The Dunwich Romance by Edward Lee

he’d given her the gold piece. Soon, though, Sary’s eyelids drooped; she took Wilbur’s suggestion to heart, and agreed to stay with him, at least for the night. As awkward as the lengthened cot appeared, she found it comfortable to a luxurious degree; sleep whelmed her in only moments.
    She recalled her melange of dreams, then—dreams whose tranquil essentia seemed so inconsonant to her: somnolent images of vast, beauteous pastures whose verdancies filled her spirit with an immeasurable delight; of resplendent and celestial dawns; of grand forests unspoilt by the encroachment of man and his ax for time immemorial, and of the silence of such forests which could only be described as deific. Moreover, partnered with all this, was an all-pervading sense of inner-equitableness the likes of which her heart had never experienced.
    What she could not grasp, of course, was the seeming instantaneous reversal of the dream’s overall mien...
    Those beauteous visions of pasture, sky, and wood—quite verily—transposed themselves into a shocking and inscrutable opposite: Osborn’s General Store and the trio of nefarious debauchers who’d accosted Sary only hours ago; and it was with her dreaming mind’s eye that she gazed at the appalling event. However, as the scene replayed, she found a thoroughly different perspective presented to her: not witnessing the assault as a victim but, this time, as an omnipresent spectator; likewise, it was not via her objective vision with which she made her observations but via what one might think of as some manner of hideous camera dementata...
    Sary saw the perpetrators—and their respective acts of self-degradation—from various flexures and multiple ranges of proximity. One after another, each of them cranked opened their mouth to unwillingly consume the material of their punition. If anything, this ocular recrudescence seemed to take place in a most unnatural slowness. Initially, Sary’s component of dream-awareness recoiled at the repugnance of this perspective, as would anyone’s, yet...
    She continued to watch with an undeniable acceleration of attentiveness. And what she saw next struck her even more inexplicably:
    She saw herself, escorted by Wilbur Whateley, leave the derelict general store.
    Yet the dream’s visuality remained, which enabled her to continue watching, and what she watched would be deemed, by any general canon, as unwatchable.
    For a time, the three men had lain shuddering once their stomachs had been filled with unmentionable effluences, and Sary had assumed that the self-inflicted atrocities were at an end.
    She was incorrect, however, in this assumption.
    It was the age-and wretchedness-wizened Tobias who first came to his feet, doing so in a straining, wincing protestation, as if being puppeteered by a force of will more malignant even than his own; and in jerking motions he picked up the spit-can and began to vomit into it. While this rather noisily ensued, under similar locomotions, Luke Lang and Henry Wheeler each staggered behind the old wood counter, rummaged falteringly amongst the aisles of shelving, and then returned, Lang bearing a half-gallon glass bottle and Wheeler holding a large bowl. Lang at once girdled the bottle’s opening with his lips and began to vomit Wheeler’s urine (along with other digestive debris). Into the bowl, of course, Wheeler regurgitated his feces.
    Even in the dream-conscience, Sary found no need to ponder over what might next take place...
    Tobias passed the spit-can to Lang, Lang passed the urine bottle to Wheeler, and Wheeler passed his heaping bowl to Tobias Whateley, and they all began to consume the contents of these receptacles. Then the process of regurgitation/consumption was repeated, until each man had had the opportunity to sample all the offerings of the day.
    Sary started awake as if a scream had issued directly into her ear, and with parallel rapidity the dream’s constituents appeared in her wakened