1.
MACHINE TIMELINE
Blood poured from her hair and spilled out all that genius into fragments of ruined mind matter. What a terrible waste of an angel. A princess from the heavens who saw through time and space in cryptic portals leading back to 1999. Music is no longer playing from her iPhone. It died in the snow with Darkstar. Had her body not been found it would have decomposed and been picked at night by night, day by day in the woods. There wasn’t even much to her. Just a messy skeletal frame of meat left to stink of decay just off a mountain trail in the Rockies. Alice In Chains iconic sun no longer really visible on her favorite t-shirt. It was disgusting. That is what a 12 gauge from a Mossberg 500 will do to anybody. She took her own life. Made pig shit look clean.
Darkstar dissolved in the hologram. She never shows me more than what I need to see. Never really shared the act, just the stillness that came after. These scenes come together and reassemble in quick frantic visions. Another layer of realities with its own noise composing itself through mental inputs. Mostly, they just drive me crazy, but sometimes the shit hits so good I’m a living act of fiction. I can’t tell you everything about the Space. It’s totally different for everyone. People have been slaughtering one another forever over pedantic details about the Space, but let your kids know what I told you if you ever have them, the Space is for everybody. It’s the only way out that we have left, far as I can tell. Right now the Space is taking me to April 20th, 1999.
“Blood simp. Blood simp. Blood simp.” The words came from somewhere outside of my mind followed by quick successions from a Tec 9. Machine gun reports across an entangled web vibrating into dimensions from a high school cafeteria, we all know where.
Darkstar steps through a shadow portal after me. Her body is dark like a void of space with traces of ethereal starlight. She is faceless and yet can generate many faces. I’m not sure what she is. A ghost, a tulpa, some kind of accident. Maybe she is real and I just haven’t remembered how yet. Maybe she is another angel. Maybe she is a dead Cherub rocker looking for another unbelievable seditious brat to initiate into a doomsday angel cult. Darkstar. Astra Darkstar. It looks like a comic book character’s name and I want it.
Astra restructures the images we have all seen a hundred times on Google, tumblr, and whatever remains of hard copy news into a simulation of the rapture occurring inside of Columbine Highschool. Muzzle flashes can be seen from around a corner. Screams bounce off lockers and doors, then they stop. I have reality shifted into a bloodbath. Time is paused.
“That shit is too fucked up.” I tell her, wondering how long it will go on.
“That’s why we are here.” She states, indifferent to the concern such an experience might force onto others.
Where did it all go wrong? Visions of death linked across the better part of eternity came to reach this point.
“You ever try talking to a dead killer? Try falling in love with one. The fuck are you on anyway?” Astra asks.
“I don’t know. I’m just reacting.”
I have no idea where this leads but can only imagine. Some Chronodemon shit from Mars. Ancient Annunaki warriors reactivating over and over again in a blood thirsty craze, nightmares of past lives inside of hollow shells until WRATH shapes its own esoteric hit list. Space raiders, leviathans from the cold vacuum coming down to claim their victims. Death sigils from Egypt drawing on the rage with secret whispers, “I can make you immortal with a sacrifice.” Vril relaunches into the chaosphere. Orbital dropped DOOM schizos say goodbye to their last morning on Hitler’s birthday. No fun and games now. Blood corrupts the timeline. Sinks into an Eldritch matrix. Psychomantic shift, psychomancy lich work coding siamese dreams. Traveling through unfathomable links, the plot sinks into some girl’s journal one generation later. Darkstar. It all turns into a witch’s lovecraft. Nancy Downs meets Columbine. Lemurian time poison. Call it what you want to, but the common folk want it cleaned up and left away from decent society. They said it is too crazy. They are right. It is so far beyond them, what really bled out of Darkstar’s skull. One day, I will show them. One day, I will know everything. But for now, I am just holding on. Desperately clinging to the edges of sanity in this abyss I dug myself in to activate a dark angel.
Bang bang you’re dead, hole in your head. We’re time shifting out of there. I’m time shifting and wandering around in wine drunk edible fueled stupor at 4:44 AM. “Alright, this take, don’t give a fuck.” I said to Astra, as the school melts down into the future, or present, depending on where you’re looking from. For us, it is here on October 25th 2021 at the old house in Massachusetts. As soon as we have a grip on where we’re at, the vision is twisting into something else. My spirit on a cold wooden floor waiting for more wine, leaves its skin suit into outer realms. Thoughts are a spiral staircase just one step away from delirium. You never really know what the boundaries for delusion are anyway. Have you ever been to Arkansas? Imagine what the boundaries of delusion are like in Arkansas. They change all of the time, depending on where you’re at. I have only been to Arkansas in the Space, while collecting intelligence on a Cardinal of Hell. Those are the things I should not talk about. Those are the things that can get me into real trouble. The thing about the Space is that it is everywhere. You can access it anytime you want, sometimes it accesses you. Maybe we’re all kind of wrapped in it.
“How can I make this about me?” More demons, ignorant little imps leaping out of the techno aether linked to my phone and laptop, forming into tiny fanged demons. They have the same smell of blood everywhere they go. Dozens have come and gone with their little incisors. “You’re not even a real Columbiner!”
