Tuesday, May 22, 1990 (cont'd.)
The room on the other side of the doors had a brick ceiling, while the walls were wooden and the floor consisted of a wooden bridge suspended over a vat of lava, similar to the boss room in Iggy's castle. And waiting for me on the opposite end of the room, in front of the exit, was Morton, his head lowered and his eyes shut.
Suddenly, I heard a whistling come from above me, and looked up to see a brick wall hurtling down towards me. I leapt forward just as it crashed to the floor, sealing off the doorway I'd entered the room through. Seconds later, another wall blocked off the exit on the other end of the room.
I folded my arms. "Morton. Are you here to fight me. Or do you want to help like Iggy claimed you Koopalings want to?"
Morton frowned and lifted his head, but his eyes were still closed. "Morton…is gone," he said in a distorted, echoing voice.
But there were two things wrong with what he said.
First, he never moved his mouth while uttering the words.
And second, the voice was right in my ears, like it was coming from someone leaning over my shoulder.
I whirled around, but there was no one behind me.
And when I turned back to Morton, his eyes were open. They were completely black, but at the same time giving off a faint, swirling, purplish-blue glow. His mouth split open in a twisted mockery of a smile, and some thick, black liquid dribbled down his lower lip. "Morton is gone," he repeated. "Only I remain."
As he said this, a series of letters I hadn't noticed before on the room's stone cornice illuminated with an indigo gleam. The same sequence of eight letters repeated over and over again: "JZUJIDGU." Another strange message, and I still had no idea what it or any of the other ones I'd come across meant.
Morton bellowed, yanking my attention back to the imminent battle, and he charged straight towards me. I leapt over him and turned around as I landed to see what he did next. I didn't even have time at this point to consider what he'd said and whether I believed it or not. All I knew was that it didn't matter if this really was Morton or not. Either way, unlike Iggy, I had to defeat him.
But even with all the bizarre things I'd seen so far on this quest, I still couldn't believe what happened next.
As Morton was about to collide with the wall, he leapt towards it and spun around so he was facing me. At the same time, all four of his limbs jerked backwards at impossible angles, accompanied by a cacophony of cracks. Fractured bones protruded through the backs of his arms and legs, smeared with more of the same black substance trickling from his mouth.
My jaw dropped, and I felt like I was about an inch shy of throwing up.
Morton, meanwhile, scrambled up the wall unnaturally fast, seemingly oblivious to his broken arms and legs. When he reached the ceiling, he smoothly transitioned from climbing up the wall to crawling across the ceiling, upside-down, digging into the stone with his claws.
I instinctually backed away from him, but was still too horrified to move fast. Morton quickly caught up to me, and when he was directly above me, he detached from the ceiling and plummeted towards me, his limbs boomeranging back into their original positions with another series of sickening snaps. I fell backwards as Morton landed in front of me, then immediately rushed towards me. I froze for a second, immobilized by the shockwave Morton created when he landed, then scrambled to my feet. I just barely managed to jump on him before he rammed into me. He roared, then continued away from me towards the wall. He twisted his arms and legs backwards again so he could ascend the wall while still keeping his black, vacant gaze locked on me.
And at some point, the walls blocking the room's exits had shifted closer. I didn't know when it happened, given that most of my attention was focused on Morton, but some of the glowing letters around the room's perimeter were half-blocked by the walls that had dropped down, when they hadn't been before.
Morton dropped towards me again, and I leapt into the air as he landed, figuring that being in the air might keep me safe from being paralyzed by another shockwave. It worked, and just as Morton turned to move, I landed on him a second time. He snarled again and rushed towards me, and this time I saw the walls close in on us as he ran towards me.
If this fight followed the same rules as my last battle with Morton (which, granted, I had no reason to believe it would), then jumping on Morton one more time should do the trick.
As Morton approached the wall, I leapt towards him from behind to try to defeat him before he could climb onto the ceiling again. And jump on him I did, knocking him to the floor. He growled and stood up, then turned to face me. Blood trickled from his empty eyes, and his jaws quavered as though in anger.
But then his mouth opened and he emitted an ear-splitting screech. Simultaneously, a writhing black cloud shot from his mouth towards me. I ducked and it flew over my head towards the far wall, smashing a hole in it and reopening the exit that had been behind Morton when I entered the room. I looked back towards Morton. He staggered to the side like he was drunk, slowly blinking and looking at me. The whites of his eyes were almost completely red, with more blood running from them down his face.
"Mario…," he grunted. "I couldn't…this wasn't…too strong…." Then his eyes fluttered and he collapsed onto the bridge. I walked over and felt his neck for a pulse. Nothing. He was dead too.
More triumphant music played from somewhere far above, just like had happened when Iggy died. I gazed at Morton's body. His arms and legs had been torn to shreds at the joints from the repeated snapping back and forth as he climbed the walls and leapt off the ceiling, with only thin strips of skin holding them together and jagged bone fragments jutting through them. I turned away, back towards the exit.
And when I looked back to Morton again, his body was melting away and dripping through the slats of the bridge into the lava below. I stumbled backwards, terrified, then took off running out the hole in the wall. Streaks of blue-black slime lined the hole, no doubt the product of the cloud that created the hole. I ended up on the castle's ramparts, and climbed down a tall, steep flight of stone steps to the ground. I ran down the path that extended ahead of me, leaving behind the castle, still not able to fully comprehend what had happened inside it.
Hours later, I still can't comprehend it. But what it did do was remove the final traces of doubt that someone other than Bowser was behind what was going on here. Iggy had been telling the truth back on Yoshi's Island. I just had to wonder if I should have listened to him, should have found a way to leave Dinosaur Land then and there.
And if now it was too late to heed his warning.
