Since time immemorial, the sun and moon have been accepted as gods. The Aztecs worshiped the sun, and Egypt’s most potent deity was Ra, the sun god. If the sun was the God of “blessings, luck, and goodness,” the moon was the opposite; throughout history, the moon has been a symbol of ominousness. The word “lunatic” comes from the word “lunar,” meaning moon; that’s all we need to know about the notoriety of the moon.
The moon has long been one of the places humans have wanted to explore. Since the beginning of time, humans have had hopes of exploring the moon. What is the single object of light that shines at night, the white object in the sky that watches over us? Is it God?
At the turn of the 20th century, many of the technologies of the Industrial Revolution began to become popular. Cars, telephones, trains, steamships, and other technologies have made life easier for humans. Still, at the beginning of their popularization, they were created with the sole purpose of killing people and destroying the world. The worst war in human history, a catastrophe with the highest number of deaths, days colored by hatred and madness, the atomic bomb dropped on Japan, and everything went quiet as if nothing had happened.
The two wars have caused millions of deaths. The wounds of battle, the agony of famine, and the crimes committed against them by the man himself. Because of these wars, many technologies were sealed away, called evil technologies, like the nuclear bomb.
After the war, everyone looked at the moon again, this time at the wider sky. The concept of ‘space’ became popular, and people wanted to go to the moon.
The reaction to space travel was very negative, with the world showing extreme disgust at the madness of Nazi Germany for launching rockets. Still, after persuasion by politicians and speeches about progress by organizations with a sense of humanity, humans began their journey into space.
In 1957, the Soviet Union sent a puppy named Laika Into space, and in 1961, a Soviet man named Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space.
Between 1961 and 1969, many people planned to go beyond space to the moon.
In July that year, Neil Armstrong arrived on a rocket bound for the moon. Four days later, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and returned to Earth six days later. The United States was the true winner of the space race.
The victory did not bring a lot of satisfaction because scientists craved more influence from the Americans on the moon orbits. It was not just landing a rocket that mattered to the Americans; they wanted to establish a civilization.
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Three years after Neil Armstrong’s moon landing, a rocket called Mythos took eight astronauts to the moon. I was one of the eight pilots of the spacecraft and also the commander, and although I had never been to the moon, I was chosen as the person most familiar with space life; having lived on the space station for several weeks, I was deemed the most experience and thus were tasked to go there.
Our mission was to find out if there was life on the moon. There is a myth in places like Korea that there are rabbits on the moon, and some scientists have debated whether there is life on the moon. Eight of us traveled to the moon to find life or at most minor signs of life to see the end of that debate.
First of all, the briefing for the mission itself was very uninformative: “Look for life on the moon,” the government said that the space agency would tell us more, but they only showed us a few pictures of the moon and some pictures of the surface.
We don’t know what it means to have life on the moon, whether we will find animals, plants, or anything else. I wondered.
When the rocket left the atmosphere, I received another photo from the space agency, and that’s when I realized our real goal, why we were going to investigate the moon.
The pictures they showed me were beyond my wildest dreams. There was a hole in the moon’s surface, with traces of something in front of it and a red liquid that looked like blood, like someone had died there. I thought about whether it might be animal tracks. Still, given the lack of air on the moon, it’s not an environment that Earth’s animals would be able to live in, and I realized it was a giant, which means that life on the moon is most likely not Earth life, but life naturally occurring on the moon itself.
I thought I was being asked to discover life, not find it. The organism found in the photo was our key to finding life on the moon. I thought my mission was to “find life on the moon,” but no, this photo was so bizarre that it could never be understood by human common sense, and I realized that the goal was not to “find life” but to “uncover the truth of this photo.”
There was a commotion on board the spacecraft; some of the astronauts debated each other’s hypotheses and logic to find out the truth behind this photo, but nothing we came up with all day.
Three days before the moon landed, another photo was sent to us. There was a skull lying near the hole. It didn’t look like a human skull, but it was definitely a skull. Our thoughts turned even more to fear; suddenly, we started to think that we would die on the moon. What is on the moon, why are there skeletons on the surface, and is it safe for humans to go there? Once I realized it was a “skull-shaped rock” that day, I kept heading to the moon, but my anxiety persisted. The skull symbolizes death, and the sight of a skull-shaped rock only made me feel like I was looking at an omen…
One day before the moon landing, we started to regret going to the moon, and some of the guys in our unit began to cry. The space agency showed us another photo, and what we found in the hole confirmed our ominous suspicions: it was a skeleton, and worse, it was someone’s skeleton. A skeleton in the shape of a human head. It wasn’t a rock; it was a skull. I
Immediately thought about diverting the rocket and fleeing to Earth, but it was too late. The Earth is nowhere to be seen from the back of the missile, and the moon looks a little faded.
