The Jehovah Contract

'Get

up!

'

Something eventually reached through the fluffy cloud of fuzzed sensation that enveloped me. I was dragged from the bed. Something stung in my neck again, and the constellations collapsed into black holes.

The universe vanished like God waking up.

God started dreaming again, and I awoke in a dark place. I wasn't sure I was completely awake, though. Something felt very wrong.

For starters, the floor rumpled and wiggled beneath me. The single light bulb hanging over me grew and shrank, pulsating opalescent colors. The ceiling squirmed like boiling pudding in slow motion. I tried to stand.

And watched my feet melt into the floor.

At first, I thought I'd slipped and fallen. When I grabbed for a nearby table and watched it twist away from me, I knew something wasn't straight, and it was I.

Blotchy hands, horribly withered, hung from my wrists. Beneath the hospital robe my body swelled and contracted. So did everything else. The whole room behaved as if it were hideously alive.

What Beathan had said about set, setting, and dosage suddenly came back to me in a thousand tiny voices. Something black and red flickered the word

stoned

. I knew it then and there. And the most frightening realization was that there was nothing I could do about it. I had to ride it wherever it would take me.

Somewhere deep back in what was left of my mind, I guessed that they'd drugged me to imprint something on my consciousness. Psychedelics-such as the one currently making me see the skeleton under my skin-have the effect of opening the mind to suggestion. The thought slithered through my mind and vanished the instant I laid my hand on the table. And put my fingers into someone's liver.

The cold, hard liver nestled in the middle of a corpse. Its skin had been folded away in sheets of yellow-grey to reveal its cold, hard organs.

The trouble was, the body squirmed around on the table, looking at me with frosted eyes. A tongueless mouth lectured me from beneath gauze wrapping.

'It is logically impossible to find God,' the corpse said. Its liver turned into a bloated, bloody worm that ate into its lungs. 'The object of the search is the searcher forever beyond your grasp. He is that and that is you.'

'Shut up,' I said, flowers parachuting out of my mouth. My skeleton turned into Malto Meal, and I slid once more to the soft marble.

All the other tables crowded in on me. I was surrounded by death and the smell of science. The tables shrieked back in a blaze of scintillating yellow. My tongue burned just watching the smells.

I stood again to walk like a fly across an inverted floor. My feet puddled and dropped bits of electric-blue shadow behind them.

I could see in both directions at once. All around me lay the gutted remains of medical cadavers. They'd all endured a good deal of use over the years.

That didn't bother me. My concern was that some of them writhed. Some groaned and gurgled. One was tap dancing.

An idea dripped acid green.

They're trying to scare the shit out of me. That's the reason for the cadavers.

'Profound conclusion,' said a face that pushed itself up from my wrist. 'But why?'

'God is why!' mimicked a truncated torso, giving off an angry taste of violet.

'God is wry!' blinked a skinless hand.

'God is rye rot, right?'

This was getting unruly. The deceptive part of it was that my mind seemed to be alert. It wasn't like being drunk. Yet I saw these