APOKALYPSIS
by William Pauley III
This letter is to be read by my brothers and sisters in residence at The Church of Death and Nothingness. Beware outsiders, who may mistakenly come in contact with these words, for you will surely be driven mad by the visions described herein. This is not to be taken lightly. Proceed at your own risk, and may God have mercy on your soul:
My name is John Astronaut.
I am an Earthling stranded on the planet we call Venus, second from the sun. I write to you not in hopes of rescue [as death is imminent and could occur even before I finish this letter], but instead to issue a warning. Let me preface by saying there is no hope for my survival. Do not feel grief over my death, of which will surely have occurred by the time you read this letter, for there is nothing that can be done. I’ve lived a full life, and besides that, even if my only recognized accomplishment proves to be issuing this warning, it will have been a life with purpose.
I suppose I should also mention that in order to keep this letter relevant to the warning, I shall abstain from interpreting these visions, as my personal beliefs and opinions are irrelevant, and the less you know about me the better.
The following visions may, at times, feel overwhelming to dissect, but there is true danger in these words. It is my hope that The Church of Death and Nothingness will organize these revelations into a formal text, the sole purpose being to warn those in the universe at large of impending doom, and what can be done to prepare for it, the latter depending more on the church than me. The visions, as they stand here in this informal letter, are far too raw and brutal for public consumption. Perhaps the insight of the church and your combined knowledge of seraphic and spiritual [otherworldly] things will help to highlight any hope found inside these disparaging prophecies. Love and peace to you all. Until my death, my every prayer is with you.
It must be said that I have no recollection of how I came to be on this planet. I simply awoke one Venusian morning and I was here, in the very same spot in which I am sitting now, composing this letter. Even the ship I seemingly came in on has mysteriously vanished, as if it was never here at all. Perhaps equally as strange is that I do not show the typical symptoms of an amnesiac. I still remember everything from my life on Earth, as well as the missions I trained for and was in the middle of working on when I inexplicably ended up here, on this hot, sulfuric planet. I simply fell asleep in my bunk on the space station and woke up here, on a planet with an ecosystem unfit for human life [yet somehow I survive, protected only by this standard-issue spacesuit]. I only mention these personal details because you may find this information relevant in some way. It certainly is curious.
In the manner of which I awoke was also peculiar [an understatement], as not only was I mysteriously thrown into this strange, uninhabited world, but I also found myself bound inside a tight cocoon. I fell asleep on a cot in the International Space Station and when I awoke I was an insect, of sorts, in mid-metamorphosis and gasping here on this bubbling, boiling planet. In a panic, I tore the flesh of the cocoon away from my body, including a spongy hose attached at the top of my helmet [an umbilical cord?], and this is when I discovered I was wearing my space suit. I drifted slowly to the surface and looked back to examine the womb from which I had just been birthed, surprised to discover there was a countless amount of hanging cocoons surrounding my own, all plump and pregnant with other astronauts. Immediately I wondered what it was we were metamorphosing into, and for a brief moment was even disappointed for having not brought myself to term. At the time of penning this letter, I still do not know the answer to this mystery, but I’m hoping I survive long enough to bear witness to the great hatching. If I do, I suppose it will serve as a sort of grand finale, the climax of not only this strange pilgrimage, but also to my life as a whole. This is, unfortunately, all I have to look forward to now, besides death [more on this later].
Instead of climbing up to get a closer look at the cocoons, my attention became focused on the dark spaces that surrounded me, specifically a cave that seemed to be emitting some sort of faint light somewhere deep inside it. I followed in the direction of the light, climbing up a steep incline of hot rocks and ash, until the passageway became impossibly narrow, barely wide enough for my body to move through. The closer I got, the more apparent it became that this cave was not a cave at all, but a tunnel, and one that seemed to have been burrowed by something living and much larger than an insect, like a literal wormhole. At the end of the tunnel, I pulled myself up and out, planting my feet firmly on the Venusian terrain. It was at this moment when I initially suspected I was treading the love god’s planet, as the landscape and atmospheric conditions matched it precisely. Scanning the horizon, I could see several large volcanoes, thinly veiled by poisonous clouds, richly soaked in sulfuric acid. The temperature on the surface had to have been close to a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, but for some unknown reason I was able to not only bear it, but also feel fairly comfortable while walking around in it. This is also the case with the atmosphere, which should have poisoned my body and killed me as I slept, but strangely did not.
