| Obscure Parodyverse Moments #14: Whispers and Screams 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, Obscure Parodyverse Moments #11: Flesh and Blood Obscure Parodyverse Moments #12: I Am John’s Psychosis Obscure Parodyverse Moments #13: The Romance of Heresy  The hall was full of ghosts. They flickered round the monster, some reaching out with insubstantial hands to pluck at his matted fur, others lost in their own misery unaware of his passing. Some were photograph-clear, captured as they were at the moment of their deaths. Others were mere smudged white blurs, trailing fading streamers away into an unfocussed distance. The worst of all were the ones that looked like what they believed they truly were.The shaggy beast moved through the hall searching for the lost girl. The ghosts parted before him. He walked right through the few that didn’t. Amnesia had been beside him until moments before. Then Herringcarp had twisted, shifting and sighing like a tormented sleeper turning in his nightmare, or perhaps closing its jaws like a predator springing a trap. Then Amnesia was gone, taken again from her guardian monster; and the monster was alone. And so the monster searched amongst the ghosts, seeking his talisman, looking for his home. Some of the dead were familiar. He recognised one of the monks that he’d seen when the grey walls were a monastery. He saw one of the asylum inmates, still bound – eternally bound – in the grubby sleeveless straight-jackets and iron masks reserved for the criminally insane. And there beside the lunatic was a warder, his throat still glistening with new-spilt blood where the monster’s claws had torn. The ghosts howled and wept and gibbered. Some stared at nothing, lost in pasts that even the monster’s watery yellow eyes couldn’t see. The monster pressed forward though the ethereal mass, feeling the pressure of souls piled on souls. One of the white silhouettes shied away from the hairy beast. One of the spirits could see him. “Who are you?” the monster demanded, in a voice which killed, a voice which could command death. “I’m a doctor,” whispered the spectre. “You have to believe me. Everything has been changed. I was the psychiatrist, not the madman. The world made sense. You have to believe me.” “Who am I?” “You’re nothing. You’re another delusion in this place of falsehoods. You don’t really exist. Only I exist. You have to believe me. You have to.” The beast felt pity for one who appealed for the faith of an unreal monster. “Where is the girl?” “There is no girl. Or if there is she is long dead, of the company of ghosts. The girl is not real either. None of this is real. It can’t be. I’m a doctor… A doctor…” The monster left the sobbing wisp behind and pressed on down the hall, into the darker narrower passage beyond. Doctor Morningstar was no shade. The white-coated medic peeled off bloody gloves and dropped them in a metal bowl, then turned to his orderly and gestured for Bradley to wheel the patient away. “Tattoo this one as subject thirteen,” the doctor commanded. “I’ve implanted the largest amount of material yet in him.” “Serve him right, the noisy bugger,” judged the brutal warder. “Bit of brain-cutting’s what that one wanted to shut him up.” “This isn’t a punishment,” Morningstar chided. “I’ve given Winkelweald a wonderful opportunity. How many medical practitioners have wanted to understand madness better? How few have actually had the opportunity to taste it for themselves?” Bradley shrugged and tried to look intelligent. “Three?” he guessed. “I have folded into this man’s brain all the nightmares of a thousand and more years of distilled insanity. I have implanted within him brain-matter from the subject Ioldabaoth, imbued by my machines with the very essence of madness captured by the monks who laboured here long ago until they too were claimed by the dark. Dr Winkelweald will be my masterpiece. My breakthrough.” “I’ll wheel him back to his cell then, shall I?” asked Bradley. “Soon I shall be ready for the final phase,” the handsome asylum head went on, ignoring the banal ignorance of his assistance. “Bradley, you will find me one of the female patients, one of those with child. The first trimester, for preference. When Winkelweald is ready I shall section his brain and we shall implant all that he has become, all that Ioldabaoth was, into that foetus. A world of the perspectives of madness into the unformed mind of an unborn.” “Get one of the girls with child. Gotcha.” Morningstar seemed to have forgotten that anyone else was there. He stared around the shadowed operating theatre but seemed to be seeing far beyond. “I shall master you at last,” he promised Herringcarp. “I shall reign here, and then I shall reign everywhere.” AMnesia's screams seemed to fill the monster's head even though she wasn't there. They dragged him on, ever more urgently, ever more depserately. He pressed through the halls of ghosts until another phantasm of greater substance blocked the his way. “Who are you?” demanded