The gibbering thing with the tattoo of an anus on his skull introduced himself as Tydeus as we both cracked open the poly-bagged capsules of mescalin. He was bloated; tumourous and gnarled. His hairy paunch hung low, almost obscuring the flaccid and pierced jumble of his genitalia.

"You're not looking for a thrill." It was half a statement and half an accusation.

"I'm looking for knowledge."

"In excess? Unhealthy for you. You're better off with herpes or an eight-year-old boy. I can arrange either."

Tydeus was an advanced form of street shaman. He knew every corner, edge, sign and orifice on the dark byways of Subreality. He understood that all people have an element of sick passion just waiting to be indulged. He had a knack for offering the right thing.

That's why I needed him, along with a head full of mescaline.

"I need to step sideways. I need to get to the root of it all."

"You want to deep-throat Subreality?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"One warning. You had better be prepared to swallow."

"Try me."

It's a profoundly weird step from concept to emotion. The niceties of reality are filtered and diffused like a fogged mirror or a fractured lens. A place where a gasp is visible across the landscape; the hitch of breath rings like a thousand bells, and the meaning of life boils down to a genital sneeze.

Beautiful and horrific and totally out of control.

The darkness comes from the essential amorality of the orgasm itself. Whether it involves rape, horses, whips or death, the end result is always the same fluid discharge.

The land shifts, heaves, jacks, and roils. In an instant, the air is heavy with the smell of cheap latex, vaginal musk, and hot sweat. A lusty miasma of modern sex wafting into every nostril. It's enough to make Danielle Steele vomit up her kidneys, copiously masturbating the entire time.

The veil draws choking over all of the innocent fun and undertones of nobility. Like the waxing and waning of the Moon, the shift swings into darkness unreal.

Havelock Ellis would weep into his hands. Robert Heinlein would recoil from the horrors of the atrocities committed in his name. Camille Paglia would blanch from the mania. Charles Bucowski would laugh his balls off.

There is a carnival of every available fetish: cutting your own orifice to fuck in a screaming woman. Encompassing a man thirty years your junior. Taking someone struggling and screaming against their will. Licking razorwire. Inserting blades like sex organs. There's a corrosive stench of urine, mixed with spent blood. The sound of flesh on flesh in abusive ways. Brief cries cut off in the night. This is all a creeping darkness; a scarlet underkimono that lines the silken seductiveness of this mad world.

Stained couches, fetid with blood and semen. A few shreds of flesh on a well-oiled handcuff bracelet. A teddy bear with a torn ear. An empty needle. A water glass, with sticky fingerprints around the outside.

Cheap neon conversations in the alley lead to the sweat-wet bricks and the smell of rotting fruit. Someone moans in withdrawal in the corner, even at the point of insertion in the other. Blood and skin under the fingernails, bruises on pale skin. Gibbering darkness. Blood on the tongue. Vaginal pink folds. Sweet pork smell of blackened flesh. Burned afterimages of discharge on the eyes.

There is no kindness in this passionately wet place. There is no justice. There is no light, just a filtered sanguine haze drawn over the eyes. There is only amoral emotion and physical feedback. There is anyone ever imagined in the black threads of orgasm. There is -- Christ, there is anything you ever hated yourself for wanting. Hating yourself--

[The rest of the document is obscured by milky stains, a bloody handprint, smears of feces and soot.]