TWILIGHT OF ABOMINATION—Written by: David MorningWay
I have always seen little glimpses of the supernatural, but it was more like seeing the edge of something real, or the shadow of something otherworldly, never direct, and never enough to fully make you believe that you saw, was indeed what you saw… not really. Although, I can never deny my mind or sanity the small incremental visions of what I skeptically beheld, it always came as seeing a darting white figure in the forest, or witnessing unnaturally large red lights coming from the sky, with the only sounds audibly being a massive, yet low pulsing, making every dog in neighborhood bark ferociously like a bear had just entered their yard.
Mantis-like creatures exiting a lake in the middle of the night, yet making no actual sound, visibly being blocked by low hanging trees, so you can’t get a good view, and other small significant, yet insignificant events. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who’s seen little supernatural things like this, out there in this extremely big, yet very small little world. Well, I can’t speak for every amazing, nightmarish or insane phenomenon witnessed by mankind throughout the millennia, only what I know, only what I have seen, and that’s why I am writing this now.
My initiation into the impossible was not merciful or kind, it did not ease me in or start off with something gentle, to create a slow fade into otherworldly events, no… it kicked me into the deep end with the sharks, while a hurricane raged on. They say when you stare into the abyss, that the abyss stares back, and it can never unsee you, nor you it, and since that night I have come to ponder if what happened was somehow my fault, that if by seeing little glimpses of supernatural things, I had somehow caught something’s attention over the years. I had to now wonder, like a flashing spotlight within the void, was I the beacon that summoned the incomprehensible storm of hell forth? I no longer question if there are things outside of our reality, no longer look up at the stars or to distant mountain sunsets and wonder what could possibly be. I asked the universe for more with my heart and mind, to show itself fully and untethered upon my gaze, as I would look up at the stars upon my roof for hours at night, in awe of the mysteries of the cosmos. Did something hear or feel my desperate and passionate plea for truth… maybe? Perhaps I’m wrong though, maybe what occurred was completely random and entirely up to chance, but it doesn’t really matter in the end, because it came… and it brought a twilight of abomination with it.
I had just gotten off work, which for me entailed walking around a warehouse next to the Olympic mountains carrying a flashlight and pepper spray, pretending that if something or someone tried to break in, that these meager defenses would ACTUALLY do something, other than piss them off, or make them laugh while they pulled out a REAL weapon. Thoughts like this made me buy a small .357 revolver and an ankle strap, along with bear mace, instead of the wispy and useless sputtering beam of slightly orange liquid that my company issued dispenser let out. I would rather have these items and never have to use them, then be caught needing them in a life-or-death situation, and be without. After my rounds, which was pretty much just me walking around the wood line and warehouse fence, listening to internet horror stories while occasionally removing my earbuds to listen for random noise, I clocked out, and began my Friday ritual.
After picking up my paycheck on the way out, I made a few special stops on the way home to help me enjoy my weekend better. After grabbing dinner to prepare from the local grocery store, I hit up the dispensary for some fresh cannabis, and before you cast any judgement, understand that I don’t like to drink, and since I have been off anxiety medicine and opiates since I got sober, cannabis is a much safer and less complicated alternative. I mean, everyone needs a way to relax and unwind right?
Anyway, I made it home a little over an hour after my shift that day, pulling into my secluded and small mountain community of only about a dozen efficiency apartments, with a couple hours of sunlight still left on the hot summer’s day. I prepared dinner and started laying my clothes out for a long hike tomorrow to start my weekend off with. Who knows, maybe by the morning I would want to change a hike, into a full-blown weekend camping trip. Perhaps I would even invite Trey to come, if his wife would let him that is, which was about a fifty-fifty chance judging by past invitations. I would send Trey a message while preparing dinner, I told myself, and then I would let his decision decide whether tomorrow would be a hike, or full-on camping excursion.
Despite our differences, we were bonded by brotherhood and nostalgic memories, as we both met one another in our late teens, within my hometown in North Carolina. He moved out here over a decade ago, while I stayed in that hellhole another seven years before I got wise and strong enough to leave. There is nothing left in that town but drugs and darkness, a small town literally on the border of Georgia, so degenerates would traffic meth and heroin back from Atlanta, corrupting the weak, naïve and youthful until they are nothing more than lost souls, or demons. If I was to tell you that I was not, one of these weak and desperate individuals at one point in time, I would be lying, and maybe that’s the real reason I stayed and rotted there so long, but just because I began as something else, doesn’t mean that’s my story, no… that was just my story’s prologue.
After I extended Trey a camping invitation via messenger, I pulled my chicken breasts out and began to simmer them in extra virgin olive oil and Tiger sauce, while setting out a small, tall pot of water to boil my asparagus in. After that, I began to prepare my brown rice, along with some spices to help flavor it up, while putting some cherry pie strain cannabis into a grinder and prepping it for after dinner. I had also gotten a vape, but that was for secret tokes at work whilst listening to stories and walking the scenic wood line.
