Effluvia

A real website about a fake airline tragedy: Flight 404.

Kyle Turley? New Orleans Hero.

Speaking of which, Turley's steroidal outburst at the end of the game the other night was the only decent moment in an otherwise lackluster contest. It didn't look any better in person, either. Of course, no one was watching on TV - all the sports nuts were watching the world series.

I saw From Hell on Halloween. Depp's the best, of course, and it was very well put together, kind of old-fashioned in the deliberate way it told the story. I liked it a lot.

And the November novel writing thing continues. I've never written about either come shots or demons getting hit by busses before this little bit - here I got to write about both at once. Being a writer is great!

Siobhanorama!

I suppose Siobhan is out tonight doing some last-minute campaigning in hopes of winning the New York mayor's race. Siobhan: For the People, By the People. Vote Siobhan in 2001!

Three Years Ago
"He may slobber on you."

Two Years Ago
"He'll use his amazing ability to marry a lesbian to fight the bats!"

One Year Ago
"You mean if I make like a potato gun or something?"

Have you ever been burned? Not a little spot-burn, either, but a good, nasty burn. Like hot grease or boiling water poured over your hand, say. A burn like that - has it ever happened to you?

The initial pain is bad, yes. The shock of going from not-in-pain to in-pain is what's bad at first. Then, you go on to actually experiencing the pain. And it feels like nothing you can do will ever make it better. And when it does finally feel better - when you run cold water over it or takes some drugs - returning to not-in-pain can be so sweet.

Now imagine those burns over your entire body. For two years. No drugs, no cold water.

That's where Chris Wiley was coming from.

In a matter of seconds he went from a swirling, snapping darkness to a drab hallway with a door at the end - a door clearly marked "EXIT." Through the door and he found himself at a place he'd known well, a few years before.

Magazine Street, New Orleans.

Specifically, the middle of Magazine Street near Jackson, in front of the Magazine Laundry. A drab little area in need of renovation.

An onlooker, someone walking their dog in the tiny park across the street, perhaps, wouldn't have seen much of note. It was a hot night at the end of July, around nine-thirty or so. Humid. Cloudy. A Tuesday. Very little traffic. Most of the businesses on that block were closed except for a small, dim bar and the laundrymat.

And then, abruptly, a naked man standing in the middle of the street, like he'd always been there. Impossible that he'd just appeared. Shit like that doesn't happen.

Chris gasped and shuddered as he breathed deep, the thick summertime air - heavy with the exhaust from a recently departed bus - sweet and cool and crisp in his parched lungs.

"Uh, uhguh, ummah," he gibbered, "out, out, out!" And then he screamed, a long, keening, ululating howl that echoed down the street and between the buildings and back to him again. His penis immediately stood erect and spat a load of semen onto a Corolla parked in front of him. He threw back his head to howl with joy again when a meek honking caught his attention. He looked to his left.

She was a tiny old lady, yes, and it was a very big car. She honked again, timidly, not wanting to upset the naked man with the dripping erection but needing to drive by all the same.

"In the road, in the road," Chris half-sang to himself, "need to move, need to move." He scampered for the sidewalk, member bobbing in front of him. The old lady drove on by, eyes wide.

Chris was still grinning and humming, but his mind was slowing down and becoming, little by little, coherent. This was where the bus hit him, he knew. He laid right in that spot in the road, right where he'd popped into existence moments ago, for a good twenty minutes before the ambulance came. He hadn't been in pain, as far as he could remember, but he certainly hadn't felt good. Sleepy, and kind of worn out. Then the paramedics went to put him on the gurney and then...

From hairless head to bare foot, Chris shook. What had happened since then didn't bear thinking about, not now, maybe not ever. He had practical concerns now. He was naked and standing around in a part of New Orleans where a naked man would be noticed. Eventually.

"Clothes," he muttered, "clothes clothes clothes," and looked around.

And there was the laundry. And open, too! They'd changed their hours while he'd been away.

Still humming, Chris walked in.

Vera Fricano had tended bar for twenty years, then taken a low-stress job as a warehouse security guard for another ten. She'd left that job three years ago, and now she made change and sold laundry detergent at an all-night laundrymat. Vera was also a practicing alcoholic - indeed, a senior alcoholic - and all these jobs had done nothing but contribute to her habit.

Bartender. Security guard. Laudry shill. Drunk. Vera had pretty much seen it all. She didn't bat an eye when Chris Wiley walked in the door of the the Magazine Laundry, hairless, naked, and his penis dripping. She wasn't sure if he was real or not - Vera knew she was a drunk, and sometimes drunks saw strange things - but he certainly looked real enough.

"Here now, son," she said, "you're drippin' spunk on m'floor! And I gotta mop that later on tonight! You know how hard it is to get spooge offa tile?"

The bald man looked down. Grinned. Looked back up and caught Vera's eyes.

"Clothes," he croaked, sounding like someone who hadn't spoken in years, "I need some clothes, old woman. Gimme some clothes."

Anyone else looking in to Chris' eyes would have seen the terror, the horror, the shock of where he had just come from. A feeling, sensitive human being could have felt Chris vibrating with such a clashing swirl of emotions it might have killed someone else, someone with a more normal, born-of-woman body.

