1.
You wake to the sound of rustling plastic as you curl your body into a more comfortable position inside your sleeping bag. You got in late last night in a thunderstorm, an inauspicious omen for your first night in a new home.
The trains had been delayed and your German wasn’t polished enough to direct a cab, so in the end you ran through the downpour following your smartphone’s directions. When you arrived at the old squatted school the front door was propped open with a chunk of broken masonry.
You’d been so relieved to escape the rain that you barely registered the massive security risk it posed. The entrance hall was an unavoidably large shallow puddle, muddied by boots, filled with cigarette butts. Feeling shy after your 14 hour journey you had squelched your way into the large shared kitchen that you remembered from your previous visit. Every wall was painted inexpertly black and scrawled with sprayed gibberish and anarchy symbols.
The kitchen was deserted, well stocked and thoroughly cleaned, but still a tangent and a half away from anything your parents would recognise as a food preparation space.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Front-Door.jpg'}
You can hear a drip in the corner of your massive bedroom. You’re aware that the pile of black plastic bags and cardboard boxes that you cobbled into a bed last night leaves you very close to the ground and probably not all that waterproof. You reach out to touch the paint-flaked stone floor. Cold but not wet.
The drip continues distantly. You’re not too concerned about the contents of the room. Apart from the sleeping bag and your rucksack, the junk all belongs to its previous occupant. As soon as you settle in you plan to appropriate as much of it as is useful and throw the rest away. Maybe build a loft bed and find a real mattress. You stretch out as long as you can in your sleeping bag, the black plastic creaks and the cardboard groans.
You had eventually found the squat’s other occupants in an upstairs communal area, lounged haphazardly on a ring of filthy sofas. Your entrance was barely registered. You couldn’t see Maria anywhere, and you didn’t recognise any other faces despite visiting the squat only two months before. You explain who you are, feeling very square indeed and are greeted with polite but distant smiles. One man dressed entirely in black gestured out of the door and to the right.
“Two doors down. The room with the horse.”
Thanking him, you’d continued down the long, dark school corridor until you found a painting of an upside-down horse on a door. Somebody had scrawled ‘Herringway’ into the handle with a knife.
You’d let yourself into your new home and immediately noticed it was filled with somebody else’s crap and no bed.
By morning the rain had finally stopped. You decide it’s time to emerge from your sleeping bag and begin your new life. You are in an old classroom full of junk, your new bedroom. The junk piles up against the walls, much of it in black plastic bags and cardboard boxes, a huge tarpaulin covers some sort of large sculpture, the space has clearly been used as a craft workshop and even now the smell of welding remains.
You get dressed and try to decide where to start.
If you want to investigate the junk and begin tidying up, [[turn to page 28.->Page 28]]
If you decide it’s more important to meet your new housemates, [[turn to page 60.->Page 60]]28.
You decide to take a look at all the cool shit that you’ve inherited. After all, Maria said that the guy who’d lived here before had pretty much disappeared, and you’d arrived in Berlin with only things you could carry. Maybe some of this crap could be useful.
You move over to the nearest cardboard box and tear the packing tape off. A Christmas thrill shoots through you, you LOVE free stuff. The box is full of books in English, a little science fiction, Bradbury, Asimov, Zelazney, mixed with hard science fact. You take out a copy of The Illustrated Man and toss it over to your bed pile for later. You open another box to find it’s mostly full of spray cans and paint thinners. The paint brushes haven’t been cleaned and are matted solid with dark red paint.
The first plastic bag you tear open is full of tiny bones. Most notably what looks like a fox’s skeleton is rearranged and glued together in the shape of a man. An A4 manilla envelope is full of mole skulls. A range of Tupperware containers house a credibly catalogued collection of paws and claws. Everything has been meticulously cleaned, and there is no smell. You put the bag aside and grab another which seems to be full of old clothes. A silver and blue Nike shell suit particularly catches your eye.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Rubbish-Sack.jpg'}
*If you decide to dress yourself entirely from this bag, note it on your adventure sheet.*
The clothes, whilst slightly musty, are clean and arguably quite fashionable. There are tight corduroy trousers, a knee length tie dyed shirt missing all but one of its buttons, a bandana that looks like a banana, numerous torn band t-shirts, a denim jacket with pockets full of feathers and a sequined crocodile on the rear, and 6 identical pairs of black Levi jeans.
If you want to continue looking through the bags and boxes, [[turn to page 96.->Page 96]]
If you decide to dig through the crap towards the covered sculpture, [[turn to page 83.->Page 83]] 96.
Intrigued by the promise of more treasures you resolve to keep digging.
A large cardboard box reads “emergency cans” which seems like a good place to start. But you quickly discover it is full to the brim of homemade crucifixes, whittled smooth and bound together tightly with wire. They have clearly been stashed haphazardly with no uniformity, but something about them inexplicably implies that they are upside-down crosses. You toss one over to your bed pile reasoning that if there are so many of them, they must be important.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Cardboard-box-1.jpg'}
The next box is too heavy to lift because it’s full of tools. Using all of your strength you drag it across the room to your sleeping pile. Eagerly you pull out a blowtorch, an oversized hammer and an almost-complete socket set. In doing so you unearth a filthy holdall with a shoulder strap which seems to be relatively un-scathed.
You are certain that the bag will be useful in the days to come, as well as increasing your squat-chic.
*You place the inverted crucifix, The Illustrated Man, and one of the tools in the holdall. Note this on your adventure sheet.*
Heartened by your excellent progress you turn back to the mountain of junk. You have barely made a dent in the treasure trove and return to your work of excavating the heap.
[[Turn to page 119->Page 119]]
83.
You wade into the huge heap of boxes and bags, instantly causing some to split and spill their contents around you.
Your first step tears a black plastic bag which appears to be completely full of sand which gratefully escapes onto the floor. You try to kick a box out of the way and stub your toe when it turns out to be full of tools. Instead you decide to climb over, disregarding any damage you could be doing to the junk.
You dislodge a huge stack of magazines and get your foot on top of what feels like a TV and heave your torso onto a well stacked and fairly stable tower of boxes leaving another avalanche of stuff in your wake. You notice that these boxes seem to be full of cassette recorders, good solid ballast for your weight as you crawl over them towards the tarpaulin-covered shape in the corner.
Eventually a box gives way and the tower tumbles, sliding you off head first and falling apart to join the hap-hazard heap behind you. The noise is significant, and you hear breaking glass in amongst the tearing of cardboard and clattering of cassette recorders. When the movement stops you are unharmed and significantly closer to the sculpture.
In the slide a handheld recorder seems to have turned itself on and you hear a muffled conversation playing from amongst the rubble. Still on your belly you rout around until you find it. A small dictaphone-style Sony Walkman.
If you decide to keep the cassette recorder, note it on your adventure sheet.
Refocussing your attention on your goal you haul yourself back into a crawling position.
[[Turn to page 128->Page 128]]60.
Good idea, go have a look around your new home and meet your squatmates. Maybe someone will offer to help you get settled in and sort through all the crap in this room. There’s gotta be something in here you can make a bed out of and some one will have a hammer.
The thought of meeting new people is kinda daunting but exciting. Sure there’ll probably be some ding dongs but keep an open mind; be helpful and nice to everyone you meet. Hopefully Maria will be around some where, she was the one who gave you the idea of moving out here in the first place. Seeing a friendly face is much needed right now after a long journey.
She was cool as hell when you met her back in September on your squat tour of Europe. You spent a few nights here, watching bands in the basement, helping out with communal living as best you could and finding out about all the cool action groups who meet at the squat.
“Move out here for a while. You’ll have a place to sleep and you can find work easily enough. We’ll help you. Take a chance. If you don’t like it for whatever reason you can go back to your claustrophobic, small minded island.” She laughed and gave you a kind hearted smile. Maria’s German logic was correct. German logic is always correct. So clear and simple. She was right; living in England is enough to scramble anyones noodle. You did a good thing by getting the fuck out brother egg.
Before leaving your room you take a quick look in the mirror, rub your temples and tell yourself to relax. Try to be a slightly cooler version of yourself and for goodness sake don’t go “RAPMODE’’. That’s the old you. You lost a lot of good friends around that time. Remember the megaphone? The bewildered and frightened family members? The camelbak of courvoisier and laying out “RAW…STREET… JUSTICE!!!”?
You have a choice now, dwell on these things more and destroy yourself with shame, devoured by rage. OR get the fuck out of that door and squeeze the plums of the life you've always wanted. You turn to look for the door. Where the fuck is the door? Last night was a damp blur and you can’t recall where you came in. Yeah it’s dark in here but it shouldn't be this hard to find the fucking door!
You turn on your phone’s torch and look around the room. Why the hell did the previous occupier have black out curtains? You whirl about with the torch, you’re starting to feel stupid and a little frantic, you never coped well when you felt trapped. Thankfully your torch falls on a door in the corner. Phew! You stride over to the door.
“Nearly popped your top there old chap! It would have been rapmode 2010 all over again!” You laugh to yourself as you pull on the door handle. The door isn’t fixed to anything and it falls towards you. You quickly shove it back against the wall. What the fuck? Who keeps a spare door in their room and moreover, where the fuck is the real door?! You look around the room again, what the hell?! The whole room has been painted completely black!
Your mind races, grasping for an explanation. Did this used to be a greasy fuck pit? Did they film bondage movies here? Or is this a squatty maze of doom? Didn’t you read about one of them? Is this it?! You feel uneasy and a little afraid but remember: you are tough and no adventure daunts you.
You embrace the fear and stand tall in the gloom. You close your eyes and grit your teeth.
Hell beckons and no one is here to hold your hand. You always knew it’d be like this.
[[Turn to page 44->Page 44]]44.
Goddamn you freaky little banana! You knew nothing was gonna happen. Nothing fun ever does. But imagine how fuckin’ fun that would have been if you’d been sucked down into hell. Your love of the occult can get the better of you sometimes but it’s good for a giggle. You spot the light switch on the wall and flick it on. You remember now - the doorway has been boxed in so no light can get in here. So as well as being a workshop this room must have been used for printing or something too. You live in a darkroom, cool. You feel like Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer which is definitely the right frame of mind you should be in to meet new people. So, where first hotpocket?
To get some fresh air and see if anyone is outside in the workshop, [[turn to page 50->Page 50]]
To get a reinvigorating SNACK and a mind-molesting coffee from the kitchen, [[turn to page 71->Page 71]]
To venture out and attempt to converse with those stern looking squatdogs in the communal room, [[turn to page 84->Page 84]]119.
Investigating further you find a widescreen TV!
You haul it out from under a pile of bags and prop it against the opposite wall. You think you spied a power cable before the inevitable plastic bag collapse so quickly dive back in after it triggering a further avalanche of plastic bags.
By the time you worm your way free, several bags are split open and the mess is disheartening. Mutilated cuddly toys mingle with old science magazines, a bag of what looks like unpaid electricity bills has split and is slowly emptying itself. More than one bag seems to be entirely full of sand, and these seem willing to share their contents with the room. All of a sudden this investigation has gone sour as you realise you’ve just trashed your new room.
You attempt to stack the magazines at least into a coherent pile. These seem to be industry mags, full of adverts for scientific equipment and cutting edge science editorial. You haven’t even heard of these fields, and you are certainly not smart enough to understand them. As this realisation sets in you adapt the magazine pile into a sturdy stool and slump down onto it. The seat holds and you take a small moment of anti-intellectual pleasure in your building skills.
[[Turn to page 2->Page 2]]
2.
Sitting more or less comfortably you turn your attention to cramming the paperwork back into its sack. The sand makes the job unpleasant, but you console yourself by planning a bonfire of all but the most useful of stuff. You are pondering the logistics of cramming everything out through the window when you find a journal hidden amongst the papers.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Book-in-puddle-1.jpg'}
It is a full A4 academic style diary, probably bought from a major retailer, but what particularly catches your attention is the wear and tear on the cover. This book has seen some use.
A deep scratch traverses the back cover, and dirt is ground into the sutures. The corners were probably once scuffed, but have now split and been torn off. The whole thing has clearly been submerged in water and left to dry, and its owner has doubtlessly used it as something of a scrapbook as scraps of paper and cloth are visible between the pages. A rubber band holds it closed which snaps invitingly as you handle the book.
If you decide to read the journal now, [[turn to page 10.->Page 10]]
If you throw it into the holdall to save it for later, record this on your adventure sheet and [[turn to page 82.->Page 82]]10.
You open the journal at random and find a biro sketching of an angular humanoid with what appears to be a canine skull. Something nightmarish in the curvature of its spine makes you feel uncomfortable, as if it reminded you of a dream you’d had as a child. The figure seemed to be screeching at the sky, and you wonder why that particular verb comes to mind. It is as if the artist has tried to capture the insides of the creature as well as a non-descript outer, unless its skin was translucent or inadequate to house it. The biro marks feather off strangely towards the end of the seemingly manic strokes giving the appearance that bones protruded through the creature’s skin.
Your mind flickers back to the fox skeleton in the box and you begin to feel slightly sick.
Flicking forward you find the words “FEAR THE MACHINE” scrawled across the double spread, and discover that this is repeated over the next 12 pages in increasingly jagged handwriting. The dates that these scribblings occur on are in the future, and you hope that this is a coincidence.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Fear-The-Machine-1.jpg'}
Fumbling back through the journal you come to more coherent entries, often illustrated. The earlier you go, the less worrying they are so you decide to take a minute with the journal to set your mind at rest.
[[Turn to page 98->Page 98]]
82.
You don’t have time for reading! You toss the journal towards your bed pile and it lands neatly in the holdall. Turning back to the rubbish your attention is caught by the tarpaulin-covered sculpture in the far corner of the room and you decide it’s time to find out what’s under there. There is a large stack of boxes which look stable enough to crawl over, but you test the theory with a sharp push and watch them collapse into an untidy pile. You decide to wade through the rubble, destroying everything in your wake.
If you are carrying a hammer on your adventure sheet, you may use it for this task. If not, you simply push the boxes and don’t destroy everything quite as thoroughly.
You quickly make progress through the room, smashing (possibly hammering) at random. Amongst the carnage is a box full of cassette recorders and a matching pair of soda streams. You stamp on the latter one by one, grinding them into dust and sending them to a carbonated after-life.
Before long you are triumphantly standing in front of the tarpaulin-covered sculpture, wiping sweat from your brow and feeling great.
[[Turn to page 43->Page 43]]3.
Miranda turns out to be a lot like you in many ways. She’s from England, she used to play in a band, she’s otherwise fairly unsuccessful in life.
If you’d like to become Miranda for the rest of this adventure, note this on your adventure sheet.
If you have elected to become Miranda, she will move into your new squat room, take on some of your memories, and chase down an adventure passing through space and time, while ‘you’ go back to your ordinary life with your tail between your legs.
If you’d like to stay as yourself, write something nice about yourself on your adventure sheet. Good self esteem is good for everybody.
Patrick - the friendly guy who you were just talking to - can sense your decision, and you can likewise sense his comprehension of it in his eyes. He seems like a good guy to have around, which is fortunate as he suddenly approaches whichever you it is that remains, and asks you if you want some help clearing out your new bedroom.
[[Turn to page 81->Page 81]]
4.
Patrick wades and crawls through the garbage towards the windows, and reaching them, simply tears down the black-out material that covers them with a no-nonsense enthusiasm fuelled - it seems to you - by it not being his room.
You want to cry out “steady on old chap” but you fear that it might reduce your credibility to an all- time low.
The second window that he uncovers turns out to be a double patio door to a balcony. The classroom that the space was designed to be starts to eek through the muck and gloom, and you can suddenly imagine that a blackboard would have garnished the wall closest to you, and the balcony doors would have been a generous fire escape.
You begin daydreaming of the righteous squat herb garden you can hang on the fire escape in mismatched colourful pots before Patrick beckons you to service.
“Are you going to just stare at me? Do you want to keep these bags, or shall we burn them all? We can have a moving in party for you by burning everything that Simon owned. It will be very symbolic. He would have hated it.”
He throws the doors of the fire escape open and begins throwing bags down to the concrete below. You suppose it would have been a playground originally, but now there is a ramshackle shed and a corrugated iron workshop obscuring most of it. Still, there is a clear space for a fire pit down there. You glance a Predator sculpture made out of old motorcycle parts and wonder briefly if it was designed to breathe fire.
Before long you are hurling plastic bags off of the fire escape faster than you can wonder what’s in them. Some of them tear, and you are surprised to find that a disappointing amount of them are filled with sand and earth. Old pornography spills out of one, and a collection of upside-down crosses from another. You seem to spend an eternity throwing individual VHS tapes, meticulously labelled with coordinates and dates, and revelling at them smashing against the concrete.
One bag explodes on impact with the 8 foot tall Predator, and showers tiny bones, meticulously cleaned and glued together, all over the ground. Something about them makes you want to hurl, but again, nurturing your credibility wherever possible you choke it down and redirect your energy into a wild yell at the sky.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Animal-Skull-1.jpg'}
Patrick shares in your glee.
After almost an hour of wanton garbage removal, you have cleared a path through the rubbish to a tarpaulin-covered shape against the far wall from where you slept, what would have been the back of the class.
Patrick grabs at it and tries to drag it towards the open door, but you feel foreboding emanating from it, and you suspect that an important decision needs to be made about that shape.
If you help Patrick drag the object to the double doors and hurl it over the balcony, [[turn to page 117->Page 117]]
If you tell him to drag the tarpaulin off so you can take a better look, [[turn to page 127->Page 127]]5.
You are not happy with this situation. The black-clad creep is in your space and he looks like the kind of dick that used to follow you around at secondary school in the playgrounds, always wanting a piece of whatever you had. A selfish, worthless piece of shit. He stares at you and you feel a vibration in the air. The air particles themselves move together, brushing your skin and caressing you like a blanket. It should feel worrying, you know that, this fucking guy is doing something to the air and trying to freak you out. The hairs on your arms stand straight out as the air tickles them. You feel them waving back and forth in the slow vibrations and it makes you angry. You feel as if you are a balloon and the air is an acrylic blanket. It charges you full of its energy.
Part of your brain tells you that this man is not a threat, that he’s nothing to worry about but it doesn’t sound like the thoughts are your own. You’re not the kind of person who thinks positive thoughts about weird men in your room. You’re the kind of gross little fuck who rummages around in other people’s garbage to try and find a useable toothbrush. You steal other people’s books and read their journals. You are a shit weasel and you know it.
Your anger builds in waves of increasing speed and the air seems to stop shaking gradually as you begin to resonate on its frequency. The man grins a sickly, horrifying grin. Saliva runs down his front teeth, and you realise that his whole black outfit is dripping slowly as if it has been soaked in oil. He steps towards the machine with a deliberate air that states clearly that you wouldn’t dream of stopping him, and the arrogance is too much for you.
You feel fully charged like a character from Street Fighter as you lift your right leg and throw your whole body into a mighty punch to the man’s jaw.
