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“No, it is a sequence of events. You will not defeat Her with some Vorpal Blade, or win anything at all from Her. It is not the End, nor can we truly Seek her, as the Labyrinth carries us where it wishes, if it can wish. Will has no meaning here, like everything else. There is no meaning. There is no pagination. There is no index, no glossary. There is no first edition, no reprinting, there is only this battered, dog-eared now. There is no gallery, there is no photographic record, there is no grand entrance or dramatic exit. There is only the great nowbody roasted in its sapphire hide, and your great seaside eyes, widening in ineffably slow understanding, rolling weakly into darkness as you are eaten, piece by piece.
It is not a Quest merely because it has a beginning with me and an ending with Her. You are not going to fight, or act, or plead. You can get nothing from Her. She may not heal you, and you cannot force Her. But you must make a circle. You may never find Her. A Quest is Heroic, you are not. You are selfish: you wish only to Survive and Devour. It will not change the Labyrinth, or the fate of a fair-armed damosel. You are the damsel and the dragon, you are the prince and the witch, you are the captain and the whale. ‘Quest’ has no meaning for you, who Seek only the delectable end of your own rattling tail. You are the Seeker-After, so get on with it and Seek.” He folded his arms across his chest.
“It is, really. You are tricking me into it, but it is a Quest, a Journey. I do not want it.”
“Nothing here is precisely what it is.”
“And I shall die otherwise?”
“Yes. You may die, anyway.”
“And it will be quite awful?”
“Yes.”
“And there is no other Road but this?”
“Has there ever been another Road for you?”
I paused. “But we cannot Strike Out and hunt her.”
“No.”
“Then how do the Doors hunt me?”
Again the slow butter-spread of a smile. “So clever, Darlingblue, so precise. How indeed? They are not like us, not our kind.”
“They Devour,” I remarked.
“How would you know? Hoo! You, the great Labyrinth-Navigator, the great Walker, escaping every Door like bread from the oven! Yes, they do, but not like us. The Doors are part of the Maze, not within. They can hunt you, and me for that matter, because they are conscious of you as the Road is; you are within them/it/all. It is all one. Such the terrible instinct to run, suspecting darkness and dread on the other side. But if you will not believe in a Monster or a Castle, why do you cling to your faith in that terrifically humanological fear of fire and black on the windward side of the Door? You do not really engage the Maze at all.”
“You do not go diving into Doors, you flee, too!” I protested.
“Yes, because I do not wish to be Devoured in any fashion, and I prefer a Singularity of Possibles. I run because I know their danger. You run because you do not, because you are good at being hunted. Perhaps the best. So good you have never been caught.”
“You’re being very serious.”
“You’re being very stupid. Afraid to save yourself.” I bristled in indignation and frustration. He watched, bemused.
“I do not wish to die on her command. So I am forced. Will has no meaning,” I sighed. “But how will we do this thing?”
The Monkey curled up next to me, long tail waving lazily, curving like a question mark. “We will be as clear as the rivers of Babylon, and the sun will shine through us as through a clear glass. We will plant our feet on this long highway and the Labyrinth’s currents will take us where they must. Or they will not. You never know. But we are caught up in a sequence, and these things usually find their way. Make no mistake, Darlingblue, we are Highwaymen, in our blue velvet cloaks, we are Dashing and Brave. And we go out onto the Road to steal and Devour. Numinous, rapacious creatures are we, and when we stamp the moon quakes.”
His tail wafted like a kite on the breeze, weaving into a figure-eight. “But now, by the sun and the fabled shores of the Gitche Gumee, it is time for tea. Boil the water, dear, whilst I go and hunt for the well-known and elusive beast, the ferocious butter-backed cucumber sandwich. Hoo!”
He scampered off, disappearing behind a low gorse bush, yellow on yellow, smooth butter of fur and flower. It is all falling apart, leaving me to strike the fire in the shelter of an overhanging Wall, crushing nettles and dried roses from the Hare’s Garden into a mild tea, pouring like a wife into my little clay pot, waiting for the returning pads of little golden feet.
I was saddled suddenly with a Companion and a Quest, and the witch’s brew bubble of pale green in my hands. I knew now how far I had slipped since I lay helpless beneath the Angel’s potent form, how close her white fingers lay to my heart, how much more quickly it beat now, now that the hooded beauty of nihilist ideation, the certainty of emptiness, the comfort of a Search without End was slowly being stretched by red-faced inquisitors, limbs pulled like taffy, plucked like harp strings. My head fills with the whipping birch-switches of that music, my arms and legs strummed roughly, that old E minor chord over and over. I can smell the simmer of the oil, molten bronze waiting for them to dip my body like an altar candle, to raise up boils and blist
ers like love-bites, fill my mouth with a liquid scream, gurgle of churning gold coating tooth and tongue. I will not confess, recalcitrant I, that all I have known is false, and that this Monkey is the master of all. I will not confess that I am a child and must be taught as though I sat at a little desk with a ruler and fat pink eraser, the smell of chalk in my nose (and yet where does this image come from, the twin-braided child with a heart-shaped face, staring into the wild nirvana of a blank green board?)
I will not confess, and whatever this is that grows inside me like a tumor shows me with boyish pride the rack and the thumbscrews, the eruption of nacreous fingernail and warm spurt of blood over knuckle, the melodious popping of joints on the merry wheel, crackling of bones like a winter fire. It is so beautiful to give in, it whispers, the voice of the Stone in my mind like a gilded priest, so simple and right, to let the welcoming arms of that promised madness enfold you, comfort you, nurse you like your own mother. Bend under the leather-handled whips, back like an ash bow, yield under the hooks and blades, allow us to come inside you and purify your soul.
It is pressing me, the Stone on my chest, the great slab crushing the ribcage of a relapsed witch, splinter of bone like rotted wood. I am losing, slowly, so that I do not even have the strength to resist this temptation, the temptation of Purpose again, floating like a blood blister before me, to resist the lead of the Monkey, the Trickster, drawing me into pursuing myself over a shapeless land. Too weak to stay my own course and continue in the velvet pleasures of Wandering alone and unfettered. I am losing myself, the self that is no other. If I knew my name, I could grip it like the edge of a cliff, drive my teeth into it and never let go. I could keep hold, and not slip. But it is hidden in the Book of the Hammer, and the inquisitors will not let me see. They are preparing a vat of acid, red as withered roses boiled for tea, sour as lime leaves. I can smell it, the mescaline-arsenic, the stabbing scent of metallic greasepaint and twelve-year scotch, and the pitch they will spread over my irisless eyes so that I will not see how they mutilate my breasts with mewling hands. It will have me, in the end, the Stone wide and bright in my mind’s eye like a rotting moon, I will burn in the tincture that even now simmers in whale-skull vats.
Into my reverie bursts the Monkey, turning temple-creature with geometric arms full of sandwiches. Dainty white squares from what ingenious tree. But he grinds to a halt and widens his almond eyes to perfect zeros of surprise.
From scalp to sole my body had flushed to deep red; red palms, red ankles, red nipples, red hair to my waist.
