Unable to sleep, although she was so weary, Amanda’s thoughts turned restlessly in her head. The heat was like a physical presence, oppressive and stifling, made worse by the stink of marsh gas issuing from the wetlands and the sweat from the bodies around her. She could not remain still, lying prone as if she was dead for much longer. As silently as possible she perched herself on the bed, lifting the mosquito net to peer out into the murkiness.
Nothing was visible except for a faint light at the far end of the curtained off space. There she could see Camilla and Richard huddled around a device like a radio, resting on a portable table. Camilla was whispering into an object resembling a microphone attached to the device but Richard sat stony faced. Amanda was tempted to join the couple but the harshness and cold demeanour of the business woman intimidated her. Why Richard was attracted to Camilla was a mystery but Amanda, considering her self a good judge of people, was certain a genuine attachment existed between them. Whatever, she could not go over there and interrupt them.
Lying on the floor near her bed was a discarded flashlight belonging to Camilla. Using this Amanda could explore the disused multi-storey car park and at the same time rid herself of her restlessness. Hopefully, when Camilla returned to her cot to sleep, she would leave the flashlight where it was and she would quietly borrow it without waking her. With this idea she lay back on the bed and waited patiently.
She waited a long time before Camilla returned, hearing her camp bed creak with her weight and then waited even longer before heavy breathing began. Slowly, ever so slowly Amanda left her resting place and picked up the flashlight. Getting on all fours and shivering slightly at the slimy touch of the concrete floor, wet with tropical lichens, she crawled under the canvas curtain.
Walking carefully a few metres before switching it on, worried she would wake the soldiers but also tripping over rubble on the floor, she was completely enmeshed in darkness. It was with a soft sigh of relief that she eventually turned the light on, the beam weakly illuminating a hardy stunted fern growing from the cracked concrete, the lines marking out the parking bays still visible beneath the layers of tiny growths.
Amanda was desperate for a pee and the small curtained off area within the larger camp, used as a toilet with its smell of urine and faeces, was unappealing in the extreme. She would rather go somewhere well away from the sleeping soldiers. She made for the edge at the far side of the multi-story car park.
By the time she reached the low wall the darkness had lifted even without the aid of the flashlight as her eyes got used to the gloom. The black sky was studded with thousands upon thousands of stars washing the region of swamps with a faint pearly light, revealing solitary palms and clumps of detritus in the vastness of stagnant but life-filled water. The Moon added its light to the primeval inundated landscape, a round white glowing globe criss-crossed with faint black lines and blotches. The sound of plentiful life continued like a constant refrain as she crouched, but another sound made her spring up right; the sound of footsteps, very near.
Pulling up her trousers hastily, picking up the flashlight and directing it at the echoing footfalls, she revealed the form of Richard Solomon stepping quickly towards her, torchlight wobbling in his hands. She stared irritably at him for a moment and his face dropped slightly, an expression of disappointment on his features.
The first one to break the silence was Richard. “Sorry to intrude but I must speak to you on your own, away from Camilla.”
“Oh…” She stared over the balustrade of the multi-story at the immense black stain of the Arboretum, moving like ink trapped between tow pieces of glass.
“What I am now doing is betrayal,” he said, taking Amanda completely by surprise. His usual calm and urbane repose appeared dented, as he kept looking behind his shoulder.
“First let me take a piss,” Amanda said, anger in her voice.
Turning his back, Richard walked a few yards and switched off his light as Amanda relieved herself. She called to him when she had finished. Retuning, his flashlight beam now lancing out in all directions, throwing long shadows against the greenish and glisteningly slick walls, Amanda’s face was exposed in its stark glare. The torch abruptly ceased its illumination, plunging them both into darkness, until their eyes got used to the dim radiance of stars and the moon once again.
The stillness between them was heavy like lead. The night sounds of the swamp, once, a long time ago suburban London, did not intrude into Amanda’s mind as she gazed at Richard’s thoughtful but worried face. She waited for him to make his confession.
