WHITE BLUR

By: Alexander Rivera

That clear and cloudless night the stars beamed their universal delight and Christian did not feel inspired at all; still trapped in the suffocating corridors of the dreadful curse of artist’s block—and he hadn’t the slightest clue why. Lying on the green carpet grass outside his finished class, staring at the stars was indeed one of his personal favorite forms of relaxation. Christian Fall was a talented, freelance painter and artist to circa his peers and patrons that took notice of his pieces, most of them ranging from classical figures paying homage to the Renaissance masters executed in digital media, and even the most surreal akin to his favorite artist, Salvador Dali.

With a seedy “Emo-Goth” appearance, heightened further by numerous rings, tight punk attire and thick, greasy raven dark short hair, he found himself on campus as a second year art student and still found it hard to call it home amongst his fellow bumpkin pupils, despite some of the qualities he shared with the isle of clichéd misfits and outcasts.

His eyes revealed to him the vast darkness and infinite expanse of what was above. If only he could be so immense, he jested in his mind, wondering what power it would take to be of such immensity to allow an entire universe to exist within one’s own existence, one’s darkness—in between the stars.

Sighing, his eyes roamed to the rose held between his thumb and index finger as it idly twirled in the night air, the petals expanding with each spin only to collapse once more with each finish in its pre-bloomed state. Drifting from the rose to the thoughts of the life beneath him within the tavern, his fingers idly let the rose fall away from his grasp. Watching as such soft petals silently landed upon the wooden roof, and rolled in its own destruction until it fell from sight to find gravity’s cruel sense of humor dragging it to its destruction upon the ground, he could only wonder if that rose had desired in those few moments its own choice in the effects of the rolling.

If it had consciousness, would it have desired to remain still? So many day by day, that would never understand they were the puppets of a world more complex than the world of a rose, yet so simplistic in the basic rules, as they were manipulated as well in their ability to only react so much. Perhaps, if that rose had bloomed, it would have gotten stuck on the roof? Perhaps, if these souls in this existence bloomed, then they would realize this as well?

Oh, who cares, really? Nothing, not even waxing on the stars or philosophy could bring him out from the stagnation that held his mind hostage, culling to make something grander than any of his previous work. In his newest work, his abstract landscapes were perfectly textured, his portraits exactly proportioned. All his tutors said the same that something was missing. When Christian asked what it was, no-one knew exactly. Scholars and professors had studied for a millennium and still were no closer to the answer. Even modern science which could send man to the moon could not identify it, never mind find a way to harness it. It’s like a spark, is all they could tell Christian.

A spark.

It started to rain, provoking him to run from the downpour right when he had narrowly missed the leaving bus and was forced to walk home through the ages. First the fashionable modern town houses, then the seventies’ post modern sky rise flats and finally the crumbling Victorian terraces. It was the night before the first year exhibition and as ever his work still seemed to pale next to his class mates.

When he arrived home his troubles only grew. The rain had developed into a storm, which had knocked out the electricity. That meant no light, no television and more importantly no hot bath. Freezing cold and sopping wet and with nothing else to do, he lit up a smoke and a few candles and grabbed a canvas. He drew out a few brushes and a stucko knife and dipped them into tubes of acrylic paint. In his mind’s eye, he saw the infernal cull for his imagination. She hung in his mind like an image burned on to a photograph. Her face twisted in confusion and panic, her language of a distant land as she tried to find her sanity. It was the look in her eyes of hopelessness that haunted him—as if she was forever falling in a vast Abyss.

Accidentally cutting himself with the small yet deadly knife, his blood streamed from his hand, down the side of the canvas on its smooth cotton surface. The pain mixed with the events of the last couple of hours engulfed him in to a feverish haze. He started to paint by the dim candle light, the only source of heat the ember of his cigarette. His breath hung like artic mist in front of him. His hands shook violently like they were having minor seizures.

The back of the girl occupied the bottom third of the canvas. In the back ground a crooked sign post with illegible writing by a dim street light. Her neck was twisted like a freshly wrung tea towel causing her head to turn round over her right shoulder. She glared back with hollow eyes, her mouth screaming a defeated sigh. On the brink of collapse he staggered to his bed and could hardly sleep at the mere thought he was once again inspired. Eventually, all he could do was sleep, deep into relaxation.

