A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty One, Pt. 2
Jill lurched into the vast, vertiginous dark. She limped, one ankle sprain-swollen and one wrist snap-twisted at the wrong angle. Through a veil of blood, she spat. “Get the fuck away from him,” Jill snarled.
“Stupid cumslut bitch-witch,” the Manifestation replied, voice guttural, gravelly, and phlegmatic once more. “You think you’re stronger than the crush-you-rape-you-hang-you world?”
“I’m not fighting the world,” Jill said. “I’m fighting the dumb animal that keeps telling me to sleep through it.”
The Manifestation shred through Sung-ho’s hand. Screams filled the whole void, Sung-ho thrashing wildly against his restraints as muscle and sinew and skin and ligament snapped and severed and came apart beneath the Manifestation’s blades. Deep claret poured from the unrecognizable meat, randomly firing electrical impulses twitching the flensed remains. Sung-ho howled until the howls turned to sobbing whimpers.
“You think you’re stronger than me?” the Manifestation clicked, each word pronounced by a chorus of insect mandibles. “Really?”
Jill glowered. “Where do you think you are?”
“I am a god, here.”
“You are a prisoner.” Jill swiped the shard of glass she clutched along the top of her left arm. A muscle-deep gash flooded red. The Manifestation recoiled from Sung-ho and darted for Jill. It reared up short, the bloodied edge of the broken mirror pointed at it. “See?” Jill asked. “You’re afraid of me.”
“I’ll make you watch them die.”
“You live inside my head. I’ll kill myself if you hurt them.”
“Then you’ll be dead.”
“After everything you’ve done to me, you think I’m scared of dying? Kicked out of my house, attacked in a tent, kicked and beaten, all the guilt and the shame and the people I hurt—you think I’m scared of dying? You stupid parasite.”
The Manifestation stepped back. It gestured its skeletal fingers at the air and an almost holographic image began to undulate into existence. “Winning this battle doesn’t make anything less painful, Jill. Remember the world outside this house? Remember what it’s done to you? To everyone? I can give you sanctuary from all of that.”
A hanged man. A hanged boy.
Jill panted and grimaced, limping forward on a bulbous bloat of ankle. She swiped through the hologram with her makeshift knife and glared up at the funhouse distortion of herself stretched so far over her head. “You’ve never given me anything.”
“I give you peace.”
“Oblivion.”
“Serenity.”
“The world will kill people with or without you. Everything I gave up to chase your bullshit…as if all the suffering goes away just because I’m too fucked up to feel it anymore. Everything I did for you, everyone I hurt, and it never changed anything.”
“But you didn’t have to feel it,” the Manifestation offered.
“Except I did. Every time I wasn’t getting high, I felt all of it. I traded you everything I had just to buy time.”
“So then what now? Kill yourself here, in front of all of us? Fight my bottomless hunger with your temporarily-righteous rage?”
Zoe swallowed a viscous gob of blood and mucus from the back of her throat. Blinking away some of her beaten dizziness, she noticed the pistol waiting between her feet. Pushing her tangled legs into a kneeling stance, she picked it up. Considered it.
Jill stared up at the Manifestation and it stared down in return.
“That’s what I thought,” the Manifestation hackled.
Zoe dropped the gun as she rose back to full height. “I promise you my guidance and my counsel. As above, so below.”
“As above, so below,” Sung-ho managed between anguished pants.
“You will never be free of me,” the Manifestation took two scarecrow steps toward Jill and stopped. “Never.”
“It was never about being free of you. It’s about being better than you.”
It craned its serpentine neck down so that its stretched-out, distorted visage settled its gaze on Jill’s. “You’ll feel me under everything. I’ll be with you and around you always. I’ll be waiting.”
Jill nodded. “I know.”
“I can wait for your whole life, if I have to. Sooner or later, I get to keep you.”
Jill nodded again. “Yeah. I know.”
The Manifestation’s twisted face twitched and swarmed, bubbles sizzling visibly beneath the first jaundiced layer. It blinked its translucent, greasy lids across its pinprick-iris eyes and flared its sharpened, mostly-nostril nose. “You can’t change the world. You need me to feel right about that.”
“I was stupid to imagine I could,” Jill admitted. “But if I try and I fail—”
“You’ll fail.”
“I will fail. But if I try, I’ll start helping people along the way instead of hurting them.”
The Manifestation’s posture sagged and vortexed, the fun-house Jill falling forward onto all fours, its bladed limbs twitching spider-like. “You’re too weak. You talk tough but rocks will crush you like the rest of them. I can break you whenever I want.”
“Prove it.”
It whipped lightning-fast toward Zoe.
Zoe went for her pistol, again.
Too slow.
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