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The mound of sentient ooze pulses with a sloshing noise, as if it were gulping down foodstuff to fuel its bloat-bound brain.

“Leire, you need to stop having a meltdown every few minutes.”

I take a deep breath as I wipe away my tears with the pad of my thumb.

“What I need to do,” I start in a slow drawl, “is grab the spare umbrella and head home, and by home I mean mommy’s apartment in the hills. The trip back there is going to feel like a journey to another galaxy, but the hot tongue of my petite amie will purge my memories of slimy, eyeball-studded freaks. After having been so thoroughly humiliated by a gelatinous mass of putrid flesh, I need to be hugged and fucked by mommy to keep the dark thoughts at bay. You can return to your realm of rotting slime, and leave me the fuck alone.”

A gloopy chuckle slurps through the blob’s bulk.

“Oh no, we ain’t done yet.”

“Sure we are.”

“You want a repeat of this evening, more hours of wasted overtime at the office, filled instead with you and I arguing? Why not? After all, you don’t care if you get fired.”

My eyelids twitch.

“By all means, please keep pestering me until I slit my wrists.”

“I’m going to force you into a lucid state by any means necessary,” the blob assures me acidly, “and I swear that we will sort this shit out before you leave tonight, because I have dealt with you as much as I can handle.”

“Why don’t you come over here and shove your ‘any means necessary’ up my ass, you quivering wad of phlegm?”

“I’m not going to punish a masochist like you with a good time. Now, I can’t expect someone who has lived a lifetime as a pile of garbage to change overnight, but I will get you to hear me out and learn the true scope of our problem.”

I groan, then run my fingers through my hair. For a second I fear that my hand will come away sticky with black ooze.

“Fuck me with a spiked dildo,” I grumble. I crack my neck, I loosen my shoulders. “You want to share a part of your universe with me?” I extend both arms, palms up, toward the interdimensional intruder, and make beckoning motions by curling my fingers. “Alright, spit it out!”

The office light fixtures are casting their cold glow on the blob’s putrid sludge and his dozens of eyeballs, that stare blankly as they bob like corks. The drumming of raindrops against the windows, along with the low rumble of thunder, have given way to an oppresive silence interrupted only by sloshing and slurping noises emanating from the bulk.

“Earth to cum monster!” I shout.

Alberto harrumphs, and a glob of slime, airborne debris that resembles a greasy pebble, splats into a puddle.

“Are you truly willing to hear me out, or are you going to pull out a fork and stab yourself in the neck again?”

An electric echo crawls up my spine. I remember that drive to dig my carotid artery, and the agony that sewed my mouth shut. It makes me shudder. I rub whatever remains of the four-holed wound from when I attempted to kill a rotten bitch.

“Of course you witnessed that as well, you unmitigated fuck-weasel. Yes, I’ve had my share of stabbings and forkings and plenty of other shit I prefer to keep to myself. I committed atrocious acts when I had to. Regardless, I will listen, as long as you have something intriguing to tell! Then I’m gone. I intend to finish off what’s left of the evening sucking on mommy’s nipples like a starved infant.”

“Can you care about anything other than yourself and your buxom lover?” the blob asks, his voice tinged with irritation.

I huff.

“I’m telling you, dude, some of the stuff that went down in this sorry excuse for a planet is, in fact, rather enticing! Do you know about the Younger Dryas cataclysm?”

“What? The Younger-what?”

“Picture this scenario: we’re in the Late Pleistocene, a period when much of North America, from the Canadian arctic down to Missouri, was buried under three-kilometers-thick glaciers. Back then, woolly mammoths, dire wolves, sabre-toothed tigers and ground sloths inhabited the frigid wilderness. They didn’t bother to build cities or write stories or any of that shit: they enjoyed the great outdoors, as well as the pleasures of eating, drinking, swimming in freshwater ponds, rolling in a mound of fresh dung to warm up, and fucking each other senseless, for thousands of generations. That megafauna may have taken delight in some of the most liberal sex positions ever practiced by the animal kingdom. They also suffered, mourned, and remembered their friends and family. Imagine these beasts in the frozen wastes of Alaska and the Yukon territory, their skulls buried in so-called ‘muck’ deposits that nowadays you can excavate from tundra and glacial soil. In the skull fragments, scientists discovered impact-related microspherules, tiny beads formed in the heat of a cosmic impact.” I take a deep breath while my heart pounds against my ribcage. “What evil force snatched such magnificent creatures from life, from our realm, leaving behind nothing but the smear of their existence? The answer lies beyond our planet, in the vast reaches of Arachne’s web, that binds the universe together. An alien spacecraft approached Earth, carrying some interstellar creep, a demigod of destruction whose mission was to crash his ship into our planet as revenge. JK, just joking, as humans like to say. A large short-period comet must have fragmented within the inner solar system. Drawn by Earth’s gravitational pull, flaming chunks of rock from another world bombarded ours. The sky flashes. The ground trembles with the shockwaves of titanic impacts, enough energy released to blast your shitpile through a hundred walls. Bursts of rocks and ash plume over hundreds of kilometers. The ice sheets melt, turning the oceans into a bloodbath of brine and slurry. Massive firestorms rage across forests and savannas and grasslands, burning ten percent of the world’s biomass to soot, while a blanket of atmospheric dust blots out the sun. In the chaos that ensued, a lone entity escaped the wreckage of his spaceship: a deity with eyes like liquid flame, with tentacles for hair. The incarnation of despair, a malevolent force from beyond time and space.” I gulp down the knot in my throat. “The region where these fossils were found, known as Beringia, was part of the largest circumarctic landmass to remain unglaciated, a refuge for Plio-Pleistocene tundra-grassland plant species, and the now-extinct megafauna. So we can assume that those noble beasts went extinct both from a cosmic bombardment and from an alien tentacle god with an egotistical cunt’s idea of fun. A fascinating albeit chilling story, don’t you think, dear Blobbert? I’m an authority on the Late Pleistocene, as I visited it briefly.”

