Wednesday, June 29, 2011

A Little Scared Boy (An Excerpt)

Posted by A Great Liar


(The following is an excerpt from the currently undergoing novel, The Liar's Lobe)

At first, it seemed the descent would never end as a little scared boy trailed down the wooden stairs. Then his stumbling blind feet hit the surface and the boy took a sigh of relief.

The earth beneath his feet felt hard and cold as he took first couple of steps. Feeling his way in, swallowed by the blind eater that masqueraded as dead darkness all around him.

Have mercy! Something in him screamed. Part of him that was wallowing in hopelessness since the day Grandpa has passed away.

Watching someone die like the way Grandpa did was like catching someone with his pants down. Stripped of all human dignity, and Danny didn’t think you are ever forgiven for that little sneak peak into reality.

He recalled the time when he saw the thing from the Grandpa's room for the first time, a night after Grandpa's died, a thing that walked and even made itself sound like Grandpa used to, approaching his room in the middle of the night, his back against me, and it starting to turn around.

And it was just as well that Danny got scared and ran back before he could face him. Deep within he knew he could never face Grandpa again, not even when it wasnt quite Grandpa that he had to face, but something else, something that only walked and talked like his Grandpa used to. 

From above he heard Jimmy calling out for him. He sounded worried. But Danny chose to stay and begged for darkness to feed him. He had come too far and there was no turning back.

His patience paid off as it seemed that the darkness finally listened to him. He began to see. The cellar was a small round sphere surrounded by layers of thickly infested dust and cobwebs. Against the wall on his left he saw shelves with portholes carved in them.

Most of them seemed empty, except couple of them as Danny poked around in the dim light.  

A square looking black object seemed to peek through the shelf’s opening.

Danny thought the little thing smiled at him.

He didn’t think when Lewis Carroll dreamed of rabbit holes of his own, he ever believed it could prove to be a doorway to things so demonic and destructive. He had thought rabbit holes to be fantastical apertures to other worlds, where life is full of color and magic. Warped in a strange but nice form of reality that make our most outrageously enlightening dreams seem like a discourse into dullness.

When Danny first laid eyes on the book, he forgot to breath. The blood underneath the skin slowly flushed out of his face, his eyes unable to focus on the black leatherbound book he found from the secret cellar in our backyard, stranded in the cobwebs and layers of dust.

Because for one brief moment, what Danny saw wasn’t some old book from the Grandpa’s past, but a thing born of darkness, of Danny’s worst nightmares and most secret dreads. A dark and slimy thing crouched in one of the portholes lined up against the wall of the cellar.

Who are you? Danny choked as the words he began to speak only succeeded to echo deep inside of him.

I am you. The dark-thing said and gave him a winning smile. Danny believed the things had eyes watching him. Weighing him down with a lots of love, the kind that gives you goosebumps and makes your blood run cold. 

I am you. The dark-thing repeated.   


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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

A World Without Air

Posted by A Great Liar

The world of dreams is a silent facade, a showy misrepresentation intended to conceal something unpleasant, something that we have all heard of, and strive for, and none achieve. If time is the big bad ball of ice rolling down the giant snow peak in clockwise motion, then the hope for happiness is the antithesis of it, an anti-clockwise act of desperation, of human struggle against the pitiless Void of creation that some call Nature, and others God.

The point is the absolute pointlessness of the whole thing. The point is not the snowball falling down the mountain, the point is why it is there in the first place.

And the point is, if there is a mysterious Machinist responsible for all the existence in the earth and beyond, a Machinist hidden to the common eye behind the veil of infinity, call it Nature or God, would it suffice as good enough explanation, a justification of sorts that everything that is there, or isnt there for that matter, is but a willfull act of Divine Providence, as it were.

But irrespective of all that, of whether we need, or could, justify anything that there is to be justified or not, the fact remains that we all live in a world without, rather than in a world within. We humans are mere entities of self denial, in a way that we forever refuse to acknowledge or be at peace with what we are, instead are in constant striving for what we arent, or dont have.

Every man or woman, no matter how mundane a soul he or she is, or how insufficient in imagination or ambition, seeks to do an act or follows a trail of otherworldiness, of that most beautiful of all that is unreal and fantastic, better known as the pursuit of happiness.
  
We are all fiddlers, freting their way into the unknown future, curious and babbling, lauging and crying, loving and hating, but always seeking to divulge from our own present form and circumstances. Whereas the ones in light seek the dark, and spent their lifetime doing it, like poor old saints trying to become clumsy sinners.

And the ones in the dark forever crave for the light, stumbling to light candles of hope, never realizing that it is not the darkness they fight against, but the very absence of light in their lives.
 
