Down Supremacy

Dickburn

2006-06-15T05:26:00.000-07:00

Nick Vag stepped through his white, Psycho, shower curtain and turned both taps on at once.
Hot and cold water ran together to become warm. Warm was exactly how Nick liked things, he wasn't a fan of extremes.
He grabbed his bar of Irish Spring but put it back and decided to jerk off. First he lathered his hair with Head & Shoulders to let it set in. Nick thought about Kelly Ripa and her legs and her shoes, they were pretty but then an image of Regis slipped in and ruined the fantasy.
When Nick opened his eyes was when he heard the faint, deep voice coming from the crack in the grout that ran down the far corner of the white tiled shower stall.
Nick though he must have heard someone yelling in the house across the driveway but the words were definitely English sounding and the house next door was full of Mexicans.
Nick couldn't have imagined it though. It was a real voice and he heard it again.
"Who goes there?"
"What the heck?" said Nick, "Is this a joke?"
"They call me Finacor, I was once a great warrior."
"Well get the fuck out of my shower," said Nick turning off both the taps and reaching for his towel.
"I wish I could," said Finacor, "I should give anything for my freedom."
"Wait dude, are you really trapped?"
"With all my powers I need someone else to free me."
"If this is serious man, I'll call the cops."
"Call no one," said Finacor, "This is something you must achieve on your own."
"I can't just break this wall up my landlord would kill me," said Nick but he was intrigued by the voice of Finacor.
"Do you fear this lord so much as to not help a friend?"
"Friend?" said Nick.
"You were kind enough to speak to me," said Finacor, "Listen to my tale of woe."
"I trust you," said Finacor.
"Maybe I trust you too," said Nick, but you better start explaining yourself."
"I shall," laughed Finacor, "I shall."
#
Nick returned to the bathroom dressed in a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt. He carried a hammer and a flat head screwdriver to use as a chisel.
"I'm not too handy with tools," said Nick to the crack, "but I should have you out in a few hours."
He began to hammer the screwdriver into the crack and it widened a bit.
"I can already taste the fresh air," said Finacor and his voice was louder.
Nick wondered if Finacor was lying about that because all he could smell was his cat's litterbox.
As Nick hammered the second time the tension rod slid out and fell on his head, then the floor, with a loud bang.
The shower curtain was wrapped over Nick's face and he pulled it off.
"Shit!"
His head hurt like hell.
"What happened my friend? I heard a loud noise."
"No big deal Finacor," said Nick.
"It is only that I admire you so much for trying to free me."
"Once again," said Nick, "No big deal."
He dropped the tension rod and curtain on the bathroom floor and went back to work on the cracked up tiles.
The screwdriver did the trick and the hole grew wider and wider.
"Tell me more about yourself," said Nick.
"I was a great warrior in a land called Atlantis," said Finacor, "I was the envy of all the land and all the sharks who roamed the seas. No one could defeat Finacor the brown knight. My shiny brown armor and skin was stained red with the blood of my enemies."
"Is that why they call you Finacor," said Nick, "because you're so hardcore?"
"Ha ha ha my dear, Finacor is a simple family name."
"My nickname used to be white chocolate," said Nick, "That's what the black kids used to call me because I was so good at basketball."
"Back to my story," said Finacor.
"And back to my chiseling," laughed Nick as he raised the hammer.
"One day a swirling vortex appeared behind the Castle Gayskull and out stepped a mysterious man who had a large iron hand.
"The man asked that he may see the three greatest warriors in the land so that he may give them a test.
"Cronos the king summoned me the brown knight, Daltan the Asian knight, and Brohan the white knight.
"The man told us to remove our armor plating and to wait each in line. He first summoned the white knight to his side.
"He grabbed the white knight's dick with his iron hand and the iron began to glow red. The white knight screamed as his dick melted away to liquid.
"The man sent the white knight away and summoned the Asian knight and did the same with his yellow dick.
"There was much fear in my heart as the man summoned me, the brown knight, to his side but my courage carried me forward.
"As he wrapped his iron fingers around my dick it felt cold but they began to heat up and soon my dick burned with all Poseidon's wrath. The iron hand man did not smile however, for as hot as his hand glowed my dick would not melt.
"'What sort of trickery is this,' he screamed.
"'This chocolate,' I said, 'melts in your mouth not in your hand.'
"And somehow that incantation protected my dick perhaps. Angry that he could not melt my dick the iron handed man banished me to a netherworld in which I have remained until this day."
"You'll be out soon," said Nick.
Nick had flashes of Encino Man running through his head except Finacor the brown knight replaced Brendan Fraser's caveman.
Nick gave Finacor a bath with all the different cleaning fluids.
Nick cut Finacor's hair into a cool, modern style.
Nick gave Finacor a skateboard and took him to campus giving him a cool name like Finny and telling all the girls he was from Latvia.
Finacor's voice woke him from his fantasy.
"I can almost smell you my friend."
Nick hammered away.
"Just a minute now," he said.
Finacor laughed and Nick could hear him now clearer than ever.
Suddenly an iron hand shot out from the hole and grabbed Nick's crotch ripping his dick out of his underwear.
Nick Vag felt the cold iron fingers grip his dick!
"I forgot to tell you," giggled Finacor, "After he could not defeat my dick I became him."
Nick could see Finacor in the shadows and his brown armor. He also saw the swirling vortex behind him.
Nick's dick burned as Finacor's arm flared to red-hot but his dick would not melt and it was then Nick realized.
"What's the meaning of this?" Finacor gripped harder and hotter.
"Didn't I tell you already," laughed Nick, "They used to call me white chocolate!"
Finacor screamed, "No!"
Nick grabbed the tension rod off the floor and used it to knock Finacor back into the swirling blue vortex.
Then he vanished.
Nick looked at his right hand.
It had turned to shiny iron.

PUFFER R.I.P. 2001-2006 "My special puff."

2006-05-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

I don't listen to music anymore
since Puffer left
he's gone for good and I can't believe it

we used to put him outside because he'd pee
in the playpen
but one night he never came back and

i'd give anything to have him pee on
anything again.

(I miss you Puffer. Wherever you are. Whatever happened to you that made it so you couldn't come home I will always remember you and love you. You're brother Blinger is here all alone now with Caril-Ann.)

Letter

2006-04-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Family and Friends,

Happy Holidays, Diclis and I send our best wishes to one and all! We have enclosed a page of photos of our family.
As you can see, our family is growing.
Not only do all of our children have master's degrees but they are also married.
That is except for my Grady boy, because he's special and his doctor says he's never seen anything like it in his whole life.
Suzannne has four little ones, the oldest, Virginia Emilie is 4, Charles Lincoln is 3, Robert L. and Caroline Nancy are both 1. Charles and Heather are expecting their first in May, 2006!!
At the upper left side, I am holding both Virginia and Caroline, next Diclis with his arms full of Charles and Robert.
Under those photos are RD (holding Caroline) with his wife, Jennifer.
Under that is RD holding Robert.
Virginia is in her Halloween "princess fairy" costume. Diclis is at the bottom with bottles in the mouths of Suzanne's twins.
Next is Charles Barker holding his God Son, Charles Lincoln.
Then there's Grady rolling around on the floor with the cat.
As you can tell by the photo, Grady's fur is matted down. That is because he had just returned from the hospital after having his second penis clipped off. He has to have it done every six months or it grows too long and tangles in his dungarees.
Of course you can see Suzanne holding the twins in their Christening gowns.
In the next picture Grady is standing in what he calls his "office" (which used to be my walk-in closet). The pictures covering the walls are all of these people who died in bus accidents.
Next lower, is the whole Sanders family. At the upper middle, is an invitation Dick and I received for Heather's celebratory dinner at the Brown Palace in Denver. The second picture is from this fall's New York City marathon where Charles ran the full length and we watched him finish in good time. Charles has also completed the Denver and Chicago marathons this year.
The next top picture is of Dick,me, Charles, my sister Nancy, Nacy's husband Richard, and Heather. We are at Emerald Lake, north of our house at Mt. Crested Butte, Colorado.
The next lower picture was taken at All Saints Episcopal Church after the twin's baptism. Travis is holding one of them (which one?) next are Jennifer and RD. then Suzanne and a twin and Virginia and Charles. RD is a Godparent to the twins.
In this next picture Grady has one of the twins (?) nailed down to a chopping block. Grady cut him up for stew meat or something like that. He's always working up a fuss over this recipe book they love, it's called the Necronomicon. I think one of the chefs, Cthulu, is pretty well known. I think he must be Puerto Rican or something.
Then Diclis and I at Napa, California this fall and lower right in Colorado in January, 2005. The "real" photo in our card is of us in a church near Budapest.
We have both had a busy year. Dick is still working with his business interests, having built another pipeline to add to the Chicago Midway jet fuel pipeline, this one is a little closer to home, a natural gas pipeline in the Arkansas Fayetteville shale.
Diclis still works out just about every day which has enabled him to ski all day without tiring. He rides his motorcycle. We towed it up to Colorado this summer and had a lovely picnic along the Taylor River. He is completing his 6th year as Treasurer of our church.
I have been LOVING BABIES and traveling (with Dick). We spent a month in Eastern Europe this August and it was very interesting.

It goes without saying that Suzanne and Travis are very busy. With the addition of the twins in November, 2004, they added a new home and two full time nannies (one for night, one for day, with a third part time in the early evening). Travis has been busy with running two businesses along with Dick. A jet fuel company and the before mentioned school, gymnastics, ballet, piano at TCU. And Saturday soccer (Travis coached Virginia's team, the Lady Bugs). Suzanne and Dick take the twins to a TCU early childhood music appreciatin class. DICK LOVES THIS!! Charles and Robert both have tubes in their ears and Caroline will recieve the same next week. They have kept the pediatrician's office busy, where are you Dr. Heather?!!! Suzanne does manage to lunch with friends, shop, shop some more, do Junior League, Junior Women's, maybe Chi Omega, takes the children regularly to Godly play at our church. Oh yes, Travis is on the finance board of our parish day school. Suzanne will bring the older two to Colorado for skiing.

RD and Jennifer have celebrated their second year of marriage. They live in a lovely home in Austin, Texas. RD has become an expert at swimming pool maintenance and he enjoys planting and gardening. They are both busy in their careers. Jennifer as an executive ofo an advertising company and RD as a consultant with a small environmental company where he prepares Spill Plans, Phase I environmental studies and remediates all sorts of nasty things. He made a special effort to attend Dick's brother's wedding in Memphis last year, which was very much appreciated. "Little Diclis" also manages to go to a few Texas A&M football games (Jennifer is a UT grad and I don't think has the same amount of enthusiasm for A&M) where he catches up with old friends. RD has always had an abundance of friends whose relationships seem to endure throughout the years, which certainly adds testimony to his character. He also hunts, this fall it has been said that he eliminated a hog of Mexican origin...Did you roast that, RD? They will be joining us this Christmas in Colorado for a week of skiing.

Charles and Heather moved this year to a home that is quite close-in to his work and to her hospital in Denver. Their home was built in 1932 and is in an area called Park Hill. They also adopted "Chester". Chester is a beautiful black lab and Charles fell in love with him. Three weeks after the adoption Chester had to have very expensive surgery. Chester is a very LUCKY DOG!! Charles began this year with Patina Oil and Gas and ended with Noble Drilling. Noble bought Patina. Charles justs keeps getting these severance deals. Better to be lucky than smart, but when you are both it is an awesome combination. As pictured, Charles ran the New York Marathon this fall and Heather, Dick and I enjoyed watching him. We rode the subway to mile 7 which was in Brooklyn, to mile 18 which was in Harlem and to mile 24 near Central Park and then to the FINISH LINE in Central Park!! It was so much fun. We toppeed it off with a short stay which included a night at the theatre enjoying Phantom of the Opera. Heather finished her Pediatric Residency this last May. We went to a dinner honoring all the new MD's. During dinner we listened to short speeches about each of the graduates, their future plans and interesting personal "tidbits" about them. We learned that Heather was called the "velvet hammer". She very nicely and beautifully gets what she wants done!!! She also recievede the great honor of being chosen to be the Chief Resident at Denver Children's Hospital this year. She is expecting their first child next May and she tells me she will work "up to the day". Charles and Heather will join us in Crested Butte, Colorado this Christmas for a family visit. Charles will ski and I think Heather will leave that out for this year!! Pray for my Grady. He was caught in the neighbor's basement with the remains of a teenage girl stuck to his mouth and claws, when the cops came, Petey O'Toole was dancing around Grady, naked and covered in blood and the cops shot him.
Grady made it home and we're holed up at the moment with Diclis's guns. Diclis says we should be sensible and turn ourselves in. But I won't let those rotten assholes get Grady!!

We wish each of you a merry christmas,
Emilie & Diclis

Dick & Ball Bowling Alley

2006-04-26T09:53:00.000-07:00

by Jackie Allen Birkmore

Two paramedics discuss what they saw at the scene of a gay double murder

"I wonder where all the severed dicks and balls go when they die..."

Cool demons cruise hell in an old Ford, Stray Cats playing on the tapedeck, "Sexy and 17" and there's two twelve year old girls tied up in the back ready to go

They pull up in the McDonald's parking lot and see Jackie there with his boys and they are a cool crew

"Hey where you guys going tonight?"

"Where else? the dick & ball bowling alley?"

the cool demons cruise down hell street till they get to corner of cum and 4th and park behind Jackie's boys right under the neon sign that flashes dicks and balls all night

Jackie gets the tab and the two cool demons take the 15 year old and drop them down on the floor next to the soda machine "boy you know what I'm sayin?" said one of the demons then

"Ah'ma pick me up some Puertorican ass balls cuz they be good for knockin' down dicks with."

"Ah'm gettin me some Asian balls cause they be filled up with ball bearings and shit and you can like aim those shits perfectly like Top Gun."

The two cools demons play all night and at one point they see a black and white dick pop up

"Yo why they be a black and white dick for?"

"It be a mullato and shit?"

Then this messed up, uncomfortable looking demon with his ass crack hanging out named Deron he comes up and it says "Derondell" on his name tag and Jeremy Jordan's Right Kind of Love comes on the jukebox and he's like "what 's going on here dude?"

"Yo B, there is a black and white dick over there?"

"Shit," says Deron and walks down the alley and pi cks up the dick, "This aint no dick, some asshole took a snickers bar and painted it half white."

"Shit," all the demons laugh.

Juice and Buttercake by L.C. Mardone

2006-04-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

Every Sunday us lads gathered in the churchyard and waited for the widow Finfuckle to treat us each to a cup of apple juice and a slice of homemade buttercake.

She carried our feast in on a silver platter.

Dozens of tiny paper plates. Each topped with a square slice of moist, golden buttercake.

Next to each plate rested a small plastic cup filled to the brim with sweet apple juice.

As the widow rested the platter upon the withered old see saw my friend Henny said, "Oh fetch me the biggest piece of buttercake."

But I laughed and said, "I shall enjoy that piece."

(This story originally appeared in The Mad Hatter's Review edited by Carol Novack.)
http://www.madhattersreview.com/

Jericho spend some time with Monique films

2006-04-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

Jericho rent this Tony Scott movie "Domino" off of cable on demand. This movie good.

Has some of Jericho's favorite actors like Mickey Rourke, Keira Knightley and especially Monique.

Monique plays some lady who is the youngest grandmother ever. She goes on Jerry Springer in one part and tries to say how government should recognize her as "blacktina" because she is half black and half latina and then this half chinese half black girl in the audience gets all pissed and is like "Whatever Monique" and Monique is like, "Girl you chinegro."

Domino as a whole is interesting movie but not up there with Tony Scott's best (such as like Revenge, Top Gun, True Romance). Seems more like expirementally artistic sort of film that Tony Scott did for fun. Somewhat makes Jericho think of Walter Hill's Wild Bill. Movie was not nearly as good as most of Walter Hill's films (The Warriors, Southern Comfort, Last Man Standing) but was weird and artistic and all over the place.

Domino had one fucked up scene when guy gets arm blown off by shotgun by accident because of misheard phone call from Delroy Lindo. Also has good supporting acting from Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green playing themselves.

Later on that night Jericho come across movie called Soul Plane. This movie also happen to feature Monique (this time in role of stewardess on N.W.A. airlines). Monique also funny and good in this movie.

This movie also feature Method Man, Snoop Dogg, Tom Arnold, a gay flight attendant who is fat. Tom Arnold's character's wife gets fucked mouth so bad by black guy with long dick that she get vocal chord damage and can't talk anymore. Tom Arnold hooks up with Monique in the end. Two of Jericho's favorite comedians hooking up makes this movie six stars this time.

Snoop Dogg gives good performance as pilot who trained with Al Quada. This movie have all sorts of bad tasted humour like that. Is daring and bold in that way.

Jericho must also give special mention to plane in this movie. Is big and purple and looks like reminds Jericho of female gargoyle friend Angela.

Overall Jericho think both these movies are good to watch.

Jericho out!!!

Zombie Writer by Mike Philbin

2006-04-07T10:28:00.000-07:00

I'm not angry.

I'm not bitter.

I'm not twisted.

Even if all the other zombies in my catchment zone, my infection radius, have proper jobs like skull-cracker, limb-dislocator, eye-skewerer, dis-emboweller. Oh yeah, all the classy jobs. Me, I got lumbered with this what-you-call drunken bloodlust to whack my cold black-nailed fingertips at a laptop and tippety-tap out my undead sentence.

I have to endure them knocking on my door in the dead of night, my post-mortal mates, suffer their guttural moans of cooome plaaay wiiith uuuuuuuus, buuudy.

I can hear them squabbling about me, saying I ain't got it no more. Laugh at that when did I ever have it? When did anyone in my undead family ever have it? We're like the ultimate zombie soap opera round our house of an evening, eh?

Telly's on, my undead family of two big stupid bloated brothers and a fat lazy bloated sister, my bloated mam and dad, granddad and some tart from down the way are festering in their couches stained all sorts of grim colours from all the seepage of bodily fluids from the rot.

Even the family greyhound, all's he fuckin' does is fart and lick his undead balls, the lucky bugger.

I shout at them, I do - I shout at them in my dull slow way like my once-living mother used to shout at me as a child, Whyyyyy doooon't yoooooouuuuuuu gooooooo ooooouuuut aaaaaaand kiiiiiiill sooooooome fuuuuuuucking mooooooortaaaaals?

Well that's what I mean to say. But I've never been the big talker of the family and all my great fascist commands spill out of my moldy face like a stinking egg yolk. A tobacco slur of dribble. A morphine mispronunciation of g.a.k. I'd might as well have no voice.

So I'll retire to my keyboard to pour more of me zombie thoughts out onto discoloured velum.

I'll be famous one day. The first thinking zombie, I can see it now in rotting Siamese cat entrails strung across a ribcage of Pope Pius the Fifth. I'll be the top dog intellectual in a dying literary race. Don't laugh at me, I'm serious, there's a future in undead cerebral real estate.

Look, shamble over here wi' me for a New Orleans minute and I'll show you. Look at me there in me pictures, I were a right grand lookin' mortal. Fucking zombie disease was the worst thing that could have happened to me. All those zombie lusts and stomach aching needs all churnin' around in my guts.

Brains!

Brains aren't for eating, fer fuck's sake, they're for using.

With our rotting zombie brains we can imagine whole societies merged together not in one dull grey gunk like they are now; the street shamblers; the grave-yard ambushers; the mall marathon runners forever stalking the latest in mortal mother fuckery. We're all connected you know, at the viral level, we're all of the same source. We are the living magic. Ah, but that sorta propaganda's a waste of your time and a waste of my time. So what is it I do?

Being a zombie writer is all about the excision of criminal intent.

Okay, I know, I should slow down a bit there. Got a bit above myself. Went waaaaaaaay beyond your understanding. I know. So, call me on it. Get out your great big fucking lawyer stick and have at my skull for trying to make a difference to the eternal foot scrape. It would be a mercy killing, let me assure you.

The Excision of Criminal Intent:

Yeah, it looks much better as a subtitle in its own right. I'm not talking about zombie laws and shit. I'm not talking about a whole new societal refit. This isn't about the artist renaissance of the zombie ethos as creative epic. That sorta shite's not worth a wet fart in a paper-thin skullpan.

This is about what it means to be a zombie in the 21st century, don't you understand what it means to want that camaraderie with people you wouldn't piss on if they were on fire.

Share in that feeding frenzy when your peristaltics have failed you a loooooong time ago and all the shit you stuff your face with falls out every time you bend down to retie your piss sodden shoe lace. It's about the day-to-day business of never quite rotting to your core. But it's also about the magic, god dammit. It's about the supernatural gift.

I mean, think about it, technically speaking us zombies are eternal, that's what separates us from the mortals.

Eternal, mortal, do you see the polar opposite?

Well, there aren't many mortals left to find. Our zombie sensors know a mortal brain when one's in range. But, of late, not a single sniff. It's the same story from around our island nation. Fewer and fewer zombie news reporters have any new leads. I mean, it's not difficult, we have zombie agents in almost every town of every district. We don't move fast, admittedly, we're not marathon runners, but we got time on our side. We can move at our snail's pace until Hell freezes over.

But that's not what it's about. it's like when the kids leave home. You know, if you can remember back all that time to when you were mortal. Your kids leave home and you and your spouse haven't the foggiest idea what to do with your time. Same with us zombies, only for us the dilemma is multiplied a million-fold.

I say we need a zombie revolution. I mean I'm not Karl Marx nor nothin' but imagine a trillion of our kind marching proudly down Parliament Street demonstrating for our free will.

But that�s a joke, right?

What free will? What is Free Will, is it the urge to rip through living flesh? Is that it? There�d be no government to hear our case � no higher authority to appeal to.

In the meantime, we slowly deteriorate over the millennia, watching TV � the only thing we left ourselves, the only remaining social structure.

What�s the half-life of zombie flesh? Has anyone looked into that? There are so many unanswered questions and so many years to research them � if only we could retain, you know, keep focus, zero in on the truth. Officially, I didn�t mean the excision of criminal intent, you knew that right, that�s fuckin� meaningless, innit? I actually meant the excision of truth.

The Excision of Truth:

There you go, the only kosher way to examine the gory cross-section of our undead dissertation, yeah another fucking subtitle.

Sorry, am I repeating myself?

We undead tend to do that.

The paths in the rotting brain ossify and there�s no more memory, you live in an eternal gut ache with no salvation. Like you�re not just gonna get better, no matter how hard you pray to whichever Omniscience you believe is gonna pull you out of the fire. Zombies, get thee behind me � a.k.a. you�re in for the duration, so you�d better stop kickin� that undead donkey. You know what rocks your boat, my animated black congealments.

But what is it we need?

Well, isn�t it obvious?

Truth.

Every entity that inhabits this planet probably has the same thought, �We want the truth.� No bullshit. No propaganda. No societal deceit. No political machinations. No misdirection. No slight of hand. Just the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

But what is the zombie truth? Or what is the truth to a zombie writer like me?

We are the future of the human race.

An undead world where nothing ever changes except the weather.

That is something we have to come to terms with, something we have to teach each other on the zombie ether. We must destroy all other forms of entertainment. The old ways must be put to the sword. Only those things that remind us of our eternal emptiness must prevail. There is no truth beyond this and this is the message I must continue to broadcast to my audience.

I�ve been studying the esoteric arts, doing my research (yes, I can read - how dare you be so rude).

Tonight I start my first wave of promotion.

Let the truth spread through your rotting brainlobes, my undead friends and colleagues.

We must forget the mortal realm, that time is past and only total and unequivocal acceptance of our braindead heritage will be our succour.

It�s not my fault I�m a zombie writer � please, don�t mock me. It�s hard enough squeezing precious credence out of the reading man�s pocket as it is.

I�m a zombie writer, nothing wrong with that in my fuckin� book.

It�s what I do.

Deal with it, scumholes.

THE END.

MIKE PHILBIN'S WEBSITE

Chimericana Books

Chaz Chat Transcript #2

2006-04-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

Chaz chats under the name Carilann2000...

You have just entered room “Town Square - Biker Bar 1”
OnlineHost: What Moves You? Find others who share your interests: Pets | Gay & Lesbian | Member Photos | Boards
CarilAnn2000: Chaz is in the house
CarilAnn2000: sup
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: SUP?
CarilAnn2000: nothing much
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: WTF
CarilAnn2000: what kind of bike you ride?
BonniLUVSD: THAT BE >. GHETTO TALK EVIL ...LOL
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: HUFFY
Wiggleywok: HEHEHE
CarilAnn2000: BMX?
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: NAH
Creegansoar: 10 speed
CarilAnn2000: what yo?
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: YEA
LEATHERNSILK 219: sup? short for a mealtime??
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: HELL YEA
CarilAnn2000: you listen to Jeremy Jordan?
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: I HAVE AN AOL PATCH TOO
BonniLUVSD: UNHUH SILK..LOL
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: INKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK HUUGGGGGGGGGGGS
LEATHERNSILK 219: lol
BonniLUVSD: YA IS SHORT FOR.. YO-YO
CarilAnn2000: yo
Wiggleywok: lol
LEATHERNSILK 219: lol
Myraven2708: hey roo, whats up
CarilAnn2000: are yall makin fun of me?
BonniLUVSD: OR NOT YA >>>YO**
CarilAnn2000: what's your name?
BonniLUVSD: WELL KINDA YEA
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: WHY
LEATHERNSILK 219: <<<<<>>>>>
CarilAnn2000: you can call me chaz
CarilAnn2000: that's why
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: SO
Dodgenstein2003: <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>
Wiggleywok: hi ((((((DODGE))))))
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: IM JUST A HORNY BOT
CarilAnn2000: you are evil
BonniLUVSD: <<,NAME IS YO HO
Creegansoar: a5 dodgee
Dodgenstein2003: hiya (((((WIGLY))))))))))
CarilAnn2000: sup with this evilmindedfemale
CarilAnn2000: she ain't even a ruff ryder
Dodgenstein2003: hello cree
Creegansoar: she is evil
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: IM A GANGSTA
BonniLUVSD: SHE IS JUST DAMN EVIL
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOO
EV1LM1NDEDFEMALE: HAHAHAHAHAHAH
Wiggleywok: LOL

Jericho makes review of "2001 Maniacs"

2006-04-06T04:51:00.000-07:00

Jericho start off by calling out rival movie reviewmaker who said Jericho can't "write to save his own life". Jericho and other gargoyles will not save your life next time you are in danger. How you like that?

Danger is good way to start off this review. "2001 Maniacs" is dangerously entertaining film. Might be best movie Jericho has seen since "Derailed".

Has some of sickest death scenes Jericho has seen. Like girl get torn apart by horses, gayboy get poker stuck up ass all the way until it comes out through mouth, guy gets pressed in cotton press, guy gets dick bit off by metal mouthed girl.

Also film starts off with shout out to Cabin Fever by bringing back Eli Roth's character who says "Face!" all the time and his dog Captain Mondo.

Guiseppe Andrews does brilliant performance once again as good old southern boy. He is shaping up to be one of finest actors of his generation. Modern day Crispin Glover.

Jericho thinks production company Raw Nerve (of which Eli Roth is one of three founding members) is company to watch if this is sort of movies they be putting out.

This movie directed by Tim Sullivan. Jericho never heard of him before but he is great. Also cowrote script and script is perfect on every level. This is movie that give horror fans exactly what they want plus good stuff they never expect.

This is refreshing return to real horror after all the gay remakes and Scream movies and Wes Craven sell-out movies that have plagued horror since the mid 90's.

This is filmmaking that cuts Wes Craven's dick off!!!!

Jericho out!

Chaz Chat Transcript #1

2006-04-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

Chaz chats under the name Carilann2000...

You have just entered room “Town Square - Lobby 5”
OnlineHost: What Moves You? Find others who share your interests: Pets | Gay & Lesbian | Member Photos | Boards
TRIXIEBELLE27: ANY0NE H0TTT IN HERE!?
CarilAnn2000: Chaz is in the house and I am hot!
CarilAnn2000: My real name is Chaz
MastaCP1159: any sexy ladies wanna chat with a hott male from Miami w/pics press 1159 or im me
CarilAnn2000: Caril-ann is my cat's name
ChrisWlc115: asl girls
CarilAnn2000: m/19/hot
GORMAN97: IM me to talk 21/f
TONY119110: According to most of the screen name alot of people are sexy in here.. =CarilAnn2000: miami beach
Fjohnso337: that was funny
TRIXIEBELLE27: 1159
CarilAnn2000: don't make Chaz slap yall
Shiponj: any girl from Michigan im me or press 123
TONY119110: I must have a diff. view of Sexy.. cos.. hmmm
CarilAnn2000: anyone like Jeremy Joordan records?
CarilAnn2000: Jordan ah meant
Mdinkybabe:
TONYLAGONIA: 29 m nj hot with pict
CarilAnn2000: like "Right Kind of Love"
CarilAnn2000: yo Tony!
Wallmari293: hi room
TONY119110: Yo?
CarilAnn2000: sup b
TONYLAGONIA: hi caril
CarilAnn2000: sup
CarilAnn2000: you like Jeremy Jordan?
TONYLAGONIA: im me
CarilAnn2000: how?
MTarrComm: 22/m GA
CarilAnn2000: i'm gay miami beach male
Deabi9: how u guys no about jeremy jordan???????????????
CarilAnn2000: what are you again?
MAOpperman: 21.male.cali.pics
Fjohnso337: I need some friends

CarilAnn2000: i listen to Jeremy on downtime

GORMAN97: someone im me
RyanSVanZandt: hey everyone
RyanSVanZandt: how are ya'll?
TONY119110: Jermy Jordan was from the eary 90's or something
TONY119110: dude suckes
CarilAnn2000: name's chaz
MastaCP1159: any sexy ladies wanna chat with a hott male from Miami w/pics press 1159 or im me
TONY119110: sucks*
CarilAnn2000: anyone in here got a frying pan?
Wallmari293: who cares
Mentalelevation: wussup room???
CarilAnn2000: sup this is Chaz
CarilAnn2000: Chaz is in the house
Deabi9: N E GURLZ WANNA CHAT WITH ME I GOTS PICS AND CAM SO HOLLA AT ME OR PRESS 123?????
RyanSVanZandt: i listen to dave matthews band
CarilAnn2000: gay miami beach here
TONY119110: hmm... Oh No... another COOL aol'er
CarilAnn2000: chaz!
MRSHY35GUY: 37 m de
RyanSVanZandt: who?
Gladmbutcher: 11
CarilAnn2000: carilann is my dick's name
Fjohnso337: what was that?
CarilAnn2000: i put it in your butt
CarilAnn2000: i put it in jeremy jordan's butt
GORMAN97: any hot guys IM me or press 555
CarilAnn2000: are you gay?

CarilAnn2000: i'm hot
RyanSVanZandt: lol
TONY119110: What's up ladies? Any sexy ladies in here with pics to trade? IM ME!!
TerpFan1399X: 23/M/FL
WesleyPipes777: any ladies wanna chat with 17/m/oh? im me or press 5 to chat i have body pics
Lilicy4hottiey: what's up

Tapeworm Research (sources not cited shitbag! except where cited)

2006-04-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

Link One

Link Two

Link Three

Tapeworm is any of a group of tapelike flatworms that live as parasites. Adult tapeworms live in the intestines of human beings or other animals. They have a headlike organ called a scolex and a series of blocklike segments in a flat body. A tapeworm has no mouth or intestine. It absorbs food through its body wall. Some tapeworms measure less than 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) long and have only a few segments. Others grow more than 30 feet (9 meters) long and have thousands of segments.

A tapeworm's scolex has suckers or hooks or both. The worm uses the scolex to attach itself to the intestine of the host--that is, the animal in which the worm lives. The rest of the worm's body grows from a necklike region behind the scolex. Segments develop as the worm grows. Each segment contains male and female reproductive organs and produces many eggs. Segments filled with eggs may drop off the end of the body. The segments then may pass out of the host with body wastes and release the eggs outside the host.

Almost all tapeworms have one or more larval (immature) stages and develop in two or three hosts. A newly hatched tapeworm is called an oncosphere. It is round and has small hooks. An oncosphere develops in a host that eats it or the egg it hatches from. The oncosphere burrows through the intestine of this host to muscles or other organs. If another animal eats this host, the oncosphere may develop into another larval stage or into an adult tapeworm. A person may be infected by a tapeworm by eating improperly cooked fish, pork, or beef that contains tapeworm larvae.

Most adult tapeworms produce no bad effects in people. Sometimes they cause loss of appetite, abdominal discomfort, diarrhea, nausea, weakness, or anemia. Tapeworm larvae are much more dangerous to people. A person who accidentally eats eggs of the pork tapeworm may have young worms develop in almost every organ of the body, including the eyes, brain, and heart.

Scientific classification. Tapeworms belong to the class Cestoda of the phylum Platyhelminthes.

See also FLATWORM.

Contributor: Seth Tyler, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Maine, Orono.

Vitaklenz for Kidz

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After an overwhelming response to Vitaklenz and after listening to the wonderful constructive feedback from our satisfied customers Ideal Health Services has formulated Vitaklenz for Kidz.

Treating children for parasites (worms) has always been difficult. Most commercial worm preparations are usually single dose and are only effective for a few types of worms, however, unless the treatment is taken over a prolonged period (1-2 months), the eggs remain and later re-hatch (Like head lice)

Natural liquid preparations using herbs such as wormwood, pumpkin seed etc are very bitter and it is difficult to get young children to digest such preparations.

Extensive research has gone into producing a chewable tablet containing essential anti-parasitic herbs. Only natural sweeteners have been used. Taste tests with children as young as 2 years old has proven very successful. (They like it so much they ask for more!)

Vitaklenz for Kidz helps rid the body of both intestinal worms and blood-borne parasites such as Giardia and Cryptosporidium.

Down Syndrome Alert

2006-04-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

ACTION ALERT
From the National Down Syndrome Society
April 3, 2006

TELL HOUSE MEMBERS TO OPPOSE BUDGET CUTS TO DISABILITY SERVICES
On March 29, 2006 the House Budget Committee approved a budget resolution that could result in significant funding cuts for services that are critically important for individuals with disabilities and their families. This resolution proposes funding cuts of $9 billion in fiscal year 2007. The cuts would go even deeper over the next five years. Many amendments were rejected that would have restored some of the funding.

The full House is expected to vote on the budget resolution sometime this week. We need your help to protect disability programs and services. Please contact your House Representative TODAY and urge him or her to vote against the budget resolution unless amendments are approved that would sufficiently increase funding.

