Silent Hill Disciples of the Crimson Tome
by Egglesplork
Chapter 11
…
1.
…
Jimmy knew the place. Oh yes he did, even if he didn't want to know it. Just like the grotesque knowledge a child has of an animal's insides run over by cars (spl-l-lat), just as full-grown people know that they could become roadkill themselves (thump-crunch) and their dying visions being the rusted nasty underside of someone's used car, just as all of those red-colored things were known and knowable, Jimmy knew…where this was.
He knew about this dark little machine-room, the small space being so hot and full of sounds. Rusted metal made for the walls—dull metal-brick walls. And where some sections of the walls were missing, there were exposed lengths of pipe-work and thick electrical cables, encrusted with the grit and grime of thousands of years. Pipes above had sloshing sounds coming from inside—pipes that carried blood and other fluids. These pipes and thick electrical cables were behind the walls, above the ceiling and in the floor, connected to the strange machines. These machines rumbled and churned away in many other small hot rooms like this one, rooms illuminated by greasy crimson-toned light bulbs. They didn't use florescent lights because, whenever they operated machines that interacted with certain worlds, florescent lights simply burnt out in the presence of so much hard radiation.
Yes, that's why rooms like these are hot—not hot in the temperature sense, but hot in the nuclear reactor sense. Grab your nuclear-biological-chemical gear, 'cause you're going to need it. Some of these rooms were somewhat passable if a person was in and out in about an hour. That person would just have to be checked out for some kinds of cancer a few months down the line, that's all. Oh, and forget about having normal-looking kids. And forget about entering some of these rooms at all, because some places here are so chock-full of hard radiation that they'll kill a dude in about a minute and leave a corpse so radioactive that it'd have to be buried in lead. (Some people think that last bit is an exaggeration on top of a joke. Well, maybe those people never heard about a quaint little place in the Russian countryside called Chernobyl.)
These places are not fit for human habitation. Such is why humans sometimes have organizations full of expert-humans to warn away other humans. After that, they put up signs like the ones with circles that have three black triangles in them—signs with words like Caution: Radiation. Do not enter. Translated, Stay the Hell away from this mother-forker.
Screw humans. Screw humans and the cars they rode in on, because this place is not for human beings at all. Humans are not the only beings capable of digging rocks out of a planet's crust, melting it down and making clever devices. And these creatures knew that as a fact.
The creatures here are humanoid—foreshortened parodies of the very race of beings that was often their enemy. Most of the creatures working this machine resembled little men in red coveralls. That is to say, each one of them had two arms and two legs on a torso, the business topped off with passable heads…temporarily ignoring just how those faces were twisted over with cancer-thickened skin and more than a few open sores. Some of the creatures had sores with moss growing out of them like little patches of green peach fuzz. But these things were made for what they can do with their hands, not strutting the fashion-show runways. What hands they were, too. Their thick-calloused fingers were at work in pushing thick metal buttons and work some heavy levers that needed pulling at certain times. Those creatures could pass for being midgets if seen on a dark moonless night, yet there was no way in Hell that the creature sitting above them could do the same.
Above them, reclining in an open-top cage was something else—a creature with a massive head too big for its corpse-pale body and huge arms, mottled all over with rotten-looking lesions and moldy spots like the ones had of other creatures here. Because this guy had no legs, it instead relied on its massive arms and powerful hands for mobility. No doubt, those arms could rip the head off of one of those midget-dudes with all the ease of popping a champagne cork, though this creature seldom had to do so. It also used those arms and hands to plug electrical cables and grimy rubbery tubes into metal sockets attached to its body where legs would have been.
What it did here was hard to tell from an outsider's point of view. It just seemed to lounge up there in its rust-metal upside-down open cage-thing, channeling electricity through its body, its massive lumpy head occasionally swaying. Whatever the thing was doing, it wasn't sitting back with a beer.
