Five-Oh-Six-Three (Part Four)

©2012 David Jasmin-Green

The visitors were met by the jumbled voices of a multitude of improbable looking creatures that stood around in small groups or sat on multicoloured animal pelts and bundles of rags. Some of the damned possessed more or less human voices whatever form they took, but a significant proportion were as far from human as it's possible to be, and they could only utter senseless, garbled cries.

“Yippee! My favourite - man meat with cabbage and spuds,” a nearby voice rang out.

“Waah! Woah! Weeeeeee!” A snow white flying something the size and shape of a hearth rug screamed as it flapped clumsily over their heads, instigating a number of the cave's occupants to shout out all at once.

“I'm ecstatic, ectoplasmic, I'm orgasmic-fantastic! I'm a Rockabilly rebel, and I suck out drunken monkey brains.”

“Fuck monkeys, they're foul and hairy and largely inedible.”

“I'd fuck a monkey – especially a drunken one. Drunken monkeys are a bit like Amy Winehouse. They're so inebriated that they can't help but act crazy. They're usually unwashed and a bit crusty around the punani department, they're as rough as fuck and crawling with crabs and pox and various diseases unknown to science, but nevertheless they're curiously attractive. I'd do her, and I bet my arse you would if she promised not to tell. And I don't fucking care if she is a bit ripe! Remember, dimwit, all flesh is ass.”

“Uuuuurgh, mummy! It's the yellow peril. I wants it, and I wants it bad!”

“Mmmmmm, nice - very nice indeed.”

“What is this place?” Blain whispered.

“Shush!” Fathom snapped.

“You're a calm and beautiful yet curiously cretinous island of a man,” a bloated, Rotweiller sized rat yelled as it scuttled past them. It had a meat cleaver buried in its skull and flashing red lights in its otherwise empty eye-sockets, and its tail was on fire. “You're a pilfered, over-pampered miasma of rock doves, thimbles and tapioca. You're obviously girlie and puffy and weak, greenhorn, which is a highly attractive quality down here, but you'll keep that quiet if you know what's good for you. That's only my opinion, mind – your feebleness, I mean - so don't take it personally, luvvy. I, on the other hand, am an indestructible stainless steel Nazi storm trooper, I'm a piezoelectric miracle, I'm a mollycoddled, highly dangerous Faustian reverie. Watch out, you limp lettuce, I'm frigging atomic!”

“Ignore the nonsense mongers,” Fathom said as the monstrous rat barged through the doors into the winding passage behind them. “At least I think it's nonsense that they spout, quite eloquently on occasion, but who knows? Maybe they're scholars and they understand exactly what they're saying, but the likes of you and I are too dense and/or too uneducated to grasp their meaning. Some of the denizens of this zone are capable of making perfect sense on occasion, but it seems that most of the poor creatures haven't a got clue what they're wittering on about. My guess is that they store and regurgitate parrot fashion random snippets of conversation they overhear from their brighter compatriots.”

“Flippant, catatonic, time-worn ignoramus!” a twisted, improbably tall, painfully thin something with too many arms and a large, heavily tentacled skull whined as it reared up in front of them, blocking their path. “Thine foliage is verdant and green, my bountiful butterfly, my bejewelled wallflower,” it said inches from Blain's face, either ignoring or failing to register Fathom, “but thy pretty bloom is decidedly poisonous, I fear. Under thy bed, man cub, I smell a selection of nacreous, nauseating monsters. Space oddity! Thou art tranquil on the outside yet red and angry and bloody within. Hells teeth! Miscellaneous macaroni! Bejesus! You are a particle accelerator, I know it!”

“Go away,” Fathom said softly. The gangling thing obeyed without question, but an enormous Halibut with bulging red eyes immediately flapped into its place.

“Hi, I'm Denise Pimplebury, and without a single exception my over-numerous children bloody hated me!” the enraged flatfish snapped. “The ungrateful bastards were embarrassed by my very existence, though I worked my fins to the bone for them. Labrador Retriever! Calamity Jane! Unshaven Armpit! Those were my eldest surviving triplets (until I mercilessly dropped them into the chip pan, that is), but I laid nine hundred and fifty one thousand three hundred and sixty six fertile eggs altogether during my lifetime – I was a Halibut on Earth too, you see, I'm convinced of it. You wanna hear the names of my fry either in chronological or alphabetical order – it's your choice - followed by what I did to the two-faced, back-stabbing fuckers? I have an excellent memory of my atrocities.”

“We'd prefer not to,” Fathom said. “Move along now, fishy.”

“All right, if that's how you feel!” Denise replied, furiously flapping across the cavern floor and hurling herself with a faultless backwards triple somersault into a large, battered iron pot over the nearest camp fire, a pot containing a few chunks of fungus, half an onion and a couple of mouldy dog turds.

“What an amazing stroke of luck,” the skinless horror doing the cooking said to his mishmash of associates as Denise flailed around and self-basted herself in the hot fat.

“I'm coming! Oh God! Aaagh, ooh, eeeee!” she squealed in delight as the bloody-faced cook pulled a set of antique ivory handled silver fish knives from the pocket of his filthy, tattered apron and polished their tarnished surfaces on a piece of rag that looked like someone had wiped their arse on it.

“Unctuous greetings, pilgrims,” a tiger sized, rather mangy looking black and white cat said as it approached them. “Ammonites are dreadfully bores, don't you think? They're not very palatable, either. And termites, rotting pork, midden piles consisting primarily of malodorous herring bones, I hate them all – eating shit like that gives me the running craps. As for rusty milk churns overflowing with black beetles, now they're not so bad – too crunchy and a trifle bitter, maybe, but overall reasonably satisfying. By the way, I'd love to taste your innards, man thing. Do you have any plans for this evening, or are you already taken?”

“Begone!” Fathom snarled, hissing at the cat, his mouth opening wide and a pair of huge, curved fangs unfolding from the roof of his mouth. Wisely the creature slinked off into the crowd.

“What are these..... these things?” Blain whispered, looking past the spindly being, which appeared to be waltzing with an invisible partner, and eyeing a cage in the far corner of the cave that was crammed full of naked men and women groaning as they were roughly prodded through the bars by a clutter of short, squat creatures covered in long, matted ginger hair.

“Shhh!” Fathom said. “Don't upset anyone, please. Just be quiet and act like you belong here, pretend you're in your local pub or your country club or something. Take in the scenery and try to look confident. I repeat - don't bug anyone, it's not wise.”

Towards the centre of the cavern lay the remains of what Blain took to be a cow or a buffalo. A collection of large, phosphorescent green crayfish were tearing at the corpse with their oversized pincers and bickering over the choicest cuts of meat. Blain caught a movement above him, and he cowered away from a trio of enormous black spiders that traversed the cave ceiling thirty or forty feet above his head. The spiders had disturbingly human features, or at least the last of the three did because it paused and turned momentarily, no doubt to enjoy the newbie's ill disguised terror. The spider looked Blain straight in the eye. It looked exactly like Joseph Fritzl, which gave Blain the heebie-jeebies to say the least, and even more disturbingly it grinned a big, old grin. “Hello, sailor! You look like a nice sort of a boy!” it trilled in a high pitched Austrian accent. “Wanna come down my fucking cellar? Hmmm? You wanton gerbil of a man, you ex fucking politician, you crippled, callous looking catamite. Cheerio! Maybe I'll catch ya later.....” The spider scuttled off and forced its fat abdomen through the same narrow cleft in the rock that its comrades had disappeared into.

“Charming, I'm sure,” Blain muttered.