Post by alycestarchylde on Apr 15, 2018 18:33:15 GMT -5
With a few days before Wrestle Wars and my match with Xmyles, we returned to Empire Falls, Maine. The city with a spider problem. When last we were there, we had learned of an old church that seemed to promote the idea of spiders as gods. Not unusual in Central Africa perhaps, but decidedly so in turn of the 20th Century America.
So it was with some attempt at preparedness that we found an ancient map of the city which delineated the location of the Church of Arachnoid Wisdom, up on old Marble Hill Road in a section of town referred to, at the time, as the Hill.
And so it was, we found ourselves on a grass-covered bluff overlooking the town of Empire Falls, walking up an ancient street whose cobblestones where now broken apart by weeds. Shattered shells of houses sat here and there with only a minimum of detritus that is usually contributed by foolhardy local children examining the ruins of the recent past. It was extraordinarily quiet here...more so than we felt was normal. There were almost no signs of life. I say almost because spiders were everywhere. Spiders of all kinds and all descriptions. It would seem the little buggers heard tell of a church where they were once venerated and decided to come by and check it out.
“S'Funny,” Brother Maylock spoke up, “this part of the world, hobos are still a thing. I am not talking about the homeless, I am talking about guys that break into trains and travel the world. Some parts of this country, that's gone...but not Maine. Should be a hobo camp around here...but there isn't.”
Jackdaw silently looked around...pretty much the same way he does everything. I nodded.
“You are right, Jackdaw,” I said, “there isn't a sign of life anywhere around here.”
Jackdaw doesn't speak...some intense mental trauma that I have to admit I am partially responsible for. His form of communication is violence, it's like his native tongue...still I seem to have a knack for unraveling his thoughts...or I at least think I do and since he can't speak he can't correct me. Pick one.
We continued walking up the road witnessing the festering houses of days gone by. Sure enough we came to the end of the road and to a large stone building. A wooden sign, hand painted in red letters lying half-hidden in the dirt read “Church of Arachn...”. I was forced to guess this was not the entire sign and that years of neglect left us with only this piece. Still and all, it seemed we were almost certainly at the right place.
We followed the remains of an ancient gravel path around the front of the stone structure and found a door. We opened it and discovered what might have once been a cloak room, for it was an open space with hooks on the walls for hanging clothes upon. The floor was choked with rubble and crawling everywhere were spiders of all description.
“I gotta say, Jackdaw,” Brother Maylock said, “When you pick a vacation destination, you go all out.” Jackdaw seemed to ignore him...or perhaps mentally agree with him. We went a little further in and found openings to a homey kitchen on one side complete with a large, if shattered and burned, dining table. On the other was an ancient lavatory on the floor of which seemed to be the withered body of one of the hobos that Brother Maylock had just spoken about. Clad in a brown suit which was filthy with age and closeness to camp fires, and wearing the battered remains of an ancient brown bowler.
Maylock kneeled, prepared to roll the body over to get a better look. One thing we could tell, the exposed flesh was covered with spider bites. No sooner had Maylock squatted down then the thing on the floor began to scrabble, trying to rise in the most jerking and violent fashion. As the thing got up, I could see it's face. It had no eyes...scores of spiders boiled down it's shrunken face from where the eyes used to be. It's mouth was open, but there was no tongue...there was no noised except for the almost imperceptible whisper of thousands of legs as spiders crowded his mouth, streaming down his chin.
“Holy Shit,” Maylock cried, leaping backwards. Even I, used as I am to nightmares and horrors, was forced to take a step back as the spider-infested thing clambered inexorably forward. Jackdaw, without registering any sort of emotion at all, put a foot forward and pushed the creatures chest causing it to tumble backwards. It hit the floor with a sickening thump as even more spiders poured from it. The force of the blow seemed to displace some long stale air from it's lungs and a horrible stench filled the small space. Maylock removed a flask of rather potent liquor that he kept on hand for medicinal purposes and the odd Molotov Cocktail and proceeded to douse the spider-ridden thing. I pulled a Zippo that was given to me for Meritorious service by a country that wanted to forget my sacrifice and herd me off to a place where I would no longer remind anyone of our past mistakes. I snapped the wheel, saw the fire and dropped it on the thing at our feet. The highly flammable alcohol caught almost immediately and soon the creature was engulfed in flame. We watched for long moments as spiders continued to pour blazing from every orifice we could see to wind up very tiny briquettes around their host. I grabbed my lighter and we proceeded into the main body of the church itself.
