LMNanowrimO

[LMNO]

CHAPTER 1: He Woke Up In Prison.



OH HOLY FUCK I'M FALLI-

Hitting the hardwood floor jolted him fully awake.  Bedclothes were strewn around him, constricting his legs, and his left arm was twisted around his back.  Jack squinted at the light coming through the slatted blinds.  He tried to remember what the hell he had been dreaming of, but couldn't.  He didn't remember any of his dreams (nightmares) anymore, just flashes of images: mouths; teeth; feathers; glass splinters; spiders.  Skies falling in.  Houses, and absences. 

"Doesn't matter," he thought to himself.  "That shit doesn't apply in this world.  I got better things to do."

Jack took inventory of himself.  He worked his arm out of the sheets, rubbed the sleep from his eyes.  There was a thin crust beneath his right eye he scraped away with a jagged fingernail.  Out of the corner of his mind, he caught the first glimmer of an old, familiar pain.  His left ankle.  Again.  "Fuck."  Pushing up against the uneven hardwood, the bedclothes dropped away.  No one else was in the room, but if they were, they'd get the idea that Jack had things on his mind other than, say, hygiene.  Or general respect for property.  You could expect that his hair would a mess, nightmare-tossed and all.  But it really didn't have to be that greasy.  Raven-black once, it was now flecked with silver, underlining the proof that the creased skin at the corners of his eyes and mouth weren't just from smiling too much.  Truth is, he hardly ever smiled anymore.  Anymore? Jack couldn't remember the last time he really cracked a grin.  Right now, this ankle bullshit wasn't helping.  He took a step, and a hammer crashed down on his ankle.  That's the thing about pain.  You can pretend it's managable, you can tough your way through it, you can even ignore it for a while, but it always comes through in the end.  It fucks with you.  It turns any day into a nails-on-the-blackboard experience. You can pretend that it doesn't affect you, that your head is your own, but your body fights hard.  Jack knew, from far too much experience, that pain isn't exhausting.  Pain is easy.  What's exhausting is the battle.  The battle to move.  The battle to communicate.  The battle to get out of your own head, to push back the solipsistic pain, to overcome the spin pain puts on everything that comes at you.  Just like everything else in the world, pain has inertia.  Once it gets going, and really gets a good head of steam, you can't just turn it aside.  It just soldiers on, punching you in the face, dropping a dark hood on everything you do.  Always.

Jack could never understand how his ankle couldn't support him anymore.  The right ankle was just the same, right?  It could support him.  It wasn't like there was much to support him, anyway.  He limped his way into the dank bathroom off the north side of his bedroom, grimacing with each alternating step.  He slapped at the lightswitch, and heard the distinctive "pop" of a blown filiament.   Some of the light from the bedroom window made it into the bathroom, and Jack could see himself in the mirror, bifurcated by the jagged crack running down the middle.  In the dim light, he could see his ribs jutting against his skin, the rough stubble of several days, and he could just make out the faint tracery of old scars mapped out on his skin.  He ran his gnarled fingers across his scalp, and leaned forward to peer in the mirror.  He could make out one bloodshot eye.  That was another thing about pain- it kept you up at night.  Jack was one of those who tossed in his sleep, and every movement brought his old, bad friend back.  He looked down, and pawed through the various bottles of meds on this sink.  Nothing serious, just the over-the counter stuff.  The more serious shit was next to the bed.  Jack hated going that far though.  It killed the pain for a while, but it wasn't relief.  There was no sleep, only the void.  And even if there wasn't pain, there wasn't anything else, either.  He still woke up every day jittery, not rested.  He felt incomplete.  Jack swallowed a couple of pills dry, and made his way back into the sunlight.

Jack limped into the kitchen, which was in itself a testament to clutter.  He had learned years ago that the less you had, the less you needed to clean, but that really didn't make a difference if you didn't give a shit about food sanitation.  The sink held on to both pots, bottoms crusted and blackened from constant use and inconstant cleaning.  He knocked those around to make some room, and grabbed the stained metal coffee pot.  The tap sputtered a few times as he turned it on.  After a quick rinse, he filled it and put it on the stove, then dumped a handful of coffee grounds into it from an open bag lying on the buckled formica counter.  He turned the electric burner to high, and watched as a thin trail of smoke drifted up, the charred carbon smell blending into the general funk of stale air, overloaded ashtrays, and old beer.

A battered pair of black pants were slung over the back of a chair in the next room, frayed cuffs and washed thin.  Jack pulled them on, and saw his shoes, one overturned, next to a bottle of cheap bourbon.  He grabbed the bottle, and went back into the kitchen.  He found a chipped cup, and tipped it over the sink.  A thin dribble seeped out, and then Jack filled it halfway with the whiskey.  The black liquid was bubbling in the coffee pot, spitting hot coffee onto the stove.  He killed the heat, and counted to twenty.  The grounds had settled by that time, so he tipped some of the coffee into the cup.  The heat from the coffee sent up whiskey fumes into Jack's face, and he breathed deep.  Anything to take the edge off.  Anything to make the day more tolerable.

The trouble was, it wasn't working so well any more. The first hour or so brought a slight comfort, but then it would fade into another dark place.  It started to strip down his defenses against the pain.  The pain didn't get any worse, but his attitude sure did.  People became intolerable.  Noises got harsher, colors became vicious and mean.  The whole damn human race, all of society, those stinking, dirty, human monkeys with their chattering!  Prattling on about insignificant bullshit that wasn't anything more than a noise that they made to keep them company.  It was worse than a herd of parrots, because at least those dumb beasts ("other dumb beasts," he corrected) didn't understand the meaning behind the sounds.

Then again, maybe the chattering monkeys didn't understand what was being understood, either.  Jack was sure they could probably break down the words into a sort of cheap, illegible dictionary. He was sure  they could actually connect the sounds to the base meaning of each step of the sentence.  But can they connect the words together?  Can they form some sort of deeper meaning behind the sounds?  At what point did they perform some sort of self-lobotomy that rewired their brains, bypassing any sort of analysis, and linking what they've heard directly to the vocal cords?

Maybe it was simply a case of self-doubt.  There's a lot of doubt in the world, Jack thought, and that's to be expected.  But for generations, the monkeys deceived themselves.  No, that's not right.  They've always been deceiving themselves.  It was only natural to make first impressions, and jump to conclusions.  Hell, no one would every get anything done without being able to do that.  But there seemed to be something that happened then.  The monkeys just... stopped.  Good enough was, well, good enough.  They built a wall up, keeping out anything that might tell them they were wrong the first time around.  That's where the re-wiring starts, he thought.  When they don't want to admit they're wrong.

So it's not self-doubt then.  It's pride.  The inability to admit mistakes.  Maybe that was the original sin.  The Sin of Pride wasn't about taking credit for your actions, or about feeling good when you've done well.  Bragging about it kind of sucks, because it's already happened.  You start living in the past, you figure you've got some sort of pass to inaction.  But that's not pride.  That's what some people wanted Pride to be, because, of, well, Pride.  Pride is what keeps you from admitting you're wrong.  So, someone twisted it around.  Someone fell into a deep pit of Pride, and decided that not only weren't they wrong, they couldn't be wrong.  Pride had to be something else.  So Pride became admitting you were actually good at something, not that you didn't know what was actually going on.

But without the fear of self-doubt, there'd be no Pride.  But who isn't afraid of being wrong?  If you admit  you're wrong about one thing, then maybe no one will ever believe you again.  Then again, why should anyone believe anything something they haven't already experienced for themselves?  Is this where faith came from?  Let's say I tell you that just around the corner, a gorilla is waiting to give you a sack full of dead roses and toaster ovens.  Whether you believe me or not depends on how often flora-and-house appliance-wielding primates have skulked around corners.  Experience, yeah?  Both faith and trust come from experience.  So, he'll believe you if you tell him something he already knows.  That's not trust, that's buying into Pride.  That's running head on into your own fear of self doubt.   

Jack's head started to spin with the whiskey and coffee. He tried to get his mind around the whole thing.  If you can't admit you're wrong, if you won't admit you're wrong, then you simply aren't.  You believe anything someone tells you that you agree with, and reject anything different.  Until experience comes along again.  So, what's the answer?  Make everyone experience everything until no one needs to trust anyone anymore? Not enough years in a lifetime.  Trust was just as necessary as jumping to conclusions.

Jack took his cup of coffee-flavored whiskey to the ratty, beat-up couch and propped up his foot.  "Damn lying monkeys," he thought to himself.  When did the lie begin?  It could be said that the lie always existed.  We've been lying to ourselves since we began to receive information into our brains.  Because we naturally forget that what we see isn't all that's really out there, and we tell ourselves that what we see is Really Real Reality.  Even barring things like hallucinations and optical illusions, we're not really getting the big picture.  Take gamma rays for example.  Have you ever seen a gamma ray?  No.  You might have seen a machine that supposedly clicks when it gets hit by a gamma ray, but all that's really telling you is that "something" happened.

Jack closed his eyes, and squeezed hard on his lids.  Behind his eyes, the demon's face appeared again.  It was happening more often now.  He couldn't escape it when he was awake, either.  It used to just be part of his par for the course nightmares, but that one face started appearing more often.  It wasn't that unique a demon, either.  Typical red eyes, pointed ears, big horns, toothy grin.  It wasn't frightening, it was... annoying.  Like when your 6-year-old cousin tries scaring you, but does it over, and over, and over again.  Jack was pretty sure it was going to get creepy eventually.  The 6-year-old thing can get creepy too, if they keep at it long enough.  The fright moves behind the action, into the motivation: Why does he keep doing that?  What's the hell is wrong with him?

In the case of the demon, it was more the insistence of Jack's own head that was bothering him.  Why that image, why so... cliché?  It bothered Jack that his brain was being so trite and unoriginal.  "I mean, even if space aliens were beaming their mind-control lasers into my head, I doubt they'd resort to cheap tricks like that," he muttered to himself.  "I liked it better when it was images of impossible perverted sex acts.  At least then it was somewhat interesting."  He thought back, trying to remember when the dime-store horror image replaced the contorted writhing.  All he could come up with was sometime before That Weekend.  Not a "lost" weekend, as much as a "found" one.  It was one of those handfuls of days that seem to pop out of nowhere.

