Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (52 page)

He was his very young son, as he looked the last time Thomas had seen him.

He was scared.

With great difficulty, the thing moved close to him and sat on its stool. It smelled like the bottom of a well. It looked like it wanted to cry.

“Thomas de Givras,” it said, looking down at him paternally, “I damn thee.”

“Where…where will I go?”

“Out.”

“How?”

“Don’t you think I’m tired of that question? Can’t you think of me?”

“May I just stay here with you?”

“I’d like that,” it said. “But they wouldn’t. And I’m more frightened of them than you understand.”

Someone yelled in another room, in another language, and then began to beg in that language.

Hell’s first floor, he began to grasp, was begging.

An utter loss of dignity, if not hope.

Not yet.

“Please.”

“Well…”

“Please?”

“No.”

Silence.

It just aimed at him with the holes it had for eyes.

“How…how do I go, then? Since I must.”

“Through me, of course.”

“How?”

“You’re a smart boy. How do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

A bell sounded, deep like a church bell.

The begging in the close room turned to screaming.

“I’m sorry. It’s time.”

So saying, it grabbed the boy by a skinny arm.

Mouths opened not just on its stomach, but in many places.

“No!
No!
”

It ate him.

It hurt.

This scene played out innumerable times, with every sort of variation, but always ending the same way. Each time, he tried to reason with it, or to fight it, or to otherwise avoid the excruciating finale. He told himself not to try, that the end was inevitable, but even after he resolved to give up, still he ran away from it, or tried to use the table to block it, or any other ploy he could devise, because it hurt just that much. At length, when he gave up trying and even speaking, the interaction shortened to nothing more than its reading off his name and sentence

Thomas de Givras, I damn thee

and then chewing him down alive.

He shivered and let it.

I damn thee

He cried and let it.

I damn thee

And then he just let it.

Eventually he even stopped yelling, and that was when they decided he was ready for something worse.

FORTY-TWO

He forgot his name. How long he had been there stopped meaning anything. He went from one torment to another, starting with bodily pain and going on to heartbreak; he was skinned and then made to drag his skin behind him, then made to sew this skin back on himself, with the dirt and gravel it had picked up now under it; he was shredded slowly, crammed with thorns and made to eject them, crowded in with naked throngs and scalded, made to fight for cool water or a glimpse of sky, and when they saw that he liked fighting, they made him fight again and again for everything, for years, until even his rage was broken, and he wept and succumbed when confronted; he was murdered and betrayed by those he loved, and then made to murder and betray them, then desecrate them, cannibalize them, regurgitate them. Nothing was left out.

No weakness was overlooked.

For pride in his strength he was made a plaything. For his carnality he was rendered sexless.

He was made to live each oath he’d spoken, no matter how ridiculous,
lapping Christ’s wounds, drowned with Christ in shit, boiled in Mary’s sour milk, sodomized by the cocks of the Apostles, until he had been stripped of his capacity for laughter, or even the capacity to disbelieve the outrageous. They took his humor from him not because they themselves were humorless—they most certainly were not—but because it so offended them that man had been given this, too.

Hell was mutable and hard, banal and shocking, painful and numbing, burning and frozen, but mostly it was real.

He had become the butt of every joke he told.

Hell was real.

He was back in Paris.

Île de la Cité.

He lay against a wall, bloated, fat, dead of plague but not dead. He could not move except to blink. He could not close his mouth, which stood painfully open. To his right, a stack of empty, broken wine barrels. Arrows lay near him, stuck in mud, or lying with their points broken off from having struck the wall behind him.

An arrow hissed down at him from a crenellated wall, punching an agonizing hole in his gut. It burned. He yelled through his gaping mouth.

“That’s it, Phillipe!” a man said to his companion on the wall.

More arrows flew, some missing, most piercing him. The last one went in his tongue and through the back of his throat.

“I work better with obstacles.”

He shrieked.

Then he saw the light.

Coming from farther down the street.

The light in this infernal Paris had been dim, as on a rainy day or just after sunset, but now a proper light was coming.

The guards on the wall looked at its source, then began firing their arrows at it. They lost the lie of their human shapes, tails snaking out behind them. More devils came, leveling cruel, barbed weapons. A
wheel of sorts made entirely of severed arms and legs rolled up and formed itself into something worse, taking up arrows with which to stab whatever was coming.

