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say, this didn't look anything like the bush maze that Jack Nicholson, ax in hand, chases his kid through in the film version of The Shining& Not until I took three steps, and then it looked exactly like the bush maze in The Shining. Hope old Heee-re's Johnny! wasn't still around. The initial fifty feet looked pretty easy. I skipped the first four openings, which probably dead-ended, but took the fifth, which was wider, because the path I'd been on appeared to terminate at a solid hedge. A left and a right later, there was no place to go. I turned to go back, and& all along the empty path I'd just come down were the headless bodies of fat ladies, about two dozen, propped up against the hedges. The heads were there, too, at the feet of each. Big heads, even more so in proportion to the bodies. Their expressions were, uniformly, one of total shock, which I guess made sense. None of the bodies were clothed, and the breasts three per lady were ponderous. Do I have to tell you they were splattered with blood? The perpetrator of this ghastly mess looked like Conan the Barbarian at the end of a really bad day. He was tall, slim-waisted, but bulging with muscles everywhere else, which gave him an illusory fat appearance. His big head was tufted with mounds of coarse black hair. He had wide, bloodshot eyes and a red slash of a mouth that was formed in a nasty scowl as he glared at me. And the worst of this picture was the bloody ax in his hand, which looked to be roughly the size of Oregon. "I am Blogodox of Jaloba," he bellowed, "and during the Jaloban time notches 5328.7 to 5331.7 I slew twenty-six fat slovenly bitches, all of whom reminded me of my mother. Let me show you how I did it." "Hey, no thanks, pal," I said, but he came at me anyway, swinging that mother of an ax. Fortunately he was slower than hell, and I sidestepped him easily. Probably the women of his world were just as slow, or these twenty-six wouldn't have wound up this way. "I am Blogodox of Jaloba " he began again, but I was outta there. I retraced my steps, chose a different passage, and this time made some good progress. But just like with any maze, I hit another dead end. This person dressed like a clown and holding a knife stood waist-deep in dead bodies; all of them appeared to be males. The painted part of his face was grinning, but I couldn't tell what the guy was really doing. "I am John Wayne Gacy of Chicago, Illinois, Earth," he said, "and in the years 1972 to 1978 I murdered thirty-three boys and young men, then buried them in the crawl space of my house and in the yard. Let me show you how I did it." "Up yours!" I exclaimed, and ducked around the Killer Clown, as they'd dubbed him back then, before he could extract himself from his handiwork. Back out again, find the path, hope I don't get off it this time. I did. The bodies were too numerous to count. They were bats, for the most part, ranging from two to five feet tall, with humanlike fingers and toes, but heads that more closely resembled a hamster's. Standing before them, holding something that looked like one of those lawn spreaders for seed or fertilizer, was another of their kind, flapping her membranous wings (yes, I could tell it was a her). Her fingers were on the handle of the spreader. "I am Vempis of Nasdakki," she said in a hissing voice, "and on the two hundred and fifth solar day of the Nasdakkian year 80971, I went absolutely bat-shit crazy and took out all these folks in a single afternoon. Let me show you how I did it." Oh, yeah, bullshit (or maybe bat-shit)! I tried to get away, but somehow I knew this one would be harder than the others. Vempis lifted off and swooped down at me, the spreader throwing pellets of Christ-knows-what all around. I ducked under the stuff, squirmed between the bat corpses like a terrified snake, got on my feet, and tore ass. This was one damn weird module. Okay, back on the right path again. Not much farther to go now, I was sure of it. Probably could reach the end of the maze without another dead end. Probably not. They were human bodies this time, not many of them, but really messed up. Something vaguely familiar about them, too. I turned quickly. The guy was short, with a scraggly head of long, black hair and an equally unkempt beard. A swastika was crudely drawn on his forehead. As he raised two fingers at me in an old sixties peace sign, other hippy types began to appear, literally coming out of the woodwork (or hedgework, or whatever). "I am Charles Manson aka Jesus Christ of the San Fernando Valley, California, Earth," he said in a frenetic voice, "and during two August nights of the Earth year 1969 my children and me ran helter-skelter amid the elitist white pigs and brought them to their knees. Let us how you how we did it." They surrounded me now, some of his Family: Susan Atkins, Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houten, Bobby Beausoleil, a couple of others whose names I couldn't remember. All looking as wild-eyed and disheveled as Manson himself, and worse: they were armed. Tex Watson waved a revolver, the others brandished knives as they moved around in a circle, like kids at play. They were chanting all kinds of weird shit, none of which made sense. Hell no, I wasn't waiting around; ran right at Charlie, and through him. Sort of wished he was solid so I could've knocked him on his ass. On the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |