 I leaned closer to examine the designs and was startled to discover that they depicted, in grossly caricaturised form, human sexual organs. Yet this was no simple gallery of antique erotica, for not one of the organs in the pictures was shown to have a human owner. They didn’t even seem to have human skin: the phalluses were covered in interlocking plates much like a suit of armour, while their female counterparts – which more than anything resembled a maniac’s attempt to copy a diagram of the female reproductive system from a biology textbook – were translucent enough for the viewer to discern a tangled network of blood vessels and nerve fibres beneath the surface of the uterus. This network became more or less visible depending on the angle from which it was viewed – a singular quality which I spent a minute or so experimenting with. But when I started moving away to inspect the reliefs on the other side of the tunnel, one of those uterine tubes suddenly throbbed, and an unidentifiable black fluid appeared to surge through it…! I was so alarmed that I dropped my Zippo, which stayed alight for a moment after it struck the ground. I looked down at the area thus illuminated and saw that the soft grass I had slept upon wasn’t grass at all – it was curly, wispy hair, sprouting from a smooth grey surface whose spasmic twitching beneath the naked flame suggested a monstrous kind of flesh…! I choked with fright and ran, choosing to abandon my lighter rather than risk direct contact with that abhorrent parody of turf. As I pelted through the tunnel – following it around to the left, then to the right, down a slight declivity and at last sharply upwards – I commenced going ‘La la laaa’ at the top of my voice in a desperate bid to drown out the slapping of my trainers against that repellent sod, and clenching my fists as hard I could lest I became too acutely aware of its loathsome undulations. Eventually I was able to make out a patch of light in the distance which seemed too pale and bright to have been created by those hellish bas-reliefs, and the further I ascended the more certain I grew that it was daylight. Daylight! It was the first time in my life I’d ever been genuinely excited by the prospect of going outdoors. The light was streaming from an opening on the right-hand side of the corridor, and as I drew nearer it became apparent that this offered my only possible escape route; the tunnel I had been following terminated in an impassable barrier of fallen rock a few feet beyond it. In view of this I stopped beside the aperture, which was more or less twice the size of a standard doorway, and cautiously put my head around it. What I saw then was enough to make me doubt my own sanity, yet it was so palpably real that my first instinct was rather to doubt the sanity of the universe.  'The story I’m about to tell is true in every detail and you must try to believe it, no matter how hard that may seem, because it proves that my "impotence" was never anything to do with me not loving you, or not thinking you were gorgeous, or being a secret gaybait. It was to do with primal forces of inhuman evil.'
That’s how I put it to my ex-girlfriend. I’m not quite sure how to put it to YOU – let’s face it, you’re capricious – but that doesn’t alter the fact that you MUST read this book. Not only does it relate the full story of how I met and fell in love with the most extraordinary woman who ever lived, it also offers a genuinely plausible explanation for all the terrible wickedness in this world AND exposes a monumentally revolting cosmic conspiracy that implicates the whole human race, as well as several others you’ve never even heard of. But I wouldn’t want to alienate you, so please try also to keep in mind that it’s basically just a lovely light romantic comedy for much of the time, with lots of droll observations about university life in the 1990s blah blah rites of passage blah blah end of innocence blah blah beautifully evoked. It only really starts to go all H.P. Lovecraft about halfway through, and even then you’ll need your sense of humour as much as your strong stomach (it IS strong, isn’t it? Oh do please say that it’s strong!). Moreover, I can promise – in fact positively guarantee – that you will never, ever be able to forget it... |
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