By C. C. Parker

... Part 1 ... Part 2 ... Part 3 ... Part 4

The spider, where he began, from a middle, with labyrinthine thoughts; the beginnings between legs, all eight of them, praying.  He looked out from that middle, and he seemed to be floating; not only floating, but arranging himself, displaying himself, preparing himself for the time he would spend here, building something out of himself.

The spider breathed deeply.  He was already very tired.

- - - - - - -

To find a shadow, The Villager crept out of his cave.  His hands worked up against the soil, his fingers digging in clay and sediment, until . . .

There was a spot of sunlight coming down through the hole he'd made.  He passed a hand through the shaft.  He stopped the hand beneath the shaft and turned it over; gazed.  There was dirt and pieces of stone embedded in his pale flesh; and something else.  His hand hurt . . . What?  The light was already getting into his brain.  And the color of his insides was deep red. 

Forcing his hand through, all the way through that soil, The Villager felt a breeze for the first time.  He was fascinated by the way it moved through his fingers and by the way it seemed to cure the hurt there.

He than pushed an arm through.

Made the whole bigger by rocking his arm back and forth.

Pushed his head through.

Jesus Christ, he thought.  What am I doing?

- - - - - - -

"Justine?"

"Yes, dear?"

"Would you like to come sit by me?"

"Sure."

The blonde one, Justine, took a seat by the red head, Vivian.  The couch was colored gold.  An ugly fucking thing.  But what do you expect?  Things had been going bad for a very long time.

"Would like to smoke this?"

"Yes." Justine took the bong away from Vivian.  She brought it to her mouth and began to set the inside of the bowl aflame.  She took a more than generous hit.  The smoke filled her lungs to capacity, filling her green eyes with immediate tears.

She let it go.  It unfurled from her thin lips.  The room was filled with a familiar haze.

They'd been watching "The Simpsons".  Now the lurid colors danced in layers of pot smoke.  Seemingly, this was illusion. 

"That's cool," Justine said, handing the bong back to Vivian.

Vivian repacked the bowl; took a hit.  The colors adjusted to the new smoke.  Neither of them had seen the television do something like this. 

"LSD," Vivian said.

"A flashback?"

"Fuckin' A.  But you see it too."

"It's 'The Simpsons'."

"Huh?" She handed the bong back to Justine.  Justine took another hit.  The smoke mounted in the small living room.  The couch began to look more and more like a chariot lost in the clouds. 

Maybe that was true.

Anything was possible here.

- - - - - - -

The Kid thought he was insane.  He formed impressions of himself.  He waded in the dirty scum water of his guilt.

He felt bad for a lot of things.

He sat in the park on a bench in a grove of trees.  He looked closely at one of the trees. 

Somebody had carved a face in the tree's wide trunk.  It's eyes opened.

The Kid felt afraid.

A mouth opened.

The Kid got up of the bench.

"Hey, Kid!" the face shrieked.

The Kid felt his great deal of disbelief wane, and he felt that he was changing, like his brain was trying to exit his skull through his ears, and he became lightheaded, nauseous, so he found the bench with his hand.

"Sit down!"

I have never experienced anything quite like this, The Kid thought and looked to the place where he knew the face would be, leering at him.

"It's okay." The voice was quieter, calmer now.  It's twisted, carved, etched eyes stared blankly ahead.  The Kid could see that the tree was dying.  It was almost as if the tree's soul were trying to possess his body.

The Kid wondered, quite sincerely, what it would be like to be possessed by the spirit of a tree.

He wasn't being very rational.

I should be home, the kid thought.  I shouldn't be here.

Still, he liked it here.

His head really did feel light.  

Beneath his rationale, there was something surging. 

"How did you know?" He asked the tree.

"I've been watching you?" the tree explained.

The Kid did come here a lot.  Every day in fact. 

He walked across the muddy soil.  Pine needles stuck to the sides of his white shoes.  He reached out and touched the face.  The face was more flesh than wood now.  The mouth opened.  The Kid touched the underside of that mouth, letting two fingers slip inside.  There was the familiar wetness, like that of a real mouth.  The Kid moved his fingers in and out of the mouth.  The thing made a sucking noise.  It's eyes were less crude as they looked up at the boy.  They looked nearly human yet were sap-filled and golden like embers, but emotional and loving; never cold.

