
The house was old on top the hill
The trees all dead and withered,
As if some plague had entered there,
And death and demons gathered,
Yet something lured me through its door,
A longing, deep in me, for shadows,
As if my mind had come unhinged,
Shot through with poisoned arrows,
For around me spun a wicked world,
Where looming doom now hovered,
So on I moved through rooms decayed,
And saw in each a grotesque vision,
Of such cruel, and vile and fiendish things,
Of madmen sprouting donkey ears,
All braying in derision,
That my mind became untethered,
Until in one I saw a pale blue light,
That hung, in mid-air, somehow, humming,
And from it heard a distant song, now forgot,
That urged me on with constant thrumming,
To turn about and trace the path,
That wound back down that hill,
To find the land where beauty reigned,
And love, unknown except in legend,
That, perhaps, could make us happy,
But with each slow descending step,
There appeared new horrors – never-ending –
Until I reached a vast and empty plain,
A river through it wending,
And close nearby a single tree,
So old and gnarled and twisted,
Deformed it seemed, demented,
On which there hung, on rotting bough,
A silvered mirror, framed in gold,
In which the future was reflected,
Or so claimed an ancient crone,
Who ancient stars collected,
In her temple of the damned,
But on looking in that glass so old,
I startled, shrieked, I moaned and shuddered,
For there, with gaping eyes I saw, too hideous to describe,
Too terrible to see,
That apelike thing they call mankind, leering back at me.
.