A Demon's Tale

Chapter Eleven

- Phantasma -

I had been walking for quite a long time back the way I had come, now walking in the opposite direction of the moon. The tall trees reminded me of my own insignificance compared to this world. I kept hearing strange whispers and I saw shadows move. I was constantly on my guard still. I felt a chronic anxiousness. I was not allowed to get a break for a second. There was a potential danger in every direction. The bug-like monsters could come from above. The strange imp-like humanoid figures could attack me from any quarter. There were creatures crawling in the mud coming up from underneath the ground below. And even if I tried to secure my back by backing up to a tree, there were creatures climbing in the trees as well. But as tragic as it was, I was getting used to the feeling of uneasiness. It was so chronic that it had become normality.

I saw the ghost-like figures come in and out of existence, some manifesting almost completely solid, while some remained transparent. As if completely lost, like blind people, aimlessly walking around and merely there, both in a sense of awareness or physical state. The creatures however were very much visually real, solid, and prominent. They appeared everywhere now.

I could feel it crawling under my skin in the same manner that I could see things crawling under the ground. Shivers went down my spine as I saw another one of the creepy centipede-looking creatures spiral down one of the trees. It was an 'itchy', 'restless' and 'crawling' kind of anxiety creeping inside me. 

There were big spider-like figures with bone-like structures and hard spiky shells like that of crayfish, jaws like that of mammals, and stingers like that of wasps. They were climbing among the web-like vines. They seemed to weave new strings attached to the dendrite-like vines, but these new webs were very dark and had what looked like a very deep-dark-purple and dark-blue color as if made of some kind of toxic chemical infecting whoever and whatever came in contact with it, as even the otherwise silicon-like vines of which they had been spun from also became infected.

I saw one creature completely entangled inside this web. I could clearly see how it had been struggling to break free, but it seemed the poison had killed it before it had managed. Its body seemed to have become completely black and hardened wherever the web attached to him as if those parts had gone into necrose. I also saw another big thing hanging from a tree. At first, I thought it was another one of the cages hanging from the trees, but then I could see that it was another creature, wrapped in, completely mummified by this dark web, hanging from a web rather than a chain. 

For some reason, it seemed these toxic webs mainly covered the sick and more rotten areas, and they seemed to target only the weak and malformed creatures, the ugliest freaks of nature. These monstrous spiders were at least twice my size and some of the webs they spun were as thick as my own forearm. I could see them diligently working in the shadows and see their many red and purplish eyes glow. 

Their presence evoked a very different unsettling form of anxiety. It was like a self-conscious kind of anxiety, one which caused me to always be on the watch for these webs, but also think about whether I was considered to be a target. Was I considered one of the weak ones? Was I considered one of the freaks? It made me very uneasy and precarious about my own qualities.

And then there were also these smaller spider-like creatures, their bodies looked like single eyeballs; eyeballs with spidery legs climbing around or sitting in the trees, staring at me as I walked by, giving the illusion that I was being watched by multiple freakish beings lurking in the trees, even though they were just single eyeballs. 

Every now and then I would see eyes of different colors shine up from within the shadows from actual beings with eyes, some belonging to the imp-like creatures that seemed to be stalking me, some belonging to other weird kinds of creatures I had not all yet been able to identify. All these eyes appearing everywhere evoked yet another kind of anxiety. It made me completely paranoid.