The Kid took his fingers from the mouth, replacing them with the tip of his erect penis.  The eyes looked at The Kid.  They really didn't show much of anything anymore.  The Kid drove his penis all the way into that mouth.  There was no gag reflex.  His balls grazed the rough, yet pleasurable, texture of the bark.  It made the same sucking noise.  The eyes were closed in golden chrysalis. 

The Kid pulled his penis out of that mouth.  Quickly, he moved a hand up and down the shaft.  It felt silky to him.  He groaned loudly.  He grabbed part of the tree with his free hand, squeezed, and discharged himself all over the carved out bark.

The Kid put his spent penis back into pants.

Luckily, the face was so low to the ground. 

Come now filled the eye sockets, burying the sap.  The expression had been lost inside The Kid's sex.  For now, the face would expressionless.

The Kid would be back.

- - - - - - -

They'd created a tribe out of the ghosts of children.  They came here, to the village, in order to seduce the minds of adults and teenagers.  You could not see them; but surely they were felt.

At night the streets were empty; and silent.  There were only sidewalks and cracked streets.  The bodies were down there, beneath the village . . . or maybe tucked away in beds made of warmth and comfort . . . and the ghost children could hear them breathing.

"Wake up," said one.

"Quiet, Samuel."

They walked together in groups, and in this particular group, there were five.  Nobody could see them, but they could see each other just fine.

"This man is dead,"  Paul, the thinnest of the ghosts said.

"Just sleeping," said Samuel.

The only girl in their group, Theresa, placed a shapeless ear to the man's chest.  There was the mark of life, the sound, groaning in the chest cavity.  She smiled cutely: "Of course he's asleep.  This is his bed."

Next to him, buried beneath the covers save for a tuft of her red hair, was the man's wife, snoring loudly.

"I want to make them sick," said George, who was standing behind the others.  His dark eyes opened cavernously inside his head.  He pressed his face inside the group to get a better look. "Let me."

The others agreed that it was a fine idea.  They let George through.

George stood at the man's side.  He craned his neck downward, until he was face to face with the man.  George puckered his lips and kissed the man on the forehead.

There were snickers all around.

"What if he dies of a heart attack?" Poot, the fifth and smallest ghost, stood at the foot of the bed.

"They rarely die of heart attacks," said Paul.        

"They have," Poot argued.

"Shut up, Poot!" said Samuel, who was watching the man eagerly.

Roger stepped away.  They watched.  They anticipated.

Nothing happened.  It wasn't all the time that something did.

"Do it again," Theresa said.  She smiled at Roger.  They were sort of, kind of, lovers.

Roger did.  He left a wet one on the sleeping man's forehead.

"What about his wife?" Poot suggested. "What about her?" He pointed a stubby finger at the lump next to the man.

"Maybe it's not his wife," Roger said wickedly.  "Maybe he's fucking someone else.  Maybe he already did away with the wife."

The man stirred.  There was a slight moaning.

Samuel, Paul, Theresa, and Roger backed up into the corner.  Poot did not move. "Come on, Poot."

Paul went to grab Poot, but the man was already waking. 

"He won't be able to see Poot."

"Shhhh," said Theresa, who held on tightly to Roger's hand.

"Some of them can," whispered Samuel. "SOME OF THEM CAN."

The man sat up in bed.  He looked over at the figure lying next to him.  He seemed to be contemplating something.  What was it that he had dreamed?  He'd forgotten already.  There was only that tight feeling in his gut, the kind that came after bad dreams.

Lowering his head back onto the pillow, the man closed his eyes.

"Nothing." Samuel left the corner.

"Ah, shit!" Roger pulled his hand away from Theresa's.  She was not hurt by it.

"What about her?" Poot suggested as before.

"Fuck her!" Roger exclaimed. "And fuck him!"

In single file, they passed through the walls of the house. 

Roger led them through dead streets.  

- - - - - - -

There were Strangers in the village who knew about the ghost children.  Naturally, these were not The Creators.  Naturally, they despised The Creators.  Strangers, skulking through the village with heads down, felt badly that they were here at all; except when they talked to these shades.  The shades could give life as easily as they could conjure nightmarish visions.

