I.

A professor of English literature, Jonathan Milton Edwards lay in the bed asleep, his wife next to him. Their children had left home years ago, rarely returning, so the couple had only each other, and their dreams, to sustain them day by day. Always, Jon dreamt terrible dreams in which he became someone he did not know, Conrad's secret sharer perhaps, images from his subconscious reminding him of his severe Pentecostal upbringing, his father's violent and hypocritical insistence that he live a life of righteousness, his Baptist's mother's incurable weakness as she gradually lost her mind over the years, believing-as they all believed-that the devil had come to possess her soul.

As the Professor Edwards slept, locked now in the labyrinth of nightmares that imprisoned him every night, he thrashed about, throwing covers off his body, wildly swinging his arms in the air about him. In his dream, he screamed, abandoned by his wife, his parents, his friends, God, as he fell crashing through dream after dream in a hellish frenzy, plummeting through a succession of personal hells born out of past experience. Imagine a man falling through an endless succession of glass houses, vertically arranged, infinite.


II.

Locked in a corridor of dreams, no longer the professor, the young man awoke. In this dream world, his name was always Matthew Strange.

Matt found himself standing alone in howling darkness, bathed in the bloody glow of a full-moon, the seemingly solid desert earth beneath his feet. He was terrified, but couldn't remember why he was afraid. Thus, he closed his eyes, felt the wind batter him, squeezed thoughts like cheese through a grater from his dulled brain, and struggled to remember.

As the chill wind hammered him, images flooded Matt's mind. The dark angel-Angel of Death?-had sought him for days. For weeks. For months. For years. The huge dark thing now tracked him, he knew, by his scent. If it caught him, the thing would beat him savagely, crack his neck and drain his body of every drop of blood. A fallen Pentecostal even in his dreams, Matthew Strange knew this would be his punishment for a lifetime of sins, imagined and real.

Now, instinctively knowing that he was nearing the end of the chase, he saw the blood-red moon hanging suspended , a scythe, over the darkened valley of glimmering lights. The cold late autumn wind of judgment blew savagely over the desert floor, blanketing the still distant city in a swirling cloud of dirt and sand. It was like looking into the dark soul of God.

His skin bone-dry, his lips and face painfully chafed from days' exposure to the elements, Matt stood trembling on a cliff overlooking sprawling Las Vegas, the modern Babylon, the wind exploding in apocalyptic gusts around him. With every blast of wind, his memory pieced together the black fragments of the events culminating in this moment.

The dark angel inevitably approaching, Matt felt as if he had been running all his life. Maybe he had been. Realizing that despair was the sin that signified complete separation from God, Matt had yet almost lost hope of ever finding the large city.

As he gradually started down the gravel descent to the desert floor four hundred feet below, he heard moaning, then a hollow baying from an immense darkness that seemed to come from within him. Hoping that the sound was caused by the wind but fearing the wrath of God, Matt glanced up at where he had just stood, saw nothing, then glanced again and saw the blazing red eyes of the huge winged shape glaring down upon him. Matt Strange froze, temporarily unable to move his arms, his hands, his feet.

This thing, this dark angel, embodied all that he feared. It was God and Satan rolled into one. The Tenth Plague sent on Egypt to free the children of Israel, the end of time. Its huge wings protruding as massive silhouettes, it couldn't have been more than fifty feet away, and he felt like shrieking with the wind. Then, praying silently for one more hour, he dove face-forward onto gravel and rocks into a somersault, forcing himself to tumble down the mountain, hoping that when he reached the bottom he would not be too badly injured to continue his flight.


III.

In old Professor Edward's corridor of dreams, tumbling downward, Matthew remembered more.

It had been several days before that his car, a 1984 primer-gray Oldsmobile, a large "Jesus Saves" sticker on the rear bumper, had given up the ghost somewhere in the desert just northeast of Pahrump, a dumpy little desert town ten miles west of Vegas. Surely, Matt had thought to himself as his car died on the spot, God had done this thing to him.

