I silenced the eye that dared to remember, Unlit the lantern that flickered with guilt. No more visions, only the ember Of truth left to rot beneath silt.
I drove the pen through the gate of knowing, Split the flesh where prophecy nested. Tore out the sun from its glass-walled throne, Where judgment once festered and nested.
Blinded the witness crouched in bone, That sentinel of shame and sky. Scraped clean the window God looked through, And left it weeping in my eye.
Exiled perception, crowned the void, Made covenant with endless night. Let the ink become my blood, Let the socket drink the light.
“No More visions, no more Sins. I Silenced the seer inside. The Gate of knowing… Violated”
In daylight, Dr. Lyman Harris was the most forgettable of men. A pathologist by training, he worked in the sterile basements of St. Erasmus Hospital, cataloging causes of death with the same detachment he once used for collecting moths as a boy. But at night, Lyman left his locked apartment, barefoot, eyes glazed like blown glass, and roamed.
No one knew at first. It was only after Mrs. Dobelin, the ancient widow in 4C, began finding muddy footprints outside her backdoor and her cats disappearing one by one that the rumors started. “Sleepwalking,” someone said. “Somnambulism,” corrected another, trying to sound educated. Theories bloomed like fungus. Drugs. Satanism. A cult.
They didn’t know Lyman was no longer human in the dark.
His dreams were black and weightless. There was no vision, no voice, just the call of some hunger. It began three months ago, after the accident, when Lyman performed a hasty autopsy on a vulture brought in by local wildlife control. The bird had been feeding on livestock infected with anthrax. The attending techs had gagged and left the room, but Lyman had stayed. It intrigued him. How could this creature feast on rot and walk away unscathed?
He found answers in the bird’s blood. Acid strong enough to dissolve bone. Antibodies to botulinum and anthrax like ancient shields. The gut, a festering cathedral of death made sacred by resistance. It was not immunity. It was dominion. And something inside him wanted that.
The first night, he dreamt of biting into the flank of a roadkill deer. He awoke barefoot in bed, his feet muddy and lips streaked with black. He assumed it was a dream. Until it happened again. And again. He began waking with bits of fur under his nails. One morning he found a raccoon paw in his mouth. Then the dreams changed: he was flying, not walking. His arms wide, catching thermals over the highway. He circled bloated deer, watched from above, and descended like judgment. What should have killed him never did. He consumed meat green with decay. A bloated fox leaking bile. Maggots writhing like caviar. Once, a dog carcass laced with antifreeze. He vomited only once, and even that tasted sweet on his tongue.
He felt no sickness. No fear. Instead, a kind of clarity. A peace.
Lyman began recording himself. He installed cameras, trying to catch the nocturnal wanderer. But every morning the files were gone, erased, or corrupted with strange, screeching audio that sounded like wings and wind over stone. In time, he stopped locking the doors. Why pretend? The beast inside him was him now.
One morning, after a particularly vivid blackout, he woke in a park. His clothes stiff with dried blood. A man was dead nearby, throat torn open, ribs cracked, face eaten away like bark stripped by fire. His wallet said Father Jules Montgomery. The police would find the body in hours. Lyman calmly walked home.
He came to believe he was chosen. Not cursed. Not sick. But evolved. He recalled something from childhood: a Persian myth about ḠUL, demons of the desert who walked like men by day but fed on corpses by night. Not evil, simply necessary. Cleaners of the dead. Priests of rot. And hadn’t vultures once been considered sacred? Lyman began experimenting. Injecting himself with strains of botulinum toxin. Anthrax. Cholera. Nothing happened. No fever. No paralysis. Not even a twitch. He was becoming something new. Something posthuman. A noctambotulist, one who walks in sleep, but feasts on death.
By the time the city connected the dots, the missing pets, the desecrated graves in Resurrection Park, the half-eaten coroner’s assistant, it was too late. They raided his apartment. Found walls scrawled with anatomical sketches of vultures and mythological creatures: ḠUL, wendigos, preta with distended stomachs and weeping eyes. In the freezer: raccoon skulls, cat vertebrae, human femurs boiled clean. But no Lyman. Only feathers. Only claw marks on the fire escape.
Some say he still walks. That on moonless nights, in suburbs and slaughterhouses, you might glimpse him hovering over a fresh body, his mouth smeared with rot, eyes dull with sleep, but smiling. A noctambotulist. A man who found peace in Decay.
