A Monster in Someone Else's Dream

A short homage to the style of HP Lovecraft

The garden was bloated in a baroque display of wealth:

Roses and exotic lilac in lurid clarity; hyper real.

Languid, in an oppressive stillness, the air hung thick and turgid with ill perfumes, and heady, intoxicating scents.

Yet on that pastoral hill I felt something foul, and earthy.

Suddenly, the verdant green and fertile knoll, so shaded as it was, seemed dour, and rightly secret;

A privileged secret. It shed its bucolic promise and left a chill, as if to say that it belonged, and I did not:

A monster in someone else's dream.

And I spied above me, breached from the knoll itself, an obelisk of disquieting proportion.

It appeared suddenly, as though through the imagination of some wholly alien, and unknowable mind.

The sight of it I disliked greatly, for its structure defied reason, and appealed not to the physical laws of any sane dimension.

And yet there it stood, frozen in some profaned birth from the earth beneath.

I know now: it was no reasonable impulse that compelled me to ascend that knoll- but, wholly maddened before that accursed monument, I managed to hesitate a moment before reaching out.

It was the last sane thing I would ever do.

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

Excellent. The opening paragraph is killer and what follows doesn't let up. Very good writing.