Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant: An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse

by Christian Winter

  Ned Bedlam paused for a moment before screaming again and resuming the slaughter, pursing Scammanders as they fled across the huge hall.

  I must be unconscious, I thought. Then something stung my ankle. I winced and looked down as a tiny Scammander jabbed my ankle again with his staff, then three more times in rapid succession. I stifled a yelp and tried to stomp him, but he zipped around my foot and shook his fist and glowered up at me. I thought about stomping him once more but he motioned me closer.

  “I’m coming up,” he said. “Hold out your hand.” I stretched my arm out in disbelief as Scammander scrambled onto the middle of my unfolded palm. “Hurry, we’ve got to get out of here,” he said as I instinctively began to close my hand and shove him in a pocket. “No, put me on your shoulder!” he yelped.

  “You can walk, illustrious illusionist,” I replied as Scammander trekked up my arm and sat on my shoulder. I noticed he was holding a pair of white lace sandals.

  “I stole them from the dwarf,” he said, “like you should have done if you were me.”

  “Well,” I said to him, “If everyone knows us, and we know none, ‘tis time, I think, to trudge, pack, and be gone.”

  “Though you run this humor out of breath, I agree,” he said, placing his hand on my shoulder and looking up into my eyes. “We came into the world like brother and brother, and now let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other.” As he finished speaking I felt a cool wind across my face and saw only the deep shadows of a forest around me.

  Perhaps Scammander had finally delivered me to Death’s dark forest. If not, destroying the ancient mansion of the elves would create enough new enemies who could. Supposing, of course, any of them survived Ned Bedlam’s rage.

  Souvent me Souvient

  “I would rather have a technique of forgetting, for I remember what I would rather not remember, and cannot forget what I would rather forget.”

  Themistocles

  I was getting pummeled.

  Over and over again.

  Something small kept crashing into my face.

  “Stop talking!” I heard him screech. “Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!” a quick punch followed each imperative.

  The sound of my voice faded to a mutter, then stopped completely, providing a welcome rest from all the talking I had been doing. I took a deep breath—or tried to. A thick wad of mucus and blood caught in the back of my nose, and I started coughing and choking before finally swallowing. I swallowed again and took a deep breath before opening my eyes.

  At first there was a lot of white.

  A young elf sat slumped in a chair across from me with his hand over his eyes, slowly massaging his temples with his thumb and fingers.

  Then I felt something warm to my left. Something warm and bright.

  “What is that?” I said weakly.

  “A gracious gift from your story!” he said with a cutting smile. “You can’t remember what it is?”

  “Too bright,” I moaned and winced. I turned my face away then tried to look at it again, but the light was blinding.

  “I have enhanced this one; perhaps that is why you don’t recognize it.” He watched me wince and writhe in the chair. He really enjoyed my suffering. “It’s a memory diamond,” he hissed. “It records everything you think and say.”

  That was not part of the plan. “I thought we destroyed all of them,” I said against my will.

  “Not the one in your pocket,” he replied.

  I winced and looked around. The room was massive and made entirely of hard white marble.

  A crude triangle had been drawn on the floor around my chair in mystical chalk. To my left sat two giant marble sphinx’s with painted gold wings on either side of a fireless fireplace. Instead there was billowing white light from the memory diamond. Next to the fireplace was crumbling wall with a broken bookshelf and jilted paintings. Books were scattered all over the room, some in piles, some still on the sagging shelf, some partially burned, and most missing their covers. To my right was a series of arched windows, each with the stained glass broken out and scattered below. Looking at the windows I realized that the book covers had been stripped away to seal them.

  I let my eyes close for a moment and let my head sink back down. After all, it felt like the heaviest part of my body. I opened my eyes and looked at the elf across from me once more.

  There were a few large piles of books surrounding his chair which still had their covers.

  I knew him, which was odd, because everyone I knew I usually murdered. But his name didn’t come immediately to my mind. Why did it take me so long to remember his name?

  Tristan.

  Draped over the side of his chair were three heads strung together on a dirty, blood-stained rope. I recognized them instantly. Whirl, Tworl, and Jurl. I also instantly recognized the risks he must have taken to obtain them simply in order to torture me.

  He saw my eyes. “We will come back to them,” he said, narrowing his. Tristan shifted in his chair and looked down at his notes. “First, I want to revisit something quite curious you mentioned.” He frowned, crossed something out, and drew a long arrow down his notebook. He set his pen down in the middle of the browning pages and looked up at me. “You said you had walked backwards for so long that you found walking forward to be strange.”

  I shrugged.

  “Well apparently this was done after you destroyed the village of hobbits, yet you never told me about how their civilization was destroyed.”

  “I must not have witnessed it,” I said remembering the oddness of walking forward after having walked backwards across a great distance. My vocal cords were taut and dry like old ship ropes, baked by sun and saltwater. “I don’t remember it.”

  “Or perhaps you’re lying.”

  I had given up on lying long ago. I shook my head. “I don’t remember. I do remember giving up on lying to you. I also would rather not talk at all,” I said grudgingly. I clenched my teeth, trying not to speak.

  Tristan looked at me for a moment, then sighed and jotted something down in his little book.