the monster. That killing voice seemed sovereign over those already dead. “I am no-one,” replied the grim shade. His face was a corpse-skull, his body a bundle of gory emaciated limbs and naked ribcage. “I never was. I was distilled from fear and pain and given flesh for a while, and then men called me the Fearwalker. I rose to greatness for a moment, as a Destroyer of Tales. Then I fell to oblivion.” The monster considered this. He could feel the hooks of terror that the phantasm tried to sink into his mind, but his burning needs allowed him to shrug them away. This was only a ghost, and nothing it could do was more important than finding the lost girl. “Who am I?” the monster asked. “You are the last of your breed, shaped by sorcery as an abomination, unlike any of your race, forever alone and damned,” replied Fearwalker, perhaps with a hint of relish at the torments of another sundered soul. The monster sensed the truth in the dead thing’s words, and they hurt. But still he pressed on. “Where is the girl?” Fearwalker paused. The creature of torment and nightmare sniffed the air as if seeking a scent. “Lost,” he replied at last. “You must go deeper if you would find the truth. There are worse things than me here. That is where your answers lie.” The monster took his leave and pressed deeper into the shadows. Now the darkness was like a living thing, cold and hungry. All the monster’s instincts warned him to flee, except for that one basic need to find Amnesia and bring her safe from the night. A door opened before him, and for a moment he thought he’d found her. There she was, dressed in tight jeans and a t-shirt, cuffed to a table. The woman standing over her in the purple jumpsuit and the walking dead man beside her were familiar too, although the monster could not remember how he knew them. But some part of him knew that they weren’t there. They were just echoes. He strained to try and hear what the echoes might be saying. The whispers were quieter even than his own. He could only catch fragments, snatched phrases remembered from another time. “…tried to stop my plans, and that I cannot allow…” “…comes looking for me you’ll wish you’d never pulled on a stupid-looking mask…” “…think I let you break in here and find this place by accident?” “…need some of your essence to make the masquerade complete…” The scene blurred into violence, then faded to shadows. The monster dived forward, growling, then crashed into the floor where the taunting dead man had been. The beast’s leap had been instinctive. A door opened where none had been before. A sickly candlelight played from the chamber within. The remaining ghosts seemed to shy away. The fur on the monster’s hackles rose as he approached the doorway. There was something inside, something dangerous. Something deadly. “Amnesia,” the monster said, to give him courage, and lurched in. “What do you think of it?” asked the Mayor. The medical man looked around the derelict shell, admiring the possibilities. “It’s wonderful,” he admitted. “The sea aspect, the secluded location offering security and quiet, the structure of the old foundation. I love it.” “Good.” The Mayor turned to his aide. “Make a note. Arrange for the budget committee to purchase this site. Quietly. We don’t want our friends in Gothametropolis York knowing that we plan a house of lunatics in their back yard.” The architect with them examined the rotting shell that would soon be rebuilt and transformed into a home for the criminally insane. Already his eye was picking out detail from the ancient ruins, suggesting new form and shape for the neo-gothic masterpiece that lurked in his mind. “What was this place?” he asked. “Who built it?” “The records are long lost,” the Mayor replied. “But it was built by somebody who understood power.” “These old carvings,” the medical man observed. “Is this a caduceus? Or an infinity symbol? And this… a green man? Some shaggy beast?” “The whole place looks ecclesiastical,” the architect ventured. “Some old priory or presbytery perhaps. The early Dutch settlers?” “I believe the layout is more on the European mediaeval model,” the clerk reported. “The floor plan is identical to one recorded on the east coast of Britain before it was washed into the sea a couple of centuries ago.” “Well, it’ll do,” said Dr Waltz, looking around enthusiastically at the site for the future Herringcarp Asylum. “It’ll do just fine.” “I’ll get to work on the designs at once,” agreed Leyland Reed, architect of Parodiopolis, about to begin work on his last and greatest edifice, the one in which he would scream out his last days in madness and despair. “And I’ll take care of the legal matters and sensitive issues,” agreed Mr Lucien the clerk. He looked exactly like Dr Morningstar and the Abbot of Herringcarp. “This is an historic moment, Mayor Parody. Here we shape the future. Here we shape the world.” The monster was frightened to go into the room, but the compulsion to find Amnesia was too strong. He ducked through the doorway and