But that was a lie, as well.  Days don't just pop up, they happen, over an over again.  And even grouping them into 7-piece sections, setting up expectations for certain days over others, that's just a lie that's been engraved into the brain so much that the stupid monkeys have made it into a fact.  They walk though their lie day, looking at lie things, thinking their lie thoughts.  Because when you have deceived yourself with Pride, lying becomes the easiest thing in the world.  But wait—doesn't the lying come first?  The deeper lie, perhaps.  Somehow, certain people (monkeys) were able to convince other monkeys (people) that what they didn't experience was true.  Then they convinced them that what they couldn't experience was true.  Big whoppers, too.  Big enough to blanket the self-doubt, and then Pride comes along and seals the deal.

Jack scratched his head.  It was starting to come together now.  He put down his coffee cup on the floor and stared out the window.  The stupid monkeys.  Their lies.  Their Pride.  Where was he going with this?  The whiskey had gotten to him again, making him slow.  Jack was sure he was getting somewhere, something to do with why he always felt an impending weight on his shoulders, the imposition of some sort of "almost".  That "almost" was trapping him, holding him back, and keeping him in a holding pattern.  He waited.  He was patient.  He felt like he had been waiting for years, maybe his whole life.  No, not his whole life, he dimly recalled when he was in school, and thought he had purpose.  He couldn't remember what exactly it was, other than studying, getting grades, making his parents happy...  Pretty simple goals, really.  And now that Jack thought about it, he didn't really mind the studying, not in any sort of meaningful negative way.  He flashed on something one of his English teachers scribbled in the margins of an essay Jack had written.  Narcissistic garbage, mostly: fairly average output for a high-school sophomore.  It was some trite piece about the perils of the future, about how the futility of life plays itself out, the absurd hopelessness of it all... very pre-Camus crap.  In the margins was scrawled, "If you take care of today, tomorrow will take care of itself."  A trite platitude for a trite sob story piece.

"Looks like that didn't really work out too well," thought Jack as he looked around.  He remembered how he took that advice all those years ago, and strived to "live in the moment": He didn't look farther ahead than the following week, if that.  He took things as they came.  He re-acted rather than pro-acted.  Any wants or desires gave way to the immediate moment; to whatever happened to get in the way.  The ambitions were minimized to getting along, getting through, getting by, getting away with it.  Motivations: to keep the status quo, to keep the Now being the Now, watching it slip into the Then, waiting for the next Eventually to become the new Now.  Now to Then, and back to Now.

And where did that lead?  To a life of Settling.  When things are Good Enough, and working too hard at something is not really appreciated.  Scraping up enough dough for rent, and maybe some food, and of course, your daily supply of booze.  And somewhere along the line, Jack thought, you turned around a corner and ended up with a beat up body and a mind the dredged up thoughts about monkey minds.  And nightmares.  God, he was so tired.  He closed his eyes, and tried not to think about them.

Through the trees came a crashing, cackling, moaning snicker, whirling like stainless steel dancing goats, with razors for hooves, and AK-47s for horns.  The screaming of 10,000 lost souls in a terribly self-conscious HP Lovecraft reference but didn't self-edit due to all the terror from spurting jets of liquid flame and molten iron.  At the heart stood the tophet, the ultimate primate of death and conformity, the one great metal beast that stops thought, stops tears, stops laughter, ends pain with the finality of the axe on the neck, the Marred and Merry Scots spinning away, gouts of blood from stumpy necks and troubled words, gaping mouths on missing heads used as toilets and orifices to horse-headed and horse-cocked beasts with 7 fingers to a hand to grabbing a skull and thrusting upon, knocking out teeth against trees in the blood-red moonlight of howling allowance.  The lights, the lights, the lights in the sky spinning with flames and with fire, heating the rods and the vices and the visors and the pokers and the bellows and the reeds and the flames the fires the rattails and the cotontails and the Peters and the Pauls and the Paupers and the pawprints of wolves in the distance, keeping their time and biding their own counsel as they wait to tear the remains from the decadence feast of negligence where the monsters of the borders move in as boarders to the blind who rip out the throats of the blind and prevent the cool waters of silence from intruding on the noise orgy as the so-called saints burn the presumptive sinners from the inside  of the lizard brain, a reverse lobotomy  of silver-tongued manacles linking the past to the future and skull-fucking the present like whored out pre-pubescent lost children snatched up by unfeeling machine spiders on two legs, spindly steel talons and mandibles ripping off tattered shifts and relying on the kindness of the very steel-stick strangers now offering them to the horrors of the night clutching at them with the pudgy manipulants like greasy sausages sewn onto palms of hearts blackened by the father-fuckers and the fucked by fathers from days of yore and yards of gore and good god, what sort of black metal wanna be fucking dream--

"--IS THIS!?"  Jack sat bolt upright, sweating and clutching his throat.

[LMNO]

His forehead and face was slick with sour-smelling sweat, and stung his eyes.  Jack groaned as he sat up, the persistent throbbing of his ankle cutting through the bleary half-conscious hypnogogue. The whiskey had made his head heavy as he fumbled for the remote for the TV.  It clicked on, blaring an ad for some neon-colored piece of trash.

Jack jammed his thumb down on the volume button, bringing it to a more manageable level.  The nightmare was almost forgotten by the time he started surfing the channels.

Click.
"-ports of a masked gunman breaking into houses in this terrified community and stealing vinyl record, making his exit by-"
Click.
"-talking with celebrated author, chef, congressional candidate, Nobel nominee and convicted pedophile-"
Click.
"-what unholy terror lurks between Gina's thighs?  Find out tonight on-"
Click.
"-Even if we bought you a pony, we'd probably have to kill it for food-"
Click.
"-Senator, how can you say that the educational budget can support the massive influx of mutant children from the parthenogenetic effects of last year's radioactive tanker spill in the northern part of-"
Click.
"-Puppies Puppies Puppies Puppies Puppies Puppies-"
Click.
"-fires still burning down on the Northwest side, the apparent cause being a sudden electrical discharge-"
Click.
"-JESUS! PRAISE HIM AND HIS HOLY NAME, AND THE MANTLE AND THE GLORY, FOR HE HAS RISEN AND HAS SPOKEN TO ME!  AND HE WANTS ME TO TELL YOU HIS MESSAGE OF PEACE AND THE AGONY OF-"
Click.
"-Brad, and you're the father." "How can that be?  I'm gay." "I snuck into your room last week, after your affair with Joey, and IÉ" "But I'm also your broth-"
Click.
"-Witnesses say that the strange lights moved erratically, almost playfully.  Experts have chalked this up to the bizarre weather patterns that have-"
Click.
"-can see, the substance reacts to stimuli almost as an amoeba would, which leads us to the possibility that this inorganic substance may actually approximate life-"
Click.
"BABY BABY BABY, I LOVES YOU SO CUZ YOU GOT SASS / LET'S GO INTO THE BACKSEAT OF MY CAR THAT'S GOT CLASS / SO I CAN FORCE YOU TO STICK IT IN-"
Click.
"Further evidence of blunt force trauma can be found on the cranial ridge.  As you can see, the blow crushed most of the face, obscuring the crucial and curious fact that-"
Click.
"-sheep, as you can see.  Their herding patterns have become very unusual as of late, and farmers are finding them arranged in concentric circles, resembling more often than not the mysterious crop circles that have been plaguing the area for-"
Click.
"A bit of turnabout in Hollywood today, as the paparazzi became the stalked when a movie star opened their limo door and released an eight-foot grizzly bear onto the photographers.  We'll tell you who, right after this."
Click.
"No money down! Pick yourself up in the wallet, AND the pants!"
Click.
"Ow!  My lining!"
Click.
"Then, in 1784 (a leap year), he launched what was to be his most ambitious project to date: Linking the death of Diderot (July 31), the Treaty of Paris (January 14), and the South African Locust swarms (ongoing) with the founding of the Methodist Church (December 25).  Interesting enough, he uses Gaussian field summations to-"
Click.
"Maybe it would be better if I just knocked your teeth out, yeah?"
Click.
"Another transformer explosion in the Northwest side knocks out power to an entire block of residents, now restless and scared due to recent incidents of random daytime lightning strikes officials are now calling, quote, 'suspicious'."
Click.
"Can cause heartburn, diarrhea, nausea, involuntary muscle spasms, loose bladder, eye twitching, heart palpitations, leg cramps, glaucoma, and seizures Ð But you'll never have to worry about hair loss again!"
Click.
"Migratory patterns have been disrupted, and even the iconic flight formations of the birds have changed, prompting many frantic calls to the police as frightened citizens saw ominous and disturbing symbols soaring overhead."
Click.
"More emergency crews have been called to the Northwest side of the city, as it becomes clear that over 300 people have died in unusual circumstances."
Click.
"Using nothing more than a ball point pen, a paper clip, and toothpaste, she seems to have been able to teach her mutant birthchild a fundamental lesson."
Click.
"The scarring is the most telling thing.  You see here, the right-to-left motion of the scraping.  If you look closer, you can see the splinters of wood that the tissue simply grew around and absorbed into the healing process."
Click.
"Officials are refusing press access to the Northwest side, citing health and safety issues."
Click.
"-helicopters have been waved off, due to the excessive smoke and periodic electric discharges that have already brought down two copters-"
Click.
"-we have obtained exclusive audiotape of what's going on inside the quarantine area-"
Click.
"-can barely see shapes through the smoke.  If we can zoom in, we may be able to locate the source of-"
Click.
"-sounds of muffled explosions.  Still no official comment from the authorities regarding this matter, as the boundaries of the quarantine have expended to include the 1600 block as well as-"
Click.
"-said Josephine Arellia, resident of the 1600 block, who was able to escape just before the blockade went into effect.  Chilling words from a clearly distraught woman."
Click.
"We're going to have to bzzzzthrow the feed back tozzzz the studio, until we bzzzzcan get our transmitting bzzzzzsystems back in control.  JohnzzzzZZZZ?"
Click.
"Reports of continued explosions and so-called lightning strikes are swamping the 911 emergency lines."
Click.
"-seem to have lost the signal there.  Can we get them back on air?  Well, in the meantime, let's turn to our meteorologist, Fran Parker.  Fran?"
Click.
"The Sergeant says that the wounds were self-inflicted, and indicated that any reports to the contrary should be treated as suspect and dubious."
Click.
"-from the sky, I'm telling you!  When they hit the ground, there was this blinding flash-"
Click.
"-under control.  We are treating this as a normal procedure, and are requesting National Guard presence as only a precaution, due to the possibility that looting might break out."
Click.
"-getting news from the situation on the Northwest side from our man on the ground, Henry Harwick, who has managed to gain access behind the barricade."
Click.
"Armored vehicles have been spotted on Highland Avenue, and are now surrounding the 1800 block.  Worried citizens have been trying to evacuate, but many streets have already been gridlocked as-"
Click.
"DEMONS!  DEMONS IN OUR MIDST, SMITING THE UNHOLY-"
Click.
"Cindy, I'm trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, as the press is being turned away at gunpoint now.  The police continue to insist this is for safety reasons, but it's becoming increasingly clear that... What? No, I'm simply reporting... You can't do that, I'm press, I-"
Click.
"-nothing else seems to be moving.  The smoke is thick, and has a taste to it, like of old seawater.  I'm going to try to move further towards the center of this-"
Click.
"At this time, we request that everyone in the city remain calm, and do not panic.  Emergency services has informed me that they are seeing more injuries from people trying to flee the scene than from the initial incident."
Click.
"-sky satellite shows these cloud formations here, they appear to be forming a ring shape around the city, with a very dense cloud pack right above the Northwest-"
Click.
"-getting reports of residents attacking the National Guardsmen in an effort to leave the area.  The Guardsmen have responded with riot shields and teargas, in a sight reminiscent of the WTO riots-"
Click.
"I'm press!  You can't do this!  Press! Press!"
Click.
"-at St Mercy hospital, talking with Doctor Abraham Stuvey, who says that the ER has been packed all day, and he's never seen anything like the injuries being sustained-"
Click.
"John, I have to admit, I've never seen weather like this.  I just can't explain it."
Click.
"Please, REMAIN CALM.  If we cannot settle the populace, this will escalate, I can assure you.  Please heed the orders of the Police and Military, and do not attempt to enter the barricades."
Click.
"Oh.  My. God.  Jason, are you getting this?  I'll try to get closer-"
Click.
"Gunfire has been reported at the Northwest riots.  No word on whether it was instigated by the crowd or the National Guardsmen, but they are taking no chances, and have affixed bayonets.  The scene is one of chaos and carnage-"
Click.
"Henry?  Henry, can you hear us?  Your feed has gone down.  Are you all right?  Is there any way we could-"
Click.
"REPENT, SINNERS!  OUR ANGRY GOD HAS SENT HIS FALLEN ANGELS INTO THIS WORLD TO WREAK VENGANCE UPON-"
Click.

