A couple days ago, for the first time I ate LSD and reenacted the Crucifixion with my church. My parents, both lifelong members, also took part. In the place of Jesus Christ, we put the Savior- our infallible leader.
No one ever told me the Savior’s real name. In our group of over five hundred brainwashed fanatics, I had never heard anyone call him anything other than “The Savior.” Before that day’s festivities began, he called me into his personal chambers.
As the guard shuffled me through the door, I looked up and saw him. My breath caught in my throat. The effect the Savior had on people was striking.
The Savior sat behind a giant mahogany desk with expensive silver statues of archangels and demons neatly arranged around a stack of paperwork. He continued looking down at a piece of paper, frowning, his brow wrinkling. Then he looked up at me.
The Savior had burn scars covering his scalp, the back of his neck and his arms. Folds of shining keloid scar tissue criss-crossed the top of his bald, scarred head. Yet his face was totally untouched.
He had striking green eyes. They shone with a muddy radiance. The color of those eyes reminded me of a swamp filled with hidden venomous snakes, some fetid waterhole that hid bones and rotting bodies.
His face was aristocratic and chiseled. He had a small, straight nose with high cheekbones. His chin looked as if it were cut from stone, strong and jutting. His eyelashes looked like those of a camel’s. The combination of powerful, charismatic elegance and nightmarish scarring marked the Savior, in both personality and appearance. He was the unifier of opposites in the flesh, the Tao, the Brahman and the Deathless Self.
“Adam,” he said to me, his deep voice booming throughout the chamber. I gave a weak, anxious smile and bowed my head.
“Good morning, Savior. Did you wish to speak with me?” I had absolutely no idea what this man wanted. He stood up, showing off his towering stature. He must have been at least six-foot-six. He nearly always dwarfed everyone around him, except for the freakishly large bodyguards he kept close at hand at all times.
“Today is the day, yes?” he asked, giving me a faint smile. I saw his sparkling white movie-star teeth through the parting lips. As I stared into his eyes, I started to feel strange, almost hypnotized. Sounds seemed far away and everything felt slow. “Today is your initiation into the fold.”
“I feel weird,” I said. He nodded, as if expecting this.
“Did you already take the Sacrament?” he said, referring to the piece of round flatbread the High Priest put in the mouths of everyone participating in the ritual. I tried to say something, but my tongue seemed to cling to the top of my dry mouth. I just nodded.
“Yes, I see. The Sacrament contains a very powerful substance, Adam. It’s called LSD. Did you know that God gave us LSD? He sent it at the same time as the nuclear bomb. It was clearly a message to humanity. God said, ‘Here is one path I have sent you, LSD- the path to spirituality and understanding of the divine. Here is the other path I have sent you- atomic weapons, the path to annihilation and incomprehensible horrors.’”
***
After the Sacrament had taken effect in the congregation, men dressed in the garb of Roman soldiers dragged the Savior out. He had on a purple robe and a crown made of thorns. Rivulets of slow-moving dark blood ran down his cheeks.
The soldiers, speaking in Latin and laughing among themselves, looked at us. Their eyes seemed to flash with an inner light for a moment. I wondered if these were actors, and if so, where the Savior had found them.
The soldiers went over a rack of torture tools, looking at various screws, bludgeons, axes and whips. Finally, laughing, one of them chose a whip with vicious metal tips, an ancient-looking version of the cat-o-nine-tails. He showed it to the others. They grinned back at him, their eerie smiles seeming too wide, their teeth too sharp and numerous.
They beat and kicked the Savior until blood streamed from his nose and mouth. His eyes began to swell shut, and they tied him to a wooden stockade. A particularly brutish, large Roman soldier walked forwards with the cat-o-nine-tails, grinning at the crowd. His teeth seemed to grow longer, sharper, more and more like those of a predator. Now I knew it wasn’t some trick of the drug or the light- his eyes really were turning crimson, a strange inner radiance rippling through them. The other soldiers around him began to transform as well as they tortured the Savior.
The whips sliced deep into his back until the bones of his spine and ribs began to shine through the wounds, white and gleaming under all that blood and torn flesh. I looked on in horror. Those bones, so pure and clean under all that mutilation and damage, shone through like sunshine through a parting storm.
Finally, after the Roman soldiers had their fill, they pulled the whimpering, bleeding man up to his feet. The Savior looked like a boxer before a knockout. He wavered on his feet, weaving and stepping from side to side, his face a mask of agony. Then he fell. The soldiers laughed, kicking him in the face and neck as he called out for God to help him, to kill him, to make it stop. But no one came.
I saw the cross nearby. They dragged him over to it and pulled out the wicked silver nails that would do the deed.
