The City (short story)

[michael christopher]

This story is pretty graphic and involves homosexuality although you won't be reading any graphic depictions of homosexual sex. It involves a great deal of violence and while I don't go into detail in the sex scenes, there are mentions of sexual interaction in the story and they are relevant to the plot.

The story is of a man who is in hell and does not realize it. It clearly does not take place in our reality, although it looks like it could be right next door. He is a drug-dealer, a pimp, a murderer, and many other things as well. He deals HI product, which is basically a code-word for "human stuff." That human stuff that he sells as a drug is bone marrow, brain matter, blood, semen, etc.

Once again, this story is graphic, and I wrote it back in high school. If you stick with it to the end you will like it, however I warn you, the main character is NOT a very nice person and you will seriously hate him pretty early on.

Ultimately this is some of my best writing ever, especially the last few chapters.

PS: This was HEAVILY inspired by William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch. So if you've read that book, you have some idea of the kind of depravity you are in for. I make no apologies for how depraved the story is, don't forget - it does take place in Hell.
--

The City

This work protected by copyright. Copying material
from here without my expressed written permission is against the law.
The electronic documents posted here are the intellectual property of Michael Christopher Thompson II. Copyright 2009.

I

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“What is it about this city that has perverted my thoughts and deluded my senses? Where is this place, and how does it even exist? How have I have become so entangled in it’s intricate little web of contradicting truth and fiction, of sin and virtue, of divinity and profanity? This city is both beautiful and ugly. It’s like a festering poison that’s seeped into the gray jelly of my brain, and its rotting the center of my being away as worms inside of an apple rot it to a festering core - yet at the same time, it is glorious, overpowering and enormous, moving on endlessly without borders. I don’t remember the world being like this, I can remember places having edges, stories having endings. The city is a darkness that has no edge and that has no end. It seems to go on forever, expanding into oblivion like an oil spill that never runs out of oil.

I walk down the street. Drunks are pissing in the gutters they crawled out of, simultaneously downing booze with a swift tip of the bottle and an endless series of gulps until a wretch in the middle of the concrete, pot-holed road is inevitable - and it usually happens while they are still pissing. Prostitutes give blowjobs and get called names like ‘faggot’ and ‘whore’ while doing so for only ten dollars a pop while strange homeless men sit in the dark and watch silently, often leaving their seed on dirty newspapers and greasy napkins.

This place must be a prison. Still, I was drawn here, out from the edges of the city where there is only darkness and where that darkness is populated by strange cults and superstitious savages. All of us are drawn here, we are drawn inward toward whatever lies at the heart of this hell - drawn to something we do not understand and cannot conceive of. What propels me forward? I don’t know. Perhaps curiosity, perhaps a chance at redemption - but none of those things are promised, or even hinted at. Really, I move to the center because there is nowhere else to go. It’s the city’s gothic splendor, its promise of grand decadence, tangible illusions and unimaginable fortune that keeps me from heading back through the edge lands and out into the darkness. It is the promise of something over nothing. Why else do we come here? Sure, the reasons are all different. Some seem to come for love. Some come for hate. Some come for fucking, heroin, cocaine, boys, girls, parties, orgies, murder, and any imaginable combination thereof. Regardless of why all move forward, I strongly suspect that we are all here because this is simply where we found ourselves one day, and we don’t know how to leave.

You can feel the madness in the air and you breathe it in like a thick smog. This is the only place in the world where a nightmare escapes that monotone parallel universe where dreams are but shadows on a white wall, colorless, soundless shadows, the only place in the world where static is hardened to plastic, where you can touch it, put it in your hands and grip it. Sometimes I think that nightmares come to life because this world is made of dreams and nightmares. There is some sort of electricity in the air - or poison. This is a city of ghosts, this is a den of zombies and vampires and werewolves and baby-killers and demons and angels and abortionists and cult-leaders and heroin-addicts and nightmares and mutants and morlocks...

This is the City.”

II


From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“Took seventeen blotters two days ago. I saw many things. I still see them, even though the visuals have mostly departed. One memory of my trip sticks in my mind like an ominous sign. I see buzzing beetle-boys stare vacantly into an oncoming headlight in stupendous awe. ‘No, I don’t like to,” mumbles a boy with green hair and purple lipstick. His face is as white as a sheet of paper, covered in thick mounds of blush and foundation. ‘Why not?’ asks the man who has approached him with a gleam in his eye and a bloodstain on his ripped t-shirt. ‘It’s a quick twenty bucks.’ ‘Cuz I’m not queer,’ the green-headed boy replies, and he accepts the ten dollars offered instead for a hand job, and I know he will not wonder whether or not his dignity was worth the useless scrap of paper that he will spend on his addiction. There is a sound in the distance, a horn, a shrieking train warning them to get the fuck off of the tracks because here it comes.

They stare at this shining twin harbinger heading toward them at two-hundred miles per hour, coming out of the blackest depths of the country and speeding out of that place where fathers do unimaginable things to their own children, where mothers lie beaten and bloodied in the locked basements while those unimaginable things are done above them. Bible pages rain down on black mud-shacks with unhinged doors and broken windows, reminders of the ever-oncoming Armageddon, a warning of the onslaught. From overhead I can hear frightened whispers of a rapture that surely has already come, and that surely none of these people will be partaking in. Demons scratch mercilessly the eyelids of holy men and angels cut off their fingers for appetizers, in that country, the no-mans land. The edge-lands.

But this train is now heading for the city, heading for its ancient gargoyles, staring down with concrete eyes like the baby born with stone corneas from a heroin-addicted mother. This train is coming for me, I know it is. The Illuminati are always after me. I thought I found a safe-way here in the city - it requires lots of acid, you see, and lots of blackouts, but I think I have it mastered. Face-erasing is, however, very expensive, and its not for the faint of heart. I don’t mean in the humanistic sense. I mean doing it literally, and paying someone to do it well. I’m talking about surgery. So I’m recovering now in the darkness of my apartment from an earlier operation that was done to keep the Illuminati train away from me - because surely it knew where to find me, at least as I was previous to taking the seventeen blotters. Thank God I took them when I did, or I would never have known I needed to have my face erased.

An expensive medical procedure, my dearest friends, is face-erasing, if you get it done professionally. But a simple street peddler such as myself can’t afford to have it done professionally, so I consult my most trusted advisor and least-jaded acquaintance, a doctor whom we shall refer to, for the sake of his own safety, as ‘Dr. Vennis.’ Doc Vennis was evicted from the medical profession after he cut off a patients face with a scalpel during a reconstructive surgery (he was having a really bad day). Now, face-erasing, as I like to call it, is not a normal part of reconstruction, although it is quite necessary to shape-changing.

Why did he do this, you might ask? LSD is a very powerful drug, and is not to be taken before such a, how do you say, ‘delicate’ operation such as facial reconstruction. But Doc Vennis, who would never be so stupid and careless as to get himself high before working on me, was still a young idiot at the time. Ah, the days of youth in doctor-hood in the city, getting sexual gratification from the nurses and patients (the patients without transmutable infections of course) in the somewhat sterile dingy-white bathrooms of the death center.

I provide him with the boys and/or girls he wants if he helps me do a shape-change whenever is necessary. There is naturally a good deal of scarring under my exterior appearance, but if you can’t see it you can’t be it, I say. One day I’m a rugged, handsome businessman, the next I’m an ugly pimp peddler, selling teenagers off the street like so much hashish. I don’t fuck them though. Don’t ever indulge in your own merchandise, unless you’re stupid!

The process is rather simple. Once while in the middle of an operation, I had asked to remain awake, and while he worked on me he spoke in his strange, indefinable foreign accent. ‘The face-chop is the first procedure,’ said the Doc, ‘With your scalpel, you delicately cut a nice smooth line into the already existing scar on your patients face’ (the only downside about the shape-change is that people know you had one cuz of the fucking scar) ‘and then you begin to peel back. First layer, gone! The face is now gone!’ (he yelped this like a dog with its tail stepped on) “Next thing you do, you do this: you cut off the meat slices on patients face. Yeah. Cut em’ off slow, be sure you hear the muscle peeling off, adds to the experience.’ Doc was a fucking nut. ‘After face is stripped and you only see red skull, you begin to put on the new meat. This meat has, of course, been sterilized, unless said patient really pissed you off.’ He threw me a wink at this point - I don’t wanna piss off the good doctor. ‘Then you apply plastic face, sew back up. Give pills, takes about 24 hours to heal up, you’re a new man!’

Of course, having this done on a weekly basis can be pretty hazardous to one’s health, particularly MY health, since that’s the only health that really matters to me (excluding the health of my lovely young elegant children, who I care deeply for - at least for as long as they are worth their weight in gold, which they are or they would no longer be my children). So I compromise - yes, that’s right, I compromise. I only have my face erased once a month anymore. I used to do it weekly, now it just isn’t safe. Give or take (usually take) a few deals (five or six), I can get away with it. Less cash, but less risk too. I wouldn’t want my new face to fall off in the middle of a trade-off, that would be bad for business! All of my businesses.

