CW: ritualistic violence, pregnancy.
Sam met Haley at a house party in the suburbs where everyone hung out in the basement, smoking inside and listening to a band called Belladonna play songs that lasted seven minutes. Sam was drunk and high on psychedelic mushrooms. To him, the basement had the quality of a bomb shelter; the world outside had been turned to ash. He didn’t mind this idea and thought that maybe time didn’t move forward like a river, but instead was a cyclone, with this single night at its center.
Haley had short black hair and a nose ring. Her face contained every color that Sam had ever seen. If he moved his head too quickly, nodding to the music while he looked at her across the room, her body left neon trails in its wake. Haley must have felt him watching, because she turned, and their eyes met. He looked away and found a cigarette in his hand that had been burning for all eternity. His fingers began to lengthen. They seemed to be the hands of another person.
This isn’t my body, he thought. My brain belongs somewhere else.
And then she was standing beside him, glowing green and pink.
“Can I bum a cigarette?” she said. The band was between songs. Waves of light came out of her mouth when she spoke.
One of the band members stomped on a pedal and his guitar made a sound like floating in outer space.
“I don’t know where I got this.” Sam had to yell over the kick drum. He drew a circle in the air with the lit end of the cigarette. It floated there for a moment before fading.
“Do you like fucked up movies?” she asked.
“What?” Sam couldn’t hear her. “I’m Sam,” he said.
She pointed at his chest. Sam was wearing his Tetsuo the Iron Man T-shirt which had on it a picture of Tetsuo the Iron Man. It was a black-and-white picture of a Japanese guy with wires coming out of his head.
“Have you seen God of the Black Moon?” she said.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s like, experimental. It’s not online anywhere. It’s only on VHS and copies are very, very hard to find. You have to know the right people.”
“Right on,” Sam said. He was seeing in high definition. He could see exactly where her makeup had been applied, little taupe patches on her nose and forehead, and those places she had missed, where her real skin was visible.
“I could show it to you sometime.”
“Right on,” Sam said, unsure if he was repeating himself.
The band played a song called “Deep Red” and then someone spilled beer on his shoes.
“Not cool,” he said, but he found that he couldn’t move.
Later they wandered through the house together, looked at photographs of people they’d never met, and then made out on a fake leather couch in the living room. His skin stuck to the cushions. She asked him to bite her neck gently, and when he did, she let out a sound like a dreaming animal. He put his hand up her shirt and she told him she was on her period. They kissed for a while longer and the taste in her mouth made Sam think of raspberry lemonade.
The drugs wore off. Haley fell asleep with her head on his chest, and he watched the strands of her hair bend when he let out a deep breath. If he closed his eyes, Sam could feel the sparks in his brain slowly fading. He thought of horror movies, of Tetsuo the Iron Man, space aliens, Christ on the cross, a woman removing a second heart from her stomach, holding it up to the night sky like an offering. He tried to give names to all the feelings inside himself but there were too many, and some had never been there before.
• • • •
The week after Sam met Haley, he found a dead bird on his porch. Purple and featherless, the creature was barely recognizable. A long navy vein ran up its back and across the skull.
Sam didn’t know if he should move the bird, so he left it there, on the wood boards, and over the next few days, watched as the body flattened out like an air mattress losing air. Not long after that, the baby bird was gone. It simply disappeared. A small, greasy shadow remained where the body had been.
He would have forgotten the baby bird—let it slip from his mind like all the other little horrors that occur in the natural world, just past the edge of perception— if it hadn’t been for a walk he took with Haley later that same week.
It was October. The sky looked like cement. The light outside made Sam think of those washed-out movies about coal miners or steel workers in some opioid town. Skeletons hung from trees. A plastic witch with light-up eyes cackled as they walked past the porch of a hoarder.
Haley was describing the plot of an Italian movie she had seen. “A bunch of people end up at this spooky movie theater. Wait no, that happens later. Let me start over.” She paused.
Sam looked intently at her face as she spoke. If there had been a cliff in front of him, he’d have walked right off the edge.
“This spooky dude in a weird mask gives this college girl free tickets to a movie. She goes with her friend. The movie they’re seeing is a horror movie. It’s about some kids that dig up the grave of Nostradamus and release a horde of demons.”
