The Second Coming
A story of prayers and their answers
He’d expected it to taste like licorice, but as soon as the pellet hit his tongue his mouth was filled with a foul tarry flavor. He swallowed it quickly, hoping to rid himself of the taste, but instead the pellet seemed to drag its pungency down deeper into his body, saturating his organs, staining his tissues.
He’d bought it in the back of a club, from a guy hanging out near the DJ booth wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He’d heard rumors of its effects from a few of the more artistically minded people he knew. He’d listened to the scare stories on the news and rolled his eyes at them. He’d browsed message boards that spoke of the anti-pope, and agents of the Vatican cooking up toxic chemicals in back-alley slums. It was enough smoke he’d be interested in the fire.
But here, now, back in his apartment, clawing at his throat on the couch he’d inherited when his grandmother passed away, he wondered if he’d made a mistake.
The blackness of it seemed to soak through his body, to stain his skin, to infect the world around him. Color leached from the world, leaving him in black and white, a thrashing figure in a film from yesteryear. Then all the white went away. Then the gray. Then it was just black. Everything black. Everything dark.
And then he was drifting, untethered, unmoored, still with that vile taste in his mouth, his lungs, his eyes, his ears.
And then he was somewhere. Not his living room. Not upon his couch. He was lying on the floor, his face pressed to the floor. And it was so cold.
-WELCOME-
A word that was more and less than a word, that was an impression, that was a thumb pressed against his soul. The sensation of welcome was thundered into him. And yet also it was not a welcome. There was no warmth in that not-word. There was only more cold and the absolute conviction that he should not raise his eyes, that if he gazed upon the source of that not-voice that he would see both everything and nothing, and in the attempt to reconcile the two he would be lost forever.
-YOU HAVE COME TO ASK SOMETHING OF ME-
Or at least that was how he parsed the violation of thoughts in his skull. That was the shape he felt his neurons manipulated into. And of course it was true. Why else would someone slip a pellet of Second Coming into their mouth and seek an audience with God? Why else but to prostrate themselves before Him and beg?
But here and now: how to say it? How to put the cravenness of his profane desire into words before this… thing?
And yet, even in his questioning of himself, it seemed to know.
-YOU SHALL HAVE HER BACK-
And the gratitude almost overcame him. He wept, his tears freezing on his cheeks before they could fall.
-BUT IN RETURN- God intoned -I SHALL ASK SOMETHING OF YOU-
#
Months later, he stood, aching, sweating, arms trembling. Beside him, Katerina poured half a flask of water over her head, downed the other half. He was parched, desperate for fluids, but he didn’t ask her for any. It was easier not to ask than to be refused. Instead, he licked salty sweat from his lip, went back to his task.
Around them, others did the same. The dull dead-eyed weight of the labor compelled them. There was no time to think, to consider, to regret. There was only the labor. They had agreed to it. They had struck the bargain. One could not renege on a deal with God.
At the day’s end, they stumbled down the steps of the great ziggurat. It rose almost two hundred yards up from the desert floor now. To fall from its steps would be lethal, often was, as the pounding sun beat delirium into the workers’ minds, sent them stumbling, sun-blinded towards oblivion. But he and Katerina made it back to their barracks, collapsed exhausted on the floor.
They woke and sustenance had been provided, as mysteriously as it had been each day since they arrived here. He and Katerina ate in silence. He licked his lips, tried again to think of a way to explain that he hadn’t thought it would be like this, hadn’t realized he was consigning her to this as well. He failed again. She picked up their single shared flask of water. He didn’t complain.
Again they ascended, hauling their load of stone with them. Again they built. Again they descended, fetched a fresh load of stone. Up and down. Up. Down. Up and up rose the ziggurat, inching towards the heavens, towards God, and with each inch the terror in his gut grew, and the coldness in Kristina swelled.
And then, days or months or years later, he placed a stone and he knew that with it something had changed, something had happened, something irrevocable, and inevitable, and holy. And he closed his eyes and when he opened them everything was black, everything was frozen. The sky was full of ink, and the stones he had helped raise were all the color of basalt, and the sand below them was like so much ash. And there was only one star in the heavens, and it was descending. A great ship of black metal. A vessel that had voyaged untold eons, that had passed through realities of which he could not conceive, that had been called here, beckoned out of space and time by this finger he had helped build upon the earth.
The ship landed. It settled. It emanated darkness.
Katerina began to pray.
So did he.
So did they all.
A door in the vessel opened, a pit yawned, a maw widened, and from it, God—in all his nightmare raiment—stepped once more upon the world that had summoned him.
Thank you for reading Something’s a Little Off. If you’re interested in sampling a few other stories, and reading an excerpt of my upcoming novella, why not check out the sampler linked to here?