by Wayne Hill
The chair leg flies from the arm cannon at tremendous speed. It sails out from The Weeping Willow pub window, over the weeping willow tree, over the allotments, over chattering ducks and geese in enclosures, out over the Lanes intestinal windings, and disappears out over the great barrier wall.
(IN FACT, THE CHAIR leg ends its journey embedded in the skull of a Barrenite, out in the woods. It slumped over to the side, dead, next to its littermate. His sister, with three bulbous eyes of hellish colours, snuffled at her brother with a hoggish nose, and scratched at him softly — her lethal-looking claws leaving bloody marks — and let out a series of shrieks and whistles. The noises translated into English would be: “Noooooo! Gerald! You shall be avenged!’ The Barrenite then sprang off, on legs that bent the wrong way, and ran (or rather, scuttled) in the vague direction the chair leg had come from.)
BACK IN THE ROOM, TOMMY and Jonesy were standing side by side at the window squinting into the sunlight and trying to see where the chair leg went.
“Did you see where it went, Tommy,” asks Jonesy.
“Not exactly, no. I lost it as it surprised that V of geese, over Mrs. Offermeyer’s house. You?”
“Huh? Oh, I think it went out over the wall,” says Jonesy, audibly scraping mange from his scabrous chin.
“Possibly,” says Tommy. “Possibly.”
“WELL! That sure is one hell of a swell blaster, that is, son!” A patron approaches Tommy and paws at the cannon, his mossy green hands trying to press various buttons. Tommy smashes him over the head with it, repeatedly, until his skull caves in, and then throws the man out of the window.
Jonesy does not move nor react. He is still scratching his chin and staring out of the window. For a brief second, he thought he had heard screeching from the Barrens. Nah, he thinks, must be the alcohol. I couldn’t hear anything that far away, surely. Mind you, the acoustics of this place are fuckin’ weird.
As the patron with the social distancing issues took a flying header out the window, Jonesy decides not to interfere. You must pick your fights. And you never pick them with a man with a cannon for an arm.
“Right,” Tommy says loudly to the shocked crowd. “Let's get one thing straight before anyone else gets killed. If anyone so much as touches me with their disgusting spider’s legs, I’ll blast them into tomorrow. I’m not to be bothered anymore. You touch, you die. Are we clear?” Everyone backs slowly out the room, muttering; Tommy hears at least one weeping softly.
“Tommy, what’s happened to you!” a voice says from near the back.
“Tommy’s gone. Someplace far from here. You may find him, now and again, under the willow, stretched across her grave, but don’t ever refer to me with that name again. My name’s Splinter.”
Splinter returns to the window that Jonesy is still staring out of — his head cocked slightly as if listening for something. The old man shakes his head, as if to dismiss a notion, or a ghost.
“That’s how you do it, lad! What’s next?” asks Jonesy.
“Get a group together. Twenty men and women. They need to have ten days left in them and have no issue with dying in space,” says Splinter, staring at the group gathering beneath the window, his arm beginning to charge.
“Right!” says Jonesy. “I like the sound of this, Tom— er, Splinter. What age range are we thinking?” asks Jonesy, pausing at the doorway.
“Age is not an issue. Just so long as they can run, fight, lift and drink. Weapons training will commence en route. Two eyes are a bonus,” says Splinter, pouring another large brandy down his gullet.
Jonesy bolts out the door. He returns, seconds later, and grabs the brandy bottle.
“Where we headed?” asks Jonesy.
“We’re going to rescue Ophelia,” says Splinter cryptically.
THIRTY YEARS PASS BY in a long slow swig of blue space grog...
4
The virus was named the Dionysus virus for the Greek god of ecstasy and wine. It was coined by the prison community of Earth, who accidentally discovered the longevity effects of consumption of alcohol. Before their revelation, the prisoners referred to the illness as merely the virus, although they could not be sure of the actual disease-causing pathogen. Scientists of the United Space Association (USA) categorised the virus, as was standard, with a concise alphanumeric code. Troops in the USA military had called it the Hellfire, based on the final horrifying symptoms. Nobody but the prisoners on prison planet Earth knew the dirty secret of alcohol prolonging the life of victims of the Dionysus virus. Without alcohol, those who contracted the virus were damned to an agonisingly short existence. Despite the USA controlling Earth — and despite all their technological superiority — the prisoners now knew something important that the USA did not.
