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Posted By: mike1966 Jan 06, 2005 - 10:42 am

Here's another short tale to keep you alert at the end of the night...

CONFESSIONS OF HFU-SZI-AMA


Every morning, before the Matinee, I go to pay my respects at the tabernacle of the Kiblah standing there at the site of the old Cathedral in my parish in Southern Spain. Casting a great shadow from dawn till dusk like a sun-dial. Inanimate reminder of how easily Empires grow, falter, collapse - then die. One man’s brush with fate will come, of that I have been assured. And I know the Lord will be my shepherd, even in the guise of this Kiblah sculpture and the power behind my eyes that will ultimately be unleashed.

I sat awake for hours after the initial vision.

In the bathroom mirror, whilst shaving my rough Spanish chin, I saw how my eyes sparkled. Saw conquered worlds flitter past like dust motes in a butter shaft of morning light. These are his words and how he will be remembered.

“The final resting place of the collective Kiblah line will rest within you, Signor Fuentes. And may your God forgive you...”

This is something I know I shouldn’t be sharing with you...

“You can’t believe how envious I am of the tree. I am but a slab of transdimensional existence. no moving parts, no detail, no difference of texture, volume, density. I am but a slab poking out from a rift in the spacetime continuum. A barnacle on a blue whale. A pebble on the side of a towerblock. A thorn in a crown of torture. I have not the ability nor the potential to grow and flourish and renew and sway in the breeze. I am a unity. One form. One mass unit. Forever. Never will my rough branches be caressed by the loving wind nor will my leaves be stroked for hours like nipples of a suckling baby. Bits cannot fall off me. Nothing can be added. In the land of the broken hearted, I am an impregnable cad.

“Time is against me. Like any fad, my userbase, fanbase, call it what you will, my reserves have finally trickled to a stop and soon I will be nothing more than the static sculpture I already represent to the survivors. Alone in a park in Malaga, a roost for mating pigeons in the Summer heat. It is for this reason that I appear to you in the form of Hfu-Szi-Ama.

“I had Acolytes, a fan base. It was these secret night visitors, dressed in ceremonial garb of a sort, flanked by wives, husbands, children, family and friends, colleagues, who kept me alive for so very long. I became the Big Machine, all former Kiblah on planet Earth having shared with me their vision of Soul Death. A collective repository of souls across the span of time and space. When we vector, we don’t even move. None of us moves. We just pull the linear stretch of space past ourselves, like a camel passing through the eye of the needle, you understand, Signor Fuentes.

“I noticed them on my first few harvests. While all around them was mad panic, they would accept their fate with calmness in their eyes and a regular heart beat. Little did the harvested matter know that its journey across the abyss of time and space was flavoured by the physical and mental state of the host. You got directed to that which you deserved, sort of… Those with a ‘healthier’ attitude towards their fate got less of a severe torturing in the fuel bins and energy converters of the Big Machine.

“The local drummer boys and the local trumpet boys tag me with their spray cans as a sign of manhood but they have nothing to fear from me. The authorities arrive one day later to sand blast me, scour off the evidence of their rites of passage. I could just transfer the graffiti across the aeons along with the brave young boys, the authorities. But I have made an oath and one thing keeps me alive. Acolytes.

“The planned conquest of Earth had failed in the time it takes to miss a news update but that no longer had import. I had taken to passively exhibiting myself in those broad boulevards of Malaga.

“On the third day, the desire for conquest left me. I watched my fellow Kiblah rot in the streets like fallen apples, their magnificent surfaces all craggy and rippled like old men’s sun scalded flesh. ORIENTATION REPORTS, o.r. as they became known, plotted accurately the vector of our next harvesting routes. All the remaining humans had to do was step aside. Anything the width of a street would do. We have such superfast metabolisms, as humans call them, such fast transfer rates, that over time we couldn’t get enough through and we were starved to death in hours.

“A young boy whose ancestors came from a country called Nigeria. Name of Newton Le Willow. He was the one who tapped into geostationary spysat NT3941. Time and again he must have seen us orienting ourselves on a trajectory before vectoring off and scooping up every living organism in our path.

“We harvest any organic thing we come across. Nothing can stand in our way. And that was our undoing in many respects. The inability to adapt to cultural circumstances like an truly evolved species. The one thing we can’t do is move and turn. Amazing really that no-one saw this as a design flaw of a conquering army.

