neoplatonic
16-06-2004, 00:31
A marble rolls. Rolls across the floor from dark to darker. Rolls from between your legs toward the far wall of the corridor and sparkles in the pale blue light that falls down from the mist that hovers near the ceiling. The glass clinks against the stone floor. It sounds like music, like a song that you might have heard when you were little.
A marble rolls. You dive to your hands and knees. Catch it. You’ve seen black claws shoot out from walls. Catch it. You’ve seen gnawing teeth burst from dead stomachs. You dive and your hands are torn ragged on the floor, and your fingers brush against the cold ball and send it spinning away to the side. The glass strikes the stone and shatters in a hiss of steam and crystal and a cloud of white vapor whips up into the air.
Get up on your knees. Pull out your knife. The little cloud gathers back down near the floor and swirls in a tight ball, no larger than your fist. It’s black now, and now red, and then fades and shrinks into a tiny little form that lays stretched out among the shards of sparkling glass. A little person, not longer than your fingernail. You lean forward to watch the creature sit up and stretch miniscule arms over a button head, and it sees you. Dark hair twists, white legs leap, and the little person is darting among the pieces of the orb.
You sweep out your hand but catch only glass, and it tears into your raw skin and you wince. Look up and you see that the person is bigger now, and growing. Pale, thin legs lead to small bare feet that patter down the passage into darkness. Red hair floats in the air.
“Wait!” you shout. Push to your feet and feel your knees pop, your head start to spin. You need more sleep, more food, but you’re so close now. You can rest later. You replace your dagger and draw out your sword and rush down the corridor. Your heavy footfalls pound in your ears in time with the rushing beat of your heart. Each pace sends a sharp jolt up your legs into your spine.
A sharp turn. You stop and press your back against the wall and inch forward, hold out the very tip of your brightly burnished sword so that you can use it to peer around the wall. Nothing. Darkness. Maybe the little person is only a phantom. Maybe they’ve fled to whatever afterlife they deserve. You let out a long breath and ease around the corner. You’re almost there. Only a few more turns to negotiate. Only a few more ambushes to survive.
The next corridor, the one that was empty. There’s a girl, thin, pale. Naked. Only thirteen or fourteen. She’s grinning at you under big yellow eyes through lank red hair that falls over her forehead and down her shoulders and chest. Immediately, reflexively, you strike with your sword. You aim downwards and the point slides easily between two of her ribs and through her slight chest. The girl’s face goes slack and then she starts to scream and she keeps screaming, the passageway ringing with her pain. You jerk your sword out of her in a spurt of blood and she collapses to her knees and her jaw is contorted with the wail tearing from her throat, but then the sides of her lips begin to curl upward. The scream staggers, falters, and it becomes a high, staccato giggle what you can feel in the back of your head. Her voice rises and falls, like music, maybe a tune that you’ve heard before.
She pulls her hands away from where your sword pierced her, and her skin is white and even. Her sharp nose is pointed at your feet, but her eyes watch your face through her curtain of hair. Her smile. Something is wrong with her smile. Her gaze flicks to the side, toward your sword, and you pull it back again to slash at her neck. You’ll take off her head. You will kill this child, this demon. Your sword has not failed yet. You squeeze the hilt but it’s too light. Twist your neck around and find your blade, but it’s not there. It’s melting away in a mist of sickly green that’s running down toward your hand.
You toss the hilt to the ground and reach for your dagger. In a smooth motion you have it in your grip and swing around to plunge it into the girl’s eye, but she ducks under your arm and rolls to the side. Her calves wrap around one of your ankles and she twists, taking your foot out from under you. You manage to keep your balance, just barely, but the girl, still pressed flat against the floor, sweeps out her leg and removes your other foot. You do fall, to your back. Your head bounces off the stone and you see only black and shining white stars for a long moment.
She jumps on your chest and straddles it and reaches out with both hands to hold down your knife arm. You push and push, but you cannot move her. She is as heavy as stone. Her face is right over yours and she’s smiling. You bring your free hand up and take a grasp of the long hair at the back of her head and pull. Her smile fades into a sneer as her head moves up to expose her frail, pale neck.
“I killed you,” you hiss.
“I killed you,” she whines, her voice high and petulant, ringing. “I killed you. I killed you!”
You twist your fingers into her greasy locks. She smiles, and then she suddenly shrinks and you’re holding onto nothing and a tiny little girl is bouncing up your armor and crawling down your neck. She’s scrambling among your chest hairs and giggling and you slap with your palms at your armor to try to crush her. You feel her moving to the side, under your armpit, like an insect. You sit up and begin to untie the laces that hold the breastplate in place.
A pain binds you. A terrible pain, like a long, dull needle going through your skin and then through one of your ribs straight into your heart, which skips one beat and then another. After a moment it passes, the pain, subsides into a warmth in your chest, but you gasp for breath and hold your side. You slowly push to your feet and wave your knife in the air before you.
“I could have killed you,” the girl’s voice says, from right beneath your ear. You swing up your hand and tear at the spot with your fingernails, but the only blood you pull away is your own.
She laughs, from under your other ear, and you scratch at that spot, too, but she’s not there.
She says, “Don’t do that. You’re hurting yourself.”
You stagger back and land against the wall. You manage to remove your breastplate and it lands with a hollow clang on the floor. You rip your shirt off your body and run your fingers up and down your skin, under your arm.
“I could have killed you,” the girl says again, now from deep inside your head, “but I didn’t. And I won’t.”
“What have you done to me?” you shout. “What kind of spell is this?”
“It’s no spell! I just want to go where you’re going. Put your armor back on.”
You whip your head from side to side. “No! Leave me be!”
Her voice becomes harsh and loud inside your skull. “I said to put your armor back on.” The same pain as before wracks your body, but now it’s focused directly on the center of your forehead. All you see for a short eternity is a burning white wall behind your eyes, and you wake up to find yourself shivering and cold on the floor.
“Your armor.”
You sit up and tie your breastplate back into place. You push up with your hands to stand against the wall.
“I only want to go where you’re going. Just do what I say and I won’t hurt you anymore.”
“You destroyed my sword.”
“We’ll find another one. Go.”
You stand still for a moment. Run a hand through your hair. You glance at the ground and see a sizzling smear where even the hilt of your sword has melted away into a thin layer of slime. Your knife is lying next to it, and you notice a round dark spot around where you were just sitting. You relieved yourself while under the girl’s fog of pain.
Pick up your knife and slide it back into its sheath. You feel something playfully prodding the base of your skull. “There’s a camp after the next three turns, but they’re all asleep. We’ll get another sword there.”
#
The walls, which had always glowed to guide your way, become dark and somber and you’re glad for that, for now you can’t see the welts and cuts running up and down your arms and legs and chest. They rub raw and painful, but she won’t let you stop. “It’s just a little farther.”
Your sword belonged to a fiendish captain, and its brilliant obsidian blade sings hideous songs to you in the dark and the bindings around its hilt undulate and crawl under your hand like the legs of a beetle, but the blade slices through armor like skin, and she will not let you drop it. “We’re almost there.”
The corridor is lit only by a narrow band of crimson light that seeps in from somewhere under the walls’ foundations, and an archway opens up into a black chamber beyond. Your little companion hisses, “Go inside.”
You cross over the threshold and walk through the black haze into a vast circular chamber. It’s empty, save for a glowing square of swirling red light in the exact middle of the room. You hold up your sword before your body and plod toward it. The thing inside of you whistles with glee.
“This is the door. This is the door!”
You reach the door and squint at it. The surface is flat and smooth, like glass, and underneath roil stormy clouds of red lightning. You walk around to try to see the edge, but it doesn’t have one, and the door disappears entirely—“It has no width,” the girl says—but reappears again instantly to reveal the opposite side.
“Go through.”
Start the argument again. “I need to rest.”
“You have to do what I say. You have to. Go through.”
