kagablog

There was a small chapel on the grounds of Alphonse Guava. It was a part of the old estate and the imp maintained it purely for aesthetic reasons. He enjoyed the quietude of the place in the afternoons, and the degradation of Number Nun upon its altar. He even liked the light beneath the quaint stainglass. The blasphemous episodes within the chapel troubled Number Nun greatly, but she was of course powerless to stop them and endured their torments in the name of her synthetic saviour. In the late afternoons, the sun would strike the chapel from the left side, throwing shafts of dusty, honey light across the altar and into the shadowy nave, illuminating the structure like the hull of an old galleon.

The deactivated body of Number Nun lay, half naked upon the antique altar, a puppet with hacked strings. Her inert form was suffused with late afternoon sunshine, lower half exposed, the inner glow of her parts and clockwork mechanisms dim and still. She appeared in fact, for all intents and purposes, dead. The android’s operating systems had been shut down and now showed no more life than a mannequin, yet another life-size effigy of the blessed Virgin. The sunlight lit her glassy hips and highs, illuminating her inner workings and the messy residues caught within her somewhat mangled synthetic genitalia. Many people had evidently been at her in the night and the playflesh was ruined beyond repair. The soft-feel pads hung in shreds, and the entire mechanism was dire need of replacement. The Sugar Twins were draped like cats along the aisle. One was sleeping and the other was on its stomach, purring. They wore matching red velvet jumpsuits, which complimented perfectly the crimson lines around their metallic eyes. The sleeping twin had bundled itself into a heavy white cape, coiled like a fallen white eagle upon the wine red carpet. The twin who was awake studied floating, glowing dust motes with feline attention, moving its head very slowly back and forth. The chapel was a mess of champagne bottles and cigarette butts. Broken things gleamed in and amongst the heaps of confetti. Soiled party streamers were tangled across sacred imagery, dangling down into space like Christmas decorations. A window had been smashed and coloured glass twinkled across overturned pews. The lucid twin stopped moving its head suddenly. A small object had caught its attention. It lay discarded in the darkness beneath the lectern, flashing intermittently. The twin flipped up fluidly, padding over to the lectern on long, pale feet. It went down, reached under and scooped out the thing it had seen, tasting it quickly. The object was about the size of a small key and resembled a translucent, mechanical baby squid. Tiny see-through tendrils flopped pathetically about, questing this way and that. They were adjoined to a glassy central node, within which pulsed a faint, but steady red light. It was obviously some vital part of Number Nun that had either been removed or come loose before, during or after her rape. The Sugar Twin stroked the part lightly with its finger and the tendrils flayed delicately against the crescent of the nail, much like a minute anemone. The twin picked up the object and sauntered over to the prone figure of Number Nun, who lay propped on her back, legs apart like a glass spider. Her crystalline head hung back, off the edge of the altar, caught in the heavy light. Little rainbows flickered throughout her cranial networks, and from this perspective it was easy to see the tiny aperture which lay just above and between her blank eyes, glittering like the vacant socket of a third eye. The Sugar Twin loitered, dreamily observing the tiny mechanical octopoid wriggle accross its palm. Finally the twin tweaked up the mechanism and plugged it back into Number Nun’s forehead. The tendrils immediately extended, slithering throughout the translucent skull as the device clicked itself snugly into place. The red pulsing switched to blue and all of a sudden, her internal mechanisms began powering, charging the silent air with a delicate hum. Lights flickered on throughout her body and her eyes began to iris open. She sat up in shock, scanning about her.

“How long have I been deactivated?” she asked reflexively. The sound of her electronic default voice disturbed the silence of the chapel, frightening some birds from the rafters.

The sleeping twin awoke instantly and they both regarded her like passive animals, or even sleepwalkers. Number Nun arose and began reviewing her memory core. She was shocked to find that certain areas had been tampered with, creating fuzzy grey holes in her perception of reality. Almost two days were missing from her memory. She performed a quick internal scan and discovered that a small hole had been drilled into her skull.

Number Nun stalked furiously up to the house with the Sugar Twins trailing in her wake like manta rays. They became distracted by something in the grove at one point and loitered in the sunshine while she moved on across the savaged lawn. The wake of orgiastic celebrations had utterly defiled the grounds. She saw a white limousine crushed like a menthol cigarette into an old fig tree. Tables and couches had been overturned throughout the lawns and party detritus was strewn everywhere, blotching the greenery with flotsam and jetsam. There were inert figures lurking in the flowerbeds, some still moving slowly against each other. The sound of an electric guitar thrashed and wailed from somewhere inside the house.

