The Planet-Eater

The boy cycles home, spokes whirring with the teeth-like playing cards haphazardly stuck into them. He brakes to a sudden stop, and jumps off onto the tarmac. Trees blow in the wind, and drops of rain begin to sprinkle onto the boy from the heavens.
         “Fuck…” The boy murmurs, and hurries up his garden path. In his arms he has clutched a voluminous tome. He sets on the floor briefly while he opens the door, and picks it up again as soon as the warm confines of the house beckon him. Inside, he again sets the book down, this time on the kitchen table. Then he pulls up a chair, and pours himself a glass of Coke. The liquid rushes into the glass, and then settles with a thin layer of mucus-like foam lining the top. The boy swallows it down in three large gulps. Then he looks around the room, satisfied.
         Now he grabs the book in his hand again, and goes through into the next room. Here is a set of candles, all set out in a pentagram. The boy looks over it, and makes sure it is as he left it. Then he lights the candles. It takes it a few tries, as his hands are shaking a fair bit now. He lights each candle, one at a time, and then looks over the pentagram again. Then he looks down at the book, and opens the dusty pages, and starts flicking through it. It is full of instructions, each with different things to put within the pentagram he has made. He tries some of these ‘recipes’. These use tree branches, glasses of water, a canvas, and many other strange things. None of these do as they are meant to.
         Disgruntled, the boy angrily flips through the book again, to see if he has missed anything. At first, it seems that he has tried all of the rituals, but then he notices a few pages at the end of the book. Blocks of small writing (they seem almost intricate enough to be hand-written calligraphy) adorn these pages. He begins to read, and finds it is some stupid legend. Something about the Earth’s guardian shutting the threat away. The threat. The guardian apparently trapped this threat away in another dimension, so that it would never threaten the well being of the planet… The boy didn’t believe any of this, but at the end of the writing he discovered one last spell.
         
         The summoning of Khahfreech-Xant-Ghagh or the Zim or Mephisto or Synson or Geocider, the Planet-Eater; for use upon travel to the Planet-Eaters realm.
Use ancient pentagram, only those upon complete innocence may perform. The blood of the eternal virginal innocent pure one shall open the gate.


“Okay…” The boy murmurs, and looks down the page. The blood of the pure, it says. Does it mean a kid? Only one way to find out.
         Looking at a scab on his arm that he had achieved by a startling topple from his bicycle a few days before, the boy considered trying this last ritual. He had gone to the trouble of getting the book already, so why not try this one?
         He picks the scab off, and wipes the blood from it. Then he rubs it against the pentagram. Nothing happens. Sighing, the boy trudges off to watch the TV. Nothing happened…
Half an hour later, the boy walks back through the room to get some more Coke from the kitchen. When he sees the pentagram, he jumps, startled. Right in the places that he had rubbed blood earlier, there is now an astonishing wave of bright light that is curtaining up from the pentagram to the ceiling. The boy rushes over and prods at it, and to his amazement (and fear-tinged delight) his hand goes right through. It worked! He opened a portal to another dimension!
The boy looks down at the pan-dimensional gate he has opened in his living room, and realizes that it is far too small to fit through. He can barely fit his hand through the gap! But then he realizes that the gate is only coming through the area where he rubbed blood… So, he just needs blood. By now he is in a haze of adrenaline and excitement, so he rushes into the kitchen, and (Coke now forgotten) grabs a knife from the top drawer. He takes it back into the living room and squats down by the brilliant white light of the portal.
He grimaces, and with a hesitant thrust of his hand, rubs the blade along his forearm. He screams at the raw pain, but smiles when he sees blood begin to leak out of the wound. With shaky arms, he lowers his arm over the pentagram and begins to slide the slippery blood onto the space within the pentagram. As he does, it appears to absorb into the wood, and he notices light begin to shine through the areas where the blood is applied.
Fifteen minutes later, the boy stands above the now human sized portal with his arm in a white bandage. He is ready to go through! He feels fear within him, a feeling that is only matched by his feeling of intense excitement. He wonders what this Planet-Eaters realm will be like. Will he be famous when he returns? He thinks of a future headline, and smiles: BOY DISCOVERS LOST WORLD, PUBLIC IN AWE.
It is with this encouraging thought that the boy brings up the courage to go through the portal. He drops, like a scuba diver off of a boat, and before he knows it, he is through.
He looks up, dazed, and sees nothing but stars around him. He is on a small rock, around the size of a coffee table, and all around him the cosmos swirls. Above him, the portal keeps open, but from this side, it emits no light. The boy reaches up towards it, frightened, but finds that his hand cannot reach it; it is quite high up. He utters a shaky moan, and then looks around him.
