Ludo - new story! (706 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1 on 3 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by indigogecko (View user info) at 2004-08-15 18:02:59 EDT
I met Ludo Francisco many years ago, when I first came to this community of performers and outcasts, The Creative Haven, which would be almost bohemian save for the darker nature of it's populus. For every single person who turned up here did so out of desparation. It is not a place of substance, but of dreams, not of touch but of emotion, and everyone there inhabits it only by night as they sleep...
By day they have their own lives in the world known to everyone else, but the are dead inside, be it through loss of a loved one to death or the arms of another, be it childhood cruelties which have marked them for eternal lonliness, or simply disillusionment with life itself. The Haven allows them to live brilliantly while they sleep, and so they go on partly living in waking hours to ensure their soft beds will bring them solace and relief at night, sleep which will bear them to this hallowed and cursed place.
I visited briefly as a child, bullied and outcast for any number of reasons. It was a dusty library then, vast dim-lit halls and a network of corridors and secret passages, all lined with ancient books on every wall and surface. I was shown around as a murder mystery game unfolded about me, but did not find my place there. I wished to leave, woke in my room and gave it no further thought.
Many years later, a failed amrriage the culmination of a series of smaller but nevertheless depressing situations led me back to the cavernous network of rooms that make up the Haven. This time I was engaged in a game of Performance Musical Chairs. In each room someone danced, sang, played an instrument or enacted a sketch, while those in the room milled about watching. Those who had already performed could sit down to watch. Movement between the rooms was allowed, and when the performance in the room you occupied stopped, just as in musical chairs we had to find a seat. Those left standing elected a new performer from their number and the remainder left for other rooms.
It was during the course of this game that I came to be sitting on a sofa next to a charismatic dark-haired young man. He smiled at me, but did not attemped to talk over the loud and spirited tribal drumming routine in progress a few feet away from where we sat. I barely realised I was edging closer to him as the act went on, and that he was drawing me closer in to him, until I was on his lap and, like so many couples about the room, curled with him under a blanket. As the music ended, we were approached by the man I knew only as The Director. He ran The Haven in a loose sort of way, acting as mentor to the lost and lonly youngsters who came here. When it was quiet enough for him to be heard, he spoke to me.
"Ludo, he fashions himself. His real name is Lucido. The man with whom you find yourself so entwined with romance is not always as he now seems. Be warned."
Ludo grinned then, as he nuzzled into my hair and whispered in my ear.
"I'm the most beautiful thing in the world," he said, "by night."
The Director was muttering something about getting me home, arrangements for my departure if I wished to leave as I had the last time... I stopped his spiel with a simple statement.
"I'll stay."
Ludo held me, kissed me, and I slept...
..and awoke in my own bed, as I knew I must.
'..wake well, my dear Ludo, I'll see thee tonight. What creature you are by day I may never know, nor do care, for by night it is as you say. You are the most beautiful thing in the world..'
These words found their way to my diary that morning. I now know who he is when he is not Lucido Francisco. But that is for another tale.
User Reviews
Submitted by Dori <simal.at.leyhomes.com> at 2004-08-15 19:18:32 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Very good description. I really like how the story was laid out, with the memory going back several years and then jumping ahead.
Submitted by shitfuck (user info) at 2004-08-15 18:10:47 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
No Comment
Submitted by indigogecko (user info) at 2004-08-15 18:06:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
sorry about typos - thought I'd checked all of them as I wrote! :(