THE OTHER SIDE OF GOD

A harrowing exploration of the devastating effects of forced religious indoctrination.

ONE

He could hear the footsteps on the floorboards above.

…CA-REAK…CREAK…CA-REAAK…

Compression, then release, a squeaking trail.

Heaven’s trumpets sounding before the Rapture.

Like the insects and vermin who’d proven his company through the seemingly endless nights, Daniel too was burrowed into his place in the basement. Among the junk and vermin shit and boxes of someone else’s forgotten dreams and moldy clothes he’d usurped (from his company of insects and vermin) to form a makeshift pallet. Not that it mattered; he'd long ago surrendered those creature comforts that most took for granted. This was simpler. A facet of the human condition that nature had hard-wired into our being on a cellular level: shelter, warmth, sustenance. The three basic needs that, on the most primal level, humans would seek even when they were not cognizant that they were doing so.

As he had each night (he’d rigged the latch open months ago with a piece of wire clothes hanger pilfered from a dumpster behind the Renewed Treasures Thrift Store on C-Street), Daniel had crawled through the basement window, finding his way through the junk and vermin shit and boxes to his moldy clothes pallet and blankets. To the cellar furnace, whose fiery tongues and fluxing light lapped at his skin, provoked the shadows into dancing eerie gavottes about the basement’s corners; his pulse clawed at his jugular like something trapped whenever their dark forms flirted with his periphery.

More importantly, he had found his way to his waiting. The waiting was all that remained, all that mattered. There was a calmness to it that came with resolve. A heightened sense of duty, of honor—an elation that was perhaps akin to that of Joan D’Arc’s in her divine appointment, or maybe that of Cain’s as the First Blade had rent flesh from bone and spilled the first skeins of blood—in having been chosen for such an appointment: to do the work of angels there in God’s country.

TWO

It was the day before Thanksgiving, drawing upon the close of two decades into the twenty-first century. He suspected that there was poetic justice in that (if one considered that the maxim of poetic justice could be applied to a matter of such nature), although he hadn’t planned it that way. That was just how the stars happened to align that night. Although one might never discern as much with the mere casting of the eyes upon the heavens, while shot-out streetlights opened the way with vast pools of darkness, that platinum-white spackling of the cosmos was rarely visible from the Northill Ghetto. Not that it was something that could be seen—the stars aligning. Such mysteries of the universe, of Providence moving in one’s favor, was something that you felt deep down below the layers of flesh, blood, and bone. Way down in the darkest recesses of the heart and soul.

There, in the basement, within the shadows of life, among his company of insects and vermin, Daniel waited. He waited and thought of the past. He thought of his brother, as he always did at Thanksgiving, although the memories proved vague and he knew that he was reconstructing many of them, like a paleontologist fleshing out a fossil into something that might have once been, based primarily on an impression. Taking equal parts of his own recollections, his mother and father’s stories, the old family photos, and a large chunk of his own desire for what might have been, he created a brother who was the person who would find a way to prevent him from doing what he’d done.

It’s murder, Daniel, his brother’s ghost vied, the scrutiny of his hollow eyes that once harbored so much life now cold hollow abysms that seemed to peer into his soul, what you have done.

The notion, a lucid introspection—such moments they came—infiltrated his mind, weighed upon his heart the burden of conscience, manacled and fettered his soul in the chains of guilt. Even within Revelation’s wake, even after so much sand had plummeted through the hourglass. It was emotional turmoil he could not afford to harbor. Painful moral indignations that ghosted to the surface once the veil was lowered, Enoch’s Eye had closed, and he was rendered as blind as anyone else.

Moments when he was at his weakest. Moments when they could impress upon him the carnal insecurities, the earthly corruptions they had impressed upon man before the Flood. Moments such as then.

It’s not murder, Daniel contended, steeling his resolve in his divine appointment. The man is not a man.

He is a Priest. Your…our Priest. A man. Nothing more.

He is…, Daniel choked out, his voice tight with despair. A vessel. One of the Sons of God, unleashed from their chains deep in the earth, corrupting humankind once again. I see what you don’t, what others cannot. The corruption, the insidious whispers, the depravity of humankind—I see it all!

Oh? And, what about the life you will take? His brother's ghost persisted, his voice—not a verbal enunciation but cold, oozing vespers of all the pieces of his brother—resonating somewhere deep inside his mind in unison. He is human, Daniel. He was your friend. He was a good man. You are taking a life—his life—and trying to convince yourself that it is right. That it is necessary. That it's just.

