Seven

Sausage Fest


And I have a body again.

It's nice to have a body.

Perhaps unfortunately my body is standing in the middle of a large ballroom thronging with people, all dressed in elegant finery of decidedly archaic nature for the most part, but with some modern outfits thrown in and a few representing the 20s and 30s - a little ancient Roman a little French Revolution - that type of thing. Long banquet tables are laid out, festooned with elegant white tablecloths draped to the floor and laden with huge platters piled high with foodstuffs - mostly sausage links. Big ones, little ones, fat ones skinny ones, whole ropes of joined links or singles. I'm flashing back now to the earlier vision of the apartment with all the Knackwurst - because the tables are also crowded with ceramic jars filled with all kinds of mustards and sauces and relishes, and there's every kind of bread and crusty roll imaginable - crackers and loaves and biscuits and buns. Cheeses of every sort - huge wheels and rounds and wedges, platters ringed with slices of every description with little toothpicks impaling them. And at the end of one table on a platter of its own sits a big pig's head parboiled with a red apple jammed in the mouth. Grisly reminder of my recent friend.

This is far too much sausage to have possibly come from O's body, but yet somehow I know it all does. This reality has strange laws I think. Stomach queasy, I turn away from the gory feast.

Strolling minstrels wander the floor, and nearby is Slush2112 in his red tartan kilt, black GnR t shirt and a tall battered stovepipe hat playing a ridiculously small mandolin or lute or something. He's finger-picking a complex and very renaissance-sounding little ditty that has several small groups of people spinning and whirling nearby. Beyond him stands a knight in full plate armour - no wait, he turns and reveals that in fact only the left arm is encased in armour - plus there's a breastplate of dark burnished steel and a few other metal fittings here and there, but the right arm and shoulder are completely bare - slender and pale. Almost feminine in fact.

He turns his head to face me and I see his eyes are dark and brooding, but the irises an almost shocking bright ice blue. Powerfully striking. In fact I can't be entirely sure it is a he - it's a rather androgynous person now that I look - tall slim and athletic yet very shapely of limb, as revealed by the bare thighs. His midsection (if indeed the knight is a he, an issue on which which I'm entirely confused at the moment) is narrow and gently ribbed with washboard abs of the kind usually only seen in late night infomercials (the breast plate really only covers the breast area itself). High black leather boots rise above his knees and are studded and banded with metal in strategic places that seem designed more to accentuate his strange androgynous beauty rather than to supply any actual protection. It looks like a cross between Callisto's armor from Xena and Milla Jovovich's from The Messenger, the Story of Joan of Arc (but skimpier than Milla's - more revealing - like Callisto's).

I find my attention strangely riveted to this dark mysterious figure who stands aloof away from the crowd and whose hair I now notice is long and brown and tied loosely at the nape of the neck. Ok, seeing the long hair I decide this is in fact a young woman - some sort of Amazon or Joan of Arc type. From her belt hang a long slim rapier and short thick main gauche for fencing and slung on her back is an unstrung short bow and quiver of thick arrows. Her face is a slightly grim mask, downcast but the dark hooded eyes are boring directly into my own with a fierce intensity. Driven by an unexplainable compulsion I approach her - I feel that at this point our destinies are somehow intertwined.

But just as I step before her, completely intimidated by the grim dark intensity of her stare, there's a distracting clatter a few feet away, where I see a strange loose-jointed marionette of a man balancing on a plank which is in turn balanced atop a basketball. Everyone is watching as he struggles to maintain his precarious balance, arms gyrating wildly and his entire body undergoing seemingly impossible contortions of a decidedly puppetlike nature in his desperation to remain atop the crazily pivoting plank.

He's short and almost impossibly skinny, pale and with a wild shock of straw-colored hair standing mostly straight up on his head. His scarecrow frame is stuffed into a black suit 4 sizes too small (for that Buddy Holly effect) and he moves like a drunken street mime as he loses his last vestige of balance and tumbles forward comically, only to go into a last-minute somersault ending with him somehow on his feet and catching ball and plank perfectly under his arms before executing a sketchy wet-noodle bow. The nearby crowd gasps and applauds quietly but appreciatively. A few toss him small sausage links which he palms and eyes suspiciously before stuffing them into a pocket (having tucked the plank under the same arm with the ball).

Delighted at his antics, I clap vigorously and extend a hand in greeting: "Hi, I'm Darkus - I think. Pleased to meet you Sir Acrobat!"

"Ya don't say." He replies, shaking my hand with a disconcerting rubber-armed effect.

"You're quite an entertaining jester." I congratulate him. "What's your name?"

"I just toldjya Yank!" He scolds in a squeaky British accent "I'm YaDontXey. Retained by Neener's staff to provide entertainment for scraps of food - but I'm not eating any of this sausage... something grotty about it if ya ask me."

"Yeah - definitely don't eat it." I shudder involuntarily.

