All bleeds through, p.26
All Bleeds Through, page 26
part #0.50 of Into Vermilion Series
“Hold that rage to your heart. Put it away. Remember it. Now, tell me about the girl.”
The scene before me stutters, like film skipping through a projector. It slows and cools. Nothing feels real anymore. The hate goes monochrome, giving my thoughts a stroke of clarity. “I love her,” I answer, certain.
“What is her name?”
“I don’t know. I did once. Before…”
“Before ULTRAblood.”
ULTRAblood. I get a brief flash of the full-bodied nerve pain that is my every waking moment.
“I want you to go back to the first time you met her.”
I am about to protest and exasperatedly tell her that I can’t remember, but the way the scenery darkens and fogs reminds me that I am no longer in control. The me that remembers still lives somewhere in my mind. Everything melts away, and a golden green glare washes away the residue.
I’m younger now. Eleven or twelve. Half-dried curses drip from the sides of my mouth, still damp from a fight with my father. But I’m stopped now at the foot of the hill between our home and the next. That’s where I see her for the first time. She’s standing at the top of the hill, gazing down at the creek that slithers through the woods. She’s wearing a blue plaid pinafore that falls to her knees. Her long hair blazes like spun gold in the setting sun. Atop her head sits an azalea crown, woven loosely out of brilliant purple flowers. My heart skips two beats in a row and then races to make up lost time.
“If she’s wearing an azalea crown,” the doctor says, “is she of the Azalea family?”
Have I been describing her aloud? The thought embarrasses me, but the stinging reminder that it is all an illusion soon replaces it. “I don’t know.”
“Tell me what you feel,” she says.
The moment drags. A flurry of wind takes a few leaves across the crest of the hill and blows the girl’s hair around her. The azaleas shake but sit firmly. “I don’t want to,” I say.
“Tell me.”
I feel I have no choice. I describe the way my heartbeat stutters, the way my breath catches, the way my palms begin to sweat as I stare up at her.
The girl looks down, and her hazel eyes find me, take me in. I can’t breathe. She smiles at me, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. This me is too young to know anything about love, but it’s the closest I’ve ever come to touching it. The closest any me has come, even now. That thought sets off a spark that lights the fire. My entire soul begins to simmer with the rage from before.
“Tell me what you feel,” the doctor demands.
“Hate,” I answer. The memory is running. Beneath it, I can make out the fire. The screams. My burning tears.
“Because they took her from you.”
“Yes.”
“The great hemo-hunts are famous for the cruelty of their mobs,” the doctor says. “Statistics suggest that for every hemo they killed, ten innocent humans were slaughtered by accident. What are the odds they managed to get three in one house?” Her words are serrated. They catch my spirit and saw at the joy my heart should be experiencing in this moment. “Her death was not an easy one. They didn’t just kill her. They butchered her. Hacked her body to pieces and sold them to the highest bidder, leaving you to weep impotently into your weak, pathetic hands.”
“That’s enough,” the other woman whispers in Danish, voice near a grating hiss. “You’re just hurting him.”
“We need to go deeper than we’ve gone before,” the doctor replies, attempting to hide her words behind a not-so-secret language. She coughs to cover her aside and addresses me again in English. “How does it feel? Tell me every detail.”
The fury builds. “God damn you,” I spit. “Why are you doing this to me?” The fact that she has spoken to me before returns, covered in spines. How many times has she forced me to relive this loss? My heart feels like it’s in a vise. I want to wrap my fingers around her throat and choke the life out of her.
“That rage, right there. Embrace it. And tell me every detail about it.”
I do not want to obey, but the words rise like steam from a volcanic vent. “It’s crawling in my brain. It…” A thought grows clear, and lucidity blossoms. My beloved’s eyes are on me. She looks like a laughing corpse. “It wants me to kill. It wants me to avenge.”
“It wants?”
“It wants me to find the people who killed her. Rip their skin from their bodies. Let the insects feast on their still-living flesh. Crush their bones, one at a time. Slaughter their young. Their old. Their sick. To bathe in their fear.”
“Good,” the doctor says. “Harness that hatred. Let it fill your heart.”