If I had to guess my exact location, I would say Maxwell Montes, the highest peak. Of course, this guess could be, and likely is, totally wrong. I could only see so far with the naked eye, and from my small viewpoint, I was certainly on the highest peak, though the planet is vast and it would be impossible to know for sure without the proper equipment.
I’m wasting time.
At my feet rot a dead pale horse, but unlike those found on Earth. I’d never seen such a creature in all my life, so it seemed natural to associate it with a beast I was more familiar with. This “equine,” however, sported several insect-like features, such as multiple eyes [seven in total, all gathered in a bunch in the middle-front of the skull], thin, naturally-armored legs, and two sets of large, spindly wings that were each easily twice as long as the beast’s body, which was roughly the same size as mature horses found on Earth. Tucked inside its maw looked to be some sort of golden crown, one specifically crafted to fit the head of a human king. Pushed through its heart were seven broadswords, in impeccable shape, as if they were hammered out only moments before having been shoved into the animal. The word, “UNLESS,” was written in blood on its white coat, with no other indicator as to what the word was referring to specifically. Against my better judgment, I bent down to remove one of the swords, just to examine it closer, and to my horror the beast whinnied and fluttered its wings. Turns out it was not dead, but dying. Naturally, my body backed away in panic and I lost my footing, which sent me tumbling down the mountain in a painful free-fall. The only thing waiting for me at the bottom besides the typical scree was a lake of fire. Magma. Boiling and rolling along the surface.
But my journey didn’t stop there.
Instead, things got weird.
I sank quickly into the sea of magma, but remained unscorched. Even my space suit was unaffected. What I found most odd about this wasn’t so much that this plunge was not painful, but that the slip down the hill was. As my journey furthered, it became increasingly difficult to ascertain if the inconsistencies of both the environment and the reactions of my own body were random or designed, as existence now felt more like a dream than reality, or what I had always perceived to be reality. At that particular moment, my reality was that I was sinking, completely entombed by rolling waves of magma, yet my body remained calm. I did not fight against the current or even bother to swim with it, instead I sank motionless and let the warm waves rush over me and pull me under.
Yes, I was being pulled. Something deep below had a hold of me and was sucking me in. I wouldn’t discover until nearly a half hour or so later, after I had already fallen through, that I was trapped in a vortex created by a drain at the bottom of the lake. I was spat out, violently thrown into darkness, and free-falling with no visible end in sight.
Then came the chanting, angelic yet haunting. Voices surrounded me. The lyrics were of another language, one unlike any I’d ever heard on Earth, yet I still found myself comforted. Despite my inability to understand the true meaning of the song, I was mesmerized by the performance, the sheer power of it. Or maybe the comfort was deep-rooted. I suppose it could have come as a result of some suppressed memory from childhood [the sounds of a church choir or the voice of my own mother lulling me to sleep] or maybe even just relief that the alien species I was about to encounter was at least civilized. Surely a civilized nation was capable of showing pity, and pity may have been my only chance at survival. I thought about how the people of Earth would react to an extraterrestrial species at first contact. I hoped my encounter would be more embracing, to say the least.
