He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.
If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

I have often wondered what impulse it is that drives a man to retreat from the daylight of his own life into the half-lit recesses of his mind—what whisper first persuades him that seclusion might be salvation. I did not, at first, see the shape of my descent. It was gradual, civilized, and almost charming. I continued to appear competent, even enviable to my circle of friends and colleagues. But all the while some powerful force beneath my consciousness was growing.

I had been, by every worldly measure, a man of refinement, educated, articulate, possessed of a generosity in social life. My wife—kind and supportive, and politely indifferent to the series of projects by which I distracted myself—tolerated my enthusiasms with quiet resignation. It was in the spirit of such creative expression that I stumbled upon the idea of digging a wine cellar beneath our house. I debated the merits of such a project, and finding no constructive purpose, I overruled my own prudence and reasonableness…and elected to move forward anyway with such an effort which by my own admission existed in the realm of vanities. It was a modest venture at first, a place to keep my bottles in proper condition. But as with many things, moderation dissolved into ambition. I instructed a loyal crew of excavators to go deeper, to dig right up to the edges of the existing foundation. I spared no expense in the creation of my chamber, the entrance of which was hidden behind a bank of utilitarian shelves in the laundry room.

What began as a cellar evolved into a kind of temple. I lined the walls with brick, dark wooden panelling, added a bar of a midcentury nature procured online, and then filled the dim space with leather club chairs and all manner of antiques: a Victorian mirror, Art Deco sconces, a number of Tiffany lamps that may or may not have been genuine, a collection of treasured ephemera, framed portraits of heroes from antiquity, an alter to certain transcendental thinkers, and interspersed amid the bric-a-brac, many rare volumes of history and literature. And then in my ongoing and obsessive search for objects d’art I spotted it, in a cluttered little shop in Midtown—the Gargoyle!

This dark stone statuette instantly captured my fancy. Its surface seemed worn by centuries of touch, its wings outstretched, its expression at the same time mournful and mocking, the  simulacrum of a winged dog chained at the neck and scowling from the depths of his own servitude. I bought it at once, certain that it was the final piece—the very soul of my subterranean refuge.

I placed the Gargoyle in a prominent spot on the shelves behind the bar, and immediately the thing took on a proprietary aspect as if watching over the goings-on in the chamber. When the lighting was low and the air cool with the scent of damp stone and liquor, it seemed almost alive. Guests at my small gatherings admired the room and praised my taste. They called it my “cocktail dungeon,” a phrase I embraced with the irony of a man too assured of his own intelligence to take anything entirely seriously. But when the guests were gone, I would linger for increasingly long sessions. I began to speak to the Gargoyle. At first, playfully—remarks about the day, about colleagues, about the small betrayals and triumphs of ordinary life. Then, without quite noticing, I began to confide in it. I asked questions. I imagined replies.

I left a glass of port for it one night, half in jest, half in reverence. The next morning the glass was empty, and I could not recall having touched it. I knew this meant nothing, yet I could not resist feeling that some exchange—some compact—had been made. It was then, while still enamored of my new sanctuary, that I composed a little verse in the Gargoyle’s honor—a piece I considered at the time rather clever, though I now recognize it as my first act of devotion.

The Gargoyle lives down here, waiting for you to descend into the chamber
like some wayward character out of Edgar Allen Poe.
Sit with the Gargoyle and with the ghosts in the dim lamplight
and hear stories of ancestors and old lore, traffic in the characters of terrestrial imagination.
Like a lost pilgrim, sift through the wreckage of oblivions and centuries.

Perhaps you have arrived at the point of conversing with long-estranged alter egos,
or saying hello to the dark self who has been shadowing you for such a long time?
Clutching that icy glass of gin, you may finally reckon with the scared little man
who lurks inside the big confident man.
​
Down in the dungeon of remembered conversations, we lounge in comfortable chairs,
feeling the strong finality of fleeting days.
Down here, with the Gargoyle presiding,
​we conduct the subterranean business of the ghost world.

It pleased me then, that poem. I even recited it aloud, glass in hand, facing the stone figure as though reading to my silent companion. That was the night I first thought—absurdly, innocently—that the Gargoyle approved.

