The Great Lover (25 page)

The demon does not start with the rest of them, but he gets out of the knife’s way.

“
You saved him!”

He flails, trying to shake the man who holds him. The other closes with his knife held low, ready to thrust. The demon suddenly stretches out his neck and jabs the fingers of one immobilized hand deep into his mouth with a swift decisive motion. The man behind him wrestles him sideways and the other darts in with the knife the demon vomits in his face and he drops the knife, staggering backward clawing at eyes full of stomach acid. The demon slips sideways letting his weight drag the other down, gets a hand free drops it to the nearest stone and smacks the man’s forehead with it.

The man who had been holding him is a big, square-built blonde in a rugby shirt. He is doubled over, hands on head, retreating sideways. The demon seizes him by the back of his shirt and swings him to and fro through the air giggling like a demented clown.

“
Ee hee hee hee! Hoo hoo hoo hoo!”

He swings him back and forth gathering momentum and launches him out over the water. He strikes the surface flat on his belly with a percussive splat, and thrashes there.

“
Come back! Come back!” Ptarmagant is shouting, and we all join him. The demon looks at us through the faint haze. Armbands lie all around him.

*

The Great Lover’s three thousand and first: a statuesque Russian woman with a weary, slightly put-upon look. Her dream heaves with dark water, white-tufted ocean on all sides and in all directions but up, an impenetrable canopy like treetops of faceted water. Black clouds are overhead, exposing a ragged strip of sulfur-colored sky at the horizon; snow falls in scalding flakes that burst in plumes of steam on contact with the water, people walking down the street in remote cities acquire thick coatings of pyroclastic snow and trail hot vapor behind them.

Lights bob with the waves. Boats gather here out of sight of all land for hundreds of miles. The mountains are under the sea, present but hidden in the forest of the ocean. The boats maneuver gingerly up alongside each other and are carefully linked together, forming a chain-hinged floating platform. There’s an atmosphere of quiet festivity, pockets of laughter, pockets of amativeness. An elongated, dark-skinned man is tenderly kissing an asian woman dressed like pierrot for goodness’ sake.

I enter, sailing in alone on the deck of a decrepit black knorr, scalps hanging morosely from the scuppers or whatever they’re called. I’m some king (this is a state occasion). On my arms and legs there are shackles fettering me to my battered wooden throne on long dirty chains. My boat sits low in the water, so I must clamber up the side of the Queen’s vessel to join the party. I’m wearing shapeless black garments of fine material coarsely woven, a heavy iron ring on my left hand, and a heavy crown.

A voice announces my arrival as I heave myself up.

“
The King of the Ogres!”

Fine, fine. Dragging my throne behind me, I get over the rail and haul it up onto the deck by the chains.

There’s a gold and orange light of torches here, gorgeous against the clear cold grey-blue air and green and black of the ocean. Musicians and courtiers bow and spring out of my way as I crash the length of the ship to the quarterdeck. The Queen sits there — my throne catches on something and in frustration I whip it loose and turn back to her — she is a Russian-looking woman who passed near to me yesterday, and whose dense dream power tugged fiercely at me as she went by. I felt it hit me like two boxcars linking up, hopeless to resist. Now she is sitting above me with a peacock’s tail spreading behind her.

She holds out her hand to me. The scepter she keeps crooked in her elbow, but the hand she holds out to me holds the orb, made of a single piece of quartz... I see white fuzz on it — ice. A globe of ice in her hand. She puts it up in front of a lamp, and lets me see the flame through the ice. She takes a feather from her tail and dips it in fire, running it again and again through the flame. When she takes it out, it’s all white.

Holding my hand, she leads me into a dark room. I’m suddenly afraid — I don’t want to go into this room. She strikes a small light and gives it to me, pointing.

“
You want to see...”

“
Don’t make me!” I know there is something right behind me I don’t want to see.

Reluctantly I take the light and turn around. There is someone under a sheet there on the floor, smelling a little. It’s death. The little room is death.

I turn back to her. The light washes over her bloodless face and she screams raising her hand, as though in revealing death some particle of death had adhered to the light and is transferred to her with the shining of the light. I drop the light and catch her just outside the door — she looks at me in a sort of fury, her mouth open and the pallor of her face makes the red of her gums intense like rubies.

*

Now, according to the map, the woods are silent. The water in the lake heaves against its banks without a sound. Among the branches, one can hear the rap of wings, and a musty scum smell like a duck pond. I am going back to check the brine tank. I look up and see wings without birds trading one limb for another in whirring explosions among the branches. A grey wing spins in and out of a patch of light like a throwing knife. The wood is seething with wings that scuttle and cling to rusks of dry bark, unfold and collapse like lungs half in the shadows.

When I reach the brine tank I am already half dead, my body is silting up from the inside out and my head is painfully light. I kneel there — I have to go into the tank, it’s the only way to save myself. I struggle against my own decision; I have to take my struggling life in my hand and crush it, like crushing a baby animal. My eyes are going dull, I can feel a clear grey cold into me, far away I hear the splash.

There are the dim shadows in the lights of the coffins which glow like cells in a honeycomb held up to the light, each dead occupant alone in his blazing wooden house. Eight smudged faces. Their decomposition dreams, and in their sleep the voices of the coffins voicelessly say, “there is only one story and now we are going to tell it again...” The words of the story are pressing for some outlet with anguish of unrequited love of these words for this moment... and you sit there, without even understanding how cruel you are, how you are keeping them apart by remaining silent, when you would have only to open your mouth and ears to bring them together. A composite voice groans from vocal chords choked with mold hacks from static jaws and amber teeth, a rank breath fumes from split and blackened mouths metered but unshaped words.

