Squid Ink Incorporated

Xmas is obviously good for me, this is the second flash I have thrashed out in one day, both on a xmassy theme. This is my entry to @chuckwendig’s flash fiction challenge, ‘Christmas in A Strange Place’.

*

    I open my mouth to allow a silverfish to slowly swim inside, little morsels such as this have become my only sustenance, for the weight of the rubbish had trapped my limbs some time ago. After twelve months here I have begun to merge with my environment, the damp newspapers, the rotting food and the everlasting crisp wrappers.

This is what I wanted, life had become to cruel for me to bear, and so, one year ago today, while the rest of the country celebrated with their family or loved ones, I walked into the municipal waste facility and allowed myself to sink into the landfill.

Now, here I lay, every day I sink a little further, I am human waste, used up, thrown away and left to decay.

It’s Christmas Day, I know this must be so as there are no trucks today, no sounds of rubbish crashing onto the ground, no clanking of machinery or shouting voices, just me and the gulls. This is what I wished for, to just give up, to take root in the rubbish that will one day become soil, regenerating the Earth.

A gust of wind, the temperature drops and something disturbs the gulls, they caw and flap their wings, wheeling up into the cold grey sky. I see a figure walking towards me, a woman, the way she holds herself reminds me of the way I had walked here a year ago. Body distorted, back bent, head down, as if the sights and sounds of the season, the bright coloured lights, Slade on the radio, was weighing down upon her shoulders.

She walks over to me, looking down at my head, now just peeking out as if I were treading water in a sea of decomposition.

‘Hello’ I say.

‘Hello’ she replies nervously, ‘Is it everything I hope it will be?’

‘So much more, for the first time in my life I feel like I belong somewhere. The gulls don’t judge me, I want for nothing and my body is weightless; I feel at peace’.

She takes off her shoes and works her feet into the rubbish. Breaking the surface layer she begins to slowly sink, first her ankles disappear, then her calves, her thighs, her hips.

She looks at me and smiles, ‘it’s nice to meet someone who understands’ she says.

I smile back; smile for the first time in… years.

Cold, white drops of snow begin to fall upon my face.

‘Merry Christmas’ I say to her softly.

‘Merry Christmas’  she replies, as her lips draw level with mine.

The potholes in the road throw us about the truck bed, the metal cage around us creaks.

Reaching the tall buildings on the outskirts of the city, Tommy kills the headlights and begins to skillfully weave his way through the abandoned cars.

As we near the hospital I tug the generator cord and it judders into life, I power up the projector and the VHS as Tommy pulls up to the hospital forecourt. Darren and ‘Shell climb up through the access hatch in the top of the cage. I bang on the back of the truck cab.

Now we wait.

This was our fourth run, at first it had seemed like suicide, but we seemed to be hitting our stride now. I try to think of it like corralling cattle, this stops me shaking enough to be able to function.

The sound begins, at first low groans, they multiply and multiply until it becomes a rush of noise, the roar of the crowd about to break over us like a giant wave.

I pick shapes out from the light of the projector, limbs flailing wildly, a few at first, then a deformed mass of twisted figures. As they approach I cover the light of the projector with my hand, reducing the light to a blue square on my palm. Above me Darren and ‘Shell ready themselves, dropping onto the cage top like sprinters on a starting line.

We wait for a hoard to mass around us, the weight of their bodies rock the truck, their hands clawing at the cage, behind each twisted  form, another, then another. We wait until we dare no longer, I hit play and pull my hand away, the projector light hitting a concrete wall.

The wall bursts into life, a huge tolling bell swinging back and forth, the trucks PA booming out across the packed forecourt. Giant words appear, ‘Frank Capra’s It’s a wonderful Life’, well it is Christmas.

As the credits play out, our assailants are hypnotised.

The projector had been our second attempt at distracting the huge crowds that built up around the city. We had needed a diversion to allow us to scavenge for food and medicine. We had tried throwing out hunks of meat from the truck, but now meat is in short supply and fuelling a feeding frenzy was just too dangerous.

