• Previous part (84)
• Next part (86)

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.

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.

• Previous part (83)
• Next part (85)

The smooth, clawlike trigger presses against the pad of my forefinger. I tighten that digit slowly, then squeeze. The hammer falls with a snick as the firing pin strikes the primer. A ring of sparks, like those churned out when a lighter’s wheel grinds against the flint, spreads outward from the gap between the frame and the cylinder, then the revolver’s muzzle blows a puff of cigarette-adjacent smoke that scatters in the air.

My heart throbs violently as I stare dumbfounded at the sleek frame of my weapon, that gleams alabaster white under the fluorescent fixtures. Shit, why didn’t the revolver spit out a bullet? Is it jammed? Did the firing pin come damaged? Should I have oiled some mechanism? Maybe I should have carried the revolver to the woods, high up on Mount Jaizkibel, and tried it out against a tree trunk. As far as I know, revolvers should just work; I’m not holding a particle accelerator.

I pull the trigger, which causes the hammer to spring back. Once the cylinder rotates to align its next chamber with the barrel, the hammer snaps forward and clunks as if the bullet primer had been struck by a mallet, yet the revolver remains dead like rusted machinery.

I must overcome the revolting monstrosity that dares to pollute my space with its filth. I have to make this fucking gun shoot!

I clutch the revolver in a white-knuckled grip, then I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the trigger. The cylinder clacks as it rotates and rotates chambering bullet after bullet. Although the hammer falls with dull snaps as the firing pin punches into live rounds of ammunition, it may as well be striking ghost bullets.

Are my hands shaking? No, the revolver is trembling like a tuning fork, a vibration that gets transmitted through my palms and up my arms, then races along my spine. The weapon starts emitting an ominous, high-pitched whirring sound; I picture an electrical panel bursting with frayed wires that would zap like a moth even the gloved electrician tasked to repair the mess.

I flip the revolver around and peer down its bore, a black hole encircled by the metallic ring of the muzzle. It offers me a top-down view of a turbulent, undulating pool of brass-colored liquid metal, whose waves spread in alternating crests and troughs as they slam against the walls of the chamber. The bullet must have cohered to a quantum state.

Should I wrap my lips around the barrel and blow? No, whenever the bullet snaps out of its state and becomes a solid projectile, I better be aiming my revolver at the wobbling mass of tarry putrefaction instead of my own face. I turn the quivering gun toward the audience of glistening sclerae, sewage-colored irises and deep black pupils.

I shake the revolver. With my left hand I smack the barrel as if it were a disobedient mutt. A drop of sweat dangles from my nose.

“Damn you, bullet! Quit your insolent game of quantum tag and collapse to an eigenstate already!”

While the revolver vibrates madly, its electric whirring worsens to a keening squeal. A tingling sensation like a static shock shoots up my right arm, then from the trigger a snakey white bolt of electricity, outlined in lilac, crackles as it arcs to lick my forefinger.

A deafening bang rocks the office, shaking the air around me and vibrating my eardrums, which makes my ears ring. From the barrel’s mouth erupts a puff of smoke, followed by a glowing, ember-colored blast that trails a stream of flickering sparks like red dwarf stars.

The revolver kicks against the palm of my right hand like a rearing horse trying to tear itself free from the reins. Its force shoots through my wrist with a sharp sting, then my forearm complains as if a white-hot shard of pain had ripped across the slow-twitch fibers.

The bullet hurtles down the barrel and flies out of the muzzle. It streaks across the office until it plows into the blob’s bloated blubber with a hollow thwack, piercing that oozing mound of black mucus like a hypodermic syringe stabbing a vein, to explode deep within the amorphous heap of putrescence. The flabby mass heaves and wobbles from the impact. Its jiggly flesh is rippling as if slapped by a giant, while the white reflections of light that mount the oily, concentric waves waver and distort. Those bulging eyeballs bob and roll about in the gunk, jostling each other. The blob lets out, as if from a mouth entombed in a quagmire, an unearthly bellow of anguish, deep and guttural. A hole bursts open in that deformed belly, a hole with a slimy rim that splays out like a black and gooey flower, and that reveals the blob’s gelatinous innards: a slithery mass of vermicular guts that squish and wriggle. A belch of foul gas rushes out and swirls around me; it stinks of rotten meat, vomit, farts, and sushi. The abomination erupts in a frothing gush of gloop, spewing mucous intestines in all directions, that as they break apart into globules of tapioca-like goop, they splatter over the carpet, the desk, the monitors, my clothes, and my face, in a caustic snowfall.

