“But even Christ had to suffer on the Cross but three hours!”
“Well, he had connections in high places, didn’t he? He had his own choice, but he knew how short its duration, how temporary its agony. You do not have that luxury. Your agony is permanent. God expects such a sacrifice, and tonight you failed Him. He’s still there. Renounce at any time, and you will return to that hospital, that bed, that pain and helplessness. I think you have learned much tonight about yourself. You have come a long way, and we will explore further in the times to come.”
“I have done nothing but play a game of illusion.”
“Oh, really? Go to the mirror. Look at yourself now.”
She turned and went over to it, fearful of what she might see or be shown. She looked at her image, and gasped.
Her body was still beautiful, and of the deepest brown, but she had changed. The face staring back at her was an attractive face, a young face. Her ears were pierced, and through them ran smooth rings of reddish bronze about the circumference of golf balls, and from each ring hung another, and yet one more. Her headband had become a true headband made of some grasses so finely and tightly woven they looked machine made, and her crude breechclout had become made of the same stuff, and hung on her hips. Her cheeks and brow and breasts were marked with some sort of chalky paint with odd designs in several light colors, and her necklace had become one of tiny, colorful, brightly polished stones. She had never seen that face, yet she knew it, knew whose reflection she saw, and she gave a small cry and turned away.
“I said I gave you a choice,” the Dark Man noted.
“Nothing is permanent except that hospital and the bed and the pain. You chose the Hapharsi Mother, and so lock in those attributes, which you take in commemoration of your choice. As you choose more, those attributes, too, will you acquire, inner as well as outer. At any time you may recant, at any time you may deny it, and at that time you will return, then and there, to the pain and the hopelessness of that hospital room. But if you do, then only your total and sincere surrender of your life and soul and will to great Lucifer will get you out.”
“You bastard!” she screamed, and picked up a piece of broken chair leg and tossed it at him. It deflected itself to the left and crashed against the cabin wall. She picked up other things, at random, and threw them at him, but no matter how true the throw she could not strike him. Finally she burst into tears and dropped to her knees. “Please!” she begged. “Please stop this! Stop this horrible nightmare!”
But he just chuckled and said, “Enough for tonight. Pleasant dreams and sleep well. You are on the right path and deserve a reward. Perhaps I will let your friend come again. She is a good outlet for you, and I grant you the power of speech with her. I wouldn’t want you to go mad.”
And, with that, he faded and was gone.
She knelt there, head bowed, for quite some time, and prayed to God, to Mary and Jesus and the saints, to deliver her, even to strike her down, but to end this thing.
But, as usual, there was no answer, no response at all. She understood why. God expected her to take the bed, make the sacrifice, go horribly mad in agony year after year. But she was no saint and she knew it. Not even the saints had been required to endure such a painful, prolonged living death, a state well within the power of those who now ran Magellan.
She knew from this very night that she could not hold out, that they would chip away at her soul as they had marked her body night after night until she was theirs and willingly so.
She could and would fight it, but the Dark Man was right. She was allowed only two choices, and that was which living Hell to join.
She knew that, no matter what the cost, she would have to try and escape, even if it meant living the rest of her life like this. She might, at least, die in the attempt and be saved from all this.
Forty miles of water. Yet, if, somehow, she could make it, she had one thing they didn’t know. She had a name and address. Just how difficult it would be, looking like this, mute and prevented from writing, to locate the place and get in and communicate her identity once there, she refused to even think about. The odds were she’d never get there in the first place.
9. A COMPROMISE OF DESPERATION
“They have reduced me to the primitive in appearance, and now, night by night, they are whittling away at my mind and heart,” Angelique said with a note of quiet desperation in her voice. “More and more of her enters in me each time. And you know—she is long dead? Perhaps hundreds, or thousands of years gone. But not her soul. It creeps from Hell at His direction and gnaws at my own.”
“I know what they can do,” Maria replied sadly.
“Do you? From the jungle and the rocks I fashion this stone spear tip, and mount it expertly. I build this lean-to here, although I do not know how I knew to do it, and prefer sleeping in it on the ground to inside the cabin. I find myself, when alone, thinking in her dead and far simpler language and nearly forgetting any other. I go to pray to God and find myself praying in that tongue to the spirits of the earth and air. I find myself in awe of the Moon Goddess, and praying to the great god who is the Sun. These marks on my face and body, they do not come off. They are some kind of primitive tattoo. All the information, it is there, in my head—the both of us. But more and more my own self, my own life and feelings and beliefs, become less important to me. If I did not have you to talk to, I could not have fought it even this long.”
Maria did not really have to be told. The wild, primitive, but still exotically beautiful body was beside the point, for she had seen all sorts of changes in folks on this island. It was, rather, as if the words that were coming from that person were what was wrong. Angelique didn’t realize just how much of a change there actually had been. It was in her very movements, the way she carried herself, the way she acted and reacted, that the primitive savagery was evident. It was evident, too, in the remains of a fat seagull, speared on the fly with uncanny accuracy by a weapon that had not been made this true in thousands of years, plucked, cooked slightly on a stick over an open flame, and devoured. Her personal hygiene had deteriorated, and the place was littered with garbage.
“And when they reduce me to the point where I stand naked on their rock and perform a sacrifice to the demons with my own hands, they will have me. Then they can restore me to my old form and merge my old and new self, and I will be in their service. Angelique will be but a cloak, a civilized shell that can be worn to deceive everyone, while underneath and in charge will be the Mother, lover to demons, servant of Hell.”
“I think my turn is coming,” Maria told her. “They are pressing me to take the oaths, to take their brand upon my forehead which may be seen only under certain lights or by others with it. Now I scrub and fetch and carry for them—I’m getting very good at carrying large things and even jars on my head—for hours on end, and then I must submit to anyone who desires my body.”
“It is getting too late for both of us, Maria,” Angelique warned. “Yet I can not do it alone.”
“I know.”
Angelique had become increasingly frustrated over the unlikelihood of getting any aid. Maria was as a faithful friend as they allowed her to be, but she wasn’t strong-willed. Out of desperation, the last few nights, Angelique had tried something both daring and dangerous.
The Mu’uhqua—the Mother—had one thing she did not. She had some of the power and she knew how to use it. Angelique had found that she could tap that power, to a degree, and direct it, although she did not really understand how she did it, and the use of it was dangerous beyond measure. To do it, she had to let herself go, become the other, and think as she had thought. To do so was to play into the hands of the Dark Man, although she wondered whether in his vast overconfidence he had considered the possibility of that power. She’d had some success commanding animals, particularly after stealing a couple of the village chickens and sacrificing them on a crude altar. She had drunk of the blood and felt the power enter her, minor though it was. She wasn’t yet ready to commit the ultimate act that would surely get her the power she needed, but she was ready to sacrifice a goat, a cow, a horse, whatever it took, and she knew just how to do it. Realizing that Maria lacked the courage to act on her own, a plan had formed in Angelique’s desperate mind.