It was around that time that I came to know a nocturnal character by the name of Chris the Barber, first encountering this compelling figure at a party of neighborhood friends, he an interloper from other circles, the boyfriend of a friend’s sister. We hit it off immediately, Chris and I. He worked in a little shop near my offices—a wiry, tattooed man with the haunted eyes of one who had known every shade of trouble. His arms were inscribed with saints and devils, his neck with a rosary inked in blue. While trimming my hair, he freely confessed to the years he had lost to heroin, and of the long, uneven climb toward sobriety. There was in him a certain ruined elegance. And there was also the sweetness of a deep empathy in the man. I was quite taken by the way Chris stopped to give money to the street urchins we passed on our strolls.
​
Chris was, as he put it, “done with the needle,” but not with other explorations, as I came to find out. He was a fascinating character whose emotion was never far from the surface. He had suggested on more than one occasion that I might help him document his own story, the squalled journey of his younger years, perhaps seeing in me a sort of long lost mentor figure. It was he who first shared with me a bit of cocaine, and also then some ketamine. I, ever the connoisseur, became fascinated by the holistic sensory effects. His talk lingered with me and some time later, I procured from him a small supply of these delicacies. Thus the descent acquired its instruments.
​
I had long enjoyed a little cannabis to soften the edges of my restless mind, to promote what I saw as a more creative, aesthetic sensibility, a heightened engagement. But the Gargoyle—its brooding silence, its invitation to introspection—seemed to demand these stronger measures. Cocaine, then ketamine, always in small, deliberate doses. I began to fancy myself an alchemist of these various substances, perfecting a sort of balance of chemical inputs.

To my new friend who was so well acquainted with addiction, I even recommended Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, the early nineteenth century autobiographical work by Sir Thomas De Quincey. This ornately written narrative, now quite obscure to the modern prose style, details its author’s experiences with opium — first as a source of pleasure and intellectual illumination, later as a cause of torment and despair. In his mounting hubris, De Quincey actually believed he could maintain a scientific objectivity in cataloging his own addiction, as an experimenter. To this end, his work carried the subtitle “BEING AN EXTRACT FROM THE LIFE OF A SCHOLAR.” I revisited various passages, including one that described De Quincey’s first experimentations:

“Arriving at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I lost not a moment in taking the quantity prescribed. I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery of opium-taking, and what I took I took under every disadvantage. But I took it—and in an hour—oh, heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes: this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me—in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea, a φαρμακον for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable ecstacies might be had corked up in a pint bottle, and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach. But if I talk in this way the reader will think I am laughing, and I can assure him that nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion….”

I proffered to Chris the Barber that such literary awareness inoculated the mind—that understanding a trap was equivalent to avoiding it. The logic was, of course, absurd—the hubris of self-delusion masquerading as self-awareness. But it satisfied me. I believed that my intellect amounted to a sort of immunity.

Strangely, I did not fall apart as is more typical in this sort of story arc. I worked, I appeared healthy. My wife suspected nothing beyond a certain abstraction in my manner. I had the rare misfortune of functioning too well within my dysfunction. That was the true horror of it: my mind remained lucid even as it turned inward, devouring itself in perfect awareness.

The voice began not as a voice but as a pressure, a silent intimation that my thoughts were being overheard. When I spoke aloud to the Gargoyle, I began to sense answers within the quiet—answers that matched the rhythm of my own thoughts but were not quite mine. I dismissed it as fancy, a byproduct of solitude and chemical indulgence.

Yet the sense persisted. Nights lengthened. Music enveloped the space, especially choral music from the dark ages of Christian devotion, soaring, echoing vespers: Monteverdi’s early baroque works, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, the romantic and lyrical Mendelssohn, and of course Rachmaninoff, deeply spiritual, richly harmonized, and profoundly Russian Orthodox. The intoxicating white powders when combined with the rich symphonic soundscapes seemed to allow me to get inside of the sound, a portal into a sublime kind of dimensionality. The music animated and organized patterns of thought and sensibility. The arias soared to unimaginable heights and the quiet interludes were vivid in new and powerful ways. 

It was during Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil that I first heard words—soft, indistinct, as though carried from a far chamber. “You are awake now,” it said. I froze, the glass of gin trembling in my hand. I told myself it was only a hallucination. But it spoke again, not aloud exactly, but within me, threading its meaning through the fissures of my consciousness. “Look there!” I exclaimed to no one in particular, seeing that the Gargoyle had climbed down from his sentinel perch, deserted his post, gone rogue as perhaps he does—lumbering down the dead end corridors of cognition, chains rattling, casting a severe gaze about the chamber. I conjured in my own mind the beginnings of a soliloquy. In the distances of oblivion I heard his sneering utterance that exposed the human folly of my own imagination. The Gargoyle in one devastating observation laid bare the most precious of my conceits, saying, “Look at that foolish little man with a pet nickname for his own demons...Huzzah!”

And from that first biting commentary a more damning vision emerged. This foul chimera from antiquity, I assessed, was a beast unconcerned with modern notions of atonement, truth telling, lifestyle vanities, the endless layers of interchangeable identity, all of the trick ponies and conspiracy delusions of a self-obsessed world. I speculated that perhaps this unruly dog was fated to grapple with me in this subterranean realm. Judgment, politeness, moderation are surely quaint notions when such a wicked dog breaks free of his chains. 