“I cannot talk for long, so I will be as brief as possible,” Richard said. “Your father is in great danger.”
The statement shocked Amanda, taking her by surprise.
“The Order has contacted its members remaining in the 21st Century. They have told us your alto-ego has found George Browne’s lost book. Your other self and her friends plan to use the formula written in the grimoire to open up the mirror, to come looking for Moonbeam and to rescue her. The Order’s plan is to allow them to do so, guide them into a trap. The Order retrieves its precious book, a key to the assimilation of the Ten Universes, and also victims for your own initiation ritual. You see, you have still not proven yourself to the Order. In his desperation your father has turned to the Order of the Arboreal Orb to look for Moonbeam and his own daughter of course. Once we have captured Jonathan Blake, you will perform a sacrifice to prove your worthiness. Not only murdering Moonbeam but killing your own father!”
“So why are you telling me this?”
The deep croaks of amphibian life emitted from the swamps seemed to increase as Richard turned his eyes away. Nervousness showed itself in the movements of his head and body as he stared behind him.
“I’m taking a huge risk…Look I’ve changed my mind. My support for the Order is based on despair, despair at the human condition and disgust at my own actions. The consequences of the Order’s…Well it is beyond imagining.”
“In other words you have turned traitor!”
Briefly fear animated Richard’s face. A guttural roar of some kind of swamp beast broke the intensity of their verbal exchange. Amanda flinched and turned to look down over the balustrade but Richard, obviously used to such sounds, continued to stare around him, frightened of something more then a monster from the marshes.
“Yes…” he stuttered. “Do you want to murder your father? You will have no choice in the matter. You kill him and join the Order or you suffer the same fate as Lucius. Or you can help save him and the world.”
Amanda thought about this. She did not care about the world, the Ten Universes, whatever, it could go literally to hell as far as she was concerned. And as for Moonbeam the notion of twisting the knife into her stomach consumed her with pleasure. But murdering her father was a boundary she could not cross.
“I don’t want to kill my dad,” she said. “To be honest with you I rather like the idea of killing other people but not my father.” She gave Richard a deliberately wicked grin.
Another anxious frown dented Richard’s face but his movements had become less nervous. He was about to say something when Amanda interrupted him.
“But what are we going to do?”
“Continue on to the Arboretum with Camilla and the soldiers. There she will tell you what I have told you. Then comes the difficult part. You must refuse to comply at the exact moment you are holding the sacrificial knife in your hand and I and some colleagues, yes I have allies, will come to your rescue.”
“As simple as that?”
“No, so many things can go wrong.” He took from the pocket of his combat trousers some rough pages ripped from a diary and handed them over. “This is an extract from my journal. It describes my journey eleven years ago through the jungles of Cambodia to the only portal to the Ten Universes other then Ashbury Manor; an ancient temple complex dedicated to Mogoloth, The Devourer of Souls. Here you may understand the reasoning behind my betrayal.”
Amanda briefly stared at the handwriting scrawled on the lined but tattered pieces of paper and then quickly thrust them into her own pocket.
“But don’t let anyone see them, no one at all,” Richard continued, turning his back on Amanda and walking a few steps towards the encampment. “Don’t follow me. Wait five or ten minutes at least before you return.” He retreated into the dark humid interior of the multi-storey car park, its enclosed concrete space like the dank, dripping chamber of an ancient forgotten temple.
The terrible roar of the unseen swamp creature arose once more from the immensity of waterlogged concrete, metal debris and vegetation beyond the balustrade; Amanda glimpsing the scaly back of a gigantic reptilian animal like an oversized crocodile arising from the moonlit streaked waters. Fear and loneliness like a sudden wave overwhelmed her but after a while she took control of herself.
Sleep was going to be impossible she realised. Beside her was a lump of broken concrete, smooth and not too wet, an ideal seat and there was enough light to read by. She settled herself and unfolded the pages from Richard Solomon’s journal.