The room was huge, filled with the shattered remains of several pews and against the back wall, where a cross might have been in a normal church, was a stylized wooden spider. The room was festooned with dozens, nay hundreds of spiderwebs and cobwebs and there were thousands of spiders crawling everywhere. The place stank to high Heaven and a quick look around revealed a small skeleton. We didn't need Bill Nye, the Science Guy to tell us the truth...that this had once been a young child. Or a very slight midget. Either way, this place seemed deadly.
They also noticed in the northeast corner of the room, a significant portion of the floor was missing. Upon further examination, the floor had shattered and fallen into a cave that ran beneath the church. Fortunately, we had come prepared and Jackdaw had some rope with him and we were able to lower ourselves into the cave.
We explored for several minutes and saw even more spiders on the cold stone walls. Soon, we turned a corner and saw them, two dog-sized spiders that began to crawl along the wall towards us. As they approached, they both flashed blue and disappeared. A few seconds later, there was a rush of cold, a smell of death and another flash of blue light and both creatures reappeared.
Fortunately, I always keep a pistol on me in case I run into rabid WGWF fans and it turns out, giant spiders are just as susceptible to hot lead as wrestling uber-nerds. 9 shots later, both creatures were lying on the stone floor in a pool of foul smelling white ichor. No sooner had we dealt with that problem than a strange noise echoed through the corridors.
It was a noise produced by no human vocal cords. It was akin to a scream and akin to a roar but was neither. It was further along in the tunnels. I reloaded my pistol while my compatriots returned to the opening where we entered, finding bits of flooring usable as makeshift weapons. They rejoined me and we went deeper into the tunnels.
And we saw it. A huge spider. As large as a tank and bearing down on us. Like it's two smaller compatriots, it disappeared in a flash of blue light and reappeared directly above us. We dove out of the way as it fell to the ground. It snapped it's massive pincers towards Jackdaw who dove out of the way. I brought my pistol up as close to the thing as I dared and emptied the clip. The thing lurched and trembled and then Maylock and Jackdaw hit the thing from the sides, using their jagged bits of wooden floor to snap off legs and shear through it's sides. More white goo flowed from it's wounds and soon the creature dropped to ground, shuddered and laid still.
We went into the next room where we saw hundreds of orbs of white and we realized they were eggs. We stomped them all into paste as we stared at the back wall. The back wall was covered with a huge painting, a flaming indian chief, all in yellow floating in the sky above a sign that read, welcome to Alamogordo.
We had solved one mystery, only to find another.
New Mexico, here we come, but first...Wrestle Wars.
Lunacy stands in a psych ward. He wears the garb of a doctor over his usual garb as he wanders through a medical ward, Maylock and Jackdaw in tow, both wearing ancient nurse garb over their own clothes.
Lunacy pauses to shove a thermometer in a patients mouth waits a few moments and looks at it. He summons a nurse over.
“He's almost ready, raise his temperature to 250 degrees and put him in a cast iron room with shallots and white wine,” he says. The nurse nods, wheeling the patient away.
“Wrestle Wars is upon us and for me, it's like Christmas. I get to put a boob through all the barbed wire that I can. You gotta love the holidays. And while there is nothing on the line in this match except madness and pride, the truth is. I am not one to respond well to this companies attempts to control me. They have put this match together because they know Grimoire Xmyles and I both have more resistance to pain than sense and neither one of us likes the other very much. In my case, that is justified because Grim almost never showers, is known to steal candy from babies and once sexually gratified himself with MY penguin. It was sad.
