Bill Parrish not only heard this alarm-scream from below, he felt the fury resonate through the floorboards, rattling the faded sepia family snaps in their frames on the dresser, shaking a steady dust-mote stream from the Victorian lampshade over the death bed.
“The cellar.” Bill Parrish was racing clumsily down the rickety staircase. Taking a right at the bottom. Finding a door ... the cellar door. Pushing it open. A mortuary breeze rushing up to assault his senses.
Taking out his Zippo lighter to illuminate his descent, he fumbled his way down into the abyss, found a light switch and flicked it on.
“It's all gone!” the bar beams of the cellar shuddered with dusty rage.
“IT'S ALL GONE.”
“What's gone?” Bill clung to the bare plaster wall.
“ALL THIS!” the first of a trio of tables bounced into the air followed by its companion followed by its companion. The row of shelves to the right where a row of rusty meathooks hung rattles with rage.
“ALL THIS!” the door at the far end of the cellar swung open and slammed back closed with a mighty boom.
“ALL THE TUBES! ALL THE DEAD BABIES! ALL OF IT! ALL OF THE DRUG! ALL OF IT GONE.”
A table overturned of its own accord. The meathooks popped loose of their chains and flung themselves shamefully to the cold stone floor in a whimsical steel cascade.
“GONE. GONE. GONE.”
The whole cellar shook. Large areas of plaster fell away, revealing bare brick. The cement between the bricks was ground to a shower of barren disillusion. Floor stones jutted up; some shooting up into the air, annihilating the rotten ceiling. The lightbulb swung on its naked cord hurling shadows left then right.
Bill Parrish staggered about in the melee, dodging falling masonry. The staircase, knackered old thing that it was, threatened to crumble under the onslaught of this bizarre emotional outburst.
Clive Idaho tore off through the house in a terrible foundation-shuddering fit of rage. He was gonna show that mad fucking bitch a piece of his fucking mind. And he knew exactly where the slut would be.
SESSION XVI
I awoke with tears of joy in my eyes. I told Dr Fanny Bradburg - still reeling and feeling quite emotionally strung out as a result of all my dreamside frolicking.
“Must he a bit of a drag having to even wake up, eh?” she tried to sympathise.
“No.” I quickly saw through the drug-dispenser's set in her eyes, “it’s refreshing to find yourself awake in the real world, for a change. I mean, you can get too much of even Paradise. All that angelic purity forever and ever, Amen. I mean no-one ever farts in Heaven, do they?”
“I wouldn't know, D.J..” Dr Fanny Bradburg was flipping through her notes, trying to find, “...ah! Yes, what do you think is the significance of the mathematician?”
“What?”
“The mathematician ... in your dreams?”
I scowled; a jeweller grinding an amethyst on his polishing wheel.
The Ebony Haired Terrorist who writes gold symbols on black vinyl with magpie quills. she read from her notes.
“What about him? He's dead.”
“But you said...”
“He's dead. I saw him dead. Heard the daft soliloquy he blabbed out before his death. Probably poisoned by that stupid gold ink.”
“No, no, D.J.. I have it written down here that later on after Arennay had..”
“Arrenay.” I corrected her.
“Sorry, can’t read my own writing. Arrenay. After she had fixed you up, you became the dark-haired mathematician. It says it right here.”
“I didn't say that.”
“It's here. I've written it down.” she showed me.
I scoured the indecipherable scrawl.
“Can't read that!” I snarled in denial, consternations brutal hand thrusting away the paperwork, “How am I to believe what I can't even read?”
It says, “Or to be more precise ... the ME I always see in my dreams. The strong healthy-looking mathematician.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I got all defensive and cocky, “I said I looked like the fucker. Not I had become the fucker. Looked like, okay? Completely different kettle of fish.”
“So you admit there is a connection between the two of you?”
“He's dead; I'm not. What does that prove, DOCTOR?” battery-acid.
“Prove?” Dr Fanny Bradburg looked amused.
“Yeah, you know, what does it PROVE?” I could feel my head swaggering, “What does it SHOW?”
“Show?”
“You alright?” the air felt wrong suddenly, “Alright?”
