In the world’s most sophisticated skyscraper on the island city of Galatea, people are taking blind ambition to a whole new level. As sinister forces human and artificial conspire to drive everyone over the edge, the smartest will be those who learn to look down and deep within. For something truly out-of-this-world is making its way to the top, and everyone’s vision will be getting a little stranger…
The edge of the universe wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The temperature was a hundred clicks below the Hadesian line, dust devil winds burned bare flesh and a tumult of spicy smog shrouded heaven’s outermost stars in a sickly, copper-coloured haze.
High in the mountains of Cys, the Tantalus Arms emptied its inebriated patrons into the desert night with a gaseous belch. Only one suction cup in the solar system’s solitary cephalopod skybar remained open. Inside, a geriatric Andavarian tenor serenaded two dewy-eyed, terminally ill aphromorphs at the VIP table. Near the reptile-wrestling pit, a trio of cyclopic scavengers lay lashed on maroon pod bays, mumbling excavation yarns into the gambling portals.
The last goddam tune I’ll ever hear, thought Lucius as he downed his final shot of M86 Throatwarmer. Waiting was the two-hearted bounty hunter’s only play now. Waiting for his two Ogressian captors, sitting slab-faced either side of him, to drag his lacerated ass to the lava gulag. Waiting to accept his sentence from the odorous overlord of Omega-69. Waiting to have his soul sucked out by the singing spidergirls of Lestrygonia, who loved to lather their victims in Kublan honeydew before drawing the terminal bleed.
Wuuupppppaaahsssshaaajjuuddeecluckercluckaphsst. The sleeping doorslith, three hundred calcics of wobbly green flesh, rocketed across the vacated gyration zone and splattered into the optics of designer toxins above the bar. An inferno of XX chromosome swept into its space. Lucius recognised her from his datacast. Electra Medici. The Syphillian galaxy’s most wanted. A hot blizzard of voluptuousness from the planet Norkus, rumoured to store the Fleece of Dragus under her scarlet spacesuit. She drew her Querff Company assault rifle and fired two plutonium parcels into the bloated bellies of his custodians. As their green guts seeped onto the sticky, sand-swept floor, osmotic tentacles twitching in tune, Lucius smirked.
Everything they said about Electra was true. The she-wolf fragrance. The crystalline eyes. The rolling, flame-coloured hair. She had journeyed fifteen celestial blocks to encircle his soul. Lucius’s eyes locked onto her Arcadian amulet, a cut of pure eroticinium. The universe’s most sacred gem. The jewel gave its owner second sight and lay like sunken treasure between a gravity distorting pair of-
“Adam!”
Outdoors on the unkept lawn, the other side of the dusty classroom window, The Pretty Girl In The Year Above with the big red backpack was glistening in the late afternoon sunshine. She was supposed to be painting a picture of the sea. Her easel was set apart from the other classmates. While they splashed their canvases with murky blues, the collage she crafted orbited a different sphere. Elegant, precise and suffused with reddish fragments torn from paper. Adam could see a grand flaming tower floating beacon-like above the waves, under which swirled lovely mermaids and lavishly detailed leviathans. A strange interpretation of the pale vista which formed the circumference of the orphanage’s world. In the make-believe sky at the top of the picture was a white disc with swirling red at its centre. Sunset on a liquid Mars, seen through the eyes of an angelic aesthete from Venus.
“Stop daydreaming!”
A shrill sound from across the cosmos. The dragon had stirred, breathing fire from its dank pit. Adam sensed Miss Guffrey’s squinting, slate-grey eyes zero in. He pictured the saliva drooling from her mouth, falling to the floor, melting the classroom tiles and seeping downwards to poison the earth’s core.
“Pay attention and look at the board!”
The Pretty Girl In The Year Above was caressing the last scraps of paper onto the canvas. Despite the sea breeze, none blew away. Her red backpack, big enough to hold a Querff gun and both of Lucius’s hearts, lay tucked under her stool. Please turn round. Adam wanted to see her immaculate face in the post-meridian light. Savour that constellation of incorruptible beauty no one else noticed. Weirdo. Freak. Alien. The vixens would shout these names as she swished serenely down the corridors. Lance said he’d once seen her alone in the woods on the other side of the island, sitting cross-legged and staring into a makeshift fire. Happy in her solitude.
“Are you listening to a word I’m saying?”
The reptile was advancing, dragging her gammy leg.
“Sorry Miss Guffrey, I thought I saw something out the window.”
“Yes Adam. Your life passing you by.”
Claws clasped on hips. Venom stewing behind the eyes. Slapped-on lavender lipstick. The bobbles on her fossil-grey cardigan reminded Adam of lunar craters. Below her yellowy-white matronly blouse was a long skirt the colour of graphite, which she probably ironed religiously every evening while spawning visions of geometric cruelty in her soul. Grey in dress. Grey in face. A creature who’d emerged fully formed from the leaden walls of the staff room. Her breath stank too, as if she’d just lowered twitching vermin by the tail into her slobbering chops. The whole school was like that. Bland, inconspicuous monsters lurked in every corner. What a crazy idea. To turn an old prison for funny people into a place for lonely children.
“Now you’re back on planet Earth, please answer the question every other member of the class has managed.”
“Sorry Miss can you –”
“Whaaat will you be when you grow up?”
The rest of the art class had headed to the dormitories, but The Pretty Girl In The Year Above wasn’t finished. She’d seen them off one by one, like Electra. Maybe she would read Adam’s story with second sight too. Softly prise him apart, sensitively tuning into the space-age symphonies stirring in his head, then leading him out of boredom’s abyss on the blaze of a million mystical torches.
“The answer’s on the board, Adam. Not on the bleedin’ horizon.”
The Bleeding Horizon is available to buy at Apple Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Google Play.
PHILIP PARRISH 