She squirms on her throne, something manufactured from indecipherable bones clumped together into the chair-like shape, decorated with a lattice of interconnected exoskeletons, polished black and brown, gunmetal gray and never-seen summer sky blue. She lifts her massive body from the cramped confines. I lean back as she stretches, twelve, fourteen feet tall. Her snaky heads reach for the ceiling, flicking tongues at it, licking the walls, before settling their attention back on me. Their attention? It is all her, this monstrous beauty, flexing and flaunting her power as veins ride the cartography of muscle beneath the scales, yet still quite visible. But with the movement, the sensual flow, I am reminded of the rumors and her insatiable appetite for the perverse. I cannot imagine what she wants. Can it be any worse than what Ratman wanted? Look how that ended up… I know, no matter what, I will have to shut my brain off and get to whatever it is she wants once she makes her request. Will it be something of a sexual nature? A quest for humanity, to further her sociology studies? Something of myself as yet undetermined? That is the way in some situations. Shut down to move forward. It is the way of those who live in the trenches and travel the dark frontier.
Her nipples drip and I first think—milk?—but it is not milk. It is saliva or some related liquid, and her nipples split into many mouths as well. More mouths—for what purpose?
“What I need is for you to let go, Marlon.”
“Let go of what?”
I know I have taken another step back as she looms over me, then forward. It’s a dance of fear, a waltz inspired by trepidation.
“I need you to let go of…everything.” The last word somehow lengthened, additional syllables added, embellishing it with a gruesome quality.
“What is that supposed to mean? How can I fulfill anything by doing nothing?”
“You’re not paying attention,” she says. Her desire coats the floor, a viscous puddle. She slithers in it, undulates with blatant appreciation, obviously enjoying the sensation. Sighs of pleasure brush my eardrums, though needles tip their reception. My foot slides as the puddle spreads out to me, but I keep my balance. In this dance, she is in the lead.
“I need you to let go of everything you have ever believed in. Everything that makes you human. Everything that matters, except your need for the Centipede.”
Of course, I think. There is nothing else that matters. I can give it all up because nothing else matters as much as the Centipede. Just this one thing…then it is mine!
“Fine. How do I go about letting go of everything to your satisfaction?”
Her smile is something to behold. Then, the words: “I’m hungry.”
“Hungry?” I say, though there is a frisson that the situation inspires, rubbing at my cerebral cortex with the gentle insistence of pumice.
Hungry, she said. Hungry, my cloaked guide had said. Hungry for…
“Through me is the final leg of the Centipede, Marlon. Through me.”
“You mean…”
And she is on me, spikes digging into my flesh as she pounced. Snakes nip at me, tearing off my clothes. Fangs slice into flesh with buttery ease. Her weight suffocates, but that isn’t even the worst. The mouths of her nipples join in, the scalpel incisions of the fangs there injecting me with venom that paralyzes. I am made stone for this derangement of Medusa.
Then she dines.
She sets her grinding vagina on my freed cock, the lips inspiring an erection, an impossible erection, yet the meaty fullness is only necessitated to better dig the barbed teeth jutting from within her into the flesh. Pulling and tearing, the pain incomprehensible—arms torn off a rag doll, defenseless—stuffing the meat into the maw as the tongue from the anus scoops my testicles from the ruptured scrotum and slurps them into the stinking orifice there.
The pain is excruciating, bending all meaning of what I thought were the limits of physical pain, creating new icons to bow down to in the process. Such knowledge, such wisdom, but to what purpose? What if she is only defiling me, slaughtering me, to feast on the remains, for her own means, and all this journey has been for naught? I am a victim of battle before battle has been waged. I am nothing but pain and putty in her hands, mouths. I am frozen; again, I am stone.
She leans in with that large mouth and that one split-pupil eye and says, “Through me is the final leg. My acidic juices, my internal digestive tract, are the penultimate extension of the Centipede. Through me is the path. Through me is the way. I am the light. I am the needle.”
She sounds like a demented god.
“Stop thinking beyond sensation. Pain of this magnitude demands participation. Nothing more matters. Oh, it will all lead to the Centipede, but right now, all I need to do is eat you alive. Devour all of you, your wayward thoughts and delicious flesh, creamy organs, breaking bones—all of it. Grind you to gruel. To shit.”
I want to scream, but this experience, no matter the enormity of suffering, has to be endured without possibility of release. Screaming is not an option, anyway, what with the paralysis. I am bestowed with the experience. Are you experienced? This experience, all that I am. The many mouths with the many teeth nip off chunks of me, slowly gnaw me to…death?
How could death lead me to…?
Death is only the beginning…
But it won’t be exactly slow as I watch the Reptile Queen’s mouth grow wide, jaw unhinged, slack, her throat as my cloaked guide’s face, a wasteland, a void. The alpha and omega of my personal infinity.
She covers my head, clamping tight, asphyxiating me as she tears through the throat, tears my head and my reeling brain from my body. As she decapitates me. I thought she might ingest me whole, as a snake would, but she’s simply joining in, taking some for this mouth. Though the reality of the situation is obvious: I am the feast to be savored by her many mouths.
And my consciousness does not waver. I am awake and mentally taking it all in. It only magnifies the travesty at hand, as I sense the mastication of my head, the skull pulverized, the brain turned to slush. The meat of me, ground down to digestible pieces. Human hamburger.
She takes all of me.
Time truly has no meaning. It is interminable, and sadistic as fuck.
The acids scour me, even the consciousness, somehow, the consciousness. I travel for what seems lifetimes in her belly, her being. I register fleeting thoughts that only heighten the pain.
Pain is my god.
Pain is my being.
I am God. The God of Pain.
Time is elastic.
It is
Now.
Now is forever.
All within the span of a millisecond.
…
Finally. A moment where the pain recedes—a black tide, perhaps rearing back, with a tsunami to follow.
How much more?
How much more?
And I sense it: expulsion. After time immemorial, but perhaps only hours, a day or two, three, I sense all of me somehow released.
I sense the plop of me as I hit a surface so cold it stings. Compared to the preceding experience, I welcome it. A reminder of real pain, something less than. Something bearable. This experience, perhaps ceasing. This experience, one to cherish? I venture not, if the end result is not as I need.
I feel rough spears poke me. I feel soft shards of me being licked off the anus—it must be, having been expulsed, having been shat out of that monstrous beauty, the Reptile Queen—and spitting me out. That abhorrent mouth worthy of a deep kiss if I am where I need to be.
Where I need to be.
The process continues.
I feel a limb, a leg, whole again.
I feel kidneys swell and vertebra sing.
I feel thoughts intensify and heart throb, quiver and forcefully re-ignite.
The shit of me. The shit I am.
I feel another limb, distinguished as an arm. A leg, joining the other. My torso, the foundation for the organs.
My tongue tastes my slimy lips and I almost regurgitate my self, turn myself outs
ide, inside. I have no firm idea beyond the manipulating of me.
Smells cluster as one in my nostrils, repugnant, yet so intoxicating.
My ears whisper to life; they hear a voice—not a voice: humming. Feathery and focused. A sing-songy soundtrack for the outlandish task at hand.
Once I am rolled and licked clean by the tongue it teases the labia lips open. My first sight now is the teeth-lined vagina, smiling in a way. I see the Reptile Queen toil as I never imagined she would, this task hers to complete, for her friend Burroughs.
Please.
“There,” she says. “All done and as ugly as ever.”
I prop myself up on my elbows, take a long gander. Even my clothing is part of the deal, amazingly stitched back together—as I have been—with no signs of having been damaged in the first place.
“You know what to do, right?”
Breathing, taking in the stale, diseased air, realizing wherever I am is not a place where cleanliness has ever trespassed. No, wherever I am is the pit of all filth. It is a shrine to all the garbage that fills our heads, our bodies, our existence, without the trespass of any gods. But this observation subsides; the smell is only stale. My awakening nostrils are adjusting to regular function and not the onslaught of filth. The onslaught of filth is within me…
The thought is eclipsed by the hiss of a cat; and another. The Reptile Queen pulls me from my swivel-headed surveillance, to face her one large eye, both pupils burning as suns about to supernova, the core gone white and blinding.