When that massive-headed creature was satisfied with whatever purpose it had in this room, it detached the electrical cables and grimy rubbery tubes from its legless lower torso. Then it crawling out through the top of its cage, going through a hole in the ceiling—grunting as it left this room.
Creatures, that's what they use for labor in this place. You might call them monsters, though that would be very unfair. A monster is something that is not natural. A monster is something that deviates. Yet in this world, these creatures are as natural as can be. Even if they looked like twisted mockeries of humanity, even if they looked like biological rejects, they are the ones running the show around here. It might also be pretty damned rude to talk about these creatures in such ways because maybe they had human beings in their distant ancestry. Or maybe these things came from worlds where they made it up the evolutionary ladder instead of that species of beings so famous on Earth.
Humans? Talking about those things? Those big-tall bastards with skin too smooth and a little bit of wrong-looking fur on top of their heads? Not around here, pal. You're talking to the wrong entities. Why don't you try the next dimension over? Meanwhile, these creatures got work to do—the great works. Won't be long before all the worlds belong to this one anyway.
Bzzt-flicker… A black box lit up in a corner of this room—a video monitor, maybe one about the size of someone's head. A human-sized head that is, not like the deluxe-sized noggin on the thing that climbed out of here. The black-box monitor was thus far unnoticed because the front of it was glossed over with a coating of algae-like slime.
Now that it was on, it was the brightest thing in here. With a faint haze of static, rows of red characters on black background appeared on the greasy screen. Someone with a smattering of Ancient Greek could maybe catch some familiar-looking letters—familiar but not totally recognizable. Beyond that bit of comprehensible ancient text, a person would be hard-pressed to understand the rest of the letters—looking like things made by Martian linguists tripped out on the extraterrestrial equivalent of LSD. They weren't numbers either, so don't even try that suggestion. Try calling them squeebles and boon-woggles, gruks and narfens… Not that those were actually the names of those strange symbols, mind you. Those whacked-out labels were as good as any for now. Otherwise, to come up with equivalents in any human language could probably take up a hundred pages or two of explanation.
Hundreds of pages of explanation…? Yes indeed. These guys have ideas that run deep, man. They are deep in the workings of various realities…as so they could rip it the Hell up.
Having the machines churning and groaning away, night-in and night-out, more of the same always being the way of things. Deep below and inside a world of machines and pipes, this place was older than worlds, continuing to exist even while civilizations fell to ruin due to various forms of self-destruction. While Rome crumbled on our version of Earth, while nuclear war ravaged other versions of Earth, while massive cities the sizes of countries died out due to a lack of reproduction among its citizenry in other versions of Earth besides that, while cities rose and died on human planets that did not even call themselves Earth, this place kept on existing. And if these creatures had anything to do with some of those worlds falling and failing—maybe they did, and maybe they didn't.
Is that their plan? Screw around with the fabric of reality? Invade ripe new worlds that never had to deal with them before? Hell yeah… It's as good a plan as any, ain't it? The forces of darkness in this place had nothing better to do for the past ten thousand years or so, and so they did what they wanted. Grannies have their gambling, frittering away their pensions before they get their curtain-calls from the Grim Reaper. College kids have their bungee jumping and the occasional broken neck to prove it. Meanwhile, people between college-age and granny-age have their hard liquor—good for rotting the guts, rotting the brain, and (most importantly) rotting the prolonged suffering of an empty life. Everybody needs a hobby, no matter how destructive and deranged it is otherwise. So it's perfectly fine for the powers-that-be in this place to have conquest of alternate realities as their fun thing in life. As for those who disagree, tell them to go have another drink or smoke some more weed. Forget that they ever heard of this other place.
This is what Jimmy knew. From coming to this place and inhabiting a body that belongs here, the knowledge was even closer and more personal. And since he had neither bottle nor blunt to chemically dull the agony of existing int his place, there was no forgetting about it. He knew about this place and what its plan was, or at least a version of its plan. He knew what the machines do and a little bit about how they operate. He knew this because…he was currently one of the little humanoid bastards operating them.