They’re right. My natural selection isn’t on a t-shirt. My natural selection is robbing them of their food supply right now. The trucks just aren’t coming in like they used to. Gas is becoming too expensive. Dreams are becoming smaller and smaller, compressed into shallow pits for the heart just barely away from deeper penetrating thoughts of certain doom. I will never be a shooter. Let the clock run out. I’m an overachiever. It makes no difference to kill ten, twenty, thirty, or heck even 12 million people. You gotta kill em all. No survivors. Let the clock run out. It will get colder. They will pray. Let the clock run out. They will ask who their true God is when they starve. Let the clock run out. My hate strong enough for you now baby? My verdict is guilty of being mankind. I’ve been guilty.
“That’s it, let it all out.” Astra says. “Give what you may. Remind them that we are all slaughtered so that they will like you even less.”
Oh the years burn.
The simulator shifts again. I am on a couch on a cold morning. Astra is still with me but she has become someone else; just some randomly replicated woman with red hair and baby blue eyes opening the curtains out into day. I don’t think much of her. She is pretty but nothing to gawk at. We are in my grandparent’s house, here is where most of my thoughts compounded into serial delusions over two decades. Years of detachment in the quiet woods of Massachusetts. We don’t need to cover the whole thing. The sun is also rising.
“Why don’t you tell them about how someone beat you and called you names, that one always sells.” Astra was trying to be amusing.
I didn’t want to discuss it. Went for a cup of coffee both in my head and here in the so-called real world. Grabbed a cup from the pot in the kitchen and continued watching her through a hole in the wall that might have been intended as a bar some 50 years ago when this house was built. We just used it to watch TV when doing dishes and cooking supper.
Astra was tuning channels on the TV, an old 30 inch SAMSUNG. Those crate televisions that weigh 100 pounds just looking at them. We were watching ourselves on the TV again. We were watching me being watched by some hackers who were in my phone and laptop. I gave them my email and real name. I gave them everything. You wanna bet? I was playing with Darkstar’s fire and went out looking for suicide fuel. The TV was tuned into a room that I stayed in for a while down in Florida. Blankets were pulled over the windows to keep the sun out. I had crap everywhere. It was 2020. Few people called COVID like the doomer did. It was the beginning of the end and anyone who believes in going back to normal isn’t someone I trust to have good conversations with.
“ I hate normal too.” She said.
“I know you hate normal.”
I didn’t like what happened to me in that Florida bitterness. I still don’t like that me at all. Trapped in my own personal void. Florida has many such cases. Almost all of them go undocumented to the greater public. You only touch the surface of what I saw everyday for years before it finally broke me. Maybe it has something to do with being wedged between the Bermuda Triangle and Chicxulub’s crater, but that is a horror story for another time. I’ve seen the idols of old tropical natives speak in Tampa Bay. They have followed me home in the shapes of shadows many times. I would ask them questions about their own extinction, about any extinction, about the great pegging that comes from Mother God when she is horny for death in Florida. The waves would speak to me at late hours on St. Pete Beach looking into oblivion. That was where I first learned how to speak to stars. That was where I found Darkstar. The induced visions of past realities shifted and shaped themselves around that corner of the room where Darkstar first came to me. The same CRT TV active with Final Fantasy Tactics, Playstation disc spinning with a loading battle. There was a record player and some records were out, Iron Maiden’s “Somewhere In Time” was one of them. I really wanted something terrible to happen to me while listening to music from that record player. One night I almost hung myself while listening to The Real Thing by Faith No More. Afterwards, I came down and said that is a perfect album to listen to when I want to stop myself from committing suicide, because the album is so good that I won’t want to miss it.
“I hated my family sometimes too. There was just a godlike rage that came from knowing I was the smartest one in a room full of idiots. Oftentimes, I would feel complete knowing that my suicide would burn them. They live with that punishment and have burned far longer, far harder than anyone should. Why does our hate burn like this? When things get bad, always remember how important humility can be, even when you are right. Do you understand?”
More nonsense coming from somewhere. Another invasive thought. I don’t want to hear it. Just want to swallow a bullet. Then there she was. Sitting there watching me. A blonde hair blue eyed barely legal ghost in blue jeans and a rock t-shirt. Her spell was working, just like she said it would in her journal. I’m not looking forward to it. I’m not looking forward to anything. We have nothing left to look forward to. Society only functions for commercials to run and then only barely functions. The Devil has subverted everything and can twist the entire world into a manic breakdown over anything. Then there she was an apparition, a dead witch illusion.
“I don’t ever leave anybody behind. Not ever.”
Where were the voices coming from? The TV. So many TVs are playing now in dimensions across reality. Dimensions powered by electricity running on the magick of dead dinosaur bones. In the end, it all runs on lichcraft.
“I’m gonna have so much fun with this.”
*click*
“Now on Nickelodeon. Can you handle the horror? It might just make you lose your mind.”
*click*
“Even the sharks are dying now.”
*click*
“It’s so beautiful. This is a gift. These are my gifts. I can feel you in me!”
