(Black screen; three blood-red Japanese characters fade up, accompanied by that dramatic chord from the start of Peter Gabriel's song The Rhythm of the Heat. The characters spell out the words RED, GREEN and BLUE.
Another chord; they fade.)
Night-time in a back alleyway cluttered with industrial waste bins, rubbish and flattened, stacked cardboard boxes. At the end of the alley is a set of fire-escape stairs leading up into darkness. The whole scene is lit by a fluoro lamp in the main street, which is only active for about eighty percent of the time. When it is on, we can see grey moths fluttering around it drowsily.
Enter Masume, a young man in his mid-twenties. He is dressed in a black full-length overcoat, with a loose grey scarf wrapped around his throat. His hair is long and untidy; a brief shot of his face (as he turns to see if he's being followed) show an odd, feverish look in his eyes, perhaps even the odd dramatic glint. He covers the distance to the stairs quickly, spares another glance back towards the flickering lamp and then ascends the stairs.
He enters a tiny apartment on the third floor, locking the door closed behind him and securing two deadbolts. The only light in the room is from the screen of his computer, an elaborate PC setup on a low table in the middle of the room. He seats himself before it, unwraps the scarf and examines the text on the screen.
Close-up of his face: his eyes (with squiggly lines of computer text reflected) narrow as if he was a hunter who had just spotted his quarry. He gives a lopsided grin, exposing teeth that almost approach the status of being fangs.
Fade into the same apartment from a different angle; some time has passed. Masume is typing quickly, occasionally glancing up at the screen; then he sits back, resting his weight on his hands. At the bottom of the screen, we see a row of 'hash' (or '#') signs growing from left to right on a background strip of reversed spaces; something is happening, something that will be finished when the hash symbols have filled the strip. Masume leans back further, swings his feet up and over the computer, rolls to the right, stands before a low table behind his desk; fills an electric jug with water and turns it on. He prepares a cup of black coffee, shakes two white tablets into it out of a lacquered match-box, stirs the drink and sits before the screen once more.
Fade into the scene (more time has passed). Pages are feeding out of his printer, covered with electronic diagrams. The last one emerges, with a list of components. He reads the list, frowns, stares at the page for a while, rubs his lower lip with the back of his index finger, appears to make a decision and then leaves.
A nightclub, the darkness punctuated by flashing overhead spotlights, parenthesised by the emissions of the smoke machines (music: something loud, fast and thrashy by KMFDM, most likely 'A Drug Against War'). Masume is sitting at a table in a darkened alcove, drawing random designs in spilled drink on the table. He is sitting across from a tall, thin man with a mohawk haircut and a large ring through his nose. They sit at the table, saying nothing for perhaps thirty seconds, occasionally glancing at the people around them, avoiding eye contact; then the punk slides a handful of notes across the table into the spilled drink. Masume rattles the lacquered box to show that it has pills in it, places it carefully in the middle of the table; picks up the money, shakes some of the liquid off the notes, stands and leaves.
It's still night-time outside, but he finds a store open which sells electronic parts. Under the faintly blue fluorescent lights, he moves from one aisle to another, checking the list, finding the components and putting them in a plastic bag. He searches the racks until he finds a circular piece of Veroboard; then he takes the components up to the counter and hands them to the old woman at the till. She consults a catalogue, shifts some beads on an abacus and holds up four fingers. Masume counts through the handful of bills the punk gave him, but apparently comes up short; he shrugs at the old woman and tries a winning smile (somewhat negated by the hopeless look in his eyes - he knows, already, that she won't give him any credit), but she closes her eyes and shakes her head. Masume shrugs in defeat. He throws the money in her face, grabs the bag of components and runs from the store, pulling over a display shelf of car alarms on his way out. He runs all the way back to his apartment and up the stairs, out of breath and laughing hysterically.
