The TFP Plotto Machine Output #2

My references may be too subtle but they are all there (more "echos" of phrases than references really).

Freedom

Physically, she was broken, of course. He had witnessed the process of demolition over the years. She was no longer recognizable as the woman he once wanted to fuck in the interrogation room.

He watched as she was dragged in, her scabbed feet making feeble, scrabbling movements across the tiled floor. As the guards left the room, he knew they would go and wash their hands.

Something moved in her hair. It made him itch.

He said nothing for a while. He watched her, and she watched him as he did so, surreptitiously.

He took his inventory.

Her clothes were rotting from her bird-like frame. Her hair had more grey in it and her skin had become grey also, as if she had lost her colour.

There was a discoloration under her right eye and she was missing some of her teeth. Her nose was bent. She looked comical.
Her fingers were misshapen; most likely the result of the frequent breakages. One finger missing.

She was grubby, but he could see scars and the fresh wheals peeping from the frayed top of her T-shirt.

That T-shirt, once yellow, had now taken on a grubby monochrome and the result gave the impression of sweat and urine stains rather than sunshine and flowers.

How many years had it been since he had admired her breasts in that canary yellow T-shirt?

Now she was a blank envelope. An empty shell.

This tiled room was washed down every evening but he could still smell her. Her stench – the acrid, rodent smell of the long-term prisoner – overpowered even the clinical smell of bleach that permeated this facility.

He breathed her in. It was best, in his experience, to breathe in deeply and embrace the smell rather than to resist it. Resistance focused the senses and would end in gagging and retching.

How old was she now? She looked to be in her seventies, but he knew she was in her mid- forties. This place aged people. He’d seen it before, many times.

It was cool in the room. His olive uniform was crisp and starched and his badges of rank clean and vibrant. His soft shoes were gleaming from their daily polish. He had shaved and showered and combed and oiled his hair. He looked at his manicured nails and the gold Rolex on his left wrist, the clean, tanned skin glowing with good food, good health and success.
He felt good. He looked good. He felt centred. He liked the idea of being happy.

He continued to stare. Not really at her, but in her direction. His eyes looked right through her. His mind had gone elsewhere, letting the seconds tick past. He knew that silence could be unsettling and would often work in his favour. Silence spreads like a rash. He had all the time he needed.

He watched a fly between the bars and the tiny window, wondering how it had got in here. Had it crawled off her, from under her ragged clothing or out of the broken, black mouth of this broken, black doll?

These people!

He thought about the fluorescent lighting and the glare of the tiled walls and the way they hurt his eyes.

Next time, perhaps he’d bring sunglasses. Mirrored sunglasses. He’d look good in those. Gold rims. They would catch the light as did his crucifix, the small stars on his epaulettes, the watch and his simple, gold wedding band, all shining to highlight the clean, tanned skin, dusted with fine, golden, sun-bleached hairs.

Enough! He clapped his hands and she looked up.

Momentarily, he had an unsettling feeling as her eyes met his but she quickly looked down again and it was gone. It was if there was someone else inside this wreck of a human being, someone else who had crawled inside it, peeped out and recognised him.

More than recognised.

Something that had looked deep into his soul and seen something pained, something to pity.

It only took a fraction of a second and he dismissed it as a trick of the light.

He sighed. “So”, he said, “here we are again, you and I”. Perhaps this time would be different.

She said nothing. Her head moved slightly but there was no other indication that she heard him.

“We can stop all of this foolishness, here and now”, he continued.

He paused. He had a sense of déjà vu. He could feel her answer already, but he asked the question anyway.

“Are you ready? If you are ready, I can grant you your freedom. Today! Freedom! It’s up to you”.

She raised her head slowly and looked him full in the eye. He could see that she wasn’t broken and he knew what she would say. She always said the same thing.

“I am free”.

He watched her as she straightened her back and raised her chin. As she smiled, a scab broke on her lip and a trickle of blood stained her lips. She held his gaze.

“I am free and I cannot surrender my freedom. I pray that you might understand and one day find yourself free, too. Take my blood, do as you wish”.

Her defiance infuriated him. Rules are rules.

They looked at each other in total silence as the second hand on his gold Rolex ticked past 30 seconds, 40 seconds, the familiar anger swelling inside him.

He reached across the table and seized her by the throat, bunching up his fist.

He hit her twice, feeling the bones give with each blow. Then, with an exasperated roar, he flung her against the wall and strode to the door.