That being said, My queen, our dark mistress, Eris, Goddess of Dischord brought us back to burn this place to the ground...we can't really begin that mission until I squash this cockroach. Now, I know Grim likes to think he's got the market cornered on crazy, but the truth is there is a reason I beat him when I faced him all those years ago and there is a reason he is not a functioning member of Anarchy...the group for all things and beings crazy and otherwise.
However, I would be remiss if I didn't consider the fact that the man...if man he be, is sicker than Richard Simmons at an AIDS clinic and that he is capable of almost as much aggressiveness and atavism as I am. But here is the thing, nerdboy. I am supremely trained for this. I was tortured beneath the sands of Saudi Arabia, tortured by terrorists and left to escape at my own devices by a country that was eager to deny my mission and what happened to my men.
Frankly, Grim, I am trained for this sort of thing. Whatever anyone can do to me in a wrestling ring doesn't even measure up. However scary you think you are...you aren't and frankly I find you to be mostly a bore and a pretender to throne of those that have tried to defeat and belittle me. You are nothing. You are a cockroach. Yeah, kinda creepy and lots of legs, but honestly a can of Raid™ or one good boot and you are no more than a stain on the floor.
And that, Grim, is my goal, to reduce you to a quivering, bloody smear on the canvas. I don't like you Grim but you have this sort of comic book in your head where we both circle around each other as the monsters both trying to determine who is the better Joker...who more deserves to be the bad guy. But that is a mistake.
You see, I have already surpassed the Joker. I am a villain so large, I need the whole of the WGWF to stand against me because one guy simply cannot do it. I've beaten so many, removed so many others from the field of combat...there really isn't any competition in that regard anymore. And yet YOU come along with your painted face and shitty suit and claim to be my equal? I hardly think so. In fact, mostly I find you to be a laughable excuse for an enemy and really, I don't fear you at all. You are a funhouse mirror version of myself...me if I sucked at everything I've ever tried.
So here's the deal, I am willing to climb into a ring with you, spill blood with you, but you really don't matter to me. I'm not a hero. You cannot hurt me by going after those I care about...you cannot hurt me by arraying yourself against me. We are cards pulled from the same deck...but I am the face card and you are merely the trey.
So, come Wrestle Wars, Grim my boy, I hope you are prepared for bloodshed...and I hope you are prepared not to matter to me...at all.”
So it was with some attempt at preparedness that we found an ancient map of the city which delineated the location of the Church of Arachnoid Wisdom, up on old Marble Hill Road in a section of town referred to, at the time, as the Hill.
And so it was, we found ourselves on a grass-covered bluff overlooking the town of Empire Falls, walking up an ancient street whose cobblestones where now broken apart by weeds. Shattered shells of houses sat here and there with only a minimum of detritus that is usually contributed by foolhardy local children examining the ruins of the recent past. It was extraordinarily quiet here...more so than we felt was normal. There were almost no signs of life. I say almost because spiders were everywhere. Spiders of all kinds and all descriptions. It would seem the little buggers heard tell of a church where they were once venerated and decided to come by and check it out.
“S'Funny,” Brother Maylock spoke up, “this part of the world, hobos are still a thing. I am not talking about the homeless, I am talking about guys that break into trains and travel the world. Some parts of this country, that's gone...but not Maine. Should be a hobo camp around here...but there isn't.”
Jackdaw silently looked around...pretty much the same way he does everything. I nodded.
“You are right, Jackdaw,” I said, “there isn't a sign of life anywhere around here.”
Jackdaw doesn't speak...some intense mental trauma that I have to admit I am partially responsible for. His form of communication is violence, it's like his native tongue...still I seem to have a knack for unraveling his thoughts...or I at least think I do and since he can't speak he can't correct me. Pick one.
We continued walking up the road witnessing the festering houses of days gone by. Sure enough we came to the end of the road and to a large stone building. A wooden sign, hand painted in red letters lying half-hidden in the dirt read “Church of Arachn...”. I was forced to guess this was not the entire sign and that years of neglect left us with only this piece. Still and all, it seemed we were almost certainly at the right place.
