A Spectre of Brick and Mortar

Whilst I wandered, my feet misty and disconnected from my lofty organ, through the fog-licked stone sidewalks of this metropolis at this unhallowed hour, swathed in the somber wool of my traveling coat, which was steeped in the musk of factories and dampened by the exhalations of the Thames, I felt a most peculiar disquiet, slithering about through my person in the most unpleasant of ways. It was a presentiment; a foreshadowing; a specter of some kind lurking betwixt the rational and the instinctual that caused a shiver from the toe to the top as the skin rose in swarths, and it was most chilling to be in such agitation in a dreary and misty night like this.

The moon was far gone at this point; it could only be seen in the few hours between dessert and lights-out, and its zenith had already wallowed until now, halfway into the witching hour, casting its shedding into a bandage of dark storm-clouds, illuminating half the sky and half the sky only. It was about to descend below the horizon beyond, and it had not called upon its successor to be ready for its crown.

The people had no such regard for time and weariness: as the moon slowly but eagerly retired to its homeland, its light was replaced – nay, overshone – by the electric lights that flooded out of polished glass windows. Vehicles whizzed by at monstrous speeds beside the flapping straps of my coat, not in eager expectation like the moon but in benumbed automation, looking for its next passenger before the current had left.

The carnage they reared up readily fueled my aversion; the reek of the gas invaded the fine hairs of my nostrils, the roaring hum left my ears numb, the puff of smoke clouded my already-befuddled eyes, and most dreadfully, its speed seemed to slam into me physically, jerking my person forward a few steps, forcing my legs to regain my body from my lurching steps.

As I recovered from one such encounter, having daintily picked up and retied my straps for the third time, my sight slipped up from the interlacing bricks paved under my black leather soles to the top of the very building that had shone sunlight vehemently in my face at noon. My presentiment, my foreshadowing, and my specter reared up, bulking and balking from the sight as my veins rushed to calm these unquiet spirits, my ears blurred their clamor lest they escape from my ear canals, my eyes blackened to shield them from the horror and my feet stumbled to take me no closer to the forsworn monument.

The lights bellowing from the glass windows jabbed ferociously at my eyes and mind; they were brighter than the sun, I swore they were, and they taunted me. This is not your realm, they mocked, this is not where you belong. You are utterly lost here, and you are forsaken.

And I agreed with my body and soul. This was no mere edifice of brick and mortar constructed for the remembrance of a great cause; it was a goliath of copper-stink and back-stabbing liars, a zoo of the most unkempt and ambitious parodies of the noble human nature; this was not where I belonged, this was not where I could thrive.

The stink! Ah, when had it come, and what or who caused it? A most rotten stench of pure desecration arose …

Then – there – amidst the chaos of light and darkness and confusion and repugnance, a silhouette detached itself from misty darkness. It did not manifest itself in the flesh; I could still see my hated enemy through it. It was clad in a woolen coat too stiff, a tie too black, trousers too pinched and ironed, and its jumper was ripped, showing too much yarn off the garment than on; it moved with a motion too jerky, its steps too out-of-sync, its head too wobbly, and its arms spread too wide.

His eyes and mine met (if it had eyes – for God help me, I could not perceive them), and the premonition that had coiled in my gut struck like an adder seeing mice. The air thickened with the scent of oil, ozone, and something fouler that I could not and would not try to ever discern.

Reason abandoned me. I fled, my coat flapping like the wings of a wounded crow, my boots thundering on the sidewalk, the laughter of that thing (or was it the wind?) nipping at my heels. The city itself seemed to contort—alleyways yawned where there none had been, streetlamps bent like beckoning fingers.

Only when I collapsed in my mold-encrusted sanctuary of a rental house did I dare to look back. The building no longer loomed towards me, its lance too far away to hurt. But etched against the moon’s corpse-pale sliver, breathing rattling breaths near its last, the silhouette of the figure stood sentinel.