A gunshot blast rips apart the air around me, and its concussive wave beats upon my eardrums like a wrecking ball smashing into a brick wall. My ears pop, my brain quakes. A billowing cloud of powder smoke wafts from the muzzle, followed by a blossom of yellow-orange flame.

My right hand explodes with stabbing aches as the revolver’s kickback snaps apart my phalanges and metacarpals. The shooting pain surges up my forearm, reverberating to my elbow, while the shockwave ripples tendons and muscles along my arm until the force slams into my shoulder, where the joint dislocates with a crunch.

A bullet cleaves its way through the air. The blob is twisting and thrashing, its blubbery skin frothing and flailing like the sea in a stormy gale, and the hole in its mass is spurting slime-laced foam, when the bullet plunges like a meteorite into the sclera of an eyeball. The outer layers of the globe, white as a boiled egg, tear off, giving way under pressure, and out squirts a tongue of pulpy, pinky-gray jelly.

An ear-splitting gunshot punches my eardrums, sounding as loud as if the revolver’s barrel had been ripped open by dynamite. The muzzle flares a vivid yellow-orange, then a vortex of gunpowder-laden smoke rolls out along with a jet of fire, in an eruption of shrapnel-like debris.

My right arm has gone numb except for a stinging, tearing pain. Bone fragments poke out of my hand like spikes, and the fingers, seized rigid, are curled in a claw around the revolver’s grip. Blood spills from the wounds, dripping in long strings. The recoil of this gunshot jerks my wrist with a grinding wrench and makes it crack like a twig. That force also knocks me off my feet, launching me backward.

A bullet cuts through the air while leaving a trail of silver smoke in its wake, until it slams like a train into a wall a couple of meters away from my boss’ office door. The brick behind the lily-white paint bursts into a pinwheel of shimmering dust, into a shower of chips, splinters and shards.

An explosion rocks the office as if a howitzer had fired an artillery round in front of me. The rippling roar shakes my bones and makes the windows rattle, penetrates my eardrums in a spike of pain and tears them apart. A red flower of flame spurts from the muzzle of my revolver as if from a flamethrower.

The fingers of my right hand are curled and rigid, like the legs of a dead tarantula, around the grip of my weapon, and my wrist is drooping at the joint, when the revolver’s kickback tears my hand off. Still clutching the handgun, my severed hand flies toward the ceiling. Blood jets out from the stump of my wrist in a crimson stream.

A corona of red flame is spiralling around the bullet as it hurtles toward the ceiling, slicing through a cloud of gunpowder smoke. The bullet smashes against a ceiling fixture, that shatters in a puff of white haze and a cascade of sparks and glass shards. A cracked flourescent tube tumbles down like an icicle.

My ears are ringing when a shockwave emanates from the runaway revolver in a rush of superheated air. The reverberating force pounds my skull, slams into my chest, ripples through my limbs, and scatters papers, pens and paperclips around the office. A horizontal mushroom cloud expands from the gun’s muzzle and ignites into a licking white flame.

Flung backward through the air, I’m sick with whirling vertigo as my mind spins like a top in a cyclone. Jagged bones, along with pinkish-tan tendons and ligaments pulled to shreds, protrude from the degloved and bloody flesh at the end of my right forearm.

A scarlet tail corkscrews after a bullet that is whizzing across the office like a fiery comet. It wallops a hung picture frame, perforating a hole in a photograph of Bunnyman and I at a birthday party. Cracks have spread out from the impact point and crisscrossed over each other in a spiderweb of glittery fractures.

An immense power is released in a single pulse. Its shockwaves resound through my cranium with an infrasonic warble that bends my bones like rubber bands. My teeth rattle, my eyeballs throb, a fountain of blood spurts from my nose. A nova-like flash lights up my field of vision, then from the muzzle of the revolver bursts a star-speckled spiderweb.

A bullet breaks the air around it apart into a glowing rainbow, while the projectile’s path deforms into outward-undulating ripples of lilac-colored distortion like those cast by a mirage, turning the contour of a ceiling fixture sinusoidal. The bullet busts through a windowpane, catches an upward gust, ascends like an accelerating rocket, drills a hole in the night sky, and shatters a solar panel of a space station orbiting high above the Earth.

I slam into the backrest of a swivel chair, knocking it over, then I crash to the floor, hitting the back of my head hard. The blow sends a jarring jolt of pain through my vertebrae; I feel my spine crack, crunch, and snap. My legs fly straight back like a ragdoll’s, and when they fall to the carpet, I lie sprawled out flat on my back in a tangle of limbs.

My brain feels swollen as if someone were pumping embalming fluid into my skull. My chest heaves, gasping for air. The smell of gunpowder smoke has mingled with the coppery scent of blood and the blob’s putrefying stench.

White light wavers in my foggy vision while in front dances a swarm of red specks. But the maelstrom of a black hole yawns at the center of my gaze, and light itself falls in a spiral down that drain, which leads to an endless night.

I’m floating in the silence of the void.

Author’s note: the song for today is “Goin’ Against Your Mind” by Built to Spill (which also sounds great live).

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

Have you had trouble picturing today’s nonsense? I paid a neural network to depict plenty of moments from this chapter. Here’s the link.

This chapter was by far the hardest to write of a sequence that by itself has been the hardest to write in recent memory. I’m tempted to pull an “Inio Asano after Oyasumi Punpun” and never do this kind of shit again.

• Previous part (82)
• Next part (84)

As if I had been transported to a movie theater in an inverted dimension, humming fluorescent lights are shining down from the ceiling, and the opposite wall has been covered with a three-dimensional black canvas made of gooey tar in which floats the audience: a score of world-globe-sized eyeballs with sewage-colored irises and pupils that dilate and contract as they glare at me, the protagonist of this demented pageant. The scene is swirling like a lava lamp; when the floor seems to tilt and I teeter, the eyeballs swimming about in the blob’s expanse of gelatinous muck, which keeps rippling and squelching, follow me with their gaze as if they were scanning my mind to pry it apart.

My bowels gurgle, my stomach turns somersaults. A wave of nausea, accompanied with an unbearable chill, floods over me as if I had ingested a bucketful of diarrhea.

At the back of my throat forms a knot of spoiled meat marinated in bitter bile. My esophagus clenches around it as if trying to reject an intruder, but the knot threatens to rise further. Although I swallow it down, hot saliva fills my mouth with an acidic and coppery taste. I tighten my clammy right hand around the grip of the revolver, lest I drop it, and I raise my left hand to cover my mouth while my ribs heave with spastic coughing. A geyser of vomit is about to surge up my esophagus.

Fuck, I’m retching! I can’t heave my guts out onto the aluminum-gray carpet; I would ruin the austere and sterile elegance of our office. But mainly I’d dread explaining such a stain to our porcine overlord. I can already hear that piggish braggart’s hoarse rasp issuing from his slobbering snout, calling me a dirty slut. Maybe he’d force me to pay for the cleaning expenses.

As my eyes water and my cheeks bulge, I rush to Jordi’s wastebasket and drop to my knees. When I attempt to grab its sides to pull the basket closer to me, I bonk the wire mesh with my revolver. Doubled over, I groan with pain, then puke a torrent of yellowish and thick vomit that contains scraps of my internal organs as well as gobbets of liquified intestines, while my nostrils spew a poisonous froth of gastric acid that inflames my sinuses. The vomit is splattering onto the corralled rubbish: crumpled papers and tissues, disposable coffee cups, ballpoint pens, wooden stirrers, plastic bottles, sandwich wrappers, empty cola cans, polystyrene containers, dead insects, dirty syringes, tied-up condoms, and murder weapons.

My eyelids are twitching and my skin has broken out in goosebumps as I retch again and again like a sickly goose. The walls of my throat and mouth are burning, my tongue has caught fire. The fangs of my tears are carving holes into my cheeks. Splatter, gag, spit, puke, regurgitate, spew, barf, drool, swallow, pant, cough, retch, breathe, gag, belch, groan, puke, splatter.

