+++

Third loop around Engineering

no sign of loose wire

or suicide plaque

yet the ship insisted both were there so

the body kept moving

ignoring the AH-bot cleaning the spanner box

and a little further on found Charlie

who said the loose wire wasn’t that loose anymore

she’d fixed it with Asami’s help, over on Deck Twenty-Seven an hour ago.

‘Where is she now?’

‘I’m going to the Arka Room, you should come too.’

‘Asami?’

‘Best seat’s by the port window.’

Body backed off and hit the wall and when it turned I saw a poster saying

SAVE ALL AH-BOTS YA-BOTS EK-BOTS

EVEN THE GLIB ONES

and to the left lay the snacks table

Sadia and Juana on top, hugging each other, Nick nearby reading Neuro-Maker

pair of floating yellow eyes

Lyotard, Yosh & Baudrillard

everyone watching my form and field and

a voice behind, Asami the Tease, keep going, keep going, keep

‘What?’

‘All of it, Keni, get it in, deeper.’

Vaguely knowing what she meant, I looked down and saw a fifteen-inch dick that was ostensibly attached to my body, pole-hard, going in and out of a pink mannequin’s cunt

metronomic rhythm

fingers stuck in the

+++

‘Armitage announced an eighty-hour stay in Zion. Molly and Case would practice in zero gravity, he said, and acclimatize themselves to working in it.’

The words were both smooth and bizarro, fitting with the blur of slipstream Id and beginnings of the hostel room reforming around me.

I closed one eye. Opened the other.

The neon was gone, thank gods, and so was Lexi.

Replaced by canned audio.

‘He’d found him curled like a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo of small, white geometric forms, cubes, spheres, and pyramids.’

I pulled myself up and, in the process, managed to accidentally topple Moon Prison onto the floor. Apparently, I’d been reading it right up until I fell asleep.

Couldn’t remember what chapter I’d reached though.

Or what happened after Chapter 22.

Ah well, just read back until something clicked.

‘Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular relationship with the deck’s physical whereabouts.’

Kuso…

What the fuck was this voice?

In-house alarm clock?

Rolling awkwardly out of bed, I seized the remote and looked for the button to silence it. After several failures, I tried the one that said Gib Call and the voice ended.

‘Peace…’ I muttered, grabbing yesterday’s t-shirt off the carpet and pulling it on. Then smelling the armpits and taking it off. My suitcase was laid out on the floor, open, so I sifted through a bit until the Don’t Get CYBER, MAN t-shirt materialised, smiled and threw it on.

Next step: locate Lexi.

Pray she’s not with Nick.

Or Juana.

Or a good-looking Japanese guy.

In a less obscure t-shirt.

+++

A quick loop of a very low-key…no, practically deserted…WinterMute Hostel led me to the pool round back and Lexi doing lengths, from the looks of it [the strap visible on her shoulder] back in the Lake Arrowhead Coffy piece.

Like Juana the night before, she didn’t notice me, so I sat down on one of the plastic chairs and watched her.

It was quite funny, she was doing breaststroke, but in a child’s way, with her head refusing to dip beneath the surface. Ryu used to do the same thing. Said he didn’t like the chlorine getting in his eyes. And when I told him to wear goggles, he said, don’t like chlorine getting in those either.

Maybe Lexi was the same.

‘A very energetic Lexitron today…’ said Nick, not appearing next to me but seemingly already present on the adjacent chair, torso covered in an incredibly vintage Kontolian Intrigue t-shirt.

‘You’re up.’

‘In the bikini I gave her too. Very touching. Wah…of course I’m up, K cat. It is morning.’

‘Where’s Juana?’ I asked, scanning the pathway at the far end of the hostel.

‘Watching Robocop 2. You write anything last night?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Something on par with the glory that is Moon Prison?’

‘Ah, that kind of writing. No.’

‘Hmm. Bad habits, Keni. Yellow Muon Blob won’t write itself.’

‘Err…’

‘And it must be written, on planet or off, just like Aziz and Kool Kool Crystal Grab. Not that Yellow Muon Blob’s on that level, but targets, ambition, discipline, vitality, all very important.’

I wasn’t sure what to say, the pace of the conversation was moving too fast and my brain was still in fade mode. Should I just look at the pool? Or tell him I hadn’t touched Yellow Muon Blob since LA?