What surprises you most is his lack of weight, he appeared to throb with power and intimidation, but upon contact your fist easily spins him around and throws him against the wall. He leaves a grubby mark as he hits the paint and collapses onto the ground. You spit on your own painted floor next to him and abruptly the world around you stops shaking, and you realise that you have been vibrating at a very high frequency and have to take a moment to calm yourself.
In doing so you realise that any items you collected and threw onto your bed pile have been drawn towards you as you seemingly became magnetised. There’s some very weird ju-ju going on. You look back to the machine which seems to gleam at you. As though your violence has impressed and renewed it. Caught up in your own internal narrative you climb onto the seat and grasp the handlebars. You glance at yourself in a reflective sheet of chrome. You grab the yellow hard hat and pull it on to your head. Your attention focuses on the large green button.
If you hold on tight and push the green button, [[turn to page 100->Page 100]]
*If you think this whole adventure is a little out of your comfort zone, now is the time to put down this adventure book. Nobody will think any less of you. Nobody will even know.*{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Original-Cover-art.jpg'}
6.
As your brain begins to catch up with the overpowering stream of information, time moves very quickly and you experience gaps between each new thought as if you are experiencing the world as the bulb of a strobe light. Painful brightness flickers against dead nothing. The wind pummels your face and torso; you try to duck down against the punch of it but barely manage to hunch your shoulders. You make out shapes flying past you; but you’ll be damned if you can tell what anything is with every sense still screaming at you and your brain malfunctioning. You don’t panic however. You suspected that this was going to be a freaky ride and you haven’t been disappointed.
You wonder suddenly if the machine requires any steering. You hadn’t really considered the implications that this is a vehicle, and instead you’ve treated it more like a rope swing, hanging on and jumping into the unknown. You do have handlebars after all. You feel like you could probably tweak them if you needed to, attempt to take control of the runaway machine and assert your implicit human dominance over this confusing plane.
If you attempt to take control of the machine, [[turn to page 41->Page 41]]
If you’re pretty sure that’s a bad idea, and decide to just let the machine do its thing, [[turn to page 26->Page 26]]7.
The thing gives you the deep willies and your fingers recoil at the thought of touching it. Your momentum takes you a couple more steps towards it, close enough that you can make out individual wiry hairs on it’s arms and the fact that it’s elbows and knees seem to be bleeding as if they’ve worn through to the bone. When it screams at you again, readying for your impact the harsh distorted white noise of it makes you want to be sick.
Throwing your body into the turn you dodge and duck to the right suddenly, underneath the spasming arms and bleeding joints. It’s claws make contact with your shoulder but you’re moving too fast for the impact to make any difference. You’re a goddamn juggernaut baby, your hide aint nobody’s.
You just need to get out of this rainforest and you’re convinced that you’ll be fine. How big can it really be anyway? You’re already suffering from deep trauma déjà vu from the identical trees and the identical things that are screaming and grabbing at you from every angle. You dodge from left to right, avoiding their grasping limbs until you have no idea which way you’re heading. They are everywhere, and you don’t know if you can realistically outrun them all. You reach a damp, swampy clearing and pause your run for a moment, sinking back into a sprinters position and breathing deeply.
You notice a gleam of metal in your periphery, and realise that you’re back where you started.
If you want to start running, and get as far away from this place as possible, [[turn to page 29->Page 29]]
If you are too tired, and are ready to risk getting back on the machine, [[turn to 51->Page 51]]8.
On closer inspection the tarpaulin is actually several small green tarpaulins, patch-worked together with thick string. The shape stands about 8 feet by 10, an imposing structure, and whatever it is is completely obscured. You begin untying the knots which hold the tarpaulins in place and slowly begin to make out the shape underneath. Tightly connected chrome shows through, in various states of disrepair as if each piece was salvaged from a different source.
It is deliberately and professionally put together, with a large bicycle seat fitted towards the back, as though the whole machine – you can no longer refer to it as simply a sculpture – were some sort of motorised penny farthing quad bike. Dragging the last tarpaulin free you observe the machine in all its majesty. Near the seat are several buttons and dials, a yellow hard hat hangs from a presumably purpose built hook. In the machine’s parentage was certainly a church organ, but also you see a line of 12 desktop computers connected by USB, and above these you’re pretty sure that the engine/forks and mountings were borrowed from a motorcycle. Instead of a wheel between the front axle, there is a huge filament lightbulb in the shape of a squashed sphere, and on looking closer this bulb is free spinning and contains at least 100 small cats-eye marbles free to flow around the inside edge of the bulb as it spins.
There is an intricate pulley system which ends with a harness, it seems to be counterweighted at the other end by a large pair of dumbbells, tied precariously to a relatively thin rope. The harness and hard hat make the machine appear more of a music video prop than any sort of transportation device. You’re not convinced you can believe the implications of what you’ve read looking at this machine created out of old junk.
You see a two pin plug hanging near a socket and decide it can’t hurt to plug it in.
[[Turn to page 70->Page 70]]
9.
This could be it. This feels like it is. The first step to becoming a real-life dick-swinging squat artist. You exhale a contended breath. You look down at your now slowly deflating piss prong. As it cowers away shamefully the traces of yellow face-paint around the base make it look like some kind of rare sub-tropical sea sponge. Your recent elation begins to slowly subside and it is precisely then that you look once again at Marius. God damn Marius. A man who moments ago was a poor man's Arabian prince, dainty yet dangerous, is now little more than a huffing grease-glazed sweat-hog. Something makes you think it is the first time you have ever seen a bus driver naked. Your not sure Marius is a bus driver but something about him makes you know he could be. And you just humped away on him. "Is this how all squat artists start their careers?" you ask yourself, with both the Yes and No scenarios seeming so right and so wrong in your head.
The grot stench pulsating from the direction of Marius causes you to sit up abruptly and all thoughts of art vanish from your minds eye. "Who the fuck is Marius?" you think to yourself and laugh a bit at not knowing and ask him "Have you been into auto-erotic asphyxiation and banging strangers butts for a longtime? Or are they things you've recently gotten into?" He looks at you for a while with a goofy turd of a grin smeared across his face and just as it is starting to get really uncomfortable he finally says "Today is always as good as any." What a phallic philosopher.
You get up to walk away while pulling splinters from your legs and brushing sawdust from your back.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Bird-over-Moon-1.jpg'}
You make your way outside for some fresh-ish air. As you look up into the sky you see dark clouds on the horizon and a pigeon shitting mid-flight in the foreground.
[[Turn to 126->Page 126]]
11.
With what feels like a *THUD*, normality abruptly returns.
You slide from the seat of the machine and dry heave for a while, scratching frantically at the skin on your face and twitching and shaking erratically. Before you’re able to draw blood or produce a decent trickle of vomit, the need leaves you and you collapse exhausted to the ground.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Leafy-swirl.jpg'}
Your brain has taken quite a beating and feels subtly different than it used to. You hope that it hasn’t become irreparably damaged, but without much enthusiasm. After the full sensory ordeal of your journey, just lying here in the wet red mud feels like a massage and a foot scrub. You ache all the way through. You roll a couple of poignant adjectives and a noun around your mouth for a while;
Wet.
Red.
Mud.
Is it worth worrying about? You feel like it’s probably not and manage to wiggle your torso a little to writhe around further in the cold filth of the forest floor. You notice that steam is rising from your body as if you’ve just stepped out of a warm bath. Everything is going to be fine, you tell yourself.
Forest.
Floor.
You look up at the thick canopy of trees hundreds of feet above you, casting long shadows from the extraordinarily dead-feeling dry red light of an old sun. Staring upwards everything seems to weave and intertwine like a mass of serpents fanned by handmaidens. You pick out individual shapes which seem to be living creatures, no longer going about their business, but now interested in your prone form. Things weave between high branches. Things swing and stare and slither all around you.
You’re in the jungle baby. You don’t need this.
Your poor, poor brain is in no state to guide you but you have to do something. These things are looking at you and you can’t deal with it right now. You need to hide somewhere and work out your next move. You briefly consider climbing back onto the machine but right now the thought of it seems like a really bad idea. You roll onto your side, pulling your knees to your chest and eventually get them under you with your hands planted in the thick red mud. You spread your fingers long into the filth, imagining this world as a sphere that you can’t quite close your grip around. You raise yourself into a sprinter’s kneel and hold it, aware that from here you could go either way; up or down. You clearly see the choices before you.
If you drop to the floor and entirely cover yourself in mud, Predator style, [[turn to 68->Page 68]]
If you run blindly into the forest as fast as you can, [[turn to 29->Page 29]]12.
Well what’s the worst that could happen?
Your head spins as you lift it away from the ground and push back the fur covers. You start to itch, but when you scratch your side it feels rough and scabbed and your fingernails come away bloody. You pull yourself up to all fours, ignoring the lurch in your stomach, and crawl over to the standing knife.
Holding it in your hand does feel good. It has a thick, natural wood handle bound to the blade with thin leather cord. The blade is thin like a kitchen knife. It flexes slightly under pressure. It feels well used. You clutch the handle in your teeth and return to the floor bed.
As you bury yourself in under the covers you feel as if you’ve taken control of your day at last.
[[Turn to page 108->Page 108]]
13.
The creature licks your face with its long tongue.
Its breath stinks and it isn’t gentle. With the last lingering remnants of heightened senses caused by your journey on the machine the tongue feels sharp and sandy. Like it wants to wear you down over time and gradually lick your bones to nothing.
It’s not too late to rethink this, you think. I could fire into motion at any moment and fight my way out of this situation. I’m a juggernaut. I’m a powerhouse. I can stop trains with my fists and walk up walls.
But you’ve made your decision, you lie flat allowing the creature to examine you with its tongue. Gradually it is joined by other creatures, and after a final intrusive lick the first arrival steps away to make room as each individual sniffs and licks you in turn. You are tired and hurting and not entirely sure that this is real, but you endure the process, curious to know what will happen next.
[[Turn to 79->Page 79]]
14.
You are so freaking high on the feel of the knife in your hand that you don’t even wait to see who or what is coming through the curtain. As soon as it twitches a second time you launch yourself towards it like a drunk rugby player, thrusting the knife through the fabric and throwing all of your weight on top of the figure beyond. The curtain tears and bundles around their arms and tangles their legs as you stab and stab and punch and stab until they stop moving. You mercifully can’t see your victim’s face, only their blood as it seeps through multiple puncture wounds in the fabric.
The adrenaline thumps through your body as you instantly regret what you’ve done. You could have at least tried to understand what the fuck was going on before you leapt into action, but oh no, big dick-swinger here decided to opt straight for total murder. Bloody amateur. Now what are you going to do? What are you even here for? Why did you get on the machine in the first place if you just planned to rampage across time and space?
You drop the knife filled with remorse. What made you such a monster? You just wanted to live off-grid and experience life outside of working a nine-to-five. It doesn’t necessarily follow that you’re a psychopath.
How are you going to make this right?
You reach out and ease the curtain away from the dead body’s face and see a reasonably human-looking twenty-something with dark hair protruding from an unevenly shaved head. He’s got a large, heavy septum ring. As you pull the curtain lower you see he has a neck tattoo and you want to throw up as you realise it says Sonic Youth. Unless this strange otherworld has independently bred hip indie rock, this guy came from your home, and was probably the previous occupant of your bedroom.
Well done asshole. Think before you murder people.
If you drag his body into the hut and work out what to do next [[turn to page 124->Page 124]]
*If you don’t want to start dragging corpses around, you might as well quit reading now and take a long hard look at yourself. You don’t have any other choices.*
15.
You tentatively arrive at the monolith, realising on closer inspection that it is merely a huge sign-post. What you took for three prongs at a distance is actually an embossed carving of a horned helmet topping the post.
As you draw closer, you begin to make out another shape on the horizon which dwarfs the monolith at which you’ve arrive. Hazy at first, you are close enough now to trace the obscene opulence and scope of a tower thrusting out of the snowy landscape, at its base a huge castle. The highest spire pierces through the marshmallow clouds in the sky, to it’s right another proudly protrudes out of a giant stone gargoyles mouth, giving the effect of puking it skywards. The left spire, slightly lower and wider, features a panoramic window in which you can just about make out a yellowish light, and what looks like scores of figures moving around. A party? A banquet? Who knows.
<img src="https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/gomjabbar/files/2021/04/Path-of-Dead-Bodies.jpg" width="400" height="400" alt="Path of bodies">
You look down at the road leading to the castle gates and take a startled step back. With your head craned up at the enormity of the castle, you didn't realise that the path was created by two parallel lines of dead bloated bodies. Their shirts are ripped open, damning judgments carved into the skin of their bellies. The words 'Traytor', 'Lyar' and 'Tyrncoat' are visible amongst the dried blood and slashes of razor sharp blades. Their faces are an even more gruesome sight, mouths permanently prised open with dental speculums, mini marshmallows overflowing from their mouths. Their heads tied down, arms and legs nailed into the ground.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Path-of-Dead-Bodies.jpg'}
Death by marshmallow? What the frozen hell is this? Who were these people? Or perhaps more worryingly, who are the people who did this to them? Suddenly, the path doesn't seem such a good idea.
If you follow the path of bodies to the castle door, [[turn to page 104->Page 104]]
If you turn back and wander the remote snowy tundra, [[turn to page 45->Page 45]]
If you look straight up at the sky, open wide and start eating the marshmallows [[turn to page 92->Page 92]]16.
Even as you made the decision you’re not sure it’s a good idea. You are entirely ravaged, physically and mentally but you’d don’t have much time to think. You crash into the creature as hard as you can, bowling it over. It scratches at your face at first, but you burrow in so closely that it can only tear at your back and buttocks. Disgusting yourself you grab at it’s face and use your teeth to bite off anything you can force your mouth around.
The fight is a blur. Any time you have an inch of space you throw your fists against the creature, or jab your fingers into its eyes which feel so soft and rubbery that you don’t know if it’s doing any good. You bite and kick and snap one of its arms at the joint.
Your back is an open mess of pain and you are convinced that you’re going to die but you cannot bear the thought that this abomination will live on after you so you continue to bite any part of it that comes close enough. It tastes like charred vegetables and its fatty flesh is the consistency of overcooked marrow. It oozes all over you as you dig your fingers in through its fragile rib cage and squeeze the only organ you can find which must be the heart as the creature’s screaming turns to a death gurgle as it dies underneath you.
You tear out the creature’s heart and collapse onto your back on the ground still grasping it. You are horribly wounded but victorious. Your throat is too dry to make words but you thrust the heart into the air and shake it at the surrounding trees and manage to rasp out a snake-like hiss of warning to anything lurking in the shadows.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Heart-1.jpg'}
Nothing else materialises and eventually you can no longer hold the heart from the ground. Your arm drops to your side and you lie staring at the sky, too tired to move until you fall asleep from utter exhaustion.
[[Turn to page 59->Page 59]]
23.
You grip the machine tightly and clench your jaw so hard that you're unsure which of your teeth are on top of the others. So much for preparatory relaxation, something about the metal of this constructed beast eats away at your calm. Your skin begins to itch as you reach out and push the button that you know - but somehow don’t really care - will drag you forcibly through hell.
\*a flash of white light\*
\*the screeching noise of tearing metal\*
\*unbearable pain behind your eyes which lasts for just a little longer than you believe you can stand\*
The machine fizzes around you as if summoning every atom in the forest to contract towards your body and crush your rib cage into your lungs. You remember the kitten that was so cute you cuddled it to death on your first xmas after finding out there was no Santa Claus. The kitten is you. You are the universe. Collapsing, crushing, breathless agony... And then, like the brand new, never-used kitty litter tray or the multipack of gourmet wet food pouches, the pain disappears like it was never there.
Unburdened from pressure, un-cracked from constriction. Forgotten. And all your eyes can scramble to focus on is white. Not because there's nothing there but because white is everything there is.
Slowly, rhythmically, a pitter patter of soft pink and white lumps bounce off of your head, waking you to full immersion in your new surroundings. The ground is snow, endless snow in all directions. And it's raining mini-marshmallows.
[[Turn to page 30->Page 30]]
24.
You notice again how enormously tall the trees are here, but in contrast to the heavily canopied forest you arrived in, the huts are situated in what seems like a deciduous glade. Huge trunks stand all around you, but an autumnal light drifts down between them, carried and coloured by occasional brown falling leaves. In all the setting is beautiful and relaxing. Perhaps if the machine had deposited you here, you think, maybe everything would have been different. Then you remember how scrambled your brain felt on arrival and feel intense shame for your actions. This is all on you, there’s no moral worming you can do to escape your own violent tendencies.
Looking freely around you see that the hut you woke in squats off to the side of the other dwellings. The others are loosely arranged in a ring, accounting for the naturally random arrangement of the huge trees, whereas ‘your’ hut is perhaps 200 meters away up a slight slope as if not quite integrated. This doesn’t strike you as terribly odd for squat culture. Communal living is a complicated equation, when there are no accepted values of normal to cling to people tend to make their own rules, and a little distance from the group seems natural enough.
As you approach the huts however you begin to doubt yourself. They are not precisely similar to the original design. They are not so enclosed as to have a single doorway, and the openings they do have seem too short for a human to walk through upright. Some have holes high on their domes, clearly arranged to access by scrambling up and crawling in. Both verbs make you feel slightly uncomfortable, seeming to foreshadow a realisation that you’re not keen to accept. The huts bulge, distorted like wasp nests, and despite their irregular shapes they imply something hive-like about their interiors. A thin, cold claw of terror crawls up your spine and you shiver in the warm golden light.
Here the leaves on the ground are disturbed by many feet, churned into cruelly suggestive patterns and piled thickly against the tallest trees. Like landing mats, you think. Your eyes water involuntarily as the thought occurs to you, and you slowly look up towards the branches of the nearest tree expecting to see thick, black shapes descending on you from above. You’ve stopped walking and now frantically scan the high trunks of the trees for the shabby, blubbery movement of the creatures.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Arms-1.jpg'}
You are so distracted by looking up, that you completely fail to notice a shape ease itself out of the nearest hut, moving like pus from a squeezed pimple, or a snail emerging from its shell. The creature oozes out, pulled by its two pairs of claw-clad arms. It moves sluggishly, unfolding its appendages and stretching them like a hideous British male who slept for too long in the sun. It notices you while your gaze is still upturned and scuttles down from its perch on top of its lair-hut. You hear the rustle of the leaves with ears already tense with fear and you freeze.
If you run away into the woods, [[turn to page 102->Page 102]]
If you approach the creature and accept your fate, [[turn to page 55->Page 55]]25.
This all seems good to you. You’ve been around, you know that people are pretty weird and don’t always react the way you expect. You may be British, but you’re not a dick. You accept people the way they are, and this guy is just kind of quiet and direct.
As you walk through the woods you comment on how beautiful the sky is and other banal small talk. You never get a meaty reply, but the guy responds politely enough. You talk just enough to make yourself feel comfortable, but frankly the silence doesn’t bother you that much and you don’t have any questions that you can’t guess the answers to. Eventually you walk into another clearing, full of small, squat huts.
You’ve been brought to the creatures’ village.
