“We are here,” they say. “Hold on.”
Jaybee is next door to me, separated only by a veil. If he sees me, he will break through. If I move, or breathe, or blink, he will see me. So I sit, like a statue, immobile, while he prowls there. Clever of the Dark One to think of this. So much worse than merely being raped, or killed. To think one may escape, if one merely doesn’t cough. Doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t move.
He is singing, beneath his breath, a happy little hum as he wanders, brushing against the veil. “Down, down, down to happyland …”
It would be easier to die.
Except for the voices that gather around me to protect me, to make all quiet. “Hold on,” they say. “We are here.” How do they stay invisible? Undetectable?
Who are they? Is it really Carabosse, old Carabosse? Is it really Israfel, come to this hideous place? Strangely, I hear more voices than theirs. I do not take time to wonder. When they offer sleep, I sleep.
Once in a while there is the sound of a great gong, the reverberations slowly dying away into nothingness. I tell myself the gong marks the passage of days, or weeks. It has rung twelve or fifteen times since I have been here. It must be to mark the passage of time. What time? Is it like Carabosse’s clock, marking the time until the end!
Time. There was a time, I remember a time, when certain things were said to be unthinkable. Persons did not dwell on these thoughts, they cast them aside, exorcising them by crossing themselves, by prayer, by recital of some formula which would wipe out the unthinkable thing. It did not do to dwell on such things. The darkness was too close. The reality of death was too near.
Later came science and electric lights, a time when people sitting in well-illuminated rooms said, “nonsense, we can conceive of anything at all.” Any horror. Any disgusting, vomit-making thing. Any garbage. Any offal. Any violence, blood, evisceration, ripping open, heads flying with blood spurting, things emerging from inside the heart with the tissue ripping like paper and the tender inner places laid bare, no defense, no place to hide. “We can think of those things,” they said, with a chuckle. “We can think of them.”
There were times, I remember, when we said certain things were unspeakable. Fantasies too horrible for words. Imaginings too gross for description. Violence too inhuman to be put in human language. And then came those who said, “We can speak it, we can say it, make stories of it, until there is nothing that is not there on the page for the eye to see, for the mind to comprehend, for the child in each of us to be corrupted and eternally tainted by.”
Innocence. Gone, forever, with the unthinkable and the unspeakable. And innocent laughter gone as well. Now only the dirty giggle, the wicked snigger, the game of out-grossing, the playtime of the beasts.
So that when the real death stalks
When the real horror begins
It will all be familiar and we will be able to enjoy it.
* * *
Barrymore Gryme has been put in the cell with me.
“Do I know you?” he screamed at me.
One eye hung on his cheek, that cheek gnawed open so that the teeth showed through. I shuddered, sickened, put my hands out and healed him. I am half fairy. I can do that. He was naked. His white, pouchy flesh was covered with scabs and bruises. Parts of him are mangled. Touching him is like touching something long dead.
“When did you die?” I asked.
“Die. Die,” he screamed at me. “I’m not dead. I wish I were dead.”
“You’re in hell,” I told him. “The hell you made. Did you believe in it, when you made it?”
He turned his face into the corner of wherever we are and wept. I tried to find a way out, but I cannot get away from him. My pain and disgust are part of the teind. They amuse the Dark Lord who is disgusted at nothing, who feels no pain, but who relishes it in others.
“Hold on,” the voices say, breathing cool, fresh air upon me. Offering me cool, fresh water.
Later I saw Barry watching me. “You’re beautiful,” he said in wonder.
“I am not beautiful,” I told him, stripping the glamour away so that he could see what I really am. He did not see. The Dark Lord will not let him see. Or perhaps he sees too well.
“You glow. You shine. Don’t be afraid,” he whispered. “I won’t hurt you. I am a decent man.”
I laughed. I laughed until I cried.
The Dark Lord cannot create. Faery cannot create. The angels cannot create. Only God, and man. I told Barry this, carefully, making him pay attention to what I was saying. It was hard. The face glued to his own would not let him breathe, the false breasts fastened to his flesh pained him, the shoes he wore had somehow been made part of his feet so he could not take them off. One of the spike heels was broken, and a fractured end of bone protruded from it. He kept reaching down to feel the bone, trying to convince himself it was not there. It was there. I saw it.
He had been playing a character from one of his own books, a woman who moves into a house occupied by a terrible thing from some other dimension of reality. It kills her children, one by one, in horrible ways, then her boyfriend, then comes after her. Barry had played the role well, so I assumed, for I had heard the Dark Lord’s bravos ringing through the substance of the cell. One of
