[continued from previous message]

rocketing green and red plaid with enormous spinning lavender
and yellow polka-dots that exploded orange and yellow a
million times over... (And still you only have a fraction of an
idea...) At a glance you could see the couples who were
sexually attracted to one another, the ones that were deeply in
love, the ones that had been married to each other for fifty
years...
Then I saw the Man. One of the Men. At a glance he looked
like all the other men, the ordinary men, that guy back in the
apartment. Brownish-blonde hair, a neat little beard, sort of
overweight, a decent but not exceptional suit. There was only
one difference: There was this... *thing*... centered right in the
middle of his forehead. Not an eye, an actual eye, but aware and
seeing nonetheless, vivid and unblinking. It was small, but
incredibly compact and... busy, a thousands squirming layers.
Dense, a knotted bundle of a million black protons and
electrons madly zipping and whirring, all leaving stinging
multicolored trails. It wasn't as bright and sharp as the Device
had been, but it was far from pleasant.
There was a tall redheaded woman with him. They were
walking arm and arm, talking and laughing like any other
youngish couple, but that woman's mindcolors... they were
perverted. Corrupted. They were stretched wildly out of shape,
wrapped and knotted tightly around that thing on her
companion's forehead, like a cheap shirt I once saw that had
been ripped right off a man's back and sucked into the spinning
hub of a piece of farm equipment.
But that wasn't the worst of it, not by a long shot. As they
walked together up that busy street in a single eternal moment...
that woman was riding the man's penis. I can't explain it, she
wasn't in two places at the same time, but as she walked up the
street in her lime-green sundress and her matching heels and
purse, laughing and smiling, she was also stripped naked and
collared and folded over, pulling his massive cock down into
her dripping snatch giving him a blowjob cracking her jaws to
breaking taking it down all the way doing it doggie style with
feverish intensity, her blue eyes draining muddy and then totally
dry...
And there were other women there too, with her. They
weren't there on the street, they were off behind desks and
walking hallways somewhere else in whatever town this scene
was part of it, but they were with that man nonetheless, and
they were *all* servicing him, all at once. A even taller blonde
woman. A black woman with incredibly long hair. A busty
brunette with very *short* fuzzy hair. Others maybe, not quite
as clear, ones that he hadn't fully pulled down into his mind,
down into the bottomless poison of that third eye...
They walked on, passing out of sight around the corner.
Neither of them never so much as glanced in my direction.
Just as they had rounded that corner, another Man appeared
from the same place, moving in the opposite direction. I didn't
see their moment of actual meeting, and I would have given a
lot for that. What would I have seen? Hostility? A casual nod
between equals? Nothing at all? The newcomer was much older
than the first, tall with a thrusting beak of a nose and a flowing
white mane of hair, still handsome in a bony, even fossilized
sort of way. He was walking alone, his pace slow and his
expression thoughtful. He held a gold-topped cane in one hand,
but didn't use it. The thing on his forehead was a hundred times
deeper, blacker, more rotten, and I couldn't begin to count the
number of women that were twisted over and shackled tightly
to his cock. I caught a glimpse of some of the eyes of the older
ones, the ones that had been trapped down there for
*decades*...
I turned, fighting the urge to vomit, and deliberately crashed
myself into the wall beside me.

* * *

It took a lot longer for me to regain myself. When I finally
was in shape to look around again, I saw that I was in a dance
studio, a wide wooden floor surrounded on all sides by mirrors
(or windows, or something made of glass...) There were
ballerinas there, several of them, but it clearly not a
performance. Some kind of practice session. Some of them
were limbering up around the edges of things, their legs up on
those handrails you see lining the walls in such places, while
others were flitting gracefully back and forth leaping high. I
only noticed all of this tangentially. My gaze was drawn
immediately to a thin hard-eyed woman shrouded in black stood
off to one side. She was almost a female version of that second
Man back out on the street, with even more extraneous matter
slued away. She didn't have a third eye like the Men, but there
was something *like* it there, tight and hard and furious,
wound up painfully and methodically year after year, decade
after decade, and held in place with grasping claws. It wasn't
bottomless, but it went down a hell of a long way.
The crone suddenly glanced in my direction, sharp and black.
She didn't see me, I'm almost positive of that, but while
snellside of the TV, she was the only individual who seemed
even slightly aware of my presence. I started to back away from
her
Then of the ballerinas did a spin, and something flashed there,
catching my eye. She landed, her back was to me. Her bare
back, her costume swooping low.
It was just like all the other dancers in the room. I guess until
that moment I hadn't really *wanted* to see.
Except for its larger size, the keys that stuck out there, spun
with smooth deadly grace, were exactly like the one on the
Device.
As I watched, one of the ballerinas ran down and stopped, her
upper body tipped over, her eyes blank. The crone stopped
looking in my direction, stalked over, and started winding the
younger woman back up. The ballerina jerked as her key was
turned.
The expression on their faces...
I turned and walked into the nearest pool.