found another spirit awaiting him. The old man sat on an ebony throne and he looked as ancient as the walls behind him. Taloned hands gripped the sides of the worn stone chair. Cold glowing eyes looked up at the monster as he entered the chamber. “So you have got this far.” said the ancient. “Good evening.” “Who are you?” demanded the monster. “A ghost,” replied the old man. “But not a ghost of the past.” He cradled his fingers together and regarded his visitor. “An answer for an answer. Have you seen me before?” The monster regarded the old man’s parchment-yellow face more closely. “Yes,” he whispered. “In the asylum, and again in the abbey. But then you were younger.” “Very good. But it wasn’t me you saw. Not yet.” The monster didn’t have time for riddles, not with greater questions burning in his fraying mind. “Who am I?” “You are a troll by birth, a creature relegated to the realms of myth by a tedious mundane world.” “I am a troll?” “The name you were given by those who captured you was Wangmundo. I do not know if that is your true name or not. It matters little to me.” “I am… Wangmundo?” “I you wish it. An answer for an answer. Do you know that you have been cursed, that your voice carries death for all who hear it? Do you care?” “Should a monster care?” The old man shook a finger. “That’s not an answer, that is an evasion.” “I care,” Wangmundo replied. “And should a monster care?” “That’s another question. But it’s my turn now. Where is the girl?” demanded the troll. “She’s close by. As near as a heartbeat but as impossible to return to as a fatal decision. This place is full of branches, Wangmundo. The wrong turn takes you down a path that cannot be reversed.” “How do I find her?” “An answer for an answer,” the old man replied. “Tell me first why you are so compelled to seek her out.” The monster had no easy reply. He searched his feelings, tried to make sense of the tattered patchwork of instinct and intellect that he was holding together with desperate effort. “I need her,” he said at last. “You need her because of what you are, and because of what you have become,” the ancient explained. “Your race has strong territorial instincts. You claim a home – a cave, a stone, a bridge – and you bond with it. If it is lost to you, a part of you dies.” It seemed true. The words clicked home like a missing jigsaw shape. The beast did not want to betray how much he needed this knowledge. “So?” he growled. The ancient shrugged. “You were hunted. Your talisman, the magical item which defined your home, was stolen from you. Bereft of it you declined, your mind dwindling, your strength ebbing, homeless and hopeless.” The monster thought of the mad, lost wisps of spirits that crowded the halls outside. Was he so different from them? “That does not answer my question,” he insisted. “Where is the girl?” “Oh, we’ll get to her,” the old man promised. “In time we shall get to everything.” It sounded almost like a threat. “When first you met, in the world beyond these walls, the girl found you at your lowest point. You were dying, mentally and physically. And she cared for you.” The monster remembered cool soft hands mending his torn flesh, gentle words soothing his tormented rage. “You had lost your talisman, that which defined your home. In your desperation you made her your talisman instead. Where she is, that is your home.” Something clicked in the monster’s mind. This was truth. “Without her I am nothing,” he realised. “My thoughts vanish, my control is gone. I am soulless, a beast. I wither and die.” “It’s why you can always find her,” the ancient explained. “It’s why you followed her even here. Those who condemned her to this place and those who seek to harm her here did not expect that.” “Then where… where is she?” The old man told him. The monster howled and rose to his full height, his watery yellow eyes blazing with fury. “There’s a way to get to her in time,” the ancient noted at last, when the beast was suitably wild. “A doorway, of sorts. It is hidden inside this structure. Find it and it will take you to the girl. The doorway resembles a mirror.” “How do I find it?” “Your instinct will drive you. Some deep sense drags you to your talisman. Let that sense guide you to the Portal, and thence to your home. Find the mirror. That is all you must do.” The monster, Wangmundo, closed his fists so tightly that his claws cut into his palms. He seized the rage coursing through him and channelled it to his voice. “Find the portal!” he commanded the dead. “Find the way to the girl!” The ancient man in the ebony chair watched the creature lope away, a burning heart amidst the debris of lost souls. That was just what he needed. The monster served his purposes. “Soon I will be free,” he promised the world in cold Latverian tones. “The troll will lead me to what I need. Soon I will be whole. Soon I will be one. Soon I will be unstoppable. And then… then we shall see.” Continued in Dance of the Dead Men 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. |
