You stand at the edge of nowhere, layered coats and mittens long succumbed to the freezing chill that batters away at skin and bone. Arms, legs, fingers, toes, all more automata than human in their rigid staggered motion. Those frostbitten hands of yours reach forward towards some sort of destination, hopeless to stop the blinding haze of snow that cuts and gouges the field of vision of anyone who approaches this barren place. Through the squinted dual windows of ice-flaked eyes, the world outside seems completely white. Things that might be trees encroach at the edges of the far distance yet you feel unsure of this discernment. The way those black branches twist, bend and flicker between torrents of snowfall gives the impression of moving limbs in an active pursuit; you’ve never had an eye for the details and it helps you convince yourself that perhaps these trees just look identical, that they are not following you.
Then in the distance… a sickly red hue illuminates the white horizon. Not warm, not comforting, just another strangeness. The red light, which grows stronger as you approach, seems to soak into the snow, polluting its purity. At the center of the red you observe an ever clarifying shape, a tall spire; could it be a tent? A radio tower? It is sharp in all the ways those things are and yet… No. No steel could be so blue, a tent surely would have blown away in such weather. The construction of the shape hurts to even look at, so sharp it makes your eyes begin to tingle. In all its design, just from seeing the blurry silhouette, you think that this might be the architecture of perfected hostility. When the tremors first erupt you panic, thinking that there must be an earthquake or avalanche and yet wherever you look there is no sign of these things. To your horror the cause of the vibrations are not an external force, but an internal one. Every organ in your body rumbles and quakes, every hair stands on end, and your eyes painfully roll themselves to look to the left, to the right, up, down, legs forcing against your will to bend backwards and walk the other way. Your entire body makes an active effort in running away from this object.
For some inane reason you close the distance between yourself and that blue dread structure, fighting every step to overcome self preservation instincts that scream “run you idiot, RUN!” Even if you wished to run however, the snow crops up to your knees; there is no fleeing in this place. The winter night air is sickly here, a not quite pitch black, the color of tepid diluted coffee permeated by the hideous luminescence of the snow reflecting the moon rays as if in a mockery of its attempt to bring comfort to the season. Out of that ink wash sky, out of the ice storm, extends the long neck, the cruel smile, the hateful eyes, the bemused face, the devilish shape of The Slasher.
And I say to you:
A nice walk
isn’t.
it
It has been some time now hasn’t it? About a year in fact, since our last gathering, I wouldn’t have it any other way. To be separated from someone you care about is such a wonderfully melancholy feeling, something you can nurture and sprout into an addictive habit. Such is that when you finally meet with those people once more the warmth, the brightness, the emotions, they all blossom forth into something strange and volatile.
Ah but, can you feel the shift in the seasons? The encroaching completion of a violent circle? My greeting was not just in good spirits but also to suggest the nature of what is to come. This has all happened before; and will happen again, and again and again and again, forever and always until this bleeding wound ends at the knife tip blade that carves it into the fate of the world. Curling inwards, along the winter spiral, we walk from dark to light; watching the candles flicker and focus inwards as we sustain ourselves against the towering cold.
The thing called “History” will never end but if say, we were to prepare, to steel ourselves against it, we can survive it a little longer. We cannot stop ourselves from being murdered by history, that great sharp toothed beast that eats everything and all, but we can outlive our intended date of death - channel the path to something lighter for a brief moment.
Since our last meeting I have wandered long, seeing all the sights of the world that my creator never got the chance to witness herself, sifting my blade through bone and skin like a comb through hair. Would you like to hear about it? There are so many stories to tell that by the time I finish them all you’ll have frozen to death, and I need you alive for a little longer… How about four recent ones? Can you manage that?
The city was… the ugliest thing I’d ever had the displeasure of seeing. Los Angeles is such a miserable place, full of shallow miserable people openly killing themselves just to live there drawing pictures. Jayne would disagree, she once wished for the chance just to scrub the floors at one of those moving picture factories before she grew bitter and disillusioned with it. Ugly neon place, home of snake oil salesmen and perfume fumes. And still, Jayne had always wanted to visit the city so in her stead I felt the need to walk its streets, meet its people, analyze its culture, all for that pitiable woman who terrified its denizens with a single drawing.
