Given the fundamental gloom of the constrained room in which she had for
some reason unknown been cornered into like a lab mouse in a brain teasing maze, it
was fortunate Lincoln had foresightfully even if naturally developed a cat like ability to
see in the dark; to an extent at least. A blackened room which could quite easily have
been either cramped or spacious greeted her as she completed the near vertical climb
up that rickety stairway like an underground cell of unknown demons which chance or
something more sinister would ensure she face.
A swinging light bulb drooped to and fro like a grand pendulum; illuminating
patches of the floor as if a scene from a nightmarish mental hospital in which even the
bursars had contracted a marauding madness; leaving the place a degenerated hellhole
in which the clinically insane prayed like horror movie antagonists on the admittedly
equally mentally maladjusted. In the tile like rectangular mat floor covering inked in
irregular black and white, she swore she could make out the distinct shape of a mosaic
skull created in the fusion of the pallid canvas; but only as the swaying light source
played tantalizing tricks on her mind.
Even in darkness there must be at least a semblance of light. It is impossible to
comprehend darkness without reference to that which runs contrary to it. The concept
itself only makes sense when compared to light; and the moment there is light there can
no longer be darkness because the notion is an ultimate one. If you have partial
darkness you must by necessity also have partial light. A thing cannot exist without its
opposite; light and dark, right and left; good and evil. Unless in actual fact neither
existed at all.
Perched upon an overhanging piece of indescript furniture like a ravenous
vulture on a drafty desert clifftop overlooking the remnants of a vicious predatory
assault on a covey of docile wilderbeast, Sashana Acrasia licked her lips at the prospect
of more spilled blood. She was one of those sadly all too regular heathens who
delighted in the destruction she was easily capable of performing. She had been one of
those warped teenagers who widdled away a misspent youth decorating herself in
macabre cobweb makeup, driving her mom to tears with blaring death metal emanating
from the scantily candle lit sanctum of her room which shook the houses foundations to
the bone, thus severely lessening its market value, and generally doing all those things a
good old fashioned teenager is not quite old enough to do in the eyes of the law. The
nearest thing she had ever got to Sunday service was thumbing through the last book of
an inherited bible which she had otherwise covered in gothic iconography penned in
sickly rose lipstick and charcoal black marker pen. The word 'Jesus'; wherever it
occurred; which had been annoyingly frequent; tended to be accompanied by a succinct
scribble of a headless matchstick man with hands held in prayer. The blind leading the
blind indeed.
But the apocalypse was a different matter; perhaps because she had led such a
lecherous life that the bloody end which St. John the divine had promised appealed to
her sense of personal isolation. 'Behold she cometh with the clouds, and every eye will
see her.' Acrasia would as a matter of course run a silent sanguinary commentary on
every mundane happening as if reciting scripture, which; in all fairness, she was,
regardless of the misdirection of previously warm hearted verses and stanzas in which
she indulged. Fire and brimstone, for one sad, doomed individual, was to be of which
the imminent future would consist.
A wisping shape; black on black; whined past the lost reactionary like a car
passing the spectator swamped finish line in an F1 grand prix; an invisible blow
delivered with a ferocious bite as it passed by; announcing itself abruptly before
slinking back off into the darkness like a bat in a midnight glade. Lincoln steadied
herself, muttered something about chivalry, or lack of, through a pair of wobbly molars
and wiped a volatile stream of blood across her formerly puritanical white sleeve as her
vision adjusted through necessity to the shady shadow dance before her. She felt like
some sort of misdirected saint with fair intentions but flawed means. Some kind of
perspective martyr trundling along with the epervescent flow of a hazy cause even she
remained unsure of.
Taking an almost intoxicated step back; fighting to shake off the effects of that
fully fledged flush thump across the face; an experience she could only feign to
compare to taking the full force of a bulging boxing glove weighted with a rusted
horseshoe, she blinked as if doing so could reveal a brighter, more tangible world when
her eyes opened. No such luck.
Acrasia, still evasive to her opponent's gaze, stroked a tearaway braid of hair
back behind a ornamented ear with the but of one of the set of obtrusive martial tonfa;
instruments resembling police batons crafted of lacquered wood and positioned in
battle readiness with the long end parallel to the underside of the arm inciting the effect
of possessing a cast iron forearm, and imagined the veneer of fiery devastation which
that indignant attack would be igniting in the solitary militant's thoughts.
