Rokonaka

  I hesitate to say that we saw her, however in part due to the limited faculties given to man I can hardly explain our experience in any other way. To say we stood in her presence is as ludicrous a statement as to say we stood upon the edge of the event horizon of a black hole and peered inside it. I will best illustrate the experience as I can with what I can remember.

 

  She, I hesitate to use the term she, yet it is agreed that is how the entity appeared to each of us, a woman of uncanny, unnatural, and eldritch beauty. She appeared between us in the circle we had erected, or something did. Her face was human, yet decidedly not so, at the time I could not, and to be honest still cannot fully describe what it was about her that was so beautiful yet so dreadful and awe inspiring all at the same time. Her bosom and face were all the skin I could see, I assume it was skin for that is how I experience her, yet it was pale, too pale even for death, a whiteness too stark for milk or makeup, not a surface covering yet not a glow, not skin for its smoothness was unlike anything I ever knew, yet fluid and solid at the same time, burning and colder than any ice. Her face is something that will forever haunt my dreams for each time I close my eyes I see hers staring back from the pitiful darkness of within my eyelids. Her eyes, so beautiful, yet so unnatural, perhaps it was their perfect symmetry, or their lack of any imperfections. A perfection so perfect as to be imperfect. No red, no veins, no mucus, fluid yet on fire, motion yet chillingly still. Those irises which were like liquid fire of blue so dark yet so vibrant that they swirl in one’s mind to try and make a place for the surreal to be fathomed where only dreams can accept them as reality. Pupil so deep that even oblivion would be lost; threatening to swallow my very sight, sanity, and soul should I have starred too long into them.

 

   I do not clearly remember her face beyond those eyes, for each time I try it changes like a fluid mask or a long forgotten dream of hormonal youth in which every beauty imaginable is represented and accepted as one. Were her lips red as the rose, or were they pale as snow, I do not know and trying to focus the mind is not an option; for once I tried so desperately to remember her face only to find a day and a half and half another night were lost with the time between a mystery known only to raving madness that had taken hold of me between the still moments.

 

   Her arms were slender and muscular, and terrifying. They seemed longer than they should be yet not so much longer than they could be. Her legs as well followed this pattern when they were visible if they ever were. Her very attire shifted, yet always of a misbegotten black. At the time we did not question it as one does not question things in a dream no matter how much they defy conventional wisdom and reasoning; a tight figure or full gown and various garments whose definitions and designs were both surreal and sublime. Her hands I dare not say if I even saw them, gloves, exposed flesh, tiger paws, crab claws, tendrils of woven shadows, or black stone and glass, why such a thing I cannot see in the mind’s eye I do now know.

 

   She did not move so much as simply changed her location, she did not vanish and reappear she simply was and then was there. Memory filling gaps perhaps, or perhaps not as infinite time between seconds of time shifted around her, the world perhaps moved around her yet movement did not seem to occur my either party, was then was again no other words I know of in my language or any born of living things I know can describe accurately that which I try in wisps of maddening despair of retelling can relate.

 

  As her position, or our perspective changed by the circle we made I once saw what I perceived to be the back of her. A hollowness of blackness, not a hole, a mass perhaps of tendrils made of shadow so profound that it pushed back the darkness, burning fluid smoke of solid state that vanished into the ether like the puppet strings of an unknown…no…a projection, not unlike the streams of dancing light one sees when looking up in a theater; a projection, a three dimensional projection for our benefit of something of infinite dimensions. This darkness however, these mysterious strains of light and shadow did not exist when viewed from any angle but one and only for the most infinitesimal of moments; not the back of her arms, back of her legs, or her…hair…a wave of blackness of changing length that trailed into her clothes, back, or nowhere, a mysterious enigma of constant motion and fuzzy memories; cascading shadows of the facsimile of hair although another swears if was a nest of black faceless vipers or the tentacles of some deep horror.

 

   Therein lies our greatest dilemma in remembering this event, for no two of our party can describe the same thing. One claims they saw the face of their mother at times, another a goddess, one cowers in fear, turns pale, and refuses to speak, each of us describes some so different that we can only conclude it was a projection of the mind for our benefits and limited faculties, or as one skeptic in our group insists a hallucination and therefore why no two accounts match up, stating that it simply was not there; yet…yet…tiny details which I described were indeed universal, that uncanny eldritch beauty, sublime lines of form and function and feminine charm of holy grace. My dear friend who wishes not to be named in this account has stated that we saw a thing from beyond time and space that projected into our world and was painted over at the same time by this thing with forms from our own minds so as to limit the madness we would endure.

