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THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
* 3 *
You go through the motions until bedtime. The food and liquid and candy go down your gullet like a basketball being swooshed. You fall onto the bed easily able to ignore all the mattress's lumps.
The real world recedes eventually away from your darkening eyelids. Soon you are ignorant of the outside world. Cycling through the different brain waves of sleep, you finally settle on the one that produces R.E.M. and dreams.
Random images, gauzy in their form, float past you like fluffy clouds seen outside a plane. Now her voice enters your mind, sharpening it: "Remember your dream, B. Lyle." Everything pulls into focus. As you stand still, you feel an object rush towards you like that strange scene in Vertigo.
Soon you see that you are facing a green door. It is an ugly brownish-yellow green. A color you would call puke-green. Otherwise it is eerie in its normalcy. It has a bright shiny rounded doorknob that looks like it is covered by that fake thin silvery covering. You reach out to it, and you notice that you can peel off the ersatz silver.
But, something odd occurs in your peripheral vision. You notice that you are actually standing in a round room. Every time you peel a piece off of the fake doorknob, a piece of the wall around you copies your very action. Revealed beneath the whitewashed veneer is a dark reddish-green wall-paper that is covered with close thick vertical lines that seem to be dripping like wax down the wall. At the same time, although you do not see it, you feel as if your own skin is being peeled off of your muscles.
You stop when there is one piece of silver foil left on the doorknob, one more piece of wall-paper to reveal, one more flake of old skin to flay off yourself. "Oh God, what horrific nightmare is this!" You feel as cold as a linoleum floor in Alaska. The door is slowly opening in front of you, creaking like a rusty metal swing.
"No, Uncle, I do not like this game anymore." The half-hidden memory comes lurching out of the ether of your brain like a zombie coming out of the ensuing dark. It has come to steal your brain. Now, you are on the rusty creaking swing again with your pants and underpants around your ankles. "Uncle, please don't."
"B. Lyle, over here!"
"Sky?"
"Yes, you must leave your fear and doubt behind and follow my voice back to the door."
"I can't."
"Yes, you can."
"Damn, boy; can't you do anything right!"
"Mommy?!"
"You broke my mood by stopping your Uncle. Now I am going to break you."
"Mommy, no!" You turn to run towards the door, towards Sky, but your pants are still around your ankles. You can only shuffle forward.
"You can't escape us! Come back to Uncle Fear and Mommy Doubt, sweetie."
"Come on, B. Lyle! You have to fight them!"
"I can't!"
Sky's voice sounds lower but more intense when she says, "Damn, I can't lose another one."
All the while Uncle Fear and Mommy Doubt seem to mutate and grow to take over the room. New organs and fleshy appendages burst from them in red and yellow as they howl with laughter. Meanwhile, a warm glow of soft light issues from the door. A vaguely feminine figure can almost be made out.
"Bobby Lee?"
"No, it can't be," the shock pierces through your mind like an arrow.
Fear and doubt both grab at their eyes with their snake like appendages and scream bloody murder as they separate them into several different shaped blood-shot eyes. "Now we can better see you. You can not defeat the both of us!"
"Bobby, my love. Come to your wife!"
"That is not your wife, she's dead" scream out he monsters behind you in return.
"Don't listen to them, listen to me!"
Bobby notices that he is now rushing down a bumpy black tunnel. Behind him. Gaining fast, are what were once human beings. Now they have been turned into grotesqueries! They have multiple blood filled eyes, millions of them that can see into his very soul! These eyes rest upon large bulbous heads complete with gigantic shark-like jaws filled with long and short spikes of teeth jutting every which way. Their bodies now trail behind them like shredded paper. They look like a bizarre combination of shark and squid.
"Hurry!" The figure at the threshold motions for you to join her. You cannot resist your true love. She had the key to your heart which unlocked The Ecstasy for you both. Now you can break free! Your legs rip the pants around your ankles as they were made of toilet paper. You break out into long strides towards the voice of your love.
"Run as fast as you like, you cannot leave our sight!
We will groove to your groans as we feast on your bones.
Your legs ache with each step as you waste finite breath.
Please understand we mean: save air for a last scream."
You feel as if you are back in the church, but this time the event is not interrupted. This time, you hear her say "I do."
"Do you, really?"
"Yes, my love. Now, just come through the door." You ignore the next odd sentence that asks if someone has a lock. It answers yes, but you are at the door again and you cannot see a lock. You pause to remove the final strip of silver foil, and the door opens to its widest.
But, before you step through the doorway to face your love, you turn to face your Fear and Doubt. "I have escaped you because of her."
They both stop mere inches from you, flinging their tentacles in front of their ghastly vestigial visages. They wiggle their sharp claws in your face, mocking you. "You will never truly escape us. None of this is real, but you will not be safe where it is real. We curse you with seeing us as your only true reality." Then each one flings a tentacle into your heart.
Pulling yourself back towards the door, you fight the blackness that invades you. You strain against the pulling tentacles, screaming in abject pain. You manage to pull yourself through the door, over the threshold, and on to the other side. You smile at the creatures as you slam the door upon their flailing arms, cutting them off. The stumps crawl inside you like ticks' heads, but at least you are free. You fall face first into the red ocean below you. Falling, falling, falling forever.
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