She does not need to tell me twice. I can feel the tendrils seeping in, dripping down. My living body tenses. My jaw goes tight, and a rumble connects my mouth to my primal core. It froths and foams, and allowing it to run rampant through me feels incredible. The thought that each tear shall be repaid in kind thrills me. Fantasies of carnage begin to appear before my eyes, scenes constructed of stained glass and bone. I can’t tell which are pure fantasy and which actually occurred.
“Now,” she says, “I want you to dive deep into that anger and go to where that hate flows from.”
The command almost interrupts my intoxication for its lack of meaning. But the image of the girl in the azalea crown melts away, and my soul is pulled inward. A nauseating collapse of the self. I twist and coil in a spiral, like my entire being has been turned to taffy. As I liquefy, that thread of hate winds itself about me, sinking its fangs and taking me deeper. Everything goes red, then dried-blood brown, then black. Black, deeper than any night or terror I have ever known.
I’m drowning in an ocean of pitch. My soul-body attempts to flail and break free, but there’s nowhere to go. There’s no light, no sense of movement. Only the inky surface of an endless, primordial nothingness. But in my struggles, I touch it. Venom fills my mind, and I feel my chest tighten with a shivering wrath that boils from the surface of this nebula.
“Tell me where you are.”
The doctor’s voice grounds me again, scattering the allure of a violent and crazed impulse. I respond that I am nowhere. I try to describe the eternal blackness surrounding me, but I can’t find words to capture its vast dimensions or lack of form.
As I speak, something seems to slither around my head. A whisper. My name. First comes one and then another. They writhe past my legs, and then my arms and neck. I shrink away, swatting at what I imagine to be a swarm of insects. Like smoky tendrils, they whirl about me, invisible and yet shimmering with something indescribably alien to my senses. Scales, unreflected in the dark. The rattle comes, echoing, in my skull. A voice, no, a thousand or more of them, all speaking of the same violence. It hurts to listen to, but I am permeated by it, unable to escape. In a panic, I begin to search for words to paint a portrait of this abyssal, formless chaos. “It’s like a river of serpents,” I tell her at length.
“Do you know what it is?”
“A demon,” I say without thinking. My voice carries a terrified certainty that chills me to my core. I have been here before, and not just once. Is this the thing that I am said to have touched during ULTRAblood? Has she made me touch it in our previous meetings?
“What manner of demon?” she asks.
“It’s a common thought. An idea.” I pause, trying to figure out what I mean. “I think it’s always been here.”
“Where is here?”
“Somewhere in the gaps. Somewhere between.” I wait for my answer to reveal between what, but I get no answer. Instead, as soon as my tongue is silent, a psychic rumbling enfolds me. For only a moment, the thing reveals itself in my mind.
A solid form lurches halfway out of the dark, cloaked in a smoky haze. Though I see only a portion illuminated by my ego, it is more than enough. It is a massive reptilian thing, larger than any creature I have ever seen, covered all over with white hair and bristling, breathing scales. Its whole form is angular, heavy and bulging with strength, and yet lithe and sinuous. It coils about with malign intent, and I’m captured in its all-penetrating gaze. It fills every sensory surface of my soul, and yet more details elude me save for those it wishes me to see. Six limbs. Six eyes. Nine horns. A gaping jaw filled with forked teeth appears, and as soon as it does, I’m alone again, shivering from the intrusion.
The doctor is asking me what has so bothered me, and I describe what I have seen. I do not speak its name, for I fear it will hear me and reappear. Even in its absence, I can feel its invasion still slinking through my thoughts. Worse, I hear a low, trilling warble, like a growl and a laugh and the breaking of a storm over the open sea. The demon is pleased by my distress. I know it is not the first time it has greeted me so in this river of serpents.
No. Not a river, the screaming voices seem to tell me. It’s a layer. A web. A carpet of kudzu. As the thought runs around in my brain, I hear a chorus of rumbling snarls from all around me. It is amused, but I fear it is only tolerating my intrusion into its domain because it is not strong enough to destroy me.
“Mr. Ellis. I want you to reach out through this demon. Seek its extrema. And tell me what you see.”
