The Mistake

 

I wake up feeling dizzy. My head burns with pain and my eyes feel heavy and sticky. The air that I breathe seems to enter my lungs, and even though it has a welcoming taste I have never before encountered, it remains opaquely trapped within my body. This body that for some irrational cause no longer feels mine. There is a vague mist in my memory. Its grand vaults are now dimly lit by thin candle lights, revealing only unconnected traces, incongruent scenes. It is futile to recover anything.

Even though my room is impressed with a dark monotony, there appears to be silver waves resonating throughout. Tinkering and mocking waves hardly visible, yet viscously present. A feeling of utter disgust at the uncoloured waves, like airy ponds of malevolence, ties my guts with cruelty. I reach with my lethargic arm to one of these palpitating, foggy waves, when, like the trembling movement of an autumn leave, it vanishes in contact with my grey flesh. The uneasiness this provokes in my confused imagination is enough to startle the blood in my veins, which I considered should not be there. It should not be there. I horribly conclude all my self should not be there, plunging into a senseless alienation. If this were indeed my room, my memory was left elsewhere, pondering in a space I could not remember. The dismemberment I feel between body and mind is chaotically peaceful. Whilst my brain apparently functions with brief explosions of time, the body I no longer recognise is not well adapted to this abnormal capsule. But the peace, this anomalous peace…

Suddenly, from the depths of this ghastly dream, I hear the echo of deep horns ringing within the very abyss of my eardrums. The sound, which carries an ancestral timbre void of any heard tonality, has a quiet yet piercing endurance. With this unearthly call touching every fibre of my dried skin, I slowly move my legs and get out of bed. The primeval instinct still alive within me urges my body to move as quietly as possible. I assume, ridiculously, this might keep the horns away, at what still seems a long distance. But due to my state of general disenchantment with everything, I am not yet fully aware that this revels inside me. One step mechanically catapults the next. There is something intrinsically violent in my movement.

Usually with dreams, the more we walk the less we begin to remember, up to the point of forgetting our dreams once sunset bathes the earth. Completely rebelling against this notion, the more I walk the more I seem to recall. The reason for my painful headache aligns with a tormented strain of thought, a feeble sensation of something past. Slowly, and walking nowhere, I begin to remember with feverish brutality. The sadistic existence of this memory is unbearable.

I remember I was once driving through a dark highway. My destination was unknown, as I glimpsed through the windows into the pitch-black forest. I do not discern time at this point, but hours seemed to pass indifferently.

 

A gloomy sensation suffocates my heart.

 

There and then, my eye-lids yearned for sleep with dense persistence. A puppet of need, I closed my eyes for a fleeting second.

 

What I feel next as I still walk nowhere makes my hands shake in convulsive desperation.

 

I saw myself break through the glass of the car, floating between the shattered pieces, blood dripping from my forehead.

 

Before I can reach the door in my room, the last piece of memory forces me to see my quivering body viciously bleeding beside a tree, in a position of horrible contortionism.

 

And while I have never left this constrained room, supposedly mine, I am now mortified with a sense that can only be compared to a struck of lightning, a shocking tremor running through my vertebrae. This sudden, all-embodied pain makes me once more conscious of this hellish room, my hand left hanging at the door knob. Since present and past time merged in that incomprehensible mob of incoherence, during my brief recalling I was unaware of the sound increasing within me. And what finally confirms a feeling of primitive fear, the sound not only in me, but now besieging the room, is menacingly close. Painfully slow is this patient increase in volume, as it gains a spatial width not even my limbs can assimilate. It encloses my unearthly surroundings, lurking in the shadows like a hunter on a prey. I have not yet opened the door, it seems somewhat an impossible accomplishment, a titanic effort. With all the power my body can endure in this outside-of-all, tight space, I turn the door knob against a heavy air created to decelerate any movement. These oppressive particles, resembling more a living organism than mere physics, conjure a spell against me. I thus realise the door I am about to open leads to a never-seen path; I am hideously conscient of this. With this in mind, those particles of air might be a warning. Do I truly need to see what is beyond? Advancing from afar, this tantalizing sound only grows deeper, traversing through my throat like a thick toxin on its way to the heart. There is no other choice, this unnatural chime is maddening, I must move.

 

As I open the door, I notice that there was never any other sound. The door opens silently, outlandishly silently. In front of me I begin to perceive a house, oddly familiar, yet not quite the familiarity I remember. It seems to me some strange hand has dig inside my mind and indifferently recreated an inferior and gaudy representation of something I once knew. To intensify this terrible sense of mental sequestration, this merciless hand has not removed some distant feelings attached to that bewildering memory. Worst of all, this vision is gruesomely mediocre. But I do not understand why I clutch to an expectation.

 

Me legs feel incredibly burdensome and numb. I step beyond the threshold of the door and into the unwelcoming cabin-house. That detestable noise keeps coming with tyrannical force. Why do I sense this sound of the horns exists just for me? Growing inside me is this feeling of disconnection, as I harken these walls which reject the unsolicited guest, softly pushing me or magically evading my touch. These walls breath, that far I know. I walk down the stairs, never truly knowing if I am floating or not. The door to the Outside is just a few steps ahead of me. Again, those particles of air form like a sumptuous barricade in front of me. Movement decelerates even more, as the horns resonate atrociously with more power. It is imminent, and alarmingly real that it is coming for me. Then I realise the floor is getting wet. The walls, the stairs, those grotesque portraits of strangers weep water, everything is covered in rain. But my dry skin is still dry. I am unnervingly dry, resected like a lizard under the blazing sun. As the horns keep playing with gargantuan energy, so does the rain imitate its ferocity, and soon, the whole house is covered with a blinding monsoon.

 

Unable to move under this violent rain, I let it soak my soul, rather what seems to be an imitation of spirit. It does not touch my skin, but I do feel it inside my nerves, travelling through my veins like an unsensitive intruder. And with this mystical water that touches upon every cardinal nerve, so I see. I am here, in this otherworld, uninvited. I can see clearly now, oh how painfully clear. I am dead. My physical body is dead under that tree. I am here, and I am no longer. But why this torture? Why can I still be allowed to be conscious? What allows this? The horns get closer, deeper, they fester on my thoughts, poison every strain of this demented consciousness. That slow movement has now become absolute stillness. The waves… the waves have stopped me. I realise just now I cannot speak. My vocal cords feel lacerated. I cannot express my anguish, not even with primitive screams, that much has been taken. Those instruments haunt me now, they are present, why can’t I see them? Who plays these horns? I wish for death, for this is not it. Every part of my body aches, and a burning flame twists and constricts my mind. Questions… questions… But I am alone. Oh, but this is it, this is where we are to rest for eternity. In this sleazy, unbecoming filth of a lazy imagination. I should not be here.

 

The horns finally arrive.

And take me.