The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

metal bowls and each one has a live bird in it. They look like crows, but they’re not. They’re just black birds covered with a shiny film of grease. Another blond guy comes to the table and takes a pair of giant clippers, like the kind used to cut bike locks, and snips their heads off and peels the skin back so all that’s left is meat on a skeleton. The birds, though, are still alive. The guy takes one of the bird heads and drinks the blood, then he tells me to take a bite of the skin. I don’t want to because I’m scared of getting some kind of weird disease, but I do it anyway. I drink all the blood out of the bird. When I’m finished, I feel a pain in the back of my neck. I turn around, and the waiter is trying to use the clippers on me for a table of customers sitting on high chairs above me. Except they don’t look like clippers anymore. They’re like a cross between a bird’s beak and a crocodile’s jaws. I try to protest, and then I realize that it’s useless, because I am watching everything upside down as one of them puts my open neck to his mouth and drinks my blood.
    I’ve seen my own death in dreams like this and it’s helped me appreciate life more. I’ve also seen my own life in dreams and it’s helped me appreciate death more.

antichrist superstar
    I N MY OPINION THE APOCALYPSE … MUST BE PRIMARILY AN INTERNAL, SPIRITUAL EVENT, AND ONLY IN A SECONDARY WAY AN EXTERNAL CATASTROPHE. T HE GATES OF THE W ATCHTOWERS … ARE MENTAL CONSTRUCTIONS. W HEN THEY ARE OPENED, THEY WILL ADMIT [S ATAN] NOT INTO THE PHYSICAL WORLD BUT INTO OUR SUBCONSCIOUS MINDS.... T HE APOCALYPSE IS A MENTAL TRANSFORMATION THAT WILL OCCUR, OR IS PRESENTLY OCCURRING, WITHIN THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS OF THE HUMAN RACE.
    â€”Donald Tyson, “The Enochian Apocalypse”
    â€œT HIS man is deceased.”
    A male voice was speaking somewhere above my body. His words were the first sounds I had heard for hours, maybe days. I didn’t know how long I’d been lying there. I didn’t even know where I was, or if I was alive. I struggled to move, but I couldn’t. My left arm tingled. Everything else was numb and impotent, like wooden limbs hanging from the severed strings of a discarded marionette. I tried to open my eyes, to command them to raise, but they wouldn’t respond. I needed to wake up, to tell them I wasn’t dead. I was still alive. It wasn’t my time to die. I had too much left to accomplish.
    My eyelids fluttered open, leaving behind a greasy, blurry film obstructing my vision. All I could make out was a blinding white light shining on me, penetrating my being, or what was left of it. It wasn’t my time to die. I knew it.
    The back of a hand, bony and varicose, rubbed my forehead. I wondered if it had been there all along. A hideous shadow, ancient, corpulent and redolent of sour cheese and wet wood, blocked the light. It spoke: “God still loves you.” The speaker was a woman, who coughed phlegm into her palm and shook her crumpled nun’s habit then continued stroking my forehead with the back of the hand she had just spit into.
    I could feel my chest now. It was tight and constricted, crushing my heart. There was a small commotion nearby. An old, emaciated man, his body covered with sores either from the mattress, old age or the bones pushing against his skin, had died in the bed next to me.
    A softer hand gripped my jaw and pulled it open. “This is going to give you a headache, but it will make your heart feel better.” She placed something under my tongue, which bubbled, fizzed and tickled, then switched off the bright lights over my bed. My body sank deeper into the bed, and a warm, enveloping wave of blood raced toward my head and rocked me back to sleep.
    When I awoke again, it was dark and the room was empty. My temples throbbed against my skin and my left arm still felt numb, but my strength seemed to be returning. I was wearing just a green, open-backed hospital gown. My clothes sat in a neat black pile on the floor and on the bedside table slouched a tall, lemon-yellow kitchen garbage bag. I tried to remember what had brought me here.
    I reached for the table, and a jolt of pain shot through my ribcage. Inside the bag was a toothbrush, toothpaste, a pen, a makeup case and a black composition notebook—my journal.
    I turned to the first page and tried to focus my eyes on the wavy blue