* * *

I visited other places, several other places.
Some kind of stone-walled S&M dungeon run by a tall
statuesque woman... a Woman... wearing a tight black leather
outfit, flagellating the pale white skin of the naked man she had
strapped into some bizarre metal framework. (Unlike the Crone,
*Her* third eye was quite real, but also different than that of
the Men. Opposite but equal, spinning the other way, all of the
colors reversed, yin and yang...)
A bizarre temple-like structure filled with enormous pillars,
where a tough-looking man (the flickerings of a third eye
nestled in the crags of his forehead) was engaged in a running
gun-battle with a group of hooded cultists, a naked blonde
woman clinging to his arm.
An orgy-scene in a pillow-filled room, members of both sexes
happily and vigorously intermingled. Either there was some
bestiality involved as well, or some of those guys *really* need
to shave. No third eyes in evidence anywhere.
A college dorm-room, much like the one I had occupied at
Greson, with two male students having slow, almost grim, sex
on the bed...
A long curving metallic corridor half-filled with debris and
smoke where a large green slobbering monster was raping
about six screaming earth-women, all at once, shooting its seed
into them, impregnating them...
A man and a woman in an artist's loft, painting a picture by
fucking on top a giant paint-smeared canvas which lay in the
middle of the floor...
A pixie-like queen sitting on her emerald throne, surrounded
by adoring male subjects, most of them buffed and muscular,
their physiques glowing and exposed and perfect...
A young pockmarked nerd with taped glasses and buckteeth,
dangling a shiny gold pocket watch in front of the eyes of the
two pretty girls, one white, one Chinese, who knelt naked at his
feet, their eyes blank and worshipful...
I staggered on and on, somehow unable to turn back or aside,
my mind stretched and pulled like taffy, there was just more,
more, more...

* * *

And then there was the last room. The very last one, my legs
were about to collapse out from under me and everything was
going thin and stretched. I pulled my eyes into focus, and I
realized I was standing on the set of a TV newsroom. But not
just any newsroom. For the first time since my journey had
begun, the room was one that was known to me. It was the set
for one of the local network affiliates in the town where I lived.
Call it KXES. There was the cityscape with the familiar green
mountains tastefully arranged behind them. There was the
equally-familiar gray-and-silver newsdesk with the KXES logo
splashed across it, although I was seeing from an new angle,
almost from the side. And seated behind that newsdesk...
There were two people.
The first...
I recognized the man. It was Dale Clark, one of the station's
two main weeknight co-anchors. The amazing plastic man,
every piece of him smooth and synthetic and fake, teeth and suit
and hair and sincerity covering the absolute vacuum within. The
perfect paragon of the degraded age of TV `news' in which we
now live.
I walked closer, staggered really, and for some reason, I
reached up and adjusted the glasses as I walked, something I
had stopped doing as I had been blasted from place to place to
place.
What I saw... even more than all the rest, I'm not sure how
*real* it was, what I was actually looking at.
There was definitely something there, though.
At first glance, first twist, Dale looked just like he always did,
suit, tie, blondish hair blow-dried then shallaced forever into
place. Surprisingly, his colors streamed and flashed as brightly
as all the rest I had seen; if nothing else, I had learned that the
man actually had a brain lurking under all of that gloss. He did
*not* have a third eye, for which I was profoundly grateful.
Then a final twist. The glasses hovered right on the very
highest edge of snallsight, thin and bright and painful. The thick
lead-lining of the newsdesk melted away, and I saw what was
going on behind there, under there, forever and forever in the
blackness out of sight of the camera. No wonder ol' Dale was
always smiling. Unlike with those Men I had seen back on the
street, this woman was quite real and all the way there. (Or was
she?) A brown-skinned woman, her curves perfect and smooth,
her hair tied back into a very long tight ponytail. She had on a
blindfold, her ears were plugged, her arms and legs restrained. I
could see the electric glow of the small engines of the vibrators
as they endlessly buzzed in her sex, in her ass, deep and hungry,
everywhere...
Her lips were wrapped around Dale's exposed penis, and she
was pumping madly, wantonly. She would be there, doing that,
without all of those restraints. The real blindfold and earplugs
and vibrators were *inside* her skull, her colors all tightly
under wraps, locked down, strapped down tight and blind and
stimulated to furious buzzing. I stared at all of this, I don't
know how long I stared, and then I remembered that *two*
people usually sat at that desk, and I looked on. She was there.
There was the thing that was the most real of it all, the thing I
remember most clearly of all.
Kari. Kari Torenza, the other of the two regular KXES
newsanchors. She was a petite blonde woman, her hair swept
up in a classy but professional style. She was very beautiful, and
I had always sort of had a long-distance crush on her. I also
thought that unlike the Dalester, she was far too good a
reporter to be wasting her time doing the usual `If It Bleeds, It
Leads' crap that has long become the mainstay of all local news
in this country. (Hell, all news in this country when you get
down to it...)
I was expecting to see a mirror-image of what was going on
with Dale, some chained hunk (like those back in that throne
room, maybe) under the desk feverishly working on her sex
with his tongue, his hefty penis caught up in some elaborate
steel trap... But no. There was only Kari behind that half of the
desk. She was entirely naked, her perky little breasts poking
proudly into the air. Around her neck was a thin gold collar
with the KXES logo sportily emblazoned on the front of it.
(Her microphone was clipped to it as well.) She smiled her
usual dazzling smile, and more vibrators buzzed deep inside her
violated body.
And the colors in her head...
There are no words. They were the best I had seen, in all of
the people I had seen. The brightest and the deepest and most
perfect. And I don't want to share my memory of them with
you, not even if I could find the right words.
They were there. And they were being slowly destroyed,
perverted, by what They... whoever `They' were... were doing
to her. She was fighting it, but already, all she could do was sit
there and smile and read the words on the Tele-Prompter.
I walked to her, walked to her without thinking, and I yanked
the collar from around her throat. Yanked away whatever it was
that that collar was representing. It turned out I *could* touch
objects; the thing burned and whipped against my hand and I
tore away the vibrators and all the rest without hurting Kari
without even breaking her skin and there was a howl and
everything went away, the snallights closing in on me from
allsides andpouncingand

