“What the fucking hell.” he spluttered, bits of the expelled sandwich clinging stubbornly to his beard. He spun round angrily in his seat, saying, “Does nobody believe in knocking before..”
He gawped at the empty room.
A damp nugget of half-chewed dough toppled from its refuge in his beard and landed on his highly polished black-leather shoe; the right shoe.
“Going outta my fuckin mind.” he resumed his campaign on the demi-baguette.
“Detective Bill Parrish?” Clive Idaho read out loud the ID badge of the bewildered detective. “You are Bill Parrish?” he asked again.
“That's what it says on my birth certificate. And who might you be?” he asked the room.
“Right here, in front of you. The closet.” Clive Idaho pinpointed his position.
“Yes.” Parrish pursed his lips at the closed metal door, “Where else. And how can I be of assistance ... whatever you call yourself.” he added, singing to himself in his head, “They're coming to take you away, hu-hu he-he ha-ha. To the loony bin.”
“Clive Idaho.” the closet addressed itself, “My name is Clive Idaho.”
“Clive Idaho eh? Normal enough name.”
“You must help me catch a serious criminal.”
“That’s interesting.” Bill Parrish took another bite of his sandwich, trying to ignore this rambling closet; the stress of the job, he assured himself warmly.
“In Cell 9 is something you should see. The woman responsible is at her accomplice's home as we speak. They're into making drugs, real powerful ones. Made from babies brains. Something very sinister is going on. She's very dangerous.”
“And where can we find this monster?”
“In Cell 9.”
“In cell 9? That's half the job done for us..”
“No, not her; the ... the ... thing. Look, we must hurry.”
“We?”
“I believe one of your officers is also in on the plot.”
“We're a very paranoid closet, aren't we?” Bill chuckled
“I'm telling YOU...”
“Listen, Clive Idaho (?) this is all very clever. This little scenario. I don't know how you got into a locked closet and furthermore this is really not the day to start pulling an old detectives plonker, savvy? Come on, I've had enough of your larking around, young fella. Out of the closet.”
“I can't.” came the doleful reply.
“Door jammed is it?” he fished for his keys as he approached the line of 6 metal doors.
“I can't come out.”
“I'll be more than happy to show you how. Believe me, this will be very simple.”
He found the appropriate key from the bunch.
“One more chance, sonny.” he added, “Come out of the closet now, of your own volition and maybe we’ll just forget this little prank ever happened. Though how the hell you got in there in the first place..”
“I'm not IN the closet.”
“You said you were!”
“Well ... I am; technically.”
“You either are or you aren't.” he popped the key into the keyhole, “Now, come on, out of the closet.”
“I can’t.”
“Out of the closet!” Bill Parrish roared at the neat stacks of papers, box files and evidence box filled interior, scowling ferociously into the glum compartment.
“I can't come out of the closet, Goddammit, I am The Closet.”
After a very long time looking into the body of any ordinary locker, Bill Parrish confessed, “This happened to my great grandfather. It was ghosts with him though, not closets. Its full of ghosts he screamed and screamed as they dragged him off to the nuthouse. I'm haunted by his heredity.”
“You're not going mad.” Clive Idaho replied.
“That's comforting, a closet telling me I’m not going mad. I can see that one impressing the jury.”
“No, really. I'm here to help you catch a terrible crook. Please. Open Cell 9. There's evidence in there'll scare the willies out of you. Then we can go and get her.”
“Oh, I can't believe this.” Bill scratched his head. “It just doesn’t pass the test..”
“Come on, follow me.” Clive Idaho said.
And although the last thing Bill Parrish fancied doing was taking a delusion seriously. You know what they say about believing your own press. He was sure that to the left of his field of focus a shape like a bag of oversized billiard balls was rolling, tumbling beneath the green of the wall, salmoning from the back of the grey metal closets in the general direction of the cell block. Like an otherwise affable man under a stage hypnotist's cynical influence, he followed the undulation; urged on to a wheezing canter by Clive Idaho’s anxious plea of HURRY. Could he see a smile on the bag of 'balls' leading edge as it bobbed in and out of existence. The suggestion of a human anatomy writhing and contorting towards cell 9. A flash of shoulder here. An arm there. Hips, knees, ribcage, head, shoulder, back a living corkscrew.