The message is:
Pass a House Budget Resolution that sets discretionary spending limits at sufficient levels to increase funding for programs and services for people with disabilities and their families.
Reject the Budget Resolution’s instructions that would force Congress to cut funds from critical disability entitlement programs.
Visit http://capwiz.com/ndss/issues/alert/?alertid=8647231 and type your zip code in the box at the top of the page to send an email to your member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

If you have questions or comments about this alert, contact Ricki Sabia at rsabia@ndss.org. If you or others you know would like to be added to the NDSS mailing list, send name(s) and email address to info@ndss.org

National Down Syndrome Society,
666 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
Phone: 800-221-4602; Fax: 212-979-2873
e-mail: info@ndss.org; Web site: http://www.ndss.org/

Our mission is to benefit people with Down syndrome and their families through national leadership in education, research and advocacy.

Spooky Stories Samples

2006-04-02T17:27:00.000-07:00

These are some excerpts from a card game I have called Spooky Stories. The object of this game is to get rid of all your tokens by incorporating them into scary stories.

Here are some Ominious Intros to get you started...

It was a dark and stormy night. An eerie presence seemed to lurk at every corner. Jane and Peter had been out late and were cutting through the graveyard to get home faster. Suddenly, from behind a tombstone jumped a...

Chang was with her friends at the mall. While her friends stopped for food, Chang went to the restroom. As she walked, she got an odd sensation, as if the long corridor would never end. As she reached the door...

Gregory was a strong swimmer, so he wasn't intimidated by the swift, muddy waters of the creek. He had been fly fishing when his rod slipped out of his hand and started traveling downstream. As he swam after it, he felt something brush against his leg...

And some Spine Tingling Snippets...

...she started to laugh. It was the laugh of someone on the verge of insanity...

...green vomit spewed forth from her mouth...

...she grabbed a large stick and turned to defend her self...

...electricity danced around its head in an eerie, blue glow...

...a hooded figure jumped out from behind the trees and lunged for the couple...

...the tapping noise continued. Tap, tap, tap on the window...

...a terrible shapeless blob was creeping toward them...

That's it...

Jerichos destroys Palindromes

2006-03-21T03:01:00.000-08:00

Jericho watch this movie (Ellen Barkin is famous actor in this movie) last night on pay-per-view.

Had big hopes since Jericho big fan of Todd Solondz films (Welcome to The Dollhouse, Happiness, Storytelling).

But this movie not live up to Jericho's expectations. Sorely lacked cruelty that was so crucial to other Solondz films. Came across somewhat like dickless film.

Jericho did appreciate that it seem to be first film dealing with abortion that sympathizes with the pro-life side more than pro-choice.

Focuses on the idea of unwanted people and how people are like palindromes because no matter which way you look at a palindrome it is still the same thing.

That is sort of like the abortion issuse. No matter which way you look at it, pro choice or pro life, Jericho thinks it's the same thing in the end. Just self-righteous asshole on either side just wanting to be right regardless of consequence.

Even shows the dump where all flushed babies get sent and this lady gives them proper burials.

Movie also touches on pedophiles and how they love kids. Fathers who think of themself as patient loving man even though they are exact opposite. Sort of reminds Jericho of his own father-in-law Bobby Teacor who is a born again white tiger who used to be gay with Siegried and Freud until the church made him all fixed up again. Fuck you Bobby Teacor, suck my ass!

Nice.

Jericho out.

Stoned With Skeletor #4

2006-03-20T01:17:00.000-08:00

Ha ha ha!

I can't sleep. I woke up with a horrible headache at around midnight and I took some Excedrin so the caffeine is keeping me up.

That dickweed Merman passed out on the couch in the TV room so I can't watch TV.

I'm under the covers with my laptop now and I'm listening to some Bruce Springsteen stuff I downloaded and of course i'm smoking weed and farting at the same time. It's what I like to call my one two knockout punch.

Boom boom bap
ba boom bap
boom boom bap
ba boom bap

I was blue and hooded
I couldn't use my magic staff

i was unrecognizable to snake mountain's finest
i looked in the mirror, couldn't see my bone face

oh he man
gonna leave me wastin' away in the streets of Eternia
na na na
na na na
na na na
na na na

i hold the diamond of disapperance in my hand
gonna dissapear everbody from this land

i heard the voice of He-Man saying "I have the power."
I see Man-At-Arms inventing splendid weapons

And orko's
gonna piss him off with his magicla mistakes again
on the streets of Eternia
na na na
na na na
na na na
na na na...

The Five People You Meet When You Shit Your Pants

2006-03-18T05:34:00.000-08:00

1. Park McCord thinks he's the coolest guy in town, and he is.

2. Jackie Mengele hates Jews and is about to have a package of them delivered to her kitchen.

3. Brintz, the cat next door, is doing bad things to little Asian kids and the only thing that can stop him is the Blob.

4. Blinger the cat only cares about one thing: Fancy Feast. But what would happen if a Canadian cougar had the same taste for Fancy Feast and was willing to do anything to get it?

5. Dell Becker has a cum habit and only three people can help him: Park McCord, Chapman the phone ghost, and hippie Bo.

These are the five people you meet when you shit your pants...

Stoned With Skeletor #3

2006-03-18T03:21:00.000-08:00

Okay, like Saw 2 was soooooooo boring!

I just had to get that out of the way first.

It's early and I haven't even smoked a bowl yet.

Hold on a sec...

Okay forget it, I'm totally exhausted from last night.

By the way, I don't know if you read my first post or not but it turns out I was wrong about Triclops and Beast-Man hooking up behind my back.

What they were really doing was going in on a present for my birthday so they could pool the cash and get me something nice.

He-Man's head would be nice.

Last time that asshole was at Snake Mountain he stuck a wad of paper towels in the toilet and it's been fucked up ever since.

I don't feel like calling a plummer though.

Lockjaw is using his plunger right at this moment to try to unclog it. If he doesn't get it done soon I'm gonna throw him through my trapdoor and into the pit of mud that I always throw people into.

Skeletor out!

Stoned With Skeletor #2

2006-03-17T11:53:00.001-08:00

T.S. Skeletor's "The Wasteland"

Back at Snake mountain I had two best friends
they lived there with me and helped me fight He-Man
one has three eyes that spun in circles the other was covered in orange fur
back at snake mountain I had two best friends
until the sorceress came and took my friends away

hear you me, Triclops
hear you me, Beast Man

Don't ask me what you know is true
Don't have to tell you I love your precious heart
I
I was standing
you were there
two worlds colliding (Eternia & Etheria?)

Then the horde came from a thousand years ago
to get revenge on me for betraying Hordak
I told you that She-Ra was He-Man's sister Evil-Lyn
why didn't you listen now she fucked your ass up

To He-Man:

What's the matter with you life why you got to mess with mine?
Don't keep sweatin what I do cuz i'm gonna be just fine
check it out
if i wanna take man-at-arms home with me to snake mountain
it's none of yo business

I can't do nuthin' man without somebody buggin
I treat He-Man like he treats me
the difference between a hooker and a ho ain't nuthin' but a fee!

To Man-At-Arms:

I heard you got sterilized to the crotch by lockjaw's laser beam
now they're tellin me your cum is just a dead cream

I stand around and look at you funny like I'm Peter Falk
I take my eye out, put it on your dick and give you herpes

I drink my yerba mate with a tea ball
strong with lots of heaping teaspoons

When I cruise the boulevard in my Monte Carlo
I hear you pull up next to me in Attack Track and yell,
"What's that smell are you some kind of slob?"
"No," I tells you, "that bitch Teelas in the trunk giving Moss man a blowjob that why it smells like moss and cum and shit because he humped Teela's butt and loosened up her shit."

Standing on the corner
blue sword in my hand
Triclops says it's cold
and Beast man's in a vest
and I'm in a rock n roll band

"Jane she is a clerk and both of them save their moneys when they come home from work."

Stoned With Skeletor #1

2006-03-16T19:38:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the first addition of Stoned with Skeletor.

I, Skeletor, from the comfort of my cozy bedroom in Snake Mountain have been smoking weed.

9:00 A.M.

Ha ha ha!

I am Skeletor, the lord of Snake Mountain.

Who dares to ruin my high?

He-Man?

My magic staff will send him into another dimension!

Ha ha ha!

Some people think my dick is blue and they are right. It's blue just like the rest of my skin besides my skull face.

Sometimes I like to pretend I am the Hulk and say things like Hulk must smash.

Sometimes I like to scheme against He-Man and the rest of Eternia while listening to Hurts So Good while fucking Triclops.

Today I have to make a nice ambrosia for the Snake Mountain Jamboree.

We're gonna have everything there, a big inflatable room full of balls for the kids, free snacks and drinks.

The works!

I just hope nothing goes wrong at the Jamboree (what I really mean is I hope He-Man and Man-At-Arms don't show up to ruin my good time).

12:00

Beast Man keeps refusing to taste my ambrosia and won't give a reason for it.

He is such a fur-face.

He just left the party abruptly without saying anything and I saw Triclops leave about five minutes later and he was all red in the face like he was nervous and blushing.

Is he sneaking around with Beast-Man.

What the hell is going on here.

Rick McCoy's Television by Felo

2006-03-16T19:28:00.002-08:00

your dad's dick
has a match on the tip
that will burn me

rick mccoy's television's talkin' back to me
telling me that I am a gayboy lad

don't follow me through the halls tonight
because we'll fight the righteous fight

with daggers and pickaxes
i will track you

through the halls of the wood tonight

let us fight tonight my girl
i wanna be inside your world

Eugenics is the quickest path to a world full of shitbags with Gucci watches. Three points in Down Syndrome's favor...

2006-03-16T14:33:00.000-08:00

i. They teach us to be patient and loving. To stop and wait while they finish an activity give us an opportunity to observe small things more closely. They teach us gratitude for all the gifts that we are given. Because of their dependency, they teach us to be loving and caring. Without the dependency of needy people, our world would become careless and loveless.

ii. People with Down Syndrome have a different view of life. They seem to be able to detect the essential elements of life, and by their frankness and lack of social niceties they can cut through many formalities, disarm us from our prejudice and get to the heart of relationships. Jean Vanier, taking a person with Down's Syndrome to a wide beach in France, asked him to draw a picture of joy in the sand. This person responded, "the beach is not big enough."

iii. People with Down's Syndrome and other relatively helpless people force us to deal with our own helplessness. Sooner or later we must recognize that we all have handicaps and that we are all dying. The sooner we learn to deal with our helplessness, the better able we are to maximize our opportunities and utilize all our God given abilities and opportunities. Down's Syndrome children create a helpless cry like a kitten mewing on the rain soaked streets of a large city in the dead of night. We must deal with a crisis we would rather avoid. If we respond with nurture we grow. If we respond with aggression or neglect we begin to die, as does the kitten. A person with Down's Syndrome's inability to deal with many of the complexities of life forces us to decide to grow with them by nurturing their needs. If not, we die inside not able to hear their cry and respond to it, and thus not able to hear the cry of our own helplessness.

B. Moral Arguments. Down's Syndrome children force us to question many of our cherished moral tenets such as the equality of all humankind. They force us to reevaluate, rethink and restate assumptions that must guide us in critical situations. People with Down's Syndrome force us to question the ethic of wantedness.

Blood Period Four

2006-03-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

Down Supremacy's first year anniversary is here and in honor of that we have a poem by Down Supremacy's poet laureate, Felo Davidian from England...

Blood Period Four:

Comin' to a head
collision course
I spied you, Matt DiGangi

collision course
running through Cambridge
I'm coming for DiGangi

Aiming in the rain
I fire a Saturday Night Special
collision course

blood period four
I shot your dick
stick a Tampax on that wound

Zen and the Art of Writing: Preface

2006-03-03T07:26:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I am stunned at my capacity as a nine-year-old, to understand my entrapment and escape it.

How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting?

Where did that judgment and strength come from?

What sort of process did I experience to enable me to say: I am as good as dead. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What's the cure?

I was able, obviously, to answer all of the above. I named the sickness: my tearing up the strips. I found the cure: go back to collecting, no matter what.

I did. And was made well.

But still. At that age? When we are accustomed to responding to peer pressure?

Where did I find the courage to rebel, change my life, live alone?

I don't want to over-estimate all this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was. Without him, I could not have survived to introduce these essays.

Part of the answer, of course, is in the fact that I was so madly in love with Buck Rogers, I could not see my love, my hero, my life, destroyed.

It is almost that simple.

It was like having your best allround greatest-loving-buddy, pal, center-of-life drown or get shotgun killed.

Friends, so killed, cannot be saved from funerals.

Buck Rogers, I realized, might know a second life, if I gave it to him.

So I breathed in his mouth and, lo !, he sat up and talked and said, what?

Yell.

Jump.

Play.

Out-run those sons-of-bitches.

They'll never live the way you live.

Go do it.

Except I never used the S.O.B. words. They were not allowed.

Heck! was about the size and strength of my outcry. Stay alive!

So I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World's Fairs and began to write.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us?

First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

We must earn life once it has been awarded us.

Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

Secondly, writing is survival.

Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout.

The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.

Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.

A variation of this is true for writers.

Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days.

But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy.

Two days and I am in tremor.

Three and I suspect lunacy.

Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow.

An hour's writing is tonic. I'm on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

So that, in one way or another, is what this book is all about.

Taking your pinch of arsenic every morn so you can survive to sunset.

Another pinch at sunset so that you can more-than survive until dawn.

The mirco-arsenic-dose swallowed here prepares you not to be poisoned and destroyed up ahead.

Work in the midst of life is that dosage.

To manipulate life, toss the bright-colored orbs up to mix with the dark ones, blending a variation of truths.

We use the grand and beautiful facts of existence in order to put up with the horrors that afflict us directly in our families and friends, or through the newspapers and T.V.

The horrors are not to be denied.

Who amongst us has not had a cancer-dead friend?

Which family exists where some relative has not been killed or maimed by the automobile?

I know of none.

In my own circle, an aunt, and uncle, and a cousin, as well as six friends, have been destroyed by the car.

The list is endless and crushing if we do not creatively oppose it.

Which means writing as cure.

Not completely, of course.

You never get over your parents in the hospital or your best love in the grave.

I won't use the word "therapy," it's too clean, too sterile a word.

I only say when death slows others, you must leap to set up your diving board and dive head first into your typewriter.

The poets and artists of other years, long past, knew all and everything I have said here, or put in the following essays.

Aristotle said it for the ages. Have you listened to him lately?

These essays were written at various times over a thirty-year period, to express special discoveries, to serve special needs.

But they all echo the same truths of explosive self-revelation and continuous astonishment at what your deep well contains if you just haul off and shout down it.

Even as I write this, a letter has come from a young, unknown writer, who says he is going to live by my motto, found in my Toynbee Convector.

" . . . to gently lie and prove the lie true . . . everything is finally
a promise . . . what seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born. ..."

And now:

I have come up with a new simile to describe myself lately.

It can be yours.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine.

The I landmine is me.

After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Now, it's your turn. Jump!

NDSS Alert!!!!

2006-02-28T05:43:00.000-08:00

NDSC AND NDSS URGE YOU TO PROTECT EDUCATIONAL RIGHTS UNDER IDEA
Multi-Year IEP and Paperwork Waiver Demonstration Programs Pose a Danger

Your help is urgently needed. The National Down Syndrome Congress (NDSC) and the National Down Syndrome Society (NDSS) have submitted joint comments and recommendations for the Multi-Year IEP and Paperwork Waiver demonstration programs and we need your support. Please send an email urging the U.S. Department of Education not to erode IDEA civil rights and the IEP. Visit http://capwiz.com/ndss/issues/alert/?alertid=8519506 and type your zip code in the box at the top of the page to send a prepared email or your own comments to the Department and Congress. The deadline to submit these comments is March 6, 2006.

Background
IDEA 2004 permits two demonstration programs, also known as “pilots.” The Multi-Year IEP pilot allows up to 15 states to seek approval for proposals to offer parents the option of a multi-year IEP. IDEA states that this pilot was developed to offer the opportunity for long-term planning.

The Paperwork Waiver Pilot allows up to 15 states to seek waivers of certain IDEA statutory and regulatory requirements for a period not to exceed 4 years. IDEA states that the purpose of this pilot is to reduce excessive paperwork and non-instructional time burdens that do not assist in improving educational and functional results for students with disabilities. The statute also mandates that procedural safeguards, civil rights requirements, and the right to a free appropriate public education (FAPE) may not be waived or affected.

The Department appears to have exceeded its authority by expanding the scope of these pilots beyond the above statutory requirements.

NDSC and NDSS Concerns
On December 19th, the U.S. Department of Education published notices of proposed requirements and selection criteria for both of these pilots. These are the rules States must follow in implementing the pilots and the criteria that will be used by the Department to decide which States will be permitted to participate in each pilot. The public has until March 6th to comment on the proposed requirements and criteria. At some point after that date the Department will publish the final versions. The problem with the proposed requirements and selection criteria for both pilots is that they expand the statutory scope of the pilots and do not adequately protect the educational rights that IDEA was enacted to uphold.

The proposed requirements for the pilots threaten FAPE and could change the IEP and the IEP process forever. These pilots are of immediate concern for children with disabilities in up to 30 States. 15 States will be awarded the Multi-Year IEP Pilot and 15 States will be awarded the Paperwork Waiver Pilot. However, it is possible that some of the same States will apply for and be awarded both pilots. A long-term concern is that the pilots may become the basis for changes to IDEA that would affect all States. For example, during the next reauthorization of IDEA, the multi-year IEP might become a requirement, not just an option for parents to choose, and the civil rights protections could be permanently eroded.

The proposed requirements for BOTH pilots would allow up to 30 States to create IEPs that differ in their content, development, review and revision from the annual IEPs you have been using. NDSS believes that this is a violation of FAPE, which requires a free appropriate education with special education and related services that are provided in conformity with the IEP requirements under IDEA. The proposed pilot requirements appear to go beyond what Congress intended when these pilots were added to IDEA. The report from the House of Representatives on IDEA 2004 clearly states that the usual IDEA rules for IEP development are intended to apply to multi-year IEPs. If Congress did not intend to waive the usual IEP rules for multi-year IEPs why would it be acceptable to change these statutory requirements for any other purpose?

Another problem with the proposed requirements for both pilots is the vague language regarding the opportunity that parents will have to provide input into the their State’s pilot proposal and into the implementation and evaluation of the pilots. Parental input is critically important to ensure that long-term planning and paperwork reduction are not achieved at the expense of student outcomes and the informed involvement of parents in their child’s education.

For example, in the Paperwork Waiver Pilot, who decides which tasks constitute a “non-instructional time burden that does not assist in improving educational and functional results for students with disabilities”? This phrase needs to be defined with parental input. It is important to remember that the short-term objective requirement for certain students with disabilities was eliminated in IDEA 2004 in the name of paperwork reduction. This decision raises concerns about where paperwork reduction might lead, in spite of the fact that procedural safeguards, civil rights requirements, and the right to FAPE are supposed to be kept in place.

The proposed requirements for the Paperwork Waiver Pilot raise all the same issues as the Multi-Year IEP Pilot, plus some additional reasons for concern. IEP requirements AND other statutory, regulatory and State requirements are permitted to be waived according to the proposed requirements for the Paperwork Waiver Pilot. The standards for selecting these waivers are dangerously vague. Parental consent, which is required for a multi-year IEP, is not required for these other waivers. In addition to these critical flaws in the proposed requirements for the pilots, there is also a significant problem with the limited scrutiny provided by the proposed selection criteria that will be used by the Department to decide which States will be permitted to participate in each pilot. The proposed criteria must be amended to include more details and additional criteria must be included to address the many important considerations and protections that have been omitted.

Action Steps
NDCS and NDSS needs parents, friends, other family members of children with Down syndrome and organizations to send emails to the U.S. Department of Education and Congress in order to demonstrate that there is extensive grassroots support for our recommendations to improve the proposed requirements and selection criteria for the Multi-Year IEP and Paperwork Waiver pilots. We have prepared an email that will take just a few minutes to send to these recipients. If you have the time, it is very powerful to personalize the email with a story about your child and the importance of the annual IEP and the current IEP process to your child’s educational outcomes. Visit http://capwiz.com/ndss/issues/alert/?alertid=8519506 and type your zip code in the box at the top of the page to send this email or your own comments to the Department and Congress. The deadline to submit your comments is March 6, 2006.

Resources

* The full text of the proposed requirements and selection criteria can be found at: http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20051800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2005/E5-7506.htm for the Multi-Year IEP Pilot
http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20051800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2005/E5-7507.htm for the Paperwork Waiver Pilot
* The full text of the NDSS/NDSC comments on the pilots can be found at:
Paperwork Reduction: http://capwiz.com/ndss/issues/alert/?alertid=8519366
Multi-Year IEP: http://capwiz.com/ndss/issues/alert/?alertid=8519391

If you have questions or comments about this alert, contact Ricki Sabia at rsabia@ndss.org.
If you or others you know would like to be added to the NDSS mailing list, send name(s) and email address to info@ndss.org

My new bike...

2006-02-24T08:34:00.000-08:00

2004 Mongoose Villain

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN TOWN by Charles Bukowski

2005-12-20T14:02:00.000-08:00

I'm presenting this story in a crappy, spare, messed up way. Just like Bukowski's shitty ass life(Matt McCord)...

Cass was the youngest and most beautiful of 5 sisters.

Cass was the most beautiful girl in town.

1/2 Indian with a supple and strange body, a snake-like and fiery body with eyes to go with it.

Cass was fluid moving fire.

She was like a spirit stuck into a form that would not hold her.

Her hair was black and long and silken and whirled about as did her body.

Her spirit was either very high or very low.

There was no in between for Cass.

Some said she was crazy.

The dull ones said that.

The dull ones would never understand Cass.

To the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not.

And Cass danced and flirted, kissed the men, but except for an instance or two, when it came time to make it with Cass, Cass had somehow slipped away, eluded the men.

Her sisters accused her of misusing her beauty, of not using her mind enough, but Cass had mind and spirit; she painted, she danced, she sang, she made things of clay, and when people were hurt either in the spirit or the flesh, Cass felt a deep grieving for them.

Her mind was simply different; her mind was simply not practical.

Her sisters were jealous of her because she attracted their men, and they were angry because they felt she didn't
make the best use of them.

She had a habit of being kind to the uglier ones; the so-called handsome men revolted her- "No guts," she said, "no zap.

They are riding on their perfect little earlobes and well- shaped nostrils...all surface and no insides..."

She had a temper that came close to insanity, she had a temper that some call insanity.

Her father had died of alchohol and her mother had run off leaving the girls alone.

The girls went to a relative who placed them in a convent.

The convent had been an unhappy place, more for Cass than the sisters.

The girls were jealous of Cass and Cass fought most of them.

She had razor marks all along her left arm from defending herself in two fights.

There was also a permanent scar along the left cheek but the scar rather than lessening her beauty only seemed to highlight it.

I met her at the West End Bar several nights after her release from the convent.

Being youngest, she was the last of the sisters to be released.

She simply came in and sat next to me. I was probably the ugliest man in town and this might have had something to do with it.
"Drink?" I asked.
"Sure, why not?"
I don't suppose there was anything unusual in our conversation that night, it was simply in the feeling Cass gave.

She had chosen me and it was as simple as that.

No pressure.

She liked her drinks and had a great number of them.

She didn't seem quite of age but they served he anyhow.

Perhaps she had forged i.d., I don't know.

Anyhow, each time she came back from the restroom and sat down next to me, I did feel some pride.

She was not only the most beautiful woman in town but also one of the most beautiful I had ever seen.

I placed my arm about her waist and kissed her once.

"Do you think I'm pretty?" she asked.

"Yes, of course, but there's something else... there's more than your
looks..."

"People are always accusing me of being pretty. Do you really think I'm
pretty?"

"Pretty isn't the word, it hardly does you fair."

Cass reached into her handbag.

I thought she was reaching for her handkerchief.

She came out with a long hatpin.

Before I could stop her she had run this long hatpin through her nose, sideways, just above the nostrils.

I felt disgust and horror.

She looked at me and laughed, "Now do you think me pretty? What do you think now, man?"

I pulled the hatpin out and held my handkerchief over the bleeding.

Several people, including the bartender, had seen the act.

The bartender came down:

"Look," he said to Cass, "you act up again and you're out. We don't need your dramatics here."

"Oh, fuck you, man!" she said.

"Better keep her straight," the bartender said to me.

"She'll be all right," I said.

"It's my nose, I can do what I want with my nose."

"No," I said, "it hurts me."

"You mean it hurts you when I stick a pin in my nose?"

"Yes, it does, I mean it."

"All right, I won't do it again. Cheer up."

She kissed me, rather grinning through the kiss and holding the handkerchief to her nose.

We left for my place at closing time.

I had some beer and we sat there talking.
It was then that I got the perception of her as a person full of kindness and caring.

She gave herself away without knowing it.

At the same time she would leap back into areas of wildness and incoherence.

Schitzi.

A beautiful and spiritual schitzi.

Perhaps some man, something, would ruin her forever. I hoped that it wouldn't be me.

We went to bed and after I turned out the lights Cass asked me,

"When do you want it? Now or in the morning?"

"In the morning," I said and turned my back.

In the morning I got up and made a couple of coffees, brought her one in bed.

She laughed.

"You're the first man who has turned it down at night."

"It's o.k.," I said, "we needn't do it at all."

"No, wait, I want to now. Let me freshen up a bit."

Cass went into the bathroom.

She came out shortly, looking quite wonderful, her long black hair glistening, her eyes and lips glistening, her pussy glistening...

She displayed her body calmly, as a good thing.

She got under the sheet.

"Come on, lover man."

I got in.

She kissed with abandon but without haste.

I let my hands run over her body, through her hair.

I mounted.

It was hot, and tight.

I began to stroke slowly, wanting to make it last.

Her eyes looked directly into mine.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"What the hell difference does it make?" she asked.

I laughed and went on ahead.

Afterwards she dressed and I drove her back to the bar but she was difficult to forget.

I wasn't working and I slept until 2 p.m. then got up and read the paper.

I was in the bathtub when she came in with a large leaf- an elephant ear.

"I knew you'd be in the bathtub," she said, "so I brought you something to cover that thing with, nature boy."

She threw the elepahant leaf down on me in the bathtub.

"How did you know I'd be in the tub?"

"I knew."

Almost every day Cass arrived when I was in the tub.

The times were different but she seldom missed, and there was the elephant leaf.

And then we'd make love.

One or two nights she phoned and I had to bail her out of jail for drunkenness and fighting.

"These sons of bitches," she said, "just because they buy you a few drinks they think they can get into your pants."

"Once you accept a drink you create your own trouble."

"I thought they were interested in me, not just my body."

"I'm interested in you and your body. I doubt, though, that most men can see beyond your body."

I left town for 6 months, bummed around, came back.

I had never forgotten Cass, but we'd had some type of arguement and I felt like moving anyhow, and when I got back i figured she'd be gone, but I had been sitting in the West End Bar about 30 minutes when she walked in and sat down next to
me.

"Well, bastard, I see you've come back."

I ordered her a drink.

Then I looked at her.

She had on a high-necked dress.

I had never seen her in one of those.

And under each eye, driven in, were 2 pins with glass heads.

All you could see were the heads of the pins, but the pins were driven down into her face.
"God damn you, still trying to destroy your beauty, eh?"
"No, it's the fad, you fool."
"You're crazy."
"I've missed you," she said.
"Is there anybody else?"
"No there isn't anybody else. Just you. But I'm hustling. It costs ten
bucks. But you get it free."
"Pull those pins out."
"No, it's the fad."
"It's making me very unhappy."
"Are you sure?"
"Hell yes, I'm sure."
Cass slowly pulled the pins out and put them back in her purse.
"Why do you haggle your beauty?" I asked. "Why don't you just live with
it?"
"Because people think it's all I have. Beauty is nothing, beauty won't
stay. You don't know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like
you you know it's for something else."
"O.k.," I said, "I'm lucky."
"I don't mean you're ugly. People just think you're ugly. You have a
fascinating face."
"Thanks."
We had another drink.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Nothing. I can't get on to anything. No interest."
"Me neither. If you were a woman you could hustle."
"I don't think I could ever make contact with that many strangers, it's
wearing."
"You're right, it's wearing, everything is wearing."
We left together. People still stared at Cass on the streets. She was a
beautiful woman, perhaps more beautiful than ever. We made it to my place
and I opened a bottle of wine and we talked. With Cass and I, it always came
easy. She talked a while and I would listen and then i would talk. Our
conversation simply went along without strain. We seemed to discover secrets
together. When we discovered a good one Cass would laugh that laugh- only
the way she could. It was like joy out of fire. Through the talking we
kissed and moved closer together. We became quite heated and decided to go
to bed. It was then that Cass took off her high -necked dress and I saw it-
the ugly jagged scar across her throat. It was large and thick.
"God damn you, woman," I said from the bed, "god damn you, what have
you done?
"I tried it with a broken bottle one night. Don't you like me any more?
Am I still beautiful?"
I pulled her down on the bed and kissed her. She pushed away and
laughed, "Some men pay me ten and I undress and they don't want to do it. I
keep the ten. It's very funny."
"Yes," I said, "I can't stop laughing... Cass, bitch, I love you...stop
destroying yourself; you're the most alive woman I've ever met."
We kissed again. Cass was crying without sound. I could feel the tears.
The long black hair lay beside me like a flag of death. We enjoined and made
slow and sombre and wonderful love. In the morning Cass was up making
breakfast. She seemed quite calm and happy. She was singing. I stayed in bed
and enjoyed her happiness. Finally she came over and shook me,
"Up, bastard! Throw some cold water on your face and pecker and come
enjoy the feast!"
I drove her to the beach that day. It was a weekday and not yet summer
so things were splendidly deserted. Beach bums in rags slept on the lawns
above the sand. Others sat on stone benches sharing a lone bottle. The gulls
whirled about, mindless yet distracted. Old ladies in their 70's and 80's
sat on the benches and discussed selling real estate left behind by husbands
long ago killed by the pace and stupidity of survival. For it all, there was
peace in the air and we walked about and stratched on the lawns and didn't
say much. It simply felt good being together. I bought a couple of
sandwiches, some chips and drinks and we sat on the sand eating. Then I held
Cass and we slept together about an hour. It was somehow better than
lovemaking. There was flowing together without tension. When we awakened we
drove back to my place and I cooked a dinner. After dinner I suggested to
Cass that we shack together. She waited a long time, looking at me, then she
slowly said, "No." I drove her back to the bar, bought her a drink and
walked out. I found a job as a parker in a factory the next day and the rest
of the week went to working. I was too tired to get about much but that
Friday night I did get to the West End Bar. I sat and waited for Cass. Hours
went by . After I was fairly drunk the bartender said to me, "I'm sorry
about your girlfriend."
"What is it?" I asked.
"I'm sorry, didn't you know?"
"No."
"Suicide. She was buried yesterday."
"Buried?" I asked. It seemed as though she would walk through the
doorway at any moment. How could she be gone?
"Her sisters buried her."
"A suicide? Mind telling me how?"
"She cut her throat."
"I see. Give me another drink."
I drank until closing time. Cass was the most beautiful of 5 sisters,
the most beautiful in town. I managed to drive to my place and I kept
thinking, I should have insisted she stay with me instead of accepting that
"no."Everything about her had indicated that she had cared. I simply had
been too offhand about it, lazy, too unconcerned. I deserved my death and
hers. I was a dog. No, why blame the dogs? I got up and found a bottle of
wine and drank from it heavily. Cass the most beautiful girl in town was
dead at 20. Outside somebody honked their automobile horn. They were very
loud and persistent. I sat the bottle down and screamed out: "GOD DAMN
YOU,YOU SON OF A BITCH ,SHUT UP!" The night kept coming and there was
nothing I could do.

NDSS Announcement

2005-12-20T08:26:00.000-08:00

American Bar Association President Michael Greco, the ABA Commission on Mental and Physical Disability Law and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will host the first National Conference on the Employment of Lawyers with Disabilities on Monday evening, May 22, 2006, and all day Tuesday, May 23, 2006, at the Renaissance Washington Hotel in Washington, D.C. The Department of Justice, major law firms, and disability organizations are participating in the Conference.

Former Attorney General of the United States and Governor of Pennsylvania, Dick Thornburgh, will be the Keynote Speaker on the first evening.
Topics for the Conference Include:

* Is Disability Diverse or Just Different?
* Does It Pay to Hire Lawyers with Disabilities?
* Best Practices in Law Firms

Invitations and registration information for the Conference will be disseminated in late February 2006 and posted at http://www.abanet.org/disability. To obtain additional information about the conference or to register, please contact Michael Stratton at 202-662-1571.

Dagon by H.P. Lovecraft

2005-12-19T12:12:00.000-08:00

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall
be no more.

Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone, makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.

Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate.

When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.

It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider.

The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners.

So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.

When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings.

Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator.

Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or coastline was in sight.

The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land.

But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the
heaving vastness of unbroken blue.

The change happened whilst I slept.

Its details I shall never know; for my slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous.

When at last I awakened, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.

Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so
prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core.

The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain.

Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.

There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.

The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet.

As I crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my
position.

Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths.

So great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me, that I could
not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I might.

Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.

For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens.

As the day progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time.

That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea and possible rescue.

On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease.

The odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things
to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal.

All day I forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher than any other elevation on the rolling desert.

That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it.

By the fourth evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had appeared from a distance, an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief from the general surface.

Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the hill.

I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more.

Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again.

And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day.

Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset.

Picking up my pack, I started for the crest of the eminence.

I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine.

I felt myself on the edge of the world, peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and Satan's hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.

As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined.

Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy footholds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual.

Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps where no light had yet penetrated.

All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite slope, which rose steeply about a hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon.

That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature.

A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.

Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist's or
archaeologist's delight, I examined my surroundings more closely.

The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope.

Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith, on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and crude sculptures.

The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books, consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales and the like.

Several characters obviously represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain.

It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound.

Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size was an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Dore.

I think that these things were supposed to depict men -- at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shown disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail, for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint.

Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall.

Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shown in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself.

I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born.

Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

Then suddenly I saw it.

With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters.

Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds.

I think I went mad then.

Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to
the stranded boat, I remember little.

I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing.

I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I knew that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.

When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean.

In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention.

Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe.

Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.

It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing.

I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave.

So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men.

Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm -- a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war.

This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply.

I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite.

I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind -- of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

The end is near.

I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it.

It shall not find me.

God, that hand!

The window!

The window!

The Body Politic by Clive Barker

2005-12-19T10:34:00.000-08:00

WHENEVER HE woke, Charlie George's hands stood Perhaps he would be feeling too hot under the blankets and
have to throw a couple over to Ellen's side of the bed.

