Run. Get the fuck out of there now.

My legs burn as I look back. They stream out, as if some egg-timer indicated when to begin all this. I see an old office building. I'm tempted to crawl in there. It'll be too obvious. I pump and chew the air. Somehow they are in the distance, unable to see me. I'm able to outrun them.

* * *

The mountain is a hollowed maze of corinthian earth. Ceilings stretch beyond where I can see them. I carefully step along giant boulders. There is a dull off-green light that comes from nowhere. I hear more than feel the wind. It's so quiet I'm continually startled, as if my scuffling has finally awoken something. I am at home in a foreign land.

And then I hear her sing. It is soft, and simple. The caverns are neatly filled with a haunting sadness; it is impossible to fathom its age.

* * *

There is a candlelight burning in a study several thousand miles away. An older man in his seventies is unable to sleep. He has put on a pair of glasses whose lenses are not nearly thick enough to allow reading. He looks through a window, to a white-blue light. He knows what I know, has studied what I've studied. I will at some point have dealings with this person or, more accurately, one of their possessions. It is a simple book, approximately 120 pages; it is noteworthy because it has nothing of note about it. I know this book. It is handwritten in a delicate way. The pages have no lines. The paper is simple and efficient. The thing can't be any bigger than an index card.

This is an important book. It contains things I have intentionally forgotten. It contains a series of false statements that are more fury than sound, and less sound than substance. It is an opinion of an opinion of direct relevance to me. It is about subject matter than I have rarely found of any practical merit.

Somehow this book and I will meet.

* * *

The beast has been fought back and contained. I was on-edge and hesitant to go into work. All I could typically feel was anger. Followed by fear. I had so many setbacks. I chose some of them unintentionally out of desperate stupidity. Others just landed into my lap, like poison-tipped cocker spaniels.

It is a hot anger that can be suppressed. The hotter it becomes, the more irrational and paranoid I become. I begin to channel the most destructive aspects of myself, and come up with elaborate ways to introduce them to the objects of my anti-affections. Things are no longer people. These are the basest instincts that demand satisfaction.

I am taken to a depth of depravity where I begin to covet hording people recreated by my whim. It becomes a matter of variables, ideas, and whispered assents remembered with ringing clarity.

I want to make them hollow versions of themselves for my pleasure and amusement, to be used on the occasions where and when it suits me.

And then I realize, and then I quit thinking that way.

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