a strange tale with original art by Jorge Peña

The sun sank low across the desert, dragging the temperature with it. In the absence of day, the nearby fast food sign struggled to illuminate the parking lot but lost the battle at the border. The terminus of cracked tarmac demarcated the end of human artifice and beginning of wasteland. The golden arches cast a sallow pall on our skin. I felt hungry.

I finally spoke, “Can we at least get something to eat before they show?”

“Look,” His eyes glistening beneath his thick-rimmed glasses, Devon kept his gaze on the horizon. I followed my friend’s eyeline. The sun dipped behind the distant hills on the western side of the basin. In the resulting green flash, we both discerned a small object in the distance, traveling toward us from the North.

The thing was bright orange, standing out like a citrus insect amid the blandness of the surrounding desert. As it got closer, I discerned a vintage sports car. No idea what the make and model could be—I’m not really a car person. It struck me that, should they decide to attack us, I wouldn’t be able to identify the vehicle other than, “mid-life crisis in tangerine.”

It’s hard to remember it all correctly. Looking back, the episode emerges in fragments, like when floating chunks piece together the story of a flood. Devon had just picked me up from the psyche ward and said we were gonna celebrate at Mickey D’s. I should’ve recognized the euphemism, but I was so loopy from the apomorphine. I shouldn’t have gone with him. But then again, I had no one else to pick me up.

Before getting fifty-one-fifty’d, I had been self-regulating my warbly perception, vacillating over and under the counter, if you catch my drift. Now I was in major withdrawal; midnight oil burned down to whale skin husk. I could feel my organism struggling to squeeze the liquid world into its dilapidated pores. Nothing was shaped correctly. Even the stars were wrong. In tense anticipation of the car’s approach, I gazed westward and spotted a tall rock shaped like a rabbit some ways away. Yeah, I remember that.

Heralding the night, the car crossed the threshold and entered the lot. Its headlights blasted the asphalt, starkly throwing our silhouettes against the fast food joint. It slowed, then spun around so that its trunk faced us. There it idled, headlights aimed at the desert whence it emerged. Neither of us moved. It got dark really fast.

Through the back window, I made out a single figure in the front seat. Devon and I didn’t budge. The driver side door opened, and a man stepped out. He wore blue jeans and an old black leather jacket. His right sleeve was torn off, exposing his thin, pale, hairless arm. The car’s cabin light flicked on, and I spotted a woman lying motionless in the back seat.

The sight of her chilled my blood. I wanted to leave immediately.

The man approached us, leaving the car door open. I regarded the stranger properly as he stepped into the tail lights’ crimson glow. He was striking, only slightly taller than me, but much sturdier. Couldn’t have been more than forty. A tangle of esoteric symbols and jewels dangled on necklaces over his filthy undershirt. His hair was white or platinum blonde—hard to tell in the dying sunset. Hard lines had set into the tan skin of his rectangular face, which bore a large tattoo of a curved knife. The hilt rested on his forehead with the blade crossing one eye and running down his cheek. He remained a few feet away, staring with opaque gray eyes. I realized that one edge of the blade on his cheek was an actual scar that had been worked into the tattoo’s design.

The stranger spoke in a crisp voice, “Last travelers to the city of man, most lost.” He laid one hand on his hip—the other held a briefcase.

 Masking my apprehension, I warily returned his gaze. 

Devon finally piped up, “Are you Gholü?”

The man raised an eyebrow, betraying nothing.

“I was given your name by Lucifia,” he quickly added, “Calls herself Satan’s Daughter.”

“Satan’s gotta lotta daughters,” said Gholü, his expression still cryptic. He promptly squatted and laid the metal briefcase on the dry, cracked earth. I assumed that meant Devon had said the right thing. As his jacket flapped, I spotted a scabbard on his belt. Big dagger in it.

Gholü popped open the case. An interior bulb shed emerald light onto an assortment of containers: baggies of pills and powder, glass tubes of strangely coloured liquids, and smoking pipes of various shapes and sizes.

“Plants or synthetic?” asked Gholü, his demeanor shifting to a frictionless warmth. “Certain travelers desire communion with their biospheric siblings. Food of the gods and whatnot.” He held up a baggie of white powder then, as if sensing my reticence, dropped it quickly.