There was noise from the pool, a louder than normal splash of water. Then a shout of ohayo gozaimasu.

Pulling out the bottom of my t-shirt to fan myself, I looked across.

Lexi had spotted us and was now swimming over.

Nick must’ve been watching her too as he didn’t add anything about the stillborn novel. Just sat there, pinching different parts of the Kontolian face on his t-shirt.

‘Are we leaving soon?’ Lexi asked, popping up on the pool curb, eyes slightly red.

‘When Juana’s done with her filmn.’

Lexi wiped the one or two droplets off her face. ‘Which one?’

‘A brainless fascist cartoon.’

‘Not-…’

‘Afraid so, comrade.’

‘But she’s-…’

‘I know.’

+++

An hour later, after Robocop 2 had finished, we all traipsed out to the car and quickly settled into the same positions as the previous day’s travel.

Lexi was out of the bikini and into a t-shirt I’d never seen before – Kollontai Shoe in cursive text and a print of what may have been Leningrad – while Juana was cropped in another summery dress [bluebells & ecru], with sunglasses on, and those weird yellow marks around her mouth gone completely. Maybe it was the result of a good night’s sleep, or the hand scrubbing in the pool the previous night, I had no idea, but she looked vibrant, buoyant, the polar opposite of the wreck on the couch moaning through Hellraiser two days earlier.

‘You feeling okay today?’ asked Lexi, lining up her phone and taking a picture of Juana from the side.

‘Better.’

‘No side effects? Headache?’

‘Side effe-…you mean from sleeping?’

‘Err…’

‘Yeah, I may have exaggerated the weirdness of my brain,’ tagged in Nick, guiding the car back out onto the 97. ‘Seems like it’s merging quite smoothly now.’

‘… … … …?’

‘Spanish, please.’

‘… … … … …?’

‘The procedure I did…the other night. In the video caffé.’

Juana scratched the spots around her mouth where the yellow marks had been, then stared out the side window.

‘You don’t remember?’ asked Lexi, leaning round the back of Juana’s seat.

‘Of course, she does.’

‘Juana?’

The Mexican ex-cannibal put a finger up to the window then altered course at the last second, scratching around her mouth again.

‘You remember or…’

‘Nick fixed me. With his hands.’

‘That’s it?’

The horn beeped suddenly, Nick leaning out the window and shouting at a truck parked at the side of the road to get out of the way. Muttering a little bit extra under his breath, he came back in and told Juana it was okay, Lexi probably didn’t remember much about her brain ops either.

‘You mean the purple stuff…in Lake Arrowhead?’

‘That’s one way of saying it.’

‘I remember bits of it…’

‘But no exact details, right?’

Lexi looked at the side of Juana’s head, then down to one of the larger bluebells on her summery dress.

‘Well, Juana’s had a direct transplant…vapour transfer, embedding…which is about ten times more nebulous. Much harder to come to terms with too. Though there is a chance…her demon physiology is helping with the transition…that would explain the lack of relapse we’re seeing.’

My thoughts appeared on the back window, lack of? She was scrubbing her hands in the pool last night, with yellow eyes, but there was no point saying that. A] cos the pool performance could’ve been totally innocent and, b] it might make me look like a perv for spying on her.

‘What about your physiology?’ I asked instead, shifting over to the central part of the back seat.

‘Mine?’

‘Yeah,’ said Lexi, shifting closer to the middle too, bare thigh stopping against mine, ‘how different is it from humans?’

‘Ah, back to the interrogation lab.’

‘Not that serious. Just friends asking a friend.’

Nick smiled at the windscreen mirrror. ‘Okay…friends. It’s hard to say.’

‘Come on, dude…’ I said, trying and failing to render his accent.

‘Ha, not bad.’

‘It is California.’

Lexi laughed, knocking her shoulder into mine. ‘About fifty years ago…’

‘Huh?’

‘She’s right, Keni. Dude is an archaic word. I’ve moved on now.’

‘So it was an affectation?’ continued Lexi, putting her hand forward and starting the twisting process on a long strip of Juana’s hair.

‘Don’t tangle it,’ was all Juana offered in defence.

‘I won’t.’