Twelve hours before the lunar landing, we had our last supper, prayed, and prepared to land on the moon, initially out of eight of us, all but four of whom were to carry detectors and other instruments for exploration, and four of whom were to carry weapons for protection, but six of us were armed. After that photo was sent.
Seven hours before the moon landing, an astronaut named “Mac” on the rocket reported to the space agency that he had spotted life moving on the lunar surface, and the communication ended with the agency saying they were investigating.
Two hours before the moon landing, we traveled to the top of the moon and prepared to land the rocket. After confirming that we were at our respective locations, we communicated, and I began to land the rocket in a vertical position. Twenty minutes later, one of the guns disappeared into the back of the rocket. In zero gravity, it was impossible to retrieve the gun, so I continued to land to retrieve it after landing on the moon.
An hour earlier, one of the agents had said he’d seen life moving, and now we were on the lunar surface with expectations and worries.
The rocket landed five kilometers away from the American flag. Those of us with guns led the way and walked to the American flag, where we planted another one, feeling only slightly comforted.
The researchers led the way in the Star Spangled Banner, and we started to follow them, weapons or not; minutes passed; I don’t know if time exists on the moon or if the concept of time is different, but after 10 minutes of walking in Earth time, we found a high hill.
We helped each other up a very steep hill, we helped each other, we held each other’s ropes, we held each other’s hands, and ten minutes later, the researchers, the combatants, they were all up the hill, and everybody saw it, and they found it right away, the hole. Right next to the hole was the skull.
Once the researchers had gotten as close as they could, all the combatants except me went down to cover them, and I told them to signal me if they found anything unusual here.
In two teams, one researcher and one soldier walked toward the hole. The first team to walk got halfway there and suddenly turned around; they called out to the other groups and said something about something, so I decided to go over to them.
They were holding a skull, the one we had seen in the photos. We were standing right where the creature had died, which meant there was a good chance there was another one out there somewhere… I thought this wasn’t a moon creature or an alien skull.
It was a human skull. The corpse of an Earthling, we don’t know why it’s on the moon, but perhaps we realize that this means that someone lived here, or something here killed this person.
We all walked to the hole, watching each other’s backs. Everyone walked carefully to the hole, including me. After a while, we realized how big the hole was after only seeing it in pictures.
As a rough estimate, the hole was about the size of Times Square.
This is what cosmic horror is all about. We were unable to move in front of the hole.
It overwhelmed us with its sheer size, so we didn’t even contemplate moving further.
One of us started walking backward, and we decided to go back to the ship first to organize a plan and explore the hole.
As we started to move, a loud earthquake shook the moon’s surface. We froze in horror, and an audible sound came behind us.
Something was coming up from the bottom of the hole, a creature, no, something that looked like a plant, and it was three times larger than the rocket we had come in on, and it wasn’t just one entity, but several at the same time, and the ‘plant’ was made of tentacles, so it looked like a Kraken.
A large shadow picked up a researcher, and its tentacles descended as the shadow grew smaller. When the tentacles came back up, there was blood where the researcher had been, and the researcher’s body was nowhere to be found.
When we saw that, we started running away.
The tentacles continued to attack, the number of survivors dropping from seven to six in an instant; each tentacle descending meant a fatality.
I ordered my men to split up unless they wanted to be annihilated. That was a mistake.
Another tentacle emerged from the hole, which promptly lowered its tentacle 30 meters from where I was standing, crushing one of my colleagues.
Another tentacle appeared, this time attacking a researcher running away from me in a westerly direction. Upon landing, the tentacle swept across the lunar surface like a vacuum cleaner, and one of the farther researchers was knocked down by the shockwave and never got up. Then, another tentacle rose from the ground, seemingly the tentacles’ leader or perhaps the main body. As the tentacle, many times the size of our rocket appeared, a loud roar echoed across the moon, and it reached straight for me.
Thinking I was going to die, I immediately rolled to the outer edge of the shadows.
As the shadow grew smaller and the tentacle descended, the moon shook with a significant vibration.
The tentacle drew, paused, and then slowly disappeared into the hole.
The bloodstains were on the lunar surface like roads.
There were no bodies of my comrades. When I saw that, I ran back to the rocket and took off without signaling the space agency.
I traveled for a week without sleep, and upon arriving on Earth, I was detained in quarantine, where I could barely sleep, but even in my dreams, I saw my comrades bleeding and dying. When the quarantine ended, I immediately retired as an astronaut. I found another job and made a living, but the memory of that day is still embedded in my brain.
20 years have passed since that catastrophe that nobody knows about.
To this day, I can’t look at the moon at night anymore. I think of it as my comrade’s grave, a place where the devil lives.