A guttural groan reverberates from deep within the putrid bulk of ooze.

“What the hell are you prattling on about?!”

“Did I strike a nerve? I shared my knowledge of the Younger Dryas cataclysm, born from a comet and an intergalactic god-monster, as a gift to you. Imagine all the contemporary species larger than a goat, then kill off sixty-fucking-five percent of them; that’s how many of the mighty Ice Age megafauna disappeared forever. And the global sea level rose by a hundred and twenty meters. Can you comprehend such catastrophe, how much misery it brought? Can I make you, a gooey puddle of sewage, listen to the screams of the victims as they suffocated in a sludge of melted glaciers? The Younger Dryas cataclysm happened, in the grand scheme of things, yesterday. You were spawned in the post-apocalypse! Your genes are scarred with the fear that the sky will fall on your head.”

“Are you kidding me? I don’t give a flying fuck about your pet rocks and your tentacle-haired cunt god!”

I narrow my eyes. I’m getting fed up with this monstrous ignoramus.

“In Arachne’s name, I swear you must have fished your brain out of a lake filled with cat poop.”

“Your morbid obsessions are completely irrelevant to what I’m struggling to convey to you.”

I rub the bridge of my nose and sigh. I picture my right hand clenching around the handle of the office door, about to pull myself out of this hellscape. The sooner the better.

I glower at the blob as I spread my arms wide.

“Then spit it out already, sludge-for-brains! Here I am, ready and willing. Tell your story or perish!”

• Previous part (99)

Author’s note: today’s songs are “The Same Old Rock” by Roy Harper, and “Waitin’ Around to Die” by The Be Good Tanyas.

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

Leire didn’t pull the stuff about the Ice Age (entirely) out of her ass. I recently came across this scientific paper. In addition, my protagonist attempted to kill a rotten bitch back in chapter 14, as the climax of the sequence titled “I’m Killing a Rotten Bitch.”

Do you want to hear this chilling chapter acted out by AI-generated voices? Check it out.

So, a hundred chapters of this shit, huh? I started the story back in October of 2021, attempting to pump out a novella after I abandoned my previous two ones. I’m not sure how it ballooned to such an extent. Anyway, I know that a few souls out there have followed this story from the beginning, probably out of morbid curiosity. Thank you. I won’t say that I couldn’t do this without you, because I was doing this alone until I started posting my crap on the internet a few years ago.

Still fifteen or so chapters to go.

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A bolt of lightning slashes the darkness, throwing the office into harsh relief. Alberto the blob, a viscous and putrid mural of shuddering goo, glistens wetly under the harsh light, and his myriad of eyeballs reflect my own dreadful image back at me.

“I wish I were riding your current high,” I say, “burning with self-righteousness, able to discharge your pent-up anger against someone else. I’d prefer, though, if you had chosen a target who did something worthy of your ire: an actual asshole.”

“You think that people can only get angry at what you do? Is that why you keep busy playing with yourself while ignoring your responsibilities, including your job and your basic needs? Your inaction can ruin lives.”

My stomach knots tighter.

“Don’t try to make me responsible for others,” I plead. “I can’t even take care of myself.”

The blob ripples like a sea of black slime and eyeballs.

“Unfortunately, the responsibility only falls on you, a weirdo who would rather be miserable than improve. You’re the one who can listen to what needs to be done, the sole person suited to stop a cosmic shitstorm. Isn’t it fitting, though? We need an aberration to beat another.”

I hunch over, and as I rub my eyelids, I seek a mental refuge from this deluge of insanity. I see her face, the glowing visage of Jacqueline, my all-encompassing muse, a pearl beyond price. Her ivory-white skin is framed by a raven-black cascade of lustrous hair. Her cobalt-blues are locked into my eyes without disgust. The rosy, wet cavity of her mouth tempts me like a fountain of potable water in a scorching day. Please come and save me from myself.

“Wh-why do I have to be the one?” I complain weakly. “Jacqueline also worked with you, for much longer, and she isn’t as eager to forget human beings as I am. She would try to understand you and help you cope. Hell, she even believes me when I open up about the otherworldly stalkers by whom I’m routinely harassed, although she’s never suffered the misfortune of gazing upon your abominable forms.”

