Currently, lying fully buried in a grave of fingernails, I listen to my heartbeat. I hear my breath rushing in my nostrils. Yes, without a doubt, it's hope that makes my heart continue to beat, my lungs to breathe. Old habits die hard. Above me, the ground heaves and shifts with every step of the tornado demon. The parings trickle into my ears, stifling any sound of Babette's screams. Stifling the clicking din from the Sea of Insects. I lie buried here, counting my heartbeats, resisting an urge to dig one hand sideways in search of Leonard's hand.
In the next instant my arms are pinned to my sides. The fingernails press in close, tightly around me, and I'm lifted into the stinking sulfurous air, rising into the flaming orange sky.
The fingers of a huge hand are clasped around me as tight as a straitjacket. This giant hand has been thrust into the loose soil and has plucked me the way one might pull a carrot or radish from its buried slumber.
Ye gods, I might be the privileged, wealthy, insulated scion of celebrity parents, but I still know where babies and carrots come from... although I was never entirely certain where Goran originated.
Soaring into the air, I can survey it alclass="underline" the Sea of Insects, the Great Plains of Broken Glass, the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm, an endless array of cages containing the damned. Below me spreads the whole geography of Hell, including demons wandering hither and yon to gobble hapless victims. At the highest point of my ascent, a canyon of wet teeth await. A wind of rank, wet breath buffets me with a stink worse than the communal toilets at Ecology Clamp. There heaves a monstrous tongue carpeted with taste buds the size of red mushrooms. All of this ringed by lips as fat as greased tractor tires.
The hand brings me to the mouth, where my arms stretch to brace against the upper lip. My feet push against the lower lip, and like a fishbone I hold myself too wide and rigid to be swallowed. Under my hands, the lips feel surprisingly plush, leathery like a banquette in a good restaurant, but very warm. Like touching the upholstery of a Jaguar someone's just driven from Paris to Rennes.
So vast is the demon's face that all I can see is the mouth. In my peripheral vision, I'm vaguely aware of eyes above me, broad and glassy as department store windows, except curved outward, bulging. Those eyes, fenced by the black pickets of huge eyelashes. I'm conscious of a nose the size of a mud hut with two open doorways, each door hung with a curtain of fine nostril hairs.
The hand pushes me against the teeth. The tongue thrusts to make wet contact with the buttoned front of my cardigan sweater.
In the moment I am resigned to my immediate fate, to be masticated and swallowed, my bones cast aside like the skeleton of every Cornish game hen I've ever eaten, at that instant the mouth screams. What occurs seems less like a scream than an air-raid siren blasting point-blank into my face. My hair, my cheeks and clothing, these are all blown and rippling, snapping like a flag in a hurricane.
One of my Bass Weejuns slips from my foot, falling, tumbling, dropping to land on the ground beside a tiny figure sporting a bold blue Mohawk. Even at this distance, I can see it's Archer standing beside the giant's sizable bare foot. Having removed the oversize safety pin from his cheek, Archer is plunging the point, repeatedly removing it and plunging it, again and again, into the arch of the demon's foot.
In the melee which ensues, I feel myself half dropped, half heaved, half lowered until I land in the soft, scratchy fingernails. The same moment as my impact, hands grasp me, human hands, Leonard's hands, and pull me to shelter beneath the slurry of nail parings... but not before I see the same parachute hand which caught me now catch Archer and lift him—cursing, kicking his boots, slashing with his pin—to where the teeth snap shut, and in a single bite guillotine off his vivid blue head.
IX.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Before I tell you the following you must promise, cross your heart and hope to die, that you won't EVER share this secret with another person. I mean it. You see, I'm well aware that you're the Prince of Lies, hut I need you to swear. You'll have to guarantee your confidentiality if we're to have a relationship of any significant depth and honesty.
Last winter, if you must know, I found myself alone at boarding school during the holiday break. It goes without saying that I'm recounting an event from my past life. Christmas occurred to my parents as just another ordinary day, and the rest of my classmates were leaving for ski vacations or Greek islands, so, for my part, there was nothing to do except put on a game face and assure them, girl by girl, that my own family would be along at any moment to collect me. That final day of autumn term, the residence hall emptied out. The dining hall shut down. As did the lecture halls. Even the faculty departed the campus with their packed bags, leaving me in almost complete solitude.
I say "almost" because a night watchman, possibly a team of them, continued to prowl the school grounds, checking locked doors and turning down thermostats, their flashlight beams occasionally sweeping the landscape at night like searchlights in an old prison movie.
A month previous, my parents had adopted Goran, he of the haunted eyes and heavy Count Dracula accent. Although he was only one year older than me, Goran's forehead was already etched with wrinkles. His cheeks, hollowed. His eyebrows grew as wild and tangled as the forested slopes of the Carpathian Mountains, so matted and bristling that if you looked too closely among the hairs you'd expect to see marauding packs of wolves, ruined castles, and stooped Gypsy women gathering firewood. Even at the age of fourteen, Goran's eyes, his voice pitched deep as a foghorn, it all gave the impression that he'd witnessed his entire extended family tortured to death as slave labor in the salt mines of some remote gulag, bloodhounds baying after them across ice floes, and leather whips cracking at their backs.
Ah... Goran. No Heathcliff nor Rhett Butler was ever so swarthy nor rudely fashioned. He seemed to exist in his own permanent isolation, insulated by some terrible history of hardship and deprivation, and I envied him that. I did so, so long to be tortured.
Next to Goran, even adult men sounded silly and chatty and insignificant. Even my father. Especially my father.
Lying in bed, alone in a Swiss residence hall built to house three hundred girls, in temperatures barely warm enough to prevent the pipes from freezing, I pictured Goran, the way blue veins branched under the transparent skin of his temples. How his hair grew so thick it wouldn't comb down, the stand-up kind of hair you'd cultivate while studying Marxist philosophy over tiny cups of bitter espresso in smoke-filled coffeehouses, awaiting your perfect opportunity to lob a burning dynamite stick into the open touring car of some Austrian archduke and ignite a world war.
My mom and dad were doubtless introducing poor Goran to the assembled media outlets represented at Park City, Utah; or Cannes; or the Venice Film Festival, while I was hiding out beneath six blankets surviving on hoarded Fig Newtons and Vichy water—avec gaz.
No, it's not fair, but I was clearly getting the better part of the arrangement.
My family assumed I was aboard a yacht, among giggling friends. My mom and dad assumed I had friends. The school assumed me to be with my parents and Goran. For two glorious weeks all I had to do was read the Brontes, evade the occasional security guards, and wander about— naked.