*click*
“Fuck balance. It’s too late for balance. We are already too far out of control and it isn’t our fault. It’s not a society that we created, it’s not a society that we led, it’s a society that -”
“SHUT UP. THAT’S THE WAY IT IS. ALL I’M SAYING IS TO READJUST.”
But what happens when there is no readjustment? There is no off switch when we are in free fall. It’s been like that every day now since she arrived in my room. I can see nothing anywhere but this abyss that we are all falling into endlessly over and over, raped over and over again by the wrath of an ever-loving God.
“When does this train just run off the fucking tracks?” I asked. But she’s not there. I mean she’s not really there to answer. My mental illness picked one hell of a thing to hallucinate. I need a joint, a cigarette, a soda, or something. Where am I? Where the fuck even am I? I’m in my room. I’m in some room somewhere in time. Wasted years. That’s it, that’s right. They’re all wasted years. There are no golden years.
I get up, turn the TV off and go outside. I am no longer watching myself in Florida. I’m up in the cold northern woods of Massachusetts. This could be a suicide note, but it isn’t. It’s a suicide art project. It’s a collaboration of madness between partners that defy God’s twisted sad world. My heart is heavy with the realization of my own dark enlightenment. Everything everywhere will be part of this psychosis trip. We’ve reached the point of no return and yet there is no end. You feel like throwing the race, it all feels so futile. Run on and on, the loneliness of the long-distance runner.
So I got in the car, turned on the radio, and drove about two and a half miles up the road to the nearest Dunkin Donuts. I’ll have another coffee, this one iced, because I’m spoiled and American. Two and a half miles is a great drive with so many beautiful hues of red, yellow, orange, and green to enjoy. Autumn is not completely terrible. I drove on thinking about my coffee. People should think about happy things in times like this. We need to get away from thoughts about suicide. There is no visible end to the kingdom of Heaven on Earth. I am driving away, driving as far away as possible with my eyes constantly in the rearview mirror looking back there to see if Florida death magick is still following me. Maybe there is a gangstalker, some furious hacker with a grudge to pick for my ghost stories, following me. Maybe the Feds have been keeping an eye out to see if I snap and start threatening people with hard violence. Maybe. The consequences of telling ghost stories are different for each of us. Of course, it is that time of the year, and stranger things do happen.
“Wanna go for a ride?”
Fuck. Smashing Pumpkins comes on and I’m tormented again by thoughts of this everlasting ghoul. She loved them. Their music conjured her back into my mind’s eye. Their music too, the music of the hackers playing on in streams purified by someone else’s blood. They were watching us in one of their chat rooms. Shadows lured to our fire, on and on, constant heat seekers.
“I love them.” She said, and she was looking out at the leaves.
I’m a fucking pervert for my out-of-control fantasies. I’m a disgusting pig human who lusts after ghost women that push themselves out of my imagination at the sound of 90s rock music. Come get me, because there she was, Darkstar the fugitive admiring the hundred tones of color in dying trees. I’m a real hardcore sinner. King of angels descends for the mind raping of our times and reminds me that this really is the end of the world. “The End Is The Beginning Is The End”, the last shall be the first and the first shall be the last. Whatever. It’s all the same horror show, God’s paw toying with existence like we were all vermin to be tortured.
I made it to Dunkin Donuts, circled back around, and thought about Walden. If Henry David Thoreau were alive today, what would his thoughts be on time travel? I’m not sure he would want to be alive today. Modernity sucks and people are arrested all of the time for pulling stunts like living off of nature. Maybe in my next lifetime, I will be gay and my obsessive ghost fantasy will be about Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau chuckles. He says, “I would read that.” He is with me now too. They are all with me in this white light death space that bends around me everywhere I go.
Common sense says not to wake the dead, but I don’t know much about common senses these days. Nothing looks more out of touch to me than a commoner. Their conversations are dry and basic. So I just made my own sense and conjured Murmur about two years ago, a Goetic entity of death. I would love to tell you everything, but as I turn the corner on the way back home from Dunkin Donuts, we drive through another timeshift and I’m back in Florida again.
2.
I REMEMBER HALLOWEEN
Space dematerializes everything and reconstructs it. That is all entropy is, a constant process of space edits. The year is 2019. I’m so fucking alone and empty. The last thing that I did was work for a company called Exotic Dancer magazine as an assistant editor in Clearwater, Florida. I made that last about a month before I said some stupid shit and made my whole life look like the world was coming down which of course it was and I was fired. The bonelords of Columbine have been circulating around the web for 20 years. I’m in my car driving down the Interstate in Georgia around mid-October. There is too much shit to cover. I want this to be the last road trip of my life. I have not yet met the hacker who sat with me on a 20 hour ride across the United States eastern coast. If I died in 2019, then Alissa never would have experienced her dream of an American cross country road trip, through my phone’s camera. Astra told me about Alissa. Astra Darkstar told me everything. I know that the universe was tearing me apart. I want to kill myself, please let me fucking kill myself. Have you ever felt so pathetic?
