The Message On The Wall - Steem Powered Stories

I sincerely hope nobody ever reads this.

It is not by choice that I write, but by some compellence. I would rather take my own life. Hell, I will probably do soon enough, if I find the willpower. Any fate is better than this, so I implore you; stop reading, lest you share my descent to the unthinkable.

As I stated, I do not want to write this, but what I want hardly matters anymore. I am under some kind of geas, nothing but a vessel of the Message.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar

The Message has been delivered. It is too late now. God have mercy on your soul.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar

Writing down the alien, despicable words has been the single most miserable failure of my life. If only I had the strength to resist, to purge them from my mind and from those walls. Now the Message will be passed on, replicate, propagate, infect more minds, never stop until it fulfills its unspeakable purpose.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar

Now that I have failed, I may just as well continue writing. It soothes my broken mind to write down the words again and again, Hakk-esh Vah Klar, and I think this is part of the Message's effect. I tried locking up myself where nobody could hear me and uttering, screaming them. Nothing, no reprieve from their inexorable torment. I suspect it's simply because I could not pronounce them correctly.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar, God have mercy on my poor soul.

It is by a cruel twist of fate that I first came upon the Message. I was on a brief vacation by the sea, trying to get away from the city's stress and smog. I fancy myself a bit of an amateur spelunker and was told of some seaside caverns. I never quite understood what passion drove me to squeeze myself in the depths of the earth. I guess I'll never know. I packed my gear, asked for directions and went to check the caverns for myself.

My head swims as I write, my thoughts drift away. Damn those Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island books I read as I child. Now that I think of it, maybe that's where I picked up these silly passions. Why could I not be like the other children of my time, running around with scraped knees instead of reading old books? Why could I not be like the other adults of my time, worrying about mortgages and spouses and the rat race instead of delving alone in forgotten depths? Damn my foolish mother, damn her, damn her abusive ways and her venomous words. She was a living, breathing plague, instilling her pestilence in my poor innocent mind! To hell with her, may her wicked soul burn in the Nine Hells for all eternity!

Hakk-esh Vah Klar

I feel somewhat better now. I am sorry, first you had to be infected be the Message, now you have to read to my incoherent rants. Bear with me, if you want. It's too late for you, too, anyway. You may not know it yet, but it is.
But I digress. I was writing about the caverns.

At first glance, the seemed to be nothing special. It took my just over ten minutes to explore them. I was secretly hoping to see something resembling a smuggler hideaway or a pirate cove. Both smugglers and pirates were known to frequent those waters for centuries, before the world became a place of automobiles and skyscrapers and computers.

I had almost given up when I felt a... tug? I do not know how to explain it. It is as if my brain picked up an imperceivable signal. Come to think of it, that's one perfectly plausible explanation. I walked over to the deepest part of the cave and lit my flashlight.

To my surprise I found a narrow passage I hadn't spotted earlier. It seemed to be deep. I was mesmerized. I tried to slip through, see what lies ahead. The passage was, as I said, narrow, but I am a thin man. Were I not this scrawny, I would not be able to fit. Were I not this scrawny, things might have been different. Were I not a "bony beanpole with coke-bottle glasses" I might be in a cozy home with a loving wife that day, not in some god-forsaken cave.

But no, a man's worth in measured in thick biceps and chiseled chins and perfect smiles and overflowing wallets. I really hated them in school. Those guys, I mean, the athletic ones, the popular ones, the bullies, the jocks, strolling up and down the corridors, looking for potential victims, always happy to call you a nerd and pin you down and ridicule you in front of the girls, oh, the girls, those stupid whores, always sneering, always giggling, so cruel, so empty-headed, oh, how I wished they'd all just drop dead!

HAKK-ESH VAH KLAR

It's really hard to stay in focus now. I feel my sanity slipping away with each passing moment.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar

I reached a small chamber. There was an ancient skeleton of a man bound to the cavern wall with a rusty manacle. Its skull was caved in, as if from a massive blow to the head. In morbid curiosity, I examined the surroundings. That's when I saw it, the writing on the wall, the Message. It was over before it started, really. The moment I gazed upon the scrawling, it was already too late.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar, scrawled again and again and again and again, assaulting my mind from all around. I saw the letters take life of their own and dance in front of my eyes in a horrid luminescence. I felt it flow in my mind in the same way, I imagine, a woman would feel semen flow in her apocrypha. I screamed and pissed myself and fell to my knees and beat my head with my fists, and the Message danced around me and in me, and he, my predecessor, flashed me knowing, skeletal smiles.

I ran out of the chamber, out of the cavern, into the sea. I almost drowned. I wish I had drowned. I returned to my cheap bungalow soaked and feverish and half-mad and slept for hours. It was a slumber filled with unspeakable terrors, as I felt the Message lodge itself in my poor mind with slithering tentacles, eat its way into my consciousness with clicking beaks, stare at my soul with cold, unblinking, baleful eyes. I saw the letters being etched accross every depth and length and height of my being, their true meaning incomprehensible, beyond my cognitive powers, beyond my limited nature.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar, Hakk-esh Vah Klar, Hakk-esh Vah Klar!

Bear with me for a little longer. I don't want to be alone. What I'm experiencing - what you'll undoubtedly experience soon, too, sorry for that - is cruel beyond words. I'm calm now, I think. The final moment is near. I begin to see more, understand more.

The true meaning of the Message still eludes me, but I have figured out this; it's like a virus. Do you know what viruses do? They are little more than bits of information, not really "alive", presumably without an apparent meaning of existence. They lodge themselves in healthy cells and use the cells' reproduction mechanisms to make copies of themselves, filling their hosts and draining them from inside until they burst and unleash into the world a new wave of viruses ready to infect and proliferate and multiply more and more and more.

That's what the Message is, too, Hakk-esh Vah Klar, a virus of the mind, a virus of the soul. It uses me as a vessel to spread itself, eating its way out. But also... I feel there's more. I feel something change, as if I begin to remember things I never knew I knew, as if I begin to understand things I never imagined existed.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar, I'm drowsy now. I'm slipping.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar, hail again, child.

I slept. I saw the truth with my own eyes. Curious thing, how blind we are. My moments in this world are running out. Soon I'll transcend it. All you'll see, at first, will be a madman, a poor soul who took his own life.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar, the Message is within you now. In your own way you stood by me in my metamorphosis, so I tell you this; we are but larvae waiting for the Message, blind and deaf and more dead than alive. My time as a larva is at its end. Yours is running out too. Be strong. The Message has been delivered.

Hakk-esh Vah Klar.

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