With an Aching In My Heart

After eons of being battered against the hard edge of a stationary continent, a handful of shells had been reduced to nothing more than grains of sand, slowly inching their way towards the shallows with the unending rotation of the tides and the moon. One particle of sand found itself washed forward on the weight of a lumbering wave, it careened through patches of kelp and seaweed until it hit a great pillar upended in the shallow water. The wave receded, and the curious particle of sand found itself left high and dry, stuck to the pillar. The sand tickled the legs of Leon Van Damme as he stood knee deep in the cool waves of the Pacific. With the sweet, cool air swelling inside his lungs, and the salt from the wind catching in his nose, Leo could barely believe that he’d actually arrived. His toes slowly dug their way deeper into the wet sand, as he turned to look back over his shoulder at the Ray’s Liquor box, which sat lightly on the hard sand, only a few trinkets from his former life to weigh it down.

A day earlier, Leo sat in the dingy tri-county airport, which was still not far enough away from Castle Apartments. He zoned out, his eyes tracing the aerodynamic curves on the jetliner outside, when the volume swelled on a television that was mounted crookedly on the opposing wall. First catching the concerned look on the face of an airline employee, Leo felt the cold vein of fate creep up his spine, as he focused on the dusty screen. A middle-aged woman with shoulder-length brown hair addressed the public, the news station logo spinning on its axis, the words “BREAKING NEWS” splayed in crimson red across the bottom of the screen. Her voice was deep, and her attitude professional as the footage cut to the headshots of two people Leo recognized. One was an Irish woman he remembered from Castle, the other a blurry shot of a man with only the word “Cleake” to distinguish him. The woman, Sile N’Bhroin had been stabbed multiple times by this Cleake person. The newscast then cut to a surly old black man standing in front of Castle Apartments, who explained that the two were neighbors in the same building. A frigid shudder violently rocked Leo where he sat; the icy chill had settled in his veins and began to solidify in his gut. That could have been him, thought Leo, as he looked skyward and kissed his thumb, then throwing the sentiment to the Heavens. He praised whatever Gods there might be for adorning him with enough strength to escape the satanically twisted, cursed walls of Castle Apartments.

After his flight landed in Santa Barbara, Leo found himself hailing a cab in a numb stupor. Arriving at the cheap extended-stay hotel where he’d shipped his boxes, he found himself being haunted by one box in particular. The box stood out, “THE PAST” scrawled with sharpie onto all sides. Grabbing the box in a bear hug, Leo sprinted out of the hotel and down the beachside road that lead to the local pier. He ran, careening past gorgeous girls wrapped in exquisite color, past gray haired men with surfboards and tan lines, past happy children spinning barefoot in the sundrenched grass, he picked up speed as he reached the long weathered pier. Sweating, Leo threw off his old tweed jacket; catching the wind it tumbled over the edge, liberated, it swept down the beach in the salty wind. Leo reached the end of the landing in a frenzy, almost plummeting over the guardrail with the momentum. He dropped “THE PAST” at his feet. As he looked west into the heart of the late-afternoon sun, Leo reached into the box, and pulled out the first thing he touched. It was the retro-style alarm clock that he’d kept at his bedside for the entirety of his sentence at his old apartment. Thinking back on it, this crummy red-plastic clock had been first thing he’d bought for room 1011. Tossing it up and down in his hand for a moment, mulling things over, he reared back and lobbed the clock into the absolving waters of the Pacific, screaming like an nineteenth century exorcism, Leo howled, “THAT’S FOR SILE, GODAMN IT!” Again Leo reached into the box this time retrieving his Atlantic City souvenir ashtray, the edges of the cheap plaster were chipped, and the image was faded. Without half a thought he chucked the ashtray as far as he could, Leo watched as it hit the crest of a wave in a pathetic splash and begin to sink into the indigo water. Leaving the heart wrenching scream for the sadly departed, he muttered “that’s for the damned who can’t escape Castle. That’s for Cleake.”

