60) Though I wake up in the backseat of a squad car joy fills me! I bleed from the flashlight wound to my head. I bleed! My stomach hungers for food. What gastronomic delights await my new tongue! My appetite and thirst are boundless. I shall ride a pony, bury my face in the fleece of the first cur I come across, stroke a cat, perhaps discover why the gods loved them. I shall swim in cold water and warm and feel it for the first time. I shall make friends with men. And as I am driven by the angry policeman, (I will win him over) I enter the limits of a small town called Browning. Funny. Nothing turns to shit, dies or browns in my presence anymore, and will not ever again! I now understand why the good Doctor put me through the awful ordeal of travel. I understand his effort to teach me the ways of the world, not to destroy or kill, I could not avoid my nature, but so that I may join in its circles. Truly a most sublime reward for monstrous service. He is creative, after all, beyond vanity.
Down the main street of Browning I see museums where great displays of the world's past are stored. I will study there. There are plentiful trinket shops so that I may find colorful adornments for new a beginning. Food stores for hunger. Bars for slacking thirst! This town has everything the tender abortion I am could want! And people. How I wish to meet them.
But first I must flee the squad car since the officer does not respond to gesture. Dr. Creep forgot speech. I remain mute. Stupid oversight. I try the doors. They do not open. I try kicking out the windows. They do not break. Lastly, the wire that separates us, it is unbreachable. They've thought of everything. Still, I have confidence they'll tire of me, the police. They'll let me go when they determine I am just like everybody else, a walker of sidewalks, a drinker, a bright, purposeful thing standing harmless by a lamp post, dressed proper for friendships and nights out. I've a lot to learn. They shall see that I am willing to learn, and let me go.
After a fine drive through town we arrive at a squat building of uninspired gray concrete. Other police meet us. I am roughly handled while taken inside. After a spell of posing I am put under a powerful hose that knocks me down repeatedly and cleans me. Next I am taken soaking wet to a room without windows, and doors made of bars. I shiver, alone. I shall have to wait here for some time, then my adventure can begin.
Police gather at the bars to stare at me. They tell me that I have been accused of committing horrible crimes all over the world. They produce drawings and pictures others have managed to secure of the episodes of my travels. It is all true, of course, but I am now something different, I am no longer that thing. My gestures are less like the Maori, warlike, threatening, than in the Hawaiian style. So I think. Nothing gets through to them. But then they show me one handbill with a banner that reads Dead or Alive. I am worried now. More dancing. Incomprehension follows.
But I begin to see the point. Yes, I have done awful things. Men, women, and children have perished in my presence. Enough life to fill a valley to overflow has died at my hand. I understand their anger a bit. They demand payment, balance to my bad play. I see. They open the iron door. They introduce me to three men of a red cast: Thomas One Lie, Joseph Can't Kill, and the robust Won't Stay Jim. My first friends. They enter the room. I open my arms to them. Before I succumb to their blows and heavy stomps, I now understand Dr. Creep's greatest gift of all: Death. I can end. And to my new friends, thank you, thank you, and thank you.

59) We waited obediently all night long, resigned to the designed enmity of the other, and witnessing, in the bone pale moonlight, the train of emanations still dissipating skyward from every breath of us. I could not see mine but I know I am full of death too. I could not think faster than the souls pouring forth. The insects are almost funny. We stamp our feet in amusement at the brace or bank of flies, silverfish, the mounds of cockroach we exhale. But then a stream of people are breathed and we ripen to quiet. Oh, the slave, the subject, endures what they must. Yet we know nothing else. We are not on circles of the living. We are creations sans difference. Singularities. Original. Well, four originals, no, four copies, we repeat indifferently the other. N,S,E, and W, our masters have no imagination. We creatures are the same. But for our eyes. The servant of the West, they are cold blue. East has flakes of yellow drifting in white emptiness. South blinks, but I believe its are violet. And mine? I am unable to remember, say or ask. Why the variation? A new thought. A dead end multiplies reflections of where it all went wrong. Finally, if eyes are adornments from other gods, they did not deign to dwell among us tonight.
Morning. Out of nowhere, emerging from shimmers of turbulence, like the aura of a migraine, the cardinal points appear just behind each of their creatures. Again, like their creations, N,S,E, and W, they are all the same. They are repetitions, too, uniformly shrouded. I feel Dr. Creep behind me. He places a hand on the obsidian crust of my shoulder. All the Doctors do the same to theirs. We creatures steel for the fight.
