A Walking Nightmare

I see now there is nothing at the end of this fading slender beam, except darkness and a grim demise. In case a tiny fraction of me kept it open a crack, that door was wrenched by a foul breeze to slam shut. I am struck by discernment of what abides in the depths as they scuttle. There can be no heavenly salvation, no ethereal reward. In sleep, in death, there is only them. An Agnostic, I now believe . . . in Monsters. And sincerely wish I had devoured such tales as hungrily as I consumed Nonfiction. I might have some notion how to face this. Aren’t those writers and readers more apt to survive an Apocalypse? I can’t clarify what the disaster is. Extinction. Invasion. Maybe they’ve been here longer than us.

Absurd. Are my last words to be dismissed as a work of Horror?

Along my quest for the unattainable, raw instinct cautioned that I was surrounded. Where did they spring or wriggle from? What exactly were they? Staring, swallowing, I surrendered to being baffled. It was okay not to know something.

Frozen as a Cemetery or Museum Statue, I couldn’t coax chiseled feet forward. Couldn’t decide on a less-lethal direction.

It dawned that where I stood, thoroughly open, unshielded, was more exposed. I swiveled at an angle, plodded toward glints of a streetlamp’s shattered glow. Stiffly I trekked, a courageous coward, respiration bated, arms outstretched. Footfalls concussed, traversing a lane of jagged shadows and light.

I cannot blame a New Moon, scattered Constellations, for the ulterior motives of Nocturne. I had dug this pit as if it were my grave . . . meandered absently through the Veil that divided levels in a melancholy Nether-Night, akin to stepping off at the wrong floor from an Elevator with no Up. Awareness, rather than bringing the satisfaction of a fulfilling banquet, has instilled a cheated hollowness accompanied by a tomb-like chill. How barren I feel.

It is on the darkest of nights that one might glimpse such creatures as scurry from the shadows in a fevered imagination. They are too hideous for any lesser quantity of murk to conjure. And once seen, there is no going back. No reclaiming the sanctity of ignorance enjoyed before stark comprehension.

We cannot appreciate what we do not know we have, until it is gone. Until a gap reveals its absence. And that is too late.

I wish I had known all the things I didn’t — without being conscious of them. Without lugging the burden like a hump on my back.

They might call the present circumstances ironic. I was so proud of myself, proud of my cultivated knowledge. And yet, despite the years of study, the decades spent reading and learning, acquiring a trove of information, I had no clue that it was better — far better — to not know certain things. I would have deemed the idea ridiculous.

And here I am. I didn’t set out to discover them. Clutching a lengthy flashlight, apprehensive, I found myself in their midst under a starless moonless sky that yielded no sympathy. Its clouded expanse weighed down on me with layers heavy as the most fathomless ocean, bitter cold and black.

My breath for company, like wisps of fog, I trudged neath that firmament toward a vile serendipity both obvious and hidden.

I guess I never felt vulnerable till then, till the moment my car broke down in the middle of a deserted neighborhood: a treacherous tract of condemned apartments; the final remnants of Affordable Housing, now used for illicit deeds.