by Paul A. Rice
Deciding that he’d seen quite enough, he walked back into the main room. As soon as he stepped out, Ken started to feel better; he really fancied a cup of hot coffee. Walking back into the main room, he was just in time to see a steel shelf sliding out from the wall, the sight almost stopped him in his tracks. The newly-protruding shelf carried a glistening metal jug with steam rising up in a thin curl from its wide spout. Ken blinked and said, softly: ‘If that’s coffee, then…’
It was coffee, he knew as soon as the smell hit his nostrils.
Nearing the coffee pot, his eyes fell upon something else, something unbelievable. Resting upon the shelf was a small metal object...one from his past...one that came complete with his old regimental cap-badge engraved upon its little, metal face. ‘Hi there, Ken! Where have you been for all of these years?’ That’s what Ken supposed it would have said. Yes, it definitely would have, if cigarette lighters had been blessed with the power of speech, then that’s exactly the words it would have used. This time he did stop in his tracks, stopped dead.
It was his old Zippo lighter – the one Smudge had given him back in 1983. Ken had lost it a year later whilst on the beer in downtown Hong Kong. Right now it was sitting on top of a pack of cigarettes, the same damned pack he’d had in his pocket on the day that all of this had started. Of all the amazing things he’d witnessed recently, this was the one that blew him away the most.
What the hell was that lighter doing here?
The memories came crashing into him, and such was their intensity that he very nearly staggered. His legs buckled, words stumbling. ‘I...how the hell can that thing be here? No, it’s not possible, it’s just not possible!’ Totally shaken, he sank to the floor and sat there in disbelief, thoughts bouncing from one ridiculous idea to the next.
‘That was more than thirty years ago, no way, it just can’t be...it’s a trick, I’m sick...it must be malaria...I’ve eaten something...I’m…’
None of those things were true, but he was scared. That much was true. Ken was scared, shocked, and bewildered. He rose to his feet and reached out for the lighter. Grasping it, he turned the small device over in his hands. There, in all their glory were the scratched initials ‘KR’. The letters sat in the bottom left corner of the lighter, and were exactly where he, with the aid of his trusty clasp knife, had put them all those years ago. He peered at the small lighter, stared at the squiggly letters, and shook his head. The mere fact that the bloody thing was even here nearly overwhelmed him with its undeniable truth.
The lighter turned his heart to stone.
With the bright flame of his own anger beginning to flare, Ken turned back to the wall and angrily slammed the lighter onto the shelf. If he was expecting the action to magically return everything back to normal, then he was sadly mistaken – the lighter merely sat there, metal face shining in the glow from the overhead lights. Ken stared at it again and listened painfully to the small voice in his head, one which he’d never heard before, a voice possessing the most annoying of hick twangs.
‘My goodness me, oh-my-oh-my-oh-my, just one little old lighter has gone and done fer you, boy, done fer you good! What’s it gonna be like when things git aroun’ to being really tough, huh – what’s it gonna be like then, hey...boyyy?’
Ken shut the voice out, it wasn’t making things any better at all, and he hoped that he’d never hear the goddamned thing again. Staring at the lighter once more, he picked it up, snapped open the lid and flicked the flint-wheel with his thumb. It sparked into life and he reached for a smoke. With trembling hands, he raised the blue and yellow flame to the cigarette, lit up and inhaled. He stayed there and smoked, not thinking, just standing and smoking, nothing else.
Having finished with his smoke, and feeling slightly better for it, he relaxed and turned to the coffee pot. After drinking several cups of the hot brew, and finding it was the best coffee he’d ever tasted, Ken felt at peace. Tired, confused, but more relaxed. Deciding to have a go at curing the tiredness, he elected to hit the sack. Dumping his clothes, he collapsed onto the sumptuous bed.
Once again he was asleep in seconds.
