Bone Pattern

Shroud- September 28, 2014

Days have passed.  Days in which I lost myself.  I drew the blinds against the lingering heat, cloaked my apartment in an eternal twilight.  Days passed, and it was always 1:00 AM.  I made tea and coffee and forgot to eat.  I lost myself in that slim little book.  It didn't seem at first that I could get lost in those pages. It is only a chapbook, after all.  But forests of bone grew up around me from the first word.  I thought Tainted Violets was an experience.  Shroud is another thing altogether.

So, I don't know exactly what Fisher was doing.  Not precisely.  But I have an idea.  After days spent pinned like a moth beneath the spiraling empty eye that he made beneath the earth, I ought to be able to guess. I keep speaking of the pattern he made as an eye, and there is a reason for that.  It is an eye.  An eye and also a tunnel.  An open wound leading through unknown spaces and ending here below the streets of Denver.  Fisher made himself an invitation.  I do mean that, he turned himself into pretty treat, beckoning into the void for whatever waited there.

And something reached through and took him.  Is taking him.  

The bones in the cavern are just a delivery system.  Just an open door.

Whatever he has invited, it is in him, curled up and resting in that vast unfathomable space he has created for it.  And when it is ready it will rise through the burning hole in his belly.

I know what he has done.  Kind of.  I can guess at how.

I don't know what is waiting within him.

Even as I write this, I can feel that tunnel bearing down upon me.  Something watches me type. Inhuman eyes on the back of my neck.  I keep needing to stop to search my skin for pinpricks, for tiny gaping mouths, emptying into void.  The day outside remains warm.  Autumn has not yet fallen.  Cold is rising around me anyway.  A greater chill than I found in that cavern.  Greater than the streets in winter.  A terrible cold seeps through my skin, and I would say I know not where it comes from.  Except I do know, or I can guess.

I don't know what will happen to me.

And for that matter, I don't know where he got those enormous bones.  Giant's bones, resting in the earth.  How long must he have looked, all unknown to his sister?  

I would leave this entry here, with the description of  Shroud, if I could.  I would tell you only of my days lost in its pages.  Of how I stand always in Fisher's cavern now, no matter what else I may be doing.  Best not to tell you too much.  Best not to quote the seductive text of that book to you.  Truly, I would leave this entry here.  Come back another day with news of Gwendolyn or how the Weaver is healing and what she is making.  I would do this thing for you.  But I cannot.

That is not all that's happened.

This morning I opened my door.  Looked out upon leaves just beginning to turn.  The warmth of the day found me, as though from far away.  It wrapped itself around my shoulders like a friendly animal, and I looked up into a blue sky, patterned over with green and yellow leaves.   For that moment, I was free of the earth and the cold and the watcher that Fisher nurses.  I was free until I saw the letter tied to the railing of my porch with red ribbon.

Until I opened it to find an unfamiliar scrawl.

Lydia, Fisher's sister, wrote to me.

"Fisher said your name in his sleep," she said, and I don't know how he knows my name, not in his eternal slumber.  "He lay on the floor this morning.  Not where I had left him.  Not in his bed.  He lay tossed on the floor with a blackened eye.  When I lifted him, he said your name.  Something is stirring in him.  Something moves in the chasm in his flesh.  I can almost see it now.

What are you doing?  

Stop it."

The letter had a hole in it.  Near one corner, it looked like it had been burned away.  But when I lifted it to the light, no light came through.  I could not see my hand behind the hole.  

Something is spreading.

That is all.  You should know, even in your shallow sanctuaries, of what is coming in the deep.