Prospero Regained

by L. Jagi Lamplighter

  Surely, he did not mean me?

  He was an elf. I was merely a mortal maid. Such a pairing was, in his own words, as likely as a hawk wedding a dove. He loathed me for being a slave owner because I would not break my magic flute and set free the Aerie Ones, Mab’s race. He despised me so much for this—even though setting the Aerie Ones free would mean the death of millions of human beings—that he decided I was not worthy to slay him.

  He could not have meant me.

  If he did not, then to which two things did he refer: the sky and my flute? The sky and music?

  The mere thought that he might have intended the words to include me caused my cheeks to burn. How foolish could I be? For five hundred years, I had remained distant, pure, and virginal. Osae the Red had seen to it that I was no longer the latter but that did not excuse a flurry of foolish girlish emotions. That I might allow myself to become enamored again, so soon after my humiliation at the hands of the fake Ferdinand—which led to Osea’s attack, to the loss of my Lady’s patronage and of the Water of Life that keeps my family immortal, and, ultimately, to the destruction of the Family Prospero and all that we stand for—was shameful.

  Of course, the fake Ferdinand had actually been Astreus, too, but in his demonic guise.

  My only consolation was that, since I would never see Astreus again, this foolishness would soon pass. Surely, the image of the smiling elf, currently constantly reoccurring in my thoughts, must have been caused by the influence of this swamp. As soon as we departed from this horrible place of torture for the lustful, my mind would grow calm again.

  And yet, as I remembered the tone of his voice when he had spoken those parting words, an odd and glorious tingle spread through me that reminded me strangely of joy. It did much to drive back the gloom.

  * * *

  AHEAD stretched one last narrow island and then an expanse of oily murk dotted here and there by large rocks occupied by fat spiders or ugly lizards. A series of hummocks formed a bridge between our current location and this last isle. To cross them, we had to let go of each other and leap from one to another in single file.

  My heart dropped at the thought that at the end of this next island, we would have to climb back into the swamp. I shivered at the memory of that awful slime oozing along my skin. Muttering darkly under my breath, I leapt onto a hummock that stood between me and the island, cursing when I slipped and landed hard on my knee. As my other leg dropped into the slimy mire, something snaked out of the water and grabbed it, dragging me backward into the mire.

  Greasy ooze slid over my face and skin. Grasping hands reached underneath my gown, groping at my thighs and tugging at my underclothes. I twisted angrily, my motions made awkward by the viscous liquid, and kicked free.

  Through the semitransparent murk, I faced three leering dead men. The damned souls grabbed at me hungrily. Something ugly burned in their dead eyes. Behind them, a fat, grinning demon floated naked in the filth. I averted my eyes at once, but the brief horrifying glimpse remained burned in my mind, causing me to squirm and retch.

  The demon wielded a cat-o’-nine-tails, with which he scoured the men. Whenever they approached me, the demon trembled with pleasure. Whenever the men lost their grip on me, he hissed, dismayed. When he cracked his whip, the men convulsed, crying out with pain and greater hunger. This, too, caused the demon convulsions of pleasure.

  They came at me from three sides, seeking to crush me between their naked bodies. I kicked and punched, struck at them with my four-foot-long pinewood flute—the same instrument that had so recently betrayed me by accidentally summoning the Hellwinds. I grabbed for my fighting fan, but the gunk around me kept drawing my shoulder bag away from my grasp, and I could not reach the weapon.

  My attackers were weak, but my blows merely passed through them. Wherever the cloth of my enchanted emerald tea gown brushed them, however, they were repelled, making my elbows and knees better weapons than my fist or foot. As I turned, the mysterious winglike brushstrokes of emerald light coming from the shoulders of my dress touched the spirit-flesh of one of my attackers, causing him to reel back, screaming in pain.

  I had a new weapon!

  I spun about. The three men recoiled, their arms and faces burnt where my wings had caught them. Eagerly, I sought to take advantage of my momentary freedom and rise. My meager supply of air was nearly depleted. When I swam in the direction I thought was up, I found only more water and more copulating pairs, one or two of whom caught sight of my struggle and left their ravaged partners to pursue me.

