Heir of the Damned

Written by Andy Naranjo

Before his eyes were planes of red and vermilion sands. Above him passing were clouds of magenta floating in seas of aquamarine skies. Behind his eyes resided an imagination sprawling through pious temperaments. The sun set behind mountains that climbed over the city horizon. Lying in desert beds, on the cusp of the cove, Jouye scaled mammoth stones.

“Lost between galaxies! Is it all a test?” he shouted.

Jouye paraded about whistling and kicking rocks, snapping branches, and humming songs. Often he would emulate concepts and from movies and shows he watched at home, usually never understanding them to the fullest. Playfully he declared the next great adventure, “We were abandoned by the Great Ghost in the sky!” he cried.

Jouye wore a three-eyed skull mask his older brother had crafted for him and in his hand, he gripped a paper-star-tipped wand. These were made in the likeness of a character Jouye would draw often and pretend to be. Blanketed by a green hooded poncho, he strode on up the hills to their dull peaks and would then descend down to their shallow bottoms.

“I’m searching for the architect who created the signs,” he cooed.

"HEY!" echoed a voice. On a hill much higher than the ground the young boy had been ravaging. The silhouette of a young man watched Jouye. He sat on a large stone as he fiddled with a pocketbook and pencil. Jagged slabs and large fractured stones peppered the planes around.

“Quit your dancing!” he laughed. Jouye stopped in his tracks.

"Break that wand and I won’t make you another!" he scolded across the desert. Squinting at the shadow of a young lanky man, Jouye could see him chewing on his lip and shuffling his feet with a shaky leg.

“HEY, MAURY!” Jouye waved, inviting him. “Want to come and play?”

Cupping his hands beside his mouth, "No! Mom said to watch you! But I really have to finish up this project!” Maury announced. “So I’ll be home drawing! Oh, and we’re supposed to watch that movie with mom tonight!”

Jouye’s eyes lit up with excitement.

“You know when to be home by right?!” Maury quizzed.

Responding in a pinched tone, "Before mOM! Ack!” Jouye coughed, choking on the sand kicked up by his amusements. Returning home, Maury left his younger brother to his ventures.

"DON’T WORRY, MAURY!” In a huff, Jouye starts again running off into the open desert aiming his wand to the hills ahead. “Go forth! To the center where it all began!”

Rooted into the earth of this barren land a shriveled athel rests. Providing a shadow for a family of toads and their tadpoles, the twisted and withered trunk leaned. This tree was Jouye's favorite place. “There it is! I found it!” Jouye exclaimed, bolting past the tree and pond. Further into the desert erected rock formations rising many yards high. They were sharp, jutting, and formed black granite halls. The area was considered to look peculiarly similar to a holy cathedral. Boasting, its survival was stark against the air of extinction in wake of civilizations once cradled by the Valley.

At the foot of the primeval arrangement, a benign drawing in the sand blemished the desert. Forgotten, like a tossed stone, its existence was devoid of any explanation as it laid there mute. Vulnerable to the elements, it was isolated and preserved by the dry desert climate; implausibly as if by divine nature. Alienated from human vernacular, the symbol and its meaning was not translatable or interpretable. However, the summary of its meaning or significance would be best compared to the single word: “Open.”

Aiming his wand at the stone ensemble, “The shadow of entropy is there!” he proclaimed. Jouye stumbled and stomped through a dying thicket of desert shrubs; finely lined scratches now scribbled the calves of his legs.

“NOW...I sacrifice myself to become—” Jouye ceremonized. Arriving at the stone Cathedral, the reflection glossed Jouye’s eyes as he proclaimed, "The king! The God, the one capable of all wrong!"

Stepping toward the sight as he swung the wand clenched in his fist, "I claim my throne as..." Jouye's voice strayed. His eyes were glazed by a sight most heinous in nature. "Heir of the..."

His thought trailed.

Off the calf glimmered blood. Trickling down the streaked scratches, his blood dripped onto an unrecognizable symbol scrawled into the sand. Subsequently, an inexplicable ritual had been cast unbeknownst to Jouye and his speech of imaginary design. He stepped through an unseeable veil and the world peeled back revealing unseen vistas and their ever-changing visage.

