Young Writers Society

There were shards of shattered crystals and stones fallen on the ground, piled on top of each other and spiraling into meaningless patterns. A soft breeze slithered through the dust and roused up the dark particles into a minuscule storm-cloud that died down in only a split second. As two pairs of feet crunched on top of the debris, the crystals hissed and crumbled with ringing screams, melting into small lumps of gray powder.

In front of the men was a door that yielded to nothing but a limitless darkness. Of the two of them, the one younger in appearance reached up with little haste to pull away the fabric that lingered over his face and covered his features whole. A bundle of white hair spilled onto his shoulders and fluttered in the wind, and the man’s closed eyelids tensed when a few strands brushed against them.

“Where shall he fall?” came a whispered question from his companion.

A thin smile twisted the lips of the white-haired man, and he reached out to set a fleeting hand against the door. The darkness shifted, and from within the room came a guttural howl that set aflame to the previously undisturbed air.

“And where shall we go?” the white-haired man murmured in response.

_

Spade only draws his hand back from the door when his fingertips start to tremble. Squeezing his eyes shut, he stumbles back into the wall and mouths the meaningless words to himself.

Where shall he fall, and where shall we go?

The soft, feathery syllables get emptier each time he utters them, and at last he forces himself to stop. And as the memories fade away from his mind, dissolving and attempting to reform like the dust storm that reigned over the ground in the images he had seen, the darkness turns tangible and presses down upon him.

For a moment, he hesitates with a hand outstretched towards the hard, cold surface of the door. Yet, the colors fade completely just as the longing becomes temptation, and he drops his hand with a sigh. Around him is the everlasting silence that overlaps with the darkness as an absolute prison of air and sound, and staring into what he can only suspect is around him, he slides down onto the floor and covers his face with his hands.

Long intervals of time pass by him without notice, and even when he reaches out, all he is able to grasp is a fistful of cold air and blank syllables of memories swimming in the air. Images flicker by in his head, thousands of thoughts, hopes and imaginations that he only has hold over until they eventually flit away into what surrounds him.

His fingernails are beginning to dig into the ground when a small portion of the door slides open, and a thin river of dusty light meets his eyes. Nearly choking on the burst of fire that is abruptly burning away at the insides of his head, Spade scrambles onto his feet and falls when he attempts to walk.

Two objects flutter to the floor, the particles of dimmed light spreading to every corner of existence as their wings. Immediately after the light fades away, and the door is sealed.

Breathing fast and shallow, Spade crawls along the floor, reaching out and clawing at the ground in an attempt to recall where the objects had fallen.

For the longest while, he feels nothing. Then his fingertips brush against something - cold and soft. There is no time for him to savor his victory, when colors and newfound light explode behind his eyelids.

Etched into the memories spilling like sunlight into his head, there are men, eyes red with a feverish need for victory. Their fingers twitch, faking a casual atmosphere atop a battered wooden table. Squinting, narrowed, hardened faces swivel and tear apart those of another.

A weary hand slowly lowers, and urges forward a bundle of small papers. Only a second of suffocating silence passes before emotions, colors and thoughts erupt and swirl into a dizzying mixture of white rage.

Cheater! Cheater! voices begin to chant, the syllables cut into jagged edges and sharp blades. The table shakes. Round chips -red, white, black, green and blue- rattle and scream, spilling onto the floor, flying into the air. Fists pound, spit flies. Cheat!

The pieces of paper in a man’s hand are crumpled into an unrecognizable lump of numbers and symbols. Bottles shatter, and chairs are dragged out roughly from their previous positions with a sickening screech.

Cheater!

As the chanting continues without losing its energy of madness and animalistic nature, Spade slowly moves his hand away from the bundle of papers that he is touching. He only faintly realizes that he is breathing heavily, sweat dripping from his forehead.

