The Cartoonist's Nightmare

“…And what exactly is a dream,
And what exactly is a joke?”
Syd Barrett

This story is dedicated to all of the
quotation marks in the world.

1

 “... of the letter, which I got tomorrow evening. But that 's not important now. I have to tell you something... a very urgent problem...,” said my closest friend, Peter Brook to me with a frightened voice. “That was the reason why I call you there in this very morning... because... the reason is that...” and the next moment his brain blew out from his skull and cover over everything in the Blue Dog Pub. I hadn't got enough time to get shocked, because the shooting started again. “Ratatatatatatata!” whispered the gun to me with burning love through to window of the pub. “This rifle wants to tear me into pieces!” The heavy rain of glass’ fragments rattled everywhere. “I have to find a shelter!” I thought and then I lie down flat on two million and twenty-one glass splinters under the table. This was not the best idea. And this shelter was only a temporary shelter. The rifle started to make fistful holes through the pub's thick gothic wall. ”Ratatatatatataa... click!” the salvo fire stopped. “It sounds like the M-16 rifle, Caliber 5.56 mm. It takes approximately 7.2801 seconds to reload. But how I know this? Anyway, you have only 5.012 seconds left to escape from under the table. Run!”
I slid on the glass splinters to the toilet on all fours, and during my journey I saw people with widely opened mouth, I couldn't hear a sound because of the M-16's loud confession, so maybe they screamed. And they covered with Guinness, and glass and blood and some parts of my dear friend's brain, and other unknown parts of the unidentifiable victims. They ran everywhere and they tried to find a shelter, but for some unexplainable reasons they always wanted to run under the same table, where there was a place for only two people, but this event belong to the field of the higher mathematics.

2

At the end of the journey I got into the women's toilet. And that was a serious mistake. Because I didn't know there was Cindy, the distinguished whore of the pub. She was an old-fashioned lady, born during the Victorian age. I thought that I couldn't get more frightened after my friend’s unusual death, but after that I saw the half-naked Cindy step out from the toilet cabin try to straighten her slip on her galaxyful buttocks, I knew that there’s always a way to get under the bottom of the hell. She was the woman of unbelievable fatness and uncountable amount of wart and she had more hair on her face than a werewolf could have. And she had a voice of a bass opera singer.

And she started to roar.

“You bloody bastards you can't even allow me time to urinate you son-of-a-bitches why you for Christ's sake don't allow me time to prepare for the next copulation there's always a cheeky bastard who come to me to take his cock in me I don't even had time to take a breathe you dickheads...!!!”

Maybe she didn't hear there's a party going on in the pub. But I didn't have time to invite her. I heard the rasping steps of my assailant approaching the toilet. There was no hope. And Cindy started to roar again. And then... the window!

With the help of my adrenalin level I jumped onto Cindy's shoulders, while she explained me why I'm a sexist fuckface, I heard the toilet's door ripped out of its frame and I reached the window opening, and with the help of Cindy's fists I fell on the alley of the pub, few inches from the soft grass onto the cobble. And my collarbone smashed into few cubic inches. A Doors song started in my head.

“I really try to run, Jim, I really try to hide.” 



