October 1, 2022.

You awake slowly, your mind and memories bound in a deep and lightless bed of cotton, wresting themselves together blindly, haltingly and by feel, towards the sensation of consciousness. Blurred images swim in your eyes, wet and only but half open. It's impossible to interpret them, spilled watercolor and shadow.

The effort proves too much. Your mind slips back into the depths of nothingness, and you cease to exist, once again. For a while.

After some infinity of time, you begin the ascent anew. Another infinity, and your eyes glimmer open again, light piercing the void. Another, and you remember the existence of your body, your limbs. You can't feel them yet, but the memory of them gives you some sense of your body again, and with it, comes your mind. Your eyes, finally, flicker open fully, and you can feel yourself breathe, the rank air filling your lungs, expelling through wracked throat and dry mouth.

The room slowly comes into focus as your eyes regain their function.

It appears to be the interior of some decrepit rotunda, piss-yellow sunlight piercing in from an array of oval and ill washed windows. Your neck doesn’t respond to your commands to turn, so instead you circle around with your bleary eyes, feeling tired, oh, so tired, or something below tired, like rising from the grave. Incurious pigeons and thick reams of layered pigeon shit sit on the ledges just below the blearing windows.

The light illuminates stacks of books, some large, leather wrapped, and decaying; but a great number newer, glossy paperbacks blossoming with mold and mildew, their airport-fresh patina forever stained. Some of the bindings have completely come apart, spilling leaves across the floor, yellowed from years of sun.

Your eyes adjust, now seeing into the shadows, and you spy now a bulky figure, hunched on a small stool, its hair greasy and flowing from its lump-ridden head. It appears to be breathing heavily, raggedly, the dampness of its back sodding its thin shirt, sweat glistening off its hairy neck.

You attempt to cry out to it, but you emit nothing more than a low and unfamiliar wheeze, vibrating through your throat muscles, nerves in your back molars inexplicably crying out. Still, it’s enough. The figure turns. Its face is ghastly. Its eyes meet yours. Small, dull, piggish eyes, embedded in a pocked and unshorn face. Its mouth splits from beneath the black and patchy beard, revealing jagged, yellowing teeth.

“Ah, you’re awake,” it croaks, in an ugly, high-pitched tone. It lifts a pair of glasses from the floor with fat, dumb fingers, raising them to conceal the eyes. You wish to god you hadn’t gotten its attention. Something seems terribly wrong.

“No need to be afraid,” it says, rising, revealing its hideous, toad-like body, clad in greasy t-shirt, stained and threadbare denim jeans. It approaches. The stench, rotten milk and liquor, hits you before it has crossed half the room. You attempt to cry out, your throat disobeying you, nothing but another hiss.

“You should not try to speak. It will... prove difficult. I am a friend. I don’t suppose you remember me.”

You do not. This... thing... is not a creature which you have ever seen before, in waking, or even in nightmare. Its tiny eyes squint as it smiles, wetness glistening below thick and matted brow. “My name is Jon Phillips. We were friends, once. Or, acquaintances at least.”

You try to make your body move, but it does not respond to you. In fact, you cannot even feel it, anything but a dull ache, a very distant pain. What was the last thing you remember? Who is this thing? Where is this place? Jon Phillips? Why does it so freely offer its name, if it means you harm?

“Shh, shh, there, there. Calm yourself. There is no sense in struggling. I mean you no harm. I am simply a... well, I am a vessel. For the Muses.”

The creature, Jon Phillips, lifts one flabby, pale, hairy arm, and gestures around it. The pigeons? Is it referring to the pigeons as Muses? This thing is insane. You must get away. You must get away now.

“I always struggled, you know. With capturing my visions, those beautiful, horrible visions given to me, by the Muses. I lacked... what do you call it. You know. Motivation. I was given the images, and yet, without a drive to draw them from me, without any vessel but the blank page to spill them to, the beauty of my visions languished inside me, turning to sickness, disease, and eventually, something close to madness. Words on a page are nothing more than that. An emptiness worse than emptiness. And no one to read them... no one... so alone... crying madly to the void.”

It laughs, staring at the floor beneath its flat and knotted feet, its laugh a disgusting, huck huck huck, like dry heaves. It looks back up from the floor. At you. Directly into your eyes. You try to close them and find the horror too intense, you cannot, you cannot look away from this horrifying image in front of you, or the terrible things it is saying.

“But now, I have you. And I thank you. I truly must thank you. For you have solved my problem. No longer will my Muses give from me, to the page, to nothing. Now, they have an audience. Now, they have an audience, if only of one.”

It reaches out, now, touches the side of your face. You try to flinch away but cannot. Its touch is so gentle, so disturbing, its fingers soft and wet.

“You... you do not need to do any work, now, to read my words. I have taken the difficult efforts myself, for you, to make things easier, for you. You are now page, and reader. You are audience, and form. And I will write only for you. From the Muses, to me, directly to you, without any liason, any creative broker. You are... you are, my beautiful, perfect, audience of one...”

It is then that it rotates the mirror it has been standing by, and shows you... you don’t recognize it as yourself, at first, and when you do, what’s left of your mouth attempts, and fails, to open into a scream.

Your eyes lock into your own, wide, swiveling, bloodshot. Tears leak down your cheeks, past your top lip, over ruined flesh, to... your jaw has been completely removed. Everything below your mouth has been either amputated, or destroyed in more hideous and insidious ways. Your head is no longer part of your body, instead simply a dome of skull and flesh, isolated, corrupted, and part of some ghastly machine...

The hard palate of your mouth is bolted to a copper plate, from which the keyboard of a typewriter springs. A purple slug, your fat and writhing tongue, works uselessly above it. Wires spring from the keys, tracing up through hanging vertebrae, directly plugged into your cervical spinal cord, and from there, buried deeply into your skull. Your trachea winds down a wooden dowel, held in place with oily fencing staples, to a thick plastic bag, which heaves as you attempt to scream. Your trachea works madly.

“Now now, none of that,” murmurs Jon Phillips, this hideous tormentor, this insane surgeon, this cruel, hairy frog of a thing. “Time for our first story together. What shall it be? Muses, speak to me.”

It listens, as you scream silently, you attempt to tear yourself from this horrifying situation, even to die. But Jon Phillips doesn’t hear you. It hears its Muses. They coo, calmly, above, amongst the windows.

“Ah, yes,” the hideous thing says, and sits down on a stool, in front of you, poising its dirty fingers above the typewriter keys that have replaced your lower jaw. “That’s just the thing.”

When its finger presses down on the first key, it is as if a great crackling firework had burst just behind your eyes, blossoming through your brain tissue until you see, lit in fire, bounding in front of your jittering eyes: W

E

L C O M E

T O

S P O O K T O B E R

S T O R I E S

Y E A R

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