You notice again how enormously tall the trees are here, but in contrast to the heavily canopied forest you arrived in, the huts are situated in what seems like a deciduous glade. Huge trunks stand all around you, but an autumnal light drifts down between them, carried and coloured by occasional brown falling leaves. All in all the setting is beautiful and relaxing.
One hut is sat off to the side, up the hill slightly. You wonder if it is the chieftain’s or witch doctor’s, then check your assumptions and let the thought drift off into the canopy. You don’t know shit and you know it. The others are loosely arranged in a ring, accounting for the naturally random arrangement of the huge trees.
A little while later you are tucked into a rustic bed in the slightly raised hut. The ground is hard but not uncomfortable. You are satisfied with the unexpected hospitality and try not to think about anything too much. You’re here and everything is fine. You hear the sound of moderate fun trickle in through the curtain covering the entrance to the hut but instead of investigating you let it gently caress you to sleep.
A month later you are integrated into the tribe. The human introduces himself as Simon and you don’t probe him for any more information. You never really become close but you work together when the chore rota schedules you to do so. He has brought a loose kind of squat culture to this other world and the creatures seem happy enough to go along with it. You don’t ask about their culture before Simon’s arrival, not wanting to seem like a prude. Instead you coast along, doing your bit and trying to keep your head down.
You don’t talk about the machine. You never even mention it to Simon who probably designed and built it in his bedroom in a squat in Berlin. Everything is normal. Everything is fine. The machine just sits in the forest, slowly disappearing amongst the undergrowth.
Every now and then you wake up wondering what the fuck is going on, but you put it down to a poor diet and decide to cut out gluten.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Mushrooms.jpg'}
Eventually you give up eating the mushrooms favoured by the tribe as a mild hallucinogen. They take them most days with dinner, but you feel like maybe they’re preventing you from sleeping.
You become a real Norman normal as much as the situation allows and spend your days picking berries and enjoying the simple life and feeling good about the community which you are sort of, but not exactly a part of.
In another month’s time the world ends abruptly.
You are so weirdly accepting that you assume it’s just another normal thing. In the seconds you have left before being torn apart by the utter destruction of the Universe you fold your t-shirt neatly on a patch of floor and allow yourself a small satisfied smile at a job well done.
THE END
[[Afterword->Afterword]]26.
There are things that are out of your control for good reason. Sometimes all you can do is find something that seems solid and hold onto it as hard as you can. You manage to tuck your chin a little tighter against the omnipresent wind.
This limits your vision, but helps to subdue the feeling that your head might blow off. In fact, your brain rewards you for this limiting of sense data by coping slightly better at analysing what’s going on. The flickering of every sense that interprets your world quickens to that of an early amateur movie. You close your left eye and your vision at least returns to a manageable level, albeit with no depth perception, and still rendered in a painful monochrome.
From what you can glimpse on either side of your own legs the sky is becoming more crowded. Mostly this manifests as a gloomy dust cloud accumulating around you, but you begin to notice small particles swirling around your position in large elliptical orbits. As though you are the birth of a new planet, thousands of years of gravitational force channels through you and attracts pure matter to fill the void that you are surrounded with.
The wind eases noticeably, although still a gale you feel it as a huge relief.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Swirl-Eye.jpg'}
You begin to notice patterns forming, and as you move your eyes to observe more, these static patterns of dust move with your vision, confusing you until you realise that they are windows of reality, and you are seeing through them into a new world. Realisation throbs inside your head, the swirling particles are not matter at all, but the dust of reality. They are coalescing around you like a jigsaw puzzle, dust hanging in the air (dust…..? air.….?) not as points in space, but pixels of your perception.
Before long you feel able to open your other eye, and aside from a sudden jarring glitch of blackness your brain copes admirably. It seems to have caught up with your situation. The wind eases further, and you begin to see shapes through the clumps of dust. The shapes are dull and faded and difficult to make out, but you think you glimpse a tree. The painful brightness is now masked by the dust and you feel yourself making sense of the world around you. This success is mitigated by the ache of loss as the vibrancy of the world dials down to a point that you can understand it. The noise arounds you drops to become INCREDIBLY FUCKING LOUD instead of the heart-stopping physical grip it had been, now merely sounding like a sphere of trains converging on you from every possible direction. You see colours for the first time, though they seem pale and lack-lustre, and your body relaxes as you cease to be aware of every particle’s past, present and future.
[[Turn to page 11->Page 11]]
27.
As you leave your room and walk down the hallway it seems very natural that you have Dragula by Rob Zombie stuck in your head. It’s gothic techno beats are making you feel industrial and hot. You feel the blood rushing to your loins. What the hell has got into you?
You reach the door to get outside and once again hear the tinkling of metal and the popping of an TIG welder. Perfect, someone’s still out there, someone who’ll guide your hand in your recently discovered passion for squat art. This venture will erase your old life, you will start anew as an anti fascist squat artist.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Shed.jpg'}
Around the corner from the entrance to the squat is a makeshift shed, which appears to be made entirely of salvaged materials, sectioned into several parts. The roof is constructed of corrugated iron, the frame work is made of heavy looking railway sleepers clad with a mish mash of planks, scraps of metal and plastic. Out the front of the contained shed is a spacious and sheltered workspace, in the back is a dimly lit area with a work bench littered with well used tools.
There is no one out the front, all the noise is coming from the open door way. For some reason, this scenario feels dangerous. Like you shouldn’t be intruding here. You walk into the workspace and silently make your way towards the door to find out who’s was making all that noise. There’s a stirring in your bowels. Is it pure fear, uncertainty or sexual curiosity that keeps you going?
You’ve read Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Remember when Constance enters the chicken run in the woods and sits in the dark, unsure whether to stay or go? She’s bored of her old life and hopes for someone to “burn up her haystack”. Soon after this she meets with Mellors who ignites a raging twat fire with his steaming poker. Her life is never the same again. You feel dizzy. Are you about to meet your Mellors?
[[Turn to page 97->Page 97]]
29.
Firing from all of your tight, youthful muscles at once you start to run as fast as you can. The ground is flat and soon dries out as you escape the swampy clearing you landed in. Ape-like screams holler all around you as you plunge through undergrowth and weave between trees. This is surprisingly good running terrain, with springy woodchips beneath your feet and enough space to see down here, deep beneath the canopy. A large thing bolts as you run towards it which improves your confidence. The trees whiz by, some of them un-earthly massive, bigger than anything you’ve seen before.
You notice that a smaller, more agile thing is keeping pace with you, swinging through branches slightly above to your right. You adapt your gait to run away from it and almost collide with another on your left which you duck underneath as you pass and feel a simian hand trying to grab at you. It is bony and skeletal and you don’t want it to touch your pretty face.
Your speed increases as you notice more things swinging through the trees and you feel the cold thrill of being hunted. It feels unpleasantly like going through US customs, as if you’re being toyed with and you don’t know the rules. You bolt to your right and flail at a shape that gets in your way, you feel a tiny child’s hand claw down the side of your face and you yell as threateningly as you can and keep running.
You see a shape drop from the trees about 40 feet away and stand waiting for you, arms outstretched, teeth bared, one leg back to take the crashing weight of you. It’s horrible spindly fingers twitch, spasming as if insane at the end of long, still, almost insectile arms. Its head is sunken into its shoulders, and wrinkled like a foreskin. It has weird looking teeth, man. In fact it looks like a disgusting attempt at a human, created by someone who didn’t have the right parts, and made a bad rush job of it because they wanted to get back poisoning kittens.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Creature-arms-stretched-1.jpg'}
You approach the creature at a dead run.
If you swerve at the last moment and keep running past the thing, [[turn to page 7->Page 7]]
If you tackle it head on and try to tear its horrifying hands off, [[turn to page 16->Page 16]]30.
You climb off the machine, impressed at yourself for coping so much better this time than the first. Was this a shorter trip? Have you hardened to the experience? Or has it helped that you were already tenderised and half scrambled when you set off?
You slowly turn 360 degrees waiting for a hunch of a direction to head in. The machine squats smugly behind you, shining like a metal god. Untouchable by the snow. You narrow your eyes at its pristine appearance, jealous of it keeping its cool when your innards have been wrenched in every direction at once.
As you seeth to yourself, a fluffy mallow lands in your mouth. You instinctively spit it out just after the split second it took for your tastebuds to confirm that, against common sense, right now where you are in space and time, it indeed rains marshmallows.
The light bounces off the blinding snow, making the horizon a near indecipherable blur. You put your hand to your forehead to shield your eyes which helps the picture become clearer. A path in the distance diverging around a three pronged towering monolith appears as the only speck on this otherwise unblemished world, if you ignore the speckling of pink mallows settling across the landscape that is. You traipse through the snow and the strange mallows towards the fork in the path.
[[Turn to page 15->Page 15]]
31.
You have a great time at the Thursday night community banquet.
You eat all you need and leisurely mingle your way through the room. The other guests and hosts listen politely as you tell them about your travels, intrigued by your adventures across dimensions. You are an alien here, and as that becomes apparent, your social value to the room increases, until - after several glasses of castle homebrew - you are surrounded by a small crowd, re-enacting your encounter with the hut-dwelling, four armed creatures from the forest world.
You are aware that you’re quite drunk, but it seems to be fine. You do your best to listen as much as you talk, but the locals all seem to know each other which leaves you feeling unintentionally excluded from conversations that aren’t all about you. You keep drinking, and everyone seems amused by your behaviour, and happy to prop you up and laugh at your jokes as you gradually become unable to stand, which quickly progresses to two kind souls escorting you to a guest bedroom, lowering you into a bed and closing the door quietly as they leave.
You fall asleep quickly and dream of similar evenings on tour. You dream that you are a big useless baby. Strangers feed and organise you, painstakingly making sure that you have a good time. Even when you throw a tantrum, the kind hearted strangers hand you a beer and find you a room to sulk in.
In the morning you wake up feeling vaguely ashamed of yourself.
[[Turn to page 46->Page 46]]
38.
“Do you remember Men in Black? With Will Smith?”
You stare at Simon. This all feels kind of right. He built the machine, he came here, he got stranded. It sort of makes sense, except that he just ate a man and now he’s asking you about Will Smith.
“They wore suits. It was late 90s.”
You nod a bit dumbly.
“That bastard, he is more like Men in Black 3. A real disappointment.”
You prop yourself up on your elbows because you feel a little uncomfortable now lying on the floor when another member of your own species is here, clearly working the room with a German accent.
“Do you want a drink? The monkeys make some crazy liquor. They’re pretty curious to know what’s wrong with you. I told them you were British. They liked that.”
“Wait, you call them monkeys? Isn’t that kind of…”
“They look like monkeys to me, so I call them monkeys. You don’t like it? I don’t mind. You need some clothes? Your other clothes are trashed.”
He’s wearing a Sonic Youth t-shirt and seems really fine with everything. You decide to go with it, and to try to act cool.
“Clothes would be great. Then you can tell me what the hell just happened.”
Once dressed, you accompany Simon outside and find yourself in a rough village of huts. Simon’s hut is a stone’s throw outside the circle of the rest of them.
The monkeys - as Simon describes them, though it makes you uncomfortable - are much more affable than your last meeting. You reflect that you maybe over-excited them with all your running around and screaming.
Simon doesn’t seem very interested in anything you have to say, least of all your questions. He gives you a large mug of liquid, which turns out to be the afore mentioned ‘crazy liquor’. You have to give it to the guy, it is pretty crazy.
You quickly get quite drunk, not fully consciously or for any reason other than it’s there. You flashback to your years on tour, and wonder how much better you could have been if you hadn’t just blindly drank everything that had been put in front of you.
You dance with the creatures. You decide in the confines of your own brain that ‘monkeys’ is way too loaded a term for you to feel comfortable with. They are social and not entirely without grace. Their spindly arms are extremely nimble and quite strong, and many of their dances involve shifting weight between their six appendages. You do your best to mimic them, and they seem to appreciate it.
Much later, after refusing to elaborate about the black-clad man, Simon asks you about the machine.
“It scared the shit out of me” he said “but I kept using it. I imagine you have the bug now. Tomorrow you will continue your adventures I’m sure.”
You are not at all sure that you’re ready for another spin with the machine, but later still the creatures walk you companionably away from their village.
Simon nods goodbye, apparently conveying with that nod that the machine is now yours, and you can do whatever you want with it except stay here on his world.
You stagger drunkenly between two creatures - surrounded by others - into the woods of massive trees, stretching higher than trees should. When you reach the clearing that the machine lurks in, they lie down on the earth to form a large, warm pile, and beckon you to join them. By this point you are so tired and drunk that you gratefully snuggle in and fall asleep.
When you wake up you are alone.
[[Turn to page 109->Page 109]]
40.
Moving slowly and smoothly you lift your favourite hand away from the ground, acutely aware of the cracking of the dried mud. The creature notices, but doesn’t move. It licks the air again and flicks its eyelids.
You stare into its eyes, trying to read its mind, and the next time the tongue appears you force your body to move quickly. You grab the tongue with your favourite hand and use the other to punch it on the nose as hard as you can.
Good thinking idiot.
Other things crowd around you, giving the impression of the sun going down. The old red light which felt pleasantly autumnal a moment ago now turns dark and threatening. The creature leaning over you bares its teeth and with a quick snap, bites your hand off at the wrist.
Through the sudden pain you wonder momentarily if this is the beginning of a new storyline. If maybe these creatures will give you a new, stronger robotic hand, and return to your world with you to fight crime.
You decide it is unlikely as the animal standing over you rears up to its full height and screams into the sky with a screeching whine like a clogged vacuum cleaner ready to explode.
Other shapes begin to lick the air around your face and legs. You lie frozen, aware that you’ve messed everything up once again, hoping for a quick and merciful death.
You are still alive as they begin to eat you and they don’t seem to enjoy the taste.
THE END
[[Afterword->Afterword]]41.
Against all opposition from the omnipresent wind, your flickering, overloaded brain, and your complete incomprehension of anything that is happening, you reach out the fingers of your right hand to grab what you assume will be the brake. After all, slowing down until you can think clearly probably isn’t such a bad idea right? You need to have some control over your own life, or what else do you have? Even if this is a mistake, at least you’re taking a stand and making a decision. It probably makes you some kind of a hero.
You realise your mistake as you squeeze the lever close to the handlebar, and you and the machine twist abruptly into a fierce spin. Your poor brain can’t handle the shift and the flickering becomes slower, with whole seconds of calm blackness between static images all it can provide you.
The last three images your brain creates from its highly questionable sense data are:
#1 You are a spinning tornado punching through a sponge-like material the size of a double decker bus. Blood streams from your nose and you taste it like an electric fence in your mouth. Your fingers burn, and you don’t know whether it’s cold, heat or impact that causes it. The scene is backed by the most beautiful sky you’ve ever seen. Dark dark blue speckled heavily with more stars and planets than you thought possible.
\*black\*
#2 You are surrounded by sand-coloured sponge. Parts of the machine are missing. Your right arm is gone. You can’t feel any pain. The sponge that you’re crashing through has grated it down to a stump. You are entirely dispassionate, covered in blood and highlighted by sparks as the machine is also grated and punished into smaller fragments. You can’t see the sky any more. The noise is unbearable.
\*black\*
#3 You are no longer recognisable as a human being. Your physical form is utterly destroyed and the machine is spread through this solid nebula of sharp rock. You are just a brain hurtling towards your death. Panic wells up as you are finally able to feel how cold you are and the signals from your nerve endings abruptly arrive in a stab of haunting agony. You are certain that you are going to die and you are terrified. You regret so much of your life and the mess you made of it.
\*black\*
The universe hums quietly to itself long after you are dead.
THE END
[[Afterword->Afterword]]42.
The friendly guy turns out to be called Patrick. He’s from North Germany in a town that you’ve never heard of near the coast. He says there’s a pretty bad punk scene there, and that it’s generally a backwater, but that the ocean is beautiful.
His English is predictably excellent and he seems like a really sweet, earnest kid. When you ask him about cooking, it turns out that he’s just finished a Masters degree in computer programming, and lived alone at University for 6 straight years. When he graduated, a major German tech company offered him a huge scholarship to patch code and do high-level remote tech support. The money was good, and he says the company are ethical, but he quickly realised that he wasn’t going to have any kind of life-progression from his years of hard-working solitude and decided to relocated to this squat to be near like-minded people and improve his social cooking.
You ask how like-minded this squat really is. When you visited previously you felt like it was more of a 24 hour party house. Is everyone a well-off tech genius?
“We all have our projects. Maria is an artist, Marius is a sculptor and a model, Simon is... er, I don’t know the word.”
“Is Maria around? She said she’d show me around when I moved out, but I haven’t seen her since I got here.”
“She is at work. She, uh... kuratieren. She curates? At a gallery."
“Wow, I didn’t know. I thought she just made pottery.”
Patrick laughs. “She is a bad sculptor. She makes teapots for grandmothers. She is very good at photograph manipulation, but she says it is not art so she doesn’t want to make money with it anymore. She has a degree for curating, so she works in a gallery for money instead, and makes teapots and promotes bands.”
He continues to describe the occupants of the squat. Marius models for a local mail-order hardware company. He has firm beautiful hands and creates great works of art in the garden. He dated Lurien Partineire from The Delicious Robots for a couple of years, and the band would play all of their release shows as outdoor squat festivals. You have no idea who this band is.
Robert is a psychiatric nurse and plays in Trashes, a stoner rock band who Patrick says are OK.
And your room used to belong to Simon, who after a lot of hand waving and searching for the right words, Patrick describes as an inventor and adventurer, but very dull. You probe at this description for some time and Patrick settles on the description that Simon was like Phileous Fog if he had been dreamed up by Jules Vern, but written with all the passion and panache of JRR Tolkein.
“Have you explored the room yet?” He asks you somewhat abruptly. “Simon left everything he owned in that room. I could help you clear it out if you like?”
[[Turn to page 81->Page 81]]
43.
There is a small envelope sellotaped to the tarpaulin. You tear it off and read it:
“If you’re reading this, I’ll probably be back soon. What are you doing in my room? You’ll be embarrassed when I catch you. On the other hand, if I’ve been missing for days, please read the note contained within.”
You open up the envelope, and unfold the note. It simply reads:
“Bugger. Something’s clearly gone wrong. Please come and get me. The dials will be set to wherever I’ve gone. Just strap yourself in and push the big green button. Thankyou.”
You digest this limited information and turn back to the tarpaulin.
[[Turn to page 8->Page 8]]
45.
The corpses give you a really bad vibe, and that’s cool and normal, man. Besides, the snowy landscape is truly beautiful, and you can’t see far enough into the distance to know if its really deserted or if there’s loads of cool stuff just beyond the marshmallow curtain. You decide to slog off in search of adventure elsewhere.
To fully embrace the beautiful randomness of a godless universe you decide to spin around until you feel sick and then stride off in whatever direction you’re facing.
The direction you pick is, well frankly the same as any other. It’s around 90 degrees to the right of the castle, and it feels as good as any. You put some distance between yourself and the monolithic signpost, all the time wondering about the corpses in the snow.
This doesn’t seem like a truly cool place to be, and after the couple of days you’ve had you start to wonder if maybe it’s time to head back to your new home and actually make some progress with your plan to move to Berlin.
