WARNING: TRIP ADVISORY RATING: EXTREME (As measured by Tess)
Story by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright) who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. Cover art made with AI.
Chapter Diminuendo
The beginning of the end arrived not as portent or foretelling, but as an infomercial on late-night television. It blipped up onto a few thousand screens, sandwiched between the third and fourth parts of hit reality show, Help, My Trousers are Racist! It was, in its totality, exactly thirty-one seconds of a bald, naked man with the physique of a balloon-animal tortoise screaming at whoever happened to be listening “JOIN THE ARMADA OF GIBBERISH, YOU SUPPURATING AXE WOUND! JOIN IT TODAY! JOIN IT FUCKING YESTERDAY! DO IT NOW!” and so on. Then it was over, and those of us who witnessed it were left staring at our crackling analogue televisions, momentarily too confused and alarmed to care about the struggles of the guy on HMTAR who’d just caught his chinos masturbating to the Reform Party’s website.
Now, some will dispute that this Dadaist abstraction of form and noise was truly the cause of what happened next, but you listen to me: I was there when Jenny from Accounts fucked herself to death with the splintery leg off a flatpack table called Sven. I fucking know the connections when I see them, and that thrice-cursed infomercial was the starting pistol announcing ‘ready, set, self-immolate!’
No. ‘Starting pistol’ isn’t right. It was subtler than that. There wasn’t a flurry of gnashing, all-at-once activity. The end-of-the-world weirdness just began creeping in real slow once that thing had slopped across our tellies.
Everyone has a story about the first thing they noticed; the first little indicator that something wasn’t right. For me, it was all the explicitly fascist food trucks that started it popping up everywhere, selling kebabs and sausages and fish and chips and street food while tinny, triumphalist marching music parped from their speakers. My personal favourite? Burrito Mussolini’s. And if you want to give me grief about giving money to a business that supported fascism, well… let’s just say I’ve got some bad news about your Disney + subscription. The point is, those were some truly stellar burritos. It was just weird that all these food truck owners suddenly decided that the best way to hawk their wares was to invoke the spirits of Dictators Past.
The second thing was the TokTube trend known, colloquially, as ‘Van Goughing’, wherein influencers and celebrities would cut off one of their own ears and send them onto those they admired or wanted to sleep with. That was how we found out Justin Timberlake was bisexual: one ear went to convicted sex-criminal Alison Mack, the other to saucy TV astrophysicist Brian Cox. Not that I pay that much attention. I’m not one of those weirdos who got super-invested in the whole ear-tracking thing. It was just in my FaceFuck feed the same day the King (under the influence of fent) shat in a watermelon, so it stuck in my head.
To be honest, at first, none of it seemed to have anything to do with me. It was all just strange nonsense in the news: the inglorious fuckery of a world that was already pretty well married to oddity, conceptually speaking. It wasn’t until the library that I considered I might have a role to play.
Chapter Scintilla
I was, at the time all this went down, a researcher in the cutting edge field of Pre-emptive Literary Discourse. That is to say, I was tasked (by the Nefertiti Sidebottom Memorial University, no less) with imagining the books that would be written over the coming five to ten years and establishing a roadmap for the discussion thereof. My department proselytised – primarily in the form of funding requests and expense reports – that we were bringing about a golden age where academics wouldn’t have to wait for some uncertain post-publication period to find out what the acceptable, mainstream opinion of a book would be. As soon as a new work of literary significance was printed, a complete catalogue of its problematic elements, artistic merits and authorial vogue-ness would already be waiting in our archive. No more risk! No more writing an early article and finding, later, that you were the only reviewer or critic to praise a work destined for ridicule!
Of course, we produced vastly more ‘misses’ than ‘hits’ – that is, most of the books we predicted never came to pass. However we celebrated that, in the broad strokes, we correctly pre-empted a solid 5% of the literary landscape year on year.
My main, professorial task was, in truth, one of extrapolation. I would go to libraries – particularly the University’s own library, on account of its convenience and excellent cafeteria – and arrange all the books on a given subject by date, so that I might predict the next logical step in the evolving pattern. I won’t bore you with the incredibly complex mathematical formulae I applied in this pursuit, but I was so lost in the numbers that I didn’t notice something was amiss for, I think, several days.
One sunny afternoon, as I sipped tea, ate a croissant and poured over my line-up of texts (today’s topic: the French Revolution – fictive portrayals thereof), I happened to see through the numbers I’d been pouring over and actually read a portion of the book immediately in front of me.
