Shapes in the

DARK

For a kill, men would kill, why they do not know

Stiffened wounds test their pride

Men of five still alive through the raging glow

Gone insane from the pain that they surely know

Take a look to the sky just before you die

It is the last time you will

Blackened roar, massive roar, fills the crumbing sky

Shattered goal fills his soil with ruthless cry

(Barry Gribb, 1984) 

DAY ONE: January 11TH

It was nearly 12:00 p.m. when he sneaked surreptitiously to a lady's garden with one fixed, self-justified aim: to callously avenge on her. He pointed his rifle directly toward the open window of her house and unhesitatingly let off a silver bullet, which smoothly ran through her chest and left her bleeding. It was a rainy cold night; a silent, overcast depressing night.

The cry of an infant was heard from the distance. The glass of the window splashed and splintered in all directions. He could then see the horrendous darkness descending on the house. He had to escape the place before it engulfed him in

Revenge had years ago preoccupied his mind that was fixated on one single idea: to make the person who stole his bloom bite the dust. He contrived collusively with the Devil by devising a secret plan to put a horrible end to his foe that was shockingly his wife. The uxoricide was tactfully carried out with the assistance of the Devil that made every necessary arrangement to bring the plan into fruition in the most devilish way away from police recognition.

But no crime is left unpunished. In the last moment before he fled, the police force had caught him red handed. She informed them previously that her life was threatened by his existence in town.

As predicted, Stoki was charged with two degree, premeditated murder. In the end of the trial, which was held in January 10th 2001, the jury reached a severe verdict: that's after five days in the incommunicado prison, he would be condemned to death. Meanwhile, the court would investigate more deeply in the case, since the alleged murderer was partially insane. He would fancy, hallucinate, and even sometimes hear sounds that no one heard and answer questions that no one asked.

Thus, the judge decided not to carry out the judgment hastily before analysing his medical reports, especially those about the abnormality of his brain cells.

It seemed incongruous to see a lonely man like Stoki assassinating his own loving spouse who, literally, was the only bright star in his galaxy. Truth to tell, as his criminal records were disclosed to her, she promptly divorced him and married another man. Amado, as he used to call her, did not offer him any chance to explicitly explain his actions.

Though he kneeled apologetically to her, all his attempts to regain her sympathy were of no avail. In seeking a shelter in Amado's heart from the haunting spectre of loneliness, he found a deep grave ready, any moment, to swallow him up. He wished to forget the past hoping to embrace the future in a new light. He wanted to get up every morning and found his pretty wife looking at him with golden sandy strips of hair laying on his face, and a smiling mouth articulating all expressions of love though unspoken.

He craved the moment the parent and children would be around the table indulging on hot chocolate all neatly and immaculately dressed ready for the day. At night, the family would be watching a film analysing the plot and laughing at its farce. But his wishes only remained wishes and all that made him frayed and obnoxious.

The only hope left for Stoki was his new-born daughter. Amado prevented him from seeing her after divorce, yet he used to frequent her house to see his child even from far. He could not help being a stranger to his only daughter and that intensified his sorrow.

Stoki was a bit psychologically disturbed. He seemed to be a reclusive, taciturn man who yours ago detached himself from the corrupt, social life, preferring to interact only with his own proper thoughts, some came from his mind , others from his conscience, but oftentimes from the Devil who was permanently accompanied with a cadaverous angel with a faint halo around him . Scarcely did he take the initiative to avert the Devils' prepositions and temptations because he was robbed of his power ever since the Devil overtook Stoki's soul and became the master of his mind.

In short, Stoki was a man of multi-personalities that even sometimes fancied discourses with his partners and, having spent long nights and days alone with his shadow that sadly escaped him at the evening, imagined their diverse shapes in the endless darkness that had fallen over him for eternity.

So ambivalent and indecisive he became as he lived in two dialectic worlds hardly differentiated and scarcely separated. With time, they blurred till the material one lost its materiality and the imagined one lost its fantasy. The real and the unreal intermingled dramatically. After a long painful life, Stoki, amid all this mental turmoil, became bipolar and his mind was drained of its abilities as though no cell were still functioning properly.

His conscience was depicted in a dainty, grumpy old woman, Nagger. She casually evinced her cumulative wisdom as she obtruded upon discussions in the form of a prolonged soliloquy. The Devil often embodied himself in a decrepit, dwarf, old man with a curved staff in his left hand.

At night, Stoki couldn't sleep as he relived the occurrences of his last hideous crime. Its scenes were graphically flashing in his mind like a violent movie made, for the first time, in the dark so that only sounds of guns and cries could be heard. He wasn't a plain novice in such acts; the Devil and he had a long history stained with blood. Only two days or three, to quote the Devil, would suffice to eternally tomb the crime in the somber cemetery of the subconscious.

At midnight, Stoki was still wide awake tossing and turning in

his white-and-black straw bed. Luckily the Devil was spending the night with him, otherwise; silence merged with darkness would aggravate his loneliness.

