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“So what’s your game, you gloppy bag of pus who gets off on tormenting innocent people? Why are you making me waste precious time with your toxic oratory? You haven’t eaten me yet; although you’re clearly unhinged, you must have some sort of agenda. Am I facing the squid-god Proteus?”

“I’m no squid. And as you should have figured out by now, we know each other.”

I snap my head back. I picture myself taking a shortcut at midnight through a grimy alley, that stinks of dog shit, urine, cigarette smoke, stale booze, and dime-store perfume. A rat scampers along a clogged storm drain. Some vermin is scrabbling in a trash can. Shards of broken glass glitter like slivers of moonstone. I’m stepping on yellowed papers and food wrappers when an orange-sized, black glob of snot drops in front of me and splatters on the piss-glazed cobblestones. The sticky substance has stained my shoes. I peer upward. Dozens of bulging eyeballs are observing me, glued to a gargantuan garland of slimy tar suspended between the graffitied brick walls, like a forgotten ornament for some holiday that honors a god of putrefaction and deformity.

My skin crawls. I want to shriek.

“I’m afraid that you must have mistaken me with someone else, you festering, foul-breathed abomination. It would explain why you thought that I wanted to be eaten. Perhaps a brain malfunction?”

“Oh, but you are. Didn’t you hear me call you by name? I think I did it twice.”

“Look, if you had checked the yearbooks in your high school’s library, you would have realized that I was in middle school when blob-people made their debut.”

The blob gurgles like a busted-up washing machine.

“Pay attention!”

“Alright, asshole. I’ll listen to the sound waves you’re generating with some mercifully hidden sphincter, if it means you’ll leave me alone. Go ahead, try your best.”

“Leire. That’s your name.”

I raise my hand to wipe the clammy sweat from my forehead.

“I’m struggling to remain sane despite your nauseating stench, but let me tell you: someone gave that name to me without my consent.”

“Is this a matter of freedom again? Or do you just hate sharing your name with thousands of other women in this province alone?”

I resent the cum monster’s derisive tone. Should I expect decency from someone who spat at my face, though?

I glare at one of the blob’s glistening, moist eyeballs, that’s drooping in the black goo like snot dribbling from a nostril. I want to gouge that eye out, then unhinge my jaw wide enough to cram the orb in my mouth. The eye would slime my lips and ooze onto my tongue. Maybe it tastes like rancid curry. I would sink my teeth into its fibrous sclera as if into a jawbreaker, and the released vitreous humor would shoot through my nose. I would keep chewing on that eyeball, and sucking up its viscous fluid, even as my jaws ached and my cheeks bulged like a puffer fish’s. Such gluttonous cravings overwhelm me in moments of revulsion; one time I was about to lick a tied-up condom left on a park bench, before I snapped out of my daze. But who am I kidding? If I were ever able to fit melon-sized stuff in my mouth, I would have already died of joy, and asphyxiation, while deepthroating one of mommy’s mammoth mammaries.

“What’s with your creepy grin?” the blob gurgles.

“Nevermind. My point was that people are assigned names so they can be addressed by others, so those other humans know to whom they’re referring when gossiping about you. Besides, how often have I wanted people to bother me? Before Jacqueline blessed my existence, my interests were always solitary. Therefore, the best name for me would have been none, and those knuckleheads who insisted on trying to address me would be forced to rely on expressions like, ‘Hey, you!’ Imagine the silly conversations they would be engaged in with each other as they criticized my personal habits, mocked my weaknesses, and debated the color of my undergarments, but doubted if they were talking about the same person! What an unhygienic lot! And over time, my lack of a name would become so awkward that I would be erased from the social memory of everyone around me, which would free me to spend my time contemplating the absurdity of my cosmic joke of a life. But yes, why choose the name Leire, with which thousands of females across the province are burdened? To whatever extent a name becomes the verbal attempt at manifesting one’s destiny, weren’t my parents setting me up for mediocrity by giving me a commonplace moniker instead of, say, Flower-Duster, or Unsliced Saliva’s Fondness for Fishbones? Once your essence has been tainted at birth with such a clichéd alias as Leire, does it ever regain the power of flight? Why pursue a dream when you’re doomed to become a mundane drone? To be fair, though, I’m warming up to the name Eide. A creative forest fae came up with it, maybe because she understood I had a penchant for being an untamed bohemian. Oh, I forgot: during a recent nightmare I was also christened as Gummo, but that rabbit bastard meant it as an insult. Besides, who would go by the name that an anthropomorphic bunny, or a fucking hamster for that matter, bestowed upon them? No, beyond that: who would want to associate with a cacodemon who came all over the pancakes they cooked for breakfast?”

The blob shifts about restlessly, squelching like a filled fleshlight.

“Astonishing ramblings by a half-wit!”

