Nightmares
Julia dreamed she was standing on the floor of the temple's central chamber, below the goddess's throne. It was bright, too bright, from sunlight that couldn't pierce the facade of the temple in the real world, as though there was a large window somewhere there shouldn't be. On the ground in front of her, a woman lay face-down. It was Hecate. Her dreadlocks were solar flares flowing out from her sun, writhing and rolling hypnotically. From the way she was lying, it was possible she was sobbing, or prostrating herself. In the dream, Julia forgot she was dead.
"M-mother?" she asked, her voice small and high like a child's. The word did not echo in a void, all around her was a hum, a vibration from the walls that drove deep into her brain. She started to walk towards the prone figure. The room was filled with tan spiders, each the size of a silver dollar, crawling on the floor and walls and in the goddess's long, thick braids. As she moved they jumped like grasshoppers and clung to her bare legs. She pulled them off, one by one, brushed them out of the way and walked closer and closer, the humming grew louder and she realized it was coming from the spiders, the millions of spiders that were everywhere, jumping on her, clinging to her, they pinched when she pulled them away. She walked closer and closer, until she was right up next to Hecate. She saw that the goddess was lying on the circle, the big circle in the center of the floor with the stars around it that was secretly an elevator, that the goddess had shown her a lifetime ago. She realized it was an elevator to hell.
She woke up when she was six inches from the goddess, about to touch her and Hecate suddenly jerked up and revealed that her face was a skull. There were marks all over Julia's legs where she'd pinched herself in her sleep. She sighed irritably and got up. She loaded up a hookah with bufo and hashish. It was one of the mildest nightmares she'd had in a long time.