| Obscure Parodyverse Moments #11: Flesh and Blood Content warning: If you’ve read the other episodes of this story you’ll know I’m serious when I say that this one includes disturbing material; I mean more than the others. Read on at your own risk. This story continues from Obscure Parodyverse Moments #7: Amnesia, Obscure Parodyverse Moments #8: Monsters on the Loose, Obscure Parodyverse Moments #9: The Black Chapel, Obscure Parodyverse Moments #10: The Cabinet of Dr Morningstar,  “I don’t eat all their flesh,” the madman told Amnesia. “Only their brains. And any choicer other parts if I’m hungry.”Amnesia backed away from the naked blood-smeared lunatic that had been imprisoned by the monks of Herringcarp Abbey for the better part of three hundred years. Exorcism and beatings and torture hadn’t driven the insanity from him. They’d only stored up rage and hate in His mind until the moment when somebody got careless and he could break free. Now those same monks were dead and carved, a madman’s larder. “Keep away from me,” Amnesia warned. She didn’t like the way the gory fugitive was eyeing her exposed flesh. Lust or gluttony was equally bad. “I mean it. Stay back.” “What are you?” he demanded. “You’re not from here. But I’ve seen you before.” Amnesia’s tentative attempt to make some sense of the events she was enduring collapsed like a house of cards. “So I’m not in the past – or some shadowy version of the past. I didn’t meet some future version of you in an 1800s madhouse. You remember me.” Did he remember the kiss? She’d been cold and vulnerable and the dangerous lunatic had been the kindest man there. Did he remember the kiss and want more? She backed off until she was pressed into the corner of the abandoned and empty scriptorium. There was nowhere left to run. “I’ve seen you amongst the ghosts,” the madman said, slowly moving forward. There was blood under his broken fingernails and little shreds of meat. “Ioldabaoth,” she said. Names were important here. Amnesia didn’t remember hers. Neither did the shaggy wounded monster that had been beside her until moments before. But the madman chained in the lightless cell had told her who he was. The madman before her paused. “Ioldabaoth,” he repeated, considering the word like a savoury entrée. “Ioldabaoth. I like it.” “It’s your name,” Amnesia told him. “At least… if you’re the same person I saw before. But then you were…” Then he’d told her that he’d done terrible things. “Ioldabaoth. Yes, that’s who I’ll be.” The madman seemed pleased by his new present. He smiled and came closer to the girl. “You have to die,” he told her in the same mildly happy tone. “I really don’t,” Amnesia denied. “Look, you were tortured by those monks. I saw that. Well I saw a ghost of it, or an hallucination or something. They kept hurting you and hurting you. But I never did. I can see why you might… be angry at the monks, at that Father Abbot who set them on you. But I’ve never hurt you.” Ioldabaoth looked at the raw red flesh around his wrists. “You never did,” he admitted, “but you have to die.” “Why?” Amnesia pleaded. “Why can’t you just let me go?” The madman was right in front of her now. She was literally cornered. She shuddered as he ran his knuckle over the curve of her cheek. “I know you die,” Ioldabaoth explained. “I’ve seen your ghost. You haunt this place. And to do that you have to die.” Amnesia huddled in another corner. This one was in the dungeons beneath the abbey, where the little cubicles had once held the madmen the clergy had tried to cleanse of their madness through pain and suffering. The rusted chains still hung from pulleys on the archways. Now it was the monks who hung from them, like butchers’ carcasses. All were dead. Most were cut apart, the tops of their skulls removed. “Why did you do this to them?” she asked in a hoarse whisper. The screaming had made her throat raw. Ioldabaoth stepped over the quartered corpse of one of the brothers. “If you want to understand,” he grinned at her, “then you’ll have to dine with me.” Amnesia’s stomach churned. “You don’t mean… eat them?” The lunatic peeled a gobbet of meat from the exposed ribcage of a fat friar. “That’s just what I mean. But not the flesh of their bodies. That doesn’t matter. You need to eat their brains.” “W-why?” Ioldabaoth pointed to the shattered containers round the room. Two dozen stone jars were broken across the floor. The dark fluids they’d contained had stained the cobbles. “Some things can only be understood from the other side of pain,” he answered. “And some only from