18/3/2010 Lol of Lolthulu Thomas Jarrett

Lol of Lolthulu

(A working title)

By

Tom Jarrett

My veins are already filled with lava, keep your burning needle to yourself.

Pierce the skin of this social construct you fabricated to keep the panic at bay,

tear at the bag over your head keeping the eyes from seeing and the mouth

from breathing. Stop telling me to be calm with your wrinkled brow and fake-

smiling eyes, I feel the lies from underground poisoning the well.

You’re one of them? The ones that whisper in my sleep and reach towards

me with promises of treachery. You’re one of them? One of the others then,

standing neatly in a corn row awaiting the Harvester with the slow scythe. “Not

in my lifetime” you say with smug stupidity. I see it now, the ignorance in your

eyes. You try to hide it with anger but that floats like cream atop the placid

eyes of a cow awaiting the hammer. You have the eyes but you do not see, not

in your lifetime perhaps but in the end the Harvester will have his Harvest, the

Earth salted behind him.

Your syringe just hides the truth behind a chemical veil. The Harvester

will have his Harvest, if you will not see it.

***

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Your questions repeat like the echoes of a skull skittering underground.

You ask the questions but do not hear the answers, you want the truth but it’s

you who bought me to this place of padded rooms and silence, stopped my

Crusade with your wailing car and metal bindings. You ask and I tell: Dave lies

dead underground, feeding the slumbering beast. I killed him, led him like a

Judas Goat before the crowd. More blood will flow to feed the end, every one of

you drained dry, and it is I who will be responsible for the letting.

No! Stay still and silent. You ask to hear but do not listen, your grabbing

hands and hard restraints send reality fluttering away like a startled crow. Let

me save you, or I shall destroy you.

***

In this picture I see a cave filled with the screaming of a million souls. In

this one I see chitinous limbs over a wailing mouth. The third is a tentacle diving

deep into flesh, sucking the warm blood from a friend. Why ask me to describe

what is plain to see? Are those tiny wireframed lenses just for show, the carefully

tousled hair and patched jacket completing your disguise as a competent

psychiatrist? It becomes apparent that without seeing there is no believing, I

shout a warning with every breath in my lungs that you drown out with softly

worded platitudes. But in the land of the blind the one eyed psychologist is king.

Dive into me and fish the words we need from the murky depths, but beware the

things that lurk beneath. They crave silence, and kill word smugglers on sight.

Take the truth and hide it, suckle and protect it, until it’s big enough to fly the

nest. Your death will have meaning, your blood will taste bitter to the

slumbering horror.

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The men with the cruel coat and liquid gag come! Hide your heart and

show them surface, they mistake depth for lies. Tomorrow you shall fish the

dark places.

***

The beginning lies in the end, a night of merriment in the company of

young girls and old whiskey. Too much of both we sampled, and proud of our

fresh shame we meandered towards a final rest. Dave was my tail, ever

following and always lost. More sober in nature and bottle he halted in front of

the dark alley, protests bouncing off the alcohol effervescent in the cracks of my

brain. The longest short cut I shall ever take. A perfume of sickly-sweet refuse

marinating in the piss of a thousand drunken tramps assailed our nostrils, a

smell so vile the moon itself covered its face. Despairing brickwork crumbled

around us, everything of value in this place long since fled or taken away. Even

the tramps.

And why not? Human refuse has value, it can kick and scream as well as

any other human.

Red tongued explosions licked saltily at nerve endings as face hit floor,

feet kicked from underneath as I was pushed from behind. I added my own

sweet flavour to that soup on the floor. Fleeting glimpses of dark figures in dark

robes in a black night were all I saw, oily shines from distant streetlamps and a

sewer stench that mugged the nostrils. Hempen bands of steel choked hands

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and feet in burning coils. Did you know the Hangman’s noose is equally deadly

wherever it is fastened? It just takes longer.

Cowls and veils and overpowering limbs, that’s all fate really is,

anonymous and irresistible.

Follow my dragging feet if you wish to know where I went. I don’t. I might

find it again. Doors were opened, stairways descended, grates removed, locks

made pointless; you are a fucking idiot. For all your learning and arrogance you

missed this entire world in shade. I was a drunken wretch, did you think I’d find

it for you, presenting it proudly like a schoolboy with his algebra homework?

Fucking idiot. All I care to remember of that trip is a journey along the sewers,

faeces and second hand toilet paper caressing my leg, a million recycled dinners

filling my long boots, soaking into my socks. Remember it too, because it’s

important. I had shit in my shoes. Remember it.

Can you hear them, marching towards this room? I despair, practice now

because when they come for you there’ll be no warnings, just the noose. We

talked of butterflies, rainbows and the aliens stealing my brain. Give them my

words and I’ll kill you myself.

