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damned_lounge2007-10-25 08:18 pm
theladyfeylene.livejournal.com) wrote in damned_lounge2007-10-25 08:18 pm
Entry tags:
Oktoberfest '07 Entry, Poison In My Bloodstream, Poison In My Soul by Fey
Title: Poison In My Bloodstream, Poison In My Soul
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theladyfeylene
Word Count: 2243
Rating: R
Character(s): Alec 'Jack' Doyle, Martin Landel
Summary: Not even Jack knew the true gruesome visage of Landel's Institute. He knew its heart was rotted, but the foul depths were hidden from human eyes....
Notes (if applicable): Um. Yeah. Fessing up, here and now, that I really don't know if the route I chose to take works or not. Also, totally not canon compliant.Yeah, I pretty much failed at the whole 'writing other people's characters' thing, but for me, writing someone else's character is like wearing their underwear.
When a man spent enough time in a place - worked there, sweated there, bled there, loved there, lived there and cried there - he could feel it. He was in tune with it, knew it in a way most people knew other human beings. Places, most people didn’t realize, had heart and soul.
Even if sometimes that heart and soul was rotten.
Jack - who refused to call himself Alec anymore - didn’t need to see where he was going. Not here. His eyes were closed as he counted steps in the same breath as he counted the beat of the music that poured out of his MP3 player.
The halls were empty. Eerily empty, considering the sun was sinking below the horizon. It was a between time, when Jack felt as though the institute was his and his alone. Not that he particularly wanted it. But what man didn’t enjoy a sense of solitary and unshared power?
Moving like a ghost through the sterile halls, Jack hummed under his breath. He felt the building thrumming under his feet, electricity and water and other powers pulsing through the walls and floor like blood.
Everything had a sort of life.
Two at a time, Jack took the stairs. Up and up, to places the luckless sots trapped couldn’t go, to places Martin wouldn’t go. To his places, the only places he felt he still had claim over.
It was cold on the roof. Jack opened his eyes now, taking in the grounds and the mountains and the darkening sky.
“What a place, what a face, all fallen into sad disgrace.” Jack chuckled. He sat, cross-legged, and then gave it up and stretched out on his back. He felt the cold cement under his back, seeping through his sweater. He stretched out beneath the pale stars, arms outstretched, cigarette already lit and dangling from his lips.
There was power in the dead hours. Not real power, but power for the soul. Power for the mind. The kind that defied description and was felt in the bones. It got the juices going.
“October skies.” There was no one to hear him, but Jack spoke anyway. He smoked his cigarette and watched the stars come out and let the cold seep into him. Fall was here, he could feel it in every fiber. He didn’t need to see the changing leaves or the autumn decorations in town. He knew the changing seasons like he knew his own mind. He was an enlightened man, a man who understood the ways of nature. His mind was open and expanded.
The cigarette fell from his fingers, smoked to the pale brown filter. Filtered cigarettes were the sexiest.
The darkness was coming on quickly. The edge of the moon crested the mountains, a single silver sliver. Beautiful. Poetic. There were clouds above it, the dark wispy kind. Edgar Allen Poe clouds.
It was too perfect a night. Nature was the greatest artist of them all, and art deserved to be enjoyed with a properly cleared mind.
Jack reached into the pocket of his black jeans, fingers brushing against a box of cigarettes until the closed over a small pipe. He pulled back his hand, the sweet scent of crushed cannabis wafting up from the his hand. He pressed a button on his MP3 player, pulling up some Pink Floyd. The Dark Side of the Moon. A perfect accompaniment to mother nature’s nocturnal masterpiece.
He sat and smoked and watched the moon rise. Cross-legged once more, he felt the sense of slow lazy pleasure wash over him. There it was, that orgasmic buzz. That heavy limbed, lidded-eyes, on top of the sky sensation. This was bliss. This was knowing, this was the growth of the soul and the opening of the mind until the blindness of humanity fell away.
The moon was beautiful. The sky and the stars and the mountains and even the grounds of the institute were beautiful with unveiled eyes. Things despised were beautiful now.
A pity that Martin would never see as Jack saw. He was blinded, forever entwined in petty human desires and greed. That selfish human need to be as god. There were no gods, no prophets no saviors or saved. Why couldn’t he understand?
Jack was not above desires. Here, wrapped in beauty that only the mind knew, he wanted more. He wanted to see as he’d never seen before. He wanted to look upon the institute with the eyes of the soul, see the whole of the spirit of the place that held him in it sway.
Now the pipe was filled again, a different scent of herb and dirt. The diviner’s herb, sage’s leaf, the stuff of the third eye. Sharp and bitter, harsh, it burned through the smoky haze of hash and sweet delight.
