GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: FATHER
FATHER
They kidnapped me from outside my apartment. One moment I was unlocking my bike, the next—a hood, hands, a vehicle that smelled like sulfur and old milk. I passed out.
I woke up, strapped to a table of cold metal—my wrists burned. The air buzzed with some frequency I couldn’t hear, but felt in my teeth. Inside I tasted dread as candles flickered while the smell of rotted flesh lambasted me.
I lifted my head to see my kidnappers in a large dilapidated open room. They’d arranged themselves with their backs to me mostly, in a semicircle around a wall. As I stared, the wall pulsed, shimmered and breathed. Like it waited for me—licking its lips to taste my fear.
These shadowy humans dressed in black gowns, wearing black goat faced masks, didn’t say anything, not until the chanting started. As I trembled, someone emerged from the shadows. Dressed in black, with her goat mask resting on her head, a woman with a lip ring and shaking hands, leaned in beside me.
She whispered, “I didn’t know they were really going to open it. I thought it was just... theater. We have to get out of her. I can help you escape.”
But it was too late.
As she tried to untie my hands, the wall tore open—not like paper, but like skin, splitting wet and red with a sound like a dog makes after panting uncontrollably to collect its drool. Shapes spilled through, sinewy and dark. They were wrong and impossible to accept as real. One of them—wearing a red robe that didn’t seem to cover what it should—grabbed my would be rescuer from behind. Her scream was swallowed as it folded her into itself.
Then it turned to me.
It lifted its robe, revealing a navelless, genderless expanse of gray muscle. From it, it sliced a long strip of flesh from its own side, steaming and twitching. It held it to my lips.
I refused. It pressed harder. I bit. And the world folded.
Taste became vision and my senses became entangled. I saw towers made of mouths, planets stitched together by bone, beings shaped like inverted gods chanting in thought, in voices I couldn't comprehend nor silence as they gnawed at my soul. I saw myself as a larval thing, tiny and naked, crawling toward a monolith shaped like my own skull. And behind it all, something watched.
Something beckoned for me. Familiar, yet alien. From my past and my future interwoven as one. When I awoke, I was naked on the lawn of the house. Daylight burned my flesh as I stood, empty and alone.
I ran. The world felt too loud, too warm, like it had shifted half a degree to the left. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t piss or shit. I couldn’t sleep. The pain in my abdomen grew sharper.
The police found me collapsed on the side of the road, half-screaming, half-begging to be unmade.
In the hospital, they scanned me, ran tests and whispered outside the room.
A nurse finally told me what an ultrasound found. Something was growing inside me—something shaped like a child.
They sedated me and removed it. Numb but awake I watched them pull it from my innards. Its eyes were open when it left me—and my eyes were now open to it.
Black, goat-like, human-ish, covered in mucus and screaming in a voice that reminded me of my own. They tried to take it away, but I fought like a rabid animal. It was mine. I had brought it to life, no matter how absurd it was or how it came to be.
That was a year ago.
Now I feed it. Raw meat, freshly killed from those the world will not miss. Those that feed on drugs, live in filth as they cling to the streets and nest under bridges like trolls. The homeless feed my child through their own sacrifice in exchange for relieving them of their earthly pain.
It grows fast and speaks now—in clicks and hums through dreams I don’t remember.
I am its guardian—its herald.
The medical community still pesters me for answers. They call me mother, though I am not one. But I feed it. I will protect it—and when the time comes, I’ll help it tear the veil wide open.
I am its father—and this is the part I was cast to play.
Art and story by Hal Hefner.
Produced by Catmonkey Studio