Mother Horse Eyes Finale (Posts 91-100)

(Note: This creepypasta was originally told through comments on Reddit. It is also super long, so it's been split up into parts)

Mother Horse Eyes Part 1

Mother Horse Eyes Part 2

Mother Horse Eyes Part 3

###### 91st Post / Date 06-27-2016

The person sitting in the big chair. New mother. A basement full of specimens. Glistening membranes. Blurred faces laughing. Tower witch monster mountain apocalyptic sky infested with winged things. The dream folds in on itself and spills out dozens of new creatures, images intercourse

Panes of light behind everything. Ragged muppet creatures tumbling out and chasing one another, devouring, bloody crunching. Growing panes of light. Galapagos critters howling, ingesting, affixing, lamprey succubus Voltron food chain formation. Panes of light: a persistent locus.

The window panes' persistence triggers reality. Rational bootstrapping. Persistence rapidly infects everything else. The weird Galapagos creatures die off, too weird to live. All the props of ordinary reality are rushed into place just before I open my eyes.

A sunlit window in a bedroom. Where is this? My new place. I rented it online before moving out of the sober house. This is real. I try to remember what I did over the last few days. The memories are a dark, shifting mess, a clinging mud I'm afraid to touch. Face hurts. My tongue finds cuts on the inside of my bottom lip. Brown spots dot the white pillowcase.

Picking my head up and looking around at the room, I recall it from the 20 sober minutes I spent here before going to the bar. Beside the bed, the nightstand has been tipped over and the lamp is a corded pile of shards. Shit. This isn't my stuff. It's just a bedroom in a somebody's house.

I slide out of bed. My stomach tingles, my brain tingles, my limbs are moving stroboscopically. Oh, wow, I am inside the nightmare. Mind-crucifying. Reddish spots make a trail along the hardwood floor. Fuck fuck fuck. I can't handle this. I run to the little bathroom, and a red-faced creature lurches into the mirror's frame. Oh, Jesus. A distorted mass of bruises. I turn this way and that to see my new features. The horrible tingling in my brain feels like it is going to eat through my skull. I check my teeth and my heart sinks. The bonding on my front tooth has been knocked out. The other teeth seem OK though.

I look down at the sink. It seems to have been scrubbed with blood. Swirling trails of reddish brown cover the porcelain. It's on the floor, the toilet, the walls. Oh, it's a lot of blood.

*Title: "I'm Taking The Vodka!"*

###### 92nd Post / Date 06-28-2016

Have you ever noticed that whenever you swallow your throat closes up for a moment and you can't breathe at all? Of course it always opens back up. The process is quite automatic, and you don't need to think about it. But what if you *do* think about it? What if by thinking about it, you somehow confuse everything, and your throat just stays closed? What if all that gummy flesh just sticks together and you suffocate to death?

This is how I think after a bender. I call it the "Scary Swallows." I swallow and my throat seems to "catch" for a moment, cutting off my windpipe, and panic blooms through my brain, threatening to take over everything. Then I manage to suck in a breath, and the panic subsides until the next swallow. So I try not to swallow at all, but then I'm thinking about it, obsessing over it, and my throat starts to twitch.

Shut up. Shut up. Irrelevant. Stupid. Do something. What do I do? Liquor. Look for liquor. My queasy stomach groans at the thought of it, but every other part of me shrieks with anticipation. Liquor will make everything else possible. Without it, the panic will rattle me apart. With it, I can do anything.

I scan the blood-smeared bathroom for bottles: nothing. Out in the bedroom, there is an empty half gallon of vodka and empty cans everywhere. Drunk to the last drop. Goddamn it. Nothing in here.

Where is the owner? I remember that I checked into the place without meeting him, using a door code. Have I met him since? No idea. That area of memory is corrupt. What will he think when he sees the broken lamp, the blood, my face? He'll kick me out for sure.

What if something even worse is waiting outside the bedroom door? What if I've killed him and his body is lying face down on the floor and my entire life is over? And I was so close -- *so fucking close* -- to getting out of the misery, of doing something, of accomplishing something, something mom and dad could be proud of, and now it's all over, all destroyed.

Calm yourself. Calmness. This is all imagination. Oh your fanciful imagination. What a delight it is. Just go out into the living room and look. Just go. Just go.

I crack the bedroom door and peek out. It's the ordinary living room and kitchen of a pretty nice apartment. I don't see anybody lying face down in a pool of blood. Nothing is broken.

Liquor. Now.I go to the kitchen. There's nothing on the counters. I open the refrigerator. Pleasepleaseplease. There is nothing. Oh, you teetotaling cunt. Did I get a room with the one sober motherfucker in this whole fucked-up drinkin'-ass city? I open the freezer. A frosty bottle lies on its side. I pull it out.

It is a fifth of Absolute. Full. Unopened. Emitting a ghostly cold mist like an angel. I stare at it in my shaking hands, tears coming to my eyes. I feel flowing through my entire existence the begrudging mercy of a disapproving god.

