“I don’t have answers for you, Father,” I said gently.
“The world of our fathers is no more. It was all for nothing. Nothing, I tell you. Nothing! A sham. Not just the Holy Church. But the Jews and the Muslims and the Hindus. They too followed a lie. A damned lie!”
“Father,” I said carefully, “we still have our souls.”
“Yes! Our immortal souls. Death is our only hope now. One solitary means of escape from this earthly torment. Jesus has turned slacker. We must take salvation into our own hands. Look!” He took two long needles from his tunic. “Do you see these?”
“I do.”
“All my life I have railed against the mortal sin of abortion. But now I perform them. And do you know why?”
“It’s better not to bring children into the world as it now is,” I replied.
“Far, far better!” he thundered. And he broke like a rainstorm, weeping uncontrollably, his dark threadbare shoulders wracking with unleashed sobs.
“Direct me to the plant, Father.”
He croaked the words out. I had no words of comfort for him. He was a broken priest, but yet also a driven man. Something was about to snap in him and only death would cure it.
“Go with God, Father,” I said.
After I had moved on, he seized control of himself and cried out, “Heed me! Trust not the Lord! Look to Satan himself for succor! Lucifer was at least once an angel! But these hellish things, they — ”
I walked away from his retching anguish. I was a lapsed Catholic. I had long ago put all belief systems behind me. I had been out in the matrix of all creation. I knew what the real score was. God was more of a hologram than a unitary being. But human consciousness was inextinguishable. There was no death, only transition to other realities. This hard-won knowledge kept me sane through all the horrific earth changes. Detachment became my baseline emotion. What was the worst that could happen to me? Death was inevitable, Old Ones or no Old Ones. If in the end the universe were devoured by the eternally-beating nuclear chaos called Azathoth, there were other universes, adjacent dimensions in which my immortal soul might dwell.
It was a strange unanchored courage, but I had learned it in the matrix. Thus fortified, I prepared to brave the locus of local activity that should explain the One Ones’ fell objectives.
The factory sat in a dell or hollow not far from the corpse-choked James River.
It looked like a coal plant, but smelled like a crematorium. The flaring smokestacks reminded me of that time I RVed Dachau. The spiritual emptiness was oppressive and overwhelming. I never wanted to go back, physically or otherwise.
And now, here I was — facing a far worse environment. I could sense it.
Lines of yoked and chained people were being driven into the main gate by a dozen centaurs, some of which had birdlike heads and tentacles for lower limbs, like the ancient representations of the suppressed Egyptian godlet, Abraxas.
I made a nest of branches, brush and other debris and hunkered down to observe closely.
When I had absorbed all my physical eyes could perceive, I closed them and eased into an alpha brainwave state, then cycled down to theta. I do my best work in theta. When I don’t click out.
I focused on the line of victims filing into the factory. What did they represent to the Old Ones? What was their value?
My first impressions were representational and confusing. I saw soda cans, milk cartons, liquor bottles. Clearly I was operating on my right hemisphere. I tried to switch to the left to invoke the clairaudient function.
I heard a single clairaudient word. A mere whisper bubbling up from my unconscious mind: containers.
My eyes snapped open. “For what?” I said under my breath. Can’t be blood. Or H2O. The Old Ones are non-physical. They were busying terra-deforming the Earth — clearing it as the Necronomicon once prophesied — so that it will be vibrationally supportive of their kind. Could they be energy vampires?
I shut my eyes and tried again. This time I set a different intention: containers for what?
A vivid image sprang up. Clouds. The cobalt clouds that had been forming above the Earth, growing by the immeasurable hour. What did that mean? I focused on those eerie apparitions.
In my mind’s eye, they brightened and pulsated. I saw turbulent faces, boiling like thunderclouds shown in time-lapse photography. Demonic faces roiled and shifted and regathered madly. The clouds spread. I recalled reading about the phenomenon of noctiluminescent clouds — mysterious atmospheric vapor formations that had been reported for over a century now — were they somehow more than mere clouds?
Orifices opened in those clouds. Many of them. Thousands. They irised wide, then snapped shut. I was reminded of gulping piranha. What were they doing? Making faces at hapless mankind?
I gave it up. Rolling over in my makeshift shelter, I stared up at the night sky. Metallic-blue cumulus clouds began gathering over the factory like scavengers to a corpse. That meant something. But what?
I upshifted my breathing and climbed back to a beta state. I needed a clear head. The deeper I went into non-ordinary states of consciousness, the fuzzier my thinking would be until normal baseline beta consciousness reasserted itself. The dreaded downside of being operationally psychic.
An hour passed. Two. A dismal line of people continued filing into the factory. Chopped-off screams broke the stillness. But I could glean nothing further on any level of perception at my command.
It had been years since I had astral-projected. I was never very good at it. Just looking and down at my body lying there was enough to give me a jolt and send me snapping back into my physical self.
Yet I had to try. It was the only way in — the only safe way. Or so I assumed.
I lay on my back and drifted into a deep meditation. Fighting a rising fear, I pushed my jagged beta brain-waves flatter and flatter, till they were sine waves, then shallow waves. As they moved toward flatline, I unexpectedly went delta.
The delta state is trance sleep. I don’t know my way around it. But somehow I achieved separation.
Below, I saw my body entangled in brush and hoped I’d get to return to it.
Carefully, I moved away. I was now in the thought-responsive aspect of reality. I had but to think of a place, and I would translate there. I approached the factory with the care of a visible man — which I was not.
At a far corner, away from all centaur activity, I eased in through a broken window. Inside, furnaces massed. The place was full of great smelters and electrical furnaces and the like. Whatever this had been, it was the fiery pit of hell now.
Centaurs with their scourges stormed about. Some wielded clubs. They drove people into the fire. Some humans quailed before the flames. Centaurs quickly dashed out their brains and flung them bodily into the glowing furnace maws.
This was a crematorium!
I was almost disappointed. That’s all?
No. Not all.
It was not a voice. I would not have heard a voice. For I had left my ears behind.
It seemed to be coming from above. I moved to the shadowy vault of a ceiling, through it, and floated above the roof.
Above hung the low-lying clouds. Dull blue, they stared down at me with hollow interest.
Suddenly I felt an irresistible force, pulling me up, higher and fast.
I willed myself back into my resting body. But the force tugging on the eternal me was strong.
Frantically, I looked around and saw the silver cord that anchored me to my mortal form. Still intact!
With a dawning horror, I spied the smoky tendril drifting down from a nodular cloud. It quested coilingly for the silvery filament that guaranteed my survival.