The TV went dark as Jack sat up sharply.  "Wait," he thought.  "He used Gaussian equations for what again?  That doesn't sound right."  Jack limped over to the freezer in the kitchen, and pulled out a roll of elastic gauze he had soaked in water the night before.  He went back to the couch, and after a few minutes of work, managed to unroll the gauze and begin wrapping his ankle tightly.  He eased on a pair of socks and some boots, fished around on the floor for a crumpled white T-shirt, and made his way out the door, throwing a shoulder bag with his usual gear over one shoulder, and grabbing a cane that was leaning by the door on the way out.  It was black, with a silver handle, and Jack took it in his right hand and deftly began to support his weight as he made his way down to the street.

[LMNO]

It was well past noon as Jack stood on the sidewalk, trying to figure out his day.  It seemed time enough for another drink.  "Craig might be in, too.  Couldn't hurt to check."  He limped up the street, and ducked into a sad looking hole in the wall just off Main.  It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, and then he made his way to the bar.  The old familiar barstool was waiting for him, and he sat down gratefully.  "Hey, Craig.  Hook me up with a beer?"

A large, burly man with short red hair looked back at him with surprise.  "Jack.  What are you doing here?"

"Yeah, I said I'd be cutting back, but what the hell, right?"  Jack rested his elbows on the bar, and leaned forward, hungrily.  "C'mon.  Do me right."

"Not that, man," said Craig, as he turned to dip a meaty hand into the cooler, pulling out a bottle of Dixie and easily popping the cap with just his thumb.  "I would have sworn you'd be down at the riots doing... whatever the hell it is you actually do."

"Riots?"  Jack looked puzzled as he grabbed the beer as soon as Craig put it on the bar. "What are you talking about?"

"You're shitting me."  Craig jabbed a stubby finger at the TV jammed high into a corner of the bar.  The volume was turned down, but Jack could see blocks of apartment buildings in flames, and angry and terrified civilians fighting hard with military personnel amidst strewn bodies, bleeding heavily.  A glance showed who the inevitable winner would be, especially considering the tanks at the end of one street slowly crushing anything, or anyone, in their paths.

"Wow." Jack took a pull off his beer. "I thought I might have dreamt that.  Looks dangerous."

"I figured that would be right up your alley."

"How far does it go?"

"Citywide.  Haven't you noticed the lack of traffic?"

Jack looked out the door of the bar, at the empty street.  Normally about now, there would be a stream of cars, buses, and bikes fighting for dominance in the road, and sometimes on the sidewalks.  Territorial battles over whatever small patch of asphalt they happened to have their tires on, vicious as a trapped hyena, bitter as a dumped girlfriend.  You could never lack for entertainment, looking out that door.  Fingers and more arcane gestures, arguments, fist fights, even the occasional stabbing.  Jack remembered one time how a pair of trannies started bitchslapping each other for 15 minutes before one of them finally kicked the other in the balls with her stiletto heels.  Over a moped.  It was shit like this that made Jack laugh every time, even while the empty absurd uselessness of all poured into his heart.  Jack took another swig of his beer, and looked around the empty bar.  "I guess I should get down there.  You want to tag along, or would I be interrupting your booming business?"

Craig looked around the bar as well.  It was a good place, when you came down to it. Craig had bought it about a decade ago, cheap, and spent a few months working back to life.  He didn't want to make it some sort of modernistic martini bar, he wanted to keep the rustic so-called "charm" of the place.  It had an aura of danger (mostly because of its location), but more than that, it had a sense of purpose.  There was one thing Craig wanted the bar to stand for, and that was to get a drink.  None of this singles scene, frat boy belching, effete ladies with their cosmopolitans they didn't touch, parents bringing in their toddlers, nightclub, sports bar, theme park for him.  He wanted a place where, if you wanted a good drink, you could get one.

Craig had sacrificed a lot for the place.  For the first few years, he even slept behind the bar.  And that was before he got the permits to add the fireplace.  He did without for so long because he had a long standing love affair with alcohol.  Not like Jack did, for the euphemistic "medicinal" purposes, but because he really was quite fond of the stuff.  He wasn't content with the mass marketed artificially flavored ethanol that passed for booze.  He treated liquor like a lady.  And as his mother often told him, "a lady keeps her asshole clean."

His speed rail started with bottles that usually go for twenty bucks retail, and things only got better when you went into the shelves.  Single malts snuck in from Scotland, Ukrainian horilka z pertsem that only left its homeland if formally invited, tequilas bartered off of old Mexican men in the mountains of Jalisco, the golden liquid nested safely in oaken barrels, and gins that were birthed from original Duch recipes.  And the wines!  Craig had a small cellar he had setup downstairs, and he spent many hours finding small, boutique vineyards that specialized in endangered grape species, and hand crafted their wines in small batches.  You could say a few things about his beer selection, but all that really needs to be pointed out is that a pretentious indie rocker from Seattle would undoubtedly shit their pants out of sheer pleasure if they ever saw what was on tap.

Yeah, you could call him a snob.  But you'd be missing the point.  Anyone else would have moved his trawl to NYC, and set himself up in some class joint, charging thirty bucks a glass.  But Craig didn't start with much, and he figured that there was no need to put this stuff out of reach for most people.  Most of the time, his drinks were priced wholesale Ð no markup.  Hence the sleeping accommodations for the first few years.  He had cut his overhead down as far as he could get it, so much so that one memorable evening his dinner consisted of a 1945 Mouton Rothschild and a half-eaten hamburger he found in the back dumpster.  He prided that his bar didn't try to screw you over in the name of supposed "quality".

He didn't mind when yuppies and hipsters who had heard about his place came in and asked for an appletini, or a single malt on the rocks.  He was the kind of guy that decided everything should have its place, and if something didn't belong, it would move along.  He was mostly right, too.  The kind of people that stuck around were no-bullshit characters.  They knew what they wanted, they knew how to drink it, and they quietly acknowledged each other with a nod, or maybe a wry grin.  They were the People of the Drink, and they sailed that ship with the grim pleasure of an Ahab who just caught a glimpse of white.

Of course, some patrons can't catch a hint.  Inevitable as clockwork, every St Patrick's day some half-cocked frat crew would stumble in, looking for their particular brand of kicks, and wind up learning a great deal about physics, leverage, and brute power.  Craig was an absolute gentleman when it came to alcohol, but he grew up in the streets, and didn't have the patience to talk things out.  That's one reason he befriended Jack.  That guy did nothing but think and talk, even though it was painfully clear that this rarely resolved anything.  And now the guy was heading towards a riot zone?  What the hell.  "Ok, let me gather some things."

Craig ducked behind the bar, and grabbed what he called his "battle gear": a sawed-off bat handle and a hunting knife.  He slipped the knife into his belt at the small of his back, grabbed his coat, and stuffed the bat up his right sleeve.  "You good?"

"Hold on a sec," said Jack.  "Daddy needs his medicine.  Toss me that rye, yeah?"  He pointed at the shelf behind Craig.

"Who the fuck do you think you are?  That's been mellowing since the civil war, you twunt."  Craig certainly had a way with words.

"Put it on my tab.  You know I'm good for it."  Although Craig could never understand how, Jack was good for it.  He always seemed to have money, but only when he needed it.  Craig tossed him the bottle, which was neatly tucked away in Jack's shoulder bag.

Craig vaulted the bar, and joined him at the door. "I'm gonna regret this, aren't I?"

"Yeah, probably.  But only sometimes.  Usually, you'll laugh about it for hours on end."

"No I won't."

"Oh yeah.  That would be me laughing, then.  Let's go."

Craig swung the big door behind them as the went back outside, looking for what Jack considered Fun.  "So, where is this going down, anyway?  Northwest side?" he asked.