The interior of the villa was even more of an unspeakable catastrophe. Broken vases and mangled furniture cascaded across vast expanses of ruined carpeting. Crockery lay crushed amongst rotting food whilst iguanas and insects drank from the fallen bowls of punch. A trio of unconscious go-go girls had been stuffed into a closet in the pantry. She passed a Buddhist Punk in the hall. The youth was writhing and gibbering feverishly on the stone tiles. He kept banging his limbs sickeningly against the walls with his exertions, drenched in greasy sweat and all tangled up in his robes. A massy, greenish hump jutted from the nape of his neck like a tumour, and this seemed to be the primary source of his physical grief. Number Nun moved away, performing a quick audio scan, scrubbing under the distant, insistent noise of the electric guitar. She discovered the sound of a film being projected in the private cinema and delved toward it.

Michelle sat in the cinema with the house lights up, muttering into a barely noticeable headset. She was running her favourite reel while she chattered away: A heavily solarized and hand-tinted cut-up of Cecil.B.DeMille’s THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Whoever had desecrated the celluloid had done a choice job, creating little obscene animations throughout the film using glowing scratch marks and dosing all the characters with flickering slashes of digital colour. The footage had been so pixellated with 8-bit tones that it sometimes resembled snippets of an old Atari videogame. A couple of refugees from the previous night’s chaos were doing unspeakable things to one another in one of the back rows, but Michelle ignored them. The distant overdrive guitar was much more discernable in the cinema, sifting down from one of the upstairs rooms. Number Nun appeared in the entranceway and called down to Michelle.

“Have you seen Judas?” she demanded.

Michelle ignored her, remaining frozen in place, crucified against the kaleidoscopic mess of the screen.

“What happened last night?” Number Nun snapped. “Was Mister Sister here? Why was I unplugged?”

Michelle ground her teeth, desperately wishing that Number Nun would leave her alone. A small sheen of sweat had broken out across her forehead as she surreptitiously turned the volume of the film up whilst hissing quietly into the tiny mic.

“No! I’ve been crucified you idiot!” she whispered ferociously whilst trying not to move her lips. “I can’t just hide the communications device! I knocked out her periphery tracer with the dentists drill last night so she can’t scan for any hardware and electronics in her vicinity, I couldn’t do more, she has safety mechanisms…Fuck she might see I move now…wait…Wait!”

“Well?” Number Nun called from the door.

Michelle remained frozen and unresponsive, too nerve racked to even turn her head.

“Never mind, you filthy heathen,” Number Nun muttered, sweeping up a flight of stairs. She passed through opulent, trashed surrounds; courtyards cluttered with comatose bodies and pilfered mattresses, ivy trellised koi-ponds poisoned with rum coco and bodily fluids. Marble statues had been spray-painted black and a leopard lay dead in one of the bedrooms. She saw screened gazeboes charred beyond repair by accidental fires and a bathtub full of cocktail scampi. At one point she passed another anguished Buddhist punk who was struggling with a hump on his back. This one was crawling painfully across a large rug, puking carrots at irregular intervals. Number Nun passed other random survivors, all writhing in exhausted but somehow orgiastic pleasure. And it seemed to her as though their pleasure centers could not be deactivated, despite the obvious fatigue of their bodies. More greenish humps disfigured these Boschean figures. Some of the figures seemed to be somehow greener than the others, the green of their humps leeching into their flesh. Their bodies of these advanced cases were all slightly warped at the joints and limbs. Faceted, insect-like patterns were developing within their clammy flesh, altering them subtly. The solid wall of discordant guitar noise had by now intensified, and Number Nun could easily pinpoint its source of origin. She moved up stairs and down corridors toward it, pausing outside the disused dance studio. A familiar sound of breathing had caught the attention of her spectrograph sensor and she tuned into it, entering the long, dusty dance studio. Large windows flooded the room in the cold glow of late afternoon. The half-light was reflected in the expansive ballet mirrors lining the far wall of the chamber. A large, gloomy pavilion brooded in the darkest corner. It seemed part of some long abandoned carnival float, the relic of long-forgotten mardi gras. A large crocodile waddled around the base, gurgling up at something on the roof of the structure.

