Mindripper
Page 31
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Heedless of all else, he raced to where he had first fallen, beside the decapitated daemon. He scooped fistfuls of colored sand and breathed in their defused glory. His nostrils burned, but he would not stop. He could not!
On and on he shoveled.
Blood flooded his chin, mixed with the sand.
Kalum stopped, gulping on joy and agony. Low murmurs pricked his eardrums with insults and sparkling granules rose around him to form horrid shapes before collapsing back into sand. He smiled, laughed.
“Yes,” he said in a half groan.
He tittered to his feet, cloaked in dancing shadows. His blood and veins whooshed with the fire of golden abstractions—the Gold Dust rekindling within. Exaltation sloshed like overheated slush inside his chest.
And a part of him wailed and wondered that addiction, any addiction, should so easily overturn years of sacrifice and dedication.
He stepped into the light that spilled from the fissures in reality that riddled the vaulted ceiling. Onto the sparkling glitter. Into the yawning bright.
A decapitated corpse—now a mummified horse, then a smiling cat—sat upon the twisting sand, ringed by chained horrors. Murder had been done here, and it smelled glorious.
Kalum knelt and scooped rainbow-colored particles into his hand, watched them fall through the gaps in between his fingers like water from a fountain.
The gargling of a forest spring, the thunder of wood banging off of stone.
He stood and turned.
Worship Osei’s ancient form strode out of the stairwell and onto the floor of the first gallery, hunched over a fiery staff, stepping carefully around human-shaped obstacles. Flakes of crimson flicked off of her gnarled staff, drifted up to the domed ceiling. A dome ceiling that contained the sky.
White clouds parted to reveal a man standing in a sea of snarling snow. A pale-skinned man who stared up at. . . .
“The Mindripper is dead?” Osei asked in a voice that echoed, as if the very earth had spoken.
“Yes. Dead. Gone.”
He wiggled the last vestige of sound from his toes, lost himself in the sensation as he gazed up at the sky. He could almost sense hellish winds ice cold on his cheeks.
Weathered fingers snapped together next to his ear. “Remember your duty!”
Kalum jerked, lowered his gaze. . . .
Osei glowered at him with sad eyes, close enough to touch. She shook her head, and her shadow whitened, morphed into a trope of screeching baboons.
“How did you get down so fast,” he asked wonderingly.
“Fast?” she asked with the softness of a hurricane. “Exactly how much Dust did you take, Kalum?”
“I. . . .”
Kalum scratched at his forehead, then studied his palm. If he focused, he could see yellow fragments blinking in his veins. Burning. What if every moment held such splendor? What if he did not have to. . . ?
“This one’s still alive!”
Kalum whirled, tracing the burning tip of Osei’s voice. She now stood more than a dozen steps away, bent over two frothing forms. He slapped himself across the face, but the stinging pain did not help ease the. . . .
He was losing time.
Naked constructs with the heads of elephants and the bodies of female acrobats climbed up from the ground. They fluttered from side to side, their hands and legs moving in unison, their hips swaying, their sweat-slicked bodies glistening.
A scream knifed the air.
A kind of bone chilling horror accompanied the sound, tearing Kalum’s eyes away from the performers. Osei lay on her side, thrashing with light, releasing waves that wobbled the air.
“No!” he howled.
He spun away from the acrobats, staggered toward Osei. The ground seemed to roll and pitch beneath him, sending him ambling left then right. He fell next to her, grasped her prone form.
“Your, Worship!” he yelled, trying to still her spasms.
A gulp of air.
“There’s another one!” Eyes wide, Osei gripped his arm.
“What?” Kalum croaked.
“There’s another Mindripper in Dilgan. And its powerful, more powerful than I’ve ever felt before.” An eye blink. “Such sadness . . . it lashes me with it. Can you not sense it?”
“Another. . . ?” His eyes drifted to the Worship’s discarded staff.
More and more embers skittered free from it like leaves from a battered tree, embers that transformed into masturbating daemons, daemons that leered at him with hooked phalluses.
Kalum felt himself tip onto his back, sensed his body begin spasms of its own, but he could only stare up at the hellish embers, unblinking.
A-an-another. . . .
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Author’s Note
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Acknowledgments
I just want to take a moment to thank by name all those who took the time to read the early drafts of this manuscript and gave me feedback. In no particular order: Madderb, Nitniuqrul, Daniel Saalo, Peerless Fatty.
Sorry if I missed anyone.