***

You look nervous. Don’t be. I gave it up long ago. Ultimately you’re just

as doomed whether you fear death or not, better to relax, make the assassins

behind you think you know something they don’t.

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Hahahahahaha! It was a joke, you see? There are no assassins. No, as I

said, the only ones who’ll kill you is them or me. But enough frivolity, listen well.

Shit in my shoes, remember? And the light, that sickly green light of

fireflies feeding from a month old corpse. There is no metaphor here, they

skittered and danced a monstrous jig through that cold stale air even whilst they

were crushed under my dead-weight body, eagerly smeared across my body in

bloody swathes. A teenage tart plastering makeup on before presenting herself

to the prom-night stud.

Don’t be dense, all of that was metaphor. This was not the place of

corpses nor a high school prom, merely the road between.

We’re long past the sewers. Read between the lines on my forehead.

These were long tunnels of needling rocks and sly edges pulling my skin off like

an overcoat. Probably Dave’s as well. Terrible friend I was, valuing my own life

over his, my longest friend. His life was worth little; my own, nothing. So let’s

balance those tiny scales with our own blood, preferably yours. Most of mine is

caked in the hallways of skittering echoes, drifting flakily in the gutter-stink of

darkened robes swishing onwards with babblingly incoherent victims underarm.

Bound like a pig for roasting, feet and hands. Stupid creatures. There was no

fire, just the butcher’s block awaiting us.

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Really it should have been quite fun, like when you were a young boy and

your Uncle Bob dragged you around the horse yard on that old burlap grain sack.

Do you remember? It was the same thing, except without Unky Bob the sack the

yard the sun and the fun, with dark and pain and fear and piss and stink and

bugs and bugs. Pulled down that tunnel like a ferret chasing rabbits, but the

rabbit caught the ferret and now he’s taking him back where the thumbscrews

are because no one chases him oh yes the filthy fucking rodent will pay yes he

will.

And the tunnel ended, and behold the glittering warren. Oh what a

beautiful party to crash into snapping all your limbs and forcing your brain

through your nose. We stood on a stony balcony with an interstellar view, but

the firebugs had eaten all the stars, nibbling unstoppably voracious until Heaven

was devoured. There was no end to it, they’d obviously moved outer space

underground.

The worn stones floors drank in my blood and revelled in my pain, fat-man

greedy. But they gave me gravedirt in return, packed tight inside refrigerating

my organs. I’d have been disappointed in the trade were it not for the mind

shredding terror. In the light of a million frenzied star-bugs I watched them drag

Dave towards the edge of this nightmare reality, the robes the pain the insects.

The gaping abyss sucked toothily at him, its gnawing hunger awakened as

the warm salty scent of blood wafted forward. A sound, the final note on a

funeral organ, heralded its awakening. It bypassed the ears and went straight to

the gut, entering every orifice like a jet-stream of gravel. That dank

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underground air almost solidified, gurgling into my lungs and hanging over head

like a billion handfuls of grave dirt.

Dark robe bottoms stopped short of a waist high boulder before the slick

precipice, and the substellar rumbling rolled around the cavern. Before then I

didn’t know that space could rumble, but I guess my stomach does when it wants

to be filled. Stationary, the figures let off fumes of sweet rotting death, rolling

outwards in thick invisible clouds. There was a big rock (altar) there, covered in

creeping vines with thorn-like teeth. Sorry, teeth-like thorns. The surreal

tableau with the macrocosmic soundtrack lasted but a second before Dave was

flung onto the rock (altar). His skull’s echoes became a staccato counterpoint.

Our robed captors drifted into a loose circle around him, boy scouts holding

marshmallows around a campfire, dib dib dib, dob dob dob.

I closed my eyes and pretended to be home. Dave was groaning, arms

wrapped around the toilet awaiting more dry heaves. The cold leeching into my

body was from the kitchen tiles I’d collapsed onto, too drunk to make it to my

room. That howling, wind through the back alleys carrying the reek of refuse.

The raw-throated screams that clawed bleeding strips from my heart were

Dave.

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The screams were Dave, who’d turned a cheap horror movie on, a tacky

tale of abduction and hooded figures and caverns underground, of hurt and bugs

and blood and death.

Open eyes saw Dave writhing as if his skin were charring. They told half

truths. Reality; Dave tried to writhe, but couldn’t. Saw-like vines coiled around

arms and legs, tasting the warm flow within. They slithered over chest and face

and groin, thorns biting deep into tender flesh, ripping skin into bleeding gashes.

That’s how Dave died. His piercing shrieks faded as the cannibal vines

drank deep, swelling vegetable leeches turning crimson under the earth. The

more they suckled, the louder the rumbling became, the sound cackling taunt of

a hyena chewing on a severed jugular and the burble of an infant full of mother’s

milk. The sound was liquid mercury in my stomach, poison gnawing at every

organ.

