It came to pass... part II

Part II

Rain, in its multitudes, stormed the evening city of Gallowglass; rain marching,in its grey uniform, over the genuflecting heads of roof-tops; spitting in the passive stone faces of old war monuments; infiltrating gutters and cracks in old derelict buildings; stoning the canopies of cowering umbrellas and the bright windows of speeding cars.

Then, wading through it all,came the little dreary figure of Sawney Bean; rain soaking in through the cracks in his rubber soled trainers and rain collecting and dripping from the folds of his plastic, purple anorak.

Pensively;he made his way to the little,
limestone, romanesque church that sat upon Broken road and looked; with its peculiar ribbed spires and towers,like a grounded, petrified space-craft.

He saw her there; standing, as if waiting;infront of the black, wrought-iron gates; glistening in a rain soaked,silver bomber jacket; pleated,plaid mini-skirt,black woolen tights and glitter spangled, blue Doc Martens.

Gilded by the spreading yellow fan of a street –lamp, was the girl; unmistakeably alien with her strange,metallic purple bob and out-sized, mirror plated sun-glasses.

"Do you always wear sun-glasses at night?", asked Sawney, half laughing and half shivering.

"Where I come from, it is always sunny.
Darkness hurts my eyes and these have light and mirrors on the insides aswell as out",she answered in a way that stunned Sawney; as if she were talking to herself and not noticing him or his in- experienced hand shaking as it held out a 5 milliard blanc note.

"You don't pay me here",she said, smiling faintly and Sawney noticed her glitter painted lips and the perfectly polished whiteness of her teeth, 'and anyway. It'll cost you 5 billiard blancs if you want the real deal".

Sawney nodded, shaking rain from his hood as he tilted it, although, for a brief moment, he'd felt like saying no but, at this moment, she seemed to be in control and he was just following her lead.

Because he had no transport, she led him to an alley-way around the back of a noisy pub and, while he looked at her; mouth gaping, he could hear the sound of a crowded bar filled with wild laughter and drunken yelling and, at first, he worried that they might be spotted but she
seemed without fear; like a Goddess, un-aware
and unconcerned about the human world.

"What's your name?",asked Sawney;his
pale,anxious,dripping face staring back at him,
in stereo, from her reflective sun-specs.

"Anoushka",she said, "That's my human name; what’s your name?".

"Mine is… um…Ronald; Ronald McDonald” , he lied, “This is my first time- I mean, friends of mine- I mean, I've heard about it but -", stammered Sawney, trying to whisper but breathing too heavilly with fear and anticipation.

Anoushka wasn't interested; instead she was gracefully unzipping the front of her silver bomber jacket and, with machine-like precision, picking loose the mother-of-pearl buttons on her multi-coloured, chiffon blouse.

Then Sawney saw them and, at first, was a little repulsed by what he saw; although they were not half as strange as he had heard them described to him, many times, by pals over tins of sparkling “Brain-Damage”.

Peering out, from beneath the thin gauze of coloured chiffon, were the large, purple, cone shaped nipples and perfectly round aureoles of two small, dark alien breasts; not three or six, as he had been expecting, but two.

"Once you're weaned on my milk, you will feel how you felt when you were a child,at home, with no worries and no fears”, she said; as if reading from a book; stroking his head with a gentleness that he hadn't thought her capable of.

Sawney wanted what she was offering; a feeling of normality and comfort and safety. Her milk was supposed to be pure liquid childhood; the opposite of other drugs that took you to a different,higher state of conciousness or another alien dimension; her milk made you feel like the whole world was cosy,innocent, quiet, hopeful and boringly mundane.

He'd spoken to people that even swore they’d been reborn after drinking it,but no, he couldn't bring himself to do it; there was something too perverse and repulsive about suckling on this alien, narcotic cow in a cold alleyway; even for someone who’d sunken as low as him.

Then, out of the pub behind that alleyway, which Sawney had noticed was called "The Life and Soul", came stumbling, a shambling wall of drunken old men; leaning on each other for support as they zig-zagged forward, singing:

"One will make you giggle;
two will make you cry;
three will make you feel alive
but four and you will die".

When Sawney heard their voices and their heavy footfalls shuffling nearer, he lost his nerve and he almost lost his senses; then he saw the milk; light pink, like the colour of stomach medicine that he'd needed as a child and the thought of swallowing it made him gag and then the old drunks seemed just about to turn the corner and so he just wanted to get away from there.

Hurriedly fishing out a 5 billiard blanc note from the rain soggy lining of his inside pocket, he stuffed it into the opening of Anoushka's blouse and, as the note fell loose and spiralled to the pavement, Sawney darted away.

