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Introductory Text

The Author's Narrative Part 20

100th Post

Posted 18 July 2016 at 00:16:24 UTC

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> I am being changed. Mother's lessons are teaching me things, transforming me. At night, I lie in my little bed eating cookies and watching the ceiling. Then the seams open up and -- wow -- look at what's behind them! Colors without names. Stars from long ago. Tunnels through the beyond.
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> My magic is growing stronger. I can make things happen. I pray and wait and they come to me. Every morning little sparrows land on tree branch outside my window. Mother says I can't be too greedy. Press at the curves, she says. Direct the flow. Don't move against it.
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> I am reading the Bible with the new words I've learned. Christ had blood magic. The magic of suffering. Of desire and limitation. At night, Mother and I watch his soft flesh writhe and struggle on the hard architecture of the cross.
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> "Mother," he cries. "Behold your son."
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> "Father," he cries. "Into your hands I commit my spirit."
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> Soon I will call my own little christ
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> Unto these yellow sands.
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> ---
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> The other passengers on the bus seem unaware that I am headed towards a showdown which will decide the fate of all mankind.
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> Am I still sane? I feel pretty sane. I'm not drooling at the mouth. I'm not shouting at the pigeons. But what really makes me feel sane is that I can still recognize that my actions are insane. I am going to confront a sinister entity which has been shaping the course of human events since prehistory, which may one day enslave all of humanity. And I am doing it wearing an old Garth Brooks t-shirt.
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> As I step off the bus and onto the blinding summer sidewalk, I am reminded of the brave Marines piling out of their landing vehicles onto the beaches of Iwo Jima. Yes, brave warriors are we. They say one hallmark of delusional thinking is grandiosity. The delusional man often thinks himself to be a part of some grand struggle, when really there is no struggle but that in his mind.
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> A pigeon bobs across my path. I mutter, "Fuck off."
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> Google Maps leads me through the streets. I expect to see a bunch of crack heads milling around but everything is empty. In the sunshine, it looks like a ordinary factory street. The warehouse itself is just a dusty old brick building with scribbles of spray paint and boarded-up windows. It's not even especially shitty.
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> The front door is chained up, but I check the boarded windows and find a board that bends back easily. A musty smell seeps out of the dark. Fuck. Am I really doing this? Sweat already coats my face. I fish a flashlight out of my backpack and turn it on.
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> Inside the warehouse, my sweeping flashlight finds dusty shapes littering the floor. Old boxes. Cinder blocks. And a gleam on the floor -- yes, it's our first crack pipe. Or maybe a meth pipe. Is there a difference? Listening to people in the rooms has made me feel rather worldly when it comes to drugs, but it's all been secondhand stories. What do I really know?
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> Shawn said there was a flight of stairs that led down to a door. The floor of the main room doesn't seem to have any stairs leading down, but there are a few doorways on the far side. I make my way over, stepping carefully through the debris. The middle doorway sits at the top of a short stair case. At the bottom is another empty doorway. The flashlight catches the glint of metal: a pair of torn hinges.
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> When we were roommates, Shawn always has such a cool demeanor -- cool and poised and confident. But now I see a new picture of him: working the hydraulic spreader, prying the door off its hinges, the metal groaning then shrieking, sweat coating his face, his eyes bright and wide with that terrible craving, that thing beyond hunger.
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> I shudder and step down the stairs. Sure enough, they lead to a tunnel. I move slowly, forced to press against some basic animal instinct to go back! get the fuck out of there! But the tunnel is strangely plain and featureless, considering that it lies under a crack den and leads to a possible flesh interface. It's just dusty block walls with no light fixtures or anything.
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> The tunnel leads to more tunnels. More stairs. Empty rooms. The black air teems with bits of dust that shine in the flashlight. My skin tingles all over. Is it the dust clinging to me? Or is it just the low-grade terror that has filled my body? It reminds me of the tingle that filled my limbs on all those mornings before the first drink. How I had begged for that feeling to end. But now I know it will never end. There will always been another awful morning, another fuckup, another withdrawal -- unless I go forward. Not away from the nightmare. But into it.
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> But it goes on and on. I cannot believe how long the tunnels are, how many rooms there are, how deep the stairs are. I can taste the dust on my lips, and I pull my shirt up over my nose. Occasionally I come across an old metal chair or some rotting boards but nothing else. I'm hoping to find some scrap of paper or maybe a nametag, some clue as to who built this monstrosity, but there is nothing but dust, more and more dust.
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> I stop and watch the dust float across my flashlight's beam. Holding out my sweating, shaking hand, I let a dark speck settle on my fingertip. Looking at it closely, I see that it's in the shape of a flake. Is it dust? Or is it ash?
