Madness

Detective Jeremy Reynolds entered the interrogation room with a half-hearted sigh at the sight of the man he was supposed to be questioning. The man must have been handsome once, but whatever roguish charm he might have had was gone now with his sanity. His hair, once short and respectable, was now long, matted and frayed, thinner in some areas than in others. His teeth were lemon-yellow and cracked, and his gums pale and bleeding. His face was worn, tired, as if he hadn't slept a day in his life, and black bags hung under his eyes like a large weight. Contrary to his exhausted appearance, though, the man's eyes were wide, darting around the room, his pupils dilated and tiny, even though the room was dark.

Reynolds sat on the other side of the table and opened up the file he was carrying with him.
"Richard Ryleh. A former best-selling author who went missing eleven months ago…I see you had an interest in the occult, Mr. Ryleh?" Reynolds asked, looking up from the file and seeing Ryleh glaring at him.
“’The Occult’ they call it. ‘Witchcraft’. ‘Magic’. This isn’t Hogwarts stuff, you ignoramus. This is the bigger picture. This is the universe, the things we can’t explain or rationalize. This is bigger than you and I, fiend. To say I had an ‘interest’ in it is akin to saying humans are ‘interested’ in the meaning of life.” He turned away, his wide, never-blinking eyes staring off into space. Reynolds shuffled in his seat, uncomfortable. The man may have lost his mind, but he was just as eloquent as he was before it happened.
“Why did you run away from home, if you don’t mind me asking?” Reynolds pressed, trying to get Ryleh to look at him.
“I saw it.” Ryleh answered impassively, not shifting his gaze.
“Saw what?” Reynolds asked, and Ryleh turned and looked him, incredulous.
“The Great Evil. The World Eater. The Destroyer of Worlds. HIM.” Ryleh seethed, the last word a hiss.
“I did the ritual, I saw through to the next dimension, under us, and I saw HIM. Well, not all of him, but what I saw was…beyond the words of even a writer such as me. The horror of a million rotting, atrophied corpses, cursed with the words of a thousand demons. A changing, impossible mass of shapes and intangibility that could not be understood by the weak human mind. I saw death in its purest, most base, terrifying form. And…it saw me. I looked at me with a billion unblinking, uncoloured eyes filled with nothing but apathy and anger and hate, and I broke. I felt reason shatter. I felt everything break. The portal window closed, and I ran. I ran as far as I could and I collapsed.”

Reynolds stared at Ryleh, then got up to leave.
“You! He’s coming here, you know. He saw me and knows where we are. We’re next.”
Reynolds ignored him, and left the room.

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