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When a bolt of lightning, from the storm clouds that are sieging this business park, blinks behind me, the flash reflects off the three computer monitors. One screen shows a photo of Nairu and me at the zoo. Another, a pouty Jacqueline-smile. The third monitor displays a close-up of mommy’s thoroughly-licked pussy. That flash also lights up the grotesquerie stuck to the opposite wall of the office: a corpse made of spoiled cottage cheese, a stygian soup of shadowy excretions that are oozing down in elongating filaments of goo. Its distending and widening surface appears grainy and lumpy under a greasy coat of slime. As the rumble of thunder ripples through my skin, the ceiling-mounted lamps keep illuminating that viscous, squirming intruder as if it were a wall-wide kinetic sculpture.

My mouth is dry, my throat constricted. A tongue of ice slides down my spine. Otherworldly bizarrenauts can catch my spoor from space-times away as if my craziness wafted off me like some miasmic aura; this elephant-sized glutinous amoeba, spewed from some interdimensional sewer overflowing with bubbling septic matter, must have penetrated this realm to hunt me down and devour me alive. From the organic sludge stuck to the wall will erupt tentacles and pseudopods that, while dripping foul juices, twisting and writhing about in a necrotic choreography, will reach across the office toward its prey. The tentacles, their touch cold, slippery and slimy like a slug’s skin, will coil around my torso and limbs to ensnare me, clamping onto my flesh with a myriad of suckers and hooks. As the soles of my sneakers slide against the carpet, the tentacles will drag me back to the undulating pustule-tissue, then yank me into its gelatinous convolutions. Once the blob engulfs me, acidic pus will flow around me like thick mud, will seep into my pores, will slither inside me through my nostrils, ears, mouth, anus and vagina as if I were being basted with a goopy sauce, clogging up my windpipe, impregnating me with caustic enzymes that will rip me apart cell by cell. My hair will fall out in clumps, my skin burn, my eyes shrivel up. As my flesh sloughs off and my bones unknit from one another, a soup of acidic toxins will eat away at my organs, melting them like lard in a frying pan, until I dissolve into a slurry of pulp and corroded bones floating amid a festering broth.

My trembling knees threaten to buckle under me, and a guttural scream is building up in my chest. Am I helpless before this onslaught of invertebrate evil? Should I tolerate being harassed, let alone ingested, by some mass of jellified boils and warts? I could hardly wrestle even a child into submission, but my equine pal, through his selfless sacrifice, provided me with the means to blast this malignant mold before it snatches me up.

If Spike hadn’t jumped to his death in front of me, he would rush to my aid galloping through the streets. I picture his hooves clattering on the asphalt, his mane flying in the wind, a halo of electric discharges enveloping his body. He would burst through the window, shattering it in its frame, scattering glass shards across the carpet. While snorting fire from his nostrils, my gallant steed would plunge his teeth into that tumorous pest. The blob would split open and splatter into goopy, gummy lumps below Spike’s belly and fetlocks. In a frenzy of white-hot flames, he would gouge out the intruder’s putrid protoplasm, he’d trample on the gloop that flopped onto the carpet. My equine pal would lick his lips and slurp down the puddles of amoebic goo. After guzzling enough of the vile brew to choke a bull, Spike would turn and charge back through the window frame with a triumphant bray. He’d tumble down the street that slopes from the business park, crushing the carcass of some squashed roadkill, before crashing into a fence. Then Spike’s body would disintegrate with a silent whoosh as his fur, flesh, blood, viscera, bones and marrow were engulfed by a nimbus of flame. Ash and cinders would remain where a horseman’s corpse once lay.

I scuttle to my workstation and shove my swivel chair aside. After I place the cellphone on top of my open notebook, from the right pocket of my trousers I retrieve the key chain, but my hands are trembling; I drop the keys on the carpet. Their brass heads sparkle in the fluorescent light. As I grit my teeth to steady my nerves, I crouch in front of the cabinet under the desk, I scoop up the keys and fumble with them to unlock the top drawer. I slide it open. Safely stowed among paperclips, ballpoints, tissues, breath mints, earbuds and tampons rests Spike’s revolver.

The silvery, polished steel of the frame gleams. Bands of shadow run along the metallic valleys of the barrel, along the flutes of its thick cylinder. I smell the phantoms of gun oil and cordite.

I glide the fingertip of my thumb across the revolver’s cool, sleek surface. I touch the relief of the checkered wood grip, as well as the skull and bones engraved on the frame. I’d love to engrave next to it the portrait of a woman with sunken eyes, emaciated cheeks and dead skin peeling off her face, accompanied by scrawled black letters that would spell “A Horseman Never Fails,” but I lack the artistic skill and patience.

I slip my fingers around the grip, then I lift the revolver off the bottom of the drawer. The weapon feels stocky and heavy in my grasp, like a rock in a world of gelatin. When I straighten my back, a trigger’s click in my brain makes me shudder as a burst of images shoots across my mind. Why don’t you point the gun to your temple, old girl? Or how about you shove the barrel in your mouth? Don’t you want to press the tips of your incisors against the steel? Don’t you want to lick the cool muzzle and figure out how it tastes? A round must glimmer at the end of that dark tunnel. How many shots can you fit inside your overheated cranium? Don’t you want to see stars? Squeeze the trigger and rid yourself of your noxious mental parasites. Rectify the mistake of your existence. Plunging scissors or knives through your eyeballs to reach the brain behind would involve an agony, but a single bullet would rip through your axons, dendrites and nerve synapses, releasing your ghosts from the crevices within before they could manifest pain. You’d free yourself from the incessant taunting, the obsessions that gnaw at your sanity, the disgust and shame for your body and mind, the self-hatred, before nature herself debases you, after a hell-spawned downward spiral ending in dementia senilis, into a slurry of flesh and bone equal to the carcasses of squashed rats rotting in a gutter. Squeeze the trigger, woman of the pastures. Bury that tumor deep inside yourself.

A drop of sweat runs down my forehead, although an icy chill has made goosebumps prickle all over my skin. I grit my teeth, narrow my shoulders and take a deep breath. No, I won’t kill myself today; if I had the guts to shoot myself in the head, to exorcise that devouring evil lurking within my skull, I wouldn’t have suffered for years like some maimed dog in its owner’s backyard, waiting for someone to throw it a scrap of meat. Besides, I’ve learned to cope with my insanity through orgasm-based therapy.

Maybe I should put down the revolver, crawl into a corner and cry like a child while furiously fingering my clit, but I have outgrown that helpless little girl. I must obliterate the cosmic pox before it pours its poison into anyone’s holes.

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Author’s note: today’s song is “Little by Little” by Radiohead, as well as this live version, that may be better than the original.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Ninety-one songs so far. Check them out.

Lately I’ve been bothering a genius neural network so it would render images related to whatever was going on in the story. Here’s the corresponding post for this chapter.

The Steam version of Dwarf Fortress has been released! It even includes Workshop features, which means that people will upload thousands of mods in a matter of months. Check out its launch trailer. This game inspired Minecraft, Factorio, Rimworld and countless others, and I have admired its legend for about fifteen years.