Underneath the Draconian Sky

by Chatwin, Dale M.

  7

  When he regained consciousness, the Guy found himself in a maze. He was surrounded by glass tanks filled with sapphire water that contained all manner of molluscs, cephalopods and crustaceans. Amongst the array of aquatic animals there swam a Frilled Shark, 6ft in length, an indefatigable fossil from a time when ancient brutality ruled the oceans. The labyrinth was made of impenetrable crystal and it was the shape of an orchid. Somewhere far off there came a blood chilling howl. He was in the High Occultist’s domain, the Island was in the rear view mirror; nothing but dust settling on a darkening horizon.

  “Thus begins my long, slow goodbye.”

  “1107, you have come at last, riding on your dead sleigh, a dead man walking with some kind of voodoo magic coursing through his veins. Eyes for daggers and a misfit ready for a shallow grave. My world echoes with your coming, quakes felt through broken clocks where the thrum of their hands and whistle of their cries chime awful sounds of doom. There’s a sense of déjà vu, like we have walked through this graveyard before. It is true, the teeth are so sharp, red and white, and I all I can do is think of you, my love. Do you like what I have created for you? Is it not a coruscating specimen? I built it from my own imagination, for that is what drives us to do the things we do, 1107: imagination. I want you to seek, for if you seek, then surely you shall find, if old mother’s words are true. Your obituary will be carved into these glassy walls and the waters will show you things you were not aware of. Seek me, 1107. Find me.”

  He found himself in the Abyssopelagic Zone, a world swallowed in dark memories and occult dreams. The creatures inside the tanks weaved and bobbed, droll in their movements and unbiased in their actions, all, except for the Frilled Shark. Its grey, lifeless eyes seemed to be full of a primeval malice, an awakened hunger that had been lying dormant for an age. It wanted him to take the plunge into the water and accept its cold embrace. The Guy snapped out of the trance and began to move.

  “What’s done is done and somewhere down the pipe is only a black and white photograph of yesterday, the piper plays and lures the children to their dooms while agents of agriculture perform their tricks with butcher men, the eye of a needle as fine as a grain of sand, a grain of my future. Translation; lost. Transition; lost. Transformation; forgotten. Indeed it is a fool who forgets that blood is only blood, sleeping and waking in a perpetual state of insomnia,” he said.

  He ran through hypersonic corridors, shimmering and meandering and there, in that space he fell flat on his face, receiving the floor with masochistic grace.

  When he pulled himself up, the Guy beheld a tank that was home to a model village; like the lost city of Atlantis, beneath the ocean, preserved, a myth discovered to be real. It was a model of Lament’s Corner, seeing it caused him to suffer from violent flashbacks: Nancy, Sylvester and the Rift Inn Time burning to ashes swarmed inside his head like wasps protecting their hive when under attack.

  “A ruin, future plans destroyed in the flames.”

  “You are the harbinger of death, 1107, you have always known that. Everything you touch becomes a decaying Golem wreaking havoc on your sanity.”

  “These tragedies will become my totem, something to hold onto when gravity shifts and the tectonic plates of my existence crumble into the magma of madness.”

  The Frilled Shark swam over the village, stirring sand from the tank, drifting up and outwards and settling on Lament’s Corner.

  “The past is made of sand,” said the Guy.

  “No sooner spoken than broken,” replied the High Occultist, his voice reverberating through the maze.

  Throughout the labyrinth he saw other models submerged in the glassy water; one was of a group of dragons gathered in a circle, wings outstretched, their necks erect while they roared at the heavens. In the middle was a pearl the size of a golf ball, glowing softly.

  “The Aakmanu manipulated both of our fates, 1107. It is everything to someone, but nothing everyone else. Even now they muster their telepathic strength to catch a glimpse of my world, every time they have failed because I am the beginning of eternity, the end of time and the beginning of every ending. If their experiments had succeeded and I was reborn a Rift Walker, you and I could have been brothers and the revolution would not have been jaded.”

  “Your R-complex stretches beyond the borders of logical malice, it is pure bile spewed forth from the gullets of cacodaemonic whores.”

  “I never was but am always to be, no one has ever seen me, nor ever will, and yet I am the confidence of all those seeking a way out of reality and into the macabre. I will forever live and breathe on this unconscious plain.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, the Guy thought he saw a slender creature stretching out its arms, or tentacles, towards him but when he turned, all he saw was the Frilled Shark laying a blanket of sand upon the bawling dragons.

  There was a pallid orchid looking through a window,

  Staring at the blots of morning dew,

  Wondering how its journey had ended here,

  Immersed in foggy solitude,

  And tormented fear.

  These hypnotising rhythmic clicks,

  A sorrowful waltz step by step

  In this amniotic fluid of stars and galaxies.

  They bring budding memories,

  Flowering in the outer realms.

  There was a model of the twin factories from the Industrial Complex, one was like a starless night sky while the other was like rare, polished ivory, and from their chimneys came bubbles that produced a relaxing sound; the Guy closed his eyes and inhaled. The silence imploded with another flesh crawling howl.

  “Poor little Nancy,” said the High Occultist, “you set her free from the shackles of Hell’s 7th circle, and thrown her into the 9th. Do you wonder what happened to her, 1107? Do you wish to bear witness to her fate? Look into the water and see, see, see.”

  He saw, and could not look away, he wanted to look away, but could not. His eyes were glued to the images that were being projected from within the labyrinth.

  Young Nancy, the eleven year old girl who had her innocence taken away by a deviant named Gerald Danmouth. After her and the other child workers had been rescued by the mysterious man, the one with the desirable emerald eyes, they all gathered on the train, the inspector took pity on them and said he’d get them safely to the Moffatt Fields, after that through they would no longer be his problem for he did not wish to get involved in such complex matters.

  A man by the name of Julian Womack saw the group of young’uns, all battered and filthy, and said he would take them to a shelter for orphans he used to live in when he was a child, growing up in a cruel world under the dominion of the Aakmanu. Like any other group of rag tag desperate children, they had no choice but to trust him.

  The house was huge, a towering giant on top of a hill of red poppies, from a distance it looked like it could be home, to Nancy it was a new beginning, a chance to regain a youth that didn’t seem to exist anymore. Being in the company of Gerald Danmouth had toughened her, like her soul had been wrapped in leather, and whatever carefree attitude that children were meant to have had been stripped from her the way he had stripped off her clothes every night; barbaric. As she approached the house she smiled for the first time, and as the bright spark of pain bedazzled her senses, she knew it would be the last, forever.

  A rusty cage, the first thing she saw, naked and bent over on all fours, shackled in that position. Nancy felt water trickling down her back; it felt like the slimy discharge that a tired old dog would produce after a day of wallowing in its own worthless environment. There was another cage, to the left of hers; in it was Tommy, strapped to a wooden chair. Above him an old television portrayed men and women engaged in foul sexual intercourse, his eyes were clamped open, and a steady drip of water from a broken pipe above served to keep them moist. On his face there was a feed bag and he chewed something hellish with zombie delight.

  “Oh Tommy,” she said.

 
Nancy noticed he was naked too, and attached to his penis was a pipe, it appeared to be sucking on his member, but where did the pipe lead?

  Her mind cleared,

  and things appeared out of the haze,

  more cages,

  a girl in one,

  a boy in another, but something was happening to the other girls that wasn’t happening to her.

  They were being inseminated by phallic objects connected to the same pipe that molested the boys.

  Nancy was young, but she wasn’t blind to the harsh reality of life, she had been in the company of a madman long enough to start thinking like one: the girls were being pumped full of semen. That’s when she started to hear the sounds of torture, the sounds of forced pleasure and the sounds of pistons and whirring machines.

  The sound of huge metal doors sliding open

  then slamming shut.

  The sound of footsteps

  approaching.

  It was James Womack and two other men: one was a neutral looking fellow with boring features, while the other was a walking mammoth. Fat and hairy, his face had the same appearance as a blobfish.

