Bogleech.com's 2013 Horror Write-off:

"Clarity in Reverie"

Submitted by David Balbata

I saw it, I lived it and now I live to be with It.
It’s at edges of my waking thoughts and free to paint a clear picture in my midnight reveries.
At one point in time I thought I had conquered it, a naïve conclusion to mask an unresting fear. I guess not of it, but what lies beyond it. Or better still, what doesn’t.
I have seen glimpses, envisioned in sleep-deprived haze and I have lived it in my dreams.
One of my friends noticed my weary and drained state, and expressed his concern. I seriously thought about telling him, not that I didn’t want to tell someone, it’s just it cannot be described in a word, or a song or even a thesis. It is a feeling beyond the temporal.
I would think of it as the naïve boy, saying to myself I don’t fear it, and that fear is all there is to it, and that is true. Yet I would lie in bed til the dawning hours of the day, prisoner of a creeping feeling. Night after night I would lay, trusting in this; fear naught and trust in a higher power. Yet this feeling crept out from the corners of my mind and ever towards the forefront of my dreams.
I saw flashes of it first. I knew what it was trying show me, but believed I knew better. I busied my mind and time with other things. And for a time that worked, but at every moment I rid myself of the feeling I noticed it was gone, opening a floodgate muddy thoughts.
After weeks of trying to bury these unabated thoughts, I found myself at tears whenever my defences wavered, at the encroaching alien feeling becoming familiar, and the pieces falling into place. Black shards, with the shadows of small crawling figures following crooked silhouettes, mirrored across each fragment.
One night the shards crystalized. All was in full. The moment I was dreading, what I knew would eventually come. It was met with no fear, because I saw it and felt it, not with eyes but within my own mind.
At the apex of this resolution I saw that all things lead to this point. From the Black we come and to Black we must go.
I may not believe in God, shit happens, but things don’t just end.
Flesh may rot, so too must the soul.