Though Lincoln continually faced up against opponents of much greater
numbers with far more savage and precise weaponry and beat them comprehensively,
this one appeared capable of utilizing that rare talent of being able to land a hit or two.
However, it all seemed a little unfair to the unarmed Lincoln; 'This is no time to
quibble about social inequality;' she reminded herself; 'government employees get
their choice of a formidable congregation of weapons whereas I; a member of the
general public, get none. That's just the way of the agonisingly elitist world.'
She held up her guard and prepared to avenge herself as Acrasia celebrated her
initial success in expectedly bigoted fashion; reentering the fray in an intentionally
egocentric encore of aimless swings, hooks and jabs. But Lincoln was more than equal
to this cardboard challenge to her longevity, and ducked, winced and leaned away from
three hopeful twirls of the sterile slabs of hardwood before throwing a deft uppercut
between her opponent's dim, ineffectual guard which would have knocked the
aggressor onto the obsessively decorated canvas had there been one. Instead, Acrasia
found herself gliding across a mercilessly greasy section of the padded floor before
crumpling into a corner between wall and stair hatch.
Lincoln thought twice about extending her sportsmanship to helping the
sepultural spiv up as she realized this would be seen as a demoralizing gesture rather
than a respectful one. By the time she had decided, though, Acrasia was back on her
feet clanking the nightsticks together like maracas and nursing a leaking gum which
appeared an incidental carbon copy of her astute adversary's, and looking altogether
irritated with the whole affair, which was probably a good sign for the latter. A hap
hazard opponent is often the easiest to defeat. 'All this time I've waited for a decent
fight, and now it comes along I just want it over. ' Lincoln frowned systematically and
raised one finger of each fist to signal the bout even as a dense air of unpredictability
drifted over the scene like a draped wedding veil.
Acrasia; paddling in deeper water than ever before in her unpredictable and
inillustrious lifetime, refamiliarised herself with her surroundings and promptly swang
Lincoln by the back of the collar as soon as the waving light permitted face first into a
highly dentable filing cabinet which had previously been concealed by darkness as the
injured social deviant scrambled in with an unsuitable hook. 'And when they saw her
they fell at her feet as dead.' During years of self inflicted identity crisis, Acrasia had
obviously convinced herself she was some kind of anti christ.
For once Lincoln's thoughts were of a markedly less philosophical nature as she
wrestled away the disorienting effects of having just inadvertently used her head to
design a kind of metal sculpture which may not have been art, but was certainly painful.
Dazed and confused like a symphony orchestra conductor at a drug enhanced rave, she
barely managed to avoid an audacious leg sweep, then a further free wheeling foot as
Acrasia tried to rectify the original failure with a swift hook which appeared to cause
splinters to dive bomb past Lincoln's face like a grouchy typhoon.
It was by now high time for a counter attack, and a counter was exactly what
Acrasia was about to receive. Making an astonishing amount of ground with a one
footed hop, Lincoln took her adversary by utter surprise. All that remained was to
snatch one of Acrasia's board strapped wrists and throw a crunching knee into her by
now unprotected stomach before ramming three sickeningly effective right hand
punches into her staggering opponent's jaw, cheek and eye respectively, thus upping
the unsanctioned bout's scoreline to an amicable two apiece.
As she collapsed in gradual, mechanically static stages, Acrasia found herself
dreaming of the white, white mountains of home. North of the border, people were less
crazy. They were more reserved and generally more respectful. Down here it was if you
want it, take it and to hell with anyone who had an equal claim to it; it always had been.
But the consumer craze had hit the US harder than the rest of the world, hence the
huge political upheaval. Canadians, according to the brosures when such things existed,
were more at home in their natural surroundings, although this stereotype was probably
an American creation born out of the fact that their general consensus was that Canada
was all snow and huskies. Acrasia though, was testament to the fallacy of this
assumption.
Her childhood had been about as natural as a genetically enhanced vegetable
cloned from scratch in a commercial warehouse, pumped full of unspeakable modifiers
and stimulants, packed in suffocating plastic and shipped off to an urban convenience
store to be greedily consumed by an unsuccessfully dieting street squab who had never
ventured far enough outside his tenement dungeon to see the sun rise let alone enjoy
some mystical communion with the organic world. She had been a rebel too in her time;
of sorts at least. As an adolescent she had spurned just about every covention which
had been pressed onto her. Her family; her education; her inherited religion, save the
good bits. If she had been able she would even have dismissed the really quite vital
human trait of inhaling oxygen.