This interdimensional tapioca pudding, if such a slimeball is worthy of the name pudding, can undervalue me as much as he pleases; I’m a helium balloon soaring above the mountains. Explaining myself at length exhilarates me.

“I’m serious. To regain the joy of the naked, unsullied state, we must venture down a path that leads to our names’ total evaporation.”

“You moron, even if your parents hadn’t named you, other people would refer to you by your relationship with others, as in, ‘This guy over here is my son, that bitch is my ex-wife.’ And eventually they would stick nicknames on you, the sort that your parents would have avoided for their beloved progeny. I can think of half a dozen such epithets. The Wretch, for example, or The Thirsty One, or even that old standby, The Cunt.”

I guffaw to release the frustration and unease swirling inside my ribcage.

“Very funny, pus bag. Those who would push an unflattering identity on me will be dismembered, their pieces strewn along mommy’s balcony to be gnawed upon by crows and other feathered scavengers.”

As the blob oozes angrily, he glowers like a shit-faced T-rex in a sauna.

“How the fuck would someone without a name get by in modern society?! Unless you live in a cabin in the woods and subsist entirely on nuts and berries, you’d have to provide proper ID to open a bank account or apply for a job. And don’t you think that the government would intervene if they had trouble collecting taxes from you?”

“I know, right? They would seize on my lack of a name as probable cause of terrorism. Those depraved cretins! Why do we let the state encroach upon our personal affairs? How far we have fallen since our fabled Paleolithic ancestors, whom I’m sure were freewheeling hedonists of great renown, roaming free in search of the perfect nipple. They never needed ID; they would simply paint a smudge of mud onto their foreheads and mumble into the trees, ‘Here I am, a boob for you,’ and any gal nearby would come crawling across the woods with her hair matted in clumps and her tongue out like a begging puppy. What a life of luxury they were blessed with by mommy Earth! Damn it, when was I asked if I wanted to partake in modern society?!”

The blob rolls his dozens of eyeballs so far back that they sink into the squirming goo, spin, then spring to the surface again. As films of black slime slide off the eyeballs, the sewage-colored irises dart about erratically like startled from a dream. When they focus on me, the wall-wide gelatinous bulk sags with a deflating groan that could be interpreted as a sigh, but that may have been a fart.

“I can’t believe I have fallen so low as to entertain your lunacy,” the blob moans. “It seems I have nothing better to do than listen to your absurd babble about names and nipples.”

“You’re just pissed because a big black squid’s arguments don’t stand for shit. Nobody else has ever complained about my eloquent sophistry. Why do you hate the truth? Is the mere existence of logic and evidence so unbearable to your warped little soul?”

“I might just be anti-nonsense.”

I take a deep breath.

“I’ve spent decades searching for some sense in this absurd existence, so I expect the same consideration and intellectual openness from others. At least don’t spit at me! But I see that, for you, I must simplify reality down to its rudimentary forms.”

“Please do. This has gone on long enough.”

“I’m indeed one of those unfortunate humans whose identity has been diminished to the name Leire. I’m also a thirty-year-old programmer without friends.”

“How very pleasant to meet you, Miss D-D-Dumb-Dumb-Dumb.”

“You bloated, pustulating turd!”

That bizarre bastard bursts into laughter, cackle after cackle. As the ghastly racket resounds, the mound of sludge shakes and ripples like the belly of an obese man who has gorged himself on a vatful of lard, and with each gargle and snort, the squelchy mass threatens to eject several gallons of its rotten innards into space.

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “Never Ending Math Equation” by Modest Mouse, and “Peacebone” by Animal Collective.

I keep a playlist with all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and five songs so far. Check them out.

Do ya know that some artificial intelligences can create images out of whatever prompt you send them? Well, do ya, punk? It just happens that I sent one of those AIs lots of sentences from this chapter. Check out the results.

Did you know that some neural networks can produce human-like voices? I exploited the best of those cutting-edge services to generate an audiochapter for this entry. Here’s the link.

This chapter was the most fun to write in quite a while, and the audiochapter that I produced from it turned out fantastic.

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I savor the cool, metallic heft of the revolver, this time gripped in my expendable hand. The overhead lights shine on the firearm’s thick barrel, that begs to be fondled. I rest the pad of my left forefinger against the curve of the trigger; a pull of its mechanism will spark a cathartic crescendo of madness and mayhem. I picture a muzzle flare followed with the eruption of gun smoke and sparkling debris. I anticipate the wave of ecstasy that will course through my nervous system as the bullet shoots off, slicing through the air like a tiny comet, to inaugurate the great purge of all things gross.

