down, he had to accept that his mind was far too lucid for this to be a mere hallucination.
“My name is Bartholomew Brooks,” he said, hoping the sound of his own voice would break whatever spell had seized him. “I am the son of Martin and Elizabeth Brooks. I am twenty-eight years old, and I think I’m losing my mind right now.” But he suspected that coherency and madness could not co-exist; therefore, he had to accept, this, whatever this was, had to be real. He closed his eyes.
When he opened his eyes, his head was raised. Above him the sky was a sea of flames, a perpetual wall, a barrier. He saw a winged creature the size of a pick-up truck trying to cross the barrier. It burst into flames before it could even reach it, and came tumbling down to a flat earth, screeching in unworldly agony.
Bart tried to take in the entirety of this new world, and wondered if maybe he had indeed lost his mind. He squatted down and passed his hand over the ashy ground. He felt the texture of the land, grainy and slimy at once. Even his senses were telling him that he was truly in this world, not as an astral projection nor a phantom but physically. Magic, he thought. It has to be some sort of magic.
The land was completely flat; he could not see it curve, regardless of where he cared to look. The land just stretched out in all directions, beyond the range of his eyes. In the distant, to what he guessed was south, he could barely make out the outlines of a forest—at least, what he thought was a forest. It was difficult to tell, but those long vertical columns did resemble trees.
When he turned east, he saw an impossibly tall mountain, its ashen tip penetrating into the great fire sky. The mountain vaguely resembled the head of a howling wolf. As he stared at it, trying to fathom its size, reality blinked. The mountain came right at him. He raised his arms over his face and ducked.
For a long time he remained crouched on the floor, eyes closed; and he would have stayed like this for an even longer time, but his mind and his senses told him something had changed. The stench of rotting meat permeated the air. He put a hand out, touching the floor. It was very smooth. Bart opened his eyes.
The chamber he was in was so vast he at first thought he was in a city. But there weren’t any structures to be seen anywhere—neither buildings nor houses—save for what appeared to be a giant statue ahead. He glanced down at the floor; it took him a few seconds to register that it was made of polished bones. He nearly jumped, and wiped his hands on his pant legs. “Holy shit,” he said.
He could see that there were walls all around him, but they were very far away. He figured he had to be near the center of whatever this place was. Raising his head, he tried focusing on the ceiling, but it, too, was too far away to properly make out. He could, though, tell that some things were hanging from what he thought were hooks. He shuddered to think what they might be. He started walking towards the statue, hoping while he did that some idea of what to do next would materialize in his head, or that the drink of Saevus would wear out.
The statue turned out not to be a statue but a throne chair of dripping gore—great puddles of blood pooled around its animal clawed feet. Sitting on the throne chair was the undiluted epitome of brutality, a grotesque manifestation of savagery and malice. Bart beheld a giant man with the head of a mutilated wolf, a bloated face covered with a myriad of scars, threatening to burst. The man-wolf thing was at least a hundred feet tall, powerfully built, mostly naked save for a loincloth made of human pelts. Coarse patches of hair covered his body and legs. Instead of hands and feet, the creature possessed hybrid claws that to Bart’s eyes appeared like a mixture of owl, bear and human.
The unbearable thing brought its gaze to bear on Bart, and he felt his soul flee. A whirlwind of fear engulfed him, weakening his resolve, and threatening his sanity, again. He closed his eyes and prayed, asking for strength, guidance, hope.
The monster laughed, a sound like the anguish of the damned.
“No one hears you but I,” it said in a voice like a raging forest fire. “I, Dread Marduel, the Lord of Filth, the God of Rage, Master of Hatred, exist above all the gods. Everything that lives, has lived, or will live, pays homage to me. For of all the gods, only I am forever. I have existed since before the conception of time, and shall continue to exist until the last gasp of eternity.”
The monster gazed down on Bart, filling him with dread like the overflow of a volcano, making him wish for oblivion, death, anything that could end the crawling madness coming towards him.