It takes another moment for him to reach the next object he had seen fall to the ground. Thin, long wisps that feel like his own hair brush against his fingertips, and he grabs at them without thought. Instantly, a whispering gray light pours into his head, washing away the wild, animal chanting and the snarling of men.

The sky is nearly as dark as the room that Spade is in, and there is a cold, moist silence lingering in the air. A man slithers forward along a stone wall, beady eyes hidden underneath the shadow of a battered hat that has lost its originally pale color some time ago. His breathing escapes white in the chill of the night. Gingerly, as if making sure that the ground will not cave in, the man moves forward step-by-step, blending into the darkness around him.

Only a few feet ahead is a pale figure that moves in stark resemblance to the man. Slightly hunched over, the woman glances left and right after every few steps she takes. Her shadow extends back as a long, slender cape, flickering with the rusty street lamp in front of her, showering what little of the world can be seen with an old amber light.

The woman’s hair is like a curtain of bones. Shifting slowly in the night, she dances forward, eyes set on a turn that will lead her into another dark alley.

A grin splits the darkness. The man abandons his facade of silence, and darts forth without pause. The sudden sound of footsteps is the equivalent of a piercing scream, and the woman doesn’t bother to look behind her as she breaks into a sprint, arms whipping back and forth, legs crashing against the ground.

She wildly turns around the corner and it only takes a second for the woman’s feet to slip. Her hair draws a sharp arc in the air as she skids into an abrupt stop in order to right herself. Gritting her teeth with an audible snarl, she nearly runs herself into the green and gray stones as she kicks off of the pavements forcefully.

The man’s hand shoots forward, and for a moment, his fingertips only linger on the fluttering strands of the woman’s hair. Then he leaps, arms sprawling.

In another inaudible sigh of the settled winds, he and the woman are both crumpled on the ground in a tangled heap of limbs.

No! the woman howls. Her eyes, wide and blue, glimmer madly in the faint light before her head is grabbed and slammed onto the ground.

The man guffaws, slipping out a knife from his belt. They pay triple for a hair like yours, sweetheart, he hisses.

No, the woman sobs, her voice trembling and higher than it was before. No, no.

The tip of the knife digs into her hairline.

Spade slowly opens his eyes, and runs his fingers through the dry strands of hair that he is holding. Exhaling shakily, he lets go. He knows -he remembers- he has seen a memory akin to this before, and he had heard a word for it, pieced together from the countless fragmented and faded memories that have made their nest in his mind.

Murder.

Leaning against the wall, Spade closes his eyes and quietly nudges the two fallen objects with his feet.

It’s a beautiful word.

_

There is a voice outside the door that has never existed before.

A long time -one of the longest- had passed since the words, cheater and murder, dropped onto the ground from the window of light. Silence mixed with darkness and the absence of anything to feel except for the hard, cold surfaces all around him. Sometimes he laughed without reason, and other times he laughed because there was no reason not to. And all of this he performed sitting with his back against the unyielding door, careful to not let any portion of his bare skin come in contact with it.

And therefore he is nothing but inseparable from the door when a whispered word slithers through the material, twisting and dying with not even a breath in the air, but he knows that it had attempted to reach him.

He jumps to his feet and sets a careful hand against the door. For a moment, all that reigns is the silence that has dominated his thoughts and senses ever since he can recall. Then it reaches him once more : “Spade.”

Spade’s lips tremble as he attempts to stare through the piece of stone and wood that is blocking his vision. He finally manages, “That’s me.”

The words sound more gritty and unpracticed than he had thought, and he battles the urge to growl.

“Spade,” the voice murmurs again.

Spade stops breathing, closes his eyes, and imprints in his mind all the miniscule details in the syllables and accents of the single word. The sound seems to reverberate through his head, and he scrapes his nails against the door in anger that he cannot see the savior who has come to lift him from Tartarus.

“That’s me,” he repeats feebly.

He waits, yet the voice has moved away, and the ringing abyss of silence floods back into him. All he can do is not to wail as he slips onto the ground and beats his head weakly against the hard, icy surface of the door.