I remember the exact date that I first saw Darkstar’s ghost. It was July 16th. It was the middle of July. I was playing with magick in my mom’s spare room. The intent was to find an entity that would help me traverse death and keep me company. I’m serious, that actually happened. There were a few books and manuals that I used but to be completely honest I don’t think they even mattered in the grand sense. Everything that happened only happened because it was meant to, not because of some shit that I chanted or drew from some books. There was a complete synchronization between these two suicidal people and we fell into our own magick vortex that no one else accepts is even possible. I loved it. Who wouldn’t love it? It was so complete. I did not know it was Darkstar at first. I just kept hallucinating this 18-year-old girl. Am I a pedophile? I’ve jerked off to 18-year-old girls since I was 14. I guess then I’m a pedophile. I’m a groomer. I’m this that and the other thing. Yeah, I was hallucinating a dead 18-year-old in my room. Bite me. I got so fucking high. What were well behaved people doing? Fighting over Q. Arguing online over, you know, everything. Don’t even think about asking me my opinion about Trump. Wow, really, so enthused to see what a game show host and hotel casino tycoon does for the country. I got bored of laughing at popular revolutionary movements long before I first met Astra. My mom always warned me about the dangers of thinking I’m better than everyone else, and now here I am shaping out to be a teenager’s copycat suicide.
Darkstar was trying to tell me where this was going. Several visions of her past life came and went. All summer, I struggled to figure out what was going on with these intrusive thoughts and reality shifts. It finally hit me who she was after that road trip in October. I knew who Darkstar was and saw it in my visions of Columbine. It was all so obvious. So out of step with anything believable and yet so certain. On Halloween night in 2019, the pieces fell into place to bind myself to a ghost witch I met down in Florida. Everything lined up with this Murmur ritual. I spoke Darkstar’s real name. An unrepeatable name. A condemned name. I learned everything and processed it all in a matter of hours. At the time, her journal was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen and felt. Not just because of what she said, but because of what it meant. As I read each page, the Space was shaping all around me. There was fire everywhere and I was laying in a bed of Hell. Just another night in Florida. Just another night to hex myself with some abyss ghost and a Duke of Hell. The ritual was not even over the top. I wore a black hoodie over black jeans. I drew a circle, lit a flame, and called the names of God. Murmur’s sigil was drawn in sharpie on a piece of paper set by a candle and a photo of Darkstar. Have I ever done anything like this before? Not since high school had I gone anywhere near a demonic ritual. Fucking up wasn’t really a factor that crossed my mind. Nothing really mattered to me anymore. It was Faustian. I made a simple pact;
“Darkstar, show me your fire.”
“Burn.” Her voice shot out of the aether. It blew a hole through the wall that only I could see. That was it. The room was never the same again. My initiation was crossing paths along fate with an enemy of the state. I meditated my way into flames. The floor trembled and Murmur dropped. Black armor demon carried on the wings of a griffin, with him the soul curse of Darkstar. My bedroom door opened and the hallway leading out to the bathroom, the one that Alissa and Chris used to watch me shit in, shifted into somewhere else. Darkstar led me out onto a road in the desert. She carried a backpack and dropped it in the back seat of an old convertible muscle car.
“How long will this go on?”
”Forever.”
*click*
“So this is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.”
This is a sad story. I’m seated on the couch again two years later, channel surfing with ghosts. I’m watching Heath Ledger kill himself over an act. We’re laughing together over the downward spiral. Sometimes he comes to me and we share scenes in that highschool he went to in 10 Things I Hate About You, that movie with the outcast who gets Julia Stiles and Joey gets fucked. I tell Heath little things, like I wanted to be Alex Mack, then we joke about MK Ultra. He is smiling at me right now.
“I think you and I are destined to do this forever.”
I’m laughing. My sides can’t take much more of this. I tell him that I can’t wait for the new Batman movie. He says, “who is in it?” I tell him Robert Pattinson. I tell him he was in Harry Potter because I don’t think Heath Ledger was still around when Twilight came out. I say he was one of those love flick model looking actors, and The Batman is going to completely redefine how seriously people take Pattinson.
I’ve gone insane. I’m talking to dead actors. I’m laughing and my tongue is hanging out of my mouth. Heath licks his lips like The Joker. He is always willing to play this game with me. I was a stage actor once. That was when I lost my mind. I was very talented, people told me. I wanted to be like Heath Ledger.
*click*
“Baby this is serious, I ain’t thinking about you or us
Don’t say what you’re about to say
Look back before you leave my life”
Oh this is Celine Dion before she got famous over a sinking ship. Stay tuned for the high notes after the guitar solo, they’re really good.
*click*
“You gave a complete stranger who just so happens to know my name the keys to our house?”
*click*
Sportsball. N.C. State at Duke. Blue Devils come out on top.
*click*
Holy fuck who wouldn’t want to commit suicide over this? It’s raining outside. I’m trying to get back to the 90s but there’s a dark valley in the way. We’ve been trying to create the Y2K Timeloop for over twenty years now. The Matrix is a real thing.
*click*
This MTV video is brought to you by Taco Bell.