Theodore was one of The Strangers.  He'd come to the village by boat.  He lived on dark waters.  He stood on the docks and surveyed his surroundings.

There was something like nausea rising up through him. 

What is it, he thought?

He looked around some more.

Something moved in front of his tired eyes.  His brain was sore because his spirit was always charged, and he couldn't think straight.

"Hey man," he said, "What the fuck!"

Annabel paused inside her ghostly aura.  She watched the man.  He seemed confused; but not frightened.        

Theodore tilted his head toward the energy.  There was some form to it. Annabel thought of running from him.  Something inside of her told her that she didn't have to this time.  That he would understand. 

"Something's up here," he said.

An elderly couple strolled past.  A walk after dinner.  The air was calm.  No fog.  No rain.  They looked at Theodore.  He looked crazy to them.  They sped up.  What was such a crazed-looking thing doing in their village? 

Annabel felt angry about the couple, but she knew all about The Creators. She only wished she could show them something beautiful.

"You know something don't you?" Theodore asked the shade.

The shade, crying, left him there.

"Don't leave," he said.

But the energy had been grossly manipulated.

- - - - - - -

The Villager's mind was on fire.  His head exploded with confusion. 

- - - - - - -

These were the people who lived in a hole.

It was a place to go.  It maintained as so.  It was a fashionable dive, worn on in years, containing enough group isolation to convey its dirty message to those on the outside; or beneath. 

Young people came mostly. 

It might has well have been hovering in the sky.

The walls were covered in crude art.  There was little expression to the whole thing, and maybe that's what made it fashionable.  The floor was usually littered.  The L.S.D. kids came to observe certain planets resting on tufted peaks of puke green carpeting.  In a back room, there were stacks of musical instruments.  A band lived here.  Many bands lived here.

It might as well have been in space.

That's okay. 

Sometimes all the bands would jam together; eleven, energized, in that small space.

Jesus Christ, what a sound.

That kind of sound was not solid, yet it was angelic; surviving it's claustrophobic tendencies.  It was defined underneath.

           

- - - - - - -

"Gravy," said Vivian, taking another bong hit.

"When?" Justine had her legs draped across Vivian's.  The gold couch sagged beneath them.

"I don't know."

"Why not?"

"I'm not really into punk music."

"It's not really punk music."

"I've heard them.  It sounded like punk music."

"It's pretty transgressive."

Justine took the bong away from Vivian. "Whatever," she said. 

Vivian looked at her wickedly.  "What?" 

"I just think your sexy when you're grumpy."

"I'm not grumpy.  And you're stoned."

"Not THAT stoned."

The room seemed very vacant at that point.

"I really want you to eat my pussy," said Vivian.

"You know I won't."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't do THAT."

"But you'll take it in the ass from Paulie."

"He's my boyfriend."

"Oh, who gives a fuck." Vivian set the bong on the floor.  "Who knows.  You might really get off on it."

"No."

"You don't think Paulie's out fucking other girls?"

"I don't think so." 

Quietly, Vivian removed her legs from Justine's lap. "Bullshit," she said, and left the room.

Justine could hear the refrigerator opening and closing.  "Would you like a beer?" came the voice. 

Bitch, thought Justine.  "Yeah.  Sure."  Her mouth felt like a desert.  Too much pot.

"Here." Vivian tossed the can onto the couch.  "Now don't be a bitch," she said.

- - - - - - -

Gravy played to a room full of strangers.  Smoke traced shadows in the light.  A cheap strobe flashed in front of the singer's face.  He looked out across a landscape of blank stares and slack faces.  They sat on couches; the sat on the floor.  They passed around a glass blown pipe colored red and black. 

The walls might as well have been plasma.  The sound was an anthem in the streets of the village.  Kids passing by would hear the sounds; or feel them.  Somehow, everybody knew what was going on.

This was not really a place at all. 

Gravy finished their first set.  Beer was handed out.  Grayish figures floated through the hole and admired the watery textures of the place, banging up against walls, making sure they were somewhere; but none were certain.  This could be some place, but what did it matter? 

The world could dissolve around, making a womb of it's decayed semblance.  Voices, no matter how strained they seemed, mattered. 

A kid wearing a Rage Against the Machine hat hiding his shocks of bright red hair walked over to the drum kit.  Nobody really cared that he wanted to play it.  He picked up the sticks, and with motion that seemed slight at first, he began to play, increasing the tempo as his emotions adjusted to this singular act.  He didn't need to speak.  People didn't need to speak here; angles never did.

That's cool.  That's fine.  Most anything was.

A girl leaned against a wall.  She thought she might pass through it.  She had eaten a tab of L.S.D. an hour ago. 

Gravy began to play again.  The girl thought they sounded like a grand belch.  She touched her hand to the wall and thought for an instant that she was touching skin.  It felt warm; and she could feel the music passing into; and out.  She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.  She remembered that she was something beyond human; a goddess perhaps.

She watched the guitar player for a while.  The long, black lanks of his hair moved in and out of the music like serpents.  She breathed; she was always breathing; but now it moved away from her, and she could see it; she missed it very much, as if it had been the very last.

Oh my God.  I'm dying.

It was more of a recollection than a thought.

- - - - - - -

The Kid was masturbating to a forestry textbook.  The sperm in his balls was ready to erupt.  He had his pants pulled down to his knees and the bottom of his shirt pulled up around his nipples.

Underneath the village, the dead were wailing. 

Little acts, like testes discharging life. 

The village was bound to this . . . thing.  It was starting to feel a little Lemure Gulliver; and it had always buckled.

- - - - - - -

Discourse on Illusion Part I:  

Sammy was chained, completely nude, to a locomotive.  Two dogs smelled her feet.  They sniffed between her toes.  They looked up at the hulking mass.  She was but a speck of angel flesh attached to that beautiful, sleek attraction.

"Bitch!" One dog barked.

She moved her slight build.  A smell of roses was faint.  It was coming from between her breasts.

"I smell meat," said the other, bigger dog.

Sammy realized that she'd attracted the wrong type of men again.

The small, hyper dog lifted a leg and pissed on her ankle.  The bright yellow fluid ran between her toes; and then trickled into the dirt beneath her; dirt that she was suspended one foot above.

They had decided to crucify her in the train yard.  

The bigger dog, who was part pitbull, leapt up, strained it's body to it's full length, and stuck it's cold, black nose near Sammy's exposed pussy.  The dog sniffed once.

"I want to smell her pussy," the little dog yelped.

"You'll get your chance," said the big dog, sniffing her again.

"Christ, she looks pretty good for such a strung out bitch."

The big dog sniffed again.  He then inserted his nose into the girl's vagina.  She writhed above him.

"Sonofabitch!" protested Sammy.  "I didn't take nothin'" She was so high she could barely speak.

"Bullshit!" The little dog propped two feet against the side of the locomotive and bit into the girls toes.  There was an after taste of sweat and piss.

"Jesus Christ, girl." The big dog, seeming to slink back into his size, had all four feet on the ground.  "You need to clean that shit."

"Is it her snatch?" The little dog took a toe in his mouth and thrashed his head from side to side.

"Fucker!" The girl screamed.

"YOU DON'T TAKE OUR DOPE!" The big dog had a voice equal to his size.

The girl was weak.  The arms, set against rusted metal, confirmed decay.  The body was a bag in which nothing remotely resembled a past life; open it up and discover the passage back to her beauty.  She was half cocoon.  She couldn't decide if she wanted to go all the way.  Her heart was the only thing that worked, and even that wore a thick coating.  Her face was set up for failure.  It was a cruelly manipulated face; it was a made up face.  It showed horror, but none too genuine; it was the horror on the faces of mirrors.  So many things had entered that face; those were the ruination of a once fine brain.  Now the brain, of which had ceased to lie to the rest of her (only to keep itself for this long), was turning liquid; that's where all piss and semen seemed to go anymore. 

I am liquid, she thought.

"Our dope!" the little dog yelped, with a voice weighted down by timidity.  He looked up to his big friend.

It went something like this:

As anyone can realize, it was seemingly impossible that either dog, or both dogs, could have done this to the girl; they just did.  That was that.  She was attached to that locomotive.  Rusty spikes had even been driven into her wrists.  When had that happened?  As anyone can realize, it probably hadn't.  Still, the dogs were pretty sure of themselves.

I make illusions, thought the big dog.

There was blood now. 