Only this time…
9
Private Show
Well...this time, Ken went to some awful places, places that any sane person would have avoided like the plague. Whilst there, he was given the ‘privilege’ of watching some rather terrible things. They would have been unwatchable things, if George hadn’t been there. Good old George, thank fuck for him when you were backed into a corner, eh? Little George, all five feet two inches of him, with red face and thinning white hair. George – a strange little man with the faint smell of whiskey upon his breath, George and those wise blue eyes of his, eyes that viewed straight into the very depths of your soul. He wore dark brown sandals with shiny buckles on the sides of their leather straps, buckles that shone so brightly it was almost as though they were winking at you. A knowing, ‘matey’, wink.
‘Don’t worry, old boy,’ they seemed to say, ‘everything will be absolutely fine, fine-and-dandy, you just wait and see!’
Yeah, those sandals said a lot, especially if you looked. Ken was trying really hard not to look, but he couldn’t help himself – he had to look.
Thank God for good old George and his brown sandals, particularly when you were about to climb aboard the old man’s private dream-train. A rollercoaster ride to hell, a less than amusing ride, one that should it have been at the fairground, would have come with a large, hand-painted sign above its turnstile, a warning sign that would have said something like:
‘This Ride Is For Mentally Insane Passengers Only.’
***
The dreams were extremely vivid and not really like dreams at all. Instead, Ken felt more akin to the lead actor in a horror movie. There wasn’t any sequence to the scenes, either. They just seemed to come at random and sometimes repeated themselves. He played no part in them, but he had to be there. His was a non-speaking, non-acting, lead role in a nightmare. He stood amongst the bombed-out ruins of vast cities and watched as they crashed to the ground in flames and smoke. Heavy, wretched noise filled his ears.
He saw people, men women and children, all of them were on fire, their tiny faces melting in the heat, eyes stewing and popping, lips and ears curling like bacon rind, heads blackening in the heat and then igniting, leaving them to run around like fiery matchsticks. It was a scene running so deep and so far into the distance that Ken felt it must have gone halfway around the Earth. It was layer after layer of pure destruction, wanton evil and misery. He smelt their flesh as it scorched, tasted the rancid flavour of their burnt hair.
Ken watched in frozen horror, even though he really wanted to spin around and run, he was simply unable to move, not one inch was he able to move. It was as though he had been welded to the fire-stricken earth. He needed to run, he must run, for surely he would die from fear and shame if he were to witness this scene for one more second. He struggled violently, the blood rushing in his ears, chest about to explode. His head screamed in agony, and just as he realised that he would certainly die from this pain, he heard the sound of a voice, a man’s voice. It spoke softly into his ear. The voice was soft and confident and it fetched with it some soothing words.
‘Look away, son, just look away!’
Ken did as he was told. Closing his eyes, he turned his head away from the awful scene. He heard the wailing sound of his own petrified thoughts filter away into the darkness of the dream. When it had gone completely and all that was left was the sound of a soft hissing, which Ken guessed was the noise of his own blood pressure; he opened his eyes and stood waiting in fear for the return of horror, which he somehow knew had not finished yet.
However, like a miracle, he found that his surroundings had changed and he was now by the ocean, and not just by the ocean. Unbelievably, he found that he was actually standing on it, standing on the sea...it was as calm as a mill pond and of the most peaceful blue he’d ever seen. The depth of the scen
e soothed him, the horrible booming in his chest and head seemed to have ceased, and it was with a great deal of relief that Ken found he was able to breathe again. The beautiful water filled him with sense of calm, one he really hoped would last.
George stood next to him, staring at Ken with those wise blue eyes of his.
‘Better now?’ he asked.
Ken couldn’t speak. He tried but no sound came out of his mouth.
His mind shouted, ‘Yes!’
He also wanted to ask: ‘Why, how do I know you, what’s happening?’
But he was simply unable to make the spoken words exit his mind.
The old man saw this. ‘I cannot tell you here,’ he said, ‘first you must look. Do not be afraid, just watch and then when we get back to the other place, you will see. It will all be made clear.’ George placed his hand on Ken’s shoulder and he felt the fear leaving him, like water leaves the mountain in springtime – rushing downwards in a tumbling, crystal torrent.
