Stanley Washington, incensed by this lack of parental respect, lashed out at the approaching hellcat with a right hook. The powerful strike caught her full in the face. And stuck.
Farce imposed itself on the proceedings as Stanley Washington spun round, wildly thrashing his right arm, trying to dislodge his older daughter from the fist. Vanessa and her younger daughter saw this as their only remaining chance and darted at the hideous abhorrence occupying dear daddy's body.
Mister Rhisland, twitching from the offset, now completely lost it. He unloaded the full six chambers at the female attackers. All six slugs hit something. Two struck Vanessa in the face and shoulder. Three ploughed right through Kerry; face again and two in the chest. One strayed wide, just grazing Stanley Washington's leg and drilled into Carroll Maryland’s left leg, scorching the femur and surrounding muscle but amazingly causing no arterial damage.
Mister Rhisland's trigger finger kept on squeezing; the numb clicks of dead chambers hurried along by Stanley Washington's panicked shouts as his family encircled him in pack formation; their adhesive, cloying, clutching embrace around him, at him, into him.
“Shoot them!!” he screamed, “For fucks sake, Barry, shoot them all!!”
Carroll Maryland took this climax in the mayhem as her cue. And, as Mister Rhisland scrabbled around in his pockets for more shells to reload his gun, she launched herself forward, coming free of the impaling nails with a sickening foot-out-of-sludge and sandpaper-on-teeth compendium of aural horrors. Leapfrogged the ever tightening Washington family unit as it came crashing to the filthy glass-strewn floor. Elbowed the dithering Mister Rhisland aside and raced right out of Hell. Straight into the grey Morris Minor parked still warm outside the door.
Mister Rhisland turned his half-reloaded revolver on her and pulled the trigger desperately. Carroll Maryland dodged out of the way and, fast as her fear would allow, headed for the square of dim light up ahead that promised freedom and liberty all in the same state.
The resounding echoes of more gunshots and Stanley Washington's pleas of “Shoot! Shoot!” rang out as she ran for her life. Into the light. Charging naked into the day. Into the path of an oncoming Transit van that swerved violently, missing her by the merest fraction.
Carroll Maryland raced on, bounding across the road, crashing over a low hedge onto waste ground and staggering barefoot over broken bricks and glass and maggots to the distant skyline of office blocks and the welcome sight of the town centre church spire; her terribly lacerated nudity bewildering and mesmerising shoppers and businessmen alike.
One portly businessman caught a whiff of her scent and was so taken by the sight of the blood spattered streaker it took him quite a while to realise that sick coincidence's band had been mixing it again allowing, nee encouraging, his tiny arousal at the white and red vision racing across the high street from him while at the same time singling him out for an impromptu rendezvous with death arranged by a speeding screwdriver.
The first puncture of blunt steel had little effect on his person or his intense voyeurism. The second stab, an eye-piercing violation, left him in no doubt as to the vehemence of his God’s calling. His body, bearing the elephantine excess of far too many business lunches, dropped like the fifteen or sixteen stone of dead meat it had suddenly become. Amazingly, dozens of pedestrians either ignored or walked around his lifeless body. Some rotting mongrel sniffed at his pinstripes and was about to urinate on him, seemed to think about it then pissed on him anyway ... it's important to mark all potential landmarks in its territory.
The only person to show any compassion, or at the very least curiosity, for the beached-whale-in-the-suit-blocking-the-pavement was a slight, black haired, pasty faced girl of about eighteen or nineteen years of age attired in gothic black leather, tight black-lycra leggings and Doc Martens. Jenifer Maryland. Her usually regulation accessories of cripplingly high stiletto heart; and lashings of black make-up obviously not a necessity so early in the day - she was only going down to the Chemist’s for ... well ... you know what.
SESSION VIII
“It means you are the perpetrator!” Dr Fanny Bradburg entered the room, quickly dismissing fawning Staff Nurse Lily Veyne with a sweeping notepad gesture. Lily smiled self consciously and left me alone with the mind parasite, locking the door after her. She removed a plastic gag that had been placed in my mouth. She placed it on a kidney dish beside my bed.
