I woke up, twisted like a pretzel, but relieved to be awake and safe back in my bedroom. I tried taking long slow breaths as I waited for my heartbeat to slow. And I kept seeing that woman's face.
When I finally looked around, it wasn't my bedroom at all. I was in a tiny hotel room. I was alone.
I went to the window. The people and the city looked foreign and everything looked small and somehow anachronistic. The walls of my room were rather flimsy and I heard the sound of a heavy airplane flying overhead. It was very high but it wasn't a jet. It was an old prop plane, the kind they had right before jets.
A tiny alarm clock on the bed stand, read 8:15. It was another pleasant morning. The streets were already bustling with people about their business. Bicycles rather than cars filled the streets. I thought the cyclists looked Asian. The signs on street shops and billboards were in what I thought was Japanese. This was a crowded but orderly and neat city. It was nice.
To my utter shock, the sky lit up brighter than the sun, a light so hot that hard tile and glass blistered and ran. Before I could blink, a massive fireball engulfed the area, and a terrible shockwave blew away or flattened every vestige of the neighborhood. The building I was in was blown downward, the roof smashing down through the flimsy structure like a piston, flattening everything in its way. Except for me. Of course. Shaddal made certain I was terrified but not physically injured.
I realized it had to be Hiroshima. Buildings, wagons, bicycles, cars, people, everything within my sight were blown away from the center of the blast at astounding speed, passing right through me. In a split second, thousands of ordinary people, just going about their daily chores, were incinerated and smashed like Japanese beetles. And later, when they counted the casualties - if nothing else, our human leaders are very good at counting casualties, they are - the death toll would rise to nearly 140,000 in this one city alone.
Harry Truman had unleashed Little Boy, a fine how-d'-you-do of U235 that changed the world that morning with the equivalent of twelve and a half thousand tons of TNT. Another gift to the human race from Satan's evil cache.
It was strangely awesome watching the great mushroom cloud of roiling pain rise over the city. As the top of the atomic cloud soared to the sky, for a moment, in the convolutions of the cloud, I recognized the demon face of Shaddal leering at me. I can't believe I had actually liked this monster.
I stumbled through the devastation, walking away from ground zero as "black rain," dark radioactive debris, fell on the city for hours. After a long time, I came upon some people who had barely survived the blast. They were in ghastly condition. Large patches of flesh torn from their bones, terrible burns, blood seeping through what few tattered garments remained on their bodies. They apparently could not see me. I knew this demonstration of my fellow human's inhumanity was just another of Shaddal's "lessons" for the night. What really blistered my ego was knowing this was his way of bragging. I was forced to acknowledge, he and his kind were doing quite a job on us.
I closed my eyes in sheer depressed exhaustion. A human can take just so much horror before he becomes inured to the pain. Or so I thought. Shaddal, evil beast that he truly is, was not finished giving me my lesson for the night.
When I opened my eyes I was outdoors in a large prison holding pen. It was cold and nasty. Seeing the sunken eyes of the people around me, from the dark hulking crematorium with its horrible smell of burning flesh, it didn't take me long to realize that I was in a Nazi concentration camp. Was it Auschwitz? It didn't matter. I got the point. Shaddal was rubbing my face in the lowest possible depths to which humans will stoop for the promise of power.
I screamed at Shaddal as I watched wagon-loads of dead flesh being piled one atop another in great grave pits. The tall chimneys belched out black sooty smoke and they all, Nazi mental cases as well as their helpless, hopeless victims, pretended they didn't notice.
In a rage, I turned around just as a uniformed soldier machine gunned me and those standing near me. I felt like I was kicked in the chest by a mule and fell backwards into a shallow pit. Other bodies fell on top of me. Legs, arms, heads all knocking and twisting together in a mass of bloody flesh. I lay there, unable to move but not dead. Not even dying. Shaddal wanted me to suffer but would not allow me to die. No, he would only allow me to experience the pain and the taste and the smell of a new magnitude of ignominious death my fellow man had invented.
I heard the sound of a bulldozer and soon felt the dead weight of more bodies being piled on top of me. So many bodies that all I could see was blackness and all I could feel was blood running down from the bodies on top of me. A body near my face must have still been alive as blood spurted out in quick heartbeats, drenching my head and running into my nose and mouth. The coppery taste of the warm fluid choked me as I tried screaming at Shaddal. Of course he chose not hear me. He finally allowed me to black out as the only sound I could hear was muffled machine gun fire.
When I opened my eyes I was back in my bedroom.
The smell and feel of someone else's blood was still in my nostrils. I ran to the bathroom and gagged. I washed out my mouth and nose. When I looked up, Amanda's alarmed face came into view in the mirror. "What's the matter, honey?" I turned to her, so traumatized I was unable to speak.
She put her warm hands on my sagging shoulders and asked, "The dreams?" I nodded.
It was still night. Suddenly, Amanda's expression changed to raw fear as the sky began flashing like a terrible lightning storm. The earth began shaking worse than the worst earthquake I had ever experienced. There was loud thunder, and then more and more. The walls began to buckle and collapse around us. There was nowhere to run. Amanda screamed for Matthew and Carly. We tried to run to their rooms but the walls fell away and the floor collapsed under us. We were thrown like dice into the backyard.
