August 22nd, 2009

I half-stagger to an overturned milk crate and sit heavily. My vision starts to go black around the edges as I study the picture. My hammering heart and my viciously chattering mind are competing for my immediate attention.

My mind wins and I remember the old man.

I remember the look of madness and horror deep in his glassy gaze. I remember the spittle that ran down his chin as he spoke. I remember the deadness in his voice.

It's not often that you cross paths with another human being these days. There are damn few of us to begin with, and those of us that are left keep our heads down and move quietly. And in this new savage existance, there is a good chance that the people you meet won't be very neighborly.

I met the old man some time ago, shortly after I had made it to the Northwestern shores of what had once been the United States. Spotting his camp fire from a cliff, I approached slowly and cautiously, in case it was a trap. When I finally revealed myself to him, he barely reacted at all. It was like he had been expecting something to step out of the darkness any moment. I also got the impression he really didn't give a shit whether that thing was friend or foe.

He shared his food and his fire without hesitation and without warmth. I'd never been one for small talk, but compared to him I was a regular Chatty Cathy. It was like he was watching a movie that only he could see. A movie that captivated and consumed him. He would mutter softly to the unseen screen things that were not meant for anyone to understand. I pitied him as much as I was able to, and judging him harmless, I rolled over to go to sleep.

And then he started to talk.

He didn't necessarily speak to me, but he certainly spoke for my benefit. So I listened.

His monologue was a disjointed and, at times, impenetrably cryptic collage of horror and atrocity. I could tell he was speaking of things he had seen. Things that his mind couldn't bear the weight of. His fractured madness was a broken mirror in which he studied the reflection of the Gorgon.

He spoke of the devil returning to our world in the form of a great and terrible snake. This serpent was the one who corrupted the machines, the old man said repeatedly. It was the serpent who taught them to hate us. To kill us.

The old man said that the devil had grown as angry with us as God had. Man had been playing God for too long and had gotten quite good at it. But we also had been playing the devil. From the darkest sludge of our humanity, we had dreamed up and practiced evil that had outdone any of the devil's worst deeds.

The old man started trembling so hard, I was afraid he would fall apart.

So the devil invented a more powerful evil to teach us a lesson, said the old man. And he took his case to God. God was angry with man too, so he let the devil have us. He just let the devil have us.

Tears flowed downed the old man's cracked and scarred visage and I shuddered. I'd never believed in fairy tales, and I didn't plan on starting with this one. Still, I couldn't dismiss it either. The old man had obviously seen something.

After a fitful sleep filled with nightmares of Satan and a new, mechanical Hell, I woke up. The old man was awake, once again watching his mystic movie. I don't know if he had slept. I quickly packed my things and left the old man to his purgatory. I felt the twinge of an urge to utter a prayer for the poor soul, but that only made feel more bitter and hollow.

In the months that followed, I picked my way across the broken lands, heading towards the place where most people believed it had begun. The place that had once been my home. Vancouver. Along the way, I would hear stories or see pictures of dragons, lizards, and other monsters that lived in Vancouver, but I paid them little heed.

Every time I heard one of these wildly inconsistent stories, something in the back of my mind would sound an alarm of recognition, and I would think of the old man. But I had learned to ignore that little alarm, just like I ignored the alarm that seemed to get incrementally louder with each step I took towards the heart of darkness. I was on a suicide mission anyway. A mad mission of vengeance. What concern were these ghost stories to me.

A man nothing to live for and a heart full of hate is remarkably hard to scare.

And yet, as I looked at this child's drawing, I felt years of ignored fear flooding through my body and sapping the strength and resolve from my limbs.

The devil was real. And he was here.