Make Your Fortune

When I started this one I was writing for a short story competition with a five hundred word limit, I don’t think I can achieve that level of brevity, or least I couldn’t with this story.
I had the idea at about 1am, sitting up with my fiancee while she marked exam papers, me next to her struggling to write, getting nowhere. Her mum was there too, and she’d turned the TV to Challenge, which in the early hours runs absolutely ancient episodes of Strike It Lucky and The Price is Right. That was enough to set me off on the following nightmare…

As the lights came up I did as I had been told.  I grinned as wide as I could, feeling insincere and openly desperate, and waved as hard as I could, as if the strength of my wave would contribute to my chances of success.  The stage lights had now obscured my view of the crowd beyond, but I could suddenly hear them clearly, or rather, felt the force of their applause hit me in my stomach.  My bolted on smile faltered as my guts rose in one mass to just under my tongue, and I knew with certainty that I would be on YouTube tomorrow:

Woman Honks on ‘Make Your Fortune!’ Blows Chunks On Ken Carthage’s Shoes

Fortunately Ken didn’t speak to me straight away, delivering a monologue to the audience that I assumed was funny, the audience laughed in all the correct places anyway.  I concentrated instead on lowering my rising gorge.  He finished his preamble and turned to me,

“Hello my dear!” He suddenly seemed to fill the whole universe with the triple towering cliffs of his weirdly large double-breasted jacket, shining forehead and ferocious white teeth. “What’s your name and what do you do?” I took a breath and found myself,

“HI KEN MY NAME’S JANET AND I’M A SOFTWARE ANALYST FROM YORKSHIRE” I blurted. Ken made some joke which I didn’t really hear, but I laughed anyway.  My stomach settled and I started to enjoy myself, this was a fun thing to be doing, I couldn’t see the audience but the cameramen and crew people looked friendly they were all was smiling at me, they all wanted me to win.  I would win! Ken was still talking to me but he turned away and delivered his lines straight into the camera,

“Well Janet, as you know I’m sure, this game is very simple. One Million Pounds can be yours if you successfully complete a mental, physical or skill based challenge behind one of these doors.” He gestured to three doors at the back of the studio, featureless except for a coat of TV show sparkles. “All you have to do is pick one, Door one, two or three! The choice is yours!” The crowd applauded again, and I think they missed him add,

“Or Door number OOOOOOOOO”.

That’s the closest approximation I can make to the sound that came out of his mouth. Not a word, but a deep, rumbling sound. I thought I’d imagined it and carried on, letting Ken lead me up to the three doors, I stood in front of them pondering my choice, the crowd bellowing different numbers in encouragement, their words merging into one nonsense sound, repeated over and over,

“Woooeee! Woooeee! Woooeee!”

On and on it went, morphing into a chant, an invocation to the Dark Gods of Television. Oh Great Square-eyed One, we beseech thee, accept this female as tribute. Hallelujah and twiddle-thy-knobs!

It was then I realised there were in fact four doors, the three I had noticed prior, and another. A ten foot, black wooden edifice that seemed to me to have been stolen from the front porch of some gothic mansion. It had a frame of white marble, every inch of it carved into leering, howling maws and despairing eyes. The imprisoned souls of the forever damned, straining for release from the chains of ivy and dead, brown brambles that had grown over the frame. Above the door, at the top of the lintel where the other doors displayed their number, this door had instead the sideways eight that I knew stood for infinity.

At the time, this seemed perfectly normal to me, and if anyone had asked me about it right then, I would have replied that there were always four doors on the show, that I had seen it many times myself on TV, the three challenge doors and the other one, the one nobody had ever chosen. Though in truth I had never seen it before today.

Ken had taken my arm and was shouting, half to me and half to the crowd, pondering out loud over which door I would choose, leading me first to one, then to another. I played along with the pantomime, all the while feeling an irresistible pull from the fourth door, knowing I would choose that one. The one nobody else was acknowledging.

