An atheist urinates on the Bible to defy God, but Jesus Christ makes him fall in terror.
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The Reckoning of Marcus
In the dim light of his cluttered apartment, Marcus sat hunched over his computer, the air thick with the scent of cold coffee and dust from electronic gadgets. It was well past midnight, but the harsh glow of the screen cast sharp shadows around the room. At 32, Marcus wore a tattered t-shirt, and his eyes sparkled with a manic excitement that bordered on madness.
On a stack of old computer magazines lay a worn leather-bound Bible, a relic inherited from a grandmother he had long despised. Chloé, perched nervously on the edge of a battered couch, fiddled with her phone, avoiding the sacred object at all costs. “I swear, Marcus, you’re going too far,” she murmured, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Not funny. It’s disrespectful,” Marcus shot back, his tone flat and devoid of any joy. He adjusted the webcam, ensuring it captured the table—and especially the Bible—perfectly. “Disrespectful to whom, Chloé? A millennia-old ghost invented to control the masses?”
Tonight was not a prank; it was an empirical demonstration. He intended to show everyone that their threats of eternal damnation were meaningless. “I’m shitting on their dogma!” Marcus declared, an adamant atheist fueled by a need for confrontation. He spent his nights debating online, searching for flaws in any spiritual thought.
But tonight, the confrontation was physical, definitive. “Why film this? Do you want to get banned from the platform?” Chloé asked, her anxiety palpable as she stood up. She had followed Marcus for years, drawn to his raw intelligence, but the darkness of his actions was beginning to suffocate her. “Banned? No, I’m seeking truth and attention. Look at the title of the stream: ‘The Experiment of Damnation.’ If God exists, let Him strike me down now. It’s perfect. The ultimate challenge. If their God is so omnipotent, so fierce, if He punishes irreverence, He will manifest.”
Marcus took a deep breath and downed a glass of water, placing it ostentatiously near the Bible. The scent of ancient leather mixed with the dampness of the apartment was almost suffocating. “Imagine the audience, Chloé. Thousands of believers praying at their screens for lightning to strike me. And what? Nothing. I’ll prove to them that there’s no one in charge, that the heavens are empty.” Chloé retreated toward the hallway door.
“I can’t watch this. Really, I can’t. You know I’m not religious. But there are limits to provocation. There’s danger—not spiritual, but real. The hatred you’ll attract.” “Hatred fuels engagement, my dear,” Marcus retorted, a predatory smile on his lips. He was already in performance mode.
Chloé shook her head, disappointment etched in her eyes. “When you’re done with your show, call me. I’m sleeping in the guest room, and if the police come knocking, that’s your problem.” She left the room, slamming the door just hard enough to emphasize her disapproval.
Marcus savored the ensuing silence, checking the viewer count—already 5,000. Comments flooded the screen, a furious mix of insults, death threats, and desperate prayers. Leaning into the microphone, his voice calm and almost professorial, he began, “Good evening, dear viewers. You are here to witness the failure of dogma.”
He held the Old and New Testaments, the foundation of Western morality, and prepared to prove their symbolic uselessness in the most primitive way possible. “I am about to commit the ultimate sacrilege, and I expect the supreme being, the one who supposedly governs the universe, to intervene. I’m giving Him exactly 60 seconds to stop me.” He straightened, unbuckling his belt, the atmosphere charged with static electricity and tension. Locking eyes with the camera, he declared, “If I’m not struck by lightning, transformed into a saddle, or devoured by demons, then you’ll know, as I do, that the very idea of God is merely a psychological crutch. Thirty seconds.”
In the silence of his small apartment, Marcus could hear his heart pounding. This was the riskiest act he had ever conceived—not physically, but as a cosmic challenge. He felt a rush of pure adrenaline, the thrill of transgression. “Twenty seconds,” he positioned himself in front of the table.
The Bible lay open to the Psalms, seemingly at random. “Ten seconds.” Marcus chuckled softly. “Time’s ticking, Lord. Your faithful are hanging on your lips—or at least your lightning.” “Three, two, one, zero.” Nothing. The screen flickered. The video feed remained stable. The world continued. Marcus grinned widely.