The little dog's slimy, pink pecker emerged; a group of fleas crawling on his balls had hoisted it up.  His nose wrinkled at the smell of rose.  A queer noise was permitted to leave his toothless mouth; it was a very queer noise.  He stuck out his tongue; fleas marched out of his mouth . . . freedom. 

The blood blanketed the bruises and scars on the girl's arms.  There was some comfort in this.

Illusion tore the girl down.

"We'll fuck the dope out of you!  We'll fuck the living dope out of you!"

"Right!" The little dog shrieked.  His slimy pecker steamed in the cold.

They threw her down on the motel's bed and raped her.  They looked into her eyes, making sure they'd taken everything.  They killed her.

Gratuitous illusion expanded the excitement of the kill.

Both were pleased.

- - - - - - -

The Kid had already came.

- - - - - - -

Theodore, sitting inside the stomach of his boat, began to write things down in a new black notebook with skinny college ruled lines.  His guts felt mixed up.  He took up a pen.  He would try to be as honest as possible.

He wrote this first stream of thoughts:

I come into the village an observer of things. 

I walk down a street in broad daylight.

The children have clean faces.  Most of the men have flat faces and thyroid eyes.  Their lips are wet, and their skin is too pink.  Next to the ghosts, they look like sexual organs; penises and vaginas.  The women are also ugly; yet substantially attractive next to their husbands.  The women do not look like sex organs.  Their faces are long.  They have eyes that resemble lizard's eyes. 

Sex offenders have guilty looks in their eyes.  The proprietors are without spines.  Drunks move exterior glands sloppily while crossing the road.

Ugliness here.  What the fuck is going on?

Not the psychiatry of the soul.  I mean this. 

I see:

People in garments; they who are wearing rags.  Layer after layer.  Duration is needed.  The people who think they are lions; people who are lizards.  Tender skin pulled tautly over sharp bones; contours of mishaps.  The directory is down in the Jesus ward.  Crippled but not admitting it.  Trading faces.  Is there a value on your soul?  Is there documentation of your spiritual ascension?  I am noisy in a crowd of silent beggars.  Where are they going?  Where could they be going?  Behold, the excrement on your fingers.  They have been holding out.  I see they have a plan.  I see that they know.  My God, they know. 

I have only been here a . . .

. . . But this is what I see.

I see:

People trading life.  I see that this is the only politic. 

Shock me into paralysis.  Clothe me in your undergarments.  Shove me . . . ME . . . into your little dark cave.  I reach out, turn my hand around; the joints in my fingers are breaking up.  I'm fading man.  I'm fading.  I'm turning into one of your little ghosts.

These are the days passing.  The letters are days in this case.

I see everything here.  Every god damn thing.  I can see the bones twitching beneath your skin.  I can see the brain twitching beneath your skull.  I can see that you're a dead mother fucker.

Dead per capita.

The group mind is gaining strength.

Come up.  Higher.  Okay.

Look down.

That grayish area is your village . . . 

Theodore stopped writing.  His hands were shaking.  Something like he'd never experienced penetrated his mind; something like madness.

 

- - - - - - -

The Villager located a shallow lake just beyond a hillock.  He drank; and observed his nakedness.

- - - - - - -

Annabel went to the church.  It was an old thing with beautiful, colorful mosaics. 

She walked through the courtyard.  The voices here were terribly loud.  She knew where they were all congregating.

Within a small copse of gnarled trees, there was a stone bench.  Annabel sat down.  She rested her thin ghostly face inside her hands.  "Damn, damn," she said. Emotions welled up inside of her.  It was a compulsion the others would not concern themselves with.

The only things mentioned in those corridors beneath the village was that lack of hope which held them all together.  "Those fuckers," one of the ghosts had said. "They took our souls."  Annabel understood that this was not the case at all.  In fact, that's all that remained; this spirit.  Each of them possessed it; multi-layered and shifting through to the core of illumination.  Halls and doorways. The Creators had entered into these chambers, placing locks on all the doors.  It was never realized; by any one of them.  They owned existence.        

She had only spoken lightly of these possibilities to the others.   

