written & illustrated by Shaun Lawton
"To set the tone down to keep even with the cauterization of the wound
means to devote the necessary breaths toward the operation."
(This will be the only thing required of us during our stay, I realize now,
as long as we are here in the light of the sun to encase our arms in warmth
during the chirruping legion of insects at night that are keeping the moon at bay, while our tales of the old days seem to fail at serving as some dim reassurance, this remains the manner in which they have intended to make us forget, please rest assured of that much, we are certain to be left here for their kind to discover, there's no question left unanswered which has hung in the air and permeated everywhere in men's minds for the past forty generations in the wake of my impending disappearance, an all too common phenomenon which probably happens every night for all we've known, this could be our last moment here hung suspended under the roiling cloudscape shining in a blue sky where there's absolutely nothing else new under the sun except our unwillingness to believe in the raiment of the so-called impossible.)
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In what I'd initially thought of as my dream, the being scintillated down in a slow motion fluttering of mothwings lit with a pulsing magma-like heat, as if its body were suffused with volcanic power. I caught what looked like a glimpse of an eye glaring at me on a dysmorphic face lost in molten fluctuations, but when I examined the rest of it more closely, the features lost their shape and meaning in a glowing conflagration of eerie formations. There was a feeling of it being a soft bodied insect like a crimson hummingbird moth descending through some sort of dimensional refraction.
There was something at once unnerving yet oddly reassuring about this, as if intimating it couldn't quite intersect with our own plane of existence. But the implication of its heated hues also suggested the capacity for crossing over by thermal vents of a potentially pyrokinetic nature, or something just beyond my ability to grasp. A certain vibration seemed to charge the atmosphere between us, yet there also appeared to exist a thin yet indestructible veil separating our actual split realities.
It was then I began to realize the creature may be trying to reach across the threshold between us, yet it didn't know exactly how, despite having made such incredible strides toward breaching the veil, as if its every effort to do so gained ground in one aspect of the crossover while losing track in another. There also seemed to be an absence of crackling force or sound, yet accompanied by almost inaudible rippling subsonic effects, insinuating that were I able to hear the resonance of its approach, the reverberations would be unbearable.
The visual spectrum shimmered and warped around it, lending it a constant sense of focusing in and out of context. I recognized its form to be synonymous with the backdrop of clouds behind it, yet at the same time taking shape in the air directly before me. I couldn't tell if its image were being projected through invisible droplets of moisture in the air, or what exactly was happening, and I also couldn't really tell if it were far away or near.
Is this some sort of angel I wondered as it hovered before me in a splendor of slowly roiling mutation. The glaring eye that I thought I'd noticed before had disappeared into the undulating musculature, replaced with a row of cilia-lined pits that seemed capable of detecting the most minute vibrations from my skin. It was as if its features were comprised of an oil slick of colors ranging through a harmonic spectrum responding to my presence. Suddenly I was aware it appeared to be mirroring me somehow, and I became startled at the thought it was seeing me in a similar configuration of polymorphous harmonics.
So immediately I closed my eyes in an instinctive effort to see it better, and was all of a sudden compelled to begin harmonizing in a low vibrato tone from deep within my larynx, which seemed to immediately affect the rate of its oscillation and shimmer. Through tightly compressed lids or in the darkness of my mind's eye, I discerned it as a humanoid being not unlike myself standing before me upon gray slate rock under a green-tinged sky. The more I harmonized the pitch of my vibrato, the clearer this image became until I could see a young man standing before me shimmering with hues like a golden pearl, clothed in a loose-fitting tunic slowly undulating as if underwater. His eyes were also shut, while a deep vibrato hummed from his own vocal chords. The susurration formed words I couldn't understand, but which clearly articulated phrases he wanted me to hear.
I responded in kind, mirroring his intonations while we engaged in a strange harmony. Together we formed a song woven of our mutual attempts at conversing with one another. Within a few measures, we were syncopating and trading phrases, reflecting one another's interludes, and echoing each other's offerings. The resultant melodic refrain continued to grow and provide us with fortuitous examples of mellifluous phrasings that amplified and continued to weave into an improvised duet. Harmonics pinged between us, and I realized my beaming smile was being reflected in him, which is when I made the mistake of opening my eyes.
Suddenly it was right there before me manifested nearly complete in our world, looking absolutely nothing like I'd visualized him in my mind during our interwoven song. Instead it appeared more like it had before, only this time crystallized into living flesh that resembled more than molten stone and less than flowing metal, rather a compounded organic tissue of another elemental aspect altogether unfamiliar to me, and intolerably grotesque beyond my ability to describe. I can only say that it gave off the appearance of bestowing immediate bewildering consequences upon my own corporeal state, akin to something so highly irradiated that to be exposed to it for any amount of time must invariably prove lethal.
While taken aback I realized several things at once, including not only the fact that I had already died from this encounter in a painful series of long drawn out humiliating convulsions, but that my death had unraveled across a bizarre whirlpooling exploded asunder into separate moments, scattered across time like burning hailstones in a flash-frozen blizzard that awaited replaying for purposes which at first lay beyond my capacity to comprehend. Until dawning comprehension occurred to me, that it was for the delectation of this creature's feasting upon my essence. It had somehow, according to some principle of its blasphemous anti-nature, spread apart the subatomic spectrum of my existence through the electromagnetism of time in order to prepare for itself a banquet.
That's when I noticed its great baleful eye once again, re-manifested along the fluctuating apparition of its hideousness, spread out like the split lobe of a Venus Flytrap before me. Part slug-like cephalopod, part death-moth humanoid, it was some sort of monstrous hexahedral entity that had gotten me to participate in submitting to its hypnotic experiment, I realized in a flash quite too late that it was an extraordinary sort of ghastly angler-fish that had met with unspeakable success during its extra-dimensional excursion.
The worst part is I'm still here, somewhat alive and functioning in my apartment, writing this on my keyboard at home, wondering how long it will take before the temporal dissolution of its profane spell reaches its interminable half-life, pondering over how the space I formerly occupied will close scarlessly like water, leaving not a shred of evidence this ever happened to me. I can now only hope I manage to wrap up this account and publish it to the world wide web on time, in a manner somewhat coherent to readers, in a last ditch aspiration that whoever encounters this narrative might somehow believe that what I've written here actually happened while I took my repose for the night.
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