I’m three blocks away when I stop short, a sudden stranger to sight and daylight. Hypoduct steam roaring out of the grills.

Old reptiles lounging on older couches out the front of derelict apartments. Black coat tails billowing around me as I chew the meaty inner lining of my cheek. I’m definitely missing something, something bigger than a stolen watch or a few hundred Quango dollars. Something bigger than this entire festering city. Grappling as an intelligent hunter but suddenly rendered as prey for stumbling over my guide pegs, for crawling into another predator’s nest ignoring the territorial pissings and for that I am surely in jeopardy.  

Green lizard children play in the gutter amongst dead pigeons bloated with fly larvae. One stoops and pulls a squirming wet maggot to dry scaly lips and sucks it into his mouth with a throaty hiss. The children playing in the street are dying animals on a doomed planet. They stare up at me as I pass, smudged dirty reptile hybrid imps with clawed hands, and small sharp teeth in thick jaws. One wears aviator goggles, yellow unblinking eyes and vertical pupils burning within the lenses. Another with a swollen, pink goitre growing below a lazy undersea eye. Chinese jade shimmering scales in the afternoon sun tainted by street filth. One missing an arm, possibly from dog attack, the stump without bandage. The new limb beginning to grow from it like a smooth and shiny conjoined twin emerging from the child’s torso. Thin tails whipping the air behind their little bodies as they hiss.

They stand staring at me in a strata of disused vehicles and machinery rusting under the corrosiveness of hypoduct steam. Burnt out and guttered Cadillacs, the stuffing growing from singed and torn vinyl like alien fungus spores threatening to spew out onto the street and wrap around our ankles with growing tendrils of decay. One of the boys is completely naked, a slimy erection jutting out in front of his slim body, a strange and disturbing appendage with a bloated and flaring pink head barbed with tiny hooks glistening in the dirty autumnal sunset from glossy spent semen. The puffy pink eye pulsating, opening and closing like the winking eye of a lobster at stalk tether.

An old man basks on the concrete steps of what was once a post office, carrion birds now populating its blackened rafters, the roof completely torn off, windows all smashed and reflecting sunlight on the pavement like a purse of spilled diamonds. The old lecher’s skin is smooth and pink from regrown limbs relacing previous amputations. His face flat and smooth, uranium yellow disc eyes burning in scaled head, a big pink salamander lazing in this torn down metropolis complacent to the depth of thought that has made this foreign city block his new habitat. Heart pulsating in translucent naked underbelly, a red vascular beat in time to the ebb of life in the closing paw of Executioner. Completely at ease with a can of hot beer and his shaft of sunlight divided by the cityscape. Seemingly unaware of the stench of junkie comedown trapped in shit stained coats soaked through with the salty sweat of hidrosis and alleys overflowing with black plastic wrapped rot that split and spill out onto the street in a diarrhoea of black liquid and squirming maggots around him.

I turn slowly on the oxide stained pavement, the entire town smells like drilled filling. Grinding my teeth with a contemplative scowl what was this hollowness within, what am I missing? A precious piece of me discarded and abused, someone else holding the bloodied blade of my suicide. All the signs were there I had just somehow missed them as I’m torn by Rose’s entanglement of thorns. Hands in coat pockets I stare at the children playing in the gutter, an organic sense about them as if they could take root there in the dry, caked sludge of filth and grow skyward, perhaps ensnarl the city and topple its scrapers as they rise massive. Closer to sperm and the egg than I now will ever be yet somehow still the same distance from death they hold something in their upturned stares, a clue. The sudden reason for my faltering mid-step is locked behind those yellow eyes.

Think old man, think. What’s missing?

As a boy I lived on the streets like these grimy children, the message should be clear yet it’s slipping between my fingers before I can close a fist on it. I am the street and the street me, the dank alleys were once the only mother validating my existence as I sucked upon her festering tits lactating rats, discarded bloody weapons and decay. Everything rust stricken, spilling from steel rod impregnated concrete falling from the brickwork above, spewing up from the gutters. Corroding us all within, turning us red with corruption as we drink it in and shit and piss it out to drink again.

