Once, among a new moon and dark clouds, without a single street-light to illuminate the way, a man walked down a cobbled road, abandoned and wet from a recent downpour. As this man walked, his pale face shining in contrast with his black hair, he whistled, breaking absolute silence with a mournful tune he had only heard in his dreams. His dreams were strange things. He reflected on his most recent dreams as he slowly meandered along with hands thrust deeply in his pockets and his eye searching for a single shimmering star that might be peeking from behind the clouds. His dreams were often about the stars. Not the giant bodies of fire and hydrogen burning endlessly and monotonously for billions of years, but the stars your spirit sees when you look at the sky on a clear night out in the country.
He dreamt of different worlds in that night sky, some filled with dancing ghosts, swirling inside sparkling fog every color known to man as well as some more beautiful than he'd ever known. Other realms were spectacular in their intelligence, with technology so advanced that it seemed like magic. There were worlds, however, and these he saw the most of, that were all dust and ruin, inhabited by beings he dare not picture even in his mind, lest they may crawl out of his imagination and into a world that needs no more evil.
This man, who, to protect his true identity, I will call Zach, as he walked down the abandoned street that dark and empty night, suddenly heard whistling and stopped, realizing it was not his voice that he heard. He listened to the sweet, tender whistling and noticed that it was the tune he had heard so many times in his dreams, dancing with the long lost ghosts, and running from the demons of his nightmares.
Now one thing you must know about this Zach, this was not the first time he had wandered down this lonely street. No, every night he could be found here, searching for something, though he could not remember what it was, as if he'd lost it in another lifetime. Every night he had walked and walked, but every night he had given up his ethereal search, pulling himself back into the reality he found himself in every morning when he awoke.
So when he heard this whistling in the dead of night, hearing for the first time this beautiful, lonely song outside of his dreams, he thought maybe the street was not abandoned, and someone had heard him carelessly whistling aloud and now was mimicking him, and whistling the tune for themselves. Despite his doubts, he was intrigued. He followed the unearthly music, down the cobbled road and through the darkness, until suddenly he found himself facing the curve where he always gave up on his search. Here the cobbled road bended, and arched out of sight into a, sometimes foggy, complete darkness. More than darkness. Absolute blackness. There were no buildings past this point that he knew of, and though he rarely saw other people on this road at night, he had never seen so much as a stray cat or a scavenging rat close to or beyond this curve, night or day.
As Zach stood at the edge of that curve, burning with the desire to go on, but held back by pure instinct, the song he had so often heard drifted farther and became softer with every fleeting moment. Suddenly Zach broke into a run, speeding around the curve and crying aloud, 'Wait, don't go,'� and praying that he hadn't lost the only clue he'd ever found to understanding his strange nightmares.
He didn't have to run long. Soon after rounding the curve, he lost his way in the shadows and had to slow for fear of falling over some loose rock or another unknown object. He felt his way along the street, all the while following that crystal-clear, angelic whistle, suppressing his ever-urgent thoughts that said the whistler was not so angelic. Soon he noticed, not cobblestones, but the crunch of gravel under his feet, and after what seemed like hours, the ground changed to tall grass.
Zach, so consumed by his curiosity and passionate desire for something more than the world he knew, walked for hours, desperately following the endless, entrancing melody that had slipped from his imagination into reality. By the time Zach collapsed from walking, with no food or water for what felt like days, he had no idea where he was, or why the sun had not yet risen. Perhaps he was losing his mind. He didn't feel insane, but did any insane person? As this thought occurred to Zach, he put his hand out, intent on pushing himself back to his feet in the darkness, and he felt a slab of concrete beneath his hand, strangely warm, though it was autumn and nighttime. What concerned him more was that the moment that Zach's flesh came in contact with the concrete, the mysterious whistling suddenly stopped.
'Wait!'� he cried, stumbling awkwardly to his feet. 'Don't stop! Where am I? Where are you?'� Zach's cries elicited no response, but when he stepped forward he felt a doorknob, and realized he must be standing in front of a house. Maybe the whistler is in there, he thought to himself, and to his surprise, the door opened freely with the slightest turn of the handle. A gust of air, smelling of mold and must, and something else which he really couldn't place, met him as he stepped past the worn, barren threshold into the entrance way of a large, dusty, but well-kept, antique house. Strange, he thought, when he closed the door to the house (so used to feeling his way that he didn't even consider it being dark) and the house suddenly lit up. Now what he found so strange in this is that, though he looked everywhere, there were no light bulbs, candles, nor any other objects that may light a house. The golden illumination, which strangely did not make him squint after the long hours of darkness, had revealed a worn couch, a rug, an old wooden staircase, and a dinner table, set for one, which was complete with turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy and dressing.
Now Zach had in no way forgotten what had led him there, but he was extremely hungry, so, not getting any response when he called out, he sat at the dinner table and began to eat. Zach still had a feeling in his gut that something very bad was going on, and so he planned to only eat what he needed to sustain himself; but when he had done that, no one had shown up to take the meal, and the turkey was quite good, so he kept on eating. He ate everything on the table with the exception of a few scraps of turkey meat that looked a little spoiled.
