Of Stardust by David D. Sanchez Ortiz

David D. Sanchez Ortiz                           about 3,560 words

In Days Past

New York City, Hell’s Kitchen

 I once wondered what awaited us beyond the celestial vault, what the stars were and what they held. Now I can only think of how I regret every day of ever finding out…. 
 It all started back on May 7th of 1952. Though before I knew it was that day, in particular, I woke up suddenly with the worst nausea I have ever had in my life. I wondered for a moment what time or place I was in before I realized that I was in my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Shortly thereafter I groggily rolled over from my bed onto the plain wooden floor. I slowly got up with the enthusiasm of a gravedigger without a shovel, and the proceeded to drag my feet to the bathroom. 

 Where I then lifted unceremoniously the crapper lid, shoved my face in there and vomited the mashed potatoes and beacon I served myself for dinner. 

 It was odd, I did not eat anything particularly rotten that night. But things still felt off, mostly because I felt that type of nausea before it wasn’t one from food. No, it was one that felt like it came from the first time I ever killed anyone during the war. In all, It was the start of a very strange series of events that made me realize a great horrible truth. 

 My name is Drake Benjamin Fallon, I, like many young men was drafted into the war, got my ass sent to North Africa to be shot at and avoid grenades while the deadliest conflict as of yet unfolded. I made it back alive, somehow. Not unscathed though, the shrapnel in my left arm and a couple of holes in my left thigh say anything is that the medic got there before I bleed to death in the middle of the godforsaken desert next to the flaming heap of scrap metal that used to be an M3 battle tank. 

 I was naturally sent to England along with the rest of the wounded to recover, and by the time I was allowed to leave the war had ended. 
 Something that I regretted. Never saw the rest of my platoon again, none of them made it, and I had to live with the reality that I was a ‘lucky one’.
 It was that that kept me at odds. I hadn't had an incident of nausea like the one I experience since the war. 

 “Maybe what I had wasn’t a dream but a memory?” I said to myself as if to try and avoid digging into it further, but then it dawned on me how that did not make much sense. 

 I hadn’t had a nightmare that had made me lose my dinner like that since I was hospitalized in that fancy place in England. 
 Sure some nights I still had nightmares, I lost sleep. But by the time I had come back home to New York I had somewhat acclimated my nerves to it. 
 No something more was going on then but at that moment I could not put my finger on it. I wasn’t truly aware then. I could not have even begun to imagine what sort of reality would be unveiled to me. I decided to take the antiseptic to wash off that reached acidic vomit taste from my mouth. 

 I was sure that it was still in the middle of the night. So I went to the clock on my nightstand and noticed that it was 3:42 AM. I had also noticed that the lights were on when I abruptly woke up. Yet I distinctly remember turning them off. 

 “No, no, no, something is not right here.” 

 I murmured to myself as I felt a cold sweat form on my brow. Fear started to creep in. 

 So I decided to get dressed, only to find nothing but the trench-coat and my brown shoes. I was wearing naught but a sleeveless undershirt and boxers, and I was a bit disturbed by finding my socks in one of my trench-coats pockets, as I never keep them there. 

 I considered for a moment that I was still asleep, that this was a bizarre dream. To which I reacted as any man would at the possibility. I pinched myself, I was still there. I then decided in my unwillingness to believe that any of this was real I then proceeded to bite my index finger with force enough to cause bleeding. In the hopes that the pain itself would wake me up. And then I was sure and could no longer deny the horrid truth. I was not dreaming. 

 I began to breathe heavily and then I opened the door to see the very same hallway that I saw every day. With that accursed sunflower painting that always hanged right outside my door. 

 Naturally, I simply decided to run and close the door behind me. 

 But then faster than the blink of an eye, I looked to the floor to find black stone under my feet, the door in front of me was gone. What instead was in front of me was this black stone, rounded wall almost like I was inside an ellipsoid if not for the obviously flat floor under my feet. 
 The room was lit but as I turned around looking I could not find the source of the lighting. No bulbs, gas lamps, or carnosine lamps to be seen anywhere. 