He stopped himself. Knowing full well what these machines can do, he stopped what he was doing and stiffly put his malformed inhuman hands down to his sides—stiffly because the muscles of these arms were feeling a little on the dead side. What do they call it? Oh yeah, rigor mortis. But if he was dead, that wouldn't explain how this odd body of his could still move. As a rule, dead folks aren't terribly mobile.
His not-quite-dead eyes staring at the levers and thick metal buttons on the machine-panel in front of him, part of himself informing his mind to push this and pull that as needed. Being in this body and having become one of the creatures, the desire to work the strange machines was a compulsion. There was a really old movie where the priests chanted over and over again, The power of Christ compels you! Here, it's more like, The power of darkness compels you! The power of darkness compels you! The power of darkness…
Nope, wasn't going to do it. Jimmy's mind was human, even if the brain it was borrowing wasn't. Not working, not doing anything, Jimmy-boy is on strike.
A hideous squeal pierced the hot dark air in this machine-room, another one of the midget-creatures talking. "Nyo ne'smirk!" came that same obnoxiously high-pitched voice. "Ne'smirk, sya! Ne'smirk elkrik, erg-ach!"
Jimmy understood what they were saying, the brain he was in doing the translation. Basically and roughly speaking, they were yelling about him not doing what he was supposed to do. They knew why he wasn't doing it. The other creatures in this room were onto his little game of imposter.
Language issues or none, all humanoids run in the same language provided that they have two or more working legs to do so. It was something that he could do which didn't require too much filtration through that other part of his mind. So run, he did.
More like, he tried running. Here he was, a human in a mutant midget-creature's body, trying to run on stumpy mutant-legs all bound up with these thick coveralls made out of some strange material like nothing on Earth. The best that Jimmy could manage was a hobbling hop-run to try and get some extra length out of his stride—his bare feet slapping the metal floor. His eyes were dead-set focused on the rust-armored door out of here, a door leading to a hallway with other doors. Some of those doors in the hall led to other worlds. What worlds? Jimmy didn't give a damn. So long as it wasn't this one, it didn't matter.
Jimmy-boy didn't have a chance. While everyone in this room at the moment had those same thick-stumpy mutant-midget bodies with the thick-stumpy limbs, they were a lot better at moving fast than he was. Those little dudes were on him with amazing quickness. They were also good at swinging their metal tools like weapons.
A wet splunch, and something smacked Jimmy in the left shoulder—the arm going limp on that side. He noticed how it was hanging kind of funny and had gone numb. Well okay, make that more numb than it was before since it was already a little bit lacking in feeling. Now that it was completely broken, that didn't matter much.
Being in this state made him oddly more tolerant to bodily damage without minding much. He could admire the fact that his left arm was busted and hanging wrong with the detached feeling of someone seeing it from the third person. His mind just registered the fact that the arm was not the way it used to be. (Oh, is that my broken arm? Hmm, interesting…) And to add the spice of life known as variety, they broke some other stuff on Jimmy too.
While he was noticing the awesome physiological change which had come about from having a shattered shoulder, broken bones and split joints, more of the same was on the way. Another one of the midget-creatures whacked him in the ribs—something important inside of his chest making a wet crunch sound before going soft. The same was true for the other whacks they gave him, all kinds of truly awesome sounds of a body being smashed and mutilated.
As this was happening, Jimmy took on the strange notion that he was being treated like a pinata. Indeed, it was like this was a roomful of kids just blasting away at him. Some would argue that the creatures were doing it wrong—that there's only supposed to be only one kid whacking the pinata. And the one kid is supposed to have on a friggin' blindfold. Furthermore, those same people would say that a pinata is full of candy, not full of sloppy wet blobs of soft meat known as internal organs.
Well guess what? One blindfolded dude or dude-ette doing the work may be how you play pinatas in your world. Around here, they do things a little bit differently, mes amis.