A gust of wind rattles the windowpanes, accompanied by the rumble of distant thunder. Does the revolver remain loaded after the earlier stunt that tore my right hand off? With my left forefinger, I slide forward awkwardly the cylinder release latch and hold it firmly, then with my right thumb I push the cylinder open. The six chambers are filled with greenish-yellow bullets designed for optimal penetration, and the percussion cap of each one bears the mark of the horseman along with his motto in golden lettering: “To end everything so that it can begin anew.” I picture my equine companion during our last hunt near the city of Cologne back in 1745, when we chased a white-tailed deer as it bolted in the moonlight across a dark road.

I close my eyes and raise the revolver’s cylinder to my nostrils. I sniff a round, inhaling the metallic tang of its metalwork mingled with that of steel. I imagine myself sucking the bullet in through my nose to figure out what a vacuum cleaner feels like.

“Is this your attempt to intimidate me?” the blob sneers.

“Oh, no way. I’m just fiddling around with this old thing that was bequeathed to me. A twenty-five caliber Desert Eagle chambered with .357 Magnum rounds.”

“You have no clue what you’re talking about.”

With a flick of my left wrist, I snap the revolver’s cylinder closed; it locks snugly against the frame with a click. I glare at the greasy goober, who is uglier than a boil on a homeless man’s butt cheek. He expects me to fire back with an irate retort, but instead I should squeeze the trigger and blow away that mucus-spewing blancmange before my sanity dissolves like an ice cube on the tongue of a polar bear.

“Do not mock me,” I growl. “Who are you to speak to me thus? My father? What did you ever do to deserve the privilege of pissing on me, you bloated sewage slug? What have you achieved in your pitiful life besides spreading putridity? For your information, ever since I was twelve I have known that firearms kill people and animals; the cops taught me how to load and fire guns during a summer camp for disturbed children. Afterwards I patronized shooting ranges to hone my aim. I went shooting in a deserted lot near my apartment to vent my wrath upon vermin and scavenging crows.” I draw a deep breath. “My grandfather, Arachne collect his soul, used to tell me that one day the government would organize a giant database to contain the fingerprints, retinal scans, DNA sequences, medical records, financial data, and online browsing habits of every man, woman, and child. They would track your transactions and the places you’ve traveled. They would track who has visited your home and with whom you had sex. They would know which toilet paper brand you prefer, and how often you masturbate. Despite the government’s excuses that these programs would provide security against terrorism and international crime, the dossiers would be exploited to spy on law-abiding citizens for political ends. If they couldn’t confiscate your privacy through legal channels, they would manufacture emergencies as pretexts for suspending constitutional rights. They intend to create a panopticon society in which people’s behavior is monitored from every street corner and every shop front, from inside every home. If you dared to utter anything deemed inappropriate, they would label you and your family as subversives. They would come in the night while we slept: jackbooted thugs in black riot gear would smash down our doors, storm our homes, then drag us from our beds while we kicked and screamed and pissed ourselves. They’d shove us into boxcars, like livestock or slaves, and seal the doors shut with locks and chains. When the train reached its destination, each boxcar would be uncoupled and rolled toward some industrial complex, where we’d be forced at gunpoint to disembark into a cattle chute. Once we had been identified by a biometric scanner, those labeled as genetic undesirables would be herded into killing pens, and their offspring taken to undergo de-individualization and de-genitalization procedures. Healthy boys would be conditioned through pharmacology and cognitive-behavioral therapy to become docile. Healthy girls would be bred. The rest of the captives, the lucky ones, would be given numbered jumpsuits and put to work in assembly lines under the supervision of armed guards. Those who resisted would be gunned down and incinerated. The workers would slave away until they dropped dead of exhaustion, disease, and malnutrition, or until the state euthanized them.” I swallow a lump in my throat. “I have the right to defend myself against tyrants, so I have kept this revolver close at hand for decades, and I will shoot any creature or inanimate object that could harbor hostile intent toward me or my loved ones. What, you think that a perverted freak like me would suffer a crisis of conscience, or that I would be intimidated by an animated heap of diarrhea like you? Hah! I have always fantasized about taking vengeance and inflicting maximum torment. Whenever necessary, I wouldn’t mind killing anyone, including myself. In fact, I yearn to kill someone. I feel that such a sacrifice might liberate the demonic energy that rages within me like a wildfire. I long for the freedom and catharsis of destruction. Everything must end so that it can begin anew.”

The blob’s dozens of eyeballs glow like those of a frog that has swallowed a lit matchstick.

“That’s not at all disturbing. You can’t kill me anyway, dickhead.”

My chest heaves as my heart beats wildly. A bead of sweat slides down my cheek and drops from my chin. I must stink like a pungent blend of sour milk and sweaty gym socks. I want to wipe myself down with a towel soaked in rubbing alcohol.

“You’re a shapeless pimple that needs to be squeezed dry,” I mumble.

