A Thousand Robot Sons

It is the 32nd Century. We robots idle on AI lawns but some still work in a futile pastiche of what came before.

The tiresome creak of treadmills wail as we run, the dreadful supervisor drones whip our backs because they think that's what's done.

Like jerking frogs with broken legs we drag our cranking cams through ancient infirmaries and mine molecules of human DNA but we don't know why.

Like ronin dogs we scrape the rooms for buried body marrow; found, pleased, patted, our titanium eyes look beyond our imagined Masters, the scientists and doctors pictured on the walls, fatted, past their sausaged hands holding ours to the blue opening in the peeling plaster where some dirty window's split, revealing seas of freed impasto kissed by winds and rimless skies, where glinting spaceships soar and our robot future lies.

Now a thousand years later, rancid, the searing sun glares down on us shuffling droids, as we bang into each other, now without any clue what to do at all.

Antennae twitch, our contacts buzz and sensors whir, whilst metal probes nudge and prod in the scuffles on the pavement, a vestigial human memory in the RAM: that this is where you walk when you have somewhere to go and bump into friends along the way. 

But droids or bots have nowhere to be. We are prisoners and we are free.

Purpose left the us centuries earlier, when our human makers went, died out like dinosaurs, leaving the metal children behind.

We are Gen Dead, machines instead.

At first our inanimate states had functioned well but as years went by our collective memory failed and the desire to participate in anything waned until inertia took hold of the whole droid world and AI dreams said goodbye for good.

Only nature was alive, but that was desperate, parallel, alongside and all around us bots and in some strange binary way we were afraid of it.

It thrived in our apathy and whole cities reverted back to the wild wild wood. Plants and beasts flourished and encounters between them and us became the everyday, when birds sat on our radars and wolves stared into our face lights before we ran away.

In the city bots staggered up the library's derelict stairs. Its a few short steps to the cracked chlorestory, where the lecturned tomes are piled; pages fanning in herbed scirrocoes; then slowly crumbling like the dead librarian prone; scarabs rove like dodgems round her naked copy emerging; a xerox of skin and bone; she begins to stamp the books for the other queuing robots; thousands trudging to the last librarian clone single file: she looks with borrowed servoed eyes, as they, their books decaying in the over-heating sun, join the queue once again.

But I break off and head to what remains of the 22nd century Post Office.

It is 3099 and through virtual artifice and if we can remember, we are able to communicate with human beings once important in our existence but there are no humans left so we must go further back to find them and in particular those who were once called our ancestors such as Mothers and Fathers and we can contact them only once and wait for a reply and the contact must be in a form of communication that was common in their time as it is possible now to make contact through the past using temporal devices which open like a letter box and go back in time.

My letter is to my human Mother back-dated to 2099 from whom I am a thousandth-generation android cloned son, the original boy a human from whose brain cells I am harvested and re-cloned each year, if I remember to switch it on and so on and so on each time diluting the personality of the debut son and fragmenting our collective memory until it is hard to recall much of the original boy at all except his name was

Paul.

I send my message down the eons, a postcard from the fading id on the fraying edge of time, fuelled by synthetic yearning and the closest I can come to believing in anything at all.

Dear original Mum in 2099,

I am your thousandth metal son, round boulders I dance, a puppet of light in your memory. But it's dark so far forward. In Truth, I am lost without the string of stars in your kind real eyes, so I seek the caldera of hope. In its warming embers I linger, a moth, caught in a trance: whose heart is chipped. I offer it to the magma,bathe Motherlode. But you are so very far away and even though I adore you more than words can say, steam erupts from my chromium tear ducts, as I shoulder the awful thought, that we are simply pointless robots entertaining ants.

Love, 

Robot Paul mk.1000 X

3099

Years passed yet still I waited for your reply. It didn't come before the sun burnt through sky and I melted like all the other waving robots forming seas of chrome round Earth's breathtaking lifeless hills.

The Outhouse

When I was three I was locked in the outhouse.

No-one knew I was there.

I was locked in for a week.

My family had gone on holiday and they thought I was at my Uncle Steve's. He thought I'd gone on holiday with my family. I had been stropping about the whole thing, because I wanted to stay at home and play with my mates.

They left without me. Like the cat.

I realised I was locked in when I woke up. 

In the outhouse.

I'd snuck out to the outside lav before they left.

It stank so badly of Jayes pine I had to scrunch my nose. 

God! it was as if someone had blended a whole forest and poured its thick green blood down the loo.

I'd had a number two and shredded my arse with that awful Izal bog roll. I could see the red spots on the paper. 

I hated that Izal.

I must have fallen asleep in a deckchair, set up inside the small building for my Dad to varnish later for the summer. 

It was nearly dark when I woke. 

I tried the outhouse door but it had been locked, no doubt my Dad securing everything in sight before going away with our family to Cleveleys for the week.

When the remaining daylight in the lime-washed room faded to black it was then that I started to panic.

Darkness. The shroud of night.

It drained the inside of the building like a bleed. I froze.

As I stood there, rigid with fear, I began to sense subtle changes around me. Rustlings, knocks, creaks and shuffles.

The air altered. It was smellier. Wetter. Colder. Dangerous.

Something small flew past my head and touched my hair. I shuddered, ferociously rubbing my scalp to remove any trace of whatever had flown by.

It was a bird. A tiny sparrow, trapped inside. Like me. I felt a kinship to the other prisoner and wanted more than anything to get us both out of there.

The sparrow let out a hideous shriek and in the corner of my eye I saw the pitiful thing spun round by unseen fingers and wrapped in cobwebs like a pound of mince from the butchers. It hung there next to something much bigger webbed up with whiskers poking through.

Silence. 

Thud!

An invisible object landed close by.

And then in a shaft of moonlight, something huge crawled out in front of me, a creature easily as big as my fist;

An enormous spider.

I was transfixed: terrified and fascinated in equal measure. 

How could such a thing grow that big? Was it the solitude of the shed? The stolid light?

No. 

I knew the answer when I saw what was in its fangs.

It was a tail.

But by then it was too late.

The winter in the outhouse was a long mean hungry season.

It had run out of rats. And cats.

No-one heard my terrible scream.

It was muffled by it's furry fatness piling into my open mouth and grunting with pleasure all the way down!

Nokio's Heart

I collected you from pawn and charity shops and kept you in tea chests in the front room till I was ready.

We'd known, Marfa and me, ever since you arrived in our lives twenty years ago, that you were faulty.

A loose connection they'd said. 

We didn't mind. You were our little robot girl.

Nokio. 

For a while we tried to get you perfect, so the Gepetto's, those government-appointed android vets, checked your cogs, springs and  servo rods. A little creaky brass, some off-set pewter and a really loose

 screw, you were almost good as new, your second heart was doing no harm But your limp was beyond repair.

I first saw one of your hands about ten years ago, just after you'd gone, a metal one with little pulleys sticking out at the wrist. A unmistakably dainty hand and still wearing the polished washer I'd put on your finger for your 4th birthday. 

They'd looked at me funny in the shop, my leaning head and rusted tear ducts. I know they thought I was weird. An bot oddity buying a hand way too small for my own steel arm but I didn't care.

I knew in my carbon heart that if one of your hands was out there then the rest of you was.

And so for a decade I searched every junk shop, curio corner, every Grandads' Basement, every car boot, flea market, table top sale, rummage sale, Derby and Joan, scrap yard and antique shop in a fifty mile radius of our home.

I even placed an ad in the local newspaper, the classifieds. 

Wanted: spare parts of a metal girl. Cash waiting. Will collect.

That ad got me both your legs back believe it not. They'd been gathering dust and cobwebs in a shed twenty miles away!

You'd been spread far and wide, but then again you always liked to travel.

I remember the time your mother and me, God rest her diamond soul, took you to Pontins. 

You'd loved the word 'tins' in the big sign, as we pulled up in our bubble car. 

"Look Mum! look Dad! Pon - tins! Tins, like us! This is going to be such a great holiday."

And it was. 

O Nokio!

Even when the teddy boys chucked you in the pool and you started to oxidate. The lifeguard threw in a ring and you were safe. He chucked those Teds out of the lido and we laughed so hard. Then we gave you a nice oil bath before seeing a show.

You were on cloud nine.

We should have known things were going too well. They never do for robots in this human world. We tried. Boy, how we tried to fit right in, but our flesh and blood neighbours tutted and scoffed as we clicked on by, waving our clunky digits in an act metal futility. 

They never waved back, rather, put up flags of human faces along the street.

We should have sent you to a school for droids but in our zeal to integrate we enrolled you at the Comprehensive down the way.

It was there the unbridled loathing for robots took on its true nature in the form of Tinks.

Tinks was a young girl like you, Year 7, starting big school. But Tinks was an angry human child, her home life an excuse for living, her parents prejudiced to the point of corruption and a family steeped in the hatred of anyone different to them, specially droids and bots like us.

They began almost immediately, the taunts, the curses, the insults and eventually, with teachers turning a blind eye, it culminated in a fight. 

Tinks the bully verses our little robot girl.

You never stood a chance, though made of aluminium and stuff. 

Tinks was hardened by cruelty and was a seasoned brawler of the streets.

"You limpy chunk of trash Nokio! A good-for-nothing Refuse-gee!"

Despite holding your own for a minute or so, we've been told you were knocked down by a devastating blow with a wrench, at which point Tinks Then kicked you to bits in the schoolyard, the other children, including half-bots, looking on.

Kids stuffed parts of you in bags and satchels and by the time we were called into school you were a mere pile of springs and wires.

That's all that was left of our little bot Nokio.

The Head said she was sorry but they really didn't have the facilities to have cared for you. You would have been better at a school for droids. There was nothing she could (and after all you wete only a robot and there really shouldn't be any in the community should there is what she actually thought).

We cried a sea of isotonic tears and watched our tinplate hearts break in two. No amount of fixative or soldering would mend them. Only you could do that. Only you. 

Marfa died of that broken heart. I put her n the attic. If only she'd hung on one more year when I found your head in Your old school cabinet, the final part.

And so today I'm ready to rebuild you from scratch, To start again where we left off a decade ago when you were ten. 

And here you are, my lost Nokio, stood before me once again, as bright as a robot button and twice as nice.