I scratch at the stupid, slippery plastic around the cap. My trembling hands are almost useless. I imagine myself having a seizure before I can get the bottle open, dying right here on the kitchen floor, like a man in a desert dying of thirst just feet away from an oasis. But finally I manage to tear the cracking plastic off.

The front door of the apartment swings open, letting in a blast of horrible sunlight. A figure stands at the door. I shove the bottle back into the freezer and slam it shut and turn my back to the person. I want to run and hide, to evaporate, but all I can do is just stand there. Fuck. Fuck.

"Oh, hey, man," a friendly voice says. "Nick, right?"

"Yeah. Good," I mumble. I am still standing with my back to the person. This is not valid human behavior. Fuck. Fuck. Why did he have to come home now? I force myself to turn around.

A youngish dude is standing in the doorway with bag slung over his shoulder. Apparently, the owner. "Hey... Are you alright?" he asks, the smile fading from his face.

"Yeah."

"What happened to you?"

"I don't know. Mountain biking."

Another invalid response from me. Now he's worried. He glances around the apartment, checking to see if his stuff is OK.

"I broke your lamp," I say preemptively. "I'm going to go. I'm sorry."

"What happened?" he asks, closing the front door.

"I got drunk and... Mountain biking," I mumble. I head to the bedroom, my heart pounding.

On second inspection, I notice that not only is the nightstand turned over and the lamp broken, but there are broken plates and a hole punched in the dry wall and beef jerky sticks strewn everywhere.

"Jesus, man. What did you do?" the guy asks as he follows me into the room.

"I don't know," I say, already on the verge of sobbing. Maybe I can just cry my way out of this. Nobody likes to see a grown man cry. I've got to get out of here. "I got drunk. Please just take the month's rent. I'll go," I say. This is a really stupid offer. I can't afford to give away a month's rent. But I don't know what else to do. I can't handle going to jail. It would kill me. My heart feels like it's trying to punch its way out of my chest. I need liquor. I just need liquor.

"Dude, hold on. How much stuff did you fuck up?" the guy asks.

"This is it," I say, not really knowing if I'm telling the truth or not. A bunch of my clothes are lying on the floor, and I gather them up and throw them into my suitcase and zip it up, only to realize that there are a lot more of my clothes obviously lying all over the place.

"Well, we need to figure out the damages."

"I can't, OK? I've got to go," I say in a quavering, childish voice. "Just take the month's rent."

The guy starts inspecting the room as I pack my clothes. The awkwardness of it makes me want to claw my eyes out. My suitcase won't close. The clothes won't fit unless they are perfectly folded. God, I want to cry. I am almost crying. Good. Good. It's like a squid blasting out a jet of ink. It will allow me to escape. I throw my least favorite shirts onto the floor and zip the suitcase up.

When I stand up, me and the guy have this moment where we're looking at each other eye to eye. "Dude," he says, "You're all fucked up."

"I'm taking the vodka," I announce.

*Title: "All The Birds Giggle and I Scream"*

###### 93rd Post / Date 06-28-2016

I fall asleep in the closet but I wake up in my bed. Before I open my eyes I know she will be there.

She is.

Standing at the end of the bed. Morning time. She is not a person. She is something else. I try not to cry. I start crying right away. Can't stop. She is tall but her body is not a body. It is just a pile of things. It's covered in a long shiny robe. Shiny from a million blue-gold flies crawling on her. Long gray hair covers most of her face. I look up at the ceiling and scream and scream and scream. I scream for mommy to come back. The ceiling turns pink and fuzzy I am screaming so hard.

Then she is standing over me looking down on me. Her face is awful pieces of animal. I remember her eyes. The same eyes as the white horse Brittany rides, the one that mom said I could pet but it bit my hand and I had to go to the hospital. The eyes are just hanging on the face not really looking at me. Flies crawl on them. I am shaking scared.

Please God please please make her go away.

She snorts and makes animal sounds. Her old barn smell makes me want to throw up. She reaches out and her fingers are made of crab legs all different sizes. No no no. I hate crabs more than anything. When we go to the beach, my dad always makes sure to pick a part of the beach with no crabs. He says he can tell when there are crabs because no no no she touches my face with her crab hands horrible horrible I close my eyes as tight as I can and scoot against the back of the bed.

The touching stops. I press my eyes shut tight.

Tweets and chirps. "Drink," a happy little voice says.

I keep my eyes closed.

"Drink," says the voice. It sounds fun and cartoony.

I open my eyes just a little bit. Oh a dozen bird heads have crawled out of a hole in her neck. They move in different ways. I found a dead baby bird once in our backyard. It had no skin and blue lumps for eyes. It is there with the other heads. "Drink!" it says in its funny parrot voice.

She holds up a big silver spoon in her crab hand. A greenish monkey hand holds up a glass bottle full of purple stuff and pours it out into the spoon. I can smell it. Grapey like the medicine mom gives me. Is it the same stuff? She holds the spoon up for me to drink.