I business in death and sex and drugs, see. They all three go hand in hand. This city, splendorous, yes, spell-binding, yes, but it’s also as deadly as rat poison that you swallow out of a glass of spiked punch. Poison without a cure. So it gets everyone in the end, the city. Everyone. No one really leaves or gets out alive, at least not once they pass a certain point. It takes three, maybe four weeks to get to that point, but it’s a point of no return. If there are people who have left, I wouldn’t know anyway - as disappearances usually mean the worst.

Disappearances would be bad for business, anyway. I help keep people here. That is my job, that is how I survive, and frankly, I enjoy the corruption. I get them all hooked in the same way. I work for the city. The city works for me.”

III

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“I’ve heard it grows in you like a cancer. It just grows in there, malignant and dangerous, waiting to kill you. Cells keep expanding, you become freakish, obscene, your soul rots imprisoned inside of your brain, each day losing a little bit more control until you’re a mindless automaton, until you live in the City exclusively; instead of eating you shoot up, instead of sleeping you fuck, instead of waking up you cum. But you still die. That remains unchanged.

There are many constants here. There is very little change – change would destroy the structure of the city, both what lies beneath its ancient streets and what comes up above at night, looking for a slow-moving prey among the concrete glades and the sewer-reek midnight air. The mutants come up at night. Sometimes they get my elegant children (I blasted one three times in the head with a shotgun once after it ate my precious little Cindy’s right hand – it crawled bleeding back into the sewers where I hope its corpse still festers to this day – Cindy bled to death, though).

They fit in here. It’s a dark place, sick and black and disgusting. The mutants are just the dark, infectious blood that spews forth from the wounds inflicted upon the concrete hide of the city everyday. They are a part of life. Just keep a taser and a handgun on you at all times, as well as a very sharp sense of awareness, and you have at least an eighty-percent chance of survival. That was what the statistics said in the last ‘Quarterly Report’ anyway. Just give the mutant fuckers a dose of hot lead in the forehead and they tend to be deterred.

I’d rather not think about what else I walk over every night. How many atrophied hideous nightmare corpses do I step over when I’m parading about with a boy on one arm and a girl on the other, just looking for my next customer? How many green mutant eyes gaze up at the sound of my footsteps, salivating at the thought of my flesh melting ever-so-tenderly in it’s gaping, jagged-toothed maw? Scary thoughts, boys and girls. Scary thoughts.”

IV

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“This is a city of shit, blood, semen and bone marrow. I’m walking down the street. Walking over sewer grates - I can see tiny green eyes glimmering up at me. I spit, they hiss. Then they run back into the onyx darkness of the underground, waiting to feast on shit. Mutants. I’m walking down the street. The gargoyles are staring at me with atrophied eyes and stone wings, wanting to swoop down and being powerless to do so... they are more likely to fall and shatter into so many concrete pieces on the streets below, newspapers blowing over their torn bodies and acting as paper blankets, soaked in piss and alcohol.

Passing an old movie theatre. ‘NOW PLAYING: WING AND A PRAYER’ announces the ancient billboard above the husk of a building. Yellow letters hang off of the bottom some have fallen onto the road below, no longer announcing ticket prices. Black, long-dead corpses sit inside the theatre watching the gray slides reel across the moth-eaten piss-colored screen, holding decayed hands and peering out through black vacant eye-sockets. A mouse moves inside of a ribcage and nestles in. It gives birth to a litter of screaming vermin. The corpses don’t care. They don’t even move. The are just trying to watch the fucking movie, thank you.

Posters still glued to the bricks. Some are peeling. Some have words written across them in black ink. ‘FAGGOT DIE’ reads one. ‘FUCK YOU’ reads another below it. Sprayed on the wall in silver paint is a circle with a line down the middle. Across this line, forming an inverted cross, is a red line. The anti-breeder trademark - I once met an anti-breeder. ‘There’s no need for them,’ he whispered to me, with my hand all over my chest, ‘we can birth all the babies we need in laboratories.’

A river of waste rushes twenty feet below the surface of the city. In this river are gray lumps. Some of them have eyes, some cry. Whether they’re rats or half-aborted babies, it doesn’t matter. They’ll all end up the same anyway, on the bottom of a shit-stained ocean in the middle of a labyrinth crawling with all of societies castaways and outsiders. Food for a few of them. I fancy I see one with a coat hanger sticking out of its leg pass under me. It looks up with shocked red eyes. It would cry if it had a mouth, but I can only see a patch of purple-gray skin over that orifice. Then its gone.

I walk off of the sewer grate. Buses pass. On the buses are the faces of a million screaming old women. I can’t see why they’re screaming, but I can hear it. Growls, hisses, the sound of flesh tearing. I think I see a spike momentarily come up to one of the windows, but then blood covers it and once more I am left blind to the cause of such torment and pain. They look at me perplexed and helpless. One of them touches the window. Her hand is gone in a flash of red and black. Then the bus is gone too. And once more I’m alone.

The wind picks up. My trench-coat blows behind me, and for warmth I grip the pistol held in my left pocket. My fedora blows off of my head and I turn around, watching it chased by an invisible ghost, one of the many here in this concentration of spirits and phantoms. I think of following suit, but no. It is not worth it. The street I am on is deserted. All the children are downtown. The parties are downtown. The bands and the drug-dealers and the rapists are all downtown, selecting their next victims. Boys in make-up and girls in bowler hats, it doesn’t matter. They all get hooked the same way. They all get caught, like fish, reeling on a line uselessly, and the city fries them, eats them up.

I used to be afraid for them. The corruption of innocence used to be too much to handle. Then I found a boy named Henry. He was so beautiful in his green make-up, his eye-shadow the color one equates with dollar-bills and his lips the green of a watermelon and just as ripe. I tried to make love to him in the back of a strangers van, and when he started crying (because he’d never been with a guy before - I’d imagine it hurt him a bit), I didn’t stop because I was too horny. He started crying so bad that I cut his face. It was a beautiful face, and I could have done no worse had I decapitated Phoebus Apollo himself, but I did it anyway. I left a bad scar. A bad, bad scar, I heard. Now I don’t know where he is. But I found something in defiling that innocence erotic. So every once in awhile I cut myself up a piece of art. Sometimes I take a souvenir.

I’m not a homosexual, per se. That is, I don’t have a preference for men. I find it easier, however, to entice a man into bed than to entice a woman. The women are wary, the men are all stupid. Not to say that I haven’t had a woman in my lifetime. I’ve had quite a few - not nearly as many men as I’ve had, but I have, yes, had women. They fulfill me, if I do them right. It takes more patience than it does with a man. You have to entice them into bed, pretend you love them. You can’t cut them until the moment is just right - and that moment, every once in awhile, doesn’t even come. Because the women are still wary. And they know how to fend off guys like me and you.

This woman saw me coming at her with the knife once (and I was about to come myself) and she hopped off the bed and pulled out a damn pistol. Shame for her, I’m not stupid. I pushed her out of a window and pissed on the gory remains that stained the concrete below. Then I left. Again. Still, woman are kind of a delicacy for me. But men do just fine usually.

V

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“My thoughts are but fragments to you, reader, my story but a myth thus far. Which is how I have intended it, I suppose. A good man never lays his cards out on the table, he has to keep his poker face, which I think I’m quite sufficient at keeping, if I do say so myself. And I do.

Right now I’m sitting at a glass table in the middle of Fountain Square. Jets of water burst in the center of the tiny man-made lake in the middle of the cross-section, and water splashes lightly to the brick red cobblestones that these glass tables are arranged upon. There is a ragged copy of a novel to my left, an odd little piece entitled The Picture of Dorian Gray. The author is a deceased homosexual. To my right is an upside down disc, shimmering rainbows in the gray light of day, the kind of light that signals a storm is coming.

It is a good day, though. The heat has been too much for me lately. So intense, the heat has been, that it has warped all of the city’s Dandies into cartoonish wooden puppets, no longer standing straight when they walk but bending into interminable angles. Their plastic eyes gaze out, almost melting, their pupils dilated from obviously the strongest of drugs. They walk with feather boas or fur coats, holding their canes out and slapping the peddlers. They dye their hair black, purple, burgundy, whichever color they happen to fancy on whichever day, and they wear the darkest of eye make-up, straggling it on their faces like charcoal and smudging it without notice. These Dandies consume alcohol and cocaine like water and bread, making homage to the dark god Bacchus, the alcohol his blood and the coke his own white flesh.

I have heard that the Dandies can be rather violent. Indeed, once I saw one sodomize a young boy of about sixteen in a back alley, then beat him bloody and senseless with a cane. The boy lay bleeding for ten minutes before crawling under a bench and waiting to die. I am not a Dandy myself, nor could I be. I am decadent, yes, splendorous, yes, but I could not fit in with these people because, for the most part, they are my customers, and it is not good business to fall in league with your customers. And aside from that, though I do many drugs, I do not find myself reaching the level of pivotal madness that these men do - they are haunted with ghosts from the past, ghosts who visit and torment in the form of syphilis, among other things. I don’t have syphilis because I know who I’m fucking (usually). They really don’t care who they’re fucking. And that, you see, is the essential difference between myself and a dandy. I give a shit.