"You bet.  Can't miss it, from what was going down on TV.  You got a car?"

"Towed.  You?"

"I traded it for a bottle of grappa."

Jack stared.  "Grappa?"

"Yeah."

"Really.  Grappa."

"Straight from Opatija."

"Oh.  Never mind, then."

"Right."

"We walk, then."

"We walk."

They started off down Main street.  Even hobbled, Jack moved at a pretty good clip.  He set the pace, with Craig next to him, impressed at his pace.  After a block or so, Craig became of a faint noise, just barely on the verge of noticing.  He looked over, and saw Jack's jaw furiously clenched, grinding his teeth together like he was milling wheat flour.  "Hey, we can slow down if you need to."

"No, everything's fine."  Jack was as used to walking on his bad ankle as he could be.  Lord knows he had done it enough so it became expected, if not familiar, and certainly not welcomed.  He had reached the point where he could ignore it, almost, for a long enough period of time that he could get where he wanted to go.  But damn, he was going to pay for that tomorrow. Maybe even later today.  Jack felt the weight of the whiskey on his hip, and he could feel its pull. Right now wasn't the time, though, because something interesting was going on.  He didn't know why, but he felt somehow that his nightmares were connected to what was going on on the Northwest side of town.  He looked up, and could see the blood orange setting sing light up the smoke they were heading toward.

In the distance, they could start to hear the familiar sounds of riot: screaming, gunfire, broken glass, sirens, and the incessant grinding of machinery.  For Jack, the grind was the key element here.  For him, this sort of stuff laid bare what he called The Machine.  There was an inevitability to it, a blind progression that everyone could predict but no one admitted.

It started when you were young, he had decided.  You began with what you Wanted.  Into that was shoved the things of Should.  Should and Want didn't get along.  Early on, Jack had heard the sound of them clashing off each other, and to him it sounded like a Detroit auto plant.  The Machine.  It got worse when the Should not only battled your Want, but even other Shoulds.  The Want, the selfish, petty, and wholly natural primatic Wants of the monkeys started becoming friends with the Shoulds.  Slowly, the faux righteous status of the Shoulds became corrupted and manipulated by the Wants, and started grinding down the primitive monkey minds of the poor humans caught in the middle.  The Machine was the result of the absolute predictive nature of the battle between Should and Want.  Jack would make a bet with anybody that as soon as the governor decided to call the National Guard, you could make an accurate prediction about how many hospital beds would be filled.  Hell, he'd even give you even odds that any large shock to the herd would spook them towards the inevitable bloodbath.

Why do these people consider themselves independent thinkers?  They're just robots running on old programs learned in school and at work, blindly heading off in one direction, heedless of what goes on around them.  The physics of the psyche:  They're like billiard balls on a shattered table.  The only time the shift their position is when they're forced to by some larger force.  It's not like they have a choice, or make a decision.  All decisions are made for them, solely on accidental encounters in their past.  It was an existence of reflection, a lifetime of reacting to habits of the past.

But what if you developed new habits? Would reprogramming your tiny brain be any different that what you were doing before?  To Jack, any successful attempt at reprogramming would just be another crack in the pool table; instead of blindly reacting to what your mother told you when you were five, you'd now be blindly reacting to what your preacher tells you at 30.  Either way, it's still a set reaction to any given stimuli.  Not like it would be that easy, even.  You don't hit a switch, or download an application.  Because you'd be reacting as the billiard ball trying to make it go sideways while it's still going forward.  Physics of psyche, yeah?  It won't change direction without adding energy.  And the faster you're tumbling down the table, the harder it is to stop.

Jack realized that not believing is easy.  There are thousands of things he didn't believe.  There was no end to it.  It was easy, for the same reason reprogramming was hard.

[LMNO]

Incidentally, 7053 words.  I'm still behind.  I think I'm supposed to be at 7800 on day 6.

[Suu]

Make sure you update at the website, it keeps it easier to track and you can laugh at everyone else too.

[hooplala]

Last night I was ahead of all y'all.

[Suu]

Last night I was ahead of all y'all.

I was right on your ass. STFU.

[LMNO]

When your program heads you in a certain direction, there ain't nothing shifting it, except for a stronger force.  Or a weaker monkey.  Because let's take a good look at the physics of the psyche.  While it's hard to shift a swiftly moving heavy object, it's easy to shift a slow moving light one.  So you've got this wacked-out, fucked-up pinball machine of a pool table, with some balls moving straight ahead, rolling over small bumps and cracks, and you have these others, like ping pong balls, flickering every which way.  Yea'h, thought Jack.  That's humanity for you.  A bunch of fucking monkeys who don't even know how to play pool.

If you have courage of your convictions, that basically means you probably will never have any others.  Nothing new will ever change your mind, ever again, regardless of what some people might call "facts" or "evidence". They just keep a-rollin along, believing their beliefs, reactin' their reactions, and ain't nuthin gonna change their minds.  Because a long time ago, someone made up their minds for them. But as strong as a long held belief is, a newly minted one is almost worse, sometimes.  When you're young, you don't even think about the little bumps and cracks you run into later on.  But when you find a strong belief later on, or if you're a small ping pong ball that gets slammed by a huge belief, well, holy shit.  There's no stopping you at all.  See, now you're consciously recognizing all the myriad potential beliefs that are coming at you, getting in your way, and you can dismiss them with a brush of your hand.  It's fairly easy to see, and fun to watch, if you're into that sort of thing.

Just imagine some poor schmuck who, after years of struggle and strife, or even after years of feeling nothing at all, suddenly finds "the" answer.  You can see it in their eyes.  There's a gleam, a spark, a drive.  It's a gleam of inertia, the kind of inertia that says, "train's a comin, best get the fuck out of the way."  It's scary.  Scary, but also really interesting.  It's like, you look at them, and you say, "really?  That's the answer?  After so many bland platitudes, and so many false starts, this is the one true Answer?  Look around, see all those other people with the mad glint in their eyes, them, THEM, the ones who, just like you, have found the One Truth that will set you all Free, because its Truly True, For Real This Time.  Why exactly is your Truth the Only Truth, and their Truth also the Only Truth?

But the you get people like Johnny Cash, who really have had a rough life, and they ground down their poor monkey minds all by themselves.  But when he finds Jesus, he's not a total freak case.  In this instance, he's seen too much.  In this case, Christ has only given him the momentum, he's seen too many cracks in the pool table.  So yeah, maybe it's tougher to reduce it down.  He's gotten into trouble going this way before.  Jack remembered when he used to talk this way at parties.  Well, casual get togethers.  Ok, bars.  Anyway, it was a few years back, and Jack had decided that it was foolish to keep his thoughts to himself.  So, he started opening his mouth.  Bad mistake, especially when it became clear that the only way he could get himself to start speaking his mind was after having a few drinks.  He got the liquid courage, but that muffled the actual thoughts.  He retreated back into the tropes, the cliches, the half true explanations, the bungled lines and was tripped up by the constant, constant interruptions.  He came off looking like a dope.

That's when he retreated back into silence.  Jack's thoughts became his companions.  Anyone else who  would stay too long got a taste, and retreated hastily backwards.  Jack learned to keep his mouth shut, and only answer the questions that were put to him.  Apparently, people don't like it when you call them monkeys.  They prefer to think of themselves as free-thinking individuals, even if they believe in destiny, even if they believe that the Great God Thor controls their lives, even if they believe that consciousness is no more than electro chemical reactions in an eight pound mass of jelly called the brain.  Their Pride that they know too much, the inevitability of the Machine that tells them Should, it overcomes their ears, shuts down their mind, and subjects them to a lifetime of ping pong ball reactions.

Take the book of Job from this perspective.  In it, Job has faith, and it's strong.  He's like a bowling ball rolling down the table.  To prove how unstoppable he is, Satan takes away everything he's ever loved, and everything he's put his faith in.  Yet time after time, he rolls on ahead, not considering other paths or alternatives.  And just when he's had enough, and says, "what the fuck?" and begins to question things, he's flattened, and kicked further down the road.  Ok, that last bit doesn't work so well, because YHWH actually makes an appearance.  Unless you want to take that as a metaphor as well, in which case, the massive subconscious structures rise up and swamp the tiny question that worked its way to the front.  Yeah, that'll work.  Until you try to jibe Satan actually taking things away, and YHVH being from the subconscious.  He'd have to work on that some more.

[LMNO]

Craig tapped Jack on the shoulder. "Dude, you're doing it again."

"Uh?  Oh.  Right.  Sorry."

"Whatever.  Listen, what the hell are we going to do when we get there?"

"We're gonna go check it out, and see what's up."

"How... and why?"

"Somehow.  We'll see when we get there.  As for why, well... Because it's there."

"Christ."  Craig realized, not for the first time, that there was often no getting through to him.  Or getting something out of him.  Sometimes he suspected that was because there wasn't much there to get.  Not that he wasn't smart, or that he was shallow.  It was more because there was something immediate about him.  He never thought too hard about what was coming next, he just took bites out of what was around him, chewed twice, and than spat it back out.  Craig didn't know if it was actually possible to live like that, and after hanging around Jack for a few years, he wasn't sure Jack really knew, either.

The guy had been bouncing around ever since they met, and it made Craig uneasy.  He only paid attention to what was right in front of him, but he was scary good at referencing that to almost anything else.  It was like he had a great memory, but he never made any connections unless he had to.

They approached the 1900 block from the South, the sounds of the riot building step by step.  They could see the commotion, now.  Armored jeeps and paddywagons had blocked off the far end of Main, and they could see police and guardsmen occasionally running between them.  Beyond the roadblock, there was a seething mass of bodies crashing into one another, and a hollow howling that echoed off the buildings.

"Around here." Jack motioned them into an alley off of Main, and peered around the corner.  "I think we can use the basements to get over there."

"Use the...?" started Craig, then noticed Jack wasn't next to him anymore, but fumbling in his bag while crouching next to a street-level window.  "Oh, Jack.  Come on."

Jack felt his knees pop as he knelt by the window. He figured he could jimmy the lock from the outside and they could make their way to the inner sections through the net of underground connections connecting the buildings together.  As he eased the wire picks into the mechanism, he wondered if it were this easy to pick into someone's brain.