“None can look upon the face of God without incurring blood guilt. You are uninvited here, flesh thing. You have transgressed against me, and seen things you were not privileged to see. For your sin, I will send my servants to your world to exact atonement.”
Marduel, the Lord of Filth, wagged a finger at Bart. Bart pressed his hands to his ears, screamed, and dropped to his knees. Red and yellow lights flashed before him, blinding him; and then, as if looking into a giant movie screen, he saw his home, the place he grew up in, the home he still loved but had not seen for two years: Bladen.
“In the day whose night shall see the birth of the new moon, four of my servants will claim the sacrifice of atonement from this place.”
Turning his back on him, Dread Marduel said, “Leave my presence.”
Bart felt his body pancake, then begin to unravel. He saw his arms coming apart, floating away like strands of spaghetti. Like water whirling down the drain, his body dissolved from one existence and materialized in another.
“Breathe,” said Anthony. “You have to breathe.”
“My lungs hurt. Oh, God, my arms.” But he did breathe, and when he sat up, he saw that his arms were intact.
“What did you see?” asked Anthony, intensity and concerned both sketched on his face.
“Not the prairies and bunnies I would have liked.”
Anthony nodded, his grey hair falling over his concerned eyes. “There is a world called Piltane,” he said, “were rabbits weigh six-hundred pounds and devour smaller animals. They have nice teeth, like our own extinct smilodons.”
“Gee, thanks, you’ve just added to future nightmares.”
“That bad, huh?”
“You told me there were three of them.”
“That we know of, yes. I’ve seen them from a great distance, and even so the experience nearly broke my mind.”
“One of them spoke to me.”
Anthony stood up rapidly, then swayed, tittering as if about to fall. “What?”
Bart stood, grabbed Anthony from the arm, and steadied the old man. He looked about for a chair, found an old computer chair, and sat Anthony on it. “It called itself Marduel, the Lord of Filth,” he said.
“From the worlds we have visited,” said Anthony, “we have learned of these creatures. The people, the good people we managed to communicate with, warned us that we could not elude these gods for long, that they would become aware of our world and covet it. I have long feared the day they would shift their gaze to us.”
“It said it would seek atonement for my transgression, my transgression of seeing the face of God. This thing believes itself a god.”
“It is a god.”
“How can that abomination be a god?”
“I think you have a very modern sensibility of what the word God means. Marduel is immortal, immensely powerful, and he is worshipped in, at least, a thousand worlds, including this one, unfortunately.”
“Celebrities are worshipped; it don’t make them gods.”
“Paper gods, to be sure, but gods nonetheless. The entire language of celebrity-hood is religious in nature. People call them Stars, meaning celestial bodies infinitely above us mere mortals, beings worthy of being worshipped, who reflect the hopes and aspirations of a mindless generation.”
“Now you do sound like an old man. If I remember my history correctly, when you were young, people had an unfortunate tendency to follow demagogues.”
Anthony smiled. “It’s good,” he said, “that this experience has not clouded your rational mind. Most
people, when they return, are babbling idiots. The demagogues of the twentieth century were gods. Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Adolph Hitler—they all claimed some sort of divine sanction, and were followed by people who had abdicated in their own hearts the ability to tell right from wrong, to distinguish between good and evil.”
“What does it mean to be a god, then?”
“The power to inflict pain and pleasure makes a god, a god; and worshippers willing to relegate good and evil to the whims of authority. We make the gods, Bart, through our failures as human beings.”
“We did not create this monster, Marduel; we could not have. It claimed to be older than time itself.”
“Marduel is a primordial demon, a formless, mindless energy the size of an atom, given form and substance by our malice and rage and hatred. In the beginning, he was but a speck, until he became aware of us—all humans in every dimension. Since then he has grown so great that in a very real sense, he no longer needs us. He is now strong enough to tear the earth in two with the utterance of a mere word.”
“Then there is no hope for us?”
“Marduel will not destroy a hateful world that feeds him so well. No, Bart, we must not lose hope, but neither must we become blind optimists. Our battles must, for the moment, be small, and they must start here.” Anthony tapped his chest four times. “Come, now we must prepare for the servants of this