Graduation
Who: Elfleda & James What: An Invitation to Hell When: Present, Middle of the Night Where: Searchlight, Nevada and Elsewhere Ratings: NSFW (Graphic Imagery, Language)
An analog clock ticked in the living room. It marked time on a long night when James laid awake on the couch for hours, a remote control on his stomach, listening to the noises of his trailer while a muted television flashed light from the corner. A collection of empty bottles grew on the coffee table. It didn’t subdue the strange feeling in his stomach, like dropping floors in an elevator he wasn’t aware he’d been riding.
Three times, he got up and looked out the window. There was nothing in the driveway but the outline of his truck and the back of the auto shop.
At 2:00 a.m., he migrated to his bed and fell into a shallow sleep. The sheets were in a knot, his skin sweating, his face buried in a pillow. The bedroom was quiet except for the muffled sound of his breathing and the whir of an air conditioner. He dreamed of being watched.
At 3:54 a.m., a candle on his dresser went out.
It had no sooner been snuffed out, soon after 4:00, than a noise like metal cutlery dropping suddenly to the floor had loudly woken him from slumber. A sound which surely had come from within the same room, yet had originated from... Nothing. There was nothing which had sent belongings sprawling to the floor and everything was still in its place. Nothing which should have caused the noise, save for the brain's curious ability to play tricks on itself. It had been so loud, though - so convincing.
Only after the momentary crisis was ascertained to be nothing, when a need for rest had coaxed him back, did a further noise intrude. This time, not from within the same room, but from above, on the roof. Like thudding footsteps and something being dragged across it, accompanied by muffled groans, as though something was being moved from within a giant sack against its will.
Then something else.
The noise of vomit hitting a bucket; a female voice grunting forth a stomach's load.
And the hissing flush of a lavatory.
"Arnette knew better," spoke something more from around his residence than from within it. Something between an echo and whisper, like a voice trying to crawl itself into physicality. "I should take offense..."
The air seemed, somehow, to vibrate. Not with noise. It was more ethereal than that. Something was testing the waters within that room, dipping a proverbial toe into his waters.
"But I'd much rather we were friends."
The walls seemed to crack like an egg and begin to fracture, but there was no physical damage. It was a form of spider-webbing shadow splintering inwards from the corners of the room, heading towards one another. Trying to meet and form an epicentre. Wanting to pool together and create an entrance point.
"We don't have to fight," said the voice, clearer now. Because it was spoken by a pair of ebony lips where the aperture of darkness was just large enough to allow them to come through. "We can play like civil animals, James."
If he wanted to force it to stop, to eject her from where she was invading through the chinks in his warding armour, it could be done. Else she would come. Just as she had in his mother's dreams.
James jerked awake.
He sat up, heels digging into the mattress as he pushed himself up against the headboard. His mouth was open but no air moved. A fish suffocating on a hook.
The noise on the roof had dredged up a nightmare. Years ago, when he was fourteen, he had watched a man drown an animal in a sack in the Gila River. James remembered the contortions in the fabric. The splash on the surface. How the sack bobbed in the current before it sank. He had turned to his mother, crying, an oversize hand bearing down on his shoulder. But she didn’t do anything. She just watched from the shoreline and scratched bloody spots on her arms.
In his bed in Searchlight, James rubbed his face. He tried to get his bearings. The shadows coalesced.
‘Arnette knew better.’
A word choked out of him. “Mom!” He pulled the sheets off his legs and staggered down the hall. From a framed photo on the wall, a blonde woman watched him run past. That memory and the fear of what was on his roof propelled him to the front door. James unlocked it and yanked it open. The door shimmied and whined on its hinges.
Wait...
He caught himself by the fingertips, a wild, one-armed swing over the threshold of the trailer. If he took another step, he’d be in the open. No wards. No defenses. James’s grip on the door jamb tightened and perspiration trickled down his side. It had to be a strategy. Get him out of the house, or give her time enough to break through. There was no one on that roof. But the urge to make sure of it was so strong it was killing him.
He grunted in frustration.
James leaned back into the trailer and shut the door. He turned the lock. He looked down the hall that led to his bedroom and wondered if anyone had ever done to her what Elfleda was doing to him: Reached into her world uninvited and had a look around. He wasn’t used to having the tables turned. That strange vibration that wasn’t noise, but carried on the air, shook his eardrums and rattled along his spine. As the seconds ticked on the analog clock, his panic began to shift into something a lot more familiar.
