Realidades

Nothing could have been more lascivious. The marketplace teemed with the energy of an ancient agora, vendors flaunting their wares as if prostitutes. Mendicants derelict and deprived of all their humanity clawed at passersby, their reptilian talons and metallic hooks reaching out to snatch unaware souls. The market itself seemed to transform before him, the narrow passages and causeways turning back on themselves without creating a loop, an ever expanding network of veins that never returned to the heart. Did they even begin there? It was a psychomanteum constructed either by a mad genius or school of possessed children. Borgaucho gripped the rail. From his vantage above the market he was safe, but he knew he could not remain there. He had errands to run, vegetables to purchase for a paella he would be making later that night, a dish to stoke the fires of a blossoming affair. He collected himself and cautiously made his way to the market.

Sifting through the endless menagerie of goods, he kept his gaze down toward his feet fearful lest he provoke the ire of an overzealous salesmen, or worse a colleague from the newspaper. Souls flew about him fitfully, forgotten and imprisoned in this labyrinth. He must be quick or he might end up like them. Borgaucho
stopped at a vegetable stand and examined the goods (term). Collectively, the assembled veggies told a gruesome tale of life. Some were young and vibrant, yet cried out in pain, stripped from their homes and bewailing their fate. Others were old, decrepit and diseased, moaning as they slid into liquid putrefaction.
Borgaucho hesitated here. The wrong choice could be disastrous. An ill-curated vegetable could wreck his meal, like hiring a deranged captain for a exploratory voyage. His hand hovered over a certain yucca root.

He stared at the thing. It was strange, the textures seemed more vibrant and violent than the other produce. He gasped. The root rippled with anticipation and from its cracked brown exterior pearlescent eyes appeared and the sliver of a mouth. It spoke to him, "Borgaucho, I am Gneb-Thoff, sorcerer king to an ancient people. A demon destroyed our civilization, but I transferred my life force into the earth. I have lived thousands of years waiting for this moment to find you. With your help I can...Wait! Where are you going?!" Borgaucho had grabbed two tomatoes, threw his currency at the proprietor, and left. He knew better than to
trust a talking yucca.

The journey home was perilous. He thought himself a more timid Ulysses, avoiding danger not through sharpness of mind or might, but fleetness of foot. Sirens, monsters, tricksters, and thugs all waited for him to slip up. Through shadow into light then back to shadow as the situation dictated, Borgaucho made his way
harried by unknown forces. Returning home, he slammed the door behind him. He pressed his back up against the wood as if to brace the entryway. He had survived another outing, but how long before he must venture forth again?

He trudged to the kitchen and set down his tomatoes. A newspaper fluttered on his desk, animated, possibly, by the spirit of a restless soul. He flinched as he picked it up and help it as far from his person
as his eyes would allow to see. Saturday May 17, 1958! Eight days had lapsed without his knowledge. He had missed his date, but where had he been?! Borgaucho felt his pulse. It was irregular, alternating long and short in elaborate sequence. Perhaps he had been drugged? He imagined his consciousness adrift in a fugue those eight days. No, it couldn't be. His blood pumped with meaning as if he were a carrier, some unaware host. A code! But sent by whom and containing what information? He needed a cipher.

Thank goodness he was a certified amateur cryptographer. He rushed to his code breaking kit. Scribbling out the intricate code as he felt he pulse, Borgaucho began to see. The code appeared a conversation, two different voices conspiring in an inhuman tongue. Whether demons conspiring or para-dimensional teenagers being homophobic, he could not be sure. It was indecipherable. Changing tactics, he entered the library of his memory in an attempt to recall when this might have befallen him. Stacks upon stacks wending about led him deeper and deeper until he came upon a geodesic dome of tomes. He stepped in and plucked a book from the structure...one of his more repressed high school memories. Quickly he put it back. It was then he decided to leave the library dwelling upon the tired maxim of the fallibility of memory, that and the librarian had demanded he depart for being too loud.

Borgaucho came to lying face up on his half twin mattress. He reasoned that no succubus could share a bed so small, thus he endured restive nights on his over-sized crib. The ceiling fan whirred above him, the blades creating in their wake a strange ripple. Borgaucho strained his eyes. Between the blades he saw another world horrible and fantastic: creatures abounding in vestigial limbs limping about and arraigning their ineffectual members in wretched boutiques, cityscapes built downward into nacreous sediment, the structures constantly shifting, collapsing, bringing ignominious death to their denizens. In disgust he stared as the extra-dimensional equivalent of Little Italy was subsumed in a structural swoon.

He shook his head. Why were all the alternate realities to which he was privy filled with monsters, idiots, and journalists? This was getting tiresome. Borgaucho stood up and rubbed the crust from his eyes. The flakes spiraled down and landed on his arm. Each fleck bloomed into a flower and then withered in decay, leaving
a putrefied dot on his flesh. He took no heed and made his way to the kitchen. Among the rotting victuals he choose to make his paella anyway, just in case his date should arrive. He laid out the tomatoes from the market and produced a kitchen knife. What once had been a steel now was stone, the cutlass itself less of a knife and more epee inscribed with symbols. It was terrible for cutting really, but he had no choice. With tremendous effort he diced the tomatoes. As if infused by the vivifying blood of the fruit, the blade gleamed and hummed with a near inaudible incantation. It seemed an ancient artifact of untold power. Perhaps
if he could steal it secrets, he might become master to powers beyond even death. There was no time, however. The muscles had to be boiled. He tossed the relic aside and continued with his preparations.

When the meal was finally cooked after a phantasmagoria of distractions, he set it down proudly on the table. Borgaucho sighed with relief. He had managed to avoid the wrath of an gluttonous spirit while cooking by pawning him off on a parasitic colony of sprites housed in a green bean. Now, in peace,
he could enjoy his meal regardless of whether his date would show up or not. He sat and sank his fork into the paella. Just then his plate shook, rippling with some harmonic force. His taste buds wept as the paella separated itself into its distinct ingredients, each neatly delineated in spherical mounds around his plate. There was a rapping at his door. What now, he thought. The wooden door burst apart, splinters careening every which way and sticking into the walls of his apartment. A burly red-gray demon stood in the doorway panting. Its eight pairs of tits drooped nearly to its ankles. Slowly in lumbered the demon over to Borgaucho. It plopped down into the chair across from him. "How many times do I have to tell you acolytes that I always prefer cookies to paella for my summoning ritual?!" Borgaucho sighed. He handed the monstrosity a fork.