“Pennies from Heaven.” the fog uttered in many voices beside my ear, “Remember. Nombres; toujours les nombres: ils sont tres importants. Ecoutez bien ... quatre-vingt-cinq, cent trente--sept. Rien de plus facile.”
I just about comprehended the message such was the colloquial speed of its royal transmission. “Remember, my friend, Whysilage is a friend for we are Legion in memory of him.”
The fog cleared.
In memory of Whysilage.
The legend faded to a static whisper of distant nightlights and the spontaneous glugs of the sewer rumbling threateningly below, tickling the legs of this rusty old bridge. A brittle bronze wire behind me suddenly shattered under its own weight in a shower of liquid nitrogen fragments. Exploding with a clang of church bells in a warzone. At my feet clattered a selection of coins of the region, higher and lower denominations.
The bridge yawed disturbingly, throwing me to my feet. I scrabbled to pick up the coins from the smooth, metal surface. Trying to get a nail under the coins as the bridge lurched this way and that under the incessant abuse of this effluent deluge.
The stench of the living bowel filled my nostrils. The carcinogenic taste of its rectal produce. I didn’t even know if any of these coins were contemporary legal tender. A wire up ahead buckled under the strain and shatters into flakes of rotten steel.
Gotta run.
Gotta run.
Gotta run.
Safely across the bridge.
I found a telephone kiosk.
Picked up the receiver.
Slammed in a coin.
No dial tone.
Slammed in another, choosing randomly from the selection. I got a dial tone and a digital display told me how much call time I had; in Randalese figures - really useful. I punch in the number ... quatre-vingt-cinq, 85 ... cent trente-sept, 137 … and waited, watching the Randalese numbers twitch and change metronomically. A deafening sound like the random communal shriek of a disturbed bat cave had me pulling the earpiece sharply away from my ear.
“Jane Louxis...” I spoke into the hideous storm of noise. The phone became really heavy; too heavy to hold. Dropping it, I saw again those familiar rainbow filaments of teleportation.
Jane Louxis, still naked as the day she was born, filled the space between me and the phone in a freshly-grilled-bacon-scented dolphin leap of resurrection. Her alabaster body still rakishly thin, barely feminine. Her freckled forehead still bore its peculiar central tilka marker. Her arms were both fully repaired - intact.
“You remembered.” she beamed, “Good boy.”
“Your arms, they're okay.”
“When you visualize me. When you say the name that personifies me. Do you say it in such a way that I will have mangled arms?”
“How could I?” my reply.
She holds out her arms, “There you have it then. Where we headed?”
“How far can you move away from this..” I nodded at the telephone, “..before you start to break up? “
“I'm not moving from here.” she looked disgusted, “I am a ‘local’ girl. I step out of range. I'm history.”
“No, I mean, where are we headed, you & I? I meant our future together…”
She picked up the handset, “Take you anywhere you want to be. One-way trip, on me.”
She didn’t realise I had already fallen in love with my Saviour.
“So...” she awaited my destination. All she had ever done.
“Down that?”
“Got me here in one piece..”
“Yeah, but you're..”
“Flesh and blood.” she interjected, “Feel.”
She took my right hand and placed it on her cold left breast; talcum soft, imperfectly globular. Replication so real.
“Where to?” she prepared to dial realising I would follow her to the ends of Time.
“An old friend told me that CUT could deciphered the information in these zvektas; though I don't know how the hell I'm supposed to trace the guy from such a name..”
“You are joking, of course?” Jane Louxis was already typing in a number.
“No. Quite serious.”
“CUT, the demon cryptolinguist of Sepukaldo?” Jane Louxis was still tapping in digits, lots of them, “CUT, first name Connecti, there is only one such Connecti-CUT on this planet worth finding. Upline transfer. Two to go.” she said into the handset finally her name-as-access-code, “Jane Louxis”.
“Name?” she asked me, then huffed, “Ha, your name I don't even know.”
“D.J.. “I started, then remembered, “No, hang on, my full name is Deniz ... Djin Deniz.”
The trap was sprung, and I had no clue where my destination lay.
My vision filled with blue. The hoarse rasping of a sawn-open viola shaved off the first of my living surface molecules as they brutally ripping from the matrix and hoovered into the telephone handset. Redefining me as a lightfast four-base scream of data.
TWENTY
The coach driver climbed out of his seat. Groaning about the ache in his lower back - the typical complaint for people who spend most of their working life behind the wheel, the most exercise they get is changing gear - he climbed down from the coach, stretching; supporting his ruined back with his hands. A fast car zipped by, horn and headlights blaring.
The man (let's call him Bert; good enough name for a coach driver, don't you think?) made it to the crest of the hill; well, just about. His angina was really playing him up.
“Itz mi knackered-in ticka.” he’d complain in northern patois when his fat wife would bollock him for never pulling his weight round the house. He did have a mild heart attack last April; and he'd certainly taken every opportunity to pamper to his disability, the crafty bugger.
“Fuck me,” he panted, holding his back, “I could go a smoke.”
