The office was unchanged, that much I realised, it was not the world that had altered, but my perceptions of it. This terrified me in a way that I can only begin to describe, the dire inference being that if what I saw was true, the world was a much more dangerous and sinister place than I had ever envisaged. My darkest and most paranoid fantasies failed to approach the level of malice and subtle hatred I could now perceive in my every quivering glance. My cubicle awaited me like a quiescent venus fly-trap plant, seemingly safe and attracting me with my own clutter I had placed there to personalise my working space. Yet, there I sensed an undercurrent of rot and decay.
It was not beyond my understanding to consider that I might be experiencing a strange and subtle form of paranoid delusion, likened to tales I had heard of the paranoid hallucinations experienced by users of some of that harder drugs. Certainly, my current quavering mental state could not be said to be significantly different to that of a junkie hooked on some particular lucid variety of crystal methamphetamine. It was only my continued self awareness and the retained capacity to order and halt the chaotic flow of my thoughts that convinced me that no such malady affected me.
It had become slightly easier to suppress the unwanted visions of the secret sides of things. The walk back to the office had been remarkable normal, despite the vague undercurrent of shadowy meanings and obscure loves I sensed about me. With a positive effort of will, I was able to even conjure a smile at the warmth on my face, the cool wind against my skin and the firm resilience of the ground beneath my feet. It had only been a momentary lack of self control that had given me my somewhat brief attack of what can only be described as “the willies” on approaching my desk, possibly brought on by the claustrophobic oppression of the office in which I worked.
Slowly, through the course of the afternoon, I was able to return to a normal state of mind, and managed to finish a few trailing reports that had been overdue for weeks. I possibly utilised that work as a mechanism for distraction, and managed to almost completely subdue the feeling of impending doom I felt less and less about me.
It came to me that the world was not so dire, the universe not so malicious. To see the secret love of the garbage bin for the refuse it housed was no dangerous omen of imminent destruction, merely another side of the suitability for any item for the task to which it was put. In a considerably lighter frame of mind I toyed gently with allowing myself to see the greed of my pencil for the paper, and to sense the bound energy it held, notice the intense desire it had to eliminate itself in graphite rubbings over every nearby object. A self-destructive orgy of silvery lines and shadings dwelt within its inanimate soul. I found this almost comical, and yet strangely sad, such a self-destructive passion for expression I saw mirrored all-too-clearly in all-too-many people in our modern society, a consequence, perhaps, of our communal yearnings to be free of stricture and rule. Some may say that modern society had improved humanities lot, I question that sometimes.
My afternoon passed in casual diligence, reports completed and documents authored, and as the evening approached I readied myself to go home.
I’ve always found the evening to be my favourite time of the day, the gathering twilight and subsequent illumination of the city combining to create an artful landscape of ambient sunset and brilliant colour. Evening is not the time for stark and confronting daylight, nor the time for enshrouding and distrustful night; but a time for comfortable rest, a velveteen time of candles and cognac, coffee and cigars. Evening is my time of greatest comfort, casual love and erudite contemplation.
Hidden things become visible in this twilit time, as people head for the safety of home, some tired and grumpy, some merely relaxed and anticipatory of the rest to come, their minds are elsewhere. It is only the sad few who move home with a directed focus of mind, either still pathetically working on laptops in train carriages, carrying on important-sounding phone conversations of scribbling frantically on note-paper. The vast majority wander along in a fugue like state, calmly relieved that the working day is drawing to an end. Few conflicts arise around this time, no time pressure drives people, there are few who have somewhere urgently to go, and in this mellow time I find solace and renewed faith in humanity as a race.
As I joined my compatriots in the great shuffle home, blank eyed and placid faced, I contemplated the day’s events.
My day had been plain, ordinary and quite mediocre. Then my lunchtime revelation had thrown me quite for a spin. My afternoon had passed in industrious work and suppressed worry, which I now saw as utterly unnecessary. Those around me posed no threat, despite the fact that each had a personal agenda, private needs and desires, and passions sometimes even hidden from themselves, they simply existed, and those secret drives remained just that, secret. I allowed myself to let slip my new-found control over my sight, and casually gazed about me.
