《Daddy's Inferno: A Novel》


 Chapter One

    That molded silence stunk of dead air, as a dull, cavernous screech came from inside my father¡¯s pregnant belly. A small, decapitated fetus festered there neatly, folded in right between the molded rot of his intestinal tract. Father was sliced down, from neck to navel, where charred, rubbered skin cinched itself a labia in the very middle of his stomach, nimbly framing a bubble-gummed embryo with bulbous purpled veins. The fetus was crying in mumbled, capricious coos, mushy electronic harmonies that filled the darkness with a humidity of hot dread. My father couldn¡¯t speak; his mouth too stitched up with strings and knots of his own forlorned genitalia while his soft, untempered brown eyes had given way to slits of yellowed jaundice. His skin had turned pigish, hotly pinked, and all fuzzed-up, an all-over elastic kind of roughness. He began to oink in short mucal snorts and murmurs, all-snotted up and suspiciously inhuman while he motioned his pregnant condition at me. A smirk of surprised dread and jugular confusion tore across his nervous system with blunt, pitiful force.Well then, who inseminated you?I asked. Nothing; dead-eyed.A virgin birth?I tried again. All he managed was a small, innocuous grunt.


    Before this, the man father donned a cage of stiff, vigorous iron that clung to him like cooled wax. A shiny, lawful suit for an indoctrinated schizoid man. When he had transitioned between the two forms though, I couldn¡¯t be sure. It had been decades since I saw him last and now somehow, we were reunited under circumstances neither of us could make much sense of. Were we summoned here? The fetus started plucking at the skin around him, slapping and popping at the resilience of my father¡¯s thick epidermis, trying to understand its true elasticity; how much more room it had to grow. I still couldn¡¯t exactly comprehend the immediate environment around us, as any notion of light grew totally fat, then detonated into a pinguid of muted black fog. It was an abstract, stagnant nothing, totally desolate of any reality, sort of an innocuous void of the completely unintelligible, growing further and further unto a dark infinity. The only light to go by came from the swimming fetus; a neon amber, alien glow with piss-poor, unhelpful radiance, shining light only upon its host¡¯s upper body. My father continued to oink rapidly, though now in more hurried, fretful gulps and I was still attempting to skirt a sense of environment from the void around us.


    But the oinks he now mustered grew into berserk fits of unmitigated rage, guttural and with a heavy, loud throat; seemingly frightened by the sudden, shifting growth of his head, which was considerably more distended and thick than mere seconds ago. His neck began to sway back and forth from the sheer weight, having a frenetic tantrum that resembled a faulty, glitched-out animatronic amped up on crude an. His eyes jerked upwards towards his head and oscillated there sadistically, on the verge of fulminating altogether. In the blink of an eye, large, drumming boils, oozing with rotting puss, crusting themselves all over his fevered skin as he attempted to yield a rowdy scream. The fetus groaned with the immediate change of motion, threading itself in and out of the intestines in an erratic seizure. It glew itself a hazy, muddled orange before disappearing altogether, swimming upwards inside my father¡¯s throat to nest there. Perhaps birthing was imminent, though I couldn¡¯t be sure. Without even the suggestion of the fetal glow, I couldn''t make out my father¡¯s shadow, more or less detect any implication of crowning. The oinks and screaming murmurs grew faint and far until disappearing altogether, an intentional blip malfunctioned him out of all circuited timelines.


    I stood quite still, waiting; waving my hands downwards to the darkness, fathoming and feeling around the blackness for any sliver of truth or suggestion to a formidable reality that I was familiar with. But there was nothing but a dewy, gelatinous ground to walk upon and my father and his fetal light were gone. The ancient stillness grew into something strangely operatic, with humming Gregorian whispers and slurried clicks and fuzzy glitches that grew syrupy around the eardrum. A whopping pressure struck forward on my calvaria as though a heavy, mechanical hand pushed the skull upwards towards the viscid, opaque gravity. Truth be told, I have no recollection of my time immediately before this place. I could make out gaunt strokes of rambling, inconspicuous concepts: vaginal birth to a vague, unshaped adulthood; but my last, contiguous memory wasn¡¯t so easily discernible; like I was only ever born inside this vacuous space and knew nothing but life inside it. Death seemed inherent, given that I had consciously felt my cerebral synapses become dutifully unwired and each brainstem fuse harshly ripped apart with a godless indulgence. A vague, mechanical separation of soul and body was beginning to take place, seemingly puppeteered by what I assumed to be a mysterious deity. But I really had no perspective, whether I was dead or alive, though I assumed I¡¯d eventually find out.


