Friday, March 23, 2012

Epilogue



The Blessed One 



“Mary,” said the Arbiter, “At last we meet. I have written so much about you, you could say I am your greatest fan. I merely wanted to leave you with a few parting words as a token of my appreciation for your work.

“Are you flushed with the greater victory of driving back Azathoth, though pained by the lesser defeats? You still pant with exertion and pain. You bite your lip and shudder in horror at the cost and the memories that will never leave you, but do you believe you have saved this world and in so doing have saved other worlds, other universes? That is incorrect.

Your sight, even enhanced by the being that infests you, is as blindness to the Gods. Beyond it was an infinity of pain and destruction. And this existence is the last survivor. The rest is death in the bowels of Azathoth. And you may think this story is over since you have won your trivial victory today in this last remaining speck of existence, but this is not the end. No story ever ends until the end.

“Know now that your long lasting luck was no coincidence, but that it truly was an act of God. Know now the truth, Pantheon, carrier of the Gods’ seed. In you they dwell. The Eldest of Gods shall soon break His banishment from this realm. Even now He gestates within you, making the God inside you one with It. Soon It shall devour this last sliver of light from the cosmos.

I bear you these good tidings, for I am the true Holy Spirit, the true voice of God. Blessed art thou among women. Blessed art thou, flesh in which the Gods have bred and fed. Thus have I written. Thus shall it be. Rejoice as you hear the mad piping of the idiot babe from your bloating womb before it bursts.”

She screamed and screamed at the sight of reality at last lay bare, and though she screamed that it would not be, her heart knew that she could not die while the seed of destruction swam in her, it would not let her.

*** 

Mary was alone. Her friends were all gone. They set the seals, but the darkness in the sky merely laughed, or roared, or was it something else, something thoughtless like an infant’s indifferent crushing of ants? It reached down with its infinite fingers, and smeared them out of existence in a single instant. And all around was screaming, screaming, even in the quiet, but she had survived… And… The Key did not take her to a new world. Just the ruined town of Arkham here. Her friends all gone. And she was left behind.

She was dirty… Dirty inside… Dirty all over. But dirtiest inside… It had taken her… To the place of no light...  Again and again and again and again and… She had… She had had to do it! The thing inside her could not live.

But… When the abortionist reached for it… It reached back... It pulled him in, bleeding and screaming.   She tried… She tried more drastic means, but she did not drown, or choke, although her neck was broken, or bleed to death. The thing inside her stirred.  But she would destroy it. Even if it were the one true God, she would destroy it.


Nine Months Later


The alley was dark. But he’d heard a woman’s moaning in it, and despite his fear went to help. What he saw there shattered his mind.

An obscenely pregnant nun blindly fumbled her bloody skinless nailless hands across the wall in an endless scrawl. “Kill me. Kill me. Kill me...” desperately smeared as far as his eye could see. Her face was gone, blown out by a shotgun blast, and blood incessantly flowed from the wound in her head. Brain matter and fragmented teeth stuck inside the gaping hole. She moaned and daubed her hands inside her skull, wetting them with her blood to paint the message she could no longer see over and over.

Inside her distended belly, he heard strange noises, and from beneath her robes dark slithering ropes dripped out, slick with slime and swelling every second. They seemed to twist around in impossible shapes, as if they somehow sought to consume themselves. But they desired to feed on other things first.

The madman fled. He knew there was no escape, he knew he could not outrun his doom. But he fled. Behind him he heard screaming. But it was not his own. No. Not his own.


































































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