So you step through the doorway, becoming one with the storm underneath and its electric currents. They roll up and down your arms and legs and through your teeth and you can’t breath. There is no air. The girl is laughing, and she moves your legs when you fail and everything becomes white and you collapse onto a hard smooth surface that is cold and luminous.
A heart beats, but not your own, although you don’t realize that for a long time as you wheeze and pant for air. This pulse, unlike your own, moves the entire world. Lift your head and open your mouth in wonder and discover before you a great glowing mountain, and it breathes and moves and shudders. You push up on your forearms and see that you are on a great ledge, running around the summit of the impossible peak, and you crawl laboriously to the precipice to try to see down to the base of the heart but you cannot. It is too far, obscured in a black fog whose top it lit by a golden brilliance emanating from the mountain’s sides. Look up now. The roof of the cavern is so far away that there are gray clouds tumbling underneath the stone cracks, and a thin mist falls down toward you but hisses away into steam before it can even reach the peak a thousand feet above your head.
Everywhere the beating of the mountain’s heart. It fills your entire being and you feel your own body’s rhythms falling into step with it. You stand up and hold the sword an inch away from your nose. A glint runs up and down the blade. There is a surge in your chest, a lightning in your arms. This is your moment. This is what you have dreamed about for years and years. You will kill Him. You remove your shield from its strap across your back and let loose its leather cover. Silver runelight cuts through the gloom.
“You shouldn’t do that,” the girl sighs.
You snarl, “I will kill Him.”
As if in response to your impetuous boast, another beat abruptly joins that of the mountain, but this one is discordant, rumbling and trembling, and its counterpoint to the mountain’s pulse shakes the massive cavern. Rocks tumble down from high above, and you can hear them screech through the air before crashing into the sides below you. You stagger back, away from the edge, parts of which begin to crumble and topple down into the depths. The other heart grows more powerful.
“I’m scared!” your companion mutters. You feel her worm through your head and then something crawls down the skin of your temple. You turn to the side just in time to see something small and white leap away from you. It disappears into a cloud of dust at your feet. You stomp around, grunting, trying to smash the little fiend, but her giggles fill the air and then fade away, up the side of the peak.
A huge quake suddenly strikes the ledge, and you fall over to the side and land on your shoulder. Stay still now, don’t move, and listen to the heart. Listen, to its pounding, but not singular, a multitude, all together and overlapping in a symphony of throbs and sighs. The rocks quiver with each beat, groan, shake and tumble along the ground toward the edge. Look, look, where two white hands, knobby and pasty white, each bigger than your entire body, reach up from below and grasp the ledge and begin to pull, and now there are more hands, a dozen of them, a hundred, and tentacles and legs and claws, all slithering up from below and slapping along the flat stone toward you. You instinctively roll away, back toward the wall of the mountain behind you.
The monstrous heart continues to beat, and you see its source when the body slowly rises up onto the ledge. It is towering, the size of a mighty warship, sickly yellow and glistening, shaped like an almond with a thick brown ridge running along the top. From underneath spills out a horde of arms and legs and tentacles, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, all jerking toward you. The body shifts and sways on the ledge, and parts of the rock begin to collapse under its weight, but clawed legs shoot out and drag the moist shell forward to safety, toward you.
You push to your feet and back away, sword held high before you, your face hidden behind your shield. A claw, attached to a slimy arm, reaches close to you and begins to snap at your feet, but you slash out with your blade and it flies away severed into the air. Grunt with satisfaction now, for He is indeed mighty, but He can be hurt, and stare at the flapping member before you. The wounded stump, gushing with white paste, seals shut and splits in two, and from each new end sprouts a sharp set of pincers. They slash at your ankles.
You leap away, up off the ledge and onto the craggy, glowing mountainside, and begin to climb. Something wraps around your legs, your thighs, your chest, and pulls you back down. Your hands wrap white around a stone outcropping and try to hold you in place, but you are wrenched away and you land on your knees back on the ledge.
You hack all around you, and bristling coils and crooked fingers fall away into the dust but more replace them. You twist around in time to see the great, pulsing, shell approach on a sea of clicking legs, and a massive tentacle whips out and coils around your entire body and begins to lift you into the air. You hold your sword ready, controlling the panic rising in your constricted throat, prepared to strike when He exposes Himself.
Rise up over His body, thirty feet up in the air, and along the brown ridge His shell parts with a wet sucking sound, strands of mucus ripping and snapping as His forebody emerges from the hard carapace. His chest is lined with overlapping ridges of hard plate which rasp and expand with each massive breath. Huge arms, four, corded with white muscles stretch out to the side and grab the mountainside and begin to pull down huge sections of golden rock. You hold your breath as the head finally arises on a sinuous tentacle from deep within the body. It slowly lifts into place and then swivels around to look at you.
His face is almost as large as your body. It is pale and tight and pasty, and you realize that it is not a face. It is a mask, covering something underneath that squirms and quivers and rolls from side to side. The tentacle holding you maneuvers you closer to Him, and His mouth parts in a huge grimace and you see that His mask covers a sea of insects, roaches and flies and centipedes and locusts. They are His eyes and His mouth. They spill out from His nostrils and His ears. His strands of waving hair are scorpion tails linked together, end to end. They are Him.
You look down over His entire body, and you see that under the hard shells and plates of chitinous armor swarm a numberless legion of insects, and each one beats and clicks and snaps at you. The beating of His heart is the buzz and drone of insects, rising and falling, iridescent wings flapping faster than the eye can see, long legs scratching together, mouthparts snapping open and shut. Theirs is a hideous murmur, their heart.
You are pulled close to His face, and bile rises in your throat at the tiny waving legs and wings and black faceted eyes that stare at you from under the mask. Your fingers wrap more tightly around your sword hilt, but then you are suddenly pressed right up against His face, and you feel the skin squirming against you and bulging out to the curves of your face and body. The noise is everywhere. You cannot think.
The sword flashes, you swing down toward His neck and then up again, and there is a great squeal that cuts through your brain. The tentacle holding you jerks you back toward the mountainside and slams you hard against the rock. You twist around and see Him standing still, His head hanging loosely to the side as huge swaths of skin dangle and flap in the air. Black clouds of insects, enraged bees, giant ants with hideous pincers, spill out to the ground and rush up the mountain toward you, and you finally hack at the coil around your body and it falls away. Push up to your feet and begin to climb again.
But then the insects stop, and then they retreat back on shuffling legs toward the body. They climb up the tentacles, up the rounded body, and then press back into the gaping wound, which suddenly begins to stitch itself back together. His head rotates around toward you, and a ghastly smile stretches across His face. Tentacles suddenly lash out from every direction. One rips your sword from your hand and snaps it in two. Others take your shield and claws bend it, rip it apart into glowing strips of metal. Your armor, your enchanted crown, are all taken away, and then tentacles lined with tiny snapping pincers wrap around your body and shake you from side to side.
After a long time, too long, they toss you back down on the ledge. Your body is lined with crisscrossing patterns of lacerations, where miniscule strips of flesh have been torn from you. Small streams of blood drip to the ground. You push up to your hands and knees, but then His giant body crashes down next to you and you are caught up in a mass of black arms and legs, all lifting you up to His face.
His huge eyes of roiling jade beetles gaze at you. You are limp and weak. You cannot move, and when the arms release you, you tumble back to the ground far below and land on your side, and then He leaves, buzzing, shuffling away on His sea of legs and claws. You manage to twist your head around in time to see His forebody pulling back into His shell, which closes up again with a slurp. He continues along the ledge, around the mountain, and finally disappears from view, although you can still hear His hearts pound and pound.
You try to stretch, to move, but everything is slow. Everything burns with pain. Sit up. Sit up! You can’t. You’re already dead, or He will come back and kill you at His leisure and feed you to His swarm.
Maybe, you think, this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe this is why no one has ever come back from the mountain.
Something prods your cheek. You split your eyes open, and through a thick layer of mucus see someone squatting over you.
