Grandma has been having strange dreams again. In her minds eye, she is watching vignettes of a spirit named Sereph who walks an endless twilight of desolation. A shrouded figure, almost like a romantic poem brought to life. Traversing the middle span of etherial nocturnes, where memories and dreams go to die. There is a majesty about it, but its so dark and nihilistic. Sometimes she dreams she is the figure, some times she is running from it. It has a tinge of a feeling she felt once in her youth. A yearning for travel, a feeling of being alone in a silent world that has no meaning. She feels like this herald of the stars has some deep prophetic message but no voice to scream the dire warning that some far out cataclysm is approaching. Like a falling star from space, or a hurling asteroid coming to vaporize the world. She feels a great kinship with this spirit but also a profound sadness, like the greatest mind of science, art and literature had to make a profound choice to save life its self… and saved nothing. Existing in an echo of horror that warned no one despite screaming into eternity. Creating a resounding silent agony. Defeated this lone watcher stands to witness the end of time over and over again. As psychic winds pour over an endless desert of labyrinthian necropolises.
She has no idea if Sereph is male or female, young or old. She wonders what the name means. Sans Serif is a type of script on type writers, Seraphim are horrible angels of creation, holding the terrible secrets of the universe. She sees the name scrawled in blood in her dreams. A tangible litany, evoking feelings of desolation and dread. The persisting night terror is always on some dry plane with moody colors. Planets dipping far down to our world. Vaguely European looking ruins that scream out over black vistas of void. Walking among shores of vast glassy ocean turned to dust. Empty skeletal eyes and teeth hidden under the most beautiful and vibrant funeral shroud. Some times the figure is in deep scarlet, other times grey and gold, blue as a summers day, white like a ghost or black like the rain of Hiroshima. She wonders if the silent wraith had a voice. What would it sound like? Soothing like the rain, or staccato like a victim of a death squad trying to call out to family to stay away. She feels such sadness, but its not hers. She has been having this dream for who knows how long. Its something she thinks about all day. This endless boneyard of urban decay, smothered by golden sands and a glimpse of a life half remembered and forgotten in the same moment while the world moves thousands of miles a second away. A shrouded witness to the isolation and despair at the eve of the end of time.
Her work with harmful microbes discovered in the rain makes her wonder if this is some message from her self in some future of blight, where the mysteries of the universe were answered by a cruel time where the atom burned the world away? Thinking of her youth, traveling trains in the first light of dawn across Europe. Looking out over towns bombed into oblivion and abandoned in 1919. Red line ruins howling some challenge for the children of war profiteers who harnessed the power of oblivion and were foolish enough to not blow the candle out and bury the flame. She hears songs lost to time where the final pressing of the record was blown up in a carpet bombing. The singer and the listeners all under tons of rubble while the blitz of zeppelins and air raid sirens take all songs away. She thinks of San Francisco in the Summer of Love, finding turn of the century books of poetry and art, and the fire that took her youthful optimism away. Seeing the stranger out of time beckoning her. She wonders will she always be strong enough to resist the call, to look away and return to her family when every thing she every wanted feels like its inside that skeletal embrace.
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At that time she was going by the assumed name Lucrezia Voss. She remembers being in Hollywood July 16, 1969. She moved down with a couple of her girlfriends trying to hit it big as a singer. She was invited to watch the moon landing at a JPL party at a local college. She was drugged by an intelligence agent named Ballard who claimed to be KGB but after trying to drown her at the Devils Gate dam in Pasadena, was gunned down by someone he was meeting with. Leaving an FBI badge she kept to this day. She remembers walking down the art deco style Colorado Street Bridge with a bullet lodged in the back of her head. Her cracked skull giving her hallucinations, shrill sounds of phantom traffic, strobing lights and other worldly winds threatening to pick her up and blow her away. She was fading in and out of consciousness. It was late at night and walking for hours no one was helping her. Dressed like the goddess Ishtar and holding a glass torch shaped like the statue of liberties flame.
She heard invasive voices in her head that felt like they were from outside. Contaminated thoughts, products of being kidnapped in a political coup among the ruins of late stage capitalism. Injected with some harmful serum telling her to jump over the railing. This was the first time she saw Sereph. The spirit was in the middle of the road beckoning her away from the edge. At this moment a grand old saloon limo from the 1940s picked her up and drove her to the hospital. She sees Sereph now in times of disarray. When the winds of change come painfully close to sweeping their little world into the maelstrom. A bullet still in her brain leeching lead so long she thought she would already be dead. Macrophages in the synovial tissue in the top of her neck locked in a war for 30 years. Somewhere in time, the mad prophet Sereph walks in empty halls of grand palaces reduced to powder. Where gilded stars and fugitive saints shamble alone, in waltz of a toxic haze. A place where even the tears of god leave a caustic stain. Moonscapes begrudging beguiled guardians under the owls blinded by nuclear winter and long shadows where children once played.