 

   I swear it spoke, yet only three of us shared this experience. I no more remember the sight of teeth or moving lips than I can remember what the lips even looked like if any ever existed at all. Words not heard, not seen, not felt, not thought, experienced is best I can say. The female of us three described it as a soft rolling orgasm behind her eyes and the back of her tongue. The professor who lead this whole experiment into madness and forbidden spells tries to contemplate the experience in scientific terms, like an electric hum felt on the tips of his fingernails and hair, places without distinct nerves nor felt deeper, and like his scrotum was on fire yet not burning, with his anus vibrating as though sitting in an old car trying to navigate a rocky road during an earthquake, he laughs and says he is surprised he did not crap himself at the time. I do not know if they speak the truth, or if what they remember is what truly happened or how their brains choose to try and interpret it. I felt not vibrations, or electricity, or anything of a particular body part good or bad. I felt like I was dying, or how I imagine dying to feel. Hot and cold at the same time, shivering yet on fire, a gradual loss of self being pulled from my very being, my body a phantom to me as lyrics of a faint song just out of the range of hearing lost in a steady breeze through the muffling trees of a dark woods. I imagine something was said, something beyond the range of human hearing a soft whisper of a song by a singer both before us and lost to sight in the depths far beyond.

 

---I make this amendment to what I have written, I will not change the words for they are the account as best I can recall. I am haunted now however by words spoken to me by another. I do not know her name; she was but a student who volunteered to be there in my good friend’s class. A girl barely out of high school; she approached me just the other day. She told me that while she spoke the truth at the time of what she experienced, she found herself humming a strange tune a few days later, and memories coming to her of hearing it during the experience of the strange entity. She told of her dream she had had the night before we had this conversation, weeks after I had written the above account which I had not shared, not published, or left anywhere but on my home and in my mind. A dream of a dark wood and a soft whisper of a lyrical song whose words she could not make out yet made her cry in pure joy, sadness, anger, and ecstasy. Tears for every emotion as no emotion previously or since in her life could be relatable to this one.

 

   What happened next terrifies me, for the girl said to me that she yelled out into the woods, “who are you,” and…

 

  *

 

  And, and I pause, I hesitate to even write this for my hands grow numb just typing it, my eyes grow blurry, and my tongue itches of all things. My ears want to pop and fill full of fluid and pressured as though deep under water. A drunken dizziness not unlike my previous lost moments; a memory just now come to me for experience is renewed perception. Yet I must push, and push I will, I will not falter.

 

  The girl spoke, her lips moved not in a natural way, more akin to a bad dubbing in a movie, I heard no words at moments, or breath, a stillness like a frame, a heat on my neck, a tingle in my spine, a burning in my eyes and a pain in my ears. What words I heard were “My name is…and then a spinning, the sensations mentioned above, yet some sound I heard, “Row…Co…Naw…Caww.” Possibly a “roo” at the end I am not certain, for I am certain I fled from the girl and vomited in a thankfully nearby sink in the biology lab.

 

  This was several days ago, only now I garnered the courage to even write these words down of the girl. I had not seen her since, my friend the professor tells me she dropped out of the class. He is not pleased as he believes she stole the antique book he performed the experimental ritual from. I have to laugh now, a ritual from a book viewed as a joke, a book easily traced back to Victorian England when such invented grimoirs were a past time of the wealthy. A class experiment in sociology and the absurdity of rituals.

 

   Absurdity, the absurd, how else can I describe everything that has happened since. Even the professor now says he believes it was an example of group influence, environment; what with going all out with what the book described, and invented memories of each of us telling the others and influencing our own retroactive conceptions.

 

   I do not think so, I know time is meaningless, when and where and how are pointless, that somewhere there is a girl with a book that had called into our plane of existence an existence bigger than our own plane and we were lucky by whatever measure or inconceivable purpose of this thing not to be that girl who remembered a song that cannot be and speak words that aren’t words.