I have become a churning cauldron of filth and corruption, and my mouth a spigot that discharges a flow of sewage in an excruciating exorcizing ceremony. I’m alone and lost in a wasteland of viscous misery. I need to find my way back to mommy’s womb. I shut my eyes tight to retreat into my shadowy mind-theater, and I render a close-up in candlelight of Jacqueline’s vagina. I see every pore of its satiny skin, the sweet pink labia glistening with her cream and my saliva, the engorged rosy nub that protrudes from beneath its hood of flesh. But her holy pussy stares back with hatred. The umbilical cord has been cut from my navel, and instead it has coiled around the trigger of a machine gun poised to annihilate me. The cord gets yanked taut so that the machine gun pumps round after round of flaming lead slugs. They rip open my bowels and stomach, turning my flesh into tatters and pulp. They pierce through my heart, my lungs, my spine. My cranium bursts in a bloody fountain that scatters my neurons into the void.

After the spate of uncontrollable fits, at last the urge to puke subsides and the acid recedes from my sinuses, although my stomach remains a quaking ball of nerves. A long stream of ochery matter dribbles over my chin and splashes onto the sodden morass that has covered the heap of garbage like with a toxic tarpaulin.

I spit out foamy saliva until I’m sure that I have hurled away all the spoiled remains inside of me. My face is numb and flushed with heat; I rest it against the cool rim of the wastebasket. I keep panting, and fever-like chills are setting in.

I sit back on my heels. An insectoid buzzing has filled the space between my ears as if a wasp were beating its wings inside my skull. But the vibrations are coming from my brain, that keeps thumping like a kettledrum, causing my mind to whirl with dizziness. Arachne, blessed be Her name, lodged in some knot of my neural matter the ability to weave narratives from random sensory inputs, and it’s translating, as if using the sticky silk of my psyche to bind my awareness, the echoing noise into voices that are chattering gibberish.

A shiver slithers down my back like an icy serpent. I keep getting racked with chills. I’m soaking wet, hot and slick with sweat that has covered a rash of goosebumps. A salty drop from the ones that have beaded on my brow rolls down into my right eye. It stings; I squeeze my eyelids shut.

My sinuses are caked with mucus, and I can barely breathe through my nostrils. A blessing, because the air is laden with a stink that makes me feel like I have wandered into an abandoned slaughterhouse during a stifling summer day, only to find myself amidst piles of shit and steaming cow carcasses. I barely distinguish the sickly-sweet stench of my vomit from this oily reek that could knock a gorilla out. A small-boned lady like myself, who rolled low on endurance, should have suffocated already, but I guess that my lungs adapted to breathing fetid miasmata thanks to Spike’s intrusions, as well as the one time I confronted that bunnyman bastard while I avoided gazing down at his torpedo-sized cock. These days I can handle any stink, any degree of madness, even the specters of guilt and self-loathing that accompany this odor of decay, because that’s what I am: a creature of putrefaction, a human plague, a biochemical nightmare spreading throughout this cursed world.

I lean on the edge of the desk for support, then I push myself to my feet. I stagger away on my rubbery legs. When I straighten up, my skull feels as heavy as a block of lead.

Vomit has spilled out of the wastebasket, leaking through its wire mesh. The viscous mixture has spread its corrosive contagion over the carpet in splattered streaks. They look like a spiderweb that has been sprayed with a gunky, yellowish-brown sauce. The acidic filth gleams dully under the fluorescent lights as it soaks into the gray fibers.

Why didn’t Jordi put a trash bag in his wastebasket? I should grab handfuls of paper towels from the bathroom to mop up the mess. I picture myself on all fours as I rub, rub, rub the stains with ferocious pressure, although I’d prefer to rip out the carpet and bury it. I also imagine myself pressing my lips to the synthetic fibers and lapping up the sickly-sweet substance with my tongue, which causes my gut to heave. For now I’ll have to erase from my mind the gooey stew that has soiled my boss’ carpet, or at least I’ll have to convince myself that I stained it with easier to explain liquids, like coffee from a clumsily dropped cup, or blood from a stomped-on rat.

I wipe my mouth with the back of my trembling right hand, that still holds the revolver. My heart is churning blood like an over-revved engine. The paroxysm of puking has coated my tongue with the taste of an overripe banana dipped in battery acid. I’m lightheaded and drained as if my body were struggling to knit back together its ruptured tissues, and my psyche, that is traversing the narrow border between consciousness and delirium, risks wafting away toward the all-encompassing darkness.

