My Grandfather’s Carpet

Though I was finally free from many of life’s worries I found the shame of feeling so pierced my high spirits. My heart burdened with the weight of an uncommon liberty; this freedom granted me by death. So distracted was I that much of my day was spent mooching from room to room, idly tugging a volume free from a shelf or inverting some curio that had come from who knows where. As I spent more time in my grandfather’s house I found that a hyperactive nausea began to lie thickly upon my soul.
Late in the evening my fingers quavered with inactivity, for I could not bring myself to settle and achieve any one thing. At length my feet took me to the bedroom at the rear of the house. My grandfather had filled the room with dark wooden furniture which hemmed me into a leathered chair in the corner opposite the bed, worn through years of use. A glass sat on a round table at my right; on a bureau sat a silver tray with a decanter of some amber liquid. I found it to be a whiskey. Maybe it would soothe me.
As the drink passed my lips I began to relax. The window gave me a narrow sliver of the night sky, the moon swollen and part-shrouded in mauve clouds. The silvery light cast curious shadows from the figurines which stood guard at the window sill. The house was full of such artifacts and I should make some inventory of them, eventually. My gaze fell to the floor, on which lay a glorious weaving. Something in the pattern intrigued me, drew me into the weave. My earlier restlessness returned and I could no longer sit still.
The twitching unease roused me from my seat and took me on a nervous curlicue of the intricate carpets. The paths I traced were surely unknown to the skilled carpeteer whose only design was that of ornament, and yet- and yet… Were not those patterns which my spirit sought out through the elocution of mine toes as they plunged admirable into the weft those patterns which had been framed in my very mind? Framed and presented to my waywarding soul in the dark resplendence of the waking dreams into which I had been lured by those awful vilified peerless ancients whose dead breath I felt in my mind’s ears. Those very treads marked the stain they had left in me.
And exposed, I saw them – naked in the furrows ploughed by my toes and heel. In a panic of fluttering wrists and palsied eye I took pen to paper to record the daemonic maze I had limberly scribed. Paper was not enough and I tore from the walls such decor as I had looked upon with former affection and littered the bed with them. High-kneed I over-stepped my footed pattern and mirrored it on the four walls of my quarters.
My work completed I fell back amongst the ruin of treasures, broken jags of frame and torn tapestry my mattress. About me I could truly see the messages the ancients had so crudely couriered to our world through the unwilling postiary of my half-woken mentation. It was only as I traced my psychic horrors on the chamber walls with a faltering thumb that I realised my error.
How stupid, how ignorantly rapt in their eldritch influence I had been. Laid bare about me I saw the nightmare gate I had etched in first ink, then, my bleeding wrists attested in the blood of my veins. And wrought a dire magic.
The runic gateway I’d mindlessly daubed were filling with a ghast light, from that place beyond emotion and life where they dwell. And from where they would soon return.