SPOILED 2 - part ten

The ventilation system snaking across the top of The Lab in many ways acted as a kind of house-of-horrors for Arthur and Manni, as they picked their way quietly along its length. Grating beneath their feet revealed such sideshows as a room full of medical beds, each occupied by a groaning fat man being force fed everything from sponge cake to meatloaf by burly orderlies, a man with a pipe inserted directly into his belly button that seemed to be irrigating him with some fattening substance, causing his middle to expand into a freakishly disproportionate ball while his pleas for the procedure to stop went unheard, and what could only be described as a human blob with several medical tubes skewering him, apparently pumping a kind of heavy cream into his body. The blob was sobbing, though no face could be discerned amid the flab.

‘Fucking Christ, Arthur,’ Manni breathed. ‘What are they doing to these poor guys?’

‘I know,’ Sweet replied in a whisper. ‘This makes The Farm look like a bleedin’ holiday camp.’

‘I think I need… a moment to process all this…,’ Dey went on.

Of course he, unlike Arthur, hadn’t witnessed true Rookery cruelty up close until now. Only Sweet had experienced first-hand what these madmen were capable of.

‘Come on,’ he patted Manni’s wide back, rubbed it, feeling the swell of muscle. ‘It’s quieter down this way. Might be a way out.’

Dey just nodded and followed, feeling deeply unsettled to his core, and learning a new appreciation for what his partner must had endured when captured on their previous case.

Though the wails and cries of fatboys went on, rebounding about the metallic walls of the shaft, Arthur found a little off-shooting branch where the sounds of torture weren’t quite so loud.

‘That conversation just now,’ Manni said in hushed tones, able to think clearer here, ‘between the doctor and that blonde kid - what do you make of that?’

‘Hmmm,’ Arthur ran a fat hand down his round cheek in contemplation. ‘It explains a few things, I s’pose; the old run down resort, for a start. And that lad Lucas mentioned “dorm boys” at one point.’

‘We saw ‘Dorms’ on the subway map thing.’

‘Aye. From what the porky doc said, sounds like they take blokes from the dorms and run these sick tests on ‘em here.’

Manni nodded with a grimace. Those same tests were still resounding faintly in his ears at this very moment.

‘I mean, we know The Rookery love to fatten guys up just for the fun of it, the more forcibly the better, so I guess that makes a twisted kind of sense,’ he said. ‘But this stuff about a Palace, and a ceremony… I can’t quite get my head around that.’

‘Hard to see how it all fits together,’ Sweet agreed.

‘And this Mr Swan character,’ Manni continued. ‘He sounds like a goddamned tyrant.’

‘And clearly the old doc has pissed him off somehow, too. We just watched the bloke get carted away.’

‘Not that I have any sympathy there. Not if what he said was true; that he used to be the Master of this island. I noticed that the boy Lucas referred to him as Dr Nightingale.’

‘Aye lad. So we’ve got a Nightingale and a Swan. As if there was any doubt that this place was a bloody Rookery clusterfuck. Ain’t no justifying what’s going on here. The doc’s as guilty as the rest. What we need to do is get down there and ‘elp them poor lads.’

‘Yeah, but we can’t, sweetheart, can we? We came here to log and record, remember? If we get involved - say we go bursting into one of those lab rooms - what are the chances we’re gonna make it out in one piece?’

‘Well, we can’t just leave ‘em here to suffer!’ Arthur stated, cheeks reddening.

‘I know, but we’re just two blokes against an entire Rookery facility. I don’t even have my taser anymore. What are we gonna do? Throw biscuits at them?’

‘This ain’t - This ain’t right!’ Sweet growled.

‘I know, big man, I know. But say we get caught. All the filming I’ve done, all the things we’ve discovered that we need to tell the outside world about - all of that goes tits up if we can’t even-‘

Something gave way beneath Manni’s leg. The bottom of the vent suddenly buckled loudly. Arthur had just enough time to say ‘Wha-!’ before the entire panel that had been supporting their combined weight gave out and collapsed downwards, taking Sweet and Dey with it.