‘Affectation is an imprecise word,’ continued Nick, ducking his head closer to the windscreen and looking up at the sign passing by above. ‘A little too detached…distant. It’s more like-…or kind of similar to-…or not that different from-…ah, explanations, too fucking exhausting. Basically, each time I take a new form, the purple transfers some of that brain’s speech patterns to my own. But I also retain some of those that were borrowed from previous forms…existing in previous eras…which means, it can get quite jumbled at times.’

‘So dude was from Nick Stahl’s brain?’ I asked, watching Lexi knot together Juana’s hair.

Nick nodded at the wing mirror. ‘I quickly realized it was outdated…especially after I used it on Lexi and her face got all scrunched up…and since then I’ve been trying to slowly phase it out. But then you still need some kind of substitute phrase…something more up-to-date…’

‘Guys?’ I offered.

‘Comrades?’ tried Lexi.

‘Equipo?’

‘Hmm. All are possible, and perhaps none. I’ll have to monitor my speech, see what comes out…see what other people say. Though I would have to say comrades might be the early frontrunner.’

Lexi finished the knot and let Juana’s twisted hair untwirl of its own accord. ‘What about your physiology?’

‘Didn’t I answer that one?’

‘No. You evaded. Again.’

‘And you’re my personal records keeper. Okay. Bueno. But it really is quite hard to say.’

‘Try.’

‘Is your body the same shape as ours?’ I prompted, quickly editing body to real body. ‘A similar design?’

‘On Triton, just a few neurons and cortexes different. Here, with the purple…there is a level of protection….physical and mental. A Specialty.’

‘You mean…on Triton, you can’t do the-…’

Nick coughed, cutting me off. ‘In the simplest terms…for the sake of my annoyingly pushy human audience…the purple assists me. Keeps me sane. And down here…it keeps me safe and sane. On a pedestal, if you will. With the lightest of monitoring. Not that I would ever need an intervention. As you’ve seen, I am a very disciplined type, especially compared to what a human would do in my position…with these abilities.’

‘What about the others of your kind?’ asked Lexi, using my knee as a prop to adjust herself into a more comfortable position.

‘It is the same.’

‘They come here too, to Earth?’

‘No.’

‘They stay on Triton?’

‘… … … … … …’ Nick murmured in no language I’d ever heard before.

‘They don’t stay on Triton?’

‘Interrogation lab closed.’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Quiet time.’

‘Dude…’

‘No exceptions.’

Lexi whistled out breath more than melody then shifted position back over to the side of Juana’s seat. Starting on a new strand of the Mexican’s hair, she gave a terse, ‘I know,’ when I leaned in to her neck and told her that other aliens and their whereabouts might be a sore topic.

‘… … … … …’ slurred Juana in Yaqui, reaching her hand back and tapping Lexi on the fingertips. ‘You’ll mess it up.’

‘Sorry.’

Tucking the stray hair back in behind the seat, Juana turned to Nick. ‘How far until Portland?’

‘Now that we’re all focused on the road, shouldn’t be too long.’

‘How many hours?’

‘Ha, detail whore. Okay. Another three to the Five-Way, then…assuming no traffic…about an hour and a half from there.’ He slowed the car down and shifted to the outside lane. ‘In fact, we’re so far ahead of schedule, I believe we can make a quick pit stop in this little toy town up here.’

‘Pit stop? We just started.’

‘Which town?’ I asked, not seeing any signs.

‘Bend.’

‘The what?’

‘Town’s name…Bend…obviously.’

‘What’s there?’

‘Don’t know, comrade, I’ve never been. But I am quite curious.’

‘About how small it is?’

Nick laughed and turned off the freeway, slapping the steering wheel and shouting, ‘Bend, comrades!’ out the window.

‘Wah, we’re really going there?’

‘Just for a little while.’

‘No, no…no podemos…we have to go to Portland,’ rambled Juana, pulling at her own hair now, basically doing the same thing she’d just ordered Lexi to stop with.

‘Think of it as research, comrade.’

‘Por qué? For what? I don’t understand.’

‘Neither do I,’ said Lexi from the back, nudging me in the side with her elbow.

‘Err…me neither,’ I muttered, elbowing back.

Nick looked at us both through the windscreen mirrror, tilting his head like one of those 70’s sci-fi actors trying to portray possessed. ‘What if I told you a young, pretty girl called Sadia stopped off in Bend a few weeks back?’

‘Sadia…’

‘Don’t you want to know what she looked at?’

