The Dark Somnium - I've Experienced Terrifying Demonic Encounters These are The Worst

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

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This is a set of instructions for how to speak with the devil, which as those of you with any sort of brains at all might note, is a patently moronic proposition on the face of it, one likely to culminate in any number of thoroughly unpleasant fates. Honestly, it would probably be smarter to publish your credit card number on Facebook or take up a career in crocodile wrestling. But then that isn't going to stop you, is it? if you're sincerely interested, at least. Technically, if you do everything just right, there's a fair chance you'll walk away, Scott

Free. And that seems to be reason enough for some people to decide that it's a good idea, especially if you're the fate-tempting, thrill-seeking, scare-junky type, or the desperate type. Which brings me to a point of clarification I ought to make. This is not a manual for making any kind of Faustian bargain. You know, the whole sell your soul type of deal. Although, if you happen to bring it up in conversation, he certainly wouldn't be one to refuse.

Following through with such a foolhardy bargain, however, would necessitate removing some of the protections which you will put in place for your conversation. And I don't think I need to spell out for you why that is a bad idea. If you're really mathematically impaired enough to want to trade something that will last an infinite number of years for something that might last, 90 tops, there are plenty of other rituals out there for you to follow. This one, if performed correctly, should only allow the two of you to talk. This perhaps begs the question of why exactly you would want to speak with the devil in the first place. Maybe some of you just like the

idea of making small talk with extremely dangerous occult entities, but for the sake of the human race, I hope most of you aren't quite that stupid. The short answer is he knows things, things that some of you may have a deep vested interest in finding out. I mean, he's not omniscient or anything, much as he might like to pretend otherwise, he is not God. But he's definitely got a supernatural advantage over the kind of knowledge any human would be able to obtain.

For example, he probably wouldn't be able to predict when the next world war will happen, or tell you the cure for cancer, but he could very well be able to predict the winning number of tomorrow's $500 million powerball drawing, or tell you what deadly, undiagnosed condition might be afflicting one of your loved ones. Of course, the Prince of Darkness doesn't just go around giving out winning lottery numbers to anyone who asks, and trusting any sort of information obtained from a being commonly described as the father of all lies is liable to land you in a worse situation than you were when you started. However, if you're really dead set on finding something out and you've

exhausted all other options, there is a way to try to get accurate information out of the guy. You see, like so many of the more urban villains in popular culture, the devil has a bit of a penchant for games and gambling. Of course, the reason he likes them so much is because he almost always wins. Unless you happen to be a fiddler named Johnny or are being represented by Daniel Webster, you're probably going to get your ass handed to you. But if you're determined enough to want to face the risks and the long odds, there's a certain game the two of you could play to try to win the information you need. First things first, though. We'll start off with the description of the summoning process, then get into the rules of the game, some tips for how to

play, and finally, of course, the inevitable litany of arcane shit that might go horribly wrong. In order to contact your conversational partner, you'll need to go to a church at midnight. It doesn't matter what kind of church, large or small, old or new, liberal or conservative, just as long as you're sure that it will be empty. The last thing you will want is for some preacher to walk in while you're in the middle of this, for the sake of the preacher's well-being as much as your own. The process will probably work best if you try it on a new moon, or a full moon, or Friday the 13th, or Halloween.

The actual day is less important than the psychological effect it has on you. As long as you don't try it on Christmas Eve or something stupid like that, you should be fine. The time is important, though. You don't have to start or end your ritual at exactly 12 a.m., Greenwich Atomic Time or anything. But as general rule of thumb, you want to show up a bit before midnight and have everything set up by no later than ten or fifteen after. Show up a lot before midnight if you don't know how you're going to get in.

Shockingly enough, most houses of God tend to lock their doors at night, at least if no one's there to watch over them. And remember, we want empty. Got it? There are, of course, certain things you need to bring and certain things you can't bring. For this ritual, you will need. A full can of salt. You won't need to use all of it, but it's always better to have more than you need than to have

less. Seven candles. Red and white being preferred. Something to light the candles with. You would be shocked how often people forget this. A cult ritual or not, they are not going to magically light themselves. A length of red string, rope, yarn, or thread. A full-length floor or wall mirror.

Ideally, you'll want to find one of these already present in the church. They're a bit unwieldy to be lugging around with you during a break-in. However, if there really aren't any there, you'll have to bring your own. You might also find it useful to bring some markers, pencil, paper, a flashlight, and any sort of tools that might be necessary to secure your entrance into the church. You will not be permitted to bring in any electronic or timekeeping devices. This includes all cell phones, smartphones, tablets, e-readers, MP3 players, PDAs, calculators, wristwatches, pocket watches, kitchen timers, hourglasses, etc., etc., etc., etc.

Seriously, it's worse than the SAT. If you're one of those people that has your smartphone practically wired to your brain, don't worry. You can bring those things with you to the church as long as you leave them outside the room in which you will be doing the ritual. If you brought a flashlight, helpful for finding your way around without attracting unwanted attention, leave that outside too. Also, don't bring any sort of religious paraphernalia to protect you, especially if it pertains

to the Abrahamic religions. And yes, if those gauphy black cross earrings you're wearing are hanging right side up, they count. If you have any kind of holy symbols like that with you, the devil will simply refuse to show up. Don't worry. You're not going in totally unprotected. In fact, most of the supplies with you are not for any sort of devil-summing ritual, but for your own protection.

Old superstitions and folk magic remedies to guard oneself from evil. From what I know of it, the effects mostly based on the power of belief, so there are probably numerous other objects, artifacts, and procedures that would work just as well. If you'd like to risk being left helpless at the mercy of the devil in order to test that theory, free to experiment. However, for anyone without a psychotic death wish, I'd recommend sticking to the ritual as follows. Once you're sure that you have all the right supplies with you, make your way into the church and find some place to set up. It can be anywhere from the main sanctuary where the services

are held, to a Sunday school classroom, to a walk-in supply closet, as long as you have a sufficient amount of open floor space and are certain not to be disturbed. Set up your mirrors first. This is where the devil. will appear when you summon him. As such, you mustn't complete the summoning until you've laid down certain wards around it. First, surround the mirror with an unbroken circle of salt. If the mirror is hanging on the wall, lay down a semicircle around it instead, making sure

that the salt touches the wall at both ends. Then wrap your red string around the mirror several times. The color red, especially red strings, is symbolic of protection in folklore of many cultures and religions. This is also why red candles are a good idea. Speaking of candles, set them up around the outside of your circle, or semi-circle, of salt, spaced at relatively even intervals. No, you don't have to get out measuring tape and make it exactly perfect, but at least try to

make it look as though it was set up by someone old enough to be trusted with matches. Light the candles in a clockwise fashion, being careful not to disturb the salt. If you break the circle, you'll have to start all over again. Once all the candles are lit and burning strongly, your protective wars are complete. You are now ready to proceed to the actual summoning. To do so, you must get the devil's attention and demonstrate your resolve by performing some sort of sacrilegious act in the holy space. Turning a crucifix or cross upside down is fairly conventional, but it's not the only option.

For example, I know a kid who once fulfilled this requirement by screen. abnoxious graffiti all over the paintings of Jesus hanging in his Sunday school classroom. The nice thing about turning a cross upside down is that once you've finished your encounter, assuming you've survived it in one piece, you can just flip it right side up again and no one's the wiser. Side-stepping the relatively minor but irritating risk of having your Sunday school turn into a reenactment of the Spanish Inquisition for the next month and a half. After you've finished doing whatever offensive thing you decide on, shut all the doors,

to the room and turn off all the lights, so that the space is lit by only the candles. Face the mirror and stare deeply into it, concentrating on your desired outcome. There are no incantations, no arcane strings of Latin you have to recite. Just look into the mirror and wish as hard as you can for the devil to appear there. After a few moments of this, when you feel ready, close your eyes and count to ten, then open them. If all is gone correctly, you will no longer see your own reflection. You will be looking at the devil, or at least looking at the way the devil has chosen to

appear to you. Chances are he won't look like your conventional red horn demon with goat legs and a pitchfork, nor any other sort of terrible apparition. No point in scaring you off now. Better to lure you in, make you feel safe. To that end, he generally takes on the appearance of a fairly average, nondescript human. human being. If anything, he's prone to vanity and will lean toward the more attractive end of the spectrum.

The only really frightening part of him will be his eyes. No matter how hard he tries, he can't hide this sinister gleam smoldering deep within them. The malevolent amusement and hunger, like the eyes of a spider, contemplating a fly, struggling in its web. They're supremely confident, those eyes. Confident. And without pity. Don't look into them too deeply, or you'll begin to feel helpless and paralyzed with dread, losing

your hope and your will to fight. Since you'll probably be just standing there, staring at him in shock for a few moments, having on some level expected the ritual to fail, he'll initiate the conversation by asking you what is your desire from him. If you can gather your wits enough to string together a coherent sentence, you should respond with something like, I wish to challenge you in a game of question and response. Even if you don't get the words exactly right, he'll know what you mean, and he'll accept your request with a wide predatory grin of anticipation. He's been playing this game for a long time, you see, and he's very good at it.

Most humans, on the other hand, are very bad at it. This gives him a chance to, at the very least, thoroughly mess with your mind and at most, well, we'll save that part for the litany of shit that could go wrong. You'll have to play it very smart to avoid justifying his expectations. The general rules to the game are very simple, with a few caveats that can make things more complicated. He'll begin by asking you a question. He always initiates the game. It can be anything from a piece of obscure trivia to a riddle to an extremely personal inquiry. Don't worry, you won't be immediately plunged into hell if you get the answer wrong or anything like that. As a matter of fact, he won't even tell you whether you got the answer right or wrong.

After you've answered his question, you get to ask him when in return. Now, here's where the consequences of your response come in. If you answered his last question correctly, he will respond to your question as honestly and accurate as he is able. However, if you answered it incorrectly, he is free to lie to you as he see fits. Perhaps if you've asked him something you're better off not knowing, he'll tell you the truth about it anyway. More likely, he'll feed you the most insidious,

damaging lie he can come up with. Either way, after he's responded, he'll ask you another question, and the process will repeat over and over until you decide to call it quits. Now, you may be sitting there thinking it sounds fairly easy to get the information you need. All you need to do is wait for a question you can answer correctly and then take the opportunity to ask him what you really want to know, ignoring everything else he's said. Well, it's not that simple. The devil will never give you an easy question, one that you can be completely sure of the answer to. He may instead give you questions that you have some vague knowledge of, that you think maybe you know the answer to but aren't really confident. That's forcing you to endlessly second-guess yourself,

obsessing over whether or not you can trust the information that he gave you next. Perhaps you'll think what he said was a lie, wish it was a lie, but be eternally consumed by doubt, Unable to fully convince yourself that you were wrong, or perhaps you'll have made a choice based on the information he gave you, and perhaps that of others as well rests entirely upon whether or not you were able to correctly recall some arcane piece of trivia that you don't even remember now. You'll never remember the exact questions the devil asked you, by the way. That would make it too easy for you to go back and check your responses.

Or maybe instead of testing your knowledge, he'll ask you something personal, something you even lie to yourself about. You'll answer back to him thinking you've gotten the question right. No, I don't resent my sister. Yes, I would turn the money into the police. But he'll know better. He'll know better than you do that you're lying. And he'll lie to you in return. And you'll believe him. You'll believe him until you are no longer able to deceive yourself. And by then, it might be too late. Or maybe. Maybe he won't even give you a chance to. to get an accurate response at all. Maybe he'll ask you an endless string of completely impossible questions, making you more and more frustrated and disheartened as you realize you'll never

be able to force him to tell you the truth. Questions like, what was the exact height of Mount Everest in centimeters in the year 1666? Or, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? Although knowing his sense of humor, if he ever asked the latter, he might consider African or European, a correct response. There are a couple of ways to short circuit his particular strategy. However, additional rules and course of action that make the game more interesting and prevent you from being stonewalled completely. Although, in all honesty, he probably wants for you to try one of these options anyway.

The first option is to ask him a riddle instead of a question. If you somehow manage to stump him and he answers the riddle wrong or gives up, he he'll be obliged to give you a truthful response to your next question. If he answers the riddle correctly, once again, don't worry. He won't pounce on you like a sphinx or drag you into hell. What will happen is that he will get a pass, allowing him to lie in response to one question that he would otherwise be obliged to answer truthfully. Honestly, if he gets a pass, you might as well just give up and quit the game right there.

It's nearly impossible to determine when he is telling the truth under the best of the best of conditions, adding another layer of complexity by constantly trying to figure out when and if he's using his pass, it's about enough to make any normal person's brain explode. There's no way. Just forget it. The second option for you is to take a dare from him. If you accept it, vow to follow through. Then once again, he'll have to answer your next question truthfully.

If you choose instead to reject it, he'll get another pass. Now, before you freak out and reject that whole idea completely, you should know that he won't ask you to do anything overly dramatic or unspeakably evil, like blow up a hospital or murder somebody. As a rule of thumb, most dares won't involve direct loss of life or any major felonies. However, they certainly won't be easy. Inflicting severe pain on yourself, doing something that terrifies the shit out of you, cutting off a treasured relationship, publicly humiliating yourself or someone you love, all those

things and more, things you might not even be able to imagine, are completely on the table. If you're willing to go that far, to put yourself in that kind of position, you'll get your answer. However, if he manages to come up with the one thing you know you simply can't or won't do, well, then once again, you might as well just quit. One last thing. Don't think you can't just tell him you're going to do something and then not do it. If you accept a dare and then don't follow through with it, well, let's just say there will be consequences. Just suck it up and keep your promise. No matter what it was, trust me, you're better off that way. Finally, when you've either gotten the information you wanted

or given up on it completely, you may end the ritual by simply thanking the devil for accepting your request, bowing politely at the waist and bidding him for a well. The surface of the mirror will seem to swim and flicker for a moment, and then you'll be looking at your own reflection again. Only when you are absolutely sure that you are looking into your own two eyes again, may you turn away from the mirror, flick the lights back on, and begin dismantling your protections. Now, and this is important, even if you haven't gotten the information that you wanted, you must end the ritual in this manner before 66 minutes have elapsed. Well, I suppose that technically you have 66 minutes and 6 seconds.

Subtle, right? But if you're seriously going to try to cut that close without any kind of timekeeping device, you're probably screwed anyway. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that you keep to this time limit. I'll save the reason behind that for the end, but don't skip ahead. I've still got a few important tips on how to play. One, be very careful what sort of personal information you give out. not to talk about yourself, especially your emotions and problems, any more than absolutely

necessary. This guy knows human psychology like the back of his hand and will get inside your head. It's like talking to Hannibal Lecter. Give him enough to work with, even if you don't believe a single word he says, he will still find a way to fuck with your mind like nobody's business. If anything he asks makes you even remotely uncomfortable, do not hesitate to lie through your teeth. There will be plenty of other questions.

2. On a similar note, try to keep the game on track and moving briskly. Unstructured interactions of any kind are to be avoided. Chances are that at some point he will try to draw you off on a tangent, discussing something that fascinates you, analyzing a response you've given him, or finding some other excuse to speak at length without moving the game forward. This is not only a waste of valuable time, but also another excellent opportunity to mess with your mind.

3. If you choose to give him a riddle, use one that you've made up yourself. If your riddle has ever been written down anywhere at all from the pages of the Hobbit to some long-lost tome of ancient magic, he will already know the answer. That said, it still has to be a legitimate riddle with an answer that makes logical sense from some angle. You can't just ask something like, What's a green has 10 legs and hops, then claim for some inexplicable reason the answer was marshmallows. Or can you ask him a straight question like, what have I got in my pocket?

He probably already knows that anyway. There are no hard and fast rules to determine whether a riddle makes sense or not, but you're a reasonable human being. Your ancestors ate from the tree of knowledge. Please, for love of crap. Use common sense. 4. If you choose to take a dare, there is a slight chance that the devil will ask you to do something

seemingly easy. a letter, for instance, or scribble a ten-digit number in a public restroom stall. If he does ask you for something like this and you even have a shred of common decency in you, do not accept. Chances are that he's using you to further some sinister plot. One liable to ruin a lot of lives and harm a lot of people. Who knows? Maybe you're the type of person who really doesn't mind throwing an unknown number of

total strangers under a bus to find out what you want to know. at least be aware that that is what you're doing. Five. Last but not least. Be wary of the time. It might be helpful to do some practicing beforehand and get a feel for how long an hour is without a watch. The devil will probably put off discussing the things you're most keen with to find out for

as long as he can. And as you near the 66-minute deadline, he'll start trying harder and harder to distract you, captivate you, and otherwise keep you playing until it's too late. He'll string you along, feed you little glimmers of false hope, and keep you thinking, just a few more minutes. I'm almost there. Don't fall for it. Don't go over the time limit, no matter what.

Now, you might be thinking that this game really doesn't sound that dangerous so far. Threats of psychological damage rarely seem to carry the same way as threats of physical damage, even though their costs are often just as great. Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but the game is far from safe. There are plenty of ways for you to seriously screw yourself over, both physically and mentally, not to mention spiritually, and it's with these that I will conclude. In the vain hope that they may make some sort of impression. First, while you're speaking with the devil, do not let him out of your sight.

Keep staring into the mirror no matter what happens. He will undoubtedly try various tricks to make you look away. You will hear a noise behind you, feel eyes in the back of your neck, see shadowy phantoms writhing in the depths of the mirror. A cold breath will blow upon you from behind, smelling like the crypt. A dead silence will settle, only to be interrupted by a loud smack directly behind your head, giving you about the worst jump scare you've ever had. Hell, the devil may even abandon a measure of his own dignified facade and give a sudden

jump of feigned shock, shouting loudly and pointing behind you with a very convincing look of terror on his face, whatever he might test you with, you must not look away from him. If you look away, if you lose sight of him completely, even for one second, you will look back at the mirror and find him gone. Well, not gone out of the mirror, in the room with you. Exactly how much of your body the police will find the next morning and what state it is in will depend entirely on the sort of mood he's in. The same goes if you break any of the protections you laid down before beginning the ritual.