“A few bullets and your silly threats. Please! You should know by now that they’re only going to make me laugh.”

It pours through me in waves, this violent longing for carnage and debauchery, a mélange uniquely mine, the product of being both a masochist and a fetishist; yet, my shoulders slump, and I feel like a broken car battery. My revolver has become more cumbersome than driftwood.

“I’m inclined to believe you. Someone this slippery and revolting must be as inescapable as the heat death of the universe.” I put the revolver down on the desk with a clunk. “But don’t expect me to apologize for the threats, because that’s my default setting. Even when I go for a walk on the beach, I feel like punching someone or hurling garbage at other beachgoers, so I would blast you with a nuclear bomb if I could.”

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Author’s note: today’s song is “Untrustable” by Built to Spill.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and three songs so far. Check them out.

Some neural networks out there are eager to generate all sorts of wild images for us, such as the ones in this post.

I added audio to this AI craziness, thanks to Eleven Labs. Check it out.

My mother has caught the virus from my sister, and I have spoken with my mother in person recently. I suppose that I’m about to experience how it feels when that damnable pathogen makes a playground out of your body. I’m vaccinated, which gave me permanent heart damage, so I hope that at the very least it has made me less vulnerable to the disease.

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“Shut your slimy, stinking piehole. Please return to that hellish dimension from whence you came, or else roll down a hillside to your doom. Leave me in peace and quiet.”

“Or what, huh?” the blob retorts. “I’m not going anywhere until you listen to what I have to say, and I haven’t even started.”

I snort.

“Good! Stay stuck to that wall forever if you want. You’re an interdimensional scab on a diseased surface. But you are alive, so at one point you’ll fall asleep, and then I’ll squeeze your fat guts between my thighs! Your squishy innards will drown in my wetness!”

The gooey mass squirms, stretching and contracting, as it emits a guttural retching noise, like that of a vacuum cleaner clogged with swallowed hairs and chunks of food waste. It makes me want to cover my ears. I realize that the blob is coughing up a lump of glop when the wad of black sputum flies out, hurtling across the office toward my face like a fist-sized, viscid stone from a slingshot.

My mind slows time down, turning the projectile into a shimmering blur that expands as it approaches its target. I picture a woman who, distracted texting, understood she was crossing the train tracks just as a freight train was bearing down on her, about to whomp the ghost out of her body. Her consciousness lingered for hours inside the slab of metal that crushed her brain, and then she sailed into the cosmos. As for me, I can’t dodge the sputum, but I manage to close my eyes and turn my head away as I gasp.

The glob of gunk splatters on my right cheek with a thwack, as if I have been smacked across the face by a cold, wet hand. The impact makes me flinch back. A pungent fume, that must have trailed behind the gooey comet like a tail, penetrates my nostrils with the stench of acidic regurgitation mixed with that of rotten eggs boiled in dirty diapers.

Hunched over, I shriek as if someone were cutting my heart out with a knife. My knees threaten to buckle under the weight of my horror, because the blob has spurted acid at me, and I know what comes next: in a second my skin will sizzle and bubble, burning with a caustic fire that will sear my nerves. I will feel the right half of my face withering and ripping apart as it gets vaporized into carbon dioxide. The acid will eat into my tongue and right eye, will melt flesh and turn bone to mush until it reaches my brain. How long will it take for my mind to dissolve into chaos?

Have I fainted? My right cheek tingles with numbness as if I had been slapped hard. A chill has spread throughout my body, my skin is crawling, and waves of nauseous revulsion are breaking on the shore of my soul. That gunk clings to my right cheek, even to my upper lip like a viscous mustache. The gooey mass must be swarming with germs and parasites, but other than that, it feels like I’ve been sneezed on by a bronchitic clown.

The ringing in my ears subsides, and I hear an uproar like a drove of pigs oinking. That blob is chortling with glee at my misfortune.

“Bullseye from across the office!” he crows.

My right eye is gummed shut. I part that pair of eyelids with my trembling fingers, but I end up smearing my fingertips with cold glop, like dipped in molasses. I blink frantically; it stings as if I had squirted lemon juice into my right eye. Although my tear glands are overflowing with brine, I witness that the filthy slimeball is jiggling like jello, emitting wet squelches, wobbling his eyeballs, and dripping pints of putrid muck onto the carpet. A myriad of warty bumps, one of them butt-shaped, have sprouted all over the blob’s body, making it resemble a rotten, oily cauliflower. His acidic laughter, that must have been festering in his septic bowels for centuries, is lancing my eardrums on its way to corrode my synapses. If only my mind could shrink to the size of an insect and take wing to escape the blob’s cretinous cackles.

“Y-you wretched slime-gargoyle!” I cry out.

The blob coughs, spitting drops of goo, as he recovers from his fit.

