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languages will allow. And his abode is not just the land of the dead, as Justice Swink believed. It is in the realm of pain. For the mission house became the House of Pain, and the room beneath it, the Pain Room. It is at the extremity of torture that one sees the paingod, Cthonos. It is when pain meets with a kind of pleasure, the pleasure just before release from life. I saw it when they tortured Mrs. Carson, you see. She laughed just before they killed her. She giggled hysterically when the scythe was brought down across her neck. There is really no such thing as being beyond pain, Mr. Grace. There is only the transformation that may occur, in which the fire that burns, freezes, the knife that cuts, heals. I know. Life and death are not just biological functions. There's more. I have seen it. And I showed it to them, to Justice and to Birdy, but they cut my tongue out for it. They held me down, both of them, and Harly wiped my forehead. Birdy whispered in my ear to just think of the pain as a gift, as something to cherish, and then I felt the cold metal of the scissors, and 381 douglas clegg Birdy whispered, 'No one really needs a tongue. No one really needs one. Don't scream. Don't scream. It's almost over.' It was later, when I woke up, that I found myself on the table. He had drugged me, mainly with heroin, and then I had to watch while I was partially conscious, as he began cutting into my stomach just like he was already a doctor, peeling the skin back while I watched. While I watched. And then the acid. Pouring it across the open wounds. The steam, rising out of my body. Across my hands, too, destroying the muscles in my fingers, so. And the razors. All of it. The needle pressed into the soft flesh where my tongue had been. I was an early experiment of theirs, for I wasn't allowed to die. They say that pain cannot be remembered, but I will tell you: every nerve in my body remembers. My nerves are the record, if you will, of my memory. Pain is always with me. Like that dog, Mr. Grace, and the dark closet, the animal as it slobbered across the back of my neck. Others watched. Others, in Cthonos. They are still here. They still watch. Their god has not left them." "What others?" She didn't answer at first. And then he knew: it came to him not in a word but in a sweeping view of a small town that lay along the gently sloping hills with vineyards and oil pumps. Empire. "It can't be," he whispered. "Not the entire town." 382 dark of the eye "Everyone," replied the inner voice, "hostages to Cthonos." "I don't believe you." She said, "believe what you like. There are the innocent few have settled here in the past five or six years, I'm sure, who have never heard the name of Cthonos. But anyone else, be he seventy or twenty, has gone through the initiation. It is a complex and arcane ritual, but it uses some of the more up-to-date techniques of sensory deprivation and suggestion, combined with a less subtle torture of living burial for each of the initiates." "Brainwashing. Special Projects knows all the tricks, too." "You remember Jonestown, Mr. Grace? Hundreds of people died because of their obedience to a leader? And Waco? Well, this is slightly different, although the technique is the same. Most of the residents of Empire are former members of Cthonos. Inactives. Their memories aren't too good, especially when it comes to their association with the religion. But should they divulge anything relating to Cthonos, a most peculiar thing seems to happen. It is nothing that can be med- ically proven. One must have faith for proof. The per- son experiences sharp pains in his head, just behind his eyes. I've heard it described as a feeling that some sort of worm is inside the head, like an apple, eating away at the rotting brain. Death comes within min- utes, in the form of a brain aneurysm. I have seen this demonstrated. I believe it." 383 douglas clegg "What about you? Why isn't your head exploding right about now?" "Mr. Grace, I have told you. I was adopted into the Swink family. As strange as it sounds, Justice and Loretta loved us. Torturing us was their way of expressing that love. Families can be like that, can they not? If they had wanted me dead, I would've died a while ago. They love us all — Monkey, me, Birdy, and Harly. Especially Harly. What they did to him . . . I don't think Loretta Swink really thought it would kill him. I think she really thought he would survive it and learn from his error." "How did he die?" But the images appeared again, flipping and speeding through his head like a movie was being run behind his eyes: A boy of thirteen, with a wisp of blond mustache on his upper lip like a milk smear, with his hands kneading something — what? The whiteness of flesh. The body of a girl with beautiful yellow hair. Dead. He pushes long slender needles slowly into her lower lip. "Don't tell, but, see, I done stuff to her and I don't want her telling when she gets to where she's headed," he says to her, but she stares at him, almost casually, but without blinking. Each needle goes through, and the black thread follows, sewing once up, once down, through the tender, torn lips of a girl of twelve. When he is done with that, and her lips are stitched together with thread, he proceeds to sew her eyelids shut. 384 dark of the eye He turns to his sister, who is standing over him. "I did it just like Mama, d'in't I?" "Uh-huh," she says, but she can't look back down at the girl. Instead she looks up around the bathroom and counts the tiles. She can hear him as he sews another part of the girl together, down beneath her stomach in the bad place that their mama is always warning them about. When he is done, he says, "Okay, you can look. Watch this." The boy is almost pretty. He has strawberry-blond hair that is too long over his ears and down his neck, and his lips are red as a rose, his eyes a sparkling blue. What mars his face is a kind of indelible sorrow etched just beneath his eyes in dark circles, and a tightness around his thick lips. He has a shiny curved instrument in his hand. "No," his sister says, "you'll get in trouble for that. It's sacred." He smiles back at her, scythe in hand. It seems big- ger than normal, maybe because it's in his hands. "Don't worry. They'll never know it's gone. Look what I can do with it." He sweeps the scythe across the left breast, barely a nub, of the dead girl with her eyes and mouth sewn up and pierced with sewing needles. "No blood," he says. "Ain’t that something?" "Paingod drank her blood already," his sister says. 385 douglas clegg Someone is standing at the door to the bathroom, in shadow from the hallway. It is their mother. "Playing with things we are not supposed to be play- ing with?" she asks, although both children know that she doesn't want an answer. And then, their mother is calling in their two other brothers, Birdy and Monkey. Harly is crying already, saying he won't do it again, that he'll do his penance like normal, and even though his sister tries [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |