He was sitting on a bed with purple blankets
—his bedroom??—
blankets tucked in at the corners and a violet pillow sitting neatly at the head
—not his bedroom—
head. A fan rotated overhead at the lowest setting. A dark-glazed urn on the bureau drawer held purple flowers which were swaying slightly back and forth. He bent toward them to sniff and heard a low hum. He peered around for some electronic source, but it seemed to come from the flowers themselves. The flowers were making a sound like very faint, very tiny bells. He touched one but it felt soft, real, not metallic. He leaned in closer and the ringing grew more distinct. He could hear more bells than there were flowers in the urn. Sounded like a million of them. He flicked the light switch to get a better look, but the lamp under the fan didn’t turn on. He flicked it a few more times, then a dozen more. He clubbed the switch with a fist and sat back onto the bed. The only light in the room came from a candle that flared softly on the curved nightstand, and the glow it cast on the dressing screen, a pair of panties draped over the rim, revealed a silhouette beyond.
Shouta grinned and pulled himself up off the bed without a sound. He crept close to the screen and grasped the edge of the frame with a few fingers. The silhouette made no movement. He snaked his head around. “Say…”
There was nothing back there but the radiator, a tank top on the floor, and another stand with another candle.
Shouta circled around the screen and stooped to collect the tank top, which he recognized vaguely. Belonged to someone he knew. He draped it over the rim alongside the panties and then noticed that the silhouette was standing motionless on the other side, now etched out of this candle’s light.
He rounded the screen. No one was there. The silhouette was back by the radiator. He rounded again. The silhouette was back by the bed.
He stood there another moment, rigid, feeling his chest constrict, before he swept the clothes off the rim, seized the screen on both sides, and folded it up with a loud snap and she was there – Ami, standing on the bed, her face contorted in hatred and her hands curled into fists.
Shouta’s feet threatened to give way. He lurched backward and almost dropped the screen. “Fuck, babe, you practic’lly gave me a heart attack,” he groaned.
She opened her mouth and laughed shrilly. The chiming of the flowers grew slightly louder. “Hahahahahaha! Keep howling, kid! You’ll
never figure it out! Hahahaha! Hahahahahaha
hahaha—”
“Oh, real nice to see you too,” he muttered.
“Hahahaha
ohhh, the little baby’s hurting now! You scared? Is that it?” She stepped off the bed and drew in close to him. “Scared of getting lost inside yourself?
Who’s in charge now?”
His fingers clenched on the rim of the dressing screen, which he realized he was holding as some kind of shield. His
DEFENSE didn’t feel much increased. “The hell you mean? This place is mine, isn’t it?”
“Haha, I didn’t think so!”
“Is this place mine or not?” he demanded.
“You heard me,” she said softly. Her eyes widened. “Or – do you – do you not have the
power? Wow, who’s in control now? Huh?”
“Then tell me what the fuckin’ point is! Are we in my head or not?” Shouta snapped, brandishing the screen. “I can go wherever the fuck I want!”
She folded her arms and stared at him for a moment, putting a prickling sensation in the back of his neck. The fan began to spin slightly faster. The candles flickered. The flowers banged against each other, and the clamor of the bells grew louder again.
“So turn the room upside-down,” she eventually said.
“Hey –
fuck you, sweetheart! I’ll do whatever I feel like!”
And Shouta swung the dressing screen over his head and smashed it into the dark-glazed urn, which shattered into pieces against the wall and scattered purple flowers all over the floor. Shouta was expecting the million bells to give one final riotous peal and then fall silent, but now the din was louder than ever. It was giving him a headache. So was the room, which looked different now. The angles were off: The room had skewed to the side where he had bashed the wall. Flakes drifted from the ceiling.
“Then they don’t know how lucky they are,” she said.
He laughed hoarsely. “Whatever I want!”
“It’s not. You think you understand everything going on in your head?
That’s bullshit. That’s the lie.” She paused, glaring, probably waiting for him to cut across her; when he didn’t speak, she tutted and turned away. “There’s people a thousand times less fucked up than you who haven’t got themselves figured out.”