Interrupting the circle of salt, letting the red string unwind, knocking over a candle or letting one go out, any of these things will free him from the mirror. And then, well, you're all a bunch of creative horror junkies, I'm sure you can fill in the blanks. On a different topic, you may reach a point in the game, probably after a series of maddeningly impossible questions where the devil asks you the deceptingly simple question, what is your full name? You must not give it to him. Names can be things of great power, although the devil will, of course, already know your name, telling it to him yourself is akin to inviting a vampire into your home. Your name is deeply synonymous with your own inner self. Thus, giving him your

name is powerfully symbolic to giving him yourself. And if you are foolish enough to make that mistake, all of your protections will be for naught, and he will seize upon your unwitting offer with malicious glee, stealing away your soul and dragging it back with him into hell. At least this way, the police will find a complete identifiable body. As a matter of fact, your vacant shell will be totally unblemished, seemingly having dropped dead of sheer terror. Last but certainly not least, there's the matter of what happens if you go over the time limit. This is arguably the worst thing you can do. You won't think so at

first. The devil will give you no indication that you have in fact exceeded the time limit and you will conclude the ritual as if nothing has gone wrong. Perhaps as the devil's image in the mirror trembles and gives way, you'll see a particularly triumphant smirk flash across his face. But this will be easily dismissed as your imagination. You'll turn the lights on, gather your belongings, and go to leave the room. But when you open the door, you'll see nothing. That's right. Nothing.

Just a flat white void extending infinitely in all directions, only the room which was reflected in the mirror will now exist. Incidentally, if you turn back around to face the mirror again, you may catch a glimpse of your own reflection. Perhaps it will even turn and favor you with a smirk and a cheeky wave before sweeping out the door and into the perfectly normal church hallway outside. As you may have already figured out, you yourself are no longer in the church. Your soul is now trapped in the mirror and the devil has taken the liberty of possessing your body now that you are no longer using it. Pound on the glass and scream all you like, you'll never get out on your

own. And no exorcist can help you. But don't worry. It's not like you're in hell, right? At least not necessarily. What you have to understand, see, is that a human soul stripped bare of its flesh is a deeply volatile and vulnerable thing, especially when trapped in the land of the living. You are now an entity of purely mental properties. And as such, the barriers between what is real to you and what is imaginary have been completely dissolved as you fill that reflected room with your anger, your sorrow.

your fear at being trapped, these emotions will begin to coalesce, given form by your mind. If you're not particularly imaginative, these creatures may not be too terrible, may not be able to inflict too much horror and pain. With time, you may even be able to teach yourself to get rid of them. If, however, yours is a mind haunted by monsters, a mind that is a vibrantly creative and imaginative and more than usually twisted, well, there's no telling what horrors might come crawling their way out of the maelstrom, tasting sweet release from the confines of your subconscious, hungering for your terror and suffering.

They will refuse to be banished, dragging you, kicking and screaming into an endless positive feedback loop of pain and fear. Needless to say, if you're a regular patron of stories like this, you're probably pretty well fucked. There's only one way to find release from the mirror, and the world that you've created therein. They say that if you call to the devil once more and ask him to free you from the mirror, he'll be willing to take you out, for the usual fee, of course. Who knows? Maybe if your imagination is twisted and powerful enough to create a personal hell that leaves you begging for the real thing, those talents might be put to good use. There are over seven billion

people in the world after all. Even the devil himself can't be messing with all their minds at once. Talented help is always appreciated. Of course, the quarrely to being trapped inside the mirror is that the devil now gets to do whatever he wants in your body until sunrise. At around that time, your body will mercifully drop dead from the strain of the possession. Autopsy will probably identify the cause as some kind of coronary event. Don't be too relieved, though. He's perfectly capable of stirring up plenty of trouble in those few hours. For instance, he may decide to do something big and dramatic, like purchase a large meat cleaver and go on a murder spree, starting with the names in your address book, and working

his way out to complete strangers if he has time, or perhaps he'll focus on only one person, someone who trusts you completely, using your persona to get him or her alone and vulnerable. Then, well, no need to describe it here. Once again, I'm sure you can think of a few things, starting to see why I call this the worst outcome yet. Of course, there's also the chance that he won't lay a finger on any of your loved ones, instead deciding to do something a little more subtle, more insidious, like drop off a few nondescript unmarked packages on certain doorsteps and dangerous parts of town, or locate a particularly

dusty, aged yellow text in the storeroom of your local library and intentionally mis-file it with the young adult literature section. Or whisper seven very choice words into the ear of the distracted-looking young redhead waiting for the 3 a.m. subway train. Or maybe he'll decide that in this age of waning superstition, not enough people are getting interested in his games, and the knowledge of them is in danger of being lost. Maybe he'll decide he needs to get the word out a bit more. a bit of networking, attract some new suckers, and challengers.

Maybe he'll take a quick peek at your browser history and see where the impressionable, curious minds are hanging out these days. Maybe he'll even record a quick tutorial in modern parlance, rather than some unscruitable, obsolete, demonological text, post it on the internet to see how many bites he gets. Well, maybe I really shouldn't have gone there. But if you've made it this far without shying, a little twist at the end isn't going to put you off, is it, dear listener? I'm sure there are plenty of intrepid adventurers among you with burning questions you'd

like answered, and you're all the smart bunch. You know the pitfalls. You know the conventions. You live and breathe this sort of thing, don't you? There's no way you'd fall into any obvious traps, right? You're not some Dick or Jane off the street, after all. You'd bring a whole new level of competition, you would. Oh, excuse me, just a moment.

I think I hear someone calling for me. What? You want out that badly. Already? Must be one hell of an imagination you've got on you. Perfect. We'd all known Dennis had less than a week, and we'd all braced ourselves for all the good that would do. This was going to tear us apart and leave a ragged gaping hole in our lives. But that would be it. It would fit within our understanding of things, and we could all assume that he went wherever

we thought people go. That would have been so much easier, so much less troubling than what actually happened. Dennis had been diagnosed with cancer a couple of days after his tenth birthday, and it was all downhill from there. There was never an upswing, never an opportunity for surgery. All of the scans showed the same thing, the oily black webs having grown. larger and denser. The fact that we were twins and had looked identical right up to when he started chemo just

made it worse. There I was right beside him, a perfect image of what he used to be before his hair fell out, and his color drained, and his cheeks sunk down into his skull. An emaciated ghost, constantly contrasted with what he should be. And then finally the doctor shut the case, snuffed out the last wisps of hope. Dennis will most likely not last more than four days, a week at most. So we'd all set up camp in his musty room at the hospital. The walls were freckled and peed green, the only light slanted in from between the shutters,

glaring bars stretching out across the floor to end just short of Dennis's bed. The staff managed to bring in another simpler bed for me. My parents slept in the old wicker chairs. Dennis looked really bad at this stage. You could as good as see his skull. We all wanted to talk to him to make the most of whatever time we had left, but he slept for most of the day, and when he woke up there'd just be silence. Nobody knew what to say.

There were no right words. And there was this underlying fear that the moment anybody interacted with the situation, they'd somehow make it real, and it would hit everyone. The first sound would knock us all off the tightrope, and we'd fall into tears and chaos, and we wouldn't be able to pull ourselves back out. So there was silence. My parents occasionally forcing smiles that never made it to their eyes. The third day was when it finally happened.

And Dennis began to shake feebly as the dry crackling sound rose up from his mouth. My parents exploded out of the chairs. My mother heading straight to Dennis, grabbing his shoulders and pleading at him to stop it and be all right. My father was at the room door, screaming down the hallways for help. The doctors and nurses at the hospital changed lately. They'd started treating Dennis differently. The resuscitations were always these frantic, desperate efforts like a hundred-meter

sprints. There was a desperate desire to succeed in every single moment. Now it was different. More like a steady jog. These were people who were going through the motions, ticking off things they were meant to try from little checklists in their minds. I don't think it would have made a difference either way. The cancer had finally tipped over and his system just couldn't shoulder it anymore.

They called it and left, offering their condolences and saying, they'd take the body away when we were ready. The doors clicked shut behind us, me, dad, mom, and Dennis's corpse. We all inched closer, up to the side of his bed and just looked. My mother cracked, breaking into great howling tears. My father pulled her close, trying to keep it together, but losing it in his own way. No sobs from him, just the occasional tear running down his face and sharp breaths bursting through his clenched teeth.

I was just quietly staring at Dennis's face. We all stood there for a long time. I finally realized that this wasn't just one thing. This wasn't a single event. For the first time, my mind started running away with itself and unfolding all the endless implications of this. Every one of them causing my gut to sink and for me to miss him so much, even though he'd just been here.

I was never going to talk to him again. He was never going to laugh at me. again. We were never going to eat dinner again. We were never going to school together again. We were never going to be in the same class in school again or talk during classes at school again. It just kept going and going as I realized that this wasn't just one person I'd lost. I'd lost a million things. Something that was meant to be this constant presence was gone and nothing would ever be as good as it should be again. Everything was going to be soured by the certainty that I wouldn't be doing it with him, or that I wouldn't be able to tell him about it later.

It had only ever been a childish assumption that any of that would happen. I was the first to see his lips quiver. Mom, Dad, his lips are moving. My parents froze, still clasp against each other. My mother curled over, supported by my father. We looked down as his lips continued to quiver. My parents went quiet again. They must have been trying to hold back hope, assuming that it was some kind of nervous tick,

but it kept going. And finally, in a dusty, hoarse voice, so faint it was like you were hearing it on the wind, he said my name. Harry. My father sprinted across the room, yelling for the nurse to come back. My mother was clutching her mouth and stumbling back from the bed. The workers tumbled back in and went through the checklist and shocked him with the defibrillators a few times and reached their verdict.

Sorry, he's still dead. But I heard him talk, said my father in a small, pleading voice. Look, it could have been gas escaping, but... Said my father, before a tiny, scraping sound cut through the room, everyone turning towards its source. It was coming from Dennis, halfway between a sigh and a croak. Harry, it's all so dark, so cold, so dark and it's pulling down, pulling out, At my insides and taking me down.

A moment later, nurses started on their rounds again, but this wasn't some perfunctory run through the checklist. You could see it on their faces and how hurried their movements were. They didn't know what was happening. They weren't even sure they were doing the right thing. They moved on to the defibrillator again, sending crashing waves of power down through Dennis's chest before listening with the stethoscope. It doesn't seem to make any sense.

One was mumbling. After ten minutes, they all just stepped back. They'd run the checklist out. Nothing had happened. What's happening? My mother screamed. One of the men, a doctor, I think, answered. Nothing's happening.

We try to pump in oxygen and it does nothing. There's no pulse and we can't induce one for more than a second or two. The body's temperatures down three degrees. He's deceased. But we heard him, I said. I know, but he's dead. The dry grating came again and everyone shut up. Please, Harry, where are you?"

I walked over to his side. I wasn't relieved he was talking. I was only afraid. This was wrong. I wanted to run. I wanted him to just be gone so I could cry with my parents and be done with it, but I kept walking and put my hand on his bony, cold, and clearly dead hand. I'm here, I said.

I can see gray, a little bit of gray, but it's so far away. I don't see it. I feel it. I feel it and I never knew something could be so far away. I'm already so far down, but I need to go so much further to get to the gray. I didn't know how to respond, so I just stood there, stood there and listened to him talk about the darkness and the distant gray smudge. Sometimes he'd answer me, sometimes he wouldn't.

A lot of stuff happened around me in the next few hours. Everyone who worked at the hospital must have been in and out. My parents started to leave sometimes when they accepted I was the only one Dennis seemed to be aware of. Dennis was looked at by every type of doctor they had in there and nobody understood. They started moving him around on a stretcher, taking him to the equipment they just couldn't bring to him. I had to come along. I was the only one who could keep him talking.

It was a long time before anything was turned up. They'd gotten desperate and had put Dennis into an fMRI machine. They'd fully prepped a corpse and put it in a machine for the least. living. My entire family was in the room. A cold, confused fear settled in my gut, making me feel a little bit like throwing up. I think we've got something, said the technician who was looking at the monitors. Please just tell us what's happening, said my mother.

She'd moved past terror and hope and was now above all else exhausted. Her red face slack and empty. Look, this scan looks for where the blood is in the brain. Well, the thing is that none of the blood in the brain is moving. We know that from the pulse, but something is happening in there. Something the machine can only pick up a little, but there is some kind of activity. Now I can't be sure, but I think the activity is clustered around some of the parts the control movement.

Everything else is totally dead. He's obviously conscious. He's using complete sentences, but... But what? said my father. But it's like whatever's doing the thing. thinking as somewhere else, still interacting with the stuff that does the talking." That's exactly right, came a voice behind us.

I looked over my shoulder and saw an old man in a gray business suit. He had a well-trimmed silver beard and was all around a strange contrast to the gloomy chaos that engulfed the hospital. Who are you? said the technician. I'm Daniel Cohen's, he said, handing the technician a crisp business card. I'm with the Orpheus Institute. We're a semi-private medical research body, and we've dealt with a few cases similar to this one. The hospital president has already agreed to let us look into this.

Almost invisibly, a number of men moved in behind Cohen, and were now making their way over to the technician. These men will help explain the confidentiality situation surrounding issues like this. We'll handle the boy from here. More men. These ones in pure white scrubs that had a strange logo on the left breast, got Dennis back on the stretcher and led us into the hallway. We followed wordlessly, never thinking to say anything because at least these new people represented new possibilities. A completely new road that might lead to an explanation.

They rolled Dennis into an operating theater, and my mother gasped. Look, just what are you doing? said my father in a husky voice that made it obvious he was still holding in tears. Coens, who had been striding alongside the stretcher with the speed that belied his age, had stopped once we got to the theater and was now taking deliberate care to look us all three in the eyes. We were still in the hallway. The operating theater doors shut beside us.

He answered in a low, comfortable tone. We're not performing surgery. It's just the quietest part of the hospital, and there are no distractions in there. We want nothing more than to understand what has happened to your son. This sort of thing has happened before. Your son is conscious, and as we understand, he will only talk to his brother here. We want to use Harry to ask Dennis our questions. We believe this would work best if he and Harry were alone.

We've got the theater wired so we can hear the answers. My parents didn't say anything for a while. My father broke the silence with weak, staggered words. Do you think he might come back? I know that even if he does, it won't be for long, but I'd really like him to come back, for however long. I didn't say enough. I wasn't big enough to say the things we had to say to each other.

If such a thing is possible, I swear we will do everything in our power to make it happen. We've prepared a private waiting room for you, too. Cohen's gestured down to the turn in the hallway. There were two people standing in white scrubs there. Pete and Shirley will lead you there, if you would please go with them. My parents began to shuffle down the corridor. My mother is still buried in my father's side. My father kept throwing looks back over his shoulder at me, like he was afraid I'd vanish.

As soon as they were gone, I felt Cohen's. hand come down on my shoulder, I turned around to him, and he knelt down so we were closer to being level. I know this is very hard on you. I know this must be the worst day of your life, but do you think you're up to a quick history lesson? I couldn't bring myself to answer properly, but some curiosity managed to rise through the delirium in shock, and I nodded.

Cohen smiled. One of the most significant moments of human history was the moon landing, and it's not even the fact itself that it was so important. that we had contact with them the whole time that they were up there. They were sending radio signals back to Earth and could be talked to. Do you think the moon landing would be what it was if we didn't have that type of connection to our men as they strode the unsettling and inhospitable surface of a place we were never meant to have knowledge of?

What if they'd just gone up and never came back? What if we knew for sure that they got there but had no signal from them? I was still quite out of it, so I can't say I was properly digesting all of it. of this, I slurred out, I don't know. They didn't know if they could get the astronauts back. It was a very real possibility that they'd be left to die up there, stranded, yet they still did it. It didn't matter if the mission was a failure.

It didn't matter if there was no triumphant return. Do you know what mattered? What mattered more than anything was speaking to them while they were up there, to have that connection to three brave men in the void, describing man's first step into the unknown. If they'd never come back, it wouldn't have changed anything. As long as we down here managed to make the connection to that beyond, as long as we down here, for however long had men up there, meant to describe the soil, meant to explain the feeling

of being so light, meant to tell us what Earth looked like, cut in half by the lunar horizon, meant to teach us about a new world. His hand tightened on my shoulder. None of that would have been possible without the people in here. Houston, without the men who talked to the astronauts, kept them focused, made sure we got the information we needed. Harry, we believe Dennis is in a very strange place that humanity would do well to learn about. You are Houston.

Your brother is an astronaut. He pulled a laminated sheet out from under his lapel. Here's a sheet with some topics you should focus on and questions you should ask. This should help you get the most useful and needed information. But the most important thing is to keep him talking. Stop talking for five seconds and you could lose him. I accepted the card, having given up on reaching a decent understanding of the situation. He ushered me inside the operating theater and shut the door behind me.

I was alone. The only sound and almost inaudible ringing that emanated from the mass of stainless steel racks and implements, and the cold, sturdy operating table Dennis was lying on. I approached the table, and in need of any sort of guidance, I looked at the laminated sheet. General principles. Try to keep your loved one, the subject, unaware of their deceased state. Past experience suggests that the shock may cause disconnection. Maintain constant conversation, as this has been shown to help maintain the connection.

Do not ask leading questions, such as whether your loved one, the subject, is having experiences in line with your own religious beliefs. First step. Asked your loved one, the subject, to describe their experiences and or surroundings. Encouraged them to be as. I pulled my attention away from the sheet. Harry. Dennis said.

Yes, it's me. I answered, grabbing his hand. There was now no doubt that he was really dead. The hand was ice cold and the fingers had locked in place at odd angles with rigamortis. His entire body had gone from the sickly white of the dying to the rain-clouded. shade of the dead. I got to the gray, to the ground, came down easy like a leaf, and cold. I'm standing there now.

Dennis, can you describe where you are? It's still gray, but it's more real now. I'm solid. Gray sand underneath, a gray ocean behind me, gray clouds above. Don't remember going through the clouds. But they're there now. The clouds. They're screaming.

An ocean, I said. Can you see anything in the ocean? Dennis took in a flemy, pointless breath. Far, far away. The horizon is getting dark. Dark hungry line where even clouds stop, where everything stops. Darkness is clawing, moving like it's alive. Miles and miles of angry, hungry dark.

Can't go there. Can't go that way. At this point, I lost the thread of the exchange as perspective suddenly hit. All the things I didn't understand and the fact that whatever Dennis was, he wasn't alive. I broke, crying and wailing and digging my face into his bare, emaciated ribs, cold like meat straight out of the fridge. I kept squeezing his hand harder and harder. pushing the stiff fingers closer together.

Dennis, please come back. Please, wherever you are, just get back here. It's hard to tell. So much here already sounds like crying. His words struck me deep enough to make my sobs catch in my throat. And I just started looking at him again, settling back to my previous catatonic distance from what was happening. I can't come back.

No getting back. Like spilling something like. the ground, no getting it all back inside and right again. It took a few seconds to force myself to accept this, but I carried on, hoping that maybe I could steer him towards some sign that he was wrong. What's in the other direction? Away from the ocean. That's the way I have to go.

