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    Fall of the Ax
    Fall of the Ax
    Fall of the Ax
    Ebook85 pages1 hour

    Fall of the Ax

    By Noel Gray

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    Fall Of The Ax

    Four prisoners are held in a concentration camp where they try to escape into their imaginations in response to the horrors they are unable to avoid. One prisoner narrates the imagined realities of the other three, as they all, one by one, finally succumb to the brutality of their captors.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNoel Gray
    Release dateSep 14, 2016
    ISBN9788822843937
    Fall of the Ax

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      Book preview

      Fall of the Ax - Noel Gray

      Ax

      PROLOGUE

      The Echo of My Life: I hear the fall of the ax and my life is over. I hear my voice screaming and my last words penetrate the air and join the sounds of all those who have screamed before me. They, and now I, march in the parade of the blameless dead, its ageless line our only monument. If this killing of the innocent cannot be stopped then an echo like mine will one day be all that is left of the Universe’s one true miracle. Time and space will then be silent, empty, soulless, un-admired, and creation will then be left to blind physics. Can someone stop this insanity? In these last moments of my life I am dreaming that you can. You may one day hear these words of mine. If you do then I pray you will hear more than just an echo, more than just a screech in the wind, more than crying dreams trapped in my mind as it vanishes forever: And what will you hear, what is it that I am screaming?

      The Garden

      I am in a concentration camp where I, and many others like me are waiting to die. Such camps concentrate consciousness, giving fuel to our imaginations in their battle against the uncontrollable horrors that eat our minds every night. In the twilight of the twentieth century these camps are said to exist no longer. They do exist. They have become places with other names, disguised as ghettos, suburbs, provinces, and even larger parts of nations. Whatever they have become, and whatever they are now called, they all rely on concentration although most have given up their walls of wire. Their new walls are more durable. They are crafted from durability itself. They are the walls against difference, differences that are declared unholy, or worse, cancerous to the future health of the nation. Rogue cells in need of radical treatment.

      The treatment we await is called ethnic cleansing: two words for murder. Two old words bleached of their dignity by being forced into a marriage neither deserve - two words crying out the close of the millennium, and ushering us to our graves. Words wearing masks always clear the path to the grave, bullets and knives their fleet messengers.

      I am waiting, and while I do I listen to three daydreams - dreams that are interwoven but also, in a way, apart from each other. Each dream has its history and together they stand alongside another history; three brief histories in the company of a fourth, much longer one. Perhaps they are as much inside this fourth history as they are alongside it? I do not know, I cannot say. All I can hear are three daydreams; the fourth remains for someone else to speak and hear.

      ****

      We were all spirited away from our homes and families, at night. Our neighbours silently and secretively watched us go as we quickly vanished like the steam from a kettle. Steam pushed out to disappear and begin its dissipation upward toward nothing. It is a telling point, a philosophical heritage no less - one we have been burdened with too long - that all heavens are somewhere else. I do not know if our neighbours thought we would go to heaven but I am sure they knew in their hearts we were headed toward nothing. Steam pushed out, the pressure released, the danger over. That is the main thing: why confuse modern social engineering with ancient metaphysics just because both deal with dissipation? We are gone for good, for their good not ours, that is the main thing.

      Now, away from our society’s gaze we wait for the horror none of us can scarcely think about let alone know how to face. We huddle in the camp and grow to know each other as only people in such a place can. We are all sons and daughters of the European Enlightenment. We are its contemporary inheritors and so are our captors although they understand themselves as its pinnacle. A pinnacle shackled to a base that for them is too base; they long to be free of us. Our existence contaminates their private thoughts and gives rise to their public hatred. Their intelligence - and they are intelligent in a way all too familiar since the first demagogue learned to conquer by dividing - longs to be purified of us. To cleanse themselves of their insecurity and fear of difference: this is their faith, their impossible dream, and our real nightmare.

      Our hut, little more than a cage, houses four prisoners. If it can be said we are lucky, then we are lucky to be in such small quarters rather than in the bigger buildings surrounding us. Cries rushing aimlessly through the air testify that these larger structures are massively overcrowded. Their huge outer shells boast a limitless capacity unmindful of the crowding of terror within their walls. The architecture of tyranny needs its grandness, its masonry. However, there is one architectural friend to be found in the compound; as I said, we four are lucky to be in a shed.

      My companions are an old man, a young man, and a boy. It is just daybreak. The uncertain dawn cautiously peeks in the window and lights their faces. Each of them has the eyes of disappearance and its receding stare. Their eyes reflect mine so we know we are all fellow travellers with the same absent future.

      Have you ever stared into living mirrors that reflect your mortality? I truly hope that you have not because such eyes are not only the windows of the soul. They are also the mirrored doors through which lost souls try vainly to escape their confinement. It is this mirrored exit to nowhere I speak about when I say my three inmates and I are all looking into each other’s eyes and see only the look in our own. We see our souls desperately trying to escape, four souls leaping between mirrors, trapped in their reflections.

      After much staring and the corresponding gain in unwanted knowledge and despair, our eyes of disappearance look down at the floor. Its splintered surface mirrors our predicament; just another mirror, older than any of us but no less shattered. Having stared ourselves into its grain we then begin a blind traipse through our minds accompanied only by the sound of our thoughts being torn into ever smaller, meaningless splinters. Eventually our terror accelerates this ripping so profoundly that our imaginations rush to our defence.

      One of my companions begins to speak. Before he gets fully underway my attention wavers for a few seconds and my mind thinks about itself:

      Daydreams and nightmares - to illuminate these two forms of dreaming my mind has two lights. One light is bright, it comes in the day; the other resembles the soft spotlight that relentlessly seeks out actors on a dim

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