Leo continued throwing the contents of his past into the ocean, each item representing one of the sad lost Lonelies from back east. Taking a horribly scratched Sting single in his hand like a Frisbee, he threw the thing towards the ever-loving horizon – an unending slew of curses towards Devon Tresp accompanying it to the deep. Finally Leo reached the bottom of “THE PAST,” and deliberated over the last two items. The first being his favorite Hula girl lamp that danced when you turned in on, the second being the old cracked New York snow globe. Holding the snow globe in his hand, and feeling the cracks with his thumb, Leo resolved to lob it, and keep the Hula girl. Raising the globe back over his shoulder to launch it far out past the pier, he lost his grip, and it slipped out of his hands and crashed to pieces on the weathered boards. Kneeling down to pick it up, he found that the skyline was intact, but the glass dome had finally shattered, and the little people of mini-Manhattan had been liberated from their endless winter. Leo held the little island up to the sun, and observed the little pieces of silver confetti as they caught the light, and filled the little town with a brilliant shadowless glow. “Never mind,” thought Leo as he placed the snowless island back in the box, next to the Hula girl lamp. He picked the box back up and headed back down the pier, determined to make it to the ocean himself. He kicked off his ratty old loafers and felt the warm California sand under his heels, recognizing that his own dome had been shattered, and now all that was left was brilliant sunlight, and the mirrors that caught its reflection.

So there Leon Van Damme stood – up to his thighs in the rising tide, watching the sun begin to dip over the horizon. The last tendrils of its fiery luminance held onto the sky, pulling every color in the known world over the edge with it. Turning his eyes skyward, yet again, Leo could swear he heard the word “Amen” come whispering across the darkening waves, he laughed under his breath, a smile growing from his chapped lips. “Amen,” he whispered back, as he loosened every muscle in his body, and fell backwards, arms spread-eagle, into a passing wave. The cool water washed over his craggy features, his gray hair, and his smiling face, as he sank to the sandy bottom. Finally Leo was completely engulfed in the all-forgiving water.

 Emerging with a gasp, he ran his fingers through his hair, and shuffled through the shallow waves towards his box, turning at just the right moment to catch the last glimmer of the sun as it ducked entirely over the edge of the west.  

THE END.

Until I Get My Way

A devilishly wicked smile played across the face of Leon Van Damme as he faced his superior, Mr. Tresp.  “I quit, Devon,” Leo said, the smile still tugging at the sides of his lips. The cold British jackass stood in the booth glaring at Leo as he handed him the handwritten formal notice. He took one last look around the room at the archaic machinery, the tapes churning away, and the lone lamp flickering over the control panel. Satisfied, he turned to leave WTF 100.4 for the last time. Tresp cleared his throat just before Leo reached the door.

“You’re a damn fine disk jockey, Leo,” Tresp mumbled. “And… you’re also the only one who knows how to fix the machines…”

“Nice try, Devon,” Leo said as his smile contorted sideways into a smirk. “But, fuck you.”

Leo paid no attention to the dreary overcast clouds as he walked home, but rather concentrated all of his energy on the weak spring sunlight that broke through the layer of cotton that hung lazily in the atmosphere. Ever since he’d decided to leave, there had been a pinging sensation deep inside of him. A yearning, not unlike hunger, that seemed to compel his entire body to head west.

As he reached the far side of the field behind Jack’s Jems and 100.4, Leo looked back on the rut he’d formed in the grass over the past however many years. A path, beaten into the earth possibly by his feet alone, stood stark and naked in the overgrown park. Careful not to damage any of the vinyl albums he was carrying in yet another box from Ray’s Liquor, he gently placed the remnants of his job on the ground, and lowered himself down on his haunches. It was springtime, and Leo looked closely at the exposed ground of his rut. He could see tiny little stems of grass bravely inching their way skyward. He stood, and looked up at the wash of gray that comprised the heavens of his little dome, and back at the tiny little green leaves. He took one last moment, before picking up his things, to envision the field in a couple of years, without the constant tread of his feet; where the grass encompasses the entirety of the space, the trees shimmering lightly in the summer breeze. It’d be high noon, so the shadow of Castle Apartments wouldn’t invade the little green swath of land.

His shoulder ached as he made his way up the battered, graffiti-scrawled stairwell of the apartment building, he felt as if he had been given a sign. The sprouting blades of grass had given him the thumbs up, the go-ahead, the green light – now all he had to do was escape Castle Apartments in one piece.

Back in his apartment, Leo placed his 100.4 stuff next to the bevy of other boxes strewn about the living room, and collapsed on the couch. He surveyed the cardboard cubes, and realized that all his possessions managed to fit into five boxes, that included the one he’d brought from work.

