J. M. DeMatteis

Wait a minute: over there, by that woman. The mist--or whatever it is. It's the same thing I saw back in Paris. Hovering. Feeding. Everytime...

Wait a minute: over there, by that woman. The mist--or whatever it is. It's the same thing I saw back in Paris. Hovering. Feeding. Everytime someone passes her without a look... ignores her existance... that thing grows in strength. The tour continues. Don't know if it's the house or the spell... Or my own unconscious mind whispering the dirty little secret I've always known but never really admitted: Evil doesn't come into the world with a magic wand or a cape--huge and fierce and terrible. This is how evil is really born. In the small things: a cruel taunt, a forgotten visit, the childish urge to hit and hurt. A broken man seeks solace in a bottle. (And the shadows feed.) A husband loses control, lashes out in anger. (And the shadows feed.) But those dark vortexes aren't something other. No... They're us. All the tiny evils we all perpetrate day after day gather and thicken in the psychic womb... ...until they take shape and form. Burst up and out. But the joke of it all is that, once we create them--they feed our own darkness back into us... ...and the tiny evils grow. A harsh word becomes a hail of bullets. A closed heart becomes the torturer's hand. If you can walk past a homeless woman on the street, then you can certainly close your eyes to famine and disease. (And grow.) If you can justify smacking the wife around, you can justify dropping bombs. If you don't give a damn about the alky in the neighbourhood bar--well, then, who cares about the bodies dumped in a mass grave half the world away? (And grow.) So we create the shadows, the shadows create us. We all feed together. ...And this is the result. Millions of small sins, billions of tiny evils--twisting, twining, groping, combining... ...Till they become a great serpent... A Blight on humanity... That rises from the collective unconscious, towering over the world... ...Blocking out the light.