Estimated reading time — 41 minutes

If you’re reading this, you know what sorry state you have found me in. I pass on my condolences for whatever trauma I may have predisposed upon you, and it is with my deepest sympathies; for it is a fate that we shall undoubtedly come to share in kindred. However, there is some solace, for before it is seen to come to pass, I am to grant you an opportunity — one that, at the time, I was less than ignorant of, and now impossible for my current circumstances. The opportunity to ensure it does not attain another series of victims and spreads its corruption and its terrible suffering to more souls, as it has to my family. I implore you and encourage you to hear me out. Please continue reading — I cannot stress this enough to you: the significance is crucial. Listen to what I have to say and do what I could not — in regrettable hindsight — or risk further continuation inspired by this evil conduit. Regardless of how you might have come into confiscation of this house and its belongings, and despite what fortune you may believe to have happened by, it is instead to the contrary; for it is to your dismay, rather than serendipity; for you have unfortunately stumbled upon things out of your control by the mere happenstance you were the one to come into possession of this place — Blackwell Manor.

The circumstances you now find yourself involved with are things beyond comprehension, matters far beyond the scope of our understanding of reality’s truth — and perhaps, even our importance, of our place in the grandeur scheme of this impartial, fleeting, vast cosmos. By reading this, I feel it is my responsibility to tell you that it is already too late. And if you have looked upon that painting, then you damn well know what I mean. You will come to know — or, perhaps, it has already come to pass – that you understand my presumedly strange words. Ones that, even before my own encounters of the preternatural witnessed in this haunted house, I would have fathomed were a spindled tall tale; delivered and woven from an imaginative sphere of phantasm. Regardless of when, as you come to ascertain the things I write about in this dreary account and share my experience of such unearthly involvement for yourself. Only then will you realise that, in actuality, my weird words truly bear more truth than fiction.

It all began three months ago when my father became into proprietorship of my grandfather’s old, derelict estate — Blackwell Manor – after purchasing it at an auction held in Kensington Gardens, following the reintroduction of the property into the public market from its prior withholding, due to its long-time standing as a stigmatized property. You see, my grandfather – the great and respected astronomer, George Harvey Locke – had hanged himself in the attic some thirty-odd years prior, and due to such haunted attachments to the property, it was held from purchase in the public and corporate domain, retained in stasis, placed in property limbo for an indefinite time. Over the period of July, my father undertook a lengthy renovation of Blackwell Manor, for since its abandonment, it had been left in a poor, rundown condition over the last three decades — it had been a period of some thirty-one years since anyone had set foot inside the domicile. Being the headstrong man, he was, with how tight he was about the purchase of his arse he was with his money, he refused to hire any third-party contractors to lend work to the place. This stemmed from his proud, stubborn, self-reliant attitude. All in all, a man. In his working life, he had built a long labouring career for himself as a handyman by trade. He had dabbled in carpentry, plastering, even self-teaching himself the business of a sparky, and by extension, even a plumber’s; for all things considered, he was a jack of all trades. However, as August came around, amid the early days of that parching month, my father started to act differently than typically expected of him, becoming a stranger to himself. Frequently, he would call, informing me of the progress he was making with the manor, albeit slowly. He would phone me for our routine calls about the mundane, monotony things of life, which I cherished and held close to my heart. Over the period of a week or so, our calls became less and less frequent; eventually, all contact with my father faded; he became out of touch with not just myself, but with everyone, cutting off communication with anyone outside that house, entirely. He became a recluse, which was strange enough in itself for two reasons: when I had last spoken to him, he was over the moon in eccentric joy, electrified with his excitement to have my partner and I over once the renovations were done, and have us for dinner. And, well, because it was estranged for his character — for he was an outgoing, charismatic extravert; the life of the party. He was a jolly, warm soul, bored by the lonesome company he kept when he was alone with only his thoughts.

After not hearing from my father for a month and a half, I began to become increasingly worried and made countless calls, which were found to be of no avail, despite my desperate efforts to reach him at the reclaimed estate. The phone line would ring out without an answer, and when, rarely the phone did pick up, an uneasy quiet returned my call; only a buzzing drone of static sounded on the other side of the call, and it was the only thing besides myself to bear a voice. After a few days, I decided I would go to Blackwell Manor myself to check in on the old man. At the time, I believed to some extent that I could have been overthinking everything, and making things up in my mind, playing it out to be worse than how things were in actuality. Perhaps during his DIY redecorations, he had damaged the phone line or something trivial in mind along those lines in his haphazard, clumsy ways. However, in my gut, I knew something was off, given his strange behaviour — I just knew something was wrong. To put my anxieties to rest and my mind at ease, I went to the house to see my father. This was two weeks ago.

I arrived at Blackwell Manor on Wednesday, the 15th of August. I pulled up to the property around ten-thirty in the morning, after a tiresome drive through the pouring rain. I stayed in my car, turning the key, sitting in the cold for a moment, stirring and gathering my thoughts, and letting the racing rain pass. I gazed over the Blackwell estate in a fraught silence as the muffled clatter of rain pit-a-pattered above me. In my quiet contemplations, I dwelled over what I might find in that place — or rather, who I might find — it gnawed on my mind, and my nerves were strung rigid like an unflexing tightrope. In all my worrying, I looked out through the rain-streaked windshield. The first thing I noticed as I looked on at that lonely house was how the mansion’s lights were all off; there was not a trace of luminosity that flickered alive inside. My father was an enthusiast of late lie-ins, so it wasn’t an alarm or any sense of surprise to me at the time — for all things considered, I assumed he was still asleep. I knocked on the door, damn near slamming the thing, calling his Christian name. I stopped for a moment, but after five or so minutes with no answer, I decided to search around the premises for a spare key that might be hidden away, beginning with the porch.

After rummaging about like a scavenging fox scouring bins for scraps of food, I returned to the front door, unable to find the key. However, miraculously, by sheer stupid luck, I stumbled across the spare key as I climbed the porch steps again. This time, I felt a bulge beneath my foot under the front door mat. Entering the house, only the daylight — or at least, what little of it that was permitted through the grey, crowded clouds — beamed in linear forks through the ridiculous number of windows the mansion was equipped with; illuminating the interior. The main room was in an absolutely dishevelled state. Odds and ends were littered across the floor in messy, heaped piles. As I searched the estate’s interior for my father, I discovered that nearly every room was in this exact same particular set of circumstances, which perplexed me further, for my father had always been a tidy, clean man. He had told me not long before how nicely the house was coming together, in a pristine set of conditions; in stark comparison to the shape it had been sold to him in or what health it now retains. Even in my accumulated worries that had begun to build further in my mind, I still persisted with the same belief that he was snoring somewhere upstairs. Despite this, the impression of vagrancy, the ambience of the house inhabited was gaunt, possessing a disturbing, telling quiet. Something didn’t feel right, to which I was less than privy till facing later encounters. After my inquisitive exploration of each of the rooms and the more than luxurious suites that my father knew what to do with, on the dilapidated ground floor, I made my ascent up to the second floor.

My heart began to pick up in pace and elevated in tempo as I scaled the stairs. I held the banister with tightened claws, digging my nails into the rickety wooden handrail. The floorboards creaked, bending by the seams, even under my petite weight. The door to the master bedroom was breached by only the slight slither of a gap. I forced myself through the narrow crevice, quietly tapping with a tender rhythm on the door as I entered, to rouse my sleeping father from his deeply embedded slumber. Yet, to my surprise, he wasn’t anywhere to be found in that spacious bedroom, nor could I find him in the terraced study just next door. I scanned the study, stumped, out of ideas where to look, but it was then, I looked up, and I discerned an open hatch, which led into the attic.

A neglected ladder had been left upended, leaning against the eastern wall in crooked posture. I rolled my eyes for not noticing it sooner. I spread the legs of the ladder apart, as well as my own wobbling things — Christ, I despise the things with an earnest passion! I abseiled the steps, lifting myself up awkwardly through the attic hole. I plummeted gracelessly, rolling about the dusty surface upon reaching the comfort of the solid ground once more. Now, before I digress, don’t assume a stupid woman out of me in your silly, pigeonhole assumptions. Before I delved into tunnelling my way into the attic space, I hunted the grounds of Blackwell Manor, in the hopes of finding a light source; whether that be a torch, or even something as archaic as a lantern. Fortunately, rummaging through my father’s many tools and belongings, I managed to find a flashlight — thank the Heavens the man wasn’t as moronic as Mother used to say. Just as in the prior rooms, the attic was in a deplorable state of affairs, papers littered the floor, books were scattered without the care the artefacts of words deserve, and other particular items and articles were thrown, forgotten about, and left to be concerned by wandering insects. Scanning the coned light about the room, I discerned a crate with little, untidy, piled papers resting atop the sealed lid of the metal box. But before I would delve into what subject materials were contained inside, I wanted to fully examine the dark room, and what masqueraded secrets were concealed within and between the clefts of shadows. Near the front end of the attic, from the view of the hatch hole, there was at least a meagre capacity of light. The scant colours from the outside bled through the stained-glass window; the paltry sunlight’s lustre was insignificant but still provided more display to the room than the darkness around it, which swallowed the attic’s shallow expanse.

The dull outside weather’s exiguous light revealed the shape of a wooden easel, which stood erect, facing its back to the stained glass, facing where the artist would stand or sit. Blessed with a pleasant vista of the exterior world to gorge upon and inspire their work. A canvas perched atop the tripod, marked and streaked in busy colours. I couldn’t quite make out the picture that was drawn, so I sought to get a closer look, intrigued. Crawling upon my knees, then feeling myself up from my skirt, I got up from my perched seat, and I walked over to the painting. It appeared to me that my imagination was far grander than the artist of this piece. From afar, I had imagined something far more exciting to be drawn across the canvas. Instead, it was as if a blind man had been left unattended to scribble like an unmannered, unbridled child, lashing out in a terrible, but colourful tantrum. The painting was merely blobs and bulges and splashes, streaks of erratic colours and mad stains and dashes without a thought of the author behind the brush. However, before I could turn and disregard the painting as the work of a madman’s eroded mind, something strange occurred before my very eyes, something I could not explain. Despite the bore of its artwork, an unknowing curiosity coerced my fixation upon the painting. The longer I examined the painting, the colours that were strewn about in chaotic designs began to morph. The amorphous colours that were dissociated from the other slowly drifted into the centre of the canvas’ face, fitting together like a jumbled puzzle, conjoining piece by piece, forming into a shape, manifesting into a feasible image; with each blink, it materialised, becoming more and more coherent, eventually merging into an exquisite picture.

It was the contour of how one might envision the sun in their artistic impression, but not fashioned by distinct yellows and undertones of orange we familiarise with — no. Instead, it was coloured by a stark crimson behind the contrasting, sweeping blackness of the dreary background; adorned carefully with ivory, lavished specks. The moving, animation of the painting came to a halt as it assimilated into its full form, far from its prior amorphous crawling shape; coming to an abrupt stop, in the blink of an eye, the canvas was plain. I was dumbfounded, enthralled by this happening, I couldn’t believe it — I wouldn’t. “It’s all in your head, Maggie! It’s the stress of it all,” I told myself, attempting to give reason and logic to the strange, unfolding phenomenon that occurred before my very eyes. I rubbed my sore eyes, realising I had kept them wide and pried in my extensive, fixated scrutiny of the painting’s living show. My mind was unable to compute, unable to fathom quite what I was perceiving. Stepping away from the painting, I decided to take a break and to continue my search for my father, wherever it was he was hiding. Yet, unknowingly, the answer was in front of me the whole time.

I relinquished looking for my father any further, forsaking our cat-and-mouse game. It was clear the old man was nowhere to be seen nor found, or had not wanted to be found, and so, I ensconced myself. I slumped down, sinking deep into one of the memory foam sofas in the main living quarters for the time being. Surrendering to the comfort of a warm, cosy blanket, with my legs outstretched, I waited to see if my father would return. To fend off my growing boredom and dull the sphere of my anxieties in my restless waiting, I took to reading one of the many books scattered amongst the messy detritus of the manor’s grounds. Hours passed by, the warm shine of the afternoon retired, turning dim, and nightfall began to seep through the windows; darkening the estate, which was paid by no further favours of the manor’s non-functional electrics; causing the manor to become embellished completely in a dreary blackened shroud of gloom. And still, there was no sign of my father. My eyes, as I was, became wearier with the further passing of time. The words of the book I read wavered like a candle’s flame in the wind, they danced in doubles as I lost all focus in my tire, becoming indecipherable, inane, blurry scribblings, gibberish. My mind mistook each page as an extraterrestrial article, due to the impossibility of spying in clarity. Despite my best efforts to stay awake, my eyelids did not share the same sentiment. I was caught fluctuating in and out of states of consciousness, if but for seconds. I fought hard yet however valiantly I fought, it did not matter, for I was very much in the middle of transitioning into slumber, whether I liked it or not. Slowly but surely, I was falling asleep due to the bounds of my bodily limitations. My eyes felt heavy, and they began to falter, drooping. Each time I felt them drop, the heavier they were than the last, and each time, the struggle to keep them pried became an increasingly more impossible task. And then, before I knew it, I was welcomed into the embrace of my inner sanctum of dreams. That was the night when the dreams that would haunt me for three nights first began.

