Hunger had long debilitated my body. When my belly was only half its former size, I summoned a cab and went off into the night. We soon reached my specified destination and a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I remember the buzz of curiosity which my advent excited within the precincts of the building. I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable, but this was not the reason for the general fuss as I crossed the room and found a seat at an empty table. The very fact I had passed through the door was enough. All who enter this establishment are greeted in the same manner.
Bewildered by the brilliancy of the menu brought to me by a tall and gaunt waiter who was shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave, and with my ears deafened by my own carefully voiced choices, I neither saw nor heard the closing of the manacles upon my wrists and ankles. I had been chained to the iron chandelier directly above my head! With a sudden tug this chandelier was drawn up and I felt myself dangling high over the other customers. An ingenious apparatus now came into play and I was trundled along rails set into the ceiling at a frightful velocity towards a pair of swing doors located near the top of the wall. Once through these doors the manacles opened and I found myself plummeting down a chute.
I swooned but will not say that all of consciousness was lost. In absolute darkness I slid and tumbled and the metaphysical concepts that absorbed the entirety of my remaining attention were typically and conveniently unutterable. At times I believed myself caught in a maelstrm in the realms of the boreal pole. Amid a roaring and bellowing I was at last deposited in an unknown place at an unknown time. I felt that I lay upon my back. I reached out my hand and it fell heavily upon something damp and soft and I strove to imagine where I could be. My eyes were still closed and I longed, yet dared not, to employ my vision. I dreaded the first glance at objects around me. At length, with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly opened my eyes.
By a disturbing yellowish lustre, the origin of which I could not at first determine, I was enabled to see the extent and aspect of my prison. The walls of this circular chamber were constructed of spherical bricks many rows deep. Looking upward, I surveyed the ceiling and my attention was riveted by what appeared to be a gigantic spoon gently swinging on a stout rope like the huge pendulum of an antique clock. Then I realised with a start that it was much nearer than I had supposed it to be, and thus much smaller, no larger in fact than an ordinary table spoon, well within my grasp if I stood on tiptoe. The rope turned out to be stout only by the same trick of perspective, for in reality it was no more than an insignificant length of string which broke when I snatched the spoon.
Here was my tool of escape! Holding it before me I attacked the substance of my confinement. Juice spurted and I shrieked. The bricks were melons peeled carefully and selected for their flavour honeydew melons! Without so much as a napkin to wipe my chin, I began to gorge my way to freedom. Buried alive! Buried alive in melons! I wielded my spoon with greater force. To the right to the left far and wide up to my mouth and down again! I alternately laughed and howled, dribbling incessantly, my lips and slick tongue moving convulsively as I chewed and swallowed. Slowly with a tortoise gradation I approached the brighter light of the other side. I groaned and slipped on cool melon flesh, a wretch to these fruits foredoomed!
Exhausted and stuffed, I stumbled out into a chamber illuminated by smoky torches set in iron brackets fixed to black stone walls. This chamber was ornately decorated and gave the impression of existing in some secret underground crypt, the vaults of an immense unholy cathedral. Seated before me on an elevated platform were three figures dressed in cloaks and pointed hoods who glared at me. I was sick sick unto death with all those melons and yet I heard clearly enough the sentence they passed on me. I saw the lips of my judges, thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness of immovable resolution of stern contempt of sensible eating habits. The candle flames wavered and I almost fainted at the finality of the words addressed to me:
"Take him away and incarcerate him in the lasagne! The vegetable lasagne! And let him be accompanied by a light salad."
Unseen hands seized me, my shirt was stuffed with lettuce leaves and slices of cucumber, and I was dragged down a corridor into a room smelling strongly of the preheated Ovens of Hell. A trapdoor was raised in the centre of the floor and into the gaping pit thus exposed I was thrust. I fell and knocked my head and lost my senses but this relief was only temporary, for when I recovered I found myself standing between two barriers of green pasta, obviously flavoured with spinach, barriers that were moving towards each other, threatening to crush me between them! With a howl of desperation I lashed out, shredding them with my fists, but although they dropped limply to the floor I perceived two new barriers behind them, barriers made of chopped courgettes, mushrooms and tomatoes, cooked in a merciless pan and compressed into a solid layer by some incredible pressure.
I punched and kicked my way through these barriers also, only to discover another pair of pasta walls. It seemed the substance of these barriers alternated in this manner right to the limits of the crust if crust there was! As this awful conviction forced itself into the innermost chambers of my soul, I cried aloud and fell to my knees. I had not sufficient strength or technique to punch through every layer. Then an idea came to me. The belt I wear is remarkable for its dull, dark and soundless buckle. Drawing it quickly out of the belt loops of my trousers, I stood and employed it as a whip, cracking it left and right and smashing layer after layer of pasta and vegetable paste. This method of attack promised complete success until a horrible disaster sabotaged hope!
