It all began, as nearly as I can tell, with a boundless longing for spiritual transcendence.  I was possessed by such a longing from earliest childhood, so it was natural that I should invest my life in the formal pursuit of divine union.  When the revelation of darkness began to occur in the third decade of my life, I was in my sixteenth year as a monk in the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel.  There could hardly have been an environment more conducive to the nurturing of my spiritual sensibilities, nor a duty more favorable for the exercising of my innate endowments.  I had spent the greater part of those sixteen years hunched over a tiny wooden table, copying the words of the Holy Scriptures onto the thick leaves of a parchment tome from a hoary exemplar.

There were half a dozen of us employed in the dim, dusty scriptorium of the abbey.  Our stations were arranged opposite each other in severe rows against the clammy stone walls.  We presented a supremely pious appearance in our monkish array:  crowns shorn, robes rough, feet bare, fingers ink-stained and raw.  Only rarely did we speak to each other.  We had taken no vow of silence, but our task was so serious and sacred, and our focus so intense upon the duty we were privileged to fulfill, that it seemed we had added an unspoken rule to the explicit rule of the order:  Do not defile the Word of God with your own words.  Let your speech and thoughts be pristine mirrors of the divine Speech and Thought.  And so, having nothing of our own to communicate that seemed worthy to compete with God’s own words, we remained silent.  For days and weeks on end, the only sounds to break the silence of the scriptorium were the moaning of the wind through granite hallways and the scratching of pens on parchment.

The abbot would appear at the end of each session, like a pale gray wisp of smoke, to glide silently through our midst; to pause, look over our shoulders, and examine our work.  And he would praise us for our progress in this sacred endeavor.  "The mind of Christ," he would say, and lay his withered old hand on a brother's bald pate.  "Allow the mind of Christ to be formed within you.  Allow Him to guide you in the transmission of the sacred Word."

And I would thrill to his praise, his kindness, his touch.  His hand was so gentle, his wisdom and compassion so renowned throughout the order, that I felt rarely privileged to be his son in the Lord.  Perhaps due to the extent of my love for him, I strove, as I saw it, harder than all the others to know the mind of Christ.  I wanted to know what my master knew.  I wanted to see with Christ’s eyes, to know with His mind, love with His heart, and record His Word with His own hand. 

Even though I knew it was sinful to take pride in my own progress, even though I recognized such pride early on as the bane of my spiritual aspirations, still I sometimes allowed myself to reflect on how pale were my brothers' spiritual attainments next to my own.  I glanced furtively at them as we worked together, and I noted their laxity, their secretive yawns, their irritable expressions on those bitter cold mornings when it seemed as if the wind were determined to scoop the entire monastery up from its precarious perch on the mountain shelf and hurl us all to a craggy death.  My brothers were merely doing what was expected of them, out of a sense of duty, or worse, out of fear of reprimand, whereas for me it was a labor of love.  I felt as if the words were burning bright and golden within me as I copied them from the exemplar.  Sometimes I was overcome by such transports of rapture as should have been the privilege of no mortal man.  At odd intervals, unexpectedly—sometimes in the dead of night as I lay alone within my cell, sometimes when I was engrossed in my scribal duty, sometimes, most perilously, during Matins or Vespers—it seemed as if a well were opened up in the depths of my soul, out of which came surging such sweet delights that I felt my flimsy human frame could not contain them all.  I never spoke of this to anyone, and I was obliged to take great pains to conceal these occurrences.

At the time everything began to change, I had passed many long, contented years in the monastery, sustained by the secret hope that I was progressing with unique rapidity toward a grand fulfillment of the metaphysical longing that had first compelled me to join a holy order.  Little did I know that the culmination of my longing would reveal to me a new and unexpected that would swallow everything I had devoted my life to serving.

When the first evidence of something extraordinary made itself known, I was very nearly unaware of it.  I had long-since grown accustomed to passing my days like any other monk, with my life arranged according to the outline of the Divine Office.  I arose from my pallet in the icy darkness of early morning, unrefreshed after four hours of sleep, to attend Matins.  I washed with the brothers in the common basin and ate with them around the common table.  I diligently put to use the prescribed hours of public and private prayer.  And while the others tended the garden or minded the goats and pigs or washed the scullery, I took my place in the scriptorium with my fellow copyists and labored to preserve and propagate the written Word of God.  In quantity, it was a life no different from that of any other monk.  But in quality—din the hidden, internal aspects, which are visible only to Him who looks upon the heart instead of the outward frame—I far surpassed them all in depth and scope of passion.

