Blindness in terror. The cold sweat, the fractured mind, the dark presence over the shoulder as it tells lies and whispers in the ear. The wordless gibberish, the insanely rolling phrases that meant nothing to anyone but he who mutters them. A scream, wordless and lost in the silence of noise.

A still, cold man shivered violently in the snow, his cloak pulled about him and cinched at his neck as if it were his noose and his armor. His eyes scan the crowd, watch every hand and every body and every face, catching every movement and gesture and hanging on each as individual pieces of a great and fearful whole. The horde around him stamped, pressed, crowded him from every direction and every angle. His hands moved without a will behind them, his body trembled.

He took a breath, shouted. A few turned to look at him, disdain on their features. He interrupted their joy. They moved on their way, ignoring him as they had before.

A soldier looked. The man gazed into his eyes for a moment, gray clouds against blue mist, and in a moment there was recognition. Both moved. One ran away, pushing through the crowd to stumble and trip and attempt the impossible: move without touching these people, these humans, these creatures with whom he felt no kinship. The herd rejected him. He rejected the herd. The soldier, the dog, saw an exile, a wolf among his sheep. He moved to intercept, moving through the crowd and playing it as a master puppeteer plays the performance of his life. The two moved quickly, one in fear and one in anger.

The man turned a corner, his cloak billowing behind him suddenly, then slipping along behind him. The sounds of his feet disappeared among the masses. The soldier followed, his armor clanking softly against his weapon. His eyes scanned the darkness of the street. It was a den of thieves and prostitutes, murderers and rapists. The only decent place along this road was the church. He turned away, back to the crowd.

As the footsteps of the soldier receded and vanished, neglecting this street and its denizens, the wolf among the sheep stood out from the doorway, the wash of his fear passing over him. He braced himself against the wall and bent at the waist, breathing between his knees and rocking back and forth to calm the churning in his stomach. He waited until his breath had stilled. His eyes remained tightly shut, his mind skittering across the plane of insanity with reckless abandon. An arm brushed against it, forcing him to count to five hundred. Eyes began to follow him. Laughter echoed at his expense, but only briefly.

With a rustle of hard cloth, he rose, his eyes closed, and stepped out into the flow of the crowd. He remained still, quiet, following the movements and focusing only on the chill of his own sweat, the dry feel of the skin on his hands, the trembling of the muscles in his back. When he could take it no longer, he pushed out of the crowd and opened his eyes onto the darkness of a doorway. The door was closed, tightly locked, and no amount of desperate fumbling would budge it from its firm place in the wall. His shoulder pressed against it and he slid to the ground, his eyes wide and terrified. He recited words that had never existed and hummed marching tunes.

Once again he rose, his eyes wide with terror this time, and took in his surroundings as the bile rose in his throat. A cross, a steeple, the church. Across the road, just across the road, he would find peace and safety. No human would be in a church on this pagan night. He stepped into the crowd, trembled, and made his way forward. The clutch of a hand at his side forced him forward, he turned, kept turning, and moved through the crowd haphazardly. Voices cursed him, but his eyes and mind were riveted on the door to the church. His hands touched the wood, and he pushed. It would not open.

He pounded once, twice. It eased open, and inside he saw nothing but darkness. There were noises in the dark, but he dared not stay in the crowd. He stepped inside, his nerves frayed and anxious, and closed the passage behind him.

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[Graphics by Me.]

"Get your facts first, and then you can
distort 'em as much as you please." ~ Mark Twain