The city’s faux government tried to crack down on Dandy-ism nearly two decades ago. At this time I was a young man of forty-six (and I do rather look like a twenty-six year old to this day, as a result of my constant face erasing). I remember it as if it were yesterday (and, in a sense, it was - the passing of years and the passing of seconds are all connected - yesterday was a premonition, tomorrow happened twenty years ago in its place). They were not successful, however, in capturing all of the Dandies because the influence of the Dandies was far too large. They controlled everything that happened in the city, back then. Now they don’t, of course, because they are simply mechanical creatures, re-fueling with drugs and unloading all that un-necessary semen in the closest vessel at hand.

It’s a fine thing to fuck a Dandy, because they always fight back. They hate being out of control. Naturally, the older the Dandy, the harder it is to capture them for such a means, but of course, the older the Dandy, the less you want to capture him anyway. The older they are, the more decayed they are, the more dangerous, the more risky. Get them while they still think they have the world in their hands, ready for a fucking. Hold them down and listen to them scream before the heroin takes effect and collapses their veins, softens their eyes, drains their vitality and hardens their flesh with age.

I sit at the table with my ragged copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray and my scratched up compact disc, imagining.

I look into a back alley from my safe vantage point in the gray daylight. I see a teenage boy trying to fight off an attacker. He’s got green make-up on his face. ‘Fuck you, green boy. You got it wrong,’ yells the Dandy with the pin-striped suit and gold cane. He smacks the boy in the face with a hard thud. I hear crying. Bittersweet tears the boy tastes in his mouth, salty and sugary at the same time. Angel tears. Fallen angel tears. ‘I’ll carve you up like a Thanksgiving turkey,’ mumbles the older Dandy. The boys clothes are off. Crumpled in the edge of the alley is a purple velvet tuxedo with a green undershirt. The boy is still wearing his violet tie, though. But that’s all. He should not have expressed interesting in becoming a Dandy, I think. Oops.

The older Dandy slaps him again. ‘You’re not one of us,’ he groans, and the boy starts to push back. ‘How old are you?’ The boy doesn’t answer. He holds his words in, hot air pulsating in his lungs and an erection between his legs, poking at his soft thighs. He likes it. “Sixteen,” he mumbles. “Yum,” says the Dandy. And so the corruption begins. I don’t particularly approve of this - but only because it’s in public.

A cop stands at the end of the alley. His hand is in his pants. He’s touching himself watching this scene. The boy knows he’s there. The older Dandy knows he’s there. Neither of them care. This is a nice little game.

The older Dandy, of course, thinks he’s raping the boy. The boy knows otherwise. It ensues.

You may hate me, and think I am disgusting, yet you have read this far because your curiosity draws you to wherever I‘m going. That‘s good, because I don‘t know where I‘m heading personally. While you are here, I will be your guardian angel. Worry not, for nothing shall happen to you… I have many connections in this place. I am being watched? Listened to? Read? Sometimes it seems that way. I often feel directed, as though someone is… telling me what to do. Like I am not in control of myself. And I feel a presence now. Are you really there? Or am I just going crazy? No one could be reading these entries… and yet I feel like I am writing them for someone. Maybe there is a reason for all of it.”

VI

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“He moans. There’s a light dusting of coke on his face. He’s one of the drug-Catholics. Snorts coke for Jesus. His own selfish metaphysical cruci-fiction, no pun intended. Oh Jesus, how I doth love thee. I snorteth this coke for you! I sacrifice mine own body and soul for you! Same old shit. Always with the coke. Next comes the heroin. For desert he hits up some speed. Then he runs through the streets screaming that THE END IS COMING and REPENT. After that he jerks off in a deserted building on a newspaper that reads ‘AIDS EPIDEMIC REACHES STAGGERING PROPORTIONS’ with his disease spiked seed.

I quickly surmise that things are not what they seem. I’ve woken up from a face-erasing. And now, as usual, I am on acid. I’m trying to find a solid, definite shape. There are only amorphous blobs. Some of the blobs shape themselves into faces of my old dead friends. I see Stephen, my first love. His eyes are blue. His hair is burgundy, twisted, into soft curls. ‘Ashes rain down on the kingdom of Sodom,’ he says. I am confused. His face disappears.

The next face is that of my sister. Katherine. Her right eye is intensely black and blue. Blood seeps from the corner of her mouth. She stares at me, her eyes accuse me. But I laugh. Acid fucks with your emotions. Her face sneers, and I see a spike of light pierce through her eye. It comes slowly toward me, and begins to curl like smoke into the air. It spirals up, and I gaze in awe. Rainbows dance in its gray translucence - it is a monochromatic technicolor. I can hear the colors changing. The blue is soft, light, the sound of a baby’s sigh. The red is a gasp for air, the result of a knife being driven upward, tearing apart the sternum and piercing the Adam’s apple.

The smoke comes to my face, plays lightly over my eyes. I laugh in my stupor. It comes into my corneas, and suddenly I see through it. I see it traveling down a black tunnel, through my pupils. There is a piercing light at the end of this tunnel, and I can see a waterfall. There are statues behind this waterfall - once more I see Stephen, as I remember him forty years ago. Sheer perfection. His body is sculpted into the rocks, and he looks trapped. I stand at the edge of the tunnel in my eye looking at him, but he does not move.

The waterfall blanketing him turns slowly to pink, and then into red. It flows downward. I look at the bottom of the bloody pool and I see dead bodies floating upside down. Bodies of children. My elegant children. Dead, drowned. Hands jut up occasionally and pull the bodies under. Then there are bubbles. Two hands rise up again out of the gory pool. They are my hands. I know because they are wearing all of my rings - I can see the gold glimmers shining before they sink back into the crimson murk of stale blood and gore.

And then the water turns from red to black, and the blackness bleeds into reality. It encompasses the blood, the children, everything, and I see only darkness now. For a moment. A headlight is coming toward me. I hear a train whistle. No, two of them. They are heading toward me, twin harbingers heading toward the city from the edge-lands.

I see buzzing beetle-boys stare vacantly into an oncoming headlight in stupendous awe. ‘No, I don’t like to,” mumbles a boy with green hair and purple lipstick. His face is as white as a sheet of paper, covered in thick mounds of blush and foundation. ‘Why not?’ asks the man who has approached him with a gleam in his eye and a bloodstain on his ripped t-shirt. ‘It’s a quick twenty bucks.’ ‘Cuz I’m not queer,’ the green-headed boy replies, and he accepts the ten dollars offered instead for a hand job, and I know he will not wonder whether or not his dignity was worth the useless scrap of paper that he will spend on his addiction.

The boy with the green lipstick fades into television snow, I can hear it crackling, sizzling in the background. I try to adjust the antenna, and his silhouette becomes a television channel. There is an anchorman staring directly into my eyes. “Hello, this is Channel 12 News at eleven o’clock,” he announced, “and we have breaking news. You are dead. You have always been dead. You will always be dead. Death is eternal - death is life, because without death, there is no life. With death, and dead, only dead are you truly alive. Death. You are death. Death is you. Buzz zzz buzzzzzzz…’

His eyes fade into insect eyes, viewing me from four hundred different perspectives. Suddenly I see myself through his eyes, and I have black wings. Bones jut through the edges, and my eyes are purple and sorrowful. My heart beats so hard it burns a hole into my chest. There is a pair of red scissors sticking into it, and I pull them out, lick the blade. I collapse into sand.

I sink downward and become part of a thousand civilizations. I am a lizard. I am an ant. I am a rock star. An alien. A demon. An angel. A crimson seraph with a golden blade cleaving away the darkness of hell, eating the eyes of madmen. But no, I am not. My mother aborted me in the womb. I am not an angel, I am an abortion.

I lie in a dumpster. A homeless man looks down on my tiny gray body. He stares for a moment, picks me up. He looks confused. Then he bites my arm. He rips it from my frail torso. Spits me out. Throws me back in the dumpster. I feel no pain.

I am Doc Vennis. I look down on my body, writhing in acid-dream delusion. I pick up the scalpel. His mad eyes glint off of it in reflection before I walk to my own body. As Doc Vennis I plunge the scalpel into my face, tearing it off, looking at the red meat underneath. I am not phased. Scalpel. Meat. Cut cut cut cut cut. Rip. Stitch. Rip. Stitch stitch stitch.

‘kill him vennis rip his face off kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill’

(the den of ghosts is waiting for you return come back love we love you we will hold you leave this ugly place behind it is nothing for you we love you more than he does kill him kill him kill him kill)

There is a void. I am flailing. My face is gone, there is only a white, crimson-streaked skull below. Darkness is eating my flesh. It punctures holes in my skin and crawls inside, infecting me with it. My veins flow with black blood. I plunge in a needle and inject. Orange fire floods up my arms and into my brain, where it dies. Ashes look out through my eyeballs. I see Doc Vennis. He’s cowering in a corner.

‘Where is my fucking face?’ I ask him. He does not reply. He cries. “Where is my fucking face?” I repeat. No reply again. I grab the bloody scalpel. I see skin sitting on the tray beside it, covered in blood. I’ll kill you. ‘You’re wearing it!’ he screams. ‘You have a face!’ I have no face. I want your face. ‘I want your face.’ But you can’t. ‘You can’t have my face!’

