Hannibal, ever pragmatic, saw potential in the project.VIDEO

 Hannibal, ever pragmatic, saw potential in the project.VIDEO

abandon the effort after one of them was found muttering in iambic pentameter while attempting to swallow his own tie. 

The twins held two truths simultaneously: first, that the towers along the coast were necessary for illumination, and second, that the lighthouses were false, designed not to guide but to deceive. They announced this to anyone who asked, and many who didn’t, their voices harmonizing in unsettling synchronicity. Their sisters, Ophelia MacBeth and Lady Voldemort (who had legally changed her name at twelve after a particularly inspiring nightmare), found the whole affair tedious. Ophelia had taken to floating in the bathtub for hours, reciting soliloquies to a rubber duck she called Yorick, while Lady Voldemort practiced wandless magic in the basement, occasionally setting laundry on fire out of sheer spite. 

Uncle Dracula, allergic to garlic but not sunlight (a fact that exasperated him endlessly), ran a failing crimson liquid bank and often complained about the decline in customer loyalty. Aunt Carrie, prone to telekinetic outbursts during family dinners, once flipped the table during an argument about property taxes, sending a roast duck straight through the window and into the stunned arms of a passing mailman. The neighbors, a group of nosy retirees and disgruntled wage-workers, had long since given up trying to understand the Vantablacks. They simply boarded up their windows and invested in sturdy umbrellas. 

The central conflict arose when the twins, in a rare moment of clarity—or perhaps profound confusion—announced their intention to build a series of tall lighthouses along the coast. Not real lighthouses, of course. False ones. With lights that didn’t guide but disoriented, leading ships astray, toward the rocks, toward oblivion. It was, they explained, an artistic statement about the nature of truth. Or maybe a joke. They weren’t clear on that point. 

Hannibal, ever pragmatic, saw potential in the project. A touch of controlled chaos, he mused, might be just what the coast needed. Norma, however, disagreed. The wallpaper had been particularly chatty that morning, whispering warnings about maritime fraud. She locked herself in the attic with a stack of old ship logs and a bottle of sherry. 

Meanwhile, the local authorities had taken notice. Inspector Javert, a man whose rigidity bordered on performance art, had been investigating a series of strange coastal incidents—missing buoys, altered nautical charts, a flock of seagulls that now squawked in perfect Latin. He arrived at the Vantablack mansion with a search warrant and a migraine, only to be greeted by Uncle Dracula offering him a glass of what he claimed was Merlot. Javert declined, though he did pocket a coaster out of habit. 

The investigation descended into absurdity. Witnesses gave contradictory statements. One fisherman swore he saw a lighthouse blink. Another insisted the towers weren’t lighthouses at all, but giant salt shakers. A third claimed to have been abducted by a sentient fog that quoted Nietzsche. The twins, when questioned, responded by singing the *Gilligan’s Island* theme backward. 

As the towers multiplied, so did the disasters. Ships veered off course, captains mutinied over disputed maps, and a cruise ship full of amateur ornithologists crashed into a reef, leading to the mass resignation of the local birdwatching society. The coast guard, overwhelmed, began recruiting volunteers from a nearby asylum, reasoning that, at this point, the inmates’ grip on reality was no worse than anyone else’s. 

In the end, the towers remained. The twins disappeared, leaving behind a note written in their private language that, when held up to a mirror, revealed only a crude stick-figure waving from a burning boat. Norma took up permanent residence in the attic, where she was often heard debating maritime law with the wallpaper. Hannibal, ever adaptable, opened a seaside restaurant specializing in “shipwreck surprise.” Inspector Javert, after a nervous breakdown involving a missing badge and an existential crisis about the nature of order, retired to raise exotic snails. 

And the bodies kept spinning, spinning, spinning—like the wheel in a hamster’s cage, like the hands of a broken clock, like the last thoughts of a drowning man who swears, just before the water takes him, that he sees a light. 

But of course, it was false. 

The Static According to White Noise Willy 

The seventh day of static was when the televisions began to cry. Not metaphorically—actual rivulets of blackened cathode rays oozing from their speakers like ectoplasmic ink. The Seers of Static collected this liquid in mason jars, insisting it held prophecies when shaken at 33.3 rpm. Their leader, White Noise Willy, dipped his fingers in the sludge and painted equations on the walls of the abandoned RadioShack that smelled of corrupted birthday candles. 

"The truth isn't in the signal," he whispered to his flock, "but in the spaces between the snow." His teeth had been replaced by tiny vacuum tubes that glowed when he lied (which was always). 

Meanwhile, on Channel 666, the mannequin anchor’s head now spun freely on its resin neck, completing a full 360-degree rotation every six minutes. Interns bet on when it would unscrew completely. Kafka (still partially fused with the faulty transmitter) murmured from inside the walls: "They're broadcasting the autopsy of the gods. Check the vertical hold." 

The FCC’s StaticVision™ goggles became mandatory by municipal decree. Citizens wandered the streets laughing at invisible canned laughter that followed their bad decisions. A barista at the Midnight Eclipse Café swore she saw her own passing in the interference patterns of a malfunctioning toaster—a car crash set to a bossa nova version of passes away Irae. 

