His skin's all covered in slimy lumps.
With lips that slide across each chin.
His twisted limbs like rubber stamps
Are waved in welcome say 'Please join in.'

My grip must be flipping,
Cos his handshake keeps slipping,
My hopes keep on dipping
And his lips keep on smiling all the time.

~from The Colony of Slippermen by Genesis.

The air was cool and he sweated, almost steamed, as he stepped out into the rainy night, pausing only momentarily to reflect on the clear, starry rapture above, mirrored in his dark eyes. The sky was a deep indigo, but it seemed some monstrous pen had splattered ink across it in black and a strange, rusty red. He shrugged deeper into his cloak, though the heat stifled, as he strode, nearly ran, across the slippery red-brick street tiles, rain splashing heavily about him, coming straight down from the penned sky.

It was a fierce, soothing sound, the somehow secretive nighttime combination of thick wind and heavy rain, cooling his fever somewhat, blowing those tips of his black hair that were not wetly plastered to his face. It was a firmly resolute sound, singular, and while not deafening, it managed to drown out his thoughts, wash them away in stillness.

He had always liked wind and rain, had opened the window above his bed at night as a child to let the two lull him to sleep, powerful yet rhythmic, wash him away from Spinner’s End till his being was refracted, a million raindrops, one with the universe.

Only fitting that when a person who had changed the world with her presence in it should leave, the balance should be outweighed, and nature should respond in the unnatural. He was probably imagining the rain that slid down his cheeks, the wind that stirred his hair like a voice in the darkness. It was only right that when a woman who had touched his life so profoundly should die that he should go mad, or die himself.

His cheeks flamed with some unseen fire and he tilted his head to let the heavens cool them, lest he burn. He could see the claret heat spiraling off them.

What glorious stars there were tonight! Strange for London, that they should be so clear, icy suns suspended in black space, unaffected by the city lights. They were brighter than he had ever seen them; perhaps they rejoiced that one of their number had returned at last?

Not fair, he wanted to tell the stars, she had been meant to be earthbound for a century more at least; but the wind caught his words before he could speak them and reduced them to scattered thoughts in a summer’s breeze.

The darkness pressed in closely, and it was a reassuring thing, except that he could still see his pale hands shining brightly. He didn’t like them there, proving his continued existence, so he touched the ground with one, hoping the earth would swallow it.

Instead, white lilies blossomed where his fingers made contact, turning and twining upwards, enclosing and entangling him in fragrant forest. He knew the lilies weren’t real, but he lay back on them anyway, because that other Lily wasn’t real anymore either, so what did it matter?

It seemed the rain had stopped, but still his cheeks were wet.

The flowers melted softly, as beautiful in ending as they had been in their genesis, pouring into a satin river of ivory. Some wilted at the edges, browning and wrinkling, but he pushed them aside so the wind could take them. A bright glow, a combination of thin red and pooling green, stemmed from the center of the flowers, pushed out of their petals as they transformed, transfixing him.

Still the river grew. The red brick collapsed into itself as the silk washed over it, caving at the edges, until he was standing on the last bit of reality, the last island of stone.

He deliberately stepped into the white, knew there was no choice, watched as his stone was silently swallowed, and knelt. Like thick cream it eddied around his knees, rippled outwards when raindrops—tears?—hit its surface, billowed in the wind, or perhaps curdled, neither liquid nor fabric.

And there was no pleasure in any of it. The cream was cold, greasy: he recoiled to its touch, like pork fat. His body felt slimy, unclean, malformed; covered in thick calluses, yet breakable too.

A febrile headache made his head pound, made him see scarlet on the edges of his vision, twisting and turning with each pump of blood. He knew he was slipping, knew he was drowning, but he could do nothing to stop his fall. He knew he was insane, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t change anything.

A sudden crashing, grating sound shattered everything. Shards of satin flew in all directions and he ducked his head to avoid being cut, yet still one fragment sliced his cheek—he could see his nails dripping with blood. The lilies twisted around his legs bubbled with each crash in a grotesque rhythm, threatening to reduce him to their existence.

The gurgling, guttural noise gnawed at him, set him on edge, rubbed his skin the wrong way. It hurt and it hurt and he held his head and tried to scream for silence, but still it seemed he was splitting along his veins. Footsteps, thundering and cracking like the lightning behind his closed eyelids, shuffling like the unwitting intruder they were, increased in volume in their growing proximity.

Suddenly, the noise stopped, and with it the pain.

All that was left was the wind sighing mournfully as it died in the trees, a far-off remote sound, yet a part of him too, somehow. He opened his eyes experimentally. He found himself looking at a little old lady.

She was hunched, her translucent skin a netting of fine wrinkles. Despite her diminutive height and frail carriage, however, a certain nobility in her manner seemed to give her substance. She was draped in rich plum robes and an emerald cape.

Her pitted old face turned upwards in a halting smile, faltering slightly, as if from the sight before her. He wanted to rend her to pieces, tear her apart, scatter her elements like ashes in the wind, but could only freeze immobile, entirely at her mercy. He waited tensely for some reprieve.

‘Have you not heard the glad tidings, my son?’ she half-whispered in a hoarse voice. ‘Sit not and weep, for on this very night have we been delivered from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Were you aware, my son? The time of celebration is upon us!’

There was utter silence between them for the moment following her words. Then, out of the hollowness of where his heart should be, he felt a strange something rising up in him, filling him until it overflowed, bursting out, a sudden croaky laugh. Hundreds more bubbled up in him, uncontrollable, till he fell to the manic laughter, an insane smile stretching and distorting his face widely, grotesquely, ripping at the seams, till he should surely die of it.

‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!’

The woman stepped back a few paces, clearly alarmed, but he took no notice of her, a slave to the laughs which continued to force their way out of his throat, scalding his face which would have fit into a frown so nicely, but instead turned upwards at all the edges. Over the din, he managed to yell, so that he could just barely be made out, ‘Yes. Yes, I was aware…’