Revenge Pt 3

 

                Had Prince bothered to pay closer to attention to the horses, events might have transpired differently.  As it stood, he failed to notice that these horses, unlike so many others, did not paw at the ground, or stamp, nor did they whinny or neigh impatiently.  Steam did not rise from their flanks after a long journey.  He did not see that behind their blinders lay empty sockets.

                The coachman was in no better state.  His eyes slitted, unmoving.  His lips parted, a thin stream of water pouring endlessly to drip onto his tattered, soaked collar.  He made no effort to attend to the passengers.  He was a willing, if slightly unable, companion. 

                She would never have forced help, only taken if offered. 

                As her four companions exited, she thought upon them.  Yes, companions.  For friends was far too generous a word and acquaintances far too distant.  Each was a Prince in their own time, each a pauper before that.  Each learned, before the end, the cost of their service to their soul, and like her kept themselves animated through sheer force of will.  Each found her in turn, having long been pursuing their own paths of revenge.  Each promised help, for services rendered.  Thus, a companionship was born. 

                Now, as her path neared an end, as the beating of her heart grew louder and louder in her ears, she wondered, without caring overmuch, what mission they would undertake next. 

                Her crow?  Raven?  Rook?  Corbie?  She never understood the difference, and it mattered little as it was all of these things and none.  A demon with feathers so dark they reflected the perpetual burning coal of its eyes, perched atop her shoulder.  This was a friend.  This was a part of her.  An extension of her. 

Her Ego.

In a gilded cage by her feet, draped in crushed velvet, dwelled her Id.  She lifted the cage and stepped outside and made her way into the basement of the bar.

In each corner stood one of her companions.

Two wooden chairs occupied the center of the room.  On the right sat the barman.  Corpulent, greasy.  The foul gleam behind rheumy blue eyes betrayed his jolly façade.  His arms hung at his sides, overdeveloped to compensate for spindly legs, ending in thick ham-hock hands and long strangler’s fingers.  Even now, he feigned jovial innocence. 

On the left sat the Prince.  Beautiful in his youth, simple, in love.  A new talent, she could see the warp and weft beneath the world, and here she saw the spiderweb skeins that connected them.  Love, devotion, passion streamed from the boy and was captured, tangled and abused, corrupted by the cruelty and manipulation of the monster sitting beside him. 

Subversion of the pure had doomed this boy long before she stepped into the room.  Left alive, Hop would claim another victim.  Dead, Hop’s victory would be in turning Prince into another monster to take his place.  Prince was marked for death the moment this toad decided to latch onto him.  She could see it, the perversion of his devotion, twisting into hate, reaching out for its willing supplicant.  A cycle of murder yet to resolve.

Sadness, unfamiliar to her after so long, blanketed her.  The crow pecked at her head.  Pity, doubt, these things offended the Ego.  Not pity, she thought at the bird.  Sympathy. 

It cackled at her.

She sat the cage down just past the doorframe and made her way to Hop.  “May I help you?  It seems I’ve fallen out of favor with you, though never a complaint have I had!  Allow me to make good whatever miscommunication there has been,” there was genuine merriment in his voice.  Hop was a charismatic showman at the best of times.

Slowly, she pulled the scarf down, revealing a face split and broken by abuse.  Slowly, she unbuttoned her blouse, much to the chagrin of Prince whose eyes were nearly bulging out of his head.  Her torso completely exposed, Hop was greeted with the sight of a living cadaver.  A gaping hole in the chest of someone he could not define as man or woman.  A body so broken and destroyed as to be hardly recognizable as a person at all.

His lips flapped and spluttered as he struggled to form words. 

She lifted her forearm to his eyes.  There, in a mass of scar tissue fish belly white, read

Lenore.

The veneer of amicable fat man dropped immediately.  “No!” he roared.  “You foul, foul thing.  No!  You are dead.  I watched him cut the heart from your chest!”  One of her companions stepped forward and forced him back into his seat.  Hop looked around, trying to read the situation.  He retreated into his cowardice, “I know where he is.  I’ll tell you.  I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.” 

A voice like a body being dragged through cold dirt answered, “Yes.”  And she moved back to the cage, flipping open the lock.

The Id spilled out, clumsily rolling around, gathering its bearings.  Growing.  Unfolding.  Stretching until it brushed the ceiling above.  It bobbed softly up and down on bamboo thick legs.  Nightmare black, with thick rose thorns that oozed golden venom, covered in weeping horizontal slits.  The Id was nothing more than a mass of those legs, connected at the center by impossible biology to a mobius strip of itself.  To stare at it, to try to understand it, was to go mad. 

Prince was trying to make sense of the thing until he seized and began foaming at the mouth.

Hop squeezed his eyes shut and tried to hide under his chair.  “Open them,” she commanded.  And he did.  “Sit,” she commanded.  And he did.

Every slit opened simultaneously.  Each contained an eye, a human eye.  They whirled around madly, no one looking or spinning in the same direction as the other.  Hop was fixated on the thing.  Her Id.  Her pet.

She pointed at Hop.

All of the eyes focused on Hop.  He squealed.  It walked across the basement without ever occupying the space between.  Still frames of movement as it simply existed in one place, then another, then another, until it was next to him.  Gently, it lifted a thorned leg and brushed it against his cheek. 

There was a whisper of parting flesh.  Then screams as the venom did work.  He gouged chunks of flesh from his throat with bloody fingernails as he rolled on the ground.  He beat his fists into pulp against the wooden floor.  Hop’s arms twitched and twisted until bones broke, throwing him into further frenzy. 

Then silence fell as quickly as it had begun.  Hop was unharmed, his wounds healed, but the pain was not forgotten.

“So many more things worse than death,” croaked Lenore. 

Prince came out of his fit just in time to see the Id’s un-body split into a nest of champing human mouths and devour a screaming, squirming Hop.  Two new slits appeared on one of its stalks.  Fresh venom dripped from its thorns.

Lenore dabbed her finger into the honey liquid and pressed it to her lips.  She knew everything Hop knew, everything he was. 

“You… you killed him,” cried Prince.

“I give you this choice,” offered Lenore.  “You can know what he was, or you can die in ignorance to prevent you from becoming like him.”

He thought it over, at war with himself.  Only when the fresh slits opened to expose rheumy blue eyes that stared loathing at him did he finally concede.  “Tell me.”

“I will show you,” and she leaned down to kiss him gently on the mouth, earning another squawk of condescension from the Ego.  It was a kindness for the boy, the last act of mercy he would ever know. 

He expired with a sigh.

As the Id folded back in on itself to enter its cage, fed and satisfied, Lenore spoke to the Raven.  “Find my cousin.  Torment him.  Send him a message.  Tell him…

…Nevermore.”