But come to think of it, you’ve made it. You live there now, and really that was about as far as the plan went on paper.
As you stomp through the snow and falling marshmallows, you ponder on the fact that you technically achieved your goal so early in this narrative. What has the rest of this adventure been if not a series of unplanned mis-steps? Have you only kept moving forwards because you feel you weren’t accepted in your new life as a squat dog? Nobody has ever implied that, so was it only a figment of your own imagination that has pushed you forwards? Why? Come to think of it, what is it that makes a life well spent, or the difference between a good plan completed or a bad plan abandoned?
You feel like it’s something to do with choice and intention, but by this point your feet are getting pretty cold and you’ve been walking for an hour or so in a straight line and haven’t even glimpsed anything else that stood out from the all encompassing whiteness.
Maybe it’s time to exercise that privilege of choice that makes life so grand.
If you head back towards the monolith and decide to investigate the castle, [[turn to page 104->Page 104]]
If you decide that this particular world is not for you, and you want to get out of here completely, [[turn to page 122->Page 122]]
If you succumb to the devil’s temptation to throw your head back and start eating the marshmallows, [[turn to page 92->Page 92]]46.
Once again you are alone in somebody else’s room in a community you don’t fully understand.
You lie still for a while staring at the ceiling. You can’t remember anybody’s names from last night, and you’re not even sure if you’d recognise their faces.
Despite drinking yourself to sleep you don’t feel physically awful, but you do feel a bit lost and stupid, and slightly sad that you’re just another guest passing through. You reflect that it doesn’t matter how many incredible places you’ve been, you always seem to be passing through like a tourist.
When you first visited the squat in Berlin, you’d fallen in love with the vibe, the community, and the possibilities of all of that space. You’d wanted so badly to embody it, and to let some of it’s wonder seep into your own self. It was a living commune of artists and scientists, feeding one another’s creativity and supporting each other’s practises. You badly wanted to fit into that community like a puzzle piece. That’s why you took the leap and moved there.
But looking back from this new vantage you realise that even the very first morning, lying on that cracked black floor, you had accepted already that you weren’t a part of it.
You realise that what you’d fallen in love with was an image of yourself as a keystone, welcomed in by good people and interesting to them only because you were an alien.
You know suddenly that you have to become more if you have a chance of staying here, and you are entirely sure in this moment that moving into this castle is your chance at redemption.
You climb out of bed and put on last night’s clothes with a determination to be useful.
[[Turn to page 74->Page 74]]
50.
From the hallway you hear the clanking of metal outside. Remember that eight foot tall sculpture of the Alien/Predator hybrid that was here last time? It had a woodburner in it’s stomach which fired sparks out of it’s jaws when it really got going. The whole thing would glow redhot and looked loco crazy in the dark. Fuck. SO SICK. Imagine if you can get involved in some of that far out metalwork biz? You could make a statue of a fucking Viking Berzerker! With a growing sense of excitement you cheese it outside.
[[Turn to page 132->Page 132]]
51.
The confused weariness that comes from running around and losing your way solidifies as a big heap of sad dung in your chest. It weighs you down. Now that you’re got some air into your lungs you think that you might be able to cope with the machine again. At least that’s what you tell yourself, really you’re just so tired and beaten that you don’t care what happens to you anymore.
The clearing goes abruptly silent and you slowly inch your way back to standing without any dire consequences. You take a couple of tentative steps towards the machine. Nothing happens. You focus your attention on the big green button. If you can just grab hold of the handlebar and depress that green button then you convince yourself that you’ll be safe. You’re about 4 meters from the machine, taking small baby steps to avoid interrupting the flow of the air. Your shoes squelch as you take another step. You hear branches rustle over your shoulder which galvanizes you into action. You launch yourself towards the machine, grabbing at the frame and swinging wildly at the green button.
Everything becomes very strange.
Your last moments alive stretch into infinity. You are no longer inside your body, but instead staring at a tableaux unfolding so slowly that it’s difficult to perceive any changes at all. Your grubby body is hanging from the squat machine, which has become larger and more menacing than you remembered. Your right hand is on the button, fully depressing it and activating the scraping, dimension tearing mechanism of the machine. Your legs dangle uselessly in the mud, your eyes are full of tears. The air is exploding into an atom cloud from the bulbous growth at the heart of the machine. Within the cloud, a tiny otherworld is modelled. It seems to be a desert of knife blades, interwoven with snakes writhing together in bile, sucking you towards it. It wants to digest you.
In mid air, hovering above you is a large creature, all rolls of fat, bloody joints, and ape-like bony claws. It is screaming electronic white noise which eventually deafens and numbs you. It looks as though it died several months ago and has just unearthed itself from the fetid soil.
This moment of death gives you no further insight into anything. There is no God waiting for you, no kind shepherd to guide you to another plane. There is only this last moment playing slowly slowly forever, and you watching it alone trying to unfurl your triumphs from your mistakes, never sure which was which and being driven madder and madder until eventually, after what seems like centuries but was actually just an insignificant instant, you cease to exist.
THE END
[[Afterword->Afterword]]52.
The guy’s name is Simon and he doesn’t seem very interested in anything you have to say, least of all your questions. He tells you a little about living with the creatures, how he crash landed and was stranded when the machine returned to the squat without him. He doesn’t seem overly worried.
It’s like his emotions have been turned right down. Even when he tells you that there is going to be a party, he says it in a way that suggests he’s already thinking about the washing up.
He gives you a large mug of liquid, which turns out to be furiously alcoholic.
You unintentionally get quite drunk, for no other reason other than it being there. You flashback to your years on tour, and wonder how much better you could have been if you hadn’t just blindly drank everything that had been put in front of you.
You dance with the creatures. They are highly social and not entirely without grace. Their spindly arms are extremely nimble and strong, and many of their dances involve shifting weight between their six appendages. You do your best to mimic them, and they seem to appreciate it and find you quite funny.
*This appreciation of your worth as an object of entertainment boosts your ego a little. Note this down on your adventure sheet.*
Much later, after refusing to elaborate about anything else, Simon abruptly asks you about the machine and talks over you as you attempt to reply.
“It scared the shit out of me” he said “but I kept using it. You have the bug now. Tomorrow you will continue your adventures I’m sure.”
You are not at all sure that you’re ready for another spin with the machine, but later still the creatures walk you companionly away from their village. Simon nods goodbye, apparently conveying with that nod that the machine is now yours, and you can do whatever you want with it except stay here on his world. For the first time as you nod goodbye, you realise that his vaguely distant demeanor is born of contentment with his situation. He doesn’t need anything else to fill him up, so instead of reaching out and clinging to other people, he simply exists amongst them, doing what he needs to get by. You make a mental note to strive for something similar in the future.
But right now you stagger drunkenly supported between two creatures and surrounded by others into the woods of massive trees, stretching higher than trees should. When you reach the clearing that the machine lurks in, they lie down on the earth to form a large, warm pile, and beckon you to join them. By this point you are so tired and drunk that you gratefully snuggle in and fall asleep.
When you wake up you are alone. Your brain feels marginally less fried than when you landed, but you have a stinking hangover.
[[Turn to page 109->Page 109]]
54.
The figure in the cell watches you walk across the floor towards him, but waits until you arrive at the cell to address you in a tired welcome.
“Meat puppet” he says, nodding wearily.
You stare at the bespectacled man that you first encountered in Berlin, trying to work out what he’s doing here.
“Slimeball” you greet him “What are you doing down here?”.
“Issss thisssss our firssssst meeting?” He asks. You remember painfully how the sibilance of his S’s hurt your brain and ears. He shakes his head and seems to speak to himself “No, of courssssse not. Filthy human has ussssssed my machine. He reekssss of it.”
He stares into your eyes. “You REEK of it. Where isss it?”
“Simon built the machine. Why do you think it belongs to you, grease-biscuit?”
The man giggles to himself conspiratorially and turns away from you in his cell.
You angrily kick the locked cage door. “Why do you insist it belongs to you? Why are you in this cell? And what do you want?”.
“All rubbishhhh isssss connected you know” He hisses at you. “If you create a big enough pile, you can ssssscurry into any trashhhhh heap in the multiverssssse. It all endssssss up in the same place, sssssssee? You can ignore time with enough trash, time issssss nothing. Never enough time. No time at all.” He gestures towards the bags piled high against the opposite wall of the dungeon. “Filthy humanssssssss digging holes in sssssssspace and time with their rubbishhhhhhh. Holesssss like trapsssss to fall into. The machine… It wassssss meant to plug them.”
You stare at him silently, waiting for him to continue, not sure that you have any reason to believe his madness.
“Thisss issss where the machine wassss built. By me. In a universssssssse you may not have visssssited. Time ssssssplits, you ssssssssee? Like trousssssssserssssss. You are here, but we have met many timessssssss in the trousssssssersssss of time. Do you know you killed me once? Once you watched me fight my passsssst ssssssself. You moved into my room. I have beaten you sssssenselessssss. I remember them all, but you humanssss move ssssstrangely through time. You encountered me a long time ago in a foresssssst. I was much younger. You took my machine and I let you have it. I wasssss living calmly. Grubby little wart.”
“In a forest? I met the creatures. And I - you pause, remembering memories that you’re not sure you made - encountered Simon.” You feel a chill in the back of your neck.
“I wassss younger. I was going through a phasssssse. I wassss living with beasssstsssss, lissssstening to Ssssssssonic Youth. I left the human ssssquat for a shhhhhhort time. I wassssss only gone a moment before they gave my room to you.”
You feel a bit slow to make the connection. “You ARE Simon? The weird guy from the forest?”
The man rolls his eyes. “Stupid fleshling. Pilesssss of rubbish. Everything you touch. I want to clean you up.”
You don’t know if you can believe what you’re hearing. But the man’s words have set a freezing deja vu spinning through your brain. You are remembering simultaneous events from the past few days, overlapping impossibly. You remember crawling through rubbish, examining skulls and dirt. You remember a living room full of people. You remember Patrick, Marius, Maria. You remember tearing a creature open with your bare hands, but at the same time, being led through the forest by the same creature, and lying down next to it to sleep. You remember stabbing Simon through the heart, and embracing him as a friend as you returned to the machine.
Is this man truthful?
“Why are you in the cell?” you ask finally.
“This cassssstle was mine. We fought a war againssssssst the capitalissssstsssss. We buried them in the sssssssnow. They cannot wasssssste anything elsssssse now. When I was done, I came here to wait for you. This place isssssss loud with children for a year now. I hate them, ssssssso I ssssstay down here. They thrown their wassssste down the ssssssstairs like filthy human sssssscum.”
“So you’re not a prisoner? Why are you in the cell?”
He giggles again and oozes between the bars in your direction. “Cell? Keepsssss you away from me.”
You step back away from his disgusting appearance. His face and clothes leave a residue on the bars as he squeezes inhumanly through the gaps.
“Where is the machine?” He asks again.
[[Turn to page 91->Page 91]]
55.
You stand up straight and walk towards the creature, trying not to give anything away.
You feel like you have failed to learn anything useful at all since you landed in this world.
The creature squats in front of you, squinting its eyes and scratching its hairy chest. It isn’t terrifying at all, just extremely different to anything you’ve encountered before.
You kneel down in front of it, dropping your head to its level and looking deep into its strange amber eyes, searching for a little meaning that you’re almost sure doesn’t exist.
This tableau persists for a long, serene time. Once positioned you feel no need to leave, and after wondering for a while what’s expected of you, you decide to focus your energy on trying to share your feelings with the creature through telepathy.
You make no headway, and the creature does nothing to reduce any feelings of guilt you have, but it does seem to accept that you are the way you are, and that it shouldn’t do anything to try and change that.
After a really long time it reaches out to you and pats you on the shoulder and gestures you to stand.
Whilst you knelt, a large group of the creatures has congregated around you. You no longer care about your fate, and walk, palms-out into the middle of them.
Their rough fur feels like a spiritual exfoliation.
They accompany you back to where the machine squats in the forest, clearly alien to this world of trees and peace.
The creatures look sadly at you for a while before gradually walking off and leaving you alone with the machine.
[[Turn to page 109->Page 109]]
59.
You are unconscious for an indeterminate amount of time.
You wake in pain, your whole body covered in what feels like knife cuts. For these first few minutes you’re not entirely sure who you are or how you came to be here.
*Add this to your adventure sheet.*
As reason slowly returns you begin to realise that you should be colder. Didn’t you bleed to death in a forest and fall asleep under foreign stars? Is this a shitty heaven or a lukewarm hell? You are covered in a blanket of skin and fur. It’s rough like cow hide and smells like earth. On further investigation you appear to have been washed.
You are in a room. You don’t know why, but you can’t start disbelieving the evidence of your own eyes simply because it doesn’t make sense to you. The walls are the colour of earthenware and roughly hewn, a fire burns in a hollow in the wall and the smoke disappears up a sort-of chimney in the raised centre of the room. The room is moderately round, but bulbous as though it were handmade by an enthusiastic amateur rather than a craftsman. You seem to be in a mud hut, but a nagging part of your brain wants to call it a yurt. Is it possible that you just took too many mushrooms whilst…. glamping?
No, you can’t start second guessing yourself. You slew a monster with your bare hands. You rode The Machine into a different dimension. You are a squat-living motherfucker. You have not lost the plot and you are not a filthy glamping yuppie.
The hut is not empty. Somebody else’s possessions are scattered around, stashed neatly in cracks and crevices in the walls. Frugally horded like precious stones. From your prone position on the floor the magpie in your heart examines them for the potential for theft.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Knife.jpg'}
Most interestingly you see a shiny kitchen knife thrust into a log on the floor like Excalibur in the stone. You imagine how much safer you would feel secretly clutching its handle beneath your blanket, ready for anything that enters the hut. You lie there for a long time imagining how it would feel and wondering if it’s worth the effort. You know that you’re feverish and that your decision making is compromised, but you cannot stop thinking about that knife. You are aware that this decision will change you, it will affect the path that your life will take. It may transform you into a killer.
If you reach over and grab the knife, [[turn to page 12->Page 12]]
If you decide to wait and see what happens, [[turn to page 78->Page 78]]
61.
People schmeeple, you justify to yourself. You can just pretend that you were asleep and they’ll think that you’re weird for a while. C’est la vie.
You hear the door knock again and ignore it completely.
You focus on the tarpaulin and stare as though you can see right through it. You almost convince yourself that you know exactly what’s there and that it’s going to change your life forever. You crawl forwards and eventually find enough solid ground to stand. You tear a few more bags, and crush another cardboard box in the process, but you barely notice.
[[Turn to page 118->Page 118]]
62.
The void lurks against the wall of the hut, looming and staring.
Its darkness is impenetrable as though it were solid, but as it moves in engulfs objects as though it has no mass. Now it is still.
After the day you’ve had, you don’t have the necessary reserves of terror and discomfort to act rationally. Instead you suddenly smirk at how human this patch of void is, the thought elbows its way into your brain that this monster is a humanvoid and you mentally pat yourself on the back.
Look at you, travelling space and time and naming new creatures. Quite the colonial instinct there.
You stop, having suddenly realised that you’re doing this all wrong.
“Do you understand me?” you say out loud. “Do you have a name?”
The void remains silent and unmoving.
[[Turn to page 85->Page 85]]
63.
Two more hours pass as you trudge closer to the gates of the enormous castle.
You wish that you’d had a fit bit to record your step count. That’s the kind of shit you used to think about back in your old life. How many steps have I taken today? Should I take another lap of the block?
You reflect on the past 48 hours and feel a triumphant pang of pride and achievement in how much you’ve managed to alter the course of your mundane life.
Admittedly it hasn’t all been great fun, and right now you’re dirty, scared, and far from comfortable. You could do with a warm fire and a long nap, and you wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea and a cheese and onion pasty. But you are triumphant in the fact that you could have settled for that in a million other lives, drinking as much tea as you could stand, living in a shit British city and working as a graphic designer or a project manager for some dreadfully boring company. All the time telling yourself that you were just paying the bills until you eventually died.
Instead you strode out on your own path, moving to a strange new city, wading through piles of garbage to ride a dangerous machine through unexplainable time and space. No-one was forcing you to do any of this, you just took the step because you’re a fucking champ and you wanted something more from your life than endlessly scrolling though social media and regretting your failure to act.
By the time you arrive at the gates of the castle you are reinvigorated with a righteous self-determination. Thus far you have stumbled through your adventures, bravely but haphazardly encountering choices without a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve.
This realisation fuels you. You’ve already taken the plunge into the unknown. You’ve done the difficult part. All you need to fully prosper in this new life with the machine is to fully commit to your choice to live.
You are here to adventure!
With this thought ringing in your ears, you bang loudly on the huge door of the castle and get ready to deal with the consequences.
[[Turn to page 111->Page 111]]
68.
You are exhausted, and the fizzing and hissing in your brain has barely died down to a manageable level. Running makes you want to throw up at the best of times, and quite frankly you’d rather sit tight and see what happens than plunge into the greenery like a maniac. You fall to your front and burrow into the mud, smearing it over your body as thoroughly as you can. Bracing yourself for the shock you roll over onto your back, keeping your eyes closed, allegedly to allow the mud to dry, but actually because you are shit scared of what you might see.
Now coated head to toe you lie still, listening as the rustlings of the forest recommence. Finally you are taking care of your brain, and your adrenaline gradually sours and allows you to relax a little.
The forest sounds are far more soothing than you would believe. They speak to your inner animal, the part of you that tenses up in cities and occasionally wants to hunt shop assistants like wild deer. The part of you that feels compelled to eat whole chickens, feathers and all and beat your boss to death with the same greasy, bloody hands. The sounds soothe you until you feel like maybe this is the moment to open your eyes and let the world in again.
The crusty mud covering your face cracks satisfyingly as your eyelids separate.
The canopy above you is quite beautiful. The old, rusty light drifts calmly through the leaves. The air moves lazily up there, only visible because of tiny specks of what you assume is pollen. You suppose that this world, as that’s clearly what it is, is not so different from your own.
A shape leans over you, encroaching on your pleasant ruminations.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Creature.jpg'}
As your eyes pull focus you see an ugly simian face. Its skin is soft and rubbery and oozes as it moves. It has large teeth and long, thin, insectile arms. It leans down closer to you and licks the air.
If you freeze and see what the creature does, [[turn to 13->Page 13]]
If you decide to take matters into your own hands and get violent, [[turn to 40->Page 40]]69.
The ring of creatures stands still, as if waiting for something to happen. You can’t even start to imagine what they’re waiting for. You wonder if you should make a speech, but that seems unlikely.
*If you are wearing a shell suit that you found earlier you unzip the jacket and play with the zip nervously. One or two creatures notice and hiss quietly but non-threateningly. They clearly think you could have made a little more effort, but they’re willing to let it slide.
If you never found the shell suit, or if you don’t know what a shell suit is then forget that you gained this piece of information.*
The moment stretches on until you hear a rustling at the edge of the clearing behind you.