“The real thing, sure. But this ain’t the real thing.”
“Not
completely. No one does, completely.” Then she blew out the candle on the nightstand.
“That’s cause
you’re not real either! You’re not the real you – fuck, I got to explain
everything to you?” His insides were jittering. His mouth was dry. He hated this feeling, having to spell things out for her. “You’re
not real!” She paid no attention. “You’re in my head, you think I can’t tell the difference? I can make you do
anything!...” She let out her little
sigh, the Patient-Yet-Aggravated one, and gazed into the mirror. She looked so fucking sanctimonious, he lost it. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her around to face him. “You want to get naked?” he yelled. “You want to suck my cock? Huh? Get down on your fuckin’—”
She kicked him – not in the crotch, but probably not for lack of trying: Her foot connected with his hip bone, only a few inches northeast of the grand prize. He lost hold of her, staggered back, hit the radiator and cracked his head against the window, where he knew without looking that a fine spiderweb of fractures had just taken shape. He brayed. Felt like someone had set off a firework in his skull. And it didn’t make any sense, Shouta thought, because at the kind of
LEVEL he was on, you weren’t supposed to
feel pain anymore – He groped the back of his head with a couple of spindly fingers and came upon a strange surface that reminded him of exposed wire.
“
Fuck you,” she was saying, though he didn’t hear her properly until the hot whine in his ears receded. “You actually believe you know yourself! That’s what this is. It’s cause you think you know yourself, you think you can control me.” Had she grown two feet in the past two seconds? Why was she towering over him, her face in shadow? “That’s how kids think. But you
are a fucking child, aren’t you.”
Shouta giggled. “Oh Christ, the hell you’ve been readin’? So we don’t know—”
“It’s real to me.”
“Bullshit.”
In the silence after this word, the bells having momentarily faded, he shook his bangs out of his eyes and squinted up at her. Too bad for her the bedroom hadn’t grown taller to match, he thought. Her neck was bent at an obscene angle against the ceiling, her head no more than a few centimeters away from being chopped off by the helicopter-strength fan blades. The glow from the remaining candle didn’t reach her upper body, and her face was all in black – except for her eyes, he realized; her eyes caught the candlelight
very well – wide lavender moons staring down from out of the darkness. A hand rose and a finger pointed, but not at him. At the flowers and ceramic shards all over the floor.
“You little shit…” came the hiss. “I paid two hundred dollars for that…”
“Maybe I have, though. Maybe that’s why they’re them and I’m me.”
“
No!” she screamed, and the hands flew toward him; the eyes swooped low he smelled lavender on her hot breath and for a second Shouta thought she was going to tear his jugular out but he was winning now and she shrank back down to size as the light from the candle covered her form again.
He grinned, showing many teeth.
“Shouldn’t be talkin’ that way to your god, you know!”
She breathed heavily, scowling at him as her eyes returned to their dark color. “Oh my god,” she moaned appropriately, “you’re such an
idiot.”
“Turn the – what?” he repeated blankly.
“That’s not the
point, Shouta,” she shot back.
He blinked. Then he leaned back against the radiator, ignoring the spark that dropped down from the back of his head. Then he smiled. Then his smile grew fixed. Then he began to strain. Then he clutched his clammy forehead. “
Fuck!”
“Shut up,” Ami said in a low, cold voice.
This time his knees did give. He fell into a ragged crouch on the floor. The hand that stopped him was cut open on the ceramic shards and began to bleed freely. The blood flickered as it dripped amid the flowers. Sparks were popping out of the back of his head and smoke was building. The glass cobweb shattered and a gust from outside extinguished the remaining candle. His brain thudded. The million bells were back in full crashing, metallic, dissonant force. Electricity coursed over his face and down to the tip of his tongue which was dangling out like a dog’s. He could not turn the room upside-down. “
Fuck you!”
“I told you not to come in here without asking.”
He screeched: “Shut your fat fuckin’ mouth, you fucking
slut!”
“Get out of here.”