It could be easy.  All you needed was to find a weak or fragile frame, and then just apply the right pressure in just the right place.  Now that doesn't mean you can just shove it in; that's a direct way to a brain collapse; plus, if there's any kind of security, they'll come running in quick, and then you're fucked.  No, what you wanted was a subtle slip, a knife's edge into the space.  Something simple.  Something they'll agree with.  That's how you do it.  Then, once you get inside, you can start to move around.  Find other agreeable things.  But the magic was, you didn't even have to find things they agreed with.  Once you were inside, no one ever noticed the damage you could do.

It was like people had this heavy security wall that only looked out.  They were incredibly skeptical about what was on the outside; that was part of the inertia; it just kept on going, blasting down the outside ideas.  Criticizing and shooting them down for any number of reasons, real or imagined.  But if something got in, then it was like they had a backstage pass at the Republican National Convention: Never questioned, never accused, never doubted.  You were home free.  So, first thing, get in.  From there, you can start spreading, like some horrifically welcomed cancer.  And oh, the things you can do.

See, most people aren't aware of how fragile their own ideas really are.  They flit about inside the compound, only bumping into their own kind, agreeing with themselves constantly, and when this goes on long enough, they think they're strong, and assured, and righteous.  But what happens when someone gets inside without their noticing?  Yeah.  Those pretty butterflies of ideas can get clipped so easily. Just... turn them a little.  One dark idea can be like a reverse lamp, all the pretty flitting things don't get drawn to it, they turn away, they turn themselves, they turn into, they begin to become like that dark idea.  They reflect.  Once the dark idea is in there, they start to push a little.  And all the flitting ideas agree with each other, so somehow, they have to agree with the dark idea, no? 

And here's where the dark rationalization comes in.  The immense power of those damn frontal lobes can turn piss into wine.  Anything can become anything else, if you just give it a little time and a push.  That little idea, that tiny, fragile thing, it so wants to be included in the greater picture, it wants to be part of the whole. But it sees that strong, dark thought and idea, and that idea is nudging.  Why not? Why not become part of a larger idea?  There's some sense in what they're saying, after all, no reason you shouldn't go along with it. 

And all the while, the perimeter guards stand silent.  After all, their job is to fight off outside concepts.  All the difficult "mental" stuff happens on the inside, their job is just to keep stuff out.  There's not upper level thinking going on here.  They can't tell the difference between an idea that they started with and one that was snuck in.  So when all the beautiful Moon Moth thoughts become flopping vultures, they start giving orders.  To the guards.  Of course, the guards don't question anything coming from the inside, they only question what's on the outside, yeah?  So, slowly but surely, the guards start guarding against what used to be on the inside, and they keep safe what they used to repel.  And that's all there is to it.  The outside comes in.

The window eased open.  There was just enough room for jack to slip through.  "Craig, wait by that door further down."  Jack disappeared through the window.

Lucky for him, most of the residents had gotten the hell out after the news reports and the tanks.  Jack felt a dim regret for not being more of a thief, and then looked for the back door.  He negotiated his way through rococo frames of someone's grandmother, poorly knit tea cozys, and ceramic bits of nothing that people seem to collect around themselves to give them meaning.  Warm and sad at the same time, really, that something as useless and simple as a mass-produced porcelin statue could somehow tweak the memories to chain them down to some long past time when they might have thought themselves to be happy.  Jack hobbled up a small set of stairs, and began the process of unbolting, unchaining and unlocking the highly imaginative, but ultimately useless barriers keeping the outside to itself.

He opened the door to see the imposing figure of Craig blotting out the setting sun, and thrusting Jack's cane at him.  "Forgot this, you fucker," he said, brushing him aside.  "So now that we've got breaking and entering on our side, where to?"

"We need to find the access tunnels," Jack replied.  "They should be either near the bathroom or the kitchen."

"Same place from the smell.  Aw, fuck.  I meant that as a joke."  The alcove they walked into had a makeshift stove, a wooden plank on top of a cinder block, and a large hole in the opposite corner.  "We don't actually have to go down in there, do we?"

"You want to face down the riot cops?"

[LMNO]

"Aw, hell.  You wouldn't happen to have a gasmask in that bag of yours, would you?"

Jack pretended to rummage through his bag.  "Sorry," he grinned.

"Go to hell."

" I can do you one better.  There's a ladder down here."  Jack swung a leg around and dropped a few feet.  His forehead crinkled a bit as the smell fully hit him.

"You still think this is a good idea, smart guy?"

"What the hell, right?"  Jack started to climb down into the tunnels.  "I mean, come on.  It isn't all one big toilet."

"I'll bet you a mahogany bar you're wrong."

"A mahogany bar what?"

"Shut up and get down there.  I'm right above you."

It was dark down there.  Luckily, Jack did have a hand cranked flashlight.  Unluckily, it only pushed the darkness back further down the tunnel.  Jack and Craig did their best not to look down at what they were walking through.  They headed North, as best as they could figure.  The tunnels were about 10 feet in diameter, and formed a lattice underneath the apartment complexes of the Northwest side.  A channel was carved in the bottom, and although the theory was that rainwater and the Wagathag river's overflow would be redirected through them, like most theories it didn't really play out in real life as expected.  Every so often, there was an access tube led up to the different buildings and apartments, but most of them were sealed off, or used as large-scale garbage disposals.

"Hey, Jack?"

"Yeah?"

"There's a lot of garbage down here."

"Yeah."

"Like, a lot of food and stuff."

"Yeah."

"Like, a lot of food that's been eaten."

"Yeah."

"Like, a lot of food that's been eaten after it's been tossed down here."

Jack swung his flashlight towards a pile of semi rotting scraps that looked like they had been tossed yesterday.  It definitely had a nibbled look to it.  "Yeah?"

"So, we haven't seen a single thing since we came down here.  You don't find that a little odd?"

"Well, it could be because we're down here."

"You actually have never been around feral rodents, have you?"

"Once or twice, maybe."

"Ex girlfriends don't count."

"What about a mother in law?"

"What about your sister?"

"All right, enough."

"I'm just saying..."

"Enough!"

"Ok, seriously.  There were a few nights when I was sleeping at the bar when I had to deal with a few of those fuckers.  Let me tell you, they aren't scared of a couple of people on their turf."

"So, how'd you deal with them?"

"The bat."

"Ah."

They walked on.  By now, they were truly inside, like two bad ideas wedged into an unresisting mind.  But that doesn't account for the subversion through immersion that happens so often.  You take a person who thinks one thing, and then you put them in an environment where every other person they talk to thinks the opposite.  All day long, they're inundated with the same message; but not confrontational.  A confrontation sets those guards up, and protects the flitting thoughts.  No, the conversion by immersion happens when it's not even discussed.  The constant opinion without rebuttal.  It just lives in the environment.  The guards, ordered to keep watch over differing opinions, eventually just accept it as part of the background noise.  It becomes accepted as normal, and then it gets inside.  And without even knowing it, you've become something other than you ever thought you could be.

So, with all of this, all of this mechanical, insidious, unthinking, unfeeling process, where so called "free thinking" people are forced to obey decades old rules they didn't even know they were signing up for, and don't even know how to change it, how the hell do you compete with something like that?  By turning the guards around, and by pointing them inside your own head.

Instead of questioning every outside thought that you encountered, you need to question every thought you've ever had.  Become a butterfly collector.  Nail those fuckers to a board and study them.  Where did your thoughts come from?  What did you experience that caused you to think like that?  And lastly, do you really agree with it, or after breaking it down, does it just not add up?  When you start thinking like this, that what you are is a combination of your environment and the feedback loop you have with your environment. 

"Jack!"

"What?"

"God, I hate it when you do that.  I said, what do you think went on up there?  Some of the news reports on Fox said it could be the Apocalypse."

"Well, that could be right."

"What?"

"The origins of the word 'Apocalypse' is from the Greek, meaning 'secrets revealed'.  I get the feeling that someone in the government  is trying to keep something hidden.  If the riots actually succeed in taking down the military, you can damn well bet that something's gonna be revealed."

Of course, apocalypse could also be a personal one.  One of those thunderbolt sparks, the aha moment, the horrific point where you know that the universe will never be the same again, because of the way you now see it.  The bell can't be un-rung, the door once opened will never be closed.

Like that old bugaboo Crowley used to talk about, the Keeper, or Guardian, at the Gate – Old uncle Al always liked to wrap his metaphors up into twisted little packages.  What if old Choronzon, mister 333 himself, was actually us?  What if the looming beast that waves us off from the grand Holy knowledge of the universe actually our old games and brain structures?  And more than that, what if the Dark Beast was actually the process of established thought, rather than what those thoughts actually are?  If so, then the way to enlightenment wasn't what you believed, it was how you believed... or if you even believed at all.  Because what, exactly was belief?

Wasn't belief simply a lie that stuck with you?  Jack had already started to work out the lies of perception.  So, if you put forth that a belief is some way that you think the world works, the only evidence that you have is from inherently false perceptions, the testimony of other people's false perceptions, or some after-the-fact meta theory that lays out an arbitrary framework that is constantly modified as it gets proved wrong.  Or, a more blatant, outright lie.

Somewhere, at some point, you had to just say 'fuck it' and move on.  Every kid has played the "why" game, breaking down a belief into it's component parts, and at some point, you say, "because."  Why? Because, at some point, no matter how much biology, or physics, or chemistry, or theology, or philosophy you have studied, there are some things they haven't figured out yet.  Theology had a pretty sneaky "out" though:  Because God said so.  Which is much more satisfying to say, and to hear, than "I don't know."  Or, for the more adventurous, "I don't know yet."  Ultimately, we have to have some sort of pragmatism here, something that says, "well, so far, it's been working; so, I'll just stop here."  And sure, it works, for now, in this scenario.  But will it always work, all the time?  Because if it doesn't, that your belief isn't really up to snuff.  Because it's based on lies.

Some philosophers and semanticists have tried to break down the words themselves, trying to glean the meanings behind the sounds.  But apart from making it much easier to write tech and instruction manuals, it didn't really get to the heart of the matter: The entire premise is based on and incomplete understanding of the information being received.  It could be argued that Jack's point of "fuck it, I'll just stop saying 'why' right about here" was set at a much higher bar than others'; but to Jack, it was all built on faulty foundations.  Even if it didn't look too far out of whack up close, once you pulled back and started building the massive structures of human consciousness on it, it becomes one butterfly's wing from disaster.