We followed the remains of an ancient gravel path around the front of the stone structure and found a door. We opened it and discovered what might have once been a cloak room, for it was an open space with hooks on the walls for hanging clothes upon. The floor was choked with rubble and crawling everywhere were spiders of all description.
“I gotta say, Jackdaw,” Brother Maylock said, “When you pick a vacation destination, you go all out.” Jackdaw seemed to ignore him...or perhaps mentally agree with him. We went a little further in and found openings to a homey kitchen on one side complete with a large, if shattered and burned, dining table. On the other was an ancient lavatory on the floor of which seemed to be the withered body of one of the hobos that Brother Maylock had just spoken about. Clad in a brown suit which was filthy with age and closeness to camp fires, and wearing the battered remains of an ancient brown bowler.
Maylock kneeled, prepared to roll the body over to get a better look. One thing we could tell, the exposed flesh was covered with spider bites. No sooner had Maylock squatted down then the thing on the floor began to scrabble, trying to rise in the most jerking and violent fashion. As the thing got up, I could see it's face. It had no eyes...scores of spiders boiled down it's shrunken face from where the eyes used to be. It's mouth was open, but there was no tongue...there was no noised except for the almost imperceptible whisper of thousands of legs as spiders crowded his mouth, streaming down his chin.
“Holy Shit,” Maylock cried, leaping backwards. Even I, used as I am to nightmares and horrors, was forced to take a step back as the spider-infested thing clambered inexorably forward. Jackdaw, without registering any sort of emotion at all, put a foot forward and pushed the creatures chest causing it to tumble backwards. It hit the floor with a sickening thump as even more spiders poured from it. The force of the blow seemed to displace some long stale air from it's lungs and a horrible stench filled the small space. Maylock removed a flask of rather potent liquor that he kept on hand for medicinal purposes and the odd Molotov Cocktail and proceeded to douse the spider-ridden thing. I pulled a Zippo that was given to me for Meritorious service by a country that wanted to forget my sacrifice and herd me off to a place where I would no longer remind anyone of our past mistakes. I snapped the wheel, saw the fire and dropped it on the thing at our feet. The highly flammable alcohol caught almost immediately and soon the creature was engulfed in flame. We watched for long moments as spiders continued to pour blazing from every orifice we could see to wind up very tiny briquettes around their host. I grabbed my lighter and we proceeded into the main body of the church itself.
The room was huge, filled with the shattered remains of several pews and against the back wall, where a cross might have been in a normal church, was a stylized wooden spider. The room was festooned with dozens, nay hundreds of spiderwebs and cobwebs and there were thousands of spiders crawling everywhere. The place stank to high Heaven and a quick look around revealed a small skeleton. We didn't need Bill Nye, the Science Guy to tell us the truth...that this had once been a young child. Or a very slight midget. Either way, this place seemed deadly.
They also noticed in the northeast corner of the room, a significant portion of the floor was missing. Upon further examination, the floor had shattered and fallen into a cave that ran beneath the church. Fortunately, we had come prepared and Jackdaw had some rope with him and we were able to lower ourselves into the cave.
We explored for several minutes and saw even more spiders on the cold stone walls. Soon, we turned a corner and saw them, two dog-sized spiders that began to crawl along the wall towards us. As they approached, they both flashed blue and disappeared. A few seconds later, there was a rush of cold, a smell of death and another flash of blue light and both creatures reappeared.
Fortunately, I always keep a pistol on me in case I run into rabid WGWF fans and it turns out, giant spiders are just as susceptible to hot lead as wrestling uber-nerds. 9 shots later, both creatures were lying on the stone floor in a pool of foul smelling white ichor. No sooner had we dealt with that problem than a strange noise echoed through the corridors.
It was a noise produced by no human vocal cords. It was akin to a scream and akin to a roar but was neither. It was further along in the tunnels. I reloaded my pistol while my compatriots returned to the opening where we entered, finding bits of flooring usable as makeshift weapons. They rejoined me and we went deeper into the tunnels.
