The Hedron Chronicles: 2014

Chapter 1: Dario

Part One:

When Dario woke up this morning he didn't think today was going to be one of those days spent under the oppressive scrutiny of a billion malicious insect eyes from some distant planet.

Let me tell you a little bit about Dario:

Dario was not a religious man by any means. Quite the opposite actually, but if you asked him to tell you about cockroaches he'd turn straight up biblical on you. The “Pestilence” he called them. He'd tell you they were created by Satan himself and put on this Earth to torment him.

He would lie awake at night thinking about them. Thinking about that time a few years ago. The last time he awoke to the living nightmare of feeling that vague brush on his arm as one of those horrible things made its way up to his face, presumably to lay eggs.

It was a paralyzing fear so intense that he couldn't even bring himself to kill it. He'd be more likely to scream and cry and run to the nearest elderly woman and ask her if she could please do it for him using her walker.

Like a little bitch.

There was something primal to his fear. He couldn't explain it rationally. Not even to himself.

Case in point, Dario's neighbor, Sweet old Miss Walker was startled out of bed when she heard the screaming. She was getting on in her years and cared for the boys across the way like they were her own grandchildren. “What would those boys do without me to keep an eye on 'em?” she asked herself as she wasted little time unfolding her walker and shuffling over.

“Are you okay in there?!” she yelled through the door as she banged on it, her anxiety over hearing the continuous screams increasing at an exponential rate. Determined to help she used the spare key entrusted to her to open the door. What she saw when she entered the bedroom appalled her.

Dario, a grown man, pointing at one of those tiny German cockroaches resting on his comforter, screaming like a woman while his roommate lingered nearby unable to stand up straight, punch drunk from laughter and lack of sleep.

Miss Walker slapped the cockroach dead with her bare palm. She shuffled back to her apartment muttering something about how the two of them should be ashamed of themselves.

That next morning Dario threw the comforter in the incinerator in the basement.

Dario lived with his long time best friend, Miguel2. Since both of them were grown men in their late 30's, Miguel2 found this particular quirk of his bosom buddy to be exceptionally fascinating and quite frankly hilarious. He relished in it.

In one particular instance (that Miguel2 delights in bringing up every time they drink, attend any kind of social gathering or one of them brings a woman home) Dario came running out of the shower in tears, naked as the day he was born, gibbering like someone having a bad acid trip. The fear was so great in fact that it caused his penis and balls to shrivel up to their infant size and his pubic hairs to turn white and fall out entirely, thus completing his transformation back into pre-pubescence.

All because while brushing his teeth in the shower, he turned and noticed a roach straddling the shower head minding its own business. This roach wasn't even of the scary variety. The way Miguel2 would recant it, the little bugger was quite the charmer in fact. Wearing a little top hat, carrying a cane and saying “well how d'you do?”

“Aw, look at the little guy! He's almost adorable! ...and what a little gent he is! I wonder if they make brandy snifters small enough for him to hold in his little roach hand?” Miguel2 gleefully mused as he walked in to the bathroom and saw the little fellow for himself, Dario cowering behind him simpering.

“That's not funny, man! Just...Kill it! KILL IT! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!! PLEASE KILL IT!!!” Dario pleaded, manic.

At which point the roach looked over at the two of them and noticed Miguel2 instinctively reaching for the roach spray. The roach then extended its horrible brown wings in response.

“Whoa whoa whoa, everybody just back off and cooool down, okay? I don't want to have to fly in anyone's face over here.” The roach warned as he fluttered his wings once, his accent going from that of a proper gentleman to that of a New York construction worker.

Dario panicked at the exact moment Miguel2 was going to start spraying.

“DON'T!! HE'LL FLY RIGHT AT US!” Dario shrieked as he scrambled his slippery feet on the floor, causing himself and Miguel2 whom he was now holding onto for dear life to slip and fall on the bathroom floor, almost as if he were ironically in cahoots with the creature.

The humor left Miguel2 the moment he realized he was now on the floor sprawled on top of a wet and buck naked Dario. He quickly and with no small amount of disgust stood up, angrily pointed his finger at Dario and made an angry proclamation, all the while trying not to look at his penis.

“You know what? It would serve you right!!” he exclaimed as he prepared to storm off and let Dario handle it on his own.

Dario, now on all fours, reached up with one hand to tug at Miguel2's waist, tears streaming down from his eyes and begged him to stay. “Please, you can't...” he whimpered.