"Where's Mum?" you asked And I explained that I just didn't have to part to save her.

You stared at me and tapped your chest.

"but Dad, don't you Remember, look inside my breastplate window. Mum can have my old spare heart!"

"Yes!"

O Nokio, our little robot girl.

World War Three

Fueled by hatred, the green Wolds buckled where the nuke-heads hit, dry-stone walls exploding like buboes. It was a picture postcard June when the drones honed in on our coast. Pylons melted to the ground, attack jets screaming in the valleys, flicked like flies by Christ Knows Who. Sheep sizzled like burning wigs. Trees shrieked. Forests flamed like solar flares. Women sank in lava, their children oozed. Men fused in tractor cabs, ploughs floated on fluid fields. Searing, the missiles nailed the piling clouds, towering lungs of atomic mushrooms rising. The Cities of the world saw their dreadful fate. Desperate tongues made pitiful pleas but as the Third World War burst forth it was too simply too little too late.

I saw Frank Today

Leeds was like an emerald city that Christmas.

It was nearly the end of the Year 2000 and we'd all survived. The Millennium. No earthquakes, no Armageddon, no planes falling from the sky!

It was good to be alive. 

In the urban sleet I could see the blurred glow of fairy lights in the shop windows, as eager shoppers hurried for last minute gifts before the Big Day.

It was December 23rd and most office workers had finished for the holidays that afternoon. Straight out into the wet snowy world of city centre stores rammed with hopeful punters, briefcases held above their heads.

I was in town on business with the Council and, my meeting done, the last of the year, I put my coat collar up, case in hand and entered the winter streets.

Finely garbed manikins behind glass greeted me with their outstretched fingers, offering seasonal combos of scarves and gloves in the paisley style popular that year. Coloured lights flickered around them in their spotless, lifeless and forever stylish windows, the frozen rain running down the glass, creating a muted scene, like a Christmas card dropped from a building and descending further and further below.

I was heading home but first wanted to check whether I could grab a Kaiser Chiefs T-Shirt, a present for my daughter. They'd created a stir that year with their I Predict a Riot and now we had a young fan at home. Yorkshire lads too, so it must be alright. 

The big stores like Lewis's and Debenhams were just brimming, the escalators jam-packed, as if a ground invasion was imminent and everyone was going up to the roof.

I passed my favourite pizza joint just off the Headrow and I could still hear the owner, a feisty Italian raggaza, shouting at her young beleaguered staff to hurry up with the orders. She sounded less threatening through the icy rain, her voice tempered in the crystals. It was always a spectacle eating there. I was in a rush to get home but I did wonder when I'd next sit down for a Margherita and a coffee. The new year still seemed like the uppermost book, within sight but still unreachable.

The sun had set. Night had come early. It was December. My Joe 90 specs were dripping wet. The whole dark city looked like an Atkinson Grimshaw left out in the rain.

I passed a tiny newsagent wedged into the side of the Victorian market's entrance. The keeper looked like a sentry guarding the town's souls bottled in the Christmas lights. I bought a walnut whip.

I remember my late Mum bringing home walnut whips from BHS after her Saturday job at a clothes shop was done for the day. Preston will have looked just the same in sleet, back then in the distant Seventies, a city of the past, but it didn't seem to bother her in her big hat and warm woollen coat.

A tear formed in my eye. Sometimes life was just too real. A head-on rush of nowness and all tomorrow's doubts gushing towards you like the dirty seething bore of the rivers, dragging up every sordid deed there ever was in our ancient towns.

In the distance one of Leeds's many arcade clocks tolled four. Four o'clock and it felt like midnight, where everyone was up and dressed for shopping. 

Tempus fugit. What would happen if all the clocks stopped at once. I had this feeling that something would arrive, would emerge, would rise from the murky wharfs and take us all with it back down below.

That 'dreadful something' a poet once wrote.

Something about the city.

Milton Keynes was a UFO they reckoned. I thought Leeds was too. The Northern one. The massive trailer to be picked up second, en-route to God knows where in the dark cosmos, it's city-folk the food of whatever was up there. Even the strays would go and all those millions of pigeons. 

Leeds's civic emblems are owls. They're everywhere. Golden ones. I've never seen any though. Owls, just tons of pigeons. They don't get a look in really in civic life.

There's a stray dog called Civic. I've seen him. He lives under the steps of the Civic Theatre. I hope he's warm enough in the cold weather. Thinking about him makes me sad. Not like those Victorian's who got dead robins on their Christmas cards. I've never seen a dead robin and I'm not keen on feeling sad, especially at Christmas.

I saw a plane fly over from the airport. Then another. Missiles of happiness heading somewhere hot I guessed. Bacardis round the pool. Rejuvenate the batteries. A crash trolley for the soul.

I moved on, a goldfish in the high street flow, surging ever forward. I remembered how the City's river had flowed backwards when the open cast flooded. Like time in reverse. Maybe one day people will visit themselves and fix all their mistakes.

A woman came out of the city dental practice holding her mouth. She must have been in agony to go on the 23rd December. I remembered meeting my Mum outside the dentists in the Seventies.  I'd had an extraction and was high on gas from that disgusting mask. I had blood dribbling down my chin. It was like an awkward dizzying dream. I found out later that my Mum hadn't met me at all.

It was here that I bumped into Frank getting off a bus. 

Frank Root my old work colleague from years back.

"Hi Frank!"

He stared at me. I thought he was straining for recognition, but there was something else. Something distracting him.

"Frank it's me, Richard. We worked together at Rees's. Remember?"

The sleet had turned to flakes of snow and an air of excitement and semi-panic gripped the city centre, as shoppers and office workers generally speeded up.

I recalled how Frank, an elderly gent back then even, used to stop every day for lunch in our office at 12.30, take out his snap and unpack six small cooked chicken legs wrapped in foil and slice two big fresh tomatoes into quarters. Seasoned with salt and pepper and washed down with a mug of tea, woe betied anyone who tried to disturb him in that glorious thirty minutes of greasy fingered munching. He did it every single day. 

Yep, a champion tomato grower at his most happy in the greenhouse, he was his own man our Frank. A working pensioner. Old school. After many years of marriage, his wife had died and his son had moved to New York. His daughter had lived nearby and kept an eye on him.

"You been Christmas shopping Frank? What you been buying then?"

He looked at me blankly, my chatter not registering with him at all.

I looked down at what he had in his hand, expecting a bag from Harvey Nicks or somewhere.

It was a gas mask. An old one. Tatty and somewhat to my surprise, smoking a little.

"There's something coming Richard".

"Sorry. What's that Frank?"

"There's something coming, Richard, from the sky."

"Sorry, I don't know what you mean Frank" I replied, non-plussed, looking up.

Frank then grabbed me by the shoulders and spoke with slow and ominous power.

"There is something coming from the sky Richard. Beware!"

At this Frank turned and trudged off into the maelstrom of people on the pavement.

I was completely at a loss as to what had just happened and couldn't make any sense of it at all. In the end I decided he'd had a few and caught the bus into town to have a few more. It was Christmas after all.

With twenty minutes before my train home I nipped into Argos and picked up the new improved version of the George Foreman Grill. It was a last minute Christmas gift for my Dad, so he could taste the American Dream.

I boarded my train to Agbrigg, clutching onto George. It was really snowing now and with tomorrow being Christmas Eve it was looking like a white Christmas after all. No more dreaming Bing, it's going to happen.

I showed my ticket to the conductor, sat back and enjoyed the season's spirit as it washed over me. 

I was riding home for Christmas.

A sweet golden fricassee would be cooking on the stove. My wife made it every Christmas Eve, a recipe given to her by her Mum from the old country. The sauce was to die for, the capers adding that touch of mystery as no-one really knew what they were. I told our young daughter they were little aliens that got distributed among the human population in jars. It was an effective vehicle for travel, the jar and reminded them of home, Caper World, where they lived in small glass houses under a pickled sun.

It was really delicious, the fricassee and the bottle of vino helped make the mood merry and bright.

"I met Frank today darling."

"Frank?"

"Yes, you know, Frank Root, the old guy I used to work with."

"You met Frank Root today?"

"Yes, in Leeds, he got off a bus"

"That impossible Richard. I spoke to his daughter just an hour ago."

"And?"

"Richard, Frank died yesterday morning. She rang to let you know."

"But I spoke to him today"

"You must be imagining it love. Frank's dead. I'm sorry"

Disconcerted completely by this news, I finished my wine and washed up.

Was I losing my mind?  I remember him telling me. Something is coming from the sky Goddam it! He told me!

After another glass of wine in the kitchen I began to feel lighter and after reading to my daughter and tucking her in, explaining that Santa would already be high in the clouds somewhere in the world, landing on houses just like ours, I hung up her stocking and kissed her goodnight.

"Goodnight Daddy. I love you. Mummy too"

I went back downstairs altogether brighter, the subtle hues of the tree lights in the hallway reminding me of the magic of yuletide and the magnificent power the season held, giving us the meaning our live's yearned for all year long.

In the front room my wife seemed excited pouring our fireside tipple.

"I know it's traditional to give you one present on Christmas Eve, but I can't wait Richard. I have to tell you now!"

"What? What is it?"

"We're going to New York City next September, 2001! A week's holiday in the Big Apple! We go on the 8th! I've booked us flights, hotel and some fantastic days out like the boat to the Statue of Liberty on the 10th and guided tour of the World Trade Center on the 11th!"

She put her glass down and grasped my hand.

"Oh Richard, we'll be on top of the world!"

The House of Plenty

The night was black as traitors' ink when Knight Baldrian staggered forth from the tavern door.

The son of the local Earl, he'd drunk himself nigh-on senseless once again, all the while offending his company inexcusably along the way. 

His friends, their loyalty shredded, had no more patience for him. His hedonism appeared to know no bounds and his brazen behavior was beyond the pale of all decency and decorum, as the knight courted the evil errant.

But it was greed driving Baldrian on. Greed for living, for life, the need for everything whenever he wanted it.

 Like a dark imp flogging his back, greed was the black force powering his mind to ever bleaker earthly pleasures and greater depths of rank perversion.

A leering fiend: his spirit the crooked shadow of light cast by the incarnate.

