I was recovered so in landing, I did not sink my hands deep in that poisonous yeast, into that multiflorid Man of War jelly. I swear that I touched, raked, scarified him with only one thing: the smallest fingernail of my right hand.
My fingernail!
And so this Dorian was shot and foundered. And so the mammoth with screams collapsed. And so the nauseous balloon sank, fold on midnight fold, upon its own boneless sell, fissuring volcanic sulfurs, immense rectal airs, outgassed whistles, and whimpers of self-pitying despair.
“Christ! What have you done!? Murderer! Damn you!” cried my host, riven to stare at Dorian’s exhaustions unto death.
He whirled to strike, but ran to reach the door and cry, “Lock this! Lock! Whatever happens, for God’s sake, don’t open! Now!” The door slammed. I ran to lock it and turn.
Quietly, Dorian was falling away.
He sank down and down, out of sight. Like a great membranous tent with its poles removed, he vanished into the floor, down flues and vents on all sides of his great platform nest. Vents obviously created for such a massive disease-sac melting into viral fluid and sewer gas.
Even as I watched, the last of the noxious clot was sucked into the vents, and I stood abandoned in a room where but a few minutes before an unspeakable strata of discards and half-born fetuses had lain sucking at sins, spoiled bones, and souls to send forth beasts in semblance of beauty. That perverse royalty, that lunatic monarch, gone, all gone. A last choke and throttle from the sewer vent underlined its death.
My God, I thought, even now, that, all that, that terrible miasma, that stuff is on its way to the sea to wash in with bland tides to lie on clean shores where bathers come at dawn …
Even now …
I stood, eyes shut, waiting.
For what? There had to be a next thing, yes? It came.
There was a trembling, shivering, and then a quaking of the wall, but especially the golden door behind me.
I spun to see as well as hear.
I saw the door shaken, and then bombarded from the other side. Fists pummeled, struck, hammered. Voices cried out and screamed and then shrieked.
I felt a great mass ram the door to shiver, to slam it on its hinges.
I stared, fearful that the door might explode and let in the flood tide of nightmare-ravening, terrified beasts, the kennel of dying things. For now their shrieks as they mauled and rattled to escape, to beg for mercy, were so terrible that I clamped my fists to my ears.
Dorian was gone, but they remained. Shrieks. Screams. Screams. Shrieks. An avalanche of limbs beyond the door struck and fell, yammering.
What must they look like now? I thought. All those bouquets. All those beauties.
The police will come, I thought, soon. But.
No matter what …
I would not unlock that door.
The end
