[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.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 the added horrors of this place is that one hears everything."The Dark Lord cannot create," I told him again."You have created everything here.You and the others.He has only borrowed it from you.""It was only a story," he cried."Only a story!"I thought of Chinanga once more.That, too, had been only a story, and yet I remembered Constanzia's face as she twirled slowly into nothingness.What are stories, after all, but reflections of a reality we make? Before Jaybee did anything, first he told himself a story about it.First I will go to her house, then I will break in her door, then I will knock her down and lie on top of her, watching her scream, then I will let my weapon out of my trousers and hurt her with it."To those who read it, it was real," I told him."They lived it, while they read it.Perhaps afterward, they lived it.Some believed it.Perhaps one of those who believe it picked up a weapon and did to someone else what you did to a character.Or tried.There was enough belief to give it reality.Otherwise you would not be here."He won't believe that.He has stopped talking to me.The cell is open.I go out.Barry comes behind me.He is playing with us, of course.We walk, and I think words.Somewhere they are distilled onto a page.We.walk.My feet shuffle along.Barry tiptoes, screaming when he does not get high enough on his toes to avoid the broken bone at his heel.This is part of it, of course.Tempting him to walk, to escape, so that he will try this ungainly, ridiculous gait which hurts him so.I shuffle, he tiptoes.Time goes by.We are still surrounded by others.We can feel them on all sides.An opening.We separate.He goes one way, I another.I found a river.I came upon a place where space breaks through into something almost real.Like the door in the cavern, like the mirror, this connects to the world.Or to some other world.It is hard to tell.Mists hang heavily over the flow, which is turgid and silent.Nothing moves in the water.There is no shore I can walk along, but only this one space where hell waits on one side and the water on the other.Still, it is a change.I sit beside the flow, listening, hoping for a sound other than those I have heard for so long.At last it comes.A slow plopping.From somewhere to my right and behind me.Eons pass and the slow sounds are no closer.And then, at last, they are here, in front of me.A rowboat, a rower, a few other figures who are drawn up past me as though made of smoke, fleeing past me into the enormity of this place.The rower turns to face me, his dark hood shadowing his face."Captain Karon," I whisper."Lady Wellingford," he smiles."Fancy seeing you here." His smile is a death's-head grin, and yet there is something of the old captain there."Back at my old trade, you see.Sometimes I miss the Stugos Queen.""I thought," I say, wondering what I thought."I thought that you [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]