Facing One's Demons

Imagine a garden vast, large as a stadium, with ivies, unruly bushes, surrounded by gothic iron fences. On the other side of it a mansion, right beside the edge of the world.

His goal is to reach that mansion, no matter the cost. He doesn’t know why, or what awaits him there. He doesn’t care. He can go nowhere else, anyway. He has no clue how he got there, however, the place seems quite familiar to him. Looking up at the sky, he sees a crimson, cloudy veil, as if God himself had bled upon the heavens. He knows it’s time. Time for what? Time, only, will tell.

He hurries through the large exterior, only to find himself against a grotesque sight. Outside the main entrance of the mansion, hundreds of disfigured monstrosities, once human, perhaps. Demented, crippled, animalistic, inhuman, as if they had been drawn by a mad artist and then washed out, yet so dreadfully familiar.

He takes of his long coat and uses it as a large steel fan, bladed on the edges. Even he, right as you do right now, questioned this act and found it ridiculous, yet he chopped and hacked and slashed through the monstrosities, leaving others split in half, others dead and others even more crippled than before, not once wondering about his motives. Only his goal: to reach the mansion.

He entered. A nice Victorian atmosphere, with red velvet covered walls and wealthy belongings. On the walls worn out pictures of the owner’s ancestors, perhaps. In front of him, a large marble staircase. He proceeds to climb it, when suddenly, at the right side of the stairs a heavy wooden door opens rumbling. Was it there before? It doesn’t matter now, because the voice calls him. A voice loud, yet soft, deep and heavy, as if it is coming from inside his head, or inside the earth itself. “Come!” it says. He runs towards the calling.

A large backyard reveals itself. Here, there sky is clearer, although still red, and a blinding red sun shines. A stone yard ending abruptly into the cosmic void of the world’s edge, with colossal walls protruding through infinity. He now sees the one whose voice is as mighty as his appearance. A demon great in form, one that words cannot describe. Tall as the infinite walls, themselves. He knows he is a general. General of whom, to whom and for what is unbeknownst to him. He just knows. Their fight is legendary. At some point, the demon grins and backs away. He then releases his fingers, which become large, disgusting worms. They attack him and as he cuts through them, he suddenly awakes, as if from a vision, walking in a street.

He didn’t know what was true anymore. Seconds before, he was fighting a large beast and now this. He was just taking a simple walk, in a simple city, in an even simpler reality. “Come to me!”. What was that? “Keep walking!”. The same bizarre voice was, once again harassing his mind. He knew it was real! He kept walking, as the voice commanded, until he reached a tall building. Outside there was a fat man with a dirty white shirt. “Welcome,” he said, laughing through his teeth. “Let us go inside”.

Inside his apartment there where all shorts of society’s scum. Drug addicts, infectious whores, mobs, drug dealers, murderers, all having fun against each other. The fat man introduced him his wife, the alpha of the whores. “She has all the illnesses in the world. Why don’t you fuck her, eh?” he said laughing ironically. She took him to the room where she “did” her customers. There, he saw a stand with two swords. One was the sword of the demon, the other was a fake copy of it. Like it was his intention from the beginning, he took the sword out of its sheath. At that moment, the demon started shouting, in terrible pain, as if all the people in the world screamed in agony. And then came clarity.

He saw a figure with a long red coat. It seemed gigantic. As he was slowly lifting his eyes upwards, he could see the garden with the monstrosities, the mansion, the backyard with the infinite walls, his fight with the general and everything else, patterned upon the silhouette’s red coat. In fear, he kept watching, as the face of the old demon was revealed to him. It was his face, only colourless, older and grotesque. Now he knew…