A sound. Out there, in the bush. Then, a thousand terrible fingers crawling down my spine.
Never have I felt such dread.
My eyes dart around the tent. In trying to hold my breath it seems so much louder. I’d ask who’s
there, but I fear I already know. The thing that’s always been there, watching you through your
bedroom window. The shadow in your backyard. The owner of those footsteps in the darkest hours
of night.
I can remember, my bed sitting right under that huge window and the clothesline spinning
directly in its view. I can remember how the moon would shine behind the clothes and their
shadows would flutter on my bedroom walls. Yes, and I can remember peaking through the blinds,
shuddering, looking out at their dark forms dancing above the lawn in some terrible parade.
Now some bell, twinkling and shimmery as it rings and cautions anyone who would hear it,
warning those hidden listeners of a loathsome being. I try my best to not make any noises against
the nylon of the tent. Bell ringing and what could be laughter out there. Why do these sounds pierce
my mind and force me to see memories I’d long since forgotten or stopped caring about? Horrible
memories of shadows in doorways. I get up and hold my hand against the zipper of the tent. Do I
open it? I need my light. I look around for it but the tent is too dark, little of the faint grey light of
the moon filters through the tent.
I unzip the tent and look out into a clearing. There stands a cataphract of gloom. His shadowy
armour glints in the moonlight. The doomhorse huffs and then rears on its legs, the clinking chains
and plates resonate out through the bush. He speaks in a language dead to the world. His great lance
severs the tall grass in a fell swoop. Only now I can consider the immense mystery of the past. The
fearsome horse thirsts for blood. Its terrible anger the lore of the great poets.
The cataphract uses his weapon to point to a distance far away at some people in a sparse dirt
field by a lake. They are robed and sifting a pan through some water, some others sit by a fire. The
knight speaks to me now in tongue I can make sense of.
“There are those men deluded in their belief that consciousness is the simple by-product of
chemical and physical processes, blinded to the workings of the soul.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, knight.” My voice trembles. “Who are you?”
“In dungeon depths I was imprisoned for my life, born into imprisonment. For years I endured in
the labyrinthine prison, devouring wallmold and tortured, boiling blood was poured into my gullet
as punishment for crimes I never knew I had committed.” The cataphract halters on his great horse,
breathing the passing wind.
His great horse huffs and then trots away. I am shivering in the cold pale light of the moon. I’m
reminded of those times where everyone is silent and the car is drifting all fast-like down a dark
highway in the middle of the country out in the real deserts. There is music playing and the nature
past your car-window is mysterious in a way not understood to you before. The cataphract calls out
to me as he walks away.
“There are ghosts in these woods, the dead are disrespected and buried without rites in these
lands. The fools have no fear of the afterlife or its reckonings. They only know the face of the
supernatural when it is right there, hand to your soul.” He grumbles, his accent is strange.
The night grows darker and the armour of the horse glints into the darkness of the forest. In a
calm wind just barely now blowing to cool me down under the stars which—in their constellations
of creatures once considered manifestations of divine forces—oh can it be felt that the tuggings of
the past are resonate with that bell!
Looking around the plain and now a true panic begins to form, either some kind of cruel magic
has occurred or the darkness is truly too all-encompassing as the location of my tent is now
obscured to me. All I have is this torch. I desperately wave it’s cone of light around but all it hits are
skinny trees curling outwards in strange formations, not the arborealic lines I am used to but instead
almost trying to constrict themselves into spirals or either twisted shapes.
My tent… no where to be found. The bell rings, shadows of memories maybe duck behind trees
as my flashlight illuminates them. The cold is harsh against my skin, my clothing apparently too
flimsy to withstand it all, shivering I have to continue into the bush to get somewhere high and find
a faraway light perhaps. To get away from this haunted clearing certainly. My shoes crunch dew-
crusted overgrowth of wheat seedlings, ferns and assorted succulents. There is a halo of ice glowing
around the moon, like a celestial eye judging me from above.
A vocalisation of some kind from the dark bush. An odd sound that can’t quite be distinguished
of how a human being could utter such a sound. I keep walking but I’m pretty sure I can hear
another set of feet, no… another two sets. Trotting. A bleating sound!
I’m on the ground and shakily turn my light around to see what was behind me.
There stands a lamb, on his face are seven eyes. Huge, glistening wet balls which blink each
independently. Seven horns tear out from it’s skull like warts. He was hurt clearly, and yet his
bleating wasn’t that of a hurt animal, he didn’t make a sound now that I was watching him. Silent
and stoic, all of his eyes watching me from afar clearly with some thinking going on behind them.
He had been impaled by something in his side, bleeding profusely from the wound.
The lamb held a scroll, he unrolled it and read it aloud to me.
“You are the babe of seven-ceremonial processes. Seven horns or bowls of melted lava. You will
be punished for aeons in the black peerless hellfire.” The lamb speaks in reverberated tones, as
though there were many voices in his throat all vying for my soul. Fear was frozen in my heart, my
eyes pin-point and deep into the eyes of the lamb. “Black peerless hellfire!”
Screaming I struggle to my feet and hurdle over the rocks of the plains. Stumbling through
strangled trees in the dark.
Running as I am a fever rises through my blood. Every artery a warm globular hive or like I
could feel the sticky openings of my heart chambers clamming together inside me and not having
the strength to open back up as though I would be struck down as I ran.