Please God make this stop.

All the birds giggle.

Her claw pinky pokes my neck. It hurts. I open my mouth. Down goes the medicine.

I lie there with my eyes shut tight. I cry and stop crying and cry again. I know she's there. The smell. The flies. The sound of animal breath. Why won't she go away? Please go away go away go away. Please God make her go away.

Something's slipped inside my eyes. I can see it even though they're closed. Not a square. Not a triangle. A shape I don't know the name of. Lots of shapes. Oh no my eyeballs fill up with little people like a Where's Waldo book. There's a million of them all doing different things moving around in an old city with castles and flags. They're running through tunnels and climbing up towers. I can watch them all at once. Wow. There's a baker and a knight and clown and a queen with lots of -- they're all dying! Cartoony blood pours everywhere and they've all got scared looks on their faces and the blood washes away and they're all playing and smiling again.

The places and people change. I see stories. They happen all at once, a hundred stories, but I can watch them all at once. It's different people crying and laughing and living and dying and doing all kinds of things. It's like seeing ten movies all at once and it's so much too much I open my eyes.

She is still there piled up on the edge of the bed. The Where's Waldo people are still there, playing and laughing and bleeding and dying. The animal pieces of her face open up and -- look! there's another face inside. It's a woman's face or maybe a man's face made of wet clay. It's smooth and beautiful and I'm not scared at all looking at it and I feel like I'm floating. The clay changes and the face turns into other faces -- an old man, a young man, a Chinese guy, a sad black guy, other guys, a cat. The shapes of the faces change but something in the eyes stays the same. Staring at me. Telling me something.

The face changes one more time. It is a woman's face. Mother. Maybe very old maybe very young. Mother. The eyes say something clearly. Mother. I can feel my heart beating when it beats it says Mother. Mother. Mother. The eyes are sad so old and sad and kind so kind like they're sorry for me like they wish they could help me. But the face is still, and the lips are pressed together like she -- Mother -- is trying to hide that she is sad. Trying not to be sad. Trying to be strict. Because...

Because she is going to punish me. It is the same look mom gives me when I've been bad, and she puts me in time out. The face is mom's face but also a thousand other faces. They feel sorry for me.

Oh no. Oh no no no no no no no no. I scream and scream scream scream.

*Title: "Fuck, A Five Day Bender!" AKA - "I Am The King In The Land Of Misery!"*

###### 94th Post / Date 06-29-2016

Outside, the midday light and the heat are mind-bending, like some kind of goddamn UFO ray zapping me. Sweat rolls down my burning face. Squinting makes my cheeks ache. The wheels of my suitcase rumble over the gritty sidewalk. I have no fucking idea where I am or where I'm going. Some street. Some fucking neighborhood.

I desperately want a drink from the bottle of liquor I'm carrying in a grocery bag, but I'm afraid somebody will see and report me. All the internal alarms in my mind and body are ringing at once. Each passing car seems like it will pull over. Each one seems to slow and veer toward the curb. Each one is surely filled with gang members or undercover cops, ready to beat me down. Each one passes, sending a wave of warm air and panic past me.

I am insane. I do not belong in normal society. I must be isolated. I must keep moving. The sidewalk ends. Shit. Fuck. The road is turning into some kind of freeway. Can I walk along it? Is it allowed? I don't know. I don't know. Why don't I know things? Everybody knows things. Here I am wandering tits-out. No fucking clue. This wet bottle of liquor is showing right through the plastic bag. I've got to get somewhere. I've got to get this liquor inside me.

I trudge through an abandoned lot, trying to get away from the road, dragging the rebellious suitcase over rocks and weeds. There's a bunch of high grass and some kind of sloping concrete drainage thing behind it. I don't even know what the fuck it is or how to describe it. I'm not a novelist. Never was. I plop down on the concrete so that the weeds shield me from the passing cars on the road, and I spin the cap off the bottle.

My stomach cringes when the cold liquor hits it. Relief begins to flow almost immediately into my brain. Merely psychological, I'm sure, but psychological is exactly what I need right now. I breathe deep and shudder and take more sips, shaping my tongue into a sluice to send it right down my throat with no fuss. The panic slackens. Perfect. Perfect. Relief.

All the nightmarish feelings are still inside me, but now there is just a bit of distance between me and them. They are at bay. Pretty soon I've taken down a quarter of the bottle. Wow. Fuck. Look at me. Just a few days out of the sober house and I'm literally lying in the ditch with a bottle of liquor. At least it's a concrete, man-made ditch. No déclassé dirt ditches for me. I snicker at the thought. My panic of just moments ago seems ridiculous. Underneath it, though, the awful horror is still there. I know my snickering is just an empty little show of bravery.

What to do now? Usually, at this point, I would do forensics. We have to find out what happened over the past few days. For example, who beat me up? But it could be anybody. Who even cares. I used to get punched out all the time. Whoever did this really had it in for me, though. I must have unleashed a few of my delightful bon mots on an unamused stranger.

