The Porter

By: Colin Maynard

The barge didn’t slow, even as it reached the port. The captain struggled with the wheel, but the boat continued to charge forward. He turned around and watched as the last of the barge’s inhabitants got onto the sole remaining lifeboat. He saw one of them beckon towards him, asking him to leave with them, but he refused. “The captain goes down with his ship!” he bellowed. The lifeboats left, and the seaman looked out at the dock that he was about to ram. He stood unwavering as he watched the dock get closer. His sea-faring life had certainly taken a turn for the worse, but he fought off his impulse to curse his career. Despite what was happening, he was going to stick with his ship. It was his companion, tool, and home.

After what seemed like hours, the barge smashed into the dock, and… the captain found himself standing on it. He was so surprised by this that he at first didn’t notice that he had a gigantic object attached to his back. The captain turned around to see what it was, but of course, the huge thing moved with him. He walked to the edge of the dock until he came to the water, and looking at his reflection, he saw that his ship, The Cross, was inexplicably bonded to his spine. He had no words; he stood gaping at his reflection as he groped behind him, prodding for the thing that couldn’t be there.

His fingers found the smooth hull, and it suddenly occurred to him that, impossibly, the boat barely weighed anything at all. Although he was aware of its presence, it seemed just as light to him as any other part of his anatomy. The captain, not knowing what else to do, trudged off to visit the town’s doctor.

Pete Cortjin’s nostrils were lined with the molecules of the virgin that he had set on fire four minutes ago. She was very probably dead now; the girl looked more like a pile of swollen spaghetti on a plate of wooden shards than a human. He looked up at the blackness in the alley wall that he had set the altar in front of. Hopefully, Mister Snail liked spaghetti. The skin around Pete’s hundreds of overused needle holes prickled, though not, as usual, with the entering of morphine. He grinned; Mister Snail was coming. He would get his desire, his desire that no one else cared about.

A slippery, squelching noise slithered from the alleyway. The remnants of the virgin lifted off of the altar and floated of their own accord into the blackness. There was a slurping sound. A voice deeper than bass breathed out of the alley. “Your sacrifice pleases me well. I will please you in return. Come in.”

Pete dutifully shambled forward through the blackness. The instant he left the light of the outside, he was in a place that felt like a dream. Everything was purple and black, and a floor and walls were felt and not seen. Though it felt like a room, it looked like infinite color. From nowhere in particular rose a cosmic gastropod. “Mister Snail”, Pete whispered in adoration, “You will grant my request?” The entity gave off a sense of regality that felt off, but Pete was no longer sensitive to feelings of offness. Mister Snail slid around Pete and kissed him on his back. Far off, in the unseen light, another watched in sorrow and disappointment.

Eyes rolled this way and that, each roll widening their pupils and allowing more crud to stain the soul beneath the eyes. The young female nurses kept on working, unaware of the mental molestation that was happening to them. The eyes kept rolling, their pupils kept widening, and the soul kept staining as Doctor Edwin Rind sat leering at the nurses that were all about. Doctor Rind’s neck was so full of lard that no veins seemed to exist on it. He pretended to work on his computer, while perpetually nodding his eyeballs, which were as puny as his sense of chastity, up at the nurses, and back down again.

He got up and took a report he had just printed into his office. When he went in, he felt an alarming sensation of his fat cells stretching backwards and converging on his back. Something was growing there, and he suddenly doubled over with the weight of whatever it was, as it was quite a heavy burden. Before Rind could get over his surprise and find out what it was, the thing gave a loud squealing noise, and hooves flapped in front of his face. Rind, hit in the face with the hooves, and frightened by loud snorting right next to his ears, dashed into the waiting room.