Charred black leaves spill against the stark brick corner of the vault. They batter against the wall, rise up, fly round in a circle, and swing down again; a sign — Spargens is watching. The black vault is growing cold.

I see a desert, covered with stationary black clouds. A breeze stirs up the dust sends a pang of longing through me, that black air, blended water and wind. Now I see: the clouds are made of swords and wings. The air of cold, yelping flames. Like wires these lines spread round the vortexes making a golden fingerprint like a wood knot, braided shining fibres patched with dust and brown threads in parallel curves and strokes, apostrophe marks like rabbit tracks, like black seeds thrown into the shit of the wind.

Fractured wings stampede down the black rain-clotted sky and power rises from the mountains, the horizon, the grave-clotted ground fertile and stinking. The flirting of the air tells me I’m underground. I crouch and put my palms beside my feet, reach out touch rock and loose stones. I take one and toss it; sound of rock on rock — the same all round. I wet a finger: the air comes from somewhere ahead. I creep forward, feeling my way.

Now I get a sense of space opening on all sides; a continuous rushing ahead. A light emerges from the ground; a lean-faced woman I’ve never seen before — sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, dark hair, dark dress of shiny material to the ground, massy bronze candelabra perfectly still in her upraised right hand. The ground under her feet is powdery, like ash, loose and filled with small stones. Now by the light I see she has come out of a groove in the rock.

She stops and turns, a gorge open at her feet. Looking around, craning her neck and pivoting her head, she is searching for something. She has deep, triangular eyes; they train themselves on me directly, and she motions to me. Without waiting, she turns and continues along the path which clings to the edge of the gorge. I follow at a distance, and the rushing sound grows a little louder — the sound of a waterfall. The woman comes to a spur of rock and stands there precariously, gesturing beyond her.

There, past the point where the gorge forks into two jagged cracks hundreds of yards across, is a phosphorescent city, spread out like so many toy blocks on a bare plateau. There are no lights, but the buildings are all made of soft-looking stone that sheds a dreamy blue-white glow like reradiated moonlight. The city is bordered on the far side by a continuous sheet of plummeting water that must be miles wide, a gargantuan waterfall that drops in a transparent, unbroken curtain out of the gloom above and down into a chasm below. The chasm is broader than the city, and evidently so deep that the water strikes bottom only long after it vanishes from sight. Despite their astounding size, the falls are awesomely silent.

A colossal woman’s face has been carved into the soft phosphorescent stone of the bluff behind the falls. Its contours flicker through the screen of water — a dreaming, unfamiliar face, a little uptilted and twice the size of the city. Her eyes are closed, an almost wide mouth the lips softly compressed and nearly smiling in sleep. Her face I’ve never seen before, I say it to myself again and again to fight a persistent feeling that I have, I have seen it before.

...Cinders are blowing everywhere, a racket like the snapping of flames bristles from the forest. It grows, the noise gathering to a roar like an invisible avalanche. Spargens walks over and gives me a long searching look.

“
Let’s get him out of there.”

We run to the tank. I take up my hook and almost immediately I have him. With Spargens, I draw him from the freezing water, enormous tears blazing with gold dust spill from his eyes. We pull him to the shack and the noise in the forest grows.

“
What is that?”

“
I don’t know.”

I try to revive him. As he begins to cough, the lights all go out at once and wind flaps wildly at us in all directions — from where?

“
Is the roof caving in?”

“
I don’t believe it!”

The trees are groaning like ship timbers in a storm. Suddenly he sits up and seizes our arms. Though I can’t really see him, I can tell by his attitude that he is straining to see or hear something in the dark.

“
What is it?”

There is something rolling around in the distance, back and forth along the far wall by the opposite side of the lake. It is circling round and round back there, where no one is — a huge thing, I imagine like a little planet, struggling in the cavern like a fly trapped in a glass.

Suddenly there is a bellow and wings come from all the trees with a noise like a terrible hailstorm. We are huddled together in the dark, beneath the flimsy roof of the shack, feeling the wings in the air. Their flapping seems to make the air lighter, like what I imagine a tornado must do — I feel the air being sucked from my lungs.

A blinding flash and for a moment I can see a cyclone of wings. A thunderclap seems to blast right on top of us and sets my ears ringing, and the ground shakes with its rumbling — thunder and lightning inside the room. My patient turns to me and shouts something at me.

“
We have to get out! We have to get out! We have to seal them in behind us!”

Another burst of light shows the wings diving into the brine tank, churning the water into foam, the surface is choked with thrashing wings. The thunder comes with a second flash — the wings are dragging themselves out of the tank onto the shore — they have attached themselves to bodies — now they launch into the air, the bodies are dangling from them.

—
Darkness.

—
An explosion throws us on our backs.

—
Light: the bodies are circling above the brine tank on mismatched wings. Only the wings are alive.

Darkness, a single blast of light and then the thunder, loudest of all. Darkness and silence. I can hear our breathing. I can feel, all around us, the winged corpses, crouching motionless in the dark. I can hear the dust trickling from their hair, their empty eyes, their gaping, slack mouths...

CHAPTER SEVEN

A clock tower with its illuminated dial all white with concentric rings drifts past the window like a dream.

Clouds break up, the sun shines through, and the sky is like a giant carousel. The entrance into a wholly new and unfamiliar landscape is like being born; what is called a moment of clarity — the experience is the opposite of a headache — a sense of pleasure in a clear panel of the head, of lightness and transparency. Racing along through the tunnels with a fantastic, steadily-building dream tension suddenly explode from the tunnel into a vast panorama of ocean sky and trees going off in his pants and slumping forward against the glass... blood spurting and spattering to the sound of radio squelches in the slow elongations of the clouds. Images and dissociated phrases blur past in subway windows—...