Fade into the apartment scene. Masume is soldering components onto the piece of Veroboard. He has gouged five triangular sections out of the circular shape, forming a rough pentagram. Close-up of the circuit under construction; it is an absolute mess, with wires poking in all directions. Close-up of the diagram; it is just as much a mess as the circuit, so the mess isn't due to his lack of skill in assembly. It looks more like a bowl of spaghetti than a circuit; tracks loop around wildly, french curves instead of the standard rectangular shapes and lines one normally sees on circuits. It's as if the circuit was designed by people who weren't constrained by the two-dimensional nature of ordinary design.
He connects a nine-volt battery to the circuit board, sits back expectantly; nothing happens.
He waits for almost a minute, then frowns, sets it aside on a shelf and begins collecting test gear to check the circuit. He pulls a yellow plastic multimeter out of a black vinyl bag and turns back to the shelf; a pale blue-green glow highlights his face, reflects from his eyes which are widened in surprise.
Shot of the shelf; a ring of blue light hovers over the circuit board, a glowing neon doughnut about half a metre across with a patch of flickering darkness in its centre. Masume stares at it slack-jawed, before moving from side to side and realising that either it's holographic, or it turns to face him no matter what his orientation, lips of light around a mouth of darkness.
He gets closer, leaning forward to examine the dark centre. It glitters, black stone with deeply-embedded flecks of silver, and he can hear a faint sound coming from it; a crowd? Shouts? A rhythmic clapping?
Abruptly, an arm emerges from the black surface, right next to his head; bright blue, scaly, fingers tipped in sharp claws. Masume falls back with a cry of surprise, lands on his ass, just missing the desk and the computer. The arm thrusts out, bends downward at the elbow and the two-inch long fingernail on the index finger slashes through a single trace on the circuit board. With a screech (tortured rusty metal hinges being forced into action) and a tooth-aching bass hum, the ring of light expands until it stretches from floor to ceiling, three metres wide, then a little further, pushing the ceiling up, cracks webbing out. The flecks of silver in the centre are now tiny points of flickering light, almost like stars; they move in a slow, anti-clockwise spiral out from the centre. Where the hand emerges from the darkness, the stars outline ripples around the arm, as if it were pushing through a layer of gelatin. The arm straightens out, the fingers flex briefly and then the arm is dragged back into the darkness quickly, like someone being snatched under water by a shark. There is a clattering sound on the concrete floor; the hand was wearing some rings, which were pulled off when it was dragged back into the gateway. Masume kneels down and finds three of them (he keeps searching, but if there are any more, he can't find them). While he sits and examines them, the faint sound of chanting from within the gateway grows louder:
The first ring is an open band of stained metal, possibly copper or brass with a silver sheen. Sanskrit letters are raised from its surface.
The second is in the form of a coiled silver snake.
The third is a large, ornate, silver cyclopean skull wearing a German world war II helmet. There is a brief glimmer of red deep in the eye-socket as he turns the ring over.
Slowly, almost as if he were in a trance, he places the Sanskrit ring on the little finger of his left hand (the chanting grows louder); he places the snake-ring on his middle finger; he places the skull-ring on his ring-finger. He sits back and smiles at the effect, holds his hand out with fingers splayed, waves them slowly (the deep-sea blue-green light glittering on the rings), then brings his fingers together. The chanting (which is quite loud, and is revealed as three words repeated one after the other, although it's hard to establish exactly what's being said) stops suddenly; there is a faint metallic 'click' as the rings come together.
There is a devastatingly loud thump, an atomic blast being played at one-tenth speed; it fades out to the sound of the chanting which, if it previously sounded like it was coming from the next apartment, now sounds like it's under the table. The room is filled with milky white light that is tinged with flashes of red, green and blue successively, in time with the chanting, cycling over and over, almost like there's a police car outside the window with a rather odd siren.