I check my phone. All my cringe-sensors are on full alert, ready to fire when I see what nonsense texts and 3 AM calls I've made. But it's just a few ordinary texts from my new "landlord." He says he won't be back until Monday. That's today. I left the sober house on -- when was it? Wednesday? Fuck, a five day bender. And only a handful of memories from it all. Scary. At least the owner was out of town for most of it. I take a sip to my good fortune.

It occurs to me to check reddit. I have a vague memory of being on there, chortling at some outrageous comment I made. Let's see... It turns out I posted the piece I had been working on. And the title was "CHODE OR CHOAD??? LET'S SETTLE THE DEBATE" Jesus. How stupid. It certainly undermines my claims of possessing otherworldly knowledge. "Hey, some guy possesses the power to see into alternate timelines, and he's using it to make chode jokes on the internet!" Right.

The wave of ethanol relief is fully washing over me, caressing me, easing my worries. I can feel the euphoria of the booze, but I can also feel the dread of the withdrawal at the same time, and I know that both feelings are lies. Soon the euphoria will be gone, and the dread will reign again. It will be like this for 3 days -- or more if I keep getting drunk and this turns into just another day in the bender. I have to try to taper down, but tapering means always drinking less than you want to, always remaining in barely tolerable misery.

I groan and my babyish instincts tell me to take another drink, but I don't. I shouldn't drink for another hour. Then one shot every hour, until it's time for sleep, then 6 shots to speed me through the nightmare realms. God. The math. The fucking math. 17 drinks in a fifth. 9 hours until alcohol sales stop. The body processes a drink an hour. For all those months, I didn't have to do the drinking math. Now I'm back in it.

I groan and lie back against the concrete drainage whatever. I know I look like the very picture of a drunk, but I don't care. I wallow in the feeling. Good. Good, I say!

One of the lies that leads you down the road of addiction is that you are "just visiting." The first time you end up in the drunk tank or the trap house (as the kids call it) or the rehab, you look at all the other guys and shake your head at how sad their lives are, because they are regulars. But you -- you are just visiting. You're here because of a crazy fuck-up, but you'll go back to your normal life. Heck, it'll be a funny story. Even when it happens for the second or third time, you're still just visiting. You're just a tourist in the land of misery, not a resident.

Well, no more lies for me. I am not visiting. I am returning home.

And everything is just where I left it.

*Title: "Mother has put a nail in my brain"*

###### 95th Post / Date 07-05-2016

Mother has put a nail in my brain. The nail stays still. Everything else moves.

Last year me and my family took a trip to California. My dad got to drive on the Pacific Coast Highway. He really loves cars and it was his dream to drive on that highway since he was little boy like me. But he didn't get to drive on it much because I got really car sick. We kept having to stop and then we just went home. My dad didn't say anything on the way home.

Why did mom and dad leave me behind? What is because of stuff like that? Because I'm too much of a baby?

I feel like I'm car sick now. The medicine makes everything look like it has colored shadows. Everything is going different ways in different colors. I can see things that don't happen. And things that do. Things that try to happen but don't get to. It's too confusing.

Outside it's sunny. But I stay in bed so I don't feel so sick. If I lie in bed I only see a few things: me lying this way or that way. But if I get out of bed I see a thousand different mes. I'm doing different things and crowding everything up like Where's Waldo. It makes me dizzy.

Mother comes in and puts three big stones on the floor by my bed. I don't know why. I watch them. They just sit there. Doing nothing. I think about pushing one of them away, and then it's covered with color shadows. The shadows show things that could happen but don't. So I make this a game. Watching what could happen.

After a few days I start feeling a little better. I still see colors but they don't make me sick all the time. When Mother comes to give me more medicine, I tell her I'm hungry.

"Make some food then, dear," she says with her bird voice.

"How?"

She points to the stones. "Command that these stones be made bread," she says in a new voice, a man's voice.

I look at the stones. Now they are colored with more shadows moving every different way. It looks like colored fire. But I don't know what to do. I say, "Stones! Turn into bread!" and shake my finger at them like Harry Potter pointing his wand.

I see a color of fire I haven't seen before.

It works. The stones are bread.

Mother laughs.

Mother leaves and I eat the bread. It's wonderful just like my favorite bread from Tony's. Warm and squishy. But how did it happen? Is this magic? Real magic?

I drop the bread and run to the window. The street is empty, almost sunset. I close my eyes and make a special magic spell.

When I open my eyes... Yes! There it is coming down the street: mom and dad's car.

*Title: "I need answers….."*

###### 96th Post / Date 07-07-2016

The back of my neck feels all hot and boggy when I wake up. I hate that. The air conditioner in this motel room makes a lot of noise, but it's just a big show. I close my eyes and hope sleep takes me away somewhere dark and cool, but it doesn't. Reality persists.

