The Fear

The queer, disquieting landscape of eldritch phantasy that emerges through the smoke shews me a vision of unspeakable horror the likes of which bewitches me in the half-moon stupor of waking nightmares, so unspeakable in its allure that the crumbling buttress betwixt sanity and madness doth threaten to splinter into a thousand shards of screaming despair as the last shred of my humanity is sacrificed on the altar of intoxicating evil. I feel the singular anxiety try to claw its way through the soil of my mind to erupt with the hideous shriek of a tormented revenant in the cold dawn of revelation. Dear God! Why do my eyes stare back from the cracked mirror with reptilian protrusion?! 

    I stumble from the grime and stink of the downstairs bathroom and grip the hallway walls with the desperation of a rock-climber ascending a precipice to make my way back into the lounge, where the cobalt mist is settling into the furniture as thickly as the ash cloud on Pompeii. In my chest, a madman hammers at the bars of his cell, his screams coursing through my blood; for a moment, I fear he will break free of his prison to burst loose in an afterbirth of viscera upon the fireside rug. The violent heaving of the room upon waves of nausea sends me reeling across the floor, clutching the air as a maelstrom of delusions besieges my senses until I collapse into the armchair beneath a tempest of sweat.  

    Before me is a melted waxwork of my father, his trembling hands parting the folds of a shroud to reveal a withered chest cut into which are train-tracks of coronary scars, angry pink and leaking viscous. His stubbled jowls waver and reform into the unblemished face of my son, his youthful eyes engorged with a terror beyond his years, the soft flesh of his arms ripped open at the wrists venting a crimson outpouring of his unlived life. I jam my palms into the gaping wounds of my ocular sockets to block out the nightmare, but the accursed vision is an acid that has burnt into my mind and dripped hissing into the recesses of my soul. 

    I vomit a shriek into the holy silence of the house, my fingers burrowing into the armrests of my chair as a thousand insects burrow beneath my skin. My elbow jerks back, causing something to plop onto the floor and, looking down as though assailed by the abyss of my own mortality, I see the battered tome of Lovecraft stories lying at my feet, the pages curling autumnal leaves. The remembrance refreshes me as though an open window has admitted the first draught of spring: I recall now how I was perusing arcane tales of indescribable terrors that slither forth from the shadows at the edge of the world, when palpitations overcame my body with the wracking assault of an earthquake. I drag deep breaths into my heaving chest and slump into tremulous relief. As my eyes refocus on my surroundings, they flutter mothlike towards the tray of ashes still smouldering on the apothecary table before me. The small, wrinkled, white stick poking forth from the tray’s chalky grey mess points at me with the accusation of a skeletal finger protruding from a grave.  

    I decide then, with a vow sworn on my every possession, that I really must stop smoking those pure grass joints.