SPOILED 2 - part twelve

Donal Keery, otherwise known as Dr Nightingale, stared at his bloated reflection in the mirror of his private quarters beside The Lab, huffing gently. Thin red stretchmarks had woven their way up the lower portion of his huge, distended abdomen, gifted to him by The Chamber. He could still feel all those cheeseburgers churning away inside his gut, flesh still tender to the touch.

Seeking fresh clothes only unearthed the fact he’d outgrown his entire wardrobe now. Lab coats and argyle sweaters? Forget it; he was forced to settle rather reluctantly on a comically-tight shirt, having to hold his breath in order to fasten each button. He would have to put in a request to Swan for larger sizes.

(How ridiculous! Me, a damned grown man, asking for permission for new clothes!)

Yet there was a part of him that couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps he deserved this. To be fattened, cowed, kept in place. After all he’d done. All of the hurt he’d caused. Perhaps it was only right that he received the same treatment he doled out each day?

He couldn’t be sure. After all, this wasn’t how things were supposed to be. It had all become… malformed. The original Dr Nightingale of old had held Eden in his hands. His fatboys had been happy! Back when The Island had been under his command, they’d come in their droves, lavished upon and fed to their hearts’ content. They hadn’t wanted to leave.

But then Swan came. With his Thing and his ego and his orders… Carving out this cesspool of a facility inside the mountain.

After that, precious Resort destroyed, Donal had been consigned to The Lab, to a role of gaoler, administrator, punisher.

Now his days were filled with screaming and crying… and begging…

He lumbered heavily about his quarters; hands rested against his great Chamber-stretched belly. Perhaps he ought to seek precautions, lest another incursion arise.

That turned his thoughts to the two detectives.

(What to make of all THAT?) They were an unknowable quantity. Anomalous in all this. They’d wreaked havoc back on Kingfisher’s Farm, apparently, but quite what they were doing here or how they even found this place was impossible to comprehend. What was surer, however, was that there could be no escape from Swan’s rage. He would hunt them down like the heartless bastard he was, show them no mercy.

Donal picked up a framed photograph in his chubby hand, fingers all the less dexterous for their added fat. His son Niall stood grinning beside his fiancée Cara in the frame, both young and enamoured; the picture had been taken on a holiday in Norway. Donal hadn’t seen his boy in years.

(Do it for him). That was a mantra he let run through his mind daily. On bad days, hourly. (Keep him safe from Swan. At all costs. Do whatever you have to).

A tap-tap-tap at the door.

‘Doctor, you’re needed at The Palace,’ came the muffled voice of a guard outside.

Dr Nightingale sighed a weighty sigh.

‘It’s urgent, Sir,’ the guard added.

‘Jaysus, Joseph and Mary… What happened here?’

There was substance everywhere. The kind of substance that belonged inside of a human body, not out. It coated the walls, the floor, it even spilled over into the canal, where Vashti the white tiger now lay, cleaning herself off. It ran down the cylindrical glass frontage of The Chamber with…

Mr Swan inside!

He thumped against the interior with one hand, fed himself laboured bites of burger with the other, looking somehow disheveled and pumped at once.

‘Never mind what happened here, you fat cretin! Get me out of this thing!’

His ordinarily smooth stomach was bulging within his designer shirt, looking painfully bloated. Swan’s impeccable beard had wilted and now homed pieces of beef and breadcrumbs. Strands of sweat-ridden hair fell before his eyes. It seemed his lungs had received quite a workout.

This was the first time Dr Nightingale had ever seen the man anything less than perfectly poised and composed.

Mr Swan was… not in control.

‘How did you even…,’ the doctor began, before resettling with, ‘What happened?’

‘Your ring, man! Use your insignia ring!’ Swan attempted to bellow with a mouthful of food and waning lung capacity.

Nightingale could only hazard that the man might’ve eaten a dozen or so cheeseburgers so far, all in a bid to keep breathing, to keep his lungs and heart fed alongside his surprisingly stretched gut.

(How ironic).

A Master’s insignia ring was the only thing that could open The Chamber, and even then only from the outside. And of course Donal knew this all too well, having so recently spent his own spell in there, he and Swan’s positions reversed.

He felt at the engraved nightingale resting atop his left ring finger. There was no question of his position.

‘Don’t just stand there! Fucking open this chamber at once!’ Swan growled, fiercely unwrapping a newly plonked cheeseburger while he devoured the remains of its predecessor, aiming to complete the task before having to experience yet another depletion of oxygen.