They turned a corner, and Jack came face to face with a rat.  A big one.  About the size of a dog.  Craig was right, he thought.  It sure has hell doesn't look scared.  It's beady eyes sized him up, and decided, "food."

Jack thought, "Ah, shit.  Here we go again."

[The Dark Monk]

Wonderful LMNO.
I thoroughly enjoyed that.
You get Mr. Green because mittens aren't as cool.

[LMNO]

PART 2: RECONSTRUCTION.

Fall was Tom's favorite time of year.  It was when everything seemed to take itself into account, and to settle into acceptance.  He loved to walk through the woods South of the city, and watch the leaves turn and flutter.  The air felt cleaner, more electric.  Spring was just damp and sluggish.  The so called "new life" that gaia freaks love to talk about is the bleary life of the newly woken.  Autumn has the spark of the man who knows he doesn't have much time left, and wants to life to the fullest.  The monsoons of Summer have given way to the crisp breezes of Fall.  It's like the world gears up for one last hurrah before the snows of winter tuck it in for the night.  He was a coat and hat kind of guy anyway; for some reason, he always felt more comfortable with his leather jacket and fedora.  Not a biker's jacket, but a thin leather coat that he found in a second hand store.  It was perfect for days like this, when the thermometer hit 58 degrees Fahrenheit, and a light breeze tossed leaves in the air.  The Summer months, with the heat and the sticky, oppressive humidity, always fired up his sweat glands.  He had been known to soak through a shirt simply by walking to work.  He always felt sluggish during those months, and like he could never get clean, no matter how many showers he took.

Tom was always grateful on days like this that he lived near the old cemetery off of Highway 41.  It was carefully positioned in a sort of valley, with the roads on the opposite sides of the rise, which cut off road noise.  It was also fortunate that people had donated quite a lot of money, because it was enormous.  It was practically a state park, provided you could ignore the tombstones.  Unlike a place like Arlington cemetery, where the graves were laid out in a precise, regimented manner, Grayson's cemetery was much more haphazard, and allowed for the existing trees to remain in places, and landscaped the rest.  This gave the place a sense of flow, of progression.  You could start at the main gates, and spend more than an hour walking the paths, meandering from rough hewn obelisks to marble fronted mausoleums, crumbling civil war headstones to brass plaqued family plots.  In between were tastefully pruned bushes and a mixture of aspens, pines, and oaks.  Sometimes, when you were walking through a stand of trees, you would come across a solitary tombstone, humbly forgotten, patiently waiting for a family member to visit.

He loved walking along the edges of the various plots, off the main paths, to where the gardeners hadn't quite gotten to yet.  His black Frye boots would kick the pine needles and fallen leaves, hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket (for all his love of the fall weather, he had fairly poor circulation in his fingers).  For all the skill and planning of the landscapers, the edges were far more interesting than the main paths.  So much more was revealed this way, from lost and forgotten graves, to the empty bottles and used condoms left by the high school kids who would sneak in at night.  Lately, Tom had noticed prescription bottles strewed amongst the remains as well. It was troubling, but not as much as the pile of cheap vodka bottles and dried bloodstains he had found last week.  He shuddered.  Sometimes, he had to agree with his boyfriend: this wasn't always the nicest of places to visit.

Doug often disagreed with his going out like this, but Tom insisted that seeing the follys and violence of youth only made the stolid natural beauty of the cemetery more striking.  He had tried explaining this many times, but Doug would usually just sigh and roll his eyes, and then change the subject.  That was ok with Tom though, as he had figured out long ago that walking by yourself was extremely different than walking with company.  When someone was along with you, there was this strange need to fill the space with talk, even if there was nothing to say.  Tom had noticed this tendency ever since he was a child.  It was almost like a safety rope, like if other people didn't say anything to them, it was as if they didn't exist; and if you didn't say anything back, it would be considered rude.  So this constant cycle of existential desparation and base level politeness filled the air with nonsensical, meaningless drivel.  Observational obviousness like, "it's cold out here today," and "boy, the leaves are sure pretty."  Or rhetorical current status questions, like "Hey, how you doin'?"

This kind of behavior is what makes Twitter and Facebook so popular, Tom thought.  You just post inconsequential updates ("I am eating three-quarters of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich," "I slept for 7 hours and 34 minutes last night"), crying out into the wilderness, not hoping that someone, anyone else will actually care what color socks you're wearing today, but that you yourself still exist.

A bird called out in the early evening air.  Tom stopped, stunned.  "I guess that's why they call it 'Twitter', then," he said to himself.  He watched the bird sing, and realized that it was posting on nature's Facebook.  Maybe the point wasn't meaningless short term confirmation of existence, he thought.  Maybe it was a vestigial form of territorialism.  We constantly make noises to call out and affirm our existence, but not based on people's responses.  We announce ourselves, we demand that people notice us, that I am here and I am mine.  In a way, it's a challenge, an order to be recognized.  Maybe that's one reason people get annoyed if you don't respond to even the most trivial of comments: it's perceived as a challenge.  So perhaps it's not the content of the message, it's simply the act of messaging that carries the weight.  Smells a little like Mcluhan.

As the sun set through the trees, Tom could see one of the mausoleums scattered thought the graveyard.  It was a large cube, about fifteen feet tall, and made of black granite.  The bars of its wrought iron gate were thick and imposing, with sharpened spikes jutting out at the top.  Tom had always thought to himself, as a joke, that it looked more like the family wanted it built to keep things inside, rather than keeping intruders out.  It was a little less amusing now, as the sunlight began to fade, and Tom noticed that the gate had swung open.  Tom walked a bit closer, but stayed at the treeline.  He could see a soft red glow from inside fall across the threshold of the mausoleum's doorway.  "Now would be a good time to be leaving," he thought to himself.  He turned to go back the way he came, when he caught the sound of mean laughter.  To his right, in the cemetery proper, were two rough looking twenty somethings. They had beat up jeans jackets, and holes in their pants. Long, ratty hair was shoved under baseball caps.  Their heavy workboots clomped against the asphalt of the path.  The taller one was holding a large bottle of sort of liquor.  The shorter one had a flashlight, and a two foot length of rebar.  Tom ducked behind a tree.  While this town was more queer friendly than most, he had learned the hard way that sometimes, stereotypes were quite accurate.  He had no intention of finding out whether these apparently disaffected youth were gay bashers, homeless vet bashers, rapists, or simply young men who enjoyed getting drunk and fondling construction materials.  They were close enough now that he could hear what they were saying.  The tall one was already in mid rant.

"I told you man, those bitches wanted it!"

"Shut the fuck up, man.  You're fucking high."

"So what?  I know them, man, they'd do anything for some weed and some booze."

"Sure, they say that, but you know what?  Fuck it.  They'd just take a hit, giggle, then say shit like it's their fucking period or something, and all we'd get out of it is an empty bottle and blueballs."

"You faggot.  That's what these are for."  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small vial. "GHB, man.  Give 'em one drop and they won't know what fuckin hit them."

"Serious?  Where'd you get that, man?"

"Down at The Block.  Some dude was selling it outside the D Street Club."

"Well, fuck.  I don't care if the bitch ain't moving, so long as I can get a piece.  Let's head back now!"

"Hold up.  Check that out."  The tall one was looking at the mausoleum.

"What the hell?"  They walked closer, and the short one pointed his flashlight into the tomb.

"What is it?"  The taller one brought the bottle up to his lips and took a swig.  He put the vial back into his pocket, and then crouched and slid a knife out of his boot.

"I don't know, it looks like aAAAKKKG-" a shadow moved through the red glow, and something lashed out at the short one.  The flashlight dropped to the ground and spun crazily, the beam of light throwing a tiny spotlight at the treetops, a row of headstones, the knees of the other thug, and then went out.  The rebar hit the ground with a clang.  Something long and ropey was extended from inside the tomb and had wrapped around the short dirtbag's neck.  He was making wet, bubbly sounds and was trying to claw at whatever was choking him.

For what it's worth, his friend at least had some sort of honor.  Instead of running away, he actually stepped up and swung the knife at the thing.  Not that it did any good.  Tom saw something flop at the foot of the door, and squirm forward.  Then, as it leaped up and wrapped around his waist, Tom could see that it looked like some sort of tentacle, stretching back into the mausoleum.  The tall thug screamed once, and then was lifted off his feet and pulled into the tomb.  Tom watched, terrified, as the tentacle wrapped around the shorter one's neck jerked back as well, with a wet crunching noise.  The young punk's body toppled forward, and his head rolled off to one side, three or four feet away.  Nothing happened for at least 5 seconds, and then Tom heard a slithering thump.  He decided he really didn't want to see what might be making its way through the door of the tomb, so he turned and ran.

This was one of those times when Tom would have been happy to have another person with him, territorial birdsongs or no.  The twilight was rapidly making way for serious night, and there was only a sliver of moon coming over the hill.  The shrubs tore at his pants, and once or twice he narrowly avoided breaking his kneecaps on a tombstone lurking in the dark.  He found his way to a more established path, and raced for the exit.  He made it to the gates, and paused to look back.  The graveyard looked back at him, silent and cold.  There was no sign of movement, and the only thing he could hear was his own lungs, panting in the chilled night air.  He needed to get home.  He needed to call the police.  He'd figure out what to tell them when he got there.

[LMNO]

Doug was in the kitchen when Tom came through the door.  The air was filled with the smell of  roast chicken and a curried pumpkin soup.  Doug considered himself a pretty decent cook, and no one had yet needed to disagree with him.  He had picked up the skill fairly young in life, hanging around his mom's kitchen, poking his fingers into things, offering to help out.  Luckily, his mother liked to cook, so he had nightly lessons on what to do to actually make food.