This was the moment. He began his act. The sound was liquid and intimate, amplified by the proximity of the microphone. The initial acrid smell quickly blossomed, soiling the leather and yellowed pages. He took his time, ensuring each page absorbed the insult. Once finished, he leaned back, breathing heavily.
He was drenched in cold sweat, but his face radiated triumph. “And there you have it!” he exhaled into the microphone, his voice trembling with exhilaration. “End of the experiment. The Bible is defiled, the act is complete, and I’m still here, intact, more atheist than ever.” A deluge of comments erupted. Believers screamed foul, while atheists celebrated.
Marcus felt invincible. He had won. He had humiliated the idea of divinity before thousands of witnesses. He abruptly cut the video feed, severing the virtual script. It was time to clean up. The silence that followed was almost total, broken only by the hum of his computer’s CPU. As he gathered rags, a smile lingered on his face.
Triumph began to mix with a slight nausea from the odor and adrenaline. He lifted the soaked Bible. It was surprisingly heavy. Suddenly, the temperature in the room plummeted. This wasn’t a draft; it felt as if the air itself had been sucked away by an invisible void, leaving behind a cold, metallic, and painful chill.
Marcus froze, rag in hand. “The insulation in this place is ridiculous,” he muttered, trying to rationalize the event. Then he heard a sound—not from the apartment, but from within his head, a dull, deep vibration, like an organ playing a note too low for human ears but felt in his chest.
Glancing nervously at the computer, he noticed the screensaver had activated, displaying a black background. Above the monitor, a light appeared. There was no visible source for it. It wasn’t projected; it simply existed. Marcus squinted. The light was an intense, pure white, the kind that should burn the retina, yet strangely only drew his gaze.
It shimmered slightly like heat rising from asphalt, but it felt frigid. His heart raced again, this time not from excitement, but from primal fear. “It’s just a migraine,” he told himself, clutching his temples, fatigue and tension mounting. He wanted to turn, to call for Chloé, but his feet were glued to the floor.
The weight of the Bible became unbearable. The white light began to coalesce, taking shape. It rose vertically, casting no shadow despite its intensity. Then Marcus saw it—a figure, immense, towering beyond the confines of the ceiling.
Despite the cramped space, it was draped in what appeared to be a robe of such whiteness that human fabric seemed trivial. The face—Marcus couldn’t focus on its features. It warped and shifted, reflecting all the light of the cosmos and none. It was not a visage of peace but of transcendent authority, an understanding that surpassed all comprehension.
Marcus recognized the figure—not because he believed, but because this image was etched in the collective unconscious he had so scorned: Jesus Christ. But this was not the gentle Jesus of stained glass; it was a colossal presence, a force of nature condensed in his living room. The figure spoke not with words but with a resonance that vibrated through Marcus’s spine. It was a question, a regret, an accusation.
Marcus let out a muffled scream, a pathetic, high-pitched sound. His legs buckled, and he fell. The book did not hit the ground with the expected thud. It hovered a few inches above the soiled floor. The liquid on the leather and pages began to retract, evaporating not into the air but absorbed by an invisible heat, leaving the book strangely clean, as if the event had never happened—except for the lingering smell.
The scent remained, now mingled with an ancient, earthy perfume. Marcus crawled backward, desperately trying to distance himself from the luminous figure. Fear overwhelmed him, erasing any trace of his scientific arrogance. He had proven his point, and the answer stood before him, horrifying in its majesty. He tried to rise and flee toward the hallway, toward Chloé’s room, but felt an immense, invisible force pressing down on his chest, pinning him to the ground. He couldn’t breathe; there was no physical contact, yet he was immobilized.
The figure leaned slightly, its light intensifying, revealing the only thing Marcus could focus on: a gaping hole in the palm of its raised hand, emanating a terrible heat. Marcus shut his eyes, screaming internally as pure terror prevented him from even struggling.