But far from opening anything, Donal stood tall and studied the man in The Chamber.

Mr Swan, despite his musculature and padded midriff, looked somehow small behind the glass. Small and vulnerable.

A frightened middle-aged man.

When the doctor said nothing, Swan went on,

‘Don’t you even think about leaving this room without releasing me, do you hear?!’ He stopped to munch, eyeing The Chamber’s internal vents. ‘Don’t even THINK about it!’

Nightingale’s shoes stuck slightly to the marble when he paced about the viscera. Swan must have exploded a lad. It was far from a first offense, though the doctor had never been so up close and personal with the aftermath before. He wondered who it had been. His eyes slid momentarily to the curved entryway; the guards were tucked around the corner, out of sight, out of earshot.

‘You’ve done quite enough damage, I think,’ he told the man behind the glass quietly.

Weirdly, Swan grinned, his cheeks puffed with cheeseburger.

‘Ohhhh no no no. No, you don’t get to judge me, old man… Not you. Not anyone!’ He suddenly whacked against the glass. ‘No-one can judge me! This is MY palace! MY island!’

‘This was never your island!’ Dr Nightingale found his venom, and spat back. ‘Never! You had no business taking it from me, coming here with your… your… aberration of nature!’

‘You would DARE to call him that?! Our founding father? Our God?!’

‘Ha! Please! That THING down there might have been Elias Crowe once upon a time but a life unnaturally stretched has turned him into nothing more than a mindless beast!’

‘I would cut out your tongue for such blasphemy!’

‘How?’ Donal raised both lengthy arms, laughed a hollow laugh. ‘How? Your ‘ultimate power’ is a fairy story, Lee!’ He delighted in seeing Mr Swan’s eyes engorge with hate at hearing his own real name spoken aloud. ‘Whatever old Crowe did hundreds of years ago to accumulate so much wealth, to extend his life against all natural laws, you’ll never find it. You think carving off his face and getting the gainer-boys to try and replicate his “deal” is really going to achieve anything? You’re living in a delusion-‘

‘ENOUGH!!’ Swan screamed, stuffing furiously.

‘I should never have let you or your cronies near my son. I should have been more careful,’ Nightingale went on, now in full swing and done cowering before this petty man. ‘And I should never have let you send poor Lucas down into that thing’s playhouse!’

‘SILENCE!’ Swan raged. ‘If you aren’t going to liberate me from this infernal contraption, then you leave me no choice…’

Dr Nightingale then heard the sound he’d heard too many times in the company of this madman - the deathly whistle.

At once, Vashti’s attention was sought, her head raised. She stood slowly, revealing red-stained teeth.

‘Vashti, my darling,’ Mr Swan said slowly. ‘Kill.’

****

(This can’t be happening…)

Everything Lucas thought he knew about reality was being defied - no, defiled - right in front of him. This nightmare fuel calling itself Elias Crowe was something that just shouldn’t exist! A two-hundred-year-old man? With claws?

Lucas was just a kid from Wyoming. He’d thought a little travelling after graduation might be a fun thing to do. The whole backpacking thing. See Europe. Soak up some culture.

He hadn’t bargained on being kidnapped and spirited away to some nutso island where they force-feed you all day every day and, oh by the way, there’s a frickin’ monster in the basement!

And now some World’s Strongest Man and his grumpy white uncle had popped up out of nowhere to fight the thing!

(This isn’t happening…)

‘Take Lucas and get him outta here!’ the big one was shouting while dodging vicious swipes from Crowe.

‘How do you guys know my name?’ Lucas asked as his arm was gripped by the strongman and pulled away from the fight.

‘Tell you later,’ he replied, ‘Come on! We need to get out-‘

‘We can’t,’ Lucas said, not exactly resisting but knowing full well it was fruitless. ‘Unless you guys left the vault door open?’

‘Go!’ the older, massive-bellied one roared. He’d scraped a chair from under the ancient table and was using it to keep Elias Crowe at bay, lion-tamer-style.

‘What vault door?’ the younger one pressed, sweat caressing his chiselled face. ‘We came down a chute of water, it was like a waterfall. No way back up.’

Crowe smashed the chair to pieces and growled.

‘We really are trapped!’ Lucas cried.

The powerlifter guy called to his… associate? Partner? Actual uncle? It wasn’t clear. ‘Arthur, they locked him down here! There’s no way out!’

