voodoo child

It begins with the birth of a child, a special child, me. It is a tale of love and hate, good and evil, night and day, truth and lies. It is the tale of a quest for something so precious, so unique, that its existence is known only to one entity in all of the multiverse, me.

How I can begin to describe the horror of that day in December 1955, the fifth to be exact, when the tail of a monstrous comet swept over the face of the Earth, the day the very foundation of reality shook. The night I was born, I swear the sky turned a fiery red.

There has always been a hellhound on my trail; a dark, nameless, faceless nemesis that pursues me in the corridors, down the alleyways, through the labyrinths of perpetual self-analysis, where abides a little shivering, quivering thing, laden with fear and doubt and shame.

In my childhood I was pale and unhealthy, subject to epileptic fits. A child angel is still very much like a child. Strange new things to comprehend. New stresses and strains to handle, more and more responsibility crushing the life out a soul and the soul out of a life. Schools and families and friends and constant change—-it is so confusing.

I remember that once my mother and sister had gone out and my father was in a world of his own, as usual. Suddenly, I had a weird sensation as if a veil came over me, like I had to do an amazingly mysterious thing but couldn’t think what. I wandered around as if I were invisible, as if I didn’t exist. I touched something and it was as if it had sucked me into another world entirely. I felt and heard strange things behind me and when I turned to look they disappeared.

The black shapes, as I call them, keeping themselves always just out of sight, scuttling away like cockroaches in my peripheral vision.

I remember telling my mother once that when you looked into a mirror it's like going into another land. Well, that’s where I thought I was going. To a place where I would live the same life as before, but differently. And when I thought I felt myself slipping into mirrorland, my beloved cat and faithful companion Drac (short for Dracula—-he's Tonkinese) slunk in and started purring as he settled himself in my lap. And it was as if a spell had been lifted and I was a bird that had been set free from a golden cage and a rainbow was above me. Free.

But that was long ago. Afterwards, I decided that whatever the feeling was, it was evil. It tried again and again, to suck me into mirrorland. I held out valiantly for many years, but in the end it defeated me. Now I’m wandering lifelessly among people I once knew and loved. Am I the changeling, or is the changeling me?

Someone who looks exactly like me is living my life. She is a handsome devil, that is true. Sensual lips, big green eyes, pools so deep you could drown in them.

She tells people she is a psychopath, and then says "…but currently I choose not to kill you, I hope you appreciate the gesture!" She says she doesn't understand where good and evil comes from. It's all just labels, she says. They don't mean anything really, absolutely.

It's impossible to describe the feeling, the state of being totally "vagued-out", when everything in the universe is unreal, and I am detached from it all anyway, and it all seems old and tired and ugly, and the silent scream hums through everything.

Praying mantis; gender, indeterminable. Stick-like, pale-green body; globular, multi-faceted eyes; sharp spurs along my serrated forelegs. Peculiar swaying movements as I edge forward over a landscape of dead leaves and knife-bladed grass.

I see the other. She is large, monstrous, cruel. My excitement grows. I must mount her, and die, this is my fate. I embrace it willingly. I cling to her with my puny arms. She beheads me. Sticky, colourless pus flows from the stump. She eats my neck, my arms, my abdomen. My passion increases as she consumes me. Mutilated and segmented, I flail and throb wildly against her, my ecstasy increasing as my death approaches. To be eaten by one such as she is bliss beyond thought...

Copyright © S R Schwarz 2007. All rights reserved.

refresh screen