Dr. Creep says, 'In your backpack are stones. Take them out.' I do. As do my enemies, at the behest of their gods. I hold the lot of them in one hand, ready to hurl and destroy. Dr. Creep, North, says, 'Throw them gently in the middle.' We all do. All of the stones fly through the air landing together on a simple arc to the ground. That's it? Wait.... The air ripples. The ground shudders. Clouds embrace. In moments there appear children, hundreds of them, sprouting from the earth. They stretch or cry, claw at the blue sky, hitch their mourning, pirouette, fall back down or stumble. Children. In halved moments they recognize kin, they separate, run to their respective cardinal point. Dr. Creep is surrounded by his own, as are the others of his kind. The children pay no attention to me, they are too full of the joy of being reunited with a father absent millennia. Much gleeful shouting and happiness. We creatures glance at each other. This is it? This is our war?
Dr. Creep, whose visage I still cannot reckon, says, 'We wanted only our children back. You shall never see me again. You are free to live the life of a mortal, your reward.'
And in the time it takes for the time it takes, he releases me from bondage. The noose of eternity is loosened. I sense my body change, to diminish, to freshen to flesh. What is this?
Dr. Creep spirits away upon the North wind, teeming brood dissolved and airborne in tow. A residue of laughter lingers as they vanish.
So follow the balance of kinder and gods from the other abject stands. We creatures are free.

Silence. The four of us, we monsters, are amazed. Release, such as we've never know, spreads across our faces. We feel the wind for the first time. The sun beats playfully upon our heads. My feet spontaneously blister. Hunger prowls. Thirsty us.
Still we gasp as animals rush the void we've made. No more death, please. Life nears, but does not die. Cattle descend the hillsides, eagles bank above, coyotes resume their howling ways. Deer emerge from the brush to drink at the streams of their ancestors. And nothing dies. We no longer can kill near or far. Our intention is blank. We monsters wander off, thankfully lost in the world of the living. East's servant goes south. West's wanders north. South's spins in place for a change. I wonder what is in the west.
After erratica in step, each deviation from north savored, I come upon a field of horses mingling among a dump of vehicles. I cringe, hunker down, still chained to the habit of death. But they are curious, the horses. They approach my fetid self behind a wreck. My eyes are tightly closed when I feel hot breath down my back. I am found out. It is not Dr. Creep. He is gone forever. It is a horse. I stand. And for the first time in my stupid existence I touch without killing. So soft is the mane. How firm the wither. I bury my ugly face in its neck. Smells I've never known swamp me. I dare feel happiness.
But then a whinning truck disturbs. The horses drift away. The truck approaches. Again, I hide, inside junk. The truck comes to a stop near me. A uniformed man steps out. He looks right and left. I watch him in fear. He does not die. I am emboldened to know about his kind. Though I cannot speak I am sure he will embrace me as one of his own. So I climb out of my junked steel. He sees me. I take a few steps toward him, as friendly as I can mimic. He smashes me with a flashlight, I think it was. I black out, like a man.

58) The night passed in silence. No sleep. The mimicry of man holds no more charm for me. I am a defeated little mocking bird. So I remained awake. I stood motionless though the moon lit the earth well enough for running. No need to hurry, I decide. Even a gravedigger keeps hours. And that's all I am. The bull frogs that heralded night with burping roars are muffled as though stuffed with mud. A great horned owl fell dead at my feet. I hear stirring in the brush, trees cracking. What will I have done by pausing here? Morning shows. The extent of destruction, when the world lit, astounded me. Elk and coyote, massive bear, lay scattered in fields of brown grass. There were other carcasses. More and more. Sure. All came too close.
I leave. I run. I run. Down the mountains to prairie.

