THE SECOND SIGHT
Chapter 38
THE BOSS PLAYERS
Location: THE CHAMBER
Pain.
Yaw Boat is in pain.
From the tips of his toes right to the crown of his head he is in absolute pain.
His body throbs with the fiery agony. Even his eyeballs seem to be aching as if somebody is pushing little pins into them.
But the fulcrum of pain is situated at his shoulder and thigh joints. His shoulders seem stretched, housing a million pain points, and the points where his thi-ghs join his body are throbbing with a fiery vengeance that causes his br@in to scream with the sheer torture.
He becomes aware of his surroundings slowly.
The darkness he finds himself in recedes degree by little degree. He is first aware of dim light, and then it seems to brighten. Boat tries to move his head, but he has a terrible headache, and keeping still makes the pain settle down to a ba-rely bearable rhythm.
His jaw feels as if it belongs to a giant; it is that swollen.
Finally he is aware that he is spread-eagled on some sort of structure. His wrists and ankles are tied securely. Summoning a great inner strength, Yaw Boat opens eyes.
He sees that he is completely nak-ed, tied to an X-shaped golden structure fixed upon a sort of pedestal that is raised several inches off the floor.
He is lying on his back on the X-shaped contraption, staring at the ceiling.
The same ceiling with its horrible murals of profane biblical presentations.
He is back in the chamber of horrors.
Funky Grounds come to life!
The six shrivelled bodies forming the macabre cross hanging from the ceiling are now right above him; dry corpses that depicts the various stages of a man’s life; sunken eyes look at him out of the skull-like faces, grimacing teeth ba-red menacingly in an eternal snarl of hatred.
There are two golden beds on each side of Boat.
The one on his right is neatly laid, the white sheets silky and expensive. It is unoccu-pied.
The one on his left is also neatly laid, but on it is the terrible corpse of the housekeeper who has se-duced him, Miss Naana.
Below him will be the golden throne and the golden crown – the crown that is resting on three human skulls – and way beyond that throne will be the gigantic black anaconda he has fled from.
The chamber is very bright.
He can see tens of candles – of different sizes, colours and shapes – lit and stuck into the walls all around.
Around the strange contraption he is tied to are majestic golden chairs, arranged in a perfect circle. They are close together, and Boat guesses they will number about twenty.
The room is smoky and hazy.
The pungent scent of burning incense as-saults his nasal cavities, and he sneezes once.
Boat tries to je-rk his wrists and ankles free of the handcuffs holding him, but they do not budge; it will take keys to free him.
Somewhere beyond his head he can hear a babble of voices crooning, M0-ning, and whispering unintelligible words in a talk-sing chanting that is more frightening than anything he has seen in the room.
Boat admits to himself that he is in de-ep hell, something far above his comprehension, and unless some divine intervention occurs, and soon, he will be a goner.
His world has come crumbling around him in a shower of elegant deceit and explosive betrayal.
His well-ordered life has turned out to be nothing more than a sham, a vanity of vanities, a useless transition that is engineered to end in death.
Everything has been stacked carefully, mapped out in such a way that he has had no inkling of what is happening. Everyone he has ever loved and trusted has turned out to be a major player in a game with stakes so high that it reaches to heaven… and hell.
Where will help come from now?
Here he is, helpless and absolutely abandoned. The most terrible thing is that he doesn’t know what is going to happen to him, or he has to do!
It is a confusing maze filled with dead-ends at every turn.
Boat is aware that he is becoming weaker and weaker.
He is drowsy, and very light-hearted, as if he has smoked ten joints of weed. Is it all a part of it, a weakening of his body and soul, a kind of savage preparation that will take him to the next level of some diabolical plan?
He has found Funky Grounds at last… and it has fangs, as he had suspected it would!
At long last the maddening chanting stops.
Yaw Boat feels totally deflated now, and it takes a real effort just to move his head. He wonders whether it is due to the smoke from the incense. Bob had once told him that there is a particular br@nd of incense from India that can floor a man for days; some folks actually got their kicks from getting stoned on the stuff.
And Boat feels stoned!
It tales a Herculean effort just to string his thoughts together now. Everything has become hazy, indistinct, more un-firm.