The moon was high when it began. The shaking of hands, the quickening of the heart, the darkening of the vision. The moon left tails of shimmering silver, the stars were things of water. The last vestiges of veiled sight fell away and Jack saw, truly saw.
The night sky was made of diamonds and silk. The sky rippled, pulsed, convulsed in a dance like rhythm. It stretched on like the ocean, the motion soothing. No construct shaped by human hands could ever match that beauty. This was awe. This was humbleness. This was knowing you were nothing, nothing in the face of eternity. God didn’t care, but God didn’t need to care. God had left his plan in the hands of man, and Jack understood.
But he knew that already. He’d seen the sky before, he’d seen the empty space where God had left.
The wind on his cheeks was like the touch of a lover. Why was there no one to share this with? All this beauty, all this truth, the proof of something greater, something real. No feeling as toppling as this should belong to one man alone.
But all things had their twisted mirror image. Every beauty had a horror. The beauty was above, the horror below.
Jack knew now why he had never looked at the institute with eyes opened by divinorum.
There was the door of the roof. There was the stone surrounding it. There were the pipes and vents and spikes of roofing. And there was the filth. Black, viscous filth that clung to the stone and metal and wood like a death shroud. It moved like slick oil. This was the building’s blood. This was the buildings soul. Controlled chaos, sick distress, twisted and rotten and corpse-foul.
Corpse-foul indeed. With deceptive speed, the death-shroud changed, a fluid canvas. He saw the faces within. Familiar faces, strange faces, white-eyed and bloated, floating in the blackened mess in inhuman dimensions. Jack stumbled backwards, hard, his hands on the concrete to brace himself. He felt the stuff under his hands. It clung to him. His skin, his clothes, it was sin made manifest.
The moon was screaming.
The surface of the institute teemed with the spirits of the dead and the moon screamed overhead. Sweet bliss was a nightmare now. There were things man was never meant to see, things the mind couldn’t comprehend. Even a mind to which the grotesque and inhuman was commonplace. His heart raced, his skin sweat, every nerve stood on end in terror that defied description.
Jack closed his eyes. He shut out the sights and the sounds but still he felt the sickly black sin on his skin. It moved over him, threatened to cover him. Would it choke him? Blind him and deafen him and steal his screams? Even dreams were never so frightening as this.
His eyes opened. Black bled into red, pulsing with a fetid beat. The heat of it burned. Jack yearned to escape it, to return to the plane where his sight was hindered, where only the tangible could be seen.
There were things in it still. Creatures born of man’s imagination, generated to feed on fear and flesh. Teeth and claws and gaping maws cut through the bleeding sac that clung to the roof. They came for him.
The roof was slick as Jack pushed himself back, away, striving to stay out of reach of the nightmares. They came on, dozens upon dozens, pouring out of the putrid mass. There was hunger in their eyes.
He would not die by their hands. By his hands. He was a man with a plan, with a mission, the one with the ammunition. He would not see it end this way. Not when so many still had to pay the price. They would not feast on him. His blood would not fill their bellies, his bones would not clean their teeth - not now, not ever.
They come on faster, more and more, and he backed away across the slick and burning roof. He got to his feet, stumbling, his black jeans and sweater stained and reeking of things worse than death. His sneakers slipped as he backed away, heart pounding in his throat. A step, another, another, again and again on the nightmarish roof.
And then his foot came down on nothing. Then he fell back, and the things leapt, and he felt the wind rush to meet him as they fell upon him to eat him. Flesh ripped and tore. Blood spurted, poured, pain beyond measure coursing and pumping until there was nothing but blackness and a strangled desire for release.
***
The moon was high overhead. Wispy black clouds - Edgar Allen Poe clouds - drifted across its surface. The stars were pale in its light, winking against the darkness of the night sky. It was cold, a light wind coming in from the surrounding mountains.
Jack lay on the roof of the institute, his heart racing and his body slick with sweat. His pipe lay beside him, dropped and forgotten. His eyes were wide open, staring at the sky above. He’d never looked away.
The high was gone, but the vision remained. Again and again it played over in his mind, a gruesome double feature that never ended. But it was in his mind and in his mind alone. Behind him was the door to the roof, the wall around it, the vents, the bits of roofing. Normal and mundane and slightly tarnished in the dimness of night. But knew what was there. He had seen the building’s blood and soul. That blood, that soul was still there, hidden from human sight by sanity and self-preservation.