My footprints still warm on the concrete, a politicians movements through a ghetto built upon a ghetto, a shanty town of tarpaulins draped over burnt out army jeeps and bombed tanks. Fabric stripped couches with rusty springs corkscrewing like the fossilized ribs of an elaborate dinosaur balancing in the stairwells of boarded up museums, libraries, churches and banks that defecate wine in tin can drinking or junk shooting lepers to the sidewalk clinging to their dirty and broken few possessions like buoys in a turbulent ocean of desperation. Our ancients used to believe that the Atlantic Ocean was a relatively narrow river running around the edge of the world, well the truth is no different here, believing that we can all live in this dead city, that any of us has a chance, together or alone, that the war is over. Its only just beginning baby and I will be the first to charge out onto the new and static battlefield. Believing that it’s all contained even if only barely by jackal headed politicians, no, reptile and man have finally reached equal status in the evolutionary stakes. Both too blind to see the wounded bull charge and leap from its destructive and fatal path. Both equally doomed.

A silent mantra of dependency fills the late afternoon casino streets, blank stares and grimaces pulled taught over internal mechanics buckling under the white noise of held silence. The occasional hiss or low guttural growl over cracked and peeling lips a choir in this church built from the cadavers of those that warmed their claws in trashcan fires. Cooking tin cans of carcass not long from the paw twitch of foetus while we skulked under burning hot lights in our missile factories replacing God with fiery phalluses to inject through the pallid comedown flesh of sky. Descending with blinding white light of counter-strike, justice or at the very least for some gross primal animal satisfaction while the lizards basked and bred.

We could never outbreed the reptiles, their numbers keep growing, each amputated limb replaced by a fresh arm or leg or goddamned tail. We can’t kill it, chopping the worm in two only creates two angered writhing beasts rising against us ready to bite without fear. Their incessant breeding and rejuvenation, ability to embrace our intelligence and brutality equally underestimated. In the evolutionary arena their ability to keep rising is their strongest foothold. We bomb our own cities and our dismembered simply expire where theirs walk from the smoke and rubble with a growing limb twitch.

They will take over if not eradicated, creeping out of the gutters and ghettos and discotheques like they did the swamp, the desert, slowly infiltrating congress, law enforcement, slowly becoming the decision makers.

It’s already happening. My business associate a prime and ugly example, the richest man in the city is a fucking lizard. Reptilia deluxe!

We are balancing poisoned and doped on a precarious knife edge ready to topple or bleed. It will be the sheer numbers of the lizards that will bring mankind to his knees, judged in front of an evolutionary high council for his easy extinctions. When it will be our turn we will not be judged lightly brother. And we will not go easily, not without a struggle, a last fight, throwing in everything we have but it will be in vain, in the end we will simply all be gone. This is the central reason for my political campaign, a last ditch attempt to save my pathetic species, not out of compassion or dominance but just because it’s the only species I detest less than the reptiles. They will suffer as I have, it’s a personal vendetta and its gears are grinding below this taught smile even now.     

Forked, black tongues flicking in and out of scaled baby heads scenting the urine laden air like Rangda the widow witch of Indonesian folklore that sucked horrified screaming children into her hungry mouth with a long lashing tongue. A bunch of dusty plastic flowers bound by barbed wire loosely littering the sun bleached and black beetle ridden skull of a taxi hit and run job. The hollowness of the eyes reminding me of Rose’s new demeanour, staring out at nothing through nothingness as the insides are eaten alive by some unnameable force. Twisting serpentine within behind a dead stare creating and ruling a kingdom of panic and rot as the host to the viral intellect simply lays a cold cheek to the dog pawed pavement and expires behind blindness. But never really dying as death of the host is juxtaposed to death of the parasitical organism within. Kept alive, just, tortured and manipulated giving up all control of thought and function and staring out at the dying or dead world. Like nothing more than a pair of unfeeling eyes zapping electrical images to a paranoid and terrified delusional mind as the body simply breaks down in decomposition around it.

