“So you see, Geoffrey, that left only you. I picked you for this task, decades before Edmond picked Ashley for hers and, besides, you’d never let me down before. I trusted you because I knew that, everything else aside, you could be bought. I knew you were slimy and self-serving and that you would do anything I asked of you if a little something extra was in it for you. Don’t you appreciate that for over thirty years now, ever since I first asked you to be my mole when the time came, that you’ve gotten extra perks and extra privileges that none of the others ever knew about, let alone got? I always gave you extra essence, extra time in the city on your own with lots of real money that you could spend lavishly on whatever or whomever you desired. I did that because I knew you were the only one I could trust to sell everybody else down the river if I asked you to. All you had to do was to watch, listen and report to me. But you had to go off on your own, didn’t you, ruining all of my efforts.”
Geoffrey was beginning to shake now. He looked at me with hatred in his eyes, as if his shortcomings were somehow all my fault.
“Why did you even have to bring her to the mansion in the first place?” he asked, his fear making him sound like a petulant child.
“Because, you idiot, I had to get her away from Edmond’s protection. His thoughts, his help, could not reach her there. The mansion, the shack, the carnival, this place we stand here now, they’re all in different dimension, my special dimension that Edmond and his cohorts cannot access. You have no idea of the safeguards he can afford her. The day after she ingested the potion at The Crypt, the one I’d prepared just for her, Edmond was able to rescue her. I was able to reach her through a vortex I’d created and was confident that she would die, for I’ve killed countless of Edmond’s ‘champions’ that way. I knew that I had wounded her mortally and I thought that she would perish from those wounds mere minutes later, but with his connection to her, Edmond was able to revive her completely. Not only that, but he was able to make her even stronger than she was before my attack on her and there was nothing I could do about it because it had already taken too much out of me and I needed to recover.
“It was at that point, I realized that it would be easier for me to get the necklace and its amulet, my real desire, than it would be to kill her, but in order to do that, I needed to get her away from his reach, away from his influence and help. At the mansion, only Edmond’s helper, Zachary, could reach her and then only through my mirror! And when Zachary was calling to her through it, did you lead her gently away from the third floor as I asked you? No, you grabbed her hand and pulled her into the storage closet just down the hall from my sanctuary and confronted her, causing her memories to return!
“I could have had her, Geoffrey, easily, if it hadn’t been for your foolishness and ego! The water had nearly wiped her mind clean and I knew she was bonding so strongly with Ben that she would gladly have given him the amulet when he asked her for it. All I needed from you was a progress report on her memory and for you to do exactly as I ordered. But you thought it would be more fun to alienate her. Had you been doing your job, I would have held the transformation ceremony early the very next morning, and I would have that amulet in my possession right now instead of having this pointless conversation with you!
“I had it in the bag this time, Geoffrey. Almost two centuries of putting up with this stupid game and I finally had it in the bag! And what did you do, Geoffrey? You took what I specifically told you to keep to yourself and you blabbed it to everyone, to Ashley even! You ruined it, Geoffrey, you ruined all of my hard work single-handedly by not respecting my directions!”
“But I was just trying to help you, Arrosha,” Geoffrey was now shaking badly and his voice was quivering.
“Help? You were trying to help? Do you know how Zachary was able to stay at the mirror long enough to tell her to use my fountain, a doorway that not even my followers knew was an exit? Because your ‘help’ pulled me away from where I needed to be, guarding the mirror so that I could make sure that exact thing did not happen. You have no idea how much it takes out of me to play this game each time. As important as getting the amulet is to me, why do you think that, whenever I can, I kill off Edmond’s people right at the start before they obtain it?
“So what was it, Geoffrey, what made you do it? Were you just so jealous of Ben’s position as the leader of the group? Were you so hard up trying to get them to see you as a big, important man that you just had to tattle? Or did you just let your meanness and pettiness override your greed this time?”
“No! It wasn’t that!” he was pleading wildly now. “It was her, it was all her doing! She – she was filth! She threatened to ruin the purity of the group.” His pleading had turned into fast-talking. “She wasn’t fit to be a part of us! I didn’t know you needed her to be a part of us to get that necklace! I didn’t know that was what you were after! I would have kept your secret if I had known!”
