A shade maze
Clara had always been excellent, the visionary with a greedy curiosity that attracted it deeper into the dark breaks of science as a moth in a flame. I love it for this – when you fell in love with Clara, you fell into a swirl of ideas and dreams and speculative future. Most people would not dare to tread on the waters in which she swimming, but to me, she was a goddess, her mind a maze I was happy to lose myself. But the splendor of its light had attracted shades that consumed it more and more every day, and those shades now pulled over me while I was looking for it in this sterile abyss.
My heart was drawn to chest pain as I thought again on that fatal day, the day she first talked about the project that would change everything. “We are on the verge of something extraordinary,” she said, her wide eyes, filling with enthusiasm. “Just imagine, the power to reorganize the structure of consciousness!”
I had laughed at it then, thinking that it was a wild manifestation of its greedy curiosity. But Clara had never been one to pull down, she solves a stone wall. That irony annoyed to me – how was it that we were both so attracted to all, unknown emotion? But there is a good line between curiosity and chaos, one that she had begun to pass inadvertently, and as the days turned into a week, I looked at a tired breath while that line was further blurred and further.
I knew the signs. Late nights spent in the laboratory, its growth of caffeine growing, eyes darkening with every sunset that passes through the sunrise. The warm laughter that once filled our small apartment was silenced in anxiety, painted only by the soft whip of the machinery and the loud snatch of the excitement that was poured from her lips as she stopped at her sanctuary. The project had consumed it, as I was afraid it would.
“Do you really think that’s sure?” I had asked, my concern by pouring over one evening as I sat away from it at our small dining table, its spray surface reflecting my concern again on me as a fighting mirror.
“Safe? Who ever made a progress while playing it safe?” She had laughed, her bright and airy voice, but when I caught a brief appearance of her smile, she felt broken, like glass pieces in a broken frame. I remember the way her mouth was twisted, almost as if she was pulling in two different directions: the girl who was once so careless and full of laughter, and the woman led by a fierce ambition that threatened to consume it completely. But I smiled, trying to play together, pushing my fear deep inside, where darkness could celebrate without obstacles.
When she finally did not return home one night, my stomach was frightened as I found herself drawn towards the lab, where she had soaked herself so completely in her work. The entrance approached me, highlighting its glass doors like the jaws of a beast. I went inside, the worrisome machine guns by warming my skin and filling my head with an electric abyss.
This was the first time I got into it. At the lab table, a tangle of wires and glass contractions reflected my horror as a grotesque mirror. There were strong forms beyond understanding – excellent tips of steel streaming and distorted, bubble fluids that seemed to call. And there in its center was all Clara, her glazed eyes, a hungry shell that had thrown her soul in the name of science. I called her name, my voice trembling with hope and fear, but was lost in the midst of the noise of this mechanical god she had created.
“Derek!” Her gaze grabbed me as if she had been awake from a deep nod. “Look! It”s incredible!”
The way her face was lit filled me with a strange mix of hope and despair. I approached the table slowly, my heart dancing in my old Clara insights; Her laughter, her eyes, all by closing in place like the puzzle pieces that fit easily together. “What have you done?” I asked, fear by climbing your throat as I scanned the messy instruments lined up in front of me.
“Changed perception, Derek!” She shouted, and felt like a mantra, echoing through sterile air, each recurrence a ballistic round hitting me with all the horror she carried. “Imagine being able to see the world through a completely different lens. More than people can understand. We can bypass instincts, fear … I can make them see through their madness and come out on the other side!”
Nessmenduri – the word echoed with violently, appearing in the air like a bubble that had exploded. “Clara, that’s not sure!”
She shook her hand disappointing, almost removing my concerns as a trace. The brightness in her eye was disturbing, a shooting of something darker. “You just don’t understand yet! Once you try it, you’ll see it.”
“Experience it?” I repeated it, grasping its thread of thought and the realization slammed with me like a cold odor against my skin. “You tested this yourself?”
“The next step is to find that limit!” Sadist joy in her voice pierced me and at that moment, I felt like I was drowning. There was a puzzle in her joy, dressed in shadows falling into the corners of her mind.
“No, Clara! We have to think that!” I pushed, taking a step forward, reaching her arm, but she shook my hand harshly, the act staring at something inside her I didn’t know.
“Don’t you want to see?” She bowed closer, those words that hung heavy among us, a noise wearing secrets that I was not prepared to choose. “You can be part of this. All I need is a small sample of you, only your blood. You will be amazed at what I can unlock!”