    The dankness of the space seemed to stretch outwards as a hot sugared taffy would, clotted in languid threads with a heavy, condensed stick. The loud, chattering noise surrounding the darkness now grew into full mouthfuls of booming incantations, harsher and more inhuman. A sludge of polar air crawled above the atmosphere, a sort of motionless cyclone that roused smells of putrid sulfurs and rotten grains while the slabbering, nonsensical incantations became thunderous shrieks and wails of pure glitch noise, both surreal and abrasive. It resembled a kind of congregational spell with an obvious conviction, a directed, intentional malice. The noise of the so-called spell eventually crescendoed and waned into an unkempt silence. A sudden, lymphatic shut-down seized my body, as all the compositional tissues, bloods, and gasses began to pool at my swollen, inflated heels. What was left of my nervous system was an anesthetized syrup of a wet, unconscious nebulous, way too weary to transmit or receive. Whatever thoughts I could muster wormed around cranial lobes like a sluggish, fat leech.


    I fainted to the ground, my back now up against whatever black sludge jelly terra firma this place was composed of. Whatever was happening, I felt the unnatural urge to succumb. The black glutinous sludge moved quickly, enveloping my body wholly, as though it demanded me its sacrificial scarab, entombed in its weird dark amber. Time was lapping itself into a folded Mobius strip, circling backwards and forwards and around itself with a tight, enigmatic knit. There were decades, centuries, and millennia around me, as I watched them stitch themselves together and then recede apart. The fluid lapse of the universe came and went while I watched it dissolve and reemerge into pools of reflective light. My breathing became muted, paced, and well-reserved, while the expanse of the space around me grew colossal, then obtuse then dwindled to the size of a needlepoint, shifting sizes and stratospheres simultaneously. It was clear to me now that the space I was in was indeed fully alive.


    As soon as the realization clicked, monstrous, muscular veins flowing surged, and bright cyan-colored blood began illuminating the dark sky as if they were flashes of lightning. I had tried to scream, but a kind of thick, acidic mucus had already infected my throat. The beast ascended itself upwards, mounting a much further elevation. It wailed some kind of war cry and I slid backward from the sludge with a tumultuous gravity, ending up somewhere much farther than where I had been. Shaken, I found stability in what seemed to be a pocket of flesh, centering myself there in preparation for another shift in gravity. Is this a kind of pseudo-nightmare? The last sporadic kick of a dying brain? A kind of drug-induced picture show? Whatever it was, the cold space quickly resumed its isolating blackness without hesitation. The movement ceased altogether and the isolation lingered and soon the oppressive sheet of humidity fell back into the atmosphere. I felt entirely nonexistent at that moment. Something of a singular energy existing somewhere in a plane of hobbled reality never once fondled by the touch of time or space; way before life crawled its way out of its first harsh, ruinous eon. Any subtle movement seemed inherently finicky in this rapturous microcosm, a single touch at a black hole could create thousands of civilizations and any quick slap at that galactic plasma would pummel those civilizations into total ruin.


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    I couldn¡¯t stomach my mind''s alignment, nothing seemed to thread together to form any sort of cohesive assimilation. Memories were floating out the nose, becoming soupy and lofty with a bumbling, boisterous itch until my mind had been nearly wiped of cognizance; wedged in between both sentient and insentient means. I felt a graveled, mucilaginous cement stir behind my eyelids, as pressure mounted to the tops of my eyeballs like some mysterious phantom pressing dutifully on my eyes with a tyrannical, concentrated force, hell-bent on popping them out and down my throat. The thick, sinewy flesh of the beast around me was throbbing in a tempo too erratic to be at all comforting, though the vibrations did ease my now sour-curdled bowels. Whatever beast I was stomached in had continued to sluggishly glide itself throughout what I had just assumed was a sort of expansive galaxy, though there was no way to be certain. The motion became quite hypotonic until it lay heavy on my tailbone. I tried to adjust the weightlessness of my body to achieve a semblance of assurance, but the spine had begun buzzing with a sickly drowse and before I knew it, a small pool of white light gathered itself in the middle of the stomach, glowing perfectly spherical, both dastardly and sterile. It leaned forward for a monstrous bite, evaporating the entirety of me directly into its center.