I pressed the intercom button beside my bed; it felt like a jelly nodule. Made a sound like squashing a beetle or cracking a flea between your fingernails. Dr Fanny Bradburg said ALRIGHT again, then screams in her most-out-of-tune screech, The hills are alive with the sound of ... COCKROACHES.
The soft-green walls of my private room lifted silently away from each other. Just floated apart in a soft crumbling of plaster and brick the way sand-dunes crawl across deserts. They just drift off into a dark malevolence of screaming bats and roaring field-mice. The air electric with the promise of death.
“COCKROACHES!” Dr Fanny Bradburg took off her spectacles and studies them with deep disgust, “Toujours lez COCKROACHES! Le CAFARDS a jamais. A jamais!”
The spectacles, thrown to the floor, shattered like the symbolic denouement of a contemporary choral recitative suddenly annihilated in top-C by a crescendo of claxons and Canada Geese.
Honk;
Honk;
Honk;
Honk;
Honk;
Honk…
A blistered sky of lacerated panic fluttered by, scything a vicious look down on my poor body on this basic bed time and again. Dr Fanny Bradburg held her naked palms up to this glowering lament.
“Squeal pigs!” she shrieks, then to me in a soft, caring voice, “Don't be afraid my little spac, Monsieur Whysilage is not my name. I do not speak the Royal Tongue. But I exist all the same. I have existed all this time in your denims, boy. In your denims get it?”
Here she grinned like the mad woman I'm convinced she'd always been. Her bleached locks lapping in the wind that has gusted up about her.
She might know her job but she doesn't know my mind. Dr Fanny Bradburg was possessed by a man's voice.
A Scottish voice.
The drunken slur of my Nomadix.
A horrible 70’s smell of Old Spice after shave.
I scrambled clumsily away from the ranting woman as her mauve cardigan inflated, billowing in her self-perpetuated whirl wind.
“My dreams for her...” the Highland tirade continued, “Will be legendary. Even in these revolting Downline catacombs.”
The whole body of Dr Fanny Bradburg went off like a laughter-alarm - a chilling snow-blind mid-air disaster above a fifteen high circling pattern stack of peaktime Christmas charter domestics. Row upon row of seats filled with terrified Beagles howling with terror and babies screaming with the shock of their first teeth cutting gums as the deafening whine of disintegrating jet engine melded to one metallic, grinding screech of murder anonymous. A disastrous collision of vocal chords insane as the stricken charters plummeted from the Wintry white of the sky, ploughing through others and slamming them into the frost-bitten tarmac below. The laugh became an oppressive block of sound. A fifteen-ton lump-hammer presence battering my brain to a numb pulp.
The speed of her lips as she whispered her death demands inside her own fucking mad head. Dr Fanny Bradburg screamed at me, “Look at her. Look at her lips move like spasming electric eels. Squealing and hissing and flitting in and out of conviction! Lapping up their salacious fucking nonsense!” she rattled on maniacally as she hoiked up her dark tartan wool skirt. Should we call it a kilt? She hadn't bothered with knickers, just tights, American Tan, the gusset slanderously off-white, the old get's slack cunt lips animating the dirge her mouth was only mimicking, adding some fake reality, to this absurdly surreal genital abuse.
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“MUMMY!” the labia wailed in a witch's throaty squawk, “MUMMY. MUMMY. MUMMY.” Their chamois-leather pout ballooned to football proportions as the thing wailed. her gasping sex slips free; just lifted itself from her pelvic region like a Dali drawer and flopped down the left leg of her tights, filling the 19 denier fabric with a gory abomination that exuded steam as it cools to a crisp shell. An overturned turtle, flapping its useless flippers against its incarceration.
“MUMMY.” Turtle's comical beak wailed as another psychomorph was extruded from Fanny's emaciated abdomen; her legs apart to the sternum. The entire cavity wriggled suddenly inside out.
“KUNTZ.” The new-born alligator barked.
“TITZ.” Turtle gagged against the American Tan nylon as it attempted to peck itself loose. Alligator set about ravaging the waist band of Fanny's tights as she watched me stagger to the edge of the ten-foot-square blue-tiled floor; all that remained of my private room bar the piss-stained bed. The dark carpet of this oppressive landscape stretched unseeable in all directions. Where to go? Or to stay here and endure whatever Fanny's demon births had in store for me?
