text: My eyes opened suddenly, my heart raced in my ears, a panic brought from the depths of a dream ending. Something was watching me, I felt it in that subhuman part of my brain that we all have, that animal instinct that told us of danger unseen. Something was watching from those dark recesses of my room, those corners that held shadow just so perfectly to invite the imagination to cast horrors unknowable. And so my heart races as my eyes scanned the room that I knew so well, the room that held me safe against all things. Eyes do not see entirely correctly when they are suddenly forced out of REM sleep and back into reality. Things are distorted, a haze that shrouds things for the briefest moments of time. They bring with them the fragments of dreams and force them into reality, but they aren’t quite there, so as I peered into the darkness that blanketed my room, I saw things that weren’t there. Yet something lay there, watching with eyes unseen. My heart raced still, drumming endlessly in my ears. What intention did it have, whatever it might be? My left over animal side knew of danger, but my human brain questioned. Did it want to watch me in my most vulnerable of moments, knowing that it could end me without a fight? Or did it want something worse? And then my eyes beheld something I wanted to believe came from the remainder of my dream, but I knew it was not. A grim visage indeed, the outline of a man that wasn’t a man, some dark mockery of our form cast in that forbidding gloom and I knew it was staring at me. The head was too pale, I saw as my eyes slowly began to adjust, and utterly without features except for two eyes and a mouth, though they weren’t quite right. They eyes were pits, swirling pools of void that drew in the darkness around it. The mouth opened, splitting decayed lips and revealing the same void that were its eyes. My ears were assaulted with the sound of rushing air and groaning metal, the sound of screams from every thing that ever existed, all pleading out for mercy that they would never receive from a master that didn’t know the concept. And then silence... All sound stopped, every background sound that our ears adjust to over the years of living in a time of constant noise, including the drumming of our own hearts and the rush of our blood, stopped. The true silence fell on my ears and threatened my mind with madness, maybe even more so than the sight of the thing before me. The darkness around the horror warped, distorted to conform to its shape, shimmering yet completely still at the same time like a ripple moving through the surface of calm water. The head moved in a way unnatural, like the still frames of a strobe light, one moment leaning left and the next right. Arms as pale as the head reached out toward me, and my fear grew a hundredfold, as razor wire, corroded by time and blood, seethed from the curve of the elbow and began crawling to cover them. They snake around those too pale arms and squeezed, bleeding that void made liquid from every inch, yet the blood refused to fall. Around the throat and across the torso it went, cutting deep to reveal not the fragility of a human form, but nothing. I pleaded with my mind to wake me, that this must be some dream. Nothing like this could exist in truth, for this was a creature born of horror and shadow. Yet as that thing stared at me, and as the silence pressed on me, I knew it was no dream, that this was real. Somehow, at that moment, I knew this thing was ancient, that it had existed all along the course of our short time on the planet. That this was the real reason we feared darkness, and begged for the light. The devil we fought against in every religion, the boogeyman we warned our children about, thinking it was some tradition that we all jokingly passed down. It was Hell, or The Abyss or the Inferno or Perdition, made real. I realized I had lain back down, having jumped with a start to my elbows when I’d awoken. How long had I been lying down again? It hovered above me; razor ripped false skin not dripping on me. A leg on each side of my torso, or was it floating above me? The head twitched back and forth and those eyes cast upon mine, and I knew death in that moment. I felt the loneliness of Ninth Circle of Hell, the cold of the void, and the agony of a wrathful god. It leaned down, ever closer, and I could smell it. The was the smell of the rotting flesh of one’s most beloved person, sulfur and frost, burning flesh and bile, rust and blood. My heart raced faster, and it pained me, a burning that spread too rapidly through my body, an agony that made me scream, but I found myself unable to open my mouth. Every inch of me begged to scream, and let my pain be known, but I found myself silent. I don’t know how long I have been like