the other side of madness. Father Abbot knew that. That’s why he kept torturing me. But I never told him how to use the Black Chapel.” Amnesia remembered the forbidding little church where the monster had laid her on the altar. “What is the Black Chapel?” she asked. Anything to divert the madman from feeding her. Ioldabaoth chewed thoughtfully on the strip of meat he’d just acquired. “I don’t quite know. Not yet. But I shall. I know more than Father Abbot though, for all his tortures.” Nothing made sense. “Please just let me go,” Amnesia begged. “I can’t follow all of this. It’s too much.” “That’s because you haven’t devoured the monks’ brains, haven’t swallowed their thoughts. You haven’t broken open the containers where they pushed the madness they dragged from those they treated. You haven’t let the madness flow into you, folded in over and over again, not one life but a hundred, a thousand, each mind screaming with new perceptions beyond the world of sanity.” He went over to one of the hanging corpses and began to examine the bloody pulp that was formerly its skull. Amnesia realised he was searching for brain matter. “Are you saying… the monks tried to take the madness from people and put it into jars?” “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Ioldabaoth replied. “As if the madness could be transferred into their stone vessels without some of it leaking into them. That’s why I had to devour their brains as well as break the vessels to get my thoughts back. I still haven’t found all the jars they hid around the abbey. I don’t know yet how I’m going to recover the parts that seeped into the very walls of this place. I think it was built to absorb them, long before the holy men ever came here.” That almost made sense to Amnesia. She shuddered as she realised she was being inexorably drawn into her captor’s delusions. “You ate the monks to get your madness back?” “Not just mine,” the lunatic grinned. “So much more.” He scrambled over to Amnesia’s corner, cupping something sloppy and red in his hand. “Do you know what defines reality?” Amnesia was distracted by the mess in Ioldabaoth’s palm. “What? Reality?” “Perception defines reality. We see the world because our mind takes images from our eyes, pressure on our ears, sensations from our skin, and builds a story. We live in that story. We share the story with the other players, in a consensus world we agree to experience together.” Amnesia forced herself to think. The man looming over her was a cannibal murderer, but there was a vein of truth somewhere in his actions, a motive that didn’t seem mad despite the trappings. “I suppose we do create our own versions of the world,” she conceded. “Perception and consensus, that’s all the world around us is. If we change that perception, we change the world. If we deny that consensus, we deny the chains of what others call reality.” Amnesia shook her head. “There has to be more than that. Otherwise we’re all just… floating on a façade, like spectators in an art gallery looking at the pictures.” “If we change perception, even in the tiniest detail, we can change the world. One little alteration to history and everything changes. But master the trick of denying the consensus and you can walk between possibilities and see them all like the pages of a book, choose between them like a reader selecting chapters.” “Is that what you want to do?” Amnesia understood at last. “And you think all the perspectives of all the madmen who ever got pinned in this terrible place can come into your mind and give you that vision? Oh, Ioldabaoth, you truly are mad!” “That’s why I fit in here,” her captor said. “If you want to survive, you have to fit in too. Madness or death, they’re the only choices. You’ll die badly, become a ghost wandering these halls forever. Or you’ll escape by transcending this reality and changing it. But which?” “Are you going to kill me?” Amnesia trembled. “That depends,” Ioldabaoth told her, holding up the cranial matter in his palm, “on if you eat.” It was life or death. It was survival. Amnesia parted her lips and pressed the tip of her tongue out like a coquette. Her head dipped down to the human brain-stuff in Ioldabaoth’s hands. If I taste this, she told herself, I will be changed forever. But if she didn’t she’d be dead. Her tongue touched the soft pink meat. It was like raw pork. She tasted blood. Memory flashed through her. She was being kissed. She was making love. It was urgent and special, although there was a mad compulsion behind it that she didn’t understand. It wasn’t her first time, but it was the only one that mattered. Only the names were missing. “Aahh!” she gasped, shuddering away from the brain-stuff. “That… It can’t work! It’s just the trauma at what I’m doing, punching through my amnesia. It’s…” “Again,” insisted Ioldabaoth. “If you want to live.” He raised his fingers and smeared Amnesia’s lips. Another memory. Amnesia felt her belly. She was great with child. Her lover’s child. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. It would destroy everything. The child would be birthed in secret, adopted, hidden forever. It was for the best. She was betraying the man she loved, for love’s sake. Even as she remembered she knew it was wrong. She knew it would end badly. “You’re starting to see,” Ioldabaoth told her. Was he seducing her with memories? “More. This time you have to chew.” Amnesia shuddered. He held her close in his arms and fed her the horrible meat. Hot tears welled on her cheeks as she did as he said. A blur of confused images made her dizzy. She tried to push them away but they pinned her down helplessly. She tried to scream but they wouldn’t let her. There were men, lots of men, and they had paid for her and she was their plaything and they had no mercy. Her body shuddered with drug-need, her mind screamed as it was lost. Was this what happened to me? Amnesia wondered. Was this when I went insane? Was this why I shut down my memory, to blank out this ordeal? The memories kept coming, man after man, horror after horror, until the torments and confusions of the cannibal dungeon began to seem like blessed release. Amnesia spat out the flesh from her mouth and dry-vomited. “I was… I saw…” “You’re getting to the heart of it,” Ioldabaoth told her. “That’s important. Unless you understand what brought you to this cliff you won’t have the courage to jump off it.” “It’s terrible!” Amnesia wept. “Everything is so cruel. I… Someone loved me once, but I betrayed him. But did I deserve to be punished so very much? Maybe I did. Maybe this is hell and I earned my place.” “It’s not hell yet,” Ioldabaoth told her. He held up the brain in his hand. He’d cleaned it back so the sloppy cerebral matter was exposed. “If you want to escape, you have to take the final step. Eat this. Swallow it down. Let it become a part of you.” There was more to remember. Amnesia knew that. There was still a hole, and what she didn’t know would damn her. She reached for the proffered offering. Then she stopped. “Why do you want me to do this?” she demanded of her captor. “Why are you degrading me to be like you?” Ioldabaoth looked surprised that she had to ask. He leaned forward and licked the blood from her lips. “So we can be together,” he told her. Amnesia rebelled. By instinct her hand came up to hammer the madman on the jaw, snapping his neck back for a punch to the throat. She hurt her toes as she kicked him in the ribs but he was more winded than she as she scrambled over him towards the exit. He reached a hand out and locked it on her ankle. She tumbled and he clawed atop her. She squirmed round and bit his wrist. She could taste his blood now atop the sour flavour of monk brains. She scrabbled away and raced for the steps back to the upper rooms. “Wait!” Ioldabaoth called, scrambled up to chase her. “You’re not saved yet!” “Get away from me!” Amnesia screamed, fleeing. Instinct led her back to the Black Chapel. Perhaps her monster would be looking for her there? The doorway was blocked. A pale translucent shape filled the arch, a ragged weeping corpse-eyed woman in tattered rags. Amnesia recognised herself. She was the ghost. Ioldabaoth raced up the steps behind her. Amnesia screwed up her courage and plunged straight through the phantom into the Black Chapel. There was a chill like she’d never experienced, numbing her limbs. A scream filled her ears until there was nothing else. Blackness overwhelmed her vision. Perception makes reality. Deny that and everything changes. By the time the madman reached the Black Chapel the woman was gone. There was a door and Amnesia staggered through it. There was a room lit by an oil lamp and a scholar at a desk. Amnesia tumbled inside and slammed the portal closed behind her. Whatever was in here was better than the madness that pursued her. The Marquis looked up from his writing and frowned. “I didn’t send for a whore,” he said. Next: I Am John’s Psychosis Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2007 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2007 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
