Author's Note: Ugh. I keep forgetting to do author's notes. Okay. So…this one is Nothing, with Cameo Appearances of Molochai, Twig, and another voice you might or might not recognize yet. (All courtesy of, property of, brilliance of, the illustrious Poppy Z. Brite) Nothing has a bad dream and smokes rather a lot of cigarettes. Living situation implied. Still pretty tame…it's all in the implications. But I know where it's going now…bumped to a PG-13 for sheer irreverence. Enjoy.
"Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
By the prickin' o' my thumbs—
Something Wicked this way comes."
-Shakespeare, the Scottish Play
The room was dark, swirling with cacophonic symphonies of sound that couldn't be deciphered into actual, individual, distinguishable verses. The words melted together like popsicles in July; their colors blending and folding into one another as though all of space and time had become one great Funhouse Mirror. Faces came out of the dark, laughing, frowning, looking reproachful, looking angry, looking sad. And every where were whispers, a giddy gleeful singsong admonishment that flooded the eyes and ears and nose and throat and drowned the victim in their simple honesty. Traitor.
* * *
Dark eyes flashed open in the night and Nothing awoke with a start, blinking back the electrified reality of pure, wild green as he stared blankly at the ceiling. His sparrow skinny frame was slicked with sweat and he gasped; he couldn't breathe. He came to in a dense tangle of arms and legs and sugar and sex and the thick black tangles that covered his face were choking him, weren't his. Like swimming through an ocean of nightmares he used both hands as paddles to guide himself through the obstructions, dislodging a face-an arm-a shoulder-a set of fingers-a knee-a foot as he sat up, struggling for air. There was a sharp, stinging pain in his right shoulder and he lifted two fingertips to touch it. They came away sticky, he put them to his lips. Grape. Molochai. Nothing sighed, expelling breath with enough force to ruffle tangled strands of artificial ink before he raked them back out of the way with a baby claw, the taste of chartreuse and strawberry incense still strong on the back of his throat.
Nothing squirmed and wriggled and writhed his way out from between the mess of limbs and wrappers that was Twig and Molochai's twisted embrace, watching with downcast eyes as those two bodies—each easily engulfing him on its own—converged on one another in his absence; filling the whole where the warmth of another body once had been. When the two of them had filled all the spaces between them they stilled, Molochai's mouth latching into Twig's shoulder the way it had on Nothing's just moments before. He stood, bare feet crinkling on sugar coated cellophane, one angular hip jutted just so as he surveyed the room. It was, as per usual, trashed; littered an inch deep with the remains of lollipops and Debbie cakes and broken empty bottles. He kicked his way through it, clearing a path out onto balcony, letting the cool night air bathe his naked skin. He couldn't shake the dream, the whispers that echoed in his mind. Falling onto a rusty chaise lounge with some of its plastic slats missing, he closed sharp fingers around the neck of an overlooked bottle of chartreuse. Bringing it to his lips, those stormy eyes fell closed for a moment as he inhaled its scent. Pine, anise; one hundred and seventeen other flavors and you could taste them all if you paid attention. He tipped the bottle and felt it burn all the way down, green fire flooding his nose and mouth and throat and lungs so that he saw and heard and touched and tasted green and the fire roiled all the while in his belly.
Twenty minutes later, he still couldn't shake it. That voice, that raspy gleeful giddy whisper followed him even when he went back inside a moment, wading through the refuse as he fished for his cigarettes. It wrapped himself around him like a blanket as he reclined, naked and chain-smoking, on a slightly bent chair on the balcony of an abandoned Presbyterian Church in the middle of the night. It taunted him, babbling horrific nothings in his ears as he drank, licked at his skin lewdly when he went inside to take a shower. Only much later, frustrated and furious and overwhelmed with an impending sense of dread, did he realized the truth of it.
The voice was inside him. The message was in his blood.