Storytime: "HYPNAGOGIA"

DOOM FICTION Podcast

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-14:51

Storytime: "HYPNAGOGIA"

Two bumbling idiots accidentally kill God after a simple vacuuming gig goes horribly wrong.

William Pauley III

Mar 17, 2025

Transcript

HYPNAGOGIA
by William Pauley III

There’s radiation in the walls of our apartment building, at least that’s what Buzz tells me. Buzz has been around these parts since the sixties, longer than I’ve even been alive. He lives in a section of the building called “The Cliff.” He says everyone calls it that because there have been so many murders and suicides on his floor over the years. The Cliff, like the end...the edge, and all the people who have gone over. Really there’ve been murders and suicides all up and down this building, just The Cliff’s are more memorable, I guess. Someone blows themselves or someone else away every couple of weeks here. It’s just that kind of place. That’s why Buzz swears there’s radiation in the walls, making everyone crazy.

Our building sits in a part of town where there aren’t even streetlights. The people who live in the buildings surrounding us, they pretend we don’t exist. Out of sight out of mind. We’re scum to them, the armpit of town, surrounded by darkness. That’s fine with us. We know our role and play the part just fine. The people on the outside call us “the trolls of Eighth Block,” Eighth Block being the section of town we live in. But see, that’s where they’re wrong. We’re not trolls by any definition of the word, no sir. See, people like us, the people of Eighth Block Tower, we don’t exist in the same sense that everyone outside exists. We live by our own code, our own laws, and even have our own God [Sheeak, our God, has skin the color of Neptune. She feasts on dark matter. Dark matter is abundant in our universe, but not so much here on Earth. That’s where Buzz and I come in. We’re the ones that feed her, but I’ll get to that in a minute].

The people here rarely ever leave the building, even just to get fresh air, or exercise, or a change of scenery, nothing. A lot of ‘em just sit on their couches and watch the color bars illuminating from their TV screens, all slack-jawed and comfy, or listen to the faint low hum that projects from the television speakers. The hum pleases us, calms us. Can’t say what it is, but something about it is just so soothing. Like a baby listening to his mother’s heartbeat, it lulls us. On any given day, and at any given time of the day, anyone could walk into these apartments here and I guaran-damn-tee a television set is on, humming. People here in Eighth Block don’t have jobs in the same sense that outsiders have jobs neither. All the jobs around here are more like chores than anything. We’ve all got something to do around here, something to pull our own weight. Charlie is usually the one that goes out and gets the mail, Sansa goes and gets the booze and chips [seems like that’s all anyone ever eats around here, potato chips], and Samantha makes sure the shit pipes don’t back up. Charlie and Sansa are the only two in the building who actually leave on a regular basis. I heard when they go out, people are afraid of them. The outsiders know a resident of Eighth Block without even having to hear them speak. There’s a certain glow we all have that gives it away. Buzz says the glow comes from the radiation in the walls. Buzz is always taking about the radiation in the walls.

Eighth Block has been around close to a full century now. Ever since the day it was built it’s been a home for the weird, the odd, and the mutated. Buzz swears that the Madsen family, who originally lived here in one of the apartments on The Cliff many, many years ago, weren’t mutants when they first moved in. He says the radiation got ‘em. Everyone on the outside says us mutants have all been banished, forced to live within the walls of this tower, but honestly, I don’t pay them no mind. I don’t, because nobody from the outside ever moves into the apartments here in Eighth Block. No one from the outside ever comes in, and except for a handful of us running errands, we never really leave the building neither. So how is it we’ve been banished here? This isn’t a prison cell, it’s our home. Our families have all been here for several generations now. I try not to get too worked up when I hear someone accusing me of being a mutant. If being a mutant is a crime, then I am guilty as sin. If Eighth Block is my punishment, then I hope I rot in here. I love it. There’s nothing out there on the outside but fuck, and I don’t need fuck [at least not in this sense of the word]. I got everything I need right here in this building. Buzz and I only leave when we go “fishing,” and even then, we don’t actually leave.

Once a week Buzz and I stand on the rooftop of Eighth Block Tower, have us a few beers, and fire up the shop vac. We screw all the hose extension accessories to each other and take turns holding the end of the hose as far as we can up into the night sky. We hold it up for hours on end some nights, waiting for the vac bag to fill up with dark matter. Sometimes it only takes us forty-five minutes or so to get a full bag, but most nights it takes hours. We call this process “fishing,” not because it’s anything like fishing really, but just because we have to call it something and “fishing” just sort of works. Buzz says we call it fishing because our brains are warped from the radiation in the walls. We don’t know any better.

When we’ve filled the vac bag full of dark matter, we finish what’s left of our beers and head back into the building. Usually I’m the one that has to lug around the vac, down the long hallways and the many sets of staircases that lead to Sheeak’s room. Buzz always offers to help, but also reminds me that his arms are too mutated from the radiation in the walls to really be of any use. Which is true. Buzz’s arms look just like tree branches, but leafless, of course. He can’t bend his elbows and his fingers are long and twiggy.

Once we get down to Sheeak’s room to feed her, we always find her lying on the floor, deflating, close to death. Buzz and I attach the hose of the shop vac to her intake valve and throw the machine into reverse, blowin’ all the dark matter out of the bag and into her body. She begins to plump up again. Once she’s eaten all she can handle. Buzz and I toss the vac aside, crawl on top of her, and sleep the rest of the night away, cuddled on top of our God. Buzz says that Sheeak isn’t really a God, just an inflatable mattress. He says we only think she’s a God because of all the radiation in the walls. When he says stuff like that I secretly pray to Sheeak, begging her not to annihilate him as we sleep. I try explaining to her that Buzz is a little crazy because of all the radiation in the walls. I’m not sure that she hears my prayers, but so far she hasn’t annihilated anyone, so that has to mean something.

