Dark Aeons

by Z. M. Wilmot

  The Parasite

  This is an affliction of the Body – It will destroy your Flesh.

  It will weaken your Mind and tear open your Head.

  This is an affliction of the Mind – It will destroy your thoughts.

  It will weaken your Spirit and tear open your Self.

  This is an affliction of the Spirit – It will destroy your Will.

  It will weaken your Life and tear open your Existence.

  That which is an affliction of the Body, Mind, and Spirit

  Is that of the Soul – And it will destroy your Being.

  An affliction of the body is better than an affliction of the mind. An affliction of the mind is better than an affliction of the spirit. That affliction that is of the body, mind, and spirit is an affliction of the soul, and an affliction of the soul will destroy you.

  It came to me first as an affliction of the body. It was not separate from its symptoms, yet lived inside me as surely as any other physical being. Its feeding was a constant tug at my reserves of energy; they slipped away slowly but surely as the weeks passed. It remained unidentifiable and unknown to even the best of physicians; as far as they could see, it did not exist. It was merely an abstract parasite with no form in the physical, that could yet still surely make me sweat and shiver in the bitterest of cold and the most fiery of heat. It never gave me respite and relentlessly drained the vitality from my body. Each day, each hour, each minute, I could exert myself less and less.

  It had come from nowhere, yet must have existed somewhere. It descended out of the blue, transforming what had been a healthy young girl, her body developing strongly and filling itself with the vibrant energy and joy of youth into a coughing, exhausted woman who felt aged a century. Her friends came to her aid, but it had control of her flesh, and she was powerless to stop it.

  No drugs could harm it, no treatment cure it. Never lacking in funds, my guardians were confident that it would be defeated given proper payment, but money means nothing without brilliance, and the mass hallucination of coinage is meaningless to a parasite. The best and brightest of the medical industry stood no chance against it, and friends and family watched helplessly as I descended into a terrible sickness.

  The worst was the clarity of mind that accompanied these stages; the hazy god of insanity eluded me, and every excruciating inflammation, every painful swelling, and every terrible itch was felt with the clarity of a cold gush of water. I could not retreat from my plight, for it had trapped me and I was powerless to resist. It was not even a week before I could no longer walk, and the powerful, striding young woman of Monday was eternally bedridden by Sunday.

  My stomach churned like a herd of buffalo across the plains, but nothing could feed it. The parasite cared not for material sustenance; that was not what it craved. Whatever I was forced to consume emerged again from my mouth within moments. My ailing body had given up and surrendered. It had lost the fight long ago, and it was well aware of it. The parasite would triumph.

  Not even the machines that they thrust into my flesh were enough to drive it back. The best of physicians were at a loss when even the intravenous sustenance was rejected by my body, yet I did not starve nor did I thirst. It kept me alive, somehow, so that I would not cease to feed it. It is in the interests of the parasite to leave its host alive.

  Yet I could feel my body begin to turn on itself, taking its own life before the parasite could stop it. I screamed at my treacherous flesh to stop its madness, but it could no longer hear – my body and mind were at a disconnect, having feuded without hope of repair. My stomach began to feed on itself, and my liver diluted my blood. The physicians saw all of this and were helpless. Surgery would kill me, they said, and her own organs fight her. How can we help?

  They couldn’t. No one can.

  The rashes began to appear then, on my breasts and knees first, and then quickly spreading across my body. My friends and family feared the Pox, and so I was left in the care only of the physicians and nurses, who took pains to wear masks at all times. I was abandoned and left alone with my rebellious body and the terrible parasite that sucked out my life-force.

  It was then that it became an affliction of the mind.

  The long-awaited insanity finally dropped over me, and the pain of my body faded away as my mind came to the fore. The relief that I felt at the prospect of surrendering my sanity was fleeting, for my mind began to despair of its own accord.

  What little control I had left of my body vanished, and I became a prisoner in my own head. I could watch my surroundings, much like an old woman watches an ancient television set, but never could I interact with them. The loneliness tore at me, and it was company that I wanted, but I could not have company. I could ask for no one, and no one would see me; they did not wish for this terrible thing to descend upon them as well. I watched in horror as my body shrank and withered beneath me, and as physicians and nurses tried to feed me, but they never failed to fail in their goals.

  The strangers surrounded me day and night, and they began to take on hideous forms, especially in the night, half-formed fiends lurking at the corners of my vision, and I could feel them approaching, but was helpless to act. I would become stiff with fear, yet know all the while that I had not moved a muscle nor ever would, for they had atrophied to an abhorrent point. The things would approach me and taunt me, and I would want to cry, but I could not. Nothing was scarier than the parasite that had taken hold of me, but it would not let me realize that. It filled me with an unholy fear and terror of the things that tread softly in the darkness.

  I could never trust a stranger, and especially not a stranger whose fangs gleamed blood-red in the cold blue sunlight, nor whose eyes flashed green. The tentacular tongues and groping fingers confirmed the validity of my nightmare, and I was aware that I had descended into Hell – but I was not free. Hell should have been a relief, but it was not. The flames burned my flesh day and night, and I was roasted slowly over a cold dark fire, turning endlessly on the eternal spit of damnation. No one could hear the cries I could not utter, and the daemons and devils around me did naught but leer and laugh. The tears that would not come could not extinguish the fire, and the writhing that I could not do would not dislodge the spit.

  The grey haze of ultimate madness fell like a curtain, and the leering Fallen Ones were gone, replaced by the empty coldness. I spent eternities alone with my thoughts, with no choice but to wander endlessly the featureless planes. But I could not even do that – I was immobile on the Plains of Asphodel, without even the flowers for company. Tartarus was hidden and Elysium invisible; I was trapped in a terrible purgatory, a dreaded state of limbo, caught between endless worlds.

  The eternal state of nothingness with consciousness is not what we were made to bear – I could contemplate whatever I wished, but it would torment me with thoughts of others and how they had gone. Snakes slithered around my ankles and through my orifices, dragging me down beneath the flowering blossoms and into the heart of the worm, whose gullet blazed with ice.

  I plunged into the fire and bounced off the solid stone that awaited me at the top, slithering up the elephant’s trunk and flying into his gaping maw. Clowns with hammers and clowns with saws pried loose my legs and had their way as they stabbed me and crushed me, taking their knives to heal me only to use their handkerchiefs to slice me open again.

  And then the fuzzies came, flying down from below me, their bodies blazing cold and filled with a chilly heat that deadened even the dead. They crawled all over me, gnawing at me with their little ears and ripping off tiny hunks of my flesh, devouring the massive pieces before my eyes, and I wept rivers of grass, filling the landscape about me with a withered splendor and spoilt wonder. The mammoths came then, bleeding upon the Earth and Sky and filling them with a rage that knocked the stars up from the heavens, causing them to rise up to me and make me swell and freeze.

  I could have accomplished much with my life, but it had all been ruined. An author, an ath
lete, a scholar, or a president – I could have done it all. That woman of my past, she could have been anything. But where had that woman gone? She wished she could say she had gone to Hell and back, but she had not come back. People only came back from Hell in fairy tales.

  The potential of a wasted life – she could have been great, a prime minister or a musician or a-

  -astronaut or an engineer or-

  -a zookeeper or a beekeeper or a squidkeeper-

  -an actress or a porn star o-

  -or a ringmaster or a bodybuilder or a governor-

  -he could have been the hegemon or a general-

  -she could have explored the depths of-

  -psychologist or teache-

  -gravedigge-

  The people all flowed into her and she lost herself in them, and it became then an affliction of the spirit. For her individuality was now gone, her personality vanished, lost in the endless recesses of her own mind, if it could indeed be called hers any longer. The memories and personas of those who had fallen before merged with her, and though she was not alone, she was hopelessly lonely, though she could not tell; if one is with others but has no self, then they are not truly with others, as there is no self to differentiate from them. She became one of the mob, the mass, the endless rolling tide that dwells in the deep unconscious of the psychotic. She was not special, she was not unique; nothing would have come of her. Her spirit began to ebb away, flowing into the terrible parasite that sat upon its crude throne of Essence. She slumped over in what humans like to think of as the waking world and her life left her, as her will had been broken; that which does not exist has no will with which to fight. And in this universe, what does not fight loses, and what loses dies. Without the indomitable will of the spirit, nothing lives and everything dies – the undoing of the spirit, then, is the undoing of the self.

  And when one has stripped away the defenses of the body, mind and spirit, what is left to them but the soul, the source of being for all that lives in the waking world? It is the soul that the parasite wants, and the soul that the parasite needs to survive – the mind and body and spirit are merely the paper wrapped around its sustenance, that it must unravel and tear through to reach the meat inside. Her soul was nothing special; it consumed hundreds of them each moment, for time had no meaning to it, that terrible, eternal parasite. It had not selected her from among billions, carefully picking his delicacy; it merely devoured whatever it could find that was closest to it, for without constant nourishment it indeed would die. She was another pea on the plate, insignificant and worthless, yet feeding the abhorrent abomination that slowly devoured all life and destroyed all being – for what else is the soul but the source of the being and of existence itself?

  Even the parasite itself was not unique, and was only one of many millions upon millions of brothers and sisters; its race feasts upon the souls of the living, who so willingly reproduce for the benefit of feeding its insatiable appetite. For what are you but its cattle, its livestock, its fowl? Who was it you think that created you? Did you think it created us to be yourselves? No, the parasites created you and your kind, and all others who dwell in what you believe to be the waking world, to ensure that they can live on in their debauchery and infinite gluttony. They care not for you, for you are merely morsels to them, and they will take every last one of your kind and strip away their defenses, leaving only their innermost soul to consume, for what are you but cattle to our being?