I can have your face. ‘I can have his face. If I want it.’

I don’t know where I am. But I walk to him. I plunge the scalpel into his throat. I twist it. Blood gargles out of his mouth. It soaks his clothes. I plunge it in further until I feel the cold metal clink against the tiled wall. Then I pull it out. I ram it into his eye. Blood spurts across the room. I taste it. Salty. I continue. His jugular is last. He feels pain. He feels pain.

VII


From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“There is a rumor here about vampires. Yes. The kind that suck your blood, that take your children from their bedrooms at night, seduce them, defile them, then suck them dry, leaving their white candle wax corpses to melt when the sun rises on the roof of your suburban shingled home with two black puncture wounds in the lily-white neck, dripping crimson sex, your teenagers dead with a hand down their pants and a moan stuck in their throat. Sweet defilation. Sweet.

I’ve never drank blood. There are people here in the city that pretend they’re vampires. They are called the Lugosi. Another class caste distinction - you have the Dandies, now you have the Lugosi. They’re not real vampires. Just pretend. I’ve never heard of a real vampire except for the one who I’ll tell you about, if you just give me some time. The Lugosi are pathetic half-bred humanoids who scar their bodies as some stupid ritual initiation rite. I’ve seen them do it. The boys are sodomized with knives and the girls take a hot spike up a very specified orifice, per se. Then they carve their names into their arms. Stupid names, like “Vladimir” or “Cecile”. All stupid. They do it for their damn club rights.

But they do get old. No matter how many civilians they beat down and rip apart, indulging in the wildest, most bloody fantasy, they age. They change. The blood only stains their skin a little sooner. Tragic. They go young, too. I’ve seen one at fifteen before, a beautiful girl who damned herself to a life of murder and non-fulfillment. She lost it. I fucked her, though. She was quite talented.

The vampire who I’ve told you about is an acquaintance. I don’t know of his legitimacy. It is not really an issue. His drugs of choice are, of course, blood and semen. And he wants the good shit. Blood is like heroin out here - some of the Lugosi buy it, and this guy, whose name I shall tell is you ‘Jakob.’ Blood and semen are the only two HI drugs on the street right now - HI meaning, of course, HUMANOID INCLUSION. Both are gold, if you can secure the right stuff.

Now, any idiot can go about getting blood and semen from some hobo off the street. Just give him a jerk book and a paper cup for the first, or just give him a knife to the throat and a bedpan for the second, whatever. But this stuff is secure because its drawn from the Albinoids. The Albinoids are, for some odd reason or another, a race of people with absolutely no complexion, no skin color, no hair color, no eye color - you name it, they don’t have it. They’re completely white. White pupils, white hair, white skin. Hell, their whiter than their fucking cum is.

No one is sure where they came from, but we do know one thing - they’re easy to kill if you can get them separated from a group. The best thing to do is to rape them for days until they’ve supplied you with enough semen to make a small fortune if you can peddle it to the right people in the right places. You shouldn’t do it more than twice a day, because it dilutes the stuff. After about a week (any longer and you’re just risking capture - the Albinoids are protected under the law, and when one goes missing it is most definitely noticed), you should just slit the jugular and drain them. With all that semen and blood, you could be rolling in dough after little more than a week.

Jakob is a valued customer. He tells me he’s a vampire too, as if the many rumors floating about town were not enough to peak my curiosity. He says I’m too old for him to ever take, though. How fun. I look so young! But he knows how old I am - he says you can smell age just as well as blood, if you’re trained and tuned into the right psychological channel. I say, who the fuck cares?

I’ve been inside of the building he likes to call home. It’s been ‘deserted’ forever. I went up there once on a deal. I’ve got no reason to be scared, I know. I’m the only Albinoid HI dealer in this section of town, so Jakob wouldn’t kill me. He also wouldn’t kidnap an Albinoid himself because, if he were to ever be caught, he would surely be killed. He’s breaking far more laws than Albinoid kidnapping. I saw boys and girls in shackles. When we entered the building, ten girls in dusty robes with dead flowers in their hair walked up to him. They caressed his body and looked back at me jealously. I guess they thought I was his new fuck toy for awhile, but alas, no. I wasn’t. And I wouldn’t trust him not to let his emotions and instincts take over if I were. I’d end up gutted and bloodless on a stone slab in the top of his building otherwise.

Their eyes were like ice, I remember, and they were so, so beautiful. They were the most beautiful girls I’d ever seen. ‘How old are they?’ I remember asking. ‘The oldest is seven-hundred and twenty three. The youngest is sixty-seven.’ They all looked fifteen to me. I saw their nails, black, but not painted. Odd. The only thing about them that looked like it should be: dead. Not to say that they didn’t look like death themselves - but they were beautiful in death. They were like corpses laid out in a coffin at a wake, melancholy in their faces, dolled and prettied up. ‘They are loyal only to me. Put your minds on other things,’ mumbled Jakob to me. So I did.

We climbed the stairs, flight after flight. I had my product in a suitcase - easily five thousand dollars worth. At least thirty-five hundred of that was in blood, the rest in semen. It would all be gone when I left. As usual. When we reached the top, he opened the ancient wooden door leading into his chamber. It was dark, but there was a bit of light. Tattered curtains blew inward and the moonlight lit the floor. In this dusty light I saw a quivering blonde boy in the corner, his arms in chains. He looked very, very pale... he would be beautiful, if he didn’t look like he was waiting to die.

‘You are constantly in the company of beautiful people, a true gentleman you must be,’ I said to him flatteringly. ‘But the spark of life never stays in them, and so death surrounds me even in this life,’ was his quick reply. He walked to the boy, picked him up, and wrapped his arms around his frail body. The boy was shivering, and a moan was trying (ineffectually) to escape his throat. Jakob kissed his mouth tenderly, then moved it to his throat. The boy began trying to move, stiffened. His eyes looked at me in what I thought was, for a second, hopelessness, but which I soon recognized as ecstasy. When Jakob dropped him to the ground, I saw that he was dying with a smile of pure ecstatic joy on his face.

‘That is the last of poor Daniel,’ he said. He brushed his long white hair out of his face, then looked at me with eyes as hard as diamonds. There was not a bit of sorrow in them. ‘You have the HI product, yes?’ ‘Of course,’ I replied. And the transaction was made. I don’t remember much after I went up there. It was the first time, and the last time, that I actually went into his quarters. Now we make deals on the streets. I don’t think he liked the way I looked at his zombie harem, or his dying fuck boy. No, I don’t think he liked it at all.

We still have a common trust, the same trust that is always between the junkie and the dealer. He knows I will not report him, and, in a sense, I have his protection. He is somewhat like a bodyguard I would imagine. The few enemies I have had (and I don’t have much anymore) have been found dead in puddles of stale water in the back alleys of the city. Some of them just disappear off of the face of the earth. I don’t think he helps me because he likes me, I think he helps me because I am a reliable and dependable connection for HI product - something which is hard to find in the city.

I wonder sometimes what thoughts run through his head. Who were those girls? And who was that dead boy? The pale dead boy with ecstatic eyes? I wonder sometimes if he’s sitting up there, still cold and dead on the stone as Jakob looks at him with his old eyes... the rumors, for the most part, can be blown off. Vampires don’t truly exist... but that doesn’t make Jakob human. He is something far more terrifying than simple flesh and blood.”

VIII

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“The process of brain-draining is rather simple (albeit quite a bit painful). Remove one eye, connect the optical nerve to the brain-drain plug. The brain-drain plug, which is really nothing more than a big rubber cord with a clamp and a suction cup on the end, will then generate impulses which will flow through the plug into the brain. The brain, receiving this overload of new impulses and sensations, will usually go into overdrive, and the brain-drain-ee will immediately be driven stark-raving mad (if the operation of removing the eye hasn’t already done it). The patient will, by this time, be fastened safely into the steel girder chair so that he or she cannot escape. The pain of the connection, not surprisingly, drives more people to try and escape than the idea of the brain-drain itself. According to theory, the overloading of sensations will force the brain to start recalling images, feelings, and emotions, which will, through the magic of the brain-drain plug, be routed through the optical nerve and into the MAKINE-X0023, the core of the brain-drain experiment, the neural storage unit, the center of the city, known by those in the business as ‘the Core.’

What the Core does is store the information gathered through the brain-drain, which is basically a recording of the brain-drain-ees entire life, from birth to brain-drain, into itself. That information is used when necessary. This allows the Illuminati to keep tabs on any citizens they find it necessary to keep tabs on, to store all necessary information for future use, and to prevent pre-planned strikes against the Illuminati orchestrated by its various enemies, although it only works in some cases. The brain-drain plug is then disconnected and the patient is injected with a toxic serum which heads directly to the already emptied brain and kills him or her. Any neural input after the brain-drain is referred to by the professionals as ‘white noise.’