Alcohol had to be ingested orally and traverse through the digestive system to counteract the virus’s progression, but no one knew why. Above average blood-alcohol levels retarded the virus, but intravenous injections of alcohol, for some reason, did not work. If left untreated, a contaminated person had, on average, just fourteen days of life once they exhibited the first symptoms of Dionysus virus — comparable with victims of the Ebola virus, which ravaged parts of pre-Dagon Earth. These signs, however, only emerged when the person’s blood alcohol level (BAC) dropped to below a critical amount. (Interestingly, this amount turned out to be a BAC of 0.08% — an amount which would usually get you convicted of drink driving in the State of New Hampshire in the United States of pre-meteorite America.)
Splinter Salem made sure his low alcohol-level alarm — or LALA (said Lala) — was inbuilt, so as not to misplace it, because drunk people are not usually conscientious. He moulded the Lala into the forearm area of his metal arm cannon. When green lights turned yellow, his arm let out a loud continual bleeping alarm — with no SNOOZE function! If his Lala triggered red lights, the beeping from his arm increased in frequency and volume. When the last red bar flashes and goes out, a high-pitched sonic screech is emitted, and his body is juddered with a high voltage, low ampage electrical shock. This warning system effectively kept Splinter continually drunk and alive.
The symptoms of Dionysus Virus are as follows.
On the first day, hands and feet may start to tingle, and you may experience a buzzing in your ears.
On the second day, symptoms include some visual impairments, e.g., flashes of light (like phosphenes). Some patients’ tongues may turn blue (without the assistance of space grog).
From days three to six, fingers and toes usually develop a green mange. At this time in the progression of the disease, around thirty percent of carriers report bleeding from the eyes, ears and anus.
From days seven to ten, the green mange of the fingers and toes spreads from the extremities towards the centre of the body. At about this stage, around twenty percent of sufferers develop a bizarre psychological disorder, Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). This disorder causes individuals to hate one or more of their limbs, and in extreme cases, some sufferers attempt self-amputation. Surgical removal of the object (or objects) of the patients’ delusion seems to somewhat ameliorate their mental trauma.
From days eleven to thirteen, subdermal black swirls appear on the face, chest and back. These tend to stay unseen in the dermis (a deeper skin layer) but will become visible with increased heart rate, as they infiltrate the upper layer of skin (epidermis).
On the fourteenth day, or last stage, the extremities heat up significantly, burning out moisture at an alarming rate, and these shrivel and blacken. Toes and fingers, ears, noses and penises are usually the worst effected, and often fully detach. The brain boils as the extremity-heating starts to affect the core, soon after the first few toes and fingers fall away — although most patients are long dead by this time. Like patients of the Ebola virus, in the distant past, people commonly die from hypovolaemic shock, due to loss of fluid.
The above disease progression description is an average one, drawn from many observations of many individuals. Some of t
he listed symptoms may arise earlier, later, or may not appear at all. The only certainty is that of the last stage.
Several different strains of the virus exist, and they all share the same level of lethality. There is no known cure, and nobody is immune to the virus, not even the genetically advantaged among the USA’s elite.
The USA represents the result of hundreds of years of genetic modification, selective breeding and immoral banishment — herding the strongest, most intelligent and healthiest humans together. It was done — like all eugenic movements throughout human’s cyclical history — for the ‘betterment’ (whatever that means!) of humanity. But, as sure as suppression leads to revolution — and as the cosmic yin-yang of reality dictates that the universe deals in opposites — a motley crew of drunken space pirates on an island, surrounded by monsters, might just be the luckiest people in this agreed reality.
