Outside
the magnificent library covered in shadows
that is my home, I see through the ornate wood window the snow
falling lazy over the thorny bushes in the garden. In some spots, the
snow mingles with some thorns covered with blood, and abruptly
changing their form and speed, the defrost snowflake carries away the
last remnant of another intruder. A lot of moons before, that sight
chilled out my very bones, but now, after seeing this happening every
now and then, I am getting used to it; there is a kind of poetry in
the silent drop carrying the spilled life of another being to nurture
its killer. The barghest vines that watch the garden never leave
enough of the intruders. Their thorns like avid teeth, unsatiable
hunger, and composed little eyes all over their branches are mighty
defenses, but not even them dissuade all those freaks of trying to
get the attention of my Mistress. Right now, I am serving as Her Most
Trustful Candelabrum, waiting for her arrival to pick up a book. From
the candle I carry the wax drip with the snowflakes rithm outside,
and while the blood moists, I get warm. Of course, sometimes I can
barely withstand the pain when the wax touches my skin, but it
solidifies, and new warm drips come over to keep away the cold night.
The flame that I carry just keeps the darkness and the ghosts at bay,
but I am not afraid. From the darkest corners of the shelves they
rise like mists, moving apparently with no direction, but they have
all the time in their undeath state, and soon they are moving toward
my light. With their cold, rasp echo, they entice me to read the
books from where they come from, to let them live again one page at a
time. They whisper of adventures on islands that float over oceans of
fire, kept from moving away from the continent by chains that could
retain the mightiest gods; of oceans made of pure probability, where
merchants in paperboats fish sunflowery vixens and death wishes of
those abandoned by their trusted ones; of cities made of bronze in
the middle of the jungle, long abandoned by their child devouring
inhabitants.
I
listen to them, but even that their enticements are splendid, this is
my duty. I am the Candelabrum of my Mistress, and I don't want to
fail in my work. I adore her, and she loves me because I'm obedient
and do my work diligently. And the reason why I love my duty is
simple. When she enters the room at dawn, and touches me softly while
embracing all my body with her delicate and cold fingers, all the
pain suffered in the night goes away and the ecstasy paralyze my
muscles to the point I just barely breathe. I feel lightning running
through my flesh directly to my soul, boiling my blood. Literally.
When the embrace is total, sometimes I smelled the steam of my boiled
blood that floats through her marble white, long, delicate fingers.
Just thinking of it makes me tremble in expectation, and my skin
wants to detach from my body to search her wherever she is at the
mansion, my thoughts belonging exclusively to her. After I nearly die
from the pleasure I receive every morning, she blows the flame from
the candle that I carry, and the fire gleefuly perishes with the
touch of her fiery breath. The ghosts humbly return to their books,
and when everything pleases her, the shining from the cloudy sky
unfolds, passes through the thorny barghests in the garden,
highlightning that only inside Her mansion we are completely safe
from the dangers outside. The ghosts once said that there is
something called “sun” beyond the clouds, but I only remember the
shining. They told me that once you pass the thorns and go outside to
the woods, and if you are lucky enough to survive, it is possible
that you can reach the End of the Woods, and somewhere there, the
First Door That Was Ever Built. Beyond the door, they say, there is
“the Great Los, the primordial sun shining over the waves of
formless chaos”. But I don't pay attention to such nonsense. There
is no reason to go outside the mansion, where there are so many
dangers, that even my Mistress need such awful plants as the
barghests to keep us safe. If there is such a thing like the First
Door That Was Ever Built, who has the key? And much more important, I
have all that I need here.
But
I have to admit that sometimes, SOMETIMES, the enticement of the
ghosts have an effect on me. Sometimes their stories have two
questions woven that scare me: what was I before getting here? What
do I dream when my vigil fails? And they scare me because for the
first question, no matter how I try, I remember only shadows of faces
floating laughing maliciously at me, dancing fast with the pulse of
their creaky laughter. I remember myself crying, trying to stop the
laughter with my hands over my ears, then running desperately against
the shadows and finding only mists and darkness beyond them. But the
faces were still there, no matter how far I run. I don’t know why
they mocked me, but I hold for certain that there was a reason. Maybe
I did something so funny that the ghosts of other place can’t
stopped laughing, or maybe they were right on some issue that
embarrased me, I don’t know and right now I don’t care. In such
wanderings of my memory I phisically recall such pain that bruises
began to appear and hurt, and I don't want to worry my Mistress.