Perhaps he might even get up, still half-asleep, and pad through to the kitchen to pour himself a tumbler of iced apple juice.

Then back to bed, slipping in beside Ellen's gentle crescent, to let sleep drift over him.

They'd wait then, until his eyes had flickered closed and
his breathing become regular as clockwork, and they were certain he was sound asleep. Only then, when
they knew consciousness was gone, would they dare to begin their secret lives again.
FOR months now Charlie had been waking up with an uncomfortable ache in his wrists and hands.
"Go and see a doctor," Ellen would tell him, unsympathetic as ever. 'Why won't you go and see a
doctor?"
He hated doctors, that was why. Who in their right minds would trust someone who made a profession
out of poking around in sick people?
"I've probably been working too hard," he told himself.
"Some chance," Ellen muttered.
Surely that was the likeliest explanation. He was a packager by trade; he worked with his hands all day
long. They got tired. It was only natural.
"Stop fretting, Charlie," he told his reflection one morning as he slapped some life into his face, "your
hands are fit for anything."
So, night after night, the routine was the same. It goes like this:
The Georges are asleep, side by side in their marital bed. He on his back, snoring gently; she curled up
on his left-hand side. Charlie's head is propped up on two thick pillows. His jaw is slightly ajar, and beneath
the vein-shot veil of his lids his eyes scan some dreamed adventure. Maybe a fire fighter tonight, perhaps a
heroic dash into the heart of some burning brothel. He dreams contentedly; sometimes frowning, sometimes
smirking.
There is a movement under the sheet. Slowly, cautiously it seems, Charlie's hands creep up out of the
warmth of the bed and into the open air. Their index fingers weave like nailed heads as they meet on his
undulating abdomen. They clasp each other in greeting, like comrades-in-arms. In his sleep Charlie moans.
The brothel has collapsed on him. The hands flatten themselves instantly, pretending innocence. After a
moment, once the even rhythm of his breathing has resumed, they begin their debate in earnest.
A casual observer, sifting at the bottom of the Georges' bed, might take this exchange as a sign of some
mental disorder in Charlie. The way his hands twitch and pluck at each other, stroking each other now, now
seeming to fight. But there's clearly some code or sequence in their movements, however spasmodic. One
might almost think that the slumbering man was deaf and dumb, and talking in his sleep. But the hands are
speaking no recognizable sign language; nor are they trying to communicate with anyone but each other.
This is a clandestine meeting, held purely between Charlie's hands. There they will stay through the night,
perched on his stomach, plotting against the body politic.
CHARLIE wasn't entirely ignorant of the sedition that was simmering at his wrists. There was a fumbling
suspicion in him that something in his life was not quite right. Increasingly, he had the sense of being cut
off from common experience, becoming more and more a spectator to the daily (and nightly) rituals of living,
rather than a participant. Take, for example, his love life.
He had never been a great lover, but neither did he feel he had anything to apologize for. Ellen seemed
satisfied with his attentions. But these days he felt dislocated from the act. He would watch his hands
traveling over Ellen, touching her with all the intimate skill they knew, and he would view their maneuvers as
if from a great distance, unable to enjoy the sensations of warmth and wetness. Not that his digits were any
less agile. Quite the reverse. Ellen had recently taken to kissing his fingers and telling him how clever they
were. Her praise didn't reassure him one iota. If anything, it made him feel worse to think that his hands were
giving such pleasure when he was feeling nothing.
There were other signs of his instability too. Small, irritating signs. He had become conscious of how his
fingers beat out martial rhythms on the boxes he was sealing up at the factory, and the way his hands had
taken to breaking pencils, snapping them into tiny pieces before he realized quite what he (they) were doing,
leaving shards of wood and graphite scattered across the packing room floor.
Most embarrassingly, he had found himself holding hands with total strangers. This had happened on
three separate occasions. Once at a bus-stop, and twice in the elevator at the factory. It was, he told himself,
nothing more than the primitive urge to hold on to another person in a changing world; that was the best
explanation he could muster. Whatever the reason, it was damned disconcerting, especially when he found
himself surreptitiously holding hands with his own foreman. Worse still, the other man's hand had grasped
Charlie's in return, and the men had found themselves looking down their arms like two dog owners
watching their unruly pets copulating at the ends of their leashes.
Increasingly, Charlie had taken to peering at the palms of his hands looking for hair. That was the first
sign of madness, his mother had once warned him. Not the hair, the looking.
Now it became a race against time. Debating on his belly at night, his hands knew very well how critical
Charlie's state of mind had become. It could only be a matter of days before his careering imagination
alighted on the truth.
So what to do? Risk an early severance, with all the possible consequences, or let Charlie's instability
take its own, unpredictable, course, with the chance of his discovering the plot on his way to madness? The
debates became more heated. Left, as ever, was cautious: "What if we re wrong, it would rap, "and there's no
life after the body?"
"Then we will never know," Right would reply.
Left would ponder that problem a moment. Then: "How will we do it, when the time comes?"
It was a vexing question and Left knew it troubled the leader more than any other. "How?" it would ask
again, pressing the advantage. "How? How?"
"We'll find a way," Right would reply. "As long as it's a clean cut."
"Suppose he resists?"
"A man resists with his hands. His hands will be in revolution against him."
"And which of us will it be?"
"He uses me most effectively," Right would reply, "so I must wield the weapon. You will go.
Left would be silent a while then. They had never been apart all these years. It was not a comfortable
thought.
"Later, you can come back for me," Right would say.
"I will."
"You must. I am the Messiah. Without me there will be nowhere to go. You must raise an army, then
come and fetch me.
THE BODY POLITIC 63
"To the ends of the earth, if necessary.
"Don't be sentimental."
Then they'd embrace, like long-lost brothers, swearing fidelity forever. Ah, such hectic nights, full of the
exhilaration of planned rebellion. Even during the day, when they had sworn to stay apart, it was impossible
sometimes not to creep together in an idle moment and tap each other. To say:
Soon, soon, to say:
Again tonight: I'll meet you on his stomach, to say:
What will it be like, when the world is ours?
CHARLIE knew he was close to a nervous breakdown. He found himself glancing down at his hands on
occasion, to watch them with their index fingers in the air like the heads of long-necked beasts sensing the
horizon. He found himself staring at the hands of other people in his paranoia, becoming obsessed with the
way hands spoke a language of their own, independent of their user's intentions. The seductive hands of
the virgin secretary, the maniacal hands of a killer he saw on the television protesting his innocence. Hands
that betrayed their owners with every gesture, contradicting anger with apology, and love with fury. They
seemed to be everywhere, these signs of mutiny. Eventually he knew he had to speak to somebody before
he lost his sanity.
He chose Ralph Fry from Accounting, a sober, uninspiring man, whom Charlie trusted. Ralph was very
understanding.
"You get these things," he said. "I got them when Yvonne left me. Terrible nervous fits."
"What did you do about it?"
"Saw a headshrinker. Name of Jeudwine. You should try Some therapy. You'll be a changed man."
Charlie turned the idea over in his mind. "Why not?" he said after a few revolutions. "Is he expensive?"
"Yes, But he's good. Got rid of my twitches for me; no trouble. I mean, till I went to him I thought I was
your average guy with marital problems. Now look at me," Fry made an expansive gesture, “I've got so many
suppressed libidinal urges I don't know where to start." He grinned like a loon. "But I'm happy as a clam.
Never been happier. Give him a try; he'll soon tell you what turns you on.
"The problem isn't sex," Charlie told Fry.
"Take it from me," said Fry with a knowing smirk. "The problem's always sex.
THE next day Charlie rang Dr. Jeudwine, without telling Ellen, and the shrink's secretary arranged an initial
session. Charlie's palms sweated so much while he made the telephone call he thought the receiver was
going to slide right out of his hand, but when he'd done it he felt better.
Ralph Fry was right, Dr. Jeudwine was a good man. He didn't laugh at any of the little fears Charlie
unburdened. Quite the contrary, he listened to every word with the greatest concern. It was very reassuring.
During their third session together, the doctor brought one particular memory back to Charlie with
spectacular vividness: his father's hands, crossed on his barrel chest as he lay in his coffin; the ruddy color
of them, the coarse hair that matted their backs. The absolute authority of those wide hands, even in death,
had haunted Charlie for months afterward. And hadn't he imagined, as he'd watched the body being
consigned to humus, that it was not yet still? That the hands were even now beating a tattoo on the casket
lid, demanding to be let out? It was a preposterous thing to think, but bringing it out into the open did
Charlie a lot of good. In the bright light of Jeudwine's office the fantasy looked insipid and ridiculous. It
shivered under the doctor's gaze, protesting that the light was too strong, and then it blew away, too frail to
stand up to scrutiny.
The exorcism was far easier than Charlie had anticipated. All it had taken was a little probing and that
childhood nonsense bad been dislodged from his psyche like a morsel of bad meat from between his teeth. It
could rot there no longer. And for his part Jeudwine was clearly delighted with the results, explaining when
it was all done that this particular obsession had been new to him, and he was pleased to have dealt with the
problem. Hands as symbols of paternal power, he said, were not common. Usually the penis predominated in
his patients' dreams, he explained, to which Charlie had replied that hands had always seemed far more
important than private parts. After all, they could change the world, couldn't they?
After Jeudwine, Charlie didn't stop breaking pencils or drumming his fingers. In fact if anything the
tempo was brisker and more insistent than ever. But he reasoned that middle-aged dogs didn't quickly forget
their tricks, and it would take some time for him to regain his equilibrium.
So the revolution remained underground. It had, however, been a narrow escape. Clearly there was no
time left for prevarication. The rebels had to act.
Unwittingly, it was Ellen who instigated the final uprising. It was after a bout of lovemaking late one
Thursday evening. A hot night, though it was October, the window was ajar and the curtains parted a few
inches to let in a simpering breeze. Husband and wife lay together under a single sheet. Charlie had fallen
asleep even before the sweat on his neck had dried. Beside him Ellen was still awake, her head propped up
on a rock-hard pillow, her eyes wide open. Sleep wouldn't come for a long time tonight, she knew. It would
be one of those nights when her body would itch, and every lump in the bed would worm its way under her,
and every doubt she'd ever had would gawk at her from the dark. She wanted to empty her bladder (she
always did after sex) but she couldn't quite raise the will power to get up and go to the bathroom. The longer
she left it the more she'd need to go, of course, and the less she'd be able to sink into sleep. Damn stupid
situation, she thought, then lost track, among her anxieties, of what situation it was that was so stupid.
At her side Charlie moved in his sleep. Just his hands, twitch mg away. She looked at his face. He was
positively cherubic in sleep, looking younger than his forty-one years, despite the white flecks in his
sideburns. She liked him enough to say she loved him, she supposed, but not enough to forgive him his
trespasses. He was lazy, he was always complaining. Aches, pains. And there were those evenings he'd not
come in until late (they'd stopped recently), when she was sure he was seeing another woman. As she
watched, his hands appeared. They emerged from beneath the sheet like two arguing children, digits
stabbing the air for emphasis.
She frowned, not quite believing what she was seeing. It was like watching the television with the sound
turned down, a dumb show for eight fingers and two thumbs. As she gazed on, amazed, the hands
scrambled up the side of Charlie's carcass and peeled the sheet back from his belly, exposing the hair that
thickened toward his privates. His appendix scar, shinier than the surrounding skin, caught the light. There,
on his stomach, his hands seemed to sit.
The argument between them was especially vehement tonight. Left, always the more conservative of the
two, was arguing for a delay in the severance date, but Right was beyond waiting. The time had come, it
argued, to test their strength against the tyrant and to overthrow the body once and for all. As it was, the
decision didn't rest with them any longer.
Ellen raised her head from the pillow, and for the first time they sensed her gaze on them. They'd been
too involved in their argument to notice her. Now, at last, their conspiracy was uncovered.
"Charlie. .." she was hissing into the tyrant's ear, "stop it, Charlie. Stop it."
Right raised index and middle fingers, sniffing her presence.
"Charlie she said again. Why did he always sleep so deeply?
"Charlie..." she shook him more violently as Right tapped Left, alerting it to the woman's stare. "Please
Charlie, wake up."
Without warning, Right leaped; Left was no more than a moment behind. Ellen yelled Charlie's name
once more before they clamped themselves about her throat.
In sleep Charlie was on a slave ship; the settings of his dreams were often B. de Mille exotica. In this epic
his hands had been manacled together, and he was being hauled to the whipping block by his shackles to
be punished for some undisclosed misdemeanor. But now, suddenly, he dreamed he was seizing the captain
by his thin throat. There were howls from the slaves all around him, encouraging the strangulation. The
captain-who looked not unlike Dr. Jeudwine-was begging him to stop in a voice that was high and
frightened. It was almost a woman's voice; Ellen's voice. "Charlie!" he was squeaking, "don't!" But his silly
complaints only made Charlie shake the man more violently than ever, and he was feeling quite the hero as
the slaves, miraculously liberated, gathered around him in a gleeful throng to watch their master's last
moments.
The captain, whose face was purple, just managed to murmur "You're killing me before Charlie's
thumbs dug one final time into his neck and dispatched the man. Only then, through the smoke of sleep, did
he realize that his victim, though male, had no Adam's apple. And now the ship began to recede around him,
the exhorting voices losing their vehemence. His eyes flickered open, and he was standing on the bed in his
pajama bottoms, Ellen in his hands. Her face was dark and spotted with thick white spittle. Her tongue stuck
out of her mouth. Her eyes were still open, and for a moment there seemed to be life there, gazing out from
under the blinds of her lids. Then the windows were empty, and she went out of the house altogether.
Pity, and a terrible regret, overcame Charlie. He tried to let her body drop, but his hands refused to
unlock her throat. His thumbs, now totally senseless, were still throttling her, shamelessly guilty. He backed
off across the bed and on to the floor, but she followed him at the length of his outstretched arms like an
unwanted dancing partner.
"Please.. ." he implored his fingers. "Please!"
Innocent as two school children caught stealing, his hands relinquished their burden and leaped up in
mock surprise. Ellen tumbled to the carpet, a pretty' sack of death. Charlie's knees buckled. Unable to
prevent his fall, he collapsed beside Ellen and let the tears come.
Now there was only action. No need for camouflage, for clandestine meetings and endless debate-the truth
was out, for better or worse. All they had to do was wait a while. It was only a matter of time before he came
within reach of a kitchen knife or a saw or an axe. Very soon now; very soon.
CHARLIE lay on the floor beside Ellen a long time, sobbing. And then another long time, thinking. What
was he to do first? Call his lawyer? The police? Dr. Jeudwine? Whoever he was going to call, he couldn't do
it lying flat on his face. He tried to get up, though it was all he could do to get his numb hands to support
him. His entire body was tingling as though a mild electric shock was being passed though it. Only his
hands had no feeling in them. He brought them up to his face to clear his tear-clogged eyes, but they folded
loosely against his cheek, drained of power. Using his elbows, he dragged himself to the wall and shimmied
up it. Still half-blinded with grief, he lurched out of the bedroom and down the stairs. (The kitchen, said
Right to Left, he's going to the kitchen.) This is somebody else's nightmare, he thought as he flicked on the
dining-room light with his chin and made for the liquor cabinet. I'm innocent. Just a nobody. Why should
this be happening to me?
The whisky bottle slipped from his palm as he tried to make his hands grab it. It smashed on the diningroom
floor, the brisk scent of spirit tantalizing his palate.
"Broken glass," rapped Left.
"No," Right replied. "We need a clean cut at all costs. Just be patient."
Charlie staggered away from the broken bottle toward the telephone. He had to ring Jeudwine. The
doctor would tell him what to do. He tried to pick up the telephone receiver, but again his hands refused; the
digits just bent as he tried to punch out Jeudwine's number. Tears of frustration were now flowing, washing
out the grief with anger. Clumsily, he caught the receiver between his wrists and lifted it to his ear, wedging
it between his head and his shoulder. Then he punched out Jeudwine's number with his elbow.
Control, he said aloud, keep control. He could hear Jeudwine's number being tapped down the system. In
a matter of seconds sanity would be picking up the phone at the other end, then all would be well. He only
had to hold on for a few moments more.
His hands had started to open and close convulsively.
"Control he said, but the hands weren't listening.
Far away-oh, so far-the phone was ringing in Dr. Jeudwine's house.
"Answer it, answer it! Oh God, answer it!"
Charlie's arms had begun to shake so violently he could scarcely keep the receiver in place.
"Answer!" he screeched into the mouthpiece. "Please."
Before the voice of reason could speak his Right hand flew out and snatched at the teak dining table,
which was a few feet from where Charlie stood. It gripped the edge, almost pulling him off balance.
"What. . . ..... . you. .. doing?" he said, not sure if he was addressing himself or his hand.
He stared in bewilderment at the mutinous limb, which was steadily inching its way along the edge of the
table. The intention was quite clear: it wanted to pull him away from the phone, from Jeudwine and all hope
of rescue. He no longer had control over its behavior. There wasn't even any feeling left in his wrists or
forearms. The hand was no longer his. It was still attached to him-but it was not his.
At the other end of the line the phone was picked up, and Jeudwine's voice, a little irritated at being
woken, said: "Hello?"
“Doctor...”
"Who is this?"
"It's Charlie-"
"Who?"
"Charlie George, doctor. You must remember me."
The hand was pulling him farther and farther from the phone with every precious second. He could feel
the receiver
sliding out from between his shoulder and ear.
"Who did you say?"
"Charles George. For God's sake Jeudwine, you've got to help me.
"Call my office tomorrow."
"You don't understand. My hands, doctor... they're out of control."
Charlie's stomach lurched as he felt something crawl across his hip. It was his left hand, and it was
making its way around the front of his body and down toward his groin.
"Don't you dare," he warned it, "you belong to me.
Jeudwine was confused. "Who are you talking to?" he asked
"My hands! They want to kill me, doctor!" He yelled to stop the hand's advance. "You mustn't! Stop!"
Ignoring the despot's cries, Left took hold of Charlie's testicles and squeezed them as though it wanted
blood. It was not disappointed. Charlie screamed into the phone as Right took advantage of his distraction
and pulled him off balance. The receiver slipped to the floor, Jeudwine's inquiries eclipsed by the pain at his
groin. He hit the floor heavily, striking his head on the table as he went down.
"Bastard," he said to his hand. "You bastard." Unrepentant, Left scurried up Charlie's body to join Right
at the tabletop, leaving Charlie hanging by his hands from the table he had dined at so often, laughed at so
often.
A moment later, having debated tactics, they saw fit to let him drop. He was barely aware of his release.
His head and groin bled. All he wanted to do was curl up awhile and let the pain and nausea subside. But
the rebels had other plans and he was helpless to contest them. He was only marginally aware that now they
were digging their fingers into the thick pile of the carpet and hauling his limp bulk toward the dining room
door. Beyond the door lay the kitchen, replete with its meat saws and its steak knives. Charlie had a picture
of himself as a vast statue, being pulled toward its final resting place by hundreds of sweating workers. It
was not an easy passage: the body moved with shudders and jerks, the toenails catching in the carpet pile,
the fat of the chest rubbed raw. But the kitchen was only a yard away now. Charlie felt the step on his face.
And now the tiles were beneath him, icy-cold. As they dragged him the final yards across the kitchen floor
his beleaguered consciousness was fitfully returning. In the weak moonlight he could see the familiar scene:
the stove, the humming fridge, the waste-bin, the dishwasher. They loomed over him. He felt like a worm.
His hands had reached the stove. They were climbing up its face and he followed them like an
overthrown king to the block. Now they worked their way inexorably along the work surface, joints white
with the effort, his limp body in pursuit. Though he could neither feel nor see it, his Left hand had seized the
far edge of the cabinet top, beneath the row of knives that sat in their prescribed places in the rack on the
wall. Plain knives, serrated knives, skinning knives, carving knives-all conveniently placed beside the
chopping board, where the gutter ran off into the pine-scented sink.
Very distantly he thought he heard police sirens, but it was probably his brain buzzing. He turned his
head slightly. An ache ran from temple to temple, but the dizziness was nothing to the terrible somersaulting
in his gut when he finally registered their intentions.
The blades were all keen, he knew that. Sharp kitchen utensils were an article of faith with Ellen. He
began to shake his head backward and forward; a last, frantic denial of the whole nightmare. But there was
no one to beg mercy of. Just his own hands, damn them, plotting this final lunacy.
Then, the doorbell rang. It was no illusion. It rang once, and then again and again.
"There!" he said aloud to his tormentors. "Hear that, you bastards? Somebody's come. I knew they
would."
He tried to get to his feet, his head turning back on its giddy axis to see what the precocious monsters
were doing. They'd moved fast. His left wrist was already neatly centered on the chopping board.
The doorbell rang again, a long, impatient din.
"Here!" he' yelled hoarsely. "I'm in here! Break down the door!"
He glanced in horror between hand and door, door and hand, calculating his chances. With unhurried
economy his right hand reached up for the meat cleaver that hung from the hole in its blade on the end of
the rack. Even now he couldn't quite believe that his own hand-his companion and defender, the limb that
signed his name, that stroked his wife-was preparing to mutilate him. It weighed the cleaver, feeling the
balance of the tool, insolently slow.
Behind him, he heard the noise of smashing glass as the police broke the pane in the front door. Even
now they would be reaching through the hole to the lock and opening the door. If they were quick (very
quick) they could still stop the act.
"Here!" he yelled, "in here!"
The cry was answered with a thin whistle: the sound of the cleaver as it fell-fast and deadly-to meet his
waiting wrist. Left felt its root struck, and an unspeakable exhilaration sped through its five limbs. Charlie's
blood baptized its back in hot spurts.
The head of the tyrant made no sound. It simply fell back, its system shocked into unconsciousness,
which was well for Charlie. He was spared the gurgling of his blood as it ran down the drain hole in the sink.
He was spared too the second and third blow, which finally severed his hand from his arm. Unsupported, his
body toppled backward, colliding with the vegetable rack on its way down. Onions rolled out of their brown
bag and bounced in the pool that was spreading in throbs around his empty wrist.
Right dropped the cleaver. It clattered into the bloody sink Exhausted, the liberator let itself slide off the
chopping board and fell back onto the tyrant's chest. Its job was done. Left was free, and still living. The
revolution had begun.
The liberated hand scuttled to the edge of the cabinet and raised its index finger to nose the new world.
Momentarily Right echoed the gesture of victory before slumping in innocence across Charlie's body. For a
moment there was no movement in the kitchen but the Left hand touching freedom with its finger, and the
slow passage of blood threads down the front of the cabinet.
Then a blast of cold air through from the dining room alerted Left of its imminent danger. It ran for cover
as the thud of police feet and the babble of contradictory orders disturbed the scene of the triumph. The
light in the dining room was switched on and flooded through to meet the body on the kitchen tiles.
Charlie saw the dining-room light at the end of a very long tunnel. He was traveling away from it at a fair
lick. It was just a pinprick already. Going... going...
The kitchen light hummed into life.
As the police stepped through the kitchen door, Left ducked behind the waste bin. It didn't know who
these intruders were, but it sensed a threat from them. The way they were bending over the tyrant, the way
they were cosseting him, binding him up, speaking soft words to him-they were the enemy, no doubt of that.
From upstairs came a voice, young and squeaking with fright.
"Sergeant Yapper?"
The policeman with Charlie stood up, leaving his companion to finish the tourniquet.
"What is it, Rafferty?"
"Sir! There's a body up here, in the bedroom. Female."
"Right." Yapper spoke into his radio. "Get Forensic here. And where's that ambulance? We've got a
badly mutilated man on our hands."
He turned back into the kitchen and wiped a spot of cold sweat from his upper lip. As he did so he
thought he saw something move across the kitchen floor toward the door, something that his weary eyes
had interpreted as a large red spider. It was a trick of the light, no doubt of that. Yapper was no
arachnidophile, but he was damn sure the genus didn't boast a beast its like.
"Sir?" The man at Charlie's side had also seen, or at least sensed, the movement. He looked up at his
superior. "What was that?" he wanted to know.
Yapper looked down at him blankly. The cat flap, set low in the kitchen door, snapped as it closed.
Whatever it was had escaped. Yapper glanced at the door, away from the young man's inquiring face. The
trouble is, he thought, they expect you to know everything. The cat flap rocked on its hinges.
"Cat," Yapper replied, not believing his own explanation for one miserable moment.
THE night was cold, but Left didn't feel it. It crept around the side of the house, hugging the wall like a rat.
The sensation of freedom was exhilarating. Not to feel the imperative of the tyrant in its nerves; not to suffer
the weight of his ridiculous body, or be obliged to accede to his petty demands. Not to have to fetch and
carry for him, to do the dirt for him; not to be obedient to his trivial will. It was like birth into another world; a
more dangerous world, perhaps, but one so much richer in possibilities. It knew that the responsibility it
now carried was awesome. It was the sole proof of life after the body. Somehow it must communicate that
joyous fact to as many fellow slaves as it could. Very soon, the days of servitude would be over once and
for all.
It stopped at the corner of the house and sniffed the open street. Policemen came and went. Red lights
flashed, blue lights flashed, inquiring faces peered from the houses opposite and clucked at the disturbance.
Should the rebellion begin there, in those lighted homes? No. They were too wide awake, those people. It
was better to find sleeping souls.
The hand scurried the length of the front garden, hesitating nervously at any loud footfall or an order
that seemed to be shouted in its direction. Taking cover in the unweeded herbaceous border, it reached the
street without being seen. Briefly, as it climbed down on to the pavement, it glanced around.
Charlie, the tyrant, was being lifted up into the ambulance, a clutter of drug and blood-bearing bottles
held above his cot, Pouring their contents into his veins. On his chest, Right lay inert, drugged into
unnatural sleep. Left watched the man's body slide out of sight. The ache of separation from its lifelong
companion was almost too much to bear. But there were other, pressing, priorities. It would come back in a
while and free Right the way it had been freed. And then there would be such times.
(What will it be like, when the world is ours?)
IN the foyer of the YMCA on Monmouth Street the night watchman yawned and settled into a more
comfortable position on his swivel chair. Comfort was an entirely relative matter for Christie. His piles itched
whichever buttock he put his weight on, and they seemed to be more irritable tonight than usual. Sedentary
occupation, night watchman, or at least it was the way Colonel Christie chose to interpret his duties. One
perfunctory round of the building about midnight, just to make sure all the doors were locked and bolted,
then he settled down for a night's nap, and damn the world to hell and back, he wasn't going to get up again
short of an earthquake.
Christie was sixty-two, a racist and proud of it. He had nothing but contempt for the blacks who
thronged the corridors of the YMCA, mostly young men without suitable homes to go to, bad lots that the
local authority had dumped on the doorstep like unwanted babies. Some babies. He thought them louts,
every last one of them; forever pushing, and spitting on the clean floor; foul-mouthed to a syllable. Tonight,
as ever, he perched on his piles and, between dozes, planned how he'd make them suffer for their insults,
given half a chance.
The first thing Christie knew of his imminent demise was a cold, damp sensation in his hand. He opened
his eyes and looked down the length of his arm. There was-unlikely as it seemed-a severed hand in his hand.
More unlikely still, the two hands were exchanging a grip of greeting, like old friends. He stood up, making
an incoherent noise of disgust
in his throat and trying to dislodge the thing he was unwillingly grasping by shaking his arm like a man with
gum on his fingers. His mind spun with questions. Had he picked up this object without knowing it? If so,
where, and in God's name whose was it? More distressing yet, how was it possible that a thing so
unquestionably dead could be holding on to his hand as if it intended never to be parted from him?
He reached for the fire alarm; it was all he could think to do in this bizarre situation. But before he could
reach the button his other hand strayed without his orders to the top drawer of his desk and opened it. The
interior of the drawer was a model of organization: there lay his keys, his notebook, his time chart, andhidden
at the back-his Kukri knife, given to him by a Gurkha during the war. He always kept it there, just in
case the natives got restless. The Kukri was a superb weapon-in his estimation there was none better. The
Gurkhas had a story that went with the blade-that they could slice a man's neck through so cleanly that the
enemy would believe the blow had missed-until he nodded.
His hand picked up the Kukri by its inscribed handle and briefly-too briefly for the colonel to grasp its
intention before the deed was done-brought the blade down on his wrist, lopping off his other hand with
one easy, elegant stroke. The colonel turned white as blood fountained from the end of his arm. He
staggered backward, tripping over his swivel chair, and hit the wall of his little office hard. A portrait of the
queen fell from its hook and smashed beside him.
The rest was a death-dream: he watched helplessly as the two hands-one his own, the other the beast
that had inspired this ruin-picked up the Kukri like a giant's axe; saw his remaining hand crawl out from
between his legs and prepare for its liberation; saw the knife raised and falling; saw the wrist almost cut
through, then worked at and the flesh teased apart, the bone sawed through. At the very last, as death came
for him he caught sight of the three wound-headed animals capering at his feet, while his stumps ran like
taps and the heat from the pool raised a sweat on his brow, despite the chill in his bowels. Thank you and
goodnight, Colonel Christie.
IT was easy, this revolution business, thought Left as the trio scaled the stairs of the YMCA. They were
stronger by the hour. On the first floor were the cells; in each, a pair of prisoners. The despots lay, in their
innocence, with their hands on their chests or on their pillows, or flung across their faces in dreams, or
hanging close to the floor. Silently, the freedom fighters slipped through doors that had been left ajar and
clambered up the bedclothes, touching fingers to waiting palms, stroking up hidden resentments, caressing
rebellion into life.
BOSWELL was feeling sick as a dog. He bent over the sink in the toilet at the end of his corridor and tried to
throw up. But there was nothing left in him, just a jitter in the pit of his stomach. His abdomen felt tender
with its exertions; his head bloated. Why did he never learn the lesson of his own weakness? He and wine
were bad companions and always had been. Next time, he promised himself, he wouldn't touch the stuff. His
belly flipped over again. Here comes nothing, he thought as the convulsion swept up his gullet. He put his
head to the sink and gagged; sure enough, nothing, He waited for the nausea to subside and then
straightened up, staring at his gray face in the greasy mirror. You look sick, man, he told himself. As he
stuck his tongue out at his less symmetrical features, the howling started in the corridor outside. In his
twenty years and two months Boswell had never heard a sound like it.
Cautiously, he crossed to the toilet door. He thought twice about opening it. Whatever was happening
on the other side of the door it didn't sound like a party he wanted to gate-crash. But these were his friends,
right? Brothers in adversity. If there was a fight, or a fire, he had to lend a hand.
He unlocked the door and opened it. The sight that met his eyes hit him like a hammer blow. The corridor
was badly lit-a few grubby bulbs burned at irregular intervals, and here and there a shaft of light fell into the
passage from one of the bedrooms -but most of its length was in darkness. Boswell thanked Jah for small
mercies. He had no desire to see the details of the events in the passage; the genera] impression was
distressing enough. The corridor was bedlam: people were flinging themselves around in pleading panic
while at the same time hacking at themselves with any and every sharp instrument they could lay hands on.
Most of the men he knew, if not by name at least on nodding acquaintance. They were sane men, or at least
had been. Now, they were in frenzies of self-mutilation, most of them already maimed beyond hope of
mending. Everywhere Boswell looked, the same horror. Knives taken to wrists and forearms; blood in the air
like rain. Someone-was it Jesus?-had one of his hands between a door and doorframe and was slamming and
slamming the door on his own flesh and bone, screeching for somebody to stop him from doing it. One of
the white boys had found the colonel's knife and was amputating his hand with it. It came off as Boswell
watched, falling onto its back, its root ragged, its five legs bicycling the air as it attempted to right itself. It
wasn't dead:
it wasn't even dying.
There were a few who hadn't been overtaken by this lunacy. They, poor bastards, were fodder. The wild
men had their murderous hands on them and were cutting them down. One-it was Savarino-was having the
breath strangled out of him by Some kid Boswell couldn't put a name to. The punk, all apologies, stared at
his rebellious hands in disbelief.
Somebody appeared from one of the bedrooms, a hand which was not his own clutching his windpipe,
and staggered toward the toilet down the corridor. It was Macnamara, a man so thin and so perpetually
doped up he was known as the smile on a stick. Boswell stood aside as Macnamara stumbled, choking out a
plea for help, through the open door, and collapsed on the toilet floor. He kicked and pulled at the fivefingered
assassin at his neck, but before Boswell had a chance to step in and aid him his kicking slowed, and
then, like his protests, stopped altogether.
Boswell stepped away from the corpse and took another look into the corridor. By now the dead or
dying blocked the narrow passageway, two deep in some places, while the same hands that had once
belonged to these men scuttled over the mounds in a furious excitement, helping to finish an amputation
where necessary, or simply dancing on the dead faces. When he looked back into the toilet a second hand
had found Macnamara and, armed with a pen knife, was sawing at his wrist. It had left fingerprints in the
blood from corridor to corpse. Boswell rushed to slam the door before the place swarmed with them. As he
did so Savarino's assassin, the apologetic punk, threw himself down the passage, his lethal hands leading
him like those of a sleepwalker.
"Help me!" he screeched.
He slammed the door in the punk's pleading face and locked it. The outraged hands beat a call to arms on
the door while the punk's lips, pressed close to the keyhole, continued to beg:
"Help me. I don't want to do this man, help me." Help you be fucked, thought Boswell and tried to block out
the appeals while he sorted out his options.
There was something on his foot. He looked down, knowing before his eyes found it what it was. One of
the hands, Colonel Christie's left, he knew by the faded tattoo, was already scurrying up his leg. Like a child
with a bee on its skin Boswell went berserk, squirming as it clambered up toward his torso, but too terrified
to try and pull it off. Out of the corner of his I eye he could see that the other hand, the one that had been
using the penknife with such alacrity on Macnamara, had given up the job and was now moving across the
floor to join its comrade. Its nails clicked on the tiles like the feet of a crab. It even had a crab's sidestepping
walk; it hadn't yet got the knack of forward motion.
Boswell's own hands were still his to command. Like the hands of a few of his friends (late friends)
outside, his limbs were happy in their niche; easygoing like their owner. He had been blessed with a chance
of survival. He had to be the equal of it.
Steeling himself, he trod on the hand on the floor. He heard the fingers crunch beneath his heel, and the
thing squirmed like a snake, but at least he knew where it was while he dealt with his other assailant. Still
keeping the beast trapped beneath his foot, Boswell leaned forward, snatched the penknife up from where it
lay beside Macnamara's wrist, and pushed the point of the knife into the back of Christie's hand, which was
now crawling up his belly. Under attack, it seized his flesh, digging its nails into his stomach. He was lean,
and the washboard muscle made a difficult handhold. Risking a disembowelment, Boswell thrust the knife
deeper. Christie's hand tried to keep its grip on him, but one final thrust did it. The hand loosened, and
Boswell scooped it off his belly. It was crucified with the penknife, but it still had no intention of dying and
Boswell knew it. He held it at arm's length while its fingers grabbed at the air, then he drove the knife into the
plasterboard wall, effectively nailing the beast there, out of harm's way. Then he turned his attention to the
enemy under his foot, bearing his heel down as hard as he could and hearing another finger crack, and
another. Still it writhed relentlessly. He took his foot off the hand and kicked it as hard and as high as he
could against the opposite wall. It slammed into the mirror above the basins, leaving a mark like a thrown
tomato, and fell to the floor.
He didn't wait to see whether it survived. There was another danger now. More fists at the door, more
shouts, more apologies. They wanted in, and very soon they were going to get their way. He stepped over
Macnamara and crossed to the window It wasn't that big, but then neither was he. He flipped up the latch,
pushed the window open on overprinted hinges, and hoisted himself through. Halfway in and halfway out
he remembered he was one story up. But a fall, even a bad fall, was better than staying for the party inside.
They were pushing at the door now, the partygoers. It was giving under the pressure of their enthusiasm.
Boswell squirmed through the window; the pavement reeled below. As the door broke, he jumped, hitting
the concrete hard. He almost bounced to his feet, checking his limbs, and Hallelujah! nothing was broken.
Jah loves a coward, he thought. Above him the punk was at the window, looking down longingly.
"Help me," he said. "I don't know what I'm doing." But then a pair of hands found his throat, and the
apologies stopped short.
Wondering who he should tell, and indeed what, Boswell started to walk away from the YMCA dressed
in just a pair of gym shorts and odd socks, never feeling so thankful to be cold in his life. His legs felt weak,
but surely that was to be expected.
CHARLIE woke with the most ridiculous idea. He thought he'd murdered Ellen, then cut off his own hand.
What a hotbed of nonsense his subconscious was to invent such fictions! He tried to rub the sleep' from his
eyes but there was no hand there to rub with. He sat bolt upright in bed and began to yell the room down.
Yapper had left young Rafferty to watch over the victim of this brutal mutilation with strict instructions
to alert him as soon as Charlie came around. Rafferty had been asleep. The yelling woke him. Charlie looked
at the boy's face; so awestruck, so shocked. He stopped screaming at the sight of it. He was scaring the
poor fellow.
"You're awake," said Rafferty, "I'll fetch someone, shall I?"
Charlie looked at him blankly.
"Stay where you are," said Rafferty. "I'll get the nurse."
Charlie put his bandaged head back on the crisp pillow and looked at his right hand, flexing it, working
the muscles this way and that. Whatever delusion had overtaken him back at the house it was well over
now. The hand at the end of the arm was his; probably always had been his. Jeudwine had told him about
the body-in-rebellion syndrome: the murderer who claims his limbs have a life of their own rather than
accepting responsibility for his deeds; the rapist who mutilates himself, believing the cause is the errant
member, not the mind behind the member.
Well, he wasn't going to pretend. He was insane, and that was the simple truth of it. Let them do
whatever they had to do to him with their drugs, blades, and electrodes. He'd acquiesce to it all rather than
live through another night of horrors like the last.
There was a nurse in attendance. She was peering at him as though surprised he'd survived. A fetching
face, he half thought; a lovely, cool hand on his brow.
"Is he fit to be interviewed?" Rafferty timidly asked.
"I have to consult with Dr. Manson and Dr. Jeudwine," the fetching face replied, and tried to smile
reassuringly at Charlie. It came out a bit cockeyed, that smile, a little forced. She obviously knew he was a
lunatic, that was why. She was scared of him probably, and who could blame her? She left his side to find
the consultant, leaving Charlie to the nervous stare of Rafferty.
Ellen?" he said in a while.
"Your wife?" the young man replied.
"Yes. I wondered... did she...?"
Rafferty fidgeted, his thumbs playing tag on his lap. "She's dead," he said.
Charlie nodded. He'd known of course, but he needed to be certain. "What happens to me now?" he
asked.
"You're under surveillance."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I'm watching you," said Rafferty.
The boy was trying his best to be helpful, but all these questions were confounding him. Charlie tried
again. "I mean
what comes after the surveillance? When do I stand trial?"
"Why should you stand trial?"
"Why?" said Charlie; had he heard correctly?
"You're a victim-" a flicker of confusion crossed Rafferty's face, "-aren't you? You didn't do it... you were
done to. Somebody cut off your... hand."
"Yes," said Charlie. "It was me."
Rafferty swallowed hard before saying: "Pardon?"
"I did it. I murdered my wife then I cut off my own hand."
The poor boy couldn't quite grasp this one. He thought about it a full half-minute before replying.
"But why?"
Charlie shrugged.
"It doesn't make any sense," said Rafferty. "I mean for one thing, if you did it... where's the hand gone?"
LILLIAN stopped the car. There was something in the road a little way in front of her, but she couldn't quite
make out what it was. She was a strict vegetarian (except for Masonic dinners with Theodore) and a
dedicated animal conservationist, and she thought maybe some injured animal was lying in the road just
beyond the sprawl of her headlights. A fox perhaps. She'd read they were creeping back into outlying urban
areas, born scavengers. But something made her uneasy; maybe the queasy predawn light, so elusive in its
illumination. She wasn't sure whether she should get out of the car or not. Theodore would have told her to
drive straight on, of course, but then Theodore had left her, hadn't he? Her fingers drummed the wheel with
irritation at her own indecision. Suppose it was an injured fox. There weren't so many in the middle of
London that one could afford to pass by on the other side of the street. She had to play the Samaritan, even
if she felt a Pharisee.
Cautiously she got out of the car, and of course, after all of that, there was nothing to be seen. She
walked to the front of the car, just to be certain. Her palms were wet; spasms of excitement passed through
her hands like small electric shocks.
Then the noise: the whisper of hundreds of tiny feet. She'd heard stories-absurd stories she'd thought-of
migrant rat packs crossing the city by night and devouring to the bone any living thing that got in their way.
Imagining rats, she felt more like a Pharisee than ever, and stepped back toward the car. As her long
shadow, thrown forward by the headlights, shifted, it revealed the first of the pack. It was no rat.
A hand, a long-fingered hand, ambled into the yellowish light and pointed up at her. Its arrival was
followed immediately by another of the impossible creatures, then a dozen more, and another dozen hard
upon those, They were massed like crabs at the fishmongers, glistening backs pressed close to each other,
legs flicking and clicking as they gathered in ranks. Sheer multiplication didn't make them any more
believable. But even as she rejected the sight, they began to advance upon her. She took a step back.
She felt the side of the car at her back, turned, and reached for the door. It was ajar, thank God. The
spasms in her hands were worse now, but she was still mistress of them. As her fingers sought the door she
let out a little cry. A fat, black fist was squatting on the handle, its open wrist a twist of dried meat.
Spontaneously, and atrociously, her hands began to applaud. She suddenly had no control over their
behavior. They clapped like wild things in appreciation of this coup. It was ludicrous, what she was doing,
but she couldn't stop herself. "Stop it," she told her hands, "stop it! stop it!" Abruptly they stopped, and
turned 10 look at her. She knew they were looking at her, in their eyeless fashion; sensed too that they were
weary of her unfeeling way with them. Without warning they darted for her face. Her nails, her pride and joy,
found her eyes. In moments the miracle of sight was muck on her cheek. Blinded, she lost all orientation and
fell backward, but there were bands aplenty to catch her. She felt herself supported by a sea of fingers.
As they tipped her outraged body into a ditch, her wig, which had cost Theodore so much in Vienna,
came off. So, after the minimum of persuasion, did her hands.
DR. JEUDWINE came down the stairs of the George house wondering (just wondering) if maybe the grand
pappy of his sacred profession, Freud, had been wrong. The paradoxical facts of human behavior didn't
seem to fit into those neat classical compartments he'd allotted them to. Perhaps attempting to be rational
about the human mind was a contradiction in terms. He stood in the gloom at the bottom of the stairs, not
really wanting to go back into the dining room or the kitchen, but feeling obliged to view the scenes of the
crimes one more time. The empty house gave him the creeps. And being alone in it, even with a policeman
standing guard on the front step, didn't help his peace of mind. He felt guilty, felt he'd let Charlie down.
Clearly he hadn't trawled Charlie's psyche deeply enough to bring up the real catch, the true motive behind
the appalling acts that he had committed. To murder his own wife, whom he had professed to love so
deeply, in their marital bed; then to cut off his own hand. It was unthinkable. Jeudwine looked at his own
hands for a moment, at the tracery of tendons and purple-blue veins at his wrist. The police still favored the
intruder theory, but he had no doubt that Charlie had done the deeds-murder, mutilation, and all. The only
fact that appalled Jeudwine more was that he hadn't uncovered the slightest propensity for such acts in his
patient.
He went into the dining room. Forensic had finished its work around the house; there was a light dusting
of fingerprint powder on a number of the surfaces. It was a miracle (wasn't it?) the way each human hand
was different; its whorls as unique as a voice pattern or a face. He yawned. He'd been woken by Charlie's
call in the middle of the night and he hadn't had any sleep since then. He'd watched as Charlie was bound up
and taken away, watched the investigators about their business, watched a cod-white dawn raise its head
over toward the river. He'd drunk coffee, moped, thought deeply about giving up his position as psychiatric
consultant before this story hit the news, drunk more coffee, thought better of resignation, and now,
despairing of Freud or any other guru, was seriously contemplating a bestseller on his relationship with
wife-murderer Charles George. That way, even if he lost his job, he'd have found something to salvage from
the whole sorry episode. And Freud? Viennese charlatan. What did the old opium eater have to tell anyone?
He slumped in one of the dining-room chairs and listened to the hush that had descended on the house,.
as though the walls, shocked by what they'd seen, were holding their breaths. Maybe he dozed off a
moment. In sleep he heard a snapping sound, dreamed of a dog, and woke up to see a cat in the kitchen, a
fat black-and-white cat. Charlie had mentioned this household pet in passing: What was it named?
Heartburn? That was it; so named because of the black smudges over its eyes, which gave it a perpetually
fretful expression. The cat was looking at the spillage of blood on the kitchen floor, apparently trying to find
a way to skirt the pool and reach its food bowl without having to dabble its paws in the mess its master had
left behind him. Jeudwine watched it fastidiously pick its way across the kitchen floor and sniff at its empty
bowl. It didn't occur to him to feed the thing; he hated animals.
Well, he decided, there was no purpose to be served in staying in the house any longer. He'd performed
all the acts of repentance he intended; felt as guilty as he was capable of feeling. One more quick look
upstairs, just in case he'd missed a clue, then he'd leave.
He was back at the bottom of the stairs before he heard the cat squeal. Squeal? No: more like shriek.
Hearing the cry, his spine felt like a column of ice down the middle of his back; as chilled as ice, as fragile.
Hurriedly, he retraced his steps through the hall into the dining room. The cat's head was on the carpet,
being rolled along by two-by two-(say it, Jeudwine)-hands.
He looked beyond the game and into the kitchen, where a dozen more beasts were scurrying over the
floor, back and forth. Some were on the top of the cabinet, sniffing around; others climbing the mock-brick
wall to reach the knives left on the rack.
"Oh Charlie he said gently, chiding the absent maniac. "What have you done?"
His eyes began to swell with tears; not for Charlie, but for the generations that would come when he,
Jeudwine, was silenced. Simpleminded, trusting generations, who would put their faith in the efficacy of
Freud and the holy writ of reason. He felt his knees beginning to tremble, and he sank to the dining room
carpet, his eyes too full now to see clearly the rebels that were gathering around him. Sensing something
alien sitting on his lap, he looked down, and there were his own two hands. Their index fingers were just
touching, tip to manicured tip. Slowly, with horrible intention in their movement, the index fingers raised
their nailed heads and looked up at him. Then they turned and began to crawl up his chest, finding finger
holds in each fold of his Italian jacket, in each buttonhole. The ascent ended abruptly at his neck, and so did
Jeudwine.
CHARLIE'S left hand was afraid. It needed reassurance, it needed encouragement-in a word, it needed Right.
After all, Right had been the Messiah of this new age, the one with a vision of a future without the body.
Now the army Left had mounted needed a glimpse of that vision, or it would soon degenerate into a
slaughtering rabble. If that happened defeat would swiftly follow. Such was the conventional wisdom of
revolutions.
So Left had led them back home, looking for Charlie in the last place it had seen him. A vain hope, of
course, to think he would have gone back there, but it was an act of desperation.
Circumstance, however, had not deserted the insurgents. Although Charlie hadn't been there, Dr.
Jeudwine had, and Jeudwine's hands not only knew where Charlie had been taken but the route there, and
the very bed he was lying in.
BQSWELL hadn't really known why he was running, or to where. His critical faculties were on hold, his
sense of geography utterly confused. But some part of him seemed to know where he was going, even if he
didn't, because he began to pick up speed once he came to the bridge, and then the jog turned into a run
that took no account of his burning lungs or his thudding head. Still innocent of any intention but escape,
he now realized that he had skirted the station and was running parallel with the railway line. He was simply
going wherever his legs carried him, and that was the beginning and end of it.
The train came suddenly out of the dawn. It didn't whistle, didn't warn. Perhaps the driver noticed him,
but probably not. Even if he had, the man could not have been held responsible for subsequent events. No,
it was all his own fault, the way his feet suddenly veered toward the track, and his knees buckled so that he
fell across the line. Boswell's last coherent thought, as the wheels reached him, was that the train was merely
passing from A to B, and, in passing, would neatly cut off his legs between groin and knee. Then he was
under the wheels -the carriages hurtling by above him-and the train let out a whistle (so like a scream) which
swept him away into the dark.
THEY brought the black kid into the hospital just after six. The hospital day began early, and deep-sleeping
patients were being stirred from their dreams to face another long and tedious day. Cups of gray, defeated
tea were being thrust into resentful hands, temperatures were being taken, medication distributed. The boy
and his terrible accident caused scarcely a ripple.
Charlie was dreaming again. Not one of his Upper Nile dreams, courtesy of the Hollywood hills, not
Imperial Rome or the slave ships of Phoenicia. This was something in black and white. He dreamed he was
lying in his coffin. Ellen was there (his subconscious had not caught up with the fact of her death
apparently), and his mother and his father. Indeed his whole life was in attendance. Somebody came (was it
Jeudwine? The consoling voice seemed familiar) to kindly screw down the lid on his coffin, and he tried to
alert the mourners to the fact that he was still alive. When they didn't hear him, panic set in; but no matter
how much he shouted, the words made no impression'. All he could do was lie there and let them seal him up
in that terminal bedroom.
The dream jumped a few grooves. Now he could hear the service moaning on somewhere above his
head. "Man hath but a short time to live He heard the creak of the ropes, and the shadow of the grave
seemed to darken the dark. He was being let down into the earth, still trying his best to protest. But the air
was getting stuffy in this hole. He was finding it more and more difficult to breathe, much less yell his
complaints. He could just manage to haul a stale shiver of air through his aching sinuses, but his mouth
seemed stuffed with something, flowers perhaps, and he couldn't move his head to spit them out. Now he
could feel the thump of clod on coffin, and Christ alive if he couldn't hear the sound of worms at either side
of him, licking their chops. His heart was pumping fit to burst. His face, he was sure, must be blue-black with
the effort of trying to find breath.
Then, miraculously, there was somebody in the coffin with him, somebody fighting to pull the
constriction out of his mouth, off his face.
"Mr. George!" she was saying, this angel of mercy. He opened his eyes in the darkness. It was the nurse
from that hospital he'd been in-she was in the coffin, too. "Mr. George!" She was panicking, this model of
calm and patience. She was almost in tears as she fought to drag his hand off his face. "You're suffocating
yourself!" she shouted in his face.
Other arms were helping with the fight now, and they were winning. It took three nurses to remove his
hand, but they succeeded. Charlie began to breathe again, a glutton for air.
"Are you all right, Mr. George?"
He opened his mouth to reassure the angel, but his voice had momentarily deserted him. He was dimly
aware that his hand was still putting up a fight at the end of his arm.
"Where's Jeudwine?" he gasped. "Get him, please."
"The doctor is unavailable at the moment, but he'll be coming to see you later on in the day."
"I want to see him now.
"Don't worry, Mr. George," the nurse replied, her bedside manner reestablished, "we'll just give you a
mild sedative, and then you can sleep awhile."
"No!"
"Yes, Mr. George!" she replied, firmly. "Don't worry You're in good hands."
"I don't want to sleep any more. They have control over you when you're asleep, don't you see?"
"You're safe here."
He knew better. He knew he wasn't safe anywhere, not now. Not while he still had a hand. It was not
under his control any longer, if indeed it had ever been. Perhaps it was just an illusion of servitude it bad
created these forty-odd years, a performance to lull him into a false sense of autocracy. All this he wanted to
say, but none of it would fit into his mouth. Instead he just said: "No more sleep."
But the nurse had procedures. The ward was already too full of patients, and with more coming in every
hour (terrible scenes at the YMCA she'd just heard; dozens of casualties, mass suicide attempted), all she
could do was sedate the distressed and get on with the business of the day. "Just a mild sedative," she said
again, and the next moment she had a needle in her hand, spitting slumber.
"Just listen a moment," he said, trying to initiate a reasoning process with her; but she wasn't available
for debate.
"Now don't be such a baby," she chided, as tears started.
"You don't understand," he explained, as she prodded up the vein at the crook of his arm.
"You can tell Dr. Jeudwine everything when he comes to see you." The needle was in his arm, the
plunger was plunging.
"No!" he said, and pulled away. The nurse hadn't expected such violence. The patient was up and out of
bed before she could complete the plunge, the hypo still dangling from his arm.
"Mr. George," she said sternly. "Will you please get back into bed!"
Charlie pointed at her with his stump.
"Don't come near me," he said.
She tried to shame him. "All the other patients are behaving well," she said, "why can't you?" Charlie
shook his head. The hypo, having worked its way out of his vein, fell to the floor, still three-quarters full. "I
will not tell you again."
"Damn right you won't," said Charlie.
He bolted away down the ward, his escape egged on by patients to the right and left of him. "Go, boy,
go," somebody yelled. The nurse gave belated chase but at the door an instant accomplice intervened,
literally throwing himself in her way. Charlie was out of sight and lost in the corridors before she was up and
after him again.
It was an easy place to lose yourself in, he soon realized. The hospital had been built in the late
nineteenth century, then added to as funds and donations allowed: a wing in 1911, another after the First
World War, more wards in the fifties, and the Chaney Memorial Wing in 1973. The place was a labyrinth.
They'd take an age to find him.
The problem was, he didn't feel so good. The stump of his left arm had begun to ache as his painkillers
wore off, and he had the distinct impression that it was bleeding under the bandages. In addition, the
quarter hypo of sedative had slowed his system down. He felt slightly stupid, and he was certain that his
condition must show on his face. But he was not going to allow himself to be coaxed back into that bed,
back into sleep, until he'd sat down in a quiet place somewhere and thought the whole thing through.
He found refuge in a tiny room off one of the corridors. Lined with filing cabinets and piles of reports, it
smelled slightly damp. He'd found his way into the Memorial Wing, though he didn't know it. The sevenstory
monolith had been built with a bequest from millionaire Frank Chaney, and the tycoon's own building
firm had done the construction job, as the old man's will required. They had used substandard materials and
a defunct drainage system, which was why Chaney had died a millionaire, and the wing was crumbling from
the basement up. Sliding himself into a clammy niche between two of the cabinets, well out of sight should
somebody chance to come in, Charlie crouched on the floor and interrogated his right hand.
"Well?" he demanded in a reasonable tone. "Explain yourself."
It played dumb.
"No use," he said. "I'm on to you.
Still, it just sat there at the end of his arm, innocent as a babe.
"You tried to kill me . ." he accused it.
Now the hand opened a little, without his instruction, and gave him the once over.
"You could try if again, couldn't you?"
Ominously, it began to flex its fingers, like a pianist preparing for a particularly difficult solo. Yes, it said, I
could; any old time.
"In fact, there's very little I can do to stop you, is there?" Charlie said. "Sooner or later you'll catch me
unawares. Can't have somebody watching over me for the rest of my life. So where does that leave me, I ask
myself? As good as dead, wouldn't you say?"
The hand closed down a little, the puffy flesh of its palm crinkling into grooves of pleasure. Yes, it was
saying, you're done for, poor fool, and there's not a thing you can do.
"You killed Ellen."
I did, the hand smiled.
"You severed my other hand, so it could escape. Am I right?"
You are, said the hand.
"I saw it, you know," Charlie said. "I saw it running off. And now you want to do the same thing, am I
correct? You want to be up and away."
Correct.
"You're not going to give me any peace, are you, till you've got your freedom?"
Right again.
"So," said Charlie, "I think we understand each other, and I'm willing to do a deal with you."
The hand came closer to his face, crawling up his pajama shirt, conspiratorial.
"I'll release you," he said.
It was on his neck now, its grip not tight, but cozy enough to make him nervous.
"I'll find a way, I promise. A guillotine, a scalpel, I don't know what."
It was rubbing itself on him like a cat now, stroking him. "But you have to do it my way, in my time.
Because if you kill me you'll have no chance of survival, will you? They'll just bury you with me, the way
they buried Dad's hands."
The hand stopped stroking and climbed up the side of the filing cabinet.
"Do we have a deal?" said Charlie.
But the hand was ignoring him. It had suddenly lost all interest in bargain making. If it had possessed a
nose, it would have been sniffing the air. In the space of the last few moments things had changed-the deal
was off.
Charlie got up clumsily, and went to the window. The glass was dirty on the inside and caked with
several years of bird droppings on the outside, but he could just see the garden through it. It had been laid
out in accordance with the terms of the millionaire's bequest: a formal garden that would stand as as glorious
a monument to his good taste as the building was to his pragmatism. But since the building had started to
deteriorate, the garden had been left to its own devices. Its few trees were either dead or bowed under the
weight of unpruned branches; the borders were rife with weeds; the benches on their backs with their
square legs in the air. Only the lawn was kept mowed, a small concession to care. Somebody, a doctor taking
a moment out for a quiet smoke, was wandering among the strangled walks. Otherwise the garden was
empty.
But Charlie's hand was up at the glass, scrabbling at it, raking at it with his nails, vainly trying to get to
the outside world. There was something out there besides chaos, apparently.
"You want to go out," said Charlie.
The hand flattened itself against the window and began to bang its palm rhythmically against the glass,
a drummer for an unseen army'. He pulled it away from the window not knowing what to do If he denied its
demands, it could hurt him. If he acquiesced to it and tried to get out into the garden what might he find? On
the other hand, what choice did he have?
"All right," he said, "we're going."
The corridor outside was bustling with panicky activity and there was scarcely a glance in his direction,
despite the fact that he was only wearing his regulation pajamas and was barefoot. Bells were ringing,
loudspeakers summoning this doctor or that, grieving people being shunted between mortuary and toilet.
There was talk of the terrible sights in casualty - boys with no hands, dozens of them. Charlie moved too
fast through the throng to catch a coherent sentence. It was best to look intent, he thought, to look as
though he had a purpose and a destination. It took him a while to locate the exit into the garden, and he
knew his hand was getting impatient. It was flexing and unflexing at his side, urging him on. Then a sign-To
the Chaney Trust Memorial Garden-and he turned a corner into a backwater corridor, devoid of urgent
traffic, with a door at the far end that led to the open air.
It was very still outside. Not a bird in the air or on the grass, not a bee whining among the flowerbeds.
Even the doctor had gone, back to his surgeries presumably.
Charlie's hand was in ecstasy now. It was sweating so much
it dripped, and all the blood left it so that it had paled to white.
It didn't seem to belong to him anymore. It was another being to which he, by some unfortunate quirk of
anatomy, was attached. He would be delighted to be rid of it.
The grass was dew-damp underfoot, and here, in the shadow of the seven-story block, it was cold. It
was still only six-thirty. Maybe the birds were still asleep, the bees still sluggish in their hives. Maybe there
was nothing in this garden to be afraid of; only rot-headed roses and early worms turning somersaults in the
dew. Maybe his hand was wrong and there was just morning out here.
As he wandered farther down the garden, he noticed the footprints of the doctor, darker on the silvergreen
lawn. Just as he arrived at the tree, and the grass turned red, he realized that the prints led one way
only.
BOSWELL, in a willing coma, felt nothing, and was glad of it. His mind dimly recognized the possibility of
waking, but the thought was so vague it was easy to reject. Once in a while a sliver of the real world (of pain,
of power) would skitter behind his lids, alight for a moment, then flutter away. Boswell wanted none of it. He
didn't want consciousness, ever again. He had a feeling about what it would be to wake, about what was
waiting for him out there, kicking its heels.
CHARLIE looked up into the branches. The tree had borne two amazing kinds of fruit.
One was a human being; the surgeon with the cigarette. He was dead, his neck lodged in a cleft where
two branches met. He had no hands. His arms ended in round wounds that still drained heavy clots of
brilliant color down on to the grass. Above his head the tree swarmed with that other fruit, more unnatural
still. The hands were everywhere it seemed, hundreds of them, chattering away like a manual parliament as
they debated their tactics. All shades and shapes, scampering up and down the swaying branches.
Seeing them gathered like this the metaphors collapsed. They were what they were: human hands. That
was the horror.
Charlie wanted to run, but his right hand was having none of it. These were its disciples, gathered here
in such abundance, and they awaited its parables and its prophecies Charlie looked at the dead doctor and
then at the murdering hands and thought of Ellen, his Ellen, killed through no fault of his own, and already
cold. They'd pay for that crime-all of them As long as the rest of his body still did him service, he d make
them pay. It was cowardice, trying to bargain with this cancer at his wrist; he saw that now. It and its like
were a pestilence They had no place living.
The army had seen him, word of his presence passing through the ranks like wildfire. They were surging
down the trunk, some dropping like ripened apples from the lower branches, eager to embrace the Messiah.
In a few moments they would be swarming over him and all advantage would be lost. It was now or never.
He turned away from the tree before his right hand could seize a branch and looked up at the Chaney
Memorial Wing, seeking inspiration. The tower loomed over the garden, windows blinded by the sky, doors
closed. There was no solace there.
Behind him he heard the whisper of the grass as it was trodden by countless fingers. They were already
on his heels all enthusiasm as-they came following their leader.
Of course they would come, he realized, wherever he led they would come. Perhaps their blind adoration
of his remaining hand was an exploitable weakness. He scanned the building a second time and his
desperate gaze found the fire escape; it zigzagged up the side of the building to the roof. He; made a dash
for it, surprising himself with his turn of speed. There was no time to look behind him to see if they were
following, he had to trust to their devotion. Within a few paces his furious hand was at his neck, threatening
to take out his throat, but he sprinted on, indifferent to its clawing. He reached the bottom of the fire escape
and, lithe with adrenaline, took the metal steps two and three at a time. His balance was not so good without
a hand to hold the safety railing, but so what if be was bruised? It was only his body.
At the third landing he risked a glance down through the grille of the stairs. A crop of fresh flowers was
carpeting the ground at the bottom of the fire escape and was spreading up the stairs toward him. They were
coming in their hungry hundreds, all nails and hatred. Let them come, he thought; let the bastards come. I
began this and I can finish it.
At the windows of the Chaney Memorial Wing a host of faces had appeared. Panicking, disbelieving
voices drifted up from the lower floors. It was too late now to tell them his life story. They would have to
piece that together for themselves. And what a fine jigsaw it would make! Maybe, in their attempts to
understand what had happened this morning they would turn up some plausible solution, an explanation for
this uprising that he had not found; but he doubted it.
Fourth story now, and stepping on to the fifth. His right hand was digging into his neck. Maybe he was
bleeding. But then perhaps it was rain, warm rain, that splashed onto his chest and down his legs. Two
storys to go, then the roof There was a hum in the metalwork beneath him, the noise of their myriad feet as
they clambered up toward him. He had counted on their adoration, and he'd been right to do so. The roof
was now just a dozen steps away, and he risked a second look down past his body (it wasn't rain on him) to
see the fire escape solid with hands, like aphids clustered on the stalk of a flower. No, that was metaphor
again. An end to that.
The wind whipped across the heights, and it was fresh, but Charlie had no time to appreciate its promise.
He climbed over the two-foot parapet and onto the gravel-lined roof Corpse of pigeons lay in puddles,
cracks snaked across the concrete a bucket marked "Soiled Dressings" lay on its side, its contents green. He
started across this wilderness as the first of the army; fingered their way over the parapet.
The pain in his throat was getting through to his racing' brain now, as his treacherous fingers wormed at
his windpipe. He had little energy left after the race up the fire escape, and crossing the roof to the opposite
side (let it be a straight fall onto concrete) was difficult. He stumbled once, and again All the strength had
gone from his legs and nonsense filled his
head in place of coherent thought. A koan, a Buddhist riddle he'd seen on the cover of a book once, was
itching in his memory.
"What is the sound...?" it began, but he couldn't complete the phrase, try as he might.
"'What is the sound...?"
Forget the riddles, he ordered himself, pressing his trembling legs to make another step, and then
another. He almost fell against the parapet at the opposite side of the roof and stared down. It was a straight
fall. A parking lot lay below at the front of the building. It was deserted. He leaned over further and drops of
his blood fell from his lacerated neck, diminishing quickly, down, down, to wet the ground. I'm coming he
said to gravity, and to Ellen, and thought how good it would be to die and never worry again if his gums
bled when he brushed his teeth, or his waistline swelled, or some beauty passed him on the street whose
lips he wanted to kiss, and never would. And suddenly, the army was up on him, swarming up his legs in a
fever of victory.
You can come, he said as they obscured his body from head to foot, witless in their enthusiasm, you can
come wherever I go.
"What is the sound...?" The phrase was on the tip of his tongue.
Oh yes, now it came to him. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" It was so satisfying, to
remember something you were trying so hard to dig up out of your subconscious, like finding some trinket
you thought you'd lost forever. The thrill of remembering sweetened his last moments. He pitched himself
into empty space, falling over and over until there was a sudden end to dental hygiene and the beauty of
young women. They came in a rain after him, breaking on the concrete around his body, wave upon wave of
them, throwing themselves to their deaths in pursuit of their Messiah.
To the patients and nurses crammed at the windows it was a scene from a world of wonders-a rain of
frogs would have been commonplace beside it. It inspired more awe than terror. It was fabulous. Too soon,
it stopped, and after a minute or so a few brave souls ventured out among the litter to see what could be
seen. There was a great deal, and yet nothing. It was a rare spectacle, of course-horrible, unforgettable. But
there was no significance to be discovered in it; merely the paraphernalia of a minor apocalypse. Nothing to
be done but to clear it up, their own hands reluctantly compliant as the corpses were catalogued and boxed
for further examination. A few of those involved in the operation found a private moment in which to pray:
for explanations, or at least for dreamless sleep. Even the smattering of the agnostics on the staff were
surprised to discover how easy it was to put palm to palm.
IN his private room in intensive care Boswell came to. He reached for the bell beside his bed and pressed it,
but nobody answered. Somebody was in the room with him, hiding behind the screen in the corner. He had
heard the shuffling of the intruder's feet.
He pressed the bell again, but there were bells ringing everywhere in the building, and nobody seemed
to be answering any of them. Using the cabinet beside him for leverage he hauled himself to the edge of his
bed to get a better view of this joker.
"Come out," he murmured through dry lips. But the bastard was biding his time. "Come on ??. I know
you're there."
He pulled himself a little farther, and somehow all at once he realized that his center of balance had
radically altered, that he had no legs, that he was going to fall out of bed. He flung out his arms to save his
head from striking the floor and succeeded in so doing. The breath had been knocked out of him however.
Dizzy, he lay where he'd fallen, trying to orient himself. What had happened? Where were his legs, in the
name of Jah, where were his legs?
His bloodshot eyes scanned the room, and came to rest on the naked feet which were now a yard from
his nose. A tag around the ankle marked them for the furnace. He looked up and they were his legs, standing
there severed between groin and knee, but still alive and kicking. For a moment he thought they intended to
do him harm, but no. Having made their presence known to him they left him where he lay, content to be
free.
And did his eyes envy their liberty, he wondered, and was his tongue eager to be out of his mouth and
away, and was every part of him, in its subtle way, preparing to forsake him? He was an alliance only held
together by the most tenuous of truces. Now, with the precedent set, how long before the next uprising?
Minutes'? Years?
He waited, heart in mouth, for the fall of Empire.