Rotten. Rotted and foul and beyond the human comprehension of evil. And if sickly death was the institute’s blood and twisted mockeries of nature’s creation were its soul, Jack knew exactly what the institute’s heart was. And it was the heart that needed to be destroyed for the institute to die. Cut out the heard and the blood stopped flowing and the soul withered.
And Jack thanked a God he didn’t entirely believe in that he had never seen Martin with anything but his human sight. Nevermind his mind, his own heart couldn’t take that, to see Martin as he truly was - some twisted, corrupt thing that wore a human shell. The heart of the institute, the source of it’s fetid blood, Martin Landel. Martin, who floundered and failed again and again, who kept the institute a meaningless hulk that slobbered and drooled and hungered with no direction. A heart and a soul and blood were all well and good, but the institute had no mind.
Not anymore.
Shaking, Jack pushed himself to his feet. He left his pipe. Maybe some intrepid adventurer would make it up here and find it. Bully for them, if they did. And a pity if they smoked what was in it.
“A man has to face his demons.” A man’s demons were always with him. Guilt, regret, remorse, failure. Maybe Martin was right, and his hands were as bloody as the other man’s. But they were his hands, and his regrets and failures. And he owned them, possessed them, used them to make himself strong. Only the strong survived the nightmare, after all.
There was movement off to his side. The monsters were out. Jack smiled, watching the eagle-like things that roosted on the roof. There was an odd fondness in his eyes as he lit another cigarettes.
“Not so scary like this, are you?” he asked, shaking his head. They weren’t about to bother him, even if he made his presence known. And he needed a distraction. He needed to remind himself he was still Jack, still the man he’d been when he first came up here. Seeing the truth of his transgressions hadn’t changed him.
The visions hadn’t left him, but he pushed them down, locked them in the box of his mind with everything else. They were his now. His sins and his regrets and his demons. He looked out once more on the grounds and the mountains and the town beyond. The first merry wanderers of the night were stumbling out into the courtyard. From the edge, one of the creatures took flight. Jack watched it a moment, watched it blot out the moon, and then turned away. He wasn’t in the mood to see a slaughter.
“Next time I feel like a trip,” he muttered as he left the roof and the hunting aquilas behind, “I think I’ll stick to acid.”
Author:
theladyfeyleneWord Count: 2243
Rating: R
Character(s): Alec 'Jack' Doyle, Martin Landel
Summary: Not even Jack knew the true gruesome visage of Landel's Institute. He knew its heart was rotted, but the foul depths were hidden from human eyes....
Notes (if applicable): Um. Yeah. Fessing up, here and now, that I really don't know if the route I chose to take works or not. Also, totally not canon compliant.
When a man spent enough time in a place - worked there, sweated there, bled there, loved there, lived there and cried there - he could feel it. He was in tune with it, knew it in a way most people knew other human beings. Places, most people didn’t realize, had heart and soul.
Even if sometimes that heart and soul was rotten.
Jack - who refused to call himself Alec anymore - didn’t need to see where he was going. Not here. His eyes were closed as he counted steps in the same breath as he counted the beat of the music that poured out of his MP3 player.
The halls were empty. Eerily empty, considering the sun was sinking below the horizon. It was a between time, when Jack felt as though the institute was his and his alone. Not that he particularly wanted it. But what man didn’t enjoy a sense of solitary and unshared power?
Moving like a ghost through the sterile halls, Jack hummed under his breath. He felt the building thrumming under his feet, electricity and water and other powers pulsing through the walls and floor like blood.
Everything had a sort of life.
Two at a time, Jack took the stairs. Up and up, to places the luckless sots trapped couldn’t go, to places Martin wouldn’t go. To his places, the only places he felt he still had claim over.
It was cold on the roof. Jack opened his eyes now, taking in the grounds and the mountains and the darkening sky.
“What a place, what a face, all fallen into sad disgrace.” Jack chuckled. He sat, cross-legged, and then gave it up and stretched out on his back. He felt the cold cement under his back, seeping through his sweater. He stretched out beneath the pale stars, arms outstretched, cigarette already lit and dangling from his lips.
There was power in the dead hours. Not real power, but power for the soul. Power for the mind. The kind that defied description and was felt in the bones. It got the juices going.
“October skies.” There was no one to hear him, but Jack spoke anyway. He smoked his cigarette and watched the stars come out and let the cold seep into him. Fall was here, he could feel it in every fiber. He didn’t need to see the changing leaves or the autumn decorations in town. He knew the changing seasons like he knew his own mind. He was an enlightened man, a man who understood the ways of nature. His mind was open and expanded.
The cigarette fell from his fingers, smoked to the pale brown filter. Filtered cigarettes were the sexiest.