“It means, in effect, it is you who are committing the murders. No chasing psychopaths round the woods like some camp television detective. You know, you've been a party to some fundamental error and through your dreaming mind you are trying to work out its formula for yourself, decode the enigma all alone, no?”
“What’s all this talk of formulas?”
“Formulae. Formulae.” Dr Fanny Bradburg corrected me sternly like the frumpy school mistress she must have been in a former life. She caught herself about to topple over an imaginary cliff … “New York.” she said.
“New York?” I repeated the place name.
“Yes, didn't you?” she checked her notes, “Ah, yes, here we are ... New York, at least that's how the virtually indecipherable ... lingo? ... made it sound around all the guttural pops and clicks of pronunciation. Tell me about New York.”
“What about it?”
“Not THE New York. Your dream place, New York, as you thought it was pronounced.”
“I knew you meant that, I'm no dope. And you said rooting through dream narratives was a waste of your time. In fact...” I consulted an imaginary notepad, licking my fingertips and flicking back through the imaginary journal.
“I know what I said.” she cut me off my research, “Am I not the therapist?”
I nodded agreement. She was, technically, the therapist. Hers was the therapist role.
“Correct, and the therapist has changed her mind, Mister Deniz. Thanks to your most recent and intimate revelation, I have reassessed my rash opinion about the story content of this other world you revert to at night ... in your sleeping hours. When you sleep, that is.”
“You think sharing this info will get me out of this shithole for Easter?”
“I can promise nothing.”
“Then maybe I don’t wanna fucking say diddly squat to you, FANNY! YOU, HEAR ME!!”
This petty outburst turned out to be quite a silly mistake.
Dr Fanny Bradburg simply took it all with a straight face, asked if I had finished then said she hoped she wouldn't have to resort to Draconian measures. Nodded to whoever had been stood watching the action from behind the wineglass circle in the door. I turn to see the same gang of burly bastards who had pinned me down for sedation that very first time - The Dope Squad; syringes poised and fully laden for the knock out shot. I spun round helplessly as they bore down on me.
The combined weight of the Dope Squad set my breaking bones aflame as Dr Fanny Bradburg whispered sadistically into my face, “Co-operation. That’s the major flaw in your tatty make-up, Djin Deniz. Co-operation. You must have heard the saying - A little goes a long way.” She addresses her henchmen, “Diazopine. 30 Ccs.”
One of the sons of bitches digs his fucking hypo into my right buttock. Down to the hip bone. Boring through marrow. My right leg goes burning-hot rigid. The dying muscles overdosing into catalepsy. Time-locked in a ferocious spasm of the clock.
So I fucked him there.
Of course I did. Yeah, in the back of that disgusting vehicle we coaxed (licked) into helping us escape the Ornamentals. There is no such thing as a romantic getaway between grown men, I am afraid. Mr Whysilage, see, he had this wonderful pair of tits, sorry, legs. Did I say tits? Well, I meant legs. Lovely white women's legs. Fucking beautiful, soft to touch and talcum-powder smooth. Detachable too. With a fucking screw thread, ha-ha. Yeah, you wouldn’t believe it.
I unscrewed Mr Whysilage’s left leg at the knee; all with his consent, of course. Then I screwed it into me where I'd always known a cock... did I say cock? Sorry, I mean
t to say Hot Fleshy Throbbing Muscular Veiny Big Shiny Sweat-glistening Fat Enormous-width-for-arse-ripping Penetration Cock COCK A DOODLE DOOOO! would go.
Oh, how I bayed and how I yapped and how I whinnied at the blazing black sky of insanity. Its crude seduction dripping down from on high like a dark-angel benediction. Oiling us down. Lubricating my new middle leg for a deeper, more thorough, jump start. Slimy horse-play in the back of a speeding fucking alien getaway car. Ripping his tender arse-passage to shreds. Shoving it into him. Slipping on the green fuck-blood that gushed hot and bacon scented out the back of him. The taste of his hairy back between my teeth as it flexed and arched and pulsed and twisted with mad life as I fucked him, I sucked him.
I FUCKED HIM!! I imagine myself out in the street confessing the sin in a short T-shirt and no underwear. Took him all the fucking way till he was bent over and backwards with his own arse-fucking toes poking out of his eyes and me slobbering all over the back of him mauling his flabby flesh like some back seat driving bitch on heat. Kneading him. And he needing me so very much. Reforming him with my rotten handstumps and his rotten leg of locomotion. Sucking frenchies on his toe-filled figure. Face fucking the cunt from behind the mask into me, like a Mobius strip looping back incestuously upon itself.
His gourmet taste; the rich cocktail of his internal anatomy all through me like a transplant. Lost in him. In me. Sucking fucking lost - totally abandoned to the thrill of acceleration. And where the Hell was this fucking car going?
Yeah, he gave me one pair of his eight remaining canary-yellow sunglasses as a keepsake. A love token he called them. Of course, he was down in some obscure tongue at the time. His English eventually came back after a short burst of Aglikk and Dthwaah - all official dialects, he assured me. In his brand-new Home Counties nasal drone, he explained that he had found that if he spoke a lot of really condensed nonsense he could sooner return to his preferred lingo.
His Love Token - made me smile when he actually said those two English words. Love Token. We were, after all the manly bicep showing and ladish camaraderie, lovers. I'd never been someone's lover before.
He said there was soothing very special about these glasses and, if I could, I should try to get to this place at that time and put them on; there would be an important message visible only by the wearer. The gift-giving concluded, we gave each other one soft respectful kiss on the lips.
“This place?” Dr Fanny Bradburg squirmed about in her chair by the bed.
“This ... place?”
“Where Mr Whysilage told you to get to at a certain time - your words not mine.”
“Aye, mine indeed. And mine they'll stay until I get some respect round here. I'm not just gonna roll over and let you sick fucks play with my dick.”
Dr Fanny Bradburg glanced at the door.
“Oh, yes, the Dope squad.” I used their unofficial name, “Bring them in!” I shook a clenched fist at the door, “Come on, lads. Come on in. I give the lot of you a good hard fucking.”
Palm raised, Dr Fanny Bradburg shook her head, indicating that their bullying assistance will not be needed for the moment.
“Lap Dogs.” I sneered.
“The facts of life.” Dr Fanny Bradburg huffed to herself. Packed up her things and, on leaving, paused at the door to goad me a little more.
“Sweet dreams, mister Djin Deniz." she smiled.
How revolting.
“Ornamentals, incoming!”
We were walking down another nameless high street at the outer edge of the megacity of New York, that's Mr Whysilage and me. We were actually holding hands. No, that's not quite true; see, Mr Whysilage had no hands anymore, but I was holding onto the end of the sleeve of his blue mackintosh - my exploded fingers had begun to grow back again. I cuddled him every now and then. As lovers do. This was just before the most horrific sheath of the whole masquerade was brutally torn away.
We thought we were out of harm's way for the time being, mingling in nicely with the myriad alien life forms striding, slinking, tumbling, chuntering and chattering in their interstellar dialects and modes of locomotion down this high street. When, from nowhere, the Ornamentals appeared. No, 'appeared' is too emotionless a word for the malevolent air these monstrosities had about them. They were born.
Born; one from behind - a car crash its innocent disguise. But Mr Whysilage knew, “Taste that?” he sneered.
“No.” I said I didn't.
“It's the taste of an Ornamental. The bad breath of a soul eater.”
I half laughed at his melodrama but he was deadly serious. Then from right in front of us, from below our very feet, was born the second Ornamental. Contorting the dead chemicals of the sidewalk and half the freeway into its death-dealing living shape.
I heard the metal structure of a building behind us groan and buckle under the stress of metamorphosis. I swivelled round to see aliens fleeing from the building as its revolving doors crumpled inwards; crushing trapped aliens to a lime pulp. Steel columns closing in to reinforce the Ornamental's callous intent. Shards of glistening crystal embellishing the dark presence with its elaborate rainbow-bleeding foliage.
Lethally sharp adornments embroiled into this bastard birth.
A fourth Ornamental materialised from thin air. We were trapped, completely surrounded.
