Tentacle Death Trip (17 page)

Samson’s eyes searched the surrounding area and saw it: a
door made of metallic hair.

The road brought them through it.
Sparks
fell onto the windshield, burning through the glass and
bubbling onto the dashboard. The road had brought them into a gigantic
dome-shaped chamber. Samson thought that it was impossible. From the outside,
the city hadn’t looked tall enough to harbor such a place. But there they were,
driving up a spiraling stone road toward the ceiling which seemed to grower
farther and farther away no matter how fast they seemed to be going in its
direction.

The dome ceiling split open like a gangrenous wound and
revealed a labyrinth of machinery constructed out of stone and giant
crustaceans.

Hundreds of emaciated human bodies hung from the machinery.
From the neck down their flesh had been stripped from their bodies. Only their
faces revealed the person they had been prior to their torture. Samson searched
the faces of the damned. Their expressions were that of souls who have lost all
purpose. They were just empty shells, decorations. Their skin looked greased
with motor oil which dripped from their feet like slow, dark rain.

Samson felt his skin loosen from his body. He was becoming
just one more instrument of the car. His bones melded with metal. His veins
expanded into tubes and pipes and his skin became leather upholstery.

The car sped toward a group of human bodies and Samson saw
the face he had been thinking about for years.

Jack’s face.

His son was older, yes, but it was him. His skin had been
flayed but it was him, Samson was sure of it. He let out a groan.

Drac
said, “What is it?”

“My son.”

“It’s not your son. Those are just bodies.”

“It’s him!”

Drac
scoffed. “It’s just one of Silver’s tricks!”

With all his strength, Samson steered the car in the
direction of Jack’s body. The road was going to bring him close enough for
Samson to drive off the road and into the air.

Drac
said, “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m going to get my son.”

“You’re going to kill us!”

“What the hell are you talking about? What do you think is
going to happen to us?”

“That’s not your son! Not anymore!”

Samson pressed his foot down on the pedal, taking advantage
of the fact that he was part of the car now. The tires started to rumble and as
Samson looked out of the windshield toward his son, he saw something else.

Behind the flayed bodies was a monstrous creature made of
wet, green flesh and a grotesque shell. Dozens of wings protruded from its body
while two giant orbs served as eyes that stared out at Samson and
Drac
with ungodly ambivalence.

The monstrous creature let out a breath and the flayed
bodies started to sway back and forth until their fluids battered Samson’s car
in a torrential downpour of blood and oil.

The giant orbs blinked. Wings fluttered and bodies started
to fall.

In horror, Samson saw Jack’s near lifeless body fall to the
road in front of him and steered the car into it.
If he could
just get him to land on the hood….

For a second he saw Jack’s eyes looking at him. Could it be
possible he recognized his father? It seemed that way or at least that’s what
Samson hoped. The body crashed into the car and through the windshield. There
was a shower of glass and blood.

Jack landed in the car, the top half of his body lying in
the backseat with the other half in the front. With an inhuman groan, he pulled
himself forward so he could see his father.

Jack’s face was weathered and pockmarked from years of
being exposed to cosmic horrors. His flayed body exposed not only his bloody
flesh but also tiny stone insects embedded in the muscle and fat. Jack bared
his teeth which were stained with ancient seaweed ink and his tongue oozed out
of his mouth: a pink tentacle covered with inhuman taste buds.

Samson could only move his eyes enough to see a small bit
of his son’s face, the boy he lost but had never forgotten, the boy who grew
into a man in an incomprehensible hell.

Through tears he said, “Son.”

A shriek escaped from Jack, emanating not from his throat
but from the stone insects. Then a guttural cough from Jack’s mouth said,
“Dad.”

Tears of salty motor oil flowed from Samson’s eyes. “I’m
sorry, Jack.”

XII.

Drac
listened to the exchange between Samson and Jack and felt
jealousy.

His own father was an intelligent man but lacked the
devotion and kindness that was evident in Samson.
Drac
doubted his father would have had the same emotional pull towards his son.

Before him appeared a circular shell, immense in size and
sparkling with colors unknown to any earthly rainbow. Images flickered on the
shell like cryptic runes on a primordial television.
Drac
saw his father sitting at an ornate wooden table, a book opened in front of
him. A young man sits down at the table. At first
Drac
thinks the young man is him but then quickly realized it is not. It is Simon
Revair
.

A black envelope is pulled out of the book and handed to
Revair
who opens it and pulls out a photograph. His mouth
gapes and his eyes widen.
Drac’s
father closes the
book, stands up, and pats
Revair
on the shoulder.