With all of his everything packed into five wine boxes, Leo no longer felt any attachment to room 1011. After a couple trips to the post office, he had successfully mailed his boxes to an extended-stay hotel just outside of Santa Barbara. Now absolutely alone in his room, Leo stood in the sun, and watched it catch the dust that pervaded the air, as it tumbled in front of the window. The sun was setting on Castle Apartments as Leo let the key to his room fall from this fingers and clatter onto the coffee table – an act that lifted a thousand pounds from across his shoulders. Taking a final lap through the sad, shadow-ridden rooms, Leo kept his momentum up and strode out of 1011 and slammed the door behind him. He made his way down the hall and felt his heart catch; slowing he looked down at his chest, and could practically see the great rusty fish-hook looping around him and piercing his heart, pulling him back towards his room. Running frantically back to the door of his personal Hell, Leo threw his sweaty fingers around the doorknob and searched in vain for his keys. In a rush of adrenaline to the fear centers of his brain, he slammed his fist against the peephole until blood began to spatter across the crooked aluminum numbers from a wicked gash in his middle finger. The beat inside of Leo began to slow as his fist did against the door, gradually he calmed down, and returned to his normal state.

Seeing his craggy features gruesomely reflected in the crimson glass of the peephole, Leo turned away from the door, pulled the hook from his heart, and ran his bloody hand through his prematurely gray hair; as he walked down the hallway towards the stairwell. He walked away from the door, away from Castle Apartments, and caught the last bus to the airport three counties over.                

Snow Globe

The door to apartment 1011 rattled as a key was being forced into the lock. The whole wall felt the repercussions of the battle raging against the door. The dust lifted from the books on the shelf that slumped crookedly next to the door. On the sloped top of the shelf the hula girl lamp, and the snow globe of Manhattan were slowly inching their way towards the precipice of the shelf. The snow globe, undeterred by a power cord, made its way halfway over the edge when the door opened and in stumbled Leon Van Damme carrying an armful of empty boxes from the package store.  In a fit of exasperated rage, Leo flung the boxes to the ground, and went to retrieve his key from the lock. Having done so, he slammed the door, giving the snow globe all it needed to fall from the shelf in with a satisfying thud. Leo reeled at the sound, then seeing the globe waddling around on the floor, knelt down and picked it up, a spidery crack now encompassing the dome. He peered inside, the twin towers standing at attention, snow lightly dusting Central Park. The snow and the dreary inescapable nature of the dome reminded him of last winter, and the day he almost died.

It was December 22nd, and the snow was piling up in front of Castle Apartments, keeping the sardines packed in their tin. The holiday sentiment did little to brighten the moods of the confined Castle Lonlies. The snow had shut the radio station down, the icicles freezing the weak bandwidth, leaving Leo with nothing to do. This gave him an opportunity to spend more than a fleeting instant in his room, this depressed him even more. Leo's breath hung effortlessly in the frigid air as he fumbled with the shitty space heater. In an attempt to increase the pitiful range of the heater to even another foot, the machine reared up all it's energy only give up and shut off with an apathetic hiss. Leo glared at the machine in disbelief, his lower lip slowly stretching towards the floor. He'd had enough. Leo threw on his big army-style parka, grabbed his cigarettes off the coffee table and thundered through the door. The hallway was warmer than his apartment, he thought, as he reached the stairwell and headed up.

The wind, supercharged with biting snow, whipped at Leo’s sharp craggy features as he stood motionless on the roof of the apartment. Having shuffled his way out on the icy pavement, he managed to get a cigarette lit under the shelter of his jacket. Not risking the slippery conditions, Leo had resolved to not move from his precarious spot. Feeling just as antsy in the stifling rush of wind and snow as he did in his apartment, Leo felt as if the world in which he lived was slowly crushing his soul. He was the outdated European sedan hanging under the power of a magnet, the next pancaked car in the junk yard. Leo decided to return to his room – dissatisfied by the inability of the wind and snow to liberate him from this claustrophobic hell. Without thinking, Leo took one big quick step towards the open door of the stairwell behind him. He slipped on the ice, and stumbled, sliding with every step towards the stairwell. At last, his foot caught the lip of the doorway, and he went careening through it. For a moment, he felt like he was flying, as his feet left the ground and the rest of his body went speeding over the first flight of stairs. He was temporarily suspended in the weightless second, as his flailing body arced through the frigid air. Then he pictured his body crumpling into the dirty brick wall. He landed a couple steps short of the landing, crushing his shoulder under the rest of his body. The momentum then carried Leo down to the landing, and across into the ill-maintained brick wall.

With his shoulder in searing pain, and blood rushing to a nasty bash on his head, Leo gazed back up the stairs to the flimsy metal door testing its hinges in the frozen wind. In his dazed state, and at this distance, Leo could see the intricate swirling patterns the snow made as it rode the wind. He shifted his weight, tested his shoulder, and grimaced. Already regretting the trek down the stairwell, Leo pulled out his crushed pack of cigarettes and took a moment to light one up before attempting to walk down flour flights of stairs. He reveled in the slight warmth the smoke brought to his body, and the fact that it was his shoulder, not his neck that received the full force of the fall.          

  

Leo dusted off the old snow globe, and placed it in one of the many boxes now scattered about his living room. He stood, and feeling the shoulder that hadn’t felt right since that day, Leo surveyed his apartment He wondered how much of his useless stuff he’d actually want in California, and how much of it he’d need to throw into the absolving waters of the Pacific before he could forget Castle Apartments, and this ruddy little shithole town.   

           

California Girls

The weathered wooden slats of Castle Apartment’s rooftop shed moaned as Leo leaned against them. Like a cowboy leaning against the wall of a saloon, he surveyed the small bundle of buildings below him. He brought a cool glass bottle of Coke up to his lips, and relished in the sugary zing that rattled up and down his spine. Leo felt as if he had accomplished what he set out to do when he first signed the lease on apartment 1121. He’d sat there in the murky carpeted room, and waited for the landlord to return with the papers. He was an old man, with dark red hair who talked out of the corner of his mouth, the rest of his face crumpling around his lips. He had handed Leo an old monogrammed pen to sign the papers, he remembers accidentally pricking is finger on the rusty clip as he began to write.

His heart sank at the hellish symmetry his memories supplied.

“I signed my life away that day,” muttered Leo as he pulled a cigarette out from behind his ear. He fiddled with the cigarette, having bummed it off of Kindra on his way upstairs; he realized his matchbook was still on his coffee table.

“Hellish symmetry,” he thought as he tucked the cigarette back into his wispy gray hair.

With his new perspective on life, Leo had the feeling that he’d broken some dam somewhere in his head; he felt the rush of blood to foreign areas of his brain, and the elation of a thousand little wildlife activists. He now felt out of touch with the Castle Lonlies, after so many years of guiding them through the mire of their nighttime desolation. He came to this small decaying urban shithole to escape his father’s serum, and to find his own. However, only finding booze and flat Coca-Cola, it took Leo accepting his father – and his ghost – to stand straighter than ever before.

He needed to leave, take a permanent vacation to the West Coast: where he’d always believed his true parents had their roots. He’d seen pictures of thirty-five year old men with gray hair like his, surfers who spent so much time under the sun that the color evaporated from their hair, leaving it eternally frazzled and unkempt. He’d be accepted there, where everyone was tall and lanky, the vastness of the ocean fostering their skyward growth. Where his craggy face would be thrown off as “weatherworn” not “acne-scarred.”

All this thinking made Leo jittery with anticipation as he lined up his Coke bottle on the concrete rim of the roof. The bottle caught the light of the sun, the glass attempting in vein to vacuum-seal the brilliance that radiated through it. Unlike the bottle, Leo had somehow managed to siphon some of world’s brilliance into his own cavities. Back at the church, on his knees before the humbling leviathan of his father’s morals, Leo managed to peer through the metaphorical keyhole and glean a quick glimpse of his life away from this town.

He needed to leave. He had to leave. Having exhausted the town, the town was now exhausting him; Leo felt that if he stayed, he’d end up nothing more than exhaust. Leo stood on the roof, mesmerized by the horizon, the gears in his mind forming an escape route. He’d sell his apartment, he’d cash his last paycheck, and he’d buy a plane ticket to the other side of the continent.

Angels Are Bright Still, Though The Brightest Fell

Leon Van Damme was crashing, he was careening out of control, his reserves empty of the energy created between moving bodies. After the ghost of his father had resurfaced, and the reality of the life lived as a depraved apartment loner smacked him in the face, he felt himself folding into the only unbiased comfort he knew – the Church.

