Falling Through the Windows of Madness - Leo Vine-Knight (top books of all time TXT) 📗

name is Carol J-----“
“Yes sir, I can assist you. My name is Carol J----“
(stunned silence)
“Surely…..it can’t be you Carol….you’ve changed….”
“Yes, The Big Man is kind and good. He issues fresh undergarments every month to all library staff.”
“But….don’t you recognise me…. I’m your husband.”
` “The word ‘husband’ is now banned. All females are now married to The Big Man. The rest are wood.”
“What happened to the children, Carol?”
“I don’t understand sir. I cannot assist you. I cannot assist you. I am biodegradable. I am biodegradable…..fizzz…..fizzz.….splutter…..”
Carol’s head lolled to one side and for the first time I noticed something a little strange about her. There was a mechanical appendage sticking out of her left ear, a chrome plated key slowly turning in unison with her revolving eyeballs and waggling tongue.
“Yes, all the assistants are half clockwork now mate” said my friend with the coffee stained penis “In 2015 psychiatrists turned back to lobotomies as their modus operandi. By that time, everyone was on psychiatric medication as a normal part of their diet, so the experts had to look elsewhere to justify their bow ties.”
“I see.”
Well, how would I find the kids now.
“The children…” gasped Carol.
“Yes, yes….Carol, what is it?”
“They’re….in….the….hospital.”
For a moment she held my gaze, and a single tear fell.

* * *

‘The hospital’ could only mean one place; that black bastion which turned minds into aspic, people into planks and ideas into prison bars. The place where the occult met the chequebook, the blind led the deaf, and the future lay previewed for an absent audience. The psychiatric hospital.
I had unconsciously avoided the hospital since my rebirth, but now was the time to grit my teeth, grasp the nettle, gird my loins, bite the bullet, and….er…..push Loo well in front. This was no mean feat, in fact, because Loo was convinced it was his day for the dog food factory (where the newly chosen Members of Parliament apparently met with The Big Man).
“Oh, my turd…I mean word….I mean pdf. I suppose I’ll have to sacrifice my career as usual, Steve.”
“Good man.”
And off we went.

The walk was a horrible combination of the familiar and the unworldly, as devastated streets were punctuated with odd, preserved artefacts from my past, curiously preserved in shattered contexts. Pickled organisms in a wrecked laboratory, the duplex flats now lay on end, the Georgian terraces blinked windowless in the sun, the park ran wild, and the corpse of an old lady sat on the white step of her tomb. Rabid boars roamed the avenues, flesh hanging from their jaws, ancient dog shit encrusted the pavements like a new fossil phylum, flattened and crystallised, stamped and ingrained, mixed and fixed. Putrid stenches vied with repulsive sights, beggars wiped their arses with tomorrow’s newspapers, a Rolls-Royce came around the corner drawn by four sickly horses, a tramp muttered a mantra as he sucked the juice from a dead bird, and the first snow of summer began to fall.
“That Rolls-Royce….” Said Loo.
“Yes.”
“The Big Man has one like that.”
“Oh.”
“Yes! Look, it’s pulling into the hospital. Maybe we can get an autograph!”

And then I saw it. Not so much the hospital, as what was left of it. Charred pillars stood around the site like the ribs of a blackened dinosaur, thick grey dust rolled and swirled about the gutted rooms and old ragged sheets fluttered from the ruined turrets. Rusting beds lay twisted on the ground, amidst the scorched grass and shattered glass, while feral beasts scuttled in and out, their eyes glinting with primordial lusts. The hospital was no more than a carcass.
“What on earth has happened here?”
“Ha Ha, that is a good one” said Loo, somewhat mechanically.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Steve, you’re the one who burned it down.”
(silence).
“Of course I didn’t….I….”
“You bloody well did, mate.”
So, my pyrotechnic delusions of yesteryear weren’t delusions after all. The only delusion was thinking I hadn’t done it. I smiled, I laughed, I guffawed, I choked and squealed and howled. I almost crapped myself with hysterical mirth.
I hadn’t meant to burn the hospital down. But I had.
And I was glad I had.
Then, as the summer snowstorm blew away, a gargantuan dazzling glass dome appeared through the murk, like a Martian fighting machine, cold, deadly and all-seeing. A cathedral of the future, mortuary of the gods, ice palace in the desolate wastes.
“The n-n-new hospital” said Loo
“B-but it’s huge, like a spaceship.”
“Well that’s about it. The aliens are health service partners now. Them and The Big Man.”
“Is it the same old patient club inside?”
“No, the place is full of seriously insane people now – those who think they can explain everything and control the world.
“You mean scientists, philosophers and politicians.”
“Yes, such blasphemous terms were once used.”
“Psychosurgery?”
“So it is rumoured around the log fires.”
“And Carol said my kids were inside that thing.”
“We need a plan.”