What has brought me here, delirious with terror, to this steamy humid jungle? The question haunts my mind but the possible answer is banal, ridiculously so. But it offers no comfort as I sweat uncontrollably in the clinging fug of putrid heat, enclosed by dense forest alive with alien malignancy. It is this malevolence that slithers into my dreams and awakens me with the sound of my own high-pitched screams.
My companions, sharing the cramped tent sheltering us from the incessant rain, are a young man and a girl. The man is barely out of his teens; a student of mine, who begged to accompany me on my idiotic expedition. He was a fool who at least had the excuse of youth. He now mumbles incoherently as the blood soaks the rough bandage wrapped around the jagged stump of his left leg. He stepped on a mine, a few days ago, littering this part of once war torn Cambodia. But there was no going back or any medical help except the simple first aid kit we carried with us and we continued upstream in our small boat, escaping areas of human depravation and danger until we came to a remoter area, a forbidden zone of thick dark rainforest, a place of dread for thousands of years.
Looking down at Michael’s sweat drenched features, contorted with pain, I felt guilty; guilt at leading him into this foul environment of fecundity and death. Guilt was an emotion dominating my whole life and it was the reason I was here. It drove my philosophical research at Kings College, London, my obsessive pouring over ancient books and manuscripts, my quest for the secrets of the universe. But regardless of this so-called objective study, what I was really looking for was escape from a guilty conscience. It was when I meet Camilla, the Queen of Pimps, that everything came together and led irreversible to this god-forsaken jungle.
I looked at Michael hoping he would die soon before the ‘forms’ surrounding us infect his brain, before he is transformed. His eyes reflect consciousness of his predicament, awareness worse then the irrational dreams, the shifting miasma of fever induced nightmares and the gnawing pain and horror of his wounds. I am sure he comprehends, he knows where he is; he is fully conscious of something more monstrous then his own death, something far worse.
I could run, take the remaining supplies and attempt to make my way out of the jungle. But I don’t know if the black book of dark incantations I hold will protect me from the Arboreal Forms if I am travelling away from the Temple rather then towards it. I desperately wished I had some morphine left, enough to put Michael out of his misery. I have no firearm to use on him; to approach the Temple with any weapon other then the Blade is against the strictures of the ritual, so is using the Blade until the correct moment. I threw away my automatic miles away before entering this tangled labyrinth of wet frondescence.
There is movement, a twitch of the tent flaps. I jerk my head away from the sweaty, half naked and comatose body of my friend lying on his sleeping bag. A brown skinned hand strangely stiff, the fingers clenched, is slowly moving through the opening. There is something else moving which tells me immediately this is no mere native of the jungle. Along the arm ripples roll like squirming maggots beneath the flesh of a corpse. Before long the top half of the body is revealed streaked with the constant swelling and my eyes are unwittingly drawn to the head. A huge pulsating mass of matter, itself made up of a multitude of tendrils, is clumped to the back of the head and three organic pipe-like proboscises, vibrating with inner ichors, extend from the blob and cover the eye sockets and the mouth of the face.
Bringing my right hand into contact with the diabolical grimoire, I pick it up and flourish it before the malformed thing and with my left I clutch the girl forcing her to stand upright. With an effort of will I lower my head and hurl myself towards the once human creature forcing it out of my way and stumble into the moist gloom of the rainforest, dragging the child with me.
Unable to help myself I stare back at the tent. There is neither sound from where I stand holding the girl’s arm nor any disturbance from within. There is silence except for the constant stream of rain plummeting from the distant green canopy of the gigantic trees soaring above me. Already I am saturated and my tough army boots sink into the rancid mud, but I don’t care. Minutes slowly pass and my eyes are glued to the entrance of the bedraggled and sagging canvas shelter.
Eventually something emerges from the tent, stooped at first and then standing upright. It is the infected thing blinded and gagged by the living tubes; the brain like glob on its head vibrates with unnatural life.
