Text: Odilius Vlak / Artwork: Eddaviel

The sentence was: "That what was read awakened, be live through in dreams." 

He accepted it after hearing, a given day of his solar existence, a shadowy voice swears: "To read Poe is an extremophile experience, but nothing compares to dream it."

So, the creepy tome titled Deadly Extremophile Stories by E. A. Poe, very soon found its way into the necromancer's cauldron. 

  He read it within a bright circle of solar rays, underlining those passages most corrupted by the death —the ones drown by the bloated blood vomited by the raven, to which his poetic delirium recited:

  Then came the first night; the first pilgrimage of the sleepwalker through the sacred dimension of Poe's stories: The Raven and The Black Cat. They turned on the green light to cross into that nocturnal beyond. 

  He rose as usual; his steps advancing in decimal numbers toward the book cover. Its illustration was a sinister version of a Bizantine painting. On it Poe was attired with a tight monastic tunic. If light get drawn in the blackness of that tunic, its corpse never would flow up again to the surface,he thought while crossing its threshold 

  Poe's head was crowned by a semicircle of skulls, each one resting on shinbones made after two scrolls soaked in blood: his poems and short stories. The skulls' holes gave away a scarlet radiance; a kind of halo. The sleepwalker understood it was the guiding lamp toward a dark mysticism. Above the head, and forming the vault of a crypt, were lined hybrid beings coming out from a superior abyss full of celestial fog —Fallen angels with raven like heads, the ones to the left; and cat like, the ones to the right. 

  To complete the vision of that insane version of the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit,were all the characters of Poe's works, his apostles, displayed on the bas reliefs decorating two enormous bones that framed the whole scene: like the columns of Salomon's temple.

  Beyond the portal waited for him the first page. The tone of its prose loaded with the same daytime shivering that shook him while reading The Raven and The Black Cat. And yes! —"Once upon a midnight dreary..." 

  Under a hellish spell, his physical body fallowed a parade of visions cosplaying a Gothic beauty. While it wandered through the narrow and gloomy streets of a ghost city, his dreams were amazed seeing Lenore carving, with a raven's peak, the bust of Pallas on the living flesh of her lover. His frenetic screens of "never more!"were silenced by the miaows of a giant cat licking a blood dripping ax.

  When his dreams happen to observe in more detail that infinity surreal landscape, the sleepwalker froze: before him laid the mutilated body of a woman misshaped by an ax's blade —the same corpse he imagined in the rapture of his reading. The pale like beauty of her dead skin permeated that space time continuum. 

  Under a sudden frenetic and morbid desire, he went on through all the pages of both stories simultaneously; living them with a sinister satisfaction. 

  Next morning, he still craved for the third dimensional reality of that dream. Because of that, he delayed to notice that beside him laid a woman corpse, a blood stained ax and a one-eyed cat devouring a mutilated raven. 

  Great! his eyes ozzed a maniac brightness. Both my dream and physical bodies deposited offerings to the Poe's genius shrine.. 

  He smiled looking forward to the huge number of stories yet to be read. Without thinking it twice, and already under the rule of his addiction, he took the tome again in order to get the first extremophile shot of the day. The title:

Editorial note:

This homage to Edgar Allan Poe was published for the first time in the section «Introvisión» of the Blozine Zothique The Last Continent: (October 2010).