Pinatas are Mexican-Spanish, not French, thought Jimmy from his position on the rust-metal floor… Yes, the floor, because he fell down at some point in the game. Fall down, go boom! More like, fall down and go crunch. All the while those short-little bastards were still at it—hitting and hitting him with their metal tools. He suspected that the body he was in now must have the consistency of meat-flavored oatmeal. Broken bones must make their efforts all the more easy. And… Hey, how is he still conscious?
That's a very good question. His chest, arms and legs were being beaten steadily into a shredded fleshy pulp with some bone fragments for variety in texture, that's true. But a humanoid creature's thinking usually doesn't happen in the arms, legs and chest. And be sure to ignore comments about a man's thinking being done below the belt. It's the head that matters. Speaking of which, one of those little geniuses with the tools must have thought the same thing because it raised its rust-metal tool—the tool's strange attachments looking like mismatched points on a mace—and brought it down hard on Jimmy's head…which split like a brain-filled melon. Gooey stuff came out. And it looked nothing like the individually wrapped treats from a glued-paper party attraction.
If it looked bad from the outside, then it was even worse for the guy experiencing it first hand. Everything…seemed to go to a side and down, a haze of darkness and sparkles filling his vision as things began fading out. He wasn't walking away from this one. Instead, he was going away. As the hearing from his soon-to-be-corpse went off into the distance, he heard the far-off sweet voice of the dead woman. He followed the voice, down and into a distance. Roger that, over and out…
…
And damned if he didn't…wake up scared shipless—jerking himself up in the bunk and looking around. (Jerking up, not jerking off. Perverts.) It was the same way he woke up after taking that night-time ride with the dead woman. Except he didn't take a ride with a not-alive lady this time. It was more like he took a ride on the wild side, the dark side.
Hope and darkness, good and evil, as Jimmy's mind became more coherent from that wild night-time nightmare, he had a really solid feeling of good and evil. Evil is not just the off-hand tomfoolery of a kid taking candy from a baby. Nor is it the antics of a masked guy running out of a bank with two big bags with dollar-symbols on them. That's little stuff compared to what Jimmy was worried about. We're talking about evil, for real. As in, bring about the downfall of reality kind of evil. Compared to that, robbing candy from babies and money from banks is small beans, microscopic beans. No, smaller than that… Subatomic beans. Maybe that dude with the money-bags is stealing to feed his family during the Great Depression, and maybe that kid snatching the candy from the proverbial baby is keeping that little 'un from developing diabetes at an early age. They're humans.
Those other things aren't. Those messed-up creatures, they were what was really evil. Those creatures wanted to make it as so all the First National Banks would crumble into ruin and all the baby cousins everywhere in all the worlds would die as conditions became too inhospitable for most life. This world would become like theirs—everything being darkened, things changing, creatures that shouldn't exist coming into existence. Darkness and madness…
As more of them broke into this reality, invading this world, they would make things happen. And if Jimmy didn't do what he was supposed to do when the time was right, they could very damn well win, damn it. Everything would be damned too, probably forever.
To think, Jimmy was sharing a cell with someone who was in cahoots with those things and their strange machines. It was the odd prisoner who also inhabited this cell—the one who was helping out those freaks. The odd prisoner was doing the metaphysical equivalent of saying, Greetings, creatures of evil. Come on over. There is plenty of space to be conquered.
Speaking of the odd prisoner, where was that traitor to humanity? Jimmy looked down over the edge of the bunk. Nope, the odd prisoner wasn't down there. He sat up and looked at the wooden chair in front of the wall covered with weird writing—the chair being empty in the gloom. Not there either. Nor was the odd prisoner on the toilet. The odd prisoner was most likely gone through a hole of a horizontal sort, not a vertical one—a hole in the wall, a hole in reality. If Jimmy had the guts to go into the hole whenever it appeared, maybe he'd be out of here too. Maybe there was a way to get that hole to open up in Vegas or something…
Yeah, right. As if he had Vegas money to spend. Jimmy knew that the odd prisoner wasn't hamming it up in that hot city of ill repute. If the odd prisoner was at any place Vegas, it probably wasn't the one on this version of Earth. He wasn't here. He wasn't there, either.