The change first began to appear in my scribal work.  I recall looking back over my efforts at the end of an otherwise uneventful day of copying, and noticing with shock the errors that had crept into the margins:  a wobble here, a smear there, several uncharacteristic loops and swirls jutting out from the beginnings and endings of lines.  My breath caught in my throat, and I must have emitted an involuntary groan, for the abbot was behind me in a flash.  I had not heard him enter, although I knew it was the usual time of day when he trod lightly among us to examine our work.  My blood froze as I felt his gaze sweep over my shoulder and across the page.  My failure was unprecedented, and I could not guess how he would react.  But I was astounded when he merely placed his hand upon my head and whispered a blessing.

The feeling of an anticlimax, of something momentous having occurred, and of my having been too obtuse to comprehend it, hounded me for the rest of the day.  It lay so thickly upon my heart that I felt smothered by its weight.  When at last I collapsed onto my rough pallet in my solitary cell, I stared up through the window at a waning gibbous moon and fancied I could hear the abbot’s blessing still murmuring in my ear.  Presently, I felt as if his words had descended to my heart, where they continued to murmur their approval of my efforts.  Soon afterwards I drifted into a sleep more profound than any I had ever known.

I awoke the next morning with a powerful sense of remoteness, and with an odd sensation of coolness in my breast.  It was not an unpleasant feeling, but more like a balm having been applied to a burning wound.  For several minutes I lay there trying to divine the nature of the change.  When I closed my eyes, I gained the impression of a second heart having been born within me.  It was a heart made entirely of light, but of a strange sort that appeared as a luminescent darkness rather than a warming glow.  My sense of imminent insight had never been so powerful, and yet its fulfillment hovered just beyond my grasp.

Of course I was ecstatic at the thought that I might have experienced divine illumination while I slept.  But I feared to say anything to my brothers, lest this phenomenon prove to be other than what I hoped.  Something about it seemed awry; the dark radiance of the new heart within me was colder and more piercing than the light I was accustomed to encountering in my religious service to God.  It was also more thrilling, in a way I could not pinpoint.  By the time I finally arose a bit later than my accustomed time, my joy had become tempered with anxiety, and I was anticipating the ritual of the daily schedule with a comforting sense of security.

My disappointment was severe when I found I was denied this small comfort.  Instead of providing reassurance, the discharge of the Divine Office had never seemed so appallingly restrictive.  My thoughts kept turning all throughout the day to the errors I had committed in my copying.  While we read the morning hours, bathed, and ate, I felt distant and distracted, and afflicted by a growing restlessness.  When at last we dispersed to our specialized endeavors at midmorning, I rushed to the scriptorium under the sway of an impulse I could not understand, and flung open the covers of my book with a sense of exultation.

With the pages laid out before me, I could see there was no evident reason why I should be gripped by such an acute sense of excitement.  The errors were simply errors, nothing more, the mere product of wandering attention.  I knew that I should feel properly contrite, and yet the inappropriate sense of excitement still gripped me in total opposition to the facts of the situation.  The new heart swelled within me at the sight of the strange markings, and before I knew what I was doing, I had seized the quill and was about to start writing without any conscious notion of what I would write.

Of course it was my training that called me back to myself.  I froze right before the tip of the quill made contact with the page, and then sat for many long minutes collecting myself.  There was something happening inside me, some transformation that filled me at once with joy and confusion.  At the moment, its primary outward expression was a perverse and nagging desire to alter the sacred work with which I had been entrusted.  Except for a few meditative thoughts at the start and end of a day’s work—perhaps a quick reflection on the passage being copied, perhaps a prayer to God for guidance of the hand in its work—no copyist was ever supposed to write freely, using nothing but his own thoughts as a guide.  And yet I felt that if I but loosed my hand, I could fill a thousand books with original words and still not have begun to exhaust the ocean of ideas struggling to emerge from my pen.

At last, with an effort of will aided by many long years of inner discipline, I forced myself to focus upon the exemplar, and not the new thoughts boiling like a storm in my spirit.  I was partway through the Gospel of Saint John, and I hoped that I might regain a sense of calmness and equanimity by letting my thoughts be molded to the writings of the disciple whom Jesus had loved.  Still, I felt a sharp pang of regret as I dipped the quill into the inkpot and began to copy the words of the Scripture.

Shortly before it was time for the abbot to enter, I set down the pen and scanned back over my work.  Again there was that sensation of my breath being squeezed off inside my throat, as I slowly understood what had happened without my being aware of it.

The purity of my intentions had not mattered.  The new thoughts struggling to emerge had had their say without regard for my attempts to suppress them.  At some point during the day, I had left off copying and started writing original words.  During the conversation between Christ and the Pharisee Nicodemus, wherein our Lord asserts the necessity of a person's being born from above in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, my book had been transformed radically, through a shocking shift in vocabulary and theology, into something else. 

