Songs from the heart of gladness.
EIGHTEEN
Badly mutilated and inhaling the acid fumes of exhaustion; the murderous obscenity hard on his heals; the physical medium he slithered through burning and scarring him from molecular friction; the searing pain of escape; torture the final moments of Clive Idaho's miserable life. But anything was better than the terror that beast represented. Those clawing bear-hooks. Those razor teeth. The guttural rumble of its insatiable intestines. The deafening gnash of those bloodied Jaws. The stench of dead flesh lifting off its throat like a sewer fog. The lingering, gnawing presence a bite from that monster left embedded in the skin and muscle; a maggoty parasite of pain.
The thing snapped out of nowhere with a hypersonic boom. Hit Clive Idaho right in the chest. The gnawing of its tiny piranha teeth against his sternum a truly nauseating sensation; rattling him to the core with its incessant pneumatic grinding.
The heat and hiss of his own blood all around him now like a lavaflow. Embalming him. Clive Idaho drowning in the hot, meaty slurry, facing imminent death in his own haemic womb as the abortionist’s surgical machinery slowly annihilated him. Consuming him bit by bit; chewing him to a pulp.
“NOOOOOOOOO!” Clive Idaho screamed, kicking out at the revolting assassin with all his remaining might. One last valiant bid for freedom. He scrambled away, trying to lose the thing in the concrete maze of the towerblock he was certain stood not too far off - Highgrove Mews, if only he could make it in one piece.
Did Clive Idaho still exist as a human? Or was he just mud and cement pretending to be human? Was the sum of his parts anything like the vague and ever-fading memory of the young man he recently was.
He arrived in the comforting stability of the concrete hi-rise and wound his way up the unfathomable structure hoping for refuge in its lofty three-dimensional maze of floors and walls and ceilings and ducts and steel. The calming comfort of concrete.
Clive Idaho heard the menacing snuffles and scuffles many floors below him methodically rising - a whisper becoming a scream. Not long now before he was tracked down. Destroyed. Humanities only real chance to save the World from Lily Veyne's vile influence. Why was she here? Why all the secrecy; the cloak and dagger. The drugs ... what was that all about? How deeply into this close-knit community did her corruption go?
Clive Idaho would never know 'cos the beast had sniffed him out and cornered him up on the eleventh floor. The last apartment on the right facing the main road. Trapped in concrete awaiting the coup de grace. An unkempt man rose solemnly from his favourite chair opposite the TV.
Clive Idaho had been totally unaware of this man's presence, so concerned nee obsessed had he become with the inevitability of his imminent demise.
Snatching the opportunity, Clive Idaho made a dash for the ruffian; a dark-haired bloke in his early twenties. Unshaven and dressed for Winter. Clive Idaho corkscrewed recklessly into the man's shoes, through his socks and into the trouser fabric, causing the hapless individual to trip over himself as he passed the modest couch and land heavily on his face. Regaining consciousness fairly rapidly, the man crawled in the direction of the kitchen, probably to seek solace in the bottle; or at least give himself some excuse for his clumsy manner.
He didn't reach the kitchen
For as the man was rising once again to his feet, struggling against his inexplicable gain in weight that was so encumbering him, the beast tries to enter his hand. The man pulls his hand back as if scorched. A loud squeal reverberated throughout the apartment floor. The man was on his knees, motionless yet alert. The beast again tried to enter, through his shins. The man was thrown back onto the floor by the shock of the intrusion. Again the pained scream rocks the floor.
Clive Idaho hung on, hoping the beast would be deterred from further attempts then felt the saw jaws lock on his ribcage grinding down on the tough muscle of his heart. The man took immediate action trying to rid himself of the two demented poltergeists that had decided today of all days to use his clothing as their battlefield. He kicked off his piss stinking jeans. Tried to wriggle free of the cumbersome overcoat. Tried to rid himself of his T-shirt and jumper in one swift economic action. The shoulders locked over his head and the beast lunged at Clive Idaho’s face hoping to sample the young Chinaman's nose; the delicacy after the stodginess of the main course.
It missed and instead sank its razor-edged jaws into the chest of the busily undressing man. His screams abruptly stopped; his sternum split open like a blood orange; heart and lunges hewn open.
