The door opened behind Heraclix-not-Heraclix. The boy peeked around him.
Standing in the doorway was a beautiful woman. Simple in dress, but beautiful, tall, with soft features, raven black hair, and a pleasant smile.
“Well, Hello there, little Georg. What do you have there?”
“Something for grandma. Coz wants me to take it to her.”
“You’d better do it, then. Coz wants what is best for your grandmother.”
The child walked around the adults and out the door, but not before shooting a hateful look at the woman, followed by a mischievous smile.
As the door was closing, the wind gusted, blowing the door wide open and sending snow and cold into the room.
Through the open door, Heraclix-not-Heraclix could see the faintly moonlit face of Prague’s astronomical clock, the Orloj, on City Hall. The moon was in Scorpio. The clock struck midnight.
Heraclix blinked and the room darkened again. He saw the old man staring intently at him. A mischievous smile, not unlike the child’s, had spread across the old man’s face.
“Georg . . .” Heraclix said, cautiously.
“Caspar,” the old man said, with a hint of hopefulness in his voice. “But not Caspar,” he conceded, falling back into a more depressed tone.
Heraclix sat in stunned silence.
The old man picked up where he had left off: “Chop, chop, chop,” he said, this time slowly and methodically, making a chopping motion with one hand hitting the palm of the other three times.
“I stayed,” he continued. “After all the crowds had left and they had rolled his headless body into a casket, I approached the executioner. I told him that I was the next of kin.
“A stranger, who had been watching from a side street, unbeknownst to me, approached the executioner at the same time. We almost bumped into each other. We three conversed, haggled, bargained, and I sold the body to the stranger for thirty silver thalers.”
“The stranger had a group of assistants, all done up in Venetian masks, who carted Caspar’s body away. The stranger wanted the head, too, but the executioner said that I couldn’t sell it. The general, the man who had ordered Caspar’s execution, wanted the head for himself.”
“Opportunistic . . .” Heraclix said.
The old man shot him a cold glance. “I went home and told grandmother, who was starting to go a little senile anyway, that Caspar had fallen into a glacier in the Alps after his lover, Vatanya the whore, had sent him on a wild search for some trinket or other. It was partially the truth,” he said.
“She had to think a long time about that one, grandma did. She thought about Caspar’s unfortunate ‘accident’ in the Alps, his association with people of ill-repute, his very enlistment in the army; all these things she . . . eventually . . . over the course of time, blamed on herself.”
The wicked grin spread again across the old man’s face.
“It drove her mad.”
“Of course,” he frowned, “she had to have someone to take care of her, someone to manage her resources. Caspar had left her much, you know.”
The frown swung up into a smile. “That someone would be me!”
Pomp wondered if she could somehow find a way to set his pants on fire.
“The person to whom you sold . . . the body . . . what did he look like? Do you know who he was?”
The old man stood up, laughing maniacally, as if he was privy to a joke that no one else could hear.
“Ha, ha! Why, he had your face, Okto! The man was you!”
Heraclix, perplexed and indignant, stood up.
“What? What does this mean?” he said.
“Oh, you really want to know, don’t you, body thief? Gravedigger! Ha! Or are you really Caspar, come to exact vengeance on me? Either way, my fate in Hell is already sealed. I shall go to my torment and leave you behind. You shall not have your vengeance, Caspar! And you, gravedigger, you’ll have to follow me for answers!” the old man yelled as he threw away the chair and dashed toward the mirror. “Follow me straight to Hell!”
The reflections of shattering glass looked like a conflagration of candle flames in a rain of blood. The old man’s glass-embedded body, quite dead, lay at the base of what was once a mirror. There, where the mirror had been, was a long, dark tunnel, like an open maw set with jagged glass teeth.
Down the tunnel ran the shrieking ghost of the old man, his glow fading and voice echoing off the walls as he raced into the black abyss.
CHAPTER 10
Pomp watches as Heraclix picks up the candle, steps over the old man’s lifeless body and gives chase down the tunnel, careful to protect the flame with his hand.
She follows, then passes him and flies ahead, reckless in her pursuit of the ghost. She plunges into the darkness, flying full speed, careening off the passage walls, leaving clumps of dirt and frightened earthworms to fall to the tunnel floor. Keeping a spirit in sight is no easy task when you’re flying blind in the dark, but Pomp is persistent. She knows Heraclix needs that ghost!