The eye falls out of the screamer in the chair and a man in a pinstriped black and gray suit catches it as another agent brings the brain-drain plug to him. He reaches inside of the screamer’s now open eye-socket and pulls out a small red worm-like appendage. The screamer is shrieking about all of the colors, oh-so-many-colors, as the plug is clasped to his optical nerve. The color of the surrounding chamber begins to fade from a clean-white to a murky-black as the screamer’s memories and dreams are sucked from his brain and transferred into the Core, and the whirring and buzzing of the machine now out-volumes the screams of it’s victim. After a few moments, the colors of the room return to white, and the first agent approaches the almost-dead victim with a syringe. Odd, inhuman noises are escaping its throat, noises similar to that of machine buzzings, wheel-squeakings... and suddenly, it’s over.

Drawing away from this death-room, we find ourselves in a dank inner chamber. Two trolls sit in a corner, but there is something wrong here. The one on the left, technically the one with the power deemed so worthy by the Illuminati, is the one we call the Alpha. The one on the right is the Omega. They hate each other, and had it not been for the dismemberment of the arms of each, they would have strangled each other to death by now.

So now they sit, locked away in some filthy padded room, armless, and legless, one good eye each, and connected by a fused optical nerve. The fused nerve allows the two to share images mentally. They have both been driven quite mad, but no one seems to care. The Alpha has the power to detect any Surge in The City. A ‘Surge’ is a character of phenomenal power, a power which could, if harnessed and controlled properly, bring an end to the Illuminati’s secret reign over the map. Perhaps ‘Jakob’ would be a Surge. The Alpha is, of course, one of these Surges. His disgusting twin brother, the Omega, is not a Surge himself, and has been jealous of the Alpha for as long as he can remember. The Alpha does not want to share any information with the Illuminati, and rather than kill him, it was decided that by forcing the two twins to share optical and mental circuits, any necessary information could be easily understood, interpreted, translated, and then shared with them by the Omega. This is all the result of brain-drain technology and logic.

The connection of the Alpha and the Omega was really quite simple. Using the technology garnered in the creation of the Brain-Drain Device, one eye was "popped" out of each brother, and the optical nerves were routed and fused together through a surgical laser procedure. The two now cannot have any private thoughts, at least not private from each other. What one thinks, the other comprehends. What one sees, the other sees as well. They are truly nothing more than one organism, anymore. Mutant freaks. But they were not born mutants, as are the normal outcasts and sewer citizens of society, they were made that way.

This is all the product of the Illuminati, the secret men who are always watching me. I see them staring through cracked glass windows sometimes, I see them looking out of the backs of moving vehicles, or sometimes I see them walking down the street and staring at me from behind onyx sunglass and black leather trench-coats. They are the secret men who walk in your kitchen at night when you are alone and trying to go sleep, with all your lights off. They are the creatures inside your closet, moving your clothes. They hide behind all of the closed doors of your house with coat-hangers and knives, waiting to slit your throat. They were the ones who hit your pregnant wife with a car, they were the ones who raped your only son in a back alley and then filleted him like a fish, leaving him to sizzle under the hundred degree sunbeams in the middle of a hot summer afternoon.

I remember...

They were the blood-sucking angels. Worse than any vampire.”

[michael christopher]

This work protected by copyright. Copying material
from here without my expressed written permission is against the law.
The electronic documents posted here are the intellectual property of Michael Christopher Thompson II. Copyright 2009.

IX

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:


“tell the truth

boys don’t cry only women bleed

some things are best left unsaid?

You can’t always say what you want. Even if you love him. Even if you think you might possibly love him you can’t say anything. Some things are best left unsaid. Your heart has a rip in it and black emotion is bleeding through, pooling in your stomach and atrophying your abdomen, letting your guts stew as you walk around waiting to rot. It’s tearing you up inside when you try to sleep at night, but you can live, because in the daytime if you’re lucky you get to see his face and you get to see him smiling, and he’s beautiful, and sometimes, though that’s not as good as love, it will do. Don’t say anything. It will ruin you. It would hurt too much to lose those small glimpses in the daytime.

Friends should say what needs to be said, so they say. Not always. Usually it’s best to let your thoughts sponge in your brain, wring them out when no one is looking, cry all that dirty water out, weep, drown in your sorrow, then lay on the roof of your house listening to old songs you can close your eyes too as the cold wind blows again you. You smell dead kerosene and stale carpet, even though you lie on the roof. Dead leaves blow past you. It is that odd period between winter and spring where it feels like fall all over again. Rake up the dead corpses and begin anew. Bleed yourself dry and suck the blood out of some new specimen. As long as its not him.

It’s like a nail in your brain when he doesn’t say good-bye. The pain wells up deep from within the core and mechanically vibrates into every fiber of your being, ringing into the tiniest membrane of every nerve in your body. He puts you in a trance. You want to smell his flesh, kiss his face, hold him close and never let him go. Feel the heat from his body assimilate with yours, amalgamate the silver of your love with the gold of his return. Kiss. Wet, warm. Happiness is in this embrace. He strokes your thigh. You love him. You love him so much.

He is the most beautiful person you have ever known. But he is not really yours. You’re dreaming. Wake up in a tense sweat. You can smell the come on your sheets. A shadow jumps on the edge of your bed, weightless but heavy. It creeps toward you, wraps its hands around your throat. Death. You ejaculate in ecstasy as your air closes off. There are nails in your brain. The shadow vibrates into every fiber of your being. Only women bleed. Boys don’t cry.

Dead leaves between spring all over fall and begin dead corpses bleed yourself atrophy and beautiful rip in your heart. Marinate in your flesh. Taste blood in your throat as the fingers enclose around your lungs and puncture them with sharp, edgy fingernails. Metallic, iron tasting thickness fills up in your body.

Your eyes fill up into dark red stones staring up at a black ceiling. You can’t feel anything anymore. You still have a hard-on. The shadow moves away and sinks back into the dark sea at the edge of your bedroom. You lie in bed dreaming. White eyes. Like pearls if it wasn’t for the bloodshot veins. Your right hand is on yourself and your left hand is in your mouth. There is a pill lying on the table beside the bed. Half of it is gone. Something sits outside your window. “Fuck me,” it whispers, and it slides through the glass, a soft liquid slinking to your bed. It slides under, your covers are pulled off. You are covered still. Your hand moves aside and the liquid begins to stroke you. orgasm.

Needles for pupils. Winged angels sing silently around your bed as your orgasm continues. ‘Mo shen Seraphem tu loduyos,’ they whisper with bloody tears in their eyes. In your parents bedroom your father stabs your mother to death with broken glass. You can hear her groans, you can almost hear the glass scraping against her rib bones. ‘We are strangers,’ softly cries the liquid. ‘you remember those times.’

‘The sun was so warm. You’d lie on the swings and die every single day. Resurrected. All of your old friends are dead... the ones you loved... the ones who loved you... they have moved on. They cry at night sometimes, but they have moved on. You are bewildered. But we are all strangers now. The past is done. You have your ugly future to look forward to. Look for comfort in the past though. You dream in color. They’re over you now... you dream in color.’

Maybe I’m losing it…”

X

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“Sweet cold raindrops. I can feel the depression poisoning my blood. You can feel it, cold and brittle, sliding into your fingertips. They tremble sometimes. It pulsates through your body, flows through your heart (ventricle pump, atrium pump, ventricle pump flow to your brain like an icicle, stabbing pains - you got a headache). It gets that way in the City. Spotlights aim up in the sky and once I fancied I saw Heaven up there, but there were dead angels crucified on the golden gates, and there were monsters drinking from cups of gold, and gulping blood. I saw myself raping an angel.

Then the spotlight died and it all went away.

I’ve been increasing acid dosage. Two or three blotters an hour yesterday. I have the weirdest dreams on acid. I need another face erasing. Had a run-in with the Illuminati. I saw one walking on my street last night. I know who it was because he was carrying a briefcase and wearing a black trench-coat. I swear he was wearing sunglasses, and the moon was out bright. Now who does that? Either a junkie or one of them.

I think I saw an eye in my food disposal last night too. It was looking up at me. I just stared at it for two or three hours, watching it blink. Finally I just turned on the water and the disposal and saw it disappear. No blood though. I don’t know where it went. I’m afraid it’s in my shower drain, so I haven’t used the restroom in awhile either. Can you blame me? They’re always watching me now, finding some means of seeing what I’m doing. And for what? They want to suck my mind out of my head, I guess. Brain-drain. I’ll kill myself before that happens. Pulled a wisdom tooth and put a nice little pill in it’s place. Wrong time something happens, I pop that fucker out with my tongue, swallow, and I’m dead in sixty seconds.

So I move to sit by the heater. It’s a kerosene heater, so it reeks like hell. I’m looking into the little glass window on the side, flicker flame flicker flicker. It licks at the glass, taunting me. ‘This is what happens when you die,’ I hear. The voice comes from nowhere. I don’t even bother to look for it. I’ve heard that drugs disintegrate the soul of a man, but I sold my soul too long ago for it to matter. I sold my soul for morphine to a man with black eyes and cracked teeth.

We all hear voices sometimes, but I hears the strangest voices of all, saying the strangest things. once I heard a demon speak to me. ‘I’ll eat your nuts, you stupid old fuck. I’ll tear out your throat and chew on your Adam’s Apple while you try to scream.’

These are monsters Jakob can’t protect me from.