_

When the voice returns, it’s with a bright shower of light that blinds Spade in an instant.

It takes him a long time to process the fact that the door had opened wholly, and even when he does, he only lets out a whine akin to that of an untamed animal and crawls backwards to hit his back against a wall. Even when he blinks rapidly, the numerous black dots dancing in front of his eyes do not disappear, and he feels his breathing beginning to become ragged.

“Spade,” the word is said, and with no small amount of effort, Spade manages to raise his head.

There is a small figure standing in front of him, and for the first few seconds, he cannot distinguish her from the light that is still spilling in and flooding his senses.

Long strands of white hair flutter in the air, spreading behind the figure like a gigantic pair of avian wings. A pale, thin hand unravels from her side and reaches out to touch Spade’s face gently, as if he might break. Spade clutches back at her hand, at the fingers that are soft and cold, for the first time touching something alive that is not himself.

Her skin is soft, and he recalls a memory that had been filled with crystalline sunlight.

“That’s me,” he whispers.

The hand retracts slowly, and Spade’s hand drops onto the ground. His fingers twitch as if they have a mind of their own, and a fingertip brushes across something that he quickly realizes is not foreign.

In the split moment, a pair of wide, blue eyes overlap with the figure’s. Strands of pale hair draw spiderwebs in the air, and particles of shattered light scatter rapidly as they dance away from the darkness.

There are windows of celestial light living in the figure’s eyes.

“Spade.”

With an unblinking stare, he moves his hand away from the clump of pale hair on the ground. He reaches up, and his fingers tangle with the silky strings of silver and light.

“Spade.”

He finds himself unable to breathe, his throat clogged by a sudden lump of darkness, a void of anything that he has ever held on to. His face growing warmer yet eyes colder, he softly encloses the figure’s neck in a lingering grip.

“Spade.”

The light soothes the rough skin of his hands and arms. He flexes his fingers as if in experiment, and the figure’s eyes find his, searching too deep.

He squeezes slowly, pieces from the memories in his head coming together and falling apart in near unison. Blue eyes and pale hair, a long, black shadow stretching out across the pavements, the man grinning, and the amber light shattering on the ground.

“Spade.”

Lidding his eyes partway against the still-blinding light, Spade beams. Murder. It is in the delicacy of the word, the gentle, suppressed syllables ; the wild emotions and violent notions contained inside each movement of the tongue and lips that is used to bring forth sound.

More strength rolls into his fingertips, and the light from outside seems to die down. Shards of the sun crash down from the gleaming strands of hair, and the wings have long since gone limp on the ground.

The voice has stopped speaking. Closing his eyes, Spade lightly brings himself onto his feet and walks into the world of light.

_

The countless memories are fragmented and distorted. Sounds and different skies blend together to form a world of a gray sun and golden buildings, roaming men of red eyes and bloody hands.

Yet, they do not fail in forming a road, as shattered as it may be. Spade follows it with no diligence in his steps, all the while glancing around and staring at the structures of ashes, dust and light that litter the world around him.

The sun rains down its tears onto the earth.

He follows the road inside his head, flying towards a fire, burning from a torch that is carved out of all the colors of the world.

_

Before Spade realizes, buildings are looming over him, sucking away the light that had washed over him the entire time as he walked. Mouth agape, he stares up at the empty windows and the gray, dull surfaces that reflect nothing.

The sky is dark farther into the forest of buildings, and a round object hangs over them all. It is bigger than a couple buildings combined, and its surface has a metallic gleam to it that seems to drive an icy blade through Spade’s chest.

There are four round eyes on the moon, rolling lazily in a certain direction every so often, scanning the world with a gaze that is unemotional yet eerily scrutinizing at the same time. Spade stares at the waxy orbs until one slowly shifts to gaze back at him. He blinks, then beams. The eye swivels away after a moment, and he continues to trudge forward.

