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

by Christian Winter

  But it wouldn’t fire.

  “Sorry vintner. Looks like utter misery for you.” If I couldn’t kill him, I could at least knock him out. I smacked the handle of the crossbow across the back of his head. He went limp.

  I didn’t know where Scammander was, and I didn’t care. My massacre had begun. The ravens would eat well tomorrow.

  Screaming. They are screaming.

  They should be.

  Sticky humans were all around me, breathing on me, bleeding on me, weeping on me, an clutching desperately at my robes. I rolled over them like a vessel on the heaving waves, now rising up over the victims, now disappearing in the liquid tumult of nervous bloodshed and havoc.

  I dug my fingers into their eyes, I pulled the hair from their heads, I spit into their faces and I swung my horns into their groins. And the sun drooped lower, and my arms were sore, but I kept swinging and I kept murdering.

  I pulled their faces off my sword, I shook their torn stomachs off my blade, and I pushed their leaking heads away with my sandals. I slapped the spit out of their faces, I slashed the blood out of their necks. And the sun drooped lower, and my arms were sore, and my head was dizzy, but I kept swinging and I kept murdering.

  I ran down their young, I ran down their elderly. And the sun drooped lower, and my arms were sore, and my head was dizzy, and my legs were burning, but I kept swinging and I kept murdering.

  I shot them in the back as they ran away. I shot them as they tripped and flailed over the fallen bodies. I shot them as they crawled through furrows of corpses. I shot them as they lay dying, faintly protesting with trembling limbs held over their faces. I shot the dead so the troubadours would wince and break the strings of their kithars and trip on their lines if they ever tried to sing about this day. And the sun drooped lower, and my arms were sore, and my head was dizzy, and my legs were burning, and my fingers were aching, but I kept swinging and I kept murdering.

  I shot them so much that it looked like I was standing in an amber field of wheat. I tread over the squishy skin and as my robe brushed across the golden darts it hissed like the scythe that whispers as it reaves, familiar to ploughshares and the ancientest farmer of this world. And the sun drooped lower but the stars would not rise for this day was too heavy, even for the heavens.

  I continued through the golden field towards the bank where a guard with a heavy crossbow had placed himself in front of the doors and watched as his fellow humans fell under my volleys.

  Humanity.

  If I was some duelist, seeking fame and immortality through song, I would have taunted the guard and mocked him so clever poets could delight their audiences.

  If I was some courteous assassin, seeking fame and immortality through song, I would have given the guard a chance to say his final words, which are always so potent and poetic, and troubadours love to recollect famous last words to upbuild their listeners and sound wise.

  But I am neither of those things. I am a new and unrighteous murderer, hearthless and hopeless and a legionnaire of oblivion. And so I ran at him with an odious brow and a volcanic heart.

  I folded the heavy crossbow under his chin and slammed him into the thick wooden doors. We wrestled until I squeezed the heavy crossbow trigger; the hard iron bolt blasted up under his soft chin, through the hard helmet and into the door, hanging him a few inches off the ground. His tongue clicked loudly in his mouth and his eyes crossed and uncrossed and his feet fluttered as death pulled him by the ankles down into its black kingdom.

  I grabbed a spare iron bolt just as a fat merchant in expensive silk and a tie opened the door and my forehead crunched into his nose. As he fell to the ground a skinny associate tried to sneak past but I flung my forearm into his throat and pinned him to the door and drove the bolt through his mustachio’d face. His forehead crunched in and his gushing face sank down around the spear. Now two bloody trophies marked the door so that neither gods, nor animals, nor creatures that use speech and writing and live in cities would ever enter here again.

  I picked the fat merchant up and shoved him back into the building.

  I stepped into the bottom floor of the trade sanctuary, where humans were running around with papers, reports, and bills, shouting prices at each other and giving commands to buy or sell overseen by giant golden statues of fat male merchants. When they noticed that the merchant had returned, everyone halted and looked at me.

  “How do humans die?” I asked to the stagnant silence. “Without a thought.”

  And with that I shot a dart of gold into the back of the fat merchant’s neck and thrust his body to the ground.

  Those who could, ran through doors in the back of the room and up the stairs to rooms on higher floors.

  But the others—the others had nowhere to run.

  They came rushing by me like a stream of gnats.

  Thuderful Momentum flashed into my hands as I staggered through the flood of traders, hacking and strangling and bellowing my way over to a towering golden statue of a corpulent merchant holding a gigantic golden balance sheet. I scampered up the monolith and severed the balance sheet, then dropped the blade and dropped to the floor.

  I grabbed the golden tablet and stood in front of a broker holding the legendary sword in awe.

  “You swing it, like this,” I snarled as I smashed the trader’s legs, knocking golden coins out of his pockets and the bones out of his legs. He dropped the blade—which vanished—and screamed before I smashed his ribs. With each swipe the tablet snapped the bone and left my hands tingling. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and hammered his face with the golden balance sheet, breaking his head into red ooze and grinding it into the buckled tile. I swiped at another victim and the bloody balance sheet slipped out of my fingers and smashed into a column, falling to the floor and denting the marble tiles.

