Prospects (II) Final Part
Psychedelic fantasy folk horror (with bikers). Inspired by the prose of Will Self and the thunder of Robert E Howard.
Content warning: extreme self indulgence
Each man queued for a shot of the brew, but His cup was never left empty.
By nightfall the band had lost themselves in a psychedelic call and response that ping-ponged round the cove, churning up the gulls, turning the flock inside out and germinating a whole new cosmos deep behind His eyes.
While seabirds stuttered in the strobe, His Brothers were brawling through the smoke of time. Cretaceous man-things flung loose against the beat, bared to their skins. Vaulting the flames and flogging at their chests. Deep in the lunatic throb.
Open your arms, open your arms…
Meat was served and ligaments were stripped back with teeth. Lemon Eye favoured cheek, while Bronco popped the eyeball on his molars, and at the edge of the sea the elder things dug loose the trilobites. Cracking free the brine chilled meat. Fending off the wolverines; hunchbacks, half-formed by shadow.
They brought Him His in a dish of iron. The heart of a pig, served in a nest of adders. He took it to his teeth. The process was purely mechanical now. Communition. Degradation. Facilitation. Breaking down the muscle into fibre and paste, an enzyme rich bolus of blood. The flavour expressed itself as pockets of purple, popping in the night to the rhythm of the drums.
From the seat at His side the Sage took His arm, pointing to the sky, at the amber moon, a sliver behind the parting clouds. “Selene, she sees you… hssss.”
An elder stepped forward with a vessel of stone; an emulsion of malachite; painting His face and neck in daubs of green. The Sage pointed to the waterline.
The Hyperboreans arrived by long boat. Carved from a single trunk of oak, the bow as a gilded dragon, it cut a furrow through the froth and shale. The elder things dragged it ashore while the travellers drifted inland like fog.
The Mothers came first. A nebulous trinity. One moment rhythmic, twisting with the drums like fireflies; another brittle and ancient. Half dead, half eternal. United by one familiar, a silver wolf that danced at their heels, winding through their paths like a moonlit stream.
The Druids came next. Collared in feathers; a riot of peafowl. Their robes were of fur; teeth and claws intact. Their heads were shorn to the bone and their faces were hidden by thick masks of ash.
Finally came the Beastmen. The hybrid clan. Horned and cloven, He could smell them at thirty paces. The heavy maudlin smell of animal, the musk of apex predators. Their horns were of buffalo and they wore nothing at all. Scrofulous, semi human genitals leaked a constant trail of urine between their legs. Amongst His human brothers, even the primarks stepped back from the Beastmen. And it was the beasts that brought His steed on their shoulders.
The Harley was of silver, hard and immaculate. An FX Big Twin Super Glide. Bedizened in jewels and semi-precious rivets. With extended forks it was fourteen feet wheel to wheel. It’s rumble, like that of a brooding lion, told Him it was very much alive.
Each Mother stepped to Him with gifts. Bloodstone from the first. A brace of headless doves from the second and the final mother revealed her body. A multitude of beaks erupted from her pallid flesh like barnacles on a hull of iron. And one by one they all sang His name.
The congregation took up torches and began the climb, up the winding stairs of chalk that were cut into cliffs.
Iron fist. Velvet glove.
His leathers were presented at the top, with the midnight sky spread open like leather and the moon, now revealed, throwing shadows by its icy light. First, His brothers stripped him like tanners, cutting away his greasy denims with shivs and pocket knives, until he stood naked in the wind. Then, seven elder things brought the ceremonial attire.
A cuirass of gator skin was strapped to his torso. His legs were bound in stallion hide, and completed with a codpiece of cold hammered iron. Pauldrons of bull-leather were tied to his shoulders; riveted white in sharp points of tusk. And his gauntlets were of steel. Etched with oathtaker’s runes.
He stared to the moon, and the moon stared into him, tugging on His gizzards with it’s majesty. All his Brothers were naked now and all had grown taller. Bronco’s back was hunched, his vertebrae like medieval brickwork, threatening to split through the shimmering skin. Lemon Eye’s brow was thick, cro-magnon, swelling his dome and almost obscuring his bad eye. His lower canines cut through his top lip and his good eye roved like a planet. Crowthers flexed; reptilian. A cobra. Twisting with the night like vapour.
And the heavens swam above them all. Onyx subsumed green which bled to purple; orange, crimson and violet. And when He drew breath the universe bulged with Him.
The tribes began to horseshoe now. Captains and primarks formed the first crest of men. Foot soldiers next, and the druids and elder things took the rear, fanning into transepts. There seemed to be thousands of elders now and they had begun a low and sombre prayer. Their black and ancient tongue made no intellectual sense to any of the Brothers but the harmonies settled like a childhood funeral. Deep in the core.
And finally, the Prospects filed past. Bronco slapped his stern, only able to grunt past his wolfen overbite. Lemon presented an egg, cracking it one handed to anoint His hair, then kissing his mark. Crowthers whipped past like a pinion. His snake crest erect in salutations. The other young riders disappeared into the tableland. Lighting torches to mark out His route.
With the congregation formed, the elders were silenced; the choir split open to allow passage for the Sage.