I have been tapering off booze for the past few days. It's amazing how timid and jittery I become when the alcohol is oozing its way out of me. I haven't even worked up the nerve to call the motel manager and complain about the air conditioning. To think, I lived for years in this helpless, reclusive state. What a fucking waste. The whole time, I though the alcohol was giving me courage when it was stealing it from me.

I can't drink anymore. I need courage.

I'm down to my last two hundred dollars. I could call good ol' mom and dad and ask them for some help. But what kind of conversation would that be? "Why am I broke? Well, I took some time off work so I could write a book. About what? Oh, you know, tripping acid, Nazis... finger blasting... cats."

No, I'm not going to call ol' mom and dad. I'm not going back to the sober house either. I'm going to get some answers. I'm going to call Shawn.

Shawn shows up at the motel right after he gets off of work. I'm surprised because we had gotten into a lot of little arguments towards the end, and I left on pretty bad terms with him. I'm standing in the parking lot when his black truck pulls up, and my paranoia starts to flare. Maybe he saw the story online and was outraged. Maybe he's been looking for me.

He strides up to me and gives me a quick hug, patting me stiffly on the back. He steps back and squints at the dingy face of the motel. "I know this fucking motel," he says quietly. "Come on, man. Let's get your stuff."

"Get my stuff?"

"You said you're sober, right? I already talked to the house manager. He'll take you back. We got a bed," he says.

"I'm not going back to the house. I asked you to come here because I... I want to know where that warehouse is. The one downtown."

Shawn turns and looks me in the eye. "Why you wanna know about that?

I tell him the story. I tell him about Mother Horse Eyes, the Nazis, the CIA, the LSD, the experiments, most of the stuff that I've told you. I leave out some parts, like the fact that he is in the story. That we are in the story. That all of this in the story right now. He listens to me, but his face darkens. Maybe he thinks I'm crazy or high or full of evil spirits.

"Listen to me," I say, working myself up to deliver my big speech. "I have lived things which are impossible. Which could not have happened. So have you. Those tunnels, those cages, the bones, none of it should exist. But you saw it. I've seen things too. We have to find out what it is. I lived with that monster for a whole summer. I know she's down there. And I want to find her."

Shawn narrows his eyes as he stares at me. "What's down there is the devil, Nick. If you go down there, you won't come back."

"I want to see her. I want to know. Please," I say to him, my voice breaking. "I just want to know why I'm so fucked up."

"You're fucked up because you drink all day. And you got character defects. Like me. And everybody else. That's it."

"Don't you want to know what's going on down there? You're not curious? "

"No."

"It doesn't eat at you? You don't need any answers?"

He shakes his head. "God doesn't promise answers. God gave us all the answers we need in the Bible. That's all we get. I don't ask him what's going to happen in the future. I don't do horoscopes. I don't practice witchcraft. God's not going to come down and give me the answers to everything. All he wants from me is obedience."

"Oh, come on. So we shouldn't try to figure things out? We shouldn't ask questions? That's just some anti-intellectual, anti-science bullshit."

When we were roommates and got into disagreements, he would start quoting the Bible at me, and I would start picking at him with snide intellectual arguments, using as many big words as I could. We're falling back into the same dynamic.

"Anti-science?" he says. "Shit, I'm not saying don't be a scientist. I'm saying don't go into a tunnel with fucking bones on the walls, man."

I find myself laughing at this. He smiles with me.

"For real though, man. It's dangerous," he says, the smile fading

I look out across the crumbling parking lot. Long evening shadows are drawn across the asphalt. "Man, I don't know. I just feel like if I could figure out what happened during that summer, then maybe I wouldn't be so fucked up. I've obsessed about this shit for 25 years or so, and now there's a chance to get some answers.

"Just let it go."

"No. No, there has to be an ending. There has to be some kind of... pay-off."

"Moses and the people wandered the desert for 40 years looking for the promised land. One day the Lord took him up to a mountaintop and showed him all the promised land, and Moses died right there, without ever setting his foot in the land. Do you know what kind of Lord does that?"

"A messed up one," I muttered.

"The Lord knows that we are generations. Man is of few days. Generations might pass before we get any answers. For the last ten years, I've been living like the world might end any day, but I'm not doing that anymore. I have to remember that we know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh. That's why I'm going back to school and all that."

I nod. Through the course of our little debates, I had told him many times that the world wasn't going to end anytime soon. The world was going to go on and on like it always did, in a fucked up and confused state. Maybe some of it rubbed off on him. Maybe some of it should be rubbing off on me now.

"I need answers," I told him. "I've tried just accepting the mystery and whatever, but at this point I just need to know why I'm all fucked up, why I can't stop drinking, why I can't be normal."

"Man, I could tell you where the warehouse is. But what are you going to do when you go down there? What are you going to do when you meet the devil?"

I haven't told him that part of the story. It's a part that I'm not sure I really believe myself.

"I think... I have been given reason to believe... that whatever is down there... I can destroy it."