I had tried the projector having remembered during the final days, crowds of them would gather around the big public screens erected for the Olympics. Watching the rolling newsfeeds, as if reviewing their progress.

I tried recordings of TV at first, XFactor, Masterchef, Eastenders, but that hadn’t held their attention for long enough. I tried Night of the Living Dead as a sick joke, but when it worked, I twigged, like animals, their vision was black and white.

I tried Psycho next, this proved my theory, not only did it distract them from our activities, they were held spellbound.

Now they stand hypnotised by Jimmy Stewart’s eyes meeting Donna Reed’s across a crowded room.

Darren and ‘Shell jump from the top of the cage, across the forecourt and into the hospital. As the masses watch the movie, our eyes follow two flashlights spiralling up the floors of the glazed building. They had under 100 minutes scavenging time, then 20 to get back down to the truck.

Around 20 minutes from the end, Jimmy Stewart is running along the streets of seedy Pottersville, the once peaceful Bedford Falls; we’re out of time.

I bang on the cab, Tommy hits the horn, and I watch as the two flashlights stop their search and begin to wind fast back down the building. Fifth floor, fourth, third, second, first… the generator stops and the projection and sound stops. The voices of George and Clarence replaced by angered growls.

I tug at the cord of the generator, my feet slip in a pool of gasoline, the fucker had sprung a leak!

I watch the flashlights descend to Ground level, stopping inside the revolving doors at the entrance. Between them and us, the hoard, now in full frenzy, their attention fixed on our truck.

The gasoline was in a can a the end of the truck bed, I throw myself down and slide towards the can, the truck begins to rock. I kick at the cage trying to drive back the gruesome fingers poking through the mesh.

From the corner of my eye I see the two flashlights bobbing up and down, frantically signalling us. Grabbing the can I crawl back up the truck as it bucks wildly.

Tommy starts the engine, I bang on the truck bed ‘No! No!’ I scream, ‘They’ll make it!’

Tommy revs the engine, rolling back and forth.

I reach the generator, holding the can with shaking hands I pour gasoline into the tank, I take the cord in my teeth and yank, the truck rears up on one side, then falls hard onto the ground.

I jerk my head frantically until the genny shudders into life. The concrete wall illuminates once more, Jimmy Stewart by a bridge, seconds later the PA, Jimmy screaming ‘I want to live! I want to live!’

The two flashlights shoot across the forecourt through the crowd of frozen figures, they jump up onto the cage. Tommy guns the engine and we pull away fast, Darren and ‘Shell digging their fingers around the mesh of the cage so as to not fly off.

The projection distorts as we pull away, the hoard begin to give chase, but were too far away now, safe.

Over the trucks PA, little Zuzu’s voice, ‘every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings’.

I feel like I have been here before, the dark twisted thoughts of self-loathing, the nausea in my stomach, the mixture of blood and flour on my face, the arcane symbols written on the white walls in freshly squeezed squid ink.

A man called ‘Proof’ had asked me to cast out the demons that haunted him, he ‘wanted everything to be alright’, to be able to ‘get over it’. The price he pays me is high, very high in fact, the price I pay, the pieces of my soul that I fritter away working my mojo on his behalf is far greater.

My add in the personals has had far greater return than I at first imagined, my sub-standard working life revolutionised by my ability to earn without a ‘day job’, an independent woman. This started out as means to an end, nothing selfish intended, now I fear I have grown greedy, will they grant my requests on this man’s behalf, or will I have of maxed out my credit this time?

I begin the incantation; I have the familiar loss of control, my body ridden by spirits. My palms sweat, my teeth grind, my pupils rotate wildly; the acid taste fills my mouth.

The secret language spills from my lips, ancient words that I have learnt from hours of furtive study from mouldy books with yellowing pages. I urge those that I cannot see to loan me their power so that I may rid my client of his torment. I draw the final lines in squid ink, air rushes into the room, the artefacts of the man called ‘Proof’ begin decompose before my eyes.

No, this is not right, not familiar now; the ink is beginning to run down the walls, I feel a sharp tug at the pit of my stomach, tinnitus in my ear.