I found myself in a place without the bearings of any familiarity. It was not somewhere, or somewhen I knew, it was a reverie vacant of the characteristics my produced worlds of fantasy customarily materialise; nevertheless, it was the most lucid of dreams I had since kept. One of the first oddities this dream possessed was the absence of acquaintances, family members, close friends, and or my partner; for that was the one constant my dreamscapes harboured. Therefore, the lack of attendance from any figures in my life, and intimacy within this dream, fabricated a sensation of fraught. I felt out of place, alone. The second peculiarity that transpired within this estranged dream arose in the particular details of my eerie, foreign surroundings. I was adrift in a cold, black infinite sea, cast into nothingness, only faraway stars accompanied this place besides myself in this unknown abyssal cleft with fleeting lustre. While a whirlpool of thoughts ran rampant in my mind, I capitulated to fear, and I waited. It felt as if time had no place in this vacuum, yet it felt as if years, hundreds, maybe even thousands, passed by; so, I waited in the deafening, dreary quiet of that obsidian sea, and I became growingly uneasy the longer I waited, gored by my concerns of what terror is unknown. I floated in the bowels of this unnerving, endless void. I found myself separate from body and mind; it imprisoned me in a preserved stasis; I was unable to move or do anything, the only thing I could do was watch and observe the unfilled barrens of this pitiful place. Mustered by my stirring perturbations, which gathered in mass, in addition to being utterly isolated and alone within this enigmatic nihility, only further invited an all-consuming forlornness; a stark loneliness beset me. And then, in the blink of an eye, the black image sundered, becoming replaced by something else, something more entirely. A fiery orb manifested in the yonder distance, swallowing the stars in the blackened gulf of space, devouring them in its superior brilliance. Growing closer by the moment, the shape oscillated in luminosity, spurting out flares like erupting geysers; however, instead of discharging jets of water and steam, it fired crimson branches from its burning bulk, leaping, like scattering forked scarlet veins into the expanse of void. I blinked again, but this time, I was brought face-to-face with the celestial titan. It whispered with a throbbing pulse, voicing a vibrating, otherworldly drone. In an instant, a wave of foreboding dread eclipsed my entire psyche. I cannot do justice, nor articulate into words quite how potent or why, but the entity felt wrong on every conceptual level, putrescent to my very fibre, odious to the soul. The pulsing lingerer encapsulated about it a sphere of a forbidding presence; this bleeding star emanated an ominous aura. Despite my unfamiliarity with this chasm of a dream, it dawned on me that there was, in fact, one familiarity amongst this strange fantasy, after all. And it was the very same thing that towered before me, staring down upon me. Even with the slight inaccuracies of the painting, which I had previously spied over, there was no denying it, no mistaking it; this was the very same entity, but in a physical, corporeal form, depicting what the artist – my grandfather – had named: the ‘Scarlet Dreamcatcher.’

Abruptly, I awoke to the cawing cries of a crow, jolting forward violently, alive. The curious bird roosted upon the armchair of the sofa I hosted in my cradled space in my respite. In my awakening, I was dressed in beads of sweat, like the racing raindrops trailing down the misty windowpanes. The vocal corvid quickly flew in a hurried flight upon my graceless, sudden waking, which caused the avian to become frightened and to flutter its wings in a panic, steering to flee and hurry back from whatever crevice it had scurried through.

Looking back in hindsight, I see now that I was deluded in my belief that my father would return. However, it was not just my desperate, delusional optimism, nor my hereditary stubbornness that would keep me held at the manor for a longer period than I intended to stay. Some other metaphysical force compelled my continued lodging at the Blackwell estate — something I was not privy to at the time, nor something I could place my finger on. The subsequent night, and the nights following, I was plagued by the same foreboding dream; every single detail was parallel to the first, down to the tee. As disturbing as the lucid, ominous reverie was, I couldn’t help but begin to foster a capacity of awe— a fascination — for the entity in my dream. Part of me began to marvel at the crimson fireball, becoming in awe at the shape’s vivid spectacle. Amongst the foreboding of that perpetual burning typhoon of unfathomable dread, there was sublimity; a striking, strange beauty. Yet, despite my growing wonder of the celestial body, the lingering fear remained, and I was haunted for a spell for the next two nights by these same lucid, vivid dreams. Upon the third night, there was a stark shift to my haunting dreams, which I had grown accustomed to. While it followed the same repetitions of the same repeating dream that obsessed over the bounds of my mind, there was a change. Something different, something new altogether — wrought of a true whirl of terrors.

Again, the fiery orb replicated the consistencies it had in my dreams prior: a bright orb manifesting into the blackness, accelerating in rapid succession, reaching me in the blink of an eye. However, this time, rather than looming over me in its incomprehensible breadth and seemingly unending cosmic vertical proportions, the burning shape began to morph, unfurling into a different shape entirely. Its form began to distort, stretching and bending, becoming wrought into an oval visage. In a matter of seconds, the face of the satellite’s epicentre turned hollow, and transparency became about the centre of its mass. Losing its broad shape, it turned into a ringed outline of its ignited pigmentations, rather than the former stark, solid bulk of gas it had consisted of. The glowing edges sputtered and jettisoned, spitting sparks from the swirling ringed formation. The volatile, incandescent window face jittered with an unstable wavering about it, and from the convulsing elliptic, enkindled branching appendages swayed tenderly to and fro in the vacuum of the obsidian sea. The newly transmuted fissure appeared to glow, like the glimmering ringed brim. Emerging from the aperture, a becoming illumination arose, filling the prolate spheroid’s translucent central mass with a shimmering umbrella of light, borne of the similar tinctures that encompassed its previous spherical form. Amidst the familiar array of its fiery palette, there was a spectrum of contrasting, differing variations of colour; mutations of both darker and contrary shades of fairer casts joined the company of vibrant tones. Whilst the arrival of developing colours painted a progressing transformation, the rift seemed to settle and stabilize, relinquishing its wobbling sway; the ringed portal became still. Simultaneously, amongst decompressing from its violent, unpredictable oscillation just moments prior, the disordered arrangements of colour amassed, piecing together a picture; each a prominent puzzle piece to the delineation it depicted. It became evident that what it had come to project in this recently developed metamorphosis was the manifestation of a place, rather than of a materializing change to its geometrical figure, as it had altered before. It was a looking glass, glancing into a place of strange quality.

I found myself being involuntarily reeled towards this realm, raptured without any regard for my consent. I was tethered by an invisible cord, heading straight into the maw of the vivified portal, into the bounds of this pocket world; into the borders beyond the unknown. Whilst at first, I had tried to fight whatever or whoever pulled upon my unseen chain, I soon conceded, for without a corporeal form, resisting from a purely physicality notion was a pointless endeavour. As I plunged into the threshold, reaching the other side, into this new, strange world, it presented me with another grave change to this weird, harrowing dreamscape. The gaunt quiet that inhabited the desolate black washed away, giving rise to something else, of a far vaster perturbing conduction; something truly terrible. A cacophonous array of indiscernible sounds wailed like an indefatigable factory. My first presumptions had me believe it came from a handful of sources, between automated machinery and the apparatus of enginery; however, as I homed in and listened more closely, I realised in horror the true bearings behind this thundering amalgamation of noises. Realising the source behind the wall of sound, my stomach dropped. They were voices, from not a hundred, not even the extent of a hundred-thousand, no — not a tenth more than that, nor even a thousandth — it was a collective of an incomprehensible number of tongues that cried out; in pain, in torment, screaming in untold agony. Each whirring agent was a member of the swarming drone, each a distinct individual soul that joined the volume of this ungodly chorus; one belonging to an unbridled nightmare. Had I not been dreaming, I would have been driven beyond the threshold of reason, and I do not state such in exaggeration; I would have crossed the edge of sanity, make no mistake. I cannot describe in full depth quite how daunting and awful the sound was; I still cannot free it from my mind now, even as I write this account.

