On the preference of dark over light, the obscure over the clearly visible, and the dangerous over the prudent...

There was, from the start, a sort of playing-with-fire aspect of all this, you know. I knew it, too.

Returning to the beginning... returning...

I woke with a start last night. A sharp wind, arising suddenly, billowed my sheer curtains and swept into my bedchamber seeming to howl more aggressively than possible.

My window had been open, of course, because of the recent balmy weather, which encourages me to overcome my ever-present paranoia and leave the windows and doors thus in order to permit the penetration of the moving (and usually gentle) currents of air that bring my discomfort its only relief (other than the cool compresses I have the new maid lay in my head--but I despise her bubbly nature and the sight of her... 'effervescent' physicality makes me want to retch), even though these communicating points also allows entry to the spectres and haints that torment my feverish rest. Thus, I toss and turn in the throes of a hideous nightmare, rather than in the sweaty embrace of the sweltering heat of a closed chamber's stagnant air,where I would be further tormented by the constant presence of the over-perfumed body of my young housemaid, the discomfort of which I can generally avoid by exposing myself to the cooling influence of the night's graces.

As I stated, this unseasonal wind woke me suddenly, though I was momentarily unaware whether I had, indeed, woken, or whether this was a maddeningly real nightmare that mimicked my waking life down to the merest detail (had I found the book of my life, or an alternate one placed next to it on the shelf?). Ultimately, I determined that I had woken, if only because this determination was the least confusing and ended speculation on the issue. Still, despite my definitively being awake, decidedly dreamy things took place.

A horde of spiders pored over the sill and onto the floor, carpeting it with a silent flood of black bodies and innumerable arms. They as quickly receded into the cracks and crevices of my aging manor, never to be seen again, and no trace to be found, and no sooner had they disappeared, than a man in a dark cloak slipped in gracefully through the open window, his face sheathed in shadow by the gleaming moon over his shoulder. I cried out for my only attendant, despicable though I find her, only to discover, again, unexpectedly, but fortunately, for once, the Noble Ghost of Panza standing over me instead of a nubile and precocious village girl.

In a moment, I was desperately wrapping what protection my sheets and blankets offered about my scantily-clad body while the invading presence battled Sancho to their mutual death in a hail of spectral clashes of steel that was cataclysmic in its violence. Their paired corpses, entwined in the strange passions of battle and too-quick departure from it, then evaporated in a puff of sweet-smelling grace, and exited through the window, pulling closed the drapes again.

So tired from the assault and my fortuitous escape from it, I found I was again asleep within a few minutes and did not wake to report the incident to my housemaid until the morning was already late and the dew of the previous night had evaporated. She was skeptical, of course, because she suffers from that mental density common to her class, the dominant aesthetics of which prize generousness of body over commodiousness of intellect. I dismissed her with a wave and immediately sat at my table to pen my notes on the encounter on a scrap of paper laying out on my pupitre, which quickly developed into this letter to you (forgive the hasty scrawl and rough edges of this found papel), which leads me to wonder if my subconscious impulses are telling me more than my conscious mind has yet allowed to cross the green pastures of its fertile valley. Where were you last night?

I ask in humble suggestion without brazen accusation,

Don Quixote de la Mancha

Now in Possession of the Scroll of Power, the Wand of Capability, and still questing nightly for the Parchment of Insight.