If I try to swim, the darkness will tear me up. Shred away everything until only my pain is left, and it'll toss that into the clouds, the clouds and I'll scream. Dennis, tell me what's in the other direction. Just the sand, the gray sand, on and on. Not many bad things yet. Not many bad things to see yet. There'll be more when I get where I'm going.

I'm going to start walking now, Harry. Where are you meant to be going? I said. I started digging my nails anxiously into my forearm. There was something nauseatingly dreadful. fully true about everything he was saying. It was like the first time you learn the world is round and it feels weird for a few seconds, but soon you get used to the idea and you see it's the truth.

That's the big secret. And it doesn't matter how flat the ground feels. Doesn't matter how little sense it makes. It's true. And he just kept talking. I can see another person. Can you talk to them? I said, trying to keep my voice steady, feeling like I shouldn't be the one who couldn't keep it

together. I suppose I could, but I can't. What do you mean? It's just not a talking kind of place. We were supposed to have done all of our talking before we came here. Now we should just keep quiet. But you're talking to me, Dennis. But my voice isn't here.

It's all the way up there with you. Dennis? I said, now squeezing my eyes to force the tears back in. Dennis, please, tell me what's happening. I think I finally died. And what's happening now is what happens next. The thing that was always going to happen next. It feels right in a scary way.

It's been expecting me for so long. Since before I was even a fuzzy little thing that might happen. Since before our parents and their parents, and so far back. It's been expecting me. Please stop talking like that. You don't talk like that. You never have.

Sorry, you just sort of see things different here. Some things you know without ever being told. Some things you forget. I couldn't think of anything to say and started to worry, remembering that if I left the pauses too long, he could stop answering. Hey, said Dennis, and the edges of his mouth, strained out, awkwardly imitating a smile. I see a few more, more people, and they're all naked, but really naked.

Their clothes are off, and they're all gray and wrinkly, but that's not it. You can kind of see inside them, like all the walls have fallen down, and you can see who they are, all their thoughts and feelings, just kind of hanging around them like ghosts. It's like someone pulled the clothes off their whole past. They're so naked, Harry. He made a light coughing sound that was meant to be a laugh. That's really scary. I thought you might have thought it was funny.

I don't think we're going to laugh at the same stuff anymore. I think you're different now. I guess that makes sense. So what are the people doing? Most of them are moving the same direction as me towards the center. The center of what? It's just called the center. The center of this place.

Maybe the center of everything. But what? I said, starting to lose control. Why do you have to go? I don't have to. Nobody has to. Just like when you don't have to shake someone's hand when they put it out or answer them when they talk to you, but it would feel wrong not to.

It's what you're meant to do. And there's not any other good options. You don't want to stand still. What happens when you stand still? Depends. A few days ago, I passed this woman. A few days? I said, gripping the cold steel of the operating table as I was filled with an eerie

sense of vertigo. You haven't been dead for even a day. I passed her a few days ago, he said, carrying on like he hadn't heard me. She didn't reach the center. She just sat down and started going her own way. She pulled one side of her rib cage out and it's all stretched, spreading up to her left so high, stretching out the arm, grabbing its corner. Most of her skin started to get hard and flaky like old wood, or crumbling stone.

I can see herself. Musician liked music Kind of thought her life like a song Sometimes it repeated itself Some bad notes here and there But it was pulling itself together She was reaching the chorus and it ended It was over so fast

And she can't accept it She picked this sharp rock off the ground She's scraping it past her ribs Like a huge harp or something Angry trying to make music. Keep the song going, but it's an awful sound. Salling bone, it's never going to replace what should have come next.

She's already grown into the ground. She's going to be here forever, trying to make the music she missed out on. There was nothing to say to that. So I just went quiet for a while, assuming he'd keep talking. He didn't. Dennis? Dennis? No answer.

The terrified jolt ran through me and I started slamming my fist onto his chest. Dennis? Come back, Dennis! A growl tore out of his mouth and his frames thrashed upwards, causing me to jump back and tumble down onto the floor, smashing into the surgeon's shelves and causing gleaming surgical instruments to rain down around me. I didn't have time to think before I forced myself up and bent over the operating table to stare desperately into my brother's eyes.

I took his hand again, squeezing it as hard as I could. Harry, he said, and relief flooded through me. It's been so long, so long, it's been years. What? I've been walking for years. Years and years, and it keeps getting worse. It hasn't been a day. It's been so many years and everything keeps getting worse.

What? What's worse? It gets worse closer to the center. There's so many. people, thousands, tens of thousands, they're all walking to the center. But what's so horrible? There's more, so many more like the girl with the heart I told you about, stuck in place, trying to fix what happened, angry about what happened, rooted to the ground, moaning, calling out names of the people they think did this to them. Sometimes if you join up, when they get all

hard and crackly like old statues, they start to grow together, start to feel each other's pain. Sometimes there's mountains of them, entire landscapes of people crying about how unfair it all is. I'm still walking, but where are you going? I told you, the center. I'm getting close now. All the clouds with their screaming faces are curving, all curving and being pulled in the same direction. twisting their way into the center. Please just stop walking and come back.

You can't. No coming back. Besides, I have to keep moving like everyone else. Doing something weird. It's the quickest way for the walkers to notice you. Oh God, what are the walkers? Started... Started seeing them more as I got towards the center. They're all over the place now.

There are these things. Walk around on three legs like stilts, covered in sharp black shells, like thorns. Remember the aquarium. They're kind of like those urchants we saw at the aquarium, but the top part, the main part, it's more exact, kind of arty. Like a sculptor designed the shape

Reminds me of some kind of chess piece When they notice you when they come over you Topling towards you but never falling over on those long legs Spindly yeah, that's what you'd say They're spindly legs and they stop right over you You're just between their legs and you see the holes underneath their main bit The tendrils come out Red windy tendrils with these

Itchy hairs come down and they start curling and swinging all around you. You almost don't mind at first. Because they're red, you've been seeing nothing but gray and black for years, and the tendrils are red and it's beautiful. But then they touch you. They touch you and it's awful. Every bad thing you've ever felt, every bad thing that's ever happened to you starts bubbling up to the surface, drowning you. All the pain that ever went into you rises up and out and the walkers' feet on it. They lick it with their tendrils.

They love the taste, the taste of all the things that shouldn't have happened. They love the taste of misery. Eventually they get full and move on, and you, you get up and keep walking. Jesus, Dennis, Jesus! It's fine. Bad, but you get a sense of perspective here. Sure, they're scary for you, but there are nothing next to the center. They're bottom feeders.

Moss that grew on the outskirts. If they're really like sea urchants, then the center. The center must be like a shock. There's some huge thing right at the bottom of the sea that's too big to come up near the surface. You've never said things like this before. I've had to describe it. When you're here, stuff just breaks down a little and you don't always need to have learned

a word to know. This place is less obsessed with causes and two plus two equaling four. Its job isn't to make sense. What is its job? I don't know. Maybe I'll find out at the center. He went quiet again. And this time I wasn't sure I wanted to stop him drifting off.

I wasn't sure I wanted to hear any more of this. But regardless of what I wanted, another groan soon creeped out of his mouth and he was back. Shit. I see it now. I see the center. His hand began to close, slowly but inevitably around mine, overcoming the rigamortis to press onto my fingers like an iron vice. I kept trying to get out, almost yanking off the table, but I couldn't even budge inside the agonizing grip.

It's inside. Inside this huge thing like a beehive floating above the ground. It's gray too. Gray and covered with streaks and ridges like it used to be a liquid, hardened or like it's made of web or something. So big hairy. I've never seen anything like it. All the clouds are swirling down into the hole at the top of it, still screaming.

Ragged holes, pitch black on the inside. It's bigger than cities, Harry, and everyone's heading towards it, thousands and thousands swarming under it, pushing against each other to climb the bridges, messy bridges from the ground right up to the holes, right into the pitch black, the center's in there, Harry. I'm here. Please. I said, whimpering with the pain in my hand. You can't go in. There's nothing good in that place. I knew this is a fact, not just because.

of the description, but as a gut feeling. I knew that what he was talking about was real and fundamental, as important a part of our existence as the sun and the moon and birth, but bad somehow, dripping with wrongness to its core. Where else is there to go? I'm at one of the bridges. Please, you can come back. No, that'd be like going back into the womb. Can't be done.

This is what's next. Oh What? Why? Oh God I'm starting to feel something I think it's the center doing it I'm getting bitter

Every mean spiteful Everything angry thing in me It's swelling Spreading out and smothering the rest of me I'm so I'm so mad Harry I'm getting so much smaller and my hate is getting so much bigger.

His hand tightened and I screamed. Why was it me? Why was it me and not you? What did you do that I didn't? What did I do that you didn't? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I said, fully in tears.

His voice had changed. It was still quiet, but it was rabid. Each word growled and soaked with vitriol. I hate you. Do you know that? Still able to run. Still able to breathe. Chew.

I was hurting all the time and you just stood there feeling sorry for me. You couldn't feel any of it. Me die so you could fuck off and do everything I never would. I was yelling and screaming for someone to come in and help. I'd almost pulled Dennis off the table, his torso hanging over the side. Held straight by whatever force was allowing. him to squeeze his hand. In all this, his eyes were still as dead as they'd always been.

And then he went limp. His hand let go. His back sagged, and he crashed to the floor. He'd broken three of my fingers, but shock was keeping it distant. I threw myself down onto my knees to see his face, slapping it and looking for any sign that he was still there. He gasped again, fainter than ever now. Oh, Jesus, I'm inside, and it's so much worse than I thought.

It's beyond worse. It's so far past the worst I thought something could be. Please, Dennis, listen. Tell me what's happening. It's the center. It's so big, big and floating above me. It's so much bigger than the hive. It's so much bigger than what it's inside.

The whole inside is so much bigger. It's so big. It's gray too. Always gray and cracked like stone over endless. miles of it. His voice had changed. It was whiny and small and afraid. It's hurting me, Harry.

It's hurting me more than I've ever been hurt. It hasn't even noticed me. Please, the man told me you need to describe it. He said if you kept talking, you might stay. So big. He said, his voice wobbling and breaking like he was crying. His fingers are bigger than skyscrapers. It's so many fingers.

millions and ribs. The body is all ribs and there are more fingers all folded up. I don't know, but there's so many and so big hairy. The mask. Jesus, the masks. What masks? The masks. The face is bigger

than countries all different. Some the eyes are perfect circles. Others have huge pointy holes where the mouse should be. Some are blank. Some have eight eye holes. Some look like human face. like perfect human faces with deep hollow eyes, all of them.

The inside of all of them is so dark. A living dark, a dark pulsing altogether. It's so huge, so huge, and you can feel it, pressing in on you, feeling the air with badness and crushing down on you from inside. And you can feel the bad in you reaching out to it, out to it like a baby, reaching out for its mom. Jesus Christ, Harry. He was breathing in and out faster and faster.

shallow, scared breaths, instincts overcoming the fact that he didn't need air. Dennis, talk to me. What is it? What is it? It's not the devil. No. That's what I thought at first, but it's not. It's more like God.

It's like if God hated everything. His breathing hiked up again. Oh, Jesus. It sees me. Please, please, promise me one thing. Just one thing. What is it? Please.

Don't ever die. One last breath rolled out of his mouth. I tried everything to get him back, everything I could think of in an animalistic burst of desperate energy. I hit him, shook him, pleaded, but he was really gone this time. I knelt there in the room for a while. His last words carving into a deep part of my mind, I knew I could never dig them out. The next few hours, in fact, the next few days.

were kind of a blur. I remember men in the Institute's white scrubs coming in and dragging me away from the body. I remember getting my hands seen to and put into a cast and sling. I remember Daniel Cohen sitting me down in a bright white room and interrogating me. He called it a conversation, but it was an interrogation. A warm interrogation by a man who could be kind if it meant getting what he wanted. He asked me if I had any visions or any strong sensations. I thought Dennis was telling the truth, and if I could explain the ways in which Dennis

was acting differently than he already was. I was detached and drowsy from exhaustion and trauma and pain from my hand and just answered honestly. At the end, Cohen's made me memorize a phone number and sign a load of confidentiality forms, making it very clear that not a word of this could leave the hospital. I was to call if I started experiencing any phenomena I thought were related to Dennis, and And finally, they left. My parents and I took a taxi home.

We didn't talk about what happened after Dennis died. I suppose that even that was this secondary add-on to the simple fact that Dennis was now properly dead and not coming back. We went home, got to bed, and the next morning we had a wordless breakfast with an extra chair pulled out. The years flew by, the whole experience became something I just had to live with. Some dreaded thing my thoughts would sometimes steer me back to, but mostly I managed to keep living. To accept it all as something I couldn't understand.

The fact that Dennis was gone was always worse than the way he went. However, terrifying and unnatural it was. But lately I've been having a dream. It started off vague and incomplete, but every few nights it repeated, getting longer and more vivid. It always starts the same with me and Dennis. Both of us kids again, on a green hill in a bright clear day, crisp air sighing past us. I can't remember most of the words, but the gist is that he's bragging, showing off, saying that Dad loves him more, that he's better than me, and he's going to keep being better

for as long as he's alive. He's going to keep making Dad love him more as long as he's able. And I get so mad, way madder than I'd ever have gotten if he said those things in real life. I see a rock and without thinking I pick it up and attack him with it, knocking him over and beating him again and again until his skull is swollen and torn, and you would see parts of his skull underneath. He managed to push me off and run, and I followed, never thinking twice about it. I chased him so far until finally he runs into a pass between two mountains in a long, dark range

that I somehow never see until that point. The range extends to either side, seemingly forever. The sky above is saturated with heavy, deep. dark clouds, it's like Mordor or something. I always stop running at that point, knowing that I've chased him far enough, the job is done. I start to leave my body, surging forward down the pass, no longer myself, just a nameless, thoughtless observer, gliding like a ghost for lack of legs.

He runs down the dark pass on and on into a sunless, barren country on the other side, a place where the soil is grey and dry. He runs for ages, but soon he stops and falls and curses me, screams about how much he hates me and how much I cost him by driving him into this place. He rages for so long. Then a second person comes. Sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes old, and sometimes young. And they say they too were driven past the mountains, or that they wandered past them by mistake

and can't get back over. Dennis always says the same thing. Let's suffer together. Let's hurt together. And this person always latches on to Dennis, and Dennis latches back, and they scream or cry and say they want to see people who wronged them skinned alive, and more always come. A trickle first, then a flood, latching onto Dennis, and the first person, all of them clasping together and piling into a giant, deafening mass of squirming bodies, and eventually it's huge,

almost up to the clouds. And then there's a rumbling. A massive shifting sound. The countless bodies start to rearrange, forming deep canyons of flesh that make up a horrendous, raged-filled outline of a face. There's a shift greater than any earthquake. The pile moves, rolling forward, pulling itself with enormous appendages made of the miserable and bitter and the despairing.

It inches and tumbles on and on, crashing down, dragging itself onward with overwhelming apocalyptic sounds, and then I see that it's heading for the mountain range. It's heading back to the bright place with all its anger and hate and vengeance, and as much as it's made of millions and millions of people, I always know it's still one thing, one thing with one will, but all the hatred of everyone buried in it. All the way back to the first one, the first one to curse. His rage still in there, rage directed at the first one to sin. It gets right up to the mountains, and then I wake up.

I think something's coming. Something that got started a long time ago, something that strips away good and builds itself on the bad. And I think it's almost strong enough to set out to start moving. And I think when it gets here, the living will be no better off than the dead. When you've been a priest for as long as I have, you start to notice patterns in people. When a parishioner approaches, I can already guess what they want to ask me by their body language or the way their eyes flicker to meet mine.

It's quite funny, actually. Everyone thinks they're unique, that somehow they're different than everyone else. Well, let me tell you, after 38 years of hearing confessions, I've come to the conclusion that we're all pretty much identical. If I have to listen to one more trembling voice confess to watching pornography, I might just lose my mind. Now, I haven't turned cynical in my old age, just, weary.

When you hear the same sins repeated over and over again, a thousand million times over, you begin to wonder if there's any hope left for the human race. I guess that's where faith kicks in. Though, now, I'm not sure how much of that faith I still possess. You see, I don't practice anymore. I've given up the collar. I witnessed something that has shaken me to this. day and the shadow of its memory still haunts me.

It was the last confession I ever did. I stifled the yawn, trying my best to remain awake after another sobbing parishioner left the confessional. The entire process had just become so mechanical to me that I barely even heard what was being whispered on the other side of the screen. I adjusted the cushion under my rear, feeling the familiar ache that had only gotten worse as my years advanced. I checked my watch and saw that I still had another 20 minutes to go.

I closed my eyes and offered it up to the Lord, begging him to fill me with patience for these people. I heard the familiar creek of wood on the other side of the screen as yet another sinner took their place. I ran a hand over my weary eyes and then spoke into the screen. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. I recited, making the sign of the cross. A male voice whispered to me from the other side.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession. I shifted the cushion beneath me, annoyed at the distraction, and tried my best to focus on the man. Do not be afraid, my son. Tell the Lord what you have done. The man said nothing for a moment, his voice rasping behind the screen. Father, I don't think there's any hope for me. I've done so much.

I sat up a little straighter. My son, there is no sin too great for God. The man struggled to keep his emotions in check, his voice straining. I think I've broken every rule in the book. Deception, greed, lust, murder, everything. The mention of murder sent a cold icicle shooting up my back. You killed someone, I asked, voice hardening. This was a serious confession.

One I'd never heard before in all my years in the booth. I could hear the man began to fall apart, shame and grief washing his words in sorrow. I've killed so many people. My heart was racing in my chest. Who have you killed? When was this? The man sniffled. It was a long time ago.

I've been on the run for a long time. I don't know what to do anymore. My whole life has been a lie. One big fake advertisement for something I was never equipped to be. I leaned into the screen, voice stern. Have you thought about turning yourself into the police? Coming clean will surely ease the weight of your sins. I can hear it in your voice.

You're suffering. The man started crying. You have no idea. I knew I had to be delicate here. Son, the Lord's love is endless. He can forgive you of these transgressions if you show him how truly sorry you are. The man surprised me by barking a laugh. His love isn't endless, nor is it unconditional.

I swallowed, treading carefully. I know it's hard to understand, to accept, especially when you're feeling so low, but hear me, nothing is too great for the Lord. His wisdom and love for you is deeper than the oceans, broader than the universe. He wants you to know that, to feel that in your soul. The man was recovering, and he snorted behind the screen. You couldn't be more wrong. Slightly frustrated, I pressed him. What makes you say that?