“
Fuck you! I’m gonna—”
Then the room swung upside-down and the dark air was filled with ceramic shards and flowers and flickering droplets of blood. She melted away into the shadows and his stomach gave a horrible twist and he plunged off the floor and downward-upward to the ceiling. So he fell into the roaring fan blades and they tore him apart scattered him in all directions gobbets of flesh flecks of blood chunks of bone pinwheeling away into the
cold dark wet. He was pressed up against a glass wall which glistened under a thin shaft of light from out of the room. His first thought was thank christ i’m alive after all and the second thought was where the fuck am i. Trailing at third was why the fuck aren’t i drowning. He was completely submerged. He would have felt like a fish in a tank except this wasn’t water it couldn’t be. It was too slimy and viscous. He started to look around the room and felt a mad tumbling sensation as if his entire body were rolling from side to side in the ooze.
Get me out of here he thought and then the wall gave way and the flourescent light poured in. But this was impossible the room outside was huge. Everything looked a thousand times bigger. It was a surgeon’s operating room all done up in gray, concrete walls steel floor lead piping plastic arm stretching down to aim a lamp upon the table. Someone familiar was lying there but he couldn’t figure out who it was. When Shouta noticed a flake of plaster the size of a kite drift down from the ceiling, he searched the corners of the room for skewing but it seemed perfectly upright.
“The room,” yet – He was already thinking of that gigantic diorama out there as “the room,” which meant he’d already accepted without realizing it that this small enclosed space was not a room at all.
So he looked all around him to take in what else was here in this not-room. Beyond the glass wall enclosing him and the slime, there were other glass walls that curved. In the wider light, Shouta could make out what they were. But this was stupid this couldn’t be at all because the thing floating in the next tank over looked like a giant nose with hairs drifting freely like seaweed, a jar filled with sickly swirling brain matter on the other side, a dish of fingernails sat on the shelf below a string of teeth the size of cats was nailed to the top shelf a box of bones at the bottom and i was he was oh god they were
A massive, waxen, pustuled face framed by heavy jowls and glasses with thick pewter-colored rims was peering into the cabinet.
“Yes,” he was muttering. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
Rubber fingers the size of a man stretched out to pull the jar of brains off the shelf. Still muttering “Yes,” the face of Dr. Severstal withdrew. He hobbled away with a thunderous sound, over to the operating table. There was another sound like a chainsaw rattling. Shouta couldn’t see what was happening at the table or else he didn’t want to either way it was pixellated, blurred out. Then there were other sounds. Then the thunder. The face of Dr. Severstal filled the cabinet frame again.
“Yes,” he said in his rasping stammer. “Now to. Now to add the.” He reached for the jar in which Shouta was suspended. “Add the eyeballs.”
The jar rattled in his hands. Shouta – the two Shoutas, for there were two of him – bounced against the glass through the wobbling slime. Dr. Severstal reached the operating table and now Shouta saw what was lying there. It was himself. His own long, bony body was stretched out on the table, clad only in a pair of boxers. Only the eyes were different, and Shouta understood once the doctor placed the jar on a stand by the table. The body had no eyes. The hollow sockets stared dark and empty up at the leak-stained ceiling, dark and empty yes but actually not completely empty because poking out of each one was the humming glowing end of a red wire.
Dr. Severstal plucked one eyeball out of the jar with a small pair of tongs. The ooze gave a wet, syrupy pop as it released the eyeball.
“A delicate pro proce pr procedure,” the doctor was telling no one, or else maybe the eyeless body on the table. “I must ens. Ensure. That the elec electricity may course through the. Through the eyeballs. Otherwise. Otherwise they will run out.”
Shouta stared upon the two hissing wires and thought oh no oh fuck oh no please don’t please i don’t want to
“Nons. Nonsense,” said Dr. Severstal. “Because if you. If you aren’t him then he will ha have to be someone else and then. Then who will you be?”
no one oh let me be no one at all put me back in the jar back on the shelf just fuck just don’t oh fucking shit don’t let the wire touch me
But the doctor was shaking his head saying “Nonsense” again and now there was something in his other hand it was a gray-capped syringe. “I recog recognize that the op. Operation will be unpleasant,” he said. “Therefore I will adm admin administer something to kill. Something to kill. Something to kill. Something to kill. Something to kill. Something to kill. Something to kill the pain.”