    I awoke sometime much later in a fit of drenched rage, clammy with a full-bodied fever and awash with a gooey delirium so sinister I was certain I¡¯d been infected with the brunt of a treacherous fungal disease. Whatever the environment now felt like a similar nothingness to the beast, this time covered in studies of large swathes of hazy greens and purplish blues. It had the same surreal complexity of the previous black nothingness, this time sweetened with an uncanny, astringent flavor completely unbeknownst to me. The spherical light-energy had seemingly swallowed me whole and I now existed somewhere in its heart valve, my body assuming the shape of a coagulated vein, puckered and tight. I wiggled around for movement, but the pressure stuck between the vein walls was unyielding. Big coughs for air were followed by short, tenuous gasps but the effort was immediately interrupted by sudden swarms of mammoth locusts whirring around in the back of my throat. They bounced back and forth between the trachea wall, rubbing themselves amongst the plaster of congealed mucus that stuck dutifully to the sides. There was nothing for me to vomit, though the ceaseless buzzing of what now seemed to be hundreds of thousands of locusts, now just far-off ancestors of those who lived just moments ago, induced gagging so audacious that the breathless momentum struck me senseless.


    There were globs of thick, syrupy tears stuck in mid-motion and I couldn¡¯t manage a singular moment of oxygen. The thin pithy flesh in between the vein grabbed onto me with a skin-tight stronghold, in a Herculean vacuum so full of heinous pressure I could feel the walls of the vein fiercely serpentine around my entire body, attempting to suffocate me in my entirety, chewing up bones and all. The lungs lurched with an amass of dead weight, like an oppressive, nuclear bomb quickly atomizing behind the ribs. The dense, tearful gagging smoldered like chemical acid while the fourth-generation locusts migrated downwards to the esophagus, crawling and gnawing their way down the intestines, feeling like an amass of burning chunks of volcanic ember. I had now lost the inability to inhale at all. I was being completely reborn in some kind of apathetic experiment, dutifully puppeteered by devious means of tortuous ambivalence, a sort of cosmic dough plaything, shaped and sculpted by an ungodly deity glutton for a certain sugary pink blasphemy.


    It was obvious now that my memory had been wiped clean, though the uncertainty of my body¡¯s extinction was less than clear. I wasn¡¯t sure what of me remained true flesh and blood, it seemed to have been made quite malleable and fluid, now existing somewhere near a superficial hybrid of apathetic human and honest anthropoidal. Just caught up in a little game of reanimation with no immediate agency. A loud, extraneous pop of a bone, and I began to feel my skin contort and contrast like a pliant rubber, bubbling up at the surface and refolded into new blistering graphs of alien pigmentation. I was costumed to stand trial, surely. A new, made-over iconography for the plight of past sins. Weariness crept up like a hardened, clotted artery as I made peace with my apathetic future. It was purgatory, that mystery seemed inevitable now.


    Of course it was, I was silly to think so obtusely. Iwasdead. A certain plight to Hell with a road paved with bricks of coagulated blood and this was the beginning of my journey there. The walls in which I was wedged suddenly gave way to movement as I squirmed myself out of the sheath-like jugulars. Before long, I reached the lipid crust of the vein and gnawed loose. The blood-red brick was there in front of me, wrapping itself like a garden python unto the ascending vista. Clouds of clotted grays loomed near the atmosphere, dripping some strange secretion that smelled of burnt motor oil and steeped lilac flowers. The road had a flabby, uncertain step that fidgeted with an apprehensive foot of movement. It fluttered with a deep, gelatinous pulse as I began to step forward. The road was alive and the journey towards my trial had already begun.