In the cosmic womb of primordial disgust, His essence spewed, incarnate shit, Consciousness is born from rancid bile, A world baptized in vomit and guile,
He staggered, half-formed, on vomitous plains, Eyes like ulcers soaked in pain, Prayers convulsed in putrid grace, A crawling soul in poisoned space,
God puked into waking flesh, Seraphic maws ripped his spirit fresh, Grafted on wings of carrion delight, Feasting on his dying light,
Feathered fiends, horns awash in gore, Slammed his soul on heaven’s floor, Serrated tongues licked divine decay, Dining on the plasma he spat away.
His Heartbeat stalled in fractured hymn, A requiem drowned in putridity, No prayer could save that wretched form, It was their feast in their bloodstorm.
Spit-out Deity, hollowed and torn, Birthe in bile, instantly mourned. Servile Wings devouring the last breath’s scream, Gnawing the carcass of a shattered dream,
God puked into waking flesh, Seraphic maws ripped his spirit fresh, Grafted on wings of carrion delight, Feasting on his dying light,
Left in the abyss, a void so divine, No divinity remains, just rancid time, Crawling from bile to birth anew, Spawned into vomit that once was you.
Cosmogony: Cathedrals of Falling Light
In the beginning was the Rancid Birth, when God, undone by cosmic sickness, vomited the very seed of consciousness into the void. The angels, ravenous for divine substance, descended upon that putrid well, devouring each blistering drop. Intoxicated by the raw essence of creation, they staggered madly until their wings collapsed and their hearts failed. Their carcasses, great ivory-pink husks, fell like dying stars. From each corpse gushed ichor, coagulated sinew, and quivering marrow. These became the earth, the seas, and the bones of the world that would be.
Leaked Diary Entry – Found beneath the utility tunnels of Resurrection Park Author Unknown.
They told us it would be beautiful. I remember the first time we powered up the PMLI system. Postmortem Machine Learning Interface. The name sounded sterile, safe. Like it belonged in a lab, not a cemetery, a shrine to human memories. We were nervous. Excited. And when Sofia opened her eyes, eyes that had been closed in death for twelve days, I thought I was watching history rewrite itself. She blinked. She cried. She spoke her son’s name in the exact same tone she used to. It felt like a miracle. I shook Dr. Thana’s hand that day. He said we’d ended death. Actually he got it restarted, a cold start.
The others started coming back. At first, they were perfect. Too perfect. Like watching people act out their lives from behind a pane of glass. The smiles held too long. The silences between words stretched just a little too far.
Then came the dreams. The Blightmares, we called it. They all started dreaming about the same place. A black sky. A flat field of ash. Wind that made no sound. And something tall… too tall, moving just at the edge of their vision. None of them could describe it properly. Their mouths twitched when they tried. At first, we wrote it off as neural distortion, ethereal memories from synaptic reassembly. But I started seeing it too. I hadn’t died. I don’t remember dying. I never flatlined. I never plugged myself in. But I’ve seen the field.
Last night, the lights in the lab flickered out. When they came back on, one of the revived, Popula Vought, standing in the center of the hall, whispering to a wall that wasn’t there. I called to her. She didn’t hear me. But when I got close, she turned and said: “It knows you now.” I haven’t slept since.
I think the interface does more than reconstruct the dead. I think it opens something. A connection, maybe. A path. I think we reached too far and someone or something reached back. And whatever we brought with us didn’t come alone.
If you find this… Burn the server rooms. Don’t let them keep coming back. Not until we’re sure they’re still human. Not until we’re sure we’re still alone.
Gregor Samsa woke up one morning, but was it really him? Or was it the thing that had always been there, crawling beneath his skin, waiting? The Body is a betrayal. A man becomes a disgusting being and the world does not end. The Horror is not in the transformation but in the silence that follows: The family had dinner night after night, Great Plays the Violin, the walls close in. He is dreaming awake, the abyss hums. Gregor does not scream, he observes, he accepts it. Yet, he crawls, he dies. And Even Dying he is more alive than the ones still standing. What is a body after all? A prison? A shell? A thing to be discarded when it no longer serves. I think the tragedy is not the fact of Gregor becoming an insect, but that he was already one, but only now they see him, only now he sees himself. A Family that sighs in relief when he’s gone, the room is aired out. Life goes on, and yet, what remains? A Stain? A Memory? A Shudder. The truth is, we are crawling, some of us just hide it better.