* * *

I woke up, lying on the floor of the apartment, the very first
apartment, the one where all of this had started.
The machine was still spinning away, although the marble was
about to shatter, I was almost out of time, and it was my last
marble. I didn't remember putting the others in the slot, but
they were gone, nonetheless.
I didn't look at the TV. I didn't *want* to look at the TV. I
only remembered bits and pieces of what had just happened,
and lot of it was bad. My hand hurt horribly, a line of fire
crawling across it and down onto my wrist.
But my time was running out, and there was one thing I still
had to do.
I crawled to my feet, picked up the Device (oddly it was light
now, as light as a feather) and I stumbled slowly towards the
front door of my apartment.
That door opened not into a hallway but rather a little
fence-enclosed porch, with my welcome mat and a potted plant
and stairs leading up to the third floor down to the first. Beyond
that was the parking lot. So I guess it was really more of a
condo than an apartment, wasn't it? Not that it matters. I
kicked the door open, I lurched out onto the porch. For the first
time since all of this had started, there was a sound in the air, an
unpleasant sound, but I didn't really hear it then, not until later
did I remember that I had been hearing it from the moment I
woke up back in the apartment. I went on, out to the railing out
to were I could see the sky and I looked up, my jaw hanging
like an idiot.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon. The clouds had burned
away and the sky was bright and blue.
And I could see the stars. They were huge, burning up there,
burning so very incredibly far away. For the first and last time in
my life, I truly understood how big and how far away those
little white pinpricks are. I was *glad* they were so far away.
Which made me realize...
My gaze went on, dragged up and up and up to the sun, our
own little pinprick in the infinite blackness. It was hovering off
in the western side of the sky, just beginning its nightly plunge
towards the ocean. I could look at it. I could look right into the
heart of the sun without pain. Without *physical* pain, at least.
It was only for a moment, the power-marble detonated with
bang leaving me blind and stunned, but it was more than
enough.
What did I see? Let's just put it this way. If more people
could see what I saw forever spinning up there, roaring and
howling and leaving those gigantic searing trails... we'd have a
lot more sun worshippers out there. Real sun worshippers.
We'd be back to building stone pyramids and wielding sharp
obsidian knives. The screams and smoke of the burning flesh
would reach all the way to heaven.
I vomited and pissed and crapped in my pants all at once,
falling backwards to land on my ass with a thud, still cradling
the Device in my arms.
The sound was louder, and it penetrated my mind like an ice
pick. My vision flashed afterimages of what I had just been
slapped with, and I couldn't get up.
Then the car came. I call it a car, but, well, in my more honest
moments I have to say that it was just something shaped like a
car. It had four wheels. Doors. Lights. Black-tinted windows.
Tail fins. Really nasty tail fins that could slice you in half as they
went screaming past.
And how they did scream, scream like a dive-bomber
plunging for its target. The car-thing came into the parking lot,
twisting around the corners, its tires leaving no black marks on
the pavement. It slid to a stop directly below me at a wide
angle, and the passenger door swung open. Chill foulness
spilled out, followed by...
A man. I call it a man, but... hell, we've been over this
already. You get the idea. Two legs. Eyes. Fingers. A gun on
one hip, a sword on the other. It had all of these things.
And its face, you ask? As I said, I was running on fumes at
this point, but, remember those Third Eyes? Well, that's what
this Man, the Last Man, that's what his whole face looked like.
He was a great big Third Eye wrapped up in a leathery scarred
skin and wound tight with a really nasty key and set to forever
walking across the wide world.
Sent out to enforce the law. Whose law? You don't want to
know. I don't want to know. All I do know is, I had broken it. I
knew this as soon as saw him. I was guilty, there was no appeal,
and he had come to carry out my sentence.
He came walking, and he pulled the gun from its holster as he
did, up the steps, the sounds of his boots thudding on the wood.
He came into view, and the gun was waiting.
And so I died. The sound was very long and very loud.

