by Matt Cardin
Abruptly, insights that had lain dormant in my breast for years surged to life and circulated upwards to my brain, where they revealed to me at last the truth of what I was seeing. This, I now understood, was the primal chaos, the formless raw matter of creation. This was the ultimate truth beyond God and Satan, good and evil, light and darkness, for it had existed long before the advent of these opposing forces, long before God spoke the creative words to bring forth an ordered cosmos peopled with conscious spiritual and physical beings. In fact—most shocking of all, a realization that I could scarcely accept—I saw that the God whom I had devoted my life to serving was the offspring of the abyss, and that both He and His cosmos were negated by its universality. Like a corrosive spiritual acid, the ocean of the uncreated was forever eating away at the shore of creation, and of its Creator.
As if he had been summoned by the culmination of the vision, the abbot slipped silently into the room at that very moment and began to make his way from desk to desk. I waited dumbly for him to finish with the others, and when he did, he paused behind me as he had done before. Then he reached down and once again ran his hand over the pages.
In a kind of trance, I looked down at his hand and saw that it, too, was infected with the seed of corruption, as indeed all flesh must be. But I could also see, as if with the aid of an invisible lens held before my eyes, that behind his ephemeral flesh, or below it, or prior to it, extending outward from some inconceivably concentrated well of entity, there lurked a vast, churning thunderhead of chaos. It shifted unendingly, appearing now as a massive black cloud looming heavy with rain, now as the elastic scaly skin of a serpent, now as the surface of an oily ocean. It was all these things and more, for no representation could convey the reality of the monstrous thing that dwelled within the flesh of this man whom for sixteen years I had loved and called my spiritual father.
He waited patiently with his hand before my eyes until the insight came clear and I understood that I was seeing the hand of the abyss itself, which had momentarily decided, for reasons hidden in the gloom of its bottomless depths, to adopt the form of a man.
4. When He Shall Appear
What kept me from fleeing in the face of all this was my longing for transcendence. This had been the start of the matter, and now it formed the end of it. I had seen so much and felt so deeply that I simply could not leave, not when the goal of my spiritual pilgrimage finally lay within reach. Drawing strength from one of the promises of St. Paul that I hoped might still apply to me, even after everything that I had learned, I began to think my true life must be hidden elsewhere—not with Christ in God, but in the blackest reaches of the abyss. I eagerly anticipated the revelation of this true self when the time was right, and its point of contact in my soul glowed with an exquisite burning coldness every day, assuring me that I would not have long to wait.
Weeks passed as time flowed by like a black river that I regarded from a stationary point on some undefined shore. I hovered above everything, clung to nothing, and consider the world and its inhabitants as figments of a fleeting and pointless dream. The sight of the abbot and my brothers sickened me, but it was a sickness that I had now transcended, for I knew that none of my thoughts, feelings, or reactions were of any consequence, save for the exquisite responsiveness that I had developed to the hints of dark enlightenment that continuously flew up from my spirit like sparks from a fire.
Aided by this ongoing inner transformation, my work continued to undergo a mutation. Nothing that came from my pen could surprise me. I did not wonder when my hand left off with words and began to produce elaborate illustrations that were far beyond my natural capacity. Drolleries and illuminations of the most intricate craftsmanship appeared in my book, twisting and twining in serpentine chains of meaning. Fanged faces with forked tongues and porcine snouts peered out from behind words or upward and inward from the borders of pages, leering at the text and adding their own silent commentaries. From time to time, a word or phrase from the Holy Scriptures themselves would spew forth from my pen, followed closely by yet another of those faces, which would bare its fangs and grin at the quotation as if to say, “Ah, yes, but . . .” or “Come now, could you really have believed . . . ?”
As for the other aspects of my life in the abbey—my daily fulfillment of the Divine Office, my association with my brothers—I had never played the game more splendidly, and was especially helped in this by a new sense of superiority far different from the one I had formerly harbored. I had always found it easier, even before joining the order, to be kind, patient, and even loving toward those whom I considered my inferiors. Thus it was natural that I was never so tender with my brothers as during those final days when I saw them as from a great height. Even my old self, centered upon my original heart, found something to satisfy its altruistic longings when it was able to look with compassion upon walking, quivering sacks of corruption that believed themselves to be men.
The abbot and I appeared to have reached an unspoken agreement. Each time I saw him, I gained a momentary glimpse of a roaring blackness that wore his face like a mask. But I said nothing about this to the others. He, for his part, stopped speaking to me entirely, and merely fixed me with a hawkish eye every day in the scriptorium after he had finished with the others, before exiting without a word. The brethren noticed this, of course, and took it as a sign that I had advanced beyond them. Formerly, my false sense of humility would have led me to deny such speculations, but now I knew they spoke nothing but the truth, so I let them speculate as they would.
Still, time was winding down, and soon the end was upon us all. It began with a vision that plagued me one night while I lay awake in my cell, buzzing with hot excitement. I had finished the day in a rush of passion. My eyes had grown wet every time I spoke softly to a brother. I had encouraged them all, prayed for them all, loved them all, and had known from their shining eyes that they were talking with awe among themselves about the amazing progress I had shown in the spiritual life. After Vespers, I had retired to my cell and known immediately that it would be a sleepless night, for I was much too energized by a wondrous sense of well being, which surged outward from my dark heart to the farthest reaches of my extremities, deadening any lingering inclination that I might have had to place stock in that body and its desires, tantalizing me with visions of the world as it would appear when the truth began to shine through the cracks of creation like rays from a black sun.
I lay awake for hours, looking up through the window at the night sky and noticing for the first time how strikingly similar it was to the abyss that bordered creation. The stars were strewn from one end of the heavens to the other in a staggering profusion on that moonless night, and their positions appeared strangely fluid. A ripple of motion skittered across them, and I wondered whether I had unknowingly fallen asleep and begun to dream. The face of that sky might have been a vast black ocean, with the stars mere sparkles upon its ever-shifting surface, or perhaps they were the shining eyes of a billion shadowy creatures hovering just beneath the water, waiting in the womblike silence of the void, staring into the cosmos from across unfathomable distances, regarding this little sphere with a rapacious interest.
Without warning, as I gazed up in awe, a bit of darkness detached itself from the stellar tableau, coalesced into an animate form , and shot like a comet toward the earth. As it came nearer, I saw that it was vaguely man-shaped, and that its proportions were the same as my own. It took only an instant for me to realize that it was headed for the monastery, and only an instant more for all the pent up longings of a lifetime to surge upward into my eyes. My new heart began to pound out a hymn of joy, and tears began to fall like rain, as I eagerly awaited the arrival of what I recognized as my true self.
But then I found that I did not even have to wait, for suddenly, through an impossible shift of perspective, I no longer lay inside my cell but gazed down upon the huddled gray roofs of the monastery from a dizzying height. As I drew closer, I saw that everything
appeared brittle and hollow. The magnificent stonework of the church, the columns and tilestones of the cloister, the roofs and archways—all appeared as flimsy as parchment. Even the towering façade of Mont-Saint-Michel itself was not exempt; I thought that I might reach out and punch through its massive face like an eggshell, dig through ancient layers of volcanic rock like dry cotton, and find only an echoing emptiness on the other side.
I shot like a spear toward the rooftops and, coming nearer, spied through a certain window a slight figure clothed in a rough brown robe and lying stiff as a rod on his pallet while he stared up at me with wide, blank eyes. It was impossible to suppress a laugh of pure joy at the sight of my old self. The sound rang out like a hiss of raindrops upon the stonework of the abbey.
Guided by an unerring instinct, I directed this new body of darkness toward a particular rooftop and then sank effortlessly through the wood and stone, coming to rest in the scriptorium, where I found my precious book lying closed upon its wooden desk beside the inkpot. My love for it raged like a black fire in my breast. Tears of darkness welled up in my new eyes. With a hand reeking of the smoky effulgence of the abyss, I reached down and opened to a random page.
There it was: the evidence of the change that had been wrought within me, the statement of the new revelation that had swallowed all my old hopes. Love and loathing vied for dominance within me, but the fire in my breast consumed them both and roared silently of its own absoluteness. Without further hesitation, I dove forward into the book.
It was like leaping through an open window. The night of uncreation rolled out before me in vast waves whose sable surfaces glowed hotly with veins of red and gold. Dimly, far off in the distant reaches of a realm where distance had no meaning, I glimpsed a coiling, pulsating nest of living shapes, like half-formed nightmares of the ancient monster of the Scriptures: “Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent, the dragon that is in the sea.” Their sinister, spasmodic motion, constricting and unfurling across multiply insane dimensions, beckoned me to come home.
My last thought before I closed the distance and flew into their impossibly malformed arms was that I had finally achieved my lifelong goal. At last I was reborn, as my former Lord had said that I must be. But it was a type of rebirth that neither He nor I had ever foreseen.
5. Our Grandfathers Which Art in Chaos
What followed might have lasted for eons or for an infinitesimal fraction of a second. Time warped and blurred, and I sank into a sense of dreamlike calm as I was torn apart and reconstructed again and again, enduring endless transformations into all manner of fantastic and grotesque shapes while a cacophony of screeches raged around me. Eventually the Lords of the Abyss settled on a form much like the one in which I had arrived. Then they sent me shooting back across the empty expanse toward a window that sparkled in the distance with the glow of created light.
When I awoke in my cell, in my old body of flesh, my first thought was that I had been dreaming. Then the presence of my true self, newly remade, pressed upward from the well in my soul, and the ecstasy of invulnerability washed over me.
I ignored Matins, instead making my way directly to the scriptorium, where I stared down with love at my book. For an instant I experienced a strange sensation of doubleness as I looked right through the pages as if through a clear window and locked gazes with my true self, which hovered in darkness on the other side, peering dispassionately into the world of creation. The resulting perceptual alchemy was akin to Ouroboros swallowing his own tail. For a time I lost the ability to distinguish between the end of my false self and the beginning of my true one.
The brothers came for me soon. They found me hunched over my book, scribbling furiously in its pages. They were so very concerned and sweet as they asked the reason for my strange actions. But when they caught sight of the swirling inked chaos on the pages, their loving looks melted into grimaces, and the long-awaited shrieks of horror finally resounded from the clammy stone walls.
I remained silent and dispassionate when they attacked this body like a pack of wolves, beating and tearing it until blood spattered like rain on the cold stone floor. The pain, like everything else in this fleeting world, was inconsequential. I remained equally remote when they took me before the abbot. Of course they brought the incriminating evidence with them, and when they showed him a sample page, he feigned all the appropriate expressions of outrage and horror. Then they all together, the brothers and the abbot, threw this body into its cell and dispatched a messenger to Paris, with instructions to forward a letter all the way to Rome regarding the awful thing that had happened in their midst.
The book they locked in the abbot’s own quarters, so that none of them would be tempted to gaze upon its contents. Of course he and I then spent many long nights eye to eye, with him gazing through the windows of the pages into the bowels of the abyss. Elsewhere in the abbey, this body in its cell laughed heartily at the irony, to the great consternation of the brother who stood guard outside the door. He tried to speak with me, perhaps to offer comfort or instruction, but I had only to open this mouth and quote a few lines from the book to silence him and send him fleeing. They were my words, from my book, and the pleasure I found in speaking freely from my own heart, unhindered by thoughts of emptying myself for the sake of God’s truth, was unutterably delicious.
Three months passed before the envoy from Rome finally arrived to hear the case—an agonizing eternity for the brothers, but the mere blink of an eye to me. Time had become meaningless, and the shadows that crawled across the floor of my cell every day with the sun’s passage moved with the swiftness of an advancing storm.
During those months, I discovered that my brothers could not endure the force of my gaze upon them. The ones who brought me food would gasp and stagger backward when our eyes met. Darkness would begin to shine from their joints and pores, and they would look as if they might disintegrate into ragged pieces of rotting flesh at the merest hint of a breath. Eventually I began to suspect that my eyes had become like two lamps glowing with the dark light of the void. Perhaps when I bathed my brothers in this otherworldly radiance, it kindled within them visions of their own imminent undoing.
When the Roman envoy arrived, headed by a bishop of imposing rank and title, I eagerly anticipated the chance to test this new faculty on him. Late one night, when he entered my cell and tried to speak what he called sanity to me, I gazed coolly upon him until his eyes began to glow with darkness. His breath grew ragged, but he must have been a stout soul, for he fought off the cold shadow and sat down beside me. He had brought with him a copy of the Gospel of St. John, and without further ado he opened it to the first page and began to read to me of Christ the incarnate Word.
Thinking to humor him, I looked down at the text and experienced a final and inevitable shock as my eye caught something astonishing. After the moment I began to laugh. The sense of hilarity grew and grew until I was screaming and weeping with laughter. My visitor’s composure broke, and he trembled as he looked at me with fear and consternation. Then he looked back down at the book in his hand, and a moment later he slammed it shut and fled my cell in a panic, although not before I saw the blackness begin to weep from his eyes. It was a fitting reaction from someone who had just glimpsed the impossible truth for the very first time.
For there on the pages of the Scripture itself were statements of the things I had so recently learned—not written in the text itself, but etched between the lines in darkly glowing letters that lit up for anyone who had eyes to see. From the beginning to the ends of eternity, the incarnate Word had always been matched and throttled by its negation, and it was those hidden lines that I had unknowingly copied and made explicit in my book. Irony of ironies, the Scriptures themselves, the supposed repositories and bringers of revealed spiritual light, were in fact the hidden carrier of the great darkness waiting on the other side.
It was then that I began to suspect what the dark powers were planning.
Sitting in my cell, abandoned by everyone, I saw the disparate pieces of the puzzle fall together, and I knew that everything had been premeditated and foreordained.
I knew that the abbot, himself an avatar of the abyss, had been placed high in the ranks of the church in order to shepherd and guide groups of spiritually minded men toward the hidden truth, until one would appear whose passion would be of such depth and scope that it would mark him as a fit vehicle for the revelation of darkness. The abyss needed a scribe. Where better to find one than among the ranks of the church with its scattered army of copyists? There could hardly have been an environment more conducive to the nurturing of my spiritual sensibilities than the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel, nor a duty more favorable for the exercising of my innate endowments than the work of copying the Holy Scriptures. My sickness, my downfall, my pending judgment at the hands of the Church—all had been planned long in advance. The extent of the conspiracy staggered me, and I shivered to think how deeply the influence of the void must reach into the very heart of the Church in order for it to successfully execute such an epic scheme, all of it centered upon my recent efforts.
In a case such as mine, the presiding bishop will surely demand that the book be produced before a court of inquiry, so that he can judge the basis of the charges against me for himself. He will surely ask to have it opened in the presence of those assembled for the hearing. And that will signal the beginning of the end and the close of creation’s opening act. My new masters have already used my hand of flesh as a vehicle for their written revelation. Now they plan to use the work of that hand as a bridge for their entrance into the created order. When the book is opened before the assembled monks and masters, the blackness of the abyss will shine forth in their midst, and its Lords will charge across the parchment bridge and will pierce the tender flesh of creation even as the spear pierced the side of Christ Himself. Then everyone present will see and know the truth that hides behind the veil of creation. And the work of uncreation will begin.