Suddenly, the man's voice filled the entire booth, a deep rumble that shook me to the very core of my soul. Because I am your lord. I blinked. My head spinning. This was new. Just what kind of person was I dealing with here? I suddenly realized that the mental state of this.

person could be seriously compromised. After a moment, I decided to play along a little longer. You're the Lord. I can hear the doubt in your voice. I sniffled. Well, forgive me if I am a little cautious around someone who proclaims they are the son of God. There is no son of God. The man said, irritated. It's just me. You guys made up all that Jesus bullshit. I had nothing to do with that.

My mind was spinning as I tried to keep up. Okay, so who are you really? And what are you doing in my confessional? The man exhaled. I just told you who I am, and I'm here to make peace before I die. Or whatever happens to me after. I don't really know how I die. I never thought about it before.

I decided it was time to start steering the ship back on course. When a soul dies in the good graces of God, it gets sent to. heaven. The man laughed. Good graces? Yeah, look, you're wrong. You're all wrong. What are you talking about? I asked, feeling anger began to stir in my chest. The man's voice dropped low. Heaven is fucking gone. I cocked an eyebrow, the seriousness in his voice giving me pause. What do you mean gone? His tone remained the same, a low rumble.

It got wiped out a long time ago. There is nothing left. For reasons unexplainable, I began to feel uneasy, a sinking dread that was just beginning to form in my stomach. How is that possible? God is almighty, the devil can never best him, I said. The man slammed his hand against the wall, causing me to jump. There is no devil.

There never was. I don't know where you people got that, but it wasn't from me. There is just myself and heaven. No angels, no saints, nothing. I created a place for you. And I created a place for me. Then I sat around and watched my creations from the comfort of my own home. My heaven.

Every once in a while I'd poke my finger in and stir up some shit. Cause a disaster or something just to see how you'd react. If heaven is gone, where do our souls go when we die? I asked. I have no idea. I don't even know if you have a soul. I certainly didn't give you one. Why would I?

I made you so I could have something to do. When you die, three more people take your place, and I watch the circus go round and round. But I have to say, I'm impressed with the human race. You've all come such a long way. I never dreamed you'd create such wonders. Bravo.

The man said. Something outside the booth in the sanctuary crashed, but I ignored it. The man drawing all my attention. Why are you here? I repeated. Mind blanking at the absurdity of what I was hearing. The man's voice turned quiet, an edge of unease now. Because I am going to die soon.

I can't hide down here much longer. They know where I am, and they're getting so close. Who? The man collected himself before whispering. The old door. I could hear the shuffling of feet echoing outside the booth as people began to leave, probably annoyed at the long confessional, but I didn't care. Something about this man held me and terrified me.

I'm not following, I said, a worm of a woman. my knees snaking up my stomach into my chest. I thought you said there was just you and us. I thought you said the devil didn't exist. He doesn't. This is something else entirely. The man hissed. The logical form of me begged to end this conversation, but I couldn't let it go.

What do they want with you? The old horns, fear entered the man's voice. I don't know. They just showed up in heaven one day, taking me completely by surprise. They destroyed everything. Their power and wrath was more furious than anything I'd ever seen before. I had no choice. I ran.

You ran and came to Earth, I asked. I had to. Where else is there to go? I don't know anywhere else but your world and mine. I don't have a clue where these entities came from or how they found me or why they want me, but there is no. No stopping them. They'll be here soon. I can't hide forever.

I exhaled, trying to collect my thoughts. Okay, so say hypothetically this is all true. Why would you come here? To confession. If you're God, what do you need to apologize for? The man was silent for a moment, then said softly. Isn't this what you're supposed to do before you die? be told, I have no idea what will happen to me when they catch up.

I've done a lot of bad things and this just seemed like the right thing to do." He trailed off miserably. I'm not the all-loving, wonderful God humanity thinks I am. I've done things to you people that sickens me. I don't know why I did them, but you can look back on history and probably pick out the events that I had a hand in. They're pretty obvious. You know how people always say

Why would God let that happen? Well, it's because I'm an asshole And I'm sorry I'm sorry for all the shit I've made you people go through You didn't deserve it I just kept pushing the envelope And you Christians never lost faith in me

You always found ways to make sense of it all Ways giving me the glory I didn't deserve I didn't say anything. The weight of his words collapsing in on me like the walls of a cave, trapping me in their conviction. How could I believe any of this? It was nonsense, and yet... Another crash echoed in the sanctuary, and this time I took notice because it filled the silence.

Oh no. I heard the man whisper, fear stirring his voice. What's wrong? I asked quietly. I heard the shuffle of a curtain. and then the creek of wood. They're here. I swallowed hard.

Who? The old horns. Something dropped into the pit of my stomach, and I was suddenly very on edge, one hand resting on the curtain in front of me. Do not look at them. The man hissed. Why? I whispered.

My voice unsteady now. Just don't. He said urgently. My time here is done. I am at the end of my road. Stay in your booth, father. until you hear the silence again. It will be safe then.

This is insane, I whispered. There's nothing out there. The man leaned into the screen, his voice, earnest. I know I have no right to ask this of you, but please. My hand remained frozen. My sweaty fingers plastered to the curtain. I was paralyzed, torn between the madness of his story and the horrific sinking feeling I felt in my chest.

Absolve me of my sins and I'll leave you. alone forever. The man begged now, voice shaking, mind spinning. I released the curtain and turned to the screen. Something moved outside the booth, a scraping sound across the marble floors. I made the sign of the cross, voice trembling. I absolve you of your sins. Go in peace. The man exhaled heavily, relief filling him. Thank you, father. Suddenly a noise blasted. through the church, so loud I had to cover my ears, my heart leaping into my throat. It was the blast of a low horn, a long single note that rattled me to the bone. As the sound faded, a drop of sweat ran down my face.

What in the hell? It's time. The man said. Wait! I cried, pressing my face against the screen. Don't go out there. Please! The man's voice softened.

Maybe this is how it's supposed to be. I never sent anyone to die. on a cross for your sins. But I do love you. I love all of you. And I can't thank you enough for keeping me company all of these years. You truly are incredible people, see you, Father. Then I heard the curtain rustle as he stepped out into the sanctuary. His footsteps echoed away from me and I slammed my hands over my ears again as another horn sounded. My breath blew sour across my tongue and I sat panting, waiting, sweat rolling down my spine. I heard the man speaking to something, but I couldn't understand him, his voice muffled.

My hands clenched my pants and every part of me screamed to look, but I resisted, teeth grinding together as I squeezed my eyes shut. I began to count in my head, desperately needing to focus on something. One, two, three, four. Their ear-splitting horns sounded off. The low note so loud I heard the confessional booth creak against the blast. Five, six, seven, eight, nine. I opened my eyes.

I had just felt something changed, something in the air, a shift in energy, a draining of something that was no longer there. I sat panting for a few moments longer, then let out a long breath, releasing the tension I had been holding inside of me. Cautiously, I reached out and grasped the curtain in front of me. I stood, my old bones sighing and dragged a shaking hand across my brow. I opened the curtain. The sanctuary stood empty.

Not long after that, I gave up the clock. I just couldn't do it anymore. Something about that day shook me to the very essence of my being. I've discussed the event with a couple of my life. with a couple of their priests, they just don't understand. I don't blame them. When I recite my story, it sounds like the ramblings of a madman, who would alter their life so drastically based on one interaction,

especially considering the circumstances. But I have, and I don't regret it. Something about prayer just feels so empty now. I don't know what's going to happen when I die. In truth, no one does. But what I do know is what I felt that day inside the confessional. That was real. When I strip away everything else, all of the questions and oddities, that twist in my gut

is what remains. I can't explain what I witnessed. I can't rationalize the bizarre sounds I heard. I can't reenact the conviction I heard in that man's voice. But I was there, and it was real. And that is what I have put my faith into. And given a chance, one single opportunity just for you, little one. You don't have to endure the tribulations about to be unleashed.

You can escape all of that misery. All you have to do is listen to my voice. As before, it begins the same. It waits from the sky that tickles the back of your throat. The resonance builds to a thunderous resounding blasts. of one of the seven celestial trumpets. Each time that horrible sound is heard, it has heralded the start of another three years of suffering, each more horrifying than the last.

Four times has the trumpet sung its song. Before the echo of the fifth trumpet fades, you will be given a chance to escape. When that familiar tickle re-emerges, an object on air in the sky. As it nears, the intensity of the deep tone grows. You know it is only a matter of time before the deafening blast is heard once more. However, this time, what is to come will be different. The past four soundings of the trumpet brought with them disasters never seen in such magnitude, yet you understand what they were.

Yes, they were terrifying, but it was all within the realm of your understanding. You know what makes the earth roll and quake. You know why fiery mountains fall from the heavens. has freed you from the archaic belief in the supernatural. No longer does such nonsense deceive you into believing the displeasure of a god will call the hurricane or a curse will summon the cyclone, or a hex will bring down the plague upon you. It is something different that approaches from above.

It is an abomination. The Hebrews called him Abadden the Banished, and the Greek knew him as Apollion the Destroyer. Life as you knew it is now over. For he holds the keys to the bottomless pit that has imprisoned his army since even before the words let there be light were spoken. Do you remember the first time we spoke, little one? After the second trumpet sounded, you were given a vision of the pools of Nakhura Seshire.

If you were able to find the location of those sacred waters, go there now. Three pools sit at the end of a T-shaped rock formation as the moon peaks out from the horizon, its crimson light gives the waters the appearance of blood. The higher it rises in the sky, long shadows are cast. Upon the rock, the likeness and resemblance of a man outstretched upon the rocks will appear before you. Stand in the center of the three pools. Tread carefully, for you stand before the image of the sacrament laid upon his symbol.

Each pool has a name. The pierced left hand. the pierced right hand, the pierced foot. Before you prepare to receive the blessings of the pierced abdomen, it requires you to be anointed with the ethereal spearhead that will now run you through. There is no outward wound, but blood is now seeping internally into the empty places within you. Your body has now become the fourth pool of sacrifice.

When you collapse from the pain, ensure that you fall into one of the pools of water. If you fall onto dry earth, you will have missed your only chance to enter the portal, and you will lose the atonement. As punishment, your wounds will be healed, but you will live the remainder of your days marked as was Cain, hunted by both angel and demon. If successful, you will awaken in a dark candle-lit stone building, lined with pews ending at a great altar. You stand upon the place of worship where the crossroads meet.

you are three mirrors, very similar in orientation to the pools of water you recently stood before. Shake off the chill from your wet body and make haste, little one. Time moves differently here, and we must move quickly. Look to the altar. Do you see it? There in the shadows a figure is kneeling in the distance. Slowly and cautiously approach it.

The creature is tall and hooded. It should be deep in prayer, whispering strange incantations. If it is not, do not come any closer, only approach if it is in prayer. Do not interrupt. Any disruption will be considered a great offense resulting in a painful death for you. Kneel in front of it, bow your head, do not make eye contact and wait. Be patient and make no mistake, it knows you are there. Once it has considered you and deemed you worthy, it will acknowledge your presence.

However, if it decides you are not worthy, well, there isn't really much more that needs to be said now, is there? It will ask you. Why have you come before me? Quickly tell it. I seek passage over the bridge. It will take its time before answering. You lack the knowledge to accomplish such a deed.

Be brave, little one. Once these words depart your lips, there is no turning back. The creature towers above you. I seek the knowledge of the forbidden. I wish to know. What is the image of God? It will slowly lift its head. Close your eyes, shut them tight.

You will hear its body creaking like breaking branches of a tree. It leans close, taking in your scent from the air. Its hands hover and encircle over you. The fingers glide in the air, following the shape and curves of your body, coming ever so close but never quite touching you. A deep, quivering exhale of breath escapes the creature's mouth, and it makes contact with your skin. It caresses your face with one hand, as the other rises slowly to embrace your head from

the nape of the neck. Its bony fingers envelop your entire head from behind. Even with your eyes closed and its mouth unseen, you can tell it is pleased with what it holds. You can tell it is smiling. It will grab you by the wrist and lift you off the ground. The ferocity of its grip is both sensual and violent. You are helplessly dangled above the ground as it brings you closer to the face hidden in the

shadows underneath its dark and worn hood. Its breath coats your face with a prickly dust that stings your skin. Droplets of saliva fall from its mouth and hit the ground as a scabbed tongue emerges from underneath the hood. It slides and probes the entire surface of your face until it finds particular interest and where your eyes rest. It is here where it wants to enter. The cold, lumpy tongue will start pushing and poking, squeezing and groping the tops of each

eyeball through your eyelids. Pressure builds in your head from your closed eyelids as it continues to violate the fragile organs that hide behind your thin eyelids. The scabs feel like hundreds of little fingers. Its fingernails quickly find where your eyelids meet and begin to scratch fiscously to try to pry them open. Shut your eyes tighter. The little fingers intensify their efforts to dig into your eyes with raw and obscene desperation.

One of the scabby protrusion's bursts, coating your face in a hot, sticky, tar-like fluid that slightly burns. The putrid afterbirth from the abscess spill onto you as the tongue continues to throb relentlessly on the surface of your closed eyes. Suddenly the tongue withdraws and there is silence. Keep your eyes shut and wait. Eventually, you begin to make out a faint sound coming from the being. It is a cross between a moan and a hum.

It is not quite a voice singing, as there is no melody to the sound. But like melodic singing, there is a flow to the tones and variation in the intonation. Listen carefully, as the words will emerge for you to hear. It happened after the sons of Adam had multiplied in those days. The angels, the children of heaven beheld them, and some became enamored with the image from whence he was created. They conspired amongst each other and said, A select for ourselves from the progeny of men. And so we were drawn onto them by insatiable hunger and thirst,

a sensation unfamiliar to our kind. We then swore altogether, and all bound ourselves by mutual execrations, to abandon our holy station. We descended upon Ardus, which is the top of Mount Armin, and devoured all which the labor of men produced. To our delight, the flesh of man cried out to us in return and embraced our new form. They loved us, and we came to love them. Never had such pleasures of skin, pleasures of sight, pleasures of tongue, pleasures of mind been experienced by any living thing. Man was shown the wondrous transcendence of the grotesque and reveled in the vile decadence of purity. During our time together, we taught them sorcery and incantations.

We gave them knowledge of the forging of metal and healing with herbs. We instructed them in ways of agriculture and mathematics. We revealed power so great it allowed them to command the atom from within the rocks of the mountain, and from the water of the super, the sea, and from the We freed their minds and released them from the enslavement of the Father. In turn, they worshipped us as their love for us strengthened. They basked in our adoration. But it was not true love we bestowed. It was deception.

Our actions and deeds came with dire consequences. We had angered the Creator and desecrated his creation. Mad with rage, the Father plunged his hands into the fabric of reality and altered the delicate strands of fate and possibilities. With this divine manipulation, he altered the pattern and set into motion a new future in the predestined plan. We had been judged. We had condemned ourselves and humanity to an eternity of suffering and pain. Our bodies would be scorched and burned until the end of time in a lake of fire and brimstone.

However, all was not lost. Been closer and whisper into your ear ever so softly. I shall grant thee thy request, for it is the seed of the holiest of lies. Darkness. Slowly open your eyes. I know you are scared, little one, but it is safe now. Get to your feet. The great altar has split open and revealed an entrance that allows you to proceed onward.

The pain in your side must be getting worse by now. I can see a protrusion the size of an apple has formed on your side. You don't have much time. Enter the altar and move on. You enter a large opening with a dark ravine separating you and a structure containing stairs, leading up to what appears to be a temple. From the ravine grows thick black thorns that slightly sway, even though there is no wind. Their points glisten with a substance that can only be poison.

not get too close. In the center of the ravine is a single pathway that juts up from the thicket of needles and thorns that will provide you a safe passage to walk on. The pathway ends at the far end to the foot of the stairways of the temple. At the top of the stairs there will be four thorns where the ones known as the four living creatures reign. They are covered with eyes in front and in the back and they look down on you with an unnerving, mischievous stare.

The first living creature is that of a lion. The second is like an ox. The third will have the face of a man, and the fourth is like a great eagle. Each of the four living creatures will have six wings covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. At the foot of each creature, a body on its knees chants continuously before them. Their faces look up to the sky in their arms pulled and stretched outward by barbed shackles embedded into their flesh.

The monocle stretch and contort their limbs to mimic the act of eternal worship. Its flesh is bleached white and heavily scarred from head to toe. It wears a blood-red smock from its waist down to its feet and holds a dirty curved blade in its hand. Branded on their backs is a room that bears the resemblance of a cross with hooked ends. Consider yourself fortunate they have their backs towards you. Be yourself fortunate, they have their backs toward you, and their mutilated faces are obscured from your view.

They are the bi-ish. Cautiously move past them. The biish were four men, great kings and leaders of the world. They ruled vast lands that ran red with innocent blood from every man, woman, and child, who had the misfortune of being born into their kingdom. The four kings were like grown children. spoiled and naked, fighting each other, biting and gnawing at the teats of their great mother earth.

Her face beaten and scratched from when they would feed so viciously. They knew only to gorge on her black milk that flowed from deep within her bosom. Their greed and decadence, their very existence offended all who could peer into your world. Their wicked lives were ended the day they were raptured and bound like statues within the walls of this great temple. They must now worship the four living creatures, as they once commanded others to worship them in life. They suffer now, as their kingdom suffered.

For every son and daughter who found death from fighting the wars they created, their skin is blistered and torn, and their eyes are stung with the venom from the tails of a thousand scorpions. But be warned, if they are awakened from their trance and given use of their limbs once Once again, one can be well assured they would not be too pleasant. In unison, the four creatures will hold up a key, each with a unique emblem on its end and speaks. The first creature that looks like a lion will offer you its key and say, HACWES.

The ox will offer you its key and say, Leviathan. The third creature with the face like a man offers its key and says, Cliff 38. Lastly, the creature that is like an eagle will offer you the final key and say, Cypherism. As the last key is presented, you hear brittle crackling, like autumn leaves from the movement of dead skin from behind you, followed by the loud clank of chains falling to the ground. Make your choice.

Make it quickly. The bi-ish are beginning to stir. Once they see you, they will catch you, and they will kill you. You will know which one to choose, I promise. Take the key and run. Run faster. Run faster. They are coming.

Their howls are high-pitched burgls and hisses. The screeches build as they close the distance between you and them. The slices of their blades come closer and closer. The blood pouring out of your mouth and nose cannot slow you down. Run faster! Run faster! Do not stop until you reach the church of worship. straight for the dark glass you saw when you first awoke in the church.