“The penis guy?”
“You’re thinking of Rasputin.”
“Oh yeah,” said Sam.
“So, eventually the movie sort of leaks out, and people in the audience start turning into demons.”
Something about the drugs he’d taken on the night they met lingered in the way he saw her. There were secret colors, he knew, hidden below her pale skin. He imagined touching the meaty part of her palm, then pulling his hand away to find a thumbprint, rainbow-colored, slowly fading as the blood returned.
“One of the demons rides a motorcycle and has two samurai swords.”
“Sick,” Sam said.
Sam had never dated anyone, not seriously, but he knew something about her was special. He wanted to shrink Haley down, slot her in the back of his head like a science fiction microchip. He wanted her to hear his thoughts, to see the images inside his mind.
Haley held her arm in front of Sam to block his way. He felt his skin prick up where her forearm touched his chest.
“Jesus Christ,” she said.
At their feet, splayed out on the sidewalk, was the crumpled body of a bird. A sparrow. Not a baby this time, an adult. At first, he thought the sparrow was dead, but looking closer, he saw the bird’s black eye flit around in its socket. One of the bird’s wings was twisted in the wrong direction. It flapped the other wing and spun in circles on the pavement.
What do we do? Sam thought and planned to say.
But before he could, Haley pressed the heel of her black boot down on the creature’s head. The sound was like crushing a wet leaf. When she pulled the boot away, the bird’s head was a collage: bits of viscera, feathers, brain, flattened and swirled together. The bird’s wing kept flapping even after it had died.
“I couldn’t let it suffer,” Haley said. Her voice was different than it had been.
She took Sam’s hand in her own and led him down a dirt trail that wound through a small, wooded area near his apartment. He’d passed the trail a thousand times but had never seen where it led.
• • • •
Haley had something special planned for Halloween. She told Sam to arrive after seven and to bring his favorite candy. He brought a six-pack and a bag of peanut M&Ms. She lived in the bottom unit of a building that was 100 years old. They’d been dating for a month and a half, but Sam was still nervous as he rang her unit, waited for her to come to the door. She met him there wearing a low-cut witch costume and black lipstick. There were jack-o’-lanterns on her leggings.
“I didn’t know I was supposed to dress up,” he said.
“That’s okay.” She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “We’ll pretend that you’re an alien and your costume is a human being.” She pulled at his neck skin. “Pretty convincing,” she said.
Inside, there were fake cobwebs stretched across the ceiling, rubber spiders hanging from strings. Haley’s orange tabby, a cat named Hieronymus, had on a lion costume. It purred and rubbed its face across the top of Sam’s sneaker.
The pull-out couch in the living room had been turned into a bed. Sam hadn’t known the couch pulled out, he’d only been to her place a few times, and he felt the way he did when he saw sleight-of-hand magic: surprised but slightly irritated that information was being kept from him. Around the bed, using blankets and pillows, Haley had erected a canopy strung with Christmas lights.
“Do you like it?” she asked, wedging the cap of a beer bottle off.
“It rules,” he said.
“Want to get high?” she asked.
“You betcha,” he said. She went to her room and came back with a Tupperware filled with tie-dye-colored pipes and a Ziplock full of weed. They lay side by side beneath the couch canopy. “Monster Mash” came out of the speaker on her phone, and they took turns passing the pipe back and forth until Sam felt his eyes sink deeper inside his head.
“Remember that movie I told you about the first time we met,” Haley said with her throat full of smoke.
Sam didn’t. All he could remember from that night was the feeling of her tongue in his mouth.
She breathed out, coughing. “It’s an experimental movie. Super trippy.”
It was difficult for Sam to focus on her words. He was looking at Hieronymus. The cat was lying beside him, staring blankly at the corner of the room. He wondered about the nature of cat thoughts. What can he see that I can’t?
“I thought we could watch it tonight,” Haley said. “It took me forever to track down a copy. They’re really hard to find.”
“Tell me again what it’s called,” Sam said.
“God of the Black Moon,” she said. “And I’m warning you, it’s really, really weird.”
“Good,” Sam said. “Weird’s my middle name.”
“Your middle name is Matthew.”
“I forgot I told you that already.”
