Of PR Man and The Writer, once Welsh Losser and Anti Olifko, respectively, who come to life and escape into Antipolex
Here, we are also treated to a quaint underground domestic scene between The Damned Fool, Toma Bed Lamb, and Tamo Shatterd, which, for the moment at least, shows them to be more like you and me. And alas, for we do not know if we shall ever meet them again…
The story of Wallace Wayne having been told, the underground scene betwixt The Damned Fool and his two maids-a-milking, Toma Bed Lamb and Tamo Shatterd, resumes, sayeth I, The Preacher, John Smith.
“Methinks it is only a question of moments before the double dead evil that sits there, which you, for some incomprehensible reason salvaged from the deep, is about to animate,” says The Damned Fool to the beautiful but borderline insane Toma Bed Lamb and Tamo Shatterd, the second being worse than the first.
“You made us do it, Fool… you made us do it!!!” cries a distraught Shatterd.
“Will they kill us,” a somewhat better collected but nonetheless distressed Bed Lamb asks.
“Nay, for they owe us their lives, so to speak, such as they are,” replies The Fool.
On the torn armchair, the two figures, the Dead Little Welsh Losser PR puppet toy and the Anti Olifko Writer Wood Dummy, come to life, growing to life-sized and rising to their feet.
They stare at the threesome evilly, backing The Fool against the wall, and then finding the passage out, leave.
“How did you know, Fool, how did you know?!?”
“I read it in this comic book.”
What had been the puppet toy is now PR Man; the wood dummy is now The Writer.
The main tunnel running under Antipolex comes up under the Antipolex Train Station, once a bustling hub of passenger transport that formed part of a larger public rail system together with, for example, the train station at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, now a ghost station, and the great Hoboken Train Station, which today services thousands of people daily to all compass points within the Northeast Corridor.
Today, the Antipolex station is an all but deserted rail yard, used for sitting boxcars and transporting undisclosed cargoes.
Spanning out from the station are labyrinths of sweatshops, followed by block upon block of tenement buildings, and slums. Like the Hoboken station, the Antipolex station sits on a Hudson River waterfront of old docks and piles, where Antipolex handles its own shipping.
The two criminals climb up into a far depot of the station.
Well, the freaks are not endless, but at times it certainly seems that way; doesn’t it?
PR Man
Once having been Welsh Losser, there is essentially no difference now with PR Man.
Whatever force had possessed Losser to drive, manhandle, and ultimately kill Anti Olifko in their most recent history in Hudson County, New Jersey, has been reversed, bringing the energies between the two back to normal and to their previous balance, as known from their encounters, interaction, and yes, even cooperation, back in Kyiv, Ukraine.
For while PR Man is now more evil than he’d ever been as Welsh Losser, like the early – the very early – Welsh Losser, PR Man is absolutely terrified of The Writer, yet finds himself strangely and irrevocably pledged to him, thereby making him like a loyal dog at The Writer’s side and at the same time very useful.
Losser’s, that is, PR Man’s, biggest power is his PR incompetence, by which he claims he can charm victims into investing their trust in him while he gives them a PR makeover that not only ruins their careers, but continues to carry dire consequences that pursue them to their deaths – and if that pursuit proves sufficiently relentless, actually causing those deaths.
Thus, in his new life as PR Man, Losser, that is, PR Man, can never be held directly responsible for murder.
When Losser changes into PR Man, he stays exactly the same – except he never changes into PR Man because he already is PR Man. Because this statement is not altogether accurate, I’ll put it another way.
If PR Man had Welsh Losser to fall back on whenever he needed a break, whenever Welsh Losser would turn back into PR Man, he’d stay exactly the same. I guess this is only to say what’d been said at the top: that there is no difference between Welsh Losser and PR Man, but that the two are essentially the same – except for the dress and the level of evil, which, with PR Man, is now far, far greater. And it would have to be to match the requirements of The Writer, to whom he is a lapdog and quivering slave.
As for the dress:
Instead of the pretty good-looking and tailored dark suit Welsh Losser had worn, which actually helped put a dash of handsomeness into the repulsive freak, PR Man wears a rust-yellow woolen sports jacket patterned into broad rectangular fields by intersecting horizontal and vertical green lines. Upon his lower body he wears a pair of cheap JC Penny stretch-band pants of a non-descript dull tan-gray color. The fedora with the feather in it, however, has stayed the same. It just looks like a rattier flunky version of the original. The shoes are brown wingtip Florsheims of the cheaper variety, as opposed to the earlier top-line black round-tipped German Salamanders.
The Writer
He looks like a papery suit of typewritten words – newspaper clippings, pages of text and poetry from books, book covers, and the always shamelessly tall-tale blurbs of back covers, lie flat against, as well as stick up, all over him, but within him is no substance and he himself is almost translucent. The suit is more like paper than latex, although at times it can balloon out to the clownish proportions of his costume when he was still an inanimate wood dummy; on the suit the words keep changing – phrases and passages from literature, and so forth. His eyes are black space, diabolically bottomless, void, and utterly terrifying, their shape is like diamonds cut out of a paper mask with scissors.