“Childbride!” Number Nun called. “Come down from there at once.”

There was a scuffling and after a few seconds Taty’s bewildered face emerged over the edge of the roof. She was scruffy and dirty, still wearing the tattered remains of the cheap flannel nightgown, wrapped in some old stage cloth she had discovered atop the pavilion.

“Where have you been!” Taty screeched, bursting into tears.

“Childbride, stop sniffling and come down from there at once.”

“But the monster will eat me!”

Number Nun deftly approached the crocodile and grabbed it by the tail. She swung it aside one-handedly, as though it were nothing more than a teddy bear. The surprised reptile tumbled and skidded across the room, crashing into a large ballet mirror. It hissed and spat but did not come any closer. Number Nun stood directly beneath Taty.

“Jump,” Number Nun commanded.

Taty hesitated, struggling out of the stage cloth. She gripped the edge of the float, faltered and then dropped neatly into Number Nun’s outstretched arms. The android was about to set her down but Taty clung fast, refusing to be released, sobbing into the black cassock. Number Nun crossed back into the corridors with her as though carrying a doll. She bore Taty up through the house and the screaming noise of the guitar grew steadily louder.

“I couldn’t find Cherry Cola,” Taty sniffed.

“Cherry Cola?” Number Nun frowned. “The waitress from the Dead Duck? What is she doing here? What happened these last two nights Childbride?”

Taty started crying again, blowing her nose in her nightgown. Number Nun paused, realizing that a detour would be necessary.

“We are near your room,” she said. “We might as well get you some fresh clothes.”

The room had survived surprisingly unscathed and Number Nun was finally able to detach Taty from her and get her out of the wretched nightgown.

“Cherry Cola brought me here from town,” Taty snivelled, wriggling into a pair of skinny white jeans. “But when we got here it was just terrible!”

She rummaged around for a t-shirt and her favorite black jersey while guitar noise thrashed and fed far off in the background.

“The carrot stealing monks were here with the Big Buddha and this green alien boy who…it was so disgusting.”

She paused to breathe deeply, shaking on the edge of the bed. Number Nun wet a towel with warm water and began to wipe the grime off her face and neck with it.

“There were these rituals they were doing…” Taty whispered, her eyes all red and unfocused. “They were wearing robes with black candles and people’s heads were…their heads were just lying there. On the floor! Like cabbages! And there were all these funny patterns drawn on the floors in white paint and rat poison…They were all…they were all getting with the monster boy! And then they caught us and they wanted me to make it with him too. But I ran away, into the secret passages…Then the crocodiles got loose.”

She buried her head in Number Nun’s robes breathing raggedly.

“Where was Romeo the Dealer?” Number Nun asked.

“He was out filming with K-Star…I didn’t see them after,” came Taty’s muffled voice.

Number Nun took her firmly by the shoulders.

“Listen Childbride, it’s not safe here anymore,” She said. “Put some shoes on and lets get moving now.”

Taty nodded and Number Nun could see that the muscles all along her neck were tense and bunched. She helped her dress and then led her by the hand, up the stairs, to the master chamber of Alphonse Guava.

The white and gold bunker doors were firmly shut. The shrieking instrument emanated from within, along with an inhuman jabbering and screaming. Taty was hiding behind Number Nun, trying to pull her back.

“Don’t go in there…” she kept whispering frantically.

Number Nun ignored her and began hammering on the lead reinforced double doors.

“Alphonse!” she called in an electronically amplified voice which cut instantly through the guitar’s frequencies and caused Taty to clap her hands to her ears.

“That hurt!” she squealed.