There, a middle aged lady in a sophisticated suit. Sterile black heels, politically correct skirt, cinched tight about a shapely waste, white blouse contained within an austere charcoal jacket that hugged the body just so, glittering faux diamond broach on the lapel. Her hair was neatly gathered above her perfectly made up face; she emanated sophistry and professionalism. She was thinking of the sex she would have with her rented lover this afternoon while her working husband was interstate. He’d never know; she’d wash the sheets and place them back on the bed tonight before sleeping in them. They’d have the rumpled appearance of use and he’d never notice that fact that a second towel retained a faint dampness from the shower his younger rival had taken with his wife. Thinking of that towel and how it would catch the water drops as they slid down her younger paramour’s firm chest sent her into other devious thoughts. It seemed the shower would not be for cleanliness after all, but merely a continuation of what she envisaged happening in the bedroom!
I saw this as clear as day, such an ordered and altogether proper appearance hid a singularly single-minded sexual predator. Not a surprising really, the restrained ones always seemed to harbour the wildest animals within. My instinctive knowledge of this fact had been with me for many years, but only now did I see with such clarity the facts that lay hidden beneath the surface. As I watched her she caught my gaze, and squirmed, vaguely violated by the knowing she must have seen in my eyes, then a chin thrust forward and a self-righteous look. Who was I to judge her! She turned to gaze out the window at the darkness rising about the city. I turned away.
What was that!?
Some scrap of movement in the corner of my eye? Had a shadow passed before the gathered people about me? A flicker of movement drew my gaze further left, and there, a hand casually dangling from a shirt sleeve. That hand, something about it. My gaze riveted upon the veined fingers and broad hand that hung casually alongside a well formed male leg as I tried to determine what had caught me so. Yes! There, a scrap of … fur … alongside the fingers! The nails seemed suddenly preternaturally long and dark, strange on a male hand, how had I missed that at first glance? My eyes trailed up the arm, over the shoulder, to meet the sullen stare of a young man with startlingly attractive chiselled features, and dark feral eyes. He was looking right at me!
I blinked, and all I saw was a young man, attractive yes, by any measure, but just a young man in a light grey business suit, lounging against an upright pole near the carriage door. He was powerfully built, from the way he filled out his clothing, but that was not uncommon in these days of home-gyms and ubiquitous personal trainers. His hand was well manicured where it depended from his shirt, supple young skin, hairless and firm, shrouding a fine network of veins and sinews, but nothing out of the ordinary. What had I seen? Was the shock of the day manifesting itself to me as hallucinations now? Shaking my head, I closed my eyes and leant back against the carriage wall to settle myself.
Enough of this foolishness, I had had enough surprises for one day. Discarding the daydream and foolish illusion of fur (Fur of all things!), I silenced my mind with iron control and looked forward to a nice glass of red wine on my arrival home.
I lived alone, and had for years. I owned no pets, I find them distracting and irritating, nor owned a single plant, my black-thumb destroyed anything green I touched. A chronic inability to care for anything other than myself served to make me, in all senses of the word, a loner. Not that being alone really bothered me. In every interaction with people and colleagues I felt I had to act, putting on a “work face” and a “social face” just to get by. Home was the only place I could relax, take off all the masks and just be myself, if only I had a clear conception of who I really was…
My unit sat atop one of five residential towers balanced on top of an urban shopping centre, a location perfect for convenience shopping and with an unimpeded view of the city centre less than eight kilometres away. At night, the view from my kitchen window rivalled any form of contemporary city-scape artwork as the city glowed against the near-horizon under the influence of myriad streetlights and neon signs. A sea of colour stretched from my doorstep all the way to the city centre, which was illumined by corporate logos and office lights. I had chosen this place for two reasons, its view, and its security. Situated atop a sixteen floor tower, access was limited by electronic key-card at the lift and keyed deadbolt on the single door. I’d had the master-keyed lock replaced as soon as I moved in. Home security is important to me.