“But all shapes are welcome in the cosmos,” he continued, “neurochemical archons synthesize every dispatch under Wotan’s eye, most watchful.” 

I wished we had gone inside the Mickey D’s.

“Actually,” said Devon, “I’m seeking something specific.”

“Say the magic word.”

Devon finally asked what he had been holding in: “Do you have the gnewt?”

Gholü’s sword tattoo crinkled with astonishment. Simultaneously, a voice came from inside the car: “Mind blower! I hardly know ‘er!”

The woman sat up from the back seat. Through the window, I could make out her tan skin and sandy brown hair. A gaunt smile glazed her features as she leered through the glass. She wore an unbuttoned blue shirt over a yellowish tank top. Reaching out the open driver door, she held up a badge. My heart nearly stopped on the spot. Below a gold star twinkled the most terrifying words in my vocabulary: Los Tindaz Police Department.

“It’s okay,” she said sardonically, “I’m undercover.” She caught my anxious eye and held up her hand in imitation of a pistol. “Bang!” She blew imaginary smoke off her finger.

“Never mind the cop,” said Gholü flatly, “She’s sleeping it off.”

She slumped back down on the seat, falling out of view while slurring, “You’re under arrest for corrupting the youth.”

Ignoring her, Gholü returned to the open car door, reached inside, and pushed a button. The trunk opened. He strolled alongside the car.

Devon didn’t say anything, but I sensed panic locked in his body, tuned to the same frequency as mine. What had he gotten us into?

“Can you see the sea?” Gholü asked, nodding westward. He loaded his briefcase into the trunk and retrieved a different kind of case: a box made of thick, green metal, like something the military would use to transport ammunition.

“As a result of illguided irrigation, the land outside the city limits became a fetid swamp. The normally arid dirt is a fetid morass teeming with vermin, most unspeakable.”

Gholü suddenly swiveled next to me and tried to put his arm around my shoulder. I instinctively back away. Rather than seem offended, the man snickered. I felt physical repulsion shiver from my core and spread to every extremity of my vibrating organism.

“Over by Lapin Lapis,” He indicated the rabbit-shaped rock, “is where the sea begins, like a shameful puddle of munt spewed from an institutional titan’s intestines. It resembles terra firma, but you’ll sink right in. All sorts of beasties man’festering out yonder. No one wants you to know, but as the magus says: knowledge is power, y’know.” He flashed his jagged array of tombstone teeth.

“Is that it?” asked Devon, who stared at the heavy metal box. He grew visibly agitated. I could see the internal jones prickling his fingertips, a sensation I well understood.

“This,” Gholü patted the chest, “contains several specimens of such unspeakable vermin. We farm them using samples taken from the Solate Sea. Brand new permutations seep out of that toxic dump.”

“Can we get on with it, man?” Devon’s forcefulness shocked me.

Gholü merely chuckled. “Can you afford this, kid? You know the payment.”

“I brought a witness.”

“Yeah, sure, but do they know the payment?”

I went cold. Devon turned but kept his head hung. I realized why he hadn’t properly looked me in the eye during the whole trip.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” he said quietly. “This isn’t like a human sacrifice or anything. They’re not gonna hurt you. You just have to watch it happen and tell someone else about it later. While you were locked up, I watched it happen and—” He stopped abruptly. He never intended to tell me. He had put it off until Gholü forced him to say it. Good ol’ Devon.

“Doesn’t sound like I have a choice,” I said in a wooden tone.

“Name me a living thing that does,” said Gholü. “You don’t need to understand what you see. In fact, I guarantee you won’t. You just need to reconnoiter and transfer the images to the next oblation.” He winked. “Word begets Image, and Image is Virus.”

Gholü stepped closer to Devon, put his arm around him—I shuddered as Devon let it happen—and led the teenager to the car.

“Listen carefully. A single mistake could trigger a catastrophic botch that every mind sharing this reality-tunnel is undiluted for. There’s going to be a shot and a chaser—the chaser curtails the limitless potential of the shot.”

He set down the large box and opened it with a heavy clunk. A green glow, like vaporized jade, emitted from within. I spotted a row of syringes.