The old drunks saw him shoot out of the alleyway like a rocket and drivers beat angrilly on horns as he hurtled across a busy road before vanishing into the shadowy entrance of St. Carnivore street underground.

Knowing that all humans were crazy, Anoushka was unphased by her latest punters odd behaviour. Bending, Anoushka picked up the crumpled 5 billiard blanc note and, for a few seconds, reflected upon how far she had fallen.

Her home world was so distant now, with its constant rainbow-ringed sun; its bio-luminescent flowers and glistening metallic fields; its energy bearing orchards; its vast cities of unmelting igloos and, most of all, the warm scent of happiness secreted from her family; so much better than this dark,dingy,hollow planet with its grey everything and its pallid, petty species.

In her culture, prostitution was an honorable profession like teaching but, in this miserable place where nothing had any honor or value, everything was dirty; everything was reduced to a commodity.

Still; she couldn't afford to go home while there was still so much work to be done.

Waking from a sleepwalker's daze; Sawney found himself on a south bound mole train taking him home and the incident that he'd just escaped from was already beginning to seem like no more than an embarrassing nightmare.

He leaned against the carriage window and felt it shuddering, cold and hard on his cheek. He tried to sleep but his mind kept him awake.

Instead, he peered into the window’s glass, made a mirror by the train tunnel’s darkness, at the other passengers who were sharing this little fragment of their lives with him before they departed for something better, or at least different, to the life he had.

Standing by the carriage doors; a tall,
excessively athletic looking,Nordic tourist, supporting a heavy rucksack upon which was tied a pair of ice-skates, stared intensely at a small underground map as if he were reading a book.

He had perfect balance; resting on two muscular legs, as thick as corinthian pillars, and didn't seem to shake or budge an inch, no matter how the carriage rattled or rocked from side to side.

Opposite him; an old lady, in a crochet hat,
clutched a sleeping terrier on her lap and
listened, contentedly, to what sounded like a marching band, through wireless, invisible earphones.

“So normal”, he thought, “and so human”, but then the nordic tourist brushed a floppy blonde fringe out of his eyes and Sawney saw a third,piercing blue eye blink within his forehead and,as the train slowed and the carriage doors slid open,the terrier on the old woman’s lap groggily raised its head and asked,in a thick american accent, “Is this our stop?”.

“No, hubby darling”, said the old woman, smiling tenderly, “Go back to sleep”.

“Sleep”, thought Sawney,grimacing, “Perchance to dream and escape this bloody nightmare world”.

Someone, he noticed, had left a copy of the Gallowglass Herald rolled up and stuffed into the space between his seat and the wall. Normally, he didn't follow the news but a headline on the front of the paper had grabbed his attention. "Alien Killer Stalks Streets Of Gallowglass", it read.

Unfurling it, he saw the black and white faces of the killer’s last two victims; two ordinary, innocent looking girls.

One had a big smile that showed a kind heart and the other reminded him of a girl who'd been in his astrogeography class at school. The paper said that they were both Aliens and it also said they'd been prostitutes but it was hard to believe from just looking at their faces.

It made him feel depressed and it made him feel guilty because it reminded him of the girl he'd left in the alley-way who'd called herself Anoushka.

Feeling too weary and too ashamed to look at anything, he shoved the paper back into the crack at the edge of his seat and tried, again, to sleep; listening to the clatter of the train.

He had almost managed to slip off of the edge
of conciousness when he was dragged back into
the light by the sound of muttering and then,
looking over his shoulder, he saw an old man in one of the train seats behind him with a wooden sign hung around his neck with the words "E Pluribus Unum" printed on it in large black gothic lettering. The old man was talking to himself.

“He must have gotten on at Albion street” , thought Sawney, “while I was sleeping”.

Sawney tried not to stare but, though the man was behaving madly, there was something charismatic in his face or perhaps in the deep, fatherly tone of his voice.

Soon it was too late to look away; the man had noticed Sawney looking at him and began to speak directly to him, smiling with the pleasure of having finally found someone who might listen to his message.

"In The Book of Bean; chapter 10; verse 4. It is written that our multiverse is one body; The Multiversal Organism and that we and our little lives are moving parts within that body. The Organism is what we are really referring to when we use the word God".

“But do you know how big the multiverse is?”, smirked Sawney, feeling slightly superior to this old man who was obviously deluded and who,with his shabby clothes and unkempt, yellow-stained beard, looked more like a vagrant or an escaped psychiatric patient than a priest.

“To an individual cell, the body would appear inordinately immense and, also, a year of our lives would be like a second in the life of God but its consciousness is immanent in all people and in all living things and thus God sees and senses all”, replied the crazy man, unphased by Sawney’s mocking tone.

“But the universe isn’t like an organism; it’s chaotic and random”, said Sawney.