Surrounded by high barren mountains, the sky ominously overcast, he jumped out of his car, cursed wildly, slammed the door, and had begun walking through the desert in what he thought was the direction of Pahrump. The thin dirt road he had driven, alone-pieces of the corpse packaged in the trunk-had been a long and winding twelve miles straight up, yet he knew that the small desert town was barely three miles as the crow flies from the point at which his car had broken down. Thus, water bottle in hand and against the advice of his father, a one-eyed black-jack dealer and part-time Pentecostal minister who had warned him years ago never, never to try to walk the desert alone, Matt had set off on foot, confident that in one hour's time he would be walking into his uncle Neil's Holy Angel of Fire Pentecostal church in Pahrump. As he walked through the desert, he sang old church hymns which his mother had always told him were good for his soul and kept away Satanic spirits.

Five hours later, as the light rapidly began to fade and as a high desert chill replaced the warmth of the day, he had found himself stumbling over a rocky landscape sparsely covered with pines; the mountain that towered over him, a dark angelic sentinel marking his every step, was dotted with caves. He knew he was lost, and despair and panic seized him.

A man who had suffered severe depression since his days in the war, Matt realized that he would have to spend at least one night out in the desert landscape without his medication. The thought was frightening as his mind turned to stories and movies about stranded people who had been brutally murdered in this desert. He recalled the story of one old Baptist woman who, several months or years ago, had broken down in the desert and subsequently been picked up by a group of teenage Satanists.

The kids had taken her to a remote spot and sacrificially, joyfully hacked her to bits. In his dreams, he had seen the old woman brutally and bloodily killed again and again. In his dreams, he had been one of the killers.

He wondered if he should pray. He had been on this particular medication for five years, and the stuff had worked moderately well. He couldn't for the life of him remember the name of the medicine, but he knew he couldn't go a night without his. Without it, within hours, the voices would come, vertigo would seize him in a whirlpool of demonic madness, and some dark winged thing-his own angel gone mad, perhaps?-would grab him by the throat and choke him. When he had reached this point of psychosis before, his wife had always taken him to the ER. Only once had Matthew been committed. He realized then that he had forgotten his wife's name, too.

But his wife couldn't help him tonight. He recalled that he had done something truly horrible, almost unforgivable. The terror of the memory was inexpressible. In an euphoric fit, inspired by his, at first, casual, then frenzied participation in a Satanic bloodfeast several nights before in his own garage-his neighbors, Sarah and Maude, were high priestesses and would not be turned away; and Christian charity bade him open the door-he had given his wife's life and blood to his own dark angel, the one that God had sent upon him years before. Blood was needed to keep the angel at bay. As the ritual replayed itself in images of crimson cascades exploding like fireworks in his head, he realized that he couldn't remember what his wife looked like.

After he had mutilated the corpse with a huge carving knife and removed the heart, he had stuffed the parts into a black plastic garbage bag, and taken the bag to the trunk, where he had kept the body under lock and key for three days, making it a point to pray over his wife's remains at least three times during the day. It became a religious gesture, designed at once to achieve forgiveness for him for having participated in a Satanic ritual and to ensure his wife's soul a place along the shores of Heaven. Because the dark angel had warned him that night that the police may come, Matt had decided last night that it was time to ditch the body. He knew a perfect place just outside of Pahrump. Sickened, he recalled that he had eaten the heart before he went to bed.


IV.

Now trudging through the desert, trying to calm himself, Matthew Strange walked up an incline towards a cave that would have to provide him shelter for the night. He wondered, constantly, what had happened to the angel that had been an abiding, though troubling presence in his life since his conversion at the age of thirteen, when the elders, aunts, uncles, mom and dad had taken him to a desert cave. In the cave, he had been exorcized of any demonic presences and baptized in the muddied, slick, smelly pond inside the cave, which Blind Preacher Ray had told him signified the burial room of Christ.

