Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

I’m old, he thought. When did I get old?

Blood in my white beard.

Vomit under it.

I’m ugly.

He wanted to touch his face but had nothing to touch it with.

He wanted to lift his vision to see what was happening in the courtyard, he wanted to see the girl.

YOU CAN FORGET THAT

YOU’RE OURS

And the courtyard melted away as if it had never been.

“They destroyed my body. God made it, not them, and they destroyed it. What right did they have?”

“You might have asked that question yourself. You’ve destroyed a body or two.”

Thomas was a small boy now, looking up at something sickening to look at, but which he thought would not hurt him.

That’s not its job

It’s just a clerk

The room was small and dim, and he was not sure where the light came from: no sconce, no niche, no hearth, no window.

No door.

How will I get out?

Will I get out?

He was not as tall as the table. The other consulted a book and other documents, hobbling around the table on its ankles, its feet turned on their sides like a cripple’s; it carried a stool upon which it sat every third or fourth step, clearly in pain. Thomas had to keep moving around to see it past the big table. It was as if it wanted to hide itself from him, as if it knew it was hideous, its eyes just holes in its gray, formless head, its skin blotched and moldy. So it shuffled painfully and kept the table between them, checking the book, checking parchments against one another; its arms had two elbows each, so it was hard to tell what it would reach for next.

A sort of fishy mouth opened in the middle of its chest.

“You really did try at the end. To do the right things, I mean. You nearly escaped. It was your bad luck to die before the retreat from Avignon, when they took all the souls with them, regardless of innocence or guilt. A betrayal of their agreement, of course, but so was attacking Heaven. I suppose the worst thing about this for you, worse than the question of whether I am lying, and I am not, though a liar would say as much, is a question of intent. Will I tell you the truth out of sympathy, because I was naturally sympathetic in life and this part of my damnation is to damn the undeserving; or because your sense of outrage at being unjustly damned will heighten your pain? Hell, like prison, is worse when you don’t feel you earned it. Eventually, of course, that goes numb. And they find something that’s still raw and they work on that, or they give you something back only to make you feel enough to scream when you lose it again. I’ve even heard them make men think they were being pardoned, or born into new earthly bodies, or rescued by God himself. They’re really quite good at it. It’s all they’ve had to do for a very long time. That, and make mockeries of beasts and men. You’ve seen one or two, I think.”

“I think so,” he said.

His voice a little boy’s voice.

He looked at his hand.

A little boy’s hand.

A polished mirror on the wall, a stone wall as in a castle, let him see himself.

His son.

He was his very young son, as he looked the last time Thomas had seen him.

He was scared.

With great difficulty, the thing moved close to him and sat on its stool. It smelled like the bottom of a well. It looked like it wanted to cry.

“Thomas de Givras,” it said, looking down at him paternally, “I damn thee.”

“Where…where will I go?”

“Out.”

“How?”

“Don’t you think I’m tired of that question? Can’t you think of me?”

“May I just stay here with you?”

“I’d like that,” it said. “But they wouldn’t. And I’m more frightened of them than you understand.”

Someone yelled in another room, in another language, and then began to beg in that language.

Hell’s first floor, he began to grasp, was begging.

An utter loss of dignity, if not hope.

Not yet.

“Please.”

“Well…”

“Please?”

“No.”

Silence.

It just aimed at him with the holes it had for eyes.

“How… how do I go, then? Since I must.”

“Through me, of course.”

“How?”

“You’re a smart boy. How do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

A bell sounded, deep like a church bell.

The begging in the close room turned to screaming.

“I’m sorry. It’s time.”

So saying, it grabbed the boy by a skinny arm.

Mouths opened not just on its stomach, but in many places.

“No! No! ”

It ate him.

It hurt.

This scene played out innumerable times, with every sort of variation, but always ending the same way. Each time, he tried to reason with it, or to fight it, or to otherwise avoid the excruciating finale. He told himself not to try, that the end was inevitable, but even after he resolved to give up, still he ran away from it, or tried to use the table to block it, or any other ploy he could devise, because it hurt just that much. At length, when he gave up trying and even speaking, the interaction shortened to nothing more than its reading off his name and sentence

Thomas de Givras, I damn thee

and then chewing him down alive.

He shivered and let it.

I damn thee

He cried and let it.

I damn thee

And then he just let it.

Eventually he even stopped yelling, and that was when they decided he was ready for something worse.

He forgot his name. How long he had been there stopped meaning anything. He went from one torment to another, starting with bodily pain and going on to heartbreak; he was skinned and then made to drag his skin behind him, then made to sew this skin back on himself, with the dirt and gravel it had picked up now under it; he was shredded slowly, crammed with thorns and made to eject them, crowded in with naked throngs and scalded, made to fight for cool water or a glimpse of sky, and when they saw that he liked fighting, they made him fight again and again for everything, for years, until even his rage was broken, and he wept and succumbed when confronted; he was murdered and betrayed by those he loved, and then made to murder and betray them, then desecrate them, cannibalize them, regurgitate them. Nothing was left out.

No weakness was overlooked.

For pride in his strength he was made a plaything. For his carnality he was rendered sexless.

He was made to live each oath he’d spoken, no matter how ridiculous, lapping Christ’s wounds, drowned with Christ in shit, boiled in Mary’s sour milk, sodomized by the cocks of the Apostles, until he had been stripped of his capacity for laughter, or even the capacity to disbelieve the outrageous. They took his humor from him not because they themselves were humorless—they most certainly were not—but because it so offended them that man had been given this, too.

Hell was mutable and hard, banal and shocking, painful and numbing, burning and frozen, but mostly it was real.

He had become the butt of every joke he told.

Hell was real.

He was back in Paris.

Île de la Cité.

He lay against a wall, bloated, fat, dead of plague but not dead. He could not move except to blink. He could not close his mouth, which stood painfully open. To his right, a stack of empty, broken wine barrels. Arrows lay near him, stuck in mud, or lying with their points broken off from having struck the wall behind him.

An arrow hissed down at him from a crenellated wall, punching an agonizing hole in his gut. It burned. He yelled through his gaping mouth.