Visitation

by Daniel Gabriel

Can darkness move?

Does the web of life disappear within it, or does it coagulate, like old blood spilled out from its living source?

Who rules the night?

It is not nightmares that prompt my questions.

The soaked sheets, the aching head, the trembling hand on the water glass afterwards: these are common enough.

It is only that when the visitations come, they come at night.

And in the restless hours that follow, while the barque of the sun still journeys through the underworld, I wonder many things. . . .

In India, there are holy men who pierce their flesh with metal spikes.

There are those who can still their breath so that a mirror held to their lips is not even fogged.

There are devourers of dung and living beetles and the scalded flesh of infants dead before their time.

Can those who say the dark powers are illusory convince the trance masters of Luzon?

The zombies of Haiti?

When men walked in fear, bypassing the circle of tumbled stones sleeping on the Wiltshire plain, were they benighted primitives or wise beyond our understanding?

For this is how it comes:

First like a scratching in the cranium . . .

then something sharp and dark and thrusting . . .

a flutter of furred wings beating down through sleep and the Pres­ence, infinitely malign, weighted on my chest . . .

The darkness is alive.

I am drowning in it.