The tunnel angles down, steeper and steeper. It grows colder and colder, then warmer and warmer as she travels deep, deeper. Soon she is flying almost straight down. The ghost grows more faint as a ruddy light begins to glow along the dirt walls. The light grows stronger, the ghost more faint, the air much warmer. Then the tunnel levels out beneath her, the further she travels. The ghost is out of sight for a moment, then Pomp, as she clears the bend, can see it rushing even faster, headlong, toward a sort of shimmering membrane that fills the tunnel from top to bottom.
Beyond the membrane is a yellow-orange glow. Firelight, she thinks. Pomp sees shadows shifting within the membrane, pulled about and stretched by dancing flames, like dark marionettes controlled by a crazed puppeteer.
The ghost flies straight into the membrane. The jelly-like barrier ripples as the ghost disappears in a flash, leaving only wisps of spirit matter that coil up into the air, then dissipate into nothingness.
She can’t see him. He is on the other side somewhere. She must follow.
Pomp plunges into the membrane and is instantly slowed to a crawling pace despite her best efforts to muscle her way through the stuff. She flutters her wings as fast as she can and swims with all her strength through the jelly-matter. All around her, she sees scenes and people and places, not from now, not from yet, but from before now. Bits and pieces of . . . “then”, float all around her, shining in convex distortion from the bubbles in the thick liquid.
Pomp reaches up to touch a bubble.
Mowler has seized her by the legs and is slapping her head and body on a rock like a wet rag. The world jolts, then shakes, grows blurry, then jolts again as he repeatedly slams her. She cannot resist as he stuffs her in a sack, then smashes her again. His hand reaches in to grab her. She tries to bite him, but she feels herself falling into something smooth, hard, and cold.
Looking up, she sees the top being closed on her glass prison.
The scene disappears as the bubble floats away from her fingertips. She turns just in time to see another bubble rushing toward her nose.
The happy boy is, has, grown into an unhappy man.
She sits next to him. His forearm is as big as her entire body.
“Why so gloomy?” she says with enough cheerfulness to ban gray clouds from the sky.
He glowers at her.
“You don’t know?” he says with a sneer.
“Everyone is happy!” Pomp says, spreading her hands to indicate the other frolicking fairies, some of who have gathered in a ring to dance around the man.
“You are ignorant,” the man says in a grumpy voice.
“We don’t ignore you!” Pomp says with the flip of a hand. “You are joking with me!”
“You are also myopic,” the man says, looking away from her, off into the distance toward some unseen darkness.
“My what?”
“Never mind,” the man says, standing up. “You can’t understand me. You know nothing of what I
am suffering.”
“You suffer?” Pomp says, surprised.
“Only until I die,” he says. “Of course, that’s something you’d know nothing about.”
“I am very confused,” Pomp says.
“Yes. I bet you are, you who know nothing about what it means to grow old and decay and die.”
“I want to help!” Pomp says.
“I don’t need your help,” he says, walking away and breaking the fairy ring at his feet. “You should have never brought me to this place.” His voice fades off into the distance as he calls out, “I don’t belong here!”
The vision fades, but the feelings remain, only stronger. This is an intensity of emotion she that has never felt. She can no longer not longer care, though she might not have cared . . . what is that word again? “Before.” Now she feels more fully the gamut of emotions: tenderness, misery, joy, fear, hope, rage, hate, love. She feels like she might burst, that she cannot contain the swellings within her own body.
She looks down at her hands and arms and is shocked to see only bones, as if the flesh has been stripped from her body. She sees her reflection in the curve of a memory-bubble, a winged skeleton. Frail, mortal. Dead? Then she is blind with fear, thrashing out with arms, wings, legs, to escape this place. Her breathing is quick, shallow. She cannot decide whether to scream or cry.
And then, suddenly, she is free.
Pomp falls to the floor covered in slime. She wipes her eyes off first to see how she is where she is.
At least her bones are clothed in skin and muscle now. She scrapes the slime from her body, wings, and hair. The air here is hot, hotter than any other place she has been. Hotter than . . .