Alligator, who had munched its way down into Turtle's tights leg, was busy going to it with razor-toothed ferocity.
Turtle's futile retaliatory measures entailed pecking at Alligator's soft underbelly. The pair of them now like Siamese twins locked at head and groin squealing TITZ and KUNTZ, TITZ and KUNTZ in between blood-ribbed snaps and gnashes. Fanny watched me with a haunting fascination; spellbound by my obvious disgust. The whistling wind about her continued to sculpt monsters from her frosty locks. She was mesmerised by my bony fingers playing with the broken lightbulbs at the edge of reality, savouring the sight of keen flesh wounds at the tips of the phalanges. She spoke, articulating the vague memory of her doctor's voice,
“Do they give you enough time in the pool, D.J.?”
As I gazed into those lifeless globes they folded back on themselves showing their chromium plated backs. Mercury bulbs bleeding from her human eyesockets, dripping the liquid silver down her haggard face and into her scarlet-lipped mouth agape.
Two silver wheels of pity. Burst from her eyes into her gaping mouth and back up the spinal column into her brain. Wheel tears - my former lisping self might have been bright enough to comment. Two gleaming saw blades trisecting Fanny's head swimming in alarm. Ears either side; Roman nose centre spread; stretching and warping, under the influence of the mini-hurricane swirling about her head now; the auricular appendages rising to meet at the zenith, tangling themselves together at the crown of her head.
A little Sunday School girl with pretty ribbons in her hair. The circular silver saws gaining momentum and mass as she stood there with her arms and legs spread, threatening an overloading of inertia, a sorrow registering a needle-into-the-red critical mass. I scrambled back into the black world of broken lightbulbs behind me. An excruciating arc of featherlike glass pops into my right palm, severing tendons.
Arrenay was still battling with the control spheres.
“Drop Out Zone.” she grunted with the strain of her task.
“Zwik a tehik?” Stephanie asked Arrenay.
“Kilbak ta ji!” she replied sternly.
“What's going on?” I shouted.
“Damned Drop Out Zone, warped her memory. Look at the spaced out bitch.”
Stephanie showed me her mind-boggled expression. I wanted to laugh but the laughs wouldn’t come out of hiding.
“It's about time someone worked out what these damned things are.” Arrenay continued her grievance, “And quick. They’re happening more frequently day by day. Reports of new Drop Outs are coming in faster than we can map them into linear time. Can't predict them. Can't even trace them. Just gotta plough through the things and hope you're not completely fucked if and when you pop out the stable end. My fucking French is getting terrible.” she curses with a wearily mischievous smile.
Meanwhile, I was busy extricating Stephanie’s drunken embrace from around my throat.
“She's definitely got the hots for you, D.J. Think I did too attractive a job on your bod. Mais, c’est la vie, n’est pas?” Arrenay smirked, brushing the fine wisp of white hair out of her eyes, trailing the effervescent remnant of the red drive-plasma through the silver. Red through silver, should that mean something? God, how my head ached. The vehicle suddenly and inexplicably filled with the oily aroma of greasepaint.
“Nomadix. Nomadix!” Stephanie screamed, scrambling into the car’s dank recess.
“Christ.” something bounced off the windscreen and clung to the bonnet.
“Drop Out Remnant.” Arrenay slammed both hands through the control globes. The car squealed to an instantaneous halt. The damp seats hugged around us in the crushing deceleration, cradling us against wind shield impact.
Stephanie in the back, however, didn't have the luxury of a restraining seat and flew by us at the crystal screen, her pretty horse face buckling on impact. Her unconscious body, slumped all over the control spheres, causes our vehicle to buck and jolt back and forth wildly. The screeching of other vehicles as they popped out of the Drop Out Zone and swerved to avoid collision with us a deafening omnipresence.
The Pierrot we had thrown from the bonnet rose slowly to his feet, maybe twenty yards in front of us. Readjusted the white skullcap back on its head. Rearranged its ruff.
Its sad greasepaint mask smudged through lime and sepia, Pierrot rose to its full seven-foot height. Approaches our car ignorant of all the other vehicles zipping by it, antilock brakes burning to a sulphurous paste in their housings.
