underground, understood

part 7

The initiation began with stripping down to the bare essentials, then covering the offending bits with postcards from picturesque places. Mary Louisa giggled and thought it was foreplay. Pasta-louis was yet to show her 'the wall', and they hadn't progressed beyond the front room, which was a twelve by fourteen shag carpeted rectangle containing a threadbare couch and a stack of encyclopedias for use as an ash tray holder. Pasta-louis only smoked two cigarettes a day, and now that his follower had the Eiffel Tower and Stonehenge scotch-taped to her twin cups, he lit the first one up.

He suddenly stood, having had a thought, and shambled through the high shag to the kitchen, retrieved a souvenir letter opener from a junk drawer and returned, thrusting the scimitar-looking nick-knack into Mary Louisa's hand. The Grand Canyon had fallen from his Bvds, and Mary Louisa giggled again from her position against a turquoise wall.  

“Hold that up,” he said. “Repeat after me, I swear to the divine Shmear that I will uphold the law of its subject, the master Pasta-louis, and do unto others as the Shmear doth command. Say that.”

“I swear to, uh, the smear,” the scimitar dipped.

“Hold it up... to the Shmear that I will uphold...”

“I swear to the Shmear to uphold...”

“the laws of me, Pasta-louis...”

“the laws of you, Pasta-louis...”

“and to do as he says, or you'll rue the day!”

“uh, and do as you say, because or else,” she finished up, then swung the letter open around for effect. “Now can we?” Mary Louisa began peeling postcards from her bra.

Pasta-louis was pleased, very, and he took a drag from the cigarette and smooshed it out in the glass ashtray, over volume eight of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He took her hand before she could reach down below to the catacombs and pulled her through the kitchen then spun her around by the shoulders. Pasta-louis gently backed her up to the dividing archway, until Mary Louisa's bare feet straddled the line between linoleum and wood planks. He looked at her seriously, then beseechingly, before slowly turning her to look beyond the room to witness the yellow wall, and great glaring Shmear.

“See the Shmear, and believe!” Pasta-louis proclaimed, thunderously. He threw his hands up and hawed.

She dropped the opener and put her hands to her mouth, and she breathed in deeply. “I must see this,” she said, but she said it to herself. Mary Louisa stepped into the room, zigzagging through the obstacle course that was a broken floor and swinging nooses, until she stood before the glob of offensive gunk. “It's everything you said it is, all it could be.” She touched the sticky splat, and appreciated the mounds and folds of its landscape. She pulled her finger out, and a string of tenuity followed behind until it broke and fluttered back to the wall like the gossamer thread of a spiderweb. “A great booger from beyond, and we are here.”

From beyond the room, Pasta-louis watched, and he grew in stature until Mary Louisa came back to him and folded him into her arms. She led him back to the couch. “We are going to rule the fucking world,” she said.