All entries for Saturday 26 January 2008

Random Monster Encounter: China's workshop

[Draft produced from an Exquisite Corpse/monster exercise set during China Miéville's Weird Fiction series.]

*

I scanned the monitors for facility staff, anyone from the crew, rats, anything. Four screens on each level, four levels, buttons underneath each to control them. Jarry was supposed to be on the bottom floor, basement 3, searching the engineer barracks. The cameras swept left-right, right-left, grainy and monochrome. It was like watching a spliced up silent film with no cast. I pushed the security guard's body out of the chair and took his place.

There. Lowest level, second camera. Was that? No, Jarry was shorter. In a dark corner of what would have been a mess room - I checked the blueprints on my PDA to confirm - near the crew cabins. What was that? A woman? In a skirt? What was she doing? Hiding? I zoomed in. She was tall, hard to say how tall because of the angle, but well over six feet, I'd have guessed. In heels? The contrast was bad, I couldn't see her feet. She had a strange cone-shaped skirt that reached to the deck. At first I thought it was one of those Spanish gypsy dresses, but the shape was wrong, bulges rolled down the side like thick sauce on pudding; no, heavier, like rolls of fat.

And then I noticed she was bald - big ears, no hair - or maybe some tufts behind her ears, that stretched more like a kind of webbing. She - he, it - had no shirt on its pale, reedy, triangular frame. A man? Jarry must have seen it, he should have squawked it. A seven foot man in a skirt didn't just stand in the corner of a room unnoticed. I zoomed in as far as the image would go, so he filled the screen from top to deck and I blinked to try and resolve the pixels into something that made sense, but my eyes couldn't match up what I was looking at with any mental registers.

I looked away at the other screens - where was Jarry? I looked back at the man. Large round ears, though they seemed oddly shaped, more like fins, and that definitely looked like webbing, not hair. Its arms were flimsy matchsticks and... Fuck, what were they? It had no hands and the arms seemed to taper away to points. I couldn't make out any joints at the wrist or elbows, just these strange pale lengths hanging from its shoulders, the same pasty colour of its head and torso.

And then, for no reason I could tell the dark, lumpy skirt bulged out, billowed like it had caught an updraft and then the thing's arms started to saturate and pulse, extending up and outwards, ugly, erectile. And Christ! They were tentacles, plain fucking tentacles. At the same time I noticed it had three of them distributed asymmetrically, two on one side, one on the other. Was this some kind of freak of nature, an abominable human deformed from birth? Or had it lost one somehow?

This thing started to ripple and I swear I'd never seen anything this crazy before, these ripples that ran up its body, from the hem of its weird skirt all the way up to its neck. How can I explain it? It reminded me of a Russian contortionist I'd seen in a travelling circus, years ago, who had made his body creep along the floor like a worm, rippling like that. Three, four ripples, tightening, flexing. The thing's tentacles pulsed and grew until they were fully extended and the ripples ran up its body, contracting rings of muscle, like it was going through a form of peristalsis. But how did the movement pass from the skirt to the body like that? I couldn't see where the skirt ended and the flesh began, the image was too poor.

Its mouth widened into an o, grew to an O, and the contractions pulsed right up to its lips, which widened more than any human could have managed, revealing a circular set of fangs, long sharp teeth that ringed the inside of its mouth - it was sickening. Its lips slid back like a sheath until its whole jaw bared itself, a bony sphincter, curved talon-teeth whitish on the CCTV. The terror that took me then - I couldn't look away, but my breath came quieter and quicker. It was so alien, so horrific and all the worse as I realised how unlike a human - how wrong I'd been at first.

A violent contraction took a hold of it and I swear to you now I could see a - a lump run up through its skirt and into its stomach, something so big that it literally forced its body apart as it swelled to accommodate whatever was inside it, pushing its bones out, stretching its skin. Even under the shock of what was happening, I made out its skeletal frame pushing against the skin, a ribcage of sorts, but more like that of a fish, or snake, than a human. Its tentacles, damn! They thrubbed and fattened and its whole torso seemed to grow.

The contraction dwindled and then another took up, forcing the now smaller bulge in its torso up to its scrawny neck and its mouth widened even further and then the thing bent forward at the waist and began to vomit. A disgusting, dark mass of wet, mushy excrement oozed out of its mouth. God knows what it was - a soft, faecal matter steeped in liquid, with small, paler pieces clearly visible in it. The vomit caught in its teeth, slid down its chin and dropped in chunks and slurs onto its skirts in a way that made me think they were not made of cloth, but of some harder, rubbery material. I thanked every power I knew that I wasn't there to hear it or smell the stink of it. The animalistic lack of self-awareness was terrifying; the filth it was sliming itself with was utterly horrible, like a sick dog fouled in its own shit that starts to wash itself with its own tongue. But this beast's eyes seemed to glare at the room like a drunkard's, the grey panache of intelligence just visible behind a sheen of delirium.

The beast stood upright again and drew another great bellows of air, squinting its little eyes and then it exhausted a great burst to clear out its insides, so all the traces of vomit, the lumps in its teeth, sprayed out across the room, spattered the metal tables and chairs. Finally, then, the creature slackened and its hideous, sphinctral jaw retracted into the sheath of its lips, which narrowed to a dark aperture, not quite closed.

This, I thought, would be the godforsaken end it, but I was so fucking wrong you wouldn't believe. The next moment, it caught another billow of air and swelled up, so the whole creature actually rose up off the floor. It began to move, taking up momementum, the edge of its skirt rippling like the fins of a flatfish, propelling it forwards, hovering, levitating, I couldn't tell what, but the moment it started to move, to come towards the camera, I felt so terrified I sobbed. I looked and looked for signs of its feet, but the angle was wrong and everything else my eyes were showing me said that this thing was hovering.

Left behind on the deck, as it moved out of the dark corner of the room, was a whitish-grey pile, from which a mucous-like saliva trailed after the monstrous thing, stringing across the floor. And this, this I couldn't believe, I couldn't parse. I moved the camera down and spotted, in the pile, the unmistakeable flesh-stripped and hollow sockets of a human skull. The pile was a human skeleton. I retched over the desk, I had to look away, but my eyes fell on the dead guard, so I had to look up, stare at the lights until they hurt my eyes, chanting one of the training mantras to focus myself.

I zoomed out to view the room. Now that I'd found Jarry - what was left of him - I had to take care of myself, get myself out of the facility. The creature was already off the monitor. Then it appeared again slithering and gliding into view on the next screen, using its tentacles to drag itself along the walls, moving fast, through the view, then on into the next screen, the atrium at the bottom of the stairwell. It was trying to come up.

At the foot of the stairs, it stopped. Its skirts billowed and heaved, and it stretched its tentacles out to an unnatural length, extending them across the full three metre width of the well, its body seeming to narrow as it did so. It gripped the walls with the flat ends of its appendages, suckering and pulling itself up a few steps. It paused then billowed up again, a few more steps. I felt, then, unequivocally, though it might just have been the sheer, bloodless fear in me, that it knew where I was and was coming for me straight up the stairs, two flights and if I didn't leave immediately it would cut off my route to the ground floor, and the exit.

George Ttoouli : 26 Jan 2008 17:28 |  Tags: China Mieville Creative Writing Monster |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem