Locust Dreams

When I was 7 years old the other girls at Sunday school told me I was born damned, and I believed them. It explained more than a bit; the different voices I kept hearing when I was alone for instance, the dreams I’d keep having over and over again where I was being covered head to toe by locusts, and the uncomfortable feeling I always got whenever we went to church, as if an ice cube were melting in the pit of my gut. If I had been given the choice I probably would have avoided religion altogether. But we lived in a small town and father was a die-hard Lutheran, so instead I was there every Sunday at nine o’clock, an hour before the doors opened to help set up the pews.

When I turned 11 I was determined to prove to God that I didn’t deserve whatever was happening to me. When I heard the voices I would pray aloud, and the weirder church made me feel the more often I wanted to go. Eventually my parents allowed me to go to the annual lock-in so long as I slept in a separate room from the boys. Halfway through the night we heard a noise and found a rat in the kitchen downstairs. Everyone including this one boy I liked from choir wanted to kill it, but the Jesus freak in me wouldn’t have it. Thou shall not kill, and there was nothing in the book about rats being exempt. I trapped it under a bowl I got off the shelf and started pushing it to the door. The girls squealed, and the boys locked the door behind me while I was outside, including that same boy I liked. So I was left out alone in the graveyard behind the main chapel, no phone and almost no light except for a farmhouse off in the distance. The voices started to rise in a chorus of whispers. Of course I broke down, crying softly as I huddled in the dim light above the doorway, until I heard footsteps. The voices stopped, like a crowd falling silent as the show was starting. “It is very late to be out, young one.” I wiped my eyes off, trying desperately not to embarrass myself in front of an adult, and looked up to see an old woman, her head and body wrapped in a shawl.

“I… No. I was kicked out. Are you with the church? I need help getting back in.”

“Ah, no. I have found that the churches here do not agree with me.”

“So you’re a Muslim?” Not the most polite question I know, but I was tired and afraid and angry and she seemed to fit the profile of what my rural Wisconsin self thought of as one of the merchant prophet’s. The strange woman’s eyes seemed to shine a little brighter.

“No. I am merely one who believes in the divine very strongly.” She looked at the church door. “You wish to enter?”
“I- um, yes.”
“Why?”
I was about to answer her before I realized I didn’t have one to give. Say I somehow got back in. Would they even let me stay? Or maybe they would and just act like nothing happened so they wouldn’t get in trouble. Which would be worse? I looked down at my trembling hands and realized I’d gone from sad to afraid all the way to pissed. Pissed at them, at myself for wanting to save the stupid rat, at everything. My hands closed into fists, and I looked up to find the woman’s cold hand on my shoulder. “I see many interesting things in you, my child. You carry the blood of the first men deep within you. I was here to visit an old friend, but I think I will keep an eye on you in the mean time. You should trust your wrath. It is a gift from the masters of this world to strike down those too assured in their righteousness.” She turned and walked back out into the field, seeming to melt into the dark despite the questions I shouted after her. I was alone again. That night ended with me putting a rock through one of the church windows and hiking two miles back home. The next day at school I asked around if anyone had seen the same strange person in town, and got nothing but weird looks as an answer. Two weeks later all the corn on the Jameson’s farm just dried up from some new strain of blight and Mrs. Jameson- her pretty husband having come back from the Gulf in a pine box- hung herself.

When I turned 15 I was knee-deep in my rebellious phase. Dyed hair, pierced lips, torn jeans, anything I could think of to stand out I grafted onto myself as if I had always been that way. I stopped going to church, and when I was forced to go I’d do my level-headed best to show up drunk. I lost my virginity in the back of a pick-up parked in the middle of some field and I only half remembered it. The school counselor assigned to me said I was exploring my boundaries. The pastor’s wife said I was in the devil’s grip. Seeing as how the dreams of being buried in insects and the voices were getting worse I tended to agree with her. It’s just I was past wanting to do anything about it. If I was damned then it was part of who I was, stitched on just as easily as my heavy mascara. And exasperated, I finally told her as much when I was “invited” to her house for a private faith-counseling session after dinner. The conversation ended with her on top of me pressing a fucking crucifix so hard into my chest I couldn’t breath, tears in her eyes as she tried to “free this child from the adversary’s hold”. Darkness crowded around the edge of my vision and I could feel death becoming real in a way it never is for a teenager. Even in my panicked strength I couldn’t push the bitch off of me.

Then all of the sudden I saw her head become wreathed in a thorny crown of black flames. The cross fell from her hands and she screeched like a banshee before her skull became pulp under the fist of the old woman from behind the church. The sickly sweet smell of black blood filled my lungs as I gasped for air, my skin speckled with red as my would-be murderer’s corpse fell to the floor in a heap. Was it really her? After 4 years I’d thought I’d made her up. But the skull-splitting thump in my head felt far too real for this to be a dream. The shawled woman kicked the cross away contemptuously, as if just touching it with her foot somehow hurt her. And I suddenly felt lifted up onto my feet without anyone touching me. She was covered in blood too, her eyes yellow rimmed like a dying flower as she licked my face clean. It was weird, it was gross, it was terrifying, but I felt like I was completely safe with her, like she was the grandmother I’d never known. “In the beginning before there was light, there was darkness. And in that darkness the first pharaohs, the first hypocrites, built their tombs and temples, and wound the first chains of light around the true world. Then came the beggar prince of the east, then Yaweh’s shepherd king and his son the carpenter, then finally the camel driver turned warlord. All apostles of the lie that their gods are eternal and that evil once sealed away can never harm them again. The first men knew better. We know better. Gaze into the darkness beyond the stars and beyond the deepest depths of the sea, Hosanna Winters. Then when you thirst for more, seek me out. I will be waiting with interest.” Then the pastor’s kitchen stove exploded in a cloud of flame and I hit my head on the edge of a table.