So now, what can Jimmy do? The easy answer would be to kill the mother-forker. Yet the not-so-easy part about it was how he could do that. A shiv could maybe get the job done. Inmates get shanked all the time. Smuggle some pieces of metal out of the metal shop, sharpen it on a worn-away piece of the concrete wall, wrap a strip of torn bedsheet around an end to make a handle… And there you have it—a makeshift knife to poke a hole in somebody's guts. Doing that used to be almost impossible ten years ago when the prison guards were more plentiful and more careful. But decades of tax cuts for rich folks means less money for government—as in, less money to pay prison guards. So now it's too easy. It's probably deliberately that way because dead inmates no longer need to be fed, clothed or given medical care. Fewer prisoners means fewer dollars need to be spent. Even if that meant one less jailbird, that was fifty thousand dollars less a year that needed to be spent from the state budget on this place. Easier to cut taxes, more money for rich people, it all works out.
It didn't work for Jimmy because he didn't' want the blood on his hands. Remember, he's only a convicted killer—not even a mommy killer because he actually didn't do the killing. He was actually innocent regardless of what that rich alcoholic's team of lawyers told the jury.
Jimmy didn't want to kill the odd prisoner or even try because the odd prisoner could do some real-life magic. That guy could conjure up some mumbo-jumbo and stop Jimmy before he even got close. He saw how the odd prisoner could summon killer creatures in the blink of an eye just to scare the squirts out of somebody.
That was just scaring people. Imagine how fast the odd prisoner could magic-up a weapon, like maybe a sword. Sure, and the odd prisoner could also probably make that sword appear in Jimmy's chest. Fatality! Flawless victory…
Okay, so it's no to the shank idea. In fact, don't even mention close-range killing again. That's a non-starter. He'd be a goner before he even had a chance somewhat resembling that of a napalm-dipped snowball's chance in Hell.
If not a shank, then what? How about a pillow over the face while sleeping? Duh, the odd prisoner didn't even sleep here. On top of that, Jimmy wasn't even sure if the odd prisoner slept at all. Even if he did, it would be the same close-range problem again—which isn't even supposed to be brought up again. The odd prisoner would wake up, do some hocus-pocus, and Jimmy would be dead. A pillow over the face is how to kill an ailing wife, not a psychopathic cell-mate who could tap into powers from another universe.
What about…an accident? What if something was to, uh…happen to the odd prisoner? Nope to that, too. In fact, screw that idea too. That's not only stupid, it's dumber than stupid. It's not like the odd prisoner got around in an automobile and Jimmy could put a hole in the brake-fluid reservoir. Never mind if Jimmy knows all about car accidents that kill people—like single young mothers… Mommy killer!
Sitting up in the bunk in the hour before wake-up, Jimmy knew that he had to stop the odd prisoner. The odd prisoner wasn't back yet. And no doubt that the odd prisoner could somehow know what Jimmy was thinking. So he would get his thinking out of the way now. Trouble is, his thinking wasn't him getting him much of anywhere at the moment. He did not know how he could stop the odd prisoner or even survive an attempt on him. Clenching his fists, squinting his eyes shut, he was hard-pressed in thought. What am I supposed to do?
…
2.
…
Some hours later and nine miles away, the warden was on the way. With nothing but some cocaine for company instead of the usual female escort (prostitute), the warden rode along in this limousine—going along that long forest road that led to the penitentiary. Just as this long-car went expertly along this forest road, the warden was expertly guiding a tube along the little white lengths of powder on the mirror in front of him—the mirror on top of a tray that was attached to the door. Normally, the fold-out door-mounted tray was used for plates of meals. Now it was being used for consumption of another kind.