She fiddled with a glinting nose ring shaped like a chaos bug which conspired to
give her away in the intermittent blackness and cracked her knuckles as if cranking up a
car wheel. She had made something of herself despite going it alone; despite neglecting
all those outdated figureheads of authority, of society; of the stagnant status quo.
Alright, so she had made herself something which more sober, more restrained people
may well have labeled impure; subversive. But she had never allowed herself to be
swayed by opinion; by other people's subjective idealism. After years of admittedly self
inflicted brushes with authority, she had come to the self serving conclusion that
idealism was useless compared to the concrete promises made by her new employers;
the young government of New York City State. 'I am she that liveth and was dead.' She
shook with a contradicting combination of agony and joy as a serrated slit opened up
on the eyelid; a glob of brash blood forming delightfully as an Easter bud opening up in
the saintly sunshine before collapsing into a jagged stream in a far less elegant motion.
'And behold I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and of death.'
Lincoln, as if she knew what her opponent was thinking, momentarily ruminated
on the fallacy of the supposition that it was she who was the mental defective, then
turned to concentrating on more immediate concerns and produced a very basic left
hand feint with which she somehow managed to confuse her already disoriented
nemesis, then sent a rib squashing kick into her midsection from the other angle.
Acrasia stooped onto one knee and was embarrassingly surprised to see her opponent
stepping back in a gesture of sportsmanship; allowing her to recover. Descriptions of
gestures of this kind were not usually part of her vocabulary, so to her Lincoln's
compassion indicated nothing but disrespect.
She span back onto her feet with the aid of a hurtling swing of the arm which
just nicked the side of Lincoln's temple as she stooped into an evasive duck. And until
today she had been under the impression that thuggery was a peculiarly male pastime.
'Behold; a throne was sat in heaven.' Gladly Lincoln being a character and not a reader,
it was not necessary for her to suffer the torment of the demented apocalyptic's choleri
circumvolusive commentary. 'And around about the throne were four beasts full of eyes
before and behind.'
Acrasia may have wished she had possessed eyes 'before and behind' as she was
pronouncingly decked with a backhand swing before turning the tables with a frazzled
back leg sweep. Both slight combatants down and squabbling for the elusive grail of
directional awareness under the swirling light which moved like a limp yo yo in a rough
figure of eight shape not unlike the nerve jangling track of a devilish destruction derby,
creating an impression of the whole room moving around like a pilot training simulator
wired up to a science fiction hyperdrive, Lincoln concluded the entire false sense of
motion was making her a tad sea sick. 'And every free man said to the mountains and
rocks; fall on us, and hide us from the face of her that sitteth on the throne, and from
the wrath of the lamb.'
Not knowing for the present by how much the darkness separated them,
Acrasia squatted like an escaped ape and tried to make herself look smaller than she
was; blinking as if she had contracted a case of oncoming glaucoma as she fought to
keep a kooky patterned contact in place. 'And when she had opened the seventh seal,
there was silence in heaven.' The minute ghost white shape of a slanted Van Ecyk style
skull snaked across her troublesome contact lens back into place by the side of the
pupil; another of her strange fashion fetishes. She tossed her hair back as if starring in
an outdated timotei ad and snarled like a baskerville hound. 'Where the hell do they dig
these people up from?' Lincoln; the answer possibly contained in the question and not
the least bit interested in graveside ritual or felonies anyway, was growing better
accustomed to the fluctuating illumination than her anarchic adversary, and approached
under the cover of a traitorous shadow like a navy SEAL under the cover of night;
finding Acrasia preoccupied as usual with her warped scripture. 'The first angel
sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood...' Chapter eight, line
seven was decidedly unmeekly cut short by not the hand of christ but the boot of
Lincoln, who sent a far from angelic tooth hurtling across the unseen floor into a
distant corner like a misbehaving child told to stand wearing a dunce cap by a scolding
teacher.
