The Herald pt. 3
Part 3: The Birth in The Death
My hands and lips quivered in exhausted anticipation. "I'll be made whole soon, made beautiful and perfect." That would indeed happen, but I, in my feverish delirium, had forgotten the cost of my salvation.
The crater still pulsed at a slow rate with the workings of a pregnant corpse. Erin was dead—I had killed him. He had been my real savior. Years of practice, preparation, protection, and providence had placed him in my life to save me from the swarm, then the tomb, and then the pain, but I did not even once consider his role in my preservation. He had given and given and given; I took, only took from him and offered nothing but a mere thanks back. I was the leech, the cretin, the parasitic insect. He was an angel among men, and I had killed him.
Cold night dew drops sparkled in sharply cold droplets that titillated my newly relieved nerves. Cool, clean dew adorned the grass that my feet, hands, and forehead now lay upon as my wrenching sobs shook my chest. "I'm sorry!" I bellowed between titanic waves of grief. "I'm so sorry!" But none of that mattered now. I had promised and been promised something in return—salvific beauty. Deliverance from my mortal calamity. My cratered flesh still glistened in the dying moonlight.
"Always darkest before the dawn," my father once said, and those words stuck with me. Now, however, I knew that no good, new sun would rise. The dread of my new master had eaten the hope of days free from cosmic catastrophe. I knew in my heart of hearts who this Bright One was and what he was to bring. His goodness only translated to predatory jealousy in my mind. I could see through it now, but there was nothing I could do to stop myself from compliance. I had tried running, fighting, and giving up, but nothing but worship would suffice.
The sun began to rise, and the warm light did not give any calming rays, nor did the soft breeze and thermal rise of wind blow away a single shred of the guilt and horror I now felt as if an ox yoke laid heavy on my neck.
I got up, returned to my house, and slept. I did not even make it upstairs; I just collapsed on the floor next to my couch, crying as the new light displayed my rancid flesh. Loose orifices, newly drained of their contents, pulsed with odd pressure. My skin was still covered in the vile film of oil-slick pus, but the warmth and pressure felt as a heavy blanket laid over me, and I passed into a dreamless sleep.
When I woke, I showered. I threw away my clothes the trash bin outside, as the stench was too strong to remove. The pus-drenched fabric grasped for the ground heavily with each step as I walked to its final resting place. I thought the shower would have hurt my open wounds, but they felt more similar to new features of my skin, and the scalding water warmed me with a pleasurable, purifying heat. The jagged punctures held little pockets of steaming water that felt as fire dwelling in my flesh, growing fat off the skin-deep ichor.
With the oily anointment gone, I noticed my empty Oxy bottle left lazily in the back corner of my bathroom countertop. Silently, it judged me for my impurity and capitulation.
I went downstairs and made some coffee. My abdomen still ached from the heaving of my exorcism the night prior, and I was overcome by a level of fatigue I have never imagined acceptable to human endurance. My coffee was far too hot when I drank it, but with the fresh memory of incapacitating suffering, the near-boiling liquid ran down my gullet with surprising and almost unnoticed ease. "Besides," I reasoned, "I deserve the pain for what I've done. For what I chose to become." My mouth began to feel scorched by the black liquid. I drank more.
I sat on my dining room chair, knees held tightly to my chest, for the rest of the day. I had slept most of it away, but enough of it remained to appraise my battle-scarred skin and sit on the chair as I gazed out the back window toward the hole in my backyard. It seemed so impossibly benign, as if a tumor that was probably not as bad as it seemed. Perhaps if I noticed little enough movement or somehow woke up from the horror, I could justify that it was a dream or had not, in some way or reality, actually occurred. I even started to imagine Erin being spared somehow, dark hope glimmering in my belly similar to that of a child seeing a present bearing their name under the Christmas tree.
As darkness fell, though, all those thoughts were snuffed out. It started with a single fly landing on the window that my unblinking eyes had surveyed all evening. Then two. Then three. Dusk had arrived. All manner of insects crowded the glass pane as the sun relinquished the face of the earth to a dreadfully bright moon.
