Come In, Patmos

A revelation from the wrong end of the radio dial. A short story.

If I hadn’t come down with the flu, I never would’ve found out I was the Antichrist.

But there I was—puking, sweating, and broke—waiting four hours at a free clinic sandwiched between a guy coughing up blood and a woman reading a conspiracy blog out loud. I was between radio gigs again, which meant no insurance, no backup plan, and no wifi.

Radio jobs had dried up faster than my throat after a Sunday shift. Stations were getting swallowed by hedge funds or replaced by automation, or they just went dark. Every week, someone I knew was replaced by an AI. Everyone listened to podcasts or streamed music anyway. Didn’t matter.

So yeah, I was miserable. But I wasn’t evil.

Or so I thought.

The doctor looked tired. One of those guys who seemed like he used to care, back before the country gave up on healthcare and he gave up on shaving. He looked at my bloodwork, then at my scalp, then back at the paper. His mouth twitched like a bug was crawling across his tongue.

“Wait here,” he said, backing out of the room.

I waited a long time.

Then the lights cut out.

The hum of the fluorescent tubes disappeared, and everything inside the clinic felt like it had gotten five degrees colder. I thought I heard something whisper my name—but maybe that was the fever talking.

Next thing I knew, two people in gray suits and surgical masks came in. No badges. No words. Just gloved hands and an air of quiet authority that screamed: We’re not with the hospital.

“Is this a joke?” I asked as they ushered me into a nondescript van out back.

Nobody answered. The windows were blacked out. My phone was taken.

We drove for hours. Could’ve been the desert, could’ve been a Costco parking lot for all I could see. I passed out twice. Once from the fever. Once from whatever they injected me with halfway through the ride.

When I woke up, I was in what looked like an upscale rehab center crossed with a Cold War bunker. The walls were thick. The lights were soft. The air smelled like lavender and formaldehyde.

And there she was. Striking like a hot slap. Jeanine Itch.

She stood in the doorway like she’d been waiting centuries for me to wake up. Tall, slender, black hair that shimmered like polished obsidian, piercing eyes that didn’t just look through you—they cataloged every inch of your soul. A mouth to die for. And a look of total sex... cold, icy sex. Dressed in a business-like top and skirt, but a business out of a porn video. And with a silver cross in the most enticing place that caught the light a little too easily. Her voice was smooth, like a court summons wrapped in velvet.

“Welcome,” she said. “You’ve been chosen.”

I tried to sit up, but everything hurt—my arms, my back, my soul, if that’s still a thing.

“Chosen for what?” I croaked.

She didn’t blink. “You’re the fulfillment of prophecy. The tipping point. The final act in a story older than time.”

“So... a prophet?”

She smiled politely, like I’d flubbed an answer on a game show. “No. You’re the Antichrist.”

I laughed—mostly to keep from vomiting. “Wrong guy. I flunked out of youth group. I play Toto deep cuts on request. That’s it.”

Jeanine stepped into the room, set a thick binder on the table beside me, and opened it to a page marked IDENTIFYING CHARACTERISTICS: CANDIDATE 666-1A.

There was a photo of my scalp. Zoomed in. Highlighted.

A birthmark. Three perfect curves. Twisting into each other.

A six. Then another. Then a third.

I stared at it, then at her. “No. Nope. That could be anything. Coffee spill. Ink smudge. Psoriasis.”

“It’s fate,” she said. “And fate doesn’t care if you’re ready.”

Then she touched my hand with hers—ice-cold—and whispered, deep and breathy, tickling me in places I forgot I had, but ice-cold—“This will all make more sense... after orientation.”

---

Sleep came like a sedative administered by force. Or maybe I wasn’t sleeping. Maybe I’d never actually woken up since the clinic.

The room was dark. Heavy. Buzzing with some low frequency that made my stomach clench.

In the dream, I was strapped to a table made of bone. The restraints weren’t leather—they were fingers. Bony, pale, and twitching with anticipation. My chest was open. Peeled.

A figure leaned over me. Shapeless and vast. It hummed with pleasure as it reached into my ribcage and pulled out my liver, taking a thoughtful bite.

Another pulled out my heart and licked it like a lollipop. It was pleasurable—the tasting, the biting, the licking—but at the same time, dreadful. Agonizing. A cannibal’s victim still alive. Aroused and horrified at once.

I saw my own face on a screen above me—smiling, confident, delivering a political speech with a charisma I’d never had, even in my wildest dreams.

Then that version of me winked and said, “We’re ready to heal the world.”

Everything melted into screaming.

---

Awake. I was given clothes. Dark blue suit. Red tie. The kind of outfit designed by a committee that had never met a human being but had a lot of opinions about “likability metrics.”

Jeanine led me into what looked like a high-tech TV studio. Cameras in all corners. Rows of empty seats. A podium with a glowing symbol pulsing faintly beneath the surface.

“We’d like to get a feel for your tone,” she said. “Just a quick run-through.”

There was a teleprompter. I walked up, throat dry. The lights were too bright. Or maybe the walls were too dark. Every instinct screamed this wasn’t a room — it was a cage.

The script started simple:

“My name is—”

I froze. I didn’t say my name.

I didn’t want to.

I tried again. Nothing came out.

Jeanine smiled from the shadows. Watching. Like a scientist who wanted to see which way the rat would run.

I forced myself to keep reading.

“We must unite… under a single truth… for peace, progress, and planetary renewal…”

My voice cracked on “planetary.” I coughed. Started over. Tripped again.