The needle swam close to Shouta’s pupil, the metal gleamed, and Shouta was sure he was screaming, it certainly
sounded as if he was screaming, but how could he when he had no mouth and
the needle
the needle
“Well? Are you going to kill me or not?”
“Of course I am, you puny little shit,” Shouta snapped.
The bald, short, well-dressed man on the checkerboard floor nodded sagely.
“Is
that what you’re going to do,” he said.
Murmurs all around; a ripple of hands lifting to cup against ears, and of heads leaning close. But soon the crowd settled again into silence and inaction, in fact they ceased all motion entirely, transforming into a perfect
freeze frieze encircling the two men in the center, limbs outstretched torsos skewed faces contorted and no more the slightest twitch. The bald man puffed his cigarette.
“Were you planning on drawing it out?” he asked. “Should I be prepared to lose my extremities one by one? Should I maybe be prioritizing my various bits and pieces? Or how about making it a clean job? One nice shot through the head.”
Shouta hesitated
- “I’m going to draw it out.”
- “I’m going to make it a clean job.”
- “I choose an as-yet-unspecified third option.”
but not for long.
“I’m not losing you this time,” he hissed. “You hear me? You think I’m gonna screw around now? After you already got away from me once? Huh?”
“Got away from you…? You don’t think that’s a strange way to frame the whole thing?” The bald man lazily reached up and flicked the
INDISTINCT WHITE TEXT floating above his head. “
I think it is!” The
TEXT twirled in midair. “Because honestly what I did doesn’t strike me as ‘getting away from anyone.’ Most ‘getting away from people’ involves running very fast and booking flights and such. Not sitting pants down on the toilet jerking my meat, as I was more or less doing.”
“Shut up shut up shut
up! Oh fuck I can’t listen to this, I ain’t here to talk! There’s just one thing I wanna ask you.
- “What’s that over your head?”
- “Who beat me to you?”
- “You couldn’t get ahold of your dick with a pair of tweezers, faggot.”
- “Woooooo. Woooooooooooo. Woooo. Woooooooooooooooo.”
- “Shouldn’t be talkin’ that way to your god, you know!”
- “Clh’rgl arn Btalzmragh! Ulkt! Ulkt gyogr’mrtef! Clh’rgl! Clh’rgl!”
Someone made you his bitch. I need to make him mine. You understand?”
“Of course I do.” The bald man smiled. “His name is
The crowd leaned in as one to listen, then returned to their original position and sheer stillness. Shouta prodded at one earhole with a finger and met cold steel. “His – what? Who?”
The bald man frowned.
“Are you asking me to repeat myself? I despise that. Didn’t you know I despise that? Is there something wrong with you, for the Lord’s sake? Still, I’ll indulge. His name is
“I don’t get it! What the hell are you saying?” Shouta demanded.
“I’m telling you
very clearly!” the bald man barked, and the crowd recoiled amid gasps before falling motionless again. The bald man threw down his cigarette onto the floor, where it expired in a plume of smoke. The
WHITE TEXT over his head spun rapidly. “
Madonn’, you’re a genuine imbecile, aren’t you? First-class! Never mind, you slack-jawed animal, just kill me if that’s what you’re here for, and see if you can make it any worse!”
Shouta grinned his toothy grin.
The gun was already in his hand, of course.
“O
kay, my little shitsmear. Mission ac-fuckin’-cepted.”
Shouta whipped the gun up to the bald man’s creased, shining forehead and squeezed the trigger. The gun went off like a stick of dynamite in his hand. The bald man flickered and for the slighest instant appeared to pass out of existence. The bullet did not strike him. Instead it left a tiny flaming crater in a far wall. The crowd collectively sighed with relief. Shouta staggered back, reeling from the recoil but also from pure stupid shock. “What the fuck was
that?” he shrieked.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” said the bald man easily, staring up at the
WHITE TEXT above him which was slowly coming to a stop. “Try again?”
