Coffin Island (28 page)

Why not strike down some natives as my
first act of colonization? I’ve named the joint. Welcome to New
Hell. The Casket Island School for Witches has gone under. We’re
all going to have to make some uncomfortable adjustments that
include death under the new ownership.

Dead natives being brutally murdered
seemed like the next logical step. Why not bloody up this new
world? Welcome to the New School. Visiting Professors include
Death.

I didn’t care that the savages had
arrived on the same ship as me. I was holding them responsible for
putting me in the hold. Also running away from me whatever the
circumstances was an admission of guilt as far as I was concerned.
The looking over the shoulder while fleeing confirmed it. The
screaming in terror while doing the above was also a strong
indicator. It was time to graduate out of this test for
good.

I had sentenced the whole planet to
death actually. What was the big deal? Was casually voicing your
desire to perpetrate a brutal over the top holocaust on an entire
planet a crime in this world? Let’s not be unreasonable here,
gentleman. Freedom of speech has its distinct limits. That’s why
protesters show up at funerals to give you one last trouncing. Step
aside pallbearer. I need to urinate on that coffin.

Pardon me, madam, I am defecating in
this hole. I can’t believe you have the audacity to put soil on top
of that coffin. Not until my toilet paper goes into that hole.
That’s freedom of speech in hell. Or at least it’s a funeral for a
world in which nobody has the good taste to die.

The only reason that I hadn’t already
perpetrated my hideous holocaust of brutal over the top
destruction, in my defense, was that I was savoring the thought of
it. I was plotting that thought like mathematics. I was working out
the geometry of this apocalypse with deadly precision. I was also
studying the vectors of the victims that I was about to kill to
learn more about their algebra before I ended it. The species was
about to be solved. Why not gather up as much field theory for
posterity as you can? The hideous stupidity of these creatures
needs to be documented with bloody precision so that it can’t be
replicated by new idiots. What good is a cautionary tale without
bloody murder as the ending? It just doesn’t pack the appropriate
force. You need to put the children to bed crying. Or just kill
them.

Honey Badger and Kaiser were chasing
after the library. Of this much I was certain. Rage hadn’t deluded
my senses to the point of total madness. Or rather the talking
animals were chasing after the vehicle of learning. I didn’t like
this. The ignorant beasts were chasing after knowledge that they
didn’t crave. And yet they didn’t even know it. Why couldn’t the
talking animals just content themselves in their pursuit of
ignorance?

Honey Badger and Kaiser just wanted a
free ride! I stepped back to at peer at that a bit. What was the
symbolic import of a glass library on wheels in hell with ignorant
animals chasing after it? I didn’t like the feeling of
that.

Did knowledge just roll up on you like
an animal and pull down that mask real horror show? Then fail to
rob you? Then it started talking nonsense to distract
you!

Why not put these talking animals to
good vehicular use? I wanted to send whoever was in-charge of them
a terse little message. It was pretty simple. Here are your dead
messengers. I’m coming for you.

I like that payphone that you’re
holding but you might want to brace yourself because we’ve got a
serious collect call coming through. Let’s just say that you can’t
afford the freight. There is also the custom tax too. Never mind
the shipping and handling. I’ll spot you that. I’m a generous when
it comes for paying for funerals.

Professor Coffin seemed to be taking
pedagogical note of the situation. I was yelling in his face. At
least he was learning something. Or he was feigning ignorance, his
base expression. It was hard to tell because I was burying him with
abuse.

He was standing there, from my vantage
point, like a dead dog with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. He
was probably savoring the idea that the glass Cadillac would swing
back for him and give him a ride so that he didn’t have to walk in
hell. Or rather crawl towards Babylon in his instance.

But that’s not how learning works. It
dumps you on the side of the road and sends gravel over your head
as it tears off for destinations that are beyond yourself. You must
walk down that highway barefoot and crying if you want a shred of
independent thought in this world. Otherwise you must content
yourself with all the hired knowledge which isn’t even sure of
itself. It cries itself to sleep in its bunk in prison when the
fluorescent lights flicker out. The grim guard rattles his
nightstick down the cold bars as his lullaby. Then something
hideous happens with the cellmate. How else to explain all the
ignorance in this world?

The world is merely a string of tiny
prisons that is populated by hostile guards and perverted
prisoners. However I refused the message. I was getting out alive.
There was no force holding me back. I would have been pinned down
by now if they could do it. This hell was nothing. Did it take me
down? Not a speck. It actually brought me up. It filled me to the
brim with power.

The glass Cadillac was driving over the
dead bodies towards some sort of mother of harlots and abominations
in this world. I didn’t like that at all. There was some sort of
Tower of Babble in the middle of this world. Some raving idiot
commissioned the atrocity and the equally incompetent architect
cribbed his ideas off some foreign fool. They beat the slaves so
mercilessly that they violently revolted before
completion.

The monstrous wart was covered with
decrepit scaffolding. It looked like the only thing that was
holding it up. Huge blocks were falling off the Tower of Babel
periodically. I wondered what sort of creature called this tower of
blasphemy, fornication and golden cups his home. I was going to
evict him. Or just cave him in. There was no way that I was going
to tolerate a holy fool in a Tower of Babel in my personal hell.
Why suffer the fools?

Kaiser was still running away. He was
pretending to chase after Honey Badger who was pretending to chase
after Kaiser. They were alternating. In their minds the ruse was
working. Or at least they were bravely trying to convince
themselves of it. They weren’t looking back as much. Why not let
them run those legs in place a bit more?

Chapter

I suppose we’ve all go to marry
something in this life even if it is just nothing like those
talking animal idiots. Or a sociopath such as Madison which was
looking like a distinct possibility for me seeing as all the other
life was slatted for slaughter at my hand on this planet. But back
to the void because it’s more pressing. The void cannot
wait.