Both Lexi and I dropped the elbow code and looked at each other. I didn’t know exactly what she was thinking but it probably wasn’t far off my current track of was this real, and what did it matter why she stopped there, she was in Portland right now.

Or maybe it was something else…something violent, vengeful…

Whatever it was, it was muted instantly as Juana said, ‘just for a little while,’ and that was pretty much that. Discussion over. Interrogation lab closed.

We were going to Bend.

+++

Driving in alongside the river, I quickly realized it wasn’t a small town we were visiting but a fairly well-stacked city with a pretty green backdrop and the expected Californian array of overpriced Taco places.

‘An extinct Volcano over there,’ said Nick, pointing off towards the left. ‘You can walk up to the top. Peek down into the magma chamber.’

‘Non active…right?’

‘Correct, Lexitron.’

‘Foda. I’m not-…’

‘At least that’s what the blurb says.’

‘Did Sadia go up there?’ asked Juana, untangling a clump of hair that Lexi had just finished with.

‘Possibly.’

‘You can’t sense it?’

‘Rationalism, comrade. I’m following her general trace, not her literal footsteps.’ He took a hand off the wheel, tapped his eyebrow. ‘Up here.’

We carried on at a slow crawl through a street that may have been the main one and watched as a mix of white and Mexican-looking types walked on the pavement outside. Unlike those videos on YA BOYY, none of them were assaulting each other.

‘Isn’t that the freeway?’ asked Lexi, pointing right towards an adjacent sign.

‘The 97.’

‘But…didn’t we just get off that?’

‘You can follow it through, if you like, but this way’s more scenic. And the place we’re looking for is across the river over there.’

Nick seemed to know what he was doing, even if the methodology behind it was a mystery to all of us, so Lexi stopped asking questions and sat back with her head slumped on my shoulder.

I persisted with the scenery, quite impressed by the prettiness of the buildings, the amount of well-spaced trees, the women in dresses and hiking gear outside…the way they moved and walked and swayed and bent forward to check their phones or brush something off their pants.

I focused on one in particular, a blonde Sadia type and…after a few generic walking shots, laughing, smiles…went quasi-dark, picturing the two of us in bed, me on top, pushing into her…but it was meaningless, sensationless…pale-room porn with one faceless prop poking a blank plastic mannequin.

‘Pretty little town,’ whispered Lexi into the Cyberman face on my t-shirt.

‘Yeah. Not bad.’

‘With about seven thousand Taco places.’

I laughed, shifting slightly as her breast pushed against my arm.

‘Wonder what’s for lunch…’

Nick’s voice cut in from the front, warning us that whispering was frowned upon in close collectives.

‘He can probably hear us anyway,’ Lexi said, moving back up into an upright position, ‘with his alien hearing powers.’

‘Not true, Lexitron.’

‘Told you.’

+++

The place that we were looking for, according to sudden local expert Nick Stahl, was fifty metres past a small park, in an industrial type building that, based on the abundance of semi-eroded fish advertising on the walls outside, used to be a fishery.

Or a fish packing plant.

Or a centre for abandoned fish.

Now it was something else entirely.

The sign outside said: The Museum Of Negativity, with follow-up posters plastered all over the door that threatened One Month Only. And to the left, something unheard of in adventurist land: a price list with a huge X through the middle.

‘Sadia stopped here… to see this?’ asked Juana, peeling off the corner of one of the posters.

‘That’s what the trace says.’

‘It’s a parody,’ I muttered, checking one of the leaflets pinned to the bottom of the sign.

‘Which part?’

‘There’s no entry charge…says free for all at the bottom here.’

‘Ah, not the concept then…’

‘No, that too. Everything, all of it. Just…feels like a joke of some kind.’

‘Well, comrade…won’t know until we try,’ concluded Nick, pushing open the main door with a counterfeit whoosh sound.

‘Looks like we’re the only ones going in,’ said Lexi, still propped up at the bottom of the steps, pulling at the sleeve of her Kollontai Shoe t-shirt.

‘You can wait outside, if you wish?’

Lexi rolled her sleeve all the way up then unraveled it again. Looked around at the three parked cars across the street and the extinct volcano in the distance. Took out her phone and probably scrolled through random Portuguese articles.

‘Well?’

‘Better not be all negativity,’ she said, keeping the phone in one hand as she walked up the steps to the door.

‘Ninety-nine per cent okay?’

‘Fifty.’