The heat makes me tired. My eyes droop and my mouth begins to fall asleep. I can feel my smile cracking into a stupefied gape. The acid is kicking in. I’ll dream about sleeping. Am I writing or living… I can’t remember anymore. Something is wrong with reality. I am another cracked actor now.”


XI

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“I know of an elegant Dandy prince who titles himself ‘the Great Ephengelson.’ He walks around in pin-striped tuxedos with a red painted slap across his left cheek, black eye-make-up, scarlet lipstick and an onyx monocle, devouring the goodness out of everything that comes in sight. In a sense, he is a vampire, but not of any legitimate means - he is not like Jakob. He doesn’t suck blood out of humanity, he sucks humanity out of blood, then leaves it to pool in the brain of a psychopath, just waiting for any little clot to send him merrily hacking through a crowd of children with a machete.

If Ephengelson had burgundy hair, he would remind me of my deceased dear Stephen, now dead forty years. Sometimes in my bitterest dreams I see him burning in hell, innocent and guilty at the same time. Hell is for unrepentant sinners, they say, but Stephen... dear Stephen’s only sin was being too beautiful. He did not knowingly spite God. He had no cruel intentions, for he was but a child, dead at nineteen, too early for one so lovely... and I know the serpents with foul, fleshy fangs bite at him, I know the fire burns his insides into plump red bags, ready to explode, every nerve in his body cooked, and he writhes, crying tears too hot to even make it off of his leathered eyelids. They clutch at my beautiful Stephen in hell, and sometimes, I know, they tear him apart.

Ephengelson is an addict, and my most favorite one at that, many a line of poetry have we snorted over drinks of LSD laced coffee, many a salted dream have we shared, many nightmares have chased us screaming into each other’s open arms. Unlike Stephen, Ephengelson is knowingly evil - he participates in every deviant activity one can think of. I have seen him outside of opium dens with prostitutes of various sexes, ages, and castes (but really, what does caste matter to a prostitute?). I have seen him with blood on his hands or on his lips, and madness in his eyes, crackling like hot lightning in a parched desert. He could split a tree with the power behind his eyes as surely as Zeus could with the power clenched between his fists.

He comes to me now particularly for HI product. He likes bone marrow, particularly red stuff, junk from the femur of a five year old to be specific, laced with cocaine. I have the goods. I don’t know how the child died or whether or not I really care - I’ve never bothered to contemplate on it. Money is my only true drug. LSD and coke are merely entrees.

“Where did you get it from?” he questions, a sly look in his right eye (the left is, of course, monocle-cloaked - no one ever, that I can recall having heard of, has actually seen it). His white gloves play with the eight-inch tall top-hat resting on his head, and he moves his right hand to his lips. The lipstick does not smudge. “I heard it was a five year old from my supplier. It’s still red. And it’s laced, how I know you like it.” “Yum,” he mumbles, licking his lips. “Much pain?” “I’d imagine so,” I reply casually. “Good. I’ll be able to taste the fear - it really adds something, you know. Makes paying for this shit more worth my cash.” I nod.

“Ephengelson, my darling,” I say, looking him over (my eyes never get tired of this particular action), “you owe me more than just money. You owe me some conversation, dear.” He smirks and rolls his eyes, leans back in his chair, and tosses his top-hat behind him. Leveling his eyes at me, a laugh escapes his slender throat. “Converse about what, my good man? You are surely quite busy!” “I’m never too busy for you, my delicate, decadent prince.” He winks at me, then falls back into place. “What would you like to talk about, lovey?” I grin. “Why not mother nature? How about this weather we’re having?” The same old cliche.

“Lovey, nature is not my mother, she tried to abort me, but silly her, I ate a hole in her womb and crawled out to the edge lands where I was raised by addicts, as I have told you a million times!” His jokes never cease to amuse me. He probably doesn’t remember how he got to this place anymore than I do. Perhaps his wit is one of the reasons he has made it this long in the City - it is quite hard to imagine that someone would not pick up this child at random on any day in the streets and merely turn him into a drug-addicted prostitute.

I roll my eyes and pull my black briefcase onto the coffee-table at which we are sitting. Opening it slowly, I take out a paperback, and dump the contents before my customer. His eyes widen - laid out on the table is one thousand dollars worth of baby bone marrow, ready for snorting. He looks up at me. “Care to share?” Confused for a moment, I think... yes, why not? Fifty dollars worth is nothing. And its always best to share with a friend, particularly if it is a friend that you would not mind keeping close at hand.

I pick up a plastic bag and empty the contents onto the table. I cut, looking up occasionally at the hungry eyes of this little boy with grown-up costumes, until there are six separate lines of red before us. “Three for you, three for me. This is, of course, free, but you’ll have to pay for the rest.” He lowers his face to the table and I hear snorting sounds. I follow suit, and within seven and a half minutes both of us gaze bewilderedly at each other.

The red handprint on his face seems to wave at me. I think I hear thunder somewhere behind us, but I take little notice. The only thing that I do happen to do is move my hands up to the briefcase, shutting and locking it almost mechanically. Then my full attention is asleep.

I am falling.

If the drugs make you elegant and fabulous and beautiful, then truly Ephengelson is a god. He gazes at me with a stupid eye and makes no motion of movement. The red stuff is kicking in. My eyes drop to the table, now clean. There is not a sign of the stuff left. My head swims, my eyes focus. Now there is an angel in front of me. I can almost see a halo, but there is a hand grasping the edge, crawling up, bloody and black. A fingernail falls off, lands on my briefcase, before the hand slips and tumbles back into the invisible abyss below the halo.

Ephengelson’s eyes are closed. His hair seems to be fading into scarlet. The painted hand-print on his face falls off, lands on the table. I hear it thud. It picks itself up, slides to me, crawls up my shirt. I can feel the wet finger-paint leaving marks on my skin as it crawls up to my face. And suddenly it is there. Paper-thin red fingers prying open my mouth, crawling into my throat. Slides down. It’s in my stomach. Rips a hole in the lining and crawls up my ribcage. It hurts like hell, but I don’t move. Suddenly its on my heart. Closing. Beating with it for a moment, and then holding on, crushing it. I can’t breathe. My lungs deflate, collapse. Ephengelson looks like Stephen now.

His eyes accuse me. The monocle is gone, I don’t know where to. The right eye is a reflection of me. The left is a reflection of Ephengelson, but he’s crying. His face is bloodied and blue. “He is not me,” says the corpse in front of me. “Ashes rained down upon the kingdom of Sodom.” There is suddenly a pain behind my eye. It starts dull, then pounding, intense, throbbing. My eyeball pops from my face and lands with a noiseless slap on my cheek. I can still see with my other eye though, my right eye. The red finger pokes out, feels around, and begins to crawl out. The eye on my cheek breaks from its nerve cord and lands on the table, looking up. This is what I see through now. The hand tries to pull itself from my face, and it splits my eye-socket both up and down, leaving a widely visible crack in my face. A black light pours forth from this crack, and I see my real face, as it would look without the shape-changes.

Old, decayed, sagging, rotting. This is the face underneath. I am haggard and old. I try to cry.

When I wake up from the trip, the briefcase is gone, and so is Ephengelson. Another friend lost forever. Another beauty spoiled to me. It tastes less sweet with every defilation.”

XII

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“Poke a fucking crystal through my eye. Re-assemble the pain in some other nerve center of my body, take it away from my heart and put it in my brains. I already bruise myself with a steel-toed boot, but I am not fragile enough to shatter and end my self-induced misery, misery that has hypnotized me, blown out of proportion my own paranoia and washed with a flood of semen and blood my sin-soaked leathered skin. I keep looking for you, but I can never seen your silhouette out on the docks. Water slams against the rocks and I wait - I contemplate tossing myself onto the jagged edges and feeling the cold hard calcium pierce my lung, and I drink of the blood coming my up throat, kill the dehydration and drown in the iron glory.

Why, how, who was I to think I deserved to love you? You, Stephen, were an angel with glass wings, and I was a demon with a hammer and a twitching wrist, I broke your beauty in half and then I slammed my sickle into your forehead in my own guilt, sorry that I had killed such a thing of beauty, but I had to put you out of your misery, because you were an angel with broken wings. And I was a demon.

Whenever I get too far away from the guilt I pull depression over me like a black funeral shroud. I don’t deserve to be free of guilt, I must live inside it, a prisoner in a prison where the bars are made of your bones and the bed is made of your dead hair, and it smells so lovely, so soft, but dead, and I remember how it smelled on you alive. You are the only person who I have ever loved, Stephen. You are the only person that ever I could love... you manifested yourself to me in a dream, and you died inside a nightmare... I hate myself for killing you.

I wish, sometimes, that I was below the sewer grates, prey for the mutants, pray for me. Amen, dear Lord God, please vanquish mine foes and eat mine eyes so that I can be blind to this hollow perception of myself that others see... rip to tiny little bits my flesh and allow the rats to feast on it, assimilate myself with them, for I am not a human being but a vermin. Infect me with pesticide and let me die screaming like a gray beast with withered eyes and a hole in my side. Let the darkness in my body bleed out, let the other rats drink of it.