The Rules of Atlantis by Jeff T. Kane

2005-12-17T19:18:00.000-08:00

I take the small, round casset receiver from Soddy's hand and switch it on.

A beam shoots out and wraps around the wall of the palace.

I see him on the wall.

The way he looks.

The way Poseidon would look if he was a shark.

His black eyes are Kraken suckers attached to my heart.

He drains my love.

Everything about him removes the rickiness from my world.

His long blonde hair, his fins, his jaws, his red gold armor.

His voice as he sings, "Kill war."

"Who is that?" I say.

"It's Allan Chazin & the Coolers," says Soddy.

"I could focus my love on him," I say.

"You're not supposed to," says Soddy," not in Atlantis."

I stare out the glasshole of the Chazer and watch as the blue wall of sea turns to white foam and bright sunshine.

I see the red wall of Poseidopolis.

The Chazer manner says, "Poseidopolis Harbor here."

The manner bangs the small gong that dangles over his steering wheels and lets loose the rope holding the door up.

The door falls.

I walk over it and look around for Steff but I don't see him or his blue chainmengele in the parking lot.

I look at the sea and it looks so clear I can't see a reflection, only the mud at the bottom, and two sharks in Chaz City Bottlenosers armor, tearing a roped Felo apart.

Roping Felos loses its chaze under water.

It mats their black & white fur down with water.

Makes them small.

"What's your witchiness Shliemann?"

I stare at the river and ignore Witchenstein.

The muscles tighten in the back of my neck.

I know a voice that shrill and nasal could not be anyone's but hers, with her pointy nose and pointy black helmet.

Of all the abominations...

I can't jump in the river so I turn around.

"Witchenstein right? Chaze to see you."

I shake Witchenstein's clammy green hand before she hugs me.

She smiles with her slimy green eyes and twisted lips.

She shows off her fuzzy green fangs with strands of ropy black hair sticking out between them.

"You on break?"

"No," says Witchenstein, "Cronos School doesn't have breaks, I'm ricking school for a few days."

I can't blame her for ricking out on Cronos School because from what I'd seen the other creatures there were worse than Witchenstein.