Looking down at his feet, Ken realised that he wasn’t standing on the ocean any more. This time it was the desert. Turning around, he saw that it was a red desert, a blood-red desert. He looked down at his feet again and saw that the sand was like red soup, it actually was blood! Blood and sand all mixed together and there he was, standing in it. The crimson dunes stretched for as far as his eyes were able to see. As he watched, Ken began to see the faces and limbs of people beneath the sand; they flowed past in ribbons of agony. All of them torn apart – yet somehow they were still alive. Ken felt their screams within his inner-most self. They reverberated around his ribcage. The bodies streamed by in all directions, never quite breaking the surface of that terrible desert floor. It bulged with their passing, their shattered, wailing bodies writhing below the surface.
He stood like a stone and did as George had said. With huge eyes and a belly full of fear, which he tried unsuccessfully to suppress, Ken stood and watched. Sensing a rumble, the vibration pulsing through his legs, he looked up. In the distance, he saw a wall of blackness looming on the horizon. It rushed towards him at an incredible rate, its speed made him think about moving. ‘I’d like to do more than just move!’ The thoughts were there in perfect clarity, but yet again his feet were nothing but lead. He was rooted to the spot. He had to watch.
The black wave, which was what he now saw it as, churned up all before it. All the broken bodies that had lain writhing under the sand were now plucked out like some garish red fruit and sucked into the giant wall of oil. Ken felt sure it was oil as he watched the huge black and red dripping wall of misery hurling itself towards him. It was an awful sight and it became more and more like some nightmarish washing machine, with oil instead of water and smashed human body-parts instead of clothes. Over the roar of the onrushing wave, he still able to feel the anger and pain of the people locked within its terrible grasp, it was like fingernails on a chalkboard and the screeching of its agony raged higher and higher in his head. The noise was horrific.
As he was about to fall to his knees and cover his ears, a low pitched rumble, almost a ripping sound, started to rise above the other noise. Right in front of him, Ken saw a large pit opening in the ground, it wrenched itself open and lay there yawning, like a black-toothed split in the wooden floor on some ancient witch’s front porch. The pit seemed to stretch into eternity, it was enormous. The wave of terror, of blood and oil, didn’t miss a beat. It plunged into the gaping trench and took everything with it. In a single rush, all the pain and misery he had been so close to, was simply flushed into the earth. As the last of its filthy puddles slithered obscenely into the bottomless pit, slimed their way into nothingness, Ken was sure that he heard a long and wistful sigh.
Then the silence returned once more and he started to relax.
‘Perhaps it’s over now...’ he thought.
That would have been pleasant, but the arrival of pleasant things wasn’t to be on the menu tonight. Instead, a distant chorus of insane giggling and cackling started. The nightmare-inducing wail of madness began in a rising crescendo that knifed into his head, its distant noise forcing him to wrench his horrified eyes up and away from the silent pit. Ken looked into the distance to where the latest noise was howling for his attention.
The skyline was littered with dozens of wild dogs. A pack numbering in the hundreds was sprinting toward the trench. Turning to gaze down at the hole, Ken saw that it had now started to close, and rapidly so. The black door to hell had started making noises like a fighter jet makes on take-off, full afterburners on, shaking the earth with its pure power. An ear-splitting sound that thinly masks the fury and intent held within its fragile metal skin.
‘That’s the sound of freedom...boyyy!’
Those hollow words from yesterday echoed around Ken’s head.
As the trench reached its crescendo, he saw that the dogs howling across the sand were, in fact, hyenas. They were now only yards away. Their awful forms flew across the desert floor. Plumes of sand rose into the air as their powerful legs pumped them forward at an incredible rate, their rolling eyes focused upon the pit. Saliva flew in rancid streams from their gaping mouths. The reality of it struck him. ‘This is a race!’
A sick race held between the trench, which was trying to close, and the scavengers who were giving everything they had to make it into the pit before it slammed them out. He watched, transfixed, as the beasts hurled themselves into the rapidly diminishing mouth of oblivion. The most bizarre thing was that many of them wore suits, finely made suits, which shimmered and rippled as their huge shoulders bulged beneath the material. The beasts never hesitated in their charge, their tufted tails whipping in fury as they leapt into the darkness, yellow eyes blazing with a madness that lay far beyond any form of logic.
