Beyond this window is a world saner than I. Beyond this window is a world less sane than I. Yes, it is sane because those in it say so. They think they know the world, have seen all that it holds. They hear the speech of one like myself and scoff. They know better, they are the sane ones. Yet they are only sane as the majority says, and the majority are fools.
I am the sane one. So sane that it fills my mind with horrifying images, truths that so many might see if they had the eyes to look. But they all see only the veil that they have created for themselves. My veil has been destroyed; I can not go back to the happy ignorance through which I have viewed life these past sixteen years. No, that has been stolen from me. Stolen by the events that I shall proceed to tell you now.
On that day the sun shone hotter, as if all the bodies now freed from the halls of mechanization and mental programming were drawing its rays more intensely. Like so many of my kind, I had been banished from my living quarters and tasked with finding some societally acceptable way to waste my time and maybe earn some compensation. After much begging and many rejections, I finally found a place that would accept the likes of me.
Beneath that malicious sun, I stood before the gates of this temple. I had heard of its interior and of the ungodly rituals that were repeated day after day inside its walls. Of the lights that blink with no earthly pattern and the sounds that vainly try to imitate life, but serve only to deaden the minds of those who can hear. The doors on which I gazed were of a hemophilic hue gilded with metal that now was tarnished and haggard. Above it was a heinous mural of their god. It was a rodent deity trying vainly to personify human features, but whose dead eyes and toothsome grin made me shiver in the caustic light of the sun. This temple was surely a place of evil.
Upon entering its doors, I saw the floor, covered in fur. The fur ran black, with unknown heavenly bodies woven into it along with those ghastly geometric figures whose purpose I knew not save to trick the eye and blind the senses. For if one could look past those horrid collections of shapes, you might see the stains of organic matter splashed across the floor. What these nauseating remains were, or from what manner of beast they might have come, I knew not then. More of my happy ignorance.
I was not alone here. Others indentured like myself wandered the rooms in a daze. My entrance was met by one elderly man, his sickly skin pulled back in a smile reminiscent of his rat god. He spoke hollow phrases of greeting, nonsense that meant little but to placate my growing fear of this place. He gestured to other automatons as they lurched past, listing identities which meant little to me. Their dark-eyed stares and slack-jawed expressions spoke only of feeble minds, broken by the tasks set before them. Dread continued to grow as the skeletal man continued to show me about the halls of worship.
As he lead me along, we came to the alter. On it stood an effigy of human proportion, fashioned in likeness to their gods. A terrifying hymn played from an unknown source and these hateful marionettes jerked to life. Their glass eyes looked past my soul as if I was not even there. They spoken in grating sounds, unlike any human voice. The males movements stuttered like muscles fighting the rigamortis that held them. The lone female staggered with a broken licentiousness that burned itself into some reptilian place in my brain and dances there still. Slowly, for fear of incurring their wrath, I backed away from the altar, letting the old man revel in their unceasing stare.
Retreating into the entrance hall, I heard an unsanctimonious growling from beyond the doors. The ghoulish chime of a clock heralded the turn of the hour. One of my uncouth fellows opened the doors.
What poured in can only be described as pure horror.
Into the building they sprinted, tiny legs carrying them, some with shaky, unsteady gait, to the flashing lights and raucous sounds of their digital quarry. They pounded on the devices, screeching for payment. Their mouths agape, filled with misshapen fangs. Some mouths were bound in metal, others were an endless stream of slobber, tongues flailing like another spasmodic limb. They stampeded past me, bodies barely coming up to my waist. Each had a look in their eye that spoke of desire and mesmerized fanaticism to the gods of this temple. Yet, over the sounds of electronic entertainment and the bark of jerking deities on stage, the most horrid sound arouse. The screaming. These beastly little creatures screamed at such a volume, with such intensity, that it stung my ears and rattled inside my skull like an entire hive of hornets, eagerly seeking escape.
Behind these creatures lurched their matured forms. Adults like I had known, but with something missing inside their souls. Their eyes were dull, listless. They staggered to various tables and chairs, crashing into them with an air of abject defeat. They sat like persecuted prisoners, waiting on their executioners. Those who arrived paired spoke quietly, leaning toward each other to hear the others rasping replies above the ungodly din. They did naught but sit and watch the terrors that had dragged them to this place.
These little demon’s whole world was focused solely on the tatters of paper that bore a printing of that vile deity. Screams would grow in volume to near mind shattering levels as they wrapped their claws around more and more of these paper scraps. Then, whence they believed that had a sufficient number, they brought them to me, dumping them upon the frail glass surface that separated me from them. I tallied their scavenged dregs and somehow managed to translate their incessant chatter to determine what foul trophy they desired in exchange. To some went hollow animal carcasses painted so to hide their rot. To others, small wrapped parcels that the monsters ripped apart and shoved the contents into their dripping jaws; hours of work gone in seconds into maws that stunk of death.
One so trapped in bondage as myself, whose branding suggested his name to be “Keith”, brought to me a staff of a sickly gold color, whose head was adorned with dying grey fibers of serpentine quality. Along with that accursed scepter came a similarly colored barrel filled with some viscous, murky fluid that spoke once of being water, but whose brown hues could no longer claim that name. This “Keith” directed me toward the temples back doors, ones through which the dwarfish beasts and towering husks had been visiting to make their offerings to thrones and gods of unknown pallor and exterior. He spoke of the gastronomical havoc wrought upon one of these beasts and bade me, no, commanded me, to attend to the creature’s odious remains left behind.
I approached the door, “Keith’s” barely contained mirth oozing through my ear and into my brain. He knew what lay beyond the door I stood before, the door with the hieroglyph bearing the shape of a man trapped in a tomb shaped of the grease-filled refuse that we offered the beings of this place. Dragging the barrel and scepter behind, I opened the door to attend to my orders.
I believe it was then that I truly went mad.
There was one of those cretins, sitting on the floor, liquid bursting from every orifice of its visage. Covering it and the floor was the half-digested remains of the food discs served to them. Its face was red and appeared near bursting. It looked up at me, filth staining it and began to sway towards me, arms stretch like it was seeking to embrace me.
I screamed like the beasts that gathered in that temple. My voice did not lessen in horror as I fled. I tore at the robes that all who were enslaved to that place must be adorned with. Maybe I lost my name then as well, as the metal plaque with my name was left with the discarded cloth, crumpled on the floor near the entrance. Pushing past the elder who had greeted me and tried to induct me into his cult, I sprinted to the doorway, into that glaring sun.
Never would I return to that den of filth.
Now I sit in my room, the only light coming from this lamp upon my desk. Anything much stronger reminds me of those flashing, hypnotic lights that deaw in and enslaved those miniscule wretches. My parents continue to speak ill of my, accusing me of sloth and lacking ambition. They remain happily unaware of the terror I have seen. Their ignorance tries to encourage me to try again, to go forth once more into that seething vortex of depravity. They list other locations where I might lend my service, as if in those hovels of consumerism my experience will be different. No, I refuse. Until the day I die I shall never take on that mantel again. Never will I work in a palace that services those creatures we call “customers.”
