Poe's Nightmares

The Midnight Visitor

It was a dreary, rain-soaked night in the gloomy city of Grimstone when the heavy pounding sounded upon my door, the echoing thuds reverberating through the dimly lit hallways of my dour residence like a deathly drumbeat summoning me to some malevolent purpose. With a heavy sigh, I lifted my weary frame from the armchair where I had been deep in contemplation of the gruesome case that had so occupied my thoughts of late - that of the self-styled "Artist of Death", the maniacal serial killer whose bloody handiwork had been spreading terror throughout the city, leaving behind a trail of mutilated corpses transformed into grotesque tableaus.

I trudged to the door with leaden steps, my spirit burdened by the weight of my inability to apprehend this fiend, despite applying the full faculties of my deductive mind that had served me so well in unraveling countless other morbid puzzles that had come before my door. Opening the door a crack, I peered out at my unexpected caller, and beheld a sight that sent a tremor down my spine.

There, standing in the flickering gaslight of the hallway, was a woman clad all in black, her pale face concealed behind a veil of dark lace. The shadows seemed to swirl and dance around her ominous figure.

"Detective Blackwood, I presume?" she inquired in a rich, throaty voice dripping with sinister amusement. "I apologize for the lateness of the hour, but I simply had to make your acquaintance. May I come in?"

Some premonitory sense of doom flashed through my mind, screaming at me to slam and lock the door against this midnight intruder. But almost against my own will, I found myself stepping back and allowing her to glide past me into my chambers like a malevolent wraith.

I followed her into the room, watching as she surveyed the books and case files scattered about. "To what do I owe the dubious pleasure of this unannounced visit?" I asked sharply.

The woman laughed, a chilling sound like shards of ice tinkling in a silver chalice. "Why, I merely wished to meet the great detective tasked with hunting me down. I am the artist you seek, the one you've so quaintly dubbed a 'serial killer'. Though I prefer to think of my work as masterpieces of the flesh."

At these words, I felt the blood drain from my face as a sickening dread gripped my innards. Before me stood the object of my manhunt, boldly announcing herself! I reached for the pistol I kept in a side drawer but she tsked me like a schoolmarm scolding an unruly pupil.

"Let's not descend into barbarism, Detective. I came here for a chat, not violence. Besides, if I had wished you dead, I could have slit your throat a dozen times over by now. But it's so much more delicious to see the terror build behind your eyes first. I crave a meeting of the minds with one who might appreciate my dreadful art."

I held up a quivering hand, striving to master myself. "If it's an interview you want, then let us converse as civilized beings, however monstrous your deeds. You claim to be an artist - elucidate me on the finer points of your grotesque handiwork."

"Gladly," she purred, perching herself on the armchair I had so lately abandoned. "The human body is my canvas, each lacerated wound and severed limb a brushstroke in my symphony of agony. I seek to elevate suffering to new heights of exquisite beauty."

Thus began her sickening soliloquy as she regaled me with the details of her heinous crimes,  each vignette of torture and death more shudder-inducing than the last. She spoke of flaying men alive, of stitching the still-writhing limbs of her victims into depraved monuments of pain, of the euphoric bliss she drank in from their desperate screams and pleas for mercy.

Before the unrelenting hideousness of her confessions, I felt my sanity beginning to buckle and sway, battered by each new revelation of the infernal depths of cruelty to which the human psyche can descend. This woman, if woman she could be called, was no mere murderer but a devil in flesh, a disciple of darkness who had thoroughly abandoned her humanity in pursuit of unspeakable evil.

At last, when I thought I could stomach no more of her unholy testament, she rose to her feet. "I'm afraid I must take my leave of you now, Detective. The night grows short and I have another masterpiece to compose. But I'll leave you with the delightful knowledge that you too will soon become my art - my greatest work. From the moment I crossed your threshold, your fate was sealed. There is nowhere in this dismal world you can hide from me."

With that, she vanished out the door, her skirts whispering a mocking farewell. And I collapsed to the floor, retching and sobbing, my mind in tatters, knowing beyond all doubt that I had stared into the abyss and the abyss had stared back, grinning with the rictus of a death's head.

In the days that followed, I tried to rally myself, to form some stratagem for confronting this unholy she-devil and foiling her prophesied design on my person. But her words had planted a seed of dread in my soul that grew like a poisonous vine, choking all reason and hope.

I took to pacing my rooms all the night through, pistol in hand, starting at every creak and groan of the aging walls. But I knew with grim certainty it would avail me not when my nemesis chose to collect her prize.

And then, on one rain-lashed night, a new series of horrors began. Each night, on the stroke of midnight, some grisly parcel would appear on my doorstep - a severed hand, an ear, a tongue, all gruesomely painted in the victim's blood, each with a tag bearing my name. My nightly gifts from a murderous admirer.

With each new arrival, I felt my grip on sanity slipping further, the boundaries between nightmare and reality blurring into a crimson smear. I took to babbling to myself, argumenting with unseen specters, my laughter ringing out in unhinged peals.

At last it happened. I returned home one rain-swept eve to find my door ajar, swinging open on shrieking hinges. And there, in the center of my room, stood my nemesis, a mad grin plastered across her bloodless face, a curved flensing knife clutched in one corpse-white hand.

"Your time has come round at last, Detective," she intoned. "I have such sights to show you, such exquisite agonies to inflict as I remake you into my crowning achievement.  You will plead for death a thousand times before I permit you that cold mercy."

I stood frozen, immobilized by the totality of my terror, unable to so much as whimper. With a triumphant cackle, she seized me and the unspeakable torments began...

My sanity cracked and shattered into jagged shards, even as my flesh was rent and torn, the world spiraling away into a crimson nightmare from which there could be no waking, no merciful release, only an eternity of horror without end, the death of all hope and light, and I knew I was forever lost, lost, lost...

Thus concludes my chronicle of unrelenting woe. I leave these shattered fragments of my tale as a dire warning to any who would hunt those who have abandoned their humanity in pursuit of evil's darkest depths - tread not the paths of monsters, lest you lose your very soul...