The great panic has vanished, and in its place he feels only exhaustion and a great nee-d to sleep and never wake up again. There is so much a man can do to stay afloat, and sometimes when all has been done, and helplessness still reigns supreme, the best solution – as horrible as it seems – is lethargy, pas-siveness, and surrender.
Suddenly he becomes aware that the golden chairs around him are shifting positions, and he stares at them in total incomprehension.
It takes him a moment longer to realize that they are indeed not moving, but that the strange thing he is handcuffed to is rather rotating slowly, turning towards the golden throne.
The beds on either side of are moving too, turning in tune with the one Boat is lying on.
Finally it turns round one hundred and eighty degrees, and Boat finds himself staring at them for the first time.
The man on the hu-ge golden throne is his father. He is dressed in a majestic all-white costume, a kind of flowing gown that reaches to his ankles. His throne is a glittering mas-s of gold and diamonds.
On each side of him are about ten people, men and women, wearing simple, straight white gowns. The material is filmy, and it appears they are nak-ed beneath the costumes.
Sitting at Joe Boat’s feet is Elaine.
She is totally nu-de, and she is holding the magnificent golden crown Boat has seen on his first visit to the chamber, the crown that had been supported by the three human skulls.
Her thi-ghs are pressed together, and her eyes seem too hu-ge and bright in the candlelight.
Has she been crying, or was it just that she is also stoned de-ep? Sitting cross-legged in front of her is the muscular body of Samson Basoah, totally nu-de too. Blood drips from fresh terrible grooves on his body, forming a thick pool around his thi-ghs. He seems to have been poked or cut de-eply all over his body, and the designs on his che-st and down his stomach seemed to be the signs of the twelve zodiacal constellations.
Boat suppresses a sudden giggle; it seems to him that the hu-ge giant Samson Basoah is the least on the scale of importance on the Devil’s ladder.
He is just a useless stooge whose body surface is the canvas for the Devil’s artists who use knives and staves as brushes. Serves the bastard right, Boat thinks, and would’ve giggled had the effort not brou-ght unbearable pain to his li-ps and gums.
Beyond the throne is the undulating mas-s of the terrible anaconda.
Boat’s wearied gaze traces it, and he realizes with shock that its body seems to have gone round the whole terrible dome, circling it completely now. Its flat head is now ba-rely discernible in the shadows not reached by the candlelight. Its head is raised, no doubt, and its ugly black eyes roves the temple, missing nothing.
Suddenly, as if by some hidden command all of them begin to chant and sway again, their faces became vacant, taking on the vacuous expressions of morons, and then their foreheads begin to blaze the mark of the beast, and their eyes changed colours instantly.
Uncle Samson is now on his feet.
He reaches out blindly, tottering like one of the zombies in Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and he picks up Elaine in his powerful arms.
There is a break – a falter – in the chanting voices for a moment, and Boat looks up to realize that they are all staring rather sternly at him with their demonic eyes.
Still in a trance, Uncle Samson puts Elaine down on the empty bed on Boat’s right side. He takes the golden crown from her and puts it on Boat’s head.
Boat shakes his head in a gesture he thinks is strong, but in reality it is a very feeble effort; the crown stays on my head.
Now the men and women in the white gowns approach, and Yaw Boat’s shock as he recognizes some of them is so profound that for a moment the fog almost clears completely, and his mind becomes more lucid than the dawn of day.
Individually they are awesome – kings and queens in their own rights.
They are all there.
From famous Prime Ministers and economists to inventors, from all over the world. Men and women of influence, of money, of power!
This is a collection of some of the core powerhouses of the world!
They look totally moronic now with their ugly eyes and blazing foreheads. Their bodies move irregularly, erratically, like mannequins being manipulated by a master hand.
de-ep in them, lur-k-ing like thieves, are inhuman beings – vicious demons that are capable of the most heinous deeds.
They sit down on the golden chairs all around Boat in a straight stiff manner, arms outstretched and palms outward, facing downwards.
They still chant in their strange talk-sing voices.
Samson Basoah is holding a little key now and he proceeds to unlock Boat’s left wrist which he ties to the shrivelled bony wrist of the corpse with a long piece of white nylon cord.
