Maybe only a split of a second was I in that realm. The mind can be a funny thing. The conscious reality that we cling to in this waking life is tenuous, that stuff we take for granted in our pitiful drop-in-the-bucket existences. The merry-go-round soup bowl we live in.
I’d never really understood it so clearly until now. I could still not describe it, since it was so abstract and timelessly alien as time itself—and so frightening. The expanse so enormous that it brought to light in chilling clarity how puny the individual awareness truly is.
In a blur, I came back.
“Wha—”
“Easy, Jet Rusco.”
I came back into my body, sucking in a rasping breath. Mong sat before me, grinning at me like a grim reaper. “How did you like your little ride?”
“What the—fuck are you?”
“I am the angel of death.”
“You’re a psycho-demon.”
“I was already well-versed in the forbidden arts before you were sucking on your mamma’s teats.” Mong’s jaw worked in satisfaction. He blew air through his nostrils. “I had hopes for you. But it’s time for you to die. Maybe then you’ll understand the truth of it all.” He nodded to Balt and had him plunk me on my ass and hold me steady.
He stripped off my monk’s robe to the waist. With my hands lashed behind my back, he stepped behind me, brandishing a glinting bowie knife. Without preamble, he cut deep into the muscles of my back.
I howled with pure agony. He took no notice of my squeals. He merely threaded leather cord into my slit flesh and looped the strips round my chest, tossing their ends up over the high beams above. As an afterthought, he wound my ripped robe around my back to contain the flesh and blood before he pulled me up like a stuck calf with his massive strength.
Regrettably I came to know the reason for those ropes now hanging in front of his obscene tanks.
Dangling and twirling like a slaughtered buck, I gasped and gurgled. How my flesh could withstand the pressure, I did not know. Perhaps a testament to Mong’s setting of knot and cord, looping rawhide around my chest to take off some of the pressure.
He stared at me in a mode of abstract curiosity, as an ever inquisitive scientist would who wonders how his lab experiment is faring. Not with eyes of sympathy, but of detached interest. How long could Jet Rusco handle the pain? How long before Jet Rusco wailed, shit his pants, cracked, gibbered like a lunatic, convulsed, cried? Most curious of all was Mong in seeing where my edges lay, the thresholds of reason before the other world of lunacy and death.
“Surrender to pain, Jet Rusco,” he murmured. “’Tis the only way to survive. Fighting will only get you deeper in the mire.”
“F-Fuck you, you shit fucking bastard sadist,” I spat out between my gritted teeth, the pain rising to indescribable levels. I closed my eyes. Utter agony had my eyes rolling backward in their sockets like a crazed yogi, hoping that a split second’s death would release me from this flesh-tearing, mind-numbing pain.
But death would not take me. Mong knew it as he knew his brutish handiwork and he was master of torture.
That figure of doom withdrew from my flickering, darkening vision, but my sense of reason knew a monster was still nearby. Next came Zan’s turn, the recruit who had shriveled to a husk, shrunken to a worm in some crab shell of fear. He thrashed and whimpered but there was no getting away from Mong’s bestial justice that would envelop Zan in seconds. In less than five minutes, we were like two stuck hogs twirling slowly and gently from our fishhook, rawhide lariats in Mong’s special house of horrors.
Through pain-streaked eyes I could make out the clear glass tanks below us. The trapped insects inside looked like black-tarred puppets, much different from this vantage: toy specimens out of a cartoon lab. So did Blest’s blond-matted head appear like a comical jack-o-lantern as he floated in his pale brine a dozen or so yards away.
Mong loosed a moody sigh. “Let me tell you the story of my mentor, Rusco. He was Zastras, a cruel man and practical man, with many innovations. We had a particularly grueling time one fine day in late summer. I remember how he strung five initiates up, one by one, dangling from rawhide straps like yours from the stout branches of certain cypress trees.
“I was one of them. A time like no other—brimstone and fire stretched across a limitless fire plain; pain and pleasure mixed as one in a long silent continuum. Suspended over the fire one minute, then dunked in ice-cold water the next. Some of us he dunked in pools of fire weed; others, he incited flesh-nibbling fish to bite at our toes.
“You can see I am much less imaginative than Zastras. I saw men with ankles bared to the bone. Zastras was a dark humorist of his time, assuring that his victim would live, that the skin would grow back. Strung up there like beasts, we would believe anything.
“Oh, Zastras was a funny man! One of the old guard. There will never be another like him, rest his cursed, black-hearted soul. Lucky I have not so macabre an imagination, Jet Rusco. Still, you will beg me to stop, you too, Zan. Both of you will beg, and I will smile and watch you squirm like maggots.”
Mong burned loathsome incenses, clouds of sickly sweet vapors, rank as mushrooms from some jungle hell, and his doped up drummer beat those skins with ever fiercer
