Richard Stein never got to read Horses Are Superior To Humans, but I’m sure he would’ve enjoyed it. He always said that horses are the greatest creatures invented, because they are BIG and strong, yet still beautiful. He said humans can never have beauty when they are BIG and strong, and neither can any other animal, even lions and bears. Unless you’re an artist, that is, because artists usually find all creatures beautiful, especially the ugly or peculiar-looking ones.
He was a BIG man himself. Not extremely defined with muscles, but pretty massive. He found himself disgusting, an ugly beast with pants. He cringed in the mirror every day, just like me. And he found all of his BIG-strong friends disgusting as well, even though they found themselves beautiful, and so did their women.
Richard Stein always envied all of the thin-small people in the world. And all of the thin-small people in the world envied him back, just for not being thin-small.
This Horse Mansion doesn’t work anymore. It was swallowed up by the Silence just yesterday, when it took its morning stroll through the walm and back, leaving a world without their god machine, which means that that world will probably die soon. It has already digested all of the horses inside of it and rendered it a BIG useless building. If it did still work, it would be a perfect solution to our problem. We could’ve gone to Heaven Two instead of oblivion.
Now that I think of it, God could’ve put a Sutter on Earth after Heaven filled up, but I guess he just didn’t care enough to do it.
Of course, even if there was a Sutter, we would’ve had to kill ourselves before the walm took our souls, and that would’ve been a pretty hard thing for us to do. It would’ve been a good backup plan anyway. Especially if there’s something that will try to stop us from going through the walm, like a prowler beast or a gatekeeper, which is a good possibility.
I was expecting the Sutter to be crowd-stuffed, but I find the opposite when I go in. It’s totally empty. I go inside, my steps echoing, echoing…. I guess all the crazies were too loud and got themselves digested already.
I just used the word praying, but I meant hoping, because praying is a pointless act in this world.
Walking hyper-stretched. Vision sick, lunking through horse-scented spaces. Some people here — walm people. Just a small some. A couple quiet blue women feeding from a wormy teenager. A few scraggly ones and a dark male are here. All of them are in their miserable insides {?}, sitting.
Keeping my mouth shut, I walk on… If I’m wrong about the Silence and it digests me, all of my friends — who happen to be the last real humans left — will become walm fuel. I can’t let that happen. They’re counting on me to be a hero. A hero. A human fuck-up is mankind’s only hope. It scares me. Obscene colors leap into my head. I murder the thought.
After an hour of striding through hallways and finding only twenty-two sad-sad beings, I go to Heaven Two to satisfy my curiosity. If Stag and Lenny aren’t in this area I’ll at least be able to say that I’ve been to heaven.
Inside, I can think of only one descriptive word for heaven: carpet. I’m not sure if I can describe what I mean, but I feel all carpety inside of here. I feel comfortably drugged and released from all stress. The whole panic of the world has slipped right off of my shoulders.
Of course, this isn’t the real heaven. It’s just an imitation of paradise. And the only thing great about it is its comfortable atmosphere. I’m sure that the comfort gets boring after some time. At the moment, though, I am tempted to stay.
I don’t find Stag or Lenny, but one of them finds me.
I hear his voice calling me from a dark section of Heaven Two, where the words Punk Land have been hand written on a carpet wall. It was Stag’s little joke.
“Where are you?” I say, not perceiving anyone in Punk Land.
“Right here,” Lenny says.
Then I notice that he’s right in front of me, but transparent. A fading image. He’s half-digested and now only half-exists, sitting in a queer position and trying to hold on to his remains.
“Where’s Stag?” I ask, not whispering.
“Gone like the rest of them.” His voice isn’t a whisper either, but it’s not as loud as mine. “You got eaten too, eh?”
“Yeah, but I’m not staying here. I’m indigestible.”
Lenny doesn’t believe me. He says, “Cock wash.”
“I just came for you. We’re getting out of this world.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Lenny says.
“It doesn’t matter then,” I gripe.
I tell him the story of Satan Burger and how we’re going to restart the human race. He doesn’t seem to know where he is. He has cotton stains on his mouth and doesn’t speak. Speaking to me has already caused him to be digested a little more.
He tells me where the walm is. “Near the center of Punk Land, where they filmed Death Corpse.” That movie I was in, as a zombie in the back of the zombie crowd. There was a close-up of my back when I and a few other corpses were killing a major character that was dressed up like a butt-rocker. Mortician and Lenny were in that movie too, but I didn’t know them very well in those days.
“Is it dangerous?”
Lenny shrugs. “There’ll be something waiting for you there. It’s the Movac and it knows everything. Everything about everything. From how the universe began to how the universe will end, to what you are thinking to what you’re going to think.”
“What is it doing there?”
“Answering questions.”
“Do me a favor, Leaf.” Lenny scratches his chest and fades a little more.
“Sorry, I’m in a hurry.” I get up to leave.
“Please.”
“What is it?”
“Kill the Movac for me.”
“Why do that?”
“It doesn’t deserve to live. Nothing should know everything.”
Scene 23
Carnal Run
I leave Silence as slip-easy as before, and feel a tremendous smile overtake my face; I’m the only person who can escape such a creature after being swallowed. I am special. Just how I am the only person owning God’s Eyes, though they have been repossessed. I walk out calm-slinky and go back to Satan Burger, through the street that Silence emptied for me.
The walk is not dangerous anymore, I think, with more Silence-emptied streets, but danger can come from within you. Right now my head-visions seem like danger — my eyes are going hell-whirl. It’s enough for me to commit self-murder, but I won’t give in to the suicide voices in my head. I have mankind to save. And besides that, I’m sensing a hard-on coming. A BIG bulge in my pants. Richard Stein always said that hard-ons are bound to happen when you least expect them, but nobody ever thought that the hero of mankind would be having trouble with a hard-on during the moment of his ultimate test.
I am guessing my shank is craving the blue woman — maybe the blue woman is craving it too — but it’s not getting any blue pleasures anymore, because I will never see that creature ever again. She tricked me into pregnancy, without even loving me, but she was so beautiful… I’m definitely going to miss the sex. But I’ll have another blue woman soon enough. Once I give birth to it, I’ll have to feed it in the same manner I fed my old blue woman. Sure it seems like incest to molest my own child, but blue women belong to another culture.