Optical Busstop and the Levitating Eunuchs

Doctor Curio’s House of Despair

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You came to this place, it was a fading wish

The merest light to raise you from a certain fate

The faintest option of another dawn

The slightest hope of being reborn

Welcome to the house of Doctor Curio

(The place you heard about in murmured anecdotes)

Come in and make yourself feel ill at ease

The dirt and dust of millennia

Lie like deserts across the decrepit uninviting entrance hall

Where a half-human, tongue-less butler takes your overcoat and hat

And ushers you into a vast and filthy library

Filled with manuscripts so old no one can ever read them

Here you are given a generous libation of a liquid unknown outside this house

Which works insidiously upon your already overstretched imagination

And you sense that before too long you will become a babbling incoherent wreck

A shadow of the soul you were but seven short ticks ago

In desperation you begin to look for signs of hospitality

A friendly smile, a kindly look or breath of benediction

Inwardly you are screaming

Every muscle in your being is wailing, straining; begging you to flee

But you resolutely stand your ground

And hold your suspect nerve

The fetid air engrains itself into your every orifice and pore

The sense-surround, foul and rancid smell invokes the innate auto-gagging

Whilst somewhere in the distant gloom a half heard discordant melody

Is played upon a foot bellowed, bat-stained instrument

Conjoined with barely human-sounding, tortured shrieking!

A skulking creature scuttles suddenly across the skirting

An involuntary shiver turns into you shaking uncontrollably

As you see the mindscape beasts of hell

Gnawing at the last bastions of your sanity

When will this nightmare ever cease?

Where is this Doctor Curio?

Then jarringly you know for sure

Your fate is written predefined in blood

Doctor Curio will never come

And you are lost for all eternity