by Chris Kelso
‘You see it’s as good as human, there’s no half measure. There is no half past fucking human. You try your best to control us in different ways, callous and cruel ways that aren’t on a level playing field. I mean, you try to control those of us who were animals by making us fear your power as the dominant species. You do that well – the occasional exhibition of wrath here, the odd possession of an innocent there…
‘You seek to terrify those of us who were once human by putting the fear of god into their hearts. By trapping us in a nightmare and forcing us to look at ourselves until we hate the sight of our own reflections. But Miles, did you know that love is really the key to power, control and happiness? I mean, like, really. It sounds so fucking trite, but it’s true. Equipped with love, real love that can go unrequited because its content just existing on its own, I can see through all your deception. All of it.
‘If you are my mother and we are all lying in your giant womb, then I must say, I reject you mother. I do not love you. How could I love such a monster? Its love you seek, I know it is. That’s what every living thing with sentience wants. I bet you didn’t expect one of your little science experiments to achieve it before you, eh? I have the power now Dunwoody so you’d do well to back the fuck away. I don’t need you to protect me from the darkness anymore or from the beasts that lurk within it. That’s not what being alive is all about. You have to show a little bravery. Arm yourself with love. Let someone inside. Fear is the mind killer, and the highway to fear is the shortest route to defeat.’ – A tear the colour of cucumber juice, translucent in diluted green, runs down the course of his chiselled cheek.
‘I’m very disappointed in you Johnny. If you refuse to co-operate I have no other option than to let the beast get you. He’s on his way. If you cannot achieve light then there is simply no hope for you. You persist on dwelling in the darkness. The beast feeds on darkness. Why?’
‘Because Kad dwells here.’ - While I feel like I have indeed mastered my fear, I can still taste the molecules of my own sweat.
Kad and I share the same locus of consciousness, separated only by body, time and place. She is my ghost sister. I feel inextricably connected to her, she’s the only person who intimately knows how I feel, knows the real me.
‘You know we made this world, not you? This is our world, the one we wanted, where meaningful things happen all the time and it’s more like a work of fiction than any kind of reality that’s gone before. If we made this world, and I made the beast, then surely we’re just as capable of destroying this world and pulling apart the sinews of the fucking bogyman prowling in the shapes of our dark home? You want me to believe I’m trapped in some taxonomical system, stuffed and docile but once dangerous and mobile. So I’ll take the memory of a streetpunk who tried to rob a convenience store. It is what it is. You have to accept your lot in life, what gives us the God-given right to anything better? Happiness has to be earned, I know that now. You appeal to the entitled. I don’t want to look into the past, I don’t really have a past to look back into. I do have a future though. It can be whatever I choose it to be.’
‘You think you know it all.’ – He mocks.
‘I know you’re not human.’
‘That’s not true. As viruses we are half supra molecular complexes and half biological entities. We behave like bacteria, more complex even than biochemical mechanisms.’
‘…and have you forgotten about the other monsters, like the parasitic life-form that assimilated organisms into its giant, gelatinous bulk; then there was the extra-terrestrial with convex eyes and tentacles that tore gateways to awful universal extra-dimensions; or what about that phantom with the mechanical arm, slotted eyes and metallic teeth that tormented each member of your family with complex philosophical questions? The beast that’s coming is ten times worse – skin desiccated, pulled thick-tight over poles and splinters of bone, an array of eyes bleeding down itself.’
‘Really?’
‘The beast has serrated teeth across the entire surface of its hide that chomps repeatedly, instinctively. Six-foot-long tentacles poke out from its layered abrasive and flaps wildly. It could skin you. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. Page 295.’
‘This beast wants revenge?’
‘The beast hates all of you. It will swim through the vellum-thin walls of this city and devour you all, starting with you. The funny thing is that you created it, you and the rest of your dark dwellers. You-ou-ou-ou-ou…’ – his electrolarynx appears to catch on the word ‘you’ and trail off in a hideous siren of vowels. The tears have interfered with his circuitry. I knew the illusion would be ruined if he continued to malfunction like this in my presence. Love is evanescent.
Part of Dunwoody’s ugliness, what makes him so detestable, stems from the preservation of the uncanny.
‘This will be a pyrrhic victory Kurt.’ – he says finally.
