RANDOM STUFF

General Disclaimers: While it features no ‘on-screen’ sexual activity or explicit adult situations, this hypnofetish story does contain examples of fictional characters doing illegal, immoral and/or impossible things to other fictional characters. If you are under the age of consent in your community, are disturbed by such concepts, or want hot wet thrusting monkey-sex in your on-line pornography, then for goshsakes stop reading now!

Permission granted to re-post for free to any electronic medium, as long as no one's being charged to view it, and this disclaimer and e-mail address (hypnovoyer@hotmail.com) are not removed. It would also be nice if you told me you were posting it.

Copyright Voyer, 2006.

Specific Disclaimers: Some short humorous(?) pieces I've composed over the years. Only one of them has any MC. Enjoy, if you can.

Dedicated to O. Henry.

The figure lying in the bed, inside the square of gauzy curtains, had once been handsome and tall, but now lay wracked in the last ravages of his grim affliction, both sunken and bloated, his white gown and bedding turning a sickly gray simply by being in contact with the greasy violated skin.

Time crawled and crawled, measured by the ticks of the great grandfather clock in the corner. The sun rose somewhere behind the clouds. Finally, suddenly, the moment came. The man in the bed gasped, clawed feebly at the sheets with blackened nails, and gave a last grudging sigh, his body seeming to collapse in on itself.

The Royal Physician leaned over him, carefully performed the appropriate tests with his long sensitive fingers. Finally, he straightened up, slowly, painfully slowly, and pulled up the gold-encrusted silk bedspread, gently covering the dough-white face. He spoke, the voice of doom.

“The King... is dead.”

Next to him, the new widow crumpled onto the bed in silence, her still-slender body wracked with muffled sobs. A sigh, a moan, a sound of painful relief filtered through the room, trickled out the windows. Somehow picking up on it, the crowd outside began to shift and murmur. The Royal Herald moved to the tall wooden door, unlocked it and opened it into the passage beyond. Many others stood there, waiting for his announcement:

“The King is dead.”

The uniformed men in hall bowed, and spread the word forth, down the hall, out into the courtyard, into the land beyond. The circling birds caught it, carried it high into the sky and across the hills. Faces were raised to the sky, and the speculations, rumors and denials began.

“The King is dead.”

The report flashed into the crowded Great Hall, lined with its great velvet tapestries, black and terrible in their splendor.

The Reverend was there in his vestments, and he raised his gnarled hands, and he spoke forth in a great deep voice, his flourishing white brows bristling above his black and powerful eyes.

“The King is dead!”

Beside him stood the equally-ancient Treasurer, holding a large pillow which matched the wall-decore. The thing on the pillow gleamed gold as the holy man picked it up with both hands and reverently set it into position on the head of the man who knelt before him and the Treasurer. The man rose, tall and handsome, impossibly handsome, and he walked up the wide steps to the waiting throne, fashioned by dedicated artisans from the purest ivory and finest porcelain. His robe flashed and glittered with diamonds beneath his upswept black hair.

He turned and faced the crowd. The Reverend spoke again, his arms once again raised high...

“The King is dead.”

“Long live the King!”

A tremendous cheer, immediately echoed and amplified by the crowd outside.

The man in front of the throne shifted his hips, smiled a dazzling smile which rippled between his sideburns. The sun broke through the clouds, spiking into the chamber. The golden glasses and their pitch-black lenses flashed together, combining to produce the very light of Grace. Men gaped in awe. Women swooned. The music, the glorious music which could never truly die, which would never go away, once again began to rise.

And the King raised his own hands, the multitude of rings sparkling, and he spoke.

“Thank yew. Thankyewverramuch.”

And the King began to sing...

In the very center of the plain, where the roads all came together, there sprawled the collection of ancient gray ruins, the last shattered remnents of a centuries-dead city, the corpse of a spider still at the center of its tattered web. Here, heaped piles of blasted and riven stone slowly crumbled, thick with the undisturbed dust of eternity. The ground was as battered and cratered as the moon overhead.

In the very center of the ruins, amidst the titantic stones which had formed the base of the greatest of the city's fungus-like towers, there was the Pit.

The gaping fissure had been rumored to reach down to the uttermoust core of the earth itself. Whatever its source, the white-hot fire there burned forever, as hot as the day it had cracked forth into the air, greedily consuming all that was tossed into it. Before the fiery missles had rained down from the outraged heavens, the now-extinct inhabitents of the city had used this flame to power their fell devices, and to offer up their brainwashed sacrifices to their blasphamous subterranean gods.

On this night, close by the edge of the fire there loomed four figures, arranged in a circle, all deeply hooded and robed in black. The garments ranged in compostion from a crude shroud tinged with grave-mold, to a silken robe entirely covered with thousands of tiny black-on-black spirals, meticulously jabbed with silver needles. Three of the owners and wearers of the robes stood as silent and still as statues; the mists of X'Thul, trailing all the way from the Eastern swamps, flowed obscenely around his (his?) half-visible figure.

Arranged precisely around each of the figures was a collection of young women, all body-styles and colors, floating a few millimeters above the polished stones, their long masses of hair twisting as if underwater, their limbs wrapped up in tight balls. Painted on each woman's back was a different obscene shape, glowing a feaverish purple, a color matched by the women's wide empty eyes.

Across from Mordan, next to Quan-Li the devil-tailed Schemer, Yndar finally shifted. The narrow plains of the deathless witch-king's saturine face flickered in the light of the fire, showing the countless tiny trenches traced in his frostbitten not-flesh, row after tortured row. He turned the two black bottomless pits which made up his gaze in the direction of the other cloaked figures and he spoke, his horrifically vital corpse of a voice echoing hollowly out of the tomb which was his body...

“Mordan. Hast thou... any sevens?”

Across the fire, Mordan's beastial tattooed figures deformed themselves into a ghastly fanged smile. The carrion bird perched on his broad shoulder shifted its metal-tipped talons, its eyes spinning madly in the light of the Pit. The flames died down, the wind stood still, awaiting his reply...

“Go fish.”

The ladder was positioned near one of the upstairs windows, so I was able to hear the phone quite clearly when it started to ring. It rang several times before my mother, who was inside somewhere, was able to answer. I scooped out another black prickly glop and dropped it down into the shrubbery below me.

There was a longish pause, and suddenly the sliding glass door onto our deck slid open with a crash and my mother appeared, her hair floating in the breeze. My father and Mr. Bates and I all paused in our tasks, looking at her as she stood there.

For the first time in my life, I was afraid of her, down at that cold, gut-clenching level. There was a strange terrible light in her eyes, and she formed a matching smile with her lips.

“Henry!” she cried, her voice suddenly young and powerful and vibrant. “They finally did it! They finally lifted the Edict! We can go home!”

My eyes were drawn down the ladder to my father. As I watched, the same terrible expression of power and lust and joy appeared on his face. Together, in perfect harmony, the two of them threw back their heads and howled up at the sky. Endless, skin-rippling, wolf-howls.

And then they split out of their bodies. It was much like the peeling of a banana, only these bananas glowed with a horrific yellow-green light, and sprouted tendrils that curled and groped and steamed in the chilly air.

The outer shells crumbled to shards and dust, and the innards streaked up into the gray sky, coming together and twisting and curling around each other like lightning in reverse. I tilted back, back, back and silently watched them go until the world suddenly went a painful black.

I’m just glad they didn’t put Mr. Bates and I in the same room at the hospital. Even now, old coot is still blaming me for his heart attack. It almost makes me wish the ladder and I had landed on him after he collapsed.

It certainly would have been softer.