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Site content may offend. Content includes horror, murder, torture, lawlessness, military carnage, Anglo Saxon crudities, occasional adult incidents and George Bush |
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From that position, Errol did his best to look around the interior of the spaceship, which was a cold, gleaming white, like the interior of the little sink that the dentist makes you spit in. He could see five, six ... seven aliens. Eight. No, four. What happened to the others? The numbers kept blurring, wobbling uncertainly, as if Errol had been drugged. In point of fact, he had not been drugged. He was just in shock. Odd thoughts went muttering through his head as he continued his survey. His dominant thought, a recurring item which he could not dismiss, however hard he tried, was this: "I just wish I could clean my teeth." Each alien lived inside a dwelling capsule of lime green gel. The dwelling capsules were carried about by skeletal robots built on a spider pattern. Sometimes, a dwelling capsule would pause quite close to Errol, enabling him to slowly build up a firm picture of exactly what he was dealing with. Each alien was a long, kinked white tube, about as long as a woman's leg. Each alien, then, was a really big fat white worm. Rays of red and green and yellow sprouted from each tube of chubby white worm flesh, the end of each ray splitting into a complex three-layer fan of hairs. At first, Errol couldn't figure out what the hairs were for. Then he realized that, in seven separate places, wiring from the skeletal robots entered the lime green gel through little yellow valves which punctured the surfaces of the dwelling capsules. (The yellow was stunningly vivid, just like the yellow of the handle of Errol's toothbrush back at home.) The wiring from the robots was interwoven with the fans of hairs. The logical deduction was that the aliens had external nervous systems, terminating in these fans of hairs, and these were hooked up in such a fashion that the aliens could control the machineries of the skeletal robots. The aliens looked to be right at home in their capsules of green gel, though Errol was ready to guess that their natural habitat was not green gel, but, rather ... something else. If you lived inside a capsule of green gel and if you could hook your nervous system up to things and control those things, then maybe you could live inside .... Then Errol's thinking came to an end as the experiments began, and soon Errol was reduced to a quivering mass of weeping humiliation, wishing he was dead, wishing he had never been born. When Errol woke up, it was night, and he was lying in the mud. It was pretty near totally dark, it was raining, and he was as naked as a jaybird. He was already cold and shivering. He was confused and disoriented, and it was almost half an hour before he found a house nearby. By that time he was in such bad shape that he was finding it hard to remember how many hands he was supposed to have. Banging on the door brought no response, so, in desperation, Errol used a flowerpot to fracture a pane of glass in the back door. "Anyone home? Anyone ....? Don't shoot me, I need help." No response. Shortly afterwards, having painstakingly broken away as much glass as he could, Errol started wriggling through the hole in the back door. By the time he made it inside, he had been cut in twenty-seven different places, one of them extremely sensitive. It was some time before he figured out that he had succeeded in breaking into his own house. Even then, he was in such a daze that it was hard to find his way to the shower. Once there, he did his best to scrub away the green and purple slime which had contaminated his body in so many places. While he was doing this, his vision started to fade, and moments later he passed out. When Errol recovered consciousness, the warm water was still raining down on him, and his skin was all wrinkled, as if he had been in the sea for a long time. "But how could I know that?" said Errol. "I've never even seen the sea." Then memories of his three trips to Hawaii surfaced, giving the lie to the thought, and hinting of how bad his condition was. He dried himself off, clumsily, then stumbled through his house, which was gray in the gray light of dawn. He needed to sleep. When Errol pushed open the door to the bedroom, the stray dog which had found its way inside got to its feet on the bed, where it had been sleeping, and started barking at him, furiously. Errol stared, first at the dog, then at the rain-ruined chaos to which his bedroom had been reduced. The remnants of the drapes hung in tatters at the window. The window was a rectangle of emptiness, devoid of glass, opening onto a void of absolute gray. Errol squinted at the void of gray, and it sharpened into the familiar site of the view of his hedge and, beyond that, the side of his neighbor's house. Errol then stared hard at the dog, hoping it would vanish, just as the void of gray had done. Instead of vanishing, the dog leapt down from the bed and headed toward him in attack mode, and Errol barely managed to close the door in time. The cops were no help at all -- basically they just told him to get lost. So Errol went on the Internet and found, in his neighborhood, Solsavlicon Abductee Services, which offered "post-relief counseling and remedial medical services." The next day, Errol found himself face to face with Doctor Spamuel Prawn, a guy in his sixties with a bald domed forehead and three arms, one handcuffed to a thong which looped out of the heavy-duty leather belt which held up the doctor's pants. "You are not hallucinating," said Doctor Prawn. "I have two left arms. The handcuffed arm belongs to my brother. You have heard of conjoined twins, I am sure." "Siamese twins," said Errol automatically, hearing a buzzing in the back of his head, seeing the room pulse slowly into darkness and then into light again. "Exactly," said Doctor Prawn. "My brother, whom my mother in her wisdom chose to call Vaughnlet, is little