I got up, walked to the field, came to the hole and looked inside.
Darkness fell alongside the realization of unavoidable doom. High-pitched humming began to poison the air. Swarms of bugs formed a thick cloud just high enough in the sky to barely hear the humming of their wings. So many and so dense, they blocked the new moon's light with unsettling efficiency. Every inch of the ground appeared to writhe with the uncoordinated movements of billions of flightless insects of all shapes and sizes. So vast and thick were the hordes that, on their backs, all types of hardly still-living animals were being carried to and placed around the maw of my Lord's womb. They were bringing offerings to him.
My eyes returned to the hole, and the earth began to shake. A finger broke the surface of the soil with unhurried movements. Slowly, the vibrating dirt contracted and expelled Erin, his abdomen still bloated with some malignant mass of limbs. His departed, foggy eyes rested on me as he pulled his last legs free from the ground and stood. His slack expression left me starved for a word, a hint, or some form of communication, but this morbid statue of my kin now seemed robbed of all light.
I did say things to him. I confessed and begged and plead for him to come back. I made no peace, as no peace was mine to make. Primal cries broke from my diaphragm. My knees crushed little crunchy servants under them as strength again left me, and sadness racked me so much like the toxins that had ruined me earlier. I could feel the multitude squirming under me. So quickly did the agony of regret and guilt saddle upon me that I swiftly forgot the delightful painlessness that I had earned through my betrayal.
As my eyes drifted down to the ground, I heard him groan. Erin's mouth opened slowly as wincing creases stretched across his face. Agony that transitioned mortal absence twisted his once sharp features into an ever-widening mouth. His jaw clicked open as it separated from his skull. His moan grew louder and louder, a death rattle. Air forced its way out of his throat as if he were being crushed by the thumb of a hateful God. The jagged edges of elbows, hands, shoulders, faces, knees, and feet grew in size and motion beneath the stretching flesh of his belly. Ribs popped outward beneath his clothes, not breaking the impossibly stretched skin but leaving an uncanny wideness to his form. The moans turned into a grieving litany as long, twisted, marble-grey fingers began to pour from his mouth as if some parasite departing its host. Wider and wider his mouth was pulled open till it was large enough for a grown man to crawl out.
It held him there for a moment as he began to glow. The light emanated from his belly at first. Then it grew to what must have been thousands of lumens, even through his stretched flesh. A form of pure light ascended upward through his chest, throat, and finally escaped through Erin's mouth as the entity unfurled its arms, wings, and legs in the black sky. As if a butterfly emerging, not only did its mass, but also its brightness grow. Powerful, hot light shone from it as beams reached out to the animals surrounding it. They burned alive in its fiery acceptance. I turned away as the light reached a peak, but my eyelids only barely blocked any of its power. My back burned and sizzled as the purifying light penetrated even my legs, which I now used in a desperate attempt to stop the scorching radiation.
Then, it stopped. I slowly turned, gazing upon its forbidden glory. It hung in the air a few hundred feet above us, Erin still standing there, arms loosely hung at his sides. His engorged torso now lesser. The fires that marked the once living sacrifices now burned with undwindling flames. They rose and fell as if connected to the lingering crystalline sun above us. It hung there in the sky. As if to welcome my praise and adoration, it spread its wings wide. Hundreds of glasslike eyes opened upon the feathers as if they were the fan of a peacock and glared at me.
Illuminated by the sacrificial beacons, Erin again convulsed as another being erupted from his body—all-consuming darkness. An orb of swirling black escaped from his mouth, it was formless. It consumed all light around it, causing a halo of bent reality around its borders, and pulsed with a thrashing, striking movement, as if containing some accursed demon.
