My grandfather warned me always to say the words before going into the attic. He said the attic was a dangerous place to enter unprotected. For years, I followed his advice, even though the words themselves were nonsense to me.
Then he passed away.
I became an adult, and adults begin to see the world differently than children. Things that once seemed serious become silly and irrational. And so it was that one day I climbed the ladder to the attic saying nothing.
After finding the antique snow globe I’d been looking for, I got on my hands and knees, backed towards the hatch through which I’d just climbed, and dangled a foot into the square opening, searching for the step-ladder I knew to be there. But instead of emptiness, I felt something unexpected—something different—something cold and wet—
Instinctively, I pulled my leg back up! It dripped with an opaque darkness.
I turned and peered down through the hatch, expecting to see the second floor of my childhood home—but what I saw instead was the near-perfectly still surface of a black liquid: blacker than the deepest night.
I ran now to the only window in the attic, which had long ago been shuttered, and pried the shutters open. Expecting to see my neighbourhood under a bright summer sky, I gasped—greeted by the sight of an endless charcoal sea beneath a crimson sky across which lightning spread like pulsing veins.
My own heart thundered within my chest, and for a time I stood paralyzed, staring at the great landscape of doom before me.
I came to several conclusions.
First, that the attic was a vessel propelled upon the surface of this stygian sea by an unknown force. Second, that this movement was toward some purpose, as in the distance far beyond there appeared a singular landmass.
Clutching the snow globe as if it were my sanity, I receded from the window and sat beside the open hatch.
I can’t say for how long I sailed.
I remember only that at some point, struggling against unconsciousness, I dropped the snow globe—
It hit the attic floor—the attic itself trembled—and when I at last picked up the agitated orb I spied within a world of swirling snow, and through it, seeing out the attic window, I was astounded to discover that there too the heavens had opened and become a blizzard.
The temperature plumetted and a tremendous wind insinuated itself into the attic.
I huddled, wrapping myself in whatever warmth I could find, as my exhalations turned to vapour and the vapour persisted in the air until, thin, freezing and famished I made landfall. I could not tell you the interval of time that’d passed except that it was inhuman, and I felt in the dry marrow of my bones that I should already be many times dead.
Yet out of the attic I crept, onto a craterous landmass resembling an alien ocean floor ascended to the planetary surface of a world ne’er imagined by me. Old, it felt; and vast. As up its craggy beach I crawled, I breathed in the foul atmosphere, which reeked of antiquity and decay.
Cresting a hill that marked the end (or beginning) of the beach, I saw before me an unfathomable expanse with such pure clarity that my mind rejected a full appreciation of it, dosing me instead with fragments: ruined cities, lost tribes, inverted mountains, lakes of obsidian, avarice and wonder, and everywhere pedestals upon which floated spheres—slowly spinning, worlds.
It took my breath away.
On I trudged, and on, older and weakened with each pained step, until I found myself on a phosphorescent path leading to a pedestal on which nothing floated.
I heard too a rhythm, following me as the final moments of daylight follow the passing of the dusk—faintly, in anticipation of their own extinguishment by the fall of absolute night. And too I saw its source, for emerging out of the waters behind me, approaching on either side, marched two columns of hideous humanoid sea creatures with flat, catfish faces and tentacular whiskers, bearing fishbone spears, with which they struck the ground as they marched.
Whensoever on my fragiled body I fell, they righted me. Although sans their aid I would have perished, their mucilaginous touch curdled my soul.
Having approached the vacant pedestal, I ceased, the snow globe drifted away from my gnarled hand as if by a hitherto undiscovered magnetic property, and the creatures began to chant word-song composed in an ancient tongue that impossibly I understood, sounds out of time, in the cadence of creation, and the snow globe, suspended supra-pedestal, began to revolve.
I felt as a dead thing blooming.
Proportions unhinged.
Everything I’d ever believed—every first principle I had ever held—rattled like unbolted shutters in a storm: then disattached: and I was, and I wasn’t, increasing at a frightening pace as the wind whispered the words my grandfather had taught me—and in the enveloping din I reached out so that my outstretched hand trembled over the spinning globe—and the words, finally I understood: Make spoken gift of fearful humility to the gods, lest in your silent pride you shall become one too. And my reverie was broken by the falling of a giant shadow upon me, and upon the land.
With hand still held above the snow globe, glancing back, in existential terror I beheld the presence of the same: my hand above the globeand my hand, gargantuan, in the sky, skin peeling from both—both mine, both me—flayed of humanity, becoming a divinity, but always mere becoming, for: I hold my hand, above a floating and revolving orb, in a floating and revolving globe, above which I hold my hand, above a floating and revolving orb…
I am caught in a recursive realization.
I am no more human, not yet divine, I am the hand outstretched and the hand which looms, yet one is always becoming the other. Like a film projector stuck illuminating a single frame, I experience the dread and the ecstasy of a single moment forever. If I had ever a mind, it is broken. If I had ever a soul, it is unmoored. I am the sutured wound between madness and sanity. I am a precipice fallen off itself, fallen off itself, fallen off itself, fallen off itself…
[
His son, Aaron, was the first to find him. “Rebecca!” he yelled, having climbed to the attic and seen his father lying, unmoving, on the floor, with his eyes opening and closing in sequence and his eyelids twitching. “Call 911! I think dad’s had a stroke!”
]
fallen off itself, fallen off itself, fallen off itself, as the sea creatures beat their spears and chant, the wind whispers, and the black liquid sea rises and falls with the coming and going of an invisible moon called destiny.