The one called Arthur was throwing the remnants of broken chair leg at Crowe, who easily swiped it away. ‘Well, that’s just fuckin… peachy, ain’t it?!’

Crowe sprang into the air from stretched hind legs, aiming his claws once more at the big man. Arthur swerved and rolled, but not before a talon-laden hand could pin him down, scratching through clothing to dig into flesh.

‘Aaargh!’ Arthur winced, trying to push the creature off.

‘Oh no you don’t!’ the muscle man left Lucas’s side and burst into a run, barrelling into Crowe’s side like a rugby tackle and tearing him from the older man.

‘Be careful!’ Lucas yelled.

‘Manni!’ Arthur called out, getting to his feet.

The one called Manni was locked into a scrum with Crowe, trying desperately to keep those claws from finding his skin. ‘How are you… so… insanely… strong…?!’ he grunted at his foe.

Crowe only gnashed teeth and slathered spittle.

‘Lucas, lad, you stay back!’ Arthur hollered across the table, grabbing another chair. He raised it aloft and brought it down hard across Crowe’s back, not achieving much. Then Arthur slammed his fists against the great beast. ‘Get! Off! Him!’

Lucas didn’t know what to do. He found himself dithering once more, coated in sweat. Elias Crowe was going to tear these two men to shreds, then probably him! He had no idea how, but the bicentennial had the strength of ten men, it seemed. His primal nature was now in full control.

Manni managed to kick Crowe away and shuffle to his feet, but his oppressor was back on him in an instant, taking the fight closer and closer to the nearest pool of lava. About the cavernous ceiling, more was pouring down, shimmering the air with deadly heat.

Arthur had taken to throwing rocks at Crowe, but they appeared ineffectual, rebounding without a scrape.

‘Mr Arthur, Sir!’ Lucas cried out, thinking. ‘Try, uh, try maybe talking him down? Maybe we can, I don’t know, get his human side to come back out? Maybe that’ll stop him from fighting!’

It was the best he could think of. Clearly all three of them, even combined, weren’t going to put a dent in Crowe physically. Appealing to whatever humanity was left in that warped, animalistic husk might be their only option.

Arthur caught Lucas’s eye, understood, and nodded.

‘Oi! Oi! I got a question, then, Elias!’ He snapped his fat fingers at the beast, trying to rouse it from the strongman Manni who was running out of ground not seeped in liquid fire to back up into. When Crowe didn’t respond, he pushed on, ‘Why fatboys? Eh? Why is it always fat blokes?’

This did something. Crowe slowed. Maybe he would have blinked had he owned eyelids. His head turned back to Arthur a mite.

‘You said,’ the big man carried on in a poorly-veiled desperate tone, ‘you started some corpulent society or summing. And it got twisted.’

Crowe swivelled his entire, long body, his black pupils darting between Arthur and Lucas, the latter of whom seemed to absorb his interest most.

‘I… fattennnned them up…,’ he said, unsure of himself.

‘Yeah, but why?’ Arthur asked, seizing this reprieve of violence and working his voice hard, back down to something more placating. ‘Why did you fatten them up, Elias?’

Crowe didn’t take his eyes from Lucas. He turned in full and stalked that way now.

Lucas felt an involuntary gulp work its way down his throat.

‘Becausssssse… I could… Becausssse… it gave mmmmmeeee… pleasurrrrre…’

Arthur saw what Crowe was doing. ‘Lucas, get back!’

Lucas tried, but knew he’d only be backing up into the tunnel he’d come here through, leading to the dead end that was that stupidly thick door.

‘So some stranger gave you a load of money, yeah? Way back when, in the 1800’s.’ Arthur waved his hands at Crowe’s periphery, intending to lead his focus away from Lucas. ‘And you started your little secret club of rich ponces who liked the belly boys, eh?’

‘The strangerrrrr…,’ was all that could be pulled from Crowe’s tongue, Lucas now filling his world. He began to clamber back over the table.

‘What…,’ Arthur sought for anything that might lull Crowe back, ‘what did you mean when you said your little gang got twisted into the Rookery? What does that mean? Twisted by who?’

‘By whom,’ Manni called out helpfully, and Arthur looked like he might murder his partner for a second.

‘My conssssortiummmm…,’ Crowe slathered, not ceasing his predatory crawl.

‘That’s the one,’ Arthur kept up the talk. ‘Who turned your consortium into The Rookery? Whom?’

‘Uhhh, Mr Arthur, it’s not working…!’ Lucas’s lips wibbled. Soon he’d be edging his lardy behind into that tunnel, and Crowe would have him cornered.