3

A misty corridor in a house built in Baroque style. But it’s not mist really. Smoke. It’s coming behind the doors. There are lot of doors in the corridor. Six hundred and sixty-nine thousand five hundred and twenty-one black doors and five half-doors painted in red. How I know the number of them? I don’t know. Actually Peter know it, or knew it. I informed about it from him or through him. It’s a very long corridor, thousand miles long. And it’s twisting and crawling like a snake. I can’t stand on the rug, because it’s sizzling and sewed by fire, the fire of burning homes and people. There are words on the doors except of numbers. Words which hasn’t got meaning for me, like: “uDvtlOriaq” or “uBöö” or “Odradeeqk” in an unusual alphabetical order. The doors’ names started with letter “z”, but the second letter started with letter “a”, and the third letter started with letter “m” which is in the middle of the Latin alphabet, like “zamiRtlyk”. But after that comes the word “zAtpruiaj” and then “zaaGSudo”, so the third letter is the seventh letter after the previous one in the alphabet. I can’t find any order in the fourth letter and the length of the names or even the changing of the majuscule and minuscule letters and the different fonts, because some letter printed in a different font than the other one, some fonts are returning ones, some fonts are not. After few hundred miles I found letters which aren’t in the Latin alphabet: Hebrew, Cyrillic, Syrian or Arabic letters or Tibetan letters or hieroglyphs, Braille-letters, pictograms and ideograms and letters which I can’t identify, or don’t even know if they are letters or pictures. Now I see a door called “w2₰ᾷ᾽hAA?AAA.Ø”. Between the two majuscule “a” letters there is a drawing of a duck standing near a swimming pool of a garden at dusk and says the following words in a speech balloon: “There’s too much lightning in the Winkie’s shop behind the Weighton’s bar after three past quarter to five in the morning. Ben likes to stay in Marrakech.” And I hear music comes behind the door, the calming frequency of the neurons of a female Tarbosaurus’ optic nerve when she saw her children broken out from their egg 69,003,239 years ago in a place which is now called the Gobi desert.

4

The half-doors. I think Peter called them half-doors, because they are half smaller than most of the doors. There are five half-doors, which hide between the black doors. They only got numbers, from one to five. But they are moving, or repeating. But I don’t really think they’re repeating. That fact suggests me that the black doors aren’t moving.  They look steady.  They look like a gunman staring through a crosshair at their victim.

The continuing emits of smoke makes me almost blind. I knocked into someone. The man dressed in black ditto suit and had a derby. He was a black-and-white picture from 1875 but the knocking happened just two weeks before the outbreak of the Anglo-Spanish War which played by two penguins and a hairy stick stabbed into a half loaf of uncooked rib roast. The man stopped and said “The time is young past seven a.m.”

“You spent too much time there” I said to myself. “Maybe three months, or seventeen years, or just two seconds. Anyway, you have to leave, before it swallows you. Now, let’s find something really threatening from your mind. /From my mind? But this meddle can occur changes which hamper me in the investigation. /Don’t care about it. Don’t you feel that you slowly become a part of it? /Well… in this case…”

A door opened. I want to step into the room behind the door. But somebody wants to close it. I want to see who it is. It was an orange-white coloured traffic cone-head guy without arms, who lay under a dirty sticky washbasin, and he kicked with his two legs tried to close the door. 



5

I whipped off my glasses and throw it to the corner of the room. I could hardly breathe. I sweated. My fingers trembled with fear, when I lighted up a cigarette. My worst nightmare is about the orange-white coloured traffic cone-head guy without arms.

And this little piece of brain had much stronger suction than I expected. It’s nearly just 0.12 cubic inches. This amount of brain shouldn’t have to have this kind of enormous gravity. Not in the case of Peter Brook.

After I fell out of the closet’s window I lost my consciousness.

And the alarm clock woke me up in my apartment. I jumped out of my bed and took up a fighting pose. Dreadful pain shut my collarbone, I fell into bed. But there was nobody at home, except me and my cat, Phil. He looked at me with boredom and the certain thought of that I am a poor bastard. I struggle into my feet and looked out of the window. People ran everywhere, and the buses, trams and cars tried not to hit them. Everything happened in the usual way. There was no sign of that there’s somewhere a madman who shoot at innocent people and stick at nothing to kill them.

“I should be a dead person, shouldn’t I?” I asked myself. Then I tottered to the bathroom, and looked into the mirror. There weren’t new holes in my head or anywhere in my body. There weren’t spectacular serious injuries. I looked under my pants. Everything looked like before and in the right place. Except my shoulders, my collarbone may cracked or broken. “I got off this cheap.”

6

Nothing moved in my apartment. Every single thing was in the right place, they took part of the determined chaos of my world.

“Then what?” I was puzzled. “Ah, yes … the clock!”

“I should have realized it.” I turned on my radio, waited a few minutes for the news, and my assumptions proved true. That was not the first time this thing happened to me.