Ken began to notice that many of them had mouthfuls of money, a stream of paper notes fluttered in their slipstream. There was never to be any halting their headlong assault – yelping and giggling madly, they plunged into the void. He almost smelled their fetid rankness; it seemed to ooze from their very being.
Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over. The trench emitted one final mournful cry – Ken caught a glimpse of a single powerful tail being sucked into the ground – then they were gone, all of them: trench, oil-blood, insane slavering carnivores. One second they were there and in the next, gone. This time the silence was total. It surrounded him.
The desert’s warm breeze blew into his face; a small bird cart-wheeled above and flew into the sunset that was starting to form around him. Shaking his head, Ken sank to the ground, he let himself flop onto the desert floor, half-sat and half-lay there with his mind stuttering, disorganised thoughts tumbling through his head. ‘What the hell had that been about?’ He knew George had told him to watch. ‘Watch and learn,’ is what Ken figured the old guy had really been saying.
George must have been listening to his racing mind because Ken received an answer almost immediately. Over a period of the next few minutes...it may have been hours, perhaps days, or even weeks, Ken didn’t really know anymore...he was treated to an experience that made him feel rather like some nether-world version of Ebenezer Scrooge during a macabre showing of A Christmas Carol.
As he sat upon the sandy stage, a never-ending parade of images began to flash overhead like a giant slide-show. Ken lay back and watched them as they flew past above him in all their horror. The images were rather like the trailer for a forthcoming movie and his eyes tried desperately to follow each one, constantly being drawn to the next picture as it appeared overhead. He wondered what it was they illustrated. That was the question.
There were scenes of war, horrific acts of destruction with long lines of bodies being bulldozed into lime-filled graves. Scenes of famine: the fly covered faces of the victims looking up with the dull eyes of those who have no hope. There were tribes of warring Africans, hacking with their machetes, slashing and bludgeoning the women and children of their vanquished foe, relentlessly dispensing with all those who we
re not of their own. There was a scene where a chain of nuclear blasts, one after the other, exploded in endless synchronicity. Sub-surface, surface, and airborne blasts, played over and over. Such was the perfect roundness of its fireball that the final brilliant flash of light looked as though it had been in space; so fierce was the brightness of the explosion that Ken had to turn away.
Pictures of terrible slums played over and over, the poor grovelling through the waste bins. More pictures of poverty: half-naked children wading through drains in bare feet and picking through the rotten scraps that lay festering in amongst the collection of filth. Terrible images of women and children being stoned or having their hands cut off whilst on-looking crowds jeered with delight. It was then that the awful addition of his newly acquired inner voice took it upon itself to decide to help Ken out with a commentary on this cinematic preview for the insane.
‘Hey everybody, look at what we have in store for you at next week’s matinee, yes siree, get yourselves a bargain bucket of popcorn and make sure that you’re early. This is gonna be a show that you simply can’t miss! Book online and we’ll throw in a treat. Yes, indeedy, we’re gonna let you kill your own kids in the aisle, right in front of us...those little bastards...and we’ll watch and we’ll cheer! And hey, guess what, if you get the audience vote, well...then you can come and do it all again next week for free, winner takes all!’
The droning voice echoing in his head made Ken feel like shooting his imaginary mental partner. He felt his sanity think about leaving, but there was to be no respite, the show rolled on.
Every now and then there would be a slide showing great geysers of oil, spewing up hundreds of feet into the air – Ken must have seen that one at least five times, and yet it still fascinated him. Many times there were images of the hyenas, ripping, tearing and slavering, their beautiful handmade suits dripping in the remains of their victim’s guts. Yellow eyes rolling in their powerful heads as they gorged upon a menu of dollar bills and piles of raw meat – meat from a species Ken knew. They sated their obvious thirst in the pools of oil-blood and Ken almost recognised some of their insane, canine faces. They reminded him of people, people whom he knew, but not quite, they mesmerized him with their grotesqueness.