The chapters were no longer numbered, as they should have been, but assigned random words. ‘Chapter Jaunty’. ‘Chapter Queef’. ‘Chapter Winkelpicker.’ It was the same with all the books. Chapter-numbers displaced by nonsense-words (many of them gleefully immature). It struck me as such an amusing conceit that I immediately vowed to incorporate it into my next published paper, then got back to the business of eating my croissant, which I fancied was particularly piquant and flaky that afternoon.
It wasn’t until I closed up and began re-shelving my books that the thought struck me that this chaptering snafu was another example of the subtle craziness seeping throughout the world and that, if I were to adopt it, I would become an additional agent of that craziness. My mind flashed back to the man like a balloon-tortoise exhorting me to join the Armada of Gibberish and I wondered, suddenly, if my viewership of this (dis)content was mere coincidence or active and targeted recruitment.
If so, then very well. If Justine Timberlake couldn’t resist the urge to cut off both his ears and mail them to Mack and Cox respectively, I saw little point trying to fight my own ingestion into the growing lunacy. One thing I am certain of – based on abdominal muscles alone – is that Mr. Timberlake was and is of stronger will than I. So no, I couldn’t resist my indoctrination into the TV-proclaimed Armada… but I could document it. From that moment on, every pertinent experience I had would be recorded for posterity. I felt just like a blushing young Aldous Huxley being introduced, for the first time, to Mr. LSD, Esq. Oh, the possibilities!
Chapter Gelatinous
The next thing – at least, the next major thing – was that the Numbers Stations started arguing. You know what the Numbers Stations are? Radio broadcasts of seemingly random strings of numbers; almost certainly coded messages between various spy agencies justifiably staying analogue in the face of overwhelming digital surveillance culture.
One frequency began to read out the numbers in a voice quite different from the usual stiff, mechanical default: a sultry, feminine voice that became audibly more aroused with each integer. Meanwhile, the next numbers station up adopted an irate, prissy tone and read out a string of numbers that corresponded to the first station’s radio frequency, following by a patina of ones and zeroes that translated, in binary, into the word ‘SLAG’. The first station responded in hexadecimal machine code that translated, ultimately, to ‘PRUDE’. After that, other stations pitched in and vocabulary quickly escalated to heights of obscenity never before reached in the annuls of swearing. I’m a cockney lad by birth and the ‘cool’ professor by inclination. I don’t shy away a good ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’ or ‘shite’ or ‘Tory’ – the four foundational swearwords of the English lexicon. But bugger me: the things those radio stations came out with would make even me blush to repeat.
Now, you might understandably be wondering why I was listening to the bickering of Numbers Stations closely enough to realise they were bickering. And the honest answer is that, until I conceived my purpose – my determination to catalogue the world’s slide into weird from the inside – I had not the slightest interest in them. I began to listen and, more, to decode, precisely because they seemed like the kind of channel by which the world’s wildest oddities might be reported. I never imagined that I’d hear a completely synthesised voice orgasm to the number ‘11’, nor get a front row seat to the heated arguments that this sexual faux-pas invoked.
It was around this time, too, that I began to see the appeal in ‘Van Goughing’. Surely, if I was to descend into the lunacy that had the world in thrall, I should descent spectacularly. Like a crashing meat comet. How could I hope to capture the voice of madness if I was unwilling to plunge, head-first into the madness? And was it really madness? Might it not be a meaningful tribute to art and sacrifice and love, expressed through the evisceration of a disposable body part? Might not the severing of an ear place the ideals and passions of the severer above the petty concerns of his physical form? Fucked if I knew, but I was pretty sure that taking a straight razor to my right lug-hole (which has always been the weaker of the two anyway) would answer my questions.
To whit and thus-wise, I stood in my bathroom one morning before work, listening to the increasingly steamy yet livid debate between the Numbers Stations, took the aforementioned razor and placed it beneath the offending auditory receptor. It was a very sharp razor, you understand, and slid through the cartilaginous tissue where my ear met my head with a smooth, wet schlick and only the faintest trace of resistance – like a hot knife gliding through a tender steak. Then the organ itself was plopping wetly into my sink, ready to be scooped up and redeployed as a sigil of everlasting affection.
