1
"Will you take tea??"
The first thing is, the room has a temperature and a smell. It's bitter cold and rancid meat, respectively, which are not what you would expect in a forest. There's a long, leaf-covered table with a teapot, a bewildering array of cups and Him. One of the cups has a duck on it, and another appears to have little legs, but when it raises its head to look at him, he realizes it's a mouse, after all, so that's all right.
"Am I late?" he sits down, chooses a cup at random, a wooden goblet with a rendering of a demonic face, leering out at him. It fits his hand perfectly.
"Well you're certainly out of order."
He doesn't remember filling his cup with tea, but when he looks down into the dark liquid, he can see his own face, thin strands of silver hair and the mismatched eyes he loves to abhor. He blows on the tea and watches the surface ruffle the image until it seems like his face is contorted, twisted and he gulps the bitter drink down.
It burns against the back of his throat, the way tea shouldn't. "Does it always taste like this?" He wonders.
"Can you imagine how boring it would be, if everything always tasted the same?"
He keeps trying to look at his dinner companion. The mouse and the cups and the forest are easy enough to see, but he can't look at him directly. But he's got a hat, a great big one and it keeps changing in front of his eyes, long black hair, a noose, demonic horns and a wyrm of fire, all twining around a head of unknowable origin.
He realizes he has an appointment and he starts to rise but the table reels, goes soft and sticky, gooey and warm under his fingers and he sits down before he looks, the smell of rancid meat turned rotting wafting toward him. Guts, underneath his hands, the vulnerable, useless part of the human animal, the part that turns rotten and sick and wrong first, the part he spends his days trying to patch back together, uselessly. "I may be sick," he says.
"I couldn't imagine if you weren't."
He shakes his head so hard his spectacles go crooked but he can't answer that. He tries to look sideways at the figure, who now wears a towering hat of candles, and there is a glimpse, a flash of violet eyes. He tries to whisper a name, a plea. Save me, he doesn't say.
He looks down at the knuckles of his hands, pale skin stretched over bone and he smiles. "I've killed people with these hands." He said as he reaches for the teapot, knocks it over so the liquid spills over his hands, eating away flesh and tendons and bones, bones that he knows all the names for. He's laughing, softly. "What do you think of that?"
His head shoots up in the silence, tearing himself away from the pure bone of his hands, stripped of humanity. He searches his companion's face for answers. The clear porcelain skin and the marble violet eyes stare back at him, hatless, unmasked.
The doll is smiling.
He screams himself awake.