Shouta fired the gun again. And again the bullet flew directly through – or was it past? – or was it over? – the bald man’s forehead without so much as grazing him. Eyes bulging, Shouta fired into the man’s jaw his heart his gut his groin leaving pockmarks like torches here and there around the walls of the circular room. The crowd screamed, ducked, and covered their ears under the sound like cannon fire. The smoke cleared. The bald man stood there, smiling. Over his head the
WHITE TEXT had come to a complete stop and Shouta could see that the words were and always had been
HP: 0000“No fair!” Shouta yelled. “No fair! No no no no no
no!”
“No no,” the bald man said, too. “You’re going about it all wrong.” He pulled the gun out of Shouta’s hand, closed his eyes, and pressed it against his right eyelid. For a minute Shouta thought the gun was a syringe but no when he looked again it still seemed to be a gun. The bald man opened his left eye and fixed it on Shouta. “Like this. You see?” Then he pulled the trigger and the right half of his head exploded backward in a spray of blood and bone. The checkerboard tiles of the floor were instantly splattered as the bald man collapsed back into a broken sprawl. The red-stained
WHITE TEXT dissipated. Shouta’d thought at first that the sound the crowd was making had been screams but now it sounded like laughter. Laughter at him.
“No
fair!” he shouted hoarsely. “No fair! That counts! No fair! That counts as mine! No fair! No fair!”
But they were cackling and giggling and jeering him now and this
this was wrong all wrong so he
he pried the gun out of the dead man’s hand and swung it up and around and squeezed the trigger again and again and again and again
and they fell one by one tumbling like ragged scarecrows onto the marble floor melting away into splashes of blood shouta’s brain pounded ears screeched gun bucked against his hand over and over screams there were screams now yes but laughter too still he thought some of them were laughing and some of them were screaming but sometimes it sounded like they were all doing both at once
The scene didn’t shift this time, actually.
Shouta stood in the middle of the giant ring of corpses, lungs heaving and eyes watering. His hand throbbed. He dropped the gun, which was out of bullets now. He could tell. There had been a hell of a lot of bullets but they were all gone now. The gun clattered slowly to rest on the checkerboard floor. Shouta kept staring at it for a few moments after it had fallen still. He was about to close his eyes and maybe fall asleep where he was standing when he noticed another faint movement out of the corner of one eye.
No.
There was no way he’d just seen that. His imagination. Had to have been. Always was overactive. There was no way that body’s hand had just twitched. Shouta’d made damn sure they were dead. This one ended at the shoulders. Her head was completely gone. Her hand had not just twitched. Impossible. Impossible.
But Shouta wasn’t gawking at her mangled form so fixedly that he didn’t notice when a dead foot clad in a tennis shoe squeaked a few inches across the floor close by.
Shouta screamed, certain that the corpses were about to rise to their feet and fall upon him as a horde, but that wasn’t how they were moving. There were no zombie groans, no glowing eyes, none of that shit, just a ripple of motion throughout the massacre ring: splintered limbs and shattered torsos dragging themselves along the tiles, some limply some stiffly some jerkily, with sick plops and thumps and the sheer slick sound of skin trailing through blood. When the fingers of the bald man with half of a face drew feebly across Shouta’s ankle, he knew that he was going to either run away or vomit, but his legs seemed to have frozen from the knees down and he couldn’t manage more than a rasping hack. But the bodies weren’t converging on him they weren’t they were converging on a point just
ahead of him, and now they were pushing against one another and hoisting each other aloft and squirming and writhing and stacking higher and higher, until it stood before him, swaying gently side to side, dripping blood from every step:
a great spiraling staircase of corpses.
And now Shouta smiled, because he understood.
He had gained
ALL THE LEVELS, and it was time to
CLAIM THE CROWN.