Except, staring it at it, I realised that there was nobody in the world to whom I wanted to send it; no special someone or long-time recipient of my admiration for whom the ear would be a suitable and meaningful gift. My isolation – not locked away in a room, Hikikomori style, but locked away in the runnels and grooves of my life – struck me, then, as never before. Soft devastation. An eiderdown hammer suffocating as it pounded.
The solution, it seemed to me, was a radical act of self-care. So, still bleeding profusely from the side of my head, I went to the local W.H. Smiths and purchased a gift-box and lovely, heart-shaped card (which I filled in with a message affirming the prospective receiver’s worthiness and value). I then placed my severed ear in the gift box, along with the card, and taped it shut before proceeding directly to the nearest post office and having the whole package mailed to myself: a small present of solidarity and love between the me of now and the me of later.
Feeling triumphant yet woozy, I collapsed in the post office, smacking my head hard on the counter on the way down. I watched the sanguinary fluid from my ear-hole pooling by face in the form a thin, incarnadine jelly. Then I lost consciousness.
Chapter Petrichor
My awakening was, at best, something of a mixed bag. On the plus side, I was in a hospital with my head bandaged. On the downside, the hospital was deserted and, when I staggered to my feet to gaze out the window, I beheld a city in the grips of insanity.
During the interval of my unconsciousness, the weirding of the world had continued apace and finally escalated to the point where the lunacy – no longer subtle – could be seen plainly, even with distance and elevation.
I beheld a crane and a bulldozer made to joust by their operators in a street full of cheering and endangered civilians. I saw an army of men and women who had stripped naked, painted themselves green, and gone about raiding the shops. Listening close, I could hear them chanting the famous lines from Rossetti’s infamous poem, Goblin Market: “We must not look at Goblin men! We must not eat their fruit! Who knows upon what soil they fed, their hungry, thirsty roots!” The singing was jaunty in tone and affect, and, combined with the green paint, strongly suggested the revellers considered themselves to be the goblins of the poems. I saw, too, things firmly located in the realm of objective impossibility. There was a two hundred foot tower block dancing like one of those wind noodles you always see outside garages.
The hospital – still resplendent in its antiseptic white certainty – was devoid of both the sick and their ministers. I was the last living soul in that shining, medicinal structure, and I found I was not wholly surprised by this. Why would anyone stay when such interesting things were happening outside?
It occurred to me that, like the impulse to remove my own ear, this notion had also been inculcated by the madness that was spreading through me and through so many others. I was not, however, horrified. You have to understand, that whatever I was becoming – whatever the world was becoming – it was as much luscious as grotesque. I was no more alarmed by the lunacy’s influence than I would be by the refreshing influence of rain after a long, stark drought.
With this in mind and a smile on my face, I sallied forth from the hospital and into the streets below, joining the festivities and frivolities.
I meandered, grinning ever wider, through thoroughfares awash with polychromatic jouissance. Here, a man dancing with a tiger released from some nearby zoo or other and reared upwards on its back paws. There, a woman bouncing along, holding so many helium balloons that each step took her lifting off the pavement for at least fifteen seconds. Here, a giant spinning top, constructed from stripped car parks, revolving endlessly and without any obvious motive force. There, a flying carpet fluttering just below roof-level, acting in lieu of a tour bus. Oh, what joys! What improbable wonders!
I had no real destination in mind, but my steps brought me, perhaps inevitably, to the Campus of Hypothetical Researches – my place of employment. The main building was a tall, stately affair of red brick. Or, at least, it had been before the detachment of my ear put me in hospital and caused me (to my partial chagrin) to miss the escalation of events. Now it was something resembling a tentacled crimson cylinder, as much squid as building, which shifted and quivered happily with a kind of merry pseudo-life.
Entering via the mouth in high spirits, I found the parquet wooden floors and floral-patterned walls much as I remembered them (though now pulsing deliciously and lugubriously, as though breathing). I meandered through the structure, spying into chambers that had once been lecture theatres, study rooms, research libraries and staff offices and which were now sites of dances, orgies, and some kind of recondite new sport in which grown adults threw Frisbies and tried to catch them, like dogs, in their teeth.
Ascending the levels of the building, I found each successive floor emptier than the last, such that my sense of buoyancy and optimism began slowly and subtly to drain. The smile remained affixed to my fizzog for floor after floor, growing fainter and fainter, until I reached Floor Nine. It was here that I saw Jenny from Accounts, to whom I alluded earlier.