“You can’t stay here,” the girl says.
You grunt.
She reaches down and wraps her arms around your shoulders, sits you up. She whispers into your ear, “You’ve almost done it. Get up!”
“I can’t do it,” you gasp.
She shakes you. “No! Keep going. This is where everyone gives up. All you have to do is keep going. I’ll help you.” Then she sits down next to you and wraps one arm around your shoulders, another around your chest, and she heaves you up to your feet. Lean into her slight body for support, but maybe she’s right. Your legs, you can move them again, just a little, and the haze before your eyes is starting to clear.
“My sword,” you say.
“You don’t need a sword. Not anymore.” With a hand pressed flat against your stomach, she leads you around the mountain, following Him. Her bare feet guide you among the gashes and tumbled earth where He has passed. You feel stronger and stronger, more alive, with each step. Finally, you push away from her and step forward on your own. She giggles.
The ledge curls around the mountain’s face, but grows thinner and thinner, until finally it’s a narrow band barely wide enough for two people to pass side-by-side. You can see great gashes on the mountain’s face where He hauled Himself from outcropping to outcropping. She prods you forward from behind. You edge over a precipitous drop and arrive at a door.
Towering far above your head, it is carved from the side of the mountain, and the frame and lintel are etched with glowing characters that you cannot read. You cannot see where the opening leads, for the threshold is marked by an oily black film that casts your own reflection back at you. Your entire body is lined with drying lines of blood. The girl stands right behind you, peering around your elbow from under her mane of fiery hair, and she is looking at your reflected face in the door.
“Now what?” you ask her.
“Go through.”
“What’s on the other side?”
She doesn’t answer, but instead shoves you forward so that you topple through the black film and land on your knees in a small room. You are wearing your traveling clothes, and no aches torture your body, save for the shooting pains that rise up from where you landed hard on your kneecaps. You stand up to see that you are in a small room, lined with dark wood panels and shelves of old, dusty books. In the middle of the chamber is a heavy black desk, squatting on feet carved to look like lions atop a carpet of woven red strands.
The single door swings open, and you stumble backwards at what enters.
It is an emaciated, hunched figure, shorter than you, gliding forward in a cloud of white miasma. Straps of ragged cloth hang off the gray body and trail behind it on the floor. The huge ovoid head, topped with floating dreadlocks of hair, swivels to stare at you. Skin is stretched tightly between gaping black holes that serve as eyes and the mouth, and you realize that this is not a face. It is a mask, but you can barely imagine what lies beneath. Blackness.
It slides into place behind the desk and sits down in a creaking chair. Dry hands fumble through the drawers, and an ancient, rasping voice slowly says, “Can you read?”
“What?”
“Your kind so often cannot read. You bask in your ignorance, yet you dare to rail against the vicissitudes of a cruel universe.”
You reach for your side and feel the hilt of your knife. You pull it out and hold it pointed toward him. “I killed you.”
“I killed you!” you hear, and you whirl about to see the girl squatting in the far corner. Her hands are pressed against the side of her face. “I killed you!”
“Terrible child,” the other moans.
She smiles at you and runs her fingers through the knots of her hair.
The creature pulls from one of the drawers a thick brown book. It drops it on the desk and a cloud of dust dances before its face. You leap forward with your blade to slash at the demon’s throat, but you miss, because you are now standing in the opposite corner of the room, over the girl. She squints furiously at you and shifts to the side to press her shoulder against the wall. She silently shakes her head.
You hesitate, but slip your knife back into its sheath and face the creature. It is turning through the pages of the book but pauses to look up at you.
“Do you know that this is?”
“No,” you say.
“It is the book of you. It is your Vindication.”
You take slow, measured steps toward the desk. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course not,” the creature intones, each word stretching out for long, long seconds. It leans back into its chair. “Every being has a measure, a record of what it is and will be. It is the book of you. Your Vindication. I have a Vindication. That wretched girl has a Vindication.” It pats the pages of the book. “This is yours.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Your beliefs are of no consequence.”
You ask, scratching your scalp, “Who wrote it?”
It tilts its head to the side, as if studying you. “An astute question, but futile.”
“Why?”
“It is meaningless. Every book that can be written, has been written. They simply exist.”
“But there has to be a writer, or how else could the book exist?” you press.
The creature sighs, raising its shoulders. “Take every possible letter. Arrange them into every possible combination. One of those combinations is your Vindication. It must exist, by definition. The author is immaterial. They are simply expressing an inevitable result, a cosmological tool to achieve a predetermined outcome. Every book that can be written, has been written, at some time or at some place. It is a logical certainty.”
You squint and ponder while the creature returns to the book and continues to turn pages. It nods to itself, running its palm along certain passages.
All you can think to say is, “I don’t believe you.”
“No, you never do.” It touches a crumbling finger to its chin. “It seems that you must be leaving now.”
The girl suddenly grabs your hand and squeezes it. She drags you toward the door. You resist and glare at the creature behind the desk. “But I killed you.”
It rises up from the chair. “The book says the same thing. I am sure that in some instance it must be true.”
You and the girl reach the door and she throws it open and tosses you inside. You reach out for the frame but miss and the last thing you see is her outlined in a box of light and then she leaps in after you. You tumble and fall through long darkness and your clothes fly away into nothing and the girl takes your fingers and pulls them, pulls your bones and muscles and tissue right out of your body and puts them back together again and now you’re someplace else.
A city, but not like any you know. The streets are flat and solid and black, not cobbled. The buildings are smooth and cold, metal, and they rise up so high into the sky that you cannot see their tops, lost in black clouds through which you can catch a glimpse of a fiery red sun. There are terrible noises, harsh rumbles and horns, and on a track above your head something long and slithering rolls and clatters through the city and its lights shine down on your face before they move away.
Something squeaks, something familiar. You glance down to see giant rats scurrying along the curb. Their eyes are red, their tails naked and rigid. The girl squeals and claps her hands and jumps at the nearest one and she catches it. You watch as she breaks it in two with her hands. She holds the body against her chest, runs her blood-stained fingers down the side of her face and neck. Streaks of red glisten on her skin, and she looks at you and grins.
You turn and run away, and her laughter chases you down a narrow alley. You press your back against a cold wall and take deep breaths. There are boxes and cans scattered on the pavement, and you squat down to hide among them. You hear soft footsteps padding toward you, and then more giggling and squeaking, snapping and the crunch of bones, over and over again. All you’re wearing is a simple gray robe, no knife, no sword, but you dig around you for something to hold, to wield.
The girl shoves her head around the corner of a box and stares at you. She has matted and braided her hair with long strips of gore and tiny bones. Rats’ jaws, still dripping, are tied together with rats’ tails into a necklace that drapes over her bare breast. She smiles at you and reveals two little rat claws, one in either hand, and she begins to dance them on the ground between you. She whistles a jaunty tune that you seem to remember and gazes into your eyes until you can no longer stand it and turn away.
You ask her, “What is this place? What are you doing to me?”
“We’re almost there.”
“Almost where?”
“You’ll see.” She drops the rat claws and takes one of your wrists in both hands and draws you out from the corner. She shoves you to your feet and then scurries up your back, latches her arms around your neck and her legs around your torso. You can feel her hot breath against your ear and she points forward. “Go that way. Go on.”
Trudge down the alley, emerge into a wide avenue, silent and dark, save for giant metal carriages that whir down the pavement, one after another. They cut before them swaths of glowing blue light, and great clouds of stinking black smoke belch from holes in their rears. You pause to gape at them, but the girl shoves her foot into your stomach and pinches your ear.
“Don’t stop. Keep going.”
She pokes and pokes you until you’re jogging, rushing down the street and passing one towering building after another. They stand silently, their black windows dull and their heavy metal doors locked shut against the world. Everything is quiet, the solitude broken only by the metal carriages that pass by every few minutes. The girl blows into your ear. You shake your head and she laughs, rubbing her body up and down against you.
