The Mask of Alabaster

Once the night had fallen upon a sleepless slumber, Whence the winter woke me when the third was three in number. I sense that a wince doth lurk and wear which wicked gaze, Of conniving shadows cast between my bedroom windowpanes. I try to sit up from the fluff of foul feathered pillows of goose, Yet they hold me down as if they'd grown on my neck to form a noose. Shadows are simple reverse reflections of what's been left behind A thing when sight can see what light has yet to hit the mind. They pirouette as silhouettes upon my wall and in my eyes, In which I sense with worry why I'm frozen and feeling tied. As I'm laying locked in horror I look through the window’s diaphanous glass, And see that in a tree there floats a fluorescent face in a mist of brass. It floats aloft the frost of the frigid Winter floor, Stirring cirrus shadow limbs of the moonlit sycamore. An incandescent twilight cloak, illumes the timber's lattice, Where shines this cryptic spectral glow akin the ignis fatuus. Abrupt by insanity as I fancy this fantasy, surely born by a brief hallucination; Optic inventions craft in confusion surely conjured such nonce observation. A peculiar perched mask seems to hang disguised within the wintry thicket, “An illusion,” I suspect “my percipience deceived, by a dubious false exhibit.” Two holes are dug beneath rubbed bone, bleached white in wan complexion, Masquerading to mock the missing paired two eyes of aesthetic perfection. “Indeed,” I thought, “These staring beams appear as do a pair of eyes,” I try and descry the light from which they shine under a gleaming guise. Purloined I’m poised in a lucid melt, tasting a poisonous pure oppression, Wrought by this face that haunts my view through the lens of my fenestration. Shifting my view to find fault in my faculty, I sought salvage in sight of such psychic insanity. My fidgeting efforts prove futile, the carven masked eyes fix upon mine still! Incessantly I’m stunned in speculum, boiling in a benumbing brisk of thrill. Alas, my eyesight: no longer the sole sense of this deville, What once was mere vision hails now my ears with a trill. My breath and pulse waxing slower, and waning ever faster, Aghast by celestial sounds from a susurrating mask of plaster. Whence from my vision avowed, to the vacillations I succumb, Of undulations the mask strums, moving inside my eardrums. Who brings to me this apparition, arisen from perhaps an adumbration, Of a visit from he whose grim reaping, lends to the living certain cessation? And then in reminiscence, to my mind arrived the anamnesis, Of the shelf that shelters a book one might otherwise dismiss. Within its parchment pages, whence in refuge resides a clue, To what this mask is made of; when, where, and why; by who? Pins prick from prior paralysis, upon my dermis disguise of bone, I shiver and grab the book and beg, bound reason to me be shone. Within this covered lexicon read acrylic words in arcane diction, Which most readers would anthologize, as ancient artifact and fiction. The first supposition tis true, that this book was bound in the archaic ages, Amiss the latter assumption that fable unfolds by the turning of its pages. In my desperation I stir commotion, reading over every turned folio, Longing for light in yonder window break, as did Shakespeare’s Romeo. Yet each passage read of occult sorcery, or a variety of mages, No line of a white mask, appeared to me on any of these pages. All hope seemed to escape with passing page, turned by my flustered fingers, Then a sudden zephyr blown ingress to the page on which now I linger. On the bottom right reads in numeral: “Nine-hundred and ninety-nine,” On which reads the magical recounted chronicle of myth upon its line. The fluorescence of the pallid mask that posts upon the tree, Shares the ashen-sheen on a face seen afore, on this page by me. An oblong oil-painted portrait, white and blush of reddish-pink, Its caption reads: “The Mask of Alabaster,” inscribed in faded ink. To the left of the ghostly image reads a paragraph like a spell, A warning of dark wizardry, which concocts white masks in hell: "Animated by a wizard whose avarice bears blithe the thaumaturgy, To forge a warlock’s soul inside a gypsum stone, This augury and the legerdemain required of such magical metallurgy, Siphons a sapphire from the fire inside his pelvic bone. His soul is trapped in a putrid shell: his very own decapitate skull, On which will gleam a glowing garnet, glimmering gold and scarlet, His eyes shall cry with weeping, sunken, hollow two eyeholes Luring any victim to view the red of this lustrous target." Such dread and morbidity of a lost soul; ‘tis most tragic, When trapped in a mask made by evil mischievous magic. What malice must succeed from such a tumorous terror? And what reconnaissance be sought by its hidden wearer? Returning my gaze to the wraith in the window, I remember that it has my mind muddled in limbo. This mask of cadaverous complexion, To my horror, mine own reflection.