Beauty (50 page)

The nature destroyers are here, the tree-cutters and whale-killers, they are here, some of them willingly. They sit on bare stone and contemplate bare stone and eat bare stone for their sustenance. Surrounded by ten thousand of their like pressed in on every side, they gasp for air and beg for water. What they did, or wrote, or filmed, or believed in life has brought them here. Here there can be no undoing or rewriting. Here one is judged by the words already on paper, the picture already on film, the speech already recorded. Nothing new is written here. Only old things, redone. Old horrors, relived.

Still, I am able to think new words and distill new paragraphs out of the awful silences between the more horrible sounds. Between the screaming, the panting, the
uhng uhng uhng
sounds flesh makes when the pain and terror grow too much for comprehension. To shut out that sound, I think sentences, I spell them into happening, into my book, wherever my book may be, writing them there in shadow letters, willing them to exist, enchanting them into existing, somewhere, to keep myself sane.

Mama stayed here for a time. Mama came away herself still, or almost herself, still. Can I?

He has put Barry and Jaybee in cells next to mine. Cells. One could call them that. Obdurate cloud, frozen pain, structured agony, something not metal nor stone, something not permeable, not tangible, not anything one knows about substance. It isn't substance, but it's there, on all sides, below, above, opening nowhere except when He reaches through with his hand, his finger, his long, sinuous, lascivious, dignity-destroying tongue.

I hear Barry's voice. He says, "Help me, help me, please, oh help me."

I scream at him in fury and pain. "Nothing is happening to you you didn't describe, think of, imagine. Nothing is happening to you you didn't conceive of and write down. Why do you ask for my help?"

I cannot even help myself.

"We are here," say the voices. They come close, like a cloak, like a bandage, like a barrier between me and what other things are here. There is healing in them. There is quiet in them. Invisibly, they are here. Even when I am being hurt, they are there, between the core of me and Him. The torturer can see my flesh, but not the thing I carry. He can feel my flesh, but not what it conceals.

"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 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 ... "

"Would vanish, with the rest? With my lovely Mrs. Gallimar? With Constanzia and the Viceroy? No. No, I was not part of that story only. I am part of many things."

"You've thought about who you are, then."

"I've had an eternity of time to think about little else," he smiled. "Plying across the Acheron, the Styx, the Cocytus, the Lethe, the Dark Waters at the end of all things."

"Who made them, Captain?"

"Men made them, Lady. Made them with magic their religions stole from Faery. Made them and named them and peopled them, too."

"Along with Acheron and Abaddon and all the rest."

"Surely."

"And this hell behind me, Captain? Did men make this one, too?"

"Men and the Dark Lord, Lady. Each helping the other." He sighed. "Is there anything else I can tell you, or do for you, Lady Wellingford?"

"Would you row me away from here? For old time's sake?"

He laughed. "Where to, Lady Catherine?"

"To the other side."

"What other side?" he smiled again, and pushed his boat away. I heard the quiet plops of the oars recede and was then drawn back into the place.

"Never mind," said the voices. "It may be a way out."

Giles. I have found I can almost escape this place by thinking of Giles. The voices give me silence, and I think of him.

When one is young, one thinks of love in romantic or erotic terms. I did. When I was sixteen, I thought of Giles in romantic and erotic terms. Romance when we were in the dining hall. Eros when I was in bed alone in the night hours. There is no innocence so deep as to veil the urgencies of the flesh from one's own youthful awareness. I wanted Giles, very specifically, to do to me what the stallions did to the mares, what the stable boys talked of doing to their sweethearts. I had no experience of it, but my flesh knew. And then, twenty years later, when we did at last what I had longed for, my flesh knew once again. It was the single thing needed, the one thing wanted, the savor and marvel of life.

I could not imagine doing without it. Being without it.

And yet, all those years in the twentieth, I had done without it, been without it. Seventeen, eighteen years old. At the peak of urgency and desire, and yet I had done without it. Because there had been no Giles. I had remembered him, lusted after him, pleasured myself in my bed pretending he was there. He had been necessary to my joy. It would have been nothing without him. So I had thought.

And when we two had come together at last, we had been splendid, but it had been more than the splendor of the flesh. It was we who loved one another. We two. Old Giles laid his hand upon mine and looked sweetly into my eyes, and I loved him no less than I had loved him on the terrace outside the ballroom where Elly and her young prince moved in a dance of another kind.

Our love, mine, was made of such little things. When we traveled to Marvella, he would rise in the morning and find something warm for me to drink. Broth, perhaps. Some herbal concoction. A cup of mulled wine. He would bring it to me, knowing I wake grumpily from the pains of sleep-since I was a child, my legs have bothered me. They pain me especially at night, and many nights I spend half sleepless, turning over and over. So, he would bring me something and sit on the side of the bed while I drank it and call me Beauty, though I was an old, white-haired hag with pouches beneath my eyes and lines around my mouth even then.

And the love would come up from inside me like water rising in a well. Not lust, not romance, but something kindlier than that. The feeling one has watching a sunrise sometimes. The feeling one has watching kittens at play. The feeling one has seeing a rose bloom beside the window. The Baskaronian feeling. A perfection of being.