It was only that she didn't want to hurt The Creators.  She didn't even want to scare them into hurting themselves.  She saw them as weak, spineless things, who could not reason.  The deeds performed by them were purely habitual.  The severing had been performed blindly; they never did see the faces draining of their color.  It wasn't in them to kill; or even maim.  Simply put; the deviator had accosted them with a very large stick.

The Creators were scared shitless of the darkness.

That darkness, repeated over time, gaining depth, retreated into itself, sucking everything down with it. 

It was generations deep.

           

- - - - - - -

Annabel stood at the front of the church.  She gazed across the crowd of shimmering bodies.  They came from great doorways at the church's rear.  Shiny tapestries rustled above the wet flow of ghost bodies.  The red tapestries moved like twisted, glazed skin; a hypnotic dance.  There were also candles; hundreds of them protruding from cracks in the high walls and scattered on the floor where they had melted in layers.  The flames of the candles flickered as the ghosts passed, and as they arrived, they pulled themselves into their bodies, creating taut slender things, emaciated, especially about the faces; swollen foreheads mounted on carved cheeks.  The foreheads, adopting tentacles to reach, groped outwardly, attaching themselves to whatever obstructed it's passage, and than retreating with it thus creating a suctioning sound. 

It was the sound of glorious orgies. 

The room would undulate and glisten. 

It was warm viscera, liberated by the razor.  It was a  bee hive; and these wet looking things lived inside of it. 

It was the inside of God's spermy cock, twitching with virility.

It was a place of worship.    

Annabel had joined them.

They waited for the voice.  The Creators had given them life; but He had given them meaning. 

At the edge of the silvery pool they had made, there stood a wrecked pulpit.  Candles were piled up around it.  The pulpit shone brightly.  There were two red tapestries on either side of the pulpit,  moving off the heat of the candles in languid, vivid movement. 

There was a form coming into view behind the pulpit. 

He did not have features but rather a darkly shifting tide beneath the clear, plasmatic skin.  He was darkness; and a voice.

Everything turned liquid beneath His voice.

The pool waited.

There was some silence; and than He shrieked:

"BASTARDS!"

The pool made a mouth in its center; like a whirlpool.

"MOTHERFUCKERS!"

The mouth came open and howled.

"I, WHO HAVE CONTROLLED, AND WHO WILL ALWAYS CONTROL YOU . . . YESSSSSSSS!

It gurgled gratefully.

"YOU WILL SUCCEED IN HELPING ME CONTROL THEM."

Yes.  Yes.  Yes. 

He was not only a voice.  He was their father.

"MAKE THEM SEE THE TERRIBLE TRUTHS!"

The walls melted as the red dye skins fluttered as the dark shape pulsed as the pool melted deeper into a dream state.  His voice was showing them the way back; leading them.  It was good that they listened.

"HATE THEM!"

"SHOW THEM FEAR!"

"MAKE THEM UNDERSTAND!"

"MAKE THEM WISH THEY WERE DEAD!"

Yes.  His voice could easily rekindle their crusade.

"THEY ARE DIFFERENT THAN YOU.  YOU ARE SUPERIOR TO THEM."

The single mouth, cut off from many, many thoughts, wailed in agreeance.

The speech was finished, after which Annabel was able to pull herself free.  The rest followed.  Their swollen heads caved in as the tentacles dissolved to points around their brows that were hardly discernible at all.  There was another suctioning sound; the reverse of the other.  Exhausted, transparent faces shuffled away.  The ones in the middle, who had been very anxious to get here, where the most malformed by the end of all this.  It would take them hours to get their shape back; and it was a small price to pay, they agreed.

Most of them leaked back into the two side doors at the rear of the church.  Annabel, who received zero pleasure from the labyrinth beneath the village, retreated in her own way.  She went out of the front door. 

Annabel, who was trembling, returned to the copse of trees.   She sat back down on the stone bench.

A few ghosts had followed her out.  She could hear them in the courtyard.

"It was a great speech," came a voice.

A softer voice followed: "I feel better now."

And one more voice, which shook excitedly when it spoke: "I think He is going to show the heart of the labyrinth.  Soon."

"He'll never show us," said the first voice.

"He has to," the exited voice argued.  Its excitement began to falter.  "I only want to know the truth."