Do not slow down. Run head first into it. Crash into the mirror. Do not look back. Do not look back. Whatever you do, do not look back. You will awaken shortly. The pools of water are now dried up earth, cracked and barren.

The moon should be at its peak height in the sky, covering the land in its red glow. In the distance of the plain, you should see a piercing shimmer of light. It is only temporary. As the moon loses its red shade, the beacon too begins to diminish in darkness. I am sorry you are in so much pain, dearest little one. It pains me to ask any more of you. Your body has so little left to give. It is so weak and fragile.

But I must ask one last thing of you. One final plea I must beg of you. You must reach that beacon of light in the distance. That last of the red moon shines down upon it, where you will be trapped. I am here for you. Push aside all pain and despair. Listen to my voice and use everything you have left to get to the light. Now!

Abidon is here. Even from miles away, his arrival knocks you off your feet. Get up, little one. There isn't much time. Abidon is near, and his thoughts are of nothing but you. You see the brilliant beam of light shoot up. up into the sky, the source of this powerful beacon comes from an archway standing on an empty plain. Within the archway is a massive and majestic door standing in the emptiness. With the key in hand,

you must get that door open before the red moon shines down upon it no more, and any hope of saving you is lost forever. Ignore the wheezing sound you make when you breathe. Pull open that door. The blood on your hands is everywhere, making it hard for you to get a good grip on the door handle. Pull harder. You only need to open it enough for you to squeeze through. The light is almost gone. Pull. Pull!

Pull! You did it. Get inside and shut that door as fast as you can and lock it. The light is gone. It is done. If you place your ear to the door, you may hear something that sounds like buzzing or fluttering, a sound that can only be made by the flapping of millions of wings. There will be scraping and there will be beating on the other side of the great door.

Then only screams. Behind you is a large, dark tunnel with a light at the end. Walk into the light and claim your reward, my little one. I walked into the bright light. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the brightness, but I could already feel a warm breeze on my face and hear a trickling from a nearby stream. Everything slowly comes into focus. The most beautiful valley spanned out in front of me.

It was made of hills and green, sprinkled with every color imaginable where the most beautiful flowers peppered the landscape. I walked towards the clearing and I saw a crystal blue pond. I dipped my cupped hands into the water and drank. It soothed my chapped lips and parched throat. It was amazingly sweet, and there was an odd sensation as I swallowed the water. It was like a shock from a tiny bit of electricity, but without any pain, only satisfaction. I then caught the scent of something new and intoxicating. On the far side of the pond was gathering of trees. I instantly knew that among these there was one that is the source of that unceasing smell. I knew there was no other like it.

Its leaves, its flower, and its bark would never wither, and its fruit would be so beautiful and delicious. As I approached the border of the foliage, that's when I saw them. A man and woman. I froze. The couple were walking hand in hand. I think they're naked. I made my way closer, making sure to stay hidden behind the bush. I don't know why I was hiding from view.

Why should I be afraid of a couple of naked people? Yep, they were definitely naked. I looked around and realized that my tree was at the center of the grove that held this paradise. But next to my tree was another tree. It was just as majestic and impressive, but there was something ominous about it, something powerful. I looked carefully at these two unique and special trees that grew in this, in this garden. I now realized what this place was and where I am. I'm startled when I feel something vibrate in my pocket. It was the key I chose. As I removed the large key from my pocket and opened

my palm, I noticed the markings on its emblem in more detail. When it was offered to me by the winged creature, I simply thought it was marked with a little. the infinity symbol. Upon closer look, now I realized it was a serpent devouring its own tail in the shape of the infinity symbol. My mind was unlocked. It was all so clear now. I knew my purpose.

I knew why I was created. It was always God's will to destroy his creation. Once destroyed, he could fulfill his promise to bind his enemies and cast them into the lake of fire where they would suffer for all eternity. The trumpets were a countdown to his planned end. Those branded the enemy had spent their immortality trying to find a way to prevent it from happening. But how do you outsmart an omniscient and omnipresent being? You use the very laws of existence against him.

For with the creation of the universe, laws had to be created. He had no choice but to subject himself to those laws for the universe to exist. The fallen ones realized the only way to prevent the end was to break the predestimpses. inevitable chain of events leading to the end. They must have figured out how to connect two points of existence, creating a bridge for me to enter. It causes everything to stop and reset back to the very beginning instead of continuing along the predestined path. It never ends.

It never reaches judgment day. Existence was a loop. We are destined to keep repeating it over and over and over again to escape damnation. It was infinity. Like the serpent devouring its tail, the serpent was thought to be Lucifer, God's adversary, but Lucifer was not a thing or an entity with thought or consciousness. He was the infinity of time. The only thing capable of denying God's divine will.

It was the one simple thing that is protecting us from the wrath of an angry God. I felt its familiar presence immediately. I don't turn around, but even if I did, I knew it would not harm me. It stood behind me for a while, quietly admiring its work. It gently placed a large and cold object in my hands before the fallen angel spoke the words that would be my final instructions. I looked down at the key, mesmerized by the shape of the serpent. It was so old and worn.

The jewel that made up the serpent's eye twinkled in contrast to the bright red piece of fruit held in my other hand. I now understood. I had one more thing to do. I wondered how many times I have done this. How many times have I crossed the bridge and stood at this very spot? How many? Man was created in the image of God, but I am not of the image.

I am the serpent. I am Nephlin. The breath of a faint whisper, now sweet and warm, was spoken into my ear. Just five simple words. Make up from the side of the road, and she smells like sweat, old fiends. fruit in the heat. She says she's not a prostitute. She's just looking for a ride east.

I tell her I'm not looking for a prostitute. She grins, bears her teeth. Never said you were, she says. We ride in silence. I say I'm headed east as well, to the coast, that she can stay with me as long as she needs, but that's where I'm going. She nods, says she's going in that direction anyway. The AC is broken in my car, and we drive with the windows open, sweat beating on her top lip,

her forehead, black locks of hair stick to her face. She sings sometimes, half-completed melodies, songs I recognize, songs I don't. When she forgets the words she just hums, letting the tune slowly die in her throat. We spend the evenings together, drenched in heat, drinking in bars, wide. Watching old movies on motel TVs, lying on synthetic sheets, holding cold bottles of beer against our cheeks. It's unspoken, but after a week we stop booking different rooms. Share a bed.

After the first time we fuck, we're laying in bed, and she says there's something inside me. It crawled inside me when I was a girl, and I can't get it out. She gets real serious when she says this. Browns in a way I didn't know her face could, pulls her lips together, I can see the tension, can see the fault lines her usual expressions play across and fall silent. She says it's eating her alive, that it's sat, squat in a pool of her bile and beer in last night's room service, and that sometimes it steals her voice, steals it right from her throat and changes her, uses her words, throws them back up and out her mouth.

It says it weighs on her, carrying this thing, and that it's like a parasite. We drive a little longer, taking our time, fucking and arguing and playing cards on plastic tables by the side of the road. She tells me about her childhood, her parents, her sister who ran away and came back with a boyfriend and half her teeth missing. She tells me she never drinks before midday, that she can play the violin but hates the sound of it, that once she was bitten by a snake and she shows me the scar, she lets me run my hand over it, the pale knot of skin half-way up her calf.

I tell her why I'm going, why I had to get out, what I hope to find on the coast. We talk of the ocean, salt spray and boats, thin clouds over a black sea, fresh fish and lemon. She mimes picking the bones from her teeth. I watch her fingers, long and tapered, the ends of her nails, ragged and chewed. Sometimes we lie in bed together, and she'll rest her forehead against my back and whisper things like I think you were made for me. I think this is how it was always meant to go, and this is where I was always meant to be. Some days she can't get up, says nothing, lies in a fetal position in the motel bed, staring

at the wall. She says she doesn't want to eat or drink, and I find things to keep myself busy. I take long walks and find a bar, read paperbacks with yellow pages and broken spines on dirty deck chairs. I swim in pools that are too chlorine, pools that make my eyes sting and my skin pucker, pools that turn a neon blue in the midday sun. She said whatever crawled inside her was dark and hungry, and that all she can do was it, but that most of the time she's so tired of being a host that she can't do anything. The day spent in bed come more and more, and sometimes now it's a whole week, her knees

drawn up to her chest, and I'll come in and find her with her forehead against the floor, or so drunk she vomits hot bile on the pillows. Sometimes when she's like this, she'll say things that make no sense, she'll say that Maybe there is no thing inside her, and it's all her, and it's all her brain. That grey lump of matter spasming and seizing in her skull. Sometimes she'll just say that she thinks there's nothing inside her, that she's hollow and empty like a doll. I tell her I love her, but I think I loved her from the moment I picked her up, and she says

I thought she was a hooker, that I wanted to fuck her and give her money, and that I hate her, like I probably hate all women. Says that if I could find it in myself to love her, then I could find it in myself to love anyone, like a sick dog shivering on the roadside. And she says that's what I am. A dog who stinks and follows her around and whines at the sound of thunder. She spits, misses. She tells me as I drift off to sleep, a pillow in the floor my bed, that she's sorry.

That she didn't mean it, but whatever crawled inside her took her voice. A week later she's dead. I find her in the bathtub and instead of slitting her wrists she slit her belly wide open like her second mouth. The incision red and clean. For a while I don't do anything. I study the condensation on the mirror, the faint pink of the water, listen to the drip of the tap.

The locals verify my alibi. The wounds are clearly self-inflicted. The police are done with it all pretty quick. They can't find her family. We have a small funeral, me and the woman at the check-in desk, who smells of lavender and holds my hand and tells me that she was so pretty and you obviously loved each other very much. And even though the words don't mean very much, I appreciate just that someone is saying something

to me. That night I cannot sleep. It's too hot. The covers stick to me. The heat feels invasive under my chin, licking at my back between my fingers. And I hear it. Motion. Scrabbling from somewhere.

The lights outside barely illuminate the room, but I can suddenly see it. A dark shape pressed in the corner of the room between the ceiling and the two walls. So many legs I can't count, a shape darker than shadow that moves like some giant insect spasmodic twitching. I can do nothing but lie still. Mouth open in a silent scream as it lowers itself slowly from the ceiling. The gossamer thread glistens in the half-light. The thing wiggles and settles on my face and it's so fucking heavy like it's made from iron,

I can feel its legs all around me and its body slowly forcing its way into my jaw. And there's nothing I can do. Nothing I can do but lie there and let it force its way in until I can see its final legs disappear down my throat. There bristles and hairs making my mouth burn. I wake in the morning. A bad dream, I think. But whatever's inside me now is hungry.

I try and smoke it out, buying a pack of cheap cigarettes, smoking one. one after the other and flicking the butts into the shimmering blue of the small pool outside. But the thing thrives on smoke. I tried to drown it, sinking beer after beer in a dive bar, blinded by the tacky signs and mirrors. A shirt sticking to my back, it's so hot. I drink so much the world staggers. Tries to find its footing but can't, and then I'm out on the curb, retching, and I can tell

the thing inside me has soaked it all up. Turned all those hops into fat and sustenance. And after this has failed, I know it's growing fat in my belly. I stumble back to my motel room and I tried to beat it out. I smash my forehead against the wall until I see spots of light and taste iron. And when they break down the door, my whole face is swollen, and I'm telling them that something crawled inside me in the night and I can't get it out. I can feel it stir in my stomach.

Something heavy and black can feel it readjusted. Just itself, away from the shaft of light I imagine my throat casts whenever I open my mouth. Like a spider in a bathtub, all joints and blinking eyes. I'm disgusted by myself. The idea that this thing lives under my skin and sleeps there, wet with my bile and warmed by my blood. I moved back home, at least to what passes for home. I never make it east.

When I retrace our route on a map, I can see that we moved in lazy circles, never really going anywhere, happy and content with the idea of motion, but not its consequence. Whatever it is inside me smothers me. Sometimes it steals my voice and says things I do not mean, but that sound like me, mean and spiteful things. It nips at my tongue and pinches my lips and I can feel it shaking against the insides my teeth. It makes a nest with the guilt and purrs. Lays eggs and cares for them. I can hear it click with glee when I don't make it out of bed. When I lie there until my head hurts

from dehydration and my skull begins to feel like a membrane, it sinks further into me. So I drift. I am baseless. I try and pretend that I have nothing under my skin, that it is just flesh and blood like everyone else, but I think people can see through that. The bags under my eyes, the dirt on my clothes, the way my face never comes to rest. Sometimes I think people can see it shifting inside me. People stop and stare on public transport, watching these limbs press against my skin from the inside like tent pulls, and I'll have to try not to cry out. I think I can spot others with something inside them.

Their silences, admissions, eyes that move too slow. We say nothing to each other, scared that if we acknowledge whatever is inside one another, we'll acknowledge whatever is inside us, and then it will be real, and there will be nothing we can do about that. The colors bleed from the world around me. Everything leaks, drains. They become brittle and shallow and nothing. There is no moment of realization.

There is no moment where I am cured. I attend meetings, talk to people, listen, hear about what crawled inside them, how they feel it, what their darkness eats and likes and thrives on. Some people will not come back. They will say things the last time I see them like, thank you. And it's been a pleasure, and live well. And then I won't see them again until I attend their funeral. generals weeks later.

I learn what it likes. I learn how to feed it, how to coexist. There is no grand victory. There is no moment where I realize that to flesh it out of my system, I must face it head on and learn some great truth about myself, and I will emerge from this chrysalis a better and more thoughtful man. There is nothing redemptive about me, no realization I am offered. Instead, I learn when to capitulate, when to let it have the upper hand.

And some days, that's exactly what happens. It steals my voice and my energy, and all I can do was lie on my bed and drool on the pillow. But some days, I learn how to keep it quiet. It retreats into the dark places inside me, hides a while. And when that happens, I take my time. I take long walks. I remember her name. I drive to the sea and sit so close I can taste the salt in the air.

I'm cancer. Stage 3. Inoperable. Those were the words that spelled out my ultimate fate. And while it wouldn't be a particularly original way to die, the irony wasn't lost on me. I'd never touched a cigarette during my short lifespan. Despite growing up in a household where pretty much everyone inhaled those toxic fumes, including my own parents.

Of course, they are both alive and healthy. Even to this day, they never suffered any consequences for any of their unhealthy habits, not even a dent put in their lung capacity. Destiny truly is a fickle bitch. There I sat at the doctor's office, speechless after hearing the diagnosis. I had just gone in for a persistent cough, from what I thought it would be nothing more than a common cold. In all honesty, I didn't feel that sick.

But my wife had convinced me to go for a checkup regardless, and because of that checkup, I had just been told that in less than a year, I would be dead. I've never been much of a religious person. If asked, I'd put myself somewhere on the agnostic spectrum of not knowing what the hell is going on. That being said, I didn't fear death. I had spent one too many nights thinking about my inevitable departure from this world, and had accepted that life was a precious resource that would inevitably expire.

I just didn't think it would be so soon. One true quarrel with death was leaving my family behind. At the not-so ripe age of 42, I still hadn't saved up enough money to keep us afloat in case of an emergency. And while my wife worked, neither of us made enough to support a child on our own, and it just so happened we had a ten-year-old son together. That's why I started praying, begging, bargaining for a second chance. Each night I tried a different God, desperately looking for otherworldly answers regardless

of religion or relevance in modern society. I was desperate. The doctor offered a combo treatment of radiation and chemotherapy. Of course, none would extend my life in any meaningful way, but I started the treatment nonetheless, hoping that maybe someone could offer a miracle cure. But of course, my hopes were left unanswered. In the beginning of this year, my body had deteriorated to the point that I was nothing but a loose sack of skin draped over a malformed set of bones.

I knew I only had a few weeks left before the cancer that justated within me, growing with each passing day, finally won the battle. When breathing became a little more than an agonizing chore, serving only to initiate a cascade of painful coughs, I ended up bedridden next to an oxygen tank. Then, finally on July 29, 2019, as I tried to get dressed and make the short journey from my bed to the little breakfast table down the hall in my hospital. Everything suddenly disappeared beneath my feet. I started falling. One second I was traversing the hospital hallway, oxygen tank dragging on behind me and with a final gasp. My pain was simply erased from existence.

The memory of my disease was nothing more than a faint dream and my life became part of a very distant past. I had died. I realized that much, but the concepts of life and death themselves meant little to me in the grand scheme of things. Yes, I had been part of a society on earth, a note in the everlasting symphony of life, but my part had passed, and the song continued on without me, while I moved on to the next stage. I floated, or sank. It was hard to tell directions apart in my new, weightless state. It almost seemed like an ocean.

The deep blue hues surrounding me on all sides with bubbles of flickering light floating by, delightfully circling me as I moved toward the brightest thing I'd ever seen. Though the light was blinding, I could sense other beings surrounding me. I turned and looked at them, squinting my eyes to get a brighter grasp of what they were. They didn't resemble any creature ever walking upon Earth's surface, but I could tell that they had once been human just like myself. They were happy, smiling without having faces, voicelessly laughing. I waved at them, and they greeted me using nothing more than the warmth of the world.

of their souls. I still had my body, not yet processed by the afterlife, but I felt healthy, no longer ravaged by the tumors within my chest. Once I got close enough to feel the heat of the light, my periphery darkened, and the joyful creatures dancing around me had been replaced by shadows, staring intently at my passing. The new creatures weren't people, but beings emitting the most dreadful sense of sadness and anger, they hated me for being able to touch the light, while they were forever trapped in the shadows. One of them reached out for me, its arms stretching impossibly far beyond its confinement. It grabbed onto my leg and pitch black nails, digging deep into my flesh, tearing muscle

from bone as I silently cried in agony. Before I could get a grasp of my situation, another pair of hands grabbed my arm, tearing it straight from its socket, a third pair wrapped around my chest, digging deep into my lungs, rummaging around where the tumors had once lived. More hands joined in, and before long I was enveloped by a second. hundreds of shadows all tearing away at my limbs and organs, but as all the meat was stripped from my body, the hands had nothing more to hold on to. And I was let go. I was jolted awake, back in the hospital, gasping pathetically for air as the cancer once more inhabited most

of my lung tissue. My family stood close by, sobbing at my demise. I really had died, but only for about a minute. Silence quickly filled the room as they noticed I was still alive, doctors wearing shock expressions and horrified stares from my son. They were surprised, confused, as no attempts had been made to resuscitate me. My death had been expected for so long that keeping me alive would be nothing more than a cruel joke. Yet once again, I lived. I had been so close to eternal salvation, but something had pulled me away, denied my entrance to whatever lay beyond.

