Hellucination (Wrath Limited Edition)

by Stephen Biro

  He ran for the front door. I tried to catch him.

  “What the Hell is going on, Rhett? What’s wrong?”

  “I haven’t had anything like that happen to me for years! I gotta fucking go!”

  Rhett scrammed, and I closed the door. I laughed and lit a cigarette while my mind did cartwheels and gymnastics, trying to put more pieces of the puzzle together.

  THE MUSE UNMASKED AND SATAN REVEALED

  My reality began to collide with the other side. Nobody knew what I was doing but they were becoming a part of it. The other side began to take notice and use the people around me as pawns, showing me its reach. This reminded me that I am not alone and that there is more to life than what we can see around us.

  I woke up the next day, exhilarated but confused. I got ready to work at the store as I thought about the night before.

  After telling me he was God, my friend Rhett told me more universal secrets, but as the conversation progressed, I could hear the human vulnerability come out. I could hear God, but I could hear something else. Rhett’s personality was coloring the words. And why did my friend freak out when our little interview was over? The Holy Ghost—or maybe even the unholy ghost—must have possessed my friend Rhett.

  Feeling confident, I drove to the store. The Man was already there, working the cash register and watching a Japanese Death File Black on the huge-screen TV.

  “Man, turn that off,” I said. “If someone normal walks in the door, they’re going to freak!”

  He stopped the video and said, “Dude, I have to talk to you.”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  He walked around the video aisle to stand in front of me. He pushed me, gently, on the shoulders and said, “Dude, I’m your muse!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m your personal muse, dude. I’m here to help you gain a deeper insight into your reality, bro! I’m here to guide you while giving you inspiration.”

  “Um, cool. Um, thanks?”

  I didn’t know what else to say. My friend’s news of being my personal muse comes hot on the confusing heels of the Rhett/God incident, to say nothing of the hallucinatory events of the prior six months.

  Muses are from Greek mythology, and they’re usually women. Nine daughters of Zeus, not a guy who sold me drugs who helped build my video store. By this time I had learned to always go with it, accept your fate and deal with the gods, demi-gods, muses and servants as they cross your path.

  The Man-Muse continued: “Everyone on the other side has noticed you by now, dude. You can’t do the shit you’re doing without everyone noticing. You’re not seeing the stop signs where normal people quit. You’re not learning some answers and turning around. You’re continuing down the highway, dealing with the mindfucks until you get the final answer.”

  “I’ve never told you about any of this,” I said.

  “How long have we been friends? Three, four years now? I was sent here for a reason and you know it. I’ve been in the background, as your friend. Helping you achieve what you want in life. Giving you the gumption, energy and wisdom to follow your dreams and helping you to make it a reality.”

  “Yeah, you have.”

  “No one saw you coming. No one expected a shit head like you to truly find or believe in what you’re searching for. Better men than you have searched and given up.”

  The Man adjusted his Yankees baseball cap, smiled and continued: “Better men have turned around, found what they thought was their destination and took a different exit. Proclaiming it to be the truth. Men have made a living on less than what you have done. Some men have changed the world with far less than what you have accomplished.”

  It started to make sense to me.

  “You sold me the acid I’ve been taking for the last year. So are you telling me this has all been a plan?”

  The Man smiled and said, “So you understand what is happening to you! Even at this moment, I’m amazed, bro. We usually never tell people what we are or what we’re doing. They normally can’t comprehend it.”

  The Man returned behind the counter. His eyes fluttered a little, and he twitched ever so slightly.

  The Man looked at me again and said, “Dude, where have I been? I don’t even remember you coming in the front door.”

  “We just had a 30-minute conversation?”

  “Weird. Well, I left off watching some killer shit! Dude, have you seen the Russian army soldier get his head stomped to the ground with a knife stuck in his throat and then get pulled in half?”

  “Yeah, and it’s disgusting.”

  “Oh, man, it’s bad ass!”

  “I try to not watch that shit anymore,” I said. “It stays in the mind way too long.”

  “You’ve showed me the roughest shit on this earth, and now you don’t want to see any more cool shit?”

  “I got enough of that floating inside my head. I don’t need it anymore.”

  The Man was obviously back to normal. I just stood there, letting everything take its course.

  “That’s cool,” he said understandingly. “How about I take off since you’re here now?”

  When the door closed behind The Man, a chill ran down my spine as I stood alone in the store. The other side was now blaring into my reality. My mind raced.

  Imagine for a moment that God was one of your friends. He does this to every soul. Imagine that every soul is actually surrounded by entities of Heaven and Hell. Think about one soul, surrounded by agents, twenty deep, of each camp. All of them manipulating and coercing the person to do good or bad, all different degrees and levels of sin or virtue.

  This is what I found myself in. I must be breaking through if possession of friends was becoming a normal occurrence. It seemed the reality I once knew would be forever changed.

  I ended up closing the store without a single person walking in the door. They dropped their videos in the slot box, but nobody came in to rent or even to say hello. My eBay account didn’t sell, and neither did my website. It was as if I’d dropped off the face of the earth. It was probably a good thing, actually. It gave me the time to think.