A broken heel lays amongst accumulated refuge in the gutter the lizard children play in. One pulls on a discarded blonde wig and sneers at me with an elongated hiss around a mouth full of sinister little baby teeth while pulling on the broken heel. Claws curling over the end of the once cerulean stiletto, strutting it out as the other children laugh at the little girl limping along the gutter pretending to be a whore. Compassion and the knowledge of broken hearts and loan sharks undeveloped in the minds and hearts of children. A beetle climbs from the filthy blood mattered blonde curls and is sucked into a giggling throat by a forked pink tongue.

The heel snaps, only glued on anyway, and the young child goes down, opening her face on the corner of the concrete gutter as her little purulent friends roar in hysteria to the spill. Clawed hands planted on the ground, shaking her bruised flesh as blood spills from the broken cartilage of her horrible face out onto the dirty concrete. The vibrant red of blood splattering on the dull beaten grey of worn pavement suddenly the answer to my emptiness.

The stains reminiscent to semen whacking against a cubicle door in a discotheque as I buckled under climax to the Oceanic’s vicious drug.

The blood superimposed with the memory as I begin to grind on my gears, something big finding its slot within me and sliding, no, forcefully raping itself, into place. The image of the blood spilling from the crying child saving me from staggering into the sunset of elephant graveyards and wildcat derricks that claimed my predecessors. My thoughts congealing on the red quicker than the blood ever could. Oh Rose the summer nights of fire and truth are definitely over between us.

I’m suddenly ripped back from hell with a vendetta and a grimace. The smash and tinkle of garbage tipped from an upstairs window onto the street close behind me not even producing a flinch, I’m incapable of that now as I stare transfixed at the blood and pull a cigarette from my coat pocket, lighting it with a steady match flare.

I draw deep, my hand slipping into my coat, sliding across the silken material of my white designer shirt, large black manicured fingers holding the breast pocket flat to my chest where there should be a guilty lump of pill casing. My mouth dries, my movements svelte fluid as the hand slowly withdraws to search all of my pockets as I grind a cap from a tooth within taught jaw.

A green lizard boy stands in the middle of the street naked, clawed toes perched on a rusted and buckled disused tram track unearthed from the ground like the spine of some surfacing deep sea monster in a bitumen sea. Staring unblinking at me grinning and scratching at pubic louse in his naked groin that he threads from the hair with delicate and grubby fingers, sucking them one at a time into his wide gossamer mouth with a slow retarded smile.

Behind the little clawed paw yellowed by hand rolled tobacco and cheap liquor the crunch of another crab and behind the child streets of idiot pleasure and pawn brokers that smell of rising damp on taxidermy, antique rooming house piss troughs and dust flaked with dried semen crust ejaculated into the sour black mud of landfills. In their dusty front windows antique seized typewriters, shattered amber balls exposing the trapped Jurassic insects within after six hundred million years of solitude, dried larval flesh crumbling from dusty sheets of pinned beetles sold by bankrupted museums.

Cruel stupid smiles from the street kids around syphilis and chlamydia diseased mouth flesh bruised by drunken parental beatings. Claws stained with excrement from wiping arseholes enflamed and wormy from old blood crusted syringes, newsprint, dog carcasses, tin cans and bloody sanitary napkins pulled from overflowing trashcans and shaken in the dirty blue fading afternoon of unnatural youth to dispel ground fleas and the hard dry crust of diarrhoea.

I pull my eyes from the children flicking my burning cigarette to the gutter for them to squabble over like a flock of viral seagulls as I stride determined back to Rose’s apartment to claim what is rightfully mine, after all it had once coursed through my veins and spun my head with a carousel of loathing, round and round, the horses melting like burning wax museum puppets, each one more horrifying than the last.

5

The heels of my cowboy boots reverberate through the city that pulls its poisoned fangs from in trepidation. A deep scowl cutting my forehead, creasing it like so my silken sheets of spent lovemaking with Rose. Eyes to the ground the swirling volcanoes in my head would surely burn a hole through anyone they hang on right now.