 Then I looked down, down to what stood behind me when I ‘thought’ there was a door there. 

 Floating above in three clear glasslike spheres in what I thought to be a clear oily substance were horrid things that boggle the imagination. 
 A sort of arachnid-crustacean like things, salmon pink, with something to eight limbs with three-fingered hands with opposable thumbs at the end, things that one would assume to heads with no mouth or eyes, or ears that I could notice, but instead a myriad of antennae, and large membranous bat-like wings folded on the center of their backs. 

 I then saw electricity arcing from the roof to the trio of spheres. And then I looked under them a floating black slab and standing behind it 4 foot, six-fingered beings with large black eyes, no ears or mouth, greyish skin, and a look of unnatural uniformity in their appearance. Like looking at twisted parodies of what men looked like. 

 I attempted to run, but I then began to float like water, I was slightly disoriented as I was having difficulty getting my bearings but then I looked down to see their right arms stretched forward to my general direction. Those arms split down the center of what I assumed to be but looked nothing like palms into three two-fingered limbs with electricity arcing between them for each one. 

 I panicked and heard the crackling noise one expects to hear from one of those mushroom-shaped electric coils and I felt pain, pain like I had never felt before, but a pain that I assumed to be from electrocution. 

 I screamed like a banshee. Fear, pain, and rage flowing out of my mouth all at once like a cornered wounded tiger. 
 At a couple of seconds in it proved to be too much and I started passing out from the pain in that infernal weightlessness, my vision blurred until it became dark and I was again unaware of the world. Unconscious and vulnerable to whatever those things wanted from me. 

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Horizons

 There is something to be said about knowing what true disconnect is, what the true abyss is. When perception is but an illusion at best, and at worst a fanciful thought. I had no perception of the passing of time, sight, sound, touch, up, down, left, right, and everything in between. You cannot even describe it as drifting. For you need to have perception and senses, to even get that you are drifting in the first place. 

 I suddenly could hear it, something that I was relieved at first because I could hear again but then… the noise became like shriek that reverberates everywhere, I could feel it, but not like it was before what I had could not be called limbs, I did not understand anything that was happening.  It is impossible to properly describe how can one hear and feel when your familiar limbs and body are simply not there. 

 But I heard it, the music of the spheres, that overwhelmed me like a shriek that reverberated everywhere, howlings of starwind, the deaths, and births of stars, it all sounded so loud but so distinct, like ripples in the water going in all directions around a sphere. Was the best way that I could try even begin to properly visualize it. 

 It all then after a while I once again regained one of my senses, my sight, and what I saw. My new found eyes that have been bestowed to me saw in horror what was in front of me. It was I, the top of my skull was surgically removed, the blood flowing from the top of my head down a strange surgical table to a receptacle, none of it spilling to the floor. 

 The sheer horror of this made me want to scream, but I had no mouth or lungs to do so. Despair had taken me. I wondered then if I was dead, had I been a mere spirit looking at my corps before awaiting judgment by God? 

 Or was I somehow alive without a body? The answer came when I saw one of the ‘things’ in the spheres appear in my line of sight and approached me. And then I realized that somehow I was contained in something, that I could not even feel. Was I just a mind in a jar, what sort of sick joke was it!? 

 I then immediately began to hear the sound again. And this maddening buzzing, it wasn’t very loud but it was consistently uniform, like it had structure, like language and ten I heard English, but in a voice that sounded so otherworldly that no sane man could ever call it human. 

 You know of what happened, you may not consciously recall it, but the knowledge of it is there, in your brain. 

 I realized what it was speaking to me about. My nightmares, the ones that I could not quite remember. Was it saying that those were memories, where those my memories or memories of someone else? Is that the reason this was happening at all? Is there a reason!? 