She was in a room alone, a table leg wedged… well, you know where it was wedged. And she was making the most ecstatic of noises, oblivious to the splinter-induced blood leaking steadily from her.
As I observed, not relishing the sight yet not as horrified as I ought to have been, she grew paler and paler, her gasps of pleasure turning to pain, yet unable to stop. Finally, she slumped over and moved no more. Thus, the madness claimed its first casualty (or, at least, the first I saw).
On balance, it was no great loss. Jenny from Accounts was, in life, the kind of person who could turn running out of teabags into a ninety-page social media rant about institutional inequality. There is a reason why her role in this narrative consists of approximately three short paragraphs, in which she does nothing but die horribly. ‘Insufferable’ would be the mildest possible epithet.
I continued on up the building, troubled less by the individual demise than by the tendency it betrayed. I couldn’t, now, say what drew me on, but… fuck it, n’est-ce pas? Sometimes the body knows what the mind does not.
I came at last to my office, which was on the twelfth and final floor of the structure, and was bemused to find my desk waiting for me. There were pages on it: whole sheaths of calculations predicting books that had yet to be written, alongside yet further sheaths of musings estimating where they should fit into the discourse. I might have dismissed these heaps of documentation as the meaningless detritus of a former life, but the notion came to me that I could very easily extrapolate the name and basic synopsis of the first book to be written about the present state of insanity. After all, future historians would certainly want to record these pivotal incidents. The impulse came from the same contaminated and submerged part of my psyche that had prompted me to cut my ear off, so naturally I trusted it. If this was part of the transformation into a functioning part of the New Abnormal, I meant to hurl myself at the process with all due enthusiasm.
There was an eerie quiet as I worked, broken only by my own snatches of upbeat whistling. The maths came easier than usual; easier than it should have. Numbers danced through my head and at my fingertips, swift and sure and leading me, transforming into words one polydigit string at a time.
The end result, however, was nothing I would have predicted or wanted, for it described not change but death: the screaming annihilation of the whole world as the madness grew less and less benign. Looking out my window, I saw that the dancing building had infected the buildings around it, many of which still had people in them, such that they were cast from the windows to splatter on the concrete below. The jousting bulldozer and crane had both toppled and were ablaze, men and women trapped beneath the wreckage and laughing as their skin peeled. The goblin-men were at war with themselves. It was as though my glimpse of the future had triggered its commencement.
But no. Jenny from Accounts had been first, before I knew what to expect. It had always been heading this way. I – and so many others – had simply been blind to it. Blinded, perhaps, by that symptom of the insanity that made insanity feel so delicious.
The book whose contents I had thus predicted had a title: Seek the Naked King. That is precisely what I resolved to do. I would find the man from the advert – the naked, shouting hulk who had told me and so many others to join the Armada of Gibberish. I would find him and, if I couldn’t stop the death of the world, I would at least understand it.
An impulse overtook me to peel off my own face using the sharp point of the pen in my hand. Indeed, I had made the first incision before I mastered myself and stopped the grotesque protest. The madness was defending itself. I took this as a sign I was on the right track.
Outside, it began to rain upwards.
Chapter Ellipses
The search for the Naked King was difficult only in that it was littered with the obstacles of a world coming apart. He was not, at least, elusive. The advertisement in which he made his presence felt had appeared on a local station via Freeview, with its studio building located on the edge of town, amid the warehouses and unidentifiable dilapidations that clustered at the briny waterfront. It was, therefore, for this redoubt of localised production that I aimed.
I was waylaid almost immediately, however, by a not-so-secret Policeman’s Ball. That is to say, many former law-enforcers, still in uniform, were dancing and gyrating (rather suggestively I might add) to classic ballroom music in the middle of the main thoroughfare. My attempts to edge around this cluster of waltzing coppers was less than successful, and I tripped over the feet of a Sargent and Corporal who were performing something resembling a sexually explicit tango at the edge of the pavement. My intrusion, suffice it to say, was unwelcome and the Corporal drew his night-stick, looking at the Sargent for approval. This latter gent nodded wordlessly, and the Corporal lunged at me with impassioned violence. I had barely regained my feet from the initial stumble, and I was forced to throw myself wildly to one side to evade his swinging, delirious blow. Mercifully, my assailant had put too much force into the assault and, having missed me, was now staggering slightly from his own momentum.
