Allow me to blow your mind

A list of the main points of interest in the movie 'Paint Your Wagon':

1. Clint Eastwood

2. Lee Marvin

3. The old west

4. Toe-tapping musical numbers, involving both stars

5. Bigamy

How's that for a gogurt tube of weirdness?

A new waste of time

So, if you're one of my three readers, I'm sure you've noticed the new link listed on the right, up there at the top. It's for a blog/extended story I'm writing, following the adventures of Runcible 'Red' Hand, and some of his friends, who wander among the various dimensions and drink at a bar together. I make no promises about quality, as my writing style can best be described as throwing every idea that wanders through my head into a pot, and posting the unholy slurry that results online, but I can promise often correct use of grammar.

I'll also be posting three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so you can be bored by my writing at least that often.

If you've just wandered by at random, welcome! Please read my story, and forgive me my trespasses. You should also read the archives on this blog. It's genius, every entry. I promise. Would I lie to you, person I've never met before, and who I desperately hope will like me?

Found this online today, so... yeah.

FOREWORD

It was Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, who remarked, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” This statement appears to be just as true today as it was then. Perhaps it is even more valid today considering the pressures and frequent monotony of today’s world. The majority of today’s men and women live in boring circumstances, and when the opportunity for change arises, they are often quick to seize the chance. For the characters in this story, the opportunity is one which many would consider perverse and deranged. But it provides a release and a need. All morals and scruples are cast aside in a moment of madness — a chance to grab pleasure before it is taken away.

SOME NUNS SUCK… SECRETLY! — a novel about the quiet desperation in so many of us — and the extremes to which it may drive us.

Bad Cut

Do you think there comes a point when, after a certain number of plastic surgeries, that you just give up on looking human any more? This question came to mind yesterday, after I tripped across a photo collection of various people who seemed to have gone overboard on going under the knife.

Now, I know that poo-pooing the fascination some people have with 'improving' their looks through surgery is the equivalent of hunting cows with a high powered rifle and scope. I know it's a slow moving target. But I have to wonder what goes through some people's minds when, after spending upwards of $30,000, they find themselves with a face that could have come from someone working them over with a crowbar. Seriously, most of them look like boxers do right after a big fight. I'd put up a couple of pictures as an example, but I'd rather not have them permanently on display. Also, I don't know how. But that's neither here nor there.

Are they happy with what they see, after all the work that's been done? Do they look in the mirror and think that if their doctor gets just one more chance to take a cold chisel and an angle grinder to them, they'll be perfect? Or, god help 'em, more perfect?

In which spoils are divided and drinks are spoiled

I figured I owed Automatic Jack a drink. Given that he'd been taken hostage while collecting money for me on bets I wasn't supposed to be making, and threatened with death as a way to force me to do something I really didn't want to do, it seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do.

So, immediately after handing a still warm, severed arm to the bastard who had been the cause of all of this, he and I made Grindlebone's our destination.

I call Jack a he, but it wasn't because of any obvious sexual characteristics on his part. Automatic Jack wasn't a flesh and blood creature, but an autonomous mechanical being. He might have been an actual robot, although his ramshackle, thrown together appearance suggested otherwise. I suspected he was either a spirit inhabiting a pile of random, humanoid shaped junk, or some sort of metal golem. I'd wondered about it, on occasion, but the situation had never seemed quite right for broaching the subject. I had quite a good friend in Jack, so it hardly mattered.

Grindlebone's, the location to which we conveyed ourselves, is one of my favorite watering holes. It managed to be both spacious and intimate through clever use of furnishings, had a number of Doors leading to a number of widely disparate places, and served surprisingly diverse and well prepared food, along with a vast array of drinks. Grindlebone often tends one of the scattered bars himself. He said it made the place more homey for the regulars.

Indeed, we saw the man himself as Jack and I entered through the Door leading from the Gambling Hell. General asking-after of each others health followed, and Jack and I were granted use of one Grin's private rooms. Jack and I had business to discuss, after all.

