A Haunting Tale
A splintering wood staircase, a dilapidated door to an old Gothic-type mansion. I stood before an unfamiliar dwelling, totally betwixt as to how I had gotten there. Startled, I began to rise, floated up, the entrance seeming immediately to dissolve, allowing me free unfettered ingress. Then I began walking haltingly down a dismal corridor, eerily lit; passing illuminated cutouts in the walls, both sides of me, unnerving windowed enclosures. Scenes one would expect to see at a serpent or spider exhibit. A dimly lit, cave-like atmosphere. A funnel of consuming darkness. View after view, were accompanied by hideous cries of pain, a grotesque harmony. Each theme was of a similar skeletal landscape, which I surveyed in pitiful sequence. Topography where leafless trees, with elongated trunks and limbs that were the extremities of once independent, living beings, had become trapped, rooted in an otherwise barren, forsaken dimension. Desolate. Suffering, emaciated creatures struggling to free themselves from what appeared a hellish captivity. Reptilian hisses...desperate articulations demanded of me: "Priest, why are you here!? Light as we have never seen before." My reply, "I do not know... I mean you no harm. Please, do not fear this intrusion." At the end of the hall unaided parted a curtain, myself feeling propelled deeper into unfathomable terror, pushed forward by an unseen protagonist with the evil essence of a far-bleaker, danker, unholy colony. In the center of the room, on the floor swiveled a medusa head, with undulating serpents for hair, gaping mouths dripping venom. "What do you want with us," authoritatively questioned the hideous amputation. I responded, "Please, do not fear me. I mean you harm. I don’t have the slightest idea as to how I arrived here, nor why I was sent. "Paul Lucius David. Do you know this name?" More sternly, the fiend demanded: "Paul Lucius David, do you know this name?"-- seeming now perplexed as I. "I truly do not know of whom you speak," my honest response. "Hmm…you will come to know this name. You will come to know this name." And just as mysteriously, I was back, seated on the edge of my bed.
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