‘Fuuuuuuck!’ Arthur yelled, as he and Manni found themselves suddenly falling down an extremely steep decline; a metal chute that banged and squeaked against their useless palms and feet. Somewhere between a fall and a slide, the pair shot down and down and down, gathering dangerous momentum.

In an otherwise quiet corner of the facility, two armed guards patrolled the corridors, until one said,

‘Do you hear that?’

‘Hear what?’

Faint sounds of echoing thumps and a rising, protracted hollering.

‘aaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA-’

A shocking thing then happened.

From above, two large men, both roaring obscenities, came crashing through a panel in the vents, tumbling down only a few feet away with a pair of resonant thumps. The buckled panel twanged against the floor tiles and promptly bounced away.

‘Fuuuuck’s sake…!’ the heavier of the two men said. He’d landed on his over-padded arse and was massaging his hip, trying to stand.

It was only after a brief moment of brushing down and cursing that the men registered a pair of cocked rifles trained directly at them, held steadfast by the armed guards.

‘Well, shit.’

****

‘I told you… I don’t… know anything…!’ Dr Nightingale wheezed, now on his fifteenth cheeseburger. The Chamber had transformed him into a sweating, hyperventilating, bloated mess. His thinning hair fell in wilted streaks down his ruddy face, and his tall body was so stuffed full of burger that his voluptuous gut had burst forth through his shirt, ripping a great hole in his argyle. His bare, hirsute form heaved in and out, slathered in perspiration as his lungs and stomach fought hard to comprehend the assault they were under. Right now air was flowing, but each time the heavy doctor paused - any micro-reprieve from eating at all - The Chamber began robbing him of oxygen again. It flowed in and out, in and out; all of Nightingale’s senses had become thoroughly shattered from the process. At one point his ears had popped from the constant changes in air pressure.

‘And I told you, Donal, passing privileged information on to a candidate - to any of our fatboys - is a heinous crime. And thus here you are, receiving your due punishment. It’s only natural,’ Mr Swan explained in return, letting lethargy seep into his voice.

‘Please…!’ the doctor spat back between gasps. ‘Spare me your… mockery of justice…!’

‘Now, will it take more delicious cheeseburgers to loosen your tongue over what was said?’ Mr Swan continued smoothly, ‘or are you really going to let your poor lungs keep burning away? You know they may start to scar if you aren’t careful.’

Medical advice from so egotistical a loon as Swan was about as far from what Dr Nightingale needed as possible. No sooner had he swallowed the last morsel of cheeseburger than the finely calibrated sensors within The Chamber had detected his lack of chewing and resumed the process of vacuuming up his precious air supply. A sixteenth wrapped cheeseburger fell into the little inner compartment without much fuss while Nightingale resembled a beached whale floundering desperately for oxygen ever the more.

His fingers shook and slipped and wriggled as he clamoured to unfurl the burger, next pushing it between his lips. Soon it would only add to the hideously packed feeling in his stomach. But for now, oxygen came flowing back in, hurting Nightingale’s eardrums.

‘I didn’t… tell him… anything…!’ he heaved, spilling crumbs and meat from his mouth, some catching in his beard.

‘Ohhhh, come now,’ Mr Swan chided. He tapped on the glass as if teasing an animal at the zoo. ‘We both know that’s not true. Why else would you have that wretched racket you call music playing so loudly in Room 39L, hmm? If not to-‘

‘Get your bloody mitts off me!’ came a growl from the nearby passageway. ‘Oi!’

‘What in the blazes?’ Mr Swan span angrily on his axis to the source of this interruption.

Two of his armed guards were prodding into the room by rifle tip a pair of men, both coated head to toe in all manner of dust and detritus. One was older, likely middle-aged, carrying a vast belly. His moustache and thick eyebrows lent him rather a grouchy appearance, quite in contrast to the second man who looked more like someone had taken a movie star and pumped him full of steroids and good eating.

‘Just picked these two up in East Wing, Sir,’ one of the armed guards explained. ‘They fell out of the ventilation system. Must’ve been crawling around in there.’

Mr Swan took a moment, comprehending this. Even Dr Nightingale stopped chewing from sheer disbelief, if only for a beat.