One avenue leads into another, and you keep running, for miles and miles it seems, but you do not grow tired. Metal trees, sharp and glistening with black oil, shoot up from squares of rusted earth that line your path. The girl points, and you follow her finger onto a broad boulevard divided into wide lanes, and queued on each one is a convoy of huge metal carriages, all heading toward the edge of a bleak wall that you can just barely make out on the horizon.
The girl squeezes your neck with her forearms. “Stop,” she hisses. “Listen.”
You tilt your head to the sky. A pulse, a rumbling, that you actually feel more than you hear. It shudders along the ground, under the horns and engines of the carriages and in rhythm with them. You twist your head to look back at the girl.
“Go,” she commands. “We’re almost there.”
You run forward, along the lines of black carriages that are stalled in their progress forward. The windows gleam bloody red under the darkening sky, and you think that you can discern squat figures sitting inside, but you look away before you can see too much. The girl tightens her grip on your body and runs her fingers up and down your neck, caresses your knot at the base of your chin.
After a long time, hours, maybe days, tireless, the clouds drifting above you and burning black rain falling on your head, you reach the last of the carriages, all lined up in rows at the series of gates built into a glowing black wall towering high over your head. The girl guides you through one of the openings, and you squeeze between the side of a steaming carriage and the gate and emerge into a plaza. The ground is a vast sheet of gray metal, hot under your feet. The sky overhead is clear, and the angry red sun pummels your head.
A single line of carriages heads toward the middle of the vast plaza, toward something huge and dark, shimmering in the heat, that rises up from the ground. The girl points, and you start to run. You follow the carriages, and you finally wonder what’s inside of their hulking frames. You ask the girl.
“You’ll see.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Run and run. Run, and the sun doesn’t move. The carriages remain in place, stuck in line, or else rumbling forward only an inch at a time, once every few decades, and all the while the massive structure in front of you begins to take shape, grow distinct in the heat haze. It is actually two towers, rough and dark, pointing up like knobby fingers, and from each belches storms of black smoke that twist and shudder over the spires.
Your robe wears away, and you’re as naked as the girl. Her weight becomes a part of you. You cannot imagine her arms not around her neck, her face not pressed against your cheek. Sometimes she talks to you but afterwards you can never remember what she says. Maybe she’s singing. Everything is automatic. You run because you have to, because she tells you to. Nothing else makes sense.
“Stop,” she finally says.
You slow, and falter, and then your feet give way and you collapse to the ground. The girl rolls off you and kneels by your face. She rubs your forehead and directs your gaze to look directly up. Here are the towers, scratching the sky with their jet forms and bulbous projections. Antennae shoot out in every direction for hundreds of feet. Giant motors deep inside churn and rumble and grind.
You sit up. The girl squeezes your shoulder.
The carriages are here, too. One by one they roll past you, maneuver around to a large iron grate the breaks through the plaza at the base of the towers, and then their rear bins rise up and you hear something tumbling down through the grate, but you cannot see it. You are facing the front of the carriages, and once their loads are delivered they roll away to join another line, stretching away on the opposite side of the towers.
The girl takes you chin and nudges it away from the grate. “Look at the towers.”
You stare at them, and squint. After so long, everything is dim. Are these the only two buildings that exist? They must be. You can remember nothing else. They are massive and mighty. The tower on the right is taller, it seems, and narrower, tapering to a wicket point far above. The sides are uneven and clanging, with long veils of iron swaying back on forth on huge hinges, with bulging windows gleaming in the sunlight, with spinning gears and servos that start and stop with great groans of metal grinding against metal. Vents sprout out like ears, and white steams hisses forth. High above, over the peak, moiling fumes turn about in a great funnel.
You look toward the second tower, and something flashes in your mind. Something familiar. This one is rusted, so that long streaks of red coat the sides, and the bulges and projections are strange, oddly symmetrical. The numerous metal gears, titanic, remind you of something. The base of the tower is divided into three unimaginable columns. Two stand close together, yet the third projects far out to the rear of the tower. Like a tail, miles long, edged with serrated plates of iron.
Yes. Now you know. Fall back on your elbows. Back away. The girl holds you in place by wrapping an arm around your neck. Her breath is hungry and hot against your eyes. Her strange smile spreads across her face.
The two close columns, the legs, lead up to the torso, then to the chest, from which sprout two arms, all of red metal, lined with huge plates, connected by round joints a hundred feet across and motivated by engines deep inside. Atop it all is the head, a squat globe that opens and closes, the mouth grinding with immense teeth that screech across the entire plaza. Clouds of vapor spill out from the curling horns. The face is flat, eyeless, expressionless, but then you realize that it is not a face. It is a mask. There is something underneath.
The girl grabs you and drags you toward the metal grate nearby. The sun suddenly shifts, and you fall under the shadow of the giant monster and your skin turns cold and white. You need to turn and flee, but she has you, and you reach the grate just as another carriage pulls up and she presses your face against the metal bars beneath you.
“Look,” she screams.
The carriage’s bin lurches up and a flap swings open and the load swishes out. Bodies. Thousands of bodies, falling down through the grate. You clamp your eyes shut but the girl reaches around and pries your lids open with her fingernails.
“Look!”
You stare, and your mouth falls open. The people, the bodies, they aren’t like you. They’re all different, with strange arms and legs and heads. Different colors and shapes and eyes. You think that you see one like you, pale pink, and he looks directly at you and then he falls past, down into the noisy metallic darkness and he’s gone, and the carriage is empty and another is coming to take its place.
You twist to look at the girl. “What is this? What’s happening?”
“I killed you!” she sings. “I killed you!” She wrenches back your head to look at the beast tower again, and it begins to move, slowly, ponderously, with great hisses of steam and squeals of metal. The head rotates, the chest swells, it begins to lean down toward the grate, toward you. A clawed hand flexes and forms a fist the size of a city.
The girl starts to shove you down the grate. “Now it’s your turn!” You manage, somehow, to grab a bar, and wrap your fingers around it and the girl gapes in vexation. She smiles, however, and then suddenly she detaches your hand from your wrist and you scream as you fall. Her face becomes a little dot surrounded by wild red hair and you twist around to look below you. Metal teeth snap open and shut, their clangs echoing up and down the hole, sparking blue electricity, and in the harsh glow you see iron walls gouged with bones and blood.
Now it’s your turn.
You close your eyes and land on something thick and downy. Reach out around you and feel only empty air, something soft brushing against your fingers. It does not close in on you. You are not crushed and splattered. Breathe again. Open one eye and peer about you.
A room of white haze, and tall windows through which fall rainbows of light. You are wearing a shimmering robe, and it floats down over a body without scars or pains. You smile, at peace, calm. You have fought the good fight. You have reached your reward. You spread out your hands and fall back on the cushion and laugh.
Small hands touch your chest. You pop your eyes open, and leaning over your face is a girl of no more than thirteen or fourteen years with long red hair. She’s naked, and smiling. You gasp, roll away to the side. She squats on her haunches, her hands dangling over her knees, and stares at you.
Your heart pounds in your chest. You glance around. The windows are dimming. The cushions are fading into gray mist. You shout at her, “Now what? What’s happening?”
She tilts her head so that hair covers her face and smiles shyly. “They said I could keep you.”
The mist begins to solidify into shapes, round and hunched, quivering. Spiders, of every form and size. Tiny ones squirm under your palms. Others cast webs from the walls that drift over your face, and you yank them away with your fingers. The girl pants.
She leaps onto your lap and straddles you. Her arms wrap around your neck and she leans forward and kisses you, but not sweetly. Lasciviously. Her mouth burns and her tongue is dry and raspy. She pulls away and her eyes are huge and yellow and there is fire behind her gaze. Her teeth are tiny little spikes behind pouting crimson lips.
From the edges of everything stalk giant spiders, six feet high, made all of glass, and their needle feet clink on the floor as they surround you. Jewel eyes sparkle with a thousand hues.
