Quezalcoatl - The Divine White Serpent

“Do this in remembrance of me,” said the priest to his flock. And as he said this, each member of the congregation ate of the sacred Wafer, which, according to ancient doctrine, became the very body of Christ upon consecration for the sacrament. In the same manner, each of the parishioners drank of the wine, which, much like the bread, became the very blood of Christ.

Even Jacob, who was not Catholic, who was not even the kind of person to subscribe to such “superstitious bullcrap” (in his own words) as religion, took the elements like the rest, mostly because he preferred not to be looked down upon by all these…

“Holier-than-thou Jesus freaks,” said Michael, “It’s not hard to know what you’re thinking, Jacob. It’s written all over your face in the form of that nasty looking scowl you’re wearing.”

Jacob only scowled more intensely at his friend.

“Go in peace,” said the priest, and his parishioners obeyed this command with as much haste as they could muster.

Once outside in the cool nocturnal air of the Arizona desert, Michael confronted his comrade once again, “You know, if you were just going to sit around and sulk like that, you didn’t have to come.”

“I came because you begged me. You also failed to mention that this particular windbag of a priest drags the five-thirty mass out over nearly…” he looked at his watch, “two hours.”

“Granted,” said Michael, “He can be a little long-winded.”

“Long-winded!?” asked Jacob. “The man talked for two hours about a pillar of salt!”

“It wasn’t about the salt, Jacob! It was about what happens when you disobey God! It was about God’s wrath against…”

“Come on, Michael,” Jacob interrupted. “I just listened to that crap for two hours on a God-forsaken hard-as-rock pew. I don’t need to hear any more.”

“You‘ve obviously missed the message…” Michael trailed off. “Look, Jacob, I won’t push you anymore.”

Jacob opened the car door, anxious to get out of the frigid wind and home to his therapeutically warm bed.

But as he stooped to get in, he saw a face. It seemed to be out in the darkness somewhere, floating. It was strikingly pale, but he could distinguish little else about it, as it was quite a distance away. He almost seemed to think it was smiling. Smiling at him.

Smiling or not, the face was beautiful. Though wan and pallid, it radiated a beautiful ivory light. This face, though it made Jacob’s blood run cold to see such an eerie visage hovering in the darkness of the trees by the old mission, seemed inviting.

It called to him.

It begged him to come.

It promised to right all wrongs in Jacob’s life.

“Jacob what are you staring at?” Michael’s voice brought him to, and suddenly the face was gone.

“You scared it off!” Jacob snapped at his friend.

“Dude, what are you talking about? Are you feeling alright?” Michael went to put a hand on Jacob’s forehead.

Then it was back. Yes! It was smiling!

“It’s back!” said Jacob, and he began walking towards it. He began running towards it.

“What’s back?” asked Michael. “What are you doing? Hey, wait up! Where you going?” and he sprinted off after his friend.

The face was gone again, but Jacob knew exactly where to go. Somehow, he knew where he needed to go to find it again. A door was open; a heavy oaken door that was always closed and securely locked from the inside, but which all knew led to the old caves under the sanctuary.

“Jacob, wait!”

Darkness. Jacob couldn’t see a thing. The darkness was all around him, asphyxiating him. Neither he nor Michael could see where he was going, but Jacob felt he knew the way. Something called him like a deep memory from his childhood. And Michael merely followed the sounds of his friend’s footsteps, every so often missing a turn and slamming headlong into a solid rock wall.

After a few extremely long minutes of running through an ocean of black, the two men came through a doorway into a sinister, dull red light. The floor seemed to be littered with bones, and a small stream of blood ran in a circular current around an island of stone, upon which was affixed a wooden crucifix.

However, the man bound to these wooden planks was not the Christ, but the man to whom the white face belonged. The two man stared, dumbfounded.

Jacob studied the face and all its awful pallor. Scraggly black hair fell to his shoulders, matted with dark blood. Cold black eyes - eyes that seemed to suck one’s soul straight from the body and reflect it back in the darkest of light - stared up from the deep sockets toward the ceiling, or perhaps towards the heavens, as if begging for forgiveness for some mortal sin. Not a single hair covered the bare white breast. Not exactly what one would call masculine - though the muscles of the arms and chest did bulge a little, as they were stretched across the wooden frame - the man was actually quite scrawny. However, both men could feel a preternatural strength emanating from this tortured soul.

All these features Jacob saw and could describe specifically with several (if all of them rather morbid) different adjectives. But when he looked upon the man as a whole, only one word came to his mind: pain. The pain of being alone. The pain of being bound, confined, imprisoned. The Pain of starvation. Eternal hunger.

“Arghhh!” screamed the man, showing razor sharp teeth as white as his skin. “Fr…Free…me…! It…buh…buh…BURNS!!!”

Jacob could not have stopped himself had he wanted to. He stepped unconsciously over the river of blood, the River Styx that surrounded this man. Jacob walked slowly, yet purposefully, up to the burning symbol of anguish. He stood before the man.

“Heh…Help…me!” said the man with much effort.

“What would you have me do?” asked Jacob.

“They…buh…bound me…here. IT BURNS! HYPOCRITES! THE LIARS BOUND ME HERE!” the man gasped for breath before letting out another cry of pain mixed with rage.

Jacob looked around frantically for anything sharp, ignoring Michael’s pleas that they leave and call the police. Finally he came across a breast bone with a crack running down the middle, which served as a sort of serrated edge. Jacob sawed at the ropes that held the poor, wretched man.

His limbs free, the man fell forward onto his face, whereupon the two other men noticed the large, cross-shaped silhouette on his back. A moment of silence followed, broken only by the sounds of the blood circulating around the island and the man’s raspy attempts to breathe. After several long minutes, the man brought himself gently to his knees, and then to a standing position. He breathed deeply for a moment before he turned to Jacob and smiled.