  I pursued them with thunderous swings, battering fluted columns and buckling the tile floor with my wild swipes, tripping from reckless smiting and slipping on the long red smears. I grabbed them by their hair and thrust them down and battered them at the feet of their gleaming statues. I chased them around the chipped columns and slick floors until they fell to their knees, until they crawled, until they labored on their elbows, until they gave up, sobbing in a corner. And then I bashed their lumpy brains out with the golden tablet.

  I gave them no burial rites. I read no funeral verses. I cried no tears. I did not beat at my breast nor pull at my hair. I burned no solemn tapers nor hung my head low. I pulled their statues down and wrecked monuments. Heads I nailed to the walls like gory guerdons hanging in ancient halls. I ripped their limbs and cast them about the trading floor. I wrote marks with their dark blood on the walls and on the floor. I did all of this so that neither gods, nor animals, nor creatures that use speech and writing and live in cities would ever enter here again.

  Ninety-nine floors to go.

  Souvent me Souvient II

  “Forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression, that is responsible for the fact that what we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are digesting it (one might call the process ‘inpsychation’) as does the thousandfold process, involved in physical nourishment—so called ‘incorporation.’ To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all for the noble functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight, premeditation (for our organism is oligarchically directed)—that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.”

  Nietzsche

  My legs kicked wildly as I snapped awake i
n my chair, much like one who is dreaming does when he suddenly feels like he is going to fall out of bed, even though he is safely lying in the middle. The room felt strangely tilted, like everything was leaning slightly to the right. I closed my eyes and gathered myself, but when I opened them everything still felt tilted.

  The room was made of a ring of massive white oak trees, connected by marble walls that filled in the once open spaces between the sylvan columns. A lively woodland scene had been painted across the walls and birds had been painted into the marble encrusted trees. Stags stared into the room from the dark green forest as plotting foxes looked slyly up into the branches. Faeries danced around a ring of red-capped mushrooms on one side of a tree while a dark gowned, smiling student reclined against it as he read his book to his lover on the other side of the natural column.

  On the high domed ceiling was an elaborate painting of a tower made of rings of swirling clouds. On each ring there was gathered a group of scholars holding books and pointing as though they were in a vigorous debate. The rings grew smaller with each successive level, and as such, the scholars in each ring were fewer and fewer. At the top was a blazing yellow sun with an open book in it, and just below it was only one scholar on the final cloud-ring, who was looking up to the book as he feverishly copied its contents.

  “Do you like the room?” Tristan said. “It’s certainly not as fascinating as it was before they filled the spaces in. It used to be an open and breezy room—a magical forest at the top of the world.”

  He tilted his head slightly as a malicious glimmer danced in his pupils.

  Don’t respond.

  Fight back.

  I clenched the sides of the chair and shut my eyes as my breath rushed in and out of my nostrils. My neck quivered as my sandals scraped and slid across the smooth floor, hissing into the patient silence. My jaw stretched and popped as Tristan’s magic wrenched it open.

  “Why did they do that?” I asked defeatedly, slouching in the seat.

  He chuckled as he turned his gaze away from me. “Too many students gazing off into the clouds and dreaming,” he smiled. “Only the birds were listening to the lecturer.”

  I glanced at a cup sitting on the edge of his chair, but he caught my eyes. “No,” he said lifting the chalice to his lips. “This is not for you,” he said smiling over the rim. “Though it is quite refreshing,” he said licking his lips and setting the cup back on the edge of the arm. I could still see the gloss of fresh, cool liquid glistening on his lips.

  I wasn’t sure why I was awake—the enchantment was still very potent.

  “I told you, I don’t want to be drowned in the horror of your slaughters,” he said, grimacing as he turned away from the glowing wonder block.

  “I’ll just edit it out,” he shrugged. “All these details, all these adjectives,” he moaned as he looked down at his notebook and shook his head. “Honestly I find your hyperadjectivized style of ekphrasis to be…” his voice faded as he searched for an insult. “Tumid and middle-class.” He paused. Neither of us spoke. “How would a prize-winning novelist tell this story? If you won’t tell it as I instruct you, you could at least narrate it as though you wanted to compete in a literary competition.”

  “Very well,” I muttered, only slightly surprised that I complied so easily to his command. “I will try to tell the tale as modern novelists do, with simple language in a concise manner, the result of which can only be boredom, which I suppose is correct—for it is a merchant-banker I will be talking about.”

  “Yes you left that part out, how did you kill him?” He sat back in his chair and smiled as he casually crossed his legs. He looked quite pleased.