The screen showed my own face with graphics beneath: WORLD CHANGER. PEACEBRINGER. FINAL WORD.

I stared at it. At me.

Who was this person? Who was I supposed to be?

And why did it feel like if I did well — if I nailed this — I would never be allowed to leave?

My hands shook. Sweat pooled in my collar. I imagined Jeanine taking notes, or worse — uploading the footage straight into some cosmic marketing algorithm.

Halfway through, I stopped. Stepped back. “I don’t want this,” I said out loud.

But no one answered. Just silence. Thick and condemning. Like I’d failed a test I didn’t agree to take.

Then they sent me to bed.

And the second nightmare came.

---

I was back in that beige conference room, but it looked like a high-end hotel suite now. Soft lighting, silk sheets, the distant throb of ambient jazz.

Jeanine sat on the edge of the bed. She was smiling. That same practiced smile—Toothpaste ad meets predator drone. But this time it was softer. Her voice, lower.

“I know you’re scared,” she said, as she slipped her heels off with a slow grace that looked a little rehearsed. “But this can be easy.” Once again, her voice tickled deep, in places you don’t talk about in public.

Then she kissed me. Only it wasn’t a kiss. It was a taste.

Her tongue flicked my neck—thin, forked, dry. Her lips retracted. No longer human. Her eyes grew faceted, black, compound. Her arms twisted the wrong way.

She was a fly. A monstrous, glistening thing towering over me.

Then her mouth opened wider than her face. Mandibles unfolded. Legs multiplied. Wings tore the ceiling open.

And suddenly she wasn’t a fly anymore. She was something worse.

Something without edges. Without name. A thing from between atoms.

Tentacles of light. Teeth made of memory. Voices—including mine—echoing through every fold of her ever-growing mass.

I saw people I’d known. Faces in the folds. My mother. My first boss. The teacher I had a crush on in 9th grade. All of them whispering the same word:

“Accept.”

I screamed until I couldn’t remember how to stop screaming. And I knew. They were doing things to me in my nightmares.

---

I woke up mid-shout, face pressed to the cold floor of the orientation suite. The lights were on. Jeanine stood in the corner, calm as a librarian.

“Rough night?” she asked.

“I’m done,” I rasped.

“No, you’re—”

“I said I’m DONE!”

I stood up. Shaking. Raving. Eyes wild.

“I don’t care what you say I am. I don’t care if you kill me. I will not do another speech, I will not read your script, I will not wear your suit. I will not become your talking-point Messiah!”

Jeanine didn’t blink.

The walls began to hum. The lights dimmed. The air changed. Something entered the room.

It wasn’t a sound, exactly—more like a pressure in the skull. Something that turned your thoughts sideways and made your teeth feel loose.

Then—the door opened. And he walked in.

Eight feet tall. Horns slick and sharp. Impeccably dressed in a deep gray suit with a crimson tie that shimmered like muscle and glowed like radiation. In one hand, a jar of Vicks. In the other, nothing—but you got the sense it could be anything. I mean, if one hand had Vicks, the other...

His face changed as he walked: Bill O’Reilly. Bill Clinton. Bill Shatner. Back again. All Bills. All wrong.

He grinned with every step.

Jeanine straightened.

The Devil—the actual Devil—looked at her, smirked.

“Nice!” he said, then turned to me and winked. “You’ve got excellent taste. Twisted, sure. But excellent.”

He clapped me on the shoulder. “You think she picked that form? No. You picked her. Somewhere deep in that moist little brain of yours, you had a folder labeled ‘Inappropriately Hot Demon Women.’ And she crawled right out of it.”

He leaned close. “Could’ve been anything. A man. A cat. A meat tower with fifty eyes and a coupon for chicken wings. But you picked this. You’re deeply misogynistic, by the way.”

Then he turned to Jeanine.

She finally spoke. “He had the mark! On his scalp. Three perfect curves!”

The Devil pointed a claw at me. My hair fell out.

He bent to look. Straightened. “That’s not three sixes. That’s three nines.”

“But—the prophecy—”

“The prophecy was a quiz, not an answer key!” The voice grew impossibly loud. ‘YOU ARE A PAPERWEIGHT COVERED IN SKIN!”

She collapsed to her knees. Her body warped, shrank. Hooves. Fork. Red skin. A cartoon devil, complete with black lipstick smeared like a grin.

“I didn’t understand!” she howled.

The Devil raised both arms. And exploded.

Light. Color. Screams.

Then nothing.

I woke up in my old apartment. Same water stains on the ceiling. Same busted headphones. Same dead wifi. Like none of it had happened.

I applied for a sales job at a big-box electronics store. The interview went bad. On the way out, I saw a crowd gathered around the TVs.

Trevor Day. The kind of name a demonic focus group would come up with if you asked it to engineer obedience. Or sleep.

Perfect face. Perfect suit. Same height as me. Same voice. Well, better.

“I’m stepping away from my work in media,” he said, “because the world is ready to unite.”

Behind him, something with horns stood in the shadows.

TREVOR DAY: A VOICE YOU CAN TRUST

I left.

And because evil never sleeps, I went back into radio.

Small station. Unrated market. Easy favorites. Soft talk. Whatever. Dying signal.

I sleep through most of my shifts now. And I wait. Wait for the moment when the world starts listening to Trevor Day.

Rob Archer, Los Angeles 2025, and Miami 1998