“I want to show you a secret,” she whispers. Her lips curl upward into a cruel sneer. She presses her face very close to you. “Are you ready?”
She shows you. She takes off her mask.
###
A marble rolls. You dive to your hands and knees. Catch it. You’ve seen black claws shoot out from walls. Catch it. You’ve seen gnawing teeth burst from dead stomachs. You dive and your hands are torn ragged on the floor, and your fingers brush against the cold ball and send it spinning away to the side. The glass strikes the stone and shatters in a hiss of steam and crystal and a cloud of white vapor whips up into the air.
Get up on your knees. Pull out your knife. The little cloud gathers back down near the floor and swirls in a tight ball, no larger than your fist. It’s black now, and now red, and then fades and shrinks into a tiny little form that lays stretched out among the shards of sparkling glass. A little person, not longer than your fingernail. You lean forward to watch the creature sit up and stretch miniscule arms over a button head, and it sees you. Dark hair twists, white legs leap, and the little person is darting among the pieces of the orb.
You sweep out your hand but catch only glass, and it tears into your raw skin and you wince. Look up and you see that the person is bigger now, and growing. Pale, thin legs lead to small bare feet that patter down the passage into darkness. Red hair floats in the air.
“Wait!” you shout. Push to your feet and feel your knees pop, your head start to spin. You need more sleep, more food, but you’re so close now. You can rest later. You replace your dagger and draw out your sword and rush down the corridor. Your heavy footfalls pound in your ears in time with the rushing beat of your heart. Each pace sends a sharp jolt up your legs into your spine.
A sharp turn. You stop and press your back against the wall and inch forward, hold out the very tip of your brightly burnished sword so that you can use it to peer around the wall. Nothing. Darkness. Maybe the little person is only a phantom. Maybe they’ve fled to whatever afterlife they deserve. You let out a long breath and ease around the corner. You’re almost there. Only a few more turns to negotiate. Only a few more ambushes to survive.
The next corridor, the one that was empty. There’s a girl, thin, pale. Naked. Only thirteen or fourteen. She’s grinning at you under big yellow eyes through lank red hair that falls over her forehead and down her shoulders and chest. Immediately, reflexively, you strike with your sword. You aim downwards and the point slides easily between two of her ribs and through her slight chest. The girl’s face goes slack and then she starts to scream and she keeps screaming, the passageway ringing with her pain. You jerk your sword out of her in a spurt of blood and she collapses to her knees and her jaw is contorted with the wail tearing from her throat, but then the sides of her lips begin to curl upward. The scream staggers, falters, and it becomes a high, staccato giggle what you can feel in the back of your head. Her voice rises and falls, like music, maybe a tune that you’ve heard before.
She pulls her hands away from where your sword pierced her, and her skin is white and even. Her sharp nose is pointed at your feet, but her eyes watch your face through her curtain of hair. Her smile. Something is wrong with her smile. Her gaze flicks to the side, toward your sword, and you pull it back again to slash at her neck. You’ll take off her head. You will kill this child, this demon. Your sword has not failed yet. You squeeze the hilt but it’s too light. Twist your neck around and find your blade, but it’s not there. It’s melting away in a mist of sickly green that’s running down toward your hand.
You toss the hilt to the ground and reach for your dagger. In a smooth motion you have it in your grip and swing around to plunge it into the girl’s eye, but she ducks under your arm and rolls to the side. Her calves wrap around one of your ankles and she twists, taking your foot out from under you. You manage to keep your balance, just barely, but the girl, still pressed flat against the floor, sweeps out her leg and removes your other foot. You do fall, to your back. Your head bounces off the stone and you see only black and shining white stars for a long moment.
She jumps on your chest and straddles it and reaches out with both hands to hold down your knife arm. You push and push, but you cannot move her. She is as heavy as stone. Her face is right over yours and she’s smiling. You bring your free hand up and take a grasp of the long hair at the back of her head and pull. Her smile fades into a sneer as her head moves up to expose her frail, pale neck.
“I killed you,” you hiss.
“I killed you,” she whines, her voice high and petulant, ringing. “I killed you. I killed you!”
You twist your fingers into her greasy locks. She smiles, and then she suddenly shrinks and you’re holding onto nothing and a tiny little girl is bouncing up your armor and crawling down your neck. She’s scrambling among your chest hairs and giggling and you slap with your palms at your armor to try to crush her. You feel her moving to the side, under your armpit, like an insect. You sit up and begin to untie the laces that hold the breastplate in place.
A pain binds you. A terrible pain, like a long, dull needle going through your skin and then through one of your ribs straight into your heart, which skips one beat and then another. After a moment it passes, the pain, subsides into a warmth in your chest, but you gasp for breath and hold your side. You slowly push to your feet and wave your knife in the air before you.
“I could have killed you,” the girl’s voice says, from right beneath your ear. You swing up your hand and tear at the spot with your fingernails, but the only blood you pull away is your own.
She laughs, from under your other ear, and you scratch at that spot, too, but she’s not there.
She says, “Don’t do that. You’re hurting yourself.”
You stagger back and land against the wall. You manage to remove your breastplate and it lands with a hollow clang on the floor. You rip your shirt off your body and run your fingers up and down your skin, under your arm.
“I could have killed you,” the girl says again, now from deep inside your head, “but I didn’t. And I won’t.”
“What have you done to me?” you shout. “What kind of spell is this?”
“It’s no spell! I just want to go where you’re going. Put your armor back on.”
You whip your head from side to side. “No! Leave me be!”
Her voice becomes harsh and loud inside your skull. “I said to put your armor back on.” The same pain as before wracks your body, but now it’s focused directly on the center of your forehead. All you see for a short eternity is a burning white wall behind your eyes, and you wake up to find yourself shivering and cold on the floor.
“Your armor.”
You sit up and tie your breastplate back into place. You push up with your hands to stand against the wall.
“I only want to go where you’re going. Just do what I say and I won’t hurt you anymore.”
“You destroyed my sword.”
“We’ll find another one. Go.”
You stand still for a moment. Run a hand through your hair. You glance at the ground and see a sizzling smear where even the hilt of your sword has melted away into a thin layer of slime. Your knife is lying next to it, and you notice a round dark spot around where you were just sitting. You relieved yourself while under the girl’s fog of pain.
Pick up your knife and slide it back into its sheath. You feel something playfully prodding the base of your skull. “There’s a camp after the next three turns, but they’re all asleep. We’ll get another sword there.”
#
The walls, which had always glowed to guide your way, become dark and somber and you’re glad for that, for now you can’t see the welts and cuts running up and down your arms and legs and chest. They rub raw and painful, but she won’t let you stop. “It’s just a little farther.”
Your sword belonged to a fiendish captain, and its brilliant obsidian blade sings hideous songs to you in the dark and the bindings around its hilt undulate and crawl under your hand like the legs of a beetle, but the blade slices through armor like skin, and she will not let you drop it. “We’re almost there.”
The corridor is lit only by a narrow band of crimson light that seeps in from somewhere under the walls’ foundations, and an archway opens up into a black chamber beyond. Your little companion hisses, “Go inside.”
You cross over the threshold and walk through the black haze into a vast circular chamber. It’s empty, save for a glowing square of swirling red light in the exact middle of the room. You hold up your sword before your body and plod toward it. The thing inside of you whistles with glee.
“This is the door. This is the door!”
You reach the door and squint at it. The surface is flat and smooth, like glass, and underneath roil stormy clouds of red lightning. You walk around to try to see the edge, but it doesn’t have one, and the door disappears entirely—“It has no width,” the girl says—but reappears again instantly to reveal the opposite side.
“Go through.”
Start the argument again. “I need to rest.”
“You have to do what I say. You have to. Go through.”
So you step through the doorway, becoming one with the storm underneath and its electric currents. They roll up and down your arms and legs and through your teeth and you can’t breath. There is no air. The girl is laughing, and she moves your legs when you fail and everything becomes white and you collapse onto a hard smooth surface that is cold and luminous.
