The Gaze Behind the Gable
By Alexander Cook
Alive, yet underneath. As the excessively old saying goes: “What goes up must come down.” It is often assumed that ‘down’ is the ground upon which everyone kicks their feet, walking to and fro. Not so. At the end, one will be sent even deeper, down further than they ever were loath to admit. For what truly holds the attention of a fear ridden mind as much as the concept of death?
This is what vexed my mind that day, the specter that so fully enthroned its face within my gaze. Not a banshee, cursed and screaming. Not a witch, cackling within her twisted hovel a-hexing. Nor even a howling ghost, replete with an incorporeal ambiguity. No, the powerful pastures of the worlds beyond harrowed my soul that day. One thing stood quite fully within my limited mental grasp: That I truly was nothing.
Very well, your curiosity must be piqued by now, your mind must be wondering, at the tip of its cortex: “What is it that brought upon this stupor of depression?” And for this I shall endeavor to explain to you. First, know this: You, just like myself, are lost to the cosmos, minuscule yet immense in the exponentially dichotomous universe.
On the day I lost my cognitive foundation, an ordinary pervasiveness kept in touch with my schedule. As for my career, I held the position of solemn gatekeeper between those who lived and those who had already passed on. I was a coroner, a well-kempt professional who took a clinical approach to my psyche. One must entreat themselves in such a way if they were to retain any sort of soul in my designation of work and solitude.
That facade however came crashing down as I was called to investigate the cause of death of one Gaius Anderson. He had been a subtle man, short, yet of large enough stature
that you wouldn’t forget that he was there. Gaius was a fan of the occult arts, a man given to strange ideas about crystals and the dimensions beyond our mortal plane. His much disturbed neighbors provided little help in ascertaining what might have transpired within his humble apartment, as they had all been somewhat disturbed by Gaius’s less than inspiring antics. Perhaps they had merely been more privy to psychic machinations pushing them away; away from that… THING…
As the sole coroner in our small town, and further, in a town nearly devoid of officers who upheld the law, I would be the sole witness and investigator sent to deal with this case. I then arrived on the scene, sliding my key dexterously into the keyhole. The door responded with ease, opening with but the smallest of creaks, the kind that wouldn’t have even dared to conjure up any visions of horror. Among the nearest unnatural adornments that curried favor from my eyes within the apartment were of the highest sordid appeal. A lamp, made out of porcelain in such a manner as to give the appearance of stitched flesh, and a rug with the emblazoned signatures of long lost languages, contorting my view as they paralleled myself and glided across the ground. Then, upon seeing these I looked over to the corner of the dimly, deeply lit room; the spot where I had been informed Gaius had met his fate.
Beyond a dirty leather couch, atop the horrid rug sat an altar of sorts. Not the excessive bloody thing that you would imagine, but a lectern, upon which sat a collection of books. Above the lectern on the wall hung two lanterns flanking a painting; a powerful image of a dour man that never seemed to stay still, always moving out of the corner of my eye. As I stepped up to the odd shrine, I looked down at the books, which read only half in English. The other tongue that had sidled its way up to the familiar letters seemed to corrugate the page in an unnatural, almost whimsical way. Incongruent lines and diagrams twisted their way around and through the pages, connecting on an extra axis by jumping across the paper. This is not however, what revealed the life altering inconsistency to me, but merely began my fascination with what lay before my eyes.
Further exploration of the collected foliums failed to reveal anything besides a further curiosity that sparked within my heart. I took the contents of this altar as a thing of naught, though something to be attended to later. Turning away, I continued my search through the apartment, investigating anything else that seemed to catch my attention. Indeed the house was full of curiosities that followed a similar fashion. Though, as I returned to my search, the designs and twisting patterns scribed within the tome I had scanned seemed to reveal themselves and stretch beyond my sight within all my surroundings.
These spirals and embittered zags of lines seemed to jump out at me, moving me this way and that, all throughout the apartment askew. The world seemed to lurch, and my mind was decidedly upside down in understanding and remembrance, casting a limited yet overarching view of the beyond. I could hardly stand upon my own two feet, yet as I stared down upon them they were as if blended together, an ellipse of sturdy manifold columns, unmoving yet omnipotent in location. I was not inebriated, nor was I sober as I spun around making sense of my own two feet; or were they three?
These dancing, glowing, physical lines entranced me back towards the painting, soullessly descending my eyes up towards the sordid figure who wordlessly gazed upon my torture. The dour, SOUR faced man now stared directly at me! PAST ME!! This solemn smirking man reached out of his prison cell of paint and pain, towards mine, the purgatory of his gaze. The wrenching grasp of a soft breeze culled my mind as he plunged his hand towards my chest, striking with the force of a runaway train, yet stopping abruptly quite unlike the same. His ghostly, corporeal hand hovered there, stealing my breath, my hopes, MY SOUL!
In the end, I realize, Gaius Anderson was never a dead man, he merely wished he was so. He lived on through that painting, playing his tricks and entreatments on unlucky passers by, immortalizing, destroying. As for myself, I never truly survived my encounter that day, and neither did you.