“My secret? Do you think I wanted you to know my secrets? The information I gave you was on a need-to-know basis only. You screwed up so badly with what I did tell you that I shudder to think what you would have done if I had told you anything more.”
“But, but, Arrosha, I really was only trying to help you! I thought…”
“You thought? You weren’t supposed to think. That’s what the water was for! Tell me, Geoffrey, when did you start to think for yourself again?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Arrosha,” he said, confused.
“Oh, yes you do. I found out too late that you were sneaking outsider water. When did that start, Geoffrey. When did you start to undermine me deliberately?”
“A – a few weeks ago, maybe six. I didn’t think you’d mind.” He was very frightened now.
“I see. And you hid it from me because you didn’t think I would mind, is that right? I suppose that’s the very same reason that you decided to pick the lock of my private storage area and my trunk. And don’t look at me like that. I know it was you who did that. It was because I wouldn’t mind, right? Good old Arrosha, she won’t mind if I just piss on her, right?”
“N-no, Arrosha, it wasn’t like that at all,” Geoffrey whined as he started more desperate attempts to backpedal. “I was trying to help you.”
“Trying to help me, you sniveling little idiot! Since when do I look like I need your help! I asked you to keep an eye on her, that’s all. Did I tell you to break into my belongings? No! Did I tell you to expose her? No!
“I certainly wouldn’t have entrusted my information to you, Geoffrey, had I known that you were thinking on your own again, that you were on your way to becoming even worse than you were before, and you certainly weren’t much to start out with. It’s interesting how success affects people, don’t you think? Some it leaves even less than they were before, if that was even possible with you, Geoffrey. You’re a loser, Geoffrey. I gave you everything. All I asked for in return was your loyalty. All you did with it was prove to me just how much of a loser you really are. I was right when I called you a whore, Geoffrey. You act like a whore and you think like a whore. The only difference between you and a whore is that a whore has more moral fiber!”
She suddenly became calm as she glided without effort over to Geoffrey, where she stopped just in front of him. She stroked his cheek tenderly.
“Oh, Geoffrey, Geoffrey,” she said. “Whatever am I going to do with you? I respected Ben the most, but in so many ways, you were my favorite, my very, very favorite. Why did you have to betray me so?”
“I didn’t mean to, Arrosha!” he was in a mad panic. “I swear to you, I didn’t mean to.”
“Of course not, Geoffrey. You really didn’t mean it, did you? You were just being yourself, weren’t you? You were just being your slimy, sleazy, con-artist, sociopathic loser little self, weren’t you? Your urge to control a situation you knew nothing about was just too strong to resist, wasn’t it?”
“No, that wasn’t it! I’ve explained! Please forgive me! Please give me another chan
ce!” He was crying as he begged her, but unlike Ben’s quiet weeping, Geoffrey was whining hysterically.
“Ah, I have it. I know what I should do with you. I overheard you telling Ashley how disappointed you were that the poster at the carnival in your childhood over-promised, how you would have loved to have seen the real thing. Be careful what you wish for, Geoffrey, for you’re about to get it.”
Before my eyes, a sideshow corral appeared. Geoffrey was thrust into the air and into its midst.
“Arrosha, no!” he cried, clamoring to his feet, trying to run out of the enclosure. Arrosha would have none of that, though, as an invisible force pulled him back down.
“I think you should get your wish, Geoffrey, and be able to see the real thing that poster promised.”
No sooner had she said this than a woman appeared in the pen. Her skin was swarthy, her eyes were bloodshot red rather than glowing red, and she was certainly not beautiful, but other than that, she was the spitting image of Arrosha in the first nightmare after I’d gone through the last door. She was eating away at the dismembered leg of another woman. When she saw Geoffrey, the woman tossed aside the leg and let out a sickening laugh. She licked her teeth, which were sharpened to points, and her fangs, which ended just below her chin. When Geoffrey saw her, he screamed shrilly in bloody terror and tried hard to escape, but Arrosha once again, did not let him.
