TEMPLE HQ
THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
9-27-2022
“Potential.” Solomon said, turning the card over, rain sheeting curtains upon the city outside, alive despite us.
“When I show this - it’s over. The pause.”
He threw the card across, letting it settle face-up on the carpet.
“Life is so fragile. Did you hear the one about the man who fell dead on the golf course?”
“No.”
Solomon gave the cheshire smile, turning to me. “I don’t have a joke. I just think it’s fitting.”
Outside, Morningstar pulled the girl by the shadow of his proletarian gait. The gate and the interior door part, as Solomon beckons, the incandescent light of the manor welcoming us into wicked lamplight. Into the subbasement, Solomon stiff behind us like a golem, his gait restricted by obligation, his dress more formal than any of ours.
“Where did you find her?” Solomon said.
“Nearby. Hour or two away.” Morningstar said, jerking her shoulder, massaging some life out of the half-dead.
“Is she on something?”
“Probably. I don’t know. Covered in track marks. You’re welcome to check.”
“No. I don’t need to. Good. Good. Did anyone call Father Milk?” Solomon fidgeted - cracks appearing - he never showed himself in nerves except in times like this, times when he insisted on overdressing against the rest of us.
“You’re welcome to.” Morningstar said. “None of us have the number he answers.”
“Of course, of course. Can you - no. I will. Excuse me.” Solomon left us, retreating upstairs while we waited. The girl wobbled, soaked hoodie and sweatpants, half-lidded eyes fixing blurrily on all of us in loping swathes.
“You’re safe now.” Dungburner said, hand on her shoulder.
“She’s dead.” I said, turning around.
“Safe.” He said, a laughing glint at me.
“Shut up.” I said.
“Get her in the baths.” Solomon said, directing the help adjoining him in descent of the staircase, waving her to scurry. “Now.” he stopped, looking over Dungburner and I. Stiff, coiled, he forced a smile. “We wait.”
Father Milk arrived, to usher us from the waiting room into the antechamber, a silent shaken-head handshake and acknowledge of his dear comrades. Leaving him in the lobby, we went first and in the antechamber, each of us changed, stripping with all the sensuality of a lockerroom (anything that could bring life to our deadened nerves would come later), into the silk clothes of the extreme, the perpetually lit marble-white of the circular temple room awaiting us. On a signal, the help emerged, half-shoving, half assisting, the girl in emerging in a cotton bathrobe, timidity beginning to crack sobriety through her haze. The air felt pregnant, not an imagination, but a scene. Something primordial to our imaginations, stamped into us by velvet-gloved hands in the earliest recesses of our minds, a template for something to come, as though our whole lives were leading up to these early morning transactions in the cold LED light of Solomon’s temple. Such is the nature of our myths - the same hands which gave to Solomon all he calls his own. A fortune like his is never kept, and certainly not by a man like him, but accounted for. He flits about his townhome like a butler whose master is perpetually out of town, a precision taken to accounts solely for he knows that those accounts, as much as they may be in his name and pass through his hands, will never belong to him. Solomon built this temple beneath a monument to the Mammon of others, and so too, goes his life - constrained like a body made of raw clay without the breath, mere dust of a golem set up by the same velvet-gloved authority which granted us the knowledge we cherish at a time like this. His freedom - his breath - was the price paid, and so, he gets to drink, little sips of wine and splendor at the behest of his benefactors, that he should give himself wholly, in name and body, to men like Father Milk - such is the genius of Solomon, not for his intellect, but for his emptiness, for a life lived in perpetual seance to higher powers that even at the moment of death, he will never understand the depth of their reach, into him, or beyond him - enthralled, to orders so outer to all common conceptions, that to the rabble, it almost looks like freedom.
Father Milk entered a bit later, red robed with red commedia mask of a minotaur pulled over his head. Wide stance, impossible limber for a man of his age, making wide, almost leaping steps, more side to side than forward, in circuits towards the girl.
“I.” He said, a shouted whisper through the mask, as she dimly enacted her role - enough will at least to play the part set out for her, though by hands clothed in leather not velvet, a destiny as defined as the one set for us.
“I.” He said, another leap forward and almost upon her now, a grasping hand tearing at the robe. She yelled, reflexive, posed so perfectly pre-raphaelite that it was almost pornographic.
Another pair of breaths. He wobbled back and forth, as she clutched a hand over the fabric, timid, fearful. Like all the devils of the dark in early childhood, she only had a dim consciousness, one which blurred all terrors into something abstract and total, so that her situation become an all-consuming Hell which groped towards her in an unknowable forest.
“I.” Another leap and a claw, fabric rent from her arms and the whole bathrobe fell in two pieces to her ankles. She tripped, falling back, legs kicking behind her. Now forward, almost tripping, stumbling to stand, wheel around -
“I.” and his hand arched in a spider-like grasping her forehead, squeezing her temples. She arched back as he leaned forward, until they made a perfect bent-back shape, him as far hunched as she could almost-fall in the thrall of it, mouth gaping beyond reason as through the maw, a shriek let out across time, a position they held in perfect, unbreathing stillness. She screamed emptily, her mouth a void, the sound coming from everywhere at once - a shriek of all ages. In her body, an old woman bent back and gripped, as the descent begins, as each scream echoes, she ages up long past a natural lifespan in seconds, each day still captured like frames of a film, a unique scream for each - every cell of every moment across the time of a life crying in sin against the world. The echoes of the woman, each ghost accumulating and feeding back, an ecstasy of all the evil the flesh is capable of, that singular will of sin - to inflict pain in equal degree that it can experience it, to become a fully hollow conduit of pain. In perpetual seance of the Hell of our wicked bodies after exile, the woman regresses still. Each cell of each moment stressed to its utmost - organisms too, regress, like a teratoma, from the uppermost and downwards - from adulthood, to adolescence, to childhood an entire history of totalizing stress until dust and the prebirth filth, the womb absent and so -
Silence as blue light fills the room.
Darkness.
The room opens back to awareness - none of us knew how long we were gone. Father Milk is sobbing, mask on the floor beside him, where the woman once lay - now a stone death mask, the woman frozen in an inhumanely intense scream, clutched in his bony hands - the sin preserved, stone as mute as our dust, flesh mockingly wicked, all life gone, all breath gone.
“Do you want it delivered?” Solomon said.
“Yes. Yes. Of course. Tomorrow, have it sent to my parsonage, the gallery, just - leave me. As always. Leave me. I need some time. I need to heal the soul i failed to save. God forgive her. God forgive this wretched birth.”