“When the shot hits, you’re gonna wanna take off into the night baying like a Hound of Tindalos, but you need the chaser, or ain’t none of us going home, ya dig?”

Devon nodded. Gholü picked up a syringe with an exceedingly long needle and two plunger rings. I traced the emerald glow to the obscured contents of the thick glass tube. It looked experimental in design, as if a deranged tinkerer had cobbled it in some garage at the end of the world.

“Wait.” I found the courage to speak, “Devon, hold on, look at me. Are you absolutely sure you want this?”

“I want what everybody wants, Fae.” It was the first time he had said something while looking at me. “Be a Buddha.”

“With these means, most expedient,” Gholü added.

I started crying. I’m not sure how it started, but my sinuses just weltered and burst. Thick snot dribbled freely from every face hole. I had to smother my sobs. The others didn’t seem to notice or care. I felt deeply, utterly alone. In the subliminal moment, I had assumed it was the rotten-egg reek of the nearby sea finally storming my delicate innards. But looking back, I felt mournful, even before it all started. I was cognizant of Devon approaching the threshold of some eldritch sphincter. It’s weird to think that maybe my organism knew something I didn’t.

Gholü said, “Help us out, Cass.”

The cop sat up. Gholü shut the door to the driver’s seat and opened the back, revealing the woman. She buckled up her blue pants and scooted away. Gholü sat Devon in the open back seat and stood in front of him. Behind Devon, the cop carefully removed the boy’s glasses and set them aside. She placed her hands on either side of Devon’s head and held him firmly. It was strange watching my friend willingly fall into the arms of these psychos, but I guess he had developed strange tastes while I was away.

Gholü turned to me and said, “When buckeroo here starts kicking, be a dear and grab his legs, would ya kindly?”

Before I could protest, Gholü leaned over Devon and brought the syringe to his face. I glimpsed horror distorting my friend’s features for a split second, then Gholü jabbed the needle’s tip into the wet, pink flesh in the corner of Devon’s eye socket. As predicted, his legs bucked and twitched. Out of concern, I grabbed hold, containing the shuddering violence within my arms.

The cop jeered, “Happy Odin’s Day!”

With a horrible shunk, Gholü pushed the long needle all the way into Devon’s face until the syringe’s glass tube kissed the rim of his eye socket.

“Retrieve the language!” cried Gholü.

Devon’s legs jerked again, forcing me to grip tighter. Now closer, I saw the glass tube attached to the needle. This part’s weird: it was just a couple seconds—maybe less—but the image carved an entire wrinkle into my brain. There’s denying its veracity. Contained within aquamarine fluid was an amphibious lizard. A pattern of orange stripes glittered luminously from its purple skin. Its tail, twice the length of its body, stretched to the tube’s bottom. Bulging gills flared on either side of its ovular head, which bore a bulbous protrusion on top, like a white wart between two black marbles. It locked eyes with me, or it seemed to. I must’ve appeared merely as moving colours outside its tiny prison.

To see a living thing in such a strange context immediately wrenched upon me the notion that perhaps this whole ordeal was a sinister dream. For a blissful nanosecond, I imagined I was undergoing some dopesick hallucination. Maybe I had never left the psyche ward. Perhaps my organism was rejecting the apomorphine with somatopsychic violence. Safe on my scratchy cot, away from the world of chrome fangs and systemic biastophilia. But I think that dreamy sensation was a defense mechanism to stave off the trauma. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember much outside of this crystalized chain of images. They manacle my organism with deep, cold claws.

“Hark!” Gholü shouted, “the cracked chimes of Saint Tobias!”

I should’ve seen it coming. With his thumb, Gholü pushed the first ring of the plunger, closing it ruthlessly on the small creature. The gnewt squirmed to the bottom, then struggled in vain against the doom. Its chromatophoric skin changed colours in wild alarm. Its body curled up within the shrinking space, until its face pressed against the edge of the tube. The white wart ripped free, followed by its tiny brain spewing out like pimple pus. Guts burst from splitting seams in its squishy skin. The plunger crushed the gnewt’s body completely, juicing its innards into the blue-green fluid. I groaned in disgust.

Gholü chuckled. “Don’t cry, kiddie. Critter survives the transmigration.”