It was at this point that Lincoln noticed the harsh distinction between colors
here. The floor; intermittent dark and light. The floating bulb was bare and pale. Her
own clothes on this fateful day steeped in plain minstrel black and white, as were
Acrasia's. It was like standing in an old fashioned film, although certain things glared
bright with a definitive color which almost granted them superior existence. The
misplaced pelts of blood which leaked across the more visible hunks of the springy
floor; standing out in striking detail in a cinematic effect which she seemed to recall
Spielberg using with a girl in red on top of a colorless scene. The sparkling pin in
Acrasia's now gushing nose also shone like a radient moon in a gloomy sky. Everything
else projected only a worrying blackness.
By the time the spotlight had returned from its curvaceous migration, the
offending proboscis was gone. 'And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent
called the Devil, and Satan, which decieveth the whole world.' The misguided prophet
had by now deemed that this intrinsically unsuccessful encounter would have to be
turned around; a personal revelation was sure to strike Lincoln down with a vengeance
and furious anger which perhaps solely for that purpose now made itself felt in
Acrasia's heart like a surgical needle full of adrenaline straight to that most influential of
organs. 'And I saw one of the heads of the beast as it was wounded to death, and his
deadly wound was healed, and all the world wondered at the beast.' Thus healed
psychologically at least, Acrasia took a mesmerizing leap through the blind landscape
and caught Lincoln flush in the jaw with a flat foot which relied more on guesswork
and demonic guidance than expertise. Next came a turn around left heel and a tawny
improvised side kick which found its backtracking target just fractions of a second after
the light hit it; too late for Lincoln's already battered brain to mount an appropriate
defense.
She murmured to herself phonetically like a tanked up pub goer turfed out for
an excessive drinking spree which the landlord really should at least have been
financially happy about finding out after a virtual pantheon of mixed tipples that she
couldn't quite remember how to stand. 'And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth,
and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of
God.' Thankfully Acrasia had only become a New York citizen in the aftermath of the
new regime’s 'revolution', and had thus escaped receiving the honorary label of a
certified nut case due to the absence of any asylum which still pertained to make such
pronunciations, but then again many would have decreed that even the new social
patriarch would have had to have been subjected to the straight jacket if such
precocious institutions had remained. 'And the winepress was trodden without the city,
and blood came out of the winepress, by the space of a thousand and six hundred
furlongs.'
Lincoln performed a symmetrical backward roll which did little to reassert any
fraught awareness of her environment and decided that she for one had witnessed
enough bloodshed for one day; a fact exasperated by the understanding that much of it
had been her own. She waited with a patience circumstance tempted her to believe she
didn't have time for for the strobe like beam to pass over where she had subconsciously
calculated Acrasia to be like a manhunting small town cop's torch catching a glimpse of
a barbaric serial killing suspect amid a kindle of curving corn crops, and with a stew of
intuition and mathematical talent, sent her bolting backward like a superhero
confronted by a block of kriptonite with a jarring jump kick to the side of the head.
From here she digressed into a gamboling gavotte which had her twirling like a
trapeze artist in mid air from back foot to front and to back again in a jaunty swivel
which ended up in a neck twanging reverse hook kick to the opposite cheekbone which
sent that annoying nosepin jangling across the hoary floor like a penny dropping out of
an adventurous property developer's cash rammed wallet as he surveyed the progress of
his latest franchise from utop a lofty girder on a skeletal building site.
An additional full airborne spin accompanied by a garnishing heel made Acrasia
believe she was the subject of an ignominious round of bat and ball which firmly
reminded her how close to the wall she was as she hit it and doubled over; her spine
seeming to catch a disabling diathermy which surged through her body like an
ephemeral poltergeist, providing a stark, florid attenuation which Lincoln picked up on
with gallant though perhaps inequitable dexterity.
She leant over the dazed attaché; placing one arm around her waist and the
other under her knee. Interlocking her hands, she pressed her teeth together as if
pushing bricks into cement despite the weakness of a gaunt set of failing gums and
hurled the rotund package over her shoulder like a highland athlete collapsing
backwards under an especially weighty caber.
This was enough for Acrasia's back to whine a solemn surrender as it flounced
and wept like a marooned moray or one of numerous serpentine heads which would
croon symbolically to the sound of the seven trumpets in her twisted day dreams of
armageddon. Lincoln performed an unintentionally condescending spin which would
have looked more appropriate in a break dancing exposition and wound up like a
rolling armadillo onto her feet. "And the beast was taken, and them that worshipped his
image." Lincoln had been no slouch herself when it came to scripture in those hazy
days locked in a protective cell with only a safety first padded bookshelf to keep her
company; "These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone."
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