“Chaos and Order;randomness and predestination are all a part of god; they are balanced with each other,usually, but the multiverse is sick; a living sickness which arose out of chaos has infected and paralysed all that is good within the multiversal anatomy. Greed,corruption,
division,war,poverty,hate,fascism,genocide and mass insanity; these are all symptoms of the sickness. The sickness is what humans refer to when they talk of Satan”.

“The irony is”, thought Sawney, “That the sickness is in your head, you frickin’ fruitcake, and you can’t see it”.

“I can see more than you think”, said the old man, smiling.

“Alright”, said Sawney, unimpressed, “So you
can read minds. Big wow! There are probably thousands of Immi’s on Enoch that can perform the same trick but,like I said, the Multiverse
is not an organism and no God has ever seemed interested in wether I live or die”.

“You are God,my friend. We are all God and
when we are interested then God is interested”,
said the old barmpot, “or,in other words,
those that serve good shall be served by
good, chapter 5, verse 12”.

Sawney woke from his dream with a start and, turning his face back to the shuddering window beside him, he saw the train slowly grind into E=MC Square; its wheels screaming to a halt like a voice enraged but too weary to argue.

A long crowd of people stood precariously close to the edge of the tracks and were all frantically elbowing to force their way inside the carriage.

Yanking himself out of a meditative daze and out of his current lethargy; he joined the ranks of the opposing scrum who were pushing their way out.

Emmerging into the station, Sawney heard the sweet, fragmented melodies of a Kaleidophone drifting from somewhere; coaxing smiles and pleasent remarks out of the rummage of tired and nervous faces. It was like some distant dream and he felt an urge to follow the music to its source.

He was already feeling a bit delirious; the way you feel when you've wandered drunk or aimlessly around a big city from station to station; North,South,East and West; looking for something, you can't know what, until you've found it.Thank God; atleast he had a home to go back to.

He climbed the stations spiral stairwell
upwards because the big lift had already
ascended;getting the measure in his aching
joints of how absolutely knackered he was
from walking; being over-taken by young men
and women who made him look geriatric as they sprinted up stairs. Finally, as he got to the top, he met the Kaleidophone player.

He was a light-skinned African-Caribbean
with a short, white beard and flowing,
yellow and tangerine coloured robes that
Sawney thought looked out of place in this
dismal industrial setting and he was cranking
the handle on a long octagonal box.

Sawney imagined all the broken fragments inside; churned up by a turn of the handle to cascade down, again and again, so that, each time they fell, they formed a different, random sonic pattern.

Adding his little piece to the random composition; Sawney took a handful of tin pennies from his pocket and scattered them so that some landed with a soft thud in the buskers upturned fez; some clinked against the hard stone floor and some spun on their edges before collapsing with a whirring clatter.

Emmerging from the tube station entrance and onto the street; Sawney saw the sunday morning sun had already started to rise. Always dim, from the veil of pollution, it could only manage a pale white complexion and looked sort-of like a fat ghost,peeping from behind the slush of grimy clouds, but it was at least a break from the
rain.

Moving away from the station, Sawney trudged along the long backbone of Great Bear street to the intersection of Castor and Pollux and down the steep slope of Dipper hill until he came in sight of his apartment block;a tall,thin,grey column that; along with its neighbouring blocks, seemed to support the dirty ceiling of the drab sky.

Entering the dimly lit ground floor, he released a quiet groan of displeasure as he discovered that the lift did not respond to his pushing the 'call' button, no matter how hard or how rapidly he jabbed it, except with the feeble grunt of a weedy weight-lifter before surrendering with a hydraulic gasp.

Mounting the first flight of the grey concrete stairwell, that would eventually take him up to his thirteenth floor flat; he felt almost like fainting, his eye-lids collapsing each time he forced them open and then, to cap it all, he heard the voice, of his landlady Stella, calling his name.

Stella’s flat; on the first floor, was easy for
anyone to find. It was darker than the rest and
you always felt her gravitational pull when you
passed it; not to mention that she usually sang
‘Ochi Chyornye’ in a booming baritone that could rattle windows.

"Come on in, Sawney",she said in a melancholic slur that made Sawney think she had probably been hitting the Jack Daniels again.

Entering the darkness of her room,Sawney
immediately felt her suction start to
pull upon his clothing. "That's close enough",
she said from out of the darkness. "Don't get
too close or you'll get swallowed up and I
can't afford to lose paying tenants.
Particularly a fine looking young gentleman
like yourself".

Stella;unusually for a black hole, always spoke with the most refined southern accent: an affectation left over from her days as a starlet in the silver cube.

Stella's story had been one of the most
embarassing legends in Holo-wood history.
She'd been one of the biggest holographic actresses of the golden age; unfortunately she’d gotten so big and bright a star that she'd turned super-nova; becoming a red giant before imploding,suddenly, into a melancholic,booze-addled black-hole.

