The Writer and The Artist: The Prologue

 

THE PROLOGUE

 

1

 

As many things do, it started with a plethora of emotion.

            It was about quarter to six in the evening. I was driving home from work with my white s**t unbuttoned at the collar and my jacket and tie flung across the adjacent passenger seat. I was hot, panting and confused, feeling as though the juices of my brain had been sucked out of me, leaving a dry shrub of nerves that would wilt and eventually die. I hated this feeling and yet, oddly enough, I loved it all the same.

            Turning off the motorway onto a B-road, I could still hear the distant ringing phones as they sneaked an echo into my withered eardrum. I could hear the shouts and screams of office clerks and managerial (but not considerably better) editors, running amok with their backsides on a 220 degree setting, collecting mislaid typescripts, ringing authors; typesetters; proofreaders, anyone but the emergency services for help.

            Gargoyles and harpies, the lot of them, I thought, finding it easier to think that than to breathe it.

            I sensed the emotions rumbling inside of me; I struggled, whilst approaching the upcoming roundabout, to suppress them. But they were, as always, overwhelming. I kept control of the wheel and the throttle as I meandered around the roundabout to the straight road at the other side.

            Before I could let my eyes submerge into a blurry impression, I saw a petrol station upcoming to my left and I flicked on my indicator and followed course. Pulling up beside the low brick wall separating the forecourt from the pavement outside, I changed to neutral, pulled the handbrake up with a vigorous motion and yanked the ignition key from the connecting lock.

            My stomach inflated with air as I undid my seatbelt.

            A momentary silence purged the void. The station forecourt was bare but for a few parked cars by the pumps and the drivers absent, paying for their fuel out of view.

I sighed, before regressed back into a fit of pants as the emotions drew level with me and fired right between my eyes. I cursed the timing of it all as my vision grew distorted.

Had it always felt this…this gut-wrenching?  I thought, as I paced though scraps of memories where these moments had happened before. They were not countless, seven at best, but enough times to denote that this feeling – this pain – was not a member of the usual commodity.

My head fell towards my knees, colliding briskly with the bottom of the driving wheel. I did not really feel the impact.

My eyes blinked uncontrollably, revealing to me for split seconds an outline; a silhouette; an old building.

Within me, I retched.

My bare feet felt the crackle of dry unkempt grass; my ears heard the creaks of an old door and the shrieks of black-coated birds as they cawed somewhere above my head. I was there again.

No!

I flinched away from the picture as my head drew back to the headrest of the driver’s seat. But I was not out yet; the image merely changed, absorbing the building and those horrific features into a darkness soaked with echoes and terrifying creatures.

It was a place I had never been before…except obscurely I had.

I had subconsciously created it.

I saw me, then I was me, sitting on my swivel chair at my office desk, hovering and shaking amidst a mass of bleeding, blending purple colours, torched with a centre of black. Perhaps it was a void, or maybe a portal, into the endless pit that was my mind.

Buzzing black phones filled nearly every available inch of the work surface, unconnected but still able to astound my ears with ring-ring-ringing. My hands raised themselves to my ears and clenched the lobes inward as much as possible.

Winged creatures filled the airway surrounding me. It was those blasted gargoyles and harpies I had imagined, yelling and snapping at me in ridiculous disguises of shirts, ties and suits. They weren’t fooling anyone, but I knew what they were and what they stood for.

I yelled.

Seconds later the picture was gone but the memory stayed intact. My senses seeped back to reality as I heard rhythmic thumping close to my right ear. Clarity wavered as I accounted for it but it felt unregistered and unimportant.

A momentary blink later and I was back, pulled completely from the wreckage and safe within my car. I looked down at myself and saw the dabs of spittle that sunk invisibly into my black trousers. My neck felt sore with the motion and I could feel my back embodied with smelly sweat.

I heard a voice and then another tap, coming from the window on my driver’s side. I jumped and looked out towards the concerned stranger – a young woman with a bald baby folded under one arm, leaning down at the thick pane of glass separating us.

            My cheeks suddenly burned, realising the embarrassment of the whole situation. I looked around to the other end of the forecourt and saw another man glaring out at me as he stood passively by his car.

It could have been worse, I thought.

            I looked back at the young woman and rolled the window down, looking out at her with as graceful a smile as I could manage. ‘Hello?’ I muttered, keeping a cool posture and trying to blank out the entire event. God knows what it must have looked like to her.

            The baby looked at me unfazed.

            ‘Sir,’ she said politely, ‘are you okay? Do you need help? Are you si…?’

            ‘I’m fine,’ I said, interrupting her from the dreaded next word. ‘Just a minor headache.’ Some headache. ‘I’ll be fine. I get them now and again.’

            The young lady stood upright and took a step backwards, swallowing my lie whole. ‘Maybe you should see a doctor about it?’ she then said, as though I might not have considered it already.

            ‘Believe me,’ I said truthfully, starting up the car again, ‘there is no cure for it.’

 

2

 

I have never seen a doctor about it.

As far as I know there is no cure for my condition, something I do not so much suffer with but adhere to. It is one unrecorded and unobtrusive to the general public but it is there all the same. I see flashes of my life as my emotions draw from my memories of particular events and create a picture that feels almost as real as the moment I type this sentence out to you. I can sense the vivid surroundings; I feel the emotions caged within the moment; I breathe the air of a paradox that does not truly exist and yet it does all at once. They are moments that last in the fabric of time for only a few seconds, but to me they exist for much, much longer.

            That ordeal in the petrol station forecourt had happened so many years ago. It was at a time when only I knew of my condition and that was the way it was going to stay.

I had driven out of the forecourt and back onto the B-road without attention, the way I had originally intended.

Before that day it had felt right not to bother anyone with the worry of irregular and uncontrolled blackouts that could happen at any time and anywhere. They were my problem and I could deal with them.

Until that day. That pain I had experienced…it was something I could not burden alone.

When I had got home that evening, it became a secret no more.

            I told her everything.

 

3

 

My name is John Henderson. I live with my loving wife Laura and it is to her that I dedicate this story to. She is my world; my flame; the piece that fits me as my other half. Without her I would right now be literally nothing, lost for eternity within a hollow space far from anywhere.

            Hear the story of the writer, the artist.

And the messenger in between.

Author's Note

I apologise for the out-of-sync paragraphs, writerscafe.org seems incapable of keeping the word document exactly as it was.

Reviews

[Alyssia Landin]

I think I am really going to like this series. The Proluge is amazing! Sorry it took so long to read it. I know you requested it sometime ago, but I havent been on. I'm planning on reading this series, and looking very much forward to it.