Once Zach was done eating, he stood and wandered around the first floor of the house, wondering how he had allowed himself to come there, and where exactly 'there'� was. Deciding to look around outside he went to the front door and turned the doorknob. Except nothing happened. He tried more vigorously, but the door would not budge. Zach thought that he would have noticed if someone had come through there and locked the door, but he apparently was not getting out tonight. He was extremely tired from the long walk and big meal, so deciding on continuing his search for the strange whistler in the morning, he wandered up the stairs to look for a place to sleep.
Upstairs there was not much light like there was downstairs, but Zach managed to find a room at the end of the hall with a very large, though slightly musty, bed. Thinking a few hours sleep would do no harm, and he would certainly wake up if he heard the strange whistling again, he laid down in the bed and instantly fell asleep.
But as always, Zach was tormented with inexplicable nightmares. In his dream he saw a gateway, a gateway as tall as twenty men, made completely of stone and glowing with strange symbols. This gate sat on ground similar to that of our moon, though Zach could see no planets in sight; only stars. On each side of the gateway stood statues of grotesque entities, reptilian in appearance but stronger, with more cruelty in their eyes and as many tentacles as a squid. Each statue held a spear and was enough to keep anyone from wanting to enter-had it not been for the music. For in this dream once again, Zach heard music, swelling and softening like the tides of an ocean, a harmonious melody that, even when he heard it, seemed like it could not exist.
Then, before his eyes, a spirit of a girl, dancing in a misty fog, with trails of sparkling colors flowing from her finger tips, appeared, dancing upon the moon with the starry sky as her background. The music seemed to emanate from her dancing, and slowly he stepped forward, past the stone guardians and across a glowing threshold that he had never crossed before. The dancing spirit grinned at him and before he got the chance to smile back, he woke with a start, and it took him a moment to realize that the music he continued to hear was no longer in his dream, but in the house.
Suddenly awake, Zach walked barefoot out of the room and into the hallway, listening intently for the music that he so longingly followed. He followed the music down the creaking hallway and down the stairs into the no longer illuminated house. He went through the now clean dining room and into the back section of the house, the crystalline melody growing louder and more intense as he ventured forth. As Zach stepped carefully through the darkness, he put his foot down only to find no floor. Following the sound he had stumbled upon another staircase going down, and though the rest of the house was wooden, these stairs were made of warm stone.
With each step he took, his stomach screamed louder and louder to turn back while he had the chance, but something in his mind, some curiosity, and need for knowledge, overruled his gut and he grew more excited with every step toward that glowing light in the basement. He noticed symbols, the same ones from his dreams, as they glowed a soft blue, the glow emanating directly from the stone walls. He vaguely wondered what they meant, and whether he wanted to know as he passed them, looking onward to the most captivating sight he'd seen in this world.
The spirit girl was there, dancing to her otherworldly music, upon what looked like a glassy mirror, or still, clear water, though her bare feet never quite touched the substance. Her dark green eyes shone under her black hair and colors unknown to this world flowed from her fingertips, swirling about her as mist. Her silk skirt, long in the back, did not have a bottom but also trailed away into soft, colorful smoke. Tentatively, but unable to restrain himself, Zach stepped onto the water-mirror, only to find that his feet could not touch it either. The music became background noise as the girl reached out her slender fingers, and Zach closed his eyes as he almost felt her touch, her fingers melding with his skin with a glow.
He opened his eyes to see a demon. Sharp, jagged teeth snarled in his face, blood dripping over dark blue, slimy lips and fire burning in the tiny slits it had for eyes. Zach screamed and fell backward, but as he fell there was no floor, and he landed a few seconds later on a hard, uneven pile of something. He lifted his hands to find blood and slime and turned to see a pile of skeletons, bodies and organs on which he was lying right at the top. Screaming as he'd never screamed before he clawed his way off the pile and frantically made his way to the wall, only to find himself next to a half-decayed body, chained to the wall and staring at him in absolute terror. He heard a noise and whirled around, back pressed to the wall, desperately wanting to escape the monster that glared at him. He tried to look away, to not look in its eyes, but as if some invisible force pulled his gaze, he ended up staring into bottomless fire. Not only at the fire, but through the fire'�through the fire straight into the depths of hell. He screamed. He kicked, he flailed. He tried to run, but suddenly found that, just like the poor soul next to him, he was chained in place to the wall, stuck staring into hell's burning pit of torment and madness'�1


'And when you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.'� 'Friedrich Nietzche.2


'Where did you find him?'� Asked a tall man, with white hair and a long white coat.
'The same place as the others,'� another man replied. 'If only they'd learn to ignore the dreams and get on with their lives, this wouldn't happen.'�
Zach screamed. 'Where am I? The screaming, stop the screaming! Demons and bodies, so many of bodies'�'� He turned toward the doctor. "What did you do! Where am I? What did you do to us!?"
'Doctor the tranquilizer please,'� the white-coated man said calmly.
'How much?'�
'Enough.'�
'No!'� cried Zach, 'Don't send me back there, you can't send me back!'� And these were his last cries before he slumped into his corner, face pressed against the soft white pad and eyes locked in horror, in madness, seeing things that shouldn't be.

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