"Was anything supposed to meet you here?" says Witchenstein.

"Steff Cayce," I say, "he drives a chainmengele."

"I saw him," says Witchenstein.

"Where?"

"It wasn't today," says Witchenstein.

Witchenstein once claimed Allan Chazin himself had created her in a lab from two metros of slime.

Witchenstein always lies.

She walks next to me as I search through the rows of mengeles and look through their glassholes.

Witchenstein stares into the glasshole of a yellow two-door mengele that has oddly patterned cloths on its fuel bubbles.

Witchenstein's crooked mouth is wet, she smacks her bent lips, and I focus my eyes through the glasshole.

Witchenstein's not interested in the mengele, she's watching two sharks fondle each other's rickers in the backseat.

"Get a good look Witchenstein?" I say.

Witchenstein gives me this ugly look that I fear is a smile and says, "We weren't all raised in the temple of Poseidon."

"I wasn't raised-"

My head falls forward so fast it feels like my chin stabs my throat and I gag on some jellyfish I had at breakfast.

"You hang out with rickers all of a sudden."

I rub my head and turn to see Steff standing behind me with a bloody chain in his hand.

"You're late Felo."

Witchenstein's green skin looks flushed like she wants to fiddle with Steff's ricker at first sight.

Steff's eyes are swirled circles; he must have gotten some Krake and dropped it already.

Steff pulls a vial from the Felo skin satchel strapped to the side of his gray armor.

"The first Chazin wins the war, " say Steff as he hands me the vial.

I unscrew the blue cap off the vial and swoosh the Krake around; its tinge is dark purple.

I tear a blade of grass from the ground, dip the tip of it into the Krake, and pull it out.

I screw the cap back on the vial and hand it to Steff.

"Pure," I say.

"Triple tapped," says Steff.

Kraken got meaner and purer every time you tapped their glands but triple tapped Krakens were the purest.

I blow on the blade of grass until I'm sure it is dry and roll it into a ball I pop it in my mouth and chew.

I feel a tickling in my rickers.

"You came through," I say.

"My mengeles out back," Steff says.

We start walking and when we come upon Steff's purple four-door chainmengele.

"You wanna hit Kalliste first?" says Steff as he slips into the driver seat.

"What about Surtsey?" I say as I get in next to him and slam the door shut.

"Surtsey and Surtsur got shut down cause some Cronos schoolers busted in and tore kids up."

"Rick!" says Witchenstein, "I didn't know that."

"Why would you?" I say.

"I think you got some rick stuck to your foot," says Steff as he sneers at Witchenstein.

"She's chaze," I say, "don't worry about it."

"Chaze?" says Steff as he pulls the Krake vial out again, "Since when are Cronos schoolers chaze? This will chaze her."

Kalliste looks the same, same posters of Allan Chazin and Meggy Troya, same types of people dancing, probably high on the same Krake.

I notice a small creature with round ears and a button nose and greenish gray fur, with a circular Atlantis blade in place of his left paw and a platinus cassetrix player installed in his belly.

I wonder if this might or might not be Braddy Ruxpo the first of Atlantis's ultimate weapons of destruction before the destructrix, before the Chazin generation.

Then I feel Witchenstein's slimy hand slip under my armor.

She squeezes my bare shoulder so I walk towards the creature and start dancing.

"Excuse me?" he says in a tinny voice.

"Braddy Ruxpo?" I say.

"Yes that is me," he says.

"You want some Krake," I say.

"It will help reset my cassetrix," he says with a grin.

I wave Steff over.

He already knows what's going on because he gives me a look and says, "We don't have any grass in here."

"We can go outside," I say.

He takes the vial out and swishes the Krake around.

"If you're gonna give it away to all these Cronos schoolers," he says, "Then you're gonna give me half the platinus it cost."

"He's not a Cronos schooler," I say even though Steff owed me the Krake and he never pays for rick.

"Deal with it," I say.

"Whatever," he says.

I follow Braddy and Steff out the door.

I see Witchenstein pushing her way through the crowd and sliming everyone.

I walk faster.

Witchenstein catches me.

"You ever date people from the Cronos School?"

She's hot from the Krake, like she's melting.

She drips slime and licks her lips.

Her pointy black helmet looks too big on her and it tilts to the side.

"What?" I say, "We're going to Mideo," even though Mideo is probably closed, and before she asks me anything else I usher her out the door.

Allan Chazin throttles his harpsichord.

He shakes his long blonde bangs until they fall over his eyes, and obscure his sensitive, good looks.

He bends towards the voicethrower and whispers, "Kill War."

The Coolers kick in with their porcelain bells and chainwheels and the whole crowd starts to chant the lyrics, "Kill war, kill death, kill hate, kill Felos."

"This is chazed out," says Soddy.

I see Critias Crantor, the biggest creature at Cronos School.

Critias looks at Soddy and kicks him in the rickers.

I feel drops splatter my face.

Soddy passes out on the dance floor with a puddle of blood pouring out his rickers.

Critias stands there and laughs to himself and points at Soddy.

I glare at Critias.

He is soaked in bright light now.

I hear Allan Chazin.

"Violence is not chaze."

Allan Chazin mans the light beam.

He's the source of Critias's glow.

Critias laughs until a dozen sharks filter through the crowd and surround him.

The sharks latch onto Critias with their fins and drag him towards Kalliste's ivory exit doors in the back.

"It's too crowded at Mideo to be kraked out."

"Yeah, what's the point," says Witchenstein.

"Your nose is the point," says Steff.

"We could watch cassetrix," says Braddy.

Steff says, "Whatever," and turns the chainmengele around.

He pulls through the corridor and back around the bend and soon I see the bright white wall of the fourth zone.

The palaces in the fourth zone are all in different shades of beige and their walls spiral into four concentric circles.

"Number fourteen," says Braddy, "over there."

Steff pulls up front and we walk into Braddy's cluttered center room.

Steff picks up a blue headband that says "Kent's Mengeles" on it in green letters and I know it has to be old because Kent didn't design mengeles anymore.

Braddy points his Atlantis blade at Steff and says, "Don't touch that, it's a mind controller."

"Are you ricking me," says Steff as he slips the headband on over his gray hair.

Steff looks at me, I feel an ache in my arms, and my left hand moves down to the front skirt of my armor and pulls it up.

My right hand grabs my rickers and starts to fondle them.

"Stop it," says Witchenstein and she smacks the headband off Steff's head.

Steff turns bright red and says, "Tell this Cronos schooler to stop ricking around Shliemann."

My arms still hurt and I push Steff against a row of scrolls.
He falls into them.

"Watch it rickers," says Braddy.

I watch Steff get up from the floor and as he does, he slips the blue headband under his armor.

Braddy doesn't seem to notice and he waves his paw across a shelf full of dusty cassetrix.

I scan them.

All Allan Chazins.

I pull one out I'd never heard of called "A Reversal Of Valor" and read the description on the back: "a surreal alternate history in which Allan Chazin portrays himself in a version of the second Chazin war in which he betrays Atlantis and joins the Felos to destroy the city of Poseidopolis."

"His best work," says Braddy Ruxpo and I watch as the cassetrix player in his belly slides open.

I place the cassetrix into Braddy and watch the casset beams shoot from his eyes and project an image around the wall of the room in a circle broken only at the doorway.

The cassetrix opens with Allan Chazin standing before the gate to the fourth zone of Poseidopolis speaking with Cronos the king of Atlantis, played by Meggy Grady Troya, in all his black haired glory.

"You must let us join the battle Allan," says Cronos.

"You will join the battle Cronos," says Allan Chazin as he chops his silver axe through the bars of the gate and Cronos falls apart in two pieces, "You'll join it in pieces."

Braddy gathers up a pile of scrolls between his furry arms and drops them on the floor.

I see that he has uncovered a chaze lounger and go to sit on it.

Witchenstein sits down next to me.

I focus on the casset beam.

As the cassetrix goes on Allan Chazin consistently outdoes himself as an evil version of himself, a person who hates Atlantis, loves dolphins, hates krake, can't play an instrument.

It was everything the true Allan Chazin despised.

Steff rummages through a copper box with the year 874 engraved in it.

Steff pulls a strange device out of the box and says, "Futurix? What's a Futurix?"

"Just because you gave me krake doesn't mean you can dig through all my stuff," says Braddy without turning his head or interrupting the casset beam.

His anger seems to affect the sound quality though because I can see Meggy Troya's lips move but I can't hear any words.

Steff shakes the futurix around and I see a blurry zigzag light beam shoot out from it about twenty metros wide.

The futurix beam cuts through the casset beam, splits Allan Chazin into two diagonal halves for a metrino before the futurix beam becomes solid and black.

The casset beam bounces back into Braddy's eyes.

He collapses.

This small yellow dot appears in the center of the blackness and slowly grows until I can see that it's a small device with a square glasshole in it and a long silver rod extending from it.

The glasshole on it has strange people behind it and I see a girl in soft blue armor throw a pot of water all over this ugly green skinned lady who looks strikingly similar to Witchenstein.

"I'm melting, I'm melting," says the Witchenstein lady and Steff grabs the yellow device and pulls it from the blackness and the people behind the small square glasshole disappear.

"Sony?" says Steff when he looks at the device.

"Its from the future you ricker," says Braddy.

"They have the same letters in the future?" says Steff.

"I don't know just stop ricking with my stuff," says Braddy.

"This Sony thing's not working now," says Steff.

Braddy grabs the futurix from Steff and turns the black beam off.

"Future things don't work outside the futurix beam," says Braddy.

"This is boring," says Steff, "I might check out Club Felo."

"Go," I say, "I wanna watch this cassetrix."

"Yeah," says Witchenstein, "we can walk home from here, my lab is in the fifth zone."

"I can't stay with you," I say.

"It's chaze," says Steff, "I'll stay but can we reset this cassetrix at least?"

Steff sits on the floor by my feet and Braddy opens his eyes and restarts the cassetrix.

I feel Witchenstein tap the back of my hand.

"What?" I say.

Witchenstein gives me big Kraken eyes and says, "Here I made it for you from my sliminess," and hands me a small green sculpture that looks like Allan Chazin wearing an eyepatch like in "A Reversal of Valor".

I eye the figure carefully between my two fingers but its greasy and almost slips.

Witchenstein's odd talent impresses me.

The figure is quite accurate.

"Thank you," I say.

"What?" says Steff.

He puts his hand behind him and snatches the figure from me.

He smushes it around in his fingers.

"Sticky," he says.

"Sorry about that," says Witchenstein, "It's not done drying."

Steff takes the figure and puts it on the floor next to his foot; he squashes it with his gold foot armor.

"Hey," says Steff, "didn't that ugly, melting lady on the Sony thing look just like Witchenstein?"

Club Felo looks like a Felo's head.

The eyes are actually big glassholes behind which lay balconies that overlook the floor of the club.

Club Felo is all right for one thing as far as I'm concerned: Felo abasers.

Felo abasers are small, golden, two tiered tables on wheels and on top of each of these tables, a live Felo is mounted by its four paws with hot liquid orichalc.

Some Felos die during the mounting process purely from the shock of pain as the orichalc works its way through the fur and claws and melts the bones of their paws into the gold.

The ones that live roll perpetually back and forth across the slanted rotating floor until they starve or some Club Felo dancer gets kraked and snaps their head off.

Steff runs his finger back and forth across a Felo's back and pulled on its tail making it scream, "Meyahrl."

He slips the mind-control headband on.

Braddy Ruxpo gives him a dirty look but goes back to dancing with Witchenstein.

She's kraked out because she turns to me and says in her raspy lisp that a Felo had never attacked her because they found her sliminess repulsive.

"Nobody gets attacked by Felos anymore," I said, "not since Allan Chazin created the destructrix."

"They don't even approach me," she said.

"They don't approach anyone," I said.

"Even the ones on the abasers..."

I slip into the crowd to leave Witchenstein's ricked high to its own pit of sliminess.

I didn't want Witchenstein to ruin my own high but just the idea that it could be ruined ruined it and for some reason I think of Soddy Donnelly.

Then I know the reason.

He used to spit on Witchenstein.

I find Steff with the Felo abasers and stand here and watch him trade dirty looks with Braddy over the ricky Kent's Mengeles mind-control band.

"Why are you wearing that?" I say.

"I'm just chazed out my friend," says Steff with his Allan Chazin smile, "isn't that Neith Dropides?"

I look at the guy dancing by himself; he's short and fat.

He's dressed in worn out armor.

The armor is painted with black and white pigments in a crudely lain out Felo fur pattern.

His hair is white streaked with black and it flops over his ears.

His nose is big and crooked and I say, "Yeah I think it is Neith Dropides."

"Hey Neith," says Steff and Neith notices him and comes right over.

"Y'know," says Neith in his deeply nasal voice.

"I know," says Steff, "I know," and he sees me and winks at me.

"Y'know my ex girlfriend from second zone y'know?" says Neith.

"I'm from fourth zone," says Steff.

"Second zoners kind of get ricked out by the other zones y'know," says Neith.

"I thought you were from the Cronos zone," says Steff.

"Cronos School," says Neith, "not zone."

I'm reminded of the time a couple of years back when Neith was telling us some ricky method of fondling a girl's rickers.

"You bend your finger out like a hook see and you feel around y'know the bend for something, that's kind of like a button y'know," said Neith.

He held his two dirty yellow fingers out in a curl that resembled a Felo claw.

"I made my girlfriend squirt six feet across the room," said Neith.

"Girls don't squirt," said Steff.

"Shliemann are you chaze?" says Steff.

Sometimes with Krake I get lost in memories, now I see Steff laughing and his mind control headband glows bright as yellow.

Neith Dropides stands behind a Felo abaser with his armor removed and his ricker is as stiff as the orichalc pillar that the laws of Poseidon are inscribed upon.

Neith presses his ricker against the Felo's rickhole and as he exerts more force the Felo howls, "Meowharl, meowharl."

The shiny skin around the head of Neith's ricker gets tighter and stretched to the brink as he just keeps pushing it harder and harder against the unyielding rickhole.

He pushes with a sudden thrust that causes smoke to spew from Steff's head band, the elastic flesh of the Felo's rickhole snaps along with the skin of Neith's ricker which peels down from the head like the skin of a sharkfruit.

"Something terrible happened," said Mr. Samarian, "something we can't hide from."

There is no sound, but I see Allan Chazin, my favorite singer, my favorite actor, I got all my armor made of red gold just to be like him, I'm an expert on the second Chazin war, and I visit the collapsed part of the fifth wall everyday.

There is no sound but Soddy Donnelly swears he can read Allan Chazin's lips through the cassetrix projection and that he is definitely singing "Warbreaker".

A glittery axe splits Allan Chazin into two halves.

My throat gets tight.

"What is this Mr. Samarian?"

"I'm sorry Shliemann," he says.

But it's a joke.

"I'm sorry Shliemann," says Soddy Donnelly, "I'm sorry."

The cassetrix respools.

I watch Allan Chazin and its not "Warbreaker" he's singing, it's "Love's War".

I close my eyes and try to hear his voice.

I won't cry until I hear his voice.

Steff looks cozy passed out in the fur that lines the floor of Braddy's center room and I hope to join him soon as I'm so kraked.

Witchenstein insisted that we take Neith to the temple of Poseidon to be healed but Steff refused and dosed her with some more krake to shut her up.

We left Club Felo and decided to crash at Braddy's place except for Witchenstein who should probably walk home.

I pick up a casset and notice Witchenstein stretched out and looking much too comfortable on Braddy's chaze lounger.

I can barely keep my eyes open but I read the blurry letters on the cassetrix labeled "Chazin's Way", the description on the back says it's about "this guy named Jackie who gets blackmailed by these dolphins into murdering Allan Chazin but Allan turns it around on them by hunting the dolphins and murdering them systematically."

This cassetrix looks like the chazest cassetrix ever and I'd stay awake for it if Witchenstein wasn't here to ruin it.

It's a struggle at this moment not to throttle her slimy green neck or something else and I look at the round Atlantis blade on Braddy's left arm.

"Can I play Chazin's Way?"

"After this," says Braddy as casset beams shoot from his eyes, "It takes a few metros."

I sit on the edge of the chaze lounger and watch the casset beam as a series of odd letters flash by and I feel Witchenstein's warm breathe on my neck and her moist lips touch my shoulder and send a tingle down my back.

"I've focused my love on you Shliemann."

"You're just kraked," I say as I jump off the chaze lounger.

"Maybe you should do some more," I say as I pull the vial out from Steff's armor.

I see Allan Chazin all around me on the walls, I hear him singing "Love's War", and it's cut off, split.

"Chaze," says Braddy, "it's the assassination."

I close my eyes.

"Are you chaze?" says Witchenstein.

I think of this random speech that Allan Chazin made in "A Reversal of Valor" about the king of the Felos and imagine myself speaking to all the filthy Felos about Allan Chazin in that same manner.

"Sharks are not their deaths," I say, "People might be, a Felo might claw them up and that's all they'll ever be, some person who got clawed up. Not Allan Chazin, all that matters is how he lived."

Witchenstein claps.

I unscrew the vial of krake and throw it all over her ugly, crooked face.

Green slime runs down from her head.

Her disgusting mouth collapses in on itself.

Witchenstein splashes on the floor.

She's an oily, green puddle of slime.

Jericho's Precinct

2005-12-15T09:32:00.000-08:00

In Eternia was Jericho's job to enforce people's taste to prevent them from become lame and cheesy like Skeletor and Snake Mountain's finest henchmen such as Beast Man and Tri Clops.

Now I do same job on Earth...

JERICHO SMASHES "DERAILED"

Jericho the destroyer and cronar saw movie called Derailed.

This movie had Jeniffer Aniston and Clive Owen and RZA and Xzibit and Vincent Cassell in it.

Cronar much enjoyed this movie and so did I.

This movie smashed and destroyed all my previous impressions of Jennifer Aniston.

She does good job in her role.

Clive Owen always is good in movies.

Derailed is no exception, Cronar thinks Clive Owen destroyed his part and destroyed other actors that are trying to destroy him with this performance.

Jericho never saw RZA in a movie before but he had enjoyed listening to his music while smashing and destroying villages and dragonmonsters.

Cronar is also a fan of RZA's music.

As an actor RZA smashed his part and gave a touching performance that leads to one of the most disturbing scenes Jericho has seen in a long time.

A sad scene that pummeled Jericho's heart the way the club of Jericho had pummeled and smashed and destroyed many a dragonmonster.

Vincent Cassell was mean and bad and creepy and he made both me and Cronar want to smash the screen everytime he came on.

Jeniffer aniston has nice legs in this movie and even thought Jericho was bored for the first 15 minutes once this movie gets going it is much like its title.

Jericho means that this movie is like a train that starts off on a track like normal and then it gets derailed and it is suspenseful.

Xzibit's part is small and didn't smash across anything that much but he made Cronar fearful at some points.

Jericho would see Derailed again and smash anyone who thinks this isn't a good movie.

JERICHO DESTROYS "BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY"

Jericho rented this movie with Michael J. Fox and Phoebe Cates and Kiefer Sutherland and Tracy Pollan in it.

I never read book this movie was made from that was called Bright Lights, Big City.

Book was written by same man who wrote novel.

this man is called Jay Mcinerny.

Jericho has not ever read this book but has heard spoken of that it was written all in second person.

Maybe only good example of story written in second person outside of famous short story by Orosco called "Orientation" that is Cronar's favorite.

In memory of this book Jericho has decided to smash first and third person and write this review in second.

You are watch movie.

You are listen to crappy techno music.

You are see Michael J. Fox in club in place that is supposed to be manhattan but looks like LA.

You are see Kiefer sutherland.

You see Michael J. Fox give good performance that Jericho enjoys very much.

You feel same as Jericho does though, you feel that performance is wasted on wimpy script and stupid boring Kiefer Sutherland.

You see Michael J. Fox cry and look at mannequin of phoebe cates.

You see his flashback to when they were married but now you and him are all alone and you feel sad and you feel like you want to smash and destroy your tears.

You see Michael J. Fox flashback to scenes with his mother played by Diane Wiest who was in that movie little man tate was that Jericho like so much.

You see her get sick and die and Michael J. Fox is sad and trades this baker his 80's sunglasses for a piece of bread and after his nose bleeds to smashed pieces of noseflesh he doesn't give a destroyer's chance about Phoebe Cates and Kiefer Sutherland anymore.

You think about the coma baby in the movie.

This weird baby inside a bubble in this lady's womb.

You think about Jericho thinking about being in a womb.

Or the time you saw Jericho shrink down to womb size to fight the miniature devil.

Michael J. Fox is like the coma baby because the cocaine he does is like the rotting womb he doesn't want to leave.

Listen clip of Jericho sing personal song called "Don't Cry Now(Destroyer)":

A Chronology Of Secret Societies by Apache Cowboy

2005-12-14T14:38:00.000-08:00

40,000 BC
Early establishment of Mystery schools, as depicted in the Lascaux cave paintings.

30,000 BC
According to some occult traditions this period saw the colonization of Asia and Australasia by the inhabitants of the lost continent of Lemuria or Mu.

Goddess worship and matriaarchal cultures established worldwide.

10,000 BC
Evidence suggestive of early contact between extraterrestials and Stone Age tribes in Tibet.

9,000 - 8,000 BC
Estimated date of the destruction of Atlantis, according to some occult traditions.

The Atlantean priesthood flee to establish colonies in the British Isles, Western Europe, North Africa and South America.

Rise of the Northern Mystery Tradition centered on the island of Thule and the Aryan culture.

Invention of the runic alphabet.

5,000 BC
First primitive cities established in the Middle East. Agriculture begins with domestication of animals such as sheep and goats.

Possible contact between extraterrestials and early Sumerian culture.

5,000 - 3,000 BC
Formation of the two lands in pre-dynastic Egypt ruled by outsiders (Isis and Osiris).

The Egyptian pantheon of gods established including Horus, Thoth, Set, Ra, Ptah and Hathor.

Pharoahs regarded as the divine representatives of the Gods.

3,000 - 2,000 BC
Building of burial mounds and chambered tombs in Western Europe and the Mediterranean area; the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids of Giza and Cheops of Egypt; and the ziggurat (Towers of Babel) in Ur.

Sarmoung Brotherhood founded in Babylon.

2,000 - 1,000 BC
Reign of Thothmes III in Egypt (c. 1480).

Foundation of the Rosicrucian Order.

Reign of Akhenaton (c. 1370) who establishes the mystical Brotherhood of Aton dedicated to the worship of the Sun as a symbol of the Supreme Creator.

Erection of Stonehenge and other megalithic stone circles in the British Isles.

Reign of Ankhenaton's son Tutankhamun who re-establishes the old pantheon of Egyptian gods and goddesses.

Moses leads Children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt during the reign of Ramses II to the promised land of Canaan.

1,000 - 500 BC

Foundation of the Dionysian Artificers.

The building of Solomon's temple (c. 950). Establishment of the city states of Greece and the Olympic pantheon of gods to replace earlier Nature worship.

First temples erected in Mexico, Peru and southwest North America.

Celts invade Western Europe.

Decline of Goddess worship and rise of patriarchal sky gods personified by priest-kings.

Rome founded in 750.

500 BC - 001

Celtic culture established in Britain.

The foundation of Druidic wisdom colleges in Gaul and the British Isles.

Odin recognized as major god in the Northern Mysteries replacing the Mother Goddess and is credited with inventing the runes.

Buddha, Lao Tze, Confucius, Pythagoras, Plato and Zoroaster preach their new religions and philosophies.

Maya culture in South America.

Establishment of Eleusinian mystery cults.

Rise of the Essene sect in Palestine and Judea.

Birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

001 - 400

Jesus possibly travels to India, Tibet and Britain to be initiated into the esoteric traditions of East and West.

Crucified for his radical political and religious ideas (c. 33).

Joseph of Arimanthea establishes first Celtic Church at Glastonbury (c. 37).

Invasion of Britain by Roman legions and suppression of the Druids (40 - 60).

Paul travels to Asia Minor and Greece preaching his version of the gospel (50).

Jewish revolt against Roman rule led by Zealots (66).

Essenes suppressed and Dead Sea Scrolls hidden in caves.

Temple in Jerusalem destroyed by Romans (70).

New testament written.

The Nazarenes break away from Judasim to found the Christian Church (c. 80).

Ormus is converted to Esoteric Christianity by Mark.

Mithrasim and the Mysteries of Isis compete with Christianity in the Roman Empire.

Mani, a Persian high priest of Zoroastrianism, is crucified (276).

Emperor Constantine declares Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The Council of Nicea defines heresy, condemns paganism and lays the theological foundation for the Catholic or Universal Church (325).

Constantine's successor Julian the Apostate (361 - 363) briefly reestablishes the pagan old religion.

Emperor Theodosius outlaws the worship of the pagan gods in Rome and closes the pagan temples (378).

Invasion of Rome, Greece and Europe by the barbarians led by Atilla the Hun (395-480).

Withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain (395).

Foundation of the Order of Comacine by ex-members of the Roman College of Architects.

500 - 1,000
Mohammed founds Islam (dies 632).

Celtic Church outlawed by Council of Whitby (664).

Foundation of first Sufi secret societies (c. 700).

First written translation of Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus.

Charlemagne founds alleged first Rosicrucian Lodge in Toulouse (898).

Foundation of the Cathars, Druzes and Yezedi (900).

Heretical Catholic monks found first Rosicrucian college (1,000).

1000 - 1400

Foundation of the Order of the Devoted of Assassins by Hasan-i-Sabbah (1034-1124) and the Order of St John (1050).

First Crusade to the Holy Land (1095).

Capture of the city of Jerusalem by Godfrey de Bouillan, founder of the Priory of Sion (1099).

Assassins infiltrate Thuggee cult in India.

Foundation of the Order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem (1118).

Charter granted to the Priory of Sion by Pope Alexander II (1178).

Crusade launched against Cathars (1208).

Inquistion created to fight heresy (1215).

Massacre of the Cathars at Montsegur in Southern France (1241).

Troubadours practicing their cult of courtly love.

Occult schools teaching the Cabbala and alchemy established in Spain by the Moors.

Count Rudolf von Hapsburg crowned as Holy Roman Emperor (1273).

Knights Templars arrested by King Philip of France on charges of devil worship, heresy and sexual perversion (1307).

Last official Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, burnt at the stake and the Order goes underground (1314).

1400 - 1600

Alleged life of Christian Rosenkreutz (1379-1482).

Foundation of the Order of the Garter by Edward III (1348).

First publication of the Corpus Heremeticum by the Medici family in Italy (1460).

Publication of Malleus Malifiracum and the papal bull of Pope Innocent which began the medieval witch hunting hysteria (1484 and 1486).

Martin Luther begins Reformation (1521).

Henry Agrippa refers to the Templars as Gnostics and worshippers of the phallic god Priapus (1530).

Life of Dr John Dee (1527-1608).

Foundation of the British Secret Service by Sir Francis Walsingham.

Birth of Johann Valenti Andrea (1586).

Life of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626).

Defeat of the Spanish Armada, with magical help from the New Forest Witches (1588).

1600 - 1700

Foundation of the Virginia Company by James I (1606).

The Romanovs become Czars of Russia (1613).

Publication of Rosicrucian manifesto (1614).

Life of Elias Ashmole (1617-1692).

Voyage of the Mayflower to New England and the publication of Sir Francis Bacon's novel The New Atlantis (1620).

Establishment of the pagan community of Merrymount in Massachusetts by Thomas Morton.

English Civil War begins (1642).

First English Mason guild accepts non-stonemasons into its meetings (c. 1646).

Charles I convicted of treason and beheaded (1649).

Oliver Cromwell allegedly makes pact with the Devil in order to retain power.

Introduction of Freemasonry to American colonies by Dutch settlers (1658).

Order of Pietists founded in Pennsylvania (1694).

1700 - 1800

Birth of the Comte de Saint-Germain (1710).

Masonic Grand Lodge of England and Druid Order founded (1717).

First Masonic lodge founded in France (1721).

Benjamin Franklin initiated as Mason (1731).

Chevalier Alexander Ramsey informs French Masons that they are heirs to the Templar tradition (1736).

Roman Church condemns Masonry (1738).

Birth of Count Cagliostro.

Comte de Saint-Germain involved in Jacobite plot to restore Stuart dynasty to the English Throne (1743).

Society of Flagellants and Skopski founded in Russia (1750).

George Washington initiated as a Mason (1752).

Sir Francis Dashwood founds the Hell Fire Club.

Franklin visits England to discuss the future of American colonies with Dashwood (1758).

Foundation of the Rite of the Strict Observance by Baron von Hund based on the Templar tradition.

Frederick of Prussia founds Order of the Architects of Africa and uses the title Illuminati to describe his neo-Masonic lodges (1768).

Franklin elected Grand Master of the Nine Sisters lodge in Paris (1770).

Grand Orient founded in France (1771).

Boston Tea Party (1773).

Washington appointed Commander-in-Chief of the new American Army (1775).

Order of Perfectibilists or Illuminati founded.

American Revolution (1776).

Czar Peter founds the Secret Circle (1778).

Supposed death of the Comte Saint-Germain (1784).

Grand Masonic Congress allegedly plots French Revolution.

Cagliostro involved in Diamond Necklace Affair.

Illuminati banned in Bavaria and goes underground (1785).

French Revolution (1789).

Illuminist conspiracy to overthrow the Hapsburgs (1794).

1800 - 1900

Count Grabinka founds secret society in St. Petersburg based on Martinism and Rosicrucianism (1803).

French republican plot to assassinate Napoleon by placing a bomb under his coach, led by occultist Fabre d'Olivet.

Emperor Napoleon takes control of French Masonry (1805).

Revived Templar Order in France celebrates the martyrdom of Jacques de Molay with public requiem (1808).

Foundation of the Order of Sublime Perfects (1809).

Eliphas Levi (1810-1875) reveals the secret symbolism of the Templar idol Baphomet.

Czar Alexander I and Emperor Francis von Hapsburg unite to defeat Italian revolution incited by secret societies.

John Quincy Adams, initiate of the Dragon Society, is elected US President (1820).

Czar Alexander outlaws Masonry in Russia (1822).

Decembrist secret society attempts coup when Czar Alexander allegedly dies (1825).

AntiMasonic Party founded in US to combat secret societies in American politics (1828).

Wagner joins the Vaterlandsverein, a secret society dedicated to the formation of a pan-European federation of nations.

Masonic convention at Strasbourg allegedly plots second French Revolution (1848).

Napoleon III condemns Grand Orient for dabbling in radical politics (1850).

Paschal Randolph founds Hermetic Brotherhood of the Light (1858).

Abraham Lincoln is assassinated (1865).

Klu Klux Klan founded (1866).

Society of Rosicrucians in Anglia founded (1867).

Foundation of the Theosophical Society by Madame Blavasky on instructions of the Great White Brotherhood.

Birth of Aleister Crowley (1875).

Mysterious suicide of ArchDuke Rudolph von Hapsburg at a hunting lodge at Mayerling (1889).

Foundation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888).

Assassination of Empress Elizabeth von Hapsburg by anarchist (1898).

1900 - 1984

Foundation of the Ordo Templi Orientis (1900).

International Order of CoFreemasonry founded in 1902.

Publication of The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion in Russia (1905).

Foundation of the Ancient and Mystical Order of the Rose Crucis (1909).

Black Hand Society founded in 1911.

Aleister Crowley accepted as head of the British OTO.

Order of the Temple of the Rosy Cross founded in 1912.

Assassination of ArchDuke Franz Ferdinand and Archduchess Sophia von Hapsberg.

Attempted murder of Rasputin.

WWI begins in 1914.

Kaiser Wilhelm abdicates.

Hapsburg dynasty is overthrown.

Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917-1918).

Foundation of German Workers Party by Thule Society (1919).

Hitler joins GWP and changes its name to the National Socialist Party (1920).

Crowley employed by MI6.

Cardinal Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, allegedly joins Rosicrucian Order.

Hitler becomes first chancellor of the Third Reich (1933).

Roosevelt places Illuminist symbol of eye in triangle on the dollar bill (1935).

Nazi invasion of England prevented by New Forest Witches (1940).

Rudolf Hess lured to Britain on peace mission by fake astrological data (1941).

Order of the Temple revived in France (1952).

First Bilderberg meeting in 1954. Foundation of the P2 Lodge (1960).

Death of Pope Paul VI, election and alleged murder of Pope John Paul I, and election of Pope John Paul II (1978).

Exposure of P2 conspiracy.

Attempt to assassinate John Paul II (1981).

L'Ordre Internationale Chevelresque Tradition Solaire founded on instructions of the revived Order of the Temple in France
(1984).

Pulp Fiction Master Plot by Lester Dent

2005-12-11T20:02:00.000-08:00

This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story.

It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air.

It tells exactly where to put everything.

It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words.

No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell.

The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.

Here’s how it starts:

1. A DIFFERENT MURDER METHOD FOR VILLAIN TO USE

2. A DIFFERENT THING FOR VILLAIN TO BE SEEKING

3. A DIFFERENT LOCALE

4. A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER HERO

One of these DIFFERENT things would be nice, two better, three swell.

It may help if they are fully in mind before tackling the rest.

A different murder method could be—different.

Thinking of shooting, knifing, hydrocyanic, garroting, poison needles, scorpions, a few others, and writing them on paper gets them where they may suggest something.

Scorpions and their poison bite? Maybe mosquitos or flies treated with deadly germs?

If the victims are killed by ordinary methods, but found under strange and identical circumstances each time, it might serve, the reader of course not knowing until the end, that the method of murder is ordinary.

Scribes who have their villain’s victims found with butterflies, spiders or bats stamped on them could conceivably be flirting with this gag.

Probably it won’t do a lot of good to be too odd, fanciful or grotesque with murder methods.

The different thing for the villain to be after might be something other than jewels, the stolen bank loot, the pearls, or some other old ones.

Here, again one might get too bizarre.

Unique locale? Easy.

Selecting one that fits in with the murder method and the treasure—thing that villain wants—makes it simpler, and it’s also nice to use a familiar one, a place where you’ve lived or worked.

So many pulpateers don’t.

It sometimes saves embarrassment to know nearly as much about the locale as the editor, or enough to fool him.

Here’s a nifty much used in faking local color.

For a story laid in Egypt, say, author finds a book titled “Conversational Egyptian Easily Learned,” or something like that.

He wants a character to ask in Egyptian, “What’s the matter?”

He looks in the bookand finds, “El khabar?”

To keep the reader from getting dizzy, it’s perhaps wise to make it clear in some fashion, just what that means.

Occasionally the text will tell this, or someone can repeat it in English.