The invisible tether that strapped about my waist had loosened and unravelled, and I was set free to go wherever it was I pleased, by the accord of my newly found freedom. However, I had wagered it was of no kind gesture, nor of any found generosity bestowed by whatever or whoever this enigmatic host was that had brought me here, but to show me of the horrors of this barren world. For what reason, I did not know at the moment in time — yet, after all, I have learnt and come to understand, I have come to the conclusion, to the belief, with good reason, to believe I was a product — placed on a stand for observation, to an auction of things beyond human affairs; seen in interest to non-human parties and buyers. Despite all the dread instilled into my heart and the throbbing sense of foreboding, in the face of all my shuddering concerns and fear, I went forth to explore the lay of this land and observe where it was wherever I was. Whether it stemmed from my fervour for the senseless duty of my imbecilic-driven curiosity or some maleficent concocted spell that compelled me to do so. Regardless, it did not matter which truth, nor to ponder such matters. I believed to be upon my own accord, and so with such things, I pressed forth, onwards to my quailed investigation of this gaunt, uncanny world; nevertheless. Descending through the murky skies in my adrift, discorporate flight, I perceived the layout of this frontier. Elaborate, scurrying mountain ranges and yawning, rolling valleys and billowing hills and cavernous gorges spread far beyond the horizon of this place; far beyond the reaches of what the eye, no less the imagination, of what one could imagine. Scarlet rivers forked, cutting inland and all throughout and across the land yonder; ruby lakes expanded astonishing breadths of untold, great beaming acres. The closer I approached within vicinity of this strange dream world, the finer the details became. Not a touch of vegetation that makes up the Earth’s diverse green sphere was found here, no matter where I looked — it was as barren as the portal’s projection: a desolate wasteland, bereft of hope and any existing forms of pitiable life.

Then, hovering above in my growing proximities, I saw moving, minuscule figures trailing off in the distance, hiking through the intricate mountain passes and the endless valleys and broad canyons, like a marching parade of ants set on a warpath. Intrigued, I sought to gather a closer examination. However, I wish I had strayed far from that interest, to spare myself, my mind, from the things I saw. Unkempt men and women, some with children in hand, dressed in ragged, torn clothes, deprived of shoe-wear, footslogged through the uneven, rocky road; spent of any rejuvenation, layered bags buried beneath the pits of their lifeless eyes as they staggered. Perplexed as to why they would drag themselves across this barren region of such a hostile climate, I filtered through the unending line of soulless pilgrims, attempting to find a reason for this ordered parade, this spiritless congregation, and why they trudged in their indefatigable march, despite the misery it served. While shimmying through the dreary amassed pilgrims of this shambling, dog-tired assembly, I caught a glimpse of the red waters that covered the expanse of this outland of shifting, shimmering mountain ranges, glistening beneath a fissured, overcast sky. I peered over the lip which perched above the hollowed, beached ravine below, littered with additional columns of further moving, marching bodies that could be seen; and further yonder beyond the perceivable horizon, more and more of these sad exoduses could be seen wandering aimlessly and without any single purpose. To take a more proper and formal observation, I hoisted my spiritual form over the edge. Despite my great distance between the desolate ground and my high advantage, I examined the true extent of the waters’ properties, albeit ineptly. In my brief observation, I gathered in gauged speculation that the pigmentation was not solely because of some abundance or amalgamation of any rich properties or compounds present or found in the water that accounted for the reason for its murky density, but the catalyst of something else — blood. Staring further across the reaches of this ill country, the crimson crystalised lakes I had seen previously, and originally thought to be nothing other than the simplicity of vibrant ruby-coloured waters, were in fact, lakes of fire. Fusillades of flaming forks jettisoned blazing plumes into the air overhead, the great gulfs between the chasms of fiery intertwined riverbeds; like violent branches of thunderless summer lightning, scattering in non-uniformed streaks, shooting varying clusters of bifurcating webbings across the cloudy heavens above. The true brilliance of the extent of such bestowed horrors that inhabited this godforsaken landscape did not dawn on me immediately — it was later when I would truly grasp its terror in my restless, awoken dawdling. The realisation came upon me the next morning, crashing. It was a soaking particularly kind of all-consuming dread — one that possesses a frantic power over oneself and possession over the regulation of emotions and the grace of pragmatic reasoning. Thus, before such matters, my future self could permit to dwell on the mind, my attention was snatched away, which, in a way, was found in fortune due to this timely, coincidental bestowal. The sound of a becoming commotion gave rise from just further down the column of unending weary and mindless wandering, dishevelled pilgrims. Digressing from the former dilly-dally of my momentary distractions, I continued to make my way through the densely packed crowd. My eyes lay upon what caused the ruckus: someone had fallen down in their exhaustion, felled, succumbing to the toll of the wear of this tempered stampede. Slumped headlong across the path, rigid and unmoving, this person caused an obstruction, and yet did little to nothing to deter the hypnotised, migrating flock.

Suddenly, a visceral alien cry, borne of a bloodcurdling capacity, filled the air, echoing and ricocheting, carried on the desolate, eerie wind, between and through every nook and cranny of the comprised complexities of the crag of yore, which embraced the shifting mountains, perched above on either side and between the linear, narrow pass. Abruptly, a great shadow loomed over the passage, swallowing the rock-strewn road in its black sail. A tremendous ebony veil expanded a mile-spanning breadth. Above, I spied the enormous black guise appear, its shape buoyant and nebulous, it suspended, glimmering in the dazzling, clouded, obstructed sky, steadily and slowly gliding adrift through the hazy sky; dwarfing all below in its undefined, shapeless broad shadow. At first, it was an amorphous silhouette, following an ephemeral breath, its shape materialized into a more distinct form, which transposed, contorting into a transformation of finer characteristics and details, and descriptions. It descended in its landing with a violent plummet, moulding into a smaller figure, yet still towering in stature amongst most men, nonetheless. Its new shape was built of an anthropoid quality in physique, might I add. Which had all manifested within a fleeting blur. The ground shuddered in the wake of this strange anomaly. Then, I saw it, unfurling slowly from its landing, it revealed itself and its otherworldly appearance under the crisp daylight — a creature of an unfathomable description. The anthropoid beast towered above the tallest ranks of men. In its long, triplicity of talons, it wielded an instrument of wicked artistry. Evidently, the wretched blacksmith of whomever forged this bronze tool wrought it for the sole intention to inflict a severity, a world of torture, upon whomever was unfortunate enough to face the other end of its forsaken, sharpened prongs; and whatever foul entertainment its wielder aspired in their fetishes propositioned of torment and agony. Whatever pit this thing slinked and climbed from, the flavour of its skin, I believe, shared the same crimson tincture of the burning crater it crawled out of. And now, as I recall and scrutinize this recent, vivid dream, I would even go as far as to say it had the same bearing tinge as the portal that had brought me to this awful place. Decrepit, bloodied antlers braced and fixed on either side of its large head, a rancid decay emanated from the drapes of stringy, rancid flesh. Roped about the trunks of bone, metallic ornaments dressed and adorned with the absurd, occult gold jewellery. I realised shortly, thereinafter, that what mounted atop its elongated, broad neck was the skinless skull of a deer. Further things of strange details were the ashen engraving of an insignia that could be seen branded and scorched into the centre of the crown of its cranium — an inverted pentagram. I am not mistaken, despite the durability of my mind’s quality at this time of writing. And though I may be compromised in my place in reality, I recall observing that marking, specifically, there is no doubt. In addition to its quantity of eldritch characteristics, protruding webbed, dorsal fang-tipped wings strapped to its spike-notched spine, sharing a similarity to the statue of an observant and patient, watching gargoyle. Or perhaps, more accurately, they appeared more in design to the visage of an enlarged, titanic bat; its fantastic wingspan stretched beyond eight feet in breadth. They fluttered as this gothic beast made landfall, casting a small gust of wind about it, whirling dust among the begrimed ground, swirling like a miniature typhoon, courted by the sharp batting of its flapping wings; balancing itself in its stature before retracting and tucking in place behind its back. Were I not dreaming, the ghoulish sight of this abhorrent, disturbing creature would have surely driven me mad. It barked from its ungodly maw, in a language unfamiliar to me — albeit the words it uttered were mostly unknown and foreign to me, I recognised certain hints of Latin, of what little I remember, in terms of its general structured vocabulary. Whatever accursed words it spoke, I could only imagine to be of cursing orders. Instructing the beaten man in its fiendish, native tongue, commanding and charging him to retract to his height and continue his place amongst this dreary hike, and who supervised these prisoners, forcing them along this crusade-driven pilgrimage.

