by Jordan Krall
As Jack’s and his body became more machine than human, he drove into an abyss of unimaginable horror and Samson realized he’d be there forever. No roads. No light. No cities. No earth. No sky.
Samson let tears gush out in a bitter deluge of motor oil.
EPILOGUE
Mr. Silver snickered.
Everything had gone exactly as planned, even better. It was the spectacle of the thing that was important. It was the pomp, the glitz, the sheer entertainment value that filled his being with power.
He had been having the dreams since he was a child but up until recently he had not known the meaning of them. He had believed them to be bizarre, childish fantasies taking place in some fantasy world of polluted water and monstrous creatures that slithered out of some noxious netherworld. But they turned out not to be fantastical dreams of a young mind.
They were premonitions.
Silver had spent his youth and his teenage years honing his skills at manipulation. Through sheer will and intensified fellness, he took down anyone who was in his way. It had appeared like providence was always on his side.
By adulthood he’d amassed a great fortune not only in monetary terms but in pure, tenebrous knowledge. Thousands of ancient texts, clay tablets, animal skins, human flesh tomes: all of it collected and studied by Silver until he knew everything he needed to know.
So now he stood on the stage, looking out onto the Atlantic Ocean where the city of R’lyeh had risen like a jade erection preparing to fuck the world into oblivion.
Silver snickered again.
He grabbed the pages of the Abrund Abschaum he had torn from Paulo’s body and started to read them into the microphone. The audience sat enraptured, their brains and bodies buzzing in a meditative haze. They would soon realize they have had the same dreams except in theirs they were simply pawns of the new world, fodder for the ancient machinery that had finally come back to life.
Silver looked at Enzo who was sobbing into his hands. No doubt his brain was spinning with insanity. Despite his outgoing personality, he was weak and unprepared to understand pure unadulterated knowledge.
Silver read from all fifty-two pages of the text. He watched the audience stand up from their seats and slowly walk down to the beach. Oh, how happy he was to see them wading in the water, waiting for his instructions.
“You simple-minded servitors. Now you walk,” he said, dropping the microphone in order to bask in his finalized glory.
Behind him, Enzo fell to the ground, his bones having turned to jelly. In front of him both Cop and Slave were having violent seizures that ended in their milky eyes popping out of their skulls and their ribs breaking out of their chests.
At that moment, Silver knew something had gone wrong.
His mouth that had once snickered with anticipation was now frowning with horror. He could feel it around him, vibrating through multiple dimensions. But this wasn’t supposed to happen, not according to his dreams.
Was there a part of his childhood dream he had forgotten?
It didn’t matter. Silver stood there on the stage, watching the stupefied audience, those passive spectators as they walked through the water towards R’lyeh. And if they had turned back to see their once revered entertainer, they would have seen him express a silent scream of agony as he was devoured by an invisible abomination.
Within seconds, there was nothing left.
Nothing at all.
THE END