The Sky was Grey.

Ok. So here it is - the final full story as promised.

When they came for me I was in the back yard digging potatoes. My hands were numb from thumbing off the cold wet mud before putting each one into the bushel basket my father had left for me. A subconscious silence matched the acreage that outstretched around me and dampness seeped up my legs as I stood on the open earth. The last of the insects were ticking weakly in the broken fall grass that surrounded the garden. I turned to look at the lake on the horizon and a cool wall of air woke up the tip of my nose, making it run just enough to warrant a smudge of grit from the back of my hand.

With three days into the crop and over two more to go, I dug listlessly and sometimes speared large healthy potatoes with my fork. Tossing them into the dead grass alleviated my careless practice and hid my betrayal of conscientious labour. I was smitten with self-pity and saw no purpose in my father’s evangelism of industrious task making. There was nothing I hated more than digging potatoes and when they came it seemed like I was waiting for them. They were the perfect distraction to break the bonds of my deed.

They came for me from behind and I had little time to respond to their showing. The silence of the day was resonating in my head and at once I sensed a crowd at my back. With my jaw set at the sight of them, I dropped the potato fork at my feet feeling it hit the steel-toe cap of my boot. My consciousness opened up into the landscape and my posture swayed as I tried to adjust to the change within me. A lid had been removed from the top of my head and I was completely open. They encircled me and we moved as a mass into the grass of the field. Their close proximity helped me to retain my balance well enough to stagger weakly with them down the hillside. I was touching the belly of a god and drawing upon its power. We marched foolishly in circles as I adapted to my new insight. The power was engorging and I was dying as we walked. God was real, he was coming at me from over the horizon.

Their hands brushed over me with reassurance and my excitement contradicted their calmness. Each one was a copy of the other, small steel-grey figures with featureless faces. Marionette-like gestures flowed; their differences in motion were the only distinguishing traits. Electricity filled the air as the lake grew closer and I realized my feet had ceased to touch the ground. There was a plate of invisible grease that I slid upon. Coasting over the black lake, a good wind cut into my face and worked at my hair. They stood on the water’s surface and it yielded to their mass like that of a mattress.

Slowing and directed we stopped in what seemed to be the middle of the lake. This was my death, there was no other explanation. I feared they would let go of me and I would sink into the void. Watching them I gently placed my hands on their smooth heads. They were like children encircling a street performer. Each one felt different and emotions glinted inside me as I explored the changes as my hands moved over them. I was connected to the sky and what seemed to be the universe. My mind was the largest thing. Did this state last for an eternity or was it just a flash? The only way to measure time was by change.

A dark colour moved above me and grew wide and elliptical. The shape fixed itself into a randomness that could only be described as a million different ovals. It lowered over me and the air changed temperature. I was being encased in an orb that ascended and dissolved the figures that had delivered me. A small disk of water was captured within the capsule as it closed below my feet and the orb rose high enough into the atmosphere to look the same size as the planet I had just left. It was the image we have all seen a thousand times. The planet we live on and contemplate. A visual cliché that looked glorified in reality.

A brain aneurism. Heart failure. I had died and my father would find me lying on my back in the turned open earth. His sorrow would haunt him for the rest of his life, guilty for making me do his petty jobs. The orb started to cloud until it became completely opaque. The walls thickened and began to close in on me. Its surface grew quickly inwards until I was completely immobilized in it. The substance filled my nostrils and mouth, descended into my throat and expanded in the pit of my gut. Suspending me weightlessness, it seeped between my clothes and snaked itself up my anus and urethra. It invaded every part of me until I felt I was the orb itself. There was only the motion of thought, blood, and heart. The blood kept its own force and the heart held me alive. I tried to count the heartbeats to measure time. In vain I continuously lost my place until the sessions of counting became nothing more than a rhythm itself. There was only my brain and for a few seconds I thought I could feel it, and the snake of my spinal cord running through me. My mind weakened, there was an end to the journey of death and I had reached it.

I awoke and through the dimness, looked at myself. They had me opened up and spread apart like a tapestry. They stood before me. I was their work of art enduring contemplation. A perception of hell and all conceivable suffering was mine and my mind wretched at the thought of what was to become of me. It seemed almost human in its structure this scene of unfathomable horror and I wondered if my assembly of reality was sure-footed. Now instead of death I contemplated insanity and the conjecture of the devil and his possible partnership in all of this.