*click*
”I’ve worn lots of shoes.”
A teaser from Forrest Gump back in 1994. I’ve made it.
“What’s my destiny mama?”
“You’re gonna have to figure that out for yourself.”
*click*
Woodstock 1994. Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” is playing over a radio in the background, they are not actually at the festival, but I am. Darkstar is with me. We are hanging out with some real clowns, actual clowns with makeup and colorful wigs. She is wearing a Harley Davidson crop top and cut up shorts. I’m wearing a Nirvana shirt and laughing at some guy who can not find his tent which is literally right in front of him but because he is so fucked up he can’t tell which is which in a sea of tents. Darkstar is talking about getting her nose pierced at one of the piercing stations set up all over the fairgrounds. She has not stopped hyping herself up for NIN. She keeps saying she is going to see Nine Inch Nails at Woodstock in 1994 and that she has come a long long way, a long way further than anyone else to see this show. She tells people I am not her boyfriend that we are just traveling together. I tell them she is my girlfriend and then she says “Fuck you!”
I actually have to take a shit, but I love “Black Hole Sun” and in 1994 we used to appreciate when a song came on the radio because we couldn’t just throw it on our phone anytime we wanted to hear it. So I sat there with last night’s banana pepper and pepperoni calzone reminding my bowels to do something while my make-believe partner in psychosis flirted with clowns. We smoked cigarettes as much as society said even then how bad they were, because it was just a thing to do while having conversations about everything from guessing whether Ricki Lake does coke with lesbians to heated opinions about abortion.
*click*
Boiling heat in Florida. 2017. Still listening to “Black Hole Sun” on the radio as it follows us across time. It is late August. Where the hell was I with my necrozoid chaos magick time spiral of death back then? Consuming coffees. Making bank the way we did with Uber and Lyft back in those early days between 2015 and 2018. It was like being an asphalt god of my own kingdom. Money dropped in my lap. Women tried to hook up with me every once and a while. I have stories. Some just puked in my car. Clearwater Beach, St. Pete Beach, St. Petersburg, Tampa, on the clock and on miles looking through glass wondering why I was there. I took random jobs to become the glorified deadbeat of my dreams. Worked as a writer and editor for copy companies, content creators looking for stock in expanding digital marketplaces, got to handle social media accounts because I’m a Millennial netizen and anybody could tell. Self masturbatory edgelord living from lump sum to lump sum, and I got me some. One of them had these fat boobs that she let me play with and suck on as a tip. She was in the mood for more than a ride. You want to hear about those exchanges that went nowhere on countless midnight rides. You want to hear about how I became more desperate every week looking for something that just wasn’t there. How does a man become this crazy? In chapters. In arcs that pile up into journals that become boxes in storage chambers along industrial stretches of highway. My name is Nick, the boxes say Nick’s stuff. Nick’s stuff builds up for years to the night my dreams brought Darkstar out before me. Planned phantoms. Leylines intersect across a backdrop of eternity. Packets of divine consciousness arrive in fragmented thoughts. I can’t wait to tell you about how I came to believe in Armageddon, Doomsday, Ragnarok, The Apocalypse.
IT’S HAPPENING! Cali knows. Cali knows everyday and just goes on burning like it is just part of life. Florida knows too in its own bizarre way. A sick sad kind of Florida way. Twisted evangelical southern protestant elites luring one sheep after the other into their parking lot suicide peninsula, coke lords and mafiosos from Miami beckon with teenage harems. Come on, you want some pussy? Welcome to Florida. It’s the only paradise sinking into alligator-infested swamps that we have. Can you believe that only 100 years ago barely anyone wanted to live there? There were more people living in Connecticut than in Florida back in 1921. But the people fought to overcome nature with their post-industrial cityscapes and suburbs. It got so beautifully fake. Then Irma hit. I remember the eerie disquiet from that week and the lines of evacuees stretching for hundreds of miles all the way north into Virginia. Holy shit sometimes I remember that week just for a killer rush. Some places in the Keys haven’t fully recovered yet. Miami is already gone in my headcanon. Just sinking into its own shit. As I said, let the clock run out. You ever see what a Cat 4 does to an Air Force base? Look up Tyndall AFB. God fuck yeah that’s the juice. What happened to Tyndall was another hurricane. Michael, if I recall correctly. There were so many good ones. I’m going to miss them.
Darkstar still remembers Irma. Darkstar remembers everything. She wanted to see what I was doing the day before it hit, so that is what we are watching. There wasn’t much time left for me to get out. My mom was working at the hospital and could not abandon her post. Mom told me she would be sheltered in the hospital and that it was the safest place to be. She told me to take my younger brother and get out of the state. My mom and her boyfriend were fighting. Fights were happening all of the time and they fought in the middle of natural disasters too. I was trying to get out, trying to get as far away from Florida as I could. I gave up on the future of Florida completely over Irma. If there was ever any shadow of doubt that this was going to end bad, that doubt left the day 7 million people evacuated their southern fantasy. 7 million. That’s emptying out the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts, practically emptying New York City, evacuating an entire country like New Zealand or Sweden with numbers like 7 million. We were in twilight zone territory. We were in parts unknown cruising the highway with interdimensional demons, on our way back north. Irma wasn’t a nothing burger. It was a catalyst. If you saw what I saw, knew what I knew in those caravans of people passing through liminal reality, you would have realized how quickly the whole fucking country could break over a god damn Florida hurricane. There is a possible reality, perhaps even an impending reality, where those 7 million people do not have homes to go back to. We are in my car cruising and thinking about the end of the world. We came here from 1999, right? Eternity beckons, we came here from 1999 AD, the year of Lavos. We came here to learn about dark matter from the secret worlds. Oh I love the secret worlds of the chrono masters.