As he strode towards the statutes of his childhood, Leo attempted to imagine the first time he entered the sanctuary religion provided. He must have been only an infant, cradled in a woman's arms- curled up somewhere loud. He felt like it must have been a plane, the woman and the baby pressed against the window in the rear of the cabin. The roar of the turbines filling both mother and child with the cleansing sensation of total deafness. The flight felt natural to Leo, as a child he always felt as if he’d been displaced; a foreigner from the opposite coast. He couldn't understand the motives of his mother to bring him across the country to the church of Monsignor Van Damme. He also failed to grasp the intentions of the Monsignor when we took the child in under his wing, giving Leo his name, and raising him as his own. Leo figured that the Monsignor couldn't possibly be his father, the vow of celibacy held at too high a regard for a man in his position. However Leo was raised as his son, motherless and quite easily fatherless. The weight of the ever-loving church adding power to every syllable the Monsignor uttered. Despite the obvious facts, the Monsignor was a father to Leo, and the only one he knew – the one he grew up fearing, respecting, and trying to escape.

It was barely light out, the sky ever so slowly shifting from the color of pitch to the color of water only slightly above the sea floor. Leo hadn't slept since he’d ingested the words of the 23^rd Psalm. Since his eyes had followed the eerie timeless curves of his father’s cursive. He could not rid himself of the heavenly ghost of the Monsignor and the devil that pervaded his own soul. In his attempt to rectify the echoes of his past, he would have to return to the source of his conflict; the great-hallowed walls of the church.

He reached the steps, hesitated only slightly before raising his arms towards the heavens to heave the great doors open. Before his fingers could press against the withered wood, they parted in front of him. Magically the seam between the doors widened. Leo was awe-struck. No doubt was it his father opening the great doors to his healing – welcoming him back to the belief that everything above us is gold and important - covered in miles of plush carpet. Leo Van Damme stood, mouth agape before the church, tears welling in the corners of his eyes. He blindly stumbled forward, ever so ready to fill his stores with light and the warmth that seeps through the pores of accepting people. Leo closed his eyes and fell through the doors.

“Outta my way, fucker.” said a gruff voice.

It was all a sham apparently.

Leo in his rush of good-intention had fallen onto the muscular shoulder of a washed-up guitarist. One of the lonelier sad-saps to inhabit one of the sardine-can floor plans of Castle Apartments, Leo recognized him, but forgot what color he went by. He pushed his way past, unperturbed by the moment he had interrupted, lost in his own problems.

Leo reeled and collapsed to his knees. He hung his head and laughed. A devout laugh that percolated within his marrow and refused to dissipate. The gravely chuckle reverberated between the arched walls of the sanctuary and were carried skyward. Tears spilling down his face his got to his feet, strode towards a young nun who stood terrified by his ruckus and kissed her heavily. He felt like the soldier in that picture, holding her around the waist and leaning over her admirable figure.

Finally Leo felt divine

He left the nun where he found her, shell-shocked, but surprisingly not agitated. Leo practically skipped home; again with his heartbeat in his ears, he felt the roar of the engines and the sensation of flight.

Psalm 23

"The lord is my Shepard, I shall not want"

Leo Van Damme gripped the yellowed paper in his trembling hands.

"He maketh me lie down in green pastures,

He leadeth me beside the still waters."

It had been at least twenty years since he'd seen these words, and they still had the same effect as they'd had back then.

"He restoreth my soul."

Every last syllable, every last letter housed the great loving sentimental act, and the hellish rage of Leo's father. Each earthshaking vowel, each thunderous consonant reverberated between his head and his heart with such speed it brought him to the cusp of tears. Leo was his father's vision, however nothing Leo could have possibly ever been, would be perfect enough for the admirable and important Monsignor Van Damme.

"He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name sake."

Reading the words that he had so long ago forsaken, Leo found himself longing to be held by his father, and healed, like so many others by his chosen profession. After his father’s death every embrace felt stifling, it reminded him of his youth living under the yoke of the Church, and his father’s godly aspirations for him. He had spent so much energy in his adult life trying to escape his father’s celestial reach, and he though he went about it rather well. He left the catholic inbred suburbs for a lost urban center – long ago forgotten by gentrification – where he’d have to find his own deities. However his best laid plans evaporated away, after last night. drunk off his ass behind Ray’s Liquor, he faced the wrath of his father’s disappointment and the devilish repercussions of said alienation. Having lost his inner-city enlightenment to the demons of loneliness and apathy, Leo found himself falling back in into the faith of his childhood.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

Leo sat in the darkened room, the afternoon light filtering through the dilapidated blinds, desperately holding the withered paper in his fingers. Written long ago on the yellowed paper in the practiced calligraphy of a catholic priest was the 23^rd Psalm. Well-worn creases ran across the sheet like city blocks, dividing the fanciful text into simplified bits. The Monsignor carried this piece of paper with him to every funeral he ever lorded over, long since memorized, he found solace in that fact that the words were still there - the verses easily within reach during trying times. Much like how a cowboy carries a bullet in the seam of his hat, Leo’s father carried the handwritten scrap of verse for his biblical six-shooter – custom .23 gauge.