I am the first avenger to arrive. I know it is the right location for I recognize the place from a pictured brochure I've carried in my stupid backpack, the brochure titled 'Indians of the West'. I am alone in gentle, rolling fields. Very alone. I am pelted by a shower of dying birds. They muss and rustle their last in my surrounds of tall grass. Robins, crows, the beloved sparrow, golden eagles, carrion eaters at large, all carpet the hissing green. And rabbits, voles, gophers, snakes. In moments I've entire taxonomies of done for animals about me. So very alone.... Yet there may be goodness here. Perhaps there will be no reckoning, perhaps Dr. Creep has played another joke. He is not here. No on else is here..... Alas, hardly has the thought vaulted my brain when I see approaching in clouds of dust and parting seas of wheat, from the East, the West, South descending from the North, my counterparts. They run, too. They may have been filled in the beginning with exalted thoughts of a destination proper to their cardinal point, for peace everlasting. But like me, belonging to North, I belong to him. We are belongings. We know war is our metier. The others abruptly halt. A hundred yards separates each of us. They are all in rags, like me. They are tall, bulked heaps, blackened, with coarse bestial hair and savage features to the extremities. Spilled philtres streak their chests. They reek of rancid tallow and shit, as must I. I've had time to catch my breath. They heavily pant, on their breath I see faint mirages of creatures they've slain on their travels, a roiling bouillon of souls, camels, wolverines, giraffe, dragonflys, hyenas, polar bear very hard to discern; they exhale ostrich forms, Siberian tiger, goat and mongoose, piranha, seal, many men, women, opalesque children, the panda, Tibetan pheasant, horses of the steppe, salmon and howler monkeys, cheetah and swine. Is this a display of menace, warning, the threat of murder? Death can't put fright in what is not really alive, us. No. None of us fear anything. But maybe we can regret, feel remorse. I don't know. We bulldoze mysteries into the abyssal trench of the brain. Here, now, we share a baleful stare, deep, deep sorrow, we see it on the other's face, all of us shamed at the emanations on the breath. Such a pointless incineration of life, life turned to piles of ash on earth and swept clean from memory's floor. All for vanity.
We wait.
All of us carry satchels.
We wait and wait.

57) I am one day's run from the meeting place, where the carnival of revenge, the grotesquerie, the circus maximus of hell, occurs. What ever I call it I cannot be prepared for the quality of destruction that will follow. Having had millennia to feast on inflicting cruelties and to cultivate mayhemic scenarios, the cardinal points, N,S,E, and W surely have honed hatred of each other to an atom-splitting point. What can have been worse than eternal reflection on the annihilation of their children? Can there be a greater pain than to tred upon loved ones for millions of years, to witness an entire world of strangers come into being, every plant and animal, down to the lowly microbe, thriving on the bodies of their young? How they must despise the earth, every living thing upon it, all entities flourishing with the fragrance of their children, soaked up through roots in the flower, or lingering on the breath of every gaping maw. And stone. I can imagine immemorial pounding, scraping, or smoothing of the same, in the miserable effort to coax forth a kinder. Cliffs battered by howls, the despair at erosion, I can hear them cursing at rivers transporting increasingly smaller bits and pieces of the loved, dispersed to the ends of the earth, never to be brought together, like the bit of Mozart, exampled from the pantheon of men, Mozart in the fire smoke of Mongolian horsemen, snagged in the eye of an Amazonian pirate, coherence is lost. Volcanoes, especially, were not spoken of, methinks. Perhaps they should have been worshipped, N,S,E,W, it can act as a salve. Worked well for Absolutes hitherto. But man, the world's sole conjugator of terrestrial rhythms and incorporeal remainders, never found them. Like the god of gravity or a god or things caught in the middle, or a god of fat, or of the tooth, of the broken vessel, a god of minerals or of rot, there is no god of invisibles as such, these and many more, have never passed through the credulous gate of man. Frogs, bees, the fithy cat have had their moment, as has the more obvious heavens, mountain, chance, breath, the zero, there are so many. But the cardinal points, never. They were merely assumed, poised as the initiation of greater schemes, necessary sores man bled and healed off and on as he scurried about the globe, singing praises to erstwise gods all the way.
Yet the cardinal points would have done nothing with the earth. Are they not to blame for their enduring calamity? Look what vanity has brought them, what life incidental has done without them! They are neither lords of water nor air. They obtain on globes, orbs, geometric things. They are useless to the life that has arisen. Yet they plot revenge, and under the limp banner of the sublime.
Life is in peril. I have meted out death as indifferently as they will, but on so small a scale. I no longer want to kill, to serve my jealous creator. Yet I am Dr. Creep's servant, I am the servant of the North. The monstrous is as the monstrous does. I am driven to begin the end of days. Tomorrow.