One time, Buzz and I were fishing on the roof, got too drunk, and accidentally woke up God from His deep slumber. Not our God, Sheeak, but the God. The creator of the universe. See, I’d warned Buzz about they way he was holding the shop vac hose that he wasn’t going to get any dark matter at the angle he had it pointed. Buzz grew cross and started complaining about how much holding the hose was hurting his shoulders, as if his shoulders were mutated too. I called him out on it. He said that if he had elbows then it would help alleviate some of the stress put on his shoulders. Always full of excuses. If it isn’t the radiation getting him down, it’s his mutation, and his mutation was caused by the radiation, and he always tells me, reminds me, pounds it into my head that it is all but his fault. Buzz is a great guy and all, but sometimes I’m not in the mood to hear him complain. Plus I was drinking a lot that night, so that probably added to my frustration a bit too.

Anyway, so there Buzz was, holding the shop vac like a crazy sunuvabitch, pointing it every which way but up.

I started yelling at him, he yelled back, then next thing we knew, the hose sucked up a big chunk of something, I think it may have been a big fat bird, like a pigeon or something. It got stuck about halfway down the hose, causing the vac bag to fill up with air and nearly explode all over the place. Buzz started screaming, actually full-on screaming, thinking the dark matter was going to escape the vac bag and swallow us whole. I was half-sure that the vac bag didn’t have any dark matter in it just yet, cause of the dumbass way he insisted on holding the hose, but just to be sure, I hurriedly threw the vac into reverse and the bird shot out the hose like a bullet from a gun.

That’s when we heard it. The voice of God, speaking to us from the heavens above. That goddamn bird shot straight through the sky and plowed its way through the windows of Heaven, ruining everything for us down here on Earth, at least that’s what I was thinking at the time. To make matters worse, I then began to think of all the dark matter we had harvested from the night sky in order to feed a God of our own, in a Heaven of our own, here in Eighth Block Tower. What if the dark matter was really grey matter? God’s grey matter. I began to panic, thinking of a time when Sansa from apartment 1B showed me a picture of the universe and compared it to a picture of a brain cell. The two were nearly identical. She was trying to convince me that there was a real God out there, outside our world, not referring to the deflating blue one that lived down the hall. She thinks that not only is there a God, but all of us, the entire universe, is living inside Him, His mind. She said that we don’t exist in the way we think we exist and that God doesn’t exist in the way we think He exists. At the time it all seemed too confusing for me, and I left the conversation feeling bummed that I couldn’t understand something a girl could understand. At the time I just wrote it off to the radiation in the walls, but now, after the bird shot from the hose straight through brains of God, I began to understand all the information Sansa tried to teach me so long ago. If the universe’s dark matter was really God’s grey matter, then that means that Buzz and I have been secretly stealing the brains of the Almighty, as He was sleeping, and feeding it to our air mattress for nearly a decade now. That made me feel horrible.

God grumbled immediately after we inadvertently shot him with a pigeon, and when He finally spoke He said, ”Goddamn it, you two fucks! I was trying to sleep...when you guys...shot a bird...at my head! What the fuck’s that about, man?” [I’m paraphrasing here. I don’t remember exactly how He said it, but this is pretty close, I think]. Buzz and I nearly shit ourselves, we were so scared. I began to sip at my beer faster now, thinking it was probably going to be the last one I’d ever drink.

That’s when He struck me down.

God pulled out a bolt of lightning from His quiver and shot it down to Earth, landing right here on the roof of Eighth Block Tower, or more specifically, right on me. Electricity surged throughout my body. My muscles stiffened and engorged with blood, and once I had absorbed all the electricity, all of God’s wrath, I collapsed. Buzz, thinking I was dead, pulled out two AK-47’s [he carried these guns everywhere he went] and hurled a barrage of bullets into the night sky in hopes that it would be enough to kill the Giant Bastard. Dead pigeons began falling from the sky in ridiculous numbers, smacking against the roof of our building, surrounding us, and even falling and filling the streets below us.

Buzz tells me that once he finally ran out of ammunition, the war was over. God was either dead or unconscious again. Well, he says that now, but immediately after I regained consciousness he told me that we hadn’t woken up God at all, that we had actually shot the pigeon through the window of an apartment in the tower across the street, and the voice we heard belonged to an angry tenant. Buzz said we only thought it was God because of the radiation in the walls. He says it’s poisoned us. Made us to where we can’t think right anymore. When we talk about that night though now, he doesn’t remember it the way he originally told me when I came to. He swears up and down that it was God that brought the hammer down on us and has told everyone in the tower that he killed God, and that He was evil, and that we should all thank him for his heroics and his bravery. Buzz says we owe him our lives. I think there must be more radiation in the walls of his apartment than the rest of the building. He may or may not have killed somebody that night. We may never know for sure.

Whatever, however it happened, life would eventually resume, exactly as we had always lived it. Lucky for me, God [if it was God] didn’t deliver the final blow that night, but I knew sometime soon He’d catch up to me, and my number would be up. I never stop thinking about it, even today. One day God is going to get His revenge on me, and when God gets revenge, He fucking cleans house. I won’t have a chance.

Until then, Buzz and I choose to live our lives in the comfort of our home, here in the Eighth Block Tower, surrounded by weirdos and freakaziods, just like us, who choose to live life the way we want to live it: sleeping on our God and eating all the rotisserie pigeon we can stand. The radiation from the walls continues to soak into our skin, and we glow happily and beautifully until the moment we all step down into our graves.