It filled me with fear that was deeper than fear. The feeling of falling, of losing balance and control, racked at my gut as I went rigid in fear and awe. Its prisoner tore at the film of inky blackness as it ascended and took its place at the left hand of the Bright and Terrible Lord. As the distance between us grew, my intense dread and fear dwindled noticeably, but hardly enough for me to relax my rigid musculature.
The two entities floated there in the sky, and the earth felt as though it had ceased rotation. Perhaps, to avoid the notice and wrath of these dueling celestials. Tendrils from the light and darkness stretched out and wove into one another. Light perverting the dark and darkness defiling the light. They held each other in rapt embrace as if oil and water. Touching and not merging. They were one and still they were separate. A heavy ache scratched at the back of my skull as my eyes traced the borders of the entanglement. The wrongness of their union violated my finite knowledge of light and dark.
I was void of anything but terrified awe. Unabashedly, I looked at them as if my punishment for witnessing them had been paid in full already. The ache grew with each passing second.
Finally, Erin moaned again, ripping my bruised eyes from the swirling embrace above. His moan broke into breathless screaming. His muscles tensed and his limbs twisted at their joints. The fingers that held the womb, which his mouth now served to be, dug into his face in a quick, violent grip similar to the clasping hooks of the bugs in my dream. The creature, the Lord, the Image of God, began to open him from his lower jaw down to his hips. Slowly, ripping seams wept with dark blood and unzipped down his torso as the final desecration of my uncle took place at the hands of the Messiah.
He was beautiful, so perfect in every way. Wreathed in calm, warm light, he bore a Godly physique. He was handsome and lovely beyond belief. Symmetrical features rewrote my understanding of perfection. He stepped forward. I almost failed to notice the ruined, bifurcated corpse of my uncle still held in his left hand. Erin’s mangled flesh flopped loosely as he approached me. His fingers finding purchase in the roof of Erin’s mouth as his flaccid, torn body dragged limply behind. Guilt attempted to rap at the gate of my mind but glided over me uselessly as I resolved to turn to Him.
The distance between us was closed not only by his perfect gait but also by my shambling crawl. I reached my fingertips to touch his feet, and terrible pleasure filled me.
"Look up to me," he said, with words that filled my every sense with warm honey. His eyes were blue and green swirling crystals nestled neatly into his perfect, sharp face. I must have looked miserable and filthy to him. Even compared to the hordes of now-charred insects, I contained impurity; at least they had been cleansed in the fiery love of their God. I was only burnt and mauled. That pain now served to elevate the pleasure I felt in all my senses as his kind eyes peered into my broken soul.
He knelt down to me. "I promised to repair you." I nodded my head jaggedly. His voice darkened and his tone changed to malice as he bit the words, "Then take my blessings now."
The light from the being above us shot down onto him, and renewed heat began to hum and screech as hot steel submerged too quickly in icy water. Slowly, the sensation of malicious fire covered my skin and penetrated every cell of my body. My bones warped as the sizzling blessing scorched my flesh. Hair burst into flame; teeth cracked with the sharp, ragged gasps of my burning lungs, swiftly replaced by new pearly bone. I was beyond the point of screaming. As if I were a prey animal in the late stages of being eaten alive, I let the pain course through me without the mental or physical ability to react.
The pain slowly ended. I saw old remnants of tainted skin still hanging from my new form. I peeled off the amniotic film and dropped it on the ground with wet sloppy plops.
My whole body glowed with unholy light. But, I felt no familiar skin. No pores or sweat. No hair or color. Pure white skin, void of human features. It was clean. It felt nothing. I had asked for painlessness and been given exactly that. I had asked for beauty and been delivered a mockery of it. Though my outside was clean and my appearance lovely, my soul and everything not visible still reeked and swirled with rot.
The agony had been a blessing. The ruin a necessary pruning. In the quiet of his light, the remnant fractures of my sanity gave way and I looked up to him in devout adoration. At least there was no pain.
A smile blossomed on my face as I beheld my un-maker.
But his face was pure, hateful disgust. Just as I had hated the bugs.
Now I was the Herald.