  Desperate for air, I circled in the murky slime, hoping for some glimpse of the lurid red of the sky. Spinning kept the damned souls at bay, for they quickly learned to fear the wings of emerald light, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw the demon itself approaching.

  It floated forward, leering lasciviously. A twelve-foot tongue protruded from its wide mouth and snaked through the water. Slipping beneath my gown, the black tongue slithered up my stomach with its forked tip. I jerked backward, resisting the urge to cry out.

  I turned to my Lady for help … but of course, She was no longer there.

  The urge to scream grew stronger, but I dared not open my mouth. The memory of the taste—like fat drippings mixed with rotting corpses and feces—still filled me with horror.

  Desperate, my heart pounding, I struck out. I struggled and swirled, badgering the crude horror with my wings. The glowing emerald light seared its skin as it had the dead men’s, but this merely excited the demon. Again and again, it lashed out with its terrible whip, causing the dead souls to twitch and dance. Despite the pain my wings had caused them, they clawed at the slime to get back to where I swam, as if only by doing so could they sate some terrible inner hunger that tormented them.

  The curling tongue, prodding my flesh, sent shivers of revulsion across my body. It triggered memories of Osae’s attack. That, combined with lack of oxygen, was too much. I panicked, thrashing wildly, my limbs flailing. I was sure I was about to lose consciousness and die, drowned in the discarded sludge of human lusts.

  In my delirium, I dreamt that Mab hovered above the demon’s head, his lead pipe rebounding off the creature’s thick skull. Then everything went red, and the demon’s face twisted and decayed before my hallucinating eyes.

  * * *

  STRONG arms, unharmed by my wings, hauled me through the ooze. Gasping, I kicked and punched, determined to win my way to freedom. My elbow slammed into something, causing a loud crack and a scream.

  Dumping me unceremoniously on the bracken, my brother Erasmus howled with pain, holding his bloody nose. His humming staff fell to one side, and all the bracken for ten feet in every direction turned gray and withered away to dust. I quickly jumped away from where the Staff of Decay buzzed unattended.

  “You see what comes from helping her?” Erasmus shouted when he could speak. “I told you we should have left her down there! Would have served her right, ending her days as the doxy of a demon! She would have been following in her dam’s footsteps!”

  Behind him, Mab and Gregor emerged from the swamp, dripping with dead vegetable matter and scum. They both came over and touched me. Gregor gagged and let go again. He tried to wipe off the scum he could not see.

  “Ugh, but that’s foul!” Mab swore, squatting beside me. “Don’t listen to him, Ma’am. He didn’t say any such thing—about leaving you in there, I mean. He just screamed like a banshee and leapt right in after you.”

  “Oh, don’t tell her that! It will go to her head,” moaned Erasmus. He gingerly poked the swollen bridge of his nose with his pinky fingers. “Well,” he added presently, “I guess every cloud has its silver lining. When I came out of that … stuff, I thought I would be ill again. But the pain in my nose had put that entirely out of my mind.”

  “That was … horrible,” I gasped for lack of a better word, shaking with revulsion. Frantically, I brushed at my body, trying to rid myself of the lingering goo. As I wrung the slime out of my hair, its
shining black color gave me a shock. I had forgotten Erasmus had restored its original color. I had expected to see the silver-blond locks that had been mine for so many centuries.

  Erasmus glanced over at me, his mouth and chin bloody, his eyes accusing.

  “Thank you, Erasmus. You saved my life,” I gushed, overwhelmed by gratitude for both my brothers and Mab. “I’m so very sorry about your nose. I thought you were another one of them.”

  I reached out to touch his arm as I talked, but he pushed me away.

  “Humph!” Turning his back, my brother used his white Urim gauntlet, which had once been part of an angel’s armor, to pick up the humming length of his staff. The gauntlet would not wither, though it was pitted and dull. All other Urim I had ever seen shone like living moonlight. Once back in Erasmus’s hand, the Staff of Decay stopped its deadly humming. Its whirling gray length slowed and fell still, becoming a long, rectangular staff, the sides of which were painted alternately black and white.

