Deus Ex Machina

He had stayed up the past thirty-eight hours, kept in an altered state by psylocibin impregnated bacon rind and walnut coffee. He had performed the mudras he had found in the photocopies he had made of suicide-artists locked hands. He’d had to fracture both wrists and break his left middle-finger to perform the more complicated gestures. Covered in ash and fat, naked save for the vestments of The King (rhine-stone suit, blue suede shoes and a stylised sneer), he had enacted the last conscious moments of the sacrificial victim. He had lacerated himself with pins and crochet hooks, letting his thick, turgid blood spatter the floor of the lift shaft in a terminal clock-face. His calculations had taken weeks to prepare and now he finally had the schematics of the murder-machine.