The figure was unmoving, despite the racket of the guttural, bellowing sounds this creature, one borne of nightmares, made. It thrust with its pitchfork, seeking to rouse the scrawled man from his idle slump. Bringing down and poking the device into the collapsed man’s back, without any inkling of mercy, steam hissed from the prongs as it pierced the man who lay there. Sticking the fellow, sinking its forked teeth into the folds between his dressed spine, the man produced his own visceral cry in return. He screamed in such a gruesome, unnerving manner, which echoed out across the expanse of the desolate hellscape — I hear it now. Tattooed into the walls of my mind! He leapt to his bloodied, bruised feet, stumbling as he did so, but managing to stay upright in his crooked balance, nonetheless, using all his power and his mental fortitude to do so. Knowing that had he fallen again, that production of unsympathetic torture would surely, without a doubt, have been applied by his abuser and prodded him once more with that scalding polearm. Plumes of smoke circulated above the man as he rose, simmering off from him and his unkempt, smeared, and creased attire. He gently sobbed to himself, quivering from his total mental collapse, hopelessly pleading with the monster to cease in its relentless cruelty. However, it did not listen; instead, it sniggered in its ethereal, ghastly grumbling voice, amused at the pain it inflicted. Laughing at the man’s attempts to bargain, with wicked, horrible cackling. Ignoring the figure’s concerns without a care, the deer skulled monstrous entity gestured with its violent hot stick, for him to rejoin the ranks of their march. I could only watch and pity the man and bear witness to his subjection to this untold misery and terrible horror — most of all, I found solace, and thought myself fortunate, in an admittance of self-regard, that I fared no part in this shared mass suffering. I did not envy him, nor his party of anguished souls, of their harrowing, capitulated plight of circumstances borne from this place, and their presiding daemonic winged overlord. Staggering and steering forward, fitting back into his place within the line of bedraggled wayfarers, no longer with his back turned to me, I caught sight of his face—I nearly shouted. Clasping my mouth with a hand, I retained the scream inwards, out of desperation not to draw attention to myself, with that sinister abomination so nearby. Despite my best efforts to remain silent, my palpitating fear overwhelmed my sense of reason and logic, and I gave in to my emotions; caution was thrown to the wind. I made a startled gasp aloud, in due cause to my horrified shock— “Dad?” I instinctively called out in a whimpered whisper, my terror, my realization of this, I tell you now, was immaculate. It seemed as if he could hear me, see me. Beyond the strange bearing of my being ethereal and without an earthly, corporeal form in this dream, I had believed I was but an invisible bystander. To most, if not all, of this uncanny dream world. Both ill-starred and malicious alike — or so I had thought. And despite my spiritual disposition, it appeared as though he was conscious to my presence, he turned, looking towards me, not through me, but, in fact, meeting my disconcerting, unblinking gaze. Abruptly, he stopped dead in his tracks, squinting and staring. His eyebrows jumped for a moment with his stupefied realisation, surprised and saddened, soft words left his pursed lips — “Magpie?”

Then, in a blink, I was snatched beyond the veil of my dreams, taken from that awful place of an ideated, parallel reality, transported back into my own familiar space of reality, one I was fond of and accustomed to returning to that darkened room again, alone. As seamlessly as I had been absorbed into that strange, terrible place, beget of my haunting dream, it was gone as quickly as it came. I found myself jolted upright from the sofa, from which I had drifted and fallen into my haunting slumber hours prior, into that godforsaken nightmare, drenched head-to-toe in a coat of oiled sweat — screaming. All the while, the plinking humdrum of cascading rain pit-a-pattered into a melody into the distance, pouring down the glistening window faces with silver forked streams.

For the remainder of the day, from which I had awoken from that former horrible dream I previously described, I was plagued with intrusive glimpses into the hellscape I had dreamt. These incursions of visions pillaged my psyche throughout the day, whilst I collected my belongings together and made preparations to leave Blackwell Manor behind — for good measure. I had planned to make the journey back home in the morning of the day following the next, but as you know, fate would not allow this to come to fruition. The next day, those relentless, repeated visions and consuming, imprisoning dreams escaped my mind and were gone from me. Though relief came over me in a breath of fresh air, the fortune it granted was fleeting for what would come next in the following sequence of terrible events. In the night of what would have been my last, in that haunted prison, I woke to sounds coming from within, upstairs — the noise of creaking floorboards and the clambering of footsteps shuffling above in a racket.

“At last!” The trickery of delusional optimistic thoughts rang throughout my head. I was filled with a warm, comforted relief after my initial, brief startled fright, precipitated by my rude awakening of what had been my only decent wink of due-spent sleep in this place since my arrival. I had presumed my father — the version I knew of him in reality, and not the depressing, slatternly illusion of whom appeared in my accursed dream, victim to that netherworld — had finally returned to this derelict abode he called home. Creeping up the stairwell with a bridled, tiresome saunter in my step, I made my way up the flight, bearing a flashlight in hand. Its bulbous glare caught my rising surroundings with every step I scaled in my yawning climb. Shifting shadows weaved, twirling between the abyssal rolling darkness, moving effortlessly in grace behind the beaming curtain’s blinding pale-coned cast. I ventured, ascending the bowing, weather-warped stairs, which were evident enough, even to the most oblivious of fools, that they were falling apart by the very seams —they carried the voice of flexing, fragile birch; even under the diminutive weight of my own petite figure. A bout of excitement came over me, and perhaps, even a mitigation of my lingering stresses, which appeared to alleviate momentarily. And yet, despite such, I possessed a great regard for caution, nonetheless. For all I had become subject to in this place, to let my guard down at that, or any given time, would have been a fool’s errand; to allow myself to become compromised and permit my mind to be cast in clouded judgment, sparse of reasonable concern for my own well-being. After all, the father I had known since recent times had changed with the metamorphosis into a castaway of his former self. Despite all of this, I missed him ever so dearly, and so, I fastened yet restrained my pace afoot.