I inwardly predict what will follow and sure enough Michael appears from behind this monstrosity. But it is no longer my friend and companion. The same type of composite matter is attached to his skull and three extensions of writhing flesh have smothered his eye balls and oral cavity.
Turning, stifling a groan, I run helplessly, pulling the girl with me. Although my mind is clogged with horror and disgust I do not flee blindly but keep to the faint trail that finally ends at my destination, the objective of my quest: The Temple consecrated to the Arboreal Orb, the Eternal Eye and the gateway to the Ten Universes, the unearthly spheres and the emanations of purist cosmic evil.
As I trudge down the pathway shut in by humid abundance like a disease of greenery, sweat and rainwater like a second skin embracing my body, my mind wanders back to when I made my awful discovery.
The moment of eureka but also despair, occurred in a Thai brothel of all places. But why not. A den of vice is very appropriate. I understood at last that reality was reducible to domination and coercion. This was no mere abstract philosophising; I had material proof, solid scientific evidence. The implications of my intellectual breakthrough burst forth here in a Bangkok whorehouse, not far from the University. Through my rifling of age-old occult and illicit tomes and finally my work in the laboratory of a scientific colleague, I had found what the ancient philosophers were looking for: the meaning and purpose of the universe. I thought my guilt would disappear. If the cosmos and everything within it was evil, if morality did not exist, could not exist and never did exist, what was the purpose of guilt?
But I was not the only one who understood the truth. Camilla Armstrong, CEO of a multinational company but also proprietor of an underground network catering to paedophiles, knew these secrets long before me. Camilla made my acquaintance soon after I published my findings (couched in highly obscure mathematical language in a small circulation science journal) and we became lovers. I was open about my conclusions, using her as a soundboard for my obsessions. But she knew more. She was part of a centuries old and very secretive organisation, whose members included some of the highest ranked politicians, business leaders and intellectuals in the world; followers of George Browne, a 16th Century Alchemist and Satanist who had come to similar but even more startling deductions five hundred years before me. I was inducted into the Order of the Arboreal Orb, the name of the occult society, a year after my meeting with Camilla, and I was given total freedom of their extensive library to complete my studies.
Here, in the air conditioned chambers of the Order’s hidden headquarters, situated in the lush forests of the Escambray Mountains of Cuba, I spent my time pouring over the lost books of diabolists and perverse sorceries stretching back to the unbelievably ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia and the Indian sub-continent. My mind swarmed with cosmos shattering formula, dread rituals for the reawakening of monstrous deities from a forgotten past and images of a hellish bestiary whose extraterrestrial forms were difficult for the merely human mind to grasp. To take my mind off this swirling vortex of horror I made frequent visits to the colourful vibrant hub of Havana, where I slacked my thirst for young flesh. But I always returned to the books, especially the obscure notes and articles of the doomed scholars who had ventured too far into the depraved thinking of George Browne. Browne’s Magnum Opus, his masterpiece, the ultimate grimoire of decadent philosophy was lost since Elizabethan times, but through the incoherent scribblings of his intellectual descendents I had an idea of where to find the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
Clutching the edges of a diary of a forgotten 19th Century explorer, leather bound and scuffed with usage, my tired eyes staring at detailed sketches of a large Asiatic temple complex and extensive lines of fading handwriting, the final piece of the puzzle was before me. The Temple was weird, familiar sacred Hindu architecture but warped, metamorphosed as if dedicated to a pantheon of darkness rather then the gods of light.
Through the writings of this long dead adventurer who had spent his last days in an insane asylum, I discovered a vanished world, an impenetrable forest, dense not only with tropical flora but with a malign menace, keeping out everyone except the most foolhardy of Western travellers. I learnt about the Arboreal Forms, a concretization of the parasitic principle; a life-form made up of a teeming host of mindless entities, worms of basic living matter. Acting as a guardian to the Temple, its myriad offshoots infected sentient creatures turning them into zombies. A sickeningly vivid depiction described the process overtaking its human victim, one of the orderlies of the expedition. Burrowing into the head via the eye sockets it directly took over the brain, a third tentacle of composite forms entered the throat tunnelling its way to the spinal column.
