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Dark Fiction - Horror
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Prologue
"Facts are mere accessories to the truth, and we do not invite to our hearth the guest who can only remind us that on such a day we suffered calamity. Still less welcome is he who would make a Roman holiday of our misfortunes. Exaggeration of what was monstrous is quickly recognised as a sign of egotism, and that contrarious symptom of the same disease which pretends that what is accepted as monstrous was really little more than normal is equally unwelcome."
Max Plowman, from Subaltern on the Somme
Chapter one: Hot dark damp forest dreams
Pham Van Dong picked his way through the world's largest contraption, "which is more than vicious." He had said before and he'll say it again, loudly, "like a descending spiral," for Dong spoke to no one but himself while he bypassed the flourishing danger (invented) and nature's traps (created and evolved).
It was hot this afternoon, every afternoon, as he walked in the bewildering valleys of shadows of death. He crossed the darkened corridors everywhere in a jungle journey, able to discern where chaos would explode over and under, inside and out, and, he faced this constant peril in the hundreds of kilometres in his path. He had been ambling through intense peril for an amazingly long time and his body went south at this moment while his mind unravelled in various directions.
The construction of a contraption like this wreaked carnage on thousands upon thousands of square kilometers. The belligerent device operated under the careful scrutiny of its constructors and would chafe at and kill reams of population unfound and unlost in an unaccountably dark region of the world. Contraption engineers like Dong fooled minds and forged a machine to shred the flesh and smash the bones of undisclosed numbers of (scrupulously counted) unsuspecting people. Dong was not alone in this task of course (except at this moment and even then not for long), for he worked inside a legion of like-minded 'Dongs' who carried sinister threads of inside knowledge, some with enough to survive. The need for this struggle to create a miazma of perpetual carnage was, nevetheless, a mystery to themselves as much as anybody else. If there was a reason, it was long forgotten.
The countryside was a slaughterhouse of the deceived and blood was shed in more than one jungle. The jungle where Dong was walking was the former Truong Son of the French Associated States of Indochine. Dong knew it would now be called the Central Highlands of someplace else. He drifted down invisible paths this afternoon in a mortifying jungle and sweat a lot as anybody would in this heat (and he was under the weather in a self-inflicted way with a damned hangover).
Up to this very day, July 20, 1956, Dong had been carousing in the City of Hanoi at victory celebrations whereas in hindsight he should have foreseen the difficulties that lay ahead and confronted him today, should have seen them even as late as last week, or sooner, like when his fancy coat and top hat were confiscated when he came back from Geneva a few weeks ago.
Now he returned to these invisible trails in the Annamite Cordillera for a miserable trek through immense danger and intense heat. He carried a canvas sack that bounced off an area of thick skin on his hip as he stepped over gnarled flora on valley floors and watched a tightly sprung trap coiling around him. Aah oui, il est un grand malaise, and the trick is to make it fatal. These are the things he considered as he walked in the Annamite Cordillera, a mountainous maze that divided the land of his forefathers into two geographical extremes.
Título : The Gods Are All Terrorists
EAN : 9798227138644
Editorial : Mack McColl
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