Francis of the Filth

by George Miller

  With that, Chin Chin duly retreated into a slash in the atmosphere, it closed over him and he was gone. Negi Generation 4 stepped forward just as the window was closing and pointed his own little leeky finger at Chin Chin and shouted “Floss!” yet he couldn’t be sure that the dark lord had caught his admonition or not. With the peace lord gone, the conditions quickly returned to their earlier state. What remained however, was one minion. The gateway had closed before it had entered and it remained on its own looking very silly and sheepish and somehow only half the size it was before. “Go,” Frank said to it, pointing down the mountain. It immediately relieved itself and then scampered down the mountain to spend the rest of its days with a host of scorpion creatures, other unknown terrorists of the beast world, and one old Lemon.

  After spending the entire episode huddled together on their buttocks, Pink Guy and Salamander Man stood and gathered themselves once again to Frank. If the resurrection of Negi Generation 4 wasn’t enough of a miracle to last them a lifetime, Frank’s defiance of Chin Chin certainly was. They knew what this meant. They finally understood that the tiers weren’t just changing but had now unequivocally changed and that Frank was at the very heart of that change. It seemed to them that there was no longer anything beyond Frank’s capabilities. Yet Pink Guy at least also knew that Frank himself was not the most stable of characters and in his heart he wondered why such power had been given to one like Frank and what would become of it. But he kept these thoughts to himself.

  Frank embraced them in a huddle and once again spoke with calm conviction to the air. “Really, if that rat comes near me one more time, I will crush it completely.” It was Alpha Centurion. He was ropeable.

  “Wow, Franku. Alpha seems to be a little hot under the collar! Well, he would be if he weren’t stark naked and had a collar ha ha ha!” Neither of them had any idea that Frank, Pink Guy and Salamander Man had been away. Frank quietly walked over and pushed Alpha Centurion back into the cupboard.

  “Stay in there till you’ve calmed down, my friend,” he said.

  “Frank! Come on, Frank!” whined Centurion as Frank closed the door on him.

  “Think about what you’ve done!”

  “I’m sorry!” came the muffled cry through the door.

  Frank ushered the others out the bedroom door. “I’m ready for breakfast. How about you?” They all agreed. The closet door was kicked open just as the others were stepping out the front door and the little fellow waddled quickly down the hallway. “Come on, Frank! Frank! I’m hungry, too!” The front door closed before he could get there. He opened it and chased his friends down the stairwell. “Frank!” he called. “Frank!” He raced after them and caught up to them just as he was pulling a T-shirt on. Regrettably, he had forgotten to put on any pants.

  Chapter 13

  Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. Everything around him was tinged that way, and nothing around him remained untouched by it. It was so divergent he couldn’t properly discern if this were actuality or an alternate reality; if he were in the truth or above it. He had been to many realms and dimensions now, and had seen the most peculiar and the most heinous. But he had always been fully cognisant of their realities and his own. Until now. Now he viewed as though from outside of time and as though free from the physical constraints of the universes. His peripheral vision was lightly pixilated as though the extremes of his fields of sight were not the ends. He was intoxicated by the experience and disquieted by it.

  The sapphire sky bathed everything below it in a soft blue hue turning the green leaves to aqua and the brown earth to a dark purple. It was cloudless above and around him and that only served to radiate the blueness. The leaves in the trees blew curiously in shades that were more diverse and vibrant than he had known in other realms yet were mysteriously ominous as well. The dimensions in this world - the perspectives, the depths, the lines and shapes - were strange, like his balance was slightly affected or he was hallucinatory. And somehow these oddities all seemed to come back and question whether it was his surroundings that were different or whether it was him who was different at this time.

  He moved over the land as a spirit hovers over the waters, without restraint or inhibition, and he quickly recognized his locale. He had finally returned to Okinawa! Yet it was no longer quite what it had been, just as he was at this time no longer who he had been. The pristine beaches and forests remained in their purity and the ruins of the Soncorp lab in which he had spent most of his life lay undisturbed, a massive hole punched in the middle of it. The roads and schools and shopping centres and hotels were all as he remembered yet presently none of them were quite the same.

  Memories trailed behind him like the tail of a kite as he soared over it all: frolicking in the surf as a young teenager with friends, finding respite in the jungles, running from the vipers, barking at Bitchiro, cowering before Sergeant Benson, the murdered Suncorp employees, the midget boxing and hooker harassment. He could also see people in real time. They were blithely going about their day posting letters, doing the shopping, attending classes, working cash registers, riding bicycles and napping in the sun. None were aware of his presence.

  He soared over the island till the sun began to sink and then he set his feet on the earth by a small tavern. The otherness of this world remained. Dreamlike, he moved about, with the sensation that he was walking on sponges. He was capable of passing through solid objects and perceiving and manipulating the existence of objects beyond his immediate presence. He could sense the overflow of his chromosomes to all he came into contact with and this brought a certain harmony and affection to the whole experience.