The fever grew worse by the second and my throat feels glamped shut. I am given visions, they
slowly manifest themselves as a fine film over my vision. Fear holds me, the kind of intense fear
you only get when your biological processes are being overtaken by some outside threat and no
amount of your power will be capable of saving you…
A languid vision of some great golden citadel in an ancient era. Those nascent times where men
had only just began to emerge out of a hundred thousand years of darkness and confusion and first
had to begin writing down symbols to keep track of their sheep and grain, and slaves. This great city
is vast and gilded by a cyclopean wall. Great statues of creatures both familiar and strange blind
your eye as their golden surfaces reflect the sun.
Within the city walls there are men performing rituals. Seven men stand in a circle and speak in
their tongues about foreboding futures. Worlds they don’t even understand. Seven men hold seven
lamb heads freshly removed from the body which smell of sick blood and drip onto their clothing.
The citadel is bustling with this kind of activity, all deeply religious and yet forgotten completely.
Only a human being could devote so much love.
I am given visions of the citadel being consumed by a great fire and collapsing under its own
golden weight. The women and men screaming and rushing to save their children as a great
calamity takes places, and then—rising from the abyssal waters—great beasts come and ravage the
citadel further. All the gold is eaten by these great monsters and we are all condemned by them as
well. The vision is terrifying indeed.
When it fades I am panting heavily and lying on my back against a mossy stone, moonlight
slowly drifts to the surface of a wide stream here in the bush. The water wine-bottle green. The only
sound is the chirping of crickets, there must be thousands of them, or maybe those are frogs, either
way it’s definitely a mixture of the two. There are bits of the vision still burned into my sight but
slowly fading from their deep dark orange hues to a lighter blue then green then white. Faces
twisted in agony rise before me and then fall back down into the darkness of the bush around me
and the glittery noises of the stream and its occupants.
The light is soft now, it feels just like the cold embrace of your lovers skin, when you are both
freshly showered and naked and your thigh rubs against theirs, soft cold light from the moon kissing
at the stream. Out here I imagine the ancient people of the land and how they would have spent
nights silently watching the land the creatures they must have seen… This is why my childhood was
so strange, I was born on cursed lands.
When you are paralysed by your own dreams and stuck in that bed and there is a minotaur
walking down your hallway, it’s huffing and the noises are terrifying. You lay there and your vision
is assaulted by worming flashes of multicoloured neon lights.
I’m broken out of my dreaming from the sounds of hoofs crunching dried leaves. That cataphract
had returned on his ghostly horse. Only this time, from afar I could see, his head was missing. It
was floating along the stream bobbing up and down as it gently came to a point where it could see
me, his body and horse wandering aimlessly in the woods. The head gets caught against a mossy
rock and speaks out to me from the stream.
“You again, O wanderer of this place. Do you know where you are? The dark continent of Keo
Deudai, a nightmarish place. The men who come here are always driven mad from the sea and the
land. The creatures here can speak in tongues, spew fire from their mouths.”
His head is adorned with beautiful chain mail. I can’t think of any way to respond so I just keep
my stare focused on his decapitated head. The eyes are gaunt and cold, grey and blue. They look out
at me with ancient wisdom. Ghostly and ethereal. His words make no sense to me and yet at the
same time, there is some clear meaning I can garner from them. Something obvious to me indeed. I
feel invigorated by these words and get up. The night is coming to an end, I will be safe soon. I am
just waiting for the sun to rise.
I get up and move along. Waving to the head and it’s body, the horse responds by bending it’s
great head to eat at the grass. A whole world right there spinning around endlessly, endless chaotic
nature.
The honey moon, trickles down between the trees. In the distance there is something hopping
over the grass. The most lurid and disgusting thing I have ever seen. It is moving in such an
unnatural way, smoothly floating over the ground. It is a body covered in a bloody linen bag. Deep
red and oranges wound it’s bandages. The whole thing moves faster and faster toward me, sealing
my fate. Then…
In a moment from behind me the beheaded body of the knight and it’s horse leap out in a
fantastical motion, his lance severs the bandages on the strange ghosts body and the whole thing
starts to come undone, the horse lands into a black darkness from which nothing can be seen and
there alone under the light of the moon the bandaged figures unravels and a ghastly burnt corpse is
revealed to be moving about inside, he blinks and then falls over, lying on the linen below him.
‘Oh my God!’ He says, rolling on the floor, on his back. ‘Oh my loving God!’ He kisses the floor
and raises his hands to the sun rising over the rocky hills to the east. ‘He is merciful, and full of
love. His creation is the greatest mystery, and he is apart of it, in every aspect of it.’ He rolls on the
ground further, in pure ecstasy. The nascent light of the sun filters through the fog of the cold
morning and the air is full of the sounds of waking birds and the flittering of the leaves of willows.
‘Oh my God. My God!’ He is crying on his back and in him I see every businessman of the world
freed from their drudgery, every child on the Eve of Christmas, every youth in the throws of love on
a crisp festival night. Despite his state of decomposition, I can clearly make out the face of the boy
who once smiled in his mother’s arms, and his smile is the centre of all Earth. He calls out for a
short while longer before finally coming to rest on the soft bloodied linen underneath him, and the
dawn shines on his contented eyes.