I could not say precisely what this new thing was, but it was certainly not the Word of God.  Nowhere in the Deposit of Faith, either oral or written, could one find teachings of such a horrific and subversive cast.  I read through the pages with a sense of mounting wonder and terror as I began to gain a powerful impression of imminent doom from certain words that appeared repeatedly in a patterned regularity whose scheme I could not divine.  They spoke of "darkness" and "disorder," "dispersion" and "depletion,” and of “the great deep, the watery waste of oblivion” that “laps hungrily at the shore of creation.”  The world as I knew it—the world of life, light, and order, where God, man, and nature stood in fixed and unalterable relation to each other—was framed by those words into a loathsome perspective of weariness, worthlessness, and wasted effort.

As this portrait gained clarity in my mind’s eye, the room around me appeared to darken.  The desk before me grew hazy. The spread pages of my book became like two windows peering out upon a midnight sky.  For a timeless moment, I gazed through those windows into an impenetrable gloom.  My thoughts slowed to a halt, and my fleshly heart seemed to freeze while the new heart of seething darkness beat pounded with a sound like approaching thunder.

When I returned to myself and looked back at my brothers, I saw they had undergone a transformation.  Instead of solid flesh and bone, inhabited by the quickening spirit of the living God, they now appeared to me as no more than empty frames, animate dirt held together temporarily by some precarious whim.  The outline of their familiar human forms trembled liquidly as they bent over their books, like the slop in the pigsty at the rear of the monastery.  I feared that if I but blinked or looked away, I might turn back to see them collapse into piles of steaming refuse.

My horror was magnified all the more when I looked down at my own hand and saw the same subtle transformation existing implicitly, hidden away within my flesh like an embryo of corruption.  It was as if an inbuilt potentiality for dissolution lurked in the crevices of my physical being, and merely awaited the arrival of a clandestine signal before springing to life and overrunning my entire body.

Even as I reeled from these revelations, I heard the door scrape open behind me, and the abbot entered the room.  Like a man in a dream, I remained paralyzed on my bench, unable to breathe, unable to reach out and shut the pages of my book to hide them from his gaze.  I waited in agony while he passed from brother to brother with quiet words of encouragement.  But when he approached me, I was astonished for the second time in as many days when he emitted no shout of horror at the vileness vibrating on my pages.  For an excruciating moment he paused, and it was as if all the air fled from the room in a rushing whisper.  We remained briefly in a silent vacuum, I on my bench and he standing behind me, while I awaited my judgment.

Then he did a most extraordinary thing:  He leaned forward, reached over my shoulder, and ran his hand down the pages in a loving caress.  He was careful to avoid the fresh ink.  His fingers merely brushed the margins and traced the contours of certain words.  Despite the absurdity of the thought, I had the undeniable impression that he was savoring what he saw.

The rasping of his papery skin on the parchment sent a chill scuttling down my spine.  I blinked and tried to clear my head of the freezing fog that had settled over it, but my mind was like a block of ice as the abbot lowered his lips to my ear and gave me his usual blessing.  Then he whispered—or, more precisely, he hissed—“The mind of Christ,” and left me to my frozen thoughts.

*

Afterward, I was more numb than horrified.  My brain felt unable to take in all that had happened, and I passed the next few hours in a sickened bewilderment.  It was not until later that night, during the reading of Vespers, that the shock of what had happened finally hit me.  When it did, I felt the abbot’s words begin to stir within me like a living presence.  His blessing felt as if it were alive, lodged in my brain, and in search of a deeper destination than my mere conscious thoughts.  Almost as soon as I realized this, the words plunged downward toward the new heart within me, and when they found it, began to nourish it with their meaning.  It leaped in recognition at their arrival, and on the instant my lungs let go, having remained in a state of semi-paralysis all afternoon.  My first great gasping inhalation was succeeded by another involuntary groan, which, in the sanctified air of the chapel, my brothers might easily have mistaken for an expression of spiritual ardor.

 

These events troubled me to the point of desperation, and I spent many days meditating on their possible meaning.  At what point, I wondered, had I become susceptible to the attacks of demons?  For that was surely what such occurrences must signify.  Despite all my exalted spiritual passions, I had fallen prey to the influence of a demon that was working through me to defile the Word of God.  Briefly, I tried to console myself with the thought that this attack must be an indication of my advanced spiritual status, since demonic affliction customarily came only to those souls who had attained such an advanced state of grace that the enemy of God took note and inflicted all sorts of horrible inner and outer torments in order to drag them down from their lofty height.  If that were indeed the case with me, then I knew I should count it an honor to be singled out by Satan himself as worthy of special attention.

But these thoughts did not comfort me, for they did not seem to reach to the heart of the matter.  The vision of the world as a kind of empty shell, congealed around a core of nothingness, continued to haunt me.  The memory of the strangeness in the abbot’s manner filled me with fear and loathing, even when I saw that he had returned to normal and displayed no more signs of a sinister alteration.  Somehow, I could sense that the scope of my affliction extended far beyond the possibility of Satan and his demons, and I was all the more terrified by this unshakeable notion that the understanding of the cosmic order I had received from the Church was pitifully inadequate.