Now, years later, stumbling through the desert, Matt feared that the angel and therefore the Lord God of Hosts had finally abandoned him, and he desperately feared being alone. He remembered being told by Blind Preacher Ray that God never left you unless, of course, you committed some unforgivable sin. For an instant, he frantically wished for the old black leather Bible that lay open on the coffee table situated in front of the TV in his meager apartment in North Las Vegas.

As he approached the opening of the desert cave, imagining that he could hear choirs of angels singing in the wind, he noticed that the entrance was much larger than he had though. Had it grown?. And as he walked into the cave, he knew he was in a room that was as large as his church. In fact, the rock formations on the floor and ceiling, the stagnant pond in the middle of the room, reminded him of the church he had grown up in as a child, the Word of God Full Pentecostal Church. This room, then, may have been a sign sent to reassure him that God was still with him and the angel was likely somewhere near.

Immediately, joy and thanks-giving welling up in his dark heart. Matt Strange dropped to his knees to pray. Then, somehow, he slept.


V.

In the old professor's dream, Matthew awoke, blood pounding furiously, insanely in his head.

The scream penetrated his dreams from some remote part of the cave, and Matt lay still-eyes wide open, flat on his back, barely breathing-listening. He didn't know how long he had been asleep. Five minutes. Five hours. He didn't know.

Suddenly, Matt sat bolt upright, heart racing, remembering that in his sleep he had heard something crying from the dark recesses of the cave. In his dream, it had been his wife, who had cried to him as a twelve-year old girl caught inside a burning house. Satan had set the fire. And in his dream, searching frantically through an endlessly dark labyrinth of tunnels, blind yet seeing, he had sought his wife, shouting, "I'm coming, honey. Hang on, honey. I'm coming! I'm coming! I'm coming!"

Now, as Matt sat up in the cave, the wind howling outside the entrance, he could still hear the crying. But as he listened, the crying became a howling, and the howling became a hollow baying. Sweating profusely in the cold cave, he wished his wife were with him now; before her death, she had always known what to do. But her death, he had been led to believe, was a necessity.

In the cave, his legs shaking, his heart pounding wildly, he struggled to his feet. The moon, now almost full, bathed the cave in an ethereal bloody glow that allowed him to find the darkest part of the cave, the area from which he had heard the howling. And now, as he stared into the darkest corner of the cave, he knew he could hear something breathing in shallow, guttural gasps; he was certain that he could see a huge dark shape within the darkness, black on black, and he could smell blood and rotting flesh; he could just make out the red blazing eyes of the thing that had just stepped out of his nightmares, and he turned and ran just as the dark thing-surely his angel-moved slowly toward him.

Once outside the cave, numbed by fear and the cold winter blasts that shook the mountains, Matt had headed in the direction of an enormous glow that he knew could be only Las Vegas, the city of lights. If he kept moving, he could reach his home in North Las Vegas in about two days. He still had his water bottle, now half-empty. He had run and walked, run and walked, sure that the dark angel was moving in close behind him. Now, two evenings later, as he lay at the bottom of the rock slide, the angel had caught him

The wind howling about him, Matt lay at the bottom of a hill, pain coursing through his body. His neck, back, and left leg throbbed with the pain from the recent fall. As he rubbed his head, he could feel the wet stick moisture that he knew could only be blood. He had a huge cut just below his hairline.

He struggled to sit up so that he could gauge how far away Las Vegas was. He could see no city; he could see no lights. Instead, he found himself surrounded by a ravenous darkness that threatened to devour him.

He had begun to crawl on all fours through the sand and rock when heard the crack immediately behind him and then felt the painful sting of a whip cutting into his flesh. He didn't have to turn around to know; he somehow knew that, when his dark angel ever caught him, the bull whip would be used on him. The Dark Angel was his father, punishing him night after night for his own imagined sins.