The staff and patients yelled and started, some getting up and running out the building. Rind stopped at a full body mirror that was set up next to the desk. Attached to his back, snorting and oinking, was a huge, grotesquely obese pig. Its head hung over his, and each snort blew large tears of snot onto Rind’s face. He wasn’t sure whether or not that was more uncomfortable than the fact that the pig was so heavy, he could barely stand. It started squealing and kicking, while pulling itself and Rind toward one of the waiting patients, a routine check-up who rigidly sat gaping at Rind, a forgotten, unwrapped sandwich in his hand. Rind, knowing that the swine was going for the sandwich, walked in the animal’s desired direction willingly. Thought he, “There’s no way I can control this pig. As it seems attached to my body, I might as well go with whatever it wants.”

After the sandwich, the pig wanted more food, so Rind stumbled to his refrigerator in his office. There, the creature consumed every scrap of edible substance that it contained. Afterwards, it let Rind know with kicks and squeals that it was still unsatisfied. There was, however, no food left in the building, so Rind lurched outside to head to the nearest store. He didn’t proceed past the parking lot, however, as he saw a few miles away, yet another impossible thing: waving back and forth, above the rooftops, was a very large ship.

It was vertically turned so that its nose was high up in the air, and bizarrely, it seemed to be walking. The pig apparently saw it too, and appeared quite upset by the fact that it seemed to be coming their direction. The hog yelled and roared, almost human-sounding, and kicked Rind harder than ever, as if to demand that he move away from the walking barge. The doctor, however, still had an ounce of free will left in him, and mustering it up, remained where he was, watching the ship come closer.

The pencil scraped along in its journey across Pete’s skin, stopped at a needle-formed crater, and went off in a different direction to find another. Pete was almost done “connecting the dots”. Mister Snail was gracious toward his servants; he had allowed Pete to use his personal mucin. Pete dipped his pencil into Mister Snail slime-trail and drew the last line on his body. There, all the dots were connected now; the needle-holes created by years of morphine abuse were all fastened together by the lead of his pencil, and made permanent by Mister Snail’s cosmic mucus. He had acquired a new, undiscovered beauty, set about from the word’s definition constructed by society. He spread himself before Mister Snail, and heard in response his familiar deep speech. “You look glorious, my child. You have embraced the part of you which society decries as wrong and made yourself a piece of new art. You’ve completed a metamorphosis, transmuted into the next stage of humanity brought upon by your natural self-experiments.”

He used his tail to raise Pete’s head. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that anything you do is wrong,” he whispered. “The only wrong-doers are those who condemn your natural acts of evolution.” Pete grinned with his mouth slightly open, a small stream of drool trickling down his greasy chin. All of a sudden, there was a voice, one filled simultaneously with sorrow and hope. It said, “I have chosen one to combat the vileness that you’ve brought to life. Your efforts are to be overcome.” Pete turned around to see who spoke. The speaker was a porter standing in an area brightly lit up by an unseen light source. Kind-faced but sad-looking, the Porter stood perfectly upright in his bright red uniform. He had an innumerable amount of arms, and Pete noticed that each one held some sort of burden, object, or piece of luggage. One in particular held a very large boat.

Mister Snail snarled at the uniformed man. “You have no power here. I’ve always been more loved, and you know it!” The Porter gave the otherworldy creature a long look. “The only reason you have power is because I’m letting you have it.” Mister Snail laughed at that, sounding like a demonic hyena the size of a galaxy. “And why, tell me, are you letting me have it? Do you even know how much destruction you’re letting me get away with?” The Porter just stared at him at first, then slowly turned his head. He kept turning it till it was fixated to one side and his black-rimmed, pupiless, pure white eyes broke through barriers that are impossible to break.

OO

He’s looking at you, reader. He sees your burdens. “Because the story needs a villain”, he says softly. The captain walked on, his new, inexplicable appendage waving back and forth with his gait. As he came to the doctor’s office, he was unsurprised that he was unsurprised at the sight of the doctor himself in the parking lot, wrestling with a giant, fat pig that was growing out of his back. The captain, unsure of what else to do, stood in the parking lot and watched. After about one minute, he felt a voice breath in his ear. “Bring him to me. Let me carry his luggage and have him touch my ship.” The captain walked up to the struggling Doctor Rind. “Doctor, you need to touch my ship,” he said in his most commanding voice. Rind tried to comply, but just then, the pig reared up, gave an unholy squeal and lunged at the captain, biting and kicking at him. He fell backwards, and he felt The Cross crash down onto the parking lot and street.