    That path sauntered onwards and up towards eternity, weaving itself forward like a relaxed, infinite noose. I marched onward for what felt like lightyears camouflaged in gulps of tiny seconds, disorienting as it was fiercely surreal. There was seemingly little movement in the environment around the red-bricked road, except for short little fragments of kaleidoscopic light that gleaned and then wanned in apathetic bursts. The ground immediately surrounding was charred and barren with an occasional outcropping of puddles with molten silver ooze, arising a vapor addled with harsh, simmering petrol. There too were short gusts of wind, each carrying hysterical whispers of audacious torment that stuck to the ear like a wet tongue. You could even hear paltry, melancholic echoes, buoyantly drifting the rough sounds of torn flesh. If you cupped your hand to the rhythm of the wind, you could detail the ferocious snap of each skin fiber tearing away from its weary ligaments.


    A long, dastardly moan settled the ground, and a sudden, electronic crack ripped forwards, crackling with the raw, frenetic noise of hot rippling static. It hovered like lightning but stuck ferocious in the air like a wrinkle in time. A stone-face emerged from the glowing slice, a somber, disintegrated sculpture of a solemn, Greecian man. The man resembled some sort of nameless, long-forgotten philosopher, too terribly paranoid and uncertain for any worthwhile legacy. He was without a sculpted body, just his monolithic face, levitating there with a certain amount of dominant might. His mouth became undone, moving up and down as if it was on a controlled hinge, but no noise came forth. It was miming a silent speech through its open jaw. Eventually, a booming, megalithic voice merged with its movement, sputtering with stereophonic sizzle.The Baby Is Bornit clapped.He Is Resting.

 Chapter Two

    The castle lay forward on the bleeding edge of the horizon, with erect, muscular turrets and a vampirish battlement flanked with rivers of warm, bobbing organs and terse thickets of overgrown fungi. The red-bricked road led right to its monstrous opening, acting as the castle''s virulent tongue, lipped right and tight at the gates of the disparaged. The acreage spanning its exterior was plastered with atomic refuge as far as the eye could fathom; various and gargantuan pieces of sharp hardwares and machineries laid heavy on the land in numbers too obese on the eye. The ocean of debris ebbed and flowed as tidal waves, clamoring with thunderous bangs of loud metals and brutal, gnawing alloys. The stenches of wet, molded copper and thick, saccharine steel clung to the palette with dizzying metallic fallout. It was junk as its own metalliferous earth, an ecosystem constructed on total refuse.


    On the top of the hill to the right of the castle stood a gargantuan effigy of Adam the Son in a clear, grassy clearing, seemingly constructed as a refuge from the viciousness of the heaping garbage. He was sculpted in limestones and various granites, with his legs spread eagle, as if to receive an eternal, slobbering blowjob. Adam, without his Eve, had his shoulders bent back into a stiff, erotic lean while his chin poised upwards towards the sky. In the middle of his phallus lay a large marbled apple, placed as if though he had given birth to the fruit himself. Tiny pops of uncontained energy kept bursting around the atmosphere, little terrible firecrackers of excess energy that fissured with a delicate and succinct whirr like water droplets on hot burning metal.


    The vitreous gluck swimming in my eyes had cracked under the vicious heat, making what surrounded Adam impossible to see. The eyes became brittle and ungreased; and without the gratification of a deep, lubricated blink, there began to arise flotsams of kaleidoscopic colors and shifting transitory lights as the road warped in and out of my sight like the vibrating recoil of a chunky rubber band. My body still seared with that acidic monster rash, so much so that it had began to flay back several layers of skin, exposing the strawed tendons in my hands that recoiled when I made a tight fist. There were shifting eyes and intentful glances buoying all around my peripheral current, as swathes and globs of running dark matter began whirring past my side in the span of a half blink, both fast and menacing. I assumed these shadowpeople, sneakily avoiding their entire electrical occupancy in the secret field of my dwarfish vision, though I could almost catch spotted entrails of their jagged walk if I moved sideways quickly enough to their unencumbered rhythm. I was still no closer to the castle than I was when I started; the timespan of this particular environment still loomed heavy like a wet dog, hours and hours caught up between my very footsteps.