Seeing the sad, pathetic spectacle in front of him, all of that despair, caused him to feel an odd mix of sympathy and disgust. With a heavy sigh and an almost too sad to be funny shake of his head at the situation, he went back towards the bathroom. Roach spray in one hand and a shoe in the other, it evoked a powerful imagery in Dario's mind of his mother protecting him from roaches as a boy with her trusty la clancha in hand.

Miguel2 swiftly dispatched the roach with extreme prejudice.

“I love you, mommy” he said (only half kidding) to his savior, who very overtly winced in mild disgust.

Dario promptly finished his shower in the hopes that they would simply never speak of this incident again. And maybe they wouldn't have...had that been the last time it happened.

--

Part Two:

As irony would have it, Dario worked as a civil engineer repairing and maintaining sewer lines.
When he got the call that there was some kind of horrible stench coming from one of the lines within his district he wasted little time suiting up and preparing to investigate, steadfast in his resolve as he always was. A consummate professional determined not to let his fears run his life. In his fifteen years with the city, getting called to check things out in the sewers was not an uncommon occurrence.

People would often wonder and sometimes even ask how it was that he went about spending his days the way he did, toiling among the very pestilence he reviled.

“I don't know man, when I'm down there I just try not to notice them. Besides, those sewer roaches ain't as brazen as house roaches. You shine a light at those suckers and they run.” he would explain when asked.

The truth of it was that he faced his fears on a regular basis. He would like to believe that he had gotten better over the years. Who knows? Maybe he had. Although today he couldn't quite shake the feeling of tiny horrible eyes watching him from the darkness.

Dario could smell the job site a mile away. The smell was, quite frankly, unbelievable. From the moment he stepped out of his truck he realized he was going to have to wear a special breathing mask (not unlike a gas mask) just so he wouldn't start retching to death. He couldn't believe that people had to live in that area. If you've seen one tenement slum you've seen them all, sure, but this one smelled like no other.

The problem was often some type of dead animal that had putrefied and exploded inside of a pipe or gotten stuck in a grate that needed to be removed, or just sewage backed up due to too many people in an above tenement flushing things that weren't supposed to be flushed (paper towels, tampons, diapers etc). Once in a while it would be the corpse of some homeless person who died in his own filth, waiting to be discovered. Those were always fun. They, much to Miguel2's amusement, allowed Dario the opportunity to go home and tell him what a disgusting fucking job he had.

It didn't smell like that this time though. This was even worse. It smelled like a pack of skunks had an orgy on top of a landmine. Still, he persevered.

So at goddamn three in the morning, listening to Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM broadcasts on his headphones, trusty map and flashlight in hand, he descended the nearest manhole to seek out the source of the stench. Normally he could just follow his nose but not this time. The stench was like a miasma that came from no discernible location.

He began with the intention of systematically searching through the tunnels, following his map grid by grid, block by block. While he was initially unaware that something was quietly stalking behind him, he quickly started to get that creepy feeling. The air itself seemed to quicken and then still around his body, causing his skin to become goose-fleshed and his hairs to stand up. He'd recognize that feeling anywhere.

It was the roach feeling. That moment when you subconsciously register there being one near you before consciously acknowledging it.

Worse even was that due to the wet, fetid nature of being in a fucking sewer mixed with his paranoia, the greenish shimmer of anything catching the light seemed to be moving. He shined his flashlight around and behind him but saw nothing.

There was a cluster of roaches a few feet ahead of him sifting around some garbage, scattering the moment the beam of his flashlight touched them but somehow he still felt that creepy feeling and knew that they weren't causing it. Something about the way the air was moving just didn't seem right.

With a heavy gulp he decided to turn around one more time and that was when he saw it.

At first the light was cast upon a very discernible and very large set of malevolent black eyes. About a dozen of them. Spread out around a large, smooth black head some three feet off the ground. A pair of whip-like, thick as rope antennae flickered at Dario, their tips gently caressing his torso. Even if Dario hadn't been momentarily paralyzed with fear he still would have needed a few moments to process exactly what he was looking at: A cockroach the size of a Saint Bernard. Drooling like one too, as it started gnashing rows of shark-like teeth in its black maw.

It was at that moment the paralysis quickly, thanks to a healthy spike of adrenaline, became a fight or flight response. He dropped his flashlight and started running, screaming at a pitch far higher then he ever thought he could reach. In that most falsetto of moments, had his testicles simply withered away and vanished for all eternity? Perhaps he would ponder that question later.