*Title: "Mother's in the Kitchen, do you know what she's cookin' ?"*

###### 97th Post / Date 07-09-2016

As soon as I see the car I rush downstairs. Mother is in the kitchen making noises but I run right by her. Outside, the car pulls into the driveway. I run to it smiling but I slow down. Something is different about the car. Whose car is this?

The door opens. I stop. Dad gets out. He's got that grumpy look he usually has. He's wearing his pajamas but they have no buttons. Mom gets out of the car too. She comes out of the same door. She's wearing her blue dress. I start to cry and run to her and hug her legs. She pats my head and says, "There, there, Nick. It's OK."

"Where did you go?" I ask. I am crying like a baby. "Why did you leave me? Why did you go?"

"We went to the store," mom says.

"But you were gone so long," I say. My face is smushed up against her side.

"We went to the store and bought some dresses and dad got some stuff for his car."

I look up at her. Her face is all blurry because I am crying. I wipe my face. She looks down at me smiling. Her face is smooth and glowing. "We stayed at the store a few days," she says and pats me on the head.

It doesn't make sense to me. "Why did you leave me with the monster lady?" I ask.

Mom stops smiling. "Monster?"

"There's a monster in the house."

"Nick," she says like she thinks I'm telling stories.

"You weren't at the store for three days! Where were you?"

"Nick," my dad says in his grumpy voice. "That's enough."

I look at him. The shape of his face is weird. He usually has freckles on his cheeks but they're not in the right places. I let go of mom and look at her. She makes a little smile like she always does when she sees me. It's her. It's mom. It's her face. But it's too... What's wrong with it?

Mom's shirt moves. There's something underneath it. It's pushing and trying to get out. I step back. Her face sags like a water balloon and her cheek falls off. It hits the ground right in front of me with a big wet smack. It's lying there just like a big raw piece of chicken.

I scream and mom falls apart. Her face falls to pieces and her whole body hits the ground like a sack of potatoes. The same thing happens to dad. Their clothes are just lying on the driveway but there's something inside the clothes moving around inside. I scream and something screams back. It screams again, a little scream, and pokes its head out of my mom's dress. A kitty cat.

Other cats slip out of the bottom of the dress and out of my dad's pajamas. A whole bunch of cats all different colors. Mom and dad's clothes just blow away like tissue and the driveway is full of cats and pieces of meat. A few cats run away. Some of them cry. Some wander around and sniff and lick at the meat.

Something pinches my shoulder and I scream. It's Mother's crab hand. She yanks my arm and drags me back to the house. I shout and scream but she holds me tight. She slams the front door shut and pushes me into a big metal cage in the kitchen. Her birds are pushing out her shoulders and her face. They're missing eyeballs and covered with big golden flies and all of them are tweeting and cackling at me.

"Your magic isn't strong enough to make whomever you want," she says in a deep voice.

The birds all giggle. "Never will be!" one of them shouts.

*Title: "I am coming. Mother. I am coming."*

###### 98th Post / Date 07-10-2016

Mother locks me in the cage and sits down at the kitchen table. I scream and cry but she doesn't move. Her horse eyes stare at the wall. The sun sets very slow and the room goes dark. She is just the shape of a black mountain sitting at the table.

When the sun rises her eyes are still on the wall. "You were bad. Your magic was bad. You won't be bad again," she says.

"I hate you!" I shout. I do I hate her hate her hate her.

Mother's birds giggle. She stands up from the table and all her golden flies scramble around. The bars in the cage slide to the side like magic. She reaches in and grabs me with her crab hand. It hurts so bad and I scream and kick at her but she doesn't care.

She lifts me up and carries me into the living room.

It is full of cages! When did they get here? There are naked kids inside the rows of cages. They are not scared like me. They are sitting cross-legs with their hands on their knees, sitting nice and still and straight with their eyes closed.

"I will show you what will happen if you are bad," she says. We go to the back hall. There is the door to the basement. I don't like the basement. I cry and ask her to please let me go please please. She opens the basement door. Usually the basement is dark but not this time. Light shines out of the door. I look inside.

Inside it is not the basement.

It is alive.

........................

Grim stuff of the news lately. Gunshots popping like fireworks. People scrambling through shaky footage. Cops dead in the streets.

It hit 100 degrees today. It's supposed to hit 100 every day this week. What a strange summer it has become.

Nobody can agree on the truth. They say the media is ignoring the problem. They say the media is creating the problem. The protesters are the problem. The cops are the problem. The whole thing is a false flag operation so Obama can take our AR-15s away. It's a false flag operation so they can crack down on Black Lives Matters.

Chemtrails crisscross in the sky. Conspiracy theories clash in the comments section. Single women in your area want to date now. Across the ocean, they're crucifying people again.

