Bathed in silver, I made my way through the alleys. They twisted and turned, walls disassembled and replaced brick by brick. A dull humming echoed across the grey walls. I looked up and couldn’t see a single star. There was only the moon dominating the heavens. Instead of stars, above me the windows housed candles. Some of them burned with a hungry light, desperate to grow fat on my attention. Others had long since fallen cold. Shadows flickered across the tops of the buildings, as though I was circled by invisible bats. The walls ceased their creeping reassembly and instead twisted at cruel angles. I knew this was the fastest way, to walk in moonlight between the byways of the day world.

Soon enough, I came to an overgrown hedgerow on a street- I had quit the alleys some time ago- populated by dilapidated mansions. Though it was hardly visible through the bulging foliage, there was a wrought iron gate that granted one access to the grounds. The barrier was decorated with iron stars scattered about the bars. On the crest, they formed the shape of Canis Major. I pushed through and they groaned like the living dead. I walked up the stone path to the door. Grass had long since laid claim to the gaps between the slabs. I saw a dancing light awaken at my approach.

A pale slender woman rose to greet me. Her long black hair contrasted sharply with her skin and ivory nightgown. Around her mouth was a poxen ring. In her left hand, she held a candelabra half unlit. Wordlessly, she bade me follow. We began to walk around to the side of the vast three-story structure. Past the fluted columns and cracked windows, she led me to the corner of the building and removed a crumbling piece of masonry from the corner. Having done so, she took an unlit candle from her collection and placed it in the wall before returning the piece of stone to its original position. We continued around the building until we came to the side door.

Inside, the whole structure teemed with a vitality that made it feel like I was walking on a live wire. We had come in through the kitchen, a room of crumbling tile and butcher blocks. We drifted through a few other rooms where faded paintings smirked in the dim light, before we came to a grand staircase. It creaked but did not give way. Its smooth oaken bannisters had held up much better than the outside of the house. I turned back and looked over the railing to see that the main door had been barred from the inside. Not just barred, but permanently boarded up. Large pieces of wood had been affixed to it and it looked as though someone had started to lay bricks in front of it.

The second floor was overall better maintained than the first. The silent woman led me through a solid looking door into an otherwise empty room. In fact, the room was more than empty. The edges of it faded away into an infinite void. I looked down at my feet in fear and saw that we stood on a white platform, the shape of the middle of a Venn diagram. The edges constantly disappeared into the depths in a shower of alabaster sparks. The platform began to turn like a potter’s wheel, and I grew dizzy. I staggered out back into the hall.

The women led me further down the hall, skipping past a few doors. She pushed one open near the end of the hall; she destroyed a number of cobwebs in doing so. Beyond this barrier, there was a room styled in lavish velvet. The carpet was thick and lush. It was furnished as a bedroom, though the window was boarded up. The bed was a vast citadel. I should have noticed this first, but only after all of this soaked into my senses did I noticed the flayed man hanging figure four in the center of the room. He was lean and muscular. He glistened scarlet and held perfectly still. He didn’t even sway in his suspension. It took me a long moment to realize that he was not alive and never was. He appeared to be some kind of horrifying prop. I stepped forward and poked him, half expecting him to wake up. He did not. He merely swayed and bumped into me.

Once again, my mute guide led me out of the room. This time we went to the other side of the hall. The air here felt lighter and so did the matter. The world grew increasingly insubstantial and hazy around me. Nevertheless, I persisted and she brought me to another door. When she went to push it open, I was worried for a moment that she might simply slip through it. She did not. Instead, she led me into a dark room. Unlike the first chamber, this was clearly just dark, not wholly nonexistent. The woman’s candlelight glinted off of silver and revealed a mirror on the floor. I stepped into the room and she placed the candelabra down on the reflective pane. She stood there motionless and looked at me. It was then that I became aware that I was petrified. I couldn’t even shift my eyes to look around. All I could do was feel the growing awareness of dread as I became cognizant of the source of my immobility. Wrapped around me like a chain was that damn gaze from nowhere. Here it was not nowhere. It was everywhere, circling the edge of my awareness like a python waiting to constrict. Vision gave way to darkness then vision again.

In the morning, I packed what I wanted and left the rest. After the day I tripped and put my elbow through the flimsy wall, I knew that I wasn’t getting my security deposit back. I felt certain that I knew what I was getting myself into now, so I didn’t bother to go out to the address. Just before lunchtime, I saw the car arrive from my window. It was sleek and black but an older model. I started carrying my junk down the stairs. The hawkish man, he had introduced himself on the phone as Milton, helped me bring my things down to the car. It took a few trips, but we finally got everything packed in. We began to head down the street.

“We’re glad to have you, Marlowe, but if you don’t mind my asking, what made you change your mind?”

I decided that he was just making conversation and that I didn’t exactly want to tell the truth. Desperation didn’t strike me as a good look. “I decided that I needed a change of pace in life. My job had been killing me.”

“It certainly will be nice for you to unplug from the apparatus of society and be yourself. There’s no better feeling than realizing that you’re a cog in a machine barreling towards destruction and then removing yourself from that machine.”

I nodded along, not really knowing what to say to that.

“It’s alright if you don’t have anything in mind, but did you have any particular artistic interests that you wanted to pursue?”

I shook my head then thought for a minute. That might not have been the right answer. “I used to write poetry back in the day. Maybe I could write some pastorals or something?”

It was Milton’s turn to shake his head. “We don’t really do the written word. You’ll have to pick something else. Anything else, pretty much. Hell, you could make spomeniks if you wanted to, but you can’t write.” A twinge of frustration carried through his voice at the mere thought of writing. Perhaps he had a rough time with his high school English teacher.

“Oh, uh, alright. Can I ask why though?”

“As artists, it is our job to reflect the beauty of creation. Part of the beauty is the unity of all things. Words can never do that. Words exist only to separate, to corral concepts, hiving them off from ‘what they are not’.” He rolled his eyes at the notion before continuing. “Words exist to do violence to that totality and therefore cannot be used to create art; they only manufacture artifice.”

Despite being the one who asked, I was once again unsure of how I ought to respond. I pondered for a moment. “Maybe I could take up painting instead?”

He smiled. “That’s a wonderful idea. I can show you the ropes tomorrow.”

We made small talk the rest of the way to the commune. Traffic was particularly bad today, but eventually we made it to our destination. It was not, in fact, a moldering mansion in a dead part of town. It was an old brick apartment building nestled on The Lupus. “You own this whole thing?”

“I do. I got it at a tax auction, actually.” He parked the car and we got out. My vision panned up to the top of the building. There could have been a hundred people living in the building, but judging by the number of cars there were perhaps a dozen.