I managed to regain my balance and begin sprinting, but this was a grotesque error of judgement. The other policemen clocked me as I accelerated and I heard someone yell “‘Allo, ‘allo, ‘allo! What’s all this then? Blighter’s breaking the speed limit!” Then they were all after me, shouting; blowing their whistles; waving their clubs and tasers.
I hurtled along the street with my pursuers gaining ground with every step. I moved as a single, flawed man: they moved as a tide… and it was this that gave me the key to my escape.
When next I drew level with an alley, I pivoted wildly and dashed down it. The peelers pursuing me, being numerous and possessed of greater forward inertia, took several moments to successful turn and begin forcing themselves down the alley, by which time I had already reached its end. It was blocked off by a high brick wall, but there was a bin in front of it and I leaped onto its lid, meaning to use it as a springboard to vault over the wall.
I had forgotten, you see, that the madness infected inanimate objects as readily as mortal minds, and instead of obtaining the slight boost I needed, I found myself the victim of cartoonish excess. The bin lid pulsed upwards like a spring and I was sent rocketing into the air at, I estimated, nearly a hundred miles an hour. The city retreated below me until, at the apotheosis of my catapulted trajectory, I seemed to be hanging above it: buildings moved and shifted below me. The streets were a never-ending party of joy and death. Everything, it seemed to me, pulsed and breathed as a single organism. Then I was falling.
I was certain I’d die, but I splashed down into a narrow waterway – a canal, I fancied, connecting the sea to docks further inland – and came up gasping for air. The dancing policemen were nowhere in sight. Either they had abandoned their chase or the bin had hurled me at such a wild angle that they couldn’t fathom where I’d landed.
I swam to shore and emerged spluttering but alive, then followed the canal down towards the seafront and its tangle of warehouses.
I was still dripping wet when I reached the studio building operated by Whitepool Broadcasting.
That the building had been Ground Zero for the spreading insanity wasn’t a controversial or surprising fact, but I hadn’t taken the time to consider what this might mean for its denizens. They were rather further along in their transformations than the rest of the world, having been exposed directly to the Naked King. The dead were the lucky ones. Luckier, anyway. The corpses I stepped over had mutilated themselves in ways that made ‘Van Goughing’ appear mild in contrast. Faces had been removed and swapped about. Limbs had been severed and inexpertly reattached at strange angles. Skins had been replaced by overlapping, reptilian scales of broken glass and mosaic. I walked through horror piled on horror but had little pity left for the deceased. The condition of the living was unimaginably worse. They had committed all the same atrocities that the dead had against their own bodies, only they had survived. At some point, too, the building had come alive and begun to assimilate these self-created abominations, such that they now emerged from floors and walls into which they were eternally fused. Some had the wit left to moan in suffering, but most cackled in madness as I passed them, footfalls softened to silence by the beige, institutional carpets that were now dyed visceral pink by faded blood. Even the wallpaper peeled liked sunburnt skin.
I approached one of the moaning abominations, whose tattered garb was still recognisable as the suit of a low-rent studio executive, and said, plainly, “I seek the Naked King.”
He looked at me with wide, frightened eyes – or rather, one wide, frightened eye and one monocle that he had forced bloodily into his own eye-socket.
I thought, perhaps, he might be too far gone to answer. But then he spoke, and in speaking told me where to find my quarry.
He spoke of an island – little more than a gull-scratched rock sticking out of the sea – from whence unnatural whispers came curling on the winds. Whispers of the Armada of Gibberish. It was all he could see when he closed his eyes; all he dreamed about when he slept. Here, I surmised, was the Naked King, settled like Nietzsche’s Ubermensch and meditating on secrets.
Into the waters again! Exiting the corrupted studios and flinging myself in the canal, I waited to be carried out into the churning, salty waves, trusting to the new, irredeemable logics of the world-gone-wrong that this would deliver me, via narrative imperative, to the island and throne of the Naked King.
Chapter Aqueous
I have said before that my journey to the King was fraught with perils, and I spoke the truth. Swept along the canal, I nearly drowned on several occasions – not because of the rapid waters, but because of the things that had taken up residence in them. I think they had once been people, but they had had grown gills and bioluminescent bulbs that emerged from their heads, like Angler Fish. They snatched at me with webbed hands and bit with teeth made impossibly sharp and tried to drag me under.