    I continued onward, though a plump weariness had begun to settle deep into both calf muscles, laden thick with a quivering thrum so heavy and erratic, I could start to feel the hard throb of my heart beating at the caps of my knees, like gelatin hardening into cold steel.  I couldn''t help but dwell on whether my father had already existed here, in this sort of purgatorial plane, or if he had already died well before me. Why was he pregnant, and what exactly had the fetus done to his body? Was it as simple as a demon rejecting its host, or something more dastardly? The fetus with no head, born in purgatory? The way it swum around that amniotic fluid was subhuman and vicious, pulling on my father''s swollen umbilical cord as if to ring a mighty cloister bell. It was already the size of an underfed toddler, with talons that curved prehistorically and a neck that suggested similarities to the build of some Paleolithic ghoul. Its business seemed both inhospitable and cataclysmic as its gonzo DNA seemed to suggest. I suspected I would have to confront that mangled vertebrate eventually, hopefully getting the opportunity to break its spine across the brunt of my bony knee.


    The cascade of the castle grew much closer now, with each ascending step I mounted further towards the gate. There were pungent blusters of fermented excrement and dour vinegar, so I knew the downwind of the castle moat was much closer now than before. Though now I was no longer alone on the road, as little groups of cock-heads sauntered into jogs right alongside me, sneezing and clucking lewdly, throwing toothy, bashful smiles in my direction. Their face was that of a fat farmyard rooster, with a puckered, creamy feather and boisterous, quivering waddles the color of newborn blood. But from the neck down, they possessed the bodies of burly, chiseled men; with juicy, brawny shoulders and throbbing pectorals with huge, mutated nipples the size of an oily pepperoni, glistening their hairy, strapping frame in the tender sunlight. They clucked faster and faster, bucking and galloping their monstrous frames with recklessness, beaming brightly as their chubby cocks swung like a pendulum, acting as my wide-eyed garrisons as I continued with a heavy foot.


    The weather seemed to shift on pure whim, cascading between storms of bitter, astringent rain to quick surges of brutal humidity, cloyingly muggy and opaque. There were massive, tortuous monoliths that fringed around the surrounding vistas, molded out of thick, rusted barbed wire, dominating the sky thousands of feet high; with seemingly no purpose but their strange, empty grandeur. I was stuck with a certain languid spectacle, my field of vision totally keen to the entirety of this fiendish environment around me, as it revealed itself more and more grotesque and untrustworthy with each wander of the eye. It was as if its reality contorted itself on a passive impulse, like the change of a season threaded around the lapse of one singular moment, folding and coalescing into this barbaric, unrhythmic ecosystem where objects evaporated and reemerged altogether, erroneously shifting into soupy absurdity that possessed no scientific law.


    I lingered for a moment and watched the sky mutate into a new, ascending scene, were there now what seemed to be hundreds of thousands of floating doors plastered against the open sky in a fringe along the road all of dissimilar shapes and sizes, hovering there sturdily in the gushing wind. There came tiny knocks and little annoyed rappings, seemingly happening at every single one almost simultaneously, like a percussive chorus. Some would suddenly open and close to reveal nothing but darkness on their strange, apathetic inside. The rooster men still flanked my side, running and whipping out their big, chunky thumbs up, all while flourishing their Cheshire grins in my general direction. Many more creatures now populated the further vista, all stuck idle in their loops of repetitive motions. There were little serpentine crocodiles praying quietly at their altars and slobbering, crooked vultures croaking deep-chorded symphonies that big-winged succubi made joy and merriment to. And paces ahead were leagues of devilish imps that had taken to sodomizing what looked to be a caucus of God''s only archangels, frozen dead in their beatific twinkle, ripping up their limp nimbuses and ejaculating ferociously all over their slain corpses, laughing wildly like children.