There was an awkward silence that lasted for a quite some time, during which Michael noticed where the eerie crimson glow was coming from. He noticed certain skulls that seemed to be set upon candles. The light cast from the candles through the eyes, nose, and mouth of each skull had first to pass through flawless rubies set into each cranial orifice. Michael suffered a severe double-take effect. Rubies!

In fact, the more he began to observe his surroundings, the less it seemed he was in some ancient, forgotten chamber, and the more it seemed he was in the treasury of some gloriously magnificent palace. Under the bones (which Michael was taking less and less notice of, and, when he did in fact let them stray into his consciousness, seemed to be quickly disappearing) there were piles upon piles of priceless trinkets. Ancient gold coins, bejeweled swords, silver plated goblets, beautifully ornate papier-mâché masks, rare stones! Jewels! Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, amethysts! Beautiful quarts rings and sapphire charms! It was more than he had ever dared dream of.

Meanwhile, the other two men were still gazing at each other, wordlessly.

“I realize you two are having a Kodak moment right now,” said Michael, “but do you think you could stop gazing longingly into each other’s eyes for just one second and give me a hand here? We need to get this stuff into bags of some kind to get it all out of here!”

Jacob took no notice of his friend. He was far too engrossed by the burning black eyes of the man before him. Empty, cold, and endless, yet ardent as bonfires. They were blacker than anything Jacob had ever seen before, and yet they burned! They raged with the passion and heat of the sun.

The man looked at Jacob for a moment, while Michael’s muffled grumbles, involving the phrases “…are so weird,” “…no respect,” and “…all this treasure,” could be heard in some distant background. The man smiled once again at Jacob, and said, “Thanks.”

“Oh…uh…don‘t mention it…” said Jacob, feebly.

“Thanks?” asked Michael of no one in particular. “We free this psycho man who’s been down here God only knows how long, and all he can say is ‘thanks’? I’ll tell you I just don’t know what’s wrong with this world…” his words trailed off to inaudible mumbles.

Jacob, on the other hand, was having an extensive conversation with the stranger, in utter silence. The more Jacob stared into the eyes of this pale creature, the more Jacob could see into the man’s past as if it were his own. The man was relaying his detailed autobiography directly into Jacob’s mind!

Jacob saw select images in flashes before his eyes, as one often sees one’s own memories flash before one’s eyes in moments of intense stress or emotional trauma. He was standing in the center of this very chamber, as he knew he’d done for centuries. Dark-skinned tribal folk filed in one by one, with solemn, dead faces. One by one they lined up along the inner walls of the circular sanctum. And one by one, without a word uttered or even a sound made, save for the patter of their soft, bare feet on the cold, damp stone floor, they came forth, tilted their heads, and presented their bare, fleshy necks. He knew what he was about to do, but he couldn’t believe it. It’s not possible, he tried to assure himself.

Images flooded Jacob’s brain. Images of white, elongated teeth piercing the skin of those necks and draining the very life straight from the veins of these willing self-sacrifices in a most astonishing and succulent feast.

Images of pale-faced invaders crashing through the doorway one evening, wearing shining, hard shells and carrying iron-wrought staves with sharpened edges and piercing tips. Images of the marauders slaughtering his food…no, his children!…then binding him to that most sacred symbol, which burned his milky skin like no fire ever could.

Jacob realized that this creature was worshipped by these early Native Americans as a deity. Jacob suddenly conceived a name through the memories the creature was feeding him. Quezalcoatl, the Divine White Serpent.

“And now,” said the creature, “I am free. I am ready to accept the sacrifice of blood and return to my former power and glory!”

“Jake, man, something’s not right here. What’s he saying…?”

“Be my first, Jacob!” said the ancient one. “Embrace eternity and become part of me! Part of an immortal one! Akin to a god!”

“Umm…Jake? You know, I’m sure this stuff’ll still be here in the morning, why don’t we come back in the morning?”

The monster leaned forward as if to kiss Jacob, then tilted his head slightly. Jacob breathed slowly, heavily in anticipation; waiting, ready.

“Jacob, man, I really want to come back in the morning. Can we please come back in the morning?”

The beast opened his mouth, ready to bite down with full force.

“Umm…Jake…I see that you and your friend there are having a nice uh…moment…but your friend over here would really like to leave. Like, now!”

The fangs drew unhurriedly closer until they came to a hesitative stop on the skin of Jacob’s neck. The feel of those deadly sharp pearls sent shivers of cold pleasure all throughout his body. He opened his mouth, smiled out of the purest happiness he had felt since birth, and sighed a long, profound sigh.

Suddenly, the animal shrieked, whereupon Michael realized that the sound his Aunt Lucile made upon being confronted by a rat was not, in fact, the most awful, deafening sound in all of Creation. The wraithlike figure wailed in terror and agony as he retreated from a rather thoroughly confused Jacob. He disappeared down the dark corridor, all the while screaming and crying and moaning in a most earsplitting manner.

Jacob could not believe it!

“Jacob?” asked Michael. “You alright?”

The first time he had ever been so close to pure, ignorant bliss! Gone forever!

“Jacob?”

Never had he felt so ready! So resolved! Never had he ever felt a desire for any one thing more than for the one that had just left him in a whirlwind of shrill screams!

“JAKE?!” screamed Michael, desperate to catch Jacob’s attention.

“WHAT!?” screamed Jacob back at him, thoroughly frustrated for having just lost his moment of self-pity.

“I think,” Michael began. “I think you have something in your teeth.”

Jacob felt something indeed, and, after much probing and prodding with his tongue and further examination with his eyes after he removed It, he discovered that it was a piece of communion wafer.

Jacob decided that he ought to take communion more often.

The End