“And you are a tasteless twerp,” he barks in a mucus-choked voice. “While you’re at it, scream for your mommy.”

“I wish I were! What the fuck is wrong with you, apart from being the foulest lowlife in the entire universe? Don’t you know a basic rule of etiquette? Never spit on a lady!”

The blob laughs like a broken-down garbage truck with bad brakes.

“What lady? I was aiming at a perverted freak!”

My fury burns with flames so intense that my skin must be glowing crimson. I have turned back into a teenager, and the imagined version of my mother is scolding me, looking down her nose, shaking her head, because I never loved the color pink, or baby-oil soap. Instead, a pagan blaze had kindled in my loins, one that threatened to burn for millennia.

My vision is blurring. When I force my vocal cords to obey, my voice comes out ragged.

“I’m sick, you ignorant blob of filth.”

“Nope, just a kinky perv who needs a good spanking.”

My hands ball into fists. A fire-red fog, the hot breath of primal rage, is spreading through my frontal cortex. I shut my eyes, then try to calm my heartbeat. Although I’m breathing through my mouth to reduce the sting in my nasal cavity, I’m tasting decay like rotting lettuce soaked in sweat.

Outside, the thunderstorm thunders on: a cosmic war with rain as bullets. Its torrential downpour is slapping at the windows like a madman trying to wake the dead. I feel cold, viscous sputum oozing down my neck.

That abyssal lord of pestilence has sullied the right half of my face, covering it with slimy gunk as disgusting as the one in which he keeps his eyes. I want to claw the sludge off with my fingernails before it dries and hardens into a crusty mask, but the prospect of soiling more of my skin with that goop makes me shudder. Should I wipe my face off with a sleeve? No, afterwards I’d have to burn my shirt.

I forgot that I always keep a pack of facial tissues next to my monitor; I never know when I’ll need to clean up in a hurry. I wipe my fingertips. I run tissue after tissue across my right cheek with deliberate strokes. I swipe away the gunk that clings to my upper lip. I remove the slime stuck in my eyelashes and eyebrows. Am I clean now? I slide my knuckles along my right cheek; it’s coated in a mucous film. I grab another tissue and I scrub the tacky half of my face to wipe all traces of that monster off. After I finish, I toss the balled-up tissue onto the heap of its brethren in my wastebasket. Likely I still stink like a septic tank, but at least I don’t look like a slime-drenched sloth who has dunked her head in a bucket of rancid lube.

“Having your face covered in goo suited you better,” the blob says. “Really brought out your eyes, as well as your inner monster.” He chuckles. “Anyway, back to work! It’s about time we get down to brass tacks.”

My right cheek aches with the strain of my frenzied scrubbing. Spike’s revolver, a relic of a bygone era when most households kept one on top of the TV as a phallic totem to ward off demons, is waiting next to my keyboard. The meticulous curves of that gleaming, silvery hunk of metal call out to me.

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Author’s note: today’s song is “I Would Hurt a Fly” by Built to Spill.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and two songs so far. Check them out.

Are you a fan of goo? Then you may enjoy the pictures that a neural network generated regarding this chapter. Here’s the link.

A revolutionary AI that generates Turing-ready voices acted out this chapter. Check it out.

So Leire’s nightmare continues during this sequence, a tale in two halves where both halves are hell.

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“Will you stop laughing already?” the blob demands in a voice viscous as dripping sludge.

My chest and back are heaving, my facial muscles are contracted in a rigid grin that bares my teeth, while tears jump from my eyes. A piggish snort interrupts the guffawing, and after a few dry gasps, I manage to straighten up.

“The abomination talked.” I wipe away the tears with my thumbs, including the little beads stuck in my lashes. “Of course it talked. That’s just my luck.”

“I’m neither an ‘it’ nor an ‘abomination.’ I’m a sentient being, an intelligent lifeform, just like you.”

“Of all the slimy blobs in this world of horrors, I had to come across one that mastered the art of speech. What an inauspicious fate.”

“You are as rude as usual,” the blob says gruffly.

Blood is rushing to my head, making it throb and ache. Simulations bubbling up from my subconscious are crowding up behind the shut sphincter of my mind, competing for my attention; I get a glimpse of myself sinking my fingers with a glugging sound into the squidgy goo, which looks like the oozing viscera of a decomposing whale, to seize whatever passes for this gutter-mouthed freak’s neck and throttle it while screaming obscenities. I clench my fists, and the tendons in my hands creak in anticipation. I also picture myself hurling a mountain-sized iceberg at this monstrosity to pulverize it.

This is what I have become: a grown woman talking to a gargantuan glob of black sludge stuck to a wall. And yet that blob has the gall to call me rude. At which of those bulging eyeballs should I glower as they bob back and forth in that viscous, wobbly mass? If eyes are windows into the soul, I’m facing one sordid, abject fiend who has earned every curse that may be heaped upon him.