The guard opened it and he stormed down the hall. As the doors clanged behind him, he could feel the walls of the prison closing in. Finally, the door that led to the outside. All was black and brittle and he wanted the sunlight and the shade of the cafe awning and some strong, sweet coffee.

And a cigarette.

 

My "connections" with stories from the previous Plotto output are bolded.

The Quartet

My given name is Claudius, Claude for short, but I was Frenchie to my old friends. I was never nuts about the nickname, but there's some things you don't get a say in.

This isn't about the old days though, except where it is, and those childhood friends are long gone now. No one's called me Frenchie since Paul Puccino, aka Poochie the Pooch Monkey's wedding in '72. My best friend Eddie “Conch” Conklin was already dead by then. Killed in Vietnam the same week he arrived. Nothing like wars and women to put the kibosh to good friendships.

Conch's twin brother Seamus, “The Shaman” left our quartet first, forced out of it in handcuffs in '68 after he'd broken into a liquor store. (curious to see if he could) He got 5 years in Ossining and was there when he got the news of his brother Conch's death. I considered hooking up with him when he got out, but thought better of it.

According to my mother, they found poor Seamus hanging by the neck in his apartment on Houston St. on a New Year's Eve in the early 80's. The exact year escapes me. My mother, always one for relishing and distributing the details, told me they suspected he'd been hanging there as early as Christmas, before the smell finally brought someone knocking. He didn't leave a note.

The musty recollections of an old man. But, don't get me wrong; I'm not dead yet. I can still make love to my wife when she's in the mood; I still write loans for young couples looking to buy their first piece of Manhattan, and I've still got 5 more years before Olivia and I will buy that little place in Tampa outright and retire like proper New Yorkers. Still, memories are like moving targets and the older you get, the faster they move until one day they're nothing but a blur.

#

I've lived in this city all my life but somehow I can still manage to end up somewhere unfamiliar. I fell asleep on the subway that evening. Easy to do when it's quiet and the office hordes are safely back in their home cubicles, but this was in the middle of rush hour. I was at least 10 stations past my stop when I was yanked from my slumber by an irate Oriental woman possibly complaining about my snoring.

I exited a subway station on the outskirts of the Bronx. I'd call Olivia and let her know I'd be late, before making the return trip. It was one of those times I regretted my stubborn refusal to own a cellphone. The first two booths I happened on were empty shells, so I headed across the street to a bar calling itself The White Rabbit, hoping they'd have a phone. I fancied a beer anyway.

South Bronx is a dangerous, reeking hellhole, even in broad daylight. At night, a dark, hooded figure sitting on a crate at the end of an alleyway, outside a bar you are planning on entering, is a perfectly viable threat. I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck as I navigated my approach.

“Hey Frenchie!” the dark, hooded stranger croaked. A juicy rendering of stage 4 lung cancer or what I assumed stage 4 lung cancer might sound like. The Frenchie bit was a coincidence, nothing more. I ignored him and kept walking.

“What the fuck, Frenchie. You too good to say hello to an old friend?” Well, maybe I did know him, or he knew me from the old days.

“I think you got the wrong guy.” I offered.

“Nope, you're the guy. Claude “Frenchie” Roman. Been waiting a long time to see you, pal.”

“Who are you?” I asked, certain I wouldn't remember him.

“It's me, your best friend, Conch. I know I don't look like me but it's the best I could do on short notice.”

“Fuck off. If you know me, you know Conch is a long time dead.” I walked into the bar. Conch's impersonator followed me.

He drew in close behind me; a whiff of dumpsters and damp basements assaulted my nostrils. “Eloise Feinstein.” he whispered near my ear.

I spun around and faced him. “Back the fuck off!”

He did, but no more than half a step. “You're the last one, Frenchie. The rest of us are all dead. Maybe you didn't hear about old Poochie. Terrible thing. Last month his third wife and her boyfriend murdered him for his life insurance. So it's up to you now, Frenchie. Are you finally ready to do the right thing?”

“Take the beef outside you jokers.” came the order from the gorilla-sized bartender.

“Just take care of it, Frenchie. You know what you gotta do.”

“Says you.”

“Cheerio.” And with that he hoisted his left middle finger at me and disappeared. Disappeared as in the magic trick you know is a trick but also know is too clever for the likes of you to figure out.

I sat at the bar and ordered a cold beer, then used the bar phone to call Olivia. As the TV above my head spewed out a Jerry Springer rerun, I drank my Molson and watched as a moving target from my past slowed down and stopped dead in front of me.