Again and again, above the din of the high howling wind, he heard the crack, crack, crack of the whip as it tore and rent first his shirt, then his flesh. Shortly, his back felt warm and damp with blood. Attempting to crawl more rapidly but losing strength by the heart beat, his knees bloody where the desert rock had torn his slacks open at the knees, he made one attempt to push himself to his feet. But, once he staggered to his feet, he felt the sharp burning, slashing sting on his neck and was brought crashing to the earth.

He turned around to look and felt the leather thong of the whip cut his left cheek just below his eye. Putting one arm in front of his bloodied face, he rolled over on his back to face the huge dark thing, which towered over him like a huge tree, its red eyes blazing. Dressed in a long black robe, its long, straggly black hair flowing over its shoulders, grinning hugely, the angel of death brought the whip down with tremendous force, cutting into his hair, his arms, his neck. The night sky around him rained blood. Exhausted, he screamed at the dark thing and then, enraged, summoning all his strength, lunged at his gigantic foe as he had lunged at his father years before when, at nineteen, he had left home for good. As his hands penetrated the folds of the angel's dark gown, the thing disintegrated into a million dark fragments, exploding into nothingness as he landed face-first in the sand.

Terror slowly receding, Matt pushed himself up and prepared to receive another blow, but the blow never came. He looked around, his strength returning to him, and saw only darkness, sage, and desert wind. The thing was gone without a trace.

Heart still wildly pounding, he stood in the bleak desert sand, felt himself from head to foot, and realized that he was uncut. He was not bleeding. Looking in the distance, he saw the golden glow of the city, and began to walk in that direction. In two hours, he would be there. In three hours, he would be in his own front room. He imagined his wife awaiting his arrival and then remembered that he had murdered her just as a huge dark hole opened beneath him in the desert sand.

Locked in the old man's dream, Matt fell as the desert floor suddenly became like thin glass, breaking beneath him. Screaming, terrified, he called out to God...


VI.

The old professor awoke, drenched in sweat, his legs tangled in bed sheets. Again, Jon had somehow escaped the hellish labyrinth that made Dante's inferno look like a children's picnic. He would live. Tomorrow morning, once again, he would walk into an eight o'clock class filled with tired students, many of whom would have spent the night studying for mid-terms or writing papers. He always enjoyed lecturing on John Bunyon's Pilgrim's Progress, the topic for tomorrow. He sighed, looked at the clock on the night stand next to his bed, saw that it was just past 3:00, then looked at his wife, who always slept soundly, peacefully, like a small child.

Beatrice. That was her name. Beatrice, the daughter of a now deceased professor of Renaissance literature at the University of Connecticut. She had been named after the woman of Dante's dreams. Jon would never kill her, never mutilate her, the professor insanely reminded himself. He loved her and loved his children. Yet, the desire to kill her now, to hack her to bloody little pieces in bed as she slept, was almost overwhelming. Jon struggled to master the insane impulse.

As Dr. Edwards finally lay back, his personal demons caged, listening to the howling wind bang against his big brick two story house, aware that he would not sleep for the rest of the night, he heard the darkness move. Something in the darkness surrounding him, surrounding every man, woman, and child on the planet, detached itself from the darkness. Jon could hear it breathing, he could hear the folds of thing's gown hissing, hissing, hissing as it approached him. He could smell blood and rotting flesh. He knew the thing would kill him if he moved or spoke.

A chill washed over him, his body went numb, cold sweat dotting his forehead, and he thought again of murdering the woman sleeping next to him. He dared not look at the thing in the darkness. He couldn't look.

But, slowly propping himself up on his elbows, straining to see, Dr. Jonathan Milton Edwards did look, and this is what he saw...

About the Author:

Rich Logsdon is a college English professor living in Las Vegas, the city of his dreams. Author of numerous publications on and off the net, Rich enjoys writing dark fiction, going to movies with his wife, and coaching soccer in his spare time.