An Unfinished Story called: "The Night, The Howling of the Wolves and the City that Trembled."
Current mood: angsty
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural
In the binding, cloistral hush, the overpowering silence of the panelled narthex, stood a tall, blond man, who wore a long, coal-black overcoat as tatterdemalion as an ancient, unraveling threadbare rug; his broad, black woolen back to the endless rows of overturned oaken pews immediately behind him in the ancient stone cathedral, arrayed around him, encircling him like a kaleidoscopic, holy corona (composed of thousands of particles of geometric, prismatic light)-the light of sunlight passing through the tapestried, filleted stained glass windows with their Christian mediaeval saintly scenes-he stood, and he prayed; prayed in German and wept, for ominousness had recently instilled and overhung the city, crept in like a thief: craven, sneaky and surreptitious and imbued, inundated all it's inhabitants-all 248, 000 of them-with dread: the dread of death. No prayer, no love of nor faith in Jesus could ever completely remove that dread and that's why Hans Olbermann wept, for he knew that, and his lack of faith, the impossibility and hopelessness of the hour, and the certainty of the coming municipal apocalypse; these shook him and he felt made of fear: a small, cowering child, cringing from, hiding from his abusive father's disciplinary blows-not a great, muscular, fearless, stalwart, fully-grown, confident man, the way he had thought of himself all his life.
All around his particular city, in the dozens of Germanic conurbations and metropolises that surrounded it, lay the ruins of civilization: great, proud, ancient cities that had stood unchallenged for a thousand years, were now little more than immense hills of rubbish, charnel and rubble, all of which, despite being only a few months dead, seemed unearthed from a far and bygone age: more like Egyptian, Greek or Roman ruins thousands of years old and millennially deserted, not lately crushed by enemies who seemed, in their fantastic, merciless fury, much worse than the Devil or God; these were German cities, German; destroyed utterly by British and American aerial forces , whose numbers ranged in the high hundreds or thousands. Vast armadas composed of more than a thousand Allied warplanes and bombers pounded the cities like an unrelenting steel flail of epic massiveness, until the ground trembled , split open and swallowed the cities-inhabitants and all-vomiting only the leavings of society, ghosts and skeletons of once-proud edifices and citadels and parks and compounds and enclosures; and vomiting forth also, mere crumpled, maligned, defiled and hideously mangled, ensanguined shadows of human life. In their thousands and hundreds of thousands did the Anglo-Americans slaughter them, reducing them to ash and their songs to dirges, to silence-eternal, abiding silence. Only tombs stodd where once were cities; tombs and graves marked by congeries of stony rubble, over which abode a constant, haunting rush of wind, whose lamenting tones and howling. bereaved-sounding shrieks scoured the land, masking all sounds of happiness (like that of birds chirping) not that there were many, certainly. Germany had become an immense necropolis cloyingly redolent with the grotesque stench of conflagration, desolation and death: the olfactory yet physical aftermath of saturation bombing. Hans saw the decrepit, worm-eaten, holey doors of the fetid, abase, insulting mausoleum opening wide, welcoming him, beckoning him into it's foul, eternal, unlightable, malodorous darkness and dankness: the caliginous oceans sealed within the mammoth, unlit, tenebrous, bottomless crypt; aye, he saw that opening even now, even while standing where he now stood-in this clean, light, wholesome, holy, invincible, bright, comforting place, in front of, looking at all those stained glass, saintly kaleidoscopic panels; panels of heartening, religious, faith-ridden scenes that afforded him small comfort-no comfort.
No comments:
Post a Comment