Most of all, I was troubled by the continued alteration in my work.  On the first day after the abbot’s strange blessing, I arrived back at the scriptorium with the intention of ripping out the offending pages and burning them.  But when I went to do it, my hand was stayed by a sudden impulse that shot out like a lightning bolt from my new heart.  I trembled so violently as I fought against it that I was forced to grip my hand with the other in order to avoid alerting my brothers that something was amiss.  For a time I sat collecting myself.  Then I tried to begin working as if nothing had happened.

That was when it became piercingly evident that I would not so easily be able to reclaim my former life.  For no sooner did I pick up the pen than I began writing without reference to the exemplar.  I filled several lines before I noticed what had happened, and the new words were of the same tenor as the ones I had written on the previous day. I gasped and immediately tried to drop the pen, but it was locked in my hand as if by an invisible fist gripping my own.  Shock and weariness had taken their toll, and all at once I was too tired to resist the impulse that kept gnawing at me from the inside.  Hot tears scalded my cheeks as I understood the helplessness of my position, and with a silent prayer of protection I reluctantly allowed my hand to begin writing again of its own will.

The result was even more terrifying than before.  The words that appeared mocked the Word of God not only with their meaning, but also with their very appearance on the page.  My hand seemed to have gone mad, for it refused to follow the guidelines of the rubric, and instead seemed determined to forge a new path.  I watched in horror as it created a kind of woven pattern of text, where sacred teachings of love, trust, purity, order, and holiness were coupled with, and sometimes even negated by, wildly coiling statements of madness and pandemonium.

After awhile, I began to feel as if I had stepped away from my desk, away from the room, away from the world itself, and was watching helplessly—and, I will admit, with a growing fascination—as my hand wrote things that were an absolute defilement of the truths it should have been transcribing.  “Darkness” and “disease” shrieked up at me from the pages.  Christ's teachings about the necessity of rebirth, the urgency of salvation, and the primacy of love were transformed into admonitions to “suckle from the breast of the unborn, which has never seen the light” and to “drink deep the nectar of oblivion.”

At the end of the day, when the impulse finally let go, my hand dropped to the desk and rested there like an alien appendage.  I was spiritually and physically drained, and afflicted by a sour sickness in my stomach and spirit.  But when I looked again at the pages filled with their bizarre textual nightmares, I experienced an even great shock at the flutter of exhilaration that tickled my breast, and that whispered to me that the book was now more truly mine than anything else had ever been.  The blasphemous new teachings felt connected, in a way I could neither describe nor deny, to that well of spiritual ecstasy buried deep within my soul.  A hot pulse of excitement, much akin to the rush of love that had overwhelmed me when I first beheld the abbot sixteen years ago, began to beat behind my eyes.  For the second time that day, my eyes filled with tears, but now they were tears of gratitude, which dried quickly and left me all the more wretched and confused.

My actual conscious capitulation occurred a few days later, during the reading of Terce.  In keeping with the obscure rhythms of the inner life, it was while I prayed aloud with my brothers that my decision was fully formed to embrace this new direction and see where it would take me.  I glanced around at the brothers, observed them chanting the litany with supreme devotion, and knew with a thrill of deep longing that I was no longer one in spirit with them.  Hints of a strange truth that had built up over a lifetime of spiritual yearning finally came together to form a clear picture, and for the first time I understood that my passion outstripped theirs not only in depth but in kind.  Not only did I want something more, I wanted something different than what the monastic life had given them.  My fear of being influenced by evil spirits dwindled as I opened myself fully to the possibility that there was more to the cosmic order than what I had allowed myself to believe, and certainly much more than the Church had ever suspected.  I was embarked on a solitary journey, with nothing to guide me but a limitless yearning for absolute union with the original source of life and consciousness.

That day in the scriptorium, I made my customary ritual of positioning the exemplar, lifting the quill, and dipping it reverently into the inkpot.  Then I paused as I knew that I was about to embark upon an unprecedented journey.  Sitting there with the pen hovering above the page, I felt as if I were staring at the smooth surface of a darkened ocean.  With a sense of plunging forward, downward, inward, I averted my eyes from the exemplar and began to write, not to copy but to write, to say things original and unheard of, and to regard them deliberately not with horror, but with an open spirit.

Instantly, the second heart was loosed within me, and a flood of new revelation began to shape itself into written words.  My hand wrote with what seemed a supernatural speed and accuracy.  Instead of cramping and requiring frequent rest, my fingers were charged with an inexhaustible energy.  The new words filled lines, then paragraphs, then pages, while I sat by like a mere spectator.  A rushing and a roaring, like the crashing of ocean surf on a rocky shore, filled my ears with increasing vividness throughout the day, and I felt the unseen presence of the abbot standing behind me.