And all the while, the ball keeps rolling down the peak, and hence the pointlessness of it all.

Though we choose not to hear it coming, we choose instead to keep looking for a whiff of fresh air in a world devoid of the very substance that we call air.

We chose to do the impossible against the face of nothingness, because it is only human to do so.

We chose not to await the ball to finishing rolling, but to try and live in this world without air... 


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Monday, May 30, 2011

Spider

Posted by A Great Liar

25 years, a life span most of the mygalomorph spiders are expected to share, years spent in captivity of the predatory inclinations inherent in my kindred; catching the unexpected prey with a silken smile, O the irony of that; I have never been fond of non-predatory feeding, if there is such a term.

With fangs that inject venom to a mere wanderer in my parlor, a Sicilian death kiss most of them find a little too sticky, though they never complain, was a necessary predicament of my livelihood; feeding my little young ones, like a good mother that I am; always making a point of eating the eyes off my prey, for my little ones did not deserve to see the glimpse of darkness in the dead eyes; the accusing look that dwells there forever.

Death was a necessity, I once thought, and was proven wrong in the course of my lifetime; the long tedious hours spent in the hollow shade of wait, watch and wait, soundless and like a shadow that casts no suspicion to the unsuspecting prey; it became a pleasure.

I have stared down many desperate faces, in fear and hopelessly deprived, throbbing and pulsating from the sigh of the silent specter before them, some begging for mercy, others dimly hoping for it, none ever appreciating death; the value they put on their lives ……

‘Is it a bad thing’, one of my young one once asked me, having watched me taking the life out of one of my victims, ‘to make a living of their lives’; ‘No’, I told him with a smile, ‘once they are caught in the silken fate, it is all right to feed off them’; a curious babbling fledgling he was, soon he will learn the underlying principles of death and dying.

Soon I will too learn the fears that enveloped my prey, now having grown in both wisdom and age; a little too much of both is a luxury none can ever afford; waiting … waiting for a silent silken kiss.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

God's Business

Posted by A Great Liar

Blood came spurring out of the wound as if finally relieved of its tensions, of all that tension of living in a state of war. The little green man fell haplessly on the ground; his blood curdled eyes staring at my lily white face - the last thing that lucky commie bastard would ever get to see in this world.

Down onto my haunches I searched the body and found nothing to my liking. Like most of his kind, he lived in the teepees and humped in the bushes - now just another slit-eyed creep with his throat gashed from my bayonet.

War is murder in wholesale, somebody once said, and I say the hell with him, because we are at war. It’s the natural order of things, and you never ever fuck with nature.

                                                ---------------------------

We move on, like a bunch of best trained sniffers a country at war could ever hope for, slashing and moving our way in, deep within the forest.

Look behind every jumble of bushes and you see a commie either breeding, or smokin' leaves, or doing both. Keep the trigger pressed for long and it doesn’t feel so cold any more. Doing God's good work on this earth makes you feel like one lucky bastard on this cursed land of tropical horrors, where sometimes the rain and mosquitoes seem more evil than the commies.

But we move on anyway, because that is the only way, because we ain't fighting this war to win; we keep on because the job needs to be finished off. We ain't no quitters, no siree, not we; it’s about finishing what you started and moving on to better things in life.

                                                ---------------------------

The cigar stays tucked in my mouth as I walk. ‘Watch out for the commie dirt’, someone shouted. It's the brains splattered on the ground, mixed with a lot of blood and stuff, mostly from the guts; the other green stuff that always shows up every time we fry a commie family of four or more with an M1 semi-automatic carbine.

That’s the one to look out for, its heathen blood and its fucking contagious once you catch it; because then you can’t get it off your skin. And aint that the proof, like someone said, proof that there aint no humans around in this island till we first landed.


Good Lord has shown us signs, the right ones, and only the weak and the faithless will ever turn away from it; and once they do, they are as good as the dead commies, 'coz we need to tell the world that it's God's business we are here to mind.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Born Down In the Dead Man’s Town

Posted by A Great Liar

We are all born down to the dead man’s town. Where each of those good old skunks was once a man of worth, till he learned to have an opinion.

Where they all kiss, smile, and die henceforth, some by chance, other by providence.

Where the wise men have a crack at Divinity and the mere average souls strive for immortality within their shaded abodes. Some worship the Seen, some Unseen, and the rest who could do with neither, followed none but their own shadows.

Some had Gods sculptured in the shoddy back lane shops, others strove for them in the towering erected domes.

And some dreamed of heaven above, while most strove to erect One of their own devices, heavens bricked with concrete and blood of their fellow beings.

But each man is born to burn in this funny little town, is what none of us realize, not in the nick of time anyway.