when everyone you have ever loved is finally gone when everything you have ever wanted is finally done with when all of your nightmares are for a time obscured as by a shining brainless beacon or a blinding eclipse of the many terrible shapes of this world when you are calm and joyful and finally entirely alone then in a great new darkness you will finally execute your special plan one needs to have a plan someone said who was turned away into the shadows and who i had believed was sleeping or dead imagine he said all the flesh that is eaten the teeth tearing into it the tongue tasting its savor and the hunger for that taste now take away that flesh he said take away the teeth and the tongue the taste and the hunger take away everything as it is that was my plan my own special plan for this world i listened to these words and yet i did not wonder if this creature whom i had thought sleeping or dead would ever approach his vision even in his deepest dreams or his most lasting death because i had heard of such plans such visions and i knew they did not see far enough but what was demanded in a way of a plan needed to go beyond tongue and teeth and hunger and flesh beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away and so i began to envision a darkness that was long before the dark of night and a strangely shining light that owed nothing to the light of day that day may seem like other days once more we feel the tiny legged trepidations once more we are mangled by a great grinding fear but that day willhave no others after no more worlds like this will follow because i have a plan a very special plan no more worlds like this no more days like that there are but four ways to die a sardonic spirit might have said to me there is dying that occurs relatively suddenly there is dying that occurs relatively gradually there is dying that occurs relatively painlessly there is the death that is full of pain thus by various means they are combined the sudden and the gradual the painless and the painful to yield but four ways to die and there are no others even after the voice stopped speaking I listened for it to speak again after hours and day and years have passed I listened for some further words yet all I heard were the faintest echoes reminding me there are no others there are no others was it then that I began to conceive for this world a special plan? there are no means for escaping this world it penetrates even into your sleep and is his substance you are caught in your own dreaming where there is no space and a hell forever where there is no time you cant do nothing you aren't told to do there is no hope for escape from this dream that was never yours the very words you speak are only its very words and you talk like a traitor under its incessant torture there are many who have designs upon this world and dream of wild and vast reformations i have heard them talking in their sleep of elegant mutations and cunning annihilations i have heard them whispering in the corners of crooked houses and in the alleys and narrow back streets of this crooked creaking universe which they with their new designs were made straight and sound but each of these new and ill conceived designs is deranged in its heart for they see this world as if it were alone and original and not as only one of count with others whose nightmares all precede like a hideous garden grown from a single seed i have heard these dreamers talking in their sleep and i stand waiting for them as at the top of a darkened flight of stairs they know nothing of me and none of the secrets of my special plan while i know every crooked creaking step of theirs it was the voice of someone who was waiting in the shadows who was looking at the moon and waiting