literary feeding time

okay, so i read too much H.P. Lovecraft/August Derleth/Clark Ashton Smith as well. i had a week off, and this is the kind of thing i end up doing at five in the fucking morning with my free time... it's a good fucking thing i have a job coming up.

bomb
Lepht Anonym
10.06.10
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There's four of them, this time. Last night there were seven, the night before, a horde of the bastards; Jacques wonders numbly if that's an improvement or not, given the fact that they're closer than ever to the foot of his blanket-strewn sofa bed. The air is utterly dead, of course - no CPU hum, no thermostat whirr. The rustle of the duvets registers briefly in the silence, then dies; they make no sign of hearing anything, as ever.

Jacques pushes his foot further, cautiously, down the bed. The four don't move. You're afraid of trips, he tells himself balefully, memories of the Nineties flooding in on all that acid he used to drop and all that Lovecraft he used to read. Bad trips. Tactile trips. But they don't move. He finds himself pushing back into the vaults of his head for the time he saw Tsathoggua, the black toad-god dripping with vile ichor and filthy, sentient intent, perched on his pillow with its tongue lolling out, after nights of reading weird fiction whilst filled up to the gills with LSD - is this like then? Will he look back on this ten, twenty years down the line and see so obviously what set it off?

He flinches as the closest one edges in, soft footfalls padding towards his head as quietly as if they're all barefoot. Good God, should it still be this detailed? This long after taking the stuff? It's been three days now, long enough for most anything to clear out of his system. They shouldn't be real enough to smell, that night-air vapour tainted with mould and sulphur and ancient dust. They're not there, not really - that he can convince himself of at least superficially - but God, that foul air invading his house and perverting his dreams, that wakes him nauseated long before they ever show up! He backs up the bed, experimentation over. The encroacher reaches out one white and withered hand to touch his cheek.

Jacques screams, and this time they don't dissipate as they did when he yelled last night; a brief flash of ordinary worry about Mr. Khera downstairs and what he must think of all this noise crosses his mind before he clamps the pillow to his face, hissing breaths into the stifling fibres, oh God why did he think he could handle that black shit? Why wrap it in a Rizla and throw it down your throat with a shot of sinthe like you're the fucking King of Dares, why not just throw it in the woodstove with the rest of the crap nobody wanted? The vision-figures coalesce now like the halves of blurred, unfocused vision to form one. One gaunt and frail thing that holds more awful bane in its caress of his cheekbone, trailing its damp fingers down his trembling throat, than all the devils and demons he's ever imagined. Please Catholic God, you can torment my soul all you want afterwards but take it away, for the love of sanity take this hellborn abomination back to where it came from, he pleads wordlessly.

No response comes save the soft cooing that issues malignantly from under the lowered hood, soft like bats' fur or moleskin, that hides the eyes of his captor. Carla's silky voice insinuates itself into his head as he sits, rigid, shaking with the effort not to move or scream. "Bomb-it! Bomb-it! Bomb-it!" chanting in the background like war drums and her, all "Nobody's ever taken that much, never mind with alcohol," and "We make wishes on shots around here..." Oh God he just wanted to do whatever they all would have done, just be cool and not an old loser hanging out with a bunch of kids half his age... The thing presses its unseen lips to his hand and he recoils with a thin screech, the sensation of a cluster of holes beneath the pursed mouth rankling on his skin as if contagious. Its breath is on him.

It'll go away. Harmless wish, bad trips, something to tell those kids about for once... doesn't everyone wish for someone to love them? It'll go away...