Closing the gap between myself and the landing, I couldn’t shake the feeling, though I was being watched, as if I were being scrutinized by a legion of unseen eyes amongst the eclipsing dimness. Hidden and prowling within the shifting, brooding shadows of this midnight hunting ground, waiting their turn to strike. It lingered in my mind. Yet, whilst this feeling persisted, I drew further upstairs, nevertheless, albeit with that unnerving, daunting emanation that loitered at the back of my mind, which arose from the bounds of this instinct — this feeling. The hairs on the back of my neck unfurled, and surged forth across my limbs, a landslide of blistering goosebumps enfolded about my forearms, like a cascading breakout of hives. For just a fleeting moment, I thought I saw the glimpse of something move in the corner of my eye as the incandescent beam searched and convexed around the spiralled staircase. Just when the light braced, bending about the decrepit, cracked walls fitted with antique paintings, which decorated and hung crookedly about the stairwell with its uncanny Victorian decor, I could have sworn I saw a measure of movement come alive about one of the pictures; it was strange. Though at first, it was but a cursory, trivial glance, reigning from the corners of my eye, I thought I glimpsed shifting eyes animating about the portraits, albeit briefly. Despite the disturbance of the thought, I disregarded it as a trick of the mind, reasoning the causation to be explained away by the contrast between the sweeping light and the impenetrable dark. But then, as I had convinced myself and had talked down my paranoia-festering thoughts, again, I saw it! I snatched my gaze away from their black-painted beads, peering afar. And just as I had, I could see in the very corners of my eye, their fixed eyes withdrew, swaying from their statue-still guise, their soulless brims, comprised of an evil, abyssal void, rolled, regarding me with an eerie, weathered staring. I veered my gaze once more, in order to catch them in the act, briskly swivelling my neck, I pivoted, throwing my eyes to meet them. Rather than before, when their fixed eyes leered steadily onwards with an unbroken, oblivious forward-placed gaze, instead, they locked eyes with me. Christ, beloved! I cannot describe the unnerving possession that took hold of me in that moment.

With shallow breathing, I reached the landing of the first floor, albeit quivering with terror. I realised shortly thereafter that the source of footsteps did not originate from this floor, but above me — into the attic. I stayed by the attic landing for a moment, stewing over my brooding thoughts, wiping the building beads of sweat from my forehead. Holding off, procrastinating my climb into the loft. Being reluctant to progress upwards amidst troubled suppositions, I held onto the britches of the ladder’s rusted frame with an invigorated quaking in my grasp. It was a crutch of some short-found comfort through my distilled, stirring anxieties. I made attempts to pull myself together, taking long, deep breaths to ease the cold shivering. My grip eased in pressure upon the metal legs; subconsciously, I had clenched increasingly more tightly to the rickety ladder in my occupying apprehension. My squeezing lessened as I began to compose with my desperately applied meditation methods, in order to muster the confidence to brave my investigation into the attic. Yet, in spite of all the techniques I practiced in order to bolster my presence of mind and steel myself in that worrisome moment of thought, I hesitated. Like loitering upon the foreshore of a beach’s edge, diffident to embrace the cool waters. Every fibre of my being screamed with a feverous intensity, like that of ringing air raid sirens, imploring me not to advance, to abandon my voluntary post here and retreat to safety back home sixty miles southwards away. Alas, I was driven and coerced by my curiosity. Like the unfortunate fate that became of the cat in those cautionary tales of old. And just as the feline in those stories, I ignored the message, surrendering my pragmatic sense for the sake of curiosity. The desire to see my father eclipsed all else and was all far too damning, and all caution was away with the wind. Before I committed to finally scaling into the attic space, and before I had even placed a single foot upon a step of the ladder, the muffled footsteps that shambled in the vacuum above me stopped, installing an unnerving silence in their place. Of course, this did nothing to steer me my piling-up worries, but in fact, to caused them to manifest a turn for the worse, enticing further negative complications. Undoing the calming measures I had applied to myself. My prior terrors I experienced relapsed, transfiguring into a far more inimical shape than the state of spiralling dread I had eased and untangled myself from formerly.

Approaching through the loft hatch headlong, I peeked a sheepish glimpse into and about the gloomy-weathered room. It was nigh impossible to discern a thing in that pitch blackness, which dressed the uncanny-filled ambience. I thought for a moment that I saw figures lingering still about the skirtings amidst the shadows. After my unnatural encounter with those haunted paintings, I did not think anything beyond the bounds of possibility. Though plighted with an uneasiness about me, I scanned my flashlight to conclude these ambitious fears, but to my relief, they were merely old cloths hung up on racks, and other miscellaneous stacks of piled-up clutter. I perceived further, spying about the sweeping shadows as the pale shine searched about the dreary room. My stomach dropped in a startled jump in surprise as the light caught a shape. The veiled black mist draped a motionless silhouette, which stood in the centre of the room, in front of the easel that the accursed painting hosted, covered in the cloak of the dim darkness. Capturing the figure in the embellished, bright, stark illumination, it parted the murky pall from them. They stood every so eerily still, staring face forward, unmoving, not bearing a sway, nor even a flinch. ‘Dad? Is that you?’ I whispered, meaning to keep it to myself, within the confines of my head, but the words left my lip, nonetheless. Aloud. Unbuckling myself from my saddle upon the rocking ladder, I crawled, dragging myself inwards clumsily into the shallow ceiling space, sliding uncomfortably upon my stomach. Grunting in doing so, assuredly addressed my presence. Whilst I scrawled with my weight against the bowing floorboards, they creaked under me. After reeling my way through into the attic entrance, I slumped and outstretched across the warping wooden floor, with a definite inelegance. In all dues to my uneasiness about tall heights. It granted less than a discreet racket as the base of the ladder’s flimsy, rusted frame bashed against the lip of the hatch’s hollowed crevice to and fro. Again, I called out to my father, this time sporting a comforting tone, rather than strictly in the manner of some spirit of surprise. In attempts to pull from him his attention in his fugue state, which caused a whirl of confusion about my father. Or at least, this was what I believed in my presumptions. ‘It’s Maggie.” I continued, fostering this new calming method of approach, gently whispering, addressing myself so as not to startle him into thinking I were a stranger seeking to flank him. I glimpsed his ears twitch from behind, albeit briefly, and in addition to this, abruptly he spoke up, wielding an eerie candour. His ambushing words caught me acutely off-guard, startling me with the sheer suddenness of their abrupt starting. I recoiled, or more so jumped, jolting with a step backwards. I found a flurry come about me in the sense of a remembrance of my prior caution for concern. The words uttered slowly from him, and the gravitas of their weight drew a bountiful dread and tension about the stillness of the air. And a uniform of woeful worry struck me, for though it shared the familiar bearing of his voice, it was not him, or at least the man I once knew in only recent times. His words perturbed me; in fact, they terrified me. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you… The Crimson Circle?” My father kept repeating this phrase, posing me this vague and strange question. Repeatedly, like a broken record, all whilst I entered into a disposition of my own, tongue-tied into speechlessness. Utterly dumbfounded. I entered into a changed state of mind, it was a catatonic mentality of sheer bewilderment, rather than the absence of self-consciousness, and the mindless wandering became about from its dawdled daze. Over and over, he uttered the same demented phrase, becoming increasingly more emotionally charged each time he repeated himself, fostering a more irritated and visceral fervour, becoming feral, even. He turned, facing me, screaming it from the top of his lungs. I gasped, nearly shrieking out, but holding my tongue in this state of untold horror, which thrilled throughout my being with harrowing fright. A freezing, blanketed chill encroached. But it was neither his volume nor tone, nor his volatile tempestuous stirring which transmitted into me such an indescribable, harrowing fear — it was for what I had glimpsed, staring back into me. What I saw was none like the usual sort of his wonted self, no. It was but a distorted version. Though it shared a vague bearing of similitude to my father, it was an uncanny attempt at replicating his visage. Perhaps it was more so in likeness to that of a caricature to his image or, even, I court, a parable to a mannequin fashioned to mimic and to resemble him. Worse thoughts might draw up farcical theories of a bohemian capacity, like something far stranger than the naturally occurring concepts, bred from matters along the lines of, perhaps, in kind to German folklore. Though the thought is preposterous, what I saw — what I believed I saw — made sense for this idea, to the likes of an impressionist, a doppelganger, attempting to imitate his appearance. Yet, their impressions envisioned it all wrong, stark, exaggerating proportions cast with a brush tapped into an unnatural palette of erroneous strokes of unsettling offset colours. Projecting my father through a crooked, disturbing mirror, yielding distorted reflections through twisted forked beams, contorting the image of a strangely leathered capture. Bare and desolate were his eyes. Bored out and unfilled, made into awful pits, burrowed and bottomless, hollowed craters, chiselled with bloody scratches along the ridges of those vacant canyons. It was a twisted, hideous representation of my father. Perhaps what caused me to shudder most of all, in severity to this possession through its other-worldly, harrowing nature, was that despite all his — its — wretched screaming, his lips did not bat and flap, nor did his tongue spasm and squirm in all his rage. His mouth did not move, for he was absent from such a thing. This circulated a particularly horrible and nightmarish question in my mind. I pondered quizzingly. How could one possibly possess the capability to helm a shout, no less amass the means to achieve a voice, if they are without a mouth, in the first place, in which to scream? Dwelling upon this, the more I thought about it, the more it unnerved me. Truly. And it filled me with a dawning terror, one, perhaps, beyond comprehension. Slamming my eyes shut, unable to bear the bout of horror that I had undergone in that terrible moment and that which I stood face-to-face with, sustaining its bedevilling faculty any longer. To further shelter myself from the emotional carnage this strange phenomenon beset upon me, in a sense of desperate delusional — and perhaps, somewhat of a childish-like mindset — I wrapped my hands around my ears, believing it would cause this awfulness to dissipate and flee. Or even, to pick me up and transfer me away, afar from what haunting desolation I encountered.