By the time he got back, Elfleda’s mouth was as real and as physical a thing as his, coming right through the thin skin between worlds. He had a metal cuff on his wrist, a set of protective runes on it. There was a bundle in one hand and a lighter in the other. He struck it and brought it to the dried herbs, drawing a protective ward with smoke that might hold her off a little longer.
James closed the lighter and tossed it on his dresser, next to the bowl of burning sage. If she was strong enough to get past him, she deserved it. “What do civil animals do, where you come from?”
It wasn’t like Hollywood movies. There was no music, flashes or violent winds. That was one of the more disturbing aspects of it; the absence. The nothingness. The almost casual way in which one realm was spilling out into another.
The question elicited a smile on those black lips. A glistening sheen being all which distinguished them from the darkness they came from.
“They watch,” she said with deliberate inference of what he had been sensing. “They scratch…”
Something from her side of the veil made a low, deep growl at that. Then those lips smoothly shifted from a smile to sneer, though whether one of dismissal or effort could not yet be divined. Only when there sounded something akin to a dying, sickly feminine groan did the answer become clear. The darkness was trying to grow, fluctuating with a ripple, but intensifying.
“They may even bite.”
Elfleda’s moan was somewhere between agonised corpse and sexual ecstasy. The splintering darkness cracked further and formed itself inward, like a puddle of mercury being collected through magnetic forces.
“This protective stench runs counter to your invitations,” she spoke with a contradicting air of dismissive delight. Elfleda was being pushed up through that same space on the floor, rising like some vampiric weed. Pushing through it with the minimal necessary footprint. Whether it was naturally drawn to her or did so in an effort to cleanse, the smoke triggered a look of distaste from the gothic figure of corruption now standing there. “Isn’t often I’m made to work for it… You do like setting a challenge, don’t you?”
Her phrasing was purposeful, deliberate. Almost spoken through gritted teeth. For a moment, something about the protective countermeasures must have tried to push her back, because there was a slight lensing effect, contorting the visitor and seeming to place a heavy force upon her from above, as if trying to force an exit. She met it with a glare and an invisible battle of wills played out, before Elfleda snapped her gaze his way.
Even in the dark, that pale complexion could be made out. There was something… Off about it, though. Either it was a conscious choice or due to the warding, but there was a translucency about Lady Elfleda. Like the flesh was made of frosted glass and one could make out the skeleton and internal organs beneath, right down to her skull.
“But I shan’t be denied, James.”
And she lifted a finger, tutting with a slow wag, side to side.
“It’s one thing to get in a house.” James pointed to his bare chest. “A little harder to get in here.”
He studied the woman in his bedroom. She was petite and had the face of a teenager, but she was dangerous, like a snake or a spider, capable of killing with the smallest wound. What she wore added to her physical presence, a macabre hood and train that made her sharp at the edges, a shard of obsidian. He’d never felt power like hers coming off of anything, and she’d yet to forcefully apply it to him.
He knew how it felt to want power like that, but it always came with puppet strings.
James moved past the Emissary. He looked at the perimeter of where she’d risen up from the floor. If she’d gotten through his barriers, was it possible to trap her and keep her from leaving that spot? Or would she sink back into the web of shadow if he tried it?
“I stopped inviting things into me a while ago,” he said. “You can do whatever you want, but I can promise you this. You won’t be crawling out of my guts.”
“You elected to discard me, James, as if I were sewage. Some would say that gives me cause for retribution… I say it gives me cause to know you better.”
She didn’t have to be specific. There was only one thing which could have been spoken of. Especially with reference to sewage. Especially with that earlier noise. She didn’t back away or move to confront him, but allowed the magician to observe, even if it might come with the sense of looking down a funnel-web spider’s burrow, with no telling what might suddenly lunge out of that smoky aperture.
“And you’ve been knocking on my door for a very long time, though you may not have known it. Meddling with parasitic detritus, when ambition should have been your guiding light.” That regal black dress swished as she walked across the room. At her feet, though, the dimensional gateway didn’t close, for once. Instead, it moved with her. Was there an inability to shut closed or was it out of choice? This was no common residence. “And, James… You don’t mind if I call you James, do you? That alcoholic wreck of a hermit can be so impersonal, can’t she? So formal… James,” she repeated, smiling with a turn of skull back in his direction, moving closer. “I don’t come to destroy you. I simply want to...”
Elfleda paused. Those ebony lips had parted, then fallen silent, as if deciding on another choice of words. A tongue, just as black, moved to wet them and her eyes darted down and then back up, again. Taking in the measure of who was standing before her.
“I want to respect you with honesty, James. How does that feel? To be treated with value? With dignity, rather than a chess piece?”
James smiled, a light shake of head indicating disbelief. “I’d say there’s a first time for everything. It’s all a chess board.” The magic user curled his hands around the edge of his dresser and leaned against it. His feet crossed at the ankles, giving him a look that was more casual than he felt. Behind him, the plume of aromatic smoke rose from its bowl, enveloping him in a cloud.
“If this is the pitch, I’ll give you a tip. I don’t need anybody to value me or what I do.” His facial features seemed to shrug along with his shoulders. “But I’m not going to tell you what I do care about. If you haven’t figured it out, you’re either not too smart or you haven’t been watching.” He inclined his head. “It’s probably the last one, right? So how much respect could I get.”
He looked at the circumference of that gaping hole in the floor where Elfleda walked. Back to her face.
She spoke of sewage and meant the incident with Penny. But James didn’t immediately think about Penny. He thought of himself at fifteen, catching his mother’s vomit in a stock pot and pouring it down the toilet. It wasn’t black like Penny’s, but it chased her out of Phoenix, and she didn’t stop until she hit Albuquerque and unpacked her things near South Sandia Peak. Twenty-two years later, he could still smell that cave. How different would he be if it weren’t for Arnette’s move? Could Elfleda see the dark forks in the road that she caused, but not by her design?
James touched the band on his wrist, feeling along the engraved runes.
Elfleda gave a slow, audible exhalation, but it was no sigh. It was like hushing the air; more forceful willpower than usual was required for her to attempt to billow out her unseen essence of corruption. It succeeded, of course, though didn't swallow him up in its midst. What he was burning could have been any number of different ingredients and they achieved their effect here, for there was a slight discolouration in the air: One etheric mass meeting another and reacting with one another, keeping him mostly protected or, at least, cleansed.
But she wasn't trying to attack. It was more the equivalent of dipping toes into water. Testing, just as she must have done in order to even show up there.
"What I offer is truth, James. I didn't force myself on the girl. She chose to imbibe me. Just as you chose to intervene. You are placing yourself... In the way," she tactfully phrased, stepping as close as the smoke would allow for. Semi-transparent hands reached slowly out and pale skin started to burn a little acrid as it passed into what was protecting him. Fingers dancing inches away from either side of his head. "They think you're a calm lake, don't they? But I can feel it, James... I can feel it raging. I'd never cage you. I'd show you how to be set free."
Like someone hovering their palm a little too close to a naked flame, the skeletal visitor suddenly retracted hands away, darkly laughing at the sensation. Fingers stretching, testing themselves.
"Or perhaps that's not what you want? Perhaps you'd rather be shown how to make it sleep?"
“I put myself in the cage.” He went quiet, but something troubled him. It was there in the dark flicker of his brow.
What was happening to James wasn’t corruption. It was awakening curiosity. Anger may have made him reckless, but underneath it, this was the drug that always called his name: the naked desire for access. The confidence that came with knowing he could open channels, he could summon things and send them away, and he could mold things for his purposes. ‘Don’t look into its eyes, Jay,’ his mother had said, a warning he heard in his head, over and over again. But he did it anyway, stared into hollow eyes and mouths and doorways, a hundred times, even when there was nothing for him to take.
Like a fool who tested the heat on a stove by touching the burner, he couldn’t seem to stop himself from looking.
James straightened away from the dresser. He stepped out of the cloud of smoke and looked at her from close range: the dark eyes, the black lips, the muscles and bones he could make out through luminous skin. Then he looked down at the edge of the oblivion at her feet.
He pictured himself taking the cuff off his arm and setting it on the surface behind him. He heard the clatter of it against the bowl. He imagined kneeling down. Reaching his hand into that black abyss.
"Don't tease unless you mean it."
Just before entrancement could fully kick in, the gothic Barbie doll spoke her words of warning with not a hint of concealment. He was partially there, as if undertaking hypnotic suggestions; Elfleda smiling her viper's smile with visible skull practically shining with approval.
And her essence now able to lap at where he had moved towards it.
"You are the cage," she declared and made for a sudden grab to the back of his neck, seeking to thrust him, face-first, down to where her feet met that fateful portal to another realm, for a better look. Somewhere different and pregnant with untold secrets.
And, somehow, directly within James' mind, a scream of simultaneous agony and ripe pleasure shrieked out from it in telepathic fury. A flurry of not just sound, but a thousand images rammed down his mental throat.