Eloise Feinstein. How could I have forgotten about her? She couldn't have been more than 10 at the time. I can still see her and my little sister Marjorie having tea with their dolls set up, seance-like, in a circle on our living room floor. The guy who raped Eloise got off because me and the rest of the quartet were too chickenshit to come forward and tell the cops we'd seen it all from Poochie's bedroom window.

Eloise was never the same after that. To add insult to injury, we'd stand by and do nothing, watching as the bullies feasted on her broken spirit.

She'd be about 55 now.

“I'll take care of it, Conch.”

 

Farces of Good and Evil. Pt 2.


Satan smiled.

Jezebel knew that one. Corners of his mouth remained horizontal but began to stretch toward his earlobes like a Hoyt CRX 32" Blackout-Camo Compound Bow, ready to loose a “Muahahahaha” into the Halls of Hades, having first deafened her. No way Hozay. Nonne vero. Bugger that.

She gauged his in-breath, waited until it reached its zenith, then slapped him on the back, saying “Told you so”.

“MuERGGGGHHH” and he fell to the ground.


“That saves us all an ear-ache,” she opined.

The downside of being the Whore of Babylon is that the most you usually get to do is OPINE. And get called stupid names, like “Rider of Ye beast” and, let’s face it “Whore of Babylon” … I’m Jezebel, soddit … If I hadn’t been immortal, I’d have opined away long time ago. And he calls Moloch ‘Wanker’. Well, Pot calls Kettle. Yeah. Listen to him talking crap.


Eyes closed, he was dribbling and mumbling. “ … tenuous strand of gentle blessing being approached by antipopulist over-reactions ... oh let the powers give courage to those who, burdened, shalt Thy bounty be unto … ”

This was different. She nearly puked. “Hang on, I know he’s supposed to be bad, but that’s just … wrong. Oh shit could it have been something I said? Or did?” She shook him, but he was away with the fairies or imps or whatever.

Fuck. Better get help. “MOLOCH????” She ran to the Hellevator and pressed for the Tenth Level: of Ye Fucking Wankers. Arriving, she could just make out, through a cloudy mess of fire, water and steam, Moloch wading around, slamming and hammering the copper walls with his fist.

She ran to him “Quick! there’s an emergency!” He didn’t hear her. His arm came back for another mighty swing and she grabbed on to it. He tripped and fell backwards on to her.

Everything went black.

#​

Stan smiled, and his grip on Isabel’s hand loosened as, his expression melting, he began to slide of his chair. She counterbalanced that with an almighty slap on his back which dragged him, sprawling, on to the hospital bed. She didn’t know why she was here, but she could feel a strong Post Ritual Over-Rush. He'd strained himself. She was new to Magik, but, from the start had grasped that only she had direct connection with the cosmic energy, and thus be replenished directly. But for him, if the polarity of his channelling were out by only a fraction of a degree, the drain would be irreversible without her help. He was conscious but his higher faculties were scorched. He was drooling and burbling “Muahahahahahaha”.

Yup, he’d skidded out of control and was now a vegetable, but he's MY good white vegetable wizard, she opined, so she’d better get him home. Silly wanke … now, now, potty-mouth.

She’d no idea where the car was, and there was no time to lose, so she called “Pale Horse Cabs”, who ran a fleet of 1,005 HP Mustang GT-Based Scythes. Arriving home in record time, she bundled him on to the couch, where he was still Muahahahaing like a Christmas toy you’ve got to tickle somewhere to get it to stop.

“I’ll bloody tickle him in a minute. Oh!” She had an idea. She went to the shelf and got his Wand, wrapped the fingers of his right hand around it, and held it aloft while pointing his left finger to the ground. But his cries just got louder, he started shaking, and the bloody radiator started clanking, deafening, louder than ever.

“Now what have I done! Argh, Bugg ...er ... dagnabbit.”

It was a helluva noise but yes, there, in her pocket was the new radiator key. She left the lounge and Stan's "Muahahaha" bleating receded. Slightly.

“Anything practical and muggins here has to do it, don’t I? His Priestessssssssss, am I? Huh. Muggins. ” she grumbled. She put a bowl under the valve of the first radiator and turned the key. And all hell let loose.

#​

The key melted into the radiator and gouts of living steam writhed. Isabel could not see her hand. Water spurted but she could not turn it off. The clanking got louder, the radiator began to shake then WHOOSH BANG, a flash of metal breast cups and chain mail bikini bottoms under translucent crimson silk tumbled out of the boiling stream, everything akimbo, as if shaken off the cover of a 1950s Sci-Fi paperback, Jezebel landed at Isabel's feet.