Haley pulled a blocky VHS case from her bookshelf and fiddled with the TV remote.
“Wow,” Sam said, “retro.” His body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. He was a man made of metal—a robot with ball bearings where his joints should be. His brains sloshed around in a canister filled with green liquid.
“What kind of weed was that?” he said.
Haley didn’t hear him, or maybe she did, and she was ignoring the question. She studied the TV remote like it was a holy object, like she might be able to unlock its mysteries if she contemplated it long enough.
Sam had forgotten what they were doing when Haley flipped off the lights and lay in bed beside him.
“I am incredibly high,” Sam said, or maybe he just thought it. The edges of the room turned hazy. Haley put her head on his chest. Sam thought about the night they had met, the taste of her saliva. His heart was like a bass drum going thump, thump, thump.
Haley rubbed her hand up and down the length of his abdomen. “I think you’ll be susceptible,” she said, lovingly.
Sam didn’t know what this meant. Thoughts passed through his mind like bits of mist.
“I’ll be anything you want me to be,” he said.
I’m too high, he thought. He looked down at Haley, squeezed his fingers around the fleshy part of her thigh, and thought, Who is this person? And then Haley pushed play and the movie started.
• • • •
Sam watched the movie as though it was inside his head, as though it was a dream he was having. His body was catatonic. Only his eyes could move. He thought there was something—some presence—in the room with them, in the dark corner the cat had watched an hour before, but he could not turn his head to see it.
Beside him, from the corner of his eye, he could see Haley smiling, her face washed over in bright, digital light.
On the screen, or maybe in Sam’s mind, the moon hung low over a black, barren field. The resolution was rotten, the film looked like it had been converted across generations, bootlegged and copied a thousand times. The colors on the edges of the screen washed out in a pixelated haze.
A doorway, framed in white stone, appeared on the right side of the field, as though spliced there between frames. A figure emerged from the doorway and walked across the empty space. The moon seemed to turn, watching, as the figure moved across the frame. The sky behind the moon was darker than black should be. There are no stars, there never have been.
Beneath the moon, an altar appeared. Laying on the altar was another figure clad in a white cloak. The camera pulled in on the altar, and he saw that the cloaked figure was female. He saw too, that the figure walking across the field had a long, Old Testament beard. The bearded figure carried a hatchet in his right hand, while his left arm clutched a bundle of cloth to his chest. Both figures wore featureless plaster masks that gave them the appearance of dull and lifeless dolls.
Sam was inside of the film now, and he felt blades of black grass tickle the skin on the undersides of his arms. He looked down and saw a hand rubbing back and forth across his torso. He’d forgotten who this hand could belong to, but then his eyes followed the hand to a wrist, to a forearm, to a shoulder, and he remembered Haley beside him. Her hand created a trail of faint sensation down his abdomen. She slid her fingers beneath the elastic band of his underwear.
His dick was already hard, in the way that it sometimes was when he woke from dreams unrelated to sex. She played with him gently while the figure in the field arrived at the altar. The female figure parted her robe to reveal a rounded stomach—the size of the bump seemed exaggerated in the moonlight.
The camera, or Sam’s awareness, had drawn closer to the scene. It was clear that the two figures were speaking, but what they said could not be heard. Sam saw then that the bundle carried by the bearded man was a child wrapped in cloth.
But when Sam looked harder, he saw that the child was not a child. Its face had no features, and its skin was purple, nearly translucent. Phosphorescent colors circulated through neon veins beneath the surface of the creature’s skin. The bearded man held the creature tightly to keep its many limbs from breaking free of his grasp. The limbs were tipped in small triangular fins.
Sam viewed this all through the prism of pleasure. On his side, Haley had taken off her clothes. Her flesh was like bone in the light of the low moon. She touched herself and played with him at the same time.
She moaned and gasped and whispered his name, and these sounds became the words of the two figures in the field.
The bearded figure pressed the tip of the hatchet to the top of the altar woman’s bulbous stomach. The moon had moved, dipped lower, and now hung over him like a massive celestial halo.
Sam’s awareness hovered above the altar looking down. The bearded man applied pressure with his hatchet and black blood began to fall down the sides of the altar woman’s stomach. The man pulled the hatchet down the length of her abdomen and as the flesh split, steam rose out of the wound like a breath in winter air.
