The Brambles Of a Deep Affliction

He appeared out of himself like a storybook character. Knotted with shab, he seemed to scrabble impotently amongst the trunks and brambles of a deep affliction. His eyes were a dropsical heap of explicit dismay, a fascicle fold of tensions, more disturbances than eyes.  The skin surrounding these cavities was swarmed and folded by wrinkled anxiety, but flecked with a squalid wickedness. His hair, a shock of charged thicket, tufted into intermittent nodules of fine wire and brush, seemed to take on mass with sharp oscillations, immediately fading from focus like grey gossamer draped over a dwindling grey evening. He was gaunt like old bones. His osseous face like a half scavenged cadaver, the eyes plucked from their sockets by pecking birds. He smiled a qualmish smile which seemed more like a plea for nourishment than an expression of good humour (if, for lack of tangible features, it could be called an expression at all). His jaw was like that of a whales, but snubbed and perspectiveless by comparison . It was pursed at the tip, and cursed with a in-humorous underbite, inscribed like a tasteless smirk on the face of a crude innuendo. Instead of krill his teeth filtered the oily slithering sounds he made by means of communication. He was exceptionally long which his trousers seemed to bask convivially in the task of punctuating, by being truncated to a deficiency of 12 or so inches. He had a blunt, stark and nasty nose, though it was long, it had a stubbiness derived from a strange and illicit depth which seemed to be almost impossible to quantify. His head was monstrous. A mountainous tremendum which tapered his body to a set of tiny feet, as if peering down the dwindling perspectives of a precipice. His body was skeletal, a trend carried over from his skulking, monolithic head. His ribcage crepitated with the sounds of dying creatures. Bleak, tuneless notes rattled in the hollows of his bones. He did not seem to move by any conventional means afforded to other creatures. Instead, he seemed to insinuate himself into angular poses like shadows cast across the objects of a room, as a rusted dusk closes in around them, spraying out obliquity like dwindling shards of laser-light. He was in a state of constant, quieted agitation, murmuring oily chin-whispers to the people he encountered, in a trigonometric fashion, padding, with an imperceptible disease, the crimples of his starch collar, by fanning his fingers outwards from the palms of his hands. He had a youthful face for his age, despite its populous mass but the features it contained in their seemingly apparent absence were old and cruel as a pederasts, yet, tinged by a frailty which overwhelmed his observers in a drenching sadness, lying heavy, and impotent across their chests, before giving way to a profound uneasiness whenever the encounter became protracted. Like his features he implied himself, and that was enough. For there was something grotesque in him. When he entered a room it seemed that he did not stride through any door but was mentioned into existence by its inhabitants. More a concept than flesh. A beast cursed to wander alone in the world like a turbulent fog, attaching itself to the suffering of others as if it meant to represent them through some clever form of advertisement. He washed through the rooms he occupied, spreading like an illness, consuming its weaker tenants in a blanket of wretchedness. He would often be seen footing a conversation by concluding with a show of one of his deep pockets. Like liquid imbibed by the phylum pores of a black sponge, the observer was guzzled by darkness. Mists of antique vapour would wisp and curl about him and he would be gone. Wished out of existence. Taking with him some snatched essence of the creature he had misappropriated.  In this way he was a physician of sorts.  More of the meta in him than a man imbued with the task of perturbing deaths trudging march upon the living corpses which littered the land like rubbish from a past forgotten. It was not a means to diagnose he sought to maintain, but the protraction of anguish. The augmentation of suffering. The perturbation and prolongation of the disreputable. He operated on his specimens with a mirthless smile but a body alive, caught up in the intoxications of wild satisfaction. The shelves of his experiment rooms were strewn with terrariums of multitudinous sizes containing the fungal remains of his subjects, fed by black veins, oxygenised by great wheezing, grey lungs. The fungus fed on substrates of limp offal, a top a carrion of waste and garbage. A plume of acrid green circulated the room like a ghost in mourning. Its septic haze clamoured at the lungs like an ancient bluster of shouts, closing round the throat in a maligned constriction. Plaster hung from the walls like dead bark. The rooms seemed to taper in the same manner as its occupant, giving rise to a myriad of false perspectives generated deep in the velvet blackness. Instrument's festooned the tops of work surfaces and embedded themselves in the landscape of scrawled notes, jutting from dense webs of extrapolations, diagrammatic representations, drawings of unknown forms and past probations. He was an ill man. It was illness that seemed to give him form. Illness specified his shape and translated him into physicality. When he spoke it was of illness, and through illness he contrived an understanding of the world. It was illness he prescribed and like an illness he attached himself to fragments of articulation which sprayed with an oily hiss between his exaggerated dentistry, and, landing like germs on their beholder, consumed them to a sodden dust. He was iniquitous in his depravity and villainous to all that shared his breath and space. His moral policies and scruples were dry and dead, prone to crumbling from beneath his utterances, as if these policies were branching the osseous outstretch of a precipitous world of bones. He navigated this world, a wraith, occluded in black rancour. Subsumed in acerbity he bore the world a grudge, for the illness he imposed upon it was not a tidy metaphor but a cancer of the throat. He had no interest in the length of other lives, whether they were terse or more verbose (unless satisfaction was to be derived from its attenuation) He was, however, interested in the duration of his own sentience. He was apprised by the feeling of being trapped in a scam, by the creatures he served, of which, the boundaries he could not yet fully perceive. They were from a foreign proportion outside of the continuance of what is known. They had given him the bones of a great spider to which he pleaded to heal him of his ulcers. It stared back at him with a dead reticence. The arrogant creatures had the corrective technologies. A restorative pharmacon of which they coveted. Of which they denied him. He could not expose his knowledge to these beasts from The Axiom however, as it was information gleaned from deep in the murk of the Archives room terminal, at the centre of their Hive. Knowledge, that if used, could snatch his wheezing breath away from him more expeditiously than any tumour could achieve.