Secrets from a Church Basement: The Desperate Diary of Fresco Ayers

Apology for the Coming Attractions

All I know is that you're lucky. For now. You won't stay that way.

My work has opened a seam into a place we should not know. Everyone will pay for my hubris. 

I don't know if I can make things right, but I won't give up. 

I stepped through the closet. Within only a few moments, I was blind again. And I started hearing things from my past. Terrible things. Things I thought I'd buried for good decades ago. The gurgling screams of my dead wife echoed without mercy. They never stopped. They only got louder as they mixed with random bits of conversation from people I've probably never met.

After a long while of this, I heard the voice of Jo in one ear while my deceased wife spoke in the other. "Open your eyes and rejoice in what you've done," they exclaimed in unison. I didn't want to do it. I only wanted to die.

Any misplaced faith in a loving God I may have been carrying around had already disappeared by that point. My loved ones had suffered. They were still suffering by the sounds of it. And, now, so was I.

With no way out of the sonic assault, I eventually opened my eyes. What I saw I cannot adequately translate. Perhaps that is for the best. You may get your chance soon anyway.

I was suspended within impossibly vibrant colors and rapidly changing patterns. Mutants swarmed around me. Ugly, vile creatures with the dripping and distorted body parts of different kinds of animals. They grabbed and clawed and wheezed and huffed.

I really believed I would be devoured. But they did everything just short of that. It felt like a lifetime of torture, times two.

I'm not sure how I got out of that mess. I remember hearing music. Perhaps the blood drifters brought me back. 

In any case, the drifters left behind another gift. And it's now clear to me that each of these paintings depicts some of the visual elements of the world from which they came. Still, what exactly is being expressed? We have to know.

But time is not on our side. I'm so, so sorry for that.