And we saw it. A huge spider. As large as a tank and bearing down on us. Like it's two smaller compatriots, it disappeared in a flash of blue light and reappeared directly above us. We dove out of the way as it fell to the ground. It snapped it's massive pincers towards Jackdaw who dove out of the way. I brought my pistol up as close to the thing as I dared and emptied the clip. The thing lurched and trembled and then Maylock and Jackdaw hit the thing from the sides, using their jagged bits of wooden floor to snap off legs and shear through it's sides. More white goo flowed from it's wounds and soon the creature dropped to ground, shuddered and laid still.
We went into the next room where we saw hundreds of orbs of white and we realized they were eggs. We stomped them all into paste as we stared at the back wall. The back wall was covered with a huge painting, a flaming indian chief, all in yellow floating in the sky above a sign that read, welcome to Alamogordo.
We had solved one mystery, only to find another.
New Mexico, here we come, but first...Wrestle Wars.
Shut your whore mouth
Lunacy stands in a psych ward. He wears the garb of a doctor over his usual garb as he wanders through a medical ward, Maylock and Jackdaw in tow, both wearing ancient nurse garb over their own clothes.
Lunacy pauses to shove a thermometer in a patients mouth waits a few moments and looks at it. He summons a nurse over.
“He's almost ready, raise his temperature to 250 degrees and put him in a cast iron room with shallots and white wine,” he says. The nurse nods, wheeling the patient away.
“Wrestle Wars is upon us and for me, it's like Christmas. I get to put a boob through all the barbed wire that I can. You gotta love the holidays. And while there is nothing on the line in this match except madness and pride, the truth is. I am not one to respond well to this companies attempts to control me. They have put this match together because they know Grimoire Xmyles and I both have more resistance to pain than sense and neither one of us likes the other very much. In my case, that is justified because Grim almost never showers, is known to steal candy from babies and once sexually gratified himself with MY penguin. It was sad.
That being said, My queen, our dark mistress, Eris, Goddess of Dischord brought us back to burn this place to the ground...we can't really begin that mission until I squash this cockroach. Now, I know Grim likes to think he's got the market cornered on crazy, but the truth is there is a reason I beat him when I faced him all those years ago and there is a reason he is not a functioning member of Anarchy...the group for all things and beings crazy and otherwise.
However, I would be remiss if I didn't consider the fact that the man...if man he be, is sicker than Richard Simmons at an AIDS clinic and that he is capable of almost as much aggressiveness and atavism as I am. But here is the thing, nerdboy. I am supremely trained for this. I was tortured beneath the sands of Saudi Arabia, tortured by terrorists and left to escape at my own devices by a country that was eager to deny my mission and what happened to my men.
Frankly, Grim, I am trained for this sort of thing. Whatever anyone can do to me in a wrestling ring doesn't even measure up. However scary you think you are...you aren't and frankly I find you to be mostly a bore and a pretender to throne of those that have tried to defeat and belittle me. You are nothing. You are a cockroach. Yeah, kinda creepy and lots of legs, but honestly a can of Raid™ or one good boot and you are no more than a stain on the floor.
And that, Grim, is my goal, to reduce you to a quivering, bloody smear on the canvas. I don't like you Grim but you have this sort of comic book in your head where we both circle around each other as the monsters both trying to determine who is the better Joker...who more deserves to be the bad guy. But that is a mistake.
You see, I have already surpassed the Joker. I am a villain so large, I need the whole of the WGWF to stand against me because one guy simply cannot do it. I've beaten so many, removed so many others from the field of combat...there really isn't any competition in that regard anymore. And yet YOU come along with your painted face and shitty suit and claim to be my equal? I hardly think so. In fact, mostly I find you to be a laughable excuse for an enemy and really, I don't fear you at all. You are a funhouse mirror version of myself...me if I sucked at everything I've ever tried.
So here's the deal, I am willing to climb into a ring with you, spill blood with you, but you really don't matter to me. I'm not a hero. You cannot hurt me by going after those I care about...you cannot hurt me by arraying yourself against me. We are cards pulled from the same deck...but I am the face card and you are merely the trey.
So, come Wrestle Wars, Grim my boy, I hope you are prepared for bloodshed...and I hope you are prepared not to matter to me...at all.”