Simon: Time Displaced Knight – Chapter Three

God this was a struggle. Something that was just supposed to be a stupid bit of fun, and I got really bogged down finishing this chapter.  Pleased with the end result though, the struggle was worth it. Thanks again to Joseph Crouch for helping me write my way out of a corner with a drastic solution. Enjoy…

PART ONE

PART TWO

I sat on the damp soil, watching the sky gradually lighten from the starless black of night to gray, then smouldering orange, hints of it’s eventual blue swirling in over time. The mighty arms of the jungle canopy silhouetted black against the heavens. They were reaching for liberty, as I was.

We who had survived the march through the jungle had been here for uncounted days. Nothing to do but sit behind the chain-link fence the machines had herded us into, joined now by huge mechanical hounds, which had leapt up at them in much in the way a real dog would greet it’s beloved master, while turning on us with barely restrained savagery. They had also been met by a troop of their fellows, who had evidently laboured in the corrosive environment of Meat for some time, as they were now succumbing to patches of rust that spread across their bodies, weakening metal plates and fouling the action of their joints. Now relieved of their duties, this group trudged off into the jungle, perhaps to leave the planet via the place where we had arrived. This was the reason for holding us in bondage, physical labour hastened the process of their physical corruption by the planet’s noxious vapours, so cheap, replaceable human labour was the solution. Many of my fellows seemed to have receded into themselves, succumbing to some sort of catatonia rather than face the abject despair of the situation. From time to time the machines would reappear, emerging from a stone hut that seemed too small to contain them all, entering our corral and taking one of our number, dragging them away, never to return.

“They’re taken to the mines,” Mira Charon had told me, in her language, which I was learning. She had leant closer to me, whispering low, even though our captors were nowhere to be seen. “The machines need the ore from the mine to build more of themselves, it’s why they captured this planet, those poor bastards won’t come out again, we’ve got to move now, before they come for us, or escape will be impossible.”

Charon had been diligently working on a plan of escape for some time now. Obscured by some dead leaves in one corner, was her attempt to scratch out a tunnel under the wire. I couldn’t bring myself to discourage her, although the hole was a sad affair not even large enough for a child, and for all her digging she had yet to get underneath the bottom of the fence, which plunged further and further down into the ground. I aided her with the digging, and concealing our efforts, because at least she was making some effort towards our salvation, whereas for much of the ordeal we had suffered through I had allowed myself to be consumed by despondency.

“You are right captain,” I said, “But I fear we must attempt some other mode of escape than digging under the fence like a pair of hungry foxes. Even the peasants on my father’s land could guard against that.”

“I beg to differ my dear Simon,” she said, “May I present to you the new addition I have made to out beautiful abode. A person of your medieval persuasion might to refer to it as,” She paused for dramatic emphasis, “A sally port!”

Charon threw aside the covering of leaves from where, only last night when I had looked last, had been our feeble scratch in the earth, which was now just barely wide and deep enough for a man to squeeze through, and also, blessedly, finally deep enough to create an opening under the wire. Charon must have laboured alone long after I had given in to sleep, and finally made a breakthrough.

“Shall we monsieur?” she said, pulling up the wire and beckoning me through.

“Please madame, ladies first,” I replied, gesturing for her to go ahead. “You have earned the privilege of being the first to taste freedom.”

I followed Charon through the hole, scratching my way through like a rodent fleeing a predator, clearing the other side and leaping to my feet, charging madly for the edge of the jungle. No sooner had we made the cover of the canopy of trees, and what I had hoped would be the comforting security of the undergrowth, a spindly metal arm snaked up from underneath the mulch and branches and darted towards us, wrapping itself around Charon’s waist. Twisting itself around her like the creeper that had grown around the stones of Father’s castle. A second arm shot from the trees ahead of us, it twisted and choked her until she was wrenched apart in two halves. Each piece being fell to the floor, a ruined lump of offal, and was dragged away into the undergrowth by each of the two hateful arms. As Captain Charon’s body disappeared, so her murderer was revealed, branches and twigs snapping away from its metal form, as if in fear.

