Lord of the feast, p.26
Lord of the Feast, page 26
Hi, Dad. It’s me, Ethan. I’ve become a highly experienced killer who’s trying to complete the task that you and the rest of the family fucked up.
The basement was dark except for the flickering light coming from the fireplace, and dark ambient music played at low volume over the sound system. Delmar was reading from The Book of Depravity, one sentence at a time, the adults repeating his words. Lying on the pool table’s surface was…. Ethan frowned. What should’ve been there were the pieces of the Lord’s body, but instead a figure made entirely of shadow lay there. No, not entirely. It had a real left leg. Elisha stood on the Lord’s right-hand side, Victorina next to him. He had been chanting along with the rest of the adults, but now he stopped and turned to look at Ethan. His eyes widened, and Ethan knew his grandfather – or at least this version of the man – had seen him. Elisha blurred out of focus for a second, and when he became clear again, he looked very different. He was ten years older, for one thing, in his late seventies now. He was thinner, too, with long greasy gray hair, and a thick bushy beard to match. His eyes were sunken in, watery and haunted. He wore a brown flannel shirt, faded jeans, and a tattered red ballcap that said High-Stakes Casino on the front.
“Ethan? Is that you?”
“Hello, Grandfather.”
No one else in the basement seemed to notice Ethan. The adults continued conducting the rite of Incarnation, while young Ethan, Kate, Reyna, and Weston looked on apprehensively.
Elisha broke into a huge grin, dry, cracked lips pulling away from yellowed teeth. He hurried over to Ethan and gave him a hug. The man’s arms were light and thin as sticks, and Ethan thought he could break Elisha’s bones simply by breathing too hard on them. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed during his entire stay at Gehenna.
He was grateful when Elisha released him and took a step back. The man regarded him for a moment then shook his head in disbelief.
“I knew I’d been in here awhile, but I hadn’t realized how long it had been. You’ve grown into a man.”
Ethan saw no reason to prolong their reunion.
“I’ve come for the leg, Grandfather.”
Before Elisha could reply, Ethan felt the atmosphere in the basement change. The air became charged with electricity, and his skin began to tingle. In response, Delmar and the other adults raised their voices and chanted faster, clearly excited. Pressure built in the basement, as if they were underwater and sinking rapidly, liquid pressing into them from all sides. The temperature plunged, and Ethan began shivering. Elisha didn’t seem to notice.
“This is my favorite part,” Elisha said.
The shadow being that lay in place of the Lord stood up on the pool table. The adults fell to their knees and raised their arms in supplication. Power rolled off the Lord in waves, and a sound issued from it, a high-pitched shriek that cut through Ethan’s ears like a red-hot razor. He remembered this moment, and reliving it now, he began to tremble uncontrollably. Even this poor version of the Lord, one which had only the original’s left leg, was absolutely terrifying. He saw Reyna get up from the couch, grab Kate’s hand, and begin to lead her to the basement stairs. Young Ethan didn’t move at first, and Weston had to take hold of his hand and pull him along after them. They rushed up the stairs, and Ethan knew that Reyna would lead them outside in time to escape the mansion’s destruction.
The Shadow-Lord bent toward Nila, grabbed her head, ripped it off, and raised it to its mouth and drank the blood pouring from the ragged opening. Nila’s body slumped over, blood jetting from her neck stump, and the adults screamed. It was one thing to believe in the Lord of the Feast when it had been an abstract concept, but the reality of the god was a different thing entirely. The entire Omniverse dying? No problem. Your dying? That was another story. The adults jumped to their feet and fled toward the stairs, even Caprice, who Ethan thought hadn’t possessed the capacity for fear. The first crimson flames began to flicker around the Lord’s body, and then with a loud woosh they burst outward, filling the basement. Ethan had come to regard the basement and everything in it as some kind of illusion, and perhaps it was, but the flames felt real, and when they engulfed Ethan a scream of purest agony tore from his throat. The pain seemed to last an eternity, but it passed, and Ethan found himself on his hands and knees, gasping for breath, the ground beneath him charred black.