She looks around and must immediately shield her eyes from a bright flash of flame that shoots out of the ground. Her eyes readjust, and she carefully scans her surroundings, her hand prepared to block out any sudden surprises.
Little Pomp stands on the floor of a vast cavern. Her wings are dry enough to fly, so she flits up to have a look around. The cavern contains within it mountains and mesas layered one atop another like piles of stone wedding cakes, each taller than a castle. Jagged stone curtains snake between and over the features, creating long walls and, in some places, lithic labyrinths. All of this is peppered with fumaroles from which flames and smoke erupt at irregular intervals. The smell of sulfur is on the air. Screams and groans echo off the cavern walls from distant places, slide down the walls and mountains, and disappear into the sinkholes in enforced anonymity.
The roaring of flames and pitiful screeches reach Pomp’s ears from every direction. She is surrounded by danger, fear, misery. The sounds of weeping and regret-filled lamentations surround her. Though she can’t see the mourners, she can tell by the sounds that no one here is happy. This is not a place of happiness. It is under a pall of smoke and sadness. She wants to leave.
She walks over to the entrance to this unfortunate place and tries to look back into the tunnel through the membrane, but the barrier has turned black, like a giant pupil. It shines, glossy in the firelight. She touches it, pushes on it. It gives a little, then bounces back like rubber. Pomp wonders if it is indeed some kind of monstrous eye set to watch over this despair-filled cavern.
Then she looks more deeply and sees, far back in the murky darkness of the eye, something moving toward her. At first it is vague, blurry, but it comes into focus more and more clearly as it approaches her side of the lens. It is a face.
The face, attached to a body, she soon realizes, smiles contentedly, as if the man who owns it is out for a leisurely walk on a pleasant afternoon, not a care in this world—nor any world, for that matter.
The man is on the plump side, rather short, balding, with pleasant blue eyes surrounded by middle-age smile lines. He is dressed plainly but not poorly, as if he has enough for his needs, but not too much. Or at least if he is wealthy, he chooses not to flaunt it. His comportment is that of a man who makes others happy by his mere presence at a gathering.
He strolls closer and closer to Pomp’s location, looking about himself as if watching a meandering cloud of butterflies.
Something looks familiar about him, Pomp decides, but she’s not sure what.
Closer he comes, slowing in the substance of the portal-eye until Pomp thinks he might come to a stop and never make it through. Then, in a moment, his nose peeks through, scarred and rough, where it had been wide and smooth. Then the rest of the face emerges, stitched, poorly cobbled together, disproportionate, like a calico quilt of flesh.
He stumbles out of the eye and falls to the ground.
Heraclix knelt on the ground and sobbed. Pomp helped to remove the slime from his body. After some time, he stopped crying and pulled himself up, wiping the tears and slime from his two very-different eyes.
“You are well?” Pomp asked.
“I was. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Inside the eye,” Pomp pointed back to the dark membrane, “I see things. I see you, but not you.”
“I saw,” Heraclix paused, as if he didn’t believe the words he was about to say, “my daughter.”
Pomp was incredulous. “Daughter? You have no daughter!”
He sighed deeply. “Apparently I did. Or the fantasies that played upon my heart and mind were some kind of cruel cosmic joke. But seeing this around me now, I have no doubt that the scene I saw was no hallucination.”
“Tell me. It makes you feel better, I think. Tell me, please. Tell me what you . . . saw.” She was amazed that she remembered the word “saw.” She muttered to herself “see, saw, see, saw.”
He stared at a far-off column of fire that curled around the cone of a mountain like a flaming snake. Several explosions burst from the serpent’s scales. The roaring memories of what he saw drowned out the far-off tumult. His own voice sounded, to him, as if it was coming to him from far away, down a long, twisting tunnel.
“I was surrounded by bubbles filled with distorted figures—”
“I saw them too!” Pomp said.
He continued, not hearing Pomp. “They were each significant to me, but one attracted me above all the others. I was compelled to reach out to it, to touch it. And when I touched it, I was transported into it, entirely engulfed in the memory. I was there. I was living it. And feelings that I had at that time came back to me unbidden and unrestrained. I didn’t know I could feel so much. I didn’t think such a thing was possible. I was totally unprepared for it. It was . . .”
