Matius turned a cross-step towards the shadows in the dark of the room;
find and find and carry and break that moment of uneasy silence here in the house.
He found the ever-walk of creaking stairs like dinosaur teeth up through his chest;
burning, burning, burning away at his insides.
Crossing that threshold of Dreaming, again.
Monster-houses, hollow-houses where the night never sleeps and has never seen
closed eyes like that before, just an endless blink and shut and open.
A waiting sort of locked-lashes, pupils roving behind and back and forth.
“Where are you going, my dear?”
My dear like dragon’s teeth.
My dear like goat’s hide and sandy gravel,
like dusty dead locusts in swarms.
“Where are you going?”
And Dyrodus spread his paws out on the floor in steps, in stepping,
in the beastly way of blinking dark-shod eyes and torn rugs.
Matius looked upon his face; primate-like, gorilla-esque,
and the matted, black and silver hair there,
and shuttered.
The beast weilded a pen, inky blackness that seeped through the beige sand
where it covered the cat-feet and when he turned his head,
there was the slide of grey-matter, the slippery ooze of decaying flesh there
at the back of his skull.
And Matius shivered there, in the dark of Waking.
“Hollow-house, dream house, how you take to flight.”
The beast’s antlers, scraping against the ceiling paint,
made the flakes fall like dirty snow in edgings across the beaten, matted garb,
plaited as it was like an old rug in strange designs.
His voice hissed like dust and desert things inside his mouth, behind his heavy tongue,
and Matius stood, hands so still as to break in tensions,
and he forgot to breathe a moment.
Dyrodus clicked his finger-bones together, bare of flesh and seeing
He ground his teeth down against each other in the night,
there, in the monster-house.
“Take heed, little beast of being so bright,” he crooned with that voice,
bending his great torso down, ribs pushing against each other and bending out of the way.
“Take heed, little beast of humanity’s delight.”
Matius’ fingers danced on the edges of the wall,
stair creakings and broken cobwebs across his face.
He held his breath, waiting, waiting, waiting
to fight the flight of his trembling legs.
Dyrodus cackled in the midnight hours,
where boys make men of dares and nights do not close and break by sunlight.
Where spiders creep and where centipedes have danced.
Dyrodus arched his back and those wings there,
made of ash and fish-scales and thin sheets of black steel,
fell open, clicking and whirring.
And Matius fell to his knees when the great maw came near, behind bone fingers,
pen outstretched.
“Monster.” The beast said,
and Matius fell away to the ink.
