John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

I saw the energy-chord carrying her music reach into his nervous system from four-space and twist his monad out of alignment. Sections of his nervous system went dark. Energy-bundles carrying control signals reached down at the same time and seized his motor centers.

Victor was not like the other two boys. In many ways, he was flatter in the direction of four-space. Once the matter in his brain had been affected, there was no other part of him to fight back.

The Victor-puppet stopped, and sat down on the ground, looking calm as ever.

At least she was being somewhat of a good sport about it. She could have made him dance a jig.

I felt a disturbance in my own nerve patterns. Two thoughts came to me, more or less at once.

First, why had Victor and I split up? It had been my idea, but where had that idea come from?

I realized that the curse, the influence which had been trying to get us to split up, to make noise, to act rashly, had not been driven out of my brain; while I had been distracted, it had altered itself and grown again. It had wanted me to go this way, and alone.

The point of splitting us up was to get us into the hands of the person who could trump our powers. They wanted to come at us in ones and twos. That is why they were closing in on us from different directions.

Second, I realized that if Miss Daw’s power was the one that negated Victor, then she was merely my equal. We shared one paradigm.

Whose power negated mine?

Dr. Fell’s power trumped Quentin; that seemed clear. Quentin and Mrs. Wren operated out of the same paradigm: both were magicians. Dr. Fell and Victor were both in the same paradigm: materialists. That left…

As I passed through Mr. Glum, reality shut off for a moment. Mr. Glum put his hand out. With a bump, the world snapped back into place. My new senses went blind.

I was a girl again, not a centaur. I was toppling through the air, falling onto Mr. Glum.

For a moment, as I hung there, I saw his face, his terrible face, all red with cold, and lust, and hate, and desire. I saw his eyes, surrounded by war paint; I saw the sick little gape-grin of his mouth.

Somehow, I knew that his desire to capture me, to force me back into the shapely body I had been so proud of, was greater than my desire to get away. I had flinched at the idea of killing an old lady in order to get away; I saw he would not have flinched.

No wonder his world was filled with lust and hate. His desires, his burning, frustrated desires, gave him strength.

Mr. Glum drove his elbow into my midriff as he caught me. Little black metallic lights danced before my eyes as I dropped to the snow, dazed, with no strength in my limbs.

“Well, well, the proud blond princess going to run me down, eh? Ah, what’s this? You brought me some rope. What to do with it, I wonder?”

I felt his arms go around my waist, pin my elbows to my sides, while I was still struggling to get a breath. I felt his desire somehow enter the rope, and it writhed like a snake, twisting tightly around my elbows and waist, forming knots he could not possibly have tied that quickly.

During this horrible moment, I kicked at him with strengthless legs and made a hoarse noise, not yet quite a scream.

He yanked my wrists together, crossed them. My hands were tied together, pinned in place behind my buttocks. Again, the rope of its own accord lashed itself tight more quickly than it should have been able to.

A second hank of rope ran from my wrists to several quick turns around the ankles of my boots. The hank was short enough to prevent me from standing up.

I wondered if the knots were like the one Colin had playfully made in my apron string; a topologically impossible knot, impossible to untie.

He pulled the scarf off from around my neck, the same one Quentin had used to blindfold me last night. I clenched my teeth, knowing it was nearly impossible, without hurting someone, to get something in past clenched teeth.

He put his fingers on my jaw and my muscles lost all strength, and he pushed a wad into my mouth and wound the slack around my head to gag me.

I could not make a noise. That was also, by the way, impossible. Merely having a wad of cloth between your teeth, you can still make noise with your nose, and scream, and carry on, and even make a few words. It is only in the movies that gags block all sound.

He was doing it. Mr. Glum was making me silent. His willpower. The cloth in my mouth was just a symbol.

Looking up at him in his silly bear skull and furry skin outfit, his skin beneath turning blue in the cold, I had the terrible intuition that he was able to do this so quickly and easily because, as Colin might say, he had put his “energy” into it. He had daydreamed about it by day, imagined it at night. Perhaps it was Vanity who had appeared in his visions more often than me, but I could not believe I had been absent.

Night after night, for years. How much “energy” was that?

“She wants to run away from Boggin, my pale gold princess, does she? Aye, well, who doesn’t? A right fine idea, in fact! Let’s see how far we can get.”

And he threw me over his shoulder, like Tarzan carrying Jane, clamped a meaty hand on my buttocks, and went leaping from rock to rock in awkward, giant thrusts of his legs, around the shoulder of the cliffs, out of sight of the others, and away.

Grendel’s desire to run must have been very great at that moment, for he ran like a man inspired. In a few minutes, he was swarming up the rocks, and I kicked my legs (as far as the rope would allow me), hoping to throw us both off balance and have us plunge to our deaths on the sea-swept rocks beneath.

He mounted the cliff, but at a point far around the shoulder of the slope, out of sight of the others. He paused just a moment to tug at the rope running between my wrists and ankles, tying it off to allow for no slack at all. My legs were now bent double, pushed up against my thighs, motionless.

Once again, I noticed the unreality of the situation. Why weren’t the bindings at my wrist cutting off my circulation, if the ropes were so tight? Why wasn’t my bruised solar plexus (where he had struck me hard enough to knock me half-unconscious) making me vomit into my gag, since that same spot was now bouncing up and down on his shoulder?

Because Grendel did not want me to be uncomfortable. He did not imagine that I would be.

He ran through the woods. Soon, pine trees were thick about us.

We came to a spot at the foot of a mound, where two slabs of stone, leaning on each other, formed a mouth to a cave. Pine needles carpeted the area beneath the shadow of the stone. From deep, deep back in the cave came the sound of water dripping slowly into a deep well.

At the mouth of the cave he put me down in the pine needles, and smoothed my hair with his hand. His look, at the moment, was not one of lust, or not merely lust, but one of pride.

“Who’d have thought old Grendel would have such a prize as you, eh? You’re like a fine work of art, you are, like sunshine.”

He smiled and touched my cheek. “I helped make you, you know. I bent my will on you when Boggin and the others weren’t looking. I made you so you were the kind of girl who likes it rough. The sort who don’t mind being carried off by force, if’n the right feller does the carrying-off, see?”

I made a little mumbling moan in my gag. I assumed he liked moans; otherwise, I assume I could have made no noise at all. I was actually trying to ask him a question, though, because a large black vulture had just landed on the ground across the clearing behind him.