You came to this place, it was a fading wish The merest light to raise you from a certain fate The faintest option of another dawn The slightest hope of being reborn Welcome to the house of Doctor Curio (The place you heard about in murmured anecdotes) Come in and make yourself feel ill at ease The dirt and dust of millennia Lie like deserts across the decrepit uninviting entrance hall Where a half-human, tongue-less butler takes your overcoat and hat And ushers you into a vast and filthy library Filled with manuscripts so old no one can ever read them Here you are given a generous libation of a liquid unknown outside this house Which works insidiously upon your already overstretched imagination And you sense that before too long you will become a babbling incoherent wreck A shadow of the soul you were but seven short ticks ago In desperation you begin to look for signs of hospitality A friendly smile, a kindly look or breath of benediction Inwardly you are screaming Every muscle in your being is wailing, straining; begging you to flee But you resolutely stand your ground And hold your suspect nerve The fetid air engrains itself into your every orifice and pore The sense-surround, foul and rancid smell invokes the innate auto-gagging Whilst somewhere in the distant gloom a half heard discordant melody Is played upon a foot bellowed, bat-stained instrument Conjoined with barely human-sounding, tortured shrieking! A skulking creature scuttles suddenly across the skirting An involuntary shiver turns into you shaking uncontrollably As you see the mindscape beasts of hell Gnawing at the last bastions of your sanity When will this nightmare ever cease? Where is this Doctor Curio? Then jarringly you know for sure Your fate is written predefined in blood Doctor Curio will never come And you are lost for all eternity There is an dance version of this poem at http://www.opticalbusstop.com/Poems.htm