1.
A Kraken slithers through the streets of the sleeping city. Lurking in the shadows, it moves unseen by man or woman. Is this a cruel manifestation of some perverted God? A scourge sent upon the populace as a result of God's anger or God's madness? Might it be a sign or herald of some as yet unconsidered spiritual transformation in the soul of mankind? Or is it a final confirmation of some nameless terror that rests in the hearts and minds of all men and women, rarely acknowledged but ever present? These things cannot be known. The Kraken is extremely large, a mile long by most accounts, and quite horrific in every way. Those few who have seen it are rendered mute and filled with an obsessive desire to construct elaborate charts and diagrams with no basis in reality. Naked men with beards perform elaborate rituals in the streets involving long pieces of string or wire and several sticks erected in pools of black tar. The sudden disappearance of the sun goes unnoticed by a populace increasingly obsessed with gazing at their fingers. Typewriters mysteriously vanish from store front displays while their keys are found glued to door knobs and window frames in indecipherable arrangements.



2.
A Serpent advises a King. "This Kraken of yours," hisses the Serpent, "is merely a phantasm of an over stimulated mind." The King remains doubtful. "The pressures of daily life cause such imaginings to appear as reality," advises the Serpent, "there is no reason to believe that a creature such as the Kraken could ever truly exist. Try to relax. Distract yourself with the real, the concrete, and you will soon forget such fantastical notions as that of the Kraken."
The King attempts to heed the Serpent's advice, but is unable to put the Kraken out of his mind. It has come to dominate his thoughts in all aspects of life. The King is beset with a constant sense of unease.



3.
A cafe in Paris. 2 upper class intellectuals, Leopold and Thomas, discuss serious matters.

LEOPOLD: I've murdered my wife, Thomas. I don't know that I should be telling you this, but I find myself unable to keep silent about it. I think you should file a police report at once.
THOMAS: My fingers, Leopold, look at my fingers. See the way they wiggle and twitch. As if they move of their own accord, each finger having a mind of its own.
LEOPOLD: Listen Thomas, I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation. By the way, have you noticed that it's always dark out lately? I suspect there's something going on.
THOMAS: They speak to me. Listen! (silence) They're telling stories about other places, other lands. They lie!
LEOPOLD: Why this obsession with your fingers? Let it go for once.
THOMAS: Wait! Wait! They're beautiful... each one... a living representation of their creator... They're like us, Leopold!
LEOPOLD: It's happening to you, Thomas. The same thing that happened to my wife, and Betsy next door... It starts with your fingers, but from there it only gets worse...

The Kraken appears on the scene. All present are seized with terror. Thomas and Leopold swallow their tongues in despair. Waitresses claw helplessly at their eyes, plunging themselves off of terraces in an attempt to forget what they've seen. Assassins terminate their contracts in helpless dismay. All good things go awry.



4.
The King dreams of the kraken. Upon awakening, the King confesses the subject of his dreams to the Serpent. "Dreams are merely the symbolic wandering of the mind," hisses the Serpent. "These things are irrational. The very fact that you dreamed of the Kraken tells me that your Kraken is nothing more than a product of your unconscious. A spectre, a ghost, a night fairy and an illusion. You must turn your mind away from such immaterial things and focus on the real."
The King, wishing to believe in the wisdom of the Serpent, cannot bring himself to extinguish a secret hope that the Kraken will someday appear to him in his waking life.



5.
A manuscript is uncovered, written years before by a man claiming to have witnessed the Kraken. The manuscript falls into the hands of the king. It reads as follows:

THE GOLDEN SPERM OF THE BLACK DREAM HORSE

A mute army of thumbtacks and clothes pins has descended into our dreams to lay waste to our erections, our thoughts resist them but our words and actions furrow misdeed and error. Carousel horses turn and sink their teeth into concrete busts while their flesh crawls with endless moons and stars and burned out planets. Operating tables quarrel in the starlit halls of roofless nursing homes. The very ether through which we live and breathe and have our being has turned to sand, engulfing our orifices and pervading our innermost thoughts.

The sun sinks down below the threshold of sleep. Neglected semen drips down walls of elevator shafts, exposing shame faced Egyptian priests and forgotten dental tools. Snake tracks left eloquently before sunrise drenched in vomit and stained with tobacco are shot through with piercing light. Unyielding knots of flesh fall listless, left by mindless assassins nights before.

A clash of typewriter keys staggers down spiral staircases, awakening sleeping foxes painted years before by God or madness. Children's drumming fingers on barren cupboards open secret compartments containing words written in moments of terror or despair. Ejaculating chinamen attempt to organize a crime scene, rendered futile in the bleak light of a fading moon. All this has come to nothing.