this, screaming in silent agony, freezing and burning and weeping no tears, begging for the end of this nightmare that could not be. A hundred thousand years passed, each second passing just a little too slow, and I felt every moment of it, and yet no time past. And I know that this will be my everything, forever. I’ve forgotten the warmth of another person’s touch, the embrace of a loved one, the feel of passionate lips on mine. The tastes of my favorite foods, the sound of my favorite band are all gone now. So too the feeling of a cool breeze at dusk on a hot day, even the simple joy of lying under a blanket in the depths of winter to read a book. My thoughts now are all the same, Let me die... A million billion years of suffering every second, and every second too slow every minute never becoming two. Let me die... Please...let me die... ...end this. But it never does quite end...it is always going on and on, all of time spread before me each moment a suffering. I sometimes wonder, now, what the man I used to be was like. I can no longer remember if that man, so long ago, was a happy man with a good life, or if I was reviled by those around me. Was I a funny man, cracking jokes all the time and able to get a room of people laughing? Was I sad with the things that brought to bed that night, whenever that last night in my bed was? That horrible silence is always my answer, a harsh truth that makes my questions meaningless. Only those pits of swirling blackness matter, that soul destroying gaze. It knew me, far more than I knew myself, and every moment it chipped away at me, an endless march toward nonexistence, but the pain makes it seem preferable. I would join that nothingness in time, but not before every ounce of suffering could be pulled from me, and it was. ...let me die. A plead that lingered unnoticed forever, an endless begging ignored. My eyes opened suddenly, my heart raced in my ears, a panic brought from the depths of a dream ending. I did not know what woke me, be it my brain ejecting me from a dream it was finished with, or simply being rested. I scanned the room; parting the veil of sleep to discover my room empty, save for the darkness and myself. Outside I heard a car door close, no doubt my neighbor getting home from a midnight shift at the convenience store down the road. Rolling over I reached out and found my phone, which I took and pressed the button on time to engage the too bright, too sudden light from the screen. The clock read five in the morning, but one would hardly know it. The sun hadn’t yet breached the horizon, nor did it show any signs of attempting it today. That dream, that hell of an existence, remained in fragments, the entirety destroyed like the surface of a mirror. Hours and coffee would see it gone for good, as the rest of the day would greet me to bring me back to my life, a normal life of working a job I neither enjoyed nor detested. I rolled from my bed, placing feet to warm fuzzy rug, and yawned. I found myself in the shower; warm beads of water beat down on my tensed muscles. I didn’t remember the act of getting in the shower, but I was thankful for the warmth. The news had said it would be another cold day, at best being as high as forty degrees Fahrenheit. My heater was broken in my car, and I still hadn’t gotten around to fixing it. The rush of cold air as I stepped outside brought the remembrance of that horrible dream in portion. I remember the feeling of floating through a cold too terrible to be real. I shook my head, trying to dispel it, it was only a dream. My jacket pulled tighter around my chest, I made my way to my car. My neighbor greeted me from his lawn as he retrieved his trash can from the curb, a gesture made and returned every day. Nothing was special about this day, only the remnants of that dream. I felt a smile cross my face, knowing that everything was okay. The sun shined down on my cold face, warming it for a moment, a perfectly normal yet sincere second of time that could exist only for those alive. The dead know not the feeling of warm sunshine, only cold dirt, and that was worth remembering. My eyes opened suddenly, my heart raced in my ears, a panic brought from the depths of a dream ending. The silence contained the world in perfect stillness, and my tormentor’s unforgiving eyes greeted my suffering again. I thought I saw a gleam of sadistic pleasure in there, somewhere, buried deep beneath the existing nothingness. A moment of sincere joy, the simple feeling of warmth from the sun, was given to me as hope. And it was taken from me, reminding me of my true fate. ...let me die. I begged through silent eyes, for no scream could pass my lips. ...let this be the end, I’ve suffered enough. ...Finish this, please. Somehow I knew it would never end.