    It was such a hostile and nightmarish circus, some brand of heinous Underworld that I''d only ever heard about in either yarns of allegory or subjective hearsay. And then, with an ugly cerebrum smack, it suddenly clicked: This was Hell. I am dead and this is Hell. And it was exactly as it was spoken through myth and fable, an amalgamation of many barbarous elements, rightfully plucked from varying religious sects; a sort of Inferno patchwork quilt, all laced together to create the very zenith of eternal damnation. And what damnation it was! The roosters, still scuttling to my side, started squawking in unison: Hellhellhhellhellhell! Hellhellhellhellhell! Welcomewelcomewelcomewelcome! Their phalluses now fully erect and all ballooned up with fiendish pride, twinkling their soft-core smiles with a feverish and spiteful giddiness until the so-called leader of the chicken clan stopped himself mid-motion, only to roar another humongous cry: There came ye Beelzebub, dressed in feathers and adorned in sin! And the rest repeated: There came ye Beelzebub, dressed in feathers and adorned in sin! The other remaining creatures all joined in on the chant, a fuck-all choir peddling little harmonies of doom and despair.


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    The castle was finally within eye reach, so much so that I could see the gnarled ivy growing out from the crumbling brick, smelling wafts of rotted brimstone and gaseous waste deep inside the nostril, burrowing itself upwards enough to scratch the nasal cavity with an unrelenting itch. I assumed my father and his newborn child waited for me within the castle, likely with a council of varying Hellish creatures; demons and hellhounds and goblins and imps alike. And where there is a court, there awaits a trial, likely for me to stand and defend my noble honor. Though for what, I had no idea. My purpose here had yet to be entirely revealed, though the torture had indicated something even more barbarous was bubbling upon the horizon. Unfortunately, I still could remember very little about my life before death, just amorphous strokes and thin, nebulous memories that dissipated right before they took cohesive shape. Though, surprisingly so, I did remember the legend of the Inferno.


    It was said that there are nine circles of Hell, all ricocheting outwards off each other like the rings of an elder tree, until the revolting thrum of the very center, where the High Holy Prince himself sat, on top of his gilded throne made of dry, knotted cartilage and wet mucal sod, grinning wildly while thumbing out human gristle between his mammoth, serrated teeth. These nine layers encompassed ''levels'' of Hell, different sects of atmospheres committed to one particular of the Seven Deadly Sins. Though that was the Christian flavor of Hell, likely wildly untrustworthy. Though I never believed in any iteration of Hell or Heaven, and I still don''t, despite quite possibly being damned to the latter.  To me, it was only a pacifying fable, but one told masterfully. So masterly, in fact, it left millions of dismembered corpses in its bloody, crusading wake.


    Since the dawn of civilization, humanity so desperately needed its regular dose of good vs. evil. A majestic performance of the two; clashing mightily, with the dashing Good prevailing over winged Evil in a boisterous, supernatural affair until the heavy velvet curtains close in their quick, swooping grandeur. Their creator, their so-called God the Father, lulled their existentialism away; gave them their life''s purpose, a wholly personal beatitude: to do good in his service, for him (father), by him (son), and with him (holy ghost). They clung to his phony phantasmal word like dew on terse thickets of grass, shouting his fanciful scripture and empty fallacies with a Shakespearean gusto. They too would march unto battle in his holy name, ready to spat and conquer with evil, with their rampant, glimmering swords and boxy, obtuse shields in hand, beheading their made-up demons one right after the other, only to lay at them at the naked foot of their beloved master. And then, when Evil so victoriously defeated, they would spend eternity amongst the flotsam wisps of the clouds, flicking their hardened nipples and slurping their tonics with a sticky, fat lip, resting easily in the stillness of their hard-earned afterlife, free eternally from the horns and the rut.


    Having finally reached the castle door, I rapped loudly against the aging wood and it gave a weak, sodded recoil that felt weird and buoyant against the knuckle. The door had no instruments, both lockless and knobless; just a hunk of rubbery wood wedged in between slabs of tight steel, looking totally immovable and unwelcoming. I pounded and pounded in one, twos, and threes, but there came no answer or any semblance of movement behind the big, bulking door. The moat surrounding the castle door bubbled loudly with carbonation, some fermented byproduct of the rotted waste and slaughtered carcasses. It boiled like water, fierce and frenzied with big, upwards gravity, with large, extraneous bubbles popping up to the surface with a big acidic bite. With every other gaseous pop, a tremendous, bloated body would buoyantly erupt to the top, skin mummified all over, plastered thickly with fierce green mold and a slimy, charcoal colored loam. Their eyelids had been gnawed off their skulls by some river chum, exposing big, bulbous doll-like eyes, shimmering and spherical, flashing a specific brightness totally unfamiliar with death or decay. Each singular river-corpse had a self-imposed cheek to cheek grin, shining upwards with a blight of weary hopefulness, all dressed with full sets of sparkling white teeth; perfectly pearly with plump, healthy gums. They all floated there like Ophelia, sapphic and serene, migrating gently amidst the slow, winding current.


