It looked like a lantern, made of tarnished copper. 

I saw it as I rounded the corner at midnight.  Nothing was holding it up.  It hung in the air just out of reach, tucked against the wall of the building, silent and perfectly still. It wasn’t lit, the stained-glass fragments which made up the windows on the six sides were dark.  To this day I remember it very clearly.  It had a pointed top and base and, protruding from the bottom, was a gently curved hook, like an Arabian sword.

I’d never seen anything like it before, but I knew it didn’t belong in this world.

It was watching me.

It was doing nothing, and it had no eyes, but it was watching me. Looking down at me.  It knew I was here.

I remember stepping away from it and pulling my coat around me a little tighter, which I thought was odd because it wasn’t particularly cold.  In fact, it wasn’t particularly anything.  I wasn’t warmer with my coat pulled around me, and I wasn’t colder with it open.  That was when I realised that I didn’t actually feel anything.  I put my hand out to touch the corner of the old sandstone wall.  I expected it to be cold.  I expected to feel grains of sand beneath my fingers, the dampness of ingrained dirt.  But I felt nothing.  Nothing at all.  I could lean on it, put my weight on it, I knew I was touching it, but it didn’t have any ‘feel’ to it.  I looked up into the darkness of the night sky.  There were stars.  Twinkling ones.  The sky was usually clouded by the lights of ten thousand people, who lit their roads and streets all night for no purpose apart from using up electricity that they needed to get rid of.  Tonight the sky was crystal clear and the stars were bright.

No-one was around.  Everyone was in bed.  Everyone except me.  How did I know that?  Who was I anyway?  Where had I just come from before I came round the corner?  Why was I here, and where was I going?  I didn’t know.  I was here now, and I knew exactly what was happening.  That was all I knew.

This thing.  This was the cause of the problems.  There had to be a way to get rid of it.  You couldn’t break it; nothing would touch it.  I knew that.  I don’t know how I knew that, but I did.

It just sat there, dark and silent and motionless, and it controlled the world.  As long as it remained here no-one felt anything, no-one thought anything, no-one did anything except what it wanted them to do.  People existed, that was all.  They did whatever it wanted, and right now they slept.  All of them.

It didn’t seem to have any malignant thoughts, it also just existed.  Like a machine of some kind sent to execute some unknown plan.

Throughout recorded history there have been countless empires of man, and few remain.  All empires rise and fall.  Scholars believe they understand the reasons behind some of the catastrophes, but others remain a mystery.  People talk of Gods that change the world, of meteor strikes, of social, and political factors that lead empires and civilisations to destruction.  Maybe they are right, but nobody is alive who knows.  Looking at this thing it made me think that perhaps there are other factors at play in this world which are outside our control, and about which we know nothing.  Perhaps we are visited.  Perhaps we are driven to a fate by things we don’t understand.  Perhaps we are just pawns in someone, or something, else’s game.

I continued to gaze at it intently for what seemed like several minutes before turning away.  It watched me walk slowly past it and away along the road in the darkness.

I don’t remember where I went that night, I don’t remember going home.

Of the events of that evening I remember nothing more, except this, which I can only assume was a dream.

Share: