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Summons (an actual short story)
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Summons (an actual short story) |
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majnu
since 2002-10-13
Posts 1088SF Bay Area |
The pale moonlight of a full moon shone down on the deserted shopping center. Barren, seemingly dead, but only asleep the modern marketplace and office space complex was eerie. The wind was blowing in from the bay, thirty-five or forty miles away – a constant chilling wind. It rustled the leaves of the willows which were weeping already, causing a strange noise made of flow and obstruction to arise and obscure any subtle sound that human ears might have hoped to hear. Parking lines, marking the proper spaces, glowed like strangely uniform snail trails in the pale wash of the night’s daughter. The willows were weeping for his fate, though he did not know it. They passed along warning in the strange shadows they threw. One looked like a serrated dagger; another looked like a pointed cane – those are strange shapes for trees’ shadows to take. Whispering in their mourning as so many funeral goers, the trees spoke of the future as if it were past. Unfortunately, their words were obscured by their own leaves rustling. Thus they could not lay before him the mind of the man who walked in the lamp lights with a bustling pace. Always aware was his motto, but mottos are just words and only reputations built by action have meaning. He was often unaware, and perhaps even rarely awake, so always aware was a farce. Blindness does not necessarily result in unawareness, but lack of awareness can be said to be blindness, of a sort. Such was his blindness; he was blind to the shadows at his feet, he was blind to the fact that there was a horizontally placed nylon sheath attached to the bustling man’s belt, and he was blind to the singular, sudden, and solitary glint of metal from that sheath. He was blind alright, always blind. A cat meowed somewhere to his right. It looked black, but then in the strange light of that night, everything unwhite looked black. He looked along the wall to his right, to where the sound had come from. A flash of reflective eyes was all he saw surrounded by the indiscernible structure of a bush. Against the wall he stood, under the awning – there was no light but the moon’s shining upon him. She had long been westering, and the slant of the light was enough to illumine his face. A sharp nose and hard jaw cast shadows on his left side; his deep-set eyes had shadows upon them. A black hat crowned it all. The parking spaces were in front of him, and a divider of concrete and dirt contained the ineffectually helpful trees. The parking lot turned to the left, and along the far left was the footpath and the lamps which lit the way of the bustling man. The bustling man and the other were dressed the same – dark suits, dark hats, and dark ties on blindingly white shirts; they looked like something out of Hoover’s FBI. In fact they even represented a type of government agency, but both of them were far more powerful than two petty federal agents. He, who was unaware, finally became aware, of the bustling footsteps coming his way. Not a moment to soon either, for the bustling man seemed to have closed the last hundred feet in the time the now wary man had blinked. The bustling had stopped barely two feet from the other, and leaned forward so that their hats nearly touched. “Belial,” said the man who bustled but now was still, and he nodded. “Moloch,” replied the wary man, he too nodded, but did so nervously. Each one’s black eyes looked directly into the others. Belial’s looked searchingly, as if trying to read information and Moloch’s simply contemplated, albeit far more coldly than any human’s possibly could. They stood there, looking only, for some time. Clouds gathered, hiding the moon in the west, and the hills and the mountain in the east. The lamps on the left of Belial still shone their sickly tribute to the night, but they gave little light near the two. Above them, however, was an expanse of openness and in Heaven there was no husbandry – its lights shone brightly down on the pair; had anyone seen them it would have seemed that there were two actors out on an open stage under untraceable lights. The trees were silent then, both with the pictures and their words. No more did the wind blow near them, although it was present in the area. Elsewhere shutters battered the walls to which they were attached, branches played erratic beats on windows, and dogs howled their displeasure at the hurricanoes. Suddenly both reached into his own coat with his right hand. There the hands lingered, out of sight, and then withdrew to reveal Belial pointing something at Moloch; the latter holding something inches away from Belial’s face. Moloch depressed his thumb and there was a click, a spark, a flash, and then the whoosh of igniting gas. Then there was silence. Belial took a long pull on his cigarette and sighed. “Well then old chap, it’s done for now,” he began. “And, if I do say so myself, I did a great job. The rhythm of the world was changed that day, eh?” “Sure it did,” replied Moloch. “Just like it was supposed to.” “Aye, but my work was singularly relevant; ‘twas I who swayed all the high ones.” “Eloquent as usual old man, but your words fall on ears who know you too well to be taken.” “Taken by what? I speak only the truth!” “Regardless,” Moloch said with a snort. “B.B. sent me up to fetch you. Rumour has it that the boss is not pleased with the result.” “Unpleased? Unhappy! He should commend me. The fools are at it again. Think of all that I caused!” “But it was not you alone! And his will is still in effect, despite your efforts. The Boss is more than unpleased. He is angry. Now let us go.” Moloch turned and began walking to Belial’s right – down the path that the formerly intrusive feline had disappeared; he did not look back. Belial watched the other’s back, and then, hesitantly turning, he raised one foot, placed it forward, lifted the other, and followed. The hole in the clouds moved with them as they walked and the lights died quickly before Moloch past. One behind the other went, on and on till at last they reached the end. There before a glowing door in a chink link fence each stood. The stars had meanwhile fled their perches and above the duo a dearth of light lay heavy. Stepping forward, his lips moving quickly, Moloch coaxed the door to open slowly. Blanching faster than the light was revealed Belial suddenly reached inside his coat for hard steel of his own. But Moloch’s hand found his belt, and attacker attacked once again missed the glint as the blade slid into his throat. The gurgling of a brook bubbling out of stone, as a body bequeathed its soul to the luminous door, gave Moloch a pleasant chill. A slight tremor and the body was part of the concrete earlier filled. Beats, intertwined and convolved, a cacophony released, as the standing man bustled home to tea. -majnu -------------------------------------- Timid thoughts be not afraid. I am a Poet. [This message has been edited by majnu (08-03-2003 02:13 AM).] |
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| © Copyright 2003 Zaheer Abbas Ali - All Rights Reserved | |||
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Match Member
since 2002-07-01
Posts 286Canada Edmonton |
I liked this  I wear my crown of thorns |
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