I wished for a quicker death.

They stood around Dave’s shredded corpse, swaying to the grotesque

baritone. Ignored, I watched slow shudders build somewhere within the

coverings, ejaculatory spasms trying to burst through. Backs arched, cowls

faced the dead sky with arms pulled back. And then the veils slipped.

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I saw the truth. The truth is a chitinous shell, a full-body scab. It’s a

slender bipedal cockroach, taller than man. Serrated arms spread in unknowable

pleasure as dread music suffocates your senses, their black eye clusters above

clacking mandibles. Truth is the hiss-clicking noise of monsters as they pounce

on your best friend’s corpse, bloody strips disappearing down alien gullets.

The veil has slipped and I have seen the truth. It shall not be unseen.

Tearing skin from flesh, they forgot about me for the moment. Biting back

the creeping bile, I thrashed like a fish on hot tarmac. Rope and bloody wrists

caught in my teeth as I tried to bite through both. Acid pain poured into my

shoulder as something ripped there, knee joints crackled as they contorted,

struggling to slip the noose from around my boots.

My foot slipped a fraction of an inch, buoyed by the sewage sloshing

within. Skin rolled off my heel, human waste stinging exposed nerves as I hauled

at one leg. Like a fawn pulling free of a bear trap, I tore loose one bleeding shit-

encrusted foot.

I ran. I didn’t even look back, to see if one of them pulled their jaws from

Dave’s flesh to stare after me, gore stained mandibles twitching in the chill

charnel breeze.

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I didn’t remember how I got above, how many days it took. All I knew was

my heart in my throat and my bowels running loose. The clacking calls of pursuit

sucking the heat from my bones. Gulping down pooled water that tasted of

rotten vegetables. Hiding down side passages and behind boulders as rustling

footsteps drew near.

The last thing I remember from that place was stumbling into that abyss

again. A different ledge, those same bulgingly grotesque glow-bugs. Putting a

hand on a rock to steady myself, pain lanced through it: the thorny plant lunged

forwards as I pulled away. The crimson blot of my blood flowed through the vine,

along and over into the substellar void.

Leaning over, I watched that drop flow down. That same bass groan

coalesced out of the air, encasing me in nausea and dread. It plucked the

starbugs out of the dead air, their needle legs lancing my skin as they flooded

from the corridor. As a single needling cloud they flew, following that single drop

downwards.

A lifetime later the swarm burst against the bottom. Something there,

hundreds or thousands of metres away (the dark had mugged me of all

perspective). The bugs zagged crazily over lumpy contours and glistening oily

pools, their sickly green glow making every square inch look coated in toad skin.

The scattered forms gathered piecemeal to one gnarled scar. It may’ve been a

mile long or more, the black robbed me of all perspective.

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Shadows shifted, darkness grew. Senses squealed as the ground knocked

me to my feet. Hands covered ears as warm blood spurted, trickling down my

fingers. The world was filled with a noise like claws down a chalkboard, but the

world itself was the chalkboard. That scar, that ancient wound, was opening like

a man sawed in half, each part falling away exposing bloody gristle. It kept

opening, splitting the ground like a cleaver, and from it flew a glistening stream

of iridescence, a million more bloated bodies to join the horde. And in that

ghostly light the veil fell completely.

It was no chance bore-hole, but a chasm lined with a thousand foot-long

teeth as sharp as the thorns that drank Dave’s blood. Damp grey flesh

undulated within, moving to the rhythm of some unknowable organ. A constant

exhalation filled the air with the carrion stench of a million corpses rotting in

their graves, knocking me to my knees to vomit as quietly as I dared.

This was how the world would end. The veil had fallen and I alone knew

what lay beneath. Into that odorous chasm civilisation would sink, thorny vines

digging deep into arteries and innumerable insect hordes blotting out the sun.

Everything reduced to slaughterhouse sweepings down the draining every last

ounce of everything to hold dear.

Do you see? Do you see? You hear but do not listen, hiding cognition

behind wire-framed lenses which only let you see the rosy fiction under your

nose.

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Take me back to my room with the soft walls and high windows. I’ve no

truth left to give you.

***

This dark cell, the common mind. Trapped in the mundane perceptions of

blindfolded cattle. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, ready or not here they

come. They will not see the truth. But you do. Those dead eyes were built for

it. That vacant head primed for it. Spewed into the world with but one goal. The

moonlight shining from your carapace is beautiful.

Hiss all you like. Grind the bars against your mouth parts, reach in with a

serrated limb and swipe and spit. The world is our prison, but soon one of us will

be free.

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