He realized he hadn’t defied nothingness. He had defied something, and that something was there. The air vibrated again. When he forced his eyes open, terrified by the sensation of his own insignificance in the face of this power, he saw the hand begin to move, slowly approaching him. The light was the last thing he saw before the world became a white wave of pure threat.
He felt like an ant under a magnifying glass. The voice, without words, resonated one last time in his mind—a deep, terrible vibration. “You sought me, and here I am.” The silence shattered like glass under the white deluge. It wasn’t a blinding light but the complete absence of all known colors, a saturation so absolute that it tore at his retina and, deeper still, his consciousness.
It wasn’t heat or cold but an unbearable pressure. The weight of infinity concentrated at a single point. The man’s body ceased to exist. He was reduced to a singular thought, a frequency of terror that screamed without making a sound. The hand, that spectral form, vanished into the homogeneity of the white, but its presence became the very air, the environment, the essence of his being.
Amidst this sensory annihilation, he understood that the entity hadn’t come to destroy him physically. Physical destruction would have been a swift mercy. It had come to peel him from the inside, layer by layer. It was an extraction, a cosmic curiosity examining an ant found beneath a stone. “You sought me, and here I am.”
The thought resonated again, but this time it was not a threat. It was a fact, a definitive and irrefutable confirmation of his own madness. Billions of pieces of information, forgotten equations, symbols etched on invisible monoliths began to whirl in his mind at a speed that shattered his mental structure.
The knowledge he had spent his life pursuing was given to him in an instant—not as illumination but as a deadly poison. He saw the alignment of forces governing the universe, the fragile fabric of reality, and the yawning abyss waiting behind it. He saw himself as a biological accident, a statistical error, an insignificant thought in the vastness, and what he saw devoured him. Time dissolved.
One second could last an eternity or never exist at all. In this chaotic flow, he felt contact. The hand was no longer a form but a direct connection to his essence. It was pulling. It was siphoning the substance of his identity, his dearest memories, the structure of his language, the reason for his impulses.
Suddenly, he recalled the sound of wind in the trees, the taste of bitter coffee, the texture of an old leather book—banalities, human anchors. He clung to them desperately, fighting against the pull. He realized that his only hope lay not in understanding the entity, which was impossible, nor in giving it what it sought—his humanity. He thought of the last person who had loved him, a blurred and distant face, a forgotten warmth.
He made that simple memory a wall, a ridiculous shield against omnipotence. The transfer intensified. The voice, without words, changed tone. There was a slight confusion—a whisper of surprise in that cosmic vibration. The entity had expected total capitulation, an immediate fusion of the inferior mind into the higher consciousness.
It hadn’t anticipated this futile resistance, this simple attachment to the pain of existence. This small human refusal became his only act of greatness. He could not overpower the entity, but he could refuse to be an easy read. The white deluge transformed into a silent scream.
The extraction was interrupted not by the strength of the man but by the sudden boredom of the entity. Frustrated by this small impurity, it withdrew as quickly as it had appeared, leaving behind a void so brutal it was almost as violent as the initial shock. Reality returned, not gradually, but like a hammer striking a bell.
The man found himself curled up on the cold floor of his lab. The familiar creaking of the floorboards under his weight, the smell of ozone and accumulated dust surrounded him. The world had returned to brown, gray, and mundane. He opened his eyes. The room was exactly as he had left it. The equipment was on.
Monitors displayed static data. The spectral projector rested on the table, its fans humming softly. Nothing was broken, nothing had burned—except for him. He tried to rise. His limbs obeyed him only with painful slowness, as if they were filled with quicksand. The first thing he realized was that he felt nothing.
He carried a heavy internal silence. Fear was gone. Terror had consumed itself. He touched his face. His skin was icy, covered in cold sweat. He staggered toward the mirror he kept in the corner for checking his appearance during long work nights. What he saw didn’t shock him; he was no longer capable of shock.
