this is a Spunkotronic Sounds mix!

it is nothing more than a mix. had it been more than a mix you would have received more detailed instructions.

I offer a brief tale to tell. One link per stanza, then, there is; one link which tells the track and binds the time. At the end I will reveal all.

Monday morning. Sunrise. The witching hour long long past, with blackskirt hags abed this hour, the city stretching long and crackling fingers over the arc of the daystar's rise, there to shine down on the alley. Water, cardboard, steel, rust, wood, spraybomb paint, paper, waste, plastic, all are here, arranged, in neatly ordered chaos about the scene of the murder.

Fear is waiting there, beneath an overturned dumpster, for the denizens of the daytime to wander by, whistling as it waits-

"...mad world..." The sounds slip out from beneath the plastic bag, shredded, lying beneath the container, and it makes me wanna die it haunts me hard enough.

Corpse lying solid staid and splayed in the center of the drainage run, laid open, pinned back, no organs to be found. Her face is left undamaged, composed; sleeping, perhaps, save for the single teardrop of blood leaking from her right eye. I turn away before I can vomit.

You'd think I'd be numb to these by now, but it isn't so - I listen intently for the tunes that Death has left, but they have retreated around the corner with the whisper of the wind. I look at the face again as the Coroner's ghouls go to work, then look up at the sky, trying to see what it was she was straining to glimpse before her vision is blocked.

Blocked it will be. 6 underground and more her orbs will lie, never again to caress the sky. Blue, down there, a darker thing, of creeping decay and corpse's tinge.

The dirt knows all.

I decide this time there's only one thing to do - that's follow the body. To the Netherworld if need be. I turn, to shout for the coroner to wait, but they're gone - I'm alone, in an alley left with chalkmark remnants and singing waste that blocks the sounds of my own demise, which comes so much more quickly than the night.

I can't even die properly. Insomnia. I want to walk, to watch- i twitch in somnambulist verve, but there is nothing for it. All I can hear is the shouting of my several nerves and myriad cells, straining at the leash, rearing, stretching, screaming.

We all want to be free, but there is no air, and nowhere to go with the taste of loam in our mouth.

I can feel them before I see them; they uncover my torso first, small hands brushing me clean as I am lifted into a night made pale with torchlight and less clean flame. There are six of them, cool kids of death, and they wear dirt-spattered tuxedos as they hold me high. One stands, waiting for me to be laid before him with a ewer in his hands - I would look away, but I cannot move even my eyes.

Voodoo child, please if you hear, please, I choose the darkness, not the light-

Voodoo People?

They cannot hear me to answer, and the ewer is raised to my cold hard lips. The only sound above the drums the thick and mealy gurgle from the spout - not a liquid gurgle, but an oil 1. The oil.

COLOR into RAIN into ACTION into MOTION and I watch in disbelief as my dead cold limbs twitch, raising me to my feet in shaking parody of movement, before I lift my zombi fingers from the ground, and turn to face them all, dead man walking.

The cheer is instant and insistant, noise caressing sensation back into my silent flesh. My badge and gun and clothes and belt, all are returned to me, in a frenzy of erotic movement, jungle boogie, and I can't help but join in, my dead ass shaking to the bongos and my newly slickened eyeballs glinting in the lights.

Legba is here. I Shudder. King of Snake and of the loa, he waits for me, reversed blackface and immaculate top hat with dreads matted through with soil, atop the altar. His gesture, not unexpected, is still powerful. Come.

I face inner confusion, but my body does not hesitate, taking me up the soil face to stand before him and hear his voice.

Accept you fate, walkin' man, white man, lawman, dead man. Accept my possession of all'n all you soul. With this, he shakes a box of unknown bits above my head, the rattling interfering constructively inside my skull. I try to shake my head, but it will not move.

Oh yes, dead man. We sendin' you back, man, to Paradise City, to run wit' us an' de Loa in de night.

this time, my head shakes slightly. Not the violent thrashing I commanded, but a negative shake, all the same. It all stops then, and Legba stoops to peer into my eyes. You in dere, lawman? you still in dere? Powerful one you be, if you still in dere after de oil, man. Can you hear? Hear me? If'n you can hear me, then, COME OUT! FREE YOUR MIND! The shaking rattle grasps my nonexistent self and pulls, insistently. I feel as if I'm being drawn into a hole in the world, it hurts, the hole is the shape of me, and the world is waiting -

...and like that, with a pop! that is audible to my bones, I'm back, and I can see it all, I know why they do this, night after night, I can see them taking people one after the other, I grok, I rez.

Alive. I'm not a zombi. I have come through. I am not dead.

I can feel death, though; lingering, there, inside me, in my mind, its power still draped across my sinews and my flesh. This is why they seek; this is why they try, to create the one who will stop them, who will converse with Legba. The Saint. Me. My lips creak, but move. I turn to the skeleton Rider next to me, who is grinning fierce, now, man; the light from behind the hill is shining through his ol' bones, through his head an' hair, an' where his eyes should be dere's nought but twin stars, an' as he move aside, I can see why.

Here comes the sun.

fin

the dreams of murder & gaussian resurrection mix is available on request from The Custodian. The tracks alluded to above are, in order:

-The Custodian