This wasn’t one of those smaller ones we had seen patrolling the undergrowth with their steel wolfhounds, this was a great hulking machine, it’s gormless dull red eyes somehow communicating the bitterest hatred. It didn’t make a noise, and neither did I. Instead I stood in awe of the giant, dread knight, as if it had been a statue of our lord, who, as a child, I would kneel before every morning so as to contemplate all at once, my significance and insignificance.

I felt my insignificance.

I knelt, and knew that death must fall.

“Hey. Guy. look.”

From my knees I looked up again. The huge machine was also turning his head, looking for the source of this new voice. Finally he found it, motors in his neck wheezing as his head settled into an odd angle, looking directly at his own shoulder, where sat one of the two-legged lizards who had followed us through the jungle, chattering nonsensically at us. This one was looking at me, it’s claws gripping the rough metal of the machine’s armour, around it’s waist tied with black straps, was a small box, emitting a ticking sound.

“Surprise fucker!” it shouted. Then the world turned white. The tiny beast had exploded, taking with it the head and upper torso of the machine. I was flung onto my back, fragments of metal plinking off my armour. From the stone hut came angry clanks and whirrs of the other machine’s agitation. In a moment they came charging from the hut, weapons raised and running faster than I imagined possible, their great long legs sending them striding across the clear to where I stood. The silver wolfhounds yapping at their heels, razor blade teeth bared in delight.

Finally thrust into combat, with no escape, instinct took over and I drew my sword, holding it forwards in a low guard. Not entirely aware I did so, I unhooked my helmet from my belt and put that on as well. No sooner had I done this than the first machine fired his lightning weapon at me, I was struck on the left gauntlet. I had seen men and women set aflame by this weapon, and the metal of my armour glowed red in an instant, smoke spurted from the leather underlayer and I flinched involuntarily as one does when burned, trying to draw my hand away from the source of the burning heat, only to have it follow me. I fumbled my sword in the mad scramble to rip off my gauntlet, leaving my hand bare, and burned a deep red and brown, the pain made my stomach lurch.

The second bolt of lighting churned up the mud next to me, leaving an area melted into black glass. I picked up my sword again, desperately searching for some protection from this assault. My eye fell upon the corpse of the giant machine, It’s body was blasted open and it’s innards exposed. There was one piece of it’s outer skin totally separated from the rest, with cords hanging from it, much like the straps of a shield, this resemblance was all that occurred to me then, but of course the machine’s own skin would be built to be impervious to their own weapons. I thrust my arm through the loops of cord and cable, that in a way must have been the thing’s veins, my burned forearm sent fresh bolts of agony through me at the touch, and lifted my new shield.

As the third bolt arced towards me and scored a direct hit on the metal, I cowered behind it, crouched into a ball as I would when guarding against a rain of arrows. For the next instant, I was safe, but I could not meet their attack while pinned behind my shield. The machine’s were approaching, I had seen at least four emerging from the hut, but there had been six guarding us, and I must assume there were at least that many facing me now, more perhaps that I had not seen before, like the destroyed giant.

More lighting licked across the edges of my shield, being deflected away into the jungle, setting foliage aflame and striking up clouds of dirt from the ground. I was trapped.

“Dude.” another small voice, at my feet another tiny lizard. This one naked as his jungle fellows had been,. “This me. Gotta go dude. C’mon. Up and at ‘em.” He looked cheerful, and something about his gentle encouragement made me think of my childhood nurse, exhorting my brother and I to rise from our beds and face the day.

“S’easy dude. Look.”  He opened his jaws wide, bearing rows of razor sharp, miniature teeth and let out a small, shrill, shriek, which was answered from all around me, a thousand times over. From every corner of the jungle, lizards emerged. Leaping down from trees and up from under the mulch of the undergrowth, running in massed companies of churning legs and snapping jaws, they fell upon the machines before they could react, swarming up over their bodies, worrying at exposed components between metal plates. The machines stomped around like giants beset by brownies, or gnomes, crushing a lizard with every step, and the wolfhounds chopped them in two with their jaws, but there were always a hundred more to replace the fallen and their courage did not falter with the deaths of their brothers. On they came, chattering and screeching.