***
The Savior had taught us that the Final Judgment was near, and that to survive and become gods, we must worship both Jesus Christ and Satan. Not only must we worship them, he said, but we must guide them towards reconciliation. Armageddon was very near, and the only way for the universe to survive was to unify the two long-lost brothers, Jesus Christ and Lucifer, twins born from the primordial Godhead at the genesis of creation. If we could succeed in bringing Christ and Satan back together into one ineffable being, if we could convince them to fuse their divine powers, then we could single-handedly prevent the Apocalypse.
The Savior called the path to summon angels and demons for power “the Process”. I had seen the effects of the rites many times growing up. Sometimes the summoned beings appeared in human form. Yet their eyes always betrayed their true nature, glowing red or turning black during the sacrifices. Our church never tried to summon Christ or Lucifer directly. We always used emissaries to communicate with the divine ones.
After the Savior had died on the cross, his lips changing into cyanotic blue, the demonic soldiers began to pull his body down. A death gasp escaped the Savior’s lips, a long, choking wheeze. The soldiers cut the ropes that bound his arms and legs to the great bloody cross. I saw his palms rip in two as the full weight of his body came down on his hands suddenly. The nails inserted through his feet tore through the flesh as the momentum of the falling body pulled against them. The Savior’s eyes stared blankly up at the sky, his pupils dilating as death’s cold touch annihilated the last of his life energy.
I looked back at my parents’ faces. They stood directly behind me in the roaring crowd of believers. My parents’ eyes had rolled back in their heads, and they swayed on their feet like sunflowers in a light breeze. With the whites of their eyes showing and their mouths hanging open, I couldn’t tell if their faces showed expressions of transcendence- or of mortal terror.
The members of the church cried and wept, formed in a circle around the ritual. Time seemed to slow down. I noticed the way the sky seemed to change colors above us now, flashing with red and orange light. Soon, lightning bolts started to smash into the nearby trees and bushes, twisting and blazing with blinding radiance. I could no longer discern the effects of the drug from what was truly real. The soldiers’ faces began to drip and melt, revealing demonic features underneath.
Spiraling black horns emerged from their skulls. Pale, bone-white skin glistened on their muscular bodies. Their legs reminded me of those of a rhinoceros, flat and round on the bottom. Their fingers appeared long, twisted and vampiric with claw-like nails the same color as their horns, shining like jet-stone.
The demons had shed their Roman garb and human masks completely now. They stood around the Savior’s body, mostly naked except for some silver armor coverings around their waist and torsos. I saw strange symbols engraved into the metal, symbols from a language I had never seen before. It looked like no written script developed by humanity. The letters seemed to morph and shift before my eyes as they dragged the Savior towards the cave.
They stopped occasionally to kneel down and suck the blood from his wounds, their sharp, serrated white teeth turning crimson. Then they threw him in the cave and rolled the heavy stone in front of the opening.
***
Sometime during the night, after all the members of the church had gone back to the compound where we slept and ate, the stone rolled away from the mouth of the cave. The Savior, now completely uninjured and unscarred except for his previous burns, stepped out.
In his purple robe, he could have been an ancient emperor. He had stepped over the boundary of death before and come back, but every time, it changed him a little more, ate away at something fundamental like a corrosive acid.
But it wasn’t until hours later when I found out just how demented the Savior had become over his life, performing these insane occult rituals and drawing forces to our group that he could never fully understand or control.
***
The next morning, the Savior called me into his office.
I hadn’t slept all night. Whatever drugs they had given me had kept me wide awake. I saw shadows morphing into silhouettes of people, trees reaching out with arms like an octopus, clouds forming together and breaking apart in the blink of an eye in rapid patterns. As I sat in bed with my eyes closed, I kept seeing those grinning demons wearing the masks of ancient soldiers, speaking in perfect Latin. It felt like a movie playing behind my eyelids, a movie that looped and repeated in all the worst and most disgusting parts.
“Adam,” the Savior said, smiling beatifically at me. “How was your first experience with the divine?” I didn’t know what he expected me to say, so I stumbled through a vague answer.
“Oh, just great, so beautiful,” I said, lying, returning his smile. Yet inside, my heart quivered with anxiety. My hands trembled, and I could barely keep my teeth from chattering. I felt very cold all of a sudden.
“How would you feel about expanding your role in the church?” he asked. I shrugged.
“OK, I guess,” I said. I actually wanted nothing less, but I knew the Savior was a very dangerous man.
“That’s perfect,” he said, showing his bleached teeth in a wide, reptilian grin. His eyes sparkled with an inner light and fanaticism. “Because we are trying to get a crew together for some very special missions. Yes, I think these are the most unique missions imaginable. I like to call them ‘creepy-crawly missions’.” The word gave me an impression of a child’s game, yet it had some sinister undertones.
