Francis of the Filth Read online

  “I’ll get them right away, sir.”

  Frank rushed back to his lab and hid whatever evidence he could.

  “Bitchiro, I need to give them our documents. Hide everything.”

  “My nama Bitchiro,” he replied.

  Frank returned with his passport, some files containing the breeding habits of starfish in the Ryukyu waters, and the results of the weekend boat races in Osaka. Benson perused the documents.

  “Well shit, boys. We hit the jackpot. We got ourselves a Japanese German.”

  The soldiers standing behind Benson smirked and widened their eyes.

  “I don’t see an issue here, sir,” Frank said.

  “Why would they have a Japanese German working in a lab like this? In Oki-fucking-nawa!”

  “We are privately owned. We do peaceful scientific research”

  “What exactly do you do?”

  “Cancer research, sir, since, you know, you guys really fucked us with that whole radiation thing.”

  “Don’t get smart with me.” Benson rammed the clip of his rifle into the back of Frank’s head and he fell to his knees. He held Frank’s head up by jamming the forestock of the rifle into his neck. Frank’s nose began to bleed.

  “You’re the two things I hate most combined into one you sorry son of a bitch, and whatever the fuck is going on here, I don’t like it.” He then spat in Frank’s face and walked out of the room.

  “I’ll be back,” he said as he kicked a table over. After the rumbles of the jeeps faded into the distance, Honda came back into the room.

  “I’m terribly sorry you had to go through that,” he said as he handed Frank a tissue to mop up his bloody nose.”

  “People fear and despise what they don’t understand,” Frank said as he stood and put an ice pack to his head wound. “He was raised that way, like an American. I cannot blame a man for his upbringing.”

  Honda nodded and looked down at his feet.

  “Plus, next time I’ll be ready to fight back. He took me by surprise.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Honda interrupted quickly. Benson will do whatever he can to have this place shut down. If you show weakness and fight back, he can cancel all operations here for unruly conduct. We are a private company, after all. We would hate to see all our funding—not to mention your talents— go to waste.”

  Frank tasted blood in his mouth. He was biting his lip out of frustration.

  “Fair enough. I will continue as planned.”

  From that day, Sergeant Benson came every week without fail. The only surprise was the time of day. Sometimes he’d kick the door in at the crack of dawn; at other times it was right in the middle of dinner. On the odd occasion he would enter through the back door at midnight. Regardless of the time, he would constantly hold a gun up to Frank’s face and proceed to turn the lab inside out. Benson knew something was up, and he didn’t like it. He was totally obsessive about it. Even the other soldiers viewed Benson’s frequent visits as a fanatical hate crime. He kept saying “A Jap-German in Okinawa working with radiation. Does that not sound suspicious to you at all?”

  Frank was rarely the sole target. He would sometimes terrorize Bitchiro, bombarding him with questions.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “My nama Bitchiro.”

  “Do you speak English?”

  “My nama Bitchiro.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “My nama Bitchiro.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “My nama Bitchiro.”

  “What is wrong with this guy?”

  “My nama Bitchiro.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “My nama Bitchiro.”

  Two months after the first visit, Benson drove up to the compound more aggressively than normal. He stormed out of his jeep and burst through the door holding his rifle. It was quite clear that he had been drinking.

  “You two, up against the wall,”

  He yelled at two young employees—no older than twenty-four. They did as they were told and lined up.

  “Benson, you can bully me all you want but please don’t bring the employees into this,” Frank calmly said. “They’re just janitors.”

  “How come I never see your notes or clipboards lying around anywhere, Frank, you autist?” Benson replied.

  “We mail them off to HQ every day.”

  “Where is your HQ?”

  “I don’t know, Sergeant Benson.”

  “Bullshit. And stop twitching your fingers like that.”

  “I really don’t know, sir. It’s classified.”

  “I don’t see any point to your research, Frank. You can’t cure cancer.”

  “I believe we can. I also believe our nations can help each other with this new research.”

  “Yeah, when pigs fly.”

  “Yeah who am I fucking kidding, you’ll never fly.”

  Benson’s eyes widened and his lips stiffened. At that very moment, for the first time in his life, Frank regretted his sharp wit.

  “This is your fault; your doing,” Benson said as he lifted his rifle and shot both of the employees multiple times in the chest. A canvas of blood splattered across the gray concrete wall. Frank watched their bodies drop on top of each other. Honda was looking out the window, waiting for the nightmare to end. “Next time it’ll be you and your little Bitchiro friend.” Benson began to head out. “I would have killed you but I like to see you suffer.” He and the other soldiers strutted out, leaving the lab pin-drop quiet. They’d all seen death before, but not in a while. For Frank it brought back with a scream all the suicides he’d seen in Okinawa during the war; line after line of men, women and even children taking their own lives rather than suffer at the hands of the enemy. Frank saw this so vividly he began to tremble. Everyone immediately went back to work. It was all they could do.

  “Eyyyy boy” said Bitchiro.

  Frank buried both of the employees later that night. He didn’t ask anyone to help because he felt responsible for their deaths. It was still typhoon season, and it had just stopped raining a few hours before. It made the soil soft and easy to dig through. Frank took a break from the shovel and looked over at the bodies. They were pale and limp. He laughed. It was a defence mechanism that worked for him. “It’s all cancer, everything is fucking cancer,” he said, laughing to himself. “I work with cancer, act like cancer, and by saying ‘cancer’ I get people killed. I AM cancer.” His laughter echoed up into the mountains and all the chirping crickets and birds went dead silent. He continued to dig.

  Frank wasn’t afraid of Benson, but he was afraid of not being able to complete his research. But he knew that the moment it was done, he would have his revenge on Benson. “I’ll fucking kill him,” Frank would say to Bitchiro after another one of Benson’s weekly visits. “After we complete the research and take back our land, I will literally slit his throat in front of his wife and children.” Saying things like that made him feel better, and motivated him to finish his work. If he ever felt discouraged at any point during the day, he would daydream about the blissful release that would come with murdering Benson. What would his blood taste like? Would his children die too? Would his wife’s pussy be tight? All kinds of dark questions swam through his head.

  Frank would spend every day by the graves, watering a couple of flowers that had managed to sprout from the compost. Frank never cared for other people. In fact, he didn’t even know the names of the two employees buried in front of him. “I don’t care about these people. Why am I still here every day?” Frank asked as Honda emerged from the trees.

  “You’re a compassionate person who was driven to narcissism by your environment. You care, but only because you’re responsible for their deaths. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an issue.”

  Frank laughed. “Yes. I’m quite rotten.”

  “Quite filthy.”

  “Bitchiro should have died instead.”

  They both laughed.

  “Eyyyyy,” sa
id Bitchiro from inside the building.

  “Listen, Mr. Honda. I need to tell you something, but you can’t tell the board until I’ve completed my research.”

  Honda was listening.

  “I am most likely dying. At first I thought my cells were multiplying at a rapid rate but I discovered that it is actually my chromosomes which are splitting.” He went on in detail that night, explaining everything to Honda about his research to date.

  “I’ve never heard of chromosomes duplicating before,” said Honda. “That should instantly kill you.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Frank.

  “We can use your gift for other things. There is no point in attempting to create a weapon that may or may not work if there’s a chance of you dying before that. We should get you out of this lab right away. Especially away from Benson.”

  “I’m going to die anyway. At least let me finish my research. I know I was born to finish this. I’ll leave blueprints to a wiser generation.”

  He never got the chance. It began in the midnight hour of a Tuesday. Frank, watching phlegm react to bursts of radiation, suddenly got mind-splitting headaches. Clutching his cranium, he dropped to his knees and let out an agonising cry before staggering to the refrigerator and grabbing a bottle of milk. He quickly downed it before collapsing onto the bed to sleep. But sleep was his tormentor that night. As he tossed back and forth the nightmares came to him. These were not, however, your run-of-the-mill nightmares of falling or being chased or drowning or of clowns. If only Frank were to escape that lightly. These nightmares were so vivid it was impossible to distinguish night from day, spirit from matter, or reality from virtuality. The pain inside his fracturing head was unbearable.

  And then they came. Numbers. Clusters of numbers tumbled across his field of vision. Stream after stream of them. He had no idea what they were or what they meant; he only knew that there was no escaping them or the fear that manifested when they came. For hours, Frank would lie, rigid with terror, watching the numbers scroll and hoping with all his heart that they would stop. Occasionally in the dreams, he would also see images; a silhouette effigy, a tree on a hilltop, a dark figure of unknown origin and nature but clearly powerful and mighty. This dark, fearful form was fused to the tree as though crucified on it; repressed by it yet somehow sustaining it. The image conveyed an ancient mystery, tragic and formidable, of agony and wonder, and it horrified Frank to his very core. In the end, he would wake in the morning light, feeling a sense of total depletion, and lie there until his strength returned. And when it did, and he needed to unleash his fear and frustration at the visitations, Bitchiro was there.

  The nightmares lasted for months and drove Frank to the brink of insanity. Had it not been for Bitchiro’s purulent presence, Frank would have slid into certain madness. Yet there was another element to the nightmares that brought a slither of intrigue amidst the dread that Frank experienced. Every night, the nightmares would conjure up their numbers, but Frank began to notice that it was the same number segments being revealed to him each time. He began to agonize over them, analysing them, reciting them, but their meaning eluded him.

  One night, tormented by the nightmares, Frank resisted the urge to go into town and hustle, and instead spent the evening crunching the numbers once again. Yet his inability to decipher them was more than his erudite mind could handle. He began to smash beakers and test tubes around the lab, overturning equipment and hurling animals. Bitchiro was madly trying to clean up after him. In his fury, Frank was unaware of the gash that had opened down the side of his hand or of the blood that was streaming from it. He began to spin in circles, reciting the numbers over and over. The claret flowed from his wound forming a circle of crimson on the ground around him. Again and again he intoned the numbers, spinning and spilling and recalling and chanting.

  All of a sudden, the floor beneath him began to rumble and pitch. The tiling cracked and the walls split. The ceiling caved in, first in small clusters, then in huge panels. Enormous steel beams fell to the ground, smashing everything beneath them. The lights on the ceiling flickered off, but an ethereal luminescence, now coming from a source beyond the lab, remained. A violent shaking and a howling wind followed from which deep chasms opened up all around him, and the equipment, the lab animals and the flooring crumbled away. The very foundations of the facility became brittle and started to break, dropping away into the darkness below. The noise which accompanied all this was thunderous, shattering ear drums and arresting hearts, as though a trumpet heralding an apocalypse.

  The world as they had all known it, ceased to be, exterminated in seconds. Bitchiro clung for his life to an ultracentrifuge that stubbornly held to Frank’s central work station.

  “My nama Bitchiro! My nama Bitchiro!” he screamed with wild eyes. Nothing remained of the lab but the circle of flooring that Frank was standing on, still encrusted in crimson, and that was fast fragmenting under his feet. Everything then fell away completely into infernal suffering.

  A thick soupy darkness surrounded him, and deformed hands, aged and tormented, reached up from it, grabbing and pulling. Voices called in falsetto screams and guttural moans, begging for release and salvation. The awful cacophony of destruction had subsided, leaving an eerie sound vacuum which amplified the cries of the tormented souls. A chilly wind blew. The contorted limbs and distorted heads with their unhinged jaws, stitched up eyes and melting flesh, were of human and beastly forms, their only fellowship being in their writhing and their agony. Again and again they desperately reached up, flinching and twitching in rage and wretchedness.

  Plumes of toxic odors, acidic and pungent to the very back of the throat, wafted up in ever greater dispersions. There seemed to be a lawlessness to the senses so that what could be seen could also be felt, what could be heard could be tasted and what could be smelt could be seen. As such, the sulphuric stench contained an anaemic glow which rose up into what had, until very recently, been air, giving everything a dull, rotting appearance. It seeped into every crevice and orifice. Screaming was one’s only release, yet it only served to exacerbate the suffering.

  Other than Frank, Bitchiro was the last semblance of life to remain. Chest-deep in damnation, he held fast to Frank’s ankle but the soulless hands were on him and around him, pulling at him, wrenching his garments and gouging their gnarled digits deep into his flesh. The young turd had fight in him. “My nama Bitchiro! My nama Bitchiro!” he continued to shriek. He swung wildly at the ogres and even tried to bite them but it had no effect other than to further excite them. In the end their appendages entered his ears, his mouth and his eyes and with one final shake of his leg, Frank flicked him off into the abyss for good. He fell into the darkness with a final blood-curdling, “My nama Bitchiro!” An overriding sense of misery extinguished any remaining flicker of hope or reprieve for Frank.

  He looked up into the portal that was opening above him. A circle of ominous light, it was in no way inviting and invoked terror almost equal to that of the blackness beneath him. He feared for his life to enter the gateway, but the overriding dread of the engulfing abyss below, with its fill of destitute souls and screaming remorse, left him with no choice. He would go. He raised his palms and ceased to resist. “Habere eam viam vestram” he said. And then he was gone.

  Chapter 4

  The boy with greasy, unwashed hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the sea. He had no idea where he was. It was perfectly still, perfectly quiet and the landscape appeared in silhouettes. The expanse above him was shadowed yet without cloud. It was impossible to make out any sort of distance in relation to it. He sat on an ice-cold rock and looked out over a sea of liquid so black it could have been crude oil. Gnarled and twisted hands continued to reach up out of it as they had before, but this time in silence. He watched them grasp in desperation, yet he felt no emotion. Only emptiness. This place was weird. Dreamlike. It had a stronger sense of reality than he had ever known but it
was hallucinatory as well. In this realm, there was nothing other than a huge frozen rock and an ocean of lost souls stretching out from it. There was no atmosphere, no warmth, no color, no fear, no joy, no desire and no time. As such, there was no telling how long he had been here or how long he would be here.

  Presently from within the confines of the shadows, something dark was fumbling along. He wasn’t sure what to make of it at first, and watched till the intentness of his gaze was able to form an image. Then the creature stepped from mirage onto clear ice and he saw that the darkness was not all shadow but mostly flesh. The creature, an unsightly humanoid, was of singular matter, and one color from head to foot. He drew near and sat beside the boy. Though a total stranger in a foreign world, there was neither any sense of alarm nor of relief. The two observed each other for a period and then the creature spoke.

  “Frank,” he addressed the boy in a deep, rich tone.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I was sent to you.”

  “By who?”

  “By higher powers.”

  Frank sat and observed the entity before him. “Am I in hell?”

  “No.”

  “Surely this can’t be heaven.”

  “No.”

  “So what is this place?”

  “We are in between worlds. Off the map. Literally nowhere.”

  “And what are we doing here?”

  “Nothing, of course. But I have been sent to you to bring revelation.”

  “Revelation? Revelation of what?”

  “Revelation of the beginning and of the paradigms.”

  “What about the end?”

  “I don’t have that authority.”

  “What happened to my world?”

  “Your world no longer exists and I’m tempted to say that it never did, but that might be misleading. Suffice to say, you’re no longer in that frequency and never can be again.”