The bile-and-black-coffee stench of the Ornamentals’ malice an ambush of the senses. Their black shapes blotting out the quivering sky as it flapped and flitted a weird and willowy cavalcade of startled hues. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse, a phrase that flashed through the last micro-seconds of my pitiful life.
“CUT!!!” someone had the audacity to scream out.
NINE
Jenifer Maryland was on her way to the Chemist to buy TAMPAX tampons, those ugly, tubular things. Her guts had been bothering her all night ... always do when it's this time of the month. The Curse - she called it. The Scourge - her boss at the shoe factory commented on her monthly absence from her menial duties fetching his coffee, typing his puerile memos, and allowing him the odd, and often brutal, fingering that frequently led to a quick shag on the tobacco-stinking industrial-brown-carpet behind his desk. She was always surprised to see how dirty the skirting boards were down there. How the false Styrofoam ceiling always seemed permanently stained with the smoke from the cigars he habitually sucked on like a baby his dummy.
His gross insertions were almost as nauseating as the dull ache of menstruation; almost as humiliating as that awkward bathroom balancing act - one foot up on the toilet seat, trying not to shove that ridiculous cotton-wool-loaded cardboard tube up her piss hole as the haemorrhage slid impatiently down the inside of her thigh. The dry pressure as the contraption was inserted. The tickle of the string against a thigh. And walking around with it tucked into your knickers like some mutated feline oddity trying to pass itself off as human by hiding its tail. Trying not to give the game away by inadvertently purring when some particularly gorgeous slab of manmeat shuffled by in the standing confines of the peak-hour bus ride home.
But home was not a place Jenifer Maryland was going. Not just yet, anyway.
For, as she crouched down over the dead business man, a hand in his breast pocket looking for ID, a burly woman dragging a large and bulging shopping trolley was primed; ready to heap a serious amount of verbal abuse on the young slut robbing that poor collapsed gentleman.
The woman kicked Jenifer Maryland in the behind, “What do you think you're doing?!”
Jenifer Maryland, eyebrows aloft, hand hidden, turned a black look on her assailant, “I’m looking for his dick, what do you think?”
“How dare you!” the shopper ranted. And raved. “You cheeky slut!” she heaved the leather-clad girl to her feet.
“Fuck off, eh. You fat twat.”
The woman raised a hand to slap the little bitch's filthy mouth. But Jenifer Maryland had already hawked up a greeny and was lethally on target. The glob of phlegm struck the woman on her peach-tinted spectacles, sending
her reeling back in disgust. Screaming, “Filthy bitch! Filthy bloody whore!” She pushed Jenifer Maryland again, “Away! Get away from him! Leave the poor man alone!”
It was at this point in the exchange that Jenifer Maryland underwent a fundamental realisation - a cerebral transformation of gigantic emotional magnitude. She was completely pissed off with this.
She reached angrily into the breast pocket of her leather and took out a small object, “See this?” she opened out the little flick-knife, “Fuck off or I’ll stick it in your fat face to the hilt!”
“Okay, there’s no need for that!” the woman placated the animal, her face voiding its colour, backing away to her trolley.
“I found him, okay?!” Jenifer Maryland shouted at the back of the woman as she waddled sheepishly away dabbing at her sweat-streaming brow. “Fat twat! I found him! Me, I found him!”
Folding up the toy weapon, she stooped to the prostrate businessman. The stench and stain of piss darkening his crotch. A disgusting thought. Well, maybe she was thinking, you know, real briefly like, of taking out that shrivelled penile specimen and slurping the effluent from it, licking his hairy balls clean of the sultry dirt and grime of the office. It's so hard to tell from such a transient viewpoint.
Jenifer Maryland found the man's wallet - containing credit cards; business cards in the name of Gorham Massachusetts; money, lots of it, big purple notes too. His official ID clip-on card and a pack of featherlite with one missing.
“Mucky sod.” she grinned.
That was the lot. No home number, only the works number, his works, i.e. the work in his name - Massachusetts Accountancy, 37 Bishop’s Gate.
Bishop’s Gate? she looked up at the name of the adjacent street – Bishop’s Gate. Huffed her surprise. Rechecked the ID card, Bishop's Gate. Checked his other pockets; apart from some extra change and a large set of keys, nothing.
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