A heart beats, but not your own, although you don’t realize that for a long time as you wheeze and pant for air. This pulse, unlike your own, moves the entire world. Lift your head and open your mouth in wonder and discover before you a great glowing mountain, and it breathes and moves and shudders. You push up on your forearms and see that you are on a great ledge, running around the summit of the impossible peak, and you crawl laboriously to the precipice to try to see down to the base of the heart but you cannot. It is too far, obscured in a black fog whose top it lit by a golden brilliance emanating from the mountain’s sides. Look up now. The roof of the cavern is so far away that there are gray clouds tumbling underneath the stone cracks, and a thin mist falls down toward you but hisses away into steam before it can even reach the peak a thousand feet above your head.
Everywhere the beating of the mountain’s heart. It fills your entire being and you feel your own body’s rhythms falling into step with it. You stand up and hold the sword an inch away from your nose. A glint runs up and down the blade. There is a surge in your chest, a lightning in your arms. This is your moment. This is what you have dreamed about for years and years. You will kill Him. You remove your shield from its strap across your back and let loose its leather cover. Silver runelight cuts through the gloom.
“You shouldn’t do that,” the girl sighs.
You snarl, “I will kill Him.”
As if in response to your impetuous boast, another beat abruptly joins that of the mountain, but this one is discordant, rumbling and trembling, and its counterpoint to the mountain’s pulse shakes the massive cavern. Rocks tumble down from high above, and you can hear them screech through the air before crashing into the sides below you. You stagger back, away from the edge, parts of which begin to crumble and topple down into the depths. The other heart grows more powerful.
“I’m scared!” your companion mutters. You feel her worm through your head and then something crawls down the skin of your temple. You turn to the side just in time to see something small and white leap away from you. It disappears into a cloud of dust at your feet. You stomp around, grunting, trying to smash the little fiend, but her giggles fill the air and then fade away, up the side of the peak.
A huge quake suddenly strikes the ledge, and you fall over to the side and land on your shoulder. Stay still now, don’t move, and listen to the heart. Listen, to its pounding, but not singular, a multitude, all together and overlapping in a symphony of throbs and sighs. The rocks quiver with each beat, groan, shake and tumble along the ground toward the edge. Look, look, where two white hands, knobby and pasty white, each bigger than your entire body, reach up from below and grasp the ledge and begin to pull, and now there are more hands, a dozen of them, a hundred, and tentacles and legs and claws, all slithering up from below and slapping along the flat stone toward you. You instinctively roll away, back toward the wall of the mountain behind you.
The monstrous heart continues to beat, and you see its source when the body slowly rises up onto the ledge. It is towering, the size of a mighty warship, sickly yellow and glistening, shaped like an almond with a thick brown ridge running along the top. From underneath spills out a horde of arms and legs and tentacles, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, all jerking toward you. The body shifts and sways on the ledge, and parts of the rock begin to collapse under its weight, but clawed legs shoot out and drag the moist shell forward to safety, toward you.
You push to your feet and back away, sword held high before you, your face hidden behind your shield. A claw, attached to a slimy arm, reaches close to you and begins to snap at your feet, but you slash out with your blade and it flies away severed into the air. Grunt with satisfaction now, for He is indeed mighty, but He can be hurt, and stare at the flapping member before you. The wounded stump, gushing with white paste, seals shut and splits in two, and from each new end sprouts a sharp set of pincers. They slash at your ankles.
You leap away, up off the ledge and onto the craggy, glowing mountainside, and begin to climb. Something wraps around your legs, your thighs, your chest, and pulls you back down. Your hands wrap white around a stone outcropping and try to hold you in place, but you are wrenched away and you land on your knees back on the ledge.
You hack all around you, and bristling coils and crooked fingers fall away into the dust but more replace them. You twist around in time to see the great, pulsing, shell approach on a sea of clicking legs, and a massive tentacle whips out and coils around your entire body and begins to lift you into the air. You hold your sword ready, controlling the panic rising in your constricted throat, prepared to strike when He exposes Himself.
Rise up over His body, thirty feet up in the air, and along the brown ridge His shell parts with a wet sucking sound, strands of mucus ripping and snapping as His forebody emerges from the hard carapace. His chest is lined with overlapping ridges of hard plate which rasp and expand with each massive breath. Huge arms, four, corded with white muscles stretch out to the side and grab the mountainside and begin to pull down huge sections of golden rock. You hold your breath as the head finally arises on a sinuous tentacle from deep within the body. It slowly lifts into place and then swivels around to look at you.
His face is almost as large as your body. It is pale and tight and pasty, and you realize that it is not a face. It is a mask, covering something underneath that squirms and quivers and rolls from side to side. The tentacle holding you maneuvers you closer to Him, and His mouth parts in a huge grimace and you see that His mask covers a sea of insects, roaches and flies and centipedes and locusts. They are His eyes and His mouth. They spill out from His nostrils and His ears. His strands of waving hair are scorpion tails linked together, end to end. They are Him.
You look down over His entire body, and you see that under the hard shells and plates of chitinous armor swarm a numberless legion of insects, and each one beats and clicks and snaps at you. The beating of His heart is the buzz and drone of insects, rising and falling, iridescent wings flapping faster than the eye can see, long legs scratching together, mouthparts snapping open and shut. Theirs is a hideous murmur, their heart.
You are pulled close to His face, and bile rises in your throat at the tiny waving legs and wings and black faceted eyes that stare at you from under the mask. Your fingers wrap more tightly around your sword hilt, but then you are suddenly pressed right up against His face, and you feel the skin squirming against you and bulging out to the curves of your face and body. The noise is everywhere. You cannot think.
The sword flashes, you swing down toward His neck and then up again, and there is a great squeal that cuts through your brain. The tentacle holding you jerks you back toward the mountainside and slams you hard against the rock. You twist around and see Him standing still, His head hanging loosely to the side as huge swaths of skin dangle and flap in the air. Black clouds of insects, enraged bees, giant ants with hideous pincers, spill out to the ground and rush up the mountain toward you, and you finally hack at the coil around your body and it falls away. Push up to your feet and begin to climb again.
But then the insects stop, and then they retreat back on shuffling legs toward the body. They climb up the tentacles, up the rounded body, and then press back into the gaping wound, which suddenly begins to stitch itself back together. His head rotates around toward you, and a ghastly smile stretches across His face. Tentacles suddenly lash out from every direction. One rips your sword from your hand and snaps it in two. Others take your shield and claws bend it, rip it apart into glowing strips of metal. Your armor, your enchanted crown, are all taken away, and then tentacles lined with tiny snapping pincers wrap around your body and shake you from side to side.
After a long time, too long, they toss you back down on the ledge. Your body is lined with crisscrossing patterns of lacerations, where miniscule strips of flesh have been torn from you. Small streams of blood drip to the ground. You push up to your hands and knees, but then His giant body crashes down next to you and you are caught up in a mass of black arms and legs, all lifting you up to His face.
His huge eyes of roiling jade beetles gaze at you. You are limp and weak. You cannot move, and when the arms release you, you tumble back to the ground far below and land on your side, and then He leaves, buzzing, shuffling away on His sea of legs and claws. You manage to twist your head around in time to see His forebody pulling back into His shell, which closes up again with a slurp. He continues along the ledge, around the mountain, and finally disappears from view, although you can still hear His hearts pound and pound.
You try to stretch, to move, but everything is slow. Everything burns with pain. Sit up. Sit up! You can’t. You’re already dead, or He will come back and kill you at His leisure and feed you to His swarm.
Maybe, you think, this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe this is why no one has ever come back from the mountain.
Something prods your cheek. You split your eyes open, and through a thick layer of mucus see someone squatting over you.
“You can’t stay here,” the girl says.
You grunt.
She reaches down and wraps her arms around your shoulders, sits you up. She whispers into your ear, “You’ve almost done it. Get up!”