Late in the afternoon, I cut off the flow of words, set down the pen, and with pounding heart scanned back over what I had written.  Not a single word was copied.  Everything was original.  And all of it was high blasphemy, by my former way of reckoning.

The pages before me spoke of something not of God's creation, and thus not subject to the redemptive work of Christ; something existing not in the world of God but outside it, seething in a void of utter confusion.  Reading these words, I began to envision dimly, as through a pane of smoked glass, a vast and ancient realm of uncreated darkness, a great gulf of eternal night where chaos churned through infinite circles of futility.  It was fantastic, breathtaking, overwhelming in its immensity and grotesquery.  Through a strange kind of epistemological alchemy, the mere sight of this realm began to impress upon me a sense of ancient secrets being laid bare.  I saw plainly the absolute immanence, the impossible nearness, of this other realm.  I saw the way it pressed in upon the world of life and light at the edges, and not only there, but also in our very midst, at the interstices where the components of the created order cohere.  I saw the true nature of the ordered cosmos upon which I had based my hopes:  its mutability and insubstantiality, as if it were merely a castle in the sand waiting helplessly and absurdly upon a deserted shore for the ravenous tide to flow in and devour it.

Abruptly, insights that had lain dormant in my breast for years surged to life and circulated upwards to my brain, where they revealed to me at last the truth of what I was seeing.  This, I now understood, was the primal chaos, the formless raw matter of creation.  This was the ultimate truth beyond God and Satan, good and evil, light and darkness, for it had existed long before the advent of these opposing forces, long before God spoke the creative words to bring forth an ordered cosmos peopled with conscious spiritual and physical beings.  In fact—most shocking of all, a realization that I could scarcely accept—I saw that the God whom I had devoted my life to serving was the offspring of the abyss, and that both He and His cosmos were negated by its universality.  Like a corrosive spiritual acid, the ocean of the uncreated was forever eating away at the shore of creation, and of its Creator.

As if he had been summoned by the culmination of the vision, the abbot slipped silently into the room at that very moment and began to make his way from desk to desk.  I waited dumbly for him to finish with the others, and when he did, he paused behind me as he had done before.  Then he reached down and once again ran his hand over the pages.

In a kind of trance, I looked down at his hand and saw that it, too, was infected with the seed of corruption, as indeed all flesh must be.  But I could also see, as if with the aid of an invisible lens held before my eyes, that behind his ephemeral flesh, or below or, or prior to it, extending outward from some inconceivably concentrated well of entity, there lurked a vast, churning thunderhead of chaos.  It shifted unendingly, appearing now as massive black cloud looming heavy with rain, now as the elastic scaly skin of a serpent, now as the surface of an oily ocean.  It was all these things and more, for no representation could convey the reality of the monstrous thing that dwelled within the flesh of this man whom for sixteen years I had loved and called my spiritual father.

He waited patiently with his hand before my eyes until the insight came clear and I understood that I was seeing the hand of the abyss itself, which had momentarily decided, for reasons hidden in the gloom of its bottomless depths, to adopt the form of a man.

 

What kept me from fleeing in the face of all this was my longing for transcendence.  This had been the start of the matter, and now it formed the end of it.  I had seen so much and felt so deeply that I simply could not leave, not when I the goal of my spiritual pilgrimage finally lay within reach.  Drawing strength from one of the promises of Saint Paul that I hoped might still apply to me, even after everything that I had learned, I began to think my true life must be hidden elsewhere—not with Christ in God, but in the blackest reaches of the abyss.  I eagerly anticipated the revelation of this true self when the time was right, and its point of contact in my soul glowed with an exquisite burning coldness every day, assuring me that I would not have long to wait.

Weeks passed as time flowed by like a black river that I regarded from a stationary point on some undefined shore.  I hovered above everything, clung to nothing, and consider the world and its inhabitants as figments of a fleeting and pointless dream.  The sight of the abbot and my brothers sickened me, but it was a sickness that I had now transcended, for I knew that none of my thoughts, feelings, or reactions were of any consequence, save for the exquisite responsiveness that I had developed to the hints of dark enlightenment that continuously flew up from my spirit like sparks from a fire.

Aided by this ongoing inner transformation, my work continued to undergo a mutation.  Nothing that came from my pen could surprise me.  I did not wonder when my hand left off with words and began to produce elaborate illustrations that were far beyond my natural capacity.  Drolleries and illuminations of the most intricate craftsmanship appeared in my book, twisting and twining in serpentine chains of meaning.  Fanged faces with forked tongues and porcine snouts peered out from behind words or upward and inward from the borders of pages, leering at the text and adding their own silent commentaries.  From time to time, a word or phrase from the Holy Scriptures themselves would spew forth from my pen, followed closely by yet another of those faces, which would bare its fangs and grin at the quotation as if to say, “Ah, yes, but…” or “Come now, could you really have believed…?”