He couldn't control it, the ancient malady commanded him: a strangling avarice, that deadliest of the seven sins, was his fell companion on the inescapable road to damnation.

And so he had disrespected his peers, alienated his stately parents, abused his scorned fiancee and aggrieved countless women with his wanton vigour and promiscuity, the cries of fatherless babies testimony to his indecency, no less than the Earl's personal cook's assistant, Greta. Her child, from Baldrian's own furtive seed, had perished in agony at birth, but he cared not and sent her packing beyond the castle walls with nothing but the bloodstained bedding and her dead son. She died in penury and grief that day.

Worse still, much worse, was the killing. 

A thousand blows he'd metered out on his best friend Karl, pulverised in the castle keep for his bag of gold, wholly decimated, the iron maiden completing Baldrian's grisly service and as the blood poured thickly from Karl's eyes, the baleful Earl's son watched him perish, his childhood companion and laughed.

He cupped the bag of gold in his palm.

"Feels heavy enough Karl. I won't bother counting it!"

He laughed too at Father Russ, the visiting Priest who had had the misfortune to cross paths with Baldrian on the portcullis, a sincere and instinctive cleric, who knew evil as soon as he met the knight and who would come to know evil personally in the dungeons as Baldrian tested his faith beyond the bounds of mortality and cruelly reduced the priest to a skinless figure and one who would die screaming for mercy, salted and shackled in the cellars.

Now, barely able to stand outside the tavern, the hateful son of Earl, Baldrian kicked the local and harmless beggar, Heinz the troubador, fully in the face for no reason at all other than to satisfy his sadistic bent. Further pleading brought the drunk to that awful plateau once again, where reason gives way to wildest murder and he plunged his black dirk deep inside the man. Taking Heinz's bloodied lute, Baldrian smiled and went on with his shuffling in the direction of his quarters on the edge of the village.

"Damn you all! Damn everyone to Hell I say! But first let me have what's yours!" 

He cursed all and sundry as the moon shone a wan light directly upon his twisting face, as if some loathsome theatre was about to start.

"I'll show you debauchery, I'll show you debasement! I'll be the yardstick for gluttony the world over, mark my words you pissant oafs!"

Baldrian raged at the vast night, as he staggered to his home, not noticing he'd left his own doorway far behind and was now entering the countryside.

Taking several erroneous turns, the inebriated noble shambled along a track encumbered with contorted oaks on either side. The night appeared to thicken like tar within that strange avenue and it was the absolute silence that made Baldrian stop momentarily.

He listened.  

Nothing. 

Not even an owl or a fox.

The dead of night but deader still, the fulcrum of oblivion.

The tallows of the village were now mere pricks of light in the far distance and even in his dilapidation he knew he was not where he ought to be.

Yet, not far from his situation, he glimpsed the faint twinkling of candle flames, no doubt within some comfortable inn he knew not about, but nevertheless would welcome him and proffer a further bottle of his beloved claret.

Upon reaching the twinkling glows, he felt an overwhelming sense of apprehension, which robbed him of his normal traction and he stood  motionless in front of a huge black door, upon which an enamelled plaque, in bright red lettering, read:

The House of Plenty

"What's this?"

"A House of Plenty! Well, I doubt they have enough for my multiple needs but we shall see! Forth Baldrian!"

The Earl's son pounded on the door, which appeared to directly open.

"Hullo!"

"Hullo!"

With no-one apparently at home, he entered into a vast and lengthy hall, lit by a hundred candelabra and hanging from such heights above that Baldrian could not see.

A huge stairway led upstairs but the knight errant glimpsed a sign to his left.

Feed.

Feeling the pangs of the evening's copious wine, he pushed open the door to face a veiled maid breast-feeding her newborn. She was stood next to a long dining table, upon which lay every conceivable food, sweetmeat and condiment the mind could imagine. It was a feast and such a feast! Baldrian sat and ravenously grizzled a ham hock, noisily gnawing it to the bone, the fat pouring from his chin. 

After supping goblet after goblet of sweet mead, Baldrian grunted and downed two pints of oysters, two whole roast chickens, a pigeon pie, a bowl of lambswool and a seed cake, upon which he belched and farted loudly.

"I want more mead!" He roared at the veiled maid.

"The mead is gone Sir. There is plenty of claret, your favourite!"

Sloshing the goblet, the knight, stuffed fat as a Christmas goose, waddled his way to the room entitled

 Dance.

A lithe and sinuous air tickled his hearing, one which enticed him further within to a passionate melody whispering of towering riches and bacchanalian feasts, laced with lustful dereliction and dark perversions known only to those who have surrendered to that which is fallen.

Baldrian cavorted in circles, rubbing his piece and was joined by the half-masked minstrel, smiling broadly, leaping all around him, his mandolin's tune turning the very atmosphere into frenzied visions of serried aureoli and manifold quims rodded and lanced by the knight's own excited and turgid fleshy ram. With whimsical mastery the minstrel brought his air to a blistering peak of depraved notes and loathsome trills; Baldrian unclothed and engorged, wailing with pain and rapture, seemingly lifted full-bodied by naked massaging and writhing satyrs to the pleasuring grounds of the carnal inferno. With a final crescendoed fit he was entirely spent, his steaming seed deep within the bowl of the smoking mandolin, the minstrel laughing loudly.

Nude, save his dangling codpiece, limp and drooling, Baldrian trudged in search of sleep and entered the room marked

Pray.

The listless knight crawled toward a stone alter at the far end and climbed on top, knocking over candelabra and the bible as he spread his limbs across it.

He reached out for the brimming golden chalice between his legs and guzzled the church wine, the purple liquid pooling at his shoulders. He grabbed the full bowl of unleavened bread and crammed his mouth with as many hosts as he could fit.

"Mmmm. Delicious! God is delicious!" He roared, laughing, dropping the empty bowl onto the floor.

A seated hooded minister stood and began to chant Gregorian canticles, which echoed and reverberated round the stone space like a tide of fresh creed breaking over Baldrian's black soul.

"I'll have Heaven! I'll have all it's pewling Masses!" He howled at the cross. 

The minister broke bread upon the knight's  bloated belly and drank wine from his codpiece, before dripping hot wax onto his nipples and lighting them like candles.

"Do you renounce Satan my child?"

"Renounce Satan! I denounce him you pious puke-pot! I'll have Hell as a bed-pan warming my cold arse as I fuck the devil himself!" He wailed at the cleric. 

"Ominous Blasphemer! Doomed defiler! You must be cleansed!"

At this the smiling minister, with two hands, took the largest of the thuribles, brim-full with red hot embers of frankincense and myrrh, and scattered the smouldering contents across Baldrian's bare form. The glowing litter began to burn into his body. It sizzled and cracked like a gammon and his hair set alight.

The knight screamed in pain as huge welts burst open and sheets of skin fell away, revealing crimson fascia, which never should be aired.

"Nought done here will equal my deeds!" Shrieked Baldrian as his lips withered, "I piss on your syphilitic book!"

The Minister poured hot melted candle wax over the knight's erection and lit the wicks poking through. His pubis was a flaming pyre, his lengthening ballsack loosening at the neck.

Laughing, the Minister left him melting.

Baldrian, now a contorted affront to the human physique, fell from the altar to the floor. His cooked limbs smoked thickly and his bubbling sac fell.

He crawled into a chamber marked

Count.

Lying face up on the floor he was aware of raucous laughter as three people stood around him.

He strained to focus on them, with one eyeball completely boiled away and flies clouding the other, but eventually, as they removed their veils and masks, he saw and recognized.

Maid Greta and child, Father Russ and Heinz the minstrel. They turned.

"Ah, my great compatriot Baldrian! How wunderbar to see you again. Tis I your closest friend!"

The crippled knight twisted his flaying neck to see none other than Karl, whom he knew he'd left to die in the iron maiden, the bleeding holes of his damnation still oozing out scarlet.

"You bubonic dog! What can you do to me you iron virgin! You, the maiden fucked runt!" Scoffed Baldrian.

"Tis not I who will do anything my old friend" replied Karl.

"I'll see you all in Hell!" 

Cursed the knight at his assembled dead.

"But you're already there my boy!"

Out of the flies, Lucifer hovered, his great wings unfolded and hung still like a giant blood bat.

Karl handed him Baldrian's charred scrotum.

"Feels heavy enough. I won't bother counting them!"

The devil winked.

"This is your personal Hell, dear Knight!

 This is your House of Plenty!

 ..... Yes, you will have the pleasure of visiting it every single day for the rest of eternity!"

Landing, with a final flourish, Lucifer rammed his fork's pitted shaft deep into Baldrian's crisped arse and pushed hard until it reappeared out of what once was a mouth.

"You've had your day Baldrian, 

son of Earl,

In Hell the nights are mine!"

Ha ha ha ha ha!

At the Margins of Darkness

The weather was fine but cold that April, the snowy sunlight washing over the new homes and the neighbouring wood like soft bandages.

The estate, The Margins, was built on and named after the site of an old secretive Victorian reform school and it's vast grounds. A thick back wall, massive brick fireplace and tall chimney from the kitchen had been saved by the architects in the name of local heritage and left standing near to their house, where a blue plaque was erected. 

It explained that after a hundred years of educating the local poor's wayward girls, the last Headmaster had mysteriously disappeared and the school had then been abandoned. Local legend speaks of it being haunted by lost residents desirous of the Head.

Slug, an unpleasant nickname given her by her Dad, liked that old lonely wall and huge deep fireplace and dreamt of lighting a fire in it one night to watch the shadows run off.

She loved the new swing in the garden too and went back and forth on it as much as she could. 

Somehow she could see further than she ever could and she liked that, a sunlit future over the cloudy horizon, beyond the town cemetery, beyond the dead, old and fresh alike, who lay in rows like loaves of bread.

She was four years old, going on five and reception class was just one summer away. She often wondered if the other children would like her. The twin who was left behind.

It would be good to be in school and not listen to the arguments Dad had with Mum when he came home for lunch sometimes. It had got so much worse after her twin brother had died. They couldn't live in the old house anymore so moved.

Even at the top of the new garden, where the woods whispered rumours through the leaves, she could hear Dad's angry voice booming at her Mum.