Because it was the last day in my apartment, before my landlady, Mrs Paincrick evicted me with his two sons, the Twins, the tough guys and the main dealers of the neighbourhood. That’s the only case I use my invention, the Get-Back-In-The-Right-Time-O-Mat. This little device looked like a fifty-year-old washing machine, because it was in a fifty-year-old washing machine, but it can only tolerate white socks. Any other dirty clothes I took into it, was ripped and covered with a pink dye. So I hid my Time-O-Mat into this machine when I was undertook the private investigator business. I felt I’ll get a lot of lovers who wake up in my bed and ask me "Morning, honey… Hey, what’s this flashing little black object next to your alarm clock? It looks like a reduced-size washing machine. Oh, how cute! And this blue button here… what for?"  But this scene never happened, lovers never came there. Maybe I have to print a prettier visiting-card.

When I accidently invited the Get-Back-In-The-Right-Time-O-Mat I swore to myself that I only use it for paying my rent in the right time, and I swore too I find a better name for it. That was the deal with the evil which helped me to invent this machine. I will die days before I have to, but I won’t be evicted all my life.

Why don’t I use this device with more ambition? Because the price for this little help was too high for me. Why don’t I get the money in the right time? Because I need the money for another horrible invention. The devil’s circle. I couldn’t get out of it.

“The first time I woke up in that day was at half past six, to get to the Black Dog Pub at half past seven. Now it’s five past seven. Maybe I can get there in time to save my friend from death.” 



7

I couldn’t.

I stepped out of the taxi two blocks away from the pub and ran. I saw that I jumped out of the closet’s window to the ground. When I saw how my collarbone brake a few yards away from me was more painful for me than the first time. I wallowed for a second on the pub’s dead-end street, and then I disappeared.

My assailant jumped out of the closet’s window. I hid behind a dustcart. He wore a black army uniform. I couldn’t see his face. He looked around, but found nothing. About the gun, I wasn’t wrong. It was definitely M-16, Caliber 5.56 mm. But how could I recognize it about the look?

I heard brake squeak. The taxi by which I came there bent in the front of the gunman. The driver opened the door, and the gunman got in the taxi, next to the driver. I couldn’t believe this! They were in cahoots.

Fortunately, my taxi driver hadn’t got too much information about me.

“Perhaps they drove towards my apartment. Farewell, my dear Time-O-Mat! Farewell, my sweet apartment!  So long, Mrs Paincrick and her sons! I hope they give some food for Phil, because the next few weeks I won’t set my foot in there.”

Or maybe I could be quicker then they were, but after this event I lost all my confidence in the taxi drivers, and in this case only they could help me.

I had to be fast, faster than I’ve ever could.

Fortunately, the assailant caused a pretty pipe breakage by shooting into pieces a fire hydrant. This accident made a perfect entrenchment to my freshly improvised plan. I ran into the pub. 



8

I saw dying people everywhere. They drowned in a special cocktail made by their blood and the beer they were drank few minutes ago. Then I saw my friend’s headless body. At first I almost started to laugh, then I almost started to puke, and then came Cindy. She came into the bar and shocked and then looked at me.

“You motherfucker son-of-a-bitch you bloody…”

I grabbed a bottle of Scotch and threw on her head. I didn’t have time for it.

“Here’s to you, Cindy!”

I got a huge tankard with a lid and started to collect my friend’s brain or the pieces of the human body which looked like they took part of my friend’s brain. I picked them up from the strip floor, from the table, from the chairs, scraped down some little brain from the walls and some hypothalamus from the landscapes of Northamptonshire, and collected them in the tankard.

After five minutes play of how-many-bits-of-brain-you-can-find-in-a-totally-damaged-pub I heard the police siren. 
“As time as usual.”

I slipped the tankard under my coat. I looked around with a cold look. I chose the back door. Fortunately, this time I was careful with this jumping out of the closet’s window and broke my collarbone on the other side.

