In my troubled dream I stumbled naked down a dark tunnel, stink and sewage to my waist, slime gushing between my toes. A man stood amongst the shit and filth. In his hand he held a pigeon, sickly and missing feathers, squirming to break free of his grasp. The man drowned it in the filth. I walked past him.
A man held a young woman who screamed and panicked, kicked and writhed. He tore at her clothes and beat her. Knocked her against the wall. She blubbered in panicked terror. He slammed her and cut her and blood and pink tissue fell from her. And the man beat her, but instead of hands there were knives and they cut and cut and still she screamed and screamed, even though there wasn't enough of her left she screamed.
Then the man's head was a bull's head and he dropped the ribbons of gore and turned to me.
“I also serve your master”
The voice was mine but I wasn't sure I had spoken. The man-bull paused, bowed, and turned to walk down the tunnel. I followed for a ways and then the bull-man left me. I was alone. I missed him. My heart sank in the way of dreams; my only friend had left me. Me, a speck drifting through the cosmos, alone now. And my master used me for sex and my trader used me for money and the world used me as a piece of art, but deep in my soul, a soul I don't believe in, it was dark, bits of dust suspended briefly in sunlight, floating, isolated, then settling back into the dark.
The old motherfucker, my master, was in the sludge before me. He laid me on a chair, knees on the seat and my stomach crushed by the back. Old, decaying and impotent, he penetrated me with rods of wood and glass. Cut thin shallow lines into my back. Square lines, boxes to hold my soul, which I didn't believe in. I was not bound. I clutched the chair and grit my teeth against the pain. A slow trickle of blood wet my hair and dripped from my down turned nose.
Obedience is life. What shit. The old motherfucker was dead and I was glad. Yet I clung there, stupidly, a mad compulsion. Acid filled my veins when I thought of murdering him, a deep upset, a frantic madness deep in my bones. Quelled only by clinging to the chair, letting the motherfucker rape and cut me. The motherfucker is dead. The motherfucker is dead. I wish only I had murdered him. He was gone and the chair fell and toppled me into the muck. I came up drenched in sewage. I vomited over and over, until my stomach was empty, and still I retched.
Next I found the demon. He was clothed in the raw hides of people and sat on a mound of guts and entrails. The sewage poured onto him from the dark above him.
“Slut” is hissed at me, “I am your master.” My deep insides twisted for I knew this as a dream then, but also knew the demon was real.
The dream was gone. I lay horizontal though I lay in nothing. A dozen people, eyes, glowing with fire, forced their hands into my mouth, a dozen hands, my jaw ached, my lips tore. “I am your master now. You will find yourself a slave and you must fain obedience. And at night you must sneak from his house, and on the streets you must murder. For I love terror, and terror is good. And you must carve into their flesh my sign, and you must spread their viscera from their bodies, and make signs of my children in blood. And you must murder men and you must murder women and you must murder children.”
As he spoke he made each of the four signs, all arbitrary nonsense. And then I woke.
I was naked still, bound kneeling so that I could breathe but could not move. Always naked. I suppose the idiots thought it demeaned me or made me vulnerable. Two vague abstractions for vague and shallow minds. I who have no self to expose, who's body belongs not to me but to my master. Now that vile obscenity.
“What a blessing to you man, to have your daughter chosen by the god thing.” The accent was thick and rustic. I couldn't see the speaker as my head was bound.
“Yes neighbor, the baby god thing smiles on me with great streams of light.” I heard coins clink. Before me I saw a wall of wooden planks.
“Thank ye sir” said the second voice. The door creaked and a new set of footsteps stomped close to me. The wood grain in the panels before me was rough. A cheap house.
“My, mighty fine thing ye got here William,” said a new voice, and I felt a greasy hand grope by boob. Fucking provincials. “Shame about yer daughter, but baby god thing gots her in the sky now with naked signin' angels and all.” More coins clinked and jingled.
There were many more interactions like that, I paid little attention. Later we were alone. The second voice, my fake master I supposed, spoke.
“God hates us motherfuckers. Fucking baby god fucking shit.”
He stepped before me and was holding a very short knife. He touched it lightly to the ropes that bound me and they split before it. A very sharp knife.
“Stand slut.”