The bearded man dropped the hatchet, and with his right hand began to make wider the stomach wound. The woman screamed silently. The moon was inside of her eyes.
When her stomach was opened wide, Sam could see what it contained. Darkness spotted with white stars, shifting constellations and cosmic formulations he had never seen before. He saw stars dying inside her, planets being born.
Haley was on top of him now, moving her hips back and forth slowly, and yet he could still see down into the altar woman’s stomach, and he watched as the bearded man removed the child that was not a child from its wrapping, and gently fit it into that star-filled cavity. The child writhed inside the womb, arms straining toward the sky, until the bearded man forced the limbs inside the woman’s skin and sealed the wound with metal liquid that spilled out from the tip of his finger.
Sam looked through his own eyes again, up at Haley’s face. She was haloed by the moon now, only the colors had reversed, the moon turned black and the sky white. He thought that maybe she was crying.
“I love you,” she said. And the moon behind her head began to crack like the shell of something ready to be born. From the center, the white splinter moved up and down the moon’s length, and from the crack emerged arms like those belonging to the bearded man’s child. The arms were beautiful in a way, and as they moved toward the two of them, intertwined in that barren field, he saw that the lights below the skin were a kind of language. They repeated Haley’s words.
I love you. I love you. I love you, the lights seemed to say. The arms were infinitely long. Stretching out from the hole in the moon, they curled around Haley’s back, reaching out toward Sam as if they were extensions of her body. He reached back. He touched the arms of the moon.
Why, Sam wondered, had no one ever told him that love was so strange?
• • • •
Sam woke up the next day with an itch inside of his mind. He was in his own bed, unsure how he’d arrived there. He had on jeans but no shirt and there were long red scratches that intersected across his chest and abdomen.
He took a shower then smoked three cigarettes on the porch. Fall had turned to winter overnight and the color of the sky made Sam think about being dead. A crow screamed at him from a tree across the street. He needed to move so he went for a walk, retracing the steps he had taken when he had walked those same roads with Haley weeks before.
He tried to call her but she didn’t answer. He remembered the canopy of lights, the Tupperware container full of weed, but that was about it. The rest of the night was blurry. They had watched a movie about the moon. He felt a sense of undirected, all-encompassing guilt that moved forward and backward across the entire length of his life.
On the sidewalk across the street, a woman wearing a blood-covered prom dress shambled by with a bucket dangling from her right hand.
“Are you okay?” Sam called to her.
“I’m Carrie,” she said. She slurred her speech.
“I’m Sam,” he said. “Do you need me to call someone?”
“Sissy Spacek,” she said, sounding defeated.
“I don’t know her number,” Sam searched his pockets for his phone and when he looked back to the sidewalk the woman was gone.
The thought he’d wanted to think when he woke up was on the verge of emerging—it was nearly in focus. But then the crow in a tree above him began to speak and all his thinking ceased.
“Unclean,” said the crow. “Purge, purge, purge.”
Its black bird eyes forced a connection in Sam’s brain and the image of the moon, coated in some dark, viscous liquid sprouted inside his head.
“I don’t understand,” Sam said.
“Unclean,” said the crow.
The thought Sam wanted to think rose out of the black liquid in his mind. It wasn’t a thought exactly, not words or pictures, but instead, a sensation, a damp, coarse feeling, like a cat’s tongue, ran up and down his torso. He remembered being caressed by hands that weren’t hands. He remembered Haley’s words.
“I love you,” he said to himself.
• • • •
In the days that followed, Sam began to see doorways in places where doorways should not have been. They appeared as black rectangles framed faintly in yellow light. He saw them in corn fields and city parks. Sometimes they hung suspended in the air. Sometimes they were half sunken into the earth. Inside, in the darkness the doors contained, dark figures shambled aimlessly.
Sam pretended that he didn’t see these things. He would close his eyes momentarily, open them again to find the doorways gone.
He tried to call Haley a hundred times. He left messages until her voicemail was full. He smoked weed all day and felt insane. He wondered, again and again, what was wrong with him, why she didn’t care enough to explain why she had left.
He called his mom and told her he’d been dumped. He didn’t mention the strange feelings in his head, the talking birds, the phantom doorways.