Achieving the mental fortitude, albeit temporarily, I gained a fleeting possession of courage to reopen my welded brims and pry my shaking grip from the sides of my head. When I looked back into the room, he was gone, and there was a returned gaunt quiet. In his place was the painting which had evoked in me all my hauntings and the author of my visions and all their shivering compositions. It lay there, still and erect, eerily perched upon the derelict easel, dressed and leaking in a particular lingering foreboding. Taunting me. Though silence had taken hold amidst creaking floorboards, there was a sudden, sharp beginning of a psionic thrum bleeding into my mind, drumming into the walls of my skull with a distinct purring. This vibrating sensation was not a voice — in the true definition of the meaning, for it was wordless — I cannot explain it! It was without a voice, and yet it spoke nonetheless through feelings, memories, thoughts, but it had no tongue no. Perhaps in better terms to describe this impossible thing, it was more of a sentient thought, yet not of my own, but a trespassing one. Belonging to a separate entity from myself, perhaps. But, sure enough, despite my nonsensical theories on the true bearings of its designation, I knew all too well. It belonged to that haunted piece, calling me, drawing me in to stare upon its accursed, living, evil picture. After my growing encounters with some unknowable, eldritch-esque phenomenon, it was of little surprise to me then to discover that the manifestation it displayed was not the same as the one I had previously seen inscribed and sewn across the picture’s face. Plain facedly, the canvas dressed but as bare as a moonless night of veiled skies, parted of peeled stars. Blank and pale, stark in contrast to the surrounding pitch-black gloom. I had no choice in the matter — in fact, I never had a choice. That had been decided for me the moment I set foot inside this house, by this pulsing device that pulled me through by the objective of its whim. This whispering, aberrant beckon led me under the spell of its striking gaze. I became bewitched, capitulated to this enslaving hypnosis. Although I was without the liberty to vehicle my own limbs, I walked with protesting sloth towards the haunted artistry — like a lamb destined for the slaughter. Cognizant and mindful of the happenings about it, but helpless to stop it. Instead, I embraced it with a defeated acceptance. Yet, persisting in a defiant attitude, nevertheless, in the face of such helplessness to this ungodly, hypnotic puppeteering power. Or was it merely a consequential causation engineered from the prior horror of that mimicry — the catalyst to the beginnings of my consuming madness? I wager the latter. Even now, I question the legitimacy of my mind, and in turn, whether my account is nothing more than the insane ramblings of a maddened crone, or whether this is all but an elaborate dream itself, stored between a labyrinth of layered dreamscapes. But I digress.

Finally coming before the easel, I looked on at the linen panel, doused in an umbrella of the torch’s incandescent glow. It was a boring device, blank-faced, scarce of anything interesting to bear, dull, devoid of the strikingly fascinating and abstract details I had remembered. Which was initially the reason it enthralled me, through my fascination with the piece, by the lull of its fantastic colours, inducing me into a hypnotised trance. But then, blinking, a change presented itself about the piece. Like before, when I laid eyes upon the painting, a surge of colours materialised upon the canvas’ surface. It began to animate, to grow, and to take form, but transubstantiating into an undefined shape. The amorphous amalgamation of varying, dripping entities of moving colours dragged across the white vacuum like a wet, clawing, scrawled living thing. Staining the portrait piece in a chaotic array of contrasting, differing colours. The rolling, shifting colours repeated just the same as I had observed earlier in the week. In my mesmerised fixation, staring upon the perplexing descriptions of its obscene disposition, of its impossible, eldritch nature, it stabilised from its uncanny, slow, stuttered, unnerving movements, like an old stop motion film. It congealed, becoming set and dried, depicting a coherent and graphic picture of an alien, yet familiar landscape. What the former revolving, almost sentient-spirited painting came to portray — to my horrible realisation — was the same place I had been forced to tour through my haunting, vivid dream, just days prior, by my anonymous tether. In an instant, the visions of that netherworld flooded into my mind, and I remembered the trauma as I became assaulted with incursions of visions. Born from all the wickedness that encompasses that awful place — that stark, harrowing, desolate wasteland. But perhaps worst of all, my head was filled with the ghastly remembering image of its turpitude ruler. In fact, as I write this now, I wager that the entity was but one of its kind that reigned in abundance throughout that ghastly realm. And by saving grace, it was, perhaps, but by stupid fortune, or some crumb of mercy, that I stumbled upon and experienced the sight of only a single one of those grotesqueries — if you can call limiting an encounter with even one of those daemonic entities, fortune.

