#scareus

OCTOBER

01. SEND IN YOUR PERFECT WHATEVER. We love responses, and we love submissions. Please, make this page pretty. 

02. HALLOWEEN. We want to see writing that’ll keep us up at night. We want to see art that’ll make us shiver. We want to see a film that will be the next Scream. We want to hear music that makes us keep on a night light.

      Dong ding ding dong

            A cacophony of chimes begin the morning.

            Cuck-ooo

            A small whisper ends the night.

            You do not speak much to customers, and you do not share glances with strangers. They are foolish, squishy, unpredictable beings, who confused you and made a mess. How lovely the tick tick tick of the clock sends you through the passage of time, without any confusion or disorder.

            Of the clocks that tell the time of day, your favorite is ironically the one that does not speak. Silently it gazes upon its small brethren, tall and stolid like a silent soldier. You feel a special sort of kinship with its grey visage, how it does not speak and therefore does not need any tuning. If only the other clocks can emulate this great paragon of chronism, its independence to go on displaying the time for all eternity without necessitating the flawed touch of man.

            You dust the great grandfather clock every other Tuesday. Unfortunately dust is one thing you still cannot control.

            On this Tuesday, much like any other, you clean it with a blue rag soaked in warm water.

            On the next Wednesday, you find traces of white dust scattered around the clocks. You break the schedule and treat the day like another Tuesday, running over all the clocks with the blue rag.

            On Thursday the dust is back. Upon close inspection, you find a small insect wing cached inside the heart of a cuckoo clock. You use a pair of tweezers to dispose of it, as you heard that touching the wings of butterflies causes blindness. You go buy some mothballs to spread around your clocks.

            Dong ding di—EEEEE---dondondon

            A clock sounds in the hall at two in the morning.

            You scatter more mothballs around the rooms, but the moths do not take any heed. In fact, they seem to be becoming braver, fluttering without care or whim, landing upon all your clocks and spreading their awful white dust upon the shelves and landing upon your sleeping nose.

            You bear it for a week. Then, you break down and buy pesticide, scattering the foul liquid everywhere to eradicate the vermin.

            The fumes begin to make you very, very dizzy. In your madness, you stare up at the grandfather clock. The grandfather clock does not move, does not speak; he only passes judgment upon your foolish actions, looking at your despair with disdain and mild pity.

            You fling the bucket of pesticide at it, and it goes Clang ker-BANG, opening up like a ribcabe. Out from the depths flutter thousands of tiny white moths, scattering their dust across the room and your eyes and your nose and your mouth.

            The grandfather clock rocks, and falls.

            You really ought to run right now.

            Well, to be fair you really ought to run every day of your life, because they come after you. Monstrous creatures with power over fire and talons sharper than crags. With their harsh screeching voices and stampeding legs they drive you from one alley to another, across centuries and lifetimes. Cuts across your arms and face sting in the salt water of the ocean.

            You have nothing else to do but wander, and wander you do under the forgiving white light that erases the pain for a while. From encampment to encampment, hiding in forests and, when the forests are gone, deep into the forests of brick and mortar, which create a facsimile forest from the absence of trees.

            But you grow old—yes, so very old, from the dirt in your bones the old earth calls you to return to its grasp, to lay down your tired head and sleep forever, covered by the mist and snow.

            You quickly abandon that notion, which insinuates itself each night as you drift from this world back to your home world, somewhere kinder, safe from the searing yellow eye. You abandon it because you cannot truly return, any more than you can turn back the course of time or tell the waves to recede from the shore.  You abandon it like the world abandons you every morning, and continue on.

            Then, finally, as if the strings of fate have been pulling you towards him all this time, you chance upon a Cheery Gentelman in the street. You try to retreat, recede like a wave into the heart of the ocean, but there is something in his not-right eye and something about his not-right smile that keeps you transfixed on him.

            “Hello,” he says, to the air rather than to you. “Lovely evening we’re having, aren’t we?”

            You grunt in reply.

            “And a prime time to shop for real estate. Now, judging from your generous size, you’ll be wanting something nice and spacey, plenty of room to stay out of sight.”

            You look up. The Cheery Gentelman widens his not-right smile and points towards the part of the sky where there are no stars. “See that over there?” You look, squinting your eyes until they blur the black and blue of your vision. “There.”

            A white moth, with wings soft as dust, flutters. You stare off and begin to chase it, as it flutters underground.

            You close the night to an audience of three. You stand there and sing your heart out.            

            You open another show to an empty theatre. You stand there and sing your heart out.

            You see the theatre close before the show ends. There’s nothing more to sing.

            You take the long way home. There’s nothing much waiting for you in that empty house. You walk on the streets as dry as the desert, staring down at the pavement so unlike the floor of the stage. How hollow your steps sound, how purposeless and empty each step feels in the unchoreographed chaos.

            At once you pass a Cheery Gentelman, selling his wares on the banks of the canal. A brown suitcase is opened to display porcelain figurines with terrified faces, and the pelts of mysterious creatures, speckled and matted.

            “Anything catch your fancy?” He asks you.

            You look at the baubles with the eye of an antique dealer. “What do you have here?”

            “Dreams. Desires. Nightmares and whims.”

            “Books?”             “By the thousands.”

            You look at the small suitcase. “I don’t see any.”

            The Cheery Gentelman smiles and reaches down into the deepest crevasses of the bag. His gnarled hand emerges holding a bound leather book.

            “Would this interest you?”

            You take it in his hands, thinking too late that he may have a ‘you touch it you by it’ policy. “What is it?”             “A libretto. You are an actress, are you not?”

            “Yes…” you mutter, flipping through the musty pages. Strange symbols jumped out of the pages, strange hieroglyphics like the runes you used to make up when you were young. “What language is it in?”

            But the Cheery Gentelman has already left.

            At home you read a few pages before you go to bed, even though the book is one for looking and not one for reading. As your eyes pass across the words you nod off to sleep, nostalgic for the glorious days when you were adored.

            You go to rehearsal the next day, back to the closed theatre though you don’t know why. You climb in through a window and walk on stage once more. Then the images stir inside your head, the oldest play ever written and the oldest memories written down on paper.

            It stirs a faint piece of music inside your head, trills and variations of a distant Passacaglia. Do you remember?

            Of course you don’t.

            A monstrous sound fills your ears. It would be sonorous, but the sheer volume of it explodes your eardrums. You scream and run blindly, clawing for the walls, clawing for a pen.

            You stumble into your dressing room, and in your confusion you break through your mirrors to a passage underground.