Inspired by William S. Burroughs
Feb 21, 2025
The air in Los Angeles
In the summer of ‘73, hung thick and heavy, a miasma of smog and simmering resentment. The sun, a malevolent eye in the hazy sky, did little to burn away the city’s perpetual twilight edge. I was drifting then, fresh off the Greyhound, lured by the whispers of a different kind of life, the kind found lurking in the shadowed alleys and dimly lit bars that lined the fringes of Hollywood. It was in one such establishment, ‘The Void,’ a dive that smelled perpetually of stale beer and forgotten dreams, that I first saw him.
He sat alone in a corner booth, a figure seemingly carved from shadow itself. Lean, with eyes that held the hard glint of chipped flint, exuded an aura that was both magnetic and deeply unsettling. This was not the manufactured unease of the movie sets; this was something primal that seeped from the very fabric of his being. Later, I learned that his name was Silas. He spoke in clipped, precise sentences, each word a carefully placed shard of glass. He talked of frequencies, of unseen currents that flowed beneath the surface of reality, shaping and controlling the lives of the oblivious masses. He spoke of words as viruses, of language as a weapon. It was pure Burroughs, unfiltered, raw, and utterly captivating in its strangeness.
Silas became my guide, of sorts, leading me through the labyrinthine underbelly of Los Angeles, a world populated by artists pushing boundaries, musicians chasing echoes of sound, and writers who bled ink onto the page in a desperate attempt to capture the unravelling edges of consciousness. We would meet in dimly lit apartments, the air thick with the scent of incense and something else, something sharper, more chemically acrid that clung to the back of the throat. The conversations were always fragmented and hallucinatory, bouncing between esoteric theories and stark pronouncements of societal decay.
One evening, in a cramped room overlooking a neon-drenched street, Silas introduced me to ‘the technique.’ He explained it was a way to unlock the mind, to bypass the conscious filters and tap into the raw, unfiltered stream of the subconscious. “Relax,” he’d said, echoing the man’s words, “Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax… into the silence.”
The technique involved prolonged sensory deprivation, a ritual of darkness and stillness designed to strip away the layers of everyday perception. The room’s windows were blacked out, and the air was heavy with a cloying sweetness I couldn’t quite place. Silas lit a single, thin candle, the flickering flame casting elongated, dancing shadows on the walls. He instructed me to lie on the floor and focus on the silence, the absence of light, and the stillness of my own body.
At first, it was just darkness, profound and absolute. Then, slowly, the silence began to hum, a low, resonant thrumming that vibrated through my bones. Shapes began to form in the darkness behind my eyelids, shifting, amorphous figures that coalesced and dissolved with unsettling fluidity. The hum grew louder, morphing into a chorus of whispers, sibilant and unintelligible yet undeniably insistent. It felt like the room was breathing, expanding and contracting around me.
Cold and sharp fear began to prickle at the edges of my awareness. The relaxation Silas had promised was nowhere to be found. Instead, a growing unease coiled in my stomach, a visceral sense that something was fundamentally wrong, that I had ventured into a territory not meant for human exploration. The air seemed to thicken, pressing in on me from all sides as if the room was alive and breathing, a malevolent entity that had been disturbed from its slumber.
The whispers intensified, becoming distinct voices, though still garbled and indistinct. They were coming from everywhere and nowhere, from the walls, shadows, and within my head. The shapes behind my eyelids became more apparent and sharper, taking on disturbing forms—geometric angles that shifted into monstrous visages, faces that seemed to writhe and decompose before reforming into something even more grotesque.
I tried to stop, to pull myself back from the edge of this sensory abyss, but I found I couldn’t move. My limbs felt heavy and unresponsive as if weighted down by an invisible force. Panic began to bubble up, hot and frantic, threatening to overwhelm me. The voices were no longer whispers; they were shouting, screaming, a cacophony of rage and pain and something else, something ancient and malevolent.
Suddenly, the candle flickered violently, spitting and sputtering before plunging the room into absolute darkness. The voices ceased abruptly, leaving an even more oppressive and terrifying silence than the noise. In the void, I felt a presence, something unseen, something close, breathing down my neck. The air grew colder, and a metallic tang filled my nostrils, like the smell of old blood.
Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The oppressive presence receded, the cold lifted, and the silence became silent again, still pregnant with dread. I scrambled to my feet, fumbling blindly in the darkness until I found the door, wrenching it open and stumbling out into the relative sanity of the neon-lit street. But the dread lingered as a heavy weight on my shoulders, a constant reminder of the horrors that lurked just beyond the edge of perception.
Silas was gone. The room was empty save for the lingering scent of incense and the faint, almost imperceptible metallic tang. I never saw him again nor attempted ‘the technique’ again.
But sometimes, late at night, in the quiet hours when the veil between worlds seems too thin, I still hear the whispers. Faint and distant, they drift in on the edges of the silence, a chilling reminder of that night and the unsettling truth I glimpsed within the darkness – that some questions are best left unasked, some doors are best left unopened, and some silences are best left undisturbed. Because in the vast, untapped resource of the mind, as Burroughs suggested, there are answers, yes, but there are also things best left undiscovered, horrors that slumber just beneath the surface, waiting for the careless hand to wake them. And once woken, they might never let you sleep again.