So I begrudgingly went through with my self made promise, endured the lights, the unpleasant people, the laughable infrastructure. If that was all there was to experience of the damned city I likely would not be recounting this story to you.
But
There was one good thing about that vile experience, one good person - at least for a bit, until they were no longer good. But at first they were sweet to be around, a meek thing with a little shop they loved to talk about. I must admit that, sadly, I am more wisened to the nuances of social interaction than my creator.
A slasher (in the idea defined by a country that sleeps with guns beneath their pillows) must be clever and amicable in order to lull their victims into a web of unlocked doors and missing cellphones.
Yet, and I speak honestly, I did not approach the person with an attempt to kill, nor is my cordiality a facade. (It is easier to deceive and engender goodwill when you mean more than half the things you say.) I genuinely found them to be pitiable in almost the same way Jayne had been. They took me around the city, seeming more lost than I was as we shopped, watched movies, among… other things. I had the inkling that they might not have left the house much before meeting me, Jayne was the same way in her graduate years, an entire amazing city that she rarely made time to explore.
Their blogs were…
interesting.
Maybe it was the loneliness that endeared me to them so much, the urge to kill it out of my new friend, to make them feel better. The idea that my presence was causing such a drastic improvement in this person's life was intoxicating, addictive, for once I was more than a slasher.
Hangouts turned into dates, turned into sleepovers, turned into morning coffee, turned into something better, something different.
But of course.
I am a slasher. Sometimes we get the final girl, sometimes we watch them run away, sometimes both.
I… did not get them in the end, or rather I did, but not the way I wanted, or they wanted.
I think we were both unhappy with how things ultimately wrapped up.
And then from that messy business I moved out and into better but still no more appealing cities, my steps timed accordingly with the weather patterns that brought with them terrible storms and choking frost air. What city I ended up in didn’t particularly matter, the important detail was of what lay within it. An esteemed art gallery, not quite big enough to be a museum, not small enough to be along the lines of one’s college art building. Well known enough that patrons regularly stopped to look up at it in admiration. As a young undergrad student Jayne had visited this gallery and been awed by the various works. Brutal paintings with frayed edges and heavily layered with brush strokes caught her mind and for the first time in her life the young graphic design student began to wonder if she could be doing something else with her life. Those brush strokes, as you surely know, would later overtake her mind in increasingly destructive ways but that is neither here nor there to discuss, a bit redundant really.
She always had thoughts about that building, loved it almost as if it was a person, the idea of returning to see it one day always on the back of her mind but much like her ambitions, never realized.
What is and what is not inhabited is such an oddity to decipher. In this world of Slashers, cartoon attack hounds, electrical men… the polka dotted thing… and of course the corpse skinned worm; well, it is interesting what other things spring to life. A painting that was loved, a building where so many suffered and lost their lives, a party gone wrong, a website that copies and echoes the events discussed on it, and a simple art gallery that a young girl loved once upon a time.
It made things inconvenient, you see, when I did what needed to be done.
I’m not sure if I could ever show my face to Jayne after what I did there.
The place that loved and hated Jayne all at once… located in windy Chicago, bombarded by the winds and downpours ferrying me through its borders. Jayne loved this place too, you know? She loved places because it was easier than loving people, and when she had to leave this state it broke her heart. She only lived there for two years, a little less than even, yet when she moved back home she would wake up at night feeling homesick for the Windy City and start to cry.
She’d tell herself it was stupid, she’d get angry with herself for getting upset over something so foolish. Deep down though she knew it wasn’t stupid and it wasn’t foolish, that place was the first time she felt comfortable calling somewhere “Home”.
That place loved her too, the people in it - at least a lot of them - loved Jayne too. But the ease with which she allowed herself to slip out of their lives left a bitter note on everything, so much that those who made life difficult for Jayne during her stay there prevented any further discussion of the zinester.
I inserted myself into the students' winter market as easily as the seasonal chill, making my rounds and spying in on what was being orchestrated behind the scenes.
