CHAPTER EIGHTY – “RETURN to SENDER”

Shuddering, Norlin grasps the tiny handle of the King's crapper - looks eastward, out the bathroom window as the opaline fog dissipates, revealing an impossibly, incredibly blue horizon; hears the scuffle and shrieks as phibes take the Intelligence Chief from behind, sees the seared, mutilated Aspid sloshing back through the mire, back towards the hallway and Sykes' boat tied to Graceland's dock... knows (somehow) that the mutilated Sergeant will make it all the way back to Jatesland, witness to a Becoming that even an ocean of Mex-American retirement tequila will never purge from his dreams. Sees a phibe look up with half of Germany's face between its teeth - and the green alpine hat, and its little, white feather floating amid so many blackfeathers and greenfeathers; the blood and rosepetals in a zigzag and swirl of the toxic, sullen Mississippi beneath the sun and moon and the faces of Henry Hat, Jates and Mondretto... smells the fumes descending from the attic through widening cracks in the King's ceiling… feels his own life streaming from a dozen punctured, scorched and imploded wounds, pulls downward...

There is an unholy shudder of ancient plumbing... a trembling rippling from America's Standard to the vast, receding corners of the King's bathroom. The walls vibrate, mirrorflakes tumbling from the ceiling as giant fissures spring from the ancient cracks in Graceland's facade.

In Tupelo, an old, cold shadow... mission accomplished... settles into the center seat between Fred Cook and an almost-jolly Homer Sack as the solar engines begin rumbling...

The dark, viscous water of the King's latrine swirls, presciently...

The counterclockwise stir of gravity tips the Veronica upwards like a paintbrush (or the torso of an exclamation point ! ), rotating crazily in the King's bowl...

Far to the south, at riversmouth, Peg Reilly keeps watch over the comings and goings of malicious malefactors; Terushka, in chrysanthemum pajamas, naps soundly, across a hillock of murdered geese. In dreams, a contrite Hitler pushes pfennings across the counter of a Solar Furnace daystation, Monsignor Goodwine impostored by a warm, blue electricity. In his vast, chilly penthouse, Stephen Stimwood ponders, stares intently at a goosequill pen... formerly property of Kings... which lurches to an upright position, and writes:

"It is fundamentally irrational to expect human resonance..."

And another phibe in Graceland's doorway holds up Captain Sykes' fishing pole...

And the Corporal lowers his head onto the rim of the commode, shuddering and coughing bloody phlegm from shredded lungs and tonsils as the white fex disappears into the maelstrom; the King's palace crumbling in its act of decomposing back into the trillions of tiny, limestone skeletons from whence it arose. And, seconds before Graceland's flaming attic crashes down upon him, C-Squad’s czar gazes eastward, out through the King's Lounge Room window and into a suddenly blue, blue sky into which a fiery projectile ascends... Norlin beholding that lonely, solar eagle bearing hopeful pilgrims on a course from Tupelo Jatesport towards their New Plasmic Becoming with Triple-J's celestial host... that murder of placid angel escorts with great, black wings, swooping in graceful, linear majesty across the kernel of the sun.

CHAPTER EIGHTY – “RETURN to SENDER”

THE END