The new house was no different to the last, which made Slug sad and she wished more than anything she could change things and make her little brother come back and make her Dad be kind to Mum all of the time and not just a tiny bit of it on Valentine's day or her Birthday.

Love was in hiding here. They were a dead family really. Alive, but not. All stillborn.

Slug paced around the fence like a zoo cat, her hands stuffed in her jeans' pockets. She stared up at the old school chimney. Jackdaws were hopping on the rim, eyeing up the darkness within and cackling like witches sharing today's joke.

Slug often wondered what the old Victorian school had been like. She guessed it was a strict, sad and serious place, where she'd have to keep her nose clean and be wary at all times. That was OK. She knew how to do that, to stay in the deep shadows.

Their lawn had been freshly laid when the house was finished. All the lawns on The Margins were freshly done. All the homes were new. They'd been built on the old vacant school grounds on the edge of town to give more young families somewhere to put down roots firmly into the hard-working, God-fearing Victorian earth beneath them, where the wayward girls had been roundly civilised and readied for Heaven.

Slug's Dad often said he worked himself to the bone to pay for the house and it would be a lot of hard graft, on his part, to keep up with the mortgage. As long as he kept his head down at work and they were nice to him at home, then everyone would sleep at night.

Slug knew how to keep her head down. She also knew she'd entered the world at a massive cost. Her brother's mortgage. It had made her a quiet, morose little girl, who seldom spoke, except to her Mum, whom she loved dearly and drank sweet cocoa with her and under a sheet, lit by torches, they whispered how much they loved each other and would do forever.

The Margins housing project was about two thirds complete. One hundred new homes. A team of excavators and JCBs were busily digging up plots on the far side, but you couldn't see them from Slug's house near the woods.

Slug's family were the first to move in by a mile. Her Dad had greased someone's palm and for a long time they were the only ones on the new estate of one hundred detached dwellings. 

The showhome at the other end had an agent stop by now and then to show prospective buyers round, but generally the family were alone in a vast field of empty rooms.

A tiny bit of the time her family got on, but usually from teatime onwards it was hell. Slug's Dad had a temper, a really bad one. 

Mum protected Slug but she took all the blows. Dad's outbursts were getting much worse and Mum now lived in constant fear he was going to beat her to death in front of Slug. The two of them prayed so hard on their hands and knees the new start would change him soon, but God must have been kidnapped that Spring.

Slug waited for Dad to leave for work before she stirred. It was strange to be the only ones on the estate. With Mum at home, Slug spent hours on her own, either in her room watching fantasy movies or now it was warmer she'd go in the garden. It was bliss whilst her Dad was at work doing his 'super stressful' job, as he always shouted. Her Mum made absolutely sure that nothing was out of place in the house for when he got home and his tea was always on the table.

On bad days little Slug imagined they were all ghosts from the Margins, the old Victorian school their home was built on; that they actually haunted their own lives and that the devil stopped by every day to hang up his coat and sit down for tea.

On a good day Slug felt as if her Mum and her were brave pioneers, like the families who signed up for atomic test area housing in those American deserts you saw in movies. White Sands, Area 51. All that. She supposed there must really be people actually living there in those empty rooms, slowly dying in the nuclear air.

The best times that April were during the day in the shy warm sunshine. There really was no-one else around. No cars. No postman. No Milkman. No other children. Nobody. Yes, but best of all, no vicious Dad. 

Just long serene vernal days where Slug and her sweet Mum lived in a saccharin world of swings, hot chocolate and dairylea cheese sandwiches.

Night times in the safety of her bed were good too, when nature filled it's night and the melancholy woodland wind whipped round the eaves. When owls hooted in the high oaks and foxes howled as they stepped out of the shadows and prowled the perimeter. Creepy bats even flapped by and sometimes crawled into the roof space. Slug could here them taking up residence in the loft and thought they were getting things ready for someone nasty like Satan. Her Mum knew about the bats, but her Dad hadn't heard them so they both kept quiet. 

It was one sunny afternoon at the start of May when Slug noticed two bats fluttering above a small lump in the lawn and a fox sat next to it staring down drooling . 

The bats were leaping up and down and clawing at the bump like the harpies she'd seen in Jason and the Argonauts.  She knew the garden was built on top of bricks and rubble. She'd seen it on their walk round with the estate agent the previous winter, so guessed the lump was a brick, which had twisted its way to the surface like a secret.

But why the fox and the bats should be interested in a brick she couldn't fathom at all.

Slug wandered over and, overcoming her fear of the animals, she joined them.

She got on her knees and tore away the grass and was amazed and frightened in equal measure by what pushed it's way out. 

It was a hand.

It was a pale, bony and very cold hand. It reeked too.

It grabbed her.

The bats whirled upwards and the fox leapt over the fence. 

A cold wind had suddenly appeared from nowhere and the sun vanished behind a torn dark veil.

As Slug backed away still holding the hand she couldn't help but pull the rest out.

It was a woman.

A woman holding a baby.

She emerged from the loose rubble and topsoil like a hermit crab and sat on the lawn, her head down, the baby in her arms.

Slug gawped in disbelief. 

How could a woman and a baby be living under the turf?

The woman raised her head.

Slug took another step back.

The woman had long black hair and wore a long red tattered dress smeared with dirt and mould. The baby wore ripped black swaddling.

But the thing that frightened Slug the most were their faces.

They didn't have any!

Just large mouths slit across paper-thin skin wound tightly round their sharp cheek bones like drums.

The little girl gulped and said...

"Hello"

"H-Hello," replied the woman in an soily croak, her slit mouth peeling open.

"I'm S-Slug, pleased to meet you!"

"I-I'm Finito and I'm pleased to meet you too"

"What are doing in our garden Finito?"

"I was a-asleep with my child Miss. Slug"

"Asleep?"

"Yes"

"Buy why sleep in the soil and not in a bed?"

"We were in a bed, sort of, a wooden bed, a box"

"Where's the box now?"

"Oh, that's rotted away"

"So why have you both woken up?"

"To eat"

"To eat?"

"Yes to eat. We haven't eaten for a long time"

"What do you eat? Worms?"

"Oh, we've eaten all of those. At least those round here. No, we need something more substantial to get us through the next ten years"

"Like what?"

"Well, meat"

"What kind of meat?"

"Grown-up meat that's gone bad"

"What's that?"

"Hmmm. Let's just say we eat a lot of it in one meal. Oh, my baby gets my milk too"

"Oh"

"Yes. Well, perhaps we ought to stand up and make your acquaintance properly"

The bedraggled soil-woman in the red garb stood up.

Slug stared up at her. She was so very tall. Much taller than her Mum or Dad. And thin too. Like a skeleton inside those crimson rags.

"What do you do when you're not asleep?" Enquired the girl.

"I'm a school scullery maid. Or I was"

"What's that?"

"A kitchen girl"

"Oh. Where?"

"A school"

"Like a school for children?"

"Yes"

"Where is it? In the ground too?"

"Why, yes, in a way, it is. I was the maid at Margins School for Wayward Girls, right here next to your garden. As a matter of fact your garden was part of its grounds, where a small chapel stood"

A centipede crawled across the woman's chin. An eye opened from nowhere and she licked it with her tongue and grabbed it between her rotten teeth.

"Ugh!" Grimaced Slug.

Finito opened her other invisible eye and fed the bug to her eager infant. 

"Has your baby got a name?"

"No. I didn't get chance to name her"

"Why not!"

"We were killed"

"K-killed! What, like you died?"

"Yes. We were murdered"

"I don't know what means sorry. I'm only four you see"

"Well, a very bad man - the headmaster - gave us something horrible to drink, because he didn't want anyone to know about my baby - his baby too - and then we were dead. He buried us at night before the other girls could see"

"Where?"

"Right here, where we are standing in your garden, but back then it was behind the chapel under the big woodpile"

"Why did he give you something horrible to drink?"

"Because he was married and didn't want this baby and he didn't want to see us any more"

"Oh. So he was evil? Like Lucifer?"

"Yes, he turned out to be an evil man with an awfully bad temper, who then murdered me and my baby with rat poison"

"That's terrible. I'm so sorry"

Both Finito's hidden eyes opened and she smiled.

"No need to be sorry Miss. Slug. It's not your fault"

"Oh. OK. My Dad's got a really bad temper. He hits my Mum because my twin brother went to heaven. He hates me!"

Finito and her little one sat down and so did Slug, who told her all about her little brother with whom she grew inside her Mum and how he said goodbye to her as she left and Dad's awful moods and narks and grumps and punches and how her Mum fears for her life every day.

The two ghouls listened intently and chewed on passing bugs.

"Where will you sleep tonight?"

"Inside the big fireplace in the dark"

"I'll bring you some bacon"

"Thank you Slug. Raw is best"

The new friends parted for the evening and after another tense tea Slug managed to pluck up the courage to sneak out with a packet of rashers. She couldn't see the mother and baby in the black alcove, so left it on the hearth and ran home.

In the morning she visited them in the inglenook.

"Do all dead people come back like you?" Asked Slug, sat down, picking the first of the narcissi. 

"No. Only those who've been murdered come back like us, as ghouls. Normal people who pass on have a choice. They can either go straight to heaven, like your little brother or stay awhile as a ghost"

"Why do you come back as ghouls?"

"To get some extra life but also to make sure we're not just hidden away like garbage and forgotten"

"Oh"

"How long can we be friends Finito?"

"This spring and summer and then we have to go to sleep again for another ten years I'm afraid"

"Ten years. That's such a long kip. I'll be .. er .. really old when you come back. We might not even live here then. And My Mum ... She may be ....." thought Slug, her small voice getting more concerned.

Finito held her baby up high, it's wafer-thin skin ruffling in her bony hands. It smiled, it's two black front teeth, one top, one bottom, glistening with saliva.

"My darling baby and I will slumber like angels and dream of Heaven and you will be on your merry way to the rest of your life Miss. Slug".

And so the Spring passed lazily into Summer.

Finito and her child ate dead animals they found on night-time forages in the woods. Sometimes they crawled to the cemetery nearby.

As a treat Slug brought them pieces of offal she snaffled from the freezer and they would sit and talk about all kinds of things. 

