Astrophysics

He had tried, like others, several times before to unlatch the gate. But this time, as heavy sleet rippled through the soft dark air refracting the beams of speeding headlights and a nearby streetlamp and modulating the pewter bars to an insidious shade of black like melting wax, Barlow, kicking at the paltry rusted chain link that had kept the grounds beyond untouched for nearly six generations of uncommon dithery—Horace Lumbago had had the gates shut in compliance with what was, for the most part, a successful act of extortion which, among other diabolical stipulations, demanded that the Lumbago estate be abandoned and locked up indefinitely and without question and to which demand Horace eagerly responded by throwing out every tenant, every maid, every cook, and every other tender hollow that resounded with the beat of a heart and slamming the gate shut for what certainly seemed like eternity, leaving what remained to wallow in an endless pit of noxious self deprival while his heirs lingered on the outskirts (hiding under beds, peeking beyond corners and curtains) and watched a once symbiotic pillar of uninhibited pride and greatness ever-so-slowly crumble to the ground—kicking with a ferocity and an insoluble tendency towards absolute depravity, shattered the link which had stood as the monarchical ruler of a generation and sending it plummeting towards the ground and landing, not with the crash and earth shaking grumble he had expected, but instead with a meager plunk into a shallow puddle that had all the while been accumulating just beneath his feet.

Barlow flung open the gate and stared deep into blackness that lie ahead of him—a blackness that seemed to reach deeper than any he had experienced before; a blackness that, as he entered, did not merely surround him but instead seemed to swallow him as if by an infinite sordid chasm of metaphysical muck. Undeterred, he trudged his way onward in the dark, panting, as would a fiend, as rain sloshed against his non-existent being. It began to rain harder and the static roar that it produced became nearly insufferable. It cast forth voices that moaned in the night and Barlow, distraught but as yet still undeterred, screamed back at them. He demanded these voices relent, but as he yelled he soon perceived that he made no noise. Despite his efforts to speak, his words would not take form neither in his head nor in the external world to which he wished to present them. There he collapsed on the ground as the static continued to build and engulf Barlow in its rich and omnipotent droll.

Until finally it stopped and Barlow found himself lying in utter silence. Still in absolute darkness, the setting was somehow different. The air was thinner and emitted an odd musk. The ground was not wet as he had thought but merely cold and made of a smooth foundation of stone and concrete. In the distance (the distance?) he thought he saw something (a light?) faintly buzzing which unquestionably drew him as would a moth to your patio lamp in the heat of the summer. And from that point on his goal, his wish, his entire existence depended on it: causing all memory and history to vanish in its languid counter-textual glance.