“You know what to do?” she says, nodding her head to the left.
“Oh, fuck,” I finally say, feeble words to express the completion of this leg of my journey.
She shoves me toward the left, where she directs me with her head nod, and I see it. An empty syringe sitting on a velvet cloth on a block of marble, like a table, or a tomb.
“If you think that was fun, wait until William gets into your blood,” she says, before peering over my head. “I must go. I’ve got…things to tend to. And I’m hungry again.” She laughs, a pillow gutted and feathers filling my ears, and steps back, once, twice, before turning to steam and disappearing.
I walk toward the syringe. Reach out. Hesitate.
My hands are moist and I cannot remember if this is simply a result of what I have gone through, or if what I have gone through is fuel on the fire that is my anticipation. It does not matter. Everything within aligns as it always does. My heartbeat races. The track of my arteries and veins greets unlimited velocity as corpuscles attain optimum speed. There are no winners here. The rampant blood only magnifies the need.
Blood is a dissonant symphony in my ears. The rapid transit a locomotive I can hear now.
My hesitation is only a sign of relief.
I step closer and a handful of cats circle my legs, before scattering into the darkness.
I’ve known anticipation. I live in a state of anticipation. Right now, with the promise of Riding the Centipede so close, anticipation is all I am.
I calm down and force myself through the steps. I pick up the syringe, feel the weight of emptiness, yet also the promise.
I turn to look behind me, where the Reptile Queen had gazed, as if I might receive a transmission.
What I see annihilates all expectations.
Chapter 25 Chernobyl
A throaty drone signifying protest pulsed from within, bypassing the throat and centering on the amygdala. Rudolf Chernobyl, never one to empathize with another person’s emotions, found himself hooked into Marlon’s innermost sensations: dread; fear. But beyond fear, obstinate ideals crept around the periphery. Perhaps the scent of defiance. But the truth was what flooded over Rudolf, bulldozing its way into him: dread; fear.
Abstractions mounted and then crumbled. A menagerie of roiling life abounded: reptiles, snakes, insects, humans, yet all grafted together, a conglomeration of the anatomically obscene, mutated, distorted—monstrous. All of this fluctuated, folded inside-out, outside-in, stretched, bending in ways that seemed crippling. He saw this behind his clamped shut lids. Clamped shut, yet quivering—wanting release: please, open now, free me, free me. Not wanting more of this. But the need eclipsed everything…
Mouth hung slack, hyperventilating. Breath coming fast and harsh, a sandstorm in his throat. The drone clipped, hung out to dry, arid, burning.
The sensations he received empathically struggled for dominance. Dread and fear versus obstinance, defiance…and something more.
The need…
Rudolf’s own insatiable need—hooked into Marlon’s insatiable need. It sung in his veins, his body, and his brain—
—sprawled across the floor. Sweat bubbling out of pores. The generator grinding unmercifully. The heat nurturing the pinpoint tumor of atomic energy—the closest acknowledgement of soul within his soulless being—inspiring it to branch out, weeds taking root and growing, pushing through the hard earth with determination. Pushing up through layers of skin, digging from within with a spade made of the lumpy, misshapen tumor/soul: obstinate; defiant—
Sitting again, shaking. Whatever was in motion was different than any other experience he’s had when using his internal homing skills. This time it was more full-bodied. Lethal. Experienced; to be experienced. (Are you experienced?) Holding his own in a necessary fight he does not feel confident in engaging in.
His veins let him know this much. They chattered in the language of addiction, their anticipation the crux of his existence.
(Feed me! Feed me!)
He was nothing without the anticipation: a vacancy in the vast art room. A discrepancy in the molecular structure of air, space. The drug was his God. All else deemed inconsequential.