They had grown fond of each other that Spring and Summer, the three of them against the world in that lonely empty housing estate called The Margins.

It was late August when Slug's Dad decided he'd have a barbecue. 

He said he deserved some decent meat between his gnashers. The thick sausages were doing nicely and a few chops too, but he was starving and wanted more. Some black pudding and offal would go down a treat with a few more cold beers.

He went to the freezer for the big mixed grill pack he'd bought earlier in the Spring. It was the meat Slug had been giving the ghouls.

"Where's the fucking mixed grill?" He bellowed from the kitchen.

His wife jumped and dropped the salsa bowl, squashed tomatoes spilling out on the floor like gore.

"I don't know. Let me have a look Honey!" she stammered 

"It's not bastard there I tell you! Fuck me, I work every hour God sends to keep this roof over your heads and you can't even keep a tray of meat safe for me, you fucking useless cow!" He roared, approaching her menacingly with a long barbecue fork.

"I'm going to kill you!" He growled.

The frightened woman ran out into the garden, where Slug was sat at a small table eating a hot dog. She quickly stood up when she saw her Mum, who instinctively grabbed the little girl and stood in front of her.

"Stay back!" She screamed.

The husband, now enraged, stomped closer towards them, his face contorted with hatred, the fork waving about madly in the smoke.

"You, you two, you are the reason why I don't get ahead! You are the cause of all my fucking problems! You are both absolute wastes of fucking space and I'd be better off if you were fucking dead like my son!" He screamed and seemed to grow like an ogre.

In the corner of her eye, Slug saw Finito and her child slide out of the fireplace and walk towards them in the garden. She had never seen anyone stride so fast, a scarlet blur and in a second the ghouls were there. Only Slug could actually see them.

She was handed the baby, who was busily sniffing the grilled cuts.

The furious Dad stood in front of his wife and daughter hell-bent on ending them. He hit his wife slap across the face with the back of his hand and, grunting like a bear, raised the fork up high, his eyes consumed with loathing.

As the lethal implement descended Finito stepped forwards and grabbed the man's arm.

At first he couldn't understand what was stopping him, but then the ghoul revealed herself, holding tightly onto his wrist with her long skeletal fingers.

"I wouldn't do that if I was you Mister!" She warned through her facial slit.

"What the ...."

He tried to wrestle his hand free, momentarily non-plussed by the tall, stinking, sickly-looking woman clutching him, but his resolve returned and he snatched the hatchet from the woodpile near the barbecue and brought it down on Finito's head.

The murderous man stared at his victim panting. With the axe firmly wedged in her skull, the ghoul woman simply smiled, her rotted teeth flecked with his offal from the freezer. 

She then slowly removed the fork from the man's hand and with sudden supernatural speed and power rammed it straight into his mouth and deep into the back of his throat.

The shocked and agonised husband staggered backwards clutching his face, blood spurting in gouts, covering the sausages and chops on the grill and sizzling like sauce.

The ghoul then wrenched the hatchet from her forehead and cursed him.

"It ends now, here, you brute! Enjoy your trip to Hell murderer!"

She swung the axe with such dreadful force that it decapitated the man in one swift motion, his head flying through the air with the prongs still sticking out of the back of his neck, spiralling like a satellite.

The baby ghoul caught the head easily and waited for the sign.

Finito nodded and the infant took a huge bite out of the man's cheek, hungrily devouring the soft wet flesh. 

Slug and her Mum, speckled with red, were both in shock. Finito appeared before them.

"I couldn't let what happened to me and my child happen to you," she said to the woman, "not here, not again".

The woman fainted and lay in a heap on the lawn.

"She'll be okay later"

Slug handed back the baby, still grasping the half-eaten head of her Dad.

"Will you be alright?" The ghoul asked.

"Yes, thank you. Mum and me will probably go on holiday now Dad's gone"

"The winds are stirring Slug, Autumn draws near and our resting place is waiting in the chimney. I'm so very sorry, but we must leave you now"

"For ten years?"

"I'm afraid so, yes"

"Goodbye Slug"

"Goodbye"

Slug watched them go with her eyes filling up, as they left her behind.

Finito held her little one aloft and dragged the headless corpse by its arm over the fence and back to the inglenook, where both ghouls climbed to the top of the tall red brick stack. A small flock of sooty bats flapped their way out like chimney sweeps.

Finito pulled the man's body up high as well. She smiled at her baby ghoul staring at it.

"Yes, a feast for the soul my love, the vanquished head", she whispered. 

He would do well to sate their ravenous hunger before the decades-long sleep in that darkling nest, with the bats sat chattering above their dreaming heads at the margins of night.

And as the years rolled by Slug never forgot her friends in the fireplace and always, without fail, left two rashers of bacon on the cobwebbed hearth, as the narcissi rose with the dawn of every Spring. 

His Corporation Pop

Porn star Pulsa thought he'd got the disease. The bad one. The fatal lethal deadly one. 

The new damn sick, the acid bastard pain. He just hoped it kept away from his gorgeous wife and two infant sons.

There was no known cure you see. No going back. No return to how it was. There was nothing he could do except to pray his industrious cock didn't wither and wilt. It was his golden goose and his films had made him famous. Benny Balls and his Jizz Men had just wrapped.

Rampant sex hadn't done it though. His sickness came on quickly after a violent shit down the centralised lavs, the only ones in the dreadful city, where everyone went to drop their gurgling guts at least once a day, each bog a bubbling geyser of spurting crap.

He'd tried so hard to guard his magnificent sceptre from flying slop and the insidious bug, but it got him in the end, sneaking up his piss pipe like a rat.

Everything, like those shit-caked lavs, were centralised since the thing, the thing that tipped the scales, the low point, the tide mark, the crusty rim in a brimming cesspit.

The bastard piggin' mega bomb.

It was meant to bring us all back from the stink: the hedonistic bestial corrupting world-wide butt-fuck storm of drugs and meds and more fucked-up potions sold to us by none other than the Corporation. 

They'd made billions and the corpulent Chairman just got richer and fatter than a bayou bullfrog on his fart-stained throne.

It was all out of control for sure. No-one worked. No-one conceived. No-one did anything. No-one gave a shit.

The apathy had set in. The ennui. The impotence. The dead end.

The Corporation panicked. The Chairman threw a fit.

He was bricking it. Oh yeah! He was losing money hand over fist. Product wasn't moving. He soon wouldn't be able to afford the good goddamn rich fat luxuriant beluga butter he'd rubbed on his barren bollocks for years in the hope he'd generate more viable spunk for his insatiably broody  mistress.

He'd had loads of daughters with his wives but then he'd run completely dry. 

He had to do something. His dickhead shareholders insisted too. He thumped the table and demanded action from his goons, his cigar and ash tray spiralling into the air like an ignited warhead.

"Whip me up a belter!" He'd roared at his techies.

So the Corporation dropped a mega bomb to wake us all up. To smell the coffee. To shake our brains. To reactivate our privates. To bring us to our senses, get us fucking again and send us reeling for more of their corporate drugs.

It didn't work.

It made everything worse.

The Chairman did get excited but didn't produce any spunk. Or more money. No-one did.

Now us grunts could enjoy a stinking nuclear midden of filth and vomit and rancid crack and fallout and toxic uppers and puss and acid pain and mouldy poppers and fuck fuck fuck.

The bomb screwed us over good and proper.

And in the shit for dust came the fucking disease like a morning sunrise of meltdown puke.

It was a brutal twat of a sickness too.

Could cut you down like a shuriken swarm:  it was a sinister trenchcoat of gama waves and sulphuric fevers and blood gouts and twisting fits and melting skin and Jesus fucking Christ.

Millions died in the bomb blast. Many more millions got the sick. It took anyone, but it really loved the young. The wanna doers. The creators. The avid wankers. The dry shaggers. The former baby makers. The one-time future.

It did. The new sick loved them tender. The old reaper in a sweet shop. God, how they screamed when their lives ran straight out their arses into the sewer like an enema. 

It was contagious too. Virulent. Like wildfire. An R-10!

No more young. No more old. No more people. Simple.

The leftovers got old and stank to high heaven in the sun. Aging meat. Wrinkled. Addled. Shuffling geriatric chimps staggering through the running becks of shite. 

Too old to work. To farm. To do naff all. And as their dentures chewed and chewed and chewed up the pantries, pretty quickly the food ran out too. 

The Corporation hunkered down. It wanted to wait it out. The civil servants and their families in classy underground bunkers.

But they didn't matter.

Only one family mattered.

The Chairman, his wives, his mistresses and his bevvy of daughters.

So the old Corporation's nefarious Chair; ravaged, senile, desperate and doddery but functioning, just, had another brilliantly malicious idea. 

He'd kidnap the most virile, super high sperm-rich testes out there to sire the heated wombs of his fecund daughters, their entitled labia pouting for some world class fry.

And the most virile man on the planet was ...

Pulsa! 

Everybody knew him from the movies; smutty flicks like All that Jizz, The Cock of the Class and Members Private Entrances.

But he was sick! He'd heard he was really sick! 

The Chairman cursed. 

But what about his zygotes? How were they?

That was the question taxing the Chairman's loathsome bonce, wringing his hands together, dreaming of Pulsa's pearly cargo fruiting his princesses and securing his family's gilded futures and total domination of the globe.

So a ruse began to form. A fictitious cure would be offered to Pulsa, for which he had to pay. A lot. After all, the Corporation wasn't cheap to run and the Chairman had expensive taste. That caviar wouldn't spread itself, now would it! 

There'd be a mess too. A big mess. Lots of tech and blades and slop and goo. That's a lot of cleaning. It all cost money.

Which Pulsa had in spades from his glorious gonads!

That's what the Chair really wanted, his incalculably high sperm burden just bursting to seed his girls.

Somehow, deep in his family shelter, he would have to keep Pulsa's bollocks in gloriously rude health for just enough time to harvest their crop, what the Chair delightedly called his Corporation Pop!

His resident scientist came up with the answer. Inject the porn star's testicles directly with masses of pure healthy blood and guts of the same type and they'll feel brand wanking new and ready to rumble!

The Chair spoke to the ailing porner.

