Legacy of Judas - Book One Read online

  Legacy

  of

  Judas

  By Christian Aragon

  Copyright © 1996 Christian Aragon

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10:1983954144

  ISBN-13:978-1983954146

  Gia & Caleb, I Love You.

  Caleb, I hope you unleash your imagination for others to see.

  Believe in You first.

  CONTENTS

  Zero Chapter – Pg 1:

  Not A Forward. Not An Introduction. More Like A Well-Wishing.

  Chapter One – Pg 2: Hell’s Beginnings

  Chapter Two – Pg 41: New Innocence

  Chapter Three – Pg 74: Innocence Lost

  Chapter Four – Pg 107: Primary Education

  Chapter Five – Pg 155: Law of Change

  Chapter Six – Pg 189: Acquisitions

  Chapter Seven – Pg 250: Dinners with Deities

  Chapter Eight – Pg 287: Vincent

  Chapter Nine – Pg 321: Escalation

  Chapter Ten – Pg 345: Hell’s Angels

  Chapter Eleven – Pg 371: Cumulative Effect

  Chapter Twelve – Pg 407: With Great Humility

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Zero Chapter

  Hell is not a place of convenient suffering, nor is Life. In both you simply suffer. One just allows for the possibility of respites. There is no personal Hell, aside from that which you create for yourself in Life, and Hell cares not in the least for your own self-imposed torment. There is no account in Life in which you can accrue credit with which to prepay any trespasses committed by you.

  After all was said and done I wasn’t given permission to write this addition to the beginning of this tale. What I thought was so expansive and grander than comprehension allowed for has apparently always fit in the palm of my hand and between my fingers. Inadvertently I struggle to convey this truth in every word I scribed.

  But such heavy subject matter isn’t good in such continual servings. I am not here to frighten nor am I here to be presentimental. Of course something is going to happen; this is an inevitable truth of everyday existence. My effort, with this Zero Chapter, is to invite a choice more so than a question. When something seems at its most painful, at its most intense, but then finds a way to get worse yet, continue. Continue. Continue yet some more. Never sacrifice knowing for ignorance.

  Chapter One

  ~

  Hell’s Beginnings

  Journal entry I

  Though it’s the proper and obvious place to begin any narrative, I can’t say in the least that I’m comfortable starting at the beginning of this account. Though I’ve kept records of certain circumstances in my previous life, I have never kept a journal of any sort in my entire existence. This is a rare circumstance, which I may never again be allowed to take advantage of.

  Since I am in a position of servitude to one who will be unable to reap the advantages of my abilities, knowledge and experiences for some time to come, I feel that I must make this as detailed as possible for her future benefit. Although, I will omit certain details since she may not ever need to know of the existence of many of the things I’ve seen or experienced. Still, there will be multitudes of the more horrible and grotesque facts left intact so this child is never able to form some sort of diluted version of what I have come to know so incredibly well.

  All of this effort, and for all I know I’m in service to some sort of village idiot who won’t last past the first collection … but I’m getting ahead of myself … a lot …

  First I should relay something which carries a particular irony in regards to this journal being written. To put it bluntly and clearly, I am a book. I have pages and a spine and contain text and illustration which any who read are able to comprehend without confusion or need of translation or extra explanation. The means by which I am able to keep this journal shall become known later. Suffice to say a book which is keeping a personal journal is something which contains so much irony that it’s the first thing to make me giggle in longer than I care to admit. Life, and death, has been difficult. Though, strangely, death has ultimately been more rewarding in the end.

  Also it should be known that any time I refer to myself, or the book I am part of, I am in fact referring to hundreds of souls all at once who make up a shared form of existence as part of this book. We are all part of this book as well as another realm of existence; a realm of the most raw suffering and torment.

  For the infant girl before us to ever stand a chance of properly understanding what I am, what we are, and where we came from, I must recall a time before I came into this form and record the journey which has transpired.

  Everyone knows the name, “Judas Iscariot,” and the historical crime he committed for a pittance of silver. This child will undoubtedly learn of Judas somehow, as well as how he spent his short, mortal life. What no one knows is how Judas has spent his time after he ended his mortal narrative prematurely.

  The rope went taught and Judas fell into the blackest void anyone could ever pray to elude. Since his blood, the sin-blackened blood of his life after his death, is what has bound this book together, I can tell you directly from his own memories about beginnings no one has ever known.

  There was no true Hell when Judas was cast into it, but his fall was halted by the essence of Hell; the shadow of God — Satan: the blackness itself. Nowhere in all the darkness beyond our skies is there a place colder and crueler to the senses than the shadow of God. It’s a cold worse than that which can freeze flesh and bone, but as I’ll soon scribe, that would be a waste of suffering. It’s a cold which chills the soul itself; bitterly biting and gnawing at the remembrance of the flesh and slowing the core of the souls to a crawl thus making time seem slower than they’re accustomed to. This is Satan; God’s shadow. Satan is the beginning — just the beginning — of the torment awaiting the damned.