  On the drive home that night, I knew I had to open another door. Shit was too crazy now, and I needed to know more. I needed to find God in his own territory. I needed to know whether I was dealing with fake or false entities. I needed to know if I could trust my own mind and reality.

  The road was a blur until I neared my house. After I pulled into the driveway, I walked up my sidewalk and said, “This is it. I’m going to find out everything.”

  At my front door, I fumbled for the keys. I found the right one and lifted it towards the doorknob.

  The night of the day still shone as I prepared to open another door. I got the key ready and slid it gently into the keyhole. It sunk right in and hit the back of the lock. I turned it, and you could hear the tumblers slide into place.

  As I slowly opened the door, multicolored flames shot out around the sides. With each new inch of opening, a multi-hued inferno increasingly engulfed the air around me. The apartment became a roaring blaze of hatred and desolation that I couldn’t understand.

  I wasn’t afraid and I wasn’t startled. By this time, I knew that everything that happened was supposed to happen. So I walked through the door and closed it behind me.

  Every color of the spectrum shimmied to a different beat as the conflagration whispered and wavered to a life it never should have had. As I watched it undulate and flicker, I could somehow feel it all coming from my soul. It was as if each flame licked a different part of my psyche or sputtered from a different facet of me.

  I was seeing the fires of Hell.

  I was transfixed by its gaping maw, hypnotized until he came. It was the entity that was always there, always watching, always showing me things I thought I needed to know.

  It rose from the flames and pulled itself into my realm. It stood there, staring at me and said, “Why are you back? You shouldn’t be here!”

>   I said, “I need to know what is going on.”

  The fires wrapped all around me in another deep conflagration.

  “You must kill yourself for your God!” it said.

  It stared hatefully into my soul from the psychedelic flames. I looked back, petrified.

  Its eyes blazed as colorless black holes that pulled my very essence to him. Its beard was wavering and changing. Its hair whipped around as if alive, and its face morphed into something I could see but couldn’t understand.

  I felt myself spasm internally. My personality broke like a huge mirror, and the living pieces all pulled themselves away from each other. It was as if every piece of my soul was a separate entity trying to claw out of the picture frame that was me.

  It said again, “You must kill yourself for your God!”

  My mind continued scattering. Every aspect of me ran in abnormal ways to get away. I could feel myself stripped of every personal characteristic and safeguard I had built from the beginning of my life. My soul was exposed.

  My ego or any portion of my false personality was gone. I was truly alone. Whatever was left of me grasped onto what I knew or what I believed. Trying to figure it out, my mind latched onto the words that were said to me: “You must kill yourself for your God!”

  Through my recent experiences, I had been conditioned to obey the wisdom of the entity, so I looked around for an object with which to kill myself. Luckily for me, I had no weapons. But as I did this, my mind kept turning around the entity’s words.

  “He didn’t tell me to kill myself for him. He told me to kill myself for my God. For my God!”

  My mind twisted as the flames burned all around me. My mind shouted, “Kill myself for my God!”

  It came to me: “I thought this entity was my God. It had been showing me supposed truth. But my search for God had found a different god. One that knew it wasn’t God but could masquerade as it. I’ve thought this was God, but it was something else.”

  I stood in the blazing inferno of this other dimension, surely the entranceway into Hell, and I stood firm. I knew suicide is an unpardonable sin, reasoning, “You’d have to change the plan of God to kill one’s self while being forgiven at the same time. No one can receive forgiveness for self-murder, because you don’t have any time after the act to ask for forgiveness. It must be the only act that can never be forgiven, because when you commit that sin, there is nothing after it.”

  Sure, as you lay there bleeding to death, you can ask for forgiveness, but you’re still in the middle of taking the action. Once it’s been fulfilled, you’re dead.

  My mind took hold of this little fact, and I looked into the Devil’s eyes, and I told Him, “My God would never ask me to kill! My God would never tell me to kill myself. You’re not my God! I can see through you for what you truly are!”

  The entity wailed, twisted and turned as anger spewed from it like a whirling dervish.

  My heart stopped. A sonic boom. This reality began to chase into itself. The inferno subsided and normalcy crawled back into my place. I saw the last of the multi-hued flames seep into crevices of everything. The burnt smell of my flesh and surroundings still floated all around me.

  I found myself sitting on the couch. Empty balloons and Whip It cartridges were strewn about the living room floor. I clutched my head and began to cry, lost and alone again. All my work was for nothing! Everything I did got me closer to the Devil, not God.

  But I began to think some more. And I had an epiphany that blasted me like a ton of bricks falling on my head.

  “Okay, so I found you. The Devil, masquerading as God! I yelled. “You showed me things, giving me some truth but twisting it to knock me off of the right path. You even possessed my friends, trying to confuse me. Then you told me to kill myself! A-ha! The Devil wouldn’t do all this unless I was about to make a breakthrough!”

  It made sense. The Devil wouldn’t fuck with me so hard if I wasn’t going down the right path. Maybe he wanted to confuse me into taking my own life, so I’d be just another soul, instead of the one who found ultimate truth.