“Sure, your girlfriend slash mommy would have done a bang-up job, if only for reminding me of the most carnal pleasures of my former world.” The blob snickers. “But nope, we are stuck with a self-defeating sack of shit, a pathetic wreck with more anxiety attacks than brain cells, who can barely accomplish the most basic of tasks, who’s never had the guts to start living, who can’t see farther than her own disgusting orifices. The perfect package for a universe on its last leg!”

I gulp down bitter acid, then take a lungful of stinging toxins.

“Again, why me?”

“Because your mind was open and ready for a trip through the cosmic craphole, Leire. What, you want me to make it simpler? You’re a walking heap of psychological garbage. In the old days, you’d have been locked up in an asylum. I had the inkling that you wouldn’t go crazier even when contacted by sentient abominations, but you still surprised me by taking the visits in stride, as if some people just happened to be accosted by teleporting horses.”

I grind my teeth.

“I’ve done nothing but rage against you fuckers.”

The blob’s legion of eyeballs catch the erratic flicker of lightning, shimmering like tiny stars caught in a sea of filth.

“Hey, cheer up, girlie! In these enlightened times, you can become the champion of interdimensional gods, which is what I’ve fancied myself to be since I escaped your realm of rot and decay.”

“If people actually worshipped you,” I grumble, “I would understand if they also persecuted anybody who depicted your image.”

The blob chokes on a chuckle, glugging noisily. My gaze wanders from my former coworker’s grotesque bulk to the black screen of my computer. Leire the Demented Seer, the Chosen Paladin of Interdimensional Gods. Sounds better than being a struggling office worker that has to curb her intrusive thoughts about shoving random penis-shaped objects into her orifices.

“Enough bullshit,” the blob barks out. “You’re going to wake up right now. You’re going to open your eyes and start taking life seriously. Time has been running out for everyone since you disregarded my warning back in your defunct car.”

I cross my arms over my chest.

“You creeps have done an atrocious job of convincing me that these supposed warnings were urgent. Perhaps you left your brains behind in some other dimension, where you should have stayed for all I care. Besides, I can’t shake the feeling that you’re lying about a cosmic threat, that you just want to fuck with me.”

The wall-wide mucus-and-eyeball-ridden monstrosity stirs like an organic tide.

“Look here, you clit-loving lunatic,” the blob snaps back in a wet gurgle. He coughs up a glob of tar onto the carpet. “An impossible message flashing across your Renault Laguna’s dashboard would have disturbed any other human being into lucidity.”

“Didn’t we discuss that already? No, we ended up arguing about my car’s supernatural powers. What did you write across the dashboard, then? ‘A horse with a dick for a head will fuck you before you die’? Such a warning might have sent me running to the psych ward.”

Gooey innards ripple and slosh in the gelatinous bulk.

“‘We’re fucked,’ damn you!”

“What was that?”

“The message I wrote on your dashboard, which you ignored as if it were junk mail, was ‘We’re fucked’!”

I grimace.

“That’s all the fuck you wrote?”

“How much clearer could I be?” he snarls. “It means that you’re fucked, that I’m fucked, that the universe is fucked!”

A knot expands in my throat, and I lower my gaze to the puddles of black goo seeping into the carpet. The slanted rain is drumming on the windows. Thunder crackles. The absurdity of it all bubbles up inside me, shoots up my esophagus, and bursts out into laughter that ricochets off the office walls. Mine is a despairing laughter tinged with madness, the sole human sound amidst the rainstorm and the blob’s otherworldly gurgles.

“Do you recall that message, then?” Alberto asks impatiently.

I raise my gaze to meet the wall-wide mass of putrid slime. His countless eyeballs are scrutinizing me like a cop eyeing a perp.

“Nope,” I say in a strained voice, “you may as well have made it up.”

The blob heaves as if I had punched his gut.

“Again with your self-imposed amnesia?!”

“Doesn’t matter. I get your point: we’re fucked.” I slide my palm down my face as the back of my eyeballs grows hotter. “That’s what you wretched snot-fondler sent as a message of utmost urgency? As eloquent as a dead rat’s turd. Of course we’re fucked, you oversized cum-sack! That much I understood since I crawled out of the womb broken, since my parents failed to behave towards each other like human beings, let alone raise a functional, healthy child. Billions of people born to struggle daily in this cesspool only to be rewarded with decrepitude and death. How many are loved along the way?” Tears well up, hot and stinging, but I press on. “I don’t need some interdimensional pus-clown to remind me of the achingly obvious fact that we’re all fucked. We never stood a fucking chance.”

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “Karma Police” by Radiohead, “Game of Pricks” by Guided by Voices, “The Plan” by Built to Spill, and “Miss Misery” by Elliott Smith.

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

Were you looking forward to the audiochapter for this entry? Well, I was. Check it out.

It took me ages to work through this chapter. I’ve been distracted programming, and my mood has been let’s say quite low. Anyway, GPT-4’s API has been broken for days, who knows why, so I’ll likely write more prose than code in the coming days.