A man lying on the bunk below me here in the poorhouse, in a pool of drool and sweat. I smell rotten cinnamon and citrus. Why am I here? Why?
The man below me constantly wheezes and gargles. Slimy coughs and burps. He moans in pain and desperation for air. I hear spit and foam being blown out and sucked back into the toothless hole in his face. I hear saliva bubbles and snot strands lashing out from his nose. I hear him twist and turn. I hear him getting out of his bed. He goes to the bathroom.
He looks like a corpse that
crawled out of a mass grave on the edge of some ancient battlefield. He contorts over the toilet bowl.
Spits.
Burps.
Loudly.
He vomits.
Spasmodically.
As he exits the bathroom he freezes in the doorframe. Staring at nothing. Then, suddenly, he spins around in slow-motion and heads for the toilet bowl again. Fumbles with his pants. Pulls them down. He sits down, and squirts a stream of vile liquid and clumps of shit into the pool beneath him. A loud obnoxious fart accompanies this process of birth.
He wipes himself, gets up, and just stands there like a disgruntled leper. His manhood is the only thing that looks healthy on a skeletal frame covered with tightly stretched bloody parchment. He pulls his pants back up, flushes the toilet, and stares into the cracked mirror above the basin.
Then he turns around and exits the bathroom. Walks across the weathered wooden floor. He weighs the same as a large vulture and I don’t expect the floor planks to creak, but they do.
Loudly.
He wheezes.
Loudly.
And walks towards me.
Relentless disproportionate steps, as if his legs are broken and buckling beneath him. His head is sucked into his shoulders. Scrawny arms hang from his shoulders like broken branches from an electrocuted tree in a graveyard.
He doesn’t swing his arms.
Moves towards me.
Closer still.
Right up to me, where I am lying on the bunk above his. He stops right there. His face is mere inches from mine.
He looks at me.
No.
He does not look at me.
He stares at me with cloudy and dead orbs. They reflect the lures of emptiness and the pleasures of zero. Snot swings from both his nostrils like fibrillating fleshy stalactites. Thick and clear saliva dangles from his lips and chin.
He opens his mouth as if to say something. Instead of words exiting his mouth, a black tongue protrudes. A long, thick, and phallic abomination that seems to have a life of its own. This tongue, this shiny black tentacle is covered with puss-oozing suckers. The whole thing shoots out towards me.
Fast.
Very fast.
It lashes out with demonic will and wraps itself around my neck with brazen certainty. There is a loud burp. A cough. A forced word perhaps.
“KHOOTHOOLHOO!”
The smell.
The stench.
The putrid odor coming from that gaping black hell in his face hits me like a tempest, and hurls my soul against the steep cliffs of insanity somewhere between worlds. The sound of this tempest, the wind it generates, sounds like a thousand out-of-tune violins.
Then the screaming starts.
And it never ends.
It never ends.
*Written on 2011/04/29 at 3 AM in a house in Observatory. Inspired by and dedicated to Henry... who died a week or two later. Rest in peace brother.
By Barend Buitekamer