The four black boys came on, quick-stepping it as he tried to hobble off the walk down into the culvert, hoping to drag one down in the mud with him at least—but the spry bastards caught up to him.

In his haste his cane slipped from his hands and a big black hand—not yet a wrinkle from work on it—picked it up and said, "S—grrgaluaaaa..." and fucking died as Jerry stabbed the fat bastard in the throat and carved a big smiley face, blood gushing everywhere.

Their hands were on him, the others, the whole damn mob, trying to pull him and push him and he slashed, stabbed, ripped, carved—stab-stab-stab-stabbed! This was so easy, like cutting cheese, like spreading butter. His creaking knees weren't creaking, his aching back wasn't aching—these punks would never mug anyone else.

The glassy brown eyes that looked up at him as he twisted the blade in the dying punk's guts and the little voice pinged, "We was jus' come ta help. White folks been gettin' banked. We da goo..."

The cop door slammed shut and the hell if he was weathering this shit storm. He hobble jogged at that pig and when the pig said nervously, "Sir, stop, drop the knife," he kept coming and coming until something ripped through him and the asphalt didn't taste half bad, a strong iron tang to it as he chewed with his broken teeth

And that is how the last night of his life went to Hell, killing four kids who were trying to see him safely home.

What were the chances?

It wasn't hot like they all said. In fact it was quite cold in the liquid darkness as he made his way to the point of deeper night in the distance, a point he arrived at over and over again only to have it draw more distant yet.

Finally, weary of the effortless glide to nothing, he sat down and the carven onyx wall gave beneath him and he pitched headlong into, "You're joking me!"

"No jokes here, Jerry" said the savage, mohawked frog on the throne, surrounded by toads, lizards, turtles, snakes, anything but an mammal, but all with human eyes.

"Seriously, a talking frog? YOU are the Lord of Darkness?"

The frog croaked in a peepish way, seeming somewhat hurt by Jerry's lack of respect, "Prince, I am the Prince of Darkness."

Jerry roared as the various creepy creatures near the enthroned frog rolled their eyes and one one-eyed snake whispered in the frog's ear. The frog brushed aside this serpentine advisor and croaked at Jerry, "I shall cast you into the smoldering pit!" and as he rose, puny before Jerry's towering shade, a force of malignant magnetism fresh cast down from the world of the living, he hopped off the throne to squat menacing before Jerry, who noted the frog was not moving with vigor.

Jerry loomed, a menacing aura radiating from his fresh-lived wrath and with a baleful thought swept the pugnacious toad croak-wise, head-over-haunch down into the sulfuric pits.

It occurred to Jerry that he was the most powerful creature in all the Abyss and that the freaks about the Throne of Hell should give back, quavering before him, and they did.

Thence, formlessly triumphant, his towering WILL, which had been jailed in that teetering body for decades flowed forth and seized the Throne and sat thereupon.

“Ha,” he thought, “and you fools intended to imprison and torment me,” and his thoughts echoed like a storm of sound throughout the realm of cold, lonely eternity.

He reclined upon that onyx throne, the second most powerful being in all of creation and he waxed wrathfully content.

Then, in less time that it would have taken for his heart to beat among the living, the gray cave gaped and a shade emerged in human shape, to pin-light peepers piercing the lonely hall.

The shade jerked about vaporously and exclaimed, "This cannot be—this is a hallucination."

Jerry answered, "No hallucinations here, Ed."

As he wondered how he knew the shade's name he heard the croak-like echo of his voice echo through the throne room, crowned by the reverberant thought of the shade, "The Prince of Darkness but a frog? How rich damnation is!"

The one-eyed snake hissed a warning to Jerry, but it was too late as the energized form recently cast among the fading from the land of the living, swept upon him in a storm of will and words, "I bought and sold companies bigger than this sorry excuse for an afterlife!"

And off tumbled Jerry with a croakish peep into the acrid stench of, "No," of ancient, stale pussy, "Norse Hel? With bitches in charge? I was supposed to be..."

...And the cold, calloused hands of a giantess reached up from the pit of ever nagging hags and dragged him down, ever down...

Impressions of Moby Dick: Herman Melville and Modern Man?s Transcendental Journey

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