“Oh honey,” she said. Her voice sounded muffled, far away. She must have had him on speakerphone. “I’m sorry. When your dad and I split up, I thought the world was ending.”
He was smoking weed on the porch. The moon was new, its crescent horns pointing across the sky toward the darkness at the edge of the world.
“But the heart isn’t a reliable narrator,” his mother said, “It doesn’t give us a clear picture of the world. It warps our perception, especially how we view ourselves. With your dad gone, I forgot who I was. I became someone else.”
Sam’s mother had rarely spoken about her relationship with his father, the aftermath of the divorce. He thought maybe she’d been drinking.
“But really, when it comes down to it, love is an illusion. It’s the result of chemical processes in the brain. All your sensory and emotional experiences are illusionary. The things that happen in your mind aren’t real . . . not in any empirical sense.”
“I’m not sure I get what you mean,” he said.
“You think you carry the world around in your head, but that’s just a puppet show really. The brain is a filter, an eliminator. It takes all the horrifying things about reality and shaves them down into the things we experience every day. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s a necessity.”
“Where is this coming from?” he said, but she continued on, talking over him.
“If our senses were expanded, if someone rooted around in the corners of our brains, removed the filter so we could see the world for what it really was, most of us would kill ourselves. The rest would writhe around in the mud like worms.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? I’m sad about a girl.” Sam held the phone away from his ear and looked down at the display. He could see movement on the screen, little numbers ticking away, but the rest was blurry, just a vague green glow.
“Here, let me show you what happens when the filter is removed.” Her voice was covered in feedback. It cracked and wrinkled like it was being played back on a tape recorder. “Look across the street at that line of trees. To your right a bit. Yes, there. What do you see?”
There was nothing there, just the shadows of limbless trees shifting in the distance.
“Trees,” Sam said.
“Look a little closer,” said his mother. “What do you see?”
A doorway faded into existence in the middle of the woods. The frame was made of white stone and there was no door. Inside, darkness shifted around like a liquid.
“What do you see?”
His mother emerged from the shadow of the doorway. Behind her, in the darkness, there were the celestial colors Sam had seen inside the altar woman’s womb in the movie that he couldn’t quite remember. His mother’s eyes contained the light of the moon. He could see her mouth moving as her words came through the speaker in his phone.
“The girl gave you a gift, Samuel. We serve a living God. He is at work in the world. His love is not illusionary. It’s the only thing that is real.”
Sam held his phone in his lap. The screen had gone black.
“As you begin to see creation for what it truly is, remember that your God loves you, and has from before you were born. With your help, with the help of all the others, he will usher in a new Kingdom, one that will last until the end of time.”
His mother had more arms than he remembered. Her head had been separated from her body. A scar of white light cut across the length of her neck. Sam thought of a paper doll, the head torn off and reattached with tape. Her feet lifted off the ground and she began to float, slowly, weightlessly, in his direction. The extra arms swung limply at her sides.
Sam wanted, very much, to be held in her many arms.
“Say the prayer in your dreams,” she said, “And he’ll come to you.”
A cloud passed over the moon and the night turned darker, made the shadows of the building and his mother impossible to see.
On the street beyond the porch, a drunk guy on his bike pedaled slowly while his front wheel wobbled back and forth.
“Steady now,” he said as he tipped over in slow motion and crashed into the sidewalk.
“I fucked up,” said the drunk guy now splayed out on the sidewalk. “Ah man, I fucked up real bad.”
Sam looked across the street again and found the forest empty, his mother, and the doorway, gone.
• • • •
Sam felt certain that if anyone could help him understand what was happening in his head, it was Haley. He stopped trying to call her. Instead, he sat in his car outside her apartment and watched her windows. He waited for the door to open, but there was never any movement, and she never came out.
So, he left and drove to one of the few places they’d ever gone together, a DIY space near the city that showed From Beyond on film a few times a year, and where, on Thursday nights, women in steampunk goggles danced and took off some of their clothes,
Sam paid the seven-dollar cover charge and watched a black metal band play songs that all sounded the same. The band members wore angular gold masks that gave them the appearance of ancient kings, costumed after some death ritual, soon to be buried. Maybe twenty square-shaped guys with beards pushed each other in a circle in front of the stage.
