Seconds after I fell asleep; I had already returned to the interior of that strange, monolithic church of ages past. It seemed to me, for the most part, to be an ordinary day, peaceful even....and then we all heard the noise.
A noise like a raging herd of bull elephants--only demonically mechanized--came roaring in from across the valley; peppered with the sound of violent explosions and tempered flames; and then amid cacophonous screaming and rising plumes of smoke, the engines of destruction themselves appeared. Glimmering jet black in the crimson, smoke-choked afternoon sun--like some diabolical futuristic brand of combat tank--the death-machines surrounded the academy as they finished what appeared to have been a fairly thorough rampage across the entire city. Their automatically-controlled hatches disengaged. And flooding forth from the metallic monsters came a most terrifying army, like nothing of this world; sheathed in ivory-coloured armour and bearing distressing white gas-masks; nearly as terrible as that of their leader. The leader was caped in gold and armoured entirely in the blackish-maroon of pure violence. The leader bore a hideous, avian-looking mask, and brandished a funerarily bejeweled staff. As the hellish nightmare army stormed their way into the building; they immediately began herding hordes of terrified occupants into the display room; except for me and a few others, who were subjugated to the north foyer instead. And there we sat, watching helplessly as the soldiers sealed the doorways to the auditorium with tape; and then we heard the horrid screams of crazed humans whose mind was being hopelessly destroyed by a gossamer white mist sprayed from hoses of the death machines, followed by their poisoned death cries. Yet the crowning moment of horror was soon to follow, when the dark-shrouded leader of the infernal army entered the foyer and gleefully removed his mask.....and my own face, ravaged by untold years and unspeakable evil, stared back at me.
After I awoke, I spent the rest of the day fearing my own future, permanently tormented by a surreal premonition. And to make matters worse, it was my birthday.
-----
I was once a member of a very important planning committee... okay, so maybe it was technically a day class. We spent our time trying to come up with new, exciting destinations for enlightening journeys; although to date, only one suggestion (Antarctica), has ever been used. I myself typed up no less than six journey-information brochures, made to give details about the program to potential customers; despite the amount of effort I put into them, they were apparently written in a format that did not do justice to that of the others; and were therefore never used. The venture was all and all a failure, hence the reason there has never been a similar program since.
-----
Whenever I look down upon The Valley, I find myself feeling slightly disappointed and saddened when I think what The Valley apparently looked like before the ravages of settlement. I imagine dense tracts of cottonwood spotting an otherwise open scrubland, creeks running undisturbed, and uncarven mountainsides still bristling with sub-alpine vegetation. Nowadays, all you see is scores of buildings, roads, car-parks, and suburban neighborhoods shrouded in introduced, overly-green trees. Parks, which would normally show what the land looked like before the city, are too unnaturally irrigated in The Valley to give a window into the landscape’s past. None of this, of course, is inherently bad; cities are built, terrain changes, and I ultimately can’t personally complain that much about the results (although I will admit to having an exclusive hatred of glass and metal buildings for aesthetic reasons).
No comments:
Post a Comment