The man gazes from his perch, entranced by the crawling ocean beneath the derelict shell of what was, once upon a time, a home. The vanished west wall of the upstairs bedroom gives him a panorama of Dover, a familiar haven.
He observes the distant ants with a longing gaze, far off civilians clustering around the local port. Observing their throbbing passion, heartful embraces of farewell and loving words whispered, all from a distance.
Hypnotised by the pulsating spiral patterns of the monochrome men and their doting admirers, hysterical on propaganda. Clockwork soldiers eager to bite the bullet in the name of heroism.
His ears ring with the naïve maxims that once ricocheted through his mind when he was the one boarding the boat:
"Tomorrow I fall in. I've finally been drafted to fight for the good of the country, like a hero, for King and country and honour and liberty"
Leaning back in his lonely throne he pities the scuttling ants, before dethroning himself to bow before an alluring brown package. In hesitant movements he removes the rancid contents and assembles his instruments of debauchery.
He pauses. Delaying his degeneracy, stalling for an act of God or a roaming bobby to pull him from his path. Nevertheless, he is alone, and no one is coming.
Marching on. He traces for the vein in the crook of his arm before observing the glass chamber eliminate its peculiar contents into his body. He doesn't fight the strange substance. He surrenders himself to the narcotic, as a hostage to vice.
The tide of the alien sensation washes away his mortal weaknesses.
The warmth of the angelic substance coils down his spine, branching in to every nerve at a gradual pace. Vibrating in his veins, its Siren call serenades him, seducing him. Its holy hand animating his stagnant, mortal mind. During this spiritual purification, eons of mindful decadence, eons of ecstatic rapture, were consumed in minutes.
A sharp acceleration in its potency strikes and conquers in a chemical blitzkrieg, a meteoric force at a whirlwind pace. The foreign substance storms across every cell in his body to seize hold of the trenches of his perception, eviscerating the dreadfulness of consciousness to carry the phantasmal projections of his subconscious into the bare space, an unchained mind paints spectral images onto the previously mundane canvas of reality.
Within an instant, mad convulsions were throttling his body, nausea and gagging gouged at his throat desperately purging his blasphemous soul of the demon. Spluttering, spitting and spewing punctuated his sorrowful cries while savage thrashes smash his uninhibited limbs against the ashen surfaces of the desecrated semi. An agonising surge of heat swells from his core, boiling and withering him, like Mercury bled through his veins.
Soon after, his frame went numb and paralysis embraced him.
Startled and shaken, nevertheless, the world was once again in order... somewhat. The heavenly smokescreen still envelops his mesmerised eyes. Ivory strobes of lurid hallucinations glide in fluid, serpentine motions over the surface of his iris until darkness saturates over this divine delusion from the outskirts of his vision.
In the darkness, reality and fantasy intertwine in a vision that resurrects the dormant horrors of his memory.
The dour gloom recedes, revealing a just as dismal grey sky. He is reanimated in some ungodly hellscape. Swarming soldiers scuttle past. He rises and follows, such is his duty.
They move in a united wave, fear stricken lads run towards the wall of hungry guns, towards a sea of sinners feral to wash them away.
Cackling Gatlings and bombarding Blockbusters bludgeon the repugnant sludge, the warning whistle of their descencion flittered before him in soft pastel pinks, shifting to darker gradients of red as it approached terra firma. Violent vermilions separate heaven and earth, before dissipating into the immutable white waves of his squealing inner ear.
His comrades hide horrified eyes behind wincing lids and tin brims, but his eyes are wide open. Mesmerised. Mesmerised, and repulsed, by his unifying, merging senses blending into an orchestra of sensations.
The scents are screaming. A fetid reek of disemboweled bellies. Skinless creatures coil in torture. Agonized shrieks spill from their mouths and writhe in the air, searing into my brain like salt in gouged eyes.
Pink whistling above. He sprints and flings his full weight forward, away from the danger.
A split second weightlessness.
A whistle, a crack and silence.
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Ending 1
A swarm of bobbies hive around a morbid spectacle, discussing possibilities of murder, and suicide, and the damn war, and these foul bombings, and how one constable's son had recently been blown to smithereens in some squalid field in France. Ultimately, they all agreed, just another coward... just another coward taking the easy way out.
As for the sleeping soldier, tranquil eyes watched the departing military boat sail off to their awful war.
Ending 2
Splinters of light, spectral and blinding, lance at his eyes. The morning sun illuminates his shame: glass shattered, vomit splattered and blood bludgeoned into the wallpaper.
His skull throbs feverishly hot, dried blood flakes on his cold forehead. The drugs have abandoned him. But he can still hear the shrill screams of mortar and machine guns, he can still see the Man-eaters dancing on the walls.
A military boat sails off to its awful war, leaving him to fight his own.
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