“Arrosha, Arrosha!” he cried and pleaded. “I’m sorry! Forgive me! I’m so sorry! No! No, Arrosha, please. Please don’t do this to me! I’ll do anything you ask! Anything!”
“Anything I ask? Why Geoffrey, you’ve already shown me that you can’t handle that. It’s what got you into this little pickle in the first place.”
“Please, Arrosha, please!”
Amidst his begging, the woman began to crawl up to him on her hands and knees, the movements animalistic, predatory, and Geoffrey’s pleas turned into an unintelligible sobbing. As she got closer, his cries turned into one hoarse scream that did not stop. Just as she was ready to pounce on him, Arrosha waved her hand and the carnival pen with its attraction disappeared altogether, leaving nothing but a crying Geoffrey screaming on the floor, his eyes closed.
His screaming continued long past the point at which the woman would ever have reached him. Eventually, perhaps sensing this, Geoffrey reopened his eyes with caution and relief washed over him.
“Oh,” he said. “She’s gone. Thank you Arrosha, thank you, thank you. I’ve learned my lesson. I will never disobey you ever again!”
“That’s right,” Arrosha said. “You won’t. Don’t consider this a pardon, Geoffrey, just a temporary reprieve. I have something else in mind for you, something more fitting. But I’m not letting you off the hook, not in the least. I just need to find a fate for you in the interim that’s less, shall we say, fatal.
“Oh, I know what I will do. I’ll just return you to where I found you, leave you as you were before I rescued you on that day you thought your life was over.”
“Arrosha, please no. Please don’t do that either. I won’t ever displease you again. Don’t do it, please don’t do it.”
I was now almost beginning to feel sorry for Geoffrey. He was crying and sweating and shaking so hard that his words were becoming difficult to understand. But as I averted my eyes from him, I caught sight of poor Ben, perched silently on the ledge, the dutiful tower Gargoyle. During the moments in which I studied Ben, Geoffrey’s begging had become hysterical, unintelligible sniveling. I now looked at him without pity, because he’d had none for any of the others. Out of everyone in the entire group, Geoffrey was the only one who actually deserved his fate.
“Arrosha! No-o-o–.” His voice faded into nothing as I found myself standing with Arrosha in a dirty, wet, urban ghetto alley. Geoffrey, at least I assumed it was Geoffrey, was lying in a large puddle of water, an oil sheen glistening its dirty rainbow colors upon the surface. His body was twisted in a grotesque fetal position, his face half buried in the filthy puddle, his left arm stretched out stiffly, rubber tubing tied above the elbow, a syringe lying on the cement just below it. His bulging jaundiced yellow eyes, half alive and half dead, looked up with great effort as his slack drool-covered mouth barely squeezed out the inevitable “help me”.
Arrosha was smiling as she stood over him. “This is where I found him so many years ago. He went downhill fast after he left Ben. Hard to believe that he was once a handsome man in his original existence even before I changed him, isn’t it? He actually came into the world meant to be quite stunning, but his own debauchery turned him into this.”
That he was handsome in his youth was almost impossible to believe as I stared at the man who was barely more than a human skeleton, lying on the dirty concrete, surrounded with garbage bags, broken bottles, cigarette butts and blood stains. The damp alley stank strongly of stale cigarette smoke, spilled booze and excrement, probably both animal and human. The figure that lay on the ground before me, body and face slowly twitching, bore no resemblance, physically, to the Geoffrey that I had known at all nor to anyone that could ever have been considered handsome. His skin, covered with sores and scabs and jailhouse tattoos, stretched tightly over his bones except where his face was slack, tinged the dirty yellow cast of advanced liver disease. His yellow eyes were set deeply into dark, shadow encircled sockets. His left arm was riddled with track marks and when he opened his mouth once again to squeak “help me”, I could see that more than a few of his teeth were missing, the remaining were yellow and rotting. It was quite obvious he was dying.
“Is it an overdose?” I heard myself asking.