"Imagine what could be done with the right doorways laid open... Just like an angel."
He was caught by it, mouth and eyes widening to receive the black cacophony projected into the furthest recesses of his mind. A psychic payload that wasn’t his, but rode on the same frequency of his young vocal chords the first time he did terrible magic and, along with it, every furious shout, every groan of pleasure, of his life. Perfectly in tune. As if he was already inside that realm. Or as if everyone like him ended up there eventually.
And the things he could see…
The world she laid bare.
His fingers, which had dug into the carpet for leverage, began to slide.
James felt the folds of Elfleda’s ephemeral dress at his side. He felt her touch on the nape of his neck. Dimly, if he pushed past the horror of what was happening, of what he was doing to himself, he knew that it had the weight and strength of an ordinary woman’s hand. No easier or harder to escape. But the rest of it...
The atmosphere around him trembled. It was his power, not hers. His left hand slid across the floor and pierced through that veil, as if diving into a glove, going all the way up to the wrist.
Where an unseen, hungry force might wait to grasp it.
An inky murk could hide many things. Not quite water, not quite air, like dry ice made black. From one world to another, James Hutchins reached and grasp him, something did.
It came suddenly, like a shark about to feast upon seal, but not something physical. It was a force, more akin to electromagnetism. Inverted gravity. And with his hand placed firmly in the gateway’s maw, it could so easily have done much more, inflicted far worse. Instead… It caressed. Plunged, somehow, into his flesh, within him. An embracing lick of sensual energies slithering through every living cell.
Hello, it was saying. A tentacled snake wishing to taste his flavours.
“Let me show you what your world won’t. Free from the prism of those who would have you beg for it.” Elfleda was slipping below those lapping waves of shadow. Smoothly descending, as if having been held aloft on an elevator. The gateway expanding around her, just enough, for two. It brought her to eye level with the crouching James; ticklishly soothing the back of his neck, now, not holding by force. Her hand slid free and offered itself to him, palm up. “See for yourself and decide your path. Take what protections you must, but don’t deny yourself what would never be learned in safety.”
Wet with sweat and panting, James clung to the brink of his indecision, just as he teetered at the edge of that void. Up close in the dark, he searched her face, one that seemed to be made of light and shadow, for some quality he couldn’t name. Was it the honesty she’d promised? In one way, Elfelda was being fairer than he’d ever been. She’d issued an invitation where he’d used ritual spaces to forcefully draw things into his world.
Was this what he wanted to do? Who he wanted to be?
Did it matter that much, to be shown?
He pulled away and the magnetism within that breach let go of his wrist. He eased back on his heel and wiped his face in the crook of his arm. He looked at the four familiar walls of his bedroom. The quieter life he had built.
James got to his feet. By now, whether because the herbs had burned acrid or by virtue of his contact with her, the smoke stung his nose and eyes. He sniffed, opened a drawer, and sifted through the objects inside until he found what he was looking for: A protective crystal on a long cord, one that interfered too much with his magic to wear it. He examined the pendant, slipped it over his head and hair, and felt it settle on his chest.
The answer was yes.
“Alright.” He got back into a crouch, looked her in the eye, and took her hand. “Show me.”
“Then take your leap of faith,” she beckoned, closing a grasp firmly around his. The translucency of her flesh still allowed Elfleda’s bones to be glimpsed in the darkness. Something which had walked the Earth during the time of his ancestors, not that he could have known that. “Come,” she invited and waited.
It must have been like jumping into candy floss. Everything a child might imagine playing in the clouds might feel like, except with a spiritual fizz to it, for this was not meant for mortal bodies. No ground existed to hold them aloft and down they sank. Here, the shadows slipped around them in a way far more tangible than those from above.
As the light faded and closed, the most curious sense of loneliness, of absence, overwhelmed him. It was the spiritual equivalent of having one’s oxygen supply cut off. Something which was taken for granted on Earth, for spiritual energies flowed freely there, but here? There was only the solidity of nothingness. A place starved of love and fuelled by hungering desolation.
But there was something else, too. Something which would take someone like James to sense. For if this realm was suffocated from heaven, life, then it possessed something else which stirred in the emptiness.
Strength.
“Welcome, to the cradle of the absolute… Welcome to the Abyss.”
The ache was intolerable for most souls. This was torment. Until there was her. Only Elfleda’s hand-hold to anchor the visitor to sanity as he floated in a gloom thick with that jet black fluidic ebony. To imagine if there had been no-one… To be left adrift for eternity there.