Accompanying the angelic tune was a cacophony of tortured voices, shouting terrible things in a language I recognized, the same language in which this letter is written. The voices shouted many things, too much to list here [and quite pointless], but the one phrase that seemed to be repeated more than anything else was: “Please, oh Lord, forget me.” Yes, I am positive they were saying “forget” and not “forgive,” although I admit at first I suspected they were saying the latter. It had been engrained in my mind, all those years spent in Sunday school, hearing those words over and over again: forgive forgive forgive, oh lord! Please forgive! It wasn’t until the mouths from which the voices spilled out from became visible to me that I stood corrected. The word they were saying was “forget,” they wanted, more than anything it seemed, to be forgotten.
Seconds later I hit a rock platform, landing hard, but again, unharmed, and when I pulled myself to my feet I found I was standing amongst them, the screaming damned. These crying creatures were humans, all of them, from what I could tell, and ostensibly unaware of their own nakedness. They did not take notice of me, nor did the seven figures hovering above them, seemingly the gods in which their pleads were directed. I have no evidence that these creatures were gods, though I have my suspicions. The hovering beasts certainly were not human, as they were more insect in appearance, specifically that of a locust. Unlike a locust, however, these brutes were easily ten times the average size of man, maybe even bigger [it was difficult to assess their exact size from my location, as they floated quite high above the crowd I had fallen into]. With their spindly arms, they each reached into a pit of fire [curiously forming in mid-air, directly in the middle of the god swarm, above our heads] and removed a torch from within. They took turns tossing the torches into the darkness below us [what I would soon learn was a true bottomless pit], and for each torch echoed a thunderous crack, as if the flames somehow gave birth to lightning bolts, igniting a storm beneath our stone platform. The vibrations made me nauseous [a welcome sensation, as I was happy to be feeling anything at all in those moments].
This may not be of importance to you, the clergymen of the Church of Death and Nothingness, but I feel I should mention it just in case. Somewhere around this point I tried to speak. I wasn’t sure what it was I wanted to say, if I had anything to say at all, but what I do know is that what came out of my mouth was not birthed from me. I mean, technically, yes, I spoke the words, but they were not the words I meant to speak. Instead, the words were complete nonsense. I was attempting to communicate in some unknown [at least to me] language. If you find this important in your assessment of my personal apocalypse, then you will be equally interested in the words I spoke. Somehow I’ve remembered them, although you’ll have to forgive me if the spelling is off: “Ashok ardebit manus hominum. Neptuno, blue regenerationis ignis.”
A series of strange events then followed. In no particular order, this is everything I remember: smoke rising all around us, the locusts all at once grew fangs, like lion’s teeth, and when they fluttered their wings it sounded like the marching of a million horses, a swarm of hornets, each roughly the size of man, gathered around the locusts and together they parted the swarm, revealing an empty golden throne, blood rained from the darkness above, covering the crowd and me along with it [at least I was protected by my spacesuit, they had nothing, no choice but to bathe inside it, to let it soak into their skin], the crowd continued to shout, with even more pain now, “Forget, oh please, forget me, Lord. Forget! I beg of thee!” they cried, their voices strained and starting to leave them, palm branches mysteriously appeared in their hands and they shook them angrily at the empty throne, the blood rain stopped and suddenly white robes appeared in stacks at our feet, every naked body became clothed and inside the pocket of these robes hid a secret, each and every one contained a tiny pill, a pink triangle with a single blue dot at its center, looking like the mighty eye of providence, and all of them removed and ingested this pill at once, as if rehearsed, as if they all knew what it was meant for and what effect it would have on them, blind faith, I suppose, some of them disintegrated right before my eyes, many of them, wasted away to nothing, a bubbling mess of gore and nothing else, others remained, branded now with an ‘X’ on their foreheads, the insects came down to eat the remains of the fallen, the bubbling pink piles of gore, they fought over the scraps like animals, making me rethink their rank, their status, could these beasts truly be gods? Not important, smoke overwhelmed us, choked us out, a rumble came from down within the bottomless pit, the world shook, things were falling in on itself, the tension between the insects and the humans grew in droves, the humans retreated, scampering off into the darkness, hiding in caves or something else beyond sight, except for me, poor stupid hopeless me, for some reason I remained stuck in my place on the stone platform, spinning my head in all directions, trying to keep an eye on each and every creature in the swarm as they buzzed around me…
A woman appeared. She was not one of the crowd, of the cowards who sank into darkness to hide from the god swarm, instead she seemingly materialized right before my eyes. Her appearance was quite angelic: blonde hair, blue eyes, soft, pale skin, draped in a heavy white tunic, carrying an oversized, ancient book in her tiny, perfect hands. However I doubted she was a true angel, as the evidence presented to me would have it seem if she belonged to the kingdom of god, then she would surely have taken on the form of an insect, a cockroach angel, a beetle cherub, a praying ‘glory be thy name’ mantis, or something similar. She stepped out of a body of water [I somehow hadn’t notice existed before], and with one foot on the land and one in the water, she began to tear pages, one by one, from the book and stuffed them into my mouth [like a dream, my space helmet vanished, allowing her to do this].
