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EXORCISING MY GOTHIC NIGHTMARE

To those who would linger here; beware that the dank, organic miasma hovering over this place would eventually permeate even the desiccated throat of a burned corpse or the bloated lungs of a drowned man. The faint, cloying perfume of faded floral bouquets blends subtly with the musk exuding from the slimy mould coating the damp, bare stonework to yield a somnolent incense. Even if, occasionally, the pungent whiff of ammonia from the urine of the odd furtive stray startles you into wakefulness, tarry here too long and it will merely act like smelling salts applied to a roofless mind furnished only with fading memories. Here all things become corrupted and torpor is eternal. Any sign of life is false, for underlying everything is the dead soil. Black, lifeless graveyard soil. Soil exhumed from decaying corpses then heaped upon layers of fresh ones and perennially peppered from above with grainy cremated coal soot and aged city grime. Even the sparse clumps of vegetation sprouting out from the cracks between the dark, towering granite angels and obelisks are dying. Deposited here by the vagaries of some ill-wind they grow shallow-rooted and off-green, but tall and spindly; throwing all their desperate energies into freeing their seeds up unto a fairer breeze before wilting away forever.

I know this place intimately because this is where I am. I do not live here, or even exist here; I am here. But you already know that. Deep down in your subconscious you know, because in some walled-off room for your darkest nightmares you have visited this place before.

Let me jolt your memory, should you dare to recall.

You oft appear here in early evening when it is not yet night, though darkness will quickly fall when you least desire it. The fading twilight casts no glimmer in this city as the sun is forever exiled behind an impenetrable sheen of thick, grey cloud which slowly descends as a fine, chilling mist. As if from nowhere, you will find yourself walking aimlessly through the oldest quarter. Some properties you pass will be dilapidated, the faded paint flaking and curling, with any windows not boarded up smashed like gaping, pecked-out eyes. Within, you might believe that you sense a pale shadow or a face, but it will be set back so far in the shadows that you will never be sure. Other houses may be candle or gas-lit and you may see flickering stationary silhouettes projected upon their drawn window blinds. But from these you will be excluded, like a bygone Sunday evening when those who had loved-ones were held close to the warm bosom of their family and those who did not roamed the streets; living wraiths like you, unseen by one another, lonely yet not alone. Regardless, one evening will come, just like this one, when each of these souls will eventually be drawn to walk up the cobbled incline toward the old cathedral and towards me. “Beware!” screams a primal warning seeded within everyone from the moment of their doomed conception, yet still you all come, eventually. It is clearly not bravery which drags your feet one reluctant step after another so what upon the earth, or beneath it, can be leading you hither?

The fog swirls away before your eyes to reveal the imposing, gothic stone frontage of this age-blackened, lurking cathedral. You stop at the two arched wooden doors, grey and rotten like weathered, worm-eaten coffin lids. Above your head, the ugly, misshapen, bug-eyed gargoyles dribble their mad moisture, dripping with the sound of some silent torture to come. Your reach out to pull on the cold iron ring, worn smooth over centuries by the hands of those countless voyeurs who have dared to visit me before. The door opens with a shudder and the first indistinguishable scent of decay assails you. This sensation of fearful foreboding grows as you step into the lofty gloom within. Your footsteps falter as they echo alarmingly upon flagstones textured with downtrodden names which have been ground down to anonymity. Glancing about nervously, the prickly sensation grows of being watched from above. But the only faces up there belong to the gallery of stained-glass figures, frozen within the lead-lined windowpanes, and all they can do is follow your movement with resentful, lifeless eyes. The cathedral is deserted. It has always been deserted. This edifice serves only one purpose. You walk up an aisle which has never brought a bride to her husband and approach a font which has never welcomed a new life. The shallow pool of water lying within it is stagnant and unholy, the rows of purple pew cushions perished, the bibles crumbling to mouldering dust. Bewildered, you stop. The sudden silence seems to muffle your ears and the dry, lifeless air suffocates your breath. Only now that you begin to remember your peril can it begin again.

The vibration from the unmistakeable, dread sound of heavy grinding slab against solid, hollowed sarcophagus is felt more than heard. Does it waft up with the fell air from the nether crypt, or blow in with the blade-sharp northern wind from the graveyard at the rear? One look down into the inky, darkness through the brass grill beneath your feet is enough to urge you to take your chances outside and you hurry through the apse door into the jumbled maze of grey, lichen-covered grave ornaments. Out here the smell of damp decay, rotting soil and misbegotten life is more vivid. Now, as I promised it would, just as the terrible grinding noise of death-in-motion stops with an ominous stone thump, the darkness drops upon you like a black mourning veil. Unseen, my unfettered shadow levitates from its pit of black, bone-riddled earth and out into the night. Now, should you desire, the future you came to observe could be given form, but fear overwhelms your curiosity and instead it is your imagination which clothes my shape. Some grow me pale, cold angel wings or dark-red-crusted bloodied horns. To others I am a corpselike, wan Romantic poet; or the bland-faced, unfeasibly tall Slender Man; or a rotten-clothed, skeletal wraith; or a fearful creature whose fingernails grow like yellowed talons from withered hands and whose hair grows drily around my ghastly, rotting countenance. Rooted to the spot and sick with fear you peer, transfixed, into the darker shadows as I glide silently between the cold monument stones, always lurking at the edge of your vision yet somehow always approaching. Just as I am almost close enough for you to clearly discern me, in terror you manage to uproot your feet to turn and run. At your back you hear my new, ill-fitting funeral shoes creak as I spring suddenly to pursuit, distant at first, then gaining, always gaining until I am at your heels. Suddenly you are out of the graveyard and into the dimly-lit streets, but against all hope I follow. You want to cry out for help but the only sounds you can make are animalistic, formless moans. The more you want to run, the more the lactic acid fills your legs like sand and gradually your flight slows to a desperate, clumsy, futile trudge. Cruelly, I slow down too, playing out the pursuit, but always, always I gain upon you. You cannot outrun me; not now that death is become animate and it can sense the fragile spark of your life. The hairs prickle upon your shoulder as you feel my slow breath chilling the nape of your neck. My long fingers trace the wisps of hair at the back of your head, sending little jolts of electricity through them like an executioner’s wires onto the surface of your scalp. I open my hand to reach out and take you, then... with a gasp of reborn life you cry out and wake in your bed, wide-eyed and bathed in a cold corpse’s sweat.

Furtively I step behind a curtain or some other object to watch you for a moment. You switch on the bedside light. Glance nervously around the room. Shuffle warily to make use of the toilet. Settle yourself back beneath the covers and pull them up to your nose. Feigning sleep your eyelids flicker over your dilated pupils and the light stays on. Your pounding heart may slow, but the warm arms of oblivion will not cradle you back to peaceful slumber again tonight. A vestige of your soul can sense that I have followed you home, that I have not left, that now I can simply wait as I have always done, but closer. We both know that even if you do not seek me out this night or the next, you will come to me again. I have marked you as mine and you have remembered that I am always ready for the sleep from which no-one wakes. For we both know that the tomb I opened was not my own and it awaits you yet.

But if that time is not now, why do you seek me out in the dark city of your nightmares? Is it your sport to savour the dread of your looming death and decay? Or is it a trial of life; a validation which one such as I cannot comprehend? I warn you, do not dare to flirt with me, even in your dreams! You will be a long time dead. Then you will surely lie in your allotted place, in line with the rest of my vast, cold collection alongside all those others who visited and thought the way to leave would always be open.

Those who now dream of life rather than death.