The isolation of my “Ivory Tower” suited me well, and the walls were well insulated, thanks to some nifty modern construction materials, so that I could only hear my neighbours if I concentrated. Double-glazing further enhanced the quiet and made my penthouse retreat a perfect place to sit back, relax and remain happily cut off from the world. I owned a TV, but never used it, accessed the world by high-speed Internet and generally kept to myself. My balcony was devoid of all furniture bar a single chair that I sometimes occupied as I gazed at my city on those nights when the weather was balmy.
Tonight the air was cold, and I gratefully closed the door behind me and hung my coat neatly on the coat stand near the door. Ignoring the balcony and the sea of lights laid before it, a vista I still enjoyed but which had lost its initial attention-catching charm, I opened an ornate wine rack made from wrought-iron twisted into fanciful floral shapes and topped with a thick and battered cap of dark rosewood. Withdrawing a random bottle of wine, I took a single wine glass and the corkscrew into my study.
My study, the core of my household and the most prized room of my tiny kingdom, prized even above my comfortable bedroom. My study was where I worked. What did I work at? Ahh, therein lies another tale, and not a tale for this time, for it is long and quite possibly boring. I rarely stop to contemplate the history that has gone before, busy as I am with what lies ahead! Suffice it to say that the masks fully came off whilst I was in my study, and here my deepest secrets lay. A dark antique desk and overstuffed leather office chair on casters took up much of the room, what space was left over was crammed with bookcases, piles of books and a scattering of handwritten notes. The desktop was the one place that had not been given over to leaning pillars of books of all shapes and sizes, for there, on the inlaid green leather mat, lay only a single book, a tome, leather bound and open beside a neat pad of white writing paper.
The book was a reference work on Human Psychology, a normal topic one might think, albeit a little dry and dusty, but this work was slightly different to your average text-book. This work had been compiled by Nazi researchers whilst experimenting on captive Jews during the Holocaust of World War II. Many of the tales and sections contained within its dusty and faded leather covers sickened me to the core of my being; never could I have ever envisaged myself reading of such acts of barbarity. But such truths had been determined, such depths of the human psyche had been plumbed under the extreme physical and mental duress of the Nazi procedures, that I could not allow myself to permit the grossness of the acts deny the usefulness of the results. I reconciled myself to the horrors described to convince myself that by making sense and use of the research revealed, I gave meaning to the terrible suffering inflicted on those nameless victims. This book had no place in my considerations for this evening, so placing the unopened bottle of wine and glass down, I marked the page, closed the book and relegated to one of the many precarious piles that populated the room.
Arrayed about the walls, in the mismatched bookcases that stood at uneven heights, some tottering and dangerously overloaded, were thousands of books; books on every eccentric topic that had ever caught my fancy. I had never found it within myself to discard a book, even after it had been read numerous times and it’s knowledge fully consumed, so many of the volumes were rag-eared and tattered, some missing covers and others still shining bright inside plastic sleeves. My interests had changed, in a course that could be plotted over the years around the walls of this study, Occult tomes sat beside texts on advanced electronics, books encompassing the reading of auras lay crookedly atop programming language reference manuals. Many of my hard-won acquisitions were exceedingly rare, found from numerous trips to some of the less well-known book exchanges, while others were obtained purely through theft. I chuckled to myself when I thought of the libraries that had yet to discover a paper sleeve entitled “Mysteries of the Egyptian Sages” enclosing a tattered Steven King novel. Myriad secrets awaited me within those multitudinous pages, needing only the application of will and intellect to unearth them, but tonight I had a more direct need.
Tonight’s study was to be dedicated to my new capacity for perception, and other tomes in my eclectic collection would prove helpful. I opened the bottle and poured myself a glass of deep carmine Cabernet, lit two of the candles that lined the back of the desk and sat back to consider my options. The sweet aroma of the wine permeated the atmosphere of the room as my eyes grazed the shelves about me. Clairvoyance would be handy so a small volume by Mme Blatvatsky might prove useful; Dion Fortune’s expertise might prove helpful, and perhaps W.E. Butler’s introductory exercises might help focus my mind. All up, I gathered four volumes before me. So with glass in hand, and a taste of wine upon my lips, I began a chaotic trawl for information that might illuminate my perceptions.