The following is a report of visions that came to me as each page was pushed into my maw:
Page One — a plane crash on the lunar surface [the Earth moon and home of The Church of Death and Nothingness]
Page Two — men and women showing teeth to a purple television
Page Three — a pod of mermaids stripped of their skin and hanged by their hair till death
Page Four — a legion of demons passing through a portal
Page Five — an electric man at the helm of a giant robot
Page Six — a television man and the man who made him
Page Seven — a junky bargaining with the devil
Page Eight — hearing the language of insects and an interpretation of their song
Page Nine — a man with a cue ball for an eye
Page Ten — a woman crucified at the edge of the universe
I swallowed every page, and as I did, the visions left me. The woman vanished, as if she was never there at all, and my space helmet returned. To my horror, when I opened my eyes, instead of seeing her warm angelic face there before me, I was greeted by the repugnant stare of a terrible beast. One of the buzzing hornets had crawled on top of me, its body just bigger than my own, and as if in rhythm with the song of the insect choir, it thrusted its stinger inside me, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven times. Each time, the stinger pierced completely through my body. Exit wounds pocked my then trembling back. I was immediately paralyzed and fell into a deep sleep.
When I awoke, I found myself again inside the cave of cocoons, thinking [thankfully] it was all a dream, but I was almost immediately proven wrong. This was no dream. The insect, the hornet that thrusted itself deep within me, had carried me here, its nest, to give birth to its young. As I took comfort in realizing the poisons running through me had started to wear off and I was finally able to move my body again, the horrific truth of what had just happened to me suddenly revealed itself in one terrible wallop. Examining my torso, I saw seven hornet larvae eating away at the gore of my exposed entrails. The creature had laid eggs inside of me.
What I initially took to be the beginning of the end for me, I quickly found in all the horror a single shred of hope. Turns out I could communicate with the younglings as they devoured my insides, and one of them took a liking to me. This is not to say any of them felt pity for me, because they were animals after all, and hunger is stronger than pity. However, I discovered as they grew, the one who favored me [Moriah, I later named it] could be controlled, or at least it would obey my every request [other than to stop feeding, of course]. We communicated in an odd way, somewhat telepathically, speaking to one another strictly through touch. We could communicate complicated messages to each other via this method, and should she follow through with my final request, you will have met her yourselves, there at The Church of Death and Nothingness, for she has acted as a carrier pigeon of sorts, delivering this letter, written in my own blood, on the plucked translucent wings of her brothers and sisters.
Please, treat her kindly.
So now I wait for death. This is not written in a morose way, nor meant to elicit some sort of pity or emotion from you, the reader of this letter, not at all. Death is more than welcome. I anxiously await it.
I’ll leave you now with one final visual: the astronauts in cocoons hovering above me have started to hatch, and oh, what a terrible sight.
Do not let this be your fate.
Until death, my prayers are with you,
JOHN ASTRONAUT
Apokalypsis
© William Pauley III, 2016
All rights reserved.
Storytime: "APOKALYPSIS"