A - a good man? Was he a good man when he was raping you like a helpless woman? Was he a good man when he took your innocence? Your life? His eyes are filled with darkness, brother; did you not see that? Was that not the last thing you saw—the corrupting influence of those ancient ones deep in the depths of his eyes where the human soul should be? How—How he is not human?

The specter drew closer, like a thousand photo negatives glitching in and out, seemingly floating across the basement in a horrid, palsied cantor, the furnace flames burning behind its eyes as it leaned in, its voices a thousand raspy echoes in his mind. He was a man, Daniel. Your friend. Our priest. He loved you. And you poisoned him.

Daniel recoiled, the specter’s proximity causing a frigid miasma that filled the basement, gnawed at the marrow in his bones, despite the furnace’s inferno. What – what the fuck do you know? You’re – you’re a figment of my imagination. A hallucination.

Oh? Am I? Tell me, brother, is it your imagination that has been tearing at your soul all these months now? The specter glitched, there in front of him one moment, suddenly behind him within the next, a cold electric current washing over his skin as it continued, a thousand utterances of the many pieces of his brother resounding in his ear. Is it your imagination that is whispering doubts in your ear? Is it your imagination that is telling you that what you did was wrong?

It is not wrong. He is not a man.

THREE

With an unsteady hand, a spastic, involuntary twitch at the wrist, and an incessant tapping of both his index and pinky fingers—collateral damage, he was convinced, of having Ascended before the Revelation—he cut and then snorted another line off the cum-stuck pages of the Busty Beauties magazine, opened to a blond bimbo with beach ball fake tits spread eagle in the sand of a fake beach that he sometimes jerked-off too when in the basement. The crystal burned through cartilage and cavity, as a sulfur-flavored vacuum purged the oxygen from his lungs. Some breathless, heart-pounding, pulse-racing moments later, the head-swooning release of a permafrost orgasm seared through his skull, torrents of its burning-cold seed oozing down over his frontal lobe like the brain freeze when he drank a slushy from the Kum N Go too fast, and Enoch’s eye opened once more.

He needed it to be opened, always, that new eye of old. So that the veil would always be lifted, the truth always revealed. He needed to see where others were blind. So that he could fulfill his duty—that he might bear witness to the Sons of God and see them again bound in their chains of iron deep inside the earth where they belonged.

FOUR

…CA-REAK…CREAK…CA-REAAK…

The footfalls pulled Daniel back from the void; unsteady, lacking any truly established meter, they formed intermittent patterns that dissipated just as quickly as they had begun. A wide teeth-baring grin stretched Daniel’s face. The man is alone up there, he thought, just as my brother had been, coming to the end of things. He followed the echoes above his head—study, hallway, dining room. The man had returned to pour himself another tumbler from the crystal decanter. All the accomplished Thespian playing the role of the Old Man of God in the old house. It was a nightly show for all Nortill. For all of God’s country.

But Daniel was able to see where others were blind, like in a Scooby-Doo ending where the mask was pulled away. Through the omniscience of Enoch’s Eye the veil was lifted, and the truth revealed: That the man was nothing special. That he was not even a man, but a host. A shell. A vessel. Animated flesh at the end of its mortality. That this Son of God, hiding behind its meat-suit mask and a pulpit, had no greater claim to God than Daniel himself.

FIVE

Aside from possession—which it was, only not in the “demonic” or “religious: sense that most people would associate the verb “possession” with—it had brought back memories of his biology class, of the Pulpul de Morte. The Octopus of Death.

An invasive parasite no larger than a soda bottle cap, the Pulpul de Morte’s cellular structure was amebic and dendritic, a horrifying creature more suited to the pages of horror novels and sci-fi movies than the Central American jungles. Gaining entry via the sinus cavity, it preyed mostly on small vermin, attaching itself via tendrils to the host’s brain stem; there was a period of symbiosis where it “took control” of the host’s central nervous system. The Pulpul de Morte, under the guise of its host, was then able to infiltrate other hosts as it feasted on the vital nutrients and tissues of its present host. The only way to neutralize, or kill, the Pulpul de Morte, was to neutralize, or kill, the host as well.
The experiment had proven to be long and extensive. Months that he’d adjusted the mix innumerable times, taken painstaking, meticulous notes, and studied the ebb and flow of the liqueurs in those containers upstairs in the dining room. Months upon months, he’d mixed the elixir to taste, spitting, and rinsing out his mouth in the basement sink, attempting to find the effective dose.

