Night.
Crescent Moon.
The blue goat, and I,
holding the photo camera with shaking hands, remembering the Satanic Master’s teachings about the Dark Lord, “It’s about perspective. Everything’s fluid disorder, constantly passing—until it all snaps into place.”
I stare through the viewfinder. Left eye closed, right eye searching:
Grasslands. Flowing.
The blue goat chewing on the fisherman’s soul I trapped after killing him and brought with me in a burlap sack coated with evil pine resin.
Crescent Moon. Scythelight above,
shines like,
reflected in the blue goat’s eyes, the Gates of Hell.
“Come on,” I repeat. “Where… are you?”
I move the camera. Creep forward. The blue goat stops chewing—for a second.
I: zoom in; out.
Soul drips from the blue goat’s maw as it turns its neck to look at me, crescent Moon sliding out of the distance and into its flesh—
Snap.
—like a horn: ancient, golden,
(I take the shot.)
piercing the blue goat’s head, burning off its skin, drilling into its goat-skull with the shriek of firescream—
[…]
—I fall back: against the swaying grasses, away from the blue goat, into
silence.
I get up. The crescent Moon is back in the sky. The blue goat chews. Night has resumed its peaceful guardianship of Earth for past and future Day. God, the camera feels heavy in my hands. I want to…; but mustn’t, I know. “Whatever you do, don’t look at the photo,” the Satanic Master said. I mustn’t. “Deliver it unto me and you will have fulfilled your duty.” But, God, I want to. I want to, and already my fingers are travelling nimbly across the plastic camera, of their own (un)free will (their own?), as if possessed (by what?), over its various buttons. I shut my eyes. I shut the voice in my head: “Behold…”
I lift the light-image from the digital viewfinder and—
My fingers assault my eyelids!
Push into my sockets.
“No, no…”
Push past my eyeballs, digging into my brain—until I am up to my elbows in my own goddamn head! And I see: what the fuck are my fingers holding? What is that? I don’t want to see. I can’t notsee. The blue goat’s burning head, branded upon my mind, (AHH!!) with the crescentmoonancientgoldenhorn drilling drilling-drillingtill it’s serpentime-and space slithering out the skull—ashes falling on the grasslands—metamorphosing into the gyrationally antigeometrical frame of the Gates of Hell, swinging open. Swinging open, and silhouetted against their nought-flatness is the darkerstill unshape of the Dark…
Dawn.
The old farmer walks his field.
First, he notices a camera in the grass. He picks it up.
Next: the charred remains of a goat.
He begins to cross himself, but before he can finish: a skeleton: human, with its arm-bones inserted impossibly into its orbits, interrupts, and he’s pondering tourists and black magic when, looking up, he sees—
dropping the camera—
the crescent moon itself, lying upon the horizon, horns pointed upward, and clambering outwards: the tortured multitudes of Hell.