"Nightmare Vision" by E. W. Farnsworth

Nightmare Vision

by E. W. Farnsworth

I do a lot of walking—for my health and for my trade.  When I walk, I let my mind wander.  That way, new ideas come to me.  I am a writer, so nothing holds greater joy for me than woolgathering while exercising.  Other scribes I know like to find their materials in the writings of others, but AI is going to make that process perilous.  I make it my practice to borrow from no one, not even—consciously—from myself.  To those who say I am psychotic, I reply, “At least I am original.”  Inevitably, though, being a trailblazer has unforeseen and unintended consequences.

Some quant among the Romantic critics calculated that William Wordsworth, an inveterate hiker, walked over one hundred thousand miles in the Lake District.  Sir Walter Scott was also a solitary walker and by my reckoning he surpassed Wordsworth though with vastly different results.  We have sticks notched by Sir Walter in a code only he could break.  So, the Waverley novels proceeded by notches.  The Romantic poet did not resort to such mechanical devices, but both great writers were prodigious producers.  Neither went mad nor died young.

I never counted the miles, but I must have clocked in a respectable number of miles, but my constant invention took its toll.  While I dazzled my editors with my seemingly endless font of innovations, I slowly conjured up ideas that, frankly, made my own hair stand on end.  My figurations were closer to the fictions of H. P Lovecraft or Howard Pyle as I look back on my published works, and when I finally stopped writing altogether, my adumbrations had crowded out all reason or even plausibility.  That final day I felt a kind of mantle falling on my back—I fancied the atra cura of Horace had come to sport with me or Marvell’s time’s winged chariot was hurrying near.  True enough, my rent was past due and my cupboard was bare; my usual confidents were offline or out of touch.

I continued to walk, but with a feeling of foreboding.  I could feel flecks of foam forming at the sides of my mouth.  My brain was overheated, with phantasmagoria springing spontaneously.  I felt the presence of fellow walkers on either side of me, but I could not see them.  I thought I saw a shadow alongside my own on one side and then another.  I quickened my pace, but whatever was following me kept right on trekking.  I tried stopping suddenly and wheeling around in a full circle.  From all physical evidence, I was still alone.  I deduced the spirits—or whatever they were—had burrowed into my consciousness.

I had the strongest impulse to laugh right out loud—and I did so.  I laughed at myself.  I laughed at the figments.  I laughed to consider my carefully laid plans vis-à-vis my writing.  Suddenly I stopped and grew sullen.  The late afternoon sun was warm, and the tongues of silence combed the woods overhead.  The air was still, and all sounds seem to have been absorbed.  I did a jig just to hear my feet hitting asphalt.  I decided to recite Latin poetry.  Going back to the basics seemed a safe way to go.  I tried the hexameters of the epic poet and the rhythmic patterns of the odes.  I consoled myself that my memory was still sound.

Taking a breath, I set out again.  I was near the farthest point from my apartment. As I turned towards home, the burden of the shadows became a thicket if not a fardel on my back.  I taxed my ears to catch the slightest sound of normalcy—a distant automobile engine, perhaps.  There were no human sounds.  In fact, there were no natural sounds of any kind.  The air lay thick upon the landscape, and the sunlight seemed to fight through the foliage, but silently.  I wiped the flecks of foam from my lips and touched my febrile, sweaty brow.   I considered stripping off my shirt, but I feared the cold of my sweat would make me susceptible to the aggressive influenza.  It passed through my mind that I was already suffering from a disease.

Meanwhile, my fardel swelled, and my back and legs felt the strain of the burden.  I felt a pressure building in my mind, and with it a nightmare vision.  The intuitive outbreak was erecting a memory theater within my skull, and against that backdrop rolled a diorama of everything I had ever written in my life.  The vision outright laughed at me while, using a makeshift pointer, it seemed to lecture nonsense, at times intersecting words and images I had entertained but rejected as inviable.  I had an epiphany—my inspiration was telling me in its original way that I had come to its end and now must use the drabs and leavings of a life’s work instead of trying to force what could no longer be had by any form of effort.

So, the vision—which incidentally had four horns and the pinkest tongue—began hauling my edits and outtakes into a huge pile.  As I pressed towards home, my brain filled, the figure never stopping with its infernal lecturing.  Instead of the lecture’s becoming clear by the aggregation of details, it assumed a role of self-righteousness and reveled in its own bizarre rendition of my writing life.  The only clear thing was my apartment, just coming into view.   I staggered down my street and up my steps past my neighbors crowded, laughing around their police CB radio.  I managed to insert my key and shove my way inside where I hit the floor as soon as I closed the door.  

I remained on the floor for hours, and finally my nightmare vision tidied up my messy brain parts, never once addressing me or seeming to notice I was in distress.  Nevertheless, I got the message: my draconian vision would henceforth abide with me always as my newly conjured, interior master.