That is when he notices the object that was emitting the light that he saw from the other side of the portal. What looks like a massive star flies up towards the small asteroid he is sitting on. As it nears him, the boy realizes that it is no star; it is actually what appears to be a massive human corpse! He screams as he sees it; it is easily the size of a solar system. It is light-years away, but all the boy can see is its massive head and even bigger chest. Its vast arms are folded, and its face is closed, like a gigantic Egyptian mummy. It wears no clothes, and as it nears him, the boy sees its Sun-sized genitals coming along for the ride as well. He murmurs in disgust and turns away, he doesn’t want to see this ancient thing. Then it is upon him. His meteor slides discreetly into the giants tear duct, and he watches the folds in its skin come and then pass. Then he is inside it.
The bloody passages inside the giant are still planet sized. The boy feels like an ant as the passages flow by. It is almost as if the rock he is sitting on is taking him somewhere… He watches as the giant’s optic nerve slides silently below. Then he sees a massive white pulp approaching. It must be the brain, he thinks, and watches as the very cells that are in this thing the size of continents slide by. He marvels at the speed he must be traveling; he is light-years into the thing’s head, yet he seems to be traveling at an extremely relaxed pace.
Then he realizes that the portal is gone from above his head. He briefly panics, but then thinks to himself that panicking will do him no good. In this place, he will just have to find a way back.
Now the rock travels among the neurons within the brain. The brain certainly does not seem dead, as its fleshy walls are pulsing gently, and emitting an ambient sound that seems so loud to the boy that when he speaks to himself, he cannot even hear what he is saying.
Then the rock lands, in what seems to be a city sized organic chamber within the thing’s brain. He steps off the rock, and to his immense disgust, slides up to his shoulders in the pink fleshy muck that is the lining of the brain.
“Oh god!” He cries out, and begins to cry. This is because the slime seems to be pulling him in like quicksand. He bawls and bawls, and then suddenly, it stops. The fleshy substance stops pulling, and the ambient noise peters off. The boy looks around, tears still sliding down his face. Then he hears a voice within his head. It seems to be speaking from inside him, in a language that isn’t English. Yet he finds that he can understand it perfectly…
“Silence.” The boy is scared now.
“Who’s there!” He calls, and feels a warm feeling around his legs that could either be urine or brain fluid.
“I.” The voice thunders, within the boy’s head. “I vocalize.”
“Tell me where I am!” The boy stutters. Again the voice replies:
“With me.” It says. “You have entered my home.”
“Who are you!”
“I am I. I am known in many ways… But I am the devourer.” With this the boy screams again, as the brain matter has started pulling him in again. He is sucked down, until his head is under and he cannot breathe. The horrid taste of the flesh of this rotting giant is acrid in his mouth, and tears are now gushing from the boy’s eyes.
And then he is through. Light once more floods his eyes, and he finds that his in an area devoid of everything. It is just white space, with know aspect of depth, colour, light or perspective. He calls out again.
“I need to get home!”
“I concur. I am a convict. Welcome to my cell.”
“What do you want from me!” The boy yells, in proper horror cliché. The mysterious voice answers back.
“I desire to be free to have revenge upon the guardian who imprisoned me. Do you know of an Edgar Allen Poe?”
“Edgar Allen Poe? Uh… The writer?”
“Possibly one of his many guises. He is the cosmic entity tasked with protecting a fledgling planet named Earth.”
“My home!”
“My prey. I was set upon the destruction of Earth when Poe had me stopped and trapped here. Now I wish to extract revenge upon him.
“He’s dead, man. Can you help me get home?”
“I can send you home in an instant.”
“Thank god! You don’t know how fucking glad I am to hear that!”
“But I won’t. You will never see home again. Now tell me about Poe.”
“What? Please, oh god, man, I’ll do anything-“
“Silence. You say he is dead, but his task and spirit shall merely embody another being. I shall find him.”
“Yeah, I’ll help you find him even, if you just help me home, I-
“Silence. You have freed me from my prison, by opening the gate. I shall use it to return to Solipsi and finish what I started.”
“Destroy Earth? Please man, don’t-“
“Silence. You have proved insolent, and hesitant to provide information.”
“Hesitant? Send me home and I’ll tell you anything! I’ll-“
“Silence. You shall serve as an adequate plaything.”
The boy looks around, and sees that he is in what appears to be a bare expanse of ground, seemingly stretching on forever. The sky is a shade of blue far too deep. He feels nauseas, and more scared then he has ever been in his life. Then a figure appears, standing right beside him.
“Is that you?” He asks, but the figure doesn’t reply. It is a humanoid shape, but unlike anything the boy has ever seen. It has an ugly face that makes the boy think of immense time, time that if you manage to think about will drive you insane. Its body is similar, with coils of flesh surrounding an arcane torso that seems to be sculpted out of alien corpses. It has thousands of spindly legs, and they swivel like machines. It is changing in size, one minute being the same height as the boy, the next the size of a planet. Then it speaks.