One machine, seeking to remove the threat wholesale, turned his lightning gun upon one of his fellows, meaning to shoot the lizards off. Before he could fire I had charged up to him, and swung my blade.

I had no conception whatsoever if my sword would be able to harm it, I doubted I could pierce its hide, but there were areas of exposed innards at its joints, it was these places the lizards attacked, pulling out more of the cords and ropes, sparks of light shooting off them as they came away. I swung my sword at just such a spot, at the back of the machine’s neck, and with a flash of discharging lightning from his innards, the machine’s head was lopped off. Behind it, the other’s were falling, having been taken apart at the knees, the waist, then the shoulders by the tiny, industrious beasts. The last one, legless but defiant, turned it’s gun toward me and fired. I blocked the blast with my shield, took one step forward and brought the sword down on the gun, the blade biting into the barrel and sticking fast as lightning burst from the sundered weapon. I seized a rock from the ground and brought it down on the machine’s head, striking again and again and again, releasing all the frustration and powerlessness I had suffered under in their captivity, every strike a blow for the poor captain, bisected without a second thought, and the others who lay, dead and mouldering on the long trail back through the jungle.

“Dude.” The little lizard had hopped up onto my shoulder. “He dead dude. Stop it. This me.” I did stop, and raised my visor, my arm was as lead, and I let the stone fall from nerveless fingers. I became aware again of the agony in my left arm. I had no water to ease the pain, but I covered the burns with mud in the hopes of keeping it cool, and providing some protection as I put back my gauntlet, an act which caused fresh waves of agony.

The machine’s head had been beaten flat into the ground, one of it’s arms was twitching, waving the lightning gun, with my sword still embedded in it, though the air. I pinned the arm to the floor with my boot and pulled the blade free. At the edge of the clearing, the surviving lizards were chasing down the last of the wolfhounds. It had lost a leg, but was still claiming victims with it’s mighty jaws, though even as I watched, the combined might of those brave little creatures finally bore it to the ground, where it was efficiently dismantled. I saw a troop of a dozen or so proudly bearing the head aloft, and carrying it away as a trophy. The leading lizard, the one who had been addressing me, now stood at my feet, his tiny eyes looking into mine.

“Hey guy. This me. Gotta go now, you coming.” I looked over at the other captives, still sat, unmoved, in the pen, their minds broken.

“Can’t help them dude. Gotta go. Friend waiting.”

“Friend? Who’s friend.” I said,

“Friend of you, guy. He send us. Come on!” He was tugging at my boot with hit little arms now. I stirred myself into action as I heard a noise coming from the other end of the clearing, a sound as percussive as a cannon blast, but constant and thudding, each whump like a punch to my chest. I stopped moving again to peer in the direction of the sound, the lizard protesting and pulling at my leg.

All I saw was the pen, and my fellow captives, consumed by an enormous maroon fireball, engulfed with a crack of doom and a wave of heat that knocked me over. Then, rising over the flame and smoke was some sort of craft, a conveyance roughly the size and shape of a sailing cog from back home, but borne aloft by some devilment. I wouldn’t understand what I had seen for some time yet, but it was a hunter drone, a cousin and ally to the machines who had been my captors, and it carried more of them in it’s armoured belly, seeking revenge.

I turned and ran, surrounded on all sides by a heaving mass of tiny green bodies, weaving in and out of my legs, scrambling without pause from branch to branch above me, and two or three hitching a ride on my shoulders, shouting encouragement. Behind us the jungle was consumed by fire and percussive blasts which shivered whole trees into flying splinters, the whirring of the hellish craft on our heels creeping inexorably forward, gaining on our vain attempts to escape with every boom.

The lizards lead me on a dizzying path. Jinking left and right a maddening and exhausting number of times, I had no idea where they were heading, perhaps nowhere, they could easily have been fleeing blindly as any mere spooked animal, but I didn’t think so. They had arrived, as if by divine providence from some unseen friend, and I had faith they would lead me to him, though as my stamina began to fail me, pounding across the rough ground of the undergrowth, I was not free of doubts.