  “Don’t know what possessed me,” Erasmus continued. “Amazingly stupid idea, traveling around here with a woman. What were we thinking? We should have left her on the bridge, taken our chances without her.”

  “We would never find Mephistopheles that way,” Gregor observed. “We would have been sucked in by some pleasant-looking evil, or perhaps walked right past him, his face hidden from us behind a dream.”

  “True,” Mab said, mopping his craggy brow. “When she fell in, everything turned nice again. Made it kind of hard to find the baddies who were attacking her. I had to bonk a dapper gentleman in a tuxedo on the head with my trusty lead pipe, and punch right in their kissers a couple of swains, who were offering her flowers and chocolates.”

  “Dapper gentleman!” I cried. “That horrible bloated … well, on second thought, maybe it’s better you didn’t see it.” I shivered again, suddenly cold.

  “Wish it could have been me instead of you who saw him, Ma’am,” Mab replied humbly.

  “We won’t find Mephisto this way either,” Erasmus complained. “All this walking around on the surface. We’re only seeing a small percentage of this place. When we first came through the gate, it seemed to Miranda as if we were under the swamp, slime and ooze in all directions. What if Mephisto is down there, like the things that tried to drag her into the depth? We’ll never find him if we’re up here!”

  “What else can we do?” I countered. “Without Mephisto, we can’t rescue any of the others.”

  “So that’s it.” Erasmus plopped down and folded his arms behind his head. “This is how I shall end my days, slogging through the Swamp of Uncleanness, searching aimlessly for my brother who had the Ball of Getting-Us-the-Hell-Out-of-Hell, in the company of the sister I hate more than any other—whose fault it is we’re stuck here to begin with—until I die, most likely from complications stemming from an infected broken nose. Appropriate way to go, I suppose, killed by Miranda.”

  “Enough.” Gregor’s head had been bowed in prayer. Now, he straightened, his voice calm yet stern. “We are in Hell, Brother, where the malicious burn upon the fires of their wrath and envy. One might hope their example would teach you civility.”

  “I have proven remarkably hard to teach,” Erasmus replied blithely.

  “That is not a trait of which I would boast,” Gregor said, his voice again stern.

  Much to my surprise, Erasmus looked chagrined.

  “You’re probably right,” he murmured, wiping his face on his sleeve. The red of his blood showed brightly against the subdued landscape. From the left, there came a kerplunk, as if something large had slid into the water.

  Mab frowned. “There are things down here that feed on blood. Wraiths, demons, and servants of demons! Vile things! Maybe we’d better get moving!”

  Hopping back across the hummocks, he stooped and picked up his fedora. Apparently, he had thrown it aside when he leapt in to save me. Frowning down at the water, to make certain no demon waited to grab his foot, he hopped back.

  We held hands again and started walking, slower than before. We were thirsty and tired. It was hot here, and it stank. The vile acts and general repulsiveness worsened as we continued. Demons, some hideous, some gorgeous to behold, moved among the damned souls, inciting them to yet greater excesses. Nearby, an emaciated man moaned pitifully as he tried to sate some burning hunger upon a fat lizard.

  In the distance rose a vast cylindrical tower with a round mushroomlike cap, constructed from something living that writhed and squirmed. I decided not to examine it any more closely, but Erasmus did and, apparently, regretted it. With a grunt of sympathetic pain, he drew his legs together and cupped his free hand protectively over his groin.

  “Oh, that’s ghastly!” he said.

  “Don’t look, Ma’am,” Mab advised. “It’s not a sight for ladies.”

  “Nothing here is fit for ladies.” Gregor’s voice sounded even more gravelly than usual.

  “Good thing our dear sister isn’t one,” Erasmus replied, a note of cheerfulness in his weary voice. When Gregor gave him a quelling look, he pointed at his swollen nose with his free hand. “Would a lady do this?”

  “No true lady yields her virtue without a fight.” Gregor used his ebony staff as a walking stick, swinging it, planting it, striding forward, and swinging it again. Its blood red runes glittered eerily as it swung.

  “But our good sister already lost her virtue to a demon,” objected Erasmus. “Why bring my nose into it?”