The Serpent advises the King that the manuscript is a fake. The King, not wishing to alarm the Serpent further, pretends to agree, but is secretly inspired and encouraged by the contents of the manuscript.



6.
An Italian bordello. Two prostitutes, Giulietta and Valeska, converse over luke-warm coffee and stale bread.

GIULIETTA: I'm scared, Valeska. There are strange men appearing in my bed. Not clients. Tiny men, less than a foot high. They leave undecipherable arrangements of silverware on the bedspread.
VALESKA: Have I shown you my fingers today? I've painted each one a different color. Look how they shine and flash in the sunlight!
GIULIETTA: That's funny - there doesn't seem to have been any sunlight over the last week or so. Do you think it's some sort of power outage?
VALESKA: They tell me things, Giulietta. Things no man or woman should want to hear. Terrifying things, but also beautiful...
GIULIETTA: Back to the men in my bed. I think they might be policemen. I mean... they seem very official. And they wear curious uniforms. Maybe there's a new program in place.
VALESKA: I can't bear to turn away from them! Look - they pick things up and put them down again! They're like... like... living creatures, with minds of their own...
GIULIETTA: Aren't you listening? I worry about your constant preoccupation with your fingers. The same thing happened to a man down the street, and just last week he was found committing unspeakable acts.
VALESKA: (still obsessively looking at her hands) So beautiful...

The Kraken suddenly enters the bordello. Screams of terror fill the rooms and hallways. Giulietta and Valeska rip their tongues out in sheer terror. A horrified madame produces a pistol and fires blindly, killing 3 clients before shooting down a ceiling fan which delivers a fatal blow to her head. Prisoners escape their confinement. Scribes doodle thoughtless obscenities. All that is known becomes obscure.



7.
The King receives a private letter. It is a love letter from the Kraken. It reads as follows:

I can no longer hide myself from you, nor can I deny the flame of my passion. I am in love with you. It is my wish that we be married at once. My heart will wait no longer, the strength of my yearning devours me more day by day.
- the Kraken

Having read the cryptic message, the King can no longer be held back by fear or doubt. The time has come to consummate his love.



8.
The King retires in secret to his private chamber to invoke the Kraken. The barbarous words and ancient formulas spill forth effortlessly from his mouth. The Kraken appears in a radiant splendour of light. Tentacles writhing in ecstasy, light pouring from its mouth and eyes, the Kraken defies all attempts at physical description. All things are plunged into darkness as the resplendent light of the Kraken radiates wave after wave of pure transformation. In this light is all terror and amazement. The sun and moon collide in mutual annihilation. A tremendous buzzing fills the chamber, rending substance from essence, turning the light of awareness infinitely back on itself in recurring waves. A vast madness fills the sky as bricks and mortor, wooden planks and sticks and stones alike flee in terror, filled with a sudden awareness of the almighty presence of the Kraken.
Amidst the unspeakable terror produced by its very existence, the Kraken speaks:

I, the very essence of the sun, am but a black stone covered in honey. Worship me in your very mouth. Drain your tears into wooden buckets, mix them with the blood of animals, and pour them onto the sand, all in my name. I adore you. I am the mother who has devoured her offspring by chance or mistake. Build for me monstrous towers of blood. Engrave my name on thick bars of iron, then let them be scattered in all directions, to be covered with tar and bees and found by naked lunatics. Let the very flesh fall into disarray. Arrange for me words and numbers within structures beyond hope of understanding, then sacrifice your very names to them. Obscurity is distilled from my shadow by the passing of hours gone unnoticed by men compelled by irrelevant obsession. My substance is composed of bees and yet I bleed black ink. Etheric egg shells cover my skin, which appears viscous but has the touch of radient darkness. Life forms deleted by God and nature breed in my hair, in which the speech of man is intermingled with the buzzing of insects. I appear as in a hazy smoke in a dream of a cloudy darkness, and yet I am denser that the core of the earth. Do not attempt to understand me, for I am the very spirit of obscurity.

As quickly as the Kraken appeared, it dissolves itself again, re-absorbed into its own obscurity.



9.
The Serpent, after a long wait, enters the private chamber of the King. The King lies listless on the brick floor, blood flowing from eyes, mouth, ears and nostrils, a look of indescribable bliss on his face.
"I will advise you again," hisses the Serpent, "to forget once and for all this obsession of yours with the Kraken. I assure you it cannot and does not exist. Perhaps a short vacation will help you regain your sense of the real, yes, a short vacation should do just that."