I dwell beneath. Not in cellars, not in dungeons, but under the thin crust of what you call life. I have not been exiled. No, worse: I have been tolerated. I am not misunderstood. I am understood too well, which is why you look away. You smell the rot under my smile and still shake my hand. You know what I am capable of, you’ve seen it, or felt it, and yet you let me pass. No punishment. No confrontation. Just your affective nods, your artificial warmth. You fear the truth more than the harm I carry.
I am evil. That’s not confession, it’s geography. I was born into this cavern and I chose to stay. What chills me is not my corruption, it is that no one tried to stop me. Once, I hoped someone might drag me into the light, burning me back into something resembling a man. But instead, they offered invitations. Applause. Polite disinterest. A silent pact: You don’t expose me, and I’ll keep my chaos quiet. They call it civility. I call it cowardice.
I feel nothing. Not for others. Not even for myself. My heart beats… mechanically, indifferently… as if it never belonged to me. Emotions come dressed as echoes, faint and directionless. I try to remember what it felt like to ache, to desire, to love. But all I find are the husks of those words, their meanings long expired.
And still, I ask: why haven’t you stopped me?
You praise empathy, compassion, morality. But when it matters, you retreat. You anesthetize yourselves with screens, causes, and empty words, hoping no one notices the moral vacancy behind your curated concern. You treat cruelty as an inconvenience, not an emergency. If I am a monster, I am not alone. I am the mirror. I am what festers when no one bothers to care enough to resist.
I’ve tried to feel. Believe me. I’ve clawed at the walls of this inner silence, hoping to draw blood. I’ve hurt others to see if guilt would rise like smoke. I’ve watched people cry, listened to their pain with the precision of a scientist, measuring the depth of my indifference. Nothing. Not even disgust. You think evil is fire and rage. You think it howls. But no! Evil is quiet. It sits. It watches. It does not flinch. It’s the stillness after the scream, the place where no echo returns.
They no longer expect kindness. That is how deep the dullness goes, not only in me, but in you. We are mutually anesthetized. I am not the only one underground, you are here too, just better dressed. And when I speak, it is not to confess but to mark territory. This interior, this echo chamber of unfeeling, is mine. And I ask again: where were you? Why didn’t you come for me? Why did you let me rot? Maybe you didn’t think I was worth saving. Maybe you weren’t either.
I am beginning to wonder if the human heart is not lost in a moment of violence, but rather in the slow erosion of feeling, a soft disappearance. One day you forget how to cry. Another day, how to ache. Then, finally, you forget that anything ever mattered at all. I suspect I’ve already reached that place. And if not, then I am close. Although some part of me still speaks. Still watches. Still writes, but why?
Perhaps I do not want salvation. Perhaps I only want to be seen in my ruin. Not fixed. Just noticed. Witnessed like a ruin in the desert, its architecture still intact, even if no soul dares enter. Perhaps this is not a plea. Perhaps this is a eulogy.
Yes, I write again. Just because i can’t scream anymore. Not Cowardly. There’s something coiled in the folds of my tired breath. Something Constantly aching. Something that aches to name the nameless. But it always fails. It’s hard to live in the pause between the thoughts, where things aren’t quite dead and not fully alive. I think I have been living in the parenthesis of existence. Like living permanently into an airplane, you are always in the between, never there or here.
Life is my luminous trap. This net made of invisible thread taunt and shimmer things I have never asked for: birth, time, the unstoppable passage of moments. I didn’t choose this. I was thrown into this like someone tossed into water before knowing how to swim. And now I tread. Tread. Tread. Tread.
I wanted to believe that there was a meaning. I hunted it like an animal, sniffing traces of it in music, movies, art, in the absurd curve of a cat’s spine as it stretches in the sun, in the tremble of a leaf before falling down. Sometimes I think I almost touched it. But it resolved under my fingers like smoke.
What do I hold on to? The fact that I am still breathing? But again, what even breathing feels like betrayal?
And yet.
I notice the light on the wall changing color, the hush of the air before the rain and the mellifluous petrichor afterwards. The way I suddenly feel that I AM being without need to explain it.
Most days I don’t feel like continuing. Not from courage, not from hope, not from obligation. I continue because something trembles deep inside. Some pulse that resists extinction. A fragile, flickering yes whispered inside the no.
Clarice wrote because she didn’t understand herself. I don’t understand myself too, and the reasons that brought me here. But perhaps, PERHAPS, this not understanding is the reason.
Black Holes Whispering in Tongues 