Chapter 60
When I see the door, I know I should not approach.
Nurse has told me so, but I have always been curious, and so I go, in little steps I go, first left, then right I go, then left again.
I dance so no one can follow. I dance because it gives me joy.
What pleasure is there in a straight line?
What anticipation? I make myself a maze, I make myself a labyrinth, and finally I arrive.
I crane my neck, the smallest peek, and at last I see this world I’ve heard so much about. Here, a shape I know to be a man, built so squarely, so symmetrically. I could draw a line from pate to toe and cleft him in two, split him right down the middle so pleasingly.
“Spirit,” he whispers, “are you there?”
His pleasure courses through me, and his need—the look upon his face, the wonderment I have wrought there. The room he works in has a symmetry too, shelves, books, scrolls, and tiny suns sparking atop wax stalks. Candles. I pull the word from his head along with his hope.
“What can I offer, spirit?”
I long for so many things. But right now, more than anything, I want to lick the walls. They’re rough stone and beaded with moisture. Rain? Dew? I don’t know. My mouth is greedy.
He has drawn upon the floor, a marvelous shape, all crossing lines and loops.
A knot for me! I look back once at the dry place I know and slide a little farther into the cool dark of this glorious puddle.
A black bird paces outside his window, and so I take its shape.
I tuck my many legs, my many arms, my many selves inside its feathered body.
“Spirit!” he gasps.
“Yes,” I say, preening in my feathers. His awe is all deliciousness. I was warned, yes, but no one told me how splendid this would be. “What can I offer?” I mimic his words and feel his rush of exultation.
“I have here this rough material and over it I have worked so many formulas and charms.”
Disappointment. Cold as clay. It’s gold he wants. I was warned of this too.
“Speak your words again,” I say, bored now.
He chants his spell and dull lead is filled with sunlight.
I wish he’d asked for a lump of honey instead, a field of wheat, a ship, a potato, something I might put my mind to.
But he is weeping, overwhelmed with happiness and pride, and all of that floods into me and I am dizzy, giddy, drunk on glorious reward.
I should go, but when he asks if I will come again, I promise that I will.
I take the shape of a cat this time that I might pad upon the floor, lick the water from the walls with my rough tongue, slip between the books and underfoot.
The knot he has prepared is glorious. I have never seen such fiery trails of complication. I am lost in it when the box closes over me.
I scream and thrash.
“Be still, spirit. I mean you no harm.”
I have never heard a lie and yet I recognize it.
I will give him what he wishes and when he has all he wants he will set me free.
I make him rich and wise and beloved. I help him win a wife of smooth skin and copper hair. I help him raise an island from the sea. I build for him a castle unlike any the world has seen.
Each time, he tells me, “Thank you, spirit. Tomorrow you will return to your realm.”
But each night he dreams and in their dreams men discover all the things they do not have.
Spindles, poisons, trebuchets, jewels, farmland, a feasting hall so tall the clouds gather in its vaulted ceiling, a thousand sons, a thousand wives to please them, wings to fly with, unsinkable ships, indecipherable codes. There is no end to their longing.
His pleasure tastes like ash to me now. I grow weak and thin in the box he has built. I miss my home, my nurse. All I have is the knot. It is my only comfort, and in its whorls I lose myself for hours, until he comes with more demands.
“Spirit, what ails you?”
“What ails us all?” I’ve grown philosophical in my despair. “When will you let me go?”
“Soon,” he says. “When I know all I need to know.”
He leaves me alone a long time and when he returns he is haggard. His beard is wet with tears. “My wife has died,” he says.
“Do you wish for me to make you a new one?”
He strikes me.
“It is her I long for and no one else! Foul thing, that you could think a soul could be replaced so easily.”
His sorrow seeps across the floor to me. I touch my tongue to it, and for the first time in years I know pleasure, fullness, possibility. If his happiness was water, then this is sweet liqueur, a meadow in my mouth.
“Forgive me, master,” I mewl, well knowing he hates it when I whimper and cringe.
Again he strikes me and again, never noticing that he has trampled my precious knot. I am sad to see it go, but I know it must be so.
“Can you not bring her back to me?” he pleads.
“Impossible,” I say. But then I think, Why not?
I make for him a perfect girl, shining young and bright with eyes full of kindness, his beloved returned, soft-limbed and warmhearted.
He shouts for joy and tries to embrace her. When his arms would fasten tight around her, I crush her into nothing. Dust she is in his arms and how he wails. He falls to the floor and weeps.
Again I bring her forth, winsome and loving.