After a long walk with no destination, Spade abruptly comes to the realization that the road that he had been following has vanished. It is as if the rocks and concrete below his feet have sucked it away. With only the briefest pause in his facade, he closes his eyes and attempts to retrace the shards that have been impaling his mind for the longest time that he can remember.

There is nothing, all of the memories he had gathered vaporized into nothingness.

Spade opens his eyes, and keeps walking.

_

Before long, a man approaches Spade with a limping step and gleaming eyes. Spade brings his feet to a stop, and waits for the man to reach him, head tilted in visible curiosity.

As the man closes the distance between them, the odor of a thing that has not met fresh air for days reaches Spade’s senses. His teeth are a dark yellow, a color that Spade has seen before yet cannot quite place his hands on. A long veil of muddy hair hangs over his eyes, the individual strands clumped together in close resemblance to his clothes that are more suited to be called rags.

“A Joker,” the man sings. “It’s a Joker in Fantasia.”

“I’m Spade,” Spade tells him in response.

Nodding feverishly, the man reaches out as if to touch Spade’s face, and Spade quickly steps away. “It’s your eyes,” the man mutters when he takes note of Spade’s confusion. “Carved into your eyes.”

Blinking, Spade raises a hand and runs it along the outlines of his eyes. He parts his lips, closes them, and simply nods.

“Heart came before you,” the man continues, now seemingly content with maintaining a burning eye-contact with Spade. “She came here, made lots of money.”

“Money?”

Giggling, the man nods again, and digs deep into the pockets of his pants. After a moment of fishing around, his face brightens further, and he brandishes a wad of green paper in front of Spade’s eyes.

“You gonna want them,” he explains in glee. “They get you food. Chips. Drugs. Good stuff.”

Spade extends a hand toward the green papers - and for a split second, the man’s eyes narrows. Yet, he doesn’t protest as he lets the money be taken. Smelling and feeling the thin, leathery texture of the papers, Spade lets all the shades of amber, gray and black stumble into his mind. A massive wave of cacophony slams into his brain, and he only manages not to fall down where he stands.

The man watches him with a thin smile, and lends a hand to steady Spade when he stumbles violently. “Come with me,” he says, and when Spade’s eyes drift to the moon hanging in the sky, he shakes his head. “Don’t watch something that will watch you back.”

Slowly, Spade drags his eyes down to meet the man’s.

The man grins, more of the foul scent flowing forth to spread throughout the air. “Let’s go, Spade.”

And Spade follows.

Above them the sky is crepuscular, an invisible sun dawning with a purple hue left behind. There are small particles of light swimming near the moon, which has allowed its eyes to move somewhat more lazily. In certain places, there exist glimmering lakes made entirely of breathing light shards. In others there are long rows of them, not moving in any direction far enough to be called for certain traveling, yet moving all the same. The gigantic, primal animals of light writhe and send down noiseless howls from up with the watching moon. Formless, blazing white infernos dance atop the surface of the buildings, bleaching the rocks white and silver. When Spade reaches out to touch one of them, the light only lingers for a second, then sings itself away.

For countless heartbeats, he and the man weave in and out through the buildings and rubble littering the earth. As the moon is nearly covered by the gray structures extruding from the ground, leaving nearly no room for one another, Spade pauses in his footsteps. From in-between two of the buildings, one of the moon’s eyes is staring at him intently.

“Don’t stare,” the man snaps at him, turning his head only so briefly as to direct a glare at Spade. “Told you, it stares back. It watches all you do. You can’t stare back.”

“I don’t understand,” Spade murmurs under his breath, yet he obliges and doesn’t stop in following the man through the gray world.

It is a long time until the surrounding landscape shifts into another shade of gray, and other figures begin to appear alongside Spade and the man. Their faces are tinged gray and black, and pairs of white eyes are stark against the skin as they roll from side to side warily.