“No. Poisoned drugs. Oh, there would have been an overdose eventually, sooner rather than later. But no, it seems our boy Geoffrey had a habit of toying with people, inevitably pissing them off royally. Someone thought that a payback was in order and laced his heroin with a slow-acting poison. Poor Geoffrey, always screwing people over and thinking he could get away with it.”
Addressing him, she said, “I thought I had washed that bad habit out of you with the water at my mansion, Geoffrey. And I did, didn’t I, Geoffrey, for a very long time. I had you under my total control for over three decades. But then you had to ruin it all by sneaking regular water, didn’t you? I didn’t even suspect it because I knew any other water would taste so foul it would be like drinking poison. It’s a shame you never learned to avoid poison, Geoffrey, so now I’ll let you die from it, as I should have done in the first place, so many years ago.”
Geoffrey was moving his lips again, but no sound was coming out this time. Blood bubbled to his lips and trickled out of the side of his mouth.
“What’s that, Geoffrey? Or shall I call you by your real name, seeing that you’re dying and all. Goodbye, Mr. Earl Duane Stubbs.” Cupping her hand to her ear in a mocking manner, Arrosha pretended to listen intently. “What’s that you’re trying to say, Earl? Help you? You want me to help you? Not a chance. With all that bubbling blood running out of your mouth, I’d have to say that you’re not long for this world at all. Not that it matters, because I won’t miss you and the world won’t miss you. As a matter of fact, no one will miss you now that Ben is gone. You’re complete and utter white trash and I’m just glad not to have to listen to that phony, affected accent of yours any longer.”
“And now, my dear,” she said. The moment I’d been dreading, the moment at which she returned her full attention to me, had arrived. “It’s your turn. But what to do with you, that’s the problem. As much as I would love to indulge in as fitting an end to you as I gave to Geoffrey, that amulet you wear won’t allow me the satisfaction. It blocks my efforts to alter you, it won’t even let me get too near you. That frustrates me to no end, you see, since, short of transmogrifying you, nothing would give me more pleasure than to strangle the very life out of you with my bare hands. How shall I deal with you, then? You’ve been far, far more trouble to me than you’re worth. No one has been this much trouble since Virginia, Marcus and Zachary. You�
�ve convinced me finally that despite my extremely generous offers, you will not give up the necklace, so I’m just going to give up on this round of the game, which, thanks to Edmond’s protection and Geoffrey’s extreme stupidity, has been a complete and total fiasco. It’s taken a lot out of me. I’m tired and I’m going to kill you. As I’ve told you before, it’s just a matter of time before someone hands the amulet over to me, someone with less protection and less dumb luck than you’ve had. Goodbye for now. I’ve had enough of you!”
Before I had a chance to react, without warning, she motioned her arm in a large sweeping movement and I was rapidly thrown up into the air and out of the room. I was floating weightless outside now, completely powerless and terrified out of my mind, for nothing was holding me up but Arrosha’s power. I realized that coming near the amulet was not a total hindrance to her ability to hurt me. She let me hover in place for a few seconds, completely at the mercy of a woman devoid of mercy, dangling above the clouds with nothing underneath my feet except air, so high up that I couldn’t even see the ground through the cloud cover. It was only at that point when, like a character in a cartoon, I felt myself start crashing down as she let me go.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
My decent was so swift that my stomach seemed to explode and turn inside out before it settled to remain, quivering, at the back of my throat. Dizziness engulfed me and my brain shut down completely except for the part that experienced terror. I heard a continuous earsplitting, bloodcurdling scream that would not stop. I was so out of my mind that it took me a fraction of a second to realize that the scream was coming from my own vocal chords.
My disorientation from this violent jolt to my nervous system was absolute. Under normal circumstances, I’m sure that I would have passed out. But these circumstances were hardly normal and the dragon amulet that I wore prevented unconsciousness. Since I was falling from such an incredible height, the other parts of my mind actually had time to begin working on a rudimentary level again. I knew it must have been the amulet allowing me to think, because my mind would surely have turned to mush by now without it.
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