The next day was clear and so was his head. He had never slept so soundly. It seemed like all life’s tension had been lifted from him. His beginning awakening had given him the inspiration and ability to paint this horrid picture of desecration. The cut on his hand was the catalyst, noting the pain as his spark of inspiration. His hand was thick with dried blood. When he went to wash it he found the electricity was still down. Scruffy and dirty he looked at last night’s frenzy. He put the canvas under his arm and set off to class.

At the student gallery opening, he won first prize with his new piece. Before, the passengers on the bus on his way to campus admired it with a mixture of shock and awe. One child took a glance and burst in to tears while her mother stared on, shell shocked. So impressed was one of the judges he offer to display the picture in his gallery. The day belonged to Christian Fall.

Of course after such a magnum opus, people would have the annoying habit of asking when his next piece would be complete. The trouble was he couldn’t seem to fulfill his destiny which had been set before him by his peers. His works afterwards reverted back to the ordinary. It seemed his spark had burned itself out. He now needed pain to paint anything decent. He experimented with the gods’ medicine of hallucinogens and watched his arms turn golden. He experimented with the love of the corner call girls with their wealth of experience and writhing lust. He culled to ignite his spark into an inferno.

He sat there for hours the blank canvas mocking him. Then he gave up waiting for inspiration and took a razorblade to his arms. The blood ran down his arms as the paint flowed on to the canvas. As the hours slipped by, the lines on his arms increased in breadth and depth.

He started his self portrait. The figure he painted was no longer human. It was like his view on the world deformed and desolate. The blood in his veins inky black, his body wasted away from lack of food and sleep, his arms cut to ribbons, his smile twisted toothless and laughing. Only his eyes were painted normally. In his mind he saw the world as it really was, a wasteland of people hiding in the shadows afraid to embrace their lives fully in case they were incinerated by their passions.

He had entered a trance like state more potent then the night of the rain storm. He needed just a little more inspiration to finish, so he took his razor to his left wrist and then his right. His pain had become more powerful and addictive then heroin. He was dying in ecstasy. This was his life—a sordid mixture of depravity and decadence. The privilege and prosperity which had served him well was now meaningless. He had forgotten every moment before the rain storm and now cared only for the thrill of the next. He now only lived for art whatever the cost. With his heart beat hammering in his ears, he suddenly felt weak.

The next moment, he found himself lying in his own pool of blood, asleep yet still managing to remain alive enough for him to breathe several more moments. That was the cue for the demented figure of demonic femininity from his painting of self-desecration to come alive, sleuthing to his side and whispering, “What is the matter? Will you not finish your masterwork?”

His eyes were weepy, jaded noticing the figure twist and bend in unnatural and completely alien positions not possible for any creature of earth to contort to without the aide of torture or shifting of its movements after death – if the succubus like figure could actually die. She mounted herself upon, making sexual gestures, dry humping him into oblivion. Tentacles unfurled from underneath her legs, slithering out like serpents. She sleuthed her soft hands across his bloodied shirt-covered chest, and sat upon his prostate, arousing him for ecstatic orgasm. Gargoyle like wings unfurled, enveloping them both in a vein-riddled cocoon of syzygy. Inside, the succubus plunged her grip into his chest, slowly ripping out his beating heart like a Mayan death priestess, on the verge of flinging it into the volcanic abyss. He shrieked in mortal terror at the infernal that culled after his lonesome, desecrated soul.

Christian pulled himself up from the heart-stopping mid-nightmare while drenched in a mess of his own perspiration and blood as if he were out at under the desert sun, over oceans of sand. Fresh from shaking uncontrollably and feeling as if he were astrally raped, he surveyed his dark surroundings and hoped that it was truly a dream while grasping at his chest to confirm his unreality. Raising himself up, his eye level met with the canvas set upon the easel only to realize it was blank—a white blur, except for a few stray red marks and finger prints. Confused, he jostled to the bathroom and looked into the grit stained mirror and saw his own panic stricken reflection. Later that night, he sat himself down to his slanted drawing desk and sketched out the unholy creature that haunted his mind. He eyed his wounds on his arms, now covered in bandages and shook his head in disgust at what he drove himself to search for—his new source of inspiration; his muse of steadfast pain.

