The Jagged Spiral Excerpt: Stump Speech

Shepherd climbs onto the tallest tower of the structure – the stinking foreman trails behind, hefting his heavy club and proudly displaying a hobo’s head on a stick – blood pulses out from the remains of the carotid artery and brain oozes sluggishly down the pallid, hairy cheek. People begin to amass before the construction – cloistering in the side streets at first then slowly drifting into the muddy square – old time party faithful begin smiling, handing out the manifestos. Coolies, selected at random from the native population, draw kabbalistic sigils in the dirt with fresh gobbets of wet brain matter and mouth the ritualistic hymns – who knows how these bastards got mixed up in this thing, but I bet they are regretting it now.

A religious babbler, dressed in his dainty-whites, appears and addresses the assembled crowd over the loudspeaker. “Law and order – that’s the ticket – out of the dark recesses of our society we have produced the following specimen – no better than common shit in a bucket!” The crowd goes nuts for it. Screech and scuttle about the square – A man in a hooded black mask is produced from somewhere in back of the stage – a reeking miasma evaporates from his oily skin, hangs thickly in the already crowded air. Nothing less than a good old fashioned lynching. The smell of blood drives these baboons into a frenzy – begin furiously rubbing one another in pneumatic orgasmic pattern.

Calhoun slithers into view in the window of a nearby building – smiles slightly and breathes in deep of the rising stench of the nation’s misery juice. Once the process has begun, it is irreversible – the platform drops, the rope twangs and that sorry motherfucker’s neck snaps in the big instant death. Of course, even the neck snap and sever is not really an instant death – impulses jet down every fibre of the nervous system and for a brief moment the poor sap glows and gasps for air – blast of tepid piss comes dripping down the leg, hitting some of the closest onlookers in their upturned eyes. The crowd goes wild – Shepherd sits in the big seat – Calhoun grins, expanding his form with each inbreath of the aggregated blood-lust. I have seen this kind of thing before, sailing down the Yangtze river watching a local ladyboy rub the feet of an old Tibetan Lama over a series of unpleasantly slow and drawn out evenings. It is not a pretty sight to watch a motherfucker like that feed in his natural fashion – as the poor attendent fingered Lama’s bony toes and their levels of disgust rose, the Lama would swell up and bulge like a purple parasite, grunting and drooling like a self-satisfied toddler. Calhoun’s appearance at this moment is similar – his tongue snakes out and dribbles a thick, meaty juice down his chin, eyes bulge out with enormous pressure and his testicles swell to an obscene size. The whole display makes my stomach churn – if there was anything at all inside of me, I am sure that I would vomit it up at the sight of him.

The body is tossed down from the scaffold and torn apart by the ravenous crowd – everybody wants a piece of him. Shepherd waves to the crowd – adoration comes welling back up at her like she was the goddamned virgin mary. Small albino dog comes to lick the brain-mash off the bitumen – chased off by some freckle-faced cretin. “Bad dog!” he yells, flailing his limbs in the most menacing gestures he can muster – grabs handfuls of the stuff and offers it up to Shepherd on the stage like it was gumballs. These people are getting out of control – swaying back and forth and screaming, violent and nasty – once the poor fuck at the end of the rope has been devoured, they start turning on one another. The guards try to keep everyone separated, but there’s only so much they can do – and Calhoun sits up in his tower getting fatter and fatter.

This is the way of things – they came here for a ritual public execution, and Shepherd has given it to them. People love a bit of violence – it excites them spiritually and sexually. Shepherd and Calhoun know this well – give the people something to eat, someone to shit on, and let them jerk off into an open wound occasionally – that’s how politics has always been, right back to the goddamned Greeks. Shepherd lets these degenerates have their fun for a little while, before she stands and addresses the throng – a sudden hush falls on the rabble. “Law and order! The government I lead will be a law and order government – none of these filthy degenerates and riff-raff wandering the streets – little bit of common decency amongst the population.” The crowd cheers wildly. One of the putrid motherfuckers lets out a horrific yell, “Let’s keep these filthy apes and cock-sucking hairdressers off our streets!” General rumble of approval from the assembled rodentry – all eyes turn to Shepherd, journalists prime their pens and voice recorders – but Shepherd is a professional, she won’t be caught so easily. “Law and order – the government I lead will be a law and order government – little bit of common decency amongst the people.” Talking points to a tee, no firm commitments – “of course the government I lead will have measures to deal with defective individuals, but everybody will have something coming to them under the government I lead.” Don’t give the bastards an inch – business as usual. The malignant prick down the front feels like he’s won this round – Shepherd’s given him just enough to justify his position, but every shade of doubt in the crowd has been simultaneously entertained. The journalists scribble furiously, getting good copy for their respective angles.

The political game is a spiral staircase of promises and vision – you never know what’s around the corner, but everyone’s pretty sure that they’re still on their way up. It doesn’t really matter what Shepherd says at this juncture – just so long as it doesn’t knock anybody back down the stairs. Of course, some people are too far down the spiral to know where the shit is coming from – sterilise the homeless, no-one cares – well, maybe the sorry eunuchs who get the snip, but they can’t see far enough up the spiral to know who sent down the order. The trick is always to stay one step ahead – that’s the game. Stock-market crash? If you’re high enough up, that sort of thing won’t knock you down – and besides, you can always blame it on the blacks or single-mothers when it comes right down to it. This is the overall method of the Control system – always has been – stay above, stay hidden. No-one can tear down what they can’t see.

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From Chapter VI Stump Speech