Annabel thought they were bargaining for their souls.  It was true that His voice moved her.  How could it not?  She was terribly shaken.  Her body, and she had one, albeit slightly transparent, felt like it had been turned inside out.  Annabel, who was much stronger than the others, believed Him in turns.  Right now, she didn't know what to believe.  Inside the church, when the flux of their bodies created that kind of energy, that oneness, she had to believe Him; to worship Him.

The voice persisted.

"It couldn't be much of anything," said the softer voiced ghost.

"Maybe he's got our flesh down there," suggested the first ghost.

There was no excitement in the second ghost's voice now.  It had been drained fully. "I'd like my flesh back."  Nearly a whimper.  "I'm not happy at all."

"He'll be fair with us," said the first ghost.

The softer voiced ghost cleared his throat.

It was the whimpering ghost who said, "I don't understand Him sometimes."

The softer voice ghost said, "that's because you're stupid."

"No," the whimpering ghost offered. "You're the one who is stupid."

"I'm not stupid."

"You're the one who is always whispering."

"But my voice."

"Fuck your voice!"

"Fuck your uneasiness!" the ghost with the soft voice coughed.

"Shut up!  Both of you!" the first ghost demanded.  "He will show us the heart of the labyrinth when He feels we are ready to see the heart of the labyrinth!"

"There's probably nothing!" Whimpers turned into sobs.  "Not a damn thing!  I'm so confused . . . and . . . fucked in the head, you know!  I want to believe in Him, but it's hard sometimes!  I mean, you never see Him outside of the church.  You never see Him in the corridors of the labyrinth!  But His voice!  I'm going crazy!"

"You're falling apart!" screamed the first voice.  "Get a hold on!  We've work to do!"

The sobbing ghost howled its dictum inaudibly.

"Come on," the soft voiced ghost said. "In another hour it'll be dark.  We need to put our heads together.  Get through this."

"THAT'S ALL WE DO!" screamed the sobbing ghost, scrabbling for his voice.  "THAT'S ALL WE DO!"

"Come on."

The voices waned.

Annabel waited a moment longer.  Her body still trembled.  She lifted her hands in front of her face to see if light still passed through them.  It did.

 

- - - - - - -

"Sucks about Sammy," Justine mentioned.

"She was a stupid, junkie bitch," Vivian managed.  She was very stoned.  The new batch of pot was pure green bud; major crystals.  Two hits would get you pretty fucked. 

They continued to pass the bong back and forth.  Time lapsed, forgetting itself.  The room felt like it was being dangled.  The television could barely hold on.  It was penetrating less and less, and the images were unclear. 

"I wonder who killed her?" Justine took still another bong hit.

"Probably some toothless junkie bastard."

"I know Sammy wasn't the greatest person in the world, but she didn't deserve that."

"She was a big girl.  Sammy always knew what she was getting into."

"They stuck needles into her pelvis.  They fucked her with a broken beer bottle.  They cut off all of her hair and carved shit into her scalp.  That's fucked up."

"Spare me the details," Vivian said weakly.

"That's the problem with the whole thing.  Look at this."  Justine handed Vivian a copy of The Villager; a local newspaper.  It was folded in half; Sammy's obituary framed in hot pink. 

"I've read this." Vivian tossed the paper onto the floor.

"It only says, 'deceased', before naming a list of family members who probably don't give a fuck anyway.  There's nothing in there about murder.  Not even in today's police reports.  That's fucked up.  The whole thing is fucked up."

"Who needs to know that other shit?"  Vivian sucked on the bong. 

Justine leaned back into the couch.  Paulie had told her about Sammy.  She shrugged.

"I mean . . . "Vivian held the cool smoke deep inside of her.  Her eyes, which were terribly red, watered. "She's dead."

"That's a fucked up attitude," Justine said.

"Would you change the channel?" Vivian asked.

Justine picked up the remote, punched a few buttons, returned it to the arm of the couch.  They weren't really watching anyway.

"God, Vivian."

"Just drop it.  I don't want to talk about Sammy anymore.  Life goes on."

Does it, Justine thought.  She wasn't sure sometimes.  "Sammy was only 22," she said.

"She was a strung out dope addict."

"Whatever," Justine said.

- - - - - - -

The Villager wept by the side of the lake.  He was cold; and hungry.  He would need to find food; and shelter. 