A guy walks over to the nearest creature, without stopping or looking in its direction he pats its claw and makes a small exchange that you can’t quite see. The creatures make room and as he walks towards you he makes the same exchange with each individual. It looks a bit like a secret handshake. One of the tribe grunts enthusiastically and the guy nods noncommittally in its direction.
He’s clearly a human being.
Examining your own emotions you don’t feel particularly surprised by this. What does puzzle you is his apparent indifference. Even filling in the apparent back-story, that he is the one who built the machine, that he used to live in your room and has been stranded here for months, you’d still expect some sort of reaction.
He stops in front of you, glances to one side then looks you in the eye. He seems bored.
“Do you need anything?”
“Uh, yeah. Maybe a brain transplant?”
He nods, looking serious. “I’ll show you where you can sleep.”
If you’re honest you do feel kind of tired. It’s been a heavy morning and you don’t know if that ride in the machine literally tore your being apart and put it back together, or if you just moved really fast through dimensions, but it has left you with a feeling a little like a hangover.
“Uh, that would be great.”
“Follow me.”
So you follow him through the woods, flanked by the inhuman tribe. The rusty light begins to dim and turn grey as the weary old sun slowly sets.
If you think this is totally fine and normal, [[turn to page 25->Page 25]]
If it’s kind of weirding you out, but you’re happy to go along with it for now, [[turn to page 116->Page 116]]70.
The machine begins to hum the second you insert the plug into the socket.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Plug-Socket.jpg'}
Although it’s not loud or particularly deep it seems infinitesimally to vibrate the solid stone floor. More than that, it seems like the air is shaking around you. Is this what it feels like when atoms decide to move together with a purpose? After a few seconds you hear the sound of a plug going into a socket and a machine starting to purr, as though a muffled echo of your own actions reflected from somewhere else. You hold your fingernails to your teeth and feel and listen to the way they bounce quickly and gently against one another.
With the heightened awareness of every hair on your body you detect a quiet scraping coming from the machine. The second you turn your head to search for it the rustle of your clothes roars loudly and you wonder briefly if your new housemates are going to be disturbed by these strange goings on. The bulb in the front of the machine isn’t turning, but one of the many cats eye marbles has started to spin. As it twists slowly, you are treated to the many facets of its pupil, a fiery yellow-orange twirl peppered with a pattern of tiny holes.
These holes grab your attention, each like a tiny wound. The pattern like the entrance to an ant’s nest, something suggesting destruction and living tissue and burrowing. As if tiny worms had dug these holes and then been pulled out with tweezers, their catacombs left as an empty network. You see the swirl of colour as a sponge of paint, encased in glass to preserve a moment of impossible delicacy. The marble spins slowly and begins working it’s way around the circumference of the bulb. Defying gravity, creating its own friction. It dislodges other marbles at first, squeezing between their inert forms ever so slowly. The spinning and the movement bear no relevance to each other, the movement is a ghostly float of no good sense.
So engrossed in the actions of the machine are you, that when a greasy hand grabs your ankle you actually cry out in distress and jump away. The hand pulls back beneath the pile of junk. Whoever’s it was is now entirely out of sight underneath a stack of plastic bags which now start to fall away to reveal a man squatting amongst them wearing glasses. He just stares at you and makes no further movements.
“Who the fuck are you?” you shout, quite reasonably in your opinion. You can’t help wondering if he was in the room all night while you slept. Squirming silent and greasy between the stone floor and the rubbish.
The man stands. The air still vibrates around you both, but he seems to stand exactly still amongst it. His eyes are too far apart and he squints at you nastily. He seems hunched, as if he’s used to a lighter gravitational pull. When his voice comes you can’t place the accent, and there is a whistle to the esses as though his breath creates feedback.
“Git out of my way fleshling.” He whispers. “the machine……” (the sibilance in the way he pronounces ‘machine’ actually hurts your ears) “…..isss belong to me now.”
If you are pretty freaked out and decide to leave him to it, [[turn to page 80->Page 80]]
If you push this creepy bastard over, jump onto the machine and push the large inviting green button, [[turn to page 5->Page 5]]71.
Good thinking stud, you haven’t eaten for a long minute and you know what you get like when you’re hungry - the big boohoo baby-bitch. You go back up the hallway towards the kitchen.
It’s a large, dimly lit room with two stove tops upon which sit large pots for the communal cooking. It smells vaguely of rotten vegetables but you’ve always been a fan of that dank shit. On the side there’s an insulated coffee pot which feels like its got something in it. You pour yourself a cup of steaming squat speed and take a deep drink from the good shit. It’s like a mouthful of grizzly bear. You growl to yourself and do a little twirl.
There’s a communal food cupboard from which you take bread, cheese, vegan spreads and some smoked tofu. A veritable feast! You’ll restock this cupboard at some point. You sit at the table and get down to it. Wow, you didn’t realise you were so hungry, you tear into the food with rabid abandon. Over by the window, in the shadowed corner is a small man with glasses on and he’s staring right at you.
You nearly choke on your food. You quickly try to regain some composure. He must have been there the whole time just watching you. He heard your little growl. Why the fuck has he been sitting there in silence?
“Another human?” He asks in a whisper. He has a strange accent, definitely not German. There’s a fruity whistle to his words like he’s got a bone stuck in his throat. His eyes are far apart and he has a large square forehead. He’s got a solid sun tan but fuck - he’s greasy. He looks and sounds gross. Like if a shit took a shit.
“Yeah, “another human”.” You reply cautiously. He continues to stare right at you without moving a muscle. “I just got here last night. Look, I don’t appreciate you scaring the shit out of me like you did. Why were you just staring at me in silence? Don't you know it’s rude to stare chuckles?”
“Last night?” his eyes light up for a moment. “Where are you from? I didn’t hear it working. I would have known, I wouldn’t have missed it if it was on. How did you get here?”
“What working?” You splutter, what the hell is up with this dingdong. Why can’t he talk normally. “I got here last night. On a train. From the UK. Why? Do you live here?”
“No. I’m not from here. I despise it here. I hate everything about it here and I find the human race repugnant in it’s very existence. In fact I am ashamed to even resemble a human. I look forward to the day I leave here but that doesn’t really concern you. You are completely ignorant of that damned machine and I can tell you are of no use to me. Beat it meatsock.” He dismisses you with a curt wave of his hand and turns to look out of the window. You notice he has a long black greasy mullet. What a kook.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Long-Fingernails.jpg'}
It is very clear that he’s not really on this planet plus he’s rude as hell! This nihilistic turkey has left a sour taste in your mouth. You decide to go up to the communal room to see the rest of the people that live here, if they’re all like this guy maybe you’re better off elsewhere. Fucking, “another human?” “that machine” “embarrassed to resemble a human.” Jeez Louise!
You walk into the communal area as two chumps are in the middle of an argument about Twitter. A guy you instantly identify as a chump is checking himself out in a mirror, there’s a greasy couple with a ravaged squat dog, a stressed looking backpacker furiously trying to close her enormous bag, and one guy sitting serenly in the middle of the room smiling at you.
Fresh from your run in with the kitchen freak, you stride right in with a bad attitude.
[[Turn to page 129->Page 129]]
74.
Back in the party room you begin cleaning up last night’s mess, throwing waste into a large black plastic bag and piling dishes onto a wheeled trolley. Nobody else is around, but when they wake up you want them to be able to relax, and you are pleased to think that you are repaying the kindness of being welcomed in and fed.
You make good progress, dividing the waste into types, wheeling the dishes down the corridor to the castle kitchen and washing them in an enormous sink.
You take a cloth and bucket back to the room and scrub up every spill and stain from the slate floor and wooden furniture. Coals of the fire remain smouldering, and you stoke them back up into a light dancing flame. Finally you fluff up the cushions on the more comfortable looking sofas and put the coffee on.
Checking that the fire is safe and the coffee won’t burn, you leave the room as inviting a prospect as you can think of.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Rubbish-Sack.jpg'}
Now you have two bags of rubbish to dispose of, and you are not at all sure how the castle’s recycling works. You grab a bag in each hand and head downstairs, trusting your instincts that waste disposal will be in the basement.
[[Turn to page 93->Page 93]]
78.
Your brain churns for a hot, sick moment. Muscles stop and start once, twice, then slump back to your sides, even that brief action exhausting. Ah, fuck it, you think. If they were gonna kill me, they’d have done it by now.
You make a silent plan, a blueprint of how you’ll schlock your heavy, noodley body to the knife if push comes to shove. A toothless preparation, a placebo, a duck-and-cover slideshow. If something out for blood comes through that door, you know deep inside that truthfully it’s all over.
And besides, despite everything, this space doesn’t read life-or-death. It reads, plainly, life.
You roll onto your side to watch the fire for a moment, taking in the décor of the yurt. Patchwork carpets and draperies, thin skins hemmed together with what might be animal sinew feature heavily. Something with thumbs did this, at the very least. Another major theme, you notice, is the abundance of lanterns. Shimmering out around the fire like errant sparks, lanterns in every shape and size nestle into carved holes in the wall. There’s one like a pyramid of frosted white glass, host to a dancing white light. Right above the fire itself lives a round lantern with a brass cap, looking not unlike a repurposed gumball machine. Every sort from ancient-looking oil lamps to a battery-operated lantern in green plastic.
You weren’t the first one here, and you won’t be the last.
The sight of the collection could very well inspire a sense of creeping dread, but instead it calms your nerves a bit. This is not a warlord’s trophy room, it is the affectionately curated collection of a gentle enthusiast.
You sit up and hiss as the thin scabbing that has begun on your worst wounds pulls and tears around the sudden tightening of skin. How long have you been asleep?
You’re trying to begin an estimation when there’s a rustling outside, and before you’re able to reconsider the knife the curtain is pushed aside. You have just enough time to pretend to be asleep, your eyes squinted but not actually closed before...
Nothing. Pitch darkness.
Until the dark comes into the hut.
It has arms - sort of - and two legs - sort of - and its form seems to stretch and spill past its bounds as it moves to the other side of the room, flowing from its silhouetted shape. You’re not sure whether it’s the fact that your eyes are screwed close to shut, but as best as you can tell there are no details on its body, no three-dimensional shape, no shadow, no nothing. Your brain cranks away. What was that paint? That special black paint?
The void creature lumbers to the fireplace wall, its positioning between you and the fire casting you in pitch-dark shadow moving perfectly with its form. And- oh, Christ- as the first moments of full immersion into its shadow hit your skin you feel the heat leach from your pores in frantic steam like the whistling of a million tiny kettles. You open your mouth to gasp, and a wretching heave wracks your tender form as the warm wetness of your guts begins sucking from your throat.
As you’re about to panic, the creature moves away suddenly, leaving a blank spot in the terra cotta wall where the gumball lantern once resided. And the room is warm and comfortable again. You swallow repeatedly, rubbing at yourself, mopping damp from your face where it left your body, and open your eyes fully.
[[Turn to page 62->Page 62]]
79.
You have been well and truly sniffed and licked.
You drip with saliva which must be masking your scent as the queue of sniffers and lickers proceeds. Surely each sniff garners a little less of your Earthly aroma, and a little more of the general smell of the tribe.
Certainly the latter creatures seem more relaxed and accepting, and as the ceremony continues you have felt much of the fear and tension leave your body. On closer inspection, and you’ve had a good chance to inspect closely, the creatures aren’t terrifying per se. They are roughly the shape of orangutans, with two sets of thin, clawed arms which look far too spindly to individually propel them through the trees. You wonder if this is evolution, two arms on each side means that the combined strength is increased, but there is more flexibility for simple tasks. Their fur is the colour of a beetle’s shell, iridescent and shimmering. It gives the impression of their hides not quite being fixed to their bones, as if it ripples and moves of its own accord.
They move sombrely here, and you roll the word ‘ceremony’ around your head again. There is something ceremonial about this whole situation. After licking your prone body some creatures rub their faces together as if making sure that your scent is spread evenly between them. You think that something similar happens with baby sharks, that they are sniffed and licked by the whole herd, and are shared between caring mothers for the first few weeks of their lives. No that can’t be true, sharks aren’t really like that. Maybe it was penguins.
Anyway you feel a little like you’ve just been born. A feeling which increases as you realise that the sniffing is over, and something else is happening. Two sturdy specimens stand over you and reach their twin arms down to lift you to your feet. You are surprised by how weak the arms feel, and you wave away their help and stand under your own steam.
On your feet you gaze around to see that you are surrounded by perhaps 40 creatures standing upright (more regal than orangutans now, taller and stiffer but truthfully a little amusing, like overweight policemen) formed around you in a circle of bodies in the clearing in the woods.
This has taken a pretty strange turn, but everything seems to be going OK.
[[Turn to page 69->Page 69]]
80.
A hard pulse shudders through the shimmering air. With your heightened senses you see the air compress and expand in front of your eyes and feel the thump as it passes through you. Strangely it seems to calm you, and suddenly the man standing in front of you loses his nightmarish visage. He’s just a guy, not attractive, not intimidating in any way. He bares his teeth and you interpret it as a smile even though perhaps he just misses forming the expression correctly. You give him the benefit of the doubt. In fact you feel benevolent and content, as if your shit has come entirely into focus and your life is stretching out contentedly in front of you. Maybe you should have some kids? You nod your head slowly and smile confidently at the man. You become aware that your body is shaking which feels disconcerting for a fraction of a moment until you sync with the rest of the world and everything becomes perfectly clear.
“Nice to meet you” you say, reaching out a hand to shake. “I’m afraid I’m a little out of sorts.”
The man’s smile widens, not pleasantly, but you know in your quickly vibrating heart that it’s not his fault if his smiles are ugly and threatening. He steps towards you and the machine and you angle yourself to let him pass.
“Help yourself. What’s mine is yours” you hear yourself saying.
You see grease drip from his black clothes. As he passes close by you he smells like a creek with the tide out, and you notice the black on the clothes is actually an oily residue which covers his entire body.
“Would you like a drink? It’s no trouble” you continue.
He ignores you and straddles the machine. His slouch is less obvious sitting down. He stretches out comfortably and pokes at a few of the dials as if he knows what he’s doing. When he is apparently ready he stares at you through his black glasses, which now droop on his face as though they are melting away. His eyes are intimidatingly wide open. You can see a little too much of the curve of his eyeballs. The world starts to shake around you again and you feel everything you identify as yourself being sucked into those eyes. He blinks dryly and you stabilise yourself.
You wonder if the man has any jobs or real estate that you could get involved in. You pat at your chest, wondering if you have a business card to offer him.
At a command from the man’s long fingers which seem to have too many knuckles, the machine thrums into life proper. You are pleased to share in his success. He claws at the air with both hands in celebration, hissing loudly and snorting through his nostrils.
“Don’t be a stranger” your voicebox manages, and your hand involuntarily offers a static wave. You narrowly avoid throwing out a double handed thumbs up.
He grasps the handlebars and revs the machine, sending a hot wave of greasy reality smashing through the room. You are aware of the pile of rubbish behind you taking the brunt of it as it passes directly through you without touching the sides. The machine flashes a painful white and begins to flicker in and out of the visible spectrum. Everything seems monochrome as the light arrives in frequencies your eyes can’t interpret. The flickering increases to the speed of a strobe light.
The man screams in horror as the flickering stops abruptly leaving you alone in a squat in Berlin. The world seems to normalise slowly as your senses relax from the overpowering overload they have just suffered. You stand staring at the wall for some time. The machine has gone, and the man begins to fade from your memory almost at once. Not that you’re forgetting him, but that he seems entirely unremarkable and not worth thinking about. Night comes and you are yet to talk to another human. You climb into your sleeping bag and pledge to do better tomorrow.
After a week in the squat you decide that perhaps this life was never meant for you and, making polite but distant apologies to Maria, you catch a flight back to England. Whilst drinking a can of diet coke in the aisle seat you notice that the guy gazing out of the window next to you is pretty cute. 6 months later you marry. He works for a graphic design agency in Manchester, and soon enough you are spending your days drinking coffee at a desk selling houses to up and comers in the Northern Quarter. Your relationship with Lyle is sexy and fulfilling. He always feels slightly cold to the touch like marble. Sometimes at dinner parties you refer to your German adventure when you lived in a shared house with some “real characters”. Sometimes it gives you the slightest of chills.
THE END
[[Afterword->Afterword]]81.
You are extremely grateful for the offer and hastily accept, stand, and begin accompanying Patrick towards your bedroom.
“We should probably get some coffee first” he says, and takes a detour into the kitchen.
If you’ve already visited the kitchen you feel a shudder of discomfort shooting down your spine. Mark this on your adventure sheet.
The kitchen is empty. Like all German squat kitchens it smells delicious and is meticulously ordered and overflowing with dried staples like rice and lentils.
“There is bread every morning for everybody. Marius has been carefully not-fucking the baker for months now. Also for everybody is the rice, pasta, coffee…”
He waves his hands at everything that is available to you, and you are struck by how great an idea this was all along. German squat living is truly the way man was meant to be.
Patrick makes a huge pot of coffee and directs you to grab a couple of mugs from the mug cupboard. You have a minor moment as you wonder whether you should be picking matching mugs, or staying wonderfully wild, and perhaps overshoot the anarchy mark by grabbing one big elephant tankard, with the trunk as a handle, and one small glass receptacle, barely bigger than an espresso shot.
You take the coffee and the mugs to the room with the upside down horse drawn on the door. You open it heavily, and Patrick flicks a lightswitch that you had previously not seen.
The room is awash with black plastic bags, old duvets, clothes in duffel bags, piles of magazines, old electronics, and you think you even see bones poking out of the mess. The patch of floor you slept on is the only bit of clear floor space in the 40 x 60 foot room. Junk is piled chest high like the dark, foreboding cliffs of Dover, and the fetid wasteland beyond.
Patrick laughs at the state of the place.
[[Turn to page 4->Page 4]]
84.
You take the stairs up to the communal room. Halfway up you start to hear human chatter. A mix of English, German, and accents you can’t place.
Opening the door you see that they’re all still lounging on that filthy ring of sofas. Two people are bickering. Their faces, framed by black hoods and neckerchiefs, are illuminated in cold blue light from their mobile phones. Someone famous has tweeted something that could be racist. One is following the hashtagged tweets, arguing for a sense of irony and satire in 280 characters while the other is defending his position that the possible racist should definitely kill themselves, because they probably are racist anyway.
You’re still standing in the doorway taking this in when a man with short, bleached hair and a t-shirt ripped at the neck just enough to show his lower neck tattoos tells you to "come the fuck in friend. Don’t fucking worry about those two wankers."
‘Wankers’ sounds strange and affected in his accent.
He laughs and as you walk in you see him check himself in a dirty mirror on the wall by the door, he rolls his t-shirt sleeves a little before swigging his beer, looking himself in the eye. He shakes your hand for too long, slightly angling his palm down so that his hand is on top and talks at you some more. Billy-Big-Balls. He overuses ‘fuck’ to the degree that his insecurity is painfully obvious. Clearly he’d really fucking lived, man. Fragile masculinity is still rife amongst the enlightened. Still, this puts you at ease a bit, at least you’re not the only one dealing with some sort of social anxiety.