A deafening wail accompanied the monster's wounded flight from its contact with this human's life; his living pain. The whiplash as it tugged at the tissue to be free so ferocious it tore the torsal skin and muscle right off in one sickening blood-bursting laceration. Quivering still, and not knowing how or why, the hapless man died; his nerves firing off their last before even they succumbed to Death's refrigerating embrace.
Clive Idaho, now fatally wounded, sloped off back into the concrete floor to seek out a safer haven to die. Clive Idaho heard the distinctive rasping sound of someone a few stories up brushing their teeth. A strange time to be attending to such dental duties. He scurried lamely to investigate.
Peeping one-eyed out of the wall on a bathroom scene littered with underwear and stockings hanging from one line of cord over the bath. The radiator was heavily laden. There was a girl on her knees; it was not her teeth she was brushing but the tiled bathroom floor. Clive Idaho, even in his dying state, was unable to deny himself one last ogle. The sight of her slender rump in those pink cotton shorts as she shunted back and forth; diligent in her scrubbing chore. Her small breasts just visible as the cut-off T-shirt she was wearing hung loosely from her. The dark part between her scarred legs. The black scabs on her feet. The encrusted lacerations on her calves and thighs. The marks on her back.
“Clive Idaho?” the girl swung round suddenly. Glanced at the exact location with joy scrawled across her battered face. Clive Idaho pulled far back into the wall, his heart up in his throat.
“Please.” he heard, “Don’t leave me. I know you can hear me. You can hear me, Clive Idaho.” Her voice trailed off as Clive fell back and back.
“Yes.” the wallpaper above the radiator took on a facial topography the size of a floating bull’s head.
“You're the good looking boy from the off-licence.” she stated, frowning.
Silence.
“Why are you in there?” she asked, gently placing her hands on the wallpaper. “How are you in there?”
“Doesn't this disgust you?” Clive Idaho asked, astonished at her instant acceptance of his reality.
“Should it? I just know you as Clive Idaho. Instinctively. It's been happening a lot lately, since my...” The girl choked on this bit of her confession. She turned away, gnawing her thumbnail; her shoulders racking softly, silently. She races from the bathroom to her bedroom adjacent.
Clive Idaho backed through the wall and tracked up into the bedroom ceiling above her weeping form on the bed. Abruptly, the girl stopped weeping and turned round to look at the ceiling. Right into Clive Idaho’s eyes.
“You know, don't you?” her eyes puffed with anguish and lose.
“I know?” Clive Idaho knew he could never simply hide from this girl, he had to reveal himself fully, his whole self.
“About my EVANDA. My little baby boy. What have they done to you, my baby?” she wailed hysterically. “I want you back in my arms, baby. To press your beautiful face to my nipple. What have they done to you?”
The ceiling hosted a guilty silence.
“You know.” she hollered at the wall above the headboard, “Don't you.” It wasn’t a question.
“I'm afraid I know only too well.” the headboard replied in a soft, understanding voice..
“Such a nice face.” she smiled.
“Sorry?”
“I remember your lovely dark hair and your silky eyes. Your polite smile. When we met that day at the off-li
cense ... I have a good memory for faces. Especially that bastard and his freaky dwarf with the yellow shit he stuck in my arms.”
She sensed a swirling dread from the headboard shift across to the adjacent wall and slip lamely through to the lounge, the sounds of laboured breathing.
“What?” she strolled into the lounge after him.
Silence.
Deathly, moody, overcast silence.
“What is it?” she asked, “What have they done to my baby?”
More of the same cold, callous silence.
“Tell me!” she screamed.
“NOOO!” the whole room shuddered, shelves dislodged, a vase cracked, a central heating pipe buckled, whimpering sobs echoed from within the mirror over the mantelpiece.
The girl bit her lip, looking at her reflection in the mirror. Seeing deep into the hazel eyes of Clive Idaho, the Chinese lad as he was. She puts a hand to the mirror, “Tell me Clive Idaho, please. Tell Rita what they did to her baby. You do know. You have to tell me what's happened. I have a right as a mother to know...”
She felt a sudden relaxing of tension from the mirror's glass surface open the gate to Clive Idaho’s guilt-ridden conscious like broadcast TV. There, Carroll Maryland read for herself the sordid files of Clive Idaho’s testimony. The despairing sight of Mister Rhisland's basement laboratory. The tubing full of that vile syrup. The babies. The meathooks. The stench of decay; of infantile brains open to the air; of other chemicals; scents from the memory of chemistry classes she was, only last year, still taking. The remains of her baby Evanda swinging on its own hook.
