Part 5

The eyes, two pale orbs hanging in the blackness, sunken and white and glazed sticky with horror, dart quickly all over my body, curious, then fix themselves on mine.

They are sentient things, aching with desire: creatures borne of night and darkness, unholy and ravenous, studying me with a malicious and undeniable intelligence. Behind the milky cataracts I can barely make out the pupils, stained with the bloodthirsty intent of an ancient predator. They stare right back into me, menacing and defiant.

Suddenly, I am struck with a searing blindness, and my limbs become fire and lightning for one agonizing instant before blackness pours into my vision, thick and oily. Slowly, tiny trails of light paint themselves across the horizon. I shake my head violently, and the stars move with it.

The eyes flash again and I jerk forward, unable to control myself. The blackness seeps slowly back into my skull, and this time the crackling and spitting of the dreadful fires and the wailing that binds the dead to earth become nothing more than a hollow drone, rising and falling in pitch, piercing the silence from far away. Dizzy and nauseous, I am pulled inexplicably through the greasy blackness, choking on the mud and sickness of the Ganga, toward the dreadful spheres, which grow larger and more hypnotic by the second. Pins and needles begin to kiss my stinging flesh until my body becomes nothing but a dull, numbing ache.

There is a deafening crack as they flash a third time, and now there is nothing; no oily black, no blinding white, no giddy star trails, no piercing hollow drone, no dull throbbing, no nausea: no feeling. I am sucked out of my body, robbed of form, and set adrift in the smoky vacuum of the dead eyes. Enveloped completely in their gaze, I am starved of life; tainted and corrupted by the finality of absolute oblivion. The cadaver, still frozen in its agonizing final moments, transfixes me in a dark caress, binding and haunting me, and I gaze upon death itself, for one fleeting and eternal moment.