“Damn and shit.” Arrenay cursed at the confounded drive mechanism.
Pierrot was now at the window; his white cotton gloves on the windscreen.
The fabric fingers dug into the sheet of transparent crystal and pulled the windscreen clean off, sheering the living edge of the crystal framing. The car let out an agonised scream and jolted itself into gear, reversing crazily across the flow of traffic. Inevitably, we hit something.
To tell the truth, about five or six vehicles initially ploughed into the back of us. Then five or six more. The groans and whimpers of half-dead machinery a gentle lullaby after the roar of collision like spoilt children crying because they can't have the most expensive toy in the shop. An alarmed tangle of cross-hatched emotion; rivets through our fragile souls.
“Geb I nah.” Stephanie snuffled into my lap, “Geb I nah.”
She hauled herself up over the dashboard and peered out the bleeding windscreen hole of our vehicle.
“Nomadix.” she gasped; pointing with an arm all torn up and spattered green. Nomadix. she rasped again, trying to free from the cloying embrace of my seat. The protective bucket wouldn't give up its catch.
Pierrot clambers in through the hole, his white gloved hands catching a raw nerve on the car's terminal laceration. It jolted forward; a seminal jerk. Pierrot tumbled forward onto Arrenay's broken and twisted husk. The brutal violation of it's white glove caused her outer easing to tremble like old plaster in a storm. Pierrot fell right into her; head & shoulders into the old girls torso.
“Djap kna nit’ta.” Stephanie struggled to free me.
Arrenay's disintegration ploy seemed to have worked for her eyes bolted alive suddenly. A mad smile illuminated her papyrus face. Big and wide and mad and proud. Her crumbled edges solidified around Pierrot’s upper torso, compressing hydraulically. Pierrot gives out a wild stallion kick, his feet smashing against the dashboard desperate to get leverage, ramming Arrenay deeper into the maternal embrace of her seat.
“They try my patience these clowns,” Arrenay pouted a heroic riposte. Then she let out one long scream as her wispy wig stood on end and her temples began to smoke as she short-circuited, her eyes bulging with the surge of electricity.
“Geba!” Stephanie freed half of me.
“Move it, greebo.” Stephanie hollered.
I scrambled loose and together we escaped the wreckage as the ticks and c
licks of biochemical overload rose to a cockroach-scrambling crescendo. A vehicle exploded behind us, lighting up the cityscape magnesium white. Another explosion; then another, mauve licked with flakes of orange. Psychedelic Canada Geese fleeing northwards across a chromium sky. Another deafening report; white again but much brighter much more ferocious threw Stephanie and myself sprawling onto the artificial sidewalk. Passing pedestrians, sheltering behind their many limbs from the light and debris of the impromptu fireworks display, shook their heads disgustedly at us. One tangerine-arsed beast defecates on Stephanie, the gooey purple turd splattering off her black fishnets and leaving its beetroot tinted foul stench on her thigh.
“Thanks for the moral support, friend.” Stephanie called after the still defecating creature.
“You speak English.” I realised, scrambling to a kneeling position in the shelter of an office-block foyer alongside her.
“What?”
“English. You speak English.”
“What is English?”
“That language, those words you're speaking, that's English.”
“I have never spoken a word of ‘English’.” she was defiant.
“It is! It must be if I can understand you.”
She looked at me as if I'd acquired another head.
“It’s English. Go on, say something. I’ll copy it.”
“Why...?” I am repeating less than a hundredth of second behind.
“What are you trying to pull here, alien?” she asked me ask her.
“Stop it.” we retorted.
“Look..” the mimicking was getting to her now, “..could we please stop this silly game? Before I have a FUCKING migraine!” we demanded, only slightly out of synch.
“I just wanted to show you it was true.” I said.
“Drop Out Zone.” she barked, that's it, “Drop Out Zone. I've spoken like this since I was oh ... any other number of sexes. All those long transforms ago. And you have the audacity to crouch there and say I'm speaking English.”
“You’re nuts, my friend.” I said
“It’s you, you’re warped; you’re hearing English - watch. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog...” I said.
Twilight's Last Gleaming Page 19