My soul obeys without waiting for me to allow it. The tide rises, and the hissing sea surges above my head. Phantasmal scales scatter and dance around me. A whispering cackle pierces my mind, like a dagger that cuts and bleeds me of all my certainty. I flow toward one tendril of this inner galaxy’s grasp. Squalls and swirls of malice guide me to a time long before me.
The scene unfolds in flashes before my soul’s eyes. I see bodies covered in boils and running blood. Burial linens cover Europe. Doctors with beaked masks crouch over the afflicted, but they can offer nothing but the false promise of the Abrahamic god’s last rites. I see riots breaking out and razing villages at the first sign of the scourge. Men killing men in fear that the hemorrhagic fever will come for them next. Scourge doctors disemboweled under suspicion of being the very hemos responsible for the Red Death. From the shadows, grinning specters revel in the fountain of death. The earth drinks well of shed vitality; and the demon grows stronger.
I see a battle unfolding. Knights with crested shields and spears charge across a burnt field, standards raised. Leading the charge, a woman in brilliant silver chainmail, unhelmed, dark hair streaming behind her as she rides. In her gloved left hand, she brandishes a sword of immaculate artisanship, steel thorns adorning the bejeweled hilt: Crux Caedis, the cross of carnage. The hemomancers and their unwilling serfs are cut down like wheat by the charge of the righteous, the sanctimonious. But from behind, the sniper escapes notice. The Lady Saint’s body twists around the impact of the bolt. She tumbles from her steed; and the demon grows stronger.
The land is stripped away. Something burrows through my mind. I brace myself for what comes next.
Bodies, lynched and strung up from the trees. Men and women, human and hemo alike, butchered by the mobs that sweep the nation. The greatest hunt of hemos since the madness that afflicted Salem. The rest of the world shakes their collective head and looks away. Blood and body parts are packed into wheelbarrows and sold at auction to the still-fledgling hemotech giants. 1932. 1935. 1937. The crescendo comes, crowds of frothing drunkards with machetes spilling into the streets and washing over towns with frightening faith in rumor and falsehood. It stirs the coals of the torpid hemos to burning.
The pendulum swings back.
Explosions rip through malls and markets. Scourge bombs take the lives of innocents. Viral outbreaks spread fear for weeks after the attacks. Quarantine breeds terror. But the Red Death cannot be repeated so easily now. Science has learned well since medieval times, leaving the Dahlia-funded terrorists to resort most often to the mundane weapons favored by humans. Bullets. Explosives. Blades. Technology’s advance has not been kind to the hemomancers. I watch a would-be redeemer raise a pistol to fire at a pair of officers closing in on him. The officers are faster. Like his twelve victims, he dies; and the demon grows stronger.
I cannot take any more of the carnage. I pull my mind back toward the relative safety of the hate-filled eternity. Out of breath, I let my heart thump against my ribs. The void around me stirs, hisses, snickers. Ghostly whispers almost take form as they scrape past me in storms of vapor.
“Well? What have you learned?” The doctor’s voice is like a splash of cold water across my face. It takes the edge off this hellish phantom digesting me with its malice.
“It’s becoming stronger,” I say. I have no other way to articulate these dissociated images into something useful. If I have been here before at the doctor’s request, then I am thankful that I do not remember. The demon of nine horns is somehow more frightening than any of the old fairy tales could have expressed. It creeps between the cracks, behind the curtain of reality, beneath the collective sea our minds all float upon. It invades weakness and fear, injects hatred, and then sups at the slaughter, feasts on the chaos. The carnage gives it strength, gives it form.
“What does it want?” Her voice is shaking with gravity. It is this question above all others she is concerned with.
Once more, the answer comes unbidden. “It wants to exist.”
I feel the air in the room shift with her movement. I get a glimmer of confusion as observed by my surface body. “No,” she mutters. “I refuse to believe it.” The denial infects her companion, who begins to shake her head and mouth counterarguments.