“I will fear no evil: for thou art with me,

Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

Leo folded the paper and placed it gently back in the shoe box containing the last of the trinkets his father had left him. He closed the box, and quietly kissed the lid, before looking up, smiling, and whispering a humbled, “Amen.”

When Comparing Your Bellyaches

The setting sun hung slowly above the horizon, as the buildings in front of Leon folded in and out of focus. He sat slumped against the western wall of Ray's Liquor, an almost empty bottle of whiskey engulfed in a paper bag hung loosely in his hand. His chin against his chest, he exhaled slowly, and thought about the condition he found himself in at the moment. Walking home from work earlier that day, after twelve hours of constant berating, Leon was suddenly his with the full force of his loneliness. With his degrading enthusiasm for his work at the station, the music he relied on for so long no longer comforted him. He had stopped, and took a different turn at the corner of Sunset Terrace and Benson Street, and headed for the liquor shop.

Presently, Leon's insides were bathed in the golden warmth of the whiskey, and his outsides were washed in the savory glow of the setting sun. He lifted his head, and rested his gray hair against the chipped concrete wall. However, he waited to open his eyes, he felt the dried tears on his face, and laughed half-heartedly to himself. Any consciousness he felt at the moment was from the neck up - everything else was in a state of blissful ignorance. At the moment, the booze had done its job, and Leon no longer felt as pathetic as he had a few hours before. Leon reflected on the fact that it had been years since he'd seen a sunset, usually he was locked in the windowless booth at WTF; riddled with angst and happily perched upon his soap box. At this thought he opened his eyes and toasted the horrible forces at be, for allowing him this moment, and drained the last of the bottle. With a hearty belch, he sighed and readjusted his back against the wall. Losing himself in the swirling pinks and oranges that infected the sky in beautiful wispy veins, Leon slowly closed his eyes, letting the image burn itself into his corneas. The thin stretch of skin had just enveloped his eyes when they suddenly flew open again at the sound of bone crunching against knuckle. Leon glanced about wildly, only seeing the fading visage that the sun had latched in front of his eyes. With the sun in his eyes and the added numbing rush of whiskey coursing through his blood, He was in no state to move. Much less defend himself from whoever lurked near. Leon stood, feeling his way up the wall, his fingers dragging unevenly across the crumbling surface. Blinking his eyes rapidly in an attempt to jettison the sunset from his eyes, his vision began to slowly return. He realized that he had made it further down the alley, closer to the dumpster behind Ray's Liquor. With his knees buckling about below him, he threw himself into the shady corner between the dumpster and the wall. In this cool low place, Leon gazed skyward and ran his hand through his hair. As he lowered his head back against the cold metal and lazily looked in the direction his head was facing. He saw him. In the alleyway directly across Sobchak, he saw a lone figure hunched over something. The figure looked about wearily; he appeared to be contorting his neck in obscene and maniacal ways. For five minutes Leon stared, mouth agape, at the demonic figure in the opposing alleyway, harvesting a soul for their sordid collection. In his rapt concentration, Leon forgot he was hiding, and let out a high pitched hiccup that reverberated between the wall and the dumpster, before launching itself at the demon. He was terrified; the demon would surly come for him next. His pathetic light would fill the next of the devil's vials, sitting in wait for eons just to fuel some satanic cocktail. Leon closed his eyes tight, hoping that his forced blindness might make the searing pain of the demons claws entering his chest, a little more bearable.

When Leon did open his eyes, he was alone, and far from the inner circle of Hell. The sun had set hours before, and the whiskey being found seemingly used, had released itself from his body. Both instances leaving only a searing ache in Leon's left temple. He got to his feet, and stumbled to the entrance to the alleyway across from where he'd been sitting. Leon looked around and scratched his head. "Oh well...” he sighed, as he kicked a piece of loose gravel into the alleyway,"so much for facing my demons."