Descent Into Darkness
written by: David C Russell
My short-term memory is of the past couple of days. It begins on a Monday evening, concluding in the bowels of darkness this Wednesday. It begins with scolding my two twin sons at home as we finish a dinner of something with meatballs.
Library
Gloaming is occurring outside the walls of this six-story, spacious, unquestionably silent public library. The hum from the old fluorescent lights has steadily intensified in volume; the sun moved further westward. Intensity of darkness peaks, or seems to peak, over the next half hour.
The aisles feel like a corn maze in the midst of summer. Aluminum shelves stacked with piles of books are on either side of me as I roam through this section of the possibly forbidden.
Each title and what it conveys seems to touch my sides, my hands, my legs, and my entire musculoskeletal system as I gaze at them in passing. Love betrayed, love accepted, emotions toyed with, moans and cursing, honeymoons and separations. These feel like hands reaching out to pull at me, pull me in, ultimately inducing suffocation.
A sensory overload threatens to do me in. Is this my reward for spending hours of research on comparing and contrasting the effects of spirituality and pornography on the human person?
What have I left behind to now confront? This confusion, disorder, non-physical harassment by the damned?
Taunts by the bedeviled are heard as I pass them. Dimming vision induces partial blindness. The silence and hum of the lights increase. My shortness of breath has brought on acute anxiety.
I feel my entire body, mind, soul, have become incurably dirty. This genre of eroticism seduces and now threatens to overdo any preexisting calm, order, or derived conclusion.
I then hear a group of children sing a Spiritual, “Jesus Loves Me.” As the words offer another sensation, a segment of the damned starts to approach me. These are historically known academics, scientists, agnostics, and devout atheists. They hold not shovels, rakes, pitch-forks, knives, or stilettos, but voices of allegation, accusation, and indictment. The volumes of the two opposing collectives are equal but increase to match one another. Altogether, the damned peel in sarcastic laughter to challenge the whole idea that a Messiah would bother with anyone whatsoever.
In minutes, I am surrounded by four gorgeous female demoniacs. To the eye, they are quite attractive, the sound of their voices inviting and seductive. One takes both my hands in hers.
“Oh, hush, audience of worshippers and singers alike. I am in charge of this ceremony and claim this sinner for myself and feminine demons! Altogether, they repeatedly say, “Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.” I feel their closeness within and their pushing me away from without.
Noticing my anxiety, quietly with a continual soft, seductive moan in my ear, she medicinally, gradually induces me into a state likened to that derived from Melatonin. Her voice, like all heard here, is a mélange of gentle, evil, youth, incompetence, seductive, and dominating.
Her words to me welcome, decisively kroon, even pipe,
“Welcome to hell! You have descended to me in darkness,” she says, adding, “I will be your companion in darkness this night, tomorrow, always and forever.”
As she speaks, her Midwest accent is noted more, she rubs my forearm in teasing fashion. Her soft moans are mingled with soft cries of fear and anguish. Her hands are a mixture of giving, grabbing, massaging, and clawing. The other voices are soon turned on each other with shouting, yelling, cursing, screaming, and sobbing in a wail-like fashion. This goes on, and on, and on, and on.
The End
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