Cell 9.
Bill Parrish hurriedly scrabbled for the cell-block skeleton key; opened the heavy wrought-iron door marked with a bronzed 9. The door squeals rustily on its hinges; opened onto an empty cell. An oily pool in the centre of the concrete floor the only evidence that anything had ever resided here.
“Where is it?” Clive Idaho screamed from the right-hand cell wall.
“Hah!” Bill Parrish snorted with glee, “I love it when that happens. Imagine a ghost getting it wrong.
“I'm not a ghost.” Clive Idaho exclaimed.
“Sorry, I forgot, you're a closet.” he hooted, almost cramped by the release of mirth in the arrogant face of undoubted insanity. Noticed that the pool on the cell floor is projecting rainbows. A trail very like a tyre tread lead out of the oily slick.
“A tyre tread?” Bill gawped.
“A car. It was in the shape of a car. A corvette.”
“What was?”
“The thing. The bodies. A man. A woman. Two girls. Four living people. They were all moulded together into this pizza-cheesy sports-car-shaped thingy.”
“A family car.” Bill Parrish pursed his lips with indignation, “So, where is it, this living vehicle?”
“I don't know.”
“I know you don't. I know you don't.”
Peter Alaska! Clive Idaho found the name.
“Good man, Pete.”
“No. No, he's not a good man, he’s in on it. There's him and the albino woman Lily Veyne and the creepy little chemist. There's definitely something going on between the three of them. Something unnaturally weird.”
“And you don't think me standing here talking to an empty Police cell seems just a teensy bit out of whack to you?”
“We've gotta get to the chemist's house. Fast. This is all ... the phone call!”
“Phone call?”
“Alaska. He’s been told to shift the thing. I bet Lily Veyne told him; she must have guessed I'd found the thing they were keeping here. We’ve got to get over there. Arrest her. This is what she wants. For no-one to believe me. Or if they do fuck about arguing over the piffling details. This is wasting time. She'll get away. She knows the more outrageous my accusations the safer she is likely to be. Be brave..”
“This ... Lily Veyne?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she now? The chemist's house?”
“I just left her there. I don’t think she saw me.”
“Come on, then. I’m game for a laugh.”
Bill Parrish humoured his encroaching insanity, pushed out the raft and rode the stupidly white rapids.
SESSION XV
Life, stark and electrifying; bliss. Mass murderers gleefully stripping the backs from their victims.
“Hey. Hey. Hey.” Arrenay proclaimed in mock cheer, “Time to cut the new man loose. Gaze in awe at the anatomical masterpiece I've made of you, my husband.”
She snipped at the air with a pair of large, chrome shears. Before I could panic the tip was under the crepe and snipping me free. The cool
ness of the air was the first thing to taste my naked flesh; the electricity of its tongue coaxed new-life's primal expression from me. A fart. A passing of gleeful gas.
“Ahhh. What a release.” I grinned.
Arrenay continued her work on the bandages. Clockwork. Methodical. Accurate. Dangerously fast. I survived the unsewing with no major lacerations. Arrenay stuck her arthritis-knotted hand into the ball of phosphorus light on her console. The plasma ball turned bright lilac and the whole world rolled obediently over as my body was brought into a vertical position. And though nauseous sensations played silly buggers with my new guts I didn't, as expected, throw up.
I saw, in the full length mirror before me the new body that was Me. The new shell around the old prejudices. Or to be more precise, the me I always stumble across in my dreams - the strong, healthy-looking mathematician who gets his kicks scratching gold symbols into black slate. I had hair. All over my body; black as magpie feathers. I had nipples; dark and pimpled with the chill of this laboratory. I had a ... cock. I had a fucking cock.
“Ha-ha!” I whooped, punching the air.
Arrenay didn't flinch, let alone blush, but, of course, this was her doing. I (my hairy, nippled, cocked body) am her doing. She had made this thing of me, my mind-form reconstructed anew with real matter and real consequence. A fantasy come true.
“Of course my husband has a ... cock.” Arrenay flicked off the tractor beam supporting me and my proud, new body fell flat on its face, busting my nose; my real, red blood jetting all over the metallic floor all globular and healthy.
