The air is thick. A cold tickle creeps across my brow as if I had broken out in a sweat, but when I slide the back of my hand across my forehead to wipe it away, it feels dry and the cold tickle remains. Strange too that I felt the pressure of my hand but nothing else. No heat. It must be really freezing in here. A tile falls off the far wall with a clatter and breaks. The room has my attention again, fear roars up and grips me in its bear claws.
A couple of thin bands of white light braid their way into the room through the makeshift door. Weaving and winding the tendrils of purist white coil against the walls and debris, pushing the walls back to where they were; the ceiling too easing that uncomfortable cloying claustrophobia. Out of the square chasm a blinding shape emerges. The source of the tendrils of light. I have never seen anything so bright, so white, and so pure. It's painful. I have to shield my eyes as it works its way into the centre of the room illuminating the entire space.
When my eyes adjust, I see the tub I climbed out of is overflowing and yet I can hear the harsh gulping and sucking sounds that the drain is making. Viscous water with cloudy ringlets of blood snakes its way over the edge, down the side cutting sharp grooves in the grime on the floor before rushing itself into a vortex over a grate in the floor near the base of the bright thing. Looking around at the newly revealed scenery I notice there are rusted, double-pronged meat hooks hung at even intervals around the perimeter of the room only a few inches from the wall. They hang over darkly stained steel troughs. There is not one thing that is comforting about what is being revealed to me here!
My eyes dart from one end of the clotted room to the other taking in the entirety of the horror show and retaining nothing. It's all a blur. The braided light shifts over the grate at the centre of the room and begins to coalesce. The blob of light grows tall and round trilling more light down over itself towards the floor like a hot slag pile at the mouth of a mine. It piles and cascades, piles and cascades; a fountain cycling its own incandescence. Around the white hole that is this thing at the centre of the room little airy pigments spark and fade like a pulsar in and out at the edges of the sliding molten light, until it finally forms a pure, heroin-white body - sort of, at least not like any body I've ever seen - standing in front of me. It's extended slender arms oscillate and surge, firing off little bolts of static as they ripple with the tide of energy flowing from its pointed crown down to the toeless mass of feet. Its face slides like liquid putty and then solidifies into a round blob divided into four pie shaped sections by two wide gashes crisscrossing its flesh. They contort into what could be a smile and the bottom two sections of its flesh open like Venus petals and something protrudes out of the mandibles and flicks around as if licking its lips - if it had any - that's when I notice the particles of gold flecked sparks floating in spritely dance, like moats in a tractor beam of light - I'm getting lighter, the kind of feeling that follows a lot of blood loss. Woozy and tired I faint. A tiny narrow appendage connects us, crisscrossing the flesh is a model of the universe. We sit across from one another at the the polar edges of the expansion. There is a release, a tiny audible click, weight fills me and I fall to my knees. The appendage is gone and the universe evaporates as the thing closes its mandibles.
"Delicious. There is always a little residue left in you beasts…" It does a small curtsy, its voice is electric and full of static as it says, "I am Af - Agent of light."
"I don't feel so good." I say as the spinning room picks up speed.
"No I do not imagine that you would. But here we are, you must be the thorn. the qliphoth; the core; depending on the cultural perspective that is."
"I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have a clue what's going on, or where the hell I am for that matter."
"Ha! Hell, yes. That is an interesting word choice. But, don't play dumb with me Yves. I know very well who you are. Who you've been consorting with. You would do well to make better choices in the future, if there is any future left for you. I do not suppose you see the fruit that you've picked, what you've brought about?"
"I can't see anything. I have no fucking clue what you're talking about. I've been in this goddamned room for what feels like forever. I'm filthy and tired. I don't know who I am. All these memories and feelings keep heaping themselves on top of me and I can't remember ever having any of them before the moment I woke up in here. I don't know these people that keep pushing to the front of my mind. Condemning me for things I have no memory of doing, or being a part of."
"Ah yes, well; as I have said, Hell is a very interesting word. You are in this very moment sitting in one of many sorting spaces. While you waited you have been visiting this husk of a man's private Hell. He was a suicide you see. Brought on by the guilt of very, very poor choices. He didn't realize it at the time, nor I am sure, did he care. He wasn't much of a pious man, he barely believed. He followed convenience rather than faith. So we whispered in his ear, until he woke up and realized the error of his ways. But alas, we took it too far. It was our hope to send him on a path to 'forgiveness,' to seek refuge in the lord. In the end the guilt was too much and he took himself from us. You are in his body because you have also fled from us. But not in as sickening a way, I might add. You were pulled by that bastard Elohim, across the 'Canvass.'" The creature, Af does some awkward attempt at finger quotes, which is mind bending to see from a creature made entirely of light. Then he continued, "the 'Outside.' a space of two dimensions before and after the imagination. Another unconsecrated place that lies beyond our reach. But Theol was able to get just the bare tip of a finger on you, and voila here you are. Though, I cannot see you fully hidden in that sack of skin, that... filthy husk. So I cannot imagine why. Anything that is comfortable in one of those, is not to be trifled with."
"What do you want with me?"
"I am to be your escort. Theol wishes to have, for better or worse, a word with you. I am to lead you back inside, to the fatherland; into the 'Storm.'"
With a snobbish air, Af lifts its face away and seems to actually sniff the air with its tongue - its ear holes twitch - very reptilian for something made of incandescent light. It looked as if it were listening to some unheard noise. It's body convulses sending blue bolts of static flashes out and a single ash grey feather seesaws to the floor near me. I don't think he noticed. I can't stop staring at it. I close my eyes and when I open them I am standing right over the feather. As if possessed to pick it up, I do. Tiny barbs prick me sharply stinging, tiny dots of blood blossom on the pads of my fingers and thumb. All of a sudden things get more cloudy and then clear instantly, there is an electric tingling that starts in my toes and begins to rise through the legs of this body an element heating up. The heat spreading from the tips of the toes through the feet and continuing all the way up, melting the rigor away and then I'm following Af. Arms pumping, legs bending and stepping. It was the craziest sensation. We stepped through the hole in the wall. It rearranges itself back into a solid wall once we are through. Af turns back to me with a fish hook sneer that is unpracticed and utterly disturbing as he glides. I can't do anything but follow awkwardly stumbling along.
I don't know who or what this Theol character is but Af is unnerving and this place is dank and dark. It's dirty and it smells like death and rot. Whatever, whoever keeps a place like this is not someone I wanna do business with. The only problem is that I'm not moving myself. My limbs have a mind of their own and they are moving. Lock step with Af.