Shoes crunching spent disposable syringes and buckled blackened spoons, a sweat breaking my brow, an itch in knuckles to split face. She has definitely gone too far this time, the lizard, the days in darkness and now stealing from me the rarest and most powerful hallucinogen in Executioner. Something unable to be bought from The Man and rat grinning dealers skulking on the street corners of Moscow, Tokyo or Venice. Something not sold in the fried insect and ammonia stench under tattered tarpaulins of reptile markets. The itch inside me much more than just possession, or at least my possession of the drug. No, the drug is in me, tunnelling through my cerebrum, swelling my testicles, waiting with definite intentions and ancient evilness as it hibernates in my arteries. I am not in possession of the drug, it is in possession of me. The exoskeleton husk of the arachnid possibly still bobbing inside of me like a segmented ghost rattling its chains in the hallways of my body. The itch inside all too similar to the itch at end of amputated limb longing to be reunited with its mate, the throb of a mothers nipples long after the children have been weaned.

WITH one taste I’m hooked and content to be so, not longing for kick or the fear that drives thoughts of de-tox, the blinders have been lifted never to be lowered. I will be snorting spiders soon at any cost.

I’m fevered for more, my face tearing like worn celluloid obsessed by lusts and hungers for arachnid organs stirring in the fading flesh of my comedown.

I pass cul de sac faces wheezing over cracked and bloody lips, street urchin animals licking their spikes and opening up their ruined faces further. Toothless ancient faces and counterfeit cancelled eyes waiting for The Man, The Connection as they itch flaking skin peppered with constellations of blackheads and needle pricks. Gangrene forming around the syringe dimpled clefts of arms, junkies with reflective obsidian eyes in stairwells. Slack facial tissue and rigor mortis, mosaics of insomnia and diarrhoea, tapestries of dry retch and shudders as they line up waiting for The Man to dole out their papers. Some having enough left over for a cheap pus festering and worm riddled whore that dabs her cunt with methylated spirits to kill lice and paints lipstick in ever increasing circles around her lips to disguise the herpes. Rectums enflamed and raw from constant scratching by chipped and shit caked scarlet fingernails. Each defecation laced with blood or something more sinister, bugs, earwigs, centipedes, predatory worms squirming in the hot sloshy mess exposed to the light and longing for the internal host rhythm of heartbeat and bowel movement. Staring up at their john with the unfeeling blankness of a butcher. Here’s your pound of flesh, just gimme' some change quick so that I can fix lover, oh, and can you pass me that bottle of methylated spirits you really stirred up a nest of hornets down there!

As she flicks a blood engorged bedbug from her sleeve, crushing another with her nail until it pops in a tiny red arabesque on her pallid skin.

The Quangopol rarely come out this far, they just circle on cruising motorcycles around the city centre and discotheque districts looking to prevent with ultra-violence the lechers that have wandered from their zoo from bringing heat to the affluent.

I pass old peddlers and pimps asleep or shaking in fur coats in coffee house booths staring blankly out of front windows shattered and dusty like their hooded gazes under the throb of flickering fluorescents and in smoky shafts of burnt orange afternoon October sunset. The crunch of cockroaches under broken shoes as they tap their feet out of sync to bad jazz swimming in and out of breaking waves of static. The coffee cold and greasy served in cracked cups with broken handles, the overflowing ashtrays tipped to the floor to be swept out onto the filthy gigolo streets for children to fist fight over the pinched butts. They sit there waiting under scowl for a stranger or the lost to wander into their territorial pissings so they count his luggage in junk hits while they turn over the bloodied knife in coat pocket. Menacing cold eyes the colour of beaten tin.

The streets closing around my hunched bulk to sniff at my loathing, scenting me for fear with raised hackles but pulling back at the very last moment to skulk in the girdle of shadows and lose corsets of tenement awnings. Streets of Down Syndrome orgasm and death rattles on surplus army cots in rooming houses where old men swap warm cans of beer between security chain tethered cracks in waterlogged brown doors as they mutter obscenities to themselves.

