S o p o r [3]

The girl floated. Vague, idle shapes that had buoyed her at first like clouds of pleasure surging back toward the heavens. It seemed an eternity she spent, rolling amid them with laughter bubbling in a warm, gentle spray up her throat. It fizzed and fluttered like butterflies in the air.

Yet, gradually, gradually she became aware. There was something, something about her. As she was inundated with those euphoric vapours the clouds did not stop—they came on, swirling queasily about her inebriated limbs. Nausea swelled her bloated breast, and she tried to swim away, but there was no end to it. She was drowning, soft and distended, saccharine bile leaking through her lips and her skin stretching, straining to contain it all till she thought she might--.

“NO!”

The girl woke with sick in her mouth, her arms pinioned, and she writhed feverishly to try and escape it all—the pleasure, that dread immolation, that--!

“Calm yourself. You’ve long since escaped.” The words grated low in her ears, and her head throbbed as she was flipped callously onto her stomach. She heard a knife severing fabric, felt her arms slack, and pushed herself upright at once.

Her vision blurred, spun, then settled. It was dark and as she ran a hand over her face she felt a shiver rattle her spine. Cobwebs. She was covered in--.

Scraping them away, she tired to compose herself. But her heart was pounding in her chest, her thoughts raced, and when at last she prized her eyes free she closed them just as soon in revulsion.

Is this a nightmare? A spider’s lai--?

“Hey.”

Again, that dagger-edged voice pierced her skull, and she wrenched her gaze up to meet the speaker.

He was tall, gaunt, and black all over. His stringy build was girthed by a fetish-laden vest, and a sleeveless shirt that clashed with his putrid, secondhand tie. Scars decorated his arms in the form of searing holy symbols. All about him was such an air of self-containment and foreboding and violence—she flinched back from him.

“You summoned me: M. Paine. I presume that you’d like to leave, then.”

She cast about her. “W—what about them?”

He regarded her with a fearsome grimace—half delirius grin, half contortion—and something glimmered in his pitted eyes. “They’re doing it to themselves, asking this of Sopor, and they have granted me no power over them.”

Her expression hardened. “I don’t—trust you. What are you?”

M. Paine smiled again; she wished he wouldn’t. “If you did there’s no doubt that my form would be much more hideous unto you. Such it is, when humans ask too much of their gods.”

The girls eyes widened, one, two moments, and then narrowed. Silence prevailed over Ms. Sopor’s cadaverous attic for yet another breath. Then the girl tottered unsteadily to her feet, looking not to M. Paine, but the door while she mused:

“Forgive me, then, if I refuse your hand. Only… I’m leaving now. Back to school. W—alk beside me awhile.”

“The closer I draw, the more crippling the loneliness, the uncertainty that’s bowing your shoulders now, girl.” His tone was mocking, amused.

She threw back those shoulders stubbornly and shot him an arch look, a look ended by a shrug while she continued through the door, out her prison.

“I’m aware. But it seems that I… owe you. Yes, that’s how I understand it. And this is what you desire, isn’t it? To join me?”

M. Paine stopped, his terrible expression occluded by the shadows thronging the stairwell. “…Pardon?”

And the girl turned to let him look upon her—no, dared him to look through her.

“You’re a god, aren’t you? Don’t all our created monsters long to be human?”