 Others like you that spawned from the primitive, but possessing a  more advanced brain with true perception also acquired this knowledge from all over this world. As such understanding, the origin of this is needed. 

 They explained this to me, it unnerved me because I had no idea what it was talking about. But at the same time, it made me wonder why it was telling me this at all? 

 Now we needed your attention for what happened next, a focus for a message, one that will be relayed by you. This is that message.
 Then red, and pain, and the buzzing not of the insectoid organism like the kind I heard before, but something like a machine, like a telegraph being made at a speed that was beyond anything I had heard would have been the best way to describe it. 

 I wondered if I was in hell, was this what the ancients tried to describe. Was this fire and brimstone, were these demons and I another damned soul to be used by them for nefarious purposes? 

 If so then the cruelty of it seemed more than wrong to me, because I felt pain, from a heat I could not quite describe, like being on fire yet not losing an ounce of flesh, or in any way feeling the structure that had arms and legs, but I felt like I was on fire, I did not know for how long, time having long been lost to me like a mirage in the desert sands of North Africa. Time to my realization but an illusion brought by the limits of a body. 

 Then it went dark again, the burning stopped, and then I felt it again the scream of the stars, the Starwind that carried that sound and all that it entailed, I had no center. No center yet with time it became beautiful to me, I realized that what I was sensing was what my body did not allow me to sense due to the constraint of flesh. 

 The screaming became elegant music, and I felt at ease about this fate.  I understood the boundless. 

 But then at some point, I regained vision, something generated the stars, it all had a beginning, a source. 
 And what I saw I could not comprehend, it was terrible, great and bathed in the incomprehensible sound, one that I could not even begin to process properly, for when I tried to actually listen carefully I felt great pain. 

 I stared at it, I did not know for how long, but I could not look away. No matter how much I actually wanted to. 
 Then abruptly it all stopped. 

_________________________________________________________________

Midgard

 White, pain, it all came at me at once when I opened my eyes. It then dawned on me that I had eyes. I looked around and I saw a hardwood forest. A raccoon looked at me while holding on to a tree, and in all, I started feeling sensation again. I felt the chilly air on my naked body. I felt the dirt, leaves, and grass from my feet. 

 I was relieved, in away. I thought for a second that all that I experience was naught but a dream. But it left me with a suspicious feeling of doubt. 
 I looked down at my now dark-skinned feet, and at my dark-skinned hands, how much ease there was to my movement now, how I was more muscular now. 

 For that was not my own body, but the body of a black man, in pristine physical condition no less. I went from being an Irishman to being the African Man. 

  I screamed. 

 “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!” 

 That wasn't my body, I continued to check this form to notice that I was completely clean-shaven everywhere. I placed my new found hands to the side of my head and I felt a single scar around the base of my skull. 

 And it dawned on me that everything that happened actually happened.

 I fell to my knees and I vomited, what came out was transparent. And that fact scared me more, for it did not even taste like vomit, it felt like I was expelled flavorless gelatin.  

 It was then that I decided to keep walking, for my new physique allowed me so. 

 Eventually, I came upon a picnic table made of a material I did not recognize, looking at a family wearing strange clothes. All people, but I still had a feeling that something was off. 

 They all took a look at me. Panicking they all ran away from the strange naked black man approaching them. Naturally, I should have expected this, but at the very least I was somewhere, probably in New England. 

 I saw the food that they left at the table. Hunger compelled me and naturally set about eating as much as I could. 
 I spent about what I guessed by the sun to be almost an hour, I then felt a jolt go through me and pain coursed through my new found body. 
 I then passed out, but this time I didn't see anything in that darkness. And in a way I felt contempt. I had sleep. But I dreamt… 
_________________________________________________________________

Of Prophets

Report from Detective William Wong

Boston Police Department District E-18 April 1st, 2020
 I sat there staring into the eyes of this man that we brought in. Everything he told me was insane, but not exactly unheard of. Every department had it's UFO story, it's Bigfoot story, its Jersey Devil, and a Mothman sighting or two. 
 I was going to write this off as some crazy idiot that got drank too many Sleep Aid pills to knock him out in the middle of the park. 
 But the rawness in which he said everything, and then the correlation that his name did come up from the veterans office. 
 I couldn’t do it. 