9

I had to recover from my injuries—physical and mental also. Then I had to mourn my best friend’s death—in this circumstances I couldn’t even went to his funeral. Then I had to think through some things—it’s not an ordinary thing to chased by some hired assassin. So I had to hide for some day with twenty-three bottles of scotch. I have a cottage deep in the woods to hide there and meditate on my problems for several days. I built up this log cabin because in the city I haven’t got enough space and safety to experiment with my new invention. And that was the fourth and the most important reason why I was here.

Before I became a private eye, I had neurophysiology studies, but I was fired from the university, because of my crazy ideas and my failed experiments. I invented a machine with which we can live through the processes happening in the other people’s brain, for example we can see what was one dream about, or what does one thinks, what memories one have, without getting involved. You are able to get into the innermost parts of one’s mind, and be an outsider observer there, without one ever gets to know it. That was my plan. But it didn’t work as well as I expected. The experiments failed because two major reasons. The first is that this machine only worked with dead subjects; if we used living creatures they went crazy and then die, because their brain burnt out. The second reason was that many observers trapped in the subject’s mind, and then the observer’s act like they had a prefrontal lobotomy. Three of my colleagues were lost in the mind of a dead chimpanzee, a guinea pig and a rat. The brain has a special kind of suction power, so it needs a strong personality to guard ourselves from it; otherwise our mind end up in a monkey’s corpse. And we live in the few moments of the dead monkey’s stream of consciousness between its heart death and brain death for eternity.

The other drawback of this device is that sometimes our imagination, or memories leak into the other’s mind, and this is makes the work impossible.

I had the opportunity in my wooden cabin to improve my machine, but it wasn’t so perfect. Obviously I can’t get trapped in an animal’s mind, but a crafted cartoonist’s mind has more suction then a black hole. After five minutes it becomes really dangerous to be in Peter Brook’s brain, even if it was just a small 0.01 cubic inch piece of it. Those people, who watched one of his films, know what I’m talking about.

10

“…Those people, who watched one of his films, know what I’m talking about.”

This was the last sentence of the diary of Peter Brook’s friend, which we discovered after we broke down into his log cabin. He worked with a huge machine, which had a lot of panels and wires and LEDs. He had a cone on his head and wore strange glasses and sat at a table. The cone connected with a wire to a huge washing-machine-like stuff, and the end of the cone stabbed into a small piece of stinking, dried flesh, probably a piece of brain. His body was shaking with electricity. We aimed our guns at him and shouted at him, but he kept shaking. I pulled out the wire from the cone, and whipped off the cone and the glasses. He stared at us, but he didn’t even realize us. He was looked like he saw something else in the room. We gave him a warning, and identify ourselves—no reaction. I slapped him in the face, and shouted at him again—no reaction. A drop of slobber started to slide down on his chin.

“Hey guys, he’s over. Lay him on the floor. And put something into his mouth not to swallow his tongue,” I said. This was the last sentence of the diary of the assassin’s head, which I discovered after I broke into his apartment and killed him.



11

How surprised they were when I parachuted out of my window. Next to my nörthern window there is a huge abyss so I had time and space to open my parachute. They were totally engrossed by my machine and my diary. They didn’t even shackle me, because they thought I’m in coma. So I grabbed my parachute, which is under my table and I jumped out of my window silently. It took a long time for them to realize I wasn’t there. But I was too far from them, flied away with my parachute, to catch me with the blind thuds of their guns.

Their appearance was the final proof of Peter Brook’s collaboration with the secret British Company of Hoodoo. As I discovered they had a cover enterprise, the Mojo Toy Company™, and they made action figures by Peter Brook’s cartoons for children. They gave him money and power to make successful films. That was the immediate turning point of his career, when he becomes a serious blockbuster cartoon-maker after he was just a poor, absent-minded, underground cartoonist fellow. I don’t know why I can’t ever notice the several secret symbols of hoodoo in my friend’s films. I never get to know this without the help of that piece of brain, catalogue number: w2₰ᾷ᾽hAA?AAA.Ø.

Ziyaou. Fleckled grunk treem fi clop, yeew as my teeth vrilling towards xooping some quit.