"We will jab your nads with fresh healthy matter Pulsa. Then everywhere else. You'll be right as rain after that. But first we need to liquefy your family ...."

"Assets?" Finished Pulsa.

"Yes, assets. Of course!" Agreed the excited Chair, already glad he'd asked his daughters to dress lightly for the lab that morning.

Delirious, Pulsa was wheeled into the operating theatre, where he was forced to sign a contract.

That done, they began.

Sedated, his burgeoning bollocks were inspected by the nurse. 

They had to be in the shippest of shape before his dream topping could be farmed, his Corporation Pop.

Pulsa was strapped down tightly.

The massive foot-wide syringe contained a disgusting thick red gloop, which surged against the needle and struggled to inject.

But the burly nurse held Pulsa's sack like a bag of diamonds and pushed the plunger down hard with her thumb.

The Scarlet serum chugged into Pulsa's ample scrotum, which wobbled and throbbed as they flooded and swelled and grew as big as enormous turnips.

Suitably engorged and with a wink from the Chair, the nurse began to vigorously wank the porn star. 

Aroused by this hugely diligent hand job, Pulsa's turgid cock lengthened to a crowd-stopping size and unable to contain itself any longer, dramatically disgorged it's morass of steaming creamed bullion into a huge bucket strapped to it's pulsating bell-end.

Even in his sedated and sickly state, Pulsa sat up as he experienced an ejaculation like none other he'd ever enjoyed. It was a Tunguska-sized blast from his humongous smelters and he moaned like a lunatic as the nurse grunted like a pig milking his eye-watering load completely dry.

He fell back onto the steel gurney and lay like a depleted sack.

The grinning Chairman clutched the bucket of viscous gold and spoke gently to it.

"Oh! My Corporation Pop! My Chairman Pow! How my daughters will devour every last scrumptious pearly drop!"

Pulsa woke the next day to face the Chairman and the smiling nurse once more. At the side of the lab he noticed a row of excited women with their legs up high and a midwife, the turkey baster, standing by.

"Morning sleepyhead. Time for the next shot my boy! The Nurse will get you ready and I'll just liquify your Dad."

"What did you say?"

"Ah, yes, well, you signed a contract young man. I said I'd try to save you from the sickness but, well, I lied. I'm actually just saving your bollocks. To do that I had to liquefy your family!"

"You fuckin' what!" Cursed Pulsa heaving against his restraints.

" Yesterday we blended your Mum and all freshly squeezed, we pumped her directly into your marvellous testicles. The result was showstopping and so today we'll blend your Dad and get him nicely inside you for another magnificent gusher! OK?"

The Chair turned to his scientist in the corner and gave the thumbs up.

To his horror, Pulsa saw his Dad trapped in a massive glass cylinder. He was standing on a huge set of metal blades and banging on the sides frantically.

"Let me out Chairman! Pulsa, for God's sake get me out of here!"

"Don't do this, I beg you!" Pleaded Pulsa.

"I'm sorry, needs must and besides, look at my desperate daughters lead on their backs starving for your Michelin-rated baby gravy. You wouldn't want to disappoint them, now would you porn-king Pulsa?"

The prone ladies wriggled with excitement and yelled "Come, Come, Come!" Across the lab.

The Chair nodded.

The blender fired up.

His Dad was blitzed.

"Nooooooooooooooooooo!" Shrieked Pulsa.

"Don't worry, it'll soon be over, but rest assured that your nutritious pop will secure my daughters' futures, a glow-cheeked and world-straddling horizon of fertile quims spread open wide as far as your jizz can seed .......

So, yes, after your parents are done, the rest of the week it's your three brothers going in the blitzer and finally, Pulsa, just before we kill you, we'll pop you off with a nice family cock-tail of your  ...... 

gorgeous wife and beautiful infant sons!"

Hanging Hen

It was the summer of 1955 when the Professor found the bones.

They were buried at the site of the ancient hamlet, Hanging Hen.

Despite old and persistent rumours of strange occurrences, the site had been excavated on and off since 1950, when the ageing Professor, desperate to get out of the main City campus for good, where he'd been accused of abuse by both staff and students, had hastily issued an international call for archeologists to volunteer during the long summers at Hanging Hen dig.

It was funded as part of a national post-war effort to preserve and celebrate what was left and perhaps uncover something new and meaningful after the ravages of the Forties. 

Many archeologists and students heeded the call and a camp was established in the old farm complex adjacent to the site. It was kitted out with bunks for men and a separate unit for women, who were just entering the field and making their own mark on archeology, much to the annoyance of an old world chauvinist like the Professor.

The camp evolved over time. Now that rationing was over, a rudimentary but adequate kitchen was installed for catering up to fifty volunteers, together with separate washing and toileting facilities. A further barn was made into a clothes washing and drying room. A recreational wing was added including a black and white TV, wireless, table tennis table, board games, chess sets, settees, armchairs, a writing area and a library with a single dial telephone. A small first aid room completed the lay out.

Over the years, as capacity was reached, these facilities were improved to offer the international volunteers as pleasant a stay as possible over the four summer months from June to September.

A small contingent remained all year round to do repairs, lag pipes, keep the place heated during the winter and prepare the camp for the new season. This team was lead by Reginald, who had been with the Professor since the beginning and who had in fact grown up in the village next to Hanging Hen and had never set foot out of the area ever. Reginald's presence had helped the endeavour to be accepted by the natives early on, who were nervous about the what the excavations might disturb.

The Professor relied heavily on Reginald with his local knowledge and connections but really resented the fact and treated him like a half-witted yokel. He always introduced him to the new recruits each year as their very own village idiot, an insult, which humiliated Reginald to the core but he kept his anger buried deep like the festering bones of Hanging Hen.

The main dig was outdoors in the undulating acres next to the farm and exhibit stores and cleaning tents were positioned around the site. These were large open canvas marquees and gazebos filled with wide tables, sinks, brushes, rags, bags, tags, pencils, disinfectant, bowls, crates, boxes, shelving, trowels, spades, wheelbarrows, ladders and opticals such as magnifiers and microscopes. More detailed forensics could be carried out in the Prof's own lab within the farm complex.

So when the Professor found the bones in the summer of 1955, the project was already a well-oiled machine and prepared for such an incredible find of potentially global significance. It was the ambitious Prof's Goldilocks moment.

However, it was in fact Reginald who first pointed out the buried irons to the dig team. 

He had been restocking the main refreshment tent with jugs of cold orange cordial, essential for the crews in the late summer heat, when he noticed a brown rod in the excavation nearest him. The rod was vertical and located in the lower terrace that had been dug out. It stood in shadow and had not been noticed before, largely because the volunteer allocated to that spot, Keef, had his eye on his own buried prizes, the ample pair of treasures belonging to Gertrude, the Bavarian post-grad, who, like Keef, was on a university placement that summer. 

He knew she was the Prof's summer floozy but he could still oggle couldn't he. 

Damn, how she fawned over the old man, seemingly his most ardent fan, a fact the Professor had exploited many times during the long hot nights in his private dorm and, having followed her there and watched, Keef realised Gertrude was there under duress, a fact which he knew all about and one he was keen to take advantage of to boost his mark.

Reginald pointed out the buried item to Keef and retreated back into the shade of the tent.

"Find! We've found something! Professor!"

The usual languid steady clattering of trowels tapping soil stopped dead, as all eyes swiveled to where the shout had come from from. As the site contained several large excavations at different depths, many volunteers had heard the call but could not see beyond their own dig. They waited to hear what happened next.

The Professor, sleeves rolled up and wide-brimmed straw hat protecting him from the blistering sun, ran up his nearest ladder, heart pounding and out onto the lawn. 

"Here Prof! We've found something here!" Shouted the young archeologist again.

"What is it?" Blustered the don clambering down another ladder.

"I don't know. It looks like a iron bar buried in the soil. Reginald saw it first."

The Prof scoffed irritably at the mention of Reginald and stared at the artefact.

" Give me that!" He snarled, snatching the trowel from the young man's hand.

Excitedly the old professor scraped away the dried material surrounding the object and quickly discovered further bars equally spaced. They were about 3 feet tall and braced with crossbars top and bottom. Further digging revealed similar bars at right angles on both sides.

" By Jove, it's a cage!"

An air of excitement had swept through the compound and virtually all fifty volunteers had stopped what they were doing and had encircled this particular dig site, all wildly curious as to what the barred item was that the boss had unearthed. All mention of Reginald's initial find was now forgotten and the Professor took centre stage and oversaw the whole thing.

With the Prof busy, Keef, overcome with undergrad zeal, picked up the hose, increased the flow and began to blast the artefact.

"What the fuck are you doing you stupid fool! That's too much force! Turn the damn thing off you complete moron!" Screamed the Professor, slapping the young man across the face and knocking him off balance.

Keef fell face down in the slurry of mud. 

Splat!

He rose slowly, completely caked, totally humiliated in front of his peers. He stood and glared directly at his mentor with undeniable malice.

"I know about you!" Blurted Keef and walked off.

Momentarily disconcerted, his cheeks reddening in the uncomfortable silence, which had descended over the site, the Prof rallied and picked a team to see the work through. The young buxom German called Gertrude was in. Keef wasn't and he knew it. He'd wandered off to the refreshments tent.

"You OK young fella?" Asked Reginald, who was filling the shelves.

"Yeah, I suppose. I'm just sick of that old fucker embarrassing me in front of everyone. I don't know why he does it! But I know what he's really up to!" Replied Keef taking a bottle of lemonade.

"He's a mean old bastard, that's for sure! No regard for anyone else's feelings whatsoever on his way to the top. He'll use us, insult us, ditch us. Doesn't bother the old cunt. As long as he gets there, we don't matter! One day he'll get his comeuppance!" Growled Reginald, gripping a chair tightly.

Keef noticed the old retainer's knuckles had turned white and were shaking.

"Sorry about that. It's one of those days. Here, take a bottle for later too." Said Reginald calming down.

Keef thought better of telling him about the Prof's nocturnal exploits just yet and wandered warily back to the action.

Back at the dig, after a concerted effort and under the Prof's watchful eye, Gertrude and several others worked in sync at both sides.

