Day 66: 666

        See my ads?  See them?  I have ads now.  That makes me feel pretty official, guys.
        Story was supposed to be done today, but instead I insist it will be done "soon".  I'm going to keep working it out until it's conclusion, here.  I didn't quit yet.  I'm writing a lot more than 1,000 words a day now ordinarily, regardless if a lot of it is any good.  I'm getting ready to proofread this sucker and revise it, then get to work on the next one.  I guess I'll give myself a couple extra days for that, should be able to get a lot of work done on Saturday.  Also, lots of people talk to you when you don't want anyone to talk to you.  This is the benefit of staying home instead of being a trendy coffee shop script writer person.
        
         Inspirational quotes from Mother Teresa:
        "If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we     have to keep putting oil in it. " 

          This goes out to the girl who knows who she is, that it goes out to.  Things are working out just fine with her, by the way.  I'm willing it to happen, and that hasn't failed.  PERTINACITY will get it for you.  Don't bother reading "Thing and Grow Rich", that's what the secret is.  He doesn't state it outright, but you're just supposed to demand what you want on a daily basis.  Yup.  Almost done with 2,000 words today, buds!

            Charles dragged the old man into his apartment by the slippered foot, pulling the door shut after he had him laying face up in his own puke.  He was faint and onmoving, but it still looked like he wanted to say something, his face frozen in mid speech.  It looked like he had just spit up an apocryphal part of his insides.

            The Dave Sword looked delighted, if it was possible for a skeletal face to have dimples and ruddy cheeks it did.  Charles could have sworn he saw a smirk rising across it’s tight lips, the spine tail maybe being slightly more straight than usual.  Charles reached to pick it up off the floor and it squirmed out of his hand, laughing a hearty sailors laugh.  It sprung away, flying around the room in an inch worms haste.  Charles stomped at it with his bare feet for a second, when he did make contact once the spiky spinal vertebrae disgusted and tickled him.

            It ran up the stairs, flinging its head up each like a grappling hook and then recoiling the neck bit like sucking a ramen noodle out of a dish.  As it drew itself up, it made a sickening slurping noise and a series of human sounding grunts.  Charles followed it onto the stairs, only realizing at the first riser that he didn’t have stairs, these were brand new.  The old man was hawking up something from his throat, convulsing in a series of spasmodic trills.  The stick had disappeared up the flight, looking back indeterminately at Charles down at the bottom of the staircase.  The flight went on further than he could see; a white light pouring down from the top like a funnel for sunlight.

            Charles cooked himself breakfast, ruining several eggs before managing to crack a few correctly into the pan.  He coated it with vegetable oil, probably using too much, and eventually had eggs.  Even he couldn’t screw up toast, and he unwrapped the state of the art toaster he had received as a house warming present.  The old man had gone quiet again.

He sat in front of the TV, his hair dishevelled, his eyes bloodshot red, and clicked on a Network Morning Show.  He checked over his shoulder every twenty minutes, the staircase is still there, yes, it’s still there.  The host droned about the weather, hinting repeatedly that a local entrepeneur would be joining him around 8:00 or 8:30. 

He rose and put the plate in the sink, unsatisfied with breakfast.  There was more to this cooking thing than met the eye.  He prodded and pushed at the staircase, concerned that it could not be real.  The stairs felt like real stairs, although the apartment above his would have had to cease to exist in order to accommodate it in space.  He fiddled with the overflowing garbage bag under the sink, removed the recycling from behind the stairs and gathered them by the door.

“Taking the garbage out, quick.”  He said to the weezing pile of old man.  He slammed the door behind him like there was a lion in the room.  He mulled the options over as he went outside, looking at the building from the highrise apartments across the street.  No stairs rising out of it to nowhere, his secret was safe.  He threw the bags in their respective containers, and thought he had better go back in case the old guy had woken up.

He ducked behind the brick wall of one side of the square apartment building when he saw an unwelcome sight, Mr. Pulp was walking toward the front door dressed in a blue Banana Republic suit, his eyes narrowed and lips pursed.  He was mumbling something to himself under his breath and continuously crossed and uncrossed his arms.

Charles ducked in through the back way and raced down the long corridor, past the framed portraits of indiscriminate older men, using a spin move to dodge the azalea plant precariously placed in the center of the hall.

            He was too late, Mr. Pulp had reached the hallway, there was no way he could escape the confrontation.  No way except for bullrushing past him, ignoring the shouts of his name, and locking the door behind him.  Pulp was a fighter though, he proved sturdier than Charles expected, and still spry and competetive in his ambiguous old age.  He reached a self assured strong hand out and engulfed Charles’s wrist, and Charles feeling like a wounded animal kicked and spat at him incessantly.  His strength was not where it had been, when unchallenged he could have went on as a walking automaton for weeks, but he had met a formidable match in his boss.