As for the other aspects of my life in the abbey—my daily fulfillment of the Divine Office, my association with my brothers—I had never played the game more splendidly, and was especially helped in this by a new sense of superiority far different from the one I had formerly harbored. I had always found it easier, even before joining the order, to be kind, patient, and even loving toward those whom I considered my inferiors.  Thus it was natural that I was never so tender with my brothers as during those final days when I saw them as from a great height.  Even my old self, centered upon my original heart, found something to satisfy its altruistic longings when it was able to look with compassion upon walking, quivering sacks of corruption that believed themselves to be men.

The abbot and I appeared to have reached an unspoken agreement.  Each time I saw him, I gained a momentary glimpse of a roaring blackness that wore his face like a mask.  But I said nothing about this to the others.  He, for his part, stopped speaking to me entirely, and merely fixed me with a hawkish eye every day in the scriptorium after he had finished with the others, before exiting without a word.  The brethren noticed this, of course, and took it as a sign that I had advanced beyond them.  Formerly, my false sense of humility would have led me to deny such speculations, but now I knew they spoke nothing but the truth, so I let them speculate as they would.

Still, time was winding down, and soon the end was upon us all.  It began with a vision that plagued me one night while I lay awake in my cell, buzzing with hot excitement.  I had finished the day in a rush of passion.  My eyes had grown wet every time I spoke softly to a brother.  I had encouraged them all, prayed for them all, loved them all, and had known from their shining eyes that they were talking with awe among themselves about the amazing progress I had shown in the spiritual life.  After Vespers, I had retired to my cell and known immediately that it would be a sleepless night, for I was much too energized by a wondrous sense of well being, which surged outward from my dark heart to the farthest reaches of my extremities, deadening any lingering inclination that I might have had to place stock in that body and its desires, tantalizing me with visions of the world as it would appear when the truth began to shine through the cracks of creation like rays from a black sun.

I lay awake for hours, looking up through the window at the night sky and noticing for the first time how strikingly similar it was to the abyss that bordered creation.  The stars were strewn from one end of the heavens to the other in a staggering profusion on that moonless night, and their positions appeared strangely fluid.  A ripple of motion skittered across them, and I wondered whether I had unknowingly fallen asleep and begun to dream. The face of that sky might have been a vast black ocean, with the stars mere sparkles upon its ever-shifting surface, or perhaps they were the shining eyes of a billion shadowy creatures hovering just beneath the water, waiting in the womblike silence of the void, staring into the cosmos from across unfathomable distances, regarding this little sphere with a rapacious interest.

Without warning, as I gazed up in awe, a bit of darkness detached itself from the stellar tableau, coalesced into a familiar shape, and shot like a comet toward the earth.  As it came nearer, I saw that it was vaguely man-shaped, and that its proportions were the same as my own.  It took only an instant for me to realize that it was headed for the monastery, and only an instant more for all the pent up longings of a lifetime to surge upward into my eyes.  My new heart began to pound out a hymn of joy, and tears began to fall like rain, as I eagerly awaited the arrival of what I recognized as my true self.

But then I found that I did not even have to wait, for suddenly, through an impossible shift of perspective, I no longer lay inside my cell but gazed down upon the huddled gray roofs of the monastery from a dizzying height.  As I drew closer, I saw that everything appeared brittle and hollow.  The magnificent stonework of the church, the columns and tilestones of the cloister, the roofs and archways—all appeared as flimsy as parchment.  Even the towering facade of Mont-Saint-Michel itself was not exempt; I thought that I might reach out and punch through its massive face like an eggshell, dig through ancient layers of volcanic rock like dry cotton, and find only an echoing emptiness on the other side.

I shot like a spear toward the rooftops and, coming nearer, spied through a certain window a slight figure clothed in a rough brown robe and lying stiff as a rod on his pallet while he stared up at me with wide, blank eyes.  It was impossible to suppress a laugh of pure joy at the sight of my old self.  The sound rang out like a hiss of raindrops upon the stonework of the abbey.

Guided by an unerring instinct, I directed this new body of darkness toward a particular rooftop and then sank effortlessly through the wood and stone, coming to rest in the scriptorium, where I found my precious book lying closed upon its wooden desk beside the inkpot.  My love for it raged like a black fire in my breast. Tears of darkness welled up in my new eyes.  With a hand reeking of the smoky effulgence of the abyss, I reached down and opened to a random page.

There it was: the evidence of the change that had been wrought within me, the statement of the new revelation that had swallowed all of my old hopes.  Love and loathing vied for dominance within me, but the fire in my breast consumed them both and roared silently of its own absoluteness.  Without further hesitation, I dove forward into the book.

