PreterNothing 1.2

This a serialized account. Read this first, or this will just sound crazy. Crazier, anyway.

My mind had retreated almost completely from the fabric of consensus reality. Nothing that I saw was fake. Nothing I felt was false. The one shining, glaring conspirator of the Darkness squeezing in my brain and sucking out my reason was the Visitor.

The Visitor formed from the malevolent void flowing from inside my head. The void became so dark and so dense under my east window that it could have formed nothing else. The window warped around the dark image. Darker than the night, blacker than the sackcloth air.

She became real.

When our bodies are slipping into sleep, strong and rapid from the boat launch of the things we expect to see into the seething river of unconscious, the first act of unwill is the paralysis. To keep you from acting out your day all over again with violent or dangerous consequence, the body shuts off your limbs. If you remain lucid, if not conscious, you feel tied down to your bed. Or as if something is sitting on your chest.

She brought with her a foreboding. She didn't just carry it. She was formed in the furnaces of the hell that are fueled by the small guilts and sulfurous lies we wish we are afraid not to tell. Foreboding was her. All the fear and hate in the world was brought to my room. Though formed of fear and hate, she was not afraid or hateful. The same as my blood is not iron and oxygen.

She had love. Love like I have feared and felt small twinges of. Mad, mad, murderous love, the love of a mother to her leprous child. The love of a lioness as she kills her own offspring to control the consumption of food. The love of a betrayed lover. Love is a many splendored thing, indeed. And it has bloodied the whole world.

My world was awash in black, festered blood. It ran from the hems of her tattered, midnight cape. The cape rose abover her head and covered it totally, shadowing her face in another shade of the same festering black. Her tall form, sucking in all around her, radiated insanity. As surely as she was formed with quarks of fear and hate and love, insanity was the fermion of the whole. Embittered maternity stood her apart from the reality of my room.

She walked towards me with measured gait. I tried with effort rarely mustered to tell my eyes to turn to her. I'm not sure if it was the paralysis or the fear that held me at bay. She moved closer. She loved me. I could tell.

I knew a woman once who was told her whole life she could not bare children. She was a stunning example for all femininity, but she could not close the deal with Eve. Her and her husband formed a lasting and true relationship in their little home in the country, in the shade of the largest oak in the county. They formed a Garden of Eden without knowledge of a Fall.

One day, after fourteen years of medical belief to the contrary, she conceived. The small microsm of The Brethren lit up in joyous celebration for the miracle, the goodness of God. Her nest found new purpose as a room was prepared for the honored guest and a tree house was put up in the old oak. Around term, she had the child. A dark, inhuman, malformed lump of lifeless flesh. The single child she dared not hope for was a dead monster. The Brethren offered plattitudes and privacy to the destroyed woman, it was all they could do. She gave birth to dead love. Her womb was cursed by God, as was God by her, but never out loud.

In the autumn months that followed, she adopted the manner and meter of an ever-expectant mother, tittering about her house, busy and insane. Madness crept into her once and still beautiful eyes like algae on a pond. Her love killed her. The husband found her hanging from the oak tree.

Madness, in her dull, flowing cape, little red riding hood from Hell, paced towards me deliberately.

She loved me, I could tell.