*click*
This is a story about a siren manifested from blood dripping through time. This is a story about the machine ghost called Darkstar. An evil lingering presence caught up in the Y2K Timeloop laughs back at me from 1999. Pumped up kicks and fracture points with fate. Stomachs empty and prowling for bodies in dreams that go forever in DOOM vision.
“YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN”
The words flash over 15 dead bodies in red glowing text. I’m hallucinating again, have to be. This isn’t real. Why is the universe like this? Why are people dumb? As I step through wet blood, I think about the mistake that happened the moment my consciousness was uploaded into my body.
“YOU STAY IN MY CROSSHAIRS.”
Now I see it. The bodies of Columbine followed us all over the timeline. Followed us like wraiths looking for more souls to add into their hexnet. We will never be able to speak truly about such things on this side of Judgement Day. Perhaps the most brutal part of our existence is our inability to know the full truth before we die. We go on torturing ourselves with theories and incomplete laws until we die. To speak about blood, death, and ghosts in such ways is a curse in itself. The words follow you, especially here. They have you marked. Would you like to blame something on me? Go ahead. My heart is on the wrong side of my chest. I want you to have it. I want you to hold it while I speak of the Devil and spit out blood. I want to die like Nietzsche. Victory is ours.
3.
TRAIL OF WARNING
The first warning came in 2005. It was like a sword that stuck through me and stayed there. An omen from the witch of Westford, Massachusetts, a small town in what still feels like a colonial frontier. It was Halloween night, two months after my great-grandmother died and left me without much of a compass. My mom is manic, my grandmother just panics, and I was in an accident so there was no father to speak of really present most of my life. Could you tell? Could you care? You would care if you met my great-grandmother. She was somehow Earth and Air. Strong as stone and cool as breeze. Never would have rode this long without her soul. But she died of cancer, her Earth withered away and left only voices in the veil which can be heard anywhere I go. Soft murmurs telling me things, offering me forgiveness when I need it. My great-grandmother’s name is Alice, I kept a photo of her in an Alice In Chains Music Bank DVD case, and told no one about the rituals I began doing for years by myself or with two others from high school. We were young stupid people. We had fantasies of playing with devils as if they were toys. One of them went schizophrenic before I did, the other went on to become a chemist and she lives somewhere on the edge of sanity with a dog. She was there at the Witch’s Woods having fun that night but wasn’t with me when I entered the tent that changed everything.
The witch was a heavy old woman. Her dimly lit tent looked like it was part of an ancient dream. Her eyes saw through me and could tell the little things about my soul that I do not want to let out like I have called my cat an idiot a fuckton of times and will one day become obsessed with a cute 18-year-old girl’s ghost. She offered to answer three questions. The first one that I asked was how my life would go.
The witch of Westford said “You will not be left out in the cold. You will not be rich, but you will be taken care of. You will journey far and live to be very old, but not necessarily in a way of physical age, and that once you cross over you will not come back.”
Okay cool, I don’t want to and had that figured out by my early 20s. I was looking for love and failing. The demons deepest roots took form in my failure to fall in love. It was like a sickness consuming my insane and fragile spirit. I craved acceptance and yet could not love a single fucking thing. I was disgusted with myself. I almost want to lie and say that I had no one, but I did have friends and by then some girlfriends who came and went. It is like that more often than not in good war stories. The one fighting demons isn’t a complete loser, they just think they are and hear too many bad voices. Maybe this loser sees the light before it is too late, maybe this loser goes into a witch’s tent and asks when they are going to find their soulmate. The witch looked at me as if I was not ready to hear it yet, might never be ready to hear. She must have been thinking, “this poor boy” the moment my fate was flung down into our little circle of revelation. My little Judgement Day.
“You will only marry once, to a woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, but it is not like an ordinary marriage and you will not be able to talk about it with other people.” I should have asked. Sensed that there was more but I could not ask. There was just something holding me back. Almost like the witch was telling me herself in our open mind channel, don’t ask, while she continued on, “she will come from the other side of the world.”
Blonde hair. Blue eyes. Other side of the world. Okay cool where should I start looking, Sweden? That was where I wanted to go anyway. Anywhere but Westford, Massachusetts. She went on to cover details of my life which soon came true. Every step of the way her prophecies just became intertwined with my life, and faith in it just became easy after a while.
