Fee Fi Fo Fin

The second half of this post is a copy of the short story "Bleeding Darkness" by Shane Ivey from the old Delta Green website. As he washes his hands, the sound rushes to him unbidden until he screws his eyes shut and places his palms against them. He is a man of four-and-forty years, he has been a catholic priest for twenty-four of them, and even now the business of exorcism frightens him. In the darkness behind his eyelids - in the strange, imaginary dancing dendroids and bismuth crystals, which he knows are only illusions, he is aware of a subtle steady mechanism at work in his mind: his entire life-experience reconfiguring itself to accommodate a new truth, as if his whole life were pictures hung on the wall, and he were forced to take them down and swap their frames, and in doing so he changes the images slightly, discovering a new and disturbing perspective of their content. It was as if maybe the picture-frames hid some detail, a figure in the margins; a vague shape kno...

When his feet began to burn and lungs began to ache, he'd find an pine with an adequately high canopy that he would crawl beneath. Then he would kneel below it as if in prayer, undoing his rucksack and drinking his water, then he'd sit. The hood of his poncho pulled over his head so as not to get sap in his hair.  He'd sit and listen, inspecting the sounds of the woods, breathing slowly through his nose, not smiling and not thinking, and occasionally, sleep would come to him. He found it funny how it sneaks up on him. No one ever sees sleep coming until its done.  In his daydreams, as he sat awake below the canopy, and in his sleep, he would revisit the college years. He would remember sitting in dim dormitories at midnight with people who, even now, he considered his closest friends; two parts drunk and speaking earnestly about love and fear and uncertainty, conversations he would never dream of broaching with his chums from grade school. He remembered the things that made...