  “I have a bad memory,” I muttered.

  “Mine is excellent,” he chirped. “I once remembered the whole line of fairy kings in less than a fortnight, as well as A. L. Huxley’s astute commentary on the poetry of the prose of Clovis’s De Caelio.” He paused and remembered fondly. “During that same week of revision I also memorized Theophilius’s Historia Plantarum.”

  “I have a bad memory,” I muttered again.

  “That’s not surprising,” he snorted. “If you had successfully killed yourself at the bottom of that well all you would ever have been was a dull bovine plowshare whose uncatalogued georgics would have been known only to the soil, sunbeams, and twinkling night sky.”

  A smile spread across my face as I looked at the marble floor. “That would have been a noble life,” I whispered.

  It was then I realized something.

  “What have you done with all the bodies?” I said as I looked around the room. “And the blood.” I missed the bloodstains, but I could still hear the screams and pleading, which brought a smile to my face. I looked over at Tristan, who was looking at the beamy wondercube, peering into my thoughts.

  “Scammander is not the only elf who knows how to stroke and pull and twist the obsidian threads of mana,” he said coolly, looking away from the glowing memory diamond and into my eyes.

  “Well then let’s go outside,” I snickered, looking over once more to the covered windows, with the streams of colorful shards scattered on the floor below them. If he let me out of the chair I’m sure there would be a few shards sharp enough to cut his throat with. “Or just throw one of those windows open a bit.” Even I couldn’t survive outside by now.

  “Those windows don’t lead to the outside, they lead to one of the illustrious academic Courts of Marble and Colored Glass. But you know that.”

  “I know that there are so many bodies out there that not all of the magic in the world
could remove them.”

  “Yes and quite shortly I’ll dump yours out there with the rest.”

  “I imagine the same fate awaits every book you will ever write,” I said glaring at the open notebook.

  That irritated him. “Do you know where you are?”

  “I’ve destroyed every city and every living thing in each one. Rubble and carcasses all look the same to me.” We had moved. Up.

  Tristan nodded his head. “We are in the office of Professor Zenothemis, the leading scholar in the study of epistemology, whose lectures I was fortunate enough to attend.” He stared at me for a moment, the way someone stares at a fallen, wounded opponent squirming in the mud right before driving a sword through the chest. “What no one else knew, including Scammander, is that he was also a leading practitioner in black and forbidden arts like necromancy, the summoning of demons, and the destruction of life. And these are his books—his notes and discoveries,” he said pointing to the stacks surrounding his chair.

  I almost laughed. “Tristan you will kill yourself with a wayward spell before you are ever able to come close to casting a spell, much less using one to actually to kill me.”

  I realized I had foolishly given my tormenter an opportunity to reflect on his academic life, which he quickly took advantage of.

  “My advisor wrote a very learned introduction to Cornelius Agrippa’s Geometry of Dreams which I’m sure you never had the chance to read nor the intelligence to understand. In fact, he wrote preambles and prefaces to many astute scholarly tomes that were being published by some of the most sophisticated doctors of his academic epoch.”

  I groaned and clenched my muscles, letting my head droop as he continued bragging.

  “He was admirably prolific, producing over four-hundred journal articles, an erudite commentary on all the major works in his discipline—and not a few in adjacent fields of study as well. And I read them all Evander. And I memorized them perfectly. I can quote all of them. I can quote the first lines of all the greatest poetry; I can quote the opening paragraphs to every novel, and the same for every work of modern philosophy.” He clutched both sides of his chair as he leaned across the gulf to scowl at me. “What can you quote?”

  I let the thin and tremulous silver waves of silence seep in around his obsequious speech and slowly submerge it in its liquid folds. Floody time hurries all to ruin, and the quickest to succumb to its destroying waters is the insignificant silt of speech.

  “This is what you screamed about in the illusionist’s oneiric palace, isn’t it?” he said with a dark smile, pointing his pen up to the cord of shrunken heads.

  “It is,” I whispered.

  “You murdered them?”

  “I did,” I whispered. More faintly. I blinked and tried not to look at the shrunken goblin heads.

  “I thought you liked the three of them,” he said slowly lifting himself out of the chair before hobbling over to mine.

  “I did,” I whispered again and looked at the floor.

  But there was someone who I murdered who I loved even more. What was his name? Or was it a female?

  “Oh no Evander, I’m afraid not,” he said, shaking his head. “You get to look at what you’ve done,” he grabbed hold of my face and jerked it up so that my eyes gazed upon the three grizzly heads. “Look at these innocents who you slayed for a friend that has abandoned you.”

  My head froze in place as he hobbled back to his scholastic chair and eased himself down into it with a pained exhale. As I looked at each severed head I renewed my tumultuous vows, whispered over the ash of burnt cities, the pooling blood of dead heroes, the cloven and unjewled crowns of ancient families, and the split rocks of lofty city walls. Oaths to mayhem and havoc, consecrated by overwrought breaths in battle—oaths taken in life, against life—taken solely so that I could take something from a life that takes everything. And as my eyes rose higher and higher, meeting each opened eye that no longer saw, my heart was like a hell of storms.