‘Ah, but then they’d have to change the name of the place. The Museum of Balance. Museum of Objectivity. Museum of…’

‘Fifty-one.’

‘…Fence Warming. Ha, much better.’

+++

      The curator of the museum, an odd-looking guy with a long, red cravat and hair that may have been pasted on, greeted us beyond the door and – with a neon red NO HOPE sign on the wall flickering above his head –  straight away launched into his introductory spiel.

      The shorthand version: akin to old travelling carnival shows, the museum was a temporary thing in terms of placement, yet eternal in mission, sustained solely by the kindness of visitor donations. The titular concept had come from the curator himself, based on a vision he’d experienced while swimming in the lake outside his home town. Basically, a man in a very realistic tree costume [his words] had appeared above the water, floating effortlessly in mid-air, and told him how the world was far too chaotic and the only way to keep it from descending into dismal, murderous anarchy was to restrict people to small rural towns.

‘Like a prison?’ asked Lexi, tilting her head at a saxophone pinned to the wall, the words Devil’s Tongue stenciled in blood red ink on a plaque below.

The curator smiled, putting his hand on the hip of an Adonis statue with its dick cut off and making it wobble. ‘That is a different place, definitively.’

      ‘Similar principle…’

      ‘Only to the ignorant.’

       Sensing danger, I moved up parallel to Lexi and gripped her hand. It seemed to do the trick as she gripped back, whispering, ‘just playing,’ into my shoulder.

      We left the saxophone – or Devil’s Tongue – and continued along the narrow avenue of displays, some of them oddly mundane, like a bottle of Korean shampoo on a pedestal, and others overtly macabre, like…a dark figure hanging from a tree, blood dripping off in thick clumps…hopefully not a person.

      ‘Is all this stuff supposed to be negative?’ asked Juana, standing a little farther down the exhibition path, next to a diorama of a Mexican family, all grinning pleasantly, wearing t-shirts plastered with SPEAK SPANISH.

      ‘Inherently.’

      ‘Even this?’

      The curator left the foam statue and joined her by the diorama. ‘It is a fact that seventy-eight per cent of all immigrants to this nation refuse to engage with the founding language.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘English, obviously. And those that do deign to engage tend to pollute it with phrases from their own tongue. Very negative. Hence the labelling.’

      ‘… … … … … …’ replied Juana in Yaqui, the old sparkle of yellow forming in her pupils.

Whether or not the curator noticed was unclear as, even though Juana’s eyeballs were just to the left of him, he continued talking, focusing his attention mostly on Nick, who had walked ahead to a stage curtain at the end of the path and pulled it halfway across.

      ‘The use of negativity towards progress and expansion…science and technology and cultural mixing and all that palaver…it is a device to delineate the parasitic undercurrents of our towns, our little societies, and force people to appreciate what their ancestors strived hard to build for them.’

      ‘You want people to stay in their towns?’ asked Nick, coming back from the curtain.

      ‘Not I, the tree demon. And yes, it is an ideological pursuit.’

      ‘But you’re a travelling museum?’

      ‘A necessary chore, within the pursuit. See, this month, I’m talking to Bend and the people living here. Next month, it’ll be somewhere else. After that, somewhere in Wyoming.’

      ‘And after that, Atlanta?’ asked Lexi, flicking at where the dick used to be on the Adonis statue. ‘Harlem? Koreatown?’

      The curator smiled, moving parallel to Nick and stroking the stage curtain, then slowly, with a poorly-acted flourish, drawing it open.

      Curious as to how much weirder the place could get, but also a bit wary of the white supremacist undertones…or just tones, really…I followed him through. Hearing you should eat this psycho and how about I just empty his head behind me, I guessed Lexi and Juana were coming too.

      Not sure what the latter thought about Sadia picking out this place. Not sure what I thought either. She was blonde…maybe a white supremacist too? Depressed at the size of Fresno, the melting pot…

      I blinked, the stage curtain quite heavy as it swung back into my face.

      No, she couldn’t be…her poems. Too solipsistic.

      More likely she just saw the sign and found it funny, assumed it was  a showman’s attempt at satire like we did. And then walked into this guy, with giant red tie and weird hair, and ludicrous tree demon story.

     Leaving the stage curtain behind, I breathed out loud enough for Nick to hear, and took in the madness of the new room. Papier mâché planet models hanging down from the ceiling, pairs of green eyes against a space background on the walls, some kind of seating apparatus that I couldn’t quite make out on the far side.