As I began cleaning my shotgun and inspecting camping gear for potential use the next day, the setting sun had snuck up on me, already starting its inevitable descent behind the Olympic Mountains, in which I lived at the base of, with our little log cabin studio apartments being about a mile or two up the mountains base, giving the five current residents a life of seclusion, while still remaining close enough to town for convenience.
I had just finished dinner and went outside to enjoy a bowl of some quality hybrid cannabis to enjoy the sunset, when it began. I sat down on my fold-out reclining camping chair, on my small front porch, exhaling sweet and gassy fumes of smoke as my mind began to unwind with my body in a true hybrid fashion. I calmly reclined back and gazed upon the setting sun slowly beginning to lay down behind the mountains in peaceful contemplation. I was watching my cloud of secondhand smoke just start to be pulled up towards my porch rafters, gliding into the gentle breeze that followed dusk that night, when I heard it.
A sonic boom unlike anything I had ever heard before issued throughout the atmosphere as the sun began to crest the mountains for its descent. The thunderous booming of the sound in the sky did not arrive alone, as a loud vibrating metallic ripping sound followed it like thunder chasing lightning, like far more than the sound barrier had just been broken. As the awful and alarming sounds tore through my senses mercilessly, I could hear something else, like loud undulating pockets of static energy, seeming to grow in noisy volume while making a roaring whomping sound, as if you were listening to loud binaural beats from a speaker so large it couldn’t even possibly exist. This continued until the blaring static and the rushing whomping sounds came together, like one unified frequency.
I could see my neighbor on his porch now too, and as he looked at me for some sort of explanation, all I could do was shake my head in mutual awe and fear of the happening before us. When I turned to look at Peter, my 62-year-old neighbor and acquaintance of almost three years now, I noticed something that started to alarm me even further, for the air around us was changing somehow, both taking on a greenish hue, and having seemed to spike in both pressure and electricity, making the hairs on my arms and back of my neck stand alert with unwavering attention.
I turned to the sunset, and what I saw began to tap into my mind like a leech sinking into flesh, but instead of drawing my blood, this incomprehensible sight threatened to steal my very sanity the longer I reluctantly gazed upon it.
The lower our sunset descended into the mountains, the higher something else was ever so slowly rising below it, matching it in size, shape and movement, except it was moving up as the sun moved down, merging together briefly as they passed one another by in opposing directions. It was becoming apparent where the greenish color in the air was coming from too, for as our familiar yellow sun fell behind the Olympics, a glowing green one was now quickly rising to take its place, moving obviously, almost menacingly towards the night sky.
I could hear Peter yelling my name from behind me, as the coalescing static frequency grew with the rising electricity in the air now, making it harder to hear him than I would have even thought possible. I heard a deep bark through the chaotic noises evolving around me, and turned to see Peter’s dog, a massive solid black German Shepard male named Midnight, that was about eighteen months old, run up his porch and into the house. Thank God, I heard Peter yell, as he shut the door behind the dog, enclosing it within the safety of his house, and then turned to me for the briefest moment, before the encroaching anomaly made him snap his neck skyward again. I joined Peter in redirecting my attention back to the sunset, only to somehow be even further surprised.
There was a violet light starting to irradiate all around it now, grabbing our attention even further. I fought hard and desperately to stare at our fading yellow ball of familiarity, as it was quickly being overtaken or eclipsed by something impossible. NO, WAIT, I remember yelling out loud as our sun was snuffed out, like a child watching one of its parents leave their room, walking out of their bedroom door at night, just as the boogeyman starts opening their closet door in response.
Just like that, the world was no more, and as the green sphere finished the pinnacle of its ascent, the noises all around us stopped so fast it almost felt violent, and that’s when I saw it.
The second the silence had swallowed up the cacophony of noises, and the ball of green had officially arrived in its splendid and horrific entirety, two things happened in unison.
Simultaneously a loud trumpet like baritone with a beautiful yet immensely powerful sound rang through the air, with such power and authority, that it felt like there was simply nothing in creation or time itself that was above it.
As my ears took in the terrifying yet divine sound, my eyes saw it, for about three seconds I witnessed it behind the green glowing sun, an entity defying everything I had ever learned in science, space or reality just by its mere presence. I gazed upon a Titan, and not an unfamiliar one at that, for anyone who had ever dabbled in horror, supernatural or any form of occult study would notice that shape without ever daring to put name to it. I certainly would not say his name, in absolute stark fear that it would hear me, and those green eyes would find mine like two emerald spotlights. The eyes were the first thing I really noticed, as the alien sun and its master made their debut into our world. The eyes were sharp angry looking slants, as if it was squinting hard in determination around a large head, with dozens of moving tentacles hanging down and all around where its mouth was. A dark scaly, almost algae green skin covered its whole body, with large dragon-like wings unfurling from its back, as enormous claws began curling inward in a clinching gesture, as if it was immediately ready to take some form of action. The moment I noticed the colossal entity in its full and terrifying entirety, was the moment it disappeared completely, and something else came through.