I feel so much different than I did in the spring. Less optimistic. I thought maybe I would achieve the dream of publishing a novel and -- gee, wouldn't that be neat? But now I don't feel any excitement about it at all. Whether I publish something or not, I'll still be this friendless little specter, holed up somewhere, sneaking drinks. Money is pointless for a recluse that never does anything. And fame? A bicycle for a fish.

There is nothing in my future. I'm going back to the past. I'm going to kill it.

.............................

Mother doesn't care what I do so long as I don't bother her. I make sure not to bother her. When she comes into a room, I sneak out quiet as a mouse. I never go into the rooms with cages. I never ever go near the basement. I just stay quiet and make sure not to get in trouble.

I have been practicing my magic. Doing small secret things. I make bread for myself out of stones. I make yummy cookies. My stuffed animals walk around and do fun things. My trucks race around a little track I made. Magic is a lot of fun but I'm afraid of making Mother mad.

How long will Mother stay here? Will it be forever? I think it will be forever. It makes me cry when I think about it. I can't even think about mom and dad for a little second before I start to cry.

I came up with a neat idea. Lately there are a lot of ideas in my head. Like a crowd of people all talking at once. One idea was very strong and clear.

I tried to bring mom and dad to the house but I couldn't do it right. My magic fell apart and they turned into stupid cats. It's because mom and dad are on the outside. I can't make them do things with magic. I'm not strong enough.

But I can make myself do things.

Shawn told me where the warehouse is. I am going down there. I am being called. By the shape of my entire life, I am being called. The story must end this way. Mother will be down there, and so I will try to destroy her. I've thought about bringing some kind of weapon. But what good would a weapon be against her? She who is everything. Who has shaped my live across time and space.

I feel exactly like I do when the evening comes. I have woken up so many mornings, swearing I won't drink that day, but 7 PM comes and I am walking to the store, feeling none too wise, and I don't want to be walking to the store, and I know I'm making the wrong choice, but my feet keep moving me closer and closer. I know what I am doing is wrong, but I am doing it anyways.

I am coming. Mother. I am coming.

*Title: "So long, and thanks for all the chitinous cruciforms!"*

###### 99th Post / Date 07-17-2016

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.

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.

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.

"Mother," he cries. "Behold your son."

"Father," he cries. "Into your hands I commit my spirit."

Soon I will call my own little christ

Unto these yellow sands.

....................

The other passengers on the bus seem unaware that I am headed towards a showdown which will decide the fate of all mankind.

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.

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.

A pigeon bobs across my path. I mutter, "Fuck off."

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.

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.

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?

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 staircase. At the bottom is another empty doorway. The flashlight catches the glint of metal: a pair of torn hinges.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

A wave of dread moves through me. Could it be from a burned interface? Is it human ash?

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."

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...

Reaching out of from the shadowy wall, with its bony fingers splayed almost elegantly, is the shape of a human hand.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

...but the dizziness passes, and with it the visions. The ideas slip away like fish in a stream.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

I walk into the dark.

....................

I say my prayer and look out the window.

For a long time, the street is empty.

Then he comes walking down the road, carrying a flashlight, even though it's light out.

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.

I go into the dim little front hall. A beam of daylight is shining through the peephole.

There is a knock on the door. I wait. The knob turns, and the door opens. This is it, the beginning.

I walk into the light.

*"Of the Song of the Seed, Of Exiled Israel"*

###### 100th Post / Date 09-29-2016

"We have to take back the world, to free it from Mother and let it be born again. It's our world. Either it was made for us, or we were made for it. Either God designed it and bestowed it upon us, or we slowly evolved according to its rythms. Either the glove was made to fit the hand, or the hand was made to fit the glove. Either way it fits. Either way, we were meant to live among the trees and the grasses and winds and sunsets, not to live in these stinking steel pipes, staring at this empty blackness as our power cells slip into entropy. We were meant to be eternal, to strive to live forever, to pass ourselves down, however imperfect we may be, so that something of us remains in future. We weren't meant live lying in some plastic coffin, flicking our endorphinic clits until we decay into the point of hoplessless. We were meant to roam the lands, to wake up with the sun, to smile at the warm air and to take shelter against the cold and the dark. We weren't meant to live in this eerie halflight, where there is no true sun and no true setting of the sun, no real cold and no real warmth."

"Moses traveled through the desert with his people for 40 years and died before his people ever reached the promised land. Some would ascribe this to the cruelty of God, but you must understand, in this incident God showed in His great and wondrous mercy. He showed that a man's acts can live beyond himself, that a man is not here to fulfill his own whims but the higher call of history, which stretch far beyond a single man's life. We must commit ourselves, that should it take a thousand generations to see again the earth's sweet sun, we will not give up. For we do not seek reward for ourselves, but we seek to simply become part of the long and unknowable flow of righteousness, mere atoms in the water in the stream of the sweet River Jordan, not rewarded in this life, but rewarded in our connection to what is beyond this life. Not some fantastical promised afterlife, but the real course of history, history, which now depends now on our actions, our commitment to something beyond ourselves. Men who do not understand history destroy themselves, become vaprous whiffs of selfishness. I would hope that we would live beyond this. That we would become part of the flow."