The night sky was all lit up, green and yellow. The earth continued to shake as if were about to split in half. We were unable to stand up because of the lateral forces. Suddenly a great shockwave hit us and everything burst into flame and was blown away. My house. My wife. My children. My town. My country. But not me. I looked to heaven and I saw Nibiru, a giant dark planet, and I knew it was the end of the world.
I knew some humans would be saved by Satan and his followers, but I wasn't sure if that would be any better than perishing right here and now. I was so exhausted I just couldn't bring myself to care anymore. The sky was raining down fiery meteors and I almost laughed when I heard the giant tidal wave rushing toward me. I fell to my knees and closed my eyes and wished I would die fast.
I didn't. I awoke again in my bedroom. I didn't trust my senses anymore. Was I really awake, or was another of Shaddal's terrible visions about to come down on me?
"Jesus," I cried, "I can't take anymore. Please make him stop. Please make him stop."
The room was quiet and I could hear sounds coming from the kitchen. Matt's clock radio was playing to wake him up for school, and I could hear water running as Carly took her morning shower. I decided I wanted this had to be real. I prayed I was finally awake in my real world.
Thank God the sun was coming up. Amanda was downstairs getting breakfast for Matt. I was glad I was alone for the moment as I was still sweating and trying to slow my heart down. I sobbed one loud gasping sob and untangled myself from the bed sheets in a mix of fear and disgust, walking to the master bathroom on wobbly legs. Writing notes could wait. It would be a good long time before I forgot this dream anyway.
I didn't need a dream interpreter to tell me the closer I got to Satan, the harder my dreams were going to be. The devils were not playing around. One could easily perish of a heart attack in one's sleep. But these damned pointy-eared demons were not going to discourage me - I was going to meet Satan, come hell or... come hell.
~
Over the next couple of days, some disturbing things happened in my real life. First, Amanda returned from dropping Matt at school, and we sat chatting in the kitchen while I had brunch. She told me that when Matt got out of the car he was greeted by a couple of his pals and they walked into the school together. As she watched the boys, a stranger, an older man, approached her car and said hello.
"So what did he want?" I asked.
"He introduced himself as the new assistant principal. I was impressed because he seemed to know quite a lot about Matt. As if that wasn't enough," Amanda mused, "He asked about you."
"Me?"
"Yeh. I couldn't imagine how he would know you."
"Well, like what did he say?"
"Something about how I must be very proud of you because you're so courageous." Amanda gave me her mischievous teasing smile, "Of course that's when I figured he'd mistaken you for somebody else."
"Thanks, honey." I flicked her cute little nose with my finger.
"Did you get his name?"
"Hmm. Johnson... Jackson, something like that. But he didn't sound like a Johnson."
"What do you mean?"
"He had a pretty strong accent. European." Amanda thought for a moment. "Not French or Italian. Maybe Austrian, German, like that."
My radar screen lit up. "What did he look like?"
"I don't know. He looked a little older than I would have expected for an assistant principal. He was kind of roundish, a little bit short. He reminded me of, you remember Nixon's Secretary of State? The one Nixon asked to pray with him. Looked like him."
Amanda saw my expression and asked, "What? You know him?"
"No. Probably just a coincidence." My stomach knotted up. "But I'll look for him when I pick Matt up later." And I did.
I wasn't able to locate Mr. Johnson or Jackson or whatever his name was. Maybe it was just a weird coincidence. But I had a bad feeling about this.
Then, on the way home, Matt talked about his new gym instructor. He thought this Mr. Haas was a great guy. But he said there was a moment after class when Haas was standing in shadow in the locker room, and he didn't know Matt was watching him. Matt swore for a second Haas looked like a lizard man. Matt laughed, thinking how ridiculous it sounded. He'd asked one of his friends if he had seen it, and the kid said no. But this kid also said that his grandfather told him there really are lizard people, and that sometimes, if you look real hard and know what to look for, you can see their lizard appearances. We both laughed out loud. But mine was a nervous laugh.
Amanda told me that she thought Carly had a new boyfriend. We were usually amused by this, but Amanda didn't seem to like this kid. Maybe, she said, it was the tattoos. A serpent, she said. Curled around the words "Hail Satan." Hmm, I thought. Fathers of young girls aren't known for their tolerance toward their daughter's boyfriends, so it was understandable that I would be looking for reasons not to like this boy. But to be fair, I told myself, what kid didn't have a tattoo nowadays, right?
Was this just another coincidence? Or were demons from my visions insinuating themselves into my family life now? It was one thing to torture me as they did - I was doing this voluntarily so it was open season on me - but if they did any harm to my family there would be more than hell to pay. There's a lot of truth to the old saw that you've got to be careful how you choose your friends.
After that day, I found myself almost obsessing about Matt's safety. And both Amanda and I kept a close watch on Carly's new relationship. I knew Amanda could take care of herself, probably better than I could. But a nine year old boy and an almost teenage girl are vulnerable on so many levels. I knew that if I tried too hard to be protective the kids would begin to feel smothered and resent it. It's only normal at that age. Not can one possibly be with his children 24 hours every day. And even if he could, there's no way on God's Earth to protect them one hundred percent. It's just not possible. Kids need freedom and things will happen. Despite what the finger-pointers (who usually don't have kids of their own) may say, one can only do his best and pray that no evil befalls his children.