As the Titan vanished from sight, the surrounding violet light exploded to life around the alien sun, pouring into our reality like it was pushed forth through a great and violent volcano, flooding our world with a torrent of beautiful unfamiliar light. I called the colors green and violet, but, there was no exact match for the otherworldly illumination that violated the once pristine and familiar nights sky, those were just the two closest colors I could fathom at the time.
Like a tidal wave of preternatural origin, these seemingly sentient lights washed away our nights sky so quick and relentlessly, that it was as if they never existed at all, like the world I knew was just a nice dream, and the terrors of the cosmos had come to wake me up and reveal the horror of reality once again. It only took mere seconds for everything I have ever known to be erased, to be cancelled out and replaced, like these lights were paint thinner upon the canvas of our existence. Without a warning, or time to adjust or even comprehend, a new world was here now, a metaphysical replacement for the fundamental laws of science that were such an integral part of our existence… of our very sanity.
The almost invasive silence started to lift, being replaced by a steady and almost melodic humming sound, as the violet lights above lowered all around us about twenty feet off the ground, like a colorful swirling fog. Staring at the abnormal lights for too long proved to be alarming all in itself, for within the collage of colorful movement, something could be made out, images of writhing and massive eldritch beings, in which every second you peered at their form, it seemed to bring about a maddening of the mind, as if simply gazing upon these beings was just too much for the human psyche to comprehend.
Forcing myself to look away from the lights was both the easiest and hardest thing I had ever done in my life, for you instantly wanted the violation of their gaze to stop, while simultaneously wanting, no NEEDING, to see more, as if the intrusion they manifested within your mind and soul was simply the price of endless knowledge, and infinite wisdom of the universe.
I remember when I was in my early twenties living in North Carolina, I had an episode of sleep paralysis, and having to keep my eyes shut tight while feverishly trying to rock back in forth in order to break whatever hold I was overtaken by. It started with my toes, moving them up and down, before I gained control of my hips, making them rock and sway each way until I forced myself to life all at once, aggressively throwing myself off the couch and panting hard after it was all over. Breaking the hold of the entities within the lights was very similar, and I wonder if I hadn’t gained experience in dealing with ethereal attackers prior, if I could have still broken the all-consuming gaze of these alien giants.
After a few moments of regaining my composure, and finally making it back to my feet, I noticed that Peter was still staring upward, apparently unable to relinquish whatever hold the celestial behemoth held him in. The longer I recovered from my own experience looking at the entity within the lights, the more I began to feel like myself again, like the monster was not just looking at me, but changing me somehow, and the longer the intrusive alien images flooded my conciseness, the less I felt like myself and the more I felt like I was being replaced by something. As I became stable on my feet once more, I noticed Peter trembling, while clutching his railing with an iron grip, still caught in the metamorphosizing stare of the eldritch being.
C’mon Pete, I said encouragingly, yet under my breath, hoping he would be strong enough to break the ethereal hold he was mesmerized in. As blood started to trickle down Peters nose, I knew he could not do it alone, and without giving myself time to change my mind, I ran over to his porch and immediately grabbed his shoulders, ripping him away from the entities hold. He was harder to move than I could have ever imagined, with his grip on the railing only relenting when I put all my strength and body weight behind the last pull, making us both fall to the wooden porch floor rather roughly. Upon Peter returning to himself, he began to throw up a lime green bile, along with a little blood, before he eventually stopped wrenching and began to pant heavily, until finally starting to settle down just a bit.
It will pass, I told him, just relax and breathe. I also began to notice something else while I was checking his pulse through his wrist, for as I grabbed his hand to put my fingers on his radial artery, I saw small black lines start to disappear, like something was in his veins, but lost its anchor to him as soon as he broke from the ominous stare of the entity. What was that thing doing to him, I thought in absolute horror, what would have happened if I didn’t force his gaze away?
As Peter started to tremble, I temporarily abandoned that thought, and quickly ran over to my place to grab a blanket for him. I would have just borrowed one from his house, but didn’t want to chance letting midnight out, that dog was everything to Peter, and to be honest, I had developed an attachment to the dog too, always coming over for scraps every time I grilled outside, laying his head on my foot patiently as I would flip whatever meat I was cooking… he was certainly loved by almost all the residents. By the time I made it back with a blanket, Peter was starting to say words again, although it took a little while until he started making any kind of sense. It needs us, wasn’t supposed to follow the other across, it sees, and it shows, and now Heaven and Hell have seen, have watched it see us…US, we are the portals, sentient gateways of flesh and bone!
Peter, it’s alright, it’s over, I said trying to bring him back to reality, calm down, you’re okay. I wrapped him in the blanket and kept reassuring him of his safety, although as I glanced around nervously, I could not help but wonder if we were truly safe at all, for what other dark surprises did this unearthly phenomenon usher with it?