Without warning, a silent explosion of scarlet illuminated the room’s surroundings in quite the way I would imagine the resemblance in viewing the extraordinary event of a supernova. Beaming appendages of crimson lightning forks materialised in the glimpse of a blur, branching and jutting out from the epicentre of the canvas’ wooden and linen framed seams with their multiple, veined and slender, reaching tendrils. Good, God! It seemed as if it were alive, reaching out to me, seeking to grasp me by the ankles and drag me back into that Hell! The erupting, vibrant gradient passed through the attic, pulsating conscious electricity, travelling with fluctuating and pulsing, shimmering ripples, shooting in a racing expanse, spreading in shifting layered bands of light, escaping from the painting’s face. With the contorted light passing me, my flashlight faltered, flickering, till it drained of its batteries. One can only assume by their earthly known comprehensions. It was not just the canvas that came to glow under these ominous colours, that moved with animal-like movements — dragging its slimy trail across the breathing floorboards, crawling, crawling. But the attic space, too. The alive, spiralling light caught the less-than-yawning room in the rich red flush with firm purchase. It occurred, if but for a fleeting moment, before dissipating into thin air, with a sudden faded transition, returning the room into the prior all-encompassing, implacable darkness. Each time I blinked, flashes of different, fluctuating images appeared upon the amorphous tapestry. The first illustrated its original form, which I had first laid my eyes upon. The crimson star. And then, in a fleeting change, it showed me the image of my father, who I believe now, beyond a reasonable doubt, was to be the true rendering of my father, rather than that disappeared, poor imitation; bearing a face of untold agony due to the torture at the hands of those devilish, abhorrent creatures. I ponder. Was he stuck in that place of unimaginable terrors beyond the unknown? Or had I crossed the threshold of my perceived reality and truly lost myself in the deliverance of madness? Despite all my desire to tear my eyes from the painting and look away, I found myself without the willpower to do so. Then came the last of the damning pictures, which stowed into me a terror I had thought, until then, unplaceable. It presented the very happenings before me. The delineation illustrated the attic space, where I stood in helpless contention, staring at the eerie, nebulous piece that lay upon the easel’s podium. Behind my artform self, a crowd of silhouettes watched from the room’s skirting, dressed in tall, winding shadows. Upon them, they wore evil smiles, comprised of needle fangs which fitted their awful smirks. My being trembled with a quaking throb emanating from each limb, traced by this immeasurable fear. I dared not look back, for I knew, whether or not they were placed in reality, my mind would construct them, regardless, believing them to be within the shifting curtains of the shallow room’s shadows. My eyes were fixed wide, refusing to blink further. I stood waging an unremitting staring contest with the accursed painting. Fuelled by my unfathomable dread, which stemmed from the idea of what I might see if I turned, no less blinked — and I dared not spy.

Unable to steel myself, enslaved to the fragile impediment of my human limitations, the strain of my pried lids became too much to bear, and I capitulated to the need to bat my eyes. Despite the gravity of things, I faltered. My eyelids fluttered, only for a fleeting moment. Dreading what I might bear witness to next. I stewed in what haunting, preternatural visage the painting would have me see. What terror it might possess over me. I found, however, there was no significant change to the painting; it retained the basic premise and the finer details of its shape, unlike as it had the last former of times. By all accounts, it stayed, maintaining the last terrifying picture in persistence — well, all save for one excruciatingly terrible detail. Standing further ahead of the others, who remained hidden beneath the veil of the ebony shrouds, albeit for their awful grins, peaking through the pale rays. An accessory member to this daemonic company conjoined, lingering in the fair moonlight, which was the sole but scarce measure of luminosity that illuminated a portion of the room in faint brilliance. Albeit in a vague, scant capacity.

This shape towered behind me, with its arms taped to its sides. It was not merely the existence or the addition of this more recent figure that caused my mind to crack at the seams, but the sheer nature of its veritable and infelicitous appearance. I dare not describe the full scope of its disturbing, inhuman quality, for its magnitude to be seen is reality-shattering. Even mere written words dare be uttered. It is best inoculating the nescient lucky from the vast dark, unfathomable canyon of uncomfortable truths, too reaching for the human mind to express, perhaps truly, no less comprehend in the absolution of such true cosmic enlightenment. Nor would I bear an attempt to visualise its God-awful face — Christ, forbid! Such a thing cannot even remotely be designated the earmark of anything close concerning human! No, no. It is not a belief but a known. If I were to even permit the thought, I know well enough that I would untether from sound rationale once more, cross the threshold of my earthly reality, and enter into another episodic bout of madness to wash about my mind in the visualisation of it. Perhaps, it would not be an intermission as in previous circumstances, but of a far more damning prospect that I would never awaken from its final descent.

I needn’t turn to know where the sudden draught that abruptly carouselled my neck in the crypt of the tightly sealed attic space. Its rancid breath was forborne of subtlety. A wet, clawed limb approached and perched, laying soft purchase about the scruff of my shoulder. Stuck in a catatonic trance, bewitched through my feverish, shivering, all I could do was watch on as this ungodly thing caressed with its drooling, slimy touch, slathering the stretch of my arm’s length. From my other side, a separate, conjoining appendage encroached, soaked in the same reeking grime. It partook, fondling my shoulders gently with its warped, viscous talons, manifestly tracing its amorphous fingers down my arms with concupiscent intent. Before I could bear witness — feel — its grim, southern advancements, its shapeless, viscous oozing head-like form leaned into my ear and whispered. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The Crimson Circle.”

That is the last I recall of the happenings in the attic, for I fancy it swallowed me whole, into madness, those haunting figures waiting still in the blanket of the shadows. Bearing those terrible toothy smiles. Worst of all was the giant, grotesque, crippled creep, with its awful, crooked physiognomy, comprised of its many mucilaginous and gelatinous-limbed appendages. No less, the vivid and strange, inescapable dreams that shimmer and waver like the ripples of a dancing mirage on a balmy summer’s day. They blend, contorting reality, each world indistinguishable from one or the other. No longer am I able to relay which world I belong to, nor am I hereby tethered nor bound. My mind entreated a full surrender into my own delivering madness. Though I journeyed into the sudden tides of my ensnaring insanity, there was a flicker of an obstinate, wilful lucidity. Perhaps, but only for a time, for I had regained a sense of clarity about myself over the days I spent lodging at the estate. Which has allowed me the time to tell my account — God! How many days must have escaped me during this spell? It is a haunting question that I dare ponder, no less than obtain the answer. Perhaps this was founded in an attempt made by my mind, desperately grasping at whatever capacity of possessed sentience I might retain. Albeit in cluttered, jumbled fragments to temporarily remedy my dwindling, fractured sanity. Making all efforts to suppress the memory that remains burnt into my mind of the vivid constituted netherworld and all its horrible visions, but for a time. Or perhaps it was divine intervention or even the evil of this house that granted me one last interval of sobriety before my total succumbing to madness, so I might recount the warning I must deliver of this house and its dark, accursed possession that haunts this place.

I feel the world caving in around me. The pillars are decrepit and withered; the foundations of my sanity are rotten, corrupted at the root — I feel it crumbling before me, piece by piece. Distortions of a once conceivable reality are fading fast, becoming a gnawing numbness to a world of normalcy I once knew and held in dear consolation. I hear them coming now, scratching at the basement hatch. They whisper, calling me by name. “Maggie!” They cry out! “Maggie!” Mocking with infantilising taunting through sneering smiles, with concealed, sharpened teeth tucked between their forked tongues. Their mad, hurried steps quicken apace, scouring and skittering across the floorboards. Dozens of them — God, help me! My time is out. There is only one thing left to do before they breach the basement, and this fleeting clarity leaves me in a rambling, incoherent shell of the person I once was, and I accept their invitation as my father had, into that doomed underworld. It sways, staring from the rafters.

I pray you bear this warning well and solemnly acknowledge its verisimilitude, for you know the fate which soon comes for you as it has for me, so you needn’t a stern reminder. I have told you all you need to know. Go now, quickly, before it takes hold! I implore you, burn it! Burn it, I say! Burn it! Destroy that godforsaken painting of haunting quality, douse it in fire – burn the whole damn house down! Bury it. Assure none may unearth that daemonic, evil tapestry!

Credit: Elijah T. Goldacre

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