In the unguarded hours of night dream gave me a demon, one who had not been named but was worthy of the gravest attempt. The demon spoke in crimson visions; visions contagious even to the tamer thoughts nearing the consolation of morning. It promoted itself perversely as a link between my world and its own, belittling the sacred boundary between mind and myth. For a few starlit moments God’s embrace weakened and allowed illness to enter my bare domain, questioning my sanity against the name of all that is holy and belonged. With squinty red eyes deeper than the trite symbols of monsters feared by children, it was an aberration sculpted for mature men… even the ones least prone to the imagination’s more fevered tampering.
Beelzebub… Behemoth… Leviathan… Abaddon…. in comparison all seemed like mere beasts of the wood, faithful to nature’s intention. A transitory predator allowed to intervene only through the most powerful witch’s unfaltering blasphemies, it spilled forth from the diseased darkness of a septic underworld to jeopardize my nightly solitude. Semi-amorphous, quasi-reptilian; the darker side of pseudo-psychedelia; crudely simian spawn born from the shadowed crevices of a madman’s coma, bringing with it crippling shards of trans-cosmic hell. Disfigured divinity devil-promised… In its shadow I am weak, in its presence I am sickened.
But even the most experienced evil must eventually withdraw its ill services, for nightmares are as fleeting as the night itself. The ebb of black tides relieves the malicious of their sway, and I awake to the harmless tapping of a woodpecker only yards from my window. Fresh morning air parts the plague as the sun regains control of its kingdom, releasing my thoughts from the grip of scabrous talons. I am once again surrounded by things more luxurious than lecherous…. Damn the restless hole to which the demon fled, and damn the feeble mind that allows it to return.
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