The connection made, she realises this is the same puke that evil bastard pumped into her arm. She clenched the hypo-lump, massaging, Evanda... “no! Not my baby. Not my little baby boy. Not in my arm.” her lump reddening under her continued scratching, “That's… disgusting.”
She turned from the mirror, holding herself; her baby Evanda. Hugging the pair of them.
“There was a big fella there? At the underground carpark?” the wall below the window asked.
She said nothing.
“Something very big is coming down. Even the cops are in on it..”
“What's new.” Carroll Maryland huffed.
“There’s a woman.” the wall by the second bedroom door stated, “A barmaid at the White House up on Standishgate. Lily Veyne, she is called. An albino, you know white hair, pink eyes. She's behind it; coordinating it. I don't know who she works for. But they’re into some pretty sick stuff. The drug they're making is so exotic. You wouldn’t believe what I've seen..”
“Why are you in my wall?” Carroll Maryland asks, out of the blue. “My walls,” Carroll Maryland repeated the question, “Why are you in them? How did you get there?”
The turbulent fog of thought enshrouded the room, seeming to make the very wallpaper tremble, flicker with fifty memories per second. The tight floral knit unwoven in animated nostalgia for all to see. Scenes of hatred; his family and sister. Scenes of shame; him entering the wall of his bedroom. Scenes of lust and revelation., the unexpurgated video of the how and why of Clive Idaho’s incarceration. The menage-a-trois back at Bedford Delaware's place that sad night. The horrendous show there up on the wall uncensored. The shifting of reality. The remorse. The self-hatred.
“I encouraged it.” you could hear the tears in his throat. “I must have wanted all those degrading things to happen to me.” The orgy ground on as he narrated his shame. “I have tried to deny it.” Bodies embedded in bodies. “But it's futile...” I probably deserved that.
Clive Idaho commented on a shot where his face was bitten into. Didn't feel a thing at the time. he chuckled, “In fact, that's the first time I’ve seen it.”
“That's the same sort of thing happened with the big bloke. At the place they held me. Him and his wife and kids. But I've told all this to the Police…” Carroll Maryland smiled to herself realising the futility of confessing such nonsense to the already infiltrated law.
“There is one hope.” Clive Idaho remembered, “A Detective Bill Parrish. He seemed untouched by this Lily Veyne woman; that won't be for long, though..”
There was a violent hammering at the door.
“Mum's back.” Carroll Maryland checked her pink-plastic-strapped Kylie watch, About time too.
“No. It's her: It's Lily Veyne.” Without warning the beast attacked Clive Idaho shooting in from his blind side. A mad scuffle of red streaked across the wall with a hideous shriek. The door was kicked in. There in the hallway stood Lily Veyne in a long, black, plastic mac; barefoot.
“Hello, little girlie.” she beamed in her haunting way, “At last we meet.”
Clive Idaho was chased over the door frame trailing gore, causing Carroll Maryland to gasp with horror.
“Boys will play.” Lily Veyne smiled as she reached for the girl's throat and lifted her to her tiptoes like the corniest thing since the bronchial Darth Vader.
“Don't want them getting all tangled up in these..” she slipped a hand down the front of Carroll Maryland's shorts, “..in all their excitement and damaging the merchandise, now do we?” Ripped them off in one.
“NNNOOOO!” the ceiling gurgled scarlet.
Lily Veyne also tore off the girl’s damp T-shirt. Carroll Maryland lashed out at the side of Lily Veyne's neck with a hand chop. It worked: Lily Veyne dropped to the floor. Carroll Maryland landed more or less on her feet and dashed naked into her mum's bedroom (because it had a lock on the door) and barricaded herself in.
“Not quite good enough!” Lily Veyne shouted from the other side as Clive Idaho and his pursuer raced round that wall, buckling structures as they went. The bedroom door sheared off its hinges. Hung limply from its dead lock. Blood dripping from the walls. Soaking into the carpet.
“What is it doing to him??” Carroll Maryland screamed as Lily Veyne poked her proud face round the damaged door’s hinges, smashed her way through to get at her quarry.
“Why are you doing this??” she shrieked as Lily disrobes of her mac, revealing nothing but a birthday-suit smile.