The explosions seemed to be snapping at my heels now, I could feel the heat washing over my back, and staggered with the waves of air pounding me. It seemed as if I must be taken up by the storm of fire any moment, when up ahead I saw the lizards flowing down into a hole in the ground, a rock pulled aside from the entrance.

I redoubled my efforts and drove forward, as fast as my aching legs could carry me, driving towards the hole, and whatever sanctuary it might offer, with the ground being ripped up behind me as if by the hand of god.

I dove into the hole, head first, plunging into darkness and expecting to meet soil and rock on the other side. Instead I fell into empty air, turning over and over before finally  meeting water, face first with a furious smack that dazed me. I sank immediately, pulled down by the weight of my armour, as I sank into the dark depths I saw fire light up the cavern as the bombardment passed over me. The last thing I felt before lapsing into unconsciousness was a legion of tiny hands and claws seizing me, and beginning to pull.

SIMON: TIME DISPLACED KNIGHT WILL RETURN IN:

SIMON SAYS DIE!

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.

Not-For-Profit

I love music. I am a poor musician but I enjoy playing, and inflicting my noise on people as part of a band, this text below is my fantasy of how that should play out. Part of a wider story that I will not finish, so here you are…

That night Green Goddess were second on at a not-for-profit DIY night in a cellar in Camden, Neal considered these to be the best kind of gigs really.  They were put on by someone with a lot of time (or some maniacs who had way too much to do already!) and all the door money was split between the bands. There were no fancy light rigs, or those tacky revolving disco things, and the musicians usually preferred to do the sound between themselves, twiddling knobs at random until they arrived at something all were happy with.  Better that than someone calling themselves a ‘sound guy’ or worse, ‘engineer’ who would do the exact same thing, before demanding payment, or worse, payment in beer.  The alternative to this DIY philosophy was the scabs who were trying to make money from the venture!  The audacity of it!  As if anyone expected a band to make money these days, a stupid idea.

      The crowd was respectable, about 50 or 60 people in a rotating roster between the main room where the bands played and the outside seating where they could smoke and talk loudly about themselves.  The challenge was to play something that would bring the self-centred tossers in to watch you, normally it worked around the time of the penultimate song.  Though a decent number were loitering inside, and they seemed to be waiting expectantly, Neal had noted this recent development, and put it down to Izzy’s influence.  They hadn’t been playing together long, but she had something, magnetism and charisma that left people staggered, him included. 

      She wasn’t, in any sense what ‘girls in bands’ were supposed to be like, she wasn’t a girl even! Izzy was, definitively and defiantly, a woman, a female musician, but never a girl.  The closest comparison Neal could think of was Poison Ivy Rorschach, the guitarist of The Cramps. 

      Everybody remembers Lux Interior deep throating the mic and running round in high heels and his PVC thong, but Ivy was the one in charge, she wrote all the music, did all the arrangements, she even took over as the band’s manager when the man who had been responsible for them fucked the whole thing up royally.  She strutted round the stage with this look, it just said do not fuck with me. These knee high boots conceal deadly weapons and I will fuck you up while my husband holds you down. See my husband? He’s the one in the bondage gear over there humping the speaker stack, I’m the boss of him, do you think anything in the world scares me?

     Izzy had the same look.  And people loved her for it.  She didn’t state any of this explicitly, or preach anything, she just lived it.

    Woody went up to the ‘stage’ first (one corner of the main bar.  The one place that didn’t obscure the route to the bar or the toilet), his own snare and kick pedal under one arm.  They were sharing a lot of gear with the first band which made this entrance look even more slick than it was.  He settled himself behind the kit, adjusting the distance of everything by fractions of inches, then stretching out his arms, a stick in each hand to gauge the positioning, and making further minute adjustments.  When he was satisfied he waved to Neal, who was ordering drinks in his most affected nonchalant way, doing his best to hide the nerves.  Neal in turn waved to the friendly bartender he’d talked to earlier, who obligingly turned out all of the lights in the room, just as Woody plugged in the strip of blue LED lights that ran right across the stage, running along the tops of the amplifiers and the PA cabinets, and was now the only source of light, a dull blue glow that made everything look cold, evil, and awesome!  Woody started drumming now, a lazy, yet thunderous beat that he kept up as Neal worked his way to the front of the crowd, carrying a pint in each hand, one for him and one for Woody, who always forgot to get one, but would be gasping by the third song at the latest.