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> A wave of dread moves through me. Could it be from a burned interface? Is it human ash?
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> The wave of dread is followed by a flurry of nervous wisecracks. Fucking dust. What the fuck do I know about dust or ash? I'm not some dust expert. Maybe it's just flaky dust. Maybe it's dandruff. Maybe I'll find a huge cache of used wigs down here. "Did you find an interdimensional portal?" "No, but these wigs are in pretty good condition. Look, we got a mid 60s Dusty Springfield here."
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> I wipe my hand on my shirt and keep moving forward. Just a few steps later, my flashlight finds the end of the block tunnel and the beginning of the rock cave. Just like Shawn said. God, can it be real? Maybe it's an ordinary rock tunnel. Maybe it's just part of an unfinished...
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> Reaching out of from the shadowy wall, with its bony fingers splayed almost elegantly, is the shape of a human hand.
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> I stare at it for a moment, letting my eyes flood with tears, before I have to kneel down and wipe my face. I am not crazy. I have not been crazy all these years. Something happened. Something happened to me when I was a child, and I'm not just some fuck up. I'm not just some piece of shit loser who can't keep his hands off a bottle. I have seen something. I have been touched by something vast and unimaginable.
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> I stand and approach the hand. Yes, it is a human hand, as real as my own hand holding the flashlight, except it is little more than bone wrapped in a gray, papery skin. It extends from a wrist that is fused to a distorted mass of gray and black shapes. The flashlight passes over an awful collage of desiccated anatomy: rows of teeth, racks of ribs, pairs of eye sockets and hip sockets, snaking vertebrae and femurs and tibias and clavicles.
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> For a moment, I feel like I am not standing on the ground but am suspended over a pit full of bodies, like one of the great burning pits of Treblinka, only much vaster. These are not just the bodies from Treblinka but from all the camps, all the prisons, all the pogroms, all the wars, all the plagues, all the indifferent machinery of history, the great unfeeling clock-wheels of the cosmos which roll sublimely along, generation after generation, rending and crushing the human form into pieces, into powder, into dust, into ash.
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> Vertigo encloses me. I totter and find myself sitting on the ground, sweating and gasping. The jumble of body parts spins around me, and I close my eyes.
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> What is this vision of death? This dead clockwork universe? Stars and abyss. Atoms and void. This is something beyond Mother. Even more horrible and fundamental. Mother is at least alive -- monstrous and devouring, but alive. Virulently fertile, she writhes and struggles within this vast tomb universe, binding times and worlds to...
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> ...but the dizziness passes, and with it the visions. The ideas slip away like fish in a stream.
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> Sitting there in the afterglow of this near-revelation, I think of what Shawn said happened to him when he came to this cave. He said he smelled apple sauce coming out of the tunnel, a smell that reminded him of his daughter. He said he could feel the presence of the 'evil one' tempting him with dreams of family and love.
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> I open my eyes and pick up the flashlight and shine it down the tunnel. Is there anything down there? Anything to tempt me? The flashlight catches awful shapes along the walls extending on and on until the beam of light fails. But I don't see anyone in the tunnel. I don't sense anyone waiting for me. And I don't smell anything but dust and ash and...
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> Cookies. Little sugar cookies. My god. I remember. They were like the one's my mom used to make for me. But not quite the same as them. These were the ones I used to make for myself. Out of stones.
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> The memory of it comes flooding up to me so hard that again my eyes are full of tears. Christ. I used to sit in my room with stones and turn them into cookies. I tried to make them like mom's cookies, but they always tasted a little different, and that made me miss her even more. Impossible. Completely impossible. And yet real. Real and floating in the darkness before me.
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> I stand and brush myself off. There is something at the end of the tunnel waiting for me. Good or evil, it will be an answer. A resolution. An end.
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> I walk into the dark.
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> ---
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> I say my prayer and look out the window.
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> For a long time, the street is empty.
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> Then he comes walking down the road, carrying a flashlight, even though it's light out.
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> I rush downstairs. Mother is sitting at the kitchen table. I think of saying goodbye to her, but the gleam in her eyes tells me there is no need.
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> I go into the dim little front hall. A beam of daylight is shining through the peephole.
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> There is a knock on the door. I wait. The knob turns, and the door opens. This is it, the beginning.
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> I walk into the light.
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> THE END
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