# 9
"Madness Under the Barrier"
Written by Robert Rock
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of fairy dust which alone, makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to fairy dust that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.
It was one of the most beautiful nights in this fair city of London. I walked about and enjoyed the night, as was my custom then. I stopped into one of my favourite pubs for a pint. What a grand time was had that night, the pints were good, my friends happy and boisterous, and the conversation enjoyable. A shining night to be remembered. Oh that I could hold onto that happy part and forget the rest.
Upon leaving the pub, I noticed a change in the air. It seemed to crackle with ozone and I almost felt light headed. From behind me there was a roar of a motorcycle and as I spun to see who was riding so quickly on such a fine night, that was when my reality began to fray.
Upon the bike was a flaming skeleton and his motorcycle had great flaming wheels. The pure horror of the sight was almost enough to make me faint straight away. This feeling was compounded over the next few minutes as the cycle sped towards a wall. I thought sure this flaming skeleton would be dashed upon the wall, as there was no time for him to halt his progression. But upon meeting the wall, his cycle simple climbed straight up and over it. I was aghast.
This was followed quickly by the appearance of a man with long flowing white hair hovering in the air following the skeleton. What madness had come to England, were these stories of Pendragons true and not storytelling to amuse children.
I fell to the ground and for several moments I sat thinking or brooding. My mind raced with possibilities, but a single thought won out over all others. I raced to following the spectres I had seen to confirm their existence and put away the fact that they may be ale related.
Ah, the days when ale could comfort me and not this wretched fairy dust.
I know not why my mind was so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain. That smiling flaming face flashed across my mind again. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure I feared. And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise it was but, awash in a cold perspiration, I determined to follow these apparitions.
As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I was urged on by an impulse, which I cannot definitely analyse and I began to follow in their wake.
Was it my imagination or were the edges of the night sky becoming as black as the Stygian depths where no light seemed to penetrate.
All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the green, which strength out hundred yards ahead of me; this object was a great black demon that seemed to be whipping out the stars with his hands. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, this demon seemed to be encasing the whole world in a cloak of purest black.
Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of a peeping tom, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the city, and revealed their starkness against the quickly blackening sky.
Plainly visible across the intervening grass, were a collection of unique and odd individuals. The two that I had saw before where there. As I continued to look, I was sure that I saw someone from an old comic book that I read as a child. His appearance in the flesh could only be a miracle. As well among the crowd was a man that looked like what I would imagine King Author looked like in his full glory.
The demon was grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, and yet damnably human in general outline despite black spikes about his body, red glowing eyes and claw like hands. There were other features less pleasant that my mind refuses to recall.
Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into the world beyond conception of the even the most daring alchemist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent scene before me.
Then suddenly I saw it. The one who looked like Arthur lunged forward and his blade seemed to sing as it sliced through the air. He cut the head of the black demon from its shoulder. Great gouts of tar like blood spurt from the crumpling body as the head somersaulted through the air. The flaming skeleton pick the head out of the air as it flipped past him and seemed to almost suck it dry of life. All the while the black severed head screamed and screamed. I think I went mad then.
When I came out of the shadows of sleep I was in a hospital; brought thither, I was told, by one of the incredible beings that I had seen. In my delirium I had said much of what I had seen, but found that my words had been given scant attention. The world was different now, and what I had originally had hoped was a terrible dream was a new reality for fair England.
It is at night, especially when the moon should be gibbous and waning in the sky above, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease. I moved then to fairy dust and it has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm -- a mere freak of fever. Then I look above and see the blackened sky and know the truth.
I cannot think of the face of the screaming
black demon without shuddering and fear that the nameless things may at this
very moment be crawling and clawing it way back into this world, only to burst
through some patch of blackened grass.
I dream of a day when that screaming demon will return and drag down in his reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind -- of a day when the world as we know it will end amidst universal pandemonium.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense scraping body lumbers against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!
I hope you enjoyed my homage to Lovecraft in the confines of the Pendragon Universe.
Was this raving of a mad man or of one who could see an unknown future? Time will tell.
Please send your comments to rarock@yahoo.ca
Cheers,
Robert