Drac
tried to close his eyes to the images on the shell but
cannot. He had just watched his father offer him, his firstborn son, to the
Church
of
Starry Engines
. Gasoline tears started to pump out of his eyes. The roar
of the car’s engine invaded his skull and brought pain and memory. He thought
of his father and cursed the man for his betrayal, for his devotion not to his
son but to his research and his church.

All of the images faded and
Drac
was left looking out at the gargantuan beast staring down at him as the car
sped upward into an empyreal abyss.

XIII.

There was no sky left, just crab shell clouds and that
giant beast staring them down, its moist skin oozing
octopoid
sweat that flew down like hungry hail, smashing into the car, peppering it with
holes.

That’s when the road cleared. With a groan that sounded as
ancient as it was ear-destroying, the creature flew out of sight and Samson saw
they were now heading straight toward a translucent wall covered with throbbing
suckers and tentacles made of quivering mirrors.

And they went right through that wall, a
multiverse
of tentacles engulfing the car.

Jack pulled himself up onto his father’s lap, alien sounds
erupting from every remaining cell of his body. He started to melt.

Samson tried moving his hands off the steering wheel to hug
his son but he was still just part of the car, just another instrument in a
biomechanical horror. But he felt Jack’s body soften and meld into his own.
They were together and would be so forever and that was better than nothing.

“I love you, Jack,” he said, trying to determine if his
son’s consciousness was going to be a part of him as well as his body.

The car shook and the passenger door was ripped open.

“
Drac
!”
Samson said but there was no answer. He managed to turn
his head a quarter of an inch to see that
Drac
was
done. The top of his glass skull was gone. It now resembled a champagne glass
full of gasoline.
Drac’s
eyes fell out onto his
cheeks, hanging there like bulbous hangmen.

What Samson was headed toward had nothing to do with a
death race. It was beyond life and death, beyond anything that anyone on earth
could have ever imagined.

As Jack’s and his body became more
machine
than human, he drove into an abyss of unimaginable horror and Samson realized
he’d be there forever. No roads. No light. No cities. No earth. No sky.

Samson let tears gush out in a bitter deluge of motor oil.

EPILOGUE

Mr. Silver
snickered.

Everything had
gone exactly as planned, even better. It was the spectacle of the thing that
was important. It was the pomp, the glitz, the sheer entertainment value that
filled his being with power.

He had been having
the dreams since he was a child but up until recently he had not known the
meaning of them. He had believed them to be bizarre, childish fantasies taking
place in some fantasy world of polluted water and monstrous creatures that
slithered out of some noxious netherworld. But they turned out not to be
fantastical dreams of a young mind.

They were
premonitions.

Silver had spent
his youth and his teenage years honing his skills at manipulation. Through
sheer will and intensified fellness, he took down anyone who was in his way. It
had appeared like providence was always on his side.

By adulthood he’d
amassed a great fortune not only in monetary terms but in pure, tenebrous
knowledge. Thousands of ancient texts, clay tablets, animal skins, human flesh
tomes: all of it collected and studied by Silver until he knew everything he
needed to know.

So now he stood on
the stage, looking out onto the Atlantic Ocean where the
city of
R’lyeh
had risen like a jade erection preparing to fuck the world into oblivion.

Silver snickered
again.

He grabbed the
pages of the
Abrund
Abschaum
he had torn from Paulo’s body and started to read them into the microphone. The
audience sat enraptured, their brains and bodies buzzing in a meditative haze.
They would soon realize they have had the same dreams except in theirs they
were simply pawns of the new world, fodder for the ancient machinery that had
finally come back to life.

Silver looked at
Enzo
who was sobbing into his hands. No doubt his brain was
spinning with insanity. Despite his outgoing personality, he was weak and
unprepared to understand pure unadulterated knowledge.

Silver read from
all fifty-two pages of the text. He watched the audience stand up from their
seats and slowly walk down to the beach. Oh, how happy he was to see them
wading in the water, waiting for his instructions.

“You
simple-minded servitors.
Now you walk,” he said, dropping the microphone
in order to bask in his finalized glory.

Behind him,
Enzo
fell to the ground, his bones having turned to jelly.
In front of him both Cop and Slave were having violent seizures that ended in
their milky eyes popping out of their skulls and their ribs breaking out of
their chests.

At that moment,
Silver knew something had gone wrong.

His mouth that had
once snickered with anticipation was now frowning with horror. He could feel it
around him, vibrating through multiple dimensions. But this wasn’t supposed to
happen, not according to his dreams.

Was there a part
of his childhood dream he had forgotten?

It didn’t matter.
Silver stood there on the stage, watching the stupefied audience, those passive
spectators as they walked through the water towards
R’lyeh
.
And if they had turned back to see their once revered entertainer, they would
have seen him express a silent scream of agony as he was devoured by an
invisible abomination.

Within seconds,
there was nothing left.

Nothing
at all.

THE
END