At the arsenic open mic night back on K. 666 Street, the necropoetic salon reached new heights when Grandpa Blackwood unveiled his pièce de résistance: a taxidermied slam poet whose abdominal cavity housed a tape recorder playing Sylvia Plath readings at half-speed, spliced into parts. The Victorian husbands (preserved in attitudes of perpetual polite applause) awarded first prize to a hemlock-ink haiku: 

Hanging by a thread 

The traffic light’s pendulum 

Ticks like a hanged clock 

The winner drank from the mug that read "Arsenic Is Just a Metaphor" and immediately joined the wives on the applause sofa—now a quartet of perfectly embalmed literary critics. 

Down the street at Count Orlok’s Lunar Lemonade Stand, business boomed after rebranding his insomnia-tear brew as "Existential Clarity." Patrons who gulped six doses reported: 

- Visions of their abandoned childhood dreams orbiting the moon like derelict satellites 

- The ability to hear the exact moment their parents stopped believing in them (usually a Wednesday) 

- An irrepressible urge to rewrite municipal zoning laws 

The health department shut it down when a customer turned inside-out while reciting the Pledge backward, but the stand reopened within hours—inspectors became devout converts after sampling the Schrödinger’s Flavor Limited Edition, which simultaneously did and did not contain elderberries. 

The trial that wasn’t (but also always is). 

In the skeletal body of the courthouse, the archivist-judge creaked his drawers in despair. The Durden twins had filed a 6,666-page brief written entirely in interpretive dance notation. The jury of broken clocks returned a unanimous "Maybe," while the stenographer transcribed proceedings using only punctuation marks—the resulting document looked like buckshot of semicolons and ellipses. 

Professor Loomis burst in screaming about "the grammar of hanging," insisting stoplights were actually commas in an unfinished sentence written by the city itself. He was subdued with a well-thrown Oxford dictionary and added to the record as "Exhibit body." 

The Swing Manifesto 

In the park, the philosopher-swing had organized the playground equipment into a nihilist collective. The seesaw wrote political theory in chalk on one end while erasing it with the other. The carousel spun so fast it achieved brief moments of Zen nothingness, vomiting existential dread in rainbow colors. 

The children kept playing, now shouting Baudelaire verses during tag: "Run faster! The abyss is winking from the subway grates!" 

Their gum had evolved to "the sweet void of non-being" flavor—a marketing triumph for Wrigley Corporation’s experimental philosophy division. 

During the final broadcast at 6:66 AM, every television in the city tuned to a channel that didn’t exist. The static coagulated into a single frame: the mannequin anchor, now missing its porcelain face, revealing a void where the screen should be. From the infinite blackness came a sound like a vinyl record skipping on the word "ver—" 

Then, silence. Not just any silence—the kind that vibrates with potential energy. The silence of a pen hovering over a blank page. The silence of a hanged man’s last thought before the rope tightens. 

The stoplights swayed. The bodies spun. The city held its breath, waiting for the next word. 

Somewhere, a typewriter kept clacking—its keys punching holes in reality itself, each letter a tiny guillotine severing what is from what could be. 

And the red light remained. 

Always red. 

Always. 

The Carousel of Lost Time 

The carousel in the old square was not like the others. Its music, creaky and distant, sounded like a whisper from another century. The village children avoided it after nightfall—not out of fear, but because something strange happened when its flickering lights turned on. 

Where others saw worn wooden horses and garish carriages, Clark saw something more. The first time he noticed it, he was seven years old. He had climbed onto the black steed, the one with mirror eyes, and when the carousel began to spin, the world around him blurred. The air vibrated, the colors stretched like molasses, and for an instant—brief as a firefly’s wingbeat—Clark felt time stop. Or rather, that it moved faster than he did. 

Between flashes, he saw impossible things: his grandfather, gone for years, waving from the edge of the square; his future self, a silver-haired man, riding the same horse with a sad smile; and then, like a fading dream, everything returned to normal. The carousel slowed, the music faded, and the other children kept laughing, unaware of what had happened. 

By the time he was twelve, Clark understood: the carousel didn’t just spin. It traveled. 

It didn’t always work. Sometimes it was just a simple fairground ride, rusty and slow. But on full-moon nights, when the mist curled around its columns, the carousel reached an impossible speed. And then, if you held on tight enough, you could peek into another time. 

The last time Clark tried, he was looking for his little brother, who had disappeared years before in an accident no one remembered clearly. He climbed onto the white horse, closed his eyes, and felt the pull of vertigo. Time tore open. 

When he opened his eyes, the carousel was intact, gleaming as if new. And there, among the laughter of children from another era, was him: his brother, with the same untied shoes, spinning in an endless turn. 

"Wait for me!" Clark shouted, reaching out his hand. 

But the carousel never stopped completely. 

And time, as always, moved forward. 

Stairs That Lead to the Yesterday of the Past. 

The house stood crooked, as if the architect had been intoxicated on sorrow when he drew the blueprints, and the builders—a group of retired circus acrobats with El Proyect issues—had assembled it while wobbling