“Well,” Grin said, “You two head back on past the hall heading towards the pool room, walk through the next set of curtains, let yourselves in the purple door. I'll send Janx along with your drinks presently. And don't worry, it's a real quiet room. Oh, and avoid the back Oak Room, there's a bit of an altercation going on there, right now.”

Grin had added the last to let us know the room would be as secure as he could make it; some of his so-called private rooms were just private enough to let people think they weren't being watched. Not that either Jack or I had anything to hide at the moment, but it was a nice touch nonetheless.

So we wandered along to the designated spot, although we did take a peak into the Oak Room. A gang of the Red Brotherhood were lighting each other up pretty hard in there. They'd probably asked specifically for that room, too, as it was out of the way and the solid wood furnishings lowered the damage charges they'd inevitably be paying. The furnishings also made cracking weapons.

The room on the other side of the purple door was quite comfortable. The drinks that came along shortly after we arrived, whiskey for me, Bertham's Oil for Jack, made it even more so. Being metal and all, I don't think Jack could have been tired in the same way I was, but the day must have been quite wearing on him mentally, and for a moment we simply savored the alcohol and sat quietly. But there was business to be done, and we got down to it in relatively short order.

I leaned forward as Jack grasped the plate of iron covering his chest and lifted it off. Once it had been removed, two small metal grates that had been concealed underneath the plate swing open, and a box extruded from Jack's chest cavity. He removed the box and set it on the table between us, as the grates closed again.

While a bastard, the person who had taken Jack hostage had at least been a truthful bastard. He had promised, upon my completion of his task, to release Jack unharmed and with all of the currency he had been carrying. The cash was all Gambling Hell Exchange Vouchers, and it made quite a nice pile on the table.

Jack said, “I still can't say the day wasn't worth it, not while I'm looking at this much money.”

“Jack, my cast-iron friend, you are not wrong. By the way, I think I owe you an apology.”

Jack pshaw-ed the very idea, and we engaged in a friendly argument over who owed whom what, all the while dividing our large pile of money into two smaller, but still very attractive, piles. When the division was complete, we both settled back in our seats, and commenced with a discussion of what really quite clever and fine fellows we both were. And now moderately wealthy, to boot.

It was at this point that our budding mutual appreciation ended prematurely, due to the appearance of some heavily armed people, coming through the door to our room. Two hairy men in scruffy combat gear cleared the corners and then brought the muzzles of their guns to bear on Jack and I, still sitting quietly behind a table piles high with money.

Sighing, I took a sip of my whiskey. This day simply would not end.

Walking out of the World

“It helps if you don’t know where you’re going,” the old man told me.

I’d been in McGinty’s most of the night, commiserating with a friend who’d lost his job and girl earlier that day. Jimmy’d gotten pretty far into his cups during the course of the evening, progressing from dislike of his ex-boss and -girlfriend into outright hatred for the whole stinking world, and this city in particular. Before the whiskey had robbed him of his ability to form consonants, my pal Jimmy had waxed rather poetic about what a soul-sucking hole our fair city is, an ‘envious and vindictive bitch of a metropolis, dedicated to taking the good out of any of her denizens and grinding them into compost to grow the poison flowers that would draw another crop of rubes out of the hills, to be destroyed the same way.” He’d seemed quite sure of himself, and seemed to feel the need to share this and other observations with most of the bar. It had all been downhill from there, and shortly another friend had helped Jimmy, still declaiming to the rafters, out of the bar and into a cab.

I sat back down, finishing my beer and deciding whether to head home or over to another bar to listen to a new band, the Murder Orgy, I’d been told about. My eye fell on a square bar napkin that Jimmy had been using early in his exposition about the evils of the world. The only legible things on the napkin were the words “Walk right out of this goddamn world”. I’d picked it up, and was poring over the words, and the odd squiggles and glyphs that surrounded it, and an old, gnarled finger had appeared and tapped the word once, twice, then a third time, and the old man’s voice had drifted into my ear, sounding like the rough rustle of leave in late fall, quiet but still perfectly audible over the background hubbub of the bar.

