Les Monstres Terribles

He swirled his glass counter-clockwise three times, tuning his every sense into the poison he so desperately clutched in his hands. The chime of the crystal against the ice, the flickering light glistening off the warm pool of whiskey and the intoxicating scent of many memories all entered his mind like a threatening haze. Any attempt to convince himself his new found solitude was pleasing was soon trampled by the undeniable truth that he could barely breathe without her. Leighton Maxwell Torrne now regretted how he had always silently snarled at her incessant request to put down the liquid fire. Her soft, precious voice had always pleaded that it brought nothing but darkness, unveiling a sinful side that she had wished he'd kept at bay. On rarity, he would retaliate and refute her claim, convinced the burn was for the demons. Without the ingested dullness, the drudgery of the common world would consume him entirely, its evil would run rampant. The demons, he claimed, although dangerous, kept him sane, kept him stable, kept him alive.

Leighton nearly laughed... treacherous little monsters, he used to call them. Nothing compared to the demons he now had to face on his own. More often than not, he found himself in the deepest of solitude, engulfed by the darkness of his studio. He found a strange form of sanctuary in the sounds and melodies of his old creaking basement, of the wind against the tarnished panes of glass, of the dampened beating of his own aging heart. His music meanderings soon drifted from humble pastime to ravaged obsession. Consisting of no more than raw emotion, lost dreams and never-forgotten longings, he soon filled pages upon pages in the form of notes to the tune of his own self-indulgent torture.

Within these notebooks, Leighton began to experience the beauty of release. Forever unknown if they saved him by enabling his escape from the mortal confines of this world, or if they drove him to complete madness, these pages became his only remains as he soon removed himself from the land of the living.

Over 200 years later, a lonely young man sat on a bench in the rain. He wasn't exactly sure why he was there, but couldn't think of a reason to be elsewhere. Without logic or forethought he looked beneath his bench to discover an old leather-bound notebook. It's pages were filled with smudged, barely legible hand-written songs and melodies. Strangled by his own despondency and loss of self, the young man found unprecedented truth and understandings in the songs within. The deeper he read the more immersed he became, and the more his life began to merge with that of L.M. Torrne's. Before long he became completely consumed and overtaken by the grotesque beauties he found within. Obsessed by the intricacies of the melodies, and scouring for meaning in the words, this young man soon went on to create what is now known as "Les Monstres Terribles."

On the rare occasion that he peels himself from the isolation of his own basement to perform on stage, he no longer is recognizable as the quiet, susceptible man he once was. Reeking of stale whiskey and solitude, he is rumored to be shadowed by a demonic presence, and many fear that he is less consumed by recreation but more so by reincarnation.