  In the distance a small point of dim, red light offered a faint point to focus in on. In this dimness Judas realized his decent had ceased and he calmed himself becoming somewhat still. Then Judas was aware of movement in the darkness; the sounds of something, some things, passing by him, crashing through the dark air about him and towards the pinpoint of red illumination so deep in the blackness. Then Judas cried like a baby; his tears flowing, and then freezing solid as they dripped from his face, over his betrayal of the Son of God.

  A voice! A voice, completely foreign to Judas, bellowed in a low and growly tone. This sound, which was not heard through just his ears, but also in his mind; his soul and throughout every single fiber of his being, even reverberated through his skeleton and compressed and expanded all the smallest bits of Judas’s flesh. Judas’s very soul quivered in the voice’s awesome attenuation; it was at first a pain no mortal could ever imagine. The voice was Satan, and his introduction was more of a diversionary statement than one of self.

  “There is nothing to cry over that you can’t put to your advantage.”

  Every word said to Judas by Satan after that point were words heard throughout his being without pain or discomfort. Satan’s first words to Judas had made him immune to the pain, the surrounding cold, and darkened his soul without Judas knowing that it had occurred or changed him at all.

  The introductions were typical: A frightened mortal trying to grasp the reality of a dark deity, THE dark deity speaking to every little nibble of Judas’s body and soul. Judas was, to say the least, nervous, to the extent he pissed and shit himself a number of
times from the fear surging through him. Or, at least, Judas believed he pissed and shit himself. It can be safely said it is a good thing nothing one is wearing at the time of death goes with you once you leave your physical body. Judas would have been a disgraceful mess. His own urine captured his attention as it fell into the blackness below his feet.

  It should be mentioned that even the most damned of souls still produce enough light to illuminate their immediate surroundings of their damnation. Judas’s urine glimmered in his own faint glow for a short time as he listened carefully for the freezing stream and frozen droplets to make contact with something . . . anything.

  What Judas heard was not what he had hoped for. As he strained his ears a noise became increasingly noticeable. Screams, shouting, bones shattering, flesh tearing, blood splashing, and only darkness separating Judas from what he now believed was to be his ultimate fate.

  “I have a task for you, Judas. You can be spared from the damnation you hear should you say yes to my proposal.”

  “Please, I am at your disposal. Please don’t let me fall to the suffering I hear. Please!” As if Judas would say anything else faced with such a choice. Of course he obliged the enemies of Christ as much out of greed for the silver as cowardice of being harmed for the same information.

  “Don’t beg, Judas. It will not get you far with the commission I wish to bestow upon you.”

  “What is it you ask?”

  “Be my adopted son; created by a union of betrayal and greed, impregnated into your own heart of hearts, and whelped like an unwanted mutt into the cold and darkness. But I’ll take you in as my own. I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you what you won’t learn in the light of day or even by the silvery glow of the crescent moon. Take charge of what you hear below. Create a realm with light, heat, and a ground on which to set your feet, and take your steps as its ruler, and me as your pedagogue to guide you.”

  “And this will spare me of the suffering for my sin against God?”

  “It will as far as I’m concerned, but then, I’m not troubled by the transgression you committed. I am simply offering you reprieve from the coffer of your conscience, the weight of which has brought you here.”

  “What do you mean, coffer of my conscience? I was cast here because of the sin I committed.”

  “We will discuss this later, Judas. For now I require an answer to my question. Yes or no?”

  Judas hesitated for several moments until it felt as if a set of eyes were drilling into him from every direction in the darkness, but ultimately, he knew his choice was made when he betrayed Jesus. He knew his choice was sealed with the first strike of the hammer driving the nail.

  “Yes.”

  Instantly Judas’s body and soul flooded with pain. From his forehead and scalp grew a crown of thorns which in appearance was not unlike the crown Christ was fitted with before his crucifixion, except this crown was comprised of the bone of Judas’s own skull. His lungs almost completely collapsed as the realization quickly set in that much abbreviated breaths were his only way of getting air. Suddenly Judas remembered seeing Christ taking short, labored breaths as he hung on the cross. The stigmata continued as his wrists and feet opened through and through with the wounds inflicted by the spikes used to affix Christ to the crucifix. The bones in his wrists revealed yet more detail from the crucifixion as these bones lent to the shapes of the spikes driven into Christ. The bones in Judas’s feet mimicked the spike driven through them causing permanent boney protrusions he must maneuver with whenever walking upon any grounds. A gash opens on his right side identical to the wound from the spear of the Roman guard. The sufferings from the betrayal of Christ were now Judas’s sufferings, but they were NOT bestowed by Christ. But this event of the flesh didn’t stop as the transgressions of the life Judas lived also manifested in physicality.

