Anima Venti by Bosley Gravel

Heat Rating: Zero Fire

Content Warning: Mild Sexual Content, Violence, Gore, Horror.

One bright and beautiful morning, Seward Felix Stacy woke up alone, godless, with no fear of death and a mild, but nagging addiction to opium. Worst of all, he woke up knowing if he died today he would leave no mark in the world, no legacy for the ages.

Seward had been a brilliant medical student once, charming many a young woman into his dormitory; he charmed them with nimble fingers that could stroke life back into the dying with an almost supernatural touch. Despite a trust fund he could use for any business practice he might dream up, he lay in what could not even properly be called a hotel, with his last bits of opium nothing but a white ash in the bottom of a cheap clay pipe.

The sun streamed in the window while the wall behind him thumped loudly. The mattress behind the wall squeaked with the sounds of loveless sex and the comically boorish interjection of the male of the pair worked its way through the walls. To this rhythm, Seward thought of his last decade of globe-trotting, and the desperate search for some meaning in his life after he had been expelled from medical school. His gifts as a surgeon stayed sharp but his desire to help humanity had dulled, and now, for a couple of gold coins, he would scrape the fresh wisps of humanity from the already scarred wombs of the tired whores who sometimes lined up two or three a day for his services.

The sun still streamed in, and he was sure the couple next door would break through the wall before the man climaxed and perhaps, at this height, if the fates smiled on Seward, the woman would conceive, and he would have another lump of opium in his pipe.

He pulled himself from the bed and looked at his reflection in the mirror over the dry sink. The image was blurry; the mirror had been poorly made, the back peeling away. He could see well enough the roundness of his head, the stubble on his face, and the lush shock of coal black hair that fell around his ears and eyes sometimes giving him the look of a madman. He was no madman though, he'd studied long and hard: in the temples of India, and in the mountains where thin renegade monks would levitate pebbles for crusts of bread. For a bit of meat they raised him up a foot from the ground, their toothless mouths in buffoonish grins. He'd lived with revolutionaries in the jungles of Mexico, and once watched them saw off a kidnapped politician's head and put it on a stick. He had danced with them that night, drinking their jungle-brewed coconut wine and never thought twice as he healed their battle wounds.

Seward submerged his hands in the cold water in the basin and then brought them to his face as the couple in the adjoining room changed rhythm, slowing to something that sounded like the tide coming in on a lonesome beach. As a young man, he had believed in a God who had put him in a zoo, who had given him a soul with the Knowing. Now, as an older man he had no God, and he had the Knowing but no soul.

As soulless as the dark being that created me, he thought.

As he examined his hands, cool water dripped down like emotionless tears, and he wondered if perhaps he could create something beautiful from nothing, to surpass God's failed attempts at bringing light into the world. He realized then, with an eerie surety what he must do, what his mark would be, something so simple, so perfect even God could not match it. He would find true love, love purer than any love God could ever presume to know. He admitted to himself, as the woman on the other side of the wall shrieked in a wild cheer for the man to finish, that, yes, he did believe in sentient God, but it was a dark and savage being, a horror of the Here, the Now. God has no soul, for what could breathe life into such a being?

Seward regarded the index finger on his left hand; a ring of scar tissue wrapped around it like some torturous wedding band. The scar marked the beginning of the end. After thoughtfully considering it in the light of the new day, he used that hand to brush the opium pipe into the trash, and opened the curtains. Today marked the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning. He felt as if he had walked on a great mobius strip around and around the world, but today, he thought, as the man next door howled like some unspeakable beast, he would step off and challenge the darkness of his own soul.