Yet, her beauty dazzled him to the point he gave himself an erection. This image was the representation of his newly fangled subject of infatuation and guardian demon—the end result of his morbid inspiration. He continued to draw portraits of his beloved all throughout the after-hours of the night, without a moments rest until he gave into the melatonin that seeped into his system, causing him to fall asleep at his desk.

Damn. Realizing he was an hour late for class when he initially woke up feeling drugged and jaded. While he rode the bus to the campus, he proudly tugged at the sketchbook of drawings he held under his arm, yet rubbing his drooping eyes; he swore he could just fall to the floor unconscious. Yet, those terrible images that crept into his waking dream kept him from doing such. Rotting hands carved out organs with ritualistic manner, sepulchers and forgotten tombs were weaved with spells; the sheer despair of it all chilled his blood cold. Those terrible wails and cries reached him; consorts of his fetid flashes of depraved forbidden rites.

Of course all of this, these morbid visions he’d beheld came with the territory of insomnia and self-degradation. Oh, how romantic the lives of tortured artists may be! His was now filled with some ever-enveloping sense of the macabre, digging further at his sanity. Sitting right across from his bus seat and feeling as if he binged drank liquor all night long, a girl no older than perhaps sixteen smiled at him innocently, admiring his Emo look and noticed the large sketchbook underneath his arm. Sleepy eyes whirled at her innocence and fought off thoughts of her own degradation, in every manner possible. After such fleeting horrid thoughts he closed his eyes to force the images out, praying for liberty from his sinking miasmic dream to dissipate.

His teacher flipped through and reviewed his sketches and noticed some dried rivulets of blood poured and smeared over each piece of paper and raised an eyebrow, asking, “Did you come up with these sigils and symbols yourself?” Christian hovered over to confirm his discovery to find that he had never actually seen such designs—only one of a haunting demoness he felt he made some kind of pact with, because of her constant lingering in his mind. “Let’s speak after class is over.” The professor gently suggested. Christian merely nodded along.

After the hours rolled by, Christian’s professor asked him incredulously, underneath his thick mustache, “Where did you learn of these sigils?”

“I don’t know,” Christian said blankly and went on, “Maybe through my dreams, I see them. I don’t even remember drawing them.”

“These symbols are known throughout some very long dead cults and esoteric orders. Only initiates would be privy to them. I’m sure you can access them on the internet, but all your sketches seem to be covered in paint…or blood?” He asked, suspiciously at him, taking note of his jaded veneer and his bandaged hand and wrist. The professor went on, “Do you need some kind of help? I have a friend in a rehabilitation center for those struggling with addiction…” Instantly, Christian lunged after his book of sketches and darted out of the classroom as if it were a raging inferno threatening to claim him.

On the way home, he decided to walk instead of take the bus; his mind drunk with the bitterness of noxious insomnia and half-baked delirium. Along the way, he noticed a few posters hanging on the walls of a building, depicting a mass full of wailing tentacles, whirling from side to side while supported by two humanoid legs—in image for a local rock band’s unsigned album, probably.

With a sidelong glance, Christian caught blurry movement from the periphery of his vision and sensed a nearby presence tease his aura and biting paranoia. He turned his head to see nothing more than dark clouds envelop overhead, angry and wrathful like an awakened leviathan. He hoped to God that rain wouldn’t catch up and drench him relentlessly.

Strangely enough, that same young teenage girl from the bus ran down the steps of some rundown apartment building right on cue and starting to walk towards his direction. Christian couldn’t help but admire her features—strawberry blonde hair covering an innocent baby face along with some tight petite features reaching from her legs to her buttocks all the way to her well developed chest. She smiled vicariously at him and greeted him as if he were her one and only friend.

“Hi!” She beamed. “Aren’t you the guy from the bus?”

“I guess so…” Christian trailed off.

“I just recognize you from somewhere…did you have that show at the art school up town with all the weird pictures?”