      ‘As you can probably tell…this next part of the Museum deals with space travel, planet colonisation, and other things related to such. Not the wonder and awe aspects that those lying TV serials try to promote, but the innate truth of the danger and evil inherent within the concept itself. Death by asteroids, death by suffocation, death by aliens, planets with no real atmosphere…’ The curator stopped next to what I hoped was a plastic scythe, gripping its shaft. ‘Did you know the devil himself resides on Jupiter?’

      ‘Err…no,’ I said, when no one else bothered to respond.

      ‘It’s true, they have conducted studies on the matter. That gigantic, mauve dot they keep seeing…that’s him, the Devil’s eyeball, watching us from afar.’

      ‘Not entirely sure that’s true…’

      The curator pulled at the red cravat circling his neck, muttering not entirely sure back to himself. Then clapped his hands together and pointed left. ‘It is an abstract concept, of course, which is why I’ve constructed a vehicle in which to experience it physically.’

      ‘Ah, this is where the budget went,’ said Nick, laughing as he followed the curator over to the seats I’d caught sight of when entering; a row of four torn-out car seats stuck together with wooden boards at the back. ‘Can we sit on them?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘Any seat?’

The curator nodded, taking the seatbelt and strapping Nick in. ‘There is some shock effect lighting, if you have epilepsy…’

‘Ha, don’t worry, comrade. My body is extremely durable.’

‘And your friends?’

‘Normal human levels. Two of them.’

‘And the third?’

‘Mexican.’

The curator nodded, for some reason glancing at me instead of Juana. ‘Not taking a seat, young man?’

‘In a second…’

‘It’s quite the experience, I assure you.’

I mumbled back a generic yeah and looked at the projection screen set out in front of the seats. My mind immediately shifted back to Juana’s video room. Similar dim lighting, screen size, vague sense of supernatural creep. The Yaqui addict clearly had the same impression as she came over and took the seat next to Nick, swatting the curator’s hand away when he tried to strap her in.

‘What exactly are we watching?’ Lexi asked, sitting down with an undisguised sigh.

‘Not watching, experiencing. It is a descent into the red eye of Jupiter, the door to the devil himself.’

‘To understand true negativity,’ said Nick, gesturing at the chair just past Lexi. ‘You’re holding us up, Keni cat.’

‘Not my name,’ I bit back, taking the final car seat, strapping in.

‘It’s safer if you’re strapped in, young lady,’ advised the curator, looking at Juana and patting his waist.

‘… … … … …’ came back, this time in Spanish.

‘As you wish.’

The curator edged to the wall at the side, near the stage curtain, and pressed a switch on what must’ve been the menu pad.

‘Lunatic VR…’ muttered Lexi to my shoulder, as the room grew darker and a distant, hazy orb appeared in front of us.

‘Jupiter,’ said the curator, moving up to the side of the screen. ‘The devil’s door.’

The syllable on door seemed to reverberate around the room, as the orb drifted towards us and gradually evolved into the recognizable form of Jupiter…or we moved towards it and devolved into solar wind as the planet kept growing, sucking us in…

‘This seat, it’s…’ I stuttered, grabbing the seatbelt, trying to stop my body floating up and out, and Lexi was doing the same thing, Juana too, and when I looked forward again, we were inside the atmosphere, descending on a staggered drift towards the red spot and

seeing it was to activate it as

it phased into a spiral and spun open with green streaks of light flashing like ammonia bolts nearby, not on the screen, but to the side of the car construct, in the actual space of the room and

‘My head feels a bit…’ started Lexi then faded out as

a faint chanting noise seeped in from somewhere, the ceiling perhaps

punctured by sharp electronic cuts

and the curator, he was floating now

in the air

in the void beside us, beyond us

spurts of green-flecked gas projecting outwards from his shoulders, his skull and

when he rotated slowly to face us

it wasn’t the red tie lunatic we were looking at, but a middle-eastern man with crescent moon cross tattooed on the neck

green maelstrom eyes

hands that were mist

legs that

‘Nick…’ I tried, but the words went nowhere

eaten by the background chants, the spirals of Jupiter’s devil eye, the language of the green-eyed thing as it split into four distinct copies

drifted closer to our seats

hands now claws

mouth now