“Sorry, my husband.” she apologised for giving my new shell the opportunity to make a complete balls-up of the unveiling, “Slipped.”
Why does she call me husband?
“No problem.” I spluttered, “Looked too perfect anyhow. The big fat broken boxer's nose suits me better.”
“You'll live.” Arrenay helped me to my feet, “Thanks to me.”
She led me out the door.
On down many synthetic corridors adorned with faithful holographic reproductions of Arrenay's slew of extra-marital affairs (either this lady has been granted with a long, very long, life OR she didn't half put it about in the time she's had here based on the sheer numbers of half-smiling faces she was busy reminiscing about with a jolly, almost girlish enthusiasm. I was still naked. Just didn't seem any need for clothes here. The air was just warm enough. The floor was just warm enough. The sense of comfort both physical and emotional was just right. Perfect: too perfect. And, as you know with me being more than a little paranoid, perfection bothers me.
My tour of the hologram-trophied corridors rounded a final corner. There, at the end of the tunnel, a door; nothing extravagant, just a plain apple-green corrugated-paper-and-hardboard Council door. Is this where the Room 101 ghost of HG Wells' 1984 resided? Beyond the insignificant green of the door?
“What's through there?” I came right out with it.
“You'll see, my husband. Or rather, you'll see again?” she smiled.
What did she mean ... she could be in on it, just repaired me, fixed me up for more Nomadix shenanigans.
Her hand reached for the door handle.
What to do?
“Here,” she beckoned me to her and wrapped a coarse hand round my new waist.
I'm in for it now, it was so obvious.
“Now, my husband, you may see again what skills my devotion has.” she beamed, turning the handle ultra-slowly and easing the door open a crack. A lilac butter-knife wedge squeezed out through the gap, widening to a diffuse violet glow as the door stood fully open. I automatically flinched at the expected Nomadix razor-keen assault as Arrenay ushered me into the room. My eyes tightly shut. The smells of the menagerie. The clamour of a zoo at feeding time. The hot, stifling sentience of life all around. The door closed behind me. The sounds of an old bed's springs creaking under their burden.
“Voila.” Arrenay called to me, “Open your eyes, my charmed creation. Witness my adoration incarnate. The hearts and minds of my multiple husbands.”
Reluctantly, the lids creaked open; one at a time.
“Jesus. Fucking. Christ.” I muttered numbly, awestruck at this truly intimate revelation my unworthy eyes were seeing.
I was stood at the foot of a single bed in a small high-ceilinged box room. The legs of the single bed had been unscrewed and removed. Draped artily about the naked black & white Paisley-patterned mattress, her negligee open, Arrenay patted the spot beside her. Her colourless legs open for my admiration framing the pious replica of any sane man’s fantasy; the doorway to their nine-month aqueous abode; their home for that formative period; their indulgence in times of genital abstinence; the cunt of this weird woman appeared mobile between the worn flesh of her thighs.
Did I just see a tongue pop out from between that coarse quartet of labia and lick a phosphorescent sheen to them? Did little babies' milk teeth gnash teasingly, inviting a dangerous liaison of cock and coos? Sucklings for the erogenous exploration of? Could that brilliant gash give Frenchies? Could I slither down into that deep crevice and lose myself to the hips? Could I maybe climb in head-first and taste the walls of the womb inside? Imbibe those foetal memories of wombic suffocation after the waters broke? Before her maternal compression closed in on me, crushing me, squidging me out into the starkly lit reality of antiseptic metal sounds and slapped arses?
“Don't look at it. Come. Kiss it, husband.” she used a different magical voice, her decrepitation an insignificant detail beside my overriding sexual desire to bury this new body's buzzing cook deep into that moist pit.
The ever-present ache in my new joints forgotten, I fell to the bed, grabbing her by the thighs and pulling that hot grease-hole onto my tongue, tasting oyster flesh, lapping the milk from the shell. The thing kissed me back; thighs tight round my ears, entwined. The lank velvet hair scurrying out of either buttock as her sex transmogrified.
I pulled back in a fit of a horror.
Arrenay's face unfolded from the genitalia.
“Good, eh?” she grinned; garlic-tuna on her breath, “Watch.”