Dunwoody starts to clog on his grief and sounds like a cat hawking up a hairball or a dog about to vomit. The thought of killing him in my heart and mind has wrung out my adrenal glands.
- I’m not Ahab at all. I’m the fucking whale. But, please, call me Ishmael…
Nine -
‘...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.’
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
What is the conclusion? Miles Dunwoody has been and gone from my life. Now I have a life left to leave with, what do I do with it? I sense the struggle isn’t over just yet.
I have these faint criss-crossing scars on my wrists. I wasn’t trying to kill myself, just trying to feel something other than complete sadness. It didn’t work. No one found me and I never cut deep enough to sever any arteries. Didn’t stop me making a habit of it.
I use a shard of glass to cut the alphanumeric symbol tattooed on the witches into my arm. I finally proved myself. I’m finally worthy. Or I’m about to be at least.
In the mirror of my mind my flesh is the off-pink pallor of liverwurst; my doughy features are as inhuman and unsympathetic as the cosmic entity which awaits me.
Kad puts a tab of rat poison on her tongue, rivulets of mascara streaming down her cheeks. I do the same. Her confidence has returned, tough as shrapnel. Her anaemic complexion holds all the light I’ll ever need.
We walk out into the railed parapet and gaze into an ingot ocean of oil. At our inverted reflection.
- I’ll never get out of this fucking place any other way…
I prepare to swallow. I hear Kad gulp. Ripples break the symmetry of my reflection. I see in the distance, a traveller huddled at the prow of a…
- Is that a ship?
I look beside me and Kad is gone, but when I contemplate at the unsettled water I see her sanding right next to me. Is this a dream? If it is, then the water holds my dream’s structure.
I refuse to ever look up from the reflective mirror into the polished monitor. Whoever or whatever I was, it doesn’t matter anymore. I will keep dreaming, even if in doing so, my ship evaporates into the dust of imagination.
We’re getting exactly what Dunwoody thinks we deserve. Sick and forgotten in the south of nowhere…
To my left there’s a busted up old warehouse with kids inside playing around with chemical drums and shards of broken glass—seem happy enough. The rippling surface of the sea looks serene. It’s too distant to be real. Nothing pleases me anyway.
I’m stuck in this crumbling city. Rather in here than out there among the street-smart living dead. I rest my stomach on the glass balustrades, lean over to inhale the grease-sea. The surface of water undulates. Maybe there’s something beyond.
A typhoon is headed southwards. I can hear the great whale who bit off my fingers thunder just beneath the surface of the oil. The beast writhes under the surface and emits a shriek of such celestial suffering that K
ad and I both experience the true isolation of the universe in the quarries of our soul, if only for a brief moment. I’m stumbling towards a dénouement here.
I gaze into the offing. What do I expect to see?
My greatest foe.
My son.
I’m ready for him. I’m ready to belong.
‘Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.’
- Samuel R. Delany, Neverÿon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Kelso is an award-winning genre writer, editor, and illustrator from Scotland. His work has been translated into French and he is the two-time winner of the Ginger Nuts of Horror Novel of the Year (in 2016 for 'Unger House Radicals’ and in 2017 for its sequel 'Shrapnel Apartments'). ‘The Black Dog Eats the City’ made Weird Fiction Reviews Best of 2014 list.
Chris Kelso features in The Black Room Manuscripts Volume Three with his short story The Cloud Sculptors Of Hachimantai, co-written with Preston Grassmann.
Some words are born in shadows.
Some tales told only in whispers.
Under the paper thin veneer of our sanity is a world that exists. Hidden just beyond, in plain sight, waiting to consume you should you dare stray from the street-lit paths that sedate our fears.
For centuries the Black Room has stored stories of these encounters, suppressing the knowledge of the rarely seen. Protecting the civilised world from its own dark realities.
The door to the Black Room has once again swung open to unleash twenty five masterful tales of the macabre from the twisted minds of a new breed of horror author.
The Black Room holds many secrets.
Dare you enter…for a third time?
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The Sinister Horror Company is an independent UK publisher of genre fiction founded by Daniel Marc Chant and J R Park. Their mission a simple one – to write, publish and launch innovative and exciting genre fiction by themselves and others.
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