56) My clothes have been reduced to rags, torn apart by the world. Garments that once had color are now shades of dark grey, like wet ash, with darker brown shit accents and dull green streaks. I have reinvented camouflage. Good for me. My boots have split open at the soles. Only my backpack retains a bit of bright shine. My hair is matted, and clumps come off should I try to pass a hand through. I've not seen my face for weeks. God knows its condition and color scheme, for my body has secreted a greasy paste the texture of rhino horn over my back and chest, broken through by tunneling parasites. I am comforted that something lives off of me. Life finds a way, I often say. Back to reality. My sutures are inflamed. Welts weep. My feet and hands are curling to cudgels of an ebony cast, while all nails of the same are hard mustard-hued ripples as though impressed upon by trilobites. I seem to be rotting and encysting at the same time. Not that I am other than what I've ever been, it is that I am more of it, and less, it's true. Hardly matters. It is not as though I have a future. I should be glad for the shiver of sentience Dr. Creep runs through me, even if it feels more like drowning in tar, or favorably compares to the pitiful life of the cranefly, born without a mouth, no way to sample the world, to eat or drink or rest, given a few days of egg-laying spasms till starved.
I have only mimicked the behaviors of men. I believe that suggests envy. Yes, I have desired their banquets by the pool, a fat pig turning on the spit, and the stuffed chairs in libraries, their beds softer than clover, overlain with goose down coverlets and satin. I know something of their styles of copulation, its variation and quality, from pictures anyway. I would not know how to begin to do such things! The Doctor is a cruel hoaxster. I suppose it is his fault he gave me eyes but mine that I see. To his credit I have enjoyed wine, and all the clawing at air for support as I happily stumbled. The list of his credits is quite short. Yet, I must remember, I am not meant to compose; I level. The day of revenge is closing. I can sense it down my petrifying spine.
And on so excessive a day of mentation I come upon a valley of horses. Just the thing to break a morose spell. I've seen many horses out here. Of all sizes and herd formations. They are rarely alone. There is nothing solitary about them though I have seen them singly with a rider. I am sure their life is hard but all they want to do, beyond the grazing, is frolic. They sometimes fight but soon turn to play, clearly their highest activity in life.
But as happened a day or two before (I've become quite the historian) people intrude. The valley echoes with the roar of trucks. The horses elude them, run as one animal. How can men do a thing to them, I laugh to my internals. I love running, as well. I understand their joy. But then I see the men have added a helicopter to the mix. The noise produces panic and agitation in the herd when it hovers close to them. They scatter. Fragmented, the men can now easily choose two here, one there, to pluck. Which they do. Horses tumble in tangles of rope. Others fall at the rifle shot. So, it is not hard to outthink a thing in fear, not for the men chasing horses, not for me to smite men. Again, I descend. I will interfere. I interfere. Everything dies by my indifferent agency. Though the remove be great, men die, the trucks seize, and the helicopter, emiting dainty circles of exhaust, smashes to the ground. But I cannot direct what I do. I cannot select. The horses die, too. The valley empties of play. There is death all around me. I am filled with shame and repulsion for what I am.
To bury the vision, I run from that awful valley, I run in remembrance of horses. I run toward gloomy clouds gathering. I hear the thunder, feel it shudder through the hell of me. I see lightning among the peaks. I climb fast. I enter a summit clearing. I stand. I wait for punishment. I am struck. I fall. So this is pain. I stand up. I am struck again. My shoes are blown away. Smoke pours off of me. I stand again. I am hurt. More. But I cannot die. How sick I am of death, every death but my own. Dr. Creep, end the misery of me.
There is an end only to the storm. The sun reemerges. N...N...North.
I thought my sorrow could not be greater but even my parasites have died.