“What’s a ‘creepy-crawly mission’?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“Well, it’s a bit of a game, like hide-and-seek. We here at the church give our members pure black clothing and some knives and guns and send them out to the world to bring back some fuel for the rituals. They do what they have to do to get inside a house, cutting the screen or reaching up through the doggie-door or whatever else gets the job done. Then they just capture the people at the house, tie them up and bring them back here. They are offerings for the ancient ones. Some, such as the Angel of Death, will not come without such as these.” He paused for a long moment, staring straight into my eyes. “Human offerings, you understand. We cannot fulfill the rituals to bring the ancient ones out without human sacrifices.”
“You’re killing people?” I asked, horrified, my mouth hanging open. He gave a wave of his hand at this.
“Adam, you have to understand, there’s no such thing as death. The only thing that dies with the body is the ego. We are liberating these people to an infinite higher plane. We are allowing their primordial consciousness to return to the oneness from which all things emerged. Everything that occurs in this world is like a mirage in front of eternal, timeless eyes peering out from behind the curtain of reality. If you think about it like that, we are actually helping these people.” He gave me a subtle wink.
“To tell you the truth, Adam, I have died many times. I have always come back stronger and more powerful than before. Death is natural, it is beautiful. When it comes, it is like a black hole, or the empty spaces between galaxies. It is cold and black, yes, but also infinite- and powerful.
“So can I count you in? Your parents are already planning on attending tonight.”
***
I decided I needed to escape the compound as soon as possible. But this was no easy task. There were cameras, security guards, stores of automatic rifles and grenades and much else besides to contend with. That night, I got out of my bed, putting on extra shirts for warmth. I put on all black clothing and a black hat with black shoes, so as to disguise myself in the shadows. I was creeping out of my room when I saw three silhouettes in front of me, standing in the dark hall.
I saw my parents, also dressed in all black, both holding knives with curving silver blades and carved opal handles. On the handles, I saw the faces of angels and demons. My father also had a pistol strapped to his waist.
The Savior stood next to them in his impeccable purple robes, a smile of enlightenment and peace spread across his proud, aristocratic face. My father had a lunatic expression on his grinning face. My mother constantly trembled, her pupils dilated, her eyes constantly flicking to the left and right. I wondered whether the Savior gave them drugs before a creepy-crawly mission.
“Ah, good,” the Savior said, “I see you’ve already dressed for the occasion. We were just coming to check on you, Adam. It is time to prove your loyalty to the church once and for all. It is time to take your first life. It is, I can assure you, a God-like feeling. After all, if God has power over life and death, why shouldn’t we, who seek to become like Him?”
My father nodded along like a puppet, my mother simply trembling at his side, the long, wicked knife clenched tight in her shaking hand. The Savior reached into his robes and pulled out a similar knife. I saw it had an opal handle, finely-crafted and glistening like rainbows. He handed it to me, bowing his head slightly and extending the handle out.
“Your time has come, Adam. It is time to prove your worth to the church.”
***
My parents and another man from the church went on the mission. I drove the car, a dark, inconspicuous sedan. They said I was to stay in the car during the actual creepy-crawly mission, at least for the first time. I was to be the driver and look-out, but more importantly, they said I should watch and learn.
“The Savior says to grab a child for the ritual,” my father said, grinning. “But the rest of the family can be slaughtered like pigs. No witnesses can survive.”
They instructed me towards a rich area of the city. Soon I was on high mountain streets with suburban homes looking down upon the ghetto far below. This was where the rich people lived, I knew. I could tell by looking at the mansions and the giant swimming pools around every house.
My father instructed me to pull over near a secluded, dark house at the end of a cul-de-sac. I parked the car. With a pounding heart, I watched them get out and climb the gates, nimbly reaching up like salamanders and pulling themselves over.
A few minutes later, I saw a half-dressed man and woman run out the front door. Their underwear and shirts were soaked in blood. They had deep slash marks on their face, their neck, their chests and arms. Rivulets of it ran down their naked legs and feet. Behind them, I saw three dark, grinning silhouettes walking slowly and laughing.
I started the car and drove away quickly after seeing the bodies collapse on the lawn. The figures standing over the limp bodies knelt down and stabbed them over and over, dozens of times. That was the last thing I saw as I turned down off the street, hyperventilating, a rising sense of panic overtaking my mind.
I quickly got lost. I just kept driving until the car ran out of gas. By then, I had driven for a few hours and somehow ended up in the next state over. A massive state park bordered the town where I found myself. I walked for a while and found a cabin with no one inside. I smashed a window and got in.
But I don’t know if it is far enough away. I feel like there’s eyes running over my back, like the next shadow I see will turn out to be a church member, dressed in all black and waiting for me.
Because the Savior has many more fanatics, and he is sending them all out on creepy-crawly missions.
And soon, they may be coming to a house near you.