So I flied down to Spain for few months. I lived with a whale from the Atlantic Ocean, who has a part-time job as a countess in Soothernmumberland. We drank a lot of sausage and entertaining ourselves with shooting at ducks made by paper. After the ground got cool behind my sole I left her, and went back to solve my case.

It was so easy. These hoodoo guys didn’t know how sharp-minded I am. I made a plan to kill their head first, because that may confuse them, the same as with bees or ants.

After I shot the head in the back of the head I heard strangled noises from one of his wardrobes, as somebody were took captive there and crying for help with a stuck mouth. Itreeekahhafhftooooikglancefor;viuukbeartklambap4231.981floor5◦{.I.opened.the. wardrobe’s.door¿}grecxx&ajuagfß<….##>Nbehindittherewasadesertklooopingsix.

It, who was I, walked in the desert for sixteen thousand years. And then I reach the middle of the desert. There was a head there, decayed to an unidentifiable state of flesh.

12

I heard buzzinging noises from inside the rotten head. I bent down to pick up the head, and see what’s inside it. It, who was I.

There were 5,012 bees in there. They were so confused buzzinging and buzzinging and flied upside down. Their world was a topsy-turvydom. Suddenly they realized me, maybe because it was twelve past fifteen, and they always stopped at this time. They just hovered and their buzzinging became angrier. I tried to throw the hand out of my head, but somebody glued the head on my hand. The bees attacked me. The bees ate me. And then there was nothing more left after me just a left hand, near to the buzzinging head. Some bees moving into my hand, who was I. I started to howl with this hand, and it, who was I came there at 12^nd November in the Year of the Brown Edges. He bent down as me and picked up the left hand, which was I, and just the same happened to him as with me. The bees only left his right hand’s little finger.

And this went again and again for centuries until in the middle of the nameless desert there were all of the parts of its, mine, body: separated, decaying pieces. Oh, shit.”

“…Oh, shit,” said a voice. This was the last sentence what Peter Brook heard, after he whipped off the cone and the glasses over the opened skull of the corpse of his friend.

“Silly, poor old fellow, I didn’t have to kill you,” he thought. “You haven’t got any good ideas for me, duder. How can I make my new movie then?” He started to cry.

“He still had enough reason after his heart death to get to know that I worked for the Hoodoos. How disastrous that I broke off the relations with them. And how crazy was I am that I killed him to get the ideas by his machine. But he didn’t allow to me to use it for this action. He began to burp about ethical reasons. We just started a friendly fight. I just accidently shot him in the head.”

13

That was the last thoughts of Peter Brook after his journey in his friend’s mind that he killed because he wanted to get ideas from it for his new film. The punishment didn’t keep him waiting for his sin of greed.

I didn’t expect such a mess, while I tried out my new extremely sharpened telescope to see how life’s going on my deeply missed home planet, on the Earth. I also didn’t expect that this telescope is as sharp as I can see into the people’s mind.

I lived on the Moon, because I was exiled there, due to the people’s incomprehension about my inventions.

I had to speak this story of Peter Brook to my dictaphone, because I want to make it as a memento for the later generations. Soon after that event, I understood the moral and destroyed my telescope.

But go back to the sorrowful story of Peter Brook.

I saw my neighbour, Tommy Knickletromm, who was a huge rabbit, stole into the room where Peter Brook cried and howled beside himself with rage and fear. I wouldn’t have to show Tommy what was happening in my telescope’s crosshair. He was exiled because of his lynch law.

Tommy shot Peter Brook in the back of his head with a cheesecake. The spectacle was awful. And then he started to tear into pieces the cartoonist’s with his incisors.

Tommy probably used my teleport-machine,” said the voice in the cassette which I found in my garbage that I had to seek through for my rabbit’s body, which was killed because he gnawed my neighbour’s carrots.

…he gnawed my neighbour’s carrots.” I can’t believe my father could write this, how can I ever…” and the videotape ended here and the scientists can’t believe that…” but why doesn’t end this sentence in the report?” murmured the old man above the book, and “Zingleflack,” thought he after realizing that he just finished the book.” The End” said the screen nervously after the film, about an old man who read a book, has ended.” That was the last sentence of...”