Posted by NL on April 05, 2005 at 14:11:37:
Revelations-- Part 6
Yes, I see no reason why I, Chuck Woe, should not aspire to be another Jim Jones or David Koresh. But you see, I would not drink the poisoned Kool-Aide, and in my compound would be a secret tunnel so I could slip away from the final conflagration, to chuckle and sniff paint thinner and feel good about my life of power, fucking any woman I might want, any time and any place, picking 'em choosing 'em, beating 'em, tossing 'em aside, in the fashion of a good old Patriarch and man of power. Before I discovered these comic books, or, before the Angel gave them to me (all the same difference) I was the sort of fellow, who, at a fancy banquet where everybody has to wear a bowtie, would fart in your soup while you had your back turned. Yes, I'd leap onto the table and fart in your vichy-SWAW and you would not even know it, but I would know, and I would chuckle and watch you slurp it up, and feel all mean inside. But not now. Now I have higher aspirations. When I left the Hammermills I served time in a fast food palace and wiped my ass with many a meat patty, spat in many a bucket of moldy lettuce, and felt myself avenged. But not no more. These comic books have opened my eye. And in this last and greatest of my comics, from one billion years in the future, I hope not to end my days like Dr. Dick Woe, with newspaper clippings drifting like cheap imitation snow across my crummy desk of deal, slipping into the chinks and cracks where dwelt the rats and roaches, and into dusty corners where dead fish became skeletal. Dr. Dick lacked method. But he liked to think that perhaps Charles Fort had had just such a study, and just such a crummy desk of deal, and that that great man had worn baggy pants, just like his. Here is a place, thought Dr. Dick, where a serious man does serious work. Serious. Serious indeed! Dr. Dick shuddered in all his fibers! Mr. Fort, be thou my staff, mein rod of iron!
The facts, as spelled out in numerous clippings, were brutal enough. Take the case of Sweet Mother Mulrooney! One wintery evening, as Mother Mulrooney bent over her flour bin, to scrape out a cup of flour, perhaps to bake a gentle strudel cake for her grandchildren (In fact, she had no grandchildren but everyday she expected them to arrive. She loved those little non-existant kids!)-- she was sure they loved her old-fashioned strudel cakes, that she, for her part, was wont to dunk in Sanka, as her husband had, when he was still alive. In fact, her husband was not dead, but she did not recognize him and had not been able to recognize him for the past ten years. He lived in the spare bedroom by himself, content with a few filthy habits, and payed his wife of many years a monthly "rent", for she considered him to be a "lodger". Ahhhh, the rich smells of baking "things" reminded her of her long-vanished family life, and of the days when her husband was still alive. Fortunately, she had a lodger who reminded her somewhat of her husband, though this man was no gentleman and seemed to have a great many filthy sexual habits. And so on that fatal day she bent over her copious flour bin, and her husband peeped through a crack in the wall and observed her rearend and began to masturbate. She scraped and bumped in the corners and crevices of the bin with her measuring cup, wiggling her butt as she did so, worrying, perhaps, that there might not be enough flour to bake a sufficient quantity of strudel cakes for such a vast number of grandchildren. And of course, her lodger would want a slice, a "piece", as he would put it, though what he would do with it she did not want to know. And she might have been thinking, despite the contra-indications of its probablility as posed by her somewhat Irish sounding name, of a simple kind of pun: cup-kopf. Head-cup. Cuphead! Heapcup! HAHAHAHAHAH! She laughed, then. She'd have to remember that one for her innumerable grandchildren. Dr. Dick paused at this point and in his anguish (it really was difficult to go on, and he wondered how Charles Fort had had the courage to do what he did) he pounded his crummy desk of deal with his fist, making a plastic novelty toy of the distant future leap up from the dust on his desktop, turn three summersets, and land again precisely where it had rested earlier, while making a serious of shrill beeps-- you must remember, this is one billion years in the future! Terror struck! A swarming black tide of CARNIVEROUS WEEVILS came moiling and boiling out of the gloomy flour bin. In mere seconds, they attacked her arm, running up it like tiny devils, and then they were all over her womanly breasts, then they stuffed her nose and mouth, they went for ther very eyes! They swarmed into her snatch! And within minutes she was reduced to a cleanly picked skeleton. Sated, the weevils retreated. And Sweet Mother Mulrooney's husband watched it all as he jacked off, fascinated, wondering whether he might now have suffered some sort of conditioning process and be forever victimized by sexual tastes and interests even more exotic than those he already sported.