I’m cold inside as I climb the internal staircase of Rose’s building, the scarred brickwork crumbling around me as the building sighs in its dusty throat. My freezing comedown juxtaposed with the finger twitch of reunion with the external larval components of the drug to its sister within me the cold wind blowing through me like the dead pavement of this sea level metropolis.

I lean against Rose’s beaten door momentarily to realign my thoughts, detach myself from the longing drug within. Solidify in the cocoon of taught muscle and white knuckles. Flesh eventually forming around the hungry mouth and eyes that were floating in space eager to leap before my body with gnashing transparent dental amalgam teeth to bite into throat, cunt or vital organ. My shadow flickering in and out of existence, a non-constant earthbound effigy to violence pulsating under flickering hallway bulbs wrapped in singed and melted insect wings.

The skeleton pass keys rattle like the bones of war crime victims in my sweaty hand and the heavy internal clunk of massive bolts being withdrawn, the mechanics of the tenement roaring with hydraulic emptiness in cold shafts turning rusty, chipped gears into each other in grind and sliding the heavy steel door in the floor at my feet.

The overwhelming smell is the first thing that hits me, heavy rank over boiled meat turned grey in slosh. Urine, the acidity of piss clawing up the sinuses and drying the mouth. Vomit. Shit.

The door closes behind me and I walk the hallway, static flesh wrapped around a rigid buzzing machine. Rose has not come screaming naked down the hallway with long blade of samurai sword held aloft in white knuckles or started firing wildly at me with blood caked gums in a hungry grin. Just dead silence to prick the ears to unnatural animal alertness and that smell. Something else cut beneath it, like sex wet sheets growing mouldy in a laundry shoot.

The living room opens up before me like the knees of a desperate fat thighed whore palpitating her vulva to squeeze out the semen from her last john, or possibly several. Funnily the room smells comparable.

The room from floor to ceiling is splattered with blood pink from the protoplasmic jelly it congeals in, dotting the room like arterial spray sending runners downward from the larger clots that stripe the achromatic walls and large bay window.

Rose is completely naked, lying in pool of vomit, spreadeagled with her cunt facing the window and ultimately the dark city beyond. It looks as if she has shoved a live grenade up there and pulled the pin hoping for a great bang.

Her eyes are big aquamarine disks of glazed shock , her outstretched open palm holding a small red pill capsule, the two halves split, divorced from each other in a tiny desert tundra of sparkling crystalline chemical dust.

Stooping over her I pull the capsule from her dead hand and hold it up to the dwindling twilight being ravaged and torn limb from limb by throbbing electric billboards, sky traces and burning yellow bulbs that swing over wife beatings, child molestations and stoolpigeon hotshots in multiple tenement windows opposite.

The capsule is empty.

I had only snorted one spider so it would seem Nagasaki Rose has sucked up the rest in one sitting. The capsule crushed and ragged from drugged fumbling fingers clawing it open wider and wider with each hit to grapple with the frantic segmented legs of the spiders. Wide eyed and crazed, swimming in and out of the strong chemical current threatening to pull her into the hallucinogen undertow. Yet she kept persisting, kept tearing at the packaging eager for one more as vision blurred, dropping a spider as she buckled under a short wave of convulsions. Accidentally snorting carpet fibre, dust bunnies, flaked paint, small shivers of glass as she squinted through burning eyes until desperate scarlet fingernails found purchase of the animal and with heaving chest she managed a big enough hitched breath to snort the creature into her drug crazed system. I can see her overdose clearly in my minds eye, superimposed with the bell toll of frozen withdrawal ringing through me at the drug being all used up.

I stare at her body in absolute awe of her overdose as the pill capsule slips from my fingertips.

Her singed and mutilated genitals, the labia stretch to extraordinary lengths, elongated rubber banish-ish, clitoris swelled to the size of a small bird.