He pushed the second ring, and the syringe injected the total mixture through the needle and into Devon’s face. His body convulsed much more violently. The cop laughed as he tried to thrash his head. I felt us all sink deeper into the infernal intestinal tract.

“Prepare the chaser, darling,” Gholü ordered the cop, who let go of Devon’s head and reached into the front passenger seat. Free of her grip, my friend’s head jerked with wider gyration. His eyes had rolled back, and saliva started frothing from his lips. Out of all the images, this one sent such a shock to my core that I weakened my grip on Devon’s legs. One of them broke free and kicked high. His foot smacked Gholü’s ear. Surprised, the man let out a crisp grunt and recoiled to the side. The needle withdrew from Devon’s eye. Blood and ichor squirted from the entry point.

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t stay to fight for my friend; flight won out. Don’t ask me why I didn’t run toward the city streets. I wasn’t in control. I sped into the desert, sprinting toward the only object my delirious vision afforded me: the rabbit-shaped rock.

“Hold on!” a voice shouted from behind me, “We gotta shot for you, too, darling!”

I heard some shuffling. The car door closed, then the engine turned over.

Every cell of my organism screamed in agony as I pushed the whole past its limit. My heart pounded. My muscles burned. My lungs felt like fire. My thought-stream tightened into a razor-narrow tunnel. I raced toward Lapin Lapis. I heard the roar of the vehicle rocketing from behind. The boulder was like a standing stone, but with a rounded side piece that made up the backside of the rabbit-shape. Its head faced away, surveying the endless desert beyond.

The sound of the car roared closer. They intended to run me over. Waiting until the very last second, I reached the rock and leapt sideways, landing on the hard dirt. I flipped over just in time to watch the car collide with the tall stone. In the driver’s seat, Gholü’s head smashed against his steering wheel before an airbag blasted it back. The cop wasn’t so lucky. Her body broke through the windshield and launched over the rabbit’s backside, clearing the boulder’s border by inches.

She soared up and cracked her spine against the rabbit’s stone ears. Merciless physics sent her body pinwheeling to the side. She arced gracelessly down to the desert and, rather than slide on the dirt, landed with a fat squelch. Her crumpled form sank into the mud. Just feet from where I laid, I could see the surface was deceptive. Soft chunks floated atop liquidinous depths. It was the swamp amid an arid climate. The Solate Sea.

I rose to a squat but daren’t move. Staring at the cop’s half-quagmired body, I felt no relief at my survival. Adrenaline kept my organism securely in the tense dimension of terror. My attention was tugged by a sound: Gholü stirring in his seat. I leapt to my feet and—God knows why—walked toward the car. I guess I knew he’d be incapacitated. Something else compelled me toward him, however, a piece of information drifting in the hazy fallout of the cavalcade of violence. 

I arrived at the car. The crash had shattered all the windows. The metal of Gholü’s door had bent, making it impossible to open. I peered into the backseat and spotted the open military chest, its contents scattered about the interior of the car. The metal bits of broken syringes lay among glass and springs. Malourdious vapor wound up from dark green stains in the upholstery. 

I thought I spotted the mottled tail of a lizard-like thing slithering just out of sight at the top of the car window. I lifted my gaze, expecting to see a gnewt crawling across the roof. To my amazement, I saw several shapes wiggle through the air, traveling in serpentine patterns away from the car. The creatures treated the night sky as an aquarium; they were tadpoles escaping the suffocating clutches of egg sacs. Their long tails whipped purple ripples in their wake. I watched their minute silhouettes cross the moon’s face and vanish completely into darkness.

An ugly cough broke from the front seat.

I turned my attention to Gholü, prepared to receive him as a threat. Instead, he remained pinned in his seat. A gruesome laceration warped the bridge of his nose and crossed up to his sword tattoo, as if the new wound were a weapon challenging the facsimile.

“Seekin’ the chaser?” he said with a snide grin. Blood gushed from between his teeth, spilled down his chin, and dripped into his lap. The dark red liquid stuck thickly to the graying skin on his face. He was in bad shape.

He slurred his words, “They was jus’ here a second ago.” Gholü didn’t seem able to move his head without great pain, so he darted his eyes to indicate the front passenger seat.