But Vera wasn't any goddamned psychologist. There was pervert in her laundry, and he was getting pushy.

"You git!" she yelled, "I'm a callin' the police!"

Chris' shoulders sagged. The cops? How could he explain himself to them? He couldn't. Chris had a certain criminal cunning, and a mind that would always note unlocked doors or unsecured valuables, but he was not creative.

Vera picked up the phone.

But then a thought came slithering up from the bottom of Chris' mind: why should he put up with this? He didn't have any plans, past getting some clothes and putting distance between the place where he'd re-entered civilian life, but he hadn't considered the possibility of pursuit until the old lady mentioned the cops. Would they come after him?

Probably.

But really, he thought, smiling an almost dreamy smile, what could they actually DO to him?

He'd already been to hell, and if that was the worst they had, well, he could handle it.

"Free pass," he whispered, "I've got a free pass. Can't get in trouble now..."

He stepped towards Vera Fricano, who was stabbing at the buttons on the phone, trying to reach the police.

The sound outside was like an avalanche, like the ripping of the world's biggest sheet of paper. The front windows of the Magazine Laundry shattered, as did the windows of the cars parked outside.

This was nothing like Chris' sedate entrance of a few minutes before. A hole, twenty feet tall and ten wide, had been ripped in the air in the middle of the street. It hurt the eyes to look at it, rippling and threatening to spread at the edges.

The hole stabbed into the paving, pierced a water main and sent a fountain up into the night. The water was steaming before it hit the ground from the heat pouring out of the gash.

The heat and smell hit them at the same time. Vera staggered back and dropped unceremoniously to the floor behind the counter. Chris sat hard on his naked ass, his penis shrinking into retreat like a frightened turtle as he started to emit a string of hiccuping sobs. Through the hole in the air he could make out the stone foot of one vast leg of the Great Smelter, a horrible vat of boiling vomit where he'd spent two months shortly after his arrival in hell. He knew he was going back in.

When he saw the thing coming through the hole, Chris covered his eyes and rolled up in a ball, shaking his head behind clenched fists.

It was half as tall as the passage it came through, and nearly as wide. It had green, knobby skin covered with a slick sheen, and four vague limbs, each tipped with a bouquet of long, thin claws. Teeth - thousands of teeth, some pointing in, some pointing out - surrounded a hole at the end of its long, flexible neck.

"Jailbreaker!" it screeched with a voice like bleeding, chewed nails on a chalkboard, "tunneler! Slippery trickster! Do you think you can just walk away from hell without setting off an alarm? It cannot be done, shiteater! What you've had up to now will be like Club Med compared to the cells you're going to now! A thousand years of pain in the basements of Gehenna! I can't wait to-"

Give him credit: the bus driver did his best. He came around the turn in Magazine Street and there, like a little slice of nightmare on an otherwise drab Tuesday night, stood a demon in front of a writhing doorway to hell. The driver didn't swerve, didn't panic, certainly didn't close his eyes. He began applying the breaks, knowing that whatever the fuck it was he was going to hit it.

The demon never had a clue. His name was Rodnais of the Blackest Depths, but his friends and coworkers just called him Rod. He was well respected in the Pit, he'd been there since the rebellion and the fall, and he was in charge of collecting escapees. The chase for Chris Wiley would be significantly delayed while he recovered.

Rod only had a second or two to think once he saw the lights of the bus. His body was fearsome, true, but it was slow. That hadn't been a handicap before - most people who saw him were too scared to run.

But Rod hand't been on earth since 1683, and they didn't have busses back then. The bus was still doing twenty-five or so when it hit Rod, popping him back into the hole he'd come out of.

"Crap!" Rod screeched. The hole closed behind him and the bus came to a stately stop. The driver got out and looked at the goo covering the front of the bus.

"We're those teeth?" he said to himself. Then he walked slowly to the bar, leaving his passengers - and there were only a few on the bus - to wonder what had happened.

[Meanwhile, back in hell, a group of annoyed demons were trying to reopen the door Rod had just come back through. Nothing they did worked, though, since the bus was parked where Chris had made his entrance and they weren't allowed to mess with the earth like that.]

Chris slowly uncovered his eyes. The heat and stink of an ocean of cooking vomit was gone. The horrible voice - and Chris had met Rod before, and to say he didn't like him is a hideous understatement - is quiet. And a bus was parked outside.

Vera slowly raised herself up above the counter and looked around warily.

She was certain she had not seen what she'd just seen. Still, best to obliterate the memory. She opened a pint of vodka she kept stashed behind the samples of Tide and drank off half of it in a long, slow swallow. The fella on the floor was getting up, and Vera knew one thing: she didn't like him.

With her free hand she rummaged around under the counter, in a basket of cast-off and abandoned clothes. She came up with a pair of threadbare, brown polyester pants and a faded red t-shirt. She tossed them at the feet of the man, whose was still looking through the shattered windows and smiling like he'd won the Powerball.

"Gah, gah, gah," Vera gagged and spat, "get out! I will call the cops!"

Chris pulled the pants on - a bit tight, but decent. He was skinny anyway. Pulling the shirt on, he walked out the door, nicking his heel on a piece of glass. The cut healed almost immediately, but he left a smear of blood on the floor and for a few steps on the sidewalk outside.