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The Spark (Chapter 1)

… abandon all hope ye who enter here; a message etched deep into every fitful sleep … 

Spontaneity is the craziest thing.

    Not thinking, not rationalising, just doing what you’ve got to do, like it’s the only thing that matters but you don’t know why.

    Not knowing if you’re acting out your ultimate fantasy or something you’ve always wished to do but have put off for too long, but in your heart of hearts, are confident in knowing it will be the most decadent thing you will ever do, a moment of pure selfishness, where whatever you do will be for yourself and only yourself, and nothing else; a moment that will see fear and consequence fall by the wayside leaving you free to take the plunge and see where the rabbit hole takes you. 

    Have you ever been compelled to challenge yourself in such a way, to do something so extraordinary in a place no one would believe, that is so incomprehensibly out of this world. I have. But not only did the experience affect my outlook, it made me completely re-examine who I was and where I wanted my life to take me.

    Talk about giving life to a monster!

    It was like being hit by the proverbial diamond bullet, my mind expanded in a million-trillion directions all at once, as if something godlike had whispered the true meaning of life into my ear.  

    But ask me to remember and I can’t – just snippets in the wee dark hours past midnight, the re-occurring night-terrors my only recollection like it never really happened, though my battered and scraped body told me otherwise. It’s as though during the day my amnesic mind spares me the trauma, only to go looking for it once I’m asleep, a place of Death’s shadowy vileness and the fantastical beasts that carry out its bidding. It is a domain of chaos where legends are born and the foolhardy brave are slaughtered in their quest for notoriety; the gods lapping it up in the darkest and most violent hell Jahannam has to offer: the ruckus.

    How I found it I’ll never understand; I’d never even heard of it – led by a casual encounter, a faceless, hooded street urchin, through a maze of tiny cobbled alleys and covered courtyards that somehow bypassed the main thoroughfares, as if Jahannam was a puzzle to solve and a prize to be had, lost at the centre of some elaborate labyrinth. But once there I knew my mystery friend had taken me to the right place. For Jahannam is a realm without comparison, without an equal; an ancient palace of sorts that descends deep into the earth, its layered tyranny dedicated to the gods of old and the power they still command.

    There decadence knew no bounds and horror became my dearest friend.   

    In the sickening imagery that haunts me to this day, the ruckus is an ultra-violent maelstrom of bloody torrents and flesh boiling and bubbling to acid-red froth, fizzing to melt a virgin’s butter soft complexion. It is a world apart of jaw-dropping amazement and gut-wrenching terror, where sight and sound combine to awe inspiring affect. It is the roaring rage of sadistic exhaustion and the almighty medieval clash of steel on steel, as maces and axes bludgeon to penetrate armour in competing to drown out the modern two-stroke motors of chainsaws, and the high revved buzz of slicing sinew and bone. It is a pair of desperate hands that claw to grab a face and the snapping teeth that pluck out its eye. It is the insanity of a speckled-red ghoul biting into a still beating heart while parading the strewn offal of its victim, draped around its shoulders like loops of macabre bunting. It is a world like no other turned on its head where elderly gimps rape child-like nymphs and infant siblings coerced into slitting older siblings’ throats, drink their blood hot from its source, and sons at gunpoint are forced to pleasure fathers, as daughters are forced to pleasure everyone else. It is a place debauched beyond darkest depravity, where only one mandate dictates: lasciate ogni speranza o voi che entrate – abandon all hope ye who enter here; a message etched deep into every fitful sleep. 

    I know when I close my eyes the rabbit hole will take me back. It always does, to low lit caverns and the dull clanks of heavy manacles and thick chain, gibbets swinging to petrified faces of stammering tears, smeared with snot and puke, the pathetic creatures within screaming an incoherent delirium to the whir of electrical power tools and the revving of industrial disc cutters.

    My dreams never failing to regurgitate the bread and butter of my sleep’s toil: the bashing in of someone’s face, pulling at teeth and gum with pliers, the cutting out of a tongue from a toothless face and pouring acid to dissolve a person’s features. I picture flash segments of battle and the sharp noise of limbs being severed and brains dashed. I catch a glimpse of a cannibal butcher sharpening his cleaver, and his gluttonous chops salivating to the splash of arterial spray and the slop sound of spilt guts hitting a hard floor. From the gloom fiendish mutations growl and snarl to glowing eyes that track your every move, fighting and tugging over body parts and the leftovers of discarded foetuses, as a new mother slumped against a pile of cadavers struggles to stuff her stillborn baby back into her mutilated C-section.

    It is horror personified as though your very essence gets swept up in a crowd of other dreamers all out of their depth, and all trying to escape. Prostitutes, sex-loving freaks, and opposing sex-hating fiends, as well as sodomites, cannibals, sadists, masochists, rapists, torturers, murderers, mass murderers, serial killers and mutilators; devotees of bestiality, urophilia, coprophilia, paedophilia, and necrophilia – everyone bitten off more than they can chew in a mad crush buffeting one another’s crazed dreamtime hoping they wake up.

    But when you don’t the horror continues its random freak-show; a gore-fest to suit every perverted mind: anonymous finger and toenails prized with red-hot needles then ripped from their root, only for the bloody digits to be amputated and the stumps cauterized with naked flame. Dungeons bellow to elbow and knee joints being drilled, as freshly made monsters unable to blink, cry into dirt speckled mirrors, their eyelids, lips, nose cartilage and ears cut away, the titbits left for the worm-like sludge that inhabits the floor; a writhing secretion alive with millipedes, centipedes, and all manner of bugs.

    But violence alone can’t satisfy all.

    There are those who seek more.

    They want high-heels, seven-inch Louboutin’s stamped through cheek and mouth pinning their quarry while the other shoe is used to excite the prostrate to prolapse.

    I’ve seen virgins thrown to the wolves, as they pick their way through a minefield of studded leather and shiny PVC locked in death-defying duels; livid females clawing and scratching, biting and gouging, doing whatever it takes, armed with greased up strap-ons and macabre dildos, where the losers hung by their hair are fisted, brutalised and left to bleed out, as other floor dwellers enticed by the lure of fresh offal scurry around everyone’s feet in a race to mop up the hysterectomy scraps. I’ve listened to the mock wedding bells and screamed echoes of twisted erotica; of a beautiful blonde slumped across a butcher’s block, her partner reeling to the soggy crunch of a spit-roasting pole as it enters her rectum, to travel the length of the spine and exit through the neck against the side of her delicate jaw. It is where the morbidly obese are waited on by salivating anorexics and starved vegans bound in carnivorous servitude convulse to strain vacant stomachs in serving stillborn calf fillet tartare. 

    And still, this is the just tip of a very dark and enticing iceberg.

    For me, it was the spark that started my fire burning; a rage that has been intensifying ever since.

    I remember a newscaster once quoting a terrorist: I am the spark that will burn down the forest. And although I recognised that this man knew he wouldn’t see his plans through to the end, what he did know was that regardless of him being alive or dead, the fire would keep on burning. And then it struck me – what an adversary – what inspiration. How do you fight someone like that? I mean, how do you even counter the willingness of an enemy who will die for their cause?  

    The thing is – you don’t. The best-case scenario is that you just get to die alongside them. For the terrorist it’s a win-win and this is what the Jahannam faithful represented, a hardcore throng that would do anything to satisfy their next fix, let alone live out the fantasies of their dreams. 

    And so, Apok was conceived in the bowels of all that is considered wicked, its inspiration the product of a damaged mind having just fought my first ruckus.  

    But again, ask me to remember – and I can’t. Not until the next time I sleep.