They were all around me, with large black eyes. They were ones you have all seen. The ones people draw. The ones on television. They moved and acted upon my anatomy with casual mechanics, like one might clean a fish and I wondered how often they had done this before. There was no pain, only the knowledge of my own devastation. I was being dismantled and catalogued. Parts of me were at other stations attracting the separate attentions of different looking creatures that do not clearly accommodate description. They didn’t have any characteristics and were constantly in flux of appearance.

A laugh of disillusionment blurted out of me and I heard it outside of my head. This brought me to a state of higher consciousness and I noticed that my company responded to my vocal outbreak.

“What the fuck are you doing to me you fucking monsters?”

One of them came closer to me with what looked like a lit wand. It had the appearance of being cheap and purposeless. The large appendage that the creature held it in was not properly evolved to its ergonomics. As the thing grew intimate I saw its skin writhing like a mass of decaying carrion. Its surface mirrored that of being separately alive, like each one of them was their own ecosystem or universe. It was either this or they were a collective of organisms working together to form one. The wand was moved in what seemed like a vaudeville charade and my mind connected with its bearer. There was heat in the core of my scull and I wondered if my brain was cooking from the inside, but then there were words that I understood but did not control.

You are of great purpose.

You are of the few that have the gateway.

We are opening this gateway … you will be one with us.

I blinked a few times and looked into the mask that had given me the words. Did it move in subtle ways to suggest personality? For a few seconds things processed between me and the wand bearer. There were no more words but calmness started to fall from the background of my thinking and grew over me.

You are of great purpose.

You will be larger than this universe.

You will know what it is to be without ignorance.

The thing seemed to be endearing, but there were parts of me scattered around what looked like some sort of laboratory and I was sure there was no way anything could ever put me back together. My head was the only thing not unwrapped and my blood was emptied out below me. There was no pulse and my heart, or what I guessed to be my heart was being eaten by a few of the red ones standing at a station half lit in the background. They were the only ones with mouths and they resembled something amphibious, with root like gills feathering out of their sides and down over their lower appendages forming an ornate skirt.

After the wand I could hear things better and the amphibians were gurgling to each other. The thing with the wand pulled me back to it and as it pressed itself into my mind I looked back and saw a difference in its appearance. It had split itself open and seemed to be shedding or was the organic surface separating from this being and making another? The being shuddered a few times and its outer skin jumped from its core and began to reshape itself on the floor beside the wand-holder.

Behold I am two.

I will travel with you back to your world and into eternity.

The eternity of change.

The mass on the floor crept into a long thin shape and held itself up and into my face. With the style of a serpent it turned and collided into the middle of my forehead. It felt like there was a river running through my head and I found myself choking on what was the wand-holders skin. It was drowning in my outstretched anatomy and pulled everything backwards into itself. My eyes saw only a light of red and then at once I felt the cold damp earth of the field. The grey sky held itself above me and the insects ticked in the dead grass that surrounded the open earth of the garden. I blinked a few times, got myself to my feet and held my hands out in front of me. I was intact but there was still a large charge of electricity in the air and for a few seconds I couldn’t think of anything.

A few minutes passed and I found myself in a different way. I was not the person that held the place I was prior. My wrists contained thin root-purple vessels that webbed out into the palms of my hands and around my fingers. My arms felt as solid as steel and as I turned my scull onto a slight angle and pressed my eyes closed I saw the universe and everything that was. I knew that my touch could turn anything inside out. I picked up the potato fork and passed my hand through its mass. First the wooden handle and then through the cold steel tines that finished its construction.

I am here. I am with you.

We are together and there is a new gateway for us to commence.

We can begin and end when you decide.

I am here. I am with you.

I smiled and saw my mother in the kitchen window. She was still wearing her nightgown and it was three in the afternoon. I looked into her mind and brought her into me. Her body dropped out of sight and I knew it was dead but it didn’t matter. I was a god now.

I threw the fork down and called out to the thing inside me. Turning back towards the lake I told him in my mind that I was ready.

I am here. I am with you.

Reaching down and picking up a large potato, I took a step forward off of the open earth and walked into the core of the universe.