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(Page 1 of 24) The Hunter by jon Lyndon
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"...only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear-"
~ H. P. Lovecraft
PROLOGUE:
It was night, again.
ONE:
Nic Frost lay in bed, in another cheap hotel, smoking a cigarette. He listened to the incessant rain beat against the thin window, the vibrating winds. It seemed the window was going to explode, perchance the whole world.
He could not rest, could not relax. It's been too long... the memory of the last kiss, the last kill was still heavy in his mind; that isolated moment of passion that only kept him sane for barely two weeks. The alcohol and cocaine were not enough.
It's still night, again. Still. Another night and the sweat bleeds chemically through his hair, his eyes. He managed to read 17 pages into the paperback novel found in the hotel room. A book called "In Glass City": ‘Forgive me, Mr Blue. I see that I am making you lamentable.' Numb and naked Frost lay there, old memories bringing him close, closer to a kind of discomfort. Blue smoke from the dying cigarette swirled round his aching head like a spiraling nebula.
He thought of the jazz CD ‘A Kind of Blue', and the improvisations of the colours. The various colours of just the simplicity of Blue - of their associations with psychology, with perceptions, experience and one's feelings. Improvisations,
-in blue. Outside the window, through the wind and rain the entire night was a dark shade of blue. The blue of horror. An eldritch sensation washed across his soul, splintering hysterical with unsatisfied madness. Mad, a place he has already gone
"There's no coming back." Five minutes later a chill breeze blew across his face, the urge of something sexual, some kind of desire. And the Thing which haunted him, always there in the fragmented shadows, in the spirals of acrid smoke, ascending upon him yet never actually there. But the semblance seemed so real. Infernal in the depths of his suffering subconscious.
He wasn't really certain if the Thing was real, almost believed it was not, but that's what made it even more... dangerous. Desperate. Like an intolerable stench, strong and saturating him with a terrible sense of fear. He wanted to scream, to launch himself through the hotel's window, shattering glass all across the asphalt of the city's street down below. He could no more scream than begin to plot his next kill.
Laughter escaped his crooked lips in rising and falling spasms. He began the silent incantations for his next articulate masterpiece; after all, each kill was a new song. And how he would improvise with the uncanny Thing his unseen counterpart.
Frost sank into despair after those shit sophisticate doctors explained to him that due to his chronic condition of an acute asthma exacerbation he could no longer play his trumpets and saxophones for more than five minutes at a time...
Five minutes! "You cannot perform in nightclubs, to an audience, anywhere... for more than five minutes."
A month after that he could barely play T. Monk's ‘Epistrophy': a one-minute standard jazz composition.
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