“I can’t do it,” you gasp.
She shakes you. “No! Keep going. This is where everyone gives up. All you have to do is keep going. I’ll help you.” Then she sits down next to you and wraps one arm around your shoulders, another around your chest, and she heaves you up to your feet. Lean into her slight body for support, but maybe she’s right. Your legs, you can move them again, just a little, and the haze before your eyes is starting to clear.
“My sword,” you say.
“You don’t need a sword. Not anymore.” With a hand pressed flat against your stomach, she leads you around the mountain, following Him. Her bare feet guide you among the gashes and tumbled earth where He has passed. You feel stronger and stronger, more alive, with each step. Finally, you push away from her and step forward on your own. She giggles.
The ledge curls around the mountain’s face, but grows thinner and thinner, until finally it’s a narrow band barely wide enough for two people to pass side-by-side. You can see great gashes on the mountain’s face where He hauled Himself from outcropping to outcropping. She prods you forward from behind. You edge over a precipitous drop and arrive at a door.
Towering far above your head, it is carved from the side of the mountain, and the frame and lintel are etched with glowing characters that you cannot read. You cannot see where the opening leads, for the threshold is marked by an oily black film that casts your own reflection back at you. Your entire body is lined with drying lines of blood. The girl stands right behind you, peering around your elbow from under her mane of fiery hair, and she is looking at your reflected face in the door.
“Now what?” you ask her.
“Go through.”
“What’s on the other side?”
She doesn’t answer, but instead shoves you forward so that you topple through the black film and land on your knees in a small room. You are wearing your traveling clothes, and no aches torture your body, save for the shooting pains that rise up from where you landed hard on your kneecaps. You stand up to see that you are in a small room, lined with dark wood panels and shelves of old, dusty books. In the middle of the chamber is a heavy black desk, squatting on feet carved to look like lions atop a carpet of woven red strands.
The single door swings open, and you stumble backwards at what enters.
It is an emaciated, hunched figure, shorter than you, gliding forward in a cloud of white miasma. Straps of ragged cloth hang off the gray body and trail behind it on the floor. The huge ovoid head, topped with floating dreadlocks of hair, swivels to stare at you. Skin is stretched tightly between gaping black holes that serve as eyes and the mouth, and you realize that this is not a face. It is a mask, but you can barely imagine what lies beneath. Blackness.
It slides into place behind the desk and sits down in a creaking chair. Dry hands fumble through the drawers, and an ancient, rasping voice slowly says, “Can you read?”
“What?”
“Your kind so often cannot read. You bask in your ignorance, yet you dare to rail against the vicissitudes of a cruel universe.”
You reach for your side and feel the hilt of your knife. You pull it out and hold it pointed toward him. “I killed you.”
“I killed you!” you hear, and you whirl about to see the girl squatting in the far corner. Her hands are pressed against the side of her face. “I killed you!”
“Terrible child,” the other moans.
She smiles at you and runs her fingers through the knots of her hair.
The creature pulls from one of the drawers a thick brown book. It drops it on the desk and a cloud of dust dances before its face. You leap forward with your blade to slash at the demon’s throat, but you miss, because you are now standing in the opposite corner of the room, over the girl. She squints furiously at you and shifts to the side to press her shoulder against the wall. She silently shakes her head.
You hesitate, but slip your knife back into its sheath and face the creature. It is turning through the pages of the book but pauses to look up at you.
“Do you know that this is?”
“No,” you say.
“It is the book of you. It is your Vindication.”
You take slow, measured steps toward the desk. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course not,” the creature intones, each word stretching out for long, long seconds. It leans back into its chair. “Every being has a measure, a record of what it is and will be. It is the book of you. Your Vindication. I have a Vindication. That wretched girl has a Vindication.” It pats the pages of the book. “This is yours.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Your beliefs are of no consequence.”
You ask, scratching your scalp, “Who wrote it?”
It tilts its head to the side, as if studying you. “An astute question, but futile.”
“Why?”
“It is meaningless. Every book that can be written, has been written. They simply exist.”
“But there has to be a writer, or how else could the book exist?” you press.
The creature sighs, raising its shoulders. “Take every possible letter. Arrange them into every possible combination. One of those combinations is your Vindication. It must exist, by definition. The author is immaterial. They are simply expressing an inevitable result, a cosmological tool to achieve a predetermined outcome. Every book that can be written, has been written, at some time or at some place. It is a logical certainty.”
You squint and ponder while the creature returns to the book and continues to turn pages. It nods to itself, running its palm along certain passages.
All you can think to say is, “I don’t believe you.”
“No, you never do.” It touches a crumbling finger to its chin. “It seems that you must be leaving now.”
The girl suddenly grabs your hand and squeezes it. She drags you toward the door. You resist and glare at the creature behind the desk. “But I killed you.”
It rises up from the chair. “The book says the same thing. I am sure that in some instance it must be true.”
You and the girl reach the door and she throws it open and tosses you inside. You reach out for the frame but miss and the last thing you see is her outlined in a box of light and then she leaps in after you. You tumble and fall through long darkness and your clothes fly away into nothing and the girl takes your fingers and pulls them, pulls your bones and muscles and tissue right out of your body and puts them back together again and now you’re someplace else.
A city, but not like any you know. The streets are flat and solid and black, not cobbled. The buildings are smooth and cold, metal, and they rise up so high into the sky that you cannot see their tops, lost in black clouds through which you can catch a glimpse of a fiery red sun. There are terrible noises, harsh rumbles and horns, and on a track above your head something long and slithering rolls and clatters through the city and its lights shine down on your face before they move away.
Something squeaks, something familiar. You glance down to see giant rats scurrying along the curb. Their eyes are red, their tails naked and rigid. The girl squeals and claps her hands and jumps at the nearest one and she catches it. You watch as she breaks it in two with her hands. She holds the body against her chest, runs her blood-stained fingers down the side of her face and neck. Streaks of red glisten on her skin, and she looks at you and grins.
You turn and run away, and her laughter chases you down a narrow alley. You press your back against a cold wall and take deep breaths. There are boxes and cans scattered on the pavement, and you squat down to hide among them. You hear soft footsteps padding toward you, and then more giggling and squeaking, snapping and the crunch of bones, over and over again. All you’re wearing is a simple gray robe, no knife, no sword, but you dig around you for something to hold, to wield.
The girl shoves her head around the corner of a box and stares at you. She has matted and braided her hair with long strips of gore and tiny bones. Rats’ jaws, still dripping, are tied together with rats’ tails into a necklace that drapes over her bare breast. She smiles at you and reveals two little rat claws, one in either hand, and she begins to dance them on the ground between you. She whistles a jaunty tune that you seem to remember and gazes into your eyes until you can no longer stand it and turn away.
You ask her, “What is this place? What are you doing to me?”
“We’re almost there.”
“Almost where?”
“You’ll see.” She drops the rat claws and takes one of your wrists in both hands and draws you out from the corner. She shoves you to your feet and then scurries up your back, latches her arms around your neck and her legs around your torso. You can feel her hot breath against your ear and she points forward. “Go that way. Go on.”
Trudge down the alley, emerge into a wide avenue, silent and dark, save for giant metal carriages that whir down the pavement, one after another. They cut before them swaths of glowing blue light, and great clouds of stinking black smoke belch from holes in their rears. You pause to gape at them, but the girl shoves her foot into your stomach and pinches your ear.
“Don’t stop. Keep going.”
She pokes and pokes you until you’re jogging, rushing down the street and passing one towering building after another. They stand silently, their black windows dull and their heavy metal doors locked shut against the world. Everything is quiet, the solitude broken only by the metal carriages that pass by every few minutes. The girl blows into your ear. You shake your head and she laughs, rubbing her body up and down against you.
