John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

“She smiled and said, ‘Ask me another question.’

“I said, ‘I have no more.’

“ ‘I do not mind telling you, I am going to kill you and all your friends in any case. I can make it gentle and slow, you feel more warm and heavy, and you fade away to night; or I can start by scooping one eyeball from your face.’

“At that moment, a black vulture, of which, yes, I know, there are none in England, and yes, I know, they do not fly at night, landed on the window behind her.

“I said, ‘We are protected, me and mine. Mavors will avenge us. Look! His bird sits yonder, watching you!’

“ ‘I scoff at him,’ she said. ‘His mother killed my children, one and all. I cried until my eyes dried up like raisins and fell out. My hate keeps me alive. Are you a child? It is given to me to kill children. Under the law, I am allowed.’

“I said, ‘You are not a Bacchant. You do not work for Dionysus. Who do you work for…?’And I bit my tongue, because that was another question.

“She said, ‘I serve one who will rejoice when Chaos sweeps the established Earth away, and pulls the broken arch of Heaven down into the poisoned seas lit up with flame. My death will be small price to pay, if, by my acts, I make all things pass away. My last question is this: Are you a child, or a man? If man, I cannot kill you; but if child, I can.’

“She pressed my neck with her hand and drew a palmful of blood to her lips.

“I said, ‘You did not answer my question perfectly.’

“She spat my blood out again. ‘The answer I tasted was ambiguous. You yourself do not know. But a man can sleep with a woman. A child has not that power, though.’

“She parted her robes, and I saw she was not wearing any underwear.

“ ‘Pleasure me, young pup, young baby boy,’ she said, smiling with her teeth all red, ‘and you survive. But if your manhood remains flaccid, soft, and weak, I will know it is a boy, and not a man, to whom I speak.’

“Well, I am sure Colin would have found it perfectly acceptable to have a drunk, naked, grown-up woman kneeling on top of you, with your own blood dripping down her chin, with the smell of wine and urine and foul chemicals still hanging in the air. He would have performed. God, he would have found it a turn-on.

“But I can’t even imagine anything worse. Being killed is bad enough, being killed in a disgusting way, by a disgusting person, and just being humiliated and embarrassed, and… ugh. I wanted to cry. I wanted my mommy. I sure did not feel like a man in any sense of the word.

“Well, I didn’t cry. She sort of rubbed up and down against my body for a long time, while I lay there, waiting for it to be over, and hoping she would kill me rather than continue.

“I tried to think of something to do or say.

“She climbed off me and, well, she laughed at my dick. She pointed and laughed. I mean, what way is that to treat a child? I would be embarrassed even to talk about it, I would not be talking about it now, even to you, except I think my capacity to be embarrassed is completely burned out of me, and gone forever.

“She said, ‘You are a child, then, aren’t you?’ And she took another hair ornament out of her hair, and it opened into a scalpel.

“It was the last moment, the last second of my life.

“And I had an odd thought.

“How am I going to act, this second? How should I behave…?

“Normally, we do things, we are polite, or we obey laws, because we want to get something out of the situation. We want to win applause and esteem, or escape punishment, or better ourselves, or something. All that went blank in my head. At this point, there was no such thing as better off or worse off. There was no advantage or disadvantage to anything I did.

“So I did what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was scare her. I mean, I could not hurt her in any other way, so I said, ‘Lamia, I know you. I call you by your true name. I deliver now to you my curse. Hear me! Unlawfully you have drunk my blood and taken it inside you. That blood I call upon now to curse and unmake you. It has the poisons placed in it by Dr. Fell, the poison that will erase your mind. He told me the minute and second that his poisons would begin to act. You told me that my powers and spells are helpless before his powers. But your powers are the same as mine, Lamia, and are bound by the same rules. You believe that Dr. Fell’s little molecular engines are beginning to dissolve your brain, don’t you? You are helpless.’

“She screamed and raised the scalpel, ‘Weep and shriek! Weep and shriek! It is what children do when they are about to die!’

“I laughed in her face. ‘Then part this shell of flesh that encumbers me, Mother of Vampires! The mortal part of me I always knew would die! Strike!’

“The knife came down toward my face, and it… jumped… out of her fingers, hung in the air before her face, unsupported, hovering.

“Then it moved and stabbed her in her eye.

“She flung herself backward, with blood and vitreous humor gushing from her ruined face.

“She screamed again, this time in anger, and started running toward the door, pulling hair ornaments out of her hair with both hands, and flipping them open into little throwing knives and hooks. She was running to the attack.

“I turned my head and saw what she was running at.

“Headmaster Boggin stood in the doorway, with Dr. Fell half a step behind him.

“Boggin had his hands clutching the doorframe, and his face was dark with wrath. His black robes started to billow around him, and his hair flew up out of its ponytail, came entirely unraveled, and started whipping around his face. His mortarboard went flying off. He braced his legs, and his chest swelled up to twice its size. Then (as his shirt was ripped into shreds) three times its size. Then he trembled and swelled up to four times his size.

“Dr. Fell, looking slightly bored, opens his third eye, and the little knives and sharp hair ornaments halt in midair, hang there a moment, and jump up to embed themselves in the ceiling boards, out of reach.

“And the Headmaster blows. Don’t imagine the puff-cheeks and pursed-up lips of a man whistling. Imagine a man opening his mouth as wide as possible, in a scream of utmost rage which is tearing out his lungs and guts and bowels. Now imagine a wind tunnel, one of those big ones that they use to test supersonic jets, with all its air compressed down and forced through an opening the size of the man’s mouth. Also imagine the temperature dropping to below zero in one second.

“That’s what happened. A hurricane exploded out of Boggin’s mouth, one of those tornado things that can pick up a piece of straw and impale it through a solid wood fence. The Lamia was picked up and thrown through the bank of windows on the far side of Dr. Fell’s office, knocking out concrete bricks as she went. Everything else in the room went flying up, too, including the table I was strapped onto, except Fell pointed his finger at the table and the metal bars bent out and grabbed onto the ceiling, and hung there while the hurricane blasted past.

“There’s not that much more to tell. Fell says, ‘Headmaster, that blow won’t kill her, not if that was Lamia.’

“Boggin says, ‘It was Lamia. Our Mr. Nemo would not be mistaken about such a thing. Get him down from there and untie him at once. We will have to organize a search for her. I don’t care if it takes all night; we must find her.’

“ ‘Are you worried that she knows what we are teaching our charges, here?’

“ ‘I take it you did not hear Mr. Nemo’s brilliant analysis of the situation. She’s not going to remember.’

“ ‘Then why worry?’

“ ‘Never mind what I am worried about, my dear Ananias. Just do as I say, there’s a good lad.’