In the begining there was fear. He felt his world was shaking. And no wonder. He was alone, blended with the dark and wasn’t willing to leave. He just waited for something. From the ashes of time the unspoken did rise and images did come. He lay absolutley still and waited to calm himself. As he breathed in and out the images moved back and forth like Poe’s pendulum. There were men, and blood, and silence and it was all true somehow. He felt it on his skin and on the tip of his tongue but didn’t move.
Stories were sawn, shapes spilled over, masking one another, taking new shapes, changing his grip to reality as they melted into thin air.
He was a lonely bastard. Maybe that was all. He felt reconciled and at ease with all his fears. He drowned into his own mind, constantly moving and witnessing all its tricks. He relished on the thinness of memories, on the delicacy of the design wich filled the darkness like so many ghosts.
He got drunk with it but the nights were all the more frightening. All the sounds felt unfamiliar, felt really close like he was in their midst. So he feed the night with insomnia and fear and it all went on.
Sometimes he lit the spotlight or the radio. Other times he hid a knife under the pillow just to feel safe. There were times when even the music couldn’t make the fear fade away.
One night it got worse. He called for a shape, the shape of a woman to fill the night. So she did. She dug deep into his mind, from all its secret drawers it put together a shape that was both atractive and repulsive. Fear filled the air, made her dark hair float as if blown by the wind. The locks grew closer and closer, weawing a nest, enveloping him until it was all dark and speachless.
It was the fear wich made him different in the morning, reluctant to anything that might make him tremble on the edge, on the verge of loosing his mind.
Nothing seemed to concern him anymore. He lost touch with familiar things like the weather report, politics or sports. He lived in a closed world. He seldom left that magic ring. Outside was unsafe but he left nevertheless. He felt restless. He needed to move. So he took long walks, randm buses that took him away in distant corners of the city. He always seemed to find the way home just as, he thought, he could always leave the darkness. But, could he ?