Despite my academic credentials, I’ve always been a man who favours the heavier type of boot and – though this did not exactly help my swimming – it proved very beneficial for the kicking of my aquatic assailants. I crushed Angler-type lanterns into glowing pulp and broke Insmouth-inflected teeth and even snapped one or two arms. And oh, what a joyous experience it was! Reminded me, somewhat, of my pre-academic days roaming the mosh pits of the Rockabilly Quarter.
At last, I was carried out of the canal and into the sea proper, where my way was immediately blocked by a dolphin in a neck-tie who had heard of my accomplishments in the field of pre-emptive literary analysis and wanted me to look over this thesis. I punched him in the bottle-nose and swam on. On and on and on, indeed, sure that, at any moment, the island would present itself.
Yet I was exhausted and still recovering from my stay in hospital and I began, inevitably, to flag. Buffeted by waves and with my quarry nowhere in sight, I turned and realised I had lost sight, too, of the land. Desperation came upon me and I struck out blindly, seeking… seeking anything! A mean scrap of rock to cling to; a ship; a stray fucking rubber ring! But alas: nothing. My legs pedalled furiously in the water, but each kick hurt; each flex of the overstrained muscle took its toll until I was only thrashing sporadically and, deprived of rhythm, began to sink.
Chapter Epiphany
I awoke to the presence of the King. He was the same ridiculous-looking man I had glimpsed on the television, but in person, he appeared altogether grander, sat upon a throne of rough hewn rock on a jagged, salt-lashed island no wider than a small garden, which emerged from the sea as a boulder emerges from rolling grey-green dales.
He smile down at me, and I deduced that he must have reached into the water and pulled me from it before I could drown.
“You’ve come a long way to talk,” he observed. “And you have risked much.” Gone was the shouting, hectoring quality of his advert-voice. He sounded wise and improbably ancient.
“You’re destroying the world,” I croaked.
The Naked King smiled beneficently down at me from his rough-hewn throne and said “This world was mad long before I came into it.” He then reached up his hand and gripped the fleshy padding of his face tightly, ripping it away like protective packaging to reveal a different face underneath. It took me a moment to recognise this new face, but then I got it: the man whose chinos had been so recently radicalised on Help, My Trousers Are Racist! “Reality TV shows designed to appeal to the basest and most degraded of our instincts.” He reached up to his new face and peeled it off in turn, like the peel of a banana, unveiling the puckered, confrontational features of Jenny from Accounts beneath. “Repression left to fester as victim-complex and a sublimated yearning for self-destruction.” In its turn, this face was ripped away and replaced by that of the man I’d spoken to in the TV studios. “Mediocre, soulless jobs rewarding mediocre, soulless people.” This time he used both hands, rending away the face with a flourish, and I gasped at what was beneath it this time. “A culture turned so trite and predictable that it can be mapped by algorithm by dull little men with no cultural passion.” The accusation landed doubly hard because it came from my own lips, and in that moment, I understood the truth. The Naked King was all of us.
“This was always going to happen, wasn’t it?” I asked.
The Naked King shook his – my – head and replied “Not necessarily. But yearning is a force as physical and quantifiable as gravity. And when the yearning for something – anything – new reaches a fever pitch, the universe folds around it as it does around a gravity well. Desperation compresses into lunacy and the lunacy wears many faces, consuming the world bite by vicious bite. I know this because you know this, and you know this because you have always known it: the same way you have always known the direction of ‘down’; the same way you have always known gravity.”
I began, then, to laugh, and finally gave into the impulse I had earlier in my quest. Reaching up to the wound left by severed ear, I dug my fingers in and pulled, feeling my face come away as easily as the Naked King’s. And why not? Because the face underneath my face was the Naked King’s. He was me. I was him. We were everyone.
The other man stood, then, from his throne, sloughing off his puffy meat until only a withered, clumsy figure – me in every detail – remained.
I approached and sat where he had sat.
“What will you do first, Your Majesty?” the man who had been the Naked King asked, bending to undress me, tenderly, as he spoke. For the Id must be naked, and what is the King if not the shared and desperate Id of all mankind?
I understood that I was to be the embodiment of the madness henceforth and I would survive this world as my predecessor had survived his. I would be the directing consciousness behind a Law of Nature – an elevated Metaphysical. This knowledge was waiting for me. And what I did with it was up to me.
“I will warn the next world,” I said, smiling. “That is to say, I will write my memoir.”
If you have read this far, then you know I was as good as my word.