But is this The Ferret, or The Ferret inside The Ferret?
Continued from “The Ferret – Somewhat Explained in Transition…”, filed by Jack Step from Nowhere Land Express, November 22, 2013
Prologue
The Ferret is inside himself; that is, he is inside The Outside Ferret, but does not know it.
Meanwhile, The Outside Ferret, whose flesh is still alive and functioning in the outside world, having been released by Harry Christian and Bill Publowsky, continues to function physically, sliming and crawling its way, almost brainless, as though galvanized by some renegade sputtering electric current, coursing on primordial raw-vestige nerve impulses and instinct, through Kyiv’s sewers, emerging, virtually unconsciously, into the streets every now and then.
He has now turned man-sized – far larger than his former Ferret self (when he had tadpole legs, batwings, and a turtle-shell back (with a line of fur going down the middle)). He is also scaly, and terrible; increasingly, its mouth fills with piercing giant rat shrieks – EEEKH-EEEKH!!! – rather than limericks and bad rhymes, and it is driven to murderous rage by the Hell-tormented poetry of the Inside Ferret, whom it transports around in its head, also unawares.
This is the story of The Inside Ferret.
***
The Inside Ferret
For now The Ferret, by some sleight of Harry Christian, is engulfed in black. He sees nothing but the dim outline of the greasy fur that encases him, with the tips of his claws barely visible as he stretches out his forefeet-arms in a test of strained vision, as only a strange, weak light, the source of which he cannot locate, illuminates him coldly, even mockingly, somewhere from far, far above, as he moves, testing the space around him, jerking and lurching this way and that.
He had been in a similar situation before – in fact, not that long ago (at least he imagines the memory of it to have been recent) – and the realization begins to dawn, painfully, that it was perhaps the moment of his life; one of supreme control, over himself and his surroundings, and a never-afore attained eloquence – one that was only partly contrived.
Yes, he had been through this before, just after the performance; there had been darkness all around and just a simple light on him from overhead. But that darkness had been tangible, its boundaries were known and not frightening; the source of the light could be easily detected.
Yes, there had been something like pitch dark, but the space around him was a stage. And there had been a light fixed on him as well, but it had been much stronger, and far hotter, and, in a word or three, simply familiar, expected, and altogether normal (in a world where things could be more or less relied on, and in which he seemed to have been helped along, for years and years, by somewhat unusual, even magical, and perhaps secretly diabolical, luck, inexplicably built into his existence, which had filled him with confidence, and which he took for granted:
- that he could never be wrong
- get away with anything
- fuck people over
- lie, cheat, and steal;
- that he could dope, stooge, and dolt them into irreparable losses from which they could never again recover;
- con, sham, mislead, betray, beguile, defraud, and double-cross those who had dealt with him in good faith, believing him to possess integrity, of being on the up-and-up
- and that his intentions, plans, motives, and goals were honest, sans scheming
- but were open and transparent, not mean-spirited and vicious with an eye toward harm and bad intent
- unconcealed surreptitiously by ulterior stealth, proceeding quite naturally from the shifty, slinking, serpentine, underhanded, treacherous, deceitful, two-faced sneak that he was;
- that he could undermine their careers
- prevent them from procreating (while he populated the world with more Ferrets)
- ruin their lives, and get away with it, thinking it was all right
- in fact, thinking nothing of it at all, as long as it got him ahead;
- building on all these the unbridled audacity to even stab in the back his superior, who had thought The Ferret a colleague, and leave him lying on the left bank to die (and had that been Stephan who somehow managed to come back as, as… a saint, or something of the sort, to prosecute him at the trial – for his (Stephan’s) own murder;
- and if it had been him, how was that possible
- and why hadn’t The Ferret recognized this possible connection before, but only now, when he is terrified, suspended in utter dark?));
whilst the present light, untraceable, distant, cold and mocking, which begrudges him even a full glimpse of his own repellent image, is ceaseless torment.