But it was the explorer’s final speculations that really twisted its barb into my imagination: It was possible the victim remained conscious, conscious but under the control of an unknowable alien object. If I had known I would actually witness this terrible consumption myself, I think I would have had second thoughts about leading my own expedition. At the time though the idea of finding the key, a gateway to the Ten Universes and maybe finally to the Eternal Eye, overpowered any qualms I might have.
It was not long before I was on my way to the stifling jungles of Cambodia, convulsive with fanatical curiosity and doing the bidding of a sect celebratory of immorality, an immorality embedded in nature, symbolised by the teeming fecundity of the rainforest.
The jungle was changing. It was becoming something other. On both sides of the trial, above and in front, the wall of greenery which dripped with moisture and the giant fern leaves steaming in the heat, were coated in a hanging growth resembling Spanish moss. Purplish in hue, glowing with a strange luminosity, it fell from the high branches like a thin curtain, trailing across my scalp. I noticed clustered deep within the shadows of the forest globes of fungi like oversized puffballs, emitting the same type of eerie light but green and yellow instead of purple. Thin cable like vines issued from these rounded organic objects spreading outwards, wrapping themselves around the trunks of trees and reaching as far as the highest branches. The enormous hardwoods infected in this way were dead. These new forms of life were sucking the juices out of the ordinary terrestrial flora.
The aberrant moss, the fungi and its vines were becoming more extensive, engulfing the commonplace vegetation, eating its very soul. The light had changed too; instead of the deep green gloom of the rainforest, a new intense form of illumination spread its influence. Originating in the bizarre parasitical plants it swirled and pulsated hypnotically and rhythmically, bright and uncanny like the beginnings of a bad LSD trip.
Strange crumbling statuary and ruins were glimpsed through the hallucinatory light. The statues were of sinister gods and goddesses related to Hinduism but somehow twisted into grotesque, monstrous and mutated shapes. Some sprouted manifold limbs, long suckered tentacles ending in sharp hooks or talons; others had wings growing out of their misshapen backs, huge and enveloping. Their bodies were bloated like the evil twins of the elephant-headed god Ganesa, layers of stone fat sliding and slipping around the plinths they stood on; or dangerously voluptuous and feminine like the goddess Kali. Their heads were not in the shape of a benign, jolly elephant or an unearthly beautiful woman but a variety of arachnid and reptile busts; horrible to gaze for long into their many faceted or lizard eyes. The artistry was otherworldly. Although invaded by the outlandish creepers, these statues were imbued with living energy, as if at any moment they would come alive.
The girl I dragged through the shimmering incandescence was awakening from her daze. With a yelp of terror she broke from my grip and ran ahead of me, following, without thought the path ahead. I scrambled after her, desperate to catch up and bring her under my control. Without her I was lost, my whole endeavour, my life work would be destroyed. My heart thumped uncontrollable in my chest, the sweat soaking my shirt as I ran, shouting her name, scraping the encrusted moss like the webs of some gigantic extraterrestrial spider off my face. Then without warning she turned and ran back, a look of wild horror eradicating the youthful lines of her features. Desperately she swerved around me but I grappled her to the ground hitting her head against a stone. Limp like a rag doll I picked her up and flung her over my right shoulder, hoping I had only stunned her.
Weighed down with the child I carried on but guilt was intruding into my obsessions. I felt the closeness of the supine body of the unconscious girl and my thoughts returned to the ramshackle hovel in Phnom Penh where she allowed me to take her passive and non-responding body for a few coins. For a few moments I saw myself as if I was somebody else and I felt sick deep inside, soul sick. I had become a monster, a beast, dragging this wretched and debased girl to her doom. Tears began to fall down my cheeks and I sobbed. I thought how different my life might have been; respected by my peers, a professorship at one of Britain’s most prestigious universities. Instead I was a puppet, a tool of the Order of the Arboreal Orb, a mad scientist, child molester and criminal psychopath. But above everything I felt guilty. I was not strong enough to be pitiless.
