Imagine

Imagine yourself at the edge of a cliff at the edge of the world in the company of shadows; pale faces flickering in and out of the darkness who wail with the wind to a tragic melody only known to them. It seems there is no sun, nor is there a moon, only the accursed gray glow pitch black offers to spur one onward into an illusionary web of optimistic determination. The wail of the wind mixed with something else… what is it…? The sirens? No. My advice is to heed not their call as they languidly sit before the distant oasis you think you may see, but in truth, you don’t. One more step and I guarantee you’ll be meeting your maker much earlier than you expected… the drop is enormous. You’ll be dead before impact.

This barren wasteland lies at the edge of comprehension, reason, and fleeting imagination. I’ve seen it not. This place is hard to find… and very few seek it. It is rumored you might find it fifty ticks away from the great barrier reef of waking dreams, where the nameless ones wander headless and heartless... grotesquely floating over a sea of murderous faces too numerous to distinguish. These faces, looking skyward, blanket the ground amidst the spiny barnacles that have broken off the lumbering, mythical black whales of heartbreak that forever patrol the cold oceans. These whales: great, grotesque leviathans 100 ft long and weighing 50 tons - their melancholy song it is said, so intensely loud, can rupture eardrums. Like icebergs that quietly float in the night, blocking out the moon, these creatures of myth obliterate any chance of spying the gray sand and shimmering faces down below, where no souls dare to go.

This cliff you stand on is not a natural structure but once a skyscraper of old, crafted in glass, metal, and stone. This barren wasteland you think you’ve traversed isn’t a wasteland at all, rather, it was once a great city, long ago filled in with red dust, it’s contents forever hidden, it’s treasures lost. If am army of laborers were to take up shovels and dig, in about three decades of painstaking work, they’d finally uncover the rotted innards of a once glorious civilization… a city on an island. They’d find rusted mechanical monstrosities, a never-ending sea of stone, rubbish, and metal, and then there would be the bodies. Hundreds, seemingly millions, rotted away, decayed ghastly eyes frightfully gazing toward the sky… decayed eyes searching for a god that never came… a sad lot truly.

Listen. There it is again. Shhhh. Block out the wind and the sirens and the tempestuous, sad voices, do you hear it? It’s the faintest whisper of a noise. A muffled ringing singing a hundred feet below, deep in the bowels of the smoky red ground. If you could turn invisible, into a phantasm, and phase through the dirt and travel the necessary distance in search of this sound you’d be led to the skeletal remains of a decrepit concrete structure. This structure is hollow inside - the insistent sands not allowed in. This building is twenty stories tall, partitioned into rooms; living spaces it appears. At the very heart there is a wooden table. On this table sits an antique device. The ringing you hear originated here, in this dusty, dark, airless apartment. This machine created by man, has rung for centuries and will continue to do so even after you’ve left, lived out your life, and crumbled into dust.