  I waited to be forced back to unconsciousness, but when nothing happened I began speaking. “Trymalchio had a good life. He had tons of gold, more than anyone else he knew. He had a beautiful, prestigious wife that reflected his own prestige. He had two children, both of them brilliant, both of them away at the prestigious human academy getting the best education that his gold could buy, where he himself had been educated. He had a beautiful mistress that did everything his beautiful wife didn’t. He ate the best breakfast, then the best lunch, and then the best dinner; and with every best meal he had the best wine. He had the best profession, which was why he had the best life. In fact, he thought that a profession was the most important thing to have in life.

  “When he walked down the street, he wore the best clothes, so people knew that he was the best. He didn’t care if they didn’t know him, just so long as they knew that he was the best. He worked in the best building, because it was the tallest that humanity had ever built. A giant glass box, it was the heart of business; because big squares are the best for business. He sat in the best office, at the very top, in the best chair and with the best furnishings. He worked with the best people, and only the best people worked for him.

  “Trymalchio was competitive, he had to be—to be the best. The best are always competitive, it’s what makes them the best. Trymalchio had never been on the losing side of a trade, he always got the best of someone. He was in the best guild of merchants, and they had been the best for a very long time. He never dreamed, and that was for the best. He planned, and had the best calculations.

  “All this he thought as he was lying down in his best bed. Then I leaned down from the top and snapped his neck in the worst possible way.”

  I stopped speaking.

  He leaned forward and patted my wrist. “See, if you could only tell everything in such a fashion, your fable would be over with already, and I could kill you, which is what you have wanted all along.”

  “I’m not telling a fable, I’m telling truths,” I whispered, trying to pool some saliva in my mouth. “And you can’t kill me, so now who’s telling fables.” I said swallowing what little spit I had.

  He took another calculated sip of the water. “Of course, though your tale was much more compact than usual, it wasn’t as taut and muscular as some of my early prose.”

  I tried to look away, anywhere from the chalice of water, and found myself staring into the floating memory diamond.

  It looked like a captured star.

  “There used to be a very precise method for destroying those things,” I said squinting from the blue light. “I’ve really got to learn to stop talking,” I said again against my will.

  Tristan began to laugh. “Oh this is delightful! Please, tell me something else.”

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  Again our eyes crashed into each other. Tristan’s arrogance was remarkable, but his understanding of magic was not. Unfortunately, he knew enough to torment me.

  I twisted in my chair and drew quick, shallow breaths through the pain that was starting to burn through my veins. “I’m going to kill you,” I gasped. “I swear on every star in the sky that I am going to kill you and throw everything you know into dust.”

  From the scowl on his face it seemed like that wasn’t something he really wanted to hear. An invisible force weighed down on my neck, slowly pushing me forward. Then I felt something puncture my spine.

  Pain.

  So much pain.

  I was doubled over in the chair and panting when an empty syringe slowly floated around my side and in front of my eyes. I was too delirious to appreciate the length of the needle, otherwise I might have passed out immediately.

  “I’m going to try something different this time Evander. I had the chance to study those books of black magic along with some apothecary manuals from the other room, and I think this mixture I have brewed might be more effective than the admittedly primitive magic I was forced to use previously in our recent conversations.” He tilted his head so he could see my eyes. “Ideally I would like to maximize the pain you feel and maximize your recollections while minimizing the amount of words you use to describe them.”

  He stopped speaking and waited for something.

  “You first owe me more information on Scammander and how he used magic. So w
e will start there.”

  And more importantly because you need that information to know how to actually cast a spell on me.

  And so I told him another truth, which, like Scammander’s eyes, has many hues.

  “I’ve seen many wizards hurl hexes in my short time in this world. For so many of them it was forced and awkward, like they were uncomfortably working through a complex math problem for a timed university exam. The best were technically proficient, like they had worked through the same complex math problem for their entire lives, only they could get through it quicker and a little less painfully.” I smiled into a warm recollection. “He had this trick,” I began. “My heart used to skip a beat whenever he cast a spell, and I would gasp—”

  Tristan sneered. “Yes, all the old mages had their signatures, tricks and gimmicks that they used for intimidating lesser sorcerers.”

  “Watching Scammander cast magical spells was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” I said as my heart fluttered and nervous ice raced up my spine and stiffened my fur. “I miss that beauty,” I whispered. “I miss that beauty from this world.” I bit my lip as warm tears blossomed in my eyes. “It was like—it was like he was meant to cast spells. It was like—it was like magic loved Scammander, and when Scammander cast magic, it looked like he was caressing the love of his life—it was like he had been looking for her, for millennia—and in that moment he had finally found her. It was like that every time he threw spells, and why he cast them like a wild star.”

  I was uncomfortable this time for a different reason. I had not done any justice to the awe I felt when I first saw Scammander cast a spell, nor the tremendous beauty of his sorcery. I glared into the wondercube. I know a pathetic posterity is coming after me, though you would call yourselves a future. None of you are worthy enough for the truth, and my bad descriptions will leave you dreary and comfortless, like silent lightning and a starless night.