Dreaming

Truth is madness.

Terrance woke in his bed. His body shivered uncontrollably and for a moment he felt he was still falling. The dream had occurred again, with its horrors accentuated by increased degrees. For the past three months his sleep had been broken by this dream at earlier and earlier hours in the night, leaving him terrified as a child is terrified of the unseen things lurking in the shadowed corners of his room. Images from the dream became clearer and more lucid with each recurrence, till now it was nearly like watching himself on a video recording. Terrance lay still waiting for the shaking to pass, his teeth to stop chattering and the whispers that he knew were no longer in his imagination to fade. He got up, stumbled and slithered to the small bathroom across the hall.

   The floor felt slimy and soft somehow but when he turned on the fluorescent light, it only showed the plain white tile and he again felt its familiar hard coldness. His face resembled more a recently dead corpses held up to a mirror, than a live thirty-year-old man. Before the dreams began he was ruddy-faced, broad and strong; ruggedly handsome when the sun darkened him. Torment reduces the human form to ash however, and skin had turned a subterranean white with a sickly yellowish tinge under the light. Life, as he had known it, was a shambles. Friends, family and livelihood were the first casualties; for the dreams had taken all his sense of sanity and seemingly righteous purpose in the world, making him a wretched mindless thing.

  Tonight he had finally seen the end. In what was no longer a diseased fancy, Terrance had seen the world's most eminent astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists give a portend of possible extinction, when what they perceived as a black hole appeared outside our solar system. Upon months of worried observation, the "black hole" grew enormously in diameter and circumference. None of their calculations or wildest theories could hold their logical and scientific minds intact as the thing grew large enough to be seen by night, a cyclopean tear of blackness that weighed and crushed the mind slowly as humanity stared into its abyss. Many went mad when they first glimpsed it and the rest locked themselves in their houses. Science and its apostles were buried as the tear opened wider, swallowing stars and the first of the planets slowly but inexorably.

  When the whispers were first heard globally in sacrilege of all known laws, in cadence and language of a profane dimension, our species was stripped to its core revealing gibbering, mewling parasites that at last understood the nature of truth. The whispers were understood in the primitive mind, hinting of the suffering that was to come, but the final remnant of coherent thought urged Terrance to venture outside now to see the end. Unending night greeted him, his eyes dragged to the austral horizon to see what none of even the darkest occultists dared imagine or conjure. In the black he saw monstrously giant and deformed cities outlined behind a light that fell out of the known color spectrum, and behind the cities mountains that moved and were alive with things cavorting, then swaying to some hellish tune, played on instruments whose sounds destroyed the last vestiges of human spirit. Millions of eyes were on him that writhed and seethed hungrily. He was swallowed and fell eternally into sentient and esurient blasphemy, his screams lost along with those that remained, in the whispers of the shambling world.