‘Crawling around in the ventilation system…,’ Swan hissed, brow deepened. ‘Just who the devil are-‘

Somewhere in the process of rounding on the two uninvited dolts, Mr Swan stopped himself short, eyes thinning. The interlopers had been shunted into the centre of the room, around which they now glared with bare unease, and in doing so ignited a spark of recognition. ‘Wait…,’ he breathed.

Could it be? Incredulous. The very men he was looking for.

The very detectives he had scores of armed guards turning this island upside-down in search of.

‘You…!’ Mr Swan continued in a low growl, every ounce of him hardening.

‘Are you okay?’ Manni uttered quietly to Arthur who was still nursing his hip, ignoring the well-turned-out older man bearing a face of absolute lividity before them, as well as the portly, tall doctor from earlier, now clearly receiving some kind of punishment inside of a giant glass canister.

Arthur nodded in silence, processing this predicament.

Mr Swan could scarcely believe this. After so much toil. All the scouring, the interrogating…

‘Here you are…,’ he spoke in barely a whisper to himself, ‘delivered at last to me…’

The fatter one was rubbing at his side. Perhaps he’d damaged it in the fall.

It made no matter. Not when stacked against all that Mr Swan was going to put these men through. Oh, the things he was going to do to these two detectives…

‘If they make a move, shoot them in the kneecaps,’ he instructed his guards, now finding his voice again. ‘I want them alive.’

‘Listen, we-‘ the movie-star one began to say.

But with a ‘Shhh!’ from Mr Swan and the clickity-clack of trained rifles, it soon shut him up.

For a few eerie moments all that could be heard were the usual babbles of the palatial indoor canals and the endless chomping and chewing from the encased doctor.

‘So… our infamous, nameless detectives…’ He stepped slowly toward them, letting his hands meet behind his back. ‘Able to best Kingfisher himself.’

He saw the lightning-bolt look pass between the two of them.

‘What a fuss you’ve both caused.’

Mr Swan stepped closer still. They smelled terrible; like saltwater, brine and dust all smeared together into so much tang.

He could see it in their faces. The endless choices running behind their scared little eyes. Should they try to run? Or fight? Perhaps plea their case?

‘And you’re the mug they call “Mr Swan” I ‘spose, are ya?’ the huge-bellied one sneered out of turn.

But it was quite alright, for Mr Swan’s swift backhand across that jowly face, coupled with the tightened draw of a rifle quickly put paid to any further impudence. The fat man wiped his freshly-struck cheek, eyes filled with what the lower classes probably thought of as hate. Mr Swan saw the other man ball his fists.

‘You’ve caused quite the ruckus,’ he spoke louder this time, letting his voice fill the room. ‘Leaving a trail of carnage in your wake, I might add.’

He put his face against the older man’s; it housed a pair of scratched spectacles which the detective glared atop. When Mr Swan made to grasp that chubby visage in one hand, the man pulled away with a grunt. Mr Swan’s retaliatory punch to the older man’s gut was fast and hard.

‘Hey!’ the younger one shouted while his partner doubled over.

BLAM!

A deliberate warning near-miss shot, swiping at the younger man’s shorts, fraying the fabric, scratching the skin.

It was enough to keep the pair of them in line, the fatter righting himself while clearing his lip of spittle, the smaller stiffening his jaw in silence.

‘That’s right, gentlemen,’ Mr Swan told them. ‘We shall have order here. If you can’t be trusted to act civilised, I’m afraid it will be imposed upon you.’

He waited for another smart-alec reply, and allowed himself a small smirk of satisfaction in receiving none.

The fat one in particular, Mr Swan was going to enjoy torturing him…

‘And so it brings me a modicum of joy to inform you both that whatever path of destruction you believed yourselves to be on ends here, in my Palace, on my Island. For it is now, fortuitous as it may be, that you are my permanent guests. And you will enjoy all the hospitality The Island has to offer while I extract answers from you.’

He noted the fat man’s jaw, though practically drowning in fat, had set. How exquisite it was going to look when quadrupled in size.