‘Ssssooo plump…!’ Crowe practically drooled, and his eyes lit once more with that entirely inhuman force. It was almost possible to see the exact moment of transition within his time-addled mind, the snuffing of rational thought, giving in to the base instincts.

‘Arthur, he’s not buying it! We gotta do something!’ Manni shouted.

‘Ohhh fuck!’ Arthur grunted.

Elias Crowe shook out his arms and leaped from the table, letting his claws extend fully outwards.

‘Guys!’ Lucas implored to the two, never taking his vision from those razor-sharp pinpoints at the end of Crowe’s digits.

Crowe roared and pushed to attack.

But he was stopped. Not by Arthur, nor Manni, and not by Lucas himself.

‘Aaaarrgh, don’t you touch him!!’

Elias Crowe was pushed back by a tall, hairy fattened body barely clothed in torn rags and savagely gouged in deep red scratches.

‘… Doc…?’

Lucas gaped as Dr Nightingale, who’d swept past him to tackle Crowe, gripped at the monster and dug his heels in, forcing that beastly form back and back.

‘I shhhhallll have… mmmmmyyy delight!!!’ Crowe bellowed.

‘You shall… have… NOTHING!!’

(Doc…)

Nightingale was grappling with all his might, straining every bulbous inch of his body to keep Crowe from advancing.

Arthur ran to join, but a snarl and a swipe from Crowe nearly took his moustache off. Manni ran up to the other side and succeeded in pinning one of Crowe’s arms back, but not without receiving a nasty gash of his own across the chest.

‘Aaargh, you fucker!’

‘Uggghhnnnhaaaaand mmmmeee!!!’

‘Not a chance, you ungodly freak.’ The doctor pushed and pushed, making headway, he steered Crowe backwards with shaking limbs, aiming for another magma pool. ‘You two,’ he carried on at Arthur and Manni, ‘get Lucas to safety! Get him out!’

‘You can’t take this thing on alone!’ Manni growled, struggling to retain a lock on Crowe’s arm. Arthur was still attempting to subdue the other which flailed wildly, claws ripping at the air.

‘UUUNNHANNND MMMEEEE!!!’

‘Doc, why? What are you doing here?’ Lucas could now see that the tall, bellied Irishman had been slashed across the face by clawmarks that looked marginally smaller than Crowe’s. Whatever had made them had taken his left eye with it.

‘Nnnnnrrghhh!’ Dr Nightingale gritted his teeth together from the effort. Somehow he was winning. Somehow Crowe was inching back and back. The magma pool was closer, and sizzling spouts of the stuff were pouring down into it from above. ‘You, with the moustache…’

‘Eh?’ Arthur responded, narrowly missing another swipe.

‘Reach… into my pocket… Give my ring… to Lucas… it acts… as a master key… You and you… go! Get him to… safety…!’

Arthur ducked as Crowe lashed out once more and pecked a quick hand into the doctor’s pocket which was swishing this way and that as the tall man continued his impossible, adrenaline-fuelled pushback against the apoplectic beast; he found the ring. It bore an insignia of a nightingale.

Crowe had given up on words and was resorting to pure, animal screams. His eyes looked set to pop out of his faceless head, teeth grinding.

‘If we leave you with him he’ll kill you!’ Manni cried, ignoring a look from his partner.

‘GO!’ Nightingale roared, pushing more, more, more. Lava poured directly behind Crowe.

‘Come on!’ Arthur gripped Manni and pulled him away, just as the doctor grappled a hairy hand against Crowe’s chin and forced his head upward and backwards.

‘Back to Hell, monster!’

Crowe writhed and lashed, scoring fresh wounds against Dr Nightingale’s skin, gouging deeply, letting blood. But the doctor’s hand was forcing his head under the downpour of lava, causing a deafening, inhuman screech.

Arthur and Manni reached Lucas, looking back in horror.

‘But… Doc…!’ Lucas began.

Dr Nightingale was forcing Crowe to swallow the pouring lava, as the both of them became engulfed in the pool. The doctor’s trousers had already caught fire.

‘Niall Jonah Keery!’ he cried out in pain. ‘That’s my son! He’s in Dublin! Tell him-‘ The flames had crept up his body, his feet were sinking into the magma, splashes of the molten stuff escaping Crowe’s throat and sizzling against his hands, his face. ‘Tell him… his Dad loves him…!’