I looked at Ken then, and saw something changing about him. Like a double exposure on an old photo, there were two of him, one laid over the other.  The paler of the two was smiling at a joke he had just made, turned towards the crowd. The other, which in my head I automatically thought of as The Real Ken was looking straight at me, the smile he had worn so easily gone as if it had never been there.

“Enough messing around.” he said. “We both know you have made your choice, the door awaits.”

“But Ken…” I said,

“No! No more talk. No more fun. Seize your destiny. Open the door and pass through to eternity.”

I felt then as if I too were splitting into two forms. I imagined I could see my physical body standing on the threshold of door two, waving and smiling. I could hear the theme music that normally played at this part of the show, but only as a dim echo, each note stretched out to an infinite, perfect drone, filling the whole of time.

My real self turned, as I had known I would, towards the fourth door.  It swung open, welcoming me, and a sound filled the air, a bass rumble similar to the sound Ken had made when naming the door.  A Gregorian chant echoing out of the abyss.

“OOOOOOOOOOOOOO”

Without pause I stepped through the door.

******************************************************************

Stars surrounded me.

When I was a little girl, I would lie on the grass in my Grandfather’s back garden and watch the stars for hours. They always seemed to be painted on a flat surface, suspended up there on the roof of the world, beautiful, but two dimensional. Now I could see them for what they were, some were close, almost as if I could touch them, and others, most others, stretched off into the depths, infinitely distant, the oldest and furthest ones glowing with light from the birth of the universe.

I had never felt so small and insignificant, but it was not a negative feeling. I was delighted to be made so strongly aware of the magnificence of all of existence. I did not feel separate from it, I was part of it, enveloped by it, so my tiny self began to blur at the edges, and merge with it.

“Yes!” Ken Carthage spoke, “Submit to the infinite my child, forget the meagre world of the flesh, and join your friends in blissful oblivion.” I could see him now, floating in the void, rubbing his hands with glee. His transformation half begun, stubby wings pushing out from beneath his jacket, yet he still maintained some of the mannerisms of the Game Show host he had been a moment ago, the broad, big-toothed smile was unchanged.

In the shock and rapture of first experiencing the void, I had forgotten that I too must be floating out here as he was, yet I still felt hard ground beneath my feet, looking down at myself I could see my body was insubstantial, transparent. I lifted one foot, and brought it down hard, and was rewarded with the resistance of the studio floor, and a loud thump. This was all an illusion, a glamour cast by Ken to entice his prey. For all that it was still dangerous, it had nearly worked on me. The time had come to stop playing up to the empty-headed contestant act and deal with this predator.

“Ken Carthage,” I said “you are guilty of holding the souls of at least 40 individuals against their will, you have one chance to release them and in so doing, avoid any sanctions.”

“Oh little girl,” he said, floating closer, his face growing larger, filling my field of vision, “I’m not holding anyone against their will, they all chose this door, just as you did. Mere wealth is nothing compared to a taste of the infinite.”

“One chance Ken,” I said, “and then I’m taking you down.” Most of my colleagues wouldn’t even give them that. Hating Ken and his kind with every fibre of their being and exterminating them without regret. I didn’t hate them any more than I would hate a poisonous spider. They, like Ken, could only act according to their nature, but I liked to give them a chance to rise above that. Some took it, not many, but enough for it to be worth trying.

“Come on now dear,” Ken said, beckoning me forward, “Join me, and reach Nirvana!” I felt again the desire to become one with the comforting blackness surrounding me, but I resisted. If I gave myself to it I would be his creature, my soul sustaining him over long years, gradually diminishing, until nothing remained except a howling face carved in marble.

He would lure me further and further into this construct of his and then contrive to trap me here, in this particular case I reckoned it would be as simple as closing the black door behind us. Looking around I saw it, hanging in space, the bright lights of the studio shining through, and the bombastic theme music and roar of the game show audience just audible over the hum and rumble of this false ‘infinity’.  Trailing through the door were two cords, like wisps of glowing smoke. The connection to our physical bodies. After drawing me in, Ken would have left again, and shut the door on my connection, trapping my astral self here, for him to use at his leisure.

