Apocalypse of Jude

The tide is sucking its force back over the rocks in the false bay. The mountains are already gathering a distant haze of dark cloud, but the lone mountain, like a Himavant, remains in shadow, its river sunken, waiting for rain, its dense overgrowth crouched in silence and limp leaves. Mae ascends the stairs that climb the outside wall of an apartment washed Mediterranean white and bought from one in this town who sold it to her father.

Her morning walk, an act she is still refusing to admit to herself is an act of mourning for Caul, has failed to rid her of the want of excessive food gripping her. Yet the growing glint of a freshly uncovered spirit is beginning to yearn for her to fight back the desire of the flesh to gorge itself, and seek, despite the fearful stench of darkness, what lies beyond the veil she needs to go. On the platform of her upper-floor door, she breathes deep for courage. But passing through the door which opens into the kitchen, the stronger spirit overpowers. Her restraint gives way and she moves to open the freezer.

She is eating ice cream quite frantically, feeling the satisfaction of her flesh being welded together with the desire of her fear. Then a tearing guilt feeling forces its way into her consciousness, making her action repugnant to her. She forces the tub down onto the table, and locks her arms over the sink, the heaves of her sobs interspersed with the heaves of her stomach.

With her skin clammy and cold, and water swilling her mouth to wash out the alkaline taste, she begins the caustic process of closing the emotional gate and not allowing a thought to run through her.

Undressing herself, she moves determined now, into circling around her studio apartment. At the moment of entering an entranced peace, however, the loathsome darkness that smothers her in fear presses in like a blanket round her. But today, in the curtained morning of her small space, the will of her spirit within her is too powerful even for her fear to control, and making use of her entire soul, a long repressed vision thrusts itself through her molten surface.

{A man of incredible beauty is standing before her bed in the light of a shining shawl. He beckons her to rise from her bed and come to him. She does so, held in rapture by his beautiful features, telling herself that this is what she has been searching for and waiting for all her life. But as he touches her, a darkness so hideous unveils itself before her. It hides his face as he removes her clothes to rape her on her marriage bed. As he deposits his seed in her, she feels her flesh become entwined and one with his seed’s spirit. The uniting opens up an abyss in her soul that begins swallowing her into its night, so that ultimately she will become totally possessed by this spirit unless she escapes it.}.

She collapses from the force of the remembered dream, onto her bed. The strength of the darkness that has enveloped her, concealing her from this remembrance for more than four months by entwining itself to her bulimic weakness every time she tried to remember what happened, is broken. Lying there, she remembers waking up that Easter Sunday, lying naked and bruised, only to stand before her bell jar mirror haunted with a confused shame, before starting to circle in the small open area of a bedroom that once was hers. She remembers the mirror capturing her image and refusing each time she looked at it to offer up any image but the raped figure she first saw. Closing her eyes, but gingerly raising her head, she looks in the direction of the mirror she could not leave behind when she moved. Feeling it must be the thousandth and first time she has looked towards it in hope of a refreshed image, she opens her eyes. She sees squinting back at her, a naked girl lying with gingerly raised head. Exhausted, with relief now cradling her where darkness once groped her, she crawls her way under her duvet and gives way to a curled up sleep.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 101