“It helps if you don’t know where you’re going,” he’d said.

I looked up and at the man for the first time that evening. He’d been sitting at the end of the bar, on the stool next to mine, all night, but I hadn’t spared him a second look in all that time. He had been there when I came in, and I suppose I’d assumed he’d be there when I left. He had the air about him of a regular, the feeling that he wasn’t so much in the bar as of the bar, a fixture, like the brass rail and the sticky floor. He belonged in the bar, and I’d accepted him in the same way I’d accepted the presence of the neon beer lights. The kind of guy you’d look at and never see.

But when I did take that moment to look at him, to see him, he became subtly wrong. The details of his appearance marked him as a stranger, and quite a strange stranger at that.

The hat he wore had too high a crown and too wide a brim, his coat was of an odd cut and material, the suit under it was of a strange hue. The man wore thick, chunky glasses made of a black substance, coming close to being what a hip young person would wear, but arriving at slightly disturbing through a slight asymmetry. Both his thick mustache and beard stubble were an odd shade of gray.

“I’m sorry?”

“If you want to walk out of the world. It helps if you don’t know where you’re going.”

“What do you mean? How can you walk out of a world?”

“Oh, it’s easy, really,” He’d said with a dry chuckle. “Many a man has gone from this world to that’un simply by being a bit to preoccupied, oh, ayuh.”

“Preoccupied?”

“Yuh. When you know where’s your going, your mind helps keep yuh pinned to the path you want, see? But when you go a wandrin’ willy nilly, or get to distracted as you travel, a body’s apt as not to come on one of the lost ways, and take a turn right out o’ the places they know, and come upon someplace wholly different, oh ay.”

“Lemme see,” I said, slurring a bit as the old man took another drink of his beer, “Lemme see…You think that if I, right, me, I were to walk out of here, and just wander around, I’d ‘walk out of the world’? Really”

“Maybe, maybe you would,” he said, scratching his temple. “Most people, they don’t, whatchacallit, they don’t have the right attitude. They could stomp around with no fixed destination for all their lives, and never come across anything out of the ordinary, least that they’d notice. Not to say they wouldn’t cross a world or two, not at all, but they’d never know it, as where they ended up would be too near what they expected to notice. Y’ever gone to a place, and later found out someone ya knew, knew pretty well, was there the whole time, and yet ya never saw one another?”

“Uh…yeah.”

“It’s the kind of thing most people write off, right? They figure they just floated around such a way they never caught sight o’ one another. And most time is, they’re probably right. But sometimes…” He took another drink. “Sometimes, one or the other o’ them, maybe both, stepped just a little bit sideways on the way in, turned a little bit, right, and ended up in a world a hair’s breadth away from the one they thought they was in.”

“So they were in the same place, but not?”

“Oh, ayuh. Y’see, most people think a place is a single thing, right? But a place is an agglomeration, really…”

“A collage?” I said, getting into the idea.

“Exactly. A collage made up of what different people expect to see when they get to a place. If you was to ask each person here, in this place, to tell you about it, you’d get as many different places described as people you asked. And even when you put all the descriptions together, you still wouldn’t have everything that makes this place what it is.”

“But, how does that make it a different world? Just because people aren’t very observant?”

“Nah, it’s that people assume most of what they see, right? You walk down a street you walked down a hundred times before, how much do you really see? Not much, oh no. Your head builds a picture, and you think it’s the real thing. Sign’s might be wrong, numbers might be different, you might have wandered onto a street you never seen before, and’ll never see again, but your head takes away the things it don’t expect to see, and fills in what it thinks should be there.”

“Like, they don’t have to look, because they know?”

“Seems like.”

“But I still don’t see where the walking out of word, worlds comes in.”

“You from the city, here?”

“No. No, I moved here...”

“Remember when you first come here,” He said, cutting me off. “Did you ever head out and end up a little lost, someplace you didn't know was there?”

“Yeah, a couple of time. Of course.”