I ran for the door, wondering what running would feel like. Would I float ineffectually, legs pumping in the vacuum? Luckily, my feet pounded on the floor I could feel but not see and I crossed the space to the threshold quickly. I heard a rasping hiss from behind me, the monster that had been Ken Carthage barrelling through space towards me, teeth growing into stiletto points and skin coloured leathery wings ripping through fabric, but he had misjudged.

I had plenty of time to step through the door and throw it shut. The wispy cord connecting Ken to his body snapped neatly with a satisfying snick sound and I felt a sharp tug in my low abdomen, this was me being pulled back into my physical self, which had been play acting a role in the dreadful game show, I found myself knee-deep in green prop slime (what they used to call Gunge in the nineties) with several gold plastic pound signs in my hands; my prizes.

This happened in an instant. Ken, the human Ken, had been standing over the space where I took the challenge, laughing along with the crowd and shouting encouragement, but as soon as the door shut and I rejoined my body, Ken’s soul was permanently severed from his, trapped in a bottle universe of his own creation with no escape. The body’s face went blank, the light disappearing from his eyes as he fell over sideways, knees straight, his head smacking loudly into the floor.

*******************************************************************

I managed to get on YouTube after all, the title was:

Ken Carthage Dies of Heart Attack On Live TV

It’s got a lot in common with the horribly sad one of Tommy Cooper, where nobody’s really sure if he’s joking or not at first.

I’m quite proud of my performance in this one, laughter at Ken’s antics turning gradually to concern, then horror. The last thing you see is my face, looking around at the studio hands, trying to tell them something’s wrong, but not finding the right words. Then the lights go down, pulling the studio into darkness.

Parliament Of The Atlantic

I’m quite pleased with this daft story inspired by information passed on to me by my sister, Rebecca Lindsay, zoology student of note. Thanks to her for checking my science and to Joseph Crouch for suggesting a tweak to the ending.

Professor Barley had placed the subject in a tank about 4 feet square, which she had filled with water and placed on the deck of the Stoneking.  It was heavy enough to remain immobile as the ship, a former fishing trawler and now the Professor’s personal floating fiefdom, rolled in the mid-atlantic swell, gentle by the standards of the great ocean, but strong enough to send unsecured items, belonging to me and the other six interns rolling merrily around below decks, creating minor chaos.  At the top of the tank, a glass lid weighing approximately five kilos blocked the open top pretty much completely, except for a metal bar, wedged between the tank and the lid, with its end in the water.

The object of this exercise was to observe the animal within the tank attempt to escape.  Professor Barley had wanted to extract a wager from one of us on the likelihood of that happening, though no one would take the bet, it looked very unlikely to us, but nobody was smart enough to bet against the Professor anymore.

The animal in the tank was currently languishing grumpily at the very bottom, lying flat against the glass, her skin flushed a sulky red, perhaps in protest at her confinement, rough handling, and the various containers she had been sloshed in and out of since blundering into one of our nets.  I walked over the deck to peer closely at the thing while she was still relatively still.  I wanted a good look at her skin if she decided to change colour, but mostly I found myself staring into her great big beautiful eyes.  They were filled with a life I hadn’t totally expected.  I’d been studying marine life at Miskatonic for the last three years to get my degree, and now I was filling up the summer before starting my masters with this internship.  In that time I had noticed the live specimens I had studied fell into two distinct categories, the blank stares of cute, dumb, little fish.  Or the blank stares of utterly terrifying ‘stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back’ type things that would bite you just to find out if you were worth eating. This was different, the octopus didn’t stare blankly at all, she looked at me, her eye moving around slightly as she took in the details of my form, my face, the sunglasses resting atop my head and my hair, its thick dark brown waves restrained in a ponytail for now, my khaki shorts and my Miskatonic Greek Council T-shirt. I still doubted she knew or understood what she was looking at, but she seemed to. I asked Professor Barley about that.

