----- stiff, otherwise a dream -----
Red streams outpouring from tall steel pinnacles.
The sky is so unbalanced, with droves of stars packed in nebulae.
The tall grass below conjures winged insects to do their duty.
Small dirt paths converge on the cobbled road like arrows to a target.
Everything is silent but for the incessant buzzing in the sky.
The moon hangs low like a malevolent, omnipresent eye.
Stringent odours waft directly over you through the stifling atmosphere.
Everything seems out of proportion.
The clouds are converging in a mass to the left.
Behind you, the baying silence pushes you onward.
The moat circles a pallisade constructed of sharp steel girders.
A bridge crosses the stagnant, steaming swampwater dug into the unseemly earth.
Footfalls begin to sound inside the pallisade.
Echoing and bouncing off everything to create a panic-like pandemonium feeling.
Deep in your heart, you can feel the cold fingers digging their way to some goal.
Youve been converted now, into the unfeeling.
Youre nothing but a toy of a zombie puppet, held on gossamer strings of intestinal tract.
Up there in the unbalanced sky, so full of splashed and misplaced stars...
Someone laughs at you.
The feeling in your heart subsides as the claws withdraw.
Uncaring, and unaware of the change, you fall limp and lifeless to the dirty bridge.
Somehow, masses of miniscule meathooks find their way into your back.
They begin to drag your ragdoll body through the dirt, across the bridge, into the pallisade.
Somewhere, a song begins.
Now you know who you are.
The stars begin to extinguish themselves in the misordered sky.
It all happens so slowly, so stop motion-like.
Everything ticks by at an unbelieveably nightmarish pace.
The meathooks bring you to rest, suspended over a lazy red river.
The heat melts your shoes from your feet and begins to bake the soles of your feet...
Someone laughs at you again.
You see them, hanging from an unearthly pulley apparatus strung with slicked wet ropes of skin.
All bones and pieces of decomposing vitae-dry skin, they are.
Some wires are attached to their face in a slapdash fashion.
Connected to the walls so that any movement causes them to dig in and draw blood.
The blood drips down grimy white plastic runnels to the lazy red river.
It hisses and steams into nothing, vaporized by the heat.
Now you know whos ugly.
Youre good enough to withstand this torture, but your feet are blackened and cracked.
Youll never walk again, you think to yourself.
Surprisingly, is doesnt hurt as much as you thought it would.
It almost feels good, in a very odd way.
You need help, but none is forthcoming from this dank steel charnel house.
Ghoulish shadows privy to the darkest secrets obey the perimeter of light cast from the windows.
Your vision is fixed to the walls, in a vain attempt to ignore the zombie puppet.
A wet, phlegmy gurgle escapes the zombie puppet.
Sickened as you break with the walls to stare at it, you feel the heat spreading up your legs.
It gurgles again, and manages to drool out a phrase...
Yoou aare nnnot taalkiiing tto meee...
It sounds like pathetic rhetoric to you.
Almost like this puppet wants nothing but a friend.
Then your eyes open and close to the nauseating pulse of cracking bones.
Almost in unison, your kneecaps shatter!
Fountaining shredded muscle and tendon, blood and a sickening after-belch of pus.
Your legs scream in prostration, while hanging limply like useless noodles.
Painted on, like the old saying goes.
Smells blank themselves out, your vision unstabilizes and you are forced to close your eyes.
Everything disappears.
Laving you still hung there in a void so cold it could freeze the balls off a brass monkey.
Now you know whos master.
Then it falls, everything falls and youre back in bed on a cold night with blankets piled.
The stars shine in on you through a mesh screen.
Streetlights accentuate the starlight and shadows open rifts into impossibility.
The laughter continues, coming from downstairs.
Bad dream.
Now you know who you are.
Now you know whos ugly.
Now you know whos master.
Now you can figure out what the fuck is in your head.
rogan-x of RaGe Press, Inc. c all rights reserved 1998-99.