I almost dropped the girl then, ready to kill myself with the Blade if need be, to end my worthless life. But like a sleepwalker in a never ending nightmare I walked on. As I did I steeled my mind to the facts, to my philosophical and scientific discoveries. In a world, a universe, were ethics did not exist, what was the point of guilt. A useless emotion, as useless as a tiger that had compassion for its prey.
Then I staggered into the clearing and I froze. I understood now why my captive had run back with that look of ungodly fright on her face. Before me was the Temple, the penultimate objective of my quest, devoted to a relatively minor deity from the unfathomably depths of time and space; Mogoloth, the Devourer of Souls, the hideous spider god, guardian and gatekeeper of the Arboreal Orb. An entity whose size was unbelievable immense, miles in length, whose food was human minds consumed forever in its cavernous stomach. It was said that at the end of all things, time and matter, the digested excreta would be expelled at last; a sticky world enveloping mass of dead souls.
Dominating the clearing the temple’s high towers and copious pilasters and arches, layered like an oriental but contaminated weeding cake, filled my head with dread. The carvings encrusting the structure like cancerous growths from another planet turned the Temple into a phantasmagoria of malign arachnid and reptilian shapes; insane gods and goddesses proliferating upwards and outwards, devouring or copulating with each other like an army of crazed interstellar ants. I stared and stared, rooted to the spot, unable to move by the sheer ghastly wonder of it all. The designer of this edifice of insanity was beyond genius, the craftsmen had to be demons possessed by an unholy spark of creativity. From the unnatural jungle surrounding the clearing, giant tendrils and creepers reached out and engulfed the building, encasing it in webs of brightly coloured vegetation, sprouting preternatural blooms; funnels and tubes with wavering stamens issuing from their purple cavities. On top of the roof of the dark entrance, an arch bigger than the others, in the centre of the Temple complex, a banyan tree, massive in size, sent down its thick roots like a mud slide almost blocking my route inside.
Still holding the girl on my shoulder I at last moved, making my way very slowly towards the entangled opening. Pushing with my left hand while holding the girl with my right I edged around the lumps of root matter breaking up the masonry. The stone floor and walls were pitted and humped, broken by the extending limps of the banyan tree, eroding the hideous eons' old statuary and faded paintings. Sweating profusely I emerged into the cavernous interior, the arched, immense roof supported by a line of giant pillars shaped into mammoth idols, redolent of an evil stretching back to the beginnings of time: Gigantean squids, spider gods, lizard beings and aquatic horrors from the depths of an ocean on a world hidden in the vastness of space. I felt dwarfed by the immensity of it all as if I was entering a cathedral designed by Lucifer. On every side were the misshapen monstrous forms of the gods and goddesses of a universal psychosis, the mind of Satan brought to light.
Directly in front was the altar; a circular wall forty or fifty meters in circumference and five or six meters in height with ancient steps leading up to its lip. I took one step at a time towards the altar; my eyes glued on the colossal statue behind it, obviously a depiction of Mogoloth, the Devourer of Souls. It had a many eyed head with a gigantic mandibled maw; its body coiled like an enormous woodlice in the process of curling into a ball and its eight long serrated arms arrayed at its sides arched over my head. As I moved further up the time-worn steps I noticed the top set of jointed arms gripped an enormous cracked and stained mirror in the shape of an oversized eye staring downwards into a seemingly never ending pit.
I knew then my calculations were correct; one year in a thousand the staring eye of Mogoloth opened waiting for its sacrificial victim. I was on time and the ritual would be performed effectively. Slowly I climbed, holding the still unconscious girl in my arms.