The darkness was coming on quickly. The edge of the moon crested the mountains, a single silver sliver. Beautiful. Poetic. There were clouds above it, the dark wispy kind. Edgar Allen Poe clouds.
It was too perfect a night. Nature was the greatest artist of them all, and art deserved to be enjoyed with a properly cleared mind.
Jack reached into the pocket of his black jeans, fingers brushing against a box of cigarettes until the closed over a small pipe. He pulled back his hand, the sweet scent of crushed cannabis wafting up from the his hand. He pressed a button on his MP3 player, pulling up some Pink Floyd. The Dark Side of the Moon. A perfect accompaniment to mother nature’s nocturnal masterpiece.
He sat and smoked and watched the moon rise. Cross-legged once more, he felt the sense of slow lazy pleasure wash over him. There it was, that orgasmic buzz. That heavy limbed, lidded-eyes, on top of the sky sensation. This was bliss. This was knowing, this was the growth of the soul and the opening of the mind until the blindness of humanity fell away.
The moon was beautiful. The sky and the stars and the mountains and even the grounds of the institute were beautiful with unveiled eyes. Things despised were beautiful now.
A pity that Martin would never see as Jack saw. He was blinded, forever entwined in petty human desires and greed. That selfish human need to be as god. There were no gods, no prophets no saviors or saved. Why couldn’t he understand?
Jack was not above desires. Here, wrapped in beauty that only the mind knew, he wanted more. He wanted to see as he’d never seen before. He wanted to look upon the institute with the eyes of the soul, see the whole of the spirit of the place that held him in it sway.
Now the pipe was filled again, a different scent of herb and dirt. The diviner’s herb, sage’s leaf, the stuff of the third eye. Sharp and bitter, harsh, it burned through the smoky haze of hash and sweet delight.
The moon was high when it began. The shaking of hands, the quickening of the heart, the darkening of the vision. The moon left tails of shimmering silver, the stars were things of water. The last vestiges of veiled sight fell away and Jack saw, truly saw.
The night sky was made of diamonds and silk. The sky rippled, pulsed, convulsed in a dance like rhythm. It stretched on like the ocean, the motion soothing. No construct shaped by human hands could ever match that beauty. This was awe. This was humbleness. This was knowing you were nothing, nothing in the face of eternity. God didn’t care, but God didn’t need to care. God had left his plan in the hands of man, and Jack understood.
But he knew that already. He’d seen the sky before, he’d seen the empty space where God had left.
The wind on his cheeks was like the touch of a lover. Why was there no one to share this with? All this beauty, all this truth, the proof of something greater, something real. No feeling as toppling as this should belong to one man alone.
But all things had their twisted mirror image. Every beauty had a horror. The beauty was above, the horror below.
Jack knew now why he had never looked at the institute with eyes opened by divinorum.
There was the door of the roof. There was the stone surrounding it. There were the pipes and vents and spikes of roofing. And there was the filth. Black, viscous filth that clung to the stone and metal and wood like a death shroud. It moved like slick oil. This was the building’s blood. This was the buildings soul. Controlled chaos, sick distress, twisted and rotten and corpse-foul.
Corpse-foul indeed. With deceptive speed, the death-shroud changed, a fluid canvas. He saw the faces within. Familiar faces, strange faces, white-eyed and bloated, floating in the blackened mess in inhuman dimensions. Jack stumbled backwards, hard, his hands on the concrete to brace himself. He felt the stuff under his hands. It clung to him. His skin, his clothes, it was sin made manifest.
The moon was screaming.
The surface of the institute teemed with the spirits of the dead and the moon screamed overhead. Sweet bliss was a nightmare now. There were things man was never meant to see, things the mind couldn’t comprehend. Even a mind to which the grotesque and inhuman was commonplace. His heart raced, his skin sweat, every nerve stood on end in terror that defied description.
Jack closed his eyes. He shut out the sights and the sounds but still he felt the sickly black sin on his skin. It moved over him, threatened to cover him. Would it choke him? Blind him and deafen him and steal his screams? Even dreams were never so frightening as this.
His eyes opened. Black bled into red, pulsing with a fetid beat. The heat of it burned. Jack yearned to escape it, to return to the plane where his sight was hindered, where only the tangible could be seen.
There were things in it still. Creatures born of man’s imagination, generated to feed on fear and flesh. Teeth and claws and gaping maws cut through the bleeding sac that clung to the roof. They came for him.
The roof was slick as Jack pushed himself back, away, striving to stay out of reach of the nightmares. They came on, dozens upon dozens, pouring out of the putrid mass. There was hunger in their eyes.