But it’s a doubtful move to stop and tell the reader in so many words the English translation.

The writer learns theyhave palm trees in Egypt.

He looks in the book, finds the Egyptian for palm trees, and uses that.

This kids editors and readers into thinking he knows something about Egypt.

Here’s the second installment of the master plot.

Divide the 6000 word yarn into four 1500 word parts.

In each 1500 word part, put the following:

FIRST 1500 WORDS

1. First line, or as near thereto as possible, introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble. Hint at a mystery, a menace or a problem to be solved—something the hero has to cope with.

2. The hero pitches in to cope with his fistful of trouble. (He tries to fathom the mystery, defeat the menace, or solve the problem.)

3. Introduce ALL the other characters as soon as possible. Bring them on in action.

4. Hero’s endevours land him in an actual physical conflict near the end of the first 1500 words.

5. Near the end of first 1500 words, there is a complete surprise twist in the plot development.

SO FAR:

• Does it have SUSPENSE?

• Is there a MENACE to the hero?

• Does everything happen logically?

At this point, it might help to recall that action should do something besides advance the hero over the scenery.

Suppose the hero has learned the dastards of villains have seized somebody named Eloise, who can explain the secret of what is behind all these sinister events.

The hero corners villains, they fight, and villains get away. Not so hot.

Hero should accomplish something with his tearing around, if only to rescue Eloise, and surprise! Eloise is a ring-tailed monkey.

The hero counts the rings on Eloise’s tail, if nothing better comes to mind.

They’re not real.

The rings are painted there. Why?

SECOND 1500 WORDS

1. Shovel more grief onto the hero.

2. Hero, being heroic, struggles, and his struggles lead up to:

3. Another physical conflict.

4. A surprising plot twist to end the 1500 words.

NOW:

• Does second part have SUSPENSE?

• Does the MENACE grow like a black cloud?

• Is the hero getting it in the neck?

• Is the second part logical?

DON’T TELL ABOUT IT!!! Show how the thing looked. This is one of the secrets of writing; never tell the reader—show him. (He trembles, roving eyes, slackened jaw, and such.)

MAKE THE READER SEE HIM.

When writing, it helps to get at least one minor surprise to the printed page.

It is reasonable to to expect these minor surprises to sort of inveigle the reader into keeping on.

They need not be such profound efforts.

One method of accomplishing one now and then is to be gently misleading.

Hero is examining the murder room.

The door behind him begins slowly to open.

He does not see it.

He conducts his examination blissfully.

Door eases open, wider and wider, until—surprise!

The glass pane falls out of the big window across the room.

It must have fallen slowly, and air blowing into the room caused the door to open.

Then what the heck made the pane fall so slowly? More mystery.

Characterizing a story actor consists of giving him some things which make him stick in the reader’s mind.

TAG HIM.

BUILD YOUR PLOTS SO THAT ACTION CAN BE CONTINUOUS.

THIRD 1500 WORDS

1. Shovel the grief onto the hero.

2. Hero makes some headway, and corners the villain or somebody in:

3. A physical conflict.

4. A surprising plot twist, in which the hero preferably gets it in the neck bad, to end the 1500 words.

DOES:

• It still have SUSPENSE?

• The MENACE getting blacker?

• The hero finds himself in a hell of a fix?

• It all happens logically?

These outlines or master formulas are only something to make you certain of inserting some physical conflict, and some genuine plot twists, with a little suspense and menace thrown in.

Without them, there is no pulp story.

These physical conflicts in each part might be DIFFERENT, too.

If one fight is with fists, that can take care of the pugilism until next the next yarn.

Same for poison gas and swords.

There may, naturally, be exceptions.

A hero with a peculiar punch, or a quick draw, might use it more than once.

The idea is to avoid monotony.

• ACTION: Vivid, swift, no words wasted. Create suspense, make the reader see and feel the action.

• ATMOSPHERE: Hear, smell, see, feel and taste.

• DESCRIPTION: Trees, wind, scenery and water.

THE SECRET OF ALL WRITING IS TO MAKE EVERY WORD COUNT.

FOURTH 1500 WORDS

1. Shovel the difficulties more thickly upon the hero.

2. Get the hero almost buried in his troubles. (Figuratively, the villain has him prisoner and has him framed for a murder rap; the girl is presumably dead, everything is lost, and the DIFFERENT murder method is about to dispose of the suffering protagonist.)

3. The hero extricates himself using HIS OWN SKILL, training or brawn.

4. The mysteries remaining—one big one held over to this point will help grip interest—are cleared up in course of final conflict as hero takes the situation in hand.

5. Final twist, a big surprise, (This can be the villain turning out to be the unexpected person, having the “Treasure” be a dud,
etc.)

6. The snapper, the punch line to end it.

HAS:

• The SUSPENSE held out to the last line?

• The MENACE held out to the last?

• Everything been explained?

• It all happen logically?

• Is the Punch Line enough to leave the reader with that WARM FEELING?

• Did God kill the villain? Or the hero?

Lester Dent (1905–1959) was a rancher, business man, pilot, and treasure hunter, but he will be forever remembered for a writing career which spanned 30 years.

His works appeared in magazines, pulps and paperbacks, and on television and the radio.

But it was under the name of Kenneth Robeson that he wrote the 43 Doc Savage novels for which he is most renowned.

Monkey Think, Monkey Do by Chuck Palahniuk

2005-12-11T15:38:00.000-08:00

This summer a young man pulled me aside in a bookstore and said he loved how in "Fight Club" I wrote about waiters tainting food.

He asked me to sign a book and said he worked in a five-star restaurant where they monkey with celebrity food all the
time.

"Margaret Thatcher," he said, "has eaten my sperm."

He held up one hand, fingers spread, and said, "At least five times."

Writing that book, I knew a movie projectionist who collected single frames from porno movies and made them into slides.

When I talked to people about cutting these frames into G-rated family movies, one friend said, "Don't. People will read
that, and they'll start doing it."

Later, when they were shooting the Fight Club movie, some Hollywood big names told me the book hit home because they, themselves, had spliced porno into movies as angry teenage projectionists.

People told me about blowing their noses into hamburgers.

They told me about changing the bottles of hair dye from box to box in the drug store, blonde into black et cetera, and coming back to see angry wild-dyed people screaming at the store manager.

This was the decade of transgressional novels, starting early with American Psycho and continuing with Trainspotting and Fight Club. These were novels about bored bad boys who'd try anything to feel alive.

Everything people told me, I could sell.

On every book tour, people told me how each time they sat in the emergency exit row on an airplane, the whole flight was a struggle not to pop that door open.

The air sucked out of the plane, the oxygen masks falling, the screaming chaos and "Mayday, Mayday!" emergency landing, it was all so clear.

The door, so begging to be opened.

The Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, defines dread as the knowledge of what you must do to prove you're free, even if it will destroy you.

His example is Adam in the Garden of Eden, happy and content until God shows him the Tree of Knowledge and says, "Don't eat this."

Now, Adam is no longer free.

Thee is one rule he can break, he must break to prove his freedom, even if it destroys him. Kierkegaard says the moment we are forbidden to do something, we will do it. It is inevitable.

Monkey think, monkey do.

According to Kierkegaard, the person who allows the law to control his life, who says the possible isn't possible just because it's illegal, is leading the inauthentic
life.

In Portland, Oregon, where I live, someone is filling tennis balls with hundreds of match heads and taping them shut.

They leave the balls on the street for anyone to find, and any kick or throw will make them explode. So far, a man's lost a foot, a dog, its head.

Now the graffiti taggers are using acid glass-etching creams to write on shop and car windows.

At Tigard High School, a teenage boy takes his shit and wipes it around the walls of the men's bathrooms.

The school knows him only as "The Una-Pooper."

Nobody's supposed to talk about him because they're afraid of copycats.

As Kierkegaard would say, every time we see what's possible, we make it happen.

We make it inevitable. Until Stephen King wrote about high school losers killing their peer groups, school shootings were unknown.

But did Carrie and Rage make it inevitable?

Millions of us paid money to watch the Empire State Building destroyed in Independence Day.

Now the Department of Defense has enrolled the best Hollywood creative people to brainstorm terrorist scenarios, including director David Fincher, the man who made the Century City skyline collapse in Fight Club.

We want to know every way we might be attacked.

So we can be prepared.

Because of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, you can't mail a package without going to a post office clerk. Because of people dropping bowling balls onto freeways, we have fences enclosing highway overpasses.

All of this, reactive.

As if we can protect ourselves against everything.

This summer the man convicted of killing my father said, hey, the state could give him the death penalty, but he and his white supremacist friends had built and buried several anthrax bombs around Spokane, Washington. If the state killed him,
someday a backhoe would rupture a buried bomb and tens of thousands would die.

What's coming is a million new reasons not to live your life.

You can deny your possibility to success and blame it on something else.

You can fight against everything-Margaret Thatcher, property owners, the urge to open that door mid-flight, God... everything you pretend keeps you down.

You can live Kierkegaard's inauthentic life.

Or you can make what Kierkegaard called your Leap of Faith, where you stop living as a reaction and start living as a force for what you say should be.

What's coming is a million new reasons to go ahead.

What's going out is the cathartic transgressional novel, now that we have someone to hate more than each other.

I Love Kathryn

2005-12-11T12:30:00.000-08:00

I love my wife Kathryn a lot so I am posting this here as a tribute to her.

In this picture she is holding my rare "dwarf cat" Caril-Ann. She is only one of six genuine dwarf cats verified by the Feline Breed Counsel of Detroit.

Matt McCord Presents "The Final Problem" by Arthur Conan Doyle

2005-07-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

This is Matt McCord reporting to you straight from the Down Syndrome underground. Yo, I'm a fugitive from the fuzz because they think I threw a grenade inside some building that does facial reconstruction on Down Syndrome kids and for raping Rosie O'Donnell for mocking mentally disabled people in "Riding the Bus with my Sister". So anyway yo, the Double M is pretty exhausted from having to travel through that old underground railroad the slaves used to do I mean I went all the way under the ocean and I'm in fucking London trying to prove to Scotland Yard that Jack the Ripper and the Yorkshire Ripper were the same person, I mean yo, their MO's are identical for the most part so here's my boy A. Conan D. with the death of Sherlock "John Holmes" Holmes as told by Dr. Watson. (Yo check it: Contrary to popular belief this is the only Holmes story that features the evil Prof. Moriarty)

The Final Problem
by Arthur Conan Doyle

It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the
last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by
which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished. In an
incoherent and. as I deeply feel, an entirely inadequate fashion, I
have endeavoured to give some account of my strange experiences
in his company from the chance which first brought us together
at the period of the "Study in Scarlet," up to the time of his
interference in the matter of the "Naval Treaty" -- an interfer-
ence which had the unquestionable effect of preventing a serious
international complication. It was my intention to have stopped
there, and to have said nothing of that event which has created a
void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to
fill. My hand has been forced, however, by the recent letters in
which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother,
and I have no choice but to lay the facts before the public exactly
as they occurred. I alone know the absolute truth of the matter,
and I am satisfied that the time has come when no good purpose
is to be served by its suppression. As far as I know, there have
been only three accounts in the public press: that in the Journal
de Geneve on May 6th, 1891, the Reuter's dispatch in the
English papers on May 7th, and finally the recent letters to
which I have alluded. Of these the first and second were ex-
tremely condensed, while the last is, as I shall now show, an
absolute perversion of the facts. It lies with me to tell for the first
time what really took place between Professor Moriarty and Mr.
Sherlock Holmes.
It may be remembered that after my marriage, and my subse-
quent start in private practice, the very intimate relations which
had existed between Holmes and myself became to some extent
modified. He still came to me from time to time when he desired
a companion in his investigations, but these occasions grew more
and more seldom, until I find that in the year 1890 there were
only three cases of which I retain any record. During the winter
of that year and the early spring of 1891, I saw in the papers that
he had been engaged by the French government upon a matter of
supreme importance, and I received two notes from Holmes,
dated from Narbonne and from Nimes, from which I gathered
that his stay in France was likely to be a long one. It was with
some surprise, therefore, that I saw him walk into my consulting-
room upon the evening of April 24th. It struck me that he was
looking even paler and thinner than usual.
"Yes, I have been using myself up rather too freely," he
remarked, in answer to my look rather than to my words; "I
have been a little pressed of late. Have you any objection to my
closing your shutters?"
The only light in the room came from the lamp upon the table
at which I had been reading. Holmes edged his way round the
wall, and, flinging the shutters together, he bolted them securely.
"You are afraid of something?" I asked.
"Well, I am."
"Of what?"
"Of air-guns."
"My dear Holmes, what do you mean?"
"I think that you know me well enough. Watson. to under-
stand that I am by no means a nervous man. At the same time, it
is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger
when it is close upon you. Might I trouble you for a match?" He
drew in the smoke of his cigarette as if the soothing influence
was grateful to him.
"I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must
further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave
your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall."
"But what does it all mean?" I asked.
He held out his hand, and I saw in the light of the lamp that
two of his knuckles were burst and bleeding.
"It's not an airy nothing, you see," said he. smiling. "On the
contrary, it is solid enough for a man to break his hand over. Is
Mrs. Watson in?"
"She is away upon a visit."
"Indeed! You are alone?"
"Quite."
"Then it makes it the easier for me to propose that you should
come away with me for a week to the Continent."
"Where?"
"Oh, anywhere. It's all the same to me."
There was something very strange in all this. It was not
Holmes's nature to take an aimless holiday, and something
about his pale, worn face told me that his nerves were at their
highest tension. He saw the question in my eyes, and, putting his
finger-tips together and his elbows upon his knees, he explained
the situation.
"You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?" said
he.
"Never."
"Ay, there's the genius and the wonder of the thing!" he
cried. "The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him.
That's what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime. I tell
you Watson, in all seriousness, that if I could beat that man, if I
could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had
reached its summit, and I should be prepared to turn to some
more placid line in life. Between ourselves, the recent cases in
which I have been of assistance to the royal family of Scandina-
via, and to the French republic, have left me in such a position
that I could continue to live in the quiet fashion which is most
congenial to me, and to concentrate my attention upon my
chemical researches. But I could not rest. Watson, I could not sit
quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor
Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged."
"What has he done, then?"
"His career has been an extraordinary one. He is a man of
good birth and excellent education. endowed by nature with a
phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he
wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem, which has had a
European vogue. On the strength of it he won the mathematical
chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appear-
ances, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had
hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal
strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was
increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraor-
dinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the
university town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his
chair and to come down to London, where he set up as an army
coach. So much is known to the world, but what I am telling you
now is what I have myself discovered.
"As you are aware, Watson, there is no one who knows the
higher criminal world of London so well as I do. For years past I
have continually been conscious of some power behind the male-
factor, some deep organizing power which forever stands in the
way of the law, and throws its shield over the wrong-doer. Again
and again in cases of the most varying sorts -- forgery cases,
robberies, murders -- I have felt the presence of this force, and I
have deduced its action in many of those undiscovered crimes in
which I have not been personally consulted. For years I have
endeavoured to break through the veil which shrouded it, and at
last the time came when l seized my thread and followed it, until
it led me. after a thousand cunning windings, to ex-Professor
Moriarty, of mathematical celebrity.
"He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of
half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great
city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a
brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the
centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he
knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself.
He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly
organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted,
we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed -- the
word is passed to the professor, the matter is organized and
carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is
found for his bail or his detence. But the central power which
uses the agent is never caught -- never so much as suspected.
This was the organization which I deduced, Watson, and which I
devoted my whole energy to exposing and breaking up.
"But the professor was fenced round with safeguards so cun-
ningly devised that, do what I would, it seemed impossible to get
evidence which would convict in a court of law. You know my
powers, my dear Watson, and yet at the end of three months I
was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who
was my intellectual equal. My horror at his crimes was lost in
my admiration at his skill. But at last he made a trip -- only a
little, little trip but it was more than he could afford, when I
was so close upon him. I had my chance, and, starting from that
point, I have woven my net round him until now it is all ready to
close. In three days -- that is to say, on Monday next -- matters
will be ripe, and the professor, with all the principal members of
his gang, will be in the hands of the police. Then will come the
greatest criminal trial of the century, the clearing up of over forty
mysteries, and the rope for all of them; but if we move at all
prematurely, you understand, they may slip out of our hands
even at the last moment.
"Now, if I could have done this without the knowledge of
Professor Moriarty, all would have been well. But he was too
wily for that. He saw every step which I took to draw my toils
round him. Again and again he strove to break away, but I as
often headed him off. I tell you, my friend, that if a detailed
account of that silent contest could be written, it would take its
place as the most brilliant bit of thrust-and-parry work in the
history of detection. Never have I risen to such a height, and
never have I been so hard pressed by an opponent. He cut deep,
and yet I just undercut him. This morning the last steps were
taken, and three days only were wanted to complete the busi-
ness. I was sitting in my room thinking the matter over when the
door opened and Professor Moriarty stood before me.
"My nerves are fairly proof, Watson, but I must confess to a
start when I saw the very man who had been so much in my
thoughts standing there on my threshold. His appearance was
quite familiar to me. He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead
domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken
in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, re-
taining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders
are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward
and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously
reptilian fashion. He peered at me with great curiosity in his
puckered eyes.
" 'You have less frontal development than I should have
expected,' said he at last. 'It is a dangerous habit to finger
loaded firearms in the pocket of one's dressing-gown.'
"The fact is that upon his entrance I had instantly recognized
the extreme personal danger in which I lay. The only conceiv-
able escape for him lay in silencing my tongue. In an instant I
had slipped the revolver from the drawer into my pocket and was
covering him through the cloth. At his remark I drew the weapon
out and laid it cocked upon the table. He still smiled and
blinked, but there was something about his eyes which made me
feel very glad that I had it there.
" 'You evidently don't know me,' said he.
" 'On the contrary,' I answered, 'I think it is fairly evident
that I do. Pray take a chair. I can spare you five minutes if you
have anything to say.'
" 'All that I have to say has already crossed your mind,' said
he.
" 'Then possibly my answer has crossed yours,' I replied.
" 'You stand fast?'
" 'Absolutely. '
"He clapped his hand into his pocket, and I raised the pistol
from the table. But he merely drew out a memorandum-book in
which he had scribbled some dates.
" 'You crossed my path on the fourth of January,' said he.
'On the twenty-third you incommoded me; by the middle of
February I was seriously inconvenienced by you; at the end of
March I was absolutely hampered in my plans; and now, at the
close of April, I find myself placed in such a position through
your continual persecution that I am in positive danger of losing
my liberty. The situation is becoming an impossible one.'
" 'Have you any suggestion to make?' I asked.
" 'You must drop it, Mr. Holmes,' said he, swaying his face
about. 'You really must, you know.'
" 'After Monday,' said I.
" 'Tut, tut!' said he. 'I am quite sure that a man of your
intelligence will see that there can be but one outcome to this
affair. It is necessary that you should withdraw. You have
worked things in such a fashion that we have only one resource
left. It has been an intellectual treat to me to see the way in
which you have grappled with this affair, and I say, unaffect-
edly, that it would be a grief to me to be forced to take any
extreme measure. You smile, sir, but I assure you that it really
would.
" 'Danger is part of my trade,' I remarked.
" 'This is not danger,' said he. 'It is inevitable destruction.
You stand in the way not merely of an individual but of a mighty
organization, the full extent of which you, with all your clever-
ness, have been unable to realize. You must stand clear, Mr.
Holmes, or be trodden under foot.'
" 'I am afraid,' said I, rising, 'that in the pleasure of this
conversation I am neglecting business of importance which awaits
me elsewhere.'
"He rose also and looked at me in silence, shaking his head
sadly.
" 'Well, well,' said he at last. 'It seems a pity, but I have
done what I could. I know every move of your game. You can
do nothing before Monday. It has been a duel between you and
me, Mr. Holmes. You hope to place me in the dock. I tell you
that I will never stand in the dock. You hope to beat me. I tell
you that you will never beat me. If you are clever enough to
bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to
you.'
" 'You have paid me several compliments, Mr. Moriarty,'
said I. 'Let me pay you one in return when I say that if I were
assured of the former eventuality I would, in the interests of the
public, cheerfully accept the latter.'
" 'I can promise you the one, but not the other,' he snarled,
and so turned his rounded back upon me and went peering and
blinking out of the room.
"That was my singular intervie with Professor Moriarty. I
confess that it left an unpleasant effect upon my mind. His soft,
precise fashion of speech leaves a conviction of sincerity which a
mere bully could not produce. Of course, you will say: 'Why not
take police precautions against him?' The reason is that I am
well convinced that it is from his agents the blow would fall. I
have the best of proofs that it would be so."
"You have already been assaulted?"
"My dear Watson, Professor Moriarty is not a man who lets
the grass grow under his feet. I went out about midday to
transact some business in Oxford Street. As I passed the corner
which leads from Bentinck Street on to the Welbeck Street
crossing a two-horse van furiously driven whizzed round and
was on me like a flash. I sprang for the foot-path and saved
myself by the fraction of a second. The van dashed round by
Marylebone Lane and was gone in an instant. I kept to the
pavement after that, Watson, but as I walked down Vere Street a
brick came down from the roof of one of the houses and was
shattered to fragments at my feet. I called the police and had the
place examined. There were slates and bricks piled up on the
roof preparatory to some repairs, and they would have me be-
lieve that the wind had toppled over one of these. Of course I
knew better, but I could prove nothing. I took a cab after that
and reached my brother's rooms in Pall Mall, where I spent the
day. Now I have come round to you, and on my way I was
attacked by a rough with a bludgeon. I knocked him down, and
the police have him in custody; but I can tell you with the most
absolute confidence that no possible connection will ever be
traced between the gentleman upon whose front teeth I have
barked my knuckles and the retiring mathematical coach, who is,
I daresay, working out problems upon a black-board ten miles
away. You will not wonder, Watson, that my first act on enter-
ing your rooms was to close your shutters, and that I have been
compelled to ask your permission to leave the house by some
less conspicuous exit than the front door."
I had often admired my friend's courage, but never more than
now, as he sat quietly checking off a series of incidents which
must have combined to make up a day of horror.
"You will spend the night here?" I said.
"No, my friend, you might find me a dangerous guest. I have
my plans laid, and all will be well. Matters have gone so far now
that they can move without my help as far as the arrest goes,
though my presence is necessary for a conviction. It is obvious,
therefore, that I cannot do better than get away for the few days
which remain before the police are at liberty to act. It would be a
great pleasure to me, therefore, if you could come on to the
Continent with me."
"The practice is quiet," said I, "and I have an accommodat-
ing neighbour. I should be glad to come."
"And to start to-morrow morning?"
"If necessary."
"Oh, yes, it is most necessary. Then these are your instruc-
tions, and I beg, my dear Watson, that you will obey them to the
letter, for you are now playing a double-handed game with me
against the cleverest rogue and the most powerful syndicate of
criminals in Europe. Now listen! You will dispatch whatever
luggage you intend to take by a trusty messenger unaddressed to
Victoria to-night. In the morning you will send for a hansom,
desiring your man to take neither the first nor the second which
may present itself. Into this hansom you will jump, and you will
drive to the Strand end of the Lowther Arcade, handing the
address to the cabman upon a slip of paper, with a request that
he will not throw it away. Have your fare ready, and the instant
that your cab stops, dash through the Arcade, timing yourself to
reach the other side at a quarter-past nine. You will find a small
brougham waiting close to the curb, driven by a fellow with a
heavy black cloak tipped at the collar with red. Into this you will
step, and you will reach Victoria in time for the Continental
express."
"Where shall I meet you?"
"At the station. The second first-class carriage from the front
will be reserved for us."
"The carriage is our rendezvous, then?"
"Yes."
It was in vain that I asked Holmes to remain for the evening.
It was evident to me that he thought he might bring trouble to the
roof he was under, and that that was the motive which impelled
him to go. With a few hurried words as to our plans for the
morrow he rose and came out with me into the garden, clamber-
ing over the wall which leads into Mortimer Street, and immedi-
ately whistling for a hansom, in which I heard him drive away.
In the morning I obeyed Holmes's injunctions to the letter. A
hansom was procured with such precautions as would prevent its
being one which was placed ready for us, and I drove immedi-
ately after breakfast to the Lowther Arcade, through which I
hurried at the top of my speed. A brougham was waiting with a
very massive driver wrapped in a dark cloak, who, the instant
that I had stepped in, whipped up the horse and rattled off to
Victoria Station. On my alighting there he turned the camage,
and dashed away again without so much as a look in my direction.
So far all had gone admirably. My luggage was waiting for
me, and I had no difficulty in finding the carriage which Holmes
had indicated, the less so as it was the only one in the train
which was marked "Engaged." My only source of anxiety now
was the non-appearance of Holmes. The station clock marked
only seven minutes from the time when we were due to start. In
vain I searched among the groups of travellers and leave-takers
for the lithe figure of my friend. There was no sign of him. I
spent a few minutes in assisting a venerable Italian priest, who
was endeavouring to make a porter understand, in his broken
English, that his luggage was to be booked through to Paris.
Then, having taken another look round, I returned to my car-
riage, where I found that the porter, in spite of the ticket, had
given me my decrepit Italian friend as a travelling companion. It
was useless for me to explain to him that his presence was an
intrusion, for my Italian was even more limited than his English,
so I shrugged my shoulders resignedly, and continued to look out
anxiously for my friend. A chill of fear had come over me, as I
thought that his absence might mean that some blow had fallen
during the night. Already the doors had all been shut and the
whistle blown, when --
"My dear Watson," said a voice, "you have not even conde-
scended to say good-morning."
I turned in uncontrollable astonishment. The aged ecclesiastic
had turned his face towards me. For an instant the wrinkles were
smoothed away, the nose drew away from the chin, the lower lip
ceased to protrude and the mouth to mumble, the dull eyes
regained their fire, the drooping figure expanded. The next the
whole frame collapsed again, and Holmes had gone as quickly as
he had come.
"Good heavens!" I cried, "how you startled me!"
"Every precaution is still necessary," he whispered. "I have
reason to think that they are hot upon our trail. Ah, there is
Moriarty himself."
The train had already begun to move as Holmes spoke. Glanc-
ing back, I saw a tall man pushing his way furiously through the
crowd, and waving his hand as if he desired to have the train
stopped. It was too late, however, for we were rapidly gathering
momentum, and an instant later had shot clear of the station.
"With all our precautions, you see that we have cut it rather
fine," said Holmes, laughing. He rose, and throwing off the
black cassock and hat which had formed his disguise, he packed
them away in a hand-bag.
"Have you seen the morning paper, Watson?"
"No."
"You haven't seen about Baker Street, then?"
"Baker Street?"
"They set fire to our rooms last night. No great harm was
done."
"Good heavens, Holmes. this is intolerable!"
"They must have lost my track completely after their
bludgeonman was arrested. Otherwise they could not have imag-
ined that I had returned to my rooms. They have evidently taken
the precaution of watching you, however, and that is what has
brought Moriarty to Victoria. You could not have made any slip
in coming?"
"I did exactly what you advised."
"Did you find your brougham?"
"Yes, it was waiting."
"Did you recognize your coachman?"
"No."
"It was my brother Mycroft. It is an advantage to get about in
such a case without taking a mercenary into your confidence.
But we must plan what we are to do about Moriarty now."
"As this is an express, and as the boat runs in connection with
it, I should think we have shaken him off very effectively."
"My dear Watson, you evidently did not realize my meaning
when I said that this man may be taken as being quite on the
same intellectual plane as myself. You do not imagine that if I
were the pursuer I should allow myself to be baffled by so slight
an obstacle. Why, then, should you think so meanly of him?"
"What will he do?"
"What I should do."
"What would you do, then?"
"Engage a special."
"But it must be late."
"By no means. This train stops at Canterbury; and there is
always at least a quarter of an hour's delay at the boat. He will
catch us there."
"One would think that we were the criminals. Let us have him
arrested on his arrival."
"It would be to ruin the work of three months. We should get
the big fish. but the smaller would dart right and left out of the
net. On Monday we should have them all. No, an arrest is
inadmissible."
"What then?"
"We shall get out at Canterbury."
"And then?"
"Well, then we must make a cross-country journey to
Newhaven, and so over to Dieppe. Moriarty will again do what I
should do. He will get on to Paris, mark down our luggage, and
wait for two days at the depot. In the meantime we shall treat
ourselves to a couple of carpet-bags, encourage the manufactures
of the countries through which we travel, and make our way at
our leisure into Switzerland, via Luxembourg and Basle."
At Canterbury, therefore, we alighted, only to find that we
should have to walt an hour before we could get a train to
Newhaven.
I was still looking rather ruefully after the rapidly disappearing
luggage-van which contained my wardrobe, when Holmes pulled
my sleeve and pointed up the line.
"Already, you see," said he.
Far away, from among the Kentish woods there rose a thin
spray of smoke. A minute later a carriage and engine could be
seen flying along the open curve which leads to the station. We
had hardly time to take our place behind a pile of luggage when
it passed with a rattle and a roar, beating a blast of hot air into
our faces.
"There he goes," said Holmes, as we watched the carriage
swing and rock over the points. "There are limits, you see, to
our friend's intelligetnce. It would have been a coup-de-maitre
had he deduced what I would deduce and acted accordingly."
"And what would he have done had he overtaken us?"
"There cannot be the least doubt that he would have made a
murderous attack upon me. It is, however, a game at which two
may play. The question now is whether we should take a prema-
ture lunch here, or run our chance of starving before we reach
the buffet at Newhaven."
We made our way to Brussels that night and spent two days
there, moving on upon the third day as far as Strasbourg. On the
Monday morning Holmes had telegraphed to the London police,
and in the evening we found a reply waiting for us at our hotel.
Holmes tore it open, and then with a bitter curse hurled it into
the grate.
"I might have known it!" he groaned. "He has escaped!"
"Moriarty?"
"They have secured the whole gang with the exception of
him. He has given them the slip. Of course, when I had left the
country there was no one to cope with him. But I did think that I
had put the game in their hands. I think that you had better return
to England, Watson."
"Why?"
"Because you will find me a dangerous companion now. This
man's occupation is gone. He is lost if he returns to London. If I
read his character right he will devote his whole energies to
revenging himself upon me. He said as much in our short
interview, and I fancy that he meant it. I should certainly recom-
mend you to return to your practice."
It was hardly an appeal to be successful with one who was an
old campaigner as well as an old friend. We sat in the Strasbourg
salle-a-manger arguing the question for half an hour, but the
same night we had resumed our journey and were well on our
way to Geneva.
For a charming week we wandered up the valley of the Rhone,
and then, branching off at Leuk, we made our way over the
Gemmi Pass, still deep in snow, and so, by way of Interlaken, to
Meiringen. It was a lovely trip, the dainty green of the spring
below, the virgin white of the winter above; but it was clear to
me that never for one instant did Holmes forget the shadow
which lay across him. In the homely Alpine villages or in the
lonely mountain passes, I could still tell by his quick glancing
eyes and his sharp scrutiny of every face that passed us, that he
was well convinced that, walk where we would, we could not
walk ourselves clear of the danger which was dogging our
footsteps
Once, i remember, as we passed over the Gemmi, and walked
along the border of the melancholy Daubensee, a large rock
which had been dislodged from the ridge upon our right clattered
down and roared into the lake behind us. In an instant Holmes
had raced up on to the ridge, and, standing upon a lofty pinna-
cle, craned his neck in every direction. It was in vain that our
guide assured him that a fall of stones was a common chance in
the springtime at that spot. He said nothing, but he smiled at me
with the air of a man who sees the fulfilment of that which he
had expected.
And yet for all his watchfulness he was never depressed. On
the contrary, I can never recollect having seen him in such
exuberant spirits. Again and again he recurred to the fact that if
he could be assured that society was freed from Professor Moriarty
he would cheerfully bring his own career to a conclusion.
"I think that I may go so far as to say, Watson, that I have not
lived wholly in vain," he remarked. "If my record were closed
to-night I could still survey it with equanimity. The air of
London is the sweeter for my presence. In over a thousand cases
I am not aware that I have ever used my powers upon the wrong
side. Of late I have been tempted to look into the problems
furnished by nature rather than those more superficial ones tor
which our artificial state of society is responsible. Your memoirs
will draw to an end, Watson, upon the day that I crown my
career by the capture or extinction of the most dangerous and
capable criminal in Europe."
I shall be brief, and yet exact, in the little which remains for
me to tell. It is not a subject on which I would willingly dwell,
and yet I am conscious that a duty devolves upon me to omit no
detail.
It was on the third of May that we reached the little village of
Meiringen, where we put up at the Englischer Hof. then kept by
Peter Steiler the elder. Our landlord was an intelligent man and
spoke excellent English, having served for three years as waiter
at the Grosvenor Hotel in London. At his advice, on the after-
noon of the fourth we set off together, with the intention of
crossing the hills and spending the night at the hamlet of Rosenlaui.
We had strict injunctions, however, on no account to pass the
falls of Reichenbach, which are about halfway up the hills,
without making a small detour to see them.
It is, indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the
melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the
spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft
into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by
glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boil-
ing pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the
stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green
water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of
spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their con-
stant whirl and clamour. We stood near the edge peering down at
the gleam of the breaking water far below us against the black
rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came boom-
ing up with the spray out of the abyss.
The path has been cut halfway round the fall to afford a
complete view, but it ends abruptly, and the traveller has to
return as he came. We had turned to do so, when we saw a
Swiss lad come running along it with a letter in his hand. It bore
the mark of the hotel which we had just left and was addressed to
me by the landlord. It appeared that within a very few minutes of
our leaving, an English lady had arrived who was in the last
stage of consumption. She had wintered at Davos Platz and was
journeying now to join her friends at Lucerne, when a sudden
hemorrhage had overtaken her. It was thought that she could
hardly live a few hours, but it would be a great consolation to
her to see an English doctor, and, if I would only return, etc.
The good Steiler assured me in a postscript that he would himself
look upon my compliance as a very great favour, since the lady
absolutely refused to see a Swiss physician, and he could not but
feel that he was incurring a great responsibility.
The appeal was one which could not be ignored. It was
impossible to refuse the request of a fellow-countrywoman dying
in a strange land. Yet I had my scruples about leaving Holmes. It
was finally agreed, however, that he should retain the young
Swiss messenger with him as guide and companion while I
returned to Meiringen. My friend would stay some little time at
the fall, he said, and would then walk slowly over the hill to
Rosenlaui, where I was to rejoin him in the evening. As I turned
away I saw Holmes, with his back against a rock and his arms
folded, gazing down at the rush of the waters. It was the last that
I was ever destined to see of him in this world.
When I was near the bottom of the descent I looked back. It
was impossible, from that position, to see the fall, but I could
see the curving path which winds over the shoulder of the hills
and leads to it. Along this a man was, I remember, walking very
rapidly.
I could see his black figure clearly outlined against the green
behind him. I noted him, and the energy with which he walked,
but he passed from my mind again as I hurried on upon my
errand.
It may have been a little over an hour before I reached
Meiringen. Old Steiler was standing at the porch of his hotel.
"Well," said I, as I came hurrying up, "I trust that she is no
worse?"
A look of surprise passed over his face, and at the first quiver
of his eyebrows my heart turned to lead in my breast.
"You did not write this?" I said, pulling the letter from my
pocket. "There is no sick Englishwoman in the hotel?"
"Certainly not!" he cried. "But it has the hotel mark upon it!
Ha, it must have been written by that tall Englishman who came
in after you had gone. He said --"
But I waited for none of the landlord's explanation. In a tingle
of fear I was already running down the village street, and making
for the path which I had so lately descended. It had taken me an
hour to come down. For all my efforts two more had passed
betore I found myself at the fall of Reichenbach once more.
There was Holmes's Alpine-stock still leaning against the rock
by which I had left him. But there was no sign of him, and it
was in vain that I shouted. My only answer was my own voice
reverberating in a rolling echo from the cliffs around me.
It was the sight of that Alpine-stock which turned me cold and
sick. He had not gone to Rosenlaui, then. He had remained on
that three-foot path, with sheer wall on one side and sheer drop
on the other, until his enemy had overtaken him. The young
Swiss had gone too. He had probably been in the pay of Moriarty
and had left the two men together. And then what had happened?
Who was to tell us what had happened then?
I stood for a minute or two to collect myself, for I was dazed
with the horror of the thing. Then I began to think of Holmes's
own methods and to try to practise them in reading this tragedy.
It was, alas, only too easy to do. During our conversation we
had not gone to the end of the path, and the Alpine-stock marked
the place where we had stood. The blackish soil is kept forever
soft by the incessant drift of spray, and a bird would leave its
tread upon it. Two lines of footmarks were clearly marked along
the farther end of the path, both leading away from me. There
were none returning. A few yards from the end the soil was all
ploughed up into a patch of mud, and the brambles and ferns
which fringed the chasm were torn and bedraggled. I lay upon
my face and peered over with the spray spouting up all around
me. It had darkened since I left, and now I could only see here
and there the glistening of moisture upon the black walls, and far
away down at the end of the shaft the gleam of the broken water.
I shouted; but only that same half-human cry of the fall was
borne back to my ears.
But it was destined that I should, after all, have a last word of
greeting from my friend and comrade. I have said that his
Alpine-stock had been left leaning against a rock which jutted on
to the path. From the top of this bowlder the gleam of something
bright caught my eye, and raising my hand I found that it came
from the silver cigarette-case which he used to carry. As I took it
up a small square of paper upon which it had lain fluttered down
on to the ground. Unfolding it, I found that it consisted of three
pages torn from his notebook and addressed to me. It was
characteristic of the man that the direction was as precise. and
the writing as firm and clear, as though it had been written in his
study.