Perhaps it was a habit borne of man’s humanity that remained. Maybe it was of the Son of God’s own device. Daniel could not be certain either way. Although the Bible did argue that they harbored earthly desires, that ‘the Sons of God saw them daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all whom they chose.’ So why, then, upon having secured a host, would they not desire other earthly pleasures as well?

It was the only working theory he had, and he hadn’t even been certain of it. Whether or not Pulpul de Morte was a good model to base his stratagem upon was yet to be seen. All that he had known was that proceeding the Revelation, a veil had been pulled back; he had been shown an obscure, if not esoteric, truth—the Knowledge of Heaven—and that he was expected to do something with it.

SIX

But now he knew.

And he believed this was the night.

He could feel it deep down inside his balls—a warm, electrical, ecstatic oozing sensation that stirred his cock—and he considered jerking off when he heard the labored steps above him, far beyond drunk, a transition into something entirely new.

The rusted antifreeze can on the basement shelf—Glycol brand, peeling and faded red and black with pastel yellow typography, decades old, clear, and still pungent—was nearly empty now. He had researched it thoroughly on the computer at the library he walked to from the old house, adjacent to Nortill High School. The dosages he found had been intended for lesser targets, such as annoying dogs and small invasive pests; there was a sweetness to the fluid, syrupy and clear, that was almost like a temptation to all manner of animals, according to Google. Along with the fine iron shavings he had added to each dose, Danniel was certain that it was the night.

He thought again of his brother. Of the person apart from the home videos, the Nortill High Memorial, or the photo albums. The person apart from his mother’s fabulistic stories or his father’s reminiscences that stopped being told long before he wanted them to stop. He thought of the person made of pieces, the shards that could be realigned into something else, into what might have really been. He had begun to forget, but now he remembered. The ghost had been fading, but it reformed itself.

It was what Daniel had.

His brother’s eyes were upon him again, on what he had now done.

SEVEN

All that Daniel knew of the future was as far as tonight.

He knew that rapture was upon him and that it excited him. With his inflicted hand he dug into his filthy sweats, rubbed himself, and pulled his cock out over the band, oblivious to the fetidness that wafted from his body. He blew a bloody snotball into his palm, applying it to himself like lube, and began to pleasure himself.

Above him, the steps slowed to a scuffle, then almost nothing. The creaking of the floor implied some effort to steady, some seeking of balance, some urge to reclaim control.

It knows something is wrong, Daniel thought, it no longer has control, the meat-suit is afflicted.

Daniel abused his cock more, aroused to no end by the knowledge he had just gleaned.

There came a silence. A deafening, vatic silence. The final accounting of all that had come before.

Even though Daniel had been waiting for both, the unified SLAM! of the heavy body to the floor and the violent eruption of his sudden release startled him. It was in the wake of his bleats, brays, and hitching breaths that a new silence came. So quiet that it seemed as if it were colored a depthless black. A divine silence of appraisal or judgment. He waited, holding his cock and his breath, for some final struggle, one last ecstatic aftershock or tremor (from either himself or the meat suit above), but none came.

His brother was close to him now, looming just across some nearly bridgeable threshold, the way ghosts only haunted us in our dark hours, when both sin and holy acts brought their eyes upon us. Danniel could speak out, utter something aloud in a petition to the spirit world that presumed such a connection.

But he did not.

He could go up and investigate, to see the meat suit laid out and done with. But there was no point in that; the meat suit was of no consequence to him, only the Fallen One that wore it. He cut and snorted another line—from the sagging but huge natural, cum-spackled breasts of the Busty Bunnies cover model—the gelid-tingling omniscience of Enoch’s Eye flooding his skull. He could see the Fallen One—the cold, amorphous, shadowy thing that it was—flailing and writhing, perhaps even in pain, desperate for a release that would not come.
The fine iron shavings he had added to each dose served as the chains that manacled and fettered it to the meat suit. To its tissues and fibers. To its very bones. And the body would be in the grave for a millennium, at least, before the bones began to turn to dust. The Fallen One again chained inside the earth, not by an Archangel but by a 20-year-old boy.

He knew he should leave. Begin to erase all connection to it, to begin to feel the slow shedding he must believe will come. But he lingered, the flames in the cellar furnace shedding light and warming his face, awaiting the Rapture. The Transcendence.

Suddenly, he felt it. Felt it all. It was not as he had thought it would be, but how it really was, at that very moment, one instance in his life that was already passing on to the next. He remained afloat in the moment. The moment after which all other moments could start, finally.

Just as Enoch had, Daniel too had come into his new life on the other side of God.