planned and sweetly executed. The death of a thousand cuts begins with one slice, but it does not end with one. Patience, time, imagination – all must be brought to bear if you would deliver a blow worthy of your potential.
But I see that you are busy. I sense your anxiousness. You have no patience to listen; no time to consider. You only want to act, to be in motion. Always in motion. Very well. Leave. The door is unlocked. But take this...here, take it! It's a book. People used to read them. His name was Poe. And he understood the horrible beauty of a wrong made fully right. May I refer you to the opening sentences:
“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You who so well know the nature of my soul will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged. At length. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes the redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.”
and then down the stairs...down....down....
“Will you not turn back, my dear Fortunato? See, the mold increases! Your health, my friend – will you not turn back? No? Then let us go on. The cask is just ahead....yes, my friend, yes, the Amontillado!"
Go. You have no patience for such talk. Send a text. Open a tab. So much to do. So busy. Go. I am not busy. I have time to think. Centuries. Go. And try to forget that I am always here, in this corner, knowing things about terror which only the madness of time can teach.
In Pace Requiescat.