As to how a big man in a black suit managed to keep from getting any of the white stuff on himself while in a moving vehicle, it all came down to years of practice. It also came from having a careful limo driver who knew what the boss-man was doing back here and maneuvered this vehicle accordingly. Practice, practice, boys and girls. This fat man had been doing nose-candy ever since… Well, he couldn't quite remember at the moment. It was hard remembering some things when one was in an altered state of consciousness brought about by certain mind-altering substances. It's hard to think along those lines.
Speaking of lines (heh-heh), the line on his timepiece—the platinum-metal hour-hand of his watch—was nearing the noon position. There was no minute-hand on his watch. No numbers either, just four notches at opposite sides—one for noon, one at three o'clock, one at six o'clock, and one at nine o'clock. Afternoon, dinnertime, evening and witching hour. When you're a big man in society like the warden or any other member of his family, there's no need to really know the specific minute or even the specific hour. You just need a vague idea as to what general time of day it is. Appointments? Fork that. You show up whenever you damn well please…damn it. If you were some poor schmuck like a prison guard or a (heaven forbid) janitor, you needed a very accurate watch to be at work, on time, every day, down to the minute. You need a watch had to tell the hour, minute and second, and it had better be set according to an atomic clock. All that mattered regarding the warden was that he be at certain places eventually. He felt that he didn't have to be at penitentiary until around the time that the big glowing Eye of Bob was just about midpoint in the sky. The boss-man sets the hours, including his own.
Large and in charge, nobody messes with him. Go wherever, do whatever, and no one was going to stop him. And had the warden not taken multiple doses of something once used as a dental anesthetic during the 1800s, he might have reacted worse to what was going to happen next.
It eventually took the warden to realize that this limousine was no longer moving. The forested scenery beyond the tinted windows was no longer being passed by. Because the passenger cabin was so well insulated and the suspension so silky smooth, it was hardly noticeable when this vehicle was moving—now noticeable with engine and wheels stopped. Somehow, he could hear the sound of the wind outside as it blew through the tall trees.
Click-clomp. The right-side door of this limousine opened up, and a tall tan-skinned man in black suit entered this limousine—his hair as dark as the seemingly silk-lined dress-jacket and pants he had on. Another sound of well-crafted car metal, and the door closed with him inside. He sat down in the leather seating. "Good day, warden. There is something that we must talk about."
Under other circumstances, the warden would have picked up his coke-dusted mirror from his tray and thrown it like a ninja-star at this intruder. He did no such thing. The cocaine doing its rounds through his bloodstream was making him somewhat more calm than he otherwise would be. Not calm by normal standards, mind you. That, and something about the intruder kept him from being violent.
Instead, the warden just became verbally violent. "Who the Hell are you!" exploded the warden's voice—though some would have expected the warden's big-huge belly to explode instead.
"That is the wrong question," said this tan-skinned intruder in the black suit, his gold-colored tie and crisp-white shirt looking extra-bright and extra-clean. It even hurt the warden's eyes a little to look. "It is more important to talk about something else." He leaned forward slightly, his dark eyes piercingly clear. "This is your last chance to do what is right."
"I'll tell you what's right," said the warden. "If you don't get out right now, I'm going to shove one of my size thirteens so far up your ass that you're gonna taste Italian leather every day until Sunday. If you're one of those people that like things shoved up their poop-chute, I can oblige!"
The tan-skinned man in dark business-suit remained calm as a breeze. "Though you have been given the privilege of having eyes that see and ears that hear, you are blind and deaf to that which is happening. There are people who have learned to hear with good hearts and see with wise minds. It is the good in the world that will let a person see that which is wrong."
"You interrupted my ride just for some mystical wisdom-talk?" said the warden through a sneer. "This ain't some after-school program for kids. This is…"
And just for a moment, the warden thought that he wasn't actually seeing and hearing this intruder. All of that talk was just too freaky to be real. Maybe it was just his imagination was getting a little help from his chemical friends. Coke isn't supposed to do that. Unless… Damn it, Ace told me this stuff was straight, thought the warden.
