Unnatural insects purposefully alight upon his dishevelled, branch-beaten hair, and by crawling have entered the inner ear adding by their passage inside his head to the cacophony, to the strains of the oozing male remains, racking his brain and drumming his mind to a new beat that takes him fearless down the unmarked way to the edge of the formal gardens from which appalling scenes are viewed with no more regrets for the path chosen, but a zombie's progress to an inevitable end. Such is the contrast between overwhelming forest and the open, moonlit environment of stretching, flattened, boot-pricked lawns of punctuating statuary and plunging fountains containing the foaming scenes of female myth, of urgent and endless repetition, that were he still a thinking being, he would in the effort to make sense of this change of view, no doubt consider the space in front to have parted for the sake perhaps of his respite, as if the abruptly altered perspective was indeed magical, the result of some divine trick of the light, of the illusion painted in trompe-l'oeil or whispered through red dreaming lips. Spewing forth from the centre of an otherwise still, limpid pool of cooling water of vast dimensions shaped by the intersecting geometry of heavenly pentagram and hexagram, in spasmodic gushes of spray belching rubberised men, a circular tunnel produces for the nets of silent women who stand glistening in highest heels, in thigh-boots like patient cranes or statuesque storks - appearing to be made of black marble or bronze to the disoriented man swimming blindly into their trap, hooking his under-belly with sharpened gaff, pulling him skidding onto the rubbery grass, where, with his lungs gasping for breath, he writhes into waking consciousness upon a bed of broken pine needles - a harvest of slaves and playthings for the luxury and the entertainment of the female inhabitants of Chateau Morville now emerging rubber-clad, stiletto-booted into the full, bright moonlight.
A whirling of retreating water, a final gurgling from far beneath, reveals the circular rim of the Mediterranean tunnel, at last emptied of its bewildered humanoid catch, a round void leading back out to sea from whose circumference we believe the first Egyptian priestess, waterproofed naturally in glossy rubber, emerged in ancient times from her otherworldly past becoming the first European member of Heel!. The piles of floundering rubbermen heaped up high beside the soon stagnating pool, when observed from the panoramic viewpoint at the forest's edge, from where retreat, by the re-discovery of the hidden route, might mistakenly strike the reader who has remained partially alert, awake, as a conceivable means of escape, are tethered tightly and individually to saddle leather, then hauled ceremoniously over the moonlit lawn by veiled equestriennes in black silk habits to strategically placed and internally subterranean ice-houses from whose dark spaces booted women dressed again in rubber extract the frozen, encased forms of male tourists as rectangular blocks of ice and guide their sliding bulk to the fountains, to be positioned over the countless seething and temporarily impeded jets of hot, gaseous spring-water.The water hissing and steaming, supplied through the cracks of oracular rock upon which each fountain was sited in prehistory, eats away at this wrapping of stiffening ice, softening the encasing lines of the rectangular block, until penetrating to the base of the spine, through which is felt a terrible and enlivening heat that stirs his nervous system by its surging of sensation through the vertebrae up into the neck and skull from which the unnatural insects escape into the night air, back to the concealing forest.
Forced higher and higher beyond the cloudless sky, projected to the Goddess' empyrean realm by the rising jet of water beneath his spine, upon which his body-weight sags down sacrificially, as if pierced through, gored from below by her red forefinger-nail, being suspended for inspection beneath the creamy rays of approving, lunar light, he perceives the slow and corresponding descent to earth of the focused moon which, at the predicted hour, settles between the curving horns of the head-dress of the statue seated upon the black granite plinth in the chateau's gardens, polished and dedicated to the Goddess Isis. Winched back down to the ground by beaten slaves, simultaneously with the lowering of the rubbermen raised up by the fountains, as if guiding the lunar orb through the night sky to this resting-place, huge balloons, glowing at the end of taut ropes of near-infinite length, appear above the chateau. The rubber balloonists, male and frozen solid, being past and entrapped readers of Heel! launched as prize-winners beyond the stratosphere to experience firsthand the divine vibration of the Goddess, are then retrieved from their plaited, wicker baskets, and gathered like the products of the harvest festival at the feet, shining in stiletto boots, of the reanimating statue of Isis.
to be continued...