When I was twelve I got knocked off my bike by a drunk driver. I split my head right open and broke nearly every bone in my body. For four days I hovered between life and death. My parents said goodbye and even picked my funeral song. They held my hand and told me they were sorry for every silly argument, but I wasn’t there anymore, I was somewhere else.
I was in the in-between. I was connected to the hospital room by only a small frayed thread that with every passing minute threatened to snap. I could hear they’re voices but only faintly, not that they were a comfort anyway, there was no such thing as comfort where I was. It was impossibly dark in that in-between, and so cold you could feel the chill in the marrow of your bones. I can’t remember what it looks like exactly, that oddly empty place.
From my waning memory, I recall it as a formless mass of, wet, dripping, nothing; there was no left or right, no up or down. You’d float around like a kite in the wind with only that little string holding you down. It felt like I was there for years. Time just seemed to elongate there. Eventually my family’s voices faded into nothing and all I could hear was the loud deafening thud of silence. It was then I heard him.”
“Hulqu-ša māru.” He said, over and over. His voice was soothingly consistent. I transcribe the phrase to you now accurately, though to my young, uneducated ears it sounded like a jumble of mismatched vowels. It was only in my adulthood that I found out that the voice he spoke to me in was Old Akkadian. Translated it meant; my child is lost.
Then I woke up. My eyes squinted from the bright hospital lights and my mother’s tears formed a puddle on my face. I can’t remember much following that, but my mum says that I kept saying “he’s real” over and over.
That’s why I know there is a god. He spoke to me, I walked in his kingdom and then I came back. Nearly eight-years later when I took my seat for the first day of my Religious Studies degree, I was perhaps the only one in that lecture theatre that knew with absolute certainty that there was a god. Was it the Christian God? The Islamic? Maybe no one has it right, but he existed. He was real. I knew that. I spent four years studying religion, and learnt nothing more important than what I found out when I was twelve.
“I have some concerns regarding your dissertation title Jeremy, Proving that God is Real, it’s… well it’s impossible to prove. We wouldn’t require faith if there was a burden of proof.” Professor Alcott said to me as he shifted through my research. “Personal anecdotes are also not sufficient subject to base an entire dissertation upon.”
“I’m committed to this research paper professor, I know with certainty that there is a god and I would like an opportunity to make this clear to everyone.” I said. “By next week sir, I will have more than anecdotes. Give me a chance.”
“I’m not one to quash academic innovation, if you would like to give this topic a bash, then I will not stand in your way. You are such a promising student Jeremy, I just don’t want you to waste your talent.” He said, looking dissatisfied.I left Alcott’s office with a seemingly impossible task. For centuries people have been looking for scientific proof in a higher power and all so far have failed. All I had was my own experience, I needed more. I scribbled down in my notebook the two most pressing features of a god with a puzzle knitting my brow together.
He’s everywhere.
He can’t be seen.
I was lying in my bed, in my dingy little student rent when I had my epiphany. Mould. It had followed me my entire life. Every room I slept in, it would curl up in the corner, an ugly black mass of reaching tendrils. It was watching me, haunting me. He was in the very air I breathed. I’m real, he was saying over and over, I’m right here. I’d been bleaching him away all of these years, drowning him in chemicals.
Mould, like mushrooms and other fungus, travels in spores, invisible to the human eye. It is said that there are fungal spores in every gulp of air we take. They grow only in conditions where they thrive, in the damp of a rundown house or in the soil at the foot of a withered tree. It made too much sense, how else could he be everywhere all at once? And with that I had a new dissertation title. Proving God is Real: The Mycological Evidence. Alcott was bemused but satisfied at least that he was in for an interesting read.
I wasn’t a mycologist when I began my dissertation, but I was by the end of my study. Fungus don’t need light to grow, in-fact there are some sources that suggest they thrive in the dark. All they really need is moisture. The in-between I’d hovered in as a child had been so damp and wet. With every new nugget of mycological trivia, the dot to dot I’d been solving my entire life was becoming clearer and clearer.