“This next song’s about Satan,” said one of the masked men. Everyone cheered. The guitar sounded like a circular saw and noise filled the room like smog.
Sam looked for Haley among the other bodies. He willed her to be present, extending some part of his mind out into the world, hoping that she might manifest, give him an answer.
He’d begun to have thoughts that were not his own. There was a black mass at the center of his thinking: a living thing taking up space in his head. I’d like to drink the blood of the black moon, he thought. I’d like to kiss the feet of the Infinite King.
Haley wasn’t there. He was losing his mind. He sat down at the bar in a separate room and watched posters on the wall shake when each new song started.
The bartender was a goth girl in a cutoff jean jacket. He ordered a beer and a shot, drank an inch off the beer and poured the shot on top. He sat there for a while and drank three more drinks and then he asked the goth bartender if she knew a person named Haley.
“I know a lot of Haleys,” she said.
Sam described his Haley—her dark hair, the nose ring.
“That’s what all the Haleys I know look like,” she said. He found this hard to believe. Had any of them been into the bar recently, he wanted to know.
“I don’t share the comings and goings of the people I know.” She lit a cocktail on fire and slid it down the bar. “For all I know, you could be sick. You could be a psychopath stalker.”
“What if I assured you that I’m not,” Sam said. He tried to make his face seem normal. He felt as though the wrong face hung in front of his own, a transparent mask was fixed across his skin. He couldn’t shift his features in the way he would have liked to.
“I’d have no way to validate that information.”
“I’m not a psycho stalker,” he said.
“That’s what every psycho stalker knows to say,” she said. “That’s the first rule in the psycho stalker playbook.” A guy at the end of the bar was trying to figure out how to drink the flaming cocktail. He picked it up, blew on it, then put it back down.
“I’ll take another beer,” Sam said. He watched the bartender walk to a cooler on the far side of the bar. He appraised her body with a part of his mind that had only recently come into existence. Currents of electricity ran through his veins.
She will be susceptible, the black part of his brain thought.
Sam drank his beer in large gulps and then wandered sluggishly through a crowd of bodies looking for the bathroom. He followed a dark hallway to an empty room with no discernable purpose. At the end of this room, Sam found a portion of the far wall had been cut out and replaced with shadow.
“That’s not right,” he said aloud.
A figure waited in the doorway, slight and feminine, he could almost make out her face. He squinted and leaned toward the darkness. But then the figure stepped out of the shadow and Sam saw that it was Haley.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
She beckoned to him silently, and he followed. He crossed the black threshold in the doorway and walked into a dream.
• • • •
The dream took place in an amphitheater made of white stone. The black moon watched them from overhead. On the horizon, far off in the distance, massive stone structures loomed. Squinting, Sam thought these structures were made to resemble animals of some species he’d never seen before. But as he watched, one of the structures lifted a pillar and began to walk across the sky. The black canopy beyond the structures rippled with fantastic colors, the air shot through with bolts of kaleidoscopic light.
“Follow me,” Haley said. Her voice resonated, made reality bend.
Sam felt a great rising in his chest, as though his lungs might inflate and lift him into the air. He walked beside her down a staircase that bisected two wings of the amphitheater. On each side, the stone rows were filled with bodies. The bodies wore plaster masks that erased their features, gave them the appearance of corpses. The masked faces all turned to watch them descend the stairs.
“Who are they?” He asked.
“Conduits, dreaming,” Haley said, “the same as you and I.” He saw now that she too wore a plaster mask.
“I’ve missed you,” Sam said.
“I know you think that.” She turned down an empty row, squeezed past rigid legs of the masked dreamers while Sam followed. “But it was really Him you missed.” She nodded toward the center of the amphitheater. They were sitting now, knees touching. He wanted to put his hand on the rough skin of her mask. He wanted to go back in time, to kiss her on the couch in some stranger’s home.
