w*********h GOTHIC
by Edward Lee“There was a knock at the door. When Nikoff Raskol opened it, he espied a baleful purview of imprecations, an apophysis of dolorous spiritum—perforce: the Nietzschean abyss. He’d dreamed of utter blackness, of dripping sounds and screams, and it was all those things that he found himself looking at beyond the transom of his solitary motel room. The blackness that was somehow fulgent, in which traversed the fallow masses with faces like poultices and acuminated grins. His heart beat in mordant rubato when the gracile hand—certainly that of some outerworldly woman—reached out from the festering clough and took his own. He thought of light’s absence in the flesh, he thought of ataxia undiluted.
Indeed, he thought of lost worlds.
Surely, this curvaceous silho