—flesh in revolt, different from the malignant tumor/soul nudging for the freedom to roam across his body, on the outside. Something Marlon is experiencing, channeled through him, the dials searching for static nightmares—and finding them—or possibly avaricious secrets within Rudolf’s reeling mind. That which connected him to Marlon rose up from within and seared his flesh, flooding up and out of pores, insistent. The horror that was his true self clamoring for freedom—
He pulled hard on the reins, no matter the need, the unquenchable need, he needed balance, to fulfill both yearnings, both extremes. His life depended on it. The tumor/soul throbbed in protest, but somehow, Rudolf kept it at bay. Mostly at bay.
(Liar!)
Marlon’s world went black. The homing device stayed precariously connected, but the drug was not just inside Marlon’s veins and mind, it surrounded him in a way incomparable to anything Rudolf had imagined a drug could do. It’s as if he was bathing in it, swimming in it; hanging ten with narcotic sharks.
An obliteration of sorts in motion. He sensed (completely) the annihilation of Marlon, yet Marlon’s destruction did not lead to death.
Transformation. Transformation takes hold.
For one of the rare moments in his life, Rudolf sensed pain. It was peripheral here, not all-encompassing, but it almost crippled his pursuit. He gasped, suffocating with the effort of trying to breathe. He emitted a squished squelch of a cry, a windpipe being squeezed tight, and knew this could not continue. It would shred him to pieces, shards of self and narcotic sharks, indistinguishable. Pain was something he knew only from afar. He distributed it, curious at the responses, but only with his birth and now, this moment, it stifled his breath, threatened to grind bones into powder. Promised to know him as it has never known any living creature. Not even Marlon, now.
Rudolf’s intentions stumbled to the forefront. The knowledge within told him that this process would not be swift. For him to endure the whole thing would extinguish his being, something he might not be able to sustain. A strange thought, as annihilation should be total, yet this molecular breakdown seemed a birthing of sorts.
(Reborn: Hallelujah!)
Understanding passed through Rudolf’s thoughts. This part of the process was readying Marlon for the final stages. It was readying Marlon
so he could Ride the Centipede.
Rudolf could not let Marlon succeed. Go through the process, this hellish stage, but he must get the drug for his employers.
(He thought this but the chattering of his veins reminded him otherwise.)
(He swiped the thought away, the chattering veins laughing at his attempts to silence them. He would bring his employer to the end game. Rudolf Chernobyl was a man of his word. Decisions afterward, well, he’d make them when all the pieces of the puzzle had been connected.)
So.
Rudolf sensed momentum. A path. From here to there.
—pain, sweet self-annihilating pain. It kissed him and the tumor/soul throbbed, ecstatic—
He sensed direction. The path. Striding forward, somehow moving beyond Marlon and into the swampy terrain of the undefined. Surging, moving within the black currents. The dark clings to him, becomes one with him. A muscular force; a liquid disintegration. An ululating progression.
(Revelations at every turn.)
The darkness here was alive.
Inertia, without struggle.
He wondered what he could do to move the process forward swifter—
—swimming, legs and arms in motion, the sweat coating the tiled floor, the quest of the tumor/soul curiously abated; for now. Fingernails pry up and loosen tiles from the floor, the western motif designs crushed to shards in his strong hands, much as the threat or impending truth his bones were to meet mere minutes, seconds, ago. Drawing blood he does not feel. He is not here, in essence. He is—
—there, driven by the destructive seduction of the drug, the Centipede, as time becomes trivial, as it should be. It should not rule lives, yet right now, patience is an ebbing tide of promises wrapped in Euphoria’s alluring arms.
It goes on…and on and on, when his breath ceases, strangled, gone.
Moments drowning in air.
Moments that linger as centuries, decaying—no—decayed. Dead. Yet not. Life compresses to will. To something less than being. Yet still present. A shadow of promise.
Are all promises lies?
Rudolf remembered again his birth, the wonder of existence, of life. Cherished gift. Cursed blight.
Riding the Centipede Page 18