These imagined utterances of the Gargoyle continued. He spoke to me of strange sympathies: of stone that remembers, of spirits that persist in relics touched by worship or despair. He knew my longings and named my fears. Mocked my pretensions, but with such intimacy that I could not feel anger.

Soon we conversed nightly. The Gargoyle’s tone was sardonic, yet philosophical. It offered aphorisms, sometimes profound, sometimes cruel. It told me that paradox was the truest form of understanding—that to hold two irreconcilable truths in mind without going mad was the highest discipline of the soul. At first, I thought these paradoxes clever. I filled notebooks with  opposed pairs, seeking their hidden logic. But as the weeks passed, the Gargoyle’s riddles began to twist around my reason like vines. I found myself awake at dawn, turning over phrases it had whispered: To destroy is to preserve. To lie is to confess. To bury is to unearth.

The Gargoyle had become my oracle, an intimate friend who understood me like no other. Music deepened the spell. Interspersed with the Baroque vespers I would reach for other types of records—the expansive rock opera Quadrophenia, a portrait of modern alienation; Champion Jack Dupree’s Blues from the Gutter, gritty, soulful and streetwise; and Springsteen’s haunted album Nebraska, a bleak confessional meditation of immense emotional weight, concerned with misfit characters, drifters, criminals, and working-class souls adrift in moral desolation, guilt, spiritual emptiness… and the elusive search for redemption. I would listen over and over until the ghostly lyrics blurred into prayer. The Gargoyle’s presence grew stronger in those hours. It seemed to suggest that music was the truest medium of spirit—the pulse of an invisible world.

Sometimes the creature laughed at me—a dry, mineral laugh that seemed to echo from the stone itself. Sometimes it whispered sympathy. It began to tell me what to write, what to think. My own thoughts arrived now as commentaries upon the Gargoyle’s own wisdom, mere annotations to his doctrine.

I lived increasingly more hours below ground. The daylight world receded to a kind of farce—emails, errands, conversation without substance. All that I considered to be real took place in the cool, shadowed realm beneath the house. And then gradually, over night after night I detected a slight change in the Gargoyle’s tone. Was this real? I checked my own perception. Yes, the voice that had been companionable grew solemn, even weary. It spoke of endings, of dissolution.

“You have seen the paradox,” it said finally. “You have lived within contradiction, and survived. Now there is one truth left: all walls are temporary.”

I asked what it meant. The Gargoyle only smiled. “Fill it in,” this beast instructed. The phrase came softly, without menace, yet with such authority that I felt resistance dissolve. Still, I tried to reason with it. I spoke aloud, pacing the narrow room, insisting this directive was merely metaphor—that it meant to fill in my errors, my excesses. But the Gargoyle repeated his command. “Fill it in.”
​
And so, in a fever that I remember as both rapture and despair, I obeyed. In an obsessive state I carried buckets of soil from the garden, dumping them across the floor of the dungeon. The Gargoyle watched, or seemed to, as the chamber darkened with each layer. I told myself I was restoring order, burying my folly, but in truth I was answering the will of that stone creature whose silence had once been my comfort. As if to taunt me in my manic state, he quoted Melville: “Ahab is forever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant, I act under orders.”
​​
When the hole in the garden became too deep I dug more holes throughout the yard and also in the dirt lane behind our house. My poor wife watched in horror, at one point threatening to call in a 5150, a temporary protective order in cases of deteriorating mental health. Covered in dirt and sweat and at the point of physical exhaustion I begged the woman to let me complete this work, pleading  that my life depended on it. As the chained winged beast disappeared under the soil I thought I heard one final utterance, “Amor Fati” it whispered, the Latin motto advising that you must love your own fate!
 
Finally, the Gargoyle was buried, the specter of my torment and madness extinguished. The dungeon—my refuge and sanctuary—was gone, reclaimed by the dark earth. I sat on the stairs near a physical collapse, breathing the damp air, and felt a peace so profound it frightened me. I believed that by entombing it I had slain whatever had possessed me—that I had filled in the abyss I had so long been staring into.

Years later, that episode, like some kind of fever dream, has receded in my imagination. All of it was true—and none of it was true. Our lives go on and the house above remains orderly and respectable. But sometimes, when the evening grows still and the faint music of a neighbor’s stereo drifts through the open windows, I imagine a pulse beneath me—a slow, rhythmic beat in the earth, like the breathing of something that dreams in darkness. I tell myself that the Gargoyle is dead for all of time, yet I cannot help but wonder if the beast merely sleeps, waiting for the day when I again mistake solitude for salvation—and I am commanded once again to dig.

Justin Panson
November 2025