“I Am The God Of Hell-fire, and I Bring You...”
(Edit #3)
For a tall while, Buck Holland was known in his town as the old shit-kicking grump with a bad hip. Putting folks down had nearly always been his way. Many days in the past you’d find him spitting from his balcony at the ant crowds down below. He was an ex-cop with a grudge at the ever-changing world, and now with his bum hip and the Trypanosomiasis it was changing him from the inside out. Trypanosomiasis had been his lifes’ cross following a crucial trip to Sandals what might has well have been Hell last month with an ace gal that wouldn’t be a returning customer. Now he’d been scouring South Beach for shells which stood for answers he sorely needed owing to a fractured mind that could barely compartimentalize.
All his clumsy nodding off back at his apartment might fly if his bud Jamie shot junk, but no luck of that sort in store for either of them. For Jamie, it had become a godawful drag to hang with Buck now more then ever. Buck bitched about his death, he bitched about his living, he bitched about the horrible haunted times they now lived in in comparison to the good old days, and he bitched about modern food with all it's perservatives. There wasn’t one thing that settled well with Buck, and this proved perplexing for one as simple minded as Jamie. Jamie would be happy with a McDonalds McGriddle and a 40 ounce, and he couldn’t understand all the unending shit that Buck went on about High Fructose Corn Syrup this and Gluten that. That and Buck’s foul flatulence brought on by drugs for the Trypanosomiasis killed all their fun flat. They could never get a decent card game going through the thick green clouds of heinous gas!
A mad array of sights’d flash through Buck’s mind while he was day-dreaming, or “sailing” as he called it. An implant of an additional world sprung up with the authenticity of reality in his continual drifting vacancy from his real life stint. It only came to him briefly, but these frequent flooding dreams of sorts were a happy and spacious oasis from all the dirty doubts of the day, and endless worries that plagued him on the reg. He'd imagine being surrounded by huge, mysterious castles with jutting turrets, surrounded by woodlands disappearing far off into the untamed wilderness. Birds from a distant past would sing each other love songs as he reveled in the crystal clear scene which only stayed visible for a short while. In the beginning, how he would achieve these nearly comatose states of bliss were by playing his old Lawrence Welk or Neil Diamond records when he was alone. More, and more, he was still managing to slip off to his dream world when people were in the same room with him. It was beginning to be a thing he felt that he was losing the will to control.
Sweatier, and sweatier each time, with darker rings around his eyes, Buck would pop up like black toast from these enigmatic naps! He’d wildly snatch a scratch pad; or anything that floated in the realm of his manic orbit to better illustrate his spirited flights of fancy. His vision wouldn’t stay lucid all morning though, so like a failing boner Buck would have to chase it, but boy, did it blow Jamie’s mind the following day when Buck would share! Variably it often seemed like it was by unseen malignant spirits that his hopping hands had unconsciously been summoned from some distant world unknown. Buck felt akin to a begging child dipping his wooden bucket in a questionable stream that was always rich with rations of glistening enligtening life that nourished him thoroughly through and through. He wanted for more out of his life, and he didn’t care where he got it, except at night sometimes, when it wouldn’t rush out from Buck’s pen, and he wondered how he could harness this incredible feeling of flirting with the all mysterious Goddess of Creativity herself. He’d been scrawling drawings lately that were his link between the two worlds. His franticly manic drawings conveyed dark, and dizzy works of a lost soul who’d passed over a minefield of sorts, and quite possibly not made it over the threshold to the other side. The brush strokes were thick, fantastic, and at times irregular, but they perfectly revealed the torments of a specific locale somewhere in this universe or the next that had previously been untapped and unmarked by man. Buck’s growing addiction to his tormented hobby of self realization through art begged him to hone the ability better. This had been what had pushed Buck to finally enroll himself in Scientology courses in the building next door to his complex, starting with the ‘Personality Test’, despite his friend Jamie’s dogged protests against joining the mysterious and controversial church.