“Yeah that’s me…what’s your name?” Christian asked.

“Holly…” She addressed, extending her hand to be greeted and shook. Christian simply replied by saying his name back. His eyes were bloodshot and she couldn’t help but notice to ask, “Are you alright?”

“Yeah…I just didn’t sleep very well. You know, I’m on my way to my place. Afterwards, maybe we can go to a bar or something?”

“You mean like a date?” She sheepishly asked, while hopeful in her tone. Christian cracked a wry smile, “Something like that.”

They both entered his practically empty apartment except for a mattress and a few desks and chairs set up near stacks of canvases lined up. Holly placed down her purse on a nearby end-table with a telephone and swung her arms in a playful fashion, beaming, “So this is your head-base of operations. I like this one…” She pointed out to a rather large sigil embedded onto the floor—something of which Christian hadn’t noticed before ever since he moved into the studio space. Christian eyed the deeper hues embedded within the wood of the floor that made up the bizarre symbol that looked as if it mirrored some Egyptian hieroglyphics and secretly wondered if he had etched the large sign himself. Holly thought and decided it was a good idea to carefully strip off her clothes over the large sigil and starred at the tortured artist with seductive eyes.

Christian asked, “What are you a prostitute?”

Finally, she basked in Christian’s eyes while in the nude, looking as if she did this a hundred times before in an almost bored manner and offhandedly replied, “Only if you want me to be.”

The next moment Christian found himself carrying on his thrusting movements against the teenage prostitute in a missionary style while still feeling jaded and rather shitty. After he was finished he found himself in the bathroom starring at his own reflection through the shattered mirror. He wondered to himself why his own life had warped so suddenly, why the lack of creativity had shaken him to the most extreme mired depths to slit his arms only to attract something that still continued to irk him. He hadn’t been with anyone for such a long time that he had forgotten how sensual and intimate the feeling he contained paradoxically, feeling drained at the same time.

Then, the ghastly images poured in, struggling to maintain his composure even when alone. He attempted to soothe the terrible sights with forced images of tranquil scenery and pristine skies yet storm clouds rolled in droves as if the succubae herself had spread her dark wings over the mired, desecrated soul.

That was calm bliss though; compared to the terror he felt as he struggled to open the bathroom door when he heard the labored breathing of Holly and the flagrant bizarre crying of a child.

His heart thumped so loud he felt it was going to burst out of his chest. So loud he thought the neighbors would hear it. Shaking violently, he had to hold the wrist of his right arm to keep his sweating hand on the brass knob. He couldn’t turn it - hands so wet they kept slipping - wrapping them in the bottom of his tee-shirt, he opened the door.

It was a small, eerie room where nothing dared to move. The candles didn’t flicker, the air was stale and heavy with incense and even the sound seemed to fade within these walls. It was as if Time had stood still, respecting the presence of Death and his servants.

Darkness filled his room as if it were almost palpable. Even the autumn moonlight couldn’t penetrate it, thanks to the requisite bulky, impenetrable shades blocking the window. But when Christian entered in, the room seemed to be bathed in some cool, hazy ghostly glow made up of billowing wisps of fog.

­He found her spread upon his bed with her legs wide open. She seemed ghostly pale as if something had extracted and ripped her soul apart from her mortal husk. Blood leaked from between her legs as if she were raped. Christian leaned over to the bed and wondered to himself if he had done this in cold blood and shuttered at the thought prospect of being incarcerated for the rest of his life. Surely, he had to cut her cadaver up, limb by limb without being arrested and tried. He placed his hand on her neck to check for any sign of a pulse but to no avail she remained still and lifeless. To his eyes, the corpse seemed similar to the paintings he made; the ghastly repellent images he featured, sometimes with his own dripping blood.

Perhaps it was the demoness who had slain the girl out of sheer mad jealousy who continued to plague him through his long streaming reverie that contained both his daily dream and nightly insomnia. Yet, the infernal creature merely existed only in his dreams—or perhaps not. He soon began to notice there were more sigils of macabre quality one would find in some blasphemous, unholy tome interwoven in this studio. They each became more heightened to the forefront of his mind’s eye, one after another in some capricious sequence. Blood dripped from each sigil as if the room itself were alive and scented with a totally alien and malign presence that seeped and bleed into his shattering reality.