She places her hand upon his back and tells him to rise, then vanishes when he reaches for her.
Dust again! We play this game all night and I feast upon his aching.
I miss my knot and all its paths, but now I can think clearly.
I can think, and breathe, and I am so very hungry.
The next night when he reaches for her, she lets him take her in his arms. Then she laughs.
“Worm, thickwit. You’re no better than a wobbly, watery shit.”
“You do not mean it,” he moans.
“I do. Each night I prayed for death that would spare me your touch and even worse your conversation.”
Through all the late hours she berates him, kisses him, humiliates him. My gullet is full, but that is not enough.
In the morning, he lies broken on the floor.
“All the world’s riches,” he sobs. “All the world’s wisdom. And all I long for is her.”
“Poor master,” I croon from inside my box. “I can tell you how you may bring her back, but it will be a gruesome business.”
“Just tell me, wretched thing.”
“And then you’ll set me free?”
“I swear it.”
“Then listen closely. I can do it, but I will need a few small things.”
You see? I’ve learned to lie too.
That night, out into the city, he goes to set about his grisly errand.
When dawn comes the wailing of a thousand women reaches my ears as they wake to find their children with their throats slit, their small hearts cut from their small chests.
The women cry out in agony, confusion, desperation, fury.
Over the palace walls their desolation pours up to the tower where I am kept, a feast of delights. I am glutted. I am fed.
My master sits against the wall with legs splayed, his robes soaked with blood, his pockets stuffed with slippery little pieces of flesh.
I laugh in the morning hours as I tell him it was all for nothing, a jape I played.
I lap up his remorse and shame. When he trumpets, “I banish you, spirit!” I laugh all the more.
Through the door I go, free and joyous.
My nurse applauds and kisses my many faces. I have become what I was meant to be, a worthy prince, a demon true.
I understand a lesson has been learned and I am glad for it.
I tell myself I am glad for it.
But mostly I am hungry.
Into the box, Alex thought. Into the cage.
“It’s easy,” she said, echoing Golgarot’s words to her. “All you have to do is save him.”
“You saw what he did to me.”
“I get it. Someone made you suffer and now you want everyone else to suffer.”
“You’re a murderer too.”
“I am. And I will be again. But you? You’re going back in the box.”
The room spun, alive with blue flame. The creature in the box wept and mewled, and Golgarot went to his knees, dressed now in velvet robes, the pockets red with blood from so many infant hearts.
Was this why he had flinched when he first saw her?
Had he seen the old wizard or some other apparition from his past?
Through the windows came the screaming of a thousand women, a broken chorus, a tide of sound. Golgarot put his hands to his ears, leaving bloody handprints in his hair.
“Make them stop!”
“I can’t stop what you began,” she said.
He clawed at the box, listening to the yowl of the cat inside. He struggled to lift it, but it was far too heavy, weighted with millennia of cruelty, of longing and anguish, of stolen souls.
Alex felt no sense of joy or triumph. She’d been in the box with him, a small creature full of curiosity, craving sweetness, happy to be fed on pap.
She’d felt her appetite change as she was used and lied to.
Alex knew what it was to feel abandoned.
But this was what all living things learned, to take from each other, to hurt and then to heal if they were lucky.
Golgarot threw himself over the box, banging his head against it, sobbing.
She knelt beside him.
“We can be done,” she said. “Let me close the door. The pilgrims were children like you, foolish and reckless and curious and arrogant.”
“Liar! They wanted to put me in a cage.”
“They didn’t understand the bargain they were making. Let me close the door.”
“Never!” the demon shrieked.
Alex drew the salt sword now resting at her hip. “Then you will die here and the door will close anyway.”
“Think so?” Golgarot lifted his head and he was smiling.
He looked up at the raised sword. It was only then that she saw his face was free of tears.
He wasn’t sobbing. He was laughing. “Hag seed, imbecile, mongrel whore.”
Alex backed away, sword still raised, trying to make sense of how she’d failed.
“You think you know this game?” Golgarot crawled toward her in a deep crouch, fingers dragging on the floor.
He didn’t look human anymore. His skin was gray, and his claws had the sheen of pearls.
His face was only teeth. “Demons do not play by human rules. You should have called out to your second while you could. You should have known this was not a fight to win alone. But that, Galaxy Stern, is the lesson Hector understood and that you refused to learn.”
Now Alex saw her mistake. Hec had warned her. Both she and Golgarot would have to make the climb. Both could cry out in their need. She swung her sword, but she knew it was too late.
“Daniel Arlington!” Golgarot shouted. “I call upon you to serve as my second.”