“Spade,” a voice finally hisses. For a second, it seems as if the word will burn into ashes and scatter away in the swaying air. Then a chant begins, slow and steady, never rising in volume and ringing lowly as a growl. Spade. Spade. Spade.

In between the words are smaller, mangled syllables that are battered yet still twisting frantically to keep themselves alive. Heart. Joker. Heart. Heart.

“Heart?” Spade calls out in front of him, where the man is relentlessly continuing in his path of seemingly aimless exploration. He glances back at Spade again, and grins an amber grin.

“She is who we be going to meet, right now.”

A lump seems to grow on the side of Spade’s heart. He unconsciously lifts a hand to let it linger beside his own eyes that have been said to have something imprinted in them - then he drops it, and scurries behind the man once more.

Spade’s feet are beginning to ache from invisible blades being stabbed into them when the man abruptly comes to a halt. Inhaling sharply, Spade barely manages to stop himself from running into the man’s slouched back, and looks about himself. There are more men clustered there than before and the chanting has not stopped, yet it is now slower and quieter.

He glances back at the man, who is staring pointedly at the gaping entrance of a small, eternally gray building. A moment passes of nearly tangible silence, then a tall figure appears from inside the darkness.

There is a long dress of silken, fine gray hair spilling onto the figure’s back and over her shoulders, which instantly yanks away all the air out of Spade’s lungs. Even from the distance, he feels like he can hear the strands brush against one another and weave together a celestial song.

With no spoken words, the woman briskly walks forth to face Spade. And truly, no words are needed to confirm the fact that is now fluttering around his head, the wings of it brushing against his face.

Heart beams, and her eyes flood with countless shades of red and orange gems. And in the middle of the two ever-changing irises are pupils the shape of a heart, a primal silver and melting within itself.

At the same time, Spade and Heart reach up to touch one another’s faces, as gently as two birds might touch the other’s wingtips in flight.

Her smile wavering, Heart closes her eyes, her fingertips becoming colder.

Spade’s vision explodes into a mixture of flames, roaring voices that blend together into an ocean of lava, and a bird taking flight from a cage with frosted bars, the feathers being clipped by the thorns which protrude from within the cage. Then the heat fades into a softer, humming tune, and eventually it fades away as suddenly as it had come.

A sudden curtain of gray enshrouds his vision, and he flails until he realizes that it is not at all a curtain.

There are statues made purely of light crashing down all around him, shattering into crystal pieces, and the pieces melting into the sky. The moon’s eyes are rolling hysterically, a blur of red and metallic whirrs.

It is not a curtain.

A world.

His eyes snap open. Breathing raggedly, he stares into Heart’s eyes, which have also opened. Their hands, now hovering just over the skin, slowly lower.

“The stolen memories are gone,” Heart mutters softly.

Spade opens his mouth to respond. Then the words slam into him a moment too late, and all of a sudden, there are clear droplets of water covering his face. It is as if someone has told him that One of the strings on the marionette is missing, can’t you see it fall?

“If they return, then you also have to,” Heart continues with an unreadable gaze reigning in her eyes.

Clutching at his chest, Spade lets out a tattered sob.

Above him, the moon hangs itself and judges in vast silence.

_

Heart leads Spade into the small building by a hand on his shoulder. The chanting clings to their backs and follows them inside, until Heart reaches out blindly to swing the door shut. With a nearly inaudible sigh, she pats the wall in the darkness until something clicks loudly and a dim light floods the space.

“I had in my hands three things when I arrived,” she begins, setting one hand against the wall and staring at it for a moment. “I lost two, and their memories. Things that they call glasses and a key.”

Spade nods silently. “I had,” he says in order to reply, yet pauses. His heart jumps to a foreign beat, and he has to remind himself to breathe. “Something,” he mutters finally.

All that Heart directs him is a gentle smile, after which she looks around the floor of the building until her being seems to come to a breathless pause. “There,” she mumbles, and kneels onto the ground. Dust billows up as if in protest, then settles just as quickly. “Come, look, Spade,” Heart says, gesturing in support for her words.

