Christmas. A beautiful, exciting time of year. Funny how the season’s feelings of peace and expectation can lull one into a false sense of security; a sense that all is well.

Truth be told, there’d been a faint signal, a small warning from the inner voice – the one we drown out with wishful thinking and superficial noise of day-to-day existence. This morning, the voice was louder, demanding my attention, causing me to dig even deeper into the work in front of me, losing myself there and losing track of time.

And time, that counterfeit dimension, suddenly whipcracked itself into my consciousness and laid its snake fingers of foreboding on my shoulder. Suddenly I could barely draw a breath. Lifting my hands from my keyboard, they were visibly shaking. My skin felt tight and frozen, yet sweat had begun to run down my back.

Down the hall, I heard the main door open and close. In another of those cruel tricks of time, many, many moments took slow boats to China before anything further stirred. The voice just outside my door sounded so much like my colleague that I thought he had arrived a full hour before his usual appearance. Relieved that something familiar had finally drawn my awareness back from a yawning abyss of dawning terror, I jumped up and took the few short steps to the hall. Anything left in me within a normal temperature range plummeted through the frozen domain of fear and into the spheres of the calm, quiet awareness of a fate inescapable as I looked into the non-face of the specter before me and heard the words: “Something from the Grim Reaper.”

“Well,” says I to myself, “Mr. Megalomania referring to himself in the third person is no fuckin’ surprise, seein’ as how he has been around for quiet some time spelling doom and finality for every single last mortal soul since Day One.” It gave me an idea. Faster than he could say You’re Next, I ripped open the box shoved it toward him and said, “take your pick, skelatore, you deserve a nice break.” Somewhat disconcerted by my reaction to his, well, menacing presence somehow seems inadequate but will have to do, he, being by now a habituated if not honorary BOTL, gladly grabbed a huge diadema, saying as he stalked away, “this’ll take the Reaper a long, long time.”