Inside Lucifer's War Read Free Page A

going into my ears and on my eyes and mouth. I try to yank them off, but as soon as one is off, another takes its place. I think this is how I will die. It crosses my mind that I am already dead and I will soon be one of these creatures.
    As quickly as they are on me, they are off. They scurry back to the black holes from which they came. Lucifer, as he calls himself, stands over me again.
    “Do not ever make the mistake of associating me with human trash,” he tells me over and over in my head until my nose bleeds.
    “Please,” I say. “I don’t deserve this. Why are you doing this to me?”
    Lucifer responds, “What do you think you deserve? From where I sit, you deserve much more than this, and I will certainly make that accusation when the time comes. Do you smell that stench? That is you. That is how we angels see and smell you. Rotten from the day you were born. Why God pours out his love on you is beyond me. Come, look at yourself, and see what I see.”
    With that, he creates a pool of water in the middle of the room. Pinching me by the neck muscles, he holds me over the water. “This is what you really look like. This is who you really are,” he says.
    The ripples in the water stop, and I see my reflection. Vomit spews out of my mouth and I try to turn away.
    “Look at yourself!” he commands, piercing his fingers into my neck.
    I see myself, but I am horribly disfigured. In my left cheek is a hole about half its size; maggots, roaches, and flies crawl out of it. My lips are dried, swollen blubber, and when I open my mouth, I see my tongue, which is forked, swollen and covered with large sores, where bugs also crawl. My eyes are black as night, and my skin is covered in disease. My ears are no more than charred flesh, and my head is covered with scabs.
    “So I am dead,” I say.
    “Yes, but not in the way you understand it,” he replies. “As you know it, you are as alive as you have ever been.” He then quotes a verse from the Bible: “‘For the wages of sin is death.’” When he speaks the passage, a hideous roar rises up from the creatures and from him, as if these spoken words hurt them.
    “You are being eaten away from the inside. The nature of sin is born into you from the day you are conceived. The rottenness you see is the sin that leads to your death, which leads to me. I own the sting of death. Yes, your physical body will someday rot as well, but that is not what I relish. I relish seeing your very nature cause you to decompose from within. I enjoy accusing you in front of him in your full shamefulness. His love for you is unbearable.”
    The pool of water disappears and his hold on me releases. I fall flat against the hard rock. I scream out as I feel a shock of pain shoot through my left forearm and into my shoulder. During the fall, my left arm curled under my body, and it absorbed the blow against the ground. I quickly grasp it with my right hand and pull it close to me. I can tell that it is broken. Instead of having a straight line from my elbow to my wrist, my arm has an L curve in it. It makes me weak in my legs, so I drop to one knee.
    “Hold it out to me,” he says.
    I reluctantly hold out my broken arm to him, supporting it with my right hand. It is too weak and painful to hold it up by itself. He grabs it, yet it doesn’t hurt. When he removes his hand, it is healed.
    “I, too, can perform miracles,” he says, smiling, moments before he disappears again.
    I am left in the room with my thoughts and the hideous creatures. Every few moments, I hear one of them whisper or see one shoot across the room. For the moment, they leave me alone. Thinking on the last few moments, I realize my government conspiracy idea was a desperate thought from a desperate man. I have no way of making sense of this place. I realize at that moment that my intellectual theories and philosophical proclamations are shells. No amount of logic is going to save me. They offer me no comfort or