The white light fades, and there are three traditional demons standing before the gateway; a female (with red scaly skin) and two males (blue and green). The Green demon - a bloated, almost spherical thing - tries to force the gateway closed, while the Red Demon - a lithe beauty with a sardonic grin and a barbed-arrow tail which lashes back and forth arrogantly - stares right at the camera. the Blue demon is a tall, thin androgynous figure with a high-domed forehead and the kind of webbed, pointy ears you might see on a mermaid; he turns around and starts hacking at the circuit board, cutting more tracks and pinching a capacitor with a flourish; the gateway collapses to the size of a doughnut with a scream (this sound is actually an extended scream from any horror-film - say, 'Evil Dead II' - sampled and reduced in duration from twenty seconds to about half a second). Just as the gateway shrinks, a mass of translucent tentacles emerges from the pooled darkness and is lopped off at the base. Green picks them up and stuffs them into his mouth, chewing noisily, clear fluids running down his chins. He drags the gateway closer to his mouth and kisses it, his broad tongue darting in, licking the puckered centre, curling around the tiny tendrils that manage to get through the reduced gap, and eating them. Blue moves over to Masume's computer, carefully moves the monitor aside and then forces his fist through the top of the case. A view from inside the machine shows his fingers splaying out and sinking into the motherboard, growing into the components like a high-speed film of a vine growing into a trellis. Tiny sparkles of blue light flicker along the copper tracks, out along the serial port, into the modem and down the phone line; when they reach the first telephone exchange, they increase speed and spread out in all directions. Back in Masume's apartment, the Blue demon starts to fade, leaving a transparent shell.
The Red demon advances on Masume, who is still lying on the floor where the blast of their entry into his world threw him. She picks him up by the front of his shirt, drags him closer and kisses him; he struggles frantically and fades into translucency, just like the Blue demon (except this isn't voluntary); when she releases him, his colour returns with a snap. She brings his hand up between them and finds the one-eyed skull ring; with the nail of her index finger, she hooks out a tiny red jewel from the eye-socket of the ring, squeezes his cheeks until his mouth is forced open, then she pokes the jewel between his lips. It burns his tongue; he tries to spit it out, but she kisses him again and spews a torrent of red energy into his mouth, which fills his head, beams streaming out of his eyes, nostrils and ears like spotlights. He falls back, fitful darts of red energy zapping from his eyes as he coughs; he sits up against the wall for a few seconds as the jewel dissolves inside. With a sound like a power-station about to explode, sharp cracks and buzzing burrs, lines of red energy appear on his skin, following his nervous system, making him jerk like someone has attached electrodes to his genitals. The Red demon kneels down in front of him, gently places the palms of her hands on his cheeks and bends to kiss his forehead; as she does this, the lines of energy firm up with a whip- crack sound and he convulses, throwing his head back (which crashes through the thin wall of his apartment, into the next room, pushing over a television which is being watched by two young girls); a ridiculously large erection thrusts forward tearing through his pants, going right through the Red demon's stomach and out her back, lightning-arcs of red energy trailing from the end. Upside-down, looking at the girls, he smiles companionably at them and apologises.
While the Red demon shakes and spasms, arms thrown back in ecstasy, transfixed by Masume's shaft, the Green Demon pulls off his index finger and forces it into the gateway, plugging it with a winebottle-cork squeak. He then kneels behind the Red demon and starts sucking red energy from the end of Masume's penis. The energy mixes with his, making his greedy face turn a shade of lime green, his lips where they are fastened around the fist-sized head bright yellow.
The Blue demon gives a shout of victory (your average, deep throaty demonic cry of 'Hah!' mixed with itself in reverse, which sounds kind of odd); the Red demon's head snaps around one hundred and eighty degrees, and the Green demon turns to look without removing Masume's erection from his mouth, his cheek bulging.
Cut to an inside view of an automated factory, robot arms dancing back and forth, fitting components for VCRs together, spinning bolts in with whirring sounds. In one corner of the factory, a machine is stamping out circuit boards; a wash of blue light covers the outside of the machine, running along the edges, there is a clunking sound and different circuit boards start coming out; looped, circular tracks in a pentagram pattern. The assembly robots hesitate for a moment, then they start fitting components into these new boards.
