Vox-Vacua House: The Poet’s Final Rhyme
The moment the heavy, bronze-plated door to Vox-Vacua House was carefully pushed open, the air rushed out—cold, dense, and heavy with the pervasive, unsettling odor of dry materials, mineral dust, and the sharp scent of heavy metals. The name, combining voice/word with empty/void, perfectly captured the manor’s function: a physical space dedicated to achieving the ultimate truth of expression, now embodying its own absolute termination of voice. This abandoned Victorian house was structured not for ordinary living, but for unwavering, controlled articulation, its internal layout a bewildering maze of small, isolated meter-testing cells, soundproofed recital bunkers, and meticulously designed acoustic stabilizers intended to eliminate all external variables that might corrupt a pure poetic form.
The final inhabitant was Poet Master Carmen Vacuum, a brilliant, but intensely reclusive master grammarian and expression theorist of the late 19th century. Master Vacuum’s profession was the study of rhythm, image, and the fundamental nature of poetry, seeking to codify a single, unified, and perfectly consistent line that was free of all interpretation, feeling, or subjective meaning. His singular obsession, however, was the creation of the ‘Zero Rhyme’—a single, perfect, flawless expressive state that would, through the absolute synthesis of all known poetic principles, reveal the ultimate, objective truth of language, free of all sound, meaning, or measurable utterance. After realizing that the very act of writing required both a pen and a page (a duality of expression), proving that absolute, independent and secure simplicity was impossible, shattering his faith in fixed literary law, he retreated to the manor. He dedicated his final years to resolving this single, terrifying goal, believing that the only way to achieve the Zero Rhyme was to understand the ultimate absence of all sound and symbol. His personality was intensely systematic, fearful of inconsistency, and utterly consumed by the pursuit of expressive finality.
The Metrical Chamber
Master Vacuum’s mania culminated in the Metrical Chamber. This secure, sealed room was where he spent his final days, not composing, but deconstructing the act of language itself, attempting to define the ultimate objectivity by isolating the point that offered no detectable expressive content. His journals, written in a cramped, precise hand that eventually gave way to complex equations concerning non-signifying marks and the theoretical limits of absolute aphonia, were found sealed inside a hollow metal inkwell. He stopped trying to define the perfect verse and began trying to define the un-spoken, concluding that the only way to achieve the Zero Rhyme was to eliminate the need for any form of symbol or articulation whatsoever. “The word is a prison; the voice is a limit,” one entry read. “The final rhyme requires the complete surrender of all expression and all meaning. The truth must be a single, self-evident, unstated conclusion, contained in a fundamental, perfect void.”
The house preserves his systematic rigor structurally. Many internal passages are fitted with small, precisely calibrated acoustic dampeners and psychological isolation barriers built into the walls, now all rusted and frozen, remnants of his attempts to create a universal, absolutely fixed and non-interfering environment for abstract literary contemplation.
The Final Verse in the Abandoned Victorian House
Poet Master Carmen Vacuum was last heard working in his study, followed by a sudden, intense sound of heavy metal grinding and snapping (from the printing press and the calligrapher’s wheel) and then immediate, profound silence. He did not leave the manor. The next morning, the study was cold, the Metrical Chamber sealed, and the man was gone. No body was found, and the only evidence was the singular, physical alteration to his final philosophical work.
The ultimate chilling clue is the small hole in the black rubber. It is the final verse—the Zero Rhyme achieved, representing the cessation of all expressive existence and the perfect, objective truth found in a single, un-dimensioned point of pure, absolute nothingness. The broken lamp and blank rubber ensure no further attempt could be made to chart the flawed, speaking world. This abandoned Victorian House, with its silent chambers and broken tools, stands as a cold, imposing testament to the master poet who pursued the ultimate, pure form of expression, and who, in the end, may have successfully defined the Perfect Non-Symbol, vanishing into the un-written, objective finality that he engineered as his final, terrifying statement of pure existence.