    Neal picked up The Pig, his cheap, heavy, and shit, bass guitar that he had bought with money he saved from his paper round in 1999, preserved for gigs, the thing sounded nasty in just the right way, but couldn’t be relied upon for anything but trouble and strife.  One day soon, when the moment felt right, Neal was going to smash it on stage, a sacrifice in the name of art and noise.  He couldn’t wait.  The Pig rumbled and burped out the bass line for the first song, slow and ominous in the blue gloom, and a few people cheered, either they knew the song of they were just enjoying themselves, could go either way.  Neal smiled to himself, concealed in the dark as Izzy stepped up and plugged in her guitar.  She’d put her game face on and that always made Neal laugh, to see his mate, normally so chilled and happy-go-lucky suddenly become this stonehearted mean faced killer, it was excellent.  The Gretsch came to life in a scream of feedback and Neal jumped into the air as Woody seemed to hit everything at once, the whole room tipped 45 degrees and the crowd howled at the sudden release of energy.  Just a few seconds in and Neal could feel the sweat gathering in the small of his back and soaking his hair, dripping from his fringe.

They must have doing something right as the room seemed more packed by the second, the smokers and the talkers were being drawn in and taken under Izzy’s spell.  One bloke, and that was the best word to describe him, except maybe ‘ape’, duck egg blue shirt stained with spilled beer and revealing some hairy belly along it’s lower perimeter, made a lunge for Izzy and managed to lay a paw on the strings of her guitar, the song faltered and hung in the balance for an agonising moment, a half second that stretched on forever.  Neal stepped forward, the headstock of The Pig pointed at eye level like a spear, but Izzy didn’t need him, probably didn’t even notice him as she kicked the guy squarely in the crotch, and shoved him back using the guitar, the crowd cheered even louder and Izzy dropped back into the song without missing a beat as the bloke was dragged away by a bouncer, what became of him after that, Neal could only speculate.

    The bar had a backstage of sorts, it had previously been a restaurant next door owned by the same guy, who also did the cooking, but when he retired his daughter took over and didn’t bother keeping the restaurant going.  Now when bands played they dumped their gear there and slumped amongst the tables and chairs when they had finished their sets to recover.  There was a sofa which a shirtless Woody had claimed, he was now soundly asleep and snoring loud enough to compete with the DJ next door.  Neal was sat on the floor with his back resting on the same sofa, head back and eyes closed.  Izzy sat on a wooden chair, putting her guitar back in its hard case and stowing away leads and doing all the myriad little fiddly things that you have to remember when gigging.  She sighed and smiled in a satisfied way.

“That was intense man,” No response, “Neal?” She snapped her fingers in his face and his eyes flicked open “Neal!”

“What? I wasn’t sleeping.” He protested as he dragged himself into a more upright position, his muscles squealing in protest.

“You were!” she insisted, “I said that was intense, people were actually into us tonight.  Nice one.”  Neal rubbed his eyes to get some life back into them after the total energy expenditure of the performance.

“It was you Izzy, they love you. You ARE a rock star, in the proper sense of the word.”

“Shut up,”

“I mean it, you’re so, and excuse me for being American here, badass! I’m a bit in love with your stage persona, She is terrifying.”

“I didn’t realise I had one.”

“Well you do,”

“Neal, can I ask you something?”

“Go on,”

“I’m really serious about doing this for a living, I know it’s stupid but I don’t want to do anything else with my life.  I need you, I don’t want to spend another two years finding the right band, you boys are it.  Can I count on you to stick with me Neal?”

Neal looked into her eyes, there was no way he could afford to keep doing this full time, his sister refused to lend him any more money and his parents didn’t speak to him all any more.  By his estimates he could go without a job for maybe another two months.

“I’m with you all the way Iz.”