92. God of the Game
Hairy RZ
RZ wastes no time. Rushes us to the cellar. Keeps asking if I brought along the knife regardless how many times I answered in the affirmative. The man’s in a dotage’s hurry, encapsulated in urgency, he is an acrimonious mad scientist, and quite changed from the chummy host he’d been in the script an aeon ago.
His habits and mannerism are intact, nonetheless. Still as dirty as ever, the entire castle gives out a decomposing animal odour. Experimented subjects lie in ponds of maggots, and fly swarms (his food source) buzz along stonewalls lined with Renaissance paintings and the cobwebbed armours of King Arthur’s knights. Excalibur, wedged between two bricks. When this is done, and if I’m still around, I can try my luck at pulling it out, he scoffs.
RZ’s taken to a nudist’s approach. Says it helps him think better, in the buff. He’s got a theory that his cerebration extends beyond the confines of his cranium and traverses the entire length, crook and cranny of his body. Thus, clothing is merely a hindrance, an impediment acting as a contraption on which ideas are trapped in the microscopic fibres of the garment. Conversely then, he perishes the frock on his back, and eureka doubles the speed of inspiration.
Frizzy white hair mops all the way down to his bum, and wherever his skin is exposed, malignant sores are present. Insect larvae crawl out from the abscesses, the result of a lifelong diet on creepy crawlies, I guess. Nevertheless, his eccentric rationale responds that it’s better this way. Uninterrupted by the need to, say, go fix a dragon fruit salad, he can simply pick a bug from any part of his body for a meal and perpetually focus on his workaholic scientific obsessions. He is a self-sufficient closed-circuit ecological unit, both for the benefit of the arthropods and his own survival sensibilities; especially since he has got a drool stained pillow by his side, and the work-chair is in the hollow shape of a commode.
The castle’s cellar is an abattoir, which has more creatures in life-and-death stages between a pink baby and a dried skeleton. Right at the centre is an old grandfather clock standing at eleven-fifty-nine. Next to it, a bloodied operation table. The hands of the antique almost touch twelve, but they do not. They never do, for the gears of their mechanism are in coma.
This, however, is a human’s reasoning, seen from mortal perspective. The timepiece is in fact well and alive. It is the keeper of cosmic time (a part of infinite time), when existence stretches over billions of years, and the birth of man only comes in the dying fraction of the last second before...
...before doomsday, before...
(Remember it’s still in 2D.)
And Hairy RZ is the custodian of grandpapa’s hickory-dickory-but-no-dock. Not yet. But when it chimes, Planet Muthafukker will unravel and cease. Planet Muthafukker, in which all Jimmy’s kingdom hang by a thread.
Jimmy and RZ: two characters in Sharon’s tale who managed to find an alternate reality and life. In the back-story, RZ stumbled across the revelation that you could transfer your consciousness to the dying psychic patterns of tortured animals and live forever when he was electrocuting mongrels for fun. But due to the limited synapses of man’s best friend, only a two-dimensional realism could be achieved. Thus they tried it Jimmy’s artistic murdering style. Victim after victim, other than the bloodied masterpieces, the serial killers were never successful concerning the hereafter with Homo sapiens. So they reverted to lesser beasts, modifying their methods, vowing to attain that coveted breakthrough, that three-dimensional Holy Grail that had so eluded them.
Jimmy’s theory why it won’t work on man is the human consciousness as a wall, warding off alien forces even at that point of death. The only way is when they’re unaware, in their subconscious, in their dreams. But getting in is an impossible feat. Thus, the one and only final means is to infiltrate the subjects from the other side. From the afterlife. Since man is fearful of death, his defence is down when he is dead. He does not know what to expect. Death is, after all, very new and alien to him, and he is naive of the supernatural faculties he possesses.
The two despicable conspirators, on the other hand, have been frequently uploading their consciousness into the last breaths of both mammalian and reptilian species, and are knowledgeable (to a degree) of the potential kicking the bucket holds. Thus, the conquest begins; soul after soul over a calculated eternity. They are aware they have a limited spell (for they operate within the tick-tock of creation), and it is unfeasible to own every human spirit within that short space. So they need a shortcut, a trump card; they need to cheat, break the law from outside once more.
Luckily, fate had arranged for Jimmy’s close proximity to Sharon. Via their relationship, he found the maker – me: a dumb, obnoxious, redolent auteur addicted to sexual and violent games. Told you not all demagogues make an impression; and if what’s in their heart and mind is perverted, and absurd, and melancholic, then so too would be their invented imaginations.
The partners in crime figure that if they can subjugate the architect, then they can access the heavens beyond the dream dimension of death, and thus, become nouveau gods themselves. But the plan was skewered, and Jimmy was banished into the jail of my abyss. RZ is oblivious to this, Sha-Rronne is dressed as Sharon, and I am in Jimmy’s form. I smell a plot.
In their modus operandi, once done away with me, the fumbling deity, the final steps are to cut Sharon open with an otherworldly artefact, scoop out Sha-Rronne’s pumping heart, consume it as the clock strikes twelve, and they would be on their way, scot-free, to an infinite playground, which is basically the same one I amuse myself in.
By observation, I arrive that Hairy RZ loathes Jimmy. Spending all death-eternal in his laboratory while Jimmy dupes the starlet Sharon and savours the fruits of the lands, the panoramic eternity of dead men and women; surely, the one stuck in a lab would be sore. But a segregation of roles is required. Jimmy’s an artist, not a scientist. He is hopeless with tubes and vials; thus RZ’s got to be the one to find a way out from this living time-bomb. Doing so, forever after, has driven him from ‘just mad’ to ‘way fucking madder!’ And in the scene that is to be unveiled, he is going to be at his ‘bloody maddest!’
AI generated art prompted by author
All characters and events, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.