And there before my eyes her face slipped out of focus, pulling back on itself and resorting to its former labial aspect. This time a triple-slut slit augmented with a delicate choirgirls chorus of Ave Maria. Lip-synching the words at either end. The song emanating from the walls of this box room which had begun to shift and sway with life. Shapes of the angelic singers floated to the surface dancing planar about one another. An eagle head. A reptilian back. An emu's bulbous plumage.
The living hieroglyphs all man sized or larger. Rising, swimming, diving, brimming forth from the living meniscus then perpetually back in, forever regurgitating and gulping itself; a man sucking his own cock. A woman bearing herself. Alien forms of procreation; lizard lepers splitting thricewise becoming triplets of seduction redissolving into an orgiastic clump of writhing pleasure as I watched on; enthralled.
“My lovers, you see. Remember, you foretold this place. Look.” Arrenay thrust open palms to the ceiling, “Even my sky as you foretold it. Adoring dark sphere with lovers' myriad stars in its eyes. Forever watching. Forever loving. Just as you foretold it.”
“Indeed.”
Eyes of every shape and size, from the birds' through frogs’ and cats' and dogs' into men’s and women’s ever-lustful gaze up into alien territory; eyes as large as the giant squid's monocular organ - spiral galaxies in the miasma of worship's vast constellation.
“They will always love their creator.” Arrenay breathed, dripping now under this infinitely lascivious paradise of adulation, “Everyone needs their special place.”
I agreed with a brain-dead grunt.
She took my cunt-hovering face with her glass-paper hands, “Everyone needs their one special place.” Her false teeth had been removed; at least that's what I at first thought. On second glance, I saw her mouth as an open ribcage; a throbbing cardiac organ at its core beating out her words on its haematic
breath. The scent of menstruation on her chalky tongue.
I pushed her back onto the mattress, the springs complaining at their abuse, as I forced myself down on top of her tissue-paper corpse. Her hands rasping against the skin of my new bottom. Testing. Tugging on the gluteus maximae. Inviting their shove. I complied willingly the instant my new, hard cock had inched snugly up to her incubating interior and had been tongued central at the entrance to this mother's uterus. I plunged in, my back torn apart with the ferocity of my lunge, blood all down my ribs. Arrenay's nails scoring the fleshy buttocks; adding to the bloody show.
“Again.” she gasped, “Again, my husband.”
I went to it, as requested - pummelling the wound with my new bludgeon. Her fleshy neck sucked corned-beef raw as I whisked the old girl into a frenzied shudder of orgasm. I came, that fast. Her cunt contracting on its mark, sucking the very last wriggling tadpole of semen from my scrotum; bleeding my new testicles dry. I gasped with shock at my genital vacuuming.
“More.” she sucked, “Give me more.”
Her sucking cunt slurping only dying cock now.
“That's it, there is no more.”
“No.” she protested, “With Arrenay, that's never it. Again!” A Russian Army general ordering a soldier through another thirty sludge-sodden press-ups.
“I can’t!” I protested, “I am spent.”
“I’ll tell you what you are capable of.” Arrenay pontificated, “My creation. See these walls?” she threw her flabby arms about, “I made them. All constructed from precious moments of sharing like this. All born by me from the wild desires of my many thousand husbands.”
Then, suddenly sobering, she said, “You know how old I am?” knowing all too well I wouldn't have a fucking idea how old she was: couldn't even guess.
“No.” I replied, suddenly nauseated by her fecundity.
“Guess.”
“Fifty-nine?” I tried, then, seeing the disdain in her eye, tried a more conservative figure, “Sixty-seven?”
Arrenay shuffled beneath me, releasing her genital hold round my spent member, “I am three hundred and fourteen thousand six hundred and seven of your comparative years old. I've lived through wars and coups and dethronements. I've fought in many of the most violent overthrowing in History. I've been captured; tortured, raped, brutalized, beaten; interrogated by your friends the Nomadix. Such unbridled vanity. And so ugly with it, disfigured by their own smugness. Believe me, I've seen it all. And will continue to do it all until that good Jostler in the sky comes and reaches for me with his electrostatic noose and wrench me into oblivion. The word NO does not exist in Arrenay's dictionary. So when I say Fuck Me I mean fuck me!”
Twilight's Last Gleaming Page 17