This is a chapter from an upcoming collection titled Night of the Black Rainbow. It’s a series of micro-stories linked thematically by a sci-fi fantasy concept dealing with the apocalypse. An anomaly appears in the sky as a huge vacuum-black arch, instilling terror, panic and hysteria in the populace. Supernatural events occur, and this is one of the wilder compositions.
Codename: Don’t Eat the Black Acid
Boy did that shit have me going. I’ve never experienced anything like that, and I’m pretty sure I’m at least half-insane because of it. I have these dreams where I’m drowning in vats of crude oil, and then I wake up coughing and spewing gibberish and pressing my palms hard to my chest. I’m scared of most people now, and still can’t take a piss in bathrooms with mirrors. The sight of my own penis sort of scares me. And believe me, it wasn’t all the acid. Something else was happening that night, and the acid just made me see it all without the filters. I fucking wish those filters were on. Then I wouldn’t have had to hastily try and push the jelly of my leaking brain back into my skull. I wouldn’t have panicked if I didn’t know of those things. I would have thought I simply banged my head on the corner of a table.
It was planned to be a little friendly mind adventure. My friend found us some pure and clean LSD at a seriously cheap price. She kept it stored away safely until we found the perfect night to take it. It was going to be my first time, so I wanted the set and setting to be just right. When the night of the black rainbow came, it just so happened to start beautifully clear, cool and starry. So I cancelled original plans and cleared my schedule for the next 24 hours. I called up my friend and she pulled out the stuff and we met up at her place. We figured the best thing to do would be to stay at her house and get comfortable in the living room. She had a lot of toys to tinker around with once we were tripping; coloring books, Legos and washable markers and crap. Everything seemed to be good, so she took out a couple tabs from a Ziploc bag. They were little pieces of black construction paper, no bigger than a slither of tape. Considering their size, I took a whole tab for myself and crowned my tongue with it. Just then, the news came bombarding into our little isolated mind adventure via the blaring television. We should have turned that fucking thing off from the start.
I won’t go into the news report. Everyone knows by now about the black rainbow and what it’s about, or what they think it’s about at least. Whatever it is, the news got me and my friend off to a bad start already, and we thought it best to turn the TV off and try to forget about it as best we could. We were hungry, and thought some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were in order. We strolled into the kitchen, took out the bread and silently started to prepare our food, but the thought just wouldn’t leave our minds. We just had to go to the window and see if we could see it for ourselves. And with one swipe of the curtains aside, there it was, the monstrosity in the sky. It sliced through the hazy light of the city like a perfect fault line in the night, ominously arching in a band that swallowed stars and spewed vacuum. We couldn’t see the ends, but figured that they stemmed out from some black pit in the ocean at the frayed ends of the planet. We stared at it so long that the jelly started to drip down over our fingers from the butter knives in our hands.
I remember my friend nudged my shoulder to break me from some weird hypnosis. She was already eating her open-faced sandwich, and I didn’t like the look in her eyes when she stared at me. Her pupils dilated and the soul within them had completely drained. The jelly she spread on her bread had turned to ink, yet she kept on eating and chewing like a cow, emptily staring through my face at the wall behind me. It must have been her way to warn me, and it’s a good thing I turned around. The trim around the kitchen window had broken, and tiny little black bird claws were clawing through the cracks to get inside. They scratched and squirmed and sure enough, they were making slow but steady progress into the kitchen. I felt the invisible tug of my eyes dilating and figured it best that we went into another room. I would have closed the curtains, had the tiny black bird claws not torn them up in a struggle to pull themselves through the wall.
Things didn’t go well from there. Though I recalled hearing that the black rainbow didn’t move or emit any sound, an incredibly deep and pulsing bass tone shook the entire house. It wouldn’t be ignored, and every time I tried to pick up a Lego to play with, a shaking vibration would knock it out of my hand and turn it into some half-liquid black wax. Every time I reached for a crayon, the room would tilt in a quaking reverberation and each crayon would roll to the other end of the room, where my friend would pick it up and eat it. Every little sense of control I thought I could retain was being taken from me. The little black bird claws had broken in. I could hear them pattering around on the kitchen floor. It was just a matter of time before they would realize they can crawl through the space under the door.
I was beginning to get really frightened and was losing grip on my sanity. My socks slipped right off my feet and turned into snakes. They turned back towards me like swaying cobras ready to pounce if I dared move a muscle. My friend was sitting by the opposite wall, eating crayons as fast as they hopped over to her, all of them pleading in their munchkin voices to be the next meal. The vibration grew immense and my eardrums popped and were leaking out of my head. Without warning, the window blew open and night-stained broken glass flew across the room, with one lodging itself right in the center of my forehead. The sock snakes withdrew, so that the monster outside the open window could make a proper entrance. The black rainbow stood in the distance, vibrating with such ferocity that it appeared fuzzy. The city was gone, the stars were gone, and everything but I, my friend, this house and the terrible things that happened next, were gone.
