ritual purposes

 

Dim yellow lights shifted overhead. Not the steady flicker of candles or braziers, but crawling along some lofty ceiling, too fuzzy to make out. Where were his spectacles? Van lifted a hand to paw for his nightstand, but the chain around his wrist only gave a foot of slack before it pulled taut.

He gasped, trying to fling himself up, and the fog in his head sharpened to a panicked edge when chains at every limb jangled mockingly and snapped him fast to the cot. Beyond, muffled sounds through the walls like the wails of dying animals. A scream welled up in his throat. It only just escaped when a gloved hand clapped down over his mouth. His eyes rolling, he thrashed, but the hot leather glove covered his nose as well.

“Shh,” said the dark-robed figure suffocating him. As he blinked away gathering tears, Van could make out a golden mask, shadowed by a curtain of golden hair. Deep blackness lay behind the empty eyes. His voice echoed within the mask like soft, strange music. “Are you going to be good?”

His air was running out, his lungs screaming. Van nodded. The hand was gone, and he didn’t try to scream. But he cried, and this at least the masked man tolerated better. He swiped his thumb over Van’s tears and appraised them; he seemed to find them satisfactory.

“There we are. No more yelling. We’ll speak to each other like civilized men, hm?”

Van hadn’t the breath or composure to answer. The masked man glided away to some counter, where Van’s near vision failed. He returned with a short blade and a deep bowl.

“And no more trying to escape! Believe me, it’s worse out there than it is in here.”

Blanching, Van tried to wriggle away from those hands, that knife. “Where am I?” he hiccuped, like that would distract his captor.

Of course, the masked man caught him. Cheerfully, he said, “You don’t want to know. Right- quick sting!”

The knife slid across the joint of his elbow. Was it dull? He hadn’t felt a thing. But then the masked man squeezed, and a stream of blood trickled down into the bowl. Now it more than stung- it burned, the demanding press of hard fingers widening the wound. Van grit his teeth. The crying had stopped, though. He could only focus on one pain at a time.

The masked man murmured encouragements to him, praises, and when Van thought he would swoon from loss of blood, finally let go and bandaged him up tight. He bustled away around the dark room, muttering to himself. At last, he brought a pitcher, and held it to Van’s lips for him to drink. Gods, he hadn’t known until that moment how thirsty he was.

Swiping his chalky tongue over his lips, he asked, “Would you at least tell me what you want?”

“My master wishes to enter this world. I cannot rest until he does.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

He paused. His voice thickened. “He’s insisted upon fresher test subjects. More meat on the bones.”

“Test subjects?” Van echoed hollowly.

“Well. I should say ‘conduits.’ Do you know what a conduit is? Yes, of course, you’ve had more learning than your predecessors. I think you’ll do nicely.”

Van faded in and out, unaccounted time in between darkness and slow-crawling lights. The masked man kept himself mostly to a smudge in the background, a soot stain on black bricks. He whispered steadily, cursed, heaved, while around them the beasts- were they beasts?- continued to moan.

He was awoken for another sip of water. Beside him, the man perched on a stool, that deep bowl settled in his lap. A pestle stuck out of it, stiff with some ugly reddish pitch. The smell defied comparison, but for a kind of fungal sweetness. He sat humming as he worked, transforming Van’s very blood into something unnatural. If he lived through all the preparations, something much worse would be done to the rest of him.

“Please. Please, let me go.”

The masked man sighed. As he turned, scattered light caught on the golden rim of his eyeholes, and lit the flesh behind. Purple bruises of a long weariness underscored yellowed, bloodshot eyes. Anything human which those eyes could belie had long been beaten out. Or perhaps Van was seeing things. Very quickly, they passed back into shadow, and the masked man gently stroked his hair.

“Oh, my poppet,” he cooed. A sweet, lullaby warmth. How could this voice belong to a monster? “No more of that. If you’re lucky… and if you’re a very good boy… you might yet survive.”

Van relaxed back into his petting fingers and wondered: will I want to?