See, there is no shape in the fireplace. The smoke is gone, gone up the chimney and out into the sky. And there is nothing in the sky, nothing I can see through the window. There is the moon, of course, high and round. But no shadow falls across the moon, no churning chaos of smoke that chokes the frail order of the earth, no shifting cloud of nightmares enveloping moons and suns and stars. It is not a squirming, creeping, smearing shape I see upon the moon, not the shape of a great deformed crab scuttling out of the black oceans of infinity and invading the island of the moon, crawling with its innumerable bodies upon all the spinning islands of inky space. That shape is not the cancerous totality of all creatures, not the oozing ichor that flows within all things. Nethescurial is not the secret name of the creation. It is not in the rooms of houses and beyond their walls . . . beneath dark waters and across moonlit skies . . . below earth mound and above mountain peak . . . in northern leaf and southern flower . . . inside each star and the voids between them . . . within blood and bone, through all souls and spirits . . . among the watchful winds of this and the several worlds . . . behind the faces of the living and the dead.

I am not dying in a nightmare.