To perpetually fear what else might be cruising, unseen, in the dark.
Even a figure like her would be somehow welcome and she floated back in. Here, she looked as others had known her. Ghostly pale skin, no skeleton. Only flesh.
“You’re falling,” she spoke with laser-like focus. “Part of you always has been. Look at me, James. Look at me… This is for the lost. You aren’t lost, James. I’ve found you. And there’s so much more to show. But you must be ready, James… I can’t have a screaming wretch begging for its mother’s teat. Strength must greet strength. Do you still possess yours?”
The closest imaginable thing to this place was the vast expanse of space. But space had light. It had form. This place had neither. When she appeared again, James couldn’t tell if she was physical or a figment of his imagination. Did he have a body here? Was he actually touching her?
James’s throat made a noise he’d never heard from himself before. Like an animal caught in a trap. Despair.
All that he knew was gone. Neither above nor below. He could remember it. Pictures of his life, his regular world, bubbling up: His home. His shop. Sam. Arnette. Celeste. James turned away from them. Bringing them into this chasm was dangerous. Somehow he knew that if he entertained thoughts of that life, he would lose his resolve. He would realize all that he risked and begin that coward’s scream.
As he’d done before, he reminded himself, ‘Steady.’ He focused back on Elfleda . He imagined himself as an emptying vessel, getting rid of the things that made him a good man, because a vessel didn’t feel fear. One by one, he let go of responsibility, inhibition, affection, the desire to return. The internal steeling of self this required was reflected in the face that looked back at her. Strength to greet strength.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m strong enough. I can handle anything you throw at me.”
James said this, knowing it wasn’t true. Knowing deep down, he couldn’t comprehend what Elfleda could do, because his mind wasn’t built for it. But he believed she hadn’t brought him here to turn him into a drooling wreck. So whatever waited for him, however high she dialed that knob, he was prepared to grit his teeth and get through, if it broke every tooth in his mouth.
He squeezed her hand.
It would be easy to strand him here, meat and blood. Easier, still, to soak him into her corrupting presence and change him by force. This was her domain. She spoke on its behalf. But that wasn’t her goal. Her ability was only a tool.
Besides, she had a legitimate point to make.
“Brave words, though not wise,” spoke that crystalline english accent. There was a touch of amusement in receipt of him having the gall to announce a challenge here. “You’ll learn.”
Her free hand joined his remaining one and she drew close enough for the fabrics of attire to touch. “Don’t fear… You’re no good to me dead or enslaved. But you may wish to hold your breath for what comes next. This isn’t even air,” she advised with a cryptic smile and blew softly into his eyes. Just enough to make him close them, as the surrounding blackness melted, phasing into reds and yellows, exchanging one location for another.
Just like the first, it seemed without end.
As were the screams.
There were no horned devils with pitchforks and red-hot pokers. It was far, far worse than that. A landscape of endless heat, baked in necrotic flesh and pools of urinated decay. It was like walking into an oven and an aromatic cocktail of rotten eggs and body waste. A great, festering, apocalyptic shithole, as far as the eye could see.
It was carpeted with the damned… Heaving piles of bodies, some locked in never-ending forced intercourse, while still more sought to ravenously feed upon one another. All of it bathed in an atmosphere of nauseous acridity.
“That stink...” Elfleda was behind him. One arm around James’ waist, the other caressing backs of fingers down his cheek. They were standing atop what would have been a mountain, were it not carved out of bones. “It’s not what your mind tells you. That’s just what they project. What they believe… It’s guilt, you see. They reek of it… The chain they forged for themselves, link by link.”
Not all were even human. Countless beasts numbered amongst them. Denizens of other worlds, perhaps? Or had they walked on Earth before man? Or had they once been human, so mutated and twisted were their psyches?
“They don’t truly have flesh to tear… But their pain is real. Their terror is real. As are their desires. It’s a kitchen, James… What they once nourished in life, they now feed here.”
Then she raised an arm to the face of what was either a cliff or crumbling wall from an ancient building. One of many, slotted haphazardly into the distance. Others sat there, within the stone framework. They could leave, yet chose not to. Some wailed, others sobbed, a few were silent. It was hopelessness personified.
“They aren’t like the rest. They can’t leave, because they await forgiveness. A forgiveness they fear may never come. And then… Then there are others. The ones who overcame.”
James was stunned.
He reeled at the magnitude of it. It was everywhere he looked, stretching into infinity. The void was a mother’s womb compared to this.
