What a pair: Here I was, three hundred pounds, nearly bald, gray goatee, wheezing from the effort of carrying my suitcase from the cab. He must have been at least thirty-seven, but he still looked like a little kid, the same dark bangs down almost over his eyes, the same lost-boy look. He might have grown an inch, and there was a little gray and a trace of facial hair, but this was still the Stephen Taylor I’d known in the 1970’s. It was as if no time had passed at all, and relationship resumed precisely where it had left off. He looked as frail and scared as ever.
“Why don’t you let me take that?” He reached out and took my suitcase, then almost flopped over it as he dropped it to the floor from the unexpected weight. He merely walked away from it and led me into the kitchen, where he went through the nervous motions of courtesy. Indeed, the airline food had hardly satisfied me and his offer of orange juice, bagels, and liverwurst was entirely welcome.
He sat quietly while I ate. I tried to read his face then. He remained, as ever, a mystery. I wasn’t even sure he was glad to see me. I hoped that all was forgiven and we were friends again. I hadn’t just pitied him, twenty years ago. There had been something in him I valued, even admired.
But there was no warmth in his manner. He sat still and seemed to be listening for something. A clock ticked in some other room. The house creaked. Outside, a horn blared, stuck, then shut off suddenly.
“You got my package.”
“Of course,” I said.
He laid out a bag of chocolate chip cookies, taking none for himself.
“Then you know why I’ve asked you to come here.”
“No,” I said with my mouth full. “No, actually I don’t.” I swallowed some orange juice and rested the glass on the table. He went to the refrigerator and got me a refill.
“It’s all the same, Ben, after all this time. Nothing has changed. Chorazin, the Tetrarchonate, everything.”
“I thought you were done with that series. Steve, I’ve got all your books. It sounds unlikely, but I’m one of your biggest fans.”
“Why unlikely?” For a moment I thought—with a flash of relief—that he was joking. Vanity in Stephen Taylor would have made him more human. But he didn’t even seem to expect an answer. He was listening again, for something. The side of his face twitched. He’d developed a nervous tic since the last time I’d seen him.
“Steve, I can’t lie to you. You’re crazy. This is some kind of delusion. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a psychiatrist or not, but if not I’ll have to be the one to break it to you that your entire life has been suffocated by a particularly hideous fantasy.”
I paused. I was afraid he’d be angry. But he spoke emotionlessly. “Produce the coin.”
He didn’t have to ask if I’d brought it with me. I produced it.
“That’s real, isn’t it?”
“And so’s a scrap of metal somebody says is from a flying saucer. I don’t know where it came from. But, Steve, look, I’m your friend, and that’s why I have to convince you, finally, that you made all this up. It’s a brilliant act of creation, but that’s what it is, an act. Something you did. God alone knows why. If you’d imagined yourself to be Tarzan or James Bond, I could understand, but this isn’t escapism. It’s the opposite. You’ve built your own Bastille and condemned yourself to life imprisonment. What I want to do, as your friend, is set you free.”
For several seconds, he made no response. The house was silent. Then he said, “What makes you think I started it, and not my father before me, and his father, and his, unto the umpteenth generation?”
“Oh, come on—”
“Ah-ah—” He raised his hand for silence, then held up the coin in both hands, quite intentionally, I suspect, like a Communion Host. He stared at it for a long time, then spoke again, without looking up. “Let us not argue, but instead deal with the matter immediately at hand, which is why I summoned you here.”
“Yes,” I said. “Why did you?”
“Would you really…set me free?”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to get drawn into the fantasy again.
“I think you would,” he went on in the same, dead monotone, “because you truly are my friend. But I’m not entirely sure what you can do against the Severus. I just hope you can think of something. You see, it is time for me to assume my duties, as Tetrarchon of Chorazin. I’ve been given notice. He is coming for me tonight.”
When dealing with a madman, never argue his delusion directly. Wheedle around it. “Uh, Steve, there is an inconsistency here, which I’d like you to explain.”
“What’s that, Ben?”
“Hadn’t the…ah…throne of Chorazin been vacant for quite a lot of years? So why is the Severus coming for you tonight?”
“Time moves differently in Chorazin, not exactly faster or slower even, just different. 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 a
s 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 could only reply: “Which way I fly is Hell; I myself am Hell.”
The cartoon caricature of the world’s pain, with erudite dialogue balloons.
In the end, too, I did not actually die. The hooded, jump-suited minions of the Severus took me down and laid me out to be healed, not in a hospital, but in a kind of morgue. I rested for a long time in a metal drawer, dreaming in the darkness, imagining that my body was a cloth dummy, a sack stuffed with sand, and the sand, which was both my pain and my life, trickled out through countless rips and tears, rattling down through the drawers below me. In my dreams I tried to figure out why I had been rejected, and felt weirdly disappointed that I had been found unworthy.