The renewed silence emphasizes the slow, churning murmurs of the demon. It’s getting louder, more insistent in its probing of my mind. Perhaps its defenses move like glaciers in the endless realm of the existenceless. Perhaps it is no longer so amused by my incursion. I feel cold. It slips razors under my skin and begins to peel. It dredges hideous thoughts up from the sediment of my past; I catch only fleeting glimpses, but what I see is enough to bring my blood to a boil. Kill, it seems to mutter in my ear. Rip. Tear. Crush. It has been too long, has it not?
“Listen carefully,” the doctor says. At her voice, the whispers scatter. “Dive back into it. Go to the place where its power is the strongest.”
The order is a relief; I do not want to spend another moment here, for I can sense my sanity fraying with each toneless utterance that reverberates through my spirit. Once more my astral form departs the thing between. This time, my destination is in the present. Returning to a plane less distant is like coming up for air, and I gasp in psychic relief.
When my vision clears, I’m again in darkness. It is not the darkness of the hate-demon, but a dusky, mortal darkness. Lamps light the dank chamber, and smoke dances from embers in open pits along its length. I blink through the unsettling smudges on my spirit eyes. Figures are huddled about the pits, and blood floats between them in geometric patterns that feed the fires.
Droning, unvoiced chants mix with the whimpers from the willing subjects of the rituals. I begin to drift through the scene, trying to make sense of it without thinking too hard about the details. I am somewhere underground, somewhere artificial. The ceiling here is vaulted, covered in indistinct murals and inscriptions. The stone walls are lined with finely sculpted pillars of burnished wood. The wide hall swims with fumes and incense and sparks of light fast devoured by the shadows. It is too similar to the whispers of the demon flowing around me in the void. If I focus, I can smell it. Raw, metallic, mixed with something deep and pungent.
At the head of the hall is a figure that seems to be overseeing the others—of which I mark there to be two dozen or more. Without knowing why, I find myself nearing her to get a closer look. I come up on her side and can see her clearly. She’s preternaturally young with gorgeous, perfect features. Her skin is as white as sculpted marble, her hair darker than onyx. Her irises burn crimson in the dim brazier light. She’s gowned in an elegant, flowing black dress that reeks of nobility—or the pretense of such.
“What can you see?” the doctor asks impatiently.
I begin to tell her about the hall and the ritual fires, but as soon as the first words are out of my mouth, the red-eyed woman tenses. She turns abruptly—purposefully—toward me. Her gaze fixates upon my form, and I’m frozen. Her eyebrows arch, and her lips shudder. A sputter of French washes over me and booms through the hall. The chants all go silent. Echoes fade.
My heart is racing again. I do not move. I do not even allow myself to breathe. Was it my imagination, or does this woman actually perceive me?
She answers my question by taking a slow, deliberate step closer. Her shoulders are squared with me, the focus of her attention unmistakable. All doubt is demolished. I am in danger. In a panic, I try to recede, to pull myself to the ceiling or beyond, anywhere, anywhere but here. Even the black of the demon’s well would be safer.
“Stay,” the devilish woman commands. Her fingers curl, scattering a plume of errant smoke. At her words, my very soul is paralyzed.
I struggle to continue floating, or at least to drift, but it’s hopeless. My body’s muscles clench and seize. I gasp for breath, but my spirit chokes. The pounding in my chest is too fast to sustain for long. I’m going to die, I can feel it. Not like this. Don’t let it be like this.
The dark lady leisurely steps nearer until she is right beside my spirit. Her hand traces my external edge. An icy chill spreads through my entirety. Her nostrils flare with an intake of breath. “I sense a soul tortured by injustice,” she says, voice anchored by her accent. There is no malice in her tone. Only bemusement. “Perhaps you would like to tell me what you are doing here?”
The entire hall of adherents is watching. Can they see me as well? The question fades into irrelevance; a greater horror has dawned on me. It is only now that I realize who it is that has trapped me. The black gown and the crimson eyes should have warned me—and they surely warned the me that remembers. The horror vibrating through me exhumes a ghastly caricature spoken of only in whispers and rumors. Lady Descoteaux. The Black Viscountess. That damned treacherous doctor! She sent me here knowing what I would face! I begin to hyperventilate. My lungs inflate faster, jabbing my heart over and over.
