Eldrid Unne: Compulsion (LJi s8e16)
ELDRID UNNE: Compulsion
Is it possible to rebuild the foundation of a house without disturbing the walls?
Black birds are such pests.
Sucking grime through the gradient of gritting teeth provides a daily fiber intake in only one breath. It tastes of greed, death and urban pollutive decay wafting through hazy air. Pumping the air through a Mister Coffee filter could supply enough sludge-coated iron to make a shiv. Somehow, people breathed in their contaminated, waste-filled air regularly. It made it hard for him to breathe at all.
The eerie dark of a frozen-fell veil evokes feelings of being absolutely alone and vulnerable at night. Surely, to most, this is disconcerting at best. Those lacking intestinal grit are frightened of what sundown may bring. But Ash sees the starless obfuscation as the unexplored. Each dusk brought whole worlds left unfound with treasures to discover. In his endless searching, it was after one of those nights that he’d met his shiniest beacon.
In those polluted dark night airs, the rubber soles of his shoes grip the cold concrete beneath his black Converse sneakers. A trench coat hangs from his arms and shoulders. His hair, as age-corroded copper wire, swoops back at his pale widow’s peak, giving him a slicked-back, used car salesman appearance. The whites of his knuckles underscore his anticipation with the balling of the leather coat’s pockets in his hands. Peculiar beats of some imaginary drum hums in his ears as a whoosh of an air current assaults his senses. “…seems to be the place,” Ash Lad says to himself, checking under his fingernails for dirt.
His neck turns to the side with a tight seizing of his jaw, forcing his pointed, ground tooth into the soft, red flesh inside his mouth. The pain reminds him why and what he’s here for. With a roll of limbs and a fluster of masked figures forming to fill a wall of bodies, Lad salutes from his brow. “Hello,” he chuckles. “Is Warlock in?”
…In what is a better question…
A full hominoid automaton choir moves with pops of their joints as a finely tuned instrument. Their feet stomp the hard, dark ground beneath them. The masks show no emotion or enjoyment of their synchronization as their arms flail in rigid clicks. Shoes press into the tips and through backward slides. Their heels thud in unison, forging a bass beat rallying around their indestructible break rattling Ash’s ears. Flipping to land on their shoulders, the drum broke erratically as legs kicked out into whirling windmills. A resounding kip-up echoed their chant at the end of their dance: “Rap is dead.”
“Tell that to Strange Famous…” Ash quietly replies.
All of the dancers flatten to paper-thin walls. The newly molded barricade outlines a rectangle in a flash of light. A small, perfect circular knob appears upon the walls staring at him in the now-still, silent air. Through the wall of collapsed b-boys, the door opens in an all-consuming light. Lad hisses with his hand covering his eyes, unable to see anything left.
“You know, I’m pretty sure Liberace was less flashy,” Lad says to his newest guest, a similarly nondescript masked figure, only differing from the previous dancers by his brown Domo baseball cap.
“Hello to you too, grievous lad.”
“Do you ever get tired of calling me that? Your damn story, now you…”
The masked figure folds his arms together, each long, spindly finger latching to his elbows in his first terrestrial display. “Well, let’s get on with this. Though you’re too late. Raven Fellows was here earlier. Guess what about?”
“I have a few ideas. Then you know.”
A masked head nods towards Ash. “Going to war with him won’t make a difference.”
“It still needs to be done.”
“How long has it been?”
“Years; I lost count, actually. A decade? Decade and a half?”
“We started out as seven; Antsy, Raven, you, me, Tyche, and Bey Tepes, brothers with Kaziklu King. We were to be a new order, to control chaos.”
“To control chaos is to kill it. If it is chaos, it is uncontrollable.”
Warlock exhales sharply from under his mask. “We were reinventing the wheel when King disappeared.”
“Repressed or oppressed, it doesn’t matter a bit to me,” Lad says, tucking his hands back into the pockets of his longcoat.
“Either or neither. Gone. Not here. I’ve searched. If I can’t find you, you’re not on this plane.”
“So you’ve given up and decided to stick to being this leader of your own chanting puppets. I’m sure the children find your act more awe-inspiring than I. We were as gods once.”
“Aye, all seven of us were; Prince of pain, passion, reasoning, pace, innocence, presentation, and the staked king…”
“I don’t enjoy this, you know,” Ash stutters out. “Going after one of us, knowing it will end badly, isn’t my idea of fun. Bey has already chosen a side. Antsy contacted me as soon as we knew Raven wasn’t done.”
“Over a woman?”
“Reason only fears what it can’t explain. Fear lashes out from my passion to Bey’s pain, beyond Tyche’s pace, as if the king’s own devices were plunged deep into a swelling chest.”
“…As I told the crow-ell-er, man-who-walks-as-bird, on flights of black wings and flutters of festering feathers; I will think on the matter. I cannot commit. I do not see this as my battle and I am quite indisposed.”
“Yes, I suppose between the krunking and the street performing, your calendar is just filled. Goody…By the way, when he decides you don’t fit his praxis anymore, just ask. I’ll be there if I’ve not already gone the way of spearing monarchs.”
I’ll think about it, a lad insane; Ash Lad…The words echo throughout the spatial environment as the leader of the chorus, Warlock, fades into the wall of his sleeping pawns. Springing to life, each party within the partition inflates as Ash settles his weight over his rear right foot.
“What now?” snaps Ash. He pushes an unfiltered Camel cigarette from his pocket with the lighter. “If I’m going into this rabbit hole deeper, Alice, I’m going to cover all my bases.” As if anticipating Lad’s reaction, a haunting, united chortle bursts from the manikins who about-face and dip their arms as waves do drift to shore.
“He can’t accept it. He can’t let go. Raven will always win!” An army of voices roar with laughter all around. Ash pinches the cigarette in his teeth with the whites of his knuckles indignantly displayed.
“Stop it, Warlock!”
“He can’t! He can’t! He can’t!”
Rust and blood drowns Ash’s clear vision. His hands ball to iron-clad fists cocked to knock something. Every target looks the same in a dreamless, endless world that was quickly igniting in blazes. A lad indecent thrust out his paw to the nearest doll’s throat as his fingers tighten upon the windpipe. Nothing could stop him, and why would it if it could? It was merely a doll, a creation, a wall, furniture. No one cared if a table got it in the end.
Lad’s left leg pushed forward to brace his chokehold by placing his knee to the tool’s back. With his leg tripping up his tormenter, Ash Lad slams the body to the pavement with only his hand covering its larynx. The doll’s fractured skull cracks the pavement with a clap of thunder and shockwave of brute force. Rearing back his free hand, Ash batters the mask with a pounding after the grounding, shoving the figure’s face into a crater upon the ground. “Peacocks ain’t shit without their feathers…If I have to burn the world to get him off my back so I can be happy with her, I will…,” growls Ash, spitting his cigarette butt to the side.
Quietly, a stoic chorus leader looks on. “Behold, a lad insane…the prince of passion,” whispers Warlock.