“The fire’s a real kick in the balls, isn’t it?” Elisha said. “You get used to it after a while, though.”
He held out a hand for Ethan. Ethan, almost too weak to move, reached up and took it. Elisha helped him to his feet, and Ethan looked at his hands and was relieved to find them unburnt. The rest of the basement was a smoking ruin, though, and the ceiling was gone. Above them was open sky, stars scattered across the blackness. There were five mounds of ash lying on the floor in various places – those family members who’d perished during the failed Incarnation. The only other item was the Lord’s left leg. It lay among the ash piles, its skin clean and undamaged. The door to the room, however, showed no sign of the fire having touched it.
Elisha began talking.
“We’d severely underestimated the amount of raw power required to fulfill the Incarnation. The Book of Depravity held enough power to create the Lord, but not enough to sustain it. The Lord was only able to exist a few moments in our reality before it fell apart. But in that short time, it managed to unleash the fire that destroyed the mansion and killed so many of our family, your father included. And the mystic energy the fire gave off mutated your mother, Delmar, and Felton. The rest of us escaped unharmed.” He gave Ethan a sad smile. “Physically, at least.”
Ethan tried to speak, but his throat felt sandpaper dry. He swallowed a couple times and tried again. His words emerged as a painful rasp, but at least they came out.
“We have the power now, Grandfather. Caprice has worked to gather it for the last ten years. All we need are the Lord’s parts, and then we can complete the Incarnation. That’s why I’ve come for the leg.”
Ethan’s own legs barely felt capable of supporting him, but he managed to take a step forward. Elisha stopped him before he could take a second.
“You can’t have it.”
Ethan looked at his grandfather in disbelief.
“I originally came to Gehenna to expunge the guilt I felt for my role in the failed Incarnation. Here, I could relive that night over and over, watch everyone die, feel the Lord’s fire purify me. I hoped the fire would eventually burn the guilt out of me, but that didn’t happen. What did happen was much better. I came to understand.”
If Ethan hadn’t felt so weak, he would’ve shoved his grandfather to the ground, taken the leg, and departed. As it was, he could barely stand. He needed time to recover his strength, so he decided to let Elisha keep talking.
“Understand what?”
“The true meaning of life, of course.”
“The only purpose existence has is to feed the Gyre,” Ethan said.
“That’s what the Quintessence believes, and our family came to adopt that view. But we were wrong. The purpose of existence isn’t to end – it’s to suffer. Only through suffering do we come to learn who we really are. It refines us, purifies us, reduces us to our core. Pain is enlightenment. Pain is love. This is the Gyre’s great gift. By devouring the Omniverse slowly, the Gyre maximizes its suffering. Only by accepting our pain and experiencing it fully can we truly live.”
“You’re insane,” Ethan said.
Elisha smiled. “Oh yes.”
Before Ethan could react, Elisha headbutted him. Pain exploded behind Ethan’s eyes, and he dropped to the floor and rolled onto his side. His shoulder wound screamed.
“You may be younger than me, but you’ll never be meaner than me.”
As if to illustrate his words, Elisha raised a foot and brought it down hard on Ethan’s left knee. The pain was nothing compared to what he’d felt when the Lord’s fire had embraced him, but it still hurt like a bitch and he cried out. Elisha stomped his knee again, for good measure.
Elisha smiled lovingly. “You’ve just taken your first step to enlightenment. You’re going to stay here with me, boy, and learn what true suffering is all about.”
The basement wavered around them, and when it solidified once more, it was restored to its previous state. Young Ethan, Kate, Reyna, and Weston sat on the couch while the adults – minus Elisha – stood around the pool table chanting. The scenario of the failed Incarnation was repeating itself.
Ethan knew what his grandfather intended. He planned to cripple him so he couldn’t leave. He would be forced to remain here in Room 437 with Elisha and be engulfed by the Lord’s flame again and again, suffering unimaginable torment until he was as batshit crazy as his grandfather.
He heard a voice in his mind then.