I see the faint outlines of faces, there are no features just dark ovals; I feel pressure on my back pushing me to my knees, ridden to heavily I buckle under the weight.

As the light begins to flow from my soul I know, I have taken too much, my debt now too great, my line of credit expired, my soul repossessed.

Magpie’s hobby was rebuilding video arcade machines; that was one of the reasons we liked him so much. His apartment was always full of huge cabinets covered in cartoon space aliens and tactile buttons. We would stay well into the small hours, our fingers hammering away on some of Atari’s finest.

To fuel his obsession Magpie would scour jumble sales, skips and tips for the electronic parts, which he would cannibalise for the guts of his cabinets. We were with him when he found the machines. He was ferreting excitedly through a box of wires and circuit boards when he found two flat plastic discs covered in tiny rocker switches, dip switches as Magpie pointed out. They looked pretty cool, but as to their function, even Magpie was at a loss.

Magpie set about dissecting, testing and randomly flicking switches, trying to work out their purpose. Knowing them as we do now, I shudder to think at the untold amount of damage he might have done. We are still trying to remember if there were any strange or catastrophic stories in the news at that time, I guess with all that goes on in the world it would be hard to tell if Magpie had been the cause.

The day we finally discovered what the machines did, we were sitting under a tree in the park. Karen and I were randomly flicking switches when the tree we were sat under disappeared. Magpie spotted the missing tree, which had materialised in the middle of the tennis courts, it was then we knew we were onto something.

It took us a while to learn how to control the machines; we started by moving little things, trees and street furniture. We began to realise that when we moved things like lampposts and telephone boxes they continued to function. We weren’t simply moving objects; we were re-configuring the landscape around us.

Before long we had moved our house from the centre of London to a private beach in Cornwall. If we wanted to pop back to the city, we simply re-configured our home back to its original plot in the city.

After a while the three of us began to use the machines to play huge scale practical jokes, making trees appear in the middle of concrete shopping centres or arranging buildings in the shape of male genitals. Karen moved her work’s office deep under the Atlantic Ocean, she was sent home on one sunny morning, her place of work having mysteriously disappeared over night. Karen spent that whole day laughing maniacally. It occurred to me; perhaps this might be how super powered villains in comic books get started.

For balance I tried to use the machines for good, breaking up urban conurbations with extracts from dense forests, I called it my ‘urban re-forestation project’. Despite my good intentions, I couldn’t escape a constant nagging thought; nothing good can really come from having such unlimited power.

Soon we became more adept in the use of the machines, our activities stepping up to the next level. Magpie moved the Statue of Liberty to the centre of Baghdad, the last word in satire he told us proudly. Not to be outdone Karen and I began a complex campaign of re-arranging famous landmarks, Nelson’s Column to the middle of the Gobi desert, the leaning tower of pizza to the centre of Tokyo, Tokyo Tower to Paris and the Eiffel Tower to the centre of Trafalgar Square.

Perhaps the funniest thing about these little pranks was the way that everyone else had responded, or rather had not, its funny how people tend to skirt over things that they don’t understand. Our global planning was complained about much in the same way as people would grumble about a rain shower or a Monday morning.

It was around that time that I stopped sleeping, I would lie awake thinking about the machines; how did they work? What had they been made for and more importantly who had made them?

Karen was the first of us to find meet Dr. Laurence David McKenzie, a name we will never be able to forget. She had taken one of the machines to generate a mountain range to replace Deptford. As Karen was configuring the dip switches the Doctor had approached and introduced himself by name. He was calm at first, pointed to the machine he asked her to kindly return his property.

Karen managed to get away by setting the rockers to displace the ground under the Doctors feet. The Doctor had broken her nose and several ribs; I will never forget the way I felt, the mixture of fear and anger gnawing at my stomach.

Magpie was the next to meet the Doctor; it was only by watching the TV news days later that we found out he had been murdered. By then we were already on the move, before Magpie had died he sent us a warning written in the landscape. Magpie had created a series of high dunes on our usually flat beach. The dunes were clearly curved into a word, what we later found out was his last word. ‘RUN!’