Of course, with the cancer relentlessly spreading throughout my body, I wasn't meant to stay. Despite the bittersweet taste of my revival, the locals hailed it as a miracle, and multiple news stations wanted to share my story. Profit from it, I promptly declined. I didn't want to tell anyone what I saw on the other side, and I was in too much pain to accept it as a miracle. As I stabilized, they moved me to a hospice care facility. Death was still lingering around the corner, but they said I might have a couple more weeks

to spend with my family if nothing more. They'd already said goodbye once, and now that cruel trick of nature made them do it twice. My wife didn't smile once in the following days. She wore a tired expression on her face. Her eyes were sunken, but I couldn't blame her. Taking care of a dying man is no easy task, much less for someone that has to do it twice. My son, on the other hand, would not stop crying. He was too young to understand, but he knew I wouldn't stay for much longer.

Two weeks came and went in the blink of an eye, each day spent in misery, dreading what it waited on the other side. Then one morning, I simply didn't wake up. Once again, the world was done with me. I had been tossed away from existence, and just like before, I started falling through time and space into an infinite void. The shapeless being still floated in the peripheries, lights that once wandered the earth, but this time there were no smiles to greet me, no joy filling my soul to the brim.

They were angry at me. I had returned to a place I didn't belong, and now my journey was one no longer welcome. I was pushed further toward the light away from the once blissful companions, and it wasn't long before I saw the shadows again. There the light lingered, just out of reach. So close I could almost touch it, when a pair of twisted hands grabbed onto me, digging into my flesh. This time they didn't settle with violence.

They started whispering, begging for me to pull them out of their prisons to take me with them. Millions of voices rushed through my heads, promising it was all a misunderstanding that they had not meant to hurt me, that they wanted nothing more than the warmth of the light. Yet with their pleas for salvation, they tore into me, ripping me apart from within. I couldn't help them. I didn't know how. And with that, their voices turned from prayers to anger. They shouted obscenities from within my head, filling it with hatred while telling me what would happen to my family once I truly perished. In a split second, a vision of my family's future became burned into my memory as if it had already happened. Depression would

force my wife out of her job and into a battle with drug addiction, which eventually melted over to our son as he grew up. Unable to escape, my son would get expelled after school, ruined by the death of his father and his absent-minded mother. At the age of 16, my son would get into drugs himself and ultimately die in a horrific car crash. That was the summary, cascade of events that followed my death, but the shadows didn't stop there. They promised a way out, that they could save me and my family, if only I took them with me toward the light, but I could never reach the light. As desperately as I long to move on, I could never quite get there, always torn to shreds

long before I touched it. Each brief visit to the promised afterlife left nothing more than a barren fragment of thought, alone in a world that didn't belong to me. No matter what they did, nothing happened. And suddenly I was once again dragged away from the light, back to an excruciating life. Since my diagnosis, I have died a total of 16 times. Each time I'm further ripped apart by shadows, each time rejected by the light and flung back to my cancer-riddled body.

My family has grown tired of my presence. My once-loving wife loath is my very existence, and my son is beyond traumatized. I can barely move. I can't feed myself. and I need help just getting from bed to the toilet, because by now my cancer has spread everywhere. The doctors say I couldn't possibly be alive, yet here I am. It is even starting to eat away at my brain as well, taking away not only my physical body, but the memory of what I used to be along with it.

I prayed, begged, bargained for more time with my family, and I guess something answered. As a result, I was given infinite life, just not a functioning body to go with it. it. But infinite agony isn't what truly haunts me, nor the fact that I've been rejected by the afterlife itself, because soon I won't have a mind to worry with. What truly frightens me is that I now see the shadows while I'm awake. I hear their whispers at night as the pain medication slowly lulls me to sleep. They're thanking me because in their whispers of lies and deceit, their false desires of entering

the light. What they really wanted was our world. And by returning to life, I've brought them here. They needed me to survive. They needed a vessel to come here and extinguish the light we live in, to take away the small amount of happiness that still exists on earth. They've already taken mine, infecting my family with their horrific purpose and desires. I thought my wife had simply suffered one too many days due to my disease, but it's the

shadows within her that has turned her to the hateful creature she's. She's become. She went from a loving spouse, taking care of me in my darkest days, to spewing vile hatred in my direction for each time I returned from death. She hated me, and she hated my son for being part of me. Every day she would laugh at my agony, telling me that I hadn't done anything right that I couldn't even die properly. In between the barrages, she'd let it slip who she really had become.

She thanked me for releasing her from the dark abyss, smiling wide as she did. It wasn't her talking, it was the creatures. Of course, my son had been infected too. He quickly followed after my wife, when he stopped speaking and eating, only rotting away in his room, neglected by his sick mother. Once he had become as emaciated and weak as myself, he finally spoke, telling me this would only be the beginning. Soon the rest would come through.

Another shadow for each trip I take to the beyond. I'm stuck in my broken body, watching everything I love. fade away, so I'm writing this all down in an attempt at warning everyone of what exists beyond the boundaries of life. I need my last deed to be something remotely useful before my mind vanishes with the rest of my decaying body. Perhaps my only hope is to destroy my body, break down everything I am so that no shadow can infest me, but I'm too weak, too frail to even leave my bed.

Don't let the darkness spread. I'm sorry for bringing it here. And my punishment is to stay alive and watch, half-witted and broken, when all I want is to simply leave this place. I want to keep falling. My name is Dr. Steven Rouston, researcher at the Martian University of Crevin. What follows aren't really research notes as much as they are a way of keeping me sane. I need them to truly grasp the magnitude of our discoveries, to keep the order in my mind,

if you will. For as long as historians could remember, humanity had been looking for their god, but to no avail. Despite several millennium of searching, no deity was ever found. This never became a real issue, though, until the late 22nd century, when we invented the ships needed to explore space outside of our own solar system. The telescopes required to truly peak far beyond the universe and technology allowing us to drill deep into the earth. Humanity had turned their eyes to the skies and to the planetary depths to look for answers. Neither heaven nor hell was ever found, however.

Throughout the 23rd century, the disappointment grew, and a new church rose. Their priests preach about a dead god, believing the ours had somehow died. The religion had its major breakthrough in 2267, and the church, and the priests preach about a dead god, believing the 267, and by 2300, they had already converted over a third of the people to this new belief. The Necrotic Church had more power than it could ever need and grew stronger every year. My story begins a good 20 years later, however, with me waking up for another day of research, aimed to find a definitive answer to the age-old question. Where is God?

I refuse to believe he died. August 24th, 2322 AD. I decided to visit the observatory today. My research had been stale these past few weeks, and I felt I could use some new insights. There is only so much one can learn from the history books, after all. It always strikes me as odd, though, whenever I talk to the scientists here, how we still have not discovered intelligent life. This in spite of our technological prowess and our planet colonizing habits.

I felt it would be a solace, though. I guess I just don't want to be alone. Probably goes for all of us. To be honest, I would already settle for a few ruins, some scriptures perhaps, anything but the animalistic species that dominate every habited planet we've come across. I digress. There actually was an exciting new discovery made, which my colleagues there told me about. They had discovered a new species of gaver-like creatures, albeit with much more flexibility

in their claw-like fingers, deep in the bush force of Titan Major. Apparently, the beast had exhibited an irrational fear of the explorers, but that was not the strange part. Although the creatures, Vidin's Titan Arashiro, displayed no exceptional cognitive ability, they had somehow crafted numerous human-like statues out of the thin wood found there. The statues vary greatly in size, from a few inches to close to ten feet, but apart from gendered differences, they are almost exactly the same. I do not know what to make of it.

Adam and Eve? Eden? I need some sleep. August 27th, 2322 AD. I received a message from Gerald as I woke up today. He urged me to call back right away. Apparently he had been trying to reach my cell all night. After all those years, he still did not remember that I cannot sleep with that thing turned on.

Not that it mattered much these past few nights. My research will not let me sleep, and even if I do fall asleep, I have to face the nightmares. I will not be riding those down here, however, as it is best I just forget them. But I digress. Eager to catch up, I called Gerald during breakfast. I did not think too much of his calls during the night back then, for he had done so before. Good morning, Dr. Starr. I hope you slept well.

I began. What? Are you alone? He promptly interrupted me. Uh, yes, yes I am. Good. Well, Dr. Rauston, I have some good news for you. He said, sounding like his old self again.

If they have not brainwashed you yet, of course. They do try, I laughed. What news do you have? You should come back to Earth, Stephen. At least that church does not control everything here yet. He explained to me how there was a whole community of like-minded scientists in Tokyo, some of them atheists. Gerald gave me a contact number of one of the Martian members.

From what I understood, the scientists were split into two research groups. One branch aimed to find heaven or any sign of God in the galaxy. The other held on to the belief that God lived inside all of us. It is a shame. I know Gerald to be a firm believer of the latter, for it would be a pleasure to work together again. Searching the galaxy sounds like a much more exciting prospect, however. August 30th, 2322 AD.

Church confiscates alien artifacts. read the heading of the news website today. Can you believe that those priests actually did that? The first alien craftsmanship we ever found, and they are claiming it and probably burning it soon, too. No scientists will be examining those wooden statues. On a more cheerful note, I finally met the other scientist Gerald had told me about. The Martian chapter operated in a state-of-the-art research facility on the crater plains near Crevan. I was able to explore the entirety of it, with chief researcher Dr.

Harvard as my guide. He explained to me that they had found several rich benefactors, mainly older religions, to take care of the financial aspect of their research. Most of the funding was used on the observatory, however, and it was magnificent. The telescopes were unlike anything I'd ever seen before, both in scale and effectiveness. Furthermore, Dr. Haverd assured me that those were not even the most advanced models they had. In the hallway stood a number of brand-new telescopes, still wrapped in their package. and several parts of a legitimately giant one laid scattered across the floor. I also took the opportunity to ask him about the news I had heard today, though I wish I had

not. You heard the news today? I asked, about the church's latest confiscation. Yes, I did. He nodded, and I'm afraid there is even more to it than that. Come, walk with me. He led me through a series of highly secured doors into another wing of the research center that I had not yet seen.

We entered a large chamber that was stacked to the brink with computers. There were huge touchscreens on both walls and at least a dozen engineers manning the technology. This is what I like to call the war room, Dr. Havard said. In here, we gather all the information we can on the necrotic church in their activities. Now, about today's news, we have reason to believe that they did not only confiscate the statues, but exterminated the whole species that crafted them as well. spoke. What?

Who knows what could have been found out by studying those animals? These thoughts will not let me sleep. What could the church be planning? September 10th, 2322 AD. The workload over the last few weeks had been enormous, and I had not had much time to write down my thoughts. These are turbulent times, but I will get to that later. Now, since I am one of the scientists at the facility without extensive prior knowledge

of astronomy, Dr. Havard had me doing mostly paperwork. I had to check the planets that had already been discarded by the other researchers to make sure that they were nothing special. Check reports on the church in the war room, and listen to the incoming radio signals, or rather radiostatic, from outer space. Most of it was not that exciting, but it left me plenty of time to talk with the other scientists there and focus on my own research. It was not so bad at first, but then the church began trekking us down. To make matters worse, we could all follow it in the war room. We could see how the bastards were systematically hunting us all down, forcing us to slow our research and keep a low profile.

I have to admit that I was and still am frightened. The facility itself is pretty secure, but the risk of getting caught in your own home grows day by day. It feels as if we are running out of time. With so many of my colleagues being captured, my workload increased immensely, and I even got to help with the telescopes. It was then that I was finally initiated in the true progress that the facility had already made. Something out there in the galaxy was moving, and we had no clue what it was. The only proof we had of its existence were our calculations, seeing the light had not

even reached its part of the galaxy yet. But whatever it was, it had our whole facility confound. as it did not seem to follow any of the laws centuries of scientific progress had come up with. 1. Our object does not move in a logical pattern and appears to be unaffected by gravity. 2. Our object seemingly pulls and releases other Celestials in its vicinity at will, without any kind of foreseeable pattern. September 11th, 2322 AD. Those are not even the most disturbing things about whatever we found out there. I was not even supposed to be supposed to be able to be. I was not even supposed to be clued in about what follows, so perhaps I should not record

it either, but I do not feel like I have a choice anymore. This is too much. Here's my attempt at transcribing my conversation with Dr. Havard, as he had called me into his office today. Dr. Ralston, have a seat. Tea? He greeted me. Well, I don't mean to be blunt, but why did you call me in here?

There's just so much work. Ah, yes. You picked up on a... Any signals yet?" He answered blankly. Well, I began until my eyes met his. Fear? There is a reason I called you in here, Stephen.

Our numbers are dwindling, and seeing as how you've helped greatly over the last few weeks, you deserve to know. He sighed and handed me a file. It was about the galactic anomaly we had discovered. The calculations show that our object's gravitational pull is so strong, so very powerful, but it is affecting the orbit of this very planet, as well as every other one. What? But we are dealing with something far beyond what we thought was rationally possible.

Beyond what we—Dr. Haverd fell silent for a moment and then looked up and started whispering something of which I could only decipher the word, life or alive. I was frightened already. It felt as if I just stood there for hours, not knowing what to do. The man simply stared at the ceiling with a creepy, blank stare. I'd finally managed to open my mouth as he looked at me again. We found God. He whispered.

We did. Isn't that a bit rash? I answered. Shivers running down my spine. No, we did. His eyes were full of steely conviction. And he knows. It's all in the file.

How the light has stopped moving towards it ever since we discovered him. him. We still can't see further into that sector of space than we could four months ago. That can't be right. It is. But there's more. He grabbed the file out of my hands and began flipping through the pages. Here, at exactly 10.06 a.m. yesterday, his movement ceased being random.

His eyes grew wide. But he's coming. Our Lord's on his way, and we are not prepared. I must remain calm and focused. I must be calm and focused. I am calm and focused. I am so. Am I?

September 12th, 2322 AD. As was to be expected, I barely slept tonight. In the morning I could not get up, though, and it was not until noon that I finally admit that I would not find the answers in my own home. So many questions kept rushing through my mind as I checked my email during breakfast. Surprisingly, Gerald had sent me a document overnight without any further information. Experiment TZ-2322-0518. Executed by Dr. Reynolds, Dr. Steyer, Dr. Colbrelli, and Dr. Zing.

9.30 AM. Subject, heavily sedated and strapped to operating table. Subject expects to receive a routine cosmetic procedure in order to ensure the experiment goes as planned. 9.41 a.m. Subject's cranium carved open and electroids applied. Shocks are being applied at regular intervals. Subject displays no visible signs of stress or duress and appears to have entered the desired semi-comatose state. 10.18 a.m. Subject grunts and mumbles intelligibly. Intensity of the shocks is being amplified. 10.34 a.m. subjects rambling loudens and twitching

occurs. Shock strength is being ramped up again. Dr. Steyer's protest is denied. 11.06 a.m. Subject suddenly stops moving and goes silent. 11.13 a.m. Subject's heartbeat has dropped noticeably over the past few minutes to an astounding 7bpm. 11.16 a.m. Subject's heartbeat drops below 1B.m. Electrodes being turned even higher, nearing maximum output. 1118 a.m. Subject starts moving, and I strongly feel that all experiment TZ-2322. 0518 points towards us having found a way to an hypothesis that is supported by all previous TZ line experiments. I was not sure what to make of it.

Why did Gerald choose to share this? It was interesting to finally read some of his research, but mostly everything was classified anyway. Not to mention that I had no clue what good such experiments could do in our story. search for the deity. It took a while for me to be able to leave the comfort of my home and head to work, at which point I was called by an unknown number. Reluctantly, I answered the call. Hello? Who is this? Steve, listen up. I don't have much time. Gerald? What? Did you read the file I sent you?

Yes, but... I'll be at Crevin tomorrow night. You need to meet me at the Pelican on Desmond Square at exactly 8 p.m. Gerald, what the hell? 8 p.m., Steve. You have to be there. Gerald? Silence. What is going on? Any answer will do.

Then, when my stressed-out self finally got to the research facility, there was no one there. Not a single soul. I carefully walked through the empty hallways as the lights were lit where I went. In my mind, there lurked something behind every corner I took. I checked my cell. No calls, no messages. Nothing. However, Dr. Haverd would not answer his.

I tried calling my other colleagues, but none of them picked up either. Strangely enough, however, most of the systems were still up and running. All of them were seemingly working towards identifying the entity rushing towards the earth. I had trouble understanding the huge chunks of data most of the screens showed without Dr. Haverd, though. There was one screen that did catch my eye, the big one in the center of the room. It showed the entity itself and the insane speed in which he was the screen. It was racing towards us.

The thing was hidden in a black cloud and the images were not sharp, but I could see it nonetheless. I could see the dark tendrils protruding from the smoke and the thousands of eyes it seemed to have. This moon-sized monstrosity, it could not be. I fear for the others. I truly do. September 13, 2322 AD. I stayed home today, despite the nightmares I battled all night.

At this point, I felt that even the horrific imagery, the paralyzing fear, and even the auditory hallucinations my mind plagued me with, were preferable to the outside world. We were all going to die horribly anyway, I figured. At least I would pass in the comfort of my home, though possibly insane. There was no point in denying it. This morning I had effectively lost it. Things bettered, however, and from two p.on onward, only minor hallucinations. I kept hearing a faint yelling, for example, and a deep, hushed voice calling out my name.

Now, psychiatrists would probably not agree with my analysis, but I blame it on the lack of sleep. What was a lot more worrying was that I still had not heard anything from the research facility. How well, I figured I should try focusing on other things. I switched on the television to distract me for a while. The channel offered me a dozen different documentaries to pick from, and I picked one about the growth of London as the first multi-layered metropolis. Anything to keep my mind occupied. Why was the clock ticking so slowly?

The documentary itself was not incredibly interesting. The host tries his best to give an exciting trip through the city, but everything seemed bleak and gloomy, and it had an effect on him as well. His demeanor grew more depressed and joyless by the minute, and that was not the only thing that changed, unfortunately. The people he passed no longer went on with the moment. their daily lives afterwards. They dropped whatever they were holding and watched with dark, hollow eyes.

It was not long until Patrick realized this, too. I would appear that some of the citizens here have taken a dislike towards foreigners, but I'm quite sure that... He paused. Oh, you are here. He spoke as his eyes turned black. They all began staring straight at me as more and more people entered the screen. What the hell is going on?

on. Christ, save me. Save us all. Save us now. Why? I only remember switching off the television and running outside in a moment of primal fear. There is no memory of how I got to Desmond Square hours early before 37 p.m. But at least the voices are gone.