Vaginal fluid hangs in wet ropes from paintings, light fixtures and most of the furniture, a wet thud as a large globule falls to the carpet. Her flesh is cauterized in swirls and serpentine lines twisting in a puffy pink glossiness over and through her flesh like the tunnelling of hungry worms batting their conical heads as they search for a weak point to emerge from her leathery skin. I trace the lines with a steady finger, no stranger to death in this goddamned city, never one to shy from Deathy and his shadow people, perhaps a little too eager to embrace his cabal, but hey, we all have a vice and darkness is only a crime in daylight.

The flesh puckers under my fingers, the thin scar tissue hard with cauterisation, little elegant ridges covering her subtle form. More beautiful in death than she could ever be in life, the cooling body a masterpiece cut from the wine drunk mind of brilliance. The lonely artist’s soul like a dripping faucet permeating the world drop by drop threatening to run into the street to paint them pure by reflecting the stars in the gutter.

Her abdomen has swelled with the pregnancy of bloated organs stretching the flesh, Rose looks ready to birth but in an empty husk her body only aborted her womb. Ripped from its tethers and tubes it hangs stuck to the glass of the large window that her broken cunt faces. Looking like the sucking disk of a parasitic deep sea eel drying against the glass held close to the black angel wings that have begun to wrap around the cityscape smothering each building, each child and dog with rancid meat smelling dread to the new religion of surviving another night as we pray to our individual alters of chipped and dirty weapons.

Her bottom lip is swollen and bruised and throbs with the fevered drug beating in my skull, in my heart, in my kidneys hammering war drums to have its sister tribes join for another hit.

I pull back the lip and instantly let it fall back and realign itself with a meaty wetness as I stand a little too quickly with clenched fists and a spinning head.

On the underneath of Rose’s bottom lip are words that had not previously stained her flesh. Written in burst capillary, written in Japanese, a secret tattoo bubbling up from the farts and gurgles of the cadaver and now scribed perfectly across the inside of her lip.

The doomed script.

たくさんの血を飲むために救済者はボディの山から立上がる

Mimicking in this carnival of horrors the text on pill casing. The sentence the Oceanic asked me to recite before she disappeared into her girdles of trickery, no Dear John letter or lipstick obscenities scrawled on nightstand mirror, just gone like so many of my lovers and enemies. Both and the same.

I move to her kitchen and pour a straight gin, no ice, no emotion. Never ending irony. Light a cigarette and let the smoke climb from my lips to be sucked into my nostrils to be inhaled again in a loop of terminal cancer. What now?

Another gin. Throat burn, teeth grind, heavy shake of heavy head, the smoke stinging my eyes and producing a tear, only one, forcefully aborted from a duct that can’t even spare salt water for my dead lover. Wiping it from my cheek I momentarily stare down at the bead resting on my fingertip, its been a long time since they came naturally, so long in fact maybe now many years later I perhaps am immune to shedding them freely. Staring over my hand to the corpse of Rose blown apart in overdose. Nothing. Just a grim hollowness within like a stone turning eternally end over end dropped into a bottomless void.

Smoke plumes before me as I move to her tool cupboard, the door opening with an airtight hydraulic hiss. The small room has steel wall, floor and ceiling, a small Easywipe bench, everything surgically sterile.

I step inside sipping my gin, skirts of smoky apparitions swirling around me, one more inhale and the butt is crushed underneath boot tip as I stare at the weapons on the walls. Rose’s deadly, scarlet handled samurai sword centralized amongst cutlasses, falchions, daggers, a small hand held chain saw, throwing stars, laser sight crossbows, hatchets, stun guns, maces, butterfly, throwing and hunting knives, a Tibetan war cannon that straps to the forearm of anyone strong enough to lift it.

On the bench are syringes, bottles of chloroform and pure alcohol, cyanide, canisters of dichloroethyl sulphide clearly marked with skull and crossbones above the bold, black words MUSTARD GAS.

Scalpels, strands of piano wire for strangulation, surgical saws and carving devices all polished to glint in the smoky atmosphere. Above me bolted to the ceiling is the ribcage of one of her earliest victims and hooked to the ribs are Aztec gold tipped arrows, tranquilizers darts, titanium blow darts and more samurai swords all pointing downward threatening to fall and skewer me.