5
Two twentieth century musicians (Anno Domini) once told a melodic story of man’s future over a 10,000-year timescale. The song was called In the Year 2525. In it, composer Danny Zager and lyricist Rick Evans — collaboratively known as Zager and Evans — warned of the danger of technology, portraying a future in which new technological and medical inventions destroy humanity. The last stanza suggests humankind undergoes a continuing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. The song reached the top of music charts in various pre-Dagon countries and was still at the top spot in America during the famous Woodstock festival, forever cementing In the Year 2525 in the minds of a generation. In the year 2525 was one of a handful of ancient antique records still in existence and featured in a Wurlitzer 3500 Zodiac jukebox, hailing from the year 1971. The record, like the jukebox, was the last of its kind in all the known worlds, universes and realities of the year 12,016 AD.
There are eighty record singles that survive inside this unique Jukebox, now standing in the private quarters of the space-pirate known as Splinter Salem. On the third floor of what used to be The Weeping Willows, Splinter’s room is humble, if not a little on the dirty side. The room is rectangular and made completely from pine wood, roofed with half-trunk beams that form the bottom of the structure’s loft trusses. His head is always a target for these, especially towards the edges, like where his bed (less a bed than a nest of blankets) lurks.
Many a night, he awakes and sleepwalks — or, on one occasion, sleep sprints — directly into one of these beams, knocking himself unconscious.
The bedroom was certainly not that of an arachnophobe; the rafters were a foot deep with spiderwebs. At night, softly illuminated by a flickering candle, they gave the impression that the roof was gone, and he was looking at fresh fluffy cumulous clouds. Daylight, however, revealed the harsh reality. The webs were littered with the husks of pine Barren moths, many wasps and flies, and the occasional White Mountain butterfly. The innumerable husks were just the lifeless wrappers of the food the spiders had sucked dry. It was a lovely cloudscape of death.
Splinter mostly keeps the spiders because they get rid of wasps — loathsome, filthy wasps. Wasps are his least favourite creature. Briefly, from deep in his mind, he hears an echo from over thirty years ago, Right, you dirty little wasp, I’ll take it from here... The drunken space-pirate feels that the wasp-graveyard has deep philosophical connotations. The drunken philosophy keeps him smiling to himself: his room is where these despicable creatures suffer for all the needless pain they dish out with their indiscriminate stinging — a Believer’s court for the filthy insects.
“Yep, your time’s up. There is no time left ... three-hundred million metres a second,” Splinter mumbles to himself.
His thoughts darkly turn to the judgement awaiting him for his last thirty years of drunken debauchery. Splinter wants to believe that he is as innocent, or naïve, as one of the many moths that are called to the light, but his self-delusions clear quickly: he is more of a spider.
Splinter refers to his bedroom as the ‘crow’s nest’. It is his daily sanctuary from the chaos that unfolds in and around the pub. Days are swallowed up in here, in drunken realms of sleep, but he also comes here to think and plan. He plans out raids in here, or attacks on the Barrenites. He ponders the next day’s tasks, or engineering problems or quantum entanglement issues. Despite doing his best thinking here, part of his mind is always busy — always planning, never resting, constantly churning. To some extent, his perpetually creative mind, as well as being a boon, is his curse.
The room is decorated to satisfy his many obsessions with the pre-Dagon Old World. The walls display ornate candelabra, wax hanging from candleholders and flowing down to the floor in white stalactites, dotted with feeding black mould.
In-between these handsomely self-made candleholders, are stolen artefacts from a forgotten age. Floating, trapped in magnetic fields: strange knives and swords of all shapes and sizes; old flint-lock pistols; shotguns and other, more advanced, ballistic weapons; a solitary Bodhran, with a golden harp picture in the middle of the drumskin, and old-fashioned tools opposite their modern-day equivalents.
Given pride of place was Splinter’s pride and joy — his 1851-1852 John Everett Millais painting, Ophelia. It is bookended by two Claude Monet paintings and sealed in a preservation tank, but it is clearly visible through the secure glass and in remarkable condition. The Monet’s are oil-painting studies of weeping willow trees. One rendered in blue hues and the other in reds, as if Monet is trying to capture the changing seasons.