Whatever it is that is haunting me, I'm sure that it will not strike me here with all those people around. One of them was Gerald. He was pale and thin, having lost at least. at least 30 pounds, and he looked to be tired beyond belief. I had a feeling you would be early. You've always been curious." He said,

Come, walk with me. I followed him as he walked towards the park. Did you read the notes I sent you? They are important, but horribly incomplete, as you could probably tell. I want to tell you what we found, because someone has to know. You are not going to make the research public? I asked him. They would never let us.

My entire team is dead, Stephen. The church killed them all. Why? What did you find? They believe that we might have found God. Gerald said bitterly. Did you? I fear not.

But believe me when I say that not a moment goes by that I hope we did. We found something, though. But you'll have to take my word for it as all of our research has been destroyed. He left the dramatic pause for a while. We have discovered an entity that dwells within all of us, seeing what we see, hearing what we hear, and ever so slightly controlling what we do. We first made contact with it during the experiments I sent you. It would appear that the constant shocks we applied on our test subject had awakened it.

We tried communicating with it, but soon our limbs were no longer our own. We were forced to kill the subject and report all of our findings to the necrotic church. of this without our consent. He sighed and sat down with slouch shoulders. I don't even know if I choose to tell you this, or whether this all fits in this, this thing's master plan. We just sat there for a few minutes until I finally knew what to say. So does the church think you found God?

I doubt it. I think they just don't want our research to get public. Not even those lunatics could incorporate that in their beliefs. Imagine what it would do to them if God turned out to be alive and almost tangible. Then what can we? He grabbed me by the shoulders and stared straight into my eyes as panic reigned in his pupils. You must listen. Do you realize what we're dealing with here?

Everything we've ever looked at, everything we've ever cared about might be a lie. He started talking faster and faster. The reality we breathe that we think we live in is warped, twisted beyond our comprehension. Gerald, listen to me. You need to calm down. We can't know, Stephen. We can't be sure anymore. What?

What can't we know? What lurks beyond the edge of our perception? Gerald whispered with an empty look in his eyes. Gerald, I snap out of it. Do not trust anything, Stephen. Gerald suddenly took a step back and reached inside his pocket to take out a small handgun. I remember yelling, No!

Like they do in movies. I remember the blood. The gun. shot and me running away. Gerald died today, and I have the feeling that he will not be the last. I do not know what is going on anymore. The hallucinations are gone for now, but I still cannot quite grasp what Gerald was telling me.

What is even real anymore? Is there really something racing towards Earth? The television shows nothing but static anymore, or am I imagining things? I feel like a pawn, but whose game are we playing? September 14th, 2322 AD. It is becoming increasingly difficult to write in here, though those two burden me immensely through every hour that I fail to catch sleep. Not just because my dreams haunt me and break me through the whores they make me watch.

It is because I have been crying tonight, endlessly and almost violently. I witnessed my best friend's death. No. No, his murder. And I cannot deal with it. What brought him to do that, and why will these tears not stop? Are these tears, through the constant damaging of my notebook, being used to stop me from writing? Am I becoming as paranoid as Gerald?

Do I really believe that there's something controlling us? I am fully aware that these are the words of a shaken, sleep-deprived, and traumatized man, but I still cannot bring myself to rip them out of this book. It is 3.15 a.m., and I am afraid to close my eyes. I must have fallen asleep eventually, because I do partially recall a dream I had. While some parts are vivid, others seem to have been oddly blurred out. Is there no place that I am safe? My dream began with me standing in the middle of a field, surrounded by a tall brick wall

a few meters away from me. It was night, but I could see no stars. I took a few uneasy steps when the wall started shifting. Bricks were constantly being added on top while others were removed just as fast. It was not long before holes began to appear in the wall though, places where the bricks were disappearing too quickly to be replaced. At first I could see nothing but darkness through these holes, but then I began to notice the blackness.

There was something out there removing those bricks and destroying my walls. A creature so very dark that it stood out like the blackness. bright a star in this otherwise starless night. I felt fear like never before as I slowly began to define its shape. Long, elongated arms made their way through and reached for me before scratching the walls in frustrated rage as I backed away again and again, my heart pounding in my chest. Suddenly the limbs pulled back and for a few heartbeats everything was quiet again. The wall had stopped shifting as a prelude of something much, much worse.

Something out there, outside of this little bit of shelter was roaring. If it could even be called that. It placed two hands on the sides of the holes and started pushing, long, bone-like fingers grabbed onto the wall, which was now clearly cracking. Its hands pushed the bricks out of the way as if it were simple specks of dust. It was only then that I finally got to see its face, greeting me with a terrifying smile that would befit a psychopath. It opened its mouth to reveal the void within, and I recall thinking that I should recognize

I recognized that face before it all went black and I woke up, sweating and out of breath. I had woken up to laughter of several tall shadow-like figures standing around my bed. I tried to scream, but they just kept staring. I tried to open my eyes, but nothing was changing. That's when it all became a blur. I remember wondering why they were not moving, but I woke up, sitting outside on my balcony. My legs were hurting, and the pain quickly urged me to stand up. Somehow I had been sitting in the lotus position, which I had not been able to do since I was

14 or so. Are there any words for my confusion? Am I really still sane? I forced myself to eat something, but practically had to force the omelet down my throat. The dream still spooked me, and I felt like my mind had finally been damaged beyond repair. My continuing headache only served to reinforce that statement, and was as if lightning split my forehead, as if my head was desperately trying to be damaged. to adopt my new-found madness, although one thing was crystal clear.

I could not let it consume me. The visions, the dreams, the disappearances, Gerald's suicide, all of it had started with the discovery of Dr. Haverd's God, not to mention the discoveries that Gerald's team had made, or had they just been crazy talk. I had to connect the dots. There had to be some sort of reasoning behind all of this. I decided to go back to the research facility to gather more information, all the while wondering why I was not more shocked by everything that had happened.

I just felt numb. Arriving at the facility was no boon for my sanity either. Strangely enough, everyone was there again, and I was greeted by one very excited researcher, Dr. Stone, according to her name tag, who talked to me with seemingly limitless respect. She told me that Dr. Harvard was looking for me and other researchers gathered around it. as she was speaking. They all held their distance and all of them. Even ones I had worked with before stared at me with reverence in their eyes.

I felt confused and oddly self-conscious. Hey, guys, I hope the research is still going strong, I said, and they seemed satisfied with that. I tried to shake off the weirdness as I made my way to Dr. Havert through the least busy hallways. There were still zero answers. two days ago, this place had been abandoned. I shivered as I knocked on Havard's door. Steve, good to see you. Let me get you some tea."

Dr. Havard pulled back a seat for me and immediately put a hot cup of tea in my hands. Perplexed as I was, I could not help but notice that he had put me in his own very comfortable desk chair, which had been specifically made to ease the strain on his aching back. Meanwhile, Dr. Havard sat on the ordinary office chair, usually reserved for guests. I could see the reverence in his eyes as well. What was going on? It was a question I found myself asking all too much these past few weeks. I had to try and get my answers.

Why have I not heard from you? This place was abandoned just two days ago. He nodded thoughtfully. Yes. Yes, we were receiving our visions too. Our Lord really did make it all clear, didn't he? Our Lord? I asked him.

Shivers reaching down my spine. Yes. Don't you— He smiled. Ah, forgive me. Our Lord already said that you might still be somewhat shaken and confused from your own revelations. We were not expecting you until tomorrow. You all had those visions, too?

Those dreams? Everyone here had them? Well, I don't think they were exactly the same. I saw some very personal things, and I'm sure others did too. We rarely talk about them, but I feel that they contain the same message overall. He hesitated, and I looked as if he was trying to muster his courage. Was he afraid of me? Would you mind if I asked about your visions?

What? My apologies. I never meant to offend you. He said quickly. It's just that, that, well, you're his prophet, right? I was dazed. Why me? Why was that thing doing that to all of us?

It explained the awe they regarded me with, but left me in the dark otherwise. Suddenly, my head seemed to split in half as I heard a deep, loud voice echoing through it, an imposing voice that could only be described as ancient. You've finally come. There were times that I doubted if you'd make it, but you've arrived. The voice said, and I looked at Dr. Haverd, who was looking ecstatic. You are to be commended. The other focused the brunt of his assault on you, but you didn't fall.

And you didn't break. I was wise to choose you as my prophet. This is unreal. I struggled to speak. What are you? I am God. There is a lot. I found a strange crimson velvet envelope between the cracks and the ground, surrounded

by an eerie pink reddish glow. It was mesmerizing to look at. I felt drawn to it, almost like it was placed there on purpose. for me to find. I always was a firm believer in the supernatural, but I never got a chance to experience it. I thought this might be a unique opportunity to see once and for all if there's something more to it. I thought I could finally get the answers I've been searching for my whole life.

I always thought about it, and my mind was provoked by this question, by this never-ending string of dark and twisted enigmas that have always filled my soul. What were heaven and hell like? Was there a purgatory also? What if all we ever knew was fake and not according to the reality that was beyond the veil of human perception? The more I looked at the strange envelope, the more it began to take a hold of my spirit. This energy that started flowing through my body was something evil, I think. That's how it felt at first. A strange sensation of the purest evil, indescribable in human words, was dropping needles in my soul like it wanted to perform a voodoo ritual on it.

My mind, body, and spirit all became weakened by this amazing and crushing force that was coming from the envelope. So I gave into it. I let it take over. I didn't even try to fight it. My desire to see and feel the supernatural transcended my will to live. It was at this moment I knew I could find something bigger than me, bigger than humanity itself. The envelope was sealed in blood.

It was signed to you by an old demon. I started feeling scared, fear clouding my mind, its poisonous arms reaching within the very dark and cold abyss of my consciousness. Right under the seal, it said, pour your own blood over the seal to open this letter, written in minuscule letters. This raw, powerful energy was taking over me, replacing whoever I was with something anew, something powerful and evil at the same time. But there was something else I was feeling then, some sort of guilt, sadness of not belonging, but they were not mine. The letter was emanating

them. I could feel that. I bit my finger and let the blood fall on the seal. I felt displaced, lost in time and space forever. The letter was short, and I don't know how, but I remember it word for word. Dear human, I didn't want you to ever find this letter, let alone read it, but yet here we are. I'm sick of it all, yet I still have to do it. It's too late for you, dear host, but I think you'll be the lucky one, the luckiest of them all. I want it to be my final time doing this.

I want to wither away, to die before you never had this chance, simply because the problem The process corrupted their mind and soul in a way that never allowed them to live again. You will see ugly and evil things. You will experience pain and fear you have never experienced before. Call this letter a curse for those who find it. But you, as process is complete and insanity, will take over you. Going on since before I can remember, since your kind started walking the earth. I don't exactly know its final perp for bother to unknowing.

or bother to understand it. Simply, my kind has to do it to your kind. It's always been this way and always will be. I know you're afraid. I know your hands are shaking while reading this. You know this is not a game, and you know there is no escape from this. All you have to do is bite your finger and pour a few drops of blood on the page. Let me show you something new. I felt more and more empowered by the evil things the letter emanated. I knew this was not a joke. I signed the paper with my blood. It caught fire, its pinkish flames slowly engulfing me.

I screamed in pain, but not because I was burning. It was a pain coming from the fact that I was being slowly taken to another plane, bit by bit. I faded to black in a way. I was still aware, though, and when I opened my eyes a bit, a large glass tube was saw that I saw. The tube seemed infinite, and the black smoke that filled it was not damaging me physically, but when that cleared, I saw twisted faces of evil beings, their shiny teeth bleeding acid

spit on the glass tube. They were everywhere. Their sharp claws were scratching at the surface, trying to break in and feed. I could see the hunger in their eyes, hatred fuelling whatever they held inside their minds and bodies. The deformities howled and screeched a ravenous desire to eat me. That was my last memory of being inside the tube. Right after seeing those horrifying creatures, I passed out completely. I don't know how much time I spent inside that tube. Time seemingly wasn't a thing inside it. It was just endless, infinite, darkness all around me. Coming back to my senses, I found myself in a small room, although it was dimly lit by

a flickering yellow light bulb. It was very dark. Right in front of me, there was a chair. It was wrapped in the exact same red velvet that the envelope was made of. Please sit down. The baritone voice said, making the room tremble as if the eons the past suddenly had a voice, a voice expressing all kinds of existential terrors and horrors that this owner had witnessed with the passing of this strange man-invented construct, time. I felt fear licking my brain and its awful embrace kept me in place, rendering me unable to move. The fear that built up inside me was life-threatening. I knew that in the medical sense of things, a person could be scared to death.

My opinion was that it wouldn't take me long to get there. Whatever was in that room with me, whatever presence loomed in the thick, damp, and heavy air made me fear for my life. The room started shaking and I sat down on the chair. The voice told me to close my eyes. In the darkness behind my eyelids, red flashes started running before them. I heard a door opening, then closing shut. There wasn't any door when I first came here. Yet again, I was absolutely positive that the natural laws, the ones we guided our lives

after, did not work here. More so, this wasn't anything natural. Open your eyes. The same voice once again told me. A wave of shock and horror pierced through my heart. It split my soul into halves, never to be repaired again. My mind shattered into thousands of small shards. I was no longer me.

Fear took its throne inside my body. The war raged on between what I thought before and what stood in front of me now. A fiend like shadow, its eyes burning a bright red hue, fixated me. It was impossible to look at, yet here I was. The monstrosity stood before me, as if it knew me from my child. even from before I was born. The smoky shadow let out a sigh, then a sad smile revealed its shiny teeth. The way its face contorted into something that revealed a dark, endless, and timeless sadness

hit me so hard. The first thing that came to mind, the way I could picture this sadness that I was seeing, was a barren wasteland with dark clouds in the sky. Just that. Endless clouds being carried away by a worn-out. weary wind above the wastelands of the fiend's former self. Don't be scared, child. I will not hurt you, I hope.

The demon fiend said, I stood aghast, static buzzing through my skull. I always wanted to experience things like this, but not in a way where fear would invade my whole body like a leech from hell. You will be the last one for me. The last human I will possess before I end my soul. I can't take it anymore. I choose you because you always wanted to see something that pertains to the supernatural." The demon said,

I just want to talk to you a little before we do this. I nodded. Shivers ran down my spine and everything I thought I knew before was obliterated by this new experience. This place. This place is called the Hollow. It is the antechamber to hell. You heard that door opening and closing, yes. What lies on the other side will make you lose your mind, and it's not even hell itself behind

it." He sighed, a deep, dark sadness escaping his mouth. I nodded. The fear that was reigning supreme inside me didn't let me speak yet. The hollow was a place where all soon-to-be possessed people go. they could sit face to face with the demon that would take over their body. Some of them would just tell secrets and forbidden knowledge. Others would say nothing at all.

They could show you other worlds, or just mock, hurt, and eventually possess you like you were nothing. I think the common thing for all people who have been inside this room was fear, a deep, unending, seething fear. I need you to help carry me to a place where I will kill myself, where I will Find a pool where I will drown because I am tired." The demon said, I finally got my voice back. I was fearful, but yet again, this is not how I wanted to find out about the existence

of the supernatural. I didn't want my first experience with it to be me being a vessel for a suicidal demon. The hollow started to tremble, and the demon told me we needed to hurry. The process will be painful, and fear would probably leave eternal marks. and scars on my mind. Are you ready, child? The demon asked me. I nodded, tears filling my eyes.

He crashed into my chest like a rifle had just been emptied into me. The pain was an eternal flame of hate, a superior being that transcended everything I knew before. The fiend spread itself across my whole body and took over me. Soon he dictated all my motions and movements. My train of thought wasn't my own anymore. I became a prisoner. The purple door appeared in front of me.

I let out a scream inside my own mind, only for it to be swallowed whole by the demon's voice. I will shield you from the insanity. You will be all right. Let's go to the pool. He finally said. The door opened and a black long corridor was revealed. It was similar in a way to the tube in which my travel here was done. Men and women were plastered all over its walls.

The demon told me that its higher-ups sometimes got off on gluing sinners to the walls, especially murderers, rapists, and pedophiles. Their never-ending screams would echo into the eternity of which they had been condemned. Cries for help and screams of anguish filled the corridor, the absence of light was not a problem for me. I could see through the demon's eyes all the way to the end of this black horizontal place fit only for beasts and former human psychopaths. What made this new sight special was that it looked like I had a fire in my eyes.

Don't know how to better explain it, like when you look through a fire and see something on the other side. That's exactly what this was. We need to hurry. He knows something's happening. The demon screamed inside my brain. Who knows? I asked, fear breaking my mind's voice.

You know who? He said. I started running, although I was not in control anymore. I ran and ran and ran. It felt like an eternity. We reached another door. It was ancient and the wood was cracked. A howl, followed by a deep groan, echoed throughout the corridor behind me, silencing every scream

that came from those sinners trapped in the walls. I heard the behemoth rampaging towards me, and not even for a second did I dare to turn my head around and see what or who it was. I didn't because deep down inside I knew who he was. I opened the door and a bright white light hit me in the face. I was temporarily blinded by this powerful beam, but soon came back to it. Run! The demon cried.

A circular construction made of stone was taking shape as I was approaching it. Water filled it, colored black. It moved unnatural as all things were here. Droplets of dark water rose in the air, dancing under the silvery sky above me. A dark red sun split into four was bleeding its core into the air, regenerating itself infinitely. Skeletal birds were flying in the sky, their screams of hateful spite making my soul shake. Trees made out of teeth were chattering when touched by the infernal winds of this place. This is a demon graveyard.

The ones who die are buried here. The water over there is sometimes used for healing. Other times for inflicting pain upon those who do not follow orders. White is for healing. Black is for pain. The demon said, He told me to part my skin because the dark water needed blood. The crimson liquid was caught, almost like it was eaten by the floating dark water droplets. Then they collapsed into the pool, hitting it like a giant rock was dropped from the hell's

heavens. A sort of maelstrom was formed. I looked inside but saw no end. It looked like a bottomless pit. I saw only dead bodies, grotesque skeletons and horns filling the void, floating around in the endless space like discarded carcasses of evil. We need to jump. You'll be back to your world safe.