But it never got to.

He could not believe what he saw.

But then it made perfect sense.

He remembered that day, before they met the woodcarver.

The cart.

The girl drove it.

He tried to remember her name.

That girl.

Who was she?

Then he remembered her name and just as quickly forced it from his thought. It was not a name to be remembered here. It was a name that would kill with sadness and failure.

The devils spat at her and leapt, but none could touch her, nor the mule, nor the cart; a dome of daylight as golden as if culled from the spring of one’s twenty-first year surrounded the intruder, and no unclean thing could tread where it shone.

She descended now, ignoring the hail of missiles and threats falling around them both, but powerless to harm.

She walked toward him.

It was the she of the girl’s dreamy eyes, the maker of the words she had spoken that were not her own.

The thing that had been Thomas croaked through its open mouth but could not speak. This was the meeting of their souls, then—his withered, hers in glory, hers somehow not just her.

He had never seen a sight that looked so beautiful; he had forgotten what beauty was.

Another betrayal

These are false shapes sent to bring memory

And memory is pain

The only truth here

He shut his eyes against them and waited for the next tortures to begin. He sensed her drawing warmly closer, kneeling before him.

The arrow in his mouth came out, painlessly.

She pulled the others out, too, each one a candle flame of misery, now extinguished.

He wept at the relief, the pure ecstasy of relief.

Her small hand lay across his eyes and it felt good.

Beyond good.

Her hand went to his chin and shut his agonized mouth.

They were so devious, so low to do this.

She whom he had loved as a daughter, and more than that, if that were possible, had come again to give him hope.

He grew angry.

This was the best illusion of her they had sent, but it was not the first. How many times had they sent her to beckon and then abandon him, how many times had his limbs refused his commands to stop as he choked the life from her or violated her or butchered her like a lamb?

He opened his eyes, and still she remained.

I SEE THROUGH YOU YOU CUNT

He spat in her face and she smiled.

I understand.

Go away.

Not without you, Thomas.

What did you call me?

Your name. Would you like to hear it again?

I’m not falling for it.

I’ll wait.

Horrid things raged behind her, bit at her, yet none came within the light that pooled around her and around the cart. He watched her for a day and a night, or what seemed like it in this place where time had been beaten beyond recognition.

At once, everything shook.

The horrors around them stopped raging and turned to see.

A sextet of Hell’s princes, each as tall as a castle’s outer wall, came down through the roof, bearing the smoldering body of an angel beautiful beyond imagination, drooping as dead as a martyr in their arms as they gnashed their teeth and descended with him through the ground and to the deepest, safest, most secret vaults of Hell.

His (her?) pale skin.

His wings smoking like paper about to catch.

Lucifer is fallen.

Mammon is Lord here now.

At last she saw a kernel of trust come into Thomas’s eyes.

Are you ready?

He nodded.

Barely perceptibly, but he nodded.

She blew into his hands to warm them back to life. She kissed his feet. She kissed his forehead.

She smelled of cedar and of the sea.

You’re Him.

There is no him or her.

Why did you not come as I would know you?

I came as you would follow me. I came as you would love me in innocence.

Why me?

That question has never been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. But you were the last one. The last one I could still save.

And yet this is Hell. I’m here.

Not for long.

I’m damned.

Not anymore.

Night lay behind her head, but true night, with stars in their proper places, and no comets to trouble them. He was in the cart. She looked down at him.

I want you to answer a question, Thomas.

Yes.

Do you want to remember?

His eyes welled with tears and he shook his head, his mouth contorting to sob.

Not Hell. I mean me. Us.

You?

Her. Delphine.

I don’t know. What are you?

I was two things together. Then one. Now two again, apart.

I don’t understand.

You don’t have to. You just have to say yes or no. But it will be harder for you if you remember. Love is always harder. Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them. Love is loss of self, loss of other, and faith in the death of loss.

Those gray eyes.

Those gray eyes through every part of him, loving what was strong and what was weak indifferently.

Yes.

I say yes.

She got in the front of the cart and took up the reins.

The cart rolled down a road near the beach.

Night was harmless here.

Someplace warm.

Provence.

Galilee.

No place at all.

He saw the stars above him, and something passed before them.

A seagull.

Just a seagull.

He slept.

FORTY-THREE