  I hardened my eyes as I looked up from the floor and drove them into his. “You interrupted me,” I said. “I have a bad memory, for just as the scholar says, those who have good memories are not the same as those who are good at recollecting. In fact, the slow-witted have better memories, but the quick witted and those who learn easily are better at recollecting.”

  He winced and sat up straight in his chair when I completed the quote.

  “You have never listened to the inward whisperings of your heart, which are as divine as the evening wind and the vesper susurrus that brushes the tresses of a young maiden’s hair across her face, revealing swollen eyes in moonbeams. You see Tristian, you and I have not read the same books. The Avia Pieridum, the great garland of the studiously serious is not woven over your brow, its soft leaves are not mingled with your locks, and its fragrance does not perfume your speech. Yes, that coronet of those who have lent their names to philosophy, which frolickingly sings ‘Avia Pieridum perago loca, nullis ante, Trita solo; juvat integros accedere fonteis; Atque haurire: juvatque novos decepere flores. Unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae’ is not learnedly inscribed across the sacrosanct smoke of your soul, and therefore, there are so many lands that your sandals have not yet tread.”

  “So Tristan,” I said as I shifted my eyes from the glazed and swollen goblin’s to his, “how’s the foot? I know of a poet who lost one, turning a tragedy into a comedy, but it seems you haven’t fared so well.”

  Tristan shrank back in his chair and shivered for a moment before gathering himself and fixing an odious stare upon my countenance. With our eyes locked and our hearts angry, our war of words commenced.

  “Often I remember—what I did to you that eve.” I let my head fall back as I chuckled darkly. “Yes, I remember you Tristan; named, no doubt, for that tristitia post coitum, the sadness and regret your parents experienced after the sour copulation that produced you.”

  But there was something else about him. Something—Ah yes!

  “How dare you speak to me in a learned and academic tongue!” he screamed as he slammed his fist onto the golden arm of the chair. “You have not mastered the trivium. You have not mastered the quadrivium. You have not learned how to think and scrutinize and you are not gowned!” He glowered at me and sat stiff and upright. “How dare you even look in my eyes!” he exclaimed once more, emphasizing it with another smash.

  “You are right,” I said. “I don’t drink and pass port—I break it,” I hissed. “Now let me out of this seat and I will prove to you how unequal we two are,” I growled. “Yes, I will demonstrate to you in one moment that I am more than one, and that you are less than one, yet somehow we are two.”

  Tristan looked completely disgusted. “You do not command me,” he growled before dissolving in anger. “You do not command me!” he screamed wildly. “My family has some of the tallest statues in all of the lands!”

  “And do you know what’s on top of all tall statues? Bird shit.”

  He screamed and lurched forward so fast that he missed a step with his gimp foot, and fell to the floor in front of me. I laughed and spit on the back of his head.

  He trembled and hissed with fury as he rose up and brushed the hair out of his face. “Your taunts will no longer bother me, and will only prolong your misery.”

  “Think about your own misery Tristan, and how every spell in this entire room isn’t going to be enough to save you from me.” I looked at his foot. “I’ll be swinging for your neck next time.”

  “I wish I could make you live forever Evander. I want to make you live even longer than I do, so you can see how many people read my notebook, and how much of a fictitious idiot I make of you. Far enough out in History no one will ever believe the race of minotaurs ever even existed,” he said with a smile. “But enough talk about me. I want to know about Scammander. I want you to lead me to him, and I want to know if he is still alive. I know you have been trained by him to tell a lie, but you must know that the spell you are under will get you to
tell me everything—the truth and the lie.” He sighed. “So sometimes I admit you will infuriate me with your excessive story, but in the end I’ll get the truth—and do with it as I please. And that, cow, should infuriate you.”

  And so I told him a truth, just as I had been doing all along. “You should hope that I am the one who kills you Tristan. For I have seen what no one else alive has: Scammander casting spells.”

  His eyes sparkled.

  I knew there was no secret professor of black magic, and that there were no books of black magic hidden in this Professor’s study or in the previous dark chamber we had moved from. He needed to know how Scammander used magic if he was going to live and if he was going to keep me under any enchantment for any length of time. And he needed me to tell the truth because if he started casting spells wrong he would die.

  Horribly.

  I smiled. “Alright Tristan, I’ll tell you about Scammander and magic.”

  What did it matter if I told him anything about magic? I had been wrong about magic before. After all, I thought we destroyed it.

  Tristan stood up and pulled the cord of goblin heads off the chair and slung it over his shoulder. He placed a smoking silver brazier on each point of the triangle and dropped rich spices and herbs into each blazing tripod. As they hissed and crackled he pulled the rope of heads off his shoulder and placed each one into the burning brazier so that their eyes were fixed on me. Once again I stared into Jurl’s eyes, which sank slowly down between the glowing coals until the head was submerged in the yellow blaze. And again I was left glaring at Tristan, who was glaring at me.

  The elf opened his book of black spells and began reciting the dark magic as he backed out of the enchanted, steaming triangle. A curtain of warm, scented smoke now separated me from my tormentor but I could see him reading from a scroll he had carefully disguised as a page in the book.