I wasn’t prepared for any of this. I never knew the black rainbow’s minions would arrive so soon. There would be silence, and then suddenly a blast of distortion would ring out and the rainbow would get all fuzzy again. Then, after that, one by one the monsters came through the window.
First a black, dwarf like creature with long lanky limbs and a flat skinny torso pulled itself up and fell into the room. It didn’t have much strength to keep erect its monstrously huge head that was littered with at least 25 razor-sharp horns and 15 randomly arranged eyeballs. It didn’t seem to have a mouth, but emitted a piercing drone that cleared my ear drums out and turned the snakes into lifeless socks again. It took one look at me with at least four of its eyes and then dragged its head across the floor to gaze at my friend. Surprisingly, she seemed welcoming. She spat out the remaining crayons she was chewing and hastily undressed. Her naked body slumped against the couch and started melting. Her face slipped a bit from off of her skull as she moaned and groaned in anticipation. Realizing its cue, the creature dragged its head behind its scrawny body and mounted on top of her into military position. Then, with one swing of its neck, it dropped its head down on her face like a medieval mace and black gooey stuff splashed all over the place. I don’t think she was dead, because she was saying something along the lines of liking what was happening…a lot. I couldn’t disagree more. This creature was having its way with her, droning with such annoyingly trebly pitch that my head almost exploded too. It dismounted her when it was finished and collapsed exhausted on the floor beside her, his giant head still lodged in her face.
The blast of distortion rang out a second time, the rainbow became fuzzy and a second visitor started sneaking in through the window. All the inanimate things in the room seemed to be excited about this and starting jumping up and down on the floor, on top of the shelves and on the coffee table. The huge racket it made drowned out the pattering of bird claws from the kitchen, and as the amorphous blob poured into the room, a gathering cheer ensued from all the little potato chip crumbs and lost pennies that rolled out from under the couch. The black blob left a tremendous amount of black slime in its path, swallowing up the first creature whole and part of my friend’s leg as it moved towards me. I was helpless and stupid and couldn’t bear to escape. But right before it reached me, it stopped dead in its seeping tracks. The body of the blob began to morph and contort until it turned into a perfectly smooth equilateral pyramid. It buzzed like the vibrating of human lips and its peak opened like a lid to allow a 30 inch black penis with stars all over it to rise from out of the hole. It didn’t stand erect, but folded down at a 90 degree angle and scanned the room like a periscope. When it found the headless, melty body of my friend, it shook with excitement and spewed from its pee-hole jet-black oil all over her chest. She seemed to like that a lot too. I didn’t like it all, and lost my stomach over the whole ordeal. My vomit spewed over all of us and the penis pyramid thought that was pretty off-putting and rude.
A third and final blast of distortion from the black rainbow, and the pyramid melted quickly into a puddle on the floor. The dwarf picked itself up from the puddle and dragged its head hastily out the window. All the inanimate objects ceased their jumping and my friend decided it was better to just go to sleep for a while under the couch. Though everything seemed to be running off in fear, as scared as I was, I still couldn’t move. My socks had wormed away and I couldn’t walk without them. A brilliant and blinding un-light coated the skin and robe of the man who lowered down from the top of the window and into the room. The un-light shrouded everything around us in shadow except for me and him. Jesus Christ was standing before me, and not at all how I pictured him. He was mostly normal looking, but he had the slit-pupil yellow eyes of a cat and they were huge like a housefly’s. He breathed like a panting dog, filing his fanged teeth with his tongue. He dropped to all fours and began crawling towards me. With every creeping leg and arm, the shadows in the room grew thicker and thicker until the dimensions of everything were lost. My eyes had already rolled up into my head, but I could still see him clearly. I twitched involuntarily as his breath smacked my face with pestilent skunk odor. My sanity squealed when his outstretched tongue tickled the shard of glass in my forehead. My penis ripped through my pants and scraped against his loincloth with mad desire when he whimpered into my ear the gibberish of lunatics. I was completely undone; a vegetable animal; a rag doll of fear; a shaky number in the reality equation.
Christ was about to finish me off when the bird claws finally figured out how to break into the living room and they swarmed the both of us. He shrieked like a boiling slug and crawled like a panicked crab backwards out the window, leaving me to be eaten alive. The little claws were clawing; my friend was yawning and getting her head out of the black puddle. Christ had beamed himself back up into the black hole anus of the rainbow and they both disappeared out of sight.
My friend pulled the black blanket with the little bird foot impressions spotted all over it off of me, and ordered my raving and drooling consciousness to go into the kitchen and clean up the chocolate animal crackers that I spilled all over the place.