However; her embarassment was multiplied by the fact that the implosion had taken place while receiving an oscar for best actress and that the academy members and most of the cream of Holo-wood had been sucked into her singularity and crushed into nothingness.

That had been death to her career and so; only fit to be cast as a special effect, she'd retired to the city of Gallowglass on the distant earth colony of Enoch 4 and become the landlady of a low-rent tenament building.

"There should be a couple of bottles of bourbon to the left of you that Mr. Munsen on the 4th floor was kind enough to leave for me in lieu
of rent. Be a good boy and toss them over to me, will you?".

Sawney groped about in the gloom by his
side until his hands made contact with what
felt like three large glass bottles which
he snatched up wearilly; proceeding to hurl
them, under-arm, towards the centre of her
gaping vortex like a man feeding fish to a whale.

As soon as they made contact with her greedy event-horizon they seemed to freeze in mid air before vanishing into nothingness.

"Oh, mon dieu! That last one really hit the spot. Nothing like a little intoxication to fill the emptiness at the core of one's being", she said,burping as daintilly as she was able to.

Sawney was happy to be of service but he was dead on his feet and needed badly to fall into a sleep filled void as deep and black as Stella's bottomless gullet.

"If you would care to stay", she pleaded, "I could give you my rendition of Desdemona being strangled. The public always seemed to love that part of my performance; or perhaps Ophelia, tragically gasping for air; that was another triumph of mine. I do love to have an audience,you understand: those little people in the dark".

"No thanks",said Sawney, slightly yawning;
discreetly backing away towards the door
as fast as he could,"I really need to get some sleep but I'm sure you'll make a comeback. You were really big ... once".

"I'm still big",protested Stella,
indignantly,"It’s my atomic mass that got smaller".

Stepping back into the light; the door of
Stella's flat sucked shut behind him and
Sawney continued his slow ascent; up the long,
winding concrete stairway and towards that blissful dream of a warm comfortable bed.

The multi-coloured,psychotropicalicious, fruit flavoured wad of ‘Dr Jekyll’s Cerebral Bubble Gum’,skillfully manipulated by Misty’s forked,
alien tongue, filled up with two extra-large lung
-fulls of despondent sigh; eclipsing her midget,
doll-like face before collapsing and being sucked,
noisilly, back into the gum-mulching, maelstrom of the young hooker’s platinum filled jaws.

The effect of the gum was like orange sherbert flavoured TNT mixing with her seratonin and blowing her neurotic mind into a blissful,
dreamy,orange-tinted pulp.

Outside, on her 5th floor balcony, the solar powered dawn birds were warbling frenetically and they sounded, to her, like the very first ever song bird; the celestial songthrush from whose golden beak had vomited the overture of creation.

Unlike that fabulous void black and star mottled creature, however, the things twittering outside were merely crude, feathery automatons glued in place by the local council of Gallowglass which was why they sounded, to most people, like the squeal of tuning radio dials as they gave their rendition of Grieg’s ‘Morning’ from Peer Gynt.

To Misty (A name given to her by a human
missionary because of her species’s peculiar
way of crying) whose eyes now seemed to have
left the nest of their sockets and were spinning amidst the planets in her rotating astronomical mobile; the chirruping of the birds also reminded
her of the brood which she had been forced to smash while they were still hatching.

‘Look there, children’,she said,waving a
purple nail-polished hand before her glazed eyes,’there goes a space-ship’.

“And now Anoushka was gone too”,thought Misty,her eyes beginning to hiss with the steam of boiling tears, “Anoushka who was her only real friend on this world or any”.

Misty thought of Anoushkas dead body and another veil of steam rose from her tear-ducts.

‘I thought you said that you were finished with that stuff’,said a familiar voice, cutting a radiant swathe through Misty’s clouded mind.

‘Anoushka?’, Misty tried to push herself
upright in her bed but flopped back down uselessly,her mind so obscured by the gums psychadelic bubble -bath, ‘Are you a ghost?’,
she asked, starting to feel a little afraid.

‘A Ghost? No’, replied Anoushka misinterpreting the question, ‘Ghosts are a completely different species’.

‘But it was all in the news or,at least,
I think it was’, Misty exclaimed deliriously,
‘or maybe it was a nightmare. Your supposed to be the 9th victim of "the Alien Killer"‘.

Anoushka chuckled quietly at the absurdity
of this idea, like a mother half-listening to
an infants wild tale, ‘I really don’t think that’s possible,Misty’.

‘But that means that the Peep-Show’s gone to mash that poor Earth-Ape up for nothing’.

‘What?’,asked Anoushka and then Misty blacked out.