Who in tarnation is Ace? Well, Ace was the street name of the dude who saw to the warden's…uh, pharmaceutical needs. In all of his dealings with the warden, Ace said that he supplied nothing but straight coke—as in, not cut with any impurities other than pure white powder. Ace is the place for illegal street drugs, as it was once put to the warden.
Yeah right, as if Ace was an ace with telling the truth. Most all coke sold in this country is cut with something—impurities put in for value-added bulk. It works like this. Say you've got one kilo of pure Columbian snow fresh off the corporate jet. Straight up. Now what you can do is make that one kilo into two with some cheap ship. Maybe you use some baking powder. And if you're bored, you can sometimes use some ground glass. Not only that, but it's too forking easy to make one kilo into six. Ace knows the score. He just wouldn't want his customers knowing it.
This sounds worse than it actually is. It could be a sort of temporary act of mercy that such impurities were added for the sake of the customers. If given pure powder, a cocaine addict (like the warden) would off himself or herself with a megadose of the undiluted stuff. A dead customer is no longer a paying customer.
This time around, though, Ace's supplier had cut the warden's coke with a little something special. More particularly, the stuff used with the warden's coke was some free natural stuff from a bare-footed hippie-lady who claimed to have once lived in a certain screwed-up town a few hours' drive away from here. Gosh 'em golly… You know what town that is.
Anyway, back to the here and now—the so-called intruder talking to the warden. He said, "Like your fathers before you, you have done much evil to this land and the people who have once lived here by the many. You alone deserve the fate of an evil path. But, the people under your control do not deserve to suffer because of your wrongs." A pause. "By allowing the odd prisoner to do what he does, you are doing much wrong in this life."
More mystical mumbo-jumbo from somebody who's probably a drugged-up figment of my tripping imagination, thought the warden. Straight coke, my ass. I'll be damned if this stuff isn't mixed with PCP. "Here's what I think about you and your wisdom-talk," said the warden before forming a fist with one finger extended. Guess which finger?
The warden wasn't finished talking either. "If you think I'm going to listen to some figment of my imagination brought to life from a little dust, you've got another thing coming. No… No, I'm not going to listen. No, I'm not going to accept your groovy proposal to stop. And in case you don't understand English, Nyet, comrade. Instead, I'm gonna let the odd prisoner do whatever he wants because he can do things for me. He's got magic, dumb-ass. Real magic, you dumb fork. All of this mystical talking you do, sounds like you ought to know what the real stuff is, and he's got it."
Said the intruder, "I had hoped that there was enough good left inside you to do what is right. Others have disagreed. They said, you would refuse because a dark wind blows too strongly in you. Now it is true that they were right, and I was not."
"Well, fork you too, buckaroo," said the warden. "Fork you like one fairy screwed the other in Brokeback Mountain."
The intruder gave one more look at the warden, the intruder's eyes somehow darker than the black silk of his business suit. "You have failed yourself and all that are near to you, your friends and family. It is with some sadness and much anger that I leave you now. May the dark and final truth come before you suffer too much." The right-side car-door opened up, and he got up out of this limousine.
All full of vicious anger himself at this violation of his personal space in his limo, the trued to get up and get at the intruder. Yet…the warden found that couldn't get out of this soft-leather seat. Despite having multiple chins, he didn't have trouble turning his head. Turn his head all he likes, probably even spin it like a merry-go-round, but he wasn't getting anywhere if he wasn't able to get the rest of himself to move.
Oh great, too late. A final clomp, and the limo door was already closed—the intruder gone as easily as he arrived. (As easily as the intruder arrived, not the coke-headed warden.) And now the warden found that he could move again. His huge suit-covered gut broke the fold-out tray off of its mount as he moved to kneel on the passenger-compartment floor and press his big face against the limo glass—looking a lot like an overgrown chubby kid looking into the display case of a pastry shop. His greedy eyes wanted to see that freak.
