In his dream he was not a body. Instead, he was as he was when his employer’s phone had rung. He was floating like a phantom, hovering in the open air, flying across the city. The rain was thick, and the fog was thicker. He swooped down aimlessly from roof to roof, mingling among the silhouettes of skyscrapers in the moonlight. This was not a fantasy land, or some psychosis, but a crystal-clear vision of the real world, from a vantage point he had never seen it from before. He drifted down to figures in the street who were shuffling by with shrunken shoulders and sombre eyes and shriveling skin, seeming almost mummified. As he approached them in the fog, their very shapes distorted as if behind a pane of warped glass. He spoke to them in silent words, but they would not answer him. He was asking about his wife. None could hear him, but in their miserable states they shook their heads all the same, and like a foreigner to the world who was lost in translation and mystified by the human race, he stumbled from body to body baffled and desperate, outstretching his palm, whispering through the wind as to where his wife could be. None answered. None heard him. But they all shook their heads all the same.

Soon he was floating through walls, caught in a malaise from one room to the next, staring down upon the empty and the disorderly and the secretive and the odious with equal measure. Both angel and wretch he would drift by longingly, echoing to all the same question. None would heed his call. Through the city, through the world, he did wander through all, gazing down upon them all, inside, outside, all spaces as one, all time frozen like a glacier. The city was less humid than it was, the weather less turbulent, the streets more populated. The burned-down cinema stood once more, and he asked usher and audience and actor on the screen alike for where she could be. None even gave him a glance. And he waded through apartments again, hurt and alone. This time he took care to stay with the people he found. Maybe they could show him the way…

First, he found a man, naked, shaking with fear and repulsion, with a tear in his eye, probing at himself in front of the mirror. In his room were stacks of CDs and an open laptop with an unfinished diary entry. In his bed was a woman who looked dreadfully pale and ill, who tried desperately to peer into the bathroom where her partner stood to see his secretive self-depreciation. Beside her a fan whirred intensely, and an open window echoed the wisps of the wind, but not his voice. It was dreadfully hot in their room, and their pipes chimed and clanged in pain, and something above them was snaking and slithering and salivating in shadows. He did not wish to linger in this room.

In the next room he found a more harrowing sight still. The whole apartment was damp and overflowing with water - a shower had seemingly left on for hours - and in the puddles that seeped onto the floor were the remnants of a smashed mirror. Wires were strung about the room like a spider’s web, and empty pill bottles also floated in the water. A man clad in leather attire had a guitar hooked up to speakers dispersed all across his room, and attached to this guitar was an electric chainsaw. The man panted and giggled uncontrollably in line with the thrashes of lightning beyond his window. Beside that window was a polaroid of the man, a rock-star, posing on his own, with a charming and youthful smile on his face, and a glitter in his eyes. The man’s eyes were now only rageful, and his smile sinister. On the bed in front of him was another partly bandaged man in formal black attire, with each limb tied to a banister, and who was squirming and gargling incomprehensibly. Quickly, he sought to leave this room also, just as the rocker plucked gleefully at his guitar and a mighty roar erupted in the room and the chainsaw began to whir.

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Lastly, he found a woman’s room. It was more spacious, more barren than the ones he had previously lingered in. She stood there alone in her robes and absorbed in her work, and behind her camera equipment laid about on her desk, and her double bed on the opposite end of the room hardly resembled a bed at all for how distraught it was. Outside her great gothic windows were the glares of neon light from other far-off windows from other similar skyscrapers, where shadowy silhouettes of men could be seen moving in an eerie, unpleasant manner. She faced away from all these things, and continued pouring over her photographs, even as icy footsteps trickled up and down the stairs outside her room. She was pinning her photographs onto her board, utterly transfixed by them, arranging them into a sequential pattern of some sort. She too was looking for someone. He felt that she might show him the way. But he also felt, more than in any previous room, that she was in personal danger, danger that she was oblivious to. She was rubbing her stomach, but she was not pregnant. She was gripping her ring finger anxiously. She was now staring at a single photograph, a monochrome profile of a black cathedral that stood out on its own in some empty wasteland. As she stood back, he approached it. And he kept on approaching it. And he zoomed further and further inward until he was inside the photograph itself.

Now he stood before this very black cathedral. The bells chimed ominously, echoing out endlessly as if announcing an almighty rapture, and reverberated in the blasted, blackened ground like a monstrous heartbeat. From the abandoned cathedral a wind trickled out like blood, and upon doing so made a slight, breathy sound. All around it, the ground was barren and tar-like, and above it, there were no clouds, there was no sky, there was not even a single star that dared to twinkle above it. It was bulging out of the earth like a tenebrous ulcer, ravaging the land around it. It was comprised of an oily black material that made it impossible to discern details of the building’s exterior in the heavy night, yet he still sensed that the door before him was open. This was all a dream, and dreams were the product of memory and experience, but he could say that he had never seen this place before, nor felt these sensations before. Something was pulling him towards the cathedral, and all his muscles grew stiff and scorching, feeling as though his soul was being seized from his body and pulled out through every stinging orifice by a rusting, burning, oily black chain. He felt as though he could vomit up his heart. The door before him creaked open some more. He did not wish to enter, but he was engulfed with the dread that he would one day. He pulled back away violently from the structure, away from his dream, but for a moment, the eidolon held its tendrilous grip, and even when eventually he did pull away from the dream and back into consciousness, he did not feel that it was because he won back control, but that this unholy monolith wanted him to.