Just because he’s insane doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Caprice wanted you to become a cold-hearted murderer so that you would be able to kill your family members to obtain the Lord’s body parts if necessary. But what did you really learn in the House of Red Tears? If you truly believed in hastening entropy, you would’ve killed your playmates seconds after you walked into the room, and you would’ve done so as efficiently as possible. But you learned to prolong their agony, to draw out the suffering. You made killing into art. You already believe as Elisha does, you just express that belief differently.
Ethan didn’t have time for bullshit philosophy. If his grandfather fucked up his other knee, he was never going to get out of there. He rolled to his side as Elisha’s foot came down where his right knee had been. He pushed himself up onto his good leg, then gently put weight on his bad one. The broken knee shouted in protest, but the leg held, and that was all he needed for now. He turned to face Elisha, thinking of a dozen ways he could disable the man. But before he could try any of them, Elisha swept out his foot and knocked Ethan’s left leg out from under him. Ethan crashed to the ground once more, his injured knee hurting twice as much as before, his shoulder wound burning like fire.
“Looks like I’m going to have to hamstring you, boy.”
Elisha walked past the pool table and the chanting adults to the bar on the other side. He reached behind it, grabbed a bottle of scotch off the shelf, and broke it on the bar’s edge. Liquor splashed onto the bar’s surface, along with fragments of glass. Elisha held the neck of the bottle, beneath which was a jagged portion of glass, more than sharp enough to perform the procedure he wanted. He started back toward Ethan, broken bottle held at his side, eyes gleaming with the bright light of madness. Ethan knew he was looking at the result of eight years of being repeatedly burned by the Lord’s fire, and he understood then that suffering wasn’t merely life. It was power, too.
The Shadow-Lord stood on the pool table. Its shriek filled the air, the adults fell to their knees, and Reyna and Weston fled the basement with the children. The Lord tore Nila’s head from her body and drank from it, and the adults screamed in terror. Elisha ignored it all. When he reached Ethan, he looked down and smiled.
“This is going to hurt a great deal. I hope you enjoy it.”
Elisha began to kneel, and that’s when crimson flame exploded from the Shadow-Lord and roared through the basement. Even though Ethan knew what to expect this time, the pain was still more than he could manage. He could only let it toss him about like a leaf in a hurricane until it ran its course. When it was over and the basement had once more become a charred ruin, he sat up. Elisha had a beatific expression on his face, as if he were a devout worshipper who’d just had a personal visit from his god. He was so caught up in this feeling that he didn’t react when Ethan grabbed the back of his head with both hands and plunged his thumbs into his eyes. Elisha screamed as blood flowed down his face. He grabbed hold of Ethan’s wrists and tried to pull his hands away, but his strength was no match for his young grandson’s.
“I’m sorry to tell you this, Grandfather, but your suffering is over.”
He gave a last hard push with his thumbs. Elisha’s body juddered as if he were in the throes of a seizure, and then went limp. Ethan pulled his thumbs free with a pair of sucking sounds, and Elisha’s body fell to the floor. The basement blurred out of existence and was replaced with a small empty room with no windows and only a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling for illumination. The Lord’s left leg lay in the center of the room, waiting for Ethan. He wiped his thumbs off on his grandfather’s shirt, stood, limped over to the leg, picked it up, and left the room. He made his way back downstairs, and as he walked across the lobby, he looked at the doll-eyed woman at the front desk.
“Room 437 just became open,” he said.
Interlude
Left Leg
Sophia Wen wished she hadn’t had a second coffee this morning. She felt hot, almost feverish, and her pulse pounded hummingbird-fast in her ears. Today was the day. She patted the ring box in the front pocket of her jeans.
You can do this, you can do this, you can do this….
Her therapist thought this was a terrible idea. Spectacularly awful was how he’d put it, but what the fuck did he know? Had he ever been in love? She doubted it, otherwise he’d understand what she was doing, what she had to do.