“You know Kayleigh, I wouldn’t like to say how much they comprehend about us, but I bet it’s more than you’d think. The whole point of this test is to show you how intelligent these animals are.”

“I thought we were supposed to be grossed out by a bit of sea snot squeezing through some tiny gap?” Juan Delray remarked from off to one side, his perpetual smirk creeping into his voice, not for the first time.  I rolled my eyes and made a loud ‘Tsk’ noise, this was involuntary, driven by my loathing for the man-child.

“You’re all postgrad marine biologists,” The professor said to the group, ignoring the tone of Delray’s interjection, “I should hope you understand how an octopus body works, no skeleton, very flexible, etcetera.  What we’re looking for here, is signs of her intelligence. Notice there isn’t actually a gap anywhere for her to get out of the tank, but she could use that little bar as a lever to make one.”

“Octopuses are amazing, but also terribly unlucky,” She continued, “Their intelligence, as a species is so great that they can solve complex puzzles and outwit pretty much any other creature in the sea, but their lives are brutally brief, the males die after mating and the females starve to death while caring for their eggs.  If they had evolved their way out of that, then they could have developed a society. One whose sophistication rivalled our own.”

Delray waddled over to the tank, hoisting his cargo pants back up over the crest of his globular hips, a task of sisyphusian proportions, then bent over, placing his lunar landscape of a face directly adjacent to the creature in the tank.  The two beings exchanged glances for a moment, then Delray rapped sharply on the glass with his meaty knuckle.

“Do something bitch!”

“Juan! Enough! We’ll talk about this afterwards,” Professor Barley admonished.

“Just getting the ball rolling Professor,” he said, before turning to his accomplice, Billy Matheson, and sharing a loathsome grin, both making a strange snorting laugh.  As he turned back to the octopus, she moved suddenly, flying at the side of the tank, tentacles first, as if to attack.  Though the glass prevented it and left her splayed across the side of the tank with her suckers and beak working furiously.  The professor threw down her clipboard in frustration,

“Fucking hell Juan! She’s too agitated to do anything now,” then she said to the group, “Ok, better make it chow time everybody, we’ll have another try at this tomorrow, while Mr Delray assists all with an extra turn on net-mending duty.”  The students filed out to the sound of Juan’s spluttering protests, I was last to go, watching the poor creature in the tank as the Professor and a couple of the regular crew attempted to recapture her, gently, and return her to the small tank she’s been kept in previously, there were tentacles everywhere as she flailed about, confused and frightened.  In that moment I felt truly sorry for this creature, supposedly so clever, being kept in a box for us to study.

That night I lay awake in my cramped bunk in the crew quarters, listening to the others snores, grunts and sleeping murmurs.  Delray wasn’t there, his net-mending would keep him out on deck for another few hours, which gave me no small amount of satisfaction.  However all I could think about was that octopus, alone and frightened in the tank.  In her eyes I had glimpsed something, the more I ruminated on it, the more I became convinced she could understand everything that was happening, that she felt shame and despair at being reduced to a specimen to be examined and tested. In the end I decided I would release her.  The little tank she had been moved to had a lock on it, I resolved to sneak into the main cabin, where all the specimens, living and…not living were kept in various boxes and bags, stacked nearly to the ceiling, pop the lock on the octopus’ box and walk away.  Plausible deniability would be my defence after that.

I got out of my cot, pulling on my dressing gown and pushing my feet into my slippers, shaped like the gaping maws of two great whites, and tiptoed out of the room, and down the tiny corridor to the main cabin.  I had to take special care to steady myself against the roll of the boat, bracing my arms on either wall.