“Invert.”
The boy is swiftly turned inside out by invisible hands, and the pain is excruciating. He realizes that he is looking at the insides of his own brain, and his sinuses are leaking into his nostrils. His fingers move in, and he can feel the texture of the outside of his lungs, as the swell and depress like bellows. His scream is caught and drawn out, as his ears are facing at his brain, right by his mouth.
Then all of a sudden, things are all right again. The boy yells and runs at the Planet-Eater, spitting swear words and curses. But then he turns to liquid, and in terror, he watches, as his legs become a puddle on the floor, followed by his torso and head. He begins to flow down along the ground, and the pain in every atom of his body is beyond measure. Then he is frozen, in puddle form. His watery mouth is caught in mid scream, and all movement suddenly ceases.
He is left there for what feels like an eternity for him. In other literary cases, use of such a time frame is hyperbole, or simply exaggeration for the use of literary effect. In this case, we must remember that there is no normal sense of time in the Planet-Eaters realm, so for the boy, it literally was an eternity. Think of infinity zeros, with a one in front. Then multiply that figure by infinity, and then that figure again. That is how long (in years) that that boy remains as a motionless puddle of human.
In this time, he invents within his own frozen mind, 701993786547887546787654170569381794017461 fictional universes, without a detail left out at all, 45905509809809812367789865498785498454384932047382645293784563292654925672 plays, all fully rehearsed down for every last detail, and multiply that last number by a number double it, and that is how many stunning breakthroughs he makes in the fields of mathematics, science and psychology. Of course, when he is returned to his usual form, he has forgotten every single bit of it.
The Planet-Eater watches. Spectates. Observes. To him it seems as though a few moments has passed. To the boy; well, you’ve heard.
Now he takes the dazed boy, and transforms him into a creature he finds within the boy’s memory, in the theoretical file marked FEAR. It is a creature invented by the boy himself, during his many imagination trips while a puddle.
He turns the boy into a ???????????, a word that means, in one of the many languages that the boy made up in his head while a puddle, the long cell. He never did think that he would become one of these creatures…
The long cell is the size of all existence. It is as thick as time, and is shaped like an inter-planetary tapeworm. It grows at the speed of light, and eats everything and anything by being within an everything of it.
The boy feels himself elongate, and feels his arms recede into his sides. He is now a long cell. The other thing about these creatures is that they possess one single cell, as vast as anything. The boy feels revulsion that he has never felt before, as he slowly and painfully is stretched to become the biggest thing that had ever existed. His bones crumble and his genitals recede into him, while his legs meld together and his head becomes part of his torso. Wrinkles appear all over him, and his cells begin to meld into one.
Then he tastes the massive corpse he is inside. He feels it begin to digest within him, without his wanting it to. Billions and billions of tons of rotting cosmic human flesh are in him in seconds. And then he is outside, growing and growing. His eyes are everywhere, and he sees everything.
The only thing that he does not taste is the Planet-Eater, who is riding his ever-growing mass like an elevator. The boy is screaming, and he can feel all humanness being sucked out of him. Then more horrible sensations take over his body.
More baby long cells erupt from his planetary bulk; he is pregnant. They erupt everywhere, and the pain at each galaxy-sized hole they make as they burst through as they erupt from his flesh is insane. He cries little boy tears within his mind, but outside, the only sound he makes is the ambient noise he had heard whilst inside the head of the massive corpse, the corpse that now rests inside him.
The pain as he grows is never ending, but suddenly it becomes much worse. His children are eating him! The most insane part of the whole thing is the uncontrollability of each of his actions, and as the biggest that had ever existed and ever will exist (that is really a little boy) is devoured by its own children, it cries for it mummy and daddy.
The Planet-Eater steps back from the chaos he has created, and enters the portal. He shows no glee, and no remorse. He never feels anything. He is merely an agent for Chaos; something he is not even sure exists. But he has a purpose, and he knows he will complete it.
Stepping into the living room of the boy who had just left, the Planet-Eater marvels at the size of this dimension. It is massive. He scuttles out of the door and down onto the street, looking where to start his destruction. And then he sees a foot come down upon his head, and he is squashed flat. His last thought as he ceases to exist is that he should begin by vanquishing these two beings bearing down on him.
The boy’s parents gasp at the horrid little insect thing they had just squashed. It had been scuttling over the sidewalk, and the boy’s mother’s high heel got rid of it.
“But it looks so gross!” She says. “”What could it be?” Her husband replies.
“I don’t know. Let’s go in now. He’ll be waiting for us.” And so the happy couple walks into the house, ready to tell their son about the funny little bug they had found out the front of the house.

They are sure he’d be very interested in it.