  Judas’s veins and muscle tissue became barely visible under his new translucent skin because Judas was a liar. His blood now flowed dark and cold as it pumped from his heart. This because Judas cared not of whom his next victim would be, nor of his victims’ torment when he was done with them. Even Judas’s very manhood, which served him so well as a youth, and then as a … man … when patronizing local harlots and forcing himself upon unfortunate girls and women, was not immune to the truths of his life. His tender, fleshy bit split into three portions down its length, and then grew in length writhing against one another while knotting, twisting, and braiding its way to an exaggerated length. As it dangled at rest, Judas’s manhood was left separated in places as if several serpents were partially braided together in a struggle, but came together with just a single, malformed head.

  No longer was there color surrounding the pupils of Judas’s eyes, nor was there white to contrast the pupils themselves, his eyelids now blinked over blood-red orbs through which he could then see the contents of the darkest surroundings. That is when the greatest realization struck him; that was when he could see the other damned falling past him in the darkness, but more importantly, Judas could see that Satan himself is the darkness around him; with no distinguishable detail of Satan to be seen other than that darkness.

  The pain subsided as his new form was completed. The sins of Judas were now reflected in his physical form.

  “From the chrysalis of death and sin …” Satan giggled.

  “Why has this happened to me? WHY?”

  “All mortals have a coffer within their souls. It is the Coffer of the Conscience they spend their lives filling with every single deed done; every word spoken, every action acted out, every thought entertained, and every emotion felt. At the end of that life it is the contents of the coffer which determines the next destination of the soul, and the form the soul will inherit, if chosen to do so in the delights of bliss or the punishment of the sins. You have just taken the form created from the attributes of the transgressions you committed during your life.”

  “I only sinned against the Jesus!”

  “No, Judas. I can see right through you. Actually, everyone can now. You sinned against yourself because you thought it easier. Now you will serve your sinful wants, your sinful needs, your sinful desires … and me.”

  Judas was no longer capable of crying and that made him comfortable for reasons he did not understand. Instead he grinned slightly at the new prospects before him. He could feel Satan’s own smile all around him in the red-hued darkness. It was to his new body like a light breeze on a warm spring day is to any mortal who could appreciate such sublime delights.

  “Search yourself, Judas. You now have the ability to carry out that which you have accepted to do for me. Now you’re going to learn how you will do this for me.”

  Their mutual grins became ear-to-ear smiles which would’ve made even a Nile crocodile nervous.

  Journal entry II

  Judas took only a few moments to gaze upon the grotesque details of his new form. He then turns his attentions to the sounds of screams and agony calling to him from deep within the darkness of Satan’s being.

  “Within my darkness you shall create a world of our own. Use the tormented ones and create that which I desire. Create from their fleshen bodies …”

  “What is … fleshen?”

  “When your mortal form dies you are a soul without a vessel. You are impervious to pain or pleasure without the aid of a physical form to feel and experience these things through. You contain the knowledge and memories of physical sensations, but you are no longer capable of feeling them. Fleshen is what you become when you fall to your damnation, or ascend to your bliss. Your soul becomes encased in a new vessel built from the memories of your previous physical form. It is false, but it serves its purposes very well, as you’re about to see. Call upon the tortured ones. Use their flesh, blood, bones, and souls to create our own Eden within me!”

  Judas did as he was told and focused on the sounds of the damned as he closed his eyes tightly in concentration. Soon it was obvious that the terrible screams were getting closer. His concentr
ation broke when he heard a scream coming from above.

  Judas turned his gaze upward and caught sight of a rather large, portly woman falling toward him. Her naked flesh ripples and jiggles as she flails through the thick, cold air. Out of instinct Judas raised his arms to shield himself against what looked like an imminent impact, but her bulbous mass quickly came to a halt as Judas realized it was his own Will which stopped her descent.

  For a moment, while Judas gazed upon the grotesquely large woman, he was suddenly and finally acutely aware, that this whole time, fleshen souls had been falling from above him towards the screams below. His new eyes allowed him to see through the infinite darkness and see the steady drizzle of the dead falling towards their just rewards.

  “Aaaahhhhh. Your new eyes are serving you well. Those weren’t part of your sins’ manifestation. Those eyes are a gift from me. With Hell’s Sight you’ll never be unable to see what’s hidden again.”

  Judas then looked to the woman’s face and was suddenly aware of her life’s deeds and misdeeds filling her coffer. Her family was one of cannibals when it suited them to be so. During times of little else to eat her older siblings would go out into the various cities and towns and abduct any they could overcome without bringing attention to themselves; typically the very young or the very old.

  During one such outing the brothers brought home several children and an old woman, all from the same household. One of the children was an infant of only a few weeks. The old woman was bludgeoned to death upon her arrival and quickly cut up and broken into suitable pieces for cooking. The other children saw this horror knowing they were next to be beaten and butchered, and were despite their struggles and protests. But, the infant was chosen when he arrived to be that night’s meal garnished with some homegrown items this pudgy girl’s mother had prepared.