“War games.” Lily Veyne dashed at the girl in the blink of an eye. She didn’t move like any human. Pinned Carroll Maryland to the bed. All around them the bedroom was repainted with the blood of Clive Idaho, his death screams rocked the bed; a storm in sheets.
“Temper, temper.” Lily Veyne laughed as the girl beneath her struggled vainly; her face going purple with the strain and anger of restraint.
“Easy, girlie.” Lily Veyne chuckled slyly. “Won’t be long, now. The show will soon be over.”
The battling pair streaked once more across the ceiling, crossing the previous blood-dripping strip; the ever-prevalent symbolism of fate.
Red slime slid to an arcing halt, ploughing through more of the same on the adjacent wall. Clive Idaho’s dying screams had been replaced by the crunchings and slobberings of consumption. Lily Veyne's face loomed very large now in Carroll Maryland’s vision.
Her mouth opening.
A crazy construction of teeth and tongue and something other roiled about inside that pink cavern. Blood mixing saliva into twisting tendrils. Instruments of interrogation hewn from bloodclots. Gums, reinvested with intricate dental technology. Cementing her sinister intent.
Whizzing and whirring, tales from the kiss of death.
SESSION XVIII
I awoke in that seedy motel room. Stephanie Sylverre asleep, her head at the foot of the bed. The redhead woman we had downlined into existence - Jane Templeton Rice - was stood in the far corner, still naked as the day she was born (well, yesterday if we're going to be pedantic about the phrase); shivering; holding the dead left arm Stephanie extracted the nerves from to take flight 'on the wings of love' last night. The arm, blue and swollen, hung limply as she tried to rub life into it.
She saw me awaken; her shivers were checked.
“Never seen anyone sleep with their eyes open.” Jane gasped.
“Sorry?”
“Your
eyes. They were open all through the night moving left then right as in your dreams the heathen soul grabbed you and ate you whole.”
What an oddly poetic mode of speech.
“You know, this place never fails to mystify me. One minute you think you've got it sussed, you know, yeah, its a bit odd but I can live with it; the very next moment your spellbound.”
“But a man with eyes that never close, a man with HELL to inter, behind such eyes he knows Immaculate fury awaits him there.” Jane Templeton Rice made her weary way towards me.
As quiet as I could, I rolled to a seated position at the edge of the bed and pulled on my one-piece latex body suit. Jane knelt down at my feet. It felt like a lobotomised dream was just churning along outside my cerebral control. She rested her frizzy ginger head on my lap. Whispered.
“I have watched you, sir, with your coral eyes unblinking. I have dreamt lids for those pearls, oyster cups for your gaze the drinking, sorrows raw and wretched there.”
“That's really beautiful. You are wasted in this job.” here was I appreciating the whore poet.
She looked at me, tears shimmering in her emerald eyes, diffusing their crisp team.
“Never blinking eyes are rare.” she smiled.
Do I really not blink? How can I prove it? How would I know?
“Will you watch me while I blink for you, Jane?”
The honour will he mine to see a pair of eyes so fine locked away to be revealed another day.
“I'll take that as a yes, shall I?”
She nodded, didn’t smile.
“Right. Ready?” Christ, this could well be the most important thing I have ever done in my life… “Ready?”
She nodded.
Blink.
A heavy-gauge steel door slammed down over my mind annihilating Jane's adoring, face, plunging me into a horrorshow world of pitch black panic. The steel door snapped open, leaving my mind fully exposed to the searing pain, every last memory the telemorph in front of me was broadcasting; blocking all channels. Sadness abounded in this sadomasochistic domain. No passion without pain. No love without loss. Love and pain; passion and loss; inseparable halves of the entrenched reality of her depraved recollections. Lovers-lost to their dreams of sinful worship. Lustmongers groping in all directions, tearing clods of flesh from pas-,ion's split--open back. Gnawing into pain's writhing face, grinding nose gristle and teeth in the same crunching gnash of ecstasy. Mortuary seduction in a lavatory cubicle witnessed by walls of screaming demon faces. A many-bodied body feeding off itself, so yearning for desire that the corruption of its mortal corpse to the detriment of its wailing soul insanely undertaken. Life destroyed in the name of Paradise. Liberation of the psyche through the murder of sons a-ad daughters, men, women, aunts and uncles, kinsmen and enemy alike all prime targets in the struggle for stark realisation. A psychofigurization of the power of desire warded deranged misguided.
Twilight's Last Gleaming Page 22