IF he didn't get eaten by a giant fucking cockroach.

He flailed his arms and screamed like a girl, and did not dare to look back. He didn't have to. He knew that the Goliath Cockroach was right behind him. He ran until his entire body felt acidic, like his blood had been replaced by stomach acid.

When he saw a dimly lit open metal doorway with a door he could actually close he jumped in without a second thought. He slammed the door shut behind him right in the beast's face. It had a round hatch locking mechanisms (like on a submarine) that he managed to lock with one very determined heave, despite the fact that it was rusted to shit and felt like it hadn't been used in years if not decades.

“Adrenaline bitch-strength” Dario thought to himself as he fell to his knees, gasping to catch his breath. The momentary relief he felt was fleeting and rapidly being replaced by grim terror as the Goliath began to bang incessantly on the door with its thick, razor sharp front legs. Dario wanted to cry.
“Oh shit oh fuck oh shit” he muttered.

After a few moments the Goliath stopped pounding on the door. Dario was relieved to finally be able to think straight and used that moment to retrace his steps. He attempted to map out where he was in his mind.

The room he was in didn't have any pipes, valves, grates or discernible markings indicating what kind of room it was. It was poorly lit and made up of slimy greenish-blue limestone bricks that seemed to serve no purpose. It didn't take long for him to realize that he simply couldn't figure out where he was on the map. Confounded, he attempted to use his phone's GPS. Of course there was no signal. As if on cue the pounding at the door resumed, this time by three different sets of of huge legs from three different Goliath roaches, causing Dario to fumble his phone right out of his hands (which of course all but shattered upon the floor).

He backed away from the door instinctively until he suddenly tripped over something and fell right on his ass, causing a minor hairline fracture in his coccyx. The pain was sobering and somewhat revelatory as, in that moment of clarity, he realized that he was actually at the source of the horrible smell he was sent to find. Or rather, that he had just tripped over it.

---

Part Three:

At first Dario looked upon what he tripped over with disgust as it appeared to be a naked man, dead and frozen stiff with rigor mortis in the fetal position.

Upon closer examination of the corpse he was horrified to find that it was no man.

It was like nothing he had ever seen before in real life. It was nearly eight feet tall and had no body hair. Its skin had a bluish-grey color and appeared to be completely smooth.

Much like a human it had two arms and two legs, only inhumanly long, which was unnerving enough, but not nearly so much as its face. The thing had a massively enlarged cranium and gigantic black eyes the size of baseballs that were open and lifeless. It had no nose and an extra long mouth that seemed to wrap almost completely around its head like a weirder, scarier muppet. His natural assumption was that what he saw before him was an alien.

That was when he noticed the slight glow coming from the cracks between its intertwined hands. The thing was clutching something. Dario found himself drawn to whatever it was holding, to the point where the sounds of the Goliath's pounding at the door faded away to a faint static. He found himself frozen in time for a moment, feeling a mix of fear and awe.

When its cold, dead black eyes turned ever so slightly towards him he wanted to scream. Instead, he remained as still as the air. Then he heard its voice in his head.

“Dario” it said, to which he recoiled in fear. His first instinct was to NOPE the fuck out of there but the sound of the Goliaths at the door immediately ruled out that option. Instead he decided to answer it.

“Yes, this is Dario” he sheepishly, curiously replied, considering that he may very well have finally lost his damned mind.

At first the only response he got was the echo of his own voice, which didn't bode well for his sanity.

After what felt like minutes of sitting in wide-eyed disbelief he finally got his reply. Its voice in his head rasped out “for...you” as its hands opened, revealing the source of the glow; a tiny shard of alien artifact.

Dario slowly reached down and carefully took the shard from the alien's hands. The alien's corpse then began to shake in a way that reminded him of the time he saw a dead bird on its back, stuffed full of worms and ants. So much so that it rocked back and forth rapidly like it was trying to get back up.

Dario, disgusted by that little bit of nostalgia wanted to stand up and step back but found that he couldn't. A warm electrical sense of energy started flowing through his body, paralyzing him.

The alien's stomach then rapidly began to get more and more distended until it burst open, sending an endless supply of cockroaches of all sizes erupting forth. The roaches were an infinite blackness that completely filled the room, enveloping everything. Including Dario.

The fear he felt was a cleansing fire so powerful that it sent excruciating pain throughout every muscle within his body, starting with his chest.