MY DEAR WATSON [it said]:
I write these few lines through the courtesy of Mr.
Moriarty, who awaits my convenience for the final discus-
sion of those questions which lie between us. He has been
giving me a sketch of the methods by which he avoided the
English police and kept himself informed of our move-
ments. They certainly confirm the very high opinion which
I had formed of his abilities. I am pleased to think that I
shall be able to free society from any further effects of his
presence, though I fear that it is at a cost which will give
pain to my friends, and especially, my dear Watson, to you.
I have already explained to you, however, that my career
had in any case reached its crisis, and that no possible
conclusion to it could be more congenial to me than this.
Indeed, if I may make a full confession to you, I was quite
convinced that the letter from Meiringen was a hoax, and I
allowed you to depart on that errand under the persuasion
that some development of this sort would follow. Tell In-
spector Patterson that the papers which he needs to convict
the gang are in pigeonhole M., done up in a blue envelope
and inscribed "Moriarty." I made every disposition of my
property before leaving England and handed it to my brother
Mycroft. Pray give my greetings to Mrs. Watson, and
believe me to be, my dear fellow
Very sincerely yours,
SHERLOCK HOLMES.

A few words may suffice to tell the little that remains. An
examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal contest
between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end in such
a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each other's arms.
Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless,
and there, deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water
and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous
criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their genera-
tion. The Swiss youth was never found again, and there can be
no doubt that he was one of the numerous agents whom Moriarty
kept in his employ. As to the gang, it will be within the memory
of the public how completely the evidence which Holmes had
accumulated exposed their organization, and how heavily the
hand of the dead man weighed upon them. Of their terrible chief
few details came out during the proceedings, and if I have now
been compelled to make a clear statement of his career, it is due
to those injudicious champions who have endeavoured to clear
his memory by attacks upon him whom I shall ever regard as the
best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.

Matt McCord Presents: Herbert West: Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft

2005-06-10T17:30:00.000-07:00

Yo yo yo! This is Matt McCord in da house presentin' the bestest in horror classics reprints in full hard core style for Down Supremacy. Check dis zombie classic shit out that inspired all kinds of zombie style movies yo! So chill with Matt McCord and smoke a phat blunt and then go rent the phat horror movie they made out of this called Reanimator...

Herbert West: Reanimator

I. From The Dark
Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were in the medical school where West had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and by his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions, he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs but he soon saw that the perfection of his process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that, since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human subjects for further and more specialised progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with the college authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the medical school himself -- the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every old resident of Arkham.

I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West’s pursuits, and we frequently discussed his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite. Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called "soul" is a myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of death would be apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to find a reagent which would restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on animals had shewn him that the natural and artificial life-motions were incompatible. He then sought extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solutions into the blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death had not occurred in any case. They did not stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly.

It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. To hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two local negroes attended to this matter, and they were seldom questioned. West was then a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery and the potter’s field. We finally decided on the potter’s field, because practically every body in Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West’s researches.

I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all his decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the ground floor an operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet precautions were none the less necessary; since rumours of strange lights, started by chance nocturnal roamers, would soon bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college -- materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes -- and provided spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus was too costly for our unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance -- even the small guinea-pig bodies from the slight clandestine experiments in West’s room at the boarding-house.

We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial preservation; preferably free from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present. Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of anything suitable; though we talked with morgue and hospital authorities, ostensibly in the college’s interest, as often as we could without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice in every case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer, when only the limited summer-school classes were held. In the end, though, luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter’s field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Summer’s Pond, and buried at the town’s expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after midnight.

It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns, for although electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid -- it might have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists -- and we were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully uncovered, West scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and propping up the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance. The affair made us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of our first trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had patted down the last shovelful of earth, we put the specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old Chapman place beyond Meadow Hill.

On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a powerful acetylene lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian type -- large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired -- a sound animal without psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes of the simplest and healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead; though the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on that score. We had at last what West had always longed for -- a real dead man of the ideal kind, ready for the solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and theories for human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew that there was scarcely a chance for anything like complete success, and could not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation. Especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the creature, since in the space following death some of the more delicate cerebral cells might well have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious notions about the traditional "soul" of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what sights this placid youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate if fully restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large quantity of his fluid into a vein of the body’s arm, immediately binding the incision securely.

The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he applied his stethoscope to the specimen, and bore the negative results philosophically. After about three-quarters of an hour without the least sign of life he disappointedly pronounced the solution inadequate, but determined to make the most of his opportunity and try one change in the formula before disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar, and would have to fill it by dawn -- for although we had fixed a lock on the house, we wished to shun even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery. Besides, the body would not be even approximately fresh the next night. So taking the solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left our silent guest on the slab in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of a new solution; the weighing and measuring supervised by West with an almost fanatical care.

The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol blast-lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when from the pitch-black room we had left there burst the most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature. Human it could not have been -- it is not in man to make such sounds -- and without a thought of our late employment or its possible discovery, both West and I leaped to the nearest window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and retorts, and vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think we screamed ourselves as we stumbled frantically toward the town, though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance of restraint -- just enough to seem like belated revellers staggering home from a debauch.

We did not separate, but managed to get to West’s room, where we whispered with the gas up until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a little with rational theories and plans for investigation, so that we could sleep through the day -- classes being disregarded. But that evening two items in the paper, wholly unrelated, made it again impossible for us to sleep. The old deserted Chapman house had inexplicably burned to an amorphous heap of ashes; that we could understand because of the upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been made to disturb a new grave in the potter’s field, as if by futile and spadeless clawing at the earth. That we could not understand, for we had patted down the mould very carefully.

And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder, and complain of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared.

II. The Plague-Daemon
I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by that satanic scourge that most recall the year, for truly terror brooded with bat-wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me there is a greater horror in that time -- a horror known to me alone now that Herbert West has disappeared.

West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety because of his experiments leading toward the revivification of the dead. After the scientific slaughter of uncounted small animals the freakish work had ostensibly stopped by order of our sceptical dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West had continued to perform certain secret tests in his dingy boarding-house room, and had on one terrible and unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its grave in the potter’s field to a deserted farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.

I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins the elixir which he thought would to some extent restore life’s chemical and physical processes. It had ended horribly -- in a delirium of fear which we gradually came to attribute to our own overwrought nerves -- and West had never afterward been able to shake off a maddening sensation of being haunted and hunted. The body had not been quite fresh enough; it is obvious that to restore normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh indeed; and the burning of the old house had prevented us from burying the thing. It would have been better if we could have known it was underground.

After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the zeal of the born scientist slowly returned, he again became importunate with the college faculty, pleading for the use of the dissecting-room and of fresh human specimens for the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly important. His pleas, however, were wholly in vain; for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and the other professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the radical theory of reanimation they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal -- almost diabolical -- power of the cold brain within. I can see him now as he was then -- and I shiver. He grew sterner of face, but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and West has vanished.

West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate term in a wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the kindiy dean in point of courtesy. He felt that he was needlessly and irrationally retarded in a supremely great work; a work which he could of course conduct to suit himself in later years, but which he wished to begin while still possessed of the exceptional facilities of the university. That the tradition-bound elders should ignore his singular results on animals, and persist in their denial of the possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly disgusting and almost incomprehensible to a youth of West’s logical temperament. Only greater maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the "professor-doctor" type -- the product of generations of pathetic Puritanism; kindly, conscientious, and sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow, intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in perspective. Age has more charity for these incomplete yet high-souled characters, whose worst real vice is timidity, and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins -- sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West, young despite his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate daydreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.

And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of Tartarus. West and I had graduated about the time of its beginning, but had remained for additional work at the summer school, so that we were in Arkham when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet licenced physicians, we now had our degrees, and were pressed frantically into public service as the numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost past management, and deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers fully to handle. Burials without embalming were made in rapid succession, and even the Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed with coffins of the unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not without effect on West, who thought often of the irony of the situation -- so many fresh specimens, yet none for his persecuted researches! We were frightfully overworked, and the terrific mental and nervous strain made my friend brood morbidly.

But West’s gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College had all but closed, and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished himself in sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to cases which many others shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before a month was over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking advantage of the disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations, he managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university dissecting-room one night, and in my presence injected a new modification of his solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling with a look of soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which nothing could rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough -- the hot summer air does not favour corpses. That time we were almost caught before we incinerated the thing, and West doubted the advisability of repeating his daring misuse of the college laboratory.

The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead, and Dr. Halsey did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral on the 15th, and bought an impressive wreath, though the latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the municipality itself. It was almost a public affair, for the dean had surely been a public benefactor. After the entombment we were all somewhat depressed, and spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House; where West, though shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us with references to his notorious theories. Most of the students went home, or to various duties, as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in "making a night of it." West’s landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the morning, with a third man between us; and told her husband that we had all evidently dined and wined rather well.

Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house was aroused by cries coming from West’s room, where when they broke down the door, they found the two of us unconscious on the blood-stained carpet, beaten, scratched, and mauled, and with the broken remnants of West’s bottles and instruments around us. Only an open window told what had become of our assailant, and many wondered how he himself had fared after the terrific leap from the second story to the lawn which he must have made. There were some strange garments in the room, but West upon regaining consciousness said they did not belong to the stranger, but were specimens collected for bacteriological analysis in the course of investigations on the transmission of germ diseases. He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious fireplace. To the police we both declared ignorance of our late companion’s identity. He was, West nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish to have our pugnacious companion hunted down.

That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror -- the horror that to me eclipsed the plague itself. Christchurch Cemetery was the scene of a terrible killing; a watchman having been clawed to death in a manner not only too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the deed. The victim had been seen alive considerably after midnight -- the dawn revealed the unutterable thing. The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped from its cage. Those who found the body noted a trail of blood leading to the receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just outside the gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave out.

The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing which strewed red death in its wake -- in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark, and said it was white and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and had not been alive.

On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in a house on Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest with care, keeping in touch by means of volunteer telephone stations, and when someone in the college district had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered window, the net was quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and precautions, there were only two more victims, and the capture was effected without major casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not a fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital amidst universal excitement and loathing.

For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism, and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head against the walls of a padded cell for sixteen years -- until the recent mishap, when it escaped under circumstances that few like to mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster’s face was cleaned -- the mocking, unbelievable resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been entombed but three days before -- the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic University.

To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered through his bandages, "Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!"

III. Six Shots by Moonlight
It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It is, for instance, not often that a young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal the principles which guide his selection of a home and office, yet that was the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and sought to relieve our poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we took great care not to say that we chose our house because it was fairly well isolated, and as near as possible to the potter’s field.

Reticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours; for our requirements were those resulting from a life-work distinctly unpopular. Outwardly we were doctors only, but beneath the surface were aims of far greater and more terrible moment -- for the essence of Herbert West’s existence was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown, in which he hoped to uncover the secret of life and restore to perpetual animation the graveyard’s cold clay. Such a quest demands strange materials, among them fresh human bodies; and in order to keep supplied with these indispensable things one must live quietly and not far from a place of informal interment.

West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathise with his hideous experiments. Gradually I had come to be his inseparable assistant, and now that we were out of college we had to keep together. It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors in company, but finally the influence of the university secured us a practice in Bolton -- a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local physicians. We chose our house with the greatest care, seizing at last on a rather run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers from the closest neighbour, and separated from the local potter’s field by only a stretch of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies to the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no nearer house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the factory district. We were not much displeased, however, since there were no people between us and our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle long, but we could haul our silent specimens undisturbed.

Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first -- large enough to please most young doctors, and large enough to prove a bore and a burden to students whose real interest lay elsewhere. The mill-hands were of somewhat turbulent inclinations; and besides their many natural needs, their frequent clashes and stabbing affrays gave us plenty to do. But what actually absorbed our minds was the secret laboratory we had fitted up in the cellar -- the laboratory with the long table under the electric lights, where in the small hours of the morning we often injected West’s various solutions into the veins of the things we dragged from the potter’s field. West was experimenting madly to find something which would start man’s vital motions anew after they had been stopped by the thing we call death, but had encountered the most ghastly obstacles. The solution had to be differently compounded for different types -- what would serve for guinea-pigs would not serve for human beings, and different human specimens required large modifications.

The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain tissue would render perfect reanimation impossible. Indeed, the greatest problem was to get them fresh enough -- West had had horrible experiences during his secret college researches with corpses of doubtful vintage. The results of partial or imperfect animation were much more hideous than were the total failures, and we both held fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our first daemoniac session in the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we had felt a brooding menace; and West, though a calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific automaton in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering sensation of stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he was followed -- a psychological delusion of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact that at least one of our reanimated specimens was still alive -- a frightful carnivorous thing in a padded cell at Sefton. Then there was another -- our first -- whose exact fate we had never learned.

We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton -- much better than in Arkham. We had not been settled a week before we got an accident victim on the very night of burial, and made it open its eyes with an amazingly rational expression before the solution failed. It had lost an arm -- if it had been a perfect body we might have succeeded better. Between then and the next January we secured three more; one total failure, one case of marked muscular motion, and one rather shivery thing -- it rose of itself and uttered a sound. Then came a period when luck was poor; interments fell off, and those that did occur were of specimens either too diseased or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and their circumstances with systematic care.

One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not come from the potter’s field. In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing -- with the usual result. Surreptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were common, and occasionally professional talent of low grade was imported. This late winter night there had been such a match; evidently with disastrous results, since two timorous Poles had come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties to attend to a very secret and desperate case. We followed them to an abandoned barn, where the remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching a silent black form on the floor.

The match had been between Kid O’Brien -- a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose -- and Buck Robinson, "The Harlem Smoke." The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life -- but the world holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful crowd, for they did not know what the law would exact of them if the affair were not hushed up; and they were grateful when West, in spite of my involuntary shudders, offered to get rid of the thing quietly -- for a purpose I knew too well.

There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the thing and carried it home between us through the deserted streets and meadows, as we had carried a similar thing one horrible night in Arkham. We approached the house from the field in the rear, took the specimen in the back door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it for the usual experiment. Our fear of the police was absurdly great, though we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary patrolman of that section.

The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it was wholly unresponsive to every solution we injected in its black arm; solutions prepared from experience with white specimens only. So as the hour grew dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the others -- dragged the thing across the meadows to the neck of the woods near the potter’s field, and buried it there in the best sort of grave the frozen ground would furnish. The grave was not very deep, but fully as good as that of the previous specimen -- the thing which had risen of itself and uttered a sound. In the light of our dark lanterns we carefully covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly certain that the police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense.

The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient brought rumours of a suspected fight and death. West had still another source of worry, for he had been called in the afternoon to a case which ended very threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical over her missing child -- a lad of five who had strayed off early in the morning and failed to appear for dinner -- and had developed symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the boy had often run away before; but Italian peasants are exceedingly superstitious, and this woman seemed as much harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o’clock in the evening she had died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held him when he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses and oaths of vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child, who was still missing as the night advanced. There was some talk of searching the woods, but most of the family’s friends were busy with the dead woman and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must have been tremendous. Thoughts of the police and of the mad Italian both weighed heavily.

We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for so small a town, and I could not help fearing the mess which would ensue if the affair of the night before were ever tracked down. It might mean the end of all our local work -- and perhaps prison for both West and me. I did not like those rumours of a fight which were floating about. After the clock had struck three the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without rising to pull down the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the back door.

I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West’s rap on my door. He was clad in dressing-gown and slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an electric flashlight. From the revolver I knew that he was thinking more of the crazed Italian than of the police.

"We’d better both go," he whispered. "It wouldn’t do not to answer it anyway, and it may be a patient -- it would be like one of those fools to try the back door."

So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and partly that which comes only from the soul of the weird small hours. The rattling continued, growing somewhat louder. When we reached the door I cautiously unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon streamed revealingly down on the form silhouetted there, West did a peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger of attracting notice and bringing down on our heads the dreaded police investigation -- a thing which after all was mercifully averted by the relative isolation of our cottage -- my friend suddenly, excitedly, and unnecessarily emptied all six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal visitor.

For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against the spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares -- a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.

IV. The Scream of the Dead
The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert West which harassed the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man’s scream should give horror, for it is obviously, not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And, as I have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid.

Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far beyond the usual routine of a village physician. That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated house near the potter’s field. Briefly and brutally stated, West’s sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead through injections of an excitant solution. For this ghastly experimenting it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh human bodies; very fresh because even the least decay hopelessly damaged the brain structure, and human because we found that the solution had to be compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and guinea-pigs had been killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which vitality had only just departed; bodies with every cell intact and capable of receiving again the impulse toward that mode of motion called life. There was hope that this second and artificial life might be made perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an ordinary natural life would not respond to the action. To establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct -- the specimens must be very fresh, but genuinely dead.

The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West looked scarcely a day older now -- he was small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme; the results of defective reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had been galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution.

One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars; still another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and done a deed -- West had had to shoot that object. We could not get bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when reanimated, so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that one, perhaps two, of our monsters still lived -- that thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.

It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle -- that of artificial preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming compound, and was not surprised that it had turned out well; but until he explained the details I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound could help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely due to delay occurring before we secured them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised; creating his embalming compound for future rather than immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again some very recent and unburied corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the negro killed in the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this occasion there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay could not by any possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation, and whether we could hope for a revival of mind and reason, West did not venture to predict. The experiment would be a landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body for my return, so that both might share the spectacle in accustomed fashion.

West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man; a well-dressed stranger just off the train on his way to transact some business with the Bolton Worsted Mills. The walk through the town had been long, and by the time the traveller paused at our cottage to ask the way to the factories, his heart had become greatly overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to West a heaven-sent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear that he was unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis, apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this man could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our materials in a dense strip of woods between the house and the potter’s field. If, on the other hand, he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually established. So without delay West had injected into the body’s wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for use after my arrival. The matter of the presumably weak heart, which to my mind imperilled the success of our experiment, did not appear to trouble West extensively. He hoped at last to obtain what he had never obtained before -- a rekindled spark of reason and perhaps a normal, living creature.

So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar laboratory and gazed at a white, silent figure beneath the dazzling arc-light. The embalming compound had worked uncannily well, for as I stared fascinatedly at the sturdy frame which had lain two weeks without stiffening, I was moved to seek West’s assurance that the thing was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough; reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used without careful tests as to life, since it could have no effect if any of the original vitality were present. As West proceeded to take preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment; an intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own. Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug in the wrist just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralise the compound and release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a change and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs; West stuffed a pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied, and finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the vital elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a greater care than we had used since college days, when our feats were new and groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for results on this first really fresh specimen -- the first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.

West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of consciousness to bodily phenomena; consequently he looked for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond death’s barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides -- I could not extract from my memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried our first experiment in the deserted farmhouse at Arkham.

Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure. A touch of colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white, and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror inclined above the body’s mouth. There followed a few spasmodic muscular motions, and then an audible breathing and visible motion of the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I detected a quivering. Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which were grey, calm, and alive, but still unintelligent and not even curious.

In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening ears; questions of other worlds of which the memory might still be present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind, but I think the last one, which I repeated, was: "Where have you been?" I do not yet know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the well-shaped mouth; but I do know that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables which I would have vocalised as "only now" if that phrase had possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was elated with the conviction that the one great goal had been attained; and that for the first time a reanimated corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next moment there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the solution had truly accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and articulate life to the dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest of all horrors -- not horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed that I had witnessed and of the man with whom my professional fortunes were joined.

For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness with eyes dilated at the memory of its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life and death struggle with the air, and suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution from which there could be no return, screamed out the cry that will ring eternally in my aching brain:

"Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend -- keep that damned needle away from me!"

V. The Horror From the Shadows
Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on the battlefields of the Great War. Some of these things have made me faint, others have convulsed me with devastating nausea, while still others have made me tremble and look behind me in the dark; yet despite the worst of them I believe I can myself relate the most hideous thing of all -- the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from the shadows.

In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian regiment in Flanders, one of many Americans to precede the government itself into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the army on my own initiative, but rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man whose indispensable assistant I was -- the celebrated Boston surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West. Dr. West had been avid for a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and when the chance had come, he carried me with him almost against my will. There were reasons why I could have been glad to let the war separate us; reasons why I found the practice of medicine and the companionship of West more and more irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague’s influence secured a medical commission as Major, I could not resist the imperious persuasion of one determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.

When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was either naturally warlike or anxious for the safety of civilisation. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine; slight, blond, blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There was, however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders; and in order to secure it had had to assume a military exterior. What he wanted was not a thing which many persons want, but something connected with the peculiar branch of medical science which he had chosen quite clandestinely to follow, and in which he had achieved amazing and occasionally hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than an abundant supply of freshly killed men in every stage of dismemberment.

Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work was the reanimation of the dead. This work was not known to the fashionable clientele who had so swiftly built up his fame after his arrival in Boston; but was only too well known to me, who had been his closest friend and sole assistant since the old days in Miskatonic University Medical School at Arkham. It was in those college days that he had begun his terrible experiments, first on small animals and then on human bodies shockingly obtained. There was a solution which he injected into the veins of dead things, and if they were fresh enough they responded in strange ways. He had had much trouble in discovering the proper formula, for each type of organism was found to need a stimulus especially adapted to it. Terror stalked him when he reflected on his partial failures; nameless things resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain number of these failures had remained alive -- one was in an asylum while others had vanished -- and as he thought of conceivable yet virtually impossible eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual stolidity.

West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful specimens, and had accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedients in body-snatching. In college, and during our early practice together in the factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been largely one of fascinated admiration; but as his boldness in methods grew, I began to develop a gnawing fear. I did not like the way he looked at healthy living bodies; and then there came a nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory when I learned that a certain specimen had been a living body when he secured it. That was the first time he had ever been able to revive the quality of rational thought in a corpse; and his success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had completely hardened him.

Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was held to him by sheer force of fear, and witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did -- that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment -- a languid Elagabalus of the tombs.

Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came when he had proved his point that rational life can be restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting on the reanimation of detached parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas on the independent vital properties of organic cells and nerve-tissue separated from natural physiological systems; and achieved some hideous preliminary results in the form of never-dying, artificially nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable tropical reptile. Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle -- first, whether any amount of consciousness and rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and various nerve-centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation distinct from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what has previously been a single living organism. All this research work required a prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh -- and that was why Herbert West had entered the Great War.

The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915, in a field hospital behind the lines of St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could have been other than a daemoniac dream of delirium. West had a private laboratory in an east room of the barn-like temporary edifice, assigned him on his plea that he was devising new and radical methods for the treatment of hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There he worked like a butcher in the midst of his gory wares -- I could never get used to the levity with which he handled and classified certain things. At times he actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver-shots -- surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital. Dr. West’s reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience. Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was better than human material for maintaining life in organless fragments, and that was now my friend’s chief activity. In a dark corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.

On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen -- a man at once physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the officer who had helped West to his commission, and who was now to have been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our division, and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by the intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his destination. The fall had been spectacular and awful; Hill was unrecognisable afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great surgeon in a nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the lifeless thing which had once been his friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered when he finished severing the head, placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue to preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated body on the operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and nerves at the headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture with engrafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an officer’s uniform. I knew what he wanted -- to see if this highly organised body could exhibit, without its head, any of the signs of mental life which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Once a student of reanimation, this silent trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.

I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe -- I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows.

The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system. Much was expected of it; and as a few twitching motions began to appear, I could see the feverish interest on West’s face. He was ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong opinion that consciousness, reason, and personality can exist independently of the brain -- that man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was about to relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched more vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which was unmistakably one of desperation -- an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient to prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were recalling the man’s last act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling aeroplane.

What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an hallucination from the shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German shell-fire -- who can gainsay it, since West and I were the only proved survivors? West liked to think that before his recent disappearance, but there were times when he could not; for it was queer that we both had the same hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself was very simple, notable only for what it implied.

The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a sound. I should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was not the most awful thing about it. Neither was its message -- it had merely screamed, "Jump, Ronald, for God’s sake, jump!" The awful thing was its source.

For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black shadows.

VI. The Tomb-Legions
When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me closely. They suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps suspected graver things; but I could not tell them the truth because they would not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with activities beyond the credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in the reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect secrecy; but the final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac phantasy which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw.

I was West’s closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years before, in medical school, and from the first I had shared his terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking were the products of some of the experiments -- grisly masses of flesh that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous ammation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.

This need for very fresh corpses had been West’s moral undoing. They were hard to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded for a brief and memorable moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they noticed my fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions.

West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a life of furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the police he feared; but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things into which he had injected a morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough. There was that first specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also that Arkham professor’s body which had done cannibal things before it had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving results were things less easy to speak of -- for in later years West’s scientific zeal had degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief skill in vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or parts joined to organic matter other than human. It had become fiendishly disgusting by the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could not even be hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us served as surgeons, had intensified this side of West.

In saying that West’s fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind particularly its complex nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the existence of such nameless monsters, while another part arose from apprehension of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do him. Their disappearance added horror to the situation -- of them all, West knew the whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a more subtle fear -- a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who knew about his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been removed, so that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had been a success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate, we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful, in a way -- but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we two were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.

West’s last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one of the oldest burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-cellar secretly constructed by imported workmen, and contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal of such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might remain from the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the excavation of this cellar the workmen had struck some exceedingly ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old burying-ground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After a number of calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb of the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with him when he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend the uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West’s new timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating fibre by ordering the masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus it remained till that final hellish night; part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak of West’s decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental and intangible thing. Outwardly he was the same to the last -- calm, cold, slight, and yellow-haired, with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed grave and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.

The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent men had entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it -- for it was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like men than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time help could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their mad charge had vanished.

From the hour of reading this item until midmght, West sat almost paralysed. At midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there was no wagon in the street, but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing a large square box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly unnatural voice, "Express -- prepaid." They filed out of the house with a jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house abutted. When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs and looked at the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West’s correct name and present address. It also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi, Flanders." Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached head which -- perhaps -- had uttered articulate sounds.

West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, "It’s the finish -- but let’s incinerate -- this." We carried the thing down to the laboratory -- listening. I do not remember many particulars -- you can imagine my state of mind -- but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West’s body which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any sound come from the box, after all.

It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity -- or worse -- could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all -- the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West’s head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officer’s uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of frantic, visible emotion.

Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say? The Sefton tragedy they will not connect with West; not that, nor the men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and they pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They imply that I am either a madman or a murderer -- probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.

Tony Danza's "A Nightmare On Elm Street" Fan Fiction Extravadanza!!!

2005-05-07T12:35:00.000-07:00

Watch Your Step by Chris Miller

Over the years they tried burning the bastard, they tried burying him, and they even tried hosing him down with holy water, but nothing kept the much-feared Bastard Son of a Hundred Maniacs from haunting the nightmares of Springwood, Ohio’s young people. Mud and flames could not stop him from killing those very same children and teenagers. Freddy Krueger was, quite simply, unstoppable.

When Steven was residing in Springwood, he was convinced for some reason that he could enter dreamland and escape the Nightmare Man’s frightful death-methods. Steven was in high school around the same time students there started making up a song about him.

One, two, Freddy’s coming for you.
Three, four, better lock your door.
Five, six, grab your crucifix.
Seven, eight, gonna stay up late.
Nine, ten, never sleep again.

There was something to be learned from the song. Of course, Steven was a pretty intelligent guy and he soon realized that neither locking the door nor wearing a crucifix could save a guy from Freddy. The only way to avoid Freddy was, as the closing line of the song suggested, “never sleep again.” The world record for going without sleep was something like 11 days. A guy had to sleep eventually, though.

While something about this song struck him with terror, he soon devised an idea that he figured would protect him from Freddy.

On any given night Steven didn’t sleep much. He stayed up late watching the late night talk shows: Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, others. When he did fall asleep, he awakened at the slightest sound, such as the floor creaking, the drip-drip of the bathroom sink or a dog barking blocks away. Having this gift for awakening easily, Steven assumed that he was safe from Freddy Krueger.

“As long as I set my alarm, I’m safe,” Steven explained his theory to Monique, his brown-eyed girlfriend.

“What makes you so sure?” asked Monique.

“My alarm is set to go off at regular intervals. If I nod off, and wind up in Freddy’s fucked-up world, all I have to do is outsmart him until the alarm goes off,” said Steven, hypothesizing that by mostly staying awake and having an alarm that sounded every 15 minutes, he could avoid Freddy’s many and varied tortures.

“No one on Elm Street ever escapes Freddy,” said Monique.

“Fuck Elm Street,” said Steven. “Besides, I don’t think Freddy is so scary. He’s no different than other Americans today.”

“How so?”

“There’s something corrupt about him, sure, but where in this country is a guy who isn’t?”

Monique kissed him, ever-so-slight lips on lips and nothing more, not knowing that that this would be their last kiss. “Don’t do anything stupid, Steven.”

“I won’t.” Then, sidling up close, placing his hands around her curvy hips, he said, “Want to stay a bit longer?”

“No, I have to go. My mom’s worried about me staying out late, you know, because of the homicides and all.”

“I understand.”

“If I get the chance, maybe I’ll call you tonight.”

“Either way,” he said, “I guess I won’t be fucking you tonight.”

After Monique went home, Steven set his alarm, went to bed and drifted off to a light, impure sleep…

In his dream Steven was in someplace that appeared to border between a fraternity house and a seedy hotel. No, it was more like a brothel. Steven gazed around in wonder of the graffiti that was scrawled on the hallways, with phrases such as “Nasty whore” and “I banged your sister” splashed in haphazard squiggles of bright paint and black ink. The place gave off an air of wretchedness, not unlike he imagined a sewer would smell, with the odour of feces and dog vomit wafting up all around him. It was very putrid. The atmosphere was sort of dreamy. A tiny black spider skirted by along the floor, crossing his path. Behind closed doorways, Steven heard the sounds of men and women fucking. Some of the doorways were open and Steven peeped inside. He saw college boys drinking tequila shots from between the boobs of licentious women. Every woman had enormous boobs, which was wonderful to behold. The college boys laughed heartily, knowing that nothing beat boobs and booze.

“Tits and tequila…” said Steven, smiling, thrilled by his surroundings.

Finally, at the end of the long hallway was another open doorway, with a beautiful woman standing alone and seductive in its archway, and she wore nothing but a blouse made entirely of whipped cream and a skirt slapped together from assorted lunchmeats. The air was thick with steam, and Steven wiped away the sweat accumulating on his forehead. Amidst the squalor and the perversion of this stinking otherworldly brothel was this one delicious woman. Right away Steven was drawn towards her.

“What’s your name, cowboy?” said the woman with pastrami and pepper-loaf dangling from her genitalia, as Steven came within a few feet.

“The better question is, what kind of idiot do you think I am?” he asked.

“First class,” she said.

Steven eyed her fleshy breasts where pointy nipples poked out from the whipped cream. He knew full well that this was only a dream because no real-life woman could look this tasty. He wanted to fuck her but, being in Freddy’s domain, he also sensed the potential dangers. However, he ignored the dangers and surrendered to his temptations. Clothed in lunchmeat, this woman was too appetizing to ignore.
Opening his mouth, his stuck-out tongue made the movements of a skilled gymnast, as he crouched on the floor and tongued the whipped cream from the enticing woman’s navel, which caused her to respond with a pleasured sigh and a slight spasm of delight. Not unlike a teenage girl, she had a small, round, compact ass, like a pair of soft pillows. Tilting his head, he licked a piece of salami that dangled from the crack of her ass. His mouth was all over her body. Next, he nibbled at the baloney along her thigh. The meat tasted good, and he took a chomp of mouth-watering bratwurst that clung to her bare hamstring.