Unable to get up, he punched clumsily at the rabid hog that was trying to chew on his face. Doctor Rind, dragged into the new struggle by his violent parasite, reached his arms forward and, after being jerked about for a quarter of a minute, managed to slap the front of the barge. Instantly, he felt the pig detach from his back. He slid down the barge’s front, along with, he noted, the captain, and looked up to find the ship, carrying the shocked-looking pig, flying away into the distant West. The captain, looking with him, felt no alarm at all about the whole matter.

Pete Cortjin could not contain his rage when he watched the barge fly into the metaphysical domain, and he screamed long and loud when the pig fell out and dissolved into a pool of Mister Snail’s mucus. All of his needle-pores screamed along with his mouth, and he didn’t stop until he heard Mister Snail say bitterly, “So it seems that the Porter has spoken true. He has orchestrated the undoing of our work.” Pete flew around, almost falling over, and spoke with both arms outstretched toward the being that he adored, his hands trembling. “You promised,” he gurgled, speaking through so much phlegm that he sounded inhuman. “You told me you were more powerful.” Mister Snail looked dangerously taken aback. “Oh, but I am, Pete. All we have to do is take the Porter’s tool out of the picture, and nothing will be in the way when we try again.’

Pete slowly put his shaking arms down to his sides. “This tool needs to be killed, torn to bits. I’ve had too many push me, tell me I’m sinful and that I need to change. Those pieces of dung…too stupid to know…my “sin” is part of my body. I, in making my “wrong-doings” part of me physically,” he ran his fingers over his body’s puncture-dots and drawn lines, “am the next form of humanity. I am better than those burden-bearers. I know because you, Mister Snail, tell me that. It’s why you agreed to take the “sin” of that doctor, that poor lustful hypocrite who told me again and again to quit my morphine use, and make it part of his body. I wanted to show him that it’s so much better to give in to our burdens; to let them consume you, and make you a creature like nothing else.”

Mister Snail nodded his large grey head and neck. Rearing back, he suddenly jumped at Pete and, dividing into clumps of molecules, entered into him through his hundreds of needle-made pores. Pete’s consciousness took a backseat, and Mister Snail, with a shudder of Pete’s body, took over. Seeing that the Porter’s barge was leaving at that moment, he jumped aboard.

The captain had spent two whole hours listening to Doctor Rind weep and talk about his newfound freedom from his previous habit of lust, and then he found himself walking back to the dock where the whole event had started. Right when he was wondering if the whole thing had been a mad delusion, he saw his ship flying back towards him. It landed on the dock, but when he made to get on it and see if it still worked on water, he jumped back in fright. From the barge leapt an extremely wild looking man. He had innumerable scar-pores all over his shirtless body and they appeared to all be connected by lines drawn from a pencil. He appeared utterly inhuman, and his frothing mouth was complimented by his strangely moluscan eyes.

He gave a laughing, lunatic yell and went clawing at the captain’s face. He fought back, but his opponent seemed supernaturally strong, and he found himself preparing for the end. After what felt like an eternity of the captain holding the madman’s hands away from his face, there was an unexpected slack. The maniac himself looked surprised, and the captain could hear a voice saying, “the villain is no longer required. Your power is now gone.” With that, the man stood up strait, and the captain watched as a single, dead snail fell out of his nostril, over the edge of the dock. The man himself fell onto the dock lifeless, morphine streaming out of his unnatural pores like blood from a thousand bullet wounds.

The captain walked across his home town with his hands in his pockets and his ship on his back. He didn’t feel a pound of it. He knew the Porter was carrying it for him.