You scan the rest of the room, the walls are covered in posters and newspaper clippings, a crusty couple fuss over a dog wearing a bandana while a stressed looking backpacker empties her large rucksack onto the floor in a desperate search for something.
One of the sofa loungers sits up and turns to you. "We met last night, Hi."
He’s another hand shaker, but no funny games this time. "Find your room okay last night?" he asks.
You recognise him as the man-in-black from your late night arrival. "Yeah, it’s good, thanks. It was a dark room before I think."
He shrugs and smiles.
The Great Twitter Debate is still raging across the room. The two duellists are now sat up and the volume rises as they each spit their arguments in the other’s direction.
[[Turn to page 129->Page 129]]
85.
“Are you here to hurt me?” you ask, not really expecting an answer but feeling it would be rude not to at least enquire.
The void remains. Or maybe it begins to shrink.
You continue talking “I arrived here on a machine. I think I’m losing my mind. I don’t know what you are, or if I should be scared of you, or if you’re just totally normal here”.
The void is definitely shrinking now. Perhaps it will just drift away of its own accord and everything will be totally fine.
You hear a voice in your head like the sound of static.
“Where isssssss my machine?”
Delirious as you are, you give yourself another mental pat on the back, if this figure is the corruptor, that means you’re doing OK. No-one tries to corrupt the already corrupted! You wonder if you’re the best version of yourself for a second, rummaging around for a half remembered old Cornish saying.
The devil doesn’t bother bad men. You sadly wonder if it should be taken to mean that the devil doesn’t bother WITH bad men, or if bad men are simply not bothered BY the devil.
The void has become a much smaller human figure, dressed in dripping oily black with wire glasses perched high on his nose. This fuck has followed you here from the squat.
“Oh bollocks” you say out loud. This is just what you need.
[[Turn to page 125->Page 125]]
87.
The curtain of the hut twitches aside to reveal a human man. The sight of him actually shocks you as it reminds you how loose your definition of humanoid has become recently. The atoms in your body recognise him as a fellow member of your own species, and good god it’s refreshing.
The greasy shitbucket looming over you does an almost comical doubletake. You see his smirking face change to actual hatred, and again, you’re shocked by how twisted your understanding of the world has become.
The human obviously recognises him, and his reaction is reciprocal.
You lie back in relief, prone in the middle of the room, still covered in a blanket, and wait for this situation to sort itself out.
With a loud hiss, the black clad man begins to grow and become unsolid. Morphing back into his humanvoid form.
The human seems unphased, kicking himself into a charge into the room towards his foe.
The humanvoid bats its large arm towards the man, but misses, and seems less opaque than you believed. As he connects with the void monster, he disappears inside it slightly, as though it is far from solid.
In your half-believing state, you watch a human man punch a quickly dissipating black cloud over and over again. As he punches it becomes thinner, and he seems to absorb it into his skin. He screams at it and it seeps into his mouth. As he pulls back a fist, he extracts a clinging tendril of black fog, like slime caught on a boot.
You don’t know what you’re watching. You don’t know who’s winning.
Now the man seems to be intentionally stuffing the remaining cloud into his mouth, choking it down in a painful mastery of gag reflex.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Bared-Teeth.jpg'}
The cloud is all gone, and the man seems to have conquered it.
You remember the last time you felt like you had control of the situation and decide to repeat your question.
“What’s going on?”
The human stands back up and turns towards you.
“I am Simon. You came here in my machine. That guy in black is a real motherfucker, huh?”
[[Turn to page 38->Page 38]]
91.
You are not sure what to do. Is there a choice to make here?
If what the man - Simon - says is true, the machine belongs to him, and despite a weird fetish with rubbish, he isn’t exactly a threat to you. In fact, you admit to yourself, he seems like a fairly right-on tech-hippy, who’s just a little grosser than you’re used to.
On the other hand, he sets your teeth on edge and feels threatening to every fibre of your being. All of your lived experience tells you that this is not a human, and that you should fear him.
You reflect on your adventures thus far. What did you really want to achieve?
You think about the warm, inviting room you prepared upstairs, and the friendly, welcoming castle squat community who would just be waking up ready for you to impress with your new found sense of usefulness.
You picture them throwing rubbish down the stairs into their dungeon, carelessly believing that this was a sustainable solution. Or worse yet, just not caring enough about the future to think about it.
The man slimes his way across the room to the rubbish, and wades in amongst it. You watch as he opens a bag, pulls out an old plastic wrapper covered in coffee grounds, and eats it with apparent gusto.
Your stomach turns.
And yet, what harm is this doing?
“Hey” you shout over to him. “The machine is out in the snow. I walked all day to get here, but if you head straight out of the castle gates and follow the road of bodies, past the sign-post at the road’s end, you’ll find it.”
You remember riding the machine, taking control of its handlebars, and plunging to your death through razor sharp rocks. You blink and the memory fades.
“Take it. It scares the shit out of me and I want to stay here and live carefree and have community banquet Thursdays and Soup Mondays, and I swear we will try to do better with the rubbish.”
In the back of your mind you remember what the man said about rubbish heaps being connected, and hope that if you clean this place up that you’ll never see him again.
“If you return to Earth, just remember that people don’t like being called bloodsacks and meatheads. They’ll think that you’re gross, but if you eat all their rubbish then they might just let you get on with it. Fuck, they’ll probably try to put you in a zoo or something, and the media will write a load of awful shit about you, and people will probably hate you because they won’t understand what you’re doing and you’ll make them feel bad for being such assholes.”
The man looks at you.
“And that’s kind of why I don’t want to be there anymore. They’re out of control and I think they’re going to destroy the planet they live on, and the only people who care enough to do anything about it are more or less completely unbearable to be around. But maybe you’ll just get on with doing your gross thing, and everything will sort of work itself out.”
He nods slowly and as you watch he shrinks down into the pile of garbage bags and disappears from sight. You would have much preferred he walk out of the doors, but it’s his life. You make a mental note to clear this shit up in the future. But you decide to give yourself a couple of days, and make sure to convince some of the other castle residents to help you in case that creep is still hiding in there.
Fucking trash portals, man. That’s some gross shit.
As you leave the dungeon up the long straight stairway, you wonder whether you did the right thing, and realise that in the end you had no choice. Emerging into the entrance lobby, the multitude of realities you never lived start to fade from your brain, and instead you are able to focus on who you are, and how you came to be here.
You arrived last night in a storm. You got in late so you tidied up and made sure the fire would last until morning. You baked some brownies and left them to cool in the kitchen. You’re looking forward to meeting your squat mates, and you’re already planning the huge sculpture you’re going to weld together out of the broken bike frames in the basement. You’re pretty sure you can make it breathe fire.
You’re happy to have found a place where you can belong.
THE (best) END
[[Afterword->Afterword]]
92.
The marshmallows are enticing aren’t they?
You throw your head back and open your mouth wide and let a few drift slowly in. They are sweet and delicious, and you cannot believe how soft they are. You chew them happily and swallow them down, before cupping your hands together to catch more.
They make you feel good in a way that nothing has in years. They make you feel like everything is going to be alright in the world, and everything is really interesting, and that you’d quite like to take your shirt off and roll in the snow.
A rushing surge of happiness in your chest nudges you towards the fact that these marshmallows just might contain a very fast acting hallucinogen. In fact the surge is so powerful that it knocks you mentally off balance for a moment. You take a few deep breaths to anchor yourself.
“Everything is fine” you tell yourself and eat another marshmallow.
“Everything is great” you say out loud.
This isn’t the first time you’ve been high, you reason. The key is to take a small amount to work out the dose, and give it an hour. Then you can take a little more once you know how it affects you.
Don’t just keep eating the marshmallows willy nilly. That’s the worst thing you could do.
You are distracted from your sensible thoughts as you sense a pattern in the falling marshmallows and stare at it for some time.
You begin laughing. The pattern stares back at you, which freaks you out and wipes the smile off your face.
You crouch down to avoid the stare and it surprises you to find that the marshmallows are turning to powder on impact, creating the snowy appearance covering the landscape. The snow IS marshmallow. You have been wading through sugar and gelatin this whole time.
You suggest to yourself that perhaps the human remains making up the path are not quite so surprising if the natural weather cycle of this world includes gelatin falling from the sky. Is there perhaps a bone cycle instead of a water cycle? Are there hot, volcanically warmed pools of congealed gelatin, boiling flesh from bone with islands of scabbed blood and foamy beaches of fatty deposits?
This isn’t a great thought to be having right now. The pattern whispers that you should start running.
You begin to run into the wilderness and fairly soon you’ve forgotten who you are, or why you came here. You experience strong hallucinations which feel like true memories, of bodies being burned and set in caramelised sugar, buried head down for centuries and eventually unearthed, and cut by stonemasons into building blocks for a giant’s staircase. Your consciousness floats unburdened through the falling marshmallows until it reaches an enormous castle full of goats. The goats scream like humans in pain and you try to save them by softening the floors beneath them with your ghost-like powers. Your ghost-body grows and stretches until the whole castle is inside you. The goats are wasps. The wasps are keys to lost padlocks which unlock the reason for you being here. You shake your head out of this fantasy and try to focus on the goats that need your help.
You firm your flickering mind and focus on a single fact that you know to be true.
I AM A GOAT.
Your life was spent in the fields overlooking Mont St Michel in Normandy. You belonged to a kind man called Andreas who fed you butterscotch from a tin bucket. He used to dress you in human clothes and take you to dinner parties. It was an embarrassing clash of cultures because you are a goat. He could never understand the discomfort you felt because he never truly listened to you.
You begin laughing. You are not a goat.
The pattern in the marshmallows shifts and flows into the snow. The marshmallows fall at random now, which seems far more threatening. They could fall ANYWHERE.
The snow is shifting like clouds in a strong wind. You see the shape of a dragon, but you always did see dragons in clouds.
You run off looking for wasps.
You draw a smiley face in the snow and tell yourself that you are the next Picasso.
You morph into a giant crow, employed to do the work of three JCBs. The unions are angry with you, but you just want to feed your family. If the company won’t pay, you’ll need to take these marshmallows. You stuff your cheeks full of them and chew them up ready to regurgitate into the mouths of your young fledglings.
Seconds later a surge of painful joy wracks your body, and your extremities feel cold and dead. You are a great whale, vibrating your way through the pacific ocean. You need to shed these useless limbs.
Your mouth is foaming, and your brain begins to give up hope.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Marshmallow-Skull.jpg'}
You apologise to the snow, and hope that the wasps will explain.
Your heart throbs to a standstill, desperately trying and failing to pump blood thick with sugar, gelatin and alien hallucinogen.
You cannot stop shaking.
You die with the taste of sugary vomit on your lips.
THE END
[[Afterword->Afterword]]93.
You walk down through the silent castle. Light filters in through small aperture windows, but the air is cold from the night.
At the bottom of the first spiral staircase you glance around the entrance lobby for a door to the dungeon. You find it by feel and smell the cold draft which emanates from around the heavy wooden door, standing slightly ajar.
That cold, dark, dungeon smell.
These steps run straight down in front of you with no curve or spiral. You cannot see the bottom of them, but you are sure in your deduction that this is where you are headed as you pad quietly down into the gloom.
You walk down the stairs for a few minutes before you reach the solid stone floor of the dungeon, and looking around, dungeon is the right word. As well as a huge pile of rubbish bags - you give yourself a silent high five as you heave your two over to join their companions - the space is an honest to god castle dungeon complete with cages and torture instruments.
One cell is filled with old bikes. One has a screen-printing press and the walls are hung with child-like art. One houses a considerable sized PA system with all the wires jumbled untidily around it.
But the last cell, far away in the opposite corner of the dungeon, is locked. And through its bars you vaguely make out the shape of an oily black figure you think you recognise.
You walk across the dungeon, wondering why this slimy fuck is here.
[[Turn to page 54->Page 54]]97.
You reach the threshold of the door and peer in.
The room is filled with a dull red glow, it smells of rich sandalwood and it’s invitingly warm.
In the far end of the room there’s a bed made out of pallets, upon it is a man laying on his back with a pillow over his face. He is grasping it in place and moaning, the other hand graciously slides up and down his swarthy tool, which shines through the dim light like a beefy lighthouse for cockstarved sailors in peril.
From your years of chronic masturbating you’d say he was pretty close to climax.
You gasp quietly.
What should you do? Walk away and come back later?
Hmmm, no. If you return later you’ll always have this image of him burned into your mind; of this stranger vigorously tugging himself into splooge armageddon.
You won’t be able to conduct a professional relationship after this. You could retreat back inside and go to meet the rest of your squatmates, delve into the world of monotonous squat meetings, humourless action groups, and anarchistic humdrum. People at home will still think you’re radical and adventurous if you do that. There would be no shame in abandoning a squat art career so soon after this mishap. Maybe give it a few months and you can come hang out with this fellow.
The guy who made that Alien/predator hybrid that impressed you so much. If you bail now maybe he’ll only get to know you as a pencil-pushing anarcho-admin assistant. You remember yourself in the mirror five minutes ago. You picture your booty. You bite your lip in a cute and unsure way, you gently run your hand over your thickening magical wand. You know what you have to do.
[[Turn to page 131->Page 131]]
98.
The journal entry reads:
“It seems that I failed to fix the ground-level configuration. I was lucky this time to appear above a rocky outcrop, as otherwise I would have fallen 40 feet straight down onto sand. As it was I cut my palms and knees landing on the rock. It was slate-like and flaky and I ended up with a rock splinter in the heel of my right hand which hurt like hell. Apart from my rock everything was flat sand, and the heat was difficult to cope with. I started to sweat quickly and as my moisture touched the rock it instantly evaporated. Even my bloody hand prints dried out before they could run. The world looked deserted so I decided to get into the shade and started crawling towards a likely looking dismount position until I heard voices coming from beneath the lip of the rock. There were three of them, sat casually in the shade, drinking water from carry-flasks. I tried to stay hidden, but dislodged more of the flaky stone which hopped and skipped towards the men’s covered position and gleefully disappeared over the edge of the rock. By the time one of them stuck his head up I’d sat back on my haunches and checked my watch. I only had about 5 more minutes until I was withdrawn, so I was confident enough that even if they were violent I could escape for long enough.
I joined them in the shade and quickly started up a conversation. Like everywhere I’ve been, they spoke perfect English and were relatively unsurprised to see me. They explained that they were ‘progressing’ the landscape, flattening out the lumps towards an inevitable attrition. They saw it as civilising it towards a final goal. They had chisels and mallets, and regularly used my rock as an oasis from the heat on their way to current sites. They couldn’t understand my protestations, that destroying everything wasn’t progress. They just grinned at each other and said “Mate, where do you think everything’s headed? It all falls apart in the end.”
I recorded much of our conversation on cassette, but eventually my watch beeped with just enough time to wish them a warm goodbye before the machine sucked me back.
Sand sample and cassette recording from this world are labelled E241.”
You sit for a while to digest this information. By “the machine” he must have been referring to the covered shape in the corner of the room. If the journal is to be believed it has the power to send you to other worlds. Judging by the later entries, not all of these worlds are happy places to be, and there is still the matter of your predecessor’s disappearance, which seems far less mysterious now.
You cross the room to the tarpaulin-covered shape with a sense of excitement and adventure.
[[Turn to page 8->Page 8]]
99.
You and Patrick spend the rest of the day throwing trash from the first story balcony of your bedroom. You drink a whole pot of coffee and feel elated at how your first day in the squat has turned out. You’ve made a friend, you’ve tidied your room, and you’ve got an awesome balcony which you didn’t expect.
Other members of the squat poke their head in during the day, checking in on your progress and interested to meet you. Marius the sculptor seems like a pleasant freak, swanning in wearing a long leather jacket, tight wet-look leggings and a pair of ug boots. He slaps you thunderously on the ass and declares that he will throw you a party tonight.
“It will give us a chance to burn all of this shit” he says jubilantly, waving a hand at the pile of rubbish below your window.
You like him immensely.
The party is surprisingly well attended, with tonnes of local punks slithering up as the light starts to fade. Everything outside is still wet from the downpour the night before, but the enormous fire that you create from the mountains of room-trash makes it fairly irrelevant.
A couple of locals remember you from when you played here before. You have a great time and meet some interesting people.
By the following week you have found some furniture on the street, and Marius has welded you a unique but functional bed-frame from old bikes. It has a disturbing H.R. Giger-style alien head looming over the pillow end. It terrifies you but you don’t want to seem ungrateful, and it is unarguably radical.
You get a job in a local cafe.
Maria never comes back to the squat, which confuses you at first, but by this point you don’t want to seem uncool, so you shrug and chalk it up to a righteous bohemian lifestyle. You embark on a crazy relationship with Marius which involves a lot of drinking and fucking and howling at the moon.
Everything goes really well and you are genuinely happy and fulfilled.
*This is a good ending, but your adventure has been weak and average, and your only big bang has been thoroughly cleaning your room. Note this on your adventure sheet and ask yourself if this is the kind of person you want to be?*
*Happy...? Fulfilled...? Seriously...?*
*Take a break for a few days and try again.*
THE END
[[Afterword->Afterword]]100.
Using your favourite hand you push the green button, deliberately avoiding the other knobs and dials. You still don’t really know what you’re expecting, but you’re smart enough to know that tampering with the settings when you don’t have the faintest idea what they do is a bad idea.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Button-1.jpg'}
The moment you release the button the colours in the room begin to saturate, as if rich unearthly colours are being pumped in from a different dimension. The sounds of the machine are like two iron disks rotating against each other, and hundreds of steel ball bearings being shaken up to fever pitch. The sounds as well as the colours seem to be infused with unfamiliar vibrancy. As if somebody is slowly maxing out all the EQ frequencies on a giant mixing desk, causing it to swell through your entire body. You can suddenly taste all of the bacteria in your own mouth, and feel the tiny mites crawling through the microscopic cracks in your skin. You can feel the tendons in each of your fingers contract as you grip the handlebar tightly. The texture of the grip is unlike anything you’ve ever felt. You can smell and see the history of the rubber that you squeeze. The colours quickly become unbearable for your eyes and slip into bright whites and deep greys, the sounds become squeals and roars, the tastes become a headache and the smells so intense that your nose starts to drip blood.
It isn’t until you focus on how slowly the blood is running down the inside of your nostril that you realise how quickly everything is happening, and to what extent your senses have heightened. You barely ponder this for a moment as all of your senses are overwhelmed by the huge amounts of data, and your brain blacks out like a stone bridge under a deluge of flood water. Everything goes black and all you can hear is the faint hum of the disinterested universe.
This is what you experience from the seat of the machine, but to a white rat living amongst the rubbish in your room the scene is far simpler. A human sits on the machine and abruptly flashes out of existence in a piercing knife of white light and screeching metal. The rat scurries over to investigate the unconscious form left behind, the non-human which smells like a disgusting meal. As the rat sniffs the dripping, oily boots of the black-clad man, a hand shoots out and pins it to the floorboard. The man crushes the rat’s skull between his thumb and forefinger and proceeds to slowly lick the blood off his fingers.
[[Turn to page 6->Page 6]]
101.