Before his eyes, are planes of bloodied red and vermillion sands. Above him passing, are thunderous storms that glow an envious and hypnotizing emerald. Behind the mountains, climbing over the horizons, a serpentine crustacean slithered up into the air. Pouring out of its snout the storms grew. Ripping through crimson and deep purple skies, tenacious lightning whipped the lands below. Freckled with segmented limbs, its long black needle legs twitched and flailed. Greedily the deformed serpent stabbed and collected whatever it could mount onto its underbelly as its gnarled body twisted around itself.

Stepping toward the towering rock cathedrals, Jhel burned in Jouye’s eyes. Retreating within his stifled subconscious kindled memories of an ordinary sentiment hindered his discomposure. The thought of a faulty street light left him bored and calm. A warm sensation pinched his cheeks as he could hear his mother announce, “I’m home.” The scabbing scratches on his legs began to itch as he recalled the taste of sand. “What are we gunna watch tonight?” the boy wondered. But these thoughts were reduced to embers as echoes of terror and horrors howled around him. Innumerable wraths of brutality scaled through the mountainous terrain as the demoniacal populace ravage one other. This place, burdened with burning star systems and uninhabitable planets, populated by the suffering, was a true realm of entropy. Jouye’s lucidity began to smolder.

His bones writhed in chills as he hung his head to avoid this unbelievable sight. His eyes clenched shut, gripping to the thought, “I am heir to this realm. I control the supernatural...”

Beneath his feet, the grit of the ground felt wet and prickly. Jouye’s fists tightened with incredulous denial, clinging to the idea that he was lost in a complicated cloud of imagination. Seeping through the shoes, a damp sensation licked and gnawed the bottom of his foot. In the air, a miasma profusely loomed under his nose. It was unlike any earthly fume, wafting through his gut as it emanated from where he stood.

“Wait—” he uttered. A sweat of realization slipped into his palm. Alarmed, “It was in my hand!” The wild and uncontrollable danced around him. Jouye’s fist loosened and his eyes unfolded to search for his wand and instead saw himself standing on the oddments of a body. The carcass, unzipped and torn, bled. Pieces of flesh bubbled at his feet. Its twisted and stretched countenance had an eye puckering where lips would be. The eye scrolled in a frenzy as it inhaled its last breath with a vomitous wheeze. Strands of hair grew randomly on its canvas. Bulbous appendages on its back were separated by the spine, protruding and curling beneath the skin. In awe, Jouye remained frozen, ankle-deep in the cadaver.

Perched and stooping on a carcass, another creature of bizarre nature lingered in the boy’s peripheral vision. The snoutless being could be heard struggling against its environment. Suddenly, an orifice located clearly on the forehead of its skull began to gurgle webs of blood and saliva. It was the fragrance of earth luring the creature closer to Jouye. With great haste, the wretched thing lunged at him. Jouye stepped back timidly. Shadowing him was the ethereal veil, the very same that brought him here. The creature, in a hysterical bloodlust, obliviously shot itself and the boy through the ingress of the transparent anomaly.

“JOUYE!” Maury called out into the empty desert.

“JOUYE!” his mother wailed over howling winds.

“JOUYE—“ beamed the bullhorns bellowing from local police cruisers.

The Cathedral City Police Department scouted the desert cove for Jouye. Hiking alongside, Maury and Jouye’s mother cried out for her missing son as Maury urgently followed. Approaching the ebony stone cathedrals, Maury noticed something odd In the sand across from them. As the authorities pressed forward, Maury jotted down a crude sketch emulating what he saw drawn in the sand.

Suddenly, snatching Maury’s wrist and whipping him forward, “Are we looking for Jouye or are we drawing?!” His mother snapped. Maury glared at her like a deer at a gun and said nothing.

“THIS is not the time...” she lectured.

Maury nodded, “No... I’m sorry. It’s just I saw...”

“What?” she interrupted, attempting to reason with Maury. “Something that will help, I hope.”

Maury glanced at the sigil in the sand. Noticing this his mother let out a sigh. The muscle in her brow began to twitch as the stress and anxieties of losing a child took control of her nerves. Trembling, at the verge of a meltdown, Maury’s mother let out a whimper as she began to walk away from Maury. Then, like a dry branch, a peculiar object cracked beneath her heel.

*CrRck*

“What…is this?” she withdrew.

“I made that for him… That’s Jouye’s wand,” Maury answered.