Smashed to bits was the apparatus of a vintage dictaphone with round sound-proof headphones. Also smashed were several cassette tapes. Similar to the syringes, they appeared to be special inventions. Instead of magnetic tape unspooling from the broken reels, there lay piles of miniscule flat-headed creatures. Orange and greasy, they looked like noodles spilled on the seat.

“Without the Lindwyrms, buckeroo is cooked with gas, most banzai.”

The worms dried rapidly, shriveling to limp husks in the crimson glow of the car’s brake lights. Steam rose from their disintegrating carcasses which burned strange shapes into the seat. Preservative amber fluid from their containers rapidly melted into the chair.

Gholü continued, “Now we’re all fucked, good and proper. Welcome to the ninth dimension—”

“Shut up,” I finally said.

A sound caught our attention. We both looked out—me over the roof of the car and Gholü through the shattered windshield—at the sea.

Several yards away, a thin arm stuck out of the mud, its hand twitching, accompanied by a pitiful moan. The limb bent to lay the hand on the surface and pushed. Its fingers sank into the muck, but the counterweight momentum lifted the cop’s head out of the mud. Brown chunks clung to her hair. I couldn’t see her eyes. She called out desperately. Unable to shape words properly, the cop sounded like an animal baying in idiot need.

“Bah fuck her,” said Gholü, “Terrible lay, anyway.”

That’s when I spotted the dagger in his lap. I reached inside, fearless of the wounded man, and took it. I unsheathed a gorgeous blade half the length of a machete. It shimmered perfectly in the car lights.

I felt like saying something to Gholü. Something about the world being a better place without him in it. About how I abhor violence on principle, but there are times that remind you why stags grow antlers. Nothing felt right. You don’t eulogize a venomous arachnoid, you just squash it.

He stared at the blade in my hand. “Wield it well. That shit goes back to Zhong Kui, most—”

I plunged it through his cheek and pushed until the hilt kissed his nose. Blood squirted from the edges of the wound. The blade sliced one eyeball, drowning its socket in red death.

Gholü’s tongue flapped out with scarlet spurts from the roof of his mouth.

“Whatta—fuh—ck—cking—trip, dude.”

He gurgled and went limp. With a beautiful schlurp, I pulled out the blade.

I heard another moan and glanced at the desert. The cop’s arm was no longer visible, but I could still make out a weak voice on the wind. Or was that just the wind? I turned and walked away from the wreckage, crossing the desert at a steady pace, the dagger at my side. Its tip wept ruby teardrops onto the dirt. I approached my friend.

He was a bad shape.

Devon’s body now resembled a tree struck by frozen lightning. What appeared to be a scaly rash of aquamarine pallor covered his entire body, the rims of each scale flashing with iridescent gold. The fleshy thunderbolt actually constituted a continuation of the bark, arcing upward. Orange circles decorated the blue skin in various spots, granting it an almost reptilian aspect. Zigzagging like a crack in the sky, the beam radiated out to become an arterylike webwork dissecting the night into shards of other colours.

Supraliminal capillaries carried musical notes to the veins of void between the singing spheres. I looked up and watched the infinitesimally branching twigs twinkle between the stellar sprawl. At the deepest distance, they reconnected into tiny polygons within the darkness, splitting the night sky into a vast honeycomb pattern. I felt like I was standing inside a massive beehive. Each cell vibrated with pretentious life, granting the stars a kind of crawling appearance, as if a billion bugs mottled the underside of our cosmic dome.

The stars were certainly wrong.

I crossed onto the pavement of the parking lot. The golden arches were no longer glowing. The interior of the fast food joint was dark. I approached my friend, at least what was left of him. His legs dangled atavistically behind the bottom of the “tree.” Gnarled shoots were sprouting from his lower abdomen to become roots. They were purple and reddish at their base, then gradually turned blue-orange as they grew further away from his flesh. It looked as if his belly had distended and burst into a mess of calcified bark. I realized each sproutling was originally an organ in Devon’s body. They twisted together into roots that had punched through the asphalt and gripped the naked dirt below, dozens of knots segmented into tightly clenched knuckles. His blood had transmuted into green sap that oozed down the roots, staining the earth with sickly fruitish thickness. It finally hit me why those things in the car were called Lindwyrms.