It was like diving through an open window.  The night of uncreation rolled out before me in vast waves whose sable surfaces glowed hotly with veins of red and gold.  Dimly, far off in the distant reaches of a realm where distance had no meaning, I glimpsed a coiling, pulsating nest of living shapes, like half-formed nightmares of the ancient monster of the Scriptures: “Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent, the dragon that is in the sea.”  Their sinister, spasmodic motion, constricting and unfurling across multiply insane dimensions, beckoned me to come home.

My last thought before I closed the distance and flew into their impossibly malformed arms was that I had finally achieved my lifelong goal.  At last I was reborn, as my former Lord had said that I must be.  But it was a type of rebirth that neither He nor I had ever foreseen.

 

What followed might have lasted for eons or for an infinitesimal fraction of a second.  Time warped and blurred, and I sank into a sense of dreamlike calm as I was torn apart and reconstructed again and again, enduring endless transformations into all manner of fantastic and grotesque shapes while a cacophony of screeches raged around me.  Eventually the Lords of the Abyss settled on a form much like the one in which I had arrived.  Then they sent me shooting back across the empty expanse toward a window that sparkled in the distance with the glow of created light.

When I awoke in my cell, in my old body of flesh, my first thought was that I had been dreaming.  Then the presence of my true self, newly remade, pressed upward from the well in my soul, and the ecstasy of invulnerability washed over me.

I ignored Matins, instead making my way directly to the scriptorium, where I stared down with love at my book.  For an instant I experienced a strange sensation of doubleness as I looked right through the pages as if through a clear window and locked gazes with my true self, which hovered in darkness  on the other side, peering dispassionately into the world of creation.  The resulting perceptual alchemy was akin to ouroborous swallowing his own tail.  For a time I lost the ability to distinguish between the end of my false self and the beginning of my true one.

The brothers came for me soon.  They found me hunched over my book, scribbling furiously in its pages.  They were so very concerned and sweet as they asked the reason for my strange actions.  But when they caught sight of the swirling inked chaos on the pages, their loving looks melted into grimaces, and the long-awaited shrieks of horror finally resounded from the clammy stone walls.

I remained silent and dispassionate when they attacked this body like a pack of wolves, beating and tearing it until blood spattered like rain on the cold stone floor.  The pain, like everything else in this fleeting world, was inconsequential.  I remained equally remote when they took me before the abbot.  Of course they brought the incriminating evidence with them, and when they showed him a sample page, he feigned all the appropriate expressions of outrage and horror.  Then they all together, the brothers and the abbot, threw this body into its cell and dispatched a messenger to Paris, with instructions to forward a letter all the way to Rome regarding the awful thing that had happened in their midst.

The book they locked in the abbot’s own quarters, so that none of them would be tempted to gaze upon its contents.  Of course he and I then spent many long nights eye to eye, with him gazing through the windows of the pages into the bowels of the abyss.  Elsewhere in the abbey, this body in its cell laughed heartily at the irony, to the great consternation of the brother who stood guard outside the door.  He tried to speak with me, perhaps to offer comfort or instruction, but I had only to open this mouth and quote a few lines from the book to silence him and send him fleeing.  They were my words, from my book, and the pleasure I found in speaking freely from my own heart, unhindered by thoughts of emptying myself for the sake of God’s truth, was unutterably delicious.

Three months passed before the envoy from Rome finally arrived to hear the case—an agonizing eternity for the brothers, but the mere blink of an eye to me.  Time had become meaningless, and the shadows that crawled across the floor of my cell every day with sun's passage moved with the swiftness of an advancing storm.

During those months, I discovered that my brothers could not endure the force of my gaze upon them.  The ones who brought me food would gasp and stagger backward when our eyes met.  Darkness would begin to shine from their joints and pores, and they would look as if they might disintegrate into ragged pieces of rotting flesh at the merest hint of a breath.  Eventually I began to suspect that my eyes had become like two lamps glowing with the dark light of the void.  Perhaps when I bathed my brothers in this otherworldly radiance, it kindled within them visions of their own imminent undoing.

When the Roman envoy arrived, headed by a bishop of imposing rank and title, I eagerly anticipated the chance to test this new faculty on him.  Late one night, when he entered my cell and tried to speak what he called sanity to me, I gazed coolly upon him until his eyes began to glow with darkness.  His breath grew ragged, but he must have been a stout soul, for he fought off the cold shadow and sat down beside me.  He had brought with him a copy of the Gospel of Saint John, and without further ado he opened it to the first page and began to read to me of Christ the incarnate Word.

Thinking to humor him, I looked down at the text and experienced a final and inevitable shock as my eye caught something astonishing.  After moment I began to laugh.  The sense of hilarity grew and grew until I was screaming and weeping with laughter.  My visitor’s composure broke, and he trembled as he looked at me with fear and consternation.  Then he looked back down at the book in his hand, and a moment later he slammed it shut and fled my cell in a panic, although not before I saw the blackness begin to weep from his eyes.  It was a fitting reaction from someone who had just glimpsed the impossible truth for the very first time.