Splinter stole Ophelia from planet Tate, otherwise known as HD40307. The planet is situated between the constellations Pictor and Dorado, near the second brightest star in the Earth’s night sky — only visible from the southern hemisphere, or space — Canopus. Splinter took the Ophelia painting years before he illegally sourced the 1918 weeping willow paintings from a dome-living private collector, residing on a large meteor near Alpha Centauri.
Elisabeth Siddal was the model used by Millais for Ophelia, and she was one of the reasons for Splinter pilfering the artwork. Her similarities to his lost love, Marie-Ann O’ Shea, is startling, from the colour of her hair to the pallid luminescent tonal changes of her skin. From Millais’s Ophelia painting, Marie-Ann O’Shea sang to Splinter.
Sometime after the capture of Ophelia, Splinter researches the inspiration for the image in greater detail. Reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet brought him even more heartache, especially the scene described in Act IV, Scene VI. A weeping willow is described to be hanging over the water where Ophelia died, drowned. Splinter’s pain of loss revisited; the moment that changed the course of his life had trapped him, once again, inflicting suffering anew. Shakespeare’s Ophelia died of ‘too much water’ (to quote Laertes); Splinter’s Ophelia died from too little.
He wondered how anyone could write or paint something so closely reflecting a real event that, so many millennia later, it could still shake his world to its very foundations. Splinter would spend at least half an hour, and sometimes as much as three hours each day, observing the beautiful painting. Sometimes he would talk to her; sometimes she would sing to him. On rare occasions, a solitary tear would trace its way down his battle-scarred face, running into wounds long forgotten, and he (unable to ‘forbid’ tears, like Laertes) would catch the tear in his silver tear-flask — watching Ophelia float in her river, lost to madness; lost to life.
The effects of the painting were stronger at times. When the moon was full overhead, and the noise from the rambunctious patrons below rose, like invisible tentacles, to patter his dulled senses with fresh confusion, Splinter felt as though he was trapped in an NTB room and stuck in the hell lights. He found that on many nights, the darker side of the painting would come out to play with his mind, to torment his very soul with festering reality.
Convulsions of disorderly emotions, fuelled by an image of impending doom, garlanded in floral abundance, began to speak to him.
Pretty do the flowers mock, says the wretched voice from Splinter’s cloudy spiderweb mind.
“No, not again, f
uck off!” splinter spits through clenched teeth, black shapes moving under the skin of his face, his cheeks dashed with swirls. The voice has no conscience. It holds no regard for his fragile mental state. It merely exists to inform him of things at inappropriate times, and so the voice ignores all Splinter’s pleas and outbursts.
I expect her to bloom with sweet forget-me-nots, with colours of her own — the frigid water has taken all hers, poor girl, says the gravelly voice. It’s dragging her down into the mud where she shall sing no more.
“I said shut up! Don’t you dare mention her!” Splinter’s arm starts to charge up, but the voice continues.
Eventually, her bloated corpse will rise to the surface, showing faint forget-me-not colours of her own ... and then the flies come. Hovering, buzzing, chattering to one another. They excitedly wait for her body to surface and lodge somewhere, then they will touch her changing flesh with their legs, tasting the dryness.
“Noooooo! My love!” Splinter clutches at his head with his only remaining hand, trying to stop the graphic story.
One large bluebottle lands on Ophelia’s glassy eye, for an instant restoring, to the pale eye, a pupil. It burrows under her moist eyelid. Very soon a new song shall be heard from her — the buzzing of thousands of wings. Mindless putrescence wriggles free from the fertile, stench-filled hollows of Ophelia’s face. Her madness is now incarnate, mocked in myriad. Nature claims this former flower garden for compost in which to grow its foul spawn.
“What shall become of me, my love? Do I deserve this fate, too? Is my fate worse? Has this already happened?” Splinter asks this of Marie-Ann, of Ophelia, of the spiders in the rafters, and of the spiders in his mind, those weaving this deranged web of sorrows.