He lifted one foot and placed it on the first step, which was the bald man with half of a face. So far, so good. Yet it still took him a moment of hesitation before he could lean in, bring up his other foot and place it on the next step, leaving none of his weight behind on the floor. This step promptly sagged slightly under him, and Shouta thought he heard a rib snap, but the construct did not give way. Well it’s got to be more solid than a cinder, he thought, and then ?? what the
fuck did that mean ?? . It didn’t matter. He ignored it. With a tense breath, he moved up onto the next step.
And onto the next.
And so up and up.
And though the blood-soaked staircase lurched here
and drooped there
and hands clawed and clutched
and feet kicked
and eyelids fluttered
Shouta Minamoto didn’t look down.
or cry out.
or turn back.
because he knew he had won.
When he reached the top of the staircase of corpses, he stood tall, proud, and with uncharacteristic patience. He gazed up above him expectantly. Before very long his wait was rewarded. There was a slow sound like paper ripping, and the ceiling peeled away fleshily from the center to reveal darkness beyond.
Shouta beamed even as his teeth chattered in the cold at this height. He was going to take up
THE CROWN. It was his. Everything was okay. He was the champion. He’d won.
bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt
A single cable dropped down from out of the void and swung to and fro like a snake in the black air.
Then another one.
Then a shape descended slowly, suspended on several loose-hanging cables.
THE CROWN. Shouta squinted through the darkness to get a better look at it. Once it was a few meters over his head, he could see it properly.
It was the splotched, rotted head of a cow, eyes sunken and rolled up into the skull, skin frayed and picked apart, horns broken, nose dry and cracked, gray tongue flopping obscenely between its teeth. As it came closer, little white things plummeted out the back of its tattered neck flap and onto the staircase. Shouta caught sight of one of them before it burrowed into the meat and disappeared. It was a maggot.
He shuddered.
Then he shrieked up at the approaching shape: “Where’s my
CROWN?”
The cow head’s mouth opened very wide, but it said nothing.
Shouta stood trembling, not breathing, for another few seconds, before howling, “
I WANT MY MOTHERFUCKING CROOWWWWWWWN—”
And now the cow’s head lowed along with him, a deep, guttural sound, and now the black eyes swiveled down from their sockets and found him, and now the riddled corpses gave way and the spiral staircase came apart and the cables snapped and the cow’s head plunged down after him still making that grisly bawl
He came down hard on the carpet with a yell, twisted to roll off whatever hard plastic thing was jutting into his hip, and immediately knocked over a stack of DVDs with his elbow. He cursed loudly, blinking around uselessly in the near-black room, where only the glows of various charging devices provided spots of light. The wires and cables trailing down off the desk looked like a mass of tentacles. She stirred feebly, up on the bed, with her back to the wall. “’S matter?” she asked.
“Bad dream,” Shouta muttered, groping the carpet to figure out what he’d landed on. It was a stray controller. He shoved it under the bed with a heavy breath, ignoring the voice in his head that hadn’t stopped repeating
oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck since he’d woken up. “Forget it.”
When he stood up to get back into bed, tugging the strap of his boxers aside to rub at the bruised hip, his eyes had adjusted such that he could make out that she’d wrapped the covers all the way around herself.
“Hey,” he said. “Stop hoggin’ the goods.”
She stretched, murmured something, loosed much less than half of the blanket and sheet, and laid them out on his side. As the covers came off from around her body, he noticed that she was wearing a tank top and panties.
Then there was an insane instant where Shouta almost fell upon her and throttled her.
But it was just a dream, he reminded himself, fighting back the urge to start shouting. Didn’t matter what he’d believed then. It was just a dream. Not her fault. His imagination. Very active. He was a creative soul. A visionary. Had its price. Of course it did.
oh fuck. oh fuck. oh fuck.He lay upon the mattress, drew his third of the blanket and sheet over his skinny body, and watched. He was expecting something to pry itself from out of the shadows once he settled back into bed, but though he lay awake for some time yet, his back to hers, eyes unblinking, nothing in the room moved at all, and eventually Shouta was able to find himself
AFFLICTED WITH SLEEP once more.