“The collective forces of the Internet found our other Achilles Heal. The stupid armies of stupid nations we wiped out in seconds. Face to face, they were no more match than a mayfly hitting a juggernaut windscreen on the expressway. It was the freelance hacker camcorder snoops who finally worked us out.

“Of all the non-organic objects, articulated buses taste the nicest, probably because of the gas they use and the piquant human content. That is if you get rid of the glass. I always do this, expel the non-digestible elements from my harvest. I imagine the worst death for a Kiblah is to be stuck in glass of any kind, bottle or sand. A perpetual loop of drowning regurgitation.

“Here I am, a bronze sculpture blackened with age. People stand and look up at me aghast. And I will never understand the tiny words they spit, their curious looks of disdain, shame.

“If I uttered one loud word on this fickle planet, the crust would split and lava would flow deep as the ocean.

“I am so used to seeing the conquered world from a top-down perspective. Your Malaga streets are just wide enough for our kind to lazily sail down. Harvesting as we glide. A panic of fleeing street life ahead of me, the infinity of the void behind. I can hear their tiny screams as they pass across the divide, fuel for the Big Machine.
“I am Hfu-Szi-Ama, the only remaining Kiblah resident on planet Earth and this is my last confession before I die. You will give me your last rites.

“400,000 of our legion stormed the Chateau Machecoul portal. Thanks to the Roman roads, it was easy to harvest the human jissom, I think it is called, the stinking pig trough of human dreamstate.

“We are Kiblah, a transdimensionally gifted trading race. We are a one slab organism spanning the dimensions. Until you cut open a slab of Zinc and witness the tarnishing of its pure gloss, you can never know its unstained colour. Do you understand? Inside, the Kiblah are ether black, stealers of, not sharers in, the fabric of reality. Space shifters, if you will.

“The Malagan Man, the Malagan Woman, carry themselves with such pride. Pride in their dress, pride in their manner, pride in their colour a national uniform of loyalty to the Sun, protector of all their futures if only they knew it. The drums of war hammer in the parks of Malaga late into the night but this does not bother me. It is like being tickled by love ants or teased by a feather wife.”

A few days ago, I received a hand written note from the Parish supervisor, here in Andalusia. It was written in Latin, always a sign of great import. It said they had broken through only a few days ago. The enormous aliens that looked like Richard Serra sculptures and moved like yachts on the calmest of seas. Why was the Monsignor telling me these things. They had no relevance to my clerical life in Malaga. Did they? I had seen him in church on one or two occasions. Never thought him out of place in any way. He was part of the furniture, you could say. The shine of the almighty, I would have said.

The vision said it was generally better to run away from a unknown enemy than face The Beast. I could feel him penetrating me, a probe was inserted into my psyche by metaphysical powers never to be understood by mere humans. He watched me smiling as he poked around. What was the meaning of his nocturnal intrusion into my chambers?

I moved my eyes in the murky gloom. There was no distinctive scent to the air, no movement, no lifting curtains. No sounds at all in fact, save for this haunting tone of sheer dread. He was confessing to me. I know it now as I knew it then. He was telling his sins. Sins against whom or what I may never know.

I know it was well past midnight because I had retired to my chambers having just finished the midnight mass of this day of our Lord 2001 and sent the altar boys home to their families. They say you must be ready to hear a confession at any time. Even in the middle of the night with the prostitutes peddling their wares at the church gate and the ponies escaping from the local glue factory a few cobbled back streets away. But here, in my room, at the foot of my bed?

HFU-SZI-AMA stood at the foot of my bed, a grey peak in morning mist. Soft focus omnipotence. You couldn’t take him all in at once; just glimmers, reflections of passing scooters and articulated buses, cars and taxis in Southern Sun. My eyes just watched and listened to the throbbing ambience his sparkling silhouette exuded. A hypnotic tone, not music exactly, not white noise either. Just this one clear tone, the sound of a park in Spring. The low moan of loss. His incredible solidity wiped my mind of all feeling, I was captured by his unwavering gaze.

THIS IS NOT THE END OF CONFESSIONS....

Mike Philbin
http://www.mikephilbin.com