Like in Faerie.” He folded his hands on the table top, still fingering the coin, and smirked very slightly. “I have an answer for everything, don’t I?”
Before I could reply, something crashed like a load of bricks dropped on the floor. The house shook. Plaster trickled down onto the table. Then came a second crash, and a third.
“What the—?”
He looked me straight in the face. He seemed utterly terrified, helpless, pleading without words. With some effort he whispered, “Will you try to set me free? This is your chance.”
“What do you suggest I do?”
Again the house shook. Furniture toppled upstairs. Floorboards creaked, broke. Then whatever it was up there paused, and I could make out ticking and whirring sounds, like mechanical parts working furiously.
“Ben—”
“What?”
He slid the coin across the tabletop. “This might help.”
I took it and, inexplicably even to myself, rose from the table with some idea of what I had to do. I walked out of the kitchen, turning back once to see Stephen huddled at the table, his eyes shut tight, his fists over his ears, trembling and sobbing, muttering, “Go, go, go…”
I ascended the front stairs. I told myself that I was going upstairs to find that Stephen had rigged a series of weights to drop in sequence, and I was going to come down again and tell him to end all this nonsense and get some professional help. This time, I was sure, he’d cooperate.
But no. There on the landing stood a maniacal version of the Tin Woodsman of Oz, a giant in tarnished silver armor, his wrathful face of living, molten gold. By the sharpness of his features, by the fury of his eye, by the crown of thorns I knew him.
The Severus spoke, its voice more profoundly terrifying than words can describe. “I seek Our Lord Tetrarchon Stephanus.”
What happened next remains, like all that followed after, incomprehensible. I didn’t run screaming into the night, which would have been a sensible reaction. I’d like to think that I heroically sacrificed myself for my friend, to set him free.… But, no. I wasn’t really sure he even was my friend. Some overwhelming inner compulsion drove me to deny, to sound to the utmost depths the mystery I now confronted. I had to go on disbelieving, since the alternative was to accept that Stephen Taylor was some kind of god, who could create whole worlds with the stroke of a pen.
Such are the lunatic lengths we go to in order to preserve intellectual self-esteem.
A matter of survival. It was him or me. One of us was going to turn out to be crazy.
The only solution was to dare the Severus to do his worst, that his secrets might be revealed.
I held up the coin and said, “I am the son of Our Lord Bernardus, Tetrarchon of Chorazin before me. Here is his image.”
The Severus seized me in a burning, crushing grip. One living iron hand covered my eyes, searing my face.
And my sin was the sin of pride.
* * * *
The city of Chorazin lies in the delta of the River Bile, between the Sea of Blood and the Desert of Shit. There pain is the industry, product, currency, and sole amusement of the inhabitants. There I ruled as Tetrarchon, prisoner and lord, for thirteen years and thirteen days, carried in a litter on the backs of legless giants, whose lower parts were black machines with squealing, sparking caterpillar treads. I dwelt in the dark palace rimmed in fire. I heard the endless screams from its lofts and great galleries, and watched in solemn state as my winged Praetorians soared high aloft with some victim in their grasp until all were lost in the swirling smoke that forever filled the sky of Chorazin. The victim came plummeting down, to be dashed into a red smear on the elaborate mosaics of the courtyard built for this very purpose.
And from the blood and scattered teeth and bits of bone, the sages of Chorazin divined the will of the Tetrarchon and carried out his will, and recorded the number of his sins.
It didn’t matter if I resisted or played along. My every action was a portent, a sign. By the raising of my hand or the turning of my head, even as I tried to avert my gaze, even as I closed my eyes; by all these things, countless thousands suffered unspeakably, as the will of the Tetrarchon was known and interpreted by the sages.
Both human and rat-faced citizens swarmed through the streets in their ramshackle automobiles—like washing machines on wheels, I decided—crashing together, bursting into flame, the onlookers swarming over the still burning wreckage to gorge themselves on half-cooked meat.
The heads on the spikes above the doorways spoke to me, babbling their woes, accusing me, calling me by the names of Tetrarchons past, for in Chorazin, where time is not as it is in any familiar country, and past and present are the same. I was one with Our Lord Bernardus and with many, many others before him; pain’s eternal avatar.
It was all so pathetically absurd, no alternate universe with its own, self-consistent logic, but a demented child’s fantasy, a jumble of cartoon anachronisms.
Yes, I presided as they tortured the duck on the wheel, breaking his limbs with sledgehammers.
And at the end of thirteen years and thirteen days, the Severus came to me and said, “Thou, too, art a sinner,” and he stripped me of my robes of state and of my diadem and bore me off to be punished with the rest.
I cannot even catalog it all: the floggings that went on for days, slowly; electro-shock that caused such spasms it broke bones; injections of acids, feces, of strange drugs that brought screaming golden mouths out of the air to devour my flesh while I dangled in some dank cell, nailed to an overhead beam with a spike. Even that was only a prologue, as the torturers of Chorazin worked on me lovingly, creating new and exquisite torments for my sake.
The torturers wore black hoods, as I thought they would, but they were hardly the burly, bare-chested fellows of the medieval stereotype. Men, women, and rats all wore blue overalls, with yellow patches of the Severus on their shoulders; and they came and went and labored and yawned and gossiped and broke for lunch and punched time-cards like an endless, anonymous steam of technicians in the great factory of my own, unique agony.
For the pain was very, very real. That much, inevitably, always, remained consistent.
The sound of the city, the breath and anthem of Chorazin, was screaming. It never stopped.
I screamed too, and at times I didn’t even know I was screaming. It sounded like someone else, far away. At times I seemed to transcend my own pain, rising before the indescribable Neo-Platonic One, which may only be glimpsed when one has put off the flesh, or had it torn from one’s body bit by bit.
In the end, I think, I yearned desperately to rise, to transcend, to put off, but I was nailed firmly in place, crucified among so many others in the great forum of Chorazin, while a brass band blared, traffic swarmed and honked and crashed, and rats gathered at my feet to drink. The man crucified behind me—I couldn’t turn my head to see him—began to recite: “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe to thee, Bethsaida! For if in Tyre and Sidon had been worked the miracles that have been worked for you, they would have repented long ago in sack cloth and ashes.”
So many, many miracles, to no purpose, for no one was redeemed.
I
