November 25
I return again, I look around relieved to see no cherry oak door. I hear a door creak open behind me. I turn around. The door leads out to a courtyard with thick, lush green grass. I walk into the room and the door predictably closes behind me. A few yards in front of me stood a table with considerably familiar figures sitting around a long table. I drew closer to investigate. These familiar figures were in fact my community counterparts in the institution. As fitting as ever, Jones sat in proud honor at the head of the table with the other fellow patients on either side, all of them drinking tea. In addition to this each one of the bizarre brained men were crowned with what looked like the tissue paper crowns obtained from Christmas crackers. Throughout this entirely bizarre spectacle, I pondered what this could all mean when my thoughts were interrupted by my name being called or rather chanted out at an alarming volume. It was then that I raised my eyes and saw that they were raising their glasses towards me as though they were toasting. To which I queried, "What are we celebrating?" Though they did not directly answer me, the answer came speedily from Jones in his artificial and candid kingly speech. "Hail! Hail to a king of kings. A man who is the insane of the insane! Behold the bigotry! Ponder his pride! Hail! Hail! Hail!
Aside from my sensibilities having been darkened and burdened by the ensconced memory of the horrid dream that had assailed me, another horror had approached in the wee hours of the night before the dream. For as my brain was in a reproachful attitude and stubbornly refused me sleep, I lay awake with my eyes painfully aware of every whisper and shift in the shadows. The window held back little in noises and across many acres arose a disturbing roar of creaturely vocals from the night as every thing that scuttled or trotted and every thing that flew in this winter burst out anachronistic chirps, yowls and caws and there it became distinguished as a wave progressing to my position proceeded and arrived as a maddening din of discordant cacophony infecting the lunatics and psychotics causing them to shriek in their cells and then all suddenly dimmed to an unsettling silence. It was here in this moment that I became acutely aware of an abated tick and a tock and the creaking of a swaying pendulum. Soon my attention grew more attuned to the sway of that pendulum swing and somehow knew well that this clock drew near to toll the hour. It resounded darkly through the halls. Bong…one, bong…two, bong…three, and so forth it drew to the twelfth and yet chimed one more to thirteen. And while I, being regularly not superstitious, would scoff at a single tremble given from a man in reaction to such a thing, I in this unfortunate ominous hour drew my covers about me as I soon became aware of a figure before me. It slinked in the dark and something in its face split, a blacker night in the form of a leering smile. And in my head played an awful cinema of chaos unleashed, of flesh being rent from bone, of darkness overriding light and of breath being drawn from living lungs. These being the darkest moments I knew not what would assuage a man's senses or drive such a pestilence to the deeply fathomed abyss. But I uttered something, I knew not why, but I uttered it all the same and an animalistic screech arose from those shadows and the horror whispered off.
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