  They stopped just outside her cage.

  “How are you enjoying the show, sir?” James asked the fat man.

  “Excellent, I will be wanting a trio of girls for tonight, I shall be running my tests on them,” he replied, breathing heavily, sweating profusely and smelling of lavender and lime.

  “What shall we do with the boys they are connected with?” asked the neutral man.

  “Slaughter them, they have served their purpose. Discordia wishes to drink her fill and I live to serve. We all live to serve.”

  Nancy couldn’t hold it in, she began to sob and when her body shuddered it felt as if her body had shaken off the numbness, she too was being penetrated and pumped. Her sudden outburst brought the men’s attention to her. The blobfish bent down, struggling, and pressed his face against the cage, staring intensely into her eyes, scrutinizing her very soul.

  “We all live to serve,” he whispered, and then got up, as he walked away she heard him shout two words: “Bring her!”

  She was allowed a few hours to recuperate. Nancy was led into a gargantuan hall; a throne room, on the walls were tapestries of a history unknown to her; great beasts of cephalopod descent threw tiny humans into the oceans and flying serpents wreathed villages in fire. A final piece of art showed the desolation, nothing but ashes forming a scum upon a great deluge. She discovered the fat man’s name was Natsam Claudius. She was still naked, always bare and always vulnerable. There was a clock embedded into the floor that had ceased to function; the time was 16:47. She was forced on all fours again. There was one bare wall, it was a haunting wall, full of silent despair and forgotten memories, after a while an image began to appear, projected from some satanic room. It was a symbol:

  ^

  [R___R]

  ¬¬¬¬¬

  ___Y___

  V

  V

  Nancy stared, overcome with a sense of confusion and disillusion. Maybe she was hallucinating all of this. Maybe she would wake up, still on the train heading towards an unknown, but better destination, but she wasn’t. It was all too real.

  She saw latex mannequins begin to move along the walls; they moved in stop motion, if she blinked she would miss a move. The floor began to shift and warp, it looked like ants on a mass exodus to enact revenge on the child who had stomped on their nest.

  Natsam appeared in front of her, materialising from some bizarre mist. He was dressed in tight red leather coveralls that emphasised his grotesque physique. He mounted her, climbed inside her and pulled her head back so she was staring at the strange symbol.

  “Do you want to see what I see? Children bathing in oil; their pores clogged with glutinous liquid, suffocating on toxic fumes while a languid beat lingers in the atmosphere. The stratosphere screams to the insects below about their sordid battles and samurai warriors slice through bodies, fountains of blood and chaos all around. I see a train ploughing through a church, smashing it to smithereens. Brick and mortar submerged in red wine, then alcoholics praise the Gods for this debauched offering. Stare at the Sigil, stare and allow it to pulsate through your being, a flash of lightning and terror will stain your dreams.” Climax, a horrid orgasm. It was a horrific hallow populated by slimy tentacles, seething nauseating gases and pulling her towards a lobotomising demise.

  “Now fucking smile, you miserable whore.”

  Nancy, poor little Nancy. So young, and yet a tough soul. She never smiled, instead she closed her eyes, the Sigil had burned itself into her consciousness, it glowed and exploded into stars that settled in a night sky. She found herself in a younger body, but still hers, in a back garden that seemed like it was in a past life. The grass was lush and smelled of summer. She played with her rabbits, allowing them to run around the garden with her hamsters.

  The Guy snatched his eyes away, fighting off the tears.

  Thirst, years of stalking through the labyrinth being stalked by that prehistoric Chlamydoselachus Anguineus, he yearned for moisture. The Herculean Aquarium that surrounded him laughed mockingly, all of that water and he could not get to it, and even if he could it would be salt water, not a good source of rehydration. As he perspired he felt weaker, the High Occultist had no intention of facing him, the Guy would just die in this unhallowed territory, he would drown in crystal glass.