Dead dead dead dead dead. You Stephen, oh my God, you are dead. I can’t believe it. Smoking gun on the floor to my right, you, lying in a corner, breathing heavily. Hole in your chest. Missed your heart by an inch, but I can’t... I will not call anyone. I grab a bat. What the fuck is wrong with me

(whack whack whack whack thud)

i’m only doing it because i love you know how much i love you i could never really hurt you this is salvation salvation sal christ died on the cross for you forgive me heavenly father of my sins forgive no salvation no forgiveness and now angels with needle-hole eyeballs and flesh coated halos stare at me screaming god does not forgive you motherfucker god does not forgive you”

XIII

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“Billy stands there with a disillusioned look on his face, like I just raped his idol with a red hot poker and captured it on video camera, staring back at me with his idiot gaze. ‘Don’t you know, kid,’ I mutter, my usual sly grin on my face, ‘he’s just going to fuck the hell out of you and leave you gasping on the floor with your hand on your cock?’ There is something wrong with this picture from the outset. Billy stands in front of me, almost completely naked, wearing only tube sox and a frown, Viril standing three feet away with a gun pointed at my forehead, and me, fully clothed, wearing a black leather trench-coat and matching fedora. My hand is gripped on a similar armament in my right pocket - yes, a pistol - and I am ready to whip it out and paint the walls with a few layers of brains should Viril fuck with me, or should little Billy get too riled up to keep himself from trying to rip my face off.

‘Now, now, boys, no need to get all hostile. You can’t hold it against me for telling the truth. Viril, you want boys and drugs, you can only afford one! Since you have so eloquently talked my boy Billy into your, erm, seduction, I have decided that it would be a wise decision to come talk him - and you - out of it. You can’t fuck my babies for free.’ Viril’s eyes level at me and I can see a werewolf ripping around behind them. It’s eating the nerves in there and he’s going blind, but he thinks he’s having trouble seeing because he’s so fucking angry. ‘You mind your own business, Thomas, you know the rules of the city…’ I laugh. ‘This IS my business, dear Viril, because Billy is my boy, and you know that. You’ve opened yourself up to trouble by talking with him outside of the limitations I have clearly set for a man of your, how do you say... stature? Not really, but it’ll work.’

Billy begins to cry and his eyes close. He is standing there humiliated, wondering what the hell is going to happen and how we got to this point anyway, while I absent-mindedly fondle the trigger of a concealed weapon and the man he thinks is his one true love aims a gun at my forehead. Viril is not really a handsome man. No, not at all. He is bald, old - thirty-seven or so, would be my guess - and he’s wearing a rather nasty looking wife-beater. How my Billy could have fallen for him is beyond me, but Viril has probably been buying some love drugs from another dealer and spiking them with ecstasy or some other compound. If I have to kill Billy, I am more than prepared to do so. In fact, losing Viril would be losing a far bigger investment - Viril is one of the number one HI addicts in the city - his addiction of choice? Oh, he likes it nice and disgusting... human brain matter. He likes the juices that make you horny. Sick bastard. Used to be he’d buy some of that shit and a boy to go with it (for the night only, of course), but now that it’s come time to make a decision, he can’t buck down on either one, and one without the other is worthless to him. I would offer him the boys free if only to keep the cash inflow coming, but in the long run that’s a loss for me, so I have no clue how I am going to secure my investment, but that’s not the point right now. The point is, this motherfucker has pissed me off quite badly.

‘Just give me Billy, god-dammit,’ he demands. ‘Now, now, Viril, don’t you dare think you’re in any position to bargain! You may have the gun, monsieur, but I have the advantage, and don’t ever try to cheat the man with the advantage. Because if you kill me, you silly fuck, then you get no more HI, and without HI you don’t get your high, so really, killing me would only be long term suicide, right? Because we know where you’d end up without my HI - you’d end up castrating yourself and jumping off a building because Viril, and though I do consider you a friend,’ (I don’t really) ‘you are as mad as a fucking hatter.’

Somewhere inside of him a little piece of hope is eaten by cancer, and a malignant tumor of doubt is spreading to his brain, ready to inflict fatal injury upon him. ‘If you consider me a friend do me this one favor. Please! I gotta have him!’ I gaze at Billy, roll my eyes. ‘Billy is a fucking whore. Look at him! He’s worthless - just standing there naked and crying. His only purpose in life is to accept the warm deposit of a million men, and he’s expended once one of them plants him with some nasty disease and cripples his mind. Then he’s dead, and a dead whore is worth about as much as a bullet in the nuts.” Billy’s already crying. I can’t keep him on after this, I probably should just give him to Viril since he’ll most likely refuse to work on the streets again. I could make him work, of course, but I only like defiling beauty when I get to fuck it as well, and I won’t be fucking Billy - that’s against my rules. Don’t play with the merchandise. But that, once again, is beside the point - if I give Billy to Viril, it gives Viril victory number one, and with one victory he might try for two. A good dealer never lets the junkie win. Not even once.

Viril seems to be backing down. His hand is trembling, and it’s either from fear, withdrawal, or both. I hope it’s both. I’m slowly making my decision - whether the investment is off or not, I can’t let him live because this, though it wouldn’t be a victory anyway, could do either one of two things: it could give him the balls to try it again when he thinks that my advantage has been downplayed, or it could completely crush him. Now, if the latter were one-hundred percent the case, there would be no problem, but I can’t take that risk because a good dealer also never takes risks. Risks are for the stupid - a smart man only takes a sure thing.

‘Viril,’ I begin, withdrawing the gun from my pocket, ‘I’m going to kill Billy now.’ He doesn’t have time to react - and by he, you can fill in either of them. One second Billy is standing there crying, the next Billy’s face is gone and he’s on his knees for the very last time, before falling forward onto the dirty ground and waiting to stagnate. Viril begins to scream and I can almost see his finger start to pull back before I aim the gun at his head and fire three times. I close my eyes after the first shot, and when I open them again, Viril is slumped against the wall, sliding down and leaving a trail of sticky red goo on the surface behind him. ‘You stupid motherfuckers,’ I mumble, closing my eyes. The rats are already feasting when they open again.”

XIV

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“I’m sitting in a room surrounded by ghosts of the past, the ghosts of everyone I’ve ever been, everyone who I’ve ever pretended to be. Sitting in one corner with white eyes and an impotent grin on his face is Mr. Heathen, otherwise known as the Legionnaire. To his left is Ash Lazarus. Then Gabriel Christian Berlin. Johnny. Stone. They are all here to attend my funeral. Star Wormwood heads for the earth, ready to break it into a million cold pieces and leave the remains floating in the cold vacuum of space and time, forever lifeless and barren. Once I had been a god... it is true, I now understand, that only in the city can a man be so utterly destroyed, so wrecked beyond total familiarity and still be able to be worshipped by his peers. We idolize sacrifice... we love hate.

There was a hand in my heart from day one, and I could feel the finger scratching ever so gently at the thick walls of my pork-chop ventricles, knowing that one day it would find a way to claw itself out and climb into my brain, taking over and forming the rest of that body, the man who I am today. I am glad I cannot see the body attached to that hand, although it is my own conscience, because it would be the most hideous demon, the most foul creation of hell... aliens with angel wings spoke to me at night, whispering softly ‘You are not what you think you are,’ and I would cry, not knowing if reality was a dream or if the dream was reality.

Stephen once told me that the greatest novels are about nothing at all. I still do not know if this was merely his youthful ignorance or if the statement is one of merit. I have felt for such a long time that my life is merely some tragic script written on the walls of bathroom stalls with the crimson lipstick of a transvestite trucker in rural Ohio, or the manuscript used for firewood by a starving artist, and I think I believe the latter, because I can see my world burning up in front of me. Everything I have ever loved is on fire, I am running out of places to go. I have run from page one and I know that I am almost at the final chapter, awaiting that final period, that one little dot at which point I will reach and incinerate, like all those I have loved. My writer now lies frozen to death or overdosed or merely dead from choking on his own vomit in the corner of the room and I am going to join him soon. He knew nothing of what he has caused me... he does not know that he is my God, and that my words are real. My words are not his, he is not writing about a character, but the character is writing about him... he is not playing the character, the character is playing him... he is not

that anything matters anymore. I am a fiction with a non-fictional relativity and reality... I am as real as you, but my blood is made of ink and my flesh is made of dead trees... my tears tend to stain, my life is meant to be horrid, my passions are letters on a page and my libido is an image in your mind. I have no control over what I do or say, for fate, in the form of the writer, has taken over my mind and soul. Pity me for playing my part more than for befalling misfortune, reader, I plead of you. The true tragedy is not that I will die, as we all know I will, but that I have no choice but to die... because I will die at my own hands, with a gun lodged in my throat and a scalpel gouged between my ribs. I have known it since my birth, and I was born at sixty-six, and I will die at sixty-six, and this is inevitable. No, I will die at one... but I might live forever, eternally reliving my own tragedies, killing my Stephen...