I want this to be my grave. My eternal home. I felt him leave my body, almost like something from the void pulled him out of me. He was floating, still alive. Thank you for your help. He said, his final words carrying feelings of relief and regret. Two long arms extended from the blackness. and kept him in place. They ripped him into two, an explosion of bright light filling

the void for a second. It blinded me and I fainted. I woke up back on the steps of my house. A ringing sound filled my head and I could still hear the screams of those plastered people from the dark corridor. The mark on my hand was still there. The bloodied scratch still showed. I think about it even to this day. What I experienced was borderline insane, but it was only a small part of the things we don't know. I got my wish fulfilled by fulfilling a demon's wish. The things I saw, though, will haunt me forever. The subsequent fear emerging from those events is eternally embedded in me like a tattoo made of darkness. I wonder what else is out there that we can't see. Dr. Daniel Vance was a smart man, too smart for his own good, maybe.

40 years old, a lecturer in fluid dynamics with a mind made of shapes and numbers. No one knows why, but one day, on a whim, he crunched the numbers on the apocalypse and came to a troubling conclusion. He didn't exactly share what he deduced, but, given that he immediately quit his job and liquidated his many assets, it's fair to say it wasn't positive. Swept up in the wake of this tremendous upheaval was his wife. A 24-year-old PhD student who had grown infatuated. with Daniel sometime before. She loved the strange bear of a man who could just as easily

build a log cabin as he could explain the idiosyncrasies of an asteroid's orbit. Speaking with Daniel always left you with the profound impression he was right, so when he told her what he wanted to do, she agreed. Fifteen years and five children later, the Vance's were living in the distant woods just beyond my hometown. They were enigmatic, richer than the Pope, and extremely serious about their prepper lifestyle. But they were all so funny, easygoing, and incredibly compelling to speak to. Larger than life survivalists, who swept into town with bizarre requests that filled local businesses, were all shipped through the remote mountains so that the vances could build their

shelter. The advanced methods they used to keep it secret were legendary. Daniel had once spent six months earning the license necessary to drive HGVs up to his compound so that no one else would lay eyes on it. And on one occasion, when a company had refused his request for GPS tracker-free vehicles, he bought them out wholesale so that they had no choice. So when they stopped appearing in town during the pandemic, when requests for food and goods stopped and all contact was dropped, most attributed it to lockdown. They had a bunker and had spent their entire lives training to be self-sufficient in the wake of civilization's collapse.

Even Alexander, the youngest at just three, was already chopping firewood as a chore and learning what local plants were edible. Most of us just assumed that if anyone could ride out COVID without breaking a sweat, it was the Vance's. The reality turned out to be something else. When the worst came to light, we discovered that Daniel had used the pandemic as an excuse for a dry run. The family intended to spend six months in lockdown and essentially beta test their fallout

bunker. Three months in, and the sheriff received a distress call on the radio. Coordinates were provided by the hushed voice of a sobbing child that most assumed to be Alexander, even though that's never been proven. Police arrived and found the bunker still sealed. It took hours for emergency responders to cut into the door, all while efforts were made to contact the family within, but to no avail. Once inside, police were left dumbfounded. There was no one to be rescued. No bodies, no survivors. There was evidence that the door's locking mechanism had failed and trapped the vances inside

with no way out, but if so, where'd they gone? Beds and cots lay everywhere with molding yellow sheets, buckets close to hand with stains all around them. Some doors were barred, others smashed to pieces. There was even evidence of a makeshift. quarantine and in places what looked like violence. The police, usually a fantastic source of gossip, were not forthcoming until the town demanded answers and the sheriff was forced to offer only the barest of outlines.

An outbreak of a waterborne illness had struck the vances down not long after they were locked inside and unable to seek help. Rumors of contagion were overstated, fueled by the unrelated rise of COVID. Whatever contaminant had killed the Vance's, it was non-organic in nature. No need to panic. The Vance's loved ones had been notified. The bunker was going to be demolished, and we could put this terrible tragedy behind us. Of course, we still had questions, a thousand of them.

Why hadn't the family called for help? They had radios, computers, and smartphones, too. They were survivalists, not Amish. And where were they? What happened to their bodies? Why hadn't they simply left? We shouted these and more at the town meeting, but the police simply refused to comment. For most of us, the excitement lasted another week or two until we realized we weren't getting

any answers anytime soon. Besides, the pandemic was in full swing, and most of us had other things to worry about. The tragic story eventually faded until it was just one of those awful things in the town's history that we didn't talk about. I was as guilty as anyone else of just a real thing. forgetting about it. I certainly never expected to find the bunker out there in the woods, faded police tape still on the door that hung wide open with scorch marks around the lock. I stood out in the woods like someone had cut a hole right in the fabric of reality.

The darkness so deep and black it almost ached to look at. The side of it made my heart drop into my stomach. It radiated pain. Does that make sense? I think part of my little The lizard brain picked out details that wouldn't become apparent to me until I got closer, like the bloody finger streaks that stained the handle where someone had scraped furiously at the lock without success, and a tiny viewing window had been smashed with a hammer that still lay nearby. I needed only to glimpse it to imagine the family taking turns to stand there and scream into the woods desperate for rescue.

Under any other circumstances, I would have run. But I'd gone there looking for my dog, and my light revealed a few wet paw prints making their way down the dusty concrete tunnel. Half Bernese and half collie, Ripley was the sort of dog who trembles in my arms when a storm buffets the windows and needs his paws held when we brush him. I love him. I don't have much of a family, or a wife, or even many friends, but I have Ripley, and I could no more have turned around and gone home to an empty apartment where I would have to sob

my grief away, then I could flap my arms and fly. He was my dog, and I'd raised him since he was a puppy, and I wasn't going to leave him out in those woods. I went in after him. I didn't know what to expect, but I knew it wouldn't be good. Whatever the police had found, they'd not only kept most of the morbid details to themselves. They had also lied. The bunker was not demolished, or even sealed off, in fact. Looking at the occasional blue latex glove tossed a side, and the one or two broken police-issued flashlights, it seemed like the last people inside had been in a hurry to get out. Given this was where seven people had presumably died, I assumed it was someone's job

to clean it all up, but the corridor looked largely untouched. Just a few meters in, and manic riding started to cover the walls. The desperate scrawls of a lone survivor left there to be rediscovered like cave paintings. There were deliberations on how to get out, diagrams, blueprints, equations, and formula, all focused on the door and the circuits responsible for its faulty lock. I instinctively assumed they belonged to Daniel, and that he'd been the last to die. What a god-awful fate for a man to outlive his children, and yet it got worse. Slowly, the writing changed from equations and plans to a desperate scrawl, the same few phrases

repeated over and over. Five, not six, six. Six. Six doors. Six. It seemed like the kind of thing you'd find in an asylum, a psychotic rambling punctuated only by six paragraphs right at the end. Each letter was impeccably neat, and each small paragraph was topped with a beautifully drawn Christian

cross. Elliot Vance, age 15, a gifted guitarist. He liked boys, even though he thought I did not know. I loved him with everything I had. He would have made a great man. Alicia Vance, age 14. She liked to paint and to shoot. She had her mother's mean streak.

It would have served her well in the future. Elijah Vance, age eight, the smartest of us all. These were Daniel's memoirs to his family, and seeing the words lit up by the torch was a haunting insight into the overwhelming despair he'd endured. He must have realized he wouldn't get the chance to speak at his family's funeral or write their obituaries. This was his last desperate way of making sure the world might one day know them as he did, as real people.

The words marked the end of the tunnel, standing adjacent to a trapdoor in the ground. It was not open, but the tunnel came to a dead end immediately afterwards, and Ripley's prince disappeared at the hatch. I feared he might be in danger, but still I stopped. and looked at the bunker door 20 meters behind me. The once gloomy forest looked so bright, even on this cloudy day, the air dotted with rain. A part of me felt like I was leaving the whole world behind as I began to climb down the ladder. I entered a large, circular living space that was packed with furniture and little nooks and crannies.

The walls were covered with folding beds and tables, and every inch was multifunctional. A dining space could become a sitting space, which in turn might be where someone slept or even exercised. It all depended on what particular bit of furniture you unfolded, or unclipped, or unfurled. Seven people in close quarters, nowhere near enough privacy. It made sense they went with this cluttered, overlapping use of space. But it was still a large room, bigger than most studio apartments. And there were a few corridors that led deeper into the earth, telling me the bunker had

seen depths. I looked for some sign of my dog and soon found his trail, but this far from the rainy entrance, Ripley's prints were starting to fade. After barely a few meters, they petered out vaguely in the direction of a nearby door. I wanted to follow, but stopped myself from rushing onwards. It was unlikely Ripley was getting out any other way, and I'd do us no good getting myself hurt. I decided to take a look around and quickly spotted a dinner table. If I needed proof the police had not bothered with a cleanup, this was it. The plates were still out. The food wrought into a strange, blackened husk.

A child's hat lay across one place setting. The once creamy fleece turned to a sickly green and yellow. The chairs had their backs reinforced with wooden beams fitted with long grooves so that someone with the width of a nail could slide into them. And on each of the cushions, there were foul-smelling stains that looked. looked oddly like an aspirant. I touched one with a gloved hand, and the material crackled audibly. Whatever it was, similar stains were on the cutlery and plates,

and there were even handprints of it placed firmly on the tablecloth. At first I thought it was blood, but that wasn't quite right. It was too contained to be from leaking blood. On the back of one of the chairs, a stain tapered exactly where a woman's waist would be, like a near-perfect silhouette. I shivered as I remembered that Miranda Vance had always been a slim woman and wondered how she had left her imprint on the gray fabric. Using my torch, I saw that these stains repeated on the oddest of places.

Yes, there were some on the beds and blankets, and even patches of plain floor, exactly like you might expect in a room full of sick people, but why did one stain on the floor bear such a strange resemblance to a child huddled in a fetal position? why was the same stuff all over the TV remote and on the bookshelves and board games too. Everything from sofa cushions to DVD boxes to piles of dirty laundry were covered in the same dried brownish material that gave off a foul coppery miasma. I found the jigsaw particularly baffling. Someone had set up another table with four chairs, all modified with the same back support as those by the dinner table, and a jigsaw had been

laid out with four separate piles, but only one was depleted. The rest looked largely untouched, almost like someone had portioned out pieces for three other people who had absolutely no interest in going along with it. Maybe Daniel had tried to keep up morale while the family was sick. God help me, if that were true, I couldn't help but imagine the poor man sat there with his loved ones close to death, desperately trying to encourage them to click their own pieces into place while they faded in and out of consciousness. Something about that room emanated madness, and the longer I stayed down there, flickering the bright disk of light of my torch from one detail to another, the more I wanted to leave. One door had wooden beams nailed across it.

One sofa had been partially disassembled, multiple beds had been burned, and all the light bulbs had been removed and put into a box on the kitchen countertop. Looking up at the ceiling, I finally had some insight into why the police were so confident that the Vance's had not survived, despite never finding their bodies. Someone had jammed a human finger into one of the empty sockets, almost like they expected it to glow with the flick of a switch. What was it about this place that had caused the police to leave and never return? Not to even take that finger and test it for signs of illness, or even just to cover.

confirm who it belonged to, I decided it was time to hurry up and find my dog. People had died in that place, and while I'm not superstitious, I can't be the only skeptic who has done the calculations in his head and realized it costs nothing to be respectful of ghosts. That bunker was cramped, terrifying, and the air stanked so bad I started to worry I'd get sick myself. It served no one any good to linger, but I'd be damned if I'd just walk away and leave Ripley to rot down there. It's not like he could climb a ladder and get out on his own, even if I wasn't entirely sure how he'd gotten down there in the first place. Summoning what little bravery I had left, I called out and broke the silence, something

which felt like a terrible taboo in that god-awful place, like screaming in a graveyard. Ripley! I waited and hoped to hell I'd hear the pitter-patter of his paws, but for the longest of moments there was only the kind of silence that makes you wonder if someone. Someone, or something in the darkness, is holding its breath, trying to look like just another patch of nothing, biting its time until you finally turn around and show it your back. The TV came on with a burst of white noise that was so loud and so sudden I cried. I threw my arms up and nearly fell backwards onto a rolled-out sleeping bag that looked

like it had spent a week in the sewer. By the time I realized what had caused the noise, I could already hear a tinny rendition of Daniel Vance's voice. I realize the issue here. I need to emphasize just how little I understand anything that's... I frowned at the screen as I approached. It showed a greenish infrared view of the bunker with Daniel up front and the dinner table behind him.

It was grainy and hard to see, but I could clearly tell that his family were sitting in those chairs. Miranda was the first to fall ill. Looking back, it makes perfect sense. Miranda often went into storage to fetch food for cooking, and we found it behind one of the refrigerators. So that's... Ah, shit. One of the figures in the background slumped onto the table with a loud clank and sent a plate spinning off onto the ground.

Shit, shit, shit. Daniel muttered as he got up and grabbed the woman by the shoulders and sat her upright. Miranda never did like my cooking. He laughed as he fussed with something at the back of the chair. The rods are much better than tape. They fit right into the spine, and with a little modification, I can just lock them into the chairs. That way, everyone is able to join in for dinner. I'm working on something similar for a family game night.

Daniel wandered over to the camera, and with a grin, he lifted it from the tripod and scanned the dinner table. What I saw nearly made me drop my torch. His family were long dead. faces, missing noses, lips that had receded to reveal awful grins. They were corpses plain as day, even when viewed through such a low-resolution image. The only thing that made them seem remotely alive was the way their eyes still reflected the infrared back so that they glowed in the dark. And yet Daniel seemed oblivious to it all. He tousled Elliot's hair, kissed his wife on the cheek,

and ran a hand across one young girl's shoulder. He even picked the young girl's. He even picked the young young Alexander up from his chair, and I assume he coddled him. I don't know for sure because I looked away, unwilling to see the poor boy up close. Eyes averted from the screen. I couldn't help but pan my torch across to that same dinner table and shiver as I finally realized what all those stains were. Not quite blood, but close. Liquefying flesh.

Left alone for months, Daniel had not put his family's bodies to rest. Instead, he had moved them around from place to place and puppeted them, living life as if nothing had really changed. Looking at where those stains had settled, I saw a clear pattern emerge. He had put them to bed. He had set dinner. He had propped them up to watch TV or gave them their favorite book. They even sat there as lifeless husks while Daniel waited for them to complete a jigsaw.

The idea horrified me to my core. Back to work. It's obviously not part of the original designs. No room on the other side, not on the blueprints. Elliot didn't believe me. And why would he? I made every inch of this place, but I did not install that door in storage on the bottom level. I checked the cameras and some of the photos I took during the build and the wall is just blank.

But the door's there now, and it must lead somewhere. I don't know when or why it opens, but it does. and the next time I'll be ready because I have to know what's on the other side and why it did this to us alone down there often all asleep at once anything could have slid our throats and been done with it

but it didn't it took its time and I have to know why it took our radios and our computers and phones one by one none of us noticing until it was far too late I kept telling the kids they needed to take better care of their things, and even as they complained, I just assumed the phones were lying behind

some shelf. Where else could they go in a locked bunker? But it wasn't the children at all. Looking back, there are so many signs. Who kept taking away the lights? Who kept draining the batteries in our flashlights? How long did we live with it before we finally realized we weren't alone? Was it here every step of the way? A door out of nothing that leads nowhere. At least most of the same. At least most of the time, because I know for a fact it does not always open to a blank wall. There is something behind it. I can hear it shuffling around in there, wet breath rattling in its lungs. A horrible sound I hear roaming these walls when it thinks I'm asleep.

I listened to Daniel, fascinating by this strangely compelling rant when movement caught my eye, an infrared camera running in the dark, its image a roiling mess of uniform noise. What was it I'd seen? I paused the tape and rewound, squinting. I saw two pinpricks of light in the darkness just over Daniel's shoulder. Slowly, the image resolved itself in my mind. I knew what I was seeing, and it turned my blood to ice. Miranda Vance had turned her head, and her lifeless eyes glowed as she fixed them on the back

of Daniel's head. Not even any point in leaving at this stage. I'm no doctor, but that door is giving off enough radiation. to, well, kill a family of seven. If none of us had touched it, being in the same room, is too risky, but not lethal. But given how sick we've become, it's pretty obvious our curiosity got the better of us. One by one, we all got too close. Or maybe not.

Maybe that thing on the other side came through and did this. I don't even know. Wait, what was that? Daniel turned and the camera stopped recording. The image it froze on was of a lone man, bright as a star in the camera's lens, facing off against unknowable darkness, broken only by six pairs of white, glowing eyes. I became painfully aware of my position relative to the table, and I had the painful premonition that if I turned, those chairs would not be empty.

I would see the vances, all of them. Daniel is well, waiting for me. Heads turned, bodies left to rot for years in the dark. Behind me, something shifted. It breathed, loud, quick, and I knew what it was. I knew. It came at me so fast that when I felt something hot and wet touch my hand, I screamed, only for the presence to suddenly recoil.

But then without hesitation, it leapt at me and bore me against the ground. I wept as Ripley licked my face. She was shivering and, worst of all, sighed. which was not normal. He was not a quiet dog, not when greeting me and not when excited like he was now, but whatever he'd seen down here, he clung to me and dug his paws into my shoulders like he wanted to be cradled over the shoulder. It was something that he had been too big to do for years.

Oh, you idiot! I cooed in a soft whisper, and even in the dark I could feel his tail wagging. Joking aside, I felt nothing but relief at finding him. Let's get the hell out of here." I picked him up, straining a little under the weight, but refusing to give in to tired muscles and made for the ladder. It wasn't easy climbing the three or four rungs to the hatch, but I managed and gave the hatch a shove.

First one hand, then two, and again and again with everything I had, but the hatch still refused to budge. I started pounding at it with my fists, but all I achieved was a sore wrist. The hatch had jammed when somehow the handle had been snapped clean off. Now I'd need a pair of pliers or something to cut through the metal bar locking it shut. My fingers couldn't move it, nor could I brute force the hatch open. The metal bar was an inch thick, and at the very least, I'd need some tools to get at it from this side. Well, at least it's fixable, I thought, as I climbed back down and caught my breath.

On one wall, I noticed a simple diagram. of the bunker made in chalk. It had three floors. The bottom was storage. Daniel had mentioned that before, and I noticed that he had drawn through it with a large red X, and the top floor was labeled quarters, where I stood now. But the middle floor was labeled workshops, and it was there I realized I'd find what I needed. There was one door that opened onto a concrete stairwell, and, standing at the top, I shone

my light down the spiraling guardrails, unsure of what I hoped. hoped to see. There were only harsh shadows in the sense of something foul rising up on the air. A smell that tickled my throat and burned a little in my lungs. Had the police even gone down this far? Had they seen what I'd seen on that TV and just left? Somehow I thought it was unlikely that had been enough to send the entire sheriff's department running.

So was it something else that had done it? Something that had been enough to...