Robotically locked in step with a white-lit lava man, thing. This is some kind of cruel karma. We step out of the dark hole from the slaughter room and into a vast corridor that seems to stretch on for an eternity. The floors and walls are completely black. So black they are jet and it is incredibly difficult to say whether we are still inside or outside reality all together. It's so hard to tell anything that is going on. Af seems to just glide along barely making a foot print or any kind of patter. This lumbering body that I'm in slaps the ground with each step echoing off the walls. It also sounds like I'm trying to run a marathon after twenty years of filling my lungs with smoke, I'm huffing so much. Even still, I feel much more flexible now, and loose in this skin. I feel like I can stretch it and move it in away that wasn't possible in before. I lope along blindly just behind Af. As we go we pass piles of what look like transparent concrete coloured clothes. They're heaped in huge mounds that spill over the rims of wheeled bins. The piles grow larger and more frequent the further down the corridor we go, until they grow shades darker and darker from the edges inward to a colour more akin to newly paved asphalt.
"What the hell are those in the bins, all those piles, what are they?"
"In time. In time you will see."
We turned and it made my head swim. It was a corner but not actually a corner. We turned without turning as if the darkness of the walls were refracted through an opposite prism and us with it. I could see the arms and legs of this body stretch into long straight bands and then bend where they shouldn't have been able to, where it should have been excruciatingly painful before sliding around with the exhilarating pull of something like a slip stream. All of a sudden the floor careened, seemed to tilt without actually moving. Cobalt filaments streaked as lightning strikes that spread out in arcs and spider webs, then shrunk away into nothing under our feet. Thin red branch work web and form livid trunks running their way down along the walls from the ceiling, which pulsed with a soft red glow, the colour of an exit sign. Under the weight of the pulses we walked and walked, and I could hear distant choirs twisting infernal bass lines and holy awes on the rims of my ears, spinning like quarters in a funnel.
The farther on we went the heavier the sounds got. Verdant Tibetan throat singing resonating through the vast hall sending neurons firing from floor to wall, arching over the missing angles. A queer tightness grabbed and clenched my guts; a giant's fist squeezing and ringing out the sodden cloths inside. Cold waves of worry and terror washed over the flesh of this body raising the hair on the back of its neck. Out of the corner of an eye I see one of the asphalt piles off to the side moving ever so slightly, and then squirming with a reckless abandon. Until it pushes its way through all the rest of the rags managing to stand. Another one stands with it. They have human forms. But they are stained, dirty grey. The grime covers most of them but electricity zips through them. They remind me of certain types of fish that have no pigment at all, they are entirely see through. There are frogs like this too, you can see all of their inner workings. They jump out of the wheeled cart and don't fall like a body would. They slowly descend to the floor. They stop and look at me. It hits me in that moment when their eyeless sockets blankly stare at me that, these things must have been beautiful once. I cock my head and notice the faint haze of purplish colour in the abdomen of one. It is in this moment I realize that they are obviously not old dirty clothes so much as old, used, dirty souls. They were the essence of something once. It hurts me, actually it really hurt me to see something so beyond our scope, trashed like that. Auschwitz is the closest thing I can think of to describing the desecration of these forms.
They are clearly trying to escape - I reel, dig in my heels and try to stop to see. Af hasn't noticed them yet. They stare at me as I'm pulled along. I look back and struggle to look them in the face. I have to help, I know I have to help them. I feel it in every fibre of my being - I lose my balance, yanked forward I pinwheel my arms and manage to stay standing as my legs work like pistons without a drive to catch up to Af. I turn around one last time only to catch the the blackness of a newly forming door in the wall where the souls are standing. It swirls wider and three white silhouettes, three different agents come through the black with those long oscillating limbs flapping and grab the souls by their jaws. The agent's face flaps fold out and long purplish forked tongues shoot out snapping and flicking at the souls as they squirm trying to move their heads to the side and out of reach. The purplish appendages end up sticking paralytic needles at the tips into the soul's non-flesh. Their black asphalt skin darkens and then drains in colour starting at the tops of their bald heads and washing down through their bodies fading to a sidewalk grey colour. The pulsing red glow in the ceiling quickens and brightens. Meat hooks descend from above, hanging from at the end of chains. The agents lift the limp souls up by the throat and hang them on each hook; piercing them through the spine. The hooks explode out through their sternums firing droplets and bulbs of clear liquid all over the walls, the tips of the hooks tickling their transparent chins. A strange grinding squeal lurches through the corridor as the hooks with their cargo lift back up into the ceiling and disappear. Some sort of viscous mucous drips from the portals in thick slow globules. I wretched hard and Af laughed. I didn't realize he had stopped with me. Enjoying my revulsion. It didn't last long before I felt the body tugged and he was moving, me along with him.
"You'll get used to that yet." He says with a mixture of delight and repugnance toward me, or this body that I'm in, or both. More than likely both. He seems to loathe the texture and the smells of humanity.
"I fucking hope not." I belched up some vomitus with the force of speaking, closed my mouth in a knee-jerk reaction and swallowed hard. Embarrassed, wiping my mouth on my sleeve I quickly turned away. Whatever this guy ate is old, mostly dissolved mush now with an overbearing chemical aftertaste. The thought of it makes me gag again.
"How much more of this shit am I going to have to deal with? Because I don't think I can handle one more upchuck. Death tastes absolutely horrific the third time." I say in a fit of verbal diarrhea. My earlier embarrassment and Af's posture intimidate me and I can't help but blabber.
"Just brace yourself. I make no guarantees that your weaknesses won't be subverted." He says loftily. I hate the way this guy talks like he's some sort of academic snob.
"Well if you can't keep the visuals to a minimum, at least warn me first, please. I'm begging you."
"We shall see. As I've said I make no guarantees." He responds.
"I pray." I say, and immediately regret it. I've never prayed. Why would I say that now?
"That is the spirit." He adds with sickening amusement. I know he can tell I'm squirming in here, and he loves every second of it. It wafts off of him in thick waves. He's enjoying this way too much. The electrical strikes and the red glowing pulses dim as we move above and beneath them. It's really dark and the aura around the place is stifling; the hot breath of madness, madness and hostility breathing down my neck.
Time takes on new meaning. Since I can't feel this body through the nerves, it's more like driving a car. I can't tell how it is feeling until it starts to slump and sag. The first time this happens I realize that it must be a long while since we left the room. We've been walking for what could have been hours. Af is just pulling me along and that adds another element of separation between myself and this human vehicle. My left leg is bending funny at the knee. Each time I step out with it the shin swings around loosely at the knee. The knee starts locking under my weight. Other little enfeeblements pop up, tripping up the body and giving it real drag. Af is getting frustrated that I am slowing him down. I can hear the forced sighs of frustration. The last thing I want to do is piss this guy off. I am growing more worried by the second. For one, why was I just following this guy; and two, what was he going do to me. This Theol doesn't seem like the forgiving kind, and Af's contempt is palpable. This body is starting to fall apart and needs rest. Probably food and there isn't a single thing close to appetizing here. It's only a matter of time, and I won't be able to defend myself when they try to stick those stingers in me...