My memories are false. My past is false. The only truth is what lies on these pages, reader, that is the only truth for me. My dreams are not dreams, but nightmares, and I live them because I feel them with no difference than I would feel a slice on finger. I have no hands to grasp you with, I have no voice to plead for help. I am doomed... you cannot save me, and I know that you cannot. Your pity, your warmth, your love and your hate, your disgust and your care, none of them can change a single thing about my ending, which shall be coming in a matter of time, for every story, no matter how badly written, has an ending, even if that ending is mid-sentence, even if that ending is merely a beginning. There are no happy endings, because endings are never happy - the end is the end. No one dies happy.

All of my characters, all of my personas, every role I have ever played... they have all come to life and died within the moth-eaten mind of my creator. The only place they have any will is in his own mind... I am writing this story just as much as the writer, except that I am not. He has already ordained the ending, understand... and there is not a thing I can do to change that.”


XV

From the journal of Thomas Mikal:

“Angels are staring at me and I can feel the guilt starting to sink in. All my fears, all my indignations, all of my allegiances and pledges were all for not. My redemption cannot come, my forgiveness and my salvation are through with – I sit inside of a circle and the bodies of decaying angels stare at me with bloody wings and rotting eyes. There is no light in those eyes – they stare back stupidly with idiot gazes, like bleeding dollies arranged around a pivot by the little boy God who has gone away, kidnapped by some other force, some stranger.

I sit and wait for something. A black presence stands millions of yards away from me, angels stretch like broken ventriloquist puppets, hanging over rusted rails, some fallen on the ground, all the way to the tiny pinpoint of ebony in the distance. The angels are all dead. Heaven is what I saw in the sky that night – black, broken. There has been a war here, and the divine have lost. But dead, they do not know it – the Metatron is the darkness, and he will not give up his throne. Even in shambles I am judged.

‘You have sinned,’ he whispers, but his whispers surround me, and penetrate a tiny hole in my skull, crawl inside like maggots and begin to fuck and reproduce. ‘You have murdered. You have broken God’s will… you have turned your back on heaven. How do you plead?’ Perhaps, I think, I am making this up in my head. ‘God,’ I begin, ‘is as dead as you are, but neither of you know it yet.’

Silence pervades. I wait for a response, but there is none. Maybe during my short reply, the Metatron breathed its final breath, died silently and is encompassed by a darkness even blacker than the cloud of flesh that had surrounded it. I walk forward, gazing at the angels on my side. Still dead. Some are beginning to rot. They do not reek, for they are not human, but they are dead nevertheless, and they are feasted upon not by worms but by tiny black slugs, crawling through gaping eye-holes and pain-frozen mouths. Dead, like I should be.

I walk for what seems like minutes, like years, like seconds, like eternity. And I reach the throne. I know what lies behind the darkness. It no longer resembles a cloud, but now perhaps a funeral shroud, and I can see a tiny body shriveled up beneath its many layers. Pulling layer to layer to the side, I advance until I reach the final section, and parting it, I see… I see Stephen. He is not decaying. But he looks far more dead than the rotting angels I have by now witnessed. His eyelids are closed and painted with black eye-shadow, his lips are bright crimson, and his skin is so white… like ivory. He looks like a wax doll.

His fingers grip the sides of the black throne upon which he sits, holding on with clenched fists, but he looks relaxed, at peace. I move to him… he is not a dead body, but he is a wax statue, I think. It is easier to think of him this way. “I am so sorry I hurt you,” I whisper, and move my hands to his face. It is not wax. It is flesh. Cold, dusty flesh – powder comes off in my hands, like white concealer, and I rub it between my fingers. Stephen’s eyes open suddenly and look up at me. They are red, red not because of some demonic force or angel light, but from the burst vessels in his eyeballs. ‘Killer,’ he whimpers. And he is glass.

I back up. Light reflects from his mirrored surface, and I stare in awe of this. The drugs

(IT’S THE DRUGS WAKE UP MOTHERFUCKER IT’S THE FUCKING DRUGS NOT REAL NOT REAL NOT REAL)

are killing me slowly and softly.

A glass mannequin walks up to Stephen, a vision of myself, baseball bat in hand and shatters this work of art into a billion tiny, jagged shards. Light issues forth and drowns everything, and I find myself falling, I fall farther, faster, and harder than I ever have coming down off of speed. I hit the cold ground, and I look up at the black skies. Clouds pass overhead. This is familiar. A man walks up to me, and I recognize something sinister about him.

‘Spare a buck?’ he questions, and begins to feel through my pockets. I grab his hand, grip it, and he hisses – hisses – a black tongue flickering out from beneath his stiff gray hoodie. Shadows coat his face. I let go, frightened, and begin to back up, trying to get to my feet. ‘You know where you live, you know where you are, and you know what you are,’ it says. Then it turns, runs. Nails tip-tap against the cobblestone sidewalk and he runs into a further darkness – I am surrounded by shades of black and white. There is no color here – even my skin is gray, I notice. This is like a horror film, black and white. I wait patiently for Bela Lugosi to descend from above and drain deeply my black life’s blood…

Move forward. Jakob comes to mind – maybe he is here. Traverse these narrow subway channels, I am lost and God cannot help me. No Bible can help me, no prayer can save me, no light can guide me no rescuer find me no monster can hurt me no angel can burn me no lover can leave me no liar deceive me. No woman can fuck me, no mother un-tuck me, no man can kill me no children fulfill me. No drug can touch me no drink can budge me no rock can cut me no key can unlock me. This is PRISON

‘This is hell,’ Stephen says from behind me. I turn around, but now I see everything. Neon lights – the black and white is gone. Colors are bleeding into everything. Limousines glide slowly by and I recognize suddenly where I am. The city.

‘This is hell.’”


XVI

(I pretend to know the things that I see are fake)

It’s here. All things left untouched finally coming back with an angry remembrance at my guiltless expenditure of nature, my wanton song into the night as I forget everything but poor dead Stephen and reflect only on the emptiness of every room in my shackled soul. Like dust under a dresser I listen to the breathing of a sleeping God in a lonely midnight hour, It breathes ever so gently, softly, then picks up, groans, a nightmare! My lifespan is up before It even awakens screaming and is clasped by ninja shadows hanging from the ceiling and just waiting to fall upon their prey.

I pretend to know the things that I see are fake. There can’t be monsters in sewer grates, dead angels singing for my damnation, rotting corpses in theatres being feasted upon by rats, wax-doll lovers in a wasted Heaven, acid-trips and facelifts and dead boys and scarring and vampires, Dandies and blood, mutants, monsters, megalomaniacs, Albinoids, HI product. This is all fake. None of it is real. Even dear Stephen never existed.

(I can’t pretend any longer)

My prayers have always gone unanswered. My life is sixty-six years in sixteen chapters, twenty-six minutes in thirty-seven days, two seconds, twelve hours, four billion years. My life is not in my own blood-stained hands. These sins I have committed are not my own wrongs, but still I am damned for them. I never killed Stephen. But I must face the consequences of his murder because it is fate for me to do so. Stephen died in your head - you’re the killer. You killed him!

I can’t pretend any longer that these apocalypses are nothing more than drug-induced visions. Painted hands do crawl off of the face of their wearer - I wonder where Ephengelson is now. Perhaps he faced the same fate that I will. Perhaps he is dead. Or like the raped Dandy boy, perhaps he is like that. You can only press your luck so far. Maybe he is shackled now on the top floor of Jakob’s hideout, or maybe he is dead and lifeless in a gutter somewhere. I fancy he got his face erased, although that’s a horrible waste of beauty, a tragedy within itself. I feel so sorry for him... perhaps I’ve already sold him as HI product. Maybe he never existed.

(These nightmares aren’t dreams, and the bogeymen really are tapping at my window)

I don’t even understand what is happening to me... I must already be in hell. I told you that I sold my soul for morphine, perhaps. Maybe I made that up. My words come out garbled and my memories are all in black and white, they reel through my head like ancient cinema. They are soundless. Perhaps there are corpses watching silently in my mind as well... or they were there all the time. I’m watching, waiting for the encore. Because after the encore, then it all ends. Then I finally die. I disappear.

These nightmares aren’t dreams, and the bogeymen really are tapping at my window. They’re whispering ‘let us in, so that we may finish your story.’ Death, O Discordia, come swiftly to me. I can smell smoke. It’s coming from all directions. I’m at the last page. THE LAST SENTENCE, THE LAST WORD approaches.

(fire closing in all around me, and the heat is making me dizzy and tired)

My GOD is DEAD. My face is melting. My hands are dripping black, I’m made of ink and paper. Highly flammable. Liquid flesh, black, stains the ground, flash-fries and tattoos into it, and I can feel it still. Something black gets in my eyes. Gotta wipe it away. I’m melting. My entire world is on fire, this is Armageddon. I’m the only one left. They’re all gone. Ephengelson is gone. Not dead... just gone. Stephen is gone. The boy with the green make-up is gone. Jakob, gone. Gone. Everything is gone. Now I will go.

Fire closing in all around me, and the heat is making me dizzy and tired. I want to fall. I want to sleep. The last word, reader, I can see it. Its lurching toward me on the ground, pulling itself toward me... touching me. Its slithering into my skin, assimilating me. Moving in my veins. Up to my head... warm... cool... I see stars for a second... then I don’t see

(end)