“Clara, please!” Despair was stuck in the throat, fighting her way to go out into a gas.
“This is our chance!” She shouted, her voice being hit as static. “Don’t you want? Can’t you feel? Emotion? Power?”
And in that dark moment, staring at the depth of her eyes, I saw it – the brightness of the obsession, a wild spark that could only lead to an unbreakable horror. I pulled back, a crack that opens between us, between love and folly.
“I can’t,” I said, my heart weight falls on my stomach.
She was wrong, the light in her eyes fading as the harsh volcano of ambition began to cool, leaving behind a bark. “You will see, Derek. In one way or another, you will do it.”
The days melted in one another after that, my dreams did not tarnish not with the spectrum of what could happen – but on the contrary what was happening already when she went inside, an operator of her mental apocalypse.
After what the years buried in isolation, Dawn came out of the Verdant light cradles, yet the colors felt broken. I wandered through our once alive, dangerous house, while scaring the remnants of memories, each shaking in my ears as a dream of fever. Clara had become a match – a ghost running in the lab, her laughter echoing against my strained heart.
At every moment that passes, the air was tightened around me, squeezing every breath outside until I felt drowning. I had a great desire to find comfort, to take her hand, and to pull her back where the light could warm her face again, but whenever I approached her, distorting the whispers cut through it, added. Glimmers of uncertainty were lit in the claws of its expressions, devoured by the shadows that wrapped its now radiant curiosity that had twisted into something grotesque.
“Derek!” She bark one night as I stayed at the door, and her students were lit, diluted as if she were not seeing me at all. “I have discovered the way to mental transcendence! This is our chance to rise up, shake the chains of who we are! Don’t you want to return to who we were, again in light?”
“How, Clara?” My voice was full of disbelief, but she could barely hear me.
“That way!” She grabbed my hand and in a state of dreams, I followed her back into the abyss. The lab was filled with shots, screens decorated with patterns and rocking data – a stunning chaos show that made my head rotate.
“Ownership of someone’s consciousness!” She laughed and had a fever in her eyes. “A new one, a better, without fear, without the shackles of everyday existence!”
I wanted to ask where she saw me in all this, if I would melt into some kind of hybrid experiment, but words slipped like sand under my fingers while cars wore a melody, pulling me to their distant, annoying drowsiness.
“Derek, join me,” she said, leading me to a chair in the center of the room – high and compelling as a dark throne. “You have to believe me! Embrace her with me, and we’ll overcome together!”
The bark left on me, a cold vibration that crossed my back. Instincto Instinct I had screaming at me to run, grab it and escape again in the warmth of our old routine. But then again, it was her – Clara always pulled me forward even when I wanted to withdraw. Attracting the ambition, unknown, of its loss completely – sitting on my chest with the weight of despair.
I took a step back, but her hand found mine, staring at a fire I didn’t anticipate, and her eyes were closed in the mine, staring at another light in the world. “Just let it go. Derek. You have to believe me. That’s the only way,” she whispered, and I felt her previous vibrancy slipped, replaced by a shadow of something foreign – some born of twisted science.
A blurred roar tried to deal with my mouth, but never did it. My blood returned to its mechanical empire as my mind tried. I felt that she would fall, reflecting the chaos by shaking among us, losing part of the self that could never be reunited.
And as she bowed closer, almost surrounding me with a crazy hug, I found myself torn as the boundaries of love and fear closed on all sides.
We were out of time.
Something in me shouted to free her from this terrible understanding of experiments and fear, but all she could see through those twisting eyes was the power she competed through her, a glamor that promised salvation but directed her soul to forgetfulness.
The bright machinery to upset Krescedo shouts and voices, the fabric of the room bending as if we were trapped inside a kaleidoscope, a twisted mirror between love and madness.
I want to wake up from this effort. I want my Clara to come back. Fiberdo fiber of my screaming screaming that I was about to dive into an infinite night without its splendor.
But she was getting closer to me, and instantly, our worlds clashed – loving and afraid by distorting inside the oven of this lab, where nature played witness to the horrors of the ambition out of control.
And somewhere in the distant loss of machinery, I lost it over and over again, each breath drawing us the spectrum mixing with shades – Clara’s remains brighter than my faded heart – and for the first time, I realized that madness was a dance learned in the dark, where a partner always falls back, lost completely.
Author: Opney. Illustrator: Stab. Publisher: Cyber.
(Tagstotranslate) Horror Madness (T) Science experiment