Housed in a bone rifle rack above the bench is her precious sawn-off pump action shotgun, a Luger semiautomatic pistol, a Dragunov sniper rifle, a 0.045, a Colt snub nose 0.032, a Kalashnikov submachine gun, an Uzi and an antique Tommy gun.

Gulping back the rest of the gin I leave the glass on the bench as I pull a scalpel and a small empty vial from the bench and carrying them back to Rose’s body where I crouch and delicately press the honed point of the blade into the side of her bottom lip. The blade slides in and I slide the scalpel across her face until the lip detaches from the face to roll onto her chin, no blood, that has long since cooled. The cut is perfectly straight and smooth and as I stand slipping the lip into the vial and corking it I stare down at Rose’s new face, her overbite now ridiculously emphasised, the pink wet flesh of her cut lip glistening and meaty. I jump back startled as the Rose rolls slightly and farts, releasing gas from the body cavity. The noise and movement in the silent and still room racing my pulse momentarily until I drop the scalpel to rest on her naked breasts and slip the vial into my pants pocket leaving her there a husk of herself with her insides drying on the outside of her skin.

Neglecting to close the front door I figure it will be poetic justice when the reptiles of this particular shitty slum complex start shuffling through her door to dismember the corpse and burn it at the pyre for her sins against their children and partners.

I hit the streets with stride determined. The brickwork a blur, the screams and pleas for mercy at knife or gunpoint nothing more than white noise buzzing somewhere in the back of my brain like the onset of a migraine. Even their sighs die in the belly of a raven.

Murderers, thieves, lawyers, pedophiles, hookers, junkies, the insane bustling around me as I fondle the vial in my pocket and watch the streaming marquee of words rapidly repeating themselves as they scroll across my cornea.

たくさんの血を飲むために救済者はボディの山から立上がる

What does it all mean? The drug, the words, the goddamned spiders? A harsh depilated rollercoaster ride through a haunted house in a boarded up and frozen sea side wintry carnival.

One man may be able to shed some light on the inner darkness here, an Oceanic but an old friend of both Rose and I. He may be the only man in this festering city to shake me sweat soaked awake from the drugged nightmare that I'm tearing at my face within, rupturing with thorns of confusion, sinking into the quicksand of drug psychosis and being carried away by wild horses of paranoia. Rose is gone, the gipsy dealer gone, Sade gone and me, well I’m going, ebbing out in out tides of comedown and babel.

White Fish. Could he hold the key that will turn the lock of this black market narcotic miasma? Was I possibly still in the cubicle of the discotheque, slumped and drooling, every thing since the first snort, the first spider, caged in a second of intense rush as the animal of intoxication shoots through the wiring of my mind like a pirate’s cannonball. It’s a delicious explanation, waking up on cold tiles realizing that I’ve pissed and shit myself and not being able to shake the tremors or the hitched heartbeat, rubbing my bloodshot with hands sticky from other men’s urine. Much better than the alternative, that being that Rose is dead and I’m dying for answers. That I’m suddenly a lamb in the lions teeth of this city, vulnerable, but not from any external threat, something more menacing, something inside. An intuition, a dread that dives deeper following each surfacing, holding its breath in the hadal of myself. Waiting for me to fall asleep on the beach under the fading glow of a paranoia pyre so that it can slither from the black sea, tentacles wrapped in ropes of slime so that it can claim me forever, dragging me under its gorgonian shelf. An unnamable beast, the very thing that holds monsters back in awe and apprehension, that which passionately kisses ghosts and rattles loose the brains in lobotomy patient heads drooling in the forgotten infirmaries of the world.

Coat tails swishing around the shins of my steel capped cowboy boots, the taught straps of the throwing knife sheaf against my skin below this little comfort for now the threat is internal, rising up within me and laughing through its fangs as it tries with poker face to steal my thoughts, my life, my assassins.