There by the Ashurst Beacon Monument - a concrete pyramid on top of a concrete cube some twenty feet high in total - the raucous troupe of 24 were gathered. A white-skinned albino woman stood on the ledge of the monument, trying to calm the mob with her hands. Bert moved closer so he could hear.
“...are you game for a bit of an adventure??” Lily Veyne was charging up her crew.
“YEAH!!” they roared, throwing up fists in the still night air.
“All this that you see.” Lily Veyne swept her arms skyward, “Every tiny dot. Is equal to the number of warring nations currently making a thorough bollocks-up of a war on the other side of your Galaxy. They need our help. They need our soul. The ammunition of our dreams. The compounds that our carbon bodies are made of. You are to be the secret weapon, the unseen threat, that will jar into action the game of stalemate we've been locked in for millennia. Like martyr warriors of a Holy War we will smash through their inadequate defences and social complacency. Taking their leaders with us as we strike at the very heart of their…”
Someone giggled drunkenly in the distance, bringing Lily Veyne crashing down to Earth with an almighty thump.
Her supposedly captive audience, hyped by the effects of Barry Rhisland's diabolical concoction, had dispersed. Sectioned off into copulating cliques. Indulging in their own private sermons. Litany heavy with supernatural overtones. Liturgies of the flesh unceremonious. The languor of lust. An alien tongue insinuated corporeal insanity. Proclaimed itself Lord and Master of the ridiculous; the religious; the reckless. Invoked from its congregation their wildest whims; their most wanton wishes. Freeing their communal spirit to contaminate and populate and simulate through the physical medium of their human frailties their hidden ideals. Their icons. Their soul.
There was Jenifer Maryland, held aloft by Vini Arkansas. She was turned back on herself in mid-air, her ankles by her ears. Arms buried in both her sexual orifices. Ten long, black-tipped tendrils popping from her mouth tickling and teasing Vini Arkansas’ body; his hair; eyes, back, arse, dick, his hairy chest pierced and plunged. An intrusive digit worked its way up his rectum. Releasing his inner bird of prey for all the world to see; for the
shit black colour that it was; making his body ooze boiling tarmac. A back shearing slake of asphalt and brakefluid. His black heart seething radiant rays. Shattering the cold, hard exterior and spewing its black influence over the packs of revellers about them as he spun faster and faster and faster on his heals until he and Jenifer Maryland tumbled drunkenly to the floor in a big black gurgling twisting mass of degradation.
His spluttering influence like the black death plague contaminated all and sundry with its decadent sermon.
Caught in the spitting treacle crossfire, Christian Alabama; his murderous guilt eking its blunt revenge on him. Pushed the weapons of his gory trade out of him. He staggered about aimlessly in the orgiastic melee, every part of him protruding screwdrivers. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Jutting from his skull. Piercing his eyes, his cheekbones, chin, clavicles. Poking from every naked part. Front and back.
“Forgive! Forgive!” the ranting heretic tortured for too long, “Take what sad revenge you must, my maker. Mine is a sad and truculent dilemma.” A screwdriver pierced his tongue, stunting his diatribe.
“Like thoo thla mithpertrabeth.” he blathered on regardless. Stumbled over a naked couple on the dewy grass, embedding himself in the back of the man as he rammed in and out of the old woman under him.
The impaired thruster juddered wildly, unloading his scrotum into the old girl. Spasming and ejaculating like copious rows of hanged men, Christian Alabama behind him stuck to his leathery back. Locked into his spine and shoulders. Shouting,
These demented things are out to teach us severance.
The oldster dropped to all fours and scampers off into the night like a startled hedgehog. Harry Ohio's manic ravings, Echoing! Echoing.' The cheating spinemonger. Teeth the work of Satan. The Chalice of Semantics all roaring and betraying their foes with these unbridled icons!
The fat woman left alone on her back in the damp grass was wearing a bizarre and twisted grin. Her eyes and teeth were as white as snow. As cold as ice. The blizzard behind her eyes becoming living flesh gushing forth from the frothing sockets. Her shoulders jolted with the arctic rush. She clasped her hands to her head against the chilling onslaught from within. A guttural revving rose from deep within her. The glee in her face beams like a headlamp. Her hands and feet together were whizzing, blurred like flywheels on reheat. Her limbs and chest went haywire in a mess of exhaust manifolds and cooling vanes. She propped forward and in so doing kickstarted herself, her engine roaring.
Albert Nebraska stumbled in on this metaphysical miracle.. mounted the big white motorbike: whooped and cried out as he revved her fucking ears. Off they went, zipping past a brawling load of jockstrapless rugger boys.
Two of the group of six were playing fisticuffs. The rest were cheering them on to even more extremes of violence. In their excitement their bulky bodies have filled out, overdosed on Mister Rhisland’s frenzy-manufactured steroid derivative. Muscle grease and sinew blade combining to add a massive bulk to their frames. Even their heads, affected by the rush, grew and swelled to nauseating proportion. The crackle of mutating bone like the sound of a burning old wardrobe. Their human shapes were swapped for more substantially mythological designs.
