Bête Noire

Spindly, crooked fingers beckon towards you, eyes betraying their spurious yet devil-may-care schemes. An almost visible draft of frigid wind spins languidly around your torso, like you have just strayed unaware into a spider’s web of silk.

The silk has flaws. You do too.

Gazing into pupil-less, vacant gaps, you shudder at how they take in the pendant hanging on a silver chain at your neck. Golden yellow against the insipid white of your skin. The holy tome lies two feet away from your quaking feet, a betrayal of sin. What you are seeing right now. What you are about to go through.

Blood trickles out through the crack of its open mouth, putrid breath staining your nostrils and the graphite ground beneath. You cannot seem to look away.

Come to us, it croaks in a voice, surely, of the undead. You cannot put a name to it. Even an attempt of the highest degree to search your mind with combs of the finest teeth yields no result; it is not giving allowance of such blasphemy. We can help you. Help you fulfill the deepest desires locked within you. Come to us and we will elucidate all, help you accrue the ubiquitous, soul-searing wants tearing your conscience…

You struggle against its iron-clad grip. Morbid fear suffuses your glands, your pores, your every muscle. Pervades your senses. Clouds your belief.

Behind you, the simplistic dome of the sacred rises, scalding your vision.

The seemingly liver-spotted fingers morph, oddly fascinatingly, into gargantuan tentacles. Wrapping around your neck, it feels like an imperceptible alloy of hard metal and soft flesh. The hold leaves you gasping for air, aching to be released from this dry, cataleptic soul of bitterness. You want out. You want to be able to believe. A swirling redness clenches at your jugular vein, halting the very same corpuscles from their journey to your life organ. The biting confusion makes you want to scream, to pound your fists against the unrelenting cage it has boxed you in until it breaks.

It is not permitting you to.

Get away from me! The hoarseness of your voice cracks its façade just a minute bit. I don’t want to follow you. My heart belongs to Him. You can’t… you won’t…

But can you see Him? It cackles, still training its literally bottomless gaze on me. The cross feels heavy. Do you know Him? Do you revere Him? Do you pray to him? Is He all you think about every single day of your paltry life? Do you truly read that book—it nods towards the leather bound text—faithfully, like a true servant?

Lachrymal sodium chloride prickles your eyelids, forcing you to evade its question. The mocking whispers close in, leaving your mind in a whirlwind of uncertainty as the sky fades into a kaleidoscope of maroon and faint blue. A weird colour, but frankly, the maroon resembles your inner battle too much.

Somebody is yelling incoherently.

You try to wrench your hand out of its slimy hold. If You are there, please… all I need is to feel your presence, know indubitably that I am Yours…

A dichotomy of assurance will be your saviour.

Child, He whispers. You pry away from its grip, stumbling back. You cannot see me, but you can feel me. Do not let it overpower you, for it is not indomitable. Let it not be the light unto your path, but let my love guide you through your darkest nights. All you have to know is that I will always be in your heart. Let it not replace what you have always known. Be rid of your cumbersome worries, my child…

Forget Him and his shtick! You can barely count the number of ungula reaching for your entity again. I can show you the world, take you to places you never even had knowledge of; let you be rid of your clandestine, ludicrous beliefs. Why believe in Him? He is just a gimmick of Man’s imagination, a product of covert lies. He does not exist. Believe in me!

Distressed? Worried?

No. It is starting to sound desperate, you think.

A jarring roar assaults your cochlea, rattling your bones into sense. You see not the coffin anymore, and the revulsion ebbs a little.

Is it starting to work?

Still, you hesitate. You admit, in a show of folly, that you are torn in between. You have not wholly served Him. He does not deserve you in your kingdom where the flowers never fade, unlike your own wavering faith. You are ashamed…

…And turning to hell.

You turn back helplessly towards the creature. Its illimitable gaze pierces your yin and yang, melds them into a spectacular medley of black and white. Who do you choose, human? Mark my words, He will only be your downfall. Come to us and we will give you everything, more than what your precious Jesus can give you… do you think His manna will sustain you? Do not be a fool!

At these words, a sort of enlightenment suddenly sticks its allegorical straw into you. You feel welcome warmth spread within your stomach area. The blood seems to rush back into your heart, pumping rich oxygen throughout your body. You no longer desire to keel over, damning the faeries to Nothing.

The finger you lift trembles with a newfound revelation.

You realise.

Its choler no longer confounds you.

Do as I tell you to and you will be the luckiest person on Earth… its voice rings tauntingly. Smothering. Engulfing.

You push back.

Because - it would not be wont to ruin your loyalty.

It is not you who can give me what I want, your voice rings out with crisp distinctiveness. Because I do not want what you think I want. You misunderstand me. He is mine. He is in me, but you are far away. I will not submit to you… fearsome as you portray yourself to be, you are nothing. Nothing.

What balderdash you speak…!

It tries to take hold of your neck again, intent on squeezing it till rivulets of haemoglobin mesh with groundwater.

But it cannot. Instead, it seems to melt into one runny mess of ruination, its last call. You watch it falter; open its dastardly mouth for one last attempt at wanton vilification.

You imprudent runt, no one can save you now! Do not come running to me again! It spits hellfire. I should not have even wasted my breath on a pusillanimous traitor like y-

Hell is not Utopia, you insolent beast. But you do not say it out loud. Instead, You smile at Him.

Slick tentacles scrabble hopelessly for something, anything, only to evaporate into nothing but a few specks of worthless dirt. Wholly disintegrating, barely within the line of peripheral vision. Maybe it is just you, but at this, you are choked by the overwhelming desire to clutch the air, to feel that something has truly changed.

It lets out a last piteous wail to ascend in a pillar of pitch black conflagration.

An existence of a nonentity, at last.

I know You, you whisper. He nods. The numbing air goes up a few degrees Centigrade. I do not deserve to enter your holy realm again. I have sinned, my Lord… but I am willing to redeem myself. Will you let me…?

That is enough, He says. Come, child of Jesus. Fill the void that is in you… and banish the iniquity from your heart always.

You take His hand, feeling the eponymous founder of Mother Earth residing in your veins (ad infinitum, at last). And in one breathtaking moment, you rise from the embers of subjugation, shedding the viscous membrane of deficit never to plague you again.

You will breathe once more.

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A/N – Inspired by a friend’s encounter with spiritual dryness, albeit temporary, and my own (only the idea of it), as well as a rather interesting IM conversation I had last night. Certain phrases (only two or so, really) are from the Bible, should you recognise them.