All the human things rushed back in a tsunami of emotion. No one who wasn’t a sociopath could hear those cries, see the rape and desecration and tearing limb from limb, and not have a response to it. A simultaneous and fruitless urge to lash out in anger, to rescue, to cover his ears and block it out. James wondered how many people had stood where he did and attempted to gouge out their eyes. Or jammed their fingers into their ears, trying to make them bleed.
He strained against Elfleda’s hand on his stomach. He wanted to peel her fingers off his skin, but he was tethered to her. Needed her.
Revulsion overtook him. It was a sick, tight twisting of his stomach and intestines, like the wringing of a towel. He might have vomited if anything could have come out of him. It wasn’t looking at the torture that did him in. It was knowing that an entity -- God or Satan or Old One -- had manifested this.
“Why do you do this?” His voice was hoarse. “What’s the point?” The question had two levels: what role did this play in the cosmic order and why show it to him?
"Oh, we don't do this, at all... They do it to themselves. Whether or not they realise, is for them to comprehend. That is the point, of course. We would never turn away a soul."
She rounded him now, placing a hand to his jaw. A gesture shared by lovers and criminals expressing dominance, alike. Her other unfurled at his chest and a warm pulse of energy swept through him. The crystal he wore reacted, but her gesture still had the desired effect... One of soothing. Of calming relaxation.
"You, James Hutchins, of all people, must surely value this lesson. A house must have foundations. To serve dessert, one must first partake of the appetiser. And to run a school, there must be grades, classrooms. From the suffering comes hardship. From hardship, order. From order... Greatness."
She gestured in the distance to a spire and, once more, everything began to blur. Around them, unbelievable torments continued. The stuff from which nightmares were composed. There were horrors playing out which no book, no film, could possibly convey. Some among the throngs projected themselves as flesh and blood, while others were contorted as the spiritual energies they were. All were caught in a perpetual cycle of hatred and suffering, inflicting it constantly upon one another.
An ocean of minds at war with themselves.
And it was melting away, just as before. Somewhere new. The atmosphere was not as before. They were in the corridors of what had to be the tower she had pointed to. The architecture was unnatural, seeming like it had been somehow grown out of smooth, wax-like metal of alien composition. Rib-like support structures jutted out in the form of artistic blades and a sense of rhythmic could be felt.
"Come," invited Elfleda and they moved past open rooms. Rooms where copulation was in full flow, playing out between all manner of species. That feeling from before... From when James had placed his hand into the murk and was greeted by pleasure... It permeated the very air, as if breathed out by a succubus. Whispers teased erotic temptations, not quite able to be heard, yet somehow alighting one's mind with heart-racing imagery.
"A classroom of surrender," she explained, pausing to admire a woman, three men and something half-mollusk locked in the perpetual slaking of desires. But there was no beginning or end to them. They had become fused in flesh and bone, yet showed only ecstasy. "But they have not learned the lesson."
In the mirror-like wall, the face of James' admirer was briefly seen, smiling coquettishly at him, before vanishing into nothingness.
"They enslave themselves," Elfleda clarified and looked towards the open archway of a giant hall. One huge orgy of millions... Demonic creatures large enough to dwarf aircraft carriers, sat upon their thrones, gloating over the masses. "Moths forever chasing the flame of release. And, so... They feed their guards with aimless lust. It is not to desires they must surrender. It is the desires, themselves, which must be surrendered. Until then, there is no release."
The mirror was a mind-fuck. James turned in a circle, searching the walls and the ceiling, trying to make sense of it. He was drunk on the air. A woosy sensation, like the release of oxytocin and dopamine during sex, but notched up exponentially higher, crashed through him. It was hard to think through the fog. All the world narrowed towards one thing, which was vivid enough to taste. It was designed not only to engage what laid before him, but to call to mind every carnal experience and hedonistic fantasy he ever had, to invite them onto this playground. To mix them with disgust and shame.
“You keep talking in riddles,” he argued, rubbing the heel of his hand against his forehead. He was trying to get his mind right. Keep himself from looking too hard at anything. “You said they did it to themselves. They have to forgive themselves… Surrender their desires. But isn’t this what you do?” He shook his head. “You tempt people to act out their worst. You make them want it, and then you blame them for falling for it? That’s just like a God,” he laughed in that atmosphere that pulsed with coital impulse. “It’s a rigged system.”
He looked out over the harvest of lust, a field of bodies fucking themselves into oblivion. “Who could find their way out of this maze?”