He would not die by their hands. By his hands. He was a man with a plan, with a mission, the one with the ammunition. He would not see it end this way. Not when so many still had to pay the price. They would not feast on him. His blood would not fill their bellies, his bones would not clean their teeth - not now, not ever.
They come on faster, more and more, and he backed away across the slick and burning roof. He got to his feet, stumbling, his black jeans and sweater stained and reeking of things worse than death. His sneakers slipped as he backed away, heart pounding in his throat. A step, another, another, again and again on the nightmarish roof.
And then his foot came down on nothing. Then he fell back, and the things leapt, and he felt the wind rush to meet him as they fell upon him to eat him. Flesh ripped and tore. Blood spurted, poured, pain beyond measure coursing and pumping until there was nothing but blackness and a strangled desire for release.
The moon was high overhead. Wispy black clouds - Edgar Allen Poe clouds - drifted across its surface. The stars were pale in its light, winking against the darkness of the night sky. It was cold, a light wind coming in from the surrounding mountains.
Jack lay on the roof of the institute, his heart racing and his body slick with sweat. His pipe lay beside him, dropped and forgotten. His eyes were wide open, staring at the sky above. He’d never looked away.
The high was gone, but the vision remained. Again and again it played over in his mind, a gruesome double feature that never ended. But it was in his mind and in his mind alone. Behind him was the door to the roof, the wall around it, the vents, the bits of roofing. Normal and mundane and slightly tarnished in the dimness of night. But knew what was there. He had seen the building’s blood and soul. That blood, that soul was still there, hidden from human sight by sanity and self-preservation.
Rotten. Rotted and foul and beyond the human comprehension of evil. And if sickly death was the institute’s blood and twisted mockeries of nature’s creation were its soul, Jack knew exactly what the institute’s heart was. And it was the heart that needed to be destroyed for the institute to die. Cut out the heard and the blood stopped flowing and the soul withered.
And Jack thanked a God he didn’t entirely believe in that he had never seen Martin with anything but his human sight. Nevermind his mind, his own heart couldn’t take that, to see Martin as he truly was - some twisted, corrupt thing that wore a human shell. The heart of the institute, the source of it’s fetid blood, Martin Landel. Martin, who floundered and failed again and again, who kept the institute a meaningless hulk that slobbered and drooled and hungered with no direction. A heart and a soul and blood were all well and good, but the institute had no mind.
Not anymore.
Shaking, Jack pushed himself to his feet. He left his pipe. Maybe some intrepid adventurer would make it up here and find it. Bully for them, if they did. And a pity if they smoked what was in it.
“A man has to face his demons.” A man’s demons were always with him. Guilt, regret, remorse, failure. Maybe Martin was right, and his hands were as bloody as the other man’s. But they were his hands, and his regrets and failures. And he owned them, possessed them, used them to make himself strong. Only the strong survived the nightmare, after all.
There was movement off to his side. The monsters were out. Jack smiled, watching the eagle-like things that roosted on the roof. There was an odd fondness in his eyes as he lit another cigarettes.
“Not so scary like this, are you?” he asked, shaking his head. They weren’t about to bother him, even if he made his presence known. And he needed a distraction. He needed to remind himself he was still Jack, still the man he’d been when he first came up here. Seeing the truth of his transgressions hadn’t changed him.
The visions hadn’t left him, but he pushed them down, locked them in the box of his mind with everything else. They were his now. His sins and his regrets and his demons. He looked out once more on the grounds and the mountains and the town beyond. The first merry wanderers of the night were stumbling out into the courtyard. From the edge, one of the creatures took flight. Jack watched it a moment, watched it blot out the moon, and then turned away. He wasn’t in the mood to see a slaughter.
“Next time I feel like a trip,” he muttered as he left the roof and the hunting aquilas behind, “I think I’ll stick to acid.”
no subject
Oh man. ♥ Jack is so freaking sexy.
This is awesome.
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Oh Jaaaaaaaack. ♥ Only you would get high on the roof.
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The man knows no fear! :D
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ANYWAY! THANK YOU FOR THE FEEDBACK! I was super nervous about this. Well, you knew that!
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I'd never even heard of that one before.It sounds pretty scary, though. I would never take something like that. XD;; Then again, I would never take any drugs...YOU'RE WELCOME. I dunno what you were nervous about, though. :P
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I think one of the main reasons it's never reached popularity is because it's perfectly legal and isn't really a social herb. Because...yeah. it's not like you're aware of reality and capable of interacting with other people if you hallucinate on it.
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Jack is freaking awesome.
Yeah, I pretty much failed at the whole 'writing other people's characters' thing, but for me, writing someone else's character is like wearing their underwear.
good to know i'm not the only one who feels that way >.>;;
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