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SHORT FAT STUBBY FINGER STORIES PRESENT:

EPISODE 10

Time:11:59:57

As Joseph skimmed through the pages of the company’s address book to find the internal e-mail location for the foreign language department he sought he became distracted by a spluttering noise and turned his attention to the monitor just as a brilliant white light exploded in his face.   And as his eyes took the full attention of the blast, Joseph’s mind went into overdrive as it tried to comprehend how, instead of going blind from the brightness of the blast, his brain was now being stretched to breaking point taking in the hundreds and hundreds of strange, distorted, unrelated images that were pouring out from the flashing screen.   Things that made no sense to him whatsoever, but they kept coming and coming and coming at him.  Faces: beautiful: ugly: distorted; three legged horses, creatures of the night, men, women … nearly everything imaginable in the world and many things that weren’t … imaginable … or of this world.

Joseph had absolutely no idea what was going on in his brain, but it was hurting him; frightening him.  He began to feel shaky; sweaty.   And then he began to feel extremely, uncontrollably dizzy.   Unexpectedly the room before him began to darken; to change dramatically.   Suddenly he was in a street somewhere familiar, but a mystery to his memory at the same time.   It was not raining, but it was extremely dark for the middle of the day – darkness caused by the thick, black clouds that covered the sky above him.   A bolt of lightening violently exploded so close to him that it made him physically jump in his high-back leather chair, and as his beating heart tried valiantly to calm itself down a huge face; an ugly, distorted, evil face, flew at him from within the storm clouds that now surrounded him – setting into play a fear like Joseph had never known could exist.

Joseph’s world began to totter out of control.   His vision began to waver, his eyes began to wander aimlessly across the room, but he understood nothing of what he saw.   The restaurant where he intended eating unexpectedly surfaced in his mind.   Someone was at his table … a blurry, indistinguishable figure that somehow sent a warm blanket of comfort and safety over his entire body – a figure there for but a second, then gone – nowhere to be seen.    The scene changed again.   A clock began appearing on the monitor … its face becoming bigger and bigger until the time dominated his vision: twelve noon … on the dot.   In the background he could hear the chimes of Big Ben confirming it was midday.   His watch began to beep, its alarms superfluously repeating the verification.   The roar of his fellow workers loudly advising their co-workers it was time to stop work quickly joined in the pandemonium.    Then the darkness began to arrive, all around him.   The monitor was the first to disappear, then the desk, then the room.   The darkness was everywhere and Joseph’s mind was ready to accept its offer to join it.

But, as his mind began to close off and meld with the total darkness that now began to engulf him, he had one more apparition: in the apparition he fell downwards towards the waiting gutter on the street his memories had failed to recognise, his eyes completely fixated on the blob of something indescribable smouldering in the gutter and although his mind would not admit to itself what it thought the thing to be, Joseph’s instincts did … and the fear and revulsion it invoked helped with the quickness of the process that rendered him unconscious.

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