It all made so much sense. There are some suggestions from credible scientists that the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms had aided the evolution from home erectus to homo sapiens. He had nudged us, even then. Not to mention the countless ancient civilisations that had claimed to commune with gods through the burning and consumption of teas made from various fungus.I needed more, coincidences and anecdotes are so easily solved.
Armed with a little scalpel and a mason jar I scraped some of the mould off my wall. I added some water and sealed it. Growing mushrooms is exceedingly simple, as all budding recreational drug users and mycologists know.. “Give me a sign.” I said to it. “Please.”
I left it on my desk and let it fester, and it did. It grew and grew until nearly the entire jar was black. I don’t really know what my plan was for my little mason-jar experiment, I certainly didn’t expect what happened.
“Dude, that shit is rank. Stick in the bin.” My roommate pointed to my desk one day as he popped his head into my room. I had almost forgotten about it. I glanced at what he was looking at and felt my heart stop.The mason jar was smashed.
Sharp little pieces of glass were inter-mingled with thick moss-like mould that was now spreading all across my desk. It hadn’t been like that in the morning, it had to have happened recently, maybe even in the past few hours that I’d been napping. I briefly considered wiping it up with a cloth, but I couldn’t - it was god - I couldn’t clean up god.
So I left it there and charted it’s growth casually in my notebook. Until one day I returned from my morning lectures and saw something… disturbing. It had grown out from the table; it’s awful tendrils reaching out towards the empty air. If you squinted it sort of looked like a hand, oddly malformed and misshapen though it was. I started to spend my nights in the library as I was so unnerved by it.Then one morning, It was gone. The mould, it was gone, like it had never even been there before.
There’s an animalistic side to all of us, one we don’t realise we have until it’s triggered. I felt it then, an overwhelming feeling of dread that built up to a crescendo where the very utterance of silence rang in my ears like alarm bells. I ought to have listened to it. But it was god, and god had a plan.
I went to bed that night with that feeling still tugging at me. Sleep did not come easy, in fact it did not come at all. My eyes narrowed from exhaustion, my room almost pitch black save for the small amount of light from my phone screen. I thought it was the silhouette of a jacket at first.
I stared hard at it, trying to discern any familiarity in it’s shape.
I stared for what felt like hours. I felt as though I was being watched, like I wasn’t alone. Then it came. Just the smallest of twitches. My finger danced over the torch button on my phone, but there was a comfort in not seeing, in the dark haze there was still a chance that it was my jacket or an odd shadow.
“Si unus extisat, sic facit alterum.” The shape said an inhuman voice that filled me with an overwhelming amount of dread. This wasn’t what I had felt when I was child, the voice of god was soothing not… wrong.
I turned the light on. All the horror films I’d watched told me that when you put the light on the awful things just… go away.
It’s a lie, a tired old trope.
Illuminated in the torchlight, It stood on hind legs, this black mass of awful clinging mould, and it looked at me, even though it did not have eyes, just empty holes. It tilted it’s head, like a dog trying to comprehend that the bag of treats had an end. It took a few steps towards me, like it had only just learned to walk, and it said it again, this time directed at my soul.
“Si unus extisat, sic facit alterum.” It said again and then, with odd movements, it slipped out my door. I heard the thud of it heading down my staircase and with every awful hoof on my steps, I felt as though I was being shot.
I knew the words this time, while the akkadian god had spoken to me in my youth had eluded me, this had not. My grammar school had a rather impressive latin department and I was close to fluent.If one exists, then so does the other.
That’s what it had said. It’s a simple turn of phrase that haunts me to this day. I wrote it all down. I turned in my dissertation with a heavy weight on my shoulders. Alcott offered me a place on his PHD programme, but I declined and he said farewell to me with an odd look glinting in his eye. He didn’t believe me, but he believed at least that I did. That’s faith for you.
He’s out there somewhere. The other.
By looking for god I had set him free and now he walks, on those unsteady legs. Maybe he’s that pile of oddly shaped clothes in the corner of your dark room, or the queer shadow that moves just slightly out of tune with your own, perhaps he’s all of these things and nothing. If one exists then so does the other. It is upon this uncertain balance that our world is built. I only wished I had met just the one.