Wicked Prompts

BLUE HAUNT

The farmhouse, started as an old trading post and roadside rest-stop to Roman Era travelers, was haunted by ghosts. Travelers that never made it to their destinations. Perpetual nomads, wandering in the hills aimlessly during the day, and resting in the house's cold wine cellar at night. Drinking from empty bottles full of cobwebs and dust.

A brick road paved its main wooden gate and was said to be the King's road. Along the horizon a backdrop of sandy tan hills made of sediment stacked up in rows of cones, like the towers of a fortress, looked down in a menacing heap at the secluded house below. Perhaps the ghosts went to the monastery nestled amongst those cone steeples to pray for redemption.

One of the house's caretakers sometimes heard the ghosts' ramblings and moaning in the middle of the night, while the residents snored in their beds, and the kitchen utensils tattled of mice. Smashing bottles from the party they held in the bodega and the faint lure of dance music and the pattering of feet to celebrate another journey begun or ended, was all he could make out.

He and the new residents had their own parties in the early evenings before retiring at midnight but the old travelers, those transparent with tints of blue against moonlight glares, moved about even later. They carried brandy bottles from room to room, sipping from them and slurring drunk'n lyrics to old marching songs from faraway lands, where they missed their loved ones, and of the homesickness that tore into their souls for eternity, questioning if this old house might be hell.

The bottles were left in various levels of emptiness, sitting on old wooden tables in the hallways, or on antique desks by open windows and sometimes on the monolithic stone table outside. No one ever claimed them in the daylight but sure enough they'd be found empty by the next moon.

On one such night the caretaker was woken from a troubled slumber, in a humid sweat and wrapped shivering in a damp sheet. He walked through the tepid light down the stairs to the kitchen. A blue whiskey, in a bottle, thick and opaque, as if smelted from an ancient sandy glass, stood on the table. Its label was yellow and worn into a faded smear, but the silky liquid filled half its rim and beckoned as if sirens chanted within. He took a glass from the shelf. Blew the dust clear of its belly and poured the blue into its womb. From the tumbler he poured the contents down his throat, and felt a tingling burn blaze a trail through his limbs and behind his temples, and closed his eyes to savor the vibrations he'd heard from walls far off minutes before, flow through him now not far away at all.

He was still in the kitchen drinking the emptiness. One glass and then another. His musings were interrupted by music. The uneven and scratchy whine of a phonograph on old vinyl. He set the glass down and stood from his chair to listen.

Soft murmuring through the walls of the old mansion beckoned him and he followed the whispers like breadcrumbs. First up the stairs, creaking and loose, over the missing step and through the cobwebs. Flies without fear buzzed around his head and jagged edges of light, shards of white, pierced through cracks in the walls, sent by a half-moon.

He traversed the empty spaces, one room after the next, stopping for moments, his next clue echoing further. Crickets playing outside muffled his trail but there was just enough to pass through the next door, to cross the next vacuum of shadows, over the floor. All the way on the other side of the house, one last room, a large studio, scattered with tables and dust, old jars of paint and boards of stained plaster, and assortments of gravel and linen, he walked to the glimmer in back, the fountain of wanderings.

Against the wall, over the bed, another bed, laying down, flowing over them like water, two bodies in motion, beneath waves of deep, long fingers caressing the head, down the neck and to the torsos, one indistinguishable from the other, he watched - a voyeur of ghosts.

Brushed onto blankness by some Goddess, every shade of color but all of them blue. The blue of cold and ice, the blue of sky, the blue of rain sheets, the blue of eyes, and blue so deep it might be black. More shades still bluer, like the blue of hearts torn asunder, the blue of music and mourning lyrics, and the blue of haunting.

He coveted their blues, projecting himself into them, wanting to live absorbed in their world of blissful intemperance. The roles in Oscar's story were reversed. He craved to live inside a painting and let the flesh and blood stand outside, aging, diminishing from the lecherous sins and the ravenous yearnings, indulgent of the pleasures in two dimensions, but yielding to them in three.

If she can paint the lusts and loss, perhaps the experience can be projected on those who view it, faded and worn through the light, yet potent, he pondered.

Their caresses moved, though still in a frame, looking through the window of an aquarium, flowing around them, shifters of light and shadow, inside one another, permeable and wet. He could hear their love cries emerge from the canvas as if from bubbles.

Feet and hands, shaped to glide, over a head pulled back, in the blue and black, to look at the light in ecstasy.