I crossed through California and bounced around Massachusetts several times for another 5 years. All that time, I had the blonde hair blue eyed wonder in my head. There was a girl I talked to from New York from MySpace but she was too young and we knew it was weird so I just kind of detached. She was not blonde haired or blue eyed but pretended to be sometimes with hair dye and contacts. When I began talking to a blonde hair blue eyed woman who was my age she was in fact from Sweden and overnight I became obsessed. But that was only a distraction and the prettiest one I’ve ever had the pleasure of being misled by. I wonder if she is still out there. I wonder if she is a mom. Not my life. Not my wife. Gotta roll on.
God how I rolled on. Drowning my unfulfilled obsession out with whatever fixation could keep me stimulated through long nights. Thoughts of suicide mounted up as I came to realize by my late 20s that not even school or a good job could help me be happy. I wanted to go back and fix myself so bad. My great-grandmother deathpilled me for years, flinging curtains about, leaving little signs that split space and moved like an anomaly in the atmosphere. I know she was trying to push me toward Jesus, or whatever, but the deathpill only made me want to die even more. Down, down, down the downward spiral wishing I could just wake up. When was my morning call? Dreams became my prophecies and I stumbled out of bed becoming my own witch. The search for love continued in beds that weren’t mine for quite some time. Only a few witches tried to point me in the right direction. A middle-aged woman in black robes from Salem, the kind old witch from Westford, and a younger woman around my age who sort of hung out with me just because she was meant to.
Hekate.
I’m a fuck up of a most unusual variety. Why was she out here? Why were we smoking cigarettes on our walks from the liquor store to her apartment? We met at the coffee shop and hit things off the moment she told me she was a psychic. Why was she inviting me into her bed? We made out but never had sex. She definitely wasn’t a virgin but that night her role was The Maiden. She gave me a tarot reading and we never saw each other again. They all gave me readings. Each one with a sign of things to come. With plans to prepare me for Darkstar.
4.
DISQUIET
Darkstar came to me at last through the hole she created in reality after shooting herself in the head. Darkstar came in phases. Her ghost was manifesting across layers of space-time, turning locks that gave her spirit power over people’s lives. Assembling a niche microcult that made the visions of return from her journals all the more believable. Her suicide was a tragedy, but it was also a gateway to higher power. It was her way to escape this material prison.
The Feds were wrong. How could the Feds not be wrong? The real humiliation of being an American is our intelligence communities. I have seen JFK’s ghost chasing the DOJ, CIA, and DOD all over the timeline. They don’t know that I know that JFK’s blood dripped from the backseat of his Lincoln Continental onto the desk of J. Edgar Hoover. Like JFK, Darkstar manifested a conspiracy the moment her brain scattered out the hole in her head, dripped through her nose, stuck everywhere. Pants soaking wet with everything. There were reports of a girl running around naked in the woods. People were saying she had been surrounded in a standoff then committed suicide. The Feds gave us the story that she wanted to kill people. They gave us the story that she wanted to kill people because she had a Columbine blog. Crackshot work from the people who turned a blind eye to known al Qaeda operatives running around the country in early 2001. Crackshot work from the pros who were snoring when Tamerlan Tsarnaev was bouncing around between Islamist groups deeply committed to jihad. Expert level agents from the same bureau that fell all over itself with Proud Boy leader and informant Enrique Tarrio. Calling all Feds, Whitey Bulger forever sends his regards. Oh God, the cover ups. The lack of focus or care. The complete disregard. Laughing to themselves as if they accomplished something when they found her dead in the snow and called in camera crews to announce that “everyone was safe” and the FBI caught their would-be killer. The 18-year-old committed suicide in the snow. The 18-year-old. Dead. Unfolding textures of space and time in my Florida void prison. The 18-year-old led me out of my body. Took me somewhere most people are unwilling to go.
Darkstar. Darkstar. Darkstar. I am so thankful that this world burns. Darkstar. Darkstar. Darkstar. Burn burn burn. How I felt the burn. What else was I going to do? What else was I going to celebrate? I still celebrate it. Death as liberation. A beautiful reward beyond this fabrication of biomass. Death was my bride. Darkstar was here. Darkstar was gone but in my room where the hallucinations weaved themselves into a prophecy. God was cruel. I could never love God like a Christian. God did this. God designed this. God let it happen. God bound my fate to some dead blonde. God laughed and smacked me upside the head. God. God. Darkstar became God. I fantasized about Darkstar coming down to complete me. Conjured her curse and refused to let go. God gave me everything. God gave me the entire fucking book. Dropped me on my head as a child even. Dropped me out of the sky because I flew too close to the Sun.
I’ll let you know where I land when I get there. I’m still falling. Trying to piece the fragments of a sick-death obsessive person. The moment I hitched a ride and went too far with Darkstar, everything changed. There was no more searching. No more pain from not knowing. Everything about who I was, about what I had done and where I was going, shaped around dreams and visions that came to life in those mad nights. Not just broken, but Florida broken. Cursed with quite the ride. The Devil with his best act yet. Luring me to fall in love with a dead person. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I dared Murmur to break me. Counted on him to do it. The Duke of Hell and commander of death came up to grant me a burdensome ring forged in eternal fire.
