Endless Loop

Horror
5 out of 5 (2 Ratings)
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One night, a man had a nightmare. It was the most frightening thing he had ever experienced. In the dream, he found himself walking in a desert. Somehow, he had no idea how he had gotten there, but he knew he was lost and alone.

When he looked down, he realized he was carrying a machete in his hand. The long, cold steel blade looked razor-sharp. The sun was beating down and the heat was intense. The man was sweating profusely, but he kept walking, even though he had no idea where he was going.

After some time, he saw a dark figure crouching down in the distance. As he approached, he saw that it was a person, lying in the sand. He had been feeling extremely lonely, so he was grateful to see another human being. He quickly ran to the man and bent over to help him.

However, when he turned the man over, he took one look at his face and recoiled in horror.

He was looking at himself.

In that instant, he was so overcome with fear that he raised the machete above his head and, without thinking, hacked the man to death.

Horrified by what he had just done, he dropped the weapon and started running through the desert, trying to get away as far away from the place as possible. With every step, his feet sank further into the sand, but he kept on going, driven by terror and panic.

Eventually, he stumbled and fell to the ground. Lying in the sand, he realized that he had sprained his ankle. He couldn’t walk another step. There was nothing he could do except lie there where he had fallen.

After a while, he looked up and saw something in the distance. It was the figure of a man, approaching across the vast expanse of desert. As the man came, he waited until he could see his face.

To his horror, he realized it was himself and in his hand, he was carrying a razor-sharp machete…

The Pit and the Pendulum

I was sick, sick unto death, with that long agony, and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of REVOLUTION, perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel. This only for a brief period, for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw, but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed judges. They appeared to me white--whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words--and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness, of immovable resolution, of stern contempt of human torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me was fate were still issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the syllables of my name, and I shuddered, because no sound succeeded. I saw, too, for a few moments of delirious horror, the soft and nearly imperceptible waving of the sable draperies which enwrapped the walls of the apartment; and then my vision fell upon the seven tall candles upon the table. At first they wore the aspect of charity, and seemed white slender angels who would save me: but then all at once there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill, as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be no help. And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness superened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, and night were the universe.

I had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was lost. What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even to describe; yet all was not lost. In the deepest slumber--no! In delirium--no! In a swoon--no! In death--no! Even in the grave all was not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterwards (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed. In the return to life from the swoon there are two stages; first, that of the sense of mental or spiritual; secondly, that of the sense of physical existence. It seems probable that if, upon reaching the second stage, we could recall the impressions of the first, we should find these impressions eloquent in memories of the gulf beyond. And that gulf is, what? How at least shall we distinguish its shadows from those of the tomb? But if the impressions of what I have termed the first stage are not at will recalled, yet, after long interval, do they not come unbidden, while we marvel whence they come? He who has never swooned is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower; is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.

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