The Black Canvas

I can’t remember leaving the road. All I know is that there is a road. A tarmac road. It had white lines in the middle. It is a road. That’s all I remember. It’s around the time the sun goes down. The sun filters through the autumn dressed trees blinding my vision with a crimson colour like fire. The canopy is sprayed with vantage holes allowing the rays to scan the forest floor, surely trying to detect my escape from this prison. I lie undetected in the undergrowth. What hideous, perfidious crime has landed me here amidst the decay of the forest floor? I must have fled the road in fear of some fire-breathing monstrosity. A beast from the dark. Will it come for me again when the rays cease their incessant search? Wait, they are becoming dimmer, slowly retracting their beams. I’m paralysed. What was I before? I can’t remember being unable to control my own movement. There was just the road. The light had been blinding. I can’t recognise forms or shapes. Floating shards of light like glass blind me. I know I still can’t shift my gaze beyond my peripheries. Light forms dance in the corners of my vision like burning leaves. I think I’m having a déjà vu. I want to remember a word. “C-c-c?” All I can remember is that there was a road. “Déjà vu is an electronic glitch in your brain.” I must have imagined it. I am born dumb. “G-aaak-agak-k-k.” It was definitely getting dark. I can be sure of the light and the dark; they are two more things that I know. Where is my place within them? I try to recognise the forms around me by tracing the edges of the shadows cast by the failing light. Pick a point on the line between the black blur of the shadow and the grey-blue of the outer area that was gradually losing the fight against the darkness. Following the line, following the line, round and round and round I intrepidly ventured. The shadow takes the offensive and its black tide spills over the retreating front line of the light. An ocean of shadow shimmered across the forest. My effort is in vain. Between the dark terror I now gaze upon and the horror of the light that haunts me with its stalking fire beast I am helpless, just floating in space without a memory. There is a road. I know there is a road. It has white lines.

I am adjusting to the dark. The light has one last hole high up in the dark from which it sends out faint beams into the black that shimmer blue and white on the forest forms. Is it I that they stalk, or each other? The conflict ensues around me as I hear a rustle followed by a liquid high-pitched warble scream. The sound is everywhere as it rips through my personal prison like an invading horde, filling the floor around me. A myriad of pin-sized flames flic…ic…icker into life from the tops of the dark towers bearing down on me, surrounding me to the furthest corners of my sight. The torchlights reveal a vast gathering of Beings whose intentions I wait, poised, to discover. Their silence is broken by a wall of noise. A plangent wave of drumming explodes like a bomb blast, “Ka-boomtakakaka!” The wave travels to the far reaches of existence, rattling my fragile being, until its echo decides to turn in flight and travel back crashing against the feet of the dark towers. “Tatakapatapatakapatatatata!” The noise acquires its own texture as it squeezes the air out of space and fills it with its own mass. I sense the horizon being erased. Something approaches but I feel haunted by a sense of loss. One Being ascends the noise like a staircase until it stopped in my sights and lets out a short hysterical cackle “Ma-ha!” I try searching the ineluctable eyes of the being but the endeavour becomes a fatuous exercise that is doomed to fail. The looking-orbs in the head of the being are like two mirrors that burn into me but reflect nothing I can utter. The Being begins to spin the flaming torch it carries, faster and faster until the blur of the flame makes a ring of fire in the air. The torch begins to morph and grow and become dark until the form of the shaft bonds with the night. The Being’s eyes flicker. They open strobing azure as if the day itself had been trapped in them. “Trust Being. Free you.” The voice of the Being floats through the sound of the drums like ice being carried on the wind. “Find road. See Stranger.” The road. I know the road. It has white lines in the middle. It was the road. I can’t find the road. I need to find the road. The spinning ceases. The instrument sails from the grasp of the Being and drifts like a feather towards my outstretched hand. My hand? As I grip it I realise my hand for the first time and couldn’t remember having been conscious of it before. As I my hand grows into consciousness the Being sends a jud-ud-dud-udder down my newly realised spi-i-i-ne? -Spine is created as it whispers its icy tongue. “Branch-shadow imprisoned. Form. Moon beams slaves to unlock. Enlighten brush. Brush. Painter. Paint. Black canvas. Unlock the stranger.”

“Black canvas?”

“Already here.” As the Being uttered its fateful last words the sky opens and the rain falls. As it falls the droplets seem to fall on the textured mass in the atmosphere of noise mass. The darkness begins to run like wet paint on a canvas. I begin violent strokes with the brush on the night around me. The beams sprouting from the shadow form in my hand move through space leaving brush strokes in the dark like the blood spatter of the Moon. The raindrops make splodges on the light strokes. The incessant drumming spurred my hand on as it moved like a spider spinning its web in the darkness, “Tatakapatapatakapatatata! Fffffffvvvvvvvmmmmmnnaaaaaah! Tatakapatapatakapatatatata! Hiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrmmmmmmnniiiaaaaaah!” The rhythm becomes like the nightmarish tick of the seconds hand of a clock stealing away precious time and engulfing space with the death toll of a funeral. Was I knitting my own shroud? Although the rain was battling with the brush strokes I can make out a road illuminated in the darkness. It is the road. I reach out to touch it but my fingers clutch at the air moving through the impressions of light in the canvas. I paint with more haste to give the painting substance. A dark figure begins to emerge. I try to recognise the face of this strange being but the rain that ever beats down, hindering my labours, masks their identity. I try to fill in as much detail as the rain allows and the elusive stranger seems to be painting also. Brush in hand. “Released.” The stranger was standing before a canvas: a painting of a dark wood. “Ma-ake i-it stop!” In the dark wood there was also a figure, much like I might imagine myself to resemble if the rain did not mask the face. Brush in hand. “Fiend! No! No! No!”

The painter has a black canvas before him. The painter paints a painter painting the painter painting the painter painting the painter painting the painter painting the painter.  Heart wrenching, blood freezing horror grips the painter whose being starts to suffocate in the darkness. What trick of horror was this black artwork? The painter looks at Being. Being’s impassible icy stare is accentuated by the inhuman mirrored orbs. The painter looks fixedly into the eyes of Being. Nothing stares back at the painter. The painter tries to scream; dark fingers wrap all around and throttle all sense of being. “C…c…c.” The painter resigns to the abyss of the black canvas.