"What's keeping you up till this time," said the Devil

"Nothing, just reminiscing how betrayed I was when I thought that my heart might find a place for love but it seems that it's completely engulfed in pain , envy ,and hatred. Like you ,Devil"

" At least I always stand with you shoulder to shoulder and never let you alone , right "

Stoki rose to a sitting posture , roving his eyes about the room as if searching for an invisible spirit

"Yeah, Always inciting me to do the good"replied sarcastically

"Are you alluring to regret?" commented the Devil with a low pitched voice to let his words strike Stoki's ears in a challenging overtone.

"Don't get me wrong, I mean __you ...and__ I have perpetrated many crimes, our life is covered with a dark opaque veil. In cold blood, I have killed my wife, whom I was enamoured of by virtue of her tenderness," Stoki continued with a quiet voice, "but envy and enmity mingled with a modicum of love fuelled me like an uncontrolled fire meant to be pulled off by water but, out of nature's law, it persists more and more insofar as water is still thrown onto it. The more I remembered her glinting teeth and love, the more ecstatic I was to see her blood. I was blinded to the truth, the truth which I knew little of"

He paused since the Devil was going to respond with an accusing sharp gaze

"So has regre__"

Stoki interrupted quickly knowing how his emasculating words would end

"Nonetheless, I still believe that I did so with conviction, and regret will never take hold of me, so you had better stop pumping me for answer which I don't mean to insinuate"

Since the Devil could not reply swiftly. Nagger, who was fond of spinning around Stoki's head in her white, dull dress, seemed to gain the upper hand and interrupted his stream of thoughts with a lingered speech as that of a coach to his failed players

"How deep have you fallen from the surface of your reasoning? Life is an everlasting battle in which a person fights against himself. You feel like if you no longer win and everything is turning against you. Your only allies are pain, despair and regret. You see others laughing but you never dare to because an inner voice says no, solve problems first. Each time you go to bed and start drifting off, problems embody themselves in a black, blurred monster haunting you till you sleep with terror. Then, a relieving breeze comes to soothe your trepidation or leastwise to sedate you for a while. Yet you still can't get out of that dark pit, appealing for help but no one seems to hear you. You are underneath a fathomless abyss imprisoned, detained and tied with a thick cord written on it "no escape!"

"What the heck are you nagging about, Nagger," Jumped the Devil above Stoki's head blocking her way,

"Look! Let the man alone he needs to sleep your philosophical thoughts will take the whole night to be digested. Let us not get bogged down in your philosophy that no one understands"

"let her speak, I want to hear more" was Stoki's only comment

"Devil , you had better stand aside" She threw him down and resumed;

"Stoki , alienation has engendered a complex identity crisis , which this naughty Devil is brazenly complicit in . Your mind, accordingly, has expunged any meaning of hope. Your brain seems to store a multitude of terms and words to synonymously describe happiness, but, unfairly, your heart has no room to embrace them. Paradoxically, as the brain conjures up happiness, the heart promptly turns it into sadness, elation into dejection, mirth into pain and only pain that is felt. Even the only shred of light that you can hardly see seems to be fading away, and if you don't handle this adversity soon, you will find yourself shrouded in an obscure vale of tears, suffocating darkness and endless valley of regret."

Then a weak voice coming from the back of the dungeon made all the three twist their gazes as though unexpected.

"Surely a flickering weak candle in a cold winter couldn't hold out for a long dark night; the quicker it melts the darker the room will be," said the Angel in a tired monotonous voice, he continued though he knew that no one was listening, "your slumbering soul is also reliable for this self-inflicted nostalgia"

The place elapsed into silence. The only audible sound was owls' hooting grimly on the top of the roof. Their sorrowful voice impermissibly penetrated the room, notwithstanding its thick walls like those of a bank vault full of jewellery and gold. The silence of the night was punctuated by the screeches and the hisses of the gray owls, which travelled directly to Stoki's ears making him imagine as if they were addressing him with a sad song of yore, entitled 'Sins and Nights':

The sin done in the day

Grows in the night so they say,

But the night is long and long it will stay,

And the pain is still! Still as the gray

"Fate did take part in the play"

Lulled! So the man would say

Why sorry? all men do it yes they

But what will change any way?

The night is still gray ,so gray

If only the sun sent its rays

But wait , the man is also clad in gray

like a feather in an abyss, how can it raise

Sunk in thought the man cried with a sigh

I !! I did it, so why going astray?

Sunrise time? Yes the time is nigh

Pain goes in the day, so they say.

Silence was intense to the extent that he could hear the beats of his heart and the whistles of his breath which sounded condemning, censuring and accusing him of the sin

In a nutshell, the situation of the poor man was miserable. As all his power was driven into minimum, within this fierce battle of thoughts that designated regret as its title, all the painful memories receded slowly, and handed the helm to the subconscious to lead him through the night. Very soon he would be irritatingly snoring not owing to the discomfort of the place, but to the incessant apparition of his three companions.

The Devil in one side erecting his horns and wagging his sleek tail , and the dull Angel crawling aside the gray-haired lady who was always ready to defend him against the Devil with her ineffective, all-night sermons.