He was having a heart attack.
And a brain aneurysm.

And a stroke.

Then another, and another, and another. Of each.

However, despite his every bodily function set to destroying itself, he only felt the pain of that first heart attack and only for a brief moment before his entire body felt warm and numb. The fear turned into a calm sense of serenity as he let his
consciousness slip away.

After a brief (but seemingly infinite) period of blackness and despair, he awoke in a dreamlike state, fully aware of the energy that was (and is to be) his physical form but on some kind of astral plane.

At that moment, feeling like the universe had just chewed him up and spit him out... covered in cosmic saliva... he died and was reborn.

The shard, his shard, was connected to something much larger and much more alien then Dario had any actual concept of. Through that he was sharing the memories and experiences of everyone and everything that was ever connected to it, and through them everything else in the universe. He came to realize that he was tapping into something greater than himself. An elemental force to be harnessed as he willed it to be.

He reached out and felt every single cockroach around him. Starting from the smallest all the way to the largest, the ravenous Goliaths just outside the door.

At that moment something struck him as odd. Through their perceptions he heard something coming for them from the tunnel. It sounded like the roar of a lion?

His awareness, like the wave of high tide washing away an earlier high water mark, increased. He was now, through his primal connection to the cockroach totem, through the power of the Hedron shard he now possessed, in touch with every single insect, carrion and crustacean on the entire planet.

Even still his awareness pushed further until he found himself in touch with beings that he intrinsically recognized as the squidroid minstels swimming the vast seas of Saturn's moon of Europa.

Then further out, past our solar system into the darkest reaches of our galaxy and so on.

Even further, he saw a dead alien world in the darkness. He knew this place to be called “Yasagrgl” and that it was the home planet of the dead alien. He saw a glimpse of the planet's surface, which looked as though gravity had simply stopped working. There were alien corpses much like the one he had just met floating in mid-air along with all forms of alien plant-life and civilization, dull blue lightning surging through it all.

He then turned his attention to the Great Hedron floating in the sky for all of Yasagrgl to see, now floating diagonally off of its axis, its once bright energies reduced to vague bolts of slowly moving blue lightning that lethargically slithered around and through all of the cracks and breaks in the throws of slow death. The energy in his shard gravitated toward the Great Hedron, assessing it in the form of a serpent of living lightning, getting the lay of the land by slithering around it. The energy returned to Dario, overflowing him with even more cosmic information. The memories of the alien being who bore the burden of the Hedron shard before him.

He hears his name.

“Islagruth”

On the day of his birth Islagruth was taken by his mother to one of the many nature preserves at the massive base of the Great Hedron to his awakening ritual.

The awakening is a sacred ritual that is as old as the Yasagrgli people themselves. It is a rite that each and every Yasagrgli infant goes through.

It is during this ritual that each individual is charged with the energies of the Great Hedron, converting each of their every living cells into a super-computer model of the Great Hedron itself.

Islagruth's mother carefully mades her way up the floating steps and placed him on the ceremonial altar, a weave of light, energy and stone to await the blessings of the Great Hedron.

During Islagruth's awakening, the Hedron Priests (sentient shards of the Hedron itself, the busy matrons of the people of Yasagrgl) saw that he was to one day become a great exterminator, an insight they simultaneously shared with Islagruth's mother and the Great Hedron itself.

Finally Dario became aware of the ever present, ever prescient thing that had been observing him for quite some time. The thing that was at the end of the line.

On a far away planet in the blackest region of space were the millions of ancient, sinister, hungry eyes that had been watching him since he awoke that day. They remembered. They had been waiting for this moment. The moment when mother would finally wake up again.

He could feel them and they, in turn, could feel him. Just as a spider feels a fly caught in her web, playing the song of desperation as it tries to escape. It was a dark kind of music. Baroque. Like the oppressive matriarchal hymns of the ancient church playing in tribute to some arcane and horrible goddess. The music felt disgusting but sounded strangely alluring. Like bad Goth-Industrial from the 90's, which happened to be one of Dario's guilty pleasures.

Despite being in tune with the universe, the part of his “self” that still existed and was connected to that timeless, most primal of realities could not help but recoil at the very hint of the will of the beings on that world. His very soul winced, causing him to stop expanding outward and rather to retreat inward into the only logical point of reference outside of the dead shell that he once was.

The Hedron Chronicles

Friday, August 8, 2014

Chapter 2

Chapter 1