Oh, how he had thoroughly enjoyed that other – real – moment that night on the stage, the real light tracking him, as he stepped with a tadpole leg here and gestured with a hunch-shouldered arm there; oh, the suddenly realized ability to create a mood of mock despondency, generate disingenuous ennui, put on self-abnegation; how, how…
And he hadn’t been soliloquizing
(as though such moments actually occurred in life, when people suddenly stopped in their tracks to extemporize drama, pour out their bitterest grievances, expose their helplessness and vulnerability in the face of forces they are too small and puny to deal with, and their rawest emotions, wrapped in put-on reckless Romantic stoicism and alienation, to no one in particular)
to no one in particular, but to the man he had held closest to his heart, Welsh Losser, his relationship with whom he felt he was all but controlling, his sexual prowess being so potent just then, and who, he had been thinking at the time, might hear, yea, might feel his yearning, reaching out to him across the interstellar Kyiv spaces. It had all been meant for him; indeed, it had all belonged to him, had been his, notwithstanding Josh Davies’s pretenses to a maker’s control – and now it was gone.
And is Josh Davies behind this? Something tells The Ferret – and he does not know what – that even Davies is incapable of horror such as this.
Yes, terror-stricken, The Ferret’s disgusting flesh shivers uncontrollably inside the black void.
He feels himself standing, but when he reaches down to touch the ground, there is none. He can fall onto all fours, which has come to feel more natural by now, but while he is able to crawl and scurry, he cannot tangibly define the supporting surface as some kind of floor.
If he wants to sit, he is readily obliged, but feeling for an actual seat under him is useless – no shape or solid form can he identify.
Sometimes, when he scrambles about (and other times not), he feels as though his feet are rushing over broken glass, but when he bends his head to the non-existent ground to detect such glass with his nose or tongue, there is none.
And then his mind opens, like the trap doors to a dungeon, and he, despite free will, stops trying to discover the nature of the dark that surrounds him and, by some power beyond his ability to contend, is made to peer, deeply and ever-deeper, into his own inner, and utter, dark.
A fire like Hell gushes up from the deep into which he peers and engulfs him, and sets him gnashing in raving pain, for this now becomes the light by which he finally sees himself.
For the anguish groans and the awful truth spreads its hellish illumination inside him.
The Agony of the Rat
I’m not even a fabulous monster,
A beautiful miscreant, but a rat.
At least I had been more fantastical,
Armed and shielded with physiologic
Wonders: tadpole legs that gave my hunched form
Spring, a turtle-shell back harder than steel
That let me hit the ground from heights immense
Without death or any kind of breakage,
Batwings for flight, claws to grip, climb, and tear,
And cloven hooves suctioning to buildings,
Sliding perpendicular on their tips
Across the many-storied glass. And this,
Retched from the bowels of measureless bad,
The seething cauldron of demented mind
That boiled me in homicidal glee, un-
Der the aegis of USAID,
That took to cutting, snipping, and carving,
Me, a child, on a maniac’s table,
With vodka only for anesthetic,
Torn apart, and other parts replaced me,
And how… and why – and yet, I would get by,
And live, and multiply, and thrive…
And I liked me. But now? How this, and why?
A rat, doomed to float in profound blackness,
Is this, then, the eternal consequence,
The last judgment, the irreversible
Damnation, payment for my life’s total
Of uncontrollable acti rei?
But I, too, had been a boy – I was once
A boy – oh! just a boy, just a little…
Boy… just a little… just a little…
Ooohh…
Aaaaaahhh…
Aaaaahhh…
Aaaaahhh…
Aaaaahhh…
The Mother’s Lullaby Recalled
Mm-mm, mm-mm,
Liu-li, liu-li,
Hush, baby, hush,
You’re in my arms,
Hush, baby, hush,
You’ll come to no harm…
Mm-mm, mm-mm…
Liu-li, liu-li,
Liu-li, liu-li, liuuu…
Filed by Jack Step, for The Broken Image Gazette, Saturday Evening Edition, November 23, 2013