  Eventually, after much slinking through shimmering halls he came to a clearing where the floor was made of the same crystal, beneath its fragile looking surface there was more water that housed many Vampire Squid. The Guy saw a thousand rabid black dogs fighting over a Minotaur skeleton. They snarled and spat thick blobs of white froth, and yet paid him no mind. The black dogs ceased their cacophony and quivered in unison, suddenly they began to merge into a single, unspeakable entity; a malignant tumour sent from the dregs of hell. The filth beast began to melt and formed a lake of shadow upon the floor, in the pool he saw creatures surfacing, then diving back down into whatever void had been called into existence.

  “Whence come you and whither are you travelling?” It whispered to the Guy, an entrancing voice that captivated his very being.

  “I seek the one known as the High Occultist or Patrick Holness, as he was formally called. I seek he who is an abomination to the cosmos, an insult to time and space,” he replied.

  “I can see you have travelled some, 1107. You have had a long journey and have been summoned to His realm, the unconscious realm. From here there is only death, whether you die by His hand, or their hand.”

  The Guy stopped breathing for a millisecond and his pupils dilated. It had felt as though the Frilled Shark was trying to slither down his throat; confusion, horror and the thought of fate conspiring against him began to chew on his mind.

  “Their hand? Who are They?” then a coughing fit took over his speech, choking off his words and sending him into spasms, blood soaked his hands and clothes.

  “The Aakmanu, they were never going to allow a Rift Walker to roam free on their Island, neither did they want a Dream Walker on the loose causing all kinds of mischief, especially one they had created. You were their key to his destruction, but there must always be a contingency plan: Hyper Intelligent Bacteria, the power to create, and the power to destroy. It is working its way around your body, slowly eating you from the inside, causing you no pain, just death.”

  Somehow he had always known.

  The lake of shadow began to metamorphose into something solid, a person, a man emitting a sickly amaranth glow: the High Occultist. A man, naked, covered in coagulated black tar, except for the Halo. He opened out his arms in a welcoming gesture and spoke:

  “Now we are on the level, 1107. Let us bring darkness to the light, let all of our desires fail and crumble to powder at our feet. Our boots are slipshod, so let us bathe them in tar and be enveloped by the mist.”

  All around them a dank fog settled, to the Guy it smelled lik
e the Rift Inn Time as it burned to the ground. The ground began to softly tremble and then a violent jolt sent him to the floor, the High Occultist still stood, smiling. The Guy heard the sounds of glass cracking; the labyrinth was beginning its final song.

  “A Rift Walker and a Dream Walker, existing in the same realm, I’d say we have enough time to talk before this place comes crashing down upon our heads…well your head,” he began to titter, a madness came over the High Occultist and he slammed his foot on the floor that formed a beautiful spider web upon the glass with him at its centre, he continued talking:

  “What is everything to someone, and nothing to everyone else?”

  “There are no time for riddles Patrick, say what you need to say, for they will be the last words you ever speak.”

  “Your mind, 1107! The answer is your mind, for what a haunting and interesting place it is. I have been inside that cranium of yours, made love to Nancy, spoke to Sylvester and crushed the vermin of the Bachman Gardens Institute for the Criminally Insane. I saw the Aakmanu, felt your pleasure as Bruce Wozniak melted inside that swimming pool of acid. Out of all the minds I have explored, yours is the most fascinating, 1107.”

  The Guy heard something pop, he was then showered with water, the crystal glass maze was beginning to give up the ghost, the air was filled with the sounds of the black dogs howling, the sounds of the labyrinth creaking and the sound of water spraying from tiny cracks. The ground quaked again.

  “The man who invented it doesn’t want it. The man who bought it doesn’t need it. The man who needs it doesn’t know it. What is it Patrick Holness?”

  “You really ought to stop calling me that, but I can forgive it this one time since you have decided to regale me in a riddle. Please enlighten me. What is it?”

  “A coffin.”

  The Guy leapt with his arms out and tackled the High Occultist, he began to beat the abomination’s face repeatedly, using both fists to achieve maximum damage. The Guy felt something connect with his testicles and he was then thrown back, smashing into a tank. The High Occultist pinned him by the shoulders.