The skull with the mandala eyes comes to you in the night.
Spinning, forcing you to watch. The twisting mouth telling you how the world is. It’s hissing voice seeping into your mind, coiling around you, snuggling close to you. Too close, too seductive. It’s passing marked by a collective shudder.
And it knows – oh, the things it knows.
Your neighbour’s money difficulties. Your workmate’s deviancy. Your children’s political indiscretions.
It warns you.
Tells you to keep yourself safe, to not have secrets. If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from the Skull with the Mandala Eyes.
And then it changes, the mandala eyes of the skull burn, it’s voice now shards of glass dragging where before the voice caressed.
Now you are to be punished.
It turns you away from what you should not see. It promises you exactly what will happen if you persist to pursue the things that would anger it. Tells you with its spinning, slashing, gnashing mouth.
And it comes, every night, seducing and terrorizing, stroking and smashing.
Every night.
Through the hours of sleep, tossing, turning and shuddering.
Not all can take it. Those who wake screaming are questioned in the days to come. They are watched. And the skull knows – the skull tells the world of their aberrant behaviour. The skull makes everyone watch. Everyone witnesses.
Witnesses through its spinning, hypnotic eyes.
So now they wake, shaking and ashen; their screams swallowed down, killed before they can get out. But no sleep comes the rest of the night. As the minutes crawl by, those who can take no more rock in their beds, sweating, crying, too scared to reach the toilet.
And now the skull knows so much more.
And those who don’t listen? Those who rush too deep into sleep to escape, or float too high for it to see? What of those who do not know what to shun, who ask the questions they shouldn’t?
In the back of your mind there is a tingle, a nagging doubt. Was there someone? But then the headache begins. Dull at first but as you think longer stabbing. White pain behind the eyes as if something is drilling, gouging.
Well – there is none like that. You would surely remember.
We all dream.
All learn.
All trust the skull with the Mandala Eyes.
All love the skull with the Mandala Eyes.