We ran; we are still running, we know McKenzie must have taken Magpie’s machine as each time we change our location, move city to city, continent to continent, he alters it, bringing us closer to him.

C/Line 1: Your circuits are currently experiencing residual visual or audio echoes from previous events, please re-boot.

C/Line 2: Should the problems you are experiencing continue please submit yourself to diagnostics.

C/Line 3: Please don’t be alarmed everything will be ok.

My hands are stained white with dust; the piece of chalk I hold between my fingers is worn down to a tiny stub. The walls around me are covered in bullet points and schematics; the information I hold in my head had to be written down before I forgot it, before its too late.

This is the last of it, my current statement. I have collated the salient points, whittled down the information to a list of ten items; ten items that you need to know, before its too late, before the due date.

1) My printers are cursed; don’t trust what they have printed,

2) There are rules applied that are causing a failure to send,

3) Always deduct from the gross,

4) I confirm the prices are pro-rata,

5) None of us can use office; it has changed beyond our recognition,

6) My gut feeling is always right,

7) Audit your soul,

8 ) They are coming, Run!

9) I’m sorry, I am really sorry,

10 ) The world will come to an end on the 23^rd, pay the suppliers on the 22nd.

I don’t know if this information will get signed off, it might be incorrect, I have requested for it to be verified. FYI the man who is checking the words is dyslexic, the man who is checking the figures has Dyscalculia.

Tomorrow is another day at the office; I hope we make it.

魔術を使う: majutsuotsukau: use [practice] magic

呪文 spell, incantation

呪文を唱える: jumonnotonaeru: chant a spell

魔力に魅せられる: maryokunimiserareru : be held spellbound by, be under the spell of

呪文を解く: jumonnotoku: break a spell

(sourced from entering words into search engine of http://www.docoja.com) http://www.docoja.com:8080/kanji/kansear?dbname=katag&sword=video&stype=1

Haunted landline;

Facsimile from the other side;

Mobile magik;

Incantations by txt;

possession of a  sat-nav;

web-casting;

tweeting in tongues;

automatic blogging;

The assembled business delegation was treated to a champagne breakfast, followed by an introduction to the company and given a demonstration of the software they had been developing.

The demonstration seemed well received, although this may of have been due to the copious amounts of free champagne the delegation had eagerly consumed. At twelve o’clock they were brought out to the golf course, their shiny black shoes crunching down the gravel drive of the course’s grand entrance, the champagne had gone to their head and some of them were giggling, passing around their blackberry phones to show each other the cruel jokes that they had received by text message. The men were asked to line up by the first tee by the company rep, once assembled the whole delegation were swiftly shot dead.

Through the shop window monitorface saw his reflection mirrored in the pile of old TV sets, black and whites, CCTV, PYE colour, his own screen reflecting them like an endless hall of mirrors.

He walked in through the door, the piercing beep of a door entry alarm heralding his entrance. Inside TVs where stacked in high piles, others hung from the ceiling, some littered across the floor, monitorface felt he was home, as if standing in a crowd of friendly faces.

Lines of static travelled horizontally across his face. like tears falling across his cheeks.

As she had told him to do, he flexed his index finger to summon the large green numbers at the top left of his screen, he flexed again flicking through his channels one, two, three. Her words echoed across his memory.. ‘remember, when the time is right turn to channel twelve’.

Inside he wept for her, he straightened his finger settling on twelve, as he did so the hundreds of TVs around him jumped into life, outside in the street he could see the vagrants TV burst into life.

Across the street the large LCD screens in Dixons dissolved into clouds of fierce static before flickering onto channel twelve.

In the square the olympic TV projected a giant number twelve in the top right hand corner of it’s giant screen.

The ladbrokes TVs jumped from horse racing, then, in turn the TVs in shops and homes across south london switched over, then TVS across London, across England, europe, the world, one after another switching from their normal programming to monitorface’s signal, she had been right, so right.