I didn't have a reason not to, I supposed. I wondered vaguely what I was supposed to be feeling. My mind had slowed. How should I react to this change in circumstance?
“Turn slut.”
I did so. A demon's slave. A slave of evil. Whatever. Did I believe in evil? I wasn't sure but didn't think so. A filth demon? Obscenely filthy. Did I care? My gorge rose as I thought of it and wasn't sure. Did I care? There were upholstered chairs and a large table, but no decorations. My faux master was studying me. He was short and gaunt, a ridiculous waxed mustache and pointed goatee.
“All fucking wrong, you. Scrawny hips. Tiny little tits. A man want's something to see, his vision along the smooth and holy curve, the baby god has said it, the holy ratio!”
What bullshit. It was chilly standing there. I hoped he would get me clothes. But, should I care if I was chilly? Certainly it meant by body reacted in certain way, my flesh tightened into bumps, I shivered, I grew numb. But should I mind being numb, or shivering? One of my masters had been an old old man. I had wiped his ass. How different was that than this filth demon? Shit all over me. Shit all over me. Obedience is water, obedience is food. In the school we were always naked. A hundred little naked girls, learning to please a school master.
My faux master entered the room leading a beautiful naked woman. I hadn't noticed him leaving. She was wonderfully proportioned, full but not gigantic breasts, lush hips, skinny waist and tapered thighs. A full head of cascading blonde hair. But her eyes. But her eyes. Black, black holes, like the eyeballs were gone and her brain was just a void. Black pits. La da la da.
She spoke: “There was a cold space and it was made of black and yarn and I crawled inside and I crawled inside and the only thing there was black and cold black cold.” She shivered and fell silent.
“I am not a cruel man” said my faux master. “I do not enjoy watching pain.” He lifted a syringe from the table and came over to me.
“Arm” he said.
“Yes I have one.” He hit me. Not hard but quick.
“Hold it out slut,” and I did. He tied some string about my bicep and, veins popping out of the inside of my elbow, he injected me.
I fell away from the world and was floating in a warm black thing. Only not separated, for the world came back, but stood at a far distance from me. I felt like I was grasping reality through thick gloves, feeling it through rubber, seeing a vague gray relief.
I was a black bug and I was crawling through a long dark hole or tunnel. It cut straight but I wasn't sure through what. I was lost lost. Somewhere in a strange dream the girl with pits for eyes was dying. The man cut her throat open with his knife and she was bleeding and convulsing on the floor. The horror of it reached me dully, I felt disgust writhe inside me as a vague and distant thing. The red of her blood drowned the light and I realized he had thrust me down into her blood, and I was caught in it writhing; it was sticky, red sticky and I drank and drank, and he was butchering the dying woman. He cut off her breasts, her buttocks and thighs. He cut the cheeks from her face and her nose. Inside her brain was shriveled and dried up. And my grip on the world slipped and I was falling and then floating. An awesome black around me. An awesome black through me.
And then he stepped to me and cut me. There was pain but it was far away. I was in a great sea, and off in the horizon a billion people churned like meat into a great sea of gore. Always the ocean, my default metaphor, thought some distant part of me. That core of bitter faithlessness, what bullshit my ungoverned mind believes. Obedience obedience obedience obedience obedience. Over and over. The idle turning of the world. Obedience obedience.
He cut open my breasts and stuffed the dying woman's inside. He cut open my hips and put the dying woman's inside. Then he cracked open my ribs and laid into me her heart. And then he placed smooth stones among my organs. And then he filled me with the dying woman's veins, and filled those veins with sand, and set her dying heart beating in my chest.
And I swam in the great black, and a thousand thousand years passed me by, and mountains ground away and rivers cut deep chasms in the stone beneath me and still the dying heart beat the sand about my dying body, and still I watched the rock die.
I woke in pain. A long steel rail through my body. Pain everywhere. My mind faltered under it. A faint chant of obedience pulsed from my subconscious, my mind a dull and imprecise thing. The man, my faux master, crouched over me, spattered with blood and organs.
“You are beautiful now, my little slut. Sleep now. Tomorrow we travel.” His face flickered between the faces of several men. He injected me again with his syringe, and I fell back into sleep.