The Saxon Rider beat a drum. The Sage at his side. Witches followed. They arced round to a stop in front of Him and the Sage removed his face mask.
“My son… hssssss. My beautiful boy.” The Sage spoke in whispers, but every man heard. “Are we not Brothers? Hssssss.” All men roared, the Beastmen barked and the Druids threw shapes at the sky. “Are we not blood? Are we not the crimson? Hsssss… the plasma in Albion’s veins.”
The Saxon Rider took a second canister from his side. A primark appeared with the helmet. All three witches sung His name now.
“You my son will take our message to Selene… hsssssss… as praise for her enduring grace and protection. To summon and to shake and to bind us all for another seven years. What we offer she, she offers we.”
From His right came a growl, a Beastman had the Harley on its shoulder. Up close, the animal’s musk made him dizzy. Tipsy with corruption. The beast set the ride down before him, as if it were just a child’s toy, and He took the bike by the horns. He swung into the saddle, feeling the steel tense like muscle. The Saxon clamped a breather to His face and the canister began to hiss.
The mushroom brew had altered him, and granted elder sight. But the vapours inside the mask truly cut him in two. Opening. And separating. Crank gas craniotomy. Peeling the conscious mind away like a segment of fruit. Removing the last trace of Adam and leaving the Reptile in control of the bike. The Saxon presented a helmet. An open mouthed Houndskull, horned in night-tusk. Inside it was black.
Listen in awe and you’ll hear him… He kicked, and the Harley snarled. A hibernating bear, asleep no more. The petrol tank throbbed like a donor organ between his thighs, the exhaust pipe flexed in arousal and the buckhorns relaxed, softening in his grip. His other self; the self of salt. The needy, malnourished human self, hovered above. Coupled to the reptile by His last strand of consciousness, but helpless in its whimsy.
Listen in awe and you’ll hear him…
His last human sensation was the taste of arsenic, collecting around the tonsils.
Bark at the moon.
The big twin shot forward to the roar of the Brothers and the Saxon’s primal drum. Twenty, forty, seventy meters. It ate the scrub; insatiable, and spat loose the refuse like a chipper. Ahead of Him, the half-mile was lined by fire — the Prospect’s intermittent beacons — but the Reptile had its own route finder. A pin-prick of starlight radiating out from the chest and opening up in front like a tunnel.
The salt-self felt something it hadn’t felt for years when riding; fear. The child was suddenly back in Epping. On a three mile straight through the forest. Five years old, with Uncle Johno in the saddle and Him holding onto Johno’s leathers for dear and bloody life… Four AM. No cops, no commuters and Johno opened up like a furnace. He’d made it until eighty before He wet himself. Johno took it past ninety before he slowed.
The first Prospect raised a torch as the Reptile shot past. The tunnel formed ahead, knitting itself together from super-charged particles. Johno had to get home quick, you see. After stomping those two skins. Rapid oxidation. Sustain. Prophecy. ‘Fucking peanuts’ Johno still had claret on his denims. A kick to the starter. The big one had a face of blood.
Wolverines flanked the Reptile now, matching His speed with ease. The Harley’s dial was caught in a whirlpool but the dogs kept pace like spitfires. A second Prospect waved him on and, the salt-self was back in London. On the Bakerloo home from school. Exothermic reaction. Two days after the nail bomb. ‘Always ride the middle carriage’, Johno had said. ‘Paddy don’t bomb the middle’. Redox. Power cut. A blue-rinse spinster sparked smokes in the dark as the train thundered on.
The fourth Prospect brought the Reptile to the narthex, and the tunnel expanded. Arches of fire framed the vanishing point. The endless black now of the English channel. Johno got Him chips. They talked football as they walked. Once home His uncle pushed Him towards the garage.
Lemon Eye yelped as the Reptile passed. Bronco blew fire while the bike began to truly limber. Bullhorns sprouted and entwined His forearms. ‘What d’yer make of that then?’ Johno switched on the light — A Yamaha RD250 — He ran a child’s finger down the chipped white tank. ‘I’ll have it runnin’ for yer birthday.’
After narthex comes nave. The cathedral rose to the heavens and the Reptile reduced its aisle to ash. Thundering on towards terminal velocity, as Selene hung silver over sea.
‘You’ll want one ae these n’all lad.’ Johno held out a second present. A bowie knife.
‘What for?’
‘Cutting yerself loose.’
And that’s where the chord snapped. As the ground gave way. On an iron horse He flies… As the cliffs gave way. The Reptile caught the super-highway dead on, but He was left with the atmosphere. The moon span faster and the Harley began to smelt. Absorbing the Reptile into its molten alloy. Releasing its impurities as sparks, until it was more eagle than bike. And it flew the sacrifice home, into the heart of the moon.
For an interminable split-second, the salt-self just hung there. Until it didn’t.
On an iron horse He gladly dies…
One hundred and seventy three feet.
Exactly falling distance.
He hits the shale like a bag of carrion, eyes still on the goddess. The perfect silver mirror in the midsummer sky. His only way home.
If you’ve got this far I’d like to thank you, both properly and improperly. So thank you. And thonk you. A.
The second half was as wild as the first! Really enjoyed this. Like a Barkeresque ritual but metal…
Whiplash writing!