Moonlight
It will soon be known that we were truly never civilized, it will soon be known that we destroyed the planet on which we inhabited, and then left it nothing but a scorched ashen volcano, on which we were never meant to tamper with. It was a gift that should have never been opened; we had tampered with the gift given to us from thousands and perhaps millions of years of ages of enlightenment.
I can no longer stand the frigid cold, as it reminds me of that night, in my cabin outside of Juneau Alaska. I was surrounded by my books, Ptolemy and Plutarch and Plato. Copernicus and Galileo.
I considered myself an amateur astronomer for several years. It began in the 90s when types like mine were hard to come across, we were called alternative researchers, or alternative historians.
We believed that there was something hidden from us by those in power, there had to be a horrid and vicious secret that was too ghastly to ever be given to the ears of the profane, as the Internet grew however; so did we.
The videotapes are gone now, I can remember the brownish looking tape wrapping around the wheels of the VCR as we looked at the grainy footage of anything we could pick up with those now ancient camcorders that were meant for being plugged into VCRs, they are as ancient malice blasphemous tomes that were meant to be placed in hidden libraries in a desert somewhere. I wonder if one still owns a VCR. What shocking images could be played on a TV hooked up to one…
We looked at everything from UFOs, Bigfoot, and of course the secret societies. I had tried to acquire every single classic piece of antiquity I possibly could in order to understand the origins of mankind. I wanted to truly understand the real origins of our species and if we indeed were merely born out of a cosmic eruption of carelessness, or if there was a divine presence in the universe that could be as equally or even more terrifying. So every night I would step out onto the patio and into the frigid Alaskan air, I would light up my briar and use my telescope. I would survey the distant stars and wonder if any life was on them, I would ponder their origins, trying to imagine that vast explosion that had given life to us all, or I would imagine the hand of an all seeing creator using sacred geometry to formulate a divine plan that none of us could ever even grasp. It was on one of these evenings, that a strange curious thing began to happen, I knew I was getting older, and that my beard was beginning to gray.
I spent the evening talking with a few of my fellow conspiracy theorists on the Internet. They had mentioned something about an old Indian legend of the earth being alive, a living creature that would take away from those that did it harm. There had been an old coal-fired power plant recently restored a few miles up the road, I could sometimes inhale the smog that was making its way across the trees, it was on one of these nights that the power plant had burned extremely heavy, it was hard to even suck on my briar, for it was as if I was inhaling charcoal along with the tobacco.
It was making it extremely hard for me to breathe at this point. I figured I had better head inside, but first I made the fateful decision to look up at the harvest Moon. I had done this several times before so I had not expected any strange occurrences to befall me; I looked into the telescope and stared straight into the blood red moon hoping to make some sort of mystical contact with an ethereal being even if for an ephemeral moment. I needed some sort of tangible empirical evidence that our collective searches as truth seekers had not been in vain.
It was then that thunder began to rumble, and rain began to pelt my aging skin. For some reason I was drawn in a hypnotic trance to keep staring at the moon, I could not in any form or way hold my gaze away from the lunar body which was seemingly controlling me. It was a ball of blood. Red droplets began to fall upon the ocular piece of the telescope, my sight was being covered in blood, the moon itself was bleeding, turning to blood, and disappearing, just as it had been prophesied within several arcane articles of eschatology. I was now shrouded in a copper darkness; the smell of copper overcame me as I ran backwards into my inner sanctum of esoteric knowledge. I had no idea what was going on or if I was even lucid. I knew I had to make my way downstairs without slipping on the cosmic blood. As I opened the door from my bedroom to make my way to the stairs, I felt the significant feature of heat, and the smell of burning materials. I had wished that lucidity was the farthest thing from empirical reality, I had to be dreaming. The moon itself had disappeared, it had bled to death, and it had bled to death under our knives, under the knives of those that dared play with reality. My house was now burning, I was sure that all my books of antiquarian and esoteric knowledge were going to go up in Pythagorean smoke.
Perhaps that was a good thing; perhaps it was my tapering with the knowledge of the universe that had caused this evening to befall me. I rushed off my porch away from my burning house, for some reason after running a short distance, I slowed to a walk as I began to hear a ringing in my ears, it was a soothing ringing that seemed to make all the terrors of the evening fade away. I began to walk through the woods not knowing or caring where I was going, I just kept following the soothing ringing, thinking it was taking me away to a place of peace and harmony with nature. I eventually found myself being summoned to the coal-fired power plant, which had on recent evenings begun to asphyxiate my lungs. For some reason I knew the code to get in, as I stepped up to the chain-link fence, I simply punched in the code. I kept walking oblivious and yet harmonious, the entire power plant was running, yet it was completely empty, the lobby floor was filled with turned over paper coffee cups.
As if they had simply fallen from the hands of individuals who had simply vanished from reality. The security cameras for some reason were still working, I noticed them as I made my way over to the elevator and pushed the button to go downward, into the basement. I felt myself being moved on an apocryphal mission, what had caused the night and nature to go so destructive was hidden within that catacomb.
The descent downwards seemed to last for an eternity, eventually I heard it as the elevator had stopped and the doors opened, I had half expected to gleefully walk straight into eternal night, fall off the edge of the elevator, and fall for eternity, I would soon wish for death, as I stepped away from the elevator I found myself in some sort of control room, shrouded by computers, each monitoring world events, revolutions in Egypt, bombings in Palestine and Syria, and rising and falling stock markets, what I saw all in the center of it all was the most horrific creature I had ever laid eyes upon, a tentacled mess with wings and one large black hole in the middle of its forehead.
The third eye after a millennium of murdered gods. I heard a high-pitched screech come from the creature as I turned to run, I heard its glass container shattering and I smelled putrid water rushing up to my feet. It was around this time that I either retreated into the safety and security of madness, or I perhaps blacked out, I do not remember, I do remember waking up in the hospital, groggily awaking to the smell of sterility, there was a young woman there, I sort of remember her quasi aging face, she was attractive by way of mesmerism, she said she was a profiler and consultant who had worked with a secret branch of the FBI.
She probably was once a young freshmen agent who investigated plane crashes.
I remember that Miss Kirsten Geary was wearing a ring which was a snake eating its own tail.
She had told me that I had inhaled a sort of psychoactive chemical that was present within the coal of the power plant, my adventure into darkness was merely a hallucinatory phantasm caused by improper burning of dangerous substances, I was reassured that nothing was wrong, and that I had been found wandering up to the back porch of a neighbor and beating incessantly on his sliding door, mumbling I was told I was then rushed to the hospital, and that everything had just been a dream . Several months have passed now, but I can no longer sleep without having several lights on. I no longer look to history or to the stars, only to the artificial light which permeates my home every evening.
Still, I can feel the shadows of the dead world creeping slowly upon me in the evenings, moving ever so closely to destroying this world and our existence, my sanity has been taken from me.
Moonlight will forever chill me.