You are covered again now. Since waking fully you dragged yourself to a wall of the hut and propped yourself against it. Your eyes are clear, though you still feel a little weary and insane.
You hear footsteps crackle over dead twigs outside and try not to tense up in anticipation. You clutch the knife tightly in your favourite hand and consider the outcomes of this next interaction. Lets not get crazy after all, you did wake up inside, in a bed, and in the circumstances extremely not dead. Unless you sleepwalked here, there was another party involved, and they seem to have acted benevolently as yet. This other party is capable of building a hut, albeit a fairly rustic one and lighting a fire and owning a knife. There’s no need to act crazy.
But the knife does feel extremely good in your fist.
The footsteps get closer, there must be a lot of broken twigs out there. Listening intently you hear a quiet murmuring, as if the footsteps were muttering to themselves about something. You can’t make out any of the words, and the thought pops into your mind, perhaps summoned from your knife hand, that maybe the approaching footsteps are preparing to cast a spell on you.
Hold on kid, that’s wild. Where the hell do you think you are? Fucking Narnia? You think Saruman lives in this horse-shit hut? Get a grip.
Yes.
Get a grip.
On the knife.
Lovely knife will protect you. Lovely sexy knife. Under the covers you touch the cutting edge to your less favoured thumb to test the sharpness. It’s sharp as shit and that makes you feel good and strong.
The footsteps arrive at the curtain which covers what you would think of as the doorway if you weren’t in some ass-backwards other-dimension. You draw your feet in under your body and prepare to spring.
The curtain twitches.
[[Turn to page 14->Page 14]]
102.
You can see how this ends from a mile away. Or rather you see the past unfolding behind you as you begin to run. These creatures must have given a different greeting to Simon, accepting him into their hut culture as a strange but similar other. For whatever reason he got stuck here, but that was OK because he just European-ed it by making the most of a weird situation and building his own hut. Now in classic British fashion you walked in assuming you know best, missing every nuance and fucking everything up. Why don’t you just sew it all up by renting a hooker and calling it a gap year?
You run with this understanding pulsing through your awful heart and as you glance back over your shoulder you feel somewhat numb to the sight of other creatures swarming out of the remaining huts. One lazily squeezes out backwards, tumbling to the leafy ground in a mound of hair and claws. One stretches to its full height, arms outstretched, claws tingling in the reddened light. It screams a high pitched caw which only serves to further numb your body. Many others are already in pursuit, some have taken to the trees while others charge after you on all four limbs like chimpanzees.
Your only option is to get to the machine. You don’t understand this world and its predator-prey relationships, its cultural differences have proven too much for you to survive. You are already at full pelt when you remember that you don’t know where you are, already heading for the densest cluster of trees because that seems to touch some synapses as being connected with the machine. Dear sweet machine, like a random and unforgiving God. You long for it to scramble your brains once more and to be allowed to come to on the hard, filthy floor of your lovely squat room. You picture the room as precisely as possible while your body runs fuelled entirely by fear.
Suddenly you fall, your legs swiped from under you by a fast claw. You cannot distinguish between the pain of hitting the ground with your face and the sudden suffocating weight of the creature on top of you. It bites into the back of your neck but you barely feel it through the sadness you experience as you realise that you deserve this.
You die silently a short while later, eyes screwed tightly shut and curled into as much of a ball as you can manage. The creatures eat your body and return to their huts to mourn the man you murdered. Their legends and songs record that while an individual human being can be a wonderful thing, they should not be kept together lest inevitable violence occur.
They never encounter another person and eventually even their simple community is wiped out by the inevitable ravages of entropy.
The world returns to darkness and chaos and nobody cares about your part in it.
THE END
[[Afterword->Afterword]]107.
There is nobody at the door by the time you cross the room and open it. It’s possible that you imagined the knocking, but you don’t think you’ve entirely lost your green green grass so you hold on for a while to see if anyone returns. With the door open you realise how un-alive your own room feels. You can’t exactly hear sounds from out there but there is a sense of something happening. As if you can sense people living in their own spaces. You suppose this isn’t a crazy thing to believe, after all humans have evolved to live in packs, is it too wild to assume that you can process information that you don’t understand, and that you can sense human beings in the same building as you?
At the thought of the pack instinct you begin to feel a yearning for human company. When you were here last you arrived with a gang of musicians and misfits. You walked in like you owned the place and for a few hours, thanks to the booze and the laidback welcoming attitude of the locals, you felt like you did. It was that initial connection that made you want to come back here in the first place.
Come on stud, abandon this scavenging mission. Get your ass out of this bonkers little bedroom and try and make a connection with somebody.
[[Turn to 27->Page 27]]
108.
Feeling safer than you have since you arrived at the squat you drift off to sleep, master of your own destiny at last.
You dream of crushing snails beneath your bare feet, feeling their gelatinous flesh and broken shells ooze between your toes as you slowly apply pressure. You are surrounded by your own carnage, the earth is nothing but slime and shards of shell, the spoils of an eternity of crushing defenceless creatures. How many million have you ground to death? You reach down and take a handful of the mush.
As you rub it on your bare chest and neck you are reminded of an exfoliating body wash which spurs you on to rub harder and scrub yourself clean of the workman’s sweat that you wear. You scrub at your armpits, working it in with your fingernails, caking your coarse black hairs in slime.
You smell like a builder but you know yourself to be the destroyer. You fall to your knees and grab more and more handfuls of the death juices, you scratch it hard into your hair and fill your ears with it. The sounds of the world are muffled as you smear it down your stomach and let it catch in your belly button. Eventually you throw yourself down and wallow in it, covering every inch of your body, scraping it between the cheeks of your ass and using both hands to massage it into your thighs.
You are half awake writhing under the furs. You exist in both the dream world and the hut, the boundaries are confused and you can’t focus on either one properly. You are covered in sweat and you try to wipe it off with the snail slime, but the broken shells open up your scabbed wounds so you end up smearing your own blood across your body. You’ve lost hold of the knife and feverishly fumble around in the carnage searching for it.
You find it pinned flat to the ground under your body and ease it out. The thick, solid handle allows you a crutch to access reality fully. You have shaken off the covers and lie uncovered on the mud floor. Smears of your blood colour the floor, and your arms and torso are streaked with it where you have broken your scabs in your sleep.
You feel better though. The sleep has helped.
[[Turn to page 101->Page 101]]
109.
You stare at the machine warily.
You may have survived, but your previous trip grated your brain like hard cheese and threatened to tear your physical being into infinite tiny pieces.
You walk around it, squatting in its clearing like a metal monolith. Now you have time to examine the area, you are surprised that there is no wreckage here. Looking up at the canopy, there is no still-smouldering hole which you crashed through. In the wet earth there are no skid marks indicating a sudden deceleration.
You didn’t arrive here like a crashing aircraft. It truly seems that you appeared from nowhere.
This thought doesn’t unsettle you, which itself seems strange. Your lack of reaction makes you edgy and uncomfortable. You start doing jumping jacks to try and get the blood flowing to your body and your brain. This activity actually feels pretty good, despite the trauma of the past 24 hours.
Looking around self-consciously, you start to do a little yoga. Balance is difficult on the rough muddy ground of the forest, but you persist and gradually feel no embarrassment at all. You decide you deserve the self love, and close your eyes to fully enjoy the experience.
After stretching out your whole body and loosening up your joints you feel much more prepared. You give the machine another dirty glance. You know you’re going to get back on it, it’s just a case of readying your physical and mental self for the barrage you know is coming.
You lower yourself to the ground and sit with your back to a tree. You try to empty your mind, planning to meditate for a time until you feel calm and fully in control of yourself.
In barely any time at all you start to feel restless and stupid.
You stand up and take a deep breath in and out before climbing into the seat of the machine.
[[Turn to page 23->Page 23]]
111.
A battered looking manservant flicks open a hatch in the enormous door. You see his dark eyes through the slit and grin broadly at him.
“I’m here for the party!” You tell him, lying squarely to his face.
The hatch flicks shut and seconds later the door swings open. You stride in with the confidence of an Oxford educated History graduate applying for a job with a tabloid newspaper that your uncle owns.
From the massive entrance hall he leads you up a vast staircase which spirals anticlockwise around the inner wall of the left-most tower. You count hundreds of steps, and have worked up quite a sweat despite the cold by the time your guide stops on a landing and ushers you into a well-lit room full of people.
Food is piled high on the table, a huge fire is blazing warmly in the hearth. Human beings - you are thrilled to realise - fill the space, talking loudly and passionately while filling their faces. The manservant walks you over to the table and grabs you a plate.
“Everyone’s welcome. Every Thursday we have a community meal where we cook enough for the whole town. The food is waste from shops that they couldn’t sell. We freeze the leftovers for Soup Mondays.”
He begins to fill a plate of his own.
You are taken aback, suddenly questioning your assumptions. “I assumed this castle signified a monarchy, or at least some sort of caste system.”
“Oh it was built decades ago. My friends and I came to live here after a regime change. It was empty, so we moved in. It used to be a squat, but new legislation meant that we had to apply for a license to make it into a community centre.”
“And the town? I didn’t see it through the snow. Hold on, what about the bodies outside?”
The man - you realise you were entirely wrong about his status as a manservant - looks embarrassed.
“It was the last government. They were the worst. Fucking nazi bastards.” He shrugs. “They are gone now.”
“And the new government is better?”
“What is better?” He clenches a fist. “Men should not rule other men.
Government is filthy. That’s why…” he gestures towards the buzzing party and the castle in general. “We do what we want. Later we will be watching a movie and knitting woolen hats. It’s cold outside no? Do you want to join us?”
A warm glow of familiarity creeps through your cold bones. You nod slowly and smile at him.
“I’d love to. I used to live in a place like this. In a city called Berlin.”
He nods knowingly, unsurprised but pleased.
“Ah yes, I could tell you were one of us.”
[[Turn to page 31->Page 31]]
116.
As you walk through the woods in this otherworldly procession, you begin to relish the down time to actually absorb some data about the freaky new world you're in. Your body aches, but you let it slide and notice how beautiful the sky is here. It seems further away than on Earth, and you wonder if that’s to do with the atmosphere being thicker, or if it’s just an optical illusion created by the enormously tall trees and how exotically deep blue it looks.
Now that they’re not attacking you the creatures lose some of their terror. You peek at them rudely but they don’t seem to mind. They are slightly shorter than you and you fumble with this information crudely and work out if it makes you less intimidated by them.
Their build is heavy and solid, but their arms, two pairs, each originating from high on their torso, are laughably spindly. As thick as your wrist at the shoulder, they barely taper until they reach the pointy, finger-like claws which clench together more like a pair of scissors than a fist. Each individual is effectively armed with four long spears, presumably stronger from the front than the sides, which double up as pincers. You doubt there’s an opposable thumb between them. The arms are armoured, but their bodies are covered in a rough, sparse black hair. Like a spider under a microscope. Their faces are jowly and contorted, but otherwise relatively ape like. They seem able to walk upright on legs which seem more in keeping with their bodies than the arms, but mostly seem to lumber using all six limbs in a surprisingly quiet pitter-patter on the leafy floor.
You turn to the human guy.
“Do they understand us?”
He still seems pretty bored by your presence.
“They understand. Not words. But in their own way.”
“How long have you been here?”
“A long time I think. It is better.”
“Better than Berlin?”
A small hint of emotion is visible in his face for a moment, but he licks his lips and it disappears. He lifts his left hand and runs it back over his shaved head.
“Yeah, why not.” He pats one of the creatures on the shoulder and gives it a much warmer expression than he has yet shown to you. It gently shoulder-barges him in return, lifts its nearest limb and pecks delicately into his palm, not breaking the skin. You don’t understand the gesture but it seems to be affectionate.
Eventually you walk into another clearing, full of small, squat huts. Huge trunks stand all around you, with an autumnal light drifting down between them, carried and coloured by occasional brown falling leaves. All in all the setting is beautiful and relaxing.
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Forest-house-1.jpg'}
You’ve been brought to the creatures’ village.
[[Turn to page 52->Page 52]]
117.
High on destruction, you help Patrick drag the machine towards the double doors and heave it off the balcony to land on the rest of the garbage.
It moves gravity strangely around it, and it is both otherworldly heavy, and extremely maneuverable.
As it falls towards the piles of rubbish you’ve created, you feel a great sense of urgency to be somewhere else, and when it finally lands the sound of its impact is delayed by several seconds. When the crash arrives it is the worst, most painful sound you’ve ever heard.
It sounds like shattering glass and twisting metal and screaming deer all at once.
You feel like you have killed a wild animal, or doomed a loved one to lifelong isolation.
[[Turn to page 99->Page 99]]
118.
Looking back at the mess you’ve created, it suddenly hits you how many of the black plastic bags seem to have been full of sand or earth. Stranger still, by the look of the split bags, there is a huge variety of different samples. The sand varies between fine, almost powdery white gold, to coarse deep red pebbles. The earths have a good mix of chalky, crumbly and claggy. Some have small plants growing in them, although mostly these are now wilted beyond saving having been stored in darkness for some time.
It seems that your predecessor had been collecting samples. The variety seems deliberate, and straining your imagination you can even begin to believe that the unruly stack of boxes and bags was actually a rudimentary filing system for somebody with an untidy mind.
Maybe the sculpture is somehow connected? Perhaps the different coarseness of the sand is used decoratively. One thing’s for sure, without uncovering it you’ll never find out.
Before long you are triumphantly standing in front of the tarpaulin-covered sculpture, ready to uncover the secret that lies within.
[[Turn to page 43->Page 43]]
122.
“Look, it’s been fun” you think out loud “but not that fun, and this whole adventure is beginning to feel like a waste of time. I moved to the city particularly to reinvent myself in a specific mould. This wasn’t just about escaping my mundane existence, it was about Berlin and the squat, and finding a community there.”
This reasoned out it seems clear what you need to do, so you turn your ass around and start trudging back towards the machine.
It’s a funny thing, but even in this neverending white-ness, you have a strong sense of direction. Or perhaps, you admit, you have a strong sense of where the machine is.
Once this thought bubbles clear into your brain, you realise that it has been true from the moment you landed on this second world. You can feel the machine in your heart, when you face it and retrace your steps, it feels like you’re returning home from a long voyage. When you stray from the most direct path, this feeling sputters and crackles like radio static interfering with a strong signal.
The feeling of home draws you closer, and you realise that your brief but exciting journey has fulfilled some of your own silent criteria of becoming the person you wanted to be. Whether you knew it or not, by accepting the temptation of the machine you became part of the narrative of the squat. You became one of the fabled characters who live within its walls.
This realisation fills you with a little buzz of pleasure. You have ridden the machine and survived, and now you’re going to go back where you belong and tell people about it.
This sense of wellbeing persists at a low level until you glimpse the sheen of metal through the marshmallow snow, and your heart leaps at the sight of the machine. You run the remaining distance and leap into the seat.
You know it’s going to hurt, but your strange connection with the machine makes you willing to take the pain in order to feel one with the universe. Your heart sings in harmony with the grating of ball bearings and lurching of gears as you hit the green button with a huge grin on your face, knowing damn well that you’re heading straight back to the squat from whence you came.
\*a single flash of white light\*
\*crashing pink noise\*
\*you scream with pain and pleasure\*
And you appear back in your room, where everything is exactly the way you left it.
Rushing out into the corridor, you head directly for the kitchen to make yourself the strongest coffee you possibly can.
Maria is sitting in there reading a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune, translated into German. She greets you warmly.
“I was wondering when you were going to get up. I didn’t realise you get could get jet lag riding the train from the UK.”
You sit down opposite her and she continues. “Sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived, there was a protest which I couldn’t get out of. It wasn’t any fun in the end.”
“It’s actually worked out better this way. I needed to sort some things out. Is it… er, is it the weekend?”
She laughs and nods.
“Great. I’m going to make some coffee, and then if you’re not doing anything could you show me around and help me work out what the fuck I’m doing here?”.
THE END
*Well done! This is a decent ending, you rode the machine and survived. You’ve adventured beyond the boundaries of this universe, but more importantly, it seems like you came to terms with some of your own insecurities and brushed up against your own boundaries. You found a place where you feel like you belong without sacrificing your sense of adventure. What more can you hope for?*
[[Afterword->Afterword]]124.
With the body back in the hut you slump back against the wall. You are covered in blood, now a mixture of his and yours, seeping fresh from reopened wounds, and you have no idea what to do.
At a loss you reflect on the last 5 minutes. As you straddled the dead body outside the doorway of the hut, you noticed other huts through the trees. You didn’t see anybody else around, although you’d be the first to admit that you weren’t thinking entirely clearly at the time. And who or what exactly do you expect to find out there? A whole community of punks, who’ve escaped your reality via The Machine to come and live in an otherworldly commune?
The idea is appealing, and not entirely beyond your understanding of what the European punk scene is capable of. Remember that Olympic swimming pool squat in Slovenia? That was some wild shit. Living in huts in the woods sounds pretty punk, and from your experiences so far it feels like you’re a long way from any capitalism.
But you have just killed a guy, and you’re covered in blood, and you suspect that no community is cool and liberal enough to just let that slide.
You decide to clean yourself up at least. The adrenaline is wearing off and you begin to remember how awful you feel. You stick your head out of the doorway and see a water butt off to the side of the hut and still no other figures around. You rinse your body clean and gently wash your wounds. When you’re finished you don’t look like an angel, but it’s an improvement. Back in the hut you find some clothes in a box against the wall. You pull on a black t-shirt and skinny jeans with a hole in the knee, feeling the familiar thrill of routing through other people’s stuff.
You glance at the body in the middle of the room and feel like a guilty piece of shit. You cover up his face again with the curtain. Time to face the music and see if you can talk your way out of this horrible situation.
The only shoes in the place are on the dead man’s feet and yeah, you steal them because really at this point, what else are you gonna do?
Fully dressed you walk outside and head towards the other huts.
[[Turn to page 24->Page 24]]
125.
“Where is my machine” the oily man drawls, sibilance piercing your ears like a fine needle.
You don’t have the strength to stand, and you quietly curse that you didn’t grab the stupid knife earlier. This is exactly the sort of situation where a knife seems like it would be handy.
He steps towards you, something about the way he moves makes you think he oozes towards you.
Why though? Why this guy again? He was creeping around the squat, and now he’s here in a different, well a different whatever this is. You still don’t really understand where/when/how you are.
You want to ask him how he’s connected to the machine, how he followed you, how he did the trick with the humanvoid. You open your mouth and try to sum it all up.
“What the fuck’s going on?” you ask. In fact your nerves and condition have got to you a bit, and you shout it right at him.
You like how it sounds so you shout it again “What’s going on?”.
He leans down over you, smiling like a horrible aunt.
Abruptly you hear a sound outside the hut. Somebody or something is approaching, and you have no idea if this is going to make your situation better or worse.
[[Turn to page 87->Page 87]]
126.
As you start to walk back to the house, Marius pokes his naughty little snout out of his fuck shed and declares that he’s going to throw you a moving-in party.