55) I am crossing at the highest elevations, along the cold spine of mountains spiking the violet horizon. Life is less plentiful up here. I carry a smaller bail of pretty souls to forget. Peak after peak roll up the earth. It is almost as if I am spinning the world, like a circus elephant atop a ball loosed by painted clowns. What a curious pret-a-porter idea, just batting around my head. I've never even been to the circus! Perhaps the idea assembled itself from the tiny bits of my knowledge of men, and Dr. Creep's designs for me, of course. And no sooner do I think it then I come upon an instructive, unwholesome place. It is a valley, a cup of snow, really, a couple dozen rods of land between two elevations. I espy a group of thick men, heavily armed. I don't know how they got there; by themselves, heft and girth considered, it is unlikely. Horses must be nearby. The men mill about, they tred upon alpine flowers and shuffle among stunted pine. There is a light wind. Voices carry. I hear words in my tongue. A few words are isolated and bounced off to me by the great ear my stony watching place makes: Home. Truck. Shit. Forty-five seventy. A truck climbs, approaches and winds down among them. A large mesh cage sits on its flatbed. Something lolls within it. On some days only a list of things occur to me to recount, things I've destroyed, killed, or have rapidly passed in a blur of the same. But today I have an object, one and only, that I might concentrate on: One thing, one life, one basin of dirty water to watch drain: A cage. No, two. Each containing a some pearl of learning. Much excitement attends their arrival. Two men get out of the truck and move to the cages. The first thing released, or dragged out on a leash, as happened, was a creature I've seen once before: an Ibex, improbable, but here. Massive horns of white and black, a narrow, stripped body, low to the ground. Savannah or the Steppe? I am graced with a memory of its passive self. And as I savor my reflection, but before I understand what I think, lost in phantoms, I hear a shot ring out. The animal falls a few feet from a man who fired, for I see the smoke of his rifle carried off. Adulation. Cheers. High-pitched howling. Done. Attention shifts. It is the turn of the second pearl. I know this animal too. It is so weak it has to be carried. Two men hoist it by the legs to a patch of clean snow. Three men gather around it to argue about who shall take what is a lion. Mane, silver-tipped with age, bury the hands that prop it up against an icey cornice. Revived by a cold it has never known, the lion steps. Another shot. The lion falls. Cheers.
Disturbed, I descend from my place to the bloody show. The men get me, my malevolence, right away and fire. I am hit often, but owing to my nature, it means nothing. Once upon them, they are vanquished in an instant. I kneel beside the lion, its eyes still open. I lay on hands until it is nothing more than tuft and vapor. My aim.

54) Running on this night with only a slivered moon to light my way has led to collisions and stumbling, over stones or whatever that was just then. I have ended up in dead-end valleys facing sheer rock cliffs and have had to depart from the pole star to find a way out. And there are the fences, of grisly wire and wood. I have gotten tangled, my clothes and flesh lightly shredded. These barricades are everywhere. So puzzling in such a vast land. I am sure they keep roaming and hungry things in or out, case by case, though I have not seen or heard a living thing, firstly because of my much improved talent of killing an greater removes, but also because night is for quiet hunts and the hiding game. I have learned so much during my travel of the earth: Vile knowledge such as life's frailty, how soft the body emptied of life, how helpless the fawn, the flower, the child in cold, moving water; pleasure knowledge, simple bird songs, shattering glass, the sigh of a soul, lost no more, ascending skyward; obvious knowledge, that night follows day, rivers run to larger waters, that illumination is a must for practical tasks like rushing a landscape. I have pieced together a manner to carry myself upon the earth, a very general comportment, it is true. I can't share my ways with any living thing, I do take the time to add stylings and refinements to the heap of me if I am chanced from far away. A voice might say, There goes a graceful racer! Or, See how well he lays upon the boulder! Best ditch sleeper I've seen! And so on. I should like to be approved of even while doing awful things, with the indulgence of the good Doctor, if I do them well. If this be vanity, then I am vain! More knowledge of my being, right down to my frozen core of nickel or coal. Good to know. Which is yet more! Such a heady spiral I climb, such a graceful commotion of mentation I lean into. I will not choose which image but take both to be mine. Others may occur to me. I'll assume them all. This thirst for the assumption of images, taking charge of the miniature stories they tell, methinks, hints at the sublime the cardinal points hoard and measure within themselves. Or not.
My learning instructs me to wait for light. I pick a sandy spot. I smell smoke. Just over rubble, down a ways, I see a merry fire and figures about it. I will not investigate at all for I would do them harm. Instead, I will be content with wiffs of their smoke. (More pleasure knowledge.) My backpack, filled with idiotic objects, I use for a pillow. The bottles of pebbles from Dr. Creep are a burden to carry and an annoyance to lay a head upon. Still I do, and I sleep. Pleasure knldg, etc.
I dreampt of being torn apart by dogs.
I woke up in snow. Over the rubble the fire is out. The men are draped in white, like me. They are still. No steamy breath. And to think I could have had fire. Further away I see their horses. They see me. Silence. I run from them as fast as I am able. I will not look back.