  He entered the bar through a side wall. The scene was curiously earthy with a touch of the heavenly. Rustic and friendly, dimly lit yet warm, the tavern was a like a second home to those who dwelled here. Old beer posters with stains and small tears decorated the walls and a couple of yellowing paper lanterns with calligraphy scribbled across them hung from the ceiling over the corners of the bar. Music - enka songs from past generations - played in the background and brought a timeless, if not sacred feel to the place. Behind the bar, an ancient mama-san leaned, her face as lined as the bark of an old tree and her hair coiffed in the manner of a bird’s nest, drew heavily on a cigarette held tightly between her lips.

  Though none of them had been to Okinawa before, his posse were all there, chatting and laughing, drinking and pursuing the good-natured arguments that friendships produce. Safari Man held audience at the bar as he so often did, with Pink Guy (completely lucid), Salamander Man, Alpha Centurion, Drone, Negi Generation 4 and, surprisingly, Percy the Pigeon, all sitting around as though at home. The soft illumination of the scene fostered a spirit of comfort and gentleness.

  Frank watched it all with a full heart. He had never really known love but was beginning to think that, in this mob of colorful scoundrels, he just might have found it. His eyes moved from friend to friend, drawn to each as they spoke and listened and gestured and moved around. Their interactions were intensely pleasing to him. This only made it all the more crushing when another figure suddenly appeared in a back corner of the tavern. Hideous and dark, it lurked with undisguised malice. The friends all noticed it immediately and a deathly silence fell upon them. Their heads turned with horror to see a huge, ugly creature standing as tall as the roof; enormous, bulbous, red eyes bulging out from a triangular head, and long, thin contorted arms holding hands which rubbed together furiously as though making fire.

  Frank recognized the creature immediately. It was the dreaded Dyopatera peace lord which had cut down the beautiful tree effigy in the rice fields realm. After all he’d been through, Frank had thought there was nothing more that could scare him. How wrong he was. With this growing affection for his friends, there came a growing fear - a real terror - that they could be damaged because of him and it cut him to the core. He called out to his friends with a raw desperation but they couldn’t hear him. He raced and stood in front of them
but it was as though he wasn’t there. This was incomprehensible to him. He had this connection with them, not merely through friendship but through his newfound chromosomal solidarity with the omniverses. So he couldn’t understand how this realm or time or apparition could be so completely outside of his influence.

  The peace lord looked once at Frank and then slowly moved toward his friends. They dived for cover behind the bar, tumbling and burrowing into one another, all knees and elbows and screams and terrors. Glasses and bottles were skittled and smashed all over the bar area in the fracas. The friends had never known such fear. They lay in a squirming dog pile on the floor. Alpha Centurion pressed his face to the floor as though trying to bury his head in it. Salamander Man and Safari Man used the same tactic. Drone played dead. Percy the Pigeon and Pink Guy were on their backs looking up. They caught the full terror of its presence.

  Over the top of the counter loomed the hideous figure. Twitching its head, tensing its muscles and rubbing its hands together with even greater action than before, it was a bundle of extreme torment and delight, as though it could hardly stand its own company, yet could barely contain the thrill of unleashing itself. Though its mouth remained fixed, they caught a smirk break across it. It reached down over the counter and picked up Percy as though lifting a toothpick. “You have no business being here,” it said in a gravelly whisper and flung him clear across the room and hard into the back wall. One of his wings broke with a loud snap and he dropped limp to the ground. Frank was aghast but remained unseen and unheard. He was frustrated beyond measure.

  Once again, the great peace lord reached down, this time raising up Pink Guy who was screaming and writhing for all he was worth. Holding him mid-air as though offering a sacrifice, the peace lord spoke to the others on the floor. “Look!” It was a weird voice; small and raspy, yet powerful and frightening. The remaining posse, terrified to their core, failed to obey and continued to burrow into the solid wooden floor. Frank called out to them, “Get out of there! Run for your lives!” The peace lord spoke again. “Look.” This time the words were not merely sound waves but physical matter which seized them, spun them onto their backs and prized their eyes wide open. “Tell Frank,” he wheezed to them, “to crawl back down his hole…” It stared at them with those horrifying, big, red, glassy eyes. “…or there will be suffering to come which he could never have imagined.”

  Those words were accompanied with one swift movement which severed Pink Guy in two. His upper half remained high in the peace lord’s grip while his hips and lower limbs dropped to the ground with a thud. A steady flow of blood and other liquids gushed from his torso. The life drained promptly from Pink Guy’s eyes and he slumped dead in the creature’s hand. There was silence. The friends were too petrified to move or utter a sound. They just watched in disbelief, eyes wide like clocks and mouths agape. It was Frank who first screamed. “No!” he howled. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” He was beside himself with grief. The atmosphere in the tavern remained in stunned silence till it was broken by Alpha Centurion, who cried out in exactly the same manner as Frank had. The others soon accompanied him till the whole place was filled with loud wailing and sobbing. The peace lord looked down on them all. “Tell Frank,” it said again with cold indifference. “Tell him.” With that, it withdrew and dissipated into thin air.

  The others all jumped up and attended hopelessly to Pink Guy’s remains. They tried to place the two halves back together but they just lay there, grotesque in their bloody lifelessness and rapid discoloring. After fooling about like this for a while, they slumped against walls and counters, looked at Pink Guy’s pale face, and mournfully gave up on him. The mama-san, stricken rigid with fear in a corner throughout the whole encounter, began to return to herself yet her senses were now permanently injured. She remained without speech for the rest of her life.

  Safari Man took a leadership role at this point. He grabbed Pink Guy’s torso and gestured for Salamander Man and Alpha Centurion to collect his lower half. They, with the others, followed Safari Man out of the tavern and struggled with the corpse over some grassy mounds and onto the beach. Not a word was spoken amongst them. Frank was there but remained undiscoverable to them. They laid Pink Guy’s remains respectfully on the sand while they gathered branches for kindling. It didn’t take them long to build a sizeable mound of firewood by the shoreline. They then rested Pink Guy’s body on the top. Salamander Man placed five-hundred yen coins on his eyes and then stepped back. They stood together in a line, arm in arm; Alpha Centurion weeping, Salamander Man looking down at the sand, Safari Man with his eyes fixed on Pink Guy, Percy the Pigeon looking up the starry heavens and Drone hovering just off Percy’s shoulder.

  Safari Man gave an impromptu eulogy. “Pink Guy. You were before us; you were our instructor, our brother and our friend. You were what we aspired to be, except for being entirely pink and incomprehensible most of the time and playing your stupid ukulele all the time and…”

  He was cut off by Percy, “Keep it together, man!”

  Safari Man collected himself and continued. “But that was what made you you. And we loved that. And we are better people for that. May you rest in peace, brother. May you move on to pinker skies. May you discover pinker horizons. May the pink lords be with you. May the pinkness of your…”

  “Come on, man, can’t you just let him lie in peace?”

  Safari Man threw a small flower onto the wood pile. The others all did the same. Salamander Man began to play a sad tune on his recorder which Frank recognized as one of the tunes that he had played to the dying salamander man in the watery netherworld.

  They all shed a few more tears before Safari Man stepped forward once again and poured petrol all over the wood pile. He doused everything liberally: Pink Guy, the wood pile, the sand all around it, and when he finally set a match to it, the whole thing exploded like a bomb from the great war. They all were all blown back about twenty meters and singed to a crisp. Even Frank felt it through the weird ether from which he observed all this. When the conflagration died down a little, they gathered around one more time, black and cooked to the core, and bawled once again. Frank could bare it no longer and left them there.

  He woke up on his face. He hated waking up on his face. It was like escaping from a near-fatal choke. But this time he wished it had been fatal. With Pink Guy gone, there seemed little left for him to live for. Life had lost whatever little meaning it had once had. He rolled over and observed his room in the dim light and through the fog of his morning brain. Alpha Centurion was sleeping in the cupboard as usual, only this time he had passed out onto the end of an umbrella which was lodged firmly in the roof of his mouth, cocking his head back and leaving his shoulders and arms slumping forward. He remained blissfully asleep. Frank rolled over and looked under his bed. Salamander Man appeared eternal to him: forever under his bed with a filthy sock hanging from the corner of his mouth while gently rubbing a nipple. Drone lay tipped on the floor beside him as though somehow injured. Negi Generation 4 lay in the middle of the floor sleeping in as perfect a star shape as it was possible for a negi to form. And across the hallway, Safari Man lay sleeping, glasses still on, with his mouth wide open and his safari hat mercifully covering his groin.

  But Pink Guy was nowhere to be seen. This was Frank’s great fear: that what he had just experienced in Okinawa was in fact reality and his closest confidant, Pink Guy, had been severed in two. This world he had woken up to began to cave in on him. All the fear and darkness and anxieties and evil fell upon him and he withdrew into a very deep, dark place. There he found a world of regret and self-loathing. There he met demons which ravaged his soul and cast him further down. And there, he heard the voice penetrate all the terror and the darkness and toll like a bell, “Tell Frank to crawl back down his hole or there will be suffering to come which he could never have imagined.” As frightening as these words were, they were also a form of sweet relief. Perhaps if he lived a life of denial, as though he were just a
nother guy going about his life unpretentiously, then he would be free from all this torment. Perhaps just giving up was not only the easy option but the safest one as well. Maybe surrender was the way to victory. He dwelt on this for a while before finally uttering his submission. “I will.”

  A soft grunt met him in response and Frank froze with fear to think that Dyopatera (or one of his lackeys) had just become incarnate in his room. He rolled over to see a flesh-colored figure looming over him. Slowly he came into focus. “Pink Guy?” Frank said. He immediately sat up. “Pink Guy?!” The darkness within Frank subsided as he jumped up and grabbed Pink Guy hard by the shoulders. “Pink Guy! Pink Guy, it’s you! It’s really you!” Frank was overcome with happiness. He shook Pink Guy hard just to be sure that it really was him and this was all real. This sudden glee and physical exuberance was thoroughly intimidating for Pink Guy, who tried to free himself from Frank’s grip and back away. But Frank had him and wasn’t letting go. He danced around the room holding onto him with Pink Guy shrieking with fear and trying to free himself.