    I stood there, wholly mesmerized by the muted sound of the bobbing bodies, sounding something like big, fat droplets of condensation plopping into an empty tin can. They seemed to be entirely transfixed with this kind of gravitational rapture, like muted, salacious sirens, lulling and teasing their prey unto the murky depths below. I couldn''t seem to break the fantastical yearning I had, to join them at their stream bed, feeling that soft, coagulated silt, first at the nape of my neck, then gliding smoothly across my rough, naked ass, feeling a warm, tranquil tingle in my taught, volatile anus. As I began to disrobe, a trio of gruff, entirely unrecognizable voices broke through the stratosphere like the raucous rip of a fractured bone. You go, how go, through here? they chanted. As I turned around to greet them, I was met with a raspy choir of three towering giantesses, their heads barely grazing the wispy clouds above. You go, how go, through here? They sang-spoke again, staring downwards with certain viciousness, towering over my small, nimble frame by at least a hundred feet. They were all adorned in robes of lush, smooth velvet, one in purple, one in emerald green, and the leader, standing astutely in the middle, wore one of a deep, crimson red, though hers was embellished with threaded designs of gold and wire. They wore masked faces made of various shiny alloys and dried, leathery hides, vaguely resembling an amalgamation of the mask of Hannya and that of a medieval plague doctor, though each mask had weird, gnarled expressions the others did not. I need to get through. The three of them looked around at each other in unison, nodding, then communicating in clicks and long, throatful croaks. You wish, we wish, his wish, they howled again in chorus. Youwishwewishhiswish, youwishwewishhiswish, they slurred into a mangled incantation, frenetic and nefarious.


    They began swaying and casting in unison, their necromantic arms outstretched towards the sky, which was growing darker and darker by each shortened breath. Their murmuring became a hollowed, garbled chant that stung my body with a crawling itch, which began tickling my ribs with whoops and whirrs of heavy agitation. I began to feel my skin contort and contrast as though it was made of pliant rubber, bubbling up at the surface, folding itself into new, blistering graphs of alienish pigmentation. There came barbed pinchers and tiny, fuzzy feelers germinating up from my cankered pores as swaths of long, full-bodied antennae oozing out from the scalp, sprouting like tafts of new hair, all while I excreted some sticky, syrupy goo. A fierce, electric thrash of hot, rippling lightning threaded through the horizon, first striking at that molted steel monolith in the distance, which spat it right back skyward, building a kinetic charge so dense, it scattered across the ground like the collapse of a mushroom cloud.


    The women now bellowed their resounding spell, echoing a piercing ripple of sound so gigantic, it shook the ground in a seismic pucker, vibrating so egregiously it oscillated through both muscle and bone. Their hex wasn''t over, and neither was my transformation, as rippling tarsuses took the place of my two legs and molded themselves into five new hinds. A hard rip of skin revealed forewing and hindwing aplenty, at least two dozen threaded back between each knob of the spine, resembling something like a buggy transfusion; some transmogrified mixture of human, cicada, and mantis. Though I still stood at well over six foot, hardly insectful, I now possessed a fully nonmortal physique, half mangled insectum, half metamorphic anthropoid.


    And I was alone again; neither the giantesses, those hung, cackling roosters, or any other Hellish creatures could be seen across my periphery now, as if they all suddenly evaporated into the swirl of the humid air. I waited for what seemed like hours at the castle gate, mulling over my new, Kafkaesque anatomy, until suddenly, the door finally let itself loose from its large, archaic hinge, revealing just a burrow of pitch black nothingness, with no disconcernable figure awaiting my entrance.  All I could hear was the mutilated cry of a newborn infant, wailing deep and colicky.