I wake again in the middle of the night with my heart racing and my skin drenched is sweat. Despite the frigid wind blowing in from the open window I peel off my flannel gown and pace the room. Goosebumps raise on my flesh and the breeze cools the fever burning through me. I run both hands through my long dark hair and try to shake the echo of the dream.
The dream comes every October, as the the days grow short and the nights grow cold. Every year, every night as the moon grows dark the dream plays out the same.
I stand in the circle of light while some dark animal prowls around the edges. I hear it's growl, feel it's hot musky breath as it paces just beyond the border. It wants me to step out of the light, to come offer myself to the dark. I freeze with my eyes closed, praying it will go away. It doesn't go away. It lingers there, just out of reach of the light; a beastly shadow waiting to claim me if I make one wrong step.
I have seen the beast in other places, in a frame of film, a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye, sometimes in the eyes of a potential lover. He is not a beast then, but a man. In this form he seduces me. He calls to places deep within my soul that cannot help but answer. I can feel his hands on my waist, taste his skin on my lips, hear his hot raged breath against my ear as he whispers his promises.
Every year he dons another mask, looks out at me from behind a different pair of eyes. He hides in every dark place, calling me, pleading with me. Patiently he waits as the autumn days slip by, waiting for the thirty-first, waiting for midnight, waiting for me to fly across the night into his arms.
He lays himself bare as an offering. He stretches up his neck and begs for me to take him, to sink teeth into flesh and claim him as my own. He whimpers as his flesh trembles in need of my touch. Take me! his eyes scream, and he knows I know that though I take him, in return he takes me and we lose ourselves in each other.
These are the visions he plants in my mind when he takes the form of a man, when he reaches for me in this world, flesh and blood and stone; in this world where I am queen and he cannot harm me.
But the dream of the forest is his world. There he is the beast. There he longs to take me as his own. There he waits for me to step over the edge of the light and fall as if off a cliff into the sea of darkness...
Happy Halloween