After all, one thing of beign Her Most Trusted Candelabrum is to keep
myself inmaculate. She once taught me a spell to vanish all the hair
from my body, and other one for my skin to look polished. It was very
clear that She liked Her Candelabrum soft to the touch and pleasant
to her eyes, and Her will is my life and my pleasure. I only take
care in not forgetting all the precious dawns in which Her Presence
fills this library, or those occasions in which She enters suddenly,
walk slowly to the shelves checking the books and the ghosts for some
story for passing the final hours of darkness. Sometimes she even
gaves me an extra time of delight in her fingers, taking me and my
flame to the far shelves, to the most old and murky books. Those
extra trips in the lands of pleasure and darkness
Regarding
the second question, the weirdness of my
dreams make me shudder. In those dreams I have hair on my body, my
skin looks bleak and I wear strange costumes, one of them specially
annoying around my neck, that falls over my chest almost down to my
waist that makes me feel asphixiated and very uncomfortable every
time I move my head. On the dreams, I picture myself inside a worm
that moves fast almost in a straight line over fields of stone,
sometimes turning to left and right abruptly. I am grabbing a grey
bar inside the worm, and there are windows built in its flesh that
let one see to the outside. There are a lot of beigns like me inside,
but no one appear to see the others, nor anybody talk. Some cling to
the bar and touch me when the worm makes one of its sudden moves, but
there is a sensation of disconfort between us, not the delicious
ecstasy of the touch of my Mistress; others sit in red thrones made
of a curiosly rugged material, staring motionless through the windows
in the worm, or with their heads punctured in the ears by strange
white or black tendrils creeping from their clothes.
The
vistas outside the worm are terrifiying: neglected castles that
looked assaulted and vandalized repeat over and over, their
walls stained by twisting lines of something that appears like the
blood or fluids of insects that cracked the windows and made their
nest inside of the ruins. The sick, the demented and women selling
their bodies to them pululate the neighboring castle fields, as if
they were the only last survivors from the bloodless massacre that
appears to have happened. They prey and pillage whatever they can
find in those narrow stone prairies. Beasts made of metal run
alongside the worm, and like it, they have windows that reveal their
agonizing prey yelling in anger or with a never ending frustration in
their eyes. All the beasts yell stridently, and now that I'm thinking
on it, there is no silence in my dreams. Maybe that is the reason why
my head hurts so much when I wake up. It seems that those metal
beasts are the ones that make the nests in the fallen castles.
I
feel strange inside the dream. It’s like I’m in a hurry for
something. I keep watching a strange clock stranded in my left wrist,
and touching an even stranger device in my pocket. It looks like a
magic window looking to green fields somewhere else, where the time
is frozen. There is an intense shining covering everything, but I am
sure that this has to be with all the Los thing whispered by the
ghosts. The only thing moving over the window are some arabic numbers
engraved in the crystal. It’s weird, but when I look to those
numbers, I feel tense and a growing sense of desesperation to be
somewhere else invades me. From time to time, the worm stops to feed,
but incredibly its mouth is located at one side of the beast, and
there is no teeth in the gaping lips. And all the food that comes
into is not chewed at all; quite the contrary: they enter into the
beast voluntarily, yet their expressions show the same void of those
who were there sitting near the windows.
Better
not remembering more. The bruises are appearing, and I don’t want
to bear much pain. Soon my Mistress will come, and I want to be Her
Most Trustful, Perfectly Polished, Obedient and Ecstatic Candelabrum.
Hello Pacho... quite a Lovecraft story you made. Great description and character depiction of a Vampire: Its feelings and sorrows almost made me cry. Good one! Thumb up. Kalator
ResponderEliminar;) Thanks! Algo que me ha parecido curioso de los comentarios que he recibido sobre el escrito es que cada lector ha interpretado al personaje principal de forma distinta. De cierta forma creo que ésto ha reflejado de una forma inusual el aspecto feérico del personaje: distinto ante miradas distintas.
ResponderEliminar