As she’d done so often before, at least a dozen times a day, she thought about when she’d met Tracy. They both went to the same gym, Feel the Burn Fitness, a twenty-four-hour-a-day members-only facility. Sophia was a hospital ICU nurse who worked third shift, and she exercised during what, for her, would be the end of the day, but which for most people was early morning. She was leaving after a particularly intense workout – it was early December and she wanted to lose the extra weight she’d put on at Thanksgiving – when she stepped off the curb in front of the building and somehow twisted her left ankle. She went down on her knees and fell forward, catching herself with both hands. Ankle throbbing and palms stinging, she maneuvered herself into a sitting position and reached down to assess her injury.
Oh my god, are you all right?
She looked up and there, framed in early morning sunlight, was the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen. Strawberry-blond hair, lean aristocratic features, and Caribbean-ocean blue eyes. The goddess smiled, and Sophia felt as if she were a mug that had just been filled with warm cocoa.
She could barely bring herself to speak.
I’m okay. Just twisted my ankle a little. I think I can—
She tried standing, but a bolt of pain shot through her ankle, and her leg buckled. The goddess wrapped an arm around her waist to catch her, and Sophia thought she might die of happiness right then and there.
C’mon, let’s get you inside.
The goddess – who Sophia would learn was called by the earthly name of Tracy Ellis – helped her hobble back into the facility. They chatted while Sophia iced her ankle and wrapped it, then they left together. Tracy was late for work and had to go. By the time Sophia pulled out of the parking lot, she knew she was in love.
After that, she made it a point to talk to Tracy every morning at the gym, but while Tracy had seemed to enjoy getting to know her at first, eventually she began showing up later and later, skipping some days altogether. Then she stopped coming entirely. Sophia told herself not to take this personally, that Tracy had probably found a gym that she liked better. That was okay. She knew where Tracy worked – Complete Protection Insurance – and all she’d have to do was give her a call and find out where she was exercising now. Sophia would then quit Feel the Burn and join the new gym. She didn’t want to be a pest, so she waited until nine fifteen to call, figuring that would give Tracy enough time to get in and get settled at her desk. Tracy answered on the second ring, but the call did not go as Sophia hoped.
To be honest, I switched gyms because you were starting to creep me out, Tracy said. Don’t get me wrong, you’re a nice person. But you can be kind of…intense at times, you know? Too intense for me. Sorry.
Then she ended the call.
Sophia had been devastated. When she told her therapist about it at their next appointment, he said that Tracy had only been setting healthy boundaries for herself. Dumbass. She and Tracy were good for each other. If her therapist could see them together for just a few minutes, he’d understand that. She and Tracy had something special, something with the potential to be so much more than it already was. She couldn’t allow that to die without a fight, and she knew that deep down, Tracy wouldn’t want her to.
She sent emails to Tracy’s work address. She left voice mails on both her home and work phones. She sent presents – flowers, candy, a mug that said Trust Me, I’m an Insurance Agent, and more. Tracy’s only response was an email asking Sophia to please leave her alone. Sophia knew she didn’t really mean it, though. When she wasn’t working at the hospital, she began to follow Tracy. She’d wait in the parking lot of Tracy’s building, then follow her car when she left work. She learned where Tracy preferred to buy groceries, which bars she liked, and most importantly, where she lived. One night, when Sophia didn’t have to work, she showed up on Tracy’s doorstep. Tracy was not happy to see her and demanded she leave.
Sophia’s therapist told her that her obsession (his word) with Tracy had gotten way out of hand. She’d told him he was full of shit and that Tracy was just confused and didn’t know what she wanted. But Sophia knew. Tracy needed to be shown how deeply Sophia cared for her and how much she wanted them to be together. And she knew exactly how to do it.
The elevator dinged and the door slid open. She got out, consulted the directory next to the elevator, then headed down the hall toward Complete Protection Insurance. There was a large blue CPI logo on a glass door, and – trembling a little – Sophia pushed it open and stepped inside. She’d never been in Tracy’s office before, but it looked more or less like she’d imagined it: blandly professional, with people sitting at desks in the outer office, more people sitting at desks in smaller, individual offices, all working at computers beneath fluorescent light. The receptionist’s desk was the one closest to the door, and she walked over. The woman sitting there favored her with a decent facsimile of a friendly smile.