The man in the mirror was him, but old—not aged by years, but aged by a mind that had seen too far. His eyes weren’t tired; they were empty. The reflection of the lights danced in them without being absorbed. They were the eyes of someone who had stared into the sun until the sun withdrew.
He realized that an essential part of him was missing. Not just fear, but joy, curiosity, impatience. The fervor that had driven him to seek the impossible had been stripped away. He was not a triumphant survivor. He was a man from whom shadow—and thus substance—had been removed.
He approached the main console, where the signal had been amplified. He searched for the recorder, the small device designed to capture frequencies beyond the visible. He needed to know how much time had passed. The recorder was off. He pressed the power button. Nothing. He shook it. The device opened, revealing its internal circuits. The hard drive was melted.
The electronics had been pulverized into fine gray dust. The violence had not been external. It had been injected directly into the machine, burning it from within. There was no material proof of what had happened, except for his own catatonic state. The man sat before the console.
He ran a hand over the cold screen of a monitor that displayed the waveform he had generated at the beginning of the experiment. It was a perfectly sinusoidal line, innocent. He inhaled. The air was heavy, saturated with silence that wasn’t the absence of noise but the absence of life. Then he felt the difference.
He no longer had the thirst for knowledge, but he possessed understanding—one that had no words, no mathematical formulas, no symbols. He knew what held the world together, and he knew how precarious that holding was. He had become a living encyclopedia of fragility. He looked up at the ceiling.
He knew it was no longer there, the entity. It had obtained what it wanted—a reading—and had left behind the defective vessel. But in its withdrawal, the spectral vibration had left a scar, a remnant. He understood that the hand hadn’t just taken; it had also deposited something within him, a fragment, an echo.
He was no longer just a man; he was an observer connected by a tenuous and painful thread to cosmic consciousness. And that link was permanent. He tried to stand again. This time, it was easier. He headed toward the exit of his underground laboratory. He needed to return to the surface, to natural light, to the familiar sounds of the city.
He reached the spiral staircase that led up to his office above. He climbed slowly, each step a trial against the regained heaviness of gravity. When he reached the door, he paused, placing his hand on the cold brass doorknob. He no longer feared what he would find outside. Fear had been replaced by a calm, terrible certainty. He turned the knob.
Daylight filtered through the curtains. The office was peaceful, filled with the smells of paper and ink. He took a few steps into the room, his senses gradually regaining their acuity. He heard the distant sound of a car, the cry of a bird, the noises of life. He arrived at his window, gently pulling aside the thick curtains.
Outside, the world was there. People walked on the sidewalk, indifferent and hurried. Life continued, absurd and wonderful. He watched a young couple laugh together, carefree. In his mind, he heard the echo of the entity’s laughter, distant and deep—a spectral vibration that understood the joke of human existence.
Now he knew the truth behind every smile, every building, every atom, and that knowledge was a prison. He brought his hand to his temple. There was no pain, just silence. But then, he felt the echo manifest. Not the voice, but a sensation of movement. The air before him, beyond the glass, shimmered slightly like an invisible heat wave.
He blinked, staring at the street below. There was no hand, but there was a presence, an enduring, permanent observation. He realized the entity hadn’t left. It had merely changed locations. It was no longer in his lab. It was in the world, and he was the only one who could see it.
The man turned slowly, stepping away from the window. He moved toward his desk, where his research journal lay filled with symbols frantically scrawled. He sat heavily, picking up a pen. He had to document this. It was his last reflex as a scientist. But as he placed the pen on the paper, his hand trembled.
He couldn’t form the letters. Human language now seemed as ridiculous and limited as a child’s babble. He stared at the blank page. Finally, after a long moment of frozen silence, he dropped the pen and closed the journal. There was nothing more to write. Knowledge was not meant to be shared.
He remained seated, motionless, facing the wall. The world continued to live outside, oblivious to the invisible rift he had opened. And in the silence of his own skull, he heard the vibration again—not threatening, but familiar. “You sought me, and here I am. And here I am.” The man knew he hadn’t found it. He had been freed.