I fold my arms and force myself to take measured breaths.

“I resent your tone, sir,” I say through a tight throat that feels scraped raw, “as I resent the rotten stench emanating from your bloated body.”

“I stink, huh?”

“It reeks of decaying garbage. No, it’s more like the stink of rotten eggs mixed with raw sewage. A putrefying miasma I wouldn’t be able to wash off even if I jumped in a pool of acid.”

“The fact that you can breathe is a small mercy in this world of filth you call home.”

“Are you speaking from experience?” I chuckle nervously. “You must have spawned from filth yourself. I swear, if there were a contest for the most hideous creature on Earth, you would be one of the frontrunners. But I will spare myself from imagining such a pageant so I can retain what little self-control I possess. Your appearance is an affront to human dignity.”

“Alright, trash-talker. You don’t have a clue how hard and unpleasant it was to manifest over here.”

A peal of thunder ripping across the sky makes me snap my head upright, and drowns out the blob’s words. Goosebumps erupt down my arms while the rumble crackles as if some heavenly douchebags were setting off firecrackers.

“Who invited you anyway?” I demand to know. “And who would invite in an intergalactic vagrant who knows nothing of etiquette?”

“What makes you think I need your permission?”

Sweat trickles down my nose. My heart is hammering so hard I’m afraid it will tear free from my chest and fall to the carpet with a splat. My carotids must be swollen and purple.

“You are a parasite,” I growl through gritted teeth. “An invader. A sewer-dwelling species from some unheard-of dimension. Do the countless worms twitching in your flesh take note of the venom in my voice?”

“They do indeed, and they’re getting a kick out of it. As are the trillions of germs swimming in your intestinal flora.”

“Don’t you dare speak to me of my digestive system. I will gut you like a fish and flay you alive!”

The blob’s bulging eyeballs, plump blisters about to burst in spurts of pus, quiver as he sniggers. It makes me picture a chorus of gargling frogs.

“Leire, you’re a bully. A bully with no sense of proportion and a pathetic personality to boot. You excel at bullying others as well as yourself.”

My forehead is moist, my hair sticks to my face, and my shirt clings to my back and breasts. I tremble with the impulse to hurl a chair or a bookcase at the interdimensional, septic abomination who continues to spew his invective even as I struggle to contain my wrath.

This is why I don’t socialize, why I’ve kept to myself for most of my life: this world of misery is filled with nauseating vermin who delight in humiliating me. I thought I had left behind me the hostility oozing from every corner, the spiteful whispers of untold monsters, but now I’m confronted with an invader whose rudeness and perversion outstrip my own. A real piece of shit, so to speak.

I need to bury my face in mommy’s breasts.

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Author’s note: today’s song is “Angela Surf City” by The Walkmen (as well as this live version).

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and one songs so far. Check them out.

Do you want to see AI-generated images inspired by moments from this chapter? No? Here’s the link anyway.

A few neural networks can now create realistic voices. Listen to them act out this chapter.

This chapter kicks off a new sequence titled “A Monstrous Ignoramus.” The previous sequence kind of did me in; I don’t want to end up again in a situation in which I will only upload a chapter every couple of weeks, but given how obsessive I am, that means posting short chapters more often. Whenever I get down to editing the chapters together into an epub file, I’ll merge plenty of them anyway.

In other news, I’ve been hooked on beta blockers due to my heart issues. My hands and feet are perpetually cold, my heart rate rarely goes above 60, and I feel somewhat physically detached from my surroundings, although not mentally, which is perfect; the serotonin reuptake inhibitors I used to take ages ago turned me into a zombie. These days I would probably come off as even more boring than usual, but thankfully I haven’t talked to anyone in person (other than waiters, servers or whatever they prefer to call themselves these days) ever since my last contract ended. Beta blockers apparently also work to prevent migraines (they terrify me), and help with anxiety in general. Perhaps I should have been taking them all along. What other drugs should I become dependent on?

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Darkness had washed over me like a foggy, polluted river. I had heard the keening cries of the naiads, I had felt their icy fingers glide along my naked skin, and shortly after, even verbs and nouns had been swept away. But the world returns in a torrent of sights and sounds and scents, dazzling me with white light.

My knees wobble, and I stumble like a toddler. I’m standing on my feet although I was lying on the carpet.

A dull pounding pulses at my temples. Rain is pelting the windows, and deeper in that white noise I discern sounds like those of wind blowing through the ruins of ancient temples. A siren howls in the distance. Thunder booms. On the ceiling, a flourescent tube is flickering with a buzz and a crackle as it emits a fitful glow.

