The Storymaker (Part Eight)

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

Ever so slowly Gordon opened his eyes. He had to open them slowly because they felt strange, they felt like they didn't belong to him, and there was a thick, crusty discharge at the corners that reminded him of having conjunctivitis when he was eight years old. He tried to lift his hands up to rub out the gunk, but his arms refused to obey him.

He was looking at his strange new location through tinted goggles, goggles that distorted the unfamiliar surroundings, and those goggles weren't rose coloured by any stretch of the imagination. 'I'm in hospital,' he tried to say, but for some reason he couldn't speak. He wondered why his vision was so blurry. 'I've had an accident of some sort, and I'm in bloody hospital. I haven't got my specs on, which explains why I can't see properly, and I feel weird because I'm anaesthetised. But that can't be - this place is too crummy, too dirty to be a hospital.'

It was like looking through the plastic swimming goggles that he had last worn forty odd years ago as a kid, only they were much bigger. 'Maybe that's because my eyes are bigger,' he told himself. 'They feel a lot bigger, if that makes sense. It doesn't make sense, does it?' And then the truth of the matter struck him. His eyes really were bigger than he was accustomed to, they were much bigger, which explained why the goggles were so huge. The lenses were tinted a greyish sepia tone and the frames were a darker version of the same nondescript colour, nothing like the fluorescent hues of swimming goggles. As Gordon pondered that detail of his predicament some mechanism within the goggles releases a fine spray that stung his eyes, but when he blinked a few times he could see more clearly.

He was lying on a bed, or a bed-shaped platform, in a dinghy, poorly-lit room. He was at an angle of forty five degrees or so, and he could see his entire body without craning his neck, which seemed unusually weak. Only it wasn't his body - whatever his head was attached to wasn't remotely human.

His new body was a short, slightly flattened cylinder and six long, thin, multi-jointed appendages were attached to it, three at either side. Oh, and he had a tail, a long, slender one that trailed off under one of his slightly bent lower limbs, the narrow tip hanging over the bottom of the bed. In the middle of his torso was a restraint, a wide, jointed belt of a dull, grey metal that was secured to the bed by thick chains. It was difficult to pick out any details of his novel anatomy because he was entirely wrapped in bandages. 'No, they're not bandages,' Gordon told himself, still unable to speak. 'They're rags, nasty, disease riddled rags spattered with old bloodstains. The wrappings covering what I loosely describe as my body stink of decomposition and methane and maybe a hint of ammonia. And there are lice crawling through them, nasty purple fuckers bigger than those giant hissing cockroaches they have at the zoo.'

He could see all this through a cluster of tubes full of slowly moving green and yellow liquid directly in front of his goggles, tubes that wound one around another and disappeared through a hole in the discoloured, roughly plastered ceiling. He guessed the other end of those tubes went into his mouth..... There were a few of the fat purple bugs crawling across the ceiling, and a dirty looking liquid dripped in several places with a soft, repetitive drumbeat that was already beginning to get on his nerves.

The walls of the room were just as unkempt as the ceiling. They might once have been white, but they were covered with brownish stains much like the walls of a rotting house on the edge of a decrepit industrial estate back home that Gordon had tentatively explored a few times while he was walking Geek, a house that had clearly been used as a squat or a drug den for some time until fire destroyed most of the roof. Minus the graffiti of that long abandoned house the walls of Gordon's hospital or prison (or third world lunatic asylum) were a pretty good match. There was a window to his left, an oblong window with eight panes so dirty it was impossible to see through them. Most of the panes were cracked and roughly taped together, and a couple were covered with what looked like stiff brown card.

'Whatever lies beyond that window is worse than the things held captive here and their assorted gaolers and tormentors,' Gordon's friendly neighbourhood inner voice told him. 'Outside is a whole lot worse than inside, so don't even think about trying to escape. It isn't daylight that's leaking in through that grubby window, Twatty, it's a purplish, screaming misty glow the nature of which you don't even want to think about, believe me.'

From what sounded like a short distance away he heard heavy footsteps and the screech of metal grinding on metal, followed by a sharp yelp of surprise. Then there was a whoosh and an eerie howl suspiciously like the howl that a cat makes when it's doused with petrol and set on fire. Unfortunately Gordon knew that sound well; it had haunted him for years ever since he witnessed a gang of louts committing that very atrocity from the window of the flat of an old girlfriend whom he had seriously considering moving in with a little while before he met Sally Anne.

'Yeah,' Gordon silently replied as the unearthly vision wavered and blacked out. 'Right. Thanks for the info, little bud.'

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“What are you muttering about?” Gordon became aware of the Buffalo's enchanting lips saying, lips that had mysteriously stopped bleeding.

“Nowt,” he said. “Zero, zilch, nothing at all.”

“Bloody liar. My meticulously planned sorcery worked perfectly, didn't it? Just for a few moments you were transported to a secret Correction Centre located somewhere on the edge of the Orion nebulae. In graphic detail you saw the quaint little cell where the real you has been incarcerated for, ooh, a long, long time. You witnessed your pathetic, heavily bandaged Venusian carcass securely fastened to the bed. You heard the screams of your fellow prisoners, maybe, but I don't think you met any of the staff. Not this time, anyway.”

“I saw nothing and heard nothing. Your magic is false, you poisonous shit, it exists only in your own imagination. Maybe you hypnotised me a little bit and filled my mind with suggestions, but you can't make me accept the cruel inventions of your blighted mind. You're one sick fuck, Frankie, I'm sure I'm not the first person to tell you that. I've had enough of your crap, cunty, I really can't stomach any more, so I'm logging off.”

“No you're not,” Frankie said, lighting another cigarette. “You won't log off however traumatic the alternative realities I force you to witness. You have to see, you long to experience, you ache to know. In your heart, Storymaker - if that fancy title really suits you, and I think maybe it does - you understand that it's your duty to know the unknowable. This, you tell yourself, is the only path you can possibly take if you seriously crave the authority to write stories with genuine meat and bone, captivating, entirely believable stories with sufficient strength to glue your readers to their seats and enough temptation to keep them rabidly turning the pages, stories potent enough to stop them from slamming shut your virtual book and casually hurling it in the nearest digital bin, never to be perused again. You have no choice but to see and feel and taste whatever delightful morsels I choose to feed you.

So how about it? Are you hungry, fat boy? You wanna eat a freshly baked sponge cake with good old Frankie as the jammy, finger-licking filling? Munch away – as you said, it's your party.

This is my body. Devour it. This is my blood. Fucking well drink it.....” Frankie's lips were bleeding again, crimson tears began to pour from the corners of her eyes and tainted reddish smoke billowed from her nostrils. “Look into my bloody eyes, my soft, pliable man bitch,” she whispered. “Want me, Twatty. Kiss me, love me, know me - drink me, eat me, fuck me.”

“No, I – I can't do that,” Gordon stuttered. “I've learned my lesson, Buffalo, honestly I have, and you'll never see me on that damned site again. I don't want anything to do with you any more, I don't want to witness the abominable turds floating around in your awful mind ever again. Leave me alone, please. Let me be. Let me go.....”

“You know I can't do that, baby fly,” Frankie smiled. “You have to complete your sentence – that is an immutable law. Now look into my eyes, Essalia.” Sheepishly Gordon complied.