In a spectral shuddering cry, coldest metal wheels screech-smacked rails that were both chains and cage. It was one of those nights that imprisoned the sun. It was one of those nights that robbed its rays not for solace, yet for greed. It was one of those nights that sent a pseudo-dawn, a pseudo-dawn of unforgiving fluorescent harshness. The whole world was underground the day it rolled into every station. Peeling paint, shattered grime-smothered glass, worn out numbers so scratched and dim. From the doors came phantoms in well starched shadows, pressed, ironed, rustling. Clomp. Clomp. All around was a crowd of spectral jack-boots. The wind was not wind, yet whispers that twisted into almost-words. That train vanished only to arrive again and thus the night rolled on and on.
Just twenty miles north of the castle is a metropolis of metal and glass, concrete and asphalt. The people mill about, measuring their lives to the second, absorbed in salacious gossip and politics. But within the castle perimeter it is nonsense to measure time that way. The smallest division here is the rising and setting of the sun, the appearing and vanishing of the mighty battlements from the naked eye.
With my back to the stone, the roughness pressing into my skin, my daydreams are picture perfect - from low-res to high definition without the use of the recreational chemicals my friends imbibe nightly. History lives here with the ghouls and ghosts. Under the slivers of moonlight I've seen phantoms pass by, never once acknowledging my presence. But perhaps they are locked in another time, visible but somehow dislocated from the here and now. I'd rather be in these ancient walls, imagining, fantasizing, building “castles in the air” than sitting safely in smog. Haunted places are my sanctuary. How can I be scared of the dead when the living are so volatile?
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