And Crowe had swallowed so much white hot lava that it flowed within his ancient flesh, actually glowing inside that horribly stretched abdomen. His entire impossible form was bowing outwards, bulging, expanding…

‘I think it’s gonna blow!’ Manni shouted, and grabbed Arthur and Lucas, tugging them into a run before-

BOOOOOOOM!!!

Elias Crowe exploded violently behind them, shaking the cavern like an earthquake, walls erupting into deep splintering cracks sprayed with gluts of hellfire. Pillars crumbled and dislodged, huge chunks of the tunnel, all rock and rubble, began raining over the trio as they pelted as fast as they could to the thick metal door. The shaking didn’t stop. Crowe’s final moment had snapped the very geological foundations of the mountain.

‘It’s locked! Fuck!’ Manni cried, beating the metal as more rubble and dust came cascading down, floor beneath him quaking.

Arthur produced the insignia ring. ‘Not for long, it ain’t! This had better bloody work…’

A rock the size of a grapefruit just missed Lucas’s head as he watched the big man press the ring against the access panel. His heart unclenched with monumental relief as the locks undid themselves and the thick metal began to swing open, albeit painfully slowly.

Manni pushed it faster with his bulk. ‘Fucking come ON!’

Outside, the full extent of the damage became clear: The entire mountain was collapsing from within! Huge hunks of interior rock were crumbling away, down into darkness, some of them taking out distant quadrants in fell swoops, electricity blazing in showers of sparks. Nothing would stop vibrating, the very walls roaring and echoing, stone on stone, breaking apart. The sound was deafening.

‘We can’t take the tram! It’s a death trap! This whole place is coming down!’ Manni moaned, seeing the vehicle sat there, presumably recently commandeered by the late Dr Nightingale.

‘Ain’t got no choice! Come on!’ Arthur hollered back, and led the three of them on board. He asked Lucas, ‘How does it work?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lucas worried back. So much was happening! ‘I… I think it’s automatic? Maybe?’

‘Sweet, try this panel,’ Manni replied.

Lucas saw Arthur join the muscle man and use the insignia ring to open a small box at the front of the tram. The pair of them guessed at some buttons and the doors hissed closed, then the whole thing was lurching into motion.

‘Got it!’ Arthur exclaimed, and then quite unexpectedly he gave the beefy guy a short kiss.

(Oh. Okaaaay…)

Pieces of mountain dinged and thunked against the tram as it sped them from Crowe’s lair.

(From the Doc’s final resting place…)

‘Here,’ Arthur Sweet sidled back to Lucas, holding out a pudgy palm. ‘This is yours. He wanted you to have it. It’s a master key, apparently.’

Lucas took the ring with the nightingale engraved on its face, not knowing what to feel.

So much had happened, and was still happening.

‘Says here the next stop is Swan Palace,’ Manni read a small display on the panel aloud.

Detritus nicked the tram window, splintering the glass into a fine cobweb.

‘That’s right,’ Lucas told him.

‘God, I hope this bloody thing holds,’ Manni muttered, frowning at the tram roof that continued to take more and more dents.

‘The yachts were near that way, right? I reckon that’s our best bet,’ Arthur said to his partner. His romantic partner, it seemed.

Manni nodded.

‘Sirs,’ Lucas added, ‘my friend is here somewhere. His name’s Reece. I can’t… I can’t leave without him, please.’

A rock then actually pierced the roof, tumbling to the back of the carriage, leaving a fist-sized hole in its wake.

‘Lucas, this place is coming apart at the seams,’ Manni replied, not unkindly.

‘No, the lad’s right,’ Arthur interjected. ‘And it’s not just his mate. What about all the other lads they got holed up here?’

Manni looked up through the hole in the roof.

‘I don’t know how much time we’ve got…’

But Arthur drew himself upright, belly proudly thrust outward.

‘We have to try.’

****

The tremors weren’t stopping. In fact, Elias Crowe’s final send-off had brought about a chain reaction within the mountain’s very core. Every quadrant shook. The dorms shook. The Lab shook. The Palace shook, including The Chamber Room where marbled masonry holding up the ceiling began to implode, bringing down massive shards of rock and stone. They glopped into the canals, burst pipes and eventually piled atop The Chamber itself.

While the foundations continued to upend themselves, The Island tearing itself apart, the heap now laden across what was left of The Chamber jarred, refusing to settle. That was, until a furious hand broke through the wreckage, bearing a ring marked with the image of a Swan.