“That's all it is. People get set in their way pretty quickly, though, and they stop coming across new things. Part of 'em assumes that the city is only so big, and eventually the set o' memory they have put aside to make a map in their heads gets full, and they get done finding things. But there are 's many cities out there as there are bars in here, see?”

“So,” I slurred, “How do you keep from assuming like ever'body does, hmm?”

“This is a mighty good way to start, no doubt.” He said, lifting his glass.

I lifted mine along with him, and finished the last third of my beer in a few gulps. “So, lemme see here, you're sayin', right, that if I walked out into the night, here, and wandered about, I might walk right out of my everyday world? Do you believe that, really?”

“Don't matter what I believe. Question is, do you?”

I lifted by gaze from my empty pint glass, and looked at the dark eyes behind the black glasses, then looked beyond the stranger to the door behind him, and the unanimous night on the other side of the door's glass.

“Another beer?” I heard the bartender ask.

The thing what came out of Dexter

By this time, Dexter’s skin had become translucent, a thin shell covering the thing that had destroyed him. Under the yellowish, parchment-like covering, lumps and tendrils moved back and forth, thrashing impatiently and pushing out, here and there, causing cracks and tears in the drying skin. Only the mouth, impossibly large and tooth-filled, and the eyes, burning red surrounding pit-black irises, showed the horror of the thing waiting to shed Dexter’s skin and be born into our unready world.

“Time itself will come to an end, Paladin.” The voice of the beast that was wearing Dexter’s skin was surprisingly high-pitched, piping and unpleasant. As it spoke, tendrils lashed out of its mouth, probing at the desiccated skin of Dexter’s face, tearing strips loose and bearing them away, into the open maw. “Those From Outside will follow my path, and this little realm will become ours; it will be rent and torn and changed to suit our whim. All that you know will end in pain and hate and terror, without end.”

With a piercing, staccato sound that might have been a demented laugh, the mouth-tendrils shot out and finally tore the skin of Dexter’s face and head loose, pulling it back into the creature’s maw in great strips, filling the air with a series of horrible tearing and cracking sounds. As the skin was consumed, the mass of thrashing, whipping, sucker-ended tendril spread and unfolded. This sudden, final destruction of the visage of a man who had been a friend to each of us brought out shrieks, groans, and no small amount of flinching from our little group, as we each fought the urge to flee headlong away from the monstrosity. The tendrils seemed to focus on our sounds, or movements, and, as more and more of them, impossibly more, unfolded, swelling to three, then four, times the size of poor Dexter’s head. The eyes had separated, each to its own tendriled stalk, above the mouth that gaped from just below where the head-stalks joined.

More ripping and tearing as all of Dexter above the waist split and then vanished, some pulled into the thing’s mouth, but most consumed by the suckers on the end of each glistening, flagella-like stalk that burst forth, freed from their chrysalis of human skin. As with the head, the monster swelled and spread out more tendrils than could possibly have been held in the dimensions of a human chest, and gave the eye-watering impression of unfolding from…somewhere else.

The appendages that had been encased in Dexter’s arm split each into two multi-jointed extremities that spread out fore and aft, and lifted the central structure, Dexter’s legs still dangling from it’s underside, off the ground. One shoe and sock dropped off, and some sort of claw like thing could be seen struggling to break free as the rest of the thing had. The maw of the creature began spitting out painful sounds, and suddenly the world around me seemed to have an unreal sheen to it, like the cheap plastic of a child’s toy.

Enough of this, I thought. Reaching to my waist, the familiar weight of the Colt 1911 came into my hand, and I could feel the sigil embossed on the grip slip into line against it’s mirror, tattooed onto my palm. As I began to speak the Words, time slowed, making it a physically taxing effort to push the weapon and my arm into line for a good shot. A burning began in my palm, and, as the incantation continued, spread it’s fierce pain up my arm and into my chest, searing my heart.