The wall of the altar was in fact the raised sides of a well or deep hole in the ground. When I reached the end of the crumbling stairs I gazed vertiginously into its depths, where I was almost certain I detected faint movement suggesting something huge and repugnant. Across this gaping hell-pit was a narrow stone platform like a diving board, blotched with the fading red stains of sacrificed blood. Nausea swam in my stomach suddenly and I retched emptily, laying the child on the hard stone of the platform. She softly moaned as I striped her of her rags and hurled them into the cavernous hole beneath me, falling like scraps of discarded paper thrown into a volcano crater.
I withdrew from my belt the Blade and I took the book of satanic incantations from the pocket of my mud encrusted combat trousers. I opened the grimoire to the correct page and rested it next to the head of the girl, staring at the ghastly drawing of a fleshy mouth like opening, where within its folds of flesh nestled an eye, hate filled and malevolent like the gigantic eye above me. Surrounding the drawn mouth were characters of a language long extinct, words written millennia ago. As I knelt in front of the prone adolescent, raising the devilishly sharp Blade above my head, gripping the handle crafted into the obscene bodies of copulating demonic forms, I begin chanting the words softly but raising my voice subtly as I continued.
Eventually I am almost bellowing the barbaric and savage language, as an energizing power shoot through my frame like electricity. The girl’s eyes open when I am nearing the climax of my ritual and her mouth rounds into a shout of terror. Plunging down, as the last phrase of the appalling verse escapes my lips, the supernatural knife slides into the soft skin of her left breast, piercing her heart. Her body thrashes wildly from side to side and she takes an age to subside as I pull the Blade from her bloodied chest. As if I am in a trance l let the blood drip from the knife onto the pages of the book, where they sizzle like fat dropped into a frying pan.
An explosion of sound then erupts from deep within the pit, rushing upwards like an express train, like the beginnings of a volcanic eruption. The platform begins to vibrate, shaking uncontrollable, large cracks opening up in its service, spilling rocks into the empty space. The gate is open. I have found my Unholy Grail at last, complete confirmation of my theories! The passageway leading eventually to the Arboreal Orb, the Eternal Eye itself is gaping. Levitating upwards towards the mirror, shaped into that hellish eyeball, I begin to scream. Suspended in the air, caught in the baleful gaze of the looking glass, I look down, as an arachnid arm as thick as a man is long, grabs the body of the teenager in its claw and drags her into the bottomless abyss.
For a few moments there is complete stillness, a hush, where I hear a background susurration like a distant swarm of locusts, and I stare upwards at the mirror suspended above me. The mirror blinks like a real eye and something clicks in my brain. The long, endless well shaft is reflected in the mirror, reversed, now like a chimney, and I realise in a flash of sickening despair, the horror of my situation, the situation of the whole of humanity. Our world is an emanation, a literal creation, a manufactured universe of the unimaginable entity or entities labelled the Arboreal Orb, the Alpha and Omega of evil. God does not exist and never did; virtue does not exist and never will. My emotions, my feelings of guilt and torment, my pleasures and selfish triumphs are nothing. We are nothing, mere nourishment for the Eternal Eye, that black void, shinning orb of nullity.
Amanda let the journal pages fall on her lap and she stared out into the moonlit swamp without seeing it. Richard Solomon is a paedophile she thought, a molester of children and young girls. She felt sick then, a shifting slimy feeling in her innards. She did not know if this was a reaction to the journal’s revelations or the start of a stomach disorder. Getting up she began the walk back to the encampment, the sensation of sickness increasing, growing inside her like a living thing. With a heave she threw the contents of her last meal onto the cracked concrete floor of the multi-story car park, the sticky tropical heat increasing around her, making her dizzy. After a while, the sweat soaking her body, she continued walking and a plan began to evolve in her head. She was not going to be part of Richard’s betrayal, the pervert probably had an ulterior motive, nor was she willing to kill her own father. Amanda had her own ideas.
Crawling back into the enclosure, the flashlight turned off, she found her cot. Resting on her side she listened to the soft breathing and snores around her, the booming chorus of swamp life and the distant roars of the beast. Her stomach gurgled slightly but an uneasy sweaty sleep soon descended.
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