Isabel gave her a cool stare “Consider yourself fortunate that I am not easily shocked …”
That was as far as she got. Another almighty rumble and Jezebel launched herself at Isabel, propelling them, in a flying embrace, to land in a tangle in the far corner of the room.
“Not shocked? You ain’t seen nothing yet ... INCOMING!!!!!!”

A blazing, blinding, puffing, belching quivering mass slammed accross the room to a multi G-force halt. ‘Muahahahahahas’ from the other room were counterpointed in this room with Moloch's bellows of “Merfy! F.O.F! Au FUCOUR!”

Jezebel and Isabel were clinging together, mouth to ear.

“Pardon the intrusion and … er … all this!” yelled Jezebel, “This is the mess that happens when I try to help a stupid Devil.”

“I don’t know who the Hell you are,” bellowed Isabel “but same here.”

“In the details, I doubt it," corrected Jezebel, "but in general … K’Yeah! Same boat.”

#​

Gentle reader. You know those friendships and alliances that can develop in an instant between complete strangers in the face of shared adversity?

You do?

Good.


Isabel grabbed Jezebel by the ears, and eye to eye, their lips almost touching, screamed above the din “Introductions later, then? Enough is enough! Let’s. Get. This. Shit. SORTED!”

“Boo-YAH!” they yelled, and levered each other to their feet and, tightly pressed back to back, Isabel faced the direction of Stan in the lounge and Jezebel, Moloch.

They yelled “Shut. The…”

Then,“W-W-WAH ... OOH!!!” they chorused, as a sudden tingle in their groins grew to an unscratchable itch at the base of their spines, which forced and thrust upward like a fountain, like an oil well; Siamese twinning and spiralling like snakes, higher and radiating through and between them. Tickling its way up their throats, swelling like a gentle strangulation, it thickened their shouts:

SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP!”

And there was silence.

Silence of waiting.

Silence of vacuum.

Then Nature … Abhorred it.

Light bulbs exploded, mirors cracked, furniture creaked, and all the plaster fell off the walls.

Jezabel looked at Isabel.

“You been reading Dune?”


To be continued.

 

Inspired by, but having nothing to do with, roachboy's first plotto...


----------------------------------------


She gave him what he asked for. It was an insistence that tugged on her, weighed her down. Always had. She held him when he was born, her gift to a cowboy silhouette, and saw those eyes, recording.

Always recording.

He had a distance of 35 millimeters between himself and the rest of the world.

She did what she was told to do, raised to do. Bath time, warm water and soap, rinsing hard to get the film off of him, out of him. Shiny iridescence, rainbow slick. Toys to stimulate, colorful blocks and balls. Knit blankets, creating callused fingers.

He would scan his eyes over the world, over her, reading, recording, compiling.

There was no warmth.

The doctors, so many doctors, told her he was “developmentally slow”… but he’d start, eventually. That it was hard for a single woman to raise a child correctly. She couldn’t do it on her own.

It was her failure that the man had become a silhouette. Gunslinger western, gone into the sunset.

Their lips were hard. Flat lines like old mesas. She subjected herself for the boy. Anything for him, for what the man had left behind.

Those first few summers passed, family videos recorded on the inside of his skull as he sat on the knit blanket and she scrubbed her calluses at night. They never faded back into the flesh of her hand.

Then school. The boy, silent and still, recorded the children playing. Recorded the lessons. She would watch the day’s work, when school released, in his eyes. Images of healthy boys ran from his pupils onto the wall above the couch. Tag. Hide-and-seek. Laughter.

She had never heard the boy laugh.

Would never hear the boy laugh.

Tiny desks and unfulfilled coloring books shifted into soccer fields and dissection labs. Frogs, entrails unearthed, decorated the wall above the couch. The boy stared. She heard whirr of film when she pressed her ear to his skull at night.

There were no more doctors. Their fingers had stopped exploring the boy, stopped prodding. Their lips ceased to create mesas when she explained of her long-gone tumbleweed drifter. They could never hear the whirr within the boy.

In seventh grade, she was asked about the boy in a parent-teacher meeting. The lights from his eyes had become distracting. The other students could hear the clicking of the machinery echo through his head. The boy, he had to leave.

She loaded him into her old green --sick green-- station wagon and drove sunrise bound. Reverse manifest destiny, the sunset would not take the boy.