“It’s a fucking cult, man! What the fuck are you doing? All that New Age shit is just after you’re last cent. What you oughta do is just keep drawing your damn doodles, and send ’em everywhere! God willing, a publisher will catch wind of them, and poof, people will gobble that shit up like it’s a shark feeding frenzy.”
“That’s not why I’m letting myself be a vessel for this shit though, Jamie! I’m doing it to shine a light on a world that I can’t see, but only get vague snippets of from time to time. If I could reign all this crazy nightmarish shit together in a pile under the lights of a good and sound philosophy, I could better understand my crazy dreams, and see if it’s some sort of vision that I’m dialing up, or if it’s just a damned neuron firing in my brain somewhere.”
“I think you’re wanting this too badly, man. I wish you would think this over.”
The most frightful trial of all was on Buck’s first day of ‘Auditing’ by the church. After exploring the spacious and well manicured grounds of the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, he was probed by the most fiercely disarming steel-blue eyes of a gorgeous women in her twenties with blonde shoulder length hair, dressed in a blue uniform that resembled someone of elevated importance. She appeared so professionally made up like she was in the Navy or a Coast Guard of some sort. On her shirt, she had a tiny gold pin that resembled a snake swimming up her blouse. Underneath the whole ensemble, Buck had a real hard time reading her though. Her eyes were like hermetically sealed man-hole covers that had been well secured against letting any outside forces in. As he faded in and out of consciousness due to an oncoming dream, she immediately inserted two steel bars, in each of his hands, that were connected to an automated unit in front of her that was supposed to read his bad reactive thoughts, or so she claimed.
“Am I supposed to hold these things in a tight grip, or can it be loose?”
“It would be better to hold them tight, but a little looseness in the grip should be ok I think. Remember, Scientology is only as true as it is for you, and what is true for you is what you have observed yourself. LRH said that.”
“O, he did, did he? Now what do you want me to do?”
“Take a deep breath, hold it for a moment, and let it out through your mouth.”
Buck sucked air up through his nose, and then let it tumble out of his mouth. He felt a little obstruction in his right nostril. The Scientologist turned her head quizically, as she paid attention to the device that was hooked up to the two bars in Buck’s hands. It was obviously producing some unseen results.
“Are you well fed, and well rested?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a present time problem?”
This question caused some trouble for Buck, as he had to turn it over in his mind for quite a bit before answering. Sure he had problems, but a ‘time problem’ had never occured to him ’til just now.
Suddenly, Buck had tumbled and been thrust into some version of farm country, and he was without a stitch on at night in the wildness of this foreign, yet familiar scene. His noctabulistic stupor drug him by his balls into an empty field, and then cast him away just as quick. Naked, amongst winds, howling down at him like razors on his skin from many points, so as to imagine that the circle he was in was more like a star of living energy, Buck suddenly became aware of a Big, Black Thing that seemed serpentine in nature. He could hear owls hooting in the trees. He was aware of a worm crawling along the ball of his heel. And now, suddenly, there was a hissing wraith that was squatting on top of his body and supping on his vital juices. It was pinning him down in the living dirt through shadowy strips of the ever night as Buck tried unsuccessfully to fight against it’s ever worsening grip. It had a hold of his neck and was impossible to grab hold of!
What was this Snake-like being that couldn’t be beat? Buck continued to fight, valuing it’s strength, as it hungrily drank of him. It had slithered out of somewhere or something. Buck watched a group of owls that gazed down on him from a evergreen tree as his vision waned. Could it have come from a hole in a tree somewhere, or a shaded bush nearby? Now Buck had to ask himself the big question, was this a lax part of his soul that he’d never came to terms with? If he relaxed would it relax? Buck tried to calm his muscles, but his fear had gotten the better of him. Was this some sickly cousin of his psyche, or had it come from outside to finally end him with a fatal poisonous bite? Whatever the case, Buck was fading fast, and there was no coming back from this. No chance of saving his soul from this ever consuming dream that fastly proceeeded to swallow him from the inside out.
The End
2019
Bunny Villaire