"I want them to evolve beyond what you have witnessed. I find the discordant note and help it find harmony. If an itch must be scratched, then let it do so with purpose. Look..."
One such soul had separated from the orgy. Was trying to get his breath back, though he used no lungs. He was looking about himself, confused, though realising it was an unending trap, not reward. Looked down at himself and began to remember he had no physical body. The illusion of flesh and bone staggered forth, instinctively reverted into a ball of light, then headed out, vanishing through a wall.
Seeking something else.
"Graduation," Elfleda declared. Her chin tilted upward as she said it and the emissary smiled, turning back to James, again. "Had I found him, he would never have started here. He would have discovered purpose, direction, long before."
“Graduation…” James repeated the word as he watched the man crumble and become light. Confused, the magic user turned back to the orgy and searched it. But it had folded in on itself, an amorphous mass of limbs that had already made up for that body’s absence. In the perpetual traffic of souls, there would be another one.
James took his hand away from his face. He began to see the hall with fresh eyes. Pain, pleasure, they weren’t what they seemed here. They were constructs. Like a body was a construct. The fog in his head began to clear.
He hadn’t followed one religion since childhood, but he knew them. Themes crossed over. Temptation, failure, guilt, prayers for forgiveness. Meditation to calm and transcend, working towards enlightenment that would never come. Restraint. Warnings not to take or do too much, even if you were capable of more.
This…
This was the inversion. It was diving in the cesspool, swimming in it -- drowning, if you had to -- until every fibre of your being was saturated. There was no going back, but you could claw your way out the other side. A Baptism of fire. His back straightened with a dawning realization. When he looked at Elfleda, his expression close to awe, he saw something different. “A guide,” he remembered.
She might not have created this Hell, but just as she’d said in the beginning, James had been knocking on her door for a long time. Some souls were bound for this place. “The only way out is through.”
Elfleda’s expression practically shone with approval. The iris of each eye might be black, but there was a distinct sense of actual happiness which was radiating from them. Maybe there had been a cosmic bet afoot or just a point to be proven, but whatever it was, he had clearly confounded one set of expectations and justified another. One she had been tentatively hoping for.
“You do understand...”
There was an embrace of personified appreciation folding around him. It was that same alien feeling of gravitational forces as before, when the portal had reached into him, through him. This time, it intensified with the curving of Elfleda’s smile and there was no menace to it. Only an inference of… If not happiness, then at least pride in a student’s solving of a puzzle..
“Yes,” she spoke, like black silk swishing in the breeze. “Your world endures its conflicts. Here, there is little choice but to feed upon them.”
Gesturing with a nod of head, she beckoned him to the wall. Upon closer inspection, there was a translucency to it, just like Elfleda, herself, had appeared like in his room. But in place of bones and internal organs, there was a dark rainbow of oily colours which seemed to be moving, flowing beneath its surface.
“This… Like blood. Anger, defiance, lust and more… Some mix, others refuse. This is strength. It takes great will and focus to achieve this. The fields of conflict, you saw… There is great power to be derived from this, James. This… Friction. Like the quaking of Earth’s crust, yes? Imagine that. A constant, unending quake… Not one of soil, but energies. Not a focal point, but weaved through the substance of this place. Is it so wrong to be harnessed? When only nothingness surrounds?”
An ecosystem, she described. A way of existence perpetually fueled by warring and predation, because there was nothing else. A food chain, of sorts. It was the way things were.
She spread his palm against the wall, telling him, “Feel... The sheer, unyielding rigidity of it all. The power.” And she looked back over the sea of carnal pleasures playing out between minds. As vast as it was, clearly just one component of countless more. “But they are as plankton… Coal for the furnace. I wish you to witness this fuel’s purpose.”
The wall felt like solid matter under his hand, but it wasn’t tactile in the sense of three-dimensional things. What pressed back at him, masquerading as a building, was the output of the place. It radiated. It hummed. James shut his eyes. He moved closer and greeted it with the planes of his face.
Water didn’t generate power until it flowed. Wind had to be harnessed through movement. This was the friction of which she spoke. There was no power in serenity, or in the ‘calm lake’ he’d become. It only came from the churning.
James had a propensity for using his body as a conduit. It was the part of magic that he loved and that came with the most risk. He tapped into a source and let it flood him until he released it, into whatever he chose. It was satisfying to be the arbiter, to give a middle finger to anything that looked at the drudges of humanity and said no. This system that Elfleda showed him was the most vulgar, and the most beautiful, display of that concept.
