Queen City and Other Dimensions. E.C. WellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
went to work manipulating the DNA of a New Caledonian scorpion with the DNA of an African cockroach. The result was a super-sized cockroach with an unnerving sized scorpion stinger like a rat’s tail. The thrill of creation! The ecstasy and the rapture from ejaculating without touching yourself was overwhelming. Work was good. Then it happened, the Murphy’s Law, the thing they never anticipated; their creation quickly duplicated itself and the duplication began to duplicate and so forth, exponentially. Their little monsters would soon be problematic.
The morning after their venerable accomplishment, Max awoke to observe several cockpions crawling up the windowpane. He imagined they were looking for a chink in the window. In a blink of his eye, the cockpions paired-up and began dancing the tango, the dangerous kind, razor-sharp angles, quick turns around the surface of the glass and all the while their stingers stood ready, but for what, or whom? “It’s time to boogie,” Max said out loud to no one but himself.
The short history of the big building on the island is that it was home to hundreds of terminally ill patients from around the world; a place to rest and wait. When whispers and rumors of Doctor Sphincter’s experimentations with body parts, especially fresh organs removed from his patients, both dead and alive, for his clandestine work to create a super-subspecies of Man, it all came to a complete halt when the authorities discovered his true vocation; he was then murdered on the spot by subhumans with brooms and pitchforks. The sanatorium was closed permanently. The Island of Doctor Sphincter was abandoned sometime in the 1950s and remained so until Doctor Fleischmann took-up residence in the early 2000s. Serving as doctor to the biggest rock star in the world paid unnecessarily well.
“Thank you Maxfield, you’ve been a good friend.”
“You doknow what will happen sooner than later?”
“I do. There is nowhere else for me to go. I am a pariah, you know.”
“I do,” mumbled Max. "Big time."
Doctor Fleischmann and Max walked in silence to the edge of the cliff on the far side of the island. They hugged one last goodbye before Max jumped from the cliff and disappeared into somewhere in the future, leaving only sparks of light that were soon extinguished by the ocean below. Maxfield reappeared under his bed. “Boy-o- boy, I’m getting pretty good at this!” Max, as he occasionally does, gleeked.
Sphincter Island was no longer habitable by humankind, nor mammals of any kind; only the pariah was left behind, tucked away from society. The huge cockpions were discovered to be cannibals that survived solely by eating one another. After every meal, they were always ferociously hungry, the cockpions split like giant amoebas infesting the island. Doctor Fleischmann knew that he could no longer endure his unique predicament. He could not live with himself for the rest of his life——which he knew would be a short one. “For Pete’s sake! I really liked his music, his dancing——”He then chose the largest cockpion from those slowly circling him, he picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand,“This is for you, Mikey.”Fleischmann waited until he felt the devil’s sting. As he lay dying, his last spoken words were, “This is it, isn’t it?” And then he was cockpion food.
Max is rarely invited to speak at universities, nor take all-expense paid trips to study bugs as he once did. When he briefly taught entomology at Queen City University his students referred to him as “A giant in his field,” then they giggled and he would humbly thank them. It took Max two years after his fleeting stint at QCU to become conscious of what they meant.
His short tenure in academia came to an abrupt end in a university men’s room. Max and three of his students were caught smoking marijuana; pre-legalization. He was conducting an experiment into the nature of memory loss. Who the devil knows why academics are so damn incredulous!? Maxfield seemed insane to some, to others he was simply an old hippy drug addict, but to a brave few, Professor Doctor Maxfield Talbot PhD was a master and guide into the creative powers hidden within the vast unending universe of the Self——the magical, mystical place of creation. Some thought Professor Talbot, TheMaster. However, Theor not, Master or not, following him was a trip down a rabbit’s hole––something to ponder before jumping in.
The late Missus Reverend Aires died while giving birth to V, so naturally she had fulfilled any debt to that which posterity could possibly hold claim. V’s mother is remembered by V’s great uncles and aunts as a ferocious force of nature with a fun wit. The late Missus Aires was clearly demented, or possessed. She loved acting in little theatres around Queen City until, while playing Ophelia in Hamlet——the devil knows what got into her——she broke-out into song and danced the cooch across the stage. What a memorable farewell performance! She gave birth to V nine months later and died, but not until every last drop of her spirit found its way into her newborn, Victoria. Whenever conversations turn to family history, especially involving the late Missus Aires, amazingly, no one recalls a thing. When relatives turn their memories to Maxfield, they cannot remember his ever looking younger than he appeared to them now. Fifty year old memories and yet Maxfield has always appeared close to seventy. They chalk it up to the tricks of memory.
Gert Aires-Birdsall, V’s father’s sister, along with her husband Charlie, established a retreat near Lake Titicaca in Peru for clairvoyants, spiritualists, astral projectionists, space and time folders and intergalactic surfers who ride gravitational waves through spacetime just for the hell of it.
Puerto Nostradamus, highly praised in several esoteric journals, enjoyed a fashionable reputation as the favored watering hole for celebrated Internationalists and the usual perennial variety nouveau riche. The glossy brochure made Puerto Nostradamus appear an attractive destination for those who would or could develop their latent psychic abilities. “Hidden potentials that lay sleeping within the initiate are carefully nurtured at Puerto Nostradamus,” was written at the top of the brochure.
Their brochure was filled with sepia-toned photographs of well known psychics, including Shirley MacLaine and Nancy Reagan. There were quotes endorsing Gert’s and Charlie’s hospitality. Madonna said, “A miraculous experience,” and New Jersey Governor Crispy Crapp bragged about having lost one-hundred pounds, “I lost 100 pounds.” (The Governor regained every ounce and then some in less than two months.) There were pictures of natives rowing across Lake Titicaca, guests riding on several domesticated llamas and a visiting dignitary helping Charlie hold down an alpaca while Gert was busy sheering it. Another photo was of Gert all alone in the garden tending to her coffee plants while a rather dark and dirty-looking family rested beneath a cacao tree in the background to the left of Gert’s bonnet. All this was beguiling, yet V had serious doubts about that sort of thing which, consequently, kept her from visiting Aunt Gertrude. Although, she did recommend Puerto Nostradamus to a good many of her ex-friends. It sounded devilish even without having any idea where it was, what it was, or anything about it. The very name of Puerto Nostradamus conjured something other than a place for spiritual enlightenment.
Then there is Cousin Harriet, Maxfield’s younger sister, who found the word “Aunt” much too matronly for her taste and, therefore, insisted she be called “Cousin” Harriet. Cousin Harriet disappeared before the courts waived her privilege to enjoy the company of three husbands while two of them were still alive. As a result, the four of them took flight from Queen City International Airport for Gotham City from where they booked passage on a Norwegian freighter and haven’t been heard from since. Cousin Harriet, in her own small and special way, achieved a certain amount of local, however infamous, notoriety.
“Why shouldn’t I enjoy a bit of recognition?” V asked her dearest friend and companion Lily Nettles.
“What have you done for it?”
“You’re being provocative, dear heart.” V had already arrived at an acerbic edge by the time she got to “dear heart.” She hated questions that led to self-incrimination. “Sometimes you beg the question, Lily. No one gives a shit about me. I have nothing. I am nobody. Just a buttload of unfulfilled dreams.”
“Boo-hoo. Give me a break! You’re being silly and you don’t believe a single word of it. By this time tomorrow today’s anxiety will have morphed into your usual arrogance of genius.”
“I