Highway lines found their way into the boy. Dash-blank, dash-blank, dash-blank. White, cracked, faded, gone. Potholes caused his film to skip, but he recorded all.

At night, the hotel rooms became a battle of lights. Dash-blank, dash-blank waged war on red-and-blue drive-bys. Trucker engines vibrated the walls, blurring the boy’s images as their lights struck through the tear-thin curtains.

Eastward, she moved the last shot of her gunslinger. She would keep the boy safe. Safe from harm, away from the sunset that stole her man away.

Months moved them through mountains, through valleys and hills. Dash-blank, dash-blank. Eastern bound, a few miles each day she ran the boy, drawing out the distance before she would slam into the wall of the coast.

The coast rose up to greet her and the boy one evening.

Dash-blank, dash-gone.

She stood at the edge of the expanse, next to the boy. Her silent companion consumed the blue with echoless eyes.

“The sun will never take you,” she told the boy.

His gaze turned to her face. She felt the breeze of film brush her cheek, and leaned in closer. Two fingers spread his lids as she peered into his eyes.

Tumbleweeds and cacti. Wooden rails. Mustangs over flat-lipped mesas. Indian paintings on the walls of his skull. A golden star pinned to the vest of a man since turned shadow.

He was never hers.

She leaned into the open window of the green –sick green—station wagon and pushed a button. Seconds passed, and then a click broke through the quiet ocean roars. She reached in again, withdrawing her parting shot.

The cigarette lighter pressed into his arm erupted into a bright yellow burn, dissolving his skin as the heat raced through a body not built for fire.

She stepped back and watched him silently burn, the hot beast licking the last of the flesh off his frame.

Against the door of the station wagon, the flames projected the last bit of film: a silhouette of a man on a horse, riding into the sunset.

She kissed her fingers and pressed it to the car door, onto the chest of the cowboy that had tamed her heart.

“Good-bye.”

 

Spiral



He sits in front of a mirrored wall.

He focuses on the array of bottles.

He looks at the notebook on the bar.

He writes:I should not write this.

He focuses on his image in the mirror.

He writes: I aspired to be blank.

I followed a sequence of granite blocks through a silver-gray afternoon of forest ascents and descents past glaucoma pools of water surfaces blank as envelopes. The sun was hanging in the air. I lost track of whether I was passing new features or the same again and again. I was suspended in time.

I walked to a pine grove. I sat near the middle of it and cleared my mind. Perhaps I fell asleep.

I awoke with the sense that something was wrong.

Things looked roughly the same but the colors were washed out and the pacing slower as if this is a movie and that, while I was asleep, the crew had realized that this project is the same project they have always done and now I was inside their boredom.

I walked back along the waveform past blocks of granite like extracted teeth, my mind crowding with explanations and the way distance expanded until there was no room left.





His sees the back of his head in the mirror.

He looks at the notebook on the bar.

He writes:I should not write this.

He focuses on the array of bottles.

I aspired to the zero.

I walked back along a waveform past fossils of teeth until I became mired in time.

I sat in the middle of the trail and tried to clear my mind.

Something was wrong.



There is no image in the mirror.

He looks at the notebook on the bar.

He writes: I will not write this.

 

Inspired by the parable of the ragman, a story I heard as a kid.


River

The fall into the river wasn’t nearly as long as it looked from the bridge. The instant the frigid waters closed around his chest, over his head, he began to struggle against the current like any common human. Quinn began to recall the chain of events leading up to his suicide.

He had set up in the Rose Street shelter a couple of weeks earlier. He had been so confident it was the right thing to do at the time. Here the truly lost and broken came in need of direction and healing. That was Quinn’s line of work, after all. Some people who floated through just needed to talk through their issues, needed a word of encouragement. Nothing so profound as “go and sin no more” or anything. The original ragman held the copyright on that one. But he tended to find the right thing to say. Now, real Healing….that was his Calling. That was what had gotten him into this predicament.

Tuesday started with the old man and the head wound. The man shambled into the shelter that morning, his back bent under the weight of years of hardship and loneliness. He had a worn, stained bandage tied around his head to cover a pretty nasty cut over his right temple. The wound had become infected and wouldn’t quite stop bleeding. Quinn carefully untied and removed the old bandage and produced a clean, white one from some inner pocket his jacket. He tied the new bandage around the old man’s head. Then he tied the old bandage about his own head. It stung like fury as blood began to seep from Quinn’s temple.