Marriage to Madison can wait. She’s
magically attached to me so what’s the risk of losing her? She’ll
just come back like a boomerang. She’s already come back from the
dead once. I can get down on bended knee anytime I like. And
propose to death.

The void is the real matter at hand
because I’m peering right into it. It’s not as bad as it seems,
strangely enough. Perhaps I might jump into it. Once you finally
muster the courage to march on it. Or it taunts you with such
ferocity that you’re given no choice but to confront it. It’s not
nice, the void, but what are you going to do? Nobody promised you a
pleasant journey into yourself.

The void is just as good a bride as
anything else now that I was upon it. My toes were dangling into
the hole. I wasn’t frightened at all. I was merely a little ticked
off that’s all. Now if I could just decapitate those two pesky
pirates. Remove them bodily from my checklist.

Professor Coffin and The Red Lady were
disturbing my thought process by yammering in the background. They
were pleading for their lives in their thoughts. I was hearing
their thoughts now. Let them plead all they want. I won’t hear
it.

However interrupting murderous
contemplations is never a good idea even if you are fruitlessly
pleading for you life. You’ll hasten the indelicate process. The
only thing that was holding me back was that I knew that their
headless corpses would continue haunt me in this world. Their
decapitated heads would keep speaking even on the end of pikes. I
knew this because I had already tested this theory.

Professor Coffin and The Red Lady were
singing sea shanties in decapitation. They were memorializing the
horror of their predicaments. They were recounting their deaths in
songs. Their corpses were carrying on a bit too. Their headless
corpses were jigging around the pikes.

Professor Coffin and The Red Lady had
been operating without intelligence for centuries. What was another
four hundred years of decapitated robotics?

We had our powers back. By me, I mean,
Madison and me. The other fools got nothing which was precisely
what they deserved. However it wasn’t a cause for celebration. The
disheartening part was that they were horrifically enhanced. I was
operating at a level of the highest order. And it wasn’t pleasant
at all. Our powers were massive. They were of uncertain
authenticity. They were to be seriously questioned. And they were
earth shattering powerful.

I felt like a god of staggering
proportions. Who wants to be a god in hell? Isn’t that job already
taken? Why has the devil ducked his obligation? I thought that
beast delighted in his domicile.

Had he quit his job? Had the devil
walked out? Casually turned out the lake of fire? Pulled a
cigarette from his pack? Snapped his lighter? Taken a deep lungful
of smoke? Blown a cloud of relief? And slyly drifted away from the
thankless task of eternal torture of the damned? Who possibly
benefited from that? There was going to be hell to pay if the devil
didn’t come back. I wasn’t doing his job.

Meanwhile Professor Coffin and The Red
Lady were moaning about their lack of power verbally and in their
thoughts. I had been giving them the cold shoulder, Casket Island
style, with all the power that I could muster. The knob in my mind,
that I had turned down to concentrate, was beginning to breakdown
from overwork. You could only tune out the idiots for so long
apparently. Then you must suffer them. And suffer them you will.
Sadly, at some point, listening to their babble became unavoidable.
This parable helped explain the necessity of execution.

You could, in fact, change people. I
was seeing the wisdom in this maxim as I peered at my elders. The
elderly, in particular, could be changed. You could hasten up the
natural process towards regression. It also helped explain while in
post-revolution the idiots and intellects are rounded up for swift
execution. The imbeciles and the intellectuals are nothing but
trouble. The elderly are sucking up all our resources. The
intellectuals are questioning everything. They all have to go,
pronto.

Professor Coffin and The Red Lady had
no powers. I wouldn’t have cared but they were groaning so
vociferously. Decapitating them didn’t even help. That was
particularly discouraging. However it demonstrated that they
weren’t real people.

Professor Coffin and The Red Lady were
part of the test. Something outside of the frame of Crypt Island
was running them. I had already plumbed the costumed fool’s
thoughts. He was mystified by what was happening. The Red Lady was
just as clueless. They were just part of the theoretical platform.
That’s all.

I put their heads back on to make
throwing them into the sun more economical. I didn’t want to miss
anything. However they just carried on like nothing had happened.
They started right back on that act of theirs. They expected me to
pretend that I hadn’t seen right through them? Just because you’re
some sort of puppet on a theoretical platform doesn’t make you
human. You’re a test human. That little puppet show of yours must
be quite the charming act in whatever sock theater that you crawled
out of but it isn’t going to fly here.

Did I just think that? Or shout it out
loud? Witchcraft is making me flip out to the point that I can’t
tell when I’m merely thinking or shouting. There is the bend and I
am firmly around it. Back behind me is the line that I have just
crossed. I think that my examiners are taking their last crack at
my mind to see if it will snap. I snap back, examiners. I gnashed
my teeth for dramatic effect too. Sometimes you’ve got to play the
crazed fool to back down your tormenters.

What was even more hideous was that I
wasn’t going back. It was all about the future now. And it was
going to be loud, fast and out-of-control. Of this much I was
certain. My mind wouldn’t lie to me. Or maybe it just did. I’ll get
to the bottom of it. Or I won’t. Something is bound to turn
up.

I turned that volume control up in my
mind. I wanted to study Professor Coffin and The Red Lady one last
time for old time’s sake. It was all becoming deliciously clear.
That whole grim musical of hunting was making perfect
sense.

You must study your prey before you
kill it. Sit in that tree quietly with the arrow pulled back.
Collect a little evidence before the lung shot. Only then do you
let go. The bow will do the rest.

Why have three worlds named after the
final resting place? It was all becoming clear to me. The death of
your instructors was the only way to graduate.