‘I’m afraid misdemeanours on the scale you two have wrought,’ he went on, absorbing, enjoying their powerless scowls, ‘are going to require a lifetime of suffering in recompense. You see, even after I’ve needled it out of you - perhaps literally - what you did with Mr Kingfisher and his pigs - after I’ve scooped all of the secrets from your tiny brains, I’m going to keep you alive while your bodies are used here for endless experiments…’

He traced a finger across the bulbous gut he’d punched moments ago, causing a delightful flinch.

‘… Perhaps we drill holes in you to see how many tubes we can shove in, pumping pure lard into that overfed body of yours… Or perhaps we-‘

‘DAMN YOU!’

This sudden exclamation and an almighty THUNK against glass jolted Mr Swan from his speech, causing he and his guards to jerk their attention back to The Chamber that Dr Nightingale had just thrown his entire weight against.

Though fruitless for the doctor, the distraction brought a snappy ‘Jump!’ from Arthur, who snatched up Manni’s hand and pulled him along into a heavy flop into the nearby canal. Both men splooshed into the slipstream, bowing deep below the surface.

Arthur heard the waterlogged sounds of Mr Swan screaming enraged diatribes, and soon felt cushioned bullets pinging into the canal behind he and Dey as they were swept along the current. Together the two men kicked with their legs, bubbles everywhere, turning and tumbling with the stream, not daring to resurface while the canal’s current bore them away from the gunfire, away from incandescent Swan.

‘GET THEM!’ Mr Swan screamed at one of the guards. ‘GET AFTER THEM! GO! I WANT THOSE MEN ALIVE!’

Then he damn-near punched his ring bearing the insignia of a Swan against the locking panel to The Chamber, opening it; a fattened, depleted Dr Nightingale fell out, gripped at the torn lapel by Mr Swan. ‘And as for you…’ He barred his teeth, but found that his reeling mind wouldn’t settle on any kind of satisfactory conclusion. ‘Hnnrgh! Get him out of here!’ he snarled to the remaining guard. ‘Drag him back to The Lab! Put him to work! I’ll deal with him later…’

He turned back to where that incorrigible fat man and his pretty-boy associate had stood - Right THERE! - He’d had them!

‘Tell every single guard on this fucking island,’ he bellowed at the lackie now hauling Nightingale’s bulk away, ‘to drop everything and BRING ME THOSE FUCKING DETECTIVES!’

****

It was an insipid heat. The kind of heat that crawls all the way to the back of your throat, settling there, acrid and dense.

And it only got thicker the further Lucas descended into the cave. It clung to him, inside and out, prying his pores wide open, stinging his eyes, even.

He could only press through it, so aware that turning back was no option at all. The sloping path just visible before him bore evidence of having been carved from the rock itself, only to have been worn by time. Many a foot had trodden this way.

Up ahead something was glowing; the dimmest bloom of orange against nothingness.

‘H-Hello?’ Lucas called out, not in his strongest voice, it had to be said.

The word just echoed down the narrow passage, unanswered.

There was quite literally nowhere else to go. He felt each breath shake out of him while he kept on teetering forward. Until his foot hit something.

‘Oh God!’ he gasped, clapping a hand over his mouth.

It was a human skull. Amid a pile of bones. He’d accidentally kicked it away, causing a semi-comical bounce down the slope. ‘Oh shit, oh shit…’

What in God’s name was this place…? Lucas had never seen a skeleton before, or a cadaver of any kind, not in real life. Keeping his heart from exploding in his chest through pure fear was a task he no longer felt sure he was up to. And the heat kept piling on, furthering the stinging sensation in his eyes and giving rise to little pockets of sweat between Lucas’s folds of fat. He wiped his quivering face.

Forcing himself away from the remains, the distant orange glow got a whole lot brighter, now a wibbly line, almost fluorescent, adorning one wall, and when Lucas drew closer he saw…

‘Jesus…’

A rivulet of lava. Just running freely down the side of the cave, seemingly spouted from the very rock face. And there were more; the tunnel walls were weeping, sizzling, gouging out thin channels of burning liquid that drizzled either side of the passage.

Further down, the words ’dont let it touch you’ had been scratched into the rock wall, perhaps by the skull’s departed owner.

‘Yeah, no shit…,’ Lucas whispered to himself, continuing on.

There were more bones here, littering the cave floor. A femur, a ribcage, maybe a collarbone, Lucas wasn’t sure. And amid the acrid burn in the air wafted something else…

Food?

His hunger engaged, rumbling his curvaceous stomach. But what a time to feel peckish! In this hole they’d stuck him in underground! The sizzle and blub of lava grew slowly louder, the human remains more frequent, and the smells of sweet meats more pungent. Lucas carried on until, after a few more uncertain steps, the passage opened up.

Suddenly he found himself gawping at a ludicrously massive cavern, stretching into darkness left, right and above, housing multiple pillars of formic rock, themselves adorned in carvings and patterns of a bizarre, almost classical nature. Lava spouted everywhere; it gushed down walls, fell from the unseeable roof, it pooled in great lakes stretching off far into the distant blackness, bubbling and hissing in flames and magma. Directly ahead was the longest table Lucas had ever seen. It reached way back in an elongated oblong and could easily have seated 100 people either side - though who in their right minds would want to dine here? Great slathering clumps of food crested its surface, dumped into lopsided piles; meats, cheeses, sagging and rotten fruits, half-eaten breads, interspersed with metal-worked goblets of wine, bottles strewn everywhere.

Lucas’s eyes roved across the table, from the closest end, all the way down to its head, where beyond, deeper into the cavern still, sat a set of stairs, again carved from the mountain, use and entropy having taken their toll. A scarlet sheet, itself torn through with holes, acted as stair-runner, leading Lucas’s gaze up and up, the top of the staircase being some 15 feet from the ground. And there, atop it all, rested an enormous, grand throne. Carved into twisted shapes, all angles and points, though from this distance Lucas could scarcely make out the details etched across every inch of the thing.

None of that mattered, however.

In fact, he may as well have been in the Himalayas, or at the bottom of the ocean, or on Mars. For whatever scenery Lucas found himself in, the only thing that could possibly absorb all of his attention now was the occupant of that throne:

A man. No - a creature… Something. Impossibly tall, limbs and digits all stretched and gnarled like the roots of some ungodly tree, each finger and toe ending in a nail fit to impale. Stark nude, it looked wizened beyond belief, resting there in its hellish seat, bald at the very top of its head, but with long greasy strands of hair flowing from halfway down the back.

Worst of all, it had noticed Lucas.

He felt his heart freeze. His body locked into place, each joint resisting command

The thing straightened its tilted head, leaned forward.

Lucas couldn’t move. He wasn’t even sure if his lungs were working. He’d never known a fear like this. It was utter paralysis. Logic told him to run - back the way he came, or in any damned direction! But nothing would compel his severely fattened frame to respond.

The thing didn’t get up, exactly. Instead it slowly placed one spindly limb before another and crawled from the throne, down the staircase, towards Lucas. It must have been at least 8 feet tall, or long, neck twice the length of a man’s.

And when it spoke! Dear God, when it spoke…

‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh… What’s thisssss…? Another offferrinnnng, I see…’

It must surely have had vocal chords like barbed wire. Lucas had never heard anything like it. Deeper than belief. Deeper than time, drenched in gravel, guttural beyond all reason.

There was no use in talking back. No part of Lucas worked, let alone his voice.

The thing was reaching the bottom of the long staircase.

‘Ssssso young… and plump!’ The final ‘P’ was spat out like a unwanted pip. ‘Whhhhooo are… yyyyyou…?’

It was clambering onto the table, grapes bursting between its stick-like fingers, bread rolling to the dirt. It continued its crawl toward Lucas, and with undiluted horror, he now saw that its face was entirely missing. There was no skin there, only scarred muscle and sinew, raw flesh, all warping and contorting with each of its laboured breaths. Its eyes were black discs against yellow snooker balls, penetrating Lucas from out of their lidless sockets.

‘L-Lucas…,’ Lucas breathed out, somehow. It was like gazing into one of his nightmares. ‘Lucas… S-Sir…’

‘Lucasssssss…’ It toyed with the syllables against its tongue, tasting them, relishing them. More food was squished and parted with every inch of its advance.

‘Mmmmmy name…,’ it continued in that hideous drawl, ‘isssss… Elias Crowe…’