Story: Chimera: Class of 666
Part: One "Waking Up"
Chapter: Three "The Iron Gauntlet"
Authored by:
Hannah Nyland (The Irreverent Revenant)
All Rights Reserved.
Chimera: Class of 666
By Hannah Nyland and Jerad Sayler
“It's hard to remember dreams,” he started
again, ‘”they are amorphous and wispy things. But my memory of this will always
stay with me. No one ever forgets their awakening, It shatters you, it
completes you and pierces you in ways you never could have imagined. Even that
astral glimpse of the Supernal Truth marks the soul and shocks the mind to its
foundation. You will never forget yours either. But up until that though my
memory may be a bit off.”
“I had a dream in which I woke up, lying in
bed at my grandparent’s in the middle of the night. Kind of a trip since that
is right where I had gone to sleep. The
room was dark but I could see pretty well from the light filtering in from the
streetlights near the small basement window. Then I heard this clacking sound.
Then more. It reminded me of those toys where you wind up those teeth with
blood red gums and little feet that chatter all over the place. Chattery Teeth.
I will dread this sound until the day I die.”
“The
door to the room slowly opened. These things came into the room and surrounded
the bed. The bottom dropped out of my stomach, I was so scared I couldn’t
move. Paralyzed. Somehow I knew they
were once people. Short hobbling forms crouched over as if they couldn't
straighten their legs all the way. They wore white strait jackets and their
arms were crossed and tied, their legs had restraint chains keeping them closer
together too. The white jackets were stained with blood and darker things at the
seams; they were sown into the flesh with knotted black cord. And their
faces... god I will never forget those horrid visages of pain, torment, and
despair. Dark gray dead flesh, pulled back so tightlythat the eyes and features
all dissolved into taunt lines to where they joined a thick glass jar jutting
out of the backs of their heads... The jars glowed with a faint corpselight
through the glass. No face, no eyes, just a lipless mouth of reddish gums and
human teeth, perpetually chattering together as if in so much strain, insanity
and pain that they couldn't stop. Maybe their teeth were their only
freedom. I hate thinking about them.”
“You
could feel sorry for them if they weren't so horrible... and I knew they wanted
to hurt me just as bad. To lash out and
hurt like they were hurting. They were
people once put death and pain changed them. The Chatterers, that is what we
called them. We all saw them in our dreams that night, but that wasn't the
worst of it.”
“Because
then the Man came in. A tall bald man in a black leathery business suit also
sown into his flesh tightly at the seams. His head was the same gray as the
chatterers but smooth. His eyelids gone, his mouth a perpetual smile of
yellowing teeth, no ears. The Gentleman, we now call him, back then he was just
The Man. He never said a single word to us, just smiled. His eyes were not
smiling, they burned with yellow hate and his mouth was strained.”
“He glided across the floor to my bedside,
floating inches above the ground on pointed toes, producing a scalpel from his
sleeve. Words did not need to be exchanged. I found I could move, survival
instinct overtaking paralyzing fear. I dove out of bed for the door. The
creatures got in my way, but with their hands bound they could only body check
me and snap those powerful jaws at my flailing limbs. I struggled through them
and through the door, it was so close. I
was really surprised I had made it out of that room.”
Jack
shakes his head and blinks his eyes a few times. “Don’t worry, we got him too.
He’s toast. And all those kids who killed themselves had been his doing, they
had been turned into those Chatterers. Their souls had been stolen in their
dreams before the Gentleman forced their bodies to self-terminate. They had
been trapped in his service until we burned them all down. It was a long
ordeal. Remind me to tell you about how
we survived that thing. It was a lot of
Beulah’s darker history dredged up. I
want to focus on my epiphany that opened up the world of magic to me.”
“Sounds good,” I said. I nodded empathetically, happy to move to a
less terrifying topic.
“I
don't remember much but running after that. I remember the others being with me
but I am not clear on that. Running with
me and freaking out, running from the same boogeyman. Things were really fuzzy
in our conjoined dreams, and the lack of internal consistency makes it harder
to remember. We were each running
together but apparently we were headed to different places. I think maybe that
is why that part of my awakening to magic seems so incongruous.”