It had been an unfortunate gas leak. The pastor’s wife had died making sure I had gotten out safely. I was suffering from a long term head injury. I was traumatized and under a lot of stress. I was very lucky. I should take these pills every morning. All these things my therapist told me when I finally came clean about the dreams and the voices, and what memories I had of that night. I had turned 17 now. Mom had divorced dad since the fire and taken me with her to Chicago. New house, new school, and no church. A fresh start I was ready to make the most of. I started going to classes again, delving into books about anthropology and the different ways ancient cultures interpreted the demonic and divine. I made friends who shared my interests in the sociology club, still an outcast but now in a place with so many people there were other outcasts to hang out with. And when I went to sleep at night the demons I read about would follow me. I would be back behind the church that night, locusts crawling over me as Moloch and Dagon danced in the flickering light of the street lamp. Then I would look up into a sky that had no stars, darkness greater than the deepest pit of the sea, and I danced with the locusts even as they devoured me down to the bone.

And still I hungered, like a seed with just enough water to know it was meant to be a tree but not enough to sprout. One night I caught a rat in the kitchen of our apartment and found myself spending hours sticking needles from mom’s sewing kit into it, keeping it inside a little shoebox, looking for something I didn’t know the name of. Was it pain? That wasn’t that hard to find, clearly. That unknown something moved away from me whenever I reached out to grasp it like a plastic bag I was chasing. I tossed the then rat carcass into the sink, soaked it in vodka from the cabinet and set it on fire in frustration, and seeing the flames rise woke something long-buried…. I remembered the black flames.

There was an abandoned lot a block away from my building that wouldn’t be used at night because there was no streetlight reaching it. It was the best place to find her I could think of in my hurry. I packed my bag with my pills, a change of clothes, and a couple of the occult books I’d amassed since coming to the city; some meager proof that I’d been learning like she’d told me. Then I finally came to the center of the lot and realized I had no idea what to do next. So out of desperation for whatever I was missing I called out to the dark corners of the asphalt, holding up one of my books like a child showing their doll. Someone sitting in the passenger’s seat of a car that had lost all its tires for as long as anyone I knew could remember motioned for me to get in from across the lot. I walked forward slowly, scared it might be some kind of predator out at night looking for easy and stupid targets, but my footsteps got more rapid when I saw her more clearly.

“And so you have come.”
I climbed into the driver’s seat next to her. “What is it?…. Please, I have a life now. I’m good at school, I have friends, I have everything I wanted but there’s something missing. You have to tell me.”
“It is not something that can merely be told, only realized. The first revelation of the void.” Suddenly I felt a sinking feeling in my gut, as if I was falling. The voices rose to a chorus of nonsense words spouted in dead languages I barely recognized as devils ran around the car and picked it up. I was going to hell. I was being dragged down to a thousand different hells written in a thousand different languages and I knew it in the same way you just knew something bad was happening in a dream. I screamed, and I couldn’t even hear myself the voices were so loud. There was nothing; no light, no heat, no hope, only the fall as I left the car and my body far behind. Darkness beyond the stars and deeper than the deepest depths of the sea. I closed my eyes and embraced the momentum, spreading my arms so that my fall turned into a flight. I was no longer in hell. It was impossible to be in hell and enjoy it. Now I was somewhere else. A place beyond and beneath even the abyss, where concepts of suffering and anecdotes of insane pointless evil wriggled misshapen and asleep. The outer dark, where Let There Be Light had never reached. This was…. This was the true world. It was terrifying and magnificent at once, like my grandmother multiplied many times over. I opened my mouth in another cry and the darkness entered.

I was back in the junked car, the old woman’s bony hand once again on my shoulder as she was looking me over, searching for something. “You…. You will do nicely. You saw the dark that waits beyond the paltry curtains of heaven and hell, yet you walked in eyes wide open.”
“I…. I…” I felt like I couldn’t breath. My heart was banging on the inside of my ribcage. “What was that? What are they?”

She sighed. “They are something old. Older than the gods of this world and more powerful. They are the blackened truth which we lords embrace where all others shun. They must be appeased, and kept docile lest their grandeur spill forth and wash away creation along with us. Do you see this now?”

“I…. I see this now.”
“And you would forsake all loyalties, commit all sins, and walk the path of Baal where all comfort save blood is as ash to see this done? Say it.” She radiated power and authority. But when I was given the chance to speak and choose, it was as if that aura waned some. She wanted the truth, not what I thought would please her.

“….I will do whatever it takes. I don’t want my friends to go to that place. I don’t want anyone to have to go there. Please show me more.” She drew me close so that I could look into both her eyes. Then she opened her mouth, letting locusts spill out, vomiting them onto me. My dreams became reality as I felt my heart slow down under their tender bites.

The voices are all silent now. Now they speak through me.