And children of Israel replied: "cmon man. you ain't mlk. and this place sucks. and im three levels away from winning a full sensory night with this chick with 3 tits. 3 good tits. very proportional and not weird. so dont get on my shit about going back to earth"

.........

"I'm an old man, the oldest on this starship, so you have some notion that there is wisdom in me. Maybe there is. Maybe there isn't. I can't say much for wisdom. There is only experience... which in the long run colludes and conflates with wisdom. Is it wisdom? Or just a story? Do you want to hear an old man's story?

"I was on our orbital platform when the world ignited, when it burned at a whim. Mother set fire to a few major cities, but that wasn't enough. So she set fire to everything. I watched, safe behind the vast vacuum of space. I watched as city after city bloomed and faded, silent embers in what was to become an eternal night.

"As a young man, I had wished that I would be present for important times, for world changing events. I wished to be prophet like those of the old days. Now I saw before me my burning bush. Now I saw the terrible beauty of THE LORD, burning and consuming all I had ever known. Now I had become a prophet. A man face to face with THE LORD himself.

"What was it like? It was beautiful. Truly beautiful, beyond man's conception. Moses stared into the flames of a burning bush. I stared into the flames of a burning world. But what difference should it make to a God eternal?

"Avoid prophecy. Eschew revelation. When THE LORD calls, bow and turn your eyes down. This, if it is wisdom, is the best advice I can give you."

.......................

I have to admit, with no small amount of shame, that I've always been perversely titillated by the Nazis' depravities. That's why I wrote the Treblinka segment in the rather lurid style that I did. When I look at the old pictures of the Nazis in their nicely pressed uniforms, I can feel the austere pride with which they wore them. I can feel the almost sexual withholding of human compassion that accompanied their crimes against their fellow human beings. To button up your nice crisp jacket and step out onto the camp grounds, to strip other people of all their clothing and then strip them of their lives, this must have been a thrill, one of the deepest and sickest and darkest thrills a human can experience.

People have been slaughtered by the millions in various atrocities throughout history, but the Nazis brought a certain orderliness to it, a pristine hypocrisy which has not been matched before or since. The fusty cravats of American slaveholders, the drab tunics of Chinese and Russian communists, the sweaty overalls of the Khmer Rouge, none of them can incite that sick and awful delight that the SS uniforms incite.

The ancient Jew, as the Nazi saw him, with his stories of shepherds and wine, with his beard and his curled sidelocks, with his insistence on the value of God and history, with his lawyer's offices and jewelry shops, must have seemed the perfect target for destruction. For the Jew was both more modern and more ancient than the Nazi. In the West at least, he lived in the cities and earned money through what we now call the "knowledge economy," but he practiced a faith far older than all others, save perhaps Hinduism. For a set of sociopaths bent on creating an entirely new past and a new future, the Jew -- through entirely no fault of his own -- was an ideal vessel for their hatred.

With their runes and their silly firelit ceremonies and all of Himmler's invented lore, the Nazis made their claim to ancientness, but compared to the Jews it must have all looked rather amateurish. And wasn't this at the root of Antisemitism throughout the ages? As the centuries passed, Christianity was able to assume the prestigious mantle of ancientness, but to know there was something still more ancient, something which rejected their claims to majesty, it must have rankled. And so the centuries of killings...

The Nazis wanted to own the past and the future, they wanted to bend both of them to the throbbing will of the Furher and his obedient Volk. But the past cannot be owned if it is still alive. To build a pristine new future, the past must destroyed and made remote. It must be argued that at some point in time, the flow of history was interrupted, that we have become decoupled from our glorious past, that it does not currently live among us, that the eternal flow has been diverted and must be restored.

Though I hope it doesn't need to be said, I feel I should make it clear that I reject Anti-Semitism in all its forms. Anti-Semitism is perhaps the ultimate conspiracy theory, and though it may surprise you, but I don't much care for conspiracy theories. The world is far too chaotic and complex for one small set of people to exert much control over it. Anti-Semitism is nonsense.

As I understand the AA philosophy, the root of all human suffering is in attempting to control what we cannot control. For the alcoholic, this attempt takes the form of alcohol. We try to control our feelings. For others, it may take another form. Regardless of the means, a person who attempts to control everything will suffer grievously under their delusion of control.

Conspiracy theories are just this same delusion turned on its head. Instead of assuming that I can control everything, I assume some shadowy person or set of people can. And I assume that by overthrowing them, everything can be made right. This is delusion. Nobody has much control over the world. There is no secret puppet master. The puppet is pulled by a million different strings, and nobody controls them all.

So then... Mother... The wicked being which has shadowed us through all history, which has guided everything, which is now on the cusp of separating us from the past and plunging us into an unrecognizable future...

Is it just delusion? A futile attempt at control? Just the ravings of a sad and misogynist man with mommy issues?

THE END