The Blue demon wanders over to the window, trailing Masume's computer at the end of an elongated arm. His colour is slowly seeping back into him as he watches the city lights, a faint smile on his face. The Green demon leaves off fellating Masume long enough to plug the telephone back in and order half a dozen pizzas. In the next apartment, the two girls are kneeling next to Masume's head and shoulders, which are still forced through the wall. One of the girls, with a dazed, hypnotised expression, bends down to kiss him; tiny arcs of energy leap around her face and into him. With a screeching sound, he draws her into his body, her arms and legs shrivelling down to wasted stalks, her glossy black hair drying out, the brittle strands breaking off at her scalp. Soon, she has been reduced to a translucent brown husk, like the shell of a cicada attached to a tree. The other girl looks at him for a second, then leaps at him, kissing his face. He forces his arms through the hole, grabs her and sits her down on his face; she writhes and clutches at the wall as he reduces her to paper-thin tatters. Coloured energy swirls through him to the Red demon, who is now kneeling astride the young man, her claws sunk into his shoulder, his penis still jutting out of her back. Marbled swirls of black and grey briefly discolour her bright red scales.
Cut back to the automated factory; a trolley-robot has been spreading the completed VCRs out along the store-room floor, using its small manipulator-arm to plug them in. There are thousands of them, stacked three or four high in places, a tangle of cords attached to six-and eight- socket powerboards. At the far end of the hall, a second trolley-robot stands next to the main power-board; its arm sweeps out and jabs a green button. All of the VCRs come on at once, clocks blinking at 12:00. There is silence for a few seconds; then thousands of gates spring into being above the VCRs, nested behind each other where the machines are stacked up, blue-green light suffusing the room. With a roaring howl, a multitude of bizarre forms rush through the gates, snakes, squids, clawed things, oozing, translucent amoeboid shapes with tiny, screaming homunculi held inside like marshmallows in jello, a confusion of shapes, an explosion in a confetti factory. They smash the windows of the factory out and each demon makes a bee-line for the nearest crowd of people, biting limbs off as they pass, picking up some of the more attractive females and sinking whatever limbs they possess into their stomachs, sucking energy from them. One elongated snake-demon pierces an entire line of Sararimen waiting for a bus, threading them like beads on a string, in between the buttocks and out through the mouth, drawing them together, forcing them to bend over and make a black-clad, bowler-hatted centipede. They stumble down the street, screaming around the ropy flesh that distends their mouths.
A murky darkness pours through the gates now; it seeps into the air like ink poured into a fish-tank, tendrils darting about agitatedly, probing here and there; then it withdraws to the edges of the gates and solidifies, like miraculously fast concrete, forcing the gates open.
Cut back to Masume's apartment; the pizzas arrive. The Green demon sets them aside, grabs the delivery-girl and eats her, starting at the feet. This isn't a subtle draining of energy as with Masume and the girls in the next apartment; this is just simple hunger, crunching bones and spurting arteries. She's dead from shock by the time he gets to her hips.
Cut back to the factory. Ranked rows of gates, their fronts paved with dark-grey stone; thousands of things like mad rabbits - all wearing brown leather aviator's caps and goggles, bright purple fur and swollen, red genitalia - leap through the gates, pick them up, drag them down the store-room corridor (power-cords snapping) and outside. Whereas the flow of things from the other side had diminished slightly, now the pace picks up again and demons pour through the gates so fast that it appears to be a solid flow, a stream of pearly energy with nasty-looking chunks in it.
Long shot of the city; loops of white light stream through the air, fall back onto the buildings and the streets, splash out into pale beads of energy. Occasionally, a stream of energy will punch through a building; one of these streams cuts a diagnonal slash through a towerblock, the top section of which slides off and falls into the streets below.
The loops of light are slowly coalescing into a spaghetti-bowl of energy, a flattened dome of otherworld essence. There are the occasional dark patches left, here and there; a camera close-up of one of these shows it filled with screaming people being sucked dry by the demons around them.