“We
tore through the cold winter night in empty dark cold Beulah streets. Barely
any light, absolutely no people, no sound but our feet and yells. It was our first
taste of the the Temenic realm of the despair of our hometown on the astral
plane. It’s okay, this story requires too much metaphysical explanation to get
into right now. Let’s just call it a collective dream of Beulah shared by its
past and present residents. I've long since trod through that place many times,
looking for things that I may have left there. The realm was in perpetual
winter, always empty, biting cold and silence. Falling snow, no wind, utter
loneliness. We split up, or I got lost... or the others were never running with
me in the first place. We each had our own road as I said, and I was separated
from the bunch.”
“I
remember finding a cold path through ditches full of snow. I thought I was
heading to the Eagle's Club near grandpa mayor’s office,” He chuckles, amused
by his other grandfather. “But things just got darker and more unfamiliar. They
seemed to stretch out into the infinite and I could go no further because I was
impossibly far away and also unfathomably close to my destination. I blinked
and found myself in total darkness. I thought I had gone blind. I couldn't feel
my body. Completely detached, it was a horrible feeling. Complete sensory
deprivation, even my concept of how long I was in that state failed me. I think I floated, maybe I didn't go anywhere,
how would I know? Vertigo. Blackness. I was nowhere and suddenly this wasn't a
dream anymore. Couldn’t be. it was too vivid and yet I felt nothing. A
nothingness so complete it hurt.”
“Then
a provocative and warm light appeared. An orb dangling at eye level. I drew close to it or it drew close to me.
Then the bowling ball sized sphere or light lifted to show the face of my demon
guide. Rather than going all Lovecraften on you and saying shit like: it was so
scary I lost my mind and I can't even describe it to you. I will actually try, no promises though. Ever
seen the movie the Relic? Think that thing with teeth as long as a door and a
mouth twice as wide. A wall of needle teeth fills this things head. Add to that
aspects of an angular fish, a dragon, and maybe a horned warthog and some gecko
for good measure. Add to that an impossible intelligence of something that has
always been and bone-crushing levels of menace. Now take that to the 29th
power… that barely describes my first Pandemonian demon in the actual abode of
demons. And it was happy to see me in the worst possible way. I will never forget
what it said to me either: “You who left the path that does not stray, welcome
to hell. The longer you stay the more you shall learn. WELCOME TO HELLLLLL….”
it dragged out that last bit impossibly slow. Its voice was like the grating of
the entire earth. It shook my body, well I didn't really have a body, I had a
mind form I think. It shook me down to
the core, mind and soul complete.”
“Then
the 'lights' came up and I could appraise my surroundings. I was in a forest of
gnarled trees that looked like they may have been people at some point. Demonic
monkeys swung through the air and tore at the people-trees. The broken branches
bled and the gnarled visages of men and women told the story of their torment
unending. But we were only at the edge and there was so much more to see. There
was an iron labyrinth beyond the edge of this horrid suicide forest. The demon
slashed at my flank with its whip-like tongue and drove me to the gates of hell.”
“This first march was so hard. The voracious slave-driver.
The endless run to the gates of Hell. I wouldn't be lying if I said it was a
million miles and also just a single thought away. I wouldn't be lying if I
said it took forever to get there, how the way you experience something drives
your perception of time. Lesson one, matter and distance have no meaning in
Pandemonium. There is only will and the mind... and the true terrors that lie
within yourself. Also you find out how much of a horrible person you have been.
All of it. Pandemonium is the realm of the True Goetic Demons, built from every
nightmare image locked in the human heart. I have felt the bell’s chime in the
darkness, the combined horrors of all mankind’s imagination and so much more. They are the darkness that lies in the human
heart found sublime perfection.”
This
rattles me pretty good, knowing what happened in class was some kind of
elaborate mystery play where the demons were apparently finding expression
within the actors in it, all the lies people I knew told. Only they weren’t really lies, just horrible
truths. So that was why.
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