  “It was an accident,” I snapped back, more harshly than I had intended. “I already apologized. No one ‘brought your nose into it.’ At the time, I thought you were a demon.”

  “A likely story,” muttered Erasmus.

  Gregor halted and leaned heavily upon his staff. With his free hand, he wiped sweat from his face. “Is it my imagination, or have we been walking for hours?”

  “Certainly seems like hours,” replied Mab.

  “We must rest,” Gregor said. “We cannot continue as we are.”

  * * *

  EVENTUALLY, we found refuge on a sandy flat isle that to me seemed completely exposed, but which my brothers and Mab, when they released my arms, assured me was surrounded by high arbors of black roses.

  “Does anyone have something to eat?” Erasmus asked sadly. “The food I brought has been ruined by the swamp.”

  I looked through the contents of my shoulder bag, but swamp water had soaked through it. Nothing remained edible. I carefully wiped off my mirrored fighting fan, my figurine of Astreus, and my tightly sealed vial of Water of Life. A wistful action really; the bag would probably just get drenched again the next time we started moving.

  To my great dismay, I discovered that the silver and horn circlet Father Christmas had given me was gone. With it, I could return Astreus’s memory to him. Apparently, it had fallen out of my bag during the fray. That meant it now lay at the bottom of the Swamp of Uncleanness, if there was a bottom. If not, it drifted ever downward and, with it, my hope of ever seeing Astreus again.

  For without it, even if the elf lord still lingered somewhere within the sooty depths of the demon Seir of the Shadows, I would never know.

  Mab’s food had fared better than the rest of ours. From the pockets of his trench coat, he pulled a number of Ziploc bags. Inside the sealed plastic, his bread and cheese was squashed but fresh. He shared the food among us. Hungry as we were, neither Erasmus nor I could bring ourselves to eat much. Erasmus shared some fresh water from a canteen.

  “I’ll never look at another woman again,” murmured Erasmus. He was lying down with his head resting on some object that was invisible to me, so that his head seemed to be floating in mid-air. He covered his eyes with his hands. “Ever! My womanizing ways are a thing of the past! Oh, to think … ugh!”

  “If you had not done so previously, you would not be in such a sorry state,” Gregor observed. “I find the place no more wearing than any other unpleasant location.”

  Erasmus raised his head.
His eyes glittered black with malice. “Forgive me if I don’t happen to be a priest, a spirit, or an ex-virgin whose only experience with love has been demon-rape. Some of us are men and must live like men.”

  “And shall suffer, after death, like unto what you call ‘men,’” Gregor thundered back in his preaching-from-the-pulpit voice, steady yet booming. “Had you chosen a virtuous life, you would not now be obliged to pay the wages of sin.”

  “Oh, and you’ll do so well when we come to the country of one of your besetting sins, will you?” Erasmus snapped.

  “The angel said Gregor was closest of all of us to overcoming his vice,” I offered, my spirits again buoyed by the mere memory of the angelic encounter.

  “You would come in on his side.” Erasmus closed his eyes and let his head drop back until it again rested upon his invisible pillow. “You shouldn’t have repeated that where Brother Gregor could hear you—the pride it engenders will mar his good record.”

  “He is right.” Gregor nodded. “Pride is a difficult enemy to defeat, and those who succumb to it suffer in a far lower place than this.”

  Looking around, it was hard to imagine that there were places worse than this. But that was where my sins would have dragged me, to the place where pride was punished. I shivered, suddenly extraordinarily grateful for Gregor and his staff.

  Erasmus looked out over the swamp, staring out at the dead cypress trees dripping with slimy gray moss. He murmured again, “It’s hopeless.”

  “Rest, Brother.” Gregor’s voice was gentle despite its gruffness. “Let us examine the matter again when we are rested.”

  “Very well.” He shut his eyes. “I’ll rest, rise, and look forward to another day of looking for Mephisto on an empty stomach. We’ll be lucky if we don’t draw the attention of the other Mephistopheles with all this shouting … the demonic one.”

  Mab and I exchanged glances, but neither of us had the strength to speak, much less to explain to my brother that there was no other Mephistopheles, just our brother, the demon. Besides, we did not know how Gregor, the Catholic priest, would take it.