Spade walks forward, and lowers himself onto his knees beside Heart. “What?”

Without any verbal response, Heart gathers up a handful of objects that threaten to fall from her thin hands. She settles them down on the dusty ground in front of Spade, and he has instantly become an invader, a brute in front of the objects which Heart touches with such an overflowing amount of care and love.

When he glances up momentarily, Heart’s eyes are fully crimson, and the poor light on the ceiling makes it look as if there are tears of glittering blood gathering in her eyes. She points at one of the objects with a timid finger. On her face is a thin smile that seems to twist its way through her lips.

“That is called a chip,” she starts, and her hair spills into her face. Frowning, she gathers it back tightly, then lets it loose and makes sure it stays. “They use it for gambling and such. Money. They get money from it.”

Spade’s fingers, for a second, twitches in a reflexive urge to come in contact with the chip. Yet, he manages to restrain himself. The chip lies dirty and scratched on the ground, the red colored stripes along the edges better called brown.

“And that, lipstick,” Heart continues. Her eyes melt into a misty yellow as she runs a longing gaze over the small stick of metal. “Decoration. Value for women. And this,” she brightens as she gestures at the last object abandoned on the ground. “Cigarettes. The box is empty, but people like cigarettes.”

Not elaborating further, Heart once again gathers up the chip, lipstick and cigarettes. Spade stares after her as she bends down to place the objects back where the had been lying in the dust, ashes and pieces of broken rock. Then her body flinches, and she stays still for a long while until she straightens back up, the objects still in hand.

She doesn’t look at Spade as she searches the building for something that she does not say. When she stumbles across a piece of ripped, gray fabric that is nearly concealed by the dust, she lays the objects atop it and wraps them carefully. Even when the objects are completely concealed, she undoes the knot that ties them together, redoes it tighter, and repeats the cycle of pretended nonchalance and attention many times.

At last, Heart stops with visible, directionless hatred when soft thuds come from the top of the building, outside where the men are waiting and chanting. Her shoulders shudder, and when she turns back around to face Spade, there are flaming tears staining her cheeks.

“Go back,” she laughs. Her entire face is trembling. “Go back on this road.”

She hands the bundle of covered objects to Spade, and he takes it without thinking. Without giving him the time to understand what has truly happened, she marches to the closed door and yanks it open.

The world has turned red outside, and Spade forgets how to breathe or blink. Heart exhales loud and long, before she reaches out with a hand. A splatter of red instantly blossoms in her palm, and she brings it in, in seemingly tired wonder.

“The moon is crying,” she at last whispers, and Spade thinks that it is to herself at first. “It cries bloody tears. They call it rain.”

Slowly, Spade steps out into the droplets of crimson. His face is stained first, then his entire body. The moon is partly covered by the buildings, and he squints through the blood flowing into his eyes in order to distinguish them. When he does spot the four eyes, his lips fall open limply. None of the eyes are moving - they are all frozen staring in different directions, rivulets of red flowing from the irises.

There are clusters of fluttering light all around the moon, forming flower petals that fall apart in the same, feeble manner that they had come together in. The buildings are drowning underwater, under the surface of an ocean that is a mirror of broken lights.

Waves rise in a dazzling tower of luster, and break apart upon themselves. For a moment, Spade doesn’t blink or breathe, for he can see the lights losing their wings and snowing down onto him.

In the midst of the thick coverage of blood-covered trees, there is a road of shattered memories reforming. As he stares mutely, a drop of the moon’s tears lands on his eye and stains his vision red. He doesn’t bother to blink out the burning liquid. All of a sudden, the bundle of objects is unbearably heavy in his hands. And in the ocean, above where the memories have drowned, the roaring lights are blinding. The chants have grown into something deafening even amongst the piercing shrieks of raindrops.

Where shall we go?

Spade’s eyes squeeze shut.