  I stood up and shouted, “Fuck you, Lucifer! Or whoever you may be! I’m still going to find God, and I am not going to fucking stop until I find out all of the answers, you fucking asshole!”

  I flopped back onto the couch, and a smile crossed my face. I could feel all the pieces of my ego crawl back into my personality, trying to shield me. I knew I’d just passed a test and my soul began to sing.

  My extreme joy in that moment cannot fully be conveyed. But it should be enjoyed nonetheless as a battle we have both won: I can pass this information along to you because I am still alive.

  As my laughter died down, I reached for the remote control to get my mind off of this episode. The remote control lay on top of the Holy Bible I’d bought a week ago. It hadn’t been opened and hadn’t been read. Little did I know the importance and devastation that book would bring me. I didn’t know at that time that a mortal couldn’t go to Hell and back without one.

  MONKS VISIT THE STORE AND A RUNAWAY CHILD FINDS HIS PLACE

  We both find ourselves in the familiar library. I’m drinking, and so are you. The fire is roaring while the books are warping, but neither of us care now.

  I cover my face, afraid to continue. But I have to. The seat you’re sitting in is hotter than it should be, so you readjust yourself.

  You can tell I’m tortured and confused. But you actually see a certain added sense to the events, because you’re an outside observer.

  You tell me, “Don’t worry. It makes more sense than you know. I need you to continue and tell me the rest.”

  I lift my head and try to look at you when shame crosses my face. I say, “You don’t understand. What if I really destroyed Heaven? Was I following the Devil and being manipulated with half-truths and lies? Was this the Devil reeling in my soul to make me an Antichrist?”

  “But you’ve said this is just the beginning of wisdom and that there is redemption. You also say you have been saved and you know God. I believe in that now.”

  I look up at you, tears streaming from my eyes, and I say, “Thank you for listening to me. I’m sorry I get lost sometimes. There’s just so much that a human can bear.”

  I wipe the tears from my eyes.

  *

  This is where the testimony gets a little weird.

  My life had taken a turn into the Twilight Zone, and I didn’t know how to get back. My ruby slippers didn’t work, and my time machine had a dead battery.

  I left for work and arrived at the store early. I opened the shop and stuck in a kung fu video to watch. The movie was called Eastern Condors, starring Sammo Hung, and it was a Hong Kong-made Rambo knock-off with a group of Chinese soldiers instead of just one. Explosions, death, and murder during the Vietnam War on the Asian side. I just enjoyed the heroism and crazy kung fu action.

  I was watching this movie when I saw a gaggle of cloaked people stop in front of my store. Eight people wore what looked like monks’ clothes and seemed to pray at my front door. After a moment, they were leaving.

  This isn’t a normal situation that happens at my store, so I jumped out of my chair and ran to the front door. I stuck my head outside, looking down the street and yelled, “Hey! What were you guys doing?”

  The monks stopped in their tracks. Several of them looked back at me and the others refused to lift their heads. One monk, the main one, turned around defiantly. Looking me straight in the eyes, he said, “We were praying over your store. We find it in league with the Devil. We do this to all of the clubs and bars in Ybor City.”

  “No, no, no,” I said with a laugh. “I’m not in league with the Devil! Come back here and let’s talk.”

  They looked at each other, then back at me.

  “C’mon, c’mon. I’m not going to bite, even if you think I am. I like it that you prayed over my store. No one has ever done that for me.”

  The monks walked back towards my store, then stopped and
said, “We can’t come in. This is a place of Satan.”

  “I couldn’t have this store if it wasn’t for God. God knows everything and I wouldn’t be able to be here if it wasn’t for Him.”

  They came closer to the front door, and I walked out, closing the door behind me.

  “Why exactly were you praying over my store?”

  The main monk answered for the group. “Well, you have the word ‘cult’ on your window and your phone number uses three sixes. And it’s called Video Mayhem, with ‘mayhem’ meaning chaos and destruction. Your store has symbols and words that tell us you are following Satan.”

  I laughed, and they all looked up at me. It was interesting because they were all about 5′2″. I wouldn’t normally mention this, but I’ve never had so many small men around me, much less in hooded cloaks.

  “The word ‘cult,’ in the movie business, just means a movie people watch over and over again. Have you ever watched a movie more than three times?”

  They all nod their heads yes.

  “That’s all that means—a film people watch over and over again. Now, my phone number has three sixes in it, but it’s actually 4,666. It’s not actually 666. Most people refuse to have this number or any number that has 666 in it. I took it because nobody else wanted it, and I figured it would be easy to remember.”

  I felt petty for defending this stuff, so I shifted gears.

  “Do you know how much I talk to my customers about God?”

  “Really?”

  “Listen, I only sell horror flicks, kung fu flicks and anime in this store. Most of my films have to do with the darker side of life. A lot even have to deal with the Devil. How can a person not be exposed to the realities of the Devil and God in their personal life? Most of my customers don’t go to church. If they watch a movie about possession or demons, then how can they not think about it? How can they not say, ‘what if?’”

  The main monk looked me in the eyes, and he could feel the warmth in them. He opened up to me.