Haunting

Whilst single raven

all ebony-glass and clever

and crafted beak so jet

lifts its shape

to coast another settling place

on the rock

before the crashing waves

a gift of

obsidian velvet

for all our

stormy skies.

Prologue

A smell of an orange grove. Alas, Lianna had arrived and whispered to me many things. Things that resonated within me. A latent ability and knowledge seemed to emerge upon listening to her words.  

^^^^^^^^^

I think that I had gone mad. Three years to this day I was to be ordained a Catholic Priest by Bishop Prieto himself! I knelt before the bishop. He placed his hand upon my head. A lightning-like flash! Then, the visions commenced. Black robes strewn about…an orgie of lust…a sacrifice of human dross…a Presencing…The Abyss…Dark Gods?!? Drecc. A sultry seductive voice-over seemingly narrated the visions.

I then looked up at the bishop who was still chanting. Somehow, I felt as if what was happening was festering my spirit. I was told later that I had collapsed.

That was my last memory before finding myself laying on a hospital bed.

“Lianna.” I said to myself. “Her name was Lianna.”

Upon my release from the hospital, I had taken in a meeting with Bishop Prieto. I found his office to be too bright and gaudy with Nazarene paraphernalia. Only a few days ago, I would’ve been ashamed to think these very thoughts.

For no reason, I was unaffected by empathy and felt a need to look for “Lianna.”

I gathered my meager savings and boarded the first available flight to New York. For some unknown reason, that was to be my destination.

I landed in Kennedy Airport in what seemed an eternity. I took a taxi to Manhattan, what the locals referred to as “The City.” I was fatigued but felt as if needed to be somewhere with a sense of urgency although it was not clearly established what it was.

As I spoke to the cabdriver, I could only manage the numbers “352.” He smiled knowingly and he drove skillfully through the mass of cars, vans, trucks, everything. I have never seen so many cars in my life!

I was in Manhattan, 3rd Ave and 52nd St. I went to pay the driver and he waved me off.

“Just go, Father. May you find what you seek.”

I got out and looked at him. He smiled and then drove off. I had found it unusual that a cabdriver sounded almost prophetic. I looked at myself and I still wore my collar! I almost believed it to be something supernatural when he referred to me as “Father.” I laughed and then I looked up.

“Bamboo 52?” I asked myself. I walked through the doors.

A scantily dressed woman in a black leather dress and black leather boots greeted me at the door. I looked into her eyes and even though the establishment was dimly lit, her Dark eyes seemed to be prominent.

She whispered in my ear. It was Lianna! I followed her to a back room. The place was filled with people and I felt as if everyone was staring. Yet, I saw no one but her. 

Lianna began to touch and caress me in ways that I had never known before. I was led to a chair that was seemingly covered with the softest material that I have ever felt.

Enveloped in Darkness, I felt her touch, her ecstasy. Her passion. I entered her and it felt as if satin had enshrouded me. After feeling replete, I began to fall asleep.

Again, I woke up in a hospital, one quite different from the one that I had been in previously.

I was in a small, dark room, minimally lit. I was laying on a blue mat in the middle of the room with green hospital pajamas on.

The door had a small plexiglass window where I saw her again. Lianna! The Dark eyes ironically illuminated my Being. I cried out for her.

Instead, two burly orderlies barreled through the door as I stood to touch the glass where Lianna’s face had been. They held me down as a tiny framed Filipino nurse injected my arm with a syringe.

I screamed out once more and felt my head spin. I closed my eyes once again.

The dream started. A nightmarish, almost indescribable landscape. Being there itself felt as if all my self-images to be illusions. Everything was broken down. “Acausal” perception perhaps? Whatever “Acausal” means.

I was roused by an orderly. A small man weraing glasses and a blue suit smiled at me.

“Hello. I am Dr. Lang. Come, let’s talk Father.”

“I am no longer a Father.”

“I see. Judging by your actions within the last year. Armed robbery, rape, assault. You have created a rap sheet in less than a year!”

“What? where’s my Brothers and Sisters?!? I was in a Temple!”

Dr. Lang ignored him. Who is this Lianna person?

“Someone, um, the Temple Mistress, she’s the most beautiful woman that I have ever seen. Um, er, she took my virginity.”

“Yes, indeed. That was the time that the police picked you up for masturbating at a sushi bar?”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“Before that, it was reported that your plane landed in Kennedy Airport, you took someone’s cab while he was attempting to lure passengers and drove yourself to the bar you were caught masturbating in?”

“No! No that’s not possible. You’re lying!”

“And that began a string of crimes where you were talking to multiple imaginary people, males and females.”

I felt myself lunging at Dr. Lang.

“Liar!” The orderly grabbed me as three more converged onto the small room.

Again, the small nurse injected me.

I found myself laying in a vast orange grove. Someone had roused me. Lianna knelt over me as the sun shone brightly in the background. I wept with joy.

An orderly roused me from my sleep as I was still weeping. I was in the same room, laying on the same mattress but this time , I was in restraints. My weeping didn’t cease.