Dr. Dick sighed. He removed his glasses. He pinched the bridge of his nose. He rubbed his eyes. He threw his massive body back into the depths of his thickly upholstered chair, making dust and vermin fly. Motes floated before him, illumined by the cheap desklamp he'd scrounged out of a dumpster recently, and to him each mote seemed to be a world, and if such were the case, he had no doubt that each of these myriad tiny worlds would teem with creatures as miserable as those he knew-- such was the meaning of the great handiwork.
Interpolated here is a page or two from a Crawling Eye comic, very rare. The Crawling Eye is oozing over its collection of Horror Comix. The speech balloon says: "Gee, this stuff is limp as over-cooked noodles! Isn't there some place where I can get a REAL horror fix?" Then, a lightbulb is shown over the Crawling Eye's "head". It remembers Earth! Vast occular systems swing into place, and mighty engines bring the tiny blue marble into the jaws of a Coude Spectrograph. The Crawling Eye's speech balloon fills with little whimpers of satisfaction and moans of pleasure.
Newspaper clippings littered his desk. Dr. Dick writhed within his tube of English Tweeds. It consoled him to imagine that H.G. Wells had perhaps worn such tweeds, even if he (Wells) had had the good sense not to attempt to work in such surroundings, cluttered with cans of paint thinner and tubes of glue, some mashed and some awaiting mashing. Dr. Dick muttered, "Now I have a case I can present to the world-- if the world is ready for it!" Gimme strenth! He cried out! Gimme strenth!
The facts were brutal: night after night, hovering in the starry skies over-reaching the vast wilderness of Wyoming, the incandescent image of a gigantic woman did appear, a vast naked woman far advanced in pregnancy looming a good five hundred feet tall and visible for many miles. Although the image swooped and glittered at times, shimmering like some kind of odd auroral display, it was obvious to all observers that the apparition held its hands in front of its face, and that it wept, projecting a sense of grief that caused some to make the following comments: "Shook me up..."; "Pissed me off..."; "If this is advertising, I don't like it..."; "Made my dog piss on my leg..."; "I wish the Army would get out a big old Atomic Cannon and put a hole in that thing, right in the bellybutton...". Fading in and out, like a picture on a poorly adjusted TV, the Weeping Woman O' Wyoming would be observed for hours at a time, and then, just as suddenly as she would appear, she would be gone!
Dr. Dick leaped from his chair! His arms flailed! His super-scientific novely toy jumped up with him, in sympathy, possesing a neural network finer than yours or mine! A carom of thunder rumbled away, into the distance, and a flash of lightening and another nearly instantaneous blast of thunder made him cringe. The wind roared at his windows, snatched at his roof shingles-- tree branches scratched at his tiny house. It was only that monster again, nature. Murthering bitch, he thought, meaner than a Dallas Ho, thou art, and he felt very defiant. I ain't afraid of no natural process! All these portents would be empty if only one could perfect the aerosol sterilant-- Instant Death in an ozone friendly pressurized can, anti-life for home consumption! He lacked the intellectual moxie to do it, to create it. But if one could unravel the chemistry, why, one would have a solution to the carniverous weevil problem for all time, as well as the nematode plague, the sowbug affliction, the crab-louse infestation, the cricket, the skipping worm, the fungi that always attacked Dr. Dick's bread before he could eat the half of a loaf, and one's fellow men.
Oh my God! Dr. Dick swirled in the suddenly pitch dark room! It was absolutely dark, but only for a moment, for a flash he took to be lightening, initially, in the great confusion of his emotions, turned out to be not that at all, but the baleful glare of the Weeping Woman, not in Wyoming, and not five-hundred feet tall, but all too real, and scaled to fit his study! She stood in the very middle of his crummy desk of deal! He thought: I wouldn't need an Atomic Cannon-- a lousy .22 would do, and I don't even have that...
(Editor's Note: What I would want to know, now, is, what did that neat little novelty toy do? Did it do anything at all? That would tell us a great deal!)