"And who is this charming though somewhat sexually indeterminate creature?" he turns and extends a hand to the young Amazon woman. Just for a moment a smile flickers across her dark features and then evaporates like a drop of water on a hot griddle.

"I'm DeMonica." She responds, shaking his hand and then mine. She's wearing a snug black garment-leather wrist glove that really only covers the fingers themselves - some sort of archery glove I assume.

"DeMonica?" he repeats as if baffled. "Haven't heard of you before. And I think I would've noticed" His eyes wander up and down her figure, lingering momentarily on the washboard abs and then the small, almost nonexistent swellings of her breastplate, which hint at femininity rather than stating it outright.

"Yeah, I'm still trying to get it changed. It's actually Doreenema, but that's not right. I contacted Slush but he said somebody has hacked into the system and the admins can't get in to do anything right now. They're working on it though."

I glance at Slush strolling and strumming nearby. "Looks like he's working real hard... " I mutter under my breath.

A tiny hiss of a laugh escapes her nostrils, almost more a derisive snort than mirth really, the kind that would be accompanied by a roll of the eyes, but her dark hooded eyes are burning intensely into mine steadily. Which is very disconcerting.

"There are other admins - Nunya for instance - plus he said they brought iIzHackr in to help with this. Nobody can find Alex though. Or Nunyabot."

The lanky puppet-man mimes stunned astonishment with his entire body. "Nunya isn't staff anymore!"

"Slush said they had brought him in to try and sort out this snafu. Apparently it's really password-blocked pretty well and nobody can get in to recode it properly. He mentioned something about the entire forum having been shunted into a single new subforum... but that's all I know."

Slush2112 had been steadily approaching and was now within earshot. Still strumming and picking away he says something that I completely fail to understand in an unbelievably thick Scottish accent. I could pick out a few words, but those I wont repeat here. YaDontXey laughs, noting my confusion, and translates - being at least from the same island if not the same country. " 'E says they can't find Nunya either. Something passing strange is goin' on, mark my words folks!"

Slush mouths another string of obscenity-laden gibberish that YaDontXey translates as "I'm afraid we can't get DV back online without Nunya. Or Nunyabot." The dark-eyed warrior-girl's face briefly lights up as she catches the Jurassic Park reference. I'm left wondering what the hell is DV, and what does it stand for?

But before I can ask, a deadly hush falls over the part of the crowd closest to the huge main doors that let onto the Throne Room deeper in Castle Neener. It grows so silent in fact that I can hear the familiar jinglebell sound made by the Black Queen's little dog, which glides smoothly onto the scene leading the way for the Black Queen herself, this time again draped in ancient Roman-style finery and leading some small animal on a leash.

No - not an animal - it's Muffin!! Looking more hollow-eyed and sunken-fleshed than before, and unaccountably now dressed in a pale yellow Shirley Temple dress complete with white ankle socks and shiny black patent leather shoes and with her long brown hair in pigtails with a big pale yellow bow atop her head, slightly off center to one side. And wearing a dog collar and being led by Queen Neener like a pet. Oh the humanity!!

My blood begins to boil on seeing it. And I can tell I'm not alone - subtle body language and strangled gasps indicate many others in the crowd are equally angry and upset - Muffin is apparently well loved in this community.

But even worse is the way Muffin is behaving... her eyes empty and staring, darker-ringed by far than those of the grim warrior girl beside me, but the eyeballs themselves just empty yellow-grey orbs showing no hint of life, and her mouth slavering and snapping now and then like a distempered dog's. Her slender arms just hang lifelessly at her side, swinging gently as she moves, and she leads with her head - her mouth really, always snapping at any flesh nearby but weakly. Sort of like a puppy or kitten of only a few days just beginning to test out its jaws and fledgeling teeth.

Something is odd about the way the Black Queen walks - I had never noticed before, but thinking back now I've never really seen her walk until now. The first time I saw her she was standing on a floating platform and the second time she was already standing before her torture device, where she stood through the entire vision. She may have walked out of the room at the end of it, but the vision was ending then and I was rapidly losing my ability to see clearly as well as consciousness.

Now however I notice her movement across the floor is too smooth, too graceful - a bit like her dog's (and it floats a few inches above the floor - doesn't walk at all really). It almost seems as if she isn't using normal human legs - or like she's done in rather poor CGI and they hadn't bothered to render the smooth spline curves all the way down till they resembled regular human walk cycles. Like something made for the Sci-Fi Channel.

A long rolling gasp followed by startled muttering in hushed tones spreads around the room as people notice poor little Zombie_Muffin on her leash being paraded about right in front of us all. It's an obvious power play - Neener is showing off her absolute disdain for what the people think, and rubbing our faces in it. A smug ironic grin lights her ivory features.

As they progress through the wide wake in the crowd created by her little dog-herald, Neener occasionally stabs a sausage link from a platter in passing with a long two-tined silver sausage fork and holds it up in front of Muffin's face, at which poor little Zombie_Muffin snaps at it and starts spasmodically clashing her teeth on it, chewing as if she's never done it before and is having a hard time figuring it out. Again her movements remind me of a recently born puppy. Little gurgling growls and foamy spittle emerge from her mouth as she chews clumsily, occasionally dropping fragments of meat on the floor that she immediately strains to get to without using her hands. My heart sinks to see Muffin reduced to this shambling empty thing - though I hadn't really known her at all.

Reaching a large clear space in the center of the hall Neener picks up an elegant brandy snifter filled with something red and daintily rings her silver sausage fork against the bowl of it several times in order to claim everyones' attention - well aware that all attention in the room is already riveted onto her.

"Attention everyone - can I have your attention for a moment please. Good people of DV - we hope you're enjoying this feast laid out for you, and the entertainment provided by household staff and freelance street performers (at this YaDontXey sketches a jerky yet somehow impossibly graceful bow moving as if underwater and deftly catches several more thrown sausages which he pockets along with the rest).

"We would now like to present for your further entertainment and enchantment, a new but dear dear friend of the Castle, and a close personal acquaintance that I consider practically a sister. Please give a warm welcome to SaffronAxe, Gypsy Dancer and recently promoted Queen as she dances and plays her Discordion for you."

... And through the same huge double doors emerges a whirling dervish in bright metallic satin gown of burnt orange and emerald green - the Vanishing Woman - the Spider Princess from chapter Four.

SaffronAxe.


Her movements are frenzied but amazingly graceful. Like Esmerelda from the Hunchback of Notre Dame, on whom the author partially based her character. All exotic and Gypsy-ish, flashing eyes and whirling dress and flying arms - doing some exotic Gypsy dance that holds us all enthralled. Occasionally snapping her fingers or clapping her hands over her head. Her hair is long and unbound, as black as Neener's, and flying around her head and shoulders like a living thing. When she spins really fast her floor-length skirt flies up around her waist, but beneath it are layers of other dresses or petticoats or whatever you call those extra skirts women used to wear under big hoop skirts and the like.

Another tiny snort of mocking mirth escapes from the Amazon warrior girl beside me - I know she's amused at how intently I'm trying to see under the Gypsy dancer's dress. Hey, I'm not the only one - look around! most of the males are enraptured, and many of the females too. But I can't help but feel my face flush with embarrassment. I swear I'm not usually this - excitable. It's this place, this strange warped reality. It's the Amygdala dammit!! Whatever that is. Here I seem to be preternaturally subject to these attractions - hopelessly adrift on a sea of desires that I can't control and unable to do aught but go where they take me. I think anyway. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Attached to SaffronAxe's sash by a short black leather thong is a small hexagonal device of ornately carved and painted wood - looking something like a stack of hexagonal drinking coasters with some small black buttons and knobs on one end. She now removes this from her sash and thumbs some secret catch that opens it - it turns out to be a sort of small accordion or concertina. She begins to play as she dances.

The sound is strange - surreal and discordant. Horrible really, but in an oddly compelling and hypnotic way. Notes that resemble rusty nails being wrenched from sheet metal swirl amid a tidal sea of deep off-kilter sounds pulling the listener toward an irresistible deep watery death that seems sweeter and more attractive than anything you can imagine while that music is playing. As it overwhelms me the room seems to grow darker, murky, almost as if it's underwater and I just couldn't see that before somehow. Everyone seems to feel it - they're all moving strangely, slowly as if underwater or hypnotized.

Suddenly YaDontXey grabs both Doreenema and me with his hands covering one each of our ears as well as possible and hugs our heads against his scrawny chest, as if trying to block out the sound as much as he can. It's a crude impromptu group hug, and he pulls us down toward the tiled floor where we fall with a slight clatter from Doreenema's armour. But nobody seems to notice, they're all captivated under the Spider Queen's Discordion spell. Now that he's broken the spell for us I can see that they're all swaying gently in unison, as if they're rooted to the bottom of the sea and subject to the pull of the deep tide. The tide of her discordant music. And she leads them all, her gentle swaying movements becoming their own. I also notice one very strange thing - small dark dots seem to be spreading outward on the floor from under her skirt. Like insects.

No - Spiders.

A shudder starts in my solar plexus and spreads quickly through my entire body.

Then YaDontXey is pulling us, sliding us across the polished tiles toward the gaping double doors through which Neener and Saffron both emerged so recently - toward the Throne Room and the interior of Castle Neener. We stay low, sliding the way you can on a freshly waxed wooden gymnasium floor and keeping hidden behind white-draped feasting tables. Nobody seems to notice us - even the Black Queen is swaying hypnotized under the sway of Saffron's music. As we pass her I make a snap decision and grab Muffin's leash from Neener's numb hand, jerking the poor zombie girl along with us - she seems to be the only one other than us unaffected, and that's only because she's already ensorcelled under her own hypnotic spell. She tumbles nervelessly to the floor and I drag her sliding smoothly along behind our little ragtag group, her mouth still working and foaming and chomping gently.