more than a vestigal brain and an arm, together with a few twists of interconnecting nerves." "So why don't you, uh ...." "Murder him?" said Doctor Prawn. "My mother was opposed to it. As a child, I sincerely wanted Vaughnlet dead. However, as an adult, I find that there are tax advantages in being two people rather than one." "Two people?" said Errol. "The IRS didn't like the idea either," said Doctor Prawn, smiling. "But the biological evidence is incontrovertible. I have DNA tests to prove it." The medical examination went at a leisurely pace since Errol was paying for it out of his own pocket. Very unfairly, neither his insurance company nor his HMO was prepared to pay as much as ten cents to help him cope with the consequences of having been kidnapped by aliens, tortured, viciously abused and used as a guinea pig in obscene medical experiments. At the end of the examination, Doctor Prawn smiled and wrote a prescription. "Here. One tablet, twice a day." "What's this for?" said Errol suspiciously. "My standard treatment for alien abductees," said Doctor Prawn. "Yes, but, uh, what ...." "It will put an end to the sleepwalking," said Doctor Prawn, with another smile, tight and professional. "It will also help with your -- how shall I put it? Your perceptual difficulties." "You're saying I'm nuts," said Errol. "Right?" "A combination of sleepwalking and ... slanted conceptualizing, shall we say ... this combination, Errol, would seem to be the most likely explanation for what happened to you." "Look," said Errol. "I have proof. I have this circular growth ... look, here. On my right bicep. You missed it." "When the patient is a grown adult the doctor relies on the patient to assist with the diagnostic process," said Doctor Prawn, evidently less than one hundred per cent happy. "We are not playing a game of hide and seek here, Errol. Remember that I'm a doctor, not a vet. Very well, let me see ... oh, that. Is that all?" "It's the mark of the aliens," said Errol. "No," said Doctor Prawn. "That's ringworm." "Ringworm?" "A fungal infection," said Doctor Prawn. "Yes," said Errol, "but how could I possibly have ringworm? That's for poor people, isn't it?" "You, I, or any man alive may end up with ringworm, dandruff or athlete's foot. Don't worry about it. I will write you a prescription for a topical cream." And that was that. Errol refused to pay his medical bill, naturally, and his next step was the tabloid press. The story Errol told was so harrowing that Doctor Prawn, harassed by headlines, finally decided to speak in self-defense. "There's nothing wrong with Errol Pops except ringworm," said Doctor Prawn. "Did the aliens give it to him?" "The stuff about aliens is hallucinatory ... nonsense," said Doctor Prawn, struggling to retain his cool. "So you're saying your patient hallucinated?" "There's a phenomenon known as dreaming," said Doctor Prawn. "It's harmless, except that after you wake up you're supposed to know the difference between your dreams and your real life." "How about the business with the mechanical gerbils?" "Mechanical gerbils?" said Doctor Prawn. "What are you talking about?" "You mean he didn't tell you?" "This is the first that I have heard anything about gerbils, mechanical or otherwise," said Doctor Prawn. "I have no idea how this relates to the present discussion." So one of the journalists enlightened him. At which point Doctor Prawn withdrew to a "no comment" position, though he was privately convinced that the stuff about mechanical gerbils was definitely a hallucination (a hallucination encouraged, perhaps, by a guilty conscience.) Errol sued Doctor Prawn for disclosing confidential medical information (Errol's ringworm). Doctor Prawn countersued, and also handed Errol's unpaid bill over to a mercantile agent. Twenty thousand dollars later Errol finally gave up the struggle, withdrew his lawsuit and paid his outstanding medical bill. The letter arrived a week after Errol quit fighting in the courts. Hidden away in the post as it was, Errol didn't notice it at first. He sat in the office of the Snowfrost Emporium for a full half hour, working his way through utility bills and home appliance catalogs and the like, until he tore open a manilla envelope and discovered inside a letter written in very dark red ink on fluorescent orange paper. "I Bow Wow Plastic kill people serialwise I vejecta you too probably. The ilavizi have wormed Mishnavrishna but good. Reply pronto please." Before having been abducted by aliens, Errol would just have thrown this in the trash. But, as an alien abductee, he was ready to chase down pretty much any lead. "I kill people," muttered Errol. "I am a serial killer." Okay ... let's get on the Internet and see what we can find. It turned out that Bow Wow Plastic was a serial killer (not one of the famous ones, just your everyday six-in-a-row man) presently incarcerated in the Gingrich Correctional Facility on the outskirts of the town of Bodycount, a small high-tech center of excellence (a major force in the biosensor industry, in fact) in the state of Maine. On inquiry, it turned out that there was no way for inmates to receive e-mail. Surely that couldn't be legal, could it? Well, maybe not. But it seemed that the only way to contact Bow Wow Plastic was to write him an old-fashioned pen-and-paper snail mail letter. Which Errol did. "I plan to pay you a visit as soon as I am able," wrote Errol. "So please put me on your visitor's list." In point of fact, Errol was not yet sure whether he would be making the drive to Bodycount. But he was a man who believed in keeping his options open. Next step: go to one of these Mishnavrishna meetings. From what Errol had seen on the Internet, this looked promising. The tape turned slowly. The words were a little hard to hear -- the microphone was placed inconveniently close to the air conditioner -- but you could make out what Errol was saying. |
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zenvirus.com. Copyright © 2002 Hugh Cook. All rights reserved. |
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