46b - The hammerhead
Griffith - 10 am Monday AEDT
Welcome to my online cyber thriller, The Phisherman. Please note - this chapter has a huge reveal. So, if you haven't been reading along, you should learn more about the story first by clicking HERE. To select an earlier chapter, click HERE.
WARNING - This chapter includes descriptive gore and violence (though the full chapter in the book is more so).As Alan’s mind stumbled back to reality, he became aware of several things simultaneously.
Overwhelming every other sensory awareness was the intense pain radiating through each fibre of his being. Every part of his head hurt with indescribable agony. It was greater than anything he thought possible for a human to endure.
Yet, it was more than the physical pain – so much more.
His world was dark, darker than it had ever been.
And no matter what he did, he knew the lights would never come back on.
His fingers delicately probed where his eyes used to be, feeling the large sockets now filled solely with torn tissue and congealing blood.
His world was also silent.
Never again would he enjoy the angry noise of his beloved heavy metal.
And the silence was deafening.
Although he was screaming at the pain, he heard nothing but the ringing inside his skull. His fingers only encountered a wet, sticky hole on either side of his head where his ears used to be.
Cautiously, he used a cupboard door handle to pull himself up so he could lean on the kitchen benchtop.
Steadying himself, Alan tried to block out the pain by focusing his mind.
Think, Alan, think.
All attempts to calm down disappeared when a hand lightly brushed against his.
Trembling with fear, he shouted, “Who’s there?”
However, he couldn’t hear the words he screamed, let alone any reply from his surprise house guest.
Helplessly, he waited, though he didn’t know what for.
And then the hand touched him again, though with more force this time.
It wasn’t a violent shove.
It was merely enough to cause him to lose his precarious hold and crumble to the floor again.
Lying in a heap, Alan knew who’d walked through his door. There was only one person it could be – the one who’d proved to be his greatest nemesis. Abaddon.
He knew what that name meant: Destroyer. Abaddon was the keeper of the dark abyss recorded in the last and darkest book of the Bible his parents claimed to believe.
When Alan first came across Abaddon in the days of The Shadow and SF, he merely thought it was a cool name.
Now he knew otherwise.
Abaddon was not merely a moniker. It was his nature.
As Alan lay on the floor, Abaddon grabbed his hand.
Through his pain, Alan realised that Abaddon had weird hands. They were even softer than his.
And small.
His right hand was forced to the ground where his index finger was used to write a message.
As his fingers moved across the sticky tiles, they spelled out what he already knew.
However, that truth was nothing compared to the shock he felt as his hand was lifted until he felt soft, warm flesh yielding to his touch through thin cotton.
Alan knew what his hand cupped. He had only felt it six times before – his six Soho girls – though he’d always been in control, and the fleshy mounds had always been larger, like Anne Johnson’s. Despite the diverse circumstances and his lack of senses, Alan knew it was a woman’s breast.
With horror, he pulled his hand away as his universe crashed in on him in a way that he struggled to comprehend.
Abaddon is a woman? What the hell? That makes no sense – he can’t be.
As Alan’s mind filled with the exploits they had been through together, the infamous hacks they’d achieved, he struggled to see how the pieces could fit into his new reality.
Then, as he allowed his filter to change, the penny dropped.
All those times my network failed as I was about to destroy another stupid bitch for being where she wasn’t supposed to be.
Slowly but surely, he saw the timeline of his life in a new way.
The thing he had trusted to keep him safe and secure – the anonymity of the online world – was what allowed the thing he hated the most to destroy him:
A mindless woman sticking her nose into a man’s world.
Alan’s mind snapped back to the present as something hard smashed into his helpless body again and again.
After too many blows, Alan’s mind decided it had been through enough. It shut down, allowing him to slip into an unconscious state where he was no longer aware of the constant violence raining down on him. 1
I hope you appreciated the dispensation of poetic justice in this chapter, despite its violent form. If you’re a subscriber, thank you for your support … and please click the heart-shaped LIKE button at the end of this chapter.
If you have any suggestions to help make the story better or want to encourage me as a storyteller (either would be nice), please …
Two Beta readers complained that Alan’s ending was too swift in version 1. If you feel the same, you will appreciate the significantly expanded version of the last two paragraphs in the book when it is published in 2024 (there’s more than a page edited out of this Substack version).