“It is scary, and I do not like it,” Pomp said.
“I saw her. Little Rhoda, precious Rhoda, my reason for living after her mother died in childbirth. The miracle of Rhoda’s very existence had carried me through the dark clouds of love-lost depression when my dear wife Elsie was taken. And now she lay there, little Rhoda, all twisted and mangled, a nest of ropes pressing into her soft skin. She was blanched white, save for her blue lips and eyelids. The warm blush had fled her pretty little face, though I couldn’t tell where it had gone. But it was gone, forever.”
“The person I was in the memory, he, I, a minister and a philosopher, I thought that I knew where to turn, that God and His angels would help me through the greatest trial I could possibly face. But the more I prayed, begged for the pain to be taken away, the more distraught I became, until I lost all hope of appealing to the celestial kingdoms for understanding.
“The beating of my heart became a dirge, then a march toward darkness. If I couldn’t gain solace and understanding from above with my pleadings, I would embrace the abyss and seize my desires by whatever means and force necessary. I lost my faith the day Rhoda died, but I didn’t lose my desire to bring her and, if possible, my Elsie, back to life.”
Heraclix stopped, then looked around, as if waking from a trance.
“Then what?” Pomp asked.
“Then . . . I don’t know,” he said. “The memory ended, and I entered into this place.” Heraclix looked around again, listened. “This has to be Hell.”
“
Come.” Pomp hurriedly scraped slime from him. “We find our way out.”
“I wouldn’t count on it, Pomp.” He stood and cleared the slime from himself anyway. “We can’t go back the way we came. I don’t know if I want to ever reenter that ocean of memory. Though a part of me wishes I could see other memories beyond the one I saw.”
“You remember nothing else?”
“Nothing. The memory seemed to start from nowhere and end nowhere, without any connection to other events. I’ve told you everything I remember. Anything beyond that is inference or guesswork. I can’t even tell you what Elsie looked like, though I know I loved her. Rhoda I might be able to identify, but only because I clearly saw her dead body. And what exactly I did after her death, I cannot tell. But whatever I did, I was driven by a mad passion. I felt it back in there. I don’t think I would have stopped at anything, anything, to have my Rhoda and Elsie back. I’m beginning to think that my past might have been as ugly as my present form.”
“You are not ugly . . . inside.”
Heraclix smiled at Pomp’s tactful self-correction.
“You don’t know that,” he said. “I don’t even know that. Again, we are back to inferences.”
A fumarole belched out a shaft of flame near them.
“And back to the inferno,” he said.
A loud scream and the rattle of chains sounded from behind a wall of rock. He drew close to the wall’s edge, with his back against the barrier, then peeked around the corner.
He ducked his head back, then turned to address his fairy friend.
“Yes, we are definitely where I thought we were, Pomp.”
“Hell?”
“No need to swear,” he said jokingly.
He turned to look back around the corner, then jumped, completely surprised by what looked back at him from around the other side.
The creature’s body was red and covered in fine bristling hairs. It stood perhaps four feet tall at the top of its horns, though the pair of lacy wings that sprouted from its back were fully eight feet high at the tips. Another, smaller pair of wings spread straight out to the creature’s side, just beneath the others. It stood on two corvine feet, sharp talons scratching the ground. Four stunted arms dangled from the torso, just above the distended belly that squatted upon those skinny bird-legs. The arms that protruded from the torso were covered with bristling hairs and insectile in their segmentation, though each of the four arms ended in something like a human hand, with four fingers and an opposable thumb. But the most disturbing aspect of this insect-human-devil hybrid was the thing’s bulbous head. It was ridiculously out of proportion to the rest of the body, fully two-thirds the size of the torso. Atop the head were two sharp horns that stood up with the look of small, curved daggers. The eyes looked as if they had been stolen from a giant fly and grafted to the head. They bulged like two multi-faceted black bubbles. The thing’s nose was also obscenely large, a proboscis with gargantuan nostrils that crawled up the side of the sausage-like extremity. The fiercest feature of the creature, its mouth, was cut in such a way that the creature was forever smiling, an ironic mockery of being consigned to Hell and eternal torment. The fang-lined mouth, however, hinted that it could inflict torment as well as be subjected to it.
Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey Page 11