An hour later, shrouded in mist and peering through the twilight, we began crawling towards the colossal dome. Having rolled in mud, pig swill and twigs, we were now virtually invisible amongst the debris and detritus of the eerie surrounding killing fields. Our elbows and knees were raw as we wormed our way through a maze of barbed wire fences, putrid ditches and abandoned bunkers, slowly circling the pulsating monster, looking for a convenient ventilation grill, sleeping guard or unsecured window. With every commando sense tuned to the slightest variation in our environment, we stealthily approached….
“Yikes!”
Surprisingly, we found ourselves swinging in the air, as the giant fists of an angry Troll closed viciously around our ear lobes and yanked us high into the sky.
“Ugh! Ugh!”.
“It’s one of the aliens” I cried.
“No, it’s a postgraduate” replied Loo. ”We should be okay if we use a lot of flattery.”
A steel door whooshed upwards and we were inside the hospital, travelling quickly down long metal corridors, past the familiar shouts and groans of patients on either side, and on towards the very heart of the fiendish hive. An archway loomed, and through it we were propelled like a pair of 10-pin bowling balls destined for a spare.
“Ugh! The visitors have arrived your majesty!”
Recovering out senses, we craned our necks around the vast stateroom, where every surface was festooned with rich silks, gold leaf, exotic wood veneers, and tropical fruits. It was Long John Silver’s treasure chest magnified a thousand times, and in the centre of it rested a stupendous, bejewelled throne, on which rested…. a….a ....a grotesquely corpulent form…..
“Richard!”
“Ho ho ho” chortled the abomination, its multiple rings of flab wobbling violently over cage-like artificial limbs, its eyes a pair of video cameras following our every movement, its face a bloated crimson caricature, its cock huge and metallically grasped.
“As always, things are well in hand, Steven” he rasped.
“You’ve aged a little Richard” I ventured.
“Rubbish! I am the acme of human advancement. A perfect quintessence of biological superiority, technological wizardry and verbal cow clap. I am absolutely impregnable.”
“Well, I can’t imagine you getting pregnant to be honest.”
“Ho ho ho. Always the court jester, Steven. But soon it will be my turn to tell the jokes.”
“How’s that?”
“Just look over there, old boy.”
And in corner of the room I saw my children, apparently hypnotised, occupying two outsize test tubes, flanked by postgraduate trolls with sadistic smiles.
“You hideous lout - release then at once!”
“Ho ho, ho. They’ll be released all right. Straight into my lucrative dog food factory. They have served their purpose in luring you here.”
“But why?”
“You think I would allow you to remain unpunished for trying to murder me?”
“Murder?”
“On the night of the hospital fire, I was trapped inside. I barely survived the ordeal, but after 1001 gruesome, experimental operations and a ten-year period of recuperation, I was at last ready for revenge. I have been waiting for you, Steven.”
(Gulp)
“In fact, we have been waiting,” announced a shrill, menacing voice.
“Oh no! Zebulon!”
From behind the massive frontage of Richard’s reverberating body, slid a shrunken monkey, with a towering mass of coifed, lacquered hair, bedecked in voguish dead mice, dried spiders and powdered cobwebs.
“B-but I thought everyone escaped from the hospital. I saw both of you outside.”
“I returned in order to rescue my collection of rare and irreplaceable porno tapes…erm…erm…I mean a briefcase with some very important, highly confidential healthcare planning documents.”
“And thus the damage was done,” said Zebulon, climbing up onto Richard’s rubbery shoulder and casually pointing a purple ray gun at my spleen. “But now we have lured you here and it is our turn to have some fun.”
“Fun! Fun! Fun!” we all chorused (old habits die hard).
“I will begin by vaporising your left testicle,” he announced, taking careful aim.
“Zap! Shriek!”
For a moment, everything was a beautifully crafted cinematic still, frozen solid by shock, and etched in memory. Then, a large hole appeared in the top of Zebulon’s mile high bushy hair-do and he slowly toppled forward, stone dead. Blood gushed from the wound and a secret was at last revealed. He did not have big hair, he had an extremely big head.
He was an elephant man.

Suddenly, the scene went into fast-forward and the room was full of wrestling bodies, ricocheting bullets, screams and shouts, whistles and bells, barked orders and muffled explosions. Richard wobbled like a blancmange in an earthquake as dozens of direct hits peppered his folds of protective flab, apparently without effect, and his prosthetic penis pumped out retaliatory bursts of flame and smoke. A somersaulting figure in studded leather dived under the looping arc of fire and stuffed a stick of Semtex where the sun no longer shone.
“Bummmmffff!”
“Yikes! That smarts!” said Richard, as the red lights on his video cameras went out, his phallus drooped and his head fell forward with an unhealthy ‘click’.
“Everything was in hand….” he whispered.
For the first time I noticed a small, gold key in his right ear rotating to a halt, and I realised the truth. Zebulon had been The Big Man, while Richard was merely the stooge, the fall guy; just another surgically enhanced slave dancing to his master’s tune. I felt a second’s regret when I looked at the lifeless vat of lard which had once been the body of a proud pygmy, but (as this was no time for nostalgia) my memory pressed ‘delete’, and I turned around.

Kate.
“Kate!”
Somehow I knew it would be her. Looking a little older, perhaps, but still magnificently statuesque in her studs, tattoos, dreadlocks, African initiation scars, and tooth-trophy necklaces. A vision of controlled menace, with armour piercing eyes, toned biceps, boa constrictor thighs and a belt full of blood bespattered butchers’ knives, saws and skewers. Just as a remembered her from the ‘Steel Balls” heavy metal club, all those years ago.
“Hello stranger, fancy seeing you here” we chorused.
“Thank you for saving my life.”
“Oh, think nothing of it. We were due to make a house call anyway.”
“And who is ‘we’?”
“Why, don’t you recognise them Steve?” she laughed.
There was indeed something vaguely familiar about the crack commandos who were now lined up in perfect formation behind Kate.
“Permission to do 200 star jumps while we’re waiting, General?” said the Sergeant.
“Carry on Sergeant.”
“That surely wasn’t….wasn’t…..”
“You’ve got it at last Steve. These fine men and women are the residents from the old hospital. You were perfectly right. Once the tea and chocolate biscuits ran out they immediately began showing signs of recovery, and when all state benefits were banned in ’13 there was a wholesale revolution of the heart.”
“Necessity is the