Next he unlocks Boat’s right wrist and ties it to the left wrist of Elaine, who is sobbing silently now, her face radiant with an inner joy only she feels, overcome by an emotional bliss so profound it makes her look like an angel, and if Boat could have moved he would’ve kicked her so ha-rd that her expression would’ve slink out of her like a second skeleton.
Boat hates her that fiercely.
He is aware that the final stages what Paul Anderson had warned him is in progress, but he is too woozy in the head to do anything about it except cry.
His soul is in anguish within him, struggling for freedom, wailing to be set free.
The de-ep pain comes out in the form of choked tears that rolls down his face in torrents.
He doesn’t wail, or M0-n, or even make any sound. As his mind searches frantically for ways out of the demonic abyss he is in, the tears just dam up behind his eyes, nostrils and throat, causing painful pressures that burst out finally in great tears exploding out of his eyes like waterfalls.
The chanting stops abruptly, and Joe Boat gets to his feet slowly. His ugly rainbow eyes bear into his son, and his mouth opens gloatingly in a sinister snarl.
Boat sees that he is losing his colour, his skin darkening rapidly, becoming darker and rou-gher.
Boat watches, and even in his agonized stupor what happens next is so frightening that the scream rises in his throat and he would have screamed his way into the Guinness book of records has it not been the fact that his voice, currently, is not in any state to make sounds.
Even so, what sees kills something inside him.
With his eyes popping out, his mouth open and his breath suspended, he knows without a shred of a doubt that he is witnessing something that will give him nightmares forever.
He also knows, again without a shred of doubt, that nothing will ever scare him again like the sight of Joe Boat at that particular moment!
His father is losing all semblance of a human being!
It is like the horror he has experienced with Ralph Stebbins, but this is more horrible!
Joe Boat’s mouth explodes out into a long snout, teeth yellow and dripping goo, and then the top of his head falls open, and the long curved horn emerges.
His upper body thickens inside the white gown, and his arms elongates, becoming bigger and hairier until the bones in there crackles, fitting, grating, ban-ging and suddenly his fingers are only three on each hand.
His body bounces up, and Boat sees him sprouting three thick legs, hairy and sturdy, and beast-like.
The Shadow-Thing personified!
This is the Shadow-Thing in reality!
The chanting around me had risen to a crescendo.
The boss players around him, the movers and shakers of the world, have also changed!
They are shaking violently as if they are at the epicentre of the world’s most violent earthquake.
They have changed into various forms of the uglies, their mouths foaming as their heads shake in an impossible fashion.
In his horrified stupor Boat sees that Uncle Samson is holding a long-bladed ugly knife in his right hand, and a hu-ge earthenware pot in the other.
Only him and Elaine are wearing the mark of the beasts but have not physically transformed into any nightmarish monsters.
Samson stands at the head of the beds, and then the knife in his hand moves down, and Boat feels a sharp pain on his left wrist where it is joined to the corpse of Miss Naana.
UNCLE SAMSON
(in a booming voice)
From Death to Ashes to Initiation!
He brings the pot low to catch the blood dripping from the cut.
After a moment he moves to Boat’s right and again he feels the pain again, this time on the point where Boat is joined to Elaine.
UNCLE SAMSON
To Life and Fulfilment!
Again their mingled blood drips into the pot.
Instantly the corpse of the housekeeper bursts into flames.
Boat feels the heat, but he does not feel pain as his left arm dangled uselessly, free from his bond with the woman who has broken his V¡rginity.
Uncle Samson is now moving around the people – no, monsters – around Boat, slashing each across the top of the right wrist and bringing the pot low to receive droplets of blood.
They are wailing uncontrollably now, and the noise finds its way into Boat’s confusion… unnerving, sickening, brutal, pure and latent evil!
Uncle Samson drops the knife after he has cut each one present except Elaine and walks quickly up to the thing that had been Joe Boat.
The horned beast takes the pot, shakes it gently for a moment, and then brings it to his li-ps, lapping hungrily and with evident relish.
Boat’s stomach roils with disgust, and he dry-retches weakly, feeling his intestines knotting and bunching up with great disgust.
TBc…