Number Nun calculated her options for a nano-second before extending her left hand and microwaving the lock’s electronics. The door began to open on its auto-hinge and the scene within was slowly revealed. A mess of broken tanks littered the soiled white shag. Pipes spurted liquid from smashed life support systems while reptiles roamed free, antagonizing one another. The noise was immense, staggering. All the glass was rattling violently. Some of the windows had even shattered. Alphonse was on the sheet twisted satin of the bed, clad in the ruins of a pink suit. He was writhing and gibbering in a paroxysm of ecstatic agony, an emerald hump surfacing from his torn collar. Taty stared in horror as Alphonse gorged himself on the small mountains of baby carrots around him. After each spluttered swallow he seemed to calm slightly, only to surge back into palsy only moments later. A massive arena quality sound stack had been moved into the room. It occupied an uncomfortable amount of space with its black bulk and cables, making the room seem so much more constricted than before. A haggard youth in a torn green jumper, black skeleton tights and a plastic Mickey Mouse ear cap stood before the tunnel-like woofers. He was wired for sound, slashing mindlessly at a shiny pink telecaster, making the whole world shake with each frantic emission. Taty watched him sway recklessly in the stereo field, palms pressed desperately to her ears. The output was such that his lank, straw-coloured hair fluffed out each time the speakers belched. The shouts of Number Nun were barely discernable within this sonic chaos, despite her frequency cutters. Her appeals to Alphonse quickly ran dry when she realized just how far gone he was. She muted her sonic input and shifted to spectral vision. Reptile energy bodies mangled like frogspawn in the waves of sound. She tuned her vision to Alphonse’s writhing form, focusing in on the odious hump that plagued him so. The X-Ray aspect of her vision detected a miniature Symb, straddling Alphonse Guava’s upper spine. The little green homunculus was even clutching at the tendons attached to his skull like reins as it attempted to settle against his bone. Somehow the creature seemed to realize that it was being observed and turned to face Number Nun through the ghostly layers of flesh. Alphonse’s head mirrored its reaction in delay, turning to face her. She was disturbed to see how many of Alphonse’s facial characteristics the Symbiote had adopted, creating a nightmarish little caricature of him, blemished by antennae and mandible extrusions. An obscene little biological self portrait which he now carried beneath his skin and close to his bones. His own face was a distorted wreck, drooling and sightless. Number Nun gathered Taty up like a rag doll and strode back out through the aftermath, carrying her close to her breast.

“We have to find Romeo the Dealer,” Number Nun told her when the guitar noise had faded sufficiently so that she could hear her speak.

“He’s the only one who can get us out of jungle country.”

A hot pink raygun bolt unexpectedly ate a glowing hole out of a nearby Doric column. The blast momentarily lit everything the colour of watermelons in the sun and Taty saw electric blue retinal mirages flicker in the aftermath.

“Stay away!” shouted a ragged voice - a voice to which Taty immediately responded.

“Cherry Cola!” she called, scrabbling from Number Nun’s bosom. She ran down into the white marble courtyard beyond the pillars. The sunken square into which she stumbled was bright, lushly illuminated by glass skylights. Potted palms saturated the corners in leafiness. A fountain dominated the center and a statue of the Venus De Milo (perversely depicted with arms) occupied the center of it, gushing water from its headless neck. Cherry Cola was splashing in the water, handcuffed wrist to wrist with the statue. She had been badly beaten and sported a succulent purple eye as well as various bruises. Her candy uniform was torn at the shoulder and she clutched a walkie-talkie in her upraised, handcuffed fist. Her other hand brandished an oversized chrome raygun, still smoking from its latest emission. The courtyard was strewn with the remains of crocodiles, Buddhist punks and party-harder’s who had attempted to approach her during the night. Some still flailed limply, leaking alien fluids and greenish malformations. It was impossible to say how long Cherry Cola had been cuffed to the statue, but she looked to be in bad shape. She started crying dry, heaving sobs when she saw Taty and the pair of them embraced violently in the lukewarm ankle deep water. Number Nun swooped down, snapping off the Venus’s stone hand at the wrist, freeing Cherry Cola’s upraised arm instantly. The roller skating waitress collapsed into the water, clutching her purplish wrist while Number Nun pincered off the cuffs with her laser fingernails.

“We need to leave this house immediately,” Number Nun re-iterated.

Cherry Cola nodded as Taty helped her up and out of the fountain.

“I got this walkie-talkie off a dead man,” she coughed. “I managed to find Kenzo Cold-Eyes frequency about an hour or two ago.”

“Is he coming?” Number Nun asked.

“He said he’d be here by nightfall,” she winced, leaning on the android for support as they limped through desecrated boudoirs and partially flooded conservatories.

“Lets wait for him in the frangipani grove,” Number Nun suggested. “That way we can see things coming.”