The mighty Minotaur and the graceful Griffon. Another lumbered by a multihorned Centaur. Georgia, the black sheep of the bunch, took to his mind's ideal existence and sprouted huge eagles wings. His face split horizontally to a crazy beak. Off into the dark sky he winged. His ebony legs withering to mainly decorative tail feathers. Higher above the torrid scene he soared. From this elevation, he could see Lily Veyne on the concrete dais that surrounded the monument. The many grotesque and distorted abominations roaring deliriously below, stumbling through nightmares, fighting demons, running scared from unseen pursuers. The stench of fear rising, even to this heady altitude. As was WPC Mavis Arizona
She, like him, was a bird of Paradise. Two sets of batwings for this ornithologist's fantasy gone wrong. Glossy and slick as cat fur. They met in a manic, beak-pecking embrace at the very zenith of their ascent. Then, as if on silent understanding, both plummeted, wrapped in each others many winged embrace. Swooping birds of prey on a crash course for a glowing mutated mass of animal parts and human memories that was struggling with its own creation like a non-swimmer caught in the Summer undertow. Lily Veyne watching on.
They hit the wet mass of flesh and bone and passion head-on. Bullseye. The momentum of their crash like a drop into a standing pool propels unrecognisable blobs of meaty manufacture high into the night sky. These clods of human tissue as they descended reforming and rearranging rodental replicants. Their tiny bodies as they splashed back into the bubbling mound struck a note. Each musical slap a single motto. The whole ensemble as it splattered like diarrhoea sounded like...
On the shores dimly seen/
Through the mists of the deep/
Where the foes haughty host/
In dread silence reposes/
Motorbike Penny Massachusetts and her rider Albert Nebraska ripped round the concrete monument in fifth. Ploughed right into the mound of undulating flesh. Expelling more musical mottoes.
What is that which the breeze/
O'er the towering steep/
As it fitfully blows/
Half conceals half discloses/
Lily Veyne was truly amazed at the extent of psycho-physical revolution her hastily manufactured concoction had encouraged. Suddenly, as if on cue, the millions of orange street lamps far below in the Skelmersdale valley blinked out from the far horizon in. Like a ripple of black water running in reverse, darkness engulfing household light and municipal lampstandard with equal hunger.
Bedford Delaware staggered to Lily Veyne's side as a westerly wind rose from the Southport beaches of filth, panting awestruck.
“What the hell is happening?” he implored.
A black car-shape came rocketing over the brow of the hill. Screaming BANZAI!! as it thumped into the lard globule. Expelling more tuneless lyric.
Now it catches the gleam/
Of the mornings first beam/
The black tide swept all the way to the summit of Ashurst Beacon. In one blinding surge of alien power the concrete Ashurst monument exploded with a blue light, throwing Lily Veyne and Bedford Delaware headlong into the slagheap of redesigned flesh before them.
Bedford Delaware screaming. Lily Veyne beaming; as their donation to the cause spewed out.
In full glory reflected/
Now shines at the stream/
Tis the star spangled banner/
The half hundred weight of human substance lifted sluggishly into the air. Its external surface baking egg-shell smooth.
O long may it wave/
The levitating gargantuan split into two, the cell division of a fertilised ovum exuding a hi-pitched cry of procreational ecstasy. The halved amoeba quartered. Like four house-sized golf balls rolling about each other before subdividing to eight with another wild, choral exclamation of Gloria in Excelsis Deo. Initiating further subdivisions - the procreation of a truly magnificent warmachine.
A Homosapien Battleship.
Each swift howling halving revealing more and more glistening detail. Ferocious dislocations fuelled by the erotic desires of its 24 component parts. Its human substructure. Shuddering with magnificent armoury and turrets, a castle in the sky. Amazing mind-boggling thrusters droning with pregnant potential; their pitch soaring, readying for blast off. Tornadoes - tiny dust storms beneath the craft whipped up by the shifted volumes of human body mass.
The Battleship turned lazily in the air, slowly developing portholes and landing gear which retracted mechanically into itself. Huge laser-guided bombs were born to its under surface. The screams and groans now throbbing with raw, near climactic power. Tail fins, one either side, slid out like flesh razors. Gleaming iridescent in the blue beam of light that emanated from the concrete Ashurst Monument stretching high into the night sky like a cobalt laser.
Over in Liverpool also a brigh
t-blue column of light reached for the stars. And inside it another Human Battleship readied itself for the last stand. Over to the East, out Manchester way, and to the North, that’d be Preston, and Warrington in the South. Cobalt beams stuck up in the night sky like a national contagion.
The cockpit of the Lily Veyne Battleship blossomed like a flower afore of the vessel's armoury. And, as the bewildered, wind swept coach-driver, Bert the coach driver, rose from his seclusion, his hands to his ears, he was sure he saw a female figure rise pneumatically into her seat behind the canopy, mouthing out the window as the screams of agony reach a deafening intensity..
O'er the land of the Free/
She flipped down the blast visor on her helmet. Punched in some co-ordinates. And the Battleship entered the light, a genetic monolith blaring a magnificent melody of sound.
And the home of the Brave//
The chorus died to a whisper.
There was one final nuclear surge.
And the whole enormous mechanism ejaculated up inside the cobalt blue column with one deafening hypersonic bang.
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