The Kyoto Man (The SciKungFi Trilogy) by Wilson D. Harlan

Author:Wilson, D. Harlan [Wilson, D. Harlan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
Published: 2013-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

MR. WHITE

“Who are you?” asked Mr. Nightranger. His voice reverberated like a dull electric charge.

Mr. White said, “I don’t know.”

“Where are we?” Mr. Nightranger’s hands grew heavy, as if filling with sand. His fingertips turned purple and exploded like haywire coronets.

The mindscreen played and rewound and replayed the scene—an act of imagination against his will.

“Where are we?” he repeated.

Mr. White said, “The nightmare of reality. The panic room of narrative.”

Vertigo. Mnemonic fictions . . .

A figure entered the room through a faux portal, head obfuscated by a nimbus cloud. Sturdy puffs emerged from the cloud near the mouth region, then ascended and spread across the ceiling in a poetic succession of ripples. A white jacket fell from the cloud like a curtain, tethered at the waist. The figure carried a black case. Its shoulders arched from its torso like cannonballs on sticks of bamboo.

Mr. Nightranger and Mr. White stared absently at the figure as it drifted across the room toward the twins.

The smoke cleared as the figure placed the case on the edge of the sink, turned on the faucet, and doused the arm of a monstrous smoking instrument, something like a cigar, or a bong, but more complex, its bulk technologized by a trellis of slim tubes and copper wires.

Full head of gleaming black hair. Rounded jaw. Pejorative rictus grin.

Dr. Josef Mengele.

[Halfway across the sky, we hear the tsunamic curses of Ira Überstein.]

He brushed off his hands and lit a cigarette. He smoked it to the filter with Olympic velocity and lit another one, smoking it slower, relishing it, lips treating the butt like hard candy, sucking it, milking it, salivating on it . . .

Chainsmoking, Dr. Mengele snapped on surgical gloves. He removed a scalpel from the case.

He made an insertion into one of the twins’ abdomens.

The twin’s eyes opened, flared . . . He screamed. At first he didn’t know why. His brother jolted awake. Screamed . . . They groped and writhed on the meathooks.

Dr. Mengele punched the twins in the heads, dazing them, and then he shoved a fist into the new wound. He probed the region, dreams of history slipping through his fingers . . . He seized the artifact. Cigarette clenched between twisted incisors, he removed his hand, gripping what appeared to be a tract of barbed wire, jointed like a chainlink, wet with dark purple blood and bright yellow bits of tissue. “Hand über Faust,” he announced . . . Each barb became progressively larger and opened the wound wider as it came out and the twins screamed louder and louder . . . Dr. Mengele accelerated the process, as if taking up an anchor from a boat, and the wire went on and on and on and formed a pile of metal and gore at the doktor’s feet as the hysterical twin collapsed and crumpled, desiccated, skin wrinkling, legs and arms disappearing into his torso.

The last barb to emerge from the twin was the size of a billiard. The twin twitched obscenely, drooling and blubbering.

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