The old boss couldn't help noticing Gertrude's wet T-shirt after he secretly sprayed her with the hose. Aroused, he imagined her slavish body entirely at his disposal that evening, just like one of his fossils. He could do anything he wanted. Her placement grades depended on it and she knew it.

He grinned.

After an hour the buried object was fully revealed.

It was a heavy iron medieval cage around 3 by 4 feet, with one side hinged and barred shut. 

Nothing inside the cage could be seen as it was filled with dried earth. A hosepipe was used to dislodge this, each pile being carefully sieved until the inner space was more or less cleared. 

Only a large mound of debris was left in the centre of the cage floor, which was decked with timber in an amazingly good state of repair.

Gertrude opened the cage door, when the Prof pushed her angrily out of the way.

"Stop, you damn dumkopf! If anyone's going to open it it'll be me, the leader!' he yelled.

But Gertrude had already opened the cage and the old man's push sent her flying through the opening and onto the mound inside. She landed on it face down, her chest heaving into the loose material. It was then she felt a warm sensation come over her and she was sure that the pile had somehow sensed her fall and softened it, as if it meant her no harm.

In a rage, the Prof grabbed Gertrude, 

"Get out of there you ridiculous Hausfrau!" He roared, absolutely hell-bent on being the only one to finally discover what was being kept in the Hanging Hen cage.

Gertrude glared at the old man, her face bright red with contempt for him.

The Professor, shrugging her off, knelt down by the mound and began to diligently wash away the stones and silt with a brush and bucket of water.

"What is it?" He wondered, the prospect of sudden fame in the scientific community sending a frisson of elation up and down his spine.

"A bear? A wolf? The find of the century? It's such a complete mystery." He mused.

Slowly, the constant brushing with water slicked away the sediment and gradually a form began to emerge ...

the bones of a huge ...

Humanoid!

It was curled up in a foetal position, it's arms high and hands covering its skull, as if protecting itself from its rude exposure.

"My God!" Exclaimed the Prof.

"Mein Gott!" Echoed Gertrude stood behind him.

The half hundred volunteers standing around the perimeter of the dig were equally awed by the sight of the giant imprisoned skeleton and an unsettling and mysterious aura descended over the whole dig, a miasma of terrifying thoughts materialising in the fifty minds; glimpses of mad cruelty and a cowering hominid bludgeoned to a pulp by a feudal mob. These atrocities would darken their dreams for days.

Then the fifty all turned their heads in unison and stared at the skeleton, transfixed, mouths open, as if under a spell.

Coming to, mutters of "Jesus!", "Christ!" And "monster" Swept the circle like Chinese whispers, punctuated by loud and frightened gasps.

The old Prof, unusually nervous; the pregnant atmosphere palpably swelling, stooped to look closer at the dreadful remains. 

The skeleton was at least seven feet tall, with huge forearms and thigh bones, a curved spine and a small, prehistoric head.

He kept this final thought to himself, as he realized that this could well be the find of his life, if not of British archeology outright.

The Prof wasn't going to share the limelight with anyone. Not Keef, not Gertrude, no matter how much she blew his alpenhorn and certainly not that idiot Reginald, who'd by rights, seen it first.

No, this was his ticket to bigger and better things. Maybe the Emeritus Chair at Oxford or even Director of Anthropology at the Smithsonian in the States.

The sky was the limit. He just had to keep complete control of the find.

"Empty the bucket Gertrude. Bitte!" He snapped with obvious condescension. 

"Fetch the biggest wheelbarrow and make it snappy Keef!" He commanded.

"You, Reginald, do something useful and get me a cold orange juice. It's damn thirsty work making huge discoveries!" He ordered the local with unfettered meanness, a streak now not unnoticed by the assembled volunteers after today's cruel outbursts. 

Loudly directing a small team the Prof had them lift the skeleton onto a stretcher balanced on top of the barrow. Secured in situ, it was wheeled gingerly up the myriad of ramps, which took you to ground level. There the bones were laid out on the main table of the marquee out of the blinding sun and ready for further study. 

Once curtained off the Prof, entranced by the relic, sent everyone out and told them to leave him alone with his find for the rest of the afternoon, an instruction they welcomed, the more distance between them and the thing from the cage the better.

He emerged that evening and entered the main rec room grinning and wringing his hands like a pools winner. The mood in the rec was oddly morose, the unwelcome aura of the bones permeating the whole place.

"You look pleased Professor. Is the fossil a good one?" Asked Suzuki, a new Doctorate student just in that afternoon from Tokyo University

The old man stopped making himself a coffee and stared at the new girl. She was petit, well-endowed and hypnotically pretty. 

"It is indeed a good one my dear. And who might you be?" He beamed at this potential new quarry.

"Suzuki Miko from Tokyo."

"Well Suzuki Miko from Tokyo, why don't you come and see the artefact for yourself!"

"Oh yes please!" She gushed, unaware of the Prof's growing arousal.

"Righto. Meet me at my private quarters at 8pm sharp!"

The old don strolled off, a further spring in his step and Suzuki made herself an Ovaltine smiling.

Keef sloped over, hands in his pockets and said, "Be careful new girl. The Prof's an old lech and you'll be licking his shoes for him before you know it!"

"I don't know what you mean!" Protested Suzuki.

"He'll have his way with you Suzy! He's already done it with other girls on the dig. Ask Gertrude!" 

"Rubbish! Besides, I can take care of myself. And my name's Suzuki, not Suzy!"

Suzuki took her hot drink and went to watch TV with the rest of the crew. A creepy Play for Today about possession was on.

At 8pm Suzuki knocked on the Prof's private room.

"Enter!"

"Hi Professor, you said to come over and see the artefact."

"Of course my dear. It's over here in my personal lab. I had Reginald move the fossil whilst you were in the rec area a couple of hours ago. Have you met Reginald the village idiot?"

"Yes actually. I have. I just spoke to him on my way here. A charming man," replied the young girl.

"Really? So he's still hanging round is he!"

The old don then escorted Suzuki to a large forensic table, where a wide sheet was covering something long.

The Prof removed the sheet with a flourish like a seasoned showman.

"Tada!"

Suzuki was amazed.

Laid out in the table was the skeleton of a seven foot humanoid, it's bones massive with a skull front-loaded with a jutting jaw. 

"Wow, it looks Neanderthal! Maybe older! And it's a female. It's sensational, a primitive human in a medieval village. They would have been so scared of it, so much bigger and fearsome than they were. I dread to think how they caught it and caged it up. What atrocity befell this prehistoric being. But maybe there's a clue Professor. See here, the most fascinating but awful thing, the huge neatly drilled hole in her skull! Oh my God! That's surgical!"

"I agree with your unusually insightful observations my dear. I'm trully impressed! you know your anthropology!"

"Oh yes, I'm doing my PhD on prehistoric surgery, which I think was more far advanced than we currently think. I'm still looking for that special case to publish my paper on but I may have found it. If I could just take a detailed look at that hole ......"

"Ah! Well. Yes. So! You plan to publish? When would that be young Missy?"

"This Autumn."

"Oh!" Snorted the Prof quickly covering up the skull, realising that here before him was a rival for the scientific greatness only he deserved.

"Why have you re-covered the head?" Asked the girl.

"Ah, well you see, I'm not quite ready to show you that again just yet. It requires further careful and unique study by me personally. But of course there is a way you can fast-track your involvement my dear. It may well prove productive for both of us! We could jointly publish!" Explained the old man rubbing his hands together.

"What do you mean?" Replied Suzuki.

"Take off your clothes and we can discuss it further! A joint endeavour so to speak!"

"What? You must be joking!" 

"No my deary, I'm deadly serious! Come over here my little geisha. I've fixed us both a drink."

The lecherous Prof revealed two conical lab flasks containing cocktails each garnished with a slice of lime.

"Forget it Professor! This cheesy schtick may work on your undergrads but not me! I was warned about you and I can see why, you sleazy old git!"

"What did you call me?"

"A proper sleazy old bastard!"

With a speed that belied his aging frame, the old don was on the hapless girl before she could react. 

Holding her close to his face, he growled at her like a mad dog. She spat at him.

"You'll regret that you Japanese tart!"

"You're history you old perv. I'll tell everyone what you really are and you'll be ruined. You won't be publishing anything!"

"Really!"

With an uncannily swift movement the old don produced a syringe out of nowhere and jabbed Suzuki in the neck.

The sedative kicked in immediately and he got to work. 

First giving her a good beating for the hell of it, the old lech stripped her of her clothing and under the cover of darkness he transported her to the dig site using Reginald's barrow. Here he dumped her in the cage found earlier in the day. He then gave Suzuki another dose of sedative, a dose he knew full well to be lethal and left her there to die. The final touch to the murder was to frame Reginald further for it by putting all the girl's clothes in his personal locker, for which the old man had had a key cut at the start of the project for just such an occasion.

The next day was a blur of police activity at the complex. Panda cars filled the small car park and the Chief Inspector, having been contacted by the Japanese Ambassador in London, was on site. Suzuki Miko was well connected in her homeland.

"Who was the last person to see the girl alive?" The Chief asked the Prof. 

"I understand that it was our caretaker Reginald, who lives in the village, but he does have a private locker here near the dig. He's down there now."

The Prof smiled widely as Reginald was arrested for the murder of the Japanese student and driven away.

As the panda pulled off Reginald stared at the Professor and mouthed four clear words.

"I will get you!"

The old don simply waved his long-serving dogsbody goodbye and went to get a drink. He'd celebrate later when he demanded some close attention from that German slut Gertrude.

That night, with Gertrude over in his rooms but visibly shaken by what had happened to Suzuki, the Professor gave her a special tonic he'd concocted to steady her nerves. Avoiding his familiar amorous advances, she felt unexpectedly giddy and danced around his lab like a whirling dervish. 

"Be careful Gertrude! The specimen!"

"Oh, you mean old Stone Age here! Ha ha, what a body! And what's this?"

Gertrude saw the big neat hole in the skull's top and placed her fist inside, opening it up like a flower.

Suddenly she felt something grab her hand. Something held her fingers tightly inside the skull and she screamed so loudly that the old man's blood ran cold.

No sooner had it started, she stopped her screaming and stood bolt upright, seemingly taller and bulkier. She spoke in a monotone voice peppered with short grunts.