            Mr. Pulp subdued him by the shoulders, staring straight into his eyes with a sincere pain in his eyes.  Charles buckled and tried to squirm away, but he was as good as a child in Pulp’s grips.  The old man burst through the door to Charles’s room, a look of horror even more horrific than the one moments earlier on his face.  Pulp screamed, a shrill womanly cry, and the old man collapsed into them like a building collapsing.

            Charles burst out of Pulp’s grip and into his room, slamming the door behind him and scurrying up the stairs, at times running on his hands.  The staircase eventually lost it’s superficial appeal, its hue brightening, the floor turning purple.  Charles stopped and peered back down the hall, a citrus colored figure ascending in an orderly fashion up the stairs a step at a time. 

            A man who looked vaguely familiar ran dead on into the staircase, breaking down onto Charles in a frenzied dash.  He stopped when he saw Charles, looking upset and pissed off.  It was the mental hospital caregiver, Chief.

            “I don’t know what all this going on is, Charles, but I went up here to rescue you and suddenly a disembodied head and spine connected itself to the headless wandering body of a minotaur.  Or atleast it looks like it might be a minotaur.”  Chief stammered, out of breath. 

            The earth shattering bray of an inhuman monster called from the top of the stairs, the crackle of lightning shaking the world above as it happened.  Chief said something to himself about this being “Fucking crazy” and ran past Charles down the hall, as fast as he could in spite of his spiked boots and wobbily knees. 

            Charles peeked out of the top of the stairs like a rabbit looking for the giant behemoth tractor that would soon destroy its home.  A creature straight of his nightmares glared down at him, a towering mass of muscular Frankenstein body parts with the skullish head of Dave, holding a trident in one hand and a giant cinder block in the other.  It shot lightning out of its mouth, the transient world around it collapsing preemptively around its every step. 

            It turned its dooming gaze to Charles, and threw its massive trident down the hallway, grazing over Charles head like a William Tell trick, the creature swinging its hand in dejection after missing like it had thrown a bad horseshoe.  Mr. Pulp was removed from the hallway entirely, reduced to a symbol of his name, Charles didn’t need to see him to know that.  He was sure his apartment had come crashing down around the rest of the building, and wondered about the structural integrity of the city block. 

            He turned and headed down the way he had come from, as the monster leaned its body over and reached an enormous hand down after him like it was trying to steal candy out of a vending machine.  Charles closed his eyes and backed into the wall, half expecting it to open a portal to a different world.  The giant arm clasped around him, prying him off of the wall with the nails on two fingers.  Charles grasped at the air, a futile attempt to break free.  He could see down the tunnel behind him as he was lifted back up, Chief hadn’t deserted him completely yet.  Mr. Pulp was nowhere to be found, most likely dead.  The trident stuck out of the end of the hall, the walls bifurcated near the end with curved stone spreading where the tines pierced it. 

            Chief looked up at him, horrified like a deer in headlights.  He manically looked around on the stairs for something to stab the monster with, coming upon a chunk of brick eventually that crumbled when he tried to pick it up.  The monster had trouble removing its arm from the tunnel, it flexed the shoulder like its muscle suddenly spasmed, and it couldn’t open the hand or else risk dropping its prize.

            It squeezed Charles hard, but the pressure didn’t break his bones.  He was in a bit of discomfort, although it wasn’t nearly as bad as he thought it would be.  He thought of a child throwing a fork, the muscles were showy, hands soft and smooth and underdeveloped.  Dave’s spinal head hung by a thread from the top, twenty feet up, completely unable to see what was going on inside the tunnel.  Charles started tickling the hand that was grabbing him, and it suddenly squeezed down harder breaking a few of his ribs.

            Chief found a better rock, a darker sedimentary rock, and struggled to lug it up the stairs, at first running and then breaking into a heaving jog.  He knew his spiked boots would come in handy at some point.  He dug the rock into the monsters pinky fingernail, ripping the cuticle open and spraying a mist of brown blood that looked and smelled the rusty sewer pipes.  The pinky released but the other fingers remained contracted around Charles, he himself clutching his stomach in and reaching his hands over the index finger like the bar of a ride in a rollercoaster.

            This made the monster realize it could lift Charles out and continue to grip him with only two fingers.  It was a delicate maneuver and the hand wasn’t up for it, and he rolled back down the stairs, striking Chief and taking him along with him.