After a period I can’t measure, my eye, arm, hand, and weapon came into line for the shot, just as the incantation ended. Time stopped. I could see the white hot lines burning bright on the metal of the weapon, extending over my hand and arm. Mostly, I saw that the shot was aimed at the abomination a few yards away from me, and would strike just where I wanted it to. I said the final word.

Time snapped back, and I had to squint away from the bright, painfully bright, spectacle of the burning power of the round pulling the lines of heat down my arm, into the weapon, and through the space that separated me from the thing that had killed my friend. The shot made a burning line out of the end of the barrel, with heat and licking fire coming from it. It hit the beast just under the jaw, where it’s form thickened from the joining of the two upper stalks.

For a moment, the thing seemed panicked, with both stalks of it’s upper section flying down and slapping at its midsection. Smoke rose from the point where the shot had struck, and the sun-brightness of it flickered and spun as the tendrils surrounding it lashed and withered under the heat.

But this only lasted a moment. The horror paused for a moment, seeming to consider, and, as it became obvious to us all that it wasn’t going to be killed by this, it’s keening ‘laughter’ filled the air again.

I was paying attention to neither it’s fear or it’s joy. While it had been preoccupied, I had taken my second weapon in had. Though this weapon was also a .45, it seemed to only weigh a slight fraction of it’s brother pistol. As I swung my right arm into line, the weapon seemed to pull my hand forward, so that I had to spit out the three words of the activating spell as fast as I could. I didn’t even bother to aim, as the pistol would make the rounds strike where it thought they should. I spoke the Firing Word and squeezed the trigger four times, feeling the stab of the freezing sigil on this one’s grip shoot pain up my arm, covering it with freezing lines that flared and vanished instantly, leaving only the seared image on my retina and steam rising from the arm of my jacket where the frozen sections that had been exposed to the lines of force met the sections that had been untouched.

The four rounds struck almost in the same instant, forming a diamond pattern around the point where the hot round had struck.

The thing stopped. It yelped, then shook itself like a wet dog, then began to shake madly and whine. The light cast by the five rounds began to spread. Fire sprang out of a few clumps of tendrils, then a few more. Ice and hoar-frost solidified on other patches. As the abomination’s painful gyrations grew in intensity, whole sections of itself became engulfed in primal cold and heat, flame giving way to ice, frost burning away under the onslaught of insistent conflagration. Huge, suppurating wounds formed at the borders of the different sections, only to be consumed and exacerbated as each element spread and fought for space on the thing’s hellish form. As it beat its four legs against the unyielding floor, cold and ice covered almost one entire appendage, which snapped under the manic terror that consumed the keening beast. One of the head stalks leaned down and tried to push the stump of the amputated limb, now attached by a thin strip of skin, against the point of the break, but screamed as the limb burst into flame and melted the eye attached to the stalk.

I tore my eyes away from the spectacle of the thrashing beast, and looked back at Saren’s horrified face.

“Saren!”, I called out, “Saren!” No response from her, my voice bouncing off of her disgusted fascination with the pain of the beast that had come out of Dexter.

“SAREN!” I screamed, to no avail. “God damn it, Saren, wake up! MYKE!”

At the sound of her given name, Saren’s eyes snapped to mine. “Now! Do it now! This won’t kill it either! It’s just gonna piss it off! Send it back, before the rest of it breaks through!”

Saren gaped at me for a moment, confusion written all over her expression. After a second, though, she snapped into focus. She glanced at the beast, which seemed to be trying to beat itself to death, then back at me. With a curt nod, she started singing.

Saren’s voice cut through the awful sounds the thing was making. As her song continued, the thing diminished, shrank, folded back in on itself. Still covered in fire and ice, it was being forced back into the aperture from which it had come, into Dexter’s skin.

Even the bits that had snapped off from the cold or melted from the heat were pulled back into the husks of Dexter’s legs. At last, all of it vanished, and, with a huge cracking sound, the scarred and battered flesh settled to the ground, empty and flaccid.

This was all that was left of Dexter.

I turned and looked at my shell-shocked friends, and realized I had no idea what to say to them.