* * *

And so...
I was reborn.
I almost wrote `and so I woke up and it was all a dream!'
Because for a time, I thought it was all a dream. For a time, I
barely remembered any of it. But gradually, I came to realize
and to remember. To remember that things had profoundly
*changed*.
You may have noted that in the earlier parts of this little
narrative, that while you learned all about the life and times of
the late Ted Capotosto, I didn't say a whole lot about The
Writingest Fool. What I do for a living, whether I was married
or living alone, whether there were any of *my* girlfriends
passing through that college apartment. There was a reason for
this.
Because everything has changed. My past has changed. I can
remember, more or less, what my life was like before that trunk
and its contents arrived, but now...
I wrote for a living before. I write for a living now. I get paid
a lot more for the new stuff, but it's still sitting all day and
staring at the screen of a word processor. I'm writing another
book, and everyone says its going to be the most popular one
I've done to date. I suppose they are right.
I had girlfriends in college. That has not changed.
I had a girlfriend before. I have a wife now. The girlfriend was
named Molly, and I had met her at the newspaper where I
worked. She was a smart and fun-loving girl with gorgeous
dark hair. We got along pretty damn well, and I think in a
couple of more months I would have asked her to move in with
me, and I think she would have said yes. Maybe some day after
that we would have made the whole thing official. Now, Molly
still exists, is still alive, she still works for that newspaper. She's
going with a nice guy named Herb Carlson, who works for a
local radio station. I checked on her and him, and she seems
happy enough. She doesn't know I exist, even if she's read one
of my books. I use a pen name.
My wife? I suppose it comes as no surprise that my wife is
Kari, the woman behind the newsdesk. We met five years ago
when she interviewed me about one of my first books.
Afterwards, we went out, we fell in love, we got married.
I had an apartment before, a condo. I have an apartment now,
a penthouse. Again, I suppose its no surprise that it's the same
one that those two people were fighting love in, high up on the
east side of the city near the harbor, with a lovely sweeping
balcony view of the main downtown skyline and the green
mountains beyond. We may be getting an even better one;
Kari's now working (has always worked) at KXES's main
competitor across town, the one station in these parts that still
maintains a slight semblance of decency and good journalism.
Her excellent work there has led her to being courted by one of
the national networks, and we may soon be moving back east. It
would help with my career as well, so while I would miss this
town a bit, I don't mind too much.
Ted was dead before. Ted is dead now. The Device is long
gone, not a trace left behind, but the trunk arrived empty at our
penthouse after Ted's death. It now sits at the foot of our bed,
filled with some of the most important things from our
marriage, so that if we ever have to flee, we can hopefully carry
it between us and save them. It seems only fitting.
It all sounds rather nice, I suppose, when I put it this way.
Wasn't I speaking earlier of punishment? Yes, I was. My crime
was ripping that collar from around Kari's neck. As I've already
said ad nasuem I'm still not sure if it all was literal or symbolic,
what I saw, what I did, while snalling over the rainbow, but that
one impulsive act definitely upset someone's plans, somewhere,
and now I am paying the penalty.
The Last Man shot me right between the eyes, and he left...
not a hole, but something else. Maybe the exact opposite of a
hole. I stand in the bathroom in the mornings and I shave, and I
can almost see what is there now, spinning and buzzing, leaving
its little trails.
Kari's been acting different around me lately. Alone at night
in our bedroom. So has Viola, my literary agent. Alone in her
office up on the tenth floor of the Bloy Building. And Ruby, the
dark-skinned woman who comes in some days to do
housework, alone in our penthouse apartment. She's been
coming up almost every day lately, actually.
They have all been acting very differently.
And I am writing a new book. It's practically writing itself,
the words stringing together, the patterns forming, page after
page after page. The next time I go out on a book signing tour,
I may very well be that World Famous Author after all. There
may even be dampened panties.
And now we are probably moving back east, to mix with the
very highest levels of society.
I look into the mirror, and I think maybe, for the first time, I
begin to have a flickering of understanding and empathy about
that older Man out there on that street.
I am beginning to understand what he was thinking about.
I am beginning, maybe, just a little, to understand why he was
walking alone.

(end)






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