He still didn't see the intruder. The view outside showed nothing but a view of the forest along with a whole lot of nobody being out there. There was no man in dark business suit walking away. Nothing but the breeze, that's what. So maybe he should close his mouth before something flies into it. Nobody wants to see the inside of that guy's mouth.
He suddenly went slamming back into the seat, nearly breaking his back and his neck, and he yelled like somebody with whiplash, suddenly in pain. He was not thrown into the rearmost leather seating, because that would mean something physically struck him and did the shoving. Given the warden's mass, it would take a Sumo wrestler with cyborg super-powers to give a good enough shove. Rather, it was more like the long seat slammed into him—because this limousine was suddenly moving as if accelerating to forty miles per hour from a dead stop. The warden wasn't really hurt too badly though, especially with all of that blubber acting like natural padding. Just winded.
When he eventually did feel up to it, still lying down on the big wide seating, he groped up and found the switch which opened up the little intercom speaker-system between the passenger compartment and the driver. "What just happened, you dumb turd-for-brains! Why the Hell did you stop for that…mystical freak? If your uncle wasn't a friend of my family, I'd have your nuts chopped off and put in a pair of golf balls while the rest of you gets fed to livestock in Jersey! They won't find you if you're ground up and made into mother-forking pig-swill."
The limo driver was properly nervous in his answer. If the warden wanted someone gone, it could happen. Came the limo driver's nervous voice through the speaker, "S-sir! I never stopped, s-swear! Please look outside! We're already here now!" The electronic speaker did make the limo driver's voice sound a little bit funny—which was probably not nice since the limo driver was trying to be as serious as possible. He didn't want to have his nuts chopped off and end up being fed to pigs.
Angry and grunting, the warden struggled to sit up and have a look. Indeed, this limousine was already slowing to a halt at the front gates of the penitentiary—deep in the forest, in its own territory cleared of trees. It was the too-familiar sight of his small part of the family political kingdom.
Time for a little logic. If this limo did stop within such a short driving distance of the penitentiary, then it would have stopped close enough for the prison guards to see anyone or anything on foot—walking or running away. The surrounding forest is declared state property and is off limits to almost everyone. That includes any and all peasants and commoners. When they post those trespassers-will-be-shot signs up on trees, they mean it. Never mind if the occasional deer or bear gets blasted for being in the wrong place at the wrong time—ending up in the sights of a prison-guard's weapon, that is. And if the intruder didn't have a car…
Okay, so the intruder in the dark business suit didn't have a car. He was still somehow able to move super-fast without a vehicle of any sort. Heh, maybe he hopped onto a saddled Bigfoot-monster and vanished into the forest without a visible trace. Why not, since everybody knows that Bigfoot monsters have invisibility skills. Sure they do. That's how they avoid hunters. Yup. Uh-huh… And the Bigfoot monsters learned their invisibility skills and other tricks from telepathically communicating with little gray aliens. They're also the same little guys that befriended Elvis Presley. Little gray aliens, Elvis Presley, working with Bigfoot-monsters, they're all in one great big conspiracy with the X-Files subdivision of the FBI as they get around in alien spacecraft disguised as black helicopters. See, it makes perfect sense. Now if you believe that, please step this way. We have a snug-fitting jacket with sleeves that go all the way around, along with a very relaxing room that has nice soft walls…
"I'm not crazy, damn it! He was here!" yelled the warden, his shout absorbed by the padded interior of this luxurious passenger compartment. Hmm, maybe the padding was just as soft as the walls of certain kinds of hospital rooms. And wouldn't a crazy person act the way that the warden was acting right about now?
"Of course not, sir!" came the blurted voice of the limo driver through the speaker. "Nobody would say that you were!" He paused. "The guards are coming over. What should I say, sir?"
"Tell 'em nothing," said the Warden to the driver. "Hell, tell 'em what you're always supposed to say! No, just tell 'em I'm not feeling right." Since that was most of the truth, it was a good enough answer.