My trousers had been gradually working loose all this time by imperceptible degrees but abruptly they quivered oh dear! and fell down! I was left in the unenviable position of having to insert my belt back through the loops and reserving the buckle to spare my blushes rather than my life. At this point my hand strayed to my pocket and discovered the spoon that had delivered me from the melons. My judges had not thought to search me before casting me to the lasagne! Now I fought back with renewed confidence, jamming spoonful after spoonful of pasta and vegetables into my maw. The most notorious feeling of fullness must, in the end, yield to the untiring rapacity of simple greed.
At last, dishevelled and bloated, I devoured my way through the final barrier. But the catalogue of horrors was not to have reached its climax so soon. I now found myself facing an enormous ape, or at the very least a man wearing an ape suit. As I recoiled in alarm this beast brandished a razor and cried, "You could have had the pudding or the tart, but you ordered the cheese that takes the biscuit!"
I shrieked and fled and realised that I was trapped in a maze made of cheese, a Leerdammer labyrinth, or rather that the maze itself was the inside of a titanic cheese riddled with the holes that served as passages from nowhere to nowhere else. Wherever I ran I heard the heavy breathing of my pursuer, his infrequent grunts and occasional curses as he tripped in his clumsy costume. Fleeing in circles was pointless. I had no option but to eat my way right through the dividing walls of this maze to the outside. I spooned and chewed with wild abandon, my stomach on the point of bursting, my blood overwhelmed with cholesterol, my teeth overworked, my New Year's Resolutions out the window, my sentiments utterly cheesy.
At last I broke into the outside world! I found myself in a little space with a low wooden ceiling and a circumference of red cloth. Crawling under this hanging I discovered that I had emerged directly beneath the table from which I had been snatched by the monstrous chandelier!
I slumped in my chair and summoned the tall and gaunt waiter. He appeared promptly and chuckled with sepulchral derision as he asked, "Everything to your dissatisfaction, sir?"
"Cheque please!"
"May I interest you in a coffee?"
"Cheque please!"
"How about a complimentary mint?"
"Cheque please!"
"Pass your hand over my tray. You cannot help feeling it is loaded with mints. Once more let me implore you to take one. No? Then I must positively press upon you a heated towel."
"For the love of God, cheque please!"
"He! he! he! ha! ha! ha! yes, the cheque. I will bring it to you with my own hands, these same hands that fought the conquering worm in the tomb, and I will laugh a long and bitter laugh, a laugh for which men have deemed me mad, but the question is not yet settled whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence whether much that is glorious whether all that is profound does not spring from disease of thought from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen..."
"Villain!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I have lots of spare change! dip into my pockets! here, here! it is an overgenerous tip!"
I scarcely remember leaving my table and passing out through the door. The moment I found myself in the street I shrieked and fled and did not cease until it started to rain and I needed to hail a cab. I have been warned on many occasions never to order a three-course meal in that establishment. Wise advice! And yet I believe I escaped lightly. The previous month an acquaintance of mine wandered in and ordered a single course consisting of a pie an ashen and sober pie with crisped and sere edges. It arrived at his table carried on the shoulders of six pallbearers. It was shaped like a coffin. When he removed the lid with his knife, he saw it was occupied by a corpse with features identical to his! An instant later this corpse sprang up to a sitting position, pointed a finger and moaned the words, 'Thou art the man!'
My acquaintance lashed out with his napkin and the whole frame of the corpse within the space of a single minute or less, shrunk crumbled absolutely rotted away beneath him. Inside the pie there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome of detestable putrescence. My acquaintance also struck the pie itself and this also dissolved into a nearly liquid mass of detestable putrescence. Then the waiter ran up. He also crumbled into a nearly liquid mass of detestable putrescence. The same held true for the table and chair. Everything my acquaintance struck with his napkin turned into a nearly liquid mass of detestable putrescence.
Utterly unhinged by such horror, he went on a rampage until even the walls of the establishment melted down around his ears. It was a traumatic experience and now he has a phobia of detestable putrescences. He cannot bear to be near them. This phobia has significantly affected his everyday life. He takes unnatural precautions to avoid the possibility of coming into contact with nearly liquid masses of detestable putrescence, deliberately making detours around morgues, abattoirs and scenes of industrial accident. I find it difficult even to persuade him to frolic in the compost heap. He has suffered much. My own sufferings were far less intense and yet I have still decided never again to dine at the Caf Poe.