You don’t know how seriously to take him, but as night falls the squat party is surprisingly well attended, with local punks slithering up as the light starts to fade. Everything outside is still wet from the downpour the night before, but no-one gives a shit.
You move into Marius’ room and bequeath the horrible dark hole of a room you slept in on the first night to it’s next occupant. You never actually meet her, as she disappears shortly after arriving. The day that she moved in you saw a bright flash of light from the room, but when you went up to investigate there was nobody there.
Marius welds you a unique but functional bed-frame from old bikes. It has a disturbing H.R. Giger-style alien head looming over the pillow end, and sometimes you chain him to it and spank him until he screams.
You get a job lying to tourists about the history of the city. The Americans tip particularly well.
Maria never comes back to the squat, which confuses you at first, but by this point you don’t want to seem uncool, so you shrug and chalk it up to a righteous bohemian lifestyle.
Everything goes really well and you have a great life.
THE END
*Nobody is going to argue with this ending. You have found happiness in a Berlin squat with a sexy artist. As far as life goals go, it feels like you shot for the moon and won. In fact, if you choose to take this adventure again, you will undoubtedly end up suffering in ways that this play through just hasn’t provided. Maybe just pass this adventure to someone else and accept that you’re a sexy winner.*
[[Afterword->Afterword]]
127.
Patrick tugs the tarpaulin from the shape and you marvel at the machine below.
On closer inspection the tarpaulin is actually several small green tarpaulins, patch-worked together with thick string. The shape stands about 8 feet by 10, an imposing structure, and whatever it is is completely obscured. You begin untying the knots which hold the tarpaulins in place and slowly begin to make out the shape underneath.
Tightly connected chrome shows through, in various states of disrepair as if each piece was salvaged from a different source. It is deliberately and professionally put together, with a large bicycle seat fitted towards the back, as though the whole machine – you can no longer refer to it as simply a sculpture – were some sort of motorised penny farthing quad bike.
Dragging the last tarpaulin free you observe the machine in all its majesty. Near the seat are several buttons and dials, a yellow hard hat hangs from a presumably purpose built hook. In the machine’s parentage was certainly a church organ, but also you see a line of 12 desktop computers connected by USB, and above these you’re pretty sure that the engine/forks and mountings were borrowed from a motorcycle. Instead of a wheel between the front axle, there is a huge filament lightbulb in the shape of a squashed sphere, and on looking closer this bulb is free spinning and contains at least 100 small cats-eye marbles free to flow around the inside edge of the bulb as it spins.
There is an intricate pulley system which ends with a harness, it seems to be counterweighted at the other end by a large pair of dumbbells, tied precariously to the relatively thin rope. The harness and hard hat make the machine appear more of a music video prop than any sort of transportation device.
You see a two pin plug hanging near a socket and decide it can’t hurt to plug it in.
Patrick is strangely unimpressed by the machine and seems slightly put out that you want to stop and play with it.
“If we’re taking a break, I’m going to make another pot of coffee. I’ll see you in the kitchen in 5 minutes.”
He starts to walk towards the door but before he reaches it he falls to his knees and begins making a strangled, retching sound.
You are peripherally aware that something strange is happening with your new friend, but your full attention is grabbed by the majesty of the machine. You might just be in love.
You lean down to plug it into the wall socket.
[[Turn to page 133->Page 133]]
128.
Before you get much further you’re distracted by a loud knock at your door. Curiosity tugs at you from both directions. You want to find out what’s under the tarpaulin, but another part of you rationalises that none of this stuff is going anywhere, and making a good first impression with your housemates is at least as important. The knock comes again, insisting that the decision is made quickly.
If you head back to answer the door, [[turn to page 107->Page 107]]
If you still want to investigate the machine, [[turn to page 61->Page 61]]
129.
The argument is mind-numbing. Partly because it’s about Twitter, and partly because it’s taking place in nobody’s first language, so it feels like all the necessary nuance has been crushed up small in a sock, whereupon all the juicy delicious liquid has been squeezed out and all that’s left is the gut pulp. Technically satisfying, and it’ll move your bowels, but it’s of no interest to anyone.
You crash on a dirty sofa next to the friendly guy.
“This place is amazing. How long have you been here?”
The backpacker shoots you an embarrassed look and rolls her eyes. You’re not sure what’s going on and you cock your head to one side questioningly. She turns back to her packing, apparently uninterested in explaining what it is that has identified you as being peak lame.
Your new friend is unphased. “I am just now telling Miranda, I have lived here for 8 months. I want to learn English better and practise my cooking. Do you know each other? You are both English.”
You decide this sounds OK, but you’re not sure you want to venture further into a conversation which feels like it could dry up at any minute.
If you ask a bit more about this guy’s life, [[turn to page 42->Page 42]]
If you decide to redirect your energies toward Miranda, [[turn to page 3->Page 3]]131.
You turn from the man on the bed and run outside. Not much time is as at hand to perform this act of cock wizardry you’re about to pull off. In the workshop area you roll down the dungarees to your waist and take off your top. Nice six pack. Killer pecks. You whip out the baby oil you found in the strangers pockets and apply liberal amounts to your upper body, shoulders and neck. In a frenzy you accidentally lube up your face. Oh no, you look greasy. Oh well, if the shoe fits, wear it and it’s time to get fucking greasy.
You get the steel ruler out the dungarees and give your pecker a quick perking, slapping it about a little bit to check it’s still capable of feelings. Is it still alive? It’s been decommissioned for the past year or so, hopefully it still works. As a quick afterthought you get the face paint out and colour your dick yellow. You hesitate, maybe you should colour your entire lower body yellow? Hmm, you’ll be like a sexy fried egg. Yeah man, you could give him a full english.
“Yeah,” You laugh to yourself, “Eat me up, ya big greasy fuck!”
Jesus man, that guy in there is about to blow a fat load and you’re out here painting dicks?! Get it together, you could be guzzling cum right now. You’re startled by a noise behind you.
“Big greasy fuck eh? Most people call me Marius.” You hear a voice behind you. You turn, hoisting your dungarees up to hide your bizarre yellow penis. It’s the guy from the shed, he’s totally nude and looks completely cheeky.
In the past you would have been embarrassed. You would have stuttered and stalled, things would have become awkward and you would have ended up maybe having a cup of tea and a chat in his room, talking about some old nonsense. Not today amigo. You’ve got an unshakeable agenda - you’re gonna fuck this dude right.
“Yeah, well, if I had known your name I wouldn’t have called you a big greasy fuck and with that pillow over your face you could have been any old haggard masturbator.”
For an instant the unknown man, looks taken aback, almost hurt. His cheeky composure is all gone, he turns solemn. You study his countenance, he looks unplaceably Arabic with thick, long black hair, dark, narrow eyes, a slender nose and gentle pursed lips. His jaw is defined, yet smooth. To cover such a beautiful face with a pillow now seems brutish and unforgiving. He meets your eyes.
“So long as men can breath or eyes can see, so long lives this,” he catches your eye with his index finger, draws it down and taps the end of his erect fellow then points back towards you “and gives life to thee!” His cheekiness returns to his face in a flourish. Goddamn, this cheeky motherfucker knows Shakespeare. You look into each others eyes, there is an obvious mutual feeling between you.
Without missing a beat you dive toward his sword, grasping it with a fury you didn’t know possessed - sheer cock lust overwhelms you and using his dong like a ships tiller you steer him back into his room kissing him frantically. His lips are soft and his embrace is reassuringly powerful. On the bed you wield his penis like a double handed battle-axe.
“Is this for me?” You ask innocently, your mouth a tantalising millimeter from his rock hard schlong.
“Bingo, hunk. Merry Christmas.”
His face twists with ecstasy as you frantically suck on his pole. His pubes playfully tickle your brow. Your mind wanders and you think how good this killer BJ must feel - you’re singing cock karaoke and hitting all the right notes.
Minutes pass, you would keep going but Marius stops you.
“If you keep going like this I’m gonna cum. And I don’t wanna do that yet.”
“Oh yeah, what do you wanna do then?” You ask with a naughty grin.
“How about I gobble your knob like a pig in a trough?”
You giggle and he throws you over on the bed, he tears down your dungarees and is momentarily halted by your bright yellow boner.
You feel no shame. “I’m a full English fuckboy and I want you to fry me like an egg.”
“Yes CHEF!” Yelps Marius as he starts bobbing for cockapples.
You thought you were good but holy moly - no one gives a BJ like Marius. Using his mouth and tongue he works you like an expert swordsman, delivering deadly blow after deadly blow. You don’t know how much of this you can take. Conan the Destroyer is about to slay your swarthy serpent. His saliva runs down your shaft and you’re about to go off like Mount Vesuvius.
You reach over and grab the ruler and slap him hard on his butt. “Woah there pony! Ease it off there!” Marius looks up confused and a little cross eyed - your meaty Python Kaa seems have sent this sexy Mowgli into a cock trance. You give him a gentle slap across the face with the ruler. It breaks the hypnotic effect. “Wanna fuck?” You ask. His eyes refocus and you prepare yourself for a good ass pounding…
…the next half an hour passes in a frenzy of buttlust and you wonder how you have managed to hold on for so long in this mammoth fuckathon. It’s only a matter of seconds before you bust your load. Whipping around you clash swords in order to perform one final duel. You both grunt and in an explosion of thick streams of jizz you reach an expertly syncopated climax.
“Holy shit!” You both say in unison collapsing on the bed covered in nothing but each others musty sweat and trouser gravy. Your lemons have been well and truly juiced.
[[Turn to page 9->Page 9]]132.
You throw the door open with the confidence of a guy with a fancy new haircut and a new pair of shoes. You’re gonna weld up a storm! The Rodin of the squat sculptors! Hold up, are you wearing khakis? You stop and give yourself the once over, no, no no - this can’t be right. Why the fuck would you move to a squat in Berlin and dress like you’re in an iPhone advert? Do you want these people to think you’re a narc? You wince slightly as you realise you’re wearing white running shoes, khaki trousers, a buttoned up shirt, a black cardigan and lensless glasses. Fool - you look like you’re rushing out the door because you heard there was a 50% off sale on at the Edinburgh Woollen Mill.
Your initial confidence drains away and your energetic sprint down the hallway slows down to the “have-I-just-shat-myself?” shuffle. Damn, you look like River Cumo’s dick. Abort! Abort! You turn around and head back to your room, there’s a ton of stuff in there, the previous occupier must have left some dungarees or something.
You look at the complete mess that is your room - bags, boxes, tools, tarpaulins, cables, spray cans and ah-ha -some dungarees! It’s almost as if you’re destined to make fucked up metalwork sculptures. You take off all of your old clothes and throw them in a pile. Maybe there’s a free-shop in this squat where you can dispose of them shits. Some dorky touring band might pick up your Poindexter threads.
You sneak a look in the mirror with your clothes off, damn dude - you’ve got an ass that could fell a tree! You’re looking real good on it at the moment, don’t forget that. Clear skin, muscle in all the right places, a perky donger, and almost completely hairless. Hot dang, put the wrapper back on this meat treat before you decide to eat yourself right up!
Forget dungarees, what you need are some denim hot pants son! Give your glorious ass-egg the ass-eggcup it deserves. You slip into a black t shirt and put on the well worn dungarees. Out of habit you check the pockets for cash and knives - a harmless throw back to your rapmode days. Some washers, a pencil with one of those naked, neon haired troll pencil toppers, some cable ties, a disposable tube of baby oil, a steel ruler, some yellow face paint and pretty decent multi tool.
Not a bad haul!
You put on a pair of the guy’s rigger boots and an ex army cap. You look in the mirror again. Hello solider! The dork is dead - you’re the pimp burger with extra hot relish. Ready to get down that metal work? Get outside man! You put your hand on the doorknob and look back at yourself in the mirror. You look perfect. A dropdead dreamboat ready to set sail to Studtown. A regular squat punk Adonis with an ass full of sweet sherbet. It’s really quite remarkable that you’ve never noticed it before. You nod and look down at it one more time. You smile and say it out loud -
“Wow, what an ass.”
Now get the fuck outside.
[[Turn to page 27->Page 27]]
133.
The machine begins to hum the second you insert the plug into the socket. Although it’s not loud or particularly deep it seems infinitesimally to vibrate the solid stone floor. More than that, it seems like the air is shaking around you. Is this what it feels like when atoms decide to move together with a purpose? After a few seconds you hear the sound of a plug going into a socket and a machine starting to purr, as though a muffled echo of your own actions reflected from somewhere else. You hold your fingernails to your teeth and feel and listen to the way they bounce quickly and gently against one another.
Behind you, Patrick squirms on the floor, clutching at his own throat. He is whimpering, and a better person than you would have instantly realised that he couldn’t breathe. His body is changing, as if his pores were sweating out a thick black oil which quickly saturates his clothing and pools beneath him on the floor. His face is altering too, his jovial, youthful German features being replaced by thick knitted eyebrows. His eyes force themselves wider, and his black oily body oozes slightly as he laboriously manoeuverss himself onto his front and begins to slowly drag himself towards you. Thank goodness he’s exhausted from his horrible transformation, as you are completely unaware of any of this.
With the heightened awareness of every hair on your body you detect a quiet scraping coming from the machine. The second you turn your head to search for it the rustle of your clothes roars loudly and you wonder briefly if your new housemates are going to be disturbed by these strange goings on. The bulb in the front of the machine isn’t turning, but one of the many cats eye marbles has started to spin. As it twists slowly, you are treated to the many facets of its pupil, a fiery yellow-orange twirl peppered with a pattern of tiny holes. These holes grab your attention, each like a tiny wound. The pattern like the entrance to an ant’s nest, something suggesting destruction and living tissue and burrowing. As if tiny worms had dug these holes and then been pulled out with tweezers, their catacombs left as an empty network. You see the swirl of colour as a sponge of paint, encased in glass to preserve a moment of impossible delicacy. The marble spins slowly and begins working it’s way around the circumference of the bulb. Defying gravity, creating its own friction. It dislodges other marbles at first, squeezing between their inert forms ever so slowly. The spinning and the movement bear no relevance to each other, the movement is a ghostly float of no good sense.
*You feel an ungodly sense of rightness, as if your whole life has led you to this point. Note this down on your adventure sheet.*
Behind your back, the oily man drags himself one a little closer before collapsing under the exertion and laying still.
Caught up in your own internal narrative you climb onto the seat and grasp the handlebars. You glance at yourself in a reflective sheet of chrome. You grab the yellow hard hat and pull it on to your head. Your attention focuses on the large green button.
If you hold on tight and push the green button, [[turn to page 100->Page 100]]
104.
Swallowing your fear, you set out towards the castle gates.
The path is paved with the mutilated corpses of warriors, so you walk slightly off to the side and try not to look at them too closely. Occasionally your attention is grabbed by a particularly gruesome wound, or mournful expression in the rictus. Mostly you keep your eyes dead ahead, ignoring the fearful segment of your mind telling you that this is a really bad move.
The snow, the mallows, and the distance had teamed up with the sheer terrifying scale of the castle to fool your senses into believing that this would be a short, manageable walk, but four hours later you are still trudging with blistered feet through the cold, wet sludge. The terrain is otherwise featureless. Through your resentment you manage to count yourself lucky that the ground is flat and hard beneath the snow, before starting to wonder where the snow came from if the stuff falling from the sky is marshmallows.
You gratefully stop walking and make an examination of the ground well away from the grizzly path. It surprises you to find that the marshmallows are turning to powder on impact, creating this snowy appearance covering the landscape. You don’t know how to feel about the fact that you have been wading through sugar and gelatin for half of the day without thinking about it. You suggest to yourself that perhaps the human remains making up the path are not quite so surprising if the natural weather cycle of this world includes gelatin falling from the sky. Is there perhaps a bone cycle instead of a water cycle? Are there hot, volcanically warmed pools of congealed gelatin, boiling flesh from bone with islands of scabbed blood and foamy beaches of fatty deposits?
Is that the kind of shit that’s going on here?
You start walking again, deciding that the castle at least seems like something you can understand.
[[Turn to page 63->Page 63]]
{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Cover.jpg'}
The Squat Machine is an interactive adventure novel in which you play the hero and make decisions which guide you through the story.
If you’ve never read an interactive novel before, don’t worry, this is a particularly simple one which doesn’t require any dice or even a pencil. Start reading on the next page, and at the end of each page follow the instructions telling you where to turn to next. Sometimes you’ll have choices to make which will affect the type of adventure you have.
You have moved to a squat in Berlin with the intention of changing your life. Elements of your character and back-story will be filled in as the story progresses.
The novel contains scenes of sex, violence and drug use, as well as other assorted filth. If this isn’t your bag, maybe give it to someone else.
Choose well.
[[Start a new adventure->Page 1]]{embed image: 'https://journal.falmouth.ac.uk/testimagehosting/files/2022/10/Original-Cover-art.jpg'}
**Afterword**
It’s a different experience for me to release a ‘new’ project that in reality was quietly progressing through pretty much the whole Trump presidency.
The Squat Machine is short for a novel, and even by interactive fiction/gamebook standards, at 86 ‘pages’ it is a strange little anomaly. Hamish and I started writing it one Christmas in a fit of excitement, and speaking for myself I poured a lot of crazy into it at a time when we were both working hard to get our real lives together.
Since then I’ve picked it up every now and then and chipped away at it. At one point I put out a call for contributions, thinking it would be fun to open- source an adventure book, like that game where you draw the legs of a monster and fold the paper and pass it on. Inevitably that was a short-lived train wreck; but the contributing authors who are listed helped it to progress when I was dead out of time and ideas. I highly recommend investigating their other creative outputs.
I know there were other submissions, but they seem to have gone missing over the years – possibly because indiscriminately handing out editing rights to a Google doc is a lousy way to manage a project.
If you submitted any work that isn’t in here, or worse, it is and you’re not credited, I’m really sorry.
Sam and Joe added the art in a flurry of creativity towards the end, and I couldn’t be happier with how it’s all turned out.
Isy Morgenmuffel deserves a hug and a medal for proof-reading – surely the most thankless job imaginable.
Editing it together into something coherent these past couple of months has driven home how full of violence and aggression the story is. I partially blame Trump, Brexit and the Tories for dominating the news throughout and filling my brain with poison during the writing process. But really The Squat Machine was always going to be a loud, violent romp because it’s about struggling against life slowing down, and wanting to escape into a world where the colours are maxed out, time stops for an instant while you tear something evil’s heart out, and every time you wake up you have no idea where you are or what’s going to happen.
I hope you enjoy it in the spirit its intended; as a smutty, pulpy romp through space and time.
I’d like to dedicate it to all of the great European squats that Bangers played at and stayed in over the years. It always felt like the weirdest stuff was happening just out of sight.
Roo
June 2021
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This really is the end, but there are 12 endings in total, and I think they're probably the best bits. If you're keen you can [[play the whole thing again->Title Page]]
Otherwise it is time to close this window (or forward it to someone else) and drop me an email to say you liked it at roopescod@hotmail.com
If you loved it you could also <a href="https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=X3KWFHUTG5V7G">donate a couple of quid</a> which I'll put towards whatever weird project comes next.