This Darkness Mine Read Online Free PDF Page B

colleague once sat or stood, there’s nothing left but the open Package. Whatever is in there, it eats everything you are. Heart, body, soul and credit history. No trace is left and the memory soon fades.
    The Packages sit in Reception. Hissing, burping, peeling boxes. Occasionally, rustling, overtaken by jumping fits as evening draws in.
    No-one has been near them and this is pissing them off.
    They are here for a reason, a purpose.
    People are not needed here.
    Need to make them redundant.
    Ex-employees.
    Ex-people.
    Ex-mortis.
    The boxes stutter and bang about, shrieking cardboard zoos. Tantrum fluid trails running down their sides, making the uneven strips of brown tape lose their adhesion, come unstuck.
    The Receptionists run for it, for the sliding doors. The boxes burst, splattering creamy sewage everywhere. It goes slipping down over everything, big teeth eat through what’s left alive, spasm spurts, ejaculation screams. Bleeding bareness melts away, evaporating and the hard white lips of air conditioning slits drink it all in. Reception stands empty but for the blood-soaked shoes of the Receptionists.
    They didn’t make it.
    We can all go home now.
    ****** 
    The season we’re in is one of dying. The sere leaves hanging out the office window turn brown, yellow and gold. Their edges are curling, vegetable skins wrinkling into resemblances of witches and warlocks. The wind strikes and snatches them away and I feel like crying. Winter is less a season, more a wilderness between autumn and spring. A fallow emptiness peopled by vague impressions of blood loss and arcane patterns painted on glass in the silvers of cold. Autumn is the disillusion before death, the wearing away of hope, that’s why America calls it the Fall. It is in the rhythm of the seasons and winter is where it all will come to an end. And it’s only at this time of year that I can sleep well, well, a bit better.
     
    I’m in a limestone square laid out beneath swirling gasoline streaks of sky. The air is thick with the swamp fever tang of an oncoming storm. I need shelter and I need it now but there are no doors, windows or recessed spaces that I can see, only this agoraphobic desolation that is both utter and complete. Sheer walls that lead to gravity-bending cones of leaden density. Opaque wings rearing from what should be diagrams of architecture but instead are architecture itself. The blandness, the flatness disturbs the blind worm gnawing at the root of my soul. The cluttered warehouse of my consciousness upheaves, tumbling its contents, sending them to scatter and then crawl, wounded, into corrugated corners.
    There, I feel them suckling at the holes that harm done.
    So many years of my life spent seeking the exit, blindly fumbling my way through auditorium space, stumbling on seats, barking my shins, dodging and diving, getting myself away from the ever-vigilant penlights of the usherettes and here I am, wanting to get inside.
     
    The red numbers, in my head, bleed heavily, scarring the sky, wounding the city. People walk on by with heavy red bursts for eyes, cauterising, rising in scabrous relief, I see the calculations spell themselves out as I walk into work this morning. The sums that I’ve corrected are there. The erroneous financial records I’ve solved. We are long past the age of blood-soiled altars, cowled monk robes and vaulted arcane chambers. The tools are different these days and so much more cosmically hellish they make the streets bubble with cancerous boils that spit and cough like perverted old hags.
    ****** 
    It is called the Exit Interview.
    That is what is happening to me right now.
    You can see the desire to inflict, abuse and dismember crawling about underneath the settled, somnambulant faces of the Panel before me, the way their eyes don’t meet with mine, don’t understand me, not wanting to.
    Outside, sick ecstasy washes through the building as the tannoy announces that I will be going soon. Feet beat out a