His mother picked up the twisted and broken wand, brushing her thumb over the paper star at the end of the stick. She eyed Maury callously. Though a single stem of evidence signaled Jouye’s disappearance from the sandy carpets of the cove, fruitless were their efforts. Grey soaked clouds loomed over. The great woes in the sky wept no tears as they hung, parched. Eventually, the crowd surrendered their efforts and returned home. That night silence dined with Maury and his mother. In the living room, an obsolescent DVD of The Road to Oz rested on the counter.

Weeks had passed as concerns quieted. The moon, full and ambient, hovered above the mountain, shedding light on the ominous sigil drawn in the dirt. Beads of blood-mixed sand rested in the canals of the fading character. Chewing on his lip, Maury contemplated it as his mother planted a wooden cross he had made near it. The stone cathedrals shadowed them. Nailed to the cross was a photo of Jouye, Maury, and their mother. With her head hung she prayed and wept, “May you guide him into a new world of joy and serenity. Amen.”

Then, soft wisps of wind gasped over the sand, obscuring the malevolent mark. Maury’s grief began to overflow as he sunk his teeth even deeper into his lip, tearing the skin. Reminiscent he recalled Jouye’s last playful moments, “Lost between galaxies! Is it all a test?” Maury smirked.

Reaching into his pocket he pulled out a palm-sized journal. In it he gazed at a drawing of the very same marking, bringing to mind Jouye’s voice again: “I’m searching for the architect who created the signs!”

Maury clenched his jaw with his lip snagged between his teeth, causing it to bleed a little. The page was dotted by a tear, then blotted by more. Among them was a speck of blood that leaped from Maury’s split lip onto the page. Maury closed it, concealing the single droplet of blood that blemished the note.

“...Ribbit...” croaked a toad.

They began to make their way back home. “I left him alone… I shouldn’t have.”, Maury admonished. His body rattled with guilt. Approaching a leaning athel tree, Maury candidly recalled to himself, “That was Jouye’s favorite place to”—a breeze brushed Maury’s neck like cool silk, interrupting his thought. With the tree in his sight, he paused abruptly in his steps. He could see the pond. Dancing on its ripples a familiar silhouette reflected over the toads and tadpoles within. His mother continued forward undisturbed in a sulking state.

Faintly, Maury could hear a familiar, yet estranged laughter fluttering in his ear. Intently he approached the leaning athel. The tittering turned into a somber tune whispered and whistled. The puckered melody relaxed the sentiment that shamed Maury, stifling his penitence. It sounded as if an orchestral number of voices softly harmonized with the wind.

Carefully, he proceeded to the tree. The sound of sand dragged and cracked behind his feet as Maury listened, transfixed on the melody. Suddenly a bristling of shrubs nearby shook away its allure. “Must be a rabbit.” Maury reasoned. Suddenly a gust of wind thrust through him as a trail of footprints stomped ahead foot by foot. The trail leading to the athel disappeared behind the veil of hanging branches and foliage caught between them. A muffled laugh and whistle chimed from behind.

“Jouye?” Maury reached out to part the curtain.

Before his eyes were planes of cool and ominous blue sands. Above him two moons ornamented the sky, and clouds of magenta swam beneath them in the starless waters of space. From a squinting distance Maury could see that between himself and the horizon the stone cathedrals stood. “This is...no.” He pondered. “This isn’t the cove.”

Blue vistas quilted over each other with dollops of sandy cerulean hills. As Maury began to look around, a light shimmered in the air, winking at him with every wandering glance. Maury held out his hand, pinched, and rubbed his fingers together. Thin white soot dusted the air, twinkling in abundance, “It’s soft. Like snow... but warm?” He mumbled as he took a deep breath. Then out of the blue a trail of footprints thudded across the sands startling Maury. He slowly jogged to the tracks, then gradually transitioned into a sprint chasing after the succeeding footprints as they zig, zagged, looped and stippled the cool desert sand. The giggles and laughter returned again with zipping whistles and bumbling hums. A credulous Maury called out for Jouye convinced it was him. As the apparition of sorts and himself ventured out into the velvet blue desert, a single star appeared out from behind the clouds. The star flickered, almost looking like it was dancing on the tufts of magenta, as they rippled through space overhead. The trail of spirited footprints darted in its direction as Maury followed.