Polarity it seemed was nothing but impermanent and began to erode; gestalts of light into darkness, melding multitudinous shapes and items into bizarre, alien angles akin to one of his previous paintings as if he were experiencing one very bad drug trip. Yet the only substance he ever indulged was the one of self-desecration. His entire surroundings became stricken with static and suddenly felt a need to paint; hellish equilibrium his inspiration.

There, a canvas was leaning next to the bed and saw his new venue of expression—beholding the death of others.

All of it. It was forced. A farce of reality. The paint was slathered on in many layers, but the canvas had worn thin in areas. Christian looked at the canvas. Something within him screamed at him to stop. It would do to stare in a contented stupor at the paint. Christian didn’t. He looked at the canvas, noticing the interwoven strings that made it up. He looked between the strings and saw…nothing; a void, but a pregnant void. There was nothing there, but the terrible space that breathed in the darkness of the room, watching him spiral further into insanity.

Christian wanted to see the thing, despite the dim, nebulous terror it inspired within him. Giving it definite form would make it less terrifying. Then, he could see its borders, its limits. He wanted to see it and know his fear, rather than leave it as a terrifying, undefined mass of shadow. Christian looked further, between and through the strings. He felt himself being drawn in. The fear did not abate, but rather grew. Christian re-thought his earlier desire. Perhaps some things are better left unseen. Suddenly feeling very worried, he tried to go back between the negative spaces to provide contrast.

Phantom arms and tentacles emerged from the mouth of Holly’s corpse and sleuthed their way to Christian to guide him into the inky depths of the underground Abyss. He turned his head back to see the guiding inky-black arms, feeling the acidic coils of panic tightening around his chest. He no longer had his bearings. He looked down at himself, wondering if his physical form could guide him back. There was nothing there.

Christian was the void.

For just a second, Christian had the briefest glimmer of conception of what true, absolute solitude was. Christian screamed. Christian had no mouth to scream with. No sound disturbed the nothingness. The non-existence of Christian searched desperately for sanity within the void, no longer having even himself for company.

There was something there, at the edges of his perception; a movement that was not quite movement, but something completely different that had only the slightest ties to the concept of movement. The void was full. But Christian was blind and deaf to its occupants.

Perhaps it was just a matter of adjusting his perception.

Slowly, clumsily, Christian began to allow his other senses to awaken. Ancient senses, long atrophied and ignored, yet still there, still with their power of perception; senses that conformed to none of those that he thought he knew—capable of receiving stimuli missed by normal sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Capable of detecting that which was invisible to all natural senses. Christian began to truly perceive. No possible analogues could be given to any who were restricted to the five mundane senses of what Christian saw. The closest comparison would be like blurred shadows, seen through frosted glass.

Even that distorted glimpse, though, threatened to be too much.

Horribly distorted and muffled, even the vaguest outlines of what populated the void, right within and around the stretched canvas of reality, what was there, around him, through him! Christian’s sanity blanched. Christian tried to blind himself, stop his ears. But those weren’t the senses that received what he now not-saw and not-heard. The line of Christian’s sanity stretched thin, threatened to break.

The winged Succubae mounted herself against the essence of what had occupied Christian’s body and whispered a bittersweet nothing into him and held him like a newborn babe with a mother, “You are not a creature of man. You belong with us, your final brethren lie awaiting your departure from this realm. Awaken to us, hither your eternal Aeon into the countless depths. It is you who have made sacrifice.”

No longer belonging to his former life, the soul personality that once was Christian foresaw and understood his sinking destiny while being held tightly within the pact he made unconsciously with the she-demon. Flailing tentacles welcomed his essence with open within the mired sea, the sheer twinge of unearthly white that engulfed his vision, Christian closed his etheral eyes facing towards the silent dread; to the former strained and nearly unbareble life that was nothing more than a mere white blur.

They found him the next day. The neighbors had noticed the blood which had flowed under his doorway. As they carried his body away they saw no note. Just a canvas soaked in blood.