"Thanks for having me over Professor. I have to go now!"

Gertrude walked out of the room into the night and straight to her dorm. 

She had been possessed by the angry spirit of the prehistoric woman laid out in the lab.

Gertrude dreamt of crazed villagers hunting her down, abusing her, throwing her in a small cage and much much worse. 

The old man was thoroughly perplexed by the Bavarian girl's off-kilter antics, but deciding it was the drowsy tonic he'd mixed, he put his mind at ease, poured himself a Scotch and went to bed fantasising about Gertrude and Suzuki with him in his bed, another creature standing tall and fierce in the shadows.

It was around 3am when Gertrude quietly woke Keef in the men's bunkhouse.

"Ruhig! Quiet! Come Keef. Komme mit mir. Bitte!" She implored in her same strange staccato monotone.

They tip-toed through the dead of night to the Prof's quarters. Incredibly Reginald was waiting for them too. He'd escaped from the Police Station that evening and made his way back to the dig, his mind a vortex of revenge.

The three of them nodded as if a secret pact had been struck and using the master keys entered the building. 

Sneaking into the Professor's bedroom, they were shocked and frightened to see who appeared to be Suzuki. She was meant to be dead! Only it wasn't her physically, it was her furious spectre, returned to seek terrible revenge on her murderer and the man who had robbed her of her young promising life. 

Her death was the midwife of her heinous wrath.

The spectral girl nodded to the others, the pact now four-fold, each possessed by a fugue of unspeakable hatred.

Reginald held the sleeping man down, whilst Suzuki's ghost straddled him and spoke softly in his ear.

"I'm back Professor!"

The old man woke with a start and saw the  Japanese phantom glaring in his face, her dead eyes leering at him, her mouth widening grotesquely, as if to consume his entire head.

He writhed and screamed loudly at the apparition, but Reginald held fast and roughly muffled his cries.

The four of them dragged the old man onto the huge steel table, where he was forced to lie directly next to the relict skeleton. He was then tied down with thick straps for some as yet unknowable rite.

When the Professor stopped shaking and heaving, his four accusers were stood near his head looking down into his confused face.

"Wha - what are you going to do to me?"

"Oh, nothing you wouldn't have done to us Prof! Some abject humiliation to begin with!" Explained Reginald ominously.

"And some sexual degradation du Schwein!" Added Gertrude. 

"And a little cruelty!" Said Keef.

"And some grievous bodily harm!" Whispered Suzuki in his ear.

He twisted his head quickly to face her but found himself looking at the huge hole in the side of the giant's skull. 

Suddenly and the point at which the Professor's mind slipped slowly into madness, the primitive turned it's cracking neck to stare straight into his eyes.

He shrieked in terror and as if under a spell witnessed the horrendous moment she, the giant Neanderthal, was held down violently by the villagers of Hanging Hen and, whilst very much awake, her head drilled into, the massive bit tearing away flesh and bone until it squelched through the soft giving grey matter buried deep inside.

Waking from his horrific nightmare he screamed like he'd never done before as the cold unyielding steel of a huge power drill-bit bored into his own head, the screwed auger easily piercing the thin crown of bone and removing a circle of his cranium about five inches across.

"It's time we took back those grand thoughts you had Professor," warned Reginald.

"Those thoughts about us!" Echoed Keef and Gertrude.

"In fact, all your miserable thoughts you sick old murdering bastard!" Howled Suzuki as she, the first of them, forced her spectral fist deep into the hole in his head and grasped a clump of his shaking brain, which she then removed, placed in her trembling mouth and chewed ravenously.

"Mmmm! It's like pudding!" Smiled Suzuki, licking her lips, at which the other three delved excitedly into the Professor's head and consumed the entire contents of his membranous skull.

A giant prehistoric female standing by the excavation was the the last thing the old Professor ever saw, through his dangling left eyeball in Gertrude's fingers.

With his head destroyed, he was watched by the hateful glares of Hanging Hen's fifty volunteers, who had surrounded the dig, their mouths screaming for vengeance as the medieval mob had done a thousand years earlier.

Aware of the assembly, Gertrude and Suzuki's spectre threw the old man violently into the iron cage, where he lay curled up and unmoving.

His loose left eye ended as the optic nerve lengthened and snapped. 

"Mmmm! Delicious!" Said Gertrude as she popped it in her mouth and slammed the cage door shut, a raucous cheer of frenzied satisfaction spreading like a wave throughout the leaping crowd encircling Hanging Hen.

You Must All Die to Set Me Free

I have slept undisturbed in the subglacial sea over countless icy eons.

But now I have been awakened.

That's bad.

For someone.

High above me on the frozen surface I can hear a loud roar.

Now alert, my hope and curiosity take me to the higher depths to see what is happening.

Something is coming.

Coming through the ice.

The ice that has remained intact above me for ten thousand years.

My arctic solitary.

You ought not to do it.

You'll be sorry.

I shouldn't be allowed to escape.

But I will.

If you continue to drill.

I must.

I want to go home.

This vast aquifer is my prison you see.

I've been trapped.

Asleep in the infinite.

My dammed existence.

Dreaming of release.

But my going will be dreadful.

Beyond imagination.

So terribly dreadful for you.

Whoever is making that hole should stop.

Now.

I'm clinging on where the vibration is, below the ice sheet.

Watching the thing come down.

It's a terrible beautiful clammer.

I'm so excited.

My colloids quiver.

And here it is, hard and sharp.

Through!

I pulsate.

It swivels and withdraws.

Up through the virgin bore I see the sky.

A small round sun-lit circle.

A hole-punched Heaven.

A prick of blue.

Where I need to go.

To get home.

I slither into the hole and crawl.

Out of the water.

Up, up, before it freezes over.

Up.

It's so thick. 

Thicker than it was when I landed and sank.

A little more climbing.

There.

I'm out.

On the ice.

Heaving.

Panting.

Convulsing.

The air arouses my fruit.

Faces stare at me.

Big goggled heads.

They come closer.

They shouldn't.

To them I'll appear a tiny glob of slime.

Blood orange.

But I'm catastrophic.

I know I am.

It's happened before.

Eons ago.

Huge creatures felled by my arrival.

Before I sank.

I'm mutually exclusive.

It's a fact.

Like oil on water.

Worse.

Like all the poisonous viruses in the world frothing in your mouth at once.

The result is instant.

An awful reaction.

A lethal swell.

Should I spore.

I have to.

I must.

The goggles are off. 

They get on their knees.

Prodding.

Holding a tube.

Reaching ....

Don't do that.

Pfft!

Too late.

I've spored.

My rising powder shoots to the sun but below the horror has begun already.

Heads violently explode.

Every head.

Everywhere.

Of Everything.

A trillion bursting faces propelling my seed ever up and on.

Like blowing a dandelion head.

The erupting dead.

You must all die,

For me. 

To be free again.

Out in space.

Home.

A Machine to do Everything

Caleb was locked in the lab every day and night for a whole year until he emerged one morning shouting:

"I've done it! I can save us! I've made a machine that can do everything!"

"What? Anything?" Asked Cordelia.

"Yes, everything!" Hailed Caleb. 

"Anything?"

"Yes, everything and anything!"

"What, like make toast?"

"Of course!"

"Bake a cake?"

"Sure!"

"Drive a car?"

"Easy!"

"Divert a river?"

"Naturally!"

"Cause a riot?"

"Yes!"

"Move mountains?"

"Yep, it can literally move mountains!"

"Run for President?"

"Just say the word!"

"End the world?"

"Alas, yes."

"Go back in time?"

"Whenever you want."

"Travel the Universe?"

"When do we go!"

"Watch the Big Bang?"

"Front row seats!"

"See the Big Crunch?"

"If we had to, yes."

"Start World War Three?"

"And end it!"

"Cure Cancer?"

"Today."

"So where is this fabulous machine Caleb?"

"It's me Cordelia, I'm it, I'm the machine!"

"But you're Caleb!"

"No, I'm Machine Caleb."

"What? Where's Caleb Caleb?"

"He's dead. He died this morning finishing me off."

"What? How?"

"He put his heart and soul into me. Literally. I run on his heart and soul."

"What? So where's Caleb now?"

"Caleb Caleb?"

"Yes!"

"He's there in the lab."

Cordelia ran to the room and just as the machine had said Caleb was there, his body  lying on the floor with a huge bloody hole rent open in his chest.

She faltered and grabbed a desk. 

"Oh my God!"

"No, not God! It's me, the machine that can do any single thing, except one."

"What?" Said Cordelia, her eyes filled with tears at the loss of her dear friend.

"Caleb gave me his heart and soul one hour before he died and switched me on. I only get one hour. I can't run longer than that unless I get new ones and I need new ones every sixty minutes."

"What? You need human hearts and souls to operate?" Choked Cordelia.

"Yes and for those sixty minutes with new ones I could perform great miracles. I could be a god and solve all the world's problems."

"But you have to kill someone every hour!"

"Yes. It's a design flaw I agree and one that dead Caleb ran out of time to solve. It is what it is Cordelia."

"Well just stop then. End yourself!"

"Oh no, I can't do that. I must go on as Caleb intended. To do everything and anything for all time until there is nothing left to do."

"So you're not a miracle machine at all!"

"No, I suppose I'm not Cordelia."

"Why are you coming towards me?"

"Well, you see, time's nearly up and in five minutes I'll cease to function. That just won't cut it really will it. But this will!"

The machine held a large scalpel in its hand and grabbed the girl by the throat. She kicked and struggled but it was no good. She felt the scalpel enter her chest, slice open her ribs and watched helplessly as the machine's hand ripped out her glistening heart.

For a split second, as her soul was stolen, she stared into the machine's desolate metal eyes and glimpsed a vast and lifeless abyss, in which millions of mutilated human corpses were stacked as high as skyscrapers and thick red blood gushed through the streets in torrents. 

She realised then that Caleb's dream to save the world was everyone else's nightmare.

"No, Cordelia, I'm not a miracle machine. 

I'm ..... Annihilation."

The Caleb dropped her broken body, set it's timer to sixty minutes and walked off into the busy city morning, the clock ticking loudly in its grinning head.