Thinking about how things went down when I attended that event tickles me so. What a mess, what a catastrophe, what a clever generation that is to inherit this earth.
Jayne would be so proud if she knew. Would be so humbled if she knew how loved she was.
The last place I visited before where we find ourselves now… family business is always repulsive, neighborhood quarrels much more so. As you’ve likely read in Jayne's zine on motherhood and the general concept of parenthood, the western family unit breeds contempt for all people. The inherent violence of the dynamic blossoming to new grotesque proportions when cultivated within suburbia. Jayne's hometown was a shallow, hollow, sallow location to grow up in, the last place you’d want a child like her to be perceived.
Sadly I was not responsible for what became of my creator's mother, something that makes me feel such a silly sort of way it’s taken everything I have not to storm into that building and strangle the ones who did it, to pick up Jayne in my arms and carry her from that bedraggled place. We would find some place free of all this, somewhere she can sleep, somewhere she can call “Home” once more.
But Jayne is strong, Jayne doesn’t need me, and if she does she will call my name. Only then will I intervene.
The reason I visited was not related to her mother, see, whatever those sailing dreamers touch with their waterlogged fingers becomes pestilent. Bad business to interact with their little productions for too long as they have a tendency to cling on long after the event.
No, what prompted my visit was the reminder of another child, one still a child, left behind when Jayne fled that town and thus losing his only confidant in the process. Confidant in what you ask? It would be rude to say. Unlike the scarecrow I do not go poking and nudging others towards things they have no business knowing.
This site though… I’ve mentioned it before but history is not solid matter, in the internet age history and information has only become more and more fluid. Taking that into consideration with the ease at which concepts and structures can be inhabited, well… It is a museum that fills the empty exhibits with its own approximations, collages from all that it may find from the deepest dredges of the web… and beyond.
Enough of this however, why are we here? Standing at the edge of the cold, letting the sleet and hail and snow chisel away at our faces? Hm?
That old patchwork scarecrow, and those who share her intuition are likely to know as well as I what the purpose of this meeting is. Yet I have intimidated them, made agreements with them, told them to mind their own business lest I grow hateful and bitter towards their proximity to me. I would never kill the puppet you understand, I would never stitch her mouth shut or rip her in half, it would be impolite, I have grown since my days as ‘the puppet killer’. It is just so that she knows there are violences that must be adhered to.
Where does that leave us? The Mutt, diminished in power. The ‘Bee’, they find themselves too weakened and too isolated to interfere in any meaningful way in what is about to occur. Mirth illuminates my face at the thought of what has been predicted.
Ah… but. I wished to tell you all goodbye. I must say I was… flattered you bothered to read about me at all, to walk with me the last time, to ponder on my many killings. How joyous it makes me feel just to remember those occasions. My only friends, my only companions..? No, my followers. Following my every word, treading after me in the cold, leaving patterns of footprints behind in the pallid snow below that resonated with the swirling snowdrifts above. It is not enough to save you however, the whole world has to pay the price of what it did to Jayne. Punish the whole class, even the students who did nothing wrong, to set an example.
You should get out of here, you’re on the wrong side of the canvas hanging out with something like me… like Them, like Her. That little imp, the Meadowvalley twins, they all have fled this place, as animals tend to do before the storm. If you’ve been prying around, reading the pitiable manuscripts of… of… of!!! Penny’s… pity party you surely must know what a dangerous thing it is she intends to do. And I intend to let her do so.
Do you intend to intervene?
Nice thought, poor decision, very messy, strangled with your own intestines, lost to the bloated parasite feasting on this place.
You honestly might be better off reclining in my quarters when the dreaded day arrives… but I do love little wagers and games. How about this: how about you find my heart? Yes even a wretched slasher such as myself has one, hidden, shallow, shuddering, yet still there. Tell me what my heart is, do that and I will consider playing another game with you on the day when the red reaches the sky.
It was a nice walk, I wish it wasn’t the last. I will think on it for a while, a long while, and I will think about the world, for a very long while. I will think about History, I will think about History for a long while, I will think about Jayne, until my heart stops its function. I will think about you no longer.
Farewell.