In college, Doug spent most of his money on rent and beer, so he couldn't really afford to go out to eat.  He had tried the ramen diet, and was completely turned off.  Instead, he found that five dollars could get you a pot of rice, some fresh spinach, and some chicken thighs, and you could actually keep the leftovers (have you ever tried eating leftover ramen? Not recommended).  His friends soon found out that Doug actually knew how a stove worked, and they all struck a deal: if they brought over the ingredients, he'd cook it.  Pooling their funds helped them get better ingredients: Lamb, artichokes, asparagus, delicata squash, prime rib even.  Doug began to watch the TV shows, and soon felt brave enough to go off recipe.  He learned a few very important lessons.  First off, cooking consisted mainly of chopping things, and adding heat to them.  Fancy techniques refined the final product, but 90% of the time, all you really needed was a pan, a knife, and a pair of tongs.  You chop, you heat, you add ingredients, you mix, you turn, you remove some things, you add others, you reduce, you deglaze, you warm through, you arrange on a plate.  Pan, knife, tongs.

That's not to say that Doug didn't get off on his fancy gadgets.  He had a slow cooker to make his own stock.  He dedicated an old coffee grinder to make his own curries and ground spices.  He had a china cap, which turned the usually "blenderized" soups into silken wonders.  He had at least a dozen blades, from cleavers to paring knives.  He had whisks, digital scales, dutch ovens, juicers, immersion blenders, steamer pots, strainers, and a drawer full of as many spatulas, bamboo spoons, and spiders as you could ever want.

The second thing Doug had learned was that, unlike baking, everything was "to taste".  Ok, almost everything.  There was still some chemistry magic going on in a few processes, but the only reason to use a full teaspoon of thyme instead of a half was whether you liked thyme, and how much of it you wanted to taste.  Taking that into consideration, his spice cabinet took up at least a quarter of the kitchen.  He had the standard basil/oregano/crushed red pepper, but that just wasn't enough for him.  Three kinds of salt; white, black, and green peppercorns; cumin, tarragon, dried chilies, mustard seed and coriander; curry powder, ras al hanout, and so called "Cajun" spice blends; at least a half dozen vinegars, just as many oils, and more kinds of hot sauce than was really good for a person to actually own.  And his fish sauce.  Ah, his fish sauce.

He knew that the recent "umami" craze was completely out of control.  The "brand new discovery" of a secret "fifth taste" that wasn't sweet, salty, sour, or bitter.  Brand new?  It's been known since 1908.  Doug figured it didn't help that it resurfaced in the age of marketing in the US, who grabbed the name "Umami" and ran with it as some sort of exotic concept.  Why not just call it "savory"?  It means the same thing, has was known in Western cooking for centuries; just look at the fascination and passion for truffles.  All the same despite all the hype, Doug couldn't deny that underlying savory flavor.  And for him, the best expression of that was his nam pla fish sauce.  Just a few splashes of the light amber liquid in a soup or a sauce brought everything together.

Doug was just pulling the toasted pumpkin seeds from the oven when he heard Tom come in.  "What the hell, Tom?  I was this far from getting worried about you!" he barked.  When Tom turned the corner though, Doug's annoyance vanished like a bad dream in the light of day.  "Tom?  What's the matter."

"I don't think you're going to believe me, but we need to call the police.  Something happened to a couple of kids in the cemetery."

"Another assault?"

"No.  It was... I have no idea what it was."  Tom sat down heavily on a chair.  He looked up at Doug with a pained expression.  "Can you get me a glass of scotch?"

"Um... Sure."  Doug didn't like it when Tom drank whiskey, because it had the tendency to turn him into another person, a mean one.  Normally, Tom was a quiet, reserved guy, with a sharp wit and an easy smile.  But put a few glasses of bourbon or scotch, and he turned surly, sarcastic, and cruel.  When they had first started dating, Doug was sure that Tom was schizophrenic, or at least bi-polar.  It took a couple of months to figure it out, and ever since, he had kept a close watch on what Tom was drinking.  Right now, it didn't seem like a good idea to start up that conversation again.  He went to the bar, and poured Tom an inch or so of single malt into a rocks glass.  He walked it over to Tom, who grabbed it and breathed the fumes deeply before taking a gulp.  "So, what happened?  You're starting to worry me again."

"I don't know how to explain it.  I was walking through Grayson's as I usually do, and when it started getting dark I saw a couple of punk kids looking for trouble.  I didn't want to even take a chance with that, so I ducked into the trees."  He took another sip of scotch.  "They were talking the standard line of shit... getting drunk, date rape braggadocio, all that.  Then.  Then.  Oh, God."

Doug knelt beside the chair, and took one of Tom's hands in both of his.  "Ok honey, you're ok.  Just go slow, and tell me what happened."

"There was this grave, this tomb, and the gate was open, and this light was on inside, and, and, and the little fuckers went near it, and this thing-"

"Wait, what?"

"-This thing, this, this tentacle thing came out and killed them-"

"Oh, you asshole."  Doug stood up and brushed his pants angrily.  "You really had me worried there.  Honestly.  You and your fucking pranks.  I swear, I don't know why you keep doing this to me, you know how pissed off I get-"

"No!  You don't understand!"  The urgency in Tom's voice stopped Doug short.  "I'm serious!  I saw... something, and it attacked those kids, and killed them! They were screaming!"

"If this is some sort of elaborate joke..."

"No, no I swear."

Doug sighed.  "Ok, so you saw 'something', it was dark, but all you really know is that two young men were attacked."

Tom looked up with pained, confused eyes.  "Yeah, I guess."

"So, you're right.  We should call the cops.  But they're going to want to know what you saw, and you can't  tell them that you saw something that sounds like a bad HP Lovecraft knockoff."

"But I was there..."

"...And you don't have a good excuse as to what happened.  What if they start accusing you of the attack, like a reverse queer bash, and your only defense are these 'tentacle things'? They'll lock you up, and I'll never see you again.  So shape up!"

"Well... I could say that they threatened me, and I turned and ran, and when I was running away, I heard screams, so that's why I called?"

"That might work. We need to do it soon, though.  The longer we wait, the less innocent and concerned we seem."

"But I am innocent!" Tom protested.

"Of course you are.  But you're not a cop.  A cop is going to see two dead assholes who were looking for trouble, and one live faggot who watched them die who doesn't have a good alibi.  I'm going to get the phone."  Doug got his cell phone from the charger, and dialed 911.  "Hello?  Yes, I'd like to report a potential hate crime at Grayson's cemetery.  Yes, I'll hold."  He looked over at Tom.  "Just let me do the talking.  You're too distraught from the attack."

"Fucking right I am," muttered Tom into his glass.

Doug turned back to the phone.  "Yes?  Yes, my partner was attacked at Grayson's cemetery this evening.  Doug.  Doug Vertian.  No, not 'Version', Vertian.  V-E-R-T-I-A-N.   Yes.  No, he just got in.  He's quite shaken up.  Two, I think.  No, they threatened him, and he ran away.  Yes, I know, but as he was running, he heard a scream.  He thinks someone else may have been attacked.  Yes.  Tom.  Tom Bertrand.  Bertrand.  B-E-R-T-R-A-N-D.  Yes.  I see.  No, that's fine.  87 and Main, Northeast.  Apartment Three.  Yes, thanks.  See you soon.  Yes.  Ok, goodbye."  He hung up the phone.  "No more scotch for you, Tom.  The police are coming over here to interview you.  I'll make some coffee."

Tom looked up.  "What do I say?"

"Say exactly what happened.  You saw some young toughs, they threatened you, you ran away, you heard screams."

"But that's not what-"

"You saw some young toughs, they threatened you, you ran away, you heard screams.  How hard is that?  Ok, look at it this way:  Their appearance seemed threatening you, you heard them scream, you ran away, right?"

"But the tentacles-"

Doug got very quiet.  "Tom, listen very closely.  The police will be here in no less than twenty minutes.  If, when they question you, you make any mention of tombs, lights, monsters, or tentacles, I will tell them you're an alcoholic and this was all a delusion brought on by your drunkenness, and that I actually called them because you beat me.  Do you understand me?"

"Hey, that's not fair!"

"Tom?"

"I... Yes."

"No tentacles.  You saw some young toughs, they threatened you, you ran away, you heard screams.  Say it."

"I saw some young toughs, they threatened me, I ran away, I heard screams."

"Good. With any luck, you'll just have to sign a report, and they'll go away.  Are there any drugs in the house?"

"Not since Wednesday."

"Better times.  Ok.  Finish that, and I'm going to make coffee.  I guess we'll have our dinner cold, later."  He walked back into the kitchen, and began to assemble to coffeemaker.  Tom drained the glass, and just sat there, looking lost.

It only took ten minutes for the police to show.  Doug let them in.  There were two of them, a detective and a patrolman.

[LMNO]

Doug showed them into the living room, and then went to the kitchen and poured out four cups of coffee.  He brought them back into the room just as they began to interview Tom.

"Ok, sir.  Just tell us what happened."

"Well, detective... Mitchell, was it?  I was taking a walk through Grayson's, and-"

"Hold it," said the detective.  "Why exactly were you walking through the cemetery?"

"What?  I... I like going for walks, and Grayson's is a nice place.."

"Is that all?  I mean, and no disrespect here, but Grayson's has a... reputation."

"And what exactly do you mean by that?" asked Doug icily.

"Well, sir.  It's just that we need a complete account of what Mr Bertrand was doing that evening."

"He told you.  He was going for a walk.  He enjoys walking.  He wasn't trying to buy drugs, and he wasn't trolling for a bit of, as you would say, 'rough trade'.  Tom isn't like that."

"Please, Mr..." He looked at his notebook. "Vertain.  Let Mr. Bertrand speak for himself."

"This is ridiculous!" cried Doug. "We call in a potential assault, and you're here asking my boyfriend if he was trolling for whores?"

"Please calm down, sir.  We have a squad car down at the graveyard, checking things out.  You, in fact, are not helping matters right now,"

"Doug, please, it's all right," said Tom softly.  "No, officer, I wasn't there for any reason other than I enjoy walking through Grayson's in the Fall."

Detective Mitchell made a note in his notebook.  "Ok then, we'll just move on for now.  What happened next?"

"Well, as I was walking, I was approached by two young men, and they started calling me names.  One of them was holding a steel bar, and I became frightened."

"What sort of things were they saying?"

"Oh... you know... things like 'hey faggot', and 'fucking queer'... stuff like that."

"And you are sure you didn't do anything to provoke them in any way?"

"Oh come on!" shouted Doug.  "I know that blaming the victim is a common habit, but I thought you would be more subtle about it!"

"That's enough, Mr. Vertian.  We're just trying to get the full story.  Answer the question, Mr Bertrand."