The walls of his cave had supplied him with food and shelter, and he knew he could never return to it.  At the moment of his exit, the cave had folded up on itself.  All the dirt and sediment and nourishment had sucked up into itself.  All that was left were a few drops of his own blood on the freshly turned soil.

He had spent the entire day examining the faculties of his mind.  Although he had the face of an idiot, The Villager realized that he had great capabilities.  Gaining food and shelter should not pose a problem to him; but it did.  True, his mind was capable of understanding need, and a great many other things, but it could not bring him food or shelter.  It could assist him; but his body, which was naked and weak, resisted easily his will. 

Than he would  surely . . .

But the thought of dying could not cross his mind.  Ever.

- - - - - - -

The band, Milton's Weathervane, a three piece, adjusted themselves to their own, lonely sound, which developed under heavy riffing, and rose out of its turbulence with something that was textural and melodic.  The bass player, who was also the singer, leaned his face up against the mike; his words came as smooth as silk, or at least that's what it looked like.  The lyrics, which he wore like a soft, malleable mask, reverberated around the space, recreating scenes from a lost Bible.  His face, contorting underneath melodies, looked out on the crowd with such intensity, that it nearly made the kids nervous.  On acid, Milton's Weathervane was holy, and nothing could stop them from looking into the singer's cavernous stare; they wanted to sip from his face.  The kids were shadows, and then lighter shadows, and then light; it was a show that wore on in images of crowd/band exploration.  Milton's Weathervane, unlike bands like Gravy, used no effects to powder their show.  This was Milton's Weathervane, with a singer that became a serpent and a Gryphon and a dragon.  The band was myth; no; the kids were myth.  The band was mythic.  On acid, Milton's Weathervane could adjust anyone's mind to that perfectly clear state of understanding; or not.  Many of the kids copulated.  Certainly, they were afraid of falling off this precipice, so they fucked like mad.  Milton's Weathervane smiled at this.  They knew exactly how much power they had; and they knew exactly when to pull out. "This music is made for acid," one kid said.  Duh.  The singer's stoned out of his mind.  His eyes are the shifting plates of some world; his.  His world is being exhaled in the right proportions; if he gives to much, and receives too little, he's in trouble.  Milton's Weathervane understands the chemistry that goes into their music; it is like flesh and muscle and bone; the shifting plates of some world; theirs.  It is an expansion of energy.  The singer is the core; the village holds the perimeters; for now anyway.  Milton's Weathervane wants control.  These could be their children.  'We're becoming liquid,' one boy explained.  His hands were at his sides; he wanted to leap out of the crowd like a porpoise, or a stream of warm piss.  "You pissed your pants," a girl said to the porpoise.  Her eyes were huge in a face that kept changing color.  She began to laugh hysterically.  "Fuck," the boy said; but nobody really cared that he pissed his pants.  People always pissed their pant here.  Nobody cared.  The boy was water now, and the crowd began to discharge themselves in several orifices.  Sperm dribbled out of cunts and asses, coating the floor with a gelatinous layer.  People slipped and fell and wallowed in their come.  The discharge that came from Milton's Weathervane was less sticky, yet equally, if not more, sacramental.  This was emotional music.  The source opened up like a flesh wound; the eye, with it's dilations, rose out of that warm meat; and . . . My God, the kids were tearing at their own flesh; but not really.  They only clawed at their bodies, which were now very naked, very exposed; and the moon shone down brightly.  They danced around the hologram of a fire.  Large boys with thick bodies stood along the walls and stroked their tiny cocks.  Milton's Weathervane expressed themselves very deeply, but now they were steeped in intestinal bindings, probing scapes that could be smelled rather than seen.  The singer, who had changed into a Gryphon for the last time, expanded his expression by gaining an erection.  He looked down at his stiff cock.  The cock smiled up at him.  "I am a source," it said, "but not the source."  He smiled down at his cock and then back to the crowd.  Things had opened wider than he imagined they could; the kids were vibrating, rather than acting out their human differences.  The singer of Milton's Weathervane was amazed by the twitching eyes; the lucid bodies; limbs that had become unearthed.  He played the last strains of his music and watched as the crowd changed in color, in form, wearing the many masks he had offered them.  It was during the climax that he saw the thing for what it was; the bareness of the feast; the importance of the ritual; and the sacrifice.