He opened his eyes. From up close, he watched with dilated pupils as the colors swirled and collided. His hand, held in place by Elfleda’s, flattened on the wall to increase its surface contact. Meanwhile, the crystal pendant that dangled from James’s neck began to vibrate on its cord. It was nearing capacity. “Why are you showing me this?” He looked at her. “I know I wanted to look, but why’d you let me?”
Untold horrors and nightmarish entities had already been witnessed and the very atmosphere was intoxicating. No doubt, if it hadn't been for Elfleda's apparent protection, it could have been all too easy to slip into the madness of mindless aggression or paralysis through outright fear. Everything was on sensual overdrive, yet she had brought him here with a purpose. He was right to question it.
"Because all things have foundation. You would not sufficiently learn if presented only with an end result," his guide clarified with gaze momentarily diverting to where the crystal was worn. It was... Distasteful. Bordered on offensive. Still, though, was tolerated. "You have earned only a glimpse, James. These are but small islands... A fraction of what these realms offer. We possess extremes which cannot be fathomed by mortal minds. Only experienced."
At his feet, the blackened soot of Elfleda's portal opened, allowing him to descend on an ethereal blanket of sensation. Through it, he passed, until the blackness cleared and he was deposited within a corridor of glass. Strange, mystic symbols were engraved within it and gravity ceased to exist, allowing him to float. Doors led off in odd directions, with no two the same size or shape. A giant cathedral, devoted to the arcane.
Elfleda gave a silent hushing gesture and ushered him along. As they moved past each door, they became transparent and a different occupant could be glimpsed within. These were quieter than the other places. Some were humanoid. Many either were not or had long since ceased to be. They were in surreal positions, some even swallowing themselves. Each in a form of purposeful meditation peculiar to themselves. Some were willingly held aloft in torture-like mechanisms, others were just pure light of different colours, subjecting themselves to prisms, where they divided and were remade whole. Yet, there was no torment. They subjected themselves to whatever they experienced.
"They learn," whispered Elfleda, turning a bend to lead him through what could only be described as a shifting meat grinder. It opened out into a different room. Before James, a symbolic pyramid of red outlines was presented. It was huge, but each brick zoomed in when he focused on it. On every one was a face. Sometimes it shifted and one face slid sideways, some merged and others moved upwards.
"They overcame... Graduated through their trials. Now they search for improvement. To become greater." With that, she pointed to the centre of the room. The walls of this one were composed of reflective fluid, shining with inner power. "Swim within, little fish. Will the waters to you... No harm shall come. Only clarity. Only knowledge."
It was the ultimate in plugging in. No physical cord, but being bathed in a direct connection to... What hell had to offer. And connect him, they would. Connect him to energies so rich, they would force him to tame them before they could be harnessed. It would be like riding a metaphysical tidal wave.
Then they would show... Show him countless other worlds, events past and future. Events and possibilities. Including a version of himself, darker than he was now, truly focused and having mastered more than should be possible.
"This is why the girl imbibed me. She was learning to grow. To become more."
James ticked at the memory. “Penny.”
It tore a small hole in the story she wove. Penny hadn’t looked like ‘more’ when she was tied up in that motel room. But the memory was far away, a blurry picture at the end of a long, black tunnel. Penny, Arnette, James… they were cogs in a wheel too large to conceptualize.
He looked at the walls of reflective liquid.
The weight of what he’d seen -- and what his brain shut down and refused to see -- was dragging him low, the longer they stayed. The crystal, her shelter of him, and his refusal to back down could only do so much. The soul wanted out. But James didn’t. The only thing that scared him more than swimming in the amniotic fluid of Hell, and the ways it might change him, was going home and not having any answers. If he was left with the horror of this place crowded into the corners of his brain and no way to process it, he’d lose his mind.
“Well,” he said, looking at her. “I’m not gonna back out now.”
No sooner had he spoken than he found himself in the center of the room. The liquid waited. All he had to do was call it. James thought of the animal in the sack in the river. The fear and confusion it must have felt when the water seeped into its cloth confinement. The cold, dark loneliness of that death.
James opened his hands and closed his eyes, as he always did before a ritual.
There was a wet sound of liquid spilling forth. A sensation of it rising from the soles of his feet, up to his calves, to the waist and higher, until the column of fluid lapped at his shoulders. He took a last breath. The liquid climbed over his mouth and nose, above his eyes, until there was nothing left of his world but it.
He exhaled. Submitted himself to whatever would come.