Cut back to Masume's apartment. The Red and Green demons have concentrated their efforts on Masume, sliding back and forth along his body which is slowly being pulled out of the hole in the wall. It's not exactly clear what they are doing, but his body is slowly swelling, as if the energy from the red jewel isn't being drained from him quickly enough. They redouble their efforts, fucking frantically, but he begins to inflate like a loaf of bread rising, and they abandon him with shrieks of frustration, smashing through the window, the Blue demon following at a more sedate pace. For a moment, we can see Masume's body pushing against the window-frame, inflated to the size of a car, his head seemingly tiny compared to his body, skin bright pink with the energy filling him. A brief close-up of his face, upside-down, poking through the window, set on a bulge of pink skin, curling strands of red light evaporating from his eyes and mouth, his tongue blowing out and vibrating like the neck of a balloon. Long shot of the apartment block as it explodes, needle-shafts of red energy punching through the surrounding blocks with the sound of glass edges sliding against each other.
Approximately five minutes (or however long we can get away with) of scenes from the city, a slow pan shot showing confusion and general disorder, various demons biting bits off people, penetrating them in novel fashions, suspending them by their hair and making kinetic toys out of them. Four demons have stretched a woman to the size and thickness of a queen-sized bedsheet, suspending her over a street where the purple-rabbit demons play volleyball with a still-living human head, using the woman as a net. A pair of demons, fluttering collections of dark robes with three glowing red eyes at their heads are floating slowly down the street, a number of television-sized bird cages strung on a line between them, each one with a human crammed inside, folded over, crying out for help. A tornado formed from a swarm of bloated bees with abdomens the size of eggs surrounds a young woman and stings her repeatedly, each wound causing a dreadful degree of swelling. The effect is overwhelmingly erotic; instead of screaming with pain, she falls to the ground and gasps with lust through lips as swollen as rotten bananas, shaking spastically.
Through all this confusion we see the Green demon wandering along, idly munching on the ragged end of what looks like a crimson penis the size of a french loaf. He comes across one of the modified VCRs; he stops, looks at it for a moment, then drops the penis and picks the VCR up, taking it over to the smashed front window of an appliance store. Ignoring the schoolchildren impaled on silver spikes emerging from the back of a giant chrome turtle, the Green demon plugs the VCR into a wall socket; the green LED display lights up. He then drags the VCR over to one of the dark-grey-stone-lined gates and shoves the VCR through, cord trailing. He then pushes his head and shoulders through.
View from the other side. There aren't any rigidly defined borders on this side; it looks like half a dozen scenes from different movies, washed to near-transparency and overlaid. Half-realised machines fly through faint mountains, herds of animals run around in circles, all of it mixing together. Standing out sharply against this dim confusion is the top half of the Green demon, clutching the VCR, his body pinched tightly by the gateway. He turns the VCR over, examining it, and accidentally presses the ON/STANDBY button. A gateway begins to form above the machine, fitfully expanding and contracting like a mad gerbil trapped inside a condom; the Green demon drops the VCR and is trying to squeeze back into human reality when there is a sharp crack and fracture line spread out from the point where the gateway was trying to form. Flat pieces of reality fall away from the fracture point, revealing a murky, dark-red blackness like a pool of old oil. The Green demon's eyes bug out comically; it desperately scrabbles against the stone which holds it fast as a pseudopod of blackness blebs out and sticks to his face. It pushes into his body, bloating it even further, and then forces itself through the gateway.
On the other side, in human reality, the Blue demon is trying to pull the Green demon out of the gateway, one green leg being stretched ridiculously. The Green demon's body shakes, his free leg kicking madly, and a stream of glistening blackness spurts out of a puckered opening beneath his vestigial tail. the Blue demon shouts, drops the Green demon's leg and shoots off into the sky, rotating slowly like a poorly-rifled bullet. Below, the blackness begins to pool on the ground, surges of it wracking the Green demon's body, rounded lumps appearing and disappearing in the flat pool, the flickering light of burning buildings reflecting from them...
All work on this site is © Nikolai Kingsley unless otherwise stated.