Abraham's Dream

Tiredness had Genesis withdrawn into the somber sanctuary of his chambers before a ravenous, insatiate hunger began clawing at him.

Not a physical hunger, mind you, but a mental famish for answers.

The unsettling chit-chat with those two shades, Cain and Abel, had stoked furnace-hot the ceaseless fires of his inquisitive nature.

Their prophetic utterings reverberated through his mind like mosquito buzzes that are not tormenting but annoying nevertheless.

Unbidden, his gaze fell upon the many sanguine patterns of voodoo sigils and hieroglyphs adorning the chamber's mold-stained woodwork.

Like eldritch calligraphies woven in tongues predating the descent of man, their tangled geometries seemed to throb with obscene sentience.

"Klooge'th...ffaiahg'gnly'hah..." Genesis' whisper was a lover's caress over those forbidden glyphs as he began ritualistically unpacking his modest travelers' trunk of tomes, manuscripts and of course clothes.

Despite his outward scholarly self-confidence, the professor's inner thoughts whirled in a disorder of infinite hypotheses.

What if the tales held a shard of proofbeyond mere baseless deceit?

What if this haunted pile truly served as a furnace of blasphemous occult rites and curses from a more primordial epoch?

The notion that enraged bondsmen had hexed their tormentor, the Lady herself, to roam these halls as a specter through endless night...

Genesis' inner child begged and prayed for these fables to be true.

And yet, for all their rich promise of unholier vistas, speculations alone could never slake Genesis' thirsting, insatiable need for validation.

Evidence was the filter that separated empirical truth from dross folklore's pyrite deceptions.

His long and skinny digits caressed a grimoire's mottled paper as he settled upon the tattered four-poster bed, gazing upward.

The flickering candlelights sure did play tricks upon his senses, casting haunting, shadows amidst the vaulted ceiling's web-draped rafters.

Slowly but surely, his eyelids grew ponderous as an opiate's fatigue while those guttering illuminations swam in hydropic delirium across his vision.

With a final lucid coherence, Genesis surrendered to the strong pull of exhaustion, allowing nightshade dreams to bear him down into tenebrous fathoms.

The tendrils of slumber's realm swiftly ensnared Genesis, drawing him inexorably into a waking vision rife with symbolism's demonic fabrics.

He found himself amidst a rich Edenscape straight from scripture's lushest passages - a panorama of green meads and multicolored blossoms rioting amidst stately, swaying arboreal giant plants.

A zephyr's dulcet whispers caressed his senses like the exhalations of Heaven's own choiring breaths.

Before him, six cherubic lambs hopped in the dappled sunshine - their fleece pure and pristine as unblemished silver, haloed in an auric, beatific glow.

Six doves winged in gilded orbits far above, each bearing an olive branch clutched in their talons, their coos joining the paradisiacal symphony.

Genesis felt butterflies within his stomach as the lambs' innocence radiated across the verdant expanse.

Yet just as he began to step forward on limbs leaden with longing, a disgusting smell tainted the idyllic zephyrs.

As if an unholy pall of decay had descended to decay this carefree realm, six serpents slithered from the shadows with terrifying, persistent deliberation.

The serpents' ageless, unblinking malignity fell upon the innocent lambs.

Jarring bolts of nightmare adrenaline surged through Genesis as he lunged toward the innocents, desperate to shield them from that pure evil.

The snakes' forked tongues flicked eagerly as they wound in tightening, sibilant coils around the calling target.

One struck with lightning quickness, its poisonous dripping fangs sinking deep into Genesis' arm.

A shock of lancing agony blazed through his vessels, yet he refused to recoil his vigil and defended the lambs heroically.

Then, a voice woven of luminous harshness echoed through this Eden-like landscape: "Wake up to reality and open your eyes.

You are surrounded by illusion.

Thine eyes, little Genesis, delude thee ever towards lightless precipices."

With a horrific start and gasp, Genesis found himself wrenched from the phantasmagoric vision - its Edenic lushness draining away like parched sands through an hourglass.

The once beautiful panorama had transmuted into a gray, colorless wasteland, barren as some petrified hell cursed by nuclear suns.

What had been cherubic lambkins at joyous frolic now disintegrated into desiccated, leathery husks strewn across blasted plains of soiled ash.

A scream withered in the scholar's throat as the last tatters of that scary mirage sloughed from his senses like flayed flesh from bone.

Genesis' eyes snapped open, greeted by the somber familiarity of his chamber's gloaming confines.

His breath tore in great heaving gasps, as if he had just breached the surface of hellish deeps.

A cold sweat sheened his pallid, clammy flesh while the timber woodwork above twisted in eldritch, tormenting visages.

"Merely...the lingering of exhaustion, jetlag..."

he wheezed, attempting to steady his thundering heartbeat with forced rationale.

"It's all in the mind, nothing more.

Just deliriums."

Despite his empty self-assurances, the perverse symbolism of that haunting nightmare clung to Genesis with desperation's hooked talons.

Paradise into desolation, life into decay, the sacred perverted into the profane - portents too steeped in mythic signifiers to dismiss as mere effects of fatigue and stress.

A humorless chuckle, rattled from his chest while his fingers massaged throbbing temples.

Unknown to him, as he rose from his bed, a presence had been with him in the night, an apparition of The Lady of Sorrows herself, her spectral smile filled with misdeeds, and then, as quickly as it had appeared, vanished into the belly of the beast, as in, the mansion.

The wall-clock's stare announced the present hour as 8:46 - the expected summons to some lecture on the mansion's historical provenance.

Affecting a mask of scholarly composure, Genesis willed his inner tempests to quiescence and made his way through the darksome corridors.

"Time to join the tourists, get some food in this howling stomach of mine, and hear this interesting lecture." He mulled over to himself while walking.

Yet with every step, a frisson of primordial and inexplicable concern slithered between his shoulders like the chill of a succubus's lingering caress.

Not a concern, but more of an instinct, an animalistic instinct, a survival instinct begging Genesis to leave this mansion...