Down beyond the amphitheater’s rows, on a large slate stage buried in the earth, sat an ornate stone altar. Atop the altar lay the body of something that was close to, but not exactly, human. Seen from a distance, the skin appeared purple, earthen, like bloody clay dried in a mold. The creature’s flesh had merged with the altar, and there was no distinction between the two. The body’s head was engorged, as though a bulbous mask covered its face—the eyes black orbs— while some sort of rippled tube, made of dull metal, extended out from the mouth, disappearing into the dirt beyond the stage. The creature’s stomach bulged toward the moon, veins of gold intersected beneath abdominal skin so taut it seemed on the verge of splitting open. Three of the creature’s arms hung limply off the side of the altar.
“Sam,” Haley said, her eyes white behind the mask. “I was given a gift, and I shared that gift with you. Our God proliferates in the thoughts of his followers, and enough thinking can make him true.”
“I don’t understand,” Sam said.
“Say the prayer and he’ll come to you.” All the bodies in the amphitheater spoke as one. A white fissure had formed at the center of the moon. “Drink the blood of the black moon.” She handed him a silver chalice filled with oil.
Words came out of Haley’s mouth that Sam had never heard before. The words echoed in the throats of the masked dreamers. He held the cup to his lips and drank the black blood. When he was finished, sounds came out of his own mouth that he could not control. He looked down as he spoke and saw a rippled metal tube that ran from beneath his shirt down into the stone below his feet. Sam lifted his shirt and saw the tube merged into the flesh of his stomach. White light pulsed beneath the skin where the metal slid inside his body.
Sam wrapped his fingers around the tube and felt cold liquid rushing through the inside. And then from the creature on the altar, and then from inside the metal tube, and then from the mouths of the masked dreamers, a voice spoke to Sam, hideous and warm with love.
“My child,” the voice echoed inside Sam’s mind. “Wake up.”
• • • •
Sam awoke in his bed with a taste in his mouth like battery acid. His head hurt in a way it never had before. He touched his face and found the skin felt thin and brittle. From the living room, he heard whispered voices and familiar sounds.
Sam’s body seemed to move on its own. He stood and walked to find the source of the sounds. It was still dark out, and he wandered blindly through the halls. In the living room, the television was on. The screen showed black and white images Sam had seen before, but where exactly, he could not recall.
On the screen, a man with a beard cut open a woman’s stomach. Two people had sex in a field. The moon turned black and began to break apart.
Sam didn’t own a VHS player. He wasn’t sure where the movie was coming from, but it was there, on the screen. He stood in the center of the living room, coated in white light, and watched the whole thing.
When it was over, it started again from the beginning.
He watched
and watched
and watched.
Days passed. Sam didn’t eat, he didn’t sleep.
After a hundred viewings, the movie began to change. New characters replaced the bearded man and the altar woman. Sometimes Sam was in the film, and sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes the characters spoke to him, and he responded, and they told him about true love, how the Kingdom of Heaven would feel. They invited him to pray with them and he said the words out loud. He already had the prayer memorized, somewhere deep inside his heart. The prayer helped push Sam—the true Sam—further into one corner of his mind. He was fine with this, really, because it allowed Him more space in Sam’s thinking, more control over what Sam chose to do.
Sam was in his car, driving but not in control. Sam was in his car; his body did the driving. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but the route he took felt familiar. On the horizon, past the skyscrapers and fog, great stone structures rose into the sky. It was dusk. Clouds of emerald-green smoke drifted past the car windows. Winged creatures without skin cycloned in the air above his car.
Sam arrived where he was going: the DIY bar where he’d found Haley. His body led him past the bouncer, past dancers wearing bodysuits made of neon-colored latex, back to the bar where he’d been days ago. The air seemed to vibrate. The walls warped and melted, revealed masked faces behind the paint. The faces repeated the prayer of the black moon, but only Sam could hear the words.
Sam’s body sat down on a stool. His eyes looked down the bar at a woman in a cutoff denim vest. An aura of pink light radiated from her skin and the tattoos on her forearm rippled, shifting into new shapes every moment. When she approached him, Sam saw that her eyes were filled over with white. When she opened her mouth, gold light spilled out.
Long, slender arms writhed around in Sam’s stomach. The arms prodded the inside of his flesh, feeling for a way out.
“Can I ask you a question?” Sam’s voice wasn’t what he remembered. He wasn’t sure who spoke through his mouth.
She smiled at him. The faces in the walls began to laugh.
“Do you like fucked up movies?” he asked.