One avenue leads into another, and you keep running, for miles and miles it seems, but you do not grow tired. Metal trees, sharp and glistening with black oil, shoot up from squares of rusted earth that line your path. The girl points, and you follow her finger onto a broad boulevard divided into wide lanes, and queued on each one is a convoy of huge metal carriages, all heading toward the edge of a bleak wall that you can just barely make out on the horizon.
The girl squeezes your neck with her forearms. “Stop,” she hisses. “Listen.”
You tilt your head to the sky. A pulse, a rumbling, that you actually feel more than you hear. It shudders along the ground, under the horns and engines of the carriages and in rhythm with them. You twist your head to look back at the girl.
“Go,” she commands. “We’re almost there.”
You run forward, along the lines of black carriages that are stalled in their progress forward. The windows gleam bloody red under the darkening sky, and you think that you can discern squat figures sitting inside, but you look away before you can see too much. The girl tightens her grip on your body and runs her fingers up and down your neck, caresses your knot at the base of your chin.
After a long time, hours, maybe days, tireless, the clouds drifting above you and burning black rain falling on your head, you reach the last of the carriages, all lined up in rows at the series of gates built into a glowing black wall towering high over your head. The girl guides you through one of the openings, and you squeeze between the side of a steaming carriage and the gate and emerge into a plaza. The ground is a vast sheet of gray metal, hot under your feet. The sky overhead is clear, and the angry red sun pummels your head.
A single line of carriages heads toward the middle of the vast plaza, toward something huge and dark, shimmering in the heat, that rises up from the ground. The girl points, and you start to run. You follow the carriages, and you finally wonder what’s inside of their hulking frames. You ask the girl.
“You’ll see.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
Run and run. Run, and the sun doesn’t move. The carriages remain in place, stuck in line, or else rumbling forward only an inch at a time, once every few decades, and all the while the massive structure in front of you begins to take shape, grow distinct in the heat haze. It is actually two towers, rough and dark, pointing up like knobby fingers, and from each belches storms of black smoke that twist and shudder over the spires.
Your robe wears away, and you’re as naked as the girl. Her weight becomes a part of you. You cannot imagine her arms not around her neck, her face not pressed against your cheek. Sometimes she talks to you but afterwards you can never remember what she says. Maybe she’s singing. Everything is automatic. You run because you have to, because she tells you to. Nothing else makes sense.
“Stop,” she finally says.
You slow, and falter, and then your feet give way and you collapse to the ground. The girl rolls off you and kneels by your face. She rubs your forehead and directs your gaze to look directly up. Here are the towers, scratching the sky with their jet forms and bulbous projections. Antennae shoot out in every direction for hundreds of feet. Giant motors deep inside churn and rumble and grind.
You sit up. The girl squeezes your shoulder.
The carriages are here, too. One by one they roll past you, maneuver around to a large iron grate the breaks through the plaza at the base of the towers, and then their rear bins rise up and you hear something tumbling down through the grate, but you cannot see it. You are facing the front of the carriages, and once their loads are delivered they roll away to join another line, stretching away on the opposite side of the towers.
The girl takes you chin and nudges it away from the grate. “Look at the towers.”
You stare at them, and squint. After so long, everything is dim. Are these the only two buildings that exist? They must be. You can remember nothing else. They are massive and mighty. The tower on the right is taller, it seems, and narrower, tapering to a wicket point far above. The sides are uneven and clanging, with long veils of iron swaying back on forth on huge hinges, with bulging windows gleaming in the sunlight, with spinning gears and servos that start and stop with great groans of metal grinding against metal. Vents sprout out like ears, and white steams hisses forth. High above, over the peak, moiling fumes turn about in a great funnel.
You look toward the second tower, and something flashes in your mind. Something familiar. This one is rusted, so that long streaks of red coat the sides, and the bulges and projections are strange, oddly symmetrical. The numerous metal gears, titanic, remind you of something. The base of the tower is divided into three unimaginable columns. Two stand close together, yet the third projects far out to the rear of the tower. Like a tail, miles long, edged with serrated plates of iron.
Yes. Now you know. Fall back on your elbows. Back away. The girl holds you in place by wrapping an arm around your neck. Her breath is hungry and hot against your eyes. Her strange smile spreads across her face.
The two close columns, the legs, lead up to the torso, then to the chest, from which sprout two arms, all of red metal, lined with huge plates, connected by round joints a hundred feet across and motivated by engines deep inside. Atop it all is the head, a squat globe that opens and closes, the mouth grinding with immense teeth that screech across the entire plaza. Clouds of vapor spill out from the curling horns. The face is flat, eyeless, expressionless, but then you realize that it is not a face. It is a mask. There is something underneath.
The girl grabs you and drags you toward the metal grate nearby. The sun suddenly shifts, and you fall under the shadow of the giant monster and your skin turns cold and white. You need to turn and flee, but she has you, and you reach the grate just as another carriage pulls up and she presses your face against the metal bars beneath you.
“Look,” she screams.
The carriage’s bin lurches up and a flap swings open and the load swishes out. Bodies. Thousands of bodies, falling down through the grate. You clamp your eyes shut but the girl reaches around and pries your lids open with her fingernails.
“Look!”
You stare, and your mouth falls open. The people, the bodies, they aren’t like you. They’re all different, with strange arms and legs and heads. Different colors and shapes and eyes. You think that you see one like you, pale pink, and he looks directly at you and then he falls past, down into the noisy metallic darkness and he’s gone, and the carriage is empty and another is coming to take its place.
You twist to look at the girl. “What is this? What’s happening?”
“I killed you!” she sings. “I killed you!” She wrenches back your head to look at the beast tower again, and it begins to move, slowly, ponderously, with great hisses of steam and squeals of metal. The head rotates, the chest swells, it begins to lean down toward the grate, toward you. A clawed hand flexes and forms a fist the size of a city.
The girl starts to shove you down the grate. “Now it’s your turn!” You manage, somehow, to grab a bar, and wrap your fingers around it and the girl gapes in vexation. She smiles, however, and then suddenly she detaches your hand from your wrist and you scream as you fall. Her face becomes a little dot surrounded by wild red hair and you twist around to look below you. Metal teeth snap open and shut, their clangs echoing up and down the hole, sparking blue electricity, and in the harsh glow you see iron walls gouged with bones and blood.
Now it’s your turn.
You close your eyes and land on something thick and downy. Reach out around you and feel only empty air, something soft brushing against your fingers. It does not close in on you. You are not crushed and splattered. Breathe again. Open one eye and peer about you.
A room of white haze, and tall windows through which fall rainbows of light. You are wearing a shimmering robe, and it floats down over a body without scars or pains. You smile, at peace, calm. You have fought the good fight. You have reached your reward. You spread out your hands and fall back on the cushion and laugh.
Small hands touch your chest. You pop your eyes open, and leaning over your face is a girl of no more than thirteen or fourteen years with long red hair. She’s naked, and smiling. You gasp, roll away to the side. She squats on her haunches, her hands dangling over her knees, and stares at you.
Your heart pounds in your chest. You glance around. The windows are dimming. The cushions are fading into gray mist. You shout at her, “Now what? What’s happening?”
She tilts her head so that hair covers her face and smiles shyly. “They said I could keep you.”
The mist begins to solidify into shapes, round and hunched, quivering. Spiders, of every form and size. Tiny ones squirm under your palms. Others cast webs from the walls that drift over your face, and you yank them away with your fingers. The girl pants.
She leaps onto your lap and straddles you. Her arms wrap around your neck and she leans forward and kisses you, but not sweetly. Lasciviously. Her mouth burns and her tongue is dry and raspy. She pulls away and her eyes are huge and yellow and there is fire behind her gaze. Her teeth are tiny little spikes behind pouting crimson lips.
From the edges of everything stalk giant spiders, six feet high, made all of glass, and their needle feet clink on the floor as they surround you. Jewel eyes sparkle with a thousand hues.
“I want to show you a secret,” she whispers. Her lips curl upward into a cruel sneer. She presses her face very close to you. “Are you ready?”
She shows you. She takes off her mask.
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