Af points to the pedestals with which these pitiful beings rest on. Actually rest, might not be the right word. They aren't really resting at all... I follow his finger with my gaze to inscriptions that contain symbols carved into the stone. Each one has its own unique set of characters and language. The submissive's base had a vertical run of ancient greek symbols, Chinese characters beneath the Chinaman, Egyptian hieroglyphs beneath the hawk faced man, and something like Sanskrit under the round, tanned, man on the pillow pedestal. The letters on each base throb with ghost light as their blood flows down from their wounds into small stone basins near their feet. Ectoplasm is funnelled through the basin running through the lines of each sigil into a large, thick silver cable and exits out the back of each base. The cable is hot with energy and is alight with the same unearthly glow as the inscribed symbols.
"What do they mean?"
"Don't trouble your mind with that. Just know that they are part of what binds these dreadful creatures to their stations. Now, come with me."
"I don't want to see anymore. This is an atrocity."
"Hmm, I didn't see your thesaurus, where are you hiding it? Your limited scope knows nothing of the true realities. You will follow. Choice is not an option."
Just like that we are moving again. I want to stop, to not go on, but I can't stay here either it's making me physically ill, it hurts too much; I don't think I can break away from this thing if my life depended on it - which, it might. The real problem is that I don't even have to move my feet, I'm just a filing heading pulled along by a magnet.
We reach the far end of the room, where two more of the same great doors stand. Only these ones have the pentagram contained in a circle of white chalk on this side. They swing open as we approach. On the other side we are once again plunged into an unearthly black corridor. This corridor is full of the thick ghost white, palpitating, silver cables. They look like the cables that run up lamp posts and telephone poles. Here they come through the Sheol wall and along the floor at length. Following the cables leads us to a stiff curtain of blue binary flowing up from the floor to the ceiling; a hologram of zeros and ones. We part the curtain like hippy beads hanging in a door frame. They burst and swirl into smoke at our touch, coagulating once we're through. The walls are all copper, gold, and different types of metals on green and black lined rectangular plates creating intricate maps of two and three dimensional landscapes. Everything vibrates with energy. The whole room is vast matrix of components, circuit boards, and monitors from a pristine antikythera in a knotted cypress box spinning and clicking through phases of the moon to tabulating machines, the Turing Machine, to the Commodore. The Cathode Ray Monitor, tubes, LCDs, plasmas, and LEDs, to the latest back-lit touch screens illuminating the room with their spectral auras. Many of the screens are mounted on the necks of misshaped, chalky, pink and white plastinated cadavers. A horrible distortion of Hagens' Body World, corpses posing like mall mannequins and people in the midst of some mundane action, walking or running. On a large square base there is a hetero couple, the female mounting the male in a coital act, their monitors facing each other looping pornographic clips. It has to be an elaborate joke. The bodies, all of them emanating the same moon glow from between the striations of their frozen musculature. The exsanguinate tissues being pumped full of ectoplasmic energy delivered by the large silver cords snaking up from the ground and wired into the cadaver's rectums. The screens cycling through endless words and images, anything and everything conceivable. Etymological strains in all languages, epistemological strains of theory and thought, from all cultures, people, alien, and not. Art from cave paintings, Warka Vases, marble mosaics, sculpted statues and busts to Pre-Raphaelite and Raphaelites, landscapes, portraits, Cubism, and Surrealism to the most obscure abstract or conceptual art and everything in between. On the largest newest screen Google and Wikipedia compete for space and endless options filter in and out as well as endless definitions, annotations and opinions of all those search options flowing from left to right and down across the screens.
I must have quite a look on my face because Af looks concerned, or more likely mock concern. It steps toward me and puts one of its molten-light hands on my shoulder. I was paralyzed by the sights, and the smell. I've never smelled anything like it: petroleum jelly, burned hair and skin mixed with the faint smell of electrical ozone, overlaid with a hint of melted rubber. Gag.
I look up at Af, his face flaps quivering, almost enjoying the scents, "I have no words. Just when I thought things couldn't get any worse..."
"This is the result of two things Yves. Those 'people' that you think are being tortured. They proved insolent, defiant. That doesn't make for a pleasant world. And, you people on earth who have forgotten them or choose to stand ignorant."
"What world is good without defiance? What gives anyone the right to take control and make the rules? Never mind forcing everyone else to follow them.
"It is quite amusing that you forget the nuances of your history and those you once looked up to for inspiration, explanation even. Yet here you are accessing that inspiration with the click of a button, or the touch of a screen.
"How many screens do you suppose are on the earth right now? How much divine inspiration do you think you people actually have access to if you'd only open your eyes, If you knew how to open your eyes? There is a vast cosmic network you all take for granted. And it is all born here!" The great showman spreads his arms wide and presenting his case. I can't believe the absurdity of this. How much desecration does it take to build something up?
Af walks over to one a small tablet mounted on the shoulders of a fetus still in utero. The screen protrudes through an angular slit in the womb so that is on the outside while the fetus' limbs are constricted into itself where the tendons have shortened over time. The Mother stands erect with a larger screen resting atop her own shoulders. It cycles through classic sitcoms. For some reason her chest is split at the centre of her clavicle just below the top of the trachea down to her navel and the skin is rolled open at her pelvis and pinned to her sides forming an upside down V, or a calligraphic A without the centre dash. As the fetus screen began to circulate newspapers and television broadcasts Af slowly reached out and hovered over the screen for a second before touching it and stopping it on a Fox News broadcast. The sound bites were swirling through words like Miracle and Terrorism as if they were connected some how and it was difficult to tell if they were saying that Terrorism was the miracle, or not. Then the camera focused in on the anchor with the face of another man tightly framed in the top right corner just above the anchors shoulder like an old cartoon angel or devil sitting on the shoulder of Daffy or Fudd whispering such sweetness or sinful delight; he began his monologue:
"Recently, one of the five Burroughs in New York fell under the spell of a
a dark mystery as the body of man who had taken his own life disappeared
from the Floating Hospital in Long Island
not long after the body was found in the bay and brought aboard.
It's believed that the deceased belonged to Antifa and was involved
in some far left shenanigans involving mail-in election fraud
before going missing.
Authorities hadn't made any inquests into the death prior
to the disappearance. The disappearance of the body has left the
family and friends of the deceased man reeling and police baffled.
The police are asking that if any one has any information
at all to please contact this number ### ### ####"
Af was watching me watch the screen. A sinister sneer tickling the corners of his mouth as he watched realization dawn on me. The image of the man on the shoulder of the anchor has the same mole at the bottom of his left jowl. The same bulbous nose and beady eyes that stared back at me in grimy mirror in the slaughter room. It was me. Well, not me exactly, but the body I am in. I feel like a broken record, my wheels are spinning again, confusion and anxiety are pythons wrapping me up and squeezing me hard. I want to ask, HOW? How is it possible? How did I end up in this guys body? How did it get to the sorting room and me with it? Why me? Is this fog ever going to blow over so that I can figure shit out for myself?