Later that day, there was the drunk. One of the sisters who rotated through the shelter found a man passed out on the front step. Quinn pulled him to his feet, helped him inside, and started pouring coffee into him. When he was able to sit up on his own, Quinn took the bottle of cheap whiskey from the man. His eyes began to clear, he sat up a little straighter, and he asked if there was some place he could clean himself up. Quinn’s head hurt like hell, and now, with this bottle in hand, he really, desperately wanted a drink of something strong and nasty to take his mind off things.

As the day went on, his body ached from several injuries he had taken away from people, his head was spinning from a number of worries and sorrows he had taken up, and his stress level was stratospheric. Through it all, something the Boss had told him a long time ago nagged at him. He was sure it was something important, but he just couldn’t focus…….

Then that night, the little girl. That was the one he just couldn’t handle. She had put Quinn in the river.

He had noticed her that evening while helping to serve supper. She was pressing herself into a corner of the shelter, trying to disappear into the wall. Quinn recognized that this child was plagued by demons. He wanted so badly to reach out to her, but she wouldn’t let anyone within an arm’s reach of her. So he had done what he could for her. He fixed a plate of food, with an extra piece of cake. Then he backed off, and hoped for the best. After lights out, he found her sleeping fitfully, trapped in some nightmare. Quinn gathered what little strength he had left from this day, braced himself, and knelt down next to her cot to kiss her on the forehead. As he did so, he felt as though someone had hit him in the head with a 20-pound sledgehammer. The little girl sighed and sunk into a deep and restful sleep, and Quinn reeled under the sudden onslaught of images and feelings. So many bruises, broken bones, and scars. Her father had beaten her mercilessly, had beaten her mother to death with his bare hands some months back. There were nightmares. There were thoughts of murder and suicide. One night after the man had passed out in his gin, she had mixed some borax and rat poison she found in the cupboard into his coffee for the next morning. Then she put a couple of shirts and a stuffed rabbit into a backpack and vanished.

Too much. Too much. His fever was raging, his entire body was wracked with pain, he still wanted—no, needed--a drink, no one should suffer the way this child had, there were three dozen other hurts he had picked up, he didn’t think he’d ever sleep or know peace again, and it was all just too much. And the Rose Street Bridge was just up the street….

And that’s how Quinn came to be here, his body drifting downstream. There were voices in the rushing of the water, shouting and whispering at once, assuring him that he’d never be good enough, he’d ultimately fail, he couldn’t Heal everyone so why even bother trying, he couldn’t handle the workload on his own. That was it. That was what the Boss had told him that he couldn’t remember earlier. “If you ever get overwhelmed, that means you’re doing too much under your own steam. Stick with me, kid, and I’ll never give you more than you can handle, and I’ll never let you fail.” The Boss’s words silenced the other voices in the river, and Quinn became aware of his body in the water. The ragman let himself relax and let the river wash away every hurt he had taken upon himself throughout the day. His cuts and bruises healed, his bones knit themselves back together, and his fever broke.

The next morning saw Quinn back at the shelter, serving breakfast, as if nothing had ever happened. The little girl came through the serving line, smiled at him and thanked him for her oatmeal. Quinn smiled. He wasn’t leaving the Rose Street shelter any time soon.

 

“Benevolent person, following a wrong course through mistaken judgment achieves a spiritual victory.”


Lidia always felt she had a good heart regardless of the demons and darkness that had possessed her for so many years of her existence.
She had always wanted to seek out help, but was cautious with her desire to rid this darkness. Not knowing what would happen to her mind, body and soul, what if she would turn to the wrong people.

Searching out secret societies that proved fake answers and risky exorcisms. They have taken her money and then her faith.

Lidia would say “is there any good spirits in this world, are all these beings evil?” She would cry herself to sleep at night, hoping for an answer.

Lidia woke up suddenly in a dream, experiencing a vision of light and then a guardian angle appeared. He was a tall man with a light complexion and a soft voice “Lidia you must go back to the church; there you will find the answers you seek. We will speak again when you arrive, they will help you there.
The place you must go is behind the church and you must step on the second and third slated pathway stones to open the stairway. It will appear out of nowhere. Lidia listen to what I say and remember this. It is a very secret group and we only come to dark souls in their dreams. If you believe, you will appear at the church with an open heart."

When Lidia finally awoke, she felt this is the truth and believed that all along she was seeking the wrong path. She prepared to leave for the church with heart filling with hope…