 It's for someone higher on the totem pole as they say.

 But What Happened next was unforeseen to say the least. He demanded paper. As much as we could bring him and pens. We keep our guns at him but we granted his request regardless. 

 Then he started drawing with precision and speed that I had never seen fro a flesh and blood person before. He drew, drew, and drew. Only stopping every once in a while for food, water, and bathroom breaks. 

 He was drawing pages upon pages of QR codes out off all things. 

 We already had him in custody for two days. And he kept drawing these for five days more.
 At the end of it all by April sixth, we had three hundred and thirty-three pages filled top to bottom with QR code. 
 He then looked at us, all of us and said. 

 “Hotep”. 

 Then he collapsed to the ground and began to putrefy with an unnatural speed, we tried moving him but the stench made it impossible to approach it was too much for any of us to bear, and it would take too long to get the gas masks. 

  By the thirteenth minute it was too late he had become nothing but a red putrid puddle on the floor. 
 All that was left was that neatly stacked three hundred and thirty-three pages of QR code. We waited for a few hours until we felt that it was safe to retrieve it from the interrogation room. 

 We gave it to the forensic Jaclyn Valentino, she basically went through the task of scanning every code with a smartphone we brought from a Best Purchase in town. 

 From there we all left Valentino to do her thing. 
 The rest of us? We all went home trying to process everything that just happened that day. 
_________________________________________________________________

Doomed

Boston Police Department District E-18, April 7th 7:33 AM

 When we came in, the news was already all over the place. Valentino at some point figured that it was best to go to the armory, put a Beretta 9mm in her mouth and pull the trigger. 
 And the three hundred and thirty-three pages? Gone. 
 Just. Gone. 

_________________________________________________________________
 William Wong, Personal Diary Entry 

 It did not take long. They all went mad in less than a day half of them committed suicide one they finished reading the first seven scans. In all what was inside those pages was beyond what man could take. Anyone involved with this entire scenario in the district is either dead or the sort of worse for wear that makes you consider that death was the better option. 

 Though in all honesty, it made me wonder. Why? Who was the message for? And for what purpose? Any that tried to understand it so far has simply found it beyond horrible. But we have no clue to precisely what.

 Each QR Code activates a text file. Mostly indecipherable gibberish, and a high pitch sound. Only the people that try to analyze it actively become affected. Truth be told maybe they are simply smart enough to get what is actually the message but it screwed them up to the point where it just isn’t worth it. 

 So that leaves me wondering what is the message? And if the people that can understand it are driven mad by the horror of it? Who or what is the actual recipient? 

 I cannot understand it, it would keep me up at night if it wasn’t for me taking three times the recommended dosage for my sleep aid. 
 Even then its always there in the back of my mind, trying to claw its way to the forefront of my consciousness. 

 It all was driving me to dig deeper into the abyss. In many ways, the challenge was too enticing. Some would say straightforwardly that its best to hide in the most remote location you can reach and hide under a rock. 

 But that is the thing, isn’t it? 

 Where are you going to run? Where are you going to hide? Extraterrestrial beings are real, they have been abducting people for decades at the very least. Why? You do not know. So what is stopping them from taking the world for themselves? Do they see us as a resource? That is the only conclusion I can honestly come up with. And in retrospect, a man with a weaker stomach might struggle to confront it, but I had worked in human trafficking cases before, I find it sickly accommodating that there is a slight familiarity with that situation and what I experienced beforehand. 

 Though in all honesty, I do not think that a sane man would make the same comparison as me. 
 Though any semblance of sanity, in this case, might have been detrimental. 
 Only time would tell if it was worth it at all.