I could see the warped shape of what used to be his upper torso behind the foremost trunk, which shot from his neck and curled behind his cranium. Head bent back, his facial features had become prolapsed rims of skin hugging the thickest branches, which grew continuously from his eye sockets, nostrils, and mouth. A slithering sound accompanied the motion outward. Must’ve begun at the point of contact where the gnewt had entered his brain. No twigs from his ears, which were totally gone. Only craters of mangled flesh remained on either side of his shriveled head, as if an explosion had blown out his eardrums from within his skull. 

Looking back, it’s easy to assume the inflection point of the transfiguration was sonically localized. Without the chaser, the mutation went unchecked. The central trunk, presumably originating from his vocal organs, met all the branches above him. The boughs twisted together, like a yagé vine spiraling up to splay out and forge the strange constellation that hung over it all. He reminded me of Dante’s suicide trees.

“Fucked up,” I said out loud.

Devon reacted to the sound. His deformed body twitched, running a ripple up the shivering lightning bolt. The colour changed as the signal traveled; the orange spots turned red and shifted to become nine-sided polygons with concentric shapes within. The interior angles sparkled into many-pointed stars. The sanguine nonagons pulsated and coruscated the jeweled pattern up, smaller and smaller, until traveling clouds of crimson dust emitted syncopated glints in the darkest recesses overhead. I watched the motion spread to the tiniest segments before it finally surpassed the border of visibility. The cells of the honeycomb splintered. The sky cracked open in a violent rent. Luminous shards descending shards and reconnected like droplets of slow-motion rain, then bloomed into floating puddles of life.

Beyond them, I spied the surface of a giant planet.

Magenta unlight shines from a fathomless star.

Plashy bogs belch gaseous games.

Briny lagoons of concentrated methane shimmer like oil spills.

Diamonds rain from crystalline clouds.

My sore eyes soar over endless vistas of kaleidoscopic consciousness.

See sour shapes animated with oddlife: herds of inseparable beasts galloping indigo chevrons through forests of stark scarlet flowerheads swaying in sync with the yellow pollen swirling in nostrils of Now. Titanic insectoids clamber up beanstalks, their arterial tendrils pulsating with affectionate sensuality. Gargantuan creatures of experimental taxonomies lick webbed digits before dipping into living pools of beneficient scum; they stick slick fingers into the tips of hoary orifices and suck sweet saliva to dance dangerously with the acidic shit.

I pick up sensory-signals from every direction. Vocal organs squeal emotions I’m reluctant to mimic. Patafloral arrangements. Dinosaurus improvisations. Mycelial pantheon. Tandem sine waves of love. Simultaneous orgiastic joy. Martial law meets marital bliss. Eyes glitter; tits dribble everywhere. And it all descends, erupts, and blasts into our cosmic culdesac. It’s not—a planet—it’s the brand new—cleus of an atom in superposition splitting open to unveil the organisms gentrifying our crackling electron cloud.

The Jötnar spill into Midgard like gore from a Yggdrasilic wound.

Wrenching my gaze away from this hypnopompic pageant, I looked back to Devon. His arms dangled at his sides, but I saw the fingers curling in spasms. He was still alive. I can’t quite explain the emotion I felt. Sadness, surely, but all my old words felt improper for mapping reality. Knowledge became a river of light marrying all matter. Image-Virus devoured alphabets in quivering quantum foam. A kernel of certainty struck up from the sticky morass. I knew what I had to do. All my tears were spent. It’s not Devon’s fault. He always had trouble kicking the hard stuff.

Lunging forward with the blade, I pierced the spot between the branches growing from my friend’s nose and mouth. I pulled out and struck deeper.

I stabbed, and I stabbed, and I stabbed, until the limbs disembogued from their holes.

The sky-crack heals just as violently. Scars bloom backward like scarlet buds in the spaces between sputtering synapses. Umbilical severance. Dark age ascendant. Idiotic vectors crisscross amniotic planes. Biologic unenlightenment blankets generations of latent bacteriophages. They wait for the next egg sac to awaken.

That’s where my memory ends,

and yours begins.

Be a Buddha.