I pulled up short with a start as I edged round the corner into the cabin, there was a pair of feet sticking out from behind a pile of boxes and packing crates, one foot was bare and one had a sock pulled half off, they were twitching and convulsing silently, as if their owner was having some form of seizure.

“Hello? Are you ok? Who’s there?” I ran over behind the stack, and then, I’m not proud of myself here, I screamed like a victim in a slasher movie.

The person prone on the floor was Juan Delray, I only knew this by his faded Rush t-shirt.  His face was totally obscured by his assailant, the octopus.

How she had got herself wrapped completely over his head I never knew, but her slimy, pliant body made a perfect seal, bulging outwards occasionally as beneath her, Delray struggled to breathe.

I stood, frozen to the spot, utterly horrified as the creature completed her act of murder, her skin changing from angry red to a light blue, the colour an octopus turns when satisfied and contented.  Delray shuddered his last and was still.  In that moment I understood the motives of the creature on the floor.

Revenge.

She had understood Juan’s cruel mockery and planned a strike of her own, I saw now her box, the lock broken and the lid pushed open, creating a tiny crack which had allowed her to escape.  The fridge, which stood in the small nook that constituted the galley, was open, its yellow light giving a sickly hue to the scene.  Delray must have come in from his net mending and sought himself a midnight snack, one he would now never eat.

The octopus slithered off Delray’s head.  Removed from the water her body lay almost totally flat, a gelatinous pancake of tentacular malice, eyes poking up from the slowly moving mass, looking around, while the arms stretched out across the floor, feeling, searching for their next target.

Still unable to shake my limbs from the terror inspired torpor, I felt a tentacle brush my feet, thinking soon this sea creature would envelop me, cutting off my air as she did to Juan a moment ago, but she moved on, instead hauling herself up a table leg, onto the keyboard of the ship’s main PC.  Facebook was open on the screen and the action of her questing arms depressed keys, spelling a series of random characters in the ‘what’s on your mind box’, before another arm pressed the backspace and deleted everything.  With torturous slowness, she pulled her whole body up onto the desk, and arranged all her arms so they snaked over the keyboard.  One by one, characters appeared in the box once again.

“moar cCuming. yOo pEritty.  go Naow.”

Suddenly, she dropped from the desk and slid across the room, squeezing under the door which lead out to the main weatherdeck with a sudden burst of terrifying speed. The letters spelt out by the creature on the computer lurked at the back of my mind, I still considered them to be random characters, glimpsed in a hurry and not considered further.  I ran to the door and threw it open looking out onto the deck, lit by floodlights in the darkness.  The octopus was pulling herself up over the rail at the edge of the deck,  I imagine our eyes met again as she sat, draped over the rail like a wet towel, then she dropped into the sea, regaining her true shape in the supporting embrace of the water and disappeared into the abyss, powered by a jet of water.

I leant over the rail, trying to get a glimpse of her as she receded, and was nearly thrown from the ship as there was a great crash, and the groaning sound of metal under stress.  The ship lurched violently, and seemed to have stopped suddenly, as if the anchor had been dropped and caught on something immovable.

I saw more shapes in the water now, approaching from the blackness, they seemed to surround the boat, thin at first, moving swiftly and in formation.  Then as one they spread their bodies to slow down, tentacles now visible and their skins changing from pale blue to deepest red.

I wanted to warn the others, but there was barely time before they slithered up the sides of the boat and infiltrated through every tiny nook and cranny.  I watched from the lifeboat I had commandeered as the lights all over the Stoneking went out, and listened, agonized over the screams of the crew and my fellow interns, which fell silent shockingly quickly.  As I gunned the lifeboat’s engine and sped in the direction I reckoned the eastern seaboard must be, I saw the boat begin to settle astern, disappearing under the waves, perhaps they had made a hole in it somehow?
In the madness of that night it seems silly to recall, that a glowing plume of tentacled flotsam seemed to rise, in two great pillars.  Taller even than the main faculty building at Miskatonic, embracing the floating tomb called Stoneking.