Fat drops of rain keep thudding, thudding, thudding against the windowpanes like the rapping of a thousand tiny knuckles, ghost kids waiting for someone to let them in. Thunder crackles, and the fluorescent ceiling fixtures flicker, as stroboscopic flashes tint the desk, swivel chairs and computer screens with lily white and iceberg blue. The barrage of lightning must be lashing apartment buildings, splitting their roofs, widening cracks in their walls to force open the seams of their bricks and surge through. Jagged spears of electricity will strike the targets inside, charring both furniture and flesh until they explode with a sizzle and a pop in puffs of ash and vaporized skin. As the smell of burning meat, hair, fabric, wood, plastic and rubber drifts down on the storm’s wet breath, the ceaseless rain will engender an apocalyptic deluge that, in its rise, turning the streets into raging rivers, will sweep away like toy boats in a bathtub the burned-out cars, smoking bricks, cracked masonry, uprooted trees, wrecked furniture, blackened bodies. Those who escaped into dreams will wake up to find themselves soaked under their blankets. Donostia, located during pre-Roman times in the domain of the Varduli, reduced in one fell swoop to a wasteland of ashes and mud, will vanish under an expanse of grasses, plants and flowers grown on their own amid birdsong.

The Stygian blob has settled in this dimension like a bloated turd that refuses to get flushed away. Its slime-slick bulk, a mound of quivering folds scattered with tumorous protuberances, squelches as it pulsates obscenely like some spasming uterus. From its underside hang half-congealed cords of goo in a stringy lacework. I refuse to count how many eyeballs are bulging on the gelatinous lump of grime and disease, in an orrery of sentient planetoids that have glued their bloodcurdling stares to my face. The corneas are glistening like made of pliant glass. Those eyeballs are judging me, scolding me, singling me out as a creep, a degenerate, a pervert, a sluglike fiend unworthy of breathing the same air as them. Their loathsome glares gnaw at me, scratch me, pinch my nipples, pry at my labia, bruise my clitoris.

My brain is boiling like a cauldron of tar. My clammy and feverish skin has become a hotbed of tickling spiders that are crawling around behind my ears, down my neck, under my armpits, inside the crack of my ass. What else could I expect from the confining, decaying sack of flesh and guts that I call my body? This hellscape must have been devised by Arachne Herself. Does She want to extract a sacrifice from me? Has She set the test up so that I must murder the blob or go mad? I shouldn’t have to tolerate being stared at by any creature against my will; that alone warrants a little murder. Besides, I’m dying to shoot this dick-substitute at anything that breathes.

I hug the revolver with my sweaty palms, locking my fingers together around the wooden grip. If I squeezed this hunk of metal until my hands hurt, the revolver wouldn’t get squashed. Is that how it feels like to have a dick, once the penis, engorged with blood, has swollen out of its velvet sheath, and has blushed with a crimson hue that rivals the brightest flowers in their blossoms? If I were a guy and I possessed a thick, meaty cock, I’d show it off proudly like a royal scepter. I would parade it around, flaunting its majestic magnificence. I’d stick my dick in any available orifice, even if that meant stuffing it in the gaping maw of a snarling dog, or sliding it between the pages of a novel as a bookmark.

I raise my revolver to eye level and aim at the center of that gelatinous mass, the inflamed carbuncle, the pus-oozing blight, the inescapable festering festering festering. The blob wobbles like a water balloon about to burst. Its eyeballs roll in sync, shifting their gaze to the revolver’s barrel, that looks like a toothpick poking up against this tide of nightmare.

My skin prickles with goosebumps under a film of sweat. The blob understands that the device I’m holding can dole out death.

I try to keep the revolver steady, but an undulating vibration courses down my spine, and my forearms start to tremble. Who cares about this slimy intruder’s sentience? Plenty of primates could recognize themselves in a mirror, yet they also deserve to die.

I curl my forefinger around the trigger. The revolver’s hammer is cocked, its cylinder loaded with bullets. I’m a motherfuckin’ gunslinger, a badass with a mighty six-shooter and a pair of leather chaps. All my life I have wanted to murder somebody. After I blast that slime-skinned, flesh-waddling, eyeball-plagued horror to bits, a splash of rain will quench the flames in my brain.

Author’s note: today’s songs are “Black Math” by The White Stripes, as well as “Brave as a Noun” and “People II: The Reckoning,” both by AJJ.

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

A couple of neural networks were kind enough to render moments from this scene (for a price). Check these out too.

Some years ago I dared to attend a few writing courses (never again), and one of the writers suggested that my stuff was like verbal diarrhea. He meant it as a compliment.