"Tom, don't.  Don't satisfy this asshole's need to make you the one to blame!"

"Enough.  Officer Jenkem, please take Mr. Vertian into the other room."  The patrolman grabbed Doug by the arm, and said, "Please sir.  Step this way."

"What?  No!  You can't tell me what to do in my own home!"

"Sir, please.  This will just take a minute.  Please.  Humor us."  Officer Jenkem calmly but firmly led Doug into the kitchen.

[LMNO]

"Now, just hold on a second-"

"Sir."  The way Jenkem looked at Doug said volumes.  It said, "Hey there, faggot.  I don't have a problem with you and your perverted ways, or your sinful life.  I'm a cop.  I've seen things that would make you puke.  You and your faggy boyfriend don't bother me.  What bothers me is when you, with your stuck up   attitude, and your 'I watch "Law and Order"' mentality, try messing with my investigation.  If you keep this up, you'll find out what 'harassment and intimidation' actually means.  So shut the fuck up, and back the fuck down."  Doug decided to keep his mouth shut, and walked into the kitchen.

Back in the living room, Detective Mitchell gave Tom a hard look.  "So, these toughs confronted you.  What happened next?"

"I didn't want any trouble, so I turned and ran."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

"And then?"

"As I was running away, I heard someone scream."

"You heard.  You didn't see anything?"

"Um.  No.  I didn't see.  Anything."

"So, those boys might have been playing a prank on you."

"I guess.  But...  Isn't it better that I called?  I mean, like, benefit of the doubt?"

"Hmm."  Mitchell turned a page in his notebook.  "Now, Mr. Bertrand, let's get back to why you were in the cemetery in the first place."

"But, I was just going for a walk!"

"So you say.  But I do have a few questions.  First off-"

A cell phone rang.  "Hold on a second."  He flipped open his phone.  "Mitchell.  Yeah.  No, I'm here.  Yeah.  Really?  Yeah.  Ok.  I think I can make that happen.  Five minutes."  He snapped the phone shut.  "That was the crew at the cemetery.  We're going to have to bring you down there."

"No!"

"Excuse me?"

"You can't take me down there!"

"But Mr Bertrand, you were just saying how you enjoy Grayson's."

"I- I'm sorry.  It's just that I'm still a little freaked out."

"But nothing happened to you, Mr Bertrand.  They called you names, you ran away.  That's all."

"You don't understand.  It was a... I was scared."

"Ok, Mr Bertrand.  If you want, you can bring your partner with you.  Will that make you calmer?"

"I.  I suppose so.  May I go tell him?"

"Be my guest."

Tom walked out to the kitchen.  His left hand trembled slightly.  "Doug?"

"Tom? Are you all right?"

"Yeah.  Tom, they're asking us to go down there.  To Greyson's."  There was a look of terror in Tom's eyes.  Doug could tell he was on the brink of freaking out.  Doug grabbed his hand.  "It will be ok, babe.  We'll be there with the police.  I'm sure officer Jenkem will make sure nothing happens."  Doug shot a look at Jenkem, who looked back stonily.

"Ok, let's go then," said Mitchell.

Pulling up at the cemetery, there were half a dozen police cars lined up at the gates, lights flashing.  The four of them stepped out of the car, with Tom holding tight to Doug's hand.  "This way," said Mitchell, leading the way inside the graveyard.  As the four of them walked down the dark path, Tom became more and more agitated.  Doug started to pick up on his anxiety.  Tentacles?  Really?  Tom was imaginative, but he was also fairly realistic, most of the time.  The fact that he was so freaked out was starting to freak Doug out. 

Up ahead, they could see the beams of other policeman's flashlights waving, cutting through the night.  As they approached, Tom could see the black, dark tomb.  He froze.

Tom had consistently slowed his steps as he drew closer to where it happened, and when he saw the dim outline of the mausoleum, he stopped completely.  It looked almost malevolent, squatting in the dark like some giant stone toad, just waiting for something tasty to fly near.  Tom did not want to be that fly.  Out of the darkness, another officer walked up to Detective Mitchell.

"Sir, we've found a large pool of blood, but no signs of a struggle, and no signs of any bodies."

"Is there any indication that the bodies may have been dragged off?"

"No sir.  Everything is basically untouched, with the exception of all the blood."

"Well, that is indeed odd." He turned to Tom.  "Mr Bergeron, can you explain this?"

"Me?  I- Why do you think I could explain...?"

"He told you," Doug broke in.  "He ran away."

"There's something you're not telling me, and I want to know what it is." As he leaned in closer to Tom, Doug noticed it had gotten much darker all of a sudden.  Cloud had rolled in quickly, and low, muting the reflected light from the city, and obscuring what little of the moon there was.  At the same time, he felt his skin begin to tingle, like when you rub your feet across the carpet, just before you zap yourself on a door handle.

"I- I- I don't know what you're talking about," stammered Tom.

"Yes you do.  I can tell.  I can feel it.  You know what happened here.  And you better start talking, you little-"

There was an enormous crack, and a blinding flash.  To the left of them, a tree exploded as a bolt of lightning struck it.  Everyone hit the ground as another bolt struck to their right.

"We have to get to some kind of shelter!" shouted Mitchell above the din.  "Get moving!"

"Where?" cried Tom, but he knew what the answer would be.

"In there!" Mitchell pointed at the tomb.  Tom could see that the gate was still open.  The red glow was gone, but there was no way he could go in there.

"I can't!"

"You have to!  Otherwise-"  There was another tremendous crack, and a policeman screamed at the bolt struck him and his shirt burst into flame.  The scream was cut short as he toppled forward, and collapsed.  Another cop started to beat out the fire on his back, separately trying to call for help on his radio. "It's not working!" he yelled.  "I can't get a signal or anyth-"  Another explosion cut off his words, and large oak was split in half, and slowly toppled over.  "Go! Go!" yelled Detective Mitchell, grabbing Tom by one arm, and dragging him to the tomb.  Officer Jenkem was pulling Doug, while Doug was trying to reach Tom.  A rapid series of lightening strikes deafened them, and laid waste to the graveyard around them.

Tom's eyes grew wide with terror as he was dragged closer and closer to the tomb.  He tried to dig his heels in, but the ground seemed slick, and he suddenly realized that the slickness was because he was being dragged through the blood puddle where one of the punks was decapitated.  He gave off a choked moan, stumbled, and was forcefully shoved by detective Mitchell into the tomb.  Tom hit the floor, and curled up into a ball.  In an instant, Doug was beside him, trying to get him to sit up.  Outside all around them, the lightening strikes hit the ground fast, and with increased fury.  The sound was deafening, as the officers and the two men crammed themselves in the tomb.  There were two stone coffins on either side, built into the floor and the walls, going up about 3 feet.  Time and neglect had eroded the names, unreadable even in the constant bright cataclysmic strobe flashes from the lightening.

An officer tapped Mitchell on the shoulder, and pointed at the floor neat the back wall.  There was a large trapdoor there, about 5 feet across, with a steel circular handle.  Mitchell stepped over to it, and pulled.  It opened easily, and revealed stairs that descended into darkness.  Mitchell motioned for everyone to follow him, and he started down the stairs.

"Come on!" Doug shouted to Tom over the crashing thunder. "It's too dangerous here!  We have to follow them!"  Tom shook his head, not moving.  "Tom, please!  We'll be with a dozen cops with guns and flashlights!  We'll be ok!  Tom!  Please!"  Doug helped him to his feet.  "I promise!  It will be all right, but we have to go now!" Slowly, with unsteady steps, Tom approached the stairs, and with Doug's help, began to walk down.

The steps led down into a large stone room, almost twice the size of the tomb above them.  The policemen's flashlights lit it up fairly well, and it was much quieter down here.  There were still constant rumblings from the thunder and lightening, but not the blinding, deafening catastrophe upstairs.

"Did anyone know about this?" asked Mitchell.  No one answered.  There was a large hole carved into one wall, which looked like it was the beginning, or end, of a tunnel.

Officer Jenkem asked the real question that was on everyone's mind: "What the fuck is going on out there?"

"Do I look like a goddamn weatherman?" replied Mitchell.  "For all I know, it's the goddamn end of days." He looked around the room.  It was bare, and clean.  Apart from the stairs and the tunnel, there was nothing there.  "Who builds a room under a graveyard?" he asked himself.  "You'd think all the bodies would get in the way."  He went over to the wall with the tunnel, and looked in.  It stretched away and slightly down, and vanished into the darkness.  He stepped in.  "Jenkem, you're with me.  Smith, Casper, keep an eye on those two," he motioned at Tom and Doug.  "The rest of you... keep trying the radios."

Mitchell unholstered his gun, swung his flashlight into the tunnel, and started down.  Jenkem followed close behind, also slipping his gun from its holster.  The tunnel was about 10 feet in diameter, and the walls were smooth stone, with tiny grooves running laterally along the walls.  Jenkem reached out to touch the wall.  "Whoa, weird."

"What's up, Rob?"

"I've never seen stone like this.  It reminds me of..."

"Yeah?"

"Well, horn, actually."

"Horn?  Like, it's been grown?  Get real."

"I'm just saying."

"Rob, would you please shut the hell up?  You're giving me the creeps."

"Yes, sir."

The tunnel was a straight shot for a few hundred yards more.  It opened up into a more prosaic tunnel, which Mitchell recognize immediately.  "Hey, isn't this part of the old tunnel system?"

"Looks like it.  I didn't know it extended this far.  Detective, look at this."  Jenkem had pointed his flashlight at where the two tunnels intersected.  The joined didn't look built so much as molded.   It was like the entire passage was formed and shaped into place, rather than constructed.  The two policemen look at each other.  "What are your thoughts, Jim?"

Mitchell looked him straight in the eye.  "Rob, I won't lie to you.  This is really weird.  But it looks like something got started, and I'm willing to stick through and finish it.  How about you?"

"You're the boss."  Jenkem looked to his right, then to his left.  "What direction are these tunnels running?"

"As as guess?  I'd say East and West.  There's a chance these things were built to handle major Spring thaw runoff, and if they're centered under The Block, that would be to the West of us."

"All right.  So, which way is West, which is East?"

"Beats the hell out of me.  Let's just go this way."

The two men went off into the darkness, and without actually knowing it, headed West.