He is more demented than The Joker; he thrives on bad writing and cannot be killed, except by good writing that writes him out of existence, but no writing is ever good enough to do that.
He kills you by feeding on your memories and preying on your sins, and there are at least five different but related methods by which he does this.
1. If he has you within his grasp, or you are within reach, he passes a convenient electronic device, perhaps something like a smartphone, over you, which collects and shows him images out of your memory and out of your past. The device is connected to Cosmic Memory, but not that of God, in whom he doesn’t believe, but that of Satan, for whom he has held high praise. For this satanic memory, anything good that you’ve done is twisted into a lie, while your every sin and misdeed, of which we are largely made, is simply stored in its proper place in time, as these need no changing. In relating back to you what you’ve done, even any time you’ve masturbated and why, you are either driven to madness or suicide. Alternatively, while you might not commit suicide, you will thenceforth take actions you would not otherwise have taken, being traumatized, leading to your quick death. Or, having twisted facts around, particularly those redounding to your good name and reputation, which are few, and therefore rare and precious, you are propelled toward criminal behavior and acts, the most heinous of which, of course, is murder: of friends, relatives, and innocents you had never known before.
2. For extra interesting and intriguing cases, which he feels are worthy of his particular engrossment and heed, having your information, he will sit in his hovel typing out your history on his desktop or laptop, particularly the story of some specific and probably pivotal moment in your life, changing some of the facts, and thereby your past, the result of the writing alone leading to any of the consequences mentioned in No. 1 above. Or, he can send you what he’d written, just to multiply the shock and give him the satisfaction of knowing that you know where the fatal changes in your life from that moment forward have come from. The results, again, would be the same as in No. 1.
3. He kills people by running his fingers over them as though typing – an extremely painful piece-by-piece death in bad prose – and the action slowly crushes his victims’ flesh up into his being, as though into his essence, or whatever visible outward substance there is of him, which eats them.
4. Alternatively, he grabs them into a keyboard and types on that, pulverizing their flesh and bones, of course slowly and miserably killing them.
5. His death of them is the bad prose he types on their bodies with his fingers about the very death he is inflicting on them. It is spontaneous and made up, meant to seem brilliant, as though waxing poetic is simply his most natural thing. But I now realize this is essentially the same as in No. 3.
Back Underground, with The Damned Fool, Toma Bed Lamb, and Tamo Shatterd
“So based on the information we have thus far, from what I can make of it, we’re looking at a stock market crash the likes of which had never been seen before, not even the one of ’29, courtesy of The Pale Dragon, who sits in the towers above us, driven by revenge to completely destroy all Wayne business, everything he could never have, bringing the corporate globe to its knees and becoming the most powerful being in the world, cruelly diseased and monstrously disfeatured as he is.”
“Fool – what are you talking like that for? So… I don’t know… so… regular all of a sudden! What happened to the… to the… you know…”
“What happened to all the ‘Soft, who goes theres,’ etc.?”
“Yeah, that’s right, Fool. That’s why we liked you. It wasn’t what you said, it was how you said it – the content didn’t matter; only the form. Don’t you know anything about women? That’s what got us to go with you, follow you around, do anything you said. That’s the thing that really turned us on! Oh, God! I want that Fool back – oh, God, I want him back so much – oh, oh, oh, ooooohh…!!!”
“Give me a break, will you?! You think it’s easy – getting it up all the time, keeping you two quenchless wenches wet and happy?! What do you think – I’m Superman or something? Ha! Close enough, I bet! And I defy you to find anyone of my species who’s closer! So – the imitation Shakespeare isn’t good enough for you, eh?! And I suppose it’s not enough I do all the shopping, the cleaning, the cooking, while you two lie around like princesses, me waiting on you hand and foot, serving you, slaving away – for your sakes! And what thanks do I get?! You should be ashamed of yourselves, you hussies! Why, you’re downright ungrateful! You’re… you’re –”
“Fool, you know what you sound like just now?”
“No, and I don’t want to know. Relax – have a beer. There’s enough Sam Adams in the fridge to tide the both of you over tonight until the morning. Or drink the heavy stuff. What’d’I have a case of Johnnie Walker in the corner for, anyway. Mix some drinks – cocktails, for heaven’s sake! Play some music, turn the TV on, play it as loud as you want, throw in a video – anything, anything, just leave me alone!”
“Aw, let him rest… he’s gone through this before. We’ll get him back! Just give him some time. Go to sleep, Fool. Curl up and take that nap that you like so much, like a little baby. And if you’re a good boy, in twenty minutes –”
“In twenty minutes you’re going to be drunk, and I want nothing to do with a pair of lousy stinking female bums!”
“No, seriously, Fool. You know what you sound like?”
“Okay, no – what do I sound like?”
“You sound just like –”
The End of Part 6 and “The Transmigration of Bad Souls”…
Filed by John Smith, October 29, 2015