For there on the pages of the Scripture itself were statements of the things I had so recently learned—not written in the text itself, but etched between the lines in darkly glowing letters that lit up for anyone who had eyes to see.  From the beginning to the ends of eternity, the incarnate Word had always been matched and throttled by its negation, and it was those hidden lines that I had unknowingly copied and made explicit in my book.  Irony of ironies, the Scriptures themselves, the supposed repositories and bringers of revealed spiritual light, were in fact the hidden carrier of the great darkness waiting on the other side.

It was then that I began to suspect what the dark powers were planning.  Sitting in my cell, abandoned by everyone, I saw the disparate pieces of the puzzle fell together, and I knew that everything had been premeditated and foreordained.

I knew that the abbot, himself an avatar of the abyss, had been placed high in the ranks of the church in order to shepherd and guide groups of spiritually minded men toward the hidden truth, until one would appear whose passion would be of such depth and scope that it would mark him as a fit vehicle for the revelation of darkness.  The abyss needed a scribe.  Where better to find one than among the ranks of the church with its scattered army of copyists?  There could hardly have been an environment more conducive to the nurturing of my spiritual sensibilities than the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel, nor a duty more favorable for the exercising of my innate endowments than the work of copying the Holy Scriptures.  My sickness, my downfall, my pending judgment at the hands of the Church—all had been planned long in advance.  The extent of the conspiracy staggered me, and I shivered to think how deeply the influence of the void must reach into the very heart of the Church in order for it to successfully execute such an epic scheme, all of it centered upon my recent efforts.

In a case such as mine, the presiding bishop will surely demand that the book be produced before a court of inquiry, so that he can judge the basis of the charges against me for himself.  He will surely ask to have it opened in the presence of those assembled for the hearing.  And that will signal the beginning of the end and the close of creation's opening act.  My new masters have already used my hand of flesh as a vehicle for their written revelation.  Now they plan to use the work of that hand as a bridge for their entrance into the created order.  When the book is opened before the assembled monks and masters, the blackness of the abyss will shine forth in their midst, and its Lords will charge across the parchment bridge, and will pierce the tender flesh of creation even as the spear pierced the side of Christ Himself.  Then everyone present will see and know the truth that hides behind the veil of creation.  And the work of uncreation will begin.

I have heard the others talking about me as I sit awaiting the culmination of these things.  Their conversation has made reference to Satan and demons, just as my own thoughts initially did.  They think an evil spirit possesses me.  Such ignorance would be laughable were it not so pitiful.  They have yet to understand that the truth shining from my eyes is far older than any demon, far older even than Satan himself. Our familiar spiritual universe, all of its powers and principalities, demonic and divine alike—God and His angels, Satan and his demons—are swallowed whole by the abyss, which leaves in their place a roaring emptiness like the echo of a vast cataract flowing eternally into a bottomless pit.

What a pity that my brothers cannot join me in celebrating this vast emptiness, where the peace of oblivion masks the madness of chaos.  But I suppose such pleasures are reserved only for the chosen few.

* * *

Last night one of them began whispering to me through the door to my cell.  I recognized his words as the pater noster, and I was strangely moved to find that he was still working for what he thought of as the salvation of my soul.  I felt for the first time a sense of what I have lost, and as I looked around at the cold stone walls of my cell, I began to wish desperately for them to appear solid to me again, and not as empty shells waiting for a puff of wind to knock them down.  I wished for my hand and wished for it to appear sound and whole again, and not as a repository for the seed of ultimate corruption.  My original yearning for spiritual light began to pant and sob like an abandoned child in my breast, and I was overcome by a desire to offer some sort of comfort or reassurance to this brother who still loved me for what I had been.  So I opened my mouth and, in a voice choked with tears, tried to give him a reply in kind.

What came out instead was another quotation from my book.  Of course it sent him fleeing with a whimper.  I had not meant to say such a thing, but it was past my lips before I recognized it.  This new truth, it seems, is no longer my own.  What happened with my hand is now happening to the rest of me.  I could sense my new self laughing deep within my soul, even as I began to weep and mourn the loss of my old self.

I cannot allow myself to reflect on the possible depth of my wretchedness. I cannot consider how much of a pawn I have been.  Instead, I must hope that the words I spoke to my brother will prove to have been enough to plant the seed of true understanding in his heart, so that he will be able to stand with the abbot and me when the black flood of reality comes to wash away everything that is unreal.

After all, what I whispered to him was none other than the new pater noster, which is the counterpoint to the old one and the invocation of all that is inescapably true:

Our Grandfathers which art in chaos
Fallow be thy names
Thy kingdom scour, Thy will devour
The earth, and hell, and heaven.

Here at the end of everything, this is all the comfort or reassurance I have left to offer anyone.  May it prove to be enough for my brother, and for me.