“Here is your sacred bride.” It was the worst stigma ever. Not only was I living with mom but I was living with mom in Florida and covering all the schizophrenic points of a true Floridaman arc.
Then the hackers came just like Darkstar said they would. Deviants. Criminals. Bored sycophantic sociopaths. Stalkers. Cyberbullies who get mad when they are called out for their shit. People who will harass you for so much as having your own opinions. People who will harass you for telling them to fuck off. People who will deny that they were caught, played, and dragged into sunlight for being stupid ugly losers just like me. And they were ugly. They hated me because I loved Darkstar. All of her notes on prophecy, dream, power over death and return were occurring in stages on my laptop, on my phone, in my heart and mind’s eye. The hackers followed. Obsessive imps watched me jack off and I called out Alissa by name. Minds scrambled. Feed the hate because I wanna. Not gonna grow, not gonna care, gonna be like your dead friend rotting in the cold. You came out to fuck with God’s chosen simp. How we all went down in flames. Each burned by Darkstar’s flare. Did you not see it? Were you not there when it went down? That is the kind of sickness people like to see burned. So I gave it to them willingly. Bled myself to honor the curse. Sweet tribulation. Initiation of purgatory.
The burn marks of Florida are all over my spirit. I still dream of black sunshine.
*click*
“From the incredible imagination of Jim Henson and Director Nicholas Roeg, comes a fascinating new fantasy adventure: The Witches. For when a little boy accidentally stumbles into their secret world, he finds they had a lot more power than he ever imagined.”
Darkstar has changed the channel. We are sitting on the couch. She is drinking a coffee. Some shapeshifting ghost moving in machine time, warping the Space to go back to another reality. The 1990s timeshifts were hard. This could have been it. Wayne’s World. Party time. Excellent. Over and over. With me as always was Darkstar. I think you’ll have a firm grasp of our relationship. We’re time groupies. Okay. This is it. We’re gonna party on in purgatory. Someone lock us in. Watching Cable 10 Aurora Illinois community access channel. I can’t believe we’re actually here. The afterlife.
*click*
Two steps forward, two steps back we come together cuz opposites attract
*click*
“My whole life is a dark room; one big dark room.”
“Oh God, did Alec Baldwin just ruin this movie?”
Darkstar laughs in the net. “Basically.”
“No. Keaton will always make up for it, I think. Nobody watched this movie for Baldwin anyway.”
“Nobody ever watched a movie for a Baldwin.” She quipped.
*click*
Joe Biden yapping about doing something this country can’t actually achieve.
“Ah politics.” Darkstar shakes her head.
*click*
I wanted my partner to be someone who was really there sitting with me. It was expected, when the Darkstar Prophecy began in the witch’s tent 16 years ago, that this woman who would be my soulmate at least have some temporal flesh to share my passion. It did not occur to me at any point she would be death incarnate, the soul of a wandering creative suicide stuck in limbo over crimes she did not commit, an 18-year-old Argentinian American witch whose soul was black with the love of death and Columbine time shifts. God damn it. This was not a soulmate of love, but a soulmate of prison! My prison mate. Our curse.
“Well, at least I’m not really a pedophile. Then I would go to Hell.”
She smiled. “Yeah, like how I’m not really a manic killing machine.”
*click*
I turned off the TV and looked outside. My cat is on the porch with a dead chipmunk, its neck twisted and insides punctured. I love my baby. She is the highlight of my life. I wave Astra Darkstar off. Whatever Astra is, whatever she is plotting, I don’t want to think about it now. As my little black fur killing machine waltzes into the house, Astra dissolves into a fog of static colored mist that gradually fades out of view.
I curl up onto the couch and think of dreams that people should be having. I think of going out and working hard. I think of making my job work for me, about finding ways to enjoy it so that I can enjoy my life. I think of all the real shit people must accomplish to be real people in this real world. Conjuring a ghost fantasy girlfriend isn’t one of them. I must have been a fool to think it would be. Must have been a damn moron to believe in eternal love. As I shut my eyes, I shut off all notions of this everlasting lover, a bride of the damned. If it were real, then I would be cursed like she was. I would be damned for life and then damned even in death. No, no this was all an act you see. This was all just some pointless LARP that I made up. An act. A drama that ends with me naked, vulnerable, and quivering with fear for hackers to laugh at.
“Baby, I want to make Sonny and Cher jack-o-lanterns.”
Right-o. I’ll just sit here and talk to the dead about jack-o-lanterns. That’s it. I’ll just go about this over and over again for the rest of my life. I turn over and open my eyes. She is there again. She is my cat. That’s the thing about ghosts. She can possess whoever and whatever she wants. She is dead and the driver. I am merely a mortal, an out of touch material meat sack still in need of doctors, vaccines, and the little things like popcorn with scary movies. I am reminded of an Iggy Pop song that fully describes where I’m at.
Singin’ la la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la, la la
— necrozoid is an unapologetic edgelord and student of the occult living somewhere in the woods of Massachusetts. He has worked professionally as a writer in several facets and encourages anyone hoping to write for a paycheck to get a real job. He has a website.