The drawer opened. Hands lifted me up.
“Thou art not the true Stephanus,” the Severus boomed. “Therefore be cast out. Return unto him as a sign of our summoning and our wrath.”
I felt myself heaved through the air, falling from darkness into light. I braced myself against the impact that never came. Naked, so light-headed I seemed to float, my skeletal limbs fumbling every-which-way, I staggered down the front stairs of Stephen Taylor’s house.
I was the hero of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, returned from Faerie…the gift and burden of wisdom—
Down, into the kitchen, as if no time at all had passed, to confront the greatest liar of them all, whose lies could create universes because he truly believed them.
It was time for a bit of skepticism.
“Stephen!” I shouted. “You’re fucking insane. There’s nothing up there. It’s all a delusion. Show’s over. You’re free.”
Such were the ravings of a palpable fraud. But Stephen wasn’t listening. When I got into the kitchen, I found my plane tickets. My luggage was still in the living room by the door where he’d been unable to lift it. Stephen Taylor was gone. He didn’t even leave a thank-you note.
* * * *
Christ, what a ridiculous ending.
Back in California, it was hard to re-establish my identity, for I was so changed, greatly aged, half my former weight, and I’d only been gone—as it turned out—thirteen weeks. You’re looking for some significance in that number. Go ahead. I can’t find it. My wife wouldn’t look into my face. I couldn’t even attempt to explain, and I could never, never undress in front of her, revealing the terrible scars that covered my body.
But she could see the marks on my wrists, and where the hand of the Severus had seared my face. I can’t blame her that she left with the kids and told them their father was dead. When confronted with the inexplicable, we can only tell lies.
And what is truth? said jesting Pilate.
You got me. Ask Steve. Maybe he can help you.
* * * *
At the university, my colleagues kept taking me aside with horrified sympathy and asking—not really wanting an answer—if there was anything they could do. The Department Head offered me indefinite leave with pay, more than once. Like everyone else, he explained the weight-loss as the onset of AIDS and was wondering why I took so long to die. But no, I had only my work, or else I’d be alone and helpless with the mysteries.
Christ, the ending—
Reclusive artist Stephen Taylor, dead of a heart attack at forty. I read your obituary in the New York Times. So our friendship, if that’s what it ever was, begins and ends with newspapers. At least you had a couple good years, Stephen. I understand you even married. And your last work, the Prison Etchings, were Fine Art, rivaling Piranesi. There is something serene, almost sublime in those endless, twisting stairways and corridors of prisons where only shadows and dust remain, from which both jailers and prisoners have long since departed.
Stephen, I’d like to believe that you set me up, that everything, from that envelope at the door of the college newspaper office to your seemingly premature death, was meticulously calculated, part of an infinitely ingenious jailbreak.
If you made it, maybe something makes sense.
Stephen, I am writing thi
s for you, to be published or to be burned, to make it true or to expose it as one last ridiculous fantasy. I’m not sure which.
THE SORCERER EVORAGDOU
When I was ten, a naked, mad boy came into our village, proclaiming the advent of the sorcerer Evoragdou. I remember how frightened I was of that boy, though he couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than me. He was so emaciated, so filthy, so burnt by the sun that he seemed less a human being than a piece of driftwood inexplicably come alive.
“Evoragdou,” was all he would say, in a kind of delirium. “Evoragdou shall dwell in this place.”
In time the women fed him, washed him, gave him clothes, and took him away.
I asked my father what all this meant, and he merely said, “The sun has destroyed his mind.”
“Who is Evoragdou?”
“There is no such person,” my father said, very sternly. I didn’t think he believed that he was saying. He was hiding his own fear.
* * * *
Two months later, I wandered out in the night, to answer the call of nature, then to stare at the dark sky and make up stories about what I saw there.
I walked for a ways, across the rickety wooden bridge over the irrigation canal, then between the rows of newly planted grain, careful of my step. The heavens were clear and moonless, the millions of stars like the sparks of some enormous forge, frozen in time. I could never be lost in the darkness, because the Great River was behind me and the desert before me. Besides, I knew my way among the stars.
I was hungry for a miracle. Pridefully, almost arrogantly, I longed to be the special one to whom visions came, who beheld the gods leaning to whisper to one another where they sat seated like vast and looming clouds, behind the stars.
It never occurred to me that the mad boy might have had his own share of miracles, that they had transformed him and could transform me. No, I wanted mine. Now.
But instead of any vision of gods, the stars themselves rippled like lights reflected in wind-swept water, and a third of the entire sky was blotted out.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror Page 8