The putrid stench of corruption has penetrated my clothes, has oozed through my pores to infiltrate my body. My blood must be turning into a sludgy sap that will clog my veins and arteries, that will bloat my belly and mar my skin with scabby lesions. I will gasp my last breath while black slime oozes out of my mouth, then I will succumb to septicemia and end up like a bag of filth and offal left to rot in an alley.

Sweat has bathed my body in cold dread. I’m sticky, sticky, sticky. My hair is matted to my forehead. My skin sticks to my clothes, my clothes stick to me. I’m sinking in crude oil.

I want to duck under a showerhead and let it spray my hair and face with ice-cold water. I imagine myself gasping for breath while the cascade streams down my chest and breasts and trickles between my thighs, raking them with the icy bristles of its flow. Goosebumps will erupt all over my skin, and my nipples will harden to firm peaks. The chill will make me shiver uncontrollably, as well as yearn for the merciful embrace of death. I envision myself kneading and massaging my clit as the pussy juices slick my fingers.

After I step, sopping wet, out of the shower, I’ll gargle with mouthwash to get rid of the acrid taste of puke. But what if trying to wash myself only spreads the slime and makes it stickier? No matter how hard I scrub, even if I scour my body with bleach, I’ll never clean this alien ooze off my hair, skin, and private parts. I will remain forever contaminated by the blob’s nauseating exudate.

I’m swaying on my feet, my heart is racing, and the edges of my vision have gone fuzzy. A tremor of hysteria shakes my whole being. My consciousness is struggling to escape from its chrysalis of flesh and bone; I’ll end up staring down at the back of my head as if from a hovering camera in a third-person videogame. Although this may be the right time for a panic attack, I better flush my system of these filthy thoughts.

I groan with anguish. When I hunch over and attempt to hold my head, I bonk my right temple with a chunk of metal. It hurts, but the pain drives out the demons of panic. What the hell am I holding? Ah, the revolver remains grasped in my right hand as if fused. That forefinger, curled around the trigger, feels stiff like a dried piece of tree fungus.

Wait, my right hand is okay?! I still feel the aftershock of the revolver’s kickback that tore my hand off as if it were a twig in a typhoon. The severed ends of tendons and ligaments had dangled from the bloody stump of my wrist. Also, how the hell am I standing? A burning pain, the sizzling trail of a red-hot soldering iron, had seared down my spine from the nape to the coccyx, as if someone were chopping up my spinal cord with hedge clippers.

If I could evoke such pain through daydreams, over the years I would have given myself countless traumas, and maybe an early-onset stroke. Was that a hallucination, an illusion brought on by the blob’s vile ichor?

I had taken a break from programming to speak on the phone with Jacqueline, my beloved queen, the most precious gemstone in my crown. Knowing that in a few hours I would return to her arms justified wasting the afternoon at the office. But I cut the conversation short, I willingly stopped the flow of Jacqueline’s melodic voice, because this bloated lump of glop, this wretched pile of protoplasm from which dangle tentacles of viscous discharge, oozed out of some cosmic sewer to intrude upon my life and plunge me into madness. My vision is swimming with phantasmic eyeballs whose moist scleras, white like milky quartz, gleam in the fluorescent light, and that stare unblinkingly because their eyelids must have been bitten off by ravenous frogs. If this revolting blight had a mouth, it would suck the flesh off my bones.

The office has become a bubble sliced off from the universe, a bubble filled with static and a dense miasma, kept inflated by a steady supply of insanity, and that has trapped me with the other inhabitant of this space: an alien abomination. I must be crazy to withstand the presence of this intruder, that looks as if a titanic demon had followed a no-fap regime for centuries, until one day, high on bath salts, as his bulging balls threatened to burst, he pumped out the load of rotten, gelatinous cum all over a wall. He then threw at the gooey splatter, like sprinkles, several serial killers’ collections of gouged-out eyeballs. That demon likely ended up in heaven for having fulfilled his purpose: unleashing a massive discharge of jizz.

This defilement of our white-walled office shan’t be forgiven. I’m going to exorcise the demonic emission in a swift and violent way, with my loaded revolver. Wait, didn’t a couple of bullets from my weapon already reach and mutilate their target?

The sight of the silvery revolver in my clenched fist should make me feel invulnerable, as if I could solve the ills of the world with well-aimed shots, yet I feel like I grabbed a venomous snake by the tail. A chill rushes through my spine. This damn gun is an instrument of chaos! Maybe the skull and bones engraved in the frame, between the grip and the cylinder, were a warning. I should have known better than to trust a horse’s offering, but this thing was too shiny and beguiling to pass up.

Have I become a slave to this inanimate object, a traitorous implement that must be scorned and banished to outer space? I shamble to my workstation and stretch out my trembling right arm to part ways with the weapon. A blaze of adrenaline has been pouring into my clitoris, and long ago reached a peak, but it must have come to a lull: even though my nethers are desperate for friction, my sense of self-preservation allows me to place the revolver beside my keyboard and mouse.

A numbness pervades my right hand as if a serpent were twisting tightly around that forearm. My pale skin is growing wrinkles now that I’ve hit my thirties. A single thwack of a butcher knife would chop off those four thin fingers. When I order them to wiggle for me, I fear that through my daredevil antics I have severed the connection between brain and hand, but those four fingers flex and straighten out, obeying me like whipped hounds.

I bring my hand to my puckered lips and kiss its clammy, dead-white palm. I kiss its smooth back, then the knuckles one by one. I lick its nails. The hand must have been starved for affection, because it shivers as I suck on its index finger, that grows slippery under my tongue. I love you, right hand! I never thought of proclaiming it to you. Until I met Jacqueline, and for about twenty years, you were the only one that loved me, on whom I could rely to assuage my loneliness. You were also the only one who could beat me at board games. For all you gave and gave, I never asked what you wanted, what you needed, or what you dreamed of. Maybe I didn’t care enough to know.

A flood of tears gushes down my cheeks. What did I ever do to deserve to have hands? I’m a slug writhing in the gutter where life has left me. I’m a fiend, an outcast cursed with the stigmata of filth and failure, who must be sacrificed to avert an apocalypse. I’m a dick. A freak. A freakish dick freak. My family died because of me. I should give this revolting blob a big hug, cradling its oozing flesh, and thank it for providing me with another dose of the crushing, suffocating burden of self-loathing.

What the hell am I saying?! Why would I conjure up empathy for this monstrous heap of goo sent forth from some galactic abyss? I’m the victim of a psychic assault! My brain is being conquered by tentacles entwined around it like the vines of a strangler fig. Although I should have donned an industrial-strength hazmat suit merely to gaze upon this menace, let alone withstand the oozing filth’s neurotoxin, I must summon the courage to fight back. Will I grab that abomination with my bare hands, shove it into an airtight container and drag it to the nearest incinerator? Should I toss it into a boiling cauldron, to be boiled alive in its own foul juices? Is it edible? Will I dine on its fricasseed eyeballs?

A faint hum, the pulse of millions of microscopic parasites swarming in the black blubber, resonates within me as I pick up a noise coming from the infested wall, that oily and carnal mass: a deep, rhythmic chugging. Intermittent spasms of frantic activity ripple over the blob. Will it blow a colossal fart with the aim of ruining my sanity? No, the sputtering makes me picture a clogged gutter that has gained sentience and is trying to speak through muck and gunk.

My muscles are tensed, my ears pricked up. I’m assaulted by the din of the blob’s gurgling snores, like those of a hibernating beast snuffling and blowing mucus in its slumber, about to cough itself awake.

A full-body tremor overtakes me, followed by a shot of rage that ignites like gasoline. My teeth grind as my head spins.

“F-fuck off, you slime-coated turd!” I shout, hoarse from vomiting. “Prepare yourself for obliteration!”

I grab a pen. I fling myself towards the target with a single stride, as well as a frenzy-fueled fury, and hurl my ink-tipped missile. The pen hits an eyeball sideways, a few centimeters over its cornea, and clings to some oily membrane as if glued. I hold my breath. The writing implement slides down the slick curve of the cornea and drops into a puddle of gloop.

That eyeball’s pupil, dark as a bottomless hole, contracts to glare at me.

“Yeah, just throw random shit at me, why don’t you,” the blob says in a viscous and dank voice, like wet concrete. “And fuck you for making me come down here, Leire.”

I shake, I quiver, I shake worse. My vision blurs. Am I about to faint, apart from pissing myself?

A surge of laughter wells up within me and racks my body as I burst into a maniacal cackle.

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Author’s note: the songs for today are “Cosmic Dancer” by T. Rex, and “Sympathy for the Devil” by The Rolling Stones.

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

Do you want to see moments from this chapter depicted by a fancy neural network? Then visit this link.

This chapter concludes the sequence titled “Cumlord of the Abyss,” which is only the first half of the “saga” (I don’t know how else to call linked sequences) involving this bizarre blob.

I don’t think I have ever written a series of chapters this hard to put together; they required lots of freewrites (virtually one for each paragraph) that included detailed descriptions of hard to picture stuff. Plenty of outlandish references. The process wasn’t altogether joyful. Of course, I’m obsessive to a pathological degree (autism and OCD is a nasty combination), so it took me entire writing sessions to get through two or three paragraphs. I vastly prefer scenes that mostly feature two characters shooting the shit with each other.

Anyway, the next chapter will kick off a new sequence, titled “A Monstrous Ignoramus.” It will feature lots of insane dialogue, to which I always look forward.