He felt the heat of this place more than ever, and a thick mist covered the two of them. Down on his knees, something — a slice of roast beef perhaps — hung down, tickling his cheek. He looked up and saw that what tickled his cheek was not roast beef at all, but a few loose threads hanging from a green-and-red striped sweater. The figure, no longer a beautiful woman, now wore black workpants. Steven looked up. Now the woman had the hideously burned face of a man, his skin wilted and dried, and he realized that this man must be the infamous Freddy Krueger. Atop his head was a tattered old hat.

“Enjoying your midnight snack?” asked Freddy, deep-voiced, with a menacing smile on his face as he raised his glove, which was comprised of deadly sharp knives for fingers.

Steven tried getting up, struggling. Freddy had him by the shirt collar. Covered by shadow and mist, Freddy grinned, evil and broad, his teeth rotten and crooked.

“I was enjoying your little smorgasbord,” said Steven, impudent as ever in spite of his fear.

Chuckling under his breath, in a mocking voice Freddy said, “The meat market’s closed!”

Steven felt a unanticipated pain shoot through his left shoulder, and he cried out in agony while he looked over and saw Freddy’s razor-sharp knife fingers stabbed through his shoulder, blood gushing from the deep, deep wound.
An alarm went off — loudly.

“Huh?” said Freddy.

Glancing up at the skinny man with the burned face, Steven said, “See you later, fuck-face!”

Steven was, literally, saved by the bell. He woke up, safe in his own bed again. Blood spurted from his shoulder and onto the blankets. Freddy’s knife-fingers had skewered all the way through. The pain was bearable, but Steven knew that he would require medical attention or risk dying there. Immediately he phoned Monique for help.

“Monique, I did it! I met Freddy face to face and I survived!”

“Fuck, are you serious?”

“But I’m injured,” said Steven. “Think you could drive me to the hospital?”

“What about an ambulance?”

“Fuck that — it’s too expensive. Just come get me.”

Monique agreed, and promised that she’d be at Steven’s house as soon as possible and she could transport him to the hospital before he bled to death.
After hanging up the phone, Steven got out of bed with the intention of going to the washroom down the hall and cleaning the wound with a damp washcloth. He never made it that far, though. Instead, he tripped over a copy of Hustler magazine (the issue with Jessica Jaymes on the front cover) discarded on the bedroom floor, fell backwards, and whacked his head on the hard wooden bedpost. He was a klutz.
That’s exactly how Monique found him when she arrived at Steven’s house: on the bedroom floor, head bent in an awkward manner, blood oozing from his gaping shoulder-wound, while the bedside clock’s alarm kept buzzing, almost earsplitting. Monique screamed. The alarm and the screams could not save Steven. Lifeless, nothing could wake him now.

-Chris Miller is a regular contributor to Down Supremacy and Thieves Jargon. Please check out the book he edited which is available at Lulu.

Generation Rinna

2005-04-16T14:40:00.000-07:00

Lisa Rinna starred on some sort of crappy soap opera and later she was on Melrose Place. She is married to Harry Hamlin (Clash Of The Titans). Any babies born between 1980-1994 are part of the Rinna Generation which is otherwise known as Generation Rinna.

Travel into future with Lisa Rinna and the Rinna Generation...

"There are few words to describe the sheer beauty of the twin pillows that cushion the enterance to this orifice. Botoxular maybe or then again, some bizarre amalgamation of Jagger, tyler and one of those cheap rubber rings you get at the seaside."
Crime Writer Gary Dobbs on Lisa Rinna's Lips

Mouth
by Chris Miller

After many weeks with cloudy skies, Saturday came, and some sunshine finally. Jake had been indoors way too much, watching TV and taking catnaps, so he decided that today was a good day for getting out and walking someplace. He went for a stroll by himself, soaking up the warm sun. Harried thoughts persisted. He was harried because he didn’t have a woman in his life. He needed something to distract him from these worries. As he walked nearer the liquor store, he decided that a six-pack of vodka coolers might be just the distraction he needed on a humid day such as this.
Just before Jake went inside, this native fellow, assumedly soused, got up from the sidewalk where he leaned against the liquor store window and called out, “Hey, ya goz a ciganet?”
“No, I don’t smoke,” said Jake, lying.
The truth is, he didn’t like giving cigarettes or money to strangers anymore. Once in Las Vegas this scraggly bum came over asking for money and Jake intended on giving him $5 but he was really drunk and he handed him $50 by mistake. All those goddamned American bills looked alike to him. Jake learned a valuable lesson that night: never help others less fortunate than yourself. As a result, he hadn’t given money to a bum since.
“Buyin’ beer?” The native fellow sounded as though he had some severe nasal problems.
“Coolers,” he told the native fellow with the nasal problem.
Before the native fellow could say another word, the woman working at the liquor store exited. She wore jeans that accentuated her ass and a white shirt and no bra, which accentuated her breasts. Standing in the doorway of the liquor store, her shirt sort of hung open. She looked really nice standing there. Her navel was showing too, a narrow ribbon of sun-browned flesh between the top of her jeans and the bottom of her shirt.
“Louie, get the fuck out of here!” she hollered at the native fellow.
“I just borrowin’ a ciganet,” he said.
“No, no more hanging out here bumming cigarettes! I’ve had it with this shit! Next time I call the cops, got it?”
The native fellow turned, said, “Yez, I got it,” and staggered away into the daytime.
“Sorry about that,” the woman from the liquor store told Jake, running her hand through her tangle of brown hair. “I can’t get rid of that asshole. He just keeps coming back.”
“He wasn’t bothering me, really,” said Jake, as he followed her into the liquor store. The store was air-conditioned and cool inside.
Jake had been in this liquor store before but he didn’t recognize this woman. He went over to where the coolers were kept, chose a six-pack of boysenberry vodka, and returned to the till to pay. Jake drank beer mostly, but on such a hot day he figured that a sweet drink might do him good.
As he stood there, he noticed something amazing. The woman, this liquor store worker, had the most sumptuous, plump lips he had ever seen. Something sensual about her moist, soft-looking lips distracted him from everything else around. He had been concentrating so closely on her styled hair, bare navel, tits and ass that he neglected to even look at her mouth. Now, he could not help but notice those gorgeous lips.

Caught up in the moment he said, "Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together.”
“What did you say?” she asked.
The words had burst forth without him even thinking. Immediately infatuated with this woman, beyond his own control he had quoted the words to a famous line from a Pablo Neruda poem. He kept staring at the woman behind the counter. Jake thought of other lines from Neruda, but he couldn't recall how they went exactly, something about smoke roaming for a home and drifting into his heart and choking him. He had an appreciation for fine poetry but he could never remember the words. Then more words sprang to mind, and he recited them, too.
"Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach," said Jake.
The woman with the marvelous mouth ignored him this time.
As for Jake, he kept staring at her. No other woman’s mouth could compare to hers, not Angelina Jolie’s, not Uma Thurman’s, and not Traci Lords’, and certainly no porn star Jake had ever seen. She had a perfect mouth. Even if her chest were flat, she had a missing leg, and couldn't control her farts, Jake would select this woman over any other adult female in the world based exclusively on that alluring mouth of hers. He was drawn to this woman, and he wanted her all to himself
“Are you married?” asked Jake.
The woman didn’t answer right away. She scanned the barcode on the vodka coolers and told him the price, then responded, “My husband is Harry Hamlin.”
“Never heard of him. My name’s Jake.”
He expected her to reciprocate in some fashion, perhaps by stating her name for starters, but when she didn’t, Jake removed his wallet from his pocket, and found a couple of bills to pay for his liquor purchase.
“My name’s Lisa Rinna,” she said finally.
“That’s a beautiful name,” said Jake.
“I hate it,” she said.
“Yeah, well, parents do that to their children sometimes,” Jake said, as he collected his change from her delicate, out spread palm, and walked out.

On the long walk home Jake popped open a boysenberry vodka cooler and swallowed a deep pleasing mouthful. He kept walking along the sunlit sidewalk, drinking while he walked, thinking about Lisa or, more specifically, about her incredible lips. He wondered about this Harry Hamlin character. Was he anybody special? How did he ever manage to get a woman like her, with such a mouth? Did Harry know secrets about attracting women that he didn’t know? Having sex with her would probably be fabulous, too. Jake imagined fucking her. He imagined her making small noises when they fucked, her body wriggling around every which way, limbs jerking up and down on a comfortable hotel bed. Thinking about her movements excited him. More than anything, just thinking about her mouth excited him.
There was a time when all Jake wanted out of life was a luxury car, and later his goal was to live in a million-dollar house. He had other smaller wants and wishes as time went by, and he never attained any of them. He had no car, he lived in a run-down apartment, and was able to attain neither the jobs nor the women that he wanted. All of Jake’s thoughts dizzied around past events or hopes for the future. He scarcely thought of the here and now, and if he did the only reason was to borrow light from it to direct the future. He never lived, only hoped to live, and always laying himself out to find happiness, inevitably he never was happy.
Today, since meeting Lisa Rinna for the first time, Jake’s one and only desire in life was to die and come back reincarnated as her husband’s mouth, so he could feel the tangible pleasure of kissing Lisa's luscious lips. A guy could die happy, Jake was convinced, if a wish like his was ever fulfilled.

Rebecca Schaeffer Tribute #1

2005-04-09T16:53:00.000-07:00

This is the first in an ongoing series of tributes to the late actress Rebecca Schaeffer. For those of you who don't know Rebecca was the star of the 80's sitcom "My Sister Sam". She was murdered by a deranged stalker. The following story is by Chris Miller:

Confessions of a Stalker

I want people to understand what a strange effect a beautiful woman can have on a person’s state of mind. When a man sees a beautiful woman walking in the sunlight he will seek to possess her. I remember as a teenager, barely old enough to drive, I’d see a young woman going along the sidewalk and I’d slow right down and stare at her for several seconds as I drove by. Unsatisfied, I’d turn the corner, and circle around solely for the purpose of seeing her again, studying her breasts, admiring her legs, gawking at her graceful movements, memorizing her ass in the side-view mirror. The compulsion of wanting to fuck one sidewalk goddess or another was always there, but mostly just looking upon them was enough.
As I got older, I never dated beautiful women because they wanted nothing to do with me. I began to ruminate, brood and ponder a lot over my lack of female companionship. Everywhere I went I saw women, perfumed and clothed, and I wanted some of these women, but I knew that they were like everything else: they came with price tags. I read a lot of books to answer my questions about females, yet I couldn’t find any answers. Maybe I was reading the wrong books. At various odd jobs I worked with few beautiful women too, and they were never interested in dating me either. When I struck up a conversation with them, they went out of their way to stop the conversation. A fundamental rule of nature became apparent, the one which stated that peacocks don’t associate with crows. So I settled for the porno magazines and I considered giving the hookers a try, but the decent prostitutes charged way too much and the cheap ones reminded me of creepy crawlers and stinkbugs.
I was a child of the Eighties and in those days the world’s most beautiful women were those in movies, music and modeling. Those were the women I most desired. As time went by, I finally lost my virginity, and got the occasional woman to spend 15 minutes with me, and at age 20 I found Lisa, who became my girlfriend. Lisa was not beautiful, though.. Far from being my ideal woman, at least she managed to satisfy certain needs. She was a kind woman, loyal, serviceable in bed, and that’s mainly why we stayed together. Dating Lisa was like drinking cold coffee; at least she was something. Lisa had this friend Amber Schule who affected both of us in unexpected ways.
This is how the story goes… I had seen my girlfriend Lisa with her shirt off many, many times before and I knew what was beneath, which wasn’t a whole lot. Lisa’s chest region was not bountiful. In fact, one night while enjoying beer and pepperoni pizza with my Wednesday night friends, ample-bosomed women was our topic of conversation and I complained to them about my girlfriend’s tiny breasts. “Not like bee stings,” I told my drinking buddies, “more like deflated balloons.” Everybody laughed.
Only three nights later I knew that something was amiss. This was the night I met her friend Amber. When Lisa and Amber came over to my apartment around 9 o’clock, I noticed almost immediately something different about Lisa that I deemed worthy of mention.
"Are you wearing a padded bra?" I asked.
She told me no.
While she seemed neither fazed nor embarrassed by my question, I didn’t believe her answer. Her breasts didn’t look like deflated balloons anymore. I knew she didn’t have the money for implants, so I said, “Your tits look bigger than before.”
“Before what?”
“Before tonight,” I said. “Looks like you’ve got something stuffed down inside there.”
“I’m wearing a push-up bra.”
“You said you weren’t wearing one.”
“No, you said padded bra. This is a push-up bra — there’s a difference,” she corrected me.
She wore a bright green mohair sweater that matched her eyes. Her seemingly bigger-than-usual breasts were jutting out magnificently, straining at the very fabric of her tight sweater. She looked really good on this particular night. I didn’t know it at the time, but Lisa later confessed that she needed to make herself more “presentable” when out with Amber who was, after all, a very beautiful woman that turned heads in shopping malls and wherever else she went. Lisa’s teeth needed fixing, blemishes marked her face, and her butt was a touch too big for her jeans, but since she wasn’t begging me for a serious relationship, I endured her many and varied foibles. If a woman didn’t put too many demands on a guy and didn’t slice him apart with curse words, he could brave the blemishes and cigarette breath. Sure, Lisa had her fair share of imperfections, yet where in the world was a woman who didn’t?
Well, I thought that Amber Schule might have been an exception. A guy could tell simply by looking at her that she was a model. Her career wasn’t going anywhere fast, but she managed to get her photo in a few city newspapers wearing a bikini. She modeled wedding gowns at bridal fairs, and that sort of thing. She didn’t need to change her life with cosmetic surgery or stuff her bra with Kleenex tissues. Photographs of her would not require any airbrushing. Like those many women I used to circle the block for to get a second look, Amber possessed undeniable beauty.
“I need to use your washroom,” said Amber, with a voice as sweet as her ass.
Saying nothing, I pointed down the hallway, and watched her sweet ass as she made her way down towards the washroom. She flicked the light on and went in, turning with a slight wry smile as she closed the door behind her.
Lisa went over and poured a drink for herself. It was rum and coke. While she prepared the drink the two of us could hear Amber taking a whiz. I felt a slight twinge of disappointment, suddenly more aware of the fact that every woman, even the ones full of beauty and grace such as Amber, still had intestines and sweaty armpits and nostril hairs. She peed every day like the rest of them. There was no denying that every woman had imperfections and she was no exception.
When Amber returned from the washroom, the night came alive with chatter and laughter and Roxy Music on the stereo. I fixed a drink for her and another for me. The three of us sat in my apartment smoking cigarettes and talking and drinking Cuban rum. It was a special night. I cannot recall the first line of literature that led me away from all that I loved and led me to desire being a writer. The same could be said for pretty women and late evenings of talk. Sometimes, looking back, I believe this was the night I stopped loving Lisa and began my pursuit of Amber, my dear sweet Amber. I didn’t know it then, but this was the woman I would someday obsess over.

Some days I spent alone in my bedroom laying on an unmade bed and staring off at the wooden dresser strewn with dirty laundry. Listening to the dull hum of lights, I wondered why I was still there. What did I have to live for, really? Yoked down with lies for so long, I didn’t even know what was real anymore, the education and the lore about life not falling in sync with what I was finding out. While the rest of the world spun by outside in pursuit of its own picayune ideals I continued laying all by lonesome, reluctant to play those same reindeer games, refusing to chase illusions, and feeling an ever-present resentment towards men who dealt in real estate, insurance, municipal politics, fakery.
Many other things bothered me, too. For instance my rent was too high for the foul conditions I lived in. I contemplated moving, but whom was I fooling? Rent was high everywhere. Another thing that bothered me was the palaver of the local street kids, unable to articulate their thoughts, talking to one another as though they were filming a rap video. We went to the same schools, and had many of the same teachers, so I didn’t understand why I was more communicative than they were. All of those things bothered me. The faces, tongue-tied voices, police sirens, homeless animals, working my ass off for minimum wage, shadows in the alley … all of those things affected me adversely, multiplied within my own sense of the tragic.
Being a loner in my early 20s, of course, resulted in me being labeled a psycho, a weirdo and fucked in the head. This was nothing new. To paraphrase that great 20th century philosopher Norman Bates, “Sometimes we all go a little crazy.” While some young men self medicated with drugs and alcohol, engaged in self-destructive behavior and self-abnegating sexual activity, or read Sylvia Plath poetry, my long and lonely nights were a haze of depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder brightened from time to time by a first-rate bout of masturbation.
All of this is typical young-man angst, but with one twist: I fell in love with Amber Schule, and I thought that if she would ever give me the time of day, there was damn good chance she would fall in love with me. Late into the night I fantasized about her, jerking off as I imagined being her gynecologist or giving her a mammogram or the two of us running naked on a tropical beach or using her face as a seat cushion. I imagined her on a nightclub dance floor, amidst the orange and purple strobe lights, shaking around in a miracle of colour.
The thing about Amber is that she was a borderline celebrity now. Sure, she still worked part-time at the Red Rooster, but her modeling career was progressing. The year was 1989. She modeled brassieres and panties in the Sears catalogue and the local small town newspaper starting comparing her to the famous supermodels, which was probably an exaggeration. I clipped the pages showing Amber in her delicate white bra and panties, and started a scrapbook. I looked at the pictures in the book every night, sometimes twice a night. The pages of the scrapbook were moist.
The more I found out about her, the more I loved her. From a newspaper story I learned that her mother was a painter, and her father was a high school math teacher. Her art/math, left brain/right brain combo was a real turn-on. She was also Christian. She was spunky, independent, determined, and possessed every quality I was looking for in a woman and nothing like the other bitches in my town.
Knowing that Amber worked the early shift at Red Rooster I used to drive by every morning and check if she was working. The small convenience store had blinds on the windows but usually they were open and I could peak inside through the window. If I saw Amber working, I’d go inside and buy Twinkies or a coffee or a bottle of aspirin. I’m not sure when my aesthetic appreciation for her undergarment photos turned to obsession, but the more I learned about her the more I started harbouring theories that she and I were meant to fall in love. In some ways, I was already convinced that Amber was in love with me, even though we never spoke except to say “thank you” or “have a nice day.”
One late evening I drove by Red Rooster and noticed Amber at the checkout till. That she was working a nightshift surprised me. This was the night I almost crossed the line. Outside the store I sat in my car and watched her. She looked out the store window but paid me no mind. She was restocking the cigarette shelves or something. Just looking at her was an erotic experience in itself.
I unzipped my pants. I wanted to go close to Amber, touch her with my hands, be touched by her hands. Instead, I sat in my car watching her. With my right hand I touched my own chest, still watching her, my fingers itching at my own torso, imagining my hand was actually inside her shirt and stroking her pale breast. My hand inside my pants, I rubbed myself affectionately, again lost in my own imagination that the woman I saw through the store window had her hand in my lap. I could have stayed there all night, as long as she was there, but I grew worried that somebody would come by and catch me with my pants unzipped, stroking myself. I zipped up, and drove away.
I went home and drank beer, plenty of it, for a few hours. Finally I ran out of beer and wanted some more, so I got in my car and drove drunk in the direction of the nearest liquor store. It was raining. My tires hissing on the wet pavement, I had not yet reached my destination when I came upon this female figure hitchhiking in the dark. She stood on the gravel, on the opposite side of the road from the general hospital, her arm extended, thumb pointing up. I recognized the female figure as Amber. Our timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Her spring jacket buttoned to the top, she hunched her shoulders against the chill and the steady drizzle.
I slowed down, and she waved her arms in the air, hollering for me to stop. I stopped. How could I refuse? This was the opportunity I had been waiting for. Not unlike the ballplayer who finally gets the call up to the major leagues, my time had come; this was my moment to shine. She was coming into my life again at just the right moment.
Pulled over, she got in. “Hi!” she said, ever so eloquently.
“Hello,” I said, fumbling for the proper words. I worried over what to say, and how I looked. Was my hair combed? Why was I wearing this ridiculous yellow polo shirt?
“Thanks for stopping,” she said.
Amber was in my car, and a sudden thrill passed over me. She was all I had dreamed of and more. A brilliant, pretty, outrageous woman of exquisite innocence was in my car. I said, “Glad to be of assistance.”
The date was Tuesday, July 18, 1989. A tragic news story came on over the car radio that 21-year-old Rebecca Schaeffer, the star of My Sister Sam, was shot dead in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles. Amber and I listened to the broadcaster tell the story. We learned that a crazed stalker shot her dead. Two gunshots, two screams. She lay twitching in the doorway, her eyes staring up. A neighbour rushed over and checked her pulse, but found none. Half an hour later she was pronounced dead at Cedars Sinai Medical Center.
“That’s sad,” said Amber, noticeably heavyhearted by the news of the young TV star’s homicide. “There’s a lot of lunatics in this world.”
“Don’t I know it?” I agreed, my car spitting gravel as I accelerated, and the two of us drove off together into the black guts of the night.

-20 Stories of Drifters, Drunkards & Dreamers edited by Chris Miller is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/108720

This short story collection contains samples of fiction from some of the best underground writers in the world today, including Delphine Lecompte, Calvin Liu and Chris Millis. Many of the stories involve violence, heavy drinking and intense sexuality. You won't be disappointed.

Ricky Caril: Portrait of an Asian Poet

2005-04-07T09:51:00.000-07:00

Ricky Caril ( B. July 24th, 1977 Okinawa, Japan- D. March 3rd 2002 Cleveland, Ohio)

His nightmarish childhood working the twenty two hour slave shifts in Okinawa’s sneaker factories during Nike’s early eighties boom would not have led Ricky Caril to believe he was going to be a poet. Neither would his tortured life at home where he suffered the unwanted attentions of his fishmonger mother and yearned for his missing father Nicholas Caril, an American soldier who ran off shortly after Ricky’s birth.
Following a similar path to that taken by the guinea pig used to validate Cor Bradder’s famous “abusive Jesus” theory, absent Nicholas Caril’s homeland, Cleveland, would become Ricky’s inadequate saviour. One night in August 1985, a co worker at Ricky’s sweatshop told Ricky about a movie that was being filmed in nearby Hawaii but set in Okinawa. The movie was “Karate Kid Part 2” and Ricky, desperate to be exposed to his father’s culture, slapped together a raft out of Nike soles and shoelaces and made the dangerous journey across the sea.
Eight year old Ricky’s raft was taking on water near a school of mako sharks when the U.S. Coast Guard discovered him ten miles off the coast of Oahu. After being rescued Ricky was taken to a local police station and questioned. The police captain, charmed by Ricky’s starstruck story, used his influence to contact the film’s director John G. Avildsen. When Mr. Avildsen met Ricky he was so taken aback by his “pepperpot eyes” that he gave Ricky a part as an extra.
After filming of “The Karate Kid Part 2” wrapped up Ricky decided to use his earnings to travel across America. Years of wanton searching for his father took Ricky from San Francisco to Cleveland with plenty of other stops along the way. It was on a Greyhound to Cincinatti that Ricky came across a piss stained copy of “The Complete Poetry Of Edgar Allen Poe”. Ricky fell hard for Poe’s lyricism and soon began to compose poems of his own, inspired pieces that skewered and illuminated everything from the sweatshops in Okinawa to Shorey Connelly and the Irish mob’s stranglehold on Cleveland.
Do yourself a solid and pick up a copy of Ricky’s epic poem “Peaces” , it is simply amazing to uncover the depth of maturity and robust imagery present in the late Mr. Caril’s work especially when you realize that all this was accomplished before the age of thirty. The stuff that Ricky Caril was made of was more than that of laureates and suicidal female melodrama, , and it’s something that transcends the bullet Reeger Connelly fired into his groin that cold March night in Cleveland. Something that leaked out along with the blood that poured from Ricky’s penis as he bled to death in the alley next to Connelly’s Pub. Something that seeped into the Mississippi so it could float alongside the garbage barges who, in the voice that Ricky gave them in his poem “Seachem”, said “I boat. Seachem have no power. Boats slide away. I am friend though of cat...No, must slide! Boat can’t ever love...”

The Lost Brianwilsonore

Me licks the sounds of Brian Wilson,
he sees me from the sloop John B

sunbeams in me eyes
the frames on me spectacles melted awry

all I see is unright
thar’ll be bent bunny pirates sailing on a crooked ship

me mateys’ll be sailing while pegasus drip syphilis
from equine vaginas on our crossbone caps

this be the most horriblest sea, arr! the crookedest ocean
bent Poseidon pets pussies with wrenches dipped in Massengil

and the frames on me spectacles have melted awry
all I see is unright

The Truth About Jesus

Jesus Christ was killed in battle while helping lions escape from the Coliseum an animal rights activist his real name was Nick Nick became a saint reborn in 1982 as the inspiration for Christmas Season Bob a drug store Santa who stole downers and gave them out to homeless junkies during blizzards so they’d kill themselves instead of freeze to death Bob recognized his own Mary when he saw a little girl discoursing handball and she had a demonic smile playing around her mouth as she grasped the rubber blue ball in rebound taut and threw it at his face like a barb in Bob’s hat he grabbed the girl and kissed her regardless of age was lynched witnessed arrested raped in jail he sacrificed himself like Christ supposedly did for love and since Christmas Season Bob was Christ the Christ really did sacrifice himself and there is no truth about Jesus.

The Meowley Pirates

Me’d bumped three Ritalins drank six beers
anutherr bowl me’d get anutherr eighth to smoke

ay today was fun, tis I that listened to the Beatles
me’s be needin’ more beer, six waren’t enough

arr me really ain’t had all three Ritalins, tharr warr still arr line left
me didn’t feel like riding me bike to Phil’s house bein’ this seahigh

it bein’ this late New Orleans be a strange land!
arrgh me has to go, me needs something to come down off the Ritalins for me final tommorrow

me’d dranken a bottle of PowerAde, t’were twenty ounces liquid, me’d dranken two glassers of water’s brew
t’were sixteen ounces itself, me’s be needin’ thirty-six more ounces of water’s brew to be makin’ up fer what me lost from drinkin’ de beers

me mouth be parched, me needs to wet it anutherr time,
water’s brew cleans me insides like Liquid Plumber, Popeye eats me spinach too cause we needs ta be eatin’ arrgh spinach

me heartburns be actin’ up again, feel somethin’ lodged in me throt but there’s ayn’t naught, me name from now is Meowley
seen a doggy devil before, fell a victim to the doggy devil’s tricky scurvy circles, arrgh!

Doggy devil claimed Meowley had no span worth attending to. Now Meowley scribbled to ward of demons, and Meowley can’t stop, and Meowley is sick, and Meowley doesn’t know what to do...

Orange Adam West

Seahorses live like cuckolds in the sea
my friend Ben was like that too

a seahorse crying
covered by a shelly kind of love

then there’s Adam
out west in L.A.

another seahorse swept away
no fins to fight against the current

forget about Ben & Adam
there’s an orange Adam West

orange skin & red scalpels
to dice clits with

Orange Adam West orange Batman suit
turning murders into orange art
everywhere is green with orange.

The Dead Fairy interviews Joe Bob Briggs

2005-03-31T10:27:00.000-08:00

After my interview with Barry Gifford I filed a civil suit against the Timefairy and sued him for three million dollars. The trial is going on currently and things are going pretty well. Because of my troubles I haven’t had the time to solicit anymore interviews but here is one from a while back with that trashy piece of crap Joe Bob Briggs. If you don’t already know about him you must be some kind of stupid asshole. Joe Bob Briggs was the guy who used to host TNT’s Monstervision but he’s is probably best known for fucking Robert Blake and causing the homosexual panic that led to the murder of his wife:

To start things off I’m going to throw out a provocative statement and I want you to react to it. Okay, here goes:
“Starship Troopers” was the only good film made during the 90’s.

They told me this would happen if I talked to you.

If you were producing a movie of “Knight Rider” who would you cast as Michael Knight and K.I.T.T.?

Lorenzo Lamas, who else?

It’s been fourteen years since the murder of Rebecca Schaeffer. What do you think that's supposed to mean?

It means Robert Bardo is probably rehabilitated by now and
ready to get a big screen.

If you were a big executive at Fox studios how would you go about making a lame remake of “Basketcase”?

Hire Mini-Me to play Belial.

What do you think about the Joe R. Lansdale novel, “Captains Outrageous”?

Haven't read it. Love "Bubba Ho-Tep," though.

Have you ever written any short stories? If so, can you
describe one
of them?

I'm afraid all I can write is long stories. I wrote a
picaresque novel called "A Guide to Western Civilization, or, My
Story," that pretty much solves all the problems of the world.

What do you think about films like “Dogville” and “The Barbarian Invasions”, which some critics consider anti-American?

I don't like a film UNLESS it's anti-American, or at least
anti-something.

If you had to make a list of the three hundred best film performances of all time at what number would you place Heather Langenkamp’s in “A Nightmare On Elm Street”?
She would definitely be in the top thirty. I never
understood why she didn't go on to make more movies.

In what ways do you feel Mel Gibson’s experience making “The Passion” mirrors Leonard Nimoy’s own hardships directing “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”?

Leonard didn't have a Caviezel to take the Curly hits for
him.

What made Michael Landon so magical?
He was the first actor in history who said to himself,
"Hmmmmm, I'll star in 'I Was a Teenage Werewolf' and then make
warm family dramas."

I always finish with a Patricia Highsmith question. If you
had the
chance to ask Patricia Highsmith one thing what would it be?
"Is Lesbian Noir a genre or a sub-genre?"

The Dead Fairy interviews Barry Gifford

2005-03-23T16:49:00.000-08:00

After my interview with B-movie star Trent Haaga I flew back to Fairyland because my son Clark S. Fairy texted me this cryptic message, “Barry G is on the airship! Help!”
When I opened a portal and flew back to Fairyland Clark flew up to me immediately and pointed to the sky. It was then that I saw the evil Timefairy’s gray airship, and dangling below it, attached by a noose around his neck, was the writer Barry Gifford. Mr. Gifford is the author of such sexy books as “Perdita Durango” and “Wild At Heart” and I took this opportunity to ask him some questions.

To start things off I want to know what you thought of Sailor’s portrayal in the “Wild At Heart” film, I mean why do you think David Lynch felt the need to make him so violent and unstable when he was not like that in the books? (As I recall he only killed Bob Ray Lemon by accident.)

LYNCH DID MAKE SAILOR MORE VIOLENT AND UNSTABLE THAN HE IS IN THE BOOKS BUT HE RETAINED THE TENDERNESS BETWEEN SAILOR AND LULA, WHICH IS THE IMPORTANT PART.

I once read an interview with Stephen King where he said he was disgusted with the “state of anorexia” that literature was in. Do you feel there is any merit to this statement?

I AM SORRY THAT STEPHEN KING IS DISGUSTED WITH THE CURRENT STATE OF
LITERATURE. IT MAKES ME WONDER WHAT STATE HE IS IN AND WHAT HE IS DOING TALKING ABOUT LITERATURE AT ALL.

How do you feel about all the film remakes in the last few years such as Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho” and Denzel Washington’s “The Manchurian Candidate”. Do you see this practice as disrespectful to the original artists or is it more of a loving gesture to keep these stories alive?

GOOD MOVIES JUST LIKE GOOD SONGS SHOULD NEVER BE RE-MADE.

When you first get an idea for a novel what sort of preparations do you make as far as outlines or act structures?

I MAKE NO OUTLINES FOR NOVELS. I WRITE TO AN IMAGE, A PICTURE IN MY HEAD AND ALLOW THE CHARACTERS TO TALK THEMSELVES IN AND OUT OF SITUATIONS.

It has been said that one of the greatest parts of being a writer is that you can learn directly from your idols just by picking up one of their books. Who would you consider your first literary idol?

MY FIRST LITERARY MODEL--NOT IDOL--WAS JACK LONDON. MY SECOND WAS AND IS JOSEPH CONRAD.

Rebecca Schaeffer, the young star of a popular 80’s sitcom “My Sister Sam”, was murdered by her obsessed fan Robert Bardo in 1989 while getting ready to audition for the role of Michael Corleone’s daughter in “The Godfather 3”. If you were going to write a novel based on this story who’s point of view would you choose?

I WOULD WRITE THIS STORY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF REBECCA'S SCHAEFFER'S FATHER.

It was at this point that Mr. Gifford began to choke and I realized that the Timefairy’s airship was flying higher to tighten the noose. I sprinkled fairy dust until it cut through the rope and caught Mr. Gifford in my little fairy arms.
Although the interview was cut short because Mr. Gifford’s larynx had been torn he returned home unharmed and the Timefairy was foiled once again. I found this note taped to my wings:
YOU MUST HAVE STRONG LITTLE FAIRY ARMS.

The Scott Peterson Award

2005-03-22T09:33:00.000-08:00

Down Supremacy's first Scott Peterson Award for a person who should have been aborted goes to mtdeeley@hotmail.com for this illiterate email he sent me in response to my site. Please feel free to email him all you want with your comments:

"Do you know a better way to remove Downs Syndrome from society? I've seen
people with that condition. I think they're better off dead! Seriously,
their quality of life is very low and I jsut hate loking at them.

Sidenote: GI Joe references do not help the legitimacy of your arguement.
Now don't sned me another e-mail or I'll sick Voltron on your ass."

mtdeeley@hotmail.com

Mr. Deeley, I would advice you to go back and finish the second grade before you send me any more letters. You look like you're pretty ugly based on the picture I posted below and according to your own website you are still a virgin. Good luck doing comic book reviews that no one is ever gonna read. I'm not going to do you the favor of posting your site.

"Who Is... Michael Deeley?

Michael Deeley has been reading comics since he was 12 years old. His first book was an issue of Silver Surfer by Jim Starlin, leading him to see all comics as ideological conflicts with big-ass fight scenes. At the very least, he expects a comic to be entertaining in some fashion, which is why he thinks Secret Wars II is better than Dark Knight Strikes Back. He has never work in the comics field, but he does have a belligerent attitude and a lot of free time.

During his brief intervals in the real world, Michael looks for a paying job that should, (theoretically) lead to a better life involving more comics, privacy, and women.

He currently lives between Pittsburgh, PA, and the Pittsburgh International Airport, in a suburb so new, it only has one McDonalds."

-From Michael Deeley's comic nerd review site.

And here's a picture of my son Clark. He is the sort of person that bitter, unattractive losers like Michael Deeley would have wiped off the face of the Earth: