The Night’s Plutonian Shore
Found amongst the documents of a late Doctor of Psychiatry. Names have been removed to preserve anonymity, suffice to say the writer holds an unusually high office.
My Dear Doctor,
You have helped me before, please, though I cannot make a personal visit at this time, diagnose my ailment though my descriptions of the symptoms as best you can.
The dreams are all the same. No thing but the same series every time sleep approaches.
It begins innocently enough. A walk, as one is accustomed to take. Traversing the streets towards… The night is still. The air is cool with mist. The sound of my footsteps alone reverberate. So little is visible through the fog. The pale light of the Moon is all.
The Moon. It hangs heavy in its shroud. Ones attention is not taken, not grasped. It is diverted.
I walk, towards the Moon. There is nothing but the Moon and the absence of it, a feeling of desolation. Hours pass (days, years, eons?), then it has gone, hidden behind a hill. I scrabble at the slope, desperate to reach the top.
In the lake the disc has doubled. I swim into the water. The reflection remains unbroken, there are no tears caused by the rippling waters. Then I am drowning, sinking. And the Moon is blurred by the waters above me.
Waking up has been terrible since the nightly visions began. Every time I feel the water filling my lungs. I feel myself falling into the abyss. Waking is freedom, made bitter by the unceasing dreams. They come at all hours and seem to resolve to the horrid conclusion in no waking time at all, though dream feels endless.
I have tried drugs to no beneficial consequence, and now resort to nightly tortures. Trying to sustain consciousness through the dark hours. I cannot even step outside in the darkness, for it is there, and it is horrible. But still it diverts, still it clamours for attention. I feel that one night I will go out and find it all as in the dreams, but I fear most of all the recent expansions.
Here I sink to the bottom, conscious of my body dissolving, of my mind becoming